MARULLUS
Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome,
To grace in captive bonds his chariot-wheels?
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb’d up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks,
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood? Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.
Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 1
I think it would have amused the Romans of Caesar’s generation if they could have learned that the assassination of Julius Caesar would eventually receive immortality through a play written more than 16 centuries after the event by a barbarian playwright in the Tin Islands that Caesar had briefly invaded. It would have tickled their well developed concept of the ludicrous, judging from Roman comedy.
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known in English as Pompey the Great, is dead at the time the play begins, murdered by the functionaries of Cleopatra’s brother in a vain attempt to have Caesar take his side in the Egyptian civil war raging between the siblings.
Pompey, and his defeat by Caesar in the preceding Roman civil war, is at the heart of the play however, discontented former supporters of Pompey assassinating Caesar, correctly fearing that he was ending the Roman Republic permanently. The shade of Pompey has his revenge, although the assassination simply hastens the decomposition of the dead Republic.
Caesar and Pompey were an odd historical repetition of the rivalry between Marius and Sulla that ended in civil wars when Pompey and Caesar were young men. Like Marius and Sulla, both Caesar and Pompey were extremely talented military commanders with outsized political ambitions, and like them they had periods of cooperation as well as confrontation. Marius and Sulla both initiated the death knell of the Republic, Pompey and Caesar merely completing the process.
The son of consul Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, who was consul in 89 BC, from his early twenties Pompey was a skilled commander of Roman legions. He earned laurels in the Social War, the revolt of much of Italy against Roman domination, and in the civil war between Marius and Sulla, with Pompey on the side of Sulla. From 76 BC to 71 BC he crushed the Sertorian revolt of Roman settlers in Spain.
In the 60’s he swept the Cilician pirates from the Mediterranean, vanquished Mithradates, King of Pontus, in the Third Mithradatic War, and reorganized the East, annexing Syria and making Rome the de facto ruler of Judea. In 61 BC he returned to Rome and celebrated his third triumph. Optimate opposition in the Senate led to his treaties in the East not being ratified and his veterans not being given land.
This led to the formation of the First Triumvirate. Pompey and Crassus, the man who defeated Spartacus, threw their support behind Caesar as Consul in 59BC. As Consul Caesar rammed the legislation favored by Pompey and Crassus through the Senate. Pompey married Caesar’s only child, Julia, a love match, she dying in child birth in 55 BC, with the child following her in death a few days later.
As Pro-Consul of Gaul, Caesar started his long conquest of that land which allowed him to build a formidable war machine. Crassus died in 53 BC in a vain attempt to conquer the Parthian Empire.
With Optimate support, Pompey was elected sole Consul in 52 BC, an unprecedented event in Roman history, and cemented the growing disenchantment between Caesar and Pompey. Crossing the Rubicon into Italy in January of 49 BC, the cold civil war between Caesar and Pompey burst into flame, with Caesar defeating Pompey at Pharsalus in Greece
His murder in Egypt was an ignoble end to one of the most brilliant of the commanders of Rome.
The fatal flaw in the Roman system of government was welding the attainment of political power to military success. Victorious Roman commanders saluted by their troops in the field were known as Imperators. It was only matter of time, once Marius and Sulla used military force to seize power in Rome, that the Republic would become one with Nineveh and Tyre and ruled by an Imperator. The play Julius Caesar relates how the attempt to turn back the clock and revive the Republic by assassinating Caesar was a flat failure. Caesar was a symptom of the inability of the Republic to deal with ambitious generals, and not the disease.
Every morning at Neutrons ‘R Us I provide a status report to our team in the area for which I am responsible; it’s all a lot of regulatory technobabble. I always end the report with an excerpt from Cicero, Seneca, Aurelius, etc., with the Latin or Greek original and the English translation. Over the past three days, I used Plutarch’s account of the assassination of Caesar, providing one paragraph at a time (yes, I cheated, and used an on-line resource because my Koine Greek is really rusty). I knew that at least one person – perhaps more – on receipt wants to save Democracy from Tyranny (you all know what that signifies), so I pointed out that the Senatorial conspirators wanted to save the Roman Republic from Caesar’s tyranny, but Empire still came. Sometimes I get feedback on my Greco-Roman meditations (that are usually Stoic ones), but not this time. And no one dared dispute that no matter the provocation, no matter how noble the aspirations, murder is always evil.
