Caesar 100–44 BC

Introduction

Gaius Julius Caesar traced his descent to Iulus Ascanius, son of Aeneas, son of Venus, daughter of Jupiter: he was god-born and god-like. The Julian house, though poor, was among the oldest and noblest families of Rome. One of the Gaius Juliuses held the consulship in 489 BC, another in 482 BC. Another member of the same house, named Vopiscus Julius, held the same office in 473 BC, a second named Sextus Julius in 157 BC, and a third in 91 BC. Caesar learned his leaning toward revolutionary methods in politics from Marius, the husband of his aunt Julia. His mother Aurelia was a lady of perfect dignity and wisdom who managed her small house in the Subura quarter—which was full of shops, taverns, and brothels—with thrift. There, in 100 BC according to one account, after a surgical operation that was later named after him, Caesar was born.

The Libertine

In Philemon Holland’s translation of Suetonius’s works it is said that “at this time Caesar had a wonderful talent for learning and study.” His teacher in Latin, Greek, and oratory was a Gaul. With this teacher Caesar unconsciously prepared himself for his greatest conquest. The youth soon became enamored of oratory and devoted himself almost entirely to youthful writing, but an appointment as military aide to Marcus Thermus in Asia saved him. Nicomedes, the ruler of Bithynia, became so infatuated with him that Cicero and other detractors later reproached him for having “lost his virginity to a king.” When he returned to Rome in 84 BC he married Cossutia to please his father; shortly afterward, upon his father’s death, he divorced her and married Cornelia, daughter of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who had assumed leadership of the revolution after Marius. When Sulla came to power he ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia; when Caesar refused, Sulla confiscated his inheritance and Cornelia’s dowry and placed his name on the list of those condemned to death.

Caesar fled from Italy and joined the army in Cilicia. When Sulla died he returned to Rome (78 BC); but when he saw that his enemies had come to power he set out for Asia again. Pirates captured him and took him to one of their special slave markets and announced that they were willing to release him for twenty talents (about 72,000 dollars). He rebuked them for undervaluing him and offered to pay fifty talents himself. He then sent his servants to raise the money and amused himself by composing poems and reading them to his captors. The poems did not please his captors, and Caesar called them dull barbarians and threatened to hang them at the first opportunity. When the ransom arrived he hurried to Miletus, assembled ships and sailors, pursued the pirates, and captured them; he recovered the ransom and then crucified them all. But because he was a man of great mercy he ordered their throats to be cut first. He then went to Rhodes to study oratory and philosophy.

After returning to Rome Caesar divided his energies between politics and love. He was handsome, though thinning hair worried him. When Cornelia died (68 BC) he married Pompeia, Sulla’s granddaughter. Since this was a purely political marriage he did not scruple, according to the custom of the time, to maintain relations with others; but since there were countless lovers of both sexes, Curius (father of the man who later became his general) called him “the husband of every woman and the wife of every man.” He continued these ways in his campaigns as well, having affairs with Cleopatra in Egypt, Queen Eunoe in Numidia, and many other women in Gaul, so that his soldiers jokingly called him “the bald adulterer.” After Caesar conquered Gaul and entered the city in triumphal procession his soldiers composed a couplet warning all husbands to guard their wives because Caesar was in the city. The aristocracy hated him for two reasons: he endangered their privileges and he seduced their women. Pompey divorced his wife because she had an affair with Caesar. Cato’s passionate enmity toward him was not entirely philosophical: Cato’s half-sister Servilia was one of Caesar’s most devoted mistresses. Once Cato, suspecting collusion between Caesar and Catiline, clashed with him in the Senate and demanded that he read aloud a letter that had just been handed to him. Caesar, without explanation, passed the letter to Cato, and it was a love letter from Servilia. Servilia remained Caesar’s passionate lover all her life, and in his later years unkind gossips accused her of having surrendered her own daughter Tertia to Caesar out of lust. During the civil war, in a public auction, Caesar sold some of the estates he had forcibly taken from irreconcilable aristocrats to Servilia at a nominal price. When some expressed astonishment at the low price, Cicero made a witty pun that might have cost him his head: Tertia deducted, which could mean “one third less” or allude to the rumor that Servilia had brought her daughter for Caesar. Tertia became the wife of Caesar’s chief assassin, Cassius. Thus the loves of men intertwine with the upheavals of nations.

Perhaps these various investments helped Caesar’s rise as much as they caused his fall. Every woman who became his mistress was an influential friend who usually belonged to the opposing camp, and most of them remained loyal to him even when his love turned to polite indifference. Crassus, although it was said that his wife Tertulla had an affair with Caesar, lent him enormous sums to cover the cost of his election campaigns and banquets; at one time Caesar owed him 800 talents (about 2,880,000 dollars). Such loans were not signs of generosity or friendship but subsidies to Caesar’s campaigns that were later repaid with political favors or military spoils. Crassus, like Atticus, needed support and opportunity to preserve his enormous wealth. Most Roman politicians of the time owed such loans: Mark Antony owed forty million, Cicero sixty million, and Milo seventy million sesterces—though these figures may be cautious slanders. Caesar must above all be regarded as an unprincipled politician and an unrestrained man who gradually, through growth and responsibility, rose to the rank of one of the most perceptive and conscientious statesmen in all history. While we rejoice in his faults we must not forget that he was a great man. We cannot boast of equality with Caesar merely because he also seduced women, bribed ward bosses, and wrote books.

The Consul

At the beginning of his career Caesar secretly cooperated with Catiline and, at the end, was the man who rebuilt Rome. Less than a year after Sulla’s death he brought a suit against Gnaeus Dolabella, one of the agents of Sulla’s reactionary government. The judges decided against Caesar. But the people applauded the democratic attack and also his brilliant speech. In warmth, wit, stirring perorations, and oratorical sarcasm he could not match Cicero; in truth Caesar disliked this “Asiatic” style and bound himself to a terse and austere simplicity that is the style of his Commentaries on the Civil War and the Gallic Wars. Nevertheless he soon came to be read as Cicero’s equal in eloquence.

In 68 BC he became quaestor (treasurer) and was assigned to service in Spain. He took command of several expeditions against local tribes, plundered cities, and gathered enough booty to pay part of his debts. At the same time he made himself popular by reducing the interest rate on loans that Roman moneylenders had given to the people of Spain. In Gades, when he stood before a statue of Alexander, he reproached himself that at an age when the Macedonian had conquered half the Mediterranean world he himself had done such insignificant things. When he returned to Rome he again entered the race for office and power. In 65 BC he was elected aedile or superintendent of public buildings. He spent his own money—or rather Crassus’s money—on adorning the Forum with new buildings and columns and won the hearts of the common people by holding lavish games and contests. Sulla had thrown out of the Capitol the memorials of Marius’s glory—his standards, statues, and trophies representing the qualities and victories of that old reformer; but Caesar restored them all to their places, gladdened Marius’s veterans, and by this very act openly declared the rebellious nature of his own policy. The conservatives protested and threatened to break his power.

In 64 BC, as president of a special court for the trial of the surviving agents of Sulla who had been commissioned by him to confiscate property and carry out executions, he summoned several of them to court and condemned some to exile or death. In 63 BC he voted in the Senate against the execution of Catiline’s accomplices and added in the margin of his speech that human personality does not survive after death; this was perhaps the only part of his speech that offended no one. In the same year he was elected Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the Roman religion. In 62 BC he was elected praetor and punished one of the leading conservatives for embezzlement. In 61 BC he became propraetor of Spain, but his creditors prevented him from departing. He confessed that he needed twenty-five million sesterces to clear his debts. Crassus came to his aid and guaranteed all his obligations. Caesar went to Spain and victoriously attacked the tribes that were dreaming of independence and gathered so much booty that he was able not only to pay his debts but also to enrich the treasury so much that the Senate voted to hold a triumph in his honor. This was perhaps a shrewd move by the “Better Sort,” for they knew that Caesar wished to run for the consulship, that the law forbade candidacy in absentia, and that a “triumphator” was required by law to remain outside the city until the day of the triumph—the Senate had set this day after the consular elections. But Caesar gave up the triumph and entered the city and with irresistible force and skill entered the election campaign.

His victory came through his shrewd attachment of Pompey to the liberal cause. Pompey had just returned from the East after a series of military and political victories. By clearing the sea of pirates he had again made Mediterranean commerce safe and restored prosperity to the cities that were its bases. By conquering Bithynia, Pontus, and Syria he had pleased the capitalists; he deposed and installed kings and lent them large sums at high interest rates from his spoils; he accepted a fat bribe from the king of Egypt to go to his country and suppress a revolt and then refused to carry it out on the pretext that the treaty was illegal; he pacified Palestine and made it a client state of Rome; he founded thirty-nine cities and established law, order, and peace; and on the whole his conduct was enlightened, statesmanlike, and fruitful. He now brought to Rome, as taxes, tribute, spoils, and redeemed or sold slaves, so much wealth that he could pay two hundred million sesterces to the treasury, add three hundred and fifty million to its annual revenues, distribute three hundred and eighty million among his soldiers, and yet, as one of the two richest men in Rome, claim equality with Crassus.

