Caesar: A Life in Western Culture - Hardcover

Wyke, Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226921530 ISBN 13: 9780226921532

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

More than two millennia have passed since Brutus and his companions murdered Julius Caesar—and inaugurated his legend. Though the assassins succeeded in ending Caesar’s dictatorship, they could never have imagined that his power and influence would only grow after his death, reaching mythic proportions and establishing him as one of the central icons of Western culture, fascinating armchair historians and specialists alike.

 

With Caesar, Maria Wyke takes up the question of just why Julius Caesar has become such an exalted figure when most of his fellow Romans have long been forgotten. Focusing on key events in Caesar’s life, she begins with accounts from ancient sources, then traces the ways in which his legend has been adapted and employed by everyone from Machiavelli to Madison Avenue, Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw. Napoleon and Mussolini, for example, cited Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in defense of their own dictatorial aims, while John Wilkes Booth fancied himself a new Brutus, ridding America of an imperial scourge. Caesar’s personal life, too, has long been fair game—but the lessons we draw from it have changed: Suetonius derided Caesar for his lustfulness and his love of luxury, but these days he and his lover Cleopatra serve as the very embodiment of glamour, enticingly invoked everywhere from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to the hit HBO series Rome.

 

Caesar is the witty and perceptive work of a writer who is as comfortable with the implications of Xena: Warrior Princess as with the long shadow cast by the Annals of Tacitus. Wyke gives us a Caesar for our own time: complicated, hotly contested, and perpetually, fascinatingly renewed.

 

About this title

About the Author

Maria Wyke has taught classics at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Reading, and she currently holds the chair of Latin at University College London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CAESAR

A Life in Western Culture

By MARIA WYKE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Maria Wyke
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-92153-2

Contents

Illustrations..............................................................
ix
Acknowledgements...........................................................
xi
1 Caesar's Celebrity From fame to fable...................................
1
2 Audacity and Adventurism Capture by pirates, c.74 BC....................
22
3 Courage, Cruelty and Military Acumen War in Gaul, 58–51 BC..............
41
4 Revolution and Risk-Taking Crossing the Rubicon, 49 BC..................
66
5 Lust, Luxury and Love Cleopatra and Egypt, 48–47 BC.....................
90
6 Triumphalism Rome, 46 and 45 BC.........................................
122
7 Liberty and Tyranny Government, 49–44 BC................................
145
8 Assassination The Ides of March, 44 BC..................................
196
9 Divinity.................................................................
239
Bibliography...............................................................
256
Illustration Credits.......................................................
279
Index......................................................................
281

CHAPTER 1

CAESAR'S CELEBRITY

From fame to fable

Julius Caesar hit the headlines in late summer 2003 when a perfectlypreserved white marble head displaying his likeness was discoveredon a small island in the southern Mediterranean. Although it wasquickly identified as another posthumous Roman portrait, it waspresented as more refined and pristine than the few other bustswhich have been most closely associated with the statesman's name.Italian archaeologists also claimed its physiognomy (the lines aroundthe brows, the sad expression, the distant gaze) revealed bothCaesar's authority and the strains under which it placed him, withperhaps even a suggestion of foresight into his impending demiseand that of his whole epoch. Found on Pantelleria, a holiday hideawayfor pop stars and Hollywood celebrities, the marble head wasthen shot by the fashion photographer Fabrizio Ferri to accompanynewspaper and magazine reports. Julius Caesar's face had emergedelegantly from the warm waters of the Mediterranean into contemporarycelebrity culture.

Why is Julius Caesar the most famous of all Romans? Why notthe dictator Sulla, the military conqueror Pompey, or the emperorAugustus? Caesar's exceptional talents, his actions, and his murder,as they figure in many ancient narratives, all assist in the process ofturning the Roman dictator into an embodiment of a profoundtransformation in the history of Western civilization from republicto empire. Caught on the threshold of epochal change, Julius Caesaris also deeply implicated in it. Consequently his biography has takenon monumental dimensions, and matured into a foundational andformative story. It has possessed extraordinary and lasting appealbecause his image has not been fixed. Whether as founder ordestroyer, Julius Caesar's life has become a point of reference fromwhich to explore concerns about conquest and imperialism, revolution,dictatorship, liberty, tyranny and political assassination. Usedas model or anti-model for warfare and statecraft, he has also beeninvoked to pose questions about more personal merits (such asaudacity, risk-taking, courage and glory, leadership, good fortuneand fame, even immortality) and about personal failings (such asarrogance, ambition, extravagance, lust and cruelty). Even from thetime of his own writing about himself, Julius Caesar's life has beenarranged, fictionalized, and sensationalized so as to become a set ofcanonic events and concepts whose telling reveals much more thanjust the minutiae of one individual's existence. Julius Caesar was aRoman leader of flesh and blood who existed in real time. He is alsoa quasi-mythic protagonist in the development of Western culture.

