The Dice — Caesar III: The Ides of March
Meanwhile in Rome, the bond that held the world together snaps. In 54 BC Julia dies, Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife, in childbirth in her husband’s house. The child outlives her by only a few days. Plutarch records that everyone understood what this meant: she alone had kept the peace between the two men. The people buried her on the Campus Martius, over the objection of the tribunes.
In 53 BC Crassus, the third of the triumvirate, is killed in an expedition against the Parthians. Of the monster’s three heads two remain, and neither likes to share a table. Rome is drowning in lawlessness. Candidates set up tables of money and openly buy votes. Plutarch writes that in the Forum men fight with bows, swords and slings, and the Rostra are stained with blood. Sensible men say ever more loudly that only a single ruler can cure this. All eyes turn to Pompey, and in 52 BC the Senate makes him sole consul.
Caesar wants one thing: to return from Gaul and take up a second consulship at once, so as not to stand trial as a private man. His opponents demand that he give up his province early.
Caesar answers with an offer that sounds honest. Let both lay down their arms, he and Pompey, and stand as private citizens. Whoever refuses accuses one of aiming at tyranny and makes the other a tyrant. The tribune Curio reads this to the people, and they shower him with flowers like a victorious athlete.
In the Senate, almost everyone votes for disarming both commanders. Then the consul Lentulus cries out that against a bandit one needs weapons, not a vote, and the session falls apart. Antony and Curio, tribunes friendly to Caesar, are driven out of the Senate. They flee Rome in slaves’ clothing, on hired carts. Caesar will show this picture to the soldiers: this is how they treat men in office. One of his centurions, hearing outside the Senate that Caesar will not get an extension of his command, slaps the hilt of his sword and says: this will give it to him.
Why did Caesar not yield? Suetonius gathers three guesses. According to the first, Pompey claimed that Caesar needed chaos because he lacked the money for his plans. According to the second, Caesar feared a trial, because Cato had announced that he would prosecute him as soon as he disbanded his army. According to the third, he simply had loved power since his youth. Suetonius considers the middle one the most probable.
At Ravenna, right at the border of his province, Caesar waits for news. When word arrives that the tribunes’ veto has been broken and they themselves have fled the city, he acts quietly and fast. A few centurions armed only with swords are to seize the first town of Italy, Ariminum. Caesar sets out after them in the evening.
What exactly did he say at the river? It depends on whom you ask. In Plutarch, he speaks the Greek phrase “Let the die be cast,” the words people used to end their hesitation before a gamble. In Suetonius, it is the Latin “iacta alea est,” along with a marvelous scene: a huge, handsome man suddenly appears, playing a pipe, snatches a trumpet from a soldier and, blowing it, walks into the water. In Appian, Caesar stands by the river and says: not to cross it is a disaster for me, to cross it is a disaster for all mankind. The scholar T. P. Wiseman reads Suetonius’s scene as a piece of theater, not reportage. One thing is certain: he crossed.
It is January 49 BC. The Rubicon is a small stream. For Romans, though, it is a boundary more sacred than a wall. Caesar, until now a governor with the right to an army, is from this moment an enemy of the state. At dawn Ariminum is his. Italy learns of it from refugees who, as Appian writes, know nothing for certain, and so imagine that Caesar is approaching with a huge army. He has five thousand men.