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CAESAR RETURNED TO ITALY FROM Hispania in August 45 B.C. but he took his time reaching Rome. He didn’t enter the city until October, when he celebrated a triumph. In the meantime, he went to his villa about twenty miles south of the city, near Labici. There he could wake up in a bedroom whose floor was paved with a delicate, carpetlike mosaic of opaque glass tiles, with plant motifs and depicting a vase full of flowers, all framed by a meander-pattern cornice. He could do business while strolling shaded porticos amid luxurious yellow marble.
An area of fertile volcanic soil, Labici was famous in antiquity for its fruit and vegetables and its vintage wine. Caesar enjoyed the cool peace of the Alban Hills, the same hills where, still today, people go to flee the searing summer heat of Rome. But if the vexing politics of the capital city gave Caesar an added reason for postponing his return, it would be understandable.
Rome was full of people who demanded that Caesar restore the political system as it was before the Civil War. Caesar had other ideas. They thought in terms of the city, while he thought in terms of the empire. As he once wrote, once the Civil War was over, people could look forward to the tranquility of Italy, peace in the provinces, and the security of the empire. Caesar looked far beyond the walls of the Senate House or the corners of the Roman Forum—in fact, he was building a new Senate House and a new Forum. He expressed scorn for the Republic that so many of his contemporaries held sacred. Finally, Caesar had a desire for power. He was already Dictator for Ten Years, a title given him by the Senate in 46 B.C. and he held a host of other honors. We can’t reconstruct precisely what he had in mind for the future. Caesar never expressed that clearly and perhaps his plans were still developing. One thing, though, is certain: Caesar’s vision of Rome’s future was incompatible with the Roman Republic’s past. Either Caesar or the Republic could survive, but not both.
A CLASH OF VISIONS
Now that the Civil War was over, Rome’s senators were ready to take back the power that they considered rightfully theirs. The way they saw it, after five years of war, tens of thousands of men killed, cities sacked, libraries burned, and money spent on carnage, it was the hour of the men in the long robes. The senators had known victorious generals breathing fire before, demanding primacy or dictatorship and, sometimes, cutting off a few heads. They had seen it all and they were confident that it meant nothing.
The Roman nobility were so impressed by their collective authority that they couldn’t imagine anyone going beyond it. They trusted in their ability to co-opt even the strongest opposition, to make it part of the Republic again. They had tamed Pompey and they were sure they could do the same to Caesar. Even now, in spite of everything, they told themselves Caesar wanted nothing but the Republic. In letters dictated to slaves, at drinking parties, or in walks in their gardens with the murmur of water in the fountains in the background, they all stated the same confident conclusion. But Caesar cheated them.
Caesar had no intention of playing the senators’ game. Cato understood that, Cicero sometimes did, but most people denied it. Caesar’s charm masked the truth. He forgave his enemies and even appointed them to Rome’s top offices. He had a smile for nearly everyone. He wrote personal letters even during military campaigns. He gave lavish gifts. It was a very good act but it was only an act.
Caesar had outgrown the city of Rome and its petty quarrels. He could afford to appoint his enemies as praetors and consuls because those jobs no longer mattered. Real power now lay with Caesar’s circle of friends. He no longer cared about the Senate. His challenge was in not making that obvious.
A year earlier, in 46 B.C., when he had returned to Rome from North Africa, Caesar was tactful. Now in 45 B.C., after a hard struggle in Hispania, Caesar was less willing to compromise. The war had come down to a do-or-die battle at Munda (near modern Seville) on March 17, 45 B.C. and the enemy almost pulled off a victory. Caesar had to plead with his men to do their part and his life was in danger at one point. In the end, his army won in a rout, but before that it was close.
The experience might have shaken Caesar or merely confirmed his darkest thoughts. In either case, Hispania seems to have left him more focused and less patient, more sensitive to life’s fragility and less willing to consult with outsiders.
