Chapter III: The Great Enemies of Rome (6)

As a soldier Caesar ranks among the greatest in the world. When he first went to Gaul his army was small--but four legions in all. The rest of his army he created, enlisting and training it on the spot. With his small forces he had to meet not Orientals, driven into battle by fear, but sturdy and fiercely warlike men with whom fighting was a natural passion. Among the Gaulish chieftains too there were leaders of great military gifts--Ariovistus, the chief of the Teutons, and Vercingetorix of the Arverni.

Some idea of the means by which Caesar stirred and inspired his men, and checked the danger of insubordination in his own ranks, which rose at times when they were called upon to fight forces far greater in numbers, is given by a passage in his own story. It begins with a speech he made to his men.

_How Caesar dealt with threats of insubordination provoked by fear
of meeting the Germans_

'If any of you are alarmed by the defeat and flight of the Gauls,
you will find on inquiry that they were tired out by the length of
the war, and that Ariovistus, who for many months had been
encamped behind the shelter of the swamps and made it impossible
to engage him, suddenly fell on them when they were scattered
without any thought of fighting, and conquered them rather by
stratagem than by valour. Such a policy might well succeed against
untrained barbarians, but even Ariovistus does not expect that
Roman armies can be ensnared by it. Again, if any disguise their
fears by a pretended anxiety about supplies or by imaginary
difficulties in the route, they are acting presumptuously; for, as
it seems, either they are hopeless about the commander's
performance of his duty or they are dictating to him what that
duty is. These matters are for my decision; corn is being supplied
by the Sequani, Leuci and Lingones, and the crops are already
ripe. As for the difficulties of the route, you will soon have an
opportunity of judging them. When I am told that the soldiers will
disobey me and refuse to march, I am not at all troubled, for I
know that, if an army has been disobedient, either its commander
has been defeated through incompetence or some overt act has
convicted him of extortion; but the whole course of my life bears
witness to my integrity, and my success is proved by my campaign
against the Helvetii. Accordingly I shall do at once what I had
intended to do later and shall march to-night at the fourth watch,
so that I may know without delay whether your fears are stronger
than the claims of honour and duty. If no one else follows me,
I shall start with the tenth legion, whose devotion is beyond
question, and I intend to make it my bodyguard.' Caesar had shown
special favour to this legion and had an absolute trust in its
valour.

This speech made an extraordinary impression upon all and inspired
very great enthusiasm and eagerness to advance. The tenth legion
set the example, thanking Caesar through its tribunes for his
generous confidence, and declaring that it was ready in every way
to fight. Then the rest of the legions commissioned their tribunes
and chief centurions to apologize to Caesar; they had never
hesitated or feared, and had never thought that they should meddle
with their commander in the control of operations. Caesar accepted
their apology and started at the fourth watch, as he had warned
them.

Caesar, _De Bello Gallico_, i. 40. 8-41. 4.

There was a moment when it looked as though all Caesar's work was to be swept away. He spent part of the year 54 in Britain. While he was away plans for a great rising were conceived. Soon after he returned all Gaul rose in a blaze. The first rising was put down. In 52 another and more serious movement took place with Vercingetorix at its head. The danger was greater than ever. It was the more serious that Caesar knew that in Rome his enemies were working against him. So great was it indeed that Caesar's officers were in despair and begged him to retreat to some safe spot until reinforcements could be sent. But to wait for reinforcements would make things worse instead of better. The rebellion would gather force. It was by no means certain that Pompeius, now hand in glove with the Conservatives, would send him more troops. Pompeius would be glad to see his rival fail. Caesar was not going to give him that pleasure. And retreat in face of danger was never Caesar's way. Always he went to meet it. So now. He delivered a blow at the very heart of the enemy's position. Caesar's capture of Alesia, the stronghold of Vercingetorix, and his defeat of the second great Gallic army that closed him in while he was blockading the town are among the great feats in the history of war. The odds were heavy against him. His army was in a position from which no luck, only the most brilliant generalship, could save it. Caesar not only saved it: he absolutely crushed the foe. Vercingetorix surrendered. The rebellion collapsed. By the end of the next year Gaul was under Caesar's feet again. It was possible for him to turn his eyes and mind to Rome (50).

He did not want to quarrel with Pompeius. He had indeed from the first done everything in his power to prevent such a quarrel. But he saw that the old order of things in Rome was crumbling into ruin. If Pompeius and he could not rule together, one of them must rule alone. In the years of his absence Pompeius had moved more and more to the Conservative point of view. His jealousy of Caesar had grown. The long struggle came to a head when Caesar's time in Gaul drew to an end.

Caesar from his winter quarters at Ravenna declared that he was ready to disband his army and return to Rome as a private citizen as soon as Pompeius demobilized his troops. Pompeius actually had a larger force of men under arms than Caesar, including two legions which Caesar had borrowed and sent back to him. In the Senate Curio proposed that both generals should lay down their commands. This was agreed to. Pompeius refused. A few months later the question came up again. Curio, who had been to Ravenna, where Caesar was, read a letter from him. In this he said he would disarm, if Pompeius did the same. The Senate declared the letter was dangerous, and the man who wrote it dangerous. A friend of Pompeius then proposed that by a certain day Caesar, if not disarmed, should be regarded as a traitor. When Marcus Antonius and Cassius, another tribune, vetoed this, they were expelled from the Senate and threatened with swords by Pompeius's adherents. Caesar could no longer have any doubt as to what awaited him in Rome. He explained how things stood to his soldiers: they cried to him to march on (49).

