Hail Caesar

In this episode, we look at the collapse of the Roman Republic, and the man whose brilliance and whose greed for power, caused a crisis in the Roman world. This was Julius Caesar, the most famous Roman of all.

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Hello and welcome back to the fall of the Roman Empire. My name is Nick Holmes, and this is episode 3 called Hail Caesar. And in this episode, we're still looking at Rome's extraordinary rise to power, since we need to know what Rome was before we can understand why it fell. So it's now time to find out about a Roman who everyone has heard of. Probably the most famous Roman ever. Yes, it's Julius Caesar. And we're going to look at why Julius Caesar was so important in Roman history, and to understand that we'll also need to look at one of ancient Rome's greatest institutions, which was the Roman Republic. So we'll begin at one of the most famous moments in Caesar's life when he was debating whether to cross the River Rubicon. The legionaries of the 13th Legion stood in the darkness. The day was the 10th of January, the year 49 BC. Their general, the victorious governor of Gaul, Gaius Julius Caesar, hesitated before leading his troops across this small, shallow river called the Rubicon. On the other side lay the land officially designated as Italia, Italy. He knew that if his legionaries crossed into Italy, they would commit the worst crime known in the Roman Republic, for the law stated unequivocally that no Roman general should bring an army into the sacred territory of Italy. Every last man who crossed the Rubicon would be condemned to death. Caesar pondered the greatest choice he had ever had to make in his life. Could he risk civil war against his former ally but now rival Pompey the Great? He thought back to his war in Gaul, a million dead, the conqueror of these barbarians. No enemy could withstand him. He had defeated not just the Gauls but the Belgi and the Helveti and the fierce German tribes. He had even landed his troops on the coast of a primitive misty island in the north called Britain, inhabited by primitive, tattooed savages. And yet the Senate would deny him all this glory. Instead they would proclaim his rival Pompey dictator and prevent him from taking his rightful place as leader of the Roman people. Caesar's mind was made up. He raised his hand and the bugles called the legionaries to march. They would follow him anywhere, the water splashed around their knees as they crossed the Rubicon. There are two versions of what Caesar famously next said as he crossed the Rubicon. One is that he turned to his friend the future historian Assinius Polio, and quoted two Greek words coined by the Athenian playwright Menander, meaning let the dice be thrown. A straightforward gambling term suggesting that anything could happen. The other, more famous version is that left by the Roman historian Suetonius, who recorded Caesar as saying in Latin Alia yacta est, meaning the die is cast. This latter version has become the accepted meaning for the widely used idiom in the English language of crossing the Rubicon, meaning to make an irrevocable decision on which there is no going back. Whatever Caesar said, and indeed if he said anything at all, is irrelevant, for by crossing the Rubicon he set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire. But before we go any further, let's stop to take a look at the Roman Republic. What was it, and just how democratic was it? Rome was originally ruled by kings, but legend had it that the last Roman king, Tarquin the Proud, was expelled in 509 BC after his son raped a Roman noblewoman, Lucretia, who subsequently committed suicide, prompting such outrage among Roman citizens that they rebelled against the monarchy and replaced it with a republic. Henceforth executive power was held by two consuls, who were voted into office for one year only by the Roman citizens. For nearly 500 years, from 509 to 27 BC, the consuls were the rulers of the Roman Republic. But by the time of the Empire, the position of consul, although it still existed, had become no more than a name. Indeed, the Emperor Caligula allegedly planned to make his horse in Citatus consul, with the stipulation that it could vote on matters of state by defecating on the floor of the Senate and using its hoof to move the horse dung in the direction of the senators whose proposals it agreed with. While the story of Caligula's horse was probably the comic invention of the Roman historian Suetonius, his bittersweet joke underlined the dramatic change in government that occurred as Rome transitioned from the Republic to the Empire. Writers like Tacitus also mourned the loss of the Democratic Republic and its replacement by an effective monarchy under the emperors. But was the Republic ever really a true democracy? The answer has to be no, for while the Republic bore the trappings of democracy, it was in reality always a benign oligarchy run by the rich and powerful members of Roman society. This may seem surprising, since constitutionally the Republic was what we might call a representative democracy, i.e. with government by groups of elected representatives, such as exist today in many modern-day democracies like the UK Parliament or the US House of Representatives. In Rome, this took the form of citizen assemblies, the most important of which was