Tradition matters to people; the modern world is no different than the ancient one in this regard. But being a man or woman apart has a distinct advantage in building a leadership base. Defying convention does not mean being disrespectful to tradition; it means not being subservient to it past the point of reason. Too often, leaders fail to make this distinction.
Like so many of us, leaders in Caesar’s time were often faced with the choice of doing what they thought was right or going with the flow. By continually defying convention, Caesar proved himself to be a man with conviction, an innovative thinker, and a fighter for the people. In the next story, Caesar shows how doing what you believe to be right can further your reputation as a principled leader, as the kind of leader that others want to follow.
He had not been accused of treason outright, but rumors had begun to swirl that he had been involved in a conspiracy against the state. Such whispers could take on a life of their own and turn deadly in ancient Rome. Treason was taken seriously; to be convicted meant death. For some, simply to be accused was enough to separate a head from its shoulders.
It was 63 BC. Gossip and innuendo worked much the same then as they do now. Petty people engaged in office politics, whispering lies or half-truths that spread like wild-fire, getting more shocking with each iteration. The haughty senatorial class reveled in salacious gossip, especially when the target was an outsider like Caesar. There were plenty of people who wanted the rumors to be true, people who would delight in the fall from grace of this ambitious up-and-comer. Then, as now, petty rivals were on the hunt for any ammunition to use against the object of their enmity.
The Senate had been called into emergency session to discuss the Catiline conspiracy that had been brought to light a few weeks earlier. The conspiracy was the result of the slow-building, seething frustration of Catiline, a senator with more ambition than talent. Despite his unassailable patrician credentials, he had found the headwinds stronger at each successive turn of his career. He ran for the consulship and failed twice, a big humiliation in an age when one’s honor and prestige were worn on one’s sleeve. Catiline determined that only armed revolution would sweep him into power, and so he got to work on a harebrained scheme to overthrow the Roman order and install himself at the top.
The Catiline conspiracy was a sinister plot to murder many prominent people, including the consul Cicero. A renowned orator, Cicero was a contradiction. Despite coming from a humble, provincial background, he quickly rose through the ranks as a defender of conservative prerogative. Touchy about his true place among the senators with ancient familial pedigrees, Cicero, upon hearing about the threat to his life, took the opportunity to cement his credentials by rallying to the defense of the Republic. In a special meeting of the Senate with Catiline in attendance, Cicero revealed the details of the plot to the shocked audience.
One by one, the horrified senators got up and walked away from Catiline, voting with their feet. As Cicero’s florid speech progressed, the no-man’s-land around the now-disgraced Catiline grew. By the time he was finished, Catiline was left sitting alone with the rest of the Senate standing together on the other side of the meeting house. Catiline was isolated, physically and politically. It didn’t take him long to flee the city.
Cicero was lauded as the savior of his country for thwarting the devious scheme, and a vengeful Senate set its will to rooting out any other conspirators. In a matter of weeks, they rounded up a handful of suspected associates. But many in the Senate believed that the conspiracy went even deeper, and rumors circulated about who else might have been plotting revolution. Many cast sideways glances at Caesar. Catiline had run for consul on a populist platform, and Caesar was a populist who was aligned with some of the political reforms that Catiline advocated.
The Senate gathered to debate the fate of the accused, and as praetor-elect for the following year, Caesar was one of the many scheduled to speak. Given the rumors surrounding him, how Caesar acted in these debates would be very closely scrutinized. A few notables spoke before Caesar about how to deal with the conspirators. They were unanimous and emphatic in their cry for immediate and merciless death to all.
Rather than adopt the bloodlust of the senators who spoke before him and cement the fate of the hapless conspirators, Caesar spoke out emphatically against execution. He passionately argued in favor of clemency, stating that instead of death, they should be banished to different corners of the empire. They had no more power; they posed no further threat. Caesar was a gifted orator, and his arguments began to weaken the resolve of some in the Senate.
