Caesar’s first appearance in the courts when he was in his 23rd year left a strong and lasting impression of his quality, but, for a figure dominant in politics, the record of evidence for and quotations from his speeches is scanty and somewhat unusual. The Roman public man might expect to plead many cases in court and make other, shorter, speeches either to express his opinion in the senate or, as a magistrate, to explain legislation and persuade the informal assembly (contio) to vote in its support. As a commander he would also have to motivate his soldiers with a rousing speech before battles. Roman public life offered little occasion for ceremonial oratory, but Caesar attracted special attention precisely because he extended the practice of uttering a public eulogy at a close kinsman’s funeral to the funerals of women; he did so twice during his quaestorship in 69; first for his aunt, the widow of the now discredited Marius, and in the same year for his wife Cornelia. His aunt’s eulogy he turned into an occasion to celebrate his family’s noble origin, and Suetonius seems to have preserved his own words:
Amitae meae Iuliae maternum genus ab regibus ortum, paternum cum dis immortalibus coniunctum est. nam ab Anco Marcio sunt Marcii Reges, quo nomine fuit mater, a Venere lulii, cuius gentis familia est nostra. Est ergo in genere et sanctitas regum, qui plurimum inter homines pollent, et caerimonia deorum, quorum ipsi in potestate sunt reges. (Suet. lul. 6)
My aunt Julia’s family on her mother’s side was descended from kings, and her father’s family was linked with the immortal gods. For the Marcii Reges, her mother’s family name, come from Ancus Martius, and the Iulii, the clan from which our family comes, descend from Venus. So in our clan there is both the holiness of kings, who have the most power among men, and the reverence due to the gods, in whose power kings themselves are held.
Caesar was not the originator of the family pride of the Iulii Caesares, which was already celebrated by L. Caesar’s Origin of the Roman Race ( Origo Gentis Romanae 15.4, 18.5), but, like many of his early actions, this shows him vindicating his family and declaring its association with Marius.
If we turn back to Caesar’s first appearances in the courts, he does in some ways conform to the pattern reported by Cicero, in which only young men and outsiders prosecuted; once a careerist was launched with a junior magistracy he would shun the risks of feuds resulting from prosecution and appear only for the defense. First, then, Caesar prosecuted the ex-consul and triumphator of 81 Cn. Dolabella, for provincial extortion during his years governing Macedonia. Dolabella was defended by the two leading orators of the days, Cotta and Hortensius, and acquittals on such charges were becoming the norm as senatorial jurors imagined themselves in the defendant’s shoes (Cicero would denounce the senatorial juries in the Verrines for their habitual acquittals), so it is not surprising that Dolabella was acquitted. Even so there was competition to prosecute this man, and we know Caesar had to plead his claim to prosecute against a rival; this preliminary divinatio and his two speeches from the two sessions (actiones) of the trial were still read and admired almost two centuries later in the time of Quintilian and Suetonius. If Velleius (2.43.3) calls the speech celebrated and speaks of popular favor, some of the glamor may have accrued in the years since Caesar’s successor won the principate. But the surviving fragment (Gell. 4.16.8) suggests a popular appeal to envy by contrasting the stolen wealth ofsuch magistrates with ‘‘the men of old in whose homes and shrines works of art were a source of both honour and beauty’’ (isti, quorum in aedibus fanisque posita et honori erant et ornatu).
Caesar’s second prosecution, probably a private case, was directed against C. Antonius Hybrida, charging him with armed robbery from Greek provincials when a military prefect in Macedonia, and was aborted when Hybrida appealed to the tribunes for protection. One legacy from Caesar’s first visit to Asia Minor and stay with King Nicomedes will have been his plea for the inheritance of Nicomedes’ daughter, but this was probably only an intervention in the senate. Another was his defense speech for the Bithynians, which should probably be dated to 74 soon after his return from study with Molon. An excerpt shows the powerful simplicity of his appeal to duty and justice:
Vel pro hospitio regis Nicomedis vel pro horum necessitate quorum res agitur, refugere hoc munus, M. Iunce, non potui. Nam neque hominum morte memoria deleri debet quin a proximis retineatur neque clientes sine summa infamia deseri possunt, quibus etiam a propinquis nostris opem ferre instituimus. (Gell. 5.13.6)
I could not shun this duty, M. luncus, either as a return for King Nicomedes’ hospitality or for my bond with these men, whose business is at issue. For neither should memory be obliterated from the hearts of close kin by human death nor can clients be abandoned without extreme disgrace, since we have made it our custom to bring them aid even against our own family.
We should note that prosecutions for provincial extortion were themselves, or could be represented as, generous acts in defense of clients and dependents, but it is characteristic of Caesar’s fragmentary speeches and his own reports of speeches made to soldiers and envoys in Gaul that he stresses his obligations and justifies his actions by the wrongness of deserting or letting down a dependent community. He shows a similar concern with doing his public duty in a fragment from his speech supporting the Plautian law to restore the Lepidan exiles (Gell. 13.3.5). A last case from this period is Caesar’s defense of Decius the Samnite, no longer read in Tacitus’ youth (Dial. 21.6), made apparently on behalf of an Italian who had been proscribed by Sulla (Clu. 161); we can guess that Caesar was trying to have the man’s property and/or civil rights restored.
