In March 45 BC Caesar defeated the last of the Pompeian party in Spain.
Now he was master of the Roman world.
Now the 12 last and most royal months of this royal life began, exactly twenty years after he had launched his political career with the unforgettable games and the program of conciliation of the popular party.
The first and fundamental action of the conqueror was the establishment of a total amnesty which far surpassed even the most unlikely promises of the years of war.
It is not possible to give in detail the contemporary witnesses to this unique work of amnesty.
Quoted below are only only 3 summary reports from classical historians.
Velleius Paterculus says:
Caesar returned to the capital city as conqueror over all his opponents and – incredible though it may seem to us – proclaimed a general amnesty for all who had taken up arms against him. Such was the clemency exercised by the great man in all his victories.
Suetonius reports:
Finally, in the last year of his life, he permitted everyone, without exception, who had not yet received an amnesty, to return to Italy and enter on the highest government offices and military posts. He even had the statues of Lucius Sulla and Gnaeus Pompeitis, which had been torn down by the populace, made new and set up again.
And he preferred to hinder than to punish hostile plans and utterances which were later directed against his own person.
Thus he prosecuted conspiracies and secret meetings which were unmasked, simply by delivering edicts that he knew all about them. When men spoke spitefully about him he was content to warn them in parliament not to do it any more.
Even the hurt done to his name by the lies of Aulus Caecina and the libellous verses of Pitholaos he bore with urbanity (civili animo).
“And Dio Cassius writes:
” By releasing from any punishment those of his opponents who had survived, and pardoning them all on the same conditions, even advancing them to government offices;
Also, one example of Caesar’s liberal policies, again the example of Marcus Junius Brutus.
In the year 46 BC, at the close of the African war, Cato, the fanatical enemy of Caesar, committed suicide in order that he might not survive the downfall of the conservative cause.
In 45 BC Brutus (his nephew and adopted son) married his daughter Porcia and composed an address of homage to the memory of the great fighter for freedom.
Caesar left him alone, and appointed him Praetor Urbanus for the year 44 BC, that is, president of the Roman senate and supreme court of justice, and deputy chief of police.
Cicero was overwhelmed. That was more than he could understand.
He felt himself all the more dearly called to play in his own way the philosophical accompaniment to Caesar’s historical deeds.
We do not find with you what we have found with every victor in civil war. You are the only one, Gaius Caesar, at whose victory no one has lost his life, except in battle.
So he addresses the dictator.
In dithyrambic speeches he praises the clementissimus dux, the most-merciful leader, his “unique and unheard-of“, his “wonderful and praiseworthy clementia“.
With wise insight he speaks in letters to friends of Caesar’s “unique humanity” and “incredible generosity“, of his “mild and good nature“.
And again he turns to Caesar himself, this time with upraised finger:
Do not weary of saving the good nobles, who have suffered a fall through no selfishness or evil in themselves, but in fulfillment of a supposed duty, fools perhaps, but not criminals .
One can imagine how “thankful” Caesar was for these political lessons.
“It is astonishing what Caesar let people say to him”, writes the modern historian L Wickert.
Probably the dictator was content with an ironical smile.
For a moment, a little uncertainly, the senate too was carried away by the general attitude, and made a unique decision in honor of the unique historical ‘moment.
It appointed Caesar as father of his country and decreed that a special temple should be built for the Clementia Caesaris.
There Caesar and his divine clementia were to be set up and worshipped, and on the pediment of the temple a globe of the world would proclaim that the clemency of Caesar spanned the whole world.
Caesar himself celebrated festivals as never before, and with him the whole people.
Seventy, a hundred, years later tales were told of the fantastic October festival in the Year 45.
«He filled the city with the most magnificent gladiatorial games, with sea-battles, cavalcades, elephant-fights and other spectacles, and celebrated a mass banquet which lasted for days. »
It was not only the capital which was to know of these things, the whole Roman world was to unite in celebrations around the festal figure of the man who was setting mankind free from need and hatred and fear.
