XXIII. CÆSAR AT WAR WITH POMPEY
[Sidenote: [133-60 B.C.]]
At this point the Roman historian Florus casts a backward look over the history of his people. Giving the point of view of the first century of the empire, it shows no little acumen and is well worth quoting.
“This,” he says, “is the third age of the Roman people, with reference to its transactions beyond the sea; an age in which, when they had once ventured beyond Italy, they carried their arms through the whole world. Of which age, the first hundred years were pure and pious, and, as I have called them, ‘golden’; free from vice and immorality, as there yet remained the sincere and harmless integrity of the pastoral life, and the imminent dread of a Carthaginian enemy supported the ancient discipline.[115]
“The succeeding hundred, reckoned from the fall of Carthage, Corinth, and Numantia, and from the inheritance bequeathed us by King Attalus in Asia, to the times of Cæsar and Pompey, and those of Augustus who succeeded them, and of whom we shall speak hereafter, were as lamentable and disgraceful for the domestic calamities, as they were honourable for the lustre of the warlike exploits that distinguished them. For, as it was glorious and praiseworthy to have acquired the rich and powerful provinces of Gaul, Thrace, Cilicia, and Cappadocia, as well as those of the Armenians and Britons, so it was disgraceful and lamentable at the same time, to have fought at home with our own citizens, with our allies, our slaves, and gladiators.
“I know not whether it would have been better for the Romans to have been content with Sicily and Africa, or even to have been without them, while still enjoying the dominion of Italy, than to grow to such greatness as to be ruined by their own strength. For what else produced those intestine distractions but excessive good fortune? It was the conquest of Syria that first corrupted us, and the succession afterwards in Asia, to the estate of the king of Pergamus. Such wealth and riches ruined the manners of the age, and overwhelmed the republic, which was sunk in its own vices as in a common sewer. For how did it happen that the Roman people demanded from the tribunes lands and subsistence, unless through the scarcity which they had by their luxury produced? Hence there arose the first and second sedition of the Gracchi, and a third, that of Apuleius Saturninus. From what cause did the equestrian order, being divided from the senate, domineer by virtue of the judiciary laws, if it was not from avarice, in order that the revenues of the state and trials of causes might be made a means of gain? Hence again it was that the privilege of citizenship was promised to the Latins, and hence were the arms of our allies raised against us. And what shall we say as to the wars with the slaves? How did they come upon us, but from the excessive number of slaves? Whence arose such armies of gladiators against their masters, if it was not that a profuse liberality, by granting shows to gain the favour of the populace, made that an art which was once but a punishment of enemies? And to touch upon more specious vices, did not the ambition for honours take its rise from the same excess of riches? Hence also proceeded the outrages of Marius, hence those of Sulla. The extravagant sumptuousness of banquets, too, and profuse largesses, were not they the effects of wealth, which must in time lead to want? This also stirred up Catiline against his country. Finally, whence did that insatiable desire of power and rule proceed, but from a superabundance of riches? This it was that armed Cæsar and Pompey with fatal weapons for the destruction of the state.”
THE WAR BETWEEN CÆSAR AND POMPEY
“Almost the whole world being now subdued,” Florus continues, “the Roman empire was grown too great to be overthrown by any foreign power. Fortune, in consequence, envying the sovereign people of the earth, armed it to its own destruction. The outrages of Marius and Cinna had already made a sort of prelude within the city. The storm of Sulla had thundered even farther, but still within the bounds of Italy. The fury of Cæsar and Pompey, as with a general deluge or conflagration, overran the city, Italy, other countries and nations, and finally the whole empire wherever it extended; so that it cannot properly be called a civil war, or war with allies; neither can it be termed a foreign war; but it was rather a war consisting of all these, or even something more than a war. If we look at the leaders in it, the whole of the senators were on one side or the other; if we consider the armies, there were on one side eleven legions, and on the other eighteen; the entire flower and strength of the manhood of Italy. If we contemplate the auxiliary forces of the allies, there were on one side levies of Gauls and Germans, on the other Deiotarus, Ariobarzanes, Tarcondimotus, Cotys, and all the force of Thrace, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Macedonia, Greece, Ætolia, and all the East; if we regard the duration of the war, it was four years, a time short in proportion to the havoc made in it, if we attend to the space and ground on which it was conducted, it arose within Italy, whence it spread into Gaul and Spain, and returning from the West, settled with its whole force on Epirus and Thessaly; hence it suddenly passed into Egypt, then turned towards Asia, next fell upon Africa, and at last wheeled back into Spain, where it at length found its termination. But the animosities of parties did not end with the war, nor subsided till the hatred of those who had been defeated satiated itself with the murder of the conqueror in the midst of the city and the senate.
“The cause of this calamity was the same with that of all others, excessive good fortune. For in the consulship of Quintus Metellus and Lucius Afranius, when the majesty of Rome predominated throughout the world and Rome herself was celebrating, in the theatres of Pompey, her recent victories and triumphs over Pontus and Armenia, the overgrown power of Pompey, as is usual in similar cases, excited among the idle citizens a feeling of envy towards him. Metellus, discontented at the diminution of his triumph over Crete, Cato, ever an enemy to those in power, calumniated Pompey, and raised a clamour against his acts. Resentment at such conduct drove Pompey to harsh measures, and impelled him to provide some support for his authority. Crassus happened at that time to be distinguished for family, wealth, and honour, but was desirous to have his power still greater. Caius Cæsar had become eminent by his eloquence and spirit, and by his promotion to the consulate. Yet Pompey rose above them both. Cæsar, therefore, being eager to acquire distinction, Crassus to increase what he had got, and Pompey to add to his, and all being equally covetous of power, they readily formed a compact to seize the government. Striving, accordingly, with their common forces each for his own advancement, Cæsar took the province of Gaul, Crassus that of Asia, Pompey that of Spain; they had three vast armies and thus the empire of the world was now held by these three leading personages. Their government extended through ten years, at the expiration of this period (for they had previously been kept in restraint by dread of one another) a rivalry broke forth between Cæsar and Pompey, consequent on the death of Crassus among the Parthians, and that of Julia, who, being married to Pompey, maintained a good understanding between the son-in-law and father-in-law by means of this matrimonial bond. But now the power of Cæsar was an object of jealousy to Pompey and the eminence of Pompey was offensive to Cæsar. The one could not bear an equal nor the other a superior. Sad to relate, they struggled for mastery, as if the resources of so great an empire would not suffice for two.”[d]
[Sidenote: [60-50 B.C.]]
It was particularly fortunate for Cæsar that the conquest of Gaul was completed before his enemies at Rome combined against him, and that Vercingetorix was vanquished before Pompey took up arms against him. The meeting at Lucca and the decisions thereof had again put a great deal of power in the hands of Pompey.
At Lucca, Cæsar had been promised the consulate for the year 48. This aim attained and supported by his victorious army, with the prestige of his deeds and his superior intellect he could easily have overreached Pompey, who was no statesman. Cæsar would have organised the popular party, and completed in some form or other the work of a democratic monarchy which had been commenced by Gracchus and had failed in the unskilful hands of Marius; the achievement would have been more glorious for him if it had been accomplished without the aid of military force.
But the most enthusiastic of Pompey’s partisans now adopted a high tone. They declined to concur in any compromise or compact which involved danger to the republic; and at the beginning of the year 51 they threw down the gauntlet to Cæsar. M. Claudius motioned for the newly appointed consuls to be sent on the 1st of March in the year 49 to Cæsar’s two vicegerencies of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul. The party also demanded Cæsar’s disbandment of his army and maintained that his grant of citizen rights to the colonies which he had founded, was not legal. An inhabitant of Novum Comum, a town to which Cæsar had granted the Latin privilege, was struck with rods.
Cæsar’s followers showed the unreasonableness of these views and courses by references to Pompey’s position, and Pompey delayed doing anything or declaring himself. The debate on the business of the nomination was fixed for the 1st of March in the year 50. The union between Pompey and the aristocrats became closer and closer, and the time they lost was to the advantage of Cæsar.
[Sidenote: [50-49 B.C.]]
In the mean time he suppressed the rebellion of Vercingetorix, and Gaul began to calm down. To show his desire for peace, Cæsar followed the senate’s command to disband two legions, the one he had borrowed some years before from Pompey and the other which he had raised himself. He recompensed both before he dismissed them. However, the government did not keep to the agreement of sending them to the Euphrates, but retained them in the Campania for any emergency closer at hand. Cæsar also gained increasing ground at Rome, where clever agents worked for him, and he won an important victory through Curio, the plebeian tribune, a dissolute but talented and wide-awake man, whom he gained over to his side by paying his debts.[116] This ally maintained that what was due from Cæsar was also due from Pompey, and threatened to put his veto upon all one-sided courses against Cæsar.
The aristocrats hesitated, and in the meantime Cæsar arrived but without his army, at Ravenna, the most southern point of his province. Then Curio formulated his measure that Cæsar and Pompey should simultaneously resign their provinces and thus allay the fears of the Roman people. The plan was very well laid, and as the event showed, very cleverly arranged. The measure was put to the vote of the senate and to the astonishment of all concerned it resulted in 370 voting for the motion and twenty against it. It therefore seemed that there were only twenty in the senate upon whom Pompey could implicitly rely. “Then take Cæsar as your chief!” exclaimed the consul Marcellus in a rage as he closed the sitting.
Pompey’s party was in fact in a great strait; and Cæsar (probably at a high price) had attained what he wished. He had forced his adversaries to enter the list as insurrectionists. Pompey began raising troops without the necessary authority, whilst Cæsar, who was with a legion at Ravenna, sent the order to his assembled troops to disband without delay. He also despatched a letter to the senate, in which he offered to resign the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul, to reduce his ten legions to two, if he were allowed to retain these and the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul until the election of the consul for 48. This document was delivered to the senate by Curio. The tribunes Mark Antony and C. Cassius insisted on its being read aloud. The sitting was stormy, and the two consuls C. Claudius Marcellus, and L. Cornelius Lentulus made a point of Cæsar’s appearing as a private individual before the judicature.
In accordance with their views, the motion was carried for Cæsar to resign his province and to disband his army within a fixed time; his neglect to concur with this decree was to be considered high treason. In that case L. Domitius was nominated as his successor. This motion was passed on the 1st of January, 49, but the tribunes put their veto on it, and a great excitement prevailed in the city, into which Pompey had brought two legions. With this support the terrified senate, after expelling the dissentient tribunes from the curia, issued the decree which involved the declaration of war. The senate solemnly conjured the leaders, the officials supported by a military force in the city and its neighbourhood, to watch over the safety of the endangered state. The tribunes renewed their veto, but threatened by the soldiers of Pompey, against whom they were powerless, they fled from Rome and repaired to Cæsar’s headquarters. The decisive step was taken, the swords were unsheathed. Cæsar still remained with his single legion at Ravenna when the tribunes arrived in the character of fugitives. He had already carefully weighed the matter, and had conceived a clear decided course. He had his own army which had served him for ten years in danger and in victory. He knew every cohort, almost every soldier in his command; and every single man was devoted to the general who shared danger and honour with them all, and who had never deserted them in any strait. Moreover he had the Transpadian, or Romanised Gauls of the Po district, to whom he had granted full civic rights on his own authority; this however was the end of his resources.
CÆSAR CROSSES THE RUBICON
[Sidenote: [49 B.C.]]
On the other side all the other forces of Rome, the legions in Spain, the state treasure, the fleet, the tribute of the dominions, the contingents and the money of the whole of the East, and the respected name of the republic were at the disposal of Pompey, who boasted, and not without cause, that he had only to stamp upon the ground for armies to appear. Perhaps the charm of the old fame of Pompey exceeded the attraction of the more recent victories of Cæsar. But Cæsar did not hesitate. On the other side of the little river Rubicon which separated the Cisalpine province from Italy, lay his native land, and the civil war which could only end with his overthrow or his complete victory.[b]
“Cæsar had sent people to bring his army,” says Appian, “but being accustomed to succeed more by diligence, striking a terror and hardiness, than any mighty preparations, he resolved to begin this great war with his five thousand men, and to seize some places of Italy that were commodious for him. First he sent before to Ariminum some centurions and men who were to enter the city as passengers, and then all of a sudden to seize on that city (the first that offers itself coming from Gaul); and himself, in the evening, going out as if he had found himself ill after a feast, leaves his friends, and mounting in a chariot drove himself the same way, followed at a distance by his cavalry. When he came to the banks of Rubicon he stopped some time, looking upon the water, and thinking of the calamities he was about to be the cause of, if he passed that river in arms.
“At length turning to those of his train, ‘My friends,’ said he, ‘if I pass not this river immediately, it will be to me the beginning of all misfortunes; and if I do pass it, I go to make a world of people miserable’; and there withal, as if he had been pressed forward by some divinity, he drove into the stream, and crossing it, cries with a loud voice, ‘The lot is cast.’ From whence, continuing on his way with speed, he seized Ariminum by break of day, and all in an instant places garrisons in all the good places of that country, which he reduced either by force or favour.
“Meanwhile, as it happens in these unexpected alarms, the whole country was filled with people flying, the countrymen forsaking their habitations, and nothing was to be heard but cries, and lamentations, and groans, yet no man knew from whence this disorder came, but all imagined that Cæsar was upon them with all his forces. The consuls receiving the news, gave not Pompey, who perfectly understood war, leisure to prepare himself, and take his own time; they began to press him to be gone out of the city, and make levies of forces in Italy, as if Rome had been in immediate danger of being taken and plundered. And the senate surprised with so unlooked for an irruption, were terrified, and began to repent they had not accepted those reasonable conditions offered by Cæsar; but this was not till fear had opened their eyes, and led them back from partiality to reason; for now men talked of a great many prodigies and extraordinary signs which had appeared in the heavens, that it had rained blood in many places, that in others the statues of the gods had sweat, that many temples had been struck with thunderbolts, that a mule had engendered, besides an infinite of other things which seemed to foretell the change of the present state, and the ruin of the commonwealth, so as it should never be re-established; wherefore they made vows and prayers as in a public consternation. And the people, remembering again the miseries they had suffered because of the dissensions of Sulla and Marius, cried out that they ought to take away the command as well from Cæsar as from Pompey, since that was the only means to prevent a war. Cicero himself was of opinion that deputies should be sent to Cæsar to treat an accommodation, but the consuls absolutely opposed it.
“Favonius, quipping at Pompey because of a word he had once said with too much arrogance, bade him stamp on the ground with his foot, and see if any armed men would rise. To which Pompey answered: ‘You will want none so you will follow me, and are not troubled to leave the city, and Italy, itself, if there be occasion; for people of courage,’ said he, ‘do not make liberty consist in the possession of lands and houses; they cannot want in any place they come to; and if they lose not their courage, will soon recover their houses and lands.’
“After having said these words, and protested he would hold him for an enemy, who out of fear to lose what he possessed, deserted the commonwealth in extreme danger, he went out of the palace, and soon after out of the city, to join the army that was at Capua. The consuls followed him presently, but the other senators weighed it a little longer, and spent all the night in the palace, without resolving anything; and at length as soon as it was break of day, the greater part followed the same way after Pompey. Meantime, Cæsar having reached at Corfinium, L. Domitius, whom they had sent for his successor with four thousand men (of which he had already lost a part), he besieged him in the city, from whence, endeavouring to escape, the inhabitants stopped him at the gate, and brought him to Cæsar, to whom the remainder of his forces yielded themselves; he received them kindly, that he might draw others by their example, and without doing any wrong to Domitius, he suffered him to go whither he pleased, with all his equipage, hoping by this courtesy to oblige him to take his party, yet without hindering him from going to find out Pompey. Pompey on the other side marched from Capua to Brundusium, that he might thence pass to Epirus, where he designed to establish the seat of war; he sent to all provinces and to kings themselves that they should send him what forces they could supply.”[c]
Pompey having accordingly decided that the most prudent course to adopt was to quit Italy and retire across the sea, had assembled all the available troops at Brundusium, though the greater half had already happily crossed to Greece. Cæsar reached the city accompanied by his legions. But Pompey, until the return of the fleet, succeeded in baffling his efforts to close the mouth of the harbour. He now barricaded the city and the two roads leading to the harbour; the rest of the army embarked, and the retreat was made on the ships, which they carried across the sea.[117] Cæsar being left with the empty town, found his hope had failed of ending the war as quickly as he had commenced it.
CÆSAR’S SERIOUS POSITION
This success was great, but the seriousness and danger of Cæsar’s position were now evident. He could not follow Pompey as long as the general’s seven powerful Spanish legions under their legates M. Petreius and L. Afranius were behind him; and if he went to Spain against them, where was he, who had no fleet, to get the means to oppose the return to Italy of Pompey, who ruled the seas? Moreover, Italy was more surprised than conquered. He had not been able in two months to gain the influence which Pompey had spent ten years to win. What would happen if insurrection broke out against him, and if Pompey’s fleet stopped supplies? The one mode of contravening these dangers was to double his force by the swiftness of his movements. But the difficulties of his position did not end here. If he plundered like Marius and Sulla, he would arouse the diverse elements of resistance against him; if he protected life and property, he would estrange such men of his own force as Mark Antony and P. Cornelius Dolabella, who expected to pay their debts by Cæsarian proscription lists.
In the hope of subsequently disbanding Pompey’s Spanish army, Cæsar repaired first to Rome, untiring in his efforts to win over to his side the peaceful burgesses who formed the party of order. The feared proscription lists did not appear, and pardons were bruited from all sides. Perhaps this was the reason Cæsar found that the assembly of the remaining senators which he summoned were not very willing to endow him with all-embracing legal authority. Pompey was still considered the stronger; Cæsar’s success seemed only transient, and his moderation was put down to a sense of weakness. Hence Cicero, who played a pitiful part in these days and stood undecided between both parties, did not appear in the Cæsarian senate. He like many other weaklings cast longing glances to the other camp beyond the sea without mustering courage to join either party. There was at least an attempt at resistance in Rome. The plebeian tribune L. Metellus covered with his body the door leading to the public treasure. Cæsar calmly gave the necessary commands regardless of the senate, and the obstinate tribune was quietly carried from the door, which Cæsar then forced open. The gold discovered proved a powerful ally. The Pompeian party left behind in the haste of their flight not less than £3,500,000.
Cæsar then took measures and did all that was necessary to create a fleet. He gave the prætor M. Æmilius Lepidus the appointment of city prefect, and despatched his officers. The legate Valerius was sent with a legion against Sardinia, and M. Cotta, Pompey’s follower who was there in command. C. Curio was commissioned to go with three legions to Sicily against M. Porcius Cato and thence to Africa. To others he deputed the organisation of the fleet, and with the remaining nine legions he repaired to Spain.
CÆSAR LORD FROM ROME TO SPAIN
[Sidenote: [49-48 B.C.]]
The seven Pompeian legions were stationed on the Ebro under Afranius and Petreius. The important city of Massilia (Marseilles) had gone over to Pompey through the L. Domitius whom Cæsar had released after he fell into his hands at Corfinium. Cæsar was moreover prevented from taking the Pyrenean passes by the legates of his foe who now took up a position somewhat north of the Iberus at Ilerda (Lerida) on the Sicoris (the left tributary of the Ebro). Cæsar took up a position opposite, whilst he left Decimus Brutus at Massilia.
During the month of June the strength of both armies was tested in numerous battles and difficult movements, until finally Cæsar, whose knowledge of war was quite different from that of his enemies, succeeded in getting the army on to the left bank of the Sicoris and cutting his enemy off from the Ebro. Having put the enemy into this position his men began to fraternise with the Pompeians. Further bloodshed seemed superfluous. At the beginning of August, 49, the Pompeians capitulated, part of the army disbanding and part joining Cæsar. The capitulation of the army on this side led to that of Further Spain also. The province was under the command of Terentius Varro, a celebrated scholar and a zealous republican, and Massilia surrendered at the same time and escaped further condemnation by resigning its arms and fleet, a part of its territory and its garrison.
