The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  He subordinated the Senate almost to the role of an advisory council. He enlarged it from 600 to 900 members and permanently transformed it with 400 new appointees. Many of these were Roman businessmen; many were leading citizens of Italian or provincial cities; some had been centurions, soldiers, or sons of slaves. The patricians were alarmed to see the chieftains of conquered Gaul enter the Senate and join the rulers of the Empire; even the wags of the capital resented this and circulated a satiric couplet:

  Gallos Caesar in triumphum ducit, idem in curiam;

  Galli braccas deposuerunt, latum clavum sumpserunt—

  “Caesar leads Gauls in his triumph, then into the Senate; the Gauls have removed their breeches, and put on the broad-rimmed toga” of the senators.52

  Perhaps Caesar purposely made the new Senate too cumbersome a body for effective deliberation or unified opposition. He chose a group of friends—Balbus, Oppius, Matius, and others—as an informal executive cabinet, and inaugurated the bureaucracy of the Empire by delegating the clerical details of his government, and the minutiae of administration, to his household of freedmen and slaves. He allowed the Assembly to elect half the city magistrates; he chose the rest by “recommendations” which the Assembly regularly approved. As tribune he could veto the decisions of other tribunes or consuls. He increased the praetors to sixteen, and the quaestors to forty, to expedite municipal and judicial business. He kept a personal eye on every aspect of the city’s affairs, and tolerated no incompetence or waste. In the city charters that he granted he placed severe injunctions and penalties against electoral corruption and official malfeasance. To end the domination of politics by organized vote buying, and perhaps to secure his power against proletarian revolt, he abolished the collegia, except some of ancient origin and the essentially religious associations of the Jews. He restricted jury service to the two upper classes and reserved for himself the right to try the most vital cases; frequently he sat as judge, and none could deny the wisdom and impartiality of his decisions. He proposed to the jurists of his time an orderly codification of existing Roman law, but his early death frustrated the plan.

  Resuming the work of the Gracchi, he distributed lands to his veterans and the poor; this policy, continued by Augustus, for many years pacified the agrarian agitation. To forestall the rapid reconcentration of landownership he ruled that the new lands could not be sold within twenty years; and to check rural slavery he passed a measure requiring that a third of the laborers on ranches should be freemen. Having turned many idle prolétaires into soldiers and then into peasant proprietors, he further diminished their ranks by sending 80,000 citizens as colonists to Carthage, Corinth, Seville, Aries, and other centers. To provide work for the remaining unemployed in Rome he spent 160,000,000 sesterces in a great building program. He had a new and more spacious meeting place for the assemblies set up in the Field of Mars, and relieved the congestion of business in the Forum by adding, near it, a Forum Iulium. He embellished likewise many cities in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Greece. Having so eased the pressure of poverty, he required a means test for eligibility to the state dole of grain. At once the number of applicants fell from 320,000 to 150,000.

  So far he had remained true to his role as a champion of the populares. But since the Roman revolution was more agrarian than industrial, and was aimed chiefly at the landed slave-driving aristocracy, then at the moneylenders, and only mildly at the business classes, Caesar continued the Gracchan policy of inviting businessmen to support the agrarian and fiscal revolution. Cicero sought to unite the middle classes with the aristocracy; Caesar sought to unite them with the plebs. Many of the great capitalists, from Crassus to Balbus, helped to finance him, as similar men helped the American and French Revolutions. Nevertheless, Caesar ended one of the richest sources of financial profiteering—the collection of provincial taxes through corporations of publicans. He scaled down debts, enacted severe laws against excessive interest rates, and relieved extreme cases of insolvency by establishing the law of bankruptcy essentially as it stands today. He restored the stability of the currency by basing it upon gold and issuing a golden aureus, equivalent in purchasing power to the British pound sterling in the nineteenth century. The coins of his government were stamped with his own features and were designed with an artistry new to Rome. A novel order and competence entered the administration of the Empire’s finances, with the result that when Caesar died the Treasury contained 700,000,000 sesterces, and his private treasury 100,000,000.

