The early life of Caesar may be seen as the story of a young man being hunted, but possessed of an indomitable spirit and a fierce determination to defend the honour of the defeated party of the populares. He incurs the enmity of the dictator Sulla, who seeks to eliminate the nephew of Gaius Marius. But Caesar is also the scion of one of the most venerable patrician families, the gens Julia, which boasted a mythical descent from Julus, the son of Aeneas. Any overt action against the young son of Gaius Julius Caesar the Elder (who had died in...

An unforeseen event marred the journey. Off the island of Pharmacussa – one of the Sporades to the south of Miletos – Caesar’s ship was seized by pirates, the ferocious pirates of Cilicia. The most colourful account of this episode, which is also found in the historical writing of Velleius,¹ is by Plutarch, and Suetonius too provides details which concur with the vivid account by his Greek contemporary. It is difficult to imagine that anybody but Caesar himself could be the source of the story. The sardonic self-confidence with which the whole episode is related must come from him. ‘The...

On returning to Rome from a journey during which, according to Velleius, he was again harassed by pirates, the ‘masters of the seas’,¹ Caesar achieved an early electoral success: he was elected a military tribune in 72 bc for the following year.² He was the first to be elected,³ no doubt because he was well aware of the way to win an electoral campaign. He deployed his energies in the battles characteristic of the tradition and the politics of the populares, all the more significant while the war against Spartacus was raging in Italy. He strove to support, says Suetonius...

The démarche which led to the surprise capture of the office of pontifex maximus (high priest) in 63 bc was one of Caesar’s most successful. Thanks to his efforts, the pontificate had again become an elected office – another blow against Sulla’s constitutional reforms.¹ This sacred office carried with it immense importance in Roman politics. Caesar, a sceptic ever close to the Epicureans in his beliefs,² clearly did not hesitate for an instant to compete for the role of supreme guardian of the religion of the state, a post which by its nature stood above everyday political squabbles. Being an...

The costs of these two hugely expensive election campaigns had exhausted Caesar’s finances, and his debts were a continuing concern. He knew very well that the last resort of those beset by debts was civil war. When young men of his class utterly ruined by debt sought his assistance, if there was no other way to help them out of their difficulties, he replied with pitiless realism that ‘what they needed was civil war’.¹ At first sight this seemed a paradoxical witticism, but it well illustrates an immediate connection in Caesar’s mind: war as a response to debt and economic...

The trade in votes, which celebrated its greatest triumphs in Roman election campaigns, is eloquent testimony to the well-known fact that only members of the wealthiest families could contemplate and pursue a career in politics. The Roman republic was, as we know, an oligarchic republic in the sense that all its leading political figures were drawn from a patrician-plebeian nobilitas characterised by being able to boast that its forebears had reached the rank of consul (the highest political and military office). It was an oligarchy which sought and directed the ‘popular’ vote in order to perpetuate itself, but it did...

Caesar’s career was marked by two conspiracies: in one of them, which failed, he was a participant ‘from a distance’, or was at least aware of it; of the other, which succeeded, he was the target. He was on the fringes of the Catilinarian conspiracy, but he stood to be swept away by it. It was Cicero who came to his rescue. Somebody had produced documents, possibly not genuine, which seemed to implicate Caesar in the plot. Lucius Vettius, a Roman knight who in his youth had known Cicero at the time of the social war (89 bc: both had...

Sallust maintains that the plan for a coup arose long before Catiline’s defeat in the consular elections of 63 bc. This date is one of the most controversial points in Sallust’s reconstruction. The initial exposure was due, according to Sallust, to the mistress of the conspirator Curius, a certain Fulvia, who learned it from pillow-talk. It was the alarm consequently raised that led to Catiline’s electoral defeat in 63 bc (for the consulship of 62). Catiline, undeterred by this defeat, persevered with his preparations for the coup. The Senate responded by granting the consuls Cicero and Antony full power to...

Had the optimates not been utterly obsessed with the idea that somebody – and that somebody could only be Pompey – was striving after a new form of personal power, they would probably not have offered Pompey to Caesar as a valuable ally. To the republic, Pompey was an extremely burdensome legacy of Sulla, the more so because his power and military prestige had grown, resting on a fine web of clientship relations which reached from one end of the empire to the other. He had followed in the footsteps of Sulla, the victor in the civil war against Marius.¹...

