Julius Caesar (19 page)

19

Disturbances in West and East

EVEN before he left Britain, Caesar knew that the situation in Gaul was daily becoming more serious. Indeed, he himself reveals that his principal reason for agreeing on terms so comparatively generous to Cassivellaunus was that his presence was needed in Gaul. The Gauls were becoming restless and—now that they felt the impact of the merchants, the slave-dealers, and the tax-collectors who followed in the wake of the legions—they began to value their freedom more than ever before. Caesar’s mood can only have been grim as he landed at Boulogne in the autumn of 54, with an unsatisfactory campaign behind him and a certainty of trouble ahead. It will have been intensified by the news that waited for him in a letter from Rome. Julia, his only child and daughter—Julia whose name evoked the aunt who had first inspired his career and recalled his first wife Cornelia for whose sake he had suffered so much at the hand of Sulla—had died in childbirth. The child she was carrying was Pompey’s son, but the child had also died.

Plutarch writes: “Caesar and Pompey were much afflicted with her death, nor were their friends less disturbed, believing that the alliance was now broken, which had hitherto kept the sickly commonwealth in peace… The people took the body of Julia, in spite of the opposition of the tribunes, and carried it into the field of Mars, and there her funeral rites were performed, and her remains are laid.” Suetonius says of these years that, during them, “Caesar lost one after the other, his mother, his daughter and his grandson.” Of his stoicism under these blows of fate Quintus Cicero, who was serving with him, wrote to his brother the orator praising Caesar’s “strength of spirit.” But he had plenty to keep him occupied and, even if his had been a quite different kind of temperament, would have been forced immediately into the world of action.

In that year the harvest had been poor and Caesar, instead of concentrating his troops into one place, felt constrained to scatter the legions so that the burden of supplying them should be spread over as wide an area as possible. Such was his account of things, but it must be noticed that he did not send the troops to the south where the harvest had been better, but concentrated them in the north, the worst affected area but the home of the tribes who had shown the greatest resistance to the Roman occupation. The disposition of the troops for the winter must have been the main talking point at the annual meeting of the representatives of the Gallic nations at which Caesar presided soon after his return to Boulogne. Hardly were these matters settled than the news reached him that the King of the Carnutes, a tribe inhabiting the Orleans territory—dark, wild country where the Druids exerted a formidable influence—had been murdered. This was a blow clearly aimed at Rome, for the young King had been appointed by Caesar himself on his usual principle of having a leader who would be personally indebted to him. In the heart of Belgic territory, and in the heartland of their religion, which must be assumed to have had a nationalist bias, such an appointment was vital. The legion which Caesar had designated to be based at Soissons was hastily summoned to winter among the Carnutes, with the task of finding the murderers—as well, of course, as keeping an eye on a disturbed area.

All the legions had now been placed and all arrangements made for the winter and Caesar was on the point of leaving for Italy, where urgent domestic politics required his attention, when the real blow fell. Revolt had broken out among the Belgic tribes. Fifteen cohorts (one and a half legions) had been massacred by the Eburones at Aduatuca in the Ardennes and their two legates killed. Quintus Cicero at Amiens was soon under attack by an army of 60,000 who were using siege engines that they had learned to make after the Roman fashion. The Treveri had risen in a body and Caesar’s chief deputy Labienus was hard put to it to hold his own against this tribe, who were once more under the leadership of the same Indutiomarus whom Caesar had earlier spared. (In due course Labienus solved the problem, as perhaps Caesar should have done earlier, and had him killed.) The whole of the New Order for Gaul and Belgium, which Caesar had thought securely constructed, was collapsing. There could be no question of his proceeding to Italy that year. Suetonius tells us that so deeply did Caesar feel the blow that he vowed neither to shave nor have his hair cut until the disaster was avenged.

