Epilogue

It is possible that Caesar embarked on a more ambitious attempt to extend and control knowledge not only of time but of place. There is plausible evidence (cited in the cosmographia attributed to Julius Honorius and the mysterious Pseudo-Aethicus: see Nicolet 1991: 95-8; Wiseman 1992) that Caesar had initiated a geographical investigation of the oikoumene, sending out four learned Greeks to explore and measure the four quarters of the civilized world a generation before a similar plan was implemented by Agrippa. It is most unlikely that Caesar’s project was implemented as or when claimed by Honorius, but Wiseman is surely right to attribute it to a time earlier than Honorius’ date of 44 BC and to link it with Caesar’s designs in 54 BC for a new portico to enclose the voting Saepta (which became the new Saepta lulia of the 20s BC, at a time when elections were increasingly pointless and ineffectual).

How many other achievements of Augustus and Agrippa were actually conceived and even begun by Caesar? At least two more intellectual projects are reported as among his intentions. We are told by Suetonius that Caesar had wanted to systematize the civil law, something which Cicero too saw was necessary, and which their contemporary Servius Sulpicius planned to take up: Caesar may well have encouraged Sulpicius, but Sulpicius died in 43, and this task would prove too complex for their generation. We might add that Caesar’s plan to establish a public library collection and his offer of responsibility for this task to the polymath Varro could be seen as an attempt to put Roman literature ‘‘on the map,’’ giving it status as a counterpart to Greek literature (see Goldberg 2005: 193-6) and constructing a canon in each representative category. In that respect it might not be unfair to say that Caesar as an intellectual was as conceptually sophisticated as he was pragmatic and scientific.