Dante’s attitude to the founder of the Empire epitomizes one of the main attitudes to Caesar in the Christian Middle Ages. For the poet of the Comedy, as for other medieval thinkers, the single most important event in history was the Incarnation, and since Christ’s birth as a man was willed by God, so his place of birth - a province of the Roman Empire - had divine sanction; therefore, the Roman Empire was the one earthly regime that had divine approval, as Dante argues in the fourth book of his philosophical work, the Convivio (1303-7), and in his political treatise, the Monarchia (1317-18). Caesar is thus placed by Dante amongst the virtuous heathens in Limbo in his Comedy, where he is described as ‘‘Caesar in arms with hawk-like eyes’’ (Inferno 4.123), the adjective armato evoking his military prowess, and the description of his eyes either deriving indirectly from Suetonius’s description of them as nigris vegetisque oculis (‘‘black and lively eyes,’’ Divus Julius 45.1), though Dante had not read the Roman biographer, or simply symbolizing his acute mental powers or his pride. However, after this positive portrait, something of the ambivalence of Caesar’s reputation emerges in the Purgatorio:. on the one hand, on the terrace of slothful sinners, his military exploits are praised as models of commendable speed (18.101-2), while on the other, the lustful see him as an example of their own sin, since his sexual promiscuity led to his famously being addressed as ‘‘queen’’ by his troops during his triumphs (26.77). The positive view of Julius returns in the Paradiso, where the Emperor Justinian gives a lengthy, laudatory account of Caesar’s speedy conquests before and during the civil war: here Julius' conquests are seen as willed by God in order to prepare the world for the universal peace of Augustus' reign in which Christ would be born (Paradiso 6.55-72). However, what was to prove the most controversial aspect of Dante's belief in the divine approval of the Roman Empire was that he placed at the very bottom of Hell those whom he considered the two worst political traitors in history, Brutus and Cassius, alongside the ultimate religious traitor Judas (Inferno 34.61-7).
It was also because of this privileged position as instigator of the divinely sanctioned Roman Empire that Julius was so often portrayed as the founder of famous
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Figure 23.1 Julius Caesar founding Florence (detail). An exotic-looking Julius Caesar (his ‘‘oriental’’ headgear perhaps suggests his status as Emperor) beside the city he ‘‘founded.’’ From A Florentine Picture-Chronicle, being a series of 99 drawings representing scenes and personages of ancient history, sacred and profane, by Maso Finiguerra, ed. Sidney Colvin (London: B. Quaritch, 1898), plate XCII.
Cities throughout Europe. This tradition extended to Florence, where Dante’s nearcontemporary, the chronicler Giovanni Villani, draws on ‘‘il grande dottore Salustio’’ (Villani 1990-1: 48) to recycle the common view that Julius had founded Florence shortly after the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy, in order to spite the neighboring town of Fiesole, which had notoriously supported the conspirators (Villani 1990-1: 63-4). Although this view would be contested by Florentine humanists at the start of the next century, the myth had a powerful hold over the popular imagination and still appears in the Florentine Picture Chronicle, attributed to Maso Finiguerra or Baccio Baldini and dating from the 1470s (figure 23.1).
Nevertheless, opposition to Caesar ran almost as deeply throughout the Middle Ages. John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Ptolemy of Lucca, who continued Aquinas’s De regimine principum (c. 1267), denounced Caesar for violently seizing the republic and becoming a tyrant (Witt 1969; Skinner 1978: I, 55). However, this tradition, though also ultimately derived from Cicero and Lucan, was not dictated by any ideological critique of Empire, as would later be the case in republican Florence, but rather by a religious and philosophical condemnation ofillegal usurpation ofpower.
