The queen of Egypt had followed her august admirer to Italy, and scrupling perhaps to exhibit her publicly in the city, he had installed her in his house and gardens on the other side of the river.[127] There she had her levees for the reception of the noblest Romans, and her blandishments were not perhaps ineffectual in soothing the asperity of their resentments. Cicero himself condescended to solicit an interview with her. She rewarded him with the promise of some Greek volumes from Alexandria, rendered perhaps doubly precious by the recent conflagration. But the populace were shocked at the report that Cæsar meditated raising this barbarian mistress to the dignity of a Roman wife. He was married indeed already to the noble daughter of Calpurnius Piso; but divorce was easy, and might be resorted to without public scandal; Cicero himself had lately dismissed Terentia for alleged incompatibility of temper, and allied himself in her place with a youthful heiress. Besides, one of his creatures was prepared, it was said, with a measure to remove all restrictions upon the dictator’s passions, and allow him to marry as many wives as he pleased, of whatever race or station.
Roman Brazier
Though arrived, as we have seen, at the summit of real power, it was manifest that Cæsar still chafed under the restraints imposed upon him by opinion and prejudice. His firm and well-poised mind seems at last to have lost its equilibrium, and given way to fretful impatience, and a capricious longing for some unattainable object. The Roman nobles, accustomed to the most perfect equality in their intercourse with one another, were mortified at the haughtiness assumed by the chief of the republic, surrounded by a crowd of flatterers through whom the independent patrician could with difficulty force his way.
Once when the senators came in a body to communicate to him their decrees in his honour, he omitted to rise from his seat to receive them. Balbus, it was said, the upstart foreigner, had plucked him by the sleeve and bade him remember that he was their master. It was reported that he had called Sulla a fool for resigning the dictatorship. But while the lines of his domestic policy were yet hardly laid, and every institution in Rome still demanded the pressure of his moulding hand, Cæsar himself was dreaming of foreign conquests, and sighing for his accustomed place at the head of his legions. The disaster of Carrhæ, yet unavenged, might furnish a pretext for war, and the influence of Mithridates, it might be remembered, had extended from the Caspian and the Euxine to the head of the Adriatic. He conceived, we are assured, the gigantic project of first crushing the Parthians, and then returning across the Tanaïs and Borysthenes, subduing the barbarians between the Caucasus and the Carpathian Mountains, and assailing the Germans in the rear. Cleopatra, who felt herself more secure of her admirer in the provinces than in Rome, would doubtless lend her influence to urge him on. The republicans in the city were not perhaps less anxious to remove him to a distance, and launch him on a long and dangerous enterprise. At the close of the year 45 he directed his legions to cross the Adriatic, and assemble in Illyricum, there to await his own speedy arrival. He contemplated an absence of considerable duration. He provided beforehand for the succession of consuls and prætors for the two following years. On the 1st of January, 44, he entered upon his fifth consulship, in which he associated himself with Antony. At the same time he obtained the designation of Hirtius and Pansa for 43, of Decimus Brutus and Munatius Plancus for 42. The prætors appointed for the year 44 were sixteen in number, and among them were M. Brutus and Cassius.
EVENTS LEADING TO THE CONSPIRACY
[45-44 B.C.]
The destined heir of Cæsar’s imperium was already in the camp at Apollonia, taking lessons at the same time both in arts and arms under the care of the ablest teachers. This young man was Caius Octavius, the son of Cæsar’s sister’s daughter, who, now beginning his nineteenth year, gave splendid promise of future excellence, marred only by the extreme delicacy of his health, which had hitherto prevented him from seeking distinction in the field. The favour with which his great-uncle regarded him had induced him to demand the mastership of the horse, but this had been refused him as a distinction beyond his years. Cæsar, however, had promoted his family from the plebeian to the patrician class, an honour which he had accorded to a few gentes, whose names were of great antiquity, among which was the Tullian, to which the character of Cicero had imparted so much new lustre. He had allowed it, moreover, to be understood that he was about to make the young Octavius his own son by adoption, to bequeath to him the bulk of his patrimony, and the dignities which the senate had declared hereditary in his family. These dignities indeed were not associated in the mind of the Romans with any ideas of succession. It was difficult for them to conceive the descent of the dictatorship from the hands of mature experience to those of untried youth, or the establishment in the sphere of a particular family of the tribunitian power, the free gift of the sovereign people. It was natural for them to conclude that their hero was intent on securing a title, the only recognised title, on which according to their notions a dynasty could be founded. Cæsar, it was reported, desired to be hailed as king. His flatterers suggested it, his enemies readily believed it, and hoped to make him unpopular by urging him to claim it. One morning a laurel garland, with a diadem attached, was found affixed to his statue before the rostra. The tribunes, Flavius and Cæsetius, indignantly tore it down; the populace expressing great satisfaction at their conduct, and saluting them with the title of the new Bruti. Cæsar affected at least to applaud them. Shortly afterwards a second experiment was tried. As the dictator returned from the Latin festival, celebrated on the Alban Mount, officious voices were hired to salute him as king. A low and stifled murmur again indicated the disapprobation of the people. “I am no king, but Cæsar,” he hastily exclaimed; but when the tribunes punished some persons who had joined in the cry, he rebuked them for their superfluous or invidious zeal, in which he detected a scheme for bringing him under unjust suspicions.
Cæsar’s friends, however, if such were the real promoters of the intrigue, were not yet satisfied that the prize was beyond his reach. They might familiarise the people with the idea of royalty by bringing it repeatedly before them. Perchance the sight of the white linen band, the simple badge of oriental sovereignty, might disabuse them of their horror at an empty name. On the 15th of February, the day of the Lupercalia, Cæsar was seated on his golden chair before the rostra, to preside over the solemn ceremonies of that popular festival. The Julian flamens were elevated to the same rank as the priests of the god Lupercus or Pan. Antony, the consul, was at their head, and next to the dictator occupied the most conspicuous place in the eyes of the multitude. Possibly the novelty of the sight of the one consul stripped to his skin, with only a narrow girdle round his loins, waving in his hand the thong of goat’s hide, and striking with it, as he ran rapidly through the principal streets, the women who presented themselves to the blow which was supposed to avert sterility, was still more attractive than that of the other in the laurel crown and triumphal robes which use had already rendered familiar. When Antony had run his course he broke through the admiring multitude and approached the seat of the dictator. Drawing from beneath his girdle a diadem, he made as if he would offer it to him, exclaiming that it was the gift of the Roman people. The action was hailed by some clapping of hands; but it was faint and brief and manifestly preconcerted. When, however, Cæsar put away from him the proffered gift, a much louder burst of genuine applause succeeded. Antony offered it a second time; again there was a slight murmur of applause, and again on Cæsar’s rejection of it a vehement cry of satisfaction. “I am not king,” repeated Cæsar; “the only king of the Romans is Jupiter.” He ordered the diadem to be carried to the Capitol and suspended in the temple of the god, to commemorate the gracious offer of the people and his own modest refusal.