Concerns about the future of Jewish life and its continuity keep many community leaders, philanthropists and Jewish census professionals preoccupied. Overwhelmingly, it seems most agree that “the Jewish future can only be secured by ensuring the continued existence and flourishing of practicing, believing, involved Jews.”
Chabad-Lubavitch Shluchim appreciate this intuitively. It’s the impetus for Chabad’s colorful, diverse and comprehensive programs that reach out to Jewish people across the spectrum, and especially to children—the key to Jewish continuity.
When 40 children arrive at Chabad’s Chai Center in Wilmette, Illinois this Thursday night, cooking stations will be there to greet them. Decked out in personalized aprons, the junior chefs will prepare Shabbat dinner for 120 guests. When they have finished cooking gefilte fish, salads, and desserts, these Hebrew School students will decorate and set a dozen tables.
“Our One Shabbat One World concludes four weeks of an intensive Shabbat curriculum, including the how, what, when, and why of Shabbat observance,” says Rivke Flinkenstein. “But there is nothing like the actual Shabbat experience to illustrate how special this day is. And it all starts Thursday night when we gather to prepare the food.”
The Jewish community of Wilmette, 14 miles from downtown Chicago, is joining 300 other communities around the globe in the fifth annual “One Shabbat One World.” The idea, explains organizer Rabbi Chaim Hershkowitz, is for Jews of all ages and backgrounds to unite at a Shabbat table and explore the concepts of Shabbat and its redemptive power. “There is a well-known maxim in the Talmud,” Hershokowitz says, “that guarantees that when the entire Jewish nation keeps one Shabbat, Moshiach will come.”
According to Rabbi Dovie Shapiro, director of Chabad at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, those at his table are getting a taste of the Messianic era along with their matzo ball soup. “When students sit around our Shabbat table it does not make a difference if they know Hebrew or if they had a bar or bat mitzvah, all that matters is that they’re Jewish. This is how it will be in the times of Moshiach when all the boundaries that divide us will fall by the wayside.”
Jordan Grelewicz is an NAU sophomore who attends Friday night dinner at Chabad each week. “If you go to a bar or party, you have such a disconnected, empty feeling,” he says, “while at Chabad, you not only connect with Judaism on a meaningful level, but also share a really good meal with really good friends.”
This week, Grelewitz is hoping to be joined by 50 other Jewish students. “This is my main social outlet here,” he says, “all my friends go to Chabad—and I expect that we will be friends for life.”
The social aspect is a large part of what makes Shabbat so appealing. “I host guests every Shabbat,” states Flinkenstein, “and after we have talked and eaten together for a few hours, they comment on ‘how magical the evening was,’ and ask for recipes and advice on how to establish their own Shabbat rituals.” With an overflow crowd expected this Friday night, Flinkenstein hopes that the shared experience will “strengthen people and allow them to see the beauty and blessing that Shabbat is.”
In Calgary, Alberta, Rabbi Mordechai Groner says that community members have had One Shabbat One World on their calendars for months. On a regular Shabbat, approximately 50 people visit the Chabad center. This week, though, organizers have had to close registration as over 90 people have signed up, and there simply is no more space. This is the first year that the center is hosting a full Shabbat of activities, and Groner says that this variety makes it more accessible.
“We have many more participants than ever before, and completely new crowds are attending this year. Even if someone cannot make it Friday night, he can attend Shabbat morning or Saturday night.” Australian mystic, Rabbi Laibl Wolf, is the weekend’s presenter and it appears that his presence is causing quite a stir in this frosty city. Shabbat’s meals and lectures will reflect his theme: how to maintain a positive outlook in the current global uncertainty.
“We will spend this Shabbat immersed in study and rest,” says Groner. “It will be just like the times of Moshiach, when we will be able to learn constantly.”
In Wilmette, Flagstaff, Calgary and hundreds of other cities around the globe, there is a lot of work to be done before the candles will usher in this unique Shabbat.
But even the work is fun. “”Usually the guys come an hour or so before and help set up the tables,” says Grelewicz. “This just gives me more time to ask the rabbi any question of my mind (including the logistics of Shabbat in Alaska and the presence of mythical creatures in Judaism). It also allows me to get to know the other Jewish students even better.”
For Grelewicz at least, Shabbat is about the “three F’s of food, friends, and fun.” One Shabbat One World, playing at 300 Chabad centers around the world, should have all three.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Elimination Of Morality
Philosophy, I maintain, does not deliver a verdict upon moral questions; and it follows that bioethics, conceived of as the search for that verdict, is a futile and misguided enterprise. The moral conclusions to be found in the books and articles written by bioethicists are not ones that philosophy produces or sanctions. They are no more than the opinions bioethicists hold upon the matters they discuss .
There is no better description of Anne Maclean’s criticism of bioethics. The fragment above is written at the beginning of her book The Elimination of Morality, and expresses the substance of her conclusion. If read thoroughly, it implies the following:
1. Somehow bioethicists (which for some reasons she identifies with the philosophers she criticises in her book ) do think that they deliver a ‘verdict upon moral questions’;
2. Bioethics is a futile and misguided enterprise if or when conceived as the search for that verdict . Thus if we do not conceive bioethics as the search for that verdict, the implication disappears;
3. Further, the moral conclusions of bioethicists (or philosophers) are not the products of philosophy itself. Fair enough: similarly, the medical conclusion of a health professional is not the product of medicine itself, nor are the conclusions of physicists about physics the conclusions of physics itself. The professionals do not identify with their professions, so philosophers do not either;
4. Such conclusions (produced by bioethicists/philosophers) are the opinions of those particular individuals who produce them – therefore they cannot have a reasonable pretence of being objective.
If we were to take Maclean’s word for it, all the bioethicists that she criticises (namely John Harris, Peter Singer, James Rachels, and R. M. Hare) pretend to deliver verdicts, and they pretend that the verdicts they deliver are ‘Made in Philosophy’; they all see themselves as ‘moral experts’.
According to bioethicists (like those mentioned above), for a proposition to be a moral judgement, it must be rationally justified, and a judgement or decision is rationally justified if it satisfies two conditions: it must be supported by a reason or principle, and that reason or principle must be “demonstrably rational to accept” .
But, argues Maclean, “moral questions are not intellectual questions, and morality is not a logical system” .
These general objections stand apart from the other specific criticisms that she makes of particular issues discussed in particular books of particular bioethicists. Her position can be summarized in the following words: “bioethicists claim to be ethical experts, and claim that ethics must obey the rules of logic; look, there are conflicting moral statements in bioethics. Therefore, bioethicists are not ethical experts and bioethics does not obey the rules of logic”. Otherwise, if philosophers do not make such claims that she says they do, her whole construction falls apart. She herself does argue on particular theories and thought exercises, complying with the same logical rules she accuses them of .
Therefore, although she places bioethicists at one extreme, she refuses to place herself at the other . As Tuija Takala rightfully writes, “in an academic field of study, it would be quite odd to disregard reason altogether. If the general rules of scientific reasoning are not applied, no conclusions could be argued for – or falsified, for that matter” .
Going back to the favourite target of Maclean’s favourite victim, namely John Harris’s The Value of Life , barely arrived at page 3 one can read the following:
[t]he resolution of moral dilemmas both requires and presupposes a willingness and an ability to question and challenge basic beliefs, and to show whether or not they can be justified. And this activity in turn requires that we understand the concepts used to frame these beliefs, and are clear as to what they mean and imply.
Both these activities are essentially philosophical. That does not of course mean that only people who self-consciously regard themselves as philosophers, or who are professional philosophers, can undertake them. Philosophy, unlike medicine, has never been the exclusive preserve of professionals, and one of the tasks of this book is to show how the resolution of the dilemmas of medical practice raises important issues of personal morality and of public policy in which we all have an interest.
Thus, apparently philosophers do not claim an exclusive and exclusionary title of ethical experts for themselves. If, for instance, we take Harris’s formulation “philosophy, unlike medicine, has never been the exclusive preserve of professionals” and Maclean’s “philosophers have no special authority to make moral judgements”, the contradiction between the two authors does not appear as harsh as she presents it. From Harris’s perspective, “anyone who is prepared to think critically and seriously about them [moral dilemmas – n.a.] can contribute to their resolution” .
Whether or not moral philosophers claim they are moral experts, they do claim that their endeavour is useful in medical practice. However, the principlist approach in particular, and with it most of the other philosophical moral theories involved in the field, are attacked from a different perspective, too. This is the ‘anti-theory’ approach. Certainly, the ‘anti-theory’ criticism of philosophy is very complex, and a fair account of it would go far beyond the purposes of this thesis. However, we cannot ignore its arguments.
But before that, let us briefly see what the main features of the principlist approach are. Wide branches of both bioethics and medical ethics declare themselves to be ‘principle-based’. The most influential account of principles in medical ethics is given by two American authors, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in their famous Principles in Biomedical Ethics. According to the two authors,
a set of principles in a moral account should function as an analytical framework that expresses the general values underlying rules in the common morality , where ‘common morality’ refers to a basic set of norms that are universally shared (the two authors place in this category rules against lying, stealing, promise keeping etc.) .
The four principles argued for, and widely endorsed by large communities of health professionals and ethicists of medicine ever since the book (now at its fifth edition) was first published in 1979, are the following:
(1) Respect for autonomy, “a norm of respecting the decision-making capacities of autonomous persons”;
(2) Non-maleficence, “a norm of avoiding the causation of harm”;
(3) Beneficence, “a group of norms for providing benefits against risks and costs”;
(4) Justice, “a group of norms for distributing benefits, risks, and costs fairly” .
Along with discussing the substance of the presented principles, Beauchamp and Childress identify four moral theories working in the field of biomedical ethics, namely utilitarianism, Kantianism, communitarianism, and the ethics of care .
The same year when Beauchamp and Childress’s book was first published (1979), the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research in the US issued the Belmont Report, where three principles were emphasized, with their respective applications relevant for medical research. These principles are respect for persons, beneficence and justice, which create the need to implement informed consent, risk/benefit assessment and fair selection of subjects for research.
Both accounts, that developed by Beauchamp and Childress and the Belmont Report, represent the starting point of much of the principlism in medical ethics, that was to follow.
Anne Maclean’s criticism of bioethics is but a ‘breeze’ of a sophisticated and vivid attack against philosophers. This attack centres, in this case, on the following issue: because they are inevitably abstract (even when informed and made as flexible as possible), philosophical moral theories and principles can never be made as concrete as necessary so as to fit particular cases. As Earl Winkler asks, how can we ever be certain that we correctly interpret a concrete case, so as to decide that it is a matter of a certain moral principle? Can we always specify sufficient reasons for which that particular case is morally similar to another?
Instead, Winkler suggests that an ethics focused on context would be fit for particular cases, for the particular views of individual moral agents, for the practices of particular moral communities. He disapproves of the deductive methods of philosophy in applied ethics, and insists that the inductive construction of moral explanations – starting with cases and moving on to a ‘considered moral judgement’ – is more fit for the practical assessment of moral dilemmas.
Winkler’s criticism, even if indeed valid, is not of direct relevance for the purposes of this thesis. As long as we are concerned with the analysis of formal documents, the issue of the involvement of (principlist) philosophers in the medical practice is not involved. Interestingly, Winkler himself is not very keen to draw the conclusions he seems to be leading the reader towards, and in his conclusion he admits that his analysis is not in the sense that moral philosophy or ethical theory are useless when it comes to moral practice.
As it appears, the possible uses of philosophy, if indeed there are any, are not without controversy.
The existence of different norms associated with different cultures and the presumably eternal incapacity (or internal impossibility) of philosophical ethics to give solutions that are uncontroversial at least within philosophy itself are likely to create further problems for the acceptance of a role of philosophers in medical ethics.
Although I do not deny that there may be exceptions, philosophers do not claim a total role of decision makers within medical ethics. Instead, they do claim that their involvement is useful, at least at the level of identifying and sanctioning flaws in argumentation that are likely to pass unnoticed in a medical discourse lacking a consistent and informed critical attitude. And, as we shall see further in this thesis, the same may be the case for the political discourse in the field of bioethics.
If there are no ethical experts, it may be that centuries of ethical discourse have made and sanctioned mistakes, and it may be that health care professionals as well as political decision makers, and whichever other instance involved, with the assistance of philosophers, could take advantage of the ensuing lessons.
By: Artur Victoria
There is no better description of Anne Maclean’s criticism of bioethics. The fragment above is written at the beginning of her book The Elimination of Morality, and expresses the substance of her conclusion. If read thoroughly, it implies the following:
1. Somehow bioethicists (which for some reasons she identifies with the philosophers she criticises in her book ) do think that they deliver a ‘verdict upon moral questions’;
2. Bioethics is a futile and misguided enterprise if or when conceived as the search for that verdict . Thus if we do not conceive bioethics as the search for that verdict, the implication disappears;
3. Further, the moral conclusions of bioethicists (or philosophers) are not the products of philosophy itself. Fair enough: similarly, the medical conclusion of a health professional is not the product of medicine itself, nor are the conclusions of physicists about physics the conclusions of physics itself. The professionals do not identify with their professions, so philosophers do not either;
4. Such conclusions (produced by bioethicists/philosophers) are the opinions of those particular individuals who produce them – therefore they cannot have a reasonable pretence of being objective.
If we were to take Maclean’s word for it, all the bioethicists that she criticises (namely John Harris, Peter Singer, James Rachels, and R. M. Hare) pretend to deliver verdicts, and they pretend that the verdicts they deliver are ‘Made in Philosophy’; they all see themselves as ‘moral experts’.
According to bioethicists (like those mentioned above), for a proposition to be a moral judgement, it must be rationally justified, and a judgement or decision is rationally justified if it satisfies two conditions: it must be supported by a reason or principle, and that reason or principle must be “demonstrably rational to accept” .
But, argues Maclean, “moral questions are not intellectual questions, and morality is not a logical system” .
These general objections stand apart from the other specific criticisms that she makes of particular issues discussed in particular books of particular bioethicists. Her position can be summarized in the following words: “bioethicists claim to be ethical experts, and claim that ethics must obey the rules of logic; look, there are conflicting moral statements in bioethics. Therefore, bioethicists are not ethical experts and bioethics does not obey the rules of logic”. Otherwise, if philosophers do not make such claims that she says they do, her whole construction falls apart. She herself does argue on particular theories and thought exercises, complying with the same logical rules she accuses them of .
Therefore, although she places bioethicists at one extreme, she refuses to place herself at the other . As Tuija Takala rightfully writes, “in an academic field of study, it would be quite odd to disregard reason altogether. If the general rules of scientific reasoning are not applied, no conclusions could be argued for – or falsified, for that matter” .
Going back to the favourite target of Maclean’s favourite victim, namely John Harris’s The Value of Life , barely arrived at page 3 one can read the following:
[t]he resolution of moral dilemmas both requires and presupposes a willingness and an ability to question and challenge basic beliefs, and to show whether or not they can be justified. And this activity in turn requires that we understand the concepts used to frame these beliefs, and are clear as to what they mean and imply.
Both these activities are essentially philosophical. That does not of course mean that only people who self-consciously regard themselves as philosophers, or who are professional philosophers, can undertake them. Philosophy, unlike medicine, has never been the exclusive preserve of professionals, and one of the tasks of this book is to show how the resolution of the dilemmas of medical practice raises important issues of personal morality and of public policy in which we all have an interest.
Thus, apparently philosophers do not claim an exclusive and exclusionary title of ethical experts for themselves. If, for instance, we take Harris’s formulation “philosophy, unlike medicine, has never been the exclusive preserve of professionals” and Maclean’s “philosophers have no special authority to make moral judgements”, the contradiction between the two authors does not appear as harsh as she presents it. From Harris’s perspective, “anyone who is prepared to think critically and seriously about them [moral dilemmas – n.a.] can contribute to their resolution” .
Whether or not moral philosophers claim they are moral experts, they do claim that their endeavour is useful in medical practice. However, the principlist approach in particular, and with it most of the other philosophical moral theories involved in the field, are attacked from a different perspective, too. This is the ‘anti-theory’ approach. Certainly, the ‘anti-theory’ criticism of philosophy is very complex, and a fair account of it would go far beyond the purposes of this thesis. However, we cannot ignore its arguments.
But before that, let us briefly see what the main features of the principlist approach are. Wide branches of both bioethics and medical ethics declare themselves to be ‘principle-based’. The most influential account of principles in medical ethics is given by two American authors, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in their famous Principles in Biomedical Ethics. According to the two authors,
a set of principles in a moral account should function as an analytical framework that expresses the general values underlying rules in the common morality , where ‘common morality’ refers to a basic set of norms that are universally shared (the two authors place in this category rules against lying, stealing, promise keeping etc.) .
The four principles argued for, and widely endorsed by large communities of health professionals and ethicists of medicine ever since the book (now at its fifth edition) was first published in 1979, are the following:
(1) Respect for autonomy, “a norm of respecting the decision-making capacities of autonomous persons”;
(2) Non-maleficence, “a norm of avoiding the causation of harm”;
(3) Beneficence, “a group of norms for providing benefits against risks and costs”;
(4) Justice, “a group of norms for distributing benefits, risks, and costs fairly” .
Along with discussing the substance of the presented principles, Beauchamp and Childress identify four moral theories working in the field of biomedical ethics, namely utilitarianism, Kantianism, communitarianism, and the ethics of care .
The same year when Beauchamp and Childress’s book was first published (1979), the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research in the US issued the Belmont Report, where three principles were emphasized, with their respective applications relevant for medical research. These principles are respect for persons, beneficence and justice, which create the need to implement informed consent, risk/benefit assessment and fair selection of subjects for research.
