one side the laurel-crowned head of Cæsar, with the inscription Cæsar
Imperator, and on the reverse the figure of conquering Venus, lance
in one hand and on the other a Victory. The conqueror was now treated
as being beyond the ordinary human standard. This recognition of
superhuman qualities is made plainer in an inscription, placed under
a relief of Cæsar (introduced on a metallic map of the world), which
reads, “he is a demigod.” The Oriental idea of deification, opposed
as it was to the whole genius of government in Rome, was now adopted
there. With Julius Cæsar began the custom of deifying the supreme ruler
of Rome, and it is significant that, although he refused a ten-year
consulship, he did not protest against this use of religion for the
purpose of adulation.
Now that the supreme authority was unassailably placed in the hands of
a single individual, who was protected in its exercise from any legal
opposition in Rome, Cæsar showed no hesitation in taking the full
responsibility of his position. The Western provinces had for some
time been practically under his personal control. He was virtually the
founder and the creator of the Roman Empire in the West. The foundation
laid by him lasted for hundreds of years. But as military lord of
the Roman world he had also to deal with the situation of the East.
There especially the extension of the Parthian rule was dreaded, and
also anticipated, for the moral effect of the defeat of Crassus a few
years before had been immense. Cæsar saw that a war in the East could
alone restore the prestige of Rome, and also that it was not safe to
leave the conduct of such a war in other hands. His plan was first to
conquer the Parthians, and through their territory to reach the Caspian
Sea. Afterwards by the way of the Black Sea he meant to march along
the Danube, where there were wild tribes which had to be taught to
respect the power of Rome, and finally to return to Italy by the way
of Germany. Such was the mighty program now developed in the vision of
the conqueror. In its details it bore the marks of the bold imagination
and the political sagacity which characterized his genius, but the
immediate necessity was to bring the Parthian war to an end, and so
restore confidence on the Eastern frontier. After the return from
Spain the transfer of the bulk of the Roman army to the East was being
prepared for.
It was in connection with this purpose that there first arose,
apparently, the idea of conferring on Cæsar the title of king. It
was said that an oracle of the Sibylline Books had declared that
only a king could get the better of the Parthians in war. Such a
designation was especially antagonistic to Roman political principles;
personal rule was tolerated, but not divine right by family descent.
Some preparations had been made for the introduction of this alien
conception by the act of the Senate, according to which the title
“Imperator,” associated directly with the name of Cæsar, should pass
to his legal heir. The road to a succession being now marked out, the
whole question of the title could not long be left undecided. Imperator
was locally understood, but made no claim on subject races. To test
popular feeling, Marcus Antonius offered the Imperator a diadem, the
insignia of royalty. This was refused, but it was noted that the offer
did not call forth the enthusiastic response that was anticipated, nor
was Cæsar’s rejection of the symbol openly deplored. Still, the desire
for some accommodation with the terms of the oracle was not abandoned.
It seemed possible that in Rome Cæsar might bow to public opinion by
employing only the title of Imperator, while in the provinces he could
exercise royal powers and use the royal title. It was supposed that
some arrangement of this sort would be made by a regular decree before
he set out for the Parthian campaign.
Opposition was bound to develop at this point from the convinced
republicans in the Senate; they were strongly represented there, and
Cæsar was responsible for their presence. He had gathered about him
men of both parties, making a special effort by his generosity to win
over some of the most convinced of the senatorial partisans who had
followed Pompeius and had fought the victor to the end of the African
campaign. But even Cæsar’s own appointees and adherents were by no
means reconciled to the program which would openly do away with the
republic; they wished it still to exist as an institution, and they
had no wish to provide for the continuance of personal rule beyond the
terms of Cæsar’s own life.
The party of Pompeius was by no means inactive; they wrote freely as
apologists for their own side, and they did not hesitate in their
intrigues to hold up Cæsar as an ambitious autocrat guilty of cruelty
on the battlefield, and now that peace was restored, using his claims
to mask his aim to establish a tyranny. These views were found among
the Senators. Cæsar either thought he was unassailable or reckoned on
their gratitude as an obstacle which would separate their theory and
their practice. This attitude was only one example of a general want of
alertness that seemed to characterize the conqueror after the close of
the Spanish campaign.
All the old republican antipathies against royalty were called into
life. Cæsar’s statue was now seen on the capitol between the figures
of Rome’s ancient kings. Another statue, that of Lucius Junius Brutus,
the founder of the republic, recalled to men’s minds the quick and
ready method of dealing with kings and tyrants. This old-fashioned
republican doctrine was not lost on a disciple and nephew of Cato,
Marcus Brutus, who had made peace with Cæsar after the battle of
Pharsalus. He claimed to be a descendant of the famous liberator, and
by this very fact had influence in heading any movement against the new
autocratic system. His personal abilities were of a mediocre order; but
he was obstinate and self-consciously vain of his integrity, and could
be paraded as a concrete argument to strengthen the republican cause,
when others might hesitate to take extreme steps.
