2023-11-13 09:28:53
Year 58 BC ‘The town’ of Bibracte, fortified Celtic capital of the Aedui, then allies of the Romans. Dense beech forests in French Burgundy. Blood is about to be spilled in the first battle of the Gallic War, with a young man Julius Caesar at the head of his legions, before go into debt for a whopping 685 million of euros at today’s exchange rate. It is not an Asterix and Obelix comic. Is ‘Damn Rome’ (Editions B / Rosa dels Vents). There, surrounded by autumn mist in the excavation of the Gallo-Roman remains, is Santiago Posteguillo, remembering the oratorical ability that Caesar himself perfected in his exile in Asia with the teacher Apollonius. The philologist and linguist speaks, with the skill that has been given to him 31 years of university professor (now on leave), of the 900 pages (be careful when passing through airport control, don’t be surprised if they think it’s a brick…) from the second of six novels in which he clears up “the unknown from the known” of the future Roman emperor.
In it he reconstructs Caesar’s kidnapping by pirates of the Mare Internum (before Nostrum and Mediterráneo), those that “in Asterix always end with the ship sunk by the Gauls”, the author smiles in the Bibracte museum; his “intense private life”, with the birth of Cleopatra or his love for his first wife, Cornelia; his participation in the fight against Spartacus in his slave rebellionare epilepsy or his ambitious rise to power.
‘Roma soy yo’, by Santiago Posteguillo, the best-selling novel of 2022
There, in the political arena, César was one of the popular ones (defenders of the people) and dealt with the conservative senators, the ‘optimate’, who defended their privileges. Two irreconcilable sides. “Although that did not prevent the first triumvirate, which was actually a motion of no confidence. Cicero and Cato controlled the Senate. And Caesar allied himself with his enemy Pompey, nicknamed ‘the butcher’, and with Crassus (who lent him the money for his electoral campaign). These two hated each other. That shows that Even though they got along badly, it didn’t stop them from forming a government.. We have not evolved too much, power is what it has,” Posteguillo says, leaving the extrapolations to journalists.
“His oratory – he assures – would stand out among those of current politicians. We are used to those who do not fulfill their electoral promises or do so at the end of their term. Caesar, on the other hand, promised agrarian reform, which was 130 years late, and he applied it the day after being elected, even though he went into personal debt to do so. As a councilor, he also financed entertainment for the people, “chariot races or the largest gladiatorial game, with more than 700 fighters. He knew that this made him popular. But he also paid for cultural and artistic activities or the maintenance of the Appian Way, because “He believed he was good for the people. He wasn’t just a power-seeking careerist.”
After 4,500,000 copies of his works have been sold, no one can dispute Posteguillo’s (1967) label as a best-selling Spanish historical novel. The first of this series, ‘Rome is me’, was the best-selling in Spain in 2022 (almost half a million copies in Spanish). After the Trilogies of Scipio Africanus and Trajan and the biology of Julia Domna (with the first won the Planet Prize), the Valencian has 8,500 published pages about Ancient Rome.
Cleopatra spoke to Caesar face to face. I think he fell in love with that
He wields “the tremendous modernity” of César. “When Cicero says that one must apply the death penalty to Catilina and the conspirators of the coup d’état, he makes a speech against it, defending permanent imprisonment with the dispersion of the courts so that they cannot communicate with each other, with arguments that could be those of today.” Another unprecedented gesture: “In Rome was never called a speech for the death of a young woman, exceptionally by a venerable old woman. And he did it at the funeral of his first wife. He loved her very much. Then came the marriage for interest with Pompeii (granddaughter of the opponent and dictator Sulla), and later with Calpurnia”.
Humanity moves more in stupidity than in evil
They were by no means the only ones in his life. “Without all these women, César cannot be understood. There is his mother, Aurelia, one of those who influenced him the most. Servilia, married and a lover who was with him all his life and who here introduces him to her 18-year-old son, Rough. dramatic irony: the reader knows more than the characters. “When Brutus kills Caesar, he is murdering his mother’s lover,” he reveals. Also his daughter Julia, the apple of his eye, whom he had to give in marriage to his worst enemy, Pompey. She told him, ‘If I were your son you would take him into battle. This is my battle, you can’t leave me behind.'”