the Committia Centuriata, the Centuriate Assembly, whose members were divided into 193 centuries or voting blocks. Each century had one vote, which was cast according to the wishes of the simple majority of its members. It voted on the appointment of the most important political appointments, such as the consuls. Another assembly called the Commitia Tributa, the Tribal Assembly, voted on proposals made by the consuls and other elected representatives. However, in practice, the opportunity for free and fair elections was severely limited for the Roman electorate for two reasons. First, the candidates for office, and there were 44 of them, including the consuls, were chosen only by the Senate and not by the citizens. This effectively prevented candidates from being put forward, except in exceptional circumstances, and meant that the vast majority of candidates were chosen from among whichever aristocratic faction in the Senate was the most powerful. Second, voting occurred in the Forum in Rome, spilling over into the Campus Martius to the north of the Forum if need be. As the Republic expanded and most of the inhabitants of Italy became Roman citizens, they could only vote by actually travelling to Rome and voting there in person. Rather extraordinarily, no balloting system for citizens living outside Rome was ever devised, which meant that Roman citizens outside the capital, who could not travel to Rome to vote, and very few could, were effectively disenfranchised. To put these logistical problems into context, a Roman census conducted at the end of the first century BC counted four million Roman citizens scattered across the Mediterranean. A few years earlier, Cicero recorded that voting for one consul in 45 BC took five hours, which historians believe suggested that in most Roman elections there was probably an average of only 10,000 to 20,000 voters. So in the later Republic, when there were perhaps 3-4 million voters, if only 20,000 of them normally voted, this would equate to only 2% of the total electorate. This was extremely low compared with voter turnout in the modern Western democracies. For example, voter turnout in the 2020 US presidential election was 66.8%, a little higher than the average of 50 to 60% for most presidential elections since the Second World War. This meant that in reality the Roman Republic was a sham democracy. Political power really lay with the Senate, for although the consuls could theoretically be chosen from anyone who put themselves forward for election, the practice quickly became established that it was only senators who could be nominated since they had the necessary experience of government. This meant that the Senate was the centre of almost all political activity and became a hotbed of political intrigue, as the great aristocratic and wealthy Roman families fought it out for election to the office of consul. Nevertheless, the Roman Republic seemed to work remarkably well. Indeed, the ancient Greek historian Polybius, musing on why Rome spiralled to success at the expense of the Greek states, attributed much of it to this republican political system, which he deemed to contain an excellent system of checks and balances. Elaborating on this, he explained that the way in which he believed Rome had a mix of kingship with aristocracy and democracy provided reasonably firm but not dictatorial government with sufficient buy-in from the ordinary Roman citizens to make the whole system work. Most important of all, the Roman constitution avoided the pitfalls of each of the three types of government that Polybius defined, as he said, monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos. It has to be said that there was much truth in Polybius' assessment, for the striking feature of the Roman Republic up until the first century BC was that it avoided the excesses of either monarchy, oligarchy, or mob rule, just as Polybius noted. This was partly because the constitutional requirement to change the two consuls each year was rigidly upheld, ensuring that there was a semblance of democratic government, although in effect what was created was a soft form of aristocratic oligarchy. But the senatorial oligarchy never became too corrupt, because there was always healthy competition for power between the senators. This meant that the Republic avoided being a despotic oligarchy. There was just enough democracy to keep senators honest. As an example of this, again it was Polybius who insisted that Roman consuls were particularly sensitive to public opinion, and always eager to secure public approval. As he said, quote, as for the people, the consuls are preeminently obliged to court their favour, however distant from home may be the field of their operations, for it is the people, as I have said before, that ratifies or refuses to ratify terms of peace and treaties, but most of all because when laying down their office, they have to give an account of their administration before it. Therefore, in no case is it safe for the consuls to neglect either the Senate or the good will of the Roman people. So the Republic achieved a truly remarkable political balancing act. In the ancient world, just as in the modern, this was highly unusual. In the modern world, we only have to look at the monarchical governments of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China to see that by comparison with