Death of Caesar : The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination (9781451668827)

by Strauss, Barry

  Caesar gave Brutus a warm welcome. Plutarch claims that the two men took a walk together. They were alone and Caesar asked where Pompey was headed. Brutus said he did not know but he reasoned that Egypt was probably Pompey’s destination because of his allies there. Caesar was convinced, says Plutarch, and so he dropped everything and headed to Egypt.

  Caesar tells a different story in the Commentaries on the Civil War, his classic version of events that combines history with propaganda. He had to tread lightly about the unsavory facts of a conflict in which he was killing fellow Romans. Caesar says that he headed east to Ephesus (in modern Turkey) before he got the news that Pompey had been seen in Cyprus, which made Caesar conclude that Pompey’s destination was Egypt. Only then did Caesar make for Egypt. But Caesar never mentions Brutus in his Commentaries. Perhaps Caesar decided to draw the veil on the story of Brutus’s betrayal of Pompey or perhaps Caesar considered Brutus’s information too tentative for him to rush off to Egypt.

  Cicero too made his peace with Caesar, but many of the Senate’s grandees fought on. They still had men and money and the Mediterranean’s most powerful fleet. The leaders went to the Roman province of Africa (modern Tunisia), where they could count on allied support. Pompey went to Egypt but was murdered as he stepped ashore.

  It took Caesar another year before he dealt with his enemies in Roman Africa, but when he did, in April 46 B.C. he crushed them in battle. Caesar then marched west to Utica (west of modern Tunis), a seaport and the capital of the province. The town was under the command of Cato, the last holdout in North Africa. Caesar relished the great symbolic victory of Cato’s surrender. He wanted Cato to accept Caesar’s clemency.

  But Cato refused. He considered Caesar a tyrant. Mercy from him, said Cato, was harder to bear than death. Cato decided to commit suicide. He told his son that he had been raised in liberty and freedom of speech, and he was too old now to learn slavery. Alone at night, Cato took a dagger and ripped out his intestines, only to have his supporters discover him and have a doctor stitch him back up. Cato finally tore out the stitches and died.

  When Caesar found out, he is supposed to have said, “O Cato, I begrudge you your death; for you begrudged me the sparing of your life.” Cato’s suicide spoiled Caesar’s story. Still, a simple and effective means of damage control lay at hand—silence. Today we think of the Romans as people who admired noble suicides, but that only came later. In 46 B.C., suicide was frowned on: even Brutus disapproved of his uncle Cato’s act as unholy and unmanly. But Caesar made a big misstep.

  When he returned to Rome in the summer of 46 B.C., Caesar got permission from the Senate to celebrate four triumphs in a row. This allowed him to one-up Pompey, who was famous for celebrating three triumphs in three separate years. Pompey’s last triumph, held in 61 B.C. for his eastern victories, was especially grand. Caesar’s, of course, were even more lavish.

  Since celebrating the death of Roman citizens was improper, Caesar had to gloss over the Civil War in his triumphs. Instead he highlighted his victories over the Gauls and over other foreign enemies. The crowd enjoyed such unscripted moments as his soldiers mockingly chanting, “Romans, watch your wives, see the bald adulterer’s back home.”

  Triumphal parades included inscribed placards. Caesar took care not to post the names of any Roman citizens. Yet Caesar allowed paintings to be displayed in the parade that depicted the suicides of three leading Roman generals after their defeat in Africa. One of them showed Cato “tearing himself apart like a wild animal.” The crowd groaned in response. By criticizing Cato’s death, Caesar gave the memory of his archenemy new life.

  That was just the beginning. The following months witnessed a pamphlet war over Cato. Brutus commissioned Cicero to write Cato, a short work in praise of his late uncle. Although aware that it would surely offend Caesar and his friends, Cicero took the job. He considered Cato a great man who had predicted the future with remarkable clarity. Although the piece does not survive, it is clear that it exalted Cato, whom Cicero called elsewhere “first in manly courage among all peoples.” Elite opinion followed. For some reason Brutus was unhappy with Cicero’s work so he too wrote a short tribute called Cato. Caesar replied with Anti-Cato. Caesar attacked Cato as greedy, drunk, and a lecher.