Both accounts, that developed by Beauchamp and Childress and the Belmont Report, represent the starting point of much of the principlism in medical ethics, that was to follow.
Anne Maclean’s criticism of bioethics is but a ‘breeze’ of a sophisticated and vivid attack against philosophers. This attack centres, in this case, on the following issue: because they are inevitably abstract (even when informed and made as flexible as possible), philosophical moral theories and principles can never be made as concrete as necessary so as to fit particular cases. As Earl Winkler asks, how can we ever be certain that we correctly interpret a concrete case, so as to decide that it is a matter of a certain moral principle? Can we always specify sufficient reasons for which that particular case is morally similar to another?
Instead, Winkler suggests that an ethics focused on context would be fit for particular cases, for the particular views of individual moral agents, for the practices of particular moral communities. He disapproves of the deductive methods of philosophy in applied ethics, and insists that the inductive construction of moral explanations – starting with cases and moving on to a ‘considered moral judgement’ – is more fit for the practical assessment of moral dilemmas.
Winkler’s criticism, even if indeed valid, is not of direct relevance for the purposes of this thesis. As long as we are concerned with the analysis of formal documents, the issue of the involvement of (principlist) philosophers in the medical practice is not involved. Interestingly, Winkler himself is not very keen to draw the conclusions he seems to be leading the reader towards, and in his conclusion he admits that his analysis is not in the sense that moral philosophy or ethical theory are useless when it comes to moral practice.
As it appears, the possible uses of philosophy, if indeed there are any, are not without controversy.
The existence of different norms associated with different cultures and the presumably eternal incapacity (or internal impossibility) of philosophical ethics to give solutions that are uncontroversial at least within philosophy itself are likely to create further problems for the acceptance of a role of philosophers in medical ethics.
Although I do not deny that there may be exceptions, philosophers do not claim a total role of decision makers within medical ethics. Instead, they do claim that their involvement is useful, at least at the level of identifying and sanctioning flaws in argumentation that are likely to pass unnoticed in a medical discourse lacking a consistent and informed critical attitude. And, as we shall see further in this thesis, the same may be the case for the political discourse in the field of bioethics.
If there are no ethical experts, it may be that centuries of ethical discourse have made and sanctioned mistakes, and it may be that health care professionals as well as political decision makers, and whichever other instance involved, with the assistance of philosophers, could take advantage of the ensuing lessons.
By: Artur Victoria
Claudius
Claudius [Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus] (10 BC–AD 54), Roman emperor, was born at Lugdunum (Lyons) on 1 August 10 BC. His father was Nero Claudius Drusus, brother of the emperor Tiberius, and at the time governor of Gaul; his mother was Antonia, the daughter of Marcus Antonius and Octavia, the sister of the emperor Augustus. Despite this impeccable pedigree, Claudius did not advance to the offices that would have been normal for a person destined by birth for an important public career. According to Tacitus (AD 56–113) this was because he was largely blocked from such distinctions by Tiberius, who was emperor from AD 14 to AD 37, due to his ‘weak-mindedness’ (Tacitus, 6.46). In fact, encouraged by the great Roman historian Livy (c.64 BC–AD 12), he became a very considerable scholar, writing works on the Etruscans and the Carthaginians, on Augustus's principate, and an autobiography; none survives, but their accomplishment points to an active and focused mind, and one well versed in Greek, the language in which he wrote. His reputation as a scholar proved sufficiently durable for Robert Graves to publish his purported autobiography, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, in 1934. Claudius did suffer, however, from severe physical disabilities, one likely reason for his being debarred from significant early office. Although well built, he dragged his right leg, spoke in a stammering voice that was barely comprehensible, being ‘raucous and throaty’, and when angry ‘would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose’. His laughter was ‘unseemly’, and his head and hands shook, all features which modern scholarship tends to interpret as signs of the condition of cerebral palsy. However, Suetonius (c.AD 69–140) does note that, while he was emperor, his health was excellent except for attacks of stomach pains that may have been heartburn; indeed, he had a particular interest in medicine, and took a favourite doctor from Cos, Gaius Stertinius Xenophon, on his journey to Britain in AD 43 (Suetonius, 31).
With the succession of his nephew Gaius (Caligula) in AD 37, Claudius's hopes of political advancement took a brief upturn. He held the consulship, as Gaius's colleague, from 1 July to 31 August 37, giving him his first taste of power. He several times presided at public shows in lieu of Gaius, bringing him acknowledgement from the people, who cried ‘success to the emperor's uncle’. Even so, he was continually insulted, not least because he was straitened financially, having only a comparatively modest inheritance. When he was obliged to become part of the priesthood of Gaius in AD 40, involving the payment of a huge sum of money, he had to borrow from the public treasury; when he could not meet his debts, his property was put up for sale to make up the deficiency. Humiliation and contempt were in fact constant companions in Claudius's life under Gaius, not least at the instigation of the emperor himself. Indeed, Gaius became ever more loathed among the political classes, whether for his autocratic manner, his swingeing taxes, or his lack of military achievement. His near-inevitable assassination came on 24 January AD 41, by officers of the praetorian guard. It took place as he passed along a passage out of the theatre on the Palatine on his way to the palace. According to the sources, Claudius, the 49-year old scholar, apparently fearful of his own life, hid in the palace on a balcony behind some curtains; a soldier, seeing his protruding feet, hauled him out and, in Suetonius's words, ‘when Claudius fell at his feet in terror, he hailed him as emperor’. Claudius was then taken to the fort of the praetorian guard and, while the senate argued about whether to restore the republic, stayed there overnight and managed to secure, partly through bribery, the support of the guard. Although the senate initially declared Claudius a ‘public enemy’, a month later he could enter the building, albeit with bodyguards, and be confirmed as emperor.
Although Suetonius describes Claudius's elevation as ‘a freak of fortune’, modern historical evaluation of the evidence suggests a highly discreet behind-the-scenes involvement with Gaius's assassination, and a prior striking of deals with those who thought that they had something to lose by the restoration of the republic. Likewise, given the nature of his accession and the lack of any sort of military achievement, he would have been well aware of the need for some sort of triumph. It was a point brought home by a brief and unsuccessful revolt against him in Dalmatia the following year. Territorial acquisition must have seemed the obvious course. Here he was able to claim much of the credit for the creation of two new provinces in north Africa, Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana. Although properly the result of Gaius's order to assassinate the Moorish ruler, Ptolemy, in AD 40, it was mainly Claudius's generals who suppressed the ensuing uprisings, and brought about order. Both he and the commander, Marcus Crassus Frugi, received triumphal insignia from the senate.
It was Claudius's conquest of Britain that was, however, to be his greatest achievement. It was an obvious target. Not only would he be following in the footsteps of the deified Julius Caesar—and would hope to surpass him by creating a permanently held province—but Britain was known to export grain, cattle, gold, silver, iron, hides, slaves, and hunting dogs. This would help to refill a treasury depleted by Gaius's extravagant spending, but would also provide booty for his soldiers. Moreover, occupation of Britain would allow a further geographical separation of the legions; there was by now a concentration of eight along the Rhine–Danube frontier, and the revolt of AD 41 was a reminder of the dangers posed by disaffected commanders. The decision to launch the conquest, already contemplated by Gaius, cannot have been difficult.
Britain at that time was ruled by a series of tribal leaders. The more advanced issued coins, mostly bearing their name, but lived in settlements of no architectural pretension, although they were often provided with quite elaborate defences of earthen banks and ditches. Until his death about AD 40, the leading figure was Cunobelinus (Shakespeare's Cymbeline), ruler of the Catuvellauni of what is now Hertfordshire. During his long reign of some forty years, he instigated a considerable expansion of Catuvellaunian power into adjoining regions. His original base may have been at Verulamium (St Albans), but he later set up a new capital at Camulodunum (Colchester), already a royal seat of the Trinovantes. Pro-Roman in stance, Cunobelinus posed no threat to the adjacent province of Gaul; however, when his two sons, Caratacus and Togodumnus, succeeded him, matters altered, for they were both warlike and fiercely opposed to Rome. The territory of the Atrebates (modern Hampshire) was probably overrun by one or the other of them, and the ruler, Verica, expelled. He fled to Rome, and appealed to Claudius for intervention. It provided a perfect justification for the conquest.
Preparations for the invasion were thorough. Not the least was the organization of the commissariat by the procurator of northern Gaul, Graecinius Laco, who was subsequently awarded the privilege of having a statue of himself erected in Rome for his work. The Britons had the reputation of being doughty fighters, and the channel, known as the Ocean, was so fearsome a barrier that initially the troops refused to embark. Eventually, however, probably in May or June AD 43, some 40,000 soldiers set sail from Gesoriacum (Boulogne). In command was Aulus Plautius, a distinguished man who came from the Balkan province of Pannonia, where he had been governor. He brought with him the ninth legion (IX Hispana) while three other legions, the II Augusta, XIV Gemina, and XX Valeria, were summoned from the Rhine; auxiliary troops were also drafted in. It was a formidable force, a comment both on the perceived strength of the opposition and on Claudius's manifest intention to succeed.
