SOURCE: “Caesar and Caesarism in the Historical Writing of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Julius Caesar and His Public Image, Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 10-57.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in German in 1979, Yavetz surveys modern interpretations of Caesar, focusing on the question of whether he should be considered a dictator.]

THE PROBLEM¹

In 1953 Hermann Strasburger startled a group of German teachers when he stated briefly and persuasively,² that Julius Caesar, despite his image of great popularity,³ was nothing more than a lonely dictator: not a single Roman senator supported his fateful decision to cross the Rubicon.

Before he took this risk, Caesar addressed his companions, ‘My friends, if I do not cross this stream, there will be manifold distress for me; if I do cross it, it will be for all mankind.’⁴ This warning left his friends unmoved. Some of them, including Calpurnius Piso (his father-in-law), Publius Dolabella, Scribonius Curio, Sulpicius Rufus and Trebatius Testa, absolutely refused to cross the Rubicon; others, like Oppius, Balbus and Matius (who were reckoned in Rome to be Caesar's most trusted associates), had their own views about it. According to Strasburger, one factor was crucial: at no point did Caesar command the total devotion of his followers.

Strasburger did not concern himself with Caesar's plans, his final aims, or his place in history. He agreed with Jakob Burckhardt that, ‘so far-reaching a view, implying that Caesar's plans were on a world-wide scale, must, since it is based on false assumptions, lead to wrong conclusions.’

At the beginning of his career Caesar was merely a Roman senator,⁵ and it is highly debatable whether he was at that time capable of thinking of himself as an absolute monarch. Most modern historians⁶ reject as unhistorical Suetonius' assertion in the name of Cicero,⁷ ‘Caesar in his consulship established the despotism which he had already in mind when he was aedile.’

It was only after the conquest of Gaul that Caesar decided on war as the means of raising his own dignitas to a level with that of Pompey.⁸ Viewed from this angle, Caesar was not for one moment planning for monarchy in the year 49 bc, he was not attempting to undermine the Republic, and he was not yet thinking of transforming it into an empire by means of a ‘new order’. Caesar declared that his aims in waging war were ‘the tranquillity of Italy, the peace of the provinces, the safety of the Empire’,⁹ but Strasburger dismissed these as words of propaganda, and having nothing in common with the pronouncements of a manifesto. Actually, Caesar was anything but a revolutionary; it was he who suggested a spirit of co-operation in the Senate, and challenged senators to share with him the burden of leading the state.¹⁰

In assessing Caesar, Strasburger asserted that Caesar was no Augustus, no Trajan and no Hadrian: he was the last patrician of the old school.

Caesar's isolation grew from day to day. While his soldiers and the masses worshipped him like an idol, his peers, and even his closest friends, accused him of tyranny. His murderers had no alternative plans of any kind. They wanted quite simply nothing more than to be rid of the hated dictator. The fact that some of Caesar's laws remained in force even after his death proves only that there was a practical necessity for them. In the last analysis no one regretted his murder.

Thus far Strasburger.

The German teachers were shocked.¹¹ In their view, Strasburger had ‘assassinated’ one of their great heroes, and some of them even wondered whether they were justified in continuing to teach the works of Caesar in their schools. In their perplexity, they sought advice from the great Matthias Gelzer,¹² so that they could bolster their belief in the view expressed in all the editions of his book¹³ that Caesar was, in fact, a great statesman.

Gelzer (rightly) praised Strasburger's article as brilliant. He agreed that Caesar was, perhaps, unloved by his contemporaries, but categorically disputed the conclusion that he was nothing but an average Roman politician. To wage war on a well-established oligarchy—and a victorious one—was the act of a great statesman. In contrast to Augustus, whose motto was festina lente, Caesar was a great improviser. In his latter days he acted like a monarch, but that is not the decisive factor for an assessment of his achievement. Caesar had a plan. Tranquillity for Italy, peace for the provinces and safety for the Empire, was more than a mere slogan. It constituted a programme, ‘in so far as one should expect a programme from Roman statesmen at all’.¹⁴ Finally, Caesar's legislation was proof of his statesmanlike insight and energy.

It is to be hoped that Gelzer succeeded in allaying the fears of those teachers who felt deprived of an heroic figure. Yet, even if the ‘Gallic War’ is again being taught in those high schools that have not so far totally abolished the teaching of Latin, the controversy over Caesar has nevertheless not reached a conclusion—and never will.¹⁵

In the sixth edition of his biography of Caesar (1960),¹⁶ Gelzer was more sceptical in his assessments of the aims of the dictator than in his earlier writings. Two decades previously he had argued against Eduard Meyer, who emphasized Caesar's personal power rather than his political intentions. ‘Living ourselves at a time when the political order is in a state of evolution, we are better able to comprehend some aspects of Caesar than former generations … Caesar founded the Roman Kaisertum designated by his name,’ he wrote in 1942.¹⁷

After the war, Gelzer changed his mind,

He published no programme; a practical politician through and through, he recognized the problems in every situation and set about mastering them with a will. Our sources … give us an insight into individual cases but no certain information about his innermost thoughts. We may go so far as to assert that eventually the dictatorship for life corresponded to his wishes. But it remains obscure when … he decided on this form for his principatus. For it is not possible to determine how far the extravagant senatorial decrees which granted him this vast power were inspired by himself. We must guard against ascribing to him actions, plans and motives for which there is no authority.¹⁸

We do not know what provoked the change in Gelzer's point of view. Possibly the impact of Syme's research drove him closer to Strasburger's argument. It is also possible that his experiences under a dictatorship in World War II moved the scholar, who never overlooked a source, to take more seriously the judgment of Cicero, who remarked after Caesar's murder, ‘So great was his passion for wrong-doing that the very doing of wrong was a joy to him for its own sake even when there was no motive for it.’¹⁹ Finally, it is also possible that he was influenced by a seldom-quoted passage of Pliny, who not only praised Caesar's intellectual vitality, the extent of his benefactions and his military genius, but also pointed out that his wars cost 1,192,000 lives, which is why Caesar neglected to mention the casualty figures in his writings.²⁰ In the last edition of the most comprehensive and important biography of Caesar written in the twentieth century, Gelzer stated that Caesar did not shrink from corruption or acts of violence to further his purposes, and that he was a man who simply had no moral scruples where politics were concerned.

Although Gelzer never questioned Caesar's greatness as a statesman, his hesitation in making a total assessment of the man was criticized by Otto Seel,²¹ who risked a more acute formulation of the question, namely whether Caesar was merely a successful scoundrel, or whether he should be regarded with awe, respect, enthusiasm and affection—a prototype worthy of imitation. To dismiss this question would be to debase history itself. One can understand Seel's aversion to scholars parading patient wisdom, ironic scepticism and cheerful resignation in their books, yet this appears to be caused by the fact that the days are long since gone when Theodor Mommsen could believe that Caesar's personality might be sketched either superficially or more profoundly, but not differently.²² (See also p. 37.)

Cicero was of a different opinion. In 46 bc he addressed Caesar,

Among those yet unborn there shall arise, as there has arisen among us, sharp division; some shall laud your achievements to the skies, and others shall ignore them.

(Cic., pro Marc., 29)

The problem was clearly recognized by Tacitus, ‘the killing of the dictator Caesar had seemed to some the worst, and to others the fairest, of high exploits (Ann. I, 8, 6). And Seneca found it difficult to answer Livy's question, whether it would have been better for the Republic or not if Caesar had not been born at all (Sen., Nat. Quaest. V, 18, 4).²³

Historiography followed the same path. It was not enough to describe Caesar as a man with ‘two souls in but one breast’. He was no Jekyll and Hyde, but rather a phenomenon of many facets which are confirmed in iconographic studies. Likenesses of Caesar show every possible character trait: majesty, pride, disdain, audacity, reflectiveness, elegance, wit, corruption and affection.²⁴ For two thousand years Caesar's personality has intrigued the heart of Europe.²⁵ In time, a ‘Caesar myth’ developed, and eventually an ‘ism’ was attached to his name. This last complication makes it necessary to define this controversial concept before returning to the investigation of Caesar the man.

CAESARISM

Historians and political scientists of the nineteenth century made more frequent use of the expression ‘Caesarism’ than their twentieth-century counterparts. W. Roscher provides a good example.²⁶ He knew, as did numerous political scientists before him, that democracy can degenerate into military despotism. The two Napoleons come to mind: Caesarism was frequently used as a synonym for Bonapartism. What expression would Roscher have used, had he written his book after World War I can only be guessed. Fascism, perhaps. His interest lay not so much in the personality of the ruler as in his attitude to the various groupings and strata of society. Everything was promised to everyone, and only the leader's genius could preserve a certain unity. No rational acts could bridge the contradictions in his programme; it depended simply and solely on blind belief in the superhuman capabilities of the ruler.

When Napoleon created his new nobility, he said to some, ‘I guarantee revolution; this caste is highly democratic, for all the time everyone is being summoned to it.’ To the great proprietors he said, ‘It will secure the throne’; to the friends of moderate monarchy, ‘It will be opposed to the abuse of absolute power, for it is becoming influential in the country’; to the Jacobins, ‘Exult, for, the ancient nobility is completely destroyed’, and to the old aristocracy, ‘In decking yourselves with fresh honours you are reviving your own again.’²⁷

Roscher was, in fact, talking about Napoleon I, but a similar account could easily be given of Napoleon III. Did not the latter promise, ‘l'Empire c'est la paix’, only to entangle France a few months later in the hopeless Crimean War? Did he not promise the Italian nationalists and likewise the Pope his support, only to disappoint both ultimately? Did he not promise free trade and protective tariffs, but when his position shifted was he not obliged to vindicate French prestige by a Mexican adventure? A. J. P. Taylor expresses it admirably,

The more we strip off the disguises, the more the disguises appear. Such was Louis Napoleon, the man of mystery: conspirator and statesman, dreamer and realist, despot and democrat, maker of wars and peace, creator and muddler. You can go on indefinitely.²⁸

Was Caesar's fate any different? Did he not also enter into fateful connections with a very mixed collection of advisers, then being compelled to satisfy the desires of a motley group of dependants (see pp. 168 ff.)?²⁹

Pompey, his great adversary, was not so clever. Cicero assessed one of Pompey's speeches as being ‘of no comfort to the poor or interest to the rascals; the rich were not pleased and the honest men were not edified’ (Cic., ad Att. I, 14). Caesar would not have let such an opportunity slip away. He would have obliged everyone, at least for a short time. And it was precisely this gift that led some political scientists to regard him as the father of modern Caesarism.

Gleichschaltung is the dictator's ideal and goal—or, in Heinrich von Treitschke's words, ‘Before the Emperor's divine blood all subjects are fundamentally alike.’³⁰ So must Roman Caesarism have also appeared: slaves ruled their owners, freedmen their patroni, the upper classes succumbed to the strictest control and the masses were entertained with sport and the circus. One of the emperors is alleged to have said to his people, ‘Devote your leisure to games and to the races in the circus. Let me be concerned with the needs of the state, and busy yourselves with your pleasures’ (SHA, Firmus 5).³¹ In a letter ascribed to Sallust, we read his advice to Caesar that the common people (corrupted by the corn dole and other hand-outs) must be occupied with their own concerns, to prevent them from causing any political damage.

That was Caesarism, a form of rule, which, under the cloak of a legitimate monarchy, was in reality based on military power. The old institutions remained unchanged. The magistracies kept their former names, and the real situation was concealed under a camouflage of artful legal fictions. Government was based on an association of heterogeneous groups, often opposed to one another, from which the key position of the leader necessarily emerged, for only he could oblige everyone. Tacitus described the situation clearly: Augustus ‘conciliated the army by gratuities, the populace by cheapened corn, the world by the amenities of peace’ (Ann. I, 2).

The concept of Caesarism, however, was not yet known to Tacitus. It was used for the first time in 1850 (!) by an enthusiastic Bonapartist, Frannçcois Auguste Romieu (in Ere des Césars). Burckhardt did not take exception to this usage. In his opinion, Caesarism, as a concept, was nonetheless very well defined.³² Mommsen, too, made use of the concept of Caesarism in his History of Rome, although, in contrast to Romieu, he loathed Bonapartism. His readers misunderstood him, however, in so far as they believed he (Mommsen) supported absolute monarchy even in his own day. In the second edition of his book the celebrated historian then clarified his view by being sharply critical of autocracy. He made clear his distinction between Julius Caesar the man, on the one hand, and Caesarism as a form of government on the other.³³ Some of his arguments are worth quoting:

At this point, however, it is proper expressly once and for all to postulate what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest against the custom—common to simplicity and perfidy—of using historical praise and historical censure, dissociated from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application, and in the present case of construing the judgment respecting Caesar into a judgment concerning what is called Caesarism.

It is true that the history of past centuries ought to be the teacher of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as if one could simply by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures for the present from in records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms for a political diagnosis and the specifics for a prescription;³⁴ it is instructive only in so far as the observation of older forms of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally—the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their combination everywhere different—and leads and encourages men, not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction. In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker, with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth a more bitter censure of modern autocracy than could be written by the hand of man (my italics, Z.Y.).

According to the same law of nature, in virtue of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic machine, every constitution, however defective, which gives play to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is and therefore dead. This law of nature has been verified in the Roman absolute military monarchy and all the more completely verified, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius and in the absence of all extraneous material complications, that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely than any similar state.

From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon showed long ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If, in the early stages of the autocracy and, above all, in Caesar's own soul, the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible way how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.

Caesar's work was necessary and salutary, not because it was or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because—with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery and was an utter stranger to republican-constitutional representation, and in presence of the legitimate civic constitution which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism—absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary and the least of evils.

When once the slave-holding aristocracy in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as their counterparts in Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too be legitimized at the bar of history; where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once a caricature and a usurpation. But history will not submit to curtail the true Caesar of his due honour, because the verdict may lead simplicity astray in the presence of bad Caesars, and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud. She too is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.³⁵

After Mommsen only a few historians made use of the concept of Caesarism, although political scientists still refer to it. Roscher has already been mentioned, F. Ruestow constitutes a further example,³⁶ as does Robert von Pöhlmann: the latter applied concepts such as communism and socialism to the classical world, and also used the concept of Caesarism where appropriate. In fact, in 1895 Pöhlmann published Die Entstehung des Caesarismus,³⁷ which added something to the contribution of his predecessors. He was not satisfied with Roscher's statement that it is possible to find prototypes of Caesarism in Roman history (such as, for example, Scipio, Marius, Sulla and Pompey). In his view Roman Caesarism had its origin in the late Greek tyrannies. Dionysius of Syracuse, Agathocles, Euphron of Sicyon, Chaeron of Pellene, Clearchus of Heraclea and Nabis of Sparta were the models for Caesarism. As far as these rulers were concerned, Pöhlmann maintained, they were indifferent to the concepts of morality, justice and law. Therefore, it was not difficult for them to be two-faced by appearing to be absolute monarchs to some and extreme democrats to others.

In general, nineteenth-century scholars were agreed that Caesarism was the outcome of a degenerate democracy, and that the rise of a dictator is usually facilitated by unavoidable conflict between the love of freedom—characteristic of the wealthy and educated classes—and the desire for equality among the masses. These objectives are mutually exclusive, and incompatible in the long run. The appetite of the mob may be contained for a while, but in the course of time its greed grows, for, as Pöhlmann said, ‘the communist idea of sharing one another's victuals for these proletarians has become second nature’.