In principle, the Civil War was over, but there were still military rumblings on the empire’s fringes and political unrest in Rome. Syria was in revolt.
In short order, Sextus Pompey—the younger of the two sons of Pompey, he survived defeat—would come out of the mountains and reemerge as a military threat in Hispania. Meanwhile, back in Rome, neither senators nor ordinary citizens accepted the idea of a long-term dictatorship. They still expected Caesar to give them back the Republic, albeit with him in a dominant position.
Most of Rome’s elite still loved their Republic. Cicero said that nothing in the world was comparable to it. Sallust, a great historian, advised Caesar, around 46 B.C., to “strengthen the Republic for the future, not in arms only and against the enemy, but also in the kindly arts of peace, a task far, far thornier.”
Even the urban plebs (as the Romans called the common people of the city of Rome) found something to love in the Republic. Poor people did not hold public office but they did get to vote. Elections brought attention and gifts from the candidates, who were usually wealthy. A hotly contested election often yielded welfare benefits for the poor.
Caesar disagreed. The man with wit and grace enough to turn so many married heads in Rome, the dandy whom Cicero once refused to take seriously because he paid too much attention to his hairstyle, that same Caesar could sometimes be as direct as a dagger thrust. He is said to have called the Republic “a nothing, a mere name without form or substance.” The remark comes from a pamphlet by an enemy of Caesar. It may be fiction but it sounds like Caesar’s stinging wit.
The old guard said that they wanted Rome to be a government of laws and not men. Caesar would have none of it, judging the old guard fraudulent, deluded, or both. He believed that only his genius offered the people of the empire peace and prosperity. To understand why he reached that conclusion, we need to understand who Caesar was.
BECOMING JULIUS CAESAR
Caesar had come a long way. He had gone from a childhood in the Subura slums of Rome to the Royal Residence off the Forum, where he lived as Rome’s Chief Priest, having won election to that high office at a young age; from running and hiding in the hills of Central Italy and fighting malaria and a death sentence from the dictator Sulla to running a campaign against Rome’s hereditary enemy and winning a battle in the hills of Anatolia so dazzling that Caesar could only describe it with the famous phrase, VENI VIDI VICI, “I came, I saw, I conquered”; from winning, at the age of twenty, Rome’s second-highest military honor and the right to a standing ovation from senators whenever he entered the room, to lording it over the defeated rebel chieftain of Gaul lying at his feet; from carrying out three marriages and countless bedroom amours with Rome’s leading political wives to conducting an affair with a queen descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals. In earlier years, Caesar had been a reforming consul who fought and beat the Senate; a political broker who considered no one his equal except Rome’s then-greatest general, Pompey, and Rome’s then-richest man, Marcus Licinius Crassus. By 45 B.C. Caesar outstripped them both; became a conqueror on three continents; and wrote military commentaries destined to last as literary classics for two thousand years. Caesar was both genius and demon, excelling at politics, war, and writing—a triple crown that no one has ever worn as well.
Caesar lived in a society in which modesty was not a virtue. He was what Aristotle called a great-souled man—one with high-flying ambitions and no small opinion of himself. He believed in his intelligence, versatility, and efficacy. He lacked neither courage nor nerve, and his appetite for self-promotion was limitless. As he saw it, he was a political virtuoso with a common touch. He was the man who did everything in the crisis of battle and saved his army again and again. He was stern, fair, and prudent with the enemy, and infinitely merciful to the people of Rome. He stated approvingly a belief that “the imperator Gaius Caesar deserved well of the republic after all his achievements.”
His whole life experience, no doubt starting at his mother’s knee, had taught Caesar that he deserved to be the first man in Rome. He was confident that he could lead the people and he had little use for the Senate. He considered the latter an obstacle to his vision of a new and greater Rome: a rebuilt city worthy of an empire, a reimagined empire that treated its inhabitants as citizens rather than subjects, and a reformed state that considered the masses as contributors to the public good rather than as stumbling blocks in the way of a noble elite.
