Caesar as Archetype
Presented on: Tuesday, June 4, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 25 of 54
Caesar as Archetype
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, June 4, 1985
Transcript:
This is a lecture delivered on Tuesday, June the 4th, 1985 at The Whirling Rainbow by Roger Ware. It's on the archetypal character of Julius Caesar.
And with Caesar we come to back to Alexandria. It's appropriate that the juncture of Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Hebrew history now comes to focus in one place. Julius Caesar is made in Alexandria. It's difficult to form an impression of the man. We have the following description - this is from Suetonius. Suetonius was writing several generations later. He was privileged to have access to information that we no longer possess. So, Suetonius' Twelve Caesars - this is the translation by Robert Graves - is interesting. He writes, "Caesar is said to have been tall, fair, and well built, with a rather broad face and keen, dark brown eyes. His health was sound, apart from sudden comas and a tendency to nightmares which troubled him towards the end of his life." And in fact, at least twice in his lifetime, Caesar was subject to epileptic fits. This psychological pressure of being prone to being seized from within by your own nervous system made Caesar the kind of man, the kind of a character, who disciplines himself on all levels, all the time, but is wise enough in his comprehensive alertness to allow for times of complete abandonment and wildness which gives you a very strange character.
For instance, Caesar was famous for his affairs. The affairs were not really indications of lust, but indications of letting himself go on purpose, making sure that he was aerated. He would do the same with his troops. The same troops that he disciplined. Constantly he would tell his troops, you have to be alert all the time. You have to be watching me all the time. And he would, sometimes, in the midst of long campaigns, put on disguises and attempt to slip out of camp unseen, depending upon the soldiers ability, the guards, the centurions, and everyone in the whole staff down to the common soldiers to be aware of what he was doing and to just follow him without question. And he would punish men if they were not alert. Those same men were sometimes given carte blanche to celebrate in the wildest of ways. So, he treated his troops, his army, like himself. His need for this complete control introduced into his personality the need to be aggressively dynamic all the time. It wasn't that Caesar plotted. It was that Caesar lived a trajectory and it had to be fed all the time - constantly. And this made him then not susceptible to the normal habitual customary dictates of the personality. It made him susceptible to the extraordinary, more indelible subconscious structures. He was a moving target and engendered in his progress, in his wake, a whole constellation of images. And these images were capable of being projected in language, in the form of desires and plans and expectations and demands.
And it was this constant carousel of dynamism that made Julius Caesar the most charismatic figure of his time. He was fanatically loved by his legions. Once, when there was a mutiny plot in the Ninth Legion to rebel, Caesar disbanded the entire legion, and for days the common soldiers beseeched him on knees with tears in their eyes to punish them, but please reinstate them, bring them back. And after executing the ringleaders, he reinstated the whole legion. He was constantly displaying his total self to the men. He kept nothing from them. Every nuance, every angle, every possibility. He was completely open about it. It was this colossal openness that offended the aristocratic party in Rome. They were used to backroom politics. They were used to the consortiums of power by older men who are considered in their judgment, and younger men who are ready to stand in the pecking order and work their way up. Caesar cut obliques and slashes across this entire power structure, and created what has come to be known as the People's Party.
Julius Caesar is the first real demagogue in world history. He is the first individual who is able to command the millions by simply burying his internal dynamic imagery constellation before them. And they, recognizing that in this kaleidoscopic, sparkling whirlwind is the only truthful leadership for them that whatever other structures there are, these are structures for other people. This man is ours, the people's candidate. And Caesar's dictatorship was based upon recognizing this demagogic popular support, both in the army and in the general population of people. And he walked on those two legs.
