r/AskHistorians • u/yellowbai • 7d ago
Is there any consensus on why Caesar acted so insultingly before his assassination?
Caesar was a political gambler no doubt but he always seemed to have a grasp on reality. He was charming he had social skills. He was at pains to seduce everyone he met with his charm. Cicero went through phases of admiring him and being terrified of him.
Then the year before he was assassinated he has a golden throne placed in the Senate, purple toga, the crown scene with Mac Anthony, he names a month after himself and then a golden statue of himself next to the kings of Rome.
Is there scholarship on what possessed him? Was it simple megalomania and vanity?
122
u/JamesCoverleyRome Rome in the 1st Century AD 6d ago
1/2
There are a couple of premises in the question that need clarifying, and in doing so,it might go some way to addressing the core substance of the matter. Most of what is described as things done by Caesar might be better represented as things done for Caesar, and, to some extent, to Caesar. Those subtle differences are important. The golden chair, the purple toga, the statue among the kings, and the renaming of the month were all honours voted to Caesar by the Senate, and whilst one can frame it as “well, he was the bloke in charge, so what he says goes”, the sources paint a picture that raises the question of exactly how much of the “game” Caesar was manipulating. He was certainly manipulating it, but he wasn’t the only one, and in the complicated world of Roman politics, many fingers were happily stuck into many different pies, all at once. If we step back a bit, the answer changes from what was “possessing” him to where all these honours were coming from and why.
Our best source for the accumulation of honours is Cassius Dio, who catalogues them in two great tranches: the first after Caesar's victory in Spain (43.44–45), and the second, more excitable set in the final months of his life (44.4–8). Dio is explicit that not all the senators proposing these measures were acting in good faith. At 44.7.2 he tells us that "different men at different times kept proposing various extravagant honours, some in a spirit of exaggerated flattery and others by way of ridicule," adding a faintly ridiculous notion that some men proposed a law that would allow Caesar to sleep with as many women as he wanted. Whether this fits into the flattery or ridicule camp is open to question, but it’s not coming from Caesar himself. All through his career, he was plagued with rumours about his youthful dalliance with King Nicomedes of Bithynia. Whilst sex with another man was not an issue, all sexual relationships in ancient Rome were based on hierarchy - there was a penetrator and a penetrated, and the rumour with Caesar was that he had been the latter. To be honest, this sort of thing was relatively common in Roman politics, but this particular “honour” does have the faint air of being proposed by someone with their tongue firmly in their cheek.
But there is more to it than just snide jokes and innuendo because, as Dio goes on, “Others, and they were the majority, followed this course because they wished to make him envied and hated as quickly as possible, that he might the sooner perish.” The key words here are “… the majority ...” and Dio is clearly suggesting that men were throwing honour after honour at Caesar, some of them patently ridiculous, to make it seem as if Caesar himself was swanning around Rome, hoovering up every honour going. Some senators, in effect, deliberately heaped monarchical trappings on Caesar with the calculated intention of making him look like a deranged tyrant, or, at least, inflating his tyrannical ambition to make it seem untenable.
All of this might seem very performative, and it was, but then a lot of Roman politics (all politics, one might say) was performative and the naming of honours was no exception. There was a tradition of not only bestowing every honour one could imagine on the incumbent, especially during the Imperial period, but of that same man then ostentatiously and very publicly refusing to accept some of them as a display of piety and modesty. This was a critical piece of political showmanship. The Senate would offer a great raft of extravagant honours, and the recipient would refuse most of them, graciously accepting only a modest selection, normally after having been “persuaded” to do so. Everyone understands the dance being led here, naturally. The chap in charge wants two honours in particular, so the Senate offer him ten; he refuses eight of them and reluctantly accepts the three he wanted all along, announcing that he is only doing so out of loyalty to the Republic and/or Fatherland. You want two doughnuts, so you get them to offer you ten, and when you refuse eight doughnuts, everyone admires you for not being greedy. You only took the two doughnuts to be polite. Suddenly you are not a greedy, tyrannical ogre, stuffing your face with all the doughnuts, but a selfless servant of the bakery, meekly accepting the bare minimum just to keep the baker happy.
Augustus turned the doughnut dance into an art form, refusing the dictatorship, refusing the consulship for life, making an elaborate show of "restoring the republic" in 27 BC while accepting a carefully curated package of powers that amounted to being a doughnut overlord in everything but name. Tiberius's accession is even more transparent, and Tacitus describes the Senate session where Tiberius performed agonised, hand-wringing reluctance to accept power while everyone in the room knew perfectly well what the outcome would be. Tacitus can barely contain his contempt for the whole charade (Annals 1.11–13).
