Perhaps, before going through your selection of books on Julius Caesar, you could briefly summarize who Caesar was. As a non-classicist, I think he conquered Gaul and Britain, and ended the Roman Republic by crossing the Rubicon. he then he was killed and said: ‘et tu, brute?’
yes, he conquered Gaul, between 58 and 50 a. c., killing perhaps a million Gauls in the process, and he too became too rich and too powerful for traditional Roman politics to cope with. No, he did not conquer Britain, although his skill as a self-propagandist has often led people to think that he did. He had two attempts to invade Britain, 55 and 54 BC. c., and was shot down both times, more by the weather than by the British.
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and yes, he crossed the rubicon, which was a shallow stream between gaul and italy. when crossing it with his army, in January 49 a. BC, he broke rules designed to keep victorious armies away from Rome, started a civil war, and gave the world a new term for an act from which there could be no going back.
Four years later, she might have said something like, ‘et tu brute,’ when she saw that one of her killers on the Ides of March was her lover’s much-loved son. but, if he did, it would probably have been in Greek. it was quite common for educated Romans to speak Greek. more importantly, he was a great writer in simple and elegant Latin. with words he established his place in the minds of his fellow Romans and millions of people later by saying what he had done, just as his death defined him for other writers.
by being murdered, he set a standard for thinking about the motives and consequences of murder. for the Romans, how you died was a very important summary of how you had lived. his death cemented what he had written about what he had done. and the consequences of his death made no one ever forget him.
His book, The Last Assassin, deals with the persecution of Julius Caesar’s assassins by his supporters, most notably his adopted son, Octavian, who would become Emperor Augustus. What does that campaign to get revenge on his killers tell us about the early establishment of his myth and reputation?
Caesar had many friends, as people who reach the top always have. but it turned out that some of those friends, for various reasons, were also his biggest enemies, so much so that they were ready to kill him.
each had slightly different motifs, some of which are related to aspects of caesar’s own character. some hated him because they hadn’t gotten as rich under his watch as they thought he had promised them they would, or expected to be. one of them didn’t like him because he had slept with his wife. some didn’t like him because he forgave them and made them feel, with his famous clemency, that he was somehow keeping that from them. they felt ashamed of having been pardoned.
Others killed him because they were jealous of other people who hadn’t been as close to Caesar in the hard days in Gaul, but who seemed to have done almost as well as them. there were many different personal reasons. one of them was upset because caesar had stolen some lions that he had planned to put in a circus show.
“for the Romans, how you died was a very important summary of how you had lived”
but everyone had this fear that caesar, even if he wasn’t a tyrant yet in 44 b.c. c., he would become a tyrant and the sole autocratic ruler of Rome. there were brief periods in roman history where there were unique autocratic rulers before, but the assassins had the idea that he was going to be different. they couldn’t know that, of course, but they thought he would become some sort of hereditary monarch and impose a different kind of tyranny that they couldn’t get rid of.
So, they argued among themselves, probably suppressing their personal motivations, about whether it was right to kill a man like Caesar, who had done much for Rome, but was now on the brink of, or above, the abyss. on the verge of establishing a tyranny. Sophisticated arguments were made as to whether he should be killed or whether the civil war likely to follow his death would be even worse.
So, there were these discussions about the bad consequences of tyranny versus civil war. that discussion was held at a pretty high philosophical level, but it was coupled with a lot of those personal motivations to kill him. philosophical arguments and individual personal motivations together address the question of who was caesar.
let’s move on to the books you recommend about julius caesar. the first is et tu, brute?: the assassination of caesar and the political assassination of greg woolf. tell us why you have chosen this.
having to choose five books about julius caesar has been a great challenge. Caesar is someone you have to look at through many different lenses and prisms. he is not an easy character to see directly. looking at it could be compared to looking at the sun. he was not the sun, except to some of his most extreme admirers. but if you try to look at him from only one direction, he is quite blinding. so the books that i’ve chosen, and greg woolf is a really good introduction to this, they try to look around julius caesar, to look at the ways that different people saw him at the time and have seen him since. Woolf is a good account of how Caesar got to the Ides of March and what happened on that day. It’s quick and short and a very good start. but there is also a long section on how the assassination reverberated throughout history, across Europe and across the Atlantic.
if he didn’t say ‘et tu, brute?’ what did he say?
‘et tu, brute?’ It was one of Shakespeare’s many contributions. if he said such a thing, it is more likely that he said the Greek words, ‘kai su, teknon’, which means ‘and you, my son’ and has been variously interpreted as ‘even you, whom I have loved so ‘. much’ and ‘even you, my mistress’s son’ or ‘you too are going to be killed in turn’. maybe it meant ‘see you in hell’ or a version of ‘up to you, brute’. .’, the Greek phrase has been interpreted in many different ways and the ‘et tu, brute?’ from shakespeare was just a convenient way for shakespeare to say what a roman might have said.
and just before moving on to the next book: we all know how caesar died, but where did he come from? Was he born into a Roman senatorial family or was he raised by his own means?
