Great Names in History

It was the middle of March, 85 BC—the Ides, in fact. The whole family turned up at the not-very-big house in the Subura district—hardly an aristocratic one. Julius, still in his toga praetexta, his boy’s toga, went to meet them one by one at the door as they arrived. It was his big day: the day he would become a Roman citizen and put on the toga virilis. He kept adjusting his toga and brushing his hair with his hands. He was handsome and had spent time at the mirror studying what he thought were penetrating glances. But then while he spoke to the guests and followed a thought, he forgot about how he looked.

His family collecting in the atrium were old Roman patricians except for Uncle Marius. Uncle Marius had been a plough-boy. He was a short man with big hands and a peasant’s loud way of talking. Now he was retired but seven-times he had been consul. He had saved Rome at least twice. He had defeated the proud African king Jugurtha in battle and brought him to Rome in chains; he had reformed the army in time to save the Republic from a massive barbarian invasion of Teutons and Cimbri in the north. Marius was insensitive to the fineries Caesar was used to; but Caesar was able to overcome his distaste for Marius’ manners while they talked and to learn from him. And Marius was able to overcome his distaste for Caesar’s foppish manners because he saw that the boy had a mind.

Marius was married to Caesar’s Aunt Julia. Julia and her sister Aurelia, Caesar’s mother, were the kind of educated, intelligent women Rome was famous for. They were from noble old families and ones in which the girls received the same instruction as the boys and joined in the talk on every subject from war and politics to literature and art. They were married to the best men their dad could find. For Aurelia he managed a match with the Julius family—one of the oldest patrician gentilitates in Italy. And for her sister he won a marriage with Marius, now champion of the popular faction and one of the most influential men in Rome.
When they saw each other the two women hugged with tears in their eyes. They were always elegantly dressed but today their ornatrices had been particularly punctilious. “My God you look beautiful,” Julia told her younger sister. “Anyone would say you are Julius’ sister.”

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The crypt was chilly and musty. He remembered waiting for the oracle at Delphi, which was fragrant with bay leaves and barley.
His mind began to drift. He began thinking about the march that would begin that same afternoon and he wished he had brought along something to write with or could begin dictating orders to a scribe. A shame to be wasting time like this.

Finally the voice came. “Pilgrim, come forth!” This time it was a girl’s voice. It was cheerful, not lugubrious or trance-like as he had suspected it would be. Pilgrim, eh? So the old priest hadn’t forgotten that one and was directing the oracle. Damn!

Caesar walked forward a few paces and saw an open niche on the wall. A cloth like a curtain hung on the other side and blocked his view of the oracle.
“Blessed is the man who comes to the god,” she said. “Welcome!”

The girl spoke very slowly and clearly in faultless Greek. She had been chosen to be an oracle as a child and educated by other, older oracles in a school for priestesses. They all spoke Greek and their model was the Delphic Pythia or perhaps the oracles at the Temple of Apollo in Athens. Hearing such competent Greek charmed Caesar, who loved language and good diction. He had expected to hear an ignorant girl talk clumsily. This oracle spoke classical Greek better than he himself. That was the way a god would speak, all right. Now that was a start!

He reached up and moved the curtain aside to see the girl. A woman of about his own age sat on a tripod, so high her head nearly touched the ceiling. She wore a simple tunic and her blonde hair was cut short. She looked intelligent. She didn’t notice Caesar. He looked around the room where she sat and was relieved to see she was alone: the High Priest had gone. Caesar quietly closed the curtain again.

“Child of the gods,” began the oracle. “Caesar!” She had learned his name. “Do not be troubled. Fortune has favored you above all other men. She will assist you and protect you until your work is accomplished here above. You must have faith—She will not abandon you, though now it seems that you have been cast aside. Do not complain, as you did yesterday after seeing the statue of Alexander. Yes—by your age he had conquered the world. But his place in Fortune’s plan was less important than yours.”

“Less important?” said Caesar. “Less important than being a tax-collecting quaestor in Spain, two thousand miles from Rome? Less important than collecting debts from Pompey’s clients here? It is Pompey whom Fortune has favored, not Caesar.
Caesar is nobody. My military career went nowhere. Sure, at Mytilene I won the the civic crown but so have half the centurions in the army. Compare that to my Uncle Marius’s record. He beat King Jugurtha and saved the country. Then he beat the Cimbri and the Teutons and saved it again. He was consul seven times. Even my father was praetor.
And as a lawyer I did no better. I showed promise—promise! They told me I spoke as well as Cicero—very helpful! But that didn’t help me win my first case against Dolabella. I had to leave Rome to protect myself afterwards. Between Sulla’s people and the oppositon of the Optimates, I simply can’t get anywhere. Or rather, I get to Hispania Ulterior.”