Suetonius continuing his description of Caesar, "He was something of a dandy, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved; and has been accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilated with tweezers." The hairs pulled out. Pubic hairs is what he's talking about. "His baldness was a disfigurement which his enemies harped upon, much to his exasperation; but he used to comb the thin strands of hair forward..." And Suetonius goes on to say the honor most enjoyed by Caesar was that the Senate conferred upon him the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath at whatever function he liked to cover up his baldness. And so, he habitually wore the laurel wreath, the crown of victory. "His dress was... unusual," writes Suetonius. He added to the normal toga "wrist length sleeves with fringes to his purple striped senatorial tunic, and the belt which he wore over it was never tightly fastened." Suetonius writes, "hence Sulla's warning to the aristocratic party beware of that boy with the loose clothes!"
This warning had come when Sulla was the dictator, the first political dictator in Roman history. And in fact, Caesar was a young man of about twenty years old when Sulla came in, grabbed power with his army, showed that it could be done, that the time was ripe for this. And in the proscription lists, Julius Caesar's name appeared. And for many months Julius Caesar, as a twenty-year-old, was a hunted man, and he slept in barns, and he slept in trenches and various out of the way places. He was a fugitive for months on end; life constantly in jeopardy until he was absolved. From the death prescription because of being defended by several prominent Romans.
Caesar's personality at this time jumps into high gear. He realizes that in order to stay alive, to defend himself, he has got to have allies, and in order to have allies, he has got to have plans. And in order to have plans, he has to make events happen so that plans are required. And in this kind of a logical retrogression sequence, Caesar in the early twenties stumbles upon the formula that will make him emperor of the world. He constantly creates the events which then have to be reacted to, and he constantly supplies the right solution to the chaos which he himself has created in large part, and thus gains a reputation for greatness. He chooses his commotions. He chooses his chaotic incidents with an eye towards being the logical one to solve them. And so, Caesar becomes the first great showman in world history. He becomes a demagogue who creates his own scenarios and then gets everybody to run through them with him. And of course, having largely written them himself, he comes out on top again and again.
When he was in his early twenties, he was in charge in one of his first offices of gladiatorial contestants. And just to show this quality of his personality, he began putting on such spectacular shows involving so many people that the Roman Senate had to disband one of his gladiatorial contests because he had so many men under arms that he was a public threat to take over the city then and there. All through his life, Caesar was a fanatic about great shows. He once put on a huge, sumptuous feast for the city of Rome, a great expense to the state, and felt at the end of the feast that it was not sumptuous enough. So, five days later he restaged the feast and doubled the efforts, costing everyone a great expense. It is this kind of a personality and the amperage to this personality was fueled not by petty, clever, egotistical plans, but by his ability to leave himself increasingly open to what we would call archetypal structures, subconscious patterns, and currents, feeling tones, desires of constellated, if you will, most aptly in mythological images.
For instance, the first office that he bribed his way to, when he left the house, he told his mother, I will either come back head of the Roman religion or I will never come back. He became Pontifex Maximus. It allowed him to live on the sacred way, to have the center of the Roman religion as his personal home. Not so much for Julius Caesar, qua Julius Caesar, but for the developing character that was emerging within this breast. And this was the clear sign of his unstoppable majesty.
Let's turn for a second to someone who understood character in the grand sense, in the sense that Julius Caesar was Shakespeare. The great English poetic tradition is founded upon an understanding of character. It's not like continental poetry, which is based on consciousness. English poetry is based on character. The great English poets - Chaucer, Shakespeare, like Shelley, Yeats, Faulkner - they all write about character, the vicissitudes of character. Shakespeare understood the qualities of Julius Caesar, and he has Cassius, in Act 1, Scene 2 talking to Brutus, says:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus' and Caesar' - what should be in that Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together. Yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with em,
Brutus' will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.'
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fanned with more than with one man?
When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome,
That her wide walks encompassed but one man.
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough
When there is in it but only one man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say
There was a Brutus once that would have booked
Th' eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.
And then a little later in Act 3, Scene 1, Caesar is talking, and in Shakespeare's language explains in dramatic flair why he is the one man:
I could be well moved, if I were as you.
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;
They are all fire, and every one doth shine.