Quintus Cicero, after withstanding a protracted siege, was finally relieved by the arrival of Caesar, who managed to deceive the chief of the forces surrounding Cicero’s legion into lifting the siege. He then marched against Caesar, attacked him without due care, and was soundly beaten for his pains. But although for the moment the Romans seemed to have quenched the main sources of the revolt, the damage to their reputation remained. The knowledge that fifteen cohorts could be wiped out and—even more disturbing to Caesar—that barbarians who only a year or so before had run at the sight of siege engines had now learned how to construct them served as grim reminders to the occupying forces that the Gauls and the Belgae were far from finished.

As the news of the uprising spread, so the
Commentaries
inform us, “nearly all the cities of Gaul were talking of war. Everywhere messengers and envoys were passing between the tribes talking of the uprising which was to begin. It was known that secret meetings were being held, and Caesar never had a moment’s peace from news about the dealings that were going on and the revolt that was being prepared.” From his headquarters at Samarobriva (Amiens) Caesar ordered the recruitment of two more legions in Cisalpine Gaul, more than making good his losses, while Pompey, still true to their agreements of mutual aid, prepared to lend another to the embattled proconsul in Gaul. Caesar would now have ten legions at his disposal. He would need them.

Early in 53, as the harsh northern winter drew to a close and before spring could bring the renewal of hope (synonymous with rebellion), Caesar summoned all the Gallic chieftains to a meeting at Amiens. Prior to this, he had set the tone for the year and used four legions to crush the Nervii. The Nervii were compelled to yield up hostages and formally submit to the Roman
imperium
, while the men and cattle captured in the expedition were all handed over as prizes to the legionaries. It was noticeable, however, that at this meeting in Amiens no representatives of the Treveri, the Senones or the Carnutes appeared: this was, in effect, a declaration of open rebellion. Caesar at once ordered the meeting to move to Lutetia (Paris)—nearer the rebel center—and had his headquarters transferred there. He acted swiftly against the rebels, and the tribes which did not surrender were taught a harsh lesson. The Rhine was crossed yet again, to dissuade any Germanic tribes from joining the Gauls, who were once more seeking their help. The Eburones were so savaged, and their countryside so plundered and laid waste, that the name of this tribe to all intents and purposes disappears from history. Ambiorix, the Belgic king who had been responsible for the massacre of the fifteen cohorts at Aduatuca, managed to escape but Acco, leader of the Senones, was tried, condemned to death, and stripped and bound to a stake before the leaders of all the Gauls. He was beaten to death and his corpse was then beheaded.
Vae Victis.
It is safe to say that, after a year in which the iron hand had been so clearly shown, never had the Romans been so hated. A stunned peace fell over Gaul, and Caesar was able to spare the time to winter once again in Italy.

There was much to engage him. The death of his daughter Julia, and of the grandson who would have strengthened the ties between himself and Pompey was a grievous blow. Pompey himself, exercising his right to govern Spain
in absentia
, had stayed in the capital while Crassus, taking up his command in the East, had begun by ravaging Mesopotamia and had then wintered in Syria. After plundering the temple at Jerusalem, he had crossed the Euphrates once more, and in the summer of 53 he had been defeated in the dry plains near Carrhae (the Biblical Haran) and killed shortly afterward. The triumvirate was thus ended, and things looked insecure for Rome and greatly to Caesar’s disadvantage, for “the richest of all the Romans” had generally tended to favor Caesar’s arguments when it came to any conflict of interests among the triumvirate. There could be no gainsaying the fact that Caesar’s political position had weakened since 55. That year had begun with great promise—which had not been fulfilled—and the invasion of Britain in 54 had done nothing to redeem his reputation, while 53 had seen the beginning of chaos in what had been previously considered in Rome Caesar’s new world in the west. Despite his careful cultivation of correspondents in the city he had lost the ear of many of those who counted, while his public image of golden success upon the battlefield had become somewhat tarnished.

