No More Learning

Course of
durioe Caesar's
Alexandria.
This Alexandrian insurrection, insignificant as it was in itself and slight as was its intrinsic connection with the events of importance in the world's history which took place at the same time in the Roman state, had neverthe less so far a momentous influence on them that it compelled the man, who was all in all and without whom nothing could be despatched and nothing could be solved, to leav: his proper tasks in abeyance from October 706 up to
882
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
48.
47. March 707 in order to fight along with Jews and Bedouins
insubor- Pharnaces.
against a city rabble. The consequences of personal rule began to make themselves felt They had the monarchy ; but the wildest confusion prevailed everywhere, and the monarch was absent The Caesarians were for the moment, just like the Pompeians, without superintendence; the ability of the individual officers and, above all, accident decided matters everywhere,
in Asia Minor there was, at the time of Caesar's de- parture for Egypt, no enemy. But Caesar's lieutenant there, the able Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, had received
orders to take away again from king Pharnaces what he had without instructions wrested from the allies of Pompeius; and, as Pharnaces, an obstinate and arrogant despot like his father, perseveringly refused to evacuate Lesser Armenia, no course remained but to march against him. Calvinus had been obliged to despatch to Egypt two out of the three legions left behind with him and formed out of the Pharsalian prisoners of war; he filled up the gap by one legion hastily gathered from the Romans domiciled in Pontus and two legions of Deiotarus exercised after the Roman manner, and advanced into Lesser Armenia. But the Bosporan army, tried in numerous conflicts with the dwellers on the Black Sea, showed itself more efficient than his own.
In an engagement at Nicopolis the Pontic levy of Cal-
Calvinus
NicopoUfc1 v'nus was cut t0 pieces and the Galatian legions ran off; only
CHAP, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
483
the one old legion of the Romans fought its way through with moderate loss. Instead of conquering Lesser Armenia, Calvinus could not even prevent Pharnaces from repossess ing himself of his Pontic " hereditary states," and pouring forth the whole vials of his horrible sultanic caprices on their inhabitants, especially the unhappy Amisenes (winter of 706-707). When Caesar in person arrived in Asia Minor and intimated to him that the service which Pharnaces had rendered to him personally by having granted no help to Pompeius could not be taken into account against the injury inflicted on the empire, and that before any negotiation he must evacuate the province of Pontus and send back the property which he had pillaged, he declared himself doubtless ready to submit ; nevertheless, well knowing how good reason Caesar had for hastening to the west, he made no serious preparations for the evacuation. He did not know that Caesar finished whatever he took in hand. Without negotiating further, Caesar took with him the one legion which he brought from Alexandria and the troops of Calvinus and Deiotarus, and advanced against the camp of Pharnaces at Ziela. When the Bosporans saw him approach, they boldly crossed the deep mountain -ravine which covered their front, and charged the Romans up the hill. Caesar's soldiers were still occupied in pitching their camp, and the ranks wavered for a moment ; but the veterans accustomed to war rapidly rallied and set the example for a general attack and for a complete victory (2 Aug. 707) In five days the campaign was ended — an invaluable piece of good fortune at this time, when every hour was precious.
48-47.
Caesar entrusted the pursuit of the king, who had gone Regulation home by way of Sinope, to Pharnaces' illegitimate brother, £jinor
the brave Mithradates of Pergamus, who as a reward for the
services rendered by him in Egypt received the crown of
the Bosporan kingdom in room of Pharnaces. In other
victory of
J8? 5" *1 Ziela.
47.
War by
was in
a very grave nature had occurred. The Dalmatian coast
had been for centuries a sore blemish on the Roman rule, and its inhabitants had been at open feud with Caesar since the conflicts around Dyrrhachium ; while the interior also since the time of the Thessalian war, swarmed with dispersed Pompeians. Quintus Cornificius had however, with the legions that followed him from Italy, kept both the natives and the refugees in check and had at the same time sufficiently met the difficult task of provisioning the troops in these rugged districts. Even when the able Marcus Octavius, the victor of Curicta (p. 235), appeared with a part of the Pompeian fleet in these waters to wage war there against Caesar by sea and land, Cornificius not only knew how to maintain himself, resting for support on
the ships and the harbour of the Iadestini (Zara), but in his turn also sustained several successful engagements at sea with the fleet of his antagonist. But when the new governor of Illyria, the Aulus Gabinius recalled by Caesar from exile 139), arrived by the landward route in Illyria
joi i
2S4
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
respects the affairs of Syria and Asia Minor were peacefully settled ; Caesar's own allies were richly rewarded, those of Pompeius were in general dismissed with fines or repri mands. Deiotarus alone, the most powerful of the clients of Pompeius, was again confined to his narrow hereditary domain, the canton of the Tolistobogii. In his stead Ariobarzanes king of Cappadocia was invested with Lesser Armenia, and the tetrarchy of the Trocmi usurped by Deiotarus was conferred on the new king of the Bosporus, who was descended by the maternal side from one of the Galatian princely houses as by the paternal from that of Pontus.
" Illyria.
In Illyria
Egypt, incidents of
also, while
Caesar
48-47. in the winter of 706-707 with fifteen cohorts and 3000 horse, the system of warfare changed. Instead of confining himself like his predecessor to war on small scale, the
a
(p.
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
285
bold active man undertook at once, in spite of the in
clement season, an expedition with his whole force to the mountains. But the unfavourable weather, the difficulty
of providing supplies, and the brave resistance of the Defeat of
m IU'
Dalmatians, swept away the army ; Gabinius had to commence his retreat, was attacked in the course of it and disgracefully defeated by the Dalmatians, and with the
feeble remains of his fine army had difficulty in reaching
Salonae, where he soon afterwards died. Most of the
Illyrian coast towns thereupon surrendered to the fleet of Octavius; those that adhered to Caesar, such as Salonae
and Epidaurus (Ragusa vecchia), were so hard pressed by
the fleet at sea and by the barbarians on land, that the surrender and capitulation of the remains of the army enclosed in Salonae seemed not far distant Then the commandant - of the dep6t at Brundisium, the energetic
Publius Vatinius, in the absence of ships of war caused common boats to be provided with beaks and manned with
the soldiers dismissed from the hospitals, and with this ex temporized war-fleet gave battle to the far superior fleet of Octavius at the island of Tauris (Torcola between Lesina Naval and Curzola) —a battle in which, as in so many cases, the "aS" bravery of the leader and of the marines compensated for
the deficiencies of the vessels, and the Caesarians achieved
a brilliant victory. Marcus Octavius left these waters and proceeded to Africa (spring of 707); the Dalmatians no 47. doubt continued their resistance for years with great obstinacy, but it was nothing beyond a local mountain-war
fare. When Caesar returned from Egypt, his resolute adjutant had already got rid of the danger that was imminent in Illyria.
