CHAPTER 10
THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF CAESAR’S REPUBLIC
THE CONFLICT THAT ENDED THE Roman Republic began with a politically momentous crossing of a physically insignificant river. On or around January 10 of 49 BC, Caesar led his army across the Rubicon. It was not an extraordinary logistical achievement. The Rubicon now is so narrow that, even near its mouth, a man can practically jump from one bank to the other. But leading an army across the Rubicon had immense political significance. The river represented the political boundary between Italy and the province of Cisalpine Gaul, and, when Caesar crossed it, he would be in open revolt against the Republic. This effectively foreclosed the chance for a peaceful resolution to his conflict with Pompey.
This should not obscure the fact that Caesar had meticulously laid the military and political groundwork for such a move for much of the previous year. When Caesar’s war commentaries covering the events of 50 BC appeared a few years later, they ended with a section bridging the conclusion of his Gallic campaigns and the beginning of the civil war. In it, one sees how Caesar’s final actions in the Gallic war blended together with his preparations for the clash to come. During the first months of 50, when most of Rome still hoped for a peaceful resolution of Caesar’s conflict with the Senate and Caesar was still based in Belgium, the general attempted to secure his conquests by giving generous gifts to the Gallic chieftains in charge of the territories he had recently conquered. With the support of these Gallic figures now solidified, Caesar left most of his troops and officers behind as he traveled south to the towns and colonies of Cisalpine Gaul with which he had built a relationship. Ostensibly, Caesar did so in order to campaign for his quaestor, Marcus Antonius (commonly known to English speakers as Mare Antony). Antony was standing in an upcoming election for a vacant priesthood. This feeble pretext evaporated when Antony was elected before Caesar even arrived in the region. Caesar then reframed the trip as either a tour thanking the voters for supporting Antony or, alternatively, a way to build support for his own plan to run for consul for the year 48. In practice, though, Caesar’s visits were carefully orchestrated to remind residents of his achievements in uniting Gaul. Entire towns turned out to greet Caesar, sacrifices were made to mark his arrival, and communities laid out couches in marketplaces and temples as if they were setting up feasts for a festival.1
Caesar then returned to his army, which was encamped not far from the modern city of Lille. He reinforced it with troops based in what is now western Germany and steadily led his forces south just as, in Rome, Caesar’s ally, the tribune Curio, began making motions that both Caesar and Pompey disarm. Caesar’s supporters framed Curio’s measures as actions to ensure “a state at liberty and under its own laws” because “the armed domination (dominatio) of Pompey created no small terror in the Forum.”2 This contrast between the liberty that Curio claimed to protect and the armed dominance over Rome exercised by Pompey and the senatorial faction supporting him drew upon deeply felt notions of Roman republicanism. Caesar’s opponent Cicero once wrote, “We are all slaves of the laws so that we might be free,” a concise statement of the general principle that the Republic depended on all Romans being governed by rules set collectively that served the interests of all.3 Pompey, Curio implied, now headed a faction willing to use force to compel all other Romans to serve only his interests and those of his allies.4 According to this line of thinking, Pompey’s continued command of forces based in Spain threatened Roman liberty.
Much of what transpired between the middle of 50 and Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in January of 49 lent additional credence to the claim that Pompey headed an armed faction aiming for the elimination of Caesar’s power. From Caesar’s perspective, a breaking point occurred in the summer when the Senate recalled one legion of Caesar’s from Gaul and a legion that was supposed to belong to Pompey for service in a planned campaign against Parthia. Caesar sent a legion as directed, but Pompey, instead of sending forces loyal to himself, designated a legion that he had lent to Caesar for his Gallic campaigns. So, in practice, Caesar lost two legions that served under him and Pompey lost none. Then, when the legions arrived in Italy, they were not sent to the East. They were instead held in Italy and, in December of 50, they were placed under the command of Pompey. This step gave Pompey control of armies based in both Spain and Italy.5
Pompey and his allies gave Caesar additional cause for concern in the first days of January 49 when Cato, the new consul Lentulus, and other long-standing enemies of Caesar prevented tribunes loyal to Caesar from using their vetoes to stop a debate about removing Caesar from command. Cato and his allies had again shown their particular talent for political cynicism as they claimed to protect the Republic even as they refused to respect the checks on power required for its proper functioning. Frightened by this breach of republican precedent, the tribunes fled to Caesar. The Senate then decreed that “the consuls, praetors, tribunes, and all the proconsuls who are near the city will ensure that the Republic comes to no harm,” the formula used to declare a state of emergency that, since the murder of Gaius Gracchus, had been used to sanction the use of lethal violence against Romans deemed to be threats to the Republic.6 Caesar was now effectively a public enemy.
