In December 50 BC the Senate voted by 370 to 22 that Caesar and Pompey should both give up their commands, and six weeks later the war began anyway.
The previous lesson left two men with armies and no institution able to judge between them. This one is about how that situation turned into a war, what Caesar did with the power he won, and why the men who stabbed him in 44 BC found that they had removed a person and not a regime, which is the same discovery the Republic's founders had made in reverse five centuries earlier.
The question nobody could answer
The legal dispute of 51 to 49 BC is genuinely difficult, and that is the point of it.
Caesar's Gallic command was ending. He wanted to stand for a second consulship without first returning to Rome as a private citizen, and a law carried by all ten tribunes in 52 BC gave him permission to stand in absence. His enemies wanted him to come home unarmed, where prosecution waited for his acts as consul in 59 and afterwards, and they had Pompey's own legislation on magistracies to cite. Both sides could construct an argument that was legally respectable, and there was no court with jurisdiction to decide between them, because the Republic had never built one.
What breaks the deadlock is not the law but the incentives underneath it. The rules required Caesar to make himself defenceless in front of men who had spent a decade promising to destroy him, and the previous lessons have shown what a Roman politician without office and without protection could expect.
Example. In December 50 BC the tribune Curio moved that Caesar and Pompey should both lay down their commands, and the Senate carried it by 370 votes to 22. What does that division prove, and what does it not?
It proves that the war was not wanted by the political class. Of 392 senators voting, 94.4 per cent preferred mutual disarmament, which means the hard line came from a small group, on the usual reckoning around Cato and the Claudii Marcelli, who nonetheless controlled the presiding magistrates and could prevent the motion from taking effect. It does not prove the majority had a policy. A vote for both men to disarm is a vote for someone else to solve the problem, and it came with no mechanism to make either of them comply. Roman decision-making could register an overwhelming preference and be unable to execute it, which is a fair epitaph for the late Republic.
Now you. On 7 January 49 BC the Senate passed its final decree, and the tribunes Antony and Cassius left Rome for Caesar's camp. Why did that detail matter to Caesar's case?
Answer
Because it let him present his invasion as a defence of the constitution rather than an attack on it. Tribunes were sacrosanct, their persons inviolable by the oldest sanction in Roman politics, and driving them out of the city was a violation the Senate's own traditions could not justify. Caesar opens his account of the civil war with exactly this argument, and it was worth making because it converted a dispute about his own command into a defence of the plebs' rights. Whether he believed it is unanswerable and largely irrelevant. What matters is that a man crossing into Italy with an army thought he needed a constitutional grievance, which tells you how much the forms still counted, even at the moment they were being destroyed.
The war
Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the stream marking the southern boundary of his province, with a single legion around 10 January 49 BC. Italy had no army in being: Pompey's veterans were in Spain, and the recruits he raised could not be concentrated in time. Sixty-six days later Pompey and the consuls sailed from Brundisium to Greece, and Caesar held Italy without a battle.
He then spent 49 BC destroying the Pompeian forces in Spain, and in 48 crossed to Greece, was beaten at Dyrrachium, and won the war at Pharsalus on 9 August. In his own account he had 22,000 infantry against Pompey's 45,000 and lost 200 men to Pompey's 15,000. Pompey fled to Egypt and was murdered on the beach as he landed. The remaining campaigns took three years: Alexandria, then Zela in Asia, then Thapsus in Africa in 46, then Munda in Spain in 45, where the dead included the last of Pompey's sons to matter.
Example. The figures for Pharsalus come from Caesar's own Commentarii, published by him during the war. How should they be used?
As the best evidence available and as advocacy. Caesar was writing for a Roman audience that contained many participants, so gross invention about the shape of the battle was risky, and his numbers for his own legions can be checked loosely against what is known of his recruitment. The ratios are where the interest lies, and they all flatter: he is always outnumbered, his losses are always trivial, and his enemies are always numerous and badly led. Asinius Pollio, who was present, is reported as giving 6,000 Pompeian dead against Caesar's 15,000. The sound method is to accept the framework, treat the casualty ratio as a claim rather than a count, and notice that a general who publishes his own dispatches has invented a political instrument as well as writing history.
Now you. Caesar took Italy in about two months without fighting a battle for it. What does that speed indicate about the state of the Republic?
Answer
That the government had no forces of its own. Everything Rome could put in the field belonged to somebody: Caesar's legions in Gaul, Pompey's in Spain, others attached to their commanders elsewhere. When the crisis came, the Senate could vote decrees and could not raise an army faster than the man already leading one could march. It also indicates something about the Italian towns, which had been enfranchised within living memory and had little enthusiasm for a war between two Roman grandees, and about Caesar's policy of sparing prisoners, which made surrender cheap. A state whose defence depends on private armies is defended only when the owner of one agrees.
What he did with it
Caesar held a series of dictatorships, briefly in 49, for a year in 48, for ten years in 46, and for life in February 44, alongside consulships in 48, 46, 45 and 44. He took the right to nominate magistrates and to command all the armies, raised the Senate to 900 by admitting Italians, provincials and some of his own centurions, and did all of it without abolishing a single institution.
