The world's leading conquerors

by Wilson Lloyd Bevan

Both sides had grievances. The Pompeians were not to be won by tactful treatment to accept Cæsar’s schemes, while his own followers often felt that their allegiance had secured no more favors from him than the open enmity of his former opponents. All experienced the common pressure of an exalted and unlimited authority, and were prepared to act together. The exact details of the conspiracy are obscure; they must have been arranged between the 15th of February and the 5th of March, on which date the Senate was to be called together in a building erected by Pompeius, to decide whether Cæsar was to be allowed to bear outside of Rome the title of king. The conspirators were at one against accepting such a proposal.

Cæsar seemed not to realize his danger, since he paid no attention to the warnings that came to him. His mind was filled with the prospect of the Eastern war. Everyone realized that another victory would render all opposition unavailing. The conspirators would have to act before Cæsar could set out for the new campaign. In the plan to be followed the leading Senators were all accomplices. The way would be easy, provided Cæsar’s fellow Consul, Marcus Antonius, who could be relied upon to defend him, were prevented from coming to the Senate. Trebonius was to see that Antonius was detained and kept occupied elsewhere, while another of Cæsar’s friends of long standing, Decimus Brutus, undertook the necessary persuasion of the dictator should the latter hesitate to come to the Curia.

Cæsar, as had been arranged, took his seat in the consular chair; the place next his was vacant, his colleague not being present. There was no time to be lost, for Marcus Antonius might appear at any moment. Tullius Cimber, showing much vehemence, drew near to the Consul, making a plea for the return of his brother from exile. As Cæsar hesitated, the prearranged signal for the murder was immediately acted upon. Cimber with both hands tore apart Cæsar’s toga; at the same time Casca aimed at his neck a blow which glanced and struck the breast. Cæsar appears to have thought that it was only an act of personal vengeance from which he could protect himself. He sprang to his feet, snatched his toga from the hands of Cimber, and threw himself on the arm of Cassius, at the same time defending himself with the stylus of his tablet. He was strong and active, and might have got the better of his two antagonists, but as he turned on Casca he received a wound in the side, then several others from the conspirators as they closed in upon him. No one of the Senators, whom he had created, came to his help. All was over in a moment, for he made no further resistance when he saw the arm of Marcus Brutus, specially bound to him by personal favors, raised to strike. He fell at the feet of the statue of Pompeius, his body pierced by twenty-three wounds. The corpse was brought back to his dwelling by three slaves in the litter in which he had been carried to the Senate. All the rest of his retinue of clients and friends had fled.

The assassination, its method of accomplishment, and the men who planned and carried it out, bound as all of them were by some kind of obligation to the conqueror, can hardly win sympathy even from those who hate autocratic rule, and think the man who destroys a democracy beyond the law. The conspirators had not the personal character of the traditional tyrannicides of Greece. There is something of a pose in the whole action. Brutus and his fellows were representing a clique and cannot be called in any sense the executors of the will of the people. It would have been more fitting if the old precedent followed in the legendary expulsion of the former kings of Rome, banishment, had been adopted here. After all, Cæsar was giving the Roman empire a better kind of government than the Senatorial oligarchy. The cause of the conspirators was weak, and the men who carried it out, as events soon showed, were even weaker than their cause. Only verbally were the interests of republicanism represented by the murderers of Cæsar. The Senate and People of Rome existed as they had done of old; but the elements in each were different. In the people of Cæsar’s days there was nothing that resembled the ancient community of the plebeians. Military expansion had long since destroyed the old civil constitution; the assemblies in the Forum were legal only in name, for they disguised the irregularities of mob rule, giving opportunities for violence and corruption on the largest scale. Even the Senate was virtually a new creation filled with Cæsar’s enemies and certainly incapable from its membership of preparing a genuine restoration of republican institutions. It had stood, even before the civil war, at a time when the oligarchy of wealth and descent had recovered its lost ground through the patronage of Sulla, for governmental inefficiency.