The Senate and consuls had run off the tribunes loyal to Caesar and then placed Pompey in command of the military forces that would oppose him, steps that seemed to support Caesar’s claim that Pompey and a faction of senators had been conspiring against him. All of them, Caesar could now convincingly state, had prevented the tribunes from imposing their vetoes (acts contrary to both Roman law and the popular will) just so that they could prevent Caesar from “being on the same level of dignity” as Pompey. Caesar’s army, his Gallic clients, and his supporters within Italy all understood the stark choice that Caesar now faced. He could march on Rome or he could wait for Pompey to build so large an army that it would guarantee Caesar’s death in Gaul. And, if they believed his version of events, Roman liberty would live or die with him.7
The struggle between Caesar and Pompey had both personal and political components. Pompey’s condescension and unwillingness to recognize that Caesar’s achievements in Gaul were similar in scope to his own conquests in the East irritated the proud commander. Caesar also saw that the political steps Pompey’s allies had taken to deprive him of armies, to prevent him from running for office, and, ultimately, to force tribunes to flee before Caesar was declared a public enemy represented profound violations of all of the Republican norms they claimed to be defending. But, to Pompey and his supporters, Caesar represented an overly ambitious figure willing to do whatever was necessary to rise to prominence in the state. Pompey saw this as a threat to his personal position in Rome, but he and his allies also feared that, whatever they did, Caesar would never pursue a normal political career and respect the constraints of the Republic’s institutions.
Though both sides had compelling reasons to want to fight, it is important to understand that, at the civil war’s outset, Caesar seemed extremely unlikely to prevail. Not only did Pompey have armies under his command in both Spain and Italy but he had also spent the better part of the past three decades building networks of clients and supporters across the Mediterranean. These included the client kings whose rule he had affirmed in Asia Minor and the Near East in the late 60s, the former pirates he had settled in coastal Asia Minor in the mid-60s, the Spaniards with whom he had been building and maintaining relationships since the Sertorian war in the 70s, and the Italians from around his home region of Picenum who had formed the first army he led into battle in support of Sulla in the 80s. And now Pompey was also fighting with the official backing of the Senate and the active support of most of Rome’s leading senators. Seeing these advantages, the Senate tasked Pompey with assembling a new massive force of 130,000 troops that could confront Caesar in Italy. He was to call up his veterans, use his ties to Italian communities to recruit as many other troops as possible, and build an army large enough to crush Caesar when the general finally made his move.
No one anticipated that Caesar would make his move into Italy during the same week when the Senate voted. Caesar recognized the great strategic disadvantages he faced, but he also understood that he had two advantages that Pompey and the Senate could not immediately counter. The first of these grew out of the nature of Caesar’s command. He had only ten legions, but they were very experienced, well-trained veterans who were intensely loyal and deeply inspired by the leadership Caesar provided.8 Caesar also had the ability to move quickly. Pompey’s forces far outnumbered him, but the 130,000 men the Senate had tasked him with raising in Italy had not yet been assembled. The only forces Pompey had in Italy on January 10 were the two legions that Caesar had sent to him at the Senate’s orders in 50 BC. If Caesar moved into Italy quickly, Pompey had nothing else on the peninsula with which to counter him.
