Cicero

by Anthony Everitt

  13

  “WHY, THIS IS VIOLENCE!”

  Plots and Conspiracies: January–March 44 BC

  From the moment the civil war finally ended in 45, respectable opinion agreed that Caesar’s duty was to restore the constitution. From his policy of pardoning his enemies whenever they fell into his hands and recruiting former Pompeians to his government it looked, in the early days of victory, as if this was what he would do. His clemency had few precedents, for previous generals who had used military force to take over the state had massacred their opponents. Most people thought it meant that Caesar had a clear vision of a reconciled society after his victory.

  He probably did. But he was also convinced that a strong executive authority should replace the incompetent competitive cockpit of Senatorial government. He had the means with which to impose his will. However, minimum cooperation from the political class was necessary if any solution he devised was to last. To begin with, he thought that he had gained it. But former enemies—such as Marcus Junius Brutus, the dead Cato’s son-in-law and half-nephew, and Caius Cassius Longinus, Praetor for 44 and hungry for a senior military command that Caesar never gave him—were willing to work with him only as long as they believed that he would bring back the Republic. AS it became clear he had no intention of doing so, they lost confidence in him and withdrew their support. The more powerful he became, the more isolated he felt.

  Despite the smiles and adulation, the Dictator knew he was unpopular in leading circles. Once, when Cicero called to see him but was not shown in at once, he remarked: “I should be an idiot to suppose that even so easygoing an individual as Cicero is my friend when he has to sit waiting for my convenience all this time.”

  The first signs of the conspiracy against Caesar can be detected almost exactly one year before the Ides of March 44—after the last battle of the civil war at Munda. AS soon as news reached Rome of the outcome of the battle, all kinds of people—entrepreneurs, politicians and young men on the make—left Rome to meet the returning army en route and catch the eye of the Republic’s undisputed master. At Narbo in Transalpine Gaul, Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s principal lieutenants, fell in with another of his supporters, who had recently been a governor in Spain, Caius Trebonius.

  Trebonius had a very curious deal to propose. He wanted to know if Antony would join a plot to kill Caesar. Antony did not respond to the tentative sounding. What was sinister about the conversation was less that it took place than that Antony did not report it. The fact that Caesar’s closest political partner saw no cause to warn him is strong evidence of the disaffection of the ruling class.

  Nothing came of this démarche, but at some point in the months that followed individuals began meeting in small groups in one another’s houses and discussed various ideas of how and where the murder should be committed. Perhaps he could be attacked on the Holy Way, the street that led into the Forum. Or he could be ambushed during an election on the Field of Mars. Voters had to pass along a narrow bridge over a stream where the ballots were counted. Perhaps Caesar could be pushed off the bridge and pounced upon. The trouble with these schemes was that they would take place in public and there was always a risk that the assassins would themselves be assaulted or killed. For the time being these quiet conversations led nowhere and were overshadowed by the hyperactivity of the regime.

  One of the leading conspirators was Caius Cassius Longinus. AS Quaestor he had taken charge of Syria after Crassus met his end at Carrhae and had scored a military success against the Parthians in 51, when Cicero had been governor of the neighboring province of Cilicia. An irascible man, he did not easily forget a grudge and fell out for a time with Brutus when the latter won a promotion at his expense. His contemporaries took the view that he opposed Caesar for personal reasons rather than on principle. According to Plutarch, he was furious when, during the civil war, Caesar came across a number of lions Cassius had acquired for use at some Games he was due to stage in Rome and confiscated them for his own purposes.

  Yet there is also evidence that Cassius had a long-standing deeply felt aversion to arbitrary government: as a boy he had gone to the same school as Sulla’s son, Faustus. When Faustus bragged about his all-powerful father, Cassius lost his temper and beat him up. The two boys were questioned about the matter by Pompey, at the time one of Sulla’s lieutenants, and Cassius is reported to have been unrepentant. He said to Faustus: “Come on, Faustus, you dare repeat in front of this man what you said before, which made me angry, and I’ll smash your face in again!”

