A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (13 page)

De Bello Gallico
is a sparse narrative written with ‘a sharp pen in sharp ink’ and does not of course refer to its author’s extra-marital and extramural activities,
which we know to have been intense from Suetonius’ list of his mistresses, which, in the fashion of the times, included the wives and daughters of his friends. An attractive man of power,
lecherous and susceptible, he must have found ample distraction when not actually on the war-path, as the bawdy ballad sung by his soldiers at his Triumph – ‘lock up your daughters,
Romans, our bald-pated chief is on his way’ – suggests.

In 53
BC
Caesar had dealt with the Treveri (around Trier), but in 52
BC
Vercingetorix, destined to become Caesar’s most glamorous and
formidable opponent in Gaul, decided to strike back. He had heard that Caesar was in trouble in Rome. Publius Clodius Pulcher was a bad lad from a grand family (his sister Clodia, mistress of the
poet Catullus, was also a bad girl). He was Caesar’s trusty in the business of political gang warfare, in opposition to Pompey’s man, T. Annius Milo (hostilities had intensified after
the break-up between the two leaders in 54
BC
). Both specialized, in Tammany Hall fashion, in delivering the vote. (Clodius was feminine enough in looks to disguise himself
as a woman and penetrate a party given by the Vestal Virgins. Caesar’s wife had been involved and in the resulting scandal he divorced her, as she was not ‘above suspicion’.)
Clodius had been murdered by Milo’s gang. Caesar was therefore fighting on two fronts, the political in Rome and the military in Gaul. For the moment, the latter became his priority.

Vercingetorix came from Arvernia (the Auvergne) and his father was only prevented from being elected king of the Gallic tribes by assassination. Energetic, eloquent and
ruthless, he had been chosen commander-in-chief of eight tribes and gave Caesar a lot of trouble with his scorched-earth policy, realizing, after three defeats, that he could not expect to beat the
Roman army in the field. The Roman soldier was not a gourmet but he had to have his porridge, and if the grain had been burned . . .?

Caesar describes the forces and the campaign of Vercingetorix as carefully as his own – one is reminded of the German General Staffs research into the character of the American commander
General Patton, in the Second World War – and mentions without remark or bitterness that he ‘turned round’ his friend Commius, whom he had made a king, but who arrived at the
siege of Alesia with a quarter of a million men and cavalry three miles long. In the battle – which was, like Waterloo, ‘a dam’ close-run thing’ – Caesar, wearing his
scarlet cloak, saved the day with a cavalry charge. Vercingetorix’s speech to the Gallic Assembly on the following day indicates the extent of the victory. ‘I did not undertake the war
for private ends, but in the cause of national liberty, and since I must now accept my fate I place myself at your disposal. Make amends to the Romans by killing me or surrender me alive as you
think best.’

Of course Caesar wanted this glittering young man alive and well for his Triumph, and indeed kept Vercingetorix in cold storage for six years against this event; when the time came he may or may
not have tried to prevent his execution, for, as even Buchan admits, Romans were not strong on gallantry or compassion. From this battle every soldier earned one prisoner-of-war, which he could
sell as a slave.

There were few survivors of the Eburones’ rebellion, which Caesar was determined should be the last in Gaul for some time. It was. Roman legions and auxiliaries cut a
swathe of terror from Bordeaux to Provence, from Switzerland to Belgium, destroying every building, killing every cow belonging to rebellious tribes. In this campaign he was helped by
‘young’ Brutus and Mark Antony so the policy of inflicting Pax Romana on the Gauls was not just Caesar’s idea. The terror worked. The tribe who started this final rebellion
delivered their leader to Caesar, who, ‘normally averse to harsh punishment’, had him flogged to death, the punishment reserved for a rebellious
subject
as opposed to an
enemy.