The causal connection between the triumvirate and the civil war is stated in the opening lines of this ode to Asinius Pollio, in which the sometime republican Horace, still a sympathiser, but from a distance, salutes the birth and development of Asinius’ work on the civil war.¹ To Horace, many years after the event, the battle of Philippi remained the moment at which ‘Valour’s self was beaten down’ (cum fracta virtus).² This view, not unlike that of Cremutius, but clearly set in a poem which views everything with disenchantment, appears in a book which opens with a somewhat nervous announcement...

Caesar’s first act as consul was to enact a law requiring publication of a written record of the Senate’s proceedings, as well as the minutes of proceedings in the popular assemblies (the comitia).¹ The aim was clearly to step up the external pressure on the Senate. Years later, Augustus repealed Caesar’s law on the publication of Senate proceedings.² Here Caesar was clearly influenced by the Greek democratic tradition, which was firmly wedded to the public use of writing. Alert to symbolism, Caesar required the lictors to walk behind him even in the months in which his fellow-consul took precedence. It...

Caesar could not ignore the phenomenon of Clodius. If what he wanted was enduring, stable administration of the provinces, the politics of Rome demanded control over the mood, the spirit and any possible murmurs of unrest among the proletarianised and parasitic urban masses, to whom déclassé elements of the ruling stratum not infrequently offered themselves as leaders. In his time Catiline had been one such, and now there was Clodius. Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was born into the patriciate but had become a plebeian¹ – with the authority of Caesar as pontifex maximus – with the sole aim of being...

The process of granting to Caesar the provinces of Gaul and Illyricum was not without its difficulties. The Senate’s original decision, a provocative one,¹ taken before Caesar had been elected, had to be annulled and a new allocation made in its place. Plutarch’s account is eloquent in its brevity:

Pompey . . . filled the Forum with armed men and helped the people to pass Caesar’s laws and to give him, as his consular province to be held for five years, Gaul on both sides of the Alps, together with Illyricum and an army of four legions.²

It is here...

When he departed for Gaul in the spring of 58 bc, Caesar had a clear idea of the movements of the peoples and their tensions; in particular, the German pressure on Gaul. He conceived a long-term strategic plan using up-to-date ethnographic knowledge to which he himself contributed with his Commentaries. This is but one example of the way he combined scientific study with imperialism.

Just how dangerous the situation in Gaul really was at that time for the neighbouring Roman provinces cannot be determined, since we rely exclusively on Caesar’s version of the facts in his Commentaries on the Gallic...

Caesar’s Gallic campaign was not exactly viewed with enthusiasm by his contemporaries. This must be taken into account when estimating its ‘long-term effects’, whose ‘inevitability’ is often teleologically overestimated. There is doubtless a risk of adopting a colonialist view. The campaign was unprovoked and there was no real menace; it led to the destruction of the old civilisation, which was gradually replaced by a Romanised one; and Pliny and Plutarch agree that it was an act of genocide of monstrous proportions. It was all for one end: it is clear that the protagonist and instigator of the venture cynically used...

Without doubt the most dangerous moment for Caesar in the political crisis which erupted in Rome, while he was occupied with the revolt of Vercingetorix, was the designation of Pompey as ‘consul without colleague’ (consul sine collega) at the end of February 52 bc. This happened in a most traumatic way from the point of view of the triumvirate (which had been strengthened at Luca but ‘decapitated’ by the death of Crassus at Carrhae, in Syria, in the catastrophic campaign against the Parthians). The destructive and uncontrollable street fighting which led to the assassination of Clodius at Bovillae (18 January...

Suetonius rejected all other explanations, including the one ‘frequently repeated’ by Pompey, which was, however, rather unlikely. According to Pompey – and one would like to know Suetonius’ source for this interesting information – Caesar could not complete what he had undertaken; that is, finish the monuments and public works he had begun and satisfy the expectations he had aroused in the people; therefore he took the path to revolution.¹ If Pompey really did say this – Butler and Cary facetiously observe – it is clear that he understood nothing about his adversary’s character.² In reality, Pompey’s remark was far...

