the last moment, he resolved to remain in Italy, in some isolated
country house or in some neutral town, living apart from public affairs,
not siding with any one, but preaching moderation and peace to all.
Already he had begun an eloquent treatise on peace among citizens; he
wished to finish it at leisure, and, as he had a good opinion of his
eloquence, he hoped it would cause the most stubborn to lay down their
arms. It was an idle fancy, no doubt; but we must not forget that Cato,
who is beyond suspicion, regretted that Cicero had given up his plan so
soon. He blamed him for going to Pharsalia, where his presence was not a
great assistance to the combatants, while, by remaining neutral, he
could preserve his influence over the two rivals and serve as
intermediary between them. But one single day overturned all these fine
projects. When Pompey quitted Brundusium, where he did not think he was
safe, and embarked for Greece, Caesar, who counted upon this news to
retain Cicero, hastened to transmit it to him. It was precisely this
that made him change his mind. He was not one of those men who, like
Caelius, turn with fortune and decide for success. On the contrary, he
felt himself drawn to Pompey as soon as he saw him unfortunate. “I have
never desired to share in his prosperity, said he; I could wish to share
his misfortune!”[216] When he knew that the republican army had
departed, and with it almost all his old political friends; when he felt
that on that Italian soil there were no longer magistrates, consuls or
senate, he was seized with profound grief; it seemed that there was a
blank around him, and that the sun itself, according to his expression,
had disappeared from the world. Many people came to congratulate him on
his prudence, but he reproached himself with it as a crime. He bitterly
accused his weakness, his age, his love of repose and of peace. He had
but one thought, to leave as quickly as possible. “I cannot support my
regret, he said; my books, my studies, my philosophy are of no use to
me. I am like a bird that wishes to fly away, and I always look
seawards.”[217]
From that time his resolution was taken. Caelius tried in vain to retain
him at the last moment, by a touching letter, in which he spoke to him
of the probable loss of his fortune, and of the danger of jeopardizing
the future of his son. Cicero, although he was much moved, was content
to reply with a firmness unusual with him: “I am glad to see that you
are so anxious for my son; but, if the republic continues, he will
always be rich enough with his father’s name; if it must perish, he will
suffer the common fate of all the citizens.”[218] And, soon after, he
crossed the sea to repair to Pompey’s camp. Not that he counted upon
success; in joining a party whose weaknesses he was acquainted with, he
well knew that he was going voluntarily to take his share in a disaster.
“I come, said he, like Amphiaraüs to cast myself alive into the
abyss.”[219] It was a sacrifice that he thought he ought to make for his
country, and it is proper to give him so much the more credit for it as
he did it without illusions and without hope.
While Cicero thus went to rejoin Pompey, Caelius accompanied Caesar to
Spain. All relations became henceforth impossible between them;
consequently their correspondence, which had until then been very
active, stops from this moment. There remains, however, one letter, the
last that passed between them, and which forms a strange contrast to
those that precede. Caelius addressed it to Cicero a few months only
after the events that I have just spoken of, but under very different
circumstances. Although it has only come down to us very mutilated, and
it is not easy to restore the sense of all the phrases, we see clearly
that the writer was a prey to violent irritation. This zealous partisan
of Caesar, who sought to convert others to his opinion, has suddenly
become a furious enemy; that cause that he lately defended with so much
warmth, he now only calls a detestable cause, and thinks “it is better
to die than remain on that side.”[220] What had happened, then, in the
interval? What motives had led Caelius to this last change, and what was
the result of it? It is well to relate it, for the narrative may throw
some light on the policy of the dictator, and above all make us
acquainted with those about him.
III.
In his treatise, _De Amicitia_, Cicero affirms that a tyrant cannot have
friends.[221] In speaking thus he was thinking of Caesar, and it must be
admitted that this example seems to justify him. Courtiers are not
wanting when a man is master, and Caesar, who paid them well, had more
than any other, but we know of scarcely any sincere and devoted friends.
