Forms of Power, from One Caesar to the Next

After Sulla, it was Julius Caesar who seized power in Rome. I wrote on that a few years back here and here. Tom Holland’s Rubicon has an excellent account on what happened next. Remember, Caesar himself had never declared himself a king, just “dictator for life” (Now you know where Calvin got that phrase!). That may sound like wordplay, but Caesar didn’t want to provoke a backlash:

“Caesar knew that the Romans would never tolerate a King Julius.”

 

Besides, his experiences in the East and Egypt had taught him something else:

“The forms taken by greatness were relative, varying from nation to nation.”

Kings, pharaohs, dictators – those were just forms of power:

“What mattered was not the form but the reality of power.”

Just to be sure, Caesar tested the Roman waters anyway:

“(Caesar) ostentatiously (and publicly) refused (Mark) Antony’s offer of a crown.”

Antony repeated the offer publicly again and Caesar turned it down again. Firmly. That’s what Shakespeare talked about via Mark Antony’s famous speech:

“I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?”

 

Cassius and Brutus were the leaders in the plan to assassinate the dictator for life. It was Brutus’s image of being an honourable man that led to his becoming the leader “worthy to save as the spokesperson and avenger of the Republic”. Cassius wanted to kill not just Caesar, but also Antony and “a wholesale destruction of the dictator’s regime”. Brutus, “the conscience of the conspiracy”, shot it down:

“They were conducting an execution, he had argued, not a squalid manoeuvre in a political fight.”

And so it came to be that when Caesar was assassinated, his regime (Mark Antony at the forefront) was still left standing.

 

Remember Antony’s repeated shots in Shakespeare’s speech (“Brutus is an honourable man”, and “noble Brutus”)? Well, Brutus was truly those things. The famous line from Antony’s famous:

“Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”

was as much about Caesar as it was about Mark Antony himself, who was doing his utmost to whip up the crowds and ride the anger to power himself.

 

It must have come as a rude shock to Antony when Caesar’s will declared not Antony, but Octavius (Caesar’s great-nephew) his heir. Octavius was just 18, and a nobody until then. Antony didn’t feel threatened. But Octavius would surprise everyone, and be the one who ultimately won. The fact that Octavius lived for a long time ensured that by the time he died, practically nobody alive remembered what the Republic even meant or whether it was a better system of governance. The name by which history remembers Octavius, the man who killed off the Republic for good? Augustus Caesar.

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