The Senate was more alarmed than pleased by these achievements. When it learned that Pompey, with an army devoted to him that could make him dictator, had landed at Brundisium, it trembled with fear. Pompey allayed the Senate’s alarm by disarming his troops and entering Rome with only his personal servants. His triumphal entry lasted two days, but even this was not enough to display all the litters that pictured his victories and showed his spoils. The ungrateful Senate rejected his request for the distribution of state lands among his soldiers, refused to ratify the treaties he had made with the defeated kings, and re-established the arrangements that Lucullus had made in the East and that Pompey had overturned. The effect of all these actions was to violate the principle of “harmony of the upper classes” that Cicero preached and to drive Pompey and the capitalists into flirtation with the “Popular Party.” Caesar took full advantage of this situation and founded the first “Triumvirate” or “Council of Three” with Pompey and Crassus (60 BC); according to it each member of the council undertook to oppose any law that displeased another. Pompey agreed that Caesar should become consul, and Caesar promised that if elected he would carry out measures that would nullify the Senate’s action in weakening Pompey’s position.

The contest was hard, and the market for bribes flourished on both sides. Cato, the leader of the traditionalists, when he heard that his supporters were buying votes, took the matter lightly and approved the practice on the grounds of the nobility of the cause. The “Popular Party” elected Caesar and the “Better Sort” elected Bibulus. Scarcely had Caesar been elected consul (59 BC) when he proposed the measures that Pompey had requested: the distribution of state lands among twenty thousand poor citizens, including Pompey’s soldiers, the ratification of Pompey’s agreements in the East, and a reduction by one third of the amount that the tax contractors had undertaken to collect from the Asian provinces. When the Senate opposed these measures with all its strength, Caesar, like the Gracchi brothers, referred them directly to the assembly. The traditionalists induced Bibulus to use his veto to prevent the vote from being taken and also stirred up the soothsayers to announce that the omens were unfavorable. Caesar ignored the bad omens and induced the assembly to summon Bibulus to court; one of the “Popular Party” enthusiasts emptied a basket of rubbish on Bibulus’s head. Caesar’s bills were approved. These bills, like those proposed by the Gracchi brothers, combined an agrarian policy with a financial program that pleased the merchants. Pompey was delighted that Caesar had kept his promises. He made Julia, Caesar’s daughter, his fourth wife, and the bond of understanding between the plebeians and the bourgeoisie turned into a wedding feast. The “Triumvirate” or Council of Three promised its reformist followers that it would support Publius Clodius’s candidacy for the tribunate in the autumn of 59 and at the same time pleased the voters with lavish games and entertainments.

In April Caesar presented his second agrarian bill, which provided that state lands in Campania should be divided among poor citizens who had three children. This time the Senate was also ignored. The assembly approved the bill, and after a century of effort the Gracchan policy triumphed. Bibulus retired to his house and from time to time consoled himself by announcing that the stars were unfavorable for the approval of this law. Caesar conducted public business without consulting him, so that the prison of the city that year was called “the year of the consulship of Julius and Caesar.” To keep the Senate under public scrutiny he founded the first newspaper; he appointed clerks to write reports of the Senate’s debates and other negotiations and news and posted these “daily acts” on the walls of the Forums. From these walls the reports were copied and sent by private letter carriers to all parts of the empire.

At the end of this historic consular term Caesar appointed himself for the next five years commander of the Narbonese province in Gaul and the southern slopes of the Alps. Since the law forbade any army to remain in Italy, the man who commanded the legions stationed north of Italy would have military control over the entire peninsula. Caesar, in order to secure his laws, arranged for his friends Gabinius and Piso to be elected consuls for 58 BC and married Piso’s daughter Calpurnia. To make sure of popular support he gave Clodius generous help in his election to the tribunate for 58 BC. Although he had recently divorced his third wife Pompeia on suspicion of adultery with Clodius, he did not allow this incident to affect his plans.

Morals and Politics

Publius Clodius Pulcher (Handsome), of the gens of the Claudii, was a young, brave, and unrestrained aristocrat. Like Catiline and Caesar he descended from his own base to lead the poor against the rich. To qualify for the tribunate of the plebs he had himself adopted by a plebeian family. To distribute the concentrated wealth of Rome among all and to destroy Cicero—who had slandered his sister Clodia and was a guardian of the sanctity of property—he joined Caesar’s staff until he could seize power himself. He praised Caesar’s policy and was in love with his wife; and when he wished to possess her he disguised himself in women’s clothing and entered Caesar’s house and then (in 62 BC) participated as high priest in a rite that women performed alone in honor of the “Good Goddess,” but his deception was discovered and he was summoned to court and tried for profaning the Good Goddess. When Caesar was called as a witness he said he had no complaint against Clodius. The prosecutor asked him why he had then divorced his wife Pompeia. Caesar replied: “Because my wife must be a woman above suspicion.” This was a clever answer that neither condemned nor acquitted an intelligent political aide. Witnesses of various kinds—who had perhaps been bribed—told the court that Clodius had had secret relations with Clodia and had seduced his sister Retia after her marriage to Lucullus. Clodius protested that he had been out of Rome on the day of the alleged profanation, but Cicero testified that he had been with him in Rome. The common people thought that the whole story was a plot by the Senate to humble a “Popular Party” leader and shouted for his acquittal. Crassus, according to some at Caesar’s suggestion, bribed a group of judges to decide in Clodius’s favor. The reformers won this time with their gold and Clodius was released. Caesar took advantage of this to marry, instead of a troublesome traditionalist wife, the daughter of a senator who had joined the popular cause.

Scarcely had Caesar retired from office when a group of conservatives proposed the complete repeal of his laws. Cato openly expressed the opinion that the statute book should be purged of the “Julian laws.” The Senate hesitated to oppose Caesar so openly, since he had legions at his disposal and Clodius controlled the tribunate. In 63 BC Cato had won the common people to the conservatives by renewing the distribution of state grain. Now (58 BC) Clodius answered Cato’s action by making grain free for all who needed it. He secured the passage of laws in the assembly that took the veto power from the priests in legislation and again legalized the collegia that the Senate had tried to abolish. He reorganized these unions and turned them into voting groups, and the unions became so devoted to him that they appointed armed guards to protect him. Clodius, fearing that after the end of his tribunate Cato or Cicero would try to nullify Caesar’s work, induced the assembly to send Cato as ambassador to Cyprus and to decree that any man who killed Roman citizens without the assembly’s permission, as the law required, should be exiled. Cicero realized that the law referred to him, so he fled to Greece, and the cities and nobles of Greece vied with one another in honoring and entertaining him. The assembly decreed that Cicero’s property should be confiscated and his house on the Palatine leveled with the ground.

It was Cicero’s good fortune that Clodius, intoxicated with the wine of victory, quarreled with both Pompey and Caesar and decided to become the sole leader of the plebeians himself. Pompey responded by supporting Cicero’s brother Quintus’s request for the orator’s recall. The Senate called upon all Roman citizens in Italy to come to the capital and vote on this proposal. Clodius brought an armed band into the “Field of Mars” to watch the voting, and Pompey stirred up an aristocrat in need named Annius Milo to mobilize a band against it. This led to riot and bloodshed and many were killed and Quintus himself barely escaped with his life, but his proposal was approved and Cicero returned triumphantly to Italy after months of exile (57 BC). As he traveled from Brundisium toward Rome the common people came out to meet him. In Rome the crowd’s welcome was so enormous that Cicero feared he might be accused of having contrived his own exile in order to have a glorious return.

Cicero had made a pact with Pompey and perhaps Caesar in return for his recall to Rome. Caesar lent him large sums to put his finances in order and refused to take interest. From then on for several years Cicero defended the Triumvirate in the Senate. When the danger of a grain shortage threatened Rome (57 BC) Cicero arranged for Pompey to be given an extraordinary mission that gave him complete control for six years over all Rome’s food supplies and all ports and trade. Pompey again pulled himself out of trouble, but the Roman constitution suffered another blow and government by law continued to give way to government by individuals. In 56 BC Cicero persuaded the Senate to approve the payment of a large sum for the expenses of Caesar’s legions in Gaul. In 55 BC he defended the plundering provincial government of Aulus Gabinius, one of the supporters of the Triumvirate, but without success. In 55 BC he lost all the favor he had gained with Caesar by raining abuse on another provincial governor named Calpurnius Piso. He well remembered that Piso had voted for his exile, but he had forgotten that Piso’s daughter was Caesar’s wife.

While (in 57 BC) Cato triumphantly settled the affairs of Cyprus and returned to Rome the traditionalists re-formed their ranks. Clodius, who was now Pompey’s enemy, accepted the invitation of the aristocracy to put his popular appeal and his thugs at their service. The atmosphere became anti-Caesar; the lampoons of Calvus and Catullus fell like poisoned darts on the head of the Triumvirate. As Caesar advanced farther into Gaul and news came of the countless dangers that beset him, hope revived in the hearts of the conservatives; Cicero said that after all a man can die in a thousand ways. If we believe Caesar’s own account, several of the traditionalists had begun negotiations with Ariovistus, the Germanic leader, for Caesar’s assassination. Domitius, who was a candidate for the consulship, announced that if elected he would immediately propose Caesar’s recall from Gaul—that is, he would accuse and try him. Cicero, who changed color like a chameleon, proposed that the Senate should examine the question of repealing Caesar’s agrarian laws on May 25, 56 BC.

