The Classical World (58 page)

The Fatal Dictator

Here you have a man who was ambitious to be the king of the Roman people, and he achieved it. If anyone says that this desire is morally right, he is mad, for he is approving the death of the laws and liberty and is thinking that their hideous and detestable oppression is glorious
.

Cicero,
De Officiis
3.83 (late October 44
BC
)

Utterly deplorable! According to Gaius Matius, our problems are insoluble: ‘for if a man of such genius as Caesar could not find a way out, who will find one now?’ In short, he was saying that everything has had it–I am inclined to agree, but
he
said it with glee… ’

Cicero,
Letters to Atticus
14.1.1, in April 44
BC
,
three weeks after Caesar’s murder

After crossing the Rubicon, Caesar moved south with exceptional speed, helped by minimal resistance on his route through Italy. It was not that he was profiting from a continuing coolness between the Italian towns and Rome, as if it had been persisting since the Social Wars of the 80s. Rather, he had prepared his ground. For some while he had been sending funds from Gaul to supporters who were to apply them to local sympathies in Italy, here with a benefaction, there with new buildings. Back in the autumn of 50 young Caelius had already written unforgettably to Cicero that in political conflicts men should take the more honourable course unless matters came to a fight: then they ‘should take the stronger course and identify the better with the
safer’.
¹
In Italy, people agreed and received Caesar because they were terrified. Their only precedent for this sort of civil war was Sulla’s, a dreadful one. The peasantry did not want to be conscripted to fight for Pompey and the property owners feared for their estates and ‘darling villas’, as Cicero acidly commented, ‘and their lovelymoney’, putting their ‘fishponds’ before freedom.

Caesar encouraged them by keeping up his campaign of spin. He emphasized his ‘clemency’ and proved it by a readiness to pardon enemies. He was the defender of ‘liberty’, he said, especially the ‘liberty’ of the Roman people’s tribunes. His enemies had just harassed these tribunes with the ‘ultimate decree’. Even Sulla, Caesar coolly observed, had left the tribunes a right of ‘intercession’ (arguably, Sulla had not left them the right of veto, but only the right to intercede against the harassment of individuals). His enemies (he said) were a minority, ‘the Faction’. Caesar would have nothing to learn from modern political advisers on presentation. But he also emphasized his concern for his own ‘dignity’, his rank and esteem, which were driving him to stand again as consul. ‘But what is dignity’, Cicero aptly commented, ‘if there is no honour?’
²

If Caesar championed ‘liberty of the people’, Pompey championed ‘liberty of the Senate’. Recently the towns of Italy had celebrated Pompey’s recovery from an illness and perhaps this recent flattery misled him. In fact, they had faked it, in Cicero’s view. For Pompey’s hopes of support in Italy were far too optimistic. In mid-Januaryhe and many senators had to abandon Rome and head south to Brundisium where theywaited until 17 March. Meanwhile, offers of compromise multiplied. If Pompey would demobilize and go off to govern in Spain, Caesar would retain only the Dalmatian coast and keep out of Italy. Pompey even offered him a second consulship and a triumph, but he refused Caesar’s offers of a personal interview and did not state that he would disband his troops too. Mediators, including Cicero, had real hopes of peace, but the offers and counter-offers were yet more ‘spin’. Neither side could really demobilize or climb down. Pompey’s abandonment of Rome made a very bad impression, but he was said to be defending it, just as the Athenians had abandoned Athens to ‘defend’ it against the Persian tyranny in 480
BC
. His aim was to set up in Greece and surround Caesar in Italy. He could gather help from
foreign princes and squeeze away Caesar’s popular support, not least by interrupting grain imports. So in mid-March he crossed by sea to regroup in north-west Greece and summon foreign help.

