Julius Caesar by T.P. Wiseman

Author:T.P. Wiseman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

7

Disasters

Caesar is convinced he cannot be safe in Rome if he leaves his army.

Marcus Caelius Rufus, Roman senator,

writing to Cicero in 51 BC77

In August 54 BC Caesar’s daughter Julia, the young wife Pompey doted on, died in childbirth. The reaction of the Roman People was extraordinary. After an emotional funeral ceremony in the Forum, the crowd refused to allow the body to be taken away for private burial. They insisted that she be buried in a grand tomb in the Campus Martius, and when Lucius Domitius, the presiding consul, told them that this would be sacrilegious without a special decree of the Senate, they shouted him down.78 The Campus Martius was the People’s property;79 Julia was the daughter of the pontifex maximus, who was fighting the People’s wars at the ends of the earth. Domitius was a wealthy aristocrat and a diehard optimate.80 Who was he to tell them what to do?

One of Caesar’s deputy commanders was contributing to this class-war atmosphere. Lucius Cotta was in charge of one of the legions left in Gaul during the expedition to Britain, and he used his spare time to compose a treatise, On the Republic. One brief quotation from it happens to survive, clearly from a passage praising the traditional frugality of the People’s commanders:

Julius Caesar, the first man in history to make the crossing to the islands of Britain, which he did with a thousand ships [a pardonable exaggeration], took only three personal servants with him.81

How different from the luxurious arrangements of the arrogant aristocracy!

Just a few months later, Lucius Cotta himself provided an object lesson in traditional Roman values when he died fighting to the last alongside his men against the Eburones in Belgium. It was the worst defeat of the entire Gallic war – one and a half legions wiped out in a single day. And it could have been even worse. The legions’ winter camps had been established further apart than usual, making them vulnerable to individual attacks. Quintus Cicero’s camp was besieged by the Nervii, and only rescued in the nick of time by Caesar himself.

He would not be going into Italy that winter. The illusion of Roman invincibility had been dispelled:

As news spread [of the Eburones’ victory], almost all the tribes in Gaul had been discussing the possibility of going to war; they were sending messengers and envoys all over the country, finding out what the other tribes were intending to do and who would make the first moves in such a war, and holding meetings at night in deserted places. Throughout the whole winter there was scarcely a time when I was not anxious, and receiving some report or other about plans for a rising among the Gauls.82

In Rome too, politicians were taking note of a changed situation.

Soon the Roman People had even worse news to digest: the abject failure of Crassus’ great invasion of Parthia. His defeat at Carrhae, a mere 60 miles east of the Euphrates, was catastrophic. Twenty thousand men were killed, and five out of seven legions lost.

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