The one man with genius and creativeness adequate to restore a practical republican government was Cæsar himself, and to him republican ideals meant nothing. He was a realistic statesman, who saw the road to monarchy as the short cut to good government, and took it unhesitatingly. At no point in Cæsar’s career is there any evidence that he believed in anything but personal rule. Alike skeptical of higher appeals and with a contempt for shams, he never wavered at any stage in his well-planned pursuit of autocratic power. His fight with the Senatorial oligarchy, who alone blocked his way, was conducted with the directness of a military campaign. There was little personal feeling, for he treated men as pawns, whether they were friends or enemies. When their power to help or to oppose him was gone, they were of no significance; so, at the close of the civil war, it was easy to exercise a clemency or a patronage which meant little. There was a superficial amiability in these acts which indicated a contempt of individuals rather than spontaneous humanity. His cold, clear-cut character seemed to work out problems in a bloodless atmosphere alike free from prejudices and from prepossessions.

Cæsar’s benefactions and his enmities were alike self-centered. The whole force of a nature extraordinarily versatile and incessantly active was turned to one end, and the various stages of his political career are explained by the closing years of his life. It was his purpose to overthrow the Senatorial aristocrats. The purpose was a most worthy one, and it is difficult to see how it could have been done except by extra-legal means, for the Senatorial faction made the laws, and so held all the cards in their hands. Their motto of government was “Heads I win, tails you lose”; and the claim of legality with such a leader as Pompeius, who had no respect for the constitution, was altogether disingenuous. Cæsar was a shrewder politician than any member of the Senatorial faction, far more brilliant in conception and far quicker in action than his rival Pompeius. After clearing the field of his opponents, he showed less creative capacity than in his preparatory work.

Of course, the time was short between his murder and the close of the last campaign in the civil war, but the government he established was a kind of sham republicanism after the Sullan model, only with a different center of gravity. He seems to have planned a better system of administration, and meant that it should be worked in a way regardful of the public interests of a great empire; but the machinery was to remain the same, except that the various magistracies were either to be held by himself or filled by men of his own selection. The shadow of republicanism was to cover a monarchical rule, and in this respect the conservatism of Cæsar was epoch-making, for it continued to influence the whole genius of the Roman imperial system for centuries.

As a general Cæsar was fortunate in having at his command an army which represented the result of years of technical training acquired in the almost continuous campaigns of the Romans. He did not have to create his army; the material for his conquests was ready to hand. He added nothing new to the art of war as it was already known, but the legion under him had a commander of great versatility, who understood how to use it to the best advantage under any given conditions. This genius in providing for the maintenance of his army repeatedly gave him the advantage over the enemy in the Gallic wars, for it enabled him to defer the decisive engagement until all conditions were favorable for his own side.

Another characteristic of his strategy was his skill in using fortified camps. He was a born engineer, and the engineering feats of his campaigns are evidently recounted with great satisfaction in his “Commentaries.” It is evident that they played a decisive part in securing success both during the Gallic campaigns and in the civil war. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of the Romans to the art of warfare was superior technique in fortifications, and in protection of camps, aided by which the defensive of a numerically smaller force could be made to balance the offensive of superior numbers. The sole method of overcoming such resistance was by starving out the army placed in a fortified camp. In his campaigns Cæsar showed remarkable versatility in using the argument of hunger as well as the argument of the sword, and he was quick to turn from one to the other as occasion required.

He seems never to have burdened himself with a pedantic following of rules. Plutarch tells us he had read the accounts of Alexander’s great victories. So far as his own “Commentaries” are concerned, there is a studied vagueness, which, as has been mentioned, often leaves important points in obscurity. He is very sparing of giving personal reflections on the progress of the war he is describing. It is noteworthy, therefore, that he once blames Pompeius for repressing the enthusiasm of his troops, saying that it is the general’s business to encourage the emotional element in battle.