By Elizabeth Lev
ROME, MARCH 12, 2009 (Zenit.org).- «Julius Caesar» remains one of the best-known names of Ancient Rome. It lives on as the popular female name Julia, and it spawned the titles of Tsar and Kaiser. While Julius has enjoyed both praise and blame in his centuries of renown, his name has never been forgotten. He achieved his greatest goal, immortality.
For the first time in Italy, an exhibit in the cloister of the Roman church Santa Maria della Pace explores this fascinating figure, from the historical facts to the scintillating lore to the lasting legend that still captivates today.
Caesar was born around 100 B.C. into the «gens Iulia,» one of the noblest and most ancient families of Rome, but was raised in an impoverished household in a tenement district of Rome. He grew up during the difficult age of civil wars on the Italian peninsula caused by the strife between the two most powerful men in Rome, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
Visitors to the exhibit are greeted by a beautifully modeled bust of Julius Caesar from the Vatican Museums. The distinctive features — high brow, slightly aquiline nose and high cheekbones — reveal portraiture at the brink of the Empire. The republican desire for individuality remains in the wrinkled forehead and deep-set eyes, but the new idealization of imperial imagery is hinted at through the elegant lines of the face.
Caesar’s Rome was torn between two warring political factions, the Optimates and the Populares. The Optimates represented the old nobles bent on retaining the privileges of the aristocracy while the latter comprised new members of the Senate. The Populares frequently used rhetorical demagoguery, attempting to harness the power of the masses of discontent Romans.
Caesar, of aristocratic lineage, joined the Populares hoping to reconcile the two increasingly opposed groups. Extraordinary even in youth, he had survived Sulla’s assassination attempt, won the Civic crown at 19 and took a seat in the Senate soon after.
A famous anecdote recounts Caesar’s awareness of his own singularity from the outset. He was kidnapped by pirates in 74 B.C., who demanded a ransom of 20 talents. Caesar declared himself worth 50 talents and vowed that he would pay his ransom, and then return to capture and crucify the pirates, a promise he kept.
Caesar’s public life is represented in the exhibition through a bronze tablet inscribed with several of his laws. Another intriguing object is an image of a senator’s chair, the «sedile curule,» next to a similar seat found in the ruins of Pompeii. Portraits of Pompey and Crassus, who formed the triumvirate with Julius in 60 B.C. to rule Rome, sit next to the portrait of Cicero, one of Caesar’s bitterest enemies. In the dark exhibition space it feels like witnessing a meeting of the ancient Senate.
Caesar’s exploits continued to amaze Rome. Taking governorship of Gaul from 58 to 52, Caesar subdued the entire territory ultimately conquering the Gaul king Vercingetorix. His political alliance was unraveling, but his prestige was growing. Highlights of the show are the artifacts from the excavations from the site of Caesar’s campaign in Gaul. Swords of Gaul, some in excellent condition, Roman lance points and helmets render vivid the memory of Caesar’s victories.
The triumvirate dissolved with the death of Crassus and soon the Optimates drew Pompey to their side. Faced with the order to disband his legions and return to Rome, on Jan. 10, 49 B.C., Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome.
The resulting civil war did not end until Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus in 48 B.C.. Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt, where he found his former ally treacherously murdered and met Cleopatra. In true Italian form, the exhibit, dedicates much space to the romance between Caesar and Cleopatra. A striking bust in black basalt presents the exotic Egyptian queen, while nearby a delicate portrait in Parian marble depicts her as similar to a Greek goddess.
In the land where rulers were divinities, one wonders if it was here where Julius first dreamed of immortality. A low relief shows Caesar as the Egyptian god Amon with his consort Cleopatra as the goddess Mut and their son Caesarion.
Back in Rome, Caesar was emphasizing the Julian connections with divinity. His family claimed a direct tie to Aeneas the Trojan prince who was the son of the goddess Venus. In the last year of his life, Caesar assumed the title of Jupiter Julius, associating himself with the king of the gods.