On the eve of civil war, in December 50 bc and the first week of January 49, illegality became official where one would least expect it: in the Senate. On 1 December Gaius Scribonius Curio, a tribune of the plebs whose support had been bought by Caesar,¹ said openly what nearly everyone else was thinking:

that, if any person suffered from apprehension of Caesar’s arms, and as the armed tyranny of Pompey was creating considerable alarm in the Forum, he would move that both leaders should give up arms and disband their armies. He held that by this means the...

It is thanks to Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus, which has survived only in part, all the letters of Atticus being missing, that we know of this letter, written by Caesar on the march towards Rome shortly after the capitulation of Corfinium.³ On 13 March 49 bc Cicero writes to Atticus, who is advising him not to break with Caesar.⁴ Cicero essentially agrees with Atticus that such an approach should be taken, but weakness undermines his resolve. As confirmation that this is the correct approach, Cicero informs his friend of the content of the lively correspondence between him on the one...

The functioning of Roman public life depended on amicitia. The fulcrum of the political groups, amicitia also humanised and strengthened relations between representatives of different alignments. According to some, it explains Roman politics: it was certainly a determining factor also because the political class had a single provenance.¹ Indeed, ‘the conservative Roman voter could seldom be induced to elect a man whose name had not been known for centuries as a part of the history of the Republic’.² Cicero reflects on amicitia in a famous treatise, in which he asserts categorically (rather in contrast with his experience of life) that...

The start of the civil conflict is a kind of ‘phoney war’. After the occupation of Picenum, Umbria and Etruria, and the humiliation of L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, who expected to succeed Caesar as governor of Gaul (and instead was ridiculed after his unsuccessful defence of Corfinium), Caesar hastened down the Adriatic coast as far as Brindisi to attempt to block Pompey’s flight from Italy. When this failed – Pompey successfully crossed to Durazzo (Dyrrhachium) on 17 March 49¹ – Caesar ‘lost’ his enemy for some time. He hurried back to Rome to consolidate, first, the conquest of Italy. This hectic...

While Caesar was occupied with the difficult campaign in the Balkans, two episodes of particularly dramatic social unrest occurred in Rome; each ended in repression. The main player in the first was Marcus Caelius Rufus, one of the tribunes who in January 49 bc had found refuge with Caesar. Caelius Rufus, much of whose correspondence with Cicero has been preserved,¹ had, on his return from the Spanish campaign against Afranius and Petreius, received the praetorship from Caesar for 48, but not the urban praetorship, which Caesar entrusted to Trebonius. This humiliated Caelius and increased his sense of disillusionment. The fact...

When Caesar reached Alexandria on 2 October 48 bc, he certainly did not expect to be greeted by the embalmed head of Pompey, but even less did he expect to be bogged down for all of nine months in a local conflict which almost cost him his life, until 28 June 47, when he finally sailed from Alexandria for Syria. Suetonius writes, correctly, that in that lengthy period Caesar found himself fighting

a war in truth of great difficulty, convenient neither in time or place, but carried on during the winter season, within the walls of a well-provisioned and crafty...

Caesar owed his salvation to the Jews, and this he never forgot. The decisive battle that lifted the siege in which he was trapped in Alexandria was the battle of Pelusium, followed immediately by that of the Jewish Camp. Here Antipater decided the battle against the Egyptians in Caesar’s favour, after the Egyptians had overwhelmed the flanking force commanded by Mithridates. According to Josephus Flavius it was Antipater who forced the surrender of Pelusium and entered the city first.¹ Brandishing the directives of Hyrcanus he secured the support of the Jews from the Memphis area.² In the battle of the...

By regarding the Alexandrian war as a not very serious ‘diversion’ or a ‘distraction’ for Caesar from his primary goal of concluding the civil war we may overlook a significant fact. While risking a great deal, with that conflict Caesar had added an important element to his clientele: Egypt, which for a long time had been feudally subject to Pompey and his associates.¹ Now, however, all his efforts were directed towards the rearrangement of the eastern clientele, disrupted by the death of Pompey. From Syria to Pontus this was Caesar’s priority, despite urgent calls for him to return to Rome,²...