In these circumstances, the most able withdraw from state service and leave the field to professional politicians, the gulf between the social classes deepens and the demagogues intensify their efforts. Unrest breaks out, and eventually people begin to yearn for the benefactor as sole ruler. Of course, they desire a prudent and moderate ruler, but that does not always turn out to be the case. Usually they put up with one who is not so good, for ‘in the last resort they prefer to permit person and property to be consumed by a single lion rather than by a hundred jackals or even a thousand rats’ (Roscher).

Pöhlmann identified this type of Caesarism as being already present in fourth-century Greece, and thought that the beginnings of a Sultanism can even be traced in Alexander of Macedon and in Julius Caesar (p. 105). Therefore, Roscher's complaint in 1888 that the word Caesarism was used in an unscholarly fashion is readily understandable, as was his unwillingness to accept a definition such as that of Littré, ‘Princes brought to government by democracy, but clad with absolute power.’

And yet, the concept of Caesarism still appears in the literature of the twentieth century. Spengler believed that democracy was doomed and predicted the approach of Caesarism with firm and measured steps. Antonio Gramsci³⁸ made use of the concepts of progressive and regressive Caesarism, and maintained that ‘Caesar and Napoleon are examples of progressive Caesarism’ because, under their regimes, the revolutionary element put the conservative in the shade.

Even if we grant that the elements sketched above are common to all Caesarisms, that every ‘Caesar’ seeks to attach himself to his predecessors, and that every sole ruler must declare, like Napoleon ‘I must remain great, glorious, and admired’; does that bring us any closer to a better understanding of this specific phenomenon?

The use of the word Caesarism, however, does not lead to a real understanding of the problem. Karl Marx had no doubt about that. In his essay, ‘Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte’, he characterized Caesarism as a schoolboy expression and its use as a superficial analogizing of history. N. A. Maškin, one of the Soviet Union's most important historians, agrees with Marx in this respect, because he finds that an analogy between Fascism, Bonapartism, and a proletarian regime has no historical value of any kind. For all that, Maškin is unable to dismiss the question of Caesarism easily, for the expression ‘Roman Caesarism’ (whatever its worth) occurs in the works of Lenin, an authority with whom a Soviet historian will not lightly venture to argue.³⁹

A. Momigliano could not be restrained by such inhibitions. He based his criticism of those contemporary historians who employed the concept of Caesarism on the proposition that this kind of terminology was utterly unintelligible to the man of antiquity, while at the same time it is too inexact for the modern man.⁴⁰

Caesarism is a typically nineteenth-century concept, which was necessary to help explain the emotional and demagogic factors in the government of the two Napoleons. In the twentieth century, however, Caesarism is of as little use as Fascism in helping us understand Caesar.

Detailed elaborations of the differences between the world of antiquity and the modern world are superfluous. Roman equites were not capitalists and the plebs were not proletarians. The Senate was no parliament, and the Roman popular assemblies have no counterpart in the modern world. Caesar was first and foremost a Roman senator, and to be able to understand him properly he must be placed within the context of his own time, that of Rome in the last century bc. But even then, many problems remain unsolved. The fact that the concept of Caesarism has developed a diversity of meanings in modern historical writing only proves once again that ‘all history is contemporary history’ (Croce). The truth of this statement finds its expression in the assessment of Caesar as a man and a ruler.

CAESAR

Mention has already been made of Mommsen's Caesarism as an anti-autocratic manifesto. He did not shed a single tear over the destruction of the old corrupt republican form of government, to which Caesar dealt the coup de grâce. Mommsen, the liberal revolutionary of 1848 and arch-enemy of the Prussian aristocrats, wrote history that offered the educated reader as much pleasure as it provided provocative reflection for the scholar. To familiarize the German reader with the Roman personalities, the author of the Römisches Staatsrecht even described a Roman magistrate as Burgomaster, and compared Cato with Don Quixote, Sulla with Don Juan and the great Pompey with a sergeant-major. His view of the Roman Republic was to,

Try to imagine London with the slave population of New Orleans, the police of Constantinople, the lack of industry of present-day Rome, and agitated by politics like the Paris of 1848, and an approximate picture will be attained of the grandeur of the Republic whose decline is deplored by Cicero and his friends in their glum letters.⁴¹

Such a regime could not long endure. Yet, as luck would have it, the man responsible for its downfall was ‘a king anointed with the oil of democracy’.⁴² Caesar was a monarch, not a deluded dictator. His personality was flawless, he was sincere, adaptable and fair, and appears to have wanted to be nothing other than primus inter pares. He understood how to avoid the error of so many who brought the abrupt tone of military command into politics. Caesar was a great statesman and a great realist. Each of his steps was prudently planned. None of his successes should be regarded as an isolated incident because there were none. The outstanding characteristic of his life's work was its complete harmony. Caesar was the last creative genius of the ancient world and the sole one that Rome produced.

Mommsen's view found followers not only in the nineteenth century, but also in the twentieth, who carried it further with minor variations. Many of them agreed that Caesar was a great statesman, a benevolent ruler, of noble distinction, and that it was he who laid the foundation for the Roman Empire.⁴³ Some condemned the conspiracy against him as the act of mean and envious persons.⁴⁴ Others enthusiastically praised his deep understanding of his times and his clear vision of the future.⁴⁵ But Hegel, himself a great admirer of Caesar, would not have accepted these paeans for one moment. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, he described him as a man,

who may be cited as a paragon of Roman adaptation of means to ends—who formed his resolves with the most unerring perspicuity, and executed them with the greatest vigor and practical skill, without passion. Caesar, in terms of history, did right, since he furnished a mediating element, and that kind of political bond which men's condition required. Caesar effected two objects; he deterred domestic strife, and at the same time developed a new struggle beyond the limits of the empire. For the conquest of the world had reached hitherto only to the circle of the Alps, but Caesar opened up a new scene of achievement: he founded the theatre which was on the point of becoming the centre of History. He then achieved universal sovereignty by a struggle which was decided not in Rome itself, but by his conquest of the whole Roman World. His position was indeed hostile to the Republic, but, properly speaking, only to its shadow; for all that remained of that Republic was entirely powerless.⁴⁶

But Hegel, too, knew that Caesar, fighting for his honour and esteem, reacted instinctively to the historical constraints of the moment. Not every one of his successes was based on prudent foresight. Hegel, like Mommsen, deplored Caesar's murder and bitterly criticized that small band who did away with the great man from pure envy. For all that, Hegel would probably scarcely approve of Mommsen's view of Caesar as the last great personality of the ancient world. Later scholars too are opposed to Mommsen's view, but unfortunately a complete survey of all the disagreements is impossible in a short work. Instead, there follows a roughly schematized examination of five main theories, organized to show the principal tendencies of each. We must also add the caveat that this investigation is restricted to so-called ‘professional historians’—and cannot extend to philosophers and littérateurs, although they have made many contributions towards a more penetrating discussion of Caesar. This is why Hegel is alluded to only briefly, and not because we belittle his influence, quite the contrary.

A considerable number of historians have resisted Hegel's philosophy of history. They preferred to concern themselves with Caesar the historic figure as sketched by the sources, and not with a Caesar who served Hegel merely as an example for a paragon of Roman adaptation of means to ends.

F. Gundolf, in considering the views of Caesar from Petrarch to Nietzsche and Wagner, maintained in one of his brilliant synopses (to say it is inexact is pointless, for he had no intention of being exact) that with regard to Caesar ‘the French were best at assessing his person, the English his work, and the Germans his mind’. Yet, by means of an excursus that guides his readers from Petrarch and Dante, Montaigne and Voltaire, Klopstock and Goethe, to Mommsen and Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wagner (to mention only the most important), he proves that European men of letters never intended to tabulate Julius Caesar in a short and narrow column.

They all went back to Petrarch, who again relied on Cicero. A man of letters himself, Cicero understood Caesar's multifaceted character, but was continually tormented by the discord between Caesar's greatness and his wantonness. Just as Petrarch could grasp that Caesar was Cupid's slave and Glory's fellow-traveller, it was unnecessary for Herder to hate Caesar in order to love Brutus; and, just as Byron tormented himself with the Caesar who wrecked the Republic, Lamartine, too, was torn between his admiration for Caesar's rich gifts and his aversion to their pernicious application.

The theme has been treated exhaustively by Gundolf in two well-known books, and although some topics could be added to the content, or alternative opinions discussed, in their genre they will remain unsurpassed for many years to come.⁴⁷ Professional historians, however, were not as sophisticated.

In 1901 G. Ferrero published Grandezza e Decadenza di Roma. Caesar was, for him, a great general and a gifted writer, but never developed into a great statesman. Ferrero admired Caesar's practical thinking, well-balanced intelligence, untiring facility for achievement and quick power of decision. On the other hand, he saw in Caesar a spirit of destruction whose mission was principally one of annihilation, and who brought about the decline and break-up of the ancient world. According to Ferrero, Caesar's contemporaries could expect nothing from him, and to succeeding generations in Europe his greatest act was the conquest of Gaul, an achievement to which he himself attached very little importance.⁴⁸ After Munda his dictatorship dissolved into an aimless, degenerate opportunism that recalled the fanciful intrigues of the old Republic. Ferrero maintained that Caesar had neither a political nor a legislative programme; he was an adventurer, whose only coherent plan was for the war in the east and the annexation of Parthia. Ferrero concluded, from a bust in the Louvre, that the dictator's face expressed deep physical suffering. In 44 bc Caesar was tired and exhausted.

In 1933 Ferrero wrote a preface to the English translation of his book.⁴⁹ Banished from Fascist Italy, he was teaching history at the University of Geneva. He did not alter his views. Rather, he saw his book as an anti-Fascist, or, should the reader prefer it, an anti-Bolshevist history of Julius Caesar. He sharply criticized historians of the nineteenth century who appeared to be swept by waves of enthusiasm for the gifted dictator, and who were not prepared to be satisfied with a single slice of historical greatness at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Napoleon).

After 1830, when the horrors of Napoleon had been forgotten, Caesar found favour in all circles. Conservatives considered him a bulwark against the liberal and democratic tendencies of the middle and lower classes, while liberals thought of him as a weapon against traditional monarchy, the principle of dynasticism and respect for the old classes. Thus, in the historical writing of the nineteenth century, there took shape one who resembled a quasi-elder brother of Napoleon rather than the historic Caesar.

At the beginning of the twentieth century a gradual disengagement from the romanticism of the nineteenth century became apparent, and historians, too, began to see Caesar in another light. However, World War I intervened, and these ideas went awry. Revolution and changes of regime in various European countries permitted the revival once more of the old romantic illusion of the dictator as saviour. Ferrero fits in at this point. He made no secret of his opinion, and is unequivocal,

If the West fails to put an end to the fairy-tale and to introduce some clarity into the confusion of facts, it (the West) will fall victim to usurpers who are swaggering about all over Europe, Asia, and America. The West has nothing to hope for from usurpers, and should be on its guard against bombastic promises, made by people who believe they can alter the course of history.⁵⁰

His hatred of all dictators won Ferrero many followers. In 1942 L. R. Taylor compared Caesar with Mussolini, and in 1948 F. R. Cowell compared him with Hitler, remarking inter alia,

Useful and important as were some of his ideas [Caesar's], they did not amount to a New Deal, still less did they offer any hope of enlarging the lives of the masses and so of filling the vacuum of Roman social life with a new moral spirit. We have seen dictators fail in our own day—despite their tremendous propaganda machines—which for a time seemed likely to wield an influence over the minds of their victims. Caesar did not form a political party. He did no more than recruit a gang. He was supported by some respectable figures—but all in all—apart from the solid ranks of his legions—he was supported only by a few personal friends. Most of his supporters came from the disaffected classes, needy debtors, failures and misfits.⁵¹

Notwithstanding the vast gulf between Mommsen and Ferrero, they do have something in common: both admitted to their political conviction either in the preface or in the body of the work. Thus, their Zeitgeist is easily detectable. In any case, it would be unjust to criticize only those who openly acknowledge their prejudice. Every historian of the past is also a man of his age, and nobody is free from bias.

Historians who wrote after World War I disclosed their personal views only rarely. Accordingly, it is not easy to judge their political motivation. Conjecture is possible, not certainty. Tacitus might have maliciously put it: the one who conceals his ways is no better than the others—‘occultior non melior’ (Hist. II, 38).

Communist and Fascist interpretations of history are the exception. They leave nothing to the reader's imagination. To Fascist historians, Caesar was the great magician of antiquity, who attempted to improve the social position of the provincials in order to achieve a supra-national or imperial homogeneous organism.

A. Ferrabino, in Cesare (Turin, 1941) was not as simple-minded. He believed not only in the indestructibility of Romanity and its universality, but also depicted Caesar as an instrument of divine will. In his view Caesar founded a new order, based on the concepts of clementia, aequitas and voluntas of the nations.

It is not surprising that a reaction set in after World War II. Italian scholars seem to have lost all interest in studying Julius Caesar, the statesman and conqueror, and concentrated instead on a thorough investigation of Caesar's writings and the Corpus Caesarianum, as well as on an analysis of his personality as it emerged from the literary stance of the commentarii. In this respect, they made a decisive contribution and yet, although there is a wealth of allusions to political and social questions to be found, we cannot concern ourselves more closely with their writings in the present context.⁵²

Soviet researchers, on the other hand, stressed Caesar's position as the representative of the slave owners who supported his dictatorship in the hope that through it the old regime, which was being destroyed by slave uprisings and the unrest of the plebs, might be rescued. This kind of historiography is worth a special study.⁵³

THE HELLENISTIC MONARCHY

Towards the end of World War I Eduard Meyer published Caesars Monarchie und das Principat des Pompeius, one of the most authoritative works written in the first half of the twentieth century. In the first edition he did not even mention Ferrero, but in the third edition (1922) he conceded that Ferrero's work was certainly interesting and even stimulating. However, ‘if the author intended to offer us a picture true to history, he [Ferrero] failed in his aim’ (p. 330). Even Mommsen, who was Meyer's predecessor as Professor of Ancient History at the University of Berlin, was not spared. A Caesar as sketched by Mommsen had, in Meyer's view, never existed. It is no coincidence that Mommsen never wrote a fourth volume of his Roman history to embrace the foundation of the Principate. After the third volume he published a fifth, on the Roman provinces. The reason, in Meyer's view, was very simple: after Mommsen's Caesar there was no room left for Augustus.⁵⁴

Meyer rejected the theory that Caesar occupied himself with plans for monarchy from the beginning of his career. He also repudiated the Shakespearean Caesar: ‘the vain, pompous, cantankerous, ageing egotist surrounded by sycophants, swayed by flatterers, suffering from a fever in Spain and from a falling sickness’.⁵⁵ Meyer's Caesar had no ideals of any sort. He was fighting for a position of power (p. 468), and one who intends to achieve it must overcome opposition. After his victory over Pompey, he could not let power slip from his grasp. The conferment of royal dignity, therefore, was an attempt to legitimize usurpation and establish it on a legal basis. ‘Caesar's intentions and the steps he took to achieve the final aim are as clearly displayed as anything else in his history’ (p. 504), and no inconsistencies or Sultanic whims can be traced in his conduct (as, for example, Pöhlmann thought (p. 18)). In his latter days, it was his intention to turn himself into an absolute monarch in the oriental style and attain once more the world monarchy of Alexander. The conquest of Dacia and Parthia, the transfer of the capital from Rome to Alexandria, and the foundation of a dynasty—all were integral components of the grand master's plan. Meyer accepted Caesar's plans as described in Plutarch, Caes. 58, as authentic and concludes that Caesar consciously strove for divine honours, as reported in Suetonius (Div. Jul. 76),

For not only did he accept excessive honours, such as an uninterrupted consulship, the dictatorship for life, and the censorship of public morals, as well as the forenamed Imperator, the surname of Father of his country, a statue among those of the kings, and a raised couch in the orchestra; but he also allowed honours to be bestowed on him which were too great for mortal man: a gold throne in the House and on the judgment seat; a chariot and litter in the procession at the circus; temples, altars and statues beside those of the gods; a special priest, an additional college of the Luperci and the calling of one of the months by his name.