  Gradually more and more people were drawn into the plot against Caesar and by the end at least sixty were involved. Their motives varied. While masquerading as principled tyrannicides or, as they called themselves, Freedom Fighters (liberatores), some in fact resented the deaths of family and friends in the civil war. For a few, the Dictator’s clemency and generosity was too much to bear, too insulting to their sense of dignity. Others were impressed by the political and social status of the leading conspirators; in particular Marcus Brutus, one of whose ancestors had led a celebrated uprising against the monarchy centuries before, was extremely influential in giving the enterprise respectability. And then there were those who had worked for Caesar a long time and felt they had not been adequately rewarded.

  Meanwhile, the regime continued to entrench itself. Honors were poured on Caesar and statues of him began appearing all over the city. His ivory image was carried in the procession at the Games alongside those of the gods. Another was set up in the Temple of Romulus, the first King of Rome, in the Forum with the dedication “To the Invincible God.” His effigy was also placed on the Capitol, Rome’s citadel, next to those of the former kings of Rome.

  AS an expression of the new spirit of harmony that he wished to project, Caesar re-erected statues of Pompey and other onetime political opponents in their old places. Cicero had the mot for the moment: “By his generous action, he has not just set up Pompey’s statues but ensured that his own remain safely in place.” Towards the end of 45 a final batch of honors was granted, in effect announcing Caesar’s deification on lines uncomfortably similar to those of the Hellenistic monarchs of Asia Minor, for whom self-conferred divine status was a long-standing convention.

  Plans for the huge expeditionary force of sixteen legions that Caesar had decided to lead against the Parthian Empire to avenge the defeat and death of Crassus in 53 were approaching completion. He would set off in mid-March 44 and might be away from Rome for as long as three years. He arranged for the advance election of all the Consuls who would hold office during his absence. The Dictator’s lack of interest in domestic politics and the renewal of Republican institutions could hardly have been more clearly demonstrated.

  On December 31 one of the Consuls died and, as elections for some other officeholders were being held at the time, Caesar forced the immediate election of a certain Caius Caninius Rebilus, a New Man who had served under him in Gaul, to be his successor for a few hours. This was using the Consulship as a cheap reward for a supporter. Public opinion was outraged. When a crowd of followers prepared to escort the new Consul down to the Forum, Cicero remarked: “We’d better get a move on, or he’ll be out of office before we get there.”

  AS the new year dawned the mood in the city was darkening. Many damaging rumors were being assiduously spread—that Caesar was going to establish Egypt as the seat of his Empire where he would rule with his mistress, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, now living just outside the capital in opulent, un-Roman style; or, even more implausibly, that Troy was to be the new capital of the Empire. These tales were little more than distorted reflections of a perfectly rational anxiety about how Rome would be ruled during Caesar’s absence in Asia Minor.

  Caesar may have begun to suspect that among the fawning Senators there were those who recommended more and more fantastic honors with the conscious aim of setting opinion against him. He hesitated over whether or not to assume the title of Dictator for Life, eventually deciding to
do so in the early days of February. This caused a good deal of angry comment, since the Dictatorship was traditionally a strictly temporary appointment that gave the officeholder supreme power for a short time, seldom more than six months, in order to cope with a state emergency.

  Caesar’s decision was seen as a very bad sign by Republicans, an obvious first step to a formal monarchy. Some of the conspirators, wanting to stir up bad feeling, began saluting him as king in public. They secretly placed a diadem (a ribbon worn around the head, denoting royalty) on one of his statues. Two Tribunes removed it, apparently to Caesar’s annoyance. A little later when he was riding in from attending a festival on the Alban Mount, some men again hailed him as king. “My name is Caesar, not King,” he remarked. The same Tribunes brought a suit against the first man who had shouted the word out. This infuriated Caesar and, when the Tribunes then issued a statement that their freedom of speech was under threat, they were unceremoniously deposed from office. The incident could suggest that Caesar really did want to establish a monarchy. However, there is another more plausible and less sinister interpretation, which an event a few days later seems to confirm.

