Crassus sent his son Publius, who had come with him as his second-in-command, to charge the line; the Parthians withdrew, pulling Publius and his men onwards, and then swung around and surrounded them. Almost all of Publius’s troops fell fighting. Publius, seeing that defeat was inevitable, killed himself. The Parthians beheaded him and stuck his head on the end of a spear, waving it at his father as they harassed the remaining Romans.
Two days later Crassus was killed as well, with almost all of his men. The Parthian general, Surena, took Crassus’s head back to Orodes, king of Parthia, who (according to the Roman historian Dio Cassius) used it as a prop in a victory play.
The eastern frontier of Rome’s empire had been closed off. The Roman garrisons in Syria braced themselves under a Parthian attack which failed only because the Parthians were not yet experienced at sieges. King Orodes now ruled over a Parthia which stretched across much of the old Seleucid territory, from the Euphrates almost all the way to the border of China.
And the Triumvirate had been reduced to two. The year after the Parthian victory, Caesar—having put down a serious rebellion in Gaul—prepared to march back into Rome richer than Pompey and with more triumphs to his credit.
The Senate regarded this prospect with horror: Caesar’s glorious reputation, his wealth, and his army together all spelled dictator. And they were no longer compelled by Pompey’s armed men to grant Caesar’s wishes. The deaths of Julia and Crassus had weakened the bond between the two men, and Pompey was increasingly jealous of Caesar’s victories. “Pompey had come to fear Caesar,” Plutarch says. “Up till this time, he had despised him.”23
Together, Pompey and the Senate sent a message north: Caesar would not be allowed to enter Rome unless he surrendered his entire army.
Caesar suggested several compromises, including permission to enter with only a few legions, but Pompey convinced the Senate to refuse. Caesar knew that if he came to Rome unprotected, his career might end in hasty assassination. He decided that—like Sulla before him—he would enter with his army, as a conqueror; and so he set out, from Gaul, towards the north of Italy.
Plutarch says that Caesar knew perfectly well that this would start a bloody civil war, and that he halted, before he reached the Rubicon, and thought through the matter again. But finally, “in a sort of passion, as though casting calculation aside,” he shouted out “Alea iacta est!” which was the gambler’s traditional cry: “Let the die be cast!” He crossed the river, and “the broad gates of war were opened.”24
Immediately Italy was struck with panic. Men and women fled from one coast to the other, trying to get out of the way of the inevitable clash. Reports constantly flew down to the city that Caesar was just over the horizon. Pompey, panicking himself, left Rome and told the Senate to come with him; clearly he was afraid that the people of Rome would throw the gates open to Caesar. He fled down south to Brundisium, on the eastern coast, set up a rump government there, and then sent his own army across the water to reassemble itself at the Greek city of Dyrrhachium.
Caesar thought that this showed tremendous weakness, and Cicero later thought it a bad decision as well. But the delay gave Pompey enough time to round up a huge army with a very strong fleet of ships, since Caesar (rather than chasing him on out of Italy) turned back towards Rome. And, like Sulla years before, Pompey soon found himself joined by hundreds of prominent Romans, including Cicero.
Back in Italy, Caesar entered Rome and “found the city in a more settled state than he expected,” with a good part of the Senate still in residence and inclined to pacify the great conqueror.25 He did not, like Marius and Sulla, institute a purge; he simply took control of the city and scared the resistance out of everyone by sheer force of personality. When the remaining tribune objected to Caesar’s raiding the treasury in order to prepare for war against Pompey, Caesar remarked, “Young man, if you don’t stop interfering, I may just kill you. And I dislike saying this much more than I would dislike doing it.” The tribune, Plutarch says, “went off in a fright,” and for the rest of the war Caesar had all the money he needed.