them, the Roman Republic was refreshingly free from tyranny and corruption. Somehow, the Romans seemed to have understood well the maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. However, even the Roman Republic could not remain impervious to human beings' greed for power forever. For it would not be long before dictators seize power, purporting to act within the framework of the Republic, and then emperors took control again, purporting to be the people's representatives. Ultimately, as we will discover in later episodes of this podcast, the Roman political system ended up as a military dictatorship sanctioned by a Christian god. The Romans thereby created the concept of the divine right of kings, or emperors in their case, that was to dominate European politics until the French Revolution in 1789. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, and let's get back to Julius Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic. And the first point to understand is that Caesar was already operating in a republic that had begun to break down. This actually began with Marius, who we discussed in the last episode as the father of the Roman army. Now, with the help of the army, Marius held power for longer than usual, becoming consul seven times, and this provoked his political opponent Sulla into a civil war. It was Sulla who then forced the Senate to make him dictator, which was under the Roman constitution an emergency office given to someone in a time of intense crisis. A dictator had absolute power for an indefinite period, but it had hardly ever been used except in the Punic Wars, and although Sulla gave up his dictatorship, he established a dangerous precedent that Julius Caesar was to follow. So let's go back to Caesar. Determined to promote himself to supreme office, Caesar had to contend with similarly daunting rivals, Pompey and Crassus, both of whom, like him, were determined to make themselves sole rulers of Rome. However, recognizing that the Republic was not yet ready for this, the three of them formed an informal alliance called the First Triumvirate, during which they agreed basically to keep out of each other's way while they extended their own prestige and wealth through foreign conquest. This is exactly what Caesar did in conquering Gaul from 58 to 50 BC. Meanwhile, Crassus, who was no general but fabulously wealthy, attempted to emulate Caesar's conquest of Gaul by invading the Parthian Empire in the east. Unfortunately for him, this ended in one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the Roman army when in 53 BC Crassus and his army of seven legions were annihilated by the Parthians at the Battle of Cari in northern Mesopotamia. So the triumvirate was one man down, and the result was civil war. Pompey, who, like Caesar, was a soldier with a string of triumphs under his belt, including those over the warlike king Mithridates of Pontus, as well as over the pirates who had virtually taken over the Mediterranean, vied for ultimate power against Caesar. Pompey was the first to seize power in Rome. Caesar was then left wondering whether to embark on a full-scale civil war with this formidable rival. So he marched to the river Rubicon in northern Italy, where we last left him and contemplated whether to march on Rome. In 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon and launched the Roman Republic into a bloody civil war. But he was quickly victorious. He defeated Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC in central Greece. Pompey fled but was assassinated, and his head was brought to Caesar. Caesar then returned to Rome and persuaded the Senate to elect him dictator for life. In that position, he didn't implement a reign of terror. Instead, his actions were relatively benign as he initiated mainly administrative reforms, from administering and taxing the newly conquered provinces of the Roman Republic to a new calendar, the Julian calendar, which has continued almost unchanged, in fact, to that used today in Europe and America. However, Caesar had polarized Roman opinion with his domineering quest for power. Some Romans supported him because they admired his conquests in Gaul and the strong direction he gave to Roman government, but others couldn't forgive the way in which he'd ridden roughshod over the traditional Republican constitution, and claimed that he wanted to return Rome to a monarchy that had last existed 700 years previously under Tarquin the Proud. Caesar was curiously unaware of this growing opposition to his rule in the Senate. The disaffected senators led by Cassius and Brutus, former supporters of Caesar's rival Pompey, hatched a plot to assassinate him on the 15th of March 44 BC. The famous Ides of March, Ides referring to a Roman celebration that day, which was the 74th day of the old Roman calendar. So, on the floor of the Senate House, Caesar was stabbed to death 23 times. Suddenly the Roman state was thrown into chaos, but it was out of that chaos that would arise the Roman Empire. And that ends this episode. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, I'd be really grateful if you wanted to subscribe, tell a friend, or best of all, of course, to leave a review. That would be fantastic, thank you. And in the next episode, we'll turn to Augustus and the creation of the Roman Empire. Thanks for listening and see you next time.