This passage has been arbitrarily selected to illustrate and sum up a series of honours. A full account of all such honours might suggest that Caesar's aim was for royal dignity and deification but would overload this chapter. Countless books and treatises have been written on this subject, and the abundance of material is, in truth, vast, but one striking fact emerges: the reports concerning Caesar's aim of royal dignity and deification have their origin in texts of the imperial period (the few indications in contemporary sources do not suffice to give a comprehensive picture). One cannot fail, however, to be impressed by the persistence with which these stories continue to recur. Meyer fully documented Caesar's presumption and stubborn purpose in order to emphasize the signs of kingship and divinity (p. 447).

Meyer stressed that such conduct could not be considered fortuitous, and that Mommsen was wrong in assuming that the royal title was of secondary importance to Caesar. It is precisely in the case of monarchy that the title is absolutely inseparable from the power.⁵⁶ That Julius Caesar valued it highly is mentioned by Plutarch, Dio, Suetonius and Appian, and is emphasized by the historians who preceded Meyer.⁵⁷ But Meyer was the first to produce a fully-fledged theory that envisaged as the final aim of Caesar's work a Hellenistic monarchy, and this signifies a state structured with an absolute ruler at its head, who enjoys divine worship.

Is it at all possible to find an explanation for this theory in Zeitgeist? Certainty is impossible; we may only hazard conjectures. Meyer, more than any other ancient historian, went to great pains to integrate the history of Greece and Rome with that of other Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples of the time. In his view the picture of the history of the ancient world is necessarily distorted when the fate of individual nations is examined independently. His Geschichte des Altertums was intended to make good such an omission. At the same time, concerned with interpretations of historical methodology, he published various articles on the subject.⁵⁸ World War I, however, prevented a visit to the East, and his universal history was never completed. Instead, he published a series of monographs, including the one on Caesar and Pompey. At that time (1918) Oswald Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes fascinated many of the readers who identified Germany's collapse in 1918 with the decline of the West. Only a few historians agreed with Spengler. Meyer, however, while critical of details, sympathized with Spengler more than any other professional historian.⁵⁹ Meyer may have been tormented for some time by the weakening of the West. Therefore, Caesar's attempt to unite West and East, to wipe out the dividing line between victors and vanquished, and to found a new regime in Rome might have impressed Meyer so forcefully that he allowed himself to accept without hesitation sources which, under other circumstances, he would have subjected to thorough-going criticism. Thus Meyer made some far-reaching generalizations that he could not document, and expressly mentioned Caesar's tendency to put citizens and non-citizens on an equal plane and to ‘subject the empire to a process of levelling down. Before the absolute ruler legal differences between subjects disappear in a subjection that affects all alike’ (p. 483).

It is, therefore, quite remarkable that Meyer, a scholar whose knowledge of the sources was unrivalled, made not a single reference to evidence that pointed out that Pompey (who, according to Meyer, was the precursor of the ‘Western’ Principate) also attempted to imitate Alexander of Macedon. Let an extract from a contemporary text (Sall., Hist. III, 88) testify, ‘Sed Pompeius a prima adulescentia sermone fautorum similem fore se credens Alexandro regi facta consultaque eius quidem aemulus erat’. Did Meyer perhaps think a ‘western’ statesman like Pompey was incapable of such an idea?⁶⁰

By and large, Meyer's work was positively received, with only a few objectors to his main ideas.⁶¹ However, under the influence of recent studies of a more fundamental nature such as those of P. A. Brunt and E. Badian, C. Nicolet and C. Meier, there was a retreat from Meyer's obsolete terminology. For example, after Nicolet's monumental work L'Ordre equestre, no one would write, like Meyer, ‘Brutus belonged to the democratic party, i.e. the party of the equites’ (p. 450). The oriental (= Hellenistic, absolute) monarchy, on the other hand, became in Meyer's day one of the accepted ‘facts’, although with many variants.

J. Carcopino is a case in point. His work⁶² is too important and too original to be treated as a parenthesis to that of Meyer, yet in a schematic survey such as this it is not possible to give everyone his due. On the one hand, Carcopino was sharply critical of Meyer, and wrote that his book was ‘badly structured, badly written, but illuminated throughout by a splendid intelligence’ (p. 592). He decisively rejected the difference between Caesar and Augustus put forward by Meyer, and saw in Caesar the true founder of the Roman Empire, ‘Caesar created the fertile elements of this “Empire”, to which the ancients owed several centuries of beneficent peace.’ On the other hand, Carcopino was in no doubt about Caesar's intention to exercise dominion over Rome as monarch. Caesar isolated himself from the city population so that he could better rule over it; he did not stumble into monarchy, but planned it carefully. Yet Roman monarchy of the eighth to sixth centuries bc was essentially different from Caesar's monarchy. The earlier monarchy was transitory, fortuitous, elective, secular and moderate, in contrast to Caesar's monarchy, which was solidly planned, divine, absolute and based on a plebiscite.

E. Pais, in Richerche sulla Storia e sul Diritto Romano (vol. I, 1918), came to similar conclusions independently, and spoke of ‘Caesar's aspiration to the throne’, but he stressed, more strongly than Meyer, the role of Cleopatra. H. Volkmann maintained that Caesar wished to elevate himself to king and god, and described his relationship with Cleopatra as a union in which affection and political considerations were inseparably amalgamated (Kleopatra, 1953, p. 61 and 77). In Divinity of the Roman Emperor (1931) L. R. Taylor never doubted Caesar's political intentions. L. Cerfaux and J. Tondriau emphasized that Caesar strove for a ‘kingship, oriental and divine in its tendency’,⁶³ and L. Homo, too, in Les institutions politiques Romaines, accepted Meyer's thesis completely.

The Soviet scholar N. A. Maškin followed Meyer's arguments and updated them by using Marxist terminology. C. N. Cochrane, the Canadian scholar, insisted that the sources left no room for any doubt that in the latter months of his life Caesar conclusively set his sights on the Alexandrine monarchy,⁶⁴ and in 1948 E. Kornemann returned to his view, developed at the end of the nineteenth century, that Caesar's dreams of empire expressed themselves in the grandiose plan to destroy the Parthian kingdom, push forward through the Caucasus to Dacia, and, by a concentrated attack from the east and west, stab the Germans in the back.⁶⁵

These few examples prove only that the attempt to classify views about Caesar according to national points of view must fail. There is no English, German, Italian or American interpretation. Anatole France and C. Jullian attached themselves to Mommsen. The views of J. Carcopino and L. Homo were closer to those of Meyer, who, for his part, was criticized by his countrymen M. Gelzer and P. Strack.⁶⁶ Some English scholars, including F. E. Adcock, R. Syme and J. P. V. D. Balsdon, roundly rejected Meyer's interpretation, which leads one to refer to an ‘English view’. But the Italian, L. Pareti (just like the English) does not believe that Caesar wanted to make himself a king or god.⁶⁷ The important fact is that the English scholars used different arguments from each other. In the matter of method Syme, from Oxford, was closer to the German F. Münzer than to Adcock, his Cambridge colleague.

THE MINIMALISTS

A further wave of criticism—that opposed Mommsen's view—arose in Britain. This school ought to be designated ‘Minimalist’ rather than ‘British’, since W. W. Fowler and C. Merivale cannot be considered among its members. On the one hand, we have seen that Meyer was not prepared to concede Caesar's greatness as portrayed by Mommsen. On the other, for all the energy Meyer expended in advancing his theory of the Hellenistic monarchy, he nevertheless considered Caesar an interlude. The real precursor of Augustus' principate was Pompey, and the future state theory was already sketched in Cicero's De Republica and in his speech on behalf of Marcellus. By and large, Caesar had no grasp of the historic moment, and historical development took a path different from the one he had previously delineated.⁶⁸

H. F. Pelham had quite different objections. He suggested, however, an open admission: that we have no key of any kind to the understanding of Caesar's future plans, even if we assume that he had the fundamental capability of such foresight.⁶⁹ Adcock did not consider it necessary to imagine a Hellenistic monarchy, in order to explain the participation of several honourable men in the conspiracy against the dictator.⁷⁰ Caesar was murdered for what he was and not for what he might perhaps have been. Meyer's Caesar was, for Syme, a mythical Caesar, conceived intellectually.⁷¹ (Actually, Meyer encountered precisely the same objection that he had levelled against Mommsen's Caesar.) If one must judge Caesar, that judgment must be based on facts and not on alleged intentions. One need not believe that Caesar planned a Hellenistic monarchy, irrespective of how one defines this concept. The simple charge of dictatorship suffices. For Syme, Caesar's final aims are uninteresting. He excluded statements about intentions from the realm of proof and counterproof:⁷² Caesar should be left as he is in his time and generation, and one should neither laud him for superhuman vision, nor damn him for his blind haste to pluck unripe fruit.

Syme's Roman Revolution is not a book about Caesar and Augustus. It is a study of the metamorphosis of the regime and the administrative hierarchy. Caesar set in motion a process which was to last long after his time. Many of the measures he hit upon were temporary and of limited purpose, which left behind the impression of superficial action. On the other hand, the elevation of the non-political classes⁷³ had an effect long after his death. Syme is convinced that the history of the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Principate was that of the ruling classes. The fact that he does not mention the lower classes lies not in lack of interest but in lack of evidence. We know more about the upper classes because they had more freedom of action.⁷⁴ Rome was always ruled by an oligarchy, open or concealed,⁷⁵ and it is precisely this oligarchy which Syme presents to his readers. Caesar's new party is better portrayed by sketching men and their personal connections, hopes and ambitions, than by an investigation of political programmes and ideologies. Thus prosopography is a necessary instrument in Syme's hands, but it never impedes the account of events.

Syme offers technical matter for the specialist in special sections, but the more general reader has no difficulty in understanding the manifold adumbrations of the new Caesarian party. To contrast reviled good-for-nothings on the one hand and noble patriots on the other is schematic and leads to the wrong conclusions. Caesar's party was an amalgam of senators, knights, centurions, businessmen, bankers from the municipia and provinces, kings and princes. Caesar's connections with the representatives of business interests were as good as his connections with the landowners. He never preached a radical division of property. The heterogeneousness of his followers was the dictator's strength and made him independent of individual factions. Syme believed that Caesar, without benevolence, would have been a second Sulla or a Gaius Gracchus, had he not lacked a revolutionary programme. He was a true Roman, more than any other. The sources of his plans for a Hellenistic monarchy are either hostile or posthumous. Concerning his plans for the future, there is room for opinion, but no certainty. No evidence for such plans is to be found in his dictatorship, and, lastly, ‘a fabricated concatenation of unrealized intentions may be logical, artistic and persuasive—but it is not history’ (p. 271).

On this point Syme agrees with Adcock, who also argues that there is insufficient evidence to prove Caesar's official deification in his lifetime. All the honours he enjoyed can be explained as an exaggerated expression of recognition of what he had achieved.⁷⁶

It is true that contemporary sources are often more valuable than posthumous ones. Nevertheless, one can scarcely imagine that Suetonius, of all people, should have invented the story of the honours offered to Caesar.

At any rate, with reference to Tiberius, he makes it abundantly clear that the princeps refused divine honours,

Of many high honours he accepted only a few of the more modest. He barely consented to allow his birthday … to be recognized by the addition of a single two-horse chariot. He forbade the voting of temples, flamens and priests without his permission; and this he gave only with the understanding that they were not to be placed among the likenesses of the gods but among the adornments of the temples. He would not allow an oath to be taken ratifying his acts, nor the name Tiberius to be given to the month of September.

(Suet., Tib. 26)⁷⁷

There is no basis for the assumption that Suetonius was particularly hostile to Caesar;⁷⁸ in any case there is room for serious doubt that he is indulging in his own opinions. Had Caesar refused the honours (as Tiberius did) the fact would have been recorded. Indeed, Cassius Dio and Appian frequently reported his refusal to accept certain honours. And yet Suetonius' account is rejected because he was not Caesar's contemporary. But Cicero was.

In a letter of June 45 (ad Att. XII, 45), Cicero talked about Caesar as ‘Synnaos/contubernalis Quirini’. This letter could be interpreted as a bad joke, had not Cicero's statements in the Philippics been even more pointed (II, 110). He listed certain divine honours in particular, and added, ‘As Jupiter, as Mars, as Quirinus has a flamen, so the flamen to divine Julius is Marcus Antonius’. Turning to Antony, he castigated him, ‘O detestable man, whether as priest of Caesar or of a dead man!’. This passage, weighty even in Syme's view,⁷⁹ caused scholars of the 1950s and 1960s to take up a novel position on Cicero's argument. That brings us to the fourth theory, which may be termed Revisionist.

THE REVISIONISTS

These scholars are all more sharply critical of Syme than of Meyer, and not one of them is prepared to come to terms with any diminution in Caesar's greatness. At first glance, it might be supposed that the Minimalists, who were British, would necessarily have been less enthusiastic about Caesar because they were reared on Shakespeare. They were probably undecided even in their youth whether the great hero of the drama was Caesar or Brutus.

However, that is not the case. Shakespeare modelled his tragedy on Plutarch, and accepted the latter's notion that Caesar was an ambitious man (Plut., Caes. 69). But Shakespeare was equally impressed by the tragedy of the conspirators, in that their work came to nothing even before it came to pass. Yet he did not despise Caesar, and it is no coincidence that these words were given to Antony, ‘Caesar was the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times’. And, as Prince Edward says in Richard III,

This Julius Caesar was a famous man:
With what his valour did enrich his wit,
His wit set down to make his valour live;
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.

W. W. Fowler⁸⁰ is right when he stresses that Shakespeare's Brutus never censures Caesar the man. Only lesser intellects refuse to understand clearly Caesar's eruptions of superbia, and when Antony's slave, speaking on behalf of his master, says to Brutus, ‘Caesar was mighty, bold, royal, and loving’, the reader is alerted to the fact that this is not merely Antony's opinion. Shakespeare himself probably leaned toward this view, and, as we now turn to a description of the historians we designate Revisionists, we must count among them all those who, in rejecting Meyer's idea of a Hellenistic monarchy, are nevertheless not prepared to subscribe to the statement that Caesar was no more than a regular Roman dictator and the last Roman patrician, and that his similarities to Sulla were more striking than the differences (Adcock).

In 1953 J. Vogt published a new interpretation of the passage from Cicero's Philippics⁸¹ cited above (pp. 32 f.), and came to the conclusion that Caesar really had enjoyed divine honours, and that, although the Romans would not have opposed the idea of such honours for a genius like Caesar, they would have shuddered at the title of king. V. Ehrenberg⁸² took Vogt's reflections a stage further. In his opinion it was not the constitutional honours and the trappings to which Caesar owed his position—so much higher than that of a regular dictator—but to his personal power which grew from day to day. Ehrenberg accepted Vogt's explanation of the significance of ‘bases for sacred statues, an enormous god-like statue in his house and his own priest’, and came to the conclusion that, in regard to Caesar's general and religious policy, Roman and non-Roman elements alike characterized his regime. As a result he was the first of the Caesars and not the last of the patricians.

