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by Strauss, Barry

  Having a bodyguard would have meant admitting that he had to live in fear, and Caesar didn’t want that. Perhaps there was another factor as well. Caesar continued to think of himself as a member of Rome’s elite of nobility and culture. He did things like going to dinner parties at Cicero’s villa and discussing literature. When Brutus and Cicero each published books in praise of Cato as the ideal Roman, Caesar ordered his literary assistant to write a reply—and then, as soon as time permitted, Caesar wrote his own Anticato. But the man who had indirectly caused the deaths of Cato, Pompey, Metellus Scipio, Domitius Ahenobarbus, and so many other champions of the Roman aristocracy could not easily claim his place in it.

  Caesar was done in by a combination of arrogance and neediness. He wanted Rome’s aristocrats to acknowledge his supremacy while accepting him as a member of their club. He really couldn’t have both. If he wanted his fellow aristocrats to pat him on the back, he couldn’t force them to kneel before him. If he insisted that they knuckle under, then he should have been ready for their knives. As wise as he was, Caesar was blind to this truth.

  Caesar may have made the additional mistake of thinking that he was untouchable. Perhaps he really did believe that he was protected by the Fortuna Caesaris—“the good fortune of Caesar.” Perhaps his calculations were strictly secular, but in that case they were arrogant. Caesar’s sense of his own genius and his exaggerated estimate of his own superiority made it seem like treason even to imagine that any of the lesser men whom he had beaten could possibly harm him.

  Half of Rome, he thought, loved him, and the other half feared him. It was irrational, he reasoned, for anyone merely to hate him. But he forgot the importance of dignitas, or rank—a strange omission indeed for a man who justified his decision to cross the Rubicon by saying that his dignitas was dearer to him than life itself.

  Alexander the Great gave up on trying to have the Macedonians kiss the ground in his presence. Caesar never tried anything so obvious with Rome’s proud aristocrats, but what he did offended them just as much. He made a mockery of the honors that meant so much to them. He flirted with being called king. And, worst of all, he forgave his enemies.

  The assassins of 44 B.C. would never forgive Caesar for pardoning them. Caesar aroused their jealousy and their fear. His achievements dwarfed theirs. His demagoguery threatened to siphon off their wealth to the common people. His reforms offended innate Roman conservatism. But worst of all, his arrogance humiliated them. The very clemency that Caesar was so proud of was the nub of his enemies’ case against him. As Cato is supposed to have said, Caesar had no right to lord it over people by exonerating them.

  And so, the conspirators gathered, now squawking like geese, now sharpening their knives like soldiers.

  The Men Who Would Be Caesar

  Rome’s senators were narrow-minded and self-defeating. They were stingy to Rome’s soldiers and unwelcoming to the elite of northern Italy and Gaul. In return, both of those groups supported Caesar. So did the ordinary people of Italy—the main target of the senators’ exploitation. And yet, these same selfish senators were the most stubborn and magnificent defenders of political liberty that the world has ever seen.

  It was liberty for a very few but it was liberty nonetheless. Nothing would make them surrender the right to do and say what they pleased. Caesar would have to kill all of them to make them submit. He was too much of an old Roman aristocrat himself to do any such thing. Caesar couldn’t kill the likes of Brutus and Cassius because he cared too much about what they thought. But after they killed him, the rules changed.

  The men who came after Caesar didn’t mind killing most of Rome’s nobility if that’s what it would take to keep them securely in power. So they did.

  That was the tragedy of the Ides of March. Rather than restore the Republic, it brought back the civil war, and with a vengeance. Caesar’s civil war lasted five years; the new outbreak lasted fourteen. Caesar had steadfastly steered clear of what the Romans called “proscription,” that is, posting lists of enemies whose lives and property were both forfeit. The new war brought it back.

  The list included two thousand three hundred of the wealthiest and most prominent members of the Roman elite. Many of them escaped with their lives but not their property. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the desire for loot, so eighteen of the richest cities in Italy, with their lands, were given to the soldiers who still supported Caesar by their commanders.

