[Sidenote: B.C. 45.] The drift of disaffection into Spain was held at
first to be of little moment. The battle of Thapsus, the final breaking
up of the senatorial party, and the deaths of its leaders, were
supposed to have brought an end at last to the divisions which had so
long convulsed the Empire. Rome put on its best dress. The people had
been on Caesar's side from the first. Those who still nursed in their
hearts the old animosity were afraid to show it, and the nation
appeared once more united in enthusiasm for the conqueror. There were
triumphal processions which lasted for four days. There were sham
fights on artificial lakes, bloody gladiator shows, which the Roman
populace looked for as their special delight. The rejoicings being
over, business began. Caesar was, of course, supreme. He was made
inspector of public morals, the censorship being deemed inadequate to
curb the inordinate extravagance. He was named Dictator for ten years,
with a right of nominating the person whom the people were to choose
for their consuls and praetors. The clubs and caucuses, the bribery of
the tribes, the intimidation, the organized bands of voters formed out
of the clients of the aristocracy, were all at an end. The courts of
law were purified. No more judges were to be bought with money or by
fouler temptations. The Leges Julias became a practical reality. One
remarkable and durable reform was undertaken and carried through amidst
the jests of Cicero and the other wits of the time--the revision of the
Roman calendar. The distribution of the year had been governed hitherto
by the motions of the moon. The twelve annual moons had fixed at twelve
the number of the months, and the number of days required to bring the
lunar year into correspondence with the solar had been supplied by
irregular intercalations, at the direction of the Sacred College. But
the Sacred College during the last distracted century had neglected
their office. The lunar year was now sixty-five days in advance of the
sun. The so-called winter was really the autumn, the spring the winter.
The summer solstice fell at the beginning of the legal September. On
Caesar as Pontifex Maximus devolved the duty of bringing confusion into
order, and the completeness with which the work was accomplished at the
first moment of his leisure shows that he had found time in the midst
of his campaigns to think of other things than war or politics.
Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer, was called in to superintend the
reform. It is not unlikely that he had made acquaintance with Sosigenes
in Egypt, and had discussed the problem with him in the hours during
which he is supposed to have amused himself "in the arms of Cleopatra."
Sosigenes, leaving the moon altogether, took the sun for the basis of
the new system. The Alexandrian observers had discovered that the
annual course of the sun was completed in 365 days and six hours. The
lunar twelve was allowed to remain to fix the number of the months. The
numbers of days in each month were adjusted to absorb 365 days. The
superfluous hours were allowed to accumulate, and every fourth year an
additional day was to be intercalated. An arbitrary step was required
to repair the negligence of the past. Sixty-five days had still to be
made good. The new system, depending wholly on the sun, would naturally
have commenced with the winter solstice. But Caesar so far deferred to
usage as to choose to begin, not with the solstice itself, but with the
first new moon which followed. It so happened in that year that the
new moon was eight days after the solstice; and thus the next year
started, as it continues to start, from the 1st of January. The eight
days were added to the sixty-five, and the current year was lengthened
by nearly three months. It pleased Cicero to mock, as if Caesar, not
contented with the earth, was making himself the master of the heavens.
"Lyra," he said, "was to set according to the edict;" but the unwise
man was not Caesar in this instance.[1]
While Sosigenes was at work with the calendar, Caesar personally again
revised the Senate. He expelled every member who had been guilty of
extortion or corruption; he supplied the vacancies with officers of
merit, with distinguished colonists, with foreigners, with meritorious
citizens, even including Gauls, from all parts of the Empire. Time,
unfortunately, had to pass before these new men could take their
places, but meanwhile he treated the existing body with all forms of
respect, and took no step on any question of public moment till the
Senate had deliberated on it. As a fitting close to the war he
proclaimed an amnesty to all who had borne arms against him. The past
was to be forgotten, and all his efforts were directed to the
regeneration of Roman society. Cicero paints the habits of fashionable
life in colors which were possibly exaggerated; but enough remains of
authentic fact to justify the general truth of the picture. Women had
forgotten their honor, children their respect for parents. Husbands had
murdered wives, and wives husbands. Parricide and incest formed common
incidents of domestic Italian history; and, as justice had been ordered
in the last years of the Republic, the most abandoned villain who came
into court with a handful of gold was assured of impunity. Rich men,
says Suetonius, were never deterred from crime by a fear of forfeiting
their estates; they had but to leave Italy, and their property was
secured to them. It was held an extraordinary step toward improvement
when Caesar abolished the monstrous privilege, and ordered that
parricides should not only be exiled, but should forfeit everything
that belonged to them, and that minor felons should forfeit half their
estates.
