THE FIRST OF ALL CAESARS

The story is told, by Suetonius, if I remember correctly, that, still as a fairly young man, Julius Caesar visited Alexander’s giant statue in Spain, and openly wept in front of it. When asked by one of his attendants about the reason for his tears, Caesar replied that he could not help it, considering that, at his age, Alexander had already conquered the world, whereas he, Caesar, had not as yet performed anything worth remembering.

As regards the sincerity of his tears, I will readily stipulate: Caesar was a man of intense ambition, and thus of great passion, and such a passion can quite easily translate into a tearful whimsical rant without anything to suspect some deliberate theatrics, unless the theatrics were spontaneous and in tandem with the naturality of his passion. However, as to the specific nature of his genius, the picture is somewhat more complicated.

He was a born despot, of course, and such a man has a towering sense of superiority, to the extent that even being reduced to tears in the presence of others cannot cause him any awkwardness, as nothing at all could ever hurt his self-esteem. I am sure that each witness of Caesar’s tears understood this, and none saw this as a sign of personal weakness on his part.

Yes, he was a despot, and a ruthless one, at that. However, all criticism of his authoritarian personality and ruthlessness must be dismissed right away: all genius rulers of history were bloody despots anyway, their cruelty revealing a strength of character, rather than a particular predisposition toward evil-doing. One can be cruel but just, and his subjects must surely prefer a strong dictator’s grand-scale purposeful cruelty to the random meaningless cruelties of some petty chieftains struggling for power…

[A curious comparison can be made to certain third-world dictators of our time, such as the late Saddam Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi, who were by no means geniuses, but who, through their strongman ruthlessness, were apparently capable of imposing some kind of peace and stability on their subjects. The chaos, into which their nations were plunged as a result of their violent demise, may surely make even their enemies remember the old times nostalgically. The same thing is going on in Syria right now, where Bashar al-Assad has proved himself already not competent enough, that is, not strong enough, not ruthless enough, to maintain a peace through dictatorial strength. His father Hafez would have known how to deal with the situation before it began spinning out of control. It’s worth remembering that under those dictators the national treasures of their respective domains were diligently preserved and maintained, whereas now they have been remorselessly plundered, while those that could not be sold, reduced to shambles, and now irretrievably lost to posterity. So, there is at least one, but surely more than one good word to be said about those bad dictators.]

…On the other hand, Caesar’s notorious licentiousness (“omnium mulierum vir, et omnium virum uxor,” according to Suetonius) is not in itself a debilitating quality, unless it is driving the man into a conflict with his best judgment. And it is indeed the quality of recklessness and utter disregard for elementary prudence that constitutes a personal weakness debilitating a political genius, where Caesar may have been the most vulnerable… But let us not rush to this conclusion before we lay down all the pros and cons.

Julius Caesar was a person of great mystery. On the one hand, he was undeniably a man of genius. In Hume’s perhaps excessive characterization, “All the world allows that the emperor was the greatest genius that ever was and the greatest judge of mankind.” (Considering his fatal misjudgment of the threat of the conspiracy, this sounds like a wicked joke at Caesar’s expense on Hume’s part, but it is possible that he had guessed the real reason behind Caesar’s recklessness, to which we will be returning at the end of this entry.) Mommsen, without renouncing his own historical objectivity, describes Caesar in his epic Römische Geschichte, as "the complete and perfect man." (Yet another instance of an alleged commendation reading more like a splurge of biting sarcasm than a bona fide opinion of the man, but again this may be also a false impression.) And Dante, of course, in La Divina Commeddia, provides Satan with three mouths, in which eternally to chew Judas (understandably), but also Brutus and Cassius, the two main conspirators in Caesar’s assassination, a rather excessive, but instructive honor for the target of their conspiracy, as if no other betrayer throughout the history of the pre-Dantian world had been more deserving of that same distinction.

Indeed, Caesar’s accomplishments were great, and many. First and foremost, he saved the Roman Republic from itself. The bloody era of civil wars, with the victors, each time, killing the resistance and proscribing their passive opponents may not seem to have been brought to the end in Caesar’s lifetime, but, in fact, it is to his credit that the Golden Age of peace and prosperity under Augustus Caesar was to be made possible in the first place. Other than that to his native Rome he delivered a much greater domain than he had inherited with his conquest of Gaul, plus much of other Europe with large chunks of Asia and Africa, including, even if Cleopatra were to disagree, the whole of Egypt. In between these conquests, he just happened to discover Albion. (According to Plutarch, the only reason why he had not quite conquered the Brits too was that “these islanders were so miserably poor that they had nothing worth being plundered of...”)