78.2. Julius Caesar. Roman marble bust of Julius Caesar, 100–44 BC. Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Photo credit Alinari/Art Resource, NY
It took him two years to defeat the expatriates over in Greece. Months of “desultory fighting,” as Plutarch terms it, finally ended in 48, in a huge clash on the plain of Pharsalus. Caesar’s infantry fought against Pompey’s cavalry as they had learned to do against the Britons, by running up to the horses and aiming their javelins at the riders’ faces. The cavalry was completely unaccustomed to this mode of fighting, and stampeded. The resistance collapsed. Pompey, watching his army fall apart, went back to his tent and sat down until he could hear Caesar’s troops storming through the camp itself; then he changed into old clothes and slipped away unnoticed.
At news of the victory, the Senate proclaimed Caesar first dictator, and then, after eleven days, consul instead. Caesar’s aide Mark Antony, who had led one of the wings of his army during the Battle of Pharsalus, ran the city as his deputy; Caesar had learned that Pompey had been sighted heading towards Egypt, and had decided to chase his enemy a little farther.26
Whatever personal reasons Caesar had for following Pompey to Egypt, his pursuit made good political sense as well. Egypt, much fallen from its old greatness, was still a rich and potentially troublesome kingdom, and it had a weak young king: Ptolemy XIII, distant descendent of the great Ptolemy himself.
The Ptolemys had followed each other in a bickering, contentious, but more or less unbroken line for the last century, since we saw Ptolemy VI quarrelling with the Seleucids over Coele Syria. However, Ptolemy XIII was in the middle of a quarrel with his sister, Cleopatra VII, over which one of them should have the throne. When Pompey sailed into view of Egypt’s shores, Cleopatra was in Alexandria, while young Ptolemy was in Pelusium with an army, getting ready to attack his sister.27
Ptolemy, Plutarch says, was “a very young man,” and his advisors made most of his decisions for him. They decided that since Caesar was already on the way down to Egypt to catch and punish Pompey, they would get on Caesar’s good side by doing the job for him. So an official delegation of welcoming Egyptians sailed out to greet Pompey’s approaching ship, saluted him as “Imperator,” and invited him aboard so that they could ferry him ashore. Just as they were reaching the landing, as Pompey began to stand up to get off the boat, one of Ptolemy’s men ran him through from behind; and then two more cut off his head and threw his body into the water. Pompey was sixty years old; he had just celebrated his birthday on September 28, the day before his murder.28
When Caesar arrived, the Egyptian officials brought him Pompey’s head in a basket. He was, reportedly, furious: he had intended to humiliate his old ally, but not kill him. But this gave him a marvelous excuse for taking control of Egypt, which he could now do by way of punishment. He ordered Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII to both come to Alexandria, where he would choose one of them as rightful ruler of Egypt (under his supervision).226
His choice turned out to be less than objective. He was smitten with Cleopatra’s beauty and ordered her brother deposed in her favor. Ptolemy XIII died fighting against the Roman troops who arrived to enforce Caesar’s decision. Cleopatra was coronated and ceremonially married to her younger brother, an Egyptian custom that the Ptolemys had been following for some time.
Meanwhile Caesar carried on a furious affair with Cleopatra which kept him idle (politically, at least) in Alexandria for some months. When he was finally able to tear himself away, leaving her pregnant, he made a military tour around the edge of the Roman Republic: up the eastern border, where he destroyed the armies of Pontus; back down along the African border; up through the Iberian peninsula; and then back to Rome.
During his travels, he had been reelected consul four times, as a way of keeping up a legal pretense for his power. In 46, Caesar’s supporters (and the Romans who were afraid of them) agreed to give him a vic
tory parade into Rome that had in it uncomfortable echoes of the ancient Etruscan kingship. Statues of him were placed around the city, alongside those of the ancient kings. He was allowed to wear a purple robe, and was hailed with the ceremonial title Imperator; the parade was led by a placard that read Veni, vidi, vici! (“I came, I saw, I conquered!”)29
After the parade, he took over the jobs of appointing magistrates, passing laws, and generally behaving as Senate, Tribune, Assembly, and Council all wrapped into one; all with the support of the army, which was loyal to him (he gave all the men who had fought in the Gallic Wars Roman citizenship), and the people, who still saw him as their benevolent guardian. He even changed the calendar: in order to institute the four-year system of leap years that we follow now, the year 46, that of his greatest public triumphs, was 445 days long.
