Characters

"The die is cast."

Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 BC with a single legion and a lifetime of calculated risk behind him. The eight years in Gaul had given him everything he needed: money, veterans, and a reputation that made his opponents' soldiers unwilling to fight him seriously. He had also built his political position with a patience that the Senate's hostility would not let him enjoy. When it became clear that his enemies intended to prosecute him the moment his command expired, he made the only choice that remained: war. The civil wars revealed a Caesar who was, if anything, more impressive than the conqueror of Gaul. His Spanish campaign — 'an army without a general' — was completed in six weeks without a major battle. His near-disaster at Dyrrachium was recovered so quickly that Pompey never believed it. At Pharsalus he anticipated Pompey's cavalry plan so precisely that he had prepared the counter-attack before the battle began. At Zela he crushed Pharnaces of Pontus in four hours. His clemency policy — pardoning enemies rather than executing them — was both genuinely humane and brilliantly political: each pardoned officer became a demonstration that Caesar could be trusted, and many became loyal supporters. And then the Ides of March. Twenty-three stab wounds in the Theatre of Pompey, delivered by sixty senators he had pardoned, appointed, or favored. He had been warned. He had dismissed his Spanish bodyguard weeks earlier, refusing to live in constant fear. His last words — if he said anything at all — were probably not the famous 'Et tu, Brute?' but either nothing or, according to one source, the Greek phrase 'καί σύ, τέκνον' ('You too, child'), addressed to Brutus. Caesar died aged 55, having conquered Gaul, won the civil wars, and created the conditions for the Roman Empire — everything except the one thing he most wanted, which was enough time to use what he had built.

"I found Rome a city of clay bricks and left it a city of marble."

Gaius Octavius Thurinus was 18 years old when his great-uncle Julius Caesar was murdered, and 32 when he won the Roman world at Actium. In those fourteen years he made every calculated, ruthless, and necessary decision to convert Caesar's inheritance into permanent power — and then spent the next 44 years converting that power into something that could survive him. He was not a great battlefield commander. He was ill before Philippi, possibly from panic, and spent much of the battle in a wagon. Agrippa won his naval campaigns. What Octavian possessed was a political genius that surpassed even Caesar's: the ability to read what Rome wanted to believe about itself and to give it that image. When he became Augustus in 27 BC he refused the title 'dictator' that Caesar had accepted and instead claimed only to be the 'first citizen' (princeps) of a restored Republic. The Senate voted him his unprecedented powers; the people adored him; the army was loyal. The fiction of the Republic served as well as the reality of monarchy, possibly better. The transition from Octavian to Augustus was the most consequential personal transformation in Roman history. The man who had cold-bloodedly proscribed 300 senators and 2,000 equites in 43 BC — who had executed Caesarion, Antony's and Cleopatra's son, to eliminate a dynastic rival — became the pater patriae, the Father of the Fatherland, sponsor of Virgil and Horace, restorer of temples, and administrator of the Pax Romana. He was simultaneously the most violent and the most effective ruler Rome ever produced.

"Friends, Romans, countrymen — lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."

Mark Antony was the best general Caesar had, the most charismatic orator of his age, and the man who — more than anyone else — set the Roman world on fire after Caesar's death. His funeral oration for Caesar, turning an ambivalent crowd into a mob that chased the conspirators from Rome with fire and iron, was perhaps the most consequential single speech in Roman history. For the next fourteen years he spent his extraordinary gifts destroying himself. His military credentials were genuine: Philippi was as much Antony's victory as Octavian's, and his campaigns in the East showed a commander of the first order. But his political intelligence was inferior to both Caesar's and Octavian's. He underestimated Octavian consistently — the 19-year-old who had marched on Rome and extorted a consulship could not, in Antony's mind, be a serious rival. He misread his relationship with Cleopatra: what was for her a matter of political survival became for him a romantic obsession that his enemies (and Octavian's propaganda machine) brilliantly exploited. The Actium campaign was the product of an accumulation of miscalculations. Antony had 100,000 infantry and 500 ships; Octavian had roughly the same. But Agrippa systematically strangled his supply routes for months while desertion and disease gutted his forces. By September 31 BC the battle he fought was not a battle of choice but an attempt to break free of a trap. He escaped; his fleet and army did not. He killed himself in Alexandria when Octavian arrived, dying in Cleopatra's arms — a monument to the gap between personal charisma and political intelligence.