This is why Caesar led only three of his ten legions across the Rubicon on January 10. The other seven stayed in reserve in Gaul, protecting it in case Pompey’s forces in Spain attempted to attack his rear. Before he crossed the river, Caesar actually sent a small force ahead of his main army to take the town of Arminium, the first community on the Italian side of the provincial border. Caesar himself entered Arminium just after dawn on the tenth and then quickly dispatched troops to occupy other Northern Italian towns.9 As Caesar’s forces continued moving south, panic spread in Rome. Pompey fled the city and stopped all levies of new troops around it. He moved first to Capua, then to the Southern Italian region of Apulia, and finally crossed to Greece with the consuls of 49 and most of the Senate. The army of 130,000 troops he was supposed to raise never materialized.10
Pompey’s decision to move closer to his friends and clients in the East made strategic sense, but it had obvious drawbacks. By abandoning Rome so quickly, Pompey left Caesar both the world’s largest city and the public treasury, without putting up a fight. Caesar responded by reassuring the terrified city that he would not treat his enemies as Marius and Sulla had. Instead of killing them, he would pardon them and allow them to either stay in Italy or go unharmed wherever they wished without fear or loss of property. For evidence of his leniency, Caesar’s supporters cited his treatment of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the governor who had been sent by the Senate to take over Caesar’s Gallic command. Ahenobarbus had mounted some of the only significant resistance to Caesar’s advance in Italy, but, when Pompey failed to reinforce him, Caesar captured Ahenobarbus and then released him without punishment.11 This act further reinforced Caesar’s claim that he was not a tyrant but a benevolent figure who had been wronged by Pompey, Cato, and their power-hungry senatorial faction.
Pompey not only handed Caesar a political victory by fleeing Italy but also ceded to Caesar much of the military initiative in the Central Mediterranean. Caesar quickly sent out legates to take charge of Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily in an attempt to secure some of the sources of the capital’s food. Cato, who had been sent to hold Sicily, bowed to the inevitable, gave the island up without a fight, and retreated to join Pompey. Sardinia and Corsica, too, quickly fell into Caesar’s hands. Pompey’s allies did hold North Africa, but, by the spring of 49, Caesar had secured Italy and the surrounding islands.12
Caesar still faced the problem of Pompeian forces arrayed to the south, east, and west of Italy. Instead of immediately pursuing Pompey in Greece, Caesar decided to attack Pompey’s army in Spain. In less than a month, he marched his forces north through Italy, arrived in Spain, defeated Pompey’s legates there, and again pardoned those of his enemies he captured. After they were released unharmed, Caesar told the soldiers and their officers to communicate news of their fates to Pompey and the forces he was assembling in the East.13 When he returned to Rome in December of 49, Caesar was the master of all of the Roman territory in Europe west of the Adriatic. Even more importantly, his very public acts of clemency now made it impossible for Pompey and his supporters to credibly claim that Caesar was a new Sulla.
This gave Caesar political cover for his next move. Upon his return to Rome, Caesar was appointed dictator by the praetor Lepidus because the consuls had fled to Pompey. Caesar held the office for eleven days so that he could preside over his own election to the consulship for the year 48 BC, an office he held alongside a loyal colleague. Caesar left Rome before the New Year and led his army south to the port of Brundisium where they could cross the Adriatic to Greece. Pompey had been meticulously gathering forces in the winter of 49–48, assuming that Caesar’s lack of ships would prevent his rival from landing an army in Greece. But Caesar again surprised. Pompey had placed Bibulus, Caesar’s fellow consul in 59 BC, in charge of using the six hundred ships under Pompey’s command to prevent Caesar from bringing an army across the sea. On January 4 of 48, however, Caesar used small crafts to ferry part of his army from Brundisium to what is now southern Albania. Bibulus only managed to intercept some of the ships when they tried to make a second trip carrying the rest of Caesar’s forces.
Caesar had caught up to Pompey, but his army remained severely outnumbered. Not only did Pompey have more men but he also had at least two hundred Roman senators with him as well as a host of other commanders who held some sort of imperium over Roman forces.14 But Pompey’s massive coalition of troops, senators, and notables was united primarily by hatred of Caesar. And, after Pompey handed Caesar a significant defeat outside the city of Dyrrachium on July 7, he developed a plan to finally finish off his rival. Pompey understood that, though Caesar had been forced to retreat south into Thessaly in central Greece, his forces were not yet finished. But their morale was declining. Some of Caesar’s troops had mutinied at the end of the battle at Dyrrachium, and Pompey believed that the army would eventually turn on Caesar and surrender as hunger and lack of supplies set upon it.