Pompey, on the other hand, had slowly learned how to improve his image with the masses and, above all, how to manipulate political power. With Crassus dead, and Caesar away, he had become the dominant figure in the state and indeed it looked as if he could easily secure the dictatorship if he so wanted. So much had public and political life declined into anarchy since Caesar’s consulship that the Roman world was at the mercy of street gangs and thugs. Money dominated all. In so sordid an arena even Pompey, whose personal reputation was far from stainless, seemed to many a source of strength round which some elements of the republic could still maintain their function. There was indeed a considerable movement afoot to make Pompey dictator and, in the absence of his fellow triumvirs, the proconsul for Spain was, because of his continued presence in Italy, granted authority to maintain law and order in the city. The dictatorship, however, was resolutely opposed by Cato; and indeed only Cato throughout all this period managed to continue to fight for the virtues that had once been equated with the word “republican.” Cicero for his part had trimmed and, as he wrote revealingly to his friend Lentulus:

We must assent, as a matter of course, to what a few men say, or we must differ from them to no purpose.—The relations of the Senate, of the courts of justice, nay, of the whole Commonwealth, are changed.—The consular dignity of a firm and courageous statesman can no longer be thought of… We must go with the times. Those who have played a great part in public life have never been able to adhere to the same views on all occasions. The art of navigation lies in trimming to the storms. When you can reach your harbor by altering your course, it is a folly to persevere in struggling against the wind.

Over the winter of 53-52 Caesar contemplated the situation in Rome from across the border in Cisalpine Gaul. He had made his headquarters at Ravenna, and it was here that he heard shortly after his arrival that his erratic agent Clodius had finally been killed. In an affray between his own gang and that of another unscrupulous aristocrat, Titus Annius Milo, he was cut down by armed followers of his rival. (It is indicative of the state of things in Rome that both these scoundrels were candidates for the consulate in 52.) Immediately following upon the murder serious rioting broke out in the city, the meeting house of the senate and other buildings near the Forum were set on fire and it was clear that public order was collapsing. It was essential for the senate to find a strong man whom they could (to some extent) trust, and Pompey was elected to the consulship—his third—but with the curious provision that he was to be sole consul, although with the right to choose himself an associate. Cato had won his way, but so desperate was the situation that Pompey had more or less achieved the power of dictator without the title. Pompey, wrote Dio Cassius, was less anxious to curry favor with the people than Caesar, and the senate considered that they could more easily detach him from the people and win him over to their way of thinking. In this they were right. Pompey had already shown that he had more sympathy with the outlook of the
Optimates
than with Caesar. After all, as a young man he had been in favor of Sulla and against Marius, so it was not very surprising that the conservative in him should once more emerge.

Caesar recognized the facts, and with almost brutal cynicism proposed to Pompey that he should marry Caesar’s grand-niece Octavia while he Caesar put aside Calpurnia (who was childless) and married Pompey’s daughter. The fact that Octavia was already married and that Pompey’s daughter was engaged mattered not at all—marriages could be annulled and engagements broken. But Pompey had no desire to bind himself to Caesar quite so closely and openly. He surprised everybody by electing to marry the daughter of Metellus Scipio, one of the most revered men in Roman society and one of the most outspoken in the anti-Caesar camp. Then, as if he had not made his views clear enough, Pompey now nominated his new father-in-law as his fellow consul. On the other hand, he did not wish to alienate Caesar entirely and he supported a popular decree that would allow Caesar to stand for the consulship of 48
in absentia
, thus permitting him to keep his office of proconsul and escape the prosecution that would otherwise have been brought against him. For although Caesar’s consulship had led to his present position of power and would lead on farther, the rank smell of his year of office would never be forgiven or forgotten by some.

Curiously enough, although Pompey now appeared to be dominant upon the board he had made an error of the kind that, although not immediately clear at the time, would ultimately lose him the game. He was in a strong position and Caesar was in a weak one. If he had pressed harder he could almost certainly have secured the dictatorship, whereas to be consul—even with his new father-in-law as fellow consul—was still to be subject to the senate and constrained within a one-year term. Caesar’s power-base in Gaul was very far from secure, whereas in the desperate state of the republic and the confusion of the empire Pompey could probably have held office as dictator for almost as long as he wanted. Pompey had temporized, seeking for favor with the
Optimates
without overtly offending Caesar. He had miscalculated Caesar’s weight in the scales of power and had not acted decisively enough to bring them down on his own side: he would never be given a similar opportunity.