  Yet while his uncle and mentor Cato had killed himself with a dagger in North Africa rather than surrender to Caesar, Brutus was enjoying the benefits of the dictator’s clemency in the cities of the north Italian plain. Eventually, Brutus would have to face the contradictions in his own behavior.

  PORCIA

  The summer of 45 B.C. was a trying time for Brutus’s mother, Servilia, even though she had a new estate near Naples to enjoy. It was confiscated from a supporter of Pompey, and it ended up in her hands either as a gift or by purchase at a good price. Evidently, Servilia still had a place in Caesar’s heart or in his calculations. In any case, she felt no qualms about profiting at the expense of one of his enemies.

  But Servilia had a new daughter-in-law to deal with. Brutus divorced his wife, Claudia, and took a new bride, Porcia. She was his cousin and the daughter of his late uncle, Cato. She was also the widow of Bibulus, a bitter enemy of Caesar, who had died two years earlier.

  Porcia was a woman to contend with. When she was young, a famous orator wanted to take her from Bibulus to produce an heir. The orator was an older man, an admirer of Cato and eager to breed from the best stock. He even offered to give Porcia back to Bibulus after she produced an heir, if Bibulus loved her. But Cato, who had authority in the matter, refused. Instead, he gave the orator his own wife!

  But Porcia was formidable as well as desirable. If the story is true, Porcia once stabbed herself deeply in the thigh in order to prove her worth to Brutus. It seems that she was indeed a child of Cato. Porcia was just the sort of woman to prove attractive to the son of the strong Servilia.

  Nor is it difficult to understand Servilia’s distress. In the summer of 45 B.C., Servilia and Porcia were not getting along even though Brutus tried to do right by both. Why the two women were at odds is not recorded but Brutus’s allegiance to Caesar was surely an issue. There is no reason to doubt that the Brutus-Porcia marriage was a love match, but many Romans would have regarded Brutus’s marriage as a slap to Caesar. One thing is certain. The son of Servilia might get taken in by Caesar’s smooth talk, but the daughter of Cato would never fall for it.

  3

  DECISION IN A VILLA

  CAESAR RETURNED TO ITALY FROM Hispania in August 45 B.C. but he took his time reaching Rome. He didn’t enter the city until October, when he celebrated a triumph. In the meantime, he went to his villa about twenty miles south of the city, near Labici. There he could wake up in a bedroom whose floor was paved with a delicate, carpetlike mosaic of opaque glass tiles, with plant motifs and depicting a vase full of flowers, all framed by a meander-pattern cornice. He could do business while strolling shaded porticos amid luxurious yellow marble.

  An area of fertile volcanic soil, Labici was famous in antiquity for its fruit and vegetables and its vintage wine. Caesar enjoyed the cool peace of the Alban Hills, the same hills where, still today, people go to flee the searing summer heat of Rome. But if the vexing politics of the capital city gave Caesar an added reason for postponing his return, it would be understandable.

  Rome was full of people who demanded that Caesar restore the political system as it was before the Civil War. Caesar had other ideas. They thought in terms of the city, while he thought in terms of the empire. As he once wrote, once the Civil War was over, people could look forward to the tranquility of Italy, peace in the provinces, and the security of the empire. Caesar looked far beyond the walls of the Senate House or the corners of the Roman Forum—in fact, he was building a new Senate House and a new Forum. He expressed scorn for the Republic that so many of his contemporaries held sacred. Finally, Caesar had a desire for power. He was already Dictator for Ten Years, a title given him by the Senate in 46 B.C. and he held a host of other ho
nors. We can’t reconstruct precisely what he had in mind for the future. Caesar never expressed that clearly and perhaps his plans were still developing. One thing, though, is certain: Caesar’s vision of Rome’s future was incompatible with the Roman Republic’s past. Either Caesar or the Republic could survive, but not both.

  A CLASH OF VISIONS

  Now that the Civil War was over, Rome’s senators were ready to take back the power that they considered rightfully theirs. The way they saw it, after five years of war, tens of thousands of men killed, cities sacked, libraries burned, and money spent on carnage, it was the hour of the men in the long robes. The senators had known victorious generals breathing fire before, demanding primacy or dictatorship and, sometimes, cutting off a few heads. They had seen it all and they were confident that it meant nothing.

