Caesar

by Adrian Goldsworthy

Caesar was raised to think of himself as special. In itself this was nothing unusual, but as the only son to carry on the family line, and with a particularly forceful and admired mother, he from the beginning doubtless developed an unus...

From around the age of seven boys began to spend more time with their fathers, accompanying them about the business. At the same stage a girl would watch her mother as she ran the household, overseeing the slaves and, at least in traditional households, weaving clothes for the family.

Boys saw their fathers meet and greet other senators, and were permitted to sit outside the open doors of the Senate’s meeting place and listen to the debates. They began to learn who had most influence in the Senate and why.

Informal ties of favour and obligation bound Roman society together in a system known as patronage.

In return the client had duties to assist his patron in various ways. Most would come to greet him formally each morning. The number of clients a man had added to his prestige, especially if they were distinguished or exotic. Senators might well include entire communities, including towns or cities in Italy and the provinces, amongst their clients.

great part of a senator’s time was spent in seeing his clients, in doing enough for them to ensure their continued attachment, while in turn ensuring that they provided him with the support he wanted. Much of Roman politics was conducted informally.

He was highly respected as a teacher of both Greek and Latin rhetoric. In this secondary stage of education there was detailed study of literature in both languages as well as practice in rhetoric.

For Caesar, like many other young aristocrats, it was not enough simply to read great literature – he was also inspired to compose his own works. Suetonius mentions a poem praising Hercules as well as a tragedy entitled Oedipus.

Cicero, who was six years older than Caesar, recalled how in 91 BC he had gone ‘almost every day’ to listen to the finest orators speaking in the Popular Assemblies and in the courts.

He also described how ‘I wrote, read, and declaimed all the time with great energy, but was not content to restrict myself just to rhetorical exercises’ and soon began observing the activities of one of the leading jurists of the day. Caesar seems to have been particularly influenced by the oratorical style of his relative Caesar Strabo, so may well have heard him in action.

Physical training was directed by similarly utilitarian aims to academic education. In the Hellenistic world athletic perfection was pursued as an end in itself and was not...

For them exercise was intended to promote physical fitness and had a strongly military flavour.

young aristocrats learned how to run, swim in the Tiber and fight with weapons, in particular the sword and javelin. They were also taught to ride, and Varro, a near contemporary of Caesar’s, tells us that at first he rode bareback rather than with a saddle. Much of the instruction in all these skills was supposed to be given by the father or another male relative.

It was highly significant that all this occurred in public view. Boys of a similar age, who would in time go on to be competitors in the scramble for political office, trained in full view of each other, and even at this early stage in life might begin to forge a reputation. Caesar

knees. In later life his skill at arms was also praised, and the Romans believed that all good commanders should handle sword, javelin and shield as well as they controlled whole legions.

The legislation of the Gracchi and Saturninus had provoked much opposition, but in the end it was the fear of the power and influence that these radical tribunes would win through their actions that contributed most to their violent deaths.

Ultimately, most of the Roman elite preferred to allow some of the major problems facing the Republic to go unanswered rather than see someone else gain the credit for dealing with them.

There was considerable opposition to the tribune, particularly to his plan to extend the franchise. However, before the citizenship law could be voted on by the Assembly, Drusus was fatally stabbed with a leather worker’s knife while greeting callers in the porch of his house. The identity of the murderer was never established, but it was clear that his law would never now be passed.

A large number of Italian noblemen, some of them close associates of Drusus, soon resolved to take things into their own hands. The result was the rebellion of large sections of Italy in what became known as the Social War – the name comes from socii, the Latin for allies.

The rebels created their own state, with a capital at Corfinium and a constitution heavily based on the Roman system, having as its key magistrates two consuls and twelve praetors elected every year. Coins were minted showing the bull of ...

Allegiances in the struggle were complex and at many points it resembled more closely a civil war than rebellion. Many Italian communities, including virtually all the Latin towns, remained loyal to Rome, while numbers of captured Roman soldiers were willing to enlist in the Italian armies and fight against their fellow citizens.20

Caesar was too young to take part in the Social War, but a number of those who would play major roles in his story, notably Cicero and Pompey, had their first taste of military service during this conflict.

Two other commanders, Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo, were credited with doing more than anyone else to ensure Rome’s military victory. Yet the Social War was won as much through diplomacy and conciliation as by force, and from the beginning the Senate had started to grant what the Italians had unsuccessfully demanded in the first place.

The way in which it was done also illustrated the reluctance to alter the existing political balance in Rome itself, for the new citizens were concentrated in a few voting tribes to minimise their influence.

