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Julius Caesar and His Public Image

1984; Oxford University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1856135

1937-5239

Henry C. Boren, Zwi Yavetz,

Classical Antiquity Studies

In 194$ I attended a course on the Late Roman Republic at thenHebrew University of Jerusalem. My teacher, VictornTcherikover, was a graduate of the University of Berlin, a pupilnof Eduard Meyer and Ulrich Wilcken. When he spoke aboutnCaesar's aims, his words left scarcely any room for doubt: in hisnopinion, Caesar was endeavouring to found an absolutenmonarchy based on divine kingship. He was aware that SirnRonald Syme's book, The Roman Revolution, had beennpublished in 1939, but regretted that a copy was unobtainablenbecause of the war.In 1955, while participating in Syme's seminars at Oxford, Inrealized that none of my English tutors shared Meyer's views.nAt that time, I was not particularly interested in Caesar, and innmy early days as a university teacher I recommended that mynstudents read Matthias Gelzer's carefully written book, but didnnot take sides in this particular argument. I was more interestednin the social and economic problems of ancient Rome than innCaesar's ambitions. But, in the course of time, it provednimpossible to avoid fundamental issues when teaching ancientnhistory. In 1970 I gave a seminar on Caesar at Queen's Collegenin New York, and in 1973 I returned to the subject at thenUniversity of Tel-Aviv. However, it was not until I readnHermann Strasburger's fascinating book, Caesar im Urteil dernZeitgenossen, that I felt compelled to study the sources from Anto Z. I present my conclusions to the reader but a few words ofnexplanation must be added.I am not of the school that considers it unnecessary tonimmerse oneself in the modem literature on the subject, andnwhich holds that we should be exclusively concerned withnprimary sources. To disregard the modem literature o f thennineteenth and twentieth centuries is to make the study ofnancient history intellectually unprofitable, whereas it isnprecisely the interplay of modem controversies that helps onento read the same source from new and fresh points of view.nUnfortunately, the number of students of the subject who readnGerman is continually dwindling in Great Britain and thenUnited States as well as in Israel. The problem of Caesar's finalnaims cannot be fully understood without an understanding ofnthe German scholarly literature. That is why a historiographicalnsurvey forms the first chapter of this book.I do not want to go into the question of divine kingship inndetail once again; this subject has been explored and treated outnof all proportion to its real significance. In my opinion, no onencan make a substantial contribution to the present state of thenargument. Everyone can form his own judgment on the basisnof material published in the comprehensive works of Alfoldi,nWeinstock, Dobesch, Gesche and Rawson. But the questionnarises: is it possible to understand the Ides of March withoutnproviding a definitive answer to the problem of divine kingship:nI have attempted to do so by means of a thorough analysisnof the sources concerned with Caesar's legislation, and haventaken pains, in the last chapter, to make a general judgmentnof Caesar's public image, pointing out that this image mightnhave been of greater political importance than Caesar'sntrue character, which bewildered not only modem scholarsnbut also Caesar's contemporaries: Caecina once expressednhis doubts and said that he was far from knowing Caesarn(' . . . totum enim Caesarem non novi' , Cic., ad fam. VI, 7, 4).For practical reasons I have avoided lengthy Greek and Latinnquotations, and made use of them only in the appendix, whichnconstitutes the first part of an article published in HarvardnStudies in Classical Philology in 1974. n n n