As consul in 59 B.C., Caesar ran over the objections of the Senate and passed two land laws that provided relief to the poor. He also passed one of the first laws to protect the people of the empire from abuses by provincial governors. The Senate opposed Caesar but he simply bypassed it and had the laws approved by the people in their legislative assemblies. This was legal but against all custom.
Caesar had little patience for custom or for the Senate. He was a refuge for the poor and proud of it, and he despised the Senate’s absolute refusal to make the slightest concession to their needs. He promoted men who horrified the snobs of the Senate—Roman knights, Italians, new citizens from Gaul or Hispania, even sons of freedmen, not to mention young members of the nobility who were in debt or had committed crimes. He made no apologies—in fact, he once said that if it took thugs and murderers to defend his dignitas (that is, his honor), he would gladly reward them with high public office. Nor did Caesar hesitate to use force against his elite enemies. He had Cato thrown out of the Senate and imprisoned after a blustery debate and he had his fellow consul, one of the Best Men, assaulted in public after he tried to stop enactment of one of the land laws.
All his life Caesar loved risk and embraced violence. There was the time he made a dangerous crossing of the Adriatic in a small boat with a few friends and slaves and just a military dagger strapped to his thigh, under his tunic, to use if he met pirates—young Caesar was in a hurry to get back to Rome. Or the time that he marched his army into a trap on the River Sabis in Gaul, without taking the proper precautions, and almost saw his forces overwhelmed by a well-prepared enemy. Caesar won anyhow by rallying his men all over the battlefield, by fighting close to the front himself, and by relying on a superb second-in-command, Titus Labienus. He presented the near disaster as a famous victory in his Commentaries, although he downplayed the contribution of his Number Two.
Caesar took his most famous risk in 49 B.C., when he crossed the Rubicon. This small river marked the boundary between Italian Gaul and Italy proper. It was illegal for a general to bring his army into Italy without the Senate’s approval. Yet Caesar did so on a January night in 49 B.C. (November 50 B.C. by our calendar).
Nowadays, “crossing the Rubicon” means making a difficult decision with no way back. So it was with Caesar. He defied the Senate and broke the law. It was the beginning of five years of civil war. Led by Cato and Pompey, Caesar’s enemies in the Senate had demanded that he give up his command and return to Rome as a private citizen. Realizing that would spell the end of his political career if not his life, Caesar refused. Addressing his soldiers, he said that his enemies were in charge of the Senate and threatened both the liberty of the Roman people and his dignitas. The men pledged their support to their commander. And so Caesar decided to risk everything on civil war. He crossed the Rubicon and marched for Rome.
No politician could stop Caesar, nor could any army defeat him. For nearly a decade the people of Gaul treated him like a king. Take one small example, the surrender of Vercingetorix at Alesia, where the Gallic leader threw himself and his best armor at Caesar’s feet after Caesar circled him on his horse. Having tasted such hard-won dominion, Caesar had no interest in turning it over to the petty, bitter politicians in Rome who, as he saw it, forced him into civil war in spite of all his services to his country.
But anyone with the least taste for romance can’t help but think that the biggest influence moving Caesar to take even more power was his mistress, the queen of Egypt.
CLEOPATRA
Caesar met Cleopatra in 48 B.C. when he went to Egypt in pursuit of Pompey. Pompey had been assassinated when he stepped ashore, betrayed by his supposed friend Egypt’s King Ptolemy XIII. Caesar had no use for Ptolemy. He had robbed Caesar of Pompey’s surrender and besides, the king refused to fund Caesar’s troops. But Caesar found a willing ally in Ptolemy’s sister, Cleopatra. She gladly offered to pay in exchange for support for her claim to the throne.