But the real motive power in the organization of the conspiracy against
Cæsar was found in Caius Cassius, also holding prætorian office like
Brutus. The two had not before been friendly, although both were
partisans of Pompeius. Cassius, with his dark and gloomy temperament
and sarcastic tongue, was not likely to accept the sententious
pomposity of his brother Prætor at that high standard of value exacted
by Brutus from his friends. What drew them together was their common
republican sympathies. Brutus was asked by Cassius what would be his
attitude at the next meeting of the Senate when the question of the
royal title would be discussed. Brutus replied that he would not be
present. Cassius said that Brutus’s position as Prætor imposed upon him
the obligation of attending the meeting. At this Brutus answered that
if he went he would defend the cause of liberty.
Such was the basis of the understanding between the two, and the
agreement for common action was accepted, not only by the remnant of
the old Pompeian party, but by those as well who called themselves the
partisans of Cæsar. Even Caius Trebonius, who had served the cause of
Cæsar in the city and on the battlefield for many years, agreed that
the freedom of the Roman people was to be preferred to the friendship
of an individual. He had once before spoken plainly to Marcus Antonius
of Cæsar’s ingratitude and of the misfortunes of the republic, but
had found no sympathy. Another of Cæsar’s companions in arms, Tullius
Cimber, felt personally injured because the commander had exiled his
brother.
Both sides had grievances. The Pompeians were not to be won by tactful
treatment to accept Cæsar’s schemes, while his own followers often felt
that their allegiance had secured no more favors from him than the open
enmity of his former opponents. All experienced the common pressure of
an exalted and unlimited authority, and were prepared to act together.
The exact details of the conspiracy are obscure; they must have been
arranged between the 15th of February and the 5th of March, on which
date the Senate was to be called together in a building erected by
Pompeius, to decide whether Cæsar was to be allowed to bear outside of
Rome the title of king. The conspirators were at one against accepting
such a proposal.
Cæsar seemed not to realize his danger, since he paid no attention to
the warnings that came to him. His mind was filled with the prospect of
the Eastern war. Everyone realized that another victory would render
all opposition unavailing. The conspirators would have to act before
Cæsar could set out for the new campaign. In the plan to be followed
the leading Senators were all accomplices. The way would be easy,
provided Cæsar’s fellow Consul, Marcus Antonius, who could be relied
upon to defend him, were prevented from coming to the Senate. Trebonius
was to see that Antonius was detained and kept occupied elsewhere,
while another of Cæsar’s friends of long standing, Decimus Brutus,
undertook the necessary persuasion of the dictator should the latter
hesitate to come to the Curia.
Cæsar, as had been arranged, took his seat in the consular chair; the
place next his was vacant, his colleague not being present. There was
no time to be lost, for Marcus Antonius might appear at any moment.
Tullius Cimber, showing much vehemence, drew near to the Consul, making
a plea for the return of his brother from exile. As Cæsar hesitated,
the prearranged signal for the murder was immediately acted upon.
Cimber with both hands tore apart Cæsar’s toga; at the same time Casca
aimed at his neck a blow which glanced and struck the breast. Cæsar
appears to have thought that it was only an act of personal vengeance
from which he could protect himself. He sprang to his feet, snatched
his toga from the hands of Cimber, and threw himself on the arm of
Cassius, at the same time defending himself with the stylus of his
tablet. He was strong and active, and might have got the better of his
two antagonists, but as he turned on Casca he received a wound in the
side, then several others from the conspirators as they closed in upon
him. No one of the Senators, whom he had created, came to his help. All
was over in a moment, for he made no further resistance when he saw
the arm of Marcus Brutus, specially bound to him by personal favors,
raised to strike. He fell at the feet of the statue of Pompeius, his
body pierced by twenty-three wounds. The corpse was brought back to his
dwelling by three slaves in the litter in which he had been carried to
the Senate. All the rest of his retinue of clients and friends had fled.
The assassination, its method of accomplishment, and the men who
planned and carried it out, bound as all of them were by some kind of
obligation to the conqueror, can hardly win sympathy even from those
who hate autocratic rule, and think the man who destroys a democracy
beyond the law. The conspirators had not the personal character of the
traditional tyrannicides of Greece. There is something of a pose in
the whole action. Brutus and his fellows were representing a clique
and cannot be called in any sense the executors of the will of the
people. It would have been more fitting if the old precedent followed
in the legendary expulsion of the former kings of Rome, banishment,
had been adopted here. After all, Cæsar was giving the Roman empire a
better kind of government than the Senatorial oligarchy. The cause of
the conspirators was weak, and the men who carried it out, as events
soon showed, were even weaker than their cause. Only verbally were the
interests of republicanism represented by the murderers of Cæsar. The
Senate and People of Rome existed as they had done of old; but the
elements in each were different. In the people of Cæsar’s days there
was nothing that resembled the ancient community of the plebeians.
