As it turned out, Spain bookended Caesar’s ascent of the cursus honorum. He returned to the province in 61 BC as proconsul, his first overseas command. Spanish proconsulship earned him a triumph in Rome. Caesar forfeited public adulation in order to stand as a candidate for the consulship of 59 (an example of close observance of legal niceties on Caesar’s part, necessitated by the vocal hostility of arch-Republican and drunkard Cato). His candidacy was successful. As with the aedileship and praetorship, Caesar’s colleague was Bibulus.
Spain had served as the location for Caesar’s quaestorship, his first proconsulship and the award of an (albeit uncelebrated) triumph. More than this, in time it was the site of his first epileptic fit and, in the wake of war waged against fellow Romans, that dream which an unidentified soothsayer interpreted as foretelling world dominion. The dream itself left Caesar shaken – understandably, since its substance was his rape of his mother Aurelia. On his return to Rome, he remarried. His choice fell on a granddaughter of Sulla and distant kinswoman of Pompey the Great. Her name was Pompeia and he would divorce her in time on suspicion of an affair with an audacious rabble-rouser who donned women’s clothes to make good a secret assignation. Justification for that divorce inspired Caesar’s well-known assertion that, guilty or otherwise – taking no account of double standards – his wife must be above suspicion.
In the long term, Caesar’s achievement was not to be a programmatic ascent of the offices of state as prescribed by Republican precedent, culminating in a benign term as consul. Nor perhaps should it have been, given those extraordinary capabilities to which even hostile sources attest. Such was Caesar’s mental agility and the acuteness of his concentration that he merited inclusion in the thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia of natural history compiled by Pliny the Elder. ‘I have heard,’ Pliny wrote, ‘that Caesar was accustomed to write or dictate and read at the same time, simultaneously dictating to his secretaries four letters on the most important subjects or, if he had nothing else to do, as many as seven.’14 (As dictator, Caesar later courted popular disfavour by dictating and reading letters while watching gladiatorial fights.) As with his mind, so too his body. It was as if his pulse beat to a tempo of its own and his limbs were endowed with more than human strength and facility. Suetonius commends his horsemanship, his skill in arms, that vitality which never flagged:
On the march he headed his army, sometimes on horseback but oftener on foot, bareheaded both in the heat of the sun and in rain. He covered great distances with incredible speed, making a hundred miles a day in a hired carriage and with little baggage, swimming the rivers which barred his path or crossing them on inflated skins and very often arriving before the messengers sent to announce his coming.
The biographer records an occasion when, harried by the enemy in the waters off Alexandria, Caesar left the one safe small skiff to his men and himself plunged into the sea. He swam using a single arm, his left arm holding important papers clear of the water. For good measure he dragged his cloak behind him, clenching it between his teeth in order to prevent the enemy from snatching it as a trophy. Less hair-raising journeys he beguiled, as we have seen, in writing or poetry. He was a stranger to idleness and the greater part of reasonable fear. Little wonder that he inspired in the men with whom he fought such fervent devotion. His standards of discipline were high without approaching that martinet cruelty which afterwards proved Galba’s undoing: he closed his eyes to minor misdemeanours. He led by inspiration, without undue recourse to the mumbo-jumbo of omens and portents, trusting in that lodestar which seldom deserted him on the battlefield, his generalship as much a matter of speed and novelty as of tactical finesse; and he treated his soldiers, whom he addressed as ‘comrades’, with something approaching love.
Such capabilities, married to Caesar’s overweening confidence, could not easily be confined within the orderliness of year-long magistracies. That power which Caesar eventually exercised in Rome arose in part from an accumulation of dignitas, auctoritas and military glory, from full-throttle cultivation of popular support and from his ability to judge whose coat-tails afforded the best ride at any given moment. Caesar’s loyalties lay consistently with himself: throughout the decade of the sixties, which he began as a virtual unknown, he sought to create a network of personal alliances which would serve as a springboard to mastery. If Suetonius’ Caesar does not breathe the word ‘revolution’, it is implicit in the many twists and turns of the second half of his career. With the consulship attained, Caesar aimed at some larger channel of power, an aspiration in which he was not alone in this period of flux anticipating meltdown. His thirst could be slaked only by creating alternatives to the Republican mechanisms of government which had served the city through five centuries. Others thought the same, and had done for years now. ‘Soon Gaius Marius, from the lowest class, and Lucius Sulla, the most savage of the nobles, turned free government, conquered by arms, into tyranny,’ Tacitus wrote. ‘Gnaeus Pompey came next, less obvious but no better, and now nothing was sought except dominion of the state.’15 Marius, Sulla, Pompey... Caesar... Given the nature of the contest, only one man could prevail.
