Julius Caesar: The Last Dictator

JULIUS
CAESAR:
THE LAST DICTATOR

CHAPTER 6.2: LEGACY AND REFORM

A plan of one of Caesar's many building projects to beautify Rome

CAESAR'S REFORMS

Certainly it is impossible to imagine Caesar's later career without the immediate actions of those who controlled Rome in his turbulent lifetime. From his uncle, Gaius Marius, he must surely have learned that political power bolstered by a loyal army was a tool of surpassing flexibility. From Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who sought the young Caesar's life, he could have seen Rome's horror of a dictator, although a dictator could override squabbling politicians to effect real change. From the multiple would-be coups d'etat by other wannabe Sullas, he could have easily seen that careful planning and army support was crucial to any bid for power. From the "Social War," he learned of the burning resentment of the Italian allies, largely disenfranchised from the benefits of Rome's rule. From Crassus, he learned the lesson that the foundation of political influence was wealth; from Pompey and Cicero, it was obvious that military might required political skill and that effective oratory benefited from the mechanics of crowd control. From Cato, he'd learned the price of filibustering obstruction in the face of necessary reforms. From his military travels throughout the provinces, he must have seen the largely untapped potential of Rome's overseas conquests. From all these examples, and from his own undoubted genius, he would reveal statesmanship of the highest order in his benign dictatorship over Rome's multifarious problems. Even more unusual, he would do so using the conventional constitutional devices of the Roman past: the edict, the senatorial decree, and the popular law. Augustus would learn from Caesar to use the familiar forms to effect change.

Long-standing problems received brisk attention when Caesar reached absolute power. Since well before the time of the Gracchi, land reforms had tormented Rome's peace. The question of debt resolution had haunted the Senate since before the time of Cato the Censor. Governing provinces was a long-standing scandal of corruption and grievance. How to reward Rome's veterans had been dealt with piecemeal in the past (land reform had been one of Caesar's first priorities as Consul). The calendar was so far off the solar year that whole seasons were incorrectly designated in time. The power-sharing between the knights and the Senators caused continual friction and turbulence. Slaves swamped the vast estates of the nobility and small farmers were increasingly without the means to support their families. Greedy politicians had increased the grain dole to ensure their own support, straining the resources of the state. The currency was devalued and administration throughout the growing Empire in chaos.

Abroad, in the past century, Rome's management of its overseas provinces was often mere plundering by the Optimates awarded the plum jobs. No civil service existed (nor would, until Augustus). Too many of Rome's governors treated its overseas possessions and colonies with authoritarian tactlessness and stole from them unabashed. Many of Caesar's actions clearly attacked this inward-looking mentality, forcing Rome to permit the rest of Italy and provinces abroad to share in her power. The colonies and provinces were a major focus of Caesar's legislation. The provinces received enhanced status and Transpadene Gaul was fully enfranchised. Franchises also went to colonial cities such as Lisbon and Cadiz. Any colony with sufficient Roman settlers received upgraded citizen status, including in many cases the citizen's right of appeal against corrupt or tyrannical magistrates. Caesar scrapped the inefficient and intolerable system of farming out provinces to governors who milked the provinces to make their own fortunes. Land taxes replaced the inefficient tithe system in Asia and Sicily. Terms of proconsulars and other overseas magistrates were reduced to prevent individual abuse.

And then there was the far-ranging desire to use political power to build. It had long been expected of Rome's first citizens to use their wealth to adorn their city, although this aspect of citizenship had languished in recent years. Caesar, half-engineer that he was, planned road-building and aqueducts, visualized draining the Pomptine marshes south of Rome, and dreamed far-ranging engineering projects from Africa to Corinth, although few were completed before his murder. Like Augustus, he had spent twenty years pouring his personal wealth into rebuilding the great public structures in the Forum (including the Senate) and gave Rome his magnificent first Imperial Forum - the Forum Julium - complete with its magnificent temple to Venus Genetrix, its markets, and law-courts.

