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

by Strauss, Barry

  In the East, Antony picked up Caesar’s mantle of opposition to the Parthians. Astoundingly, the Parthians had the help of Quintus Labienus, the son of Caesar’s old friend-turned-enemy Titus Labienus. The Parthians conquered much of the Roman east after Philippi. Now Antony’s deputy pushed them back and captured and executed Quintus Labienus. Then Antony pushed too far—he tried to invade Parthian territory via Armenia, only to end in utter failure. But history remembers Antony for something entirely different during his time in the East—his relationship with Cleopatra, a political and military alliance as well as a love affair. It wasn’t his first move. After Fulvia died in 40 B.C., Antony married Octavian’s sister, Octavia. They had two daughters together, but it was not enough to keep him from Cleopatra.

  If Octavian had Caesar’s name, Antony had Caesar’s mistress. There are many fascinating stories to tell about history’s most famous power couple, but they are not our subject. Cleopatra was once again the lover of a man like Caesar. He was one of the two most powerful men in the Roman world. But the world could not stand two Caesars. Eventually, there was war between Octavian on the one side with Antony and Cleopatra on the other.

  Now master of the sea at last, Octavian had the winning fleet at the Battle of Actium in western Greece in 31 B.C. It was a decisive victory. Within the next year, Antony and Cleopatra each committed suicide in Alexandria. At last, Octavian really was the one and only Caesar, the sole master of the Roman Empire. But there were still scores to settle over the Ides of March.

  Suetonius writes that within three years of Caesar’s assassination, all the participants in the conspiracy were dead. That’s not correct. At least two of the assassins lived on for another decade. They were both obscure characters, which is probably not an accident. The triumvirs cut off the tallest heads as quickly as they could. The more obscure were able to escape vengeance longer.

  Decimus Turullius was one survivor. After Philippi, Turullius escaped with his ships and a large sum of money to Sextus Pompey in Sicily. Several years later, after Sextus’s eventual defeat, Turullius went over to Antony. He supported his former enemy with gusto, building Antony a fleet and even minting coins for him. Turullius fought for Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. The next year, Octavian caught up with Turullius on the Greek island of Cos. He had Turullius executed on the grounds of having cut down wood from a sacred grove in order to build warships. Why not a charge of having assassinated Caesar? Perhaps by now Octavian wanted to change the subject.

  The next of Caesar’s assassins to die was Turullius’s colleague Cassius of Parma. He was a poet, and a good one, to judge from the great Roman poet Horace, who praised Cassius of Parma’s “little works,” probably elegies—that is, short, epigrammatic and learned poems. None of Cassius of Parma’s pieces survive. Cassius of Parma was an officer at Philippi, and Horace too fought in the republican army there. Perhaps the two men exchanged lines of poetry while waiting for the battle.

  After Philippi, Cassius of Parma gathered the remaining troops and went over to Sextus Pompey. Six years later, in 36 B.C., he switched his loyalties to Antony. While associated with Antony, Cassius of Parma wrote satire insulting Octavian’s ancestry. He fought for Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. Once again, Cassius of Parma escaped defeat, this time fleeing to Athens, but his nemesis was on his heels. At Athens, he had a recurring nightmare of a dark and disheveled man coming for him, telling the poet that he was his evil genius. Not long afterward, in 30 B.C., Cassius of Parma was executed on Octavian’s instructions.

  If the sources are right, Cassius of Parma was the last of Caesar’s assassins to die. We cannot document the fate of all of Caesar’s known assassins but none appears in the sources after 30 B.C. It seems likely that fourteen years after the Ides of March, they were all dead. Octavian had his revenge. But Rome, Italy, and indeed places around the Roman world had all paid a price.

  13

  AUGUSTUS

  SUMMER 29 B.C. WAS A time for celebration. After fifteen years of civil war there were no more enemies. Octavian returned to Rome from his victories overseas and he returned in peace.

  Decimus did not trouble Octavian for long. Brutus and Cassius had been more formidable foes but they were gone within three years of the Ides of March. Sextus Pompey held out for another seven years and then he too succumbed. Antony provided Octavian’s greatest challenge, but Octavian prevailed in the end.