She was smuggled into the palace in Alexandria, covered, as one story has it, in bed linens, then unrolled in front of Caesar. Cleopatra had great physical presence. She was short and vigorous—she could ride a horse and hunt. If we can judge by her coins, she was not conventionally pretty—she had a prominent chin, a large mouth, and a rugged nose, but the coins might give her exaggerated masculine features to make her look kingly. Certainly, Cleopatra was clever, cunning, and seductive. She represented glamour—she was Egypt, a land of antiquity and elegance. She was glory because she was descended from Alexander the Great’s marshal, Ptolemy I. She was youth; Cleopatra was twenty-one, Caesar was fifty-two. Within a month of their meeting, she was pregnant.
When Caesar and Cleopatra were together, the parties often went on until first light. They cruised together on the Nile on her state barge. Accompanied by more than four hundred ships, they pushed south nearly all the way to Ethiopia, past majestic temples and exotic flora and fauna. It was a journey of exploration and adventure as well as romance.
By spring 47 B.C., after hard fighting in Alexandria and the Nile Delta, Caesar was master of Egypt. And Cleopatra was mistress of Caesar, or so the legend has it. They were two power politicians, not fools for love. Sound political reasoning urged Caesar to prefer Cleopatra to Ptolemy—she was weaker. Ptolemy had strong popular support in Alexandria; Cleopatra needed Rome. She would make a loyal client as ruler of Egypt.
Yet the bright young queen might have had an impact on Caesar even so. What did he think, for example, if she asked him why he wasn’t a god? After all, she was a goddess and every king or queen of Egypt was divine. Alexander the Great was a god, and so, for that matter, were other rulers of the Greek East. Why not Caesar? Why, for that matter, wasn’t he a king? By praising his forceful behavior in Alexandria, Cleopatra might have reinforced Caesar’s desire to be done with the tiresome grandees of the Senate and the constitutional trivialities that they hid behind to protect their privileges. And her connection to Alexander could remind Caesar that there were new worlds to conquer in the East.
In summer 47 B.C., after Caesar’s departure from Egypt, Cleopatra had a son. She named him Ptolemy XV Caesar, but he was known as “Caesarion” or Little Caesar. She claimed that Caesar was the father. It’s hard to know how Caesar responded, if at all, because the subject is encrusted with later propaganda battles. A Roman source says that “certain Greek writers” claimed that Caesarion looked and walked like Caesar.
Caesar was probably not a doting father, but it’s easy to imagine the boy stirring his soul. Twenty years earlier, when he was thirty-three, Caesar had lamented the fact that Alexander the Great was already dead at his age while Caesar had not yet achieved anything of note. Now, he was a great conqueror, and Caesarion linked him genetically with one of Alexander’s generals. Still, even if Caesar did accept the boy as his own, he certainly never thought of making a half Egyptian, born out of wedlock, his heir in Rome.
We are on firmer grounds imagining that Alexandria impressed Caesar. The great city would have impressed anyone. It was about as populous as Rome and immensely grander. Founded by Alexander the Great, it was the showplace of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Beginning with its famous lighthouse, which rose to a height of about 350 feet on an island north of town, Alexandria’s architecture bedazzled. The Palace District, the ports, the colonnades, the Museum, the great Library, the tombs of the Ptolemies and of Alexander the Great, the wide boulevards on a grid plan, the play of marble and granite—it all captivated a visitor. Alexandria outshone Rome. No wonder Caesar put so much emphasis afterward on building a bigger and better Rome.
Caesar did not forget Cleopatra when he left Alexandria in 47 B.C. The next year, back in Rome, he included a gilded statue of the queen as part of his new forum. The statue was a slap in the face to Roman traditionalists.
But Caesar wasn’t thinking of them. He knew that most of the Senate and nearly all the ex-consuls (consulars, as they were called) had opposed him in the Civil War. What mattered to Caesar were a few trusted loyalists as well as his allies in the new elites of Italy and the provinces, the urban plebs, and, above all, the army. Let the Best Men grumble in spite of all he did to conciliate them. Caesar’s men would treat him as he deserved, he who was his country’s best hope.