  Among those who did not survive was Cicero. The orator’s hands and tongue were brought as gruesome trophies to the man who ordered his murder, Mark Antony. Caesar’s former lieutenant emerged after the Ides of March as one of the two most important leaders of Caesar’s troops. The other was Caesar’s nineteen-year-old grandnephew.

  Gaius Octavius, the grandson of Caesar’s sister, was Caesar’s legal heir. Caesar had traveled back from Spain with young Octavius in 46 B.C. and was impressed by him. Octavius was sharp, cunning, and ambitious. Having no living, legitimate children of his own, Caesar adopted Octavius posthumously, which was not an unusual procedure in Rome. When Caesar’s will was read, Octavius became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus—often called Octavian today.

  Unlike Alexander, Caesar had an adult heir. But like Alexander, Caesar left a succession struggle behind him. Mark Antony had no intention of giving way to Octavian. Antony was a grown man of about forty and a great soldier. Octavian was no solider, but he had more important qualities. Octavian had not only Caesar’s name he also had Caesar’s political talent, and then some. He began outmaneuvering Antony from the start.

  The two of them fought in Italy and Octavian’s troops won the upper hand. Then they joined forces against the army of Brutus and Cassius, which they defeated at the battle of Philippi, in Macedonia, in 42 B.C. Antony and Octavian then divided up the Roman world. Octavian got Italy and the West, while Antony got the East—and Cleopatra.

  Caesar’s former mistress now hitched her wagon to Antony’s star. Together, the two of them planned to build a new Eastern empire and then defeat Octavian. But Antony went down to defeat against Parthia, where he tried and failed to carry out the invasion that Caesar had planned.

  Octavian, meanwhile, gathered his own forces. He defeated the last remaining son of Pompey, Sextus Pompeius, in a naval war off Sicily. He solidified his support in Italy and the West while caricaturing Antony as the love slave of an Eastern queen.

  Octavian’s propaganda proved more successful than Antony’s heroics. In 32 B.C., the Senate declared war on Antony and Cleopatra. The conflict was decided in the naval battle at Actium in 31 B.C., a victory for Octavian.

  In 30 B.C., Antony and Cleopatra each committed suicide. Caesarion was killed on Octavian’s orders. Octavian was now the sole master of the Roman world. Known by the title Augustus (“Majestic”) from 27 B.C. on, he would rule Rome as its first emperor. Between the two of them, Caesar and Augustus established a succession of emperors that lasted in Rome for five hundred years.

  By 30 B.C., there was nobody left in Rome who remembered what the old Republic had been like. Years of war and proscription had swept them all away. The field was clear for Augustus to finish what Caesar had started. But, in turning Rome from a republic to a monarchy, Augustus learned from Caesar’s example.

  Augustus would take no title such as “dictator for life.” He merely called himself princeps, that is, “first among equals.” Nor did he display disrespect for the Senate. On the contrary, Augustus claimed that he was restoring the Republic. He pretended to follow all the old rules of the political game.

  But no one was fooled. All Rome understood that Augustus had established a new regime, one that brought law and order at the price of liberty. But law and order were better than war.

  THE ESSENCE OF DECISION

  None of our three commanders ended his war well. None managed to combine military victory with statesmanship. And yet, each failed in a different way.

  Hannibal’s conflict ended in disaster. Wh
en he left for Italy in 218 B.C., he launched what he might have expected to be a relatively short war. When it became clear that it would be a long war, he proved to be unable to acquire the resources—the manpower and money—needed to win. He did not adapt well to changing circumstances. He demonstrated neither good judgment nor sound strategy.

  When he invaded Italy, Hannibal was the essence of audacity. When it came to leaving Italy, he seemed to be stuck. After Hasdrubal’s defeat at the Metaurus in 207, the failure of Hannibal’s Italian expedition should have been obvious. And yet he stayed in Italy for four more years.

  If the choice to stay was his, then it demonstrates stubbornness and illusion on his part. If the Carthaginian government was forcing him to stay, then Hannibal showed a lack of leadership by not persuading them otherwise.