In addition, Caesar throughout his career fought to establish more overseas colonies than any Roman had ever considered. He not only thus provided land for his hungry veterans, but created satellite Romes throughout the Mediterranean and the East. Each colony was granted a variety of citizenship and colonial rights. Soon these towns - Carthage, Corinth, Hispalis in Spain and multiple colonies in France, Spain, and Africa - would send their sons to the motherland; eventually, as Romans, they would rule it. Particularly in newly-pacified Gaul, with bitter memories of Caesar's wars, resettlement rewove the postwar economy as well as guaranteeing reserves of trained ex-soldiers to pacify the new territory. Whether he deliberately intended it or not, settling veterans in newly-conquered provinces ensured the eventual merger of Roman and local values. At the same time, Caesar resettled tens of thousands - perhaps as much as 80,000 or more - of Rome's indigent proletarii in his new colonies, reducing the powder keg of the Roman landless and unemployed. This vastly increased Rome's influence to the far fringes of the Empire. Caesar is known to have personally mandated building dozens of Roman straight-streeted towns, with forums, basilicas, courts, schools, and theaters, as a physical manifestation of Rome's successful sway. At the same time, he extended Roman citizenship to important native leaders throughout Spain and Gaul, including their futures in the greatness of Rome and securing their support and influence for its extension. This is one of the many great ironies: that the man who broke Gaul and brought it into the Empire should have been one of the first to give its prominent citizens all Roman rights.

Caesar ordered an exact census of Rome's population and, based on the results, the free distribution of grain was re-regulated, reducing the total number eating at state expense from 320,000 to 150,000, a number not exceeded in the future. Caesar granted special privileges to fathers of large families and gave citizenship rights to doctors and teachers. He provided public libraries and commissioned scholars and historians to collect and classify Greek and Latin books on a comprehensive scale. He reformed the degraded currency and intelligently administered provincial sources of revenue together with his fabulous war-booty, putting the currency on a stable basis again. He issued coins in his own image, it is true, but they were coins on a sound economic basis.

Caesar was more effective dealing with Rome's intransigent debt problems than any politician before him. With the death of Pompey, following fifty years of multiple civil insurrections, chronic debt was destroying the Roman social fabric. In the aftermath of the great Civil War, men looked to the Senate to abolish all debt or dreaded that Caesar would, in fact, do so, depending upon whether they were debtors or creditors. In 49, he enshrined a brilliant compromise that kick-started the flagging economy, even though it pleased neither extreme. Instead of plundering the properties classes for debt relief, he issued a well-considered dictatorial edict regulating the issue. By its provisions, creditors had to accept land in settlement of debt land at its prewar value, as assessed by independent arbitrators. Regarding capital loans, a portion of the pent-up interest was deducted on debts which, extending over years of civil chaos, would bankrupt the debtors if forced to repay in full. Thus the lenders were assured a portion, if not all, of their loan and profits while the debtors were allowed easy terms to repay without having to lose their property or lands. Regulations also regulated allowable interest rates and, to promote economic liquidity, Caesar limited how much cash a citizen could hold by reinstating an old law. This put money back into the economy while simultaneously erasing crushing debt; in fact, it was probably the greatest single act Caesar issued and stabilized the economy within a very short time.

As Suetonius notes, Caesar also tackled the almost intractable problem of Roman law. Rather like the English common law until codified, Rome was a mass of unwieldy, contradictory statues deriving over centuries of jurisprudence. Caesar set himself to reduce the Civil Code to manageable proportions, by selecting the most essential statues and having them published. In this he was the precursor to great jurisprudential administrators like Justinian, many centuries later.

In the government of Rome itself, both to break the power of the oligarchs and to create new opportunities for both plebeians and Equites (loosely knights, the merchant class), Caesar increased the number of governing magistrates, praetors, quaestors, and aediles. He created, through the lex Julia Municipalis, a local government to help manage Rome's urban problems. He raised the number of Senators by as much as a third, replacing the numbers decimated by civil war by new blood. Many were his own clients; but his own clients, for the first time, included Roman citizens from the provinces. With senators from both Gaul and Spain, the Senate's pronouncements would have a force reverberating beyond merely the Italian peninsula. For the knights, Caesar provided a more stable judicial system by leaving equal numbers of Senators and businessmen concerned with legal administration and judgments. Only senators and knights could serve on juries and penalties for severe crimes were stepped up; in murder cases, he introduced the confiscation of the whole of the criminals property and, in other cases, by half (previously wealthy criminals had not suffered much other than the penalties of exile).