All the more serious was the position of things in Reorgan- Africa, where the constitutional party had from the i*fu°n outset of the civil war ruled absolutely and had continually coalition la augmented their power. Down to the battle of Pharsalus ASAc*
286 BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book V
king Juba had, properly speaking, borne rule there; he had vanquished Curio, and his flying horsemen and his numberless archers were the main strength of the army ; the Pompeian governor Varus played by his side so sub ordinate a part that he even had to deliver those soldiers
of Curio, who had surrendered to him, over to the king, and had to look on while they were executed or carried away into the interior of Numidia. After the battle of Pharsalus a change took place. With the exception of
Pompeius himself, no man of note among the defeated party thought of flight to the Parthians. As little did they attempt to hold the sea with their united resources ; the warfare waged by Marcus Octavius in the Illyrian waters was isolated, and was without permanent success. The great majority of the republicans as of the Pompeians betook themselves to Africa, where alone an honourable and constitutional warfare might still be waged against the usurper. There the fragments of the army scattered at Pharsalus, the troops that had garrisoned Dyrrhachium, Corcyra, and the Peloponnesus, the remains of the Illyrian fleet, gradually congregated ; there the second commander- in-chief Metellus Scipio, the two sons of Pompeius, Gnaeus and Sextus, the political leader of the republicans Marcus Cato, the able officers Labienus, Afranius, Petreius, Octavius and others met If the resources of the emigrants had diminished, their fanaticism had, if possible, even increased. Not only did they continue to murder their prisoners and even the officers of Caesar under flag of truce, but king Juba, in whom the exasperation of the partisan mingled with the fury of the half-barbarous African, laid down the maxim that in every community suspected of sympathizing with the enemy the burgesses ought to be extirpated and the town burnt down, and even practically carried out this theory against some townships, such as the unfortunate Vaga near Hadrumetum. In fact
chap, X PHARSALUS, AND THAI SUS
887
it was solely owing to the energetic intervention of Cato that the capital of the province itself, the flourishing Utica —which, just like Carthage formerly, had been long regarded with a jealous eye by the Numidian kings — did not experience the same treatment from Juba, and that measures of precaution merely were taken against its citizens, who certainly were not unjustly accused of leaning towards Caesar.
As neither Caesar himself nor any of his lieutenants undertook the smallest movement against Africa, the coalition had full time to acquire political and military reorganization there. First of all, it was necessary to fill up anew the place of commander-in-chief vacant by the death of Pompeius. King Juba was not disinclined still to maintain the position which he had held in Africa up to the battle of Pharsalus ; indeed he bore himself no longer as a client of the Romans but as an equal ally or even as a protector, and took it upon him, for example, to coin Roman silver money with his name and device ; nay, he even raised a claim to be the sole wearer of purple in the camp, and suggested to the Roman commanders that they should lay aside their purple mantle of office. Further, Metellus Scipio demanded the supreme command for himself, because Pompeius had recognized him in the Thessalian campaign as on a footing of equality, more from the consideration that he was his son-in-law than on military grounds. The like demand was raised by Varus as the governor — self-nominated, it is true — of Africa, seeing that the war was to be waged in bis province. Lastly the army desired for its leader the propraetor Marcus Cato. Obviously it was right. Cato was the only man who possessed the requisite devotedness, energy, and
authority for the difficult office; if he was no military man, it was infinitely better to appoint as commander-in- chief a non-military man who understood how to listen to
OS BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
reason and make his subordinates act, than an officer of untried capacity like Varus, or even one of tried incapa city like Metellus Scipio. But the decision fell at length on this same Scipio, and it was Cato himself who mainly determined that decision. He did so, not because he felt himself unequal to such a task, or because his vanity found its account rather in declining than in accepting ; still less because he loved or respected Scipio, with whom he on the contrary was personally at variance, and who with his notorious inefficiency had attained a certain importance merely in virtue of his position as father-in-law to Pompeius; but simply and solely because his obstinate legal formalism chose rather to let the republic go to ruin in due course of law than to save it in an irregular way. When after the battle of Pharsalus he met with Marcus Cicero at Corcyra, he had offered to hand over the com mand in Corcyra to the latter — who was still from the time of his Cilician administration invested with the rank of general—as the officer of higher standing according to the letter of the law, and by this readiness had driven the unfortunate advocate, who now cursed a thousand times his laurels from the Amanus, almost to despair ; but he had at the same time astonished all men of any tolerable discernment. The same principles were applied now, when something more was at stake ; Cato weighed the question to whom the place of commander-in-chief belonged, as if the matter had reference to a field at Tusculum, and adjudged it to Scipio. By this sentenc es own candidature and that of Varus were set aside. But he it was also, and he alone, who confronted with energy the claims of king Juba, and made him feel that the Roman nobility came to him not suppliant, as to the great-prince of the Parthians, with a view to ask aid at the hands of a protector, but as entitled to command and require aid from a subject. In the present state of the
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
289
Roman forces in Africa, Juba could not avoid lowering his claims to some extent; although he still carried the point with the weak Scipio, that the pay of his troops should be charged on the Roman treasury and the cession of the province of Africa should be assured to him in the event of victory.
By the side of the new general-in -chief the senate of the "three hundred" again emerged. It established its seat in Utica, and replenished its thinned ranks by the admission of the most esteemed and the wealthiest men of the equestrian order.
The warlike preparations were pushed forward, chiefly through the zeal of Cato, with the greatest energy, and every man capable of arms, even the freedman and Libyan, was enrolled in the legions ; by which course so many hands were withdrawn from agriculture that a great part of the fields remained uncultivated, but an imposing result was certainly attained. The heavy infantry numbered fourteen legions, of which two were already raised by Varus, eight others were formed partly from the refugees, partly from the conscripts in the province, and four were legions of king Juba armed in the Roman manner. The heavy cavalry, consisting of the Celts and Germans who arrived with Labienus and sundry others incorporated in their ranks, was, apart from Juba's squadron of cavalry equipped in the Roman style, 1600 strong. The light troops consisted of innumerable masses of Numidians riding without bridle or rein and armed merely with javelins, of a number of mounted bowmen, and a large host of archers on foot To these fell to be added Juba's 120 elephants, and the fleet of 55 sail commanded by Publius Varus and Marcus Octavius. The urgent want of money was in some measure remedied by a self-taxation on the part of the senate, which was the more productive
as the richest African capitalists had been induced to enter
VOL. V
158
Move- Spain! .
it Corn and other supplies were accumulated in immense quantities in the fortresses capable of defence; at the same time the stores were as far as possible removed from the open townships. The absence of Caesar, the trouble some temper of his legions, the ferment in Spain and Italy gradually raised men's spirits, and the recollection of the Pharsalian defeat began to give way to fresh hopes of victory.
The time lost by Caesar in Egypt nowhere revenged itself more severely than here. Had he proceeded to Africa immediately after the death of Pompeius, he would have found there a weak, disorganized, and frightened army and utter anarchy among the leaders ; whereas there was now in Africa, owing more especially to Cato's energy, an army equal in number to that defeated at Pharsalus, under
leaders of note, and under a regulated superintendence.