Things did not go so well in places where Cæsar could not himself be present. During his absence in Spain, M. Æmilius Lepidus, whom he had left as prefect of the city to govern Italy, had named him dictator. He assumed the great dignity thus conferred upon him, but held it only eleven days. In that period he presided at the comitia and was elected consul, together with P. Servilius Isauricus, one of his old competitors for the chief pontificate. He also passed several laws. One of these restored all exiles to the city, except Milo, thus undoing one of the last remnants of Sulla’s dictatorship. A second provided for the payment of debts, so as to lighten the burdens of the debtors without satisfying the democratic cry for an abolition of all contracts. A third conferred the franchise on the citizens of Transpadane Gaul, who had since the Social War enjoyed the Latin right only. Certainly Sardinia and Sicily were held by Cæsarian lieutenant-generals who kept the Pompeian force in check; and Curio, who here again gave evidence of his great talent, was at first victorious over the soldiers of Pompey when he was transferred from Sicily to Africa. He was victorious at Utica, and commenced the siege of the city. But a false report which led him to believe he had only to deal with a small force of the foe drew him into the Bagradas plain. He began the battle boldly, but it ended in his entire defeat when King Juba of Numidia, the ally of the Pompeians appeared in the vicinity with his ready prepared army. Curio himself fell. The rest of his troops surrendered the following day to P. Atius Varus, the Pompeian governor of Africa. Cæsar met with another reverse in Illyricum. The ships under P. Dolabella, and the land forces under C. Antonius were seized and destroyed by superior Pompeian forces in the attempt to avoid an attack of Pompey on this side.
Pompey himself had done nothing all the summer but make preparations on a colossal scale. He was probably hampered in doing what he knew would be advisable by the brainlessness, the inaccuracy, and the pride of the aristocrats about him, which, from all we know, we cannot overestimate. But it certainly gives us a very poor idea of his talent as a general when we see that whilst he was engaged, during the whole of the important summer of 48, in these fruitless preparations, he let his enemy gain possession of Spain, Italy, Sardinia, the cities of Sicily and as far as he was concerned, Africa too, without making any resistance, and even allowing the foe time to collect a naval force.
The place of assembly of the aristocrats and Pompeians was Macedonia. Their senate was held at Thessalonica where its members numbered two hundred. To their remarkable incapacity for politics the aristocrats added a deplorable want of judgment; the useless rage of this class expended itself in wild talk and revengeful plans. Defeated through their own fault, they avenged themselves with fine words for Cæsar’s energetic deeds. Their obstinate pride rejected every peace negotiation offered by Cæsar, and regaled itself in vengeance-breathing declamations. “They are,” writes Cicero, who had finally decided which party to join, “devastating in war and in their speech so wild, that I shudder at their success. They are an exalted people, but deeply in debt--but what would you have? They have nothing good about them but the cause.” Yet even the cause was bad if it had no other supporters. It was natural for Pompey to feel crippled with these generals of high rank, these incompetent officers. But he at least knew how to use the rich supplies which came to him from the East, over which he still exercised unconditional control. Eleven legions, seven thousand horsemen, Celts, Thracians, Commagenian archers, Armenians, Numidian cavalry, a fleet of 500 sail, and a well-filled treasure chest were placed at his disposal. He assembled his forces on the coast of Epirus.
CÆSAR IN GREECE
[Sidenote: [49 or 48 B.C.]]
In the meanwhile Cæsar had returned from Spain, and after a short dictatorship, he was elected in Rome consul for the year 48, and at the beginning of the year [or by the rectified calendar in November 49] collected his troops at Brundusium. He had succeeded with great trouble in collecting a fleet which, to the great surprise of the crews, brought him and his six legions safely to the Acroceraunian coast. But the bold venture might have been fatal. The fleet of the foe commanded the sea and the second fleet of transports did not appear. Cæsar found himself cut off from Italy with scarcely twenty-five thousand men. He would have been lost if Pompey had promptly advanced against him from Dyrrhachium.[b]
APPIAN DESCRIBES THE BATTLE OF DYRRHACHIUM
[Sidenote: [48 B.C.]]
“Cæsar pitched his camp directly against him, on the other side of the river Alora, which parted the two armies, where yet there happened some horse skirmishes, now one party and then another passing the river, but neither would engage with all their forces, because Pompey thought good first to exercise his forces that were newly levied, and Cæsar expected those that were to come from Brundusium. He thought if they stayed till spring, and then should come over with ships of burden (and he had no other) they could no way be secured, Pompey having such a number of galleys to defend the passage; but if they embarked during winter, they might slip by their enemies, who now lay harboured in the islands, or if they were engaged, might open themselves a passage by the violence of the winds, and the bulk of their vessels; wherefore he did all he could to hasten their coming.
“And therefore out of impatience that the rest of his army came not from Brundusium, he resolved himself to go privately over, thinking they would sooner follow him than any other; wherefore without discovering his design to any one, he sent three of his slaves to a river not above twelve furlongs distant, to secure some very light boat, and a good pilot, as if he had an intention to send him upon some design, and feigning himself ill, rose from the table where he desired his friends to continue, and taking the habit of a private man, mounting his chariot, came to the boat as Cæsar’s messenger.
“He had given orders to his slaves to command the mariners what they had to do, whilst he kept himself concealed under coverlids and the darkness of the night. Though the wind were contrary, and very raging, the slaves made the pilot put off, bidding him be of courage, and make use of his time to escape the enemy, who were not far from them, they laboured so hard, that by force of oars they got the mouth of the river, where the waves of the sea beating against the stream of the river, the pilot (who on the other side was afraid of falling into the enemies hands) did all that was possible for man to do, till seeing they gained nothing, and the seamen not able to pull any longer, he left the helm. Then the consul discovering his head, cried out, ‘Courage, pilot, fear no storm, for thou carriest Cæsar and his fortune.’ Whereupon the pilot and his crew astonished at these words, redoubling their force, passed the mouth of the river; got out to sea; but because the winds and the waves still drove them towards the lee shore in spite of all their endeavours, and day approaching, the mariners fearing to be discovered by the enemy, Cæsar angry at fortune that envied him, suffered the pilot to regain the river, and the boat presently running afore the wind, came to the place from whence they set out: Cæsar’s friends admired at his boldness, others blamed him for having done an action more proper for a private soldier than a general; and he seeing his design had not succeeded, and that it was impossible for him to pass over without being known, sent Postumius in his place. He first had charge to tell Gabinius that he should presently embark the army, and bring it to him; and if he refused, then to address himself to Antony, and at last to Calenus, and if none of these three had spirit enough to execute these orders, he had a letter for the army in general, by which the soldiers were exhorted to come over and follow Postumius, landing at any place they could, without regarding the ships; for he had more need of men than ships, so much confidence had he in fortune, indeed more than in prudence.
“Pompeius then judging he ought no longer to delay, drew out his army in battalia, and caused them to advance against Cæsar; but two of his soldiers being entered into the river to sound the ford, and one of Cæsar’s men having slain them both, he took this as an ill presage, and led back his forces into the camp, though many lamented the loss of so fair an occasion.
“As for the forces at Brundusium, Gabinius, refusing to follow the orders brought by Postumius, with all that would follow him, went the way of Illyricum by land, taking such long marches that his men being quite tired the inhabitants of the country cut them all in pieces, for which Cæsar could not yet be revenged, being engaged in affairs of more importance. Antony shipped away the rest, and having the wind right aft, passed in sight of Apollonia with a merry gale; but about noon the wind beginning to slacken, they were discovered by twenty of Pompey’s galleys, who made up towards them; they were fearful lest the stems of the long ships running on board them should pierce through and sink them. However, they were preparing to fight, every man laying hold of his sling, his javelin, or arms of the like nature; when on a sudden there sprung up a fresher gale than the former; so that Antony, setting his low sails, went spooning away before, whilst the others, not able to bear sail, were tossed to and fro where the winds and waves pleased, and at length driven into the narrows and cast upon lee shores where there was neither port nor harbour. Thus Antony safely recovered the port of Nymphæum without losing more than two ships, which unfortunately running upon the flats were taken by the enemies.
“Cæsar having now with him all his forces as well as Pompey, they pitched their camps in sight of each other upon eminences where each entrenched themselves, raising out forts, which were often attacked by one party and the other, one general still striving to block up the other’s army and cut them off from provisions, so that there happened many skirmishes. In this new mode of making war, as Cæsar’s men one day proved the weaker in a fort assailed by the enemy, a centurion called Scæva, famous before for many gallant actions, being wounded in an eye, leaped from the rampart, and making a sign with his hand for silence, as if he had something to say, he called to one of the centurions of the contrary party, a man of reputation, to whom he said, ‘Save the life of one of thy own quality, save the life of thy friend; send somebody to lead me by the hand, thus wounded as I am.’ Whereupon two soldiers stepping in to receive him as a runaway, he slew one before he suspected the deceit, and knocked the other down. He did this action out of the pure despair he was in of being able to defend the place; but it succeeded better than he imagined, for this happy success so raised the courage of his companions that they repulsed the enemy and remained masters of the fort. Minucius, who commanded, had a great share in the glory as well as in the danger of this assault, for ’tis said that his buckler was six and twenty times pierced through, and he was wounded in the eye as well as Scæva; so Cæsar honoured them both with many military recompenses.
“Meantime he had formed intelligence in Dyrrhachium, and upon hopes the place would be delivered to him, he came with a small company to the gate which is near the temple of Diana; but his design being discovered, came off again without doing anything. The same winter Scipio, father-in-law to Pompey, bringing him another army out of Syria, was set upon in Macedon by C. Calvisius, whom he defeated, and slew him a whole legion, fourscore soldiers only escaping. There came now no more provisions to Cæsar by sea, Pompeius being the stronger, wherefore the soldiers were forced to make bread of a certain kind of herb, pieces of which being by some runaways brought to Pompey, thinking it would be to him a joyful present. Instead of rejoicing at it, ‘What sort of beasts,’ said he, ‘have we to deal with?’ Cæsar now pinched with necessity drew together his forces, resolving to engage Pompey whether he would or no; but Pompey being now possessed of several good forts, kept close in his trenches, which so much troubled Cæsar that he undertook a work almost impossible, and scarcely credible, which was to enclose all the forts Pompey had with a trench drawn from the sea, judging that though his design took not effect, he should gain the reputation of a man capable of great things; for this trench must have been twelve hundred furlongs in length. Pompey on his part, drew lines and trenches directly opposite to Cæsar’s works; thus one eluded the enterprises of the other.
“At length there happened a great fight between them, wherein Pompey bravely repulsing Cæsar’s men and having put them to flight, pursued them to their very camp. Many colours they took and had taken the eagle of a legion, if the standard-bearer who carried it had not thrown it with all his force into the trenches, that he might preserve it for Cæsar; for the Roman soldiery have a great respect for their standards. Cæsar with other companies came to the relief of those that fled, but so terrified were these too, that as soon as they beheld Pompey at a distance, though they were near the camp, it was not possible for Cæsar to stop them, nor to make them go in again, nor so much as to hearken to him; the soldiers fled away in disorder without shame, without reason, or without anything to oblige them to it; Cæsar might well run up and down, and with reproaches show them that Pompey was yet a great way off. This hindered them not from throwing down their arms and flying, or else standing still, silent and immovable, fixing their eyes upon the ground with shame and confusion, so great was that panic fear that possessed them. There was an ensign who, as his general would have stopped him, presented him the point of his javelin, but he was upon the spot punished by the gods as he deserved. Those who escaped into the camp were so cast down that they kept no guard at the gates nor lined the rampire, but the trenches were left without any to defend them. All men believed that Pompey might have thrown himself into the camp with the flyers, and so have made an end of the war, if Labienus (for God would have it so) had not persuaded him rather to pursue those he had routed, then march up to the trenches; him therefore he believed, whether it were that he was not in such haste as to make an end of all at once, or that seeing the camp defenceless, he feared some ambuscade, or else being victorious, scorned that little advantage. Going therefore to charge those that were still abroad, he made yet a great slaughter, so that in two engagements in one day he gained twenty-eight colours, and twice lost the opportunity of ruining his enemy beyond redress. And Cæsar himself stuck not to say that that day the war had been ended, had his enemy known how to make use of his victory.
“Pompey after this glorious success wrote largely of it to the kings and commonalties; and conceived hopes that in a short time Cæsar’s army, either oppressed by famine or terrified with disgrace, would yield themselves to him; especially the tribunes, fearful of being punished for a fault they knew themselves guilty of. But they and all the soldiers touched with repentance as by divine inspiration, confessed themselves criminals; and afflicted themselves the more, that their general spoke kindly to them, and granted them pardon before they asked it: they would not forgive themselves; but with a wonderful change desired, as a punishment of their fault, they might be decimated according to the custom of their ancestors, but he would by no means admit it; which increased their shame the more that they should be guilty of such cowardice in prejudice of the best man of the world, and who most deserved their faith and their services.
“They besought him that at least he would punish the ensigns, who had been the cause of this rout; for in flying they had only followed their colours; and seeing Cæsar could not resolve to do that, but with much ado would consent to the punishment of a few, his moderation begot in the mind of the soldiers a general joy.
“They began all with one voice to cry out that he should lead them against the enemy, that by gaining a new victory they might wipe away their infamy; and in the sight of their general they swore by whole companies one to the other, never to return from the fight but victorious. Wherefore his friends advised him to take the army at their words, and make trial of them upon this height of repentance before their zeal grew cooler; but he answered them before all the multitude that he would choose a time more proper to show them the enemy; exhorting them then to remember the good will they now protested, and in private he told his confidants that it was convenient to let that fear which so late a loss had imprinted be worn a little out of the minds of the soldiery; and by temporising, let the fierceness of his enemies heightened by their late victory, be likewise a little cooled: He confessed withal he had committed a great fault in coming to a camp so near Dyrrhachium, where Pompey had all things in abundance; whereas if he had drawn himself farther off, they might have met with equal difficulties.
“After having discoursed in this manner, he came to Apollonia, and from thence privately by night took his march towards Thessaly; and on the way, coming to a little city called Gomphi, that refused to open their gates, he took it by storm and gave the plunder to his soldiers; who having long endured scarcity, fed now beyond measure, and filled themselves with wine, especially the Alamanni, whose drunkenness made them ridiculous to all the rest: so that here again in all appearance Pompey lost a fair occasion of victory by not pursuing an enemy he despised; but lying still, whilst in seven days’ march he got into Thessaly, and encamped near Pharsalia.”[c]
The pride of the victorious party after the success of Dyrrhachium knew no bounds. They were in no hurry to follow the advice of prudent men and to get possession of Italy again. The danger, if it had ever existed, now seemed past. The rest of the campaign would be nothing more than a safe march; the wild plans of revenge with which they had hoped to exceed the Sullanian restoration and its terrors seemed quite near their fulfilment.
Such was the mood of the army, especially of the conceited young aristocracy, when Pompey’s army joined with Scipio’s corps at Larissa, whilst Cato remained with eighteen cohorts at Dyrrhachium, and the Pompeian fleet of three hundred ships dropped anchor at Corcyra.
PHARSALIA
Cæsar had stationed himself by the town of Pharsalia on the left bank of the river Enipeus, which traverses the plain between the line of hills of Cynoscephalæ in the north and the mountains of Othrys in the south, and Pompey took up his stand on the right bank, at the foot of the Cynoscephalæ hills. Pompey could have conquered his foe by prolonging the war, and he, with his own experience of war, was himself conscious of the fact. But he had long ceased to be master in his camp. It was ruled by a hydra-headed regiment of high-born people, and the hot-blooded noble youth were already, as if victory was assured, disputing the division of the honours of Cæsar and the property of his allies. They pressed for a decisive blow, and they gave Pompey to understand that he was too fond of playing the part of Agamemnon, the king of kings, the commander-in-chief of so many prætors and consuls, the king of vassals and the prince of clients.[118] Confident of success they pointed to the forty-seven thousand foot-soldiers, and the seven thousand horsemen of their own army, which far exceeded the twenty thousand of Cæsar’s beaten force.
Pompey could not resist the pressure. He had put himself into this position, so he ceased to delay; and on the fateful 9th of August 48 [6th of June by the rectified calendar] he led his army over the river Enipeus.
Success seemed to favour the aristocrats when their numerous superior cavalry surrounded Cæsar’s right wing, which faced the plain, whilst the fighting by Cæsar’s left wing was resultless, and the weak cavalry of Cæsar could not long withstand the masses of Pompeian horsemen. T. Labienus commanded the corps against his former imperator, but as he pressed forward victoriously he was opposed by the two thousand picked legionaries which Cæsar, foreseeing the enemy’s attack, had placed there. “Strike the pretty young dancers on the face,” cried their general to them, and the determined, unexpected method in which they, contrary to custom, used the pila as lances threw the enemy’s cavalry into disorder and forced it to flight.
Cæsar profited by this movement to make his reserve line advance for a general attack. Pompey’s legions, greatly inferior to Cæsar’s veterans in military prowess, began to retreat across the Enipeus. All was not yet lost, but Pompey, too spoiled by success to bear a moment’s reverse, neglected his duty, and throwing up the sponge he rode back to the camp. The vanquished legions gradually followed suit, as it became known in their ranks that mercy and consideration would be shown them by the enemy. They were driven from the camp by fresh onslaughts, and at midday it was stormed by the Cæsarians.
But Pompey had already mounted his horse and fled. His soldiers, in increasing disorder, destitute of command albeit fighting continuously, withdrew to the hills in the attempt to reach Larissa by that route.
But the dissolution was at hand; a number cast down their arms trusting to the victors’ promised mercy, and those who reached the heights were disappointed in their hope of getting to Larissa, for they were surrounded in the evening by Cæsar’s lines. The next morning twenty thousand men, a whole army, laid down their arms; fifteen thousand capitulated the previous day, whilst not more than six thousand lost their lives.
The victory did not cost Cæsar more than one thousand men. The enemy’s army was destroyed, but the results of the battle were not foreseen. They depended upon the course Pompey would take. Of him nothing was known but that he had taken the road to the sea and had escaped.
It is evident that this battle was mainly lost from want of command. But why did Pompey so quickly give it up for lost without any attempt to arrest the course of fate? We have no record from his headquarters which can throw light upon these facts, but it seems that the party of which he was the chief had grown too much for him; that a deep discontent and ill-humour took possession of him, and both the party and the cause for which he had sacrificed himself had become loathsome to him before the battle took place. This is the only explanation of his conduct at the battle. How could it be otherwise? His aim and object were quite opposed to those of the party to which he was chained, and he was so entirely in its power that even complete victory would have only benefited them, not him. Perhaps the shame of appearing before his own party drove him to this hasty flight; perhaps he was afraid of personal danger at the hands of his colleagues, for this Pompeian camp was torn with every passion. Suffice it to say he escaped, and this flight made the defeat dangerous, for his person was the rallying point for the resistance of his party.
He hastened to Larissa; then disguised, and with a few companions, he proceeded to the mouth of the Peneus, the celebrated Vale of Tempe, and from thence by ship to Amphipolis.
At Mytilene he took his wife Cornelia and his son Sextus on board, but he did not stop there, as the news of the disastrous battle and the unexpected consequence had spread all over Asia Minor. It did not seem advisable to attempt anything here. But he conceived the plan of putting himself at the head of his large fleet and joining the victorious land force in Africa. Choosing another course and another country, he might, perhaps, hope to be more independent. So he decided to turn to Egypt and start fresh undertakings, with this excellent position as a basis. But they were undertakings in which he had no real confidence, through having once been crossed by fortune.
Whilst the princes and powers of the East hastened to lay down their arms and cast themselves upon the mercy of the conqueror after the battle of Pharsalia, Pompey pursued the lonely course in which he met his fate.
From the coast of Asia Minor he sailed to Cyprus and from thence to the Egyptian shore after announcing his intended arrival to the king who was still a minor. The eunuch Pothinus persuaded Ptolemy, a thirteen year old boy, to secure as he thought, by a bloody deed, the favour of the victor whose support he would need against the claims of his sister, Cleopatra, who disputed his claim to the throne.
The ships of Pompey came in sight east of Pelusium by the Cassian Mountains. Egyptian troops were assembled on the shore, and in their midst stood the king. Then there pushed off from the shore a little boat, in which were Achillas, the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army, and two Roman officers. One of them greeted the imperator and invited him to board the boat as the shallow water of the shore prevented a large ship being sent. His party was suspicious. But Pompey, deaf to their warning and adjurations, embarked in the boat with two companions. Before he left he was heard to repeat to Cornelia the lines of Sophocles:
“Who to the tyrant turns his step Becomes his slave altho’ he went as a liberator.”
