The Twelve Caesars Read online

  In the aftermath of victory, gifts and games. Suetonius records ‘a combat of gladiators and stage plays in every ward all over the city... as well as races in the circus, athletic contests and a sham sea-fight’. So great were the crowds of spectators that many were killed in the crush. There were public banquets, gifts of grain and oil; a payment of 300 sesterces to members of the public, booty to Caesar’s foot-soldiers and land for their retirement.

  Pompey had led the army of the Republic, pursued by Caesar, to Thessaly. There, at Pharsalus, Caesar won a decisive victory; Pompey escaped only to be murdered by the king of Egypt. Ignorant of his fate, Caesar arrived in Egypt to find Pompey already dead. He consoled himself with Cleopatra, whom he put on the throne in place of her brother Ptolemy XIII and took as his mistress. There were hostile legions in Spain and at Massilia, in Pontus and in Africa. At Thapsus, on the African coast, Caesar’s men overwhelmed fourteen legions of the Republican army. On that April day in 46, if we choose to believe the sources, 10,000 Pompeians died; Caesar’s side sustained little more than fifty casualties. Three months later, Caesar was back in Rome. His victory had taken three-and-a-half years. In a gesture redolent of past glories, the senate voted him forty days of thanksgiving. He celebrated four triumphs. At the end of the Gallic triumph, Vercingetorix was killed by strangulation: a prisoner, he had waited six years for his humiliation on the streets of Rome. Exhibits in the Pontic triumph included a bronze tablet inscribed with the legend ‘veni, vidi, vici’ in celebration of that speediest victory. For his part, Caesar received the right to be preceded through the streets of Rome by seventy-two lictors.25 It constituted an unprecedented distinction. That same year also witnessed his third consulship, an appointment to the dictatorship for ten years, and an award which encompassed aspects of the censorship including controlling membership of the senate.3 The consulship was renewed in the following year and the year after. In February 44 Caesar was named dictator for life – as Plutarch describes it, ‘confessedly a tyranny, since the monarchy, beside the element of irresponsibility, now took on that of permanence’.26 It was an accumulation of honours akin to Banquo’s commendation of Macbeth: ‘Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all...’ For Caesar, as for Rome, endgame had been reached.

  Once Cato had claimed that Caesar was the only man who undertook to overthrow the state when sober. Unrivalled power – corrupting or intoxifying, as we will – overrode that sobriety, muddied his responses to those around him, occluded his vision, blurred the boundaries of possibility. Arrogant in eminence, he offended senate and commons alike. ‘So far did he go in his presumption,’ Suetonius reports, ‘that when a soothsayer once reported direful inwards without a heart, he said, “They will be more favourable when I wish it; it should not be regarded as a portent, if a beast has no heart.”’

  In the Rome of the sources, portents are never superfluous (Tacitus described it as ‘a city which found a meaning in everything’).27 They punctuate the rise and fall of human existence as surely as life and death. To overlook – or worse, disdain – the asomatous was just another instance of Caesar’s failing judgement. Overworked and tired, increasingly plagued by epilepsy, he made plans nevertheless for a three-year absence from Italy, beginning on 18 March, to avenge Crassus’ defeat in Parthia. His plan finally ended the procrastination of that conspiracy of sixty senators under Marcus Junius Brutus, which, on the Ides of March, forcibly prevented his departure, almost on its very eve. Anticipating tragedy, horses left by Caesar to graze the banks of the Rubicon wept copiously; a bird called a king-bird, flying into the Hall of Pompey with a sprig of laurel in its beak, was pursued and killed by larger birds; a burning slave, cloaked in flames, survived uninjured; and Caesar’s wife Calpurnia dreamed that the pediment of their house collapsed and that Caesar was stabbed in the arm. On more than one occasion, a soothsayer called Spurinna warned Caesar to beware of danger that would come to him no later than the Ides of March. In response he disbanded his Spanish bodyguard.