“You were sent here by the gods.”

“Then they must have no use for me either,” whined Caesar.

“Man of little faith! You are not to presume to know more than they, Caesar.
Don’t you even believe the words that you yourself pronounced at your Aunt Julia’s funeral last year—that you are descended from a hero-king and a goddess? Do you dare to be cynical even here, in the presence of the god?”

Caesar accepted her scolding. For the last time in his life he became the serious child his mother and his Aunt Julia had brought up.
“I was so moved at Julia’s funeral because I was ashamed of myself. She had so much faith in me. I spent half my boyhood at Aunt Julia’s. My Uncle Marius was the consul. They loved me and believed they were bringing up a future consul. I sat at table with them and listened to all the great men of Rome—all the great men who were not Optimates, of course, and whom Marius had forced out of Rome. Sulla was in Asia with his army and we all knew that there would be trouble, probably a civil war, when he came home. But during those years Rome belonged to us, to the people. I was sure I was going to have a brilliant future. Then Sulla came back, he took terrible vengeance and the Optimates got back into power. Since then they have been foiling every plan I ever had. Aunt Julia’s education was not enough. All my talents are not enough. It was only with much bribing that I was able to become quaestor.”

“You speak as though your life were through,” said the oracle. “The best you are meant to do lies ahead. What was the dream the gods sent you?”

“A nightmare, Oracle, a dream full of troubled, unnatural, vicious acts.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the girl. “Perhaps the vicious acts were not so at all.”

“In the dream I slept with my mother,” said Caesar.

“And you possessed her?”

“I raped her.”

The oracle never hesitated. “That wasn’t your mother but the very Earth, Gea. You possessed the earth itself, the common parent of all mankind. The name of Caesar will live for thousands of years, long after those of Marius and Pompey have been forgotten. You are the man who has been chosen to save your nation from destruction. Because of you, Rome will continue to rule and to civilize the earth until it is ready for another kind of empire and a greater design of the heavenly Creator.”

I wish I could believe that, thought Caesar.
In fact, he did believe it. He had always felt his own superiority to the men around him. He took it for granted. He could never simply watch or suffer the circumstances of his life: his clear vision of them made him intervene. Wherever he went it seemed to him that men needed the direction apparently only he could give them. That was what he could never understand. Most men seemed so helpless—was he the only one who saw the obvious? Why was it his duty to stop and take the world by the hand?
“I can’t possess the world from this end of it,” said Caesar.
“You can possess the world wherever it pleases the gods to give it to you. Go back to Rome,” said the oracle. “Speak to the propraetor and ask for a discharge. Your work here as quaestor is finished. Today—now—your mission has begun.”
“And today’s march north? I can’t simply leave. I am so deeply in debt, I…”
“In Rome you will find help. There is a wealthy man there who will aid you. Go now. The god is with you.”

Caesar walked up the dark stairs of the cellar and out into the open courtyard of the Herakleion. It had stopped raining. The cloud cover had torn open in places and let the sunlight through. His lictors were waiting with the horses. He liked the oracle’s order to ask for a discharge and return to Rome and he was already planning what he would say to the propraetor. He was impatient to begin. Caesar never did learn patience—maybe the gods who had made him impatient, never meant to correct the fault.

Before leaving for Rome he bribed one of the priests to allow a sculptor to make a mold of the temple door reliefs. They were cast in bronze and packed on a ship out of sight of the Herakleion. They would have been a wonderful and surprising—a unique—adornment to his house in Rome. Unfortunately, it was not part of the gods’ plans to allow the reliefs to reach Ostia, the Roman port. They sent a storm to sink the ship.

Return to Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part One)

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The next morning a temple acolyte came to the Roman camp with the news that the oracle was ready to receive the quaestor. The acolyte wore the same white alb as the temple priests, and his head was shaved, which made his eyes seem enormous. He had never seen a Roman camp or any camp of soldiers, and he seemed so fascinated that the guard let him peek in through the gate. A bugle sounded. “What’s that?” he asked the guard, his eyes all full of wonder.
“That’s the call for breakfast.”
“Is the food good?”
“Chah! Coom see, coom sah.”
“Which tent is the quaestor’s?”
“See that big one in the center, with the red flag flying?”

The boy looked at the guard’s armor, his shield and his sword.
“Can I touch your sword?”
“Touch all you want,” said the guard. “I can’t unsheathe it for you, though, kid: we’re not allowed to do that only for the hell of it.”
“Are you going to go fight soon?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Did you ever kill anybody?”
The guard nodded. “Hey, kid, you’d better get back to the temple. They’re going to think you got lost. Or some floozy got her hands on you.” He started laughing as he pictured the floozy getting her hands on the big-eyed boy.

