Another view is that he dreaded having to account for the irregularities of his first consulship, during which he had disregarded auspices and vetoes, and defied the Constitution; for Marcus Cato had often sworn to impeach him as soon as the legions were disbanded. Moreover, people said at the time, frankly enough, that should Caesar return from Gaul as a private citizen he would be tried in a court ringed around with armed men, as Titus Annius Milo had lately been at Pompey’s orders.8 This sounds plausible enough, because Asinius Pollio records in his History that when Caesar, at the Battle of Pharsalus, saw his enemies forced to choose between massacre and flight, he said, in these very words: ‘They brought it on themselves. They would have condemned me to death regardless of all my victories—me, Gaius Caesar—had I not appealed to my army for help.’ It has also been suggested that constant exercise of power gave Caesar a love of it; and that, after weighing his enemies’ strength against his own, he took this chance of fulfilling his youthful dreams by making a bid for the monarchy. Cicero seems to have come to a similar conclusion: in the third book of his Essay on Duty, he records that Caesar quoted the following lines from Euripides’s Phoenician Women on several occasions:
Is crime consonant with nobility?
Then noblest is the crime of tyranny—
In all things else obey the laws of Heaven.
31. Accordingly, when news reached him that the tribunes’ veto had been disallowed, and that they had fled the City, he at once sent a few battalions ahead with all secrecy, and disarmed suspicion by himself attending a theatrical performance, inspecting the plans of a school for gladiators which he proposed to build, and dining as usual among a crowd of guests. But at dusk he borrowed a pair of mules from a bakery near Headquarters, harnessed them to a gig, and set off quietly with a few of his staff. His lights went out, he lost his way, and the party wandered about aimlessly for some hours; but at dawn found a guide who led them on foot along narrow lanes, until they came to the right road. Caesar overtook his advanced guard at the river Rubicon, which formed the frontier between Gaul and Italy. Well aware how critical a decision confronted him, he turned to his staff, remarking: ‘We may still draw back but, once across that little bridge, we shall have to fight it out.’
32. As he stood, in two minds, an apparition of superhuman size and beauty was seen sitting on the river bank playing a reed pipe. A party of shepherds gathered around to listen and, when some of Caesar’s men broke ranks to do the same, the apparition snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran down to the river, blew a thunderous blast, and crossed over. Caesar exclaimed: ‘Let us accept this as a sign from the Gods, and follow where they beckon, in vengeance on our double-dealing enemies. The die is cast.’
33. He led his army to the farther bank, where he welcomed the tribunes of the people who had fled to him from Rome. Then he tearfully addressed the troops and, ripping open his tunic to expose his breast, begged them to stand faithfully by him. The belief that he then promised to promote every man present to the Equestrian Order is based on a misunderstanding. He had accompanied his pleas with the gesture of pointing to his left hand, as he declared that he would gladly reward those who championed his honour with the very seal ring from his thumb; but some soldiers on the fringe of the assembly who saw him better than they could hear his words, read too much into the gesture. They put it about that Caesar had promised them all the right to wear a knight’s gold ring, and the 4,000 gold pieces required to support a knighthood.
34. Here follows a brief account of Caesar’s subsequent movements. He occupied Umbria, Picenum, and Tuscany; captured Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus who had been illegally named as his successor in Gaul and was holding Corfinium for the Senate; let him go free; and then marched along the Adriatic coast to Brindisi, where Pompey and the Consuls had fled from Rome on their way to Epirus. When his efforts to prevent their crossing the straits proved ineffective, he marched on Rome, entered it, summoned the Senate to review the political situation, and then hurriedly set off for Spain; Pompey’s strongest forces were stationed there under the command of his friends Marcus Petreius, Lucius Afranius, and Marcus Varro. Before leaving, Caesar told his household: ‘I am off to meet an army without a leader; when I return I shall meet a leader without an army.’ Though delayed by the siege of Marseilles, which had shut its gates against him, and by a failure of his commissariat, he won a rapid and overwhelming victory.