In advance of his consulship in 59 BC, Caesar brokered what Suetonius calls a ‘compact’. His partners were that same Gnaeus Pompey, pre-eminent among the current generation of Roman generals and the son of a Sullan loyalist, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Roman history and vanquisher of Spartacus to boot. At the heart of the arrangement was an agreement ‘that no step should be taken in public affairs which did not suit any one of the three’. A secret, if informal, alliance between Rome’s leading militarist and that magnate whose vast riches had bankrolled several of Caesar’s election bids, it demonstrated a recognition on Caesar’s part that, in 60 BC, power in Rome rested on twin foundations of money and might.
Prior to Caesar’s intervention, the relationship of Pompey and Crassus was discordant. Cassius Dio describes them as ‘at enmity with each other’:16 Crassus’ jealousy supplies an explanation. In the short term, the certainty of mutual advantage overrode the larger misgivings of all three members of what historians have called the ‘First Triumvirate’. Caesar undertook as consul to expedite measures of Pompey and Crassus previously blocked by the senate; in return, their influence would secure for him a province sufficient to clear his enormous debts.1 And this is what happened. But in riding roughshod over the inevitable objections of his fellow consul and old sparring partner Bibulus, Caesar came close to acting illegally. Such was Bibulus’ determination not to cooperate with Caesar that he sought to derail the latter’s programme entirely by declaring every day inauspicious for senatorial business and all transactions suspended accordingly. Caesar, inevitably, discovered an alternative methodology: he published daily accounts of government business and moved to check bureaucratic rapacity in the provinces. Neither Bibulus, unmellowed by long familiarity, nor his supporters would quickly forget the chamber pot emptied over his head. Irregularities in his consulship – in his own mind forced upon him – made doubly pressing Caesar’s need to escape from Roman justice (or revenge) into a lucrative province at the end of 59. He did not entertain the senate’s derisory offer of stewardship within Italy, a custodianship of forests and woods. Instead, thanks to the triple inducement of that money (Crassus), armed force (Pompey) and mob support (Caesar) which the triumvirate commanded, Caesar was awarded Cisalpine Gaul (north Italy) and Illyricum for a five-year period. Against the advice of Cato, who regarded the step as akin to ‘placing the tyrant in the citadel’,17 the senate subsequently added Transalpine Gaul on the Mediterranean coast. In military terms it represented a total of four legions at Caesar’s disposal. The stage was set. Following his divorce from Pompeia, Caesar married for the fourth and last time – Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso – and departed Rome for immortality.
For the next eight years, acting upon his own initiative, Caesar divided each year into two seasons. He spent the summer campaigning season north of the Alps: in
addition to the conquest of Gaul, an achievement unrivalled by the greatest of his contemporaries, he crossed the Rhine and twice journeyed to Britain. The winter season he devoted less showily to civil administration in the peaceful provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum on the Balkan coast. (Subsequently, in 49, he bestowed citizenship on the inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul north of the River Po, thereby completing the unification of Italy.)