The boat approached the shore. “Do I see in thee one of the dangers of war?” said Pompey to one of the officers who bowed his head in silence, whereupon Pompey without further parley took a leaf in his hand and wrote a message to the king in the Greek language. The boat arrived, Pompey arose to disembark. At that moment he received a blow from behind and the two other men straightway fell upon him. Resistance was impossible. Pompey resigned himself to his fate without making a sound, he covered his face and fell dying to the ground. He was in the fifty-eighth year of his life and he died in the thirty-fifth of his career as a general. The body was left upon the beach, a prey to animals, but perhaps some faithful followers may have secretly saved it; the head, the witness of their scandalous deed, was taken off by the Egyptians.
Such was the sad end of a man whom the freaks of fortune and the great confusion of the Roman state raised to a height beyond his natural power. He, like Marius, was above all, a great soldier, clever enough to accomplish deeds when favoured by fortune but not independent enough to attain them against odds. He was unequalled in warlike courage, military skill, and personal bravery, and his moderate life in spite of his great wealth put the aristocrats of his time to shame. But he was utterly wanting in the higher qualities which secure lasting success, overthrow effete state organisations and construct new ones in their places. He was hard, selfish, and cruel. “As oppressor,” as a Roman subsequently said of him, “not better than Marius or Sulla.” Neither did he retain his position as a great general when the time came to prove his real worth, and his utter want of independence and capacity as a statesman was the rock upon which his life was wrecked; whilst Cæsar’s success was due to his capacity as a general as well as a statesman, and the power of bringing both these qualities to bear upon his course.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[115] [The purity of this primitive age has been universally exaggerated. Early Roman virtue was based on poverty and ignorance.]
[116] [Of him Velleius Paterculus[e] says, “For producing the civil war and all the calamities that ensued from it for twenty successive years, there was no one that supplied more flame and excitement than Caius Curio. He was of noble birth, eloquent, intrepid, prodigal alike of his own reputation and fortune and those of others; a man ably wicked and eloquent to the injury of the public, and whose passions and designs no degree of wealth or gratification could satisfy.”]
[117] [Says Florus:[d] “Dishonourable to relate! he that was recently as the head of the senate, the arbiter of peace and war, fled across the sea over which he had once triumphed, in a single vessel that was shattered and almost dismantled.”]
[118] [“Thus the fates hurrying him on, Thessaly was chosen as the theatre for battle, and the destiny of the city, the empire, and the whole of mankind, was committed to the plains of Philippi. Never did fortune behold so many of the forces, or so much of the dignity, of the Roman people collected in one place. More than three hundred thousand men were assembled in the two armies, besides the auxiliary troops of kings and nations. Nor were there ever more manifest signs of some approaching destruction; the escape of victims, swarms of bees settling on the standards, and darkness in the daytime; while the general himself, in a dream by night, heard a clapping of hands in his own theatre at Rome, which rung in his ears like the beating of breasts in sorrow; and he appeared in the morning (an unlucky omen!) clad in black in the centre of the army.”--FLORUS.[d]]
XXIV. FROM PHARSALIA TO THE DEATH OF CATO
CÆSAR IN EGYPT
The nobles betrayed their own cause at Pharsalia by their want of courage and self-devotion. It is in vain that Lucan rounds a poetical period with the names of the Lepidi, the Metelli, the Corvini, and the Torquati, whom he supposes to have fallen in the last agony of the defence; of all the great chiefs whom we know as leaders in the Pompeian camp, Domitius alone perished on that day, and even he was killed in flight.
The fragments of the mighty ruin were scattered far away from the scene of disaster. Pompey and a few adherents fled, as we have seen, in one direction to Larissa; a larger number escaped by the road to Illyricum, and met again within the walls of Dyrrhachium. The principal reserve of the Pompeian forces was there commanded by M. Cato, and there also was the common resort of the wavering and dissatisfied, such as Varro and Cicero, who wished to secure their own safety in either event. The fleets of the republic, under Octavius and C. Cassius, still swept the seas triumphantly; the latter had recently burnt thirty-five Cæsarian vessels in the harbour of Messana. But the naval commanders were well aware that their exploits could have little influence on the event of a contest which was about to be decided by the whole military force of the Roman world; and forming their own plans, and acting for the most part independently, they began more and more to waver in their fidelity to the common cause. As soon as the event of the great battle became known, the squadrons of the allies made the best of their way home, while some, such as the Rhodians, attached themselves to the conqueror.
Then the soldiers in garrison at Dyrrhachium became turbulent. They plundered the magazines and burnt the transports on which they were destined to be conveyed to some distant theatre of protracted warfare. The desertion of the allies, the mutinous spirit of the troops, and the report of the numerous adhesions which Cæsar was daily receiving from the most conspicuous of the nobles, convinced Cato that the last hope of keeping the party together, and maintaining the struggle effectually, depended upon the fate of Pompey himself. In the event of the destruction of the acknowledged chief of the senate, he only contemplated restoring to the shores of Italy the troops confided to him, and then betaking himself to retirement from public affairs in some remote province. While the fatal catastrophe was yet unknown he withdrew from Dyrrhachium to Corcyra, where the headquarters of the naval force were established; and there he offered to surrender his command to Cicero as his superior in rank. But the consular declined the perilous honour, and refused to take any further part in a contest which, from the first, had inspired him with distrust and remorse. The young Cneius Pompey had urged the exercise of summary vengeance upon whomsoever should threaten defection at such a crisis, and it was with difficulty he was restrained from using personal violence against Cicero, when he declared his intention of embarking at once for Italy. The recreant consular’s life was barely saved by Cato’s vigorous interference. At Corcyra many of the fugitives from the field of battle rejoined their confederates. Among them were Scipio and Afranius, the former of whom now assumed the command of their combined forces, and it was upon him, as soon as the fact of Pompey’s death was ascertained, that the leadership of the party most naturally devolved.
Meanwhile, Cæsar followed up his success with unabated activity. He allowed his soldiers at the most only two days’ repose on the scene of their triumph, and amidst the spoils they had acquired. His care was divided between improving the victory he had gained in the East, and securing his acquisitions in the West. With the latter view he ordered Antony to return to Italy with a large part of his forces, and watch over his interests in that quarter, where he apprehended that some of the beaten faction might hazard a descent upon the centre of his resources. He also required his lieutenant Calenus to complete, without delay, the subjugation of southern Greece. Athens had not yet opened her gates to him, but the event of the great battle determined her to obey his summons. The long resistance this city had made exposed it, by the laws of ancient warfare, to the vengeance of the conqueror; but Cæsar ordered it to be spared, for the sake, as he said, of its illustrious dead. The Peloponnesus was now speedily evacuated by the forces of the republic, and Calenus occupied the points on the coast where he anticipated the possibility of fresh intrusion. Scipio had landed at Patræ, probably to receive the remnant of the Pompeian garrisons in that province, but straightway abandoned it, and stretched his sails for Africa.
Cæsar devoted himself to the pursuit of Pompey with the utmost energy and impatience, being anxious not merely to prevent his assembling a new armament, but if possible to secure his person. He pushed forward with a squadron of cavalry, and was followed by a single legion. He reached Amphipolis just after the fugitive’s departure, and, taking the route of Asia by land, crossed the Hellespont with a few small vessels. In the passage he fell in with the squadron of C. Cassius, who had been despatched to the Euxine to stimulate or co-operate with Pharnaces, king of Pontus, whose promised succours were urgently demanded. It was remarked as an extraordinary instance of the good fortune ever supposed to wait upon the mighty conqueror, that the mere terror of his name induced Cassius to surrender his galleys to a few fishing-boats. There can be little doubt that the republican commander had already made up his mind to change his side, when accident threw this favourable opportunity in his way. As a man of influence and authority, as well as an able soldier, he was well received by his adopted leader, and the good offices attributed to Brutus could hardly have been required to conciliate to him the favour of Cæsar.
Having now arrived on the Asiatic coast, Cæsar advanced more leisurely. He had received information of Pompey’s flight to Egypt, and was aware that, if the suppliant were received there, he could not be dislodged except by regular military operations. He was content therefore to await the arrival of ampler succours, and employed himself in the meanwhile with repairing the injuries which Scipio was accused of having inflicted upon the unfortunate provincials. He earned their favourable opinion by the remission of taxes, and by restraining the exactions of the farmers of the revenue. He saved a second time from spoliation the treasures of the Ephesian Diana, which Ampius, an adherent of the opposite party, had been on the point of seizing. These benefits he accompanied with further favours and distinctions, and then handed over the government of the province to Calvinus, to whom he entrusted three legions, to defend it against Pharnaces and the other oriental allies of the senate. Cæsar retained only two legions about his own person, and those so much reduced in number as to contain much less, than half their proper complements. The whole of this force consisted of only 3200 infantry, and eight hundred cavalry, and with these he sailed without hesitation for Egypt. It was only a few days after the death of Pompey that he appeared thus attended off the port of Alexandria. No sooner was his arrival known than Theodotus hastened to meet him on board his vessel, and brought to him the head and ring of his murdered rival. The latter might be of important service to assure the wavering of the event which had occurred, and Cæsar took and preserved it for that purpose; but from the mangled head he turned away with horror, and gave orders, with tears in his eyes, that it should be consumed with the costliest spices. The ashes he caused to be deposited in a shrine which he erected to the avenging Nemesis. The murderers were confounded and alarmed at the feeling he exhibited, nor were they less astonished, perhaps, at the perfect confidence with which he disembarked upon their coast, and claimed with his handful of followers to settle the concerns of a powerful kingdom.
It had been Cæsar’s policy to spare the wealth of the provinces which he wished to attach to his side, and his system was directly opposed to the confiscation of his enemies’ estates; but his want of money was urgent, and it was in arranging the quarrels of a dependent kingdom that the best opportunity might be found for exacting it. This undoubtedly was the urgent motive which impelled him to intrude upon the affairs of a jealous people, in which his principal designs were in no way implicated. When Auletes came to Rome to negotiate his restoration to the throne, he had purchased the support of the leaders of the senate by the most lavish bribes. Cæsar himself had received the promise of seventeen millions and a half of drachmæ; an obligation which had never yet been discharged. He now confined his demand to ten millions, but sternly rejected the representations of Pothinus, who pleaded for a longer time for the payment of so large a sum. But even at the moment of landing Cæsar was warned of the difficulties into which he was rushing. His military force was contemptible; it was upon the dignity of his title as consul of the republic that he could alone rely. Accordingly, he entered the streets of Alexandria with all the insignia of his office, thereby offending the populace, who were easily persuaded that he offered an intentional insult to their independence. A riot ensued, in which many of the Cæsarian soldiers lost their lives. Cæsar felt that he had mistaken the character of the nation, and underrated their jealousy of foreigners.
But policy would not allow him to give way. He summoned the rival sovereigns before him, and offered to decide their disputes in the name of the republic. Ptolemy left his camp at Pelusium, and gave Cæsar a meeting in the palace of Alexandria, where he soon found himself watched and detained as a hostage. Cleopatra had already implored the consul’s mediation, and now, when her brother or his ministers obstructed her approach to his presence, she caused herself to be carried by stratagem into his chamber. The fame of Cleopatra’s beauty, which was destined to become second only to Helen’s in renown, was already bruited widely abroad. She had been seen by Mark Antony during the brief inroad of Gabinius into Egypt; and grave legates of the republic had brought back to Rome glowing reports of the girlish charms of the Lagid princess. She was indeed, at the time of her introduction to Cæsar, not twenty years old, and her wit and genius in the arts of female conquest were yet unknown. Perhaps it was fortunate for their celebrity that the man upon whom she was first to prove their power was already predisposed to submit. Cæsar forthwith undertook the championship of the distressed beauty, for it suited his purpose to play off her claims against the haughty minions of her rival. In devoting himself to her cause he did not deny himself the reward of his gallantry; but while he indulged in the luxuries and dissipations of the most sensual of capitals, he kept his eye steadily fixed on his main object, and at the same time carefully guarded his own person from the machinations of his unscrupulous enemies.
The ministers of the young king were well assured that the reconciliation of the brother and sister would be the signal for their own disgrace. They employed every artifice to rouse the passions of a jealous mob, and alarmed the fanaticism of priests and people against a foreigner, whom they accused of desecrating their holy places, of eating accursed meats, and violating their most cherished usages. Cæsar had despatched an urgent message to Calvinus to hasten to his succour with all the forces he could muster. But while waiting for the arrival of reinforcements, the necessity of which he now keenly felt, he dissembled every appearance of apprehension, and occupied himself in public with the society of Cleopatra, or in conversation with the Egyptian sages, and inquiry into their mysterious lore. His judgment was no more mastered by a woman’s charms than by the fascinations of science; but the occupation of Alexandria was essential to his plans, and he assumed the air of curiosity or dissipation to veil his ulterior designs. With this view he visited with affected interest all the vaunted wonders of the city of the Ptolemies, and even proposed, it was said, to relinquish his schemes of ambition to discover the sources of the Nile. At the first outset of his career of glory, his imagination had been fired at Gades by the sight of Alexander’s statue; now that the highest summit of power was within his reach, he descended to the tomb of the illustrious conqueror, and mused perhaps on the vanity of vanities beside his shrouded remains.
The young king, though kept in hardly disguised captivity within the walls of his palace, had found means to communicate to his adherents the alarm and indignation with which he viewed the apparent influence of his sister over the Roman commander. The Macedonian dynasty which had reigned for three centuries in Alexandria was not unpopular with its Egyptian subjects. Though the descendants of Lagus had degenerated from the genius and virtues of the first sovereigns of their line, their sway had ever been mild and tolerant, and both conquerors and conquered reposed in equal security under the shadow of their paternal throne. Achillas, the general of the king’s armies, had a force of twenty thousand men, consisting principally of the troops which Gabinius had employed in the restoration of Auletes, and which had been left behind for his protection. These men had for the most part formed connections with the natives, and had imbibed their sentiments at the same time that they adopted their manners. The camp was filled, moreover, with a crowd of deserters and fugitive slaves from all parts of the Roman Empire, for Alexandria was the common resort of the desperate and abandoned, who purchased impunity for their crimes by enlisting in the king’s service. These were the men who had placed Auletes on his throne, who had murdered the sons of the Roman legate Gabinius, and expelled Cleopatra from her royal inheritance. They were the reckless agents of the populace of Alexandria in each capricious mood of turbulence or loyalty. They were now prepared to join in the general outcry against the intrusion of the Romans, and encouraged by their leader and Arsinoe, the younger sister of their sovereign, they entered the city, and imparted vigour and concentration to the hostile ebullitions of the multitude.
[Sidenote: [48-47 B.C.]]
Cæsar awaited anxiously the expected succours; in the meantime he sought to avert the danger by concession, and while he proposed that Ptolemy and Cleopatra should resume their joint sovereignty, he was prepared to satisfy the claims of Arsinoe by surrendering to her, together with another younger brother, the province of Cyprus. But before these arrangements were completed, the discontent of the Alexandrians revived with more alarming violence. A skirmish which occurred in the streets between the Roman soldiers and the Egyptians determined Cæsar to take the bold step of seizing and burning the royal fleet. It was thus only that he could hope to keep the coasts open for the approach of his reinforcements. The city of Alexandria stretched along the sea-shore, and its port was formed by an island named Pharos, which lay over against it, and was connected with the mainland in the middle by a narrow causeway and bridge. The island was occupied by the villas of the Alexandrians and the suburbs of the great city. Its position enabled it to command the entrances of the double port which were apparently much narrower than at the present day. As a military position therefore it was invaluable, and while the tumult was raging in the streets Cæsar transported into it a portion of his troops, and seized the tower or fortress which secured its possession. At the same time he continued to occupy a portion of the palace on the mainland, which held the keys of communication with Pharos by the causeway. He strengthened the defences with additional works, destroying in every direction the private houses of the citizens, which being built entirely of stone, even to the floors and roofs, furnished him with abundant materials for his massive constructions. The Egyptian troops set to work with no less energy in forming triple barricades of hewn stone at the entrance of every street, and thus entrenching themselves in a fortress in the heart of their city. They looked forward already to the arrival of winter, and were convinced that the enemy must fall eventually into their hands, when he could no longer derive supplies from beyond the sea.
But in the meanwhile the shade of Pompey began to be avenged on his murderers. At the commencement of the outbreak Cæsar had seized the person of Pothinus, who was in attendance upon the young king, and detecting him in correspondence with Achillas he put him summarily to death. Soon after, Arsinoe, who hoped to make use of the Egyptian general to elevate herself into the royal seat, having reason to be dissatisfied with his conduct, induced her confidant Ganymedes to assassinate him. The adhesion of the army she secured by a munificent largess, appointed Ganymedes her minister and general, and, assuming the diadem of her ancestors, caused herself to be proclaimed sole queen of Egypt.
The Alexandrians pressed the blockade with pertinacity. They could not hope to dislodge the enemy by force, but they expected to reduce him by cutting off his means of subsistence. A contemporary writer describes the artificial contrivances by which the population of Alexandria obtained their water, an abundance of which is of such primary necessity in the climate of Egypt. It is well known that rain rarely falls there, nor were there living springs for the supply of fountains. The common people, indeed, were content with the water of the Nile in the turbid state in which it flows through their slimy plain; but the houses of the wealthier classes were supplied by means of subterranean channels, with which the whole city was mined, and through which the stream of the river was carried into reservoirs, where the noxious sediment was gradually deposited. Such of these channels as led to the parts of the city occupied by the Romans the Alexandrians obstructed, so as to prevent the river from flowing into them, while on the other hand they filled them with sea-water, raised by hydraulic machinery, in the construction of which they were eminently expert. This operation caused at first great consternation among the Romans, and still more among the native population shut up within their defences. But its effect was defeated by Cæsar’s sagacity. He caused his soldiers to dig pits on the sandy beach, and the brackish water which oozed up in them furnished a sufficient supply, not altogether unfit for drinking. At the same time the arrival of a legion from Asia, with a convoy of provisions and military stores, at a point a little to the west of Alexandria, revived the courage of the besieged, and restored the fortunes of their commander.
The Rhodian vessels which had betaken themselves to Cæsar’s side were now of great service to him in establishing a communication with these reinforcements. The islanders of Rhodes had succeeded to the nautical skill of Athens and Corinth, and were among the expert mariners of the time. Combined with the small flotilla which Cæsar had brought with him, and the ships which had lately arrived, these new allies presented a formidable force. The Egyptians, however, though the royal fleet had been destroyed, possessed considerable resources for the equipment of a naval armament. They collected from every quarter all the vessels they could muster, and hastily constructed others, till they found themselves in a condition to dispute once more the approach to the harbour. Nor were they less vigorous in the attack they made upon the enemy’s defences by land. The crisis of danger called forth all Cæsar’s energies; he never exposed his person more boldly, or encountered more imminent peril. At one moment he was so hard pressed as to be forced to leap from his vessel into the sea, and swim for his life, carrying his most valuable papers in his hand above the water, and leaving his cloak in the possession of the assailants, who retained it as a trophy, as the Arverni had preserved his sword.
The Egyptians indeed were ultimately worsted in every encounter, but they could still return to the attack with increased numbers; and Cæsar’s resources were so straitened that he was not disinclined to listen to terms of accommodation, the insincerity of which was transparent. The Alexandrian populace declared themselves weary of the rule of their young princess, and disgusted with the tyranny of Ganymedes. Their rightful sovereign once restored to them, they would unite heartily with the republic, and defy the fury of the upstart and the usurper. It cannot be supposed that the Roman general was deceived by these protestations; the bad faith of the Alexandrians was already proverbial in the West. But he expected perhaps that the rivalry of Ptolemy and Arsinoe would create dissension in their camps; he may have preferred coping with the young king in open war, to keeping a guard over him, and watching the intrigues with which he beguiled his captivity; possibly the surrender was made in concession to a pressure he could not resist, and was adopted as a means of gaining time. But when Ptolemy was restored to his subjects, and immediately led them to another attack upon the Roman position, the soldiers are said to have felt no little satisfaction at the reward of what they deemed their general’s weak compliance.
Cleopatra, whose blandishments were still the solace of the Roman general throughout his desperate adventure, rejoiced to see her brother thus treacherously array himself in rash hostility to her protector. The toils were beginning to close around the young king. Mithridates of Pergamus, an adherent in whose fidelity and conduct Cæsar placed great reliance, was advancing with the reinforcements he had been commissioned to collect in Syria and the adjacent provinces. He reduced Pelusium, the key of Egypt by land as Pharos was by sea, and crossed the Nile at the head of the Delta, routing a division of the king’s troops which attempted to check his progress. Ptolemy led forth his army to give battle to the new invader, and was followed by Cæsar. The Romans came up with the Egyptians, crossed the river in the face of their superior numbers, and attacked them in their entrenchments, which, from their knowledge both of the Macedonian and the Roman art of war, were probably not deficient in scientific construction. But the shock of the veterans was irresistible. The Egyptians fled, leaving great numbers slaughtered within the lines, and falling into their own ditches in confused and mangled heaps. The fugitives rushed to the channel of the Nile, where their vessels were stationed, and crowded into them without order or measure. One of them in which Ptolemy had taken refuge was thus overladen and sank.
