CHAPTER 10
IN THE WINTER OF 46, Caesar was forced to leave Rome and Cleopatra. Pompey’s two sons—young Sextus, who had witnessed his father’s murder off the shores of Egypt, and his much older brother, Gnaeus—had raised thirteen legions in Spain, including seasoned veterans from Pharsalus and the African campaign, which Caesar’s legates had been unable to defeat. It was, as Plutarch wrote, an extremely dangerous situation. So swift was Caesar’s departure that he had no time to oversee elections to fill the key political offices for the following year. To defer the problem until his return, he had himself elected sole consul for 45.
Appian relates how Caesar made the long journey from Rome in just twenty-seven days. As he bounced about in a springless carriage he composed a lengthy poem entitled, appropriately enough, “The Journey,” but now lost. On March 17, 45, at the battle of Munda, east of modern Seville, he defeated the Pompeian forces, but only after fierce fighting, during which the fifty-four-year-old Caesar dismounted, grabbed a shield and shamed his faltering troops by rushing at the enemy. He later told his supporters that although he had often fought for victory, this was the first time he had fought for his life. Sextus managed to escape, but a few days after the battle his elder brother, Gnaeus, was caught and killed, ending the rising. Caesar, who had usually been merciful during the civil war, punished the rebels without mercy—executing them in droves and ordering their heads, including that of Gnaeus, to be displayed on spikes. Perhaps hot blood and a consciousness of the closeness of the conflict hardened his heart, together with a desire to signal that no further risings would be tolerated.
Cleopatra’s movements during this time are unclear. Cicero, writing in 44, seems to suggest that some while earlier she had left Caesar’s estate. She might have taken the opportunity to return briefly to Alexandria to reassure herself that all was well there. However, she would have known that King Bogud of Mauretania was once again assisting Caesar, just as he had in North Africa, and that with him would be Eunoe. Cleopatra therefore would not have wished to absent herself from Rome for long. Far better to remain and be ready to greet the returning conqueror and remind him of all he had been missing.
Antony did not wait for Caesar’s return to congratulate him. Anxious to regain Caesar’s favor, he hurried off to join him in southern Gaul and was delighted by Caesar’s response. His old patron conspicuously honored him, choosing him as his traveling companion in preference even to his young great-nephew, Octavian.* Ill health had prevented Octavian from accompanying Caesar when he left for Spain, but after recovering sufficiently he had followed after him, surviving shipwreck and enemy-infested roads to reach him. Being displaced from Caesar’s carriage by Antony and relegated to traveling in the chariot behind must have seemed a poor reward.
Curiously, during the long, bumpy journey back to Italy, though the two men talked of many things, comfortable in their reestablished amity, Antony failed to mention that an old drinking friend, Gaius Trebonius, had hinted of a plot to murder Caesar. He had been sounding Antony out to see whether he might wish to join it. Antony had firmly refused but did not see fit, as he lolled by Caesar’s side, to warn him of the plotting that in a few months would claim his life. Perhaps for the moment he was hedging his bets. Perhaps he did not wish to incriminate a friend.
Weakened by the campaign and the epileptic fits that were becoming ever more frequent, Caesar decided not to return at once to Rome. Instead, he went to his country estates southeast of Rome, where Cleopatra may have joined him. While he convalesced he wrote his will, to be given into the care of the Vestal Virgins. It named Octavian as his main heir. On Caesar’s death he was to receive most of Caesar’s huge wealth and become his adopted son. The document, kept private for the present, made no reference either to Caesarion or to Cleopatra but could hardly have done so since the law prevented Roman citizens—even dictators—from naming foreigners as their heirs. However, according to Suetonius, Caesar “provided for the possibility of a son subsequently born to himself” by designating guardians for the child. Cleopatra must have been the mother he had in mind. Ironically, those he appointed to protect any future child were to be among his own assassins.
News of Caesar’s final triumph over his republican enemies had already prompted the Senate to load him with fresh honors and titles. He was awarded the right to wear his triumphal robe at all public gatherings. Like Cleopatra, his statue was to be erected in a temple—in Caesar’s case that of Quirinus, the divine form of Rome’s mythical founder, Romulus. The inscription was to read, “To the undefeated god.” Another statue of Caesar was erected on the Capitol next to those of the kings, while his ivory effigy was to be carried in the procession of gods that preceded the games. The Senate also handed him complete military and financial control over Rome and appointed him consul for ten years.