The Conquest of Gaul

In the spring of 58 BC Caesar arrived at the command of the southern slopes of the Alps and the Narbonese province in Gaul—that is, northern Italy and southern France. In 71 BC Ariovistus, at the request of one of the Gallic tribes that had asked his help in a war with another tribe, entered Gaul with fifteen thousand Germans. He fulfilled his promise of help and then established his dominance over the tribes of northeastern Gaul. One of these tribes, the Aedui, asked Rome for help against the Germans (61 BC). The Senate gave the Roman commander in Narbonese Gaul permission to answer this call; but almost at the same time it placed the name of Ariovistus among the friendly rulers of Rome. At this time one hundred and twenty thousand Germans crossed the Rhine, settled in Flanders, and gave Ariovistus so much power that he regarded the natives as his subjects and dreamed of conquering all Gaul. At the same time the Helvetii, who had gathered around Geneva, began to migrate westward; there were three hundred and sixty-eight thousand of them, strong-bodied, and Caesar learned that they intended to cross the Narbonese province in Gaul on their way to southwestern France. Mommsen says: “From the sources of the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean the Germanic tribes were in motion and the entire Rhine line was threatened by them. This was a movement like the invasion that the Germanic and Frankish tribes … five hundred years later made upon the Roman Empire to the ruin of the Caesars.” While Rome was plotting against Caesar, Caesar was planning to save Rome.

At his own expense and without obtaining the permission he should have sought from the Senate, Caesar raised and equipped four additional legions besides the four he already had. He made a final request to Ariovistus to come to him to discuss the situation; and, as he expected, Ariovistus rejected the invitation. Now ambassadors from many Gallic tribes came to Caesar and asked for his protection. Caesar declared war on both Ariovistus and the Helvetii and marched north and in a bloody battle at Bibracte, the center of the Aedui tribe, near the modern city of Autun, met the Helvetian invasion. Caesar’s legions won, but not brilliantly; in most cases we must accept Caesar’s own account. The Helvetii agreed to return to their own land and Caesar agreed to grant them safe passage on condition that they accept Roman rule in their own territory. All Gaul now thanked him for its liberation and asked his help in driving out Ariovistus. He confronted the Germans near Ostheim and, according to his own account, killed or captured almost all of them (58 BC). Ariovistus escaped but died shortly afterward.

Caesar took it for granted that the liberation of Gaul meant its conquest and, on the pretext that there was no other way to preserve it against the Germans, immediately placed it under Roman rule. Some of the Gauls who were not convinced by this argument began to rebel and called upon the Belgae, a powerful tribe of Germans and Celts living in northern Gaul between the Seine and the Rhine, for help. Caesar defeated their forces on the banks of the Aisne and then, with a speed that gave the enemy no time to gather, attacked the tribes of the Suessiones, Ambiani, Nervii, and Atuatuci in turn, defeated them, plundered their goods, and sold the captives to slave dealers in Italy. He somewhat prematurely announced the conquest of Gaul, and the Senate declared the land a Roman province (56 BC) and the common people of Rome, who were as fond of their generals’ conquests as they were, cheered for that hero far from home. Caesar again descended from the Alps toward the foothills in Gaul and busied himself with the internal administration of the land, gave his legions fresh equipment, and asked Pompey and Crassus to meet him at Luca and draw up a plan for their common defense against the conservative reaction.

These men agreed, in order to block Domitius’s path of advancement, that Pompey and Crassus should run for the consulship in competition with him in 55 BC; that for five years (from 54 to 50 BC) Pompey should govern Spain and Crassus Syria; that Caesar should remain in command of Gaul for another five years (from 53 to 49 BC); and that at the end of this period he should be allowed to run for the consulship a second time. Caesar, with the spoils he had gathered from Gaul, gave funds to his colleagues and friends to cover the cost of their election campaigns and sent large sums to Rome to carry out a vast program of public buildings, to provide work for the unemployed, wages for his supporters, and credit for himself. He bribed so many senators who had come to inspect his war spoils that the movement to repeal his laws suddenly collapsed. Pompey and Crassus also, after giving the usual bribes, were elected consuls and Caesar again set about convincing the Gauls that peace is sweeter than freedom.

Flames of revolt blazed from the banks of the Rhine, from the lower part of Cologne. Two Germanic tribes poured into a part of Gaul that was the home of the Belgae tribe and advanced as far as Liège, and Gallic patriots asked their help against the Roman invasion. Caesar confronted these two tribes at Xanten (55 BC) and drove them back toward the Rhine and killed all of them—men, women, and children—who had not drowned in the river. He then had his engineers build a bridge across the broad river, which at that point was 430 meters wide, in ten days; Caesar’s troops crossed the bridge and fought in Germanic territory long enough to make the Rhine a firm frontier. After two weeks Caesar returned to Gaul by the way he had come.

We do not know why Caesar now attacked Britain. Perhaps stories that had spread about the abundance of gold or pearls in that land had tempted him; perhaps he wanted to seize the tin and iron reserves of Britain and send them to Rome; or perhaps he was angry that the Britons had helped the people of Gaul and thought that Roman power in Gaul must be safe on every side. He crossed the narrowest point of the English Channel with a small force, defeated the unprepared Britons, and, after taking notes, returned to Gaul (55 BC). A year later he crossed the sea again, defeated the Britons who were fighting under the command of Cassivellaunus, reached the Thames, took a promise of tribute, and then returned to Gaul.

Perhaps he had heard that the Gallic tribes had once again risen in revolt. He punished the Eburones and again invaded Germany (53 BC). On his return he left the greater part of his army in northern Gaul and the remainder of his troops went to northern Italy to spend the winter, hoping to devote a few months to improving his position in Rome. But at the beginning of 52 BC he received news that Vercingetorix, the ablest leader of the Gallic tribes, had united almost all the tribes for a war of independence. Caesar’s position became extremely dangerous. Most of his troops were in the north, and the land between him and his troops had fallen into the hands of the rebels. Caesar attacked the Auvergne from the snow-covered mountains of the Cevennes with a small army; when Vercingetorix mobilized his forces to defend that point, Caesar placed Decimus Brutus in command and himself, with a few horsemen in disguise, crossed the whole length of Gaul from north to south, joined the main body of his army, and suddenly began the attack. He besieged and captured Avaricum (Bourges) and Cenabum (Orléans), plundered them, killed all their inhabitants, and refilled his empty treasury with their treasures. He then attacked Gergovia, but the Gauls resisted so stubbornly that Caesar was forced to abandon the attack. The Aedui, who had been freed from the Germans by Caesar’s power and had since become his allies, now abandoned his side, seized his base and stores at Soissons, and prepared to drive him back into the Narbonese province of Gaul.

This was the most disastrous period of Caesar’s life, and for a while he considered himself defeated. He concentrated all his strength on besieging Alesia, where Vercingetorix had gathered thirty thousand soldiers. Caesar had not yet surrounded the city with an equal force when news arrived that two hundred and fifty thousand Gauls from the north were preparing to attack him. He ordered his men to build two concentric earthen walls around the city, one in front and one behind them; Vercingetorix’s troops and their allies attacked these walls and the Romans several times in vain. After a week, just when the Romans’ supplies had run out, the relief army, disorganized and short of food, broke up and scattered into powerless bands. Before long the citizens, who were dying of hunger, sent Vercingetorix at his own request as a prisoner to Caesar, and then surrendered to the Romans themselves (52 BC). The city was not harmed, but all its soldiers became slaves of the legionaries. Vercingetorix was chained and taken to Rome; there he added splendor to the triumphal celebration and paid with his life for his attachment to freedom.

The siege of Alesia decided the fate of Gaul and the character of French civilization and added a country twice the size of Italy to the Roman Empire and opened its treasuries and markets of five million people to Roman commerce; it freed Italy and the Mediterranean world for four centuries from barbarian invasions; and it raised Caesar from the brink of ruin to the heights of fame, wealth, and power. After the Gauls spent another year in scattered revolts and everywhere were suppressed with unusual severity by the angry Roman general, their entire land submitted to Roman rule. As soon as Caesar saw his victory assured he again became a merciful conqueror and treated the Gallic tribes so well that they, during the subsequent civil wars in Rome, when neither Caesar nor Rome had any possibility of retaliation, made no movement to throw off the Roman yoke. Gaul remained a Roman province for three hundred years, enjoyed the Roman peace, learned the Latin language and transformed it, and became a gateway for the entry of ancient classical culture into northern Europe. Doubtless neither Caesar nor his contemporaries were aware of the immense consequences of his bloody victory. Caesar thought he had saved Italy, opened a province, and provided an army; but he did not imagine that he had created French civilization.

The Decline of Democracy

During Caesar’s second five-year stay in Gaul, corruption and bloodshed had made the political atmosphere of Rome so turbulent that there was no precedent for it. Pompey and Crassus, as consuls, pursued their political aims with vote-buying in elections, intimidation of judges, and sometimes murder. When the term of these two ended, Crassus raised and mobilized a large army and set out for Syria. He crossed the Euphrates and met the Parthians at Carrhae. The more mobile Parthian cavalry defeated him; his son was also killed in the battle. Crassus, with order, was busy withdrawing his troops when the Parthian general invited him to a conference. He accepted the invitation but was treacherously killed. Crassus’s head was sent to the Parthian court to play the role of Pentheus’s body in Euripides’ Bacchae. His leaderless army, long wearied by battle, scattered and disappeared (53 BC).

Meanwhile Pompey had also raised an army and apparently wanted to complete the conquest of Spain. If Caesar’s plan had succeeded, while he extended the Roman frontier to the Thames and the Rhine, Pompey was to have completed the conquest of Further Spain and Crassus that of Armenia and Parthian territory. Instead of taking his legions to Spain, Pompey kept them all in Italy except for one legion that he placed at Caesar’s disposal during the crisis of the Gallic revolt. In 54 BC the strongest bond linking him to Caesar was broken, for his wife Julia, Caesar’s daughter, died in childbirth. Caesar offered him his niece Octavia, who was now his closest female relative, in marriage and himself sought the hand of Pompey’s daughter; but Pompey rejected both proposals. The disaster of Crassus and his troops the following year removed another balancing force; for if Crassus had been victorious he might have opposed the dictatorship of either Caesar or Pompey. From then on Pompey openly allied himself with the traditionalists. His plan for attaining the highest power now had only one obstacle in its path, and that was Caesar’s ambition and army. Pompey, knowing that Caesar’s command would end in 49 BC, obtained decrees that extended his command until the end of 46 BC and obliged all Italians capable of bearing arms to swear allegiance to him personally; he was thus certain that the passage of time would make him master of Rome.