CAESAR’S MEN
Not only did the war in Gaul make Caesar one of history’s greatest conquerors; it also let him build a state within a state. There was, first and foremost, his army.
Other Roman generals before Caesar used their men’s loyalty as a political tool but no one did it better. It was clear at the time and it still shines through on the pages of Caesar’s Commentaries. The emotional heart of that work is not the senior officers but the centurions, the Roman equivalent of a captain. Caesar depicts their bravery, self-sacrifice, and professionalism. They repaid him in Rome, as political allies and more. His centurions even lent Caesar money before he crossed the Rubicon and started the Civil War in 49 B.C.
Centurions were not poor. They probably came from the upper middle class—and, if not, they were paid well enough to end up there. By contrast, ordinary soldiers were very poor and they simply loved their chief. Not that Caesar responded sentimentally.Power, he once said, depended on only two things: soldiers and money. Caesar paid his men and worked magic with them. He cultivated a reputation for endurance and sharing the soldiers’ sacrifices. He shared his men’s risks, too. At the start of one engagement, for instance, he sent the officers’ horses away to make clear that it was a matter of do or die. He sent his own horse away first.
Whether it was the little things, like leaving his hair and beard unshaven as a sign of mourning for heavy casualties, or the big ones, like giving out wages, loot, and land, Caesar took care of it all. The upshot was to make Caesar’s men “absolutely attached to him and absolutely steadfast.” What was said of Rome’s legendary founder, Romulus, could be said of Caesar, too:
He was more pleasing to the masses than to the Senate but it was in the hearts of the soldiers that he was the most popular by far.
When they marched in Caesar’s triumphs in 46 B.C. his soldiers, wearing military dress including proudly displayed decorations, shouted for joy and sang bawdy songs about Caesar’s sexual exploits. They also called out together, “If you do right, you will be punished, but if wrong, you will be king.” What they meant of course was that Caesar broke the law as consul and began a civil war, and yet dodged punishment and ended up on top. It’s said that Caesar was delighted to know that he and his men understood each other. But he didn’t leave the show of sympathy to mere words.
Caesar gave his soldiers big cash bonuses at the triumphs. Each of his veterans got a lump sum of 6,000 denarii—more than twenty-five times a legionary’s annual wage of 225 denarii. Centurions received double this amount while military tribunes (colonels) and cavalry commanders received four times—stupendous bonuses made possible only by Caesar’s enormous wealth, won in the spoils of war.
It was a taste of things to come. The soldiers were the real power in Rome. In less than three years that would be obvious to everyone. For now, it was still possible to believe that the soldiers bowed their heads to the political authorities.
Caesar counted on the support of the urban plebs and he made payments to them, too. The soldiers had no interest in sharing their wealth so they rioted in protest—and were crushed by him in turn. More than a quarter of a million male citizens were each eligible for 100 denarii. Then there were rent rebates, both in Rome and the rest of Italy—a boon to the poor. Caesar was not yet ready to agree with what, centuries later, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus told his sons on his deathbed: “Make the soldiers rich and pay no attention to anyone else.” Caesar knew that without the support of his legions, he couldn’t rule at all, but without the support of the people, he couldn’t rule in peace. So he had three of the rioting soldiers killed, two by ritual execution, and he displayed their heads outside his office.
In addition to the soldiers and the urban plebs, Caesar built a new elite. Starting in Gaul he put together a team of advisors that included politicians, administrators, lawyers, propagandists, fixers, and bankers. They served as his gatekeepers, troubleshooters, spies, and hatchet men. Almost none of them came from Rome’s nobility; some were not even born Roman citizens; most came from the ranks of the upper classes of Italy, who were Roman citizens but by and large excluded from high office.
