The Caesars

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> The Caesars

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In the mingled yarn of human life, tragedy is never far asunder from
farce; and it is amusing to retrace in immediate succession to this
incident of epic dignity, which has its only parallel by the way in the
case of Vasco de Gama, (according to the narrative of Camoens,) when met
and confronted by a sea phantom, whilst attempting to double the Cape of
Storms, (Cape of Good Hope,) a ludicrous passage, in which one felicitous
blunder did Caesar a better service than all the truths which Greece and
Rome could have furnished. In our own experience, we once witnessed a
blunder about as gross. The present Chancellor, in his first
electioneering contest with the Lowthers, upon some occasion where he was
recriminating upon the other party, and complaining that stratagems, which
_they_ might practise with impunity, were denied to him and his, happened
to point the moral of his complaint, by alleging the old adage, that one
man might steal a horse with more hope of indulgence than another could
look over the hedge. Whereupon, by benefit of the universal mishearing in
the outermost ring of the audience, it became generally reported that Lord
Lowther had once been engaged in an affair of horse stealing; and that he,
Henry Brougham, could (had he pleased) have lodged an information against
him, seeing that he was then looking over the hedge. And this charge
naturally won the more credit, because it was notorious and past denying
that his lordship was a capital horseman, fond of horses, and much
connected with the turf. To this hour, therefore, amongst some worthy
shepherds and others, it is a received article of their creed, and (as
they justly observe in northern pronunciation,) a _sham_ful thing to be
told, that Lord Lowther was once a horse stealer, and that he escaped
_lagging_ by reason of Harry Brougham's pity for his tender years and
hopeful looks. Not less was the blunder which, on the banks of the
Rubicon, befriended Caesar. Immediately after crossing, he harangued the
troops whom he had sent forward, and others who there met him from the
neighboring garrison of Ariminium. The tribunes of the people, those great
officers of the democracy, corresponding by some of their functions to our
House of Commons, men personally, and by their position in the state,
entirely in his interest, and who, for his sake, had fled from home, there
and then he produced to the soldiery; thus identified his cause, and that
of the soldiers, with the cause of the people of Rome and of Roman
liberty; and perhaps with needless rhetoric attempted to conciliate those
who were by a thousand ties and by claims innumerable, his own already;
for never yet has it been found, that with the soldier, who, from youth
upwards, passes his life in camps, could the duties or the interests of
citizens survive those stronger and more personal relations connecting him
with his military superior. In the course of this harangue, Caesar often
raised his left hand with Demosthenic action, and once or twice he drew
off the ring, which every Roman gentleman--simply _as_ such--wore as the
inseparable adjunct and symbol of his rank. By this action he wished to
give emphasis to the accompanying words, in which he protested, that,
sooner than fail in satisfying and doing justice to any the least of those
who heard him and followed his fortunes, he would be content to part with
his own birthright, and to forego his dearest claims. This was what he
really said; but the outermost circle of his auditors, who rather saw his
gestures than distinctly heard his words, carried off the notion, (which
they were careful every where to disperse amongst the legions afterwards
associated with them in the same camps,) that Caesar had vowed never to lay
down his arms until he had obtained for every man, the very meanest of
those who heard him, the rank, privileges and appointments of a Roman
knight. Here was a piece of sovereign good luck. Had he really made such a
promise, Caesar might have found that he had laid himself under very
embarrassing obligations; but, as the case stood, he had, through all his
following campaigns, the total benefit of such a promise, and yet could
always absolve himself from the penalties of responsibility which it
imposed, by appealing to the evidence of those who happened to stand in
the first ranks of his audience. The blunder was gross and palpable; and
yet, with the unreflecting and dull-witted soldier, it did him service
greater than all the subtilties of all the schools could have
accomplished, and a service which subsisted to the end of the war.