While the potential dictators maneuvered for this office, the stench of dying democracy filled the capital. Court decisions, offices, provinces, and rule over client kingdoms were sold to those who paid the highest price. In 53 BC the first section of voters in the assembly was paid ten million sesterces for its vote. When gold did not suffice, the path of bloodshed was open; or they were forced to submit by searching into their past and threatening to expose secrets. Crime flourished in the city and banditry in the countryside and there was no police or magistrate to prevent it. The rich hired bands of gladiators to protect them or to support their side in the comitia. The smell of gold or the promise of grain drew the lowest men of Italy to Rome and destroyed the dignity of the assembly sessions. Anyone who voted as they wished in return for gold was admitted among the voters, whether citizen or not; sometimes only a few of those who voted had the right to vote. Several times it became necessary to secure the privilege of speaking in the assembly by storming the speaker’s platform and holding it by force. Legislation depended on the superiority of one faction’s vote over that of its rival; those who voted against were sometimes beaten to the point of death and then their houses were set on fire. Cicero wrote after one such session: “The Tiber was full of the bodies of citizens and the sewers were choked with them; and slaves had to clean the Forum with sponges from the flowing blood.”

Clodius and Milo were the most prominent and capable men of Rome in this kind of parliament. They mobilized bands of ruffians against each other on political issues and not a day passed without some kind of contest between them. One day Clodius attacked Cicero in the street, and another day his warriors set Milo’s house on fire; finally Clodius himself was captured and killed by Milo’s band (52 BC). The proletariat, which knew nothing of all his intrigues, honored Clodius as a martyr, gave his body a splendid funeral, carried it to the Senate house, and then set the Senate building on fire as a pyre for the dead. Pompey brought his soldiers into the fray and dispersed the demonstrators. In reward he asked the Senate to elect him “consul without colleague,” a phrase that seemed better to Cato than the word “dictator.” Pompey’s request was granted. He then presented two bills to the assembly, which was now terrified of his soldiers: one on combating political corruption and the other on the repeal of the right of candidacy for the consulship in absentia (which the bill of 55 BC had given to Caesar). Pompey, with the help of military force, supervised the activity of the courts with impartiality. Milo was tried for the murder of Clodius and, despite Cicero’s defense, was condemned but fled to Marseilles. Cicero went to govern Cilicia (51 BC) and there, by showing competence and integrity, so acquitted himself that his friends were astonished and annoyed. All the pillars of wealth and order in the capital consented to Pompey’s dictatorship, but the lower classes hopefully looked forward to Caesar’s arrival.

The Civil War

A century of revolution had broken the self-centered and short-sighted aristocracy but had not established another government in its place. Unemployment, bribery, bread distribution, and circus games had transformed the assembly into a shapeless and turbulent mob that was openly incapable of governing itself, let alone an empire. Democracy had fallen according to Plato’s rule: liberty had turned into license and chaos had prepared the way for the abolition of liberty.

Caesar agreed with Pompey that the Republic was dead and said that the Republic was now “only a name without substance”; and there was no escape from dictatorship. But Caesar hoped to establish a form of leadership that would be progressive; that would not stabilize the “existing order” but would alleviate the irregularities, injustices, and deprivations that had dragged democracy into decline. He was now fifty-four years old and had doubtless been exhausted by his long campaigns in Gaul; and he did not like the struggle with his fellow citizens and old friends. But he saw the traps that had been spread in his path and was distressed that the savior of Italy was being so unworthily rewarded. His term of command in Gaul ended on the first of March, 49 BC; he could not run for the consulship until the autumn of that year; in the meantime he lost the immunity of officeholders and could not enter Rome without exposing himself to decrees of arrest and confiscation—which were among the common weapons in party warfare. A little earlier Marcus Marcellus had proposed to the Senate that Caesar should be removed from his command before the end of his term, which meant voluntary exile or being dragged to trial. The tribunes of the plebs saved him with their veto, but the Senate had openly expressed its agreement with this proposal. Cato had said plainly that he hoped Caesar would be prosecuted, tried, and exiled from Italy.

Caesar made every effort to find a way of compromise. When the Senate, on Pompey’s proposal, asked both generals to place a legion at its disposal for the war with the Parthians, Caesar, although his army was small, immediately complied with this request; and when Pompey asked him to return the legion that had been sent to him the previous year, he sent the legion back. His friends warned him that these legions, instead of being sent to fight the Parthians, had been stationed at Capua. Caesar, through his supporters, asked the Senate to renew the decree that the assembly had issued at the beginning of his work authorizing his candidacy for the consulship in absentia. The Senate refused this request and asked Caesar to disband his troops. Caesar realized that the legions were his only guardians and that he had perhaps won their loyalty to his person for just such a crisis. Nevertheless he proposed to the Senate that both he and Pompey should resign their commands, and this request seemed so reasonable to the people of Rome that they showered flowers on Caesar’s messenger. The Senate accepted this plan with 370 votes against 22, but Pompey refused to accept it. In the last days of 50 BC the Senate declared that if Caesar did not resign his command by the first of July he would be an enemy of the people. On the first day of 49 BC Curio read a letter in the Senate in which Caesar agreed to relinquish all his ten legions except two on condition that he remain in command until 48 BC; but he added that rejection of this proposal would be tantamount to a declaration of war. Cicero spoke in defense of the proposal and Pompey also consented to it; but the consul Lentulus intervened and the assistants of Caesar, Curio and Antony, were expelled from the Senate building. After a long debate the Senate was persuaded by the arguments of Lentulus, Cato, and Marcellus and reluctantly gave Pompey the command and authority “to see that no harm came to the country.” This was a Roman way of declaring dictatorship and martial law.

Caesar hesitated more than was his custom. Legally the Senate was right; he had never had the authority to set the conditions for his own resignation from command. He knew that civil war would plunge Gaul into revolution and Italy into ruin. But his submission would mean surrendering the empire to incompetence and reaction. While he was thinking these thoughts he received news that one of his closest friends and ablest officers, Titus Labienus, had abandoned his side and joined Pompey. He then summoned the soldiers of the Thirteenth Legion, which was particularly dear to him, and explained the situation to them. His first word enchanted the soldiers: “Comrades!” These men, who had always been witnesses of Caesar’s participation in hardships and dangers and complained that he risked his life more than he should, granted him the right to use this word. He had always, instead of using the short and harsh word “soldiers!” like heartless commanders, addressed his soldiers in this way. Most of his soldiers came from Cisalpine Gaul and had received the right of Roman citizenship from him; they knew that the Senate had refused to ratify this right and that even a senator, to show his displeasure at Caesar’s action in granting the right to vote, had flogged one of the inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul; and yet flogging a Roman citizen was forbidden. These men had become accustomed in their countless battles to respect Caesar and even to love him in their own rough way and in the language of silence. Caesar severely punished cowardice and disorder, but he forgave the faults of his soldiers that arose from their human nature, overlooked their debaucheries, did not unnecessarily endanger their lives, increased their pay, and generously distributed his spoils among them. He informed them of his proposals to the Senate and the Senate’s reaction to them; he reminded them that such a lazy and corrupt aristocracy did not deserve to give Rome order, justice, and prosperity. And when he asked them whether they would follow him, not a single man hesitated. When he told them that he no longer had money to pay their wages, they all poured their savings into his treasury.

On the tenth of January, 49 BC, Caesar led one legion of his army across the Rubicon, a small river near Ariminum that was considered the southern boundary of Cisalpine Gaul. He is reported to have said at this moment: “The die is cast.” His action was apparently foolish, for nine legions of his troops were still out of reach in Gaul and their arrival would take weeks, while Pompey had ten legions or sixty thousand soldiers and was free to raise as many troops as he wished and to arm and feed them all with his money. Caesar’s Twelfth Legion was in Picenum and his Eighth Legion in Corfinium joined him; he mobilized three more legions from prisoners, volunteers, and conscripts. Gathering an army was not so difficult for him; Italy had not forgotten the “Social War” (88 BC) and now saw Caesar as the defender of the rights of Italians; the cities opened their gates to him one by one and in some of them all the inhabitants came out to meet him. Cicero wrote: “The cities greeted him as a god.” Corfinium resisted a little and then surrendered; Caesar protected it from the plunder of his soldiers, released all the captured officers, and sent the gold, supplies, and baggage that Labienus had left behind to Pompey’s camp. Although he had no money in his coffers, he refrained from confiscating the estates of his opponents that fell into his hands, and this was a very wise policy that kept most of the middle classes neutral. He announced that he considered all neutrals his friends. After every victory Caesar made a new effort toward reconciliation. He sent a messenger to Lentulus and asked him to use his consular authority to establish peace. In a letter to Cicero he wrote that he was willing to retire to private life and leave the field to Pompey on condition that he could live in safety. Cicero tried to bring about a compromise between them, but found his logic powerless against the obstinacy of the rivals in the revolution.

