the exertions of the besiegers were directed to destroy his fleet
and cut him off from the sea by which supplies reached him.
The island with the lighthouse and the mole by which this was connected
with the mainland divided the harbour into a western and an eastern half,
which were in communication with each other through two arched openings
in the mole. Caesar commanded the island and the east harbour,
while the mole and the west harbour were in possession
of the citizens; and, as the Alexandrian fleet was burnt,
his vessels sailed in and out without hindrance. The Alexandrians,
after having vainly attempted to introduce fire-ships from the western
into the eastern harbour, equipped with the remnant of their arsenal
a small squadron and with this blocked up the way of Caesar's vessels,
when these were towing in a fleet of transports with a legion
that had arrived from Asia Minor; but the excellent Rhodian mariners
of Caesar mastered the enemy. Not long afterwards, however,
the citizens captured the lighthouse- island,(42) and from that point
totally closed the narrow and rocky mouth of the east harbour
for larger ships; so that Caesar's fleet was compelled
to take its station in the open roads before the east harbour,
and his communication with the sea hung only on a weak thread.
Caesar's fleet, attacked in that roadstead repeatedly
by the superior naval force of the enemy, could neither shun
the unequal strife, since the loss of the lighthouse-island
closed the inner harbour against it, nor yet withdraw, for the loss
of the roadstead would have debarred Caesar wholly from the sea.
Though the brave legionaries, supported by the dexterity
of the Rhodian sailors, had always hitherto decided these conflicts
in favour of the Romans, the Alexandrians renewed and augmented
their naval armaments with unwearied perseverance; the besieged
had to fight as often as it pleased the besiegers, and if the former
should be on a single occasion vanquished, Caesar would be
totally hemmed in and probably lost.
It was absolutely necessary to make an attempt to recover
the lighthouse island. The double attack, which was made by boats
from the side of the harbour and by the war-vessels from the seaboard,
in reality brought not only the island but also the lower part
of the mole into Caesar's power; it was only at the second arch-
opening of the mole that Caesar ordered the attack to be stopped,
and the mole to be there closed towards the city by a transverse wall.
But while a violent conflict arose here around the entrenchers,
the Roman troops left the lower part of the mole adjoining
the island bare of defenders; a division of Egyptians landed there
unexpectedly, attacked in the rear the Roman soldiers and sailors
crowded together on the mole at the transverse wall, and drove
the whole mass in wild confusion into the sea. A part
were taken on board by the Roman ships; the most were drowned.
Some 400 soldiers and a still greater number of men belonging
to the fleet were sacrificed on this day; the general himself,
who had shared the fate of his men, had been obliged to seek refuge,
in his ship, and when this sank from having been overloaded with men,
he had to save himself by swimming to another. But, severe as was
the loss suffered, it was amply compensated by the recovery
of the lighthouse-island, which along with the mole as far as
the first arch-opening remained in the hands of Caesar.
Relieving Army from Asia Minor
At length the longed-for relief arrived. Mithradates of Pergamus,
an able warrior of the school of Mithradates Eupator, whose natural son
he claimed to be, brought up by land from Syria a motley army--
the Ityraeans of the prince of the Libanus,(43) the Bedouins
of Jamblichus, son of Sampsiceramus,(44) the Jews under the minister
Antipater, and the contingents generally of the petty chiefs
and communities of Cilicia and Syria. From Pelusium, which Mithradates
had the fortune to occupy on the day of his arrival, he took
the great road towards Memphis with the view of avoiding
the intersected ground of the Delta and crossing the Nile
before its division; during which movement his troops received
manifold support from the Jewish peasants who were settled
in peculiar numbers in this part of Egypt. The Egyptians,
with the young king Ptolemaeus now at their head, whom Caesar
had released to his people in the vain hope of allaying the insurrection
by his means, despatched an army to the Nile, to detain Mithradates
on its farther bank. This army fell in with the enemy
even beyond Memphis at the so-called Jews'-camp, between Onion
and Heliopolis; nevertheless Mithradates, trained in the Roman fashion
of manoeuvring and encamping, amidst successful conflicts gained
the opposite bank at Memphis. Caesar, on the other hand, as soon as
he obtained news of the arrival of the relieving army, conveyed a part
of his troops in ships to the end of the lake of Marea to the west
of Alexandria, and marched round this lake and down the Nile
to meet Mithradates advancing up the river.
Battle at the Nile
The junction took place without the enemy attempting to hinder it.
Caesar then marched into the Delta, whither the king had retreated,
overthrew, notwithstanding the deeply cut canal in their front,
the Egyptian vanguard at the first onset, and immediately stormed
the Egyptian camp itself. It lay at the foot of a rising ground
between the Nile--from which only a narrow path separated it--
and marshes difficult of access. Caesar caused the camp to be assailed
simultaneously from the front and from the flank on the path
along the Nile; and during this assault ordered a third detachment
to ascend unseen the heights behind the camp. The victory was complete
the camp was taken, and those of the Egyptians who did not fal
beneath the sword of the enemy were drowned in the attempt to escape
to the fleet on the Nile. With one of the boats, which sank
overladen with men, the young king also disappeared in the waters
of his native stream.
Pacificatin of Alexandria
Immediately after the battle Caesar advanced at the head
of his cavalry from the land-side straight into the portion
of the capital occupied by the Egyptians. In mourning attire,
with the images of their gods in their hands, the enemy received him
and sued for peace; and his troops, when they saw him return as victor
from the side opposite to that by which he had set forth, welcomed him
with boundless joy. The fate of the town, which had ventured
to thwart the plans of the master of the world and had brought him
within a hair's-breadth of destruction, lay in Caesar's hands;
but he was too much of a ruler to be sensitive, and dealt with
the Alexandrians as with the Massiliots. Caesar--pointing
to their city severely devastated and deprived of its granaries,
of its world-renowned library, and of other important public buildings
on occasion of the burning of the fleet--exhorted the inhabitants
in future earnestly to cultivate the arts of peace alone, and to heal
the wounds which they had inflicted on themselves; for the rest,
he contented himself with granting to the Jews settled in Alexandria
the same rights which the Greek population of the city enjoyed,
and with placing in Alexandria, instead of the previous Roman army
of occupation which nominally at least obeyed the kings of Egypt,
a formal Roman garrison--two of the legions besieged there,
and a third which afterwards arrived from Syria--under a commander
nominated by himself. For this position of trust a man
was purposely selected, whose birth made it impossible for him
to abuse it--Rufio, an able soldier, but the son of a freedman.
Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemaeus obtained the sovereignty
of Egypt under the supremacy of Rome; the princess Arsinoe
was carried off to Italy, that she might not serve once more as a pretext
for insurrections to the Egyptians, who were after the Oriental fashion
quite as much devoted to their dynasty as they were indifferent
towards the individual dynasts; Cyprus became again a part
of the Roman province of Cilicia.
Course of Things during Caesar's Absence in Alexandria
This Alexandrian insurrection, insignificant as it was in itself
and slight as was its intrinsic connection with the events
of importance in the world's history which took place at the same time
in the Roman state, had nevertheless so far a momentous influence
on them that it compelled the man, who was all in all and without whom
nothing could be despatched and nothing could be solved,
to leave his proper tasks in abeyance from October 706 up to March 707
in order to fight along with Jews and Bedouins against a city rabble.
The consequences of personal rule began to make themselves felt.
They had the monarchy; but the wildest confusion prevailed everywhere,
and the monarch was absent. The Caesarians were for the moment,
just like the Pompeians, without superintendence; the ability
of the individual officers and, above all, accident
decided matters everywhere.
Insubordination of Pharnaces
In Asia Minor there was, at the time of Caesar's departure for Egypt,
no enemy. But Caesar's lieutenant there, the able Gnaeus Domitius
Calvinus, had received orders to take away again from king Pharnaces
what he had without instructions wrested from the allies of Pompeius;
and, as Pharnaces, an obstinate and arrogant despot like his father,
perseveringly refused to evacuate Lesser Armenia, no course remained
but to march against him. Calvinus had been obliged to despatch
to Egypt two out of the three legions left behind with him and formed
out of the Pharsalian prisoners of war; he filled up the gap
by one legion hastily gathered from the Romans domiciled in Pontus
and two legions of Deiotarus exercised after the Roman manner,
and advanced into Lesser Armenia. But the Bosporan army,
tried in numerous conflicts with the dwellers on the Black Sea,
showed itself more efficient than his own.
Calvinus Defeated at Nicopolis
Victory of Caesar at Ziela
In an engagement at Nicopolis the Pontic levy of Calvinus
was cut to pieces and the Galatian legions ran off; only the one old
legion of the Romans fought its way through with moderate loss.
Instead of conquering Lesser Armenia, Calvinus could not even prevent
Pharnaces from repossessing himself of his Pontic "hereditary states,"
and pouring forth the whole vials of his horrible sultanic caprices
on their inhabitants, especially the unhappy Amisenes
(winter of 706-707). When Caesar in person arrived in Asia Minor
and intimated to him that the service which Pharnaces had rendered
to him personally by having granted no help to Pompeius could not be
taken into account against the injury inflicted on the empire,
and that before any negotiation he must evacuate the province of Pontus
and send back the property which he had pillaged, he declared himself
doubtless ready to submit; nevertheless, well knowing how good reason
Caesar had for hastening to the west, he made no serious preparations
for the evacuation. He did not know that Caesar finished
whatever he took in hand. Without negotiating further,
Caesar took with him the one legion which he brought from Alexandria
and the troops of Calvinus and Deiotarus, and advanced against
the camp of Pharnaces at Ziela. When the Bosporans saw him approach,
they boldly crossed the deep mountain-ravine which covered their front,
and charged the Romans up the hill. Caesar's soldiers
were still occupied in pitching their camp, and the ranks wavered
for a moment; but the veterans accustomed to war rapidly rallied
and set the example for a general attack and for a complete victory
(2 Aug. 707). In five days the campaign was ended--an invaluable piece
of good fortune at this time, when every hour was precious.
Regulation of Asia Minor
Caesar entrusted the pursuit of the king, who had gone home by way
of Sinope to Pharnaces' illegitimate brother, the brave Mithradates
of Pergamus, who as a reward for the services rendered by him in Egypt
received the crown of the Bosporan kingdom in room of Pharnaces.
