The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

His first steps in Rome concerned the will of Cæsar. Although his family, and notably his stepfather, strongly dissuaded him, he declared fearlessly, with a premature confidence in his determination that is striking, that his intention was to bid for Cæsar’s inheritance, and this in the presence of Caius Antonius who had taken over the affairs of a town prætor since the flight of Brutus; shortly after this, in about the middle of May, he was presented to the people as Cæsar by the people’s tribune, Lucius Antonius, a brother of Caius. The young Cæsar hereby pledged himself to the Roman people to exclude his adoptive father’s legates, nor could he hope that Mark Antony would be prepared to deliver up to him that adoptive father’s treasure.

Mark Antony indeed after his return did everything in his power to load young Cæsar’s position with difficulty. His conduct to the son of his friend was loveless it is true, yet we can hardly deny that it is explicable. Two things there were especially which separated their interests: Antony would not and could not pay back Cæsar’s treasure to the legitimate heir—equally impossible was it for him to divide the conduct of his party with a boy of nineteen. At the very first personal encounter between the two in the gardens of Pompey, which were then occupied by Antony, the incompatibility of aims which separated them came clearly to light, and the attempts of friends common to them both to bring the two rivals closer to each other could not avail to avert an open breach.

Rightly did Antony oppose the illegal bid of his rival for the tribunate of the people, but nothing but petty spite was the source of his refusal to allow the confirmation by the curiæ of the perfectly valid adoption by Cæsar. Moreover, the young Cæsar, in order to curry favour with the people, had declared his readiness to fulfil a vow of the dictator and to grant games in honour of the victory of Cæsar. Caius Matius and other friends of the dictator gave him every support at these games, from the 20th to the 30th of July; but Mark Antony, who had no power to prohibit games, succeeded in preventing a golden chair with a coronal from being publicly set up in honour of Julius Cæsar. To the friend of Cæsar this Cæsar worship appeared at once of doubtful taste, a worship which his youthful rival sought to organise with all the outward show of an agitator; and before the decisive sentence of the consul the private man had at last to yield. But the later Augustus tells with peculiar satisfaction in his memoirs that, suddenly, in the course of the games, a mighty comet with a long tail was seen, and that it was greeted by the multitude as the star of Cæsar. The star of the Julii was again in the ascendant; and the son who had reared a brazen statue, surmounted with a star of gold, to his father in the temple of Venus, the mother of his stock, secretly hoped to attract the rays from this auspicious talisman upon his own future. A comet always stirs up the imagination of the people mightily, it signifies war; so a contemporary poet mourns: Comets full of foreboding never shone so frequent. This time the people were right; the figure of Nemesis for the murder of Cæsar stood in the doorway.

The nearer things came to a crisis the blacker grew Cæsar’s situation. Antony had contemptuously rejected a confederacy with him; an apparent reconciliation on the Capitol had no enduring consequences. By the outbreak of a civil war, in which a Cæsar could not (even if he would) remain neutral, the young man could only rank himself as a bond fellow of the senate, of the very men who had murdered Cæsar. The thought was so intolerable to him that he did not shrink from an attempt to free himself of his opponent by assassination. Luckily for Cæsar’s cause the attempt failed, and Antony was free a few days later to make away to his legions at Brundusium. Had the attempted assassination succeeded, the young Cæsar, whose security grew more and more perilous would, in all probability, not have been in a position to reap the benefit of this bloody deed. When we take into account the prudence of Cæsar’s conduct on every other occasion but this, we can only explain this folly by the light of that systematic opposition with which Antony had met all his aspirations. To the murderers of Cæsar and the senate he behaved with somewhat greater caution.f