  On February 15, 44, the festival of the Lupercalia was held—a strange ritual which symbolized the renewal of civil order near the year’s beginning. The Luperci were a college of priests, young men of good family who every year on this day ran through the city naked except for goatskin loincloths. They represented wolf-men living in a primal community held together by violence.

  Caesar attended this exotic event, watching it from his gilded chair on the Speakers’ Platform in the Forum. The ceremony opened with the sacrifice of goats and a dog, whose blood was smeared on the foreheads of two young men. The blood was then wiped off with milk-soaked wool, after which the Luperci dressed themselves in the bloodstained skins of the victims. They ate and drank heavily before running around the Palatine Hill to purify a grotto there which was sacred to the Luperci. They brandished strips of freshly flayed animal skin and lashed out with them at childless women, who placed themselves in their way in the belief that a touch of the whip would relieve them of their infertility.

  Antony, now in his late thirties and a little old for the part, was among the runners, but instead of carrying a thong he held a diadem in his hand, twined around a laurel wreath. Some of his fellow runners lifted him up so that he could place it at Caesar’s feet. Voices in the crowd shouted that Caesar should be crowned with it. Cassius with another of the conspirators, Publius Servilius Casca, picked up the diadem and put it on Caesar’s knee. The Dictator made a gesture of refusal and there were cheers from the crowd. Then Antony ran up again, presumably onto the Speakers’ Platform itself, and put the diadem on Caesar’s head. Antony said, “The people offer this to you through me,” and Caesar replied, “Jupiter alone is King of the Romans.” He immediately took it off and flung it into the crowd; those at the back clapped, but in the front rows people shouted that he should accept it and not resist the will of the People. An early source says that this “pantomime” went on for some time with applause ringing out with every refusal. Looking thoroughly put out, Caesar stood up and opened the front of his toga and said that anyone who wanted to cut his throat might do so.

  Eventually Antony retrieved the diadem and had it sent to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. The official record in the archives for the Lupercalia of that year read: “To Caius Caesar, Life Dictator, Mark Antony the Consul, by command of the People, offered the kingship: Caesar was unwilling.”

  The episode betrays every sign of having been premeditated. AS Cicero pointed out later to Antony: “Where did the diadem come from? It is not the sort of thing you pick up in the street. You had brought it from home.” It is highly unlikely that Antony would have dared to improvise or stage an ambush of this kind without Caesar’s knowledge and it seems equally implausible that the government was unaware of the real state of public feeling.

  In all probability Caesar decided that the growing rush of rumors needed to be stemmed. Perhaps he had become wise to the unwisdom of accepting so many honors. Almost on the eve of the Parthian expedition, the feverish political climate needed to be calmed. The Lupercalia offered a high-profile opportunity to stage a “spontaneous” request and then have it decisively turned down. It is fascinating to observe (according to one of the earliest sources, Nicolaus of Damascus, who at one point in his life was a tutor in the household of Antony and Cleopatra) the active involvement of two known or presumed critics of the regime (and conspirators) in the charade. Their presence at the scene may imply an intention to involve a wide range of political opinion in a spectacle that was meant to quash the rumors once and for all.

  The maneuver failed. What if the crowd’s applause had supported rather than refused the “crowning”? skeptics wondered. Could suspicious and cynical constitutionalists be sure what would have happened then? So far as the conspirators were concerned the Lupercalia did nothing to lull their fears. If anything, it focused their minds and hurried them up. What was probably an inchoate group, or groupings, of malcontents came together as a clearly defined plot. It was probably at this point that Cassius was able to recruit the conspiracy’s most celebrated member, Marcus Brutus.

  Attacking Antony in a speech almost exactly a year later, Cicero said, “You, you, assassinated him at the Lupercalia.” This colorful overstatement contained a germ of truth: the public offer of kingship was in a sense Caesar’s death warrant.