Petrarch too was initially critical of the great general. It was probably his early reading of Lucan and parts of Suetonius that caused his early hostility to Caesar. His Latin epic, Africa (1338-64), has as its hero Scipio Africanus, and when in a dream vision Scipio’s father prophesies to his son the future of Rome, he warns that Julius Caesar will conquer Gaul, Britain, and Germany, but adds that he would have been even greater had he only possessed a sense of moderation (Africa 2.219-28 in Petrarca 1926). Instead Julius will turn his victorious hands on the state in a civil war, and here Scipio senior condemns the ambition which leads one man to seize complete power for himself, to raid the treasury, enslave the senate, and drench the Capitol in blood (2.229-39). Such anti-Caesarian views were consistent with Petrarch’s enthusiasm for Scipio and with his support in mid-century for Cola di Rienzo’s ill-fated attempt to revive a Roman republic (1347-54), the poet at one stage even hailing Cola as a new Brutus, as well as a new Romulus and a new Camillus (Petrarca 1994: 64; Ferraii 2006b). However, despite his interest in Scipio and initially in Cola, the great humanist never explicitly states his support for a republican form of government (Ferraui 2006b), and in the end his reading of Suetonius (in his most heavily annotated copy of the Roman biographer Petrarch writes most annotations on the lives of Julius and Augustus: Billanovich 1960), of Caesar’s Commentaries (which he attributed to Julius Celsus), and of the text he himself discovered in Verona in 1345, Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, led to a revaluation of Caesar’s achievements (Fenzi 2003). Political factors too, such as the poet’s disillusionment with Cola’s failure, and the humanist’s subsequent patronage by single rulers such as the Visconti in Milan and the Carrara in Padua, account for his later pro-Caesar attitudes: in fact for Petrarch Caesar is a prototype more of a contemporary Signore than of a Roman Emperor, a private citizen who takes power to resolve a situation of civic discord. In his declining years, the humanist knew that it was local rulers such as the Visconti and Carrara families rather than the superpowers of the Church and the Empire that offered a valid model for political recovery in Italy at the end of the Trecento (Ferraui 2006c: 98-101).
Petrarch perhaps started the Degestis Cesaris as just another in the series of lives he had written for his De viris illustribus (1338-43), amongst which he had included an extended Vita Scipionis (c. 1357), but the length of his biography of Caesar outstripped even that of his life of Scipio, and it was in the end intended to be a freestanding biography. It circulated anonymously in rare editions of Caesar and was only reattributed to Petrarch in 1827 (Blanc 1985). Its medieval title at first glance seems to place it close to vernacular compilations such as the anonymous Ifatti di Cesare, a farrago of legends based on Sallust, Lucan, and Suetonius, but translated from a French original; however, in reality Petrarch’s work stands at the beginning of a new source-based historiography. In chapter 20, which comes after the account of the Gallic wars and before the civil war, the author interrupts the narrative to quote letters by Caesar in Cicero’s Letters to Atticus (discovered by Petrarch himself, as we saw) to prove his real desire for peace, and to show that even Cicero, although anti-Caesar, was also highly critical of Pompey. Petrarch was proud of the novelty of his approach here, in eliciting evidence from the protagonist’s own letters and from ‘‘a rather remote source,’’ namely Cicero’s letters (Petrarca 1827: 211; 2003: 209 Ferraui 2006d: 199).
The Letters to Atticus (esp. 9.7c, 9.13a, 10.8b) are exploited elsewhere by Petrarch (Seniles 16.5; Petrarch 1992: II, 622-3) to show that, contrary to medieval lore, Caesar did not introduce the royal plural (nosinstead of ego): once again the humanist is concerned to produce the most accurate version even of linguistic history. The final chapter of the De gestis, before dealing with the assassination, offers a description of Caesar’s appearance and mores, largely based on Suetonius, concluding that although Caesar had been at times rather impetuous and keen to seize power, as well as being adulterous, nevertheless no victor ever showed more clemency or munificence, and for this Petrarch can cite the evidence of ‘‘maximi auctores’’ (Petrarca 1827: 314-17; 2003: 302-4).
Petrarch’s vernacular poetry evinces a similar movement from an anti - to a pro-Caesar stance: in two early sonnets from the 1330s, he says that Caesar’s hands were more than ready to turn Thessaly vermilion with blood (Petrarca 2004: 44), and he recalls Julius’s simulated tears on seeing the severed head of Pompey (Petrarca 2004: 102; Hainsworth 1988: 24-9). Yet the poet praises Julius as slaughterer of the barbarians in the great political canzone ‘‘Italia mia’’ (Petrarca 2004: 128.49-51) of 1345. This oscillation between his two heroes, Scipio and Caesar, continues in the Triumphs, though in the Triumph of Fame the movement appears to be in the opposite direction. In his first redaction of this text (c. 1351), he places as the front marchers in Fame’s cohorts first Julius Caesar then Augustus and Drusus, and only after these Caesars come the two Scipios (Triumph of Fame Ia. 23-7: Petrarca 1996). However, in the later redaction (c. 1364), he places Scipio side by side with Caesar and is unable to say which is nearer the goddess Fame, though he does add that Scipio was a slave only to virtue, not to Love, whereas Caesar was in thrall to both, thus suggesting Scipio’s superiority (Petrarca, Triumph of Fame 1. 22-4: Petrarca 1996; Martellotti 1947, 1975, 1976; Baron 1962).
