The world's leading conquerors

by Wilson Lloyd Bevan

If the rise of the republic of Rome is difficult to account for, even more difficult is it to explain why such a community endowed with great generals, great statesmen, and great patriots, found it impossible so to modify their republican institutions that the manifest advantages of a sane and well-balanced democracy might be retained unimpaired, and might be extended at the same time to conquered races and nations. The rigidity of Roman republican institutions led to grave and demoralizing social disorders. The victories of Roman arms abroad were accompanied by political degradation at home. It must have been felt as a shock when a local government, admirably devised to promote civic virtues and secure just administration, was found, just as soon as Rome got the better of her numerous enemies, to be such a convenient protection for misrule.

As early as the last twenty-five years of the second century before Christ, the machinery of Roman government seems to have been recognized as inadequate to perform its functions. Constitutional methods and precedents were inadequate to solve the agrarian question, nor was there in the state, as an organism, sufficient force either to check an oligarchy of wealth or to impose restrictions on the personal ambitions of successful military leaders such as Marius and Sulla. Some of the fundamental principles of the Roman republican system were now treated as legal fiction. There had been years of civil war, for not only had Rome been attacked by groups of Italian towns associated with her for several hundred years, but Roman citizens had been divided among themselves in a way that would have been unthinkable in the period of the Punic wars.

One would like to know the personal political convictions of the opposing leaders, Marius and Sulla. The probability is that neither of them looked much farther ahead than does a representative of “boss” rule in America, who would be very much surprised if asked whether he would like to see the principles of the political ring incorporated frankly and definitely in the Constitution of the United States. It is certain that after the death of Sulla, though personal rule had come to an end, there was no effort made to prevent its re-emergence. The question was rather—from what quarter it would emerge. The common opinion was that the popular general, Pompeius, distinguished by his victories in the East, would come to take the place left vacant by Sulla’s death. He had none of the antipathetic personal qualities of the late dictator, therefore he was regarded as a man of principle, and accordingly, fitted to supply the personal element in Roman administration which most people seem to have felt was needed.

But all these calculations were soon upset. Pompeius, rapidly elevated to greatness along a smooth road of easy gradients, trusted to his friends in Rome to overcome all the political obstacles in his way there. While he was still acclaimed the great military champion of the Roman Republic, he soon found himself face to face with a rival—a man who set himself forward purposefully to revive the popular platform of the Marian party.

Caius Julius Cæsar, born July 12, 100 B.C., had no natural affiliations with the popular side of politics represented by Marius. So far as descent was concerned, he was an aristocrat of the aristocrats, belonging to an ancient patrician gens which traced back its legendary origin to a divine being—the goddess Venus. Of the early years of Cæsar only a little is known; and that little is handed down in the form of anecdotes the value of which lies in the incidental light they throw on his travels in the eastern part of the Roman world. It would be more interesting to know something of Cæsar’s education than of his capture by pirates off the coast of Asia Minor—an accident used by his ancient biographers to prove what everybody knows—that he was a brave man even in the most hazardous circumstances. His early years could not have been spent carelessly, for he acquired a remarkably sound education. His literary tastes must have been the result of long discipline. His manysidedness and intellectual facility were fully recognized by his contemporaries. Even Cicero, who claimed to have spent his youth as a model “grind,” tacitly allows that Cæsar’s intellectual equipment was fully the equal of his own. The years of study were a necessity as well as a diversion. It was not safe even for a brilliant young man, while the truculent Sulla was dictator, to show practical interest in home politics, especially if his sympathies were with the Marian party.

And Cæsar was from the first a partisan of Marius. He was pledged to this political faction by family ties as well as by personal conviction. Marius’s wife was Cæsar’s aunt, and Cæsar himself had made the alliance with the Marians closer by taking as his wife the daughter of Cinna, one of the most active of Marius’s supporters. During the Reign of Terror caused by the proscriptions of Sulla, Cæsar, because of his relations with the democratic party, had with difficulty escaped the dictator’s vengeance, and while Sulla continued to control the Republic Cæsar found it prudent to withdraw into obscurity, from which he only emerged when the revival of the democratic tradition could be safely undertaken. Then he took the first opportunity that offered itself to make a declaration of loyalty to Marius, the old leader of the democracy. It was at the death of his aunt, Marius’s widow, that he delivered a funeral address in which he praised Marius’s principles and achievements. (68 B.C.) This challenge made to the dominant party by the young politician was a bold stroke. His speech was the sensation of the hour, and the glowing words which expressed his purpose of working for the restoration of the Marian democracy won for him the warm approval of the popular party. Not long after this Cæsar was chosen to his first elective office, that of Ædile, in 65 B.C., a somewhat irregular proceeding, for he was two years short of the legal age. He used his term of service in order to increase his favor with the democracy, and he showed a keen political scent in discovering ways and means by which he could keep himself constantly in the foreground as the champion of popular rights, earning a reputation for lavish expenditure of money by giving public games, fairs, and gladiatorial shows. It was not difficult at this time to win the favor of the Roman democracy. Pompeius, who controlled the army and through his position as commander-in-chief exerted a preponderating influence on the government, was on the point of completing the destruction of the upstart empire of Mithridates and bringing the Asiatic provinces with firm hand again under the sway of Rome. There stood in Cæsar’s way as a competitor for political honors only the second-rate personality of Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who, somehow, despite his belief in the venality of the populace and his readiness to act upon his belief, seemed never to have struck the popular imagination powerfully enough to acquire the momentum of the genuine demagogue.

