Caesar and Christ

The two favorites of Sulla, now consuls together, devoted themselves to overthrowing the Sullan constitution. Pompey and Crassus paid their debt to the populares by passing a bill that restored all the power of the tribunes. They consolidated their alliance with business by directing Lucullus to give the publicans full charge of tax collections in the East; and they supported legislation that required juries to be drawn equally from the Senate, the equestrian class, and the tribunes of the Treasury. Crassus had to wait fifteen years for his reward—the privilege of drinking gold in Asia; Pompey received his in 67, when the Assembly voted him almost limitless authority to proceed against the pirates of Cilicia. Once Rhodes had kept the Aegean free of such marauders; but Rhodes, humiliated and impoverished by Rome and Delos, could no longer maintain the fleet required for such a service; and the landed aristocracy that controlled the Senate had no keen interest in making the channels of maritime commerce secure. Merchants and plebs felt the results more sharply: trade became almost impossible in the Aegean, even in the central Mediterranean; and imports of grain fell so rapidly that the price of wheat at Rome rose to twenty sesterces per modius, or three dollars a peck. The pirates flaunted their success with gilded masts, purple sails, and silver-plated oars on their thousand ships; they took and held 400 coastal towns, plundered temples in Samothrace, Samos, Epidaurus, Argos, Leucas, and Actium, kidnaped Roman officials, and assailed even the shores of Apulia and Etruria.

To meet this situation Pompey’s friend Gabinius proposed a bill giving him for three years absolute control of all Roman fleets, and all persons within fifty miles of any Mediterranean shore. Every senator but Caesar opposed this extraordinary measure, but the Assembly passed it with enthusiasm, voted Pompey an army of 125,000 men and a navy of 500 vessels, and ordered the Treasury to place 144,000,000 sesterces at his disposal. In effect the bill deposed the Senate, ended the Sullan restoration, and established a provisional monarchy as a prelude and lesson to Caesar. The outcome strengthened the precedent. The very day after Pompey’s appointment the price of wheat began to fall. Within three months he accomplished his task-captured the pirate ships, took their strongholds, executed their leaders—and yet without abusing his unusual authority. Commerce took heart and sailed again, and a river of cereals flowed into Rome.

While Pompey was still in Cilicia, his friend Manilius offered the Assembly a bill transferring to him full command of the armies and provinces then (66) under Lucullus, and prolonging the powers conferred upon him by the Gabinian Law. The Senate resisted, but the merchants and moneylenders gave strong support to the proposal. Pompey, they hoped, would be less lenient than Lucullus to their Asiatic debtors; he would restore the tax collections to the publicans; he would conquer not only Bithynia and Pontus, but Cappadocia, Syria, and Judea; and these rich fields would be thrown open to Roman trade and finance under the protection of Roman arms. A “new man,” Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had been elected praetor for that year with the aid of the business class, spoke “For the Manilian Law,” and attacked the Senatorial oligarchy with a rash eloquence unheard in Rome since the Gracchi, and with a candor shocking in a politician:

The whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic provinces. If these revenues are destroyed, our system of credit will crash. ... If some lose their entire fortunes they will drag many more down with them. Save the state from such a calamity. . . . Prosecute with all your energies the war against Mithridates, by which the glory of the Roman name, the safety of our allies, our most valuable revenues, and the fortunes of innumerable citizens will be effectively preserved.³⁵

The measure was readily passed by the Assembly. The plebs cared little for the fortunes of the financiers; but it rejoiced in having found, through the issuance of extraordinary powers to a general, a means of annulling the Sullan legislation and deposing its ancient enemy, the Senate. From that moment the days of the Republic were numbered. The Roman revolution, helped by the oratory of its greatest foe, had taken another step toward Caesar.

VII. CICERO AND CATILINE

Plutarch thought that Marcus Tullius was called Cicero because of a wart, shaped like a vetch (cicer), on an ancestor’s nose; more probably his forebears had earned the cognomen by raising renowned crops of chick-peas. In his Laws Cicero describes with engaging tenderness the modest villa that had seen his birth near Arpinum, halfway between Rome and Naples, in the foothills of the Apennines. His father was just rich enough to give his son the best education that the age could provide. He engaged the Greek poet Archias to tutor Marcus in literature and Greek and then sent the youth to study law with Q. Mucius Scaevola, the greatest jurist of his time. Cicero listened eagerly to the trials and debates in the Forum, and rapidly learned the arts and tricks of forensic speech. “To succeed in the law,” he said, “a man must renounce all pleasures, avoid all amusements, say farewell to recreation, games, entertainment, almost to intercourse with his friends.”³⁶

Soon he was practicing law himself and making speeches whose brilliance and courage won him the gratitude of the middle classes and the plebs. He prosecuted a favorite of Sulla and denounced the proscriptions in the midst of the Sullan terror (80 B.C..).³⁷ Shortly afterward, perhaps to avoid the dictator’s revenge, he went to Greece, and continued there his studies of oratory and philosophy. After three happy years in Athens he passed over to Rhodes, where he heard the lectures of Apollonius, son of Molon, on rhetoric, and those of Poseidonius on philosophy. From the first he learned the periodic sentence structure and purity of speech that were to distinguish his style; and from the other that mild Stoicism which he would later expound in his essays on religion, government, friendship, and old age.

Returning to Rome at the age of thirty, he married Terentia, whose ample dowry now enabled him to go into politics. In 75 he distinguished himself by his just administration of a quaestorship in Sicily. In 70, having resumed the practice of law, he raised a furor among the aristocracy by accepting a retainer from the cities of Sicily and bringing suit against the senator Caius Verres, on the charge that as propraetor there (73-71) Verres had sold his appointments and decisions, had lowered individual tax assessments in inverse proportion to bribes received, had despoiled Syracuse of nearly all its statuary, had assigned the revenues of a whole city to his mistress, and all in all had carried injustice, extortion, and robbery to such a pitch as to leave the island more desolate than after two Servile Wars. Worse yet, Verres had kept for himself some of the spoils that usually went to the publicans. The business class supported Cicero in the indictment, while Hortensius, aristocratic leader of the Roman bar, led the defense for Verres. Cicero was allowed some hundred days to gather evidence in Sicily; he took only fifty, but he presented so much damaging testimony in his opening address that Hortensius—who had decorated his gardens with part of Verres’ sculptural loot—abandoned his client. Condemned to pay a fine of 40,000,000 sesterces, Verres fled into exile. Cicero published the five additional speeches that he had prepared; they constituted an unsparing attack upon Roman malfeasance in the provinces. His energy and courage won him such support that when he ran for the consulate for 63 B.C. he was elected by acclamation.

Born of modest equestrian rank, Cicero had naturally sided with the middle class and had resented the pride, privileges, and misrule of the aristocracy. But far more deeply he feared those radical leaders whose program, he thought, threatened all property with mob rule. He therefore made it his policy, now that he was in office, to promote a “concord of the orders”—i.e., a co-operation of the aristocracy and the business class—against the returning tide of revolt.

The causes and forces of discontent, however, were too deep and varied to be easily dissolved. Many of the poor were listening to preachers of utopia, and some who listened were ripe for violence. A little above them were plebeians who had forfeited their property through defaulted mortgages. Some of Sulla’s veterans had failed to make their land allotments pay and were ready for any disturbance that might give them loot without toil. Among the upper classes were insolvent debtors and ruined speculators who had lost all hope or wish to meet their obligations. Others had political ambitions and saw their road to advancement cluttered with conservatives who took too long to die. A few revolutionists were sincere idealists, convinced that only a complete overturn could mitigate the corruption and inequity of the Roman state.

One man sought to unite these scattered groups into a coherent political force. We know Lucius Sergius Catiline only through his enemies—through the history of his movement by the millionaire Sallust, and through the violent vituperation of Cicero’s orations Against Catiline. Sallust describes him as a “guilt-stained soul at odds with gods and men, who found no rest either waking or sleeping, so cruelly did conscience ravage his overwrought mind. Hence his pallid complexion, his bloodshot eyes, his gait now fast now slow; in short, his face and every glance showed the madman.”³⁸ Such a description suggests the pictures that a people struggling for life or power paints of its enemies in war; when the battle is over the pictures are gradually revised, but in the case of Catiline we have no revision. In youth he had been charged with deflowering a Vestal Virgin, a half sister of Cicero’s first wife; the court had acquitted the Virgin, but gossip had not acquitted Catiline; on the contrary, it added that he had killed his son to please his jealous mistress.³⁹ In the scale against these stories we can only say that for four years after Catiline’s death the common people of Rome—“the miserable, starveling rabble,” Cicero called them—strewed flowers upon his tomb.⁴⁰ Sallust quotes what purports to be one of his speeches:

Ever since the state fell under the sway of a few powerful men . . . all influence, rank, and wealth have been in their hands. To us they have left danger, defeat, prosecutions, poverty. . . . What have we left save only the breath of life? ... Is it not better to die valiantly than to lose our wretched and dishonored lives after being the sport of other men’s insolence? ⁴¹

The program on which he proposed to unite the heterogeneous elements of revolution was simple: novae tabulae—“new records”—i.e., a clean sweep and abolition of all debts. He labored for this purpose with all the energy of a Caesar; indeed, for a time he had the sympathy, if not the secret support, of Caesar. “There was nothing,” said Cicero, “that he could not undergo, no pains that he would spare of co-operation, vigilance, and toil. He could bear cold, hunger, and thirst.”⁴² We are assured by his enemies that he organized a band of 400 men who planned to kill the consuls and seize the government on the first day of 65. The day came, and nothing unusual transpired. At the end of 64 Catiline stood against Cicero for the consulate and waged a vigorous campaign.^* Capital took fright and began to leave Italy. The upper classes united in support of Cicero; for a year the concordia ordinum that he had asked for was a reality, and he was its perfect voice.

Blocked politically, Catiline turned to war. Secretly his followers organized an army of 20,000 men in Etruria, and gathered together in Rome a group of conspirators that included representatives of every class from senators to slaves, and two urban praetors—Cethegus and Lentulus. In the following October Catiline again ran for the consulate. To make sure of his election, conservative historians tell us, he planned to have his rival murdered during the campaign, and to have Cicero assassinated at the same time. Claiming that he had been apprised of these plans, Cicero filled the Field of Mars with armed guards and superintended the voting. Despite the enthusiastic support of the proletariat, Catiline was again defeated. On November 7, says Cicero, several conspirators knocked at his door, but were driven away by his guards. On the morrow, seeing Catiline in the Senate, Cicero flung at him that superb excoriation which once every schoolboy mouthed. As the oration proceeded, the seats around Catiline were emptied one by one, until he sat alone. Silently he bore the torrent of accusations, the sharp, relentless phrases falling like whips upon his head. Cicero played upon every emotion; he spoke of the nation as the common father, and of Catiline as in intent a parricide; he charged him—not with evidence given, but by innuendo and implication—with conspiracy against the state, with theft, adultery, and sexual abnormality; finally he petitioned Jove to protect Rome, and to devote Catiline to eternal punishment. When Cicero had finished, Catiline walked out unhindered, and joined his forces in Etruria. His general, L. Manlius, sent a last appeal to the Senate:

We call gods and men to witness that it is not against our country that we have taken up arms, nor against the safety of our fellow citizens. We, wretched paupers, who through the violence and cruelty of usurers are without a country, condemned to scorn and indigence, are actuated by only one wish: to guarantee our personal security against wrong. We demand neither power nor wealth, those great and external causes of strife among mankind. We only ask for freedom, a treasure that no man will surrender except with life itself. We implore you, senators, have pity on your miserable fellow citizens! ⁴⁴

The next day, in a second oration, Cicero described the rebel’s following as centering around a coterie of perfumed perverts, and indulged without stint his genius for sarcasm and invective, ending again on a religious note. In the following weeks he presented evidence to the Senate purporting to show that Catiline had tried to stir up revolution in Gaul. On December 3 he had Lentulus, Cethegus, and five other adherents of Catiline arrested. In a third oration he declared their guilt, announced their imprisonment, and told the Senate and the people that the conspiracy was broken and that they might retire to their homes in security and peace. On December 5 he convoked the Senate and asked what should be done with the prisoners. Silanus voted that they should be executed. Caesar advised mere imprisonment, recalling that the execution of a Roman citizen was forbidden by the Sempronian Law. In a fourth oration Cicero gently advised death. Cato gave the opinion the sanction of his philosophy, and death won the day. Some young aristocrats tried to kill Caesar as he left the senate chamber, but he escaped. Cicero, with armed men, went to the jail and had the sentence carried out with a minimum of delay. Marcus Antonius, co-consul with Cicero, and father of a famous son, was sent north with an army to destroy Catiline’s force. The Senate promised pardon and 200,000 sesterces to every man who would leave the rebel ranks; but, says Sallust, “not one deserted from Catiline’s camp.” On the plains of Pistoia battle was joined (61). The 3000 insurgents, far outnumbered, fought to the end around their treasured standards, the eagles of Marius. None surrendered or took flight; every one of them died on the field, among them Catiline.

Being essentially a man of thought rather than of action, Cicero was surprised and impressed by the skill and courage he had shown in suppressing a dangerous revolt. “The direction of so great an enterprise,” he told the Senate, “seems scarcely possible to merely human wisdom.”⁴⁵ He compared himself with Romulus, but considered it a greater deed to have preserved Rome than to have founded it.⁴⁶ Senators and magnates smiled at his language, but they knew that he had saved them. Cato and Catulus hailed him as pater patriae, father of his country. When, at the end of 63, he laid down his office, all the propertied classes in the community, he tells us, gave him thanks, named him immortal, and escorted him in honor to his home.⁴⁷ The proletariat did not join in these demonstrations. It could not forgive him for violating the laws of Rome by putting citizens to death without appeal; it felt that he had made no effort to remove the causes of Catiline’s revolt, or to mitigate the poverty of the masses. It refused to let him address the Assembly on that last day, and listened in anger when he swore that he had preserved the city. The revolution was not over. With Caesar’s consulate it would begin again.

CHAPTER VIII

Literature Under the Revolution

145-30 B.C.

I. LUCRETIUS

AMID this turbulent transformation of economy, government, and morals, literature was not forgotten, and did not quite escape the fever and stimulus of the age. Varro and Nepos found safety in antiquarian scholarship or historical research; Sallust retired from his campaigns to defend his party and disguise his morals with brilliant monographs; Caesar stooped from empire to grammar and continued his wars in his Commentaries; Catullus and Calvus sought refuge from politics in the pursuit and poetry of love; timid and sensitive spirits like Lucretius hid themselves in the gardens of philosophy; and Cicero retreated now and then from the heat of the Forum to cool his blood with books. But not one of them found peace. War and revolution touched them with pervasive infection; and even Lucretius must have known the restlessness which he describes:

There is a weight on their minds, and a mountain of misery lies on their hearts. . . . For each, not knowing what he wants, seeks always to change his place, as if he could drop his burden. Here is one who, bored to death at home, goes forth every now and then from his palace; but feeling no better abroad, suddenly returns. Off he courses, driving his nags to his country house in headlong haste. . . . He has hardly crossed the threshold when he yawns, or seeks oblivion in a heavy sleep, or even hurries back to the city. So each man flees from himself; but, as one might expect, the self which he cannot escape cleaves to him all the more against his will. He hates himself because, a sick man, he does not know the cause of his complaint. Any man who could see that clearly would cast aside his business, and before all else would seek to understand the nature of things.¹

His poem is our only biography of Titus Lucretius Carus; it is proudly reticent about its author; and outside of it, barring a few allusions, Roman literature is strangely silent about one of its greatest men. Tradition placed his birth at 99 or 95, his death at 55 or 51, B.C.. He lived through half a century of the Roman revolution: through the Social War, Marian massacres, and Sullan proscriptions; through Catiline’s conspiracy and Caesar’s consulate. The aristocracy to which he probably belonged was in obvious decay; the world in which he lived was falling apart into a chaos that left no life or fortune secure. His poem is a longing for physical and mental peace.

Lucretius sought refuge in nature, philosophy, and poetry. Perhaps also he had a round of love; he must have fared badly, for he writes ungallantly of women, denounces the lure of beauty, and advises itching youth to appease the flesh with calm promiscuity.² In woods and fields, in plants and animals, m mountain, river, and sea, he found a delight only rivaled by his passion for philosophy. He was as impressionable as Wordsworth, as keen of sense as Keats, as prone as Shelley to find metaphysics in a pebble or a leaf. Nothing of nature’s loveliness or terror was lost upon him; he was stirred by the forms and sounds, odors and savors, of things; felt the silences of secret haunts, the quiet falling of the night, the lazy waking of the day. Everything natural was a marvel to him—the patient flow of water, the sprouting of seeds, the endless changes of the sky, the imperturbable persistence of the stars. He observed animals with curiosity and sympathy, loved their forms of strength or grace, felt their sufferings, and wondered at their wordless philosophy. No poet before him had so expressed the grandeur of the world in its detailed variety and its congregated power. Here at last nature won the citadels of literature, and rewarded her poet with a force of descriptive speech that only Homer and Shakespeare have surpassed.

So responsive a spirit must have been deeply moved in youth by the mystery and pageantry of religion. But the ancient faith, which had once served family discipline and social order, had lost its hold on the educated classes of Rome. Caesar smiled indulgently as he played pontifex maximus, and the banquets of the priests were the holydays of Roman epicures. A small minority of the people were open atheists; now and then some Roman Alcibiades nocturnally mutilated the statues of the gods.³ No longer inspired or consoled by the official ritual, many among the lower classes were flocking to the bloodstained shrines of the Phrygian Great Mother, or the Cappadocian goddess Ma, or some of the Oriental deities that had entered Italy with soldiers or captives from the East. Under the influence of Greek or Asiatic cults the old Roman idea of “Orcus” as a colorless subterranean abode of all the indiscriminate dead had developed into belief in a literal Hell—a “Tartarus” or “Acheron” of endless suffering for all but a “reborn” initiated few.⁴ The sun and the moon were conceived as gods, and every eclipse sent terror into lonely villages and teeming tenements. Chaldean fortunetellers and astrologers were overrunning Italy, casting horoscopes for paupers and millionaires, revealing hidden treasures and future events, interpreting omens and dreams with cautious ambiguity and profitable flattery. Every unusual occurrence in nature was examined as the warning of a god. It was this mass of superstition, ritualism, and hypocrisy that Lucretius knew as religion.

No wonder that he rebelled against it, and attacked it with all the ardor of a religious reformer. We may judge from the bitterness of his resentment the depth of his youthful piety and the distress of his disillusionment. Seeking for some alternative faith, he passed through the skepticism of Ennius to the great poem in which Empedocles had expounded evolution and the conflict of opposites. When he discovered the writings of Epicurus it seemed to him that he had found the answers to his questions; that strange mixture of materialism and free will, of joyful gods and a godless world, appealed to him as a free man’s answer to doubt and fear. A breath of liberation from supernatural terrors seemed to come out of Epicurus’ garden, revealing the omnipresence of law, the self-ruled independence of nature, the forgivable naturalness of death. Lucretius resolved to take this philosophy out of the ungainly prose in which Epicurus had expressed it, fuse it into poetic form, and offer it to his generation as the way, the truth, and the life. He felt in himself a rare and double power—the objective perception of the scientist and the subjective emotion of the poet; and he saw in the total order of nature a sublimity, and in nature’s parts a beauty, that encouraged and justified this marriage of philosophy and poetry. His great purpose aroused all his powers, lifted him to a unique intellectual exuberance, and left him, before its completion, exhausted and perhaps insane. But his “long and delightful toil” gave him a consuming happiness, and he poured into it all the devotion of a profoundly religious soul.

