The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  The siege of Alesia decided the fate of Gaul and the character of French civilization. It added to the Roman Empire a country twice the size of Italy and opened the purses and markets of 5,000,000 people to Roman trade. It saved Italy and the Mediterranean world for four centuries from barbarian invasion; and it lifted Caesar from the verge of ruin to a new height of reputation, wealth, and power. After another year of sporadic revolts, which the angry general put down with uncharacteristic severity, all Gaul accepted subjection to Rome. Once his victory was certain Caesar became again the generous conqueror; he treated the tribes with such lenience that in all the ensuing Civil War, when he and Rome would have been helpless to retaliate, they made no move to throw off the yoke. For three hundred years Gaul remained a Roman province, prospered under the Roman peace, learned and transformed the Latin language, and became the channel through which the culture of classic antiquity passed into northern Europe. Doubtless neither Caesar nor his contemporaries foresaw the immense consequences of his bloody triumph. He thought he had saved Italy, won a province, and forged an army; he did not suspect that he was the creator of French civilization.

  Rome, which had known Caesar only as a spendthrift, rake, politician, and reformer, was amazed to find him also a tireless administrator and a resourceful general. At the same time it discovered in him a major historian. In the midst of his campaigns, disturbed by the attacks upon him in Rome, he had recorded and defended his conquest of Gaul in Commentaries whose military conciseness and artful simplicity raised them, despite a thousand milia passuum, from a partisan pamphlet to a high place in Latin literature. Even Cicero, shifting again, sang a paean in his praise, and anticipated the verdict of history:

  It is not the ramparts of the Alps, nor the foaming and flooding Rhine, but the arms and generalship of Caesar which I account our true shield and barrier against the invasion of the Gauls and the barbarous tribes of Germany. It is to him we owe it that, should the mountains be leveled with the plain and the rivers be dried up, we should still hold our Italy fortified not by nature’s bulwarks but by the exploits and victories of Caesar.16

  To which should be added the tribute of a great German:

  That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history, that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic ... all this is the work of Caesar; and while the creation of his great predecessor in the East has been almost wholly reduced to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religions and states.17

  V. THE DEGRADATION OF DEMOCRACY

  During the second quinquennium of Caesar in Gaul, Roman politics had become an unparalleled chaos of corruption and violence. Pompey and Crassus, as consuls, pursued their policies by the bribery of votes, the intimidation of juries, and occasional murder.18 When their year of office ended, Crassus recruited and conscripted a large army and sailed for Syria. He crossed the Euphrates and met the Parthians at Carrhae. Their superior cavalry defeated him, and his son fell in the battle. Crassus was withdrawing his forces in good order when the Parthian general invited him to a conference. He went and was treacherously slain. His head was sent to play the part of Pentheus in a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae at the Parthian court; and his leaderless army, long wearied of the campaign, disappeared in a disorderly rout (53).

  Meanwhile Pompey too had levied an army, presumably to complete the conquest of Spain. Had Caesar’s plans matured, Pompey would have brought Farther Spain, and Crassus Armenia and Parthia, within the orbit of Roman power at the same time that Caesar was extending the frontier to the Thames and the Rhine. Instead of leading his legions to Spain, Pompey kept them in Italy, except for one which he lent to Caesar in the crisis of the Gallic revolt. In 54 the strongest tie that held him to Caesar was cut by the death of his wife Julia in childbirth. Caesar offered him his grandniece Octavia, now Caesar’s nearest female relative, and asked for the hand of Pompey’s daughter; but Pompey refused both proposals. The debacle of Crassus and his army in the following year removed another balancing force, for a victorious Crassus would have opposed the dictatorship of either Caesar or Pompey. Henceforth Pompey openly allied himself with the conservatives. His plan to secure supreme power through legal forms had now only one obstacle—the ambition and army of Caesar. Knowing that Caesar’s command would expire in 49, Pompey secured decrees continuing his own command to the end of 46, and requiring all Italians capable of bearing arms to take an oath of military fealty to him personally; in this way, he trusted, time itself would make him master of Rome.19