In early October 45, restored to health, Caesar marched in glory into his capital. This time the Triumph lauding his Spanish victories made no pretense he had conquered anyone other than dissident and treacherous Romans. It concluded with a feast for the entire population of Rome, not once but twice. In a gesture designed to whip up popular adulation, Caesar dismissed the first repast as too meager and ordered it to be repeated four days later with “more succulent provender.” However, his grandiose gesture increased rather than stifled people’s unease, and it is indicative that he could not see this. The greater the honors heaped on Caesar, the more isolated he was becoming and thus the more faulty his judgment. Unlike the citizens of Alexandria, Romans were not conditioned to living gods. To many, Caesar appeared to have forgotten the warning words whispered by the slave in his ear during his Triumphs: “Remember you are human.”
Unsurprisingly, resentment focused on the continued presence by Caesar’s side of his Egyptian mistress, whose statue gleamed portentously within the temple of Venus. While Romans were indulgent, even admiring, of their leaders’ sexual peccadilloes while on campaign, back in Rome it was a different matter. Sex was seen as diminishing physical prowess—the week before a fight, gladiators’ penises were fitted with an apparatus of metal bolts to prevent them ejaculating and diluting their strength. Additionally, sexual overindulgence, indeed any kind of overindulgence or lack of self-control, was viewed as a character defect. Caesar was condemned, not admired, for succumbing to Cleopatra’s sexual magnetism. If a man could not govern his own appetites, how could he govern other people?
Some, though, saw Cleopatra as something far more dangerous than just Caesar’s mistress. To them she epitomized an unwholesome, alien, royal and despotic influence on republican Rome. Stories spread that the besotted Caesar intended to shift his capital to Alexandria—even that he planned to marry Cleopatra. Suetonius related that a tribune, Helvius Cinna, “admitted to several persons that he had a bill drawn up in due form, which Caesar had ordered him to propose to the people in his own absence, making it lawful for Caesar to marry what wives he wished, and as many as he wished, for the purpose of begetting [legitimate] children.” The accusation was probably fabricated but the very fact that such stories gained credence shows the suspicion and resentment toward the Egyptian queen, for if Caesar wished to take another wife, surely it would be Cleopatra.
Caesar, though, was thoroughly preoccupied with what he intended to be the most glorious and ambitious campaign of his career—crushing the Parthian Empire. Rome had not yet avenged the Parthians’ humiliating defeat of Crassus at Carrhae in 53, and their horsemen were now menacing Rome’s eastern provinces, raiding into Syria. The Parthians were originally seminomads from the southeastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In the decades following Alexander’s defeat of the Persians they had increased their territories to include Mesopotamia, and by this time their empire extended from the borders of Roman Syria in the west to the Indus in the east, and to the south embraced much of Persia, giving them a dominant position across the eastern trade routes. The conquest of Parthia would therefore be an immense undertaking in which the support of Rome’s allies—especially the wealthy Cleopatra—in providing money, ships and men would be essential. However, the rewards would be commensurately great.
It is impossible to know what was in Cleopatra’s mind during her time in Rome, but her detractors were probably right to fear her intentions. In Alexandria she had deliberately bound herself to the Roman world’s most powerful man to secure her personal position. Now in Rome she perhaps began to glimpse an important, even central role for her kingdom in what might follow. For Cleopatra, the future in early 44 must have seemed ripe with possibilities. Like Caesar, she was capable of thinking on a grand scale, innovatively pushing forward the boundaries of the practicable. If Caesar conquered Parthia, he would be leader of the Mediterranean world’s only remaining superpower. What could he then not do for those he owed—and, indeed, for those he loved? And what better heir to this great empire than a boy with the blood of Alexander’s people and also of Caesar in his veins, her beloved Caesarion?
The date set for Caesar’s departure from Rome for the Parthian campaign was March 18, 44, and, as the winter months passed, Cleopatra was probably also planning her own return to Egypt, from where she could directly oversee the Egyptian aid to be sent to Caesar. She would also be closer to Caesar and able speedily to join him and share in his expected triumphs.
Others were less enthusiastic about Caesar’s eastern adventure, which he himself estimated would take three to four years to accomplish. Although the campaign would remove him from Rome, they knew that during his absence he would appoint compliant cronies to rule on his behalf. Caesar’s powers to dictate how Rome would be governed seemed removed by only a hair’s breadth from those of a king. When the custodians of the Sibylline Books conveniently “discovered” a prophecy that “only a king can conquer the Parthians,” this fed the rumors that Caesar intended to use the Parthian campaign as a springboard to kingship.