Great as Caesar was by the benefit of his original nature, there can--be no
doubt that he, like others, owed something to circumstances; and perhaps,
amongst these which were most favorable to the premature development of
great self-dependence, we must reckon the early death of his father. It
is, or it is not, according to the nature of men, an advantage to be
orphaned at an early age. Perhaps utter orphanage is rarely or never such:
but to lose a father betimes profits a strong mind greatly. To Caesar it
was a prodigious benefit that he lost his father when not much more than
fifteen. Perhaps it was an advantage also to his father that he died thus
early. Had he stayed a year longer, he would have seen himself despised,
baffled, and made ridiculous. For where, let us ask, in any age, was the
father capable of adequately sustaining that relation to the unique Caius
Julius--to him, in the appropriate language of Shakspeare,

"The foremost man of all this world?"

And, in this fine and Caesarean line, "this world" is to be understood not
of the order of co-existences merely, but also of the order of
successions; he was the foremost man not only of his contemporaries, but
also of men generally--of all that ever should come after him, or should
sit on thrones under the denominations of Czars, Kesars, or Caesars of the
Bosphorus and the Danube; of all in every age that should inherit his
supremacy of mind, or should subject to themselves the generations of
ordinary men by qualities analogous to his. Of this infinite superiority
some part must be ascribed to his early emancipation from paternal
control. There are very many cases in which, simply from considerations of
sex, a female cannot stand forward as the head of a family, or as its
suitable representative. If they are even ladies paramount, and in
situations of command, they are also women. The staff of authority does
not annihilate their sex; and scruples of female delicacy interfere for
ever to unnerve and emasculate in their hands the sceptre however
otherwise potent. Hence we see, in noble families, the merest boys put
forward to represent the family dignity, as fitter supporters of that
burden than their mature mothers. And of Caesar's mother, though little is
recorded, and that little incidentally, this much at least, we learn--
that, if she looked down upon him with maternal pride and delight, she
looked up to him with female ambition as the re-edifier of her husband's
honors, with reverence as to a column of the Roman grandeur, and with fear
and feminine anxieties as to one whose aspiring spirit carried him but too
prematurely into the fields of adventurous honor. One slight and
evanescent sketch of the relations which subsisted between Caesar and his
mother, caught from the wrecks of time, is preserved both by Plutarch and
Suetonius. We see in the early dawn the young patrician standing upon the
steps of his paternal portico, his mother with her arms wreathed about his
neck, looking up to his noble countenance, sometimes drawing auguries of
hope from features so fitted for command, sometimes boding an early blight
to promises so prematurely magnificent. That she had something of her
son's aspiring character, or that he presumed so much in a mother of his,
we learn from the few words which survive of their conversation. He
addressed to her no language that could tranquillize her fears. On the
contrary, to any but a Roman mother his valedictory words, taken in
connection with the known determination of his character, were of a nature
to consummate her depression, as they tended to confirm the very worst of
her fears. He was then going to stand his chance in a popular election for
an office of dignity, and to launch himself upon the storms of the Campus
Martius. At that period, besides other and more ordinary dangers, the
bands of gladiators, kept in the pay of the more ambitious amongst the
Roman nobles, gave a popular tone of ferocity and of personal risk to the
course of such contests; and either to forestall the victory of an
antagonist, or to avenge their own defeat, it was not at all impossible
that a body of incensed competitors might intercept his final triumph by
assassination. For this danger, however, he had no leisure in his thoughts
of consolation; the sole danger which _he_ contemplated, or supposed
his mother to contemplate, was the danger of defeat, and for that he
reserved his consolations. He bade her fear nothing; for that without
doubt he would return with victory, and with the ensigns of the dignity he
sought, or would return a corpse.