Pompey, although he still had superiority over Caesar in numbers, retreated from the capital with his troops and a disordered crowd of aristocrats followed him who had left their wives and children behind in the hope of Caesar’s mercy. After rejecting every invitation to peace, Pompey declared that he would consider any senator who did not leave Rome and join his camp an enemy. Most of the senators remained in Rome, and Cicero, hesitant and himself criticizing Pompey’s indecisiveness, wandered among his country estates. Pompey set out for Brundisium and transported his troops across the Adriatic Sea. He knew that his undisciplined troops needed more training to cope with Caesar’s legions and at the same time hoped that the Roman fleet under his command would keep Italy so hungry that his rival would be destroyed.

Caesar entered Rome on the sixteenth of March without meeting any resistance and with his troops stationed in neighboring cities. He first proclaimed a general amnesty and restored order and social stability to the city. The tribunes summoned the Senate, and Caesar asked the Senate to name him dictator, but the Senate refused; he then asked the Senate to send envoys to Pompey to discuss the conclusion of peace, and again the Senate refused. When Caesar asked for funds from the national treasury, Lucius Metellus, the holder of the tribunate, prevented the acceptance of his request. But when Caesar pointed out that it was harder for him to threaten than to carry out the threat, he abandoned his opposition. From then on Caesar spent freely from the treasury, but with scrupulous honesty he deposited in the treasury the spoils he had won in his recent battles. He then returned to his soldiers and prepared himself for battle with the three armies that Pompey’s supporters had raised in Greece, Africa, and Spain.

To provide a grain reserve (for Italy’s life depended on it), Caesar sent the tireless Curio with two legions to Sicily to take it. Cato surrendered the island and fled to Africa; and Curio followed him with the recklessness of Regulus, attacked prematurely, but was defeated and killed in battle; in his last moments he regretted not his own death but the harm he had done to Caesar. Meanwhile Caesar had taken an army with him to Spain so that on the one hand the export of grain from that country to Italy would continue and on the other hand, when he set out to confront Pompey, he would not be attacked from behind. In Spain, as in Gaul, he made major strategic mistakes. For a while his troops saw the danger of hunger and defeat before them, but Caesar, with his usual efficiency and personal courage, saved himself from danger. By changing the course of a river he not only broke the danger of encirclement but also encircled the enemy; he then waited patiently until the trapped army was forced to surrender, although his troops were thirsty for attack; finally Pompey’s supporters abandoned resistance and all Spain fell into Caesar’s hands (August 49 BC). Caesar set out for Italy by land but at Marseilles saw that an army under the command of Lucius Domitius had blocked his way; this Domitius was the man who had been captured by Caesar at Corfinium and then released. After a hard siege Caesar took the city, gave a new form to the administration of Gaul, and in December was in Rome.

This battle, which had calmed the fearful hearts of the capital, strengthened Caesar’s political position. The Senate now elected him to the dictatorship. But Caesar, after being elected one of the two consuls in 48 BC, resigned this title. Since hoarding of money had lowered rates and debtors refused to repay in valuable money the cheap money they had received, Italy had fallen into a credit crisis. Caesar decreed that individuals could pay their debts in goods whose prices had been fixed by state arbitrators on the basis of pre-war rates. This action seemed to him “the most fitting solution for preserving the honor of debtors and at the same time preventing the general cancellation of debts that is feared after every war.” The fact that Caesar was forced to prohibit debt slavery again is itself an indication of how far reforms had progressed in Rome. He allowed debtors to deduct from the principal the interest they had already paid and also limited the interest rate to one percent per month. These measures pleased most of the creditors, who feared the confiscation of their property, but disappointed the reformers to the same extent, who had hoped that Caesar would follow Catiline’s actions by canceling all debts and distributing large estates. Caesar distributed grain to the needy, canceled all sentences of exile except that of Milo, and pardoned the aristocrats who returned to Rome. No one thanked him for these acts of moderation. The pardoned traditionalists resumed their plots against his life and, while he was fighting Pompey in Thessaly, the reformers also abandoned his side and joined Caelius, who promised the cancellation of debts, the confiscation of large estates, and the redistribution of land.

The Civil War

Near the end of 49 BC Caesar joined his troops and the fleet that his assistants had assembled at Brundisium. At that time it was unprecedented for an army to cross the Adriatic in winter; Caesar’s twelve ships could carry only one third of his sixty thousand soldiers at a time, and Pompey’s superior fleet guarded all the islands and ports on the opposite shore. Nevertheless Caesar set sail with twenty thousand soldiers and headed for Epirus. His ships were sunk on their return to Italy. Caesar, in order to learn the reason for the delay of the rest of his troops, tried to cross the sea in a small boat. The boatmen rowed against the waves and nearly sank. Caesar, who stood fearlessly among the terrified crew, encouraged them with this perhaps legendary comforting remark: “Fear not, for you carry Caesar and his fortune.” But the wind and waves drove the boat back to shore and Caesar was forced to abandon the attempt. Meanwhile Pompey seized Dyrrhachium with forty thousand men and its valuable stores; then, because of the indecisiveness that characterized his years of excessive corpulence, he refrained from attacking Caesar’s weak and hungry force. Mark Antony in this interval assembled another fleet and transported the remainder of Caesar’s army across the sea.

Caesar was now ready for battle, but he still did not like to pit Roman against Roman. He therefore sent an envoy to Pompey and proposed that both generals should resign their commands. Pompey gave no answer. Caesar attacked and was driven back; but Pompey did not follow up this victory by pursuing Caesar. Pompey’s officers, despite his advice, killed all their prisoners, while Caesar spared the lives of his prisoners, and this contrast in conduct strengthened the morale of Caesar’s troops and weakened that of Pompey’s soldiers. Caesar’s troops asked him to punish them for the cowardice they had shown in this first battle with Roman legions. When Caesar refused this request they asked him to lead them into battle; but Caesar more wisely decided to retreat to Thessaly and give his troops a rest.

Pompey now made a decision that cost him his life. Africanus advised him to return and seize undefended Italy. But most of Pompey’s advisers asked him to pursue Caesar and finish his work. The aristocrats in Pompey’s camp exaggerated the victory at Dyrrhachium and imagined that that battle had decided everything. Cicero, who had finally joined them, was astonished to see their quarrels over their shares of the future spoils and their luxurious life in the midst of war—for they ate their meals from silver dishes and their tents had comfortable carpets and were decorated and covered with flowers. Cicero writes:

Except for Pompey himself, those in his camp fought so savagely and spoke so cruelly in conversation that I could not even imagine the possibility of their victory without trembling with fear. … There was nothing among them but their ambition. … They issued sentences of death and confiscation not against one man but against many. … Lentulus had promised himself Hortensius’s house, Caesar’s gardens, and Baiae.

Pompey would have preferred to follow the Fabian rules of delay and attrition, but when he was accused of cowardice from every side he ordered the attack.

The decisive battle was fought with the utmost violence at Pharsalus in Thessaly on the ninth of August, 48 BC. Pompey had forty-eight thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry, and Caesar had twenty-two thousand infantry and one thousand cavalry. Plutarch writes: “A few of the noblest Romans, who stood outside the battle as spectators, had no other thought in mind than to see where personal ambition had led the empire. … The entire vitality and strength of the very city that in this battle had drawn the sword against itself was clear proof of how blind and mad a man becomes when he falls into the trap of lust.” Close relatives and even brothers fought against each other in the two contending armies. Caesar ordered his troops to spare the lives of Romans who surrendered; but about Marcus Brutus, the young aristocrat, he ordered that he should be captured unharmed, and if this was not possible, that he should be allowed to escape. The leadership, experience, and superior morale of Caesar’s troops defeated Pompey’s soldiers; fifteen thousand of Pompey’s soldiers were killed or wounded, twenty thousand surrendered, and the rest fled. Pompey also tore off the insignia of command and fled like the others. Caesar relates that he lost only two hundred men—and this claim casts a shadow of doubt on all his books. His troops laughed when they saw that the tents of the defeated were so luxuriously furnished and their tables so richly spread for a victory banquet. Caesar ate Pompey’s dinner in Pompey’s tent.

Pompey rode all night to Larissa, from there set out for the seashore, and then sailed to Alexandria. In Mytilene, where his wife joined him, the citizens asked him to settle there; Pompey politely refused this request and advised them to surrender themselves without fear to Caesar, for “Caesar is a man of boundless kindness and mercy.” Brutus also fled to Larissa but lingered there and wrote a letter to Caesar. The victorious general was overjoyed to learn of his safety, immediately pardoned him, and at his request also pardoned Cassius. He also treated the peoples of the East, who under the rule of the upper classes had supported Pompey, with kindness. He distributed Pompey’s grain stores among the hungry population of Greece and, when the Athenians apologized to him, said with a reproachful smile: “How long will the greatness of your ancestors save you from self-destruction?”

Perhaps he had been told that Pompey hoped, with the help of the Egyptian army and the forces that Cato, Labienus, and Metellus Scipio were raising at Utica, to resume the war. But when Pompey reached Alexandria, Potheinos, the effeminate minister of the young ruler Ptolemy XII, perhaps hoping for a reward from Caesar, ordered his servants to kill Pompey. As soon as the general set foot on shore he was killed with a dagger while his helpless and terrified wife stood watching from the deck of the ship on which they had come. When Caesar arrived the servants of Potheinos presented him with Pompey’s severed head. Caesar turned away in horror and wept at this fresh proof that men reach the same goal by different paths. He established his headquarters in the royal palace of the Ptolemies and decided to settle the affairs of that ancient kingdom.