The Civil War imposed choices which are enduring examples in the history of all politics: their results changed world history. It caught many prominent Romans with conflicting allegiances and it tested principles which others had long professed. We can still follow them unforgettably in the surviving letters to and from Cicero who had returned to Italy in December 50, hoping initially for the honour of a triumph for his minor victory in his minor province in the East. Events swept that hope away, and Cicero found himself being leaned on as a mediator by Caesar, who was predictably so amicable to him and others around him. Cicero was certainly no fighter, but he was still a great speaker and a senior figure who would lend respectability to Caesar’s cause. It also so happened that he had borrowed hugely from Caesar to finance his houses and his career and had not yet repaid. But he refused Caesar’s direct offers at interview and wrote: ‘I think Caesar is not pleased with me. But I was pleased with myself, which is more than I have been for a long time.’
³
Caesar’s supporters were a frightful collection of men on the make, unprincipled time-servers, the ‘army of the underworld’, as Cicero and his friend Atticus so wonderfully described them.
⁴
But the interview with Caesar ended ominously: ‘if Caesar could not get my advice, he said he would take the advice of anyone he could, and stop at nothing.’
⁵

He certainly did not: on reaching Rome in April 49 Caesar waited outside the city-boundary, correctly, but then crossed it and threatened to kill one of the tribunes who had, equally correctly, denied him the money in the Treasury. His next step was less expected: a quick march west to Spain, to break Pompey’s possible hold on the province. He succeeded (not without trouble), returned to Rome and was appointed dictator (for a brief eleven days), and then elected consul for 48. It sounds easy, but it was not. He had repeatedly promised bonuses to his troops since reaching the Rubicon, but although he had booty in Gaul, he did not have the cash at hand with which to pay. On returning to Italy, some of his troops actually mutinied, and not for the last time, either. In Rome, there was no magistrate left to preside over an election to the consulship, so Caesar
had to be made dictator in order to preside over the election of himself. He then had to cross to Greece from Brindisi in order to cope with Pompey’s army. It took months to contrive a safe departure by sea and even then he was running huge risks.

In superb letters, we can watch Cicero meanwhile wavering and wondering where he could possibly go. His close friend Atticus was going to stay on in Rome, rich, uninvolved and artfully neutral. Cicero’s womenfolk were there too and, so far, Caesar had not been too radical. He had not cancelled existing debts or systematically redistributed land. The land of some of his enemies had passed to some of Caesar’s friends, but at least it had been auctioned or sold to them. And yet Caesar was a manifest enemy of Cicero’s ideal of senatorial liberty. Should I go somewhere neutral, Cicero wondered? Should I go to Malta? Should I try Sicily or take a military command in Africa? Basically, he hated the option of war and the destruction it would bring.

On the other side, Pompey did stand for the ‘liberty’ of the Senate and he had done Cicero one great favour: in 57 he had helped to restore him from exile. Yet, as so often, Cicero was not entirely deceived. If Pompey returned from Greece, he would attack Italy and allow the most dreadful reprisals. In the end, Pompey too would want to dominate (though at least he was older and would last less long). Obliged by a past favour and believing in what Pompey used as spin, Cicero crossed to join him in Greece. When he eventually arrived he found Pompey’s supporters there to be awful: ‘their talk was so bloodthirstyI shuddered at the thought of victory.’ They were already carving up their jobs for the future and ‘all those great men were deep in debt. Why go on? The only good thing was the cause itself.’
⁶
So Cicero resorted to his unfailing verbal wit. He made his ‘disapproval of Pompey’s plans obvious, but did not refrain from jokes at the foreigners who were come to help’
⁷
(Pompey had called on help from ‘barbarian’ dynasts from Asia and even from up by the Danube). ‘Cicero went round camp darkly without a smile, but he made others laugh in spite of themselves.’
⁸

When Caesar eventually landed in north-west Greece he should have been defeated promptly on two occasions. Instead, the second occasion became his crucial victory near Pharsalus (in Thessaly) on
9 August 48
BC
, in which his supporter Mark Antony commanded the left wing with distinction. Caesar’s agents, meanwhile, had gone south to woo Athens. They had even gone through the motions of selling the obstinate Megarians as slaves and then freeing them, a sure way (still) to the neighbouring Athenians’ hearts. Unprepared for defeat, Pompey fled and eventually set foot on the coast of Egypt by the eastern arm of the Nile Delta. On arrival he was killed on the advice of a Greek, a rhetor from the island of Chios. Years later, in 130, Hadrian would rediscover the simple tomb of Pompey; ‘the man’, Cicero wrote coolly, ‘whom I knew to be honest, decent and serious’.
⁹
Devious and inscrutable were also apt words for him. Hadrian cleared away the sand, restored the statues which Pompey’s family had put up (and others, later, had defaced) and wrote verses for his tomb. ‘How lowly a tomb…’, theybegan. Hadrian did not understand the legal and personal complexities which we have been following.

