CONSTRUCTING CAESAR: JULIUS CAESAR’S CAESAR AND THE CREATION OF THE MYTH OF CAESAR IN HISTORY AND SPACE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Bradley G. Potter, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Erik Gunderson, Adviser Professor Fritz Graf ______________________ Professor Ellen O’Gorman Advisor Department of Greek & Latin ABSTRACT Authors since antiquity have constructed the persona of Caesar to satisfy their views of Julius Caesar and his role in Roman history. I contend that Julius Caesar was the first to construct Caesar, and he did so through his commentaries, written in the third person to distance himself from the protagonist of his work, and through his building projects at Rome. Both the war commentaries and the building projects are performative in that they perform “Caesar,” for example the dramatically staged speeches in Bellum Gallicum 7 or the performance platform in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum Iulium. Through the performing of Caesar, the texts construct Caesar. My reading aims to distinguish Julius Caesar as author from Caesar the protagonist and persona the texts work to construct. The narrative of Roman camps under siege in Bellum Gallicum 5 constructs Caesar as savior while pointing to problems of Republican oligarchic government, offering Caesar as the solution. Bellum Civile 1 then presents the savior Caesar to the Roman people as the alternative to the very oligarchy that threatens the libertas of the people. The text dramatizes the aristocratic game that Julius Caesar engaged in and won. Caesar simultaneously champions his own cause and that of the people because Julius Caesar has already conflated the private dignitas of Caesar with the public dignitas of all Romans. Caesar’s enemies threaten the dignity of both Caesar and the Roman people. Thus Caesar’s inimici become Rome’s. ii In both commentaries, Julius Caesar devotes attention to engineering projects. Two of these engineering projects, the bridge over the Rhine in Bellum Gallicum 4 and the siege tower at Massilia in Bellum Civile 2, receive a great deal of attention in the texts. Both descriptions contribute to Caesar’s power and his claim for power, constructing the potestas Caesaris. The engineering projects within the texts serve a similar purpose to the building projects at Rome. Social space is a social product, created by a society while producing and reproducing the relations of production for the society. Julius Caesar’s building projects, as part of the Late Republican social framework, served this process, while producing a new framework that allowed for the shift from oligarchic to autocratic rule. Julius Caesar’s building projects were numerous, and reached a broader audience at all levels of society. These projects presaged the Augustan propaganda of later decades because they sought to reconstruct the city for the greater glory of Julius Caesar. The Forum Iulium, Julius Caesar’s most effective use of civic space, conflated public and private as it celebrated the achievements of one individual as well as Rome. Readers of Julius Caesar’s commentaries tend to conflate Caesar the protagonist with Caesar the author. Yet, by doing so, we miss an important element of the Caesarian texts, and consider too narrowly their veracity as reports. Only by understanding the fiction of Julius Caesar’s literary output can we understand how Julius Caesar constructed his persona and how that persona affected his audience, both at Rome in the 40s BCE, and today. iii For E. H. H. and in memory of E. H. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my advisor, Erik Gunderson, for his generous help and support in writing this dissertation. I would also like to thank Ellen O’Gorman who has always been willing to read my work and to share her insights and suggestions. I also thank Fritz Graf for taking the time to be a reader of this dissertation. In addition, I thank Dennis Duncan for being so kind as to proofread my final draft. However, any errors that do remain are my own doing. v VITA EDUCATION 1999-2004 Doctoral program, The Ohio State University 2002 American Academy in Rome Summer Classical Program 1999 M.A. Classics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska 1995 M.A. Liberal Arts, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico 1989 M.A. English, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba 1985 B.A. English, Doane College, Crete, Nebraska FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Classics vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract . i Dedication . ii Acknowledgments . iii Vita . iv Chapters: 1. Introduction. 1 2. Performing Caesar . 15 3. Constructing Caesar as Savior . .43 4. Constructing Potestas Caesaris . .75 5. The Constructing Caesar . .112 6. Conclusion . .141 Bibliography . 