The heroes of the Bible were stalwarts of an obscure sect operating on a narrow, almost tribal stage. Even King David was no more than a petty king who made little impact on secular history. Their fame rests essentially on the worldwide spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs and the literary magic of the book which recounts their deeds: a book which has been read by more people than any other.
With Alexander and Caesar we come to the two principal actors of antiquity who operated in the theater of the entire known world and became prototypes of the heroic character for the next thousand years. They carved out vast empires for themselves and hammered their names into the history of the earth. Each was brave, highly intelligent, almost horrifically self-assured, whose ambitions knew no bounds. Also selfish, cruel, without scruple and fundamentally unlovable. But they were admired, inevitably, more perhaps than any other two men of their kind. They were giantlike, almost superhuman in every respect. What are we, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with all our moral sensibilities, and our painfully acquired knowledge of human evil, to make of these two alarming fellow men?
Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the son of a tyrant. Philip II, king of Macedon (reigned 359–336 BC), was murdered at the age of forty-six, in circumstances which are still dark, and possibly with his son’s connivance. He was a man of formidable achievements. Greek power and glory had been built on the culture of the commercial city-state and a combination of idealism and realism. Philip replaced the city-state with the nation-state formed from his own people of Macedonia, and the polarity of ideals and realism with a brutal realpolitik. He was highly creative. He built up a formidable professional administration with the capacity to raise money in vast quantities and to stretch its communications almost indefinitely. He also created a permanent professional army, based on the infantry phalanx, which was without equal in its own age, but also containing a well-trained cavalry arm, a vast siege train operating equipment never before seen, and a highly efficient commissariat. This army could go anywhere and do anything, and without it Alexander could have achieved little. It was the most magnificent inheritance an aspiring world conqueror could possibly hope for, and he also inherited Philip’s ambition, having subdued all Greece, to seek revenge for the repeated invasions by Persia by launching a campaign of conquest in Asia.
If Alexander’s father was a tyrant of genius, his mother, Olympia of Epirus, was passionate, ambitious, unscrupulous and violent, as well as a mystic. Whether she murdered her husband is doubtful. But after her son died, she pursued her own career as a ruler in Epirus and Macedonia, killing those who stood in her way. She was eventually cornered and executed by the families of those she had slaughtered, since the Macedonian authorities were not prepared to put to death themselves the mother of Alexander the Great.
Alexander, therefore, had a sinister parentage. But he was well educated. Philip chose as his son’s tutor the philosopher-polymath Aristotle (384–322 BC), son of a doctor, who had worked under Plato and thus had links with Socrates himself. Alexander’s years under Aristotle form one of the most intriguing relationships of all antiquity. It astonishes me that none of the great dramatists or novelists—Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy—took it as a theme. Aristotle was bald, thin legged, had small eyes and a lisp—there is in the Vienna history of art museum a statue of him, perhaps done from life. He made up for his physical defects by fancy dressing and warned off criticisms by a talent for mockery. He was an awkward person to deal with, for, like many pedagogues, he could be sarcastic and severe. His sheer knowledge was encyclopedic, but he also created the basic vocabulary of philosophy, which we still use, and he had a genius for clarity, order, taxonomy and the logical progression from one subject to the next, in ascending order of difficulty. He was a born teacher, and it is hard to imagine an instructor more qualified to prepare a clever, ambitious young prince for world responsibilities.
It is a pity that Aristotle, who wrote so much about almost everything, did not leave us a few paragraphs about his most significant pupil—what he taught him, how well it was assimilated and how the prince struck him as a character. Such a portrait would be of enormous help in making up our minds about this world hero. For the truth is, we have virtually no firsthand information about him. This is not for want of any effort on Alexander’s own part. He prepared his own historiography with care. He took with him on his wars one of Aristotle’s cousins, Callisthenes, whose specific post was to write up the campaigns. Others close to him whom he encouraged to tell the story were one of his leading generals, Ptolemy, later ruler of Egypt; his boyhood friend Nearchus, later his admiral; another naval commander, Onesicritus; his architect Aristobolus; and Cleitarchus, also on the expedition. All of them did as they were expected, writing up the story from their leader’s viewpoint. Cleitarchus wrote within thirteen years of Alexander’s death, and Onesicritus was even speedier. But, without exception, none of these firsthand eyewitness accounts has survived. All were used by later authorities, some of whom were excellent historians, and whose texts have come down to us. But the earliest of them, Diodorus of Sicily, lived three centuries later. He effectively rewrote Cleitarchus’s account. Quintus Curtis, writing about 45 AD, four centuries later, had access to all the Greek eyewitness accounts, and part of his work has survived. Plutarch, working early in the second century AD, and Arrian, writing a generation later, also used the contemporary sources in works we can read. But of course it is not the same thing. Apart from a few fragments, no letters or documents from Alexander’s day are known. There are coins, for what they are worth. Alexander had a court portraitist, Apelles, and a sculptor, Lysippos. He even had an official engraver to picture him on jewels. But none of their original work survives. Modern writers have to engage in a complex and difficult “search for Alexander,” rather than settle down to a straightforward source-based biography.