"Give me the ships and the men, and I will do the rest."

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was the most important person in the Roman Civil Wars whose name most people have never heard. He was Octavian's oldest and most devoted friend, his greatest general, and — when the Senate voted Octavian the tribunician power and the name Augustus — the man who could have demanded an equal share but instead accepted second place without apparent resentment. Without Agrippa, Octavian would almost certainly have lost both the naval wars and the Battle of Actium. Agrippa had trained as a soldier in Apollonia alongside Octavian when Caesar was murdered. He returned to Rome with his friend and fought every campaign at his side. His military genius was primarily in engineering and naval warfare: he built the artificial harbor of Portus Julius in a matter of months, designed the harpax (a grappling catapult that revolutionized naval combat), trained an entire fleet from scratch, and systematically dismantled Sextus Pompey's naval power at Naulochus before the final reckoning with Antony. At Actium, the victory was his: he had spent the summer seizing Antony's supply ports and communication lines, reducing Antony's fleet to a fraction of its strength before a battle was even fought. He married Augustus's daughter Julia and became the father of Augustus's heirs. He built the original Pantheon in Rome, constructed the aqueducts that still supply water to the city, and administered Egypt. When Augustus died of illness in 23 BC and should have been succeeded, it was widely expected that Agrippa would take over — he didn't, and nobody could quite explain why. He may simply have been the most loyal man in an age of loyalties.

"Sulla could lay down his dictatorship; why should Caesar not do the same?"

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus — Pompey the Great — was the greatest Roman general of his generation before Caesar arrived. He had cleared the Mediterranean of pirates in three months, defeated Mithridates the Great in the East, reorganized the Roman provinces of Asia, and returned to Rome in 62 BC with a triumph that lasted two days. He was the most celebrated military hero Rome had seen since Scipio Africanus, and he spent the rest of his career discovering that past glory cannot indefinitely substitute for present ability. The civil war exposed Pompey's central flaw: he was a superb organizer and an excellent operational commander but an indecisive strategist. He had the better army at Dyrrachium and failed to exploit it. He had the better position before Pharsalus and allowed his senatorial advisors to pressure him into fighting on ground of Caesar's choosing. His flight from the battlefield at Pharsalus — abandoning his soldiers without orders, going directly from the fighting to a ship in the harbor — was the act that ended him, whatever Caesar's legions had or had not done. The murder on the Egyptian beach was its own kind of verdict. He had sailed to Egypt expecting sanctuary from the king he had helped place on the throne; the courtiers calculated that Caesar would rather find Pompey dead than alive. He was killed as he stepped from his small boat to the shore, stabbed in the back by a former Roman officer now serving Egypt. His head was cut off and preserved in salt to present to Caesar. Caesar turned away from it weeping — genuinely, his soldiers believed.

"I am unwilling to be indebted to a tyrant for anything — not even life."

Marcus Porcius Cato — Cato the Younger, or Cato Uticensis — was the conscience of the Roman Republic, a Stoic philosopher-senator who embodied in his own person the virtues he believed Rome was betraying. He wore rough wool when other senators wore fine cloth. He walked barefoot while others rode. He drank plain water and ate coarse bread. He had renounced a bribe of an enormous fortune. In an age of corruption and personal ambition, his personal austerity was so ostentatious as to be itself a form of politics. Caesar feared Cato's moral authority more than his military ability — Cato was no general but his incorruptibility made him the living argument that the Republican cause was not merely the defense of aristocratic privilege but of something genuinely worth defending. Caesar's famous clemency, which dissolved opposition faster than any military victory, failed completely on Cato: he refused to be pardoned by a man he considered a tyrant, refused to have his life preserved on terms that implied Caesar had the right to grant it. His suicide at Utica in 46 BC was characteristically deliberate. He spent the evening reading Plato's *Phaedo* (a dialogue on the immortality of the soul), attempted suicide but failed when his hand was wounded and the wound was bandaged by his doctor, then tore the bandages off and forced open the wound. Caesar's comment on hearing the news: 'Cato, I grudge you your death, as you have grudged me the chance of saving your life.' The Roman Stoic tradition elevated Cato's death immediately into the defining example of philosophical principle over political survival — and he haunted Caesar's reputation for the rest of Caesar's life.

