Death of Caesar : The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination (9781451668827) Read online

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  THE BEST MEN

  BRUTUS

  In August 45 B.C. Caesar met in the city of Mediolanum with Marcus Junius Brutus, his chosen governor of Italian Gaul for the previous year. In 45 B.C. the province had rotated to another man and Brutus had returned to Rome, but now he made the trek back to northern Italy to report to his chief.

  Coming under the dictator’s inspection could only have been a daunting prospect, even if at fifty-five Caesar was beginning to show his age. He was subject to dizzy spells, possibly a symptom of the epilepsy that brought him infrequent seizures. He was balding. After nearly fifteen years of war, his face was creased and his cheeks sunken. Yet Caesar still was cunning and dangerous. He personified talent, strategy, memory, literature, prudence, meticulousness, reasoning, and hard work, as a contemporary said.

  Still, Brutus was not easily cowed. At forty, he was in the prime of life. He was proud, talented, sober, high-minded, and probably a little vain. At the very least, Brutus had leading-man looks. A coin and a marble bust, identified as Brutus’s portrait, show the man’s intelligence, his forceful personality, and his regular, classical features. He appears as vigorous, determined-looking, and mature. He had a thick, curly head of hair, a pronounced brow, deep-set eyes, a straight nose, thick lips, a jutting chin, and a muscular neck. Brutus might have sweated a bit before Caesar because, unlike Antony, Decimus, or Octavian, he was not one of Caesar’s longtime supporters but a rehabilitated enemy. Brutus was an example of Caesar’s policy of clemency—forgiving his opponents and sometimes even rewarding them with public office.

  By entrusting Italian Gaul to Brutus, Caesar showed his confidence in the man. It was a strategic province, the very place where in 49 B.C. Caesar had launched his march on Rome in the Civil War, and the governor’s job came with command of two legions. It was essential not to give the governorship to an ambitious man yet it couldn’t go to an incompetent or a vulture, either. The province’s inhabitants were Caesar’s supporters because many of them owed their recent Roman citizenship to him—most other Italians were already Roman citizens—and so they had to be treated well. A capable but unthreatening administrator was called for. Brutus was the solution.

  Unlike Antony or Decimus or Caesar himself, Brutus was no general. A civilian through and through, he deferred to Roman constitutional norms. Rome had no written constitution but it was set in the ways of its government—ways that meant everything to a man like Brutus but much less to those outside the charmed circle of privilege. Although Brutus was a philosopher, he was also a man of the world. He believed in the Republic, in liberty, in arranging favors for friends, and in getting ahead. Caesar could do business with a man like this. Brutus turned out to be an excellent governor—the rare Roman who did not fleece the locals. Instead, in gratitude, they put up a statue of him in Mediolanum.

  Brutus was probably not thrilled with his appointment. As lieutenant governor (quaestor) in Cilicia (southern Turkey) in 53 B.C., he extorted money from the locals and lined his purse. In Italian Gaul, his wings were clipped. Since Caesar embraced a policy of making alliances with provincial elites, it was harder to steal from them. And Caesar had men to keep an eye on governors, especially in important places like Italian Gaul. No more looting the locals for Brutus. Caesar had other ways of rewarding those who served him but that depended on Caesar’s goodwill and not on the independence that a Roman noble cherished.

  Caesar and Brutus traveled together through Italian Gaul, possibly conferring about which lands in the prosperous province to hand over to Caesar’s veterans. The dictator praised Brutus for a job well done and promised him a bright future. Caesar said he would make Brutus urban praetor (Rome’s chief judge) for 44 B.C. and one of the two consuls for 41 B.C. Aside from the dictator the consuls were the highest officials in Rome. Politician that he was, Caesar perhaps made other promises, too. During the Civil War years Caesar had grabbed powers for himself and, now that peace was back, the optimists hoped he would return them to the Senate and the people of Rome. It cost Caesar nothing to encourage such hopes, which might explain why Brutus said afterward that he thought Caesar was going over to their side—the side of the elite that traditionally ran Rome and clung to a narrow and conservative vision of the public good, a group that liked to call themselves the optimates, or “Best Men.”