So coins were struck with the type of Caesar with the inscription Pater Patriae, or the temple of mercy with the words CLEMENTIA CAESARIS, and reverse in both instances a riding-scene from the October festival.
These coins were intended as good tidings, messengers of the man who was filled with the royal passion to have joyful men and a joyful world around him.
However, though in 49 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar, then a very popular general of Rome’s armies, emerged the victor from a civil war and Caesar’s victory both removed his chief political and military rival, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (defeated by Caesar at the Battle of Pharsalus), and concentrated military power in the hands of Caesar, thereby clearing the path for him to assume dictatorial power.
As dictator, Caesar was de jure Chief Executive and Military Commander of Rome, powers which he had already assumed in practice.
However, the legal office of dictator also granted Caesar power to rule by decree, and also to wield unilateral judicial power.
As a consequence of this, the balance of political power shifted away from Rome’s political elite, the Senate, which had for centuries served as Rome’s premier electoral and administrative body, and entirely towards Caesar.
Unsurprisingly, the Senate took this loss of power and privilege less than lightly.
Throughout Caesar’s dictatorship, Caesar had consolidated his political power even further, being declared dictator Perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity) and also passed laws that allowed him to personally appoint senators and other officials loyal to him, and to dismiss others at whim.
This stoked fears that Caesar wished to completely dismantle the Roman Republic, and instead rule as a king.
To put the gravity of this in perspective, kings ruled Rome prior to the founding of the Republic by Lucius Junius Brutus.
Brutus, in roughly 509 BC, summoned the Roman people to vote for the overthrow and exile of the monarchy – an act of rebellion sparked by the rape of a Roman noblewoman, and Brutus’ kin, Lucretia who felt being raped dishonored her family, so killed herself.
After the monarchy was successfully deposed, one of Brutus’ first acts was to get the people to swear an oath that never again would a king rule in Rome.
Brutus’ influence was also of more immediate impact on Caesar’s assassination: he was ancestor of Marcus Junius Brutus, the very Brutus to whom Caesar (allegedly) cried out to in death.
As evidenced by Seutonius who also notes that “some have written” that when Caesar saw his close friend Marcus Brutus rushing at him, he said in Greek, “Kai su, teknon,” a phrase that is notoriously difficult to translate but is often rendered “You too, my child?”
Reportedly, Senator Gaius Cassius Longinus, one of the principal architects of the plot to kill Caesar, attempted to entice Marcus Brutus to participate in the assassination by implying his ancestor would have done the same.
This outlawing of kingship in Rome, in tandem with the personal distress and jealousy of the weakened Roman Senate was the uppermost motive for Caesar’s assassination.
And despite Caesar’s pompous attitude, his assassination is never seems fully justified.
This is because a claim to clemency does not imply supra-legal powers; it had been made by Caesar, but was open to any office holder.
What was meant was that while Pompey had declared all enemies who were not on his side to be enemies of the state at the beginning of the civil war, Caesar announced that he would, conversely, treat all neutrals as friends.
In other words, if you are not against me, then you are with me – a bold assumption.
That of course brought him huge crowds, because most didn’t want the civil war.
And after the victory, instead of persecuting and murdering them like Sulla once with proscription lists, Caesar forgave his enemies and even reinstated them in office and dignity.
More than that, he burned Pompey’s files that had fallen into his hands so that he wouldn’t even know who he had forgiven everyone for.
Finally, he said goodbye to his bodyguard and trusted the word of the senators, who had solemnly committed to protecting his person, as he did to them.
Of course, the conspirators took advantage of this to murder him.
Caesar was fatalistic about the danger of assassination.
He knew it was a possibility but he was a decorated soldier who did not want to live his life in fear.
He dismissed his official bodyguard but, to deter attack, surrounded himself with tough men and former soldiers.
Only senators could enter the meeting hall, however, so Caesar was vulnerable at senate meetings.
His enemies knew that, which is why they struck at a meeting of the Roman Senate on the Ides of March – March 15, 44 BC.