In other respects the affairs of Syria and Asia Minor were peacefully
settled; Caesar's own allies were richly rewarded, those of Pompeius
were in general dismissed with fines or reprimands. Deiotarus alone,
the most powerful of the clients of Pompeius, was again confined
to his narrow hereditary domain, the canton of the Tolistobogii.
In his stead Ariobarzanes king of Cappadocia was invested with
Lesser Armenia, and the tetrarchy of the Trocmi usurped by Deiotarus
was conferred on the new king of the Bosporus, who was descended
by the maternal side from one of the Galatian princely houses
as by the paternal from that of Pontus.
War by Land and Sea in Illyria
Defeat of Gabinius
Naval Victory at Tauris
In Illyria also, while Caesar was in Egypt, incidents of a very grave
nature had occurred. The Dalmatian coast had been for centuries
a sore blemish on the Roman rule, and its inhabitants had been
at open feud with Caesar since the conflicts around Dyrrhachium;
while the interior also since the time of the Thessalian war,
swarmed with dispersed Pompeians. Quintus Cornificius
had however, with the legions that followed him from Italy,
kept both the natives and the refugees in check and had
at the same time sufficiently met the difficult task of provisioning
the troops in these rugged districts. Even when the able
Marcus Octavius, the victor of Curicta,(45) appeared with a part
of the Pompeian fleet in these waters to wage war there against Caesar
by sea and land, Cornificius not only knew how to maintain himself,
resting for support on the ships and the harbour of the Iadestini
(Zara), but in his turn also sustained several successful engagements
at sea with the fleet of his antagonist. But when the new governor
of Illyria, the Aulus Gabinius recalled by Caesar from exile,(46)
arrived by the landward route in Illyria in the winter of 706-707
with fifteen cohorts and 3000 horse, the system of warfare
changed. Instead of confining himself like his predecessor
to war on a small scale, the bold active man undertook at once,
in spite of the inclement season, an expedition with his whole force
to the mountains. But the unfavourable weather, the difficulty
of providing supplies, and the brave resistance of the Dalmatians,
swept away the army; Gabinius had to commence his retreat,
was attacked in the course of it and disgracefully defeated
by the Dalmatians, and with the feeble remains of his fine army
had difficulty in reaching Salonae, where he soon afterwards died.
Most of the Illyrian coast towns thereupon surrendered to the fleet
of Octavius; those that adhered to Caesar, such as Salonae
and Epidaurus (Ragusa vecchia), were so hard pressed by the fleet
at sea and by the barbarians on land, that the surrender
and capitulation of the remains of the army enclosed in Salonae
seemed not far distant. Then the commandant of the depot at Brundisium,
the energetic Publius Vatinius, in the absence of ships of war caused
common boats to be provided with beaks and manned with the soldiers
dismissed from the hospitals, and with this extemporized
war-fleet gave battle to the far superior fleet of Octavius
at the island of Tauris (Torcola between Lesina and Curzola)--
a battle in which, as in so many cases, the bravery of the leader
and of the marines compensated for the deficiencies of the vessels,
and the Caesarians achieved a brilliant victory. Marcus Octavius
left these waters and proceeded to Africa (spring of 707);
the Dalmatians no doubt continued their resistance for years
with great obstinacy, but it was nothing beyond a local mountain-warfare.
When Caesar returned from Egypt, his resolute adjutant had already got rid
of the danger that was imminent in Illyria.
Reorganization of the Coalition in Africa
All the more serious was the position of things in Africa,
where the constitutional party had from the outset of the civil war
ruled absolutely and had continually augmented their power.
Down to the battle of Pharsalus king Juba had, properly speaking,
borne rule there; he had vanquished Curio, and his flying horsemen
and his numberless archers were the main strength of the army;
the Pompeian governor Varus played by his side so subordinate
a part that he even had to deliver those soldiers of Curio,
who had surrendered to him, over to the king, and had to look on
while they were executed or carried away into the interior of Numidia.
After the battle of Pharsalus a change took place. With the exception
of Pompeius himself, no man of note among the defeated party
thought of flight to the Parthians. As little did they attempt to hold
the sea with their united resources; the warfare waged by Marcus Octavius
in the Illyrian waters was isolated, and was without permanent success.
The great majority of the republicans as of the Pompeians
betook themselves to Africa, where alone an honourable
and constitutional warfare might still be waged against the usurper.
There the fragments of the army scattered at Pharsalus, the troops
that had garrisoned Dyrrhachium, Corcyra, and the Peloponnesus,
the remains of the Illyrian fleet, gradually congregated;
there the second commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio,
the two sons of Pompeius, Gnaeus and Sextus, the political leader
of the republicans Marcus Cato, the able officers Labienus,
Afranius, Petreius, Octavius and others met. If the resources
of the emigrants had diminished, their fanaticism had, if possible,
even increased. Not only did they continue to murder their prisoners
and even the officers of Caesar under flag of truce, but king Juba,
in whom the exasperation of the partisan mingled with the fury
of the half-barbarous African, laid down the maxim that in every
community suspected of sympathizing with the enemy the burgesses
ought to be extirpated and the town burnt down, and even practically
carried out this theory against some townships, such as the unfortunate
Vaga near Hadrumetum. In fact it was solely owing to the energetic
intervention of Cato that the capital of the province itself
the flourishing Utica--which, just like Carthage formerly,
had been long regarded with a jealous eye by the Numidian kings--
did not experience the same treatment from Juba, and that measures
of precaution merely were taken against its citizens,
who certainly were not unjustly accused of leaning towards Caesar.
As neither Caesar himself nor any of his lieutenants undertook
the smallest movement against Africa, the coalition had full time
to acquire political and military reorganization there. First of all,
it was necessary to fill up anew the place of commander-in-chief
vacant by the death of Pompeius. King Juba was not disinclined
still to maintain the position which he had held in Africa
up to the battle of Pharsalus; indeed he bore himself no longer
as a client of the Romans but as an equal ally or even as a protector,
and took it upon him, for example, to coin Roman silver money
with his name and device; nay, he even raised a claim to be the sole
wearer of purple in the camp, and suggested to the Roman commanders
that they should lay aside their purple mantle of office.
Further Metellus Scipio demanded the supreme command for himself,
because Pompeius had recognized him in the Thessalian campaign
as on a footing of equality, more from the consideration that he was
his son-in-law than on military grounds. The like demand was raised
by Varus as the governor--self-nominated, it is true--of Africa,
seeing that the war was to be waged in his province. Lastly the army
desired for its leader the propraetor Marcus Cato. Obviously
it was right. Cato was the only man who possessed the requisite
devotedness, energy, and authority for the difficult office;
if he was no military man, it was infinitely better to appoint
as commander-in-chief a non-military man who understood how to listen
to reason and make his subordinates act, than an officer of untried
capacity like Varus, or even one of tried incapacity like Metellus
Scipio. But the decision fell at length on this same Scipio,
and it was Cato himself who mainly determined that decision.
He did so, not because he felt himself unequal to such a task,
or because his vanity found its account rather in declining
than in accepting; still less because he loved or respected Scipio,
with whom he on the contrary was personally at variance,
and who with his notorious inefficiency had attained a certain importance
merely in virtue of his position as father-in-law to Pompeius;
but simply and solely because his obstinate legal formalism chose
rather to let the republic go to ruin in due course of law
than to save it in an irregular way. When after the battle of Pharsalus
he met with Marcus Cicero at Corcyra, he had offered to hand over
the command in Corcyra to the latter--who was still from the time
of his Cilician administration invested with the rank of general--
as the officer of higher standing according to the letter of the law,
and by this readiness had driven the unfortunate advocate,
who now cursed a thousand times his laurels from the Arnanus,
almost to despair; but he had at the same time astonished all men
of any tolerable discernment. The same principles were applied now,
when something more was at stake; Cato weighed the question
to whom the place of commander-in-chief belonged, as if the matter
had reference to a field at Tusculum, and adjudged it to Scipio.
By this sentence his own candidature and that of Varus were set aside.
But he it was also, and he alone, who confronted with energy
the claims of king Juba, and made him feel that the Roman nobility
came to him not suppliant, as to the great-prince of the Parthians,
with a view to ask aid at the hands of a protector, but as entitled
to command and require aid from a subject. In the present state
of the Roman forces in Africa, Juba could not avoid lowering
his claims to some extent; although he still carried the point
with the weak Scipio, that the pay of his troops should be charged
on the Roman treasury and the cession of the province of Africa
should be assured to him in the event of victory.
By the side of the new general-in-chief the senate of the "three hundred"
again emerged. It established its seat in Utica, and replenished
its thinned ranks by the admission of the most esteemed
and the wealthiest men of the equestrian order.
The warlike preparations were pushed forward, chiefly through
the zeal of Cato, with the greatest energy, and every man capable
of arms, even the freedman and Libyan, was enrolled in the legions;
by which course so many hands were withdrawn from agriculture
that a great part of the fields remained uncultivated, but an imposing
result was certainly attained. The heavy infantry numbered fourteen
legions, of which two were already raised by Varus, eight others
were formed partly from the refugees, partly from the conscripts
in the province, and four were legions of king Juba armed
in the Roman manner. The heavy cavalry, consisting of the Celts
and Germans who arrived with Labienus and sundry others incorporated
in their ranks, was, apart from Juba's squadron of cavalry equipped
in the Roman style, 1600 strong. The light troops consisted
of innumerable masses of Numidians riding without bridle or rein
and armed merely with javelins, of a number of mounted bowmen,
and a large host of archers on foot. To these fell to be added Juba's
120 elephants, and the fleet of 55 sail commanded by Publius Varus
and Marcus Octavius. The urgent want of money was in some measure
remedied by a self-taxation on the part of the senate, which was
the more productive as the richest African capitalists had been
induced to enter it. Corn and other supplies were accumulated
in immense quantities in the fortresses capable of defence;
at the same time the stores were as far as possible removed
from the open townships. The absence of Caesar, the troublesome temper
of his legions, the ferment in Spain and Italy gradually raised
men's spirits, and the recollection of the Pharsalian defeat
began to give way to fresh hopes of victory.
