The Book of Emperors: A Translation of the Middle High German Kaiserchronik

II. Julius Caesar

71 II Julius Caesar In modern times no Romans are counted as emperors before Augustus Caesar, in whose name the Roman Senate put an end to the old Republic’s checks on monarchical power in 27 BC, thus inaugurating the Empire; however, a medieval historian did not feel similarly bound. Finding in ancient chronicles several early military commanders with broad political powers who were called imperator, he might introduce Lucullus and Pompey as the first emperors, as did the Chronicle of Fredegar, a seventh-century Frankish work, on the basis of the 300-years-older Chronicle by Eusebius and Jerome. More likely, however, if interested in Roman antiquities he would be decisively influenced to begin the succession of emperors with Julius Caesar by the widely available work of Orosius, possibly influenced by Suetonius, who in the early fifth century had presented Julius as a particularly capable and heroic figure. As a committed partisan protagonist of the Holy Roman Empire , our author doubtless desired to begin his stories of emperors with a dramatic and imposing subject. It is not that he would have found Augustus Caesar lacking in this respect, but the general tendency of medieval writers to begin with Julius was reinforced for him by the ease with which Julius could be credibly related to German history. Two of his sources had already pointed in this direction. He derives a section of his account of Julius Caesar’s exploits in Germany from distinctly feudal references to one of the Gallic Wars in a local Latin history of Trier or Trèves. This city had been an important Roman outpost, and its surviving Roman ruins, such as the Black Arch (Porta Nigra) and the ancient amphitheater, which remain even to this day, reminded medieval 72 Chapter Two Germans of the past history of Roman power in Germany. Our author’s story of Julius Caesar is the first of only two parts in the Book of Emperors in which sequences of more than a few lines are taken from a surviving German-language source. By far the largest sections of Caesar’s struggles with the German tribes, almost the whole lengthy episode of his battle against Pompey (historically the Battle of Pharsalus in southwestern Thessaly) and all but a fraction of Daniel’s vision with its interpretation come from the Annolied, a poetical presentation of the life of Bishop Anno of Cologne, which antedates the Book of Emperors by roughly half a century. In the Annolied, a long sketch of Julius Caesar and a very short one of Augustus are part of a summation of world history since the Creation, which gradually narrows its focus to Cologne and Bishop Anno. Where the Annolied, naturally enough, discusses Daniel and his prediction of a succession of world empires before proceeding to Roman history, our author presents the prophet’s vision as a flashback, to show its fulfillment under Julius Caesar. In so doing, he tampers more than a little with the symbolic animals. The Annolied had made the dreadful beast with ten horns (Dan. 7:7–8) into a boar, signifying the fierce freedom of the Roman Empire, out of which the eleventh horn was to grow. The Annolied, however, was faithful to the tradition of Christian scholarship since Saint Jerome, which had seen the eleventh horn as the antichrist, while our author has no intention of letting the antichrist spring from his beloved Roman Empire. He thus grafts the evil eleventh horn onto a different beast, and the unencumbered boar, symbolizing Julius, will appear on the Roman banner in several later chapters to inspire fighters for the empire. In recording Caesar’s death, the author notes the number of years he reigned. Possibly he relied on a list of rulers with their dates of the type sometimes copied in the introductory part of monastery annals. In any event, he continues to make the same kind of note as he records each emperor’s death with only two excep- Julius Caesar 73 tions. Individually his reign dates are often reasonably accurate: the five years that Caesar ruled would have been reckoned originally from 49 BC, when he crossed the Rubicon in order to claim sole political power, to his murder in 44 BC. The idea that Caesar ’s remains were buried at the top of a high column is probably based on a Mirabilia account that Caesar’s ashes were buried in...