The Twelve Caesars (5 page)

In 64
BC
, proof that the direction of Rome’s political winds was changing, Caesar presided as a magistrate over the trials of those who had accepted payments from
Sulla in return for killing proscribed men. Generous to the defeated as he would remain in every important contest in his life bar his treatment of
Germans and Gauls, he did
not approach the task in a spirit of vindictiveness. Instead the undertaking provided him with further opportunities to lay claim to Marius’ legacy, a rich ‘inheritance’ of
populist distinction and martial prowess. At the end of 63, as a result of further large-scale spending, Caesar won the position of
pontifex maximus
, head of the College of Pontiffs to which
he already belonged and chief priest of the state cult. This prestigious appointment provided him with a house in the Forum. It was a foothold in the very centre of Rome which the cash-strapped
Caesar, modestly housed in the Subura, had previously lacked.

As it turned out, Spain bookended Caesar’s ascent of the
cursus honorum.
He returned to the province in 61
BC
as proconsul, his first overseas command.
Spanish proconsulship earned him a triumph in Rome. Caesar forfeited public adulation in order to stand as a candidate for the consulship of 59 (an example of close observance of legal niceties on
Caesar’s part, necessitated by the vocal hostility of arch-Republican and drunkard Cato). His candidacy was successful. As with the aedileship and praetorship, Caesar’s colleague was
Bibulus.

Spain had served as the location for Caesar’s quaestorship, his first proconsulship and the award of an (albeit uncelebrated) triumph. More than this, in time it was the site of his first
epileptic fit and, in the wake of war waged against fellow Romans, that dream which an unidentified soothsayer interpreted as foretelling world dominion. The dream itself left Caesar shaken –
understandably, since its substance was his rape of his mother Aurelia. On his return to Rome, he remarried. His choice fell on a granddaughter of Sulla and distant kinswoman of Pompey the Great.
Her name was Pompeia and he would divorce her in time on suspicion of an affair with an audacious rabble-rouser who donned women’s clothes to make good a secret assignation. Justification for
that divorce inspired Caesar’s well-known
assertion that, guilty or otherwise – taking no account of double standards – his wife must be above suspicion.

In the long term, Caesar’s achievement was not to be a programmatic ascent of the offices of state as prescribed by Republican precedent, culminating in a benign term as
consul. Nor perhaps should it have been, given those extraordinary capabilities to which even hostile sources attest. Such was Caesar’s mental agility and the acuteness of his concentration
that he merited inclusion in the thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia of natural history compiled by Pliny the Elder. ‘I have heard,’ Pliny wrote, ‘that Caesar was accustomed to write
or dictate and read at the same time, simultaneously dictating to his secretaries four letters on the most important subjects or, if he had nothing else to do, as many as seven.’
¹⁴
(As
dictator
, Caesar later courted popular disfavour by dictating and reading letters while watching gladiatorial fights.) As with his mind, so too his body. It was as if his pulse beat to a
tempo of its own and his limbs were endowed with more than human strength and facility. Suetonius commends his horsemanship, his skill in arms, that vitality which never flagged:

The biographer records an occasion when, harried by the enemy in the waters off Alexandria, Caesar left the one safe small skiff to his men and himself
plunged into the sea. He swam using a single arm, his left arm holding important papers clear of the water. For good measure he dragged his cloak behind him, clenching it between his teeth in order
to prevent the enemy from snatching it as a trophy. Less hair-raising journeys he beguiled, as we have seen, in writing or poetry. He was a stranger to idleness and the greater part of reasonable
fear. Little wonder that he inspired in the men with whom he fought such fervent devotion. His standards of discipline were high without approaching that martinet cruelty which afterwards proved
Galba’s undoing: he closed his eyes to minor misdemeanours. He led by inspiration, without undue recourse to the mumbo-jumbo of omens and portents, trusting in that lodestar which seldom
deserted him on the battlefield, his generalship as much a matter of speed and novelty as of tactical finesse; and he treated his soldiers, whom he addressed as ‘comrades’, with
something approaching love.

Such capabilities, married to Caesar’s overweening confidence, could not easily be confined within the orderliness of year-long magistracies. That power which Caesar eventually exercised
in Rome arose in part from an accumulation of
dignitas
,
auctoritas
and military glory, from full-throttle cultivation of popular support and from his ability to judge whose coat-tails
afforded the best ride at any given moment. Caesar’s loyalties lay consistently with himself: throughout the decade of the sixties, which he began as a virtual unknown, he sought to create a
network of personal alliances which would serve as a springboard to mastery. If Suetonius’ Caesar does not breathe the word ‘revolution’, it is implicit in the many twists and
turns of the second half of his career. With the consulship attained, Caesar
aimed at some larger channel of power, an aspiration in which he was not alone in this period of
flux anticipating meltdown. His thirst could be slaked only by creating alternatives to the Republican mechanisms of government which had served the city through five centuries. Others thought the
same, and had done for years now. ‘Soon Gaius Marius, from the lowest class, and Lucius Sulla, the most savage of the nobles, turned free government, conquered by arms, into tyranny,’
Tacitus wrote. ‘Gnaeus Pompey came next, less obvious but no better, and now nothing was sought except dominion of the state.’
¹⁵
Marius, Sulla, Pompey... Caesar... Given the nature of the
contest, only one man could prevail.