What about Caesar’s political speeches? By far the most famous is the one for which we have ostensibly the most evidence, but also strong reasons to doubt that evidence: this is Caesar’s proposed amendment (in modern terms) to the motion for executing the Catilinarian conspirators in the senatorial debate of December 5, 63 BC. Caesar had seen this coming earlier in 63 and given a warning by his sponsorship of the show trial of old Rabirius for the supposed killing of Saturninus. This clearly indicated to the senate and consuls of the year that he would challenge the senate’s right to declare an emergency and suspend the people’s prerogative of trial on capital charges. Both the careful diplomacy of Cicero’s report as presiding officer on Caesar’s contribution to the debate on executing the conspirators ( Cat. 4.7-8) and the uninhibited artistic re-creation by Sallust (Cat. 51) show that Caesar’s speech included two main points: first the quasi-philosophical argument that death was not as severe a penalty for extreme guilt as imprisonment (and a guilty conscience); secondly and more significantly, the constitutional argument that this decision violated the Porcian laws against the flogging of citizens, giving them a right of appeal to the people against summary punishment, together with Gaius Gracchus’s Sempronian law, prohibiting any form of trial not authorized by the people. He adds to this political statement the perhaps ironic warning that this would be a bad precedent, easily perverted by less scrupulous magistrates.
Some details, such as Caesar’s invocation of Cato the Censor’s speech advocating mercy to the Rhodians - a pointed allusion for his adversary the younger Cato - and his citation of the 30 Athenian tyrants and Sulla as tyrannical precedents for unauthorized slaughter, may well have been part of his speech; others, such as the false praise of his adversary’s skilled eloquence ( composite loqui), are probably Sallust’s own embroidery. Cato too (Cat. 52.9), and Marius (Sall. Jug. 85.26, 31), implicitly question the sincerity of their adversaries by praising their professional techniques.
This was a time of great danger for Caesar, and he clearly made at least one speech to the people when he published a bill to initiate an inquiry into Catulus’ handling of the restoration of the Capitol, at the beginning of his praetorship in January 62. But the Senate reacted with strong condemnation and he was forced to protect himself by obeying the senate’s decree and withdrawing from his praetorian jurisdiction (lul. 15-16). The fact is that, both in 62 and as consul in 59, Caesar must have spoken up for his desired legislation in the senate and at public meetings, but no specific occasions are recorded. The only evidence cited in Malcovati for speeches during his consulship refers to a defense of his Campanian land bill before he left for Gaul in 58 (ORF2 C. Julius Caesar no. 40, p. 394). It seems that he also brought the charges of illegality and violating the auspices made by Memmius and Domitius to the senate for formal discussion, but these charges failed for lack of support (Suet. Iul. 23).
Cicero makes Brutus declare in 46 BC that he had had no opportunity to hear Caesar speak, and it is likely that from 58 onwards Caesar was more often engaged in exhorting his forces; the Gallic War contains more than one commander’s speech. It was routine to rally soldiers before battle (e. g. BG 2.21.2-3), but in BG 1.40 Caesar sets out in some detail the powerful speech with which he rallied and shamed his men when they were panicking before battle with the Helvetii. To the military council, including all his centurions, he declared that if they were afraid to follow him into battle he would go on with the Tenth Legion alone and this would be his praetorian cohort. Caesar clearly sees this as a more formal speech than usual, and continues his narrative with ‘‘when he had made this speech....’’ Even in 49 he is known to have quelled a mutiny at Placentia by treating his soldiers as mere civilians, and two versions survived of speeches which he was supposed to have delivered to the soldiers in Africa. Again Suetonius quotes from one of these a more continuous excerpt that bears witness to his techniques.
Scitote paucissimis his diebus regem adfuturum cum decem legionibus, equitum triginta, levis armaturae centum milibus, elephantis trecentis. Proinde desinant quidam quaerere ultra aut opinari, mihique, qui compertum habeo, credant, aut quidem vetustissima nave impositos quocumque vento in quascunque terras iubebo avehi. (Suet. lul. 66.)
Know that in the next few days the King will be here with ten legions, thirty thousand cavalry and a hundred thousand light infantry, as well as three hundred elephants. So let certain people stop asking questions and voicing views, and believe me, since I have the knowledge, or I shall order them to be loaded on a decrepit ship and carried by random winds to random quarters of the earth.
From 49 indeed Caesar’s power was not openly challenged at Rome, and he will have contented himself with bare statements of his consent - to the senate, for example granting the restoration of Marcellus, and the pardoning of Ligarius, leaving to others such as Cicero the burden of devising an appropriate rhetoric.
Caesar’s first consulship had taught him that political rhetoric wasted time that could be saved by the use of force, with the support of Pompey’s veterans in that case, and this may have been why he turned to more productive uses of language, providing his own record of his Gallic campaigns and, in his leisure, entering the purely objective and dispassionate debate over the regularization of Latin sermo. Since the commentarii on the Gallic and Civil Wars are discussed in their own right by Kraus and Raaflaub, chapters 12 and 13 in this volume, I shall focus now on Caesar’s views about language itself.
World History
