Caesar's Heritage: Hellenistic Kings and their Roman Equals

In 44 B.C. Caesar, newly declared dictator perpetuo, told a crowd hailing him halfheartedly as king that they were mistaken: he was ‘not Rex but Caesar’; but he punished the tribunes who removed the diadems placed on his statues, and who arrested a man for putting them there. Not long after, at the Lupercalia, the consul Mark Antony thrice offered a diadem to Caesar, who was sitting, as Cicero, doubtless an eye-witness, describes him, ‘amictus toga purpurea, in sella aurea, coronatus’; Caesar refused it, sending it to Jupiter on the Capitol, and had inscribed in the Fasti a notice that he had been offered the diadem populi iussu (which was certainly not true), but had not accepted it. But would he have accepted had the people been more enthusiastic ? Thus began a controversy as to Caesar's final intentions that has still not been resolved. I have no dogmatic answer to the question, and I do not wish to go through all the old arguments, though I would like to suggest that there is good contemporary evidence for believing that Caesar was willing to be worshipped as a god, but did not wish to take the name of king; and I would also like to suggest that there might have been more logic than appears at first sight in accepting a number of honours that suggested kingship (as well as divinity, which so often in the East went with it), and yet refusing the name. For on the usual interpretations of Caesar's last actions we are in a dilemma: if he simply wanted to avoid the name of king and the hatred which, as a practical proposition at least, it still aroused in Rome, then he did, or permitted, a lot of incredibly foolish things. On the other hand, if he simply wanted to take the title, he was, as events were to show, very shortsighted—and indeed some scholars have supposed him suffering from megalomania or senility.