Military expansion had long since destroyed the old civil constitution;
the assemblies in the Forum were legal only in name, for they disguised
the irregularities of mob rule, giving opportunities for violence
and corruption on the largest scale. Even the Senate was virtually
a new creation filled with Cæsar’s enemies and certainly incapable
from its membership of preparing a genuine restoration of republican
institutions. It had stood, even before the civil war, at a time when
the oligarchy of wealth and descent had recovered its lost ground
through the patronage of Sulla, for governmental inefficiency.
The one man with genius and creativeness adequate to restore a
practical republican government was Cæsar himself, and to him
republican ideals meant nothing. He was a realistic statesman, who saw
the road to monarchy as the short cut to good government, and took it
unhesitatingly. At no point in Cæsar’s career is there any evidence
that he believed in anything but personal rule. Alike skeptical of
higher appeals and with a contempt for shams, he never wavered at any
stage in his well-planned pursuit of autocratic power. His fight with
the Senatorial oligarchy, who alone blocked his way, was conducted
with the directness of a military campaign. There was little personal
feeling, for he treated men as pawns, whether they were friends or
enemies. When their power to help or to oppose him was gone, they
were of no significance; so, at the close of the civil war, it was
easy to exercise a clemency or a patronage which meant little. There
was a superficial amiability in these acts which indicated a contempt
of individuals rather than spontaneous humanity. His cold, clear-cut
character seemed to work out problems in a bloodless atmosphere alike
free from prejudices and from prepossessions.
Cæsar’s benefactions and his enmities were alike self-centered. The
whole force of a nature extraordinarily versatile and incessantly
active was turned to one end, and the various stages of his political
career are explained by the closing years of his life. It was his
purpose to overthrow the Senatorial aristocrats. The purpose was a most
worthy one, and it is difficult to see how it could have been done
except by extra-legal means, for the Senatorial faction made the laws,
and so held all the cards in their hands. Their motto of government
was “Heads I win, tails you lose”; and the claim of legality with
such a leader as Pompeius, who had no respect for the constitution,
was altogether disingenuous. Cæsar was a shrewder politician than any
member of the Senatorial faction, far more brilliant in conception
and far quicker in action than his rival Pompeius. After clearing the
field of his opponents, he showed less creative capacity than in his
preparatory work.
Of course, the time was short between his murder and the close of the
last campaign in the civil war, but the government he established
was a kind of sham republicanism after the Sullan model, only with
a different center of gravity. He seems to have planned a better
system of administration, and meant that it should be worked in a way
regardful of the public interests of a great empire; but the machinery
was to remain the same, except that the various magistracies were
either to be held by himself or filled by men of his own selection. The
shadow of republicanism was to cover a monarchical rule, and in this
respect the conservatism of Cæsar was epoch-making, for it continued to
influence the whole genius of the Roman imperial system for centuries.
As a general Cæsar was fortunate in having at his command an army which
represented the result of years of technical training acquired in the
almost continuous campaigns of the Romans. He did not have to create
his army; the material for his conquests was ready to hand. He added
nothing new to the art of war as it was already known, but the legion
under him had a commander of great versatility, who understood how to
use it to the best advantage under any given conditions. This genius
in providing for the maintenance of his army repeatedly gave him the
advantage over the enemy in the Gallic wars, for it enabled him to
defer the decisive engagement until all conditions were favorable for
his own side.
Another characteristic of his strategy was his skill in using fortified
camps. He was a born engineer, and the engineering feats of his
campaigns are evidently recounted with great satisfaction in his
“Commentaries.” It is evident that they played a decisive part in
securing success both during the Gallic campaigns and in the civil
war. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of the Romans to
the art of warfare was superior technique in fortifications, and in
protection of camps, aided by which the defensive of a numerically
smaller force could be made to balance the offensive of superior
numbers. The sole method of overcoming such resistance was by starving
out the army placed in a fortified camp. In his campaigns Cæsar showed
remarkable versatility in using the argument of hunger as well as the
argument of the sword, and he was quick to turn from one to the other
as occasion required.
He seems never to have burdened himself with a pedantic following of
rules. Plutarch tells us he had read the accounts of Alexander’s great
victories. So far as his own “Commentaries” are concerned, there is a
studied vagueness, which, as has been mentioned, often leaves important
points in obscurity. He is very sparing of giving personal reflections
on the progress of the war he is describing. It is noteworthy,
therefore, that he once blames Pompeius for repressing the enthusiasm
of his troops, saying that it is the general’s business to encourage
the emotional element in battle.