  After Actium and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian was the master of the Roman world. He had won a civil war but the Roman public didn’t like being reminded of citizens killing each other, so Octavian shrewdly rebranded his success. It was, he said, victory over a foreign foe, the defeat not of Antony but rather of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. Horace, the politically savvy poet, agreed, writing a poem that savaged Cleopatra without mentioning Antony. Octavian did something more—he sealed his victory with the approval of the man who spelled success in Roman eyes. He claimed the blessing of Caesar.

  Octavian held a triple triumph—three triumphs on successive days. On the first day he celebrated victories in the Balkans. The second day marked his naval victory at Actium. On the third day, he celebrated the conquest of Egypt, the last independent major Greek state, now finally a Roman province. Egypt was one of the richest countries in the ancient world and Octavian was proud of having conquered it for Rome. Appropriately, the Egyptian triumph was the most magnificent of the three. Cleopatra was dead and she couldn’t be forced to march, but she appeared in effigy, lying on a couch while two of her children by Antony walked behind. Not Caesarion, though—he wasn’t there. Octavian had executed him on the advice that “Too many Caesars is not a good thing.” Caesarion was only seventeen but Octavian had been dangerous at that age, as he might have remembered. Octavian entered last, riding in a chariot, followed by senators and other leading public officials.

  Victory at Actium meant peace. Octavian now demobilized about half his legions. Egypt meant wealth. Octavian was able to buy land in Italy and around the empire for new colonies to settle his veterans. There were no more property confiscations to settle former soldiers, as there had been in 46–45 B.C. and 41 B.C. Octavian managed to resolve one of Rome’s biggest causes of conflict—real estate.

  On the eighteenth of the month Sextilis, the day after the third triumph, Octavian continued the pageantry. He dedicated the Temple of the Deified Julius, an event followed by days of spectacular public games and banquets. The building had been planned in 42 B.C. and construction had begun in 36 B.C. One might have thought the temple would be dedicated in the month of July—that is, the month of Caesar’s birthday, formerly known as Quintilis. But the point of the ceremony was less to commemorate Caesar than to consecrate Octavian. Octavian wanted to tie the dedication to his triumphs. (In 8 B.C. Sextilis would be renamed August in memory of the three triumphs and in recognition of the title that Octavian had taken by then: Augustus, “revered.”)

  The architecture and decoration of the new temple seemed to give Caesar’s blessing to the new regime. The columned structure stood on a high podium. Inside the temple stood a statue of Caesar in his robe as Chief Priest. Octavian decorated the building with the spoils of war from Egypt. Perhaps one of those was a masterpiece of Greek painting showing Venus—Caesar’s patron goddess and alleged ancestor—emerging from the ocean. Symbols of the comet that proclaimed Caesar’s divinity were also carved in the marble that lined the interior.

  In addition to the temple proper, the structure consisted of a rectangular platform that was decorated with the prows of ships captured at Actium. The message was that Caesar’s mistress, Cleopatra, and Caesar’s right-hand man, Antony, were now public enemies. Only Caesar’s son, Octavian, was true to Caesar’s memory. Only Octavian had built Caesar’s temple.

  In the center of the front of the platform before the temple was a niche with an altar to mark the spot of Caesar’s cremation. The platform served as a Speaker’s Platform, just like the other, older Speaker’s Platform at the
opposite end of the Roman Forum. From now on, funerals for the Roman emperors were held on this new Speaker’s Platform in front of the deified Caesar’s temple.

  The celebrations for the new temple looked backward and ahead. As at Caesar’s dedication of the Temple of Mother Venus in 46 B.C., they included the “Games of Troy.” These were equestrian exercises by young nobles, exercises supposedly going back to Troy, the place where Caesar claimed his family began before immigrating to Italy. There were hints of Egypt with the appearance of a hippopotamus and rhinoceros for the first time ever in Rome. There were gladiatorial games and public feasts as well.

  The new religion had its own sacred days. Caesar’s birthday was to be celebrated every year on July 12. After Antony’s death in 30 B.C., his birthday, January 14, was marked as a day when normal public business was prohibited. Antony’s death was to be remembered negatively. The Ides of March was called Parricide Day, the day of murdering a close relative. It was an inauspicious day, one on which no courts could convene or legislation be passed. Pompey’s Senate House would never be used again for meetings of the Senate. In 42 B.C., the Senate had voted to wall up the structure. Later, public toilets were constructed outside the building. It is also possible that a monument was erected inside the building to mark the spot where Caesar fell.