  As a scientific basis for taxation and administration, he had a census taken of Italy, and planned a like census of the Empire. To replenish a citizenry decimated by war, he granted the Roman franchise widely—among others, to physicians and teachers in Rome. Long disturbed by the fall in the birth rate, he had in 59 given precedence in land allotments to fathers of three children; now he promulgated rewards for large families and forbade childless women under forty-five to ride in litters or wear jewelry—the weakest and most futile part of his varied legislation.

  Still an agnostic, though not quite free from superstitions,53 Caesar remained high priest of the state religion and provided it with the usual funds. He restored old temples and built new ones, honoring above all his alma mater Venus. But he allowed full liberty of conscience and worship, withdrew old prohibitions against the Isis cult, and protected the Jews in the exercise of their faith. Noting that the calendar of the priests had lost all concord with the seasons, he commissioned the Alexandrian Greek Sosigenes to devise, on Egyptian models, the “Julian calendar”: henceforth the year was to consist of 365 days, with an added day in every fourth February. Cicero complained that Caesar, not content with ruling the earth, was now regulating the stars; but the Senate accepted the reform graciously, and gave the dictator’s family name, Julius, to the month Quinctilis—which had been fifth when March opened the year.

  As impressive as these things done are the works begun or planned by Caesar but postponed by his assassination. He laid the foundations of a great theater, and of a temple to Mars proportioned to that god’s voracity. He appointed Varro to head an organization for the establishment of public libraries. He designed to free Rome from malaria by draining Lake Fucinus and the Pontine marshes, and reclaiming these acres for tillage. He proposed to raise dykes to control the Tiber’s floods; by diverting the course of that stream he hoped to improve the harbor at Ostia, periodically ruined by the river’s silt. He instructed his engineers to prepare plans for building a road across central Italy and for cutting a canal at Corinth.

  The most resented of his undertakings was to make the freemen of Italy equal citizens with those of Rome, and the provinces ultimately equal with Italy. In 49 he had enfranchised Cisalpine Gaul; now (44) he drew up a municipal charter, apparently for all the cities of Italy, equalizing their rights with Rome’s; probably he was planning some representative government by which they would have had a democratic share in his constitutional monarchy.55 He took the appointment of provincial governors out of the hands of the corrupt Senate and himself named to these posts men of proved ability, who remained at every moment subject to recall at his will. He reduced provincial taxes by a third, and entrusted their collection to special officials responsible to himself. He overrode ancient curses to restore Capua, Carthage, and Corinth—completing again the work of the Gracchi. To the colonists whom he sent to found or people a score of cities from Gibraltar to the Black Sea, he gave Roman or Latin rights, and evidently hoped to extend Roman citizenship to all free adult males in the Empire; the Senate was then to represent not a class in Rome, but the mind and will of every province. This conception of government, and Caesar’s reorganization of Rome and Italy, completed the miracle whereby the youthful spendthrift and roisterer had become one of the ablest, bravest, fairest, and most enlightened men in all the sorry annals of politics.

  Like Alexander he did not know where to stop. Contemplating his reordered realm, he resented its exposure to attack at the Euphrates, the Danube,
and the Rhine. He dreamed of a great expedition to capture Parthia and avenge his old pocketbook Crassus; of a march around the Black Sea and the pacification of Scythia; of the exploration of the Danube and the conquest of Germany.56 Then, having made the Empire secure, he would return to Rome laden with honor and spoils, rich enough to end economic depression, powerful enough to ignore all opposition, free at last to name his successor, and to die with the pax Romana as his supreme legacy to the world.

  IX. BRUTUS

  When news of this plan trickled through Rome the common people, who love glory, applauded; the business classes, smelling war orders and provincial loot, licked their chops; the aristocracy, foreseeing its extinction on Caesar’s return, resolved to kill him before he could go.