Fame

From the ancient sources (including Julius Caesar's own writing),there emerges the portrait of the most charismatic and talentedRoman of his time. A spectacular and varied list of gifts, skills andcapacities reveal a figure without precedent: a man of wide learningand sophisticated tastes, but also physical strength, endurance,courage, focus and energy; an eloquent and lively orator, a versatileand direct writer; a supremely shrewd general and magnetic leader,an astute and dynamic politician and statesman, an effective administrator,a clever self-publicist and showman, a successful lover, afavourite of fortune.

Blessed with such characteristics, and acting notionally in thename of the senate and the people of republican Rome, JuliusCaesar conquered Gaul, vastly extended the boundaries of Romanrule, laid the foundations of France, and initiated the formation ofwhat would become modern Europe. Then, in crisis-riddenRome, he instigated a civil war against the republic's supporters andtheir leader Pompey, usurped power and established a permanentdictatorship. His populist, autocratic mode of government was cutshort by his murder but eventually, after more than a decade of furthercivil war between his aspiring successors and his assassins, anenduring imperial monarchy was put in its place.

The Roman general and dictator constantly cultivated a publicimage for himself that was larger than life in order to arouse admirationand, therefore, increase his political authority, and also toachieve a lasting recognition (or fama) for those great deeds of state.Beyond the games and triumphs which he staged, and the honorificdistinctions with which he adorned himself, his own commentarieson the war in Gaul and the subsequent civil war constitute a successfuland enduring example of his self-promotion in pursuit offama. In these works, the author refers to himself as 'Caesar' – a separableentity whose reputation can be favourably manipulated,polished and inflated. While the narratives affect third-personobjectivity, a breathless haste and the limitations imposed by battlefieldreporting, they tell tales of vast territories annexed andenemies utterly outwitted and overwhelmed.

Set alongside (and at times against) this self-presentation of'Caesar' are the depictions which emerge from the works of contemporariessuch as the poet Catullus, the orator and statesmanCicero, or the political historian Sallust. In his letters, speeches andphilosophical essays, Cicero in particular offers no consistency:open hostility at times, at times expedient eulogy, frequently anoscillation between admiration and distaste. On at least one occasion,he expresses an apprehension that Julius Caesar will begranted the enduring fame he so desires, only for it to prove highlyvolatile:

Posterity will be staggered to hear and read of the militarycommands you have held and the provinces you haveruled ... battles without number, fabulous victories, monumentsand shows and Triumphs. And yet unless you nowrestore this city of ours to stability by measures of reorganizationand lawgiving, your renown, however far and wide itmay roam, will never be able to find a settled dwelling-placeor firm abode. For among men still unborn, as among ourselves,there will rage sharp disagreements. Some will glorifyyour exploits to the skies. But others, I suggest, may findsomething lacking, and something vital at that.

(Cicero, pro Marcello 28–9. Trans. M. Grant, 1969)

Cicero found himself in a difficult political situation after hehad been pardoned by Caesar for supporting Pompey in the civilwar. For a while after Pompey's defeat, flight and death in Egypt,the orator stayed away from Rome and delivered no publicspeeches. Yet, breaking his silence at last in this speech ofSeptember 46 BC, he even manages to hint at a certain incredulityabout the dictator's own reports on his glorious military activities,to the dictator's face.