[Had Plutarch been living in our time, he might have taken a cue from PM David Cameron, who reacted, on his recent trip to India, to a request of the Indian Government to return one of the Indian artifacts, plundered by the British in the Colonial era, by saying that had Britain started returning all such items to their original owners, nothing would have been left of the British Museum… I am sure that Great Britain, even after having lost her great Empire, isn’t quite done with plundering, on Mr. Cameron’s watch. How many priceless artifacts from Syria, I wonder, having been kept in their original sites for thousands of years, will now end up in the British Museum?...]

…Beside this, to the world, he bequeathed the monumental Julian Calendar, which is still the staple of the Russian, Armenian and other Eastern Orthodox Churches, as well as the First of January as the start of every New Year, plus the name of the month of July. He also left a significant literary inheritance, sine qua no diligent student of Latin of yesterday, today, and tomorrow would ever have been able to learn the language (please forgive me this little exaggeration!), plus many other things which I could enumerate with a greater thoroughness, in some later revision of this entry.

And of course one of Caesar’s crowning achievements has been… his name, which was to become the title of every Emperor of Rome from Augustus to Hadrian, and later also inherited by the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Kaiser has been derived from Caesar as well. And as for Russia, the title Caesar, elliptically shortened to CÇsar, had evolved into the “Czar,” or “Tsar,” the meaning of which word is well known to billions of citizens of our planet, even to those for whom the etymology of the word itself is unknown.

Yet, on the other hand, here was a vain, reckless, pleasure-loving man who was spending far too much time with Cleopatra, both during his first time in Egypt, and back in Rome, to the point of neglecting his duties and basic demands of political prudence, thus raising the pertinent question whether he was, indeed, in the position to control the situation, or, perhaps, it was Cleopatra all along, who was successfully manipulating him… Or was it something else, like what I would call the Rasputin factor? Is it possible that Caesar was ill (and we know that he was indeed suffering from certain serious ailments!), and Cleopatra’s knowledge of exotic Egyptian pharmacology may have provided him some relief and palliation?...

And then, of course, comes up the small matter of his assassination: Was he indeed that blind, not to realize what was coming to him? Some judge of character! Napoleon may have been perfectly right to say of him: “Caesar was a failure. Otherwise he would not have been assassinated.” It is true that great men are getting assassinated all the time, but it is the circumstances of their demise which matter. Napoleon himself lost his Empire, but he was not exactly a loser, in the sense that the whole of Europe ganged up against him twice, honoring the British real-politik principle of the balance of power, and he went down, having put up a good fight (his return from Elba and the battle of Waterloo testify to that!). His critical mistake was the decision to invade Russia, but then, how easy has it been, historically, to misunderstand and misjudge the Russian riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma: America is committing that same folly today, as we speak…

In the specific case of Caesar’s assassination, the gross misjudgment on Caesar’s part appears to have been caused not so much by the occupational hazard of every dictator, nor by a force majeure, but by a personal weakness of character, displayed by Caesar here, and throughout his life. Can brilliant statesmanship of an authentic genius coexist in his nature with a blind and reckless faith in his own infallibility and invincibility and a glaring disregard for common prudence, such as displayed in Caesar’s case? Shakespeare’s answer is his stubborn fatalism and a rigid belief in predestination: “Cowards die many times before their death, The valiant never taste of death but once; Of all the wonders that I yet have heard it seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” (Julius Caesar.)

On the other hand, a totally different explanation is also possible. We already know that Caesar was suffering from certain probably incurable ailments, where even Cleopatra’s skills must have been proven in vain. Divus Iulius, a living legend deified in his lifetime, dying of a silly human disease at the age of fifty-five?

Perhaps it was not some irresponsible recklessness on his part, but some very special kind of recklessness, which prompted him, even being well appraised of the assassination plot, to choose a heroic end to a heroic life, rather than to thwart it, only to succumb to a miserable ignominious demise afflicting a slave as much as a Caesar and thus tarnishing his glory?

I would bet he had made the right choice, dismissing all those warnings, and resolutely stepping into Pompey’s Theater to add another powerful legend to his legendary life: the legend of his death.

Whichever version of events is the closest to the truth, nothing cancels out either Caesar’s world-historical evaluation as a remarkable genius (although some of the epithets showered on him by Hume and Mommsen seem far too excessive), or as a failure, in Napoleon’s view of him. What remains however is the mystery of the great man’s soul, raising some interesting questions in our own mind, and prodding us to make a challenging and inquisitive peep inside our own psyche, for traces of a similar conundrum.