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaken of motion; and that I am he.
The unmoving focus of the age. The only dynamically archetypally, compulsive moving man of the age. His movement was to a different tune, not to the events that were happening - those were but games to him. It didn't really matter, only that the show must go on, that the colossal, universal grandeur of it all be exfoliated, regardless of the cost. And so, it was not so much to an eye towards his winning or losing, but an eye towards unfolding to the nth degree the possibilities that were inherent in him. This made him a willing sacrifice upon the wheel of cosmic history. Now we talk about how he opened himself up and in the mythology of Julius Caesar. And remember now that this mythology is going to bubble up through his conniving, bubble up through his daily and yearly events so that the mythology now becomes more and more conscious, more and more planned, as it were. More and more amenable to conscious reflection and manipulation and arrangement. And for those who are coming on Saturdays, you realize that it's this very process that turns a mythology into a politics. And it's this ability, first exemplified by Julius Caesar.
Alexander the Great never quite did it this conscious way. He lived out the myth, but he never manipulated the myth as a politic like Caesar did. Caesar creates the political genius who becomes the dictator, the tyrant. Even today, the word Kaiser means Caesar. This mythology, these mythological images of desire, of feeling, bubbling up, percolating into conscious, manipulative capacities becomes a politic. And for Caesar, then the politic was to create the world in which he himself could flourish. Not to structure the world for anything else, but to create a world in which he can unfold himself. For he increasingly views himself as a cosmic man, a universal man. The pole star, as Shakespeare puts into his words. This capacity at being a cosmic figure is the edge that the aristocratic critics of Caesar were constantly seizing, trying to pull the man down by exposing him as human. In fact, a small incident was blown up. He was, as a young man, a barrister, a lawyer. He had prosecuted a very famous man named Dolabella. It was an eloquent prosecution. Caesar lost the case, but the language of the prosecution was held up by Cicero as being the work of genius. That even though he was a despicable individual in many ways, the Latin language in his hands was incomparable in Cicero's own testament.
At any rate Caesar had to quit Rome and go into an exile for the rest of the year - self-imposed. It's very powerful men - you can't offend them lightly. And he ended up in Asia Minor in the province known as Bithynia, which had a king who was a real roustabout. And it was alleged that Caesar had a homosexual liaison one night with the king. And so, this was seized for years and years and years as an instance, to show that Caesar was just as stupid and fallible as any man could ever be. In fact, the great Roman poet Catullus wrote two poems about Julius Caesar, and both of them have this incident in the back. This is number 57 from the catalogue of Catullus poems. This again, is in the Penguin Classics translation.
Cesar Mamurraque!
A peerless pair of brazen buggers,
both tarred with the same brush
this, from the city
that, from south Latium
the stain ingrained no purgative can flush...
double dyed,
the heavenly twins',
erudite in the skills of one divan, each
as voraciously adulterous as the other -
joint competitors in the woman's market.
A peerless pair of brazen buggers!
Roman poetry was quite outspoken, incidentally Catullus, the head of the list. This is number 29.
What man could stomach the sight
that was not enthralled
by loot, lechery, and the political game?
Intolerable Mamurra
squanders
what shaggy Gauls
what ultimate Britons
once possessed.
Noblest Pederast!
Does your stomach remain unturned?...
You are enthralled
by loot, lechery and the political game.
Overindulged in overweening, the man stalks from bed to bed like a white Venus dove. Or a parody of Adonis - noblest pederast.
Does your stomach remain unturned?...
You are enthralled
by loot, lechery and the political game.
Was this the reason for the British venture?
That a debauched instrument
(yours and your son-in-law's)
should gobble up all this money?
An unusual campaign...
an unusual general!
Your celebrated munificence
would appear to have been
misplaced'. Has not enough coinage
dribbled through this man's fist?
First his inheritance,
second the Pontic loot,
third, your own war in Spain,
(the Tagus
where you washed for gold has a story of that),
And now Gaul,
And now Britain,
shake in their shoes.
