As a busy head of state, Cleopatra surely spent much of her time in Rome in the traditional business of visiting kings and queens—that is, networking with important people. They gave each other gifts. Cleopatra brought bangles from Egypt while the Romans offered information and access.
Mark Antony came to see her. Perhaps that lit the spark that later flamed into one of history’s most passionate love affairs. Cicero came to see her, too, but love was not on his mind—far from it. He received a promise of some choice books from Egypt’s famous royal collection. But he never got them.
“I hate the Queen,” Cicero wrote in spring 44 B.C. He was probably not alone in that sentiment. Romans distrusted foreigners, especially Greeks and powerful women. Her royal presence only fueled the rumors that Caesar wanted to be a king himself or that Caesar planned to move permanently from Rome to Alexandria, the city of his mistress, or to Troy, the city of his mythic ancestor Aeneas. They also said he would take the wealth of the empire with him, drain Italy of its manpower, and leave the city of Rome in the hands of his friends.
CAESAR TURNS EAST
Caesar wanted to settle things in Rome first before embarking for Parthia. He said he was concerned about his laws being disregarded. But Caesar spent too little time in Rome for us to think that he was seriously worried about this. More likely he found politics in Rome frustrating and dull compared to his favorite arena—war. And perhaps Caesar thought a breathing space would make the Romans used to his rule. In fact, if the men he left behind fell short of his standards, people might even long for his return.
He was gathering a huge army, one so big that plans were in motion by fall 45 B.C. at the latest. It would be the largest force that Caesar ever commanded—16 legions, or 80,000 infantrymen if full strength and 10,000 cavalrymen. Six of the legions, along with auxiliary troops, were to winter near Apollonia (in modern Albania) at the western end of the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that ran eastward to the Hellespont. Caesar planned to leave Rome for his new war on March 18, 44 B.C.—the usual springtime start of the campaign season, and a year and a day after his victory at Munda.
At first glance, Caesar’s Parthian Expedition looks like a matter of national security, but on closer look, it had explosive consequences in domestic politics. The national security argument focused on defending Rome’s eastern frontier against a rival empire that had already invaded Roman Syria. Powerful Parthia stretched from eastern Iran to what is now eastern Turkey and Kurdistan. Parthia was the only border state that threatened Rome. Conquering Parthia would end the threat, yet the Romans split on party lines when it came to this war. The Populists were hawks and the Best Men were doves.
Crassus, with Caesar’s encouragement, had attacked Parthia in 53 B.C. and lost. For Caesar, Parthia represented another grand military campaign, this time, as in Gaul, against foreigners rather than against fellow Romans, as in the Civil War. Victory in Gaul had made Caesar Dictator in Perpetuity; the victory in Parthia might make him king. No one who still believed in the Republic could face the new war with ease.
But the war was probably popular with ambitious young Roman men, both in the elite and the masses, for reverse reasons. Fighting in Gaul had made tens of thousands of men rich and powerful. The Parthian War offered the ambitious a new opportunity for the same success. They probably jumped at the chance.
One young Roman had more to gain from the war than anyone else—Octavian. In December 45 B.C., Caesar sent him to Apollonia, a major Roman military base, to spend the winter with the legions and a military tutor. The tutor would teach him the art of war, while the legions would let Octavian practice his political skills. It was a way of introducing Caesar’s chosen heir to Caesar’s soldiers. To anyone watching closely, it was another reason to fear the Parthian War.
In the Republic, opposition to the war would be aired in full in the Senate. There would be a no-holds-barred debate, set-piece speeches, accusations, boasts, divisions, votes, and repercussions. But now the dictator decided.
Caesar claimed that he already had enough glory, but maybe not. Maybe he wanted to end his military career fighting foreigners and not in a civil war. Because he had encouraged Crassus to attack Parthia in 53 B.C., Caesar might feel that now his dignitas demanded that he avenge the loss. He might want to avenge others who also fell at the decisive Battle of Carrhae—Crassus’s son, Publius, who fought for Caesar as an officer in Gaul, as well as a unit of Gallic cavalrymen. He might want to eliminate the possibility of Parthian support for Pompey’s son Sextus, who was still at large.