The government he ran was effective in a way the Republic had not managed for decades. Veterans and the urban poor were settled in colonies overseas rather than by confiscations in Italy, which defused the quarrel that had run since the Gracchi. Debts were handled by writing down what had been paid in interest and valuing property at pre-war prices, which satisfied neither creditors nor the men who wanted debts cancelled outright, and is therefore probably about right. Cisalpine Gaul got the citizenship.
What he did not do is as striking. He wrote no new constitution, abolished no assembly, and left the consulship, the tribunate, the courts and the Senate standing, filling them with his own men rather than replacing them. The regime had no name and no rule of succession, which is why the question of what would happen when he died had no answer inside it, and why the men who killed him could believe that removing him was the whole of the task.
Reforms a republic could not pass
The most durable act is the least political. The Roman calendar had drifted so far from the seasons that the harvest festivals fell in the wrong months, and every serious Roman knew it and nobody had fixed it. Caesar, as chief priest, took Greek astronomical advice, inserted enough days to make 46 BC a year of 445 days, and started a new calendar of 365.25 days on 1 January 45.
Example. The Julian year is 365.25 days and the true tropical year is about 365.2422. Work out the accuracy of the reform and say what it demonstrates.
The error is 0.0078 days a year, which accumulates to one day in about 128 years, so the calendar was good to roughly one part in 47,000 and held with a single correction for over 1,600 years. What it demonstrates is not Caesar's genius, since the astronomy was Greek and available to anyone, but the difference a decision-maker makes. The reform required agreement across the priestly colleges, the magistrates and the assemblies, all of which had reasons to obstruct it, and under the Republic it had failed for a century. One man with unquestioned authority did it in a year. That is exactly the argument for autocracy, and it is worth stating in its strongest form, because the Romans who accepted the Principate were not fools and this is the kind of thing they were buying.
Now you. Suetonius says Caesar cut the number of people receiving subsidised grain in Rome from 320,000 to 150,000. Compute the reduction and consider how a Republican politician would have fared attempting it.
Answer
A cut of 170,000 places, or 53 per cent. Under the Republic the grain list was the most sensitive question in city politics: Gaius Gracchus built a coalition on it, Clodius made distributions free in 58 BC, and any attempt to shorten the roll would have been met with a tribune's veto, a hostile assembly and organised violence in the streets. Caesar did it by census and audit while holding the dictatorship, and nothing happened. The episode shows both what the concentration of power could achieve and what it had displaced: the list was not merely a welfare measure but the standing bargain between the poor of Rome and their politicians, and cutting it unilaterally announced that the bargain was now a favour.
The Ides
None of that answers the question of what Caesar intended for the long run, and the honest position is that we do not know, because he was preparing to leave for a Parthian campaign of several years and had made arrangements for magistracies to be filled in his absence.
What he had done was make the permanence explicit. Dictator for life is not an emergency office, and the title said so in the one word Roman politics could not absorb. The rest, the statues, the gold chair, the coins with his portrait, the refusal to stand when the Senate approached, mattered because they pointed the same way.
On 15 March 44 BC some sixty senators, many of them men he had pardoned in the civil war, stabbed him in a meeting of the Senate. He was struck twenty-three times. The leading conspirator, Marcus Junius Brutus, was descended, or claimed to be, from the Brutus who expelled the last king in 509, and the whole act was staged as a repetition of that one, 465 years later.
The staging is also the clue to why the act failed. Removing a would-be king had worked in 509, on the tradition, because the powers he held reverted to institutions that could hold them, and in 44 BC there were no such institutions. The armies belonged to their commanders, the veterans expected land from Caesar's arrangements, the treasury and the state papers were in Antony's hands within a day, and Caesar's heir was an eighteen-year-old with a name worth legions. The conspirators had no plan for the day after, made no attempt to seize the treasury or the city, and expected the Senate to resume. Two days later that Senate voted an amnesty for the killers and confirmed all of Caesar's acts in the same session, which is a precise measure of the situation: it could not condemn the murder or undo the regime.
Nor did Caesar's clementia, his policy of pardoning defeated enemies rather than proscribing them, protect him, though it is usually contrasted favourably with Sulla's method. A pardon is an exercise of the power to kill, and every man who received one was reminded that his life was now a gift. Sulla's proscriptions removed his enemies; Caesar's clemency left them alive, in the Senate, holding office, and diminished, and several of the men who stabbed him had been pardoned at Pharsalus. Cicero saw the point exactly and wrote that the fault lay in a position where a Roman could be spared rather than acquitted. The comparison therefore cuts both ways: Sulla's method was monstrous and it worked, in that he died in his bed and his settlement outlived him by a decade, and Caesar's was humane and it killed him.
Where this leaves the Republic
The Republic on 15 March 44 BC had a dead dictator, an amnesty for his murderers, a confirmation of all his laws, a consul in possession of his papers, an heir nobody had heard of, and eleven legions in Gaul, thirteen in the east and a dozen more elsewhere, every one of them attached to a man rather than to the state.
Nobody in Rome was proposing monarchy and nobody could produce a working republic. The thirteen years that resolved that, and the settlement that replaced the res publica with something that used all its words, are the last lesson.