Caesar and Cleopatra

Since the death of Ptolemy VI (145 BC) Egypt had rapidly declined. Its kings could no longer maintain social order or national independence. The Roman Senate imposed its policy more and more on that country and Alexandria had become a garrison of Roman troops. Ptolemy XI, who had been placed on the throne by Pompey and Gabinius, made a will providing that the government should pass to his son Ptolemy XII and his daughter Cleopatra and that these two should marry and rule the country together.

Cleopatra was originally from Macedonian Greece and was probably more fair than dark-eyed. She was not extremely beautiful, but her coquetry, vivacity of spirit and body, various arts, charming behavior, and the melodiousness of her voice, when combined with her royal status, acted like a heady wine that could also bring a Roman general calmly to his knees. She was familiar with Greek history, literature, and philosophy; she spoke Greek, Egyptian, and Syrian and, according to reports, other languages as well. She had added the spiritual charm of Aspasia to the unrestrained sensuality of a completely shameless woman. It is said that she wrote two treatises, one on the tools of cosmetics and the other on the interesting subject of Egyptian weights and coins. She was a capable ruler and stateswoman who gave commerce and industry in Egypt great prosperity and was considered an expert in financial affairs, even in the days of her love affairs. With these qualities she combined Eastern sensuality, a cruelty and recklessness from which suffering and death arose, and a political ambition that dreamed of an empire and recognized no law except the law of success. If she had not inherited the fiery and passionate temperament of the later Ptolemies she might have achieved her dream of being queen of a united Mediterranean empire. She realized that Egypt could no longer be independent of Rome and saw no reason why she herself should not hold both countries together under one command.

Caesar was displeased to learn that Potheinos had driven Cleopatra from the country and was now ruling on behalf of the young Ptolemy. He secretly sent for Cleopatra and she came to him in secret. To reach Caesar she hid herself in a sheet and the sheet was carried into Caesar’s chamber by her servant Apollodorus. The astonished Roman, who never allowed his conquests in war to surpass his successes in love, became infatuated with Cleopatra’s courage and cleverness. He reconciled Cleopatra with Ptolemy and again placed her with her brother on the throne of Egypt. When he heard from the barbers that Potheinos and the Egyptian general Achillas had plotted to kill him and massacre the small army he had brought with him, he shrewdly arranged for Potheinos’s murder. Achillas fled to the camp of the Egyptian troops and incited them to revolt, and the Senate’s garrison in the city joined the revolt against this treacherous intruder who wanted to establish the royal line in the Ptolemaic family and even place a son of his own on the throne of the heir apparent.

In this difficult situation Caesar acted with the cleverness and resourcefulness that were his way. He fortified the royal palace and the adjacent theater for himself and his soldiers and asked for reinforcements from Asia Minor, Syria, and Rhodes. When he saw that his undefended fleet would soon fall into the hands of his enemies he ordered it to be burned entirely; part of the library of Alexandria, whose size is not known, was also destroyed in that fire. Caesar captured the island of Pharos with several desperate attacks but later lost it and then recaptured it, for Pharos was the key to the entrance of the reinforcements he was awaiting. In one of these battles, when the Egyptians drove Caesar and four hundred of his soldiers from a makeshift causeway into the sea, he saved himself by swimming under a rain of spears to the shore. Ptolemy XII, who thought the rebels were victorious, left his palace and joined the rebels and disappeared from the pages of history. When the reinforcements arrived Caesar routed the Egyptians and the Senate’s garrison in the “Battle of the Nile.” He rewarded Cleopatra’s loyalty to him by choosing her younger brother Ptolemy XIII to reign with her, and in practice the brother surrendered all his powers to Cleopatra’s absolute rule.

It is not known why Caesar spent nine months in Alexandria while his opponents’ troops were mobilizing near Utica and Rome, stirred by Caelius and Milo into a reformist revolution, was impatiently awaiting him to put affairs in order with his management. Perhaps he thought that after ten years of war he deserved a short rest and relaxation. Suetonius says that he “often stayed with Cleopatra until dawn and, if his soldiers had not threatened him with mutiny, he would have traveled with Cleopatra through all Egypt and perhaps even gone by royal barge to Ethiopia;” after all, not all those soldiers could reach the courtesans of the city. Perhaps Caesar, out of gallantry, did not want to leave Cleopatra alone in the days of her labor pains. In 47 BC a son was born to Cleopatra who was named Caesarion; according to Mark Antony, Caesar admitted that the son was his. It is not unlikely that Cleopatra whispered this sweet dream into Caesar’s ear that Caesar himself would sit on the throne and marry her and unite the entire Mediterranean in one “bed.”

This is of course a guess, and a scandalous guess at that, and there is nothing but rumors to confirm it. But it is certain that when Caesar heard that Pharnaces, son of Mithridates VI, had again seized Pontus, Lesser Armenia, and Cappadocia and had once again stirred the East to revolt against Rome, he took action. His wisdom in pacifying Spain and Gaul before the battle with Pompey now became clear; if the West and East had begun to rebel at the same time the fabric of the Roman Empire would have unraveled and the “barbarians” would have poured south and Rome would never have seen the age of Augustus. Caesar, after reorganizing three of his legions, set out in June 47 BC and with his usual speed crossed the entire coast of Egypt and entered Pontus through Syria and Asia Minor and defeated Pharnaces at Zela (the second of August of the same year) and sent this short report to a friend in Rome: “I came, I saw, and I conquered.”

At Tarentum he met Cicero (the twenty-sixth of September), and Cicero apologized on behalf of himself and the other conservatives. Caesar accepted this apology with a cheerful face. He was distressed to learn that during the twenty months of his absence from Rome the civil war had turned into a social revolution; that Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella had joined Caelius and presented a bill to the assembly for the cancellation of debts; that Antony had armed his soldiers against the desperate poor who followed Dolabella; and that eight hundred Romans had been killed in the Forum. Caelius, as praetor, recalled Milo from exile and the two together raised an army in southern Italy and incited the slaves to join them in a widespread revolution. These two were not very successful in their work but they had strong hearts. In Rome the reformers celebrated the memory of Catiline and again scattered flowers on his grave. Meanwhile Pompey’s army in Africa had grown to the size of the army that had been defeated at Pharsalus. Sextus, Pompey’s son, raised a new army in Spain, and once again Italy was in danger of a grain shortage. Such was the state of Italy in October 47 BC when Caesar arrived in Rome with Cleopatra, her “brother and husband,” and Caesarion and Calpurnia.

In the few months he had between his battles Caesar restored order to the country. When he was again elected to the dictatorship he pleased the reformers by canceling Sulla’s last law and canceling all rents of less than two thousand sesterces in Rome for one year, and at the same time he appointed Marcus Brutus to the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul. He assured Cicero and Atticus that he would not wage war on private property; and he ordered the statues of Sulla, which the poor common people had overthrown, to be re-erected; and in these ways too he tried to calm the minds of the conservatives. When he turned his thoughts to the work of Pompey’s supporters he was distressed to learn that his most trusted legions, because of delay in receiving their pay, had mutinied and refused to go to Africa. Since the treasury was empty he raised funds by confiscating the property of rebellious nobles; he said that he had learned by experience that an army rises with money, money with power, and power with an army. He then suddenly appeared among his mutinous legions and summoned them together and calmly told them that they had been discharged and could return to their homes, and added that when he conquered “with other soldiers” in Africa he would repay all their overdue wages. Appian says: “When Caesar said this, all of them were ashamed that they were abandoning their general at the moment when his enemies surrounded him from every side. … They then shouted that they repented of their mutiny and begged him to keep them in his service.” Caesar with a pleasing reluctance accepted this request and set out with them by sea for Africa.

On the sixth of April, 46 BC, Caesar met the combined forces of Metellus Scipio, Cato, Labienus, and Juba I, king of Numidia, at Thapsus. He was again defeated in this first encounter but re-formed his ranks and began the attack and defeated the enemy. Caesar’s bloodthirsty soldiers, who blamed this second battle on his pardon and mercy at Pharsalus, mercilessly killed ten thousand of the eighty thousand soldiers who supported Pompey, for they did not want to face these men again. Juba killed himself; Scipio fled and was killed in a naval battle; Cato fled with a small army to Utica. When the leaders of the army wanted to defend the city against Caesar, Cato persuaded them that this was impossible. He provided money for those who intended to flee but advised his son to surrender himself to Caesar. But he himself rejected both these remedies. He spent the evening in philosophical discussion and then went to his chamber and read Plato’s Phaedo. His friends, fearing his suicide, removed his sword from beside his bed. When they left their guard he had his servant bring the weapon back. For a while he pretended to be asleep; then he suddenly seized the sword and plunged it into his stomach. His friends rushed into the chamber and a physician replaced the protruding intestines and sewed up the wound and bandaged it. As soon as these men left the chamber Cato removed the bandage and tore open the wound and pulled out his entrails and died.

When Caesar arrived he was saddened that he had not had the opportunity to pardon Cato. He could only pardon his son. The people of Utica gave the Stoic’s body a splendid funeral, as if they knew that they were now burying the Republic that had lasted for almost five centuries.