After Julius Caesar was assassinated two years later, disagreementsraged even more intensely and more urgently over how toevaluate his exploits abroad, his seizure of power, and his autocraticgovernment at home. Cicero himself expressed astonishment, in aletter written soon after the dictator's death, that all his actions,writings, speeches, promises and plans now had more force than ifhe had still been alive (Letters to Atticus, 14.10.1). His murder conferredon Caesar both humanity and tragedy; the themes ofbetrayal by friends, brutal slaughter, and greatness suddenlybrought low formed part of his biography forevermore. Only byrecasting it as the noble killing of a usurper, tyrant and destroyer ofthe republic could the chief conspirators Brutus and Cassiusbestow some nobility on the deed rather than the victim.Evaluation of Caesar's life thus became caught up in the dramatichorror of his death – was it a life that deserved to be taken away? – andconstituted an integral part of the propaganda war wagedbetween Caesar's assassins and his successors Mark Antony andOctavian, until finally, in 42 BC at Philippi in Macedonia, the twosides engaged in battle either to restore republican government orto inherit the dictator's power.

These bitter conflicts over the image of Caesar assumed strikingvisual form on the coinage issued by each side in the aftermath ofhis murder. A silver denarius issued in Rome around 43 BC by theofficial moneyer L. Flaminius Chilo (Figure 1.1) shows on theobverse a portrait of Julius Caesar, his head garlanded with laurel.The coinage minted shortly before the dictator's death had offereddistinctively realistic representations of his face: the baldness, thedeeply wrinkled brow, the large eyes with surrounding crow's feet,prominent nose, thin-lipped mouth, heavily creased cheeks, juttingcheekbones and chin, long, scraggy neck displaying sagging folds ofskin, a pronounced Adam's apple. Now, after his death, the dictator'sphysical blemishes and peculiarities are partially obscured,though not yet wholly idealized as those of a god. His head isendowed with more hair, greater regularity of feature, smootherskin and a more monumental aspect. The reverse of the coin unitesthis fresh, physically forceful representation of Caesar with thegoddess Peace, who leans on a long sceptre of power and holds atwisted staff of prosperity.

Conversely, a silver denarius issued by Brutus in 43 or 42 BC(Figure 1.2), from a travelling mint which moved with his encampmentthrough Greece and Asia, displays a humbly bare-headedportrait of Brutus the general. With him is conjoined, on thereverse, a cap of liberty (or the pilleus customarily granted to slaveson the death of their master). The cap is inserted between two daggersbelow which sits the clear legend EID[ES] MAR[TIAE] – anarchaic spelling of the Ides of March, the day in 44 BC on which theminter, along with some of his fellow senators, killed Julius Caesar.Here the promise of peace, prosperity and legitimate governmentwhich was being promoted for Caesar's successors in Rome is thoroughlyrebuffed. Instead (and in order to stimulate military andcivic support for the coming war), Brutus presents himself in theglorious republican tradition of tyrant-slaying: his heroic assassinationof Caesar has freed the Roman state from servitude. Thisextreme polarity in the fame of Julius Caesar – betweensuperhuman provider for the Roman people and sordid master ofslaves – has further ensured the enduring and diverse significance ofthe Roman statesman in Western culture.

This polarity is clear in later testimonies to the life of JuliusCaesar which survive from antiquity – the biographies, historiesand epic poems which have supplied a substantial part of the rawmaterial from which the diverse Caesars of subsequent millenniahave been moulded. Commemoration of Julius Caesar was anessential political strategy for his grand-nephew Octavian, who, byvirtue of his adoption as Caesar's son and his inheritance of Caesar'sname and estate, could now lay claim also to his soldiers, his civiliansupport and his disputed authority over the Roman state.Octavian named himself 'Caesar, son of Caesar' and officially recognizedhis father's divinity. Yet, once securely installed as emperorof Rome's vast dominions and now also entitled 'Augustus', hisimage was carefully constructed by his court biographer Nicolausof Damascus as an heroic ruler to be distinguished from hispolitically inept predecessor. The tale of the father's assassinationwarns in the most graphic terms against the errors and dangerswhich the son must avoid in order to survive. Within the canon ofvirtues and vices collated by the imperial loyalist Valerius Maximusduring the reign of Tiberius, it is possible to find Julius Caesar as ahigh celestial power, an ethical model of courage and clemency,whose death is parricide – the shocking murder of the father of thecountry. In contrast, under the emperor Nero, in the seeminglyseditious epic on the civil war composed by the poet Lucan, thenarrator makes of Caesar a demonic and destructive force of nature,an unscrupulous despot whose anticipated murder will be a fittingpunishment and an example to all tyrants. During the reign ofTrajan, when Julius Caesar appears to have taken on an exemplaryfunction specifically as Rome's greatest general and conqueror, hewas also instated as the 'first of the Caesars' and thus not just a crucialpivot between republican and monarchical systems ofgovernment, but also the divine founder of empire and of an imperialdynasty which bore his name. Yet, when the evaluation ofJulius Caesar's life no longer needed to function as a vital signal ofa Roman subject's patriotism or treachery, in later histories andbiographies it became possible to acknowledge his elevated status asfirst Roman emperor while still detailing his excessive ambition andhis abuses of power, and even endorsing his murder as a just punishment.