Early indeed did Caesar's trials commence; and it is probable, that, had
not the death of his father, by throwing him prematurely upon his own
resources, prematurely developed the masculine features of his character,
forcing him whilst yet a boy under the discipline of civil conflict and
the yoke of practical life, even _his_ energies would have been
insufficient to sustain them. His age is not exactly ascertained, but it
is past a doubt that he had not reached his twentieth year when he had the
hardihood to engage in a struggle with Sylla, then Dictator, and
exercising the immoderate powers of that office with the license and the
severity which history has made so memorable. He had neither any distinct
grounds of hope, nor any eminent example at that time, to countenance him
in this struggle--which yet he pushed on in the most uncompromising style,
and to the utmost verge of defiance. The subject of the contrast gives it
a further interest. It was the youthful wife of the youthful Caesar who
stood under the shadow of the great Dictator's displeasure; not
personally, but politically, on account of her connections: and her it
was, Cornelia, the daughter of a man who had been four times consul, that
Caesar was required to divorce: but he spurned the haughty mandate, and
carried his determination to a triumphant issue, notwithstanding his life
was at stake, and at one time saved only by shifting his place of
concealment every night; and this young lady it was who afterwards became
the mother of his only daughter. Both mother and daughter, it is
remarkable, perished prematurely, and at critical periods of Caesar's life;
for it is probable enough that these irreparable wounds to Caesar's
domestic affections threw him with more exclusiveness of devotion upon the
fascinations of glory and ambition than might have happened under a
happier condition of his private life. That Caesar should have escaped
destruction in this unequal contest with an enemy then wielding the whole
thunders of the state, is somewhat surprising; and historians have sought
their solution of the mystery in the powerful intercessions of the vestal
virgins, and several others of high rank amongst the connections of his
great house. These may have done something; but it is due to Sylla, who
had a sympathy with every thing truly noble, to suppose him struck with
powerful admiration for the audacity of the young patrician, standing out
in such severe solitude among so many examples of timid concession; and
that to this magnanimous feeling in the Dictator, much of his indulgence
was due. In fact, according to some accounts, it was not Sylla, but the
creatures of Sylla (_adjutores_), who pursued Caesar. We know, at all
events, that Sylla formed a right estimate of Caesar's character, and that,
from the complexion of his conduct in this one instance, he drew his
famous prophecy of his future destiny; bidding his friends beware of that
slipshod boy, "for that in him lay couchant many a Marius." A grander
testimony to the awe which Caesar inspired, or from one who knew better the
qualities of that man by whom he measured him, cannot be imagined.

It is not our intention, or consistent with our plan, to pursue this great
man through the whole circumstances of his romantic career; though it is
certain that many parts of his life require investigation much keener than
has ever been applied to them, and that many might easily be placed in a
new light. Indeed, the whole of this most momentous section of ancient
history ought to be recomposed with the critical scepticism of a Niebuhr,
and the same comprehensive collation of authorities. In reality it is the
hinge upon which turned the future destiny of the whole earth, and having
therefore a common relation to all modern nations whatsoever, should
naturally have been cultivated with the zeal which belongs to a personal
concern. In general, the anecdotes which express most vividly the splendid
character of the first Caesar, are those which illustrate his defiance of
danger in extremity,--the prodigious energy and rapidity of his decisions
and motions in the field; the skill with which he penetrated the designs
of his enemies, and the exemplary speed with which he provided a remedy
for disasters; the extraordinary presence of mind which he showed in
turning adverse omens to his own advantage, as when, upon stumbling in
coming on shore, (which was esteemed a capital omen of evil,) he
transfigured as it were in one instant its whole meaning by exclaiming,
"Thus do I take possession of thee, oh Africa!" in that way giving to an
accident the semblance of a symbolic purpose; the grandeur of fortitude
with which he faced the whole extent of a calamity when palliation could
do no good, "non negando, minuendove, sed insuper amplificando,
_ementiendoque_;" as when, upon finding his soldiery alarmed at the
approach of Juba, with forces really great, but exaggerated by their
terrors, he addressed them in a military harangue to the following effect:
"Know that within a few days the king will come up with us, bringing with
him sixty thousand legionaries, thirty thousand cavalry, one hundred
thousand light troops, besides three hundred elephants. Such being the
case, let me hear no more of conjectures and opinions, for you have now my
warrant for the fact, whose information is past doubting. Therefore, be
satisfied; otherwise, I will put every man of you on board some crazy old
fleet, and whistle you down the tide--no matter under what winds, no
matter towards what shore." Finally, we might seek for the
_characteristic_ anecdotes of Caesar in his unexampled liberalities
and contempt of money. [Footnote: Middleton's Life of Cicero, which still
continues to be the most readable digest of these affairs, is feeble and
contradictory. He discovers that Caesar was no general! And the single
merit which his work was supposed to possess, viz. the better and more
critical arrangement of Cicero's Letters, in respect to their chronology,
has of late years been detected as a robbery from the celebrated
Bellenden, of James the First's time.]