In advance of his consulship in 59
BC
, Caesar brokered what Suetonius calls a ‘compact’. His partners were that same Gnaeus Pompey,
pre-eminent among the current generation of Roman generals and the son of a Sullan loyalist, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Roman history and vanquisher of Spartacus to boot. At
the heart of the arrangement was an agreement ‘that no step should be taken in public affairs which did not suit any one of the three’. A secret, if informal, alliance between
Rome’s leading militarist and that magnate whose vast riches had bankrolled several of Caesar’s election bids, it demonstrated a recognition on Caesar’s part that, in 60
BC
, power in Rome rested on twin foundations of money and might.

Prior to Caesar’s intervention, the relationship of Pompey and Crassus was discordant. Cassius Dio describes them as ‘at enmity with each other’:
¹⁶
Crassus’ jealousy supplies an explanation. In the short term, the certainty of mutual advantage overrode the larger misgivings of all three members of what historians
have
called the ‘First Triumvirate’. Caesar undertook as consul to expedite measures of Pompey and Crassus previously blocked by the senate; in return, their
influence would secure for him a province sufficient to clear his enormous debts.
¹
And this is what happened. But in riding roughshod over the
inevitable objections of his fellow consul and old sparring partner Bibulus, Caesar came close to acting illegally. Such was Bibulus’ determination not to cooperate with Caesar that he sought
to derail the latter’s programme entirely by declaring every day inauspicious for senatorial business and all transactions suspended accordingly. Caesar, inevitably, discovered an alternative
methodology: he published daily accounts of government business and moved to check bureaucratic rapacity in the provinces. Neither Bibulus, unmellowed by long familiarity, nor his supporters would
quickly forget the chamber pot emptied over his head. Irregularities in his consulship – in his own mind forced upon him – made doubly pressing Caesar’s need to escape from Roman
justice (or revenge) into a lucrative province at the end of 59. He did not entertain the senate’s derisory offer of stewardship within Italy, a custodianship of forests and woods. Instead,
thanks to the triple inducement of that money (Crassus), armed force (Pompey) and mob support (Caesar) which the triumvirate commanded, Caesar was awarded Cisalpine Gaul (north Italy) and Illyricum
for a five-year period. Against the advice of Cato, who regarded the step as akin to ‘placing the tyrant in the citadel’,
¹⁷
the senate subsequently added Transalpine Gaul on the
Mediterranean coast. In military terms it represented a total of four legions at Caesar’s disposal. The stage was set. Following his divorce from Pompeia, Caesar married for the
fourth and last time – Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso – and departed Rome for immortality.

For the next eight years, acting upon his own initiative, Caesar divided each year into two seasons. He spent the summer campaigning season north of the Alps: in addition to the conquest of
Gaul, an achievement unrivalled by the greatest of his contemporaries, he crossed the Rhine and twice journeyed to Britain. The winter season he devoted less showily to civil administration in the
peaceful provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum on the Balkan coast. (Subsequently, in 49, he bestowed citizenship on the inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul north of the River Po, thereby completing
the unification of Italy.)

There were setbacks: Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus’ threat that, if elected consul for 55, he would demand Caesar’s recall to Rome to answer charges about his behaviour in 59, a
curtailment and an indictment the latter dare not countenance; and the revolt of the Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix, king of the Arverni, in 52, backed by a large coalition of the tribes of
central Gaul. But nothing seriously challenged Caesar’s overwhelming, passionate and entirely self-serving desire for what Sallust described as ‘an unprecedented war’ which gave
his ability the chance to display itself.
¹⁸
Lavishly Plutarch enumerates the magnitude of his achievement: ‘He took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and
fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand-to-hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.’
¹⁹
As he had always intended, as we know
he had to, Caesar exploited the killing fields of Gaul for that glory an intractable senate stubbornly withheld from him.
The cost of so personal a victory included wholesale
destruction of two tribes: the men, women and children of the Tencteri and Usipetes, mown down by Roman cavalry in a day of fighting which yielded a death toll estimated by Caesar at 430,000.
²⁰
It
was genocide in the service of self-promotion; at best the killings were political. Although Romans thrilled to the grandeur of Caesar’s victories, awarding him extended celebrations of
thanksgiving, when the smoke of sacrifice darkened the city’s altars and the gods themselves were besought to witness the empire’s growing magnificence, such unambiguous brutality
directed against a civilian population provoked mixed reactions even in Rome. Such ruthlessness, even if we dismiss it as blinkeredness, must colour our assessment; certainly it stimulated
reflection among Rome’s senators. ‘All that part of Gaul which is bounded by the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Cervennes, and by the Rhine and Rhône rivers,’ Suetonius wrote,
‘a circuit of some 3,200 square miles... he reduced to the form of province.’ Secure as long as he remained in that province (in which he now had at his disposal no fewer than ten
legions), Caesar was at last rich and great. He was not yet fifty.