Caesar returned from Africa towards the end of July 46. His first weeks were spent organizing four Triumphs, which took place in late September and lasted an unheard-of eleven days. They marked his victories in Gaul and Egypt and over Pharnaces in Asia Minor and Juba in Africa. The number of enemies killed, excluding citizens, was claimed to be 1,992,000. Money to the value of 65,000 talents was carried in the parade. Games and shows were also staged. AS a personal tribute Caesar promoted a gladiatorial display in memory of his still much-missed daughter, Julia, and a public banquet with 22,000 tables. It was ill omened to triumph over Roman citizens and Pharsalus was passed by in silence, but the crowds showed their disapproval of painted representations of the deaths of the Republican leaders in Africa: Cato was depicted tearing himself apart like a wild animal. There were groans as the images passed along the streets. The all-conquering war leader had not yet registered how long a shadow Cato was to cast. Another incident alarmed superstitious Romans: the axle on Caesar’s chariot broke just opposite, of all places, the Temple of Fortune. AS atonement for the portent, he climbed the steps of the Capitol on his knees.
The public mood was unsettled. There were complaints about the amount of blood shed at the Games and the soldiery, annoyed by the extravagance, rioted. Caesar reacted with extraordinary fury: he grabbed one man with his own hands and had him executed. Two other soldiers were sacrificed by priests to Mars and the heads displayed outside his official residence, the State House. This was highly unusuaclass="underline" the most recent previous human sacrifice was reported to have been conducted by Catilina in the 60s to bind his fellow conspirators to his cause and before that one had to go back to the darkest days of the war against Hannibal more than one and a half centuries earlier. Perhaps the threat of a mutiny in the center of Rome was such a serious matter that the most extreme measures were required: alternatively, the soldiers’ offense may have broken some religious taboo. One way or the other the disinterested observer might have wondered about the stability of the regime.
The Forum of Julius, which had been under construction on the far side of the Senate House at Caesar’s expense since 54, was officially opened. It put the old Forum somewhat in the shade and eclipsed, both by its location and its extent, Pompeius’s theater beyond the pomoerium on the Field of Mars. Controversially, a gold statue of Cleopatra was erected next to one of Venus, whose temple was one of the Forum’s key features. About this time the Egyptian queen appeared in Rome in person with her court and her brother and co-Pharaoh, the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy XIV. Her motives for leaving her kingdom for what turned out to be an eighteen-month stay were probably mixed. She and Caesar no doubt wanted to continue their affair, but she also knew that her throne depended on her lover and the favor of Rome’s ruling class. Egypt was the last great imperial prize for the all-conquering Republic, and the danger of annexation was real. Cleopatra was prepared to devote all her personal charms to maintaining her country’s independence.
She also brought Caesarion with her, whose name drew scandalous attention to her liaison with the Dictator. She stayed in a garden villa of Caesar’s on the far side of the Tiber, where she must have held court with Egyptian splendor. Caesar was probably too busy to spend much time with her. She seems to have mixed on social terms with leading Romans, although she cannot have had much sympathy with antiauthoritarian attitudes. Cicero had some dealings with her and soon came to dislike her.
The Senate voted Caesar unprecedented honors, the most important of these extending his Dictatorship for ten years and the Controllership of Morals for three years and according him the right of nominating officeholders for election.
In the past, the Senate had been more or less a gentleman’s club, with a few New Men like Marius or Cicero added to the mixture from time to time. Caesar, wisely acknowledging the multicultural composition of both the Empire and the city of Rome itself, resumed the old custom of opening citizenship and power to defeated and annexed peoples. More radically, he enlarged the Senate, recruiting from the provinces and the Italian communities. Cicero was shocked to find himself sitting next to trousered Gauls, bankers, industrialists and farmers. Worse than that, former centurions and sons of freedmen were appointed to the Senate.
Caesar enacted at great speed a number of important and well-judged reforms. To many people’s surprise he acted evenhandedly and favored neither radical nor conservative causes, making decisions on the merits of a case. His first priority concerned the social problems of Rome and Italy. An exact census of the city’s population was conducted; the free distribution of corn (Rome’s equivalent of social security or unemployment payments) was limited; many of the urban proletariat were settled in citizen “colonies” overseas; special privileges were given to the fathers of large families in an attempt to increase the birth rate and so eventually replace the heavy casualties of war. In order to discourage the replacement of jobs for citizens by slave labor in the countryside, at least one third of the cattlemen on Italy’s large ranches had to be freeborn.
From January 1, 45, the calendar was sensibly extended to 365 days. Previously the year had had ten fewer days, necessitating occasional intercalary months and every other year the College of Pontiffs had usually inserted an additional month to keep the calendar in time with the sun. During the years running up to the civil war, this procedure had been neglected and the result was that the calendar was more than two months ahead of itself (this meant that when, for example, Cicero returned to Italy after the battle of Pharsalus in mid-October 48 according to contemporary dating, the real date was sometime in August). To effect the transition, Caesar inserted 67 days between November and December 46 and introduced the solar year of 365¼ days. In an acid reference to the new calendar, Cicero refused to be pleased with an autocrat’s decisions, however benign. When someone remarked that the constellation Lyra was due to rise on the following night, he replied: “Of course. It will be following orders.”
Apart from such sour wisecracks, Cicero had little to say about all this legislation, at least in the extant correspondence. (There are no long runs of letters from this period.) He was silent in the Senate and his attendance record does not survive. His general disenchantment, though, can be deduced from a letter to a friend towards the end of the year. He wrote: “I used to sit in the poop, you see, with the helm in my hands. But now I hardly have a place in the bilge.”
In order to be able to govern effectively, Caesar assembled a personal cabinet drawn from trusted lieutenants of his in Gaul, who worked alongside the official magistrates. He also seems to have laid the foundations of what eventually became the imperial civil service. Balbus was one of its key members and spent much of his time drafting decrees. Every now and then Cicero’s name was borrowed without prior consultation as having proposed an edict. “Don’t think I am joking,” he remarked. “Let me tell you I have had letters delivered to me from monarchs at the other end of the earth thanking me for my motion to give them the royal title, when I for my part was unaware of their existence, let alone of their elevation to royalty.”
For anyone with eyes to see, the old, level arena where equal competitors could contend had disappeared. Members of the ruling class who had survived the civil war were no longer genuinely elected to office but became functionaries whose imperium was not theirs but was on loan from the Dictator.