The Fifteen-Month Year — Caesar III: The Ides of March
From Alexandria Caesar marches east, where Pharnaces is crushing Roman forces. He arrives, wins, and writes three words to a friend in Rome.
There is still the war against those who fled from Pharsalus. In Africa, Scipio and Cato gather their forces with King Juba. Caesar wins at Thapsus in 46. Cato would rather die than accept mercy from Caesar. Caesar says: I begrudge you this death, for you begrudged me the chance to save you.
The last war, in Spain at Munda in 45, is the most dangerous for him. His own army wavers. Caesar runs along the ranks and asks them point-blank whether they are not ashamed to hand him over to boys, meaning Pompey’s sons. He wins with difficulty. Afterward he tells his friends that he had often fought for victory, but today for the first time for his life.
In 46 BC Rome watches four triumphs in one month: over Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and Africa. During the Gallic triumph the axle of Caesar’s chariot breaks, and in the evening he rides up to the Capitol by the light of lamps carried by forty elephants. Captives walk behind the chariot. Dio writes that the Romans were moved by the sight of Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s sister, led in chains. She was released. Vercingetorix, who six years earlier had sat at Caesar’s feet, was executed. What the Romans dislike most is the triumph after Munda: this time Caesar is celebrating the destruction of the sons of the most powerful of Romans.
And now something that hangs in your own kitchen: the calendar. The old Roman year is lunar and has to be patched constantly. This is done by priests, who add months and days as they please. Plutarch writes that only they knew the proper date and would suddenly, to everyone’s astonishment, announce an extra month. The result, which Suetonius mentions: the harvest festivals do not fall in summer, nor the vintage festivals in autumn.
Caesar consults the best philosophers and mathematicians. According to Dio, he takes his model from Alexandria, where the year is counted by the Sun. He fixes the year at 365 days and adds one day every fourth year. To make everything fit from January 1, he inserts two extra months between November and December. The year 46 therefore lasts fifteen months, counting the old intercalary month.
Cicero mocks it: when someone remarked that the Lyre would rise tomorrow, he replied: yes, by decree. Such jokes are the price of a power that regulates even the sky by decree. The month of his birth will later be given his name. It is our July. And the calendar, with a single 16th-century correction, hangs on every one of our walls today.
The calendar is only the beginning. Caesar reduces debts by about a quarter. Doctors and teachers in Rome receive citizenship. Eighty thousand citizens leave for colonies overseas, including a rebuilt Carthage and Corinth.
Most astonishing of all, however, is his mildness. Brutus and Cassius, who fought on Pompey’s side, become praetors. Caesar has Pompey’s statues, pulled down by the crowd, set up again. Cicero says that by setting them up Caesar made his own secure. Rome votes him a Temple of Clemency.
His friends ask him to keep a bodyguard. Caesar refuses: better to die once than to be always expecting death. He even dismisses the Spanish soldiers who had guarded him until then.
This is what a man at the summit looks like. Who will bring him down? According to Plutarch, it was flatterers who harmed him most. Senators outbid one another in honors for Caesar, until they become unbearable even to moderate citizens. Plutarch adds that Caesar’s enemies helped the flatterers along, so as to have as many pretexts as possible.