“Y Cleopatra, clear. They had to cross paths when, as a child, she went with her father, Pharaoh Ptolemy, to Rome. It’s been 30 years -he emphasizes-. They still don’t know that they will end up together. More dramatic irony to make the reader complicit. Cleopatra was the exception among the women who influenced him because she is the only one who had real power. She spoke to him from you to you. I think he fell in love with that.”.
The lack of culture and humanism in Congress and the Senate among people who must make complex decisions about the country hurts.
His mother, Aurelia, tells him that power is built on a lot of blood. “Yes, there is an inertia in human nature that leads to that,” he laments, “despite the fact that to avoid it the rational part of humanity has sought imperfect formulas, such as the Declaration of Human Rights or democracies, which give periods of peace. But the generations that are born in these stages of peace fall into the absolute stupidity of forgetting where they come from and do not listen to their elders, who from their experience warn them that if they go that way they will fall into disaster. to the First World War after a period of relative peace and young people happily went to war thinking it would be epic: it was carnage. We move more in stupidity than in evil. There is no way for human beings to learn through knowledge, reading and education and acquire critical capacity.”
I rebel against an educational system that only seeks to reduce the effort of students to create untrained and manipulable graduates.
Spartacus and Caesar read, and Caesar wrote ‘The Gallic War’. “Caesar was very intelligent, a great communicator. He knew that information and propaganda were essential to give his vision of the facts.. I used the social networks of the time. There was no Twitter or Instagram, but he wrote his comments on the military campaigns, which reached both the people and the Senate.” Today, Posteguillo recommends politicians “read.” “The lack of culture and humanism in Congress and the Senate hurts between people who must make complex decisions about the country. This persistence in repeating situations that have ended very badly can only be understood through evil or historical lack of culture,” warns the professor, who regrets “that knowledge is a value in disuse.” “I rebel against an educational system that only seeks to reduce the effort of students to create graduates lacking training and manipulated by governments that only want puppets interested in current gladiators, that is, football and mass entertainment, ‘bread and circuses’. “We have to fight the cultural battle.”
The novel does not forget the probable Caesar’s epilepsy. “It was his internal battle. He had attacks in moments of anxiety and tension. We know that they had to remove him from some battle. Today there are those who defend that they were strokes, but he never had the typical consequences of cerebral infarctions. Everyone knew that he had one, but like him Divine disease, la enfermedad divina, had an aura of mystery that was not perceived as a weakness. It is debated whether Alexander the Great also had it.”
Little is known that Caesar was one of the many Romans kidnapped by Cilician pirates. And even less so than when his boss, Demetrio, puts a price on the ransom, “he tells her ‘I’m worth more’ and raises it two and a half times. He knows that this way he protects his life.” And little is known that he was contemporary of Spartacus, the slave who put Rome on the ropes and whose body was never found. “It would be nice to do a ‘spin-off’ about him, imagining that he escaped – he nods -. Caesar valued the bravery and intelligence of the enemy in combat, therefore we can extrapolate that he felt respect and admiration for Spartacus. It is believed that in the campaign “To quell the rebellion Caesar was under the command of Crassus and from there arose the close relationship with the person who would later lend him the money for his political career.”
Migrations, and migrations
It all begins and ends in Bibracte, which Caesar mentions 8 times in his ‘Gaul War’. It was also there where Vercingetorix rose up as leader of all the Gallic peoples against Rome and where the Aedui betrayed his alliance. The first battle was against the Helvetii, whose migration to Bibracte “responds to their need to improve their living conditions by fleeing the Alps, where the crops were not enough to supply their growing tribe.” “They encounter an army. Other exiles, like that of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, visit Senates and palaces. It’s easy to draw parallels, isn’t it?”
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