  About this time, an apparently unimportant misunderstanding also left a bad impression. Caesar was sitting in the vestibule of the Temple of Venus in his newly opened Julian Forum deciding various construction contracts. A Senatorial delegation appeared on the scene with a commission to present him with a formal record of all the honors he had been voted. Unfortunately, the Dictator was not looking in their direction and seems not to have noticed them. He went on conducting business until someone pointed out their presence. It was only then that he put aside his papers and received the Senators but, as an added discourtesy, failed to rise to his feet. He evidently realized this was a gaffe, for his friends soon put it around that he had been unable to stand up because of an attack of diarrhea.

  What were Caesar’s real political intentions for the future? It is hard to be certain today, and even contemporaries struggled to find an answer to the question. This may well be because Caesar himself was unsure of the way forward. In all probability he recognized that the formal assertion of monarchy was out of the question. The Dictatorship for Life gave him what he wanted while staying, more or less, inside constitutional norms. He was quoted as saying: “I would prefer to hold the Consulship legally rather than a kingship illegally”; the same principle could be applied to the Dictatorship and this was probably his genuine view on the subject.

  Caesar’s personal mood was depressed. His health was deteriorating. (As he got older, it is reported, his epileptic fits became more frequent and he suffered from headaches and nightmares.) He became aware of plots against him and secret nocturnal meetings but took no action except to announce that he knew of them. Warned that Brutus was plotting against him, Caesar touched his body and said: “Brutus will wait for this piece of skin.” On another occasion, though, he took a less sanguine view. When Dolabella and Antony were reported to be plotting revolution, he replied: “It’s not fat, longhaired fellows that worry me but those pale, thin ones”—by whom he meant Brutus and Cassius.

  The Dictator dispensed with a troop of armed Spaniards that was his permanent escort, as well as a bodyguard of Senators that had been voted to him. He mingled publicly and unprotected among all comers. When advised to rehire the Spaniards, he said: “There is no fate worse than being continuously under guard, for it means you are always afraid.” His decision was probably as much motivated by scorn for the opposition as by a desire to bid for popularity. “It is more important for Rome than for me that I should survive,” he said on more than one occasion. “If anything happens to me, Rome
will enjoy no peace. A new civil war will break out under far worse conditions than the last one.” Those close to him felt he had lost the desire to live much longer.

  Caesar’s reluctance to show any signs of compromise and his refusal to share power with others explain the remarkable fact that so many leading members of the government joined the conspiracy to put an end to their leader. Besides Cassius and the much-trusted Marcus Brutus, who were both Praetors, there was Decimus Junius Brutus (a distant relative of Marcus), who was to be Consul in 42. The continuing silence of Mark Antony, now Consul, about his conversation with Trebonius speaks louder than words. AS the final plans for the assassination were laid, the conspirators spent some time pondering what to do about Antony. The fact that he was seen as a potential sympathizer was a reason for not making him a target alongside Caesar. However, Cassius argued that he should be killed along with Caesar: he was a physically strong man and might intervene to help the Dictator. Also, he and Caesar were Consuls and he would be the senior official after the assassination. If he were out of the way, Brutus and Cassius, as Praetors, would be able to take charge of the government legally. Brutus disagreed: it was one thing, he said, to kill a tyrant but quite another to kill a lawfully appointed Consul. It was finally agreed that Trebonius would isolate Antony at the crucial moment by intercepting him before the meeting and holding him in conversation.

  During the first three months of 44 a great simplification of Roman politics took place. On the one hand, Caesar finally came to see that he had failed to reconcile the optimates to his dominance and further consolidated his authority. On the other, the optimates finally came to despair of a restoration of the Republic. Neither side could see a way out of the impasse except by Caesar’s removal from the scene—permanent, so far as Brutus and Cassius were concerned, and temporary from Caesar’s perspective. The Parthian expedition was, in its own way, a recognition of Caesar’s failure. However it was to be achieved, he had to go.