This signal defeat, and still more the death of their unfortunate sovereign, reduced the defenders of the monarchy to despair. The populace of Alexandria issued from their gates to meet the conqueror in the attitude of suppliants and with the religious ceremonies by which they were wont to deprecate the wrath of their legitimate rulers. He entered the city, and directed his course through the principal streets, where the hostile barricades were levelled at his approach, till he reached the quarters in which his own garrison was stationed. He now reconstituted the government by appointing Cleopatra to the sovereignty, in conjunction with another younger brother, while he sent Arsinoe under custody to await his future triumph at Rome. The throne of his favourite he pretended to secure by leaving a Roman force in Alexandria. The pride of the republic was gratified by thus advancing another step towards the complete subjugation of a country it had long coveted. Cæsar was anxious that so much Roman blood as had been shed in his recent campaigns should not appear to have sunk into the earth, and borne no fruit of glory and advantage to the state. The whole of this episode in his eventful history, his arrogant dictation to the rulers of a foreign people, his seizing and keeping in captivity the person of the sovereign, his discharging him on purpose that he might compromise himself by engaging in direct hostilities, and his taking advantage of his death to settle the succession and intrude a foreign army upon the new monarch, form altogether a pregnant example of the craft and unscrupulousness of Roman ambition.[b]
The ancients have given us no satisfactory solution of Cæsar’s object in allowing himself to be entangled in this war. We cannot believe that he was really intoxicated by a passion for Cleopatra, and surrendered his judgment and policy to her fascinations. It is more probable that he had fixed his eyes upon the treasures of Alexandria, to furnish himself with the resources of which he stood greatly in need; for he still firmly abstained from the expedients of plunder and confiscation within the limits of the empire, and the great victory of Pharsalia though rich in laurels had proved barren of emolument. He had yet another campaign to undertake against the beaten party, and his troops, so often balked of their prize, might require an instalment of the rewards of their final triumph. But when once engaged in a contest with the Egyptians, it was no longer politic, indeed it was hardly possible to withdraw. Cæsar threw himself, as was his wont, heart and soul into the struggle, and risked everything in a warfare which he felt to be ignoble. But when at last fortune favoured his arms, he still allowed himself to remain three months longer to consolidate the advantage he had gained. He had acquired a footing in the wealthiest kingdom in the world; he had placed there a sovereign of his own choice, whose throne he secured by means of a guard of Romans, thus preparing the way for the reduction of the country at no distant period to the form of a Roman province. As long as the remnant of the Pompeians were still scattered and unprepared, he lost little by neglecting to prosecute the war against them. He might wish them to gather head again, that he might again strike them down in a single blow. Indeed he now found leisure for a campaign against Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates.
THE WAR WITH PHARNACES
[Sidenote: [47 B.C.]]
Though professing himself an ally of Pompey, the king of the Bosporus had failed to bring his contingent to the republican camp. After the battle of Pharsalia he hoped to profit by the ruin of his father’s foe, and the confusion of the republic. He mustered his forces and drove Deiotarus and Ariobarzanes from Armenia the lesser and Cappadocia. These princes sought the succour of Cæsar’s lieutenant Calvinus, and though they had just fought on the Pompeian side, he received instructions to restore them. Calvinus however was routed by Pharnaces, who recovered his father’s dominions in Asia Minor, and proceeded to expel from them the Roman settlers. Cæsar quitted Alexandria in April (47), landed at Tarsus, traversed Cilicia and Cappadocia, and reached the barbarian host at Zela in Pontus. A bloody battle ensued in which the Roman was completely victorious. The undisciplined hordes of the eastern sovereign once routed never rallied again. Pharnaces escaped from the field, but he was stripped of his possessions, and perished soon afterwards in an obscure adventure. The war was finished in five days, and the terms in which Cæsar is said to have announced it to the senate can hardly be called extravagant: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” When he compared this eastern “promenade” with the eight years’ struggle in which he had conquered Gaul by inches, he might exclaim on the good fortune of Pompey who had acquired at so little cost the reputation of a hero. After regulating with all despatch the affairs of the province, he hastened back to Italy, where his protracted absence had given occasion to serious disorders.
The measures which the dictator had enacted for the adjustment of debts were not received with equal satisfaction in every quarter. As soon as he was removed from the centre of affairs, the passions of the discontented found vent, and a prætor named Cælius fanned the flame for objects of personal ambition. Cælius was a clever, restless intriguer, and shrewd observer of other men, as appears in his amusing letters to Cicero, but altogether deficient in knowledge of himself, and much deceived in the estimate he formed of his own powers. He raised the criminal hopes of the worst and neediest citizens by proposing an abolition of debts; but he was unable to direct the passions he had excited, or to cope with the firmness of Servilius and the Cæsarian senate. He was declared incapable of holding any magistracy, expelled from the curia, and finally repulsed from the tribunate. He quitted Rome in disgust and fury, and had the temerity to plunge into an insurrection. Joining himself with Milo, who had left his place of exile and armed his gladiators in the south of Italy, he traversed Campania and Magna Græcia, soliciting the aid of outlaws and banditti. But the authorities of the capital had hardly time to take measures against the rebels, before they were reassured by the destruction of the one before Cosa, the other at Thurii.
CÆSAR RETURNS TO ROME
Cæsar’s protracted absence from the capital strongly marked the confidence he felt in the stability of his arrangements there. Notwithstanding these symptoms of transient and partial disaffection the great mass of the citizens was firmly attached to him, and to this result the ferocious menaces of the Pompeians had in no slight degree contributed. We may imagine with what anxious suspense the upper classes at Rome had awaited the event of the campaign in Illyricum; nor were they altogether relieved by the report of the victory of Pharsalia. For this welcome news was accompanied or closely followed by the assurance that the victor was plunging still farther into the distant East, while the forces of his enemy, supported by their innumerable navies, were gathering once more in his rear. Nevertheless, his adherents insisted on the statues of Pompey and Sulla being ignominiously removed from the Forum, and his secret enemies were controlled by spies, and compelled to join in the public demonstrations of satisfaction. Much of the anxiety which still prevailed was removed by the account of the death of Pompey, confirmed by the transmission of his signet to Rome. None could now distrust the genius and the fortune of the irresistible conqueror. There was no longer any hesitation in paying court to him. His flatterers multiplied in the senate and the Forum, and only vied with one another in suggesting new honours for his gratification. Decrees were issued investing him with unbounded authority over the lives and fortunes of the vanquished. He was armed with full powers for suppressing the republican party which was again making head in Africa. In October, 48, Cæsar was created dictator for a second time; and the powers of the tribunate were decreed to him for the term of his life. He appointed Antony his master of the horse, and commandant of the city. Brave, but violent and dissolute, Antony possessed neither the vigour nor the prudence which circumstances demanded.
The rumours which soon began to circulate at Rome of the perils which Cæsar was incurring at Alexandria, rendered his conduct uncertain; he hesitated to put down, with a firm hand, the disturbers of the republic, whom the death of his master might make more powerful than himself. The son-in-law of Cicero, Cornelius Dolabella, overwhelmed with debt, had followed the example of Clodius in getting himself adopted by a plebeian, and had thus acquired the tribunate. In this position he had recommended himself, like Cælius, to the worst classes of the citizens, by urging an abolition of debts. One of his colleagues resisted, and both betook themselves to violence. For some time Antony looked on as if uncertain which party to espouse; but a domestic affront from Dolabella, who had intrigued with his wife, roused his passion; he attacked the turbulent mob with arms, and filled the streets with the indiscriminate slaughter of eight hundred citizens. He did not venture, however, to punish the author of the disturbance, but contented himself with menaces and precautions till the fortunate arrival of the dictator himself in September, 47.
Contrary to the apprehensions of many of the citizens Cæsar’s return was marked by no proscription. He confined himself to the confiscation of the estates of the men who still remained in arms against him; and that of Pompey himself, whose sons were in the hostile camp, he set up to public auction. A portion of them was bought by Antony, who ventured to evade the due payment of the price. He conceived that his services might command the trifling indulgence of release from a paltry debt. He found, however, that his patron was in earnest, and prudently submitted to the affront. The dictator remained only three months in Rome. Every moment was fully occupied in the vast work of reconstructing the government; but we know not what were the special measures enacted at this period, and Cæsar’s legislation may fitly be reserved to be contemplated hereafter at a single view. Two consuls were appointed for the remaining three months of the year, and for the next ensuing Cæsar nominated himself for the third time, together with Lepidus. He caused himself also to be again created dictator. His partisans he loaded with places and honours, and sated the populace with largesses. The soldiers demanded the fulfilment of his repeated promises. Those of the tenth legion broke out into open revolt, and ran from Campania to Rome to extort their claims. Cæsar convoked them in the Field of Mars, approached them unattended, mounted his tribunal, and demanded the statement of their grievance. At the sight of their redoubted general their voices faltered, their murmurs died away; they could only ask for their discharge. “I discharge you, citizens,” replied the imperator; and they cowered under this disparaging appellation, abashed and humiliated. To the fierce and haughty soldier the peaceful name of citizen seemed a degradation. They entreated to be restored to their ensigns, and submitted to severe punishment in expiation of their fault. This simple incident is a key to the history of the times. This application of the title of citizen, and the effect it produced, show plainly that the basis of Cæsar’s force was purely military, and that Cæsar himself knew it. This was the point at which every party leader in turn had tried for years to arrive, and Cæsar had succeeded.
THE AFRICAN WAR
As soon as this sedition was repressed Cæsar departed to crush the remnant of his enemies assembled in Africa. The defeated host had been scattered in various directions, but the largest division of the fugitives had made its way to Dyrrhachium, and there deliberated on its further movements. Cato, to whom the command was offered, waived it in favour of Cicero, as his superior in rank; but the orator declined to associate himself further in the honours and perils of a fruitless struggle, and departed mournfully for Italy. His life was with difficulty preserved from the fury of Cneius, the elder son of the great Pompey, a man of ungovernable passions and slender capacity. Shortly afterwards Scipio assumed the command of the main body, and carried it to Utica in the province of Africa. Cato at the head of another division skirted the coasts of Greece and Asia, and picked up some scattered adherents of the cause. He followed in the track of Pompey, but when the news of his chief’s assassination reached him, he landed on the shore of Libya, and demanded admission within the walls of Cyrene. The natives shut their gates; but Cato, always loath to exercise any unprofitable severity, generously abstained from chastising them. Anxious now to effect a junction with the remainder of his friends, he coasted westward as far as the lesser Syrtis, and then plunged with his little army into the sandy desert. The seven days’ march through this inhospitable region, torrid with heat and infested with serpents, was justly considered one of the noblest exploits of the Roman legionaries. The poet of the Pharsalia exalts it above the three triumphs of Pompey and the victories of Marius over the tyrant of Numidia. He turns with pardonable enthusiasm from the deified monsters, the Caligulas and Neros of his own day, to hail its achiever as the true Father of his Country, the only worthy object of a free man’s idolatry.
The arrival of Cato at the headquarters of the republicans in Utica was quickly followed by that of Cneius Pompey, and in the course of the year 47 the remains of the great host of Pharsalia were assembled with many reinforcements under the banners of Scipio. These forces amounted to not less than ten complete legions, and Juba, who could bring one hundred and twenty elephants into the field, besides innumerable squadrons of light cavalry, had promised his assistance. The officers began to brag of their future triumphs almost as loudly as before their recent disasters. Their defiance was re-echoed to the opposite shores of Italy, and caused fresh dismay to the time-servers, who had abandoned the Pompeian cause on the event of its first discomfiture. But this force, numerous as it was, was not in a condition, it would seem, to choose a distant field of operations. The want of money may have compelled its chief still to act on the defensive, and await through a whole year the expected attack of the enemy. Nor were these chiefs themselves unaffected by personal jealousies. Scipio and Varus contended for the command, the one as the foremost in rank and dignity, the other as the legitimate proconsul of the province; while Juba, conscious of his own importance to the cause, affected to lord it over both. Cato alone continued still to act with his usual simplicity of purpose and patriotic devotion. But his noble demeanour rebuked the selfishness of his associates, and they contrived to remove him from their counsels by charging him with the defence of Utica, while they shifted their own quarters to the neighbourhood of Hadrumetum. The brave philosopher rejoiced that he was not compelled to draw his sword in civil strife, while he busied himself not the less earnestly in the collection of stores and preparation of defence. Of all the professed asserters of Roman liberty he alone really lamented the necessity of arming in her cause; from the first outbreak of the war he had refused to trim his venerable locks or shave his grizzled beard, and from the fatal day of Pharsalia he had persisted in sitting at his frugal meals, and denied himself the indulgence of a couch.
[Sidenote: [47-46 B.C.]]
A whole year had now passed, while the republicans contemplated with folded arms the perils Cæsar had surmounted in Alexandria, the victory he had gained over Pharnaces, and the brilliant reception he had met with in Rome. Cæsar assembled six legions and two thousand horse at Lilybæum in Sicily, and in the middle of October 47, he appeared off the African coast with the first division of his forces, and summoned the republicans in their camp at Hadrumetum to surrender to “Cæsar the imperator.” “There is no imperator here but Scipio,” they replied, and inflicted death upon his envoy as a deserter. The dictator sailed on to Leptis, and was there invited to take shelter, while he awaited the arrival of the rest of his armament.
While these reinforcements were coming slowly in he was attacked by Scipio, and subjected to annoyance and peril from the movements of the enemy’s cavalry. Labienus, who frequently charged him at the head of the Roman horse, distinguished himself by the bitter taunts with which he addressed the veterans whom he had so often led to victory. But Cæsar maintained himself in a fortified position till he could move forward with a force of five legions. At the same time the alliance he had formed with the Mauretanian kings, Bogudes and Bocchus, the jealous rivals of the Numidians, enabled him to draw off Juba to the defence of his own capital Cirta. He pushed on, offering battle, which Scipio, though with double his numbers, steadily refused, until Juba returned with his vaunted elephants and cavalry. The necessities of the Roman chiefs compelled them to submit to revolting indignities at the hands of this barbarian ally. He forbade Scipio the use of the imperator’s purple cloak, which he declared to belong only to kings. When he issued his royal mandates to the Roman officers, they were observed to be even more punctually obeyed than the orders of the general himself.
At last on the 4th of April the armies met on the field of Thapsus. On this occasion many of Cæsar’s men were fresh recruits, and he was not without some misgivings about their steadiness. But they were not less impatient for the onset than the veterans, whom their general recommended to their imitation, and loudly demanded the signal to engage. While he still hesitated, checking with hand and voice the impatient swaying of the lines, suddenly the blast of a single trumpet burst forth on the right wing. The impetuous ferocity of the tenth legion could no longer brook restraint; they had raised the signal unbidden; and now the whole army rushed forward in one unbroken body, overpowering their officers’ efforts to detain them. Cæsar, when he beheld rank after rank pouring by him, without the possibility of recall, gave the word “Good luck” to his attendants, and spurred his horse to the head of his battalions. The combat was speedily decided. The elephants, thrown into confusion by the first discharge of stones and arrows, turned upon the ranks they were placed to cover, and broke in pieces their array. The native cavalry, dismayed at losing their accustomed support, were the first to abandon the field. Scipio’s legions made little resistance; they sought shelter behind their entrenchments. But their officers had fled, and the men, left without a commander, rushed in quest of their discomfited allies. They found the Numidian camp in the hands of the enemy; they begged for quarter, but little mercy was shown them, and Cæsar himself beheld with horror a frightful massacre which he was powerless to control. Scipio escaped to the coast, and embarked with others for Spain, but was intercepted and slain.[119] Juba and Petreius fled together, and sought refuge within the walls of Zama. But the Numidians rejoiced in the defeat of their tyrants and refused them solace or shelter. The fugitives, repulsed in every quarter, and disdaining to solicit the victor’s clemency, placed themselves at a banquet together, drank their fill of wine, and challenged each other to mortal combat. Petreius, the elder of the two, was despatched by his opponent, who then threw himself upon his own sword.[120]
The rout of Thapsus was known at Utica on the same evening. On the morrow Cato convened the Roman officers and residents, and laid before them the state of their affairs. Calmly and cheerfully he enumerated his means of defence, and desired them to decide for themselves whether they would resist the conqueror, or seek safety in flight or capitulation. The knights and senators, despairing of pardon, would have held out to the uttermost; but the traders and men of peace, who had long settled in Utica, and were conscious that they had done nothing hitherto to provoke the wrath of the assailant, insisted on a timely surrender. When it was known that Cæsar was approaching, Cato caused all the gates to be closed except that which led to the sea, and urged all that would to betake themselves to the ships. He dismissed his personal friends, of whom a few only, and among them his own son, insisted on remaining with him; for he had plainly intimated that for his own part he would not quit his post. With these cherished associates he sat down to supper, and discoursed with more than his usual fervour on the highest themes of philosophy, especially on the famous paradox of the stoics, that the good man alone is free, and all the bad are slaves. His companions could not fail to guess the secret purpose over which he was brooding. They betrayed their anxiety only by silent gestures; but Cato, observing the depression of their spirits, strove to reanimate them, and divert their thoughts by turning the conversation to topics of present interest.
[Sidenote: [46 B.C.]]
The embarkation was at this moment proceeding, and Cato repeatedly inquired who had already put out to sea, and what were the prospects of the voyage. Retiring to his chamber he took up the Dialogue on the Soul, in which Plato recorded his dying master’s last aspirations after immortality. After reading for some time he looked up and observed that his sword had been removed. In the irritation of the moment he gave way to a burst of violence, such as often marked the behaviour of the Roman master to his slave; calling his attendant to his presence he struck him on the mouth, bruising his own hand with the blow. He then sent for his son and friends, and rebuked them sharply for their unworthy precaution; “as if,” he said, “I needed a sword to kill myself, and might not, if I chose, put an end to my existence by dashing my head against the wall, or merely by holding my breath.” Reassured perhaps for the moment by the calmness of his demeanour, they restored him his weapon, and at his earnest desire once more left him alone. At midnight, still anxious about those who were departing, he sent once again to inquire if the embarkation were completed. The messenger returned with the assurance that the last vessel was now on the point of leaving the quay. Thereupon Cato threw himself on his bed, as if about to take his rest for the night; but when all was quiet he seized his sword and thrust it into his stomach. The wound was not immediately mortal, and the victim rolled groaning on the floor. The noise at once summoned his anxious attendants. A surgeon was at hand, and the sufferer was unconscious while the protruding intestines were replaced, and the gash sewn up. But on coming to himself he repulsed his disconsolate friends, and tearing open the fatal wound, expired with the same dogged resolution which had distinguished every action of his life.
Cato had no cause to despair of retaining life under the new tyranny. At an earlier period he had meditated, in such a contingency, seeking refuge in retirement and philosophy. But his views of the highest good had deepened and saddened with the fall of the men and things he most admired. He now calmly persuaded himself that with the loss of free action the end of his being had failed of its accomplishment. He regarded his career as prematurely closed, and deemed it his duty to extinguish an abortive existence.[121] Cæsar, when he heard of his self-destruction, lamented that he had been robbed of the pleasure of pardoning him, and to his comrades in arms he exhibited, according to the most credible accounts, the same clemency by which he had so long distinguished himself. But the same man who could now speak and act thus generously, did not scruple, at a later period, to reply to Cicero’s panegyric with a book which he called the Anti-Cato, in which he ridiculed the sage’s vain pretensions, and scoffed at him for raking in his brother’s ashes for the golden ornaments of his pyre, for transferring to Hortensius the wife who had borne him as many children as he desired, and taking the widow to his arms again enriched with a magnificent dowry. Could the proud philosopher have anticipated a time when the wantonness of power might sport unchecked with the good fame of its victims, he would have shrunk from such moral degradation with greater horror than from the servitude of the body.[c]
SALLUST’S COMPARISON OF CÆSAR AND CATO
“After hearing and reading of the many glorious achievements which the Roman people had performed at home and in the field, by sea as well as by land, I happened to be led to consider what had been the great foundation of such illustrious deeds. I knew that the Romans had frequently, with small bodies of men, encountered vast armies of the enemy; I was aware that they had carried on wars with limited forces against powerful sovereigns; that they had often sustained, too, the violence of adverse fortune; yet that, while the Greeks excelled them in eloquence, the Gauls surpassed them in military glory. After much reflection, I felt convinced that the eminent virtue of a few citizens had been the cause of all these successes; and hence it had happened that poverty had triumphed over riches, and a few over a multitude. And even in later times, when the state had become corrupted by luxury and indolence, the republic still supported itself, by its own strength, under the misconduct of its generals and magistrates; when, as if the parent stock were exhausted, there was certainly not produced at Rome, for many years, a single citizen of eminent ability. Within my recollection, however, there arose two men of remarkable powers, though of very different character, Marcus Cato and Caius Cæsar, whom, since the subject has brought them before me, it is not my intention to pass in silence, but to describe, to the best of my ability, the disposition and manners of each.