K. Kraft contributed extremely detailed investigations of the coins of that period which led him to recognize that Caesar's aim was to reintroduce the old pattern of Roman kingship and not the Hellenistic—oriental—form.⁸³ Kraft examined the wreath worn by Caesar on portrait coins and concluded that this was not the triumphator's laurel wreath, which he was permitted to wear continuously after his victory in Spain (Dio XLIII, 43, 1), but was a gold one as represented in Etruscan paintings and on coins and vases. By the time of the Lupercalia (February 15), Caesar is portrayed as wearing this wreath (coronatus) for the purpose of making clear to all present that he had in mind a ‘royal symbol in the Roman national tradition’ (p. 60). Therefore he indignantly refused the diadem offered by Antony, since gold wreath and diadem were incompatible.

Here we have the actual essence of the Revisionist school, which began to flourish after World War II. Yet even in historical research, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. References to kingship of an old Italian style are to be found earlier in Mommsen, and also, many years later, in A. Ferrabino. As far as the history of ideas is concerned ‘Revisionism’ goes back to A. Bachofen, but he had no influence of any sort on any historian. He believed in Rome's mission to subdue the sensual materialism of the East, and, by the establishment of the patriarchal state, to replace it by the virile spirit of the West. For him, Caesar was a western hero whose building of Rome was not after a foreign pattern. The argument had come full circle, ‘from the son of the oriental Aphrodite had emerged the creator of the Western Empire’.⁸⁴ But, as pointed out, Bachofen made no impression on twentieth-century historians, and the immense influence of Meyer's work allowed the theory of a Roman type of kingship to sink into oblivion. Vogt, Ehrenberg and Kraft gave it fresh impetus, and many followed in their footsteps.

L. Wickert⁸⁵ positioned himself between the two camps. In his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Ancient History at Cologne, he essentially attached himself to Meyer's school. He remarked that Caesar, for all his greatness, could be considered as an interlude, ‘Yielding to a playful impulse, one might, in theory, remove from history the monarchy of the strongest master Rome had ever produced, but never the principate of Augustus.’ Likewise, he did not exclude Hellenistic influences on Caesar. But in the last resort Caesar's actual achievement is not to be derived from Hellenism. It is Caesarian and simultaneously Roman. Caesar was the first to embrace the idea of empire in an inspired fashion—he also decided to put it into practice. His most important achievement was the extension of the citizenship of Rome to citizenship of the empire. Rome, formerly head of a commonwealth, expanded to become head of an empire. The process of representation for the empire's population begins with the appointment of provincials to the Senate—in spite of the angry opposition of conservative Roman senators.

F. Vittinghoff⁸⁶ proceeded in this direction. In fact, he was concerned only with Caesar's colonization and policy on citizenship, but inter alia put forward the view that for Caesar, Italy and Rome signified the fulcrum of the empire. In Strabo (V, 216) we read, ‘And at the present time … they (sc. the Italians) are all Romans’, and in Vellius Pat. (II, 15, 2) they are already ‘men of the same race and blood’. That was Caesar's idea of empire. In this respect, it is unproductive to look to the Hellenistic kings as prototypes. Caesar's work was so completely orientated towards the future that his contemporaries could not appraise it (p. 95).

In 1958 H. Oppermann, who had already proved to be a distinguished Caesarian scholar by his earlier work on Caesar as a man of letters, stated that Meyer's evidence for the Hellenistic monarchy did not always stand up to meticulous examination.⁸⁷ In his opinion, a sharp distinction should be drawn between Caesar's titulature in Rome and in the Empire. The decision on Caesar's title in the area designated domi was postponed until the end of the projected Parthian war. Until 44 bc he was satisfied with the dictatorship, an entirely Roman office, which Sulla had also held. Kingship should apply only in the realm of militiae: it would appear natural to the eastern regions. Oppermann pointed out that this new form of world dominion, unlike divine kingship, was not based on the mysterious incarnation of a god in human form—a mystery that man cannot grasp, but before which he can only bend the knee—but on the greatness and majesty of the man in question. That is not a Hellenistic idea but a European one, and Caesar had fought for the leadership of the European part of the empire. His victory over Pompey signified the victory of the West in the historic struggle between Europe and Asia.

Charisma,⁸⁸ F. Taeger's two-volume work, appeared two years later. Taeger had no doubts about Caesar's steadfast determination to translate his power into the form of a kingdom to be held by his house in perpetuity and of his equally firm belief in the providential nature of his undertaking. Incarnation was indispensable to his political position, and the connection of the cult of clementia with the cult of Caesar presupposed deification as an established component of the new ruling ideology. On the one hand the great Julius resembled Alexander (Taeger remained convinced that Caesar was already divus in his lifetime), yet Meyer's view that Caesar intended to introduce a Hellenistic monarchy to Rome is but a half-truth. In an attempt to demonstrate that Caesar's efforts in this direction were a product of the Roman environment rather than an import from the Orient, Taeger remarked, ‘Caesar's position aroused in his opponents and adherents attitudes that promoted him to the realm of charisma. This emotion was genuine and had its roots in Roman religion.’

R. Klein also attempted to describe a Caesar whose thought took root from the irrational and the metaphysical.⁸⁹ As a pupil of Seel, he also believed that history cannot be realized without a tincture of the irrational, the tragic and the transcendental. Klein rejected Meyer's notion of a Hellenistic monarchy as well as his observation that Caesar considered religion merely as a tool to be used for political ends.⁹⁰ He tended to follow B. E. Giovanetti, who stressed Caesar's attachment to the irrational.⁹¹ Romulus was not a mere model for Caesar, and in this respect the chapters in Book II of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, recognized many years previously by M. Pohlenz as a piece of political pamphleteering of the Caesarian period, served as a useful source for Klein.⁹² As Basileus, alongside supreme command in war, Caesar was obliged to exercise the supreme religious functions in the state. His Regnum was not an office but a sacred duty, and the people were obliged to suffer his performance of it as the rule of a deity.

Finally, J. Dobesch⁹³ also scrutinized yet once more Caesar's deification in his lifetime and campaign for the royal title. His analysis showed that Caesar did desire royal dignity and divine status. But, in spite of his well-ordered source material and his clear and logical style, Dobesch could not produce any new evidence because it simply does not exist. Thus many readers continued to harbour doubts. As one conservative scholar opposed to the theory of divine kingship put it, ‘You cannot build a king out of a golden crown and a pair of red shoes’ (Balsdon).⁹⁴

Those who reject Caesar's aims to achieve kingship prove less extreme than the exponents of such a view. It is perhaps interesting to note that the opponents of the kingship theory make use of the same arguments as those employed by Napoleon I when he composed Précis des Guerres de Jules César in exile on St Helena. Napoleon concluded that the accounts of Caesar's efforts to become king were a shameless slander on the part of his assassins, ‘To justify after the event a murder that was slipshod in its execution and ill-advised, the conspirators and their partisans alleged that Caesar wanted to make himself king, a statement obviously constituting an absurdity and calumny …’ The French emperor could hardly imagine that Caesar could be capable of seeking ‘stability and grandeur’ in the crown of a Philip, Perseus, Attalus, Mithridates, Pharnaces or Ptolemy.⁹⁵

A more detailed scrutiny of the ‘revisionist’ view would unnecessarily inflate this chapter. This brief survey may satisfy the non-specialist and professional historians will turn to the sources anyway. But the exception proves the rule, for the indefatigable studies of two great scholars—A. Alföldi and S. Weinstock, who devoted virtually their whole lives to the subject—can scarcely receive their due in a few lines. They ought to be treated in somewhat greater detail.

The essential significance of Alföldi's contribution lies in the fact that he was not content to evaluate once more the literary and epigraphic material, but took pains to analyse afresh and reinterpret the evidence of the coins. He was the leading exponent in our time of the view that, even if the sole rule of an autocrat had its origins in the Greek east, ‘in the last resort this foreign element too became fused with Rome, and was eventually submerged in the political arena as on the battlefields’.

In his work on Caesar's monarchy published in 1952,⁹⁶ Alföldi attempted to evaluate the complex evidence of the coinage in relation to the events of the first months of the year 44 bc. He came to the clear conclusion that Caesar did, in fact, want the title of king, but the Senate begrudged it him. All attempts to achieve it also foundered in that year, and Caesar was eventually obliged to be content with the compromise solution that he could employ the title only in the provinces but had to be satisfied with dictator perpetuo (never perpetuus!) in Rome and Italy. This compromise solution was to be announced at the meeting of the Senate on March 15 on the basis of a Sibylline oracle. This step of Caesar's did away with his obligation to abdicate.

On the basis of his work on the coinage Alföldi established an exact chronology for the events of February and March of 44 bc. Until then it was generally accepted, and, in fact, based on an express assertion in Cicero (Phil. II, 87), that Caesar was already dictator for life at the time of the Lupercalia on February 15. Alföldi rejected Cicero's statement. In his assessment of an issue of M. Mettius (with the legend caes. dict. qvart.), he found that instead of the lituus, which normally appears on the denarii of Mettius, there is clearly recognizable the diadem, which Caesar refused at the Lupercalia, and dedicated to Jupiter on the Capitol. Alföldi spotted on the coins a diadem hanging on a hook (Alföldi, loc. cit. pls 2, 5, 6), and concluded that Mettius wished to perpetuate this gesture of Caesar's, for he could have struck these coins only immediately after February 15. In fact, Caesar does not appear on these coins as dict. perp. (dictator for life), but as dict. qvart. (dictator for the fourth time).

Consequently, if Alföldi is right with his interpretation of the ‘diadem’, the exact chronology—with its far-reaching historical implications that literary sources cannot provide—appears to be:

1 January 44: denarii of the old style with ‘Sulla's dream’

2 Beginning of February until shortly after February 15: issues with Caesar's portrait and legend caes. dict. qvart.

3 March i caes. imp.

4 After March i caesar dictator perpetvo

5 All the coins struck by Macer and Maridianus with the legend caes. dict. perpetvo and caesar parens patriae, portraying Caesar with veiled head, are to be attributed, at the earliest, to the period after the Ides of March

Up to April 10, the coins with dict. perp. remained in circulation but after the abolition of the dictatorship the coins with parens patriae appeared. At that point Antony needed to show Caesar in priestly garb, to demonstrate to the Roman people that its Pontifex Maximus had been murdered. He himself appears as consul on the denarius struck by Macer, with head covered and beard unshaven as a sign of mourning. No one can still harbour doubts about Caesar's final plans, for ‘he assigned the charge of the mint and of the public revenues to his own slaves’ (Suet., Div. Jul. 76, 3), and that, too, was one of the reasons that led to his murder.

Alföldi pursued the subject further in a series of articles in Museum Helveticum, the Schweizer Münzblätter and the Schweizer Numismatische Rundschau, etc.,⁹⁷ and later presented his discoveries to his followers and critics in two impressive volumes (only one of which has been published), entitled Caesar im Jahre 44.⁹⁸ He remained, apparently, largely true to his former opinions, although he modified certain points in matters of detail.

Alföldi was convinced of Caesar's endeavours towards monarchy, although he attempted to prove that they were not the sudden whim of a confident autocrat. Quite the contrary. In the time of Scipio Africanus a vague vision of a saviour was awakened in the Roman people (Phoenix XXIV (1970), p. 166), while since Sulla's time monarchy had been knocking at the gates of Rome. From the turn of the last century of the Republic the saviour theory was proclaimed on the annual issues of denarii. The belief in the return of a ‘Golden Age’ became fused with the yearning of the masses for a new Romulus. Alföldi pointed out that even those in the highest circles in Rome attempted to work out the imminent return of the ideal king of antiquity through the arithmetical tricks of astrology. Prominent politicians from Sulla to Augustus wanted to be considered the new Romulus. The misgivings of lesser persons concerning a rule by a king—so dreaded by the Senate—disappeared over the years. For them the dream come true would be the return of a king, and the hated symbols of sovereignty, such as diadem, sceptre and the ruler's wreath, are concealed by the apparently guiltless garb of a king of remote antiquity. Thus a predisposition for a king's actual return is facilitated by fantasy.

In 67 bc, Pompey was reviled as Romulus by a consul, yet five years later Romulus appeared on the issues of denarii struck by M. Plaetorius Cestianus. Pompey's exaltation at the end of the Republic—an alternative to his glorification as saviour—had to be enveloped in the Romulus Allegory.⁹⁹ Foundation and establishment of a new order were prized even by Cicero as acts of the highest virtue, and the concepts conditor, servator, parens and deus are inseparable from the concept of the new Romulus.

The virtues of Romulus as depicted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus are intelligible only through their adaptation to Caesar's political programme. Caesar was reviled as Romulus by Catullus (29, 5; 28, 15; 49, 1), yet Alföldi had no doubt that in the last phase of his life Caesar strove to be compared with Romulus. He wanted to derive his claim to renew Romulus' virtues as ruler from his family tradition: the red shoes, the garb of the former kings, the purple gown and white diadem¹⁰⁰ were symbols of the Caesarian-Romulean monarchy that Caesar so fervently desired. But, since he also knew how much the appellation ‘king’ in Rome was held in odium, his real aim had to be camouflaged by the catchword parens patriae.

The old father-symbol penetrated political life in the first century bc. Even before this it was a stereotyped honour accorded to many, and thus provided an established title for one. The expression pater patriae has a different significance with reference to Cicero than with reference to Caesar, who was continuously parens but never pater, and the Brundisium inscription, ‘C. Julio Caesari pont. max. patri patriae’ (ILS 71), is, in Alföldi's opinion, a scholarly forgery. Further, Cicero was hailed as pater patriae for giving the order for the execution of the Catilinarians, and his severitas was accordingly represented as the virtue of a saviour. Caesar, on the other hand, was called parens patriae on account of his clementia. The gentle, fatherly quality of the benevolent prince is antithesized with the tyrant's anger and the mitissimus parens with the crudelis tyrannus (de dom. 94). As domestic slaves swore by the genius of the head of the household, men must now swear by Caesar's genius; and, as, according to tradition, it was a worse offence to kill a parens patriae than to kill one's own father (‘est atrocius patriae parentem quam suum occidere’). Caesar was foolish enough to discharge his bodyguard in the hope that he could rely on his legally established sacrosanctitas. That was his undoing, and Rome lost a man of unheard-of tolerance and magnanimous clementia.

Alföldi, it must be granted, never obscured his views in hazy phraseology. On the contrary, he ruthlessly judged the republican regime as ‘a collective monarchy of the nobles who were sucking the blood from the Empire like leeches’.¹⁰¹ It did not occur to him that Caesar broke the law by crossing the Rubicon, and he posed the question whether the frenzy of the gangs in Rome before Caesar's rise to power had been in any sense constitutional. ‘One might describe the event in terms of an analogy, as the act of conceiving outside the mother's body, in the case of the Republic—a conception outside the constitution. The emergence of the child into the world spelt certain death for the mother.’