Though in Rome one of the ‘
populares
’, Caesar approved the excuse of the apologetic and finally submissive tribes, that their rebellion had been due to the influence of
demagogues from the proletariat. Whatever their politics at home, Romans always supported the establishment abroad, granting citizenship only to the rich – as to the father of Paul of Tarsus
in Cilicia, who had the wool monopoly. When he judged Gaul truly conquered, Caesar distributed presents to loyal collaborators and encouraged the conquered in the pursuit of the Roman way of life.
This worked, for within three generations the bearded and belligerent Asterix became the urbane, clean-shaven Q. Tullius Crassus, as it were, giving dinner parties for the local garrison officers
in his newly built villa, complete with mosaics, murals, central heating and curtains, such as are currently being excavated on an island in a graceful curve of the Vienne, in Limoges, just half an
hour up the road from where I am writing. Indeed Gaul quickly grew to be the Romans’ favourite province. The Emperor Claudius was born in Lugdunum (Lyons), Hadrian was acclaimed Emperor in
Lutetia, the capital of the Parisii, and the rue St Jacques, Paris’s exit to the south, which leads,
like all roads, to Rome, is a Roman road. It was from Rome that
France learned the art of making vintage wine, an art rediscovered in the eighteenth century by a Dutchman, who worked out that sulphur had to be added to grape juice to kill the spoiling bacteria.
The Romans cleansed their wine barrels with fire and were able to seal promising wine in
amphorae
for twenty years. Ausonius, Professor of Rhetoric in Bordeaux, had a boyfriend who went
‘walkabout’ – as Australians say of Aborigines who go absent without leave – and being a man of influence asked Rome to find him. Discovered in a bar in Barcelona, the
boyfriend refused to return but sent a message to Ausonius saying, ‘Cultivate your vineyard.’ (Hence Chateau Ausone.
²¹
)

The Gallic Wars over, Caesar’s enemies in Rome, notably the consul Metellus, tried to relieve him of his legions. While campaigning, the Triumvirate, of which he was a
third, had not worn well. Pompey’s affection had gone with the death of his wife Julia, whom he had really liked, and he declined another alliance with Caesar’s family. (Marriages at
this level in politics were purely political.) Crassus, the elderly backer, had creaked off to Parthia (Rome’s
bête noire),
where he had been defeated and decapitated; his head,
delivered to Athens, had been kicked around on a stage. (In better times Pompey had repaid Caesar’s IOUs to Crassus with a special tax on Asia.) Without an army (as Caesar observed later,
surveying the Roman dead after the battle of Pharsalus, where he defeated Pompey), a general was no better than a felon. (‘
Hoc voluerunt
,’ he also said – ‘It was
their idea.’) The Senate voted Pompey sole consul and at the trial of Milo, his man, for the
murder of Clodius, Caesar’s man, he menaced the court with soldiers.
(There was no police force in Republican Rome.) Milo had hired Cicero to defend him but it was the great advocate’s only failure and when he sent his client the speech he had been unable to
deliver, Milo replied from exile in Marseilles that he was glad, because otherwise he would not be enjoying the local mullet.

The Civil War was not so much the result of the rivalry between Caesar and Pompey but that of the Optimates and the Populares. The Senate had voted, 370 to 22, on a proposal from Caesar’s
new spokesman, an impoverished patrician called Curio, that both Pompey and Caesar relinquish their commands. Pompey dithered, then, prompted by Metellus, agreed to take command of all land-forces
in Italy. Caesar was menaced. He had to act. He left Ravenna and seized a little town called Ariminum (Rimini); there he slipped out of a dinner party with a few friends in the middle of the night
and crossed a little stream, whose whereabouts is now unknown, but which history records was the Rubicon, muttering, it is said, ‘The die is cast’ – for he had crossed the Italian
border. His first action was to ‘liberate’ some horses in a meadow on the other side. The Civil War had begun.

Caesar had a winning reputation and though he started with one legion and no money, troops were drawn to him like iron filings to a magnet. He took his fill of money from the treasury in the
Forum and sent friendly messages to Pompey. He met Cicero, the intellectual doyen of the Optimates, and let him join, in perfect safety, his rival. The war spread to Africa and Spain, then to
Greece, Egypt and Asia (western Turkey), but Caesar prevailed. Unlike previous dictators, to which special office he was elected in 46
BC
, he behaved with courtesy and
clemency to his defeated fellow Romans. At home he used his exceptional powers to relieve
debtors and recall exiles. When Pompey fled to Egypt, after losing the final battle in
Thessaly, and was murdered by the advisers of the ten-year-old king, Caesar mourned him with the rest of the Roman world.

