Biggest Roman of Them All

JULIUS CAESAR (205 pp.)--Alfred Duggan--Knopf ($2.50).

Author Duggan has come to unbury Caesar, not to praise or blame him. It takes some digging. Shakespeare casually sketched in the great Roman in his tragedy and pivoted his play around the character of the tormented liberal, Brutus.

Casting Shakespeare in modern dress, Orson Welles sleight-of-handed Caesar the role of a fascist. Hollywood's Joe Mankiewicz saw his Caesar as a kind of tired, pompous stockbroker. Shaw's hero in Caesar and Cleopatra is a worldly-wise but disenchanted superman whom power has made not mad, but sad. Front-rank Historical Novelist Duggan (The Little Emperors) throws dirt on these literary ghosts by spading straight for the facts and unearthing many a fascinating shard from ancient Roman political life.

Nailing Up Heads. Like most of the Roman ruling class, Caius Julius Caesar was a somebody at birth. He liked to trace the family tree right to Rome's legendary founder Romulus, and even claimed kinship with Mars and Venus.

When he was born in 100 B.C., his uncle-by-marriage Marius was in his sixth consulship, a personal reign as unprecedented in Roman history as F.D.R.'s four terms were in U.S. history. The two major parties, the Populars and the Optimates, and factions within them, had already begun a bloody jockeying for power that sometimes clogged Roman sewers with corpses.

The Populars were a mass party of planners and share-the-wealthers, founded a generation before by the Gracchi. The Optimates were a conservative elite of class-conscious constitutionalists. Marius was a leader of the Populars, and in 88 B.C. the Optimates, under the generalship of Sulla, ran him out of town and nailed the heads of his leading followers up in the Forum. Later Sulla was to spare young Julius, but warned, "One day this man may destroy the cause that you and I uphold. For this Caesar is worth six of Marius." Caesar went off to soldier in Asia, at 18, and won both honor and disgrace. For saving the life of a fellow soldier in combat, he was decorated with the cherished Civic Crown. Flawless in courage, he also showed a streak of sordid opportunism.

Bargaining for the much-needed fleet of King Nicomedes of Bithynia, Caesar was faced with one condition; the King would lend his fleet "if the handsome young Roman noble would sleep with him." Although he was always known as an enthusiastic ladies' man, Caesar agreed, and felt he had done his country a patriotic turn.

He failed to see that he had outraged all highborn Romans, who did not necessarily disapprove of homosexuality, but felt that Caesar had prostituted himself.

Three's a Crowd. During the next 20 years, Caesar climbed nimbly up the Roman ladder of state offices--quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul. He became a proper pol. He curried favor with Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and married off his daughter to Pompey, the most powerful.

By 59 B.C., the famed Triumvirate, or rule of three, had begun, and at first Caesar did not find three a crowd. Caesar was 39 before he had an active troop command, 41 when he began his conquest of Gaul; yet he proved a legendary general.

As Author Duggan describes it, his tactical genius was speed and surprise, his psychological genius was knowing the breaking point of his own men. In a tight spot, he could pick up a broadsword and lead a charge with the doughtiest of his centurions. He never killed for fun, but he killed wholesale. Many Romans were shocked when his legions slaughtered 430,000 Germanic tribesmen in one day, when their envoys were actually in Caesar's camp seeking peace. Five years later, the Senate, pushed by Pompey, ordered Caesar to lay down his command; instead, Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome.

Heritage v. Histrionics. In 65 days he was master of all Italy. As his troops swaggered into Rome, they sang: "Home we bring the bald adulterer. Romans, lock your wives away." A cowed Senate voted him dictator-for-life. Caesar was supreme and lorded it over his social peers, showing what Author Duggan considers his "one weakness, a contempt for the self-respect of his fellow men." "Why don't you make me restore the old constitution?" he taunted a venerable Senator who failed to rise in his presence. For such taunts he paid at the base of Pompey's statue.

The great merit of Duggan's Caesar is that he is not a tailor's dummy draped in a thesis. Professional historians from Tacitus to Mommsen have cloaked Caesar in dissertations about one-man power, the Roman constitution, and the pros and cons of emperors and empires. On the other hand, Duggan feels no need to give Caesar a coating of grease paint so he can strut the stage. Author Duggan has grasped the elusive obvious, that great men are measured by heritage, not histrionics. As Duggan sees it, Caesar's enduring heritage was divided into three parts: he 1) set the boundaries of Italy just about where they are today, 2) was responsible for the Julian calendar of 365 days, 3) brought France into the 'community of nations and fixed the civilization of the Mediterranean world into the mold which still contains it. The dagger-wielding son of his onetime mistress to whom he gasped "Et tu, Brute" may have been the noblest, but Caius Julius Caesar was certainly the biggest Roman of them all.

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