“Their birth, age, and eloquence, were nearly on an equality; their greatness of mind similar, as was also their reputation, though attained by different means. Cæsar grew eminent by generosity and munificence; Cato by the integrity of his life. Cæsar was esteemed for his humanity and benevolence; austereness had given dignity to Cato. Cæsar acquired renown by giving, relieving, and pardoning; Cato by bestowing nothing. In Cæsar there was a refuge for the unfortunate; in Cato, destruction for the bad. In Cæsar, his easiness of temper was admired; in Cato, his firmness. Cæsar, in fine, had applied himself to a life of energy and activity; intent upon the interests of his friends, he was neglectful of his own; he refused nothing to others that was worthy of acceptance, while for himself he desired great power, the command of an army, and a new war in which his talents might be displayed. But Cato’s ambition was that of temperance, discretion, and, above all, of austerity; he did not contend in splendour with the rich, or in faction with the seditious, but with the brave in fortitude, with the modest in simplicity, with the temperate in abstinency; he was more desirous to be, than to appear, virtuous; and thus, the less he courted popularity, the more it pursued him.”[e][122]
FOOTNOTES
[119] [Florus[d] says: “Scipio got off in a ship but, as the enemy overtook him, he thrust his sword into his bowels; and when some one asked where he was, he returned this answer: ‘The general is well.’” Appian[f] says: “he ran his sword through his body, and threw himself into the sea.”]
[120] [Says Florus[d]: “Petreius slew both Juba and himself; and the half-consumed meats and funeral dishes were mixed with the blood of a king and a Roman.”]
[121] [Florus[d] in Roman fashion says: “Hearing of the defeat of his party, he did not hesitate to die; but even cheerfully, as became a wise man, hastened his own death.”]
[122] [Sallust’s comparison of Cæsar and Cato should not mislead the reader as to the importance of the latter, who in fact exercised little influence on the great events of his age.]
XXV. THE CLOSING SCENES OF CÆSAR’S LIFE
THE END OF THE AFRICAN WAR
The suicide of Cato was the consistent act of a heathen philosopher, determined at least to maintain the purity of his soul uncontaminated by base compliances. Assuredly the calm dignity of its execution demands our respect and compassion, if not the principle on which it was based. Far different was the manner in which the rude barbarian Juba and the coarse soldier Petreius ran forward to meet their ends. They had escaped together from the field of battle, and the Numidian offered to provide shelter for his companion in one of his own strongholds. The Roman province was so ill-disposed towards the barbarian chief that he was obliged to hide himself by day in the most secluded villages, and roam the country on his homeward flight during the hours of darkness. In this way he reached Zama, his second capital, where his wives and children, together with his most valuable treasures, were deposited. This place he had taken pains to fortify at the commencement of the war, with works of great extent and magnitude. But on his appearance before the walls, the inhabitants deliberately shut their gates against him and refused to admit the enemy of the victorious Roman. Before setting out on his last expedition, Juba had constructed an immense pyre in the centre of the city, declaring his intention, if fortune went ill with him, of heaping upon it everything he held most dear and precious, together with the murdered bodies of the principal citizens, and then taking his own place on the summit, and consuming the whole in one solemn conflagration. But the Numidians had no sympathy with this demonstration of their sovereign’s despair, and resolved not to admit him within their walls. Juba having tried in vain every kind of menace and entreaty, to which no reply was vouchsafed, at last retired, but only to experience a similar reception in every other quarter to which he resorted. He at least had little to hope from the clemency which the victor had extended to his conquered countrymen. His companion, hard as his own iron corslet, scorned to accept it. The fugitives supped together, and, flushed with the fumes of the banquet, challenged each other to mutual slaughter. They were but unequally matched; the old veteran was soon despatched by his more active antagonist, but Juba was constant in his resolution, and only demanded the assistance of an attendant to give himself the last fatal stroke.
Nor was the fate of Considius, of Afranius, and Faustus Sulla less disastrous. The first of these had abandoned the defence of Thysdrus at the approach of the forces which Cæsar despatched against it, and attempted to make his escape with the treasures he had amassed into the territories, until now friendly, of the Numidian chieftains. He was destroyed, for the sake of his hoarded booty, by the Gætulians who accompanied him in his flight. The others had retained the command of a squadron of Scipio’s cavalry, and after burning one town which had shut its gates against them had made a desperate attack on the military post which Cato maintained outside the walls of Utica, to wreak an unworthy vengeance on the Cæsarian partisans there kept in custody. Baffled in this object they had made their way into Utica, while Cato still commanded there, and had added bitterness to his last days by the violence and ferocity of their behaviour. From thence they led their ruffians along the coast in the hope of finding means of transporting them into Spain. But on their way they fell in with Sittius, who was advancing to join Cæsar; their men were routed and themselves taken. The bands of the Roman adventurer carried on war with the same brutality as the barbarians among whom they practised it. The captors quarrelled among themselves; their passions were inflamed, perhaps, in the distribution of the prisoners and the booty; and both Afranius and Faustus were killed in the fray which ensued. But the massacre of the son of the dictator Sulla, accidental as it was, or at least unauthorized, could hardly fail of being charged as a deliberate act upon the representative of Marius.
While his foes were thus flying and falling, Cæsar advanced triumphantly from the scene of his last exploit, receiving the submission of the towns on his way, carrying off the stores and treasure collected for his enemies’ use, and leaving garrisons to retain them in fidelity. As he drew near to Utica he was met by L. Cæsar, whose petition for mercy seems to have been confined to his own person, and to whom, as well as to a long list of distinguished nobles, the conqueror extended the promise of his protection. He lamented with every appearance of sincerity that Cato had robbed him of the pleasure of pardoning one who, of all his antagonists, had been the most obstinate in his opposition, and the most inveterate in his hatred. The fatal compliance of the Utican senators, who, not content with obeying his enemies’ commands, had contributed money to their cause, furnished him with a specious pretence for rifling their coffers of the treasures he now most urgently needed. His requisitions amounted to two hundred millions of sesterces. At the same time the city of Thapsus was mulcted in two millions, and the company of Roman traders in three. Hadrumetum paid down three millions, and its Roman capitalists five. Leptis and Thysdrus also suffered in due proportion. A grand auction was held at Zama for the sale of all the objects of Juba’s royal state, and of the goods of the Roman citizens who had borne arms under the tyrant’s orders. Upon the people who had so boldly defied their sovereign, and refused him admittance within their walls, honours and largesses were munificently showered, and the taxes heretofore demanded for the royal treasury were partially remitted by the collectors of the republic. But the country of Numidia was deprived of its independence, and definitely reduced to the form of a province, under the proconsulate of Sallust. The rewarded and the punished acquiesced equally in the conqueror’s dispositions; the submission of Africa to his authority was from thenceforth complete. The Uticans were allowed to commemorate with a funeral and a statue the humane and noble conduct of their late governor.
THE RETURN TO ROME
Cæsar settled the affairs of Africa with his usual despatch, and sailed from Utica on the fourteenth day of April, 46 B.C. On his way to Italy, he stopped at Caralis, in Sardinia. The aid which the island had afforded to his adversaries furnished him with a decent pretext for extorting from the inhabitants large sums of money. At the end of the same month he again weighed anchor; but the prevalence of easterly winds drove him repeatedly to shore, and he at last reached Rome on the twenty-eighth day after his departure from the Sardinian capital. The reports he received at this time of the revival of the republican cause in Spain did not give him much uneasiness. Cneius had been detained by sickness in the Baleares, and the fugitives from the field of Thapsus had been almost all cut off in their attempts to reach the point to which their last hopes were directed. The legionaries who had mutinied against Cassius Longinus were still either unsatisfied with their treatment under the commander who had superseded him, or fearful of their general’s vengeance when a fitting opportunity should arrive. It was from Cæsar’s own soldiers that the invitation had gone forth to the republican chiefs to renew the struggle on the soil of Spain. The spirit of the old commonwealth still survived in many of the towns of Bætica; promises of support were freely given; but the remnant of the African armament was contemptible both in numbers and ability. Of all the haughty nobles who had thronged the tent of Pompey at Luceria or Thessalonica, not one with a name known to history remained in arms, except Labienus alone. He indeed had succeeded in making his escape from Africa, in company with Varus; but the insurgents had already placed themselves under the command of Scapula and Aponius, officers of their own, nor would they suffer themselves to be transferred from them to any other except the son of the great Pompey. The extent to which the flame of insurrection had spread was probably unknown at this time to Cæsar. He was impatient to reap at last the fruit of so much bloodshed, to assume the post of honour he had won, and to work out the principles and objects of so many years of anticipation. A distant and contemptible outbreak might be subdued without meeting it in person. Accordingly, C. Didius, an officer of no eminent reputation, was sent with a naval and military force to the succour of Trebonius, whom, however, he found already expelled from his government by the growing force of the new movement.
Meanwhile Rome had sunk, during the conqueror’s absence, into a state of torpid tranquillity. The universal conviction that the dictator’s power was irresistible had quelled all further heavings of the spirit of discontent. Dolabella had been gratified with a command in the late campaign; while others, in whose fidelity and military skill he could rely, had been left behind to overawe disaffection. The most illustrious of the nobility having now no occasion to remain at Rome for the sake of paying court to a jealous ruler, had retired generally to their country seats; but Cicero seems to have feared giving occasion for distrust if he withdrew himself from the broad eye of public observation. He occupied himself, however, in his philosophical studies, and could rejoice that he had never, like so many of his contemporaries when plunging into the excitements of political life, abandoned the literary pursuits common to them in youth. While he still regarded the contest in Africa with the sentiments of a true republican, he confessed with a sigh that though the one cause was assuredly the more just, yet the victory of either would be equally disastrous. He probably held aloof from the proceedings of the servile senate, which occupied itself during the months of Cæsar’s absence in devising new honours for his acceptance. First of all it decreed the religious ceremony of a thanksgiving of forty days, being twice the term to which the compliance of popular gratitude had ever previously extended, and it was by the length of the observance that the honour was estimated. Next it appointed that the victor’s triumphal car should be drawn by horses of white, the sacred colour, and that the number of his attendant lictors should be doubled. He was to be requested to undertake the office of censor for three years, under a new title, which should not remind the citizens too closely of the times of republican liberty, that of præfectus morum, or regulator of manners. The changes which the revolutionary storm had effected in the condition of so many of the citizens justified a resort to the old constitutional resource for purging the senate of scandalous or impoverished members, and infusing new blood into its veins.
The most substantial of all these tributes to Cæsar’s ascendency was the decree by which he was appointed dictator for a period of ten years; for thus the initiative of legal measures was united in his hands with the command of the legions both at home and abroad. Other specious honours, in the taste of the times, were accumulated upon him. His chair was to be placed between those of the consuls in the assembly of the senate; he was to preside and give the signal in the games of the circus; and his figure in ivory was to be borne in procession among the images of the gods, and laid up in the Capitol, opposite the seat of Jupiter himself. A statue was to be erected to him in bronze, standing upon a globe, with the inscription, “Cæsar the demi-god.” His name was to be engraved on the entablature of the Capitol, in the place of that of Catulus, its true restorer. The historian who recounts these honours assures us that many others besides these were offered; he has only omitted to specify them because Cæsar did not think fit to accept them. It is difficult to imagine to what lower depth of obsequiousness the senate could have descended, or what higher dignities the conqueror would have rejected.
CÆSAR’S TRIUMPHS
The time had now arrived for the celebration of the Gallic triumph, which had been so long postponed. In the interval, the imperator’s victories had been multiplied, and the ranks of his veterans had been recruited by fresh enlistments; so that every soldier who had shared in his later perils and successes demanded the reward of participating in his honours. Cæsar claimed not one, but four triumphs: the first, for his conquest of the Gauls; the second for his defeat of Ptolemy; another, for his victory over Pharnaces; and the last, for the overthrow of Juba. But he carefully avoided all reference to what were in reality the most brilliant of his achievements. In Spain and Thessaly he had routed the disciplined legions of his own countrymen; but their defeat brought no accession of honour or territory to the republic. The glory it reflected on the victor was dubious and barren. The four triumphs were celebrated, with intervals of a few days between each, that the interests of the public might not pall with satiety. The first procession formed in the Campus Martius, outside the walls of the city. It defiled through the triumphal gate at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, and crossed the deep hollow of the Velabrum and Forum Boarium, on its way to the Circus Maximus, which occupied the valley between the Palatine and Aventine. In passing through the Velabrum, the chariot in which the imperator stood, happened to break down; a mischance which so affected him that he never afterwards, it is said, ascended a vehicle without repeating a charm.
The long procession wound round the base of the Palatine, skirting the Aventine and Cælian hills, to the point where the arch of Constantine now stands. There it began the ascent of the gentle slope which separates the basin of the Colosseum from that of the Roman Forum. It followed the same track which now leads under the arch of Titus, paved at this day with solid masses of hewn stone, which may possibly have re-echoed to the tramp of Cæsar’s legions. Inclining a little to the right at the point where it gained the summit of the ridge and looked down upon the comitium and rostra, in the direction of the Capitol, it passed before the spot where the temple of Julius was afterwards built; thence it skirted the right side of the Forum, under the arch of Fabius, till it reached a point just beyond the existing arch of Severus, where the two roads branched off, the one to the Capitoline temple, the other to the Mamertine prison. Here it was that Cæsar took the route of triumph to the left, while Vercingetorix was led away to the right, and strangled in the subterranean dungeon. The Gallic hero doubtless met with firmness and dignity the fate to which he had so long been doomed, while his conqueror was exhibiting a melancholy spectacle of human infirmity, crawling up the steps of the Capitol on his knees, to avert, by an act of childish humiliation, the wrath of the avenging Nemesis. The next instance of similar degradation recorded is that of the emperor Claudius, who being corpulent and clumsy performed the ungraceful feat with the support of an arm on either side. The practice was probably of no unusual occurrence, and was deeply rooted, we may believe, in ancient and popular prejudices. A remnant of it still exists, and may be witnessed by the curious, even at the present day, on the steps of the Ara Cœli and at the Santa Scala of the Lateran.
The days of triumph which succeeded passed over with uninterrupted good fortune. The populace were gratified with the sight of the Egyptian princess Arsinoe led as a captive at the conqueror’s wheels; but she was spared the fate of the Gallic chieftain out of favour to her sister, or perhaps out of pity to her sex. The son of the king of Numidia who followed the triumphal car was also spared, and lived to receive back his father’s crown from Augustus. Though Cæsar abstained from claiming the title of a triumph over his countrymen, he did not scruple to parade their effigies among the shows of the procession. The figures or pictures of the vanquished chiefs were carried on litters, and represented the manner of their deaths. Scipio was seen leaping desperately into the sea; Cato plunging the sword into his own bowels; Juba and Petreius engaged in mortal duel; Lentulus stabbed by the Egyptian assassin; Domitius pierced perhaps in the back, in token of his flight. The figure of Pompey alone was withheld for fear of the commiseration it might excite among the people whose favourite he had so lately been. Nor, as it was, were the spectators unmoved. Upon the unfeeling display of Roman defeat and disaster they reflected with becoming sensibility. But the pictures of Achillas and Pothinus were received with unmingled acclamations, and loud was the cry of scorn at the exhibition of Pharnaces flying in confusion from the field. After all, the most impressive part of the ceremony must have been the appearance of the rude veterans whose long files closed the procession. With what ignorant wonder must the children of Gaul and Iberia, of Epirus and Africa, have gazed at the splendour of the city, of which the fame resounded in their native cabins! What contempt must they have felt for the unarmed multitudes grinning around them! How reckless must they have been of the dignity of the consuls and senators, they who claimed the license of shouting derisive songs in the ears of their own commander! Little did they think that grave historians would sum up their coarse camp jokes in evidence against the fame of their illustrious leader; still less did they dream of the new power which the military class was thenceforth to constitute in the state. Rome in fact was their own; but it was a secret they were not yet to discover.
The satisfaction of his armed supporters, however, was the first condition on which the supreme power of the dictator must henceforth be maintained in the city. It was a matter, indeed, of hardly less importance to secure the good humour of the urban population. While the soldiers receive each a donative of twenty thousand sesterces, the claims of the much larger multitude of the free citizens were not undervalued severally at four hundred; especially as they received the additional gratification of one year’s remission of house rent. It does not appear how this indulgence differed from that for which Cælius and Dolabella had raised their commotions; but the dictator had so strenuously resisted every attempt to set aside the just claims of creditors on all previous occasions, that it can hardly be doubted that in this case he gave the landlords compensation from the public treasury. The mass of the citizens was feasted at a magnificent banquet, at which the Chian and Falernian wines, the choicest produce of Greece and Italy, flowed freely from the hogshead, and towards which six thousand lampreys, the most exquisite delicacy of the Roman epicure, were furnished by a single breeder. The mighty multitude reclined before twenty-two thousand tables; each table having its three couches, and each couch, we may suppose, its three guests; so that the whole number feasted may have amounted to nearly two hundred thousand. When Cæsar undertook the functions of his censorship, the number of recipients of the public distributions of corn was estimated at 320,000. Upon a scrutiny into their claims as genuine and resident citizens, he was enabled to strike off as many as 150,000 from this list. Adding to the remainder the senators and knights, and the few wealthy individuals who might have scorned to partake of a state provision, the sum will correspond pretty accurately with the number of the imperial guests as above computed.
The public shows with which these gratifications were accompanied were carried out on a scale of greater magnificence than even those recently exhibited by Pompey. There was nothing in which the magistrates of the republic vied more ostentatiously with one another than in the number of wild beasts and gladiators which they brought into the arena. The natural taste of the Italian people for shows and mummery degenerated more and more into an appetite for blood; but in this, as in every other respect, it was Cæsar’s ambition to outdo his predecessors, and the extraordinary ferocity and carnage of the exhibitions which he complacently witnessed excited a shudder even in the brutal multitude. The combatants in the games of the Circus were either professional gladiators, who sold their services for a certain term of years, or captives taken in war, or lastly public criminals. But Cæsar was, perhaps, the first to encourage private citizens to make an exhibition of their skill and valour in these mortal combats. He allowed several men of equestrian rank, and one the son of a prætor, to demean themselves in the eyes of their countrymen by this exposure to the public gaze. It was only when a senator named Fulvius Setinus asked permission thus to prostitute his dignity, that the dictator was at last roused to restrain the growing degradation.
If the people of Rome were shocked at the bloodshed which they were invited to applaud, it seems that they were offended also at the vast sums which were lavished on these ostentatious spectacles. They would have preferred, perhaps, that the donative to themselves should have been greater, and the soldiers even exhibited symptoms of discontent and mutiny in consequence. No instance of Cæsar’s profuse expenditure excited greater admiration than his stretching a silken awning over the heads of the spectators in the Circus. This beautiful material was brought only from the farthest extremity of India, and was extremely rare and precious at Rome at that time. Three centuries later it was still so costly that a Roman emperor forbade his wife the luxury of a dress of the finest silk unmixed with a baser fabric. But a more permanent and worthy object of imperial expenditure was the gorgeous Forum of which Cæsar had long since laid the foundation with the spoils of his Gallic Wars. Between the old Roman Forum and the foot of the Quirinal, he caused a large space to be enclosed with rows of marble corridors, connecting in one suite halls of justice, chambers of commerce, and arcades for public recreation. In the centre was erected a temple to Venus the ancestress, the patroness for whom Cæsar had woven a breastplate of British pearls, and whose name he had used as his watchword on the days of his greatest victories. He now completed the series of his triumphal shows by the dedication of this favourite work. It remained for centuries a conspicuous monument of the fame and magnificence of the first of the Cæsars. His successors were proud to cluster new arches and columns by its side, and bestowed their names upon the edifices they erected in connection with it. Finally, Trajan cut through the elevated ridge which united the Capitoline with the Quirinal, and impeded the further extension of the imperial forums. He filled the hollow with a new range of buildings, occupying as much ground as the united works of his predecessors in this quarter. The depth of his excavation is indicated, it is said, by the height of the pillar which bears his name.
