Epilogue
Oh, could my dying hand but lodge a sword
In Caesar’s bosom, and revenge my country,
By heavens, I could enjoy the pangs of death,
And smile in agony.
—JOSEPH ADDISON CATO
General George Washington left the crowded, makeshift theater at his camp in the snowy hills of Pennsylvania and walked slowly back to his quarters. It had been a miserable winter for his men. The British army had outmaneuvered Washington during the autumn of 1777 and captured Philadelphia in spite of his best efforts. It seemed that nearly everything he had done since assuming command of the continental army two years earlier had ended in disaster. The invasion of Quebec had failed, New York had been abandoned to the British, and now the capital of the fledgling republic was in enemy hands.
Washington’s only hope was to retreat to the settlement of Valley Forge, eighteen miles northwest of Philadelphia, and wait for spring. But the situation was perilous. Primitive huts were the only shelter for his 12,000 men, there was little food aside from flat cakes made of flour and water, and most lacked clothing to keep out the bitter winds that blew constantly from the north. Disease—typhus, dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia—swept through the camp, killing as many as 2,000 of his soldiers that winter.
Faced with imminent defeat, Washington decided to put on a play. The drama he chose was Cato by the English writer Joseph Addison, one of the most popular productions in eighteenth-century America. The play, set in the final days of Cato’s life, was one of Washington’s favorites. In it Cato is the embodiment of republican and patriotic values for all ages, the noble foe of tyranny fighting against all odds to free his country from the oppression of Caesar. Washington saw the ancient Roman Republic as the embodiment of all he held most dear. Although Cato dies at the end of the play, Washington hoped his sacrifice would inspire his beleaguered soldiers in their own war against the tyranny of King George III. If, like Cato at Utica, the Continental army was defeated at Valley Forge, the new American republic would vanish forever.
The battle for Caesar’s legacy began with his assassination on the Ides of March. Brutus and Cassius had assumed that the Roman people would welcome the death of Caesar and that the Republic would rise again. They failed to realize that the army had become the deciding factor in Roman politics. Whoever could control the most troops controlled the empire.
At Caesar’s funeral, Mark Antony, holding the dictator’s bloodstained toga aloft, evoked the legacy of the slain leader before the crowd, many of whom were Caesar’s angry veterans. In time the conspirators were forced to flee east to really their forces. Octavius adopted Caesar’s name as his own while he kept an uneasy truce with Antony and steadily increased his own power. The clemency of Caesar was forgotten as Antony and Octavius began a massacre of their political enemies at home, including Cicero, and attacked the Republican armies abroad. With the defeat of Antony and Caesar’s old love, Cleopatra, at Actium in 31 B.C., Octavius emerged as sole ruler of Rome. As Caesar’s heir, Octavius, now Caesar Augustus, lauded his great-uncle as a visionary leader and downplayed any hint of tyranny. After the fall of Rome, the courts of medieval Europe held Caesar up as the model of the ideal king—the Germans even borrowed his name for the title Kaiser, as did the Russians with czar. Beginning with Shakespeare the modern world became more ambivalent about Caesar. When Thomas Jefferson showed Alexander Hamilton his portraits of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke as the three greatest men in world history, Hamilton, a republican to the core, spoke for many when he shook his head and reluctantly proclaimed:
The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar.