Dictator

The civil war was begun by Caesar, and his lightning march through Italy made it impossible for Pompey to prepare any real resistance. The towns of Italy refused to offer opposition: their leading citizens (like the majority in the Senate) desired peace, and they were naturally hesitant to be drawn into a struggle the particulars of which they did not at all appreciate and the repercussions of which they very much hoped to evade (Sulla’s brutal treatment of hostile communities had not been forgotten). Pompey lacked any legal authority, except over his own legions and legates, and the optimates were loath, or at least very slow, to accept him as their supreme commander (this concession came only in 48). Pompey, who immediately grasped the hopelessness of the Senate’s situation, began to plan to evacuate, confident that, like Sulla, he could successfully invade Italy from the east.44 But the strategic advantages of this move were lost on other senators, who tended to oppose the idea.

The civil war was hard fought. Caesarian successes in Spain were matched by republican victory in Africa. The war waged between Caesar and Pompey should have gone against Caesar, but the republican nobility, envious of their general, goaded him into risky and unnecessary battle at Pharsalus (in 48). Defeated by Caesar, Pompey was soon assassinated in Egypt. Cato, defeated in Africa, committed suicide (in 46). Yet the final battle of the civil war, which took place in 45, was nearly a republican victory (at one stage of the conflict, Caesar believed he had lost and considered suicide: Suet. lul. 36). Caesar’s triumph was by no means inevitable, and the ferocity of the struggle must be borne in mind when one contemplates Caesar’s dictatorship.

From the very beginning, Caesar trampled on constitutional sensibilities, in matters great and small alike. Nevertheless, he needed respectability and so welcomed the support, or at least the acquiescence, of the aristocracy, even those who had originally supported Pompey. Hence his famous clemency, which pardoned Marcus Brutus - and Cicero. In the course of Caesar’s fourth dictatorship - perhaps, at some stage, ‘‘for the restoration of the Republic’’ - he was finally made dictator ‘‘for life’’ (dictator perpetuo).45 This office he often combined with tenure of the consulship. He designated future consuls and praetors, and he deposed office holders at will. With the plunder of the empire at his disposal, he rewarded his soldiers with bounties and he entertained the People. His popularity was unsurpassed. Caesar accumulated an extraordinary list of honors, not a few of which were unprecedented and too many of which suggested that he aimed at regal or even divine status. This too conspicuous monopoly on power and glory made him anathema to the men who felt right in deeming themselves to be his peers. Even Caesar’s positive social reforms, of which there were many (e. g., his reform of the calendar, his resolution of the debt crisis, his moral legislation), because they were imposed by order, rankled. And there seemed no limit to his ambition: he planned an eastern campaign against the Parthians; it was believed by some that Caesar aimed at conquering what was left of the world.46

But on the Ides of March, only days before he was to leave Rome for the east, great Caesar fell. The conspiracy against him was extensive, and its success, when one considers the aristocracy’s almost characteristic incapacity for cooperation during this period, was striking. The leaders of the conspiracy, men like Marcus Brutus, Cassius Longinus, and Decimus Brutus (Cicero had been excluded from the ranks of the tyrannicides), were not Caesar’s enemies. In fact, they had benefited from his friendship. But they remained at heart genuine oligarchs, whose ambitions for their own class proved equal to Caesar’s ambitions for himself.

It was Cicero’s opinion that, in victory, Pompey would not have showed any better than Caesar.47 And it remains difficult to admire the political and social vision of Caesar’s assassins, for whom libertas constituted a greedy claim to privileges denied. ‘‘They wished it so,’’ was Caesar’s judgment on the optimates in the aftermath of his victory at the Battle of Pharsalus (Suet. lul. 30. 4). His assessment was not unjust. It was, however, incomplete. He and Pompey, like the optimates, bore responsibility. The causes of the civil war were manifold. But the Senate’s control of affairs did not collapse owing to foreign invasion or popular rioting in the city or a peasants’ revolt in the countryside of Italy. Unrestrained sharp practices by the political elite in their contest for individual domination brought the Republic to a civil war fought, unabashedly, over dignitas (see also Chapter 29).