Plautius had divided his invasion fleet into three. Where they landed is not known for certain, but Rutupiae (Richborough, in east Kent) is a strong probability on archaeological grounds, while another detachment may have headed for Noviomagus (Chichester) in a part of Verica's former kingdom. Initial skirmishes were followed by a great battle, which took place over two days (an unusual feature in antiquity), very likely at the River Medway. The fighting then moved on to the Thames, where the Britons were eventually ousted and Togodumnus was killed. The Romans now halted their advance, and sent for Claudius, as he had instructed. When word reached Rome, Claudius immediately began the arduous journey by sea to Massalia (Marseilles) and overland to Gesoriacum. With him were a considerable number of senior senators, doubtless brought to stop them from plotting in Rome, and also some elephants, which were commonly used in the Hellenistic world to frighten the enemy. The ancient sources disagree on Claudius's military achievements in Britain; but they were very likely real, and the Roman name for Chelmsford, Caesaromagus, may reflect his presence at a significant battle. Before long, he and the army had reached Camulodunum and captured it. When later the storming and sacking of a town, and the surrender of the British kings, was re-enacted in the Campus Martius in Rome, it was almost certainly the taking of Camulodunum that was being portrayed.
Claudius is said to have stayed only sixteen days in Britain, and by early in AD 44, after some six months away, he was back in Rome. There he received a triumph (the first for a princeps or emperor since 29 BC), and the building of two celebratory arches was voted by the senate: one in Rome and the other in Gaul, where he had embarked. The triumphal arch in Rome was dedicated in AD 51, and the surviving part of the inscription records that it was put up ‘by the Roman Senate and People because he [Claudius] had received the surrender of eleven British Kings, defeated without loss, and for the first time had brought barbarian peoples from beyond the Ocean under Roman rule’ (Inscriptiones, 6, no. 920). A coin was struck, showing an equestrian statue of Claudius on top of an arch, inscribed DEBRITANN[IS], thus disseminating the news of the conquest throughout the empire; and a triumphal arch was erected by the citizens of Cyzicus and a relief, with Claudius subduing Britannia, at Aphrodisias. Both were places in far-off Asia Minor: it was a famous victory.
Meanwhile, the Roman army pressed on in Britain. By AD 47, when Aulus Plautius returned to Rome to the great honour of an ovation, all of the territory as far as the road known as the Fosse Way (from Exeter to Lincoln) had been taken. Under the new governor, Ostorius Scapula, significant advances were made into eastern Wales and Cheshire. The Mendip lead and silver mines were in production by AD 49, and a network of forts and roads established; while Camulodunum, initially a legionary fortress, was in the same year converted into a colonia for retired legionaries. In AD 51, Caratacus himself was finally captured and taken to Rome. The new province was thus firmly established, and Claudius's own position as emperor was likewise now secure.
Claudius never again left Italy, despite the annexation of other territory in the Balkans (the province of Noricum) and Lycia, in south-west Asia Minor. He was responsible for great public works, like the harbour at Ostia and aqueducts serving Rome; and he also had an active private life. He was married four times: to Plautia Urgulanilla (AD c.10); to Aelia Paetina (in AD 28 or before); to Valeria Messal(l)ina (AD c.38); and finally to Julia Agrippina (AD 49), who survived him. He died in Rome on 13 October AD 54, it is said by poison, to be succeeded by Nero. He may have been buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus, in the Campus Martius in Rome, but this is unproven.
Claudius's intervention in British affairs was, literally, to change the face of the country. Although he was not responsible for the conquest of the whole province, which took decades, many of today's lowland towns and cities (not least London) originated during his principate, just as the essentials of the road network are owed to Roman engineers. Claudius, who gained so much from the conquest, would surely have taken a personal interest in these matters; it was an epoch which properly marks the beginning of British history.
Sources
Suetonius, Claudius, ed. H. E. Butler and M. Cary (1927) • Dio's Roman history, ed. and trans. E. Cary, 7 (1924), lx • C. Tacitus, The histories [and] the annals, ed. and trans. C. H. Moore and J. Jackson, 2 (1931) • A. K. Bowman, E. Champlin, and A. Lintott, The Cambridge ancient history, 2nd edn, 10 (1996), 229–41, 503–16 • E. M. Smallwood, Documents illustrating the principates of Gaius, Claudius, and Nero (1967) • B. Levick, Claudius (1990) • S. S. Frere, Britannia: a history of Roman Britain, 3rd edn (1987) • P. Salway, Roman Britain (1981) • G. D. B. Jones and D. Mattingly, An atlas of Roman Britain (1990) • D. R. Dudley and G. Webster, The conquest of Britain (1965) • K. T. Erim, ‘A relief showing Claudius and Britannia from Aphrodisias’, Britannia, 13 (1982), 277–85 • S. B. Platner and T. Ashby, A topographical dictionary of ancient Rome (1929) • W. Henzen and others, Inscriptiones urbis Romae latinae, no. 920
With the succession of his nephew Gaius (Caligula) in AD 37, Claudius's hopes of political advancement took a brief upturn. He held the consulship, as Gaius's colleague, from 1 July to 31 August 37, giving him his first taste of power. He several times presided at public shows in lieu of Gaius, bringing him acknowledgement from the people, who cried ‘success to the emperor's uncle’. Even so, he was continually insulted, not least because he was straitened financially, having only a comparatively modest inheritance. When he was obliged to become part of the priesthood of Gaius in AD 40, involving the payment of a huge sum of money, he had to borrow from the public treasury; when he could not meet his debts, his property was put up for sale to make up the deficiency. Humiliation and contempt were in fact constant companions in Claudius's life under Gaius, not least at the instigation of the emperor himself. Indeed, Gaius became ever more loathed among the political classes, whether for his autocratic manner, his swingeing taxes, or his lack of military achievement. His near-inevitable assassination came on 24 January AD 41, by officers of the praetorian guard. It took place as he passed along a passage out of the theatre on the Palatine on his way to the palace. According to the sources, Claudius, the 49-year old scholar, apparently fearful of his own life, hid in the palace on a balcony behind some curtains; a soldier, seeing his protruding feet, hauled him out and, in Suetonius's words, ‘when Claudius fell at his feet in terror, he hailed him as emperor’. Claudius was then taken to the fort of the praetorian guard and, while the senate argued about whether to restore the republic, stayed there overnight and managed to secure, partly through bribery, the support of the guard. Although the senate initially declared Claudius a ‘public enemy’, a month later he could enter the building, albeit with bodyguards, and be confirmed as emperor.
Although Suetonius describes Claudius's elevation as ‘a freak of fortune’, modern historical evaluation of the evidence suggests a highly discreet behind-the-scenes involvement with Gaius's assassination, and a prior striking of deals with those who thought that they had something to lose by the restoration of the republic. Likewise, given the nature of his accession and the lack of any sort of military achievement, he would have been well aware of the need for some sort of triumph. It was a point brought home by a brief and unsuccessful revolt against him in Dalmatia the following year. Territorial acquisition must have seemed the obvious course. Here he was able to claim much of the credit for the creation of two new provinces in north Africa, Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana. Although properly the result of Gaius's order to assassinate the Moorish ruler, Ptolemy, in AD 40, it was mainly Claudius's generals who suppressed the ensuing uprisings, and brought about order. Both he and the commander, Marcus Crassus Frugi, received triumphal insignia from the senate.
It was Claudius's conquest of Britain that was, however, to be his greatest achievement. It was an obvious target. Not only would he be following in the footsteps of the deified Julius Caesar—and would hope to surpass him by creating a permanently held province—but Britain was known to export grain, cattle, gold, silver, iron, hides, slaves, and hunting dogs. This would help to refill a treasury depleted by Gaius's extravagant spending, but would also provide booty for his soldiers. Moreover, occupation of Britain would allow a further geographical separation of the legions; there was by now a concentration of eight along the Rhine–Danube frontier, and the revolt of AD 41 was a reminder of the dangers posed by disaffected commanders. The decision to launch the conquest, already contemplated by Gaius, cannot have been difficult.