Caesar rode to the temple on horseback, with four military lictors. He was better on a horse than any of them.
It was raining when they reached the Herakleion. A young deacon walked towards Caesar as he jumped down from his dripping horse. Roman riders had no stirrups—there was no stepping down, only jumping. And Caesar was as agile as a boy, though he was thirty-one now.

The deacon showed them where to shelter their horses and he led Caesar alone to a cellar beside the temple. A sickening smell of rotten flesh and incense hung in the air; and as Caesar descended the cellar steps, the smell of mold became strong. There were small oil lamps burning in niches along the stairs to light the way.
The cellar itself was lighted, not very effectively, with two torches on the wall. The place might have been a tomb. Caesar didn’t like to be enclosed that way. He had had to hand his sword over to one of the lictors before coming down and now he felt trapped. Where was the darned oracle anyway? Was she going to pop out of a niche in the wall? Caesar decided this was the last time he played their silly games. Couldn’t these prophets talk to a fellow face to face in a normal room? Such cheap histrionics! “Oracle!” he shouted out. Who gave orders to who?

A voice answered from the wall at the far end of the cellar. But it wasn’t a girl’s voice. It was the voice of the High Priest. “The priestess is in deep meditation, preparing herself to receive the spirit of the God. You must do the same. Without the proper disposition you will learn nothing from the God. Humility, Excellency. You are in the crypt where the body of our Lord lies.”

So the High Priest is going to whip me into obedience, is he? thought Caesar. Does he mean to coach the oracle?

Caesar tried to meditate. Did he feel awe? Did he really believe that the God Herakles would speak to him through the ignorant girl on the other side of the wall?

In politics Caesar was cynical. He would say one thing and do another. He bribed. He schemed, he threatened. He spent fortunes on games and shows to win the vote of the Roman rabble. He was religious in the legalistic Roman way though not at all superstitious. He performed the prescribed sacrifices and observed the religious laws but he never let a so-called divine warning—a faulty liver, a bad omen—keep him from undertaking a battle or a trip. He was known to invent an omen to bring fearful soldiers his way.

And yet an oracle was another matter. The oracle was a god speaking directly, using the girl for his voice. The greatest men of antiquity had consulted the Delphic Oracle in Greece, and her predictions and other utterances had formed part—had determined part—of history. Who could forget the Oracle’s declaration that Socrates was the wisest man in the world? Or her sound political advice to Lykurgus and Solon? Or her advice to Croessus, the vain Lydian king, to know himself?

Caesar had been brought up on Greek myths and the beautiful stories of Greek heroes. He could recite whole passages of the Illiad and the Odyssey. His head was filled with the deeds of Achilles and Ulysses and Agamemnon. Ever since he could remember, Caesar had considered himself one of the heroes.
Not twenty-four hours ago he had puzzled a comrade by complaining that he, Caesar, was getting nowhere. “By my age Alexander the Great had conquered the world.” Was that the career Caesar was dreaming up for himself?
Alexander had consulted the Delphic and other oracles. He had made a pilgrimage to the temple of Isis in the Egyptian desert. He believed the gods spoke through their messengers. Why shouldn’t they?
In any case, Caesar thought he could himself judge by the oracle’s dictum whether it came from an ignorant peasant girl or a god.

See Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part Three)

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Caesar went straight to the Herakleion in Cadiz. It wasn’t just tourism: he had some business for the oracle there. His visit had been announced beforehand—he was coming with the Roman propraetor—and the priests turned out in their white robes and welcomed the two Roman officers on the steps of the temple.

The Herakleion, the most famous shrine in the West, looked from the outside like a Greek temple. The facade was a triangular pediment supported by four columns. You walked up the steep steps, passed through the two central columns and entered through enormous bronze doors.

Caesar stopped to look at the sculpture that covered the doors. “I see you appreciate art,” said the eldest of the priests, smiling. He spoke Greek, not Latin.
“The Twelve Labors of the God,” said Caesar. Caesar’s Greek was fluent. “Very beautiful. Could a reproduction of these doors be made and sent back to Rome?”
“I’m sorry,” said the old priest. “Our rules don’t allow even drawings to be made.”
Caesar nodded. He decided to repeat his question to the priest when he made his donation to the sanctuary. He could just see those beautiful reliefs on one of the doors of a Roman palace he was always mentally designing for himself.