Perhaps he had some among those obscure servants whose memory history
has not preserved,[222] but none of those whom he placed in the first
rank, and whom he invited to share in his good fortune, remained
faithful to him. His liberalities only brought him ingratitude, his
clemency disarmed no one, and he was betrayed by those on whom he had
lavished most favours. His soldiers alone can really be called his
friends, those veterans who remained from the great Gallic wars; his
centurions, all of whom he knew by name, and who let themselves bravely
be killed for him under his eyes: that Scaeva, who at Dyrrhachium had
his shield pierced with two hundred and thirty arrows;[223] that
Crastinus, who said to him on the morning of Pharsalia, “This evening
you shall thank me dead or alive.”[224] These men served him faithfully,
he knew them and relied upon them; but he well knew that he could not
trust his generals. Although he had heaped money and honours upon them
after his victories, they were discontented. A few, and those the most
honourable, were grieved to think that they had destroyed the republic
and shed their blood to establish absolute power. The greater number had
not these scruples, but all thought their services ill rewarded.
Caesar’s liberality, great as it was, had not sufficed to satisfy them.
The republic was delivered up to them, they were praetors and consuls,
they governed the richest provinces, and yet they ceased not to
complain. Everything served them as a pretext for murmuring. Antony had
got Pompey’s house awarded to him at a low price; when they came for the
money he got in a passion and only paid with insults. No doubt he
thought that day that they were wanting in respect for him, and called
Caesar ungrateful. It is not uncommon to see those warriors, so brave
before the enemy, and so admirable on the day of battle, become again in
private life vulgarly ambitious, full of base jealousy and insatiable
greed. They began by murmuring and complaining; they almost all ended by
betraying him. Among those who killed Caesar were found perhaps his best
generals, Sulpicius Galba, the conqueror of the Nantuates, Basilus, one
of his most brilliant cavalry officers, Decimus Brutus and Trebonius,
the heroes of the siege of Marseilles. Those who were not in the plot
did not conduct themselves any better that day. When we read in Plutarch
the narrative of the death of Caesar, our heart bleeds at seeing that no
one tried to defend him. The conspirators were only about sixty in
number, and there were more than eight hundred senators. The greater
number among them had served in his army; all owed to him the honour of
sitting in the curia, of which they were not worthy, and these wretches,
who held their fortune and their dignity from him, who begged for his
protection and lived on his favours, saw him killed without saying a
word. All the time this horrible struggle lasted, while, “like a beast
attacked by the hunters, he strove among the swords drawn against him,”
they remained motionless on their seats, and all their courage consisted
in flying when Brutus, beside the bleeding corpse, essayed to speak.
Cicero recalled this scene, of which he had been a witness, when he said
later, “It is on the day when the oppressors of their country fall that
we see clearly that they have no friends.”[225]
When Caesar’s generals, who had so many motives for remaining faithful
to him, betrayed him, could he reckon more on those doubtful allies that
he had recruited on the Forum, and who before serving him had served all
parties? To accomplish his designs he had need of politicians; in order
that the new government should not appear to be a wholly military rule
he had need of the greatest number possible. Therefore he was not
squeamish, he took them without selection. It was the dishonest men of
all parties that came to him by preference. He received them well,
although he esteemed them little, and carried them everywhere in his
train. Cicero had been very much afraid of them when Caesar came with
them to see him at Formiae: “There is not a rascal in all Italy,” said
he, “who is not with him,”[226] and Atticus, usually so reserved, could
not help calling this retinue an infernal troop.[227] However habituated
we may be to see the initiative in such revolutions taken by men who
have not much to lose, there is reason, nevertheless, to be surprised
that Caesar did not find a few more honourable allies. Even those who
are most opposed to him are compelled to recognize that much which he
wished to destroy did not deserve preservation. The revolution that he
contemplated had profound causes, it was natural that it should have
also sincere partisans. How does it happen then that, among those who
aided him to change a government of which many complained, and from
which every one had suffered, there are so few who seem to act from
conviction, and that almost all, on the contrary, are only paid
conspirators working without sincerity for a man whom they do not love,
and for a purpose that they consider bad?
