David Drake: Tyrant

Then Caesar and Pompey, successful generals in the mold of Marius and Sulla, fought for the throne — first through gangs of thugs in the city, then with armies across the entire empire and beyond. Caesar won, and despite his immediate assassination, his victory had doomed the Republic and even the semblance of democracy in Rome.

As I said — simple. And almost entirely untrue.

In large measure the simplicity is what makes it false. Marius and Sulla were only two actors in an enormously complex struggle which involved many parties within the Roman polity and even more outside it. The rights of the elites of the Italian states (the Socii , allies), foreign enemies who used resentment of Roman rule to gain support within the outlying provinces (Mithridates VI was the most prominent but by no means the only example), local resistance movements aided by one or another Roman party (Sertorius and others), piracy on a scale unequaled by illegal enterprise until the appearance of modern drug cartels, and a massive slave revolt were all major factors.

That was just the prelude. The Civil War, the climactic struggle that gave us genuine works of art in the form of Lucan's epic de Bello Civile and Caesar's prose dispatches collected under the same title, was just as complex. After the fact it's easy to assume that — for example — Clodius was in command of Caesar's street gangs in Rome. Caesar wouldn't have claimed that, and Clodius would have denied it hotly: his blood went back to Attus Clausus at the beginning of the Republic, and he was very much a player in his own right.

The same is true of scores of others, great men or would-be great men, whose names are forgotten now except by experts on the period. Alliances were circumstantial and unstable (look at the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan for a contemporary model of the situation). Every man had his own vision, and almost every one was out for himself. The Roman conquest of the Near East with its enormous wealth had made the potential prizes (for the infantryman no less than for the warlord) so great that greed generally overwhelmed honor.

Oddly enough, Caesar himself was one of the few who actually tried to save the state. He saw that the old system was dead: the government suitable for a city-state couldn't effectively rule an enormous empire, especially given the difficulties of communicating over the distances involved. The system he tried to put in place required that all parties recognize that it was the best possible compromise.

None of them did. Greed and fanaticism won, leaving Caesar dead on the floor of the Senate house.

Caesar's system might not have worked anyway. He was a very smart man and perhaps a wise one, but he wasn't a saint. At the time of his murder he was planning another military expedition, this time into Mesopotamia. Perhaps he meant it as a way to occupy the tens of thousands of soldiers who were too dangerous to demobilize, but it could as easily have been because Caesar himself had no real plan except war till Rome's armies had marched to the ends of the earth.

Regardless, Caesar's attempt to turn the Roman Republic into a moderate autocracy was never tried. At his death, another — even messier, even bloodier — civil war convulsed the Roman world for fifteen years. At its conclusion, Augustus — Octavian — reigned supreme in a fashion no one could call moderate.

One of Caesar's last acts was to send away his German bodyguard, saying that a Roman official didn't need foreigners to protect him against his own people. That was a mistake Augustus never made.

And Augustus died in bed.