This strategy might have worked. In the imperial period, most Roman civil wars would end in just this way, with an army turning on its commander when his cause looked lost. Caesar, however, had a gift for managing the emotions of his soldiers that many of these later imperial commanders lacked. Roman generals often punished mutinous troops with random executions, but Caesar, like Sulla, understood that, in a civil war that could be approaching its end, mercy better rebuilt morale than fear. He publicly shamed some of the mutineers but otherwise refused to consider any other punishment, a strategy that made both the mutineers and the rest of the army even more dedicated to him.15
On the other side, the motley crew of senators, commanders, and other notables campaigning with Pompey assumed that the war had already effectively been won. Eager to return to Rome, they pushed Pompey to move aggressively to finish Caesar. Pompey apparently thought this unwise and preferred to wait for Caesar’s forces to surrender, but, under the circumstances, an aggressive move seemed politically expedient. Therefore, Pompey linked his forces up with those commanded by Metellus Scipio, and the combined army set upon Caesar outside of the Thessalian town of Pharsalus. Pompey and Scipio commanded twice as many infantry and seven times as many cavalry as Caesar, but Caesar’s tactical brilliance and the experience of his forces outweighed Pompey’s numerical advantages. Caesar neutralized Pompey’s cavalry, overwhelmed his infantry, and then ultimately captured his camp. Pompey fled the battlefield on horseback. He went first to the port of Larisa and then, ultimately, sailed to Egypt.16
The reverse at Pharsalus had been so sudden and complete that Pompey chose to sail to the kingdom of the Ptolemies to regroup. He had worked closely to enroll Ptolemy XII, the father of Egypt’s current king, among the ranks of Rome’s officially recognized allies and was hopeful that Ptolemy XIII would reciprocate the favor done to his father by offering Pompey refuge in Alexandria. The war could perhaps still be won, somehow, if Pompey could receive Egyptian help. But the young Egyptian king and his advisers had apparently already decided that Pompey had lost. They were already embroiled in their own civil war with Cleopatra, the queen who was both the wife and the sister of Ptolemy, and they had no interest in becoming involved in Rome’s civil war too. Although Ptolemy’s messengers had indicated that Pompey would indeed find shelter in Alexandria, the king instead had Pompey beheaded as soon as he arrived in the city.17
The death of Pompey did not end the Roman civil war. Caesar had pursued Pompey to Alexandria to prevent him from continuing the war from there. When he landed in the city after Pompey’s murder, Caesar was met by an angry mob incensed that his presence and that of his armed troops infringed upon the sovereignty of the king. Caesar soon found himself drawn into the Egyptian civil war, wasting the rest of 48 and much of 47 sorting out affairs in Egypt before securing the kingdom’s throne for Cleopatra. While Caesar tarried in Egypt, other problems erupted. Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, invaded Pontus, forcing Caesar to return to Rome via Syria and Asia Minor. The war against Pharnaces ultimately ended with such a swift victory in August of 47 that it prompted Caesar’s famous line “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered).18 But the travel and logistical preparation required before Caesar could utter this short phrase had real consequences while Rome’s civil war still raged.
Not everyone who had once sided with Pompey continued fighting after Pharsalus. Many Romans simply switched sides and took advantage of Caesar’s offers of amnesty, Cicero among them. But a core group of senators pressed on and whatever men remained of the forces Pompey commanded regrouped while Caesar was in the East. Cato emerged as the inspirational leader of this group. Pompey had placed him in charge of three hundred ships and, after Pharsalus, Cato led this fleet and the remnants of the army to North Africa where they combined forces with troops provided by the Numidian king Juba. Caesar pursued them there, and after an initial reverse, he again emerged victorious, defeating the combined forces outside of the city of Thapsus in April 46. Cato, Juba, and Lucius Scipio all committed suicide following the battle. Pompey’s two sons, Gnaeus and Sextus, escaped from Africa to Spain to continue the resistance, but Caesar defeated them too at Munda in March of 45. Gnaeus was killed following the battle, but Sextus Pompey evaded capture and continued to mount naval raids against Italy for most of the next decade.
Caesar’s dramatic military campaigns offer only limited insight into the ways that he changed Roman political life during the early part of the 40s. Caesar understood intuitively that his long-term survival demanded that he become utterly indispensable to the smooth operation of Rome and its empire. This dynamic already had become clear in 48, before the victory at Pharsalus. After Caesar chased Pompey and his senatorial supporters out of Italy, the credit market collapsed as people anticipated that Caesar would institute proscriptions and asset seizures like those undertaken by Sulla. Not only did this threat to private property depress the prices of Italian real estate but it also encouraged lenders to call in loans before all of the value of the collateral disappeared. This, in turn, prompted calls throughout Rome for a cancelation of all debts, a move that would have caused even more damage to the Roman financial system than Mithridates’s killing of Roman tax farmers had done in 88 BC. More ominously, panic about Caesar’s intentions prompted hoarding of gold, silver, and coined money in Italy as people sought to keep as much of their wealth as possible in easily movable precious metals in case they needed to flee.19
Caesar recognized the narrow space in which he could act. Debts could not be abolished without inflicting massive economic damage, but Caesar also appreciated that he needed to somehow stabilize the tumbling prices of assets against which loans had been made. Caesar’s clemency for those who opposed him in the civil war formed one part of the solution, helping to reassure Romans that the proscriptions and confiscations of Sulla would not be repeated. But it could not completely calm the city. Even if Romans trusted that Caesar would not repeat Sulla’s proscriptions, the war remained unresolved and no one could predict what his opponents might do if Caesar eventually lost, or what property might be destroyed should fighting resume in Italy.