By Sulla's law the Rubicon was the military boundary of Italy. No one might cross it under arms. Caesar paused for a moment on the bank; then suddenly crying, 'The die is cast', he crossed the river at the head of his men and marching with great speed entered Ariminum.

The poet Lucan, writing long afterwards, tried to penetrate the secrets of his mind, and guess what passed in it at this moment.

_The Approach to the Rubicon: a Poet's Phantasy_

Caesar had already hurried across the frozen Alps, pondering in
his heart vast schemes of war to come; but when he reached the
narrow waters of the Rubicon, the vision of his distracted country
rose awful to his gaze, with saddened features clear seen through
the gloom and white locks flowing from beneath her crown of
towers. All dishevelled and bare-armed she stood before him,
uttering words broken by sighs: 'Whither do ye press on? Whither
do ye bear these my standards? If ye come as loyal citizens, thus
far and no further.' Then Caesar shuddered in every limb, his hair
stiffened, and faintness of heart, checking his steps, stayed him
at the very brink. Soon he cried: 'Oh Lord of thunder, that from
the Tarpeian rock dost survey all our city, and gods that followed
the race of Iulus from Troy, and mysteries of Quirinus lost to our
sight, and Jupiter enthroned over Latium on Alba's mount, and
hearth of Vesta's fire, and thou, Rome, worshipped as divine, be
gracious to my cause. I bear against thee no frenzied arms. Lo!
here am I, Caesar, conqueror by sea and land, still everywhere thy
soldier if none forbid. On him, on him shall rest the guilt who
makes me thy enemy!' Then without delay be gave the signal for
advance and quickly led his men through the swollen stream.

Lucan, _Pharsalia_, i. 183-203.

There was no resistance. It was not Caesar's intention to use any violence. In Rome, however, when the news came that he was moving south, people fell into a panic. Pompeius lost his head. Although the forces at his command were greater than Caesar's, he left the city, leaving everything, including the State Treasury, behind him. Most of the senators and people of consequence did the same.

Within sixty days from his crossing the Rubicon Caesar entered Rome and made himself master of it and of all Northern Italy without bloodshed. People who had trembled and believed that a reign of terror and proscriptions of the kind carried out by Marius and Sulla would follow, breathed again. Caesar showed no bitterness. There were no executions. The property of those who had fled with Pompeius was untouched. Even to Labienus, the one officer of his own who deserted him and joined the other side, Caesar was generous. He sent his goods after him.

Caesar summoned those members of the Senate who had remained in Rome and addressed them in a mild and gracious speech. He had no desire for war: he urged them to send deputies to Pompeius. But no one would do this. Pompeius meantime was embarking for Greece. Caesar did not follow him. He was master in Rome: but Rome was utterly dependent for all its supplies, the means by which it lived, on the world outside. Of that world Pompeius seemed master. Caesar's first task was, therefore, not to defeat Pompeius but to secure the food supply of the capital. For this purpose he himself set out for Spain, where there was a strong Pompeian army, leaving Marcus Antonius in charge in Italy and sending Curio to Sicily. The Spanish campaign was severe, but after the Battle of Ilerda the Pompeian armies were shattered. A considerable force surrendered. Caesar pardoned the men and many of them joined his legions. When he returned home, capturing Massilia on the way, he heard that Curio had done excellently in Sicily: Cato had been defeated and fled to Pompeius.

The West was safe. From Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia corn flowed into Rome. Caesar could sail for Dyrrachium to meet Pompeius. Pompeius rejected all his proposals for peace. He was in a strong position: his army far outnumbered Caesar's, and his companions were blindly certain of victory. They indeed spent their time quarrelling among themselves as to who should hold the great offices in Rome when they got back there: who should be Pontifex Maximus for instance, when Caesar had been killed. They were so sure of victory that when Caesar was compelled to shift his camp, since his men were dying of starvation, they insisted on following him and giving battle, though Pompeius saw that this was playing Caesar's game: whereas to delay would have worn him down. At the battle of Pharsalia (48) Caesar's much smaller army won a complete victory, thanks to his superior generalship. The princes of the East sent in their submission to the conqueror. The senators and men of rank who survived Pharsalia hastened to make their peace with Caesar, all except Cato, who had not shaved or cut his hair since Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and now sailed to Africa to resist to the last.

Pompeius fled to Egypt. Thither Caesar followed him only to learn the news of his death. When the bloody head of his chief enemy and sometime friend was handed to him Caesar turned away, tears in his eyes.