THE LAST CAMPAIGN
[Sidenote: [46-45 B.C.]]
Our review of the dictator’s proceedings in the discharge of his civil functions must be postponed, but only for a moment, to relate the short episode of his last military exploit. The despatches of his lieutenants in Spain represented that province as rapidly falling into the hands of the republican faction. Varus and Labienus had escaped from Africa, and joined the standard under which Scapula marshalled the disaffected legions in Spain. Cneius Pompeius had also issued from his retreat in the Balearic Isles, and as soon as he appeared in their camp every chief of the oligarchy waived his own pretensions to the command in deference to the man who represented the fame and fortunes of their late leader. Yet Scapula had the confidence of the soldiers, Labienus was an officer of tried ability and reputation, and Varus had at least held the highest military commands, while Cneius himself was personally unknown to the legions in Spain, and his only achievement in war had been a dashing naval exploit. So cowed by its repeated reverses was the spirit of the old Roman party, which had revived for a moment in Africa with vain exultation at finding itself relieved from the ascendency of its own military champion. Cneius, on his part, seems to have regarded the renewed contest in the light of a private quarrel. His war-cry was not “Rome,” “Liberty,” or “The Senate,” but “Pietas,” “Filial Duty.”
The disaffection among Cæsar’s soldiers had become widely spread; a large body of them had enrolled themselves under their new leaders; their numbers had been augmented by provincial enlistments; even slaves had been drafted into the ranks; while the cities and states of the peninsula lent their aid more or less openly to the cause. It was not in the remoter parts of the province or among the half-subdued native principalities, but in the centre of Roman influence and civilisation, in Corduba itself, that the standard of the adventurers was unfurled. Cæsar had completed the ceremonies of his quadruple triumph, and was deeply engaged in the arduous task of legislation for the new system of government which he had undertaken to raise, when he found it necessary to postpone every other occupation to meet his enemies once more in arms. So uncertain and tedious was the navigation of those days that he may have chosen the land route across the Alps and Pyrenees, for the sake of reaching his destination with greater speed.[123]
The details of the campaign into which he immediately plunged are given, but very obscurely, in the last of the series of contemporary memoirs which have hitherto been our guides throughout the military history of the period. In point of composition it betrays less literary accomplishment than any of its kindred works. The rude soldier who seems to have been its author had no hesitation in recording in their undisguised enormity the cruelties which disgraced the conduct of both parties. Cæsar’s character for humanity suffers more in this than in any other contemporary narrative of his actions. The campaign was, indeed, a series of butcheries on either side, but Cneius was, perhaps, the most savagely ferocious of all the captains of the civil wars. The scene of the last act of Roman liberty was laid in the valley of the Guadalquivir and the defiles of the Sierra de Tolar. After a variety of desultory movements, of which we obtain from the narrative only an indistinct notion, we find the rival armies at last drawn up in hostile array on the field of Munda. Cæsar was this time superior in numbers, and especially in cavalry; but the enemy was well posted, and fought well: never, it is said, was the great conqueror brought so near to defeat and destruction.[b]
“When the armies were going to close, Cæsar, seeing his men go on but coldly and seem to be afraid, invoked all the gods, beseeching them with hands lifted up to heaven, not to let the lustre of so many glorious actions be darkened in one day, and running through the ranks, encouraged his soldiers, taking off his head-piece that he might be better known. But do what he could, he could not raise their spirits, till snatching a buckler out of a soldier’s hand, he said to the tribunes who were about him, ‘This shall be the last day of my life, and of your engagement in the war.’ And at the same time made furiously towards the enemy; he had scarce advanced ten feet but he had above two hundred darts thrown at him, some of which he avoided by bending his body, and others received on his buckler, when the tribunes ran with emulation to get about him, and the whole army thereupon charging with all their fury, they fought all day with divers advantage, and at length towards the evening the victory fell to Cæsar, and it is reported that hereupon he was heard to say these words, ‘that he had often fought for victory, but that now he had fought for life.’
“After the defeat, Pompeius’ men flying into Corduba, Cæsar, to prevent their escape thither, lest they should rally and renew the fight, caused the place to be invested by the army, where the soldiers being so tired that they could not work in the circumvallation, heaped up together the bodies and armour of the slain, which they kept piled up with their javelins stuck into the ground, and lay all night under that kind of rampire. Next morning the city was taken. Of Pompeius’ captains, Scapula setting up on a pile of wood burned himself; the heads of Varus, Labienus, and other persons of quality were brought to Cæsar. As for Pompeius, he fled from the battle with a hundred and fifty horse, bending his course towards Carteia where his fleet lay; he entered the port in a litter, and in the habit of a private man. But seeing the seamen had likewise lost all hopes, he threw himself in a little boat, in which as he was going out to sea, his foot tangling in the cordage, one of his people going to cut the rope, by mischance cut his heel, so that to cure his wound he was forced to go ashore at a small village, where hearing that Cæsar’s horsemen were coming, he took his flight through a country covered with thorns and briers, which added to his wound, so that being tired and sitting down at last under a tree, he was found by those who gave him chase, and slain, generously defending himself; his head was carried to Cæsar, who caused it to be buried. Thus [says Appian] was this war ended by one only fight and contrary to the opinion of all the world.”[g]
Of all the leaders of the senatorial party, Sextus Pompeius was now the only survivor. He had made his escape from the field of Munda, and had an asylum in the wildest districts of the Hither Province. He had nothing to hope from the clemency of the conqueror, who had shown unusual bitterness against his family by the confiscation of their patrimonial estates, and was now preparing to celebrate his triumph over them as foreigners and enemies of the state. Thus driven to despair, he infused new spirit into the predatory habits among the tribes among whom he had taken refuge, and continued to defy the power of the provincial authorities. Cæsar occupied himself for some months in reconstituting the government of Spain, taking precautions for the entire subjugation of the party which had shown such vitality in that quarter. The battle of Munda was fought on the seventeenth of March, but the dictator was not at liberty to return to Italy till September, after an absence of ten months.
The hostile attitude of the last of the Pompeians in Spain was not the only exception to the tranquillity which prevailed generally throughout the empire. In Gaul the Bellovaci had risen in arms; but this movement was expeditiously repressed by Decimus Brutus, the proconsul of the newly conquered province. In the extreme East, however, the republican party still continued to make head, under the leadership of Cæcilius Bassus. Their champion was an obscure knight, and their forces were insignificant, consisting principally of two legions which Bassus had seduced from their allegiance to Sextus Cæsar, the commander to whose care Syria had been entrusted by his kinsman. But the proximity of the Parthians, ever on the watch for an opportunity to wound the sides of their great rivals, rendered any movement in this quarter formidable. Sextus Cæsar was murdered by his soldiers, and Bassus took possession of the city of Apamea, which, with the assistance of the national enemies, he continued to keep against the petty attempts which were made to dislodge him. The dictator kept his eye upon him, and already meditated his destruction; but for the present he was content to leave his temerity unpunished, while he applied himself to the consolidation of his power by bold and comprehensive legislation at home.[b]
THE LAST TRIUMPH
[Sidenote: [45 B.C.]]
On the 13th of September, 45, the dictator appeared once more at the gates of Rome, but he did not triumph till the commencement of October. His victory was represented as gained over the Iberians; the miserable outcasts whom Cneius had banded together were all confounded together under the common title of strangers and enemies. Two of the dictator’s lieutenants, Fabius, and Pedius who was also his kinsman, were allowed the honour of separate triumphs. These ceremonies were followed as usual with games and festivals, which kept the populace in a fever of delight and admiration. They had complained that among the numerous spectacles offered to their view each citizen could witness only a portion, while to the foreigners who flocked to this great feast of nations, the dramatic entertainments had been unintelligible. The games were now multiplied in various quarters of the city, while plays were represented in different languages for the benefit of every people. The subjects of the empire had entered Rome as conquerors in Cæsar’s train, and thus he inaugurated the union of the capital with the provinces. Kings and commonwealths sent their ambassadors to this mighty congress of nations. Among them were the Moors and the Numidians, the Gauls and the Iberians, the Britons and the Armenians, the Germans and the Syrians. The Jews, insulted by Pompey and rifled by Crassus, offered their willing homage to the champion who alone of all the Romans had spoken to them in the language of kindliness and respect. Cleopatra the queen of Egypt came, her crown in her hand, offering her treasures and her favours to her admirer and preserver. All in turn had trembled at the official caprices of the Roman knights, and Cæsar could afford them perhaps no sweeter revenge, nor represent to them more vividly the extent of his power, than in degrading before their faces these petty tyrants of the provinces. He compelled one of them, named Laberius, who was also a dramatic composer, to enact one of his own comic pieces, that is, to dance and sing upon the stage before the concourse of citizens and strangers. “Alas!” said the wretched man in his prologue, “after sixty years of honour I have left my house a knight, to return to it a mime. I have lived one day too long.” Cæsar restored to him the golden ring of knighthood, forfeited by this base but compulsory compliance. He presented him also with a large sum of money, to show perhaps more completely the prostration of his order.
Such trifling persecutions, whether personal or political in their objects, are undoubtedly pitiable enough. But it is Cæsar’s glory that his arm fell heavily upon none of his fellow-citizens. The nephew of Marius forgot the banishment of his uncle, the ruins of Carthage, and the marshes of Minturnæ; the avenger of the Sullan revolution scorned to retaliate the proscriptions; the advocate of Cethegus and Lentulus refrained from demanding blood for blood. It is worth remarking that Cicero, the most humane perhaps of his own party, the most moderate in sentiments, the fairest estimater of men and measures, could hardly persuade himself of the possibility of Cæsar abstaining from massacre. Such was the wise man’s reading of the history of his countrymen; and when at last he found that the conqueror meditated no such use of his victory, his heart, we fear, still remained untouched, and he never, perhaps, renounced the secret hope that Cæsar’s opponents would prove less merciful than himself.
Nor was the conqueror’s clemency confined to sparing the lives of his opponents. He refrained from confiscation which had been wont to accompany the edicts of his predecessors. The wealth indeed which was poured into Rome from the tribute of so many new subjects, and the plunder of so many temples, rendered it more easy to practise this unusual liberality. It was ungenerous perhaps to make the estates of his great rival the chief exception to this rule of moderation. But Cæsar intended to brand as rebels to constituted authority the men who renewed the strife after Thapsus, and this confiscation was meant, not as an insult to the dead, but as a punishment of the living opponent. The name of the Great Pompey had already passed into the shrine of history, and the victor was proud of closing the fasti of the republic with so illustrious a title. Far from approving the precipitation of his flatterers in removing the statues of Pompey and Sulla, he caused them to be restored to their places in front of the rostra, among the effigies of the noblest champions of the free state. Towards the institutions of the commonwealth he evinced a similar spirit of deference. He sought no new forms under which to develop his new policy. Sulla had attempted to revive the aristocratic spirit of the ancient constitution by overthrowing the existing framework of the laws; but the popular dictator, in laying the foundation of a more extensive revolution, studied to preserve it intact. While making himself an autocrat in every essential exercise of power, he maintained, at least in outward seeming, all the institutions most opposed to autocracy, the senate, the comitia, and the magistracies. But he had long before said that the republic was no more than a shadow, and these very institutions had long been merely the instruments by which tyrants had worked out the ends of their selfish ambition.
Cæsar now was fully aware that he could sway the Roman world unchecked by the interference of a senate, two-thirds of which perhaps were nominees of his own. Under the sanction of an organic law he had raised the number of the assembly to nine hundred, thus degrading the honour by making it cheap; and he still more degraded it in the eyes of the proudest of the citizens by pouring into it his allies from the provinces, his soldiers, and even, if we may believe their bitter sarcasms, the captives who had just followed his car of triumph. The Romans exercised their wits on these upstart strangers losing themselves amidst the forests of columns which thronged the public places, and placards were posted recommending no good citizen to guide them to the senate house. This servile council, with less respect for appearances than its chief, would have given him the right of nominating to all curule and plebeian offices, to the entire abrogation of the electoral prerogatives of the people. But Cæsar declined to destroy the last shadow of liberty, assured that no man would venture to sue for a magistracy without his consent. He contented himself with recommending certain candidates to the suffrages of the people, and these recommendations were equivalent to commands. Moreover the senate had imposed upon the elected the obligation to swear before entering on their office, that they would undertake nothing against the acts of the dictator, for every act of his was invested with the force of law. The consuls, prætors, and other officers thus continued to exercise their ordinary functions under the dictator’s superintendence; the prætors were increased in number, while the consuls, though never exceeding two at the same time, were rapidly supplanted, sometimes month by month, by fresh aspirants whom it was expedient to gratify. As the avowed champion of the people Cæsar retained the appropriate distinction of the tribunitian power, which also rendered his person inviolable;[124] while both the senators and the knights offered to surround him with a guard of honour of their own members to secure this inviolability by a stronger instrument than the law. To the reality of power he added its outward signs. In the senate, the theatre, the circus, and the hall of justice he might seat himself on his golden chair in a robe of regal magnificence, while his effigy was impressed upon the public coinage.[125] Apart from the title of king there is no outward symbol of royalty more appropriate than that of the hereditary transmission of offices and distinctions. The imperium, or military supremacy, which had been granted to Cæsar for his life, was rendered transmissible to his children, and with it the august distinction of the sovereign pontificate.
In fine, the dictatorship for life and the consulship for five years, with the right of drawing at pleasure upon the public treasury, secured to Cæsar the executive power of the state; the imperium gave him the command of its forces; the tribunate invested him with a veto upon its legislation. As prince, or first man of the senate, he guided the debates of that assembly; as controller of manners even its personal composition depended upon his will. As chief pontiff he interpreted the religion of the state, and made omens and auguries declare themselves at his bidding. Thus the finances, the army, the religious system, the executive with a portion of the judicial power, and indirectly almost the whole functions of the legislature were combined in the hands of the autocrat of the Roman commonwealth. Nevertheless he had assumed no title inconsistent with the principles of the republic, and the precedents of constitutional history.
CÆSAR’S REFORMS
[Sidenote: [46-44 B.C.]]
What then were the objects to which Cæsar proposed to direct this enormous accumulation of powers? His cherished scheme for the amalgamation of the various elements of the empire was necessarily slow in progress. He did not seek to precipitate it by violent measures.[c]
From his last triumph to his death was somewhat more than five months (October, 45 B.C.-March, 44 B.C.): from his quadruple triumph to the Spanish campaign was little more than four months (June-September, 46 B.C.). Into these two brief periods were compressed most of the laws which bear his name, and of which we will now give a brief account. The evils which he endeavoured to remedy were of old standing. His long residence at Rome, and busy engagement in all political matters from early youth to the close of his consulship, made him familiar with every sore place and with all the proposed remedies. His own clear judgment, his habits of rapid decision, and the unlimited power which he held, made it easier for him to legislate than for others to advise.
The long wars, and the liberality with which he had rewarded his soldiers and the people at his triumphs, had reduced the treasury to a low ebb. He began by revising the register of citizens, principally for the purpose of abridging the list of those who were receiving monthly donations of grain from the treasury. Numbers of foreigners had been irregularly placed on the list, and he was able to reduce the list of state paupers resident in or near Rome from 320,000 to less than half that number. The treasury felt an immediate and a permanent relief.
But though, for this purpose, Cæsar made severe distinctions between Roman citizens and the foreign subjects of the republic, no ruler ever showed himself so much alive to the claims of all classes of her subjects. Other popular leaders had advocated the cause of the Italians, and all free people of the peninsula had in the last thirty years been made Romans: but no one had as yet shown interest in the claims of the provincial subjects of Rome, except Sertorius, and his object was rather a transference of power from Italians to Spaniards, than an incorporation of Spain with Italy. Cæsar was the first acknowledged ruler of the Roman state who extended his view beyond the politics of the city and took a really imperial survey of the vast dominions subject to her sway. Towards those who were at war with Rome he was as relentless as the sternest Roman of them all; but no one so well as he knew how “to spare the submissive”; hardly any one except himself felt pleasure in sparing. All the cities of Transpadane Gaul, already Latin, were raised to the Roman franchise. The same high privilege was bestowed on many communities of Transalpine Gaul and Spain. The Gallic legion which he had raised, called Alauda from the lark which was the emblem on their arms, was rewarded for its services by the same gift. All scientific men, of whatever origin, were to be allowed to claim the Roman franchise. After his death a plan was found among his papers for raising the Sicilian communities to the rank of Latin citizens.
The imperial character of the great dictator’s government is strongly shown by his unfulfilled projects. Among these was the draining of the Pontine marshes, the opening of lakes Lucrinus and Avernus to form a harbour, a complete survey and map of the whole empire--plans afterwards executed by Agrippa, the minister of Augustus. Another and more memorable design was that of a code of laws embodying and organising the scattered judgments and precedents which at that time regulated the courts. It was several centuries before this great work was accomplished, by which Roman law became the law of civilised Europe.
The liberal tendency of the dictator’s mind was shown by the manner in which he supplied the great gaps which the Civil War had made in the benches of the senate. Of late years the number of that assembly had been increased from its original three hundred.[126] Cicero on one occasion mentions 415 members taking part in the votes, and many of course were absent. But Cæsar raised it to nine hundred, thus greatly exceeding the largest number that had ever been counted in its ranks. Many of the new senators were fortunate soldiers who had served him well. In raising such men to senatorial rank he followed the example of Sulla. Many also were enfranchised citizens of the towns of Cisalpine Gaul. The old citizens were indignant at this invasion of barbarians. “The Gauls,” said one wit, “had exchanged the trews [trousers] for the toga, and had followed the conqueror’s triumphal car into the senate.” “It were a good deed,” said another, “if no one would show the new senators the way to the house.”
The curule offices, however, were still conferred on men of Italian birth. The first foreigner who reached the consulship was Balbus, a Spaniard of Gades, the friend of Cæsar; this was four years after the dictator’s death.
To revive a military population in Italy was not so much the object of Cæsar as that of former leaders of the people. His veterans received few assignments of land in Italy. The principal settlements by which he enriched them were in the provinces. Corinth and Carthage were made military colonies, and regained somewhat of their ancient splendour and renown.
He endeavoured to restore the wasted population of Italy by more peaceful methods. The marriage tie, which had become exceedingly lax in these profligate times, was encouraged by somewhat singular means. A married matron was allowed to use more ornaments and more costly carriages than the sumptuary laws of Rome permitted to women generally. A married man who had three children born in lawful wedlock at Rome, or four born in Italy, or five born in the provinces, enjoyed freedom from certain duties.
The great abuse of slave labour was difficult to correct. It was attempted to apply remedies familiar to despotic governments. An ordinance was issued that no citizens between twenty and forty years of age should be absent from Italy for more than three years. An ancient enactment was revived that on all estates at least one-third of the labourers should be free men. No doubt these measures were of little effect.[d]
Viewing the dominions over which he presided as a whole, endowed, or speedily to be endowed with a general equality of rights, and Rome herself no longer as an isolated municipium and a mistress-city, but the centre and capital of the Roman world, he proceeded to lay the groundwork of a comprehensive scheme of universal legislation. His first care was to develop the material unity of the vast regions before him, by an elaborate survey of their local features. A commission of geographers and mathematicians was appointed, as we have just said, to construct the map of the Roman Empire, a work so novel and so full of detail, as to require the labour, as it afterwards proved, of no less than thirty-two years. Another effort, not less gigantic, was required to impress a moral unity upon this vast machine. Cæsar prepared to collect and combine in a single code the fragments of Roman law, dispersed in thousands of precedents, the edicts of the prætors, the replies of the learned, the decisions of pontiffs, and the traditions of patrician houses. Such a mighty work had already been contemplated by Cicero, as the hopeless vision of the philanthropist and philosopher; but Cæsar’s practical sagacity saw that it not only ought to be done, but could be done, and doubtless had he but lived ten or twenty years longer, he would have anticipated by six centuries the glory of the imperial legislator Justinian.
