Cicero introduced to Rome the Greek ideas that formed the basis of Western thought for the next 2000 years. His works have sometimes been criticized as derivative, but he laid little claim to originality in his treatises. “They are transcripts,” he wrote to a friend. “I simply supply words and I’ve plenty of those.” It is a remarkably humble statement for a man who made such an extraordinary contribution to Western philosophy: he translated Greek works, invented Latin words to explain hitherto untranslatable concepts, and elucidated the main philosophical schools. His vast discourse amounted to an encyclopedia of Greek thought.
In the end, Cicero’s inability to hold his tongue proved his undoing. When Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son and the future Augustus, learned of Cicero’s remark about him—“the young man should be given praise, distinctions, and then disposed of”—it spelled doom for the orator. Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate shortly afterward, and Cicero was declared an enemy of the state. Pursued by soldiers as he halfheartedly fled Italy, Cicero was brutally murdered, his head hacked off, and the hand with which he had written the offending speeches displayed in the Roman forum.
“There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier,” Cicero reportedly said to his assassin, “but do try to kill me properly.”
CAESAR
100–44 BC
I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.
Gaius Julius Caesar, possessed of all the talents of war, politics and literature, was born of a noble but no longer rich family. Ruthless, cold and irrepressibly energetic, (yet an epileptic), he climbed the cursus honorum of Roman republican politics with astonishing speed, a rise made possible by the brutal civil war between Marius and Sulla. At age nineteen and keeping his distance from Sulla, he first distinguished himself in the wars of the east (where he was accused of a gay affair with the king of Bithynia). Caesar was captured by pirates, who ransomed him. Typically, once he was freed, he put together a flotilla and returned to hunt them down, killing all of them. Caesar was a keen practitioner of the adventurous school of politics and a serial seducer of married women—a sexual adventurer, nicknamed the bald adulterer who slept with the wives of his rivals Crassus and Pompey as well as the mother of his future assassin, Brutus. And then there was Cleopatra.
As a nephew of Marius, Caesar was almost murdered by Sulla—and was only able to begin his career after the dictator’s death. His rise was initially limited by the supremacy of Pompey the Great, the conqueror of Syria and Rome’s greatest soldier and wealthiest statesman, who had been awarded an exceptional three triumphs. Elected consul in 61 BC, Caesar managed to form the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus to rule Rome peacefully. But he really made his name with his astounding nine-year conquest of Gaul and the west for Rome, a campaign he later recounted (in the third person) in his Commentaries, revealing his expertise as a historian. He personally fought fifty battles. It was in Gaul that Caesar made his reputation—and his fortune.
Caesar was forty-one. It was late in life for a conqueror—Alexander was dead at thirty-three, Hannibal fought his last battle at forty-five, Napoleon and Wellington both fought their last battle, Waterloo, at forty-six.
In 54 and 55 BC he invaded, but did not occupy, Britain. In 53 the Triumvirate fell apart; Pompey dominated Rome and the Senate ordered Caesar to resign his command. Caesar refused. Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the river that separated his own Gallic provinces from Italy itself, marked his bid for power. Pompey retreated to rally his forces in Greece, and Caesar took Rome, where he was appointed dictator. Caesar defeated his enemies at Pharsalus in 48 BC. Pompey was afterward murdered in Egypt, where Caesar fell in love with the young queen Cleopatra and fought to establish her rule. They celebrated and rested on a luxurious cruise down the Nile. On the way home, he stopped in Asia to defeat King Pharnaces of Bosporus at the Battle of Zela, his quickest victory, which he celebrated with the laconic “Veni, vidi, vici”—“I came, I saw, I conquered.” Caesar fought and defeated the Pompeyans not only in Greece but in Italy, Spain and then in Africa. He finally returned to Rome in 46 BC to celebrate a record four triumphs. In 44 BC he planned new campaigns in the Balkans and against Parthia. In Rome, he was politically supreme, his power absolute and nearly monarchical, but though his supremacy was feared and resented, he did not rule by terror and was forgiving and clement, using his power for the greater good. Caesar turned down the throne but received the titles Father of the Country, imperator, dictator for life and consul for ten years, and he was declared to be sacred.
Caesar’s monarchical powers led to an assassination plot under his erstwhile supporters Brutus and Cassius. Caesar was warned that he might be assassinated on the Ides of March, but he ignored the warnings. On the Ides of March 44 BC, sixty senators attacked and stabbed Caesar as he received petitioners at a Senate meeting. When he lay dead, he was found to have 23 wounds. After the conspirators were defeated in a civil war, the empire was divided uneasily between Caesar’s commander Mark Antony and his heir, great-nephew and adopted son, Octavian. In 31 BC, however, Octavian defeated Antony at Actium, thereby uniting the Roman empire and emerging as its first emperor: Caesar became a title synonymous with “emperor” or his heir. “Caesar” came to signify legitimate power, the German “Kaiser” and Russian “Tsar” being its derivatives.
HEROD THE GREAT
c. 73–4 BC
Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.
Matthew 2:16
Herod the Great was the half-Jewish, half-Arab King of Judaea and Roman ally, whose thirty-two-year reign saw colossal achievements and terrible crimes. Famously handsome in his youth, he was a talented, energetic and intelligent self-made monarch who combined Hellenistic and Jewish culture, presiding over the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple, the embellishment and restoration of Jerusalem, and the building of great cities and impressive fortresses. He created a large, rich and powerful kingdom with a special status at the heart of Rome’s eastern empire. Yet in his lust for power, women and glory, he became the bloodthirsty villain of the Christian Gospels and the despot of Josephus’ Histories of the Jews. Even though he did not actually order the Massacre of the Innocents, as told in the Gospels, he killed three of his own sons, as well as his wife and many of his rivals, and used terror and murder to hold on to power right up until his death.
Born around 73 BC, Herod was the second son of Antipater, an Idumean convert to Judaism and chief minister of the Jewish king Hyrcanus II, great-grandson of Simon the Maccabee, who had established Judaea in 142 BC as an independent Jewish state. The Maccabees had ruled Judaea as both kings and high priests ever since, but to win back his throne in 63 BC, after his brother Aristobulus had wrested it from him, the ineffectual Hyrcanus was forced to ally himself with the Roman strongman Pompey the Great, ceding control of Judaea to Rome. Herod and his father Antipater were shrewd students of politics in Rome, always supporting the winner in the civil wars, from Pompey to Augustus, in order to keep power. When Julius Caesar subsequently appointed Antipater as governor of Judaea in 47 BC, Hyrcanus continued as king in name only, and though he survived a revolt in 43 BC led by his popular nephew Antigonus—a revolt in which Antipater was poisoned—he was exiled three years later. The Parthians, Rome’s rival empire, invaded and overran the Middle East, and Antigonus became king under their patronage. Herod escaped to the protection of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt and thence to Rome, where the two dominant strongmen, Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) appointed him king of Judaea. It took him three years to conquer his kingdom. When he took Jerusalem, he slaughtered forty-six of the Jewish ruling council.