Perhaps the Senate was afraid of the army’s retaliation and of public resistance, should they cease to shower him with honors. In 44, the Senate agreed to name him dictator for life. But this was not the same as being king; and now it became clear that somewhere in his youth, Caesar had allowed the idea of becoming a king to take root in his imagination.
On February 15 of 44, Mark Antony made a trial run at putting a crown on Caesar’s head. Antony, as part of a religious festival, was carrying a diadem with a laurel wreath tied to it. He offered it to Caesar, but the crowd responded with only scattered applause. Caesar, reading their mood, pushed it away several times, which brought on a much bigger cheer. The people of Rome had made it quite clear that they would not like Caesar to become an actual king. Perhaps king had too many echoes of the Parthians to the east; perhaps the lingering idea that Rome should be a meritocracy made the hereditary nature of a kingship repugnant. Caesar had no legitimate sons (although Cleopatra had given birth to a son, Ptolemy XV Caesarion), but he had named his eighteen-year-old great-nephew Octavian, son of his sister’s daughter, as his legal heir in his will.
Not long afterwards, the Senate agreed that Caesar could wear a crown, but only when he was out of Rome campaigning against Parthia—because myth said that only a king could conquer Parthia. Perhaps this was the last straw for those senators who were increasingly worried that the Republic would lose even its half-mythical reality. These hostile senators, which included Caesar’s own cousin Marcus Brutus (one of the heirs named in his will), made plans to assassinate the Dictator for Life when he entered the Senate next, on March 15 of 44 BC: the Ides of March. Everyone knew that Caesar’s right-hand man Mark Antony would not join in the plot, and so plans were made to stall him at the door while the act was done.
In his biography of Caesar’s heir Octavian, the Greek writer Nicolaus of Damascus describes the assassination with clinical detail:
When he came in and the Senate saw him, the members rose out of respect to him. Those who intended to lay hands on him were all about him. The first to come to him was Tullius Cimber, whose brother Caesar had exiled, and stepping forward as though to make an urgent appeal on behalf of his brother, he seized Caesar’s toga, seeming to act rather boldly for a suppliant, and thus prevented him from standing up and using his hands if he so wished. Caesar was very angry, but the men held to their purpose and all suddenly bared their daggers and rushed upon him. First Servilius Casca stabbed him on the left shoulder a little above the collar bone, at which he had aimed but missed through nervousness. Caesar sprang up to defend himself against him, and Casca called to his brother, speaking in Greek in his excitement. The latter obeyed him and drove his sword into Caesar’s side. A moment before Cassius [Longinus] had struck him obliquely across the face. Decimus Brutus struck him through the thigh. Cassius Longinus was eager to give another stroke, but he missed and struck Marcus Brutus on the hand. Minucius, too, made a lunge at Caesar but he struck Rubrius on the thigh. It looked as if they were fighting over Caesar. He fell, under many wounds, before the statue of Pompey, and there was not one of them but struck him as he lay lifeless, to show that each of them had had a share in the deed, until he had received thirty-five wounds, and breathed his last.30
Plutarch says that he died crying out for help; several Greek accounts, that he called out in Greek to Brutus, “Even you, my son?”227 And Suetonius says that, as Caesar was first stabbed, he cried out in blank surprise: “But this is force!”31
Caesar’s killers were simply at the logical end of a process that had begun with the Gracchi a hundred years before. No constitution or balance of powers had ever been able to restrain the ambitions of the powerful; Caesar himself had demonstrated this, and now he had fallen by the same methods he had used. But his shock reveals that the idea of the Republic still had a grasp on the Roman imagination. The official name of the Republic, engraved on the standards of the legions and on the buildings of Rome itself, was SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romani, The Senate and the People of Rome.