A peculiar evil star seemed altogether to preside over tn's African expedition of Caesar. He had, even before his embarkation for Egypt, arranged in Spain and Italy various measures preliminary and preparatory to the African war ; but out of all there had sprung nothing but mischief. From Spain, according to Caesar's arrangement, the governor of the southern province Quintus Cassius
Longinus was to cross with four legions to Africa, to be joined there by Bogud king of West Mauretania,1 and to
1 Much obscurity rests on the shape assumed by the states in north western Africa during this period. After the Jugurthine war Bocchus king of Mauretania ruled probably from the western sea to the port of Saldae, in what is now Morocco and Algiers (iii. 410) ; the princes of Tingis (Tangiers) —probably from the outset different from the Maure- tanian sovereigns—who occur even earlier (Plut Serf. 9), and to whom it may be conjectured that Sallust's Leptasta (Hist 31 Kritx) and Cicero's Mastanesosus (In Vat 12) belong, may have been independent within certain limits or may have held from him as feudatories just as Syphax already ruled over many chieftains of tribes (Appian, Pun. 10), and about this time in the neighbouring Numidia Cirta was possessed, probably however under Juba's supremacy, by the prince Massinissa
W. (Appian, B. C. iv. 54). About 672 we find in Bocchus' stead a king called Bocut or Bogud (iv. 9a Orosius, v. a1, 14), the son of Bocchus.
2go
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
;
;
5,
ii.
chap, x ' PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
291
advance with him towards Numidia and Africa. But that army destined for Africa included in it a number of native
and two whole legions formerly Pompeian ; Pompeian sympathies prevailed in the army as in the province, and the unskilful and tyrannical behaviour of the Caesarian governor was not fitted to allay them A formal revolt took place ; troops and towns took part for or against the governor; already those who had risen against the lieutenant of Caesar were on the point of openly displaying the banner of Pompeius ; already had Pompeius' elder son Gnaeus embarked from Africa for Spain to take advantage
of this favourable turn, when the disavowal of the governor by the most respectable Caesarians themselves and the interference of the commander of the northern province suppressed just in right time the insurrection. Gnaeus
who had lost time on the way with a vain attempt to establish himself in Mauretania, came too late ; Gaius Trebonius, whom Caesar after his return from the east sent to Spain to relieve Cassius (autumn of 707), met 47. everywhere with absolute obedience. But of course amidst these blunders nothing was done from Spain to disturb the organization of the republicans in Africa ; indeed in con sequence of the complications with Longinus, Bogud king
of West Mauretania, who was on Caesar's side and might at least have put some obstacles in the way of king Juba, had been called away with his troops to Spain.
Still more critical were the occurrences among the troops Military whom Caesar had caused to be collected in southern Italy, J^T^j. in order to his embarkation with them for Africa. They
were for the most part the old legions, which had founded
Caesar's throne in Gaul, Spain, and Thessaly. The spirit
From 705 the kingdom appears divided between king Bogud who possesses 49. the western, and king Bocchus who possesses the eastern hair, and to this
the later partition of Mauretania into Bogud's kingdom or the state of Tingis and Bocchus' kingdom or the state of Iol (Caesarea) refers (Pun.
H. N. v. a, 19 ; comp. Bell. Afrit. 23).
Spaniards
Pompeius,
2g2
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book T
of these troops had not been improved by victories, and had been utterly disorganized by long repose in Lower Italy. The almost superhuman demands which the general made on them, and the effects of which were only too clearly apparent in their fearfully thinned ranks, left behind even in these men of iron a leaven of secret rancour which required only time and quiet to set their minds in a ferment The only man who had influence over them, had been absent and almost unheard-of for a year ; while the officers placed over them were far more afraid of the soldiers than the soldiers of them, and overlooked in the conquerors of the world every outrage against those that gave them quarters, and every breach of discipline. When the orders to embark for Sicily arrived, and the soldier was to exchange the luxurious ease of Campania for a third campaign certainly not inferior to those of Spain and Thessaly in point of hardship, the reins, which had been too long relaxed and were too suddenly tightened, snapt asunder. The legions refused to obey till the promised presents were paid to them, scornfully repulsed the officers sent by Caesar, and even threw stones at them. An attempt to extinguish the incipient revolt by increasing the sums promised not only had no success, but the soldiers set out in masses to extort the fulfilment of the promises from the general in the capital. Several officers, who attempted to restrain the mutinous bands on the way, were slain. It was a formidable danger. Caesar ordered the few soldiers who were in the city to occupy the gates, with the view of warding off the justly apprehended pillage at least at the first onset, and suddenly appeared among the furious bands demanding to know what they wanted. They exclaimed : " discharge. " In a moment the request was granted. Respecting the presents, Caesar added, which he had promised to his soldiers at his triumph, as well as respecting the lands which he had not promised
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
393
to them but had destined for them, they might apply to him on the day when he and the other soldiers should triumph ; in the triumph itself they could not of course participate, as having been previously discharged. The masses were not prepared for things taking this turn ; convinced that Caesar could not do without them for the African campaign, they had demanded their discharge only in order that, if it were refused, they might annex their own conditions to their service. Half unsettled in their belief as to their own indispensableness ; too awkward to return to their object, and to bring the negotiation which had missed its course back to the right channel ; ashamed, as men, by the fidelity with which the Imperator kept his word even to soldiers who had forgotten their allegiance, and by his generosity which even now granted far more than he had ever promised ; deeply affected, as soldiers, when the general presented to them the prospect of their being necessarily mere civilian spectators of the triumph of their comrades, and when he called them no longer " comrades " but " burgesses,"—by this very form of address, which from his mouth sounded so strangely, destroying as it were with one blow the whole pride of their past soldierly career; and, besides all this, under the spell of the man whose presence had an irresistible power — the soldiers stood for a while mute and lingering, till from all sides a cry arose that the general would once more receive them into favour and again permit them to be called Caesar's soldiers. Caesar, after having allowed himself to be sufficiently entreated, granted the permission; but the ringleaders in this mutiny had a third cut off from their
triumphal presents. History knows no greater psychological master
piece, and none that was more completely successful.
This mutiny operated injuriously on the African cam- Caesar paign, at least in so far as it considerably delayed the ^^
commencement of it When Caesar arrived at the port
Conflict at Ruspina.
194
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
of Lilybaeum destined for the embarkation, the ten legions intended for Africa were far from being fully assembled there, and it was the experienced troops that were farthest behind. Hardly however had six legions, of which five were newly formed, arrived there and the necessary war-vessels and transports come forward, when Caesar put to sea with
47. them (25 Dec. 707 of the uncorrected, about 8 Oct. of the Julian, calendar). The enemy's fleet, which on account of the prevailing equinoctial gales was drawn up on the beach at the island Aegimurus in front of the bay of Carthage, did not oppose the passage ; but the same storms scattered the fleet of Caesar in all directions, and, when he availed himself of the opportunity of landing not far from Hadrumetum (Susa), he could not disembark more than some 3000 men, mostly recruits, and 150 horsemen. His attempt to capture Hadrumetum strongly occupied by the enemy miscarried ; but Caesar possessed himself of the two seaports not far distant from each other, Ruspina (Monastir near Susa) and Little Leptis. Here he en trenched himself; but his position was so insecure, that he
kept his cavalry in the ships and the ships ready for sea and provided with a supply of water, in order to re-embark at any moment if he should be attacked by a superior force. This however was not necessary, for just at the right time the ships that had been driven out of their course
48. arrived (3 Jan. 708). On the very following day Caesar, whose army in consequence of the arrangements made by the Pompeians suffered from want of corn, undertook with three legions an expedition into the interior of the country, but was attacked on the march not far from Ruspina by the corps which Labienus had brought up to dislodge Caesar from the coast. As Labienus had exclusively cavalry and archers, and Caesar almost nothing but infantry of the line, the legions were quickly surrounded and exposed to the missiles of the enemy, without being able to
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
295
retaliate or to attack with success. No doubt the deploying of the entire line relieved once more the flanks, and spirited charges saved the honour of their arms ; but a retreat was unavoidable, and had Ruspina not been so near, the Moorish javelin would perhaps have accomplished the same result here as the Parthian bow at Carrhae.