  While the potential dictators maneuvered for position, the capital filled with the odor of a dying democracy. Verdicts, offices, provinces, and client kings were sold to the highest bidders. In the year 53 the first voting division in the Assembly was paid 10,000,000 sesterces for its vote.20 When money failed, murder was available;21 or a man’s past was raked over, and blackmail brought him to terms. Crime flourished in the city, brigandage in the country; no police force existed to control it. Rich men hired bands of gladiators to protect them, or to support them in the comitia. The lowest elements in Italy were attracted to Rome by the smell of money or the gift of corn, and made the meetings of the Assembly a desecration. Any man who would vote as paid was admitted to the rolls, whether citizen or not; sometimes only a minority of those who cast ballots were entitled to vote. The privilege of addressing the Assembly had on several occasions to be won by storming the rostrum and holding it by main force. Legislation came to be determined by the fluctuating superiority of rival gangs; those who voted the wrong way were, now and then, beaten to within an inch of their lives, after which their houses were set afire. Following one such meeting Cicero wrote: “The Tiber was full of the corpses of citizens, the public sewers were stuffed with them, and slaves had to mop up with sponges the blood that streamed from the Forum.”22

  Clodius and Milo were Rome’s most distinguished experts in this brand of parliament. They organized rival bands of ruffians for political purposes, and hardly a day passed without some test of their strength. One day Clodius assaulted Cicero in the street; another day his warriors burned down Milo’s house; at last Clodius himself was caught by Milo’s gang and killed (52). The proletariat, not privy to all his plots, honored Clodius as a martyr, gave him a mighty funeral, carried the body to the senate house, and burned the building over him as his funeral pyre. Pompey brought in his soldiers and dispersed the mob. As reward he asked from the Senate, and received, appointment as “consul without colleague,” a phrase that Cato recommended as more pleasant than “dictator.” Pompey then put through the Assemblycowed by his troops—several measures aimed at political corruption, and another repealing the right (which his bill of 55 had granted to Caesar) to stand for the consulate while absent from Rome. He impartially supervised, with military force, the operation of the courts; Milo was tried for the murder of Clodius, was condemned despite Cicero’s defense,III and fled to Marseilles. Cicero went off to govern Cilicia (51), and acquitted himself there with a degree of competence and integrity which surprised and offended his friends. All the elements of wealth and order in the capital resigned themselves to the dictatorship of Pompey, while the poorer classes hopefully awaited the coming of Caesar.

  VI. CIVIL WAR

  A century of revolution had broken down a selfish and narrow aristocracy, but had put no other government in its place. Unemployment, bribery, bread and circuses had corrupted the Assembly into an ill-informed and passion-ridden mob obviously incapable of ruling itself, much less an empire. Democracy had fallen by Plato’s formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty.24 Caesar agreed with Pompey that the Republic was dead; it was now, he said, “a mere name, without body or form”;25 dictatorship was unavoidable. But he had hoped to establish a leadership that would be progressive, that would not freeze the status quo, but would lessen the abuses, inequities, and de
stitution which had degraded democracy. He was now fifty-four, and surely weakened by his long campaigns in Gaul; he did not relish a war against his fellow citizens and his former friends. But he saw the snares that had been prepared for him, and resented them as an ill-reward for one who had saved Italy. His term as governor of Gaul would end on March 1, 49; he could not run for the consulship until the fall of that year; in the interval he would lose the immunity of an officeholder, and could not enter Rome without subjecting himself to those proscriptions which were among the favorite weapons of party warfare in Rome. Already Marcus Marcellus had proposed to the Senate that Caesar should be deposed from his governorship before its expiration—which meant self-exile or trial. The tribunes of the plebs had saved him by their veto, but the Senate clearly favored the motion. Cato frankly expressed the hope that Caesar would be accused, tried, and banished from Italy.

