6
ELECTED DICTATOR
By Bill Fawcett
Doing the wrong thing for the right reason.
One of the turning points in Roman history was the Roman Senate’s vote to make Julius Caesar dictator for ten years, with no term limits. Despite the horrible legacy of earlier rulers, there were those in Rome who actually wanted the famous general to become the “king” of the Roman Empire. After the Romans managed to throw out the Tarquin kings, who, by comparison, made Stalin’s paranoid rule look beneficent, the title had been banned permanently. Dictator was a position in Rome that was supposed to be temporary, and such a leader was normally appointed only if the empire or the city was threatened. He remained in office as long as the crisis lasted. Even then, under the republic, the reign of a dictator was limited to no more than two years, no matter what.
Still, if Rome had to make the mistake of picking a dictator, Gaius Julius Caesar was an excellent choice. He was popular, persuasive, and charismatic. This is shown by the simple fact that he got the Senate to basically vote itself into obsolescence. While Caesar’s father had been the proconsul of Gallia Narbonensis, this relatively small province on the south coast of modern France, including Marseille, had become a booming trading area and a constant target for Germanic raiders. The rest of modern France and Germany, the real Gaul, was still ruled by a number of tribes. It had been assumed that Julius, as the son of a not-too-wealthy patrician, would go into politics, rising slowly through the ranks until he, too, could rule one of the small provinces, if he was lucky.
After his father, Gaius Caesar, died when Julius was sixteen, Julius revealed himself to be a young man of unbridled ambition. He began by marrying into a much more politically powerful (and wealthier) family. Caesar then began establishing a power base that included a number of factions. Unfortunately for him, one of these was the remaining supporters of the disgraced Gaius Marius. Marius had led what was effectively a peasants’ revolt in Rome that nearly toppled the patrician class. Their reaction was to put Lucius Sulla in charge, and he went after all of Marius’s supporters and their allies. This included young Julius Caesar, who found it expedient to join the army and leave Rome rather hurriedly.
With his connections and wealth, Julius Caesar started near the top in the legions. He began as the military assistant to a provincial governor. Then he served in combat in Cilicia and was honored for his courage. Caesar returned to Italy and may have aided in the campaigns that annihilated Spartacus’s slave revolt. But finding Rome still controlled by Sulla (and therefore still dangerous), Caesar avoided politics, for the most part, and spent some time concentrating on rhetoric—the art of swaying others by verbal argument. He must have been well trained and had some talent, because Cicero himself later publicly observed, “Do you know any man who, even if he has concentrated on the art of oratory to the exclusion of all else, can speak better than Caesar?”
Deciding to spend part of the winter in the warmer Rhodes, Caesar sailed from Italy. He never arrived. His ship was captured by pirates and he was held for several months, until a substantial ransom was paid. Caesar himself later wrote about how, during his captivity, he constantly made a point to warn his captors that he would return and crucify them all—a warning he delivered with a smile. The Roman was still a young man. The pirates took it as a joke. When he was freed, he quickly raised a small fleet, returned to the place where he’d been imprisoned, and scoured the coastline for the men responsible, crucifying each and every one of them. By the time he was done, not only had he eliminated the pirates who had held him, but he had also substantially reduced piracy throughout the Mediterranean. This success led him to be appointed to organize and command the army and fleet that were needed to defend the coast of what is today Turkey. This, too, the young noble accomplished, thus enhancing his reputation.
Finally, Sulla’s faction lost power and it was safe for Caesar to return to the Seven Hills of Rome. There his recent successes and connections got him appointed to the high position of quaestor in Spain. Most notable, when the twenty-six-year-old first arrived in Spain, were the words he spoke while standing before a statue of Alexander the Great. Caesar was said to have broken into tears when he compared what little he had achieved to the accomplishments of Alexander—who, by age thirty, had made himself emperor of the known world. Returning to Rome, Julius Caesar then bribed and cajoled himself into a series of higher and higher positions. He was elected aedile, which put him in charge of public buildings and festivals. He spent a large fortune throwing lavish festivals, using borrowed money, and even did a decent job of repairing many buildings. All this brought Caesar to the attention of those to whom his rise was a threat. So he wisely then took the job of pontifex maximus, which was the head priest for the city of Rome. This gave him prestige—and also protected him from his many enemies and creditors.
When his term as pontifex ended, the forty-one-year-old patrician was still deeply in debt, and still a target. There had been trouble with the tribes in Spain. So Julius Caesar pushed the Senate to send him back to that territory as the praetor, a military commander. He was expected to fail in that role, but instead showed real talent as a military leader. This shocked not only his opponents, but Caesar himself. The wealth gained from the spoils of that campaign paid off all of Caesar’s debts, and his reputation was now so great that most of his enemies could only watch in frustration as he joined the ranks of the empire’s most important citizens. He formed a three-way partnership, a triumvirate, with the older, politically stronger general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and the richest man in Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus. They were both first consuls. Julius Caesar became (officially) one of two second consuls. The other second consul quickly decided his best and healthiest move was to spend most of his time home with his family, leaving the administrative duties and power to Caesar alone. The triumvirate pushed through many reforms that had been resisted by the patricians in the Senate, most of which endeared them to the common men and the merchants. Caesar’s daughter married Pompey, cementing their alliance.
When it was decided that Rome finally needed to tame the fringes of Gaul far north of Italy and the greater Gaul beyond, Caesar was tasked with raising one of the largest armies in the empire’s history. Before that was completed, a barbarian tribe, the Helvetians, was pushed by other tribes into the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul. This was located in the north of Italy. Julius Caesar took what he had formed of his army so far and marched north. A few months later, he had decisively defeated the Helvetians and ended the threat. But within a few more months, two German tribes (the Swabians and Sueves) had invaded his father’s old province. He again led his still-growing army to meet this threat and was again decisively victorious.
