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Chapter Five: Appian: The Assassination of Julius Caesar
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five appian The Assassination of Julius Caesar W e come at last to perhaps the most renowned event in Roman history, and certainly the most commemorated assassination of a Roman statesman in Western thought. Caesar’s death had been contrived by the most upstanding citizens of the day, men whose lives were measured by their belief in, and their adherence to, an intangible mos maiorum (ancestral custom). Leading the conspirators were Brutus, his brother-in-law Cassius, and Caesar’s former legates Decimus Brutus and Gaius Trebonius. Not one woman, slave, or foreigner betrayed the conspiracy. The successful assassination of the dictator belonged solely to Rome’s most élite citizens. A conspiracy narrative is characterized by an epistemological gap caused by the secrecyand silence that shroud the event. But the successfullyexecuted assassination of Julius Caesar revealed the secrets, brought the conspiracy to light, and enabled it to be narrated. Nicolaus of Damascus, Suetonius, and Plutarch recount the details in biographical form; the epitomes of Livy and Florus outline the major events of the Ides of March; the historians Velleius Paterculus and Dio also recount the events. Valerius Maximus includes certain peculiarities of the conspiracy under various rubrics in his Facta et Dicta Memorabilia. Of all the ancient testimonia, however, we shall concentrate on the account given by the Antonine historian Appian in his Civil Wars, since he offers the longest connected narrative of the event in a historical work. Born in 96 c.e. in Alexandria, Appian enjoyed a distinguished career as an advocate. His forensic skills earned him notoriety among his compatriots. He spent some time in Rome pleading cases before emperors, evidence that he was fluent in Latin as well as Greek.1 He flourished in the reign of Antoninus Pius and began his Roman History in 150. He was the first historian to organize material geographically and ethnically, according to the nations conquered and not according to the rigid annalistic formula employed since the incep- successful conspiracies tion of Roman historiography. Although his writing betrays an admiration for the Romans, nevertheless, like Josephus, he cannot escape his position as an outsider. He thereby proffers the unique perspective of history from the standpoint of the provincial. The recent revival of interest in Appian is a welcome trend with several driving forces behind it. First, Barbu’s monumental study of Appian’s sources effectively demonstrated the principle that Appian used contemporary sources for an event whenever possible. For example, he used Sallust for the Catilinarian conspiracy and Nicolaus of Damascus for the assassination of Julius Caesar.2 Gabba attempted to establish that the lost work of Asinius Pollio was the principal source for the whole of Appian’s Civil Wars.3 Thus, regardless of how one judges his methods, whether he is regarded as an inept compilerora faithful copier, Appian brings us as close as possible to the events he narrates and as close as possible to some otherwise irretrievable sources. Second, scholarship on the second sophistic, and especially Plutarch, has provided a much needed social context for writers such as Appian. We are now in a better position to understand the milieu in which Appian composed his history.4 A general shift in modern expectations of ancient historiography has opened new avenues to explore Appian. Rather than expect objective history in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, instead we appreciate the worldviews that such an author projects in his representations of the past.5 As with Josephus, Appian is an extremely valuable source, and sometimes he is the only source for a period. He offers the best surviving connected narrative of the years 133–35 b.c.e., and his is the sole connected narrative for the years 133–70. Naturally, he should merit attention for this reason alone. But recent scholarship has also made fruitful advances by comparing Appian with Dio and Florus.6 All these factors make it easy to incorporate Appian into this study of conspiracy narratives in the Roman historians. This final chapter proceeds along the two main avenues of inquiry that have guided this study throughout, namely, the historiographical issue of narrative form and function and the historical role of women in conspiracies. In the first part, I examine the narrative strategies deployed by Appian in his account of the assassination. Appian’s narrative of the assassination of Julius Caesar bears few of the marks of epistemological uncertainty or hesitancy that characterize especially the conspiracy narratives of Sallust...