Clearly, Stoicism went well with the Roman sense of duty and pietas. The Romans with whom it was popular—and there were many—were perhaps less interested in the Stoic view that all men were necessarily imperfect than in Stoic injunctions to face misfortune, grin and bear it, which had a powerful resonance throughout the culture of Rome and with many of its intellectuals and public figures. Cicero was one of these, and he also had a strong philosophical and meditative bent, which displayed itself in his many orations and voluminous writings. The great project of his political life was holding and defending the ancestral system of republican government. He wanted to bring about a “concord” of the conservative, senatorial aristocrats and the rapacity of the growing class of equestrians, but this was beyond his powers, as it would have been beyond anyone’s. Neither Cicero nor anyone else could deflect the movement toward one-man rule in Rome, which, in the first century B.C.E., was the chief direction of its politics.
The emblematic figure of this movement was Julius Caesar.
Some family lines last for centuries, are of the utmost nobility, and yet for unknown reasons produce no individuals of special achievement or eminence. One of these was the Julian clan—one of the oldest and most distinguished in Rome, with a generally accepted claim to be descended from Aeneas himself, from his mother, the goddess Venus, and from his son Iulus. Most of its members did little and were mediocrities. But there were two blazing exceptions, men who utterly transformed Rome, its internal politics, its culture, and its relations with the rest of the world, and were, without competition, the outstanding figures of power in their times.
The first of these was Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.E.). The second was his grandnephew, his legal and political heir and Rome’s first emperor, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (63 B.C.E.–14 C.E.) known at first as Octavian and later, to Rome and the world, after his thirty-sixth birthday, as Caesar Augustus.
Julius Caesar’s career had a slow start. He had spent the years 75–74 B.C.E. studying oratory and rhetoric in Rhodes, from which he emerged as a perfected and highly polished speaker, superbly equipped for public political life. He was not a florid speechifier—that, as anyone knows who reads the crisp, unadorned prose of his later war commentaries, was not his way—but he had an exemplary talent for singling out the heart of an issue and driving straight to it. On the voyage back from Rhodes, he gave a foretaste of his future toughness when his ship was taken by pirates and Caesar briefly became their prisoner. He swore that he would crucify every last one, and in time he did.
Cicero, so great an orator himself, was a more astute critic of oratory than any man alive and called him the most elegant of all Roman speakers. But others could perhaps rival Julius Caesar on the podium. Where he excelled was in the manipulation of politics and, later, in the command of armies on the battlefield. In politics, he first briefly inclined toward the optimates, or “top people.” This was the name adopted by the Roman upper class, the party of wealth and power, which defined itself and its interests against the populares, a “people’s party” of workers, farmers, and small traders originally mobilized and led by the brothers Gracchi c. 133 B.C.E. Before going to Rhodes to study rhetoric, Caesar had confirmed his growing allegiance to the popular party by marrying Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, who was a chief opponent of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138–78 B.C.E.), leader of the optimates, who had given Pompey his basic political education.
Sulla was a vengeful and merciless patrician, who by sheer drive and cunning had obtained a consulship and the command against Mithridates, the Persian king of Pontus, who had rashly invaded Rome’s provinces in Asia. Political enemies at home, members of the populares faction, canceled Sulla’s command, whereupon he retreated to Capua and gathered six legions that were prepared to go with him against the government in Rome and, once they had taken over the city, to go after Mithridates in Asia. In 86 B.C.E. Sulla and his legions invaded Greece and captured Athens. From there he returned to Italy, his army laden with booty. Landing at Brundisium in 83 B.C.E., he and his army were joined by Pompey, Marcus Crassus, and an ultraconservative senator, Metellus Pius, with all their men. The Roman government was not able to withstand them for long. Within a year, Sulla had taken Rome and was proclaimed dictator of Italy. He now began a reign of terror through “proscription,” publicly listing for death everyone who was or might have been an enemy; any soldier could murder such enemies, their property went to the state (namely, to Sulla), and all citizens were encouraged to betray and denounce whomsoever they chose—it was proleptic Stalinist justice, pure and simple. In this way, Sulla is thought to have eliminated forty senators and 1,600 equites, knights, whose sons and grandsons were also excluded from public life. Such was the exemplar and political patron of Pompey.
In 68 B.C.E. Caesar had been dispatched as a quaestor or magistrate to Hispania Ulterior (Further Spain); in that year, his wife, Cornelia, died, and he made what was clearly a political marriage to Pompeia, a girl in Pompey’s family. Now he was elected an aedile, a position of great importance to the plebeians of Rome, since it gave him charge of temples, markets, and (most telling of all) the corn supply, a great collector of votes. During this time, he spent lavishly on the restoration of temples and the holding of public entertainment, especially gladiatorial shows. He had to borrow the money from the immensely wealthy consul Marcus Crassus, destroyer of Spartacus’ slave revolt, who distrusted Pompey but was not above financing his son-in-law’s strategies for ingratiating himself with the commoners. Naturally, the cost of winning popularity in this way put Caesar heavily in debt to Crassus and the optimates, who did not altogether trust him. To get further as a politician, he needed to bypass their suspicions: to become a consul and then obtain a major military command, whose victories would be as irrefutable as Pompey’s. In Rome, Caesar had in 59 B.C.E. become a senator. He made an alliance with Pompey and Crassus (the “First Triumvirate”) and joined with Pompey—now consul—in repealing some of Sulla’s more extreme and biased alterations to the constitution. There was no sign, as yet, of any discord between Pompey and Caesar. In fact, in 59 B.C.E. Pompey married Julia, Caesar’s own daughter by his first wife, Cornelia, thus completing a neat matrimonial symmetry.
In 58, as proconsul, Caesar took on the control of both Cis- and Transalpine Gaul (the Po Valley in northern Italy, and southern France, which he called “the province,” a name commemorated ever since as Provence) as well as Illyricum (Dalmatia). From 58 to 50 B.C.E., Caesar concentrated on Rome’s northern, Gallic frontiers, methodically wearing down all resistance from them. He did not hesitate when it came to deciding what Rome’s overseas policies should be. Rome had to conquer and intimidate any state or people that might give it trouble. That had been the chief lesson of Cannae. Everyone concurred in this, including Cicero, who rather disliked Caesar personally but admired him politically:
He believed not only that it was necessary to wage war against those who he saw were already in arms against the Roman people, but also that all Gaul must be subjected to our sway. And so he has fought with the fiercest peoples, in gigantic battles against the Germans and Helvetians, with the greatest success. He has terrified, confined and subdued the rest, and accustomed them to obey the empire of the Roman people.…