These persistent fears prompted Caesar to act to further stabilize the value of property and, by extension, to calm the credit market. He created an arbitration process through which people could appeal the value set on the property that served as collateral for a loan. The arbitrator would presumably set this value not by looking at the current price the property might fetch but instead by considering its higher, pre-crisis value. Setting an artificially high value for property would discourage people from seizing land or goods that could only be sold for a much lower price. Caesar’s measure thereby ensured that it made more financial sense to renegotiate a loan than to seize the collateral and attempt to sell it. It worked so well that no one apparently felt the need to bring a case before its arbitrators.20
The calm did not last long. Once Caesar left Rome and headed to Greece to fight Pompey, his political enemies in Rome began working to undermine support for the arbitration process. At first, the praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus proposed stopping interest collection on loans for six years. When this did not generate any popular enthusiasm, he then backed legislation that would cancel all debts and all rents paid to landlords. Caelius and his followers then attacked the urban praetor (the praetor responsible for managing legal affairs in the city) after he failed to back the measure, prompting Caesar’s consular colleague to suspend Caelius from office. Caelius’s next move involved linking up with Clodius’s old adversary Milo to foment a pro-Pompey rebellion in Italy. Both men were killed in skirmishes before their rebellion could develop into a significant threat, but Caelius had shown that concerns about debts and rents could be exploited politically while Caesar was away.21
The violence did not end with the deaths of Caelius and Milo. Another round of demagogic exploitation of the issues of debt and rents prompted such unrest that Caesar’s deputy Marc Antony felt compelled to lead troops into the city, occupy the Forum, and kill the riotous citizens. The city settled down only when Caesar returned briefly in September of 47 while on his way from the East to campaign against Cato in Africa.22
Caesar’s presence calmed the civil disturbances in the capital, but he now confronted a new problem. Groups of his best soldiers, some of whom had been fighting for more than a decade, demanded their discharge and the payment of the bonuses that Caesar had promised them. The soldiers became so angry that they declined an additional 1,000-denarii bonus that Caesar offered in the hope of inducing them to serve on his African campaign. Then they almost killed the historian Sallust when he arrived to try to negotiate with them.23
Caesar’s response to this dangerous situation established the template for how an individual could use money and charisma to control the loyalties of armies in the Roman world in the decades to come. Caesar first ordered the legion that Antony had used to control the civil disturbances in Rome to come to serve him as a bodyguard. Then, Caesar went to the rioting soldiers personally and shamed them into repentance. Specifically, he agreed to discharge the rioters, telling them that he would fight in Africa with other soldiers. He would still pay all bonuses he had promised the rioters, but he would do so only when the African campaign was over and those other units marched in his triumph instead of his disloyal veterans. The ashamed soldiers then begged to be returned to service. Caesar accepted them all back except for the members of the tenth legion, the most accomplished group of his soldiers, because their disloyalty stung him the most. Caesar then made an extraordinary promise. He told the assembled soldiers that, when the wars concluded, he would give lands to all of them. Caesar would not, however, do as Sulla had and reward his soldiers by stealing from other Roman citizens. Instead, the soldiers would receive property from the stocks of public land and, if there was insufficient public land, they would receive land and agricultural implements purchased by Caesar out of his own private fortune.24
Caesar had made himself utterly indispensable to his soldiers. To be certain, commanders in the past had relied on the Republic to reward their soldiers using public property. Even the confiscated property distributed by Sulla had passed through public control before his followers received it. Caesar, however, promised to make his land distributions using both public resources and his own private funds. Because the program could not work without both sources of support, Caesar’s army now needed him to be both alive and empowered to receive its promised compensation. They had become simultaneously servants of the Republic and of the individual who led it. Caesar had found a way to ensure that Rome would be stable only if he remained in charge of it.