Likewise, Caesar should not be blamed for trying to become king. The idea occurred to him only after the Senate had showered him with honours—initially against his will—which eventually led him to overstep the limits of the permissible ‘only after the chorus of time-servers had led the way’.¹⁰² In an article, ‘La divinisation de César’, Alföldi also remarked that ‘a slavish Senate’ had pronounced Caesar a god.¹⁰³ In his general eulogy of Caesar he recalls the emotional style of nineteenth-century scholars, ‘He (Caesar) wanted to rule as sovereign, but preferred to expose his body to his murderers’ daggers rather than go on wasting his life away like a tyrant reliant on a bodyguard for safety. The nobile letum Catonis has its counterpart: the nobile letum Caesaris'.¹⁰⁴

Despite the impressive collection of sources and numismatic evidence Alföldi used to support his thesis, his work attracted little attention in the English-speaking West. In E. S. Gruen's highly interesting and stimulating book, which concludes with an extensive bibliography, Alföldi is not mentioned¹⁰⁵—whether accidentally or intentionally can only be surmised. Yet it must surely be recognized that Gruen totally disagrees with Alföldi, and rejects as ‘hindsight’ the theory that, since the time of Sulla, the idea of monarchy hovered like a bird of prey over the gates of Rome. Actually, in speaking of the Romans' longing for a great man, Alföldi reflected to some extent the remarks of Gundolf, written before Hitler's rise to power, ‘Today, since the need for a strong man is voiced, since men, weary of critics and carpers, make do with sergeants instead of generals, since, particularly in Germany, the government of the people is entrusted to any especially noteworthy talent displayed by soldiers, economists, civil servants or writers …’

Alföldi himself admitted, ‘My researches on the year 44 have been rejected without serious argument and have remained ignored.’¹⁰⁶ There are some important reasons why this is so. In the first place, there is no agreement about the significance of pater patriae. In Alföldi's view the expression pater constitutes a superior concept, embracing the whole essence of the princeps. This title, in his opinion, is the immediate prerequisite for one man's rule; it is not merely an honorary title; it puts the whole community under an obligation to the one in power.

Most scholars reject Alföldi's position. It was Mommsen's opinion that the title pater was not essential to the emperor's position, and that no rights were associated with it.¹⁰⁷ A. von Premerstein took it simply as an honorary title; for A. H. M. Jones it was ‘a harmless and ornamental title and office’, and even S. Weinstock attributed no decisive importance to it.¹⁰⁸ We cannot attempt a more detailed discussion of all the different opinions on this question, but it is sufficient to say that there is no agreement on the significance of the distinction between parens and pater, nor, indeed, on the significance of the title imperator, which Caesar, in Alföldi's view, adopted after his failure to be proclaimed king on 15 February 44, since only this title remained acceptable to the republicans.¹⁰⁹

Despite their readiness to make use of Dio, Appian, Suetonius and Plutarch as important sources for Caesar's history, modern scholars are not prepared, without further discussion, to take as gospel every statement of later sources. Alföldi, in turn, was not prepared to recognize this problem, and introduced the coinage as conclusive proof for his fundamental statements about Caesar's honours. But it is precisely here that he encountered the most decisive opposition from his fellow numismatists. Although impressed by his acuteness and originality, they did not agree that the Roman mint-masters would have worked into their coins ‘shrewdly conceived combinations of types’.¹¹⁰ A numismatist as remarkable as M. H. Crawford is strongly critical of Alföldi's work.¹¹¹ The latter's basic argument, that it was possible to discover on the coinage of the first century bc the desire for a new Romulus, is rejected as ‘obsessed with supposed prophecies of a golden age and full of surprising assertions’.¹¹²

In a short footnote (n. 108), Weinstock, who was ideologically not far removed from Alföldi, observed that although the latter had devoted a hundred pages to an examination of the concept pater patriae only a few of them touch on the problem. Alföldi continued the argument with Weinstock—after the latter's death—and replied in a long article (Gnomon XII 1975, 154-79). Non-specialists should steer clear of such debates. Yet, the most important objections raised by experts such as C. M. Kraay and R. A. G. Carson in England, and, independently, by H. Volkmann in Germany, must be briefly mentioned.¹¹³

All scholars are united in their recognition of Alföldi's pains to work out a precise chronological table of the issues and a detailed sequence of the dictator's intentions. Kraay, however, maintained that most of Alföldi's conclusions were untenable, and that they yielded no key to Caesar's policy. Alföldi was convinced that he could prove which coins were struck before February 15, which were struck in the second half of February, and which were struck at the beginning of March. But on this point there is no agreement. These are weighty questions not to be ignored.

Carson rejected the conclusion that Caesar, convinced of the failure of his attempt to become king on February 15, allowed coins to be struck in the second half of February merely with the legend imp., and only at the beginning of March issued those with dict. perp. It is, however, expressly reported in a contemporary source such as Cicero (Phil. II, 34; 87) that Caesar was already dictator perpetuus on February 15. Why, then, throw away a reliable literary source in favour of a baseless numismatic theory? Why should the assumption of the title imperator be seen as surrender to the republicans? Was even a ten-year dictatorship so acceptable to these republicans?

Furthermore, on what ground should it be supposed that the series with caes. dict. (later replaced by pater patriae) and those with the legend caes. imp. were not struck simultaneously (1) as a normal state issue, which Caesar employed to demonstrate the offices on the basis of which he governed, or (2) to supply coinage for the Parthian wars, designed by the commander-in-chief?

Finally, even if it is generally recognized that the discovery of the Mettius denarius in the Königliches Munzkabinett at The Hague (unknown until 1952), and its description, was a brilliant stroke by Alföldi, it remains hazardous to draw very far-reaching inferences when only a single specimen is available for study. Alföldi's own analysis arouses serious doubt. Kraay is not convinced that the denarius shows Caesar's diadem hanging up in the temple, and takes it as unproven that a lituus is not here quite simply in question. Indeed, it is true that on the rest of the Mettius denarii with the legend caes. dict. qvart. a lituus inclined to the right instead of the left appears. But a lituus inclined to the left appears on Mettius denarii with the legend caes. imp., so it is not unusual.

The most important argument in opposition to Alföldi's views appeared in a long monograph by D. Felber.¹¹⁴ Naturally, he follows the views of Kraay and Carson relating to the chronology of the coins. However, he returns to the conclusion that Caesar became dictator for life on February 15, and rejects Alföldi's interpretation derived from ‘Sulla's Dream’, that coins with different legends are to be put in chronological order and that all the issues with the caput velatum are posthumous.

We shall return to Felber in another connection; at this point it need only be remarked that his devastating criticism could lead to the conclusion that one should not attribute an exaggerated significance to coins. It would be worth while to ponder on Jones' sensible advice, ‘If numismatists wish … to assist historians, I would suggest that they should pay less attention to the political interpretation of the coins … Latterly the value of numismatic evidence has tended to be overstrained and its interpretation has become over-subtle’.¹¹⁵

To sum up, it must be said that Alföldi's opponents have not actually proven any new theory, but have demolished his argument by their sceptical observations and thereby pointed in a new direction.

If one studies Alföldi's thorough criticism of Weinstock's book,¹¹⁶ one might be surprised that the critic and the subject of his criticism belong to the same school, here termed the Revisionist. But in fact Alföldi's criticism was not fundamental. His attack on Weinstock's numismatic analysis was the more acute, mainly because the latter had taken scarcely any notice of the results of his own research. In numerous details, inter alia in matters of ancient Roman religion, he also stands apart from Weinstock.

By and large, however, there are no differences of opinion between the two scholars, as Alföldi dealt with the question of kingship, and Weinstock concerned himself with the deification. They agree that Caesar strove for both in his lifetime, even if Weinstock's precise wording was the more cautious and reserved. His enormous knowledge was steeped in German and Italian scholarship, but in the course of a long life in the atmosphere of an Oxford college he adapted to English style and English ways of thought. Using expressions like ‘may’ and ‘might’ he frequently softened the pointedness of an argument that would doubtless have aroused antagonism in another language.

Weinstock guarded against speaking of Caesar's far-reaching schemes, but likewise did not sketch him as a child of fortune or superman. Yet he, too, agreed with the view, as did Alföldi, that it was Caesar's first task to set up a monarchy (p. 281), and that at a certain point of time he was not satisfied with it, ‘While fighting in Parthia, his rule was to be strengthened by religious means and his divinity was to be established gradually’ (p. 286). Both Alföldi and Weinstock agreed that religious honours at this point became a constitutional necessity, since actual power was transferred from the annual magistrates to the one and only ruler.¹¹⁷

Weinstock's position on deification mirrored Alföldi's criticism of Meyer's idea of a Hellenistic monarchy and his substitution of the idea of a western monarchy, ‘Caesar's new position in Rome was to be prepared in a Roman fashion: the influence of Greek Soteres, Gods, and kings can be felt, but what was made of it was due to the influence of an old Roman tradition’ (p. 167), and, further, ‘[Caesar] did not want to appear as an innovator, nor to spread a new philosophy of life, but to be guided by tradition—yet one who at the end radically broke with it’ (p. 411). This is the fundamental view that made Weinstock a representative of the Revisionist school. It is also the main theme of his book Divus Julius, which is not only a work on the deification of Caesar but a history of ideas, with the object of explaining how a particular atmosphere facilitated such deification. Since a mechanical incorporation of oriental rites into Rome appeared to him logically unacceptable, Weinstock described the development of the ‘cults of personified values’, concordia, salus, pietas, victoria, honos, virtus, iustitia, and finally, of course, clementia, in all their details,—one of the finest chapters in the book. The connection of these virtues with a statesman forms the core of the whole work.

In Weinstock's 450 closely-printed pages Caesar appears before us, not as the acute, tireless politician and army commander or the dictator driven by ambition, but ‘as an imaginative and daring religious reformer who created and planned new cults, accepted extraordinary honours and died when he was about to become a divine ruler’ (ibid.).

In contrast to this view Alföldi particularly stressed the enthusiasm with which the Senate compelled Caesar to accept all possible honours. But Weinstock forcefully maintained, ‘Caesar was not a passive recipient. The decrees often fulfilled his expectations’ (p. 412). ‘He was involved in detailed planning of his cult and moved first towards an accumulation of priesthoods.’ It was no accident that Caesar made every effort so that his adoptive son should inherit the office of Pontifex Maximus from him (p. 33). ‘Varro dedicated to him his Antiquitates Rerum divinarum and Granius Flaccus De indigitamentis which was probably another antiquarian survey of prayer and ritual’ (p. 32). Finally Caesar emerges as one who strove after a ‘sacred kingship’ (p. 323).

In Weinstock's favour it must be said that he warned his readers that some of his assertions were nothing more than learned conjectures, often emerging from evidence of doubtful reliability. His greatest service was to promote general public awareness of an elementary fact: that one ought not to judge Caesar without taking into account the religious background of the time (p. 260), and in this respect his work is preferable to that of B. E. Giovanetti published in 1937.

But even after a thorough study of his comprehensive work some questions remain, of which a single example may suffice. At one point Weinstock described in detail the religious tradition of the Julian family, a tradition that had its origins in Bovillae. He analysed a small incident related by Cassius Dio (XLI, 39, 2), of how Caesar set about sacrificing a bull to Fortuna, before putting to sea in pursuit of Pompey, and of how the bull eluded him. Weinstock arrived at a far-fetched interpretation—again taking assistance from the little word ‘may’, ‘He may have intended to make the bull of Bovillae as popular as the she-wolf of Rome’ (p. 7). The Julii had for years been responsible for local rites in Bovillae—and probably also in Alba. The ritual of the Feriae Latinae was celebrated on the Alban Mount by a rex, which explains why, in 45 bc, Caesar began to dress in the garb of the Alban kings.

But with the help of the word ‘may’ a different conjecture is also possible: the bull was also the ensign of the Italians, and if Vell. Pat. II, 27, 2 reports that Italian freedom was ravaged by the Roman wolves, so the Roman she-wolf's subjection by the Italian bull may be symbolically portrayed on the coinage (Hill, Hist. Roman Coins (1909), pl. XI, 49). Perhaps one should be permitted the conjecture that Caesar did not have his family emblem in mind at all, but was rather attempting to drop a hint to the Italians that their support in the war against Pompey could turn out to be profitable for them. And the question mark remains.

In addition, it is hard to be convinced that Caesar was a religious man, for Weinstock himself expressed astonishment that Caesar did not take the trouble in any of his writings to stress that he was a citizen who continually observed his religious duty (p. 26). It must also be added that Caesar—like every influential Roman—had a very good understanding indeed of how the masses could be manipulated with the aid of religion (Polyb. VI, 56), but he never allowed himself to be deterred from his purpose by religious scruples (Suet., Div. Jul. 59, 1; 81, 4).

Weinstock's assumption that Caesar treated Apollo as his ancestral god remains only a conjecture based on a passage of Dio concerning the statement of Atia to the effect that Apollo begat her son. Likewise, no one allows himself to be convinced that Caesar became Jupiter Julius in his lifetime. None of the stories that appear in Dio (such as p. 264, n. 6, on Dio XLI, 15, 4; 16, 4), can be regarded as solid fact beyond all doubt.¹¹⁸ All scholars from Mommsen to Adcock read these same sources, and the majority formed the conclusion that it was only after his death that Caesar legally became divus.¹¹⁹ But the Revisionists stubbornly stick to their view, and eventually Balsdon desisted from further discussion: ‘The truth is that in this sharp division of opinion scholars on either side preach to the converted.’¹²⁰

In our view, Vogt's briefer and more penetrating article would have sufficed to present us with the insoluble problem. Some may have presumed that further discussion was futile. And yet it is not surprising that by way of reaction another group of scholars surfaced whom we term the Sceptics.

THE SCEPTICS

This section does not permit as simple a systematization as the earlier ones. There is no lack of common ground, yet most of the adherents of this school go their own ways. In general, it may be said that the Sceptics are usually prepared to accept the fact that even with the evidence that is available today it is impossible to penetrate to the full truth. At the outset they abandoned research into intentions and questions such as ‘Did Caesar strive after honours, or was it the Senate that showered him with honours?’, because satisfactory answers are not possible.

One has the impression that the consequences of World War II are readily discernible in the historical research of the last thirty years. Not only has Germany taken enormous strides towards the Anglo-Saxon democracies, but disapproving remarks about German historical research have disappeared from English works; on some issues an exchange of roles seems to have taken place. In fact, an extremely sceptical view on the divinity of humans might have been expected in the British Isles. Yet we read in Jocelyn Toynbee, a most distinguished archaeologist, that ‘to the Greeks and Romans men and gods were not on two completely separated differential levels, and that a mortal could move godward by ascending degrees until he reached virtual identification with an immortal god’. She thinks that, with the aid of detailed research, ‘the case of transition from man to god can be observed’.¹²¹

Precisely the opposite can be read in Carl Joachim Classen's article ‘Gottmenschen in der römischen Republik’.¹²² He comes to the conclusion that no individual Roman was honoured in a way that brought him nearer to the gods either in his lifetime or after his death. Contrary to the Greek conception, a deep gulf separated man and god. Genii are not divine, for there are as many genii as there are living men. Sacrifices are a way of offering honour and respect: they are also owed to gods, but not only to gods. They are a kind of thanksgiving for a particular achievement brought to fulfilment. Classen is prepared to admit that Caesar's measures were more audacious than those of all his predecessors, but no more than that.

Of course, everything cannot be blamed on World War II. E. J. Bickermann's warning, voiced in 1930, must not be forgotten, especially with regard to research into the emperor cult.¹²³ In his opinion it was not permissible ‘to confuse ideology with the sacral law which alone determines worship, and nobody should confuse divinity and association with the divine’.¹²⁴

A new view can be traced in the research of C. Habicht,¹²⁵ which was also mirrored in studies of Caesar and his desire for deification. R. Cohen remarked that the ruler cult is ‘the most delicate question in the organization of monarchy’,¹²⁶ and in L. Cerfaux and J. Tondriau we read, ‘A cult is a matter of feeling, and the intentions that dictate it almost always escape us. Nothing is more dangerous than to try to reconstruct, above all in matters of religion, the mentality and reasoning of a man of the ancient world.’¹²⁷ These warnings were eventually heeded.

