CHAPTER 8
CAESAR’S EMOTIONS ON PARTING from Cleopatra are not recorded but he was immediately preoccupied. According to the author of The Alexandrian War, as soon as Caesar reached Syria he learned that “there was much that was bad and unprofitable in the administration at Rome” and that rivalries among the tribunes were producing “dangerous rifts.” Caesar, though, did not rush home. Instead, he turned his attention to King Pharnaces of Pontus. Attempting to regain his father’s territories, Pharnaces had recently defeated a Roman army sent to stop him and was now inciting other local rulers to rebel. So lightning-quick and easy was Caesar’s victory over Pharnaces in Pontus that he could write boastfully to a friend, “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). He added that it was little wonder that Pompey had built a reputation as a great general if all the eastern enemies he had fought had been of this caliber.
On September 24, 47, Caesar finally landed back in Italy and hurried to Rome to assess the “dangerous rifts” for himself. The problems were formidable—restive, time-served legions eager for disbandment, breakdowns in law and order and economic stagnation. Antony had not performed as well this time as he had during Caesar’s absence fighting against Pompey’s supporters in Spain.
The thirty-six-year-old Antony had, of course, proved his talents as a military commander early in Egypt and later in Gaul. His men loved him for his courage, judgment and stamina and also for his generosity. Like Caesar, he had an effortless charm and understood how to inspire loyalty and devotion. Plutarch noted how he had the common touch—the ability to make himself one of the lads: “his swaggering air, his ribald talk, his fondness for carousing in public, sitting down by his men as they ate, or taking his own food standing at the common-mess table made his own troops delight in his company and almost worship him.” An imposing physical appearance enhanced his endearingly bluff manner. A handsome bull of a man with wild curls, broad shoulders and muscular thighs, he exuded strength and energy. Cicero would sneeringly deride him as resembling a prizefighter.
Antony could also be a clear-thinking, imaginative, decisive administrator—otherwise Caesar would not have twice left him in charge of Italy in critical times. However, growing quickly bored with the routines of political and administrative life, which held little appeal for him as a natural man of action rather than reflection, Antony had given way with gusto to his sensual, self-indulgent side. Lost in a sybaritic whirl of parties, drinking and lovemaking, his favorite companions had become actors, musicians and courtesans. With ill-placed brio, he had taken to riding about in a chariot drawn by lions in imitation of Bacchus or to taking his favorite actress with him when he visited other cities on official business, reputedly providing her with a retinue larger than he accorded his mother, Julia. Racked by hangovers and bleary-eyed after all-night drinking bouts, he struggled to get out of bed in the morning. On one occasion, after a particularly heavy night, he astonished members of the popular assembly who had summoned him to an early meeting by arriving still worse for wear and throwing up in front of them into a cloak thoughtfully held out for him by one of his friends. When riots broke out in support of attempts by the tribune Dolabella to introduce a decree canceling all debts, a lethargic Antony had at first done nothing, then reacted with unnecessary violence. One reason for his sudden brutality was said to be a growing suspicion that Dola-bella was cuckolding him with his wife, Antonia.
Convinced that Antony’s had not been a safe pair of hands, Caesar, for the moment at least, dropped him, leaving him without any official role. He had himself elected as consul for the following year, 46, and chose a relative nonentity, Lepidus, whom he thought could be trusted to show no initiative, to be his co-consul and to replace Antony as master of the horse. To sweeten his political supporters, Caesar increased the number of priesthoods and praetor-ships and appointed his cronies to them. To seduce the populace, he ordered landlords to freeze their rents for a year. He also placed a ban on some of the 94 luxury foods that made up such a key part of the conspicuous consumption envied and despised in equal measure by those unable to afford it. Cicero later complained that having to eat turnips rather than oysters and eels had given him violent diarrhea.
At the same time, Caesar needed money. The civil war was not over and he needed to be able pay his armies to fight for him. After Pharsalus, Cato, one of the most important surviving republicans, had fled to the Roman province of Africa (modern-day Tunisia) and with the help of King Juba of Numidia (northern Algeria) had gathered a large force to continue the fight against Caesar. To raise the necessary funds, Caesar ordered towns across Italy to send gold and took out loans. He also auctioned off the property of those opponents he had not pardoned. Antony was among those who made foolishly high bids, mistakenly convinced that, as Caesar’s friends, they would never be expected to pay up. Antony moved into Pompey’s luxurious town house, which he had acquired at one of the auctions—according to Plutarch, ransacking and rebuilding it “as if it were not grand enough as it was”—only to be shocked when officials arrived to demand the money he owed for it.
