Caesar the Dictator, Roman Empire

After five long years globe-trotting and conquering, Caesar returns home. The Roman people are subjected to three Triumphs back-to-back (then another after he returns from defeating Pompey’s sons). Caesar finally receives his Triumph for the Gallic Wars, garrotting Vercingetorix before the Roman people. Then are two Triumphs dedicated to his victory in the civil wars, masked as triumphs for his victory over the foreign kings Pharnaces II of Pontus and Juba I of Numidia (an ally of Cato’s who fought at Thapsus).

Spoils taken from fellow Romans are displayed. Standards, weapons and arms from the defeated legions are paraded through the streets, Pompey’s banners fly limp and tattered in the breeze. Paintings of Cato’s suicide, as well as senators and generals who opposed Caesar, are paraded to the jeers of the crowd. 

Many look on in horror. Young Marcus Junius Brutus and his friend Cassius see the ideals and traditions of the Republic trampled through the dirt. Never before have Roman citizens been forced to endure the humiliation of public display, and never before have the banners of a proud Roman legion been paraded through the streets of Rome as a conqueror’s spoils.

In 44 BCE, Caesar names himself Dictator in Perpetuity, allowing him to rule by decree. For many in Rome, this must have seemed like the ultimate triumph of the populares faction. Caesar immediately sets out a series of political reforms to the benefit of the people. He dramatically increases the size of the Senate to about 900 members, inducting his allies and reducing the political weight of individual senators. Then, he addresses the material needs of the poor. The grain dole is expanded and made free, providing each citizen of Rome with food security. Next, veterans and the poor are settled on free land, and huge infrastructure projects begin, aqueducts bring fresh water into the city, and temples are built. Finally, Caesar makes that most shocking of moves - he cancels debts. Debt relief, land reform and free food for Rome’s poor - an unholy trinity of horrors for Rome’s elite.

Caesar is a man of the people to some, but to others, he is acting more and more like a king. Though he refuses the royal diadem, offered to him by Mark Antony at the boisterous Lupercalia festival, and always refers to himself as one among equals, he grants himself a series of honours that put him far above the community of peers he is meant to belong to. 

The historian Suetonius describes Caesar’s king-like honours at length. They include: a statue of himself standing among the ancient kings of Rome, the title ‘Father of the Country’, a golden throne in the Senate House, a priest of his own cult, a whole college of priests to celebrate his divinity, a golden chariot to carry his image through the Circus Maximus, and the renaming of the fifth month in the Roman calendar to ‘July’, after himself. By stressing his proximity to divinity, Caesar sets himself up as something more than a politician and something closer to what we today would think of as a monarch. 

The mood among the city’s senatorial class is morose. Old Cicero complains bitterly in his letters about the new autocracy, wishing for a return to the old days of elite competition and equality. But it is the young who take action. A conspiracy is formed, led by a political firebrand named Cassius. They will save the Republic, and they will dethrone the tyrant Caesar.

In a moment immortalised countless times over the centuries, Caesar arrives at his new Senate House, ignoring the warnings of a soothsayer. He is met by a crowd of young senators, who pull him into the Senate and, from under the folds of their togas, produce assassin’s blades. Caesar fights back with his stilus, but he is surrounded and killed. As he flees, he collapses in a bloody heap just at the feet of the statue of Pompey.

The assassins of Caesar claim to be acting in defence of the freedom and ideals of the Republic. But, like the assassins of the Gracchi and the coup against Marius, there are more pragmatic motives at play. After the defeat of the optimates, the senatorial order and the rich saw themselves at the wrong end of class struggle, with their power, prestige, and wealth curtailed. The assassins spoke of lofty ideals of freedom and tradition, but the hit on Caesar was, in reality, an attempt by an entrenched elite to hamper the structural change brought about by the dictator’s radical and populist political programme, and to revive a system that had benefited them for generations.

Caesar is dead, but in dying, he sets a final fatal precedent for the Republic: if a politician is powerful and popular enough, if he can utterly vanquish their opponents, then he can bestow on himself honours that put him far above his fellow citizens. Now, all Rome is in confusion, and the streets are in chaos. None can know what the future holds; all that is certain is that a great struggle is brewing, and civil war will visit Rome once again.