Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was a great general, a great statesman and a great impresario. For his multiple triumph in 46 BC he imported six hundred lions, four hundred other large cats, 20 elephants and a rhinoceros and held a huge animal hunt. He is said to have sent 1500 men, one third of them mounted, and 40 elephants into the arena to do battle in two separate events.
His capacity for conspicuous extravagance had hardly grown since he held his first spectacle in 65 BC, when he put on a massive show involving 320 pairs of gladiators armed with silver weapons. They were pitted against each other in combat and also against a series of wild animals. In tune with the custom of the day he claimed the event was intended to honour his father. The valediction was a pretext, of course, for his father was long since dead. At this stage of his political career Caesar was just another ambitious young magistrate looking for popular support. This habit of holding a tnunits to win over the crowds at election time, together with the bribery that often went along with it, was becoming such a serious problem that the Senate eventually passed a law in 63 BC banning all games during the two years preceding an election.
Caesar had plotted his career carefully, having forged an alliance with two rich and powerful men, Pompey and Crassus, in 60 BC, in order to gain more influence over the Senate. This coalition, known as the First Triumvirate, was further cemented when Pompey married Caesar’s daughter Julia. With such influential allies, Caesar’s appointment as consul in 59 BC came as a matter of course, but he had also made some powerful enemies. As he rose to prominence he began to employ gladiators as personal bodyguards. Under the command of an aristocratic bully named Clodius, these men were thugs, basically. While Caesar was away fighting the Gallic wars and invading Britain, Clodius and his henchmen were conducting their own reign of terror, forcing Pompey’s ally Cicero into exile and physically attacking Pompey himself. It is reported that Pompey was brought home injured and covered in blood; Julia, who was heavily pregnant at the time, went into labour and died in childbirth. Pompey retaliated by forming his own band of thugs, controlled by a man called Milo. Milo’s gang included two well-known gladiators, Eudamus and Birria. The two groups clashed one day and Clodius was killed. His supporters brought his body along the Appian Way into Rome and he was cremated on a magnificent
Julius Caesar held his first spectacle in Rome in 65 BC and had a reputation for extravagance.
Funeral pyre. Accused of his murder, Milo went into exile at Marseilles.
Julia's death served to widen the rift between Caesar and Pompey (Crassus was dead by then, killed in battle in 53 BC) and by the time Caesar returned to Italy in 50 the two men had ended up on different sides of the civil war that had broken out. Cicero reports that at this stage Caesar had control of five thousand gladiators based in the barracks at Capua. Pompey seized them, disarmed them and dispersed them by billeting them in pairs on his supporters. The civil war continued until 45 BC, by which time Pompey had been killed in battle (in 48 BC) and Caesar had held three triumphs to celebrate his victories in Gaul and elsewhere. These involved some lavish games, as the Roman historian Suetonius (AD c. 69-c. 150) records:
He gave entertainments of diverse kinds: a combat of gladiators and also stage plays in every ward of the city... as well as races in the circus, athletic contests... combats with wild beasts were presented on five successive days and last of all there was a battle between two opposing armies in which five hundred infantry, 20 elephants and 30 horsemen engaged on each side... For the naval battle a pool was dug in the lesser Codeta [a swampy area on the Campus Martius, next to the Tiberl and there was a contest of ships...
The animal hunts involved four hundred lions and, for the very first time in Rome, several giraffes. Caesar’s mock naval battle (naumachia) on this occasion is the first recorded in the capital. It involved four thousand oarsmen and two thousand warriors, in costume, re-enacting an historical encounter between the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. These events were so crowded, that several people were crushed to death, including two senators.
Two years later Caesar was assassinated, the result of a coup against him led by Cassius, a general, and a fellow senator, Brutus. Civil war broke out again and peace was only restored with the defeat of Mark Antony and Caesar’s ex-mistress Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.
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