Rome is a place where the people have power: this had not been true for decades, but the Romans had no other way to think of themselves and no other name for their collective identity. It was a powerful lie, and even a dictator could still be aghast when its falsity was forced in front of his eyes.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Empire
Between 44 BC and AD 14,
Octavian becomes the First Citizen,
the Parthians reject Roman ways,
and the entire empire pretends that Rome is still a republic
WITH CAESAR’S BODY STILL LYING on the floor of the Senate, Mark Antony finally managed to shove his way into the Senate chamber. He was too late to help Caesar, but he did prevent the conspirators from throwing Caesar’s body into the Tiber, as they had planned. Instead they deserted the Senate and marched in phalanx to the Capitol, swords still drawn, shouting to the people to come join them, and “resume their liberty.” They were at a crucial juncture: the people in the street might spontaneously band together against them. A few of the better-known citizens of Rome fell into the march with them, and soon the city was past the immediate danger point. Meanwhile three of Caesar’s household slaves came and got his body from the empty chamber and carried him home.1
Mark Antony, not sure how the public mood would break, fled to a friend’s house, disguised himself as a slave, and got out of the city as quickly as possible. Brutus and Cassius, on the other hand, continued to make speeches about Caesar’s death as a tragic necessity. The next day, they reassembled the Senate and suggested that Caesar be given a big honorable funeral and also be honored as divine, now that he was safely dead. The Senate agreed. This kept Rome calm, and also encouraged Mark Antony, who had not gone far, to come back; clearly no purges of Caesar’s allies were about to begin.
But in the next days, the calm was wrecked when Caesar’s will was made public, and it was found that he had divided his huge private fortune among the citizens of Rome. His body was then carried through the streets; Brutus and Cassius had agreed to this, as a necessary part of an honorable burial, but when the citizens to whom he had been generous saw the mutilated body, a riot began to form.
Mark Antony, who was in the Forum to give Caesar’s funeral speech, encouraged the uprising. He had brought with him an armed guard, led by one of his allies: Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who had been appointed by Caesar to be the governor of provinces in Gaul and Nearer Spain. Lepidus had not yet left for his new command, but he had been collecting troops in Rome to take with him. Now he surrounded Mark Antony with them. Safely guarded, Antony capped off his funeral speech with a show-and-tell: he took Caesar’s ripped and bloodstained toga out from under his arm and shook it out so everyone could see how many times he had been stabbed.
The sight of Caesar’s toga was the last push needed to send the people in the street over the edge. Citizens ran through the streets, waving torches and yelling for Brutus and Cassius to be found and torn to pieces.
No one could find them. They had managed to get out of the city in the early hours of the riot, and were now holed up in Antium. Mark Antony took control of the governm
ent and, by way of thanking Lepidus for his support, gave Lepidus the position of Pontifex Maximus, High Priest of Rome.
But Mark Antony’s hold on power was very shaky. He was, as far as the Senate was concerned, Caesar Junior, as likely to become a tyrant as Caesar had been, and without Caesar’s charisma to persuade any of them onto his side.
At the same time, Brutus was wooing the public from his exile at Antium, sending money back to Rome for public festivals, hoping to buy his way back into the good graces of the people. One of his allies in the Senate, the orator Cicero, helped him out by making continual speeches about his generosity and his willingness to fight tyranny. “By this time,” says Plutarch, “the people had begun to be dissatisfied with Antony, who they perceived was setting up a kind of monarchy for himself; they longed for the return of Brutus.”2
Brutus might have been able to return as a hero in a matter of weeks except for one factor: Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, now eighteen, had been posted away from Italy on military duty, but as soon as he heard of his uncle’s murder, he headed home.
When Octavian arrived, Cicero (who thought Mark Antony a fool and a tyrant in the making) saw the young man as his best possible ally against Antony’s power. This naturally headed off any support for Brutus, the assassin. Plutarch writes that Brutus took this badly, and “treated with him very sharply in his letters.”3
This did nothing to get Cicero back on his side, and Brutus gave up for the time being, left Italy altogether, and went to Athens to stay with a friend.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 72