The time lost by Caesar in Egypt nowhere revenged itself
more severely than here. Had he proceeded to Africa immediately
after the death of Pompeius, he would have found there a weak,
disorganized, and frightened army and utter anarchy among the leaders;
whereas there was now in Africa, owing more especially to Cato's energy,
an army equal in number to that defeated at Pharsalus, under leaders
of note, and under a regulated superintendence.
Movements in Spain
A peculiar evil star seemed altogether to preside over this African
expedition of Caesar. He had, even before his embarkation for Egypt,
arranged in Spain and Italy various measures preliminary and preparatory
to the African war; but out of all there had sprung nothing but mischief.
From Spain, according to Caesar's arrangement, the governor
of the southern province Quintus Cassius Longinus was to cross
with four legions to Africa, to be joined there by Bogud
king of West Mauretania,(47) and to advance with him towards
Numidia and Africa. But that army destined for Africa
included in it a number of native Spaniards and two whole legions
formerly Pompeian; Pompeian sympathies prevailed in the army
as in the province, and the unskilful and tyrannical behaviour
of the Caesarian governor was not fitted to allay them. A formal revolt
took place; troops and towns took part for or against the governor;
already those who had risen against the lieutenant of Caesar
were on the point of openly displaying the banner of Pompeius;
already had Pompeius' elder son Gnaeus embarked from Africa for Spain
to take advantage of this favourable turn, when the disavowal
of the governor by the most respectable Caesarians themselves
and the interference of the commander of the northern province
suppressed just in right time the insurrection. Gnaeus Pompeius,
who had lost time on the way with a vain attempt to establish himself
in Mauretania, came too late; Gaius Trebonius, whom Caesar
after his return from the east sent to Spain to relieve Cassius
(autumn of 707), met everywhere with absolute obedience. But of course
amidst these blunders nothing was done from Spain to disturb
the organization of the republicans in Africa; indeed in consequence
of the complications with Longinus, Bogud king of West Mauretania,
who was on Caesar's side and might at least have put some obstacles
in the way of king Juba, had been called away with his troops to Spain.
Military Revolt in Campania
Still more critical were the occurrences among the troops
whom Caesar had caused to be collected in southern Italy, in order
to his embarkation with them for Africa. They were for the most part
the old legions, which had founded Caesar's throne in Gaul, Spain,
and Thessaly. The spirit of these troops had not been improved
by victories, and had been utterly disorganized by long repose
in Lower Italy. The almost superhuman demands which the general
made on them, and the effects of which were only too clearly apparent
in their fearfully thinned ranks, left behind even in these men of iron
a leaven of secret rancour which required only time and quiet
to set their minds in a ferment. The only man who had influence
over them, had been absent and almost unheard-of for a year;
while the officers placed over them were far more afraid of the soldiers
than the soldiers of them, and overlooked in the conquerors
of the world every outrage against those that gave them quarters,
and every breach of discipline. When the orders to embark for Sicily
arrived, and the soldier was to exchange the luxurious ease of Campania
for a third campaign certainly not inferior to those of Spain
and Thessaly in point of hardship, the reins, which had been
too long relaxed and were too suddenly tightened, snapt asunder.
The legions refused to obey till the promised presents
were paid to them, scornfully repulsed the officers sent by Caesar,
and even threw stones at them. An attempt to extinguish the incipient
revolt by increasing the sums promised not only had no success,
but the soldiers set out in masses to extort the fulfilment
of the promises from the general in the capital. Several officers,
who attempted to restrain the mutinous bands on the way, were slain.
It was a formidable danger. Caesar ordered the few soldiers
who were in the city to occupy the gates, with the view of warding off
the justly apprehended pillage at least at the first onset,
and suddenly appeared among the furious bands demanding to know
what they wanted. They exclaimed: "discharge." In a moment
the request was granted. Respecting the presents, Caesar added,
which he had promised to his soldiers at his triumph, as well as
respecting the lands which he had not promised to them
but had destined for them, they might apply to him on the day
when he and the other soldiers should triumph; in the triumph itself
they could not of course participate, as having been previously
discharged. The masses were not prepared for things taking this turn;
convinced that Caesar could not do without them for the African campaign,
they had demanded their discharge only in order that, if it were refused,
they might annex their own conditions to their service. Half unsettled
in their belief as to their own indispensableness; too awkward
to return to their object, and to bring the negotiation
which had missed its course back to the right channel; ashamed, as men,
by the fidelity with which the Imperator kept his word even to soldiers
who had forgotten their allegiance, and by his generosity
which even now granted far more than he had ever promised;
deeply affected, as soldiers, when the general presented to them
the prospect of their being necessarily mere civilian spectators
of the triumph of their comrades, and when he called them no longer
"comrades" but "burgesses,"--by this very form of address,
which from his mouth sounded so strangely, destroying as it were
with one blow the whole pride of their past soldierly career;
and, besides all this, under the spell of the man whose presence
had an irresistible power--the soldiers stood for a while mute
and lingering, till from all sides a cry arose that the general
would once more receive them into favour and again permit them
to be called Caesar's soldiers. Caesar, after having allowed himself
to be sufficiently entreated, granted the permission; but the ringleaders
in this mutiny had a third cut off from their triumphal presents.
History knows no greater psychological masterpiece, and none
that was more completely successful.
Caesar Proceeds to Africa
Conflict at Ruspina
This mutiny operated injuriously on the African campaign,
at least in so far as it considerably delayed the commencement of it.
When Caesar arrived at the port of Lilybaeum destined for the embarkation
the ten legions intended for Africa werefar from being
fully assembled there, and it was the experienced troops
that were farthest behind. Hardly however had six legions,
of which five were newly formed, arrived there and the necessary
war-vessels and transports come forward, when Caesar put to sea with them
(25 Dec. 707 of the uncorrected, about 8 Oct. of the Julian, calendar).
The enemy's fleet, which on account of the prevailing equinoctial gales
was drawn up on the beach at the island Aegimurus in front of the bay
of Carthage, did not oppose the passage; but, the same storms scattered
the fleet of Caesar in all directions, and, when he availed himself
of the opportunity of landing not far from Hadrumetum (Susa),
he could not disembark more than some 3000 men, mostly recruits,
and 150 horsemen. His attempt to capture Hadrumetum strongly occupied
by the enemy miscarried; but Caesar possessed himself of the two seaports
not far distant from each other, Ruspina (Monastir near Susa)
and Little Leptis. Here he entrenched himself; but his position
was so insecure, that he kept his cavalry in the ships and the ships
ready for sea and provided with a supply of water, in order to re-embark
at any moment if he should be attacked by a superior force.
This however was not necessary, for just at the right time the ships
that had been driven out of their course arrived (3 Jan. 708).
On the very following day Caesar, whose army in consequence
of the arrangements made by the Pompeians suffered from want of corn,
undertook with three legions an expedition into the interior
of the country, but was attacked on the march not far from Ruspina
by the corps which Labienus had brought up to dislodge Caesar
from the coast. As Labienus had exclusively cavalry and archers,
and Caesar almost nothing but infantry of the line, the legions
were quickly surrounded and exposed to the missiles of the enemy,
without being able to retaliate or to attack with success. No doubt
the deploying of the entire line relieved once more the flanks,
and spirited charges saved the honour of their arms; but a retreat
was unavoidable, and had Ruspina not been so near, the Moorish javelin
would perhaps have accomplished the same result here
as the Parthian bow at Carrhae.
Caesar's Position at Ruspina
Caesar, whom this day had fully convinced of the difficulty
of the impending war, would not again expose his soldiers untried
and discouraged by the new mode of fighting to any such attack,
but awaited the arrival of his veteran legions. The interval
was employed in providing some sort of compensation against
the crushing superiority of the enemy in the weapons of distant warfare.
The incorporation of the suitable men from the fleet as light horsemen
or archers in the land-army could not be of much avail. The diversions
which Caesar suggested were somewhat more effectual. He succeeded
in bringing into arms against Juba the Gaetulian pastoral tribes
wandering on the southern slope of the great Atlas towards the Sahara;
for the blows of the Marian and Sullan period had reached even to them,
and their indignation against Pompeius, who had at that time made them
subordinate to the Numidian kings,(48) rendered them from the outset
favourably inclined to the heir of the mighty Marius of whose Jugurthine
campaign they had still a lively recollection. The Mauretanian kings,
Bogud in Tingis and Bocchus in Iol, were Juba's natural rivals
and to a certain extent long since in alliance with Caesar.
Further, there still roamed in the border-region between the kingdoms
of Juba and Bocchus the last of the Catilinarians, that Publius Sittius
of Nuceria,(49) who eighteen years before had become converted
from a bankrupt Italian merchant into a Mauretanian leader
of free bands, and since that time had procured for himself
a name and a body of retainers amidst the Libyan quarrels.
Bocchus and Sittius united fell on the Numidian land, and occupied
the important town of Cirta; and their attack, as well as
that of the Gaetulians, compelled king Juba to send a portion
of his troops to his southern and western frontiers.
Caesar's situation, however, continued sufficiently unpleasant.
His army was crowded together within a space of six square miles;
though the fleet conveyed corn, the want of forage was as much felt
by Caesar's cavalry as by those of Pompeius before Dyrrhachium.
The light troops of the enemy remained notwithstanding all the exertions
of Caesar so immeasurably superior to his, that it seemed almost
impossible to carry offensive operations into the interior
even with veterans. If Scipio retired and abandoned the coast towns,
he might perhaps achieve a victory like those which the vizier of Orodes
had won over Crassus and Juba over Curio, and he could at least
endlessly protract the war. The simplest consideration suggested
this plan of campaign; even Cato, although far from a strategist,
counselled its adoption, and offered at the same time to cross
with a corps to Italy and to call the republicans there to arms--
which, amidst the utter confusion in that quarter, might very well
meet with success. But Cato could only advise, not command; Scipio
the commander-in-chief decided that the war should be carried on
in the region of the coast. This was a blunder, not merely inasmuch as
they thereby dropped a plan of war promising a sure result, but also
inasmuch as the region to which they transferred the war was in dangerous
agitation, and a good part of the army which they opposed to Caesar
was likewise in a troublesome temper. The fearfully strict levy,
the carrying off of the supplies, the devastating of the smaller
townships, the feeling in general that they were being sacrificed
for a cause which from the outset was foreign to them
and was already lost, had exasperated the native population against
the Roman republicans fighting out their last struggle of despair
on African soil; and the terrorist proceedings of the latter against
all communities that were but suspected of indifference,(50)
had raised this exasperation to the most fearful hatred.