Cicero had prophesied so positively that Caesar would throw off the
mask of clemency when the need for it was gone, that he was
disappointed to find him persevere in the same gentleness, and was
impatient for revenge to begin. So bitter Cicero was that he once told
Atticus he could almost wish himself to be the object of some cruel
prosecution, that the tyrant might have the disgrace of it.[2]
He could not deny that "the tyrant" was doing what, if Rome was to
continue an ordered commonwealth, it was essential must be done.
Caesar's acts were unconstitutional! Yes; but constitutions are made
for men, not men for constitutions, and Cicero had long seen that the
Constitution was at an end. It had died of its own iniquities. He had
perceived in his better moments that Caesar and Caesar only could
preserve such degrees of freedom as could be retained without universal
destruction. But he refused to be comforted. He considered it a
disgrace to them all that Caesar was alive.[3] Why did not somebody
kill him? Kill him? And what then? On that side too the outlook was not
promising. News had come that Labienus and young Cnaeus Pompey had
united their forces in Spain. The whole Peninsula was in revolt, and
the counter-revolution was not impossible after all. He reflected with
terror on the sarcasms which he had flung on young Pompey. He knew him
to be a fool and a savage. "Hang me," he said, "if I do not prefer an
old and kind master to trying experiments with a new and cruel one. The
laugh will be on the other side then." [4]
Far had Cicero fallen from his dream of being the greatest man in Rome!
Condemned to immortality by his genius, yet condemned also to survive
in the portrait of himself which he has so unconsciously and so
innocently drawn.
The accounts from Spain were indeed most serious. It is the misfortune
of men of superior military ability that their subordinates are
generally failures when trusted with independent commands. Accustomed
to obey implicitly the instructions of their chief, they have done what
they have been told to do, and their virtue has been in never thinking
for themselves. They succeed, and they forget why they succeed, and in
part attribute their fortune to their own skill. With Alexander's
generals, with Caesar's, with Cromwell's, even with some of Napoleon's,
the story has been the same. They have been self-confident, yet when
thrown upon their own resources they have driven back upon a judgment
which has been inadequately trained. The mind which guided them is
absent. The instrument is called on to become self-acting, and
necessarily acts unwisely. Caesar's lieutenants while under his own eye
had executed his orders with the precision of a machine. When left to
their own responsibility they were invariably found wanting. Among all
his officers there was not a man of real eminence. Labienus, the ablest
of them, had but to desert Caesar, to commit blunder upon blunder, and
to ruin the cause to which he attached himself. Antony, Lepidus,
Trebonius, Calvinus, Cassius Longinus, Quintus Cicero, Sabinus, Decimus
Brutus, Vatinius, were trusted with independent authority, only to show
themselves unfit to use it. Cicero had guessed shrewdly that Caesar's
greatest difficulties would begin with his victory. He had not a man
who was able to govern under him away from his immediate eye.
Cassius Longinus, Trebonius, and Marcus Lepidus had been sent to Spain
after the battle of Pharsalia. They had quarrelled among themselves.
They had driven the legions into mutiny. The authority of Rome had
broken down as entirely as when Sertorius was defying the Senate; and
Spain had become the receptacle of all the active disaffection which
remained in the Empire. Thither had drifted the wreck of Scipio's
African army. Thither had gathered the outlaws, pirates, and banditti
of Italy and the Islands. Thither too had come flights of Numidians and
Moors in hopes of plunder; and Pompey's sons and Labienus had collected
an army as numerous as that which had been defeated at Thapsus, and
composed of materials far more dangerous and desperate. There were
thirteen legions of them in all, regularly formed, with eagles and
standards; two which had deserted from Trebonius; one made out of Roman
Spanish settlers, or old soldiers of Pompey's who had been dismissed at
Lerida; four out of the remnants of the campaign in Africa; the rest a
miscellaneous combination of the mutinous legions of Longinus and
outlawed adventurers who knew that there was no forgiveness for them,
and were ready to fight while they could stand. It was the last cast of
the dice for the old party of the aristocracy. Appearances were thrown
off. There were no more Catos, no more phantom Senates to lend to
rebellion the pretended dignity of a national cause. The true barbarian
was there in his natural colors.
