Tears in Gades — Caesar II: Rome on Credit
Caesar begins to speak, and his subject is his aunt. It is 69 BC, he is about thirty-one and has recently become quaestor, the most junior of Rome’s magistrates. It is customary to deliver a eulogy for the family’s dead, and Julia, his father’s sister, was the widow of Marius. It looks like an ordinary tribute. Caesar will turn it into something else entirely.
It sounds like a piece of family lore, but it is a declaration of faith. After Sulla’s victory, Marius and his friends were declared public enemies, so for thirteen years no one dared to show their likenesses in a procession. According to Plutarch, Caesar was the first to do it in public. In time, this moment will prove to be his first proof that the people are behind him.
Not everyone likes it. Some onlookers cry out that it is an outrage, but the crowd answers with shouts and applause. Plutarch writes that people admired Caesar for bringing Marius’s honors back from Hades to the city after so many years.
What is certain in this scene? Both authors, Plutarch and Suetonius, know of the speech over Julia, but only Plutarch writes about the likenesses of Marius. We know from Roman custom that wax masks of the ancestors were carried at funerals. The actors in masks and the silence that falls when the crowd recognizes a face are our additions: this is a reconstructed scene, not a record.
What had he been doing in the preceding years? We know little, and none of it brings fame. Suetonius notes that as a military tribune, the first office elected by the people, he supported the restoration of the power of the tribunes of the plebs, which Sulla had curtailed, and pushed through a law recalling from exile his brother-in-law, Lucius Cinna, who had followed the rebel Lepidus. No command, no office to boast of. If anyone in Rome pays attention to this man, it is because he likes to provoke, not because he is dangerous.
Within a short time Caesar buries two women. Cornelia, his first wife and the mother of his daughter Julia, also dies. He delivers a eulogy for her too from the Rostra, though no one before him had given such a speech for a young woman. Plutarch adds that this won him goodwill as well: the people saw him as a man of feeling. A Rome that watches his every word is best left for a while. The lot drawn for quaestors sends him to Further Spain.
In Spain, Caesar tours the cities of the province and holds court on the praetor’s behalf. In Gades, today’s Cádiz, he enters the temple of Hercules. A statue of Alexander the Great stands there. Suetonius writes that Caesar sighed, as if losing patience with his own inactivity: at his age Alexander had already conquered the world, and he had not yet done anything worth remembering. He promptly asks to be relieved of his post, so that he can look for greater opportunities in Rome.
Caesar’s superior in Spain is the praetor Antistius Vetus. Caesar will remember him with gratitude: when he himself becomes praetor, he will choose Vetus’s son as his quaestor, as Plutarch attests. Further Spain is distant and rich in silver, and a quaestor has his hands full. And yet what we remember most is the moment when Caesar stands and looks up.
Plutarch tells it differently. In his account Caesar weeps over a book about Alexander, in Spain, but several years later, when he governs the province as praetor. His friends ask why he is weeping. He answers: at my age Alexander was already king of so many nations, and I have not yet achieved anything great.
Suetonius adds a dream from the following night. Caesar dreams that he forces himself on his own mother. He wakes in terror, but the soothsayers reassure him: the mother is the earth, parent of all men, so the dream foretells dominion over the world. Plutarch moves the same dream to the night before the crossing of the Rubicon. Today we tend to read it as a story about an enormous hunger for power, and about how ancient biographers liked to put dreams at the key moments.
After returning to Rome, Caesar marries a second time. His bride is Pompeia, daughter of Quintus Pompeius and granddaughter of Sulla. The man who defied the dictator and hid from his men marries the dictator’s granddaughter. Why, the sources do not say. They do tell us how much this marriage will cost him.