Perhaps we must explain the composition of Caesar’s party by the means
that he usually took to recruit it. We do not see that when he wished to
gain any one over to his cause he lost his time in demonstrating to him
the defects of the old government and the merits of that by which he
wished to replace it. He employed more simple and sure arguments: he
paid. This showed that he knew well the men of his time, and he was not
deceived in thinking that, in a society altogether given up to luxury
and pleasure, weakened beliefs only left room for self-interest. He
organized then without scruple a vast system of corruption. Gaul
furnished the means. He pillaged it as vigorously as he had conquered
it, “seizing,” says Suetonius, “all that he found in the temples of the
gods, and taking towns by assault, less to punish them than to have a
pretext for plundering them.”[228] With this money he made himself
partisans. Those who came to see him never went away empty-handed. He
did not even neglect to make presents to the slaves and freedmen who had
any influence over their masters. While he was absent from Rome, the
clever Spaniard Balbus and the banker Oppius, who were his agents,
distributed bounties in his name; they discreetly helped embarrassed
senators; they became the treasurers of young men of high family who had
exhausted the paternal resources. They lent money without interest, but
the services by which they would have to repay the loans were well known
to every one. It was thus they bought Curio, who set a high price on
himself; he was in debt for more than 60,000,000 sesterces (£480,000).
Caelius and Dolabella, whose affairs were in a not much better state,
were probably gained by the same means. Never was corruption practised
on a greater scale and displayed with more impudence. Almost every year,
during the winter, Caesar returned to Cisalpine Gaul with the treasures
of the Gauls. Then the market was opened, and the great personages
arrived one after another. One day, at Lucca, so many came at once that
two hundred senators were counted in the apartments, and one hundred and
twenty lictors at the door.
In general, the fidelity of people who are bought does not last much
longer than the money they receive; now, in their hands, money does not
last long, and the day one tires of providing for their prodigality, one
is obliged to begin to distrust them. There was besides, in the case of
all these political friends of Caesar, a special reason why, one day or
other, they should become discontented. They had grown up amidst the
storms of the republic; they had thrown themselves early into that
active and bustling life, and they had acquired the taste for it. No men
more than they, had used and abused liberty of speech; to it they owed
their influence, their power, and their renown. By a strange
inconsistency, these men, who worked with all their might to establish
an absolute government, were those who could least do without the
struggles of public life, the turmoil of business, and the excitement of
the rostrum, that is to say just those things which exist only under
free governments. There were no men who would sooner find despotic power
burdensome than those who had not been able to support even the light
and equitable yoke of the law. Accordingly they were not long in
perceiving the error they had committed. They soon found out that in
aiding a master to destroy the liberty of others, they had delivered up
their own. At the same time it was easy for them to see that the new
government that they had established with their own hands could not give
them what the old one had given them. What, in fact, were those
dignities and those honours with which it was pretended to reward them,
when one man alone possessed real power? There were, no doubt, still
praetors and consuls; but what comparison could be made between these
magistrates, dependent on one man, subject to his caprices, dominated by
his authority, overshadowed, and, as it were, obliterated by his glory,
and those of the old republic? So then must inevitably arise mistakes,
regrets, and often also treasons. This is why those allies whom Caesar
had recruited in the different political parties, after having been very
useful to him, all finished by causing him great trouble. None of those
restless and intractable minds, undisciplined by nature and habit, had
willingly consented to submit to discipline, or heartily resigned
himself to obey. As soon as they were no longer under the eye of the
master and restrained by his powerful hand, the old instincts in them
gained the upper hand; they became again, on the first opportunity,
seditious as before, and though Rome had been pacified by absolute
power, troubles recommenced every time Caesar was absent. It is thus
that Caelius, Dolabella, and Antony compromised the public tranquillity
they had been charged to maintain. Curio, the head of that youth that
rallied round the new government, died too soon to have had the time to
be discontented; but we may conjecture, from the light and flippant
manner in which he already spoke of Caesar in his private conversation,
from the small degree of illusion he seemed to have about him, that he