Very reluctantly Caesar found that he must himself grapple with this
last convulsion. The sanguinary obstinacy which no longer proposed any
object to itself save defiance and revenge, was converting a war which
at first wore an aspect of a legitimate constitutional struggle, into a
conflict with brigands. Clemency had ceased to be possible, and Caesar
would have gladly left to others the execution in person of the sharp
surgery which was now necessary. He was growing old: fifty-five this
summer. His health was giving way. For fourteen years he had known no
rest. That he could have endured so long such a strain on mind and body
was due only to his extraordinary abstinence, to the simplicity of his
habits, and the calmness of temperament which in the most anxious
moments refused to be agitated. But the work was telling at last on his
constitution, and he departed on his last campaign with confessed
unwillingness. The future was clouded with uncertainty. A few more
years of life might enable him to introduce into the shattered frame of
the Commonwealth some durable elements. His death in the existing
confusion might be as fatal as Alexander's. That some one person not
liable to removal under the annual wave of electoral agitation must
preside over the army and the administration, had been evident in lucid
moments even to Cicero. To leave the prize to be contended for among
the military chiefs was to bequeath a legacy of civil wars and probable
disruption; to compound with the embittered remnants of the aristocracy
who were still in the field would intensify the danger; yet time and
peace alone could give opportunity for the conditions of a permanent
settlement to shape themselves. The name of Caesar had become
identified with the stability of the Empire. He no doubt foresaw that
the only possible chief would be found in his own family. Being himself
childless, he had adopted his sister's grandson, Octavius, afterward
Augustus, a fatherless boy of seventeen; and had trained him under his
own eye. He had discerned qualities doubtless in his nephew which, if
his own life was extended for a few years longer, might enable the boy
to become the representative of his house and perhaps the heir of his
power. In the unrecorded intercourse between the uncle and his niece's
child lies the explanation of the rapidity with which the untried
Octavius seized the reins when all was again chaos, and directed the
Commonwealth upon the lines which it was to follow during the remaining
centuries of Roman power.
Octavius accompanied Caesar into Spain. They travelled in a carriage,
having as a third with them the general whom Caesar most trusted and
liked, and whom he had named in his will as one of Octavius's
guardians, Decimus Brutus--the same officer who had commanded his fleet
for him at Quiberon and at Marseilles, and had now been selected as the
future governor of Cisalpine Gaul. Once more it was midwinter when they
left Rome. They travelled swiftly; and Caesar, as usual, himself
brought the news that he was coming. But the winter season did not
bring to him its usual advantages, for the whole Peninsula had
revolted, and Pompey and Labienus were able to shelter their troops in
the towns, while Caesar was obliged to keep the field. Attempts here
and there to capture detached positions led to no results. On both
sides now the war was carried on upon the principles which the Senate
had adopted from the first. Prisoners from the revolted legions were
instantly executed, and Cnaeus Pompey murdered the provincials whom he
suspected of an inclination for Caesar. Attagona was at last taken.
Caesar moved on Cordova; and Pompey, fearing that the important cities
might seek their own security by coming separately to terms, found it
necessary to risk a battle.
[Sidenote: March 17, B.C. 45.] [Sidenote: B.C. 45.] The scene of the
conflict which ended the civil war was the plain of Munda. The day was
the 17th of March, B.C. 45. Spanish tradition places Munda on the
Mediterranean, near Gibraltar. The real Munda was on the Guadalquiver,
so near to Cordova that the remains of the beaten army found shelter
within its walls after the battle. Caesar had been so invariably
victorious in his engagements in the open field that the result might
have been thought a foregone conclusion. Legendary history reported in
the next generation that the elements had been pregnant with auguries.
