Extract
[...] The intention of the conspirators was to drag his corpse into the Tiber, to confiscate his goods, and to annul his acts: but the fear they had of Consul Mark Antony and Lepidus, master of the cavalry, made them renounce this plan.Suetonius, Life of the Divine Caesar, LXXXII) « There was a statue of Pompey, and it was one of the buildings he had dedicated to serve as an ornament to his theater. Is it not a clear proof that this undertaking was conducted by a god who had marked this building as the site of the execution? [ . ] When Caesar entered, all the senators stood up to honor him. Some accomplices of Brutus, some placed themselves around Caesar's seat. [ . [...]
[...] He uses the example of Caesar for the moral edification of the readers. As a result, the treatment of the same event differs a lot between the two authors. The fact is particularly marked for the conquest of Gaul by Caesar in -51 « Here, in a few words, is what he did during the nine years of his command. He reduced the entire Gaul, between the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Cevennes, the Rhone and the Rhine [ . to a Roman province [ . [...]
[...] II/ Two different ways of presenting the biography of Caesar In the work of Suetonius, the first Life to be published is that of Caesar in 121. It fits into the context of the philocésarien propaganda under the reign of Trajan. Suetonius seeks to describe precisely the actions and behavior of Caesar both on the battlefields, in his daily practice of government as in his life intimate. Plutarch has another intention: he wants to lead the reader to exalt his hero. [...]
[...] On the other hand, he presents Caesar, as we see in the excerpt, as the plaything of fate and the gods. In this scene, the daimôn (the genius) of Pompey represented by the statue inspires the conspirators. Thus, the two sources are chronologically distant from the subject they evoke. They sometimes rely on the same sources (Asinius Pollio, for example) but the treatment of Caesar's biography differs according to the objective of each author. More than opposed, the two sources are actually complementary in order to try to understand the power that Julius Caesar claimed. [...]
[...] He seeks to reach the smallest actions of Caesar. On the other hand, he does not analyze the causes or the driving forces of this conquest: the biographer takes precedence over the historian. The conquest is then a succession of strategic actions and battle phases. In the second excerpt, Plutarch magnifies Caesar, placing him as the sole winner of Vercingetorix in 2007, forgetting the organization of the Roman army. The defeated is presented as submitted to his conqueror." If the two authors recognize the clemency and mildness of Caesar, especially after the civil wars, the distance between the two is marked again when they report the assassination of Julius Caesar in -44 « When he sat down, the conspirators surrounded him one of Casca, to whom he was turning his back, wounded him, a little below the throat. [...]