Plutarch’s Lives – Assassination of Caesar
So far, perhaps, these things may have happened of their own accord; the place, however, which was the scene of that struggle and murder, and in which the senate was then assembled, since it contained a statue of Pompey and had been dedicated by Pompey as an additional ornament to his theatre, made it wholly clear that it was the work of some heavenly power which was calling and guiding the action thither. Indeed, it is also said that Cassius, turning his eyes toward the statue of Pompey before the attack began, invoked it silently, although he was much addicted to the doctrines of Epicurus; but the crisis, as it would seem, when the dreadful attempt was now close at hand, replaced his former cool calculations with divinely inspired emotion.
Well, then, Anthony, who was a friend of Caesar’s and a robust man, was detained outside by Brutus Albinus, who purposely engaged him in a lengthy conversation; but Caesar went in, and the senate rose in his honor. Some of the partisans of Brutus took their places round the back of Caesar’s chair, while others went to meet him, as though they would support the petition which Tullius Cimber presented to Caesar in behalf of his exiled brother, and they joined their entreaties to his and accompanied Caesar up to his chair. But when, after taking his seat, Caesar continued to repulse their petitions, and, as they pressed upon him with greater importunity, began to show anger towards one and another of them, Tullius seized his toga with both hands and pulled it down from his neck. This was the signal for the assault. It was Casca who gave him the first blow with his dagger, in the neck, not a mortal wound, nor even a deep one, for which he was too much confused, as was natural at the beginning of a deed of great daring; so that Caesar turned about, grasped the knife, and held it fast. At almost the same instant both cried out, the smitten man in Latin: “Accursed Casca, what are you doing?” and the striker, in Greek, to his brother: “Brother, help!”
So the affair began, and those who were not privy to the plot were filled with consternation and horror at what was going on; they dared not fly, nor go to Caesar’s help, nay, nor even utter a word. But those who had prepared themselves for the murder bared each of them his dagger, and Caesar, hemmed in on all sides, whichever way he turned confronting blows of weapons aimed at his face and eyes, driven hither and thither like a wild beast, was entangled in the hands of all; for all had to take part in the sacrifice and taste of the slaughter. Therefore Brutus also gave him one blow in the groin. And it is said by some writers that although Caesar defended himself against the rest and darted this way and that and cried aloud, when he saw that Brutus had drawn his dagger, he pulled his toga down over his head and sank, either by chance or because pushed there by his murderers, against the pedestal on which the statue of Pompey stood. And the pedestal was drenched with his blood, so that one might have thought that Pompey himself was presiding over this vengeance upon his enemy, who now lay prostrate at his feet, quivering from a multitude of wounds. For it is said that he received twenty-three; and many of the conspirators were wounded by one another, as they struggled to plant all those blows in one body.
After reading this article and LQC’s comment below, I realize I am too dumb and ignorant for this blog….
Lead Kindly Light –> NO! Absolutely not! I always look forward to your comments. We all got talents. And my wife constantly reminds me of how, even though I’m a nuclear engineer, I can be terribly stupid and thickheaded.
After reading this article and LQC’s comment below, I realize I am too dumb and ignorant for this blog….
Not at all LKL! I always look forward to your comments. My ignorance of many subjects is vast, and over the past seventeen years that sea of ignorance has been alleviated by what I have learned from the commenters.
Interesting part of the assassination is that it delayed the end of the republic not at all. It just made the transition a bit messier and the follow on empire even less satisfactory. I have often wondered what would have been the nature of the empire had Caesar had lived considering his desire and talent for conquest.
In theory imperium (“unequal-ness”) belonged to the Roman people, who granted it to one of the two consuls (often by lot) at the start of a war. Later it passed to governors of provinces, according to the law for that province, and (in civil matters) meant the right to have the last word. “Imperium” before the time of Diocletian left local laws and leaders that did not clash with Roman authority in place.
Until the end of the third century, Italy was not under the Imperium Romanum (or Romanorum). There never was an “empire of Rome”, for Rome HAD the empire and was never UNDER it. Napoleonic France and Wilhelmine Germany followed the same naming practice: a “French Empire” and “German Empire”.
Another thing to LKL: the smartest people like you comment here. Bob Kurland, Guy McClung, Art Deco, of course Donald, Elaine Krewer (did I get that right?), Ezabelle, Greg Mockeridge, Father J, I can’t remember all the names! That’s why I come here: to learn from the smartest.
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