"Caesar was mighty, bold, and worthy of love; but he was ambitious — and I slew him."

Marcus Junius Brutus was Caesar's most beloved enemy and the man whose name has since defined the archetype of the noble but fatal betrayal. Caesar had pardoned him after Pharsalus — where Brutus had fought on Pompey's side — appointed him governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and planned to make him consul. When the conspirators approached Brutus, they told him the plot needed him specifically because he was above suspicion: no one would believe that Caesar's most favored friend would strike against him for personal gain. This was both the source of his importance to the conspiracy and the explanation of its ultimate failure. Brutus was a Stoic philosopher in the Catonian tradition, deeply sincere, genuinely convinced that killing Caesar would restore the Republic. He insisted on killing only Caesar — not Antony, whom Cassius wanted dead too — because to do otherwise would look like murder rather than liberation. It was the political decision that destroyed him: Antony survived, delivered the funeral oration, and within days the conspirators were fleeing a mob that had burned the house of a tribune named Helvius Cinna because his name was confused with one of the conspirators. At Philippi, Brutus's wing won the first battle — he broke Octavian's position and captured his camp. But Cassius had already died in a mistake. After the second battle, facing encirclement, Brutus ran onto a friend's sword. His last words quoted Euripides: 'Wretched virtue — thou wert but a name.' Antony covered his body with a purple cloak from his own mantle. Caesar reportedly said Brutus alone had acted from genuine conviction rather than personal ambition; Caesar's heir Octavian had Brutus's severed head sent to Rome to lay at the feet of Caesar's statue.

"What we have done to Caesar, let Caesar's heir do to us."

Gaius Cassius Longinus was the organizing intellect of the Ides of March conspiracy — the man who recruited the other conspirators, planned the operation, chose the Theatre of Pompey as the site, and persuaded the wavering Brutus that the action was necessary. Without Cassius there would have been no conspiracy; without Brutus there would have been no moral cover. It was a partnership of political genius and philosophical principle that unraveled within hours of its apparent success. Cassius was a general of real ability — he had commanded the rear guard of Crassus's catastrophic defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC, organized the survivors into a coherent force, and defended Syria against the Parthian counterattack. He was practical where Brutus was idealistic, which is why their relationship was so productive and so tense. He had wanted Antony killed along with Caesar; he was overruled by Brutus. He predicted the consequences; they arrived on schedule. At the first Battle of Philippi, Cassius's wing was overwhelmed by Antony's attack. Sending a scout to determine what was happening on Brutus's side — where the Caesarians were actually losing — Cassius misread the scout's return as further bad news and concluded the entire battle was lost. He ordered his freedman Pindarus to kill him. Minutes later, messengers arrived with news that Brutus had won his half of the battle and that Cassius had died unnecessarily. Brutus covered his body and called him 'the last of the Romans.'

"I will not be led in triumph through Rome."

Cleopatra VII Philopator was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the last independent monarch of the ancient world, and — in Octavian's propaganda and in Western cultural memory — something quite different from the historical reality. She was a polyglot administrator who spoke nine languages (the first of the Ptolemies to speak Egyptian), a political strategist who had survived three civil wars of her own dynasty before meeting Caesar, and the ruler of the richest kingdom in the Mediterranean. The image of her as primarily a femme fatale seducing Romans into political destruction was Octavian's creation, and it worked so well that it largely persists. Her alliance with Caesar was a political calculation first and a personal relationship second. She needed Roman power to secure her throne; he needed Egyptian grain and gold for his armies. She bore him a son, Caesarion, and spent time in Rome in 46-44 BC before his assassination removed her primary protector. With Antony she found both a political partner and a genuine personal ally — the years they spent in Alexandria between campaigns were, by ancient accounts, genuinely happy. She bore him three children and made him gifts of territories that Rome regarded as belonging to the empire. The final act was her masterstroke and her failure simultaneously. When Octavian besieged Alexandria in 30 BC, she preserved her treasure and tried to negotiate — she would support Octavian if he would let Caesarion and her children survive. Octavian agreed to nothing. When Antony died, she knew she faced either a Roman triumph (displayed in chains) or death. She chose death, and she chose the time and manner of it — dressed in her royal robes, reportedly arranging for an asp to be smuggled in with a basket of figs. Octavian wanted her for his triumph; she denied him the satisfaction.