Caesar

by Adrian Goldsworthy

Caesar was not a cruel ruler and paraded his clemency to his defeated enemies, but in the end he was stabbed to death as a result of a conspiracy led by two pardoned men, which also included many of his own supporters.

The family line perished with Nero in AD 68, but all later emperors still took the name of Caesar, even though there was no link by blood or adoption.

What had simply been the name of one aristocratic family – and a fairly obscure one at that – became effectively a title symbolising supreme and legitimate power. So strong was the association that when the twentieth century opened, two of the world’s great powers were still led by a kaiser and a tsar, each name a rendering of Caesar.

Today the Classics have lost their central position in Western education, but even so Julius Caesar remains one of a handful of figures from the ancient world whose name commands instant recognition. Plenty of people with no knowledge of Latin will recall Shakespeare’s version of his dying words, et tu Br...

Of other Romans only Nero, and perhaps Mark Antony, enjoy similar fame, and from other nations probably only Alexander the Great, the Greek philosophers, Hannibal and, most of all, Cle...

Caesar was a great man. Napoleon is just one of many famous commanders who admitted that he had learned much from studying Caesar’s campaigns.

Although he was fiercely intelligent and highly educated, Caesar was a man of action and it is for this that he is remembered. His talents were varied and exceptional, from his skill as an orator and writer, as framer of laws and as political operator, to his talent as soldier and general. Most of all there was his charm that so often won over the crowd in Rome, the legionaries on campaign and the many women whom he seduced.

His great knack was to recover from setbacks, admit, at least to himself, that he had been wrong, and then adapt to the new situation and somehow win in the long run.

Even so one source claims that over a million enemies were killed during his campaigns. Ancient attitudes differed from those of today, and the Romans had few qualms about Caesar’s wars against foreign opponents like the tribes of Gaul.

In eight years of campaigning at the very least Caesar’s legions killed hundreds of thousands of people in the region, and enslaved as many more. At times he was utterly ruthless, ordering massacres and executions, and on one occasion the mass mutilation of prisoners whose hands were cut off before they were set free.

His attitude was coldly pragmatic, deciding on clemency or atrocity according to which seemed to offer him the greatest advantage.

He was an active and energetic imperialist, but having said that he was not the creator of Roman imperialism, merely one of its many agents.

Far more controversial at the time were his activities in Rome and his willingness to fight a civil war when he felt that his political ri...

His grievances had more than a little justice, but even so when Caesar took his army from his province into Italy in January 49 BC he became a rebel. The civil wars that followed his assassi...

The Republic fell and was replaced by the rule of emperors, the first of whom was his heir. During his dictatorship Caesar held supreme power and had generally governed well, bringing in measures that we...

Previously the Republic had been dominated by a narrow senatorial elite, whose members all too often abused their position to enrich themselves by exploiting poorer Roma...

Caesar took action to deal with problems that had been acknowledged as real and serious for some time, but which had not been resolved because of a reluctance to let any ...

He won supreme power by military force, and we know that he employed bribery and intimidation at other stages in his career. His opponents were no different in their methods and were as willing to fight a civil war to destroy Caesar’s position as he was to defend it, but that is only to say that he was no better or worse than they were.

After his victory he ruled in a very responsible manner and in marked contrast to the senatorial aristocracy – his measures were designed to benefit a much broader section of society. His regime was not repressive and he pardoned and promoted many former enemies.

Caesar was not a moral man; indeed, in many respects he seems amoral. It does seem to have been true that his nature was kind, generous and inclined to forget grudges and turn enemies into friends, but he was also willing to be utterly ruthless.

Cleopatra is by far the most famous of these – and the romance may have been genuine on both sides, but it did not stop Caesar from having an affair with another queen soon afterwards, or from continuing his pursuit of the aristocratic women of Rome.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that from a young age Caesar was absolutely convinced of his own superiority. Much of this self-esteem was justified, for he was brighter and more capabl...

Such commentators tend to emphasise the opportunism that marked his rise to power. Caesar certainly was an opportunist, but the same has surely been true of virtually every successful politician.

Instead the focus is on what Caesar did, and on trying to understand why and how he did it. Hindsight is obviously inevitable,

There has been a tendency in the past for books to look at Caesar either as a politician or as a general. This distinction had no real meaning at Rome, in contrast to modern Western democracies.

Roman senator received military and civilian tasks to perform throughout his career, both being a normal part of public life. Neither one can fully be understood without the other, and here the two will be covered in equal detail.

Caesar’s own Commentaries on his campaigns survive and provide us with detailed accounts of his campaigns in Gaul and the first two years of the Civil War. They are supplemented by four extra books written after his death by his officers, which cover his remaining operations.