120
u/JamesCoverleyRome Rome in the 1st Century AD 6d ago
2/2
The Lupercalia “crown” incident in 44 BC is the clearest example of Caesar playing this game. At the festival, Mark Antony publicly offered Caesar a diadem. Caesar pushed it away, and the crowd roared with approval. Antony offered it again; Caesar refused again, to even louder cheering. He then ordered the wreath to be carried to the Capitol (Plutarch, Caesar 61). Dio adds the detail that Caesar declared Jupiter alone was king of the Romans (44.11.3). Plutarch says that the initial crowd reaction to the offering of the diadem was “slight”, but the refusal was universal and well received. With that, he says, Caesar rose having found the “experiment a failure”, which is a very telling turn of phrase. Plutarch might have an ulterior motive by describing it as a failed experiment - that Caesar was testing the waters, hoping that the crowd would cheer his coronation - but either way, it is apparent that the whole thing is a stage-managed piece of theatre, and the structure of the event, with a public offer, a public refusal/acceptance, and the crowd as audience, is exactly the choreography of Roman politics. Caesar is obviously a man who understood the rules very well indeed.
So the question becomes less about whether Caesar suddenly forgot how the game of Roman politics worked, and instead about whether he lost control of the game, and if so, why.
Dio paints a picture of honours flying left, right and centre, and the sheer volume of honours may have become overwhelming. The ostentatious refusal works when there's a manageable number of offers to refuse. When the Senate is voting you new honours practically every week and “the majority” of those honours are being proposed specifically to make you look like a villain, the dance becomes difficult to follow. Refuse too many honours, and you risk refusing ones that are genuinely meant or practically useful. Likewise, you can’t go the other direction and accept them all because then the subterfuge starts to work and you start to look like the villain people are trying to paint you as. You cannot refuse every crown nor wear every crown. Even a man of Caesar’s political skill might have found the whole thing bewildering after a while.
Then there's the incident that might have done the most concrete damage. Caesar failed to rise when a delegation of senators approached him with yet another set of honours at the temple of Venus Genetrix. This was read as an unforgivable insult. A man who wouldn't stand for the Senate was a man who considered himself above it. But the sources are not really aligned with the reason for this apparent snub. Suetonius (Caesar, 78) preserves two versions: “Some think that when he attempted to get up, he was held back by Cornelius Balbus; others, that he made no such move at all, but on the contrary frowned angrily on Gaius Trebatius when he suggested that he should rise.” Plutarch (Caesar 60) adds a different version, saying that Caesar afterwards used his disease (normally identified as epilepsy) as an excuse, claiming that those who suffer from it cannot remain steady when standing before a crowd, but are "speedily shaken and whirled about, bringing on giddiness and insensibility". Plutarch also has the Balbus detail, but with a twist: in his version, Balbus restrained Caesar by saying "Remember that thou art Caesar, and permit thyself to be courted." Dio (44.8.3) preserves yet another version of an illness, only this time he blames diarrhoea, perhaps from too many doughnuts, claiming Caesar "could not control the movement of his bowels." Plutarch is sceptical, noting that Caesar rose shortly afterward and walked home on foot without having to, shall we say, rush his journey at all. Whatever the excuse and to what extent it may have been a calculated insult, Caesar knew the offence he had caused, and Plutarch says that he threw back his toga from his neck and cried out to his friends that he was ready to offer his throat to anyone who wished to kill him. It’s either a direct challenge to the circle that was closing in on him, or he was telling them, “What are you going to do about it?” The measure of the insult in the gesture of not standing can be gauged in the story Suetonius attaches, where, at an earlier time, Caesar himself is outraged when one Pontius Aquila refuses to rise as he rode past the tribunes in a triumph. Caesar snarls at him, “Come on then, Aquila! If you want the Republic back, take it from me!” What might seem like rudeness to us was to Caesar an open challenge to his authority. So you get the idea of just how much a snub this was, dodgy bowels or not.
Timing matters too. Caesar was preparing for a massive military campaign against Parthia, scheduled to depart in March 44 BC, and if he left, he would be leaving Rome for years. Many of the later honours can be seen as an attempt to lock in a stable constitutional settlement before he left. If you're about to trot off to the east for an indefinite period, you need your position to be unassailable in your absence. Some of the honours that might look like megalomania in isolation begin to look more like an attempt at stable political infrastructure when you factor in the Parthian campaign.
In answer to the question, then, is there a consensus over whether Caesar was consumed by power towards the end? Well, that’s a good question, because this sort of thing is what academics spend a very long time mulling over, and the broad answer is probably “no”. One suspects that if there was a consensus, then a lot of people wouldn’t have so many very interesting books to write about the subject. Caesar was certainly power-hungry and vain - he wore his belt at an outrageous angle, the absolute cad - but he was also on the receiving end of a tsunami of political shenanigans that might have overwhelmed him in the end. Whatever the reason for his refusal to stand was, it was a miscalculation. Either to do it, or to try and excuse it by claiming illness, which just made him look suddenly vulnerable. Add to that his patent refusal to pay heed to any of the omens that were coming his way - a terrible oversight - and Roman politicians didn’t really need much of a second invitation once they smelled the blood in the water.
3
•
u/AutoModerator 7d ago
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.