would have acted like the rest.[229]
It is easy now to understand what reasons Caelius had to complain, and
how that ambition which the dignities of the old republic had not
satisfied at last found itself ill at ease under the new government. The
strange letter that he wrote to Cicero, and that declaration of war
which he made to Caesar and his party are now explained. He had early
become discontented. From the very beginning of the civil war, when he
was congratulated on the success of his party, he answered gloomily:
“What do I care about that glory which never reaches to me?”[230] The
truth is that he was beginning to understand that there was only room
for one man in the new government, and that he alone for the future
would have glory as well as power. Caesar took him on his expedition to
Spain without giving him, it appears, an opportunity of distinguishing
himself. On his return to Rome he was appointed praetor, but he did not
have the urban praetorship which was the most honourable, and Trebonius
was preferred to him. This preference, which he regarded as an insult,
caused him great vexation. He resolved to revenge himself, and only
waited for an opportunity. He thought it had come when he saw Caesar set
out with all his troops for Thessaly, in pursuit of Pompey. He thought
that in the absence of the dictator and his soldiers, in the midst of
the excitement of Italy, where a thousand contradictory rumours on the
result of the struggle were circulating, he might attempt a decisive
stroke. The moment was well chosen; but what was still better chosen was
the question on which Caelius resolved to begin the fight. Nothing does
more credit to his political ability than to have so clearly discerned
the weak sides of the victorious party, and to have seen at a glance the
best position he could take up for a successful attack upon it.
Although Caesar was master of Rome and of Italy, and it was seen that
the republican army would not check him, he still had great difficulties
to surmount. Caelius knew this well; he knew well that in political
struggles success is often an ordeal full of danger. After the enemy has
been vanquished one’s own friends have to be provided for, a task which
is often troublesome. That greed must be resisted which has hitherto
been tolerated, or even encouraged, when the time to satisfy it seemed
distant; it is necessary above all to defend oneself against the
exaggerated hopes that victory produces in those who have gained it, and
which yet cannot be realized. Usually, when one belongs to the weaker
party and wishes to gain adherents, promises are not spared; but when
one reaches power it is very difficult to keep all the engagements that
have been made, and those fine programmes that have been accepted and
scattered abroad become then a source of great embarrassment. Caesar was
the recognized chief of the democratic party; thence came his strength.
We remember that he had said, on entering Italy, that he came to restore
liberty to the republic which was enslaved by a handful of aristocrats.
Now, the democratic party of which he thus proclaimed himself the
representative had its programme ready prepared. It was not exactly that
of the Gracchi. After a century of often bloody struggles, hatred had
become envenomed, and the senseless resistance of the aristocracy had
made the people more exacting. Each of the chiefs who, since Caius
Gracchus, had come forward to lead them, had formulated for them some
fresh demand the more surely to draw them after him. Clodius had aimed
at establishing the unlimited right of association and of governing the
republic by secret societies. Catiline promised confiscation and
pillage; accordingly his memory had remained very popular. Cicero speaks
of the funeral banquets which were celebrated in his honour, and of the
flowers that his tomb was covered with.[231] Caesar, who presented
himself as their successor, could not altogether repudiate their
heritage; he must promise that he would finish their work and satisfy
the wishes of the democracy. At this moment the democracy did not appear
to care much about political reforms; what it wanted was a social
revolution. To be fed in idleness at the expense of the state, by means
of gratuitous distributions very frequently repeated; to appropriate the
best lands of the allies by sending colonies into the richest Italian
cities; to arrive at a sort of division of property, under pretext of
recovering from the aristocracy the public domain which it had
appropriated, such was the ordinary idea of the plebeians; but what they
most urgently demanded, what had become the watchword of all this party,
was the abolition of debts, or, as they said, the destruction of the
registers of the creditors (_tabulae novae_), that is to say, the
authorized violation of public faith, and a general bankruptcy decreed
by the law. This programme, violent as it was, Caesar had prepared to
accept in proclaiming himself the head of the democracy. As long as the
struggle was doubtful, he took care to make no reservations, for fear of
weakening his party by divisions. Therefore it was thought that as soon
as he was victorious he would set himself to work to realize it.
