In ancient Rome, Gaius Julius Caesar is legally a god, a dictator, a consul, a priest, a revolutionary, and one of the world’s most crafty military leaders whose slaying is a shock that reverberates throughout history.
It’s natural to question, what virtues he may hold or lack.
Yet, more than 2,000 years after the fateful Ides of March, he is still a puzzle to historians and playwrights.
Is he the man who came, saw, and conquered, cast the die, and crossed the Rubicon the world’s greatest ruler?
Or merely its most famous assassination victim?
Equally questioned, is the meaning and use of his most famous virtue: clemency.
The ‘Clementia Caesaris’ question is not whether it was strategic (it was), but to understand whether Caesar is being honest in professing it as charity toward his enemies.
Caesar defines it in a letter to Cicero
Haec nova sit ratio vincendi, ut misericordia et liberalitate nos muniamus
“This is the new winning strategy: that we arm ourselves with compassion and freedom”(Cic. Ad Att. 9.7 c)
In 44 BC, a few months preceding Caesar’s famous assassination, a temple “to him and his preeminent virtue, Clemency (Clemtentia) ” is declared sacred, by the Roman Senate.
Ironically, this same virtue is considered as one of the main causes of his death.
After the killing of Caesar, it is accepted in public worship.
In Roman belief, Clementia was the goddess of mercy, penance, redemption, absolution, and salvation.
The immediate occasion of the for the temple is Caesar’s generosity in granting to his opponents in the Civil War life, citizenship, and the retention of their property.
It is important to maintain peace for a sector of his population who prior to this, did not have this protection or status – to unify them back together, clemency was needed.
In a more modern era, this will be echoed in the American and French Revolutions.
Clemency in the Republican Era
Although the idea of virtue exists in Roman times, the term clemency is not a word and it takes some time for it to emerge in Roman texts.
The Stoics are the ones to settle on the traditional canon of four, and it is this canon that survives until the Late Republic Rome.
Of which. mercy is shown to defeated foes and in the law-courts, and the idea develops further when the Romans become more involved in Greek and Eastern affairs.
Yet, Seneca, writing to Nero, still stresses the use of clemency leads to safety and security:
“yet kings, by clemency, gain a security more assured, because repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all.’
Excessive cruelty eventually causes animosity, while clemency is meant to ensure the support of the conquered.
Although Seneca is writing this in the 1st century A.D., it is reasonable to hypothesize that similar attitudes were present in the Late Republic.
In Virgil’s 9th Eclogue (9.4), he references this by saying
” If clemency is denied, there is no recourse.
All that remains is to suffer and lament …”
Roman policy is to use leniency, whenever possible, when it comes to dealing with defeated enemies, as can be seen in Cicero’s De officiis.
He stresses the need for moderation -especially concerning enemies who voluntarily lay down their arms.
When a general conquers a city, the city loses its freedom and the general becomes the patron of that city upon its reestablishment.
The victorious general makes decisions about important matters concerning the defeated, and who holds authority.
In another example from 167 B.C, Cato the Elder delivers a speech to the Senate on behalf of the Rhodians, entitled Pro Rhodiensibus.
When the Romans defeat Perseus of Macedon in 168 B.C., the Rhodians worries that prior discussion in the assembly will be interpreted as a sign of disloyalty to Rome.
As a result, they send representatives to plead their case in the Roman Senate which is when Cato the Elder stresses the use of clemency.
When considering these examples it is important to keep several ideas in mind.
First, Clementia is something that was shown in a political or military context toward non-Romans.
Second, the examples of Carthage and Macedonia are placed in this military context, one in which the Romans are the ultimate victors.
Third, mercy is a trait possessed by a much greater power and exercised to vanquished people, who were much weaker.
In a way, clemency in these instances become an exercise of power in itself, since it is the Romans who have the power to decide the fate of the defeated.
Vercingetorix
By accepting the bestowal of mercy, the defeated enter into a relationship of submission to the conqueror.
As mentioned above, the conqueror now has the authority to make important decisions regarding the vanquished.
Considering that the restraint of the self, by choosing not to kill the defeated, they now owe their lives to the victor, but they also lose control over their lives as well.
Denarius, mint moving with Caesar. Front Women with Diadem Back Vercingetorix as a war trophy with Gallic shield and carnyx; below, captive seated r. with hands tied behind back.
Demonstrating clemency is not only an exercise in absolute power but is also a method of vengeance showing the vanquished have nothing worth taking.
However, by letting local leaders remain powerful, Roman rule is more secure and gives a buffer zone of seemingly non-totalitarianism.
While Cicero offers a definition of clemency in his youthful rhetorical treatise De Inventione (the term occurs in his early speeches, after the civil wars it begins to appear with greater frequency in his letters and orations) with 13 occurrences in the so-called Caesarian discourses alone (Pro Marcello and Pro Ligario, 46 BC.; Pro Rege Deiotaro, 45 BC).