M. Liberanome, who was concerned with Caesar's aims for kingship, was much more cautious than Weinstock, although he admits the religious vitality of the people.¹²⁸ Elsewhere we noted Felber's decisive objections to Alföldi's chronology derived from the coinage, but he should again be mentioned in the present context, since he can serve as a prototype for the ‘Sceptics’. Not content merely with a fresh examination of the numismatic material, Felber also reassessed the literary sources from which conclusions concerning Caesar's aim for kingship and deification may suitably be drawn, ‘It is to be doubted that Caesar, in the attire in which he showed himself to the public at the Lupercalia, was unmistakably distinguished as the new Romulus and old Roman king.’¹²⁹ And, ‘the assertion that Caesar had already introduced the title imperator as a personal name and mark of the ruler in the sense of the praenomen imperatoris of the empire, is untenable’ (pp. 231 ff.).¹³⁰ And, ‘the view that the dictator intended to acquire the title of king with the aid of a sibylline oracle does not hold water’ (pp. 254 ff.). And finally (from the sources at our disposal), ‘… one can get no answer to the question whether Caesar, in fact, wanted to establish a kingdom’ (p. 273).

Gustav Haber,¹³¹ a pupil of Vogt, is also doubtful about Caesar's aims regarding kingship, and in 1968 Helga Gesche, a pupil of K. Kraft, published a brief, clear, and impressive book, which provides a fundamental analysis of all the literary, epigraphic and numismatic material connected with the deification of Caesar.¹³² Her critics must be impressed by the meticulousness of her investigations, even if they do not agree with her conclusions.¹³³ Frau Gesche particularly stresses the difference between the concepts Vergötterung and Vergottung, and comes to the clear conclusion that on the coins struck before Caesar's death epithets such as Deus or Divus Caesar are missing, and that the dictator was never represented as a god (p. 16, especially n. 26).

Nevertheless, Helga Gesche, for all her caution, also believes that Caesar not only strove for deification, but also planned in advance for the time after his death. Of course, there is no evidence for such a view as yet, and, therefore, it is pointless to start the discussion afresh. As the source material at our disposal does not allow for a decision, it would be preferable to abandon the question for the time being, rather than hazard further guesses. As a sceptical English scholar put it, ‘The foot of Hercules may be a sufficient clue to his stature, but we shall scarcely succeed in reconstructing him from the parings of his toe-nails.’¹³⁴

The real protagonist of sober judgment in Caesar's case is Hermann Strasburger. As far back as 1937, in his review of H. Rudolph's Stadt und Staat im römischen Italien (Leipzig 1935), he warned against treating Caesar as a superman, and attempted to put him into measured perspective.¹³⁵ The proper perspective, however, was achieved in his brilliant essay ‘Caesar im Urteil der Zeitgenossen’, with which we introduced this historiographic section.

W. Schmitthenner, too, in a thorough analysis of all the events preceding the assassination of Caesar, had to take into account the doubts of numerous scholars, viz. that with regard to Caesar's final plans there can be only opinion, but no certainty, despite the pains and discoveries of the numismatists. Schmitthenner's sceptical view contained a warning, ‘If we allow ourselves to be led by the search for truth, positions that are compulsorily established suddenly become open and inexact.’¹³⁶

Strasburger's influence was felt as much in England as in Germany. Thus R. E. Smith, for instance, was not interested in whether Caesar really aimed at kingship, ‘Whether Caesar ever had in mind to take the name of king we cannot know, nor does it greatly matter.’¹³⁷ Smith, like Strasburger, was mainly concerned with what Caesar's contemporaries thought about him, and assumed that they considered him a tyrant who put himself at the head of a Republic that stood for annual magistrates.

One finds similar conclusions, although based on a different theoretical foundation, in Christian Meier's brief remarks about Caesar.¹³⁸ In his opinion, the basic reason for Caesar's failure lay in the fundamental circumstances of the world in which he lived, not in this or that mistake or attribute of the dictator. Meier finds little value in posing the question of whether Caesar intended to found a monarchy. We simply do not know that. We know only that he reigned as a monarch and possessed the full powers of a monarch. ‘He could command, dispose, forbid, establish institutions, do away with them, alter them, give laws, circumvent them, break them, elect and suspend magistrates as he willed.’

We know, too, that Caesar was given exaggerated honours, partly associated with royalty and partly with divinity, without being admittedly marked out as a king or god. Meier supposes that Caesar either had not given any thought to instituting a monarchy in Rome, or at least saw no viable way of approaching this aim. He was, above all, a pragmatist and improviser, and convinced himself that he could improve everything.

Meier stated that to Caesar and his followers the question of regnum and respublica was one and the same. His considerations were those of a typical Roman aristocrat who conceived no new constitutional ideas. ‘Had the commonwealth been a piece of clay, politics a matter of manufacture, and not a vital process of manoeuvring, then Caesar would have been quite happy.’ In truth, things appeared to be quite different. Meier pointed out that the omnipotent victor and dictator Caesar was actually powerless (ohnmächtig). That everything depended on him disturbed him no less than it vexed Cicero. Too many demands were made upon him; he felt oppressed, and as a result of ennui planned a Parthian war instead of restructuring the state and society. This was not due to Caesar's personality or character. Within Roman society there was no touchpoint which might have sparked off a direct conflict, in the course of which it might have been possible to work towards a new structure. To do this, there would have to have been some sort of articulated social group or class involved in a kind of emergency, surmountable only through a fundamental and comprehensive reform (or revolution). In the 50s and 40s of the first century bc the principle of the commonwealth was only extended, not supplanted, and Caesar's personality can be understood in the context of a crisis without an alternative.

Meier's view is contained in a popular work that until now has provoked only an insignificant response. Yet, a thorough investigation in the direction taken by this book would be desirable, although Meier himself doubted the interests of his professional colleagues in themes of this kind.

This survey would not be complete without a reference to J. H. Collins, a scholar who is not easily classified although he wrote many important works including an excellent article, ‘Caesar and the Corruption of Power’.¹³⁹ An American who worked under Gelzer in Germany, he brought his critical examination of the sources to a high level, but did not hesitate to make use of the social sciences such as sociology and psychology in his research.¹⁴⁰ Collins believed that contemporary researchers shrink from generalizations, which are reserved for chatter in the corridors and the faculty commonrooms. He was convinced that there is one Caesar for the years between 60 and 48 bc and another for the years between 46 and 44 bc. The turning-point is thus the year 47 bc, the year that brought him into contact with the East and Cleopatra. She was more than a mistress. She was, as Horace put it, ‘no ordinary woman’.

Collins maintained that Caesar's contemporaries also noticed changes in his nature and conduct. Initially they believed in him, but in the final analysis they were bitterly disappointed. Between 50 and 46 bc Sallust was still expecting Caesar to reform the Republic. Collins supported this view by reference to the Letters of Sallust, in which the writer addressed these words to Caesar,

But if you have in you the spirit which has from the very beginning dismayed the faction of the nobles, which restored the Roman commons to freedom after a grievous slavery, which in your praetorship routed your armed enemies without resort to arms, which has achieved so many and such glorious deeds at home and abroad that not even your enemies dare to make any complaint except of your greatness; if you have that spirit, pray give ear to what I shall say about our country's welfare.

(Letter to Caesar I, 2, 4)

Sallust suggested a series of ideas for reform, but later lost all hope. Caesar changed into a tyrant and was murdered. The serious doubts of H. Last, R. Syme and E. Fraenkel as to the authenticity of the letters did not prevent Collins from recognizing Sallust as the author. But Collins could have invoked the doubtless authentic work of Sallust, The Jugurthine War (3, 2), written after Caesar's death, ‘For to rule one's country or subjects by force, although you both have the power to correct abuses, and do correct them, is nevertheless tyrannical …’

Cicero's relationship with Caesar (according to Collins) was similar. In the years between 55 and 53 bc they were intimate friends. Even after the civil wars Cicero continued to hope that Caesar would restore the Republic (his speech Pro Marcello). Later came disappointment, and then the irrevocable breach.¹⁴¹ Cicero's mixed feelings towards Caesar were made abundantly clear in a letter of May 4, 44 (ad Att. XIV, 17). Cicero recalled that Caesar's behaviour towards him was moderate enough but otherwise unbending (de div. II, 23). Collins rightly emphasized that to Cicero Caesar was an enigma because he did not fit into any of the categories of his moral philosophy.

To sum up, in Collins' view there was sufficient evidence to suggest that Caesar's deepest political conviction was based on the old republica. Only when he began to despair of it did he feel that despotism was the only other way open to him. But his arrogance, illusions of grandeur, aggressiveness towards the Senate and respect for nobilitas of great distinction was not purely arbitrary. The view that the Republic deserted Caesar and not Caesar the Republic is the truer of the two; and, if that is right, Balsdon also deserves credit for his statement (Historia VII (1958), 86, 94) that Caesar was not murdered because he had changed, but because he had not changed.

To add further notion or surmise to this medley of opinions would be a real presumption, but I would like to suggest some thoughts that might be worthy of further study.

Caesar is one of the phenomena that appear upon the stage of history in times of crisis and hope. His rule drew support from a heterogeneous social group, a fact impressively proved by Syme's research. Yet it does not clearly emerge from all the studies we have mentioned that each of these groups expected a different solution to the acute problems of the day from Caesar. Each group saw him in a distinct way: some saw him as a man of clemency, others as the harsh ruler. Some expected a land distribution, others the cancellation of debts. Some hoped he would restore the Republic to its former greatness, others wanted its abolition once and for all. Each individual was convinced that his picture of Caesar was the right one.

Collins drew a distinction between the Caesar of the years before 46 bc and the Caesar of later years, which does not solve the problem, however, since there were ‘several Caesars’ before 46 bc as well as after it. In 49 bc Caesar crossed the Rubicon, apparently to plead for the tribunes' rights, but in the same year he himself infringed on the rights of Metellus when he tried to make himself master of the treasury in the temple of Saturn.

In 49 bc a cancellation of debts was generally expected, but towards the end of that year the money-lenders, bankers and wholesale merchants were among Caesar's most loyal followers. After the crossing of the Rubicon, there was some expectation that Caesar would reach an understanding with all the members of the nobilitas; indeed, he made extraordinary efforts to reach such an understanding with them. Many were receptive to his canvassing, and the list of consuls for the years between 49 and 44 bc proves that the firmly entrenched nobilitas understood how necessary it was to preserve their influence in the state.

Who and what, then, was Caesar? Strasburger and Balsdon, Béranger and others proved that Caesar was a tyrant.¹⁴² But that was only in the eyes of a limited group of senators in the latter days of Caesar's life. Did the people think so too? In another book¹⁴³ I have attempted to explore the masses' image of Caesar. It is not easy to free oneself of the picture of Caesar as portrayed, above all, in the writings of Cicero and Sallust because the common man wrote no literary works and it is difficult to say with certainty what the masses thought. But the attempt is worth while. From close consideration of his conduct, however, there is no doubt about how Caesar wanted to appear in the eyes of the people, and that he held himself up to the plebs as the popular father-figure freed from the shackles of the Senate.

There are historians who maintain that the similarities between Caesar and Pompey are greater than the differences. Even if that is true, and the difference is much less than we suppose, the Roman plebs were not of this opinion. When Julius Caesar organized games and festivals, on a generous scale, the people were jubilant. Yet, when Pompey permitted eighteen elephants and five hundred lions to be brought into the arena, sympathy was shown for the animals and he was met with angry abuse.¹⁴⁴ Why? How did the ideal figure of a leader appear in the eyes of the people? It is apparent that concern for the physical well-being of the masses was only one factor. All Roman rulers bribed the people with bread and circuses, and yet the one was popular and the other hated. Seneca provided us with the answer: the giving is not the decisive factor but the manner of the giving.¹⁴⁵ ‘Idem est quod datur, sed interest quomodo detur’. The people were more easily swayed by how a ruler did than by what he did, and respected the one who at least took the trouble to appear popular.¹⁴⁶ When Caesar decided to live in the poor quarter (before the elections!), the people saw no false altruism in the action.¹⁴⁷ They preferred him to Pompey, who made not the slightest effort ‘to climb down to the people’. Therefore, it is not surprising that after Ilerda all ‘civil war games’ played by Roman children ended with the victory of the ‘Caesarians’.¹⁴⁸ The vast mass of the people loathed the members of the nobilitas, but were powerless against them. The most popular political leaders (all aristocrats in origin) were those who criticized and debased the existing ‘establishment’ of senators in public and coram publico made much of the fact that they—‘although senators themselves’—were not the slaves of their class.¹⁴⁹ The common people are not always as capricious as the sources make out. Perhaps Goethe was quite right when he wrote,

Tell me, are we doing the right thing? We must
deceive the rabble, See just how inept, how boorish, and
how transparently stupid it is! It appears inept and stupid, just
because you are deceiving it, Only be honest, and it, believe me,
is human and shrewd.

(Venetian Epigrams).

Caesar grasped every opportunity and spared no efforts to appear to be the people's friend, a man whose chief concern was the well-being of the common man.

Is that the true Caesar? I have never maintained so. I suppose there will be those who will say that my position is influenced by the conduct of those politicians in our age of mass media who are primarily interested in burnishing their personal image before the television cameras and the press.

Such criticism would be justified. Each generation writes history anew and adds its own ingredient to existing knowledge. I cannot quarrel with Friedrich Frhr. von Wieser's observation that the present is the teacher of the knowledge of the past. I have not discovered the quest for the ‘image’. It does exist in the sources, but it seems to me that insufficient attention has been paid to it. In any case, this is not the last word on Caesar's place in history, and I am far from solving the enigma of Caesar the man.

If we tried to discover how the Gauls,¹⁵⁰ the Jews, the municipales in Italy or the merchants in Spain saw Caesar, it would become clear that there are still several ‘Caesars’. But, even if we could not know which of them is the ‘true’ Caesar, we would better understand why he remains such an enigma to the present day. ‘Maxima quaeque ambigua sunt’—it is precisely the most important state of affairs that remain ambiguous (Tac., Ann. III, 19, 2).¹⁵¹

However, nothing is achieved by extreme scepticism. A Cambridge modern historian explains, ‘The historian who tries to reject everything that is unproven will be rejecting much that is true. His talent lies neither in a corrosive and tiresome scepticism about everything, nor in absolute positivism, but in discernment and discrimination, best called historical understanding’.¹⁵²

If we knew exactly what Caesar's intentions were, our subject would become wholly factual. But since we do not know them, we must be content with the English maxim, ‘People should be judged by facts, not by alleged intentions’. What, then, are these facts? Thirty-eight laws and measures are supposedly associated with Caesar's name. It ought to be possible, by a thorough investigation of these laws and measures, to understand how Caesar was assessed by different sections of the public? It is worth making the attempt. Moreover, can something be learned about Caesar's aims and personality from his laws?

Notes

1. This chapter is in no way designed to be exhaustive. It is intended as a general survey for the educated reader, not for the specialist. In addition, the interested reader might like to read further in G. Walter, César, Paris 1947; M. Rambaud, L'art de déformation historique dans les commentaries de César, Paris 1966; id., ‘Rapport sur César’, Ass. G. Budé, Actes Congr. Lyons 1958, Paris 1960, pp. 205-38; J. H. Collins, ‘A Selective Survey of Caesar Scholarship since 1935’, Class. World 57 (1963/64), pp. 46-51 and pp. 81-88; H. Opperman, ‘Probleme und heutiger Stand der Caesarforschung’, ed. D. Rasmussen, Caesar, WdF. XLIII, Darmstadt 1976, pp. 485-522.