Another work of equal utility but fortunately of much smaller compass was the reformation of the calendar, and this it was given to the great Julius to effect, and to call after his own name. The Roman year, even before the time of Cæsar, ought to have equalled on the average 365 days and six hours; so near had the astronomers of the period of Numa already arrived to the real length of the earth’s revolution round the sun. This year had been calculated on a basis of 354 days, with the intercalation every second year of a month of twenty-two and twenty-three days alternately; but another day had been added to the 354 to make an odd or fortunate number, and to compensate for this superfluous insertion the number of intercalations was proportionally diminished by a very intricate process. The simplicity of the original arrangement being thus violated, great carelessness had soon prevailed in making the requisite corrections. In course of time the pontiffs, to whose superior skill the guardianship of the calendar had been entrusted, had shrouded their science in a veil of religious mystery, and turned it to political or private ends. They commanded the intercalation of a month arbitrarily, when it suited them to favour a partisan who desired the extension of his year of office, or the postponement of the day on which his debts should become due. They abstained from the requisite insertion at the instance of some provincial governor, who was anxious to hasten his return to the enjoyments of the capital. This control over the length of the civil year, as well as the power of proclaiming the days on which business might or might not be transacted, had become an engine of state in the hands of the oligarchical government, with which the pontiffs were for the most part politically connected. The grievance had lately become intolerable. In the distracted state of public affairs and amidst conflicting personal interests, the pontiffs had abstained from intercalating since the year 52, and had even then left the civil calendar some weeks in advance of the real time. Since then each year had reckoned only 355 days, and the civil equinox had got eighty days in advance of the astronomical. The consuls accordingly, who entered on their office the 1st of January, 47, really commenced their functions on the 13th of October. The confusion hence resulting may be easily imagined. The Roman seasons were marked by appropriate festivals assigned to certain fixed days, and associated with the religious worship of the people. At the period of harvest and of vintage, for instance, seasonable offerings were to be made, which it was no longer possible to offer on the days specifically assigned for them. The husbandman rejected the use of the calendar altogether, and depended on his own rude observations of the rising and setting of the constellations.
Cæsar had acquired a competent knowledge of astronomy, in which his duties as chief of the pontiffs gave him a particular interest. He composed himself a treatise on the subject, which had long retained its value as a technical exposition. With the help of the astronomer Sosigenes, he recurred again to the simple calculations of Numa, and was content to disregard the discrepancy, which he conceived perhaps with Hipparchus to be more trifling than it really is, between the length thus assigned to the year and the true period of the earth’s revolution. In the course of centuries this error has grown into importance, and in the year A.D. 1582, when the Julian calendar was corrected by Pope Gregory XIII, the civil year had got forward no less than ten days. The requisite correction was not made, as is well known, in England till the middle of the eighteenth century. The basis of Cæsar’s reform was that the commencement of the new era should coincide with the first new moon after the shortest day. In order to make the year 46 thus begin, ninety days required to be added to the current year. In the first place an intercalary month of twenty-three days was inserted between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of February, and at the end of November two new months were added comprehending sixty days, together with a supplemental addition of seven more. The period which was marked by this series of alterations received vulgarly the appellation of “the year of confusion”; but “the last year of confusion,” it has been justly remarked, would be its more appropriate title.
Besides these noble efforts of social organisation, Cæsar, like almost every other great man of his nation, had an intense passion for material construction. He had already distinguished himself by the Forum, which he called by his own name in the heart of the city; a work which was loudly demanded on account of the inconvenient narrowness of the spot on which the public business of the republic had been transacted from the period of its infancy. But among the honours now showered upon him was one which had been granted only once or twice before to conquerors who had furthest enlarged the limits of the empire, and which, it has been remarked, was alone wanting to complete the “good fortune” of Sulla. This was the permission to extend the pomœrium, the space left open about the walls of the city, partly within and partly without them, originally perhaps for the convenience of defence; but which was consecrated by solemn ceremonies, and traversed by religious processions. Cæsar proposed, it is said, to remove this line, and with it probably the walls themselves, so as to embrace the Campus Martius, which he would have enlarged by turning the Tiber westward with a bold sweep from the Milvian to the Vatican bridge. This grand project was never destined to be accomplished, and though in later times the emperor Augustus and others were allowed to extend the pomœrium, the walls of Rome were not removed beyond the lines traced by Servius till the time of Aurelian, three centuries after Cæsar. Nor was the dictator more fortunate in completing the many other works of public interest and utility which he was already meditating. He planned, it is said, the emptying of the lake Fucinus, the draining of the Pomptine marshes, the construction of a canal from Rome to Tarracina, of a new road across the Apennines, and of a magnificent harbour at Ostia, the erection of a superb temple to Mars, and the cutting of the Isthmus of Corinth. Of all these designs the temple and the harbour were alone accomplished by his successor; it is probable that Cæsar himself had commenced them. [Under his patronage the first public library was opened at Rome, and for the transaction of public business he erected the magnificent building called the Basilica Julia.]
CÆSAR’S LIFE IN ROME
Such were the subjects of meditation which engrossed Cæsar’s mind during the days and nights he devoted to public affairs. But he had also his hours of recreation, and he shone in private life among the most cultivated men of his time, the most refined in habits, the most fascinating in manners.
There is no feature of Roman life perhaps which we can regard with so much satisfaction as the tone of habitual intercourse among public men at this period. The daily conflicts at the bar or in the Forum to which they were trained, would have only embittered their feelings towards one another, had they not been accompanied by the humanising influence of social discussion on topics of literature and philosophy. The combination of these two habits seems indeed to form the best discipline of society, imparting to it earnestness without violence, and a masculine courtesy far removed from servility and adulation. The records of Roman debate present us with hardly a single scene of personal altercation, while the private reunions of the most eminent statesmen are described to us as full of modest dignity and kindly forbearance. To this pleasing result every school of philosophy contributed; but none of them perhaps studied so well as the Epicurean the science of making society agreeable. To this school both Cæsar himself and most of his personal friends professed their adherence. The circle of his intimates comprised: Cornelius Balbus, an acute man of business; Asinius Pollio, a devoted student; A. Hirtius, who like his master both fought, wrote, and talked well; C. Oppius, full of gentleness and affection; C. Matius, thoughtful, generous, and disinterested. To these may be added Vibius Pansa, a lounger and a good liver, yet neither incapable of office, nor inexperienced in action. Antony, the gayest of boon companions, has already been mentioned; but under the garb of good fellowship, he hardly concealed the most intense selfishness, and of all Cæsar’s friends he alone stands open to the suspicion of intriguing against the life of his patron. Among these men and others of similar stamp Cæsar unbent from the cares of empire, and often abandoned himself without restraint to the enjoyments of festive mirth. With little wit of his own he was amused by the witticisms of others, even when directed against himself, and treasured up every caustic remark which fell from the lips of Cicero, whose patriotism, relieved from the fear of impending proscription, now exhaled itself in malicious pleasantries against the policy of the dictator. At table indeed, surrounded by companions addicted to the grossest self-indulgence, Cæsar was distinguished for his moderation. Cato had said of him long before, that of all the revolutionists of the day he alone had come sober to the task of destruction. But his amours were numerous, and their character peculiarly scandalous; for his countrymen still professed to regard the corruption of a Roman matron as a public wrong, while his attachment to a foreigner, such as Cleopatra, was denounced as a flagrant violation of religious and social principles.
In religion the Epicureans were sceptics, and Cæsar went farther and openly professed his unbelief. The supreme pontiff of the commonwealth, the head of the college whence issued the decrees which declared the will of the gods, as inferred from the signs of the heavens, the flight of birds, and the entrails of victims, he made no scruple in asserting before the assembled fathers that the dogma of a future state, the foundation of all religion, was a vain chimera. Nor did he hesitate to defy the omens which the priests were especially appointed to observe. He gave battle at Munda in despite of the most adverse auspices, when the sacrifices assured him that no heart was found in the victim. “I will have better omens,” he said, “when I choose.” Yet Cæsar, freethinker as he was, could not escape the general thraldom of superstition. We have seen him crawling on his knees up the steps of the temple to appease an indignant Nemesis. Before the battle of Pharsalia he addressed a prayer to the gods whom he denied in the senate, and derided among his associates. He appealed to the omens before passing the Rubicon. He carried about with him in Africa a certain Cornelius, a man of no personal distinction, but whose name might be deemed auspicious on the battlefields of Scipio and Sulla.
The queen of Egypt had followed her august admirer to Italy, and scrupling perhaps to exhibit her publicly in the city, he had installed her in his house and gardens on the other side of the river.[127] There she had her levees for the reception of the noblest Romans, and her blandishments were not perhaps ineffectual in soothing the asperity of their resentments. Cicero himself condescended to solicit an interview with her. She rewarded him with the promise of some Greek volumes from Alexandria, rendered perhaps doubly precious by the recent conflagration. But the populace were shocked at the report that Cæsar meditated raising this barbarian mistress to the dignity of a Roman wife. He was married indeed already to the noble daughter of Calpurnius Piso; but divorce was easy, and might be resorted to without public scandal; Cicero himself had lately dismissed Terentia for alleged incompatibility of temper, and allied himself in her place with a youthful heiress. Besides, one of his creatures was prepared, it was said, with a measure to remove all restrictions upon the dictator’s passions, and allow him to marry as many wives as he pleased, of whatever race or station.
Though arrived, as we have seen, at the summit of real power, it was manifest that Cæsar still chafed under the restraints imposed upon him by opinion and prejudice. His firm and well-poised mind seems at last to have lost its equilibrium, and given way to fretful impatience, and a capricious longing for some unattainable object. The Roman nobles, accustomed to the most perfect equality in their intercourse with one another, were mortified at the haughtiness assumed by the chief of the republic, surrounded by a crowd of flatterers through whom the independent patrician could with difficulty force his way.
Once when the senators came in a body to communicate to him their decrees in his honour, he omitted to rise from his seat to receive them. Balbus, it was said, the upstart foreigner, had plucked him by the sleeve and bade him remember that he was their master. It was reported that he had called Sulla a fool for resigning the dictatorship. But while the lines of his domestic policy were yet hardly laid, and every institution in Rome still demanded the pressure of his moulding hand, Cæsar himself was dreaming of foreign conquests, and sighing for his accustomed place at the head of his legions. The disaster of Carrhæ, yet unavenged, might furnish a pretext for war, and the influence of Mithridates, it might be remembered, had extended from the Caspian and the Euxine to the head of the Adriatic. He conceived, we are assured, the gigantic project of first crushing the Parthians, and then returning across the Tanaïs and Borysthenes, subduing the barbarians between the Caucasus and the Carpathian Mountains, and assailing the Germans in the rear. Cleopatra, who felt herself more secure of her admirer in the provinces than in Rome, would doubtless lend her influence to urge him on. The republicans in the city were not perhaps less anxious to remove him to a distance, and launch him on a long and dangerous enterprise. At the close of the year 45 he directed his legions to cross the Adriatic, and assemble in Illyricum, there to await his own speedy arrival. He contemplated an absence of considerable duration. He provided beforehand for the succession of consuls and prætors for the two following years. On the 1st of January, 44, he entered upon his fifth consulship, in which he associated himself with Antony. At the same time he obtained the designation of Hirtius and Pansa for 43, of Decimus Brutus and Munatius Plancus for 42. The prætors appointed for the year 44 were sixteen in number, and among them were M. Brutus and Cassius.
EVENTS LEADING TO THE CONSPIRACY
[Sidenote: [45-44 B.C.]]
The destined heir of Cæsar’s imperium was already in the camp at Apollonia, taking lessons at the same time both in arts and arms under the care of the ablest teachers. This young man was Caius Octavius, the son of Cæsar’s sister’s daughter, who, now beginning his nineteenth year, gave splendid promise of future excellence, marred only by the extreme delicacy of his health, which had hitherto prevented him from seeking distinction in the field. The favour with which his great-uncle regarded him had induced him to demand the mastership of the horse, but this had been refused him as a distinction beyond his years. Cæsar, however, had promoted his family from the plebeian to the patrician class, an honour which he had accorded to a few gentes, whose names were of great antiquity, among which was the Tullian, to which the character of Cicero had imparted so much new lustre. He had allowed it, moreover, to be understood that he was about to make the young Octavius his own son by adoption, to bequeath to him the bulk of his patrimony, and the dignities which the senate had declared hereditary in his family. These dignities indeed were not associated in the mind of the Romans with any ideas of succession. It was difficult for them to conceive the descent of the dictatorship from the hands of mature experience to those of untried youth, or the establishment in the sphere of a particular family of the tribunitian power, the free gift of the sovereign people. It was natural for them to conclude that their hero was intent on securing a title, the only recognised title, on which according to their notions a dynasty could be founded. Cæsar, it was reported, desired to be hailed as king. His flatterers suggested it, his enemies readily believed it, and hoped to make him unpopular by urging him to claim it. One morning a laurel garland, with a diadem attached, was found affixed to his statue before the rostra. The tribunes, Flavius and Cæsetius, indignantly tore it down; the populace expressing great satisfaction at their conduct, and saluting them with the title of the new Bruti. Cæsar affected at least to applaud them. Shortly afterwards a second experiment was tried. As the dictator returned from the Latin festival, celebrated on the Alban Mount, officious voices were hired to salute him as king. A low and stifled murmur again indicated the disapprobation of the people. “I am no king, but Cæsar,” he hastily exclaimed; but when the tribunes punished some persons who had joined in the cry, he rebuked them for their superfluous or invidious zeal, in which he detected a scheme for bringing him under unjust suspicions.
Cæsar’s friends, however, if such were the real promoters of the intrigue, were not yet satisfied that the prize was beyond his reach. They might familiarise the people with the idea of royalty by bringing it repeatedly before them. Perchance the sight of the white linen band, the simple badge of oriental sovereignty, might disabuse them of their horror at an empty name. On the 15th of February, the day of the Lupercalia, Cæsar was seated on his golden chair before the rostra, to preside over the solemn ceremonies of that popular festival. The Julian flamens were elevated to the same rank as the priests of the god Lupercus or Pan. Antony, the consul, was at their head, and next to the dictator occupied the most conspicuous place in the eyes of the multitude. Possibly the novelty of the sight of the one consul stripped to his skin, with only a narrow girdle round his loins, waving in his hand the thong of goat’s hide, and striking with it, as he ran rapidly through the principal streets, the women who presented themselves to the blow which was supposed to avert sterility, was still more attractive than that of the other in the laurel crown and triumphal robes which use had already rendered familiar. When Antony had run his course he broke through the admiring multitude and approached the seat of the dictator. Drawing from beneath his girdle a diadem, he made as if he would offer it to him, exclaiming that it was the gift of the Roman people. The action was hailed by some clapping of hands; but it was faint and brief and manifestly preconcerted. When, however, Cæsar put away from him the proffered gift, a much louder burst of genuine applause succeeded. Antony offered it a second time; again there was a slight murmur of applause, and again on Cæsar’s rejection of it a vehement cry of satisfaction. “I am not king,” repeated Cæsar; “the only king of the Romans is Jupiter.” He ordered the diadem to be carried to the Capitol and suspended in the temple of the god, to commemorate the gracious offer of the people and his own modest refusal.
THE CONSPIRACY
[Sidenote: [44 B.C.]]
The tact with which Cæsar withdrew the claims which were thus prematurely advanced for him baffled every attempt of the republican leaders to excite a popular feeling against him. But in the upper ranks of the nobility there were many who cherished such sentiments of hostility towards him, nor were his personal enemies confined to the ranks of his political adversaries. A plot was formed for his destruction, which embraced sixty or even eighty conspirators, many of whom had been most conspicuous in their devotion to him, and seemed most to merit his confidence. Among them were doubtless some whose hopes of preferment he had disappointed. But such was not the case with Decimus Brutus, who had received from him the government of the Cisalpine, and was already designated as the consul of a future year. Such was not the case with Trebonius, who had just quitted the consulship for the administration of Asia. Basilus, Casca, and Cimber had all received greater or less marks of the dictator’s favour. Yet all these men now joined in the intrigue against his life. Had they really loved the republic better than their imperator, and regarded him as a tyrant and a traitor, they should not have accepted the highest offices at his hands. But even the chiefs of the opposite party betrayed no reluctance to profit by his generosity. It was not the needy or disappointed among them, but those whom he had honoured and promoted, who now raised their hands against him. The most active conspirator, and perhaps the author of the design, was C. Cassius, who had recently been appointed prætor. The cry of liberty and the republic, which was in the mouths of all his associates, could have little real influence on the sentiments of Cassius, whose avowed Epicurean principles, no less than his late political conduct, might vouch for his indifference to party. “I prefer,” he had written to Cicero, “our old and clement master Cæsar to the ferocious upstart, the son of Pompey.” But he was by nature vain and vindictive; his temper fluctuated between mean subservience and rude independence. His sharp and acrid humour had not escaped the observation of Cæsar, by whom the pale and lean were accounted dangerous, and who loved, as he said, the company of the sleek and light-hearted.
The conspirators required the charm of a popular name to sanction their projected tyrannicide. M. Junius Brutus, the nephew of Cato, pretended to trace his descent from a third son of the founder of the republic, whose elder brothers had perished, as was well known, childless by the axe of the lictor. His mother Servilia derived her lineage from the renowned Ahala, the slayer of Spurius Mælius. But far from inheriting the zeal of his progenitors, the Brutus of the expiring republic had acquiesced in Cæsar’s usurpation with less apparent reluctance than perhaps any other member of the Pompeian party. Despondent in her hour of distress, he had been the last to join, the earliest to desert the unfurled banner of the republic. After Pharsalia, he was the first to seek refuge in the camp of the victor; in the city he was the foremost to court the friendship and claim the confidence of the dictator.
He zealously served his interests by the discharge of important offices; nor did he blush to govern Cisalpine Gaul for Cæsar, while his uncle still held Utica against him. A feeble panegyric of the sturdy sage whom he had abandoned while he affected to adopt his principles and emulate his practice, seemed to Brutus a sufficient tribute to his virtues. He had divorced his consort Claudia to espouse the philosopher’s daughter Porcia, a woman of more masculine spirit than his own. But thus doubly connected with strength and virtue, Brutus had failed nevertheless to acquire the firmness which nature had denied him. While professing the character of a student he still courted public life for the sake of its emoluments. The countenance of Cæsar raised him to an eminence which pleased and dazzled him, while his uncle’s renown seemed also to shed a light upon him, and his vanity was excited by a saying, possibly a jest, ascribed to Cæsar, implying that of all the Romans he was the worthiest to succeed to supreme power. The weakness of his character may be estimated from the means employed to work upon him. A bit of paper affixed to the statue of the ancient Brutus with the words, “Would thou wert alive”; billets thrust into his hand inscribed, “Brutus, thou sleepest, thou art no longer Brutus,” shook the soul of the philosopher to its centre. Under the influence of Cassius, who had married his sister, he was led to embrace the schemes of the conspirators, and assumed the place of chief adviser, which they pretended at least to offer him.
His renowned name became at once a charm of magic potency. It raised the sick Ligarius from his bed. A pardoned partisan of Pompey, the clemency of Cæsar rankled in his bosom. “How sad for Ligarius,” said Brutus to him, “to be disabled at such a moment.” The sick man raised himself on his elbow, and replied, “If thou hast any project worthy of the name of Brutus, behold, I am well again.” Ligarius was admitted to the secret, and took an active part in the deed which followed. We learn with pleasure that the conspirators did not venture even to sound Cicero. The fatal intrigue was now ripening to its execution. As long as Cæsar remained at Rome his fearless demeanour exposed him to the daggers of assassins, for he had dismissed the guard which had at first surrounded him, and appeared daily in public with no other attendance than that of his unarmed companions.
His legions had been despatched to Illyricum. To the remonstrances of his friends, from whom perhaps the rumours of his peril were not altogether concealed, he had replied that it was better at once to die than to live always in fear of dying. But from the moment he should assume the command of his armies, his safety would be assured by the fidelity of his troops. Once intoxicated with the splendour of royalty in the provinces, he would never consent to return a citizen to Rome. He had promised, it was said, to restore the towers of Ilium, the cradle of the people of Æneas and Romulus. Possibly he might transfer thither the throne which the pride of the Romans forbade him to establish in the Capitol. Or if the charms of Cleopatra should still retain their power, he might take up his abode in Alexandria, and remove the seat of empire to the shrine of the Macedonian conqueror.
