Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar
Philip Freeman
Simon & Shuster, 2008
416 pp.


Would you kill for Caesar?

Would you die for him?

And why on Earth would you do either?

These are some of the questions that have begun nagging me as I read more about the ancient world, and they're unsettling because the sentiment behind them is a modern one, intruding onto the past where these mores don't belong. But yet, the more I ignore the motivations of why someone would gladly rush into battle to kill for Rome, Julius Caesar or Alexander of Macedon, the louder the questions ring in my mind.

Philip Freeman's book is highly competent and well-written, packed with information and tightly constructed as well as a volume for the general reader can be. Yet throughout it, I was continually forced to ask the question of what motivated troops to follow a man like Caesar for years on end. We do not possess written records of what the "common man" thought of his brave general, or his attitude towards the barbarians he was ordered to fight on behalf of the Senate and the people of Rome. We all know of the glory of that city, the relative high civilization that it represented and its inexorable march to world supremacy. That alone—the splendor of Rome—is supposed to be reason enough.

Unfortunately, these are not questions that historians answer, namely for lack of evidence. At the same time, it's a missing piece of history that deserves some comment, some extrapolation about why people follow others. To this end, studying the life of Caesar is a frustrating exercise because the question of motivation applies equally to him: by the end of Freeman's book, there's a general sense of dissatisfaction that we don't know exactly why Caesar did what he did. What was he really trying to accomplish? If he saw that the Republic was long over, did he intend to replace it with another system or found an imperial dynasty? We know of course that Caesar took this to the grave: his high ambition and undefined project ended on the Ides of March. It would take his adopted grand-nephew Octavian (Augustus) to nail the Republic's coffin shut and begin the imperial tradition.

To be fair, Freeman's book is the first one I've read that has made it quite clear that the Roman Republic was long over before Caesar arrived on the scene. But that begs another question: what exactly were figures like Cicero, Cato or Brutus trying to save? What was the essence of the Republic that they wanted to keep from slipping away, to the point where they would conspire to kill Rome's most brilliant and resourceful military leader? The conspirators truly expected to be treated like heroes, and were perplexed and frightened when Rome's citizens didn't rush out to thank them for a job well done. Indeed, there is a sense that the Republic had already outlived its usefulness and needed to be transformed, but like elites throughout the ages, they were desperate to keep the status quo at all costs.

But what exactly was that transformation? What was Caesar trying to do? Were his political motivations just to secure power for himself, to found a dynasty, to truly be a king in Rome? The realm of psychobiography is always fraught with difficulty, namely because of the deep subjective nature of the quest and more so because of a lack of evidence. Caesar may have been a very good writer, but he kept his intentions at bay and did not reveal his hand. We have no personal journal or letter where he pours out his soul, so trying to construct what he really thought might be a fool's errand. Yet there's a real gap in what Freeman presents and what he omits. While he can't answer the question of what Caesar actually wanted, he doesn't even bother to venture a guess or even digress a bit to ponder the issue at all.

As mentioned earlier, it is an ill-advised thing to transport our modern mores back onto the past and walk away disgusted. When we learn that Cato the Elder ended many of his speeches with "Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be destroyed), we understand it as representing a worldview that saw Carthage as a direct threat to the growing power of Rome. We don't think twice about how this statement eventually became reality and its human cost: it was, after all, war. We accept that Spartacus lead a slave rebellion that ended with thousands crucified along the Appian Way. Life, to use Gibbon's well-worn phrase, certainly was nasty, brutish and short.

Yet the personal discontent grows. Perhaps it's a delayed acceptance when dealing with the harsh realities of the past. Consider that Cicero is held with high esteem as a master rhetorician and excellent writer, pushing the Latin language from its awkward (vis-à-vis Greek) phase into a mode of communication of which to be proud. In reading Anthony Everitt's "Cicero," however, I was left with a certain distaste for what surely was an unpleasant man: timid, a bit cowardly and perhaps history's best-talking busybody who ingratiated himself in the circles of power so that it would be difficult to ignore him. My idea of Cicero, by the end of Everitt's book, was easily expunged and not without a brief whiff of satisfaction that he deserved his gruesome fate at Octavian's command. By the same measure, as I read of Caesar's (seemingly) unending campaign in Gaul and Germania, I was almost hoping that he would fail. Freeman's admiration for Caesar's ambition and smarts had become a bit tiresome, what with the endless repetition of the adjective "amazed" to describe the reaction of all the barbarians to what Caesar was doing. And when it came to the final showdown between Caesar's last true adversary, Vercingetorix, I vainly hoped that the Gaulish leader would prevail although I knew that a drawn-out ugly fate awaited him, the last act of which included being a sideshow at Caesar's triumph in Rome before being executed.

That same sense of impatience, or perhaps, unease, followed me when reading about Alexander the Great. By the third book I'd read about the much emulated conqueror, I had started to question why his troops had followed him for so long. In the end, tired of the endless campaign, they turned on the Macedonian and forced him to return back, but not before their leader punished them by trekking through the desert, causing many to perish. It was here that I questioned what made Alexander so "Great." By the same token in reading Freeman's book, I began to wonder why exactly we laud these men, who prime motivation was ambition for power and the desire to control. Alexander might have mitigated some of this good old-fashioned war mongering by trying to fuse the West and the East culturally, but he was a warrior first and foremost. He could easily have said, as Caesar famously did, "I came, I saw, I conquered." The notion that Alexander wanted to found some kind of universal brotherhood appears curious next to the massive stack of dead bodies he left in his wake.

I do not write from the point of view of bashing dead European males. But lately, I have become concerned about the moral dimensions of why we hail Alexander or Julius Caesar as great men. They were great at killing and getting their own men killed, to be sure. They were militarily brilliant; that cannot be doubted. And that they cared about their men cannot be dismissed. But what made them move is another question altogether. Were they moral people? Caesar could be astonishingly forgiving, it is true, although he could also be merciless. We might be expected to accept that: these are men of their times, as the saying goes. Yet after all the stories of the battles, the plotting, the brushes with death and the intrigues, it's difficult to say whether or not Julius Caesar was a good man. Especially one to die for.

And that leads me back to my original question: why would anyone die for Caesar? There is something about military culture that extends across the past to the present that is for some reason, given the short shrift when reading general histories. At many times, both Alexander and Caesar were forced to give speeches to their men to placate them, encourage them or at least, keep any threats of mutiny at bay. But it almost becomes cliché to read that all it takes is one good, rousing speech to satisfy hundreds of weary soldiers to continue doing your will. True, the motivation of future land and money (maybe even freedom) is enough to keep anyone going, but this aspect of the story is remarkably absent. Can we say that Caesar's hold on his men was what we now call a cult of personality? Was the military culture of ancient Rome entrenched with loyalty to a leader? We know the answer is yes, but at the same time, that famous Roman discipline alone cannot be the sole reason. (Is it?) What makes a common soldier love his commander (for there is no other verb) to the point where years can pass away from home and family, following a general to what seem like the ends of the earth? Roman soldiers were not necessarily known for defections and that makes the hold that Caesar had on his men the more intriguing: they were willing to die for him, they were adept at killing for him and stayed with him throughout his campaigns in Gaul. Yet of course, without them, Caesar has no victories and we have no stories. We can only view history because of the victors, not the ones who made that possible.