One could argue that the reason the civil war did not end at Pharsalus was precisely because Pompey died so unexpectedly. The distinguishing feature of this civil war, different from all the others between the first century bc and the third century ad, was that it never ended. The forces in the field remained in balance, neither side able to achieve conclusive military success. For Caesar, the most urgent imperative each time was to achieve decisive victory on the field of battle, and, immediately or at the same time, to seek a political solution that would re-establish the balance of...

Octavius, the future Augustus, was the son of a certain Octavius (of an equestrian family, of Velitrae/Velletri) and Atia. Atia was the daughter of Marcus Atius Balbus of Aricia, who had married Caesar’s sister, Julia, and perhaps because of this he had forged ahead in his public career, attaining the praetorship. The kinship, then, between Octavius and Caesar was not close. Sources like Dio Cassius who describe Octavius (the later Octavian) as the son of a sister of Caesar (43.41.3) simplify too much, or are lying in order to bring Octavius and Caesar closer together, like the historical myth-maker Nicolaus...

With Cato dead at Utica in the manner we know, laudationes of the republican martyr and model Stoic followed one upon another. It was Cicero, with his innate imprudence, who inaugurated the series of posthumous commemorations whose political significance as ‘opposition’ is plain. At the request of Marcus Junius Brutus, Caesar’s favourite, but Cato’s nephew and admirer,¹ Cicero began writing a Laus Catonis as early as April 46 bc, as soon as the news reached Rome of Cato’s suicide in Africa. In the Orator (which followed shortly after), he stresses that the impulse for this came from Brutus: ‘I would...

In his Defence of Marcellus (late summer of 46 bc) Cicero had urged the senators he was addressing to be on the alert and protect Caesar from possible conspiracies. And he talked at length about the ‘madness’ of those who would conceive or plan an attempt on Caesar’s life, even – he specifies, turning directly to Caesar – ‘among the ranks of your own’. It is strange that he felt the need to point out this possibility to the Senate and, above all, to Caesar himself. ‘Still, since there are in the human mind corners so dark and recesses so...

After the hard-fought battle of Munda, the subjugation of Hispania Baetica (Further Spain) kept Caesar busy for several months. He admitted that this time he had fought not for victory but for his life,¹ and then had to confront determined resistance with no prospect of real pacification. The survivors from the defeated army had barricaded themselves in Corduba (Cordoba) and in the city of Munda; ‘cleansing’ those cities of these stubborn fighters, who were ready for anything, entailed considerable losses of men² and months of military and political effort.³ In managing the victory Caesar abstained from his usual clementia, and...

The most striking and theatrical incident was provoked by Antony, at the very moment when rumours of an imminent, openly monarchical shift in Caesar’s aspirations were being nourished from several sides. Once again suspicion turned to the possible role of Cleopatra as the moving force behind the scenes, especially since she had borne Caesar a son. This led to a persistent rumour that the dictator was about to move his seat permanently to Alexandria.¹ Suppositions concerning these alleged ‘Oriental’ plans were finally shown to be false only when Caesar’s will was read after his death. Then not only was the...

It was the ‘expansion’ of the dictatorship that led to the crisis. Caesar’s decision to identify his own real power (unprecedented in its extent) indefinitely with the traditional, constitutional dictatorship was not in reality a matter of choice. The dictatorship was the only instrument that allowed him freedom of action with respect to his followers. Here we shall review the stages through which the ‘revitalisation’ of the dictatorship had been achieved by the beginning of the civil war.

In an aside in the second book of his Commentaries on the civil war, in admirably modest and impersonal style, Caesar reports...

The historian who claimed that persons of Epicurean belief dominated the conspiracy against Caesar, and that Epicureanism, creatively reformulated in the fifth book of Lucretius, underpinned the anti-monarchic rebellion of these ‘Epicureans in revolt’, was Arnaldo Momigliano.¹ His belligerent essay is compelling but largely unfounded, especially in its central tenets: that the conspirators and later republican fighters were mostly ‘unconventional’ (that is, politically committed) Epicureans, and that Lucretius was their formative reading. It remains a good article on the aesthetic level, extolling the ‘heroic’ nexus between Epicureanism in philosophy and militant libertarian republicanism in politics. For Momigliano, writing that daring...