So did Caesar’s behavior, which was becoming increasingly autocratic. His arrogant attitude was no doubt influenced by his belief that the Senate needed to be subjected to his strong, executive direction in order for the empire to be ruled effectively—and by the increasing impatience and intolerance of an aging man with many plans and little time for the constitutional process and the tedious business of conciliating opponents for whom he had long felt only contempt. Also, one of the driving forces behind his career had always been his consciousness of his dignitas and the respect to which he felt himself entitled. Perhaps he felt that by now his achievements were such that he and his actions were beyond question or scrutiny.
When, without warning, Caesar resigned as consul and named two supporters as consuls for the remainder of 45, it caused great offense. He seemed to be treating the consulship as a mere gift for services rendered rather than a serious office held on behalf of the people. He also extended eligibility for citizenship to more parts of the empire and increased the number of senators from six hundred to nine hundred to enable him to reward his supporters and friends. The new senators included a number of freedmen, even Gauls. While these actions wisely reflected the growing diversity of the Roman empire and gave a greater stake in Rome’s success to those living in her provinces, Roman traditionalists joked about senators wearing trousers who were such strangers to Rome they could not find their way to the Senate house. To them Caesar’s reforms seemed a gesture of contempt toward Rome’s ancient institutions and their own treasured privileges.*
Whatever the senators’ private fears, in public, as if uncertain what else to do, they continued hectically heaping honors upon Caesar, declaring his birthday a public holiday and conferring on him the right to sit on a golden chair in the Senate and wear the golden wreath of the ancient Etruscan monarchs. Caesar had already taken to appearing in the high red boots of the Alban kings. In addition, the Senate sycophantically agreed that Caesar was to have his own shrine and his own priest—Antony—and, on his death, was to become Divus Julius (Julius the god). Most significantly of all, Caesar was appointed dictator perpetuus (dictator for life), an honor he accepted in February 44 after only a little hesitation. His head now appeared on Roman coins—the first time any living Roman had been so honored and dangerously close, in the eyes of some, to the personality cult surrounding royal rulers such as Cleopatra in Egypt.
All that was lacking was the title of king. The previous month, when a man had hailed Caesar as Rex, he had replied that no, he was Caesar. However, when the tribunes had the man arrested, Caesar punished them, not the man. A few days after Caesar had become dictator for life, he presided from his gilded chair on the speaker’s rostrum over the feast of the Lupercalia. This was an ancient spring fertility ritual. First, priests sacrificed a dog and some goats. Then the goats were skinned and well-born young men wound the skins around their otherwise naked bodies and, glistening with oil, ran through the streets lightly striking women with strips of the fresh hairy goat hide to make them fertile or, if pregnant, to ensure a safe and easy delivery.
As consul for 44, Antony was participating. Even though at thirty-eight he was beyond his first youth, he was still proud of his physique. Clad only in his bloody goatskin loincloth, he ran up to the platform in the Forum where Caesar was seated on his golden throne and wearing his golden wreath. Several times he tried to place a laurel-decked diadem on Caesar’s head. Whether Caesar knew in advance of Antony’s gesture is unclear. What is certain is that there was no responding roar of enthusiasm from the crowd. Instead, “a groan echoed all round the Forum.” According to Plutarch, “The amazing thing was that, although they were already, for all practical purposes, under the rule of a king, they rejected the title, as if it represented the loss of freedom.” Caesar firmly declined the diadem and ordered it to be sent to the Capitol and dedicated to Jupiter, Rome’s only king.
Despite this public act of self-denial, many still suspected Caesar of aiming at the ultimate prize and of having contrived the whole thing with Antony to test public reaction. Cicero later asked, “Where did this diadem come from?” and claimed that “it was a premeditated crime prepared in advance.” Caesar’s behavior seemed to bear this out. In one notable outburst he shouted that the republic “was nothing—a mere name without form or substance.” He added that Sulla had been a dunce to resign his dictatorship.
Despite the fact that Caesar had pardoned both Brutus, Cato’s nephew and Caesar’s rumored son, and Cassius, a former officer of Pompey the Great after Pharsalus and had even made them praetors for 44, they had lost faith that he would ever restore the republic inaugurated by the coup of Brutus’ ancestor, Lucius Brutus, against Tarquin. They believed that Caesar made policy in private with his advisers and cronies and then, rather than discuss it with his peers in the Senate as tradition demanded, cut out the Senate and went directly to the people and to his soldiers to secure backing for his decisions. Both thought Caesar’s death would lead to the restoration of the Senate’s supremacy. Wanting to make a clean sweep, Cassius had argued for the deaths not only of the dictator but of his deputy in the dictatorship, his master of the horse, Lepidus, of Antony and a host of others. Brutus, however, insisted that their target was one man only—Caesar. The day they chose was March 15, three days before Caesar was due to depart on his Parthian campaign. The place, perhaps symbolically, was to be a meeting of the Senate, the institution whose powers Caesar had so diminished. The assassins pondered inviting Cicero to join the plot but decided he was too old, timorous and, above all, indiscreet to be of any use.