Why keep him?
What is he good for -
beyond treating the fattest endowment
as a comestible?
Is this the reason
Rome's topmost tycoons,
father and son-in-law,
have been playing billiards
with our world?
But Caesar is unusual because he is effective, and he is unstoppable in his effectiveness, because he was not amenable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, because he was not there as a personality of noble proportions. He was not there as an ego, inflated and arrogant, demanding something for himself. He had long since transformed himself very effectively into a subconscious reflection of all of the desires, hidden and forgotten, squelched of the Roman people. He became the perfect embodiment of the hidden desire for the Romans to live an incredibly audacious life, filled with adventure after adventure founded upon the glories of warfare. It is warfare.
Remember now that the triad of the Roman state pantheon was all masculine. It was Mars, it was Quirinus, and it was Jupiter. Three men and hidden in that is not so much the feminine aspect of divinity, but that the feminine aspect was forced to be a terrestrial. In fact, Julius Caesar, once in an oration over the death of his wife Julia, who was incidentally a distant relative of his, said that the Caesars, who were a branch of the Julian clan, were descended from the gods, in fact from the goddess Venus, that Venus was the ancestor for all of the Julians, and they were part immortal, and that what he was contacting in himself was that immortal Venusian context and allowing it to operate unfettered by the pettiness of a single life. That he was offering it a kaleidoscopic series of all possibilities. So that it could manifest whatever amperage and energy it could in that time.
The perfect woman to feed those fantasies, to fan those cosmic fires of archetypal endeavor was none other than the last Ptolemy - Cleopatra. She was the perfect figure to evoke and elicit and mirror from Caesar exactly what he had suspected of himself all his life. And so, it was the meeting of Caesar and Cleopatra in Alexandria in 48 BC that sets the final stage, a stage that will only close when Caesar's nephew Augustus also comes to Alexandria and Augustus will have seen before him not only his illustrious archetypal uncle Julius Caesar go to rack and ruin through Cleopatra, but will have seen the first deputy of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, also go the same path. And Cleopatra will, thinking a third time is charmed, try to make arrangements for Augustus, for Octavian. And Octavian will rise to the issue because he will have understood his uncle more than any man alive and will be the first individual to be able to handle those incredible archetypal images with the kind of care and caution that they require.
Let's give you an analogy. It's like Julius Caesar introducing for the first-time radioactive isotopes, and he simply killed himself by the contamination. Augustus will use instruments and gloves so as to handle those images in a way in which he forestalled contamination by himself. The only thing is that he will not realize that the whole Roman state will be contaminated by that kind of radioactivity. They will be unable to handle the influx of images and energies that Julius Caesar opened the door to. Christianity will be the only solution, the only solution possible because of peculiar historical circumstances in Alexandria.
What drew Caesar to Egypt was early manifested in his career. The very first appointment he wanted was to be assigned to Egypt. In fact, as a young, up and coming, pushy, aggressive conspirator and plotter in Rome. His desire for being governor of Egypt was laughed at by individuals. The reason that he finally did go to Alexandria was that that is where his archrival, once friend, once triumvirate, comrade, and finally, last great competitor, Pompey fled after the Battle of Pharsalus. Pharsalus in Thessaly in north-middle Greece.