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He was born into a good family. all the people we talk about in history, all caesar’s assassins, were part of the elite, so to speak, although the man who has interested me most lately, cassius parmensis, the last surviving assassin, was not one of the better, which somehow made his eyes a good lens through which to watch the action.
caesar was a member of one of the elite families that had been rivals, fought and cooperated with each other, and fought each other for hundreds of years, and had made rome the extraordinary conqueror of so much. Little by little, it turned out that the larger the empire of Rome and the larger the army that its generals had, the more impossible it was to control them from the center. so, caesar, in gaul, with many legions, was much more powerful than the senate, which was supposed to be his master. so the system was at risk of tipping over under its own weight.
“caesar had many friends… but it turned out that some of those friends, for various reasons, were also his greatest enemies”
but there were still people who thought they could shore it up, that the problem was not the system but caesar himself. These people were also among the elite, not among the people or the army, which greatly loved Caesar, as the assassins discovered to their cost. These assassins thought that if they could get rid of Caesar, they could once again divide power in Rome among themselves, as they had always done.
let’s move on to american caesar: douglas macarthur 1880-1964 by william manchester. This is the life of American General Douglas MacArthur, who ruled occupied Japan after World War II. why did you choose this book?
This book is a great example of how long the idea of Caesar lived in the minds of people who write about soldiers and politicians. macarthur was an extraordinary figure. he prided himself on his superiority over everyone else, on his speed and imagination. he didn’t like trench warfare or anything slow. he appreciated the unexpected. he was an egomaniac, not for nothing, claimed by donald trump as his favorite general, and often quoted by people who want to fight the establishment, who want to argue that the establishment is always laborious and slow and wants to do things as usual . done.
donald trump liked to compare himself to douglas macarthur just like macarthur’s biographer liked the comparison to julius caesar. they were people who did things differently, who subverted the ideas of the elite to actually work for the people. This is a continuing thread of thought since Caesar’s death, and the background to much of Donald Trump’s mind.
and was macarthur himself consciously inspired by caesar’s?
Yes, it did, in many different ways. Caesar’s writings were designed to make him a hero at home, even when he fought far away. and macarthur in the pacific islands was a master at making sure everyone back home knew what he was doing and who was setting the big policies. he was never in retreat, only ‘advancing in another direction’, much like julius caesar’s thinking. When MacArthur said, ‘The most important rules are the ones you break,’ he too was echoing Caesar. he ruled post-war japan like a caesar. Eventually, the US president at the time, Harry Truman, got fed up with this, decided that he was risking a war with China over Korea, and in April 1951 ordered him to come home.
did macarthur have any political ambitions? Did he end up in the senate or something?
He made a lot of noise for a long time, trampling the whole country. he made a fortune talking. and it was a long time before he gave up the idea that he might have his own political ambitions. he was an egomaniac. he had political ambitions, but he was frustrated. He died just a few months after the assassination of President Kennedy. one of the great lines of it was that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. douglas macarthur, once president truman fired him, he faded, until donald trump brought back the american caesar. That could have been the fate of Roman Caesar as well, but because he was assassinated, a certain idea of Caesar was pushed forward thousands of years.
let’s move on to george bernard shaw’s play, caesar and cleopatra. Tell us a bit about the play and why Shaw was drawn to this particular story. what is the twist it gives?
shaw had a very high view of himself and constantly compared himself to shakespeare. he thought that shakespeare had been wrong about the romans when it came to handling power. his idea was that shakespeare was very good at dealing with failure and romance, but not very good at dealing with the great hero.
shaw paints a portrait of caesar in which his motivations, those that romantic biographers and filmmakers like to portray as having to do with love, were actually shaped out of hard and brutal political realities and calculations. Shaw was commenting, in a sense, on the British occupation of Egypt, which he had begun in 1882, and relating it to the Roman occupation. He took the harshest and most unromantic view of that part of Caesar’s life, in contrast to the view presented by so many short story writers, balladeers and Shakespeare.
shaw was very interested in nietzsche and thought that caesar was an example of the “new man” who would solve the problems of the old world. He saw Pompey, whom Caesar had defeated after crossing the Rubicon, as part of the old world that had to be cast aside.
shaw was writing at a time when many people were willing to discard the old and corrupt and find new superheroes. he thought that caesar was such a great man that he had not been able to find a vehicle to show his greatness.
And is it a good play or a good read? do you wear regularly still?
It’s funny and brave and was a big hit on broadway back in the day. It would probably be considered a bit dated now, but Shaw is a great playwright to read. he always wrote long introductions to his works explaining what the work was about. You know what Shaw was trying to say about Julius Caesar, even if the acting doesn’t quite say it.
let’s move on to the next of your books, the complete commentaries of julius caesar. There is probably not much need for an explanation of why he has chosen them, but tell us a bit about them and also a bit about why Caesar wrote them: It is quite unusual for a general to be a great literary figure.
