The Twelve Caesars (6 page)

In 55
BC
, in response to Ahenobarbus’ threat, the members of the triumvirate had met at Luca (modern Lucca). On that occasion, fissures were more
evident than goodwill in this flimsiest of opportunist coalitions. Caesar’s diplomacy, spiced by charm, won the day. Crassus and Pompey held the consulship in 55 in Ahenobarbus’ place,
electoral victory theirs through purchase and intimidation. They extended Caesar’s proconsulship of Gaul for a further five years and devised on their own behalf a bill that was passed by the
tribune Trebonius. This granted
each of them a similar five-year proconsulship – Syria for Crassus and two provinces of Spain for Pompey. (In the event, permitted to
remain in Italy through an additional commission which placed him in charge of Rome’s grain supply, Pompey governed the latter through legates, preferring to remain on his country estates
with his young wife, Caesar’s daughter Julia.
²¹
) Afterwards Caesar planned a second consulship, for 48, beginning, as Roman law dictated, a decade after completion of his previous term. Despite
his victories and that inordinately enhanced
dignitas
by which he set such store, the misdeeds of his first consulship could not be erased. Caesar remained a man on the run.
²

Only as consul invested with
imperium,
that power of military command possessed by magistrates and pro-magistrates for their term of office, could Caesar survive in Rome unscathed: any
other return risked legal proceedings. At that point, all the achievements of the last two decades became forfeit to technical niceties maliciously exploited by enemies who, quite correctly, saw in
Caesar a threat not only to their own positions but to the very continuance of the Republic as they knew it. It may be true that even now Caesar’s principal aim was not supreme power for
himself per se. But a man so lavishly endowed with dynamism could scarcely embrace the treading-water prevarication of a system whose impotence he had explicitly recognized in the triumvirate. That
alliance had attained its ends outside the ordinary sphere of senatorial action: its was the new reality of Roman politics. Where even the qualified democracy of the senate
was powerless, iron-fisted authoritarianism promised to break through every impasse. For its protagonists it offered action and progress. Impossible that Caesar should forsake either.
Authoritarianism then it must be, a policy which precluded the senate’s self-regarding inertia. A second consulship for Caesar would avert for another year indictment and crisis. It also
promised to place him once again nearer to that position from which he could bypass senatorial constitutionalism in pursuit of his own goals.

But Caesar had failed to consider the omnipresence of death. In the event, not one but three deaths served to unravel his best-laid plans. A year after the triumvirate’s meeting at Luca,
in August 54, Pompey’s wife and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, died in childbirth. Briefly, mismatched father- and son-in-law were united in grief. That the bond between them was weakened,
both surely acknowledged. ‘Their friends were greatly troubled too,’ according to Plutarch: ‘they felt that the relationship which alone kept the distempered state in harmony and
concord was now dissolved.’
²²
Pompey declined Caesar’s suggestion that the older man marry Caesar’s great-niece Octavia, while he marry Pompey’s daughter Pompeia (an instance
of politic bed-hopping which would have required three of the four participants to divorce existing spouses). In 53, Crassus was roundly defeated by the Parthians at Carrhae, his body decapitated,
his troops butchered, Roman standards seized by the enemy. A crucial intermediary between Caesar and Pompey had vanished at a stroke. In the aftermath of Rome’s humiliation, which Caesar
later vowed to avenge, on 6 December Publius Clodius Pulcher, patrician-born rabble-rousing tribune of the plebs and one-time rumoured lover of Caesar’s third wife Pompeia, was killed.
Assassinated in Suetonius’ account, he may have died in an outbreak of
politically motivated gang violence on the Appian Way outside Rome. Certainly Clodius’
funeral gave rise to rioting, which in turn engendered panic on the part of the senate; in the air a sense of escalating lawlessness, of the state inadequate to address new challenges. ‘There
were many,’ Plutarch reports, ‘who actually dared to say in public that nothing but monarchy could now cure the diseases of the state.’
²³
Attention turned to Pompey. At Cato’s
suggestion Caesar’s remaining fellow triumvir was appointed sole consul without an election but with enhanced powers, which he in turn used to legitimize Caesar’s desire to stand for
the consulship in his absence. He also obtained a five-year extension to his own command in Spain. Shortly afterwards, in an unexpected change of heart, Pompey passed a law preventing absenteeism
among candidates for the consulship. Late in 52 he sugared the pill by sanctioning a second public thanksgiving – on this occasion twenty days long – for Caesar’s defeat of
Vercingetorix. In Plutarch’s version, Pompey’s former contempt for Caesar as his junior in age, achievement and distinction had belatedly turned to fear.