There is a tradition that pays particular attention to the role of Cassius in the events leading to Caesar’s murder. It emerges here and there in the sources and may well provide a valuable element of information. The clearest text is also the most interesting: Plutarch’s account of the coup at the beginning of his Life of Brutus, which uses sources very close to the events and the protagonist. He relies on Brutus by Emphylos, the Rhodian rhetorician who remained Brutus’ friend and confidant to the very end, as well as the biography written by Brutus’ stepson, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus,...

In his Life of Brutus Plutarch presents the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius. Cassius is driven to make peace by one politically decisive consideration: everyone he approaches with the proposal of a violent attempt to eliminate Caesar replies that he would be party to it only if Brutus were to take the lead. Should Brutus refuse, then any such enterprise must be considered a failure, precisely because Brutus had rejected it!¹ This is why Cassius decided to restore the contact with Brutus that had been broken off when he found himself competing with him for the praetorship.² The first question...

Having related the reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius, Plutarch informs us that both began to get in touch with their friends. But he really only relates the steps taken by Brutus.¹ This is not surprising, seeing that he is writing Brutus’ biography, and in any case he has already said that Cassius has been busy for some time.

According to Plutarch, Brutus received only two noes: both from persons who had had very close ties to Cato and would later die at Philippi in the republican ranks – Statilius² and Favonius. The latter was described in this context by Plutarch...

Speaking in the Senate on 19 September 44 bc, in the absence of Cicero, Antony made a serious accusation: ‘When Caesar had been slain, Brutus, whom I name with respect, at once lifting high his bloody dagger, shouted for Cicero by name, and congratulated him on the recovery of freedom’.¹ From Brutus’ remark (which Cicero does not deny) Antony concluded, perhaps rightly, that Cicero was not unaware of the conspiracy. In the Second Philippic, a savagely Demosthenian reply that was never delivered, Cicero accurately quotes Antony’s words and hits back with a detailed and deadly polemical retaliation: he recalls the...

Suetonius, who is well informed about reports of warnings reaching Caesar before the conspiracy,¹ wonders whether Caesar actually wanted to die, given that exhaustion had led to physical decline – a question which, he says, has already been explored by others. He paid no attention, it is said, to omens or ‘the reports of his friends’.² Suetonius also records the view that Caesar felt safer after the senators had sworn to protect him,³ and therefore made the mistake – which made possible his murder – of dismissing his bodyguard. A third opinion, which Suetonius duly records, is actually very close...

The evening before the assassination, Caesar was among the guests at supper at the house of Marcus Lepidus, his magister equitum, and the discussion turned to the question: what kind of death would be best? While the rather strange conversation lingered on this question – a cryptic warning? – Caesar, when his turn came to speak, said that he would by far prefer a sudden and unexpected death.¹ He had expressed the same preference (‘subitam et celerem’) before, in the context of another philosophical dialogue, in the margin of a passage on the death of Cyrus in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.² In...

This exchange between Caesar and Trebonius, in Act III, Scene 1, of Julius Caesar, follows immediately after the fatal dagger-blows which end the dictator’s life. Shakespeare was a diligent reader of the ancient sources, and had culled from them and exploited a crucial and awkward point: the panic to which Antony gave way, having been detained by Trebonius outside Pompey’s Curia while the assassination was taking place inside; and a little later Antony’s attempt to reach an understanding with the assassins, with particular attention to the inner feelings of Brutus, the more moderate of the leading conspirators, who brandished their...

In the moment in which the conspirators leave the body of the dictator unattended and abandon the idea of getting rid of it by throwing it into the Tiber, they lose everything. The Caesarians begin to regain ground when they are able to make political and emotional capital out of the corpse, whose cumbrous presence weighs increasingly heavily, and in the end decisively, on Roman politics. Shakespeare recognised the ‘potential’ of this corpse when in Antony’s (partly imagined) speech before the bloodstained body he captured the mood of the urban plebs.

In the very first moments after the murder, Brutus...

A fragment of Livy, most probably from book 116 (a ‘definitive’ portrait of Caesar following the account of his death),¹ raised a question mark over Caesar’s entire career. By citing it Seneca introduced a new angle, which has its own profound poetry – an analogy with the wind: ‘As things are, however, it could be said of winds what was commonly said of Julius Caesar, as reported by Titus Livy; it is uncertain whether it was better for the state that Caesar had been born or not.’ It would be wrong to read this as a hostile judgement on Caesar....