  Caesar made every effort at conciliation. When, at Pompey’s suggestion, the Senate asked both generals to release to it a legion for use against Parthia, Caesar at once complied, though his force was small; and when Pompey asked Caesar for the return of the legion sent him a year before, Caesar dispatched it to him without delay. His friends informed him, however, that instead of being sent to Parthia these legions were being kept at Capua. Through his supporters in the Senate Caesar requested a renewal of the Assembly’s earlier decree permitting him to stand for the consulship in absence. The Senate refused to submit the motion and demanded that Caesar dismiss his troops. Caesar felt that his legions were his only protection; perhaps he had nourished their personal loyalty with a view to just such a crisis as this. Nevertheless, he proposed to the Senate that both he and Pompey should lay down their commissions—an offer which seemed to the people of Rome so reasonable that they garlanded his messenger with flowers. The Senate favored the plan, 370 to 22, but Pompey balked at it. In the last days of the year 50 the Senate declared Caesar a public enemy unless he should abandon his command by July 1. On the first day of 49 Curio read to the Senate a letter in which Caesar agreed to disband all but two of his ten legions if he might retain the governorship till 48; but he spoiled the offer by adding that he would look upon its rejection as a declaration of war. Cicero spoke for the proposal, and Pompey agreed to it; but the consul Lentulus intervened and drove Caesar’s lieutenants, Curio and Antony, from the senate house.26 After a long debate the reluctant Senate, persuaded by Lentulus, Cato, and Marcellus, gave Pompey orders and powers to “see that no harm should come to the state”—the Roman phrase for dictatorship and martial law.

  Caesar hesitated more than was his wont. Legally the Senate was right, he had no authority to name the conditions under which he would resign his command. He knew that civil war might bring Gaul to revolt and Italy to ruin. But to yield was to surrender the Empire to incompetence and reaction. Amid his deliberations he learned that one of his nearest friends and ablest lieutenants, Titus Labienus, had gone over to Pompey. He summoned the soldiers of his favorite Thirteenth Legion and laid the situation before them. His first word won them: Commilitones!—“fellow soldiers.” They who had seen him share their hardships and perils, who had had to complain that he risked himself too readily, recognized his right to use this word; he had always addressed them so rather than with the curt Milites! of less gracious commanders. Most of his men came from Cisalpine Gaul, to which he had extended Roman citizenship; they knew that the Senate had refused to recognize this grant and that one senator had flogged a Cisalpine Gaul just to show his contempt for Caesar’s enfranchisement; it was illegal to flog a Roman citizen. They had learned to respect Caesar—even, in their rough mute way, to love him—during their many campaigns. He had been severe with cowardice and indiscipline, but he had been lenient with their human faults, had winked at their sexual escapades, had spared them unnecessary dangers, had saved them by skillful generalship, had doubled their pay, and had spread his spoils among them handsomely. He told them of his proposals to the Senate and how these had been received; he reminded them that an idle and corrupt aristocracy was unfit to give Rome order, justice, and prosperity. Would they follow him? Not one refused. When he told them that he had no money with which to pay them they emptied their savings into his treasury.

  On January 10, 49, he led one legion across the Rubicon, a small stream, near Ariminum, that marked the southern boundary of Cisalpine Gaul. lacta est alea, he is reported to have said—“the die is cast.”27 It seemed an act of folly, for the remaining nine legions of his army were still distant in Gaul and could not reach him for weeks to come; while Pompey had ten legions, or 60,000 troops, authority to levy as many more as he pleased, and funds to arm and feed them. Caesar’s Twelfth Legion joined him at Picenum, the Eighth at Corfinium; he formed three legions more from prisoners, volunteers, and levies upon the population. He had little difficulty in getting recruits; Italy had not forgotten the Social War (88), and saw in Caesar a champion of Italian rights; one by one its cities opened their gates to him, some turned out en masse to welcome him; 28 “the towns,” wrote Cicero, “salute him as a god.”29 Corfinium resisted briefly, then surrendered; Caesar protected it from sack by his soldiers, freed all captured officers, and sent to Pompey’s camp the money and baggage that Labienus had left behind. Though almost penniless, he refrained from confiscating those estates of his opponents that fell into his hands—a characteristically wise measure, which won to neutrality most of the middle class. It would be his policy, he announced, to consider all neutrals his friends. At every new advance he tried again for reconciliation. He sent a message to Lentulus begging him to use his consular influence for peace. In a letter to Cicero he offered to retire to private life and leave the field to Pompey, provided he should be allowed to live in security.30 Cicero labored to effect a compromise, but found his logic helpless before the rival dogmatisms of revolution.31