But Caesar had not only come to destroy a government, he wished to found
another, and he knew very well that nothing solid can be established on
spoliation and bankruptcy. After having used, without compunction, the
programme of the democracy to overturn the republic, he understood that
he would have to take up a new part. On the day that he became master of
Rome, his statesman’s instinct, and his interest as a sovereign made him
a conservative. While he extended his hand to the moderate men of the
old parties, he had no scruple in often returning to the traditions of
the old government.
It is certain that the work of Caesar, taking it altogether, is far from
being that of a revolutionary; some of his laws were praised by Cicero
after the Ides of March; which is as much as to say that they were not
conformable to the wishes and hopes of the democracy. He sent eighty
thousand poor citizens into the colonies, but over sea, to Africa and to
Greece. He could not think of altogether abolishing the donations made
by the State to the citizens of Rome, but he diminished them. In the
place of the three hundred and twenty thousand citizens who shared in
these under the republic, he only admitted a hundred and fifty thousand;
he ordered that this number should not be exceeded, and that every year
the praetor should fill up the place of those persons, thus privileged
by poverty, who had died within the year. Far from changing anything in
the prohibitive regulations that were in force under the republic, he
established import duties on foreign merchandise. He promulgated a
sumptuary law, much more severe than the preceding, which regulated in
detail the manner in which people should dress and live, and had it
executed with tyrannical rigour. The markets were guarded by soldiers
lest anything should be sold that the law forbade, and the soldiers were
authorized to enter houses and seize prohibited food even on the tables.
Caesar had taken these measures, which hampered commerce and industry,
and consequently were hurtful to the interests of the people, from the
traditions of the aristocratic governments. They could not therefore be
popular; but the restriction he put upon the right of meeting was still
less so. This right, to which the democracy clung more than to any
other, had been respected even to the last days of the republic, and the
tribune Clodius had skilfully used it to frighten the senate and to
terrorize the Forum. Under pretext of honouring the tutelar deities of
each cross-way, associations of the districts (_collegia compitalicia_),
comprising the poor citizens and the slaves, had been formed. Beginning
by being religious, these societies soon became political. In the time
of Clodius they formed a sort of regular army of the democracy, and
played the same part in the riots of Rome as the “sections” in ’93 did
among us. By the side of these permanent associations, and on the same
model, temporary associations were formed, every time a great election
took place. The people were enrolled by districts, they were divided
into decuries and centuries; chiefs, who led them to vote in military
order, were appointed; and as in general the people did not give their
votes for nothing, an important person named _sequester_ was appointed
beforehand, in whose hands the sum promised by the candidate was
deposited, and distributors (_divisores_) charged, after the voting, to
divide it among each tribe. This is how universal suffrage was exercised
in Rome towards the close of the republic, and thus this race, naturally
inclined to discipline, had succeeded in giving an organization to
disorder. Caesar, who had often made use of these secret associations,
who by them had managed elections and dominated the deliberations of the
Forum, would no longer suffer them when he had no longer need of them.
He thought that a regular government would not last long if he allowed
this underground government to work by its side. He did not shrink then
from severe measures to rid himself of this organized disorder. To the
great scandal of his friends, he suppressed, at a single stroke, all the
political societies, only allowing the most ancient, which presented no
danger, to continue in existence.