Years before Caesar had planned to bring Egypt under the Roman rule: but this plan had been defeated. Now he found everything in confusion there. The old king, dying two years earlier, had left his kingdom to his children, Cleopatra, then sixteen, and a baby boy. By Cleopatra, who even as a young girl had those extraordinary powers of mind and charm that have made her famous through the ages, Caesar was fascinated. Her wit and gaiety, her beauty and changefulness, held him entranced: and week after week he stayed on in Alexandria, while a dangerous insurrection was being planned by the ex-vizier of the old king. Suddenly it broke out. Caesar had but a handful of troops: to save his fleet from being used against him he had to set fire to it with his own hands. From the dock the flames spread to the palace and destroyed the great Alexandrine library, the most wonderful in the world. Caesar himself only just escaped: he had to swim across the harbour, holding his papers in one hand.

The danger was serious but brief. Reinforcements arrived from Cilicia: the Egyptian rebels were defeated: the ex-vizier put to death: Cleopatra and her brother made rulers over Egypt under the protection of Rome. Caesar in the spring crossed to Asia Minor, where he came, saw, and conquered, as he himself said. In September he was in Athens: in October in Rome: in December in Africa. There, at the battle of Thapsus, he crushed out the last spark of opposition. Cato, who had fled to Utica, killed himself, much to Caesar's distress. He admired the sturdy independence of the old man and would have spared him. His daughter Portia was married to Marcus Junius Brutus, a Pompeian whom Caesar had pardoned and loved as a son.

The secret of Caesar's clemency, which astonished his contemporaries, lay partly in his own nature, partly in his clear purpose to re-establish life in Rome on a firm and lasting foundation. His mind had no bitterness. Bitterness arises out of some inner uncertainty; Caesar had a rare certainty as to what he wanted to do and as to his being able to do it. He was not afraid of other people or of their judgements. He had no need to compare himself uneasily with them. He could stand on what he did, irrespective of what they thought about it. He had come to build, not to destroy. He had seen the failure of Marius and of Sulla. Sulla had tried to restart Rome on a false basis--the rule of one party in the State, standing on the bleeding bodies and broken fortunes of the other. He had failed. His system had crumbled, and in its ruin it had brought the whole State to the ground. Moreover, Sulla's system had left no room for growth. Rome's task in the world had grown enormously and the old machine was quite incapable of fulfilling it. Caesar wanted to create a new machine that could govern not a city but a world.

Caesar worked with the energy and power of a giant at his colossal task. Every part of the State was in disorder--the army, the navy, the treasury, the laws, trade, the whole business of government. He had to reconstruct the whole, and in the space of little more than a year he did much towards this. And besides these great tasks there were lesser ones--the reform of the calendar, of the system of weights and measures, of the language. Reforms are never popular. The change from bad to good is slow and gradual. Caesar's followers were not made as rich as they had hoped. His measures were directed to filling, not private pockets, but the coffers of the State.

The people loved him. Their lot was vastly improved. But a growing body began to say that he was behaving as a tyrant and that things were no better than they had been under the old government. Some of these people were sincere republicans who were afraid that Caesar was trying to make himself king. Among them was Marcus Junius Brutus.

Brutus had married Cato's daughter and shared many of Cato's ideas. Round him there gathered a knot of men, among whom the ablest was Caius Cassius, who determined to free the city of the tyrant. To the minds of Brutus and Cassius it seemed that Caesar was destroying the seeds of greatness in all other men, to make himself supreme. Shakespeare makes Cassius argue thus:

_The Penalty of Greatness_

_Cassius._ Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
'Brutus' will start a spirit as soon as 'Caesar'.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art sham'd!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam'd with more than with one man?
When could they say, till now, that talk'd of Rome,
That her wide walls encompassed but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O! you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook'd
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.

Shakespeare, _Julius Caesar_, I. ii.

Caesar was warned of the conspiracy but took little heed. He had always taken his life in his hand. He knew that he walked in constant danger. When a soothsayer warned him to beware the Ides of March he only laughed; and when the Ides (March 15) came and his wife implored him to stay indoors, he paid no attention but set out for a meeting of the Senate as usual to transact his daily business, hearing petitions and so on.

It was the day chosen by the conspirators. One of them detained Marcus Antonius, who generally watched over his chief's safety: the others gathered round Caesar. At a sudden signal, they fell upon him with their daggers. Caesar was unarmed. At the foot of the statue of Pompeius, which he had himself caused to be set up in a place of honour, he fell. Pierced by six and thirty wounds he died. Marcus Brutus raised his dagger, dyed with Caesar's blood, and holding it aloft declared that he had freed Rome from a tyrant.

So Caesar fell (44). Years of bitter civil war followed. Then at last Caesar's nephew and adopted son, Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, did that which Brutus had slain Caesar to prevent--changed the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. All the Emperors bore the name of Caesar. Throughout the vast world over which the Roman eagles flew, Julius Caesar was worshipped almost as a god.

Printed in England at the Oxford University Press

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Errata:

The word "invisible" means that there is an appropriately sized blank space, but no printed character. The repeated words in "From her her sons and daughter learned" and "be recognized as as big a man as Pompeius" are not errors.

the long and bitter wars that followed. [_final . invisible_]