The two most powerful of Caesar’s new elite were Gaius Oppius, a Roman knight, and Lucius Cornelius Balbus, a new citizen from Hispania. In the know and usually tight-lipped, they worked behind the scenes and served as Caesar’s eyes and ears. Balbus and Oppius were chiefs of staff, ministers of communications, and secretaries of the treasury combined. They pulled many strings in Rome. Cicero complained that Balbus was drawing up decrees and signing Cicero’s name to them without ever consulting him. In the old days, sighed Cicero, he was virtually helmsman on the Republic’s ship of state, but now he barely had a place in the hold.
It was virtually impossible to see Caesar without going through them, as Cicero discovered to his displeasure. The process was not only wearisome but an affront to one’s dignitas—to think of the social inferiors with whom he had to rub shoulders! It would seem that Caesar himself recognized how unpopular his gatekeepers made him. Caesar supposedly said that if a man like Cicero had to wait to see him, then everyone, including Cicero, must have really hated him. Evidently Caesar felt that as unfortunate as this was, there was no alternative.
CAESAR’S REFORMS
While Caesar stayed in his villa at Labici, waiting to enter the capital, he might have considered how much he had already changed Rome. The year before he had passed a dazzling series of laws that advanced the country in everything from the grain dole to the calendar and from the countryside to new colonies abroad.
To the urban plebs he brought handouts, entertainment, and debt relief—but not enough to hurt the wealthy. To his supporters in the provinces he brought Roman citizenship. To leading Roman knights he opened up public offices and seats in the Senate, which he eventually expanded from 600 to 900. A few of Caesar’s new senators were citizens who came from Italian Gaul and probably even from Gaul across the Alps. To the former supporters of Pompey he offered pardons and promotions. He used his massive wealth to purchase new friends including senators who got low-or no-interest loans as well as freedmen and even slaves who had influence with their masters.
Caesar offered land for his veterans and grain for the urban poor, but with a sting—he reduced the number of those on the grain dole and began plans to move large numbers of the city’s poor to new colonies abroad. Eighty thousand colonists were settled by the time of his death. He helped debtors by decreeing that land be valued at pre–Civil War prices, but he refused to forgive people’s debts altogether, which reassured creditors. At the same time he encouraged the immigration of doctors and teachers to Rome.
Caesar limited the term of provincial governors to two years—he didn’t want anyone else using his province as a springboard to supreme power as he had used Gaul. He increased the number of public officials, which both responded to the press of public business and gave jobs to his friends. But his most important administrative reform by far concerned the calendar. Rome’s lunar calendar, based on a year of about 354 days, was out of sync with the seasons. Caesar put through an epoch-making reform—the solar calendar of 365 days plus leap year that is still in use today by most of the world (with a few adjustments in the 1700s A.D.). The new calendar started on January 1, 45 B.C.
As for the capital city, Caesar replaced republican austerity with imperial pomp and sealed it with a dynasty’s stamp. And at the center of everything, dictator and nearly demigod, stood Caesar.
CITY OF MARBLE
Caesar followed his triumphs in Rome in September 46 B.C. with a series of spectacular public banquets and games, including gladiatorial games dedicated to his daughter, Julia, nine years after her death. It was the first such event held in honor of a daughter. Even more unusual, the games were combined with those for the inauguration of a new temple, the Temple of Venus Genetrix—Mother Venus, which was dedicated on September 26. This was major, and in fact, it marked nothing less than the start of a monumental rebuilding of the heart of Rome. As in other things, Caesar was following in Pompey’s footsteps.
Pompey built a spectacular new complex as a memorial of his triumph of 61 B.C. and his success in the East. Pompey had freed the sea of pirates, defeated the terrible rebel King Mithradates of Pontus, and won the Republic a new and glittering set of provinces and protectorates. The new complex consisted of two interconnected parts, the Portico of Pompey and the Theater of Pompey. The Romans sometimes referred to the whole thing as Pompey’s Works. Although its outline can be traced in today’s street plan—and even in the footprints of some of the buildings—little of the structure survives. Still, the complex was every bit as iconic in its day as the Colosseum would be later.