We talked about several weeks ago how Caesar refused to disband his armies, in fact, brought eight or ten legions into Italy and paused above the Rubicon River. He had already sent out forays and was holding the keys to Ravenna. The tribunes, with their veto power, had vetoed the action of the Roman Senate under the control of the aristocratic party but they feared for their lives, and so they fled to rendezvous with Caesar at the Rubicon River. Caesar addressed his troops and, according to testimony recorded by Plutarch and by Suetonius, he bared his chest to the troops and said to them that this was a watershed in world history, that if they crossed the bridge, there would never be a turning back, and they would have to fight. If they did not cross, they could disband now, and history would return back to its more pedestrian shapes. But if they chose to follow him, he would never let them down. For he was by that time convinced and able to demonstrate to them that he was no mere mortal, but that he had embodied all of these forces, all of these desires, all of this imagery into himself, so much so that he was no longer there as an individual. He was there for them, in the words of Wallace Stevens, as a man who, like a million diamonds, summed them up, all of their aspirations, all of their fears, all of their hopes. And it was this kaleidoscopic aspect of him that was hypnotic. And, of course, the adventure of turning loose in the world, the unconscious, the subconscious elements prompted the troops to encourage him to cross, and he never looked back from that.
Eventually Pompey fled. We talked about last week how Cicero, in his works, records again and again the hesitation of Pompey, who was a great general himself. Who was in his 60s and was tremendously capable. Who had tremendously sophisticated legions at his command. But what Pompey sensed was that the man was unbeatable because he was not just Julius Caesar, he had become Caesar. He had already become that embodiment of a transpersonal, a transcendent, kind of an individual who has the luck, the élan, the incredible fortitude, the right combination to the secrets of all men and all aspirations.
How can you fight a growing legend? How can you fight someone who is a focus of a whole mythological intent? He was the embodiment of the landslide of history, whose meaning had converged constantly towards his incarnation. And it was this kind of supposition and insight on Pompey's part that made him fearful. He kept hesitating, hoping that it would go away, that events would change. He went to extraordinary lengths. He evacuated the whole city of Rome, some 2 million people, and Caesar was hundreds of miles away. It's an incomprehensible thing, as Cicero says, unless you understand the tremendous amperage. The push from Caesar and the pull in the fearfulness of other men. His command of the subconscious imagery was so great that just the aspect of Caesar coming was enough to destroy this field of confidence. Caesar, in his own accounting, says that while he debated on the shores of the Rubicon, listening to advice here and there, opening himself up in his deeper levels to try and sense what was the desire of the forces of history that he saw moving among the campfires on the other side of the Rubicon, some gigantic phantasmal-type shape that kept motioning him to cross. Come on, let's go. And he said that it was the vision of seeing that giant phantasmal figure beckoning him on, that he knew he was unbeatable. And instead of keeping it to himself, he shared this vision with his men, and they believed him.
And one of the most remarkable figures and statistics that comes out of all this is that in the thirteen years of warfare that Caesar was a commander of his legions, there was not one individual that went AWOL - nobody abandoned him. That's an incredible statistic. Incredible.
Pompey fled and regrouped his armies. There was an enormous field of armies. I think he had somewhere in the vicinity of sixty thousand, seventy thousand men on the plains of Pharsalus. Caesar came up with twenty thousand men, but they were veterans. He had the sixth legion that had been with him through many, many of the campaigns and they proved on the Battle of Pharsalus that if you have a disciplined, trained, professional fighting force well supplied, that they cannot be beat. They ground through Pompey's troops, even though they were also tough Roman legionnaires. But Caesar's troops were incredibly used to relentless fighting, and also used to the directive of one man and Caesar's tremendous capacity to translate immediately his insights on the battlefield so that they would run almost like an electric current through his men, so that they would regroup and conduct themselves in incredible, complex moves.
Most of this elaborately recorded by Caesar. Caesar is the first individual in history to record his own strategic thinking. He becomes a classic in warfare. And while we marvel at the tremendous planning of Alexander the Great before a battle, it is Caesar's determination to prepare his troops from scratch all along so that they cannot be beaten. They will not retreat. They will die in their tracks. They will help each other and die to the last man. It's this capacity which we see in World War 2, and the figure of General Patton, who will train his men from day one for that eventuality, that when the battle comes down to it you will not have any choice except victory or death, and you will not even think of any other possibility.