35. Caesar returned by way of Rome, crossed the Adriatic and, after blockading Pompey near the Illyrian town of Dyrrhachium for nearly four months, behind an immense containing works, routed him at Pharsalus in Thessaly. Pompey fled to Alexandria; Caesar followed, and when he found that King Ptolemy had murdered Pompey and was planning to murder him as well, declared war. This proved to be a most difficult campaign, fought during winter within the city walls of a well-equipped and cunning enemy; but though caught off his guard, and without military supplies of any kind, Caesar was victorious. He then handed over the government of Egypt to Queen Cleopatra and her younger brother; fearing that, if made a Roman province, it might one day be held against his fellow-countrymen by some independent-minded governor-general. From Alexandria he proceeded to Syria, and from Syria to Pontus, news having come that Pharnaces, son of the famous Mithridates, had taken advantage of the confused situation and already gained several successes. Five days after his arrival, and four hours after catching sight of Pharnaces, Caesar won a crushing victory at Zela; and commented drily on Pompey’s good fortune in having built up his reputation for generalship by victories over such poor stuff as this. Then he beat Scipio and King Juba at Thapsus in North Africa, where the remnants of the Pompeian party were being reorganized; and Pompey’s two sons at Munda in Spain.
36. Throughout the Civil War Caesar was never defeated himself; but, of his generals, Gaius Curio was killed fighting against King Juba; Gaius Antonius was captured off Illyricum; Publius Dolabella lost another fleet off Illyricum; and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus had his army destroyed in Pontus. Yet, though invariably successful, he twice came close to disaster: at Dyrrhachium, where Pompey broke his blockade and forced him to retreat—Caesar remarked when Pompey failed to pursue him: ‘He does not know how to win wars’—and in the final battle at Munda, where all seemed lost and he even considered suicide.
37. After defeating Scipio, Caesar celebrated four triumphs in one month with a few days’ interval between them; and, after defeating young Pompey, a fifth. These triumphs were the Gallic—the first and most magnificent—the Alexandrian, the Pontic, the African, and lastly the Spanish. Each differed completely from the others in its presentation.
As Caesar rode through the Velabrum on the day of his Gallic triumph, the axle of his triumphal chariot broke, and he nearly took a toss; but afterwards ascended to the Capitol between two lines of elephants, forty in all, which acted as his torch-bearers. In the Pontic triumph one of the decorated wagons, instead of a stage-set representing scenes from the war, like the rest, carried a simple three-word inscription:
CAME, SAW, CONQUERED!
This referred to the speed with which the war had been won.
38. Every infantryman of Caesar’s veteran legions earned a war-gratuity of 240 gold pieces, in addition to the twenty paid at the outbreak of hostilities, and a farm. These farms could not be grouped together without evicting former owners, but were scattered all over the countryside. Every member of the commons received ten pecks of grain and ten pounds of oil as a bounty, besides the three gold pieces which Caesar had promised at first and now raised to five, by way of interest on the four years’ delay in payment. He added a popular banquet and a distribution of meat; also a dinner to celebrate his victory at Munda, but decided that this had not been splendid enough and, five days later, served a second more succulent one.
39. His public shows were of great variety. They included a gladiatorial contest, stage-plays for every quarter of Rome performed in several languages, chariot-races in the Circus, athletic competitions, a
nd a mock naval battle. At the gladiatorial contest in the Forum, a man named Furius Leptinus, of patrician family, fought Quintus Calpenus, a barrister and former senator, to the death. The sons of petty kings from Asia and Bithynia danced the Pyrrhic sword dance.
One of the plays was written and acted by Decimus Laberius, a Roman knight, who forfeited his rank by so doing; but after the performance he was given five thousand gold pieces and had his gold ring, the badge of equestrian rank, restored to him—so that he could walk straight from stage to orchestra, where fourteen rows of seats were reserved for his Order. A broad ditch had been dug around the race-course, now extended at either end of the Circus, and the contestants were young noblemen who drove four-horse and two-horse chariots or rode pairs of horses, jumping from back to back. The so-called Troy Game, a sham fight supposedly introduced by Aeneas, was performed by two troops of boys, one younger than the other.
