The Ides of March

Julius Caesar was murdered on 15 March 44 BCE, the Ides on the Roman dating system. In parts of the Mediterranean world the civil war had by no means ended. Pompey’s son Sextus still had a force of at least six legions in Spain and was continuing to fight for his father’s cause. But Caesar was mustering a vast force of almost 100,000 soldiers for an attack on the Parthian Empire, a revenge for the ignominious defeat of Crassus at Carrhae and a useful opportunity for military glory against a foreign rather than a Roman enemy. It was just a few days before he was due to leave for the East, on 18 March, that a group of twenty or so disgruntled senators, supported actively or passively by a few dozen more, killed him.

Appropriately, the deed took place in a new senate house, which Pompey had built into his new theatre complex, in front of a statue of himself, which ended up splattered with Caesar’s blood. Thanks in part to the reworking of the theme in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the murder of the Roman dictator in the name of libertas has been the template for last-ditch opposition to tyranny and for principled assassination ever since. It was no coincidence, for example, that John Wilkes Booth used ‘Ides’ as the code for the day on which he planned to kill Abraham Lincoln. But as a backwards glance through Roman history shows, this was the last in a series of murders of popular, radical but arguably too powerful politicians that started with the lynching of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE. The question must be: what was Caesar trying to do and what made him so unacceptable to this group of senators that assassination seemed the only way out?

Despite his rare appearances in Rome, Caesar initiated a vast programme of reforms going beyond even the scale of Sulla’s. One of them governs life even now. For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping. The traditional Roman year was only 355 days long, and it had for centuries been the job of Roman priests to add in an extra month from time to time to keep the civic calendar in step with the natural seasons. For whatever reason – probably a combination of lack of expertise and lack of will – they had signally failed to get their calculations correct. The result was that the calendar year and the natural year were sometimes many weeks apart, with the Roman equivalent of harvest festivals falling when the crops were still growing and the climate in what was called April feeling more like February (which it was). The truth is that it is always dangerous in Republican history to assume that any given date is an accurate indication of the weather. Using Alexandrian know-how, Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.

Other measures harked back to familiar themes from the previous hundred years. Caesar launched, for example, a large number of new overseas colonies to resettle the poor from the city of Rome, following up Gaius Gracchus’ initiative with a successful foundation at Carthage. It was this, presumably, that allowed him to get away with reducing the number of recipients of free grain by about half, to 150,000 in all. He also extended Roman citizenship to those living in the far north of Italy, beyond the river Po, and at least proposed granting Latin status to the population of Sicily. But he had even more ambitious plans to overhaul Roman government, including attempts to regularise – even micromanage – all kinds of aspects of civic organisation, both in Rome and throughout Italy. These ranged from questions of who could hold office in local Italian communities (no gravediggers, pimps, actors or auctioneers unless they were retired) to issues of road maintenance (householders to be responsible for the footpath in front of their house) and traffic management (no heavy-goods vehicles in Rome during the daytime except for the purposes of temple building or repair, or for removing demolition rubble).

Caesar also became part of the calendar, as well as rewriting it. It may not have been until after his assassination that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius, our July, after him; Roman writers do not always make the chronology clear. But it was overweening honours of that sort, voted during his lifetime by a compliant senate, combined with his more or less official takeover of the democratic processes that provoked the deadly opposition. This went far beyond his head on the coinage. He was allowed to wear triumphal dress almost wherever he liked, including the triumphal laurel wreath, which he found convenient for disguising his bald patch. Temples and a priesthood in his honour seem to have been promised too, and his statue was placed in all the existing temples of Rome. His private house was even to be decorated with a triangular gable (or pediment), to give it the appearance of a temple, the home of a god.

Almost worse within the Roman context were the strong hints that he was aiming at becoming a king. On one famous but rather murky occasion, just a month before his assassination, his loyal lieutenant and one of the consuls of the year, Mark Antony, used the religious festival of the Lupercalia to offer Caesar a royal crown. It was obviously a carefully choreographed piece of propaganda, and it may have been designed as a test of public opinion. Would the watching crowd cheer when Caesar was offered the crown or not? If it did, would that be a cue to accept? Even at the time, Caesar’s response and the overall message were disputed. Did he, as Cicero thought, ask Antony to send the crown to the Temple of Jupiter, the god who – Caesar insisted – was the only king of Rome? Or was it thrown to the audience and then put on a statue of Caesar? It was suspiciously unclear whether he was saying ‘No, thank you’ or ‘Yes, please’.