Caesar himself employed it sparingly in his Commentarii, although it appears 5 times in the continuations.
On the basis of this distribution, Stefan Weinstock conjectured that, before the middle of the 1st century B.C., the abstract noun “clemency was a rare word; so the suspicion arises that it was intentionally avoided in Roman politics” (1971, 236).
This inference from silence is open to question, especially since the adjective and other forms were current earlier.
In the late Republican setting, in the midst of the civil wars, the rules concerning who could receive clemency and who could bestow it began to change.
As the virtue was transferred into a political context, no longer was it the defeated, foreign enemy receiving mercy from the benevolent and powerful victor.
Now a Roman was bestowing clemency and the recipient was his fellow Roman citizen.
Such a change had a profound impact on the civil wars that were waged in the final decades of the Republic, and on how generals and political figures would treat their fellow citizens.
To understand the implications of this shift it is first necessary to examine its origins.
Cicero can be credited with defining the term clemency in its political context, with it first appearing in his Verrines in 70 B.C.
He uses it in connection with past kindnesses that were bestowed upon the Sicilians, only to have them be treated cruelly in the present age.
Cicero chooses the Latin words fortitudo (fortitude), justitia (justice) , prudentia/sapientia (prudence / wise judgment) , and temperantia (temperance), to correspond to the Stoic canon of the four cardinal virtues, further dividing temperantia into continentia (self-control), modestia (modesty), and clementia (clemency).
However, in his discussions and speeches concerning political figures and the ideal general, Cicero continues to use words more common from the period before Caesar rose to prominence.
When extolling the qualities of Pompey, Cicero chooses words like humanitas and mansuetudo as virtues ideal in a general.
At this point in time, clemency is still a rare word, not appearing very much in Cicero’s work at all.
Authors still use other words that are closely related to the idea of clemency when describing the virtues of politicians and generals.
Moreover, considering that conquered people became slaves to Rome, clemency, in addition to ensuring security, was also intended to ensure funds.
One possible reason for this may be that this was still a virtue that was used in a foreign context in connection with a defeated enemy, but this changed when Julius Caesar rose to prominence.
In a domestic sense, an example of its purpose can also come from US History.
“Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of clemency should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed.
The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.”
In other words, a robust presidential pardon power is a necessary check on the criminal justice system.
Did you know…?
Roman prisons were not used to punish criminals, but instead served only to hold people awaiting trial or execution.
The Age of Festivity
Birth of Rome Festivities – Present Day
In the year 65 BC Julius Caesar began his official career, as Aedile, (officer in charge of the games for the Roman people).
His nature was royal, both in thought and in life there was greatness, and with the extravagant splendor of a king, he organized for the people the games which were the most popular part of his duties.
Birth of Rome Celebrations Present Day
The year 65 BC was a great and splendid year – like a ceremonial overture to a new and better time after the previous 70 yrs of violence and bloodshed.
The Roman people never forgot that year, and ever afterward the phrase Munificenia Caesaris was used by them to mean a time of festival and rejoicing.
Rome Present Day
This royal figure became the leader of the popular party.
What led him to that position?
He despised the narrow and reactionary spirit of the senate clique, and he was convinced that their historical role was at an end.
He loved the idea of the sovereign great kingdom in the sense of Alexander the Great and believed that the problems alike of domestic and of foreign politics could only be solved by the establishment of a universal monarchy of a new kind.
But above all, he had a passion for having splendid men around him.
Julius Caesar had the most royal passion of all: the passion to make men happy.
That is why he lavished enormous sums from his own estate upon the great public games and made the people’s cause his own.
That is why he wanted power.
The General Amnesty
Julius Caesar was a royal nature in this deepest sense of the word.
Plato once said that ” when the law is just, but the king is good”.
In this sense, What did Caesar desire?
He desired appeasement, mercy.
And what did the popular party desire?
It desired a general amnesty.
These strains had not been heard in Rome before.
It was a new age.
However, though Julius Caesar believed in a policy of clemency, certainly, Caesar was no sentimentalist.
He was a hardened general with a record of massacres against foreign enemies that impressed his own contemporaries.
(Buller 1998 itemizes them in suitably scandalized tones).
The elder Pliny (HN 7.91) claims that Caesar fought more battles than anyone else in history, and, leaving aside civil wars, slew 1,192,000 men.
But Pliny sees no contradiction between this extraordinary body count and Caesar’s clemency, which Pliny says, he surpassed everyone, even to the point of repentance (7.92–93)
Nor was Caesar a romantic enthusiast; on the contrary, he was an accomplished expert, even a virtuoso who knew how to instill into the best men in his party his own belief in clemency.
With his summons to clemency, he showed his party new ways of work.
And with this word clemency as propaganda, he enormously strengthened the attraction of his party.