It is likely that Alexander was handsome, blond, curly haired, slightly florid, above middle height, quick spoken and highly articulate. He rose early. His diet was spare. He learned to drink heavily at banquets or symposia, and unlike the Athenians, he did not water his wine but drank it neat, Macedonian style. But he was not a secret or solitary drinker. He was a superb rider and audacious hunter, especially of lion. He wrestled but otherwise did no athletics. But he was skilled with the sword and spear and expert at all forms of arms drill—his trade from boyhood. He loved bathing. He dressed to be seen: a lion helmet with a high crest, linen body armor and a big, flaunting cloak. He had various wives and was polite to women. His male friendships could be close. But he was not a passionate man. He slept alone.
He read Homer all his life and knew passages by heart. It was, to him, a Bible, a guide to heroic morality, a book of etiquette and a true adventure story. No one in his day (or for long after) had any doubt that what Homer described had actually happened. Alexander also believed he was descended from Herakles (or, as the Romans pronounced it, Hercules) the hero, sometimes treated as a god, whose “labors” made him the most popular of all Greek celebrities. This mythical ancestry—very real to Alexander—had an important impact on his life, inspiring in him a spirit of emulation in courage and daring, and a longing to perform comparable marvels. Herakles’ horrible death (he had himself burned in a pyre on Mount Oeta when he found the poison of Nessus taking hold of him) also gave him a certain fatalism, which made the risk of death unimportant to him. Aristotle certainly encouraged Alexander’s love of Homer but tried to get him to distinguish the element of truth in history from mythical accretion, and to learn from nature. On this point his pupil was enthusiastic. When Aristotle returned to Athens after the death of King Philip, he founded a school and began to collect manuscripts, the prototype for all the great libraries of antiquity. He also assembled maps and objects to illustrate his lectures, especially on plants and animals. Alexander gave him the large sum of eight hundred talents to start the museum, and thereafter he ordered officials of his growing empire to send to Aristotle any portable objects of interest and to describe the scientific novelties they came across. Alexander’s scientific and collecting instincts, inspired by Aristotle, were in turn to lead to Napoleon Bonaparte, in his 1799 expedition to Egypt, to take a one-hundred-strong team of scholars with him.
Alexander began to plan his war against Persia the moment he took over the throne, and he launched it immediately after his army and fleet were ready. One of the things Aristotle encouraged was the study of maps—he made a collection of the best available—and Alexander’s ability to read a map and follow it expertly both inspired his enormous territorial ambitions and helped to realize them (here too Napoleon, a superb map reader, resembled him). Alexander believed, wrongly, that the great eastern ocean (the Pacific) was not far from the Indus Plain, and this was why he thought he could conquer the whole world. But in general he knew very well what he was doing in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, and he did it promptly. He crossed the Hellespont in 334 BC, and thereafter, for the next eleven years until his death in 323 BC, he was continually fighting and traveling. His career can be divided into seven phases. First, he won the battle of Granicus, near the Hellespont, thus enabling him to free the Greek cities of what is now the Turkish coast. Second, he destroyed the Persian fleet bases on the coasts of Phoenicia and Egypt, thus depriving his enemy of a naval arm and giving the Greeks complete command of the sea. Third, he defeated the main Persian army at the battle of Issus, near what is now Alexandretta. Fourth, he captured the fortress of Tyre, thought to be impregnable. Fifth, rejecting the offers of the Persian king, Darius, to divide his empire, he invaded Babylonia and destroyed the remaining Persian forces at the battle of Gaugamela on the Mesopotamian plain. Thereafter Darius was no more than a fugitive, and when he shortly died, Alexander succeeded him as king, treating any subsequent Persian hostilities as mere rebellion. He took the main imperial centers of Babylon, Susa, Persepolis and Ecbatana. From the Caspian to the Hindu Kush he experienced little opposition. But the conquest of Bactria and Sogdiana (Turkestan) was difficult and took three years. Sixth, he led an expedition into India to the Lower Indus and won the Hydaspes battle. He overran the Punjab. But at this point his army refused to go any farther. The return to Mesopotamia was difficult and horrific, but successfully accomplished. The seventh and last phase, occupying the last years of his life, was taken up by his plans to merge the Greek and Persian elites into one super race of warrior-conquerors, and in planning the conquest of Arabia. He was about to set out when he died of a fever after a series of terrific drinking banquets.