Caesar, whom this day had fully convinced of the Caesar's difficulty of the impending war, would not again expose P°sm. on"1 his soldiers untried and discouraged by the new mode of
fighting to any such attack, but awaited the arrival of his
veteran legions. The interval was employed in providing
some sort of compensation against the crushing superiority
of the enemy in the weapons of distant warfare. The incorporation of the suitable men from the fleet as light horsemen or archers in the land -army could not be of
much avail. The diversions which Caesar suggested were somewhat more effectual. He succeeded in bringing into
arms against Juba the Gaetulian pastoral tribes wandering
on the southern slope of the great Atlas towards the
Sahara; for the blows of the Marian and Sullan period
had reached even to them, and their indignation against Pompeius, who had at that time made them subordinate to
the Numidian kings (iv. 94), rendered them from the
outset favourably inclined to the heir of the mighty Marius
of whose Jugurthine campaign they had still a lively recollection. The Mauretanian kings, Bogud in Tingis and
Bocchus in Iol, were Juba's natural rivals and to a certain extent long since in alliance with Caesar. Further, there still roamed in the border-region between the kingdoms of Juba and Bocchus the last of the Catilinarians, that Publius Sittius of Nuceria (iv. 469), who eighteen years before had become converted from a bankrupt Italian merchant into a Mauretanian leader of free bands, and since that time had procured for himself a name and a body of retainers amidst the Libyan quarrels. Socchus and Sittius united
296
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book V
fell on the Numidian land, and occupied the important town of Cirta; and their attack, as well as that of the Gaetulians, compelled king Juba to send a portion of his troops to his southern and western frontiers.
Caesar's situation, however, continued sufficiently un pleasant His army was crowded together within a space of six square miles ; though the fleet conveyed corn, the want of forage was as much felt by Caesar's cavalry as by those of Pompeius before Dyrrhachium. The light troops of the enemy remained notwithstanding all the exertions of Caesar so immeasurably superior to his, that it seemed almost impossible to carry offensive operations into the interior even with veterans. If Scipio retired and aban doned the coast towns, he might perhaps achieve a victory like those which the vizier of Orodes had won over Crassus
and Juba over Curio, and he could at least endlessly protract the war. The simplest consideration suggested this plan of campaign ; even Cato, although far from a strategist, counselled its adoption, and offered at the same time to cross with a corps to Italy and to call the republicans there to arms —which, amidst the utter confusion in that quarter, might very well meet with success. But Cato could only advise, not command ; Scipio the commander- in-chief decided that the war should be carried on in the region of the coast This was a blunder, not merely inasmuch as they thereby dropped a plan of war promising a sure result, but also inasmuch as the region to which they transferred the war was in dangerous agitation, and a good part of the army which they opposed to Caesar was likewise in a troublesome temper. The fearfully strict levy, the carrying off of the supplies, the devastating of the smaller townships, the feeling in general that they were being sacrificed for a cause which from the outset was foreign to them and was already lost, had exasperated the native population against the Roman republicans fighting
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
297
out their last struggle of despair on African soil ; and the terrorist proceedings of the latter against all communities that were but suspected of indifference (p. 286), had raised this exasperation to the most fearful hatred. The African towns declared, wherever they could venture to do so, for Caesar ; among the Gaetulians and the Libyans, who served in numbers among the light troops and even in the legions, desertion was spreading. But Scipio with all the obstinacy characteristic of folly persevered in his plan, marched with all his force from Utica to appear before the towns of Ruspina and Little Leptis occupied by Caesar, furnished Hadrumetum to the north and Thapsus to the south (on the promontory Ras Dimas) with strong garrisons, and in concert with Juba, who likewise appeared before Ruspina with all his troops not required by the defence of the frontier, offered battle repeatedly to the enemy. But Caesar was resolved to wait for his veteran legions. As these one after another arrived and appeared on the scene of strife, Scipio and Juba lost the desire to risk a pitched battle, and Caesar had no means of compelling them to fight owing to their extraordinary superiority in light cavalry. Nearly two months passed away in marches and skirmishes in the neighbourhood of Ruspina and Thapsus,
which chiefly had relation to the finding out of the concealed store-pits (silos) common in the country, and to the exten sion of posts. Caesar, compelled by the enemy's horsemen to keep as much as possible to the heights or even to cover his flanks by entrenched lines, yet accustomed his soldiers gradually during this laborious and apparently endless warfare to the foreign mode of fighting. Friend and foe hardly recognized the rapid general in the cautious master of fence who trained his men carefully and not unfrequently in person ; and they became almost puzzled by the masterly skill which displayed itself as conspicuously in delay as in promptitude of action
Battle at p
398 BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
At last Caesar, after being joined by his last reinforce-
ments, made a lateral movement towards Thapsus.
had, as we have said, strongly garrisoned this town, and thereby committed the blunder of presenting to his opponent an object of attack easy to be seized ; to this first error he soon added the second still less excusable blunder of now for the rescue of Thapsus giving the battle, which Caesar had wished and Scipio had hitherto rightly refused, on ground which placed the decision in the hands of the infantry of the line. Immediately along the shore, opposite to Caesar's camp, the legions of Scipio and
appeared, the fore ranks ready for fighting, the hinder ranks occupied in forming an entrenched camp; at the same time the garrison of Thapsus prepared for a sally. Caesar's camp-guard sufficed to repulse the latter. His legions, accustomed to war, already forming a correct estimate of the enemy from the want of precision in their mode of array and their ill-closed ranks, compelled —while yet the entrenching was going forward on that side, and before even the general gave the signal—a trumpeter to sound for the attack, and advanced along the whole line headed by Caesar himself, who, when he saw his men advance without waiting for his orders, galloped forward to lead them against the enemy. The right wing, in advance of the other divisions, frightened the line of elephants opposed to it—this was the last great battle in which these animals were employed — by throwing bullets and arrows, so that they wheeled round on their own ranks. The covering force was cut down, the left wing of the enemy was broken, and the whole line was overthrown. The defeat was the more destructive, as the new camp of the beaten army was not yet ready, and the old one was at a considerable distance ; both were successively captured
almost without resistance. The mass of the defeated army threw away their arms and sued for quarter; but Caesar's
Juba
Scipio
chap, X PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
299
soldiers were no longer the same who had readily refrained from battle before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless at Pharsalus. The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner on the battle-field of Thapsus. If the hydra with which they fought always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought, and not wholly without cause, the reason of this state of things in the unseasonable clemency of Caesar. He had sworn to retrieve the general's neglect, and remained deaf to the entreaties of his disarmed fellow- citizens as well as to the commands of Caesar and the superior officers. The fifty thousand corpses that covered the battle-field of Thapsus, among whom were several Caesarian officers known as secret opponents of the new monarchy, and therefore cut down on this occasion by their own men, showed how the soldier procures for himself
The victorious army on the other hand numbered no more than fifty dead (6 April 708).