From this time forward, a man from the popular party and a man of clementia were interchangeable ideas.
Orosius, for example (Hist. 6.17.1) wrote:
“Julius Caesar died in an attempt to rebuild the political world in the spirit of the Clementia, contrary to the example of his predecessors”.
Julius Caesar was in earnest about the new principle.
In the domestic policy of the 60’s and 50’s BC a whole series of individual cases could be recounted in which the leader of the popular party showed that he was indeed the man of clemency.
We take a single example.
In the year 60 BC Caesar formed along with Pompey and Crassus the first triumvirate.
In 59 BC Caesar became consul for the first time.
That same year the ultra-conservative Marcus Junius Brutus struck his first coins of freedom, which are simply the defiant protest of the reactionary senate against the monarchist trend in the popular party.
But Caesar did not touch a hair of the young Brutus’s head.
In the same year Brutus was suspected of a conspiracy against Pompey; but Caesar saved him.
In 58 BC, Caesar assumed the command in Gaul, and in the 8 years of the Gallic War, he had continual opportunities to work out the principle of clemency in the sphere of military and foreign policy.
We know how passionately devoted the legions were to him.
But we know too, in what a masterly fashion he succeeded, in virtue of his clemency, in making a political conquest and friend out of the enemy who had been defeated in the field.
He himself, at any rate, makes frequent reference in his war memoirs to this policy of conciliation in enemy country.
Again and again, he relates how the emissaries of the subjugated tribes appeal to his clemency:
“Deal with us in accordance with the mildness and magnanimity which are peculiar to you”.
“If you will treat us in accordance with the mildness and generosity which we have heard from reports of other tribes is peculiar to you, then leave us with our weapons.”
We can see how Caesar’s clemency has already become an international idea, a fixed formula in diplomatic language.
Caesar himself replied to such pleas in these words:
“I will save the town, less for its merits than for the sake of my custom.”
On another occasion, he reported how in the name of the Roman people he extended pardon to the conquered tribe, instead of annexing its land.
Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum is not the memoirs of an old man, willing to live the remainder of his life on proud memories of war, but a highly political work, written in the tumult of events and published just when Caesar was moving towards the decisive stroke of his political life, on the eve of the civil war.
The Roman people were to be left in no doubt about the spirit in which Julius Caesar planned to conduct the struggle for power – and that was the spirit of clemency.
But the public could also see – and was meant to see from many examples of ruthless campaigning, that Caesar was no mere romantic weakling.
So there were many people in Rome to whom the leader of the popular party and the conqueror of Gaul was still a profoundly ambiguous or sinister figure.
For example, it’s the same idea held by Sir Ronald Syme in his great study of Tacitus (1958, 1.414):
“When Caesar, the dictator paraded a merciful and forgiving spirit . . . , he did not endear himself to all men in his class and order.
Clemency depends not on duty but on choice and whim, it is the will of a master not an aristocrat’s virtue. To acquiesce in the ‘Clementia Caesaris’ implied a recognition of despotism.”
The historian Sallust, for instance, sent a letter in the year 50 BC to Caesar in which he asked him not to follow in the tracks of the bloodthirsty Sulla.
The new Tactic of Victory
In the last days of December of the same year, the Roman consul handed to the conservative Pompey, the sword for the defense of Rome against Caesar.
And now the whole world waited with bated breath the unrolling of events.
In January of the year 49 BC the die was cast.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon
Caesar marched into Italy.
One town after the other capitulated, one legion after the other went over to him.
Pompey fled from the capital.
By February Caesar was outside the town of Corfinium, east of Rome.
He forced its capitulation, but let Pompey’s occupying forces go free.
The news of this signal act of clemency ran like wildfire through the Roman world.
The Caesarians seized on it for their propaganda, and in speeches and letters praised the humanity and conciliatory spirit of the conqueror and his abhorrence of every kind of cruelty.
His enemies, too, were given food for thought.
Corfinium was the beginning of a moral victory for Caesar which was no less successful than his military campaigns.
Meanwhile Caesar continued his march southwards, driving Pompey before him.
At the beginning of March, 49, he was in Apulia, where he wrote an open letter to his friends, in which he said:
I heartily rejoice over your words of approval of what I did in Corfinium.
I will gladly adapt to your opinion, and all the more willingly, as already on my own initiative I decided to show myself as mild as possible and for reconciliation with Pompey.
In this way, if it is possible, we want to try to regain everyone’s trust and enjoy a lasting peace.
For our predecessors, in virtue of their cruelty, were not able to escape hatred, and could maintain their victory for but a short time – with the exception of Lucius Sulla, whose eample I do not intend to follow.
I want to inaugurate a new way of winning: strengthening my position with mildness and generosity.
I already have some ideas on how this can be done, and many more they can find.