The African towns declared, wherever they could venture to do so,
for Caesar; among the Gaetulians and the Libyans, who served in numbers
among the light troops and even in the legions, desertion was spreading.
But Scipio with all the obstinacy characteristic of folly persevered
in his plan, marched with all his force from Utica to appear
before the towns of Ruspina and Little Leptis occupied by Caesar,
furnished Hadrumetum to the north and Thapsus to the south
(on the promontory Ras Dimas) with strong garrisons, and in concert
with Juba, who likewise appeared before Ruspina with all his troops
not required by the defence of the frontier, offered battle repeatedly
to the enemy. But Caesar was resolved to wait for his veteran legions.
As these one after another arrived and appeared on the scene
of strife, Scipio and Juba lost the desire to risk a pitched battle,
and Caesar had no means of compelling them to fight owing
to their extraordinary superiority in light cavalry. Nearly two months
passed away in marches and skirmishes in the neighbourhood
of Ruspina and Thapsus, which chiefly had relation to the finding out
of the concealed store-pits (silos) common in the country,
and to the extension of posts. Caesar, compelled by the enemy's
horsemen to keep as much as possible to the heights or even to cover
his flanks by entrenched lines, yet accustomed his soldiers
gradually during this laborious and apparently endless warfare
to the foreign mode of fighting. Friend and foe hardly recognized
the rapid general in the cautious master of fence who trained his men
carefully and not unfrequently in person; and they became almost puzzled
by the masterly skill which displayed itself as conspicuously
in delay as in promptitude of action.
Battle at Thapsus
At last Caesar, after being joined by his last reinforcements,
made a lateral movement towards Thapsus. Scipio had, as we have said,
strongly garrisoned this town, and thereby committed the blunder
of presenting to his opponent an object of attack easy to be seized;
to this first error he soon added the second still less excusable
blunder of now for the rescue of Thapsus giving the battle,
which Caesar had wished and Scipio had hitherto rightly refused,
on ground which placed the decision in the hands of the infantry
of the line. Immediately along the shore, opposite to Caesar's camp,
the legions of Scipio and Juba appeared, the fore ranks ready
for fighting, the hinder ranks occupied in forming an entrenched camp;
at the same time the garrison of Thapsus prepared for a sally.
Caesar's camp-guard sufficed to repulse the latter. His legions,
accustomed to war, already forming a correct estimate of the enemy
from the want of precision in their mode of array and their
ill-closed ranks, compelled--while yet the entrenching was going forward
on that side, and before even the general gave the signal--
a trumpeter to sound for the attack, and advanced along the whole line
headed by Caesar himself, who, when he saw his men advance
without waiting for his orders, galloped forward to lead them
against the enemy. The right wing, in advance of the other divisions,
frightened the line of elephants opposed to it--this was
the last great battle in which these animals were employed--
by throwing bullets and arrows, so that they wheeled round
on their own ranks. The covering force was cut down, the left wing
of the enemy was broken, and the whole line was overthrown.
The defeat was the more destructive, as the new camp of the beaten army
was not yet ready, and the old one was at a considerable distance;
both were successively captured almost without resistance. The mass
of the defeated army threw away their arms and sued for quarter;
but Caesar's soldiers were no longer the same who had readily refrained
from battle before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless
at Pharsalus. The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind
by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner
on the battlefield of Thapsus. If the hydra with which they fought
always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy
to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if
the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought,
and not wholly without cause, the reason of this state of things
in the unseasonable clemency of Caesar. He had sworn to retrieve
the general's neglect, and remained deaf to the entreaties
of his disarmed fellow-citizens as well as to the commands of Caesar
and the superior officers. The fifty thousand corpses that covered
the battle-field of Thapsus, among whom were several Caesarian officers
known as secret opponents of the new monarchy, and therefore
cut down on this occasion by their own men, showed how the soldier
procures for himself repose. The victorious army on the other hand
numbered no more than fifty dead (6 April 708).
Cato in Utica
His Death
There was as little a continuance of the struggle in Africa
after the battle of Thapsus, as there had been a year and a half before
in the east after the defeat of Pharsalus. Cato as commandant
of Utica convoked the senate, set forth how the means of defence stood,
and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether
they would yield or defend themselves to the last man--
only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself,
but all in unison. The more courageous view found several supporters;
it was proposed to manumit on behalf of the state the slaves
capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment
on private property, and suggested in its stead a patriotic appeal
to the slave-owners. But soon this fit of resolution in an assembly
consisting in great part of African merchants passed off, and they agreed
to capitulate. Thereupon when Faustus Sulla, son of the regent,
and Lucius Afranius arrived in Utica with a strong division
of cavalry from the field of battle, Cato still made an attempt
to hold the town through them; but he indignantly rejected their demand
to let them first of all put to death the untrustworthy citizens of Utica
en masse, and chose to let the last stronghold of the republicans fall
into the hands of the monarch without resistance rather than to profane
the last moments of the republic by such a massacre. After he had--
partly by his authority, partly by liberal largesses--checked so far
as he could the fury of the soldiery against the unfortunate Uticans;
after he had with touching solicitude furnished to those who preferred
not to trust themselves to Caesar's mercy the means for flight,
and to those who wished to remain the opportunity of capitulating
under the most tolerable conditions, so far as his ability reached;
and after having thoroughly satisfied himself that he could render
to no one any farther aid, he held himself released from his command,
retired to his bedchamber, and plunged his sword into his breast.
The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death
Of the other fugitive leaders only a few escaped. The cavalry
that fled from Thapsus encountered the bands of Sittius,
and were cut down or captured by them; their leaders Afranius and Faustus
were delivered up to Caesar, and, when the latter did not order
their immediate execution, they were slain in a tumult by his veterans.
The commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio with the fleet of the defeated
party fell into the power of the cruisers of Sittius and,
when they were about to lay hands on him, stabbed himself. King Juba,
not unprepared for such an issue, had in that case resolved to die
in a way which seemed to him befitting a king, and had caused
an enormous funeral pile to be prepared in the market-place
of his city Zama, which was intended to consume along with his body
all his treasures and the dead bodies of the whole citizens of Zama.
But the inhabitants of the town showed no desire to let themselves
be employed by way of decoration for the funeral rites
of the African Sardanapalus; and they closed the gates against
the king when fleeing from the battle-field he appeared, accompanied
by Marcus Petreius, before their city. The king--one of those natures
that become savage amidst a life of dazzling and insolent enjoyment,
and prepare for themselves even out of death an intoxicating feast--
resorted with his companion to one of his country houses,
caused a copious banquet to be served up, and at the close
of the feast challenged Petreius to fight him to death in single combat.
It was the conqueror of Catilina that received his death at the hand
of the king; the latter thereupon caused himself to be stabbed
by one of his slaves. The few men of eminence that escaped,
such as Labienus and Sextus Pompeius, followed the elder brother
of the latter to Spain and sought, like Sertorius formerly,
a last refuge of robbers and pirates in the waters and the mountains
of that still half-independent land.
Regulation of Africa
Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa.
As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa was broken up.
The most eastern portion or region of Sitifis was united with the kingdom
of Bocchus king of East Mauretania,(51) and the faithful king Bogud
of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts. Cirta (Constantine)
and the surrounding district, hitherto possessed under the supremacy
of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred
on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle
his half-Roman bands there;(52) but at the same time this district,
as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion
of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as "New Africa"
with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country
along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert,
which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed
by the new ruler on the empire itself.
The Victory of Monarchy
The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken
against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted
for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch.
No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time
on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus; it might already
be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league
had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous
aristocratic constitution. Yet it was only those baptisms of blood
of the ninth August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside
the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion,
and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy.
Risings of pretenders and republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke
new commotions, perhaps even new revolutions and restorations;
but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted
for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established
throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy
of accomplished fact.
The End of the Republic
The constitutional struggle was at an end; and that it was so,
was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica.
For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle
of the legitimate republic against its oppressors; he had continued it,
long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory.
But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic
which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived;
what were the republicans now to do on the earth? The treasure
was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved; who could
blame them if they departed? There was more nobility, and above all
more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life.
Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness,
that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases
which have stamped him, for his own and for all time,
as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all
who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably
and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system
doomed to destruction. Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself
inwardly annihilated before the simple truth, and because
all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend
not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part
in history than many men far superior to him in intellect.
It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death
that he was himself a fool; in truth it is just because Don Quixote
is a fool that he is a tragic figure. It is an affecting fact,
that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men
had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue.
He too died not in vain. It was a fearfully striking protest
of the republic against the monarchy, that the last republican went
as the first monarch came--a protest which tore asunder like gossamer
all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar
invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood
the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis
of which despotism grew up. The unrelenting warfare which the ghost
of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius
and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later,
against the Caesarian monarchy--a warfare of plots and of literature--
was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies.
This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude--
stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid,
hopeless, and faithful to death; and accordingly it began
even immediately after his death to revere as a saint the man
who in his lifetime was not unfrequently its laughing-stock
and its scandal. But the greatest of these marks of respect
was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made
an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont
to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as republicans,
in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave
with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel
towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas
which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.
CHAPTER XI
The Old Republic and the New Monarchy
Character of Caesar
The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole domain
of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his
fifty-sixth year (born 12 July 652?) when the battle at Thapsus,
the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed
the decision as to the future of the world in his hands. Few men
have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar--
the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced
by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path
that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one
of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage
to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact
to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years
of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch
were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as
the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed,
had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours,
had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself
initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles
pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as
into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.
But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both
his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired.
In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,
and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity
of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time
were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like
slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another--
was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least
among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body.
His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision
and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders
without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless,
and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously
with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius,
and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived,
he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia
(his father having died early); to his wives and above all
to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection,
which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs.