This is an astonishing story, quite unprecedented and never again even equaled in the age of horsepower. Apart from his actual battles and sieges, Alexander traveled over twenty thousand miles, much of it on foot in difficult mountain and desert terrain. How did he do it? The most important factor, as always with successful statesmen and men of action, was sheer willpower. He had preternatural self-confidence and persistence, the feeling that it was right to do what he planned and that he could certainly do it. There is no substitute for will. Alexander almost certainly believed not so much in his divine mission as in his divine power. His descent from Herakles was one pointer. His mother had given him others. In Egypt he undertook a dangerous and difficult mission to see the oracle in the Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert, to ask if he had, or would have, divine status. This seems odd to us but was not strange to a Greek of the fourth century BC, with a credulous worldview in which the difference between a god and a hero was narrow. The answer was reassuring, and eventually Alexander began to assume divine honors and to believe that he was the son of a god—possibly Zeus himself—rather than Philip. His self-confidence was continually reinforcing itself, both by success and by intimations of immortality.
But there were ten important practical reasons why Alexander succeeded. First, though he inherited a superb military machine, he continually improved it (by intensive training) and, above all, by leading it. He always marched with the men. He invariably led from the front. In his set battles, he was in the first rank of the cavalry charges that usually proved decisive. In sieges, he was under fire all the time, helping to operate the giant machines. Second, his battle leadership had a record written on his body. He was wounded nine times, nearly always in sieges—four wounds were superficial but they left interesting scars; four were serious, one nearly fatal, and after it he was no longer nimble enough to fight on foot, sticking to horse or chariot to move about the battlefield. When the men grumbled or threatened mutiny, he told them: “I have been hit by a sword, lance, dart, arrow and a catapult missile.” He stripped and showed the scars. (Did this gesture pass into Persian folklore? When I interviewed the last shah of Iran, he took off his shirt and showed me the bullet marks left by an attempted assassination.)
Third, though Alexander fought on foot when not leading his cavalry, and led from the front, he seems to have been able to direct the battle and, if need be, change his tactics in midencounter. This was because Philip had created a good type of staff officer, which his son improved. Fourth, his battles were well planned thanks to his thoroughness in getting the best maps and his ability to read them. Fifth, he understood the technology of the day (thanks, again, probably to Aristotle), so his siege train was of the highest quality and was efficiently used. The ability to take a strongly defended city was crucial to his conquests. Sixth, he understood the importance of sea power and used it on a large scale and with skill. Whenever practical, his conquests were combined operations. Seventh, he grasped the vital role played by good, safe harbors. The pharaohs had ruled Egypt for three thousand years without building a proper oceangoing port on the Nile Delta. He set about constructing one as soon as he took over Egypt, and Alexandria still functions to this day. (He founded the great library there too, again inspired by Aristotle.) Eighth, he turned the whole expedition into a continual adventure by stressing comradeship. His cavalry were his “companions.” His infantry “loved the King and he loved them.” He usually knew them by name. Shakespeare picked up this point for his Henry V: “We few, we happy few,” and Churchill for his Battle of Britain fighter pilots. Ninth, there were more material rewards. The booty secured during the conquests was colossal, and Alexander ensured that the men got a fair share of it and, equally important, that it was sent home safely to their families in Greece. (This again was a practice successfully followed by Napoleon.) Finally, from first to last, Alexander thought, decided and above all, moved swiftly. He appreciated the importance of speed in war, and the terrifying surprises speed made possible. His enemies were nearly always stunned and shocked by his arrival. He invented the blitzkrieg.
I have been describing Alexander essentially as he was in his twenties: the field commander and reckless conqueror. This is the heroic Alexander. As he entered his thirties, a different personality began to emerge. In some ways it was a statesman. In others a tyrant. Let us look at each in turn. As his empire expanded Alexander devoted increasing attention to the problem of how it could be ruled permanently. He came to the conclusion that it could not be done by Greeks alone, a fortiori by Macedonians alone. There were not enough of them, and too few could adapt anyway. So he introduced a policy of what we would call aculturalization. Not only did he appoint Persians, Egyptians and Indians to senior posts (this policy did not succeed; most Persian governors, for instance, had to be removed), he also set up training programs. He began with the military, enlisting twenty thousand Persian youths as cadets in his army, to be taught Macedonian drill, weapons training, tactics and discipline. But he wanted to go further and have joint administrative training so that senior officials, whether Greek or native, would use common terms and methods, counting, language and procedures. He showed himself willing to adopt native dress, jargon and customs when appropriate. In the far distance lay a vision of a multilingual, multicultural empire, based on power sharing and acquiring the permanency which rule by consent alone (in his view) could bring.