On his way to Parthia Caesar would have to deal with the situation in the Roman province of Syria. An able and dangerous man, Quintus Caecilius Bassus took control there in 46 B.C. He was a supporter of Pompey and he promptly arranged for the murder of Caesar’s cousin Sextus Caesar. When Caesar sent out a new governor the next year, Bassus defeated him. Now Caesar decided to deal with Bassus himself.
COMEDY IN A VILLA
Everybody who was anybody in Rome had a country villa. Actually, they often had several. Cicero, for instance, owned three villas on the Bay of Naples as well as another in Tusculum, in the Alban Hills. The Roman elite loved both locales. Cicero had a lovely Neapolitan villa outside Puteoli (the modern city of Puzzuoli near Naples) on the high ground of the eastern shore of Lake Lucrinus with a view of the sea.
He complained about his rich and apathetic neighbor, Lucius Marcius Philippus, whose huge estate included fishponds—to Cicero, the symbol of idle, irresponsible wealth. A former consul, Philippus was a schemer who although related to Caesar managed to get through the Civil War without choosing sides. He had Caesar’s approval at the war’s end. Philippus was married to Caesar’s niece Atia and was stepfather to her son, Octavian. He was, in short, very well-connected.
It’s no surprise that on the night of December 18, 45 B.C., Philippus received a visit from Caesar. It was the second night of the Saturnalia, the Roman winter festival. The dictator was no easy guest because he did not travel light—two thousand soldiers as well as additional staff accompanied Caesar, as Cicero claimed. It’s possibly an exaggeration, but surely Caesar had a large number of men and the army crammed the estate. Cicero took note because Caesar was coming to his house the next day. To prepare, Cicero borrowed guards from a friend and pitched a camp for the soldiers. Cicero describes the whole thing in a breathless letter that he dashed off the same day to his friend Atticus, full of verbal shortcuts and Greek words, as if he couldn’t wait to get the story out but wanted to make it pretty.
Cicero was probably glad to have Caesar’s attention after a long year. In February, Cicero’s beloved daughter Tullia died after childbirth. Her son survived, as did his father, her former husband, Publius Cornelius Dolabella. The two had divorced a few months earlier after an unhappy marriage. Cicero was inconsolable, although many friends and colleagues sent their condolences. Caesar wrote from Hispania. A friend wrote archly that Tullia lived no longer than the Republic.
In May, Cicero drafted a letter to Caesar, sending it first to Balbus and Oppius. They asked for so many changes that Cicero thought better of it and gave up the idea. Now, he would actually speak to the great man.
On December 19, 44 B.C., after Caesar spent the morning working and taking a walk on the beach, he arrived at Cicero’s. There followed a bath, no doubt including a massage and scrape-down, then an anointment with a thin layer of perfumed oil. Finally, Caesar sat down to a sumptuous meal and ate freely. Caesar engaged in his usual act of vomiting after dinner. Like many other elite Romans, Caesar followed a regular course of emetics to keep his weight down while indulging in gastronomy.
It was all very jovial and very disciplined. Cicero felt satisfied that he made a good impression after a serious but not crushing effort. Caesar seemed pleased. Yet Cicero noticed that Caesar did not change expression when he heard bad news about a supporter. Behind Caesar’s smiling face was the man who had taken away Cicero’s political power and sway. And behind Cicero’
s flattery and gratitude was the man who resented it intensely.
There was no talk of anything serious, said Cicero, but plenty of talk about literature. How did the former consul feel about that? “Not a guest to whom you would say, ‘I’d love it if you’d come back to see me here.’ Once was enough.” After leaving Cicero’s villa, Caesar’s next stop was the estate of Dolabella. A demagogue who once tried to outbid Caesar for popular support, Dolabella had fought for Caesar in Africa and Hispania. The dictator planned to make use of him in the future. Now, Caesar’s entourage passed Dolabella’s villa nearby. While Caesar sat on his horse, the whole force of armed men lined up on either side of him in a salute to Dolabella.
Cicero ends his letter with this almost cinematic image of the reality of Roman power. The orator who once steered the fate of nations from the well of the Senate was reduced to reporting about a man on horseback. The question was, would anyone take the horseman down?