With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high
and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity,
with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned
any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner
of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely
from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering,
several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave,
even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.
If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it
may be singled out as characteristic, it is this--that he stood aloof
from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course,
Caesar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius;
but his passion was never stronger than he could control.
He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken
lively possession of his spirit; but with him they did not penetrate
to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long
and earnestly; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking
of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused
on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses,
as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other hand
he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science.
While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care,
the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over,
avoided it entirely. Around him, as around all those
whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in youth,
fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger;
even in later years he had love-adventures and successes with women,
and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance,
or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness
of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness,
which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public
in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered
some of his victories, if he could thereby have brought back
his youthful locks. But, however much even when monarch
he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself
with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him;
even his much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only contrived
to mask a weak point in his political position.(1) Caesar was thoroughly
a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook
and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety
which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius.
To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present,
undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this
he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour,
and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest
and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed the many-sided power
with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend
and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease
with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns;
to this he owed the "marvellous serenity" which remained
steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed
the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite
or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover,
from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself
illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man;
in his case the friendly veil was lifted up, which conceals from man
the inadequacy of his working. Prudently as he laid his plans
and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent
from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident,
must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance
that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular
again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference.
As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves
to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point
at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.
Caesar as a Statesman
Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.
From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the deepest
sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed
to propose to himself--the political, military, intellectual,
and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation,
and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin
to his own. The hard school of thirty years' experience changed
his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim
itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation
and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue
and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness,
and in those when, as joint possessor of the supreme power
and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day
before the eyes of the world. All the measures of a permanent kind
that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their
appropriate places in the great building-plan. We cannot
therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of Caesar;
he did nothing isolated. With justice men commend Caesar the orator
for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts
of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed.
With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity
of the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language.
With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised
Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding routine
and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare
by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which
was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty
of divination found the proper means for every end; who after defeat
stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign
invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare,
the treatment of which serves to distinguish military genius
from the mere ordinary ability of an officer--the rapid movement
of masses--with unsurpassed perfection, and found the guarantee
of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity
of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid
and daring action even with inadequate means. But all these were
with Caesar mere secondary matters; he was no doubt a great orator,
author, and general, but he became each of these merely because
he was a consummate statesman. The soldier more especially
played in him altogether an accessory part, and it is
one of the principal peculiarities by which he is distinguished
from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that he began his political
activity not as an officer, but as a demagogue. According
to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object, like Pericles
and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms, and throughout eighteen years
he had as leader of the popular party moved exclusively amid
political plans and intrigues--until, reluctantly convinced
of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years
of age, put himself at the head of an army. It was natural
that he should even afterwards remain still more statesman
than general--just like Cromwell, who also transformed himself
from a leader of opposition into a military chief and democratic king,
and who in general, little as the prince of Puritans seems to resemble
the dissolute Roman, is yet in his development as well as
in the objects which he aimed at and the results which he achieved
of all statesmen perhaps the most akin to Caesar. Even in his mode
of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized;
the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England
do not more clearly exhibit the artillery-lieutenant who had risen
by service to command than the similar enterprises of Caesar exhibit
the demagogue metamorphosed into a general. A regularly trained
officer would hardly have been prepared, through political
considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside
the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Caesar did
on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing
in Epirus. Several of his acts are therefore censurable
from a military point of view; but what the general loses,
the statesman gains. The task of the statesman is universal
in its nature like Caesar's genius; if he undertook things
the most varied and most remote one from another, they had all
without exception a bearing on the one great object to which
with infinite fidelity and consistency he devoted himself;
and of the manifold aspects and directions of his great activity
he never preferred one to another. Although a master of the art of war,
he yet from statesmanly considerations did his utmost to avert
civil strife and, when it nevertheless began, to earn laurels
stained as little as possible by blood. Although the founder
of a military monarchy, he yet, with an energy unexampled in history,
allowed no hierarchy of marshals or government of praetorians
to come into existence. If he had a preference for any one form
of services rendered to the state, it was for the sciences and arts
of peace rather than for those of war.
The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a statesman
was its perfect harmony. In reality all the conditions
for this most difficult of all human functions were united in Caesar.
A thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past
or venerable tradition to disturb him; for him nothing was of value
in politics but the living present and the law of reason, just as
in his character of grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian
research and recognized nothing but on the one hand the living
-usus loquendi- and on the other hand the rule of symmetry.
A born ruler, he governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds,
and compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves
at his service--the plain citizen and the rough subaltern, the genteel
matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania,
the brilliant cavalry-officer and the calculating banker.
His talent for organization was marvellous; no statesman has ever
compelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army
out of unyielding and refractory elements with such decision,
and kept them together with such firmness, as Caesar displayed
in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions;
never did regent judge his instruments and assign each to the place
appropriate for him with so acute an eye.
He was monarch; but he never played the king. Even when absolute
lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the party-leader;
perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation,
complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he wished to be
nothing but the first among his peers. Caesar entirely avoided
the blunder into which so many men otherwise on an equality with him
have fallen, of carrying into politics the military tone of command;
however much occasion his disagreeable relations with the senate
gave for it, he never resorted to outrages such as was that
of the eighteenth Brumaire. Caesar was monarch; but he was never
seized with the giddiness of the tyrant. He is perhaps the only one
among the mighty ones of the earth, who in great matters and little
never acted according to inclination or caprice, but always
without exception according to his duty as ruler, and who,
when he looked back on his life, found doubtless erroneous calculations
to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret. There is nothing
in the history of Caesar's life, which even on a small scale(2)
can be compared with those poetico-sensual ebullitions--such as
the murder of Kleitos or the burning of Persepolis--which the history
of his great predecessor in the east records. He is, in fine,
perhaps the only one of those mighty ones, who has preserved
to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between
the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task
which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all--
the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success,
its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left
the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better,
never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils
that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken,
he always obeyed. Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow,
turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant
at destiny for bestowing even on its favourites merely limited successes;
Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine;
and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates
not unbounded plans of world-conquest, but merely well-considered
frontier-regulations.
Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is so infinitely
difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent clearness;
and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid information
about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world.
Of such a personage our conceptions may well vary in point
of shallowness or depth, but they cannot be, strictly speaking,
different; to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure
has exhibited the same essential features, and yet no one
has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret lies
in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in his place
in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts
of existence meet and balance each other. Of mighty creative power
and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment;
no longer a youth and not yet an old man; of the highest energy of will
and the highest capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals
and at the same time born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence
of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself
as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic
types of culture--Caesar was the entire and perfect man.
Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage
what are called characteristic features, which are in reality
nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human development.
What in Caesar passes for such at the first superficial glance is,
when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity
not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation;
his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him
with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position,
his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament
of Romans in general. It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity
that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions
of time and place; for there is no abstract humanity--
the living man cannot but occupy a place in a given nationality
and in a definite line of culture. Caesar was a perfect man
just because he more than any other placed himself amidst
the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed
the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation--practical aptitude
as a citizen--in perfection: for his Hellenism in fact was only
the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian
nationality. But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty,
we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life.
As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty,
so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters
the perfect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits
doubtless of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion
of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby
in her most finished manifestations normality and individuality
are combined, is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us
but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain
some faint conception of it from the reflected lustre which rests
imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature.
These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero
himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek predecessor
not merely as an equal, but as a superior; but the world had meanwhile
become old and its youthful lustre had faded. The action of Caesar
was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward
towards a goal indefinitely remote; he built on, and out of, ruins,
and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely
as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned
to him. With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact
of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman,
and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all
the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend.
But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during
thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines
which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world
belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs
by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily,
fraught with shame.
Setting Aside of the Old Parties
If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was to be
successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to be renovated,
it was necessary first of all that the country should be
practically tranquillized and that the ground should be cleared
from the rubbish with which since the recent catastrophe it was
everywhere strewed. In this work Caesar set out from the principle
of the reconciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or,
to put it more correctly--for, where the antagonistic principles
are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation--
from the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and the populace
had hitherto contended with each other, was to be abandoned
by both parties, and that both were to meet together on the ground
of the new monarchical constitution. First of all therefore
all the older quarrels of the republican past were regarded as done away
for ever and irrevocably. While Caesar gave orders that the statues
of Sulla which had been thrown down by the mob of the capital
on the news of the battle of Pharsalus should be re-erected, and thus
recognized the fact that it became history alone to sit in judgment
on that great man, he at the same time cancelled the last remaining
effects of Sulla's exceptional laws, recalled from exile those
who had been banished in the times of the Cinnan and Sertorian troubles,
and restored to the children of those outlawed by Sulla
their forfeited privilege of eligibility to office. In like manner
all those were restored, who in the preliminary stage of the recent
catastrophe had lost their seat in the senate or their civil existence
through sentence of the censors or political process, especially
through the impeachments raised on the basis of the exceptional laws
of 702. Those alone who had put to death the proscribed
for money remained, as was reasonable, still under attainder;
and Milo, the most daring condottiere of the senatorial party,
was excluded from the general pardon.
Discontent of the Democrats
Far more difficult than the settlement of these questions
which already belonged substantially to the past was the treatment
of the parties confronting each other at the moment--on the one hand
Caesar's own democratic adherents, on the other hand the overthrown
aristocracy. That the former should be, if possible, still less
satisfied than the latter with Caesar's conduct after the victory
and with his summons to abandon the old standing-ground of party,
was to be expected. Caesar himself desired doubtless on the whole
the same issue which Gaius Gracchus had contemplated; but the designs
of the Caesarians were no longer those of the Gracchans.
The Roman popular party had been driven onward in gradual progression
from reform to revolution, from revolution to anarchy, from anarchy
to a war against property; they celebrated among themselve
the memory of the reign of terror and now adorned the tomb
of Catilina, as formerly that of the Gracchi, with flowers
and garlands; they had placed themselves under Caesar's banner,
because they expected him to do for them what Catilina
had not been able to accomplish. But as it speedily became plain
that Caesar was very far from intending to be the testamentary
executor of Catilina, and that the utmost which debtors might expect
from him was some alleviations of payment and modifications
of procedure, indignation found loud vent in the inquiry.