  Rome had no political parties but its politicians tended to divide into two groups. The alternative to the optimates or “Best Men” was the populares, or “Populists.” Both groups were led by elites and courted the votes of ordinary people, often by offering welfare benefits.

  The Best Men represented inherited privilege. They believed that a tiny elite, centered on the Roman nobility, should continue to govern the empire and its 50 million people, just as it had governed the city of Rome for centuries. In their view only a very few men had the birth, the breeding, the wealth, and the virtue to keep Rome great and free. They had little interest in sharing their privileges even with the upper classes of Italy or the empire, much less the masses.

  The Populists stood for change. They championed the poor, the landless, the foreigners, the noncitizens, nobles who were trapped in debt, and men throughout Italy who were rich but not noble—a group known as Roman knights or equestrians—and who sought admission to the Senate.

  The Senate was an exclusive club. Its members served for life and jealously guarded their privileges. They came mostly from a few prominent families. They had each served in one of Rome’s top political offices, most of which had a one-year term, sometimes followed by service abroad, and then leading to a lifetime in the Senate. Although the Best Men dominated the Senate, Populists too were represented there.

  Caesar was not one of the Best Men. Quite the opposite—he was Rome’s greatest Populist, who put together a broad new coalition that rode to power on popular consent and his legionaries’ swords.

  The Romans called their political system the Republic, Latin for “commonwealth.” Whether it would still be a republic when Caesar was through was the question of the day for the Best Men.

  CICERO

  If the Republic had a voice in 45 B.C., it was Cicero. It was, however, a muted voice, since few people dared to oppose Caesar in public. A former consul and a leader of the Best Men, in 49 B.C. Cicero supported Pompey in the Civil War and afterward made his peace with Caesar. Now sixty years old, Cicero withdrew from most political life and devoted himself primarily to philosophy. Ancient portrait busts depict him as aging but vigorous and wrinkled, with a prominent chin, aquiline nose, and receding hairline.

  Cicero didn’t trust Caesar. In private, he called him a king. Cicero thought Brutus’s optimism about Caesar and the Best Men was ridiculous.

  “Where would he find them?” Cicero asked rhetorically. “He’d have to hang himself,” because after the bloodbath of the Civil War, few Best Men were left alive. Brutus was one of them, or so Cicero had thought, but Brutus disappointed him. “As for Brutus,” Cicero added, “he knows on which side his bread is buttered.”

  It was easy for Cicero to be skeptical of Caesar when Caesar was several hundred miles away. It was difficult to resist Caesar when sitting in the same room, as Brutus had to do. Cicero, who knew this, disparaged Caesar in private but praised him in public. Caesar was one of Rome’s most powerful speakers and a charmer to boot. When Cicero wrote that Caesar “speaks Latin the most eloquently of nearly all the orators,” Caesar returned the compliment by calling Cicero “almost the pioneer and inventor of eloquence.” He went further, saying of Cicero that “it was a greater thing to have advanced the frontiers of the Roman genius than to have done the same with the frontiers of the Roman empire.” Caesar would not have spoken as warmly about Cicero’s politics, but politics was close to Cicero’s heart.

  In an outpouring of philosophical writing between 46 and 44 B.C. Cicero offered a brilliant description of republican ideals. Cicero grieved for the Republic but he recognized that it might not survive. The Roma
ns were practical people, after all. In 46 B.C. he wrote a correspondent that the Republic was in ruins, at the mercy of force instead of justice. “Liberty,” wrote Cicero, “has been lost.” But later that year Cicero wrote a friend that he saw hopeful signs that Caesar was trying to set up “some sort of a constitutional system” in Rome. And Cicero sympathized with Brutus for paying court to Caesar. “What else can he do?” Cicero asked.

  Whether or not Cicero liked Brutus, he recognized Brutus’s talent and his prominence. In Brutus (46 B.C.), Cicero paid Brutus what he considered to be the highest compliment. He said that Brutus was making such progress in his young career that he could become a great orator in the Forum. In other words, Brutus could have become like Cicero in his heyday. Cicero laid it on thick, despite his private doubts about Brutus’s oratory. As for why Brutus never reached the oratorical heights, the answer was easy: Caesar had a chilling effect on free speech. Flattery replaced frankness, for example, in a speech that Cicero himself gave in 46 B.C. The orator did all he could to flatter Caesar and the “immortal fame” achieved by his “godlike courage.” Cicero wrote to a friend afterward that the day seemed so beautiful to him that he almost thought he caught a glimpse of a reviving republic.