Caesar’s speech demonstrated his essential humanity. He could be as ruthless as the next Roman, but he had to be pushed a lot further to take such drastic action. By arguing for banishment, he was arguing for the exercise of power over force. For those paying attention to the happenings in the Senate, Caesar’s actions also helped demonstrate that he was a senator, but not of the Senate. He was his own man, an independent freethinker who would come to your defense if it was the right thing to do. Caesar stood apart.
Caesar knew what people would say. They would suggest that he had some association with the conspirators and was trying to save them out of a sense of obligation. It didn’t matter. He spoke out against the loss of life because it was the right thing to do, even though it would kick the rumor mill into overdrive.
At the conclusion of Caesar’s speech, Cicero and Caesar’s inveterate foe Cato spoke again. They stiffened the backbone of the Senate and reaffirmed the case for death. The compliant Senate followed their lead, and the conspirators were quickly executed. No trial, no jury, just death. They were strangled by a senatorial executioner that very same day.
Caesar’s actions remind us that we are often faced with the choice of doing what we think is right or going with the flow. In the case of the Catiline conspiracy, Caesar genuinely believed that the loss of life, even of those accused of plotting the murder of others, was unnecessary. He spoke up, accepting the fact that people would question his motives for doing so. As Caesar sought to build his power base, he knew the importance of being seen as a person of conviction, someone who could be counted on to be genuine and authentic. He understood that his argument for clemency was as much about gaining future acceptance for his words and actions as it was about saving the lives of the conspirators.
Sometimes following the crowd in the present can give someone reason to doubt you in the future. As unorthodox as Caesar’s argument was in the Senate, no one could doubt that it was his own. By defying convention, he helped solidify his reputation as a leader whom the people could trust to speak out against senatorial force. He did what he thought was right, and he turned the situation to his advantage. He showed that he was the kind of leader that the Roman people wanted to follow.
It wasn’t just in senatorial proceedings that Caesar established himself as a different kind of patrician. Just when it would seem that this type of behavior could put his life in danger, it ended up helping augment his position and growing his personal legend, as the next story very early on in Caesar’s life shows.
It was 75 BC, and young Caesar wasn’t behaving the way most captives did. The fierce pirates of the ancient Mediterranean were used to hostages cowering below deck, not calling them “ignorant savages” and demanding quiet so that they could read in peace (and getting away with it). But if Caesar wasn’t a typical leader, then he also wasn’t a typical hostage.
While still a teenager, Caesar was married off to a young woman whose family had wealth and prestige but deadly political enemies. One of those enemies, Sulla, a ruthless dictator who had been decorating the Forum with the heads of his adversaries, ordered Caesar to divorce his wife in 81 BC. Ever defiant, the young leader refused. Rather than add his head to Sulla’s macabre décor, Caesar went on the run, eventually heading east for some well-timed overseas military adventures, winning honors and glory for his bravery.
After Sulla’s death in 78 BC, Caesar came back to Rome and took to prosecuting members of the aristocracy for their corrupt fleecing of the poor provincials in Rome’s overseas holdings. That the young aristocrat Caesar took up the cause of the poor and dispossessed, defying class conventions and crusading against his own class, was noble indeed. As suspected, the juries acquitted their own, and Caesar realized that he would need more than a just cause to win such cases. His advocacy began to make enough people angry that he decided to head east once again for rhetorical training. He would hone his craft under the masters. Caesar chose the very best. In particular, he sought the same teacher who had helped the great orator and statesman Cicero achieve such lofty heights. After extensive schooling, Caesar headed back to Rome and in the process was captured by pirates off the coast of Greece, stumbling into a dire threat to his life.
Caesar’s captors were delighted to learn of his elite patrician rank and set his ransom at twenty talents of silver (roughly equivalent to seventy pounds today). Caesar was indignant—not at being captured and held hostage, but because he believed that a man of his rank and pedigree should command a much higher ransom. Upon his insistence, his amused captors more than doubled their demands, raising the ransom from twenty to fifty talents of silver. He wanted to be a big deal, and he needed proof that he was seen as such.