For whom then had the popular party conquered, if not for the people?
And the rabble of this description, high and low, out of pure chagrin
at the miscarriage of their politico-economic Saturnalia began first
to coquet with the Pompeians, and then even during Caesar's absence
of nearly two years from Italy (Jan. 706-autumn 707) to instigate there
a second civil war within the first.
Caelius and Milo
The praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus, a good aristocrat and bad payer
of debts, of some talent and much culture, as a vehement
and fluent orator hitherto in the senate and in the Forum
one of the most zealous champions for Caesar, proposed to the people--
without being instructed from any higher quarter to do so--
a law which granted to debtors a respite of six years free of interest,
and then, when he was opposed in this step, proposed a second law
which even cancelled all claims arising out of loans and current
house rents; whereupon the Caesarian senate deposed him from his office.
It was just on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, and the balance
in the great contest seemed to incline to the side of the Pompeians;
Rufus entered into communication with the old senatorian
band-leader Milo, and the two contrived a counter-revolution,
which inscribed on its banner partly the republican constitution,
partly the cancelling of creditors' claims and the manumission of slaves.
Milo left his place of exile Massilia, and called the Pompeians
and the slave-herdsmen to arms in the region of Thurii; Rufus made
arrangements to seize the town of Capua by armed slaves.
But the latter plan was detected before its execution and frustrated
by the Capuan militia; Quintus Pedius, who advanced with a legion
into the territory of Thurii, scattered the band making havoc there;
and the fall of the two leaders put an end to the scandal (706).
Dolabella
Nevertheless there was found in the following year (707) a second fool,
the tribune of the people, Publius Dolabella, who, equally insolvent
but far from being equally gifted with his predecessor,
introduced afresh his law as to creditors' claims and house rents,
and with his colleague Lucius Trebellius began on that point once more--
it was the last time--the demagogic war; there were serious frays
between the armed bands on both sides and various street-riots,
till the commandant of Italy Marcus Antonius ordered the military
to interfere, and soon afterwards Caesar's return from the east
completely put an end to the preposterous proceedings.
Caesar attributed to these brainless attempts to revive the projects
of Catilina so little importance, that he tolerated Dolabella in Italy
and indeed after some time even received him again into favour.
Against a rabble of this sort, which had nothing to do with
any political question at all, but solely with a war against property--
as against gangs of banditti--the mere existence of a strong government
is sufficient; and Caesar was too great and too considerate
to busy himself with the apprehensions which the Italian alarmists
felt regarding these communists of that day, and thereby unduly
to procure a false popularity for his monarchy.
Measures against Pompeians and Republicans
While Caesar thus might leave, and actually left, the late democratic
party to the process of decomposition which had already in its case
advanced almost to the utmost limit, he had on the other hand,
with reference to the former aristocratic party possessing
a far greater vitality, not to bring about its dissolution--
which time alone could accomplish--but to pave the way for
and initiate it by a proper combination of repression and conciliation.
Among minor measures, Caesar, even from a natural sense of propriety,
avoided exasperating the fallen party by empty sarcasm;
he did not triumph over his conquered fellow-burgesses;(3)
he mentioned Pompeius often and always with respect, and caused
his statue overthrown by the people to be re-erected at the senate-
house, when the latter was restored, in its earlier distinguished place.
To political prosecutions after the victory Caesar assigned
the narrowest possible limits. No investigation was instituted
into the various communications which the constitutional party
had held even with nominal Caesarians; Caesar threw the piles of papers
found in the enemy's headquarters at Pharsalus and Thapsus
into the fire unread, and spared himself and the country from political
processes against individuals suspected of high treason. Further,
all the common soldiers who had followed their Roman or provincial
officers into the contest against Caesar came off with impunity.
The sole exception made was in the case of those Roman burgesses,
who had taken service in the army of the Numidian king Juba;
their property was confiscated by way of penalty for their treason.
Even to the officers of the conquered party Caesar had granted
unlimited pardon up to the close of the Spanish campaign of 705;
but he became convinced that in this he had gone too far,
and that the removal at least of the leaders among them was inevitable.
The rule by which he was thenceforth guided was, that every one
who after the capitulation of Ilerda had served as an officer
in the enemy's army or had sat in the opposition-senate, if he survived
the close of the struggle, forfeited his property and his political
rights, and was banished from Italy for life; if he did not survive
the close of the struggle, his property at least fell to the state;
but any one of these, who had formerly accepted pardon from Caesar
and was once more found in the ranks of the enemy, thereby
forfeited his life. These rules were however materially modified
in the execution. The sentence of death was actually executed
only against a very few of the numerous backsliders. In the confiscation
of the property of the fallen not only were the debts attaching
to the several portions of the estate as well as the claims
of the widows for their dowries paid off, as was reasonable.
But a portion of the paternal estate was left also to the children
of the deceased. Lastly not a few of those, who in consequence
of those rules were liable to banishment and confiscation of property,
were at once pardoned entirely or got off with fines, like the African
capitalists who were impressed as members of the senate of Utica.
And even the others almost without exception got their freedom
and property restored to them, if they could only prevail
on themselves to petition Caesar to that effect; on several
who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus,
pardon was even conferred unasked, and ultimately in 710
a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unrecalled.
Amnesty
The republican opposition submitted to be pardoned;
but it was not reconciled. Discontent with the new order of things
and exasperation against the unwonted ruler were general.
For open political resistance there was indeed no farther opportunity--
it was hardly worth taking into account, that some oppositional
tribunes on occasion of the question of title acquired for themselves
the republican crown of martyrdom by a demonstrative intervention
against those who had called Caesar king--but republicanism
found expression all the more decidedly as an opposition of sentiment,
and in secret agitation and plotting. Not a hand stirred
when the Imperator appeared in public. There was abundance
of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling
popular satire against the new monarchy. When a comedian
ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest
applause. The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme
of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public
all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free.
Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field;
he himself and his abler confidants replied to the Cato-literature
with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes
fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes
round the dead body of Patroclus; but as a matter of course
in this conflict--where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings
was judge--the Caesarians had the worst of it. No course remained
but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known
and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius
Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty
in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles,
while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected
to a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more
annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded
was utterly arbitrary.(4) The underground machinations
of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly
set forth in another connection. Here it is sufficient to say
that risings of pretenders as well as of republicans were incessantly
brewing throughout the Roman empire; that the flames of civil war kindled
now by the Pompeians, now by the republicans, again burst forth brightly
at various places; and that in the capital there was perpetual
conspiracy against the life of the monarch. But Caesar
could not be induced by these plots even to surround himself
permanently with a body-guard, and usually contented himself
with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.
Bearing of Caesar towards the Parties
However much Caesar was wont to treat all things relating
to his personal safety with daring indifference, he could not possibly
conceal from himself the very serious danger with which this mass
of malcontents threatened not merely himself but also his creations.
If nevertheless, disregarding all the warning and urgency
of his friends, he without deluding himself as to the implacability
of the very opponents to whom he showed mercy, persevered
with marvellous composure and energy in the course of pardoning
by far the greater number of them, he did so neither
from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud, nor from the sentimental
clemency of an effeminate, nature, but from the correct statesmanly
consideration that vanquished parties are disposed of
more rapidly and with less public injury by their absorption
within the state than by any attempt to extirpate them by proscription
or to eject them from the commonwealth by banishment. Caesar could not
for his high objects dispense with the constitutional party itself,
which in fact embraced not the aristocracy merely but all the elements
of a free and national spirit among the Italian burgesses;
for his schemes, which contemplated the renovation of the antiquated
state, he needed the whole mass of talent, culture, hereditary,
and self-acquired distinction, which this party embraced;
and in this sense he may well have named the pardoning of his opponents
the finest reward of victory. Accordingly the most prominent chiefs
of the defeated parties were indeed removed, but full pardon
was not withheld from the men of the second and third rank
and especially of the younger generation; they were not, however,
allowed to sulk in passive opposition, but were by more or less
gentle pressure induced to take an active part in the new administration,
and to accept honours and offices from it. As with Henry the Fourth
and William of Orange, so with Caesar his greatest difficulties began
only after the victory. Every revolutionary conqueror learns
by experience that, if after vanquishing his opponents he would
not remain like Cinna and Sulla a mere party-chief, but would
like Caesar, Henry the Fourth, and William of Orange substitute
the welfare of the commonwealth for the necessarily one-sided programme
of his own party, for the moment all parties, his own as well as
the vanquished, unite against the new chief; and the more so,
the more great and pure his idea of his new vocation. The friends
of the constitution and the Pompeians, though doing homage
with the lips to Caesar, bore yet in heart a grudge either
at monarchy or at least at the dynasty; the degenerate democracy
was in open rebellion against Caesar from the moment of its perceiving
that Caesar's objects were by no means its own; even the personal
adherents of Caesar murmured, when they found that their chief was
establishing instead of a state of condottieri a monarchy equal
and just towards all, and that the portions of gain accruing to them
were to be diminished by the accession of the vanquished.
This settlement of the commonwealth was acceptable to no party,
and had to be imposed on his associates no less than on his opponents.
Caesar's own position was now in a certain sense more imperilled
than before the victory; but what he lost, the state gained.
By annihilating the parties and not simply sparing the partisans
but allowing every man of talent or even merely of good descent
to attain to office irrespective of his political past, he gained
for his great building all the working power extant in the state;
and not only so, but the voluntary or compulsory participation of men
of all parties in the same work led the nation also over imperceptibly
to the newly prepared ground. The fact that this reconciliation
of the parties was for the moment only externaland that they were
for the present much less agreed in adherence to the new state of things
than in hatred against Caesar, did not mislead him; he knew well
that antagonisms lose their keenness when brought into such outward union,
and that only in this way can the statesman anticipate the work of time,
which alone is able finally to heal such a strife by laying
the old generation in the grave. Still less did he inquire who hated him
or meditated his assassination. Like every genuine statesman he served
not the people for reward--not even for the reward of their love--
but sacrificed the favour of his contemporaries for the blessing
of posterity, and above all for the permission to save
and renew his nation.