Well: that is indeed a modern notion, is it not? The Greeks were not ready for it, and the Macedonians hated it. They wanted to rule as they had conquered: by the sword. Moreover, they saw in Alexander’s aculturalization policy not so much statesmanship and power sharing as a desire to seize a greater measure of power for himself, and power of a demeaning oriental kind. Greeks and Macedonians alike had a sense of freedom, and the dignity of man. Primitive and precarious it might be, but it was there. Persians and Egyptians did not possess it or even understand what it was. In Alexander’s army the notion of freedom had been accentuated by the idea of participation in a common adventure and the status of “companion.” Blending the cultures ran horribly counter to this military solidarity of brave men. And then, was not Alexander in danger of “going native” and being corrupted by power, of embracing the ways of oriental despots? Indeed he was. Given his successes, and the power victory thrust into his hands—power over countless millions—it would have been astonishing if he had not been corrupted.
The issue began to come to a head over Alexander’s experiments with the Persian-oriental custom of prostrating in front of the monarch, what the Greeks called contemptuously proskynesis. And in the background to this was the rumor that the king intended to have himself deified. The result was a series of dreadful incidents which show the world conqueror in a brutal and uncivilized light. The first occurred in 328 or 327, during one of the symposia of dinner and drinking parties the king held with senior commanders and cronies. Cleitus, or “the Black,” was a senior cavalry commander, in his late forties, who had saved Alexander’s life at the battle of Granicus. He was of the old school and did not like what he called Alexander’s “newfangled ideas.” He had a sarcastic turn too. When both were drunk on the neat wine the king insisted on serving, they had an angry exchange, and Alexander suddenly seized a spear and killed Cleitus on the spot. This was the first time he had committed an outrageous act on a prominent Macedonian, and he took to his bed in a nervous collapse of remorse and self-disgust. Cleitus was evidently not popular among the young commanders and the murder was not at first held against him, or so it seems. Indeed his court historian, Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew, took the trouble to persuade Alexander that he must put the episode behind him. But Alexander also fell afoul of the younger generation of commanders—his own—when he suddenly accused Philotas, a fine officer and commander of the Guard Corps, of conspiracy. He had criticized the king’s adoption of oriental habits and plans for mingling the ruling classes, but there is no evidence of a plot. But Alexander had him tried “before the army” and got a conviction, the wretched man being sentenced to “execution by a volley of javelins.” At least he got a trial of a sort. His father Parmenion, one of Philip’s generals and originally second-in-command of the conquering army, was simply murdered. The death of Callisthenes was even more repellent. He had steered the king through the Cleitus crisis, but he objected strongly to prostration. When the king, after a drinking dinner, held a kind of dress rehearsal of how he expected his senior men to perform obeisance to him in the future, the historian, with all the rationalist arrogance of the Athenian intellectual elect, flatly refused. Shortly afterward, he was accused of complicity in the “Pages’ Plot,” a conspiracy by six teenage boys who had privileged access to the king in his quarters, to murder him in his sleep. This followed an incident in which one of them was flogged for stealing the king’s quarry in a state hunt. All the pages were well connected and (it emerged) had family grievances against the king. They were savagely tortured and confessed, implicating Callisthenes. Alexander executed them all, and tortured the historian for good measure, though accounts vary about how he died. Some say he was starved and dragged around the camp in chains until he succumbed. Another version is that he was gradually cut to pieces: first his ears, nose and lips; then he was shut in cages with fierce dogs and a lion, until a merciful friend slipped him poison.
Instances of Alexander’s cruel, irrational, violent and drunken behavior increased as he moved into his thirties, and it is plausible that he was becoming an alcoholic, and that alcohol was a factor in his death on June 10, 323 BC. On May 29 he had attended a banquet given by Medius, one of his officers, and we know the names of the seven or so men who attended it, some of whom were said to be in a conspiracy to poison him. Historians learned to be skeptical of poison reports before the nineteenth century, and this is no exception. Alexander was in an area (Babylonia) where, to this day, infections of all kinds, some still mysterious and many of which could then have been fatal, are encountered by visitors, especially those who are incautious about their eating and drinking habits. Eumenes, the king’s secretary, kept a detailed diary, later published by a writer called Diodatus. The diaries from the king’s last weeks were quoted by later sources. They show that Alexander’s drinking bouts were becoming more frequent and serious and were followed by terrible hangovers, in which he took thirty-six hours to recover. There were five such bouts in the last months of his life. There is a story that after one of them he tried to kill himself by drowning in the River Tigris, but that he was prevented and rescued by his Iranian wife, Roxane, or “Little Star,” daughter of the Sogdian Lord Oxyontes. At all events, he died in his bed, of fever and weakness. It was not exactly a hero’s death, and no doubt Alexander himself would have preferred to have died in battle. His approaching Arabian campaign would surely have seen him off anyway, from sunstroke or heat exhaustion.