  When he finally was recalled to Africa in 203, Hannibal probably behaved about as well as any general could under the circumstances. But by then it was too late. It is an open question whether he should have refused to continue fighting at all.

  Alexander avoided disaster, but he stretched his empire to the limit. The last years of the war, from Sogdiana to India, had been of limited strategic value or none at all. Spitamenes did not pose enough threat to justify Alexander’s campaigns. India offered great wealth, but it was nearly impossible to hold.

  Caesar ended his war most successfully. Neither North Africa nor Spain will go down as his most smoothly run campaign, and each offered moments of great danger. But he handled them in the proper order and kept returning to Rome to manage political affairs. His strategy was sound.

  Things look different if we turn to each man’s peacemaking skills. Alexander showed a lack of interest in organizing the infrastructure needed to make his claim to be “king of Asia” into a reality. He paid insufficient attention to the new governing class, beginning with his own dynasty. At the age of thirty-two, and after more than a dozen years on the throne, he was just getting around to producing a legitimate heir. He demonstrated leadership in promoting mixed marriages, but he left open the question of whether the children of these unions would be able to govern the empire. He had a new army but its effectiveness was untested.

  The Persians had barely held their empire together, and Alexander’s realm was even larger. Rebellions were a foregone conclusion, but cohesion was not. Alexander did little to tighten his grip on his “spear-won” land. On the contrary, he set off on a new war in Arabia, with other expeditions in the works. The warrior had insufficient interest in becoming a statesman.

  Caesar did better, at least to an extent. A politician before he became a general, Caesar took internal issues much more seriously than Alexander did. But Caesar displayed only limited patience with the process of reform. He proved unable to manage the old Roman aristocracy who stood in his way, and he paid for it with his life. But even had he been more diplomatic he would not have been more focused on the task at hand. Like Alexander, he hardly ended one war before he began the next.

  In an irony of history, Alexander and Caesar each died as he was about to start a vast new war. Neither man could stand life in the capital when the camp beckoned.

  Alexander did not succeed in creating a great new empire or dynasty, but he did succeed in destroying an old empire—the Persian empire. And he did lay the groundwork for a series of successor states under a new Greek and Macedonian ruling class. In that sense, he was a successful statesman.

  Caesar failed in his attempt to lead a long life as a dictator. But he began the process of reforming Rome that, under his chosen successor, Augustus, turned it from the Roman republic into the Roman empire. Caesar’s statesmanship, although flawed, seems far greater than Alexander’s.

  Each man also left a brand behind. From Alexander’s successors to Pyrrhus to Hannibal to Caesar and beyond, to Trajan and Julian the Apostate, would-be conquerors looked to Alexander as their model. Caesar had such an impact as a conqueror that not only did every Roman emperor take his name, but so did the rulers of such far-off states as Germany, Austria, and Russia, whose kaisers and tsars are just variations of “caesar.”

  But Hannibal’s is the most ironic case of all. At the very moment that his military dreams died, his political skills came alive. By establishing a relationship with Scipio, he probably did the single most important thing he could to save himself from exile or execution. He then proceeded to reinvent himself as a statesman and reformer, doing for Carthage what Caesar did for Rome—and then some. It might seem selfish if Hannibal considered himself indispensable, but it was probably true. Could anyone other than Hannibal have saved Carthage? No one else combined the magical name with his audacity and leadership, and with a good judgment that had been honed in adversity,

  Tragically, Hannibal was not permitted to stay in Carthage to enjoy the fruits of his success. Even worse, Carthage found that its very prosperity brought ruin at the hands of a vengeful Rome. But thanks to Hannibal, the last generations of the great north African metropolis were among its most peaceful and well-governed.

  Few could have expected that from the man who once looked at Italy from the heights of the Alps with murder in his eyes.

