The Twelve Caesars Read Online Free Page B

merited inclusion in the thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia of natural history compiled by Pliny the Elder. ‘I have heard,’ Pliny wrote, ‘that Caesar was accustomed to write
or dictate and read at the same time, simultaneously dictating to his secretaries four letters on the most important subjects or, if he had nothing else to do, as many as seven.’ 14 (As dictator , Caesar later courted popular disfavour by dictating and reading letters while watching gladiatorial fights.) As with his mind, so too his body. It was as if his pulse beat to a
tempo of its own and his limbs were endowed with more than human strength and facility. Suetonius commends his horsemanship, his skill in arms, that vitality which never flagged:
    On the march he headed his army, sometimes on horseback but oftener on foot, bareheaded both in the heat of the sun and in rain. He covered great distances with incredible
     speed, making a hundred miles a day in a hired carriage and with little baggage, swimming the rivers which barred his path or crossing them on inflated skins and very often arriving before the
     messengers sent to announce his coming.
    The biographer records an occasion when, harried by the enemy in the waters off Alexandria, Caesar left the one safe small skiff to his men and himself
plunged into the sea. He swam using a single arm, his left arm holding important papers clear of the water. For good measure he dragged his cloak behind him, clenching it between his teeth in order
to prevent the enemy from snatching it as a trophy. Less hair-raising journeys he beguiled, as we have seen, in writing or poetry. He was a stranger to idleness and the greater part of reasonable
fear. Little wonder that he inspired in the men with whom he fought such fervent devotion. His standards of discipline were high without approaching that martinet cruelty which afterwards proved
Galba’s undoing: he closed his eyes to minor misdemeanours. He led by inspiration, without undue recourse to the mumbo-jumbo of omens and portents, trusting in that lodestar which seldom
deserted him on the battlefield, his generalship as much a matter of speed and novelty as of tactical finesse; and he treated his soldiers, whom he addressed as ‘comrades’, with
something approaching love.
    Such capabilities, married to Caesar’s overweening confidence, could not easily be confined within the orderliness of year-long magistracies. That power which Caesar eventually exercised
in Rome arose in part from an accumulation of dignitas , auctoritas and military glory, from full-throttle cultivation of popular support and from his ability to judge whose coat-tails
afforded the best ride at any given moment. Caesar’s loyalties lay consistently with himself: throughout the decade of the sixties, which he began as a virtual unknown, he sought to create a
network of personal alliances which would serve as a springboard to mastery. If Suetonius’ Caesar does not breathe the word ‘revolution’, it is implicit in the many twists and
turns of the second half of his career. With the consulship attained, Caesaraimed at some larger channel of power, an aspiration in which he was not alone in this period of
flux anticipating meltdown. His thirst could be slaked only by creating alternatives to the Republican mechanisms of government which had served the city through five centuries. Others thought the
same, and had done for years now. ‘Soon Gaius Marius, from the lowest class, and Lucius Sulla, the most savage of the nobles, turned free government, conquered by arms, into tyranny,’
Tacitus wrote. ‘Gnaeus Pompey came next, less obvious but no better, and now nothing was sought except dominion of the state.’ 15 Marius, Sulla, Pompey... Caesar... Given the nature of the
contest, only one man could prevail.

    In advance of his consulship in 59 BC , Caesar brokered what Suetonius calls a ‘compact’. His partners were that same Gnaeus Pompey,
pre-eminent among the