Caesar and Sata

Caesar and Satan Author(s): William Blissett Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1957), pp. 221-232 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2707625 . Accessed: 06/11/2011 00:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Ideas. http://www.jstor.org CAESAR AND SATAN BY WILLIAM BLISSETT In a recent article on " Lucan's Caesar and The Elizabethan Villain "' I have tried to show the way in which the conception of Julius Caesar in Lucan's Pharsalia, a figure exaggerated by all the devices of rhetoric into a more than life-size monster of impatience, impiety, and tyrannous ambition, after a long life through the Middle Ages, entered English literature, espe- cially Elizabethan drama. Plays on Roman subjects or on the theme of civil war frequently showed Lucanic influence, but of the Elizabethan dramatists Marlowe was the most profoundly influenced by the Pharsalia, the first book of which he translated: almost all his heroic figures are strongly marked by Lucanic Caesarism, and a Marlovian influence on subsequent drama is to some extent an influence of Lucan. A generation later Ben Jonson in his two Roman tragedies shows fresh Lucanic influence-his Catiline and Se- janus displaying in addition to the heroic energy which Marlowe had found and imitated in his model, a moral depravity and a delight in destruction that is not present in Tamburlaine, Mortimer, or the Guise and is present only as a quality of a private man in the Jew of Malta. In Jonson the Caesarian villain is beginning to take on a Satanic cast. The concern of this article will be with the affinity between the figures of Caesar (especially Lucan's Caesar) and Satan (especially Milton's Satan). I For a space we must postpone treatment of Lucan and of Milton to con- sider the figure of Caesar in relation to Satan. The historic Caesar, though enigmatic, though at once and to a high degree attractive and repellent, is not particularly Satanic. His prose style is too plain, for one thing. His contemporaries even when most distrustful of him express their disquietude in imagery far removed from the Satanic, where evil is not latent but mani- fest. Plutarch, for example, writes thus: At all events, the man who is thought to have been the first to see beneath the surface of Caesar's public policy and to fear it, as one might fear the smiling surface of the sea, and who comprehended the powerful character hidden beneath his kindly and cheerful exterior, namely Cicero, said that in most of Caesar's political plans and projects he saw a tyrannical purpose; " on the other hand," said he, "when I look at his hair, which is arranged with so much nicety, and see him scratching his head with one finger, I can- not think that this man would ever conceive of so great a crime as the over- throw of the Roman constitution." 2 About one thing there can, however, be no doubt-his impiety: the his- torians join with Lucan on this point.3 Caesar is a rebel not only against Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 553-575. 2 B. Perrin, ed. & tr., Plutarch's Lives (Loeb Classical Library, 1919), VII, 449-51. 3 J. C. Rolfe, ed. & tr., Suetonius (Loeb Classical Library, 1935), I, 81: " No re- gard for religion ever turned him from any undertaking, or even delayed him." Cicero, De Officiis, 3.82, quotes Caesar as often repeating the lines of Euripides: If wrong may e'er be right, for a throne's sake Were wrong most right:-be God in all else feared. For passages from Lucan see my earlier article. 221 222 WILLIAM BLISSETT Pompey and the Senate but against Roman pietas: he places himself and his cause above the cause of the republic and the gods. Caesar appears in a new perspective when seen through Christian eyes. " Caesar" is of course used as a generic term in Scripture and commentary except when Augustus and Tiberius are specifically mentioned, but Julius Caesar as founder of the line remains the archetype, and his initials point the contrast with Christ and suggest an association with the "Prince of this World," an association probably intended by Milton in Paradise Regain'd when Satan in offering all the kingdoms of the world speaks of glory the reward That sole excites to high attempts the flame Of most erected Spirits, most temper'd pure Aetherial . . . and climaxes a list of such spirits thus: Great Julius, whom now all the world admires, The more he grew in years, the more inflam'd With glory, wept that he had liv'd so long Inglorious.4 It would be a mistake to make an easy identification of Caesar and Antichrist,4a for that would identify the type with the antitype; it would also deny the legitimacy of worldly power, the obligation to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. A complication