Caesar erected a new forum, with a lofty temple dedicated to Venus Genetrix, as progenitor of his clan. A stunning statue from the Louvre shows what the cult statue would have looked like, with the elegant goddess draped in a long white robe, holding the golden apple as the most beautiful of all.
Cases of exquisite handicrafts reflect Caesar’s taste for luxuries. Silver drinking cups, glass plates, gold jewels and minute mosaics reflect a love of things temporal, but Caesar always kept his eye on posterity.
Caesar was assassinated in the Curia of Pompey on the Ides of March 44 B.C., but for his legend, this was only the beginning. The rest of the exhibit studies how the memory of Caesar’s feats only grew after his death. His cremation in the Forum by a grief-stricken mob of Romans attested to the fact that while many Romans would not accept Caesar as king, they were willing to accept him as a god.
Caesar’s adopted son and designated heir Octavian, later to be known as Augustus, did the most to promote Caesar’s deification. Everything he commissioned, from decorative reliefs of Roman histories to Virgil’s Aenead written from 28-19 B.C., was intended to establish the divine lineage of the gens Iulia.
On Aug. 18, 29 B.C., Augustus dedicated the temple to the Divine Julius, the first temple in the Forum to a man who had become a god. Erected on the site of his ad hoc cremation, the temple faced the great shrine of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. Caesar had achieved what no Roman had done before him, official recognition of his immortality.
The subsequent emperors would claim deity based on the precedent of Julius Caesar and Rome would be littered with temples to the deified Hadrian, Claudius and others. Caesar had forged a new path of conquest for Rome where men become gods.
Meanwhile, in the very age when the emperors began to imagine that they could live forever, the true promise of eternal life was born. Forty four years after the death of Caesar, in the reign of his successor Augustus, Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. As altars and shrines to neo-deities proliferated through the Empire, Jesus would teach there is only one path to eternal life — through him.
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Forever Punished
While the Romans on the cusp of the Empire established deification as the greatest honor that could be conferred on man, they similarly devised a punishment intended to reach beyond the confines of mortal life, the «condamnatio memoriae.»
The condemnation of memory, a posthumous punishment, came into being when Emperors could expect deification in due course. Images of apotheosis abounded in Rome from Titus peering from the back of an eagle as he is born heavenward, to the finely wrought Antoninus Pius and Faustina being conveyed by winged figures.
An emperor who had too flagrantly abused his power, however, would not only be denied divinity, but as in the case of Emperor Domitian, assassinated in 96, the Senate «… could not restrain itself from outdoing one another in showering the defunct with injurious and violent invectives, and from ordering ladders brought immediately to detach the images and busts of Domitian and throw them to the ground.»
The historian Suetonius also tells us that they «decreed that they erase all his inscriptions and cancel his memory.» In a world where immortality was everything, the deliberate destruction of a man’s deeds and memory
was the cruelest punishment of all. With no chance of ever rehabilitating his name, the cloud of ignominy would dwell over him forever.
In the vindictive spirit of this decree, detractors heaped accounts of misdeeds upon misdeeds, each more graphically detailed than the next. Roman «transparency» decreed that sexual aberrations be exhaustively recounted and murders described in gory exactitude, while all positive exploits and achievements were systematically effaced.
The miscreant would be consigned to history as an appalling being, with no redeeming quality worthy of remembrance and respect.
Christianity took judgment after death out of the hands of men, mobs and senators and put it in the hands of God. Compassion and prayer for the dead replaced the persecution of a person’s memory. While Christians declared «saints» of those who exhibited exceptional virtue, especially the martyrs, they never thought to draft a list of the damned, commending all rather to God’s mercy and leaving judgment to him.
The Christian injunction to not speak ill of the dead and to avoid defamation grew from the Christian virtue of charity, Christ’s «new commandment.» As the greatest of all virtues, it superseded the pagan desire to pursue retribution beyond the grave, commending to God’s mercy and justice the faithful departed.
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Elizabeth Lev teaches Christian art and architecture at Duquesne University’s Italian campus and the University of St. Thomas Catholic studies program. She can be reached at lizlev@zenit.org.