  He had treated these bluebloods with such generosity as to stir Cicero’s eloquence in his praise. He had forgiven all surrendering foes and had condemned to death only a few officers who, defeated and pardoned, had fought against him again. He had burned unread the correspondence he had found in the tents of Pompey and Scipio. He had sent the captured daughter and grandchildren of Pompey to Pompey’s son Sextus, who was still in arms against him; and he had restored the statues of Pompey which his followers had thrown down. He had given provincial governorships to Brutus and Cassius, and high office to many others of their class. He bore silently a thousand slanders, and instituted no proceedings against those whom he suspected of plotting against his life. To Cicero, who had trimmed his wind to every sale, he offered not only pardon but honor, and refused nothing that the orator asked for himself or his Pompeian friends; he even forgave, at Cicero’s urging, the unrepentant Marcus Marcellus. In a pretty speech For Marcellus (46) Cicero acclaimed Caesar’s “unbelievable liberality,” and admitted that Pompey, victorious, would have been more vengeful. “I have heard with regret,” he said, “your celebrated and highly philosophical remark, lam satis vixi, ‘I have lived enough, whether for nature or for fame.’ . . . Put aside, I beg you, that wisdom of the sage; do not be wise at the cost of our peril. . . . You are still far from the completion of your greatest labors; you have not yet laid their foundations.” And he solemnly promised Caesar, in the name of all the Senate, that they would watch over his safety and oppose with their own bodies any attack upon him.57 Cicero now prospered so well that he planned to buy still another palace—no less than that of Sulla himself. He enjoyed the dinners to which he was invited by Antony, Balbus, and others of Caesar’s aides; never before had his letters been so gay.58 Caesar was not deceived; he wrote to Matius: “If anyone is gracious, it is Cicero; but I doubt not that he hates me bitterly.”59 When reassured Pompeians resumed their opposition, this unctuous Talleyrand of the pen fell in with their hopes and wrote a eulogy of the younger Cato that should have put Caesar on his guard. Caesar contented himself with writing a reply, the Anti-Cato, which did not show the dictator at his best; in this duel he had given Cicero the choice of weapons, and the orator had won. Public opinion praised Cicero’s style, and the mildness of a ruler who composed a pamphlet when he might have signed a death warrant.

  Men who have been deprived of wonted power cannot be mollified by pardoning their resistance; it is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured. The aristocrats fretted in a Senate that dared not reject the proposals that Caesar so constitutionally submitted to them. They patriotically denounced the destruction of a liberty that had fattened their purses, and would not admit that the restoration of order required the limitation of their freedom. They looked with horror upon the presence of Cleopatra and Caesarion in Rome; it was true that Caesar was living with his wife Calpurnia apparently in mutual affection; but who could say—who would not say—what happened on his frequent visits to the gorgeous queen? Rumors persisted that he would make himself king, marry her, and place the capital of their united empires in the East. Had he not ordered his statue to be erected on the Capitol next to those of Rome’s ancient kings? Had he not stamped his own image upon Roman coins—an unprecedented insolence? Did he not wear robes of purple, usually reserved for kings? At the Lupercalia, on February 15, 44, the consul Antony, sacerdotally naked V and impiously drunk, tried thrice to place a royal crown upon Caesar’s head. Thrice Caesar refused; but was it not because the crowd murmured disapproval? Did he not dismiss from office the tribunes who removed from his statue the royal diadem placed upon it by his friends? When the Senate approached him as he sat in the Temple of Venus, he did not rise to receive them. Some explained that he had been overcome by an epileptic stroke; others, that he was suffering from diarrhea and had remained seated to avoid a movement of his bowels at so unpropitious a moment.60 But many patricians feared that any day might see him proclaimed a king.