arises here: the con- cept of kingship which the Christian centuries were to evolve has a place for every Caesar except Caesar. Any distinction between a king and a tyrant, in which a king rules by hereditary right or by free election and under law, and a tyrant by personal power unlawfully seized and exercised, must place Julius Caesar among the tyrants. Among literary men im- perialists are in a minority: 5 Dante surprises most of his readers by put- ting Brutus and Cassius at the bottom of hell.6 Among English writers, Sir Thomas Elyot often speaks of Caesar as "the first emperor, a noble example of virtue "; for him the initial seizure of power is legitimized by its subsequent establishment. Not so with Sir Philip Sidney, just as staunch a royalist, who exclaims, " See wee not vertuous Cato driuen to kyll him- selfe? and rebell Caesar so aduanced that his name yet, after 1600 yeares, 4 Paradise Regain'd, III, 25-8, 39-42. 4a Though Tertullian admits the divine institution of civil power, he also says " Regnum Caesaris regnum diaboli." See Charles Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1940), 113, 213, and ch. 4. J. A. K. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics (London, 1952), 95: "The Middle Ages and the Renaissance were, like the Romans themselves, divided on the question of Caesar's assassination, Roman philosophers and the authors for the most part justifying or not disapproving of it, the imperial government naturally con- demning it." 6 Inferno, Canto 34. 7 F. Watson, ed., The Gouvenour (Everyman, 1937), 100, 105, 133-4, 138. CAESAR AND SATAN 223 lasteth in the highest honor? "8 Jean Bodin is as politic a writer as can be found. He wrote, concerning Caesar, that "no one can have any just cause of taking up arms against his country," and again speaks of " triumph and imperium (for the sake of which Caesar thought crime was justifiable)." 9 If Caesar can appear in so villainous a guise in the writings of monar- chists, what may we expect in republican writers? Machiavelli it is who sets the tone. Not, of course, the murderous Machiavel who in the prologue to The Jew of Malta said: Many will talk of title to a crown: What right had Caesar to the empery? Might first made right, and laws were then most sure When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood.10 Not even the Machiavelli whose Prince was written for Cesare Borgia, namesake and imitator of Caesar, but the Machiavelli of the Discourses, a book which had the strongest influence on the political thought of the seventeenth century.1" Machiavelli detests Caesar as the man who did what Catiline failed to do, destroyed the Republic.l2 James Harrington, who praises Machiavelli as " the sole retriever of this ancient prudence," 13 shares his opinion of Caesar: for him there are two periods of government- the one ending with the liberty of Rome, which was the course of empire, as I may call it, of ancient prudence, first discovered to mankind by God Himself in the fabric of the commonwealth of Israel, and afterwards picked out of His footsteps in Nature, and unanimously followed by the Greeks and Romans; the other beginning with the arms of Caesar, which, extinguishing liberty, were the transition of ancient into modern prudence....14 He returns again to speak of "the execrable reign of the Roman emperors taking rise from (that felix scelus) the arms of Caesar." 15 Algernon Sydney takes the same view.16 Such, then, were the opinions of the chief republican thinkers of Milton's time. While there is no specific passage from Milton to lay along side these, we may suppose that the view would be familiar and not repugnant to him. As for those who were republican on religious 8G. G. Smith, ed., "An Apology for Poetry," in Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), I, 170. 9 Beatrice Reynolds, tr., Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (Co- lumbia University Press, 1945), 49, 50. 10 H. S. Bennett, ed., The Jew of Malta (London, 1931): Prologue, 18-22. 11 See Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Northwestern University Press, 1945). 12 J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1947), 129-on Discourses, III, vi; I, x. Leonardo Bruni agrees: " The Roman imperium began to go to ruin when first the name of Caesar fell like a disaster upon the city." Quoted by Wallace Ferguson in The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 10. 13 Henry Morley, ed., The Commonwealth of Oceana (London, 1887), 36. 14 b., 15. 15 Ib. 48. 