145 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Constructing Caesar is an activity authors have engaged in from antiquity. Julius Caesar was first to offer Caesar to the Roman public.1 The persona that he created served as protagonist of his commentaries and continued to influence his public image as he struggled in and eventually won the contest for power. However, it is a general tendency among readers of Julius Caesar’s commentaries to conflate Caesar the protagonist with Caesar the author. Such a reading of the texts overlooks the fact that ‘Caesar’ is a literary construct of its author. We cannot directly apprehend Julius Caesar by reading the commentaries because he is always already hidden by ‘Caesar.’ This conflation of author and protagonist has shaped the scholarship of Julius Caesar; for example, many scholars question Julius Caesar’s veracity. Michel Rambaud and those who have followed him regard Julius Caesar as having distorted history to disguise his unlawful actions and to present himself as a grand homme.2 Since historians have made up the bulk of the scholars who study Caesar, the literature has been largely concerned with separating fact from fiction. Yet Julius Caesar’s fiction is every bit as important to 1 In the discussion that follows, I make a distinction between Julius Caesar, the historical figure and author of the commentaries, and Caesar, the persona constructed by Julius Caesar for his public image. 2 Rambaud 363-364. 1 understand as the facts his accounts preserve. Until we understand how Julius Caesar constructed the persona of ‘Caesar’ and the effect that construct had on his audience, we are doomed to continue to misread him.3 Julius Caesar was an artist working in a variety of media. He was a bold innovator who reworked and revolutionized the traditions. To begin with, there is his career itself. Weinstock points out that every one of his honors had a precedent,4 yet each honor was unlike any before awarded. Julius Caesar also redefined the genre of the commentarius, preserving not a general’s log or official report to the senate, but a historical account written in the manner of ancient historiography; however, the texts do not advance a moral agenda as the works of ancient historians so often do. And finally, his efforts in civic building were not unusual in the Late Republican context, yet he worked on a grandiose scale that outdid all of his fellow aristocrats in the agonistic game of self- promotion. All of these activities contributed to the construction of the persona ‘Caesar.’ Authors since antiquity have engaged in the activity of constructing ‘Caesar’ in their own fashion. Both Suetonius and Plutarch construct him as an ambitious man cut down by his desire for greatness. As we will see, later authors who discussed his building projects put him in the company of Xerxes and Nero, emphasizing Caesar the tyrant. Modern authors, too, have engaged in constructing ‘Caesar.’ For example, Mommsen casts Caesar as the great Democrat working on behalf of the people. Jakob Burkhardt, while not agreeing entirely with Mommsen, did assert that in Julius Caesar “everything great came together” (Meier 15). Thus, Mommsen’s position held throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, but the post World War II view of him tended to see 3 Because “Caesar” is not confined to the commentaries, it can be read as a product of the various projects that Julius Caesar engaged in, that is, in the building projects at Rome, especially the Forum Iulium. 4 passim, see especially 163-174. 2 sinister motives in everything he reported. Indeed, in post-Hitler Europe, the notion of “the great man” lost much currency: much that was once ascribed to Caesar has become highly questionable. The threat of the Germani, for instance, which Mommsen credited him with removing, did not exist. Above all, Caesar’s statesmanly abilities--or rather potentialities--have been increasingly called into question. Whatever great feats of organization he performed as ruler, it is uncertain, if not improbable, that he knew a way out of the crisis that faced the Roman republic” (Meier 18). Zwi Yavetz provides a useful summary of the scholarship from Mommsen to the 1970s, classifying the various approaches into five different schools. Thus he points to the varied response to Caesar from modern scholars. What Yavetz does not recognize is that this tendency to recreate Caesar as each scholar perceives him--so often guided by his or her own cultural and political milieu--derives from Julius Caesar’s presentation of Caesar in legendary terms. The texts the author created drive readers to “reconstruct” Caesar, that is, to “master the master.” In many ways, these authors compete all over again with Julius Caesar in specifically Republican terms, working to establish their own virtus and to advance their gloria through their reconstruction of Julius Caesar’s construction.