In addition we have the letters, speeches and theoretical works of Cicero, which provide us with a wealth of detail for this period. Cicero’s correspondence, which includes letters written to him by many of the leading men of the Republic, was published after his death and contains a handful of short messages from Caesar himself.

It is always important to remind ourselves that only a tiny fraction of one per cent of the literature of the ancient world is available today.

Most other sources are much later. Livy wrote during the reign of Augustus and so some events were still within living memory, but the books covering this period have been lost and only brief summaries survive.

The Greek writer Appian produced a massive history of Rome, of which two books cover the civil wars and disturbances from 133 to 44 BC. Plutarch was also Greek, but his most important work for our purposes was his Parallel Lives, biographies pairing a famous Greek and Roman figure. Caesar was paired with Alexander the Great as the two most successful generals of all time.

that claimed descent from the goddess Venus. We have no idea, however, what any of this meant to him. He was rarely, if ever, restrained from doing anything because of religious scruples and was willing to manipulate religion for his own benefit, but that does not necessarily mean that he was entirely cynical and had no beliefs.

In his fifty-six years he was at times many things, including a fugitive, prisoner, rising politician, army leader, legal advocate, rebel, dictator – perhaps even a god – as well as a husband, father, lover and adulterer. Few fictional heroes have ever done as much as Caius Julius Caesar.

‘For, when Rome was freed of the fear of Carthage, and her rival in empire was out of her way, the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in headlong course. The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new. The state passed from vigilance to slumber, from the pursuit of arms to the pursuit of pleasure, from activity to idleness.’ – Velleius Paterculus, early first century AD.1 ‘The Republic is nothing, merely a name without body or shape.’ – Julius Caesar.2

By the end of the second century BC the Roman Republic was the only great power left in the Mediterranean world.

colony whose trading empire had dominated the West for so long, had been razed to the ground by the legions in 146 BC. At almost the same time, Alexander the Great’s homeland of Macedonia became a Roman province.

The other major kingdoms that had emerged when Alexander’s generals had torn apart his vast but short-lived empire had already been humbled and had d...

Many of the lands in and around the Mediterranean – the entire Italian Peninsula, southern Gaul, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, Macedonia and part of Illyricum, Asia Minor, much of Spain and a corner of North Africa – were directly ruled by the Romans. Elsewhere Rome’s ...

In 100 BC Rome was hugely strong and very rich and there was nothing to suggest that this would change. With hindsight, we know that Rome would in fact grow even stronger and richer, and within little more than a century would have conquered the bulk of an empire that would endure for five centuries.

Rome’s rise from a purely Italian power to Mediterranean superpower had been rapid, shockingly so to the Greek-speaking world, which had in the past scarcely regarded this particular group of western barbarians.

The struggle with Carthage had lasted over a century and involved massive losses, whereas the defeat of the Hellenistic powers had taken half the...

A generation before Caesar’s birth, the Greek historian Polybius had written a Universal History with the express purpose of explaining just how Rome’s dominance had been achieved. He had himself witnessed the closing stages of the process, having fought against the Romans in the Third Macedonian War (172–167 BC), then gone to Rome as a hostage, living in the househ...

Although he paid attention to the effectiveness of the Roman military system, Polybius believed that Rome’s success rested far more on its political system. For him the Republic’s constitution, which was carefully balanced to prevent any one individual or section of society from gaining overwhelming control, granted Rome freedom...

Internally stable, the Roman Republic was able to devote itself to waging war on a scale and with a relentlessness unmatched by any rival. It is doubtful that any other contemporary state could have survived the catastrophic losses and deva...

Caesar was born into a Republic that was some four centuries old and had proved itself in Rome’s steady rise. Rome itself would go on to even greater power, b...

In 105 BC a group of migrating Germanic tribes called the Cimbri and Teutones had smashed an exceptionally large Roman army at Arausio (modern Orange in southern France).

The casualties from this battle rivalled those of Cannae in 216 BC, when Hannibal had massacred almost 50,000 Roman and allied soldiers in a single day.

The Cimbri and Teutones were peoples on the move in search of new land, not a professional army engaged in an all-out war. In battle their warriors were terrifying in appearance and individually brave, but they lacked discipline.

At a strategic level the tribes were not guided by rigid objectives. After Arausio they wandered off towards Spain, not returning to invade Italy for several years. This temporary relief did little to reduce the widespread panic at Rome, fuelled by folk memories of the sack of the city in 390 BC by large, fair-complexioned and savage warriors – in that case Gauls rather than Germans – but the Romans retained a deep-seated fear of all northern barbarians.

There was widespread criticism of the incompetent aristocratic generals who had presided over the recent disasters. Instead they insisted that the war against the tribes must now be entrusted to Caius Marius, who had just won a victory in Numidia, ending a war that had also ...