Even if it was a ‘No, thank you’, his position as dictator, in various forms from 49 BCE, seemed pernicious to some. He was first appointed to the office for a short term, to conduct elections to the consulship for the next year, an entirely traditional procedure, except for the entirely untraditional fact that he oversaw the election of himself. In 48 BCE, after his victory at the Battle of Pharsalus, the senate again made him dictator for a year, and then in 46 BCE for ten years. Finally, by the start of 44 BCE he had become dictator for life: to the average observer, the difference between that and king must have been hard to discern. Under the terms of his dictatorship Caesar had the right directly to nominate some candidates for ‘election’, and he controlled the other elections behind the scenes more efficiently than Pompey had done with his notebook of future consuls’ names. At the end of 45 BCE he caused a particular stir when the death of one of the sitting consuls was announced on the very last day of the year. Caesar instantly convened an assembly to elect one of his friends, Caius Caninius Rebilus, to the vacant post for just half a day. This prompted a flood of jokes from Cicero: Caninius was such an extraordinarily vigilant consul that ‘he never once went to sleep in his whole term of office’; ‘in the consulship of Caninius you may take it no one had breakfast’; ‘Who were the consuls when Caninius was consul?’ But Cicero was also outraged, as were many conservatives. For this was almost worse than fixing the elections; it was not taking the elected offices of the Roman Republic seriously.

What might now appear to be Caesar’s best quality was, ironically, the one most flagrantly at odds with Republican tradition. He made much of his clementia, or mercy. He pardoned rather than punished his enemies, and he made a display of renouncing cruel retribution against fellow Romans, provided they gave up their opposition to him (Cato, Metellus Scipio and most Gauls were quite another matter, and deserved all they got). Caesar had pardoned several of his future assassins, Brutus among them, after they had fought on the Pompeian side in the civil war. In many ways, clementia was the political slogan of Caesar’s dictatorship. Yet it provoked as much opposition as gratitude, for the simple reason that, virtue though it may have been in some respects, it was an entirely monarchical one. Only those with the power to do otherwise can exercise mercy.Clementia, in other words, was the antithesis of Republican libertas. Cato was said to have killed himself to escape it.

So it was not just a case of simple ingratitude when Brutus and the others turned on the man who had given them a second chance. It was partly that. It was partly motivated by self-interest and disgruntlement, driven by the assassins’ sense of dignitas. But they were also defending one view of liberty and one view of the importance of Republican traditions going back, in Rome’s mythology, to the moment when Brutus’ distant ancestor was instrumental in expelling the Tarquins and became one of the first pair of consuls. In fact, the design of a silver coin later issued by the assassins underscores that very point, by featuring the distinctive hat – the pileus, or cap of liberty – that slaves wore when they were granted their freedom. The message was that the Roman people had been liberated.

48. A silver coin issued by the ‘liberators’ of Rome the year after the assassination of Caesar (43–42 BCE). One side celebrates the freedom won: the pileus, worn by newly freed slaves, is flanked by the daggers that did the deed, and underneath is the famous date EID MAR (the ‘Ides of March’, that is 15 March). On the other side, the head of Brutus himself implies a rather different message. The portrayal of a living person on a Roman coin was taken as a sign of autocratic power.

Or had they? As we shall see, it turned out to be a very odd sort of freedom. If the assassination of Julius Caesar became a model for the effective removal of a tyrant, it was also a powerful reminder that getting rid of a tyrant did not necessarily dispose of tyranny. Despite all the slogans, the bravado and the high principles, what the assassins actually brought about, and what the people got, was a long civil war and the permanent establishment of one-man rule. But that is the story of Chapter 9. First we must turn to some of the equally important aspects of the history of Rome that lay behind the politics and the headlines.