Wild-beast hunts took place five days running, and the entertainment ended with a battle between two armies, each consisting of 500 infantry, twenty elephants, and thirty cavalry. To let the camps be pitched facing each other, Caesar removed the central barrier of the Circus, around which the chariots ran. Athletic contests were held in a temporary stadium on the Campus Martius, and lasted for three days.
The naval battle was fought on an artificial lake dug in the Lesser Codeta, between Tyrian and Egyptian ships, with two, three, or four banks of oars, and heavily manned. Such huge numbers of visitors flocked to these shows from all directions that many of them had to sleep in tents pitched along the streets or roads, or on roof tops; and often the pressure of the crowd crushed people to death. The victims included two senators.
40. Caesar next turned his attention to domestic reforms. First he reorganized the Calendar which the Pontiffs had allowed to fall into such disorder, by intercalating days or months as it suited them, that the harvest and vintage festivals no longer corresponded with the appropriate seasons. He linked the year to the course of the sun by lengthening it from 355 days to 365, abolishing the short extra month intercalated after every second February, and adding an entire day every fourth year. But to make the next first of January fall at the right season, he drew out this particular year9 by two extra months, inserted between November and December, so that it consisted of fifteen, including the intercalary one inserted after February in the old style.
41. He brought the Senate up to strength by creating new patricians, and increased the yearly quota of praetors, aediles, and quaestors, as well as of minor officials; reinstating those degraded by the Censors or condemned for corruption by a jury. Also, he arranged with the commons that, apart from the Consul, half the magistrates should be popularly elected and half nominated by himself. Allowing even the sons of proscribed men to stand, he circulated brief directions to the voters. For instance: ‘Caesar the Dictator to such-and-such a tribe of voters: I recommend So-and-so to you for office.’ He limited jury service to knights and senators, disqualifying the Treasury tribunes—these were commoners who collected the tribute and paid the army.
Caesar changed the old method of registering voters: he made the City landlords help him to complete the list, street by street, and reduced from 320,000 to 150,000 the number of householders who might draw free grain. To do away with the nuisance of having to summon everyone for enrolment periodically, he made the praetors keep their register up to date by replacing the names of dead men with those of others not yet listed.
42. Since the population of Rome had been considerably diminished by the transfer of 80,000 men to overseas colonies, he forbade any citizen between the ages of twenty and forty to absent himself from Italy for more than three years in succession. Nor might any senator’s son travel abroad unless as a member of some magistrate’s household or staff; and at least a third of the cattlemen employed by graziers had to be free-born. Caesar also granted the citizenship to all medical practitioners and professors of liberal arts resident in Rome, thus inducing them to remain and tempting others to follow suit.
He disappointed popular agitators by cancelling no debts, but in the end decreed that every debtor should have his property assessed according to pre-war valuation and, after deducting the interest already paid directly, or by way of a banker’s guarantee, should satisfy his creditors with whatever sum that might represent. Since prices had risen steeply, this left debtors with perhaps a fourth part of their property. Caesar dissolved all workers’ guilds except the ancient ones, and increased the penalties for crime; and since wealthy men had less compunction about committing major offences, because the worst that could happen to them was a sentence of exile, he punished murderers of fellow-citizens (as Cicero records) by the seizure of either their entire property, or half of it.
43. In his administration of justice he was both conscientious and severe, and went so far as to degrade senators found guilty of extortion. Once, when an ex-praetor married a woman on the day after her divorce from another man, he annulled the union, although adultery between them was not suspected.
He imposed a tariff on foreign manufactures; forbade the use, except on stated occasions, of litters, and the wearing of either scarlet robes or pearls by those below a certain rank and age. To implement his laws against luxury he placed inspectors in different parts of the market to seize delicacies offered for sale in violation of his orders; sometimes he even sent lictors and guards into dining-rooms to remove illegal dishes, already served, which his watchmen had failed to intercept.
44. Caesar continually undertook great new works for the embellishment of the City, or for the Empire’s protection and enlargement. His first projects were a temple of Mars, the biggest in the world, to build which he would have had to fill up and pave the lake where the naval sham-fight had been staged; and an enormous theatre sloping down from the Tarpeian Rock on the Capitoline Hill.