But even with money, Caesar found it hard to raise the army he needed. Many of his experienced legionaries were tired. They wanted to disband and settle into the quiet life on a nice piece of land they believed was their due. Some, including Caesar’s beloved Tenth Legion, marched to the Campus Martius, where they asked to be released. Caesar handled them with consummate skill. Addressing them as quirites, fellow citizens rather than fellow soldiers, implying they were already free of the army, he agreed to release them. They would receive their promised rewards, he assured them, but only when he returned in triumph from Africa with the new army he would recruit to replace them. This had the anticipated effect—the legionaries, shocked not to be considered indispensable, clamored to accompany the leader whom most of them revered and to share in the glory of his expedition.
That glory was hard won. High winds scattered Caesar’s ships as they sailed for Africa from Sicily and, once they had arrived, food soon became scarce. The horses wrinkled their lips at their sparse diet of rinsed seaweed and grass. At the same time, Caesar’s adversaries played hit-and-run, avoiding offering battle. However, in April 46 Caesar engaged the Pompeian forces at Thapsus. Some accounts suggest that while he was drawing up his forces Caesar suffered what Plutarch called “one of his usual fits,” presumably an epileptic attack. This may explain why, for the only time in Caesar’s career, his soldiers attacked before he gave the order. Whatever the case, victory was swift and complete.
News of it reached Cato, left in command of a fortress at Utica on the coast twenty miles from the tumbled ruins of Carthage. Ever since Caesar had forced Pompey out of Italy, the forty-eight-year-old Cato had refused to cut his hair or beard. After Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, as a mark of mourning, he had eaten sitting, rather than reclining as a Roman should, and had lain down only to sleep.
At dinner, after hearing the news of Thapsus, Cato began to debate philosophy with his friends. The Romans had compensated themselves for the absence of an integrated theology by the contemplation of the sophisticated philosophies of the Greeks, from whose relatively abstract theorizing they derived practical guidance. Two philosophies were prevalent. One was Epicureanism, whose eponymous founder, Epicurus, propounded salvation by common sense and happiness through peace of mind. He dismissed divine providence and the immortality of the soul as illusory. Man should enjoy the world as it is, rejoicing in nature. The universe was limitless. Knowledge was generated through man’s inquiring mind and he should strive to understand and enjoy nature’s bounty. Remarkably for a man who lived more than two millennia ago, Epicurus emphasized that man should cease depleting the planet’s resources through his insatiable greed.
The other was the somewhat somber Stoic philosophy named after the stoa or painted covered passage leading from the Athens marketplace where its originator, Zeno, propounded it. His thesis was that man is a rational being who should lead a virtuous life practicing civic duty, self-discipline and tolerance and respect for others. He should accept and endure whatever fate held in store for him with dignity. In so doing, while conquering himself and his fears, he could take pride in rising spiritually above the vicissitudes of life. Cato was, unsurprisingly, a Stoic, who in the dinnertime conversation that night was adamant that only such a good man could be free. Stoic philosophy predisposed its followers to seek “a good death,” even if it was by their own hand, and this was the course Cato determined to follow.
After retiring for the night, Cato stabbed himself in the abdomen. When his son, alerted by the sound of his father’s body crashing to the floor and knocking over an abacus, discovered what he had done, he summoned physicians to push his father’s protruding intestines back into his body cavity and sew up the wound, but Cato ripped off the dressings. According to Appian, he “opened the suture of the wound, enlarged it with his nails like a wild beast, plunged his fingers into his stomach and tore out his entrails.” His final advice to his grieving son was, “In present conditions it is impossible to engage in politics in a manner befitting a Cato, and to engage in them in any other way would be disgraceful.” By the time Caesar reached Utica, Cato was already in his grave, a potent martyr for the austere old republican values, as he had intended. Just before his death he had said, “I am not willing to be indebted to the tyrant for his illegal actions. He is acting contrary to the laws when he pardons men as if he were their master when he has no sovereignty over them.”
In late July 46, Caesar, decked with the laurels of victory, marched back into Rome. The Senate was apprehensive. The followers of the traditions of the elders could only hope that, like Sulla, he would swiftly renounce his powers after rewarding his friends, thus leaving their unwritten constitution basically unchanged. It cannot have encouraged them that at around this time Caesar sent messengers to Egypt summoning Cleopatra to join him. The publicly proclaimed purpose of Cleopatra’s visit was to reaffirm the bonds between Egypt and Rome but the prospect of the Egyptian queen’s arrival must have stoked senatorial concern that Caesar might be seeking autocratic power in Rome similar to that which Cleopatra wielded in Egypt.