He chose for his work a philosophical rather than a poetic title—De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things”—a simple translation of the Peri Physeos (“About Nature”) which the pre-Socratics had used as a common name for their treatises. He offered it to the sons of Caius Memmius, praetor in 58, as a road from fear to understanding. He took as his model the Empedoclean epic of exposition, as his speech the quaint bluntness of Ennius, as his medium the mobile and versatile hexameter. And then, forgetting for a moment the distant carelessness of the gods, he began with a fervent apostrophe to Venus conceived, like Empedocles’ Love, as a symbol of creative desire and the ways of peace:

Mother of Aeneas’ race, delight of men and gods, O nurturing Venus! . . . Through thee every kind of life is conceived and born, and looks upon the sun; before thee and thy coming the winds flee, and the clouds of the sky depart; to thee the miraculous earth lifts up sweet flowers; for thee the waves of the sea laugh, and the peaceful heavens shine with overspreading light. For as soon as the springtime face of day appears, and the fertilizing south wind makes all things fresh and green, then first the birds of the air proclaim thee and thy advent, O divine one, pierced to the heart by thy power; then the wild herds leap over the glad pastures, and cross the swift streams; so, held captive by thy charm, each one follows thee wherever thou goest to lead. Then through seas and mountains and rushing rivers, and the leafy dwellings of the birds, and the verdant fields, thou strikest soft love into the breasts of all creatures, and makest them to propagate their generations after their kinds. Since, therefore, thou alone rulest the nature of things; since without thee nothing rises to the shining shores of light, nothing joyful or lovely is born; I long for thee as partner in the writing of these verses. . . . Grant to my words, O goddess, an undying beauty. Cause, meanwhile, the savage works of war to sleep and be still. ... As Mars reclines upon thy sacred form, bend thou around him from above, pour sweet coaxings from thy mouth, and beg for thy Romans the gift of peace.⁵

II. DE RERUM NATURA

If we try to reduce to some logical form the passionate disorder of Lucretius’ argument, his initial thesis lies in a famous line:

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum—

“to so many evils religion has persuaded men.”⁶ He tells the story of Iphigenia in Aulis, of countless human sacrifices, of hecatombs offered to gods conceived in the image of man’s greed; he recalls the terror of simplicity and youth lost in a jungle of vengeful deities, the fear of lightning and thunder, of death and Hell, and the subterranean horrors pictured in Etruscan art and Oriental mysteries. He reproaches mankind for preferring sacrificial ritual to philosophical understanding:

O miserable race of men, to impute to the gods such acts as these, and such bitter wrath! What sorrow did men [through such creeds] prepare for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our children! For piety lies not in being often seen turning a veiled head to stones, nor in approaching every altar, nor in lying prostrate . . . before the temples of the gods, nor in sprinkling altars with the blood of beasts . . . but rather in being able to look upon all things with a mind at peace.⁷

There are gods, says Lucretius, but they dwell far off in happy isolation from the thought or cares of men. There, “beyond the flaming ramparts of the world” (extra flammantia moenia mundi),⁸ beyond the reach of our sacrifices and prayers, they live like followers of Epicurus, shunning worldly affairs, content with the contemplation of beauty and the practices of friendship and peace.⁹ They are not the authors of creation, nor the causes of events; who would be so unfair as to charge them with the wastefulness, the disorder, the sufferings, and the injustices of earthly life? No, this infinite universe of many worlds is self-contained; it has no law outside itself; nature does everything of her own accord. “For who is strong enough to rule the sum of things, to hold in hand the mighty bridle of the unfathomable deep?—who to turn all the heavens around at once ... to shake the serene sky with thunder, to launch the lightning that often shatters temples, and cast the bolt that slays the innocent and passes the guilty by?”¹⁰ The only god is Law; and the truest worship, as well as the only peace, lies in learning that Law and loving it. “This terror and gloom of the mind must be dispelled not by the sun’s rays . . . but by the aspect and law of nature.”¹¹

And so, “touching with the honey of the Muses” the rough materialism of Democritus, Lucretius proclaims as his basic theorem that “nothing exists but atoms and the void”¹²—i.e., matter and space. He proceeds at once to a cardinal principle (and assumption) of modern science—that the quantity of matter and motion in the world never varies; no thing arises out of nothing, and destruction is only a change of form. The atoms are indestructible, unchangeable, solid, resilient, soundless, odorless, tasteless, colorless, infinite. They interpenetrate one another to produce endless combinations and qualities; and they move without cease in the seeming stillness of motionless things.

For often on a hill . . . woolly sheep go creeping wherever the dew-sparkling grass tempts them, and the well-fed lambs play and butt their heads in sport; yet in the distance all these are blurred together and seem but a whiteness resting on a green hill. Sometimes great armies cover wide fields in maneuvers mimicking war; the brilliant bronze of their shields illumines the countryside and is mirrored in the sky; the ground trembles and thunders under their marching feet and their galloping steeds; and the mountains, buffeted by the sound, hurl it back to the very stars: and yet there is a place on the peaks from which these armies appear to be motionless, a little brightness resting on the plain.¹³

The atoms ^* have parts—minima, or “least things”—each minimum being solid, indivisible, ultimate. Perhaps because of the different arrangement of these parts, the atoms vary in size and shape, and so make possible the refreshing diversity of nature. The atoms do not move in straight or uniform lines; there is in their motion an incalculable “declination” or deviation, an elemental spontaneity that runs through all things and culminates in man’s free will.^*

All was once formless; but the gradual assortment of the moving atoms by their size and shape produced—without design—air, fire, water, and earth, and out of these the sun and moon, the planets and stars. In the infinity of space new worlds are ever being born, and old worlds are wasting away. The stars are fires set in the ring of ether (a mist of thinnest atoms) that surrounds each planetary system; this cosmic wall of fire constitutes the “flaming ramparts of the world.” A portion of the primeval mist broke off from the mass, revolved separately, and cooled to form the earth. Earthquakes are not the growling of deities, but the expansion of subterranean gases and streams. Thunder and lightning are not the voice and breath of a god, but natural results of condensed and clashing clouds. Rain is not the mercy of Jove, but the return to earth of moisture evaporated from it by the sun.

Life does not differ essentially from other matter; it is a product of moving atoms which are individually dead. As the universe took form by the inherent laws of matter, so the earth produced by a purely natural selection all the species and organs of life.

Nothing arises in the body in order that we may use it, but what arises brings forth its own use.¹⁴ ... It was no design of the atoms that led them to arrange themselves in order with keen intelligence . . . but because many atoms in infinite time have moved and met in all manner of ways, trying all combinations. . . . Hence arose the beginnings of great things . . . and the generations of living creatures.¹⁵ . . . Many were the monsters that the earth tried to make: . . . some without feet, and others without hands or mouth or face, or with limbs bound to their frames. ... It was in vain; nature denied them growth, nor could they find food or join in the way of love. . . . Many kinds of animals must have perished then, unable to forge the chain of procreation . . . for those to which nature gave no [protective] qualities lay at the mercy of others, and were soon destroyed.¹⁶

Mind (animus) is an organ precisely like feet or eyes; it is, like them, a tool or function of that soul (anima) or vital breath which is spread as a very fine matter throughout the body, and animates every part. Upon the highly sensitive atoms that form the mind fall the images or films that perpetually emanate from the surfaces of things; this is the source of sensation. Taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch are caused by particles coming from objects and striking tongue or palate, nostrils, ears, eyes, or skin; all senses are forms of touch. The senses are the final test of truth; if they seem to err, it is only through misinterpretation, and only another sense can correct them. Reason cannot be the test of truth, for reason depends upon experience—i.e., sensation.

The soul is neither spiritual nor immortal. It could not move the body unless it too were corporeal; it grows and ages with the body; it is affected like the body by disease, medicine, or wine; its atoms are apparently dispersed when the body dies. Soul without body would be senseless, meaningless; of what use would soul be without organs of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight? Life is given us not in freehold but on loan, and for so long as we can make use of it. When we have exhausted our powers we should leave the table of life as graciously as a grateful guest rising from a feast. Death itself is not terrible; only our fears of the hereafter make it so. But there is no hereafter. Hell is here in the suffering that comes from ignorance, passion, pugnacity, and greed; heaven is here in the sapientum templa serena—“the serene temples of the wise.”¹⁷

Virtue lies not in the fear of the gods, nor in the timid shunning of pleasure; it lies in the harmonious operation of senses and faculties guided by reason. “Some men wear out their lives for the sake of a statue and fame”; but “the real wealth of man is to live simply with a mind at peace” (vivere parce aequo animo).¹⁸ Better than living stiffly in gilded halls is “to lie in groups upon the soft grass beside a rivulet and under tall trees,”¹⁹ or to hear gentle music, or lose one’s ego in the love and care of our children. Marriage is good, but passionate love is a madness that strips the mind of clarity and reason. “If one is wounded by the shafts of Venus—whether it be a boy with girlish limbs who launches the shaft, or a woman radiating love from her whole body—he is drawn toward the source of the blow, and longs to unite.”²⁰ No marriage and no society can find a sound basis in such erotic befuddlement.

As Lucretius, exhausting his passions on philosophy, finds no room for romantic love, so he rejects the romantic anthropology of Greek Rousseauians who had glorified primitive life. Men were hardier then, to be sure; but they dwelt in caves without fire, they mated without marriage, killed without law, and died of starvation as frequently as people in civilization die of overeating.²¹ How civilization developed, Lucretius tells in a pretty summary of ancient anthropology. Social organization gave man the power to survive animals far stronger than himself. He discovered fire from the friction of leaves and boughs, developed language from gestures, and learned song from the birds; he tamed animals for his use, and himself with marriage and law; he tilled the soil, wove clothing, molded metals into tools; he observed the heavens, measured time, and learned navigation; he improved the art of killing, conquered the weak, and built cities and states. History is a procession of states and civilizations rising, prospering, decaying, dying; but each in turn transmits the civilizing heritage of customs, morals, and arts; “like runners in a race they hand on the lamps of life” (et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt).²²

All things that grow decay: organs, organisms, families, states, races, planets, stars; only the atoms never die. The forces of creation and development are balanced by the forces of destruction in a vast diastole and systole of life and death. In nature there is evil as well as good; suffering, even unmerited, comes to every life, and dissolution dogs the steps of every evolution. Our earth itself is dying: earthquakes are breaking it up. The land is becoming exhausted, rains and rivers erode it, and carry even the mountains at last into the sea. Someday our whole stellar system will suffer a like mortality; “the walls of the sky will be stormed on every side, and will collapse into a crumbling ruin.”²³ But the very moment of mortality betrays the invincible vitality of the world. “The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge sung for the dead.”²⁴ New systems form, new stars and planets, another earth, and fresher life. Evolution begins again.

Looking back over this “most marvelous performance in all antique literature,”²⁵ we may first recognize its shortcomings: the chaos of its contents, left unrevised by the poet’s early death; the repetition of phrases, lines, whole passages; the conception of sun, moon, and stars as no larger than we see them;²⁶ the inability of the system to explain how dead atoms became life and consciousness; the insensitiveness to the insights, consolations, inspirations, and moving poetry of faith, and the moral and social functions of religion. But how light these faults are in the scale against the brave attempt at a rational interpretation of the universe, of history, of religion, of disease; ^* the picture of nature as a world of law, in which matter and motion are never diminished or increased; the grandeur of the theme and the nobility of its treatment; the sustained power of imagination that feels everywhere “the majesty of things,” and lifts the visions of Empedocles, the science of Democritus, and the ethics of Epicurus into some of the loftiest poetry that any age has known. Here was a language still rough and immature, almost devoid as yet of philosophical or scientific terms; Lucretius does not merely create a new vocabulary, he forces the old speech into new channels of rhythm and grace; and, while molding the hexameter into an unequaled masculinity of power, reaches now and then the mellow tenderness and fluency of Virgil. The sustained vitality of his poem shows Lucretius as one who amid all sufferings and disappointments enjoyed and exhausted life almost from birth to death.

How did he die? Saint Jerome reports that “Lucretius was driven mad by a love philter, after he had written several books. . . . He died by his own hand in his forty-fourth year.”²⁸ The story is uncorroborated, and has been much doubted; no saint could be trusted to give an objective account of Lucretius. Some critics have found support for the story in the unnatural tension of the poem, its poorly organized contents, and its sudden end;²⁹ but one need not be a Lucretius to be excitable, disorderly, or dead.

Like Euripides, Lucretius is a modern; his thought and feeling are more congenial to our time than to the century before Christ. Horace and Virgil were deeply influenced by him in their youth, and recall him without name in many a lordly phrase; but the attempt of Augustus to restore the old faith made it unwise for these imperial protégés to express too openly their admiration and their debt. The Epicurean philosophy was as unsuited to the Roman mind as epicurean practices suited Roman taste in the age of Lucretius.^* Rome wanted a metaphysic that would exalt mystic powers rather than natural law; an ethic that would make a virile and martial people rather than humanitarian lovers of quiet and peace; and a political philosophy that, like those of Virgil and Horace, would justify Rome’s imperial mastery. In the resurrection of faith after Seneca, Lucretius was almost forgotten. Not till Poggio rediscovered him in 1418 did he begin to influence European thought. A physician of Verona, Girolamo Fracastoro (1483-1553) took from the poet the theory of disease as due to noxious “seeds” (semina) floating in the air; and in 1647 Gassendi revived the atomic philosophy. Voltaire read the De Rerum Natura devotedly, and agreed with Ovid that its rebel verses would last as long as the earth.³⁰

In the endless struggle of East and West, of “tender-minded” and consoling faiths vs. a “tough-minded” and materialistic science, Lucretius waged alone the most vigorous battle of his time. He is, of course, the greatest of philosophical poets. In him, as in Catullus and Cicero, Latin literature came of age, and leadership in letters passed at last from Greece to Rome.

III. LESBIA’S LOVER

In 57 B.C.. the Caius Memmius to whom Lucretius dedicated his poem left Rome to serve as propraetor in Bithynia. After the growing custom of Roman governors he took with him an author—not Lucretius, but a poet different from the other in everything but the strength of his passion. Quintus (or Caius) Valerius Catullus had come to Rome some five years before from his native Verona, where his father was of sufficient standing to be frequent host to Caesar. Quintus himself must have had a substantial competence, for he owned villas near Tibur and on Lake Garda and had an elegant house in Rome. He speaks of these properties as choked with mortgages, and repeatedly proclaims his poverty; but the picture we form of him from his poems is that of a polished man of the world who did not bother to earn a living, but enjoyed himself unstintingly among the wilder set in the capital. The keenest wits, the cleverest young orators and politicians belonged to this circle: Marcus Caelius, the impecunious aristocrat who was to become a communist; Licinius Calvus, brilliant in poetry and in law; and Helvius Cinna, a poet whom Antony’s mob would mistake for one of Caesar’s assassins and beat to death. These men opposed Caesar with every epigram at their disposal, unaware that their literary revolt reflected the revolution in which they lived. They were tired of old forms in literature, of the crudity and bombast of Naevius and Ennius; they wished to sing the sentiments of youth in new and lyric meters, and with a refinement and delicacy of execution known once in the Alexandria of Callimachus, but never yet seen in Rome. And they were resentful of old morals, of the mos maiorum perpetually preached upon them by their exhausted elders; they announced the sanctity of instinct, the innocence of desire, and the grandeur of dissipation. They and Catullus were no worse than other young literary blades of their generation and the next; Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, even the shy Virgil in his youth, made life and verse revolve around any woman, married or not, who fed their muses with facile casual love.

The liveliest lady in this group was Clodia, of the proud old Claudian gens that even now had emperors in its loins.^* Apuleius³¹ assures us that it was she whom Catullus named Lesbia in memory of the Sappho whose poems he occasionally translated, often imitated, and always loved. Arriving in Rome at the age of twenty-two, he cultivated her friendship while her husband governed Cisalpine Gaul. He was fascinated the moment she “set her shining foot on the well-worn threshold”; he called her his “lustrous goddess of the delicate step”; and indeed a woman’s walk, like her voice, may be in itself a sufficient seduction. She accepted him graciously as one of her worshipers; and the enraptured poet, unable to match otherwise the gifts of his rivals, laid at her feet the most beautiful lyrics in the Latin tongue. For her he translated perfectly Sappho’s description of the lover’s frenzy that now raged in him;³² and to the sparrow that she pressed to her bosom he indited a jewel of jealousy:

Sparrow, delight of my beloved,

Who plays with you, and holds you to her breast;

Who offers her forefinger to your seeking,

And tempts your sharp bite;

I know not what dear jest it pleases my shining one

To make of my desire! . . .^*

For a while he was consumed with happiness, played attendance upon her daily, read his poems to her, forgot everything but his infatuation.

Let us live, Lesbia mine, and love,

And all the mumbling of harsh old men

We shall reckon as a pennyworth.

Suns may sink and return;

For us, when once our brief sun has set,

There comes the long sleep of everlasting night.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

Then another thousand, then a second hundred,

Then still another thousand, then a hundred.

And when we shall have reached many thousands

We shall confuse the count, lest we should ever know,

Or some mean soul should envy us,

Learning the great sum of our kisses.†

We do not know how long this ecstasy lasted; probably his thousands wearied her, and she who had betrayed her husband for him found it a relief to betray him for another. Her benefactions now ranged so widely that Catullus madly fancied her “embracing at once three hundred adulterers.”³⁵ In the very heat of his love he came to hate her (odi et amo³⁶) and rejected with a Keatsian image her protestations of fidelity:

A woman’s words to hungry lover said

Should be upon the flowing winds inscribed,

Upon swift streams engraved.³⁷

When sharp doubt became dull certainty his passion turned to bitterness and coarse revenge; he accused her of yielding to tavern habitués, denounced her new lovers with obscene abandon, and meditated suicide, poetically. At the same time he was capable of nobler feelings: he addressed to his friend Manlius a touching epithalamium or wedding song, envying him the wholesome comradeship of marriage, the security and stability of a home, and the happy tribulations of parentage. He snatched himself from the scene by accompanying Memmius to Bithynia, but he was disappointed in his hopes of restoring there his spirits or his purse. He went out of his way to find the grave of a brother who had died in the Troad; over it he performed reverently the ancestral burial rites; and soon afterward he composed tender lines that gave the world a famous phrase:

Dear brother, through many states and seas

Have I come to this sorrowful sacrifice,

Bringing you the last gift for the dead. . . .

Accept these offerings wet with fraternal tears;

And forever, brother, hail and farewell.^*

His sojourn in Asia changed and softened him. The skeptic who had written of death as “the sleep of an eternal night” was moved by the old religions and ceremonies of the East. In the rich and flowing verse of his greatest poem, “Atys,” he described with vivid intensity the worship of Cybele, and caught an exotic fervor in the lament of the self-emasculated devotee over the joys and friends of his youth. In “Peleus and Thetis” he retold the tale of Peleus and Ariadne in hexameters of such melodious delicacy as even Virgil would hardly equal. In a small yacht bought at Amastris he sailed through the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Adriatic, and up the Po to Lake Garda and his villa at Sirmio. “Oh, what happier way is there to escape the cares of the world,” he asked, “than to return to our own homes and altars, and rest on our own beloved bed?”³⁹ Men begin by seeking happiness and are content at last with peace.

We know Catullus more intimately than most Roman poets, because his subject is nearly always himself. These lyric cries of love and hate reveal a sensitive and kindly spirit, capable of generous feeling even for relatives, but unpleasantly self-centered, deliberately obscene, and merciless to his enemies. He published their most private peculiarities, their pederastic propensities, their bodily odor. One of them washes his teeth with urine, after an old Spanish custom;⁴⁰ another is so foul of breath that if he should open his mouth all persons near him would fall dead.⁴¹ Catullus oscillates easily between love and offal, kisses and fundaments; he rivals Martial as a guide to the street-corner urology of Rome, and suggests in his contemporaries and his class a mixture of primitive coarseness with civilized refinement, as if educated Romans, however versed in the literature of Greece, could never quite forget the stable and the camp. Catullus pleads, like Martial, that he must salt his lines with dirt to hold his audience.

