CAESAR AT THE RUBICON: A PLAY ABOUT POLITICS by Theodore H. White. 174 pages. Afheneum. $5.

The Julius Caesar usually met with in histories and in Shakespeare's theater is up to his laurels in politics; but somehow one rarely thinks of him as a politician. His grubby preoccupation with the buying and selling of votes, the maneuvers of rival factions--these tend to be obscured by poetry and rhetoric. Theodore White has chosen to treat Caesar mostly as a practitioner--and ultimately a victim--of politics. White has always been fascinated "by the way men use other men to reach their goals." In magazine pieces and in two books about The Making of the President, he has pursued this preoccupation with a high degree of judgment and craftsmanship. As long ago as 1963, he decided to follow the journalistic track into the past and, for a change, to use the drama as his mode.

Perhaps White would have been better advised to tell his political tale as a novel, for his play has little of true theatrical quality. Beyond that, Caesar at the Rubicon is faultless: it has White's usual lucidity of language, and his analysis of Caesar's political dilemma is intelligent and plausible.

The Beginning of Doom. Caesar, at 52, is on the Rubicon, with nine years of conquest behind him; Gaul and its three parts, the German barbarians, the Britons, have all been soundly, brilliantly beaten. Now his spies tell him that the Senators in Rome want to get rid of him as soon as the victory parade is over. Caesar is a visionary; they know it and fear him for it. He wants power to establish order, to set up a world republic; the corrupt bosses want to split the spoils he has won so dearly. Question: Should he return to Rome and retire to polish his trophies, or should he move in as dictator to reform the state?

He decides, of course, to take the second alternative. He is imperious and gay, kindly and cruel--and he knows his enemy. Yet his special mixture of idealism and cynicism makes a poor weapon against the greed, ignorance and envy of his political foes. His subjects look upon him as a god, and soon, the reformer begins to see himself that way too. It is the beginning of his doom.

A Matter of Trust. In an epilogue, the author specifically attempts to establish Caesar's contemporaneity. "He wrestled with the problems of the cities," writes White. "He cut the relief rolls from 320,000 to 150,000 citizens. . . He tackled credit and restored some commercial stability to the system ravaged by his own wars; put through tax reforms; wrestled with the problems of labor and wages; and began to examine what we today call the problems of urban environment. . . He tried to reorganize the crowded city traffic that choked the streets of Rome, and, of course, like all men dealing with urban traffic ever since, failed."

Yet his tragedy, as White correctly points out, was that with all his love of liberty and order, he could not trust himself to trust the people, and so attempted to twist the law into the vehicle for his ambition. This is the lesson that Journalist White appears to offer today's rulers. "When men are treated as God, they begin to feel they are God," says White. Absolute power, he suggests, does not merely corrupt; it invites paranoia. The real virtue of this crisp exercise is that it is put in terms that a historian can respect and even a county politician can understand.

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