Fable

Julius Caesar's talents, actions and murder, their vivid and extensiverepresentation in ancient sources, and the frequent, violent andsometimes fatal conflicts which took place over those representationshave all contributed to his lasting fame – which, in turn, hasdeveloped into a way of addressing the concerns of the present andanxieties about the future. Yet the title of founder of monarchy andempire, which Caesar acquired in the second century AD, and hiselevation to the position of first emperor provide further explanation.For 'Caesar' then became both the name of the Romanmilitary leader and statesman and the sign of Rome and its imperialsystem of government. From the perspective of early Christianityand then the Middle Ages, Julius Caesar oversaw the profoundtransformation of the world from pagan to Christian and created anoffice which, under the Christian emperors, would become sanctifiedbecause it was divinely appointed.

While in some ecclesiastical literature Julius Caesar might representthe apogee of pagan pride before Christ advanced the teachingof humility, or was coloured more darkly still as an Antichrist,more often he personified supreme secular power on earth, and hismonarchical mode of government a temporal counterpart to thespiritual government of God in heaven. Thus, in medieval literature,many features of Julius Caesar's ancient biography – which wasdominated now by the authority of Lucan, whose civil war poemwas read as a testimony to the benefits of monarchy – underwentepic and chivalric embellishment and invention. Already towardsthe end of the republican period (whose end is conventionallydated nowadays as 31 BC, when Octavian defeated Mark Antony ina sea battle and began to accrue far greater sovereign powers eventhan Caesar), and during the reigns of the first Roman emperors,Julius Caesar's life from birth to death had been fabricated by himselfor others as unique and fated. In the Middle Ages, it was alsodeeply infused with an exemplary flavour – a celebration of ancientvirtues (and, occasionally, a denigration of a few vices) delivered toaristocratic readers as a practical guide to their appropriate politicalrole and moral behaviour at court. Sometimes miraculous taleswere threaded into the surviving historical record to create aCaesarian fable about a supreme courtly hero and champion, justconqueror and emperor, who was a form of pagan saint. In thehands of medieval clerics, court chroniclers and poets, the life of

Julius Caesar was transformed into a kind of secular scripture.Julius Caesar had himself already started the process of turninghis biography into an heroic myth. Early in his life he had laid claimto both royal and divine ancestry, advancing himself and his familyas descended from the first kings of Rome and the goddess Venus.Such ancestry rooted his biography within the narrative strategiesfitting for an epic hero like Venus' son (and his supposed ancestor)Aeneas, and imply that a semi-divine mandate to greatness flowedthrough his veins.

Better to mark this extraordinary destiny, medieval literature andart elaborated a miraculous birth for the Roman statesman(although it is possible that comparable claims had been made forhim in the earliest, lost sections of his ancient biographies).Authentication was supplied by retrieving its supposed historicalrecord from ancient speculation about the origin of the familyname 'Caesar': one of several classical explanations was that it camefrom the verb 'to cut' (cadere), and indicated that the first memberof the Julian family who held it had been cut out (caesus est) of hismother's womb. Julius Caesar was not the first to bear this cognomen.Other etymologies for the name were also in circulation.Histories of ancient medicine made it clear that in republicanRome such an operation involved the death of the mother, yetCaesar's mother Aurelia did not die in childbirth. Nevertheless,medieval literature and iconography gave ample space to a birthwhich would be a suitably marvellous and auspicious beginning forsuch a great man. A lavish illustration for an extraordinarily popularmedieval epic on Julius Caesar's deeds provides one suchexample (Figure 1.3). In conformity with medieval customs forlying in, the operation takes place exclusively among women. Thedead mother is laid out on a litter of straw to soak up her blood,while a servant prepares the boiled water with which to wash thenewborn who has emerged from his mother's open abdomen. Theentire event is literally framed within one chamber of the castle ofJulius Caesar's great achievements.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226921530
• ISBN 13: 9780226921532
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 287