Sulla had gained much credit for his role in suppressing the rebels and by the end of 89 BC he returned to Rome and won election to the consulship for the following year, defeating as one of his main competitors Caius Julius Caesar Strabo.

Sulla began his career rather later than was normal, but served as Marius’ quaestor in Numidia and played the principal role in arranging the betrayal and capture of Jugurtha.

While the Romans were busy with the war in Italy, the king had overrun the Roman province in Asia and ordered the massacre of the Romans and Italians in the region.

For Sulla this command was a great opportunity to campaign amidst the famous, and extremely wealthy, cities of the east and he set about forming an army to take with him. There seems to have been little shortage of recruits, for wars in the east were renowned for the easy fighting and rich plunder.

ordinary circumstances Sulla would simply have gone to the war and done his best to add new...

tribune named Sulpicius passed a bill through the Assembly giving the eastern command to...

It was one of a series of laws in which he tried to follow in the path of the Gracchi and Saturninus by using the tribunate f...

We must always remind ourselves that politics was about individual success and not parties.

For the moment Marius had clearly decided that he needed once again to fight a war in order to win back the adulation he had enjoyed after defeating Jugurtha and the northern barbarians.

Sympathy and all precedents were with Sulla, but technically there was nothing illegal about this. Sulpicius backed up this legality with mob violence and one story maintained that Sulla only escaped with his life by taking refuge in Marius’ house.

Sulla had been unfairly treated, his dignitas as an aristocrat, senator and consul severely dented.

Leaving Rome he went to his army and told the soldiers that now that he had been supplanted in the eastern command, it was inevitable that Marius would raise his own legions to fight the war. Rather than let this happen, he called upon the legionaries to follow him...

None of the senatorial officers, save one, responded to his appeal, but this reluctance was not shared...

It was the first time that a Roman army had marched against the city. Two praetors sent to confront the army were roughly handled; their robes were torn and the fasces, carried by their attendants to symbolise that they held imperium, were smashed by the angry legionaries.

When the entry into Rome of a small force was stopped by hastily organised forces loyal to Marius and Sulpicius, Sulla responded with greater force, his men fighting their way through the streets and burning down a number of houses in the process.

Sulla outlawed twelve of the opposing leaders, including Marius and his son, as well as Sulpicius, making it legal for anyone to kill them and then claim a reward. The tribune was betrayed by one of his own slaves and killed.

Marius, after a series of picturesque adventures – no doubt much embellished by later legend – eventually reached Africa, where he was welcomed by the communities of his veterans established there after the Numidian war.

Sulla took some measures to restore normality and then left with his army to fight Mithridates, not returning to Italy for almost five years.

The two consuls for 87 BC swiftly fell out and one, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, was declared an enemy of the Republic and expelled from office after attempts to undo Sulla’s legislation. Copying Sulla, Cinna fled to one of the armies still engaged in stamping out the last ...

Octavius refused to flee when the enemy entered the city and was killed as he sat in his chair of office on the Janiculum Hill.

Sulla’s house was burned to the ground in an important symbolic gesture, for a senator’s residence was not only the location for so much political activity but was a visible sign of his importance.

His wife and family were sought out, but managed to evade capture and eventually joined him in Greece. If Sulla’s seizure of Rome had been shocking, the brutality of this second occupation was far worse. Marius and Cinna were elected consuls for 86 BC, but the former died suddenly a few weeks after taking up the office. He was seventy.

‘Lists of proscribed people were posted not only in Rome, but in every city in Italy. There was nowhere that remained free from the stain of bloodshed – no god’s temple, no guest-friend’s hearth, no family home. Husbands were butchered in the arms of their wives, sons in the arms of their mothers. Only a tiny proportion of the dead were killed because they had angered or made an enemy of someone; far more were killed for their property, and even the executioners tended to say that this man was killed by his large house, this one by his garden, that one by his warm springs.’ – Plutarch, early second century AD.

His son was nearly sixteen, but had probably already formally become a man, laying aside the purple-bordered toga praetexta – worn only by boys and magistrates – and replacing this with the plain toga virilis of an adult.

As part of this ceremony the boy also removed the bulla charm from around his neck and laid it aside forever. For the first time in his life he was shaved, and his hair was cut in the short style appropriate for an adult citizen, rather than the somewhat longer fashion acceptable for a boy.

Apart from ceremonies within the household, an aristocratic child would be paraded through the heart of the city by his father and his father’s friends, symbolising the son’s admission as an adult into the wider community of the Republic.