CAESAR (Life of a Colossus)
by Adrian Goldsworthy

This life of Julius Caesar was originally published (minus subtitle on jacket) as one of Weidenfield's military history tomes back in 2006. With the success of the BBC/HBO TV series “Rome”, it was quickly repackaged and relaunched to cater for a subsequent surge of interest in the founder of Imperial Rome. Arguably, Julius Caesar has always been ancient history's most popular figure. Even contemporary contenders for that distinction – Cleopatra as beauty/queen, Pompey Magnus as fixer/general, Cicero as writer/orator - were more or less satellites of Gaius Caesar of the Julii. What sets him above the other great figures of the day is the breadth of his achievements from the battlefield, to politics to oratory & authorship. Goldsworthy's biography, we are told, is wider in scope than other accounts. Whereas many books concentrate on Caesar the military tactician, others deal with the rise and fall of his dictatorship. What we have here is a life that claims to combine the man's political career with his military campaigns. But is that enough to pad out a full life?

Most biographies succeed or fail neither by strict adherence to fact, nor by spinning the good yarn. Where an author has to dig out hidden truths, then such facts may have something spicy to add. And where the telling of the tale reflects the legendary nature of its protagonist, then the story may benefit from spicier writing. However, built on original research & good writing, a successful biography needs to give the reader a contextualised portrait that stands up for itself. In the case of a well-known figure from ancient history, especially the most famous of all, the biographer is faced with two main obstacles. First comes the difficulty of finding out anything new. Secondly, when a tale has already been told many times, detaching the plausible from the mythologised takes precedence over constructing new narrative. And to compare the task of writing a biography of Julius Caesar with that of a “colossus” from recent times – say Winston Churchill – an author needs to keep the obscurity of the facts under control while encasing the narrative in familiar terms.

It's interesting that Goldsworthy draws only sparingly on Caesar's own Commentaries, preferring third hand accounts. But surely the reports he sent from the campaigns in Gaul, which were published more of less annually in Rome, would have been widely read at the time? According to Cicero, the author tells us, even tradespeople were fond of reading. Furthermore, Caesar was renowned for the clarity of his writing - making it easier for the less educated, and therefore I think we should simply assume he was a popular author in his lifetime. Although he didn't write an actual autobiography, like Sulla (his predecessor as dictator); I think it's necessary to distinguish between the way Caesar saw himself and the way others recalled him.

At this point, I pray to digress and delve into my own motives for reading a biography of such a remote figure. I often read these accounts of real people's lives as a sort of antidote to my fiction reading. It intrigues me to see how well or ill character is conveyed by words alone; and I qualify that point of view by stating I come from the first generation brought up in the television age (I was born in 1956 and remember watching Popeye cartoons at the age of three or four). The virtual window of inscribed words on a page (whether of clay tablet, papyrus roll, paper book or e-reader screen) was established long before the time of Julius Caesar. By his era, real life & myth had already been recorded in histories or mimicked in prose & verse for more than a thousand years (if we go merely as far back as the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh). Caesar himself made unique contributions to the body of writing, not only by publishing the Commentaries his own accounts of his military campaigns, he was also a poet and critic. Biographers, therefore, are able to use his own writing – and that of contemporaries such as Cicero – to base much of their texts on. We also have two thousand years' worth of commentaries on those commentaries to help us decipher them. When we pick up any book purporting to be a life of Julius Caesar, therefore, I think we are entitled to expect a fine distillation not just of the grapes of truth (if such a phrase may be pardonned) but the true essence of the man.

Goldsworthy's method, especially in the first third of his book, is to extrapolate Caesar's youth and early career from a wide-ranging of reading around the subject. He conjectures on the likely upbringing the boy would have received as a member of an old but somewhat undistinguished branch of the aristocratic Julii clan. He then fills in the backstory of Sulla's dictatorship, which began when Caesar was about fifteen years old. The known facts give the first inklings of the young man's character: his dandiness, defiance and courage. Goldsworthy's caution prevents him from drawing too fine a portrait, though; and when he recounts the young adventurer's expedition to Bythinia (incidentally located in the very part of modern Turkey where I live) he is confronted with one important unknown fact. Did Caesar have a homosexual affair with King Nicomedes? Contemporary sleaze-mongers styled him “Queen of Bythinia” - a sobriquet to dog him for the rest of his life. Though there is no other suggestion that Caesar was anything other than heterosexual (and the prolific seducer of other men's wives), he was still issuing denials of the affair in the year of his assassination, four decades later! In addition to the mocking title of “Queen”, Caesar so distinguished himself in battle against King Nicomedes' enemies (and therefore the enemies of Rome), he was awarded the Civic Crown, the second highest honour possible. These are the facts.