He atoned for these faults by the conscientious perfection of his verse. His hendecasyllabics leap with a naturalness and spontaneity that escape the artifices of Horace and occasionally rise above all the graces of Virgil. It took much art to conceal his art, and Catullus more than once refers to the painful toil and care that produced his quick intelligibility and apparent ease. His vocabulary helped him to this end; he molded the words of popular speech into poetry, and enriched the Latin of literature with affectionate diminutives as well as tavern slang. He avoided inversions and obscurities, and gave to his lines a limpid fluidity grateful to the ear. He pored over the poets of Hellenistic Alexandria and ancient Ionia: mastered the smooth technique and varied meters of Callimachus, the lusty directness of Archilochus, the vinous exuberance of Anacreon, the amorous ecstasy of Sappho; indeed, it is largely through him that we must guess how these poets wrote. He learned their lessons so thoroughly that he became, from their pupil, their equal. He did for Latin poetry what Cicero did for Latin prose: he took it as crude potency and lifted it to an art that only Virgil would surpass.

IV. THE SCHOLARS

How were Latin books written, illustrated, bound, published, sold? For school exercises, short letters, transient commercial records, the Romans through antiquity wrote with a stylus upon waxed tablets and erased with the thumb. The oldest literary Latin known to us was written with quill and ink upon paper manufactured in Egypt from the pressed and glued leaves of the papyrus tree. In the first centuries of our era parchment made from the dried skins of animals began to rival papyrus as a receptacle of literature and important documents. A folded sheet of membrane, or vellum, constituted a diploma, or twofold. Usually a literary work was issued as a roll (volumen, “wound up”), and was read by unrolling as the reading progressed. The text was customarily written two or three narrow columnae to a page, often without punctuation of clauses or even separation of words. Some manuscripts were illustrated by ink drawings; Varro’s Imagines, e.g., consisted of 700 portraits of famous men, each picture accompanied by a biographical note. Anyone could publish a manuscript by hiring slaves to make copies, and selling the copies. Rich men had clerks who copied for them any book they wished to own. Since copyists were fed rather than paid, books were cheap. First “printings” were usually of a thousand copies. Booksellers bought wholesale from publishers like Atticus, and sold at retail in arcade bookstalls. Neither publisher nor bookseller gave the author anything except courtesy and occasional gifts; royalties were unknown. Private libraries were now numerous; and about 40 B.C. Asinius Pollio made his great collection the first public library in Rome. Caesar planned a still larger one, and made Varro its director; but this, like so many of his ideas, waited upon Augustus for its fulfillment.

Stimulated by these facilities, Roman literature and scholarship began to equal the industry of the Alexandrians. Poems, pamphlets, histories, textbooks rivaled the Tiber’s floods; every aristocrat adorned his escapades with verse, every lady composed words and music, every general wrote memoirs. It was an age of “outlines”; summaries on every subject struggled to meet the needs of a hurried commercial age. Marcus Terentius Varro, despite many military campaigns, found time during his eighty-nine years (116-26 B.C.) to synopsize nearly every branch of knowledge; his 620 “volumes” (some seventy-four books) constituted a one-man encyclopedia for his time. Fascinated by the pedigrees of words, he wrote an essay On the Latin Language, now our chief guide to early Roman speech. Perhaps in co-operation with the aims of Augustus, he tried in his treatise On Country Life (De Re Rustica, 36 B.C..) to encourage a return to the land as the best refuge from the disorder of civil strife. “My eightieth year,” said his introduction, “warns me that I must pack up and prepare to leave this life”; ⁴² he would make his last testament a guide to rural happiness and peace. He admired the sturdy women who were delivered of children in the fields and soon resumed work.⁴³ He mourned the low native birth rate that was transforming the population of Rome; “formerly the blessing of children was woman’s pride; now she boasts with Ennius that she ‘would rather face battle three times than bear one child.’” In his Divine Antiquities he concluded that the fertility, order, and courage of a nation require moral commandments supported by religious belief. Adopting the distinction of the great jurist Q. Mucius Scaevola between two kinds of religion—one for philosophers and one for the people ⁴⁴—he argued that the second must be upheld regardless of its intellectual defects; and though he himself accepted only a vague pantheism,^* he proposed a vigorous attempt to restore the worship of Rome’s ancient deities. Influenced by Cato and Polybius, he in his turn decisively affected the religious policy of Augustus and the pious ruralism of Virgil.

As if to complete the work of the elder Cato in every field, Varro continued the censor’s Origines in his Life of the Roman People—a history of Roman civilization. It is a pity that time has scuttled this and nearly all of Varro’s work, while preserving the schoolboy biographies of Cornelius Nepos. In Rome history was an art, never also a science; not even in Tacitus did it rise to a critical scrutiny and summary of sources. History as rhetoric, however, found in this age a brilliant practitioner—Caius Sallustius Crispus (86-35 B.C.). He played a vigorous role as politician and warrior on Caesar’s side, governed Numidia, stole with skill, and spent a fortune on women; then he retired to a life of luxury and letters in a Roman villa that became famous for its gardens and was to be the home of emperors. His books, like politics, were a continuation of war by other means; his Histories, Jugurthine War, and Catiline were able defenses of the populares, powerful attacks upon the “old guard.” He exposed the moral decay of Rome,† charged the Senate and the courts with placing property rights above human rights, and put into the mouth of Marius a speech asserting the natural equality of all classes and demanding a career open to talent wherever born.⁴⁶ He deepened his narratives with philosophical commentary and psychological analysis of character, and carved out a style of epigrammatic compactness and vivid rapidity which became a model for Tacitus.

That style, like almost all Roman prose of Sallust’s century and the next, took its color and tone from the oratory of the Forum and the courts. The development of the legal profession, and the growth of a talkative democracy, had widened the demand for public speaking. Schools of rhetoric were multiplying despite governmental hostility; “rhetoricians,” said Cicero, “are everywhere.” Great masters of the art appeared in the first half of the first century before Christ: Marcus Antonius (father of Mark), Lucius Crassus, Sulpicius Rufus, Quintus Hortensius. We may imagine the strength of their lungs when we hear of audiences that overflowed from the Forum into neighboring temples and balconies. The flamboyant eloquence and purchasable conscience of Hortensius made him the darling of the aristocracy and one of Rome’s richest men; he left his heirs 10,000 casks of wine.^46b His delivery was so animated that famous actors like Roscius and Aesopus attended the trials at which he pleaded, to perfect their acting by studying his gestures and his delivery. Following the example of old Cato, he revised and published his speeches—an art which his rival Cicero perfected, and which furthered the influence of rhetoric upon all Roman prose. It was through oratory that the Latin language reached its full height of colorful eloquence, masculine power, and almost Oriental grace. Indeed, the younger orators who came after Hortensius and Cicero condemned the luxurious adornment and passionate turbulence of what they called the “Asianic” style; and Caesar, Calvus, Brutus, and Pollio pledged themselves to a calmer, chaster, sparer “Attic” speech. Here, so long ago, the battle lines formed between “romanticism” and “classicism”—between the emotional and the intellectual view of life and domination of style. Even in oratory, the young classicists complained, the East was conquering Rome.

V. CICERO’S PEN

Proud of his speeches, and aware that they were making literature, Cicero felt keenly the criticism of the “Attic” school, and defended himself in a long series of treatises on oratorical art. In lively dialogues he sketched the history of Roman eloquence and laid down the rules for composition, prose rhythm, and delivery. He did not admit that his own style was “Asian”; he had modeled it, he claimed, upon that of Demosthenes; and he reminded the Atticists that their cold and passionless speech drove audiences to sleep or flight.

The fifty-seven orations that have come down to us from Cicero illustrate all the tricks of successful eloquence. They excel in the passionate presentation of one side of a question or a character, the entertainment of the auditors with humor and anecdote, the appeal to vanity, prejudice, sentiment, patriotism, and piety, the ruthless exposure of the real or reported, public or private, faults of the opponent or his client, the skillful turning of attention from unfavorable points,, the barrage of rhetorical questions framed to make answer difficult or damaging, the heaping up of charges, in periodic sentences whose clauses are lashes, and whose torrent overwhelms. These speeches do not pretend to be fair; they are defamations rather than declamations, briefs that take every advantage of that freedom of abuse which, though forbidden to the stage, was allowed in the Forum and the courts. Cicero does not hesitate to apply to his victims terms like “swine,” “pest,” “butcher,” “filth”; he tells Piso that virgins kill themselves to escape his lechery, and excoriates Antony for being publicly affectionate to his wife. Audiences and juries enjoyed such vituperation, and no one took it too seriously. Cicero corresponded amiably with Piso a few years after the brutal attack of the In Pisonem. It is to be admitted, further, that Cicero’s orations abound rather in egotism and rhetoric than in moral sincerity, philosophical wisdom, or even legal acumen or depth. But what eloquence! Even Demosthenes was not so vivid, vital, exuberantly witty, so full of the salt and tang of the human fray. Certainly no man before or after Cicero spoke a Latin so seductively charming and fluent, so elegantly passionate; this was the zenith of Latin prose. “You have discovered all the treasures of oratory,” said the generous Caesar in dedicating his book On Analogy to Cicero; “and you have been the first to employ them. Thereby you have laid the Roman people under a mighty obligation, and you honor your fatherland. You have gained a triumph to be preferred to that of the greatest generals. For it is a nobler thing to enlarge the boundaries of human intelligence than those of the Roman Empire.”⁴⁷

The speeches betray the politician; the letters of Cicero bare the man, and make even the politician forgivable. Nearly all of them were dictated to a secretary and never revised by Cicero; most of them were written with no thought of publication; seldom, therefore, has a man’s secret soul been so completely exposed. “He who reads these letters,” said Nepos, “will not much need a history of those times”;⁴⁸ in them the most vital part of the revolutionary drama is seen from within, all blinds removed. Usually their style is artless and direct and dances with humor and wit;⁴⁹ their language is an attractive mixture of literary grace and colloquial ease. They are the most interesting of Cicero’s remains; indeed, of all extant Latin prose. It is natural that we should find in so large a correspondence (864 letters, ninety of them to Cicero) occasional contradictions and insincerities. There is no sign here of the religious piety and belief that appear so frequently in Cicero’s essays or in those speeches in which he plays up the gods as his last trump. His private opinion of various men, especially of Caesar, does not always conform with his public protestation.⁵⁰ His incredible vanity appears more amiably here than in his orations, where he seems to be carrying his own statue with him wherever he goes; he smilingly confesses that “my own applause has the greatest weight with me.”⁵¹ He assures us, with charming innocence, that “if ever any man was a stranger to vainglory it is myself.”⁵² We are amused to find so many letters about money and so much ado about so many homes. Besides modest villas at Arpinum, Asturae, Puteoli, and Pompeii, Cicero had an estate at Formiae valued at 250,000, another at Tusculum worth 500,000, and a palace on the Palatine that cost him 3,500,000 sesterces.^* Such comfort seems outrageous in a philosopher.

But which of us is so virtuous that his reputation could survive the publication of his intimate correspondence? Indeed, as we continue to read these letters, we almost come to like the man. He had no more faults, perhaps no greater vanity, than we; he made the mistake of immortalizing them with perfect prose. At his best he was a hard worker, a tender father, a good friend. We see him in his home, loving his books and his children, and trying to love his wife, the rheumatic and irritable Terentia, whose wealth and eloquence equaled his own. They were too rich to be happy; their worries and quarrels were always in large figures; at last, in their old age, he divorced her over some financial dispute. Soon afterward he married Publilia, who attracted him by having more money than years; but when she showed dislike for his daughter Tullia he sent Publilia away, too. Tullia he loved humanly beyond reason; he grieved almost to madness at her death and wished to build a temple to her as a deity. Pleasanter are the letters to and about Tiro, his chief secretary, who took his dictation in shorthand and managed his finances so ably and honestly that Cicero rewarded him with freedom. Most numerous are the letters to Atticus, who invested Cicero’s savings, extricated him from financial difficulties, published his writings, and gave him excellent unheeded advice. To Atticus, wisely absent in Greece at the height of the revolution, Cicero writes a letter of typical cordiality and charm:

There is nothing of which I so much feel the want as of him with whom I can communicate everything that concerns me; who loves me, who is prudent; to whom I can speak without flattery, dissimulation, or reserve. My brother, who is all candor and kindness, is away. . . . And you, who have so often relieved my cares and anxieties by your counsel, who used to be my companion in public matters, my confidant in all private ones, the partaker of all my words and thoughts—where are you?⁵⁴

In those turbulent days when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, conquered Pompey, and made himself dictator, Cicero retired for a moment from political life and sought solace in reading and writing philosophy. “Remember,” he begged Atticus, “not to give up your books to anybody, but to keep them, as you promised, for me. I entertain the strongest affection for them, as I now feel disgust for everything else.”⁵⁵ In his youth, defending the poet Archias in the most modest and amiable of his speeches, he had praised the study of literature as “nourishing our adolescence, adorning our prosperity, and delighting our old age.”⁵⁶ Now he took his own counsel, and in little more than two years wrote almost a library of philosophy.^* The dissolution of religious belief in the higher classes had left a moral vacuum, by which Rome seemed to be drawn into a disintegration of character and society. Cicero dreamed that philosophy might serve as a substitute for theology in providing for these classes a guide and stimulus to right living. He resolved not to construct one more system, but to summarize the teachings of the Greek sages and offer them as his last gift to his people.⁵⁷ He was honest enough to confess that he was for the most part adapting, sometimes translating, the treatises of Panaetius, Poseidonius, and other recent Greeks.⁵⁸ But he transformed the dull prose of his models into limpid and graceful Latin, enlivened his discourse with dialogue, and passed quickly over the deserts of logic and metaphysics to the living problems of conduct and statesmanship. Like Lucretius he had to invent a philosophical terminology; he succeeded, and put both language and philosophy heavily in his debt. Not since Plato had wisdom worn such prose.

It was from Plato above all that his ideas stemmed. He did not relish the dogmatism of the Epicureans, who “talk of divine things with such assurance that you would imagine they had come directly from an assemblage of the gods”; nor yet that of the Stoics, who so labor the argument from design that “you would suppose even the gods had been made for human use”⁵⁹—a theory that Cicero himself, in other moods, would not find incredible. His starting point is that of the New Academy—a lenient skepticism which denied all certainties and found probability sufficient for human life. “In most things,” he writes, “my philosophy is that of doubt.⁶⁰ . . . May I have your leave not to know what I do not know?”⁶¹ “Those who seek to learn my personal opinion,” he says, “show an unreasonable degree of curiosity”; ⁶² but his coyness soon yields to his talent for expression. He scorns sacrifices, oracles, and auguries, and devotes an entire treatise to disproving divination. Against the widespread cult of astrology he asks if all the men slain at Cannae had been born under the same star.⁶³ He even doubts that a knowledge of the future would be a boon; the future may be as unpleasant as much else of the truth that we so recklessly chase. He vainly thinks to make short work of old beliefs by laughing them out of court: “When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?”^63a Nevertheless, he is as skeptical of atheism as of any other dogma. He rejects the atomism of Democritus and Lucretius; it is as unlikely that unguided atoms—even in infinite time—could fall into the order of the existing world as that the letters of the alphabet should spontaneously form the Annales of Ennius.⁶⁴ Our ignorance of the gods is no guarantee of their nonexistence; and indeed, Cicero argues, the general agreement of mankind establishes a balance of probability in favor of Providence. He concludes that religion is indispensable to private morals and public order and that no man of sense will attack it.⁶⁵ Hence, while writing against divination, he continued to fulfill the functions of official augur. It was not quite hypocrisy; he would have called it statesmanship. Roman morals, society, and government were bound up with the old religion and could not safely let it die. (The emperors would reason so in persecuting Christianity.) When his beloved Tullia died, Cicero inclined more strongly than ever to the hope of personal immortality. Many years before, in the “Dream of Scipio” with which he ended his Republic, he had borrowed from Pythagoras, Plato, and Eudoxus a complex and eloquent myth of a life beyond the grave, in which the good great dead enjoyed eternal bliss. But in his private correspondence—even in the letters that condoled with bereaved friends—there is no mention of an afterlife.

Knowing the skepticism of his age, he based his moral and political treatises on purely secular grounds, independent of supernatural sanctions. He begins (in De Finibus) by inquiring for the road to happiness, and hesitantly agrees with the Stoics that virtue alone suffices. Therefore (in De Officiis) he examines the way of virtue, and by the charm of his style succeeds for a time in making duty interesting. “All men are brothers,” he writes, and “the whole world is to be considered as the common city of gods and men.”⁶⁶ The most perfect morality would be a conscientious loyalty to this whole. More immediately a man owes it to himself and society, first of all, to establish a sound economic basis to his life, and then to fulfill his duties as a citizen. Wise statesmanship is nobler than the subtlest philosophy.⁶⁷

Monarchy is the best form of government when the monarch is good, the worst when he is bad—a truism soon to be illustrated in Rome. Aristocracy is good when the really best rule; but Cicero, as a member of the middle class, could not quite admit that the old entrenched families were the best. Democracy is good when the people are virtuous, which, Cicero thought, is never; besides, it is vitiated by the false assumption of equality. The best form of government is a mixed constitution, like that of pre-Gracchan Rome: the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, the almost royal power of the consuls for a year. Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship. Writing five years after Caesar’s consulate, Cicero cast a dart in his direction:

Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root . . . and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite. . . . For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as leader . . . someone bold and unscrupulous . . . who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man, because he has much reason for fear if he remains a private citizen, the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He surrounds himself with an armed guard, and emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.⁶⁸

Nevertheless, Caesar won; and Cicero thought it best to bury his discontent in melodious platitudes on law, friendship, glory, and old age. Silent leges inter arma, he said—“laws are silent in time of war”; but at least he could muse on the philosophy of law. Following the Stoics, he defined law as “right reason in agreement with nature”;⁶⁹ i.e., law seeks to make orderly and stable the relations that rise out of the social impulses of men. “Nature has inclined us to love men” (society), “and this is the foundation of law.”⁷⁰ Friendship should be based not upon mutual advantage but upon common interests cemented and limited by virtue and justice; the law of friendship should be “neither to ask dishonorable things, nor to do them if asked.”⁷¹ An honorable life is the best guarantee of a pleasant old age. An indulgent and intemperate youth delivers to age a body prematurely worn out; but a life well spent can leave both body and mind sound to a hundred years; witness Masinissa. Devotion to study may make one “unaware of the stealthy approach of old age.”⁷² Age as well as youth has its glories—a tolerant wisdom, the respectful affection of children, desire and ambition’s fever cooled. Age may fear death, but not if the mind has been formed by philosophy. Beyond the grave there will be, at the best, a new and happier life; and at the worst there will be peace.⁷³

All in all, Cicero’s essays in philosophy are meager in result. Like his statesmanship they clung too anxiously to orthodoxy and tradition. He had all the curiosity of a scientist and all the timidity of a bourgeois; even in his philosophy he remained a politician, reluctant to offend any vote. He collected the ideas of others, and balanced pros and cons so well that we come out from his sessions by the same door wherein we went. Only one thing redeems these little books—the simple beauty of their style. How pleasant Cicero’s Latin is, how easy to read, how smoothly and clearly the stream of language flows! When he narrates events he catches some of the vivacity that made his speeches chain attention; when he describes a character it is with such skill that he mourns that he has no time to be Rome’s greatest historian;⁷⁴ when he lets himself go he flowers into the balanced clauses and crashing periods which he had learned from Isocrates, and with which he had made the Forum resound. His ideas are those of the upper classes, but his style aims to reach the people; for them he labors to be clear, toils to make his truisms thrilling, and salts abstractions with anecdote and wit.