Despite these oscillations Petrarch’s mature views are to be found in the De gestis and in a late letter-treatise on the wise ruler (Seniles 14.1), written about the same time (1373) and dedicated to his patron, Francesco da Carrara, ruler of Padua. There he puts Caesar forward several times as a model for rulers to follow, including a whole page which claims that he epitomizes all the princely virtues: even Cicero said Julius forgot nothing except past injuries (Petrarch 1992: II, 527). However much he had admired Scipio and Cola in his earlier years, the mature Petrarch saw in Julius Caesar the prototype of the great general, the model ruler, and a complex human being.
Petrarch’s disciple Giovanni Boccaccio wrote one of the first commentaries on Dante’s Enferno (c. 1373-4), though the commentary only reached as far as canto 17 before Boccaccio’s death. Despite Dante’s placing of Julius Caesar amongst the virtuous heathens in canto 4, Boccaccio’s commentary on the passage (Boccaccio 1965: 217-21) provides a mini-biography largely based on Suetonius, in which he condemns Caesar for lust and avarice as well as for his violent and tyrannical seizure of the state. Clearly the anti-Caesar tradition was still influential in Boccaccio’s time, primarily because of Lucan’s status as a canonical poet; but Boccaccio’s attitude may also have stemmed from the fact that he possessed the manuscript of Tacitus’s Histories (which he appears to have stolen from the monastery at Montecassino), and his anti-Caesarian critique seems to have been influenced here by the great historian’s views. However, the most learned complete Dante commentary of the century, written 1375-83 by Benvenuto da Imola, is more ambiguous: in his commentary on Inferno 34 he says Caesar deserved assassination, but on Paradiso 6 he offers a more balanced account of his vices and virtues. Benvenuto was also more cautious on the question of whether Julius founded Florence (in his commentary on Inferno 15), rightly observing that the great general would never have had time to found all those cities whose foundation was attributed to him; for Benvenuto Caesar could not have founded Florence at the time of the Catilinarian conspiracy, as Sallust shows, and the commentator simply admits he does not know who founded Florence.
This ambivalent note is characteristic of the approach to the dictator in Florentine circles towards the end of the fourteenth century. Another of Petrarch's disciples, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), was a formidable humanist and Chancellor of the Florentine republic at the turn of the century (1375-1406). He was the first to realize that it was Caesar himself and not Julius Celsus who wrote the commentaries on the Gallic and other wars (Salutati 1891-1911: II, 299-300; Gilson 2005: 66-9), and just as Petrarch had found Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, so Salutati discovered Cicero’s Letters to his Friends (1392). But whereas Petrarch’s discovery led him to criticize Cicero’s abandonment of philosophical otium for political dealings that brought about his death, and to reassess Julius Caesar as a man of peace, Salutati’s reading of the Familiares turned him against Caesar and enhanced his republican sympathies, causing him to declare that Julius turned the people's freedom into monarchical enslavement (‘‘monarchie servitutem’’, Salutati 1891-1911: II, 389; Witt 1969: 462-4), and even to go so far as to quote Lactantius’s phrase for Caesar, ‘‘patricida patriae’’ (Salutati 1891-1911: II, 409). These sentiments were most strongly expressed in Salutati’s official writings for the Florentine republic: in a letter of 1394 to the rulers of Genoa he writes that Caesar’s and Augustus’ rule was simply the beginning of perpetual slavery (Viti 1992: 45, n. 139). However, the most famous defense of the Florentine republican tradition was his invective against Antonio Loschi, the Milanese humanist, who had attacked Florence’s republican constitution and claimed that the city had not been founded by Romans. Salutati’s Invectiva (1403) cites Sallust (Catiline 28.4) to show that the city was founded by Sulla's soldiers; hence it descended from the Roman republic, and he champions the achievements of republican libertas (Garin 1952: 16-21; Witt 1983: 246-52; Baldassarri 2007: 47-51). Yet Salutati too felt ambiguous about the figure of Caesar himself: despite his pro-republican stance, he also wrote a political treatise, De tyranno (c. 1400), in which he defended Dante's decision to place the great republican heroes Brutus and Cassius at the bottom of the Inferno (Witt 1983: 368-91). So by the end of the fourteenth century in Italy the widespread medieval adulation of Julius Caesar becomes in Petrarch and his disciples an admiration based on human criteria, thanks also to their knowledge of a wider range of historical sources. However, the increased knowledge of ancient texts also fostered a corresponding contestation of the founder of the Empire’s status, particularly in ideological terms in Florentine circles, a trend that would reach new peaks in the following century.
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