The Twelve Caesars (2 page)

Introduction
: Death of Julius Caesar by Alexander Zick © Bettmann / Corbis

‘E
xactitude is not truth,’ wrote the painter Henri Matisse in 1947. Readers of the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius
Tranquillus must surely agree. In his
De vita Caesarum
– usually called in English
The Lives of the Caesars
or
The Twelve Caesars
– which was probably published in
the decade after the accession of the emperor Hadrian in
AD
117, Suetonius sought instances of both: not all overlap. Exactitude is apparently one result of much of his
careful fact-finding and evidence-sifting; many of his truths are verifiable by reference to other surviving primary sources. Equally obviously, there are omissions from the twelve
Lives
;
there are also areas where the reader must exercise caution.

In intent Suetonius’ approach to biography is comprehensive, embracing both the public and private lives of his subjects, and he essays impartiality, quoting conflicting opinions,
demonstrating consistently that arguments have at least two sides, abiding by Virginia Woolf’s injunction that the biographer ‘be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same
face’.
¹
The principal property of his writing is not precision save in the sharpness and bold outline of the many anecdotes he preserves: he adopts (when it suits him) a loose
chronology or schematic approach to his material, and his method intermittently suggests a squirrel hoarding nuts, piling and compiling details. He is not writing history as the ancients understood
it – an account of the public
and political life of the state in war and in peace: chronological, annalistic, thematic, interpretative. His work is life-writing, then as
now accorded lowlier status, susceptible to intrusions of the subjective and admitting the possibility of alternative truths: a bravura unmasking of the office-holder behind the office. Given the
open-handedness of his approach, his refusal either to endorse or to condemn, the cumulative effect of Suetonius’ research retains an exhilarating, mobile quality reminiscent of Impressionist
and Pointillist paintings: an emphasis on looking and seeing; a manipulation of light and shadow; passages of bold colour; a vigorous quest for truth; a certain deliberate liveliness unconstrained
by academic convention.

In a survey of female biography written at the turn of the nineteenth century, Mary Hays wrote: ‘The characteristic of the Roman nation was grandeur: its virtues, its vices, its
prosperity, its misfortunes, its glory, its infamy, its rise and fall were alike great.’
²
It was a statement of its time, a reiteration of that grandiloquence which history painters of the
later eighteenth century had sought to extract from Roman subjects. But successive generations of readers have agreed with Hays’ vision of Rome, and it is possible to enjoy Suetonius’
biographies as the expression of this ‘grandeur’ coloured by a dozen different prisms, a compendium of glory and infamy, virtue and (notably) vice.

No account of Rome’s twelve rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian can escape the long shadow of Suetonius. To attempt to do so would be contrary: that has not been my intention. The
present work revisits Suetonius’ 1,900-year-old survey in acknowledgement of the immense riches both of its subject matter and of the author’s treatment. I have not attempted to imitate
my starting point, which would not be possible, nor to offer a commentary on it, an academic appreciation or a
riposte. Rather the present work, like Suetonius’, looks at
the breadth of its subjects’ lives in an effort to uncover the human face of eminence and snapshots of vanished moments which are utterly remote from our own experience but intermittently
familiar. Only implicitly does it address Lord Acton’s famous assessment of the connections between access to power and personal corruption which are all too evident in several Caesars’
spectacular failings.

Instead, the present
Twelve Caesars
, informed by additional primary sources and associated secondary material including paintings, revisits aspects of that earlier magnum opus in an
effort to create for the generalist reader portraits which recall telling facets of twelve remarkable men: the political seen through the personal, the private impulse exposed to public scrutiny,
even the history of their histories, which expresses another kind of truth. None of these portraits is exhaustive; none is encyclopedic. None aims primarily to titillate, none to instruct or offer
moral exempla. Material is arranged by turns thematically and chronologically, a loosely knit garment, the intention to cast light on the origins, nature and impact of lives and careers which
cannot otherwise be satisfactorily confined within a book of this length. Each of these vignettes, I hope, explores ‘the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and
engenders’.
³
The present work is an entertainment, and will have succeeded in its aim if a single reader is inspired to return to that earlier, justly celebrated
Twelve Caesars
.

Julius Caesar
: Statue of Caesar © Osa

I
solated by eminence, ‘the bald whoremonger’ Gaius Julius Caesar conceals from us the innermost workings of heart
and mind. ’Twas ever thus. Repeatedly he came, saw, conquered; he wrote too, and with impassioned gestures and in a high-pitched voice he importuned his contemporaries if not for love, then
for acquiescence, assistance, acknowledgement, awe, acclaim, an approximation of ardour and, above all, admiration and action. He did not stoop to explanations, but asserted unblushingly that
dearer to him than life itself was that public renown the Romans called
dignitas
(a quality he rated higher than moral decency, according to Cicero).
¹

The scale of his achievements dazzled and repelled his contemporaries. (So too a habit of playing fast and loose with the strict legalities of those offices of state he won by bribery, force of
will and sheer charisma.) Ancient sources, including Cicero’s letters, betray this ambivalence: they omit to unravel any motive bar vaunting self-belief. Openly Caesar regarded himself as the
leading man of the state. He could tolerate no superior and once announced that he preferred the prospect of pre-eminence in a mountain backwater to second place in Rome. Suetonius claims that he
‘allowed honours to be bestowed on him which were too great for mortal man... There were no honours which he did not receive with pleasure.’ We know too well the outcome.

Intermittently his character was cold, the white heat of ambition his defence against the loneliness of epic hubris. We learn as much of the man himself from the handful of
portraits which survive from his own lifetime: long-nosed and broad-browed, with strong cheekbones, a resolute, direct gaze and the receding hairline which caused him such anguish. Their style has
yet to evolve that bland idealization which will transform the public face of his successor Augustus from autocratic wunderkind to ageless marble dreamboat. As the written sources confirm,
Caesar’s was not the appearance of a hero (nor was blandness among his characteristics). He dressed with eccentric flamboyance, customizing the purple-striped tunic that was the
senator’s alternative to the toga with full-length fringed sleeves and a belt slung loosely about his waist; later he affected scarlet leather boots. Fastidiousness bordering on vanity
reputedly extended to depilation of his pubic hair. It is the sort of detail by which the Romans habitually found out their heroes’ feet of clay and we may choose to disregard it if we
will.

Of the twenty-three dagger wounds inflicted on Caesar on the Ides of March 44
BC
by that conspiracy of friends, Romans and countrymen – not to mention cuckolded
husbands and former colleagues – only one was fatal, poetically a wound to the heart (or near enough). It was not a poet’s death, although Caesar had written poetry – one
composition, appropriately called ‘The Journey’, undertaken on the twenty-four-day march from Rome to Further Spain. Rather it was the death of a man who had sown and reaped mightily.
As he announced at Marcus Lepidus’ dinner party while dissent fomented, his choice had always been for a speedy death. Conspiracy did not thwart that final ambition. Given his apparent
disregard for the good opinion of Rome’s governing class, his destiny, as Plutarch concluded, was ‘not so much unexpected as... unavoidable’.
²