THE THREE LAST STRAWS
Titus Livius was a teenager at the time of the Ides of March. A citizen of Patavium (modern Padua) in northern Italy, he was swept up in the civil wars of the era. But Livy, as he is better known, stayed alive and wrote one of the greatest histories of ancient Rome. Large parts of it survive today, but unfortunately we have only a capsule sketch of the chapters on Julius Caesar—a summary written later during the Roman Empire. Still, the summary includes an important analysis. It shows the enormous public relations challenge facing Caesar as he was about to take on a new role. His whole life, Caesar was a master manipulator and stage director. But the role of Dictator in Perpetuity required a new script. No Roman “rewrite man,” no matter how skilled, could tell it without arousing resistance in some part of his audience.
The Senate granted Caesar the highest of honors, but they in turn generated a Roman politician’s bad dream—invidia, that is, ill will. As Livy states, three incidents in December 45 B.C., January 44 B.C., and February 44 B.C. tipped the balance against Caesar in a crucial segment of public opinion. They were, it seems, the last straws as far as some Romans were concerned.
The first incident probably took place in December 45 B.C. or possibly early 44 B.C. The Senate was voting honor after honor to the dictator. Some said that his enemies jumped on the bandwagon in order to embarrass Caesar with an overload of distinctions. Only a few senators voted no. Eventually the Senate decided to present the honors to Caesar formally. They marched as one to Caesar’s Forum. The consuls and praetors headed up the group followed by the other officials and the rest of the senators. Typically, attendance at a Senate meeting was low, but they might have numbered 100 to 200 of the 800–900 total Senate body. They were wearing their robes of office and no doubt made an impressive sight. A large crowd of ordinary people followed behind.
Caesar was sitting in front of the Temple of Mother Venus. Etiquette called for him to stand to greet the senators but he did not get up. Not only that, but he also made a joke about their news, saying his honors needed to be cut back rather than increased. By practically rejecting a gift and by refusing to recognize the senators’ rank, Caesar insulted them—and, some said, insulted the Roman people as well. Why a man as shrewd as Caesar did this is not clear. Perhaps he wanted to test the limits of his power.
The sources are full of commentary about this incident. There are explanations for why Caesar might have insulted the senators, but no one knows for certain whether the insult was intentional. Some say that it was the main and deadliest cause of ill will against Caesar, others merely that it gave the future conspirators one of their chief excuses. It allowed Caesar’s enemies to argue that he wanted to be addressed as a king.
The Romans often thought of their government as “the Senate and the Roman People,” SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS, the famous SPQR. In the incident in the Forum Julium, Caesar gave the strong impression that he no longer cared about the Senate. Next he seemed to turn on the Roman people.
The second incident pitted Caesar against two of the People’s Tribunes for 44 B.C., Gaius Epidius Marullus and Lucius Caesetius Flavus. One day in January 44 B.C., they found a diadem on the head of Caesar’s statue on the Speaker’s Platform in the Roman Forum. Some one—no one knew who—put it there. A diadem was the ancient Greek equivalent of a crown—far simpler, but still a symbol of royalty. It was an embroidered white silk ribbon that ended in a knot and two fringed strips. Marullus and Caesetius removed the diadem and said that, to his credit, Caesar had no need of such a thing. Caesar was angry even so. He suspected a put-up job—the tribunes arranged for the diadem to appear so that they could remove it and look good. Meanwhile, people would suspect him of wanting to be a king. Then, shortly afterward, on January 26, 44 B.C., matters escalated.
Caesar and his entourage were traveling the Appian Way after coming down the narrow path from the shrine of Jupiter Lattiaris on the Alban Mount (now Monte Cavo), which rises above the crystalline waters of Lake Albanus, southeast of Rome. There, they celebrated the Feriae Latinae, the old, annual festival of the Latin-speaking peoples. Normally it was held in the spring but the dictator had moved it to January because of his planned departure for the Parthian War. As they traveled north they passed the town of Bovillae, where Caesar’s family, the Julii, traced their roots to a time even before the founding of Rome.