   While the present book was in preparation it was too late for me to take into account Helga Gesche, Caesar, Erträge, der Forschung, vol. LI, Darmstadt 1976. In this work Helga Gesche has collected and arranged chronologically and by subject some 2,000 titles selected from the academic literature published between 1918 and 1972-73. More important is the fact that she succeeded in overcoming an almost insurmountable task in producing not merely a survey of the literature but an accompanying critique of outstanding quality that immediately makes all other surveys of research seem out of date. In the not too distant future her work will rank as an essential component of every Caesarian scholar's library, and in the course of time the comprehensive bibliography can be cited, quite simply, by a brief reference, ‘see Gesche, No. 620’ etc. Nor was E. Wistrand's excellent study, Caesar and contemporary Roman society. Göteborg 1978, taken into account.

2. H. Stasburger, ‘Caesar im Urteil der Zeitgenossen’, Hist. Zeitschrift 175 (1953), pp. 225-64, Darmstadt 1968.

3. On the concept of ‘image’ in classical antiquity, see Appendix, p. 214.

4. Plut., Caes. 32; App., BC II, 35.

5. H. Strasburger, Caesars Eintritt in die Geschichte, Munich 1938; L. R. Taylor, ‘The Rise of Julius Caesar’, Greece and Rome IV (1957), pp. 10-18; ‘Caesar's Early Career’, Classical Philology XXXVI (1941), pp. 421 ff.

6. Suet., Div. Jul. 9, 2.

7. R. Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford 1939, p. 47, cf. J. Carcopino, Les Etapes de l'impérialisme Romain, Paris 1961, pp. 118 ff.; id., Julius César, Paris 1968.

8. See the recently published study of Kurt Raaflaub, ‘Dignitatis contentio’, Vestigia, vol. 20, Munich 1974.

9. Caes., BC. III, 57, 4. Similarly, too, U. Knoche in his article ‘Die geistige Vorbereitung der augustäischen Epoche’, in Das neue Bild der Antike (1942), p. 213: ‘But actually it is astonishing and shocking (sic!) how small a role the idea of empire plays at all here. And it is extraordinary that Caesar, the master of propaganda, allowed this role to escape him.’ Naturally Knoche particularly underlines Caesar's notions of leadership and following. This volume appeared at the time of the Nazi regime in Germany, and was edited by H. Berve.

10. BC. I, 32, 7. It is noteworthy that Strasburger does not quote the second part of Caesar's suggestion, I, 32, 7, ‘But if they shrink through fear he will not burden them, and will administer the state himself.’ That is simultaneously an invitation and a threat, and it is scarcely to be supposed that the Senate was overjoyed about it. See J. H. Collins, ‘Caesar and the Corruption of Power’, Historia IV (1955), p. 445.

11. W. den Boer, ‘Caesar zweitausend Jahre nach seinem Tod’, WdF XLIII, p. 436.

12. M. Gelzer, ‘War Caesar ein Staatsmann?’, Hist. Zeitschrift 178 (1954), pp. 449-70 (= Kleine Schriften, Wiesbaden 1963, vol. II, pp. 286 ff.).

13. Id., Kleine Schriften, vol. III, p. 190.

14. Ibid. vol. II, p. 301.

15. A. Heuss, HZ CLXXXII (1956), p. 28 (see also A. Heuss, ‘Matius als Zeuge von Caesar's staatsmännischer Größe’, Historia XI (1962), p. 118.

16. M. Gelzer, Caesar, Stuttgart 1921. See also his article, ‘Caesars weltgeschichtliche Leistung’, Vorträge und Schriften, Preuss. Akademie d. Wiss., Heft 6, Berlin 1941 (= Vom römischen Staat II, pp. 147 ff.).

17. Das neue Bild der Antike, vol. II, p. 199. But otherwise Gelzer preserved his academic integrity during the Nazi period. Only in a lecture ‘Caesars weltgeschichtliche Leistung’, Berlin 1941 (De Gruyter), p. 4, was there the hint that it was not easy for him in every respect. He compared Caesar with Frederick the Great, with Napoleon, Richelieu and Bismarck, ‘not to mention those who are still alive’. Is this irony or evasion? Yet there is no doubt about his general attitude. In 1928 he took up a critical position towards F. Münzer's Entstehung des römischen Prinzipats, Münster 1927, and made comments against the enthusiasm for the rule of the individual, ‘Because we have conceived of a period of history as necessary, must we also hail it as salutary?’

18. M. Gelzer, Caesar: Politician and Statesman, tr. P. Needham, Oxford 1968, pp. 329-30 (= Caesar, Wiesbaden 1960, p. 306).

19. Cic., de off. II, 84.

20. Plin., NH VII, 91-2.

21. O. Seel, ‘Zur Problematik der Grösse’, Caesarstudien, Stuttgart 1967, pp. 43-92, especially p. 57.

22. Th. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, vol. III, Berlin 1909 edition, p. 479 (History of Rome, vol. IV, tr. W. Dickson, London 1894 edition, p. 440.

23. J. Geiger, ‘Zum Bild Caesars in der römischen Kaiserzeit’, Historia XXIV (1975), p. 444.

24. R. Herbig, ‘Neue Studien zur Ikonographie des Julius Caesar’, Kölner Jahrbücher für Vor und Frühgeschichte IV (1959), p. 7 = Gymnasium LXXII (1965), p. 161 = WdF XLIII (1967), p. 69. Cf. also J. M. C. Toynbee, ‘Portraits of Julius Caesar’, Greece and Rome IV (1957), p. 2; Erika Simon, ‘Neue Literatur zum Caesarporträt’, Gymnasium XXVI (1954), p. 527.

25. J. H. Collins, Gnomon XXVI (1954), p. 527.

26. W. Roscher, Politik, Geschichtliche Naturlehre der Monarchie, Aristokratie, Stuttgart 1893, p. 588.

27. Mémoires de Mme de Remusat III, p. 349.

28. A. J. P. Taylor, From Napoleon to Lenin. Historical Essays, New York 1966, pp, 12-20.

29. Two additional passages of Cicero are worth mentioning in this connection, ad fam. XII, 18, 2, ‘for the issues of civil war are invariably such that it is not only the victor's wishes that are carried out, but those also have to be humoured by whose assistance the victory was won’, and ibid. 4, 9, 3, ‘For there are many things a victor is obliged to do even against his will at the caprice of those who helped him to victory.’

30. L. Wickert, ‘Zu Caesars Reichspolitik’, Klio XXX (1937), pp. 232-53.

31. Presumably in 1895 Roscher was not yet aware of the then sensational articles of Dessau in Hermes XXIV (1889), pp. 337-92; XXVII (1892), pp. 561-605, on the historical value of the SHA. In any case the passage cited above can serve only by way of illustration.

32. Cf. A. Momigliano, ‘Per un riesame della storia dell' idea di Cesarismo’, RSI LXVIII (1956), p. 220-29, and ‘Burckhardt e la parola Cesarismo’, ibid. LXXIV (1962), pp. 369-71, and, in Hebrew, C. Wirszubski, ‘The domination of Julius Caesar’, Molad (Sept. 1957), pp. 348 ff., with similar conclusions.

33. L. Hartmann, Theodor Mommsen, Gotha 1908, pp. 66-77. Napoleon III himself wrote a book about Caesar, but his German tutor (Froehner) was under no illusions about Napoleon's philological and historical knowledge. In his memoirs he remarked that Napoleon muddled Grammatici with Gromatici, and was absolutely convinced that he had read Livy Book XI (!).

34. I assume that, in speaking of the vulgar sense, Mommsen would have had in mind such sentences as ‘Roman history in general, viewed in the proper light, is and remains the most trustworthy guide, not only for our time, but for all times’. This sentence comes from Hitler's Mein Kampf (1939), p. 470.

35. Th. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, vol. III, p. 477 f. (= Eng. tr. in Everyman's Lib., Vol. IV, pp. 439-440.

36. W. Roscher, ‘Umrisse zur Naturlehre des Caesarismus’, Abh. der Sächs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. X (1888), p. 641; F. Ruestow, Der Caesarismus, sein Wesen and Schaffen, Zürich 1879.

37. R. v. Pöhlmann, ‘Entstehung des Caesarismus’, Altertum und Gegenwart, Munich 1895, p. 245.

38. A. Gramsci, ‘Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo stato moderno’, Einaudi-Jovino (1949), pp. 58-60 especially stresses the ‘conciliatory character of Caesarism’.

39. N. A. Maškin, Printsipat Avgusta, Moscow 1949 (pp. 47 ff. German edition).

40. Momigliano, see n. 32.

41. Th. Mommsen, loc. cit. p. 513.

42. It is perhaps noteworthy that Caesar's power appeared legitimate to Napoleon, ‘because it was the result … of the people's wish’ (whether Napoleon was familiar with App., BC I, 4, 16 is debatable).

43. C. Merivale, The Fall of the Roman Republic, London 1874; W. W. Fowler, Julius Caesar and the Foundation of the Roman Imperial System, London 1892, to mention but two English examples. L. Wickert (loc. cit. p. 232) believed that an idea of empire always develops when the territory of the state grows beyond a certain limit. Caesar's plan was to reshape the Imperium Romanum, replacing the Republican state that was head of a community by a state ruled by a monarch that was head of an empire. A necessary factor in the fulfilment of this task is the absolute rule of the individual, for only the monarch who is superior to all his subjects can gain the requisite support, impossible for collegiate government in the Roman style, involving several principals.

44. E. G. Brandes, Caesar, 2 vols, Copenhagen 1918-21; or, E. Kornemann, Weltgeschichte des Mittelmeerraumes, Munich 1948, ‘The crime of March 15th effaced forever the empire planned by the powerful Julius.’

45. E.g. G. A. v. Mess, Caesar, Leipzig 1913, pp. 162-66, ‘His aim was legalized monarchy. He was not only an innovator, but stirred into growth and strengthened what remained strong and healthy in the old roots; he was above party politics, and was the man to put new content into the old form.’ Mess considered that Caesar's election as Pontifex Maximus (‘head of the state church’), was a ‘preparation for popular monarchy’ (p. 41).

46. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (ed. Brunstäd), Leipzig 1907 (Reclam Verlag), pp. 400-1 (= English translation by J. Sibree, New York 1944, pp. 312-13). Many nineteenth-century scholars who were not Hegelians shared this view, e.g. Droysen, who in 1834 wrote to Welcker that he had always preferred Alexander to Demosthenes and Caesar to Cato (G. Droysen, Briefwechsel (ed. R. Hübner), 1929, vol. I, p. 66.

47. F. Gundolf, Caesar, Geschichte seines Ruhmes, Berlin 1924, and Caesar in 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1926.

48. So, too, Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, New York 1950, p. 118.

49. G. Ferrero, The Life of Caesar, London 1933, the second volume of his work Grandezza edecadenza di Roma, Turin 1904.

50. At first glance it may seem that there were no real anti-Caesarians before Ferrero, while devotees of Julius Caesar were to be found even among the founders of American democracy. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and his Time, Boston 1951, vol. II, p. 286, maintained that Hamilton was a great admirer of Caesar. In an article that has appeared recently Thomas P. Govan has proved precisely the opposite and has convincingly demonstrated that Hamilton, in fact, championed Ferrero's ideas even during the American Revolution. In his view, Caesar was not only an efficient general and despotic autocrat, he was also a Catiline—a demagogic conspirator—who flattered the people and destroyed their freedom. To warn Washington against people of this kind, Hamilton wrote, ‘When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, … possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits, despotic in his ordinary demeanour … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion, that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’

    Hamilton hated those who fostered the folly and prejudices of the people and who played on their ambitions and fears. His comparison of Jefferson with Caesar in 1792 was no compliment. (Thomas P. Govan, ‘Alexander Hamilton and Julius Caesar’, The William and Mary Quarterly, July 1975, p. 477. I am grateful to my friend Prof. T. Draper for the reference to this article).

51. L. R. Taylor, ‘Caesar and the Roman Nobility’, TAPA LXXIII (1942), pp. 10-27; F. R. Cowell, Cicero and the Roman Republic, London 1948, pp. 203-4. This anti-Caesarian attitude is also not a new one. Since the time of Machiavelli and up to the French Revolution, conspirators whose declared aim was to free their enslaved country were highly regarded. The argument has become more intense since the time of Napoleon.

52. The new direction of Italian research on Caesar after World War II was instituted by G. Perotta with the article ‘Cesare scrittore’, Maia I (1948), pp. 5-32. Cf. also G. Funaioli, ‘Giulio Cesare scrittore’, Studi Romani V (1957), p. 136; E. Paratore, ‘Cesare scrittore’, Cesare nel bimillianario della morte (ed. Radio Italiana), Rome 1956, p. 23; A. La Penna, Cesare—La guerra civile—Introduzione, Turin 1954.

    See also the important works of G. Pacucci, G. Funaioli, E. Paratore, A. La Penna, L. Canali (Personalità e stile di Cesare, Rome 1963); F. Semi (Il sentimento di Cesare, Padua 1966), and the extremely useful synopsis by E. Paratore, ‘Das Caesarbild des 20. Jahrhunderts in Italien’, Caesar, WdF., see n. 24. I have unfortunately been unable to obtain G. Costa, Giulio Cesare, Rome 1934. See now J. Kroymann, ‘Caesar und das Corpus Caesarianum in der neueren Forschung, ANRW I, 3, 457.

53. As an example of Soviet literature see Maskin (n. 39). Western Marxists did not follow the path of their Soviet colleagues, and works of the Italian left (cf. n. 52) such as those of Canali and La Penna are stimulating and refreshing.

54. See also U. v. Wilamowitz, ‘Th. Mommsen. Warum hat er den vierten Band der Römischen Geschichte nicht geschrieben?’, International Monatschrift XII (1918), p. 205, and especially the fine article by A. Wucher, ‘Mommsens unvolendete Römische Geschichte’, Saeculum IV (1953), pp. 414 ff.

55. J. H. Collins, loc. cit. (p. 12, n. 10).

56. This was also the view of E. Herzog, Geschichte und System der römischen Staatsverfassung, Leipzig 1884-91, II. 1, p. 44 (1887). He did not doubt that Caesar strove for sole rulership as a regular, permanent form of government, and in this connection the title never bothered him.

57. E.g., E. Kornemann, ‘Ägyptische Einflüsse im römischen Kaiserreich’, N. Jahrb. f.d. kl. Altertumswissenschaft 1889, p. 118; J. Kaerst, Studien zur Entwicklung und theoretischen Begründung der Monarchie im Altertum, Munich 1898, especially pp. 80 ff.; H. Willrich, ‘Caligula’, Klio III (1902), p. 89. A. V. Domaszewski, ‘Kleine Beiträge zur Kaisergeschichte’, Philologus XXI (1908), p. 1.

58. See his Kleine Schriften.

59. E. Meyer, Spenglers Untergang des Abendlandes, Berlin 1925.

60. O. Weippert, Alexander Imitatio und römische Geschichte in republikanischer Zeit, Augsburg 1972, pp. 56 ff.

61. Cf., however, Gelzer's review of the year 1918, reprinted in Kleine Schriften, vol. III, p. 190.

62. J. Carcopino, César, Paris 1935; cf. ‘La Royauté de César et de l'Empire universel’, Les Etapes de l'impérialisme Romain, Paris 1961, pp. 118 ff., with the important review of T. Gagé, ‘De César à Auguste’, RH CLXXVII (1936), pp. 279-342. Also R. Etienne, Les Ides de Mars, Paris 1973, whose interpretation is similar to Carcopino's.