Alexander became the prototype hero for the Hellenic age and many centuries after because of the extent of his achievement and his personal courage. He left his mark in many ways. He founded seventy cities, many named after him, in western Asia and Africa, with square, straight streets and gardens in the “modern” fashion. He thoroughly understood the art and technology of war in its most advanced form, but he had many other interests too: art, architecture, science, gastronomy, metallurgy, exploration, energy sources, and many other curiosities. He poked his nose into everything and missed nothing. He patronized actors and the theater, and artists of all kinds. Under his patronage the visual arts of the Greek city-states, disparate and competitive, were united in a common Hellenic style. His empire as a unity, under one man, was ephemeral, but the three Greek kingdoms into which it dissolved lasted hundreds of years. His conquests, in fact, made the subsequent Roman Empire possible, and it can be said that, as a result of Alexander’s imperialism, the world took a giant step forward, to civilized unity and globalization. The destruction of life and property caused by his invasion was more than compensated for by the economic consequences of his wars. Alexander found in the Persian palaces truly prodigious quantities of gold and silver bullion, and by minting this into high-value coinages, and putting the results into circulation, financing the upsurge of trade produced by his new harbors and pirate-free seas, Alexander enormously increased the wealth and production of the entire area under his rule and beyond it. Here again he adumbrated the Roman age.
That is the positive side. Against this, Alexander’s territorial greed, which was insatiable, and his love of war and the actual business of fighting—the passion of his life—set the worst possible example for all future generations, especially since his crimes against peace and humanity were gilded over by his martial glamour, heroism and quasi-divine status. Many evil and ambitious men took heart from his record. His favorite painter, Apelles, to whom he showed extraordinary generosity, giving him on one occasion his current maîtresse en titre, created what the Romans believed was a symbolic picture of the king in his chariot, pulling behind him a bound prisoner. The Romans said this captive was War, and that Alexander was the warrior who, by his decisive triumphs, had “captured”—i.e., ended—war itself. The picture has not survived of course, but the interpretation, indeed the symbolism, is specious. At his death he was planning another war against the Arabs, on the grounds that they had not sent him an embassy—a mere pretext, said his colleague Aristobolus: “In truth, he was never content with his conquests and he wanted to rule everybody.” He was the first man to aim, realistically, at world rule, at any cost. He was a murderer, and in his battles a mass murderer, a lifelong criminal whose crime was the supreme one of war.
And was Julius Caesar, who lived a quarter millennium later (c. 100 BC–44 BC), any better, morally? As a hero he was on the same universal level as Alexander, the cynosure of the entire Greco-Roman world into which Caesar was born. But Caesar’s fame, and example, as a permanent feature in the life of politics and statecraft, lasted far longer. Caesar effectively transformed the Roman Republic into an empire. Caesar refused the crown himself, but he made it possible for his designated successor, Octavian, his great-nephew whom he adopted as his son, to accept it under the title of Augustus Caesar. Thereafter the emperors were all Caesars, the name of the man having become synonymous with world authority. This nomenclature long outlasted the empire of the West, which endured for more than four hundred years, and the empire of Byzantium, which continued until the mid-fifteenth century, and as kaisers, tsars and the like, European emperors continued to call themselves after Caesar until the end of the First World War. The name survived in other ways. The Dark and Middle Ages, even the Renaissance, were overshadowed by the shattered glories of imperial Rome. In large parts of Europe any fortified hill or ruin whose origin was ancient and obscure became known locally as “Caesar’s Camp” or “Caesar’s Tump” or “Caesar’s Wall.” There are over twenty thousand such place-names west of the Rhine and south of the Alps. Caesar endures in another and important way. He was a man of colossal energy and farsighted cunning. He aimed to conquer posterity as well as the world he lived in, and he knew that to do this he must get in his own version of events in good time—and what better way to do it than to write it yourself? So, amid all his other activities and worries, in camp and in moments of hurried repose, he wrote, and wrote, and wrote. He finished seven books of the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, his account of his conquest of Gaul, one covering each year from 58 to 52 BC (his subordinate Hirtius completed the tale to 50 BC, after his general’s death). He also contrived to produce three books called Commentarii de Bello Civili, the civil war he started and won. These books, written at speed and under pressure, have the supreme merits of simplicity and clarity. Cicero, greatest of all the masters of Latin prose, who heard Caesar speak in the Senate and read his work, praised warmly the correctness and precision of his Latin. Caesar’s simplicity was deliberate. He wrote not to show off or astonish but to get his point across. He said you should “avoid an unfamiliar word as a ship avoids a reef.” So his works were widely read and survived, being copied in endless manuscript chains across the Middle Ages, and then being among the first to be printed. They served as primary school texts for countless generations of children learning Latin. In the 1930s, I began my Latin prose studies with Commentarii de Bello Gallico, book one, chapter one, just as I began Latin verse with the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid. The best-remembered of all Latin tags are Caesar’s supposed last words, “Et tu, Brute?” addressed in agony, both physical and mental, to the young Brutus, son of Servilia, the mistress whom Caesar loved the best after Cleopatra. But according to Suetonius, in his Life of the Divine Julius Caesar, the great man, who had been well educated and spoke perfect Greek, used the language of culture to rebuke his favored junior: “Kai Su, teknon?”