  Romans had glorified great leaders before, but only Romulus, the semi-legendary founder of Rome, had a temple in Rome (and even he was worshipped under another name, Quirinus). The cult of Caesar was something new.

  Caesar’s name became a category. After Augustus, it became clear that every ruler of Rome would be called Caesar. A “Caesar” was an emperor, and so it would continue through modern times. The German kaiser and the Russian tsar (or czar) derive from Caesar.

  Caesar became, in short, a kind of saint: St. Julius, the patron of the Roman Empire. His assassination did not herald the restoration of republican liberty but its burial. The Ides of March, the day of Caesar’s martyrdom, might have become a saint’s day, except that Caesar got an entire month instead. His temple on the edge of the Roman Forum, on the site of his cremation, was his shrine.

  Caesar’s blood sanctified the Roman Empire. Where Caesar rose to heaven, Octavian came to earth. We call him Octavian but he called himself Caesar. He was also an imperator, a conquering general, and the Son of the Deified One. Octavian or, more accurately, the new Caesar, was well on his way to becoming Augustus. Two years later, in 27 B.C., he accepted that title from the Senate. He would rule the Roman Empire for forty-one more years, until A.D. 14. Historians refer to Octavian from 27 B.C. onward as Augustus. He was the first Roman emperor. Sometimes referred to as the Augustan Age, his reign is thought of as one of the high points of Latin literature, a classical period in which the poets Virgil, Horace, and Ovid and the historian Livy were all writing.

  What Caesar had hinted at, Augustus carried out. Augustus created a dynasty. When he died, his adopted son Tiberius replaced him. After Tiberius’s death in A.D. 37, other members of their extended family served as emperor. Ironically, three of those emperors were descended from Antony through his marriage to Octavia, Augustus’s sister. Eventually the family was forced out of power and, in A.D. 69, a new dynasty replaced it. And so it went on for centuries, through wars and revolutions, invasions and revelations, plagues and upheavals. An emperor ruled in Italy until 476 and, in Constantinople, in the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, emperors lasted for another millennium, until 1453. So mighty were the foundations of the system that Caesar and Augustus put into place.

  Augustus himself denied being a monarch. He maintained that he had restored the Republic. He officially returned control of the state to the Senate. True, he held the powers of consul, tribune, and Chief Priest, which would have been anathema to Cato or Cicero. He controlled enough of the army to put down any would-be rival. He lived in a great mansion on the Palatine Hill overlooking the city to which he descended and which he graced with his presence from time to time when needed. Behind the scenes, he manipulated the system. It was monarchy with a friendly face.

  The ruins of Caesar’s temple still stand. Even today, someone regularly leaves flowers at the site of the altar there in memory of Rome’s last dictator. Far from condemning Caesar as a tyrant, people mourn him as a martyr. Caesar’s genius and his sympathy for the poor live on while his war against the Republic in favor of one-man rule and his murderous rampage in Gaul, which killed or enslaved millions, are forgotten. It is the opposite of what Shakespeare said:

  The evil that men do lives after them;

  The good is oft interred with their bones.

  And so, is that what they were reduced to, the most famous assassination in history and the titanic civil war that followed? Were they all just detours on the road to monarchy and canonization of a dictator? Did men wield their daggers and risk their lives in vain?

  In fact, they fought the good fight. It would take more violence to save the Republic but it could have been saved. That was the lesson of the years after the Ides of March. If the assassins had prevailed on the battlefield they could have restored the Republic as long as they made some concessions. To begin with, they would probably have had to purge their opponents and to accept a period of dictatorship to reform the regime. Then they would have had to adopt certain additional reforms to prevent the instability that had plagued Rome in the years of Pompey and Caesar. Rome needed a stronger executive in order to introduce continuity into imperial administration; it needed strict term limits on governorships to keep a new Caesar from arising; more power-sharing with the provinces in order to prevent revolts; higher taxes on the rich in order to pay for the military; and a limit on military expansion in order to keep costs down and to prevent the emergence of future military strongmen. Would the result still be a republic? Certainly. Unlike in Augustus’s Rome, the government would not belong to just one family. A reformed Republic would have had constitutional government, free elections, term limits in the executive, freedom of speech, and rule by a public-spirited elite. But in order to survive the Republic would have had to evolve far more than Cato, Brutus, or Cicero would have liked. History respects tradition but it is hard on institutions that don’t evolve with the times. In the words of the classic Italian novel The Leopard: “If we want everything to stay the same, everything has to change.”

