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Essential Histories Special 06, Rome at War: Caesar and His Legacy

by: Kate Gilliver, Adrian Goldsworthy, Michael Whitby, foreword by Steven Saylor

Osprey Publishing Product Description:

& 8220;The story of a small town that rose to become the most powerful empire of the ancient world has been an inspiration to generations of people. Even after the collapse of the Roman Empire, many nations and their leaders have styled themselves 'heirs of Rome', emulating its society, technology and warfare. This book details the wars that shaped the Roman Empire, from the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar and the subsequent civil war between Caesar and Pompey which tore apart the ageing Republic, through the expansion of the early Empire to its 'decline and fall'. Contains material previously published in Essential Histories 21: ‘Rome at War’, Essential Histories 43: ‘Caesar's Gallic Wars’ and Essential Histories 42: ‘Caesar's Civil War’.& 8221;

From the Foreword:

"'Julius Caesar stood before a statue of Alexander the Great and wept', Gore Vidal tells us. 'for Alexander at 29 had conquered the world and at 32 was dead, while Caesar, a late starter of 33 had not yet subverted even his own state.'

In due course, Caesar would become a conqueror himself, then a revolutionary, and finally dictator for life of the Roman world. His achievements would more than match those of Alexander, but at the age of 56 he would nonetheless feeI compelled to follow in Alexander's footsteps and head eastward in pursuit of further conquests. For better or worse, his campaign against the Parthians never got past the planning stages, thanks to the assassins who abruptly-ended all Caesar's ambitions on the Ides of March, 44 BC.

Like Alexander, Caesar conquered the world but never had the chance to rule it; he can be assessed as a general, but not as a king. And like Alexander, Caesar would cast a long shadow across those who followed, all the way from Augustus, the founder of empire, to the rulers who oversaw the Empire's dismantlement and gradual eclipse. Seven centuries after Caesar, emperors who no longer ruled from Rome but from Constantinople, who no longer issued orders in Latin but in Greek, who no longer sacrificed to Jupiter but instead shared the body of Christ, and whom we would call Byzantine rather than Roman, would nonetheless declare themselves the heirs of Caesar and do their best to emulate him.

Caesar was a tireless self-promoter as well as a bold and skilful general, and thanks to his propagandistic memoirs we know a great deal about his campaigns against the Gauls. We must assume that most contemporary Romans approved of Caesar's actions in Gaul, even when those actions amounted to what we would call atrocities. Consider the massacre of the Usipi and Tencteri, the details of which we know from Caesars own cold-blooded account: 'Because they had brought all their possessions with them when they had abandoned their homes and crossed the Rhine, there were also many women and children, and they began to flee in all directions. Caesar ordered the cavalry to hunt them down.' No mercy was shown. as Kate Gilliver reminds us in her study of Caesar's Gallic Wars in Part I, and the result was a bloody slaughter of non-combatants. Undoubtedly many citizens back in Rome proudly applauded such a result, however, some expressed dismay at Caesar's conduct; Cato demanded that Caesar should be tried for war crimes, and his intransigence on the matter was one of the issues that eventually led to civil war. Of course, Cato was no less a politician than Caesar, and it may be, as Gilliver asserts, that the concern of those wishing to prosecute Caesar 'was aimed more at destroying Caesar's reputation than exacting justice.'

Historians who lived a century ago, looking back on Napoleon from a safe distance and unable to imagine what awaited the world with Hitler and Stalin, tended to be a bit starry-eyed in their assessment of Caesar. Nowadays, historians feel obliged to tome to grips with the human suftering of the Gallic Wars, when as Adrian Goldsworthy notes. Caesar and his legions fought 'with extreme brutality, some sources claiming that over a million people had been killed in less than a decade.' Of course, genocide was not the actual goal of Caesar's campaign; survivors were valuable as slaves, and the sale of humans made Caesar a very wealthy man.

His successes in Gaul also put Caesar in a position to make his next move: a war against Rome itself, or more precisely, against his rivals in the ruling class. The complicated events that led to the Roman Civil War have seldom been so concisely laid out as in Goldsworthy's evaluation in Part II. Equally cogent is his assessment of the two ways of viewing Caesar and his legacy. In between the course of battles from Spain to Egypt, and the interplay of personalities still vivid across the centuries - Cato, Clodius, Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Cleopatra, Antony and the rest - make for one of the most fascinating epochs in all of human history.

The chaos of civil war was eventually replaced by the Pax Romana of the Empire, which reached its height under Hadrian and the Antonines. two centuries after Caesar; but then, to borrow from the historian Cassius Dio, 'a realm of gold' turned 'to one of iron and rust'. The era of which Michael Whitby writes in Part III finds the ship which Caesar launched to be overloaded, springing one leak after another, encircled by sharks, and sailing dangerously close to the rocks.

The emperors and generals of this era would surely have emulated Caesar - and, looking east, Alexander - if they could have, but most of their energy was consumed with putting down palace intrigues, snuffing out treacherous kinfolk, fretting about taxation, bracing for barbarian invasions, and keeping up with the Persians - the rival 'superpower' of the day. Justinian and his general Belisarius enjoyed the satisfaction of reconquest, but those who came before and after learned to 1ive with disaster as a daily occurrence; no wonder apocalyptic religion took such a firm hold on the popular imagination. The emperor Heraclius, who should be better known, lost an empire, then regained it, then lost it again to the sudden and overwhelming rise of Islam, which dismembered the enfeebled Roman Empire for good and put an end forever to the dreams of any would-be Caesars.

Whitby's task - to give coherence to a tumultuous era of lowered expectations -is more problematic than that of Gilliver and Goldsworthy, and the sources upon which he must draw are more scattered and obscure. Nonetheless, this era of decline and fall, which so inspired Gibbon, casts its own spell - not the sun-drenched allure of the Classical World with its godlike mortals emulating the conduit of all-too-human gods, but the more mysterious, shadowy, ethereal fascination of the Byzantines, who charted a path away from earthly glory toward an invisible empire which they declared to be divine."

Steven Saylor

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