He re-created the Latin language. He extended its vocabulary, forged from it a flexible instrument for philosophy, fitted it to be the vehicle of learning and literature in western Europe for seventeen hundred years. Posterity remembered him more as an author than as a statesman. When, despite all his reminders, men had almost forgotten the glory of his consulate, they cherished his conquests in letters and eloquence. And since the world honors form as well as substance, art as well as knowledge and power, he achieved, of all Romans, a fame second only to Caesar’s. It was an exception that he could never forgive.

CHAPTER IX

Caesar

100-44 B.C.

I. THE RAKE

CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR traced his pedigree to lulus Ascanius, son of Aeneas, son of Venus, daughter of Jupiter: he began and ended as a god. The Julian gens, though impoverished, was one of the oldest and noblest in Italy. A Caius Julius had been consul in 489, another in 482, a Vopiscus Julius in 473, a Sextus Julius in 157, another in 91.¹ From his uncle-in-law Marius he derived by a kind of avuncular heredity an inclination toward radical politics. His mother Aurelia was a matron of dignity and wisdom, frugally managing her small home in the unfashionable Subura—a district of shops, taverns, and brothels. There Caesar was born 100 B.C.., allegedly by the operation that bears his name.^*

“Now was this Caesar,” says Holland’s Suetonius, “wondrous docible and apt to learn.” His tutor in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric was a Gaul; with him Caesar unconsciously began to prepare himself for his greatest conquest. The youth took readily to oratory and almost lost himself in juvenile authorship. He was saved by being made military aide to Marcus Thermus in Asia. Nicomedes, ruler of Bithynia, took such a fancy to him that Cicero and other gossips later taunted him with having “lost his virginity to a king.”² Returning to Rome in 84, he married Cossutia to please his father; when, soon afterward, his father died, he divorced her and married Cornelia, daughter of that Cinna who had taken over the revolution from Marius. When Sulla came to power he ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia; when Caesar refused, Sulla confiscated his patrimony and Cornelia’s dowry, and listed him for death.

Caesar fled from Italy and joined the army in Cilicia. On Sulla’s death he returned to Rome (78), but finding his enemies in power he left again for Asia. Pirates captured him on the way, took him to one of their Cilician lairs, and offered to free him for twenty talents ($72,000); he reproached them for underestimating his value, and volunteered to give them fifty. Having sent his servants to raise the money, he amused himself by writing poems and reading them to his captors. They did not like them. He called them dull barbarians and promised to hang them at the earliest opportunity. When the ransom came he hurried to Miletus, engaged vessels and crews, chased and caught the pirates, recovered the ransom, and crucified them; but being a man of great clemency, he had their throats cut first.³ Then he went to Rhodes to study rhetoric and philosophy.

Back again in Rome, he divided his energies between politics and love. He was handsome, though already worried about his thinning hair. When Cornelia died (68) he married Pompeia, granddaughter of Sulla. As this was a purely political marriage, he did not scruple to carry on liaisons in the fashion of his time; but in such number and with such ambigendered diversity that Curio (father of his later general) called him omnium mulierum vir et omnium virorum mulier—“the husband of every woman and the wife of every man.”⁴ He would continue these habits in his campaigns, dallying with Cleopatra in Egypt, with Queen Eunoe in Numidia, and with so many ladies in Gaul that his soldiers in fond jest called him moechus calvus, the “bald adulterer”; in his triumph after conquering Gaul they sang a couplet warning all husbands to keep their wives under lock and key as long as Caesar was in town. The aristocracy hated him doubly—for undermining their privileges and seducing their wives. Pompey divorced his wife for her intimacy with Caesar. Cato’s passionate hostility was not all philosophical: his half sister Servilia was the most devoted of Caesar’s mistresses. When Cato, suspecting Caesar’s complicity with Catiline, challenged him in the Senate to read aloud a note just brought to him, Caesar passed it to Cato without comment; it was a love letter from Servilia.⁵ Her passion for him continued throughout his life, and merciless gossip, in her later years, charged her with surrendering her daughter Tertia to Caesar’s lust. During the Civil War, at a public auction, Caesar “knocked down” some confiscated estates of irreconcilable aristocrats to Servilia at a nominal price; when some expressed surprise at the low figure, Cicero remarked, in a pithy pun that might have cost him his life, Tertia deducta, which could either mean “a third off,” or refer to the rumor that Servilia had brought her daughter to Caesar. Tertia became the wife of Caesar’s prime assassin, Cassius. So the amours of men mingle with the commotions of states.

Probably these diversified investments helped Caesar’s rise as well as his fall. Every woman he won was an influential friend, usually in the enemy’s camp; and most of them remained his devotees even when his passion had cooled to courtesy. Crassus, though his wife Tertulla was reported to be Caesar’s mistress, lent him vast sums to finance his candidacies with bribes and games; at one time Caesar owed him 800 talents ($2,880,000). Such loans were not acts of generosity or friendship; they were campaign contributions, to be repaid with political favors or military spoils. Crassus, like Atticus, needed protection and opportunities for his millions. Most Roman politicians of the time incurred similar “debts”: Mark Antony owed 40,000,000 sesterces, Cicero 60,000,000, Milo 70,000,000—though these figures may be conservative slanders. We must think of Caesar as at first an unscrupulous politician and a reckless rake, slowly transformed by growth and responsibility into one of history’s most profound and conscientious statesmen. We must not forget, as we rejoice at his faults, that he was a great man notwithstanding. We cannot equate ourselves with Caesar by proving that he seduced women, bribed ward leaders, and wrote books.

II. THE CONSUL

Caesar began as the secret ally of Catiline and ended as the remaker of Rome. Hardly a year after Sulla’s death he prosecuted Gnaeus Dolabella, a tool of the Sullan reaction; the jury voted against Caesar, but the people applauded his democratic offensive and his brilliant speech. He could not rival Cicero’s verve and wit, passionate periods, and rhetorical flagellations; indeed, Caesar disliked this “Asianic” style and disciplined himself to the masculine brevity and stern simplicity that were to distinguish his Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars. Nevertheless, he was soon ranked as second only to Cicero in eloquence.⁶

In 68 he was chosen quaestor and was assigned to serve in Spain. He led military expeditions against the native tribes, sacked towns, and collected enough plunder to pay off some of his debts. At the same time he won the gratitude of Spanish cities by lowering the interest charges on the sums that had been lent them by the Roman bankers. Coming at Gades upon a statue of Alexander, he reproached himself for having accomplished so little at an age when the Macedonian had conquered half the Mediterranean world. He returned to Rome and plunged again into the race for office and power. In 65 he was elected aedile, or commissioner of public works. He spent his money—i.e., the money of Crassus—in adorning the Forum with new buildings and colonnades, and courted the populace with unstinted games. Sulla had removed from the Capitol the trophies of Marius—banners, pictures, and spoils representing the features and victories of the old radical; Caesar had these restored, to the joy of Marius’ veterans; and by that act alone he announced his rebel policy. The conservatives protested and marked him out as a man to be broken.

In 64, as president of a commission appointed to try cases of murder, he summoned to his tribunal the surviving agents of Sulla’s proscriptions and sentenced several of them to exile or death. In 63 he voted in the Senate against the execution of Catiline’s accomplices and remarked casually, in his speech, that human personality does not outlive death;⁷ it was apparently the only part of his speech that offended no one. In that same year he was elected pontifex maximus, head of the Roman religion. In 62 he was chosen praetor, and prosecuted a leading conservative for embezzling public funds. In 61 he was appointed propraetor for Spain, but his creditors prevented his departure. He admitted that he needed 25,000,000 sesterces in order to have nothing.⁸ Crassus came to his rescue by underwriting all his obligations. Caesar proceeded to Spain, led militarily brilliant campaigns against tribes with a passion for independence, and came back to Rome with spoils enough to pay off his debts and yet so enrich the Treasury that the Senate voted him a triumph. Perhaps the optimates were subtle; they knew that Caesar wished to stand for the consulate, that the law forbade candidacy in absence, and that the triumphator was required by law to remain outside the city until the day of his triumph—which the Senate had set for after the election. But Caesar forewent his triumph, entered the city, and campaigned with irresistible energy and skill.

His victory was obtained by his clever attachment of Pompey to the liberal cause. Pompey had just returned from the East after a succession of military and diplomatic achievements. By clearing the sea of pirates he had restored security to Mediterranean trade, and prosperity to the cities it served. He had pleased the capitalists of Rome by conquering Bithynia, Pontus, and Syria; he had deposed and set up kings and had lent them money from his spoils at lush rates of interest; he had accepted a huge bribe from the king of Egypt to come and quell a revolt there, and then had refrained from carrying out the compact on the ground that it was illegal;⁹ he had pacified Palestine and made it a client state of Rome; he had founded thirty-nine cities and had established law, order, and peace; all in all he had behaved with judgment, statesmanship, and profit. Now he had brought back to Rome such wealth in taxes and tribute, goods captured and slaves ransomed or sold, that he was able to contribute 200,000,000 sesterces to the Treasury, add 350,000,000 to its annual revenues, distribute 384,000,000 among his soldiers, and yet keep enough for himself to rival Crassus as one of the two richest men in Rome.

The Senate was more frightened than pleased at these accomplishments. It trembled when it heard that Pompey had landed at Brundisium (62) with an army personally devoted to him and capable at his word of making him dictator. He magnanimously relieved its fears by disbanding his troops and entering Rome with no other retinue than his personal staff. His triumph lasted two days, but even that time proved insufficient for all the floats that pictured his victories and displayed his garnerings. The ungrateful Senate rejected his request that state lands be given his soldiers, refused to ratify his agreements with conquered kings, and restored those arrangements that Lucullus had made in the East and which Pompey had ignored. The effect of these actions was to break down Cicero’s concordia ordinum, or alliance of the higher classes, and throw Pompey and the capitalists into a flirtation with the populares. Taking full advantage of the situation, Caesar formed with Pompey and Crassus the First Triumvirate (60), by which each pledged himself to oppose legislation unsatisfactory to any one of them. Pompey agreed to support Caesar for the consulate, and Caesar promised, if elected, to carry through the measures in which Pompey had been rebuffed by the Senate.

The campaign was bitter, and bribery flourished on both sides. When Cato, leader of the conservatives, heard that his party was buying votes, he unbent and approved the procedure as in a noble cause. The populares elected Caesar, the optimates Bibulus. Caesar had hardly entered upon his consulate (59) when he proposed to the Senate the measures asked for by Pompey: a distribution of land to 20,000 of the poorer citizens, including Pompey’s soldiers; the ratification of Pompey’s arrangements in the East; and a one-third reduction of the sum which the publicans had pledged themselves to raise from the Asiatic provinces. As the Senate opposed each of these measures by every means, Caesar, like the Gracchi, offered them directly to the Assembly. The conservatives induced Bibulus to use his veto power to forbid a vote, and had omens declared unfavorable. Caesar ignored the omens and persuaded the Assembly to impeach Bibulus; and an enthusiastic popularis emptied a pot of ordure upon Bibulus’ head. Caesar’s bills were carried. As in the case of the Gracchi, they combined an agrarian policy with a financial program pleasing to the business class. Pompey was impressed by Caesar’s performance of his pledges. He took Caesar’s daughter Julia as his fourth wife, and the entente between plebs and bourgeoisie became a feast of love. The Triumvirs promised the radical wing of their following that they would support Publius Clodius for the tribunate in the fall of 59. Meanwhile they kept the voters in good humor with profuse amusements and games.

In April Caesar submitted his second land bill, by which the areas owned by the state in Campania were to be distributed among poor citizens who had three children. The Senate was again ignored, the Assembly passed the bill, and, after a century of effort, the Gracchan policy triumphed. Bibulus kept to his house and contented himself with periodical announcements that the omens were unpropitious to legislation. Caesar administered public affairs without consulting him, so that the town wits referred to the year as “the consulate of Julius and Caesar.” To bring the Senate under public scrutiny, he established the first newspaper by having clerks make a record of Senatorial and other public proceedings and news, and post these Acta Diurna, or “Daily Doings,” on the walls of the forums. From these walls the reports were copied and sent by private messengers to all parts of the Empire.¹⁰

Toward the end of this historic consulate Caesar had himself appointed governor of Cisalpine and Narbonese Gaul for the ensuing five years. As no troops could lawfully be stationed in Italy, the command over the legions stationed in north Italy gave its possessor military power over the whole peninsula. To guarantee the maintenance of his legislation, Caesar secured the election of his friends Gabinius and Piso as consuls for 58 and married Piso’s daughter Calpurnia. To ensure continued support from the plebs he lent his decisive aid to the election of Clodius as tribune for 58. He did not let his plans be influenced by the fact that he had recently divorced his third wife, Pompeia, on suspicion of adultery with Clodius.

III. MORALS AND POLITICS

Publius Clodius Pulcher (the Handsome) was a scion of the Claudian gens, a young aristocrat whose courage knew no fear and his morals no restraint. Like Catiline and Caesar he descended from his rank to lead the poor against the rich. To be eligible as a tribune of the people he had himself adopted into a plebeian family. To redistribute the concentrated wealth of Rome and to destroy Cicero—who had abused his sister Clodia and stood for the sanctity of property—he served as a subaltern to Caesar until he could take power into his own hands. He admired Caesar’s policies and loved Caesar’s wife. To gain access to her he disguised himself as a woman, entered the house of Caesar, then (62) high priest, took part in the ceremonies offered by women alone to the Bona Dea, was detected, accused, and publicly tried (61) for having violated the mysteries of the Good Goddess. Caesar, called as a witness, said that he had no charge to make against Clodius. Why, then, asked the prosecutor, had he divorced Pompeia? “Because,” said Caesar, “my wife must be above suspicion.” It was a clever answer, which neither exonerated nor condemned a valuable political aide. Various witnesses—perhaps bribed—told the court that Clodius had had relations with Clodia and had seduced his sister Tertia after her marriage to Lucullus. Clodius protested that he had been away from Rome on the day of the alleged sacrilege; Cicero, however, testified that Clodius had on that day been with him in Rome. The populace thought the whole affair a Senatorial plot to destroy a populares leader and cried out for acquittal. Crassus—some say at Caesar’s behest—bribed a number of judges for Clodius. The radicals for once had the more money, and Clodius was freed. Caesar took advantage of the situation to exchange an inconveniently conservative wife for the daughter of a senator allied to the popular cause.

He had hardly retired from office when some conservatives proposed the complete annulment of his legislation. Cato did not conceal his opinion that these “Julian laws” should be wiped off the statute books. The Senate hesitated to fling so open a challenge to Caesar armed with legions and to Clodius wielding the tribunate. In 63 Cato had wooed the populace for the conservatives by renewing the state distribution of cheap corn; now (58) Clodius countered by making the dole completely free to all who came for it. He passed bills through the Assembly forbidding the use of religious vetoes against legislative procedures and restoring the legality of the collegia, which the Senate had tried to disband. He reorganized these guilds into voting blocs and won such fealty from them that they provided him with an armed guard. Fearing that after his year as tribune had expired Cato or Cicero might attempt to undo Caesar’s work, Clodius persuaded the Assembly to send Cato as commissioner to Cyprus, and to pass a decree banishing any man who had put Roman citizens to death without securing, as law required, the Assembly’s consent. Cicero saw that the measure was aimed at him and fled to Greece, where cities and dignitaries rivaled one another in offering him hospitality and honors. The Assembly decreed that Cicero’s property should be confiscated, and his house on the Palatine was razed to the ground.

It was Cicero’s good fortune that Clodius, overcome with success, now attacked both Pompey and Caesar, and planned to make himself sole leader of the plebs. Pompey retaliated by supporting the petition of Cicero’s brother Quintus for the orator’s recall. The Senate appealed to all Roman citizens in Italy to come to the capital and vote on the proposal. Clodius brought an armed gang into the Field of Mars to supervise the balloting, and Pompey engaged a needy aristocrat, Annius Milo, to organize a rival band. Riot and bloodshed ensued, many men were killed, and Quintus barely escaped with his life. But his measure carried, and after months of exile Cicero returned in triumph to Italy (57). Multitudes greeted him as he passed from Brundisium to Rome; there the welcoming crowd was so great that Cicero feigned fear that he would be accused of having contrived his banishment for the sake of this glorious restoration.¹¹

Apparently he had pledged himself to Pompey, and perhaps to Caesar, as the price of his recall. Caesar lent him large sums to recoup his finances and refused to take interest.¹² For several years now Cicero became the advocate of the Triumvirs in the Senate. When a dearth of grain threatened Rome (57), he secured for Pompey an extraordinary commission with full power for six years over all the food supply of Rome and over all ports and trade. Pompey again acquitted himself well, but the constitution of the Republic suffered another blow, and government by men continued to replace government by laws. In 56 Cicero persuaded the Senate to vote a substantial amount for the payment of Caesar’s troops in Gaul. In 54 he unsuccessfully defended the extortionate provincial administration of Aulus Gabinius, a friend of the Triumvirs. In 55 he canceled all the favor he had gained with Caesar by an abusive attack upon another provincial governor, Calpurnius Piso. He remembered too vividly that Piso had voted for his banishment; he forgot that Piso’s daughter was Caesar’s wife.

Upon Cato’s return (57) from his brilliant reorganization of Cyprian affairs, the conservatives reformed their lines. Clodius, now the enemy of Pompey, accepted the invitation of the aristocracy to lend it the assistance of his popularity and his thugs. Literature took on an anti-Caesarian tint; the epigrams of Calvus and Catullus flew like poisoned darts into the camp of the Triumvirs. As Caesar moved farther and farther into Gaul, and news came of the many dangers that he faced, hope sprung anew in noble breasts; after all, said Cicero, there are many ways in which a man may die. If we may believe Caesar, several conservatives opened negotiations with Ariovistus, the German leader, for the assassination of Caesar.¹³ Domitius, running for the consulate, announced that if elected he would at once move for Caesar’s recall—which meant Caesar’s indictment and trial. Veering with the wind, Cicero proposed that on May 25, 56, the Senate should consider the abrogation of Caesar’s land laws.

IV. THE CONQUEST OF GAUL

In the spring of 58 Caesar took up his duties as governor of Cisalpine and Narbonese Gaul—i.e., northern Italy and southern France. In 71 Ariovistus had led 15,000 Germans into Gaul at the request of one Gallic tribe seeking assistance against another. He had provided the desired aid and then had remained to establish his rule over all the tribes of northeastern Gaul. One of these, the Aedui, appealed to Rome for help against the Germans (61); the Senate authorized the Roman governor of Narbonese Gaul to comply, but almost at the same time it listed Ariovistus among rulers friendly to Rome. Meanwhile 120,000 Germans crossed the Rhine, settled in Flanders, and so strengthened Ariovistus that he treated the native population as subject peoples and dreamed of conquering all Gaul.¹⁴ At the same time the Helvetii, centering about Geneva, began migrating westward, 368,000 strong, and Caesar was warned that they planned to cross his province of Narbonese Gaul on their way to southwestern France. “From the sources of the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean,” says Mommsen, “the German tribes were in motion; the whole line of the Rhine was threatened by them; it was a movement like that when the Alemanni and the Franks threw themselves upon the falling empire of the Caesars . . . five hundred years afterward.”¹⁵ While Rome plotted against him, Caesar plotted to save Rome.

At his own expense, and without the authority he should have sought from the Senate, he raised and equipped four extra legions besides the four already provided him. He sent a peremptory invitation to Ariovistus to come and discuss the situation; as he had expected, Ariovistus refused. Deputations came now to Caesar from many Gallic tribes, asking for his protection. Caesar declared war against both Ariovistus and the Helvetii, marched northward, and met the Helvetian avalanche in a bloody battle at Bibracte, capital of the Aedui, near the modern Autun. Caesar’s legions won, but by a narrow margin; in these matters we must for the most part follow his own account. The Helvetii offered to return to their Swiss homeland; Caesar agreed to give them safe passage, but on condition that their territory should accept the rule of Rome. All Gaul now sent him thanks for its deliverance, and begged his aid in expelling Ariovistus. He met the Germans near Ostheim,^* and slew or captured (he tells us) nearly all of them (58). Ariovistus escaped, but died soon afterward.