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He had the talent and he had extraordinary stamina. he had people to help him, secretaries and copyists. some of his assistants were actually people who helped him with his writing. one of the things everyone said about him was that he had this gift for what we might now call multitasking. he could dictate six or seven letters, write a speech, and watch where the enemy was headed, all at the same time. he probably exaggerated himself enormously but, clearly, then as now, some people are much better at it than others.
sounds a bit like churchill.
exactly. And I think if you have that ability and other people don’t, it’s useful to highlight it because it makes you seem somewhat superhuman, even if you’re actually doing something that a lot of regular people can do as well. We all know people who can only focus on one thing and people who can do four or five things at once. if one of those skills is elegant, clear writing, that’s a rare and very useful gift.
“‘et tu, brute?’ was one of shakespeare’s many contributions.”
one of the reasons caesar’s gallic wars became a staple text for generations upon generations of british, german, french, and american schoolchildren was not just because it showed a hero in his own voice, if you think about Caesar as a hero. but he also had that extraordinarily disciplined, economical, and beautiful use of language. he was an extraordinary writer and i don’t think five books on julius caesar would be complete without the complete works.
These include the famous Gallic Wars, but also books on the period covered by Shaw’s work, the so-called Alexandrian War, the time when he was fighting for Cleopatra to settle in Egypt. This was probably written by admirers of Caesar, the so-called ‘continuators’, who fought with him in Gaul and other war zones and finished the books after his death. and you can really tell the difference in style between the books that caesar himself wrote and the rest. continuators keep the character for caesar but cannot match the latin for caesar.
Were they written for the record or did they serve a political purpose?
The comments absolutely served a political purpose, which is one of the reasons they are so clear and focused. he was fighting away from rome for years and years at a time. but he still needed the support of the romans and he wanted them to know what he was doing, just like macarthur, following him, did.
so the comments about every year of the war in gallia found their way, quite deliberately, back to rome and were copied and people were talking about them and saying, “isn’t caesar doing fantastically well?” the assassins really got it very wrong, because the people knew that caesar was doing all these great things, the soldiers knew that he was doing these great things. By modern standards, he was a genocidal egomaniac, but on his terms, Rome was doing just fine.
that point of view was greatly advanced by the image of caesar that caesar himself had created. the comments were a very important part of projecting that image, so to speak, over the senate, to the Roman people. again, it’s that kind of language you get from trump and other populists: you can bypass the elite and somehow get your message directly to the common people.
although we don’t know much about the publication of caesar’s work, it’s pretty clear that people in rome had a very good idea of what he had achieved and these comments were their way of making sure that it was.
So, comments were a version of twitter from the 1st century BC. c., indeed.
to some extent. but they were more extensive and connected than that. they were more like newscasts, really. they were long and described every battle, or rather every battle he wanted you to know about. any battle he lost or nearly lost could be considered not a battle at all and quietly eliminated. but he was judicious. not everything went well for him. When it came to Britain, he wrote an account of his two attempts to conquer Britain, both of which were failures. he found reasons to explain that. he didn’t pretend it was all absolutely wonderful, which, of course, probably in itself enhanced the credibility of what he said.
do you make any sense of it by reading his comments about what he was like as a private individual, beyond the carefully selected public figure?
no, there is no sense of what he was doing at night. that would have been unusual. I don’t think that meant Caesar was particularly secretive. It’s just not the particular style of that particular book, any more than Douglas MacArthur, when he was broadcasting her exploits at home, would have told you about her mistress in her hotel room. he gives the impression of someone who was quick, decisive, successful and brutal when he had to be. His writings also strongly emphasize his capacity for mercy, a virtue that was very important to Caesar but would also embarrass and anger some of those who became his assassins.
let’s move on to “infamy! infamy! they all have it with me!” which is an essay by nicholas cull on imperial projections in modern popular culture.
yes. It is a good part of a very good book. Carry on Cleo, one of the most popular carry on movies, is another important way to see julius caesar. The people who made the movies would probably have laughed at the idea of them being a sociopolitical text, but Nicholas Cull is right to present them that way. the plot of carry on cleo is a mix of the stories of caesar and cleopatra, anthony and cleopatra, plus a bit about the invasion of britain all mixed into one. it’s a good reminder that much of the history we read that seems so clear-cut could be a mixed bag. but it’s also a kind of triple satire: on Caesar himself, on the British Empire (which was rapidly fading by the 1960s), and, perhaps most importantly, a satire on the new American hegemony. The entire film is based on the set of the great Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor movie Cleopatra.
The producers went on to say that they could make an entire movie about Cleopatra in the time it would take Joseph Mankiewicz and his team to paint a wall on a set. carry on cleo was done cheaply, very quickly and had a wonderful script. and it’s got the amazing murder line where kenneth williams, like a very camp julius caesar, runs out a door with a dagger in his back and a bunch of angry killers behind him, and yells, ‘infamy! infamy! you’ve all earned it!’ many fans of post-war British comedy say the line was never better anywhere.
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