He is also fond of calling attention to the rôle played by fortune or
chance, and so he has been often blamed for the risks he was willing
to take because he trusted too much to luck, and it is said that he
conducted warfare in the spirit of a gambler. Like Napoleon, he appears
to have believed in his star, but the references to fortune in the
“Commentaries” are probably a literary device intended to impress
a popular audience who, though they had lost belief in the gods of
polytheism, were ready to recognize an incalculable and mysterious
element in human life.
But there was in his strategy more than a spontaneous brilliancy
adequate to rescue him from the difficulties of a position he had not
anticipated. In his campaigns we see evidence enough of caution and
calculation. Especially in the matter of numerical superiority he was
careful not to allow himself any hazards in a decisive engagement.
The battle of Pharsalus is the only one in which it is certain that
he won a victory with an army inferior in numbers to his opponent. In
this case nothing else could have been done, for Pompeius, who was in
control of the sea, would have removed his army from Greece if he had
been outnumbered. There was but one way of forcing a pitched battle
under these circumstances, and it was part of superior strategy to
induce an enemy relying on superior numbers to confront troops superior
in quality. But such chances Cæsar only took when obliged. There was
little of the bravado element in his wars. The situation was outlined
beforehand. The almost mathematical result bears witness to the
presence of that same type of cool reflection which in the political
side of his career makes the founder of the Roman Empire something of
an enigma. It is hard to believe that a man can be just as unfeeling
and unethical in statesmanship as when he is directing the movements of
masses of troops. Cæsar’s genius stands for an abnormal development of
intellectual power disciplined to serve the ambitious purposes of a man
bent on enjoying personal rule, who, to a unique degree, had measured
the capacity of other men and himself.
* * * * *
CHARLES THE GREAT
I INTRODUCTORY
Out of the chaos in Western Europe due to the collapse of Roman
provincial rule in the fifth century, there came into being various
Teutonic states. They all bore the mark of the early tribal
organization of the German peoples and took up the work, more or less
successfully, of assimilating the orderly elements and traditions
of Roman polity. In the Italian peninsula the permanence of these
political creations was short-lived, except in the case of the
Lombards, who maintained an enduring rule, largely because they adhered
to a crude policy of isolation and set well-considered limits to their
desire for expansion. In Spain, the Goths, despite the predominance of
the Roman provincial element, succeeded, with the help of the Church,
in attaining a fairly centralized organization for several centuries
until it was swept aside by the irresistible pressure of the Moslem
conquest. To the North, in France, which was first of all the seat of
various Teutonic peoples, the Franks, under the astute leadership of
their tribal monarchs, gradually absorbed all the territory of the old
Roman province of Gallia, adding to it the land to the east which had
been the home of their ancestors before they had crossed into the Roman
province.
Chlodvig, the founder of the Merovingian line of kings, was not a
ruler of the type of Theodoric the Ostrogoth. In contrast with the
Teutonic kingdoms of Italy and Spain, the Merovingian showed a stubborn
conservatism. After Chlodvig’s death there was no man of first-rate
ability during the period of Merovingian rule with the dubious
exception of Dagobert. These were long years of division, lawlessness,
and bloodshed. The Franks kept possession of their conquests, but
the royal line produced a succession of weak and helpless rulers who
showed themselves incapable of casting aside the traditions of tribal
rule. The demand for centralization was recognized and met by the
representatives of the noble family of Heristal who, because they
were landlords over wide estates, became, as mayors of the palace,
_de facto_ possessors of sovereign authority. To them the Frankish
chieftains throughout the land looked for leadership, and did not
look in vain, for their efficient statesmanship soon arrested the
disintegrating tendencies of Merovingian rule, and gave their people
such an amount of cohesive strength that they became the foremost
representatives of Teutonic power in Western Europe. It was the House
of Heristal which saved the Franks from the fate of the Visigoths,
for it was Charles the Hammer who met the Moslem host on the field of
Poictiers and swept them back across the Pyrenees.
Charles’ son, Pippin, carried on the work of his father; he was strong,
courageous, and cautious, a thorough type of the opportunist statesman,
willing so far as he was concerned to control his people under the
title of Mayor of the Palace, while the titular dignity of king was
kept intact in the Merovingian family. The bloodless revolution which
made Pippin a monarch _de jure_ from a ruler _de facto_, was due to
outside pressure, and this pressure came from the See of Rome, which
appealed to him for help as the representative and most powerful
Catholic leader in Western Europe after the Emperors at Constantinople
had alienated the population in Italy by the part they played in the
Iconoclastic controversy.
The Popes of the eighth century, seeing the inability of the Eastern
Empire to protect its Italian possessions, and unwilling to give them
support against the aggressions of the Lombards, were face to face with
a difficult problem. They did not wish to be absorbed in the Lombard
kingdom, and were just as much afraid of seeing any restoration of
power to the hands of the Emperor’s representative, the Exarch of
Ravenna.