Britain at that time was ruled by a series of tribal leaders. The more advanced issued coins, mostly bearing their name, but lived in settlements of no architectural pretension, although they were often provided with quite elaborate defences of earthen banks and ditches. Until his death about AD 40, the leading figure was Cunobelinus (Shakespeare's Cymbeline), ruler of the Catuvellauni of what is now Hertfordshire. During his long reign of some forty years, he instigated a considerable expansion of Catuvellaunian power into adjoining regions. His original base may have been at Verulamium (St Albans), but he later set up a new capital at Camulodunum (Colchester), already a royal seat of the Trinovantes. Pro-Roman in stance, Cunobelinus posed no threat to the adjacent province of Gaul; however, when his two sons, Caratacus and Togodumnus, succeeded him, matters altered, for they were both warlike and fiercely opposed to Rome. The territory of the Atrebates (modern Hampshire) was probably overrun by one or the other of them, and the ruler, Verica, expelled. He fled to Rome, and appealed to Claudius for intervention. It provided a perfect justification for the conquest.
Preparations for the invasion were thorough. Not the least was the organization of the commissariat by the procurator of northern Gaul, Graecinius Laco, who was subsequently awarded the privilege of having a statue of himself erected in Rome for his work. The Britons had the reputation of being doughty fighters, and the channel, known as the Ocean, was so fearsome a barrier that initially the troops refused to embark. Eventually, however, probably in May or June AD 43, some 40,000 soldiers set sail from Gesoriacum (Boulogne). In command was Aulus Plautius, a distinguished man who came from the Balkan province of Pannonia, where he had been governor. He brought with him the ninth legion (IX Hispana) while three other legions, the II Augusta, XIV Gemina, and XX Valeria, were summoned from the Rhine; auxiliary troops were also drafted in. It was a formidable force, a comment both on the perceived strength of the opposition and on Claudius's manifest intention to succeed.
Plautius had divided his invasion fleet into three. Where they landed is not known for certain, but Rutupiae (Richborough, in east Kent) is a strong probability on archaeological grounds, while another detachment may have headed for Noviomagus (Chichester) in a part of Verica's former kingdom. Initial skirmishes were followed by a great battle, which took place over two days (an unusual feature in antiquity), very likely at the River Medway. The fighting then moved on to the Thames, where the Britons were eventually ousted and Togodumnus was killed. The Romans now halted their advance, and sent for Claudius, as he had instructed. When word reached Rome, Claudius immediately began the arduous journey by sea to Massalia (Marseilles) and overland to Gesoriacum. With him were a considerable number of senior senators, doubtless brought to stop them from plotting in Rome, and also some elephants, which were commonly used in the Hellenistic world to frighten the enemy. The ancient sources disagree on Claudius's military achievements in Britain; but they were very likely real, and the Roman name for Chelmsford, Caesaromagus, may reflect his presence at a significant battle. Before long, he and the army had reached Camulodunum and captured it. When later the storming and sacking of a town, and the surrender of the British kings, was re-enacted in the Campus Martius in Rome, it was almost certainly the taking of Camulodunum that was being portrayed.
Claudius is said to have stayed only sixteen days in Britain, and by early in AD 44, after some six months away, he was back in Rome. There he received a triumph (the first for a princeps or emperor since 29 BC), and the building of two celebratory arches was voted by the senate: one in Rome and the other in Gaul, where he had embarked. The triumphal arch in Rome was dedicated in AD 51, and the surviving part of the inscription records that it was put up ‘by the Roman Senate and People because he [Claudius] had received the surrender of eleven British Kings, defeated without loss, and for the first time had brought barbarian peoples from beyond the Ocean under Roman rule’ (Inscriptiones, 6, no. 920). A coin was struck, showing an equestrian statue of Claudius on top of an arch, inscribed DEBRITANN[IS], thus disseminating the news of the conquest throughout the empire; and a triumphal arch was erected by the citizens of Cyzicus and a relief, with Claudius subduing Britannia, at Aphrodisias. Both were places in far-off Asia Minor: it was a famous victory.
Meanwhile, the Roman army pressed on in Britain. By AD 47, when Aulus Plautius returned to Rome to the great honour of an ovation, all of the territory as far as the road known as the Fosse Way (from Exeter to Lincoln) had been taken. Under the new governor, Ostorius Scapula, significant advances were made into eastern Wales and Cheshire. The Mendip lead and silver mines were in production by AD 49, and a network of forts and roads established; while Camulodunum, initially a legionary fortress, was in the same year converted into a colonia for retired legionaries. In AD 51, Caratacus himself was finally captured and taken to Rome. The new province was thus firmly established, and Claudius's own position as emperor was likewise now secure.
Claudius never again left Italy, despite the annexation of other territory in the Balkans (the province of Noricum) and Lycia, in south-west Asia Minor. He was responsible for great public works, like the harbour at Ostia and aqueducts serving Rome; and he also had an active private life. He was married four times: to Plautia Urgulanilla (AD c.10); to Aelia Paetina (in AD 28 or before); to Valeria Messal(l)ina (AD c.38); and finally to Julia Agrippina (AD 49), who survived him. He died in Rome on 13 October AD 54, it is said by poison, to be succeeded by Nero. He may have been buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus, in the Campus Martius in Rome, but this is unproven.
Claudius's intervention in British affairs was, literally, to change the face of the country. Although he was not responsible for the conquest of the whole province, which took decades, many of today's lowland towns and cities (not least London) originated during his principate, just as the essentials of the road network are owed to Roman engineers. Claudius, who gained so much from the conquest, would surely have taken a personal interest in these matters; it was an epoch which properly marks the beginning of British history.
Sources
Suetonius, Claudius, ed. H. E. Butler and M. Cary (1927) • Dio's Roman history, ed. and trans. E. Cary, 7 (1924), lx • C. Tacitus, The histories [and] the annals, ed. and trans. C. H. Moore and J. Jackson, 2 (1931) • A. K. Bowman, E. Champlin, and A. Lintott, The Cambridge ancient history, 2nd edn, 10 (1996), 229–41, 503–16 • E. M. Smallwood, Documents illustrating the principates of Gaius, Claudius, and Nero (1967) • B. Levick, Claudius (1990) • S. S. Frere, Britannia: a history of Roman Britain, 3rd edn (1987) • P. Salway, Roman Britain (1981) • G. D. B. Jones and D. Mattingly, An atlas of Roman Britain (1990) • D. R. Dudley and G. Webster, The conquest of Britain (1965) • K. T. Erim, ‘A relief showing Claudius and Britannia from Aphrodisias’, Britannia, 13 (1982), 277–85 • S. B. Platner and T. Ashby, A topographical dictionary of ancient Rome (1929) • W. Henzen and others, Inscriptiones urbis Romae latinae, no. 920
Julius Caesar
Caesar [Gaius Julius Caesar] (100–44 BC), politician, author, and military commander, was born on 13 Quinctilis (July) 100 BC, probably at Rome, the son of Gaius Julius Caesar, a patrician of old but recently undistinguished family whose brother-in-law was Gaius Marius, and Aurelia, probably daughter of Lucius Aurelius Cotta (consul in 119 BC). He had two sisters, married to Quintus Pedius and to Marcus Atius Balbus of Aricia; the latter's grandson, adopted in Caesar's will, became the emperor Augustus.
Nothing is known of Caesar's education. He was twelve when his uncle Marius was driven into exile by Sulla's march on Rome, and thirteen at the time of Marius's vengeful return with Lucius Cornelius Cinna. When he was fifteen, his father died; the following year Caesar broke off his engagement to a girl from a wealthy equestrian family to marry Cinna's daughter Cornelia (d. 69 BC). In 82 BC Sulla returned victorious from the east; by now Marius and Cinna were both dead, and Caesar went into hiding. His relatives successfully pleaded for his life, but the dictator sourly commented ‘There are many Mariuses in that boy’ (‘Life of Caesar’). Caesar left Rome to serve in Asia Minor, where he was decorated for bravery in the attack on Mytilene. He came back to Rome at the news of Sulla's death, and announced his arrival on the political scene with the prosecution (unsuccessful) of a senior senator for extortion. In 75 BC, sailing to Rhodes to study rhetoric, he was captured by pirates; on payment of the ransom, he raised a squadron to defeat them, and had them crucified.
Caesar's first public office was the elective military tribunate (probably in 72 BC); in 69 he was quaestor, serving in Spain; in 65, curule aedile. It was a period of revived hope for popularis politicians: the Sullan oligarchy had proved itself corrupt, and the people's tribunes had regained the powers of which Sulla had stripped them. Caesar advertised his allegiance by his funeral speech for his aunt Julia, widow of Marius, in 69 BC, and by restoring to public view, as aedile, the Marian trophies Sulla had pulled down. In 63 BC, though still a junior senator, and in competition with two distinguished ex-consuls, he got himself elected to the high office of pontifex maximus. He was thirty-seven, already a formidable politician, and no friend of the conservative ‘establishment’ in the senate.
After a stormy praetorship in 62 BC, Caesar's first military command came with his proconsulship of Further Spain, in campaigns against the Callaeci and Lusitani conducted with characteristic decisiveness and dash. He was granted the right to a triumph, which for most Romans was the height of ambition. Caesar chose to forgo it. He wanted the consulship, and by entering the city to declare his candidacy he had to abandon his military command. His ambitions were not those of ordinary Romans. After the consulship there would be a greater command, one like those the people had conferred on Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great), whose triumph over the pirates and Mithridates, an affair of unprecedented splendour, had taken place in 61 BC.