It's all very well to assume Caesar, as a youth, received the same education as every other scion of the rich. That level of research could be summarised without quotes from Suetonius (writing on Caesar himself) or Cicero (writing about another young man). What stands out in Caesar's case? Where precisely were his estates? What local legends survive of him? What is known of the gardens he was to bequeath in his will? I believe there must be things of this kind worthy to include, no matter how dubious the sources may be. After his adopted son Octavian became the Emperor Augustus, Romans worshipped Julius Caesar as a god. Temples were erected to him and all kind of relics would have been dug out and revered. Still being in living memory, anyone who knew him would have contributed to this lore. For comparison, take the life of Jesus Christ, who was far less well-known, yet many little snippets of his family story came out after his death. For example, during the flight to Egypt, Joseph is believed by Coptic Christians to have worked as a carpenter on the Fortress of Babylon in Old Cairo. In the decades after Julius Caesar's death, I am sure thousands of stories were told and many places identified with him. But this book is not based on field research, which is a great shame. We need to know more of his background than just the supposed shape and colour of his toga.

Other ways of getting at the real man could have included a comparative study of the sculpture. Roman artists followed the realism of their Greek masters and though not exactly a warts-and-all approach, neither was Roman stone portraiture ever more than lightly idealised or stylised. Caesar's portrayal in contemporary literature is undoubtedly biased towards the writer's politics. Suetonius in “The Twelve Caesars”, written a century and a half later, was drawing on such like, which writers have done ever since. There is a short round-up of Caesar in literature towards the end of Goldsworthy's book, but nothing like the comparative study I would have expected. Gielgud's portrayal of Shakespeare's Caesar, which I saw at the National Theatre in London, 1977, was somewhat elderly and patrician (the actor himself was probably too old by then), but I seem to remember it was greeted as a classic performance. Caesar, was responsible for his own myth-making, and his efforts to promote himself have reverberated down the centuries.

Any narrative that ends in the pre-known sudden death of its protagonist is bound to be overshadowed by a Faustian cloud; especially a text like Goldsworthy's, which blithely reminds us what is going happen to its protagonist every fifty or so pages. It's hard to imagine anyone watching a film like “The Bunker” without the grim knowledge of how it's going to end. Yet it does not follow that as soon as Caesar crossed the little Rubicon river with the XIIIth Legion (an act of civil war), that his committal of treason therefore doomed him. Yet the expression “crossing the Rubicon” equates to “burning one's boats” not to “selling one's soul to the devil”. It is no coincidence that so many of Caesar's words and actions (whether real, invented or associated) have similarly entered international parlance and culture. He may have uttered the phrase, “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (“I have come, I have seen, I have conquered”) on a previous occasion, but when he included it in his Commentary on the Civil War, he was referring to the pushovers of Pontus and not to his greatest victories. A few months later, returning in triumphal to Rome, the expression was written out on placards and carried in procession and was taken to mean ALL of his conquests. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” - the words with which Shakespeare has Mark Anthony open Caesar's funerary ovation - have become the catch-phrase of the populist rabble-rousing politician. Yet Caesar, then dead, remained aloof from the implication. Even the phrase, “Et tu, Brute”, which he himself may not have uttered, remains an expression of the betrayal he obviously felt, and therefore not actually untrue. The myth he built around himself continued to grow long after his death, robbing the assassins of their justification.