  And so it came to pass that Gaius Julius Caesar, described by Suetonius as invariably kind and considerate to his friends, died at the hands of a conspiracy whose members were all known to him. Many centuries later, the scene was painted by the Italian Neoclassicist Vincenzo Camuccini. Camuccini’s re-creation depicts a frieze-like orchestration of balletic fury, its focus a crimson-clad Caesar languid in fearless profile. The truth cannot have been so orderly. Under the rain of dagger blows, a single groan escaped Caesar’s lips; also, in some accounts, the words ‘You, too, my child?’, uttered in Greek to Brutus. Thanks to Shakespeare, who rendered that dying cadence ‘Et tu, Brute?’, the murdered tyrant became a tragic hero. Our story is rich in such apparent contradictions and ambiguities.

  AUGUSTUS

  (63 BC–AD 14)

  ‘All clap your hands’

  Augustus: Bronze statue of emperor Caesar Augustus © Only Fabrizio

  Augustus described himself as a player in the comedy of life. Undoubtedly the man who appended to his dispatches the seal of Alexander the Great and who responded with pique to the inclusion of his name in the writings of any but the most eminent authors treated that comedy and his own role in it with seriousness. ‘He had clear, bright eyes in which he liked to have it thought that there was a kind of divine power, and it greatly pleased him, whenever he looked keenly at anyone, if he let his face fall as if before the radiance of the sun.’ Quasi-divinity became Augustus’ lot in life long before Numerius Atticus, kneeling at his funeral pyre, earned a million sesterces by witnessing the ascent of his spirit to heaven ‘in the same way, as tradition has it, as occurred in the case of Proculus and Romulus’.1 Adoption by Julius Caesar had made him the son of a god at eighteen; the very name ‘Augustus’ (‘the increased one’) embraces in its etymology associations of the sublime and ordinary human abilities extraordinarily magnified.

  He boasted of transforming brick-built Rome into a city of marble, ‘adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded’: his boastfulness, though on occasion disingenuous, seldom encompassed levity. (The habit of propaganda, once entrusted to Virgil and Horace, was too strong. The Res gestae divi Augusti (‘Acts of the Divine Augustus’), his valedictory inventory of his achievements inscribed in bronze outside his mausoleum, asserted unblushingly and without elaboration achievements history has yet to surpass.) As his contemporaries acknowledged – as we continue to acknowledge – the talents of this divine comedian extended beyond rebuilding Rome. He was the architect of a revolutionary settlement which hoodwinked the majority and held in check for his lifetime the disaffected few. In the turbulent aftermath of Caesar’s murder, it carved peace from chaos and conjured prosperity from civil strife and bloody factionalism; relief at the advent of that peace facilitated Augustus’ ‘revolution’. In time it directed the lives of all ten successive Caesars and shaped the experience of countless millions across Rome’s empire. In its way it was every bit as influential as ‘the radiance of the sun’ glimpsed in those eyes which Pliny the Elder described as being as widely spaced as a horse’s. Impossible that its creator should avoid assertions of divinity: on the face of it his actions amounted to more than one man’s portion.

  Asking whether he had played the comedy of life fitly, the dying Augustus answered his own question and begged our recognition:

  Since well I’ve played my part, all clap your hands

  And from the stage dismiss me with applause.