Upon this last topic it is the just remark of Casaubon, that some
instances of Caesar's munificence have been thought apocryphal, or to rest
upon false readings, simply from ignorance of the heroic scale upon which
the Roman splendors of that age proceeded. A forum which Caesar built out
of the products of his last campaign, by way of a present to the Roman
people, cost him--for the ground merely on which it stood--nearly eight
hundred thousand pounds. To the _citizens_ of Rome (perhaps 300,000
persons) he presented, in one _congiary_, about two guineas and a half a
head. To his army, in one _donation_, upon the termination of the civil
war, he gave a sum which allowed about two hundred pounds a man to the
infantry, and four hundred to the cavalry. It is true that the legionary
troops were then much reduced by the sword of the enemy, and by the
tremendous hardships of their last campaigns. In this, however, he did
perhaps no more than repay a debt. For it is an instance of military
attachment, beyond all that Wallenstein or any commander, the most beloved
amongst his troops, has ever experienced, that, on the breaking out of the
civil war, not only did the centurions of every legion severally maintain
a horse soldier, but even the privates volunteered to serve without pay--
and (what might seem impossible) without their daily rations. This was
accomplished by subscriptions amongst themselves, the more opulent
undertaking for the maintenance of the needy. Their disinterested love for
Caesar appeared in another and more difficult illustration: it was a
traditionary anecdote in Rome, that the majority of those amongst Caesar's
troops, who had the misfortune to fall into the enemy's hands, refused to
accept their lives under the condition of serving against _him_.

In connection with this subject of his extraordinary munificence, there is
one aspect of Caesar's life which has suffered much from the
misrepresentations of historians, and that is--the vast pecuniary
embarrassments under which he labored, until the profits of war had turned
the scale even more prodigiously in his favor. At one time of his life,
when appointed to a foreign office, so numerous and so clamorous were his
creditors, that he could not have left Rome on his public duties, had not
Crassus come forward with assistance in money, or by promises, to the
amount of nearly two hundred thousand pounds. And at another, he was
accustomed to amuse himself with computing how much money it would require
to make him worth exactly nothing (_i. e._ simply to clear him of debts);
this, by one account, amounted to upwards of two millions sterling. Now
the error of historians has been--to represent these debts as the original
ground of his ambition and his revolutionary projects, as though the
desperate condition of his private affairs had suggested a civil war to
his calculations as the best or only mode of redressing it. But, on the
contrary, his debts were the product of his ambition, and contracted from
first to last in the service of his political intrigues, for raising and
maintaining a powerful body of partisans, both in Rome and elsewhere.
Whosoever indeed will take the trouble to investigate the progress of
Caesar's ambition, from such materials as even yet remain, may satisfy
himself that the scheme of revolutionizing the Republic, and placing
himself at its head, was no growth of accident or circumstances; above
all, that it did not arise upon any so petty and indirect an occasion as
that of his debts; but that his debts were in their very first origin
purely ministerial to his ambition; and that his revolutionary plans were
at all periods of his life a direct and foremost object. In this there was
in reality no want of patriotism; it had become evident to every body that
Rome, under its present constitution, must fall; and the sole question
was--by whom? Even Pompey, not by nature of an aspiring turn, and prompted
to his ambitious course undoubtedly by circumstances and the friends who
besieged him, was in the habit of saying, "Sylla potuit, ego non potero?"
And the fact was, that if, from the death of Sylla, Rome recovered some
transient show of constitutional integrity, that happened not by any
lingering virtue that remained in her republican forms, but entirely
through the equilibrium and mechanical counterpoise of rival factions.