Throughout the book, the initials BC are used, which I can't bother objecting to as date marker. The alternative BCE, though it is more politically correct, still refers to the Gregorian calendar (itself a revision of a calendar introduced by Julius Caesar), and anchors history to a Romano-Christian world view. What niggles me is the Faustian countdown effect of constantly referring to these dates. Goldsworthy even talks about BC decades as though they existed. Well, yes, of course ten year periods did exist, but not in the way we count them back from the estimated birth year of Jesus Christ. The Romans had their own anno primo (though never fully agreed on) from which Julius Caesar lived in the eighth century. Roman people would refer to a year as “when so-and-so had the consulship”, or “x years after the dictatorship of another so-and-so”, or “when the triumph of whatshisname was held”. By constantly mentioning years in the countdown BC timetable, Goldsworthy alienates us from the mental set of the Romans.

When we get into the middle and latter thirds of the book, the narrative is dominated by Caesar's military campaigns in Gaul and the Civil War, the true military bias of the book is revealed. Generals throughout history (whether of the field or armchair variety) have studied Caesar's campaigns and Napoleon Bonaparte's commentaries on Caesar's set piece battles are mentioned several times. Caesar's luck, especially in recovering from his own mistakes, seems to have been a major feature of the campaigns he waged. Also, his caution, which probably cost him more victories than defeats, preserved him to fight another day. Of life on his campaigns, Goldsworthy gives interesting details. For example, that Caesar would often stay with local Celtic nobles rather than in his own camp. That horses were fed on seaweed when all other fodder was used up. And that barley or even roots were sometimes made into bread for the legionnaires.

What Goldsworthy fails to do, I think because he always prefers to reserve final judgement, is to summarise the main qualities of Caesar's war fighting succinctly enough. And yet, all the evidence is in the book. Firstly, he was a front-line general who shared the risks of combat and thereby gained the devotion of his soldiers. As a youngster, he went East, organised local militias along Roman lines, and achieved modest successes against poorly-led opposition. Later on, in Gaul, again pitching well-trained troops against semi-wild native warriors, time and time again he overcame divided enemies. Finally, forced to fight against Roman legions in the civil war, he lost almost everything - except his head. Against a tired Pompey, the twelve years he had spent leading armies in the field gave him a significant edge and total victory in the end .

It may come as no surprise to the reader that Caesar suffered from epilepsy, and Goldsworthy does mention the bare facts. However, I would expect a biographer worth his salt to have investigated the incidence of epilepsy amongst other figures from military, political and literary history. Then, by comparing Casear's situation with their's, at least we could have had a better idea of what he and his followers were up against.

Nowhere does Goldsworthy make it clear that Caesar's ability to compromise with his fellow Roman aristocrats would, in the end, prove his downfall. His dictatorship was never the tyranny that Sulla's was, he didn't have people rounded up and killed. He wanted genuine reform: land redistribution to the less well off, the prosecution of corrupt officials, the reward of loyalty, even democracy. He was not vengeful, never dismissed the Senate or blocked elections to the various offices of state. Few could have borne him real grudges. It was simple jealousy, with which the Roman republic was rife (and which he practised as much as most), that set men against him. Jealousy was even encouraged by the system. Elections for the highest offices of state being held every year was just incompatible with a growing empire. Having already expanded far beyond the city-state it was founded as, Rome risked the same fate Athens had suffered four centuries before. An empire needs both strong central AND devolved local government. When appointments were made on a yearly basis and new governors took months to arrive at their territories, there was bound to be discontinuity and corruption. As long as men were able to fight amongst themselves for favours, they would do so to the detriment of the common good.

That's not to suggest Caesar was too saintly for his own good. He and the rest of the Roman nobility were a blood-thirsty lot, which Goldsworthy's book bears witness to and apologises for. What distinguished the Romans from their Gaulish, Egyptian and German neighbours was their organisational skill; meaning they were able to work together in a way unique in the ancient world. Co-operating as soldiers on campaign, they divided the labour of foraging, construction work and actual fighting in a manner that confounded their enemies. In times of war and peace they were business people, traders, settlers, opportunists, you could almost say proto-capitalists – slave-drivers without ethical qualms. In the upshot, Caesar's assassination differs not from any St Valentine's Day massacre type of peer justice. All Caesars, whether big-hearted Julius' or snidey little Edward G. Robinson's, live and die by the sword of jealous brothers-in-arms.