Such dreams, however, were rudely interrupted by the news that the Pompeian party had gathered its forces in Spain; and Cæsar was obliged to turn his attention to that part of the world. In the winter of B.C. 46, therefore, he set out for the south-west, impatient at the delay which the new campaign necessitated in his great schemes. He was in no mood to brook any opposition in Rome, and before leaving the capital he arranged that he should be made Consul without a colleague for the ensuing year B.C. 45, as well as Dictator, thus giving himself absolutely autocratic power. On his way to Spain he sent a despatch to Rome, appointed eight praefecti urbi with full powers to act in his name, thus establishing a form of cabinet government which should entirely over-ride the wishes of the Senate and of the people; and in this manner he secured the political situation to his own advantage. Naturally there was a very great outcry against this high-handed action; but Cæsar was far too deeply occupied by his vast schemes, and far too annoyed by this Spanish interruption of his course towards the great goal of his ambitions, to pay much attention to the outraged feelings of his political opponents.
The enemy in Spain were led by the two sons of the great Pompey, but at the battle of Munda, fought on March 17, B.C. 45, they were entirely defeated with a loss of some thirty thousand men. The elder of the two leaders, Cnæus Pompeius, who was said to have once been a suitor for Cleopatra’s heart, was killed shortly after the battle, but the younger, Sextus, escaped. Cæsar then returned to Rome, being met outside the capital by Antony, with whom he was reconciled; and in the early summer he celebrated his Triumph. In this he offended a number of persons, owing to the fact that his victory had been won over his fellow-countrymen, whose defeat, therefore, ought not to have been the cause of more than a silent satisfaction. After Pharsalia Cæsar had celebrated no triumph, since Romans had there fought Romans; and, indeed, as Plutarch says, “he had seemed rather to be ashamed of the action than to expect honour from it.” But now he had come to feel that he himself was Rome, and that his enemies were not simply opposed to his party but were in arms against the State.
Knowing now that the Pompeians were at last crushed, Cæsar decided to attempt to appease any ill-feeling directed against himself by the friends of the fallen party; and for this purpose he caused the statues of Pompey the Great, which had been removed from their pedestals, to be replaced; and furthermore, he pardoned, and even gave office to, several leaders of the Pompeian party, notably to Brutus and Cassius, who afterwards were ranked amongst his murderers. He then settled down in Rome to prepare for his campaign in the East, and, in the meantime, to put into execution the many administrative reforms which were maturing in his restless brain. It appears that he lived for the most part of this time in the house of which his wife Calpurnia was mistress; but there can be little doubt that he was a constant visitor at his transpontine villa, and that he spent all his spare hours there in the society of Cleopatra, who remained in Rome until his death.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EGYPTO-ROMAN MONARCHY.
The people of Rome now began to heap honours upon Cæsar, and the government which he had established did not fail to justify its existence by voting him to a position of irrevocable power. He was made Consul for ten years, and there was talk of decreeing him Dictator for life. The Senate became simply an instrument for the execution of his commands; and so little did the members concern themselves with the framing of new laws at home, or with the details of foreign administration, that Cicero is able to complain that in his official capacity he had received the thanks of Oriental potentates whose names he had never seen before, for their elevation to thrones of kingdoms of which he had never heard. Cæsar’s interests were world-wide, and the Government in Rome carried out his wishes in the manner in which an ignorant Board of Directors of a company with foreign interests follows the advice of its travelling manager. He had lived for such long periods in foreign countries, his campaigns had carried him over so much of the known world’s surface, that Rome appeared to him to be nothing more than the headquarters of his administration, and not a very convenient centre at that. His intimacy with Cleopatra, moreover, had widened his outlook, and had very materially assisted him to become an arbiter of universal interests. Distant cities, such as Alexandria, were no longer to him the capitals of foreign lands, but were the seats of local governments within his own dominions; and the throne towards which he was climbing was set at an elevation from which the nations of the whole earth could be observed.
In accepting as his own business the concerns of so many lands, he was assuming responsibilities the weight of which no man could bear; yet his dislike of receiving advice, and his uncontrolled vanity, led him to resent all interference, nor would he admit that the strain was too great for his weakened physique. Intimate friends of the Dictator, such as Balbus and Oppius, observed that he was daily growing more irritable, more self-opinionated; and the least suggestion of a decentralisation of his powers caused him increasing annoyance. He wished always to hold the threads of the entire world’s concerns in his own hands. Now he was discussing the future of North African Carthage and of Grecian Corinth, to which places he desired to send out Roman colonists; now he was regulating the affairs of Syria and Asia Minor; and now he was absorbed in the agrarian problems of Italy. There were times when the weight of universal affairs pressed so heavily upon him that he would exclaim that he had lived long enough; and in such moods, when his friends warned him of the possibility of his assassination, he would reply that death was not such a terrible matter, nor a disaster which could come to him more than once. The frequency of his epileptic seizures was a cause of constant distress to him, and his gaunt, almost haggard, appearance must have indicated to his friends that the strain was becoming unbearable. Yet ever his ambitions held him to his self-imposed task; and always his piercing eyes were set upon that goal of all his schemes, the monarchy of the earth.