Pompey’s Works included Rome’s first permanent theater, what was in effect Rome’s first public park, a temple to Venus the Victorious (Pompey’s personal goddess of Victory), art galleries, shops, government offices, and a new Senate House, including a statue of Pompey. The whole thing was a gigantic monument to an overbearing general who threatened to suffocate the liberty of the Republic by his ego and ambition.
From its dedication in 55 B.C., Pompey’s Works was immensely popular. A year later Caesar launched a big new project of his own, the Forum Julium, or Caesar’s Forum. Like the Portico of Pompey, it was to be a colonnaded, rectangular space with a temple to Venus, but Caesar dedicated his temple to “Mother Venus” because Venus was founder both of Caesar’s family and the Roman people, so the change from Victorious to Mother did double duty.
In front of the Temple of Mother Venus stood a statue of Caesar on horseback in a conquering pose made famous by Alexander the Great. Adjacent to the Forum there would be a new Senate House, the Julian Senate House (Curia Julia), named for Julius Caesar’s family, the Julii.
Unlike Pompey’s Works, Caesar’s Forum did not include a theater, but Caesar planned to build one relatively close by (eventually, it became the Theater of Marcellus, completed under Augustus and still partially standing). Nor was there a park but, as we shall see, Caesar had a plan to outdo Pompey on that score. Best of all, and unlike Pompey’s Works, Caesar’s Forum had a central location in Rome, adjacent to the Roman Forum. Pompey’s Works was located in the Field of Mars, about half a mile away, on the low-lying plain between the republican city walls and the bend of the River Tiber. Caesar planted his flag practically in the center of Roman power. The real estate alone cost a fortune, nearly enough to fund Rome’s armies for a generation.
The Temple housed a statue of Venus by Arcesilaus, a prominent Greek sculptor in Rome. Other decorations in the temple—all gifts to the goddess—included priceless paintings, engraved gems, and a breastplate of British pearls. Finally there was that gilded statue of Cleopatra.
Caesar’s new Forum and Senate House were just the beginning. He ordered a complete overhaul of Rome’s most important political real estate, the Assembly Place, located in front of the Senate House. There would be a new assembly space, a new Speaker’s Platform, and, just beyond it to the east, a new judicial complex, the Julian Court Building, also named after Caesar’s family. He arranged for the construction in the Field of Mars of a huge marble colonnade to be used for elections—called the Julian Enclosure. It all represented an unfriendly takeover of the Republic’s most hallowed ground by one family. Ironically, although Caesar expanded the spaces for public speeches and elections, he made them irrelevant. Behind the scenes, the dictator pulled the strings and decided who would or wouldn’t hold office.
There was more. Caesar planned a great new Temple of Mars, the war god, and a library to rival the famous Library of Alexandria. To end the problem of the city’s frequent floods, he ordered the River Tiber to be diverted from the center of Rome. He also planned a major port for the mouth of the Tiber at Ostia, located about twenty miles southwest of Rome.
It is tempting to imagine Caesar and Cleopatra planning such projects together as a way of bringing Rome up to the grandeur of Alexandria—of making it a city worthy of Caesar. Then again, public works projects represented jobs for the poor and contracts to be awarded strategically; both were ways for Caesar to increase his support.
WHAT CAESAR WANTED
Even as Dictator for Ten Years, even with an expanded Senate, a redesigned Forum, a frightened silence in the public square, and an enormous ebb and flow of population, Caesar still lacked legitimacy. Most Romans expected the Republic to continue much as it had before. Yet Caesar’s actions spoke louder than any words. They made it clear that the dictator wanted power to flow to him and his friends and away from the traditional institutions of the Senate and the people.