6 Fink, Classical Republicans, 158, refers to Sydney's Works, ed., Robertson (1772), II, xvii, 143; xxiv, 198-9; xii, 121ff. 224 WILLIAM BLISSETT principle: if the New Jerusalem on earth is to be a republic, then its enemies are Caesar-Antichrists. An ambiguous suggestion of this appears in that subtle poem, Marvell's " Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland." So restless Cromwel could not cease In the inglorious Arts of Peace, But through adventrous War Urged his active Star. And, like the three-fork'd Lightning, first Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst, Did thorough his own Side His fiery way divide.17 Margoliouth quotes a correspondent in the T.L.S. as comparing these lines with Pharsalia i, 144ff., and comments: Marvell perhaps had in mind both the Latin (cf. successus urgere suos and 'Urg'd his active Star') and Tom May's translation, which here reads as follows (2nd edition, 1631): But restless valour, and in warre a shame Not to be Conqueror; fierce, not curb'd at all, Ready to fight, where hope, or anger call, His forward Sword; confident of successe, And bold the favour of the gods to presse: Orethrowing all that his ambition stay, And loves that ruine should enforce his way; As lightning by the winde forc'd from a cloude Breakes through the wounded aire with thunder loud, Disturbes the Day, the people terrifyes, And by a light oblique dazels our eyes, Not Joves owne Temple spares it; when no force, No barre can hinder his prevailing course, Great waste, as foorth it sallyes and retires, It makes and gathers his dispersed fires, . . . Note the verbal resemblances, 'restless valour' and 'industrious Valour' 'forward Sword' and 'The forward Youth,' 'lightning . . . from a cloude Breakes' and 'Lightning . . . Breaking the Clouds.' Further I suggest with diffidence that the striking phrase 'active Star' owes something to the chance neighborhood of the two words in another passage in the same book of May's translation (Pharsalia, i, 229-32): . . . the active Generall Swifter than Parthian back-shot shaft, or stone From Balearick Slinger, marches on T'invade Ariminum; when every star Fled from th'approaching Sunne but Lucifer . . . Caesar is up betimes, marching when only the morning star is in the sky: Cromwell urges his 'active star.' 18 It is with even greater diffidence that I note that this star is Lucifer. As 17 Margoliouth, ed., Poems of Andrew Marvell, 87, lines 9-16. is Marvell, 237. 19 Marvell, 87-8, lines 17-36. CAESAR AND SATAN 225 the poem proceeds, it is true, the force of long literary tradition forces Marvell to speak of King Charles as " Caesar," but in character and his- toric role it is Cromwell who approximates to the Lucanic figure: it is he who has been a leader of rebel forces in civil war and who now rules by force of character and arms; it is he who left his private garden to go "burning through the Air," " to ruine the great Work of Time." 19 II The Elizabethan stage-villain derives in part, I have argued, from Lucan's Caesar; we must now attempt to determine the degree to which the same figure may be accounted Satanic. The association of the two is made by Friedrich Gundolf when he says of Lucan, "Casar war ihm ziinachst weniger das Widerideal, das er brandmarken wollte, als der finstere Riese, ein erhabenes Ungeheuer wie Marlowes Tamerlan, Shakespeares Richard, Miltons Satan-eine lockende Schreckgestalt, keine Fratze des Hasses." 20 The specifically Satanic quality is absent in Marlowe's protagonists for all their heroic energy; and Richard III and Macbeth, who possess Caesarian virtu joined to the blackest malice, are influenced by Lucan, if at all, only through Marlowe-though Macbeth's images of world-destruction are not- able analogues of the world-risking, world-destroying Caesarism of the Pharsalia.21 In the play which may be described as presenting the most Lucanic con- ception of Caesar on the Elizabethan stage, Chapman's Caesar and Pompey, there is strongly in evidence a murky apprehension of evil, a sense of the mystery of iniquity-the effect that Lucan had sought to gain by this sort of apostrophe: But what night furies, what Eumenides, What Stygian powres, or gods of wickednesse, What hellish fiend, Caesar, didst thou appease Preparing for such wicked warres as these? [VII, 168 ff. L8v.] * Chapman invents a character whom he calls Fronto, a ragged knave rescued from suicide for worse things by Ophioneus, who, " devilish serpent by inter- pretation, was general captain of that rebellious host of spirits that waged war with heaven." 22 The motive for the invention is not apparent, and Chapman makes little use of the character. What interests us here is the explicit association of the two civil wars, Caesar's and Satan's. Another link in the chain of association we are forging is provided by Ben Jonson's Catiline. There Julius Caesar ends a speech of evil counsel by saying: 20 F. Gundolf, Caesar Geschichte seines Ruhms (Berlin, 1925), 34. 