Caesar’s true motives for sending for Cleopatra are as intriguing as they are opaque. He was far too wise not to have realized that there was no political imperative for Cleopatra’s presence and indeed some downside to it. Perhaps his action had something to do with his own self-image. With her would come Caesarion—reassuring confirmation that, though middle-aged, Caesar was virile and vigorous. He would also have been curious to see his only son, by then nearly a year old.
In addition, the thought of his royal mistress witnessing his pomp and power must have been highly appealing. Even before he had marched back into Rome, the Senate had awarded him unique privileges in order to appease his ambition. He was to be dictator for the next ten years—an unprecedented period—and have the right to nominate magistrates. He was also to be prefect of morals, a new position that caused some sniggering but would allow him to censor and control his opponents. The supplicatio, the traditional festival of prayers and thanksgiving to honor a victor, was to last forty days compared with the fifteen that had celebrated Caesar’s successes in Gaul in 57, and his triumphal chariot was to be placed before the statue of Jupiter on the Capitol, together with a bronze statue of Caesar, bestriding a globe to symbolize his mastery of the world. The inscription would hail him as a demigod.
The Senate also awarded Caesar his Triumphs. Between September 20 and October 1 Caesar held four great parades marking his victories over Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and Africa. The processions, each lasting a day, began in the Campus Martius and ended before the Temple of Jupiter. Here Caesar ascended the hundred steps, passed through the great bronze gates and sacrificed white bulls before laying his laurels in the lap of the god. The marveling crowds were shielded from the autumn sun by silken awnings extending all the way up to the Capitol. Among the impressive trophies and gorgeous treasures carried by the marching columns were signs boasting of the number of battles fought and enemies killed. The tally was fifty battles and between one million and two million slain, excluding his fellow Roman citizens. Caesar, wearing a rippling purple toga, rode in his triumphal chariot pulled by three white horses. His face was painted with red lead in tribute to Jupiter, who had made Rome great and whose representative Caesar was. His balding head was wreathed in laurels and in his hand he grasped an eagle-headed scepter. Lest in these moments of glory he forget his mortality, as was traditional, a slave holding a golden wreath above his head whispered repeatedly in his red-tinted ear, “Remember you are human.”
In the procession celebrating Caesar’s victory in the Alexandrian War, mock flames rose from a model of the phallic Pharos lighthouse borne through the streets as Caesar’s men belted out raucous songs celebrating their leader’s sexual feats in Egypt. The crowds roared their approval at pictures portraying the bloody deaths of Pothinus and Achillas, but their greatest interest was in the pathetic figure of Cleopatra’s half sister, Arsinoe, stumbling along in chains with the other prisoners at the head of the procession. Prisoners were usually executed immediately after a Triumph. Vercingetorix, who had been kept caged for six years after his capture, had been executed immediately after the Gallic Triumph. However, the sight of the young princess roused the pity of the Roman crowd. Caesar read the people’s mood and spared her the strangling that was the traditional fate of conquered rulers. He permitted Arsinoe to leave Rome and, like her father, Auletes, before her, to seek sanctuary in the vast white marble temple of Artemis at Ephesus, whose fine ivory doors had been installed by her father.
As he had when he displayed Arsinoe, Caesar also misjudged when, as part of his African Triumph, he arranged for a float depicting Cato’s suicide to be drawn through the streets. It was usually considered bad taste to gloat over the defeat of fellow Romans, but Caesar’s justification was that Cato and those who had fought with him had been mere mercenary lackeys of King Juba. Their deaths, he argued, had been the just deserts of collaborators. The people of Rome wept openly at the representation of Cato’s lonely end, stoically ripping out his own guts. The infant son of the dead King Juba, another Juba, was also carried in the African procession and, as a child, was spared. Plutarch observed that “it was a highly fortunate captivity for him, since instead of being an uncultured Numidian, he came to be counted among the most learned writers of Greece.”*
Among the many celebrations that Caesar arranged to accompany his Triumphs were five days of wild-animal shows. Such shows, which almost inevitably culminated in a hunt, or rather slaughter, of the exhibits, had a long history but had become ever more spectacular in the past few decades. Lions, ostriches (known for some reason to the wits in the audience as sea sparrows) and leopards (known as African mice) had been exhibited for some time as, of course, had bulls, bears and stags. More recent imports were hippopotamuses and crocodiles.† But Caesar, like his predecessors, strove to dream up ever more novel displays. Some of his spectaculars were achieved by sheer numbers—on one occasion he loosed four hundred snarling lions. He also delighted the crowds by producing creatures entirely new to them, being the first to import a giraffe, probably from Egypt. Another novelty was Thessalian bullfighting, where mounted riders chased the bull until the beast was so exhausted the riders could leap from their saddles, grip the bull’s horns and, in theory at least, with a quick twist break the bull’s neck.