The temple was only partially roofed, so inside it wasn’t dark like Roman temples. The altar at the far end was open to the sky. Even so, the place smelled a little. Every day priests sacrificed a lamb or a dove and sprinkled its blood on the altar. A fire burned on a tripod but there was no statue of the god. The Phoenicians, who had founded the temple a thousand years before, didn’t allow images of their divinities. They had not dedicated it to Hercules but to their own god Melkart, whose famous temple they had left behind in Tyre at the other end of the Mediterranean. Since those days the Phoenicians and even their descendents in Carthage had disappeared and the Greeks had come and Melkart had become Herakles, a Greek god who was so similar to the Phoenician one that everyone just let one do for the other. To the Romans Herakles was Hercules—they were all names for the same god-hero.
He was buried in a crypt under the temple—the mortal remains of him.

“You will notice the various chapels or side-altars,” said the old priest-guide. “This one is dedicated to Old Age; the others are to Poverty, to Art, to Death, to the Month, and to the Year.”
They looked like old attics, filled with strange wax exvotos and dried cloth, wooden and metal undefinables (weapons?), covered with the dust of ages. Each had an altar and each stank with the sacred stench of blood sacrifice.
“If either of your Excellencies would like to make an offering to one of the……..”
“Not right now, Reverend,” said Caesar. “I’d like to consult the oracle.”
The young priests looked at each other in confusion and embarrassment. The old priest said: “The oracle is on retreat right now. She will be unavailable for……”
“Tell her this is urgent,” said Caesar.
“I have no way of reaching her,” said the old priest. “She is in the mountains twenty miles from here in a sanctuary.”
“That’s no problem,” said Caesar, “I’ll send one of my tribunes after her.”

Caesar didn’t ask whether the shrine rules allowed the oracle to be fetched from her sacred prayers. Caesar was like that. Rules were for people who had no choice but to obey them—not for him. He wasn’t going to let an oracle keep him waiting. He had seen oracles in Greece and Asia and he had no illusions about them. He had walked away from the Delphic Oracle in anger because she didn’t seem to understand who he was. She seemed to think he was just another rich Roman student and predicted “a successful career” for him, and “lots of children”—that idiot.

The old priest now at the Herakleion didn’t care for Caesar’s pushiness. Romans thought they could go anywhere and order people around. Everyone else came to the Herakleion with a little humility. “Our rules require the oracle to spend a complete week fasting and praying. That is part of her purification. This is the most sacred time of year and under no circumstances can her duties to the God be interrupted.”
“Don’t you have a substitute?” asked Caesar.

The priest glared at him without answering. He knew what was coming next.
“I would be willing to make a very substantial offering to the temple,” said Caesar.
“Men don’t make offerings to the temple, Excellency, but to the immortal God.”
“I will make one to the immortal god and another to the temple,” said Caesar.

The High Priest was quiet for a while. He was sorry the other priests were hearing this conversation, which seemed to show them that there could be negotiations on such matters as the Holy Rule.
“In any case you couldn’t see the oracle immediately,” he finally told Caesar. “Pilgrims to this sanctuary must spend an entire day in fasting and prayer before their consultation with the oracle. No one is sinless before the God.”

“That’s the first I ever heard of that rule,” said Caesar, beginning to swell. “I have friends who have seen your oracle and no fasting was required of them. I have been to Delphos and to Athens and, though they recommend preparation before seeing the oracle, they don’t insist on it. Besides, I am not a pilgrim.”
“Not a pilgrim?” frowned the old priest. “Then what are you, Excellency?”

The pro-praetor, who had come with Caesar, didn’t like the turn of this conversation. It should have been friendly or at least cordial. He decided to try to re-direct it:
“You must forgive my colleague’s impatience, Holy Father,” he said. “He will take command of an army within a few days and cannot stay here in Gades long. Privately he has told me of a troubling dream and an interpretation by your oracle would ease his mind and allow him to work better. He is a devout man who fears the gods and means no disrespect. But he has the fault of impatience.”
“Perhaps it is time he corrected that fault.”
“He has come here because he believes in the world-famous wisdom of the Herakleion Oracle. That faith alone shows his earnestness and his respect.”

“I will fast and say the reglamentary prayers while on the march to Portugal,” said Caesar. “After I speak with the oracle.”

That afternoon Caesar sent the priest his offering—two talents. That was a huge amount for a consultation with an oracle. On a talent the entire community of priests could live for a month. Caesar borrowed the talents—he didn’t have that kind of money. In fact he was one thousand three hundred talents in debt to Roman bankers. He had borrowed their money to pay for his campaigns as military tribune and quaestor.
How would he pay it all back?

With the booty he proposed to get from the wars he was about to start with the Portuguese. With a little luck he should get those one thousand three hundred talents and much more. With a little luck (and the forcing of luck) he would become a rich man. What would he do with his wealth? Buy his way into the most powerful office in Rome. He didn’t want wealth—he wanted power.
See Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part Two)
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