Caesar's Work
In attempting to give a detailed account of the mode in which
the transition was effected from the old to the new state of things,
we must first of all recollect that Caesar came not to begin,
but to complete. The plan of a new polity suited to the times,
long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained
by his adherents and successors with more or less of spirit and success,
but without wavering. Caesar, from the outset and as it were
by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years
borne aloft its banner without ever changing or even so much
as concealing his colours; he remained democrat even when monarch.
as he accepted without limitation, apart of course from the preposterous
projects of Catilina and Clodius, the heritage of his party;
as he displayed the bitterest, even personal, hatred to the aristocracy
and the genuine aristocrats; and as he retained unchanged
the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens
of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual equalization
of the differences of rights among the classes belonging
to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate:
his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy,
that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion
and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy
was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as
Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded--
the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts
supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas, which lay
at the foundation of Caesar's work, were so far not strictly new;
but to him belongs their realization, which after all is everywhere
the main matter; and to him pertains the grandeur of execution,
which would probably have surprised the brilliant projector himself
if he could have seen it, and which has impressed, and will
always impress, every one to whom it has been presented in the living
reality or in the mirror of history--to whatever historical epoch
or whatever shade of politics he may belong--according
to the measure of his ability to comprehend human and historical
greatness, with deep and ever-deepening emotion and admiration.
At this point however it is proper expressly once for all to claim
what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest
against the custom--common to simplicity and perfidy--of using
historical praise and historical censure, dissociated
from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application,
and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar
into a judgment as to what is called Caesarism. It is true
that the history of past centuries ought to be the instructress
of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as if one could simply
by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present
in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms
for a political diagnosis and the specifics for a prescription;
it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms
of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally--
the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their
combination everywhere different--and leads and encourages men,
not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction.
In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism,
with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker,
with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth
a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written
by the hand of man. According to the same law of nature in virtue
of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic
machine, every constitution however defective which gives play
to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely
surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former
is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is
and therefore dead. This law of nature has verified itself
in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself
all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius
and in the absence of all material complications from without,
that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely
than any similar state. From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show
and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external
coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally
it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early
stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar's own soul(5)
the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development
and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly-
gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form
how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.
Caesar's work was necessary and salutary, not because it was
or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because--
with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery
and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation,
and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course
of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism--
absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary
and the least of evils. When once the slave-holding aristocracy
in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as
their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too
be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history;(6)
where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once
a caricature and a usurpation. But history will not submit
to curtail the true Caesar of his due honour, because her verdict
may in the presence of bad Caesars lead simplicity astray
and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud. She too
is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool
from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will
be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.
Dictatorship
The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally,
at least in the first instance, as a dictatorship. Caesar took
it up at first after his return from Spain in 705, but laid it down
again after a few days, and waged the decisive campaign of 706
simply as consul--this was the office his tenure of which was
the primary occasion for the outbreak of the civil war.(7)
but in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus
he reverted to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him,
at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709
as an annual office, and then in January or February 710(8)
for the duration of his life, so that he in the end expressly dropped
the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave
formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of -dictator
perpetuus-. This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral
and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution,
but--what was coincident with this merely in the name--the supreme
exceptional office as arranged by Sulla;(9) an office,
the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances
regarding the supreme single magistracy, but by special decree
of the people, to such an effect that the holder received,
in the commission to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth,
an official prerogative de jure unlimited which superseded
the republican partition of powers. Those were merely applications
of this general prerogative to the particular case, when the holder
of power was further entrusted by separate acts with the right
of deciding on war and peace without consulting the senate
and the people, with the independent disposal of armies and finances,
and with the nomination of the provincial governors. Caesar could
accordingly de jure assign to himself even such prerogatives
as lay outside of the proper functions of the magistracy and even
outside of the province of state-powers at all;(10) and it appears
almost as a concession on his part, that he abstained from nominating
the magistrates instead of the Comitia and limited himself to claiming
a binding right of proposal for a proportion of the praetors
and of the lower magistrates; and that he moreover had himself
empowered by special decree of the people for the creation of patricians,
which was not at all allowable according to use and wont.
Other Magistracies and Attributions
For other magistracies in the proper sense there remained alongside
of this dictatorship no room; Caesar did not take up the censorship
as such,(11) but he doubtless exercised censorial rights--
particularly the important right of nominating senators--after
a comprehensive fashion.
He held the consulship frequently alongside of the dictatorship,
once even without colleague; but he by no means attached it permanently
to his person, and he gave no effect to the calls addressed to him
to undertake it for five or even for ten years in succession.
Caesar had no need to have the superintendence of worship
now committed to him, since he was already -pontifex maximus-.(12)
as a matter of course the membership of the college of augurs
was conferred on him, and generally an abundance of old and new
honorary rights, such as the title of a "father of the fatherland,"
the designation of the month of his birth by the name which it
still bears of Julius, and other manifestations of the incipient
courtly tone which ultimately ran into utter deification.
Two only of the arrangements deserve to be singled out:
namely that Caesar was placed on the same footing with the tribunes
of the people as regards their special personal inviolability,
and that the appellation of Imperator was permanently attached
to his person and borne by him as a title alongside of
his other official designations.
Men of judgment will not require any proof, either that Caesar
intended to engraft on the commonwealth his supreme power,
and this not merely for a few years or even as a personal office
for an indefinite period somewhat like Sulla's regency,
but as an essential and permanent organ; or that he selected
for the new institution an appropriate and simple designation;
for, if it is a political blunder to create names without substantial
meaning, it is scarcely a less error to set up the substance
of plenary power without a name. Only it is not easy to determine
what definitive formal shape Caesar had in view; partly because
in this period of transition the ephemeral and the permanent buildings
are not clearly discriminated from each other, partly because
the devotion of his clients which already anticipated the nod
of their master loaded him with a multitude--offensive doubtless
to himself--of decrees of confidence and laws conferring honours.
Least of all could the new monarchy attach itself to the consulship,
just on account of the collegiate character that could not well
be separated from this office; Caesar also evidently laboured
to degrade this hitherto supreme magistracy into an empty title,
and subsequently, when he undertook it, he did not hold it
through the whole year, but before the year expired gave it away
to personages of secondary rank. The dictatorship came practically
into prominence most frequently and most definitely, but probably
only because Caesar wished to use it in the significance which it had
of old in the constitutional machinery--as an extraordinary presidency
for surmounting extraordinary crises. On the other hand it was
far from recommending itself as an expression for the new monarchy,
for the magistracy was inherently clothed with an exceptional
and unpopular character, and it could hardly be expected
of the representative of the democracy that he should choose
for its permanent organization that form, which the most gifted champion
of the opposing party had created for his own ends.
The new name of Imperator, on the other hand, appears in every respect
by far more appropriate for the formal expression of the monarchy;
just because it is in this application(13) new, and no definite
outward occasion for its introduction is apparent. The new wine
might not be put into old bottles; here is a new name for the new thing,
and that name most pregnantly sums up what the democratic party
had already expressed in the Gabinian law, only with less precision,
as the function of its chief--the concentration and perpetuation
of official power (-imperium-) in the hands of a popular chief
independent of the senate. We find on Caesar's coins,
especially those of the last period, alongside of the dictatorship
the title of Imperator prevailing, and in Caesar's law
as to political crimes the monarch seems to have been designated
by this name. Accordingly the following times, though not immediately,
connected the monarchy with the name of Imperator. To lend
to this new office at once a democratic and religious sanction,
Caesar probably intended to associate with it once for all
on the one hand the tribunician power, on the other
the supreme pontificate.
That the new organization was not meant to be restricted merely
to the lifetime of its founder, is beyond doubt; but he did not succeed
in settling the especially difficult question of the succession,
and it must remain an undecided point whether he had it in view
to institute some sort of form for the election of a successor,
such as had subsisted in the case of the original kingly office,
or whether he wished to introduce for the supreme office
not merely the tenure for life but also the hereditary character,
as his adopted son subsequently maintained.(14) It is not improbable
that he had the intention of combining in some measure the two systems,
and of arranging the succession, similarly to the course
followed by Cromwell and by Napoleon, in such a way that the ruler
should be succeeded in rule by his son, but, if he had no son,
or the son should not seem fitted for the succession, the ruler should
of his free choice nominate his successor in the form of adoption.
In point of state law the new office of Imperator was based
on the position which the consuls or proconsuls occupied
outside of the -pomerium-, so that primarily the military command,
but, along with this, the supreme judicial and consequently
also the administrative power, were included in it.(15)
But the authority of the Imperator was qualitatively superior
to the consular-proconsular, in so far as the former was not limited
as respected time or space, but was held for life and operative also
in the capital;(16) as the Imperator could not, while the consul could,
be checked by colleagues of equal power; and as all the restrictions
placed in course of time on the original supreme official power--
especially the obligation to give place to the -provocatio-
and to respect the advice of the senate--did not apply
to the Imperator.
Re-establishment of the Regal Office
In a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else
than the primitive regal office re-established; for it was
those very restrictions--as respected the temporal and local
limitation of power, the collegiate arrangement, and the cooperation
of the senate or the community that was necessary for certain cases--
which distinguished the consul from the king.(17) There is hardly
a trait of the new monarchy which was not found in the old:
the union of the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority
in the hands of the prince; a religious presidency over the commonwealth;
the right of issuing ordinances with binding power; the reduction
of the senate to a council of state; the revival of the patriciate
and of the praefecture of the city. But still more striking
than these analogies is the internal similarity of the monarchy
of Servius Tullius and the monarchy of Caesar; if those
old kings of Rome with all their plenitude of power had yet
been rulers of a free community and themselves the protectors
of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come
to destroy liberty but to fulfil it, and primarily to break
the intolerable yoke of the aristocracy. Nor need it surprise us
that Caesar, anything but a political antiquary, went back
five hundred years to find the model for his new state; for,
seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained
at all times a kingship restricted by a number of special laws,
the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete.
At very various periods and from very different sides--
in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's
own dictatorship--there had been during the republic a practical
recurrence to it; indeed by a certain logical necessity,
whenever an exceptional power seemed requisite there emerged,
in contradistinction to the usual limited -imperium-,
the unlimited -imperium- which was simply nothing else
than the regal power.