There were setbacks: Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus’ threat that, if elected consul for 55, he would demand Caesar’s recall to Rome to answer charges about his behaviour in 59, a curtailment and an indictment the latter dare not countenance; and the revolt of the Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix, king of the Arverni, in 52, backed by a large coalition of the tribes of central Gaul. But nothing seriously challenged Caesar’s overwhelming, passionate and entirely self-serving desire for what Sallust described as ‘an unprecedented war’ which gave his ability the chance to display itself.18 Lavishly Plutarch enumerates the magnitude of his achievement: ‘He took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand-to-hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.’19 As he had always intended, as we know he had to, Caesar exploited the killing fields of Gaul for that glory an intractable senate stubbornly withheld from him. The cost of so personal a victory included wholesale destruction of two tribes: the men, women and children of the Tencteri and Usipetes, mown down by Roman cavalry in a day of fighting which yielded a death toll estimated by Caesar at 430,000.20 It was genocide in the service of self-promotion; at best the killings were political. Although Romans thrilled to the grandeur of Caesar’s victories, awarding him extended celebrations of thanksgiving, when the smoke of sacrifice darkened the city’s altars and the gods themselves were besought to witness the empire’s growing magnificence, such unambiguous brutality directed against a civilian population provoked mixed reactions even in Rome. Such ruthlessness, even if we dismiss it as blinkeredness, must colour our assessment; certainly it stimulated reflection among Rome’s senators. ‘All that part of Gaul which is bounded by the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Cervennes, and by the Rhine and Rhône rivers,’ Suetonius wrote, ‘a circuit of some 3,200 square miles... he reduced to the form of province.’ Secure as long as he remained in that province (in which he now had at his disposal no fewer than ten legions), Caesar was at last rich and great. He was not yet fifty.
In 55 BC, in response to Ahenobarbus’ threat, the members of the triumvirate had met at Luca (modern Lucca). On that occasion, fissures were more evident than goodwill in this flimsiest of opportunist coalitions. Caesar’s diplomacy, spiced by charm, won the day. Crassus and Pompey held the consulship in 55 in Ahenobarbus’ place, electoral victory theirs through purchase and intimidation. They extended Caesar’s proconsulship of Gaul for a further five years and devised on their own behalf a bill that was passed by the tribune Trebonius. This granted each of them a similar five-year proconsulship – Syria for Crassus and two provinces of Spain for Pompey. (In the event, permitted to remain in Italy through an additional commission which placed him in charge of Rome’s grain supply, Pompey governed the latter through legates, preferring to remain on his country estates with his young wife, Caesar’s daughter Julia.21) Afterwards Caesar planned a second consulship, for 48, beginning, as Roman law dictated, a decade after completion of his previous term. Despite his victories and that inordinately enhanced dignitas by which he set such store, the misdeeds of his first consulship could not be erased. Caesar remained a man on the run.2
Only as consul invested with imperium, that power of military command possessed by magistrates and pro-magistrates for their term of office, could Caesar survive in Rome unscathed: any other return risked legal proceedings. At that point, all the achievements of the last two decades became forfeit to technical niceties maliciously exploited by enemies who, quite correctly, saw in Caesar a threat not only to their own positions but to the very continuance of the Republic as they knew it. It may be true that even now Caesar’s principal aim was not supreme power for himself per se. But a man so lavishly endowed with dynamism could scarcely embrace the treading-water prevarication of a system whose impotence he had explicitly recognized in the triumvirate. That alliance had attained its ends outside the ordinary sphere of senatorial action: its was the new reality of Roman politics. Where even the qualified democracy of the senate was powerless, iron-fisted authoritarianism promised to break through every impasse. For its protagonists it offered action and progress. Impossible that Caesar should forsake either. Authoritarianism then it must be, a policy which precluded the senate’s self-regarding inertia. A second consulship for Caesar would avert for another year indictment and crisis. It also promised to place him once again nearer to that position from which he could bypass senatorial constitutionalism in pursuit of his own goals.