There was as little a continuance of the struggle in Africa after the battle of Thapsus, as there had been a year and a half before in the east after the defeat of Pharsalus. Cato as commandant of Utica convoked the senate, set forth how the means of defence stood, and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether they would yield or defend themselves to the last man— only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself, but all in unison. The more courageous view found several supporters ; it was proposed to manumit on
behalf of the state the slaves capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment on
repose.
and suggested in its stead a patriotic appeal to the slave-owners. But soon this of resolution
private property,
46.
Catoin t"aL
fit
Hi* death,
in an assembly consisting in great part of African merchants passed off, and they agreed to capitulate. Thereupon when Faustus Sulla, son of the regent, and Lucius Afranius arrived in Utica with a strong division of cavalry from the field of battle, Cato still made an attempt to hold the town through them ; but he indignantly rejected their demand to let them first of all put to death the untrustworthy citizens of Utica en masse, and chose to let the last strong hold of the republicans fall into the hands of the monarch without resistance rather than to profane the last moments of the republic by such a massacre. After he had—partly by his authority, partly by liberal largesses —checked so far as he could the fury of the soldiery against the unfortunate Uticans ; after he had with touching solicitude furnished to those who preferred not to trust themselves to Caesar's mercy the means for flight, and to those who wished to remain the opportunity of capitulating under the most tolerable conditions, so far as his ability reached; and after having thoroughly satisfied himself that he could render to no one any farther aid, he held himself released from his command, retired to his bedchamber, and plunged his sword into his breast
Of the other fugitive leaders only a few escaped. The cavalry that fled from Thapsus encountered the bands of Sittius, and were cut down or captured by them; their leaders Afranius and Faustus were delivered up to Caesar, and, when the latter did not order their immediate execu tion, they were slain in a tumult by his veterans. The commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio with the fleet of the defeated party fell into the power of the cruisers of Sittius and, when they were about to lay hands on him, stabbed himself King Juba, not unprepared for such an issue, had in that case resolved to die in a way which seemed to him befitting a king, and had caused an enormous funeral pile to be prepared in the market-place of his city Zama,
300
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The
1he re. publicans
death.
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
301
which was intended to consume along with his body all his treasures and the dead bodies of the whole citizens of Zama. But the inhabitants of the town showed no desire to let themselves be employed by way of decoration for the funeral rites of the African Sardanapalus ; and they closed the gates against the king when fleeing from the battle-field he appeared, accompanied by Marcus Petreius, before their city. The king — one of those natures that become savage amidst a life of dazzling and insolent en joyment, and prepare for themselves even out of death an intoxicating feast—resorted with his companion to one of his country houses, caused a copious banquet to be served up, and at the close of the feast challenged Petreius to fight him to death in single combat. It was the con queror of Catilina that received his death at the hand of the king ; the latter thereupon caused himself to be stabbed by one of his slaves. The few men of eminence that escaped, such as Labienus and Sextus Pompeius, followed the elder brother of the latter to Spain and sought, like Sertorius formerly, a last refuge of robbers and pirates in the waters and the mountains of that still half-independent land.
Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa. Regulation As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa ° Afnca. was broken up. The most eastern portion or region of
Sitifis was united with the kingdom of Bocchus king of
East Mauretania (iii. 410), and the faithful king Bogud
of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts. Cirta
and the surrounding district, hitherto pos sessed under the supremacy of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle his half- Roman bands there ; 1 but at the same time this district,
1 The inscriptions of the region referred to preserve numerous traces of this colonization. The name of the Sittii is there unusually frequent ; the
(Constantine)
The monarchy,
as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as "New Africa" with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert, which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed by the new ruler on the empire itself.
The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch.
No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus ; it might already be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous aristocratic constitu tion. Yet it was only those baptisms of blood of the ninth
308
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book \
48. 46. August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion, and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy. Risings of pretenders and
The end republic.
republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke new commotions,
perhaps even new revolutions and restorations; but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy of accomplished fact
The constitutional struggle was at an end ; and that it was so' was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica. For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle of the legitimate republic against its oppressors ; he had continued long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory. But now the struggle itself had become impossible the republic which
African township Milev bears as Roman the name colonia Sarnennt I. , viii. p. 1094) evidently from the Nucerian river-god Sarnm
Sueton. Rhet 4).
! C. I.
;
it,
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
303
Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived ; what were the republicans now to do on the earth ? The treasure was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved ; who could blame them if they departed ? There was more nobility, and above all more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life. Cato was anything but a great man ; but with all that short sightedness, that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases which have stamped him, for his own and for all time, as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system doomed to destruction.
Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself inwardly anni hilated before the simple truth, and because all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part in history than many men far superior to him in intellect. It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death that he was himself a fool ; in truth it is just because Don Quixote is a fool that he is a tragic figure. It is an affecting fact, that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue. He too died not in vain. It was a fearfully striking protest of the republic
against the monarchy, that the last republican went as the first
monarch came—a protest which tore asunder like gossamer all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis of which despotism grew up. The unre lenting warfare which the ghost of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later, against the Caesarian monarchy —a warfare of plots and of literature
.
304 BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, PHARSALUS, THAPSUS BK. v
—was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies. This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude — stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid, hopeless, and faithful to death ; and accordingly it began even immediately after his death to revere as a saint the man who in his lifetime was not un- frequently its laughing-stock and its scandal. But the greatest of these marks of respect was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as re
in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.
publicans,
ch. XI THE OLD REPUBLIC AND NEW MONARCHY
305
CHAPTER XI
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND THE NEW MONARCHY
The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole Character
Julius ° Caesar'
domain of Romano -Hellenic civilization, Gaius
Caesar, was in his fifty- sixth year (born 12 July 652? ) 102. when the battle at Thapsus, the last link in a long chain
of momentous victories, placed the decision as to the future
of the world in his hands. Few men have had their J elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar — the
sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved
on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium—which traced back its lineage to the heroes of
the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus- Aphrodite common to both nations—he spent the years
of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable
life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature
and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love- intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the myfteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But
the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
vol. T
153
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these dissipated and flighty courses ; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria ; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night — a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another— was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrange ments, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simulta neously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex
influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends —and that not merely from calculation —through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus
Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.
If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it may be singled out as characteristic, it is this—that he stood aloof from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course, Caesar was a man of passion, for
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
307
without passion there is no genius ; but his passion was never stronger than he could control. He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken lively possession of his spirit ; but with him they did not penetrate to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long and earnestly ; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses, as everybody then did, but they were weak ; on the other hand he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science. While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care, the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over, avoided it entirely. Around him, as around all those
whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in youth, fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger ; even in later years he had love-adventures and successes with women, and he retained a certain foppishness in his out ward appearance, or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness, which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered some of his victories, if he could thereby have brought back his youthful locks. But, however much even when monarch he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him ; even his
much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only con trived to mask a weak point in his political position 276).
Caesar was thoroughly realist and man of sense; y and whatever he undertook and achieved was pervaded
and guided by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or expectation to this he owed
by
a
;
a
(p.