Elephants had been shown for nearly a quarter of a century, and Romans felt very sympathetic toward them. At Pompey’s games in 55, some had escaped into the crowd and the spectators, excited by both pity for the beasts and fear for their own safety, had shaken their fists at Pompey. Cicero had written that there was “a feeling that the monsters had something human about them.” Rather than pitting elephants against other elephants or bulls, as was customary, Caesar fitted them with “castles,” presumably like howdahs, from which men fought as part of two contending armies in a mock battle involving five hundred infantry, thirty cavalry and twenty elephants. The battle was enacted in the Circus Maximus, from which, according to Suetonius, Caesar removed the central barrier around which the chariots ran to allow the camps to be pitched facing each other.
Another of Caesar’s innovations was a dramatic naval battle staged in a large pool on the Campus Martius in a swampy area near the Tiber where four thousand oarsmen and two thousand costumed warriors—gladiators and condemned prisoners—bloodily reenacted a naval battle. The games bored Caesar himself and, at the climax of a later spectacular, he was observed in his box pointedly attending to his government papers rather than watching. However, the crowds took a different view. According to Suetonius, “Such huge numbers of visitors flocked to these shows from all directions that many of them had to sleep in tents pitched along the streets or roads, or on rooftops; and often the pressure of the crowd crushed people to death. The victims included two senators.”
Some young men of the patrician classes even took part in the horse-riding events at the games, racing each other in the Circus Maximus. Each rode a pair of horses roped together, vaulting from one to the other at the end of every lap.* Not content with providing spectacular shows, Caesar feasted so many citizens as part of the celebrations that he had to provide twenty thousand couches.
Yet just as interesting to the people of Rome as these lavish festivities was the arrival in their city of the exotic queen of Egypt with her retinue of eunuchs and slaves, baby son, Caesarion, and thirteen-year-old brother-husband, Ptolemy. The exact timing of Cleopatra’s arrival is unclear. She may have missed the Alexandrian Triumph and Arsinoe’s public humiliation, and in any event, however violent her hostility to her half sister, it hardly would have been seemly for her to watch Arsinoe’s disgrace in person or, indeed, a Roman Triumph celebrating the defeat of her countrymen, albeit her enemies. A greater disappointment may have been Caesar’s decision to spare her sister—as long as Arsinoe was alive she was a potential risk to Cleopatra and her son. Cleopatra would later look to Antony to free her of that danger.
In Rome, Cleopatra, her husband and their respective entourages were installed in mansions in the beautiful gardens of Caesar’s estate on the right bank of the Tiber. In the warmth of an Italian summer, less shatteringly hot than in her own more easterly capital, Cleopatra must have been hoping that this interlude would strengthen the emotional bonds between herself and Caesar. As she would have known, he was not a faithful man, and his opportunities for sexual encounters, even with queens, were legion. His affair with the beautiful Eunoe, queen of Mauretania, was the subject of common gossip and he had almost certainly been sleeping with her during his African campaign. But now it was Cleopatra with her diaphanous garments, rich jewels, compelling sexuality and agile intellect who could fill Caesar’s horizon and drive thoughts of other women from his mind.
Her armory of course included the child he had not yet seen—the boy whose paternity became the subject of avid speculation among Rome’s chattering classes. Caesar did not publicly acknowledge the boy as his own, though Antony would later claim that he had done so in private, but Cleopatra’s choice of name for him was a blatant statement to the world that he did nothing to deny. Perhaps she also hoped to become pregnant by Caesar again and give birth this time in Rome. The thoughts of Caesar’s childless wife of thirteen years, Calpurnia, living in their town house, about the arrival of the Egyptian queen and her son are unrecorded but can be guessed.
*In later years he would marry the daughter of Cleopatra and Antony.
†Later, Nero had polar bears chasing seals.
*They rode bareback and, of course, without stirrups, which were not used in Europe until 750 years later.