‘Caesar has the wind in his sails just now’, wrote Cicero in June 60 BC (Cicero, ad Atticum, II.1.6). Certainly Caesar's enemies thought so, and did their best to prevent his election as consul, or to commit him in advance to a harmlessly administrative consular command (the forests and drove-roads of Italy). It was in vain: Caesar was elected consul for 59 BC, with the powerful backing of Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, and, having swiftly neutralized his optimate colleague Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, forced through a programme of land distribution in the teeth of furious conservative opposition.
The people's consul was rewarded with an extraordinary command (like those for Pompey in 67 and 66 BC) passed by a tribune's law in May 59 BC: he was to have Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum (that is, northern Italy and the eastern coast of the Adriatic) for five years; Pompey subsequently got the senate to add Gallia Narbonensis (Provence). So the great campaigns of conquest, to rival Pompey's in Asia, would be either eastward or north-westward (in modern terms, either on the middle Danube or in France and Belgium) according to opportunity. As it turned out, the migration of the Helvetii took Caesar west and north. He left Rome as proconsul on or about 19 March 58 BC. When he next entered it, just over nine years later, it would be as an invader in a civil war.
As consul, Caesar's first act had been to make public the proceedings of the senate. As proconsul, he reported his campaigns to the Roman people in annual ‘commentaries’, which have been recognized ever since as masterpieces of military narrative. First (58 BC), the defeat of the Helvetii, and of Ariovistus's Germans; second (57), the defeat of the Nervii (a very close-run thing) and the conquest of the Belgic peoples; third (56), the conquest of Brittany and Aquitaine. In three years, Caesar had conquered to the ocean and the Rhine; now it was time to go beyond.
Again, Caesar kept his options open. The fourth commentarius, for 55 BC, reports the bridging of the Rhine and the punitive raid into Germany, and after that the preliminary expedition to Britain in late summer. Either of those could be repeated on a larger scale the following year, for his allies Pompey and Crassus were now consuls, and the people duly voted him a five-year extension to his command. Britain was the more glamorous option, an adventure beyond Ocean itself, and public opinion in Rome was excited about the conquest of this people at the very ends of the earth (ultimi Britanni, Catullus, 11.11f).
The show of force in September 55 BC was very nearly a disaster. Caesar's main cavalry force was unable to make the crossing; he had the greatest difficulty in getting his two legions disembarked (near Deal in Kent), against fierce opposition; four days after the landing a violent storm and high tides seriously damaged his transports; and when one of the legions was ambushed, only the last-minute arrival of reinforcements prevented its total defeat. In the end Caesar was glad to be able to get back to Gaul in his patched-up transports before the equinox.
For the main assault the following year Caesar ordered the building of large numbers of new transport ships, low in draught to be beached easily, and able to be worked by oars or sail. In the midsummer of 54 BC he set sail from Portus Itius (Boulogne) with five legions and 2000 cavalry, in an armada of 800 ships. Tides and currents made it an awkward crossing, and oars were needed to get the transports to the landing place, probably not far from the previous year's, though this time undefended. The British forces had withdrawn inland to higher ground; Caesar disembarked, left his ships at anchor, and marched inland the same night. His forces had crossed the Stour and captured a British defensive stronghold, probably Bigbury, when news came that a storm had driven the ships ashore, with great damage. Caesar had to return to the coast, organize repairs, send for replacements from Gaul, and bring the ships on shore behind a defensive fortification. In the meantime the Britons had put Cassivellaunus, the powerful king of the Catuvellauni, in command of their forces.
Resuming his advance through Cantium (Kent), after hard fighting against well-organized British cavalry and charioteers, Caesar forced a crossing of the Thames (possibly at Brentford) and eventually found Cassivellaunus's fortress and stormed it. Meanwhile, an attack on the base camp and Caesar's ships was successfully beaten off. Cassivellaunus asked for terms; Caesar accepted his surrender, demanded hostages and an annual tribute, and took his army back to Gaul.
On his return Caesar was told of the death of his only child, his beloved daughter, Julia, Pompey's wife, in childbirth in her early twenties. (Julia's mother, Caesar's first wife, Cornelia, had also died young; his second wife, Pompeia, was divorced in 62 BC, for not being ‘above suspicion’; he then married Calpurnia, who outlived him—it was she who had bad dreams on the night before the ides of March.) He also found dangerous unrest in Gaul, which was why he had come back so quickly. It soon blew up into full-scale rebellion in the Belgic lands, with one Roman winter camp wiped out and another, under Cicero's brother Quintus, only narrowly saved from the same fate. One and a half legions, about 7000 men, were lost in the disaster.
It is not known where or when the fifth book of commentaries was written; Caesar was desperately occupied in the winter of 54–53 BC. But it contains, among other things, the first ever account of the geography and ethnography of Britain: ‘The island is triangular in shape, with one side facing Gaul … The second side faces westward, towards Spain’ (Caesar, v.12–14). As Caesar's contemporary Catullus confirms (ultima occidentis insula, Catullus, 29.12), the Romans thought of Britain as in the far west, close to Spain. It was a fitting scene for a heroic epic, duly composed by Cicero from material supplied by his brother (Cicero, Ad Q. fratrem, II.14.2, 16.4, III.7.6). But now that adventure was over, as Quintus, after his narrow escape, knew better than most.
Caesar spent the next four years reconquering his conquests. The great pan-Gallic rebellion of Vercingetorix in 52 BC came very close to destroying his whole achievement, and him with it. His enemies in Rome took heart: Crassus was dead, Pompey could be seduced to their side as the protector of the republic. They were determined to destroy Caesar, and he was determined not to be destroyed. In January 49 BC he threw the dice in the air and marched into Italy.
With his battle-hardened army of veterans, Caesar fought his civil war against Pompey and the republicans all over the empire of Rome, and beyond: Spain in 49 BC, Thessaly in 48 (defeating Pompey at Pharsalus), Alexandria in 48–7 (where he probably wrote the three books of his De bello civili commentaries), Asia Minor in 47 (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’), and above all north Africa in 46, where Marcus Porcius Cato, symbol of the old republic, killed himself after Caesar's victory at Utica. In September 46 BC, by the then calendar, Caesar at last held the great triumph that would outshine Pompey's of fifteen years before. He was now dictator for a ten-year term, with a formidable programme of projects of which the most lasting was the Julian calendar, introduced on 1 January 45 BC. But warfare still preoccupied him: first against Pompey's sons in Spain, won only by a hair's breadth at the battle of Munda (March 45 BC), and then a planned campaign against the Parthians, to avenge Crassus. But by now his autocracy was openly regal, and deeply offensive to the senate. He was careless of his own security, trusting perhaps in the luck that had protected him for so long. The latest of his long line of mistresses was Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, now conspicuously living in Rome; in 44 BC he was made dictator for life; the month of his birth, Quinctilis, was renamed ‘July’; a cult of Caesar, with his own priest (flamen), was instituted. It was too much. On 15 March he was murdered in the Curia Pompei in Rome by republican senators under the leadership of Cato's son-in-law Marcus Junius Brutus.
The body lay where it fell, unworthily fouled with the blood of a man who had forced his way to the west as far as Britain and Ocean, and intended to force his way to the east against the empires of Parthia and India. (Nicolaus of Damascus, 95)
So Nicolaus of Damascus, writing about twenty years after the event, sums up the many-sided genius of Caesar in the way he would probably have wanted, as an imperial conqueror.
In 42 BC Caesar was deified. The heir to his name and fortune was his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, whom he adopted in his will as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and who dedicated the temple of Divus Julius on 18 Sextilis (later ‘August’) 29 BC, immediately after his own triumph over Cleopatra's Egypt. The young Caesar ‘Octavian’ became Caesar Augustus, and thereafter Caesar's name became synonymous with imperial autocracy throughout the history of Europe.
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was first performed in 1599 and has always been one of his most frequently performed plays. Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's Lives (written some 150 years after Caesar's death) in the translation by Sir Thomas North of 1579, or its reprint of 1595. Shakespeare's play deals with the final days and assassination of Caesar and shows no interest in his role as Britain's first invader.
