The Twelve Caesars (3 page)

Compulsively adulterous, subject to the aphrodisiac of power as he resisted submission in every other aspect of his life, he cultivated a legend of personal distinction and
vaulting audacity in which none believed more fully than he. At a time when unbridled self-esteem was inculcated in the majority of senators’ sons, Caesar succumbed in splendid fashion.
³
He
dreamed, a soothsayer explained to him, that he was destined to rule the world: a restless spirit, unchecked energy and an irrational need for paramountcy drove him towards that preposterous goal.
‘Caesar’s many successes,’ Plutarch wrote, ‘did not divert his natural spirit of enterprise and ambition to the enjoyment of what he had laboriously achieved, but served as
fuel and incentive for future achievements, and begat in him plans for future deeds, and a passion for fresh glory, as though he had used up what he already had.’
⁴
Those achievements were to
change the political map of Europe and divert the course of Western history, connecting the untamed lands of the north with the culture and, in time, belief systems of the south; against that,
reorganization of the calendar and a month named in his honour appear small beer. What Suetonius describes as ‘incredible powers of endurance’ facilitated feats of comic-book daring and
derring-do, and doggedness in the face of opposition which, in different forms, proved unrelenting.

For seven days following Caesar’s murder, the sun was dark as if eclipsed; skies above Rome thrilled to the nightly appearance of a comet of surpassing splendour universally acknowledged
by the credulous as the dead man’s soul. In death he was deified; his legend had begun in life. If some of the evil that he did lives after him, as Shakespeare has Mark Antony assert in his
funeral oration for Caesar, not all of the good lies interred with his bones.
⁵
Revisionism began with the last of those dagger wounds. Even Cicero, whose relationship with Caesar was notoriously
troubled, admitted that ‘his character was an amalgamation of genius, method, memory, culture, thoroughness, intellect and industry’.
⁶

On every level Caesar was himself the architect of his own mythology: we shall discover that it is a trait of those who aspire to pre-eminence. His seven books of
Commentaries on the Gallic War
, covering the period of his proconsulship of Gaul from 58 to 52
BC
, present his self-appointed task of subduing Gaul for the empire
(and himself) in the light of military manoeuvres necessitated in the interests of national security. The truth is both different and less clean-cut. Those who contributed to his successes, notably
his second-in-command Quintus Atius Labienus, scarcely check the progress of this narrative of military apotheosis; nor are rare setbacks acknowledged as failure or wrong calls on Caesar’s
part.
⁷
(Not surprisingly, Labienus later transferred allegiance away from Caesar.) It would be easy to dismiss him as a fraudster or a confidence trickster, but none was convinced more fully than
he. In Suetonius’ account, belief in his own superhuman destiny shapes Caesar’s thoughts throughout his mature career, attested in the unusually large number of direct quotations the
biographer preserves. This for Suetonius was central to any understanding of Caesar, as well as his interest as a biographical subject. It probably explains why Suetonius felt able to dismiss the
conquest of Gaul in a single paragraph, focusing instead on those qualities which permitted Caesar to pull off such a grandiose scam by inspiring and sustaining a relationship of lover-like
devotion between himself and the soldiers who followed him year after eventful year, and who even offered to fight for him without pay.
⁸
For Suetonius’
Caesar, dogged by
debt, the attraction of proconsulship of Gaul was that, of all provinces, Gaul was ‘the most likely to enrich him and furnish suitable material for triumphs’. By dint of iron will, and
relentless exploitation of blood and iron, his guess came good. This was not heroism in the cause of the senate and the people of Rome. In placing self before service, Caesar acted in the spirit of
the times. An ailing republic failed to enforce – or to generate – those mechanisms needed to contain the ambitions of dangerous men. In his
Parallel Lives
, written in the
century after his death, Plutarch twinned Caesar with Alexander the Great. No shrinking violet, Caesar made the same comparison himself, regretting his own tardiness in the face of
Alexander’s prodigiously well-spent youth. Like his all-conquering predecessor, in time he bestrode the earth like a Colossus. In the final call, such might could not be reconciled with a
republic dedicated through five centuries to curbing individual eminence.

Gaius Julius Caesar was an aristocrat when noble birth was still at a premium in Rome. The family into which he was born on 13 July 100
BC
was ancient,
obscure and of slender means: patricians, members of the city’s oldest aristocratic class. In his veins, he claimed, flowed the blood of kings, heroes and a goddess: invincibility was coded
into the physical chemistry of his being like lesser men’s predisposition to freckles or thick ankles. Among descendants of the Julii were Venus, her son Aeneas (Trojan hero and progenitor of
the Roman race) and those kings of Alba Longa who counted among their offspring Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus. It was as hard to disprove as to prove, although Velleius Paterculus,
that
enthusiastic chronicler of the Julio-Claudians, described it as ‘a claim acknowledged by all those who study the ancient past’.
⁹
Perhaps. Such lofty assertions
overrode the curiously unelevated etymology of the ‘Caesar’ cognomen, which may have referred to Punic elephants or blue-grey eyes or the family trait of a luxuriant thatch of hair (the
last singularly inappropriate in Caesar’s case) or, more graphically, to birth by caesarean section. Years later, triumphant in Spain, Caesar would commend his troops for storming the
heavens; from the outset he claimed for himself by dint of birth something approaching direct heavenly access. ‘Our stock... has at once the sanctity of kings, whose power is supreme among
mortal men, and the claim to reverence which attaches to the Gods, who hold sway over kings themselves,’ Caesar told mourners in a funeral oration for his father’s sister in 69
BC
. Of such is the discourse of omnipotence. It was a language with which he kept faith lifelong.