Lastly, outward considerations also recommended this recurrence
to the former kingly position. Mankind have infinite difficulty
in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms
as sacred heirlooms. Accordingly Caesar very judiciously
connected himself with Servius Tullius, in the same way
as subsequently Charlemagne connected himself with Caesar,
and Napoleon attempted at least to connect himself with Charlemagne.
He did so, not in a circuitous way and secretly, but, as well as
his successors, in the most open manner possible; it was indeed
the very object of this connection to find a clear, national,
and popular form of expression for the new state. From ancient times
there stood on the Capitol the statues of those seven kings,
whom the conventional history of Rome was wont to bring on the stage;
Caesar ordered his own to be erected beside them as the eighth.
He appeared publicly in the costume of the old kings of Alba.
In his new law as to political crimes the principal variation
from that of Sulla was, that there was placed alongside
of the collective community, and on a level with it, the Imperator
as the living and personal expression of the people. In the formula
used for political oaths there was added to the Jovis and the Penates
of the Roman people the Genius of the Imperator. The outward badge
of monarchy was, according to the view univerally diffused in antiquity,
the image of the monarch on the coins; from the year 710
the head of Caesar appears on those of the Roman state.
There could accordingly be no complaint at least on the score
that Caesar left the public in the dark as to his view of his position;
as distinctly and as formally as possible he came forward
not merely as monarch, but as very king of Rome. It is possible even,
although not exactly probable, and at any rate of subordinate
importance, that he had it in view to designate his official power
not with the new name of Imperator, but directly with the old one
of King.(18) Even in his lifetime many of his enemies as of his friends
were of opinion that he intended to have himself expressly nominated
king of Rome; several indeed of his most vehement adherents
suggested to him in different ways and at different times
that he should assume the crown; most strikingly of all,
Marcus Antonius, when he as consul offered the diadem to Caesar
before all the people (15 Feb. 710). But Caesar rejected
these proposals without exception at once. If he at the same time
took steps against those who made use of these incidents to stir
republican opposition, it by no means follows from this that he was not
in earnest with his rejection. The assumption that these invitations
took place at his bidding, with the view of preparing the multitude
for the unwonted spectacle of the Roman diadem, utterly misapprehends
the mighty power of the sentimental opposition with which
Caesar had to reckon, and which could not be rendered more compliant,
but on the contrary necessarily gained a broader basis,
through such a public recognition of its warrant on the part
of Caesar himself. It may have been the uncalled-for zeal of vehement
adherents alone that occasioned these incidents; it may be also,
that Caesar merely permitted or even suggested the scene with Antonius,
in order to put an end in as marked a manner as possible
to the inconvenient gossip by a declinature which took place
before the eyes of the burgesses and was inserted by his command
even in the calendar of the state and could not, in fact,
be well revoked. The probability is that Caesar, who appreciated alike
the value of a convenient formal designation and the antipathies
of the multitude which fasten more on the names than on the essence
of things, was resolved to avoid the name of king as tainted
with an ancient curse and as more familiar to the Romans of his time
when applied to the despots of the east than to their own Numa
and Servius, and to appropriate the substance of the regal office
under the title of Imperator.
The New Court
The New Patrician Nobility
But, whatever may have been the definitive title present to his thoughts
the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court
established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp,
insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe
of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes,
but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity
as the proper regal attire, and received, seated on his golden chair
and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate.
The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories,
and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital,
his principal servants marched forth in troops to great distances
so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be
of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city
where he dwelt. Personal interviews with him were rendered
so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience,
that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate
even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons
even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the antechamber.
People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself,
that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose
a monarchical aristocracy, which was in a remarkable manner at once
new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting
into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty,
the nobility by the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted,
although without essential privileges as an order, in the character
of a close aristocratic guild;(19) but as it could receive
no new -gentes-(20) it had dwindled away more and more in the course
of centuries, and in the time of Caesar there were not more than
fifteen or sixteen patrician -gentes- still in existence.
Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right
of creating new patrician -gentes- conferred on the Imperator
by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast
to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate,
which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchical
aristocracy--the charm of antiquity, entire dependence
on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides
the new sovereignty revealed itself.
Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly
be scope for a constitution at all--still less for a continuance
of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation
of the burgesses, the senate, and the several magistrates. Caesar fully
and definitely reverted to the tradition of the regal period;
the burgess-assembly remained--what it had already been, in that period--
by the side of and with the king the supreme and ultimate expression
of the will of the sovereign people; the senate was brought back
to its original destination of giving advice to the ruler
when he requested it; and lastly the ruler concentrated in his person
anew the whole magisterial authority, so that there existed no other
independent state-official by his side any more than by the side
of the kings of the earliest times.
Legislation
Edicts
For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive maxim
of Roman state-law, that the community of the people in concert
with the king convoking them had alone the power of organically
regulating the commonwealth; and he had his constitutive enactments
regularly sanctioned by decree of the people. The free energy
and the authority half-moral, half-political, which the yea or nay
of those old warrior-assemblies had carried with it, could not indeed
be again instilled into the so-called comitia of this period;
the co-operation of the burgesses in legislation, which in the old
constitution had been extremely limited but real and living,
was in the new practically an unsubstantial shadow. There was therefore
no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia;
many years' experience had shown that every government--
the oligarchy as well as the monarch--easily kept on good terms
with this formal sovereign. These Caesarian comitia were an important
element in the Caesarian system and indirectly of practical significance,
only in so far as they served to retain in principle the sovereignty
of the people and to constitute an energetic protest against sultanism.
But at the same time--as is not only obvious of itself, but is also
distinctly attested--the other maxim also of the oldest state-law
was revived by Caesar himself, and not merely for the first time
by his successors; viz. that what the supreme, or rather sole,
magistrate commands is unconditionally valid so long as he remains
in office, and that, while legislation no doubt belongs only to the king
and the burgesses in concert, the royal edict is equivalent to law
at least till the demission of its author.
The Senate as the State-Council of the Monarch
While the democratic king thus conceded to the community of the people
at least a formal share in the sovereignty, it was by no means
his intention to divide his authority with what had hitherto been
the governing body, the college of senators. The senate of Caesar
was to be--in a quite different way from the later senate of Augustus--
nothing but a supreme council of state, which he made use
of for advising with him beforehand as to laws, and for the issuing
of the more important administrative ordinances through it,
or at least under its name--for cases in fact occurred where decrees
of senate were issued, of which none of the senators recited
as present at their preparation had any cognizance. There were
no material difficulties of form in reducing the senate to it
original deliberative position, which it had overstepped more de facto
than de jure; but in this case it was necessary to protect himself
from practical resistance, for the Roman senate was as much
the headquarters of the opposition to Caesar as the Attic Areopagus
was of the opposition to Pericles. Chiefly for this reason
the number of senators, which had hitherto amounted at most
to six hundred in its normal condition(21) and had been greatly reduced
by the recent crises, was raised by extraordinary supplement
to nine hundred; and at the same time, to keep it at least
up to this mark, the number of quaestors to be nominated annually,
that is of members annually admitted to the senate, was raised
from twenty to forty.(22) The extraordinary filling up of the senate
was undertaken by the monarch alone. In the case of the ordinary
additions he secured to himself a permanent influence through
the circumstance, that the electoral colleges were bound by law(23)
to give their votes to the first twenty candidates for the quaestorship
who were provided with letters of recommendation from the monarch;
besides, the crown was at liberty to confer the honorary rights
attaching to the quaestorship or to any office superior to it,
and consequently a seat in the senate in particular, by way of exception
even on individuals not qualified. The selection of the extraordinary
members who were added naturally fell in the main on adherents
of the new order of things, and introduced, along with -equites-
of respectable standing, various dubious and plebeian personages
into the proud corporation--former senators who had been erased
from the roll by the censor or in consequence of a judicial sentence,
foreigners from Spain and Gaul who had to some extent to learn
their Latin in the senate, men lately subaltern officers
who had not previously received even the equestrian ring,
sons of freedmen or of such as followed dishonourable trades,
and other elements of a like kind. The exclusive circles
of the nobility, to whom this change in the personal composition
of the senate naturally gave the bitterest offence, saw in it
an intentional depreciation of the very institution itself.
Caesar was not capable of such a self-destructive policy;
he was as determined not to let himself be governed by his council
as he was convinced of the necessity of the institute in itself.
They might more correctly have discerned in this proceeding the intention
of the monarch to take away from the senate its former character
of an exclusive representation of the oligarchic aristocracy,
and to make it once more--what it had been in the regal period--
a state-council representing all classes of persons belonging
to the state through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily
excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner; just as those
earliest kings introduced non-burgesses,(24) Caesar introduced
non-Italians into his senate.
Personal Government by Caesar
While the rule of the nobility was thus set aside and its existence
undermined, and while the senate in its new form was merely a tool
of the monarch, autocracy was at the same time most strictly
carried out in the administration and government of the state,
and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch.
First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question
of any moment. Caesar was able to carry personal government
to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which
is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity
and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground
in a more general cause. When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus,
and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity
which transcends our notions of human powers of working, the reason lies,
not in any change that human nature has undergone since that time,
but in the change which has taken place since then in the organization
of the household. The Roman house was a machine, in which even
the mental powers of the slaves and freedmen yielded their produce
to the master; a master, who knew how to govern these, worked as it were
with countless minds. It was the beau ideal of bureaucratic
centralization; which our counting-house system strives indeed
zealously to imitate, but remains as far behind its prototype
as the modern power of capital is inferior to the ancient system
of slavery. Caesar knew how to profit by this advantage;
wherever any post demanded special confidence, we see him filling it up
on principle--so far as other considerations at all permit--
with his slaves freedmen, or clients of humble birth. His works
as a whole show what an organizing genius like his could accomplish
with such an instrument; but to the question, how in detail
these marvellous feats were achieved, we have no adequate answer.
Bureaucracy resembles a manufactory also in this respect,
that the work done does not appear as that of the individual
who has worked at it, but as that of the manufactory which stamps it.
This much only is quite clear, that Caesar, in his work had no helper
at all who exerted a personal influence over it or was even so much as
initiated into the whole plan; he was not only the sole master,
but he worked also without skilled associates,
merely with common labourers.
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