Sources
Caesar, Bellum Gallicum, ed. W. Hering (Leipzig, 1987) • Suetonius, Divus Iulius, ed. H. E. Butler and M. Cary (1927) • ‘Life of Caesar’, Plutarch's Lives, ed. and trans. B. Perrin, 7 (1919) • Cicero, Cicero's Letters to Atticus, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 7 vols. (1965–70) • Cicero, Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem et M. Brutum, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (1980) • Catullus, Carmina, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Classical Texts (1958) • Nicolaus of Damascus, ‘Bios kaisaros’, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby (1961), 395–420 • M. Gelzer, Caesar: politician and statesman, trans. P. Needham (1968) [Ger. orig., Caesar: der Politiker und Staatsman, (Munich, 1921)] • J. A. Crook, A. Lintott, and E. Rawson, eds., The Cambridge ancient history, 2nd edn, 9 (1994), chaps. 6–11 • K. Welch and A. Powell, eds., Julius Caesar as artful reporter: the war commentaries as political instruments (1998) • T. R. Holmes, Ancient Britain and the invasions of Julius Caesar (1907), chaps. 6–7 • S. Weinstock, Divus Julius (1971) • W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. A. Humphreys (1984) • J. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (1980) • C. Meier, Caesar, trans. D. McLintock (1995) [Ger. orig., Caesar (Berlin, 1982)]
Nothing is known of Caesar's education. He was twelve when his uncle Marius was driven into exile by Sulla's march on Rome, and thirteen at the time of Marius's vengeful return with Lucius Cornelius Cinna. When he was fifteen, his father died; the following year Caesar broke off his engagement to a girl from a wealthy equestrian family to marry Cinna's daughter Cornelia (d. 69 BC). In 82 BC Sulla returned victorious from the east; by now Marius and Cinna were both dead, and Caesar went into hiding. His relatives successfully pleaded for his life, but the dictator sourly commented ‘There are many Mariuses in that boy’ (‘Life of Caesar’). Caesar left Rome to serve in Asia Minor, where he was decorated for bravery in the attack on Mytilene. He came back to Rome at the news of Sulla's death, and announced his arrival on the political scene with the prosecution (unsuccessful) of a senior senator for extortion. In 75 BC, sailing to Rhodes to study rhetoric, he was captured by pirates; on payment of the ransom, he raised a squadron to defeat them, and had them crucified.
Caesar's first public office was the elective military tribunate (probably in 72 BC); in 69 he was quaestor, serving in Spain; in 65, curule aedile. It was a period of revived hope for popularis politicians: the Sullan oligarchy had proved itself corrupt, and the people's tribunes had regained the powers of which Sulla had stripped them. Caesar advertised his allegiance by his funeral speech for his aunt Julia, widow of Marius, in 69 BC, and by restoring to public view, as aedile, the Marian trophies Sulla had pulled down. In 63 BC, though still a junior senator, and in competition with two distinguished ex-consuls, he got himself elected to the high office of pontifex maximus. He was thirty-seven, already a formidable politician, and no friend of the conservative ‘establishment’ in the senate.
After a stormy praetorship in 62 BC, Caesar's first military command came with his proconsulship of Further Spain, in campaigns against the Callaeci and Lusitani conducted with characteristic decisiveness and dash. He was granted the right to a triumph, which for most Romans was the height of ambition. Caesar chose to forgo it. He wanted the consulship, and by entering the city to declare his candidacy he had to abandon his military command. His ambitions were not those of ordinary Romans. After the consulship there would be a greater command, one like those the people had conferred on Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great), whose triumph over the pirates and Mithridates, an affair of unprecedented splendour, had taken place in 61 BC.
‘Caesar has the wind in his sails just now’, wrote Cicero in June 60 BC (Cicero, ad Atticum, II.1.6). Certainly Caesar's enemies thought so, and did their best to prevent his election as consul, or to commit him in advance to a harmlessly administrative consular command (the forests and drove-roads of Italy). It was in vain: Caesar was elected consul for 59 BC, with the powerful backing of Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, and, having swiftly neutralized his optimate colleague Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, forced through a programme of land distribution in the teeth of furious conservative opposition.
The people's consul was rewarded with an extraordinary command (like those for Pompey in 67 and 66 BC) passed by a tribune's law in May 59 BC: he was to have Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum (that is, northern Italy and the eastern coast of the Adriatic) for five years; Pompey subsequently got the senate to add Gallia Narbonensis (Provence). So the great campaigns of conquest, to rival Pompey's in Asia, would be either eastward or north-westward (in modern terms, either on the middle Danube or in France and Belgium) according to opportunity. As it turned out, the migration of the Helvetii took Caesar west and north. He left Rome as proconsul on or about 19 March 58 BC. When he next entered it, just over nine years later, it would be as an invader in a civil war.
As consul, Caesar's first act had been to make public the proceedings of the senate. As proconsul, he reported his campaigns to the Roman people in annual ‘commentaries’, which have been recognized ever since as masterpieces of military narrative. First (58 BC), the defeat of the Helvetii, and of Ariovistus's Germans; second (57), the defeat of the Nervii (a very close-run thing) and the conquest of the Belgic peoples; third (56), the conquest of Brittany and Aquitaine. In three years, Caesar had conquered to the ocean and the Rhine; now it was time to go beyond.
Again, Caesar kept his options open. The fourth commentarius, for 55 BC, reports the bridging of the Rhine and the punitive raid into Germany, and after that the preliminary expedition to Britain in late summer. Either of those could be repeated on a larger scale the following year, for his allies Pompey and Crassus were now consuls, and the people duly voted him a five-year extension to his command. Britain was the more glamorous option, an adventure beyond Ocean itself, and public opinion in Rome was excited about the conquest of this people at the very ends of the earth (ultimi Britanni, Catullus, 11.11f).
The show of force in September 55 BC was very nearly a disaster. Caesar's main cavalry force was unable to make the crossing; he had the greatest difficulty in getting his two legions disembarked (near Deal in Kent), against fierce opposition; four days after the landing a violent storm and high tides seriously damaged his transports; and when one of the legions was ambushed, only the last-minute arrival of reinforcements prevented its total defeat. In the end Caesar was glad to be able to get back to Gaul in his patched-up transports before the equinox.
For the main assault the following year Caesar ordered the building of large numbers of new transport ships, low in draught to be beached easily, and able to be worked by oars or sail. In the midsummer of 54 BC he set sail from Portus Itius (Boulogne) with five legions and 2000 cavalry, in an armada of 800 ships. Tides and currents made it an awkward crossing, and oars were needed to get the transports to the landing place, probably not far from the previous year's, though this time undefended. The British forces had withdrawn inland to higher ground; Caesar disembarked, left his ships at anchor, and marched inland the same night. His forces had crossed the Stour and captured a British defensive stronghold, probably Bigbury, when news came that a storm had driven the ships ashore, with great damage. Caesar had to return to the coast, organize repairs, send for replacements from Gaul, and bring the ships on shore behind a defensive fortification. In the meantime the Britons had put Cassivellaunus, the powerful king of the Catuvellauni, in command of their forces.
Resuming his advance through Cantium (Kent), after hard fighting against well-organized British cavalry and charioteers, Caesar forced a crossing of the Thames (possibly at Brentford) and eventually found Cassivellaunus's fortress and stormed it. Meanwhile, an attack on the base camp and Caesar's ships was successfully beaten off. Cassivellaunus asked for terms; Caesar accepted his surrender, demanded hostages and an annual tribute, and took his army back to Gaul.
On his return Caesar was told of the death of his only child, his beloved daughter, Julia, Pompey's wife, in childbirth in her early twenties. (Julia's mother, Caesar's first wife, Cornelia, had also died young; his second wife, Pompeia, was divorced in 62 BC, for not being ‘above suspicion’; he then married Calpurnia, who outlived him—it was she who had bad dreams on the night before the ides of March.) He also found dangerous unrest in Gaul, which was why he had come back so quickly. It soon blew up into full-scale rebellion in the Belgic lands, with one Roman winter camp wiped out and another, under Cicero's brother Quintus, only narrowly saved from the same fate. One and a half legions, about 7000 men, were lost in the disaster.
It is not known where or when the fifth book of commentaries was written; Caesar was desperately occupied in the winter of 54–53 BC. But it contains, among other things, the first ever account of the geography and ethnography of Britain: ‘The island is triangular in shape, with one side facing Gaul … The second side faces westward, towards Spain’ (Caesar, v.12–14). As Caesar's contemporary Catullus confirms (ultima occidentis insula, Catullus, 29.12), the Romans thought of Britain as in the far west, close to Spain. It was a fitting scene for a heroic epic, duly composed by Cicero from material supplied by his brother (Cicero, Ad Q. fratrem, II.14.2, 16.4, III.7.6). But now that adventure was over, as Quintus, after his narrow escape, knew better than most.
Caesar spent the next four years reconquering his conquests. The great pan-Gallic rebellion of Vercingetorix in 52 BC came very close to destroying his whole achievement, and him with it. His enemies in Rome took heart: Crassus was dead, Pompey could be seduced to their side as the protector of the republic. They were determined to destroy Caesar, and he was determined not to be destroyed. In January 49 BC he threw the dice in the air and marched into Italy.
