According to one of his companions on the journey – Gaius Asinius Pollio, historian, senator and founder of Rome’s first public library – when he finally approached the Rubicon after some hesitation, Caesar quoted in Greek two words from the Athenian comic playwright Menander: literally, in a phrase borrowed from gambling, ‘Let the dice be thrown.’ Despite the usual English translation – ‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty, a sense that everything now was in the lap of the gods. Let’s throw the dice in the air and see where they will fall! Who knows what will happen next?
What did happen next was four years of civil war. Some of Caesar’s supporters in Rome rushed to join him in northern Italy, while Pompey was pushed into the command of the ‘anti-Caesarians’ and decided to leave Italy and fight from his power base in the East. In 48 BCE his forces were defeated at the Battle of Pharsalus in northern Greece, and Pompey was murdered soon after, when he tried to take refuge in Egypt. But despite his famed speed (celeritas was one of his watchwords), Caesar still took three more years, until 45 BCE, to overcome his Roman adversaries in Africa and Spain, as well as to squash trouble from Pharnaces, the son and usurper of Mithradates. Between crossing the Rubicon and his death in March 44 BCE, Caesar made only fleeting visits to Rome; the longest was the five-month stretch from October 45 BCE. From the point of view of the city, he became a largely absent dictator.
In some ways, this civil war between Pompey and Caesar was as odd as the Social War. How many people it directly involved is impossible to say. The priority of many of the inhabitants of Italy, and of the empire, was probably to avoid getting inadvertently caught up in the struggles of rival armies and to keep clear of the crime wave that the war unleashed in Italy.
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Julius Caesar was murdered on 15 March 44 BCE, the Ides on the Roman dating system. In parts of the Mediterranean world the civil war had by no means ended. Pompey’s son Sextus still had a force of at least six legions in Spain and was continuing to fight for his father’s cause. But Caesar was mustering a vast force of almost 100,000 soldiers for an attack on the Parthian Empire, a revenge for the ignominious defeat of Crassus at Carrhae and a useful opportunity for military glory against a foreign rather than a Roman enemy. It was just a few days before he was due to leave for the East, on 18 March, that a group of twenty or so disgruntled senators, supported actively or passively by a few dozen more, killed him.
Appropriately, the deed took place in a new senate house, which Pompey had built into his new theatre complex, in front of a statue of himself, which ended up splattered with Caesar’s blood. Thanks in part to the reworking of the theme in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the murder of the Roman dictator in the name of libertas has been the template for last-ditch opposition to tyranny and for principled assassination ever since. It was no coincidence, for example, that John Wilkes Booth used ‘Ides’ as the code for the day on which he planned to kill Abraham Lincoln. But as a backwards glance through Roman history shows, this was the last in a series of murders of popular, radical but arguably too powerful politicians that started with the lynching of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE. The question must be: what was Caesar trying to do and what made him so unacceptable to this group of senators that assassination seemed the only way out?
Despite his rare appearances in Rome, Caesar initiated a vast programme of reforms going beyond even the scale of Sulla’s. One of them governs life even now. For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping. The traditional Roman year was only 355 days long, and it had for centuries been the job of Roman priests to add in an extra month from time to time to keep the civic calendar in step with the natural seasons. For whatever reason – probably a combination of lack of expertise and lack of will – they had signally failed to get their calculations correct. The result was that the calendar year and the natural year were sometimes many weeks apart, with the Roman equivalent of harvest festivals falling when the crops were still growing and the climate in what was called April feeling more like February (which it was). The truth is that it is always dangerous in Republican history to assume that any given date is an accurate indication of the weather. Using Alexandrian know-how, Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.
Other measures harked back to familiar themes from the previous hundred years. Caesar launched, for example, a large number of new overseas colonies to resettle the poor from the city of Rome, following up Gaius Gracchus’ initiative with a successful foundation at Carthage. It was this, presumably, that allowed him to get away with reducing the number of recipients of free grain by about half, to 150,000 in all. He also extended Roman citizenship to those living in the far north of Italy, beyond the river Po, and at least proposed granting Latin status to the population of Sicily. But he had even more ambitious plans to overhaul Roman government, including attempts to regularise – even micromanage – all kinds of aspects of civic organisation, both in Rome and throughout Italy. These ranged from questions of who could hold office in local Italian communities (no gravediggers, pimps, actors or auctioneers unless they were retired) to issues of road maintenance (householders to be responsible for the footpath in front of their house) and traffic management (no heavy-goods vehicles in Rome during the daytime except for the purposes of temple building or repair, or for removing demolition rubble).
Caesar also became part of the calendar, as well as rewriting it. It may not have been until after his assassination that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius, our July, after him; Roman writers do not always make the chronology clear. But it was overweening honours of that sort, voted during his lifetime by a compliant senate, combined with his more or less official takeover of the democratic processes that provoked the deadly opposition. This went far beyond his head on the coinage. He was allowed to wear triumphal dress almost wherever he liked, including the triumphal laurel wreath, which he found convenient for disguising his bald patch. Temples and a priesthood in his honour seem to have been promised too, and his statue was placed in all the existing temples of Rome. His private house was even to be decorated with a triangular gable (or pediment), to give it the appearance of a temple, the home of a god.
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