I would like you to reflect on this topic
How to realize this in very deed is a subject about which I have many thoughts, and there are many ways still to be discovered for its accomplishment.
The conciliation of Corfinium, and these words about the new way of conquering, together with exhibit the same spirit and the same man, and they did not fail of their effect.
Even the skeptical Cicero succeeded in uttering a few appreciative words.
Caesar took him up at once, and wrote:
You have interpreted me aright, for you know how nothing is further from my nature than cruelty.
Nothing is dearer to me than to remain true to my character and the Pompeians to theirs.
But Cicero’s mind was too small to grasp properly the greatness and newness of what Caesar’s actions proclaimed.
He was too pleased with his clever skepticism.
As late as May 49 BC, Cicero was having witty conversations with his friends about Pompey’s Sullan cruelty and the insidiosa clementia, the insidious clemency, of Caesar – conversations devoid of understanding, and stuffed with mistrust and fear.
When a decision had to be taken one way or the other, Cicero decided for Pompey.
Meantime Caesar and Pompey armed themselves, both morally and militarily, for the final struggle.
A classical historian gives the following account:
Caesar showed marvelous moderation and clemency in the conduct of the civil war.
Pompey declared that he would treat everyone as an enemy who was disloyal to the cause of the republic.
Caesar proclaimed that he would account mediating statesmen and neutrals as his friends.
Every officer whom he had appointed on the recommendation of Pompey was freely permitted to cross over to Pompey’s camp.
When the conditions for capitulation were being negotiated in Spain (at Ilerda), and in consequence a lively traffic arose between the two camps, the enemy leaders Afranius and Petreius suddenly turned round and had every soldier of Caesar’s who was in the Pompeian camp seized and slain.
The Destruction of the Files
In the autumn of 48 Caesar gained the decisive victory over Pompey at Pharsalus.
After the battle, countless prisoners fell at the victor’s feet and begged him with tears for their life.
Caesar replied with a few words about his lenience (de lenitate sua) and pardoned them all without exception.
Pliny writes:
Caesar’s special and most profound characteristic was his royal clemency, with which he conquered and converted all men.
So he showed the example of a great spirit, such as cannot be seen again …
But the genuine and incomparable height of his all-conquering heart is seen most clearly at Pharsalus.
For when the coffers with the Pompeian papers fell into his hands, he caused them to be burnt
In the same spirit, Caesar declared in 47 BC in the Alexandrine War,
“I do nothing more gladly than grant an amnesty to those who plead for mercy.”
In the same style he conducted the moral and military campaign in 46 BC against Cato and the last of the resistance in Africa.
We hear how the defeated general encouraged his anxious troops with the words,
“I have great confidence in Caesar’s clemency.”
His confidence was not misplaced.
“Caesar’s clemency towards the defeated was the same as in earlier instances,” says an ancient reporter.
And Pliny recounts how Caesar had all the enemy papers destroyed unseen, precisely as at Pharsalus.
Similarly, the defeated Pompeians in Spain appealed to Caesar’s clemency, from which they hoped for every security, and in fact, experienced it.
In this regard, reported the thoughts of Luca Canali:
I believe that Cesare behaved more humanly in the civil war than in the
Gallic war, not because of propaganda needs or because of the distinction of its current ones opposing civilians from ancient barbarian enemies (and by that I don’t mean these two facts had no influence, but only that they had no influence determinant), but because his judgment on reality and his rational attitude devoid of prejudice, grudges, personal passions, they told him that this conflict could to be won more easily with peace than with war, with clemency rather than with cruelty.
Caesar felt he was following the course of history, of interpreting them progressive needs of his time;and that his enemies fought against this course and they were historically condemned to defeat;therefore he understood that his task was to lead with maximum energy, but together to limit as much as possible, conflict.
That is, to isolate the core of the more conservative opposition uncompromising, conversely bridging the conscious representatives unaware of the new order and the adversaries, from the most modest to the most distinguished, than for personal, ideological, economic reasons (all of which he would have tried to overcome with his generosity and his balance) were still in the field against him.
The ideal of clemency did not correspond only to a need for war, psychological and Caesarian propaganda, nor was it exclusively a generic one interpretation of the need for peace by people exhausted by decades of bloody civil conflicts.
(in this generic sense the opposition, which Caesar loved to make, of himself to Silla); let alone a message from political wisdom launched to posterity.
Of course, it was all these things together: but in political terms, it had to be something more limited and concrete, and at the same time more historically significant:
The reversal of the Ciceronian password of the concordia ordinum (class alliance), that is, properly, its acquisition as concept, but deduct the reactionary component (coalition of the boni classes homines under the hegemony of the conservative classes), and grafting the imperative of a new alliance and participation of all the peoples of the Roman universal state below the hegemony of the progressive classes, of which Caesar set himself as the highest representative.
It’s natural to question, what virtues he may hold or lack. 