The Statesman

After appointing Sallust governor of Numidia and giving the African provinces a new organization, Caesar returned to Rome in the autumn of 46 BC. The terrified Senate, seeing the rise of monarchy near, gave Caesar the dictatorship for ten years and arranged such a triumphal entry for him as had never been seen before. He paid each of his soldiers five thousand Attic drachmas (3,000 dollars), that is, much more than he had promised them. He spread twenty-two thousand tables for the citizens and, for their entertainment, arranged a naval battle spectacle with ten thousand participants. At the beginning of 45 BC he set out for Spain and at Munda defeated the last army supporting Pompey. When he returned to Rome in October he found all Italy in turmoil. The bad government of a small group of rich men (oligarchy) and a century of revolution had disorganized agriculture, industry, finance, and commerce. The exhaustion of the provinces, the hoarding of capital, and the riskiness of investment had thrown the circulation of money into disorder. Thousands of villages were falling into ruin; one hundred thousand men had been called from productive work to war; countless peasants, because of competition from foreign grain and the “system of large estates” (latifundia), had joined the poor masses of the cities and eagerly listened to the promises of demagogues. The remnants of the aristocracy, whom Caesar’s pardon had not reconciled, began to plot against him in their clubs and palaces. He asked them in the Senate to accept the necessity of dictatorship and to help him in the rebuilding of the country. But they denounced the usurpations of this usurper and reproached the presence of Cleopatra in Rome as his guest, and spread the story in such a way that Caesar dreamed of kingship and wanted to transfer the capital of his united empires to Alexandria or Ilium.

Caesar, although at the age of fifty-five he had aged more than he should, single-handedly girded himself with Roman energy for the reform of the Roman state. He knew that if he did not build something better in place of the ruins he had swept away his victories would be wasted. When his ten-year dictatorship was extended for life in 44 BC he saw little difference, although he could hardly have foreseen that he would die five months later. The Senate, perhaps with the intention of making him odious to the people who even hated the name of king, was lavish in bestowing titles on him and praising him. It also allowed him to wear the laurel wreath—which Caesar used to cover his bald head—and to exercise the powers of “imperator” even in time of peace. With these powers Caesar brought the treasury and, with the title of Pontifex Maximus, the priests under his supervision; as consul he could propose and carry out laws; as tribune he was safe from any punishment; and as censor he could appoint or remove senators. The assemblies retained the right to approve bills, but Caesar’s deputies—Dolabella and Antony—controlled the assemblies as they wished, and the assemblies in general supported Caesar’s policy. Caesar, like all dictators, tried to base his power on popularity with the common people.

He turned the Senate almost into a consultative assembly. He increased its members from 600 to 900 and by installing 400 new members permanently changed its character. Many of these newcomers were Roman merchants and chosen citizens of the cities of Italy or the provinces, and some were centurions (commanders of companies of one hundred) and soldiers or freedmen. The patricians, seeing that the chiefs of the defeated Gallic tribes had entered the Senate and joined the ranks of the rulers of the empire, fell into fear; even the wits of the capital were disturbed by this situation and spread a satirical couplet:

Caesar leads the Gauls in triumph,  
Then brings them to the Senate; and the Gauls have taken off their trousers and put on the broad togas of senators.

Perhaps Caesar deliberately made the new Senate so large that it would be neither useful for practical consultation nor capable of unified opposition. He chose a group of his friends—Balbus, Oppius, Matius, and others—as members of an unofficial executive board and, by assigning the details of secretarial government work and the minutiae of administration to his freedmen and household slaves, laid the foundation for the imperial bureaucracy. He allowed the assembly to elect half of the city officials and himself appointed the other half with “recommendations” that the assembly always accepted. As tribune he could “veto” the decisions of other tribunes or consuls. He increased the number of praetors to sixteen and quaestors (treasurers) to forty so that municipal and judicial work could be completed more quickly. He himself supervised all aspects of city administration and tolerated no incompetence or laxity. In the charters he granted for the government of cities he strictly forbade corruption in elections and dishonesty by government agents and imposed heavy penalties for them. To put an end to the dominance of the custom of buying votes over political life, or perhaps to preserve his own power against a revolt of the poor, he abolished the collegia except for some ancient Jewish associations that were mostly religious in nature. He restricted jury service to the two upper classes and reserved the right to try the most serious cases for himself; he often sat on the bench and no one denied the wisdom and fairness of his judgments. He suggested to the jurists of his time that they organize and codify the existing laws of Rome, but his early death left this plan unfulfilled.

Caesar took up the work of the Gracchi brothers again and distributed land among his old soldiers and the poor common people. This policy, which was later followed by Augustus, calmed the unrest of the peasants for several years. To prevent the rapid and concentrated re-accumulation of landownership he decreed that newly acquired lands could not be sold for twenty years; and to stop the expansion of slavery in the countryside he passed a law according to which one third of the workers in the fields must be provided from free men. After first assigning many idle poor to military service and then turning them into landed peasants, he further reduced their number by sending eighty thousand citizens to found colonies in Carthage, Corinth, Seville, Arles, and other centers. To provide work for the other unemployed in Rome he spent one hundred and sixty million sesterces on a vast program of public building, built a new and spacious building in the “Field of Mars” for holding assemblies, and, by building the “Julian Forum” next to the main Forum of the city, reduced the congestion of business in it. In the same way he adorned many cities in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Greece. Having thus reduced the pressure of poverty he made poverty a condition for receiving state grain. At one stroke the number of applicants fell from three hundred and twenty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand.

So far Caesar had remained faithful to his role as champion of the “Popular Party,” but since the Roman Revolution was more agrarian than industrial and its aim was first the landed and slave-owning aristocracy and then the usurers and to a lesser extent the commercial classes, in following the policy of the Gracchi brothers he asked the merchants to support the agrarian and financial revolution. Cicero tried to unite the middle classes with the aristocracy. Many of the great capitalists, from Crassus to Balbus, participated in meeting Caesar’s financial needs, just as such men also helped the American and French revolutions. Nevertheless Caesar destroyed one of the greatest sources of his own financial exploitation, and that was the collection of taxes in the provinces by groups of agents. He reduced the amount of taxes in the provinces by one third and placed their collection in the hands of those who were responsible to him personally. He lowered the level of loans; he enacted strict laws against heavy interest rates; and with the bankruptcy law, the main part of which is still in force today, he settled cases of severe insolvency. By adopting gold as the backing for money and striking a new gold coin called the aureus, whose purchasing power was equal to the English pound sterling in the nineteenth century, he restored monetary stability to the country. The coins of the government were stamped with his image and were struck with an artistic skill that was new in Rome. Order and new efficiency entered the administration of the empire’s finances, and the result was that at Caesar’s death the state treasury had seven hundred million sesterces and his private treasury had one hundred million sesterces in assets.

To put the collection of taxes and the organization of government on a scientific basis he took a census of the population of Italy and planned to do the same for the entire empire. To increase the number of citizens, which had been reduced by war, he made more Romans eligible for the right to vote and among them gave this right to physicians and teachers in Rome. Since the decline in the number of infants had long alarmed him, in 59 BC he gave priority in receiving land to fathers who had three children; he then decreed that large families should be rewarded and forbade women under forty-five years of age without children to ride in litters or to adorn themselves with jewels—and this was the weakest and most futile of his various laws.

Caesar, despite his attachment to some superstitions, was an agnostic, but he still held the office of chief priest of the official religion and provided the customary funds for it. He restored the old temples and built new ones and honored above all his “tender mother” Venus. But he allowed complete freedom of religious belief and worship and repealed the old decrees against the worship of Isis and left the Jews free to perform their religious duties. When he saw that the priests’ calendar no longer corresponded with the seasons he commissioned Sosigenes, one of the Greeks of Alexandria, to prepare the “Julian calendar” on the basis of Egyptian models, which consisted of 365 days per year with an extra day added every four years in February. Cicero said with a groan that Caesar, not content with ruling the earth, had now set about regulating the course of the stars. But the Senate accepted this reform with open arms and placed the family name of the dictator, Julius, on the month of Quintilis, which was the fifth month in a year that began with March.

The works that Caesar planned or began but that were left unfinished because of his murder were as praiseworthy as these measures. He built a great theater and a temple to Mars worthy of that god’s hunger for glory. He appointed Varro to head an organization for founding public libraries. He intended to drain Lake Fucinus and the marshes of Puteoli and develop their lands for agriculture in order to free Rome from malaria. He planned to build a dam to prevent the floods of the Tiber; and by diverting the course of that river he hoped to improve the condition of the port of Ostia, which every now and then was falling into ruin because of the accumulation of river silt. He instructed his engineers to draw up plans for building a road across central Italy and digging a canal at Corinth.

Caesar decided to bring the free men of Italy to the same level of citizenship as the free men of Rome and ultimately to make the provinces equal to Italy; and this was a work that caused much dissatisfaction. In 49 BC he gave the inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul living on the slopes of the Alps the right to vote, and now (44 BC), by issuing a municipal charter, apparently for all the cities of Italy, he made their rights equal to those of Rome. Perhaps he was thinking of establishing a representative government through which these cities, on the basis of democratic principles, would have a share in his constitutional monarchy. He took the appointment of provincial governors out of the hands of the corrupt Senate and himself appointed men whose competence had been proven. He reduced the taxes of the provinces by one third and placed their collection in the hands of those who were responsible to him personally. He ignored the curses of his predecessors and rebuilt Capua, Carthage, and Corinth and in this field too completed the work of the Gracchi brothers. To the colonists he had sent to found or settle in twenty cities ranging from Gibraltar to the Black Sea he gave Roman or Latin rights and openly hoped to make all adult males in the empire eligible for Roman citizenship. In that case the Senate would no longer be the representative of one class in Rome but the embodiment of the ideas and wishes of all the provinces. This conception of government and the reorganization of Italy and Rome by Caesar completed the miracle that turned a dissolute and boastful youth into one of the most worthy, bravest, most just, and most enlightened men in all the sad history of politics.

