Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Caesar the author of the Commentaries remained central to the education of those groomed for public life. Even writers critical of his character and career, such as Rousseau, praised the ‘‘candor and truth with which the greatest man on earth spoke of himself’’ as a lesson worth teaching to young men (Rousseau 1969: 29-30).
Caesar the politician, in contrast, was a much more contested figure in an age when theories of resistance were at the heart of political debate (Friedeburg 2001). The regimes that were established around and after the middle ofthe seventeenth century, when the wars that had torn apart England (the Civil War), France (Wars of Religion and Fronde) and Germany (the Thirty Years War) had ended, remained in power until the French Revolution and Napoleon transformed Europe’s political and social landscape yet again (Woolrych 2002; Berce 1996; Asch 1997; Parker 1997). Anxious to put the terrifying experiences of the previous decades behind them, the political culture of these regimes was characterized by corporate privileges, social distinctions, and the aristocratic notion of glory, which determined the place of Caesar in political debate, literature and the arts. Caesar the conqueror thus remained an important point of reference; some authors justified Caesar’s usurpation of power as the only way out of the turmoils of the late Roman Republic, and most authors agreed that the Republic could not have continued even without Caesar. However, the transformation of Rome into a dictatorship remained deeply problematic for an age in which political legitimacy was conveyed by right of birth (even electoral monarchies such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands usually remained in the hands of one dynasty), or by highly ritualized election from a circle of patrician families.
Hereditary monarchs from the old dynasties that dominated European politics during this period found it difficult to identify with a usurper murdered by aristocrats in his own capital. Panegyric literature made numerous references to Caesar-like courage or military genius throughout the early modern period, and military authors up to and including Napoleon regularly compared the abilities of contemporary commanders to Caesar’s exploits: for instance, the German translation of Henri de Rohan’s Le parfaict Capitaine: Kriegs-Regeln desperfecten Capitains uber den Julium Caesar, ersten romischen Kayser, was first published in 1609, and reprinted several times throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, Caesar was rarely put at the center of royal iconography, and figured much less prominently in history painting or sculpture than other figures of Greek and Roman history, such as Alexander the Great, Augustus, or the younger Cato (Pigler 1974: vol. 2, 374-5). Louis XIV (1643-1715), who is usually considered the epitome of absolutism but whose reign had started with the aristocratic revolt of the Fronde, may have translated Caesar’s Commentaries in his teens, but he chose Alexander the Great (in addition to Apollo) as his symbol in his early years, and the Emperor Augustus in his maturity (Burke 1992). Having pacified post-civil war Rome, supported the arts, and established a dynasty ruling over the greatest empire on earth, Augustus was one of the two great models for seventeenth - and eighteenth-century monarchs. After 1660, propagandists of the Stuart dynasty, which had returned to Britain following the demise of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, also built on the parallels between Caesar’s death and the execution of Charles I (1625-49). They claimed that Charles II (1660-85) and, later, Queen Anne (1702-14) had brought peace to the British Isles after the upheavals of the civil war, quite as the first princeps had done in Rome (Weinbrot 1978: 49-50).
World History