Pompey's troops were decimated. More than fifteen thousand were killed outright. Twenty-five thousand were taken as captives. The rest of them fled or turned themselves over to Caesar's troops. And here is the incredible brilliancy of Julius Caesar in operation on the field of Pharsalus. He made a declaration that spread like wildfire through the opposing armies, that every valiant Roman soldier under command of Caesar has the right to save a life of a fellow Roman who was fighting on the other side. If that man will only cringe behind him, he will, his life will be spared so that he doubled the size of his force, literally in a matter of less than an hour. And these were the troops that eventually provided the margin of victory for him in the Alexandrian War.
This is the quality of the man. It's not the decision of a human being so much as someone who has opened himself up to the deepest currents of sympathy available to man, and who exercises himself free in that flow, he has a freedom in that archetypal energy. And this is what made him unbelievable, literally unbelievable, to his time, because no one had ever seen anyone like this before. It was this example that Augustus would follow, and when we get to Augustus, we'll see the image of Julius Caesar improved by Augustus. Caesar will become the image that the popes assume for themselves. And the doctrine of infallibility will come directly from the Caesar's ability to tap these universal energies. These are not decisions. These are not judgments. This is how it is on the deepest level. This is reality. Even today, the Vatican is an independent political state. They tie between mythology becoming conscious as a politic and the effectiveness of a state empire. Religion is a direct connection. It's almost a cost of connection.
When Pompey fled to Alexandria, he fled because there was a Roman army in Egypt that had been placed there by him to keep the peace. When Ptolemy Auletes had died in 58 BC, he left four children: two girls and two boys. The oldest girl will be Cleopatra, the youngest girl named Arsinoe, and then the two boys. Pompey had executed the will, was the executor representing the Roman people of the will of Ptolemy Auletes, and he equally divided the kingdom between the oldest boy and the oldest girl. Then he went off, leaving a Roman army in command, and went off to try and beat Julius Caesar at his own game in Italy. The two oldest Ptolemy children, conniving, finally raised opposing armies, and the older boy thinking to himself that if he could only compromise the Roman soldiers there to help him, he could beat his sister. So, the Romans, falling prey to these invitations from the conniving Alexandrians, joined the man known as King.
Ptolemy Cleopatra raised an opposing army and had met these two armies, had met each other at Pelusium, which was the great fortress there roughly where the Port Said area is at the end of the Suez Canal on the Mediterranean Ocean. Pelusium was the infantry entrance into Egypt, and Pharos in Alexandria was the maritime entrance into Egypt. These were the two entry points. If you controlled one or the other, or both, you controlled Egypt. The opposing armies had met for battle the very day that Pompey arrived on the scene, fleeing from Julius Caesar. Incredible chance in history.
Pompey had two thousand men, and he figured with the Roman army that he would pick up there he could regroup. And with the tremendous wealth of Egypt in no time at all, he would have Asia on his side. But when Pompey went ashore, the two Roman commanders took their swords off and killed Pompey in the little boat before they got to shore in sight of everybody. Pompey, of course, noble Roman that he was, covered himself with his cloak, so that the family and the troops would not be able to see his death cringes. His head was removed by sword and placed on a pike, and this was carried around. And when Julius Caesar landed with his troops a couple of days later, the head of Pompey was sent to him to placate him. He, of course, had the messengers who brought the head executed on the spot and set up a relentless war of revenge against the plotting Alexandrians. How dare they interfere in Roman history? Yes, they were enemies, but they had been enemies in an archetypal way, not in a personal way. His daughter Julia had been married to Pompey. He had married Pompey's daughter Pompeia. They had been friends for a long time. This war was a serious war between men and here the Alexandrian boys are interfering in this man's honorable warfare for control of the world. How dare they even think of it!