  Shortly after the Lupercalia, Gaius Cassius, a sickly man—“pale and lean,” as Plutarch describes him61—approached Marcus Brutus and suggested the assassination of Caesar. He had already won to his plan several senators, some capitalists whose provincial pillage had fallen with Caesar’s restriction of the publicans, even some of Caesar’s generals, who felt that the spoils and offices awarded them had not quite equaled their deserts. Brutus was needed as the front of the conspiracy, for he had won a wide reputation as the most virtuous of men. He was supposedly descended from the Brutus who had expelled the kings 464 years before. His mother Servilia was Cato’s half sister; his wife Portia was Cato’s daughter and the widow of Caesar’s enemy Bibulus. “It was thought,” says Appian, “that Brutus was Caesar’s son, as Caesar was the lover of Servilia about the time of Brutus’ birth”;62 Plutarch adds that Caesar believed Brutus to be his son.63 Possibly Brutus himself shared this opinion, and hated the dictator for having seduced his mother and made him, in the gossip of Rome, a bastard instead of a Brutus. He had always been moody and taciturn, as if brooding over a secret wrong; at the same time he carried himself proudly, as one who in any case bore noble blood in his veins. He was a master of Greek and a devotee of philosophy; in metaphysics a follower of Plato, in ethics, of Zeno. It was not lost upon him that Stoicism, like Greek and Roman opinion, approved tyrannicide. “Our ancestors,” he wrote to a friend, “thought that we ought not to endure a tyrant even if he were our own father.”64 He composed a treatise on Virtue and was later confused with that abstraction. Through intermediaries he lent money at forty-eight per cent to the citizens of Cyprian Salamis; when they balked at paying the accumulated interest he urged Cicero, then proconsul in Cilicia, to enforce the collection with Roman arms.65 He governed Cisalpine Gaul with integrity and competence and, returning to Rome, was made urban praetor by Caesar (45).

  Every generous element in his nature rebelled against Cassius’ proposal. Cassius reminded him of his rebel ancestry, and perhaps Brutus felt challenged to prove it by imitation. The sensitive youth blushed when he saw, affixed to statues of the older Brutus, such inscriptions as “Brutus, are you dead?”—or, “Your posterity is unworthy of you.”66 Cicero dedicated to him several treatises written in these years. Meanwhile it was whispered among the patricians that at the next meeting of the Senate, on March 15, Lucius Cotta would move that Caesar be made king, on the ground that according to the Sibylline oracle the Parthians would be conquered only by a king.67 A Senate half filled with Caesar’s appointees, said Cassius, would pass the measure, and all hope of restoring the Republic would be lost. Brutus yielded, and the conspirators then made definite plans. Portia drew the secret from her husband by stabbing her thigh to show that no physical injury could make her speak against her will. In a moment of unprophetic sentiment Brutus insisted that Antony should be spared.

  On the evening of March 14, to a gathering at his home, Caesar proposed as topic of conversation, “What is the best death?” His own answer was, “A sudden one.” The next morning his wife begged him not to go to the Senate, saying that she had dreamed of seeing him covered with blood. A like-minded servant sought to provide a deterrent omen by causing an ancestral picture to fall from the wall. But Decimus Brut
us, who was one of his closest friends and was also one of the conspirators—urged him to attend the Senate if only to adjourn it courteously in person. A friend who had learned of the plot came to warn him, but Caesar had already left. On his way to the Senate he met a soothsayer who had once whispered to him, “Beware the ides of March”; Caesar remarked, smiling, that the ides had come and all was well. “But they have not passed,” answered Spurinna. While Caesar was offering the usual presession sacrifice before Pompey’s theater, where the Senate was to meet, a tablet informing him of the conspiracy was put into his hands. He ignored it, and tradition says that it was found in his hand after his death.VI

  Trebonius, a conspirator who had been a favored general of Caesar, detained Antony from the meeting by conversation. When Caesar entered the theater and took his seat, the “Liberators” flung themselves upon him without delay. “Some have written,” reports Suetonius, “that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him he said, in Greek, kai su teknon—‘You, too, my child?’ ”69 When Brutus struck him, says Appian, Caesar ended all resistance; drawing his robe over his face and head, he submitted to the blows and fell at the foot of Pompey’s statue.70 One wish had been granted to the most complete man that antiquity produced.

  * * *

  I It was already an ancient mode of birth, being mentioned in the laws ascribed to Numa. Caesar’s cognomen was not derived from the operation (caesus ab utero matris); long before him there had been Caesars among the Julii.

  II Ten miles west of the Rhine, 160 miles south of Cologne.

  III The speech as it has come down to us was much revised. It differed so much from the actual address—which had been confused by hostile disturbances—that when Milo read it he exclaimed: “O Cicero! If you had only spoken as you have written I should not now be eating the very excellent fish of Marseilles.”23