Caesar could justify his actions by pointing to the need for reform and the unyielding rigidity of the old guard. Such words would fall on deaf ears. Neither the Senate nor the people were ready to give up their ancient liberties. Caesar could not convince them; he could merely accustom them to change as it accumulated. Because Rome was still a republic he could never obtain the appreciation that he considered worthy of his dignitas and his achievements.
It would take more than one lifetime to change Rome. And Caesar might have wondered just how much lifetime he had left.
There are those who think he was depressed. “I have lived long enough for nature or glory,” said Caesar repeatedly in 46 B.C. Some of his friends thought that he had no wish to live longer because his health was poorer than it had been. There are accounts offainting spells and night terrors towards the close of his life—symptoms, perhaps, of his epilepsy.
Caesar was an epileptic but he was also a politician, so he carefully managed information about his health. He did have occasional seizures, possibly with related dizziness or fainting, but some of the incidents mentioned in the sources look suspicious and might be merely excuses to cover up missteps in the Forum or battlefield lapses. Overall, Caesar’s health was good. Indeed he planned another major military campaign.
Yet even Caesar knew he was mortal. He also knew that he did not have a legitimate heir, a son to continue his legacy in Rome.
OCTAVIAN
In his villa at Labici, Caesar revised his will. It was the Ides of September—September 13, 45 B.C. The key to the document was that, after Caesar’s death, he would adopt Gaius Octavius—Octavian—and give the boy his name—Caesar. He also made Octavian heir to three-quarters of his fortune.
Earlier that summer Caesar gave Antony a privileged position in the return to Italy and he gave Decimus a position equal to Octavian’s. There may be truth to the rumor that Antony hoped to be adopted by Caesar. Decimus sat in the second carriage and he already was adopted (by another man), but where there’s a will there’s a way and he too might have hoped to get the nod. But Caesar chose Octavian.
We can reject as slander Antony’s charge that Octavian sold his body to Caesar, but that still leaves the question of why Caesar chose as he did. Perhaps the old fox sensed that Octavian’s blood ran even colder than Antony’s, and if so, surely Caesar approved. As events would soon show, young Octavian was brilliant, shrewd, ambitious, audacious, and utterly ruthless, and so a man after Caesar’s heart. Octavian knew how to turn on the charm and that too surely impressed Caesar, perhaps even worked its magic on him. Besides, Antony, the man Caesar chose to do his financial dirty work, was not the man to be great Caesar’s heir. Or was it also a matter of blood being thicker than water? Antony was a distant cousin of Caesar but Octavian was his grandnephew.
As for Decimus, he was not Caesar’s kin. Decimus was a heroic battlefield commander but fell short as a strategist. Both Decimus and Antony were more closely tied to the old nobility than Octavian but neither could match his cunning. Antony and Decimus were mature men in their late thirties. Octavian was a month short of his eighteenth birthday. Yet in Caesar’s eyes, Octavian was their equal if not their superior.
After Hispania, the topic of a son might well have occurred to Caesar. Pompey had been dead for three years and yet he still made war on Caesar via his sons. Caesar had no son except perhaps for Cleopatra’s boy, the illegitimate Caesarion. Adopting Octavian was a solution.
Both legally and politically, this was complicated. In Rome, adopting an adult was standard practice but adopting by one’s will was not. Octavian was not required to accept. In fact, Caesar left open the possibility of Octavian’s rejection and named substitute heirs. Finally, Caesar was only in his mid-fifties. He might expect to live another two decades, by which point Octavian would be a mature man. Caesar also allowed for the possibility that he might yet have a legitimate son who would take precedence over Octavian. Still, the document was a remarkable vote of confidence in Caesar’s young grandnephew.
The will was given over to the chief of the Vestal Virgins for safekeeping. Apparently, even in Rome, where little or nothing was sacred, this meant it was kept secret. But we have to wonder if any of the three men who shared the chariots that returned to Italy in 45 B.C.—Antony, Decimus, or Octavian himself—suspected Caesar’s fateful choice.