Like Alexander, Caesar did not know where to stop. While he was thinking of reorganizing his own realm he did not want to expose it to the danger of attack from the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine. He planned to send a great force to conquer Parthian territory and avenge Crassus, about which he had long thought; to circle the Black Sea; and to pacify Scythia. He also intended to explore the Danube and conquer Germany. And then, when he had made the empire secure, he would return to Rome laden with glory and spoils, rich enough to end the economic depression, strong enough to ignore opposition, and finally at leisure to appoint his successor and, while bestowing the “Roman peace” as his supreme legacy upon the world, lay his head in the dust.

Brutus

As news of this plan gradually spread in Rome the common people, who love grandeur, applauded it; the commercial classes, who smelled the scent of war contracts and the plunder of provinces, sharpened their teeth; and the aristocracy, who saw their own destruction clearly in advance with Caesar’s return, decided to kill him before he departed.

Caesar had treated those nobles with such generosity that he aroused Cicero’s eloquent praise of him. He pardoned all the enemies who had surrendered and only condemned a few who, after defeat and pardon, had again taken up arms against him. He burned unread the letters he found in Pompey’s and Scipio’s tents. He sent the daughter and grandchildren of the captive Pompey to Sextus, Pompey’s son, who was still in rebellion against him, and re-erected the statues of Pompey that Caesar’s supporters had overthrown. He gave the governorship of the provinces to Brutus and Cassius and other high offices to many others from their number. He endured thousands of insults without complaint and did not summon to trial those he suspected of plotting against his life. He not only pardoned Cicero, who changed color like a chameleon, but honored him and did not refuse any of the orator’s requests, whether for himself or for his friends who were supporters of Pompey. At Cicero’s insistence he also pardoned the unrepentant Marcus Marcellus. In an eloquent speech in defense of Marcellus (46 BC) Cicero praised Caesar’s “incredible magnanimity” and confessed that if Pompey had been victorious he would have been more vengeful than Caesar. He said: “I have heard with sorrow this famous and very wise saying of yours: ‘I have lived long enough, whether for nature or for fame.’ … I ask you to set aside this wisdom of the sages; do not be wise at the cost of endangering us. … You still have a long way to go to complete your works and you have not even laid their foundations yet.” Cicero made a firm pact with Caesar on behalf of all the senators that they would all guard his safety and shield their own bodies against any harm that might befall him. Cicero had now become so rich that he had thought of buying another palace, no smaller than Sulla’s, and he enjoyed the banquets to which Antony, Balbus, and other supporters of Caesar invited him. His letters never speak of such happiness as at that time. But Caesar was not deceived and wrote to Matius: “There is no one of Cicero’s magnanimity, but I am sure he hates me deeply.” When Pompey’s supporters revived and began to quarrel with Caesar, these smooth-tongued men of the pen agreed with their hopes and Cicero wrote an elegy in praise of Cato the Younger that provoked Caesar to reply. Caesar only wrote a reply against Cato that is not the dictator at his best; he gave Cicero the choice of weapons in this dispute, and victory fell to the orator. The common people approved Cicero’s style and the ruler’s moderation in a place where he could have signed a death warrant he wrote a treatise.

Those who have become accustomed to power and then have been deprived of it cannot be tamed by pardoning their enmity. Forgetting the generosity of others toward us is as difficult as forgetting the harm we ourselves have done to another. The aristocrats, whom Caesar had treated with such generosity, could not be reconciled. Forgetting the generosity of others is as difficult as forgetting the harm we have done to another. The aristocrats in the Senate, which did not dare to reject Caesar’s legal proposals, writhed with anger. They denounced the destruction of liberty—the same liberty that had made their purses heavier—and were unwilling to accept that the condition for restoring order was limiting their freedom. They feared the presence of Cleopatra and Caesarion in Rome; it is true that Caesar lived with his wife Calpurnia and the two apparently loved each other, but who knew—and who did not know—what passed during his frequent visits with that queen? Rumors constantly supported the claim that Caesar would marry Cleopatra and choose the capital of his united empires in the East. Had he not ordered that his statue should be placed on the Capitol beside the statues of the ancient kings of Rome? Had he not with unprecedented boldness had his image engraved on Roman coins? Did he not wear a purple robe, which was usually reserved for kings? At the Lupercalia festival on the fifteenth of February, 44 BC, the consul Antony, naked in the manner of the priests, in a drunken state, three times tried to place the royal diadem on Caesar’s head, and Caesar three times turned his head away; but was it not because the crowd grumbled? Was it not that he had removed three tribunes from office for having removed the royal diadem that his friends had placed on his statue? Once he was sitting in the temple of Venus and when the senators came to visit him he did not rise to greet them. Some offered the excuse that he had been seized by an epileptic fit and others that he was suffering from diarrhea and had remained seated so that his bowels would not move at such an inopportune moment. But many patricians feared that one of those days they would see Caesar on the royal throne.

A few days after the Lupercalia festival, Gaius Cassius, a sickly man—“pale and lean” in Plutarch’s description—went to Marcus Brutus and planted the idea of killing Caesar in his heart. He had already won over several senators to his side, as well as some capitalists whom Caesar had stopped from plundering the provinces by limiting the powers of the tax agents, and even some of Caesar’s generals who did not see the spoils and offices he had distributed as worthy of them. Brutus’s presence was necessary for leading the conspiracy, for everyone considered him the most virtuous of men. It was thought that he was descended from those Bruti who had driven out the kings 464 years earlier. His mother Servilia was Cato’s half-sister and his wife Portia was Cato’s daughter and the widow of Bibulus, Caesar’s enemy. Appian says: “They thought that Brutus was Caesar’s son, for Caesar had been in love with Servilia in the months before Brutus’s birth.” Plutarch adds that Caesar considered Brutus his son. Perhaps Brutus himself believed this and hated Caesar because he had seduced his mother and, according to the gossips of Rome, had made him, instead of a man of the Brutus family, a bastard. He was always melancholy and taciturn, as if thinking of some hidden fault; at the same time he had a proud manner, as if he were after all of noble blood. He was a Greek teacher and a lover of philosophy; in metaphysics he followed Plato and in ethics the school of Zeno. It was not hidden from him that the Stoic school, like Greek and Roman beliefs, considered the killing of tyrants lawful. He wrote to a friend: “Our ancestors believed that we should not submit to any tyrant, even if he were our father.” He wrote a treatise on “virtue” and later his name became synonymous with this abstract concept. He lent money at forty-eight percent interest to the citizens of Salamis in Cyprus through the mediation of brokers; when the debtors refused to pay the accumulated interest he asked Cicero, who was then propraetor in Cilicia, to recover the interest by the sword of Rome. He governed Cisalpine Gaul with integrity and competence and when he returned to Rome he was appointed urban praetor by Caesar (45 BC).

His noble character was completely incompatible with Cassius’s proposal. Cassius reminded him of the rebellious character of his ancestor Brutus, and perhaps Brutus was also stung by honor to prove this meaning by imitating his ancestors. He, who was a sensitive youth, when he saw inscriptions on the statue of the elder Brutus such as “Is Brutus dead?” or “Your descendants are unworthy,” blushed with shame. Cicero dedicated several treatises he had written in those years to him. At the same time among the patricians the whisper spread that on the fifteenth of March Lucius Cotta would propose in the Senate that Caesar should be given the royal title, for, according to the Sibylline oracle, the Parthians would only be defeated by a king. Cassius said that a Senate half of whose members were Caesar’s appointees would approve this proposal and all hope of restoring the Republic would be lost. Brutus yielded and then the conspirators drew up their definite plans. Portia learned the secret of the conspiracy from her husband’s mouth by plunging a dagger into her own thigh to show that if she wished no bodily harm could make her speak. Brutus for a moment was overcome by blind emotion and insisted that no harm should be done to Antony’s life.

On the evening of the fourteenth of March Caesar, in an assembly of friends that had gathered at his house, proposed as the subject of discussion to talk about “what is the best death?” and himself answered: “Sudden death.” The next morning his wife asked him not to go to the Senate and said that she had seen him in a dream covered with blood. A servant, who like Caesar’s wife was fearful, also threw down the image of Caesar’s ancestor from the wall to discourage Caesar and prevent him from going. But Decimus Brutus, who was one of his closest friends and also one of the conspirators, asked him to go to the Senate and himself courteously adjourned its sessions for an indefinite period. A friend who had learned of the conspiracy came to see him to warn him, but Caesar had already left the house. On his way to the Senate Caesar met the soothsayer Spurinna, who had once whispered in his ear: “Beware of the Ides of March!” Caesar smilingly said that those days had come and all was well. The soothsayer Spurinna replied: “But those days have not yet passed.” When Caesar, according to the tradition that was current before Senate sessions, was offering a sacrifice in front of Pompey’s theater, a tablet was handed to him in which he was warned of the conspiracy. Caesar paid no attention to the tablet, and according to the accounts the tablet was found in his hand after his death.

Trebonius, one of the conspirators who was also one of Caesar’s favorite generals, by engaging Antony in conversation prevented him from going to the Senate. When Caesar entered the hall and took his seat the “liberators” immediately rushed upon him. Suetonius reports that, according to some, when Marcus Brutus intended to take his life Caesar said to him in Greek: “Kai su, teknon”—that is, “You too, my son?” Appian says that when Brutus struck Caesar, Caesar completely abandoned resistance; he then drew his robe over his head and face and submitted to the blows and fell at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Thus the wish of the most complete man that antiquity had nurtured in its bosom was fulfilled.