Caesar ai a states-
the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour, and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest and most incidental enterprise ; to this he owed the many-sided power with which he grasped and mastered whatever under standing can comprehend and will can compel ; to this he owed the self-possessed ease with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns; to this he owed the "marvellous serenity" which remained steadily with him through good and evil days ; to this he owed the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover, from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man ; in his case the friendly veil was lifted up, which conceals from man the inadequacy of his working. Prudently as he laid his plans and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident, must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference. As indeed occasion ally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.
Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a states man. From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a states man in the deepest sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed to propose to himself —the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin to his own. The hard school of thirty years' experience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached ; his
J08
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
309
aim itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when, as joint pos sessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world. All the measures of a permanent kind that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their appropriate places in the great building-plan. We cannot therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of
Caesar ; he did nothing isolated. With justice men com mend Caesar the orator for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed. With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity of the com position, the unique purity and beauty of the language. With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree dis regarding routine and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty of divination found the proper means for every end ; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare, the treatment of which serves to dis tinguish military genius from the mere ordinary ability of an officer — the rapid movement of masses — with unsur passed perfection, and found the guarantee of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid and daring action even with inadequate means. But all these were
with Caesar mere secondary matters ; he was no doubt a great orator, author, and general, but he became each of these merely because he was a consummate statesman.
3io
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book V
The soldier more especially played in him altogether an accessory part, and it is one of the principal peculiarities by which he is distinguished from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that he began his political activity not as an officer, but as a demagogue. According to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object, like Pericles and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms, and throughout eighteen years he had as leader of the popular party moved exclusively amid political plans and intrigues — until, re luctantly convinced of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years of age, put himself at the head of an army. It was natural that he should even afterwards remain still more statesman than general—just like Cromwell, who also transformed himself from a leader
of opposition into a military chief and democratic king, and who in general, little as the prince of Puritans seems to resemble the dissolute Roman, is yet in his development as well as in the objects which he aimed at and the results which he achieved of all statesmen perhaps the most akin to Caesar. Even in his mode of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized; the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England do not more clearly exhibit the artillery-lieutenant who had risen by service to command than the similar enterprises of Caesar exhibit the demagogue metamorphosed into a general. A regularly trained officer would hardly have been prepared, through political considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Caesar did on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing in Epirus. Several of his acts are therefore censurable from a military point of view ; but what the general loses, the statesman gains. The task of the statesman is universal in its nature like Caesar's genius ; if he undertook things the most varied and most remote one from another, they had all without
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
311
exception a bearing on the one great object to which with infinite fidelity and consistency he devoted himself; and of the manifold aspects and directions of his great activity he never preferred one to another. Although a master of the art of war, he yet from statesmanly considerations did his utmost to avert civil strife and, when it nevertheless began, to earn laurels stained as little as possible by blood. Although the founder of a military monarchy, he yet, with an energy unexampled in history, allowed no hierarchy of marshals or government of praetorians to come into exist ence. If he had a preference for any one form of services rendered to the state, it was for the sciences and arts of peace rather than for those of war.
The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a . statesman was its perfect harmony. In reality all the con ditions for this most difficult of all human functions were united in Caesar. A thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past or venerable tradition to disturb him ; for him nothing was of value in politics but the living present and the law of reason, just as in his character of grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian research and recognized nothing but on the one hand the living usus loqtundi and on the other hand the rule of symmetry. A born ruler, he governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves at his service—the plain citizen and the rough subaltern, the genteel matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania, the brilliant cavalry-officer and the calculating banker. His talent for organization was marvellous ; no statesman has ever com pelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army out of unyielding and refractory elements with such decision, and kept them together with such firmness, as Caesar dis played in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions ; never did regent judge his instruments and assign
V*
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
each to the place appropriate for him with so acute an eye.
He was monarch ; but he never played the king. Even when absolute lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the party-leader ; perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation, complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he wished to be nothing but the first among his peers. Caesar entirely avoided the blunder into which so many men otherwise on an equality with him have fallen, of carrying into politics the military tone of command ; however much occasion his disagreeable rela tions with the senate gave for he never resorted to out rages such as was that of the eighteenth Brumaire. Caesar was monarch but he was never seized with the giddiness of the tyrant. He perhaps the only one among the mighty ones of the earth, who in great matters and little never acted according to inclination or caprice, but always without exception according to his duty as ruler, and who, when he looked back on his life, found doubtless erroneous calculations to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret. There nothing in the history of Caesar's life, which even on small scale1 can be compared with those poetico-sensual ebullitions —such as the murder of Kleitos or the burning of Persepolis —which the history of his great predecessor in the east records. He fine, perhaps the only one of those mighty ones, who has pre
served to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures the most difficult of all — the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural
The affair with Laberius, told in the well-known prologue, has been quoted as an instance of Caesar's tyrannical caprices, but those who have done so have thoroughly misunderstood the irony of the situation as well as of the poet to say nothing of the naivtU of lamenting as a martyr the poet who readily pockets his honorarium.
;
1
is a
is
is, in
is
;
it,
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
313
limits. What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better, never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken, he always obeyed. Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow, turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant at destiny for bestowing even on its favourites merely limited successes ; Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine; and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates not unbounded plans of world- conquest, but merely well-considered frontier-regulations.
Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is so infinitely difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent clearness ; and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid information about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world. Of such a personage our conceptions may well vary in point of shallowness or depth, but they cannot be, strictly speaking, different; to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure has exhibited the same essential features, and yet no one has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret lies in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in his place in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts of existence meet and balance each other. Of mighty creative power and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment; no longer a youth and not yet an old man ; of the highest energy of will and the highest capacity of execution ; filled with republican ideals andatthesame timeborntobeaking; aRomaninthe deepest essence of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic types of culture —Caesar was the entire and perfect man. Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage what are called
3H
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
characteristic features, which are in reality nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human develop ment. What in Caesar passes for such at the first super ficial glance when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation; his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position, his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament of Romans
It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions
general.
of time and place for there
living man cannot but occupy
and definite line of culture.
just because he more than any other placed himself amidst the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation — practical aptitude as citizen — in perfection for his Hellenism fact was only the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian nationality. But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty, we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life. As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty, so the historian, when once in thousand years he encounters the perfect, can only be silent regarding For normality admits doubtless of being expressed, but gives us only the negative notion of the absence of defect the secret of nature, whereby in her most finished manifesta tions normality and individuality are combined,
no abstract humanity —the place in given nationality Caesar was perfect man
beyond expression. Nothing left for us but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain some
faint conception of from the reflected lustre which rests imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature. These also, true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero himself stood by the side of his
it is
a is
it
is
;
a
a a
is :
; itit.
in
in
a
in a
is,
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
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youthful Greek predecessor not merely as an equal, but as a superior ; but the world had meanwhile become old and its youthful lustre had faded. The action of Caesar was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward towards a goal indefinitely remote ; he built on, and out of, ruins, and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned to him. With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman, and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend. But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily, fraught with shame.