Cæsar had great advantages through his family connections; his position as the legitimate heir of Marius made him already a central figure in the political life of the city, and even Crassus found it advisable to work for him and with him, by advancing him large sums of money to cover the lavish expenditure of the three years’ ædileship. Cæsar was already looking beyond Rome and its purely local interests. That he had no confidence in the kind of government under which he served is shown by pretty clear intimations that he was aware of the existence of a plot, intended to reduce the power of the senatorial oligarchy to zero. It is certain, too, that Cæsar worked hard to secure a military command in Egypt, which was not yet a Roman province and, therefore, could furnish him an admirable vantage ground by its wealth and by its strategical position for blocking the plans of Pompeius, who was working through control of the senatorial oligarchy for a revival in his own hands of personal rule after the Sullan model. This design of Cæsar was a bold one and conceived with a large vision. Its aim was to provide a stronghold for the democracy should the central government, as seemed likely to happen, be manipulated by an irregular dictatorship. The plan may have been suggested by the career of Sertorius in Spain, where this successful opponent of the Sullan régime had so long offered a refuge to all those who were enemies of the oligarchy that ruled the capital. It was characteristic of Cæsar’s confident temperament that he was willing, without previous military training, to undertake a hazardous adventure that meant certainly a conflict with the seasoned generals of the oligarchy.

A further indication, if any were needed, of the purpose of the new leader of the democratic party to treat Pompeius as the danger point on the horizon, was a proposed scheme of an agrarian legislation by which a board was to be created with extensive military and judicial power for the purpose of selling all the properties and territories acquired by the state since the year 88, along with all of the war booty and confiscated revenues now in the hands of Pompeius. To this measure was added a clause intended to transform the bill into a popular manifesto for the colonization of Italy with small landholders, and therefore constructed on the lines of those earlier agrarian laws which mark the commencement of the struggle of the Roman democracy with the capitalistic oligarchy two generations before Cæsar’s time. This agrarian legislation was defeated by Cicero, who in this case, as often elsewhere, championed the interests of the moneyed classes. He who was now Consul and was posing as the Grand Conciliator, praised Pompeius as the strict constitutional champion, and characterized Cæsar’s agrarian legislation as revolutionary. In the face of the Consul’s opposition Cæsar hesitated to press the matter and withdrew his bill. (64 B.C.) As this is the first legislative act brought forward under Cæsar’s influence, it is interesting to note that his later political methods and policies are anticipated in it. His Agrarian Law, when analyzed, contains two elements. There is the purely personal feature, more or less cleverly concealed in various clauses of the measure so constructed as to forward the political interests of its author, and, secondly, one can detect in Cæsar’s plan for agrarian reform a keen-sighted appreciation of existing social and economic needs. This last showed itself in the provision that the surplus population of Rome should be employed as cultivators of the soil. Cicero’s methods of defeating the bill by appealing to party prejudice were as essentially demagogic as were Cæsar’s plans for winning popular support for his measure. The only difference between them was that Cicero was working in the interest of a capitalistic oligarchy, while Cæsar directly aimed at the establishment of personal rule under the protection of an irresponsible commission with unlimited powers. The campaign against the dominant party was not, however, allowed to drop because of the withdrawal of the Agrarian Bill. Cæsar, through one of his lieutenants, brought impeachment proceedings against the murderer of a democratic leader who had distinguished himself in the last days of Marius. It was part of his pin-pricking policy, meant to intimidate the senatorial faction, and the aim was clear, for the Senate had by a decree relieved the murderer of responsibility years before. Nothing came of the impeachment, but it went on record as showing Cæsar’s loyalty to the democracy. His next proposal was especially gratifying to the admirers of Marius, because it involved the removal from the children of the victims of the Sullan proscription the disqualification by which they were prevented from holding public office.

Soon after this, in the spring of 63, when there was a vacancy in the office of Pontifex Maximus, the supreme head of the religion of the city of Rome, Cæsar became a candidate. There were no religious qualifications necessary; the office had no more relation to personal belief than that of a prince bishop of the later history of the German States, when territorial princes added the episcopal to their other titles. Cæsar was one of the most advanced free-thinkers in Rome. But he felt no incongruity, and apparently no one else did, in his desire to figure as the director of the traditional religious usages of the capital. The position meant so much to Cæsar that, heavily indebted as he was, he refused to withdraw his name, when a large sum was offered by an opposing candidate on condition that he would retire from the contest. The office of Pontifex Maximus carried with it a number of powers with great political possibilities, because in addition to controlling the property attached to the college of priests over which he presided, the Pontifex had important jurisdiction in religious questions, the determination of religious scruples, and the charge of the Calendar. All of these matters were intimately connected with the Roman legislative procedure and also with the judicial system as worked by the Roman magistrates. Moreover, it was a life position, and one’s only surprise is that Cæsar’s administration of the office was not attacked by his enemies. As a matter of fact, his career as an official religious leader is marked by beneficent reforms in the Calendar and by a solid contribution to the science of chronology.

There was some difficulty in the election, for it had been placed by Sulla in the hands of the members of the college. But this measure was repealed, and when the people became the electors, Cæsar had easily the majority of the votes over his two conservative opponents. The year 63 had not been, as we have seen, a happy or tranquil one for the men in power; there had been a constant series of attacks made upon them, and they had been forced to stand steadily on the defensive.