In a case, therefore, where no benefit of choice was allowed to Rome as to
the thing, but only as to the person--where a revolution was certain, and
the point left open to doubt simply by whom that revolution should be
accomplished--Caesar had (to say the least) the same right to enter the
arena in the character of candidate as could belong to any one of his
rivals. And that he _did_ enter that arena constructively, and by
secret design, from his very earliest manhood, may be gathered from this--
that he suffered no openings towards a revolution, provided they had any
hope in them, to escape his participation. It is familiarly known that he
was engaged pretty deeply in the conspiracy of Catiline, [Footnote:
Suetonius, speaking of this conspiracy, says, that Caesar was _nominatos
inter socios Catilinae_, which has been erroneously understood to mean
that he was _talked of_ as an accomplice; but in fact, as Casaubon
first pointed out, _nominatus_ is a technical term of the Roman
jurisprudence, and means that he was formally denounced.] and that he
incurred considerable risk on that occasion; but it is less known, and has
indeed escaped the notice of historians generally, that he was a party to
at least two other conspiracies. There was even a fourth, meditated by
Crassus, which Caesar so far encouraged as to undertake a journey to Rome
from a very distant quarter, merely with a view to such chances as it
might offer to him; but as it did not, upon examination, seem to him a
very promising scheme, he judged it best to look coldly upon it, or not to
embark in it by any personal co-operation. Upon these and other facts we
build our inference--that the scheme of a revolution was the one great
purpose of Caesar, from his first entrance upon public life. Nor does it
appear that he cared much by whom it was undertaken, provided only there
seemed to be any sufficient resources for carrying it through, and for
sustaining the first collision with the regular forces of the existing
government. He relied, it seems, on his own personal superiority for
raising him to the head of affairs eventually, let who would take the
nominal lead at first. To the same result, it will be found, tended the
vast stream of Caesar's liberalities. From the senator downwards to the
lowest _faex Romuli_, he had a hired body of dependents, both in and
out of Rome, equal in numbers to a nation. In the provinces, and in
distant kingdoms, he pursued the same schemes. Every where he had a body
of mercenary partisans; kings are known to have taken his pay. And it is
remarkable that even in his character of commander in chief, where the
number of legions allowed to him for the accomplishment of his mission
raised him for a number of years above all fear of coercion or control, he
persevered steadily in the same plan of providing for the day when he
might need assistance, not from the state, but _against_ the state.
For amongst the private anecdotes which came to light under the researches
made into his history after his death, was this--that, soon after his
first entrance upon his government in Gaul, he had raised, equipped,
disciplined, and maintained, from his own private funds, a legion
amounting, perhaps, to six or seven thousand men, who were bound by no
sacrament of military obedience to the state, nor owed fealty to any
auspices except those of Caesar. This legion, from the fashion of their
crested helmets, which resembled the crested heads of a small bird of the
lark species, received the popular name of the _Alauda_ (or Lark)
legion. And very singular it was that Cato, or Marcellus, or some amongst
those enemies of Caesar, who watched his conduct during the period of his
Gaulish command with the vigilance of rancorous malice, should not have
come to the knowledge of this fact; in which case we may be sure that it
would have been denounced to the senate.

Such, then, for its purpose and its uniform motive, was the sagacious
munificence of Caesar. Apart from this motive, and considered in and for
itself, and simply with a reference to the splendid forms which it often
assumed, this munificence would furnish the materials for a volume. The
public entertainments of Caesar, his spectacles and shows, his naumachiae,
and the pomps of his unrivalled triumphs, (the closing triumphs of the
Republic,) were severally the finest of their kind which had then been
brought forward. Sea-fights were exhibited upon the grandest scale,
according to every known variety of nautical equipment and mode of
conflict, upon a vast lake formed artificially for that express purpose.
Mimic land-fights were conducted, in which all the circumstances of real
war were so faithfully rehearsed, that even elephants "indorsed with
towers," twenty on each side, took part in the combat. Dramas were
represented in every known language, (_per omnium linguarum histriones_.)
And hence [that is, from the conciliatory feeling thus expressed towards
the various tribes of foreigners resident in Rome] some have derived an
explanation of what is else a mysterious circumstance amongst the
ceremonial observances at Caesar's funeral--that all people of foreign
nations then residing at Rome, distinguished themselves by the conspicuous
share which they took in the public mourning; and that, beyond all other
foreigners, the Jews for night after night kept watch and ward about the
emperor's grave. Never before, according to traditions which lasted
through several generations in Rome, had there been so vast a conflux of
the human race congregated to any one centre, on any one attraction of
business or of pleasure, as to Rome, on occasion of these spectacles
exhibited by Caesar.

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