Caesar was born about 100 BC from a noble family, which claimed descent from Venus, and so from Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who founded Rome. His father died when Caesar was a teenager, and the family was poor anyway, so Caesar, hugely ambitious, had to do it all for himself. He had a clever, encouraging mother. He suffered from epilepsy, then common. (“The usual complaint,” as Plutarch says.) He became bald early and responded by cutting his remaining locks short and shaving off all his body hair. He had an obsession with cleanliness. His physique was good and he kept fit. He swam well, and his skill saved his life when he swam across the harbor in Alexandria. He was a superb and fearless rider: could gallop bareback with his hands folded behind him. His energy was colossal and he spent his life transmuting it into speed. He thought fast, decided promptly, above all was quick to move. On this point he excelled over even Alexander. He could notch up a hundred miles a day, whatever the conditions, and keep it up day after day. His ability to move fast the length and breadth of a vast theater of war was one key to his success, and the despair of his enemies. He was born to soldier. He loved the life of the camp. While celerity in action was his strength, he also possessed the patience to train his men with infinite care. The Roman legions were good before his time, but, after it, they formed the finest professional army of antiquity, better even than the Macedonian phalanxes. He said of his men: “These legions can tear down the sky.” He trained his staff and senior commanders as meticulously as he trained the legionaries, and as a result could delegate authority with confidence. But he also led from the front, at the front when necessary, wearing a flaming red cloak so he could be seen by friend and enemy alike—just like Nelson with his stars and braid, a dangerous ploy. We know that he fought no less than fifty battles, almost exactly the same number as Napoleon, a dozen more than Wellington, and like these two fortunate commanders he was never seriously wounded. He looked after his men, saw that they were well fed, gave them brilliant little pep talks (like Montgomery), which he recorded in his books. Like Alexander, he saw that they got their booty to their families, and when they were too old to fight he settled them on farms. For Caesar, war was a career, and he turned it into a worthwhile career for his men.
Why did Caesar need to turn to war to make his way? By his day the republic was over four centuries old and had become not only the greatest power in the world but extremely complicated. The emancipation from the Etruscans dated from 509 BC. By 295 all Italy was Roman. From 264 to 206 BC Rome destroyed its chief international enemy, Carthage. By 241 Sicily was a Roman province. There followed Spain, North Africa, Macedon. By 129 BC all Greece and Anatolia were in the empire; by 58 BC, when Caesar came on the scene, eastern Turkey, Syria and Cyprus.
To run Rome, Italy and the vast expanding empire, the republic developed a wide range of elective officers operating under a highly specific law code. Rome was a class society: nobles, knights, plebs, merchants, “New Men” (Novus homines), etc. That was the warp, which determined who was eligible for what office, and whether he was likely to get it. The woof was family, and family connections. The family was all important, as it is in Italy today. Indeed the more I study Rome in the last days of the republic, the more it seems to resemble Italy in the early twenty-first century. In theory the law was inflexible and all deciding. In practice it yielded to family, and money; and money was made available by the corruption which family networks made possible. Money made it easier to run successfully for office, as in the United States today. But also useful was fame. And the surest way to acquire fame—and, incidentally, money too, often in huge quantities—was service in extending the empire.
Thanks to family connections, and judicious marriages (three in all), Caesar made his way slowly up the official hierarchy, but also made sure he saw military action, first in Cicelia and the province of Asia. To further his career he went to Rhodes to study rhetoric (in Greek of course), and when returning was captured by pirates. Caesar raised the money to pay his ransom, then a further sum with which he equipped a private navy, captured the pirates and crucified them all. In 74 BC he equipped a private army to fight the king of Pontus. His breakthrough came in 61 BC when he secured the governorship of Further Spain, using borrowed money and family influences. He was now deeply in debt, but the governorship meant fighting, and fighting meant loot. Caesar was so successful that he returned rich, paid all his debts and had cash to finance further moves. He was given charge of Cisalpine Gaul, and by a stroke of luck he soon got Transalpine Gaul too.