For Caesar, thanksgiving in Rome was a sideshow. What mattered was his election to the consulship for a second time and, equally importantly, the management of that election in such a manner
that his enemies were denied any opportunity of placing him on trial for previous misdemeanours. This was possible only if he retained proconsular
imperium
, which obtained only so long as he
remained outside Rome. Electoral victory
in absentia
had become a point of honour, more important to Caesar than the evident loss of Pompey’s former amity. In the service of the
Republic he had won victories unrivalled in its history: he refused to countenance the possibility of arraignment for transgressions of the previous
decade. While the
senate’s line hardened, Caesar issued an ultimatum: either he be allowed to stand for election as proconsul of Gaul or, in the event that he was forced to give up his province, other holders
of military commands (a reference to Pompey) behave in like manner. They were, in his own words, ‘very mild demands’. Cicero described it as a ‘fierce and threatening
letter’
²⁴
. Either way, the import was clear. Caesar would not compromise. Nor in the event would a hostile senate. On 7 January 49
BC
, the senate approved the
senatus
consultum ultimum
which made Caesar a public enemy of Rome. Plutarch claims Pompey’s new father-in-law Scipio as instigator of the decree. Caesar’s response determined the future of
his life. It also changed history, and not only that of Rome.

Early in the morning, on 11 January, in company with a single legion, Caesar crossed the Rubicon. In crossing the narrow stream which separated Cisalpine Gaul from Italy, he crossed from
legality to illegality, from the status of heroic outlaw to traitor. It was a step not lightly made in Suetonius’ account, in which, at this critical juncture, an intervention of the
supernatural strengthened Caesar’s resolve. ‘There appeared hard by a being of wondrous stature and beauty, who sat and played upon a reed... [T]he apparition snatched a trumpet...
rushed to the river, and sounding the war-note with mighty blast, strode to the opposite bank.’ The ancient sources vie with one another in their presentation of Caesar’s historic
transgression. ‘The die is cast,’ cries Suetonius’ hero, admitting the possibility of fatalism, then tearfully he implores his troops, tearing the clothes from his breast.
Plutarch offers instead a quotation from the Greek dramatist Menander: ‘Let the die be thrown!’ It is a challenge, a compact with destiny, the stuff of legends: impossible to remain
unmoved. Except that Caesar is not a victim unfairly penalized.
Defence of his
dignitas
is the only justification he offers for a war in which his own countrymen will
suffer and die – that self-seeking cause is victorious, of course. It is a conflagration with no foundation in ideology, principle or hope. As with so much in our story, its focus is
power.

In the aftermath of victory, gifts and games. Suetonius records ‘a combat of gladiators and stage plays in every ward all over the city... as well as races in the circus,
athletic contests and a sham sea-fight’. So great were the crowds of spectators that many were killed in the crush. There were public banquets, gifts of grain and oil; a payment of 300
sesterces to members of the public, booty to Caesar’s foot-soldiers and land for their retirement.

Pompey had led the army of the Republic, pursued by Caesar, to Thessaly. There, at Pharsalus, Caesar won a decisive victory; Pompey escaped only to be murdered by the king of Egypt. Ignorant of
his fate, Caesar arrived in Egypt to find Pompey already dead. He consoled himself with Cleopatra, whom he put on the throne in place of her brother Ptolemy XIII and took as his mistress. There
were hostile legions in Spain and at Massilia, in Pontus and in Africa. At Thapsus, on the African coast, Caesar’s men overwhelmed fourteen legions of the Republican army. On that April day
in 46, if we choose to believe the sources, 10,000 Pompeians died; Caesar’s side sustained little more than fifty casualties. Three months later, Caesar was back in Rome. His victory had
taken three-and-a-half years. In a gesture redolent of past glories, the senate voted him forty days of thanksgiving. He celebrated four triumphs. At the end of the Gallic triumph, Vercingetorix
was killed by strangulation: a prisoner, he
had waited six years for his humiliation on the streets of Rome. Exhibits in the Pontic triumph included a bronze tablet inscribed
with the legend ‘
veni, vidi, vici
’ in celebration of that speediest victory. For his part, Caesar received the right to be preceded through the streets of Rome by seventy-two
lictors.
²⁵
It constituted an unprecedented distinction. That same year also witnessed his third consulship, an appointment to the dictatorship for ten years, and an award which encompassed aspects of
the censorship including controlling membership of the senate.
³
The consulship was renewed in the following year and the year after. In February
44 Caesar was named
dictator
for life – as Plutarch describes it, ‘confessedly a tyranny, since the monarchy, beside the element of irresponsibility, now took on that of
permanence’.
²⁶
It was an accumulation of honours akin to Banquo’s commendation of Macbeth: ‘Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all...’ For Caesar, as for Rome, endgame
had been reached.

Once Cato had claimed that Caesar was the only man who undertook to overthrow the state when sober. Unrivalled power – corrupting or intoxifying, as we will –
overrode that sobriety, muddied his responses to those around him, occluded his vision, blurred the boundaries of possibility. Arrogant in eminence, he offended senate and commons alike. ‘So
far did he go in his
presumption,’ Suetonius reports, ‘that when a soothsayer once reported direful inwards without a heart, he said, “They will be more
favourable when I wish it; it should not be regarded as a portent, if a beast has no heart.”’