Between 46 and 44 BC, Caesar expanded this system of buttressing the public activities of the Republic with his own private resources. Following his successful war in Africa, he celebrated a massive quadruple triumph that included distributions of gold and silver to his soldiers and to other Roman citizens. The triumph also involved musical performances, gladiatorial games, mock battles and naval engagements, and even an event where two teams of twenty elephants fought each other. He also began construction of a new forum anchored by a temple to Venus Genetrix, the goddess from whom Caesar claimed ultimate descent. The funds for all of these came from a mixture of public and private resources, both of which Caesar now controlled.25
Caesar also inserted himself into the political processes of the Republic in carefully crafted ways. At the end of 48, he was again appointed dictator with a term that extended across 47. From January of 46 onward, he held the office of dictator and was made one of the two consuls who took office at the start of every year. After his Spanish victory in 45, Caesar also took complete control of both public expenditures and all Roman armies. Caesar’s annual consulship then became a tool that he could use to reward supporters to whom he passed the honor. Perhaps nothing shows Caesar’s control over the consulship better than the situation in 45 BC. Caesar began the year as consul but soon resigned the position and appointed Quintus Fabius to serve the remainder of the year. Fabius, however, died on the last day of his consular term. Caesar then appointed Gaius Caninius Rebilus to serve the last few hours that remained, a stint as consul that Cicero jokingly remarked revealed such bravery and prudence that Rebilus never slept for even a moment of his term.26 The consulship had once been among the most prestigious honors the Republic made available. It remained incredibly prestigious, but the consulship had now become a sort of private benefaction that Caesar could bestow upon whomever he wished.
10.1. Forum of Julius Caesar and the Temple of Venus. Photo by Manasi Watts.
By 44, Caesar’s control over the offices through which the Republic had once rewarded service and conferred honor had become nearly complete. Not only did he appoint consuls but he also effectively appointed the candidates for lower office by reserving the right to accept or reject the results of elections. Then, as Caesar prepared for what he imagined would be a lengthy military campaign against Parthia, he created a list of magistrates who should hold office in subsequent years. For 43, he prepared a list that covered all magistrates, and for 42 he chose the consuls and the tribunes. Caesar would, of course, continue as dictator, though, in a move that puzzled many Romans, his deputy (the man who held the office Romans called master of the horse) would now be neither Marc Antony, who had served in this capacity in the early 40s, nor Lepidus, the man filling the role in 43 and early 44 BC. Instead, as soon as Lepidus went off to govern the provinces of Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania Citerior, the new master of the horse would be a boy of eighteen named Gaius Octavius. No one at the time could imagine that this boy (better known to modern historians as Octavian) would grow up to become the emperor Augustus.27
Caesar nonetheless struggled to define the power that he now exercised, and to articulate the authority he now claimed, in ways that did not offend Roman sensibilities. Many in Rome understood the particular challenge he faced. During his quadruple triumph in 46, his own soldiers are said to have shouted to Caesar in unison: “If you do right, you will be punished. If you do wrong, you will be king.”28 Everyone, including Caesar himself, understood that the army was correct. If Caesar ever did what was right and voluntarily surrendered power, he would be prosecuted or executed. If he held on to power, however, Caesar would have no choice but to effectively become like the kings whose rule the Republic had replaced more than four centuries before.
Between 48 and 44, Caesar repeatedly teased the possibility that he might ultimately move toward openly having himself declared king. Rumors of Caesar taking this step evidently began circulating in 45, talk that, at one point in early 44 BC, prompted some in Rome to greet Caesar as king. When people groaned at this action, Caesar blamed opponents in the Senate for conspiring to make him look like a tyrant. But, when the consul Marc Antony placed a crown on Caesar’s head during the Lupercalia festival in February of 44, none could deny that Caesar was testing the popular mood to find a moment when he might officially assume the title.29
In many ways, the title Caesar held would have made no difference in how he ran Rome and its empire. Kingship had not existed in Rome for almost five hundred years, and any effort to formally reinstitute it would have required reenvisioning the office and its powers in light of the dramatically different context of the first-century Republic. But, in practice, Caesar already exercised whatever powers he might have given to himself had he declared himself king. Caesar had served as pontifex maximus since 63, a position that already made him the chief religious figure in Rome. His legal authority over the Republic ultimately derived from the dictatorship, which he assumed on a permanent basis in 44 BC after being named dictator three times before, in 48, 47, and 46. In addition to the formal powers of dictator, by 44 Caesar also enjoyed power over the treasury, complete command authority over all Roman armies, the freedom to use a publicly owned residence, the effective ability to appoint or approve magistrates, and, as time passed, a free hand to remake the Senate through selection of the magistrates who would qualify for membership.30 He was, in effect, already an absolute monarch regardless of the title he held.