  Most of the assassins faded into oblivion. Decimus’s memory did not age well. Decimus was no intellectual. He had no philosophical friends to canonize him after his death, as Brutus had, nor any famous son to praise his memory as Sextus praised his father Pompey. Augustus portrayed Decimus as an archvillain, but a half century later, Decimus’s fate was not merely oblivion but ridicule.

  Decimus was destined to become Imperial Rome’s poster child for a bad death. By the time Seneca the Younger wrote in A.D. 64, the anti-Decimus version of his execution was ready to hand. If Cato epitomizes the good death, writes the moralist Seneca, then Decimus stands for a death that is unseemly and shamefaced. When ordered to bare his throat, writes Seneca, Decimus said, “I’ll do it but only if I live.” Decimus was reduced to a mockery; so much for the courageous man who braved the tides of Brittany, the siege of Mutina, and the privation of an overland route through the Alps.

  Poor Decimus became a diminished thing for all his importance on the Ides of March. Not so for Brutus and Cassius. They failed as men of action but, as martyrs, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This cynical remark of a newspaper editor in the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies to the men who stabbed Julius Caesar. Brutus, in particular, turned into myth. At least three or four friends of Brutus—including philosophers, historians, or fellow soldiers—wrote books or gave speeches that revered his memory. Cassius, Brutus’s brother-in-law and comrade-in-arms, shared in the reflected glory, but Brutus was the star.

  Like Caesar, Brutus became a cult figure, virtually the patron saint of nostalgia fo
r the lost Republic. Unlike Caesar he had no temple but he lived on in men’s hearts—and in words and images. Senators who chafed under the pressure of the ruling dynasty, philosophers who dreamt of liberty, orators who ached for the eloquent days of the Republic and its free speech—all called on Brutus (and sometimes Cassius, too). Even Augustus allowed a certain amount of revisionism on the subject of Brutus. The story goes that when Augustus saw a statue of Brutus in Mediolanum (Milan), he called not for its destruction but its preservation.

  Brutus, Cassius, and Decimus didn’t maintain their offices or honors. They didn’t prevent Octavian from ruling Rome; in fact, they opened his road to power. They didn’t save their own skins. On the contrary, they hastened their own ends—violent and untimely deaths. And yet, if they didn’t save the Republic, they saved republicanism.

  The Ides of March changed the world, but not as the men who held the daggers that day planned. If Caesar had lived, won at least a grain of success against Parthia, and then marched back to Rome in triumph, things would have been different. By their subservience, the Roman nobility would have proved themselves ready for tyranny. Like Alexander before him, Caesar would have sampled the trappings of eastern despotism, and it is hard to believe that he wouldn’t have liked them. With his mistress Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, beside him, and with dozens of new noble Parthian clients in tow, no doubt bowing low to him as their ancestors did to Alexander, Caesar would have come back to Rome as king of Asia. In short order, Rome would have become an absolute monarchy.

  Of course, Rome did eventually become an autocracy, but not for another three hundred years until the reign of Diocletian (ruled A.D. 285–309). Not under Augustus. When Octavian defeated Antony and became the ruler of Rome, he did not call himself dictator, much less king. Instead, he called himself Princeps—First Citizen. Unlike Caesar, he wore no purple toga or golden crown. He even claimed to turn power over to the Senate and to have restored the Republic—claims that no one believed. Yet, if Augustus was a king, it was a limited monarchy. Augustus carefully justified his very powers by reference to Rome’s traditional form of government. For much of his reign he let senators hold the consulship. He controlled the most strategic provinces and the bulk of the legions, but he let the Senate run a few important provinces and a small number of legions.