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Book Review, 27 July 2006 Good luck: a virtue of an emperor
Caesar: the life of a colossus Dignity, always dignity," purrs Gene Kelly at the beginning of Singing in the Rain as he explains his greatness to fawning reporters. But what we actually see on the screen is a succession of banana-skin moments from his childhood and youth. To us moderns, dignity is a bubble we love to prick. To the ancients it was a bubble worth dying for, and it's not that they lacked a sense of humour. Adrian Goldsworthy in this new biography does not challenge the accepted but astonishing fact that Julius Caesar, for the sake of his personal dignitas, crossed the Rubicon River and fought a civil war which left thousands of Romans dead. It's interesting to read in Suetonius, however, that the baker's mule cart he'd hired to get across the Rubicon got lost and blundered around till dawn; not dignified. In the vicious late Roman republic you look in vain for a wider moral vision. Goldsworthy shows Caesar's adoption of popular causes to be relentlessly self-serving. But he had a genius for practical administration and a natural "generosity, charm and competence". His "perpetual dictatorship" in 46 BC was not a reign of terror, but, unlike Octavian (later Emperor Augustus), he didn't curb his impatience with obstructive formalities. Dignity got in the way again. Rome's top dogs found their own paths to greatness blocked and shouted "Liberty!", or, as Shakespeare put it, "we petty men/ Walk under his huge legs, and peep about/ To find ourselves dishonourable graves ..." Cato the Younger, later canonised as a stoical republican zealot, was a master of the art of quashing enlightened and beneficial reforms by speeches that went on till closing time. Like most senators, he preferred a festering problem to a solution that might bring too much glory to any individual. It is typical of the times that no one, not even Cicero, liked him when he was alive but they eulogised him when dead. The Republic, too, was more lovely when it was dead. Cato's famous virtue doesn't bear close inspection. Public life was a high-wire act requiring bribery, violence and debt which could only be paid off by success. A consul who'd "saved his country" might be impeached the following year by a cabal of enemies. No wonder these soldier-politicians became increasingly reluctant to lay down their legions or their imperium at the end of a year's office. Goldsworthy avoids "assuming that the Civil War and the collapse of the Republic were inevitable" but fails to convince one otherwise. The fatuousness of the republican call to arms was bleakly demonstrated when the senators stood with their daggers round Caesar's corpse, uncertain what to do next. Caesar seems to have viewed the possibility of assassination with a nonchalant fatalism. He had lived long enough, he said, either for Nature or for glory, and the best way to die was "unexpectedly". He knew that his death would plunge Rome into further civil wars. If he thought his enemies understood this too, he overestimated them. Goldsworthy speculates interestingly about his jaded state of mind after Pharsalus when his great rival Pompey was dead and he cruised up the Nile with Cleopatra. Pompey had been his son-in-law, his friend and, for a shorter time, his enemy, but he was above all the only other general Caesar had ever cared to impress. Plutarch suggested that, lacking any equals, Caesar, who just before his death was about to set off and conquer Parthia, had been reduced to competing with himself. As Chateaubriand said, writing of Napoleon: "great men, a very small family upon earth, can unfortunately find no one but themselves to imitate them". In a long narrative of fathers, sons, brothers and uncles with almost identical names who constantly changed sides, clarity is the first requirement, even if it adds to the number of pages. This Goldsworthy achieves. He is careful and judicious in his analyses, seeking to integrate the man of action, the scholar, the showman, the lover, legal reformer, town planner - the list is endless. What he doesn't do is engage in the stylistic flourishes which a life of such enigmatic grandiosity naturally inspires; as an expert in Roman warfare he is at his best in the heat of the front line. The rapid feats of engineering, the jab of the pilum, and thunder of Gallic cavalry, the extraordinary loyalty of veterans and their general's "finger-tip" feel for the battle, come wonderfully alive. Vercingetorix and Pompey are the enemies you feel for most, but the others of the Pompeian party are unattractive and display none of that clemency which Caesar claimed, along with good luck, as his foremost virtue. Cato so detested the prospect of Caesar's clemency that he tore out his own entrails. In this equivocal ambience, the only thing you can root for is charisma. However much Goldsworthy reminds us of Caesar's cruelties, the contest between the villain with panache and his obstinate, priggish enemies is an unequal one. Even the grudging Cicero admitted that this conqueror of the world was good company at dinner.  |
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