Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, part 2: "Veni, Vidi, Vici" (13 Education Group, WNET, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 9) I watched the second episodes of two PBS mini-series that at first I had feared they wouldn’t show over the air but just make you subscribe to their streaming service, “Passport,” to be able to watch. One was “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” the second show in the three-part miniseries on the life and political and military career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m not sure how much the original producers (Evih Efue, Emma Frank, Helen Hunt, Alexander Leith and Adam Turner), directors (Emma Frank and Richard Pearson) and writers of this show were motivated by the parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they are clear and unmistakable. Both Caesar and Trump were utterly unscrupulous, both were motivated by political ambition and greed, both were secular and highly licentious individuals who cloaked themselves in the guise of religiosity (before he was elected Consul, one of the two executives at the head of the Roman Republic, Caesar first ran for and won the office of Pontifex Maximus, essentially the pope of Rome’s multitheistic religion), and both systematically upended and ultimately destroyed republics that had lasted for centuries. In Rome’s case the Republic had lasted for 500 years – twice as long as America’s experiment in representative government – until Caesar came along to wreck it. Part one of this series, “High Priest,” ended with Caesar’s first term as Consul (the Consulship lasted only one year and there were two of them, ostensibly to check each other’s power; the framers of the U.S. Constitution copied much of it from the Roman Republic but decided to make the President just one person and give him a four-year term; Alexander Hamilton wanted the President elected for life, but that was the biggest battle he lost at the Constitutional Convention because George Washington, who was obviously going to be the first President, wanted a periodic chance to decide whether he still wanted the gig) and his appointment as governor of Gaul (modern-day France).

Part two was called “Veni, Vidi, Vici” after the famous message Caesar sent to the Roman Senate at the conclusion of his conquest of Gaul – it meant, “I came, I saw, I conquered” – and his successful resistance to the efforts of members of the Senate in general and his main political enemy, Cato, in particular. One point Frank, Pearson and whoever wrote the narration for the show made was that both as consul and as a provincial governor, Caesar was immune for prosecution for any crimes he might commit in those offices – he essentially had what Trump is currently seeking from the U.S. Supreme Court – and so the only way his enemies in the Senate could stop him was if they could first strip him of his Gallic command. That posed a problem for them because Caesar was regularly sending letters to Rome detailing how well his war was going. Later he collected these into a book called Commentary on the Gallic Wars (the bane of Latin students ever since) in which he wrote about himself in the third person so people hearing the tales (remember this was not only before the age of printing but before most people could read, so they relied on town criers to tell them what was in the book: essentially the audio books of their time) would forget that the portrait of the great hero Julius Caesar had been created by Caesar himself. Caesar’s conquests in Gaul made him one of the most popular political figures in Rome, and he aligned himself with the Populares, the faction in Rome’s government which sought to undercut the authority of the Senate by presenting as many issues as possible directly to the people by vote. Caesar also aligned himself with another Roman general, Pompey, and his principal financial backer, Crassus, to form what became known as the First Triumvirate.

Each of the three got themselves appointed to govern a Roman province: Caesar got Gaul, Pompey got Spain (though he ruled it by remote control and stayed in Rome, which seems to me would have been a lot more difficult then than it is now) and Crassus got Parthia (ancient Mesopotamia and modern-day Iran). Unfortunately for Crassus, while Caesar was sweeping to victory in Gaul (albeit by committing war crimes; one of the things his enemies in the Senate wanted to remove him for was breaking a treaty with one of the Gallic tribes and massacring 400,000 of them), Crassus got his ass kicked by the Parthians. They literally beheaded him, and though Caesar had got Pompey and Crassus elected as co-consuls to succeed him, Crassus’s death unraveled Caesar’s political position in Rome. As the only surviving consul, Pompey decided his political future lay in allying himself with the anti-Caesar faction in the Senate. Pompey had previously married Caesar’s daughter Julia to cement the alliance between them, but Julia got pregnant, had a miscarriage and not only died herself but took the baby with her. Caesar tried to keep Pompey on board with their alliance by offering him his grand-niece as a second wife, but Pompey essentially said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode ends with Caesar about to break one of the main laws of the Roman Republic: the ban on taking one’s own private army into Rome. Things get complicated when one of Caesar’s agents, Clodius – one of the 10 “Tribunes of the People,” an office created during an earlier period of instability in the Roman Republic to ensure that the people had a voice in their government in case the consuls and the Senate got too powerful and flouted the popular will – decides to strike out on his own.

Historian Tom Holland said in the show, “Clodius, for years, had served as Caesar's agent, enforcing Caesar's interests in Rome, and Clodius learnt from Caesar that power can come directly from the people. Clodius elevates this to a whole new level. Political order in the streets of the capital rapidly starts to collapse.” When Clodius is assassinated brutally by a lynch mob, his widow Fulvia decides to stage his funeral in front of the Senate. She builds a pyre and burns his body, and the fire spreads to the Senate building, destroying it. Caesar is able to stop the Senate’s latest attempt to end his provincial governorship of Gaul by bribing another tribune to block it; or, failing that, to pass a bill stripping both Caesar and Pompey of their armies. The show ends with Caesar literally at the Rubicon River, which marked the boundary between Gaul and Rome. Already his enemies in the Senate had essentially declared him a political exile and threatened to prosecute him if he marched his army into Rome, but he did anyway, kicking off a new civil war that would ultimately lead to Caesar’s appointment as a permanent dictator (Dictator perpetuo) in 45 B.C. and his assassination a year later. The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is a grim and all too timely warning of how fragile a republic can be in the face of an authoritarian – a Caesar, a Hitler, a Putin, a Trump – determined to destroy it and with enough popular support to be able to pull it off.