The conquest of Gaul, 58 to 50 BC, was the fulcrum of Caesar’s life. It added an enormous and, potentially or actually, rich territory to the empire, and made Caesar, in cash terms, the richest man in Rome. It was done without any authority from the Senate, indeed against the rule that no further territory was to be conquered without specific permission. The cool effrontery with which Caesar describes his step-by-step conquest, never using the word “I” or “my”—always “Caesar” or “Caesar’s”—is one of the most consummate impostures in literary history, let alone political history. He makes everything he did the mere inevitable response to events. The Caesar he presents was guided purely by his devotion to Rome and its interests. Personal ambition did not come into it at any stage. Everything was the ineluctable logic of history, fate and geopolitics. The simple, terse and factual prose adds greatly to the plausibility of his tale. The Caesar who emerges is not only superbly capable and efficient but also wise and moral, even innocent. The work says, “This is what Caesar had to do.”
It may be that this is what he really believed, and that Caesar had powers of self-deception, or the ability to identify the republic’s interests with his own, of a rare order. Caesar had a wonderfully optimistic temperament. One envies the delight he took in soldiering. His battle cry was “Felicitas!” He was in truth Wordsworth’s “happy warrior, which every man in arms would wish to be.” He led charges “at an enthusiastic gallop.” He drilled his troops “not like a commander of veterans but like a gladiatorial fencing-master with new recruits.” It was an art, a culture, he was imparting, with the delight of a virtuoso. On campaign in Gaul, he was always cheerful and self-confident. His approach to difficulty was: all problems are soluble. When fodder ran out he fed his horses on seaweed washed in fresh water. There were a lot of jokes and bawdy songs in his army. The soldiers called him Baldy or “the Bald Adulterer.” They joked about his supposedly, when a youth, staining the bed of King Nicomedes of Bithynia (a rumor Caesar always hotly denied). It is impossible to deny that Caesar created and commanded not only a superb army but a contented one, a willing and smiling instrument.
Yet we have to say that the eight-year conquest of Gaul was, from an ethical viewpoint, one of the great crimes of history. And Caesar could not claim, like Alexander in subduing the Persian empire, that he was ending an oriental tyranny and replacing it with Greek civilization, including notions of freedom. Rather, he was stamping on tribal kingdoms where ideas of freedom were already living, and reducing them to the slavish mold of a colony. His expedition to Britain, flowing logically from his Gallic conquests, indicates he would have done the same there, had the timetable of his ambition permitted. The human cost was enormous. Caesar, in organizing his “triumphs” in Rome after his victories, always gave accurate figures of the numbers slain, based on body counts and likely, therefore, to be underestimates. A figure compiled at the time gives 1,192,000 slain, a large majority Gauls. This does not include prisoners, naturally. Their fate could be gruesome. Vercingetorix, who led the Gaulish rebellion against the conquest, was kept in chains for six years, then put to death. Caesar’s triumphant celebrations, conducted on an unprecedented scale to curry favor with the Roman plebs and demoralize his rivals and critics, involved real battles between his prisoners and criminals under sentence of death—and the prisoners might also be savaged by wild beasts or trampled to death by elephants.
The complex maneuverings which followed Caesar’s success in Gaul and culminated in his unlawful incursion into Italy at the head of his army—“crossing the Rubicon” (the river which formed the provincial boundary)—can be seen as high politics or mere gang warfare, struggles between rival mafias for jobs, offices, the chance to run systems of corruption, and the right to inflict judicial murder on your opponents. It led inevitably to large-scale civil war; the battle of gangs for territory was fought on an intercontinental scale. Caesar campaigned swiftly and efficiently in Italy and Greece, in Spain and Africa, by land and sea. Throughout the history of Europe, princes and future kings would be taught about Caesar’s battles—all of which he won—in order to learn about war and ruling. But these struggles can be seen in the harsh light of gangster criminality, as well as the soft glow of historic grandeur. Pompey was a major hero figure like Caesar, the two men sharing a hatred for pirates, and Pompey rid the Mediterranean of this scourge as soon as he had the power and chance. But the empire, though vast, was not wide enough for them both. Caesar, one of history’s greatest generals, and with an army he had personally trained and commanded for a decade, inevitably prevailed. Pompey fled to Egypt, arriving three days ahead of Caesar’s ships. The Greek king, Ptolemy XIII, decided to win the great man’s favor by cutting off Pompey’s head, and presented it when Caesar arrived in the palace. Caesar turned away in sorrow and disgust and wept when the dead man’s signet ring was handed to him. He had wanted to pardon his beaten opponent. So he gave him a decent burial and was generous to his remaining followers.