Among them were those whom he had appointed as his heirs.
This made the people so bitter when the will was read.
So the was misused Clementia Caesaris doomed to the Caesar killers.
The people had decided: the freedom which Caesars liberalitas founded was more important to them than the freedoms which the liberatores conjured up.
The Clementia Caesaris was never denied by anyone, not even Brutus himself: he did not murder Caesar not because he found his clemency lying, but because freedom from Caesar’s grace seemed to him to be none.
This is something else.
However, as David Konstan notes, led to the communis opino – commonly supposed that Julius Caesar’s celebrated clemency toward his fellow citizens was perceived by his contemporaries not as a virtue, but rather as a manifestation of his tyrannical power.
Far from welcoming his clemency as a sign of generosity or benevolence, the senatorial aristocracy in fact resented it deeply.
It is not surprising that a group of Roman Senators, many of them also military men, gathered together to kill Caesar.
Caesar threatened to change their lives in ways that mattered – and that hurt.
By parading his clemency and offering pardon, Caesar was patronizing and adding insult to injury by rubbing salt in the wounds of his defeated enemies.
In their own estimation, they were Caesar’s peers, and were indignant at being treated with what they regarded as condescending charity.
Caesar was undertaking a series of fundamental reforms in Rome and its empire.
He wanted to downplay the power of the city of Rome and its ancient elite and to share power with new elites in the provinces.
He also wanted to reduce the power of the Roman people in the annual elections to choose public officials.
The result would be more efficient and fairer to the tens of millions of people who lived in Rome’s provinces but it threatened the privilege and power of both mass and elite in the city of Rome.
And it threatened to turn a republic into one-man rule, which few in Rome wanted.
Caesar was a visionary but the old Romans held back.
What is more, the association between clemency and tyranny persisted at least into the 1st century of the Empire, if not beyond:
the elite classes continued to take offense at professions of imperial clemency, and an emperor who called attention to his clemency knew that it might be construed as an insult – Noblesse oblige is not a virtue when directed at fellow noblemen.
The virtue, used in a political sense, became more prominent in the Late Republic, with leading figures such as Sulla, Pompey, and Julius Caesar.
In the case of Sulla and Pompey, ancient authors often employed their crudelitas as a literary trope to heighten the contrast between them and a leading politician’s clemency.
Cicero at first represents the general as ignorant of the cruelties that were being carried out in Rome, and only later acknowledges the brutality of the proscriptions, but implies that Marius and Cinna deserved their fate for crimes committed against Rome.
Cicero uses the actions of Sulla, however, to show how the earlier years were so much better than the current times.
No matter what Sulla did, his actions are consistently portrayed as those of a man who was good by nature, but who was forced to commit terrible acts because of the pressures of traitorous politicians.
When Sulla defeated the tyrant, Aristion, who, having been placed in Athens by Mithridates, was oppressing the city, he made sure to pardon the city.
These two examples are significant.
In the latter, Sulla bestowed clemency on a defeated city, Athens, an action which up until this point had been common in the Hellenistic world and in Roman treatment of defeated foreigners.
The significance in the former example lies in the fact that Sulla had bestowed clemency not on a defeated, foreign foe, but on a fellow Roman aristocrat.
An action such as this is uncommon before Julius Caesar, and is an important element in tracing the evolution of the virtue in the Roman political context.
This sudden shift in the use of the term clemency , however , indicates that the appearance of Caesar inspired the high frequency, and also suggests that his particular type of mercy needed its own definition.
When Caesar set free the prisoners at Corfinium, he was bestowing clemency not on defeated barbarians, but on his fellow Roman citizens.
This action is significant as such a bestowal had always carried with it certain connotations.
Seneca writes that someone who has been spared “has lost his life who owes it to another. .. he is a lasting spectacle of another’s prowess
Another thought commonly held was , an offer of mercy “upholds the worst class of men, since it is superfluous unless there has been some crime, and since it alone of all the virtues finds no exercise among the guiless.