But the title mattered greatly. Though most Romans bitterly hated the idea of a king, kingship offered a potential avenue through which Caesar could distinguish himself from the other Romans with whom he had once been equal or to whom he had once been subordinate. Roman kings of the pre-Republican period did not inherit the throne but were instead elevated to the position by their peers after showing they merited selection. If Caesar did want the title (and one cannot know for sure whether he really did), kingship was a status that might acknowledge both his current authority and the support he enjoyed from the other members of the Roman Senate.31
But the efforts to create a sense of majestic superiority around Caesar went far beyond just experimenting with a royal title. Later sources are full of lists of the honors that the Senate voted to Caesar in 45 and 44 BC. Among the most notable of these are the decrees that Caesar’s body was to be inviolable and holy, that he should wear the special clothing normally reserved for men celebrating a triumph when he sacrificed to the gods, that he should transact all public business from a gold and ivory throne, and that Rome should create a cult in his honor with quadrennial festivals “as to a hero” and with statues of Caesar erected in cities controlled by Rome as well as in all temples within the city.32
The evolution of Caesar’s claims to distinctiveness can perhaps be seen most clearly in the coins that he issued between 49 and 44 BC. The first notable issue, a denarius minted as Caesar’s army moved through Italy in 49, shows an elephant trampling a dragon above the legend CAESAR on the obverse and pontifical elements on the reverse, a combination that references Caesar’s status as pontifex maximus and the onset of the civil war.33 By 47, the iconography shifted to one that more clearly alluded to Caesar’s claims of descent from the goddess Venus and from Aeneas, the legendary Trojan hero whose descendants founded the city of Rome. In that year, a mint traveling with his army in Africa issued a coin with Venus on the obverse and an image of Aeneas on the reverse above the legend CAESAR.34 The coin issues of 44 BC, however, reflect a later stage in the struggle to define in acceptable ways Caesar’s superiority to all other Romans. Unlike the military mint issues of 49 and 47, the coins of 44 were issued by moneyers, and these magistrates affixed their names to the issues. Although the coins were issued by men holding a normal Republican office, they broke a significant Roman taboo against depicting living figures on coins by featuring the face of Caesar himself. The coins also bore evolving legends as Caesar’s titles changed in the first two months of 44 BC. They began by showing Caesar’s face and the words CAESAR DICT QUART, a reference to Caesar’s fourth term as dictator. Then, when the Senate voted Caesar the honorific title Imperator, CAESAR IMP or CAEASAR IM appeared alongside his portrait on the obverse of the coin. Finally, when Caesar’s dictatorship became permanent, the legends again shifted to CAESAR DICT PERPETUO or CAESAR DICT IN PERPETUO.35
10.2. A denarius of Julius Caesar depicting Venus on the obverse and Aeneas carrying his father on the reverse, two images that allude to the dictator’s claims of descent from the goddess and the line of Rome’s founding family (Crawford 458/1). Private collection. Photos by Zoe Watts.
By early 44, it had become clear that Caesar’s experiments in autocracy had alarmed some elements in the city of Rome. Graffiti began appearing on statues of Brutus, the man Romans credited with expelling the kings and founding the Republic, bemoaning the fact that he was no longer alive. Some even called on his descendants to show that they were worthy of his name.36 They had one particular person in mind: Marcus Junius Brutus. Excluding perhaps only Cato, no Roman had linked his public profile more closely to the principled defense of the Republic and the liberty it supposedly represented than this Brutus had. When he served as moneyer in 54 BC, Brutus affixed his name to two silver coin types. The first featured the portrait and name of the goddess Libertas on the obverse, and a reverse showing the Brutus who founded the Republic walking with lictors above the legend BRUTUS. The second showed a portrait of that same Brutus with an identifying legend on the obverse and, on the reverse, a portrait of Servilius Ahala, a Roman politician who murdered Spurius Maelius in the fifth century BC so that Maelius would not become king.37
10.3. A denarius of Brutus showing Libertas on the obverse and the Republic’s legendary founder Brutus on the reverse (Crawford 433/1). Private collection. Photos by Zoe Watts.