Caesar took it for granted that his liberation of Gaul was also a conquest of it: he began at once to reorganize it under Roman authority, with the excuse that in no other way could it be protected against Germany. Some Gauls, unconvinced, rebelled, and invoked the aid of the Belgae, a powerful tribe of Germans and Celts inhabiting north Gaul between the Seine and the Rhine. Caesar defeated their army on the banks of the Aisne; then, with a celerity of movement that never allowed his foes to unite, he moved in succession against the Suessiones, Ambiani, Nervii, and Aduatici, conquered them, despoiled them, and sold the captives to the slave merchants of Italy. Somewhat prematurely he announced the conquest of Gaul; the Senate proclaimed it a Roman province (56), and the common people of Rome, as imperialistic as any general, shouted the praises of their distant champion. Caesar recrossed the Alps into Cisalpine Gaul, busied himself with its internal administration, replenished his legions, and invited Pompey and Crassus to meet him at Luca to plan a united defense against the conservative reaction.

To forestall Domitius they agreed that Pompey and Crassus should run against him for the consulate for 55 B.C..; that Pompey should be made governor of Spain, and Crassus of Syria, for five years (54-50); that Caesar should be continued for another five years (53-49) as governor of Gaul; and that at the end of this term he should be allowed to seek a second consulate. He furnished his colleagues and friends, from the booty of Gaul, with funds to finance their campaigns; he sent great sums to Rome to provide work for the unemployed, commissions for his supporters, and prestige for himself, by an extensive program of public buildings; and he so oiled the palms of the senators who came to sample his loot that the movement to repeal his laws collapsed. Pompey and Crassus were elected consuls after the usual bribery, and Caesar returned to the task of persuading the Gauls that peace is sweeter than freedom.

Trouble was brewing on the Rhine below Cologne. Two German tribes had crossed into Belgic Gaul as far as Liége, and the nationalist party in Gaul was seeking their help against the Romans. Caesar met the invaders near Xanten (55), drove them back to the Rhine, and slew such of them—women and children as well as men—as were not drowned in the river. His engineers then built in ten days a bridge over the great stream, there 1400 feet wide; Caesar’s legions crossed, and fought long enough on German soil to establish the Rhine as a secure frontier. After two weeks he retraced his steps into Gaul.

We do not know why he now invaded Britain. Possibly he was lured by rumors that gold or pearls abounded there; or he wished to capture the tin and iron deposits of Britain for Roman exportation; or he resented the aid that Britons had sent to the Gauls, and thought that Roman power in Gaul must be made secure in every direction. He led a small force across the Channel at its narrowest point, defeated the unprepared Britons, took a few notes, and returned (55). A year later he crossed again, overcame the British under Cassivelaunus, reached the Thames, exacted promise of tribute, and sailed back to Gaul.

Perhaps he had heard that revolt was once more agitating the Gallic tribes. He suppressed the Eburones and marched again into Germany (53). Returning, he left his main army in northern Gaul, while with his remaining troops he went to winter in north Italy, hoping to devote a few months to mending his fences in Rome. But early in 52 word came to him that Vercingetorix, the ablest of the Gallic chieftains, had united nearly all the tribes in a war for independence. Caesar’s situation was precarious in the extreme. Most of his legions were in the north, and the country between them and himself was in rebel hands. He led a small detachment over the snow-covered Cevennes against Auvergne; when Vercingetorix brought up his forces to defend it, Caesar left Decimus Brutus in command and, with a few horsemen, rode in disguise across all Gaul from south to north, rejoined his main army, and at once led them to the attack. He besieged, captured, and sacked Avaricum (Bourges) and Cenabum (Orléans), massacred their populations, and replenished his depleted supplies with their treasuries. He moved on to assail Gergovia; there, however, the Gauls resisted so resolutely that he was compelled to withdraw. The Aedui, whom he had rescued from the Germans, and who heretofore had remained his allies, now deserted him, captured his base and stores at Soissons, and prepared to drive him back into Narbonese Gaul.

It was the lowest ebb of Caesar’s fortunes, and for a time he considered himself lost. He staked everything upon a siege of Alesia (Alise Ste.-Reine), where Vercingetorix had gathered 30,000 troops. Caesar had hardly distributed a like number of soldiers around the city when word came that 250,000 Gauls were marching down upon him from the north. He ordered his men to raise two concentric walls of earth around the city, one before them, the other behind them. Against these walls and the desperate Romans the armies of Vercingetorix and his allies threw themselves in repeated vain attacks. After a week the army of relief broke up in disorder for lack of discipline and supplies, and melted into ineffectual bands at the very moment when the Romans had reached the end of their stores. Soon thereafter the starving city sent Vercingetorix at his own suggestion as a prisoner to Caesar, and then surrendered to the Roman’s mercy (52). The town was spared, but all its soldiers were given to the legionaries as slaves. Vercingetorix was led in chains to Rome; there he later graced Caesar’s triumph and paid with his life for his devotion to liberty.

The siege of Alesia decided the fate of Gaul and the character of French civilization. It added to the Roman Empire a country twice the size of Italy and opened the purses and markets of 5,000,000 people to Roman trade. It saved Italy and the Mediterranean world for four centuries from barbarian invasion; and it lifted Caesar from the verge of ruin to a new height of reputation, wealth, and power. After another year of sporadic revolts, which the angry general put down with uncharacteristic severity, all Gaul accepted subjection to Rome. Once his victory was certain Caesar became again the generous conqueror; he treated the tribes with such lenience that in all the ensuing Civil War, when he and Rome would have been helpless to retaliate, they made no move to throw off the yoke. For three hundred years Gaul remained a Roman province, prospered under the Roman peace, learned and transformed the Latin language, and became the channel through which the culture of classic antiquity passed into northern Europe. Doubtless neither Caesar nor his contemporaries foresaw the immense consequences of his bloody triumph. He thought he had saved Italy, won a province, and forged an army; he did not suspect that he was the creator of French civilization.

Rome, which had known Caesar only as a spendthrift, rake, politician, and reformer, was amazed to find him also a tireless administrator and a resourceful general. At the same time it discovered in him a major historian. In the midst of his campaigns, disturbed by the attacks upon him in Rome, he had recorded and defended his conquest of Gaul in Commentaries whose military conciseness and artful simplicity raised them, despite a thousand milia passuum, from a partisan pamphlet to a high place in Latin literature. Even Cicero, shifting again, sang a paean in his praise, and anticipated the verdict of history:

It is not the ramparts of the Alps, nor the foaming and flooding Rhine, but the arms and generalship of Caesar which I account our true shield and barrier against the invasion of the Gauls and the barbarous tribes of Germany. It is to him we owe it that, should the mountains be leveled with the plain and the rivers be dried up, we should still hold our Italy fortified not by nature’s bulwarks but by the exploits and victories of Caesar.¹⁶

To which should be added the tribute of a great German:

That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history, that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic ... all this is the work of Caesar; and while the creation of his great predecessor in the East has been almost wholly reduced to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religions and states.¹⁷

V. THE DEGRADATION OF DEMOCRACY

During the second quinquennium of Caesar in Gaul, Roman politics had become an unparalleled chaos of corruption and violence. Pompey and Crassus, as consuls, pursued their policies by the bribery of votes, the intimidation of juries, and occasional murder.¹⁸ When their year of office ended, Crassus recruited and conscripted a large army and sailed for Syria. He crossed the Euphrates and met the Parthians at Carrhae. Their superior cavalry defeated him, and his son fell in the battle. Crassus was withdrawing his forces in good order when the Parthian general invited him to a conference. He went and was treacherously slain. His head was sent to play the part of Pentheus in a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae at the Parthian court; and his leaderless army, long wearied of the campaign, disappeared in a disorderly rout (53).

Meanwhile Pompey too had levied an army, presumably to complete the conquest of Spain. Had Caesar’s plans matured, Pompey would have brought Farther Spain, and Crassus Armenia and Parthia, within the orbit of Roman power at the same time that Caesar was extending the frontier to the Thames and the Rhine. Instead of leading his legions to Spain, Pompey kept them in Italy, except for one which he lent to Caesar in the crisis of the Gallic revolt. In 54 the strongest tie that held him to Caesar was cut by the death of his wife Julia in childbirth. Caesar offered him his grandniece Octavia, now Caesar’s nearest female relative, and asked for the hand of Pompey’s daughter; but Pompey refused both proposals. The debacle of Crassus and his army in the following year removed another balancing force, for a victorious Crassus would have opposed the dictatorship of either Caesar or Pompey. Henceforth Pompey openly allied himself with the conservatives. His plan to secure supreme power through legal forms had now only one obstacle—the ambition and army of Caesar. Knowing that Caesar’s command would expire in 49, Pompey secured decrees continuing his own command to the end of 46, and requiring all Italians capable of bearing arms to take an oath of military fealty to him personally; in this way, he trusted, time itself would make him master of Rome.¹⁹

While the potential dictators maneuvered for position, the capital filled with the odor of a dying democracy. Verdicts, offices, provinces, and client kings were sold to the highest bidders. In the year 53 the first voting division in the Assembly was paid 10,000,000 sesterces for its vote.²⁰ When money failed, murder was available;²¹ or a man’s past was raked over, and blackmail brought him to terms. Crime flourished in the city, brigandage in the country; no police force existed to control it. Rich men hired bands of gladiators to protect them, or to support them in the comitia. The lowest elements in Italy were attracted to Rome by the smell of money or the gift of corn, and made the meetings of the Assembly a desecration. Any man who would vote as paid was admitted to the rolls, whether citizen or not; sometimes only a minority of those who cast ballots were entitled to vote. The privilege of addressing the Assembly had on several occasions to be won by storming the rostrum and holding it by main force. Legislation came to be determined by the fluctuating superiority of rival gangs; those who voted the wrong way were, now and then, beaten to within an inch of their lives, after which their houses were set afire. Following one such meeting Cicero wrote: “The Tiber was full of the corpses of citizens, the public sewers were stuffed with them, and slaves had to mop up with sponges the blood that streamed from the Forum.”²²

Clodius and Milo were Rome’s most distinguished experts in this brand of parliament. They organized rival bands of ruffians for political purposes, and hardly a day passed without some test of their strength. One day Clodius assaulted Cicero in the street; another day his warriors burned down Milo’s house; at last Clodius himself was caught by Milo’s gang and killed (52). The proletariat, not privy to all his plots, honored Clodius as a martyr, gave him a mighty funeral, carried the body to the senate house, and burned the building over him as his funeral pyre. Pompey brought in his soldiers and dispersed the mob. As reward he asked from the Senate, and received, appointment as “consul without colleague,” a phrase that Cato recommended as more pleasant than “dictator.” Pompey then put through the Assemblycowed by his troops—several measures aimed at political corruption, and another repealing the right (which his bill of 55 had granted to Caesar) to stand for the consulate while absent from Rome. He impartially supervised, with military force, the operation of the courts; Milo was tried for the murder of Clodius, was condemned despite Cicero’s defense,^* and fled to Marseilles. Cicero went off to govern Cilicia (51), and acquitted himself there with a degree of competence and integrity which surprised and offended his friends. All the elements of wealth and order in the capital resigned themselves to the dictatorship of Pompey, while the poorer classes hopefully awaited the coming of Caesar.

VI. CIVIL WAR

A century of revolution had broken down a selfish and narrow aristocracy, but had put no other government in its place. Unemployment, bribery, bread and circuses had corrupted the Assembly into an ill-informed and passion-ridden mob obviously incapable of ruling itself, much less an empire. Democracy had fallen by Plato’s formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty.²⁴ Caesar agreed with Pompey that the Republic was dead; it was now, he said, “a mere name, without body or form”;²⁵ dictatorship was unavoidable. But he had hoped to establish a leadership that would be progressive, that would not freeze the status quo, but would lessen the abuses, inequities, and destitution which had degraded democracy. He was now fifty-four, and surely weakened by his long campaigns in Gaul; he did not relish a war against his fellow citizens and his former friends. But he saw the snares that had been prepared for him, and resented them as an ill-reward for one who had saved Italy. His term as governor of Gaul would end on March 1, 49; he could not run for the consulship until the fall of that year; in the interval he would lose the immunity of an officeholder, and could not enter Rome without subjecting himself to those proscriptions which were among the favorite weapons of party warfare in Rome. Already Marcus Marcellus had proposed to the Senate that Caesar should be deposed from his governorship before its expiration—which meant self-exile or trial. The tribunes of the plebs had saved him by their veto, but the Senate clearly favored the motion. Cato frankly expressed the hope that Caesar would be accused, tried, and banished from Italy.

Caesar made every effort at conciliation. When, at Pompey’s suggestion, the Senate asked both generals to release to it a legion for use against Parthia, Caesar at once complied, though his force was small; and when Pompey asked Caesar for the return of the legion sent him a year before, Caesar dispatched it to him without delay. His friends informed him, however, that instead of being sent to Parthia these legions were being kept at Capua. Through his supporters in the Senate Caesar requested a renewal of the Assembly’s earlier decree permitting him to stand for the consulship in absence. The Senate refused to submit the motion and demanded that Caesar dismiss his troops. Caesar felt that his legions were his only protection; perhaps he had nourished their personal loyalty with a view to just such a crisis as this. Nevertheless, he proposed to the Senate that both he and Pompey should lay down their commissions—an offer which seemed to the people of Rome so reasonable that they garlanded his messenger with flowers. The Senate favored the plan, 370 to 22, but Pompey balked at it. In the last days of the year 50 the Senate declared Caesar a public enemy unless he should abandon his command by July 1. On the first day of 49 Curio read to the Senate a letter in which Caesar agreed to disband all but two of his ten legions if he might retain the governorship till 48; but he spoiled the offer by adding that he would look upon its rejection as a declaration of war. Cicero spoke for the proposal, and Pompey agreed to it; but the consul Lentulus intervened and drove Caesar’s lieutenants, Curio and Antony, from the senate house.²⁶ After a long debate the reluctant Senate, persuaded by Lentulus, Cato, and Marcellus, gave Pompey orders and powers to “see that no harm should come to the state”—the Roman phrase for dictatorship and martial law.

Caesar hesitated more than was his wont. Legally the Senate was right, he had no authority to name the conditions under which he would resign his command. He knew that civil war might bring Gaul to revolt and Italy to ruin. But to yield was to surrender the Empire to incompetence and reaction. Amid his deliberations he learned that one of his nearest friends and ablest lieutenants, Titus Labienus, had gone over to Pompey. He summoned the soldiers of his favorite Thirteenth Legion and laid the situation before them. His first word won them: Commilitones!—“fellow soldiers.” They who had seen him share their hardships and perils, who had had to complain that he risked himself too readily, recognized his right to use this word; he had always addressed them so rather than with the curt Milites! of less gracious commanders. Most of his men came from Cisalpine Gaul, to which he had extended Roman citizenship; they knew that the Senate had refused to recognize this grant and that one senator had flogged a Cisalpine Gaul just to show his contempt for Caesar’s enfranchisement; it was illegal to flog a Roman citizen. They had learned to respect Caesar—even, in their rough mute way, to love him—during their many campaigns. He had been severe with cowardice and indiscipline, but he had been lenient with their human faults, had winked at their sexual escapades, had spared them unnecessary dangers, had saved them by skillful generalship, had doubled their pay, and had spread his spoils among them handsomely. He told them of his proposals to the Senate and how these had been received; he reminded them that an idle and corrupt aristocracy was unfit to give Rome order, justice, and prosperity. Would they follow him? Not one refused. When he told them that he had no money with which to pay them they emptied their savings into his treasury.

On January 10, 49, he led one legion across the Rubicon, a small stream, near Ariminum, that marked the southern boundary of Cisalpine Gaul. lacta est alea, he is reported to have said—“the die is cast.”²⁷ It seemed an act of folly, for the remaining nine legions of his army were still distant in Gaul and could not reach him for weeks to come; while Pompey had ten legions, or 60,000 troops, authority to levy as many more as he pleased, and funds to arm and feed them. Caesar’s Twelfth Legion joined him at Picenum, the Eighth at Corfinium; he formed three legions more from prisoners, volunteers, and levies upon the population. He had little difficulty in getting recruits; Italy had not forgotten the Social War (88), and saw in Caesar a champion of Italian rights; one by one its cities opened their gates to him, some turned out en masse to welcome him; ²⁸ “the towns,” wrote Cicero, “salute him as a god.”²⁹ Corfinium resisted briefly, then surrendered; Caesar protected it from sack by his soldiers, freed all captured officers, and sent to Pompey’s camp the money and baggage that Labienus had left behind. Though almost penniless, he refrained from confiscating those estates of his opponents that fell into his hands—a characteristically wise measure, which won to neutrality most of the middle class. It would be his policy, he announced, to consider all neutrals his friends. At every new advance he tried again for reconciliation. He sent a message to Lentulus begging him to use his consular influence for peace. In a letter to Cicero he offered to retire to private life and leave the field to Pompey, provided he should be allowed to live in security.³⁰ Cicero labored to effect a compromise, but found his logic helpless before the rival dogmatisms of revolution.³¹

Though his forces still far outnumbered Caesar’s, Pompey withdrew with them from the capital, and a disorderly stream of aristocrats followed him, leaving their wives and children to Caesar’s mercy. Rejecting every overture of peace, Pompey declared that he would consider as an enemy any senator who did not abandon Rome and join his camp. The majority of the Senate remained in Rome, and vacillating Cicero, despising Pompey’s vacillations, divided himself among his rural estates. Pompey marched to Brundisium and ferried his troops across the Adriatic. He knew that his undisciplined army needed further training before it could stand up to Caesar’s legions; meanwhile, he hoped, the Roman fleet under his control would starve Italy into destroying his rival.

Caesar entered Rome (March 16) unresisted and unarmed, having left his troops in near-by towns. He proclaimed a general amnesty and restored municipal administration and social order. The tribunes convoked the Senate; Caesar asked it to name him dictator, but it refused; he asked it to send envoys to Pompey to negotiate peace, but it refused. He sought funds from the national Treasury; the tribune Lucius Metellus barred his way, but yielded when Caesar remarked that it was harder for him to utter threats than to execute them. Henceforth he made free use of the state’s money; but with unscrupulous impartiality he deposited in the Treasury the booty from his later campaigns. Then he returned to his soldiers, and prepared to meet the three armies that the Pompeians were organizing in Greece, Africa, and Spain.

To secure the grain supply upon which Italy’s life depended, he sent the impetuous Curio with two legions to take Sicily. Cato surrendered the island and withdrew to Africa; Curio pursued him with the recklessness of Regulus, gave battle prematurely, was defeated, and died in action, mourning not his own death, but the injury he had done to Caesar. Meanwhile Caesar had led an army to Spain, partly to ensure the renewal of its grain exports to Italy, partly to forestall a rear attack when he marched to meet Pompey. In Spain, as in Gaul, he made serious blunders in strategy.³² For a time his outnumbered army faced starvation and defeat; but, as usual, he redeemed himself by brilliant improvisation and personal bravery.³³ By altering the course of a river he turned blockade into counterblockade; he waited patiently for the entrapped army to surrender, though his troops fretted for action; at last the Pompeians gave in, and all Spain came over to Caesar (August, 49). Returning toward Italy by land, he found his way blocked at Marseilles by an army under Lucius Domitius, whom he had captured and released at Corfinium. Caesar took the town after a hard siege, reorganized the administration of Gaul, and by December was back in Rome.