But Caesar had failed to consider the omnipresence of death. In the event, not one but three deaths served to unravel his best-laid plans. A year after the triumvirate’s meeting at Luca, in August 54, Pompey’s wife and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, died in childbirth. Briefly, mismatched father- and son-in-law were united in grief. That the bond between them was weakened, both surely acknowledged. ‘Their friends were greatly troubled too,’ according to Plutarch: ‘they felt that the relationship which alone kept the distempered state in harmony and concord was now dissolved.’22 Pompey declined Caesar’s suggestion that the older man marry Caesar’s great-niece Octavia, while he marry Pompey’s daughter Pompeia (an instance of politic bed-hopping which would have required three of the four participants to divorce existing spouses). In 53, Crassus was roundly defeated by the Parthians at Carrhae, his body decapitated, his troops butchered, Roman standards seized by the enemy. A crucial intermediary between Caesar and Pompey had vanished at a stroke. In the aftermath of Rome’s humiliation, which Caesar later vowed to avenge, on 6 December Publius Clodius Pulcher, patrician-born rabble-rousing tribune of the plebs and one-time rumoured lover of Caesar’s third wife Pompeia, was killed. Assassinated in Suetonius’ account, he may have died in an outbreak of politically motivated gang violence on the Appian Way outside Rome. Certainly Clodius’ funeral gave rise to rioting, which in turn engendered panic on the part of the senate; in the air a sense of escalating lawlessness, of the state inadequate to address new challenges. ‘There were many,’ Plutarch reports, ‘who actually dared to say in public that nothing but monarchy could now cure the diseases of the state.’23 Attention turned to Pompey. At Cato’s suggestion Caesar’s remaining fellow triumvir was appointed sole consul without an election but with enhanced powers, which he in turn used to legitimize Caesar’s desire to stand for the consulship in his absence. He also obtained a five-year extension to his own command in Spain. Shortly afterwards, in an unexpected change of heart, Pompey passed a law preventing absenteeism among candidates for the consulship. Late in 52 he sugared the pill by sanctioning a second public thanksgiving – on this occasion twenty days long – for Caesar’s defeat of Vercingetorix. In Plutarch’s version, Pompey’s former contempt for Caesar as his junior in age, achievement and distinction had belatedly turned to fear.
For Caesar, thanksgiving in Rome was a sideshow. What mattered was his election to the consulship for a second time and, equally importantly, the management of that election in such a manner that his enemies were denied any opportunity of placing him on trial for previous misdemeanours. This was possible only if he retained proconsular imperium, which obtained only so long as he remained outside Rome. Electoral victory in absentia had become a point of honour, more important to Caesar than the evident loss of Pompey’s former amity. In the service of the Republic he had won victories unrivalled in its history: he refused to countenance the possibility of arraignment for transgressions of the previous decade. While the senate’s line hardened, Caesar issued an ultimatum: either he be allowed to stand for election as proconsul of Gaul or, in
the event that he was forced to give up his province, other holders of military commands (a reference to Pompey) behave in like manner. They were, in his own words, ‘very mild demands’. Cicero described it as a ‘fierce and threatening letter’24. Either way, the import was clear. Caesar would not compromise. Nor in the event would a hostile senate. On 7 January 49 BC, the senate approved the senatus consultum ultimum which made Caesar a public enemy of Rome. Plutarch claims Pompey’s new father-in-law Scipio as instigator of the decree. Caesar’s response determined the future of his life. It also changed history, and not only that of Rome.
Early in the morning, on 11 January, in company with a single legion, Caesar crossed the Rubicon. In crossing the narrow stream which separated Cisalpine Gaul from Italy, he crossed from legality to illegality, from the status of heroic outlaw to traitor. It was a step not lightly made in Suetonius’ account, in which, at this critical juncture, an intervention of the supernatural strengthened Caesar’s resolve. ‘There appeared hard by a being of wondrous stature and beauty, who sat and played upon a reed... [T]he apparition snatched a trumpet... rushed to the river, and sounding the war-note with mighty blast, strode to the opposite bank.’ The ancient sources vie with one another in their presentation of Caesar’s historic transgression. ‘The die is cast,’ cries Suetonius’ hero, admitting the possibility of fatalism, then tearfully he implores his troops, tearing the clothes from his breast. Plutarch offers instead a quotation from the Greek dramatist Menander: ‘Let the die be thrown!’ It is a challenge, a compact with destiny, the stuff of legends: impossible to remain unmoved. Except that Caesar is not a victim unfairly penalized. Defence of his dignitas is the only justification he offers for a war in which his own countrymen will suffer and die – that self-seeking cause is victorious, of course. It is a conflagration with no foundation in ideology, principle or hope. As with so much in our story, its focus is power.
The Twelve Caesars Page 3