Caesar’s sojourn in Egypt in 48 to 47 BC forms a lurid and dramatic episode, the stuff of plays, as it has often become. He put up at the palace, and there Ptolemy’s elder sister Cleopatra, then twenty-one, arrived in a small boat and was delivered to him in a bag. Plutarch says “her appearance was majestic and pitiful.” She won Caesar’s heart. Suetonius says that of all “foreign women,” she was the one he loved most, and longest. She was well educated and spoke many languages. A book on cosmetics was named after her—perhaps she wrote it. Her great charm was her thrilling voice: “It was a delight to hear its tone—her tongue was a lyre of many strings.”
Although Cleopatra became Caesar’s much-loved mistress, the ministers of her young brother stirred up the mob to attack the Romans (Alexandria now had a population of 500,000, and was notorious for its anti-Semitism and xenophobia) and Caesar was in effect besieged in the water palace and the island lighthouse of Pharos. Caesar set fire to the Egyptian warships in the harbor, and this was the occasion when he saved his life by swimming out to his own ships. The fire did great damage and, it is reported by Plutarch, destroyed the great library of manuscripts, the largest in the world (the total of volumes, or rolls, is variously given as 100,000, 400,000, and 700,000). This was founded, on Aristotle’s model, by Ptolemy I, Alexander’s immediate successor, and its loss was a blow to scholarship still felt to this day.
Caesar returned from Syria with reinforcements, destroyed all opposition in Egypt and installed Cleopatra as sole ruler (her brother was drowned in the Nile). He went quickly to Asia Minor, where he defeated Pharnaces of Bosphorus at Zela. This was the occasion when he reported laconically: “Veni, vidi, vici.” He returned to Africa, via Rome, won the battle of Thapsus, went to Spain again, and finally destroyed the remnants of the opposition at Munda. This was said to be his hardest battle, and on the whole Caesar had to do it all himself, in a hurry. Once the civil war began, he never had time to build a reliable command structure. Antony was loyal, willing and eager, but by temperament a Number Two. Tall and handsome, according to Plutarch, “he had a well-shaped beard, wide forehead and curved nose which made him look manly and rather like the statues and paintings of Hercules.” Good-natured, lascivious, a boaster and hard drinker, he did good service under Caesar but needed orders. As Plutarch put it, “Cleopatra found Antony already tamed.”
Back in Rome, the civil war over, Caesar was made dictator with the mandate to hold elections for offices. In 46 he became dictator for ten years, and in 44 for life. His last years in Rome saw him inaugurate a series of fundamental reforms, in citizenship, taxation, land settlement, municipal corporations, colonies and the Senate (which he enlarged to nine hundred). He also prepared to go on campaign in Asia against the unconquered Dacians and Parthians. He refused the title rex, but accepted many other unprecedented honors, which the stiffer element among the republicans could not bear. Caesar tried to reassure them by dismissing his Spanish bodyguards, but that gave his hard-line opponents the opportunity to carry out his murder. He was stabbed to death in a Mafia-style killing in the Senate on the ides of March 44, and died at the foot of Pompey’s statue. This outrageous crime in a sacrosanct place, designed for debate and the enactment of law, was hailed by Cicero, supposedly defender of the republic’s highest standards of constitutional behavior, with delight. The truth is, the republic was a sham, the rule of law a fantasy, and family, money and, in the last resort, force ruled Rome and its empire. Caesar’s entire career essentially destroyed nothing, but exposed everything.
There is no doubt that Caesar was a man of exceptional ability over a huge range of activities. Among his qualities Pliny the Elder listed as foremost: great mental power, energy, steadfastness, a gift for understanding “everything under the sun,” vitality and “fiery quickness of mind.” Few men have such a combination of boldness, shrewdness and wisdom. But if he was the model of kingship for two millennia, he was also the inspiration for dictators and tyrants. Napoleon, at the height of his power, when all Europe danced attendance at his levees, said to Goethe: “You should write about the death of Caesar in a worthy manner, better than Voltaire. It could be the greatest task of your life. The world should be shown how happy Caesar would have made it, how much better everything would have been if only he had been given time to bring his sublime plans to fruition.” That is one view. Another might ask: “How many more would Caesar, had he lived, have killed.” Napoleon killed five times as many as Caesar’s total, perhaps five million. Mao Tse-tung, another admirer of Caesar, killed seventy million. These things need to be weighed when we tell the stories of heroes.