But Caesar only had about four thousand men, and the winter storm season set in, and he could not be relieved by ship. And so, the Alexandrians, thinking we have done in Pompey, let us also do in Julius Caesar, and we'll put an end to this Roman nonsense. And so, the Alexandrian war began. And Caesar, of course, recognizing that he only had a toehold on the island of Pharos and on the mainland of Alexandria, around where the Brewseum is - the royal palace. So, in order to fortify his flank, he burned all of the Alexandrian ships in the great harbor. Somewhere around 112 ships were burnt in one evening. The fire from these ships burnt half the library - the Great Library of Alexandria - denying the Alexandrian Sea power. In Caesar's mind, meant that he was going to be mobile along the coast, and even if they could overwhelm him by numbers at any point in the coast, he could shift from place to place and wait for reinforcements. So, he had his men attack the island of Pharos, and they drove out all of the inhabitants of Pharos. I think some six thousand people were killed in this debacle. And within three or four days, the Alexandrians had outfitted another fleet. They had gone into all the storage sheds along the Mediterranean coast, and working day and night with incredible verve, had put together some 27 more ships, large quinquereme Marines these huge many-tiered ships.
But the Rhodian element of Caesar's navy was an almost unbeatable maritime group. And the battle was arranged outside of the eastern harbor of Alexandria. And four Rhodian ships went directly into the Alexandrian fleet, and by tremendous discipline always kept its prow towards the approaching ships and slice - the technique was to slice off a side of the oars with your prow. This would disable a ship so that it could only turn in one direction, and then you would simply come in on a counter direction and ram it, because they couldn't get out of the way, and you would sink it.
So, the Alexandrian navy was destroyed again, and Caesar felt that he was capable, finally, of sustaining almost anything. They attempted to push their arms in towards the city. This great mole, seven stadia long, running from the island of Pharos to the city of Alexandria, and it was punctuated by two open spaces that were covered by bridges, kind of like wooden drawbridges, so that ships could get in and out of the various harbors. On the inner bridge there was a mix up in a panic, and the Roman soldiers began fleeing and Caesar himself was caught personally on the bridge. And the Alexandrian madmen thinking that at last we have him, Caesar, holding his plans, his documents, his strategies in one hand, put his purple Roman toga in his teeth, dove into the water, and swam about 200 yards in the water, holding his plans up above the water and dragging his purple tunic with his teeth through the water, and made it to safety. And the Roman soldiers, seeing this, seeing this commander with this incredible élan and flair, rallied and carried the day.
And the Alexandrians were completely disheartened because they felt that indeed, we're up against a God. This is not a man. The eventual upshot of the Alexandrian war was that Julius Caesar became sole dictator of Egypt also. And the way in which Caesar phrased it was not that the Roman people have conquered a new province, but that I, Caesar, have a new possession. It is mine. And he is speaking as the embodiment of the Roman people, not as the representative of the aristocratic party, not as the emissary of senatorial power, but as the force of the Roman people who have now earned the right to have a God-man lead them in their midst. And it is at this point that we are just about ready to understand why the Roman Empire was completely taken over by Christianity in a matter of a few generations. Because it had already been set up. The archetypal triggers had been created in the time of Julius Caesar.
But Caesar himself brought back in his triumph to Rome, redoing the city of Rome, he was making new structures and new laws and recasting Roman society completely - just in a few years. And of course, members of his closest entourage - his great love in his life was Servilia, whose son was Brutus, who was the first man to plunge a sword into Julius Caesar. Not out of hate, out of fearful love, that the man had become too large to countenance in the same horizon as other men. Shakespeare, to conclude tonight, has Antony say,
O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well. -
I know not, gentlemen, what you intend.
Who else must be let blood, who else is rank.
If I myself, there is no hour so fit
As Caesar's death hour, nor no instrument
Of half that worth as those your swords made rich
With the most noble blood of all this world.
I do beseech you, if you bear me hard,
Now, whilst your purple hands do reek and smoke,
Fulfil your pleasure. Live a thousand years,
I shall not find myself so apt to die;
No place will please me so, no mean of death,
As here by Caesar, and by you cut off,
The choice and master spirits of this age.
Well, it's closed for tonight.
END OF RECORDING