With his battle-hardened army of veterans, Caesar fought his civil war against Pompey and the republicans all over the empire of Rome, and beyond: Spain in 49 BC, Thessaly in 48 (defeating Pompey at Pharsalus), Alexandria in 48–7 (where he probably wrote the three books of his De bello civili commentaries), Asia Minor in 47 (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’), and above all north Africa in 46, where Marcus Porcius Cato, symbol of the old republic, killed himself after Caesar's victory at Utica. In September 46 BC, by the then calendar, Caesar at last held the great triumph that would outshine Pompey's of fifteen years before. He was now dictator for a ten-year term, with a formidable programme of projects of which the most lasting was the Julian calendar, introduced on 1 January 45 BC. But warfare still preoccupied him: first against Pompey's sons in Spain, won only by a hair's breadth at the battle of Munda (March 45 BC), and then a planned campaign against the Parthians, to avenge Crassus. But by now his autocracy was openly regal, and deeply offensive to the senate. He was careless of his own security, trusting perhaps in the luck that had protected him for so long. The latest of his long line of mistresses was Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, now conspicuously living in Rome; in 44 BC he was made dictator for life; the month of his birth, Quinctilis, was renamed ‘July’; a cult of Caesar, with his own priest (flamen), was instituted. It was too much. On 15 March he was murdered in the Curia Pompei in Rome by republican senators under the leadership of Cato's son-in-law Marcus Junius Brutus.
The body lay where it fell, unworthily fouled with the blood of a man who had forced his way to the west as far as Britain and Ocean, and intended to force his way to the east against the empires of Parthia and India. (Nicolaus of Damascus, 95)
So Nicolaus of Damascus, writing about twenty years after the event, sums up the many-sided genius of Caesar in the way he would probably have wanted, as an imperial conqueror.
In 42 BC Caesar was deified. The heir to his name and fortune was his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, whom he adopted in his will as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and who dedicated the temple of Divus Julius on 18 Sextilis (later ‘August’) 29 BC, immediately after his own triumph over Cleopatra's Egypt. The young Caesar ‘Octavian’ became Caesar Augustus, and thereafter Caesar's name became synonymous with imperial autocracy throughout the history of Europe.
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was first performed in 1599 and has always been one of his most frequently performed plays. Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's Lives (written some 150 years after Caesar's death) in the translation by Sir Thomas North of 1579, or its reprint of 1595. Shakespeare's play deals with the final days and assassination of Caesar and shows no interest in his role as Britain's first invader.
Sources
Caesar, Bellum Gallicum, ed. W. Hering (Leipzig, 1987) • Suetonius, Divus Iulius, ed. H. E. Butler and M. Cary (1927) • ‘Life of Caesar’, Plutarch's Lives, ed. and trans. B. Perrin, 7 (1919) • Cicero, Cicero's Letters to Atticus, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 7 vols. (1965–70) • Cicero, Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem et M. Brutum, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (1980) • Catullus, Carmina, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Classical Texts (1958) • Nicolaus of Damascus, ‘Bios kaisaros’, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby (1961), 395–420 • M. Gelzer, Caesar: politician and statesman, trans. P. Needham (1968) [Ger. orig., Caesar: der Politiker und Staatsman, (Munich, 1921)] • J. A. Crook, A. Lintott, and E. Rawson, eds., The Cambridge ancient history, 2nd edn, 9 (1994), chaps. 6–11 • K. Welch and A. Powell, eds., Julius Caesar as artful reporter: the war commentaries as political instruments (1998) • T. R. Holmes, Ancient Britain and the invasions of Julius Caesar (1907), chaps. 6–7 • S. Weinstock, Divus Julius (1971) • W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. A. Humphreys (1984) • J. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (1980) • C. Meier, Caesar, trans. D. McLintock (1995) [Ger. orig., Caesar (Berlin, 1982)]
The Crisis Of Language And The Language Of Crisis
Language has become trivialized in our modern world, stripped of its depth and power. Where words were once experienced as rich, pregnant with signification, in our finessed and fragmented vocabulary all that has changed. Now a strictly logistical principle appears to hold sway, reducing the word to a mere symbol, a simple placeholder in a syllogism (as demonstrated in an earlier post), having a single, unambiguously identifiable referent, and only one. A must equal A, and it can never equal B, let alone A, B and C all together, at once. There must only be one precise meaning for each word – everything disambiguated – following both the scientific ideals and legalistic requirements of our culture.
But if you look back into the obscure and shadowy history of language, you would find a time and place before the written word, where there was only talking, with oral traditions passed down from generation to generation. Written language, emerging approximately six thousand years ago, only fully appeared coincident with the birth of cities – with civilization and history. We began to make history only when we began to write history!
This was another momentous invention of domesticated life. With the birth of cities on the heels of agriculture, it was necessary to develop stable and uniform systems of social and political control to handle the gathering together of diverse and unrelated village, clan and tribal members as urban strangers – within and well beyond the city walls. This demanded a severe change in the nature of human communication, including the removal of polysemic ambiguity in primal speech, and the articulation of a strictly univocal, written tongue. Such linguistic rationalization was only effected with the invention of the syllogism, early on perfected by the Greeks, and recast by legislators, scientists, and other specialists down through the ages. According to syllogistic reasoning, universal statements were to be related to particular circumstances within a coherent logistical structure leading to logical legal and scientific conclusions. So it all comes down to “precise words and correct syntax...that is where social laws are made and natural laws are made or discovered.”
Long before such sweeping linguistic changes took hold, our pre-historical talk and proto-historical writing were much involved in myth. Passed on from originally oral sources, myth had a textural depth and resonance that was still packed with meaning. Not only did the mythic word call up multiple referents, but also the copula between those diverse referents was extremely strong. To speak the name of something was in fact to invoke its existence, to feel its power as fully present. It was not then as it is now, where a metaphor or a simile merely suggests something else. To identify your totem for a preliterate gatherer-hunter was to be identical with it, and to feel the presence of your clan animal within you.
Even revisiting some of the earliest known written languages, for example, Old Kingdom Egyptian, you find yourself immersed within a poly-semantic world whose non-alphabetic characters bear precisely this sort of weight and significance. Hieroglyphic writing still retained almost as much multi-referential power as did the preliterate word of far-older, oral traditions. In fact, the hieroglyphs for various Egyptian divinities – Ra, Ptah, Isis, Osiris – would not only allow of multiple referents; they also embodied the power of the particular divinity symbolized on the sarcophagus or on the temple wall.
Such was the strength, the potency, of primal languages. Over millennia of civilization, these languages were forced into univocity and impotence. Stripped of their resonant depth, words became flattened-out under the requirements of an unambiguous, linear history and a scientific requirement of syllogistic communication that eventually defined the direction of modern thought and life.
But if you look back into the obscure and shadowy history of language, you would find a time and place before the written word, where there was only talking, with oral traditions passed down from generation to generation. Written language, emerging approximately six thousand years ago, only fully appeared coincident with the birth of cities – with civilization and history. We began to make history only when we began to write history!
This was another momentous invention of domesticated life. With the birth of cities on the heels of agriculture, it was necessary to develop stable and uniform systems of social and political control to handle the gathering together of diverse and unrelated village, clan and tribal members as urban strangers – within and well beyond the city walls. This demanded a severe change in the nature of human communication, including the removal of polysemic ambiguity in primal speech, and the articulation of a strictly univocal, written tongue. Such linguistic rationalization was only effected with the invention of the syllogism, early on perfected by the Greeks, and recast by legislators, scientists, and other specialists down through the ages. According to syllogistic reasoning, universal statements were to be related to particular circumstances within a coherent logistical structure leading to logical legal and scientific conclusions. So it all comes down to “precise words and correct syntax...that is where social laws are made and natural laws are made or discovered.”
Long before such sweeping linguistic changes took hold, our pre-historical talk and proto-historical writing were much involved in myth. Passed on from originally oral sources, myth had a textural depth and resonance that was still packed with meaning. Not only did the mythic word call up multiple referents, but also the copula between those diverse referents was extremely strong. To speak the name of something was in fact to invoke its existence, to feel its power as fully present. It was not then as it is now, where a metaphor or a simile merely suggests something else. To identify your totem for a preliterate gatherer-hunter was to be identical with it, and to feel the presence of your clan animal within you.
Even revisiting some of the earliest known written languages, for example, Old Kingdom Egyptian, you find yourself immersed within a poly-semantic world whose non-alphabetic characters bear precisely this sort of weight and significance. Hieroglyphic writing still retained almost as much multi-referential power as did the preliterate word of far-older, oral traditions. In fact, the hieroglyphs for various Egyptian divinities – Ra, Ptah, Isis, Osiris – would not only allow of multiple referents; they also embodied the power of the particular divinity symbolized on the sarcophagus or on the temple wall.
Such was the strength, the potency, of primal languages. Over millennia of civilization, these languages were forced into univocity and impotence. Stripped of their resonant depth, words became flattened-out under the requirements of an unambiguous, linear history and a scientific requirement of syllogistic communication that eventually defined the direction of modern thought and life.
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