Caesar perhaps had some intimation that Brutus and Cassius were his foes. According to Plutarch, when someone warned him that Antony and Dolabella were subversives, he replied, “I’m not afraid of these fleshy, long-haired men, so much as those pale, lean ones,” that is, Cassius and Brutus. But, contemptuous of danger and confident no one would wish to risk reigniting civil war by killing him, Caesar ignored a rash of graffiti scrawled on public monuments. Among them were the words “If only you were alive now” daubed on a statue of Brutus’ king-ousting ancestor, and the following verse scribbled on Caesar’s own statue:
Brutus was elected consul
When he sent the kings away;
Caesar sent the consuls packing,
Caesar is our king today.
Caesar had dismissed his two-thousand-strong guard and was moving openly about the city, almost as if tempting fate. Anxious friends urged him to appoint a new bodyguard, but he ignored them. He would rather die, he said, than spend his life anticipating death. When the augur Spurinna predicted that Caesar would meet his doom on the ides, which fell on March 15, Caesar shrugged this off as well.
On the night of March 14 Lepidus invited him to dinner. The two men are said to have discussed what manner of death was preferable, and Caesar’s choice was a death that came swiftly and without warning. The next day, Caesar woke feeling groggy and ill and reluctant to attend the meeting of the Senate he had called, which was to take place in Pompey’s great stone theater. Calpurnia, unnerved by a night of terrifying dreams in which she cradled Caesar’s murdered body in her arms, begged him to stay at home. Caesar offered sacrifice, and the diviners’ unfavorable reading of the omens provided by the sacrificed animal’s entrails added to his unease. He decided to send Antony to the meeting of the Senate in his place. However, Decimus Brutus, one of the plotters, opportunely happened to call at Caesar’s house and laughingly derided the diviners and managed to persuade Caesar to change his mind.
Just before noon, Caesar was borne by litter to Pompey’s theater, where the Senate was awaiting him in an assembly hall. As he climbed down, a Greek scholar who had learned something of the plot pushed forward to thrust a scroll into his hand, crying out, “Read this one yourself, Caesar, and read it soon. The matters it mentions are urgent and concern you personally.” The insistence in the man’s voice convinced Caesar to keep hold of the scroll instead of passing it as usual to his servant, but he did not unroll it. Seeing Spurinna standing by the entrance to Pompey’s theater where the Senate would meet, Caesar remarked sarcastically that the ides of March had come. The augur replied, “Yes, they have come, but they have not yet gone.”
While Gaius Trebonius, the man who almost a year earlier had attempted to draw him into the conspiracy, detained Antony on a pretext, Caesar entered the building. The senators rose to greet him as he made his way to his chair beneath the statue of his rival Pompey, which he himself had ordered to be reerected. Some of the sixty conspirators were ranged behind it. Others now pushed through the ranks of senators, as if eager to present a petition to him. When Caesar waved them away, one of the supposed petitioners grabbed at Caesar’s toga with both hands. This was the agreed signal for the attack. Caesar turned the first blade, that of Casca, aside before it could penetrate deep into his throat, but the other conspirators closed around, each determined to deliver the dagger blow they had promised. Their knives thrust into his body until finally Caesar, bleeding copiously from twenty-three stab wounds, crumpled at Pompey’s feet. He pulled his bloodstained purple toga over himself to hide his dying moments from the round-eyed senators watching in horrified disbelief. Suetonius wrote that “Caesar uttered no word after the first blow . . . although some say that when he saw Brutus about to strike he reproached him in Greek with, ‘You too, my son!’ ”
The bloodstained assassins tumbled half crazed from Pompey’s theater and, running across the Campus Martius, entered the city and ran onward to the Forum shouting, “Liberty!” Waving his dripping dagger in the air, Brutus declared the tyrant dead and wished long life to the republic. But there were no answering cheers. Instead, as the news spread, panicking people tripped over one another in their hurry to get home and barricade their doors against the chaos they feared was about to burst over them. For Cleopatra, it was a terrible moment. She and her son had lost their protector. All she could do now was try to save their lives.
*Octavian’s actual name was Gaius Octavius and he later became Gaius Julius Caesar and even later the emperor Augustus, but to save confusion he is referred to here as Octavian.
*Caesar also offered citizenship to individuals or groups of individuals with skills needed to keep Rome running—for example, any foreign doctor willing to work in Rome.