If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was Setting to be successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to ^de^ be renovated, it was necessary first of all that the country parties, should be practically tranquillized and that the ground
should be cleared from the rubbish with which since the
recent catastrophe it was everywhere strewed. In this
work Caesar set out from the principle of the recon ciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or, to put it
more correctly —for, where the antagonistic principles are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation —from
the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and
the populace had hitherto contended with each other, was
to be abandoned by both parties, and that both were to
meet together on the ground of the new monarchical constitution. First of all therefore all the older quarrels
of the republican past were regarded as done away for
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ever and irrevocably. While Caesar gave orders that the statues of Sulla which had been thrown down by the mob of the capital on the news of the battle of Pharsalus should be re-erected, and thus recognized the fact that it became history alone to sit in judgment on that great man, he at the same time cancelled the last remaining effects of Sulla's exceptional laws, recalled from exile those who had been banished in the times of the Cinnan and Sertorian troubles, and restored to the children of those outlawed by Sulla their forfeited privilege of eligibility to office. In like manner all those were restored, who in the preliminary stage of the recent catastrophe had lost their seat in the senate or their civil existence through sentence of the censors or political process, especially through the im peachments raised on the basis of the exceptional laws
62. of 702. Those alone who had put to death the proscribed for money remained, as was reasonable, still under attainder; and Milo, the most daring condottiere of the senatorial party, was excluded from the general pardon.
Discontent of the democrats.
Far more difficult than the settlement of these questions which already belonged substantially to the past was the treatment of the parties confronting each other at the moment — on the one hand Caesar's own democratic adherents, on the other hand the overthrown aristocracy. That the former should be, if possible, still less satisfied than the latter with Caesar's conduct after the victory and with his summons to abandon the old standing -ground of party, was to be expected. Caesar himself desired doubtless on the whole the same issue which Gaius Gracchus had contemplated ; but the designs of the Caesarians were no longer those of the Gracchans. The Roman popular party had been driven onward in gradual progression from reform to revolution, from revolution to anarchy, from anarchy to a war against property ; they celebrated among themselves the memory of the reign of terror and now adorned the
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tomb of Catilina, as formerly that of the Gracchi, with flowers and garlands; they had placed themselves under Caesar's banner, because they expected him to do for them what Catilina had not been able to accomplish. But as it speedily became plain that Caesar was very far from intending to be the testamentary executor of Catilina, and that the utmost which debtors might expect from him was some alleviations of payment and modifica tions of procedure, indignation found loud vent in the inquiry, For whom then had the popular party conquered,
if not for the people ? and the rabble of this description, high and low, out of pure chagrin at the miscarriage of their politico-economic Saturnalia began first to coquet with the Pompeians, and then even during Caesar's absence of nearly two years from Italy (Jan. 706 — autumn 707) to instigate there a second civil war within the first.
The praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus, a good aristocrat and bad payer of debts, of some talent and much culture, as a vehement and fluent orator hitherto in the senate and in the Forum one of the most zealous champions for Caesar, proposed to the people — without being instructed from any higher quarter to do so — a law which granted to debtors a respite of six years free of interest, and then, when he was opposed in this step, proposed a second law which even cancelled all claims arising out of loans and current house rents; whereupon the Caesarian senate deposed him from his office. It was just on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, and the balance in the great contest seemed to incline to the side of the Pompeians ; Rufus entered into communication with the old senatorian
band-leader Milo, and the two contrived a counter-revolu tion, which inscribed on its banner partly the republican constitution, partly the cancelling of creditors' claims and the manumission of slaves. Milo left his place of exile Massilia, and called the Pompeians and the slave-herdsmen
48-47.
Caelius ^^
47. Dolabella.
Nevertheless there was found in the following year (707) a second fool, the tribune of the people, Publius Dolabella, who, equally insolvent but far from being equally gifted with his predecessor, introduced afresh his law as to creditors' claims and house rents, and with his colleague Lucius Trebellius began on that point once more — it was the last time — the demagogic war ; there were serious frays between the armed bands on both sides and various street - riots, till the commandant of Italy Marcus Antonius ordered the military to interfere, and soon afterwards Caesar's return from the east completely put an end to the preposterous proceedings. Caesar attributed to these brainless attempts to revive the projects of Catilina so little importance, that he tolerated Dolabella in Italy and indeed after some time even received him again into favour. Against a rabble of this sort, which had nothing to do with any political question at all, but solely with a war against property — as against gangs of banditti —the mere existence of a strong government is sufficient; and Caesar was too great and too considerate to busy himself with the apprehensions which the Italian alarmists felt regarding these communists of that
and thereby unduly to procure a false popularity for his monarchy.
While Caesar thus might leave, and actually left, the late democratic party to the process of decomposition which had already in its case advanced almost to the utmost limit, he had on the other hand, with reference to the former aristo
3i8
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND BOOK V
to arms in the region of Thurii ; Rufus made arrangements to seize the town of Capua by armed slaves. But the latter plan was detected before its execution and frustrated by the Capuan militia; Quintus Pedius, who advanced with a legion into the territory of Thurii, scattered the band making havoc there ; and the fall of the two leaders put
48. an end to the scandal (706).
Measures against Pompeians and re publicans.
day,
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
319
cratic party possessing a far greater vitality, not to bring about its dissolution —which time alone could accomplish —but to pave the way for and initiate it by a proper combination of repression and conciliation. Among minor measures, Caesar, even from a natural sense of propriety, avoided exasperating the fallen party by empty sarcasm ;
he did not triumph over his conquered fellow-burgesses ; l
he mentioned Pompeius often and always with respect, and caused his statue overthrown by the people to be re-erected at the senate-house, when the latter was restored,
in its earlier distinguished place. To political prosecutions after the victory Caesar assigned the narrowest possible limits. No investigation was instituted into the various communications which the constitutional party had held even with nominal Caesarians ; Caesar threw the piles
of papers found in the enemy's headquarters at Pharsalus and Thapsus into the fire unread, and spared himself and the country from political processes against individuals suspected of high treason. Further, all the common soldiers who had followed their Roman or provincial officers into the contest against Caesar came off with impunity. The sole exception made was in the case of those Roman burgesses, who had taken service in the army of the Numidian king Juba; their property was confiscated by way of penalty for their treason. Even
to the officers of the conquered party Caesar had granted unlimited pardon up to the close of the Spanish campaign
of "05 ; but he became convinced that in this he had 49. gone too far, and that the removal at least of the leaders among them was inevitable. The rule by which he was thenceforth guided was, that every one who after the
capitulation
of Ilerda had served as an officer in the
1 The triumph after the battle of Munda subsequently to be mentioned probably had reference only to the Lusitanians who served in great cumbers in the conquered army.
3*i
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
enemy's army or had sat in the opposition-senate, if he survived the close of the struggle, forfeited his property and his political rights, and was banished from Italy for life ; if he did not survive the close of the struggle, his property at least fell to the state; but any one of these, who had formerly accepted pardon from Caesar and was once more found in the ranks of the enemy, thereby forfeited his life. These rules were however materially modified in the execution. The sentence of death was actually executed only against a very few of the numerous backsliders. In the confiscation of the property of the fallen not only were the debts attaching to the several portions of the estate as well as the claims of the widows for their dowries paid off, as was reasonable, but a portion of the paternal estate was left also to the children of the deceased. Lastly not a few of those, who in consequence
of those rules were liable to banishment and confiscation of property, were at once pardoned entirely or got off with
fines, like the African capitalists who were impressed as members of the senate of Utica. And even the others almost without exception got their freedom and property restored to them, if they could only prevail on themselves to petition Caesar to that effect ; on several who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus, pardon
44. was even conferred unasked, and ultimately in 710 a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unre- called.