Images had sweated; the sky had blazed with meteors; celestial armies,
the spirits of the past and future, had battled among the
constellations. The signs had been unfavorable to the Pompeians; the
eagles of their legions had dropped the golden thunderbolts from their
talons, spread their wings, and had flown away to Caesar. In reality,
the eagles had remained in their places till the standards fell from
the hands of their dead defenders; and the battle was one of the most
desperate in which Caesar had ever been engaged. The numbers were
nearly equal--the material on both sides equally good. Pompey's army
was composed of revolted Roman soldiers. In arms, in discipline, in
stubborn fierceness, there was no difference. The Pompeians had the
advantage of situation, the village of Munda, with the hill on which it
stood, being in the centre of their lines. The Moorish and Spanish
auxiliaries, of whom there were large bodies on either side, stood
apart when the legions closed; they having no further interest in the
matter than in siding with the conqueror, when fortune had decided who
the conqueror was to be. There were no manoeuvres; no scientific
evolutions. The Pompeians knew that there was no hope for them if they
were defeated. Caesar's men, weary and savage at the protraction of the
war, were determined to make a last end of it; and the two armies
fought hand to hand with their short swords, with set teeth and pressed
lips, opened only with a sharp cry as an enemy fell dead. So equal was
the struggle, so doubtful at one moment the issue of it, that Caesar
himself sprang from his horse, seized a standard, and rallied a
wavering legion. It seemed as if the men meant all to stand and kill or
be killed as long as daylight lasted. The ill fate of Labienus decided
the victory. He had seen, as he supposed, some movement which alarmed
him among Caesar's Moorish auxiliaries, and had galloped conspicuously
across the field to lead a division to check them. A shout rose, "He
flies--he flies!" A panic ran along the Pompeian lines. They gave way,
and Caesar's legions forced a road between their ranks. One wing broke
off and made for Cordova; the rest plunged wildly within the ditch and
walls of Munda, the avenging sword smiting behind into the huddled mass
of fugitives. Scarcely a prisoner was taken. Thirty thousand fell on
the field, among them three thousand Roman knights, the last remains of
the haughty youths who had threatened Caesar with their swords in the
senate-house, and had hacked Clodius's mob in the Forum. Among them was
slain Labienus--his desertion of his general, his insults and his
cruelties to his comrades, expiated at last in his own blood. Attius
Varus was killed also, who had been with Juba when he destroyed Curio.
The tragedy was being knitted up in the deaths of the last actors in
it. The eagles of the thirteen legions were all taken. The two Pompeys
escaped on their horses, Sextus disappearing in the mountains of
Grenada or the Sierra Morena; Cnaeus flying for Gibraltar, where he
hoped to find a friendly squadron.
Munda was at once blockaded, the enclosing wall--savage evidence of the
temper of the conquerors--being built of dead bodies pinned together
with lances, and on the top of it a fringe of heads on swords' points
with the faces turned toward the town. A sally was attempted at
midnight, and failed. The desperate wretches then fought among
themselves, till at length the place was surrendered, and fourteen
thousand of those who still survived were taken, and spared. Their
comrades, who had made their way into Cordova, were less fortunate.
When the result of the battle was known, the leading citizen, who had
headed the revolt against Caesar, gathered all that belonged to him
into a heap, poured turpentine over it, and, after a last feast with
his family, burnt himself, his house, his children, and servants. In
the midst of the tumult the walls were stormed. Cordova was given up to
plunder and massacre, and twenty-two thousand miserable people--most of
them, it may be hoped, the fugitives from Munda--were killed. The
example sufficed. Every town opened its gates, and Spain was once more
submissive. Sextus Pompey successfully concealed himself. Cnaeus
reached Gibraltar, but to find that most of the ships which he looked
for had been taken by Caesar's fleet. He tried to cross to the African
coast, but was driven back by bad weather, and search parties were
instantly on his track. He had been wounded; he had sprained his ankle
in his flight. Strength and hope were gone. He was carried on a litter
to a cave on a mountain side, where his pursuers found him, cut off his
head, and spared Cicero from further anxiety.