On 2 October 48 Caesar arrived, to be presented with Pompey’s head which had been cut off for him. He then entered Alexandria and became involved in a fateful strife in the Ptolemaic royal house. Since the previous king’s death in 51, the kingdom had been bequeathed by will to Rome. Caesar now settled an outstanding feud by upholding the joint rule of the previous king’s young son and his slightly older daughter. As Ptolemies, this brother and sister were already married to each other, but the sister, Cleopatra, arrived in Caesar’s presence, hidden in a linen bedding-sack. Aged twenty-one, she was to fascinate the thrice-married Caesar. His wife Calpurnia was back in Rome, but he was not yet a love-sated man past his prime.
¹⁰
Love now accompanied Rome’s hand in Egypt.

News of the victory at Pharsalus reached Rome byOctober 48 and caused Caesar, the consul in absence, to be named ‘dictator’ for a whole year. Yet for another nine months Rome was not even to see him: was he dead? In fact, he became caught up in a savage war in Alexandria which was begun by two discontented Alexandrian Greek courtiers: during it, his troops began a fire which did irreparable damage to Alexandria’s royal bookstores and libraries, perhaps Caesar’s most permanent ill-effect. It was his turn, now, to depend on ‘barbarian’ help: Jewish soldiers arrived to help him, and in return Caesar would be a firm supporter of Jews and their status. Eventually,
peace was restored and in spring 47 it does seem that he could relax by boating up the Nile with Egypt’s newly secured queen, who was so sweet-voiced and accomplished in conversation. She had already become pregnant. In the summer she bore a son and called him Caesarion, a name which Caesar did not repudiate. Caesarion’s birth-date and parentage continue to be questioned, but when he appears in Cicero’s surviving letters in spring 44 he is not described as if his origin was disputed at the time. Julius Caesar had no other surviving children by anyone else.

Even after the death of Pompey, Caesar had to fight three more wars to assert his dominance. They are ample evidence that there was nothing inevitable about his supremacy or about the ‘fall’ of the Roman Republic. The first war was over quickly in July 47, a victory in Asia over Mithridates’ son: it was so quick that it was here that Caesar said ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ (at Zela). Then he returned to Rome, to confront yet another mutiny among troops who had been left in Italy. Here his deputy, Mark Antony, had not proved a safe pair of hands, quite apart from his carryings-on with a notorious courtesan, a woman whose presence at dinner was denounced by Cicero, a fellow guest, who was both shocked and intrigued.
¹¹
In late December 47 Caesar was off again, this time to north Africa against another major pocket of republican resistance. Again, he ran huge risks by landing with far fewer troops against some fourteen enemy legions. After three separate victories, his constant republican opponent, Cato, killed himself. Ever the man of principle, Cato first read Plato, then took a sword and succeeded at the second attempt.

Back in Rome in spring 46
BC
, news of this failed ‘last stand’ seemed to mark a decisive turn: Caesar was voted the first cluster of what were to proliferate as exceptional honours. A chariot and a statue with a globe were to be set up on the Capitol hill, and most remarkably an inscription on the statue was to call him ‘demi-god’, in the very heart of Rome. The senators, perhaps, were outrunning even Caesar’s expectations. More mundanely, Caesar was voted another dictatorship, but this time for ten whole years. How was he going to rule? He was not going to legislate for a whole new system in one transforming package. He had very few changes to make to Rome’s existing system of justice. Instead, laws would come out one by one, and they were
to be reasonable enough. The calendar, hopelessly out of line, was to be reformed. Debts were certainly not to be cancelled (many people owed big sums to Caesar, including Cicero), but there was to be a suspension of rent, but only up to a modest limit and for one year. In Italy, debtors were finding that their security for their loans, their land, was collapsing in value in the crisis: a new ruling, therefore, obliged creditors to accept land at its pre-war value. The harsh old rules of bankruptcy were also moderated. This sort of legislation was very far from the red-blooded abolitions of debt in previous Greek history, and other populists would try to go further. In Caesar’s Rome, however, the populist groups which had been the focus of Clodius in the 50s were restricted: the people’s clubs and ‘colleges’ would not now be allowed unless they were licensed (few were) and the numbers who were eligible for grain doles were steeply cut.