  But it was hard to stay optimistic in the new Rome. Cicero muttered darkly about Greek history and its rich store of examples of how wise men bore regna (singular, regnum)—monarchy—and rex—king. These were words of abuse in Rome. In Roman eyes, monarchy had a suggestion of arbitrary power, tyranny, and even enslavement. A king was the enemy of free, constitutional government.

  Brutus’s ancestors were famous for driving the last king from Rome long ago, but instead of standing up to Caesar, Brutus actually seemed to believe the dictator’s rubbish. So Cicero complained, but he should have known by now that Brutus had a way of believing what was convenient for himself. In a lifetime of flip-flops, Brutus displayed a stunning flexibility. Perhaps Brutus’s upbringing explains his inconsistency.

  SERVILIA

  Brutus’s mother, Servilia, was one of the most powerful women in Rome. She was the talented, attractive, and ambitious daughter of a prominent patrician clan. She was born with important connections and made it her business to acquire new ones. None mattered more than her son and her lover.

  In 77 B.C., eight-year-old Brutus lost his father. The man, also named Marcus Junius Brutus, was one of the leaders of a revolt opposed by Pompey. After holding out under siege Brutus’s father finally surrendered, only to be treacherously killed. Pompey either gave the order or did nothing to stop it. In either case, the dead man’s family blamed and despised Pompey.

  The education of young Brutus fell into Servilia’s hands. Roman women married young, and Servilia was a teenager (ca. 85 B.C.) when she had Brutus. In her early twenties when her husband was murdered, Servilia married another important politician. But he didn’t have her heart.

  Skilled in the art of attracting powerful men, she saved for herself the most powerful of them all—Caesar. As one writer says:

  But before all other women Caesar loved Servilia, the mother of Marcus Brutus, for whom during his first consulship [59 B.C.] he bought a pearl costing six million sesterces [that is, nearly 7,000 times the annual wages of one of Caesar’s legionaries, or the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s terms].

  Servilia served as Caesar’s confidante and at times his agent in delicate political negotiations as well as his eyes and ears in Rome while the conqueror was abroad. Later, Caesar moved on to other amours. As for Servilia, she had a knack for inserting herself into important situations and she did her best to take charge. She cultivated connections with financiers and political operators.

  A formidable woman in an era of formidable women, Servilia wielded political power behind the scenes. This “very knowing and careful lady,” as Cicero described her, sometimes found herself at home surrounded by eminent men seeking her advice; she could influence the writing of legislation. No one appears to have found that unusual.

  Her main interest, however, was her children. She married her three daughters to up-and-coming politicians. As for her son, Brutus—her “every care begins and ends with you,” said a correspondent to Brutus when he was a grown man, and it was surely true from his childhood on. Servilia devoted herself to his career, beginning with having him adopted into her own family. The major male role model in young Brutus’s life was his uncle and his mother’s half brother, Cato—a man who was also Caesar’s archenemy.

  Brutus, it seemed, spent half his life living up to Cato’s unyielding expectations and the other half living them down. And then, a year before Brutus met Caesar in 45 B.C., Cato was gone. But Cato’s ghost seemed only to grow more solid every day, with his disapproving glare hovering over all Rome and zeroing in on Brutus’s tender heart, a lifeless uncle who spoke more loudly to his ward now than he ever had in the flesh.

  CATO

  Brilliant, eloquent, ambitious, patriotic, and a crank, Cato was an original. He was an elitist who looked down on the masses. Yet Cato also defended freedom of speech, constitutional procedure, civic duty and service, honest administration, and the enlightened pursuit of the public interest.

  Like Caesar, Cato impressed contemporaries as lofty and persuasive. Unlike Caesar, he was austere. A follower of Stoic philosophy, Cato showed his contempt for luxury by traveling on foot instead of in the litters favored by people of his class. Cato sometimes walked Rome’s cobbled streets barefoot. A surviving portrait bust gives him a serious, pensive, and faraway look.