These two coins fit the narrative of the early Republic that Romans liked to believe. The Republic, in this telling, came about because Romans could not bear to be under the political domination of one man. Liberty, in this conception, meant life under a constitutional and legal framework that ensured the participation of citizens and protected them from political domination.38 Ahala’s murder of Maelius was a heroic action undertaken to ensure that Romans remained free from Maelius’s illegal and unconstitutional seizure of power. The images of the founder of Rome’s Republic and of the tyrannicide who saved it advertised a conviction that murder was justified (and even admirable) if it upheld Rome’s legal order.
In the 50s, Brutus’s invocations of the Republic’s founder and one of its saviors offered a powerful statement that he stood for liberty under the law, to be defended by violence if necessary, despite the violent political climate cultivated by men like Clodius and Milo. By 44 BC, however, ideas of liberty, legality, and even republicanism had all become much more complicated. Though Caesar effectively controlled Rome, the Republic still operated in a legal sense. Elections for offices continued, Roman law continued to govern commercial and personal transactions, juries continued to hear trials, and Romans continued to enjoy the right of appeal. Even amid the talk of his seizing the kingship, Caesar in fact exercised power as a dictator, a formally defined Republican office whose term he had extended. The extensions defied true Republican precedents, but they had been done using legal means and with apparent popular support. Caesar also exercised power as a consul (at least until his latest planned resignation of the office before heading to fight Parthia). If Caesar ruled through the offices integral to Rome’s legal and constitutional order, and if his rule had popular support, could his murder still be justified as a defense of liberty?39
A politician named Gaius Cassius Longinus seems to have forced Brutus to confront this question early in 44 BC.40 Both Brutus and Cassius had served with Pompey in the initial stages of the civil war before accepting Caesar’s clemency and finding themselves reincorporated into the administrative fabric of Caesar’s Republic. But both had become disenchanted with Caesar’s growing autocracy. They seem to have easily found a group of people who felt similarly, including some of Caesar’s longtime supporters as well as some of his most implacable opponents. The group decided that Caesar must be killed before he departed for his Parthian expedition on March 19 and determined that the Senate meeting on March 15 would offer the last, best opportunity to do this.
On that day, the Ides of March, the Senate assembled in a building near the expansive theater and garden complex that Pompey had dedicated in 55 BC on the site of the modern Campo de’ Fiori. As Caesar entered the building, one of the conspirators stopped the dictator to ask a favor. When Caesar answered, the conspirator grabbed Caesar’s robe, pulled it from his neck, and urged his fellow plotters to attack. They exposed concealed daggers, set upon Caesar beneath a statue of Pompey, and stabbed him twenty-three times. An autopsy would later reveal that only one of the twenty-three wounds inflicted by the senators proved fatal.41 Even Caesar’s assassins seem to have been uneasy with the deed they had committed.
The apprehension many of the conspirators apparently felt about killing Caesar extended to Rome as a whole. Brutus had chosen a meeting of the Senate as the moment for the assassination because he imagined that even those senators who did not know about the plot would immediately applaud its success. He even had composed a speech celebrating the reestablishment of Roman liberty that he believed had been achieved by Caesar’s murder. But Brutus never got to give his speech. The senators fled in terror, fearing both the possibility of more violence in the Senate and the unrest that they worried would descend on a city now suddenly deprived of the man who ensured its stability. As news spread, panic followed. Gladiators bolted from the theater before they could perform, with the audiences running just behind them. Some crowds spilled out into the marketplaces, plundering shops even as shopkeepers escaped. People who reached their homes dared not go out again. They barred the windows, shut their doors, and prepared to defend their houses from the tiled roofs that, in an emergency, could be broken up and made into the sort of lethal missiles that once killed Pyrrhus.42
On March 15, 44 BC, no one knew how to respond to a murder that was committed in the seductive name of liberty, even as it threatened to reignite the horrible chaos of civil war. Caesar was dead, and the threat many felt he posed to the Republic was over. But it remained to be seen whether the Republic could survive without him at its center.