His political position had been strengthened by this campaign, which had reassured the worried bellies of the capital. The Senate now named him dictator, but he surrendered that title after being elected one of the two consuls for 48. Finding Italy in a credit crisis due to the fact that the hoarding of currency had depressed prices, and debtors were refusing to pay in dear money what they had borrowed in cheap money, he decreed that debts might be paid in goods valued by state arbitrators at prewar prices; this, he thought, was “the most suitable way both of maintaining the honor of the debtors and of removing or diminishing the fear of that general repudiation of debts which is apt to follow war.”³⁴ It is a revelation of how slowly reform had moved in Rome that he was compelled again to forbid enslavement for debt. He permitted the interest already paid on debts to be deducted from the principal, and limited interest to one per cent per month. These measures satisfied most creditors, who had feared confiscation; correspondingly they disappointed the radicals, who had hoped that Caesar would continue Catiline by abolishing all debts and redividing the land. He distributed corn to the needy, canceled all sentences of banishment except Milo’s, and pardoned all returning aristocrats. No one thanked him for his moderation. The forgiven conservatives resumed their plotting against his life; and while he was facing Pompey in Thessaly the radicals abandoned him for Caelius, who promised them a complete abolition of debts, the confiscation of large properties, and the reallotment of all land.

Near the end of 49 Caesar joined the troops and fleet that his aides had collected at Brundisium. A winter crossing of the Adriatic by an army was in those days unheard of; the twelve vessels at his disposal could carry over only a third of his 60,000 men at one time; and Pompey’s superior squadrons patrolled all islands and harbors along the opposite coast. Nevertheless, Caesar set sail and crossed to Epirus with 20,000 men. On their way back to Italy his ships were wrecked. Wondering what delayed the remainder of his army, Caesar tried to recross in a small skiff. The sailors rowed out against the surf and were nearly drowned. Caesar, dauntless amid their terror, encouraged them with the possibly legendary exhortation: “Fear not; you carry Caesar and his fortune.”³⁵ But wind and wave tossed the boat back upon the shore, and Caesar had to abandon the attempt. Meanwhile Pompey, with 40,000 men, seized Dyrrhachium and its rich stores; then, with the indecision that marked his obese years, he failed to attack Caesar’s depleted and starving force. During this delay Mark Antony gathered another fleet and brought over the rest of Caesar’s army.

Ready now to join battle, but still loath to turn Roman against Roman, Caesar sent an envoy to Pompey proposing that both leaders should lay down their commands. Pompey gave no reply.^* Caesar attacked and was repulsed; but Pompey failed to follow his victory with pursuit. Against Pompey’s advice his officers put all captives to death, while Caesar spared his³⁷—a contrast that raised the morale of Caesar’s troops and lowered that of Pompey’s. Caesar’s men begged him to punish them for the cowardice they had shown in this their first fight against Roman legions. When he refused, they besought him to lead them back to battle; but he thought it wiser to retreat into Thessaly and let them rest.

Pompey now made the decision that cost him his life. Afranius advised him to return and recapture undefended Italy; but the majority of his counselors urged him to pursue and destroy Caesar. The aristocrats in Pompey’s camp exaggerated the victory at Dyrrhachium and supposed that the great issue had there been decided. Cicero, who had finally joined them, was shocked to hear them dispute as to their respective shares in the coming restoration, and to see with what luxury they lived in the midst of war—their meals served on silver plate, their tents comfortable with carpets, brilliant with hangings, garlanded with flowers.

Excepting Pompey himself [Cicero wrote], the Pompeians carried on the war with such rapacity, and breathed such principles of cruelty in their conversation, that I could not contemplate even their success without horror. . . . There was nothing good among them but their cause. ... A proscription was proposed not only individually but collectively. . . . Lentulus had promised himself Hortensius’ house, Caesar’s gardens, and Baiae.³⁸

Pompey would have preferred a more Fabian strategy, but taunts of cowardice prevailed upon him, and he gave orders to march.

At Pharsalus, August 9, 48, the decisive battle was fought to the bitter end. Pompey had 48,000 infantry, 7000 horse; Caesar had 22,000 and 1000.³⁹ “Some few of the noblest Romans,” says Plutarch, “standing as spectators outside the battle . . . could not but reflect to what a pass private ambition had brought the Empire. . . . The whole flower and strength of the same city, meeting here in collision with itself, offered plain proof how blind and mad a thing human nature is when passion is aroused.”⁴⁰ Near relatives, even brothers, fought in the opposed armies. Caesar bade his men spare all Romans who should surrender; as to the young aristocrat Marcus Brutus, he said, they were to capture him without injuring him, or, if this proved impossible, they were to let him escape.⁴¹ The Pompeians were overwhelmed by superior leadership, training, and morale; 15,000 of them were killed or wounded, 20,000 surrendered, the remainder fled. Pompey tore the insignia of command from his clothing and took flight like the rest. Caesar tells us that he lost but 200 men ⁴²—which casts doubt upon all his books. His army was amused to see the tents of the defeated so elegantly adorned, and their tables laden with the feast that was to celebrate their victory. Caesar ate Pompey’s supper in Pompey’s tent.

Pompey rode all night to Larissa, thence to the sea, and took ship to Alexandria. At Mytilene, where his wife joined him, the citizens wished him to stay; he refused courteously, and advised them to submit to the conqueror without fear, for, he said, “Caesar was a man of great goodness and clemency.”⁴³ Brutus also escaped to Larissa, but there he dallied and wrote to Caesar. The victor expressed great joy on hearing that he was safe, readily forgave him, and at his request forgave Cassius. To the nations of the East, which—controlled by the upper classes—had supported Pompey, he was likewise lenient. He distributed Pompey’s hoards of grain among the starving population of Greece, and to the Athenians asking pardon he replied with a smile of reproof: “How often will the glory of your ancestors save you from self-destruction?”⁴⁴

Probably he had been warned that Pompey hoped to resume the contest with the army and resources of Egypt, and the forces that Cato, Labienus, and Metellus Scipio were organizing at Utica. But when Pompey reached Alexandria, Pothinus, eunuch vizier of young Ptolemy XII, ordered his servants to kill Pompey, presumably in expectation of reward from Caesar. The general was stabbed to death as he stepped upon the shore, while his wife looked on in helpless terror from the ship in which they had come. When Caesar arrived, Pothinus’ men presented him with the severed head. Caesar turned away in horror and wept at this new proof that by diverse means men come to the same end. He established his quarters in the royal palace of the Ptolemies and set himself to regulate the affairs of the ancient kingdom.

VII. CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

Since the death of Ptolemy VI (145) Egypt had rapidly decayed. Her kings were no longer able to maintain social order or national freedom; the Roman Senate increasingly dictated their policy, and garrisoned Alexandria with Roman troops. By the will of Ptolemy XI, whom Pompey and Gabinius had established on the throne, the government had descended to his son Ptolemy XII and his daughter Cleopatra, who were to marry each other and reign together.

Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek by origin, and more probably blonde than brunette.⁴⁵ She was not particularly beautiful; but the grace of her carriage, the vivacity of her body and her mind, the variety of her accomplishments, the suavity of her manners, the very melody of her voice, combined with her royal position to make her a heady wine even for a Roman general. She was acquainted with Greek history, literature, and philosophy; she spoke Greek, Egyptian, Syrian, and allegedly other languages, well; she added the intellectual fascination of an Aspasia to the seductive abandon of a completely uninhibited woman. Tradition credits her with a treatise on cosmetics and another on the alluring subject of Egyptian measures, weights, and coins.⁴⁶ She was an able ruler and administrator, effectively promoted Egyptian commerce and industry, and was a competent financier even when making love. With these qualities went an Oriental sensuality, an impetuous brutality that dealt out suffering and death, and a political ambition that dreamed of empire and honored no code but success. If she had not borne the intemperate blood of the later Ptolemies in her veins she might have achieved her purpose of being the queen of a unified Mediterranean realm. She saw that Egypt could no longer be independent of Rome and knew no reason why she should not dominate their union.

Caesar was not pleased to learn that Pothinus had banished Cleopatra and now ruled as regent for young Ptolemy. Secretly he sent for her, and secretly she came. To reach him she had herself concealed in some bedding which her attendant Apollodorus carried into Caesar’s apartment. The amazed Roman, who never let his victories in the field outnumber his conquests in love, was captivated by her courage and wit. He reconciled her with Ptolemy, and re-established her with her brother on the throne of Egypt. Learning from his barber that Pothinus and the Egyptian general Achillas were plotting to kill him and slaughter the small force that he had brought with him, he delicately arranged the assassination of Pothinus. Achillas escaped to the Egyptian army and roused it to insurrection; soon all Alexandria was alive with soldiers vowing death to Caesar. The Roman garrison which had been stationed in the city by the Senate was inspired by its officers to join in rising against this treasonable interloper who presumed to settle the succession to the throne of the Ptolemies, and even to beget an heir for its future.

In this emergency Caesar acted with his customary resourcefulness. He turned the royal palace and the near-by theater into fortresses for himself and his men, and sent for reinforcements from Asia Minor, Syria, and Rhodes. When he saw that his defenseless fleet would soon fall into the hands of his enemies, he ordered it burned; in the fire an uncertain portion of the Alexandrian library was consumed. By desperate sallies he captured, lost, and recaptured the island of Pharos, as being essential to the entry of the relief he awaited; in one of these engagements he swam for his life, amid a storm of arrows, when the Egyptians drove him and 400 of his men off the connecting mole into the sea. Thinking the rebels victorious, Ptolemy XII left the royal palace, joined them, and disappeared from history. When reinforcements arrived, Caesar routed the Egyptians and the Senatorial garrison in the Battle of the Nile. He rewarded Cleopatra for her fidelity to him in this crisis by making her younger brother Ptolemy XIII coregent with her, which left her in effect the supreme ruler of Egypt.

It is hard to understand why Caesar remained nine months in Alexandria while hostile armies were being organized against him near Utica, and while Rome, stirred to radical revolt by Caelius and Milo, longed for his fine administrative hand. Perhaps he felt that he deserved a little rest and play after ten years of war. He “often feasted with Cleopatra till daybreak,” says Suetonius, “and would have gone through Egypt with her in her royal barge almost to Ethiopia, had not his soldiers threatened mutiny”; ⁴⁷ they had not all found queans. Perhaps he gallantly waited to share the pains of her confinement. A child was born to her in 47 and was named Caesarion; according to Mark Antony, Caesar acknowledged the boy as his son.⁴⁸ It is not impossible that she whispered to him the pleasant thought of making himself king, marrying her, and uniting the Mediterranean world under one bed.

This, however, is conjectural as well as scandalous; nothing but circumstantial evidence supports it. Certainly Caesar flew to action when he learned that Pharnaces, son of Mithridates, had recaptured Pontus, Lesser Armenia, and Cappadocia, and was inviting the East to rise once more against divided Rome. His wisdom in “pacifying” Spain and Gaul before meeting Pompey was now apparent; had the West revolted at one time with the East the Empire would probably have broken up, the “barbarians” would have moved southward, and Rome might never have known an Augustan age. Re-forming his three legions, Caesar set out in June of 47, marched with characteristic speed along the coast of Egypt through Syria and Asia Minor into Pontus, defeated Pharnaces at Zela (August 2), and sent to a friend at Rome the laconic report, Veni, vidi, vici—“I came, I saw, I conquered.”⁴⁹

At Tarentum (September 26) he was met by Cicero, who asked forgiveness for himself and other conservatives. Caesar consented amiably. He was shocked to find that during his twenty months’ absence from Rome the Civil War had become a social revolution: that Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella had joined forces with Caelius, and had proposed to the Assembly a bill canceling all debts; that Antony had let loose his soldiers upon Dolabella’s armed prolétaires, and 800 Romans had been killed in the Forum. Caelius, as praetor, had recalled Milo; together they had organized an army in southern Italy and had invited the slaves to unite with them in a thoroughgoing revolution. They had met with small success, but their spirit was in the air. At Rome the radicals were celebrating the memory of Catiline and again garlanding his tomb. Meanwhile the Pompeian army in Africa had grown as large as the one that had been beaten at Pharsalus. Pompey’s son Sextus had organized a new army in Spain, and the grain supply of Italy was once more hanging in the balance. Such was the situation in October, 47, when Caesar reached Rome and Calpurnia, bringing with him Cleopatra, her boy husband-brother, and Caesarion.

In the few months permitted him between campaigns he set about restoring order. Having been reappointed dictator, he appeased the radicals for a moment by repealing the last of Sulla’s laws and canceling for a year all rents below 2000 sesterces in Rome; at the same time he tried to comfort the conservatives by making Marcus Brutus governor of Cisalpine Gaul, assuring Cicero and Atticus that he would abet no war against property, and ordering the re-erection of the statues of Sulla, which the prolétaires had knocked down. When he turned his thoughts to the Pompeians he was discouraged to hear that his most trusted legions were in revolt because of long-overdue pay and were refusing to embark for Africa. As the Treasury was nearly empty, he raised funds by confiscating and selling the property of rebel aristocrats; he had learned, he said, that soldiers depend upon money, money upon power, and power upon soldiers.⁵⁰ He suddenly appeared among the rebellious legions, called them together, and quietly told them that they were released from service and might go to their homes; he added that he would make up all arrears to them when he had triumphed in Africa “with other soldiers.” “At this expression,” says Appian, “shame seized upon them all, that they were abandoning their commander in this moment when enemies surrounded him on every side. . . . They cried out that they repented of their revolt, and besought him to keep them in his service.”⁵¹ He yielded with charming reluctance, and sailed with them for Africa.

At Thapsus, on April 6, 46, he met the combined forces of Metellus Scipio, Cato, Labienus, and Juba I, the Numidian king. Again he lost the first encounter; again he re-formed his lines, attacked, and won. His blood-crazed soldiers, blaming his clemency at Pharsalus for having to fight this second battle, slaughtered 10,000 of the 80,000 Pompeians, giving no quarter; they did not propose to meet these men again. Juba committed suicide; Scipio fled and died in an engagement at sea; Cato with a small division escaped to Utica. When the officers wished to defend the city against Caesar, Cato persuaded them that it was impossible. He provided funds for those who planned flight, but advised his son to submit to Caesar. He himself rejected both courses. He spent the evening in philosophical discussion; then he retired to his room and read Plato’s Phaedo. Suspecting that he would kill himself, his friends took his sword from his bedside. When they had relaxed their vigil he compelled his servant to bring back the weapon. For a while he feigned sleep; then suddenly he took the sword and plunged it into his abdomen. His friends rushed in; a physician put back the extruding intestines and sewed and bandaged the wound. As soon as they had left the room Cato removed the bandage, tore open the wound, pulled out his entrails, and died.

When Caesar came he mourned that he had no chance to pardon Cato; he could only pardon the son. The Uticans gave the dead Stoic a magnificent funeral, as if knowing that they were burying a republic almost five centuries old.

VIII. THE STATESMAN

After appointing Sallust governor of Numidia, and reorganizing the provinces of Africa, Caesar in the fall of 46 returned to Rome. The frightened Senate, recognizing the advent of monarchy, voted him the dictatorship for ten years, and such a triumph as Rome had never seen before. He paid each of his soldiers 5000 Attic drachmas ($3000), much more than he had promised them. He feasted the citizens at 22,000 tables, and for their amusement provided a sham sea battle involving 10,000 men. Early in 45 he left for Spain, and at Munda defeated the last Pompeian army. When, in October, he reached Rome, he found all Italy in chaos. Oligarchic misrule and a century of revolution had disordered agriculture, industry, finance, and trade. The exhaustion of the provinces, the hoarding of capital, and the precariousness of investment had disturbed the flow of money. Thousands of estates had fallen into ruin; 100,000 men had been drawn from production into war; peasants beyond number had been driven by the competition of foreign grain or latifundia slaves to join the proletariat in the towns and listen hungrily to promising demagogues. The surviving aristocracy, unmelted by Caesar’s clemency, plotted against him in their clubs and palaces. He appealed to them in the Senate to recognize the necessity of dictatorship, and to co-operate with him in a healing reconstruction. They scorned the advances of the usurper, denounced the presence of Cleopatra as his guest in Rome, and whispered that he was planning to make himself king and move the seat of the Empire to Alexandria or Ilium.

Caesar alone, therefore, though prematurely old at fifty-five, set himself with Roman energy to remake the Roman state. He knew that his victories would be meaningless if he could not build something better than the wreckage that he had cleared away. When, in 44, his dictatorship for ten years was extended for life, he did not much exaggerate the difference, though he could hardly foresee that in five months he would be dead. The Senate heaped adulation and titles upon him, perhaps to make him odious to a people that hated the very name of king. It let him wear the laurel wreath, with which he hid his baldness, and carry even in peace the imperator’s powers. Through these he controlled the Treasury, and as pontifex maximus, the priesthoods; as consul he could propose and execute laws; as tribune his person was inviolable; as censor he could make or unmake senators. The assemblies kept the right to vote on proposed measures, but Caesar’s lieutenants, Dolabella and Antony, managed the assemblies, which in general favored his policies. Like other dictators he sought to base his power upon popularity with the people.

He subordinated the Senate almost to the role of an advisory council. He enlarged it from 600 to 900 members and permanently transformed it with 400 new appointees. Many of these were Roman businessmen; many were leading citizens of Italian or provincial cities; some had been centurions, soldiers, or sons of slaves. The patricians were alarmed to see the chieftains of conquered Gaul enter the Senate and join the rulers of the Empire; even the wags of the capital resented this and circulated a satiric couplet:

Gallos Caesar in triumphum ducit, idem in curiam;

Galli braccas deposuerunt, latum clavum sumpserunt—

“Caesar leads Gauls in his triumph, then into the Senate; the Gauls have removed their breeches, and put on the broad-rimmed toga” of the senators.⁵²

Perhaps Caesar purposely made the new Senate too cumbersome a body for effective deliberation or unified opposition. He chose a group of friends—Balbus, Oppius, Matius, and others—as an informal executive cabinet, and inaugurated the bureaucracy of the Empire by delegating the clerical details of his government, and the minutiae of administration, to his household of freedmen and slaves. He allowed the Assembly to elect half the city magistrates; he chose the rest by “recommendations” which the Assembly regularly approved. As tribune he could veto the decisions of other tribunes or consuls. He increased the praetors to sixteen, and the quaestors to forty, to expedite municipal and judicial business. He kept a personal eye on every aspect of the city’s affairs, and tolerated no incompetence or waste. In the city charters that he granted he placed severe injunctions and penalties against electoral corruption and official malfeasance. To end the domination of politics by organized vote buying, and perhaps to secure his power against proletarian revolt, he abolished the collegia, except some of ancient origin and the essentially religious associations of the Jews. He restricted jury service to the two upper classes and reserved for himself the right to try the most vital cases; frequently he sat as judge, and none could deny the wisdom and impartiality of his decisions. He proposed to the jurists of his time an orderly codification of existing Roman law, but his early death frustrated the plan.

Resuming the work of the Gracchi, he distributed lands to his veterans and the poor; this policy, continued by Augustus, for many years pacified the agrarian agitation. To forestall the rapid reconcentration of landownership he ruled that the new lands could not be sold within twenty years; and to check rural slavery he passed a measure requiring that a third of the laborers on ranches should be freemen. Having turned many idle prolétaires into soldiers and then into peasant proprietors, he further diminished their ranks by sending 80,000 citizens as colonists to Carthage, Corinth, Seville, Aries, and other centers. To provide work for the remaining unemployed in Rome he spent 160,000,000 sesterces in a great building program. He had a new and more spacious meeting place for the assemblies set up in the Field of Mars, and relieved the congestion of business in the Forum by adding, near it, a Forum Iulium. He embellished likewise many cities in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Greece. Having so eased the pressure of poverty, he required a means test for eligibility to the state dole of grain. At once the number of applicants fell from 320,000 to 150,000.

