Ides of March: Caesar Lives!

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2

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.

I have always been fascinated by alternate history.  What if Caesar had not been assassinated?  Caesar was 56 at the time of his death, and although his health was iffy, periodic seizures perhaps due to epilepsy, he probably had at least a handful of years ahead of him.  He had embarked on a few land reform programs and building programs, but he had not yet materially altered the Roman society he had been born into, and he probably regarded his dictatorship a personal one which would end at his death.

Plutarch believes that Caesar had an ambitious agenda at the time of his death:

Caesar’s many successes, however, did not divert his natural spirit of enterprise and ambition to the enjoyment of what he had laboriously achieved, but served as fuel and incentive for future achievements, and begat in him plans for greater deeds and a passion for fresh glory, as though he had used up what he already had. 5 What he felt was therefore nothing else than emulation of himself, as if he had been another man, and a sort of rivalry between what he had done and what he purposed to do. 6 For he p579 planned and prepared to make an expedition against the Parthians; and after subduing these and marching around the Euxine by way of Hyrcania, the Caspian sea, and the Caucasus, to invade Scythia; 7 and after overrunning the countries bordering on Germany and Germany itself, to come back by way of Gaul to Italy, and so to complete this circuit of his empire, which would then be bounded on all sides by the ocean. 8 During this expedition, moreover, he intended to dig through the isthmus of Corinth, and had already put Anienus in charge of this work; he intended also to divert the Tiber just below the city into a deep channel, give it a bend towards Circeium, and make it empty into the sea at Terracina, thus contriving for merchantmen a safe as well as an easy passage to Rome; 9 and besides this, to convert marshes about Pomentinum and Setia into a plain which many thousands of men could cultivate; and further, 10 to build moles which should barricade the sea where it was nearest to Rome, to clear away the hidden dangers on the shore of Ostia, and then construct harbours and roadsteads sufficient for the great fleets that would visit them. And all these things were in preparation.

I can believe that the old soldier longed for yet one more military campaign, especially to avenge the humiliating defeat incurred by Crassus at the hands of the Parthians nine years before.  However, what Plutarch states as to foreign wars has the feel of rumor about it, Roman scuttlebutt,  rather than a well thought out future military operation.  Work on the Tiber seems real enough, usually a preoccupation of whoever has ruled Rome for any time.

At any rate, such musings remain firmly in the realm of alternate history, as the daggers of his assassins brought the agenda of Caesar to an abrupt conclusion on that Ides of March more than 2000 years ago.