  CONCLUSION

  In spring 322 B.C., the crowds gathered everywhere along the ancient roads from Babylon to Syria. What they saw passing by, heading westward, was a procession like no other. First came the engineers and road-repair crew to smooth the way, then the military guard, then a team of sixty-four mules and—finally—the object that the beasts were pulling, a funeral cart. It was so grand and magnificent that the cart had taken two years to construct. It was decorated with sculpture and paintings and covered with enough gold and jewelry to make it gleam in the sun. Inside the covered cart, hidden from view, buried under a gold-embroidered purple robe and a hammered-gold coffin with a golden lid, lay the body itself, embalmed and surrounded by spices. It was all that was mortal of Alexander the Great, dead nearly two years now.

  Since his death, Alexander’s marshals had jockeyed not only over his empire but his corpse. The body conveyed prestige and, if you believed the soothsayers, the favor of the gods. Some wanted to bring it to the traditional burial place of Macedonian kings at Aegae in Macedon. Others wanted it in the Shrine of Ammon, at an oasis in Libya, where Alexander had once been welcomed as the son of Zeus. The governor of Egypt, Ptolemy son of Lagus, had the last word. Accompanied by an army, he met the funeral procession in Syria and brought it to Egypt. Ptolemy had no intention of shipping the body off to the desert; instead, he gave it a place of honor in his capital city, Alexandria.

  There Alexander’s Tomb invited visits by kings and emperors for the next seven hundred years, until it was finally sacked.

  Nearly three hundred years after Alexander’s funeral procession, a funeral took place in the Roman Forum. It was March 18, 44 B.C., three days after the Ides and the most famous assassination in the history of the Western world. There might not have been a funeral at all if the assassins—the Liberators, as they called themselves—had followed their original plan. They intended to dump the corpse of Julius Caesar in the Tiber River. But they panicked and left the body where they had killed it, which allowed it to be brought to Caesar’s home. Then, instead of insisting on a private burial, they agreed to a public funeral in the Forum with full honors. It was a mistake.

  And so, the scene was set for Shakespeare’s famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen!” speech. Although Shakespeare’s version is fiction, the speech is based on fact. When Caesar’s body was brought to the Forum for a public funeral, Mark Antony really did give the funeral oration. It was a short speech and lacked the three famous words, but it was powerful. Antony mixed his sorrow with anger at the killers. When he was finished, Antony held up Caesar’s bloodstained robe and pointed out the wounds.

  The crowd responded by rioting. The ordinary people of Rome had supported Caesar when he was alive. Now they missed him, especially when they heard that Caesar’s will left a cash gift to every citizen and a new
public park to the city. Antony’s words and gestures set their passion ablaze. The crowd burst into nearby buildings, hauled out wooden benches and stands, and built a pyre. Although the plan had been to carry Caesar’s body to his daughter’s tomb across town and cremate it there, the people would have none of it. They cremated Caesar on the spot. Then they streamed out of the Forum with torches and attacked the houses of the men who had killed him. Caesar himself could not have turned the tables more dramatically.

  The third funeral—actually, a memorial service—took place two thousand years later, in 1934. The site was a hill outside the industrial city of Gebze, thirty miles east of Istanbul. The spot looks over the Gulf of Izmit, the ancient Astacus Gulf, toward the rugged hills of the far shore. None other than the president of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, delivered the eulogy. One of history’s most successful generals and statesmen, Atatürk had come to honor another general who had reached a dead end here. He had ended his life on the coast, below the very hill where Atatürk stood, about 2,115 years before. He was Hannibal. It was here, in ancient Libyssa in 183 B.C., that Hannibal took poison rather than let the Romans take him alive.

  Atatürk genuinely admired Hannibal, but he had an ulterior motive for the memorial. In 1934 Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, was trying to pressure Turkey. Atatürk responded by honoring Hannibal, one of the greatest enemies Italy had ever had. He ordered a monument to be put up at the traditional but unconfirmed site of Hannibal’s tomb. It took nearly fifty years, until 1981, for the monument finally to be built.

  “The brave have the whole earth for their sepulcher,” said the Athenian general and statesman Pericles. Alexander’s tomb in Alexandria is long gone. Caesar’s temple in the Roman Forum lies in ruins. How ironic it is that Hannibal, who failed against Rome and died a suicide, has a modern monument to his passing.