  Cato believed in a republic that was stern, virtuous, and free. Its public officials would look for guidance to the Senate, a place of open debate among the noblest, wisest, and most experienced men in Rome.

  Cato believed that Caesar cared only about power and glory and that he would destroy republican liberty in order to advance his career. An angry Cato once called Caesar a drunkard but he knew better. “Caesar,” Cato later said, “is the only man to try to overturn the Republic while sober.” His criticism of Caesar backfired once and embarrassed Cato at a tense Senate meeting. Someone passed Caesar a letter and Cato, smelling conspiracy, demanded to read it. It turned out to be a passionate note from his half sister Servilia.

  Brutus shared Cato’s hostility to any man who monopolized political power. Freedom, they believed, required sharing power. Like his distant cousin Decimus, Brutus claimed descent from Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled the last king from Rome in 509 B.C. and founded the Republic. On his mother’s side, Brutus’s ancestor was Gaius Servilius Ahala, who in 439 B.C. killed a would-be tyrant. To proclaim his heritage, Brutus displayed a family tree in the reception room (tablinum) of his house, a complement to the beeswax ancestor masks that every noble family kept in a cherished place at home.

  Unlike the unintellectual Antony or Decimus, Brutus shared his uncle Cato’s passion for philosophy and perhaps also shared some of his uncle’s distrust of Servilia’s lover, Caesar. Brutus could hardly have ignored the rumor that he was Caesar’s illegitimate son. It was almost certainly false, since Caesar was fifteen at the time of Brutus’s birth in 85 B.C. Ironically, it might have been a useful rumor to help a young man get ahead, even if Brutus bristled at the idea of illegitimacy.

  Having learned how to steer between Cato and Servilia, Brutus developed a taste for compromise but also, as it turned out, a talent for betrayal.

  CHANGING SIDES

  Young Brutus’s career went well. As lieutenant governor in 53 B.C. Brutus lent money to the people of one city in Cyprus at the steep annual interest rate of 48 percent. When they refused to pay, Brutus’s enforcer, backed up by armed horsemen, locked the town councilmen in their council house until five of them starved to death. When Cicero found out about this, he was shocked.

  Civil war broke out four years later in 49 B.C. Cato led the diehards who insisted that Caesar was so dangerous a threat to the Republic that no compromise was possible. Although Brutus blamed Pompey fo
r the death of his father, he took his side, following both republican principle and Cato. During the following military campaign, Brutus took part in the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 B.C., the great showdown with Caesar. Pompey managed to escape from Pharsalus, and so, in a manner of speaking, did Brutus. According to one report, Brutus slipped out of Pompey’s camp, which was under siege after the defeat, and made his way through marshes to a nearby city. There he wrote to Caesar.

  Brutus probably knew that Caesar had proclaimed a policy of clemency. He pardoned his enemies, which was a stunning reversal of Rome’s previous dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Under Sulla’s brutal rule (82–80 B.C.), the dictator’s foes were executed and their property confiscated. Caesar now demonstrated that he was not Sulla. Brutus wanted more than a pardon; he wanted to prosper and he did.

  There were stories that Caesar gave orders at Pharsalus to spare Brutus and that he did so as a favor to Servilia. Caesar was not sentimental, so, if the story is true, it must have been a political move. The powerful Servilia was an excellent friend and a dangerous enemy. There are references also to Caesar’s supposed fear that Brutus was his son. That was surely untrue but Caesar surely knew the gossip and did not want even the suspicion of having killed his own child.

  And then there was Caesar’s opinion of Brutus. Cicero heard years later from one of Caesar’s close friends that Caesar was in the habit of saying of Brutus, “What this man wants, is a major problem, but whatever he wants he wants very much.” Here Caesar captures the personality of a man who was important and determined but hard to pin down.

  Brutus’s greatest value to Caesar was as a symbol. Cato’s nephew and a popular man in Rome, where he had a reputation for honesty, Brutus was the first great name of the Roman nobility to join Caesar. Perhaps Brutus reasoned that he had done his duty by fighting at Pharsalus and, with Caesar’s victory, it was time to accept reality. No die-hard he.