Such considerations as these forbade delay. The preparations for Cæsar’s departure were almost complete. The senate was convened for the ides of March, the 15th day of the month, and the royal name and power, it was said, were then to be conferred upon him in the provinces. On this day, as soon as he should enter the curia, it was determined to strike the blow. The prediction was already current that the ides of March should be fatal to him. Still Cæsar refused to take any precautions. He had lived, he said, enough either for nature or glory; his ambition was satisfied, or perhaps disappointed, and he was proudly indifferent to longer existence.[c]
THE ASSASSINATION
On the evening of the 14th of March, Cæsar was supping with M. Lepidus, his master of the horse, who was now at the head of a body of troops without the walls, and was preparing shortly to march with them into Transalpine Gaul, which had been assigned to him by Cæsar as his province. It happened that Cæsar was engaged in writing, when the rest of the party began to discuss the question, “What kind of death is most to be desired?” The subject on which they were talking caught his attention, and he cried out, before any one else had expressed an opinion, that the best death was a sudden one.
A coincidence so remarkable was likely to be remembered afterwards by all who had been present; but it is said, also, that he had been often warned by the augurs to beware of the ides of March; and these predictions had, probably, wrought on the mind of his wife, Calpurnia, so that, on the night that preceded that dreaded day, her rest was broken by feverish dreams, and in the morning her impression of fear was so strong, that she earnestly besought her husband not to stir from home. He himself, we are told, felt himself a little unwell; and being thus more ready to be infected by superstitious fears, he was inclined to comply with Calpurnia’s wishes, and allowed some part of the morning to pass away, and the senate to be already assembled, without having as yet quitted his house.
At such a critical moment as this the conspirators were naturally wide awake to every suspicion; and becoming uneasy at his delay, Decimus Brutus was sent to call on him, and to persuade him to attend the senate by urging to him the offence that he would naturally give if he appeared to slight that body at the very moment when they were preparing to confer on him the title of king. Decimus Brutus visited Cæsar, and being entirely in his confidence, his arguments were listened to, and Cæsar set out about eleven o’clock to go to the senate house. When he was on his way thither, Artemidorus of Cnidus, a Greek sophist, who was admitted into the houses of some of the conspirators, and had there become acquainted with some facts that had excited his suspicions, approached him with a written statement of the information which he had obtained, and putting it into his hand, begged him to read it instantly, as it was of the last importance. Cæsar, it is said, tried to look at it, but he was prevented by the crowd which pressed around him, and by the numerous writings of various sorts that were presented to him as he passed along. Still, however, he held it in his hand, and continued to keep it there when he entered the senate house.
Mark Antony, who was at this time Cæsar’s colleague in the consulship, was on the point of following him into the senate, when C. Trebonius called him aside, and detained him without, by professing to desire some conversation with him. It is said that some of the conspirators had wished to include him in the fate of Cæsar; but Brutus had objected to it as a piece of unnecessary bloodshed; and when it was remembered that he himself, not long ago, had proposed to Trebonius the very act which they were now about to perform, they consented that his life should not be endangered. Meantime, as Cæsar entered the senate house, all the senators rose to receive him. The conspirators had contrived to surround his person in the street, and they now formed his immediate train as he passed on to the curule chair, which had been prepared, as usual, for his reception. That chair had been placed near the pedestal of a statue of Pompey the Great; for the building in which the senate was assembled had been one of Pompey’s public works; and it is said, that Cassius, labouring under the strong feeling of the moment, turned himself to the image, and seemed to implore its assistance in the deed which was to be perpetrated.
When Cæsar had taken his seat, the conspirators gathered more closely around him, and L. Tillius Cimber approached him as if to offer some petition, which he continued to press with vehemence when Cæsar seemed unwilling to grant it, and the other conspirators joined in supporting his request. At last, when Cæsar appeared impatient of further importunity, Cimber took hold of his robe and pulled it down from his shoulders; an action which was the signal agreed upon with his associates for commencing their attack. It is said that the dagger of P. Casca took the lead in the work of blood, and that Cæsar, in the first instant of surprise, attempted to resist and to force his way through the circle which surrounded him. But when the conspirators rushed upon him, and were so eager to have a share in his death, that they wounded one another in the confusion, he drew his robe closely around him, and having covered his face, fell without a struggle or a groan. He received three and twenty wounds, and it was observed that the blood, as it streamed from them, bathed the pedestal of Pompey’s statue.[128] No sooner was the murder finished, than M. Brutus, raising his gory dagger in his hand, turned round towards the assembled senators, and called on Cicero by name, congratulating him on the recovery of their country’s liberty. But to preserve order at such a moment was hopeless; the senators fled in dismay. Antony made haste to escape to his house. A universal consternation was spread through the city, till the conspirators, going in a body to the Forum, addressed the people, and by assuring them that no violence was intended to any one, but that their only object had been to assert the liberty of Rome, they succeeded in restoring comparative tranquillity. Still, however, distrusting the state of the popular feeling, they withdrew into the Capitol, which Decimus Brutus had secured with a band of gladiators whom he retained in his service; and there, having been joined by several of the nobility, they passed the first night after the murder. Meanwhile, the body of Cæsar was left for some hours, amidst the general confusion, on the spot where it fell; till at last three of his slaves placed it on a litter, and carried it home, one of the arms hanging down on the outside of the litter, and presenting a ghastly spectacle. It was asserted by the surgeon, who examined the wounds, that out of so many, one alone was mortal; that, namely, which he had received in the breast when he first attempted to break through the circle of his assassins.[e]
Such was the untimely ending of Cæsar’s dramatic and history-making career. Appian has left us a minute account of his last deeds and of the plot against him. Let us look to him for certain familiar details, beginning with Cæsar’s last military project.
APPIAN’S ACCOUNT OF CÆSAR’S LAST DAYS
“At length, whether he lost all hopes, or else for the better preservation of his health, never more afflicted with the falling sickness and sudden convulsions than when he lay idle, he resolved upon a far distant expedition against the Getæ and the Parthians. A rumour was spread that there was an oracle of the Sibyls which declared that the Parthians could not be subdued by the Romans, unless they were commanded by a king. This made some talk publicly that in regard of other nations taxed under the Roman Empire, there needed no scruple be made at the giving Cæsar that title. He having still refused it, hastened all he could to get out of the city where many envied him. But four days before the day appointed for his departure he was slain by his enemies in the palace, either out of malice to see him raised to such supreme felicity and height of command, or else (as themselves said) out of a desire to restore the commonwealth to its first estate; for they feared that, after having overcome these other nations, nothing could hinder him from making himself king; yet as it appears to me it was only for the name’s sake they attempted all things; for in the thing itself there is no difference between dictator and king.
“There were two chiefs of this conspiracy, the son of that Brutus whom Sulla put to death, M. Brutus Cæpio, who came for refuge to Cæsar himself after the battle of Pharsalia, and C. Cassius who yielded to him the galleys in the Hellespont, both of Pompey’s party, and with them was joined one of Cæsar’s most intimate friends, Decimus Brutus Albinus. He had always treated them honourably, and with great confidence, and when he was going to the war in Africa, he had given them armies, and the government of the Gauls, to Decimus Brutus of the Transalpine, and to M. Brutus of the Cisalpine. Brutus and Cassius were at this time designed prætors, and were in difference for a jurisdiction which among the citizens is accounted the most honourable of all others, whether they contended out of ambition, or only feigned to do it, lest their conspiracy should be perceived. Cæsar was arbitrator between them, and, as it is said, he acknowledged to his friends that Cassius had reason, but yet he would favour Brutus, so much he loved and honoured him, for all men believed he was his son, because he visited Servilia Cato’s sister at the time she grew with child of Brutus, wherefore it is likewise said, that in the battle of Pharsalia he ordered his captains to have a great care of Brutus’ life.
“However, whether he was ungrateful, or knew nothing of it, or did not believe it, or that he thought his mother’s incontinence of dishonour, whether love of liberty made him prefer his country before his own father, or being of the ancient race of the Bruti who had expelled the kings, and now pricked forward by the reproaches of the people, who on the statues of the old Brutus, and on his prætor’s tribunal had secretly written such words as these, ‘Brutus thou sufferest thyself to be corrupted with gifts. Brutus thou art dead, would to God thou wert now alive; either thy successors degenerate, or thou hast not begot them.’ He, I say, young as he was, chafed by these and such like things, engaged himself in this enterprise as an act worthy his predecessors.
“The discourses concerning the royalty were not then quite extinct, when just as they were going to the senate Cassius took Brutus by the hand, and said, ‘What shall we do if Cæsar’s flatterers propose to make him king?’ To which Brutus answered, that he would not be at the senate. Whereupon, the other again demanded, ‘What if they summon us as prætors, what shall we do then, my friend?’ ‘I will,’ he said, ‘defend my country, even till death.’ Whereupon, Cassius embracing him said, ‘And what persons of quality will you take for companions in so brave an attempt? Do you think there are none but tavern-people and artificers that put writings on your tribunal? Know that they are the prime men of the city, who expect from other prætors only plays and shows; but require their liberty from you as the work of your predecessors.’ Thus they discovered to each other what they had long had in their thoughts; and began to try their own friends, and some of Cæsar’s, according as they knew them capable of good things. They engaged in their design the two brothers, Cæcilius and Bucolianus, Rubrius Rex, Q. Ligarius, M. Spurius, Servilius Galba, Sextius Naso, Pontius Aquila: and of Cæsar’s friends they drew to their conspiracy Decimus, of whom I have already spoken; Caius Casca, Trebonius, Attilius Cimber, Minucius, and Basilus. When they thought they had companions enough, for it was not convenient to communicate this design to all the world, they gave their words one to another without either oath or sacrifice, and yet no one changed his mind or ever discovered the plot.
“There was nothing now wanting but choice of time and place. The time urged, for within four days Cæsar was to depart and take guards. For the place they thought the palace most convenient; for they concluded that all the senators, though they were not made privy to it, yet, seeing the action, would joyfully join with them; which, as it is said, happened at the death of Romulus, after having changed the regal power into tyranny. Wherefore this attempt would have the same success with that; especially being not privily executed, but in the palace, and for the good of the commonwealth. That they needed not to fear anything from Cæsar’s army, being all composed of Roman people; in conclusion, that the authors of this great action doing it publicly, could expect nothing but reward.
“Having all decreed the palace for the place of execution, there were divers opinions concerning the manner of doing it; some being of opinion that they should likewise make away Antony, Cæsar’s colleague, the most powerful of his friends, and well beloved of the soldiery. But Brutus opposed that, saying, that it was only by killing Cæsar, who was as a king, that they ought to seek for the glory of destroying tyrants; and that if they killed his friends too, men would impute the action to private enmity, and the faction of Pompey. This advice prevailing, they only expected the assembling of the senate. Now the day before Cæsar being invited to sup with Lepidus, carried along with him Decimus Brutus Albinus; and during supper the question being proposed what death was best for man; some desiring one kind, and some another; he alone preferred the suddenest and most unexpected. Thus divining for himself they fell to discourse of the morrow’s affairs. In the morning finding himself somewhat out of order with the night’s debauch, and his wife Calpurnia having been frightened with dismal dreams, she advised him not to go abroad and in many sacrifices he made there were none but affrightful tokens; he therefore gave order to Antony to dismiss the senate. But Decimus Brutus persuading him that it was more convenient, he went himself, to avoid the opinion that might be conceived, that he did it out of pride or scorn, he went to dismiss them himself, coming to the palace in his litter.
“There were at that time plays in Pompey’s theatre, and almost all the senators were at the windows of the neighbouring houses, as is the custom in the time of spectacles. The same morning the prætors, Brutus and Cassius, gave audience to those who made suit for it, with great tranquillity, in a gallery before the theatre. But when they had heard what happened to Cæsar in the sacrifices, and that therefore they deferred the senate, they were much troubled. One of those that stood there having taken Casca by the hand, told him: ‘You kept it close from me that am your friend, but Brutus has told me all.’ Whereupon Casca pricked in conscience, began to tremble; but the other continuing with a smile: ‘Where then will you raise the money to come to the ædility?’ Casca gave him an account. Brutus and Cassius themselves being talking together, one of the senators, called Popilius Lænas, drawing them aside said: ‘I pray God what you have in your hearts may succeed happily, but it is fit you make haste.’ At which they were so surprised that they gave him no answer.
“At the same time that Cæsar went to the palace in his litter, one of his domestics, who had understood something of the conspiracy came to find Calpurnia; but without saying anything else to her but that he must speak with Cæsar about affairs of importance, he stayed expecting his return from the senate, because he did not know all the particulars; his host of Cnidus called Artemidorus running to the palace to give him notice of it came just at the moment of his being killed; another, as he sacrificed before the gate of the senate house, gave him a note of all the conspiracy; but he going in without reading it, it was after his death found in his hands. As he came out of his litter, Lænas, the same who before had spoken to Cassius, came to him, and entertained him a long time in private; which struck a damp into the chiefs of the conspiracy, the more because their conference was long; they already began to make signs to one another that they must now kill him before he arrested them; but in the sequel of the discourse, observing Lænas to use rather the gesture of suppliant than accuser, they deferred it; till in the end, seeing him return thanks to Cæsar, they took courage.
“It is the custom of the chief magistrates entering the palace, first to consult the divine: and here as well as in the former sacrifices, Cæsar’s first victim was found without a heart, or as some say without the chief of the entrails. The divine hereupon telling him it was a mortal sign, he replied laughing, that when he went to fight against Pompeius in Spain he had seen the like; and the other having replied, that then likewise he had run hazard of losing his life; but that at present the entrails threatened him with greater danger. He commanded they should sacrifice another victim, which foreboding nothing but ill, he feared to seem tedious to the senate; and being pressed by his enemies, whom he thought to be his friends, without considering the danger, entered the palace; for it was of necessity that the misfortune to befall him should befall.
“They left Trebonius at the gate to stop Antony under pretence of discoursing some business with him; and as soon as Cæsar was seated, the other conspirators surrounded him according to custom, as friends, having each his dagger concealed. At the same time Attilius Cimber standing before him began to entreat him to grant the return of his brother who was an exile; and upon his refusal, under pretence of begging it with more humility, he took him by the robe and drawing it to him, hung about his neck, crying out, ‘Why do you delay, my friends?’ Thereupon Casca first of all reaching over his head, thought to strike his dagger into his throat, but wounded him only in the breast. Cæsar having disengaged himself from Cimber, and caught hold of Casca’s hand, leaped from his seat, and threw himself upon Casca with a wonderful force; but being at handy grips with him, another struck his dagger into his side, Cassius gave him a wound in the face, Brutus struck him quite through the thigh, Bucolianus wounded him behind the head, and he, like one enraged, and roaring like a savage beast, turned sometimes to one and sometimes to another; till strength failing him after the wound received from Brutus, he threw the skirt of his robe over his face and suffered himself gently to fall before Pompey’s statue. They forebore not to give him many stabs after he was down; so that there were three and twenty wounds found in his body. And those that slew him were so eager that some of them through vehemence, without thinking of it, wounded each other.
“After this murder committed in a hallowed place, and on a sacred person, all the assembly took their flight, both within the palace and without in the city. In the crowd there were several senators wounded, and some killed: there were slain likewise other citizens and strangers; not with design, but without knowing the authors, as happens in a public tumult; for the gladiators, who were armed in the morning to give divertisement to the people, ran from the theatre to the senators’ houses; the spectators affrighted, dispersed as fast as their legs would carry them, the commodities exposed to sale were made plunder of, the gates were shut, and many got upon the roofs of their houses to secure themselves from violence. Antony fortified himself in his house, judging that they had a design upon his life as well as upon Cæsar’s; and Lepidus, general of the horse, hearing upon the place what had passed, made haste to the island in the river, where he had a legion; which he drew into the Field of Mars, that he might be in readiness to execute the orders of Antony; for he yielded to him, both in the quality of Cæsar’s friend and consul.
“The soldiers would very willingly have revenged Cæsar’s death so basely murdered, but that they feared the senate, who favoured the murderers, and expected the issue of things. Cæsar had no soldiery with him, for he loved not guards, but contented himself with ushers; besides, he was accompanied by a great number of people of the robe, and whole troops of as well citizens as strangers, with freedmen and slaves, followed him from his house to the palace; but in a moment all these crowds were vanished, there remained with him only three unhappy slaves; who putting him in his litter, and taking it upon their shoulders, carried him, who but a little before was master of both sea and land. The conspirators after the execution had a mind to have said something to the senate; but nobody staying to hear them, they twisted their robes about their left arms instead of bucklers, and with their bloody daggers in their hands ran through the streets, crying out, that they had slain the king and the tyrant; causing to march before them a man carrying a cap on the head of a pike, which is the badge of liberty; they exhorted likewise the people to the restoring of the commonwealth; putting them in mind of the first Brutus, and the oath wherein he had engaged the citizens, and with them their posterity.”[g]
FOOTNOTES
[123] Appian[g] says that Cæsar arrived in Spain from Rome in twenty-seven days, accompanied by a part of his army; Suetonius[i] that he reached the Further Province in twenty-four. Strabo[j] seems to rely on the same authorities as Appian. From Rome to Corduba or Obulco is more than a thousand miles, a distance which it is utterly impossible for an army to accomplish in the longest of these periods. The author of the Commentary on the Spanish War is contented with the expression celeri festinatione, and Dion Cassius[k] prudently follows him.
[124] [According to Nicolaus, it was the conspirators who moved the senate to declare Cæsar inviolable. They prompted this decree with the cunning aim of hereby making Cæsar secure (as he would think) and so inducing him to dismiss his bodyguard. After his return from Spain whenever he came forth in public, not only in the country but also in town, he had himself accompanied by a bodyguard. He did not dismiss this bodyguard until shortly before his appointment as perpetual dictator, which took place between the 26th of January and the 15th of February, in the year 44 B.C.
“That this statement of Nicolaus rests on a pure invention can hardly be assumed,” says Wiegandt, who gives it full credit, and adds:
“This is all the more probably true of the above-mentioned decree, because it served the most vital interests of the conspirators. For, so long as Cæsar was protected by his bodyguard any attack upon him exposed their own lives to the hazard. Consideration of their own personal safety, again, influenced the conspirators at every step. Even after Cæsar had dismissed his bodyguard, the attempt was constantly being postponed in view of the danger resulting from his numerous attendance. In this way were rejected the various designs to murder him on the Via Sacra, on the occasion of the meeting of electoral committees in the Campus Martius, or during the gladiatorial games at the theatre. What recommended the senate house to the combined choice of the conspirators as a fit place in which to execute the blow was this, that here, secretly armed themselves, they had nothing to fear from the unarmed friends of Cæsar, and, moreover, might rely on the protection of the gladiators of Decimus Brutus.
“A second argument in favour of the statement of Nicolaus is that a still broader decree of the senate appears to have been based on the same cunning motive. The conspirators had reckoned too little with Cæsar’s sober practical nature when they hoped that as a man sacrosanct he would renounce all armed attendance. As a matter of fact he attached so little significance to the decree, that it never occurred to him to dismiss his escort.”[h]]
[125] [“But,” says Florus,[f] “all these honours were but as decorations laid on a victim doomed to die.”]
[126] [Sulla had raised the number of senators to six hundred; cf. page 444.]
[127] [On this much discussed question of Cæsar and Cleopatra it is interesting to quote Froude’s opinion from his Cæsar: “Cleopatra is said to have joined Cæsar at Rome after his return from Spain, and to have resided openly with him as his mistress. Supposing that she did come to Rome, it is still certain that Calpurnia was in Cæsar’s house when he was killed. Cleopatra must have been Calpurnia’s guest as well as her husband’s; and her presence, however commented upon in society, could not possibly have borne the avowed complexion which tradition assigned to it. On the other hand, it is quite intelligible that the young queen of Egypt, who owed her position to Cæsar, might have come, as other princes came, on a visit of courtesy, and that Cæsar, after their acquaintance at Alexandria, should have invited her to stay with him. But was Cleopatra at Rome at all? The only real evidence for her presence there is to be found in a few words of Cicero: ‘Reginæ fuga mihi non molesta.’ (‘I am not sorry to hear of the flight of the queen.’) There is nothing to show that the ‘queen’ was the Egyptian queen. Granting that the word Egyptian is to be understood, Cicero may have referred to Arsinoe, who was called queen as well as her sister, and had been sent to Rome to be shown at Cæsar’s triumph.”]
[128] [“Thus,” says Florus,[f] “he who had deluged the world with the blood of his countrymen, deluged the senate house at last with his own.”]