Amnesty.
The republican opposition submitted to be pardoned ; but it was not reconciled. Discontent with the new order of things and exasperation against the unwonted ruler were general. For open political resistance there was indeed no farther opportunity —it was hardly worth taking into account, that some oppositional tribunes on occasion of the question of title acquired for themselves the republican crown of martyrdom by a demonstrative intervention against
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
3a1
those who had called Caesar king — but republicanism found expression all the more decidedly as an opposition of sentiment, and in secret agitation and plotting. Not a hand stirred when the Imperator appeared in public. There was abundance of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling popular satire against the new monarchy. When a comedian ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest applause. The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free. Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field ; he himself and his abler confidants
to the Cato -literature with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes round the dead body of Patroclus ; but as a matter of course in this conflict —where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings was judge —the Caesarians had the worst of it No course remained but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles, while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected to
a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded was utterly arbitrary. 1 The underground machinations of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly set forth in another connec tion. Here it is sufficient to say that risings of pre tenders as well as of republicans were incessantly brewing
1 Any one who desires to compare the old and new hardships of authors will find opportunity of doing so in the letter of Caecina (Cicero, Att. fam. ri. 7).
replied
VOL. V
X54
Beanngof
towards the parties.
3a3 THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
throughout the Roman empire ; that the flames of civil war kindled now by the Pompeians, now by the republicans, again burst forth brightly at various places ; and that in the capital there was perpetual conspiracy against the life of the monarch. But Caesar could not be induced by these plots even to surround himself permanently with a body-guard, and usually contented himself with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.
However much Caesar was wont to treat all things relating to his personal safety with daring indifference, he could not possibly conceal from himself the very serious danger with which this mass of malcontents threatened not merely himself but also his creations. If nevertheless, disregarding all the warning and urgency of his friends, he without deluding himself as to the implacability of the very opponents to whom he showed mercy, persevered with marvellous composure and energy in the course of pardon ing by far the greater number of them, he did so neither from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud, nor from the sentimental clemency of an effeminate, nature, but from the
correct statesmanly consideration that vanquished
are disposed of more rapidly and with less public injury by their absorption within the state than by any attempt to extirpate them by proscription or to eject them from the commonwealth by banishment Caesar could not for his high objects dispense with the constitutional party itself, which in fact embraced not the aristocracy merely but all the elements of a free and national spirit among the Italian burgesses; for his schemes, which contemplated the re novation of the antiquated state, he needed the whole mass of talent, culture, hereditary and self-acquired distinction, which this party embraced; and in this sense he may well have named the pardoning of his opponents the finest reward of victory. Accordingly the most prominent chiefs of the defeated parties were indeed removed, but full pardon
parties
chaf. XI THE NEW MONARCHY
323
was not withheld from the men of the second and third rank and especially of the younger generation ; they were not, however, allowed to sulk in passive opposition, but were by more or less gentle pressure induced to take an active part in the new administration, and to accept honours and offices from it As with Henry the Fourth and William of Orange, so with Caesar his greatest difficulties
began only after the victory. Every revolutionary conqueror learns by experience that, if after vanquishing his opponents
he would not remain like Cinna and Sulla a mere party- chief, but would like Caesar, Henry the Fourth, and William of Orange substitute the welfare of the commonwealth for the necessarily one-sided programme of his own party, for the moment all parties, his own as well as the vanquished, unite against the new chief; and the more so, the more great and pure his idea of his new vocation. The friends of the constitution and the Pompeians, though doing homage with the lips to Caesar, bore yet in heart a grudge either at monarchy or at least at the dynasty ; the degen erate democracy was in open rebellion against Caesar from the moment of its perceiving that Caesar's objects were by
no means its own ; even the personal adherents of Caesar murmured, when they found that their chief was establishing instead of a state of condottieri a monarchy equal and just towards all, and that the portions of gain accruing to them were to be diminished by the accession of the vanquished. This settlement of the commonwealth was acceptable to no party, and had to be imposed on his associates no less than on his opponents. Caesar's own position was now in a certain sense more imperilled than before the victory ; but what he lost, the state gained. By annihilating the parties and not simply sparing the partisans but allowing every man
of talent or even mereiy of good descent to attain to office irrespective of his political past, he gained for his great building all the working power extant in the state ; and not
Caesar's work.
only so, but the voluntary or compulsory participation of men of all parties in the same work led the nation also over imperceptibly to the newly prepared ground. The fact that this reconciliation of the parties was for the moment only external and that they were for the present much less agreed in adherence to the new state of things
than in hatred against Caesar, did not mislead him; he knew well that antagonisms lose their keenness when brought into such outward union, and that only in this way can the statesman anticipate the work of time, which alone is able finally to heal such a strife by laying the old genera tion in the grave. Still less did he inquire who hated him or meditated his assassination. Like every genuine states man he served not the people for reward—not even for the reward of their love—but sacrificed the favour of his con temporaries for the blessing of posterity, and above all for the permission to save and renew his nation.
In attempting to give a detailed account of the mode in which the transition was effected from the old to the new state of things, we must first of all recollect that Caesar came not to begin, but to complete. The plan of a new polity suited to the times, long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained by his adherents and suc cessors with more or less of spirit and success, but without wavering. Caesar, from the outset and as it were by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years borne aloft its banner without ever changing
or even so much as concealing his colours ; he remained democrat even when monarch. As he accepted without limitation, apart of course from the preposterous projects of Catilina and Clodius, the heritage of his party ; as he dis played the bitterest, even personal, hatred to the aristocracy and the genuine aristocrats ; and as he retained unchanged the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual
324
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
325
equalization of the differences of rights among the classes belonging to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate : his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy, that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded —the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas, which lay at the foundation of Caesar's work, were so far not strictly new ; but to him belongs their realization, which after all is everywhere the main matter ; and to him pertains the grandeur of execution, which would probably have surprised the brilliant projector himself if he could have seen and which has impressed, and will always impress, every one to whom has been presented in the living reality or in the mirror of history—to whatever his torical epoch or whatever shade of politics he may belong
—according to the measure of his ability to comprehend human and historical greatness, with deep and ever-deepen ing emotion and admiration.
At this point however proper expressly once for all to claim what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest against the custom—common to simplicity and perfidy —of using historical praise and historical censure, dissociated from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application, and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar into judgment as to what called Caesarism. It true that the history of past cen turies ought to be the instructress of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as one could simply by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms for political diagnosis and the specifics for prescription
a
a
if is
a
it is
it
; is
.
it,
&6
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally— the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their combination everywhere different —and leads and encourages men, not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction. In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism, with all the unsur passed greatness of the master- worker, with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth a sharper censure of
modern autocracy than could be written by the hand of man. According to the same law of nature in virtue of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic machine, every constitution however defective which gives play to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism ; for the former is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is and therefore dead.