21 Macbeth, II, iii, 60, 108-9; IV, i, 58-60; IV, iii, 107-9; V, v, 49-50. * References throughout are to the third edition of Thomas May's translation, 1635, with the line-numbers of the Loeb edition added. 22 T. M. Parrott, ed., The Plays and Poems of George Chapman: The Tragedies (London, 1910), II, i, 60. 226 WILLIAM BLISSETT Come, there was neuer any great thing, yet, Aspired, but by violence and fraud: And he that sticks (for folly of a conscience) To reach it Catiline completes the sentence:-is a good religious fool. Caesar replies immediately in words that link his companion to the sail- winged infernal serpent and with Judas: A superstitious slave, and will die beast. Good night. You know what CRASSUS thinkes, and I, By this: Prepare you wings, as large as sayles, To cut through ayre and leaue no print behind you. A serpent, ere he comes to be a dragon, Do's eate a bat: and so must you a Consul, That watches. What you do, do quickly SERGIUS. You shall not stir for me.23 Catiline as the play proceeds, shows a satanic lust for destruction: That I could reach the axell, where the pinnes are, Which hold this frame; that I might pull 'hem out, And pluck all into chaos, with myself.24 The Satanic parallel continues when to please the Senate he is " thrust head- long forth ,; 25 and like Satan's his ruin is not single, for he boasts that his funeral pyre will be in The common fire, rather than mine owne, For fall I will with all, ere fall alone.26 Once the rebellion is under way, he addresses his followers; Well, there's now No time of calling backe, or standing still.27 And of these, in a phrase which might pass for Milton's if it were not straight from Lucan, it is said, They knew not, what a crime their valour was.28 The figure of Catiline will serve as a translation to Paradise Lost, for Lucan himself represents him as among an infernal host waiting to receive Caesar in hell: Fierce Catiline, sterne Marius, and the wild Cethegi breaking chaines orejoyed were: The popular law promulging Drusi there, And daring Gracchi shouting clapt their hands Fetter'd for ever with strong iron bands 23 C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, ed., Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1947), V, Cati- line, III, 515-26. 24Catiline, III, 175-7. 25Catiline, IV, 504. 26Catiline, IV, 510-11. 27 Catiline, IV, 541-2. 28 Catiline, V, 659; cf. Pharsalia, VI, 147-8. 29 Para- dise Lost, I, 48-9. CAESAR AND SATAN 227 In Plutoes dungeon; impious ghosts had hopes Of blessed feats; Pluto pale dungeons opes, Prepares hard stones, and adamantine chaines To punish the proud Conqueror, ordaines. [VI, 793-802.L4r.] We are in the neighborhood of Pandemonium, where Satan dwells In adamantine chains and penal fire Who durst defy th'omnipotent to arms.29 Of course, in Lucan's poem Caesar's men are not yet a host of hell, though their leader in commanding silence adopts a stance very similar to that used ages before in Hell and ages later in Milton's epic: on the top Of a turfe mount stands Caesar fearlesse up, Deserving feare by his undaunted looke.30 [V, 316ff. H5r.] III That Milton was widely read in ancient and modern literature goes without saying. The index to the Columbia edition of his works 31 shows over thirty references to Julius Caesar scattered through ten of Milton's writings. Both Plutarch and Suetonius are quoted several times, with a specific reference each to their lives of Caesar. There are fourteen references to Lucan. The Elizabethan Lucanists figure much less prominently: Kyd and Chapman are not referred to; the direct Marlowe references are only to Dido, Faustus, and Hero and Leander; and of the sixteen references to Ben Jonson, none are to Sejanus or Catiline. From this we may gather that any influence of Lucan is more likely to be direct than mediated, though in my opinion it is unlikely that Milton should not have read all the plays of Marlowe, the two poets having so much in common in education, one aspect of temperament (the rebellious), and poetic style.32 Similarities with Chapman and Jonson which may imply influence will be discussed later. While Professor Clark in his exhaustive description of seventeenth-cen- tury school curricula, focussing on that of St. Paul's School, does not men- tion Lucan as being included,33 frequent references to Lucan by the Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth may be taken as sufficient indication that he knew the Pharsalia in the original. This does not preclude the possi- bility of a supplementary acquaintance with the poem in English, for 30 A gesture of Caesar's hand before an earlier speech in the Pharsalia (1, 297) is appropriated by Milton to Satan who on his triumphal return to his cohorts in Hell- with hand Silence, and with