So far he had remained true to his role as a champion of the populares. But since the Roman revolution was more agrarian than industrial, and was aimed chiefly at the landed slave-driving aristocracy, then at the moneylenders, and only mildly at the business classes, Caesar continued the Gracchan policy of inviting businessmen to support the agrarian and fiscal revolution. Cicero sought to unite the middle classes with the aristocracy; Caesar sought to unite them with the plebs. Many of the great capitalists, from Crassus to Balbus, helped to finance him, as similar men helped the American and French Revolutions. Nevertheless, Caesar ended one of the richest sources of financial profiteering—the collection of provincial taxes through corporations of publicans. He scaled down debts, enacted severe laws against excessive interest rates, and relieved extreme cases of insolvency by establishing the law of bankruptcy essentially as it stands today. He restored the stability of the currency by basing it upon gold and issuing a golden aureus, equivalent in purchasing power to the British pound sterling in the nineteenth century. The coins of his government were stamped with his own features and were designed with an artistry new to Rome. A novel order and competence entered the administration of the Empire’s finances, with the result that when Caesar died the Treasury contained 700,000,000 sesterces, and his private treasury 100,000,000.

As a scientific basis for taxation and administration, he had a census taken of Italy, and planned a like census of the Empire. To replenish a citizenry decimated by war, he granted the Roman franchise widely—among others, to physicians and teachers in Rome. Long disturbed by the fall in the birth rate, he had in 59 given precedence in land allotments to fathers of three children; now he promulgated rewards for large families and forbade childless women under forty-five to ride in litters or wear jewelry—the weakest and most futile part of his varied legislation.

Still an agnostic, though not quite free from superstitions,⁵³ Caesar remained high priest of the state religion and provided it with the usual funds. He restored old temples and built new ones, honoring above all his alma mater Venus. But he allowed full liberty of conscience and worship, withdrew old prohibitions against the Isis cult, and protected the Jews in the exercise of their faith. Noting that the calendar of the priests had lost all concord with the seasons, he commissioned the Alexandrian Greek Sosigenes to devise, on Egyptian models, the “Julian calendar”: henceforth the year was to consist of 365 days, with an added day in every fourth February. Cicero complained that Caesar, not content with ruling the earth, was now regulating the stars; but the Senate accepted the reform graciously, and gave the dictator’s family name, Julius, to the month Quinctilis—which had been fifth when March opened the year.

As impressive as these things done are the works begun or planned by Caesar but postponed by his assassination. He laid the foundations of a great theater, and of a temple to Mars proportioned to that god’s voracity. He appointed Varro to head an organization for the establishment of public libraries. He designed to free Rome from malaria by draining Lake Fucinus and the Pontine marshes, and reclaiming these acres for tillage. He proposed to raise dykes to control the Tiber’s floods; by diverting the course of that stream he hoped to improve the harbor at Ostia, periodically ruined by the river’s silt. He instructed his engineers to prepare plans for building a road across central Italy and for cutting a canal at Corinth.

The most resented of his undertakings was to make the freemen of Italy equal citizens with those of Rome, and the provinces ultimately equal with Italy. In 49 he had enfranchised Cisalpine Gaul; now (44) he drew up a municipal charter, apparently for all the cities of Italy, equalizing their rights with Rome’s; probably he was planning some representative government by which they would have had a democratic share in his constitutional monarchy.⁵⁵ He took the appointment of provincial governors out of the hands of the corrupt Senate and himself named to these posts men of proved ability, who remained at every moment subject to recall at his will. He reduced provincial taxes by a third, and entrusted their collection to special officials responsible to himself. He overrode ancient curses to restore Capua, Carthage, and Corinth—completing again the work of the Gracchi. To the colonists whom he sent to found or people a score of cities from Gibraltar to the Black Sea, he gave Roman or Latin rights, and evidently hoped to extend Roman citizenship to all free adult males in the Empire; the Senate was then to represent not a class in Rome, but the mind and will of every province. This conception of government, and Caesar’s reorganization of Rome and Italy, completed the miracle whereby the youthful spendthrift and roisterer had become one of the ablest, bravest, fairest, and most enlightened men in all the sorry annals of politics.

Like Alexander he did not know where to stop. Contemplating his reordered realm, he resented its exposure to attack at the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine. He dreamed of a great expedition to capture Parthia and avenge his old pocketbook Crassus; of a march around the Black Sea and the pacification of Scythia; of the exploration of the Danube and the conquest of Germany.⁵⁶ Then, having made the Empire secure, he would return to Rome laden with honor and spoils, rich enough to end economic depression, powerful enough to ignore all opposition, free at last to name his successor, and to die with the pax Romana as his supreme legacy to the world.

IX. BRUTUS

When news of this plan trickled through Rome the common people, who love glory, applauded; the business classes, smelling war orders and provincial loot, licked their chops; the aristocracy, foreseeing its extinction on Caesar’s return, resolved to kill him before he could go.

He had treated these bluebloods with such generosity as to stir Cicero’s eloquence in his praise. He had forgiven all surrendering foes and had condemned to death only a few officers who, defeated and pardoned, had fought against him again. He had burned unread the correspondence he had found in the tents of Pompey and Scipio. He had sent the captured daughter and grandchildren of Pompey to Pompey’s son Sextus, who was still in arms against him; and he had restored the statues of Pompey which his followers had thrown down. He had given provincial governorships to Brutus and Cassius, and high office to many others of their class. He bore silently a thousand slanders, and instituted no proceedings against those whom he suspected of plotting against his life. To Cicero, who had trimmed his wind to every sale, he offered not only pardon but honor, and refused nothing that the orator asked for himself or his Pompeian friends; he even forgave, at Cicero’s urging, the unrepentant Marcus Marcellus. In a pretty speech For Marcellus (46) Cicero acclaimed Caesar’s “unbelievable liberality,” and admitted that Pompey, victorious, would have been more vengeful. “I have heard with regret,” he said, “your celebrated and highly philosophical remark, lam satis vixi, ‘I have lived enough, whether for nature or for fame.’ . . . Put aside, I beg you, that wisdom of the sage; do not be wise at the cost of our peril. . . . You are still far from the completion of your greatest labors; you have not yet laid their foundations.” And he solemnly promised Caesar, in the name of all the Senate, that they would watch over his safety and oppose with their own bodies any attack upon him.⁵⁷ Cicero now prospered so well that he planned to buy still another palace—no less than that of Sulla himself. He enjoyed the dinners to which he was invited by Antony, Balbus, and others of Caesar’s aides; never before had his letters been so gay.⁵⁸ Caesar was not deceived; he wrote to Matius: “If anyone is gracious, it is Cicero; but I doubt not that he hates me bitterly.”⁵⁹ When reassured Pompeians resumed their opposition, this unctuous Talleyrand of the pen fell in with their hopes and wrote a eulogy of the younger Cato that should have put Caesar on his guard. Caesar contented himself with writing a reply, the Anti-Cato, which did not show the dictator at his best; in this duel he had given Cicero the choice of weapons, and the orator had won. Public opinion praised Cicero’s style, and the mildness of a ruler who composed a pamphlet when he might have signed a death warrant.

Men who have been deprived of wonted power cannot be mollified by pardoning their resistance; it is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured. The aristocrats fretted in a Senate that dared not reject the proposals that Caesar so constitutionally submitted to them. They patriotically denounced the destruction of a liberty that had fattened their purses, and would not admit that the restoration of order required the limitation of their freedom. They looked with horror upon the presence of Cleopatra and Caesarion in Rome; it was true that Caesar was living with his wife Calpurnia apparently in mutual affection; but who could say—who would not say—what happened on his frequent visits to the gorgeous queen? Rumors persisted that he would make himself king, marry her, and place the capital of their united empires in the East. Had he not ordered his statue to be erected on the Capitol next to those of Rome’s ancient kings? Had he not stamped his own image upon Roman coins—an unprecedented insolence? Did he not wear robes of purple, usually reserved for kings? At the Lupercalia, on February 15, 44, the consul Antony, sacerdotally naked ^* and impiously drunk, tried thrice to place a royal crown upon Caesar’s head. Thrice Caesar refused; but was it not because the crowd murmured disapproval? Did he not dismiss from office the tribunes who removed from his statue the royal diadem placed upon it by his friends? When the Senate approached him as he sat in the Temple of Venus, he did not rise to receive them. Some explained that he had been overcome by an epileptic stroke; others, that he was suffering from diarrhea and had remained seated to avoid a movement of his bowels at so unpropitious a moment.⁶⁰ But many patricians feared that any day might see him proclaimed a king.

Shortly after the Lupercalia, Gaius Cassius, a sickly man—“pale and lean,” as Plutarch describes him⁶¹—approached Marcus Brutus and suggested the assassination of Caesar. He had already won to his plan several senators, some capitalists whose provincial pillage had fallen with Caesar’s restriction of the publicans, even some of Caesar’s generals, who felt that the spoils and offices awarded them had not quite equaled their deserts. Brutus was needed as the front of the conspiracy, for he had won a wide reputation as the most virtuous of men. He was supposedly descended from the Brutus who had expelled the kings 464 years before. His mother Servilia was Cato’s half sister; his wife Portia was Cato’s daughter and the widow of Caesar’s enemy Bibulus. “It was thought,” says Appian, “that Brutus was Caesar’s son, as Caesar was the lover of Servilia about the time of Brutus’ birth”;⁶² Plutarch adds that Caesar believed Brutus to be his son.⁶³ Possibly Brutus himself shared this opinion, and hated the dictator for having seduced his mother and made him, in the gossip of Rome, a bastard instead of a Brutus. He had always been moody and taciturn, as if brooding over a secret wrong; at the same time he carried himself proudly, as one who in any case bore noble blood in his veins. He was a master of Greek and a devotee of philosophy; in metaphysics a follower of Plato, in ethics, of Zeno. It was not lost upon him that Stoicism, like Greek and Roman opinion, approved tyrannicide. “Our ancestors,” he wrote to a friend, “thought that we ought not to endure a tyrant even if he were our own father.”⁶⁴ He composed a treatise on Virtue and was later confused with that abstraction. Through intermediaries he lent money at forty-eight per cent to the citizens of Cyprian Salamis; when they balked at paying the accumulated interest he urged Cicero, then proconsul in Cilicia, to enforce the collection with Roman arms.⁶⁵ He governed Cisalpine Gaul with integrity and competence and, returning to Rome, was made urban praetor by Caesar (45).

Every generous element in his nature rebelled against Cassius’ proposal. Cassius reminded him of his rebel ancestry, and perhaps Brutus felt challenged to prove it by imitation. The sensitive youth blushed when he saw, affixed to statues of the older Brutus, such inscriptions as “Brutus, are you dead?”—or, “Your posterity is unworthy of you.”⁶⁶ Cicero dedicated to him several treatises written in these years. Meanwhile it was whispered among the patricians that at the next meeting of the Senate, on March 15, Lucius Cotta would move that Caesar be made king, on the ground that according to the Sibylline oracle the Parthians would be conquered only by a king.⁶⁷ A Senate half filled with Caesar’s appointees, said Cassius, would pass the measure, and all hope of restoring the Republic would be lost. Brutus yielded, and the conspirators then made definite plans. Portia drew the secret from her husband by stabbing her thigh to show that no physical injury could make her speak against her will. In a moment of unprophetic sentiment Brutus insisted that Antony should be spared.

On the evening of March 14, to a gathering at his home, Caesar proposed as topic of conversation, “What is the best death?” His own answer was, “A sudden one.” The next morning his wife begged him not to go to the Senate, saying that she had dreamed of seeing him covered with blood. A like-minded servant sought to provide a deterrent omen by causing an ancestral picture to fall from the wall. But Decimus Brutus, who was one of his closest friends and was also one of the conspirators—urged him to attend the Senate if only to adjourn it courteously in person. A friend who had learned of the plot came to warn him, but Caesar had already left. On his way to the Senate he met a soothsayer who had once whispered to him, “Beware the ides of March”; Caesar remarked, smiling, that the ides had come and all was well. “But they have not passed,” answered Spurinna. While Caesar was offering the usual presession sacrifice before Pompey’s theater, where the Senate was to meet, a tablet informing him of the conspiracy was put into his hands. He ignored it, and tradition says that it was found in his hand after his death.^*

Trebonius, a conspirator who had been a favored general of Caesar, detained Antony from the meeting by conversation. When Caesar entered the theater and took his seat, the “Liberators” flung themselves upon him without delay. “Some have written,” reports Suetonius, “that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him he said, in Greek, kai su teknon—‘You, too, my child?’ ”⁶⁹ When Brutus struck him, says Appian, Caesar ended all resistance; drawing his robe over his face and head, he submitted to the blows and fell at the foot of Pompey’s statue.⁷⁰ One wish had been granted to the most complete man that antiquity produced.

CHAPTER X

Antony

44-30 B.C.

I. ANTONY AND BRUTUS

THE assassination of Caesar was one of the major tragedies of history. Not merely in the sense that it interrupted a great labor of statesmanship and led to fifteen years more of chaos and war; civilization survived, and Augustus completed what Caesar had begun. It was a tragedy also in the sense that probably both parties were right: the conspirators in thinking that Caesar meditated monarchy, Caesar in thinking that disorder and empire had made monarchy inevitable. Men have divided on the issue ever since the Senate sat for a moment in consternation at the deed and then fled in tumult and terror from the hall. Antony, arriving after the event, saw valor in discretion and fortified himself in his house. Cicero’s eloquence lost its tongue, even when Brutus, dagger in hand, hailed him as “Father of His Country.” Emerging, the conspirators found an excited populace in the square; they tried to win it with catchwords of Liberty and the Republic, but the dazed crowd had no homage for phrases so long used to cover greed. Fearing for their lives, the assassins took refuge in the buildings on the Capitol and surrounded themselves there with their personal gladiatorial guards. Toward evening Cicero joined them. Antony, approached by their emissaries, sent a friendly reply.

The next day a larger crowd gathered in the Forum. The conspirators sent agents to buy its support and organize it into a legal assembly; then they ventured down from the Capitol, and Brutus delivered an oration which he had prepared for the Senate. The speech failed to move its hearers. Cassius tried and was met with cold silence. The Liberators returned to the Capitol, and as the crowd thinned out they stealthily departed to their homes. Antony, thinking himself Caesar’s heir, obtained from the stunned Calpurnia all the papers and funds that the dictator had left in his palace; at the same time he secretly summoned Caesar’s veterans to Rome. On the 17th, by his authority as tribune, he convened the Senate and astonished all parties by his amiability and calm. He accepted Cicero’s proposal for a general amnesty, and agreed that Brutus and Cassius should receive provincial governorships (i.e., flight with safety and power), on condition that the Senate should ratify all the decrees, legislation, and appointments of Caesar. Since a majority of the Senate owed office or emoluments to these acts, it consented; and when it adjourned Antony was acclaimed as a statesman who had snatched peace out of the jaws of war. That evening he entertained Cassius for dinner. On the 18th the Senate met again, recognized Caesar’s will, voted him a public funeral, and appointed Antony to deliver the customary eulogy.

On the 19th Antony secured the will from the Vestal Virgins, with whom it had been deposited, and read it, first to a small, then to a larger gathering. It bequeathed Caesar’s private fortune to three grandnephews and (to the astonishment and anger of Antony) named one of them, Caius Octavius, as adoptive son and heir. The dictator had devised his gardens to the people as a public park and had left 300 sesterces to every citizen of Rome. The news of these benefactions sped through the city; and when, on the 20th, Caesar’s body, which had been embalmed in his home, was brought into the Forum for the last rites, a great concourse of people, including Caesar’s veterans, gathered to do him reverence. Antony seems to have spoken at first with cautious restraint; but as he went on, his pent-up feelings flared into eloquence. When he raised from the ivory bier the torn and bloody robe through which Caesar had been stabbed, the emotions of the crowd were stirred beyond control. Amid weird wailing and frenzied cries men gathered wood anywhere and built a fire beneath the corpse. Veterans threw their weapons upon the pyre as an offering, actors threw their costumes, musicians their instruments, women their most precious ornaments. Taking brands from the fire, some enthusiasts sought to burn down the houses of the conspirators; but these buildings were well guarded, and their masters had fled from Rome. A large part of the crowd stayed all night long by the smoldering pyre; many Jews, grateful for Caesar’s sympathetic legislation, remained there three days, intoning their ancient funeral chants. During those days riot surged through the capital; at last Antony directed his soldiers to restore order and to fling persistent marauders from the Tarpeian rock.

Antony was one half of what Caesar had been, as Augustus would be the other half; Antony was a good general, Augustus a superlative statesman; neither would be both. Born in 82 B.C., Antony had spent a large part of his life in camps and more in the quest of wine, women, good food, and fun. Though of high lineage and handsome features, he had the characteristic virtues of the common man: strength of body, animal spirits, good nature, generosity, courage, and loyalty. He had scandalized even Caesar by keeping a harem of both sexes in Rome, and traveling with a Greek courtesan in his litter.¹ He had bought in Pompey’s house at auction, occupied it, and then refused payment.² Now he found in Caesar’s papers, or (some said) placed there, whatever it suited him to find—appointments for his friends, decrees for his purposes, perquisites for himself; in two weeks’ time he had paid off $1,500,000 in debts and had become a rich man. He seized the $25,000,000 that Caesar had deposited in the Temple of Ops and took another $5,000,000 from Caesar’s private treasury. Noting that Decimus Brutus, whom Caesar had appointed governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had assumed that lucrative office despite sharing in the assassination of Caesar, Antony passed through the Assembly a bill giving himself that strategic province and consoling Decimus with Macedonia. Likewise Marcus Brutus and Cassius were to surrender Macedonia to Decimus and Syria to Dolabella, and were to content themselves with sharing Cyrene and Crete.

Alarmed by Antony’s spreading power, the Senate invited to Rome, as a foil to him, Caesar’s adopted son. Caius Octavius, who was to make himself the greatest statesman in Roman history, was eighteen years old in 44. By natural custom he took his adoptive father’s name; adding his own as a modifier, he became Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, until, seventeen years later, he received that lofty name of Augustus by which the centuries have known him. His grandmother was Caesar’s sister Julia; his grandfather had been a banker of plebeian stock at Velitrae, in Latium; his father had served as plebeian aedile, then praetor, then governor of Macedonia. The boy was trained to Spartan simplicity, and educated in the literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome. In the last three years he had lived a good part of the time in Caesar’s palace. It was one of the sorrows of Caesar’s life that he had no legitimate son and one of his profoundest insights that he adopted Octavius. He took the boy with him to Spain in 45 and was pleased to see the courage with which the frail and nervous invalid endured the perils and hardships of the campaign. He had him carefully instructed in the arts of war and government.³ Many statues have made his features familiar: refined, delicate, serious, at once diffident and resolute, yielding and tenacious; an idealist forced to be a realist, a man of thought painfully learning to be a man of action. He was thin and pale and suffered from a poor digestion. He ate little, drank less, and outlived the strong men around him by abstinence and the regularity of his life.

Late in March of 44 a freedman arrived at Apollonia, in Illyria, where Octavian was stationed with the army, and brought the news of Caesar’s death and will. The sensitive youth was horrified at men’s ingratitude; all his love for the great-uncle who had so cherished him, and had worked so feverishly to rebuild a shattered state, welled up in him and filled him with a silent resolve to complete the labors of Caesar and avenge his death. He rode down to the sea, crossed to Brundisium, and hastened to Rome. His relatives there advised him to stay in hiding lest Antony destroy him; his mother likewise recommended inaction; but when he scorned such a course she rejoiced, merely suggesting that whenever possible he should use patience and subtlety rather than open war. He followed this wise counsel to the end.

He visited Antony and inquired what was being done against Caesar’s enemies. He was shocked to find Antony busy planning to lead an army against Decimus Brutus, who had refused to surrender Cisalpine Gaul. He asked Antony to disburse Caesar’s legacies according to will, especially the forty-five dollars bequeathed to every citizen. Antony saw many reasons for delay. Octavian thereupon distributed the money to Caesar’s veterans out of funds borrowed by him from Caesar’s friends, and with this approach, organized his own army.