Thus bloodily ended the Civil War, which the Senate of Rome had
undertaken against Caesar, to escape the reforms which were threatened
by his second consulship. They had involuntarily rendered their country
the best service which they were capable of conferring upon it, for the
attempts which Caesar would have made to amend a system too decayed to
benefit by the process had been rendered forever impossible by their
persistence. The free constitution of the Republic had issued at last
in elections which were a mockery of representation, in courts of law
which were an insult to justice, and in the conversion of the Provinces
of the Empire into the feeding-grounds of a gluttonous aristocracy. In
the army alone the Roman character and the Roman honor survived. In the
Imperator, therefore, as chief of the army, the care of the Provinces,
the direction of public policy, the sovereign authority in the last
appeal, could alone thenceforward reside. The Senate might remain as a
Council of State; the magistrates might bear their old names, and
administer their old functions. But the authority of the executive
government lay in the loyalty, the morality, and the patriotism of the
legions to whom the power had been transferred. Fortunately for Rome,
the change came before decay had eaten into the bone, and the genius of
the Empire had still a refuge from platform oratory and senatorial
wrangling in the hearts of her soldiers.
Caesar did not immediately return to Italy. Affairs in Rome were no
longer pressing, and, after the carelessness and blunders of his
lieutenants, the administration of the Peninsula required his personal
inspection. From open revolts in any part of the Roman dominions he had
nothing more to fear. The last card had been played, and the game of
open resistance was lost beyond recovery. There might be dangers of
another kind: dangers from ambitious generals, who might hope to take
Caesar's place on his death; or dangers from constitutional
philosophers, like Cicero, who had thought from the first that the
Civil War had been a mistake, "that Caesar was but mortal, and that
there were many ways in which a man might die." A reflection so frankly
expressed, by so respectable a person, must have occurred to many
others as well as to Cicero; Caesar could not but have foreseen in what
resources disappointed fanaticism or baffled selfishness might seek
refuge. But of such possibilities he was prepared to take his chance;
he did not fly from them, he did not seek them; he took his work as he
found it, and remained in Spain through the summer, imposing fines and
allotting rewards, readjusting the taxation, and extending the
political privileges of the Roman colonies. It was not till late in the
autumn that he again turned his face toward Rome.
[1] In connection with this subject it is worth while to mention another
change in the division of time, not introduced by Caesar, but which
came into general use about a century after. The week of seven days
was unknown to the Greeks and to the Romans of the Commonwealth, the
days of the month being counted by the phases of the moon. The
seven-days division was supposed by the Romans to be Egyptian. We know
it to have been Jewish, and it was probably introduced to the general
world on the first spread of Christianity. It was universally adopted
at any rate after Christianity had been planted in different parts of
the Empire, but while the Government and the mass of the people were
still unconverted to the new religion. The week was accepted for its
convenience; but while accepted it was paganized; and the seven days
were allotted to the five planets and the sun and moon in the order
which still survives among the Latin nations, and here in England with
a further introduction of Scandinavian mythology. The principle of the
distribution was what is popularly called "the music of the spheres,"
and turns on a law of Greek music, which is called by Don Cassius the
[Greek: armonia dia teddaron]. Assuming the earth to be the centre of
the universe, the celestial bodies which have a proper movement of
their own among the stars were arranged in the order of their apparent
periods of revolution--Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury,
the Moon. The Jewish Jehovah was identified by the Graeco-Romans with
Saturn, the oldest of the heathen personal gods. The Sabbath was the
day supposed to be specially devoted to him. The first day of the week
was, therefore, given to Saturn. Passing over Jupiter and Mars,
according to the laws of the [Greek: armonia], the next day was given
to the Sun; again passing over two, the next to the Moon, and so on,
going round again to the rest, till the still existing order came out.
Dies Saturni, dies Solis, dies Lunae, dies Martis, dies Mercurri,
dies Jovis, and dies Veneris. See Dion Cassius, _Historia
Romana_, lib. xxxvii. c. 18. Dion Cassius gives a second account of
the distribution, depending on the twenty-four hours of the day. But
the twenty-four hours being a division purely artificial, this
explanation is of less interest.
[2] _To Atticus_, x. 12.
[3] "Cum vivere ipsum turpe sit nobis."--_To Atticus_, xiii. 28.
[4] "Peream nisi sollicitus sum, ac malo veterem et clementem dominum
habere, quam novum et crudelem experiri. Scis, Cnaeus quam sit fatuus.
Scis, quomodo crudelitatem virtutem putet. Scis, quam se semper a
nobis derisum putet. Vereor, ne nos rustice gladio velit
[Greek: antimuktaerisai]"--_To Caius Cassius, Ad Fam_. xv. 19.