Another task he set himself was the reduction of the Civil Code to manageable proportions, by selecting from the unwieldy mass of statutes only the most essential, and publishing them in a few volumes. Still another was to provide public libraries, by commissioning Marcus Varro to collect and classify Greek and Latin books on a comprehensive scale. His engineering schemes included the draining of the Pomptine Marshes and of Lake Fucinus; also a highway running from the Adriatic across the Apennines to the Tiber; and a canal to be cut through the Isthmus of Corinth. In the military field he planned an expulsion of the Dacians from Pontus and Thrace, which they had recently occupied, and then an attack on Parthia by way of Lesser Armenia; but decided not to risk a pitched battle until he had familiarized himself with Parthian tactics.
All these schemes were cancelled by his assassination. Before describing that, I should perhaps give a brief description of his appearance, personal habits, dress, character, and conduct in peace and war.
45. Caesar is said to have been tall, fair, and well-built, with a rather broad face and keen, dark-brown eyes. His health was sound, apart from sudden comas and a tendency to nightmares which troubled him towards the end of his life; but he twice had epileptic fits while on campaign. He was something of a dandy, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved; and has been accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilated with tweezers. His baldness was a disfigurement which his enemies harped upon, much to his exasperation; but he used to comb the thin strands of hair forward from his poll, and of all the honours voted him by the Senate and People, none pleased him so much as the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath on all occasions—he constantly took advantage of it.
His dress was, it seems, unusual: he had added wrist-length sleeves with fringes to his purple-striped senatorial tunic, and the belt which he wore over it was never tightly fastened—hence Sulla’s warning to the aristocratic party: ‘Beware of that boy with the loose clothes!’
46. Caesar’s first home was a modest house in the Subura quarter, but later, as Chief Pontiff, he used the official residence on the Sacred Way. Contemporary literature contai
ns frequent references to his fondness for luxurious living. Having built a country mansion at Nervi from the foundations up, one story goes, he found so many features in it to dislike that, although poor at the time and heavily in debt, he tore the whole place down. It is also recorded that he carried tessellated and mosaic pavements with him on his campaigns.
47. Fresh-water pearls10 seem to have been the lure that prompted his invasion of Britain; he would sometimes weigh them in the palm of his hand to judge their value, and was also a keen collector of gems, carvings, statues, and Old Masters. So high were the prices he paid for slaves of good character and attainments that he became ashamed of his extravagance and would not allow the sums to be entered in his accounts.
48. I find also that, while stationed abroad, he always had dinner served in two separate rooms: one for his officers and Greek friends, the other for Roman citizens and the more important provincials. He paid such strict attention to his domestic economy, however small the detail, that he once put his baker in irons for giving him a different sort of bread from that served to his guests; and executed a favourite freedman for committing adultery with a knight’s wife, although no complaint had been lodged by the husband.
49. The only specific charge of unnatural practices ever brought against him was that he had been King Nicomedes’s catamite—always a dark stain on his reputation and frequently quoted by his enemies. Licinius Calvus published the notorious verses:
The riches of Bithynia’s King
Who Caesar on his couch abused.
Dolabella called him ‘the Queen’s rival and inner partner of the royal bed’, and Curio the Elder: ‘Nicomedes’s Bithynian brothel’.
Bibulus, Caesar’s colleague in the consulship, described him in an edict as ‘the Queen of Bithynia… who once wanted to sleep with a monarch, but now wants to be one’. And Marcus Brutus recorded that, about the same time, one Octavius, a scatterbrained creature who would say the first thing that came into his head, walked into a packed assembly where he saluted Pompey as ‘King’ and Caesar as ‘Queen’. These can be discounted as mere insults, but Gaius Memmius directly charges Caesar with having joined a group of Nicomedes’s debauched young friends at a banquet, where he acted as the royal cup-bearer; and adds that certain Roman merchants, whose names he supplies, were present as guests. Cicero, too, not only wrote in several letters:
The Twelve Caesars Page 3