Who was after julius caesar8/25/2023 ![]() ‘The murder of Caesar marked the beginning of a long and protracted civil war’ The law of unintended consequences would never be better proved. The man who felt the clearest impact of the assassination did not give up power till AD 14, and then only at his peaceful death and a handover to his own adopted son. Rome’s first emperor, who preferred to style himself Rome’s First Citizen, took all Caesar’s centralised power that the assassins had feared, and more. ![]() There was pretence by the newly named Augustus that his rise to be more powerful than any mere dictator was a peaceful continuation of the best old ways – a ploy followed by Party General Secretaries far into the future. Caesar’s son initiated a revolutionary terror of populists against those alleged to be reactionaries. There was a terror, but not of the kind feared on the afternoon of the Ides of March. The fourth impact combined the first three. Caesar’s people had much less interest in these concepts than the intellectual aristocrats did. Their attempt to fight under the banner of ‘Liberty’ and ‘Death to Tyrants’ ended in defeat. The power of a popular name to motivate soldiers and the poor left his killers amazed. Caesar’s teenage adopted son took over where his father had left off. The third impact was the realisation of a new reality. They preferred to take command of the top jobs in the provinces that Caesar had already promised them. In the days after the wielding of the daggers it suited both Caesar’s killers and his loyal lieutenants to pretend that the dictatorship had been a blip, an aberration, and that, with Caesar gone, normal life could resume. For as long as history might repeat itself, it was safer to take cover. Maybe the plotters were merely aristocrat reactionaries who wanted back what Caesar had taken away? But lesser reactionaries in recent history had murdered thousands of their enemies. Few in Rome knew how many killers there were, or who their next target might be. The assassination was a public act by Roman grandees against one of their own class who had become a populist dictator. Peter Stothard Author of The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) and Crassus: The First Tycoon (Yale University Press, 2022)įirst, there was fear of the new. ‘The assassination was a public act by Roman grandees against one of their own class’ Without Octavian, Caesar’s death may have been just one in an ongoing series of tyrannicides and wars, a comma in Roman history. He was able to learn from his father’s mistakes and carve out the Principate over the course of decades instead of years. The Ides of March is still remembered because of Octavian, because the violence allowed him to start two civil wars on the pretext of avenging his father, to ‘restore liberty to the Republic’ through better planned violence. Octavian’s early career raising private armies, turning Caesar into a divinity and creating his own political career outside of official structures was guided entirely by the manner of Caesar’s death. He claimed to want vengeance against his ‘father’s’ murderers and he upended every due process to pursue this claim. While the adults in the city were attempting to come to a very uneasy truce with Antony as consul and the assassins in safe positions abroad, Octavian refused to play along. Over the months that followed, however, Octavian used the manner of Caesar’s death as an unimpeachable foundation on which he could build power, influence and an army. No assassin considered the 18-year-old to be a political or military threat, and indeed he was treated as a nuisance and a joke by both Mark Antony and Cicero when he appeared in Rome two months after 15 March 44 BC to take up his place as Caesar’s heir. The Ides of March left an immediate impact on the Roman historical landscape not just because of Caesar’s unique position as Perpetual Dictator, but because it opened the door for his astonishing grand-nephew Octavian (who later renamed himself Augustus) to reshape the entire political world and to look reasonable while doing it.Ĭaesar adopted Octavian as his son in his will, written just six months before he died. Julius Caesar was neither the first nor the last leader to be assassinated in Roman history, but his is the only death that still reverberates. Before it was the Republic and after it came the Principate, under the rule of a single emperor. The Ides of March was a bottleneck in Roman history. ‘Caesar’s is the only death that still reverberates’Įmma Southon, Author of A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum ( Oneworld, 2021) and A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women (published in September 2023) Wiki Commons/Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome. ‘The Death of Caesar’ (detail), by Vincenzo Camuccini, c.1804.
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