63. L. Cerfaux and J. Tondriau, Le culte des souverains, Tournay 1957.

64. C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, Oxford 1940.

65. E. Kornemann, Weltgeschichte des Mittelmeerraumes, Munich 1948, vol. I, p. 478.

66. P. Strack, ‘Zum Gottkönigtum Caesars, Probleme der augustäischen Erneuerung’, Gymnasium IV (1938), p. 21; also C. Koch, Gottheit und Mensch im Wandel der römischen Staatsform (1942), now in ‘Religio. Studien zu Kult und Glauben der Römer’, Erlanger Beiträge zur Sprache und Kunstwissenschaft, vol. VII, Nuremberg 1960, p. 94.

67. L. Pareti, Storia di Roma e del impero Romano, 6 vols. Turin 1952-61.

68. Cf. E. Meyer, ‘Kaiser Augustus’, Kl. Schriften, and E. Burck, ‘Staat, Volk and Dichtung im republikanischen Rom’, Hermes LXXI (1936), p. 307. Burck maintained that Augustus retreated from Caesar's notion of the Hellenistic state, embraced the old Roman tradition, and made way for a blood (blutmässig) reformation. The expression blutmässig was apparently better conceived in 1936.

69. H. F. Pelham, Essays in Roman History. Oxford 1911, p. 27.

70. CAH IX, p. 724.

71. R. Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford 1939, p. 54.

72. R. Syme, ‘Caesar, the Senate and Italy’, PBSR XIV (1938), p. 2.

73. When Syme spoke of non-political classes he meant tax farmers, wealthy merchants and great landowners who had no political ambitions and supported any regime that could guarantee them economic returns.

74. Cf., the outstanding small volume, unfortunately all too seldom cited, Colonial Elites, Oxford 1958, pp. 27, 52.

75. R. Syme, The Roman Revolution p. 346.

76. F. E. Adcock, CAH IX, p. 271, and also the important article by J. P. V. D. Balsdon, ‘The Ides of March’, Historia XII (1953), pp. 80-94. The most important review of Syme's work, long since recognized as ‘classic’, comes from A. Momigliano (JRS XXX (1940), p. 75). Momigliano applauded Syme's work as a masterpiece, but was critical of the one-sidedness of its prosopography, (‘prosopography is not history’), and regretted that ‘spiritual interests of people are considered much less than their marriages’. Numerous scholars have since associated themselves with Momigliano, including A. W. Sherwin-White (JRS LIX (1969), p. 287), whom Lintott praised ‘for considering ideas and actions of contestants rather than their matrimonial bulletins’. Momigliano also regretted that Syme had not attached enough importance to Roman law, and in another place he pointed out that it would have been desirable to enquire ‘… how the Romans knew and used law and constitutional practices as the tool for building an empire. The Romans did not rule the world by nepotism’ (Contributo alla storia degli Studi classici I, Rome 1955, p. 399). From another marginal comment it might be concluded that Momigliano was haunted by the question of whether Syme had in mind the rise of Fascism when he wrote the Roman Revolution, ‘A candid admission of the purpose of one's own study, a clear analysis of the implications of one's own bias helps to define the limits of one's own historical research’ (Contributo I, p. 374). In fact, it is not altogether easy to discover the Zeitgeist from Syme's text. It was easier in the case of Niebuhr. But one thing is clear: Syme learned more from Münzer than from Namier, and there is no reason for supposing that he had eighteenth-century England in mind when he wrote his Roman Revolution. He believed in the role of Dynamis and Tyche in history rather than in established trends that can be predicted, and in a period such as that before World War II, when political ideology was awash in a wave of slogans, he was more interested in the actors on the stage of history than in their warnings, ‘Bonum publicum simulantes pro sua quisque potentia certabant’.

77. The Spartan Agesilaus likewise most vigorously refused divine honours (Plut., Mor. 210 D). Thus he once enquired of the inhabitants of Thasus whether they were in a position to change a mortal into a god. When they assented, he suggested they first make themselves into gods, then he would believe that they could also deify him (Plut., Agesilaus 21, 5; Mor. 213 A).

78. W. Steidle, Sueton und die antike Biographie, Munich 1963, pp. 13 ff.

79. Cf., Syme, Roman Revolution, p. 54, ‘Cic. Phil. II, 110, however, is a difficult passage’.

80. W. W. Fowler, Roman Essays, Oxford 1920, p. 268.

81. J. Vogt, ‘Zum Herrscherkult bei Julius Caesar’, Studies presented to D. M. Robinson, vol. II, St Louis 1953, p. 1138.

82. V. Ehrenberg, ‘Caesar's Final Aims’, HSCP LXVIII (1969), p. 149 = Man, State and Diety 1974, 127.

83. K. Kraft, ‘Der goldene Kranz Caesars und der Kampf um die Entlarvung des Tyrannen’, Jahrbücher für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte IV (1952), p. 7. Cf., also the critical article of D. Felber, ‘Caesars Streben nach der Königswürde’, Untersuchungen zur römischen Geschichte (ed. F. Altheim), vol. I, Frankfurt/M 1961, pp. 211 ff.

84. F. Gundolf, Caesar im 19 Jahrhundert, Berlin 1926, p. 79.

85. L. Wickert, ‘Caesars Monarchie und der Prinzipat des Augustus’, NJAB IV (1941), pp. 12-23.

86. F. Vittinghoff, Römische Kolonisation und Bürgerrechtspolitik, Mainz 1951.

87. H. Opperman, Caesar—Wegbereiter Europas, Göttingen 1958, especially pp. 96-97; 106-7.

88. F. Taeger, Charisma, Stuttgart 1960, vol. II, pp. 50 ff., 65, 68, 70, 72.

89. R. Klein, Königtum und Königzeit bei Cicero (diss.), Erlangen 1962, especially pp. 57-59, 67.

90. E. Meyer, Caesars Monarchie, p. 401. Cf. F. Altheim, Römische Religionsgeschichte II, Baden-Baden 1953, p. 63.

91. B. E. Giovanetti, La religione di Cesare, Milan 1937.

92. M. Pohlenz, ‘Eine politische Tendenzschrift aus Caesars Zeit’, Hermes LIX (1924), p. 157. Pohlenz's view was not shared by all scholars. Some attributed the passage of Dionysius to the Augustan period (e.g. Premerstein), others to the time of Sulla (e.g. E. Gabba, ‘Studi su Dionigi da Alecarnasso’, Athenaeum XXXVIII (1960), pp. 175 ff.

93. J. Dobesch, Caesars Apotheose zu Lebzeiten und sein Ringen um den Königstitel, Vienna 1966, reviewed in JRS VII (1967), pp. 247-48 and E. Rawson, JRS LXV (1975), p. 148.

94. The review by J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Gnomon XXXIX (1967), pp. 150 ff. is important. See also K. W. Welwei, ‘Das Angebot des Diadems an Caesar und das Luperkalienfest’, Historia XVI (1967), p. 44.

95. Correspondance de Napoléon I, vol. 32, p. 86, cited by Alföldi in ‘Der neue Romulus’, MH VIII (1951), p. 208.

96. Ibid.

97. See the bibliography of A. Alföldi, Antiquitas, series 4, vol. III, 1966, XIII.

98. At the time of writing only vol. 2 of Das Zeugnis der Münzen, Bonn 1974 (Antiquitas, vol. XVII), was available to me.

99. MH VII (1950), pp. 1-13.

100. On the diadem as employed by the Persians and Alexander, see Hans-Werner Ritter, Diadem und Königsherrschaft, Munich 1965 (Vestigia 7).

101. Phoenix XXIV (1970), p. 166.

102. Gnom. XII (1975), p. 12.

103. RN XV, 1973, p. 126.

104. Phoenix XXIV (1970), p. 176.

105. E. Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1974, p. 544.

106. Alföldi, loc. cit. p. 105.

107. Staatsrecht II, p. 780.

108. S. Weinstock, Divus Julius, Oxford 1971, p. 200, n. 4. A. H. M. Jones, JRS XLI (1951), pp. 117, 119, contra, A. Alföldi, Vater des Vaterlandes, Darmstadt 1971.

109. E.g., R. Syme, ‘Imperator Caesar. A Study in Nomenclature’, Historia VII (1958), pp. 172-88. R. Combes, Imperator, Paris 1966. J. Deininger, ‘Von der Republik zur Monarchi’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (ed. Temporini), vol. I (1972), p. 982, with the conclusion that neither the coins nor the epigraphic evidence offers any clear proof that Imperator was more than a title to Caesar.

110. A. Alföldi, ‘Der machtverheissende Traum des Sulla’, Jahrb. d. bernischen Hist. Museums in Bern XLI-XLII (1961), p. 284.

111. Michael H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage, 2 vols, Cambridge 1974. To cite only a few examples: p. 83, n. 5: ‘The arrangement proposed by A. Alföldi, JNR 1954 may safely be ignored’. Or p. 89, n. 2: ‘The attempt of Alföldi to date this issue must be regarded as a failure’. Or, ‘… the unacceptable view of Alföldi’, p. 488, n. 1.

112. Ibid. p. 601, n. 3; p. 733, n. 2.

113. C. M. Kraay, ‘Caesar's Quattuorviri of 44 bc: The Arrangement of their Issue’, NC XIV, Ser. 6 (1954), p. 18; R. A. G. Carson, Gnomon XXVIII (1956), pp. 181-86 and Greece and Rome IV (1957), pp. 46-53. H. Volkmann, ‘Caesars letzte Pläne im Spiegel der Münzen’, Gymnasium LXIV (1957), p. 299.

114. D. Felber, ‘Caesars Streben nach der Königswürde’ in Untersuchungen zur römischen Geschichte (ed. F. Altheim), Frankfurt/M. 1961, vol. I, pp. 211-84.

115. A. H. M. Jones, ‘Numismatics and History’, Essays in Roman Coinage presented to H. Mattingly (ed. R. A. G. Carson and C. H. V. Sutherland), Oxford 1956, p. 32.

116. S. Weinstock, Divus Julius loc. cit., reviewed by A. Alföldi, Gnomon XII (1975), pp. 154-79; R. E. Palmer, Athenaeum LI (1973), p. 201, and J. A. North, JRS LXV (1975), p. 171.

117. Weinstock, loc. cit. p. 3; Alföldi, Gnomon, loc. cit. p. 158.

118. E.g. R. Syme, ‘Livy and Augustus’, HSCP LXIV (1959), 80, no. 85: ‘Dio's passage (LXIV, 4, 3) is a patent anachronism’.

119. Staatsrecht II, p. 756, n. 1. Adcock. CAHM IX, 721.

120. Gnomon XXXIX (1967), p. 155.

121. NC VI, Ser. 6 (1947), pp. 127 ff.

122. Gymnasium LXX (1963), pp. 312 ff. especially p. 333.

123. E. J. Bickerman, ‘Die römische Kaiserapotheose’, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft XXVII (1930), p. 1.

124. Id., ‘Consecratio, Culte des Souverains’, Fondation Hardt, Entretiens XIX, Geneva 1973, pp. 3-37, especially p. 7.

125. C. Habicht, Gottmenschtum und griechische Städte, Munich 1957 (Zetemata, no. 14) (cf. n. 121), pp. 41 ff. and most recently in ‘Consecratio’.

126. R. Cohen, La Grèce et l'Hellenisation du monde antique, Paris 1939, p. 614.

127. Cerfaux and Tondriau, loc. cit. p. 77.

128. M. Liberanome, ‘Alcune osservazioni su Cesare e Antonio’, RFIC XVI (1968), pp. 407 ff.

129. Felber, loc. cit. p. 226.

130. Cf. n. 106. and n. 111.

131. G. Haber, Untersuchungen zu Caesars Pontifikat, Tübingen 1971.

132. H. Gesche, Die Vergottung Caesars, Frankfurt/M. 1968.

133. A. Alföldi, Phoenix XXIV (1970), p. 169.

134. M. Cary, ‘The Municipal Legislation of Julius Caesar’, JRS XXVII (1937), p. 49.

135. Gnomon XIII (1937), p. 191.

136. W. Schmitthenner, ‘Das Attentat auf Caesar’, Gesch. i. Wiss. u. Unterr. XIII (1962), pp. 685 ff., especially p. 694.

137. R. E. Smith, ‘Conspiracy and the Conspirators’, Greece and Rome IV (1957), p. 62.

138. C. Meier, Entstehung des Begriffs ‘Demokratie’, vier Prolegomena zu einer historischen Theorie, Frankfurt/M. 1970, pp. 131-35.

139. J. H. Collins, Historia IV (1955), p. 445.

140. In his thesis, unfortunately unpublished, Propaganda, Ethics and Psychological Assumptions in Caesar's Writings (diss.), Frankfurt/M. 1952.

141. Collins assumed that Cicero would have happily seen Caesar dead (ad Att. XII, 4; XIII, 40). Other scholars do not take these passages seriously.

142. J. Béranger, ‘Tyrannus: Notes sur la notion de Tyrannie chez les Romains particulièrement à l'époque de César et de Cicéron’, REL XIII (1935), p. 85; ‘Cicéron précurseur politique’, Hermes LXXXVII (1959), p. 103. W. Allen, ‘Caesar's Regnum’, TAPA LXXXIV (1953), p. 227.

143. Z. Yavetz, Plebs and Princeps, Oxford 1969, p. 38.

144. For the evidence, ibid. p. 50.

145. Ibid. p. 101. Idem est quod datur sed interest quomodo detur.

146. Ibid. p. 53.

147. Ibid. p. 99.

148. Ibid. p. 50, n. 7.

149. Ibid. pp. 114-16.

150. G. Schulte-Holtey, Untersuchung zum Gallischen Widerstand gegen Caesar (diss.), Münster 1968. Others are inclined to stress the interests of Gallic merchants under Roman occupation, e.g. N. J. De Witt, ‘Toward Misunderstanding Caesar’, Studies in Honor of Ullman, St Louis 1960, p. 137; and C. Jullian, Vercingetorix, Paris, 1911, who deplores Caesar's conquest of Gaul as a conquest that arrested the development of Celtic civilization:

151. This sceptical view has deep roots. The question had already been posed by Livy: whether it would have been better for the state for Caesar to be born or for him not to have been born (‘in incerto esse utrum illum magis nasci an non nasci rei publicae profuerit’, Sen. Nat. Quaest. 5, 18, 4). Seneca had no clear answer to this question.

152. D. Thompson, The Aims of History, London 1969.

Abbreviations

Abbot-Johnson: F. F. Abbot - A. Ch. Johnson, Municipal Administration in the Roman Empire, Princeton 1926.

A. N. R. W.: Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (Hrsg. H. Temporini), Berlin-New York 1972.

A. R. S. P.: Annali della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

C. A. H.: Cambridge Ancient History

C. I. L.: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

E. S. A. R.: T. Frank (ed.), An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, Paterson, N. J. 1959.

F. A. S.: Frankfurter althistorische Studien

F. G. H.: F. Jacoby (Hrsg.), Fragmente der griechischen Historiker

FIRA (Riccobono): S. Riccobono, Fontes Iuris Romani Antejustiniani

G. W. U.: Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht

I. G. R. R.: Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes

I. L. S.: Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae

M. G. W. J.: Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums

M. R. R.: T. R. S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, New York 1951.

N. J. A. B.: Neue Jahrbücher für Antike und deutsche Bildung.

R. E.: Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft

R. G.: Th. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte.

Rotondi: G. Rotondi, Leges Publicae Populi Romani.

R. R. (Syme): Sir Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford 1939.

R. R. (Varro): M. Terentius Varro, de re rustica.

S. I. G.: W. Dittenberger (Hrsg.), Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum.

WdF: Wege der Forschung, (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt).

All other abbreviations (names of series, periodicals etc.) correspond to the ones used in l'Année Philolgique.