Infuriated by the insolence of this “boy,” as he called him, Antony announced that an attempt had been made upon his life and that the would-be assassin had named Octavian as the instigator of his plan. Octavian protested his innocence. Cicero took advantage of the quarrel to persuade him that Antony was a ruffian, who must be defeated. Octavian agreed, joined his two legions with those of the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, and marched with them northward to battle Antony. Cicero lent this new civil war the aid of his invective in fourteen powerful “Philippics” against the public policy and private life of Antony, some delivered to the Senate or the Assembly, the rest published as propaganda broadcasts in the best tradition of martial blackening. In the ensuing engagement at Mutina (Modena), Antony lost and fled (44); but Hirtius and Pansa fell, and Octavian returned to Rome sole commander of the Senate’s legions as well as his own. With this force behind him he compelled the Senate to name him consul, to repeal its amnesty to the conspirators, and to sentence them all to death. Discovering that Cicero and the Senate were now his enemies, and were merely using him as a temporary tool against Antony, he composed his differences with Antony and formed with him and Lepidus the Second Triumvirate (43-33). Their combined armies marched into Rome and took it without resistance. Many of the senators and conservatives fled to south Italy and the provinces. The Assembly ratified the Triumvirate and gave it full power for five years.

To pay their troops, replenish their coffers, and revenge Caesar, the three men now let loose the bloodiest reign of terror in Roman history. They listed 300 senators and 2000 businessmen for execution, and offered 25,000 drachmas ($15,000) to any freeman, and 10,000 to any slave, who would bring in the head of a person proscribed.⁴ To have money became a capital crime; children to whom fortunes had been left were condemned and killed; widows were shorn of their legacies; 1400 rich women were required to turn over a large share of their property to the Triumvirs; at last even the savings deposited with the Vestal Virgins were seized. Atticus was spared because he had helped Antony’s wife Fulvia; while acknowledging the courtesy, he sent great sums to Brutus and Cassius. The Triumvirs set their soldiers to guard all exits from the city. The proscribed hid in wells, sewers, attics, chimneys. Some died resisting, some submitted quietly to their slayers; some starved, hanged, or drowned themselves; some leaped from a roof or into a fire; some were killed by mistake; some, not proscribed, committed suicide on the bodies of slain relatives. Salvius the tribune, knowing himself doomed, gave a last feast to his friends; the emissaries of the Triumvirs entered, cut off his head, left his body at the table, and bade the feast go on. Slaves took the opportunity to get rid of hard masters, but many fought to the death to protect their owners; one disguised himself as his master and suffered decapitation in his stead. Sons died to protect their fathers, others betrayed their fathers to inherit a part of their fortunes. Adulterers or deceived wives surrendered their husbands. The wife of Coponius secured his safety by sleeping with Antony. Antony’s wife Fulvia had tried to buy the mansion of her neighbor Rufus; he had refused to sell; now, though he offered it to her as a gift, she had him proscribed and nailed his severed head to his front door.⁵

Antony placed Cicero high on the list of those who should be killed. Antony was the husband of Clodius’ widow and the stepson of the Catalinarian Lentulus whom Cicero had slain in jail; and he resented with some reason the unstinted vituperation of the “Philippics.” Octavian protested, but not too long; he could not forget Cicero’s glorification of Caesar’s assassins and the pun by which that reckless wit had excused to the conservatives his dalliance with Caesar’s heir.^* Cicero tried to escape; but being buffeted and sickened by the sea, he disembarked and spent the night in his villa at Formiae. The next day he wished to stay there and await his executioners, preferring them to a choppy sea; but his slaves forced him into a litter and were carrying him toward the ship when Antony’s soldiers came upon them. The servants wished to resist, but Cicero bade them set the litter down and yield. Then, “his person covered with dust, his beard and hair untrimmed, and his face worn with his troubles,”⁷ he stretched his head out so that the soldiers might more conveniently decapitate him (43). By Antony’s command Cicero’s right hand was also cut off and brought with the head to the Triumvir. Antony laughed in triumph, gave the assassins 250,000 drachmas, and had head and hand hung up in the Forum.⁸

Early in 42 the Triumvirs led their forces across the Adriatic and marched through Macedonia into Thrace. There Brutus and Cassius had massed the last republican army, financed by exactions beyond even Roman precedent. From the Eastern cities of the Empire they demanded, and received, ten years’ taxes in advance. When the Rhodians proved reluctant, Cassius stormed the great port, ordered all citizens to surrender their wealth, killed those who hesitated, and carried away $10,000,000. In Cilicia he quartered his soldiers in the homes of Tarsus till it paid him $9,000,000 to leave; to raise this sum the citizens auctioned off all municipal lands, melted down all temple vessels and ornaments, and sold free persons into slavery—first boys and girls, then women and old men, finally youths; many, on learning that they had been sold, killed themselves. In Judea Cassius levied $4,200,000 and sold the inhabitants of four towns into slavery. Brutus, too, could raise money by force. When the citizens of Lycian Xanthus refused his demands, he besieged them until, starving but obdurate, they committed suicide en masse.⁹ For the most part Brutus, loving philosophy, tarried in Athens; but the city was filling with young Roman nobles clamoring for a war of restoration. When sufficient funds had been raised Brutus closed his books, joined his troops with those of Cassius, and took the field.

The rival armies met at Philippi in September of 42. Brutus’ wing forced back Octavian’s and captured his camp; but Antony’s routed the legions of Cassius. Cassius ordered his shield-bearer to kill him and was obeyed. Antony could not follow up his success at once; Octavian was confined to his tent with illness, and his troops were in disorder. Antony reorganized the whole army and after a few days’ rest led them against Brutus and put the last remnants of the republican forces to flight. Seeing his men yield, Brutus realized, perhaps with relief, that all was lost; he threw himself upon the sword of a friend and died. Antony, coming upon the body, covered it with his own purple robe. They had once been friends.

II. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

The old aristocracy fought its last land battle at Philippi. Many of them—Cato’s son, Hortensius’ son, Quintilius Varus, and Quintus Labeo—joined Brutus and Cassius in suicide. The victors divided the Empire between them: Lepidus was given Africa, Octavian took the West, Antony, having his choice, took Egypt, Greece, and the East. Always needing money, Antony forgave the Eastern cities their contributions to his enemies on condition that they give him a like sum—ten years’ taxes within a year. His old geniality returned as victory made him seemingly secure. He reduced his demands upon the Ephesians when their women, dressed as Bacchantes, greeted him as the god Dionysus; but he gave his cook the house of a Magnesian magnate as reward for a distinguished supper. He called an assembly of the Ionian cities at Ephesus and settled the boundaries and affairs of these states with such good judgment that Augustus a decade later found little to change. He pardoned all who had fought against him except those who had shared in killing Caesar. He gave relief to the cities that had suffered most severely from Cassius and Brutus, released several of them from every Roman tax, freed many who had been sold into slavery by the conspirators, and liberated the cities of Syria from the despots who had overthrown their democracies.¹⁰

While displaying these graces of his simple character, Antony surrendered to such exuberant sensuality that his subjects lost respect for his authority. He surrounded himself with dancers, musicians, courtesans, and roisterers, and took wives and concubines whenever a fair woman struck his Olympian fancy. He had sent messengers to bid Cleopatra present herself before him at Tarsus and answer charges that she had aided Cassius to raise money and troops. She came, but in her own time and way. While Antony sat on a throne in the forum, waiting for her to plead and be judged, she sailed up the river Cydnus in a barge with purple sails, gilded stern, and silver oars that beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. Her maids, dressed as sea nymphs and graces, were the crew, while she herself, dressed as Venus, lay under a canopy of cloth of gold. When the news of this seductive apparition spread among the people of Tarsus they flocked to the shore, leaving Antony solitary on his throne. Cleopatra invited him to dine with her on her ship. He came with an overawing retinue; she feted them with every luxury, and corrupted his generals with gifts and smiles. Antony had almost fallen in love with her as a girl in Alexandria; now he found her, at twenty-nine, in the full maturity of her charms. He began by reproving her, and ended by presenting her with Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Cyprus, and parts of Arabia, Cilicia, and Judea.¹¹ She rewarded him according to his desire and invited him to Alexandria. There he spent a carefree winter (41-40), drinking the Queen’s love, listening to lectures at the Museum, and forgetting that he had an empire to rule. She herself was not in love. She knew that Egypt, rich but weak, would soon attract the cupidity of omnipotent Rome; the only salvation for her country and her throne lay in marriage with Rome’s lord. She had sought this with Caesar; she sought it now with Antony. And he, who had no policy but Caesar’s, was tempted to realize the dream of uniting Rome and Egypt and making his capital in the fascinating East.

While Antony frolicked in Alexandria, his wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius were plotting to overthrow Octavian’s power in Rome. Octavian had found no happiness there: the Senate was a rump of adventurers and generals, labor was restless with unemployment, the populares were disorganized, Sextus Pompey was blocking the import of food, business was petrified with fear, taxation and spoliation had ruined nearly every fortune, and many men were living in a reckless and sensual riot on the ground that the morrow might in any case bring repudiation of the currency, or further spoliation, or death. Octavian himself was anything but an exemplar of chastity at this time. To perfect the confusion, Fulvia and Lucius raised an army and called upon Italy to oust him. Marcus Agrippa, Octavian’s general, besieged Lucius in Perusia and starved him out (March, 40). Fulvia died of illness, frustrated ambition, and grief over Antony’s neglect of her. Octavian pardoned Lucius in the hope of maintaining peace with Antony, but Antony crossed the sea and besieged Octavian’s troops in Brundisium. The armies, showing more sense than their leaders, refused to fight each other, and compelled them to a peaceable agreement (40). As a pledge of good behavior Antony married Octavian’s sister, the gentle and virtuous Octavia. Everybody was briefly happy; and Virgil, writing now his Fourth Eclogue, predicted the return of Saturn’s Utopian reign.

In 38 Octavian fell in love with Livia, the pregnant wife of Tiberius Claudius Nero. He divorced his first wife Scribonia, persuaded Nero to release Livia, married her, and found, in her persuasive counsel and her aristocratic connections as a member of the Claudian gens, a passage to reconciliation with the propertied classes. He reduced taxes, returned 30,000 runaway slaves to their masters, and set himself patiently to restoring order in Italy. With the help of Agrippa, and of 120 ships contributed by Antony, he destroyed the fleet of Sextus Pompey, secured Rome’s food supply, and ended the resistance of the Pompeians (36). The Senate by acclamation named him tribune for life.

After marrying Octavia in a state ceremony at Rome, Antony went with her to Athens. There for a time he enjoyed the novel experience of living with a good woman. He put aside politics and war and, with Octavia at his side, attended the lectures of philosophers. Meanwhile, however, he studied the plans that Caesar had left for conquering Parthia. Labienus, son of Caesar’s general, had entered the services of the Parthian king and had led Parthian armies victoriously into Cilicia and Syria—lucrative provinces of Rome (40). To meet this threat Antony needed soldiers; to pay soldiers he needed money; and of this Cleopatra had plenty. Suddenly tiring of virtue and peace, he sent Octavia back to Rome and asked Cleopatra to meet him at Antioch. She brought him a few troops, but she disapproved of his grandiose plans and apparently gave him little of her fabulous treasury. He invaded Parthia with 100,000 men (36), tried in vain to capture its citadels, and lost almost half his forces in a heroic retreat through 300 miles of hostile country. On the way he annexed Armenia to the Empire. He awarded himself a triumph and shocked Italy by celebrating it at Alexandria. He sent a letter of divorce to Octavia (32), married Cleopatra, confirmed her and Caesarion as joint rulers of Egypt and Cyprus, and bequeathed the Eastern provinces of the Empire to the son and daughter that Cleopatra had borne him. Knowing that he would soon have to square accounts with Octavian, he abandoned himself to a year of frolic and luxury. Cleopatra encouraged him to dare the last gamble for omnipotence, helped him to raise an army and a fleet, and chose as her favorite oath, “As surely as I shall one day give judgment in the Capitol.”¹³

III. ANTONY AND OCTAVIAN

Octavia bore her rejection silently, lived quietly in Antony’s house at Rome, and brought up faithfully his children by Fulvia and the two daughters that she herself had given him. The daily sight of her mute desolation inflamed Octavian’s conviction that both Italy and he were doomed if Antony’s plans succeeded. He saw to it that Italy should realize the situation: Antony had married the Queen of Egypt, had assigned to her and her illegitimate offspring the most tribute-yielding of Rome’s provinces, was seeking to make Alexandria the capital of the Empire, and would reduce Rome and Italy to subordinate roles. When Antony sent a message to the Senate (which he had for years ignored) proposing that he and Octavian should retire to private life, and that the institutions of the Republic should be restored, Octavian escaped a difficult situation by reading to the Senate what he claimed was Antony’s will, which he had taken by force from the Vestal Virgins. It named Antony’s children by Cleopatra his sole heirs, and directed that he should be buried beside the Queen in Alexandria.¹⁴ The last clause was as decisive for the Senate as it should have proved suspicious; instead of raising doubts that a will filed in Rome should have made such provisions, it convinced the Senate and Italy that Cleopatra was scheming to absorb the Empire through Antony. With characteristic subtlety Octavian declared war (32) against her rather than Antony, and made the conflict a holy war for the independence of Italy.

In September, 32, the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra sailed into the Ionian Sea, 500 warships strong; no such armada had been seen before. Supporting it was an army of 100,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, mostly supplied by Eastern princes and kings in the hope of making this a war of liberation from Rome. Octavian crossed the Adriatic with 400 vessels, 80,000 foot, 12,000 horse. For almost a year the rival forces prepared and maneuvered; then, on September 2, 31, they fought at Actium, in the Ambracian Gulf, one of the decisive battles of history. Agrippa proved the better tactician, and his light ships more manageable than Antony’s heavy-towered leviathans. Many of these were consumed by fires set by burning brands cast upon them by Octavian’s crews. “Some sailors,” says Dio Cassius,

perished by the smoke before the flames could reach them; others were cooked in their armor, which became red hot; others were roasted in their vessels as though in ovens. Many leaped into the sea; of these some were mangled by sea monsters, some were shot by arrows, some were drowned. The only ones to obtain an endurable death were those who killed one another.¹⁵

Antony saw that he was losing, and signaled to Cleopatra to carry out their prearranged plan for retreat. She headed her squadron southward and waited for Antony; unable to extricate his flagship, he abandoned it and rowed out to hers. As they sailed for Alexandria he sat alone on the prow, his head between his hands, conscious that everything was lost, even honor.

From Actium Octavian went to Athens; thence to Italy to quell a mutiny among his troops, who clamored for the plunder of Egypt; then to Asia to depose and punish Antony’s adherents and raise new funds from long-suffering cities; then to Alexandria (30). Antony had left Cleopatra and was staying on an island near Pharos; thence he sent offers of peace, which Octavian ignored. Unknown to Antony, Cleopatra sent Octavian a golden scepter, crown, and throne as tokens of her submission; according to Dio he replied that he would leave her and Egypt untouched if she would kill Antony.¹⁶ The beaten Triumvir wrote to Octavian again, reminding him of their former friendship and of “all the wanton pranks in which they had shared as youths”; and agreed to kill himself if the victor would spare Cleopatra. Again Octavian made no reply. Cleopatra gathered all that she could of the Egyptian treasury into a palace tower and informed Octavian that she would destroy it all, and herself, unless he granted an honorable peace. Antony led what small forces remained to him in a last fight; his desperate courage won a temporary victory; but on the next day, seeing Cleopatra’s mercenaries surrender, and receiving a report that Cleopatra was dead, he stabbed himself. When he learned that the report was false he begged to be brought to the tower in whose upper chambers the Queen and her attendants had locked themselves; they drew him up through the window, and he died in her arms. Octavian allowed her to come forth and bury her lover; then he granted her an audience and, immune to what lure survived in a broken woman of thirty-nine, he gave her terms that made life seem worthless to one who had been a queen. Convinced that he intended to take her as captive to adorn a Roman triumph, she arrayed herself in her royal robes, put an asp to her breast, and died. Her handmaidens Charmion and Iris followed her in suicide.¹⁸

Octavian permitted her to be buried beside Antony. Caesarion, and Antony’s eldest son by Fulvia, he slew; the children of Antony and the Queen he spared and sent to Italy, where Octavia reared them as if they were her own. The victor found the Egyptian treasury intact and as abundant as he had dreamed. Egypt escaped the indignity of being named a Roman province; Octavian merely mounted the throne of the Ptolemies, succeeded to their possessions, and left a praefectus to administer the country in his name. Caesar’s heir had conquered those of Alexander, and absorbed Alexander’s realm; the West again, as at Marathon and Magnesia, had triumphed over the East. The battle of the giants was over, and an invalid had won.

The Republic died at Pharsalus; the revolution ended at Actium. Rome had completed the fatal cycle known to Plato and to us: monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchic exploitation, democracy, revolutionary chaos, dictatorship. Once more, in the great systole and diastole of history, an age of freedom ended and an age of discipline began.

BOOK III

THE PRINCIPATE

30 B.C.-A.D. 192

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

B.C.

30:

Octavian receives tribunician power for life; Horace’s 2nd book of Satires

29:

Virgil’s Georgics; Horace’s Epodes

27:

Octavian becomes Augustus

27-A.D. 68:

JULIO-CLAUDIAN DYNASTY

27-A.D. 14:

Principate of Augustus

25:

Agrippa’s Pantheon; fl. Tibullus

23:

First 3 books of Horace’s Odes

20:

First book of Horace’s Epistles

19:

Death of Virgil; fl. Propertius

18:

Lex lulia de adulteriis

13:

Theater of Marcellus; fourth book of Horace’s Odes

12-9:

Campaigns of Drusus in Germany; Tiberius subjugates Pannonia

9:

Fl. Livy; Ara Pacis of Augustus

8:

Death of Maecenas and Horace

6:

Tiberius in Rhodes

2:

Banishment of Julia

A.D. 4:

Augustus adopts Tiberius

8:

Ovid banished to Tomi

9:

Defeat of Varus in Germany; lex Papia Poppaea and lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus

14:

Death of Augustus

14-37:

Principate of Tiberius

14-16:

Germanicus and Drusus in Germany

17-18:

Germanicus in the Near East

18:

Death of Ovid

19:

Death of Germanicus; trial of Piso

20:

Lex maiestatis; rise of informers

23-31:

Rule of Sejanus

27:

Tiberius settles at Capraea

29:

Death of Livia; banishment of Agrippina

30:

Fl. Celsus, encyclopedist

31:

Death of Sejanus

37-41:

Principate of Gaius (Caligula)

41-54:

Principate of Claudius

41-49:

Exile of Seneca

43:

Conquest of Britain

48:

Death of Messalina; Claudius marries Agrippina the Younger

49:

Seneca praetor, and tutor to Nero

54-68:

Principate of Nero

55:

Seneca dedicates De Clementia to Nero; Nero poisons Britannicus

59:

Nero orders death of his mother Agrippina

62:

Fall of Seneca; death of Persius; Nero kills Octavia and marries Poppaea

64:

Burning of Rome; first persecution of Christians in Rome

A.D.

65:

Execution of Seneca and Lucan

66:

Death of Petronius and Thrasea Paetus

68-69:

Principate of Galba

69 (Jan.-Apr.):

Principate of Otho

69 (July-Dec):

Principate of Vitellius

69-96:

FLAVIAN DYNASTY

69-79:

Principate of Vespasian

70:

The Colosseum; Quintilian fills first state professorship

71:

Vespasian banishes philosophers

72:

Suicide of Helvidius Priscus

79-81:

Principate of Titus

79:

Eruption of Vesuvius; death of the elder Pliny

81:

Arch of Titus

81-96:

Principate of Domitian; fl. Martial and Statius

81-84:

Campaigns of Agricola in Britain