Despite holding a priesthood of Jupiter and the prestigious office of
pontifex maximus
, nothing survives to illuminate Caesar’s religious outlook bar his unshakeable belief in a
goddess Fortuna directly concerned with his own destiny and his hunch concerning the benefits of heavenly paternity, however remote. Later, in a gesture that combined family piety and caste
complacency, he built a temple to Venus Genetrix. He also made use of his aedileship in 65
BC
to challenge convention by hosting, after a delay of twenty years, funeral
games in honour of his father, another Gaius Julius Caesar. The 320 pairs of gladiators who appeared in front of Rome’s crowd that year dressed in elaborate silver armour testified not only
to Caesar’s lavish generosity but to the distinction of the older Caesar and, by implication, the whole Julian
gens
, including of course Caesar himself.

Patricians the Caesars may have been: in recent generations they were mostly strangers to prominence or effective power.
Caesar’s father died when his son was
sixteen. He collapsed putting on his shoes. It was symptomatic of decline and fall, as was the marriage Caesar
père
had organized for his son to the daughter of a wealthy equestrian.
(The teenage Caesar subsequently broke off the engagement – or terminated the marriage if indeed the young couple were actually married – choosing instead Cornelia, daughter of Lucius
Cornelius Cinna, four times consul, fellow patrician and, at the time, the most powerful man in Rome. It ought not to surprise us.) A recent history of family mediocrity, added to his marriage to
Cornelia, would play a pivotal role in determining the course of Caesar’s life.

Caesar’s legacy has been debated since the moment of his slaughter. His great-nephew Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, exploited the memory of his murdered forebear to destroy for
ever the Republic which in its turn had destroyed him. It was Octavian who had the sarcophagus and body of Alexander the Great removed from its shrine so that he could honour Alexander in death
with flowers and a golden crown. The great-nephew discerned the same parallels which afterwards inspired Plutarch and had inspired Caesar himself. Alexander, of course, was not the only recipient
of a golden crown in Octavian’s lifetime. It was symbolically his own reward for realizing through conquest, mass-manipulation and deft political sleight of hand what Caesar’s less
compromising self-promotion had foretold but flunked: an autocracy – monarchy by another name – in place of that ‘democratic’ oligarchy which was the proud boast of the
Republic. The conquest of an empire, including Caesar’s own contributions of Gaul and Lusitania, made Rome rich: Gaul alone yielded an annual tribute of forty million sesterces (and
incidentally cleared Caesar’s chronic debt). Caesar’s heirs enjoyed riches and empire. Provincial
legions and provincial governors, both products of empire, would
ultimately destabilize the settlement created by Caesar’s heirs – witness the turbulent ‘king-making’ of the Year of the Four Emperors – just as Caesar had exploited
legionary loyalty and the fruits of provincial governorship to provoke, and in time prevail in, civil war.

Covetousness killed him: the longing for absolute power. ‘The animal known as king is by nature carnivorous,’ Cato the Elder had said in the century before Caesar’s birth;
¹⁰
in
Rome, kingship remained an impermissible aspiration. That Caesar himself betrayed aspects of ‘carnivorousness’ is undeniable: Plutarch estimates that a million Gauls were killed in the
Gallic campaign, with another million taken into slavery. Too late in the wake of conquest to repudiate Mark Antony’s gift of a crown at the festival of the Lupercalia or to spurn the
crowd’s acclaim with the statement ‘I am Caesar and no king.’ Too late in 46 to demand the erasing of a statue inscription which labelled him a demi-god. His face appeared on
coins – a first for a living Roman; like the monarchs of the East he had humoured divinity to the extent of permitting his own statue to be set up in Rome’s Temple of Quirinus. His cult
was integrated within state worship: his lieutenant Mark Antony was nominated its priest. In February 44, Caesar was appointed
dictator in perpetuum
, king in all but name. He had held the
dictatorship before, as early as December 49: opportunities for repudiation had surely not been lacking. Plutarch asserts without equivocation that ‘the most open and deadly hatred towards
him was produced by his passion for the royal power’.
¹¹
Like Gaius and Domitian after him, he paid for the tyrannous impulse with his life.