With all these invasions, some of Rome’s neighbors saw an opportunity to attack—while Rome was distracted and her legions busy. One group, the Belgae, prepared to invade Roman territory. After being surprised by several Belgae ambushes, Caesar finally engaged the main tribe, the Nervii, whom he defeated in a very close-run battle. With their largest tribe broken, it was only a matter of weeks before the rest of the Belgae were suppressed.
Having conquered most of Gaul, Julius Caesar remained behind to govern the large and wealthy province. He defeated a German invasion and even marched into Germany. Then he returned to Britain, this time to stay, and again increased his power. The next year, 54 BCE, the Belgae again revolted and it took a year to ruthlessly end all resistance. Less than two years after that revolt, all Gaul rose against Rome under the charismatic Vercingetorix. All but three of the nearly three dozen tribes in Gaul joined this revolt. Always outnumbered, Caesar again prevailed. Eventually, he spent a total of nine years conquering and then stabilizing Gaul—and away from Rome.
By this point, things in the Roman Empire had changed. Crassus tried to prove himself as good a general as Pompey or Julius Caesar. His attempt ended in the Parthian desert, with the loss of two legions and his own life. When Julia, Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife, died in childbirth, the tenuous bond that held the two highly ambitious Romans together was gone. Competition between the followers of the two generals became fierce and occasionally violent. The city of Rome and the empire were also in constant social upheaval. Unemployment in Rome may have been as great as 50 percent. The leading citizens lowered produce prices by using slave labor on their large estates. The result was that they impoverished the small landholders. Then, by raising taxes on land, they forced them off their property, which they added to their own estates. These small farmers, who once had been the backbone of both the legions and the electorate, now streamed into Rome, unemployed and unhappy. Riots in Rome were becoming too common, and conflicts between political factions ever more violent.
With Caesar away, Pompey changed sides and joined the aristocratic party, the Optimate. Caesar remained the darling of the people, but was far away in Gaul. For a while, he stayed out of Roman politics and in Gaul. But he remained a threat. When Pompey tried to remove him from his governorship, he really left Julius Caesar no choice. A few months later, Caesar had gathered up his legions, crossed the Rubicon, and marched his army on Rome itself.
With the general population supporting Caesar, Pompey found himself outnumbered and unable to hold Rome. He fled and was later defeated in Greece. It took more battles in Egypt, northern Africa, and, a few years later, Spain, but the Optimate faction was destroyed and no one was left to oppose Julius Caesar’s supporters.
The republic had lasted for centuries, but many in the Senate agreed this was a time of crisis and a strong hand was needed. The once-jealous Senate was cowed by Caesar’s public and military support and so voted to make him, as it had made Pompey earlier, sole consul. Julius Caesar then personally appointed all the magistrates (judges) and controlled every aspect of the government. He also spent lavishly the loot gained in his battles to sustain the support of the people. In 44 BCE, the Senate made its final mistake. It voted to make Julius Caesar “dictator perpetuus”—dictator for life. He had the power of the long-detested Tarquin kings handed to him by the representatives of the people. The Senate, at the insistence of the masses living in Rome, chose to cede all power to an unquestionably capable and charismatic man. What they never considered was that, once that power was given, it could never be taken back. Caesar became, effectively, an unchecked dictator because his ten-year, rather than two-year, term meant no one really could countermand any of his decisions. Effectively Julius Caesar had become the very thing many Romans feared, a virtual king, accountable to no one. Caesar rapidly took advantage of this situation, using the position for his own gain. That one vote, which was made under pressure from the people and Caesar himself, ended the republic, and indirectly doomed the Roman Empire to extinction. One has to wonder what they expected would follow a lifetime of one-man rule.
A month later Julius Caesar was assassinated on that same Senate’s steps by senators who feared he would become what they themselves had voted to make him. If the senators had continued to show the courage they had shown by assassinating Caesar, and reasserted the power of the Senate, there might have been a counterbalance to later Caesars. But by showing that it could be cowed by the mob and a powerful general, the Senate destroyed its own power. Rather than a return to a republic after the assassins were defeated, Caesar’s adopted heir, Augustus, stepped into the role of “first consul”—effectively the same dictatorial position voted to his father. For a few decades under Augustus, Rome thrived. Then, with the Senate no longer able to remove incompetent or dishonest administrators, there was no check at all on the emperor, nothing to prevent the Caesar (or, later, his praetorian guards) from abusing his position. Some truly terrible and demonstrably insane men held the position. Rome lost its power, its ability to defend itself, and even split the empire. The last man declared emperor of Rome was not even a Roman, but a barbarian chief.
All this, perhaps, might also be a lesson even today: don’t let immediate concerns and problems allow citizens to turn into dictators and demagogues, who will destroy people’s freedom or way of life. If the Senate had somehow managed to resist the call to dictatorship, Caesar might have had his power limited. More importantly, there would have been a mechanism to elect the empire’s leaders for their competence, and not simply for their Julian blood. Emperors who were (literally) insane might not have ruled and helped the empire destroy itself from within. Rome might have managed to recuperate its greatness, and the Pax Romana, the fleeting decades of peace during Augustus’s reign, might have lasted for centuries. With barbarian tribes held at bay, there would have been no dark age, no era of church dominance and religious wars, or possibly even nationalism. The concept of an elected government might have not disappeared for over a thousand years. If instead of giving in to a soon-to-be assassinated Julius Caesar, the Senate could have found the courage it once had demonstrated and saved the republic, life today would be different and possibly much better.