As he waited for his family to raise the funds for his release, Caesar settled in to life at sea. But rather than quietly wait in intimidated silence below deck, Caesar readily took to the life of a pirate. He helped on deck and engaged in wrestling matches with his captors. He read speeches to them, and when they didn’t like his work, he called them ignorant savages. When he was trying to read below deck and their raucous noise grew to be a distraction, he upbraided them and demanded quiet. He made himself one of them: loud, full of demands, and doing just as he pleased. The pirates took great amusement in this young Roman noble who clearly thought highly of himself. They grew to like him tremendously. They even chortled at Caesar’s joking that when he was freed, he would come back and crucify them all.
After a little more than a month at sea, Caesar’s family delivered his ransom. He bade his captors good-bye, and one can only imagine that they were disappointed to see him go. Once released, however, Caesar demonstrated that his good-natured joking with the pirates had been deadly serious. He set to work raising a small military force on his own authority.
Caesar found the pirates at their base, and then attacked and captured them. True to his word, he had the pirates crucified, but in what he considered an act of mercy, he had their throats slit to prevent too much suffering. It is the stuff of legend.
Caesar cultivated a view of himself as someone who did things differently, and this created opportunity for him. When kidnapped by pirates, acting differently than your run-of-the-mill hostage created the opportunity for him to enjoy greater freedom of thought and action. It also created the conditions by which he could exact his revenge and restore the stain on his honor. And it certainly didn’t hurt Caesar’s reputation to have been part of such a larger-than-life adventure!
Any casual student of history can look at Caesar’s career and see that it is full of examples of the use of force. In truth, Caesar was no stranger to the use of arms. However, it is important to note how and when he drew the distinction between his use of power and use of force.
When being held captive, Caesar used his power to form friendships with the pirates. His cultivated identity as a man of the people gave him license to move and act more freely than other hostages. But once he was released, Caesar turned to lethal force to grow his reputation.
Caesar had no interest in being a leader to the pirates. He saw them as enemies outside the scope of his leadership. These were the groups that were subject to his ruthless hand, his use of force. Alternatively, he led those within his ranks using his power. In many ways, Caesar blurred the lines more than his contemporaries, granting favors and amnesty to people who should have been his avowed enemies. But even though he was more liberal in his distinctions between “us” and “them,” he kept a firm grip on those he considered to be on his team and acted accordingly. Much in the same way, modern leaders must use the boundaries of their organizations as guideposts in choosing between the use of power and the use of force.
Innovation in leadership is as much about framing the problem as it is about seeking solutions and novel approaches. Once we have an image of an idea, concept, or process, it is easy to get trapped in seeing things only in a manner that fits that definition. To give something a name is to be complacent in our understanding of it. Caesar’s innovative leadership never fell into this trap. He distilled the issue at hand to its essence in order to see past conventions and definitions. He kept his mind nimble.
Not all of the examples of Caesar’s defiance of convention were as colorful as his run-in with the pirates. As entertaining and demonstrative as it was of his going against the grain, it wasn’t a supreme test of his leadership. In one such test, about twenty years down the road, Caesar’s ability to defy convention and think on his feet turned a potential deadly trap into a decisive advantage.
It was 58 BC. Caesar didn’t trust his enemy and his enemy didn’t trust him. Many times had a commander come to the peace table only to discover that his adversary had lured him into a trap, violating the terms of the parley and ruthlessly dispatching the conned enemy. This scenario was on the minds of both Caesar and his foe, the Germanic commander Ariovistus.
To help each feel secure, they agreed by way of messenger to meet on a hillock in between their respective camps. Only the two commanders and their mounted bodyguards would be present; this would keep each mobile, able to flee quickly in the event of danger. However, this scenario presented Caesar with a problem: He did not have any Roman mounted soldiers in Gaul at his disposal. Caesar’s only real cavalry were Gallic allies, and their loyalties were not assured.