  Though his forces still far outnumbered Caesar’s, Pompey withdrew with them from the capital, and a disorderly stream of aristocrats followed him, leaving their wives and children to Caesar’s mercy. Rejecting every overture of peace, Pompey declared that he would consider as an enemy any senator who did not abandon Rome and join his camp. The majority of the Senate remained in Rome, and vacillating Cicero, despising Pompey’s vacillations, divided himself among his rural estates. Pompey marched to Brundisium and ferried his troops across the Adriatic. He knew that his undisciplined army needed further training before it could stand up to Caesar’s legions; meanwhile, he hoped, the Roman fleet under his control would starve Italy into destroying his rival.

  Caesar entered Rome (March 16) unresisted and unarmed, having left his troops in near-by towns. He proclaimed a general amnesty and restored municipal administration and social order. The tribunes convoked the Senate; Caesar asked it to name him dictator, but it refused; he asked it to send envoys to Pompey to negotiate peace, but it refused. He sought funds from the national Treasury; the tribune Lucius Metellus barred his way, but yielded when Caesar remarked that it was harder for him to utter threats than to execute them. Henceforth he made free use of the state’s money; but with unscrupulous impartiality he deposited in the Treasury the booty from his later campaigns. Then he returned to his soldiers, and prepared to meet the three armies that the Pompeians were organizing in Greece, Africa, and Spain.

  To secure the grain supply upon which Italy’s life depended, he sent the impetuous Curio with two legions to take Sicily. Cato surrendered the island and withdrew to Africa; Curio pursued him with the recklessness of Regulus, gave battle prematurely, was defeated, and died in action, mourning not his own death, but the injury he had done to Caesar. Meanwhile Caesar had led an army to Spain, partly to ensure the renewal of its grain exports to Italy, partly to forestall a rear attack when he marched to meet Pompey. In Spain, as in Gaul, he made serious blunders in strategy.32 For a time his outnumbered army faced starvation and defeat; but, as usual, he redeemed himself by brilliant improvisation and personal bravery.33 By altering the course of a ri
ver he turned blockade into counterblockade; he waited patiently for the entrapped army to surrender, though his troops fretted for action; at last the Pompeians gave in, and all Spain came over to Caesar (August, 49). Returning toward Italy by land, he found his way blocked at Marseilles by an army under Lucius Domitius, whom he had captured and released at Corfinium. Caesar took the town after a hard siege, reorganized the administration of Gaul, and by December was back in Rome.

  His political position had been strengthened by this campaign, which had reassured the worried bellies of the capital. The Senate now named him dictator, but he surrendered that title after being elected one of the two consuls for 48. Finding Italy in a credit crisis due to the fact that the hoarding of currency had depressed prices, and debtors were refusing to pay in dear money what they had borrowed in cheap money, he decreed that debts might be paid in goods valued by state arbitrators at prewar prices; this, he thought, was “the most suitable way both of maintaining the honor of the debtors and of removing or diminishing the fear of that general repudiation of debts which is apt to follow war.”34 It is a revelation of how slowly reform had moved in Rome that he was compelled again to forbid enslavement for debt. He permitted the interest already paid on debts to be deducted from the principal, and limited interest to one per cent per month. These measures satisfied most creditors, who had feared confiscation; correspondingly they disappointed the radicals, who had hoped that Caesar would continue Catiline by abolishing all debts and redividing the land. He distributed corn to the needy, canceled all sentences of banishment except Milo’s, and pardoned all returning aristocrats. No one thanked him for his moderation. The forgiven conservatives resumed their plotting against his life; and while he was facing Pompey in Thessaly the radicals abandoned him for Caelius, who promised them a complete abolition of debts, the confiscation of large properties, and the reallotment of all land.