  Augustus understood the theatre of politics. He was not, like Julius Caesar, impatient of those pragmatic deceits by which personal ambition was reconciled to convention. He understood that, in espousing Caesar’s legacy, all his world became a stage: when the time was ripe, his own role was that of Rome’s principal strutting player. Perpetual dictatorship had cost Caesar his life. When the people did their best to force the dictatorship upon Augustus, like an actor in the theatre ‘he knelt down, threw off his toga from his shoulders and with bare breasts begged them not to insist’. His career was one o
f manipulation, his sleight of hand worthy of a conjurer: his ‘restoration of the Republic’ became a suit of new clothes for an emperor. His ascent to a position approaching majesty, described by his contemporaries as princeps (‘leader’), took him a dozen years; his ‘reign’ lasted four decades. ‘He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness,’ Suetonius records. His favourite sayings included ‘More haste, less speed’ and ‘That is done quickly enough which is done well enough’. After the all-consuming whirlwind of Caesar’s fiery glory, the victory of his great-nephew offered Romans drama of a different kind. The ruler who displayed to curious crowds a rhinoceros, a tiger and a snake measuring fifty cubits, and ‘who surpassed all his predecessors in the frequency, variety and magnificence of his public shows’, insisted on his own place centre-stage. For the first time in Roman history, this canny impresario enrolled his family as supporting actors and politicized every intimate domestic impulse from weaning to weaving, carefully displayed for public consumption. His greatest monument, the Ara Pacis Augustae, dedicated in 13 BC and celebrating that settlement he imposed empire-wide, is decorated with friezes carved with images of his extended family. They preserve in marble the dramatis personae of the Augustan spectacular.

  In the drama of his life, the comic impulse was balanced by something darker (intimations of tragedy); offenders included his daughter and his granddaughter, both Julias. For his part Augustus donned the mantle of epic heroism crafted in his service by unrivalled poets, patrons and scribblers united in their vision of a new Golden Age. His own happy ending, which bestowed on Rome and her empire the singular glory of the pax Augusta, was seldom rivalled in the reigns of his successors, though the strength of that peace was such that it survived through generations. In Augustus’ life, statecraft and stagecraft combined. Even the decoration of his houses included an element of theatrical fantasy. In preference to costly paintings or statues, rooms were full of ‘the monstrous bones of huge sea monsters and wild beasts, called “the bones of the giants” and the “weapons of the heroes”’, a topsy-turvy visual idiom which challenged distinctions between appearance and reality and created an environment of super-scaled make-believe in which Augustus reigned supreme as a mythic conqueror at home with heroes and giants. The creation of the principate was a magnificent piece of improvisation. As with any theatre, it depended for its success on a suspension of disbelief among its audience, the challenge not only for Augustus but for each of his successors.

  Augustus’ story reverses the pattern that will emerge in the course of our survey. For the record of those Caesars who follow him is one of decline over the passage of time; reigns which, joyful at the outset, end in personal disillusionment, the evaporation of early hopefulness succeeded by bloodshed, brutality and the unthinking pursuit of self (Vespasian and Titus are exceptions). Augustus, by contrast, who first contemplated world domination in his teens, embarked on that unthinkable course with a ruthless single-mindedness which made few concessions to finer scruples; benevolence came later. This giant of world history is described by Suetonius prior to his emergence as princeps as having ‘incurred general detestation by many of his acts’. If we believe Suetonius’ account, that loathing is well founded. One day the praetor Quintus Gallius approached Augustus with folded tablets concealed among his clothes. Augustus’ suspicions immediately descried a hidden sword. Gallius was removed from the gathering and tortured: of course no confession of intended wrongdoing emerged. Still Augustus ordered his execution. For good measure, first he ‘[tore] out the man’s eyes with his own hand’. It is a vigorous contradiction of the author’s subsequent assertion that ‘the evidences of his clemency and moderation are numerous and strong’. We will discover that clemency is the luxury of the autocrat, a benignity available to those whose position of superiority is unassailable. At the end of his life, Augustus was able to bequeath just such a position to his heirs. Behind that legacy lay a scramble for supremacy which concealed ugly and discreditable truths. There were good reasons why the future emperor Claudius was persuaded to exclude from his history of Rome an account of Augustus’ rise to power. Unlike those of Julius Caesar, Augustus’ illegalities never seriously threatened to find him out. Among his manifold achievements that were denied Julius was longevity: he survived long enough to outlive the memory span of many of his contemporaries.