If Caesar went at the appointed hour to meet Ariovistus and his Gallic cavalry abandoned him, then he would be alone and at the will of his enemy. If he didn’t show up at the peace talk, it would be tough to play the role of the aggrieved party. Besides, honor demanded that Caesar confront his enemy face-to-face. Without trusted cavalry, but needing to maintain his dignity, what was Caesar to do?
Caesar was a master of improvisation. He realized that he didn’t need cavalry so much as he needed trusted troops to spend a few minutes on horseback. It didn’t matter if these troops were trained in cavalry tactics; what mattered was that Caesar could depend on their loyalty and that he could present a show of force to Ariovistus.
Tapping into his vast reserves of cleverness, Caesar turned to his most trusted unit, the Tenth Legion. He trusted this unit above all others, and they in turn would acknowledge no other commander. Despite their decidedly terrestrial training, Caesar asked the Tenth to mount horses and act the part of cavalry. They happily obliged their commander, and Caesar rode out to his conference. The two sides met, and discussions took place as the commanders sat atop their mounts. Each leader presented his case, but neither saw much merit in what the other had to say. The war was to continue.
It is entirely plausible that many of these soldiers had never even ridden a horse before. And yet, here they were, sitting astride horses arranged for the conference, accompanying their commander to negotiations with a hostile enemy, far away from the safety of their camp. They must have felt like the proverbial fish out of water.
In striking upon this simple solution, Caesar defied orthodoxy. He surveyed the situation and realized that riding experience was not necessary to accomplish the goal that mounted cavalry would have otherwise provided. What he needed most of all was a safety net, and his best and most trusted legion fit the bill. He distilled the situation to its essentials and came up with a novel solution to a quirky but important problem.
For the rest of their history, the unit took on the name Mounted Tenth, carrying forward those few brief moments into their very identity. A Roman legion was ferociously proud and protective of its identity. The fact that they took the name Mounted Tenth shows clearly how important it was for them to be associated with novelty and innovation. They took great pride in being a part of something so far removed from the typical experience of a Roman soldier. Furthermore, honored to be associated with the cleverness of their commander, the Mounted Tenth deepened their loyalty to him. As his career unfolded and the stakes grew larger, the power that this unit gave to Caesar paid massive dividends.
People like to be a part of new and important solutions. A team’s morale can surge on the front lines of innovative projects. Challenging conventions, being creative, disrupting the norm—these were just as important to a team’s identity then as they are now.
When life is on the line, literally or figuratively, knowing that a leader has invested you with their trust increases your sense of loyalty and obligation toward them. In short, the leader’s power grows for having given the trust. This follows a very clear pattern of leadership from Caesar’s career that warrants consideration. Time and time again, Caesar found ways to show his organization that he trusted them—as individuals, as units, and as whole armies—and in doing so grew his power.
Power is not binary. Rather, it is a continuum, and the degree of power that someone holds can wax and wane over time. Caesar sought to maintain and increase his power by nurturing, investing in, and growing the connections that he had with people and never took their affections for granted. Caesar is the archetype of the ambitious climber who never lost sight of where he and his power came from.
Part of becoming a dynamic leader is standing out from the rest and getting noticed. But it is not enough to be different for its own sake. Standing out is important, but so is authenticity. Caesar challenged the assumptions that he genuinely felt needed to be challenged. He did not try to take on every single aspect of Roman society, just as a modern leader can’t take on every element of a company’s culture. We, like Caesar, need to pick our battles.
To stand out as a leader, find the root cause of why things are the way they are and then act accordingly. The first step is to identify the established orthodoxy. Ask yourself: What assumptions are we taking for granted? By mapping out the assumptions that people make, a leader can find the subcurrents running through an organization and find the conventions that need to be defied. Focusing on outdated assumptions that drag down performance or hinder breakthrough ideas is a great place to start.