In other words, clemency only benefits the bad and not the good.
They also felt the bestowal of clemency implied the commitment and the pardoning of a crime, there was the expectation that the defeated would show loyalty.
An example of this can be found in Cicero, in his speech on behalf of King Deiotarus, who had been accused of plotting against Julius Caesar:
This man, then, who was not merely freed by you from peril but advanced to the highest dignity, is accused of having desired to murder you in his house; a suspicion which, unless you deem him an utter madman, you assuredly cannot entertain.
For, not to advert … to the inhumanity and ingratitude of behaving like a tyrant towards one by whom he had been entitled King.
Since Deiotarus had been spared by Caesar, the charge that he had plotted against the general did not seem likely, as his loyalty was expected.
Therefore, clemency’s connotations, when used in connection with foreign foes, were not a problem, but showing mercy to one’s fellow citizens made the relationship between the victor and the conquered more problematic.
It is for this reason that clemency was not a part of a democratic government, such as in Athens, since all citizens were considered equal.
Although a significant turning point, it does not seem that Caesar’s grant of mercy to Pompey’s soldiers had a deep impact since the men were used to being under the control of someone.
When it came to bestowing clemency on the elite members of society, however, the granting of it became dangerous.
Since clemency carried with it associations of defeated enemies and an inferior status, the aristocracy resented being the recipients of such an act.
Julius Caesar was supposed to be their equal, and the implication that he was now their superior, that he now had power over them, caused them to feel bitter towards him.
For example, in the writing of Cicero, the orator can be seen to feel both gratitude, as he was a recipient of Caesar’s clemency, but also unease with the dictator’s actions.
Yet Cicero also reveals his discontent and doubt.
His claim that he “had written praising to the skies [Caesar’s] kindness, his at Corfinium, contains traces of insincerity, as does his statement that Caesar “thought mild measures would win popularity.
Such feelings were probably not uncommon among the elite class, whose classics did not consider themselves to be of a lower status than Caesar.
These examples also indicate that part of elite disapproval stemmed from Caesar using clemency as a means to gain the favor of the people.
It seems that the elite were willing to tolerate Caesar’s clemency as long as it did not encroach on their authority, and some even benefited from it.
The moment when they felt that their authority was compromised or that Caesar was elevating himself above them, they quickly denounced his clemency.
The Clementia Caesaris proved to be Caesar’s undoing when the very people to whom he had shown mercy formed the conspiracy to murder him.
The idea his policy of clemency was a failure is conceded by Cicero.
Cicero, in his speech pro Ligario, succeeded in obtaining pardon for Quintus Ligarius, but ironically Ligarius may have been involved in the plot to assassinate Caesar.
Moreover, their constant theme is that a man of the most illustrious character has been killed; that by his death the constitution has been thoroughly shaken; that his will be rendered nugatory as soon as we cease to be frightened; that his clemency did him harm; and that if he had not shown it, nothing of the sort would have befallen him.
In the end, it was this virtue that stirred up enough resentment among the senatorial elite that they killed him.
This text also illustrates that the Clementia Caesaris was yet another example of the way in which the dictator alienated the elite and threatened their authority, which contributed to his downfall.
Though that be the case, clemency is neither a failure , nor did it fail Caesar ultimately.
The assassins of the Ides of March were wrong to suppose they could destroy Caesar’s work, or mock the will of history.
They had to pay dearly for the dagger-blow at Caesar’s Clementia.
Caesar dead caused more trouble to his enemies than Caesar living, wrote a contemporary historian.
Once more the bloodthirsty ghost of the proscriptions went through the land, and three hundred senators and two thousand Equestrians were to die before the young Augustus resumed his father’s policy of conciliation.
In the aftermath of his assassination, there was a distancing away from the policy and the concept, before it would reemerge again under the emperor Augustus, once it was safe to bring out and continues to present day – it lives and breathes on, not dying with Caesar and through it justice pursued.