  Suetonius endows Augustus with a supernatural endorsement of unparalleled richness, beginning with the ‘warning that nature was pregnant with a king for the Roman people’ which presaged his birth in a small house on the Palatine on 23 September 63 BC. At the turning points in his life omens and portents abound. For the early biographer, this sanction of the numinous serves the essential purpose of exempting Augustus from culpability: the fates have decreed the course of his life – the completion of the transition from Republic to Empire. It is a dialectic which seeks to erase ambition and which Augustus himself contradicted in those actions and edicts which asserted his dynastic intent and his craving for long continuance of his settlement: ‘bear with me the hope when I die that the foundations which I have laid for the State will remain unshaken.’ Unrivalled in life in authority and renown, after his death he received from a grateful state the sanction of divinity. Suetonius subscribes to the irresistibility of that impulse, discounting the political expediency to Augustus’ successors of his own status as a god.

  His first and best-known opponent, Mark Antony, insisted that Augustus owed everything to a name, the name of Julius Caesar bestowed on him by testamentary adoption following Caesar’s bloody death. Caesar was Augustus’ great-uncle, though in Rome, inevitably, rumour construed the young Augustus, then called Octavian and described as ‘unusually handsome and exceedingly graceful’, as the older man’s catamite. (A habit of softening the hairs of his thighs by singeing them with hot walnut shells cannot have helped in the emergence of such a tradition; Lucius Antonius also claimed that Octavian had offered himself to Aulus Hirtius for 3,000 gold pieces.) But the connection of great-uncle and nephew transcended heredity (or lust): their affinity was one of character and spirit. Augustus’ mother and stepfather vigorously opposed Octavian’s assumption of Caesar’s name. Atia’s admonishments fell on stony ground. ‘His divine soul... spurned the counsels of human wisdom,’ Velleius Paterculus records, ‘and he determined to pursue the highest goal with danger rather than a lowly estate and safety.’2 It was indeed the avowal of a ‘Caesar’.

  Cato, we have seen, claimed that Caesar was the only man who undertook to overthrow the Roman state when sober. It was an accusation better levelled at Augustus. For while Caesar, punch-drunk with ambition, lost sight of political realities, Augustus’ focus never wavered: his sobriety was central to that cult of personality which underpinned his rule. Amassing unprecedented power and riches – in his final two decades he received 1,400 million sesterces in bequests from friends – he offered Romans a display of considered modesty as accomplished in its dramatic mendacity as anything presented on the classical stage by those pantomime actors whom he so admired. ‘You must take great care not to write and talk affectedly,’ he cautioned his granddaughter Agrippina: his instincts recoiled from ostentation even in speech, ‘the noisomeness of far-fetched words’, or the florid style of his friend Maecenas, sponsor of Virgil, Horace and Propertius, which he dismissed as ‘unguent-dripping curls’. Only Augustus’ ease and affability mitigated a deliberate austerity inspired by the customs of the Republic, with its emphasis on communal wellbeing. Suetonius pulls no punches: ‘In the... details of his life it is generally agreed that he was most temperate and without even the suspicion of any fault.’

  He lived in the same small house on the Palatine for forty years. His furniture was such as would stifle pride in a middling citizen of Hadrian’s reign, the time of Suetonius’ writing. There was a cultivated ordinariness to his clothes, which he claimed his sister Octavia, his wife Livia or his daughter Julia made for him (incredible claims in relation
to Livia and Julia). He ate simple food sparingly: green figs, coarse bread, small fishes, handmade moist cheese, a handful of dates or firm grapes, sharp apples, cucumber and young lettuce, that diet Tityrus offers Meliboeus in Virgil’s first Eclogue; occasionally he soaked his bread in cold water. He drank with similar restraint. Assiduous in the service of the state, he worked late into the night free from the befuddlement of gluttony or hard drinking. His study was small, squirrelled out of sight at the top of the house and called ‘Syracuse’ in reference to the mathematician and philosopher Archimedes. Physical discomfort was a badge of honour, proof of the wholeheartedness of his dedication to Rome’s custodianship. When his granddaughter Julia built a particularly sumptuous country retreat, Augustus pulled it down. So easily was luxury sacrificed to a political manifesto. Cynical sources may doubt the sincerity of this affectation of the mundane: none can deny the rigour of Augustus’ stance.