  The Roman nobility were so impressed by their collective authority that they couldn’t imagine anyone going beyond it. They trusted in their ability to co-opt even the strongest opposition, to make it part of the Republic again. They had tamed Pompey and they were sure they could do the same to Caesar. Even now, in spite of everything, they told themselves Caesar wanted nothing but the Republic. In letters dictated to slaves, at drinking parties, or in walks in their gardens with the murmur of water in the fountains in the background, they all stated the same confident conclusion. But Caesar cheated them.

  Caesar had no intention of playing the senators’ game. Cato understood that, Cicero sometimes did, but most people denied it. Caesar’s charm masked the truth. He forgave his enemies and even appointed them to Rome’s top offices. He had a smile for nearly everyone. He wrote personal letters even during military campaigns. He gave lavish gifts. It was a very good act but it was only an act.

  Caesar had outgrown the city of Rome and its petty quarrels. He could afford to appoint his enemies as praetors and consuls because those jobs no longer mattered. Real power now lay with Caesar’s circle of friends. He no longer cared about the Senate. His challenge was in not making that obvious.

  A year earlier, in 46 B.C., when he had returned to Rome from North Africa, Caesar was tactful. Now in 45 B.C., after a hard struggle in Hispania, Caesar was less willing to compromise. The war had come down to a do-or-die battle at Munda (near modern Seville) on March 17, 45 B.C. and the enemy almost pulled off a victory. Caesar had to plead with his men to do their part and his life was in danger at one point. In the end, his army won in a rout, but before that it was close.

  The experience might have shaken Caesar or merely confirmed his darkest thoughts. In either case, Hispania seems to have left him more focused and less patient, more sensitive to life’s fragility and less willing to consult with outsiders.

  In principle, the Civil War was over, but there were still military rumblings on the empire’s fringes and political unrest in Rome. Syria was in revolt.

  In short order, Sextus Pompey—the younger of the two sons of Pompey, he survived defeat—would come out of the mountains and reemerge as a military threat in Hispania. Meanwhile, back in Rome, neither senators nor ordinary citizens accepted the idea of a long-term dictatorship. They still expected Caesar to give them back the Republic, albeit with him in a dominant position.

  Most of Rome’s elite still loved their Republic. Cicero said that nothing in the world was comparable to it. Sallust, a great historian, advised Caesar, around 46 B.C., to “strengthen the Republic for the future, not in arms only and against the enemy, but also in the kindly arts of peace, a task far, far thornier.”

  Even the urban plebs (as the Romans called the common people of the city of Rome) found something to love in the Republic. Poor people did not hold public office but they did get to vote. Elections brought attention and gifts from the candidates, who were usually wealthy. A hotly contested election often yielded welfare benefits for the poor.

  Caesar disagreed. The man with wit and grace enough to turn so many married heads in Rome, the dandy whom Cicero once refused to take seriously because he paid too much attention to his hairstyle, that same Caesar could sometimes be as direct as a dagger thrust. He is said to have called the Republic “a nothing, a mere name without form or substance.” The remark comes from a pamphlet by an enemy of Caesar. It may be fiction but it sounds like Caesar’s stinging wit.

  The old guard said that they wanted Rome to be a government of laws and not men. Caesar would have none of it, judging the old guard fraudulent, deluded, or both. He believed that only his genius offered the people of the empire peace and prosperity. To understand why he reached that conclusion, we need to understand who Caesar was.

  BECOMING JULIUS CAESAR

  Caesar had come a long way. He had gone from a childhood in the Subura slums of Rome to the Royal Residence off the Forum, where he lived as Rome’s Chief Priest, having won election to that high office at a young age; from running and hiding in the hills of Central Italy and fighting malaria and a death sentence from the dictator Sulla to running a campaign against Rome’s hereditary enemy and winning a battle in the hills of Anatolia so dazzling that Caesar could only describe it with the famous phrase, VENI VIDI VICI, “I came, I saw, I conquered”; from winning, at the age of twenty, Rome’s second-highest military honor and the right to a standing ovation from senators whenever he entered the room, to lording it over the defeated rebel chieftain of Gaul lying at his feet; from carrying out three marriages and countless bedroom amours with Rome’s leading political wives to conducting an affair with a queen descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals. In earlier years, Caesar had been a reforming consul who fought and beat the Senate; a political broker who considered no one his equal except Rome’s then-greatest general, Pompey, and Rome’s then-richest man, Marcus Licinius Crassus. By 45 B.C. Caesar outstripped them both; became a conqueror on three continents; and wrote military commentaries destined to last as literary classics for two thousand years. Caesar was both genius and demon, excelling at politics, war, and writing—a triple crown that no one has ever worn as well.