People were now beginning to discuss openly the subject of his elevation to the throne. It was freely stated that he proposed to make himself King and Cleopatra Queen, and, further, that he intended to transfer the seat of his government to Alexandria, or some other eastern city. The site of Rome was not ideal. It was too far from the sea ever to be a first-rate centre of commerce; nor had it any natural sources of wealth in the neighbourhood. The streets, which were narrow and crookedly built, were liable to be flooded at certain seasons by the swift-flowing Tiber.[58] Pestilence and sickness were rife amongst the congested quarters of the city; and in the middle ages, as Mommsen has pointed out, “one German army after another melted away under its walls and left it mysteriously victorious.” After the battle of Actium, Augustus wished to change the capital to some other quarter of the globe, as, for example, to Byzantium; and it is very possible that the idea originated with Cæsar. At the period with which we are now dealing Rome was far less magnificent than it became a few years later, and it must have compared unfavourably with Alexandria and other cities. Its streets ascended and descended, twisted this way and that, in an amazing manner; and so narrow were they that Cæsar was obliged to pass a law prohibiting waggons from being driven along them in the daytime, all porterage being performed by men or beasts of burden. The great public buildings and palaces of the rich rose from amidst the encroaching jumble of small houses like exotic plants hemmed in by a mass of overgrown weeds; and Cæsar must often have given envious thought to Alexandria with its great Street of Canopus and its Royal Area.
Those who study the lives of Cleopatra and Cæsar in conjunction cannot fail to ask themselves how far the Queen influenced the Dictator’s thoughts at this time. During these last years of his life—the years which mark his greatness and give him his unique place in history—Cleopatra was living in the closest intimacy with him; and, so far as we know, there was not another man or woman in the world who had such ample opportunities for playing an influential part in his career. If Cleopatra was interested, as we know she was, in the welfare of her country and her royal house, or in the career of herself and Cæsar, or in the destiny of their son, it is palpably impossible to suppose that she did not discuss matters of statecraft with the man who was, in all but name, her husband. At a future date Cleopatra was strong enough to play one of the big political rôles in history, dealing with kingdoms and armies as the ordinary woman deals with a house and servants; and in the light of the knowledge of her character as it is unfolded to us in the years after the Dictator’s death, it is not reasonable to suppose that in Rome she kept aloof from all his schemes and plans, deeming herself capable of holding the attention of the master of the world’s activities by the entertainments of the boudoir and the arts of the bedchamber. Her individuality does not dominate the last years of the Roman Republic, merely because of the profligacy of her life with Antony and the tragedy of their death, but because her personality was so irresistible that it influenced in no small degree the affairs of the world. I am of opinion that Cleopatra’s name would have been stamped upon the history of this period even though the events which culminated at Actium had never occurred. The romantic tragedy of her connection with Antony has captured the popular taste, and has diverted the attention of historians from the facts of her earlier years. There is a tendency completely to overlook the influence which she exercised in the politics of Rome during the last years of Cæsar’s life.[59] The eyes of historians are concentrated upon the Alexandrian drama, and the tale of Cleopatra’s life in the Dictator’s villa is overlooked. Yet who will be so bold as to state that a Queen, whose fortunes were linked by Cæsar with his own at the height of his power, left no mark upon the events of that time? When Cleopatra came to Rome her outlook upon life must have been in striking contrast to that of the Romans. The republic was still the accepted form of government, and as yet there was no definite movement towards monarchism. The hereditary emperors of the future were hardly dreamed of, and the kings of the far past were nigh forgotten. Now, although it may be supposed that Cleopatra, by contact with the world, had adopted a moderately rational view of her status, yet there can be no doubt that the sense of her royal and divine personality was far from dormant in her. Her education and upbringing, as I have already said, and now the adulation of Cæsar, must have influenced her mind, so that the knowledge of her royalty was at all times almost her predominant characteristic; and it would be strange indeed if the Dictator’s thoughts had been proof against the insinuating influence of this atmosphere in which he chose to spend a great portion of his time. Did Rome herself supply Cæsar’s stimulus, Rome which had not known monarchy for four hundred and fifty years? But admitting that Rome was ripe for monarchy, and that circumstances to some extent forced Cæsar towards that form of government, can we declare that the Dictator would, of his own accord, have embraced sovereignty and even divinity so rapidly had his consort not been a Queen and a goddess?