The boy king had a sister, a Macedonian like all the Ptolemies, at eighteen more witty than pretty, but full of charm, dash, ambition and courage. Enter Cleopatra. She had been seen off by her
brother’s faction but when she heard that the new conqueror had arrived in Alexandria she contrived to have herself smuggled into the palace and presented to Caesar. So began the world-famous
affair. But they did not, as legend has it, spend the next two months cruising down the Nile, for though Caesar was enchanted by the beguiling princess, he had other, less agreeable, things to do.
The son of Mithridates had invaded the Roman province of Cappadocia and Caesar defeated him in a lightning campaign summed up in a scrap of graffiti on a cartwheel subsequently displayed in Rome
(where he was badly needed):
Veni
,
vidi
,
vici.
Caesar’s
mots
were always pithy, never endearing.

The dreaded Milo, gang-leader of the Optimates, had returned to Rome and his debt laws were being sabotaged. His own veterans were so grumpy that they had marched on the capital demanding their
demob pay and Caesar returned just in time to halt them with a speech beginning, ‘
Quirites
’ – citizens – meaning that he could no longer think of them as his
soldiers. He saw Cicero, dismounted and walked with him for ‘several furlongs’. He had to cross to Africa to squash Pompey’s father-in-law, then to Spain to deal with
Pompey’s sons. The Senate voted him his fifth consulate and at each victory, more honours, more Triumphs, more titles, including ‘Liberator’ and finally, in February 44
BC
, that of ‘Dictator Perpetuus’. (Unlike Augustus he declined none of them.) The month Quintilius was renamed, after him, July. For some
Romans all this was too much. In February the Ides of March were not far off.

Caesar enjoyed power and its trappings. He would have liked to run the Republic for ever and said that Sulla was an idiot to have resigned his dictatorship. More than the
auctoritas
and
potestas
of his position he revelled in his
dignitas
– the esteem of his peers – and it had been to preserve this that he had crossed the Rubicon. He did not want to be
King or Emperor in Rome, nor had he wanted to start a dynasty. Indeed he made it an offence for anyone to hail him as King, rejecting a royal wreath when it was offered to him saying, ‘
non
Rex sed Caesar sum
’ (‘I’m not Mr King I’m Mr Caesar’). Octavian, his adopted son and great-nephew, was his testamentary, not his political heir, and it was not
Caesar’s intention that he should parley himself into becoming the Emperor Augustus.

Caesar was not, like his predecessors (Marius and Sulla) or his successors (Octavian, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero), dictators before him, and Emperors after him, in a dynasty he
unknowingly founded, ever cruel, vindictive or greedy. No proscriptions followed his victories over other Romans, no son was deprived of his patrimony, no husband was contemptuously cuckolded
– and most of those who struck the twenty-seven blows which killed him on 15 March 44
BC
were his friends. Caesar was a radical but not a dreamer. His measures were
practical, like the reform of the calendar which still endures, the autonomy for the municipalities, the rationalization of the corn dole (similar to the thinking behind the proposal to abolish the
child allowance for the better off in Britain today), the codification of Roman Law, a new harbour at Ostia, draining marshes, founding twenty new towns, changing the oligarchic city state of Rome
into a serious and efficient capital – first of Rome then of the
Roman world – and so on and so forth. When he was killed he was planning to extend the Roman world
and particularly wanted to subdue Parthia and avenge his friend Crassus. He had maddened the Optimates by increasing the number of officials – the
aediles
from four to six,
quaestors
from forty to sixty – and bumping up the Senate to 900, to include businessmen, loyal Gauls and even centurions, thus broadening the powerbase and diminishing the perquisites
and profits of the aristocracy. It was for these measures, coupled with increasing arrogance and irritability in the last months of his life, that he was killed.

Caesar might have disdained a crown but his manner was often regal and his flip
hauteur
was wounding. The Games bored him – but did he have to be seen in his box reading his papers?
A group of senators with a swathe of yet more honours came towards him but he did not his golden curule throne.
²²
A spot of giddiness perhaps? It was
rumoured in Rome that his ambition was to be buried within the city limits, an honour granted only to a Roman who had died in a victorious battle. Even Augustus was careful to build his mausoleum
well outside the city limits. Caesar had said, had he not, that it needed a king in Rome to defeat Parthia. What did he mean?