The Senate granted Caesar the right to come back to Rome on horseback as if celebrating a minor triumph. So, people crowded around the mounted dictator as he reached the city’s Appian Gate. Suddenly, someone in the crowd greeted him as king—rex. Others took up the cry. Caesar answered: “I am Caesar, not Rex.” It was witty because, like the English word king, Rex was a family name as well as a royal title. Caesar’s ancestors, in fact, included “Kings”—the Marcius Rex family. Caesar’s wordplay suggested that someone merely had his name wrong. Cynics figured that the whole thing was staged, making it just another occasion for Caesar to show off his supposed republican sentiments.
The tribunes Marullus and Caesetius were not amused. They had the man who first cried “Rex” arrested. Now Caesar finally expressed his anger, accusing them of stirring up opposition to him. They in turn issued a declaration that they felt threatened in the exercise of their office. Caesar called a meeting of the Senate.
There were calls for the death penalty for the tribunes but he rejected that. He spoke more in sorrow than anger, he said. He wanted to grant his usual clemency but the issue, said Caesar, was his dignitas. So he insisted that the tribunes be removed from office and ousted from membership in the Senate. And so they were. As his parting shot, Caesar demanded that the tribune Caesetius’s father disinherit his son, but the man refused and Caesar dropped the issue.
The removal of the tribunes should have ended the matter but some people accused Caesar of blaming the messengers—they said that he should have been angry at those who called him Rex rather than at the tribunes. Shortly afterward, elections were held to choose new consuls and some people voted for Marullus and Caesetius. That suggests resentment as well at Caesar’s tendency to turn elections into rubber stamps.
The Roman plebs took their tribunes seriously as the champions of the common people. Caesar did too at one time. In 49 B.C., he said that one of the main reasons for crossing the Rubicon was to protect the People’s Tribunes from abuse by the Senate. Now he put himself on the wrong side of public opinion. The result was to generate invidia—ill will—on the grounds that Caesar wanted to be king. But Caesar actually indulged in the finery of Rome’s ancient kings such as high red boots and golden wreaths.
Which brings us to Livy’s third incident, the celebration of the Lupercalia festival on February 15, 44 B.C. The incident in Caesar’s Forum was unscripted, while the incident at the Appian Gate was either unscripted or veered out of control. The Lupercalia was definitely scripted, but who wrote the script and what it was are unclear.
The story is as follows. The Lupercalia was an annual festival associated with fertility. After a sacrifice, the priests, wearing
only loin cloths, ran around central Rome and touched bystanders, especially women, with goatskin straps. The festival was associated with Romulus, mythical founder of Rome, which no doubt appealed to Caesar or anyone who saw him as Rome’s second founder. Before February 15, the Senate set up a special association of priests in Caesar’s honor in connection with the festival. Mark Antony was the Chief Priest, so he led the runners.
The Lupercalia was an annual celebration, but in 44 B.C. it was a festival like no other. The jaw-dropping main event saw Caesar offered a diadem and ostentatiously refusing it. Caesar was sitting in the Roman Forum on the Speaker’s Platform, or Rostra.
The Speaker’s Platform itself was an impressive new monument that was part of Caesar’s redesign of Rome’s civic center. The old Speaker’s Platform stood for centuries before being demolished. Rostra means the Beaks, a name referring to the bronze-covered rams or “beaks” of captured warships with which it was decorated. The Speaker’s Platform was the main place for addressing the Roman people and, accordingly, the old Speaker’s Platform stood in a central position. When Caesar rebuilt Rome’s civic space, he moved the new Speaker’s Platform to a corner of the Roman Forum, a sign of what the dictator thought of public speakers.
Caesar’s Speaker’s Platform stood over 11 feet high and was more than 43 feet long. It had a curved front, probably extended on supports into a rectangular platform. Seven steps led up to the Speaker’s Platform from the back, while the front faced the open space of the Forum. The whole thing was lined with marble. Four statues decorated the platform. Caesar restored the statues of Sulla and Pompey, each on horseback, which the people had earlier destroyed. In addition, two statues of Caesar were erected, one with his famous oak wreath—the Medal of Honor or Civic Crown—and the other with a grass-and-wildflower wreath, an even higher military honor. One of the two statues was on horseback. In short, the only images on the Speaker’s Platform were two dictators and a domineering general and politician who was also Caesar’s son-in-law. There were no champions of liberty like Brutus’s ancestor, Lucius Junius Brutus.
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