Finally, Caesar consulted Egyptian and other astronomers (including the Greek scholar, Sosigenes) with the towering end-result of institution of the Julian calendar. Acting as Pontifex Maximus, Caesar introduced, as of January 1, 45, a solar year of 365 1/4 days; to do so, he had to insert an additional 67 days between November and December of 46, which thus had 445 days. The efficacy of the Julian calendar has endured almost unchanged to this day. It finally brought Roman religious and other festivals into line with the seasons they celebrated.

From his turbulent consulship, Caesar had tried to address many of these issues: in his last year, he built on those reforms. Caesar mandated that one-third of all workers on large estates were freemen, partially to stop the drain of dispossessed landless men into Rome itself. Most of the remaining "public land" in Italy was broken up to create individual veterans' farms.

Part of the new excavations of Caesar's Forum in Rome; Caesar's building projects were not only logical but popular.

CAESAR'S LEGACY

Other than a desire to excel, what else was in Caesar's mind concerning his hopes for Rome? Besides the ambition, was there a genuine concern for reform? Or was reform merely a tool to extend his power over the mob? It is all too easy for recent scholars to mock at Caesar's career as a despicable personal ambition. Caesar surely revealed a steely ruthlessness throughout his career which, in the absence of real accomplishment, would lend color to such a comparison, if the accomplishments were not so undeniable. Cicero claimed Caesar would stop at nothing to achieve his aims. Cato loathed him as the embodiment of destructive ambition. He conquered millions of people around the Roman world; imposed tributes; levied judgments; brutally led men. Much written about him in his own time is hostile. Augustus, for his own purposes, did not promote epics in his adopted father's memory. How, then, can such a man ever be summarized or known?

Pompey; Caesar; Antony; and Augustus, the only one who died in his bed.

It is arguable that the arguments for or against Caesar are markedly similar to those for or against Napoleon nearly 2000 years later. Both rose to power in a vacuum, in a time of decayed revolution, violence, and political instability. Both sought world conquest for their own glory as well as their nation's. Both were extraordinarily intelligent and without scruple, scorning the floundering efforts of their inept peers. Both were as involved with civil, legal, and administrative reforms after their conquests as they had been with their magnificent armies; as if armies are mere tools for the changes that they could effect. Both are now remembered not only for their military brilliance and intellectual arrogance but for the stunning civil reforms they realized in the teeth of opposition. Both were so single-mindedly confident in the rightness of their own star that no man's argument could sway them and no nation's plea could move them in accomplishing what they considered their destinies. Yet even Napoleon was, in his own quest for glory, an imitator and admirer of the great original - Caesar.

Those who love liberty can never accept the concept of a benevolent dictator, a contradiction in terms. Yet Caesar's greatness far outweighs those of the many petty politicians who, neither Ciceros nor Catos, attempted to control Rome in his own time. It is difficult to drag Caesar down to earth to judge him impartially with them. Yet he left a solid body of legislative achievements behind him that helped lay the legal and political groundwork for an Empire. Perhaps in three areas his legacies must be considered remarkable: that he started to break the stranglehold of a small, Roman elite upon political power; that he treated the provinces with tact, allowed them increasing political power and responsibility, settling tens of thousands of Romans throughout them so that the peoples would eventually grow together. He also chose the remarkable Octavian as his heir. Augustus' remarkable political and social achievements are his own (though in his reign he did more than Caesar to bury the Republic): yet Augustus built in every direction upon Caesar. There was a reason that all emperors were called Caesar for thousands of years after the man himself was gone. He intended to change Rome's history, and did.

In the judgment of history, Caesar received what he probably most desired: a primacy of fame. The next chapter will seach for the man behind the legend.

Fresh flowers mark the site of Caesar's pyre in the Forum.

Sources:

Image of Caesar and map of the Julian Forum courtesy of James Grout,Encyclopedia Romana . Photographs of the present-day Julian Forum and the site of Caesar's cremation in the Forum Romanum by the author. The four magnificent late-Republican coins courtesy of From Octavian to Augustus: Images Illustrating His Rise to Power.