  Caesar lived in a society in which modesty was not a virtue. He was what Aristotle called a great-souled man—one with high-flying ambitions and no small opinion of himself. He believed in his intelligence, versatility, and efficacy. He lacked neither courage nor nerve, and his appetite for self-promotion was limitless. As he saw it, he was a political virtuoso with a common touch. He was the man who did everything in the crisis of battle and saved his army again and again. He was stern, fair, and prudent with the enemy, and infinitely merciful to the people of Rome. He stated approvingly a belief that “the imperator Gaius Caesar deserved well of the republic after all his achievements.”

  His whole life experience, no doubt starting at his mother’s knee, had taught Caesar that he deserved to be the first man in Rome. He was confident that he could lead the people and he had little use for the Senate. He considered the latter an obstacle to his vision of a new and greater Rome: a rebuilt city worthy of an empire, a reimagined empire that treated its inhabitants as citizens rather than subjects, and a reformed state that considered the masses as contributors to the public good rather than as stumbling blocks in the way of a noble elite.

  As consul in 59 B.C., Caesar ran over the objections of the Senate and passed two land laws that provided relief to the poor. He also passed one of the first laws to protect the people of the empire from abuses by provincial governors. The Senate opposed Caesar but he simply bypassed it and had the laws approved by the people in their legislative assemblies. This was legal but against all custom.

  Caesar had little patience for custom or for the Senate. He was a refuge for the poor and proud of it, and he despised the Senate’s absolute refusal to make the slightest concession to their needs. He promoted men who horrified the snobs of the Senate—Roman knights, Italians, new citizens from Gaul or Hispania, even sons of freedmen, not to mention young members of the nobility who were in debt or had committed crimes. He made no apologies—in fact, he once said that if it took thugs and murde
rers to defend his dignitas (that is, his honor), he would gladly reward them with high public office. Nor did Caesar hesitate to use force against his elite enemies. He had Cato thrown out of the Senate and imprisoned after a blustery debate and he had his fellow consul, one of the Best Men, assaulted in public after he tried to stop enactment of one of the land laws.

  All his life Caesar loved risk and embraced violence. There was the time he made a dangerous crossing of the Adriatic in a small boat with a few friends and slaves and just a military dagger strapped to his thigh, under his tunic, to use if he met pirates—young Caesar was in a hurry to get back to Rome. Or the time that he marched his army into a trap on the River Sabis in Gaul, without taking the proper precautions, and almost saw his forces overwhelmed by a well-prepared enemy. Caesar won anyhow by rallying his men all over the battlefield, by fighting close to the front himself, and by relying on a superb second-in-command, Titus Labienus. He presented the near disaster as a famous victory in his Commentaries, although he downplayed the contribution of his Number Two.

  Caesar took his most famous risk in 49 B.C., when he crossed the Rubicon. This small river marked the boundary between Italian Gaul and Italy proper. It was illegal for a general to bring his army into Italy without the Senate’s approval. Yet Caesar did so on a January night in 49 B.C. (November 50 B.C. by our calendar).

  Nowadays, “crossing the Rubicon” means making a difficult decision with no way back. So it was with Caesar. He defied the Senate and broke the law. It was the beginning of five years of civil war. Led by Cato and Pompey, Caesar’s enemies in the Senate had demanded that he give up his command and return to Rome as a private citizen. Realizing that would spell the end of his political career if not his life, Caesar refused. Addressing his soldiers, he said that his enemies were in charge of the Senate and threatened both the liberty of the Roman people and his dignitas. The men pledged their support to their commander. And so Caesar decided to risk everything on civil war. He crossed the Rubicon and marched for Rome.