Of a Saying of Caesar

Caesar is said to have remarked, passing through some poor Alpine village, that he would rather be the first man there than the second in Rome. This sentence has been much quoted, usually in illustration of Caesar’s ambition, but it seems to me to deserve more careful attention than the use made of it generally allows. For it is not straightforwardly a statement of vanity. It is a statement about the nature of power and the way men experience it — about the difference between being supreme in a small sphere and being excellent in a great one.

The man who is first in a village has something real: he is consulted, he is deferred to, his decisions are followed, his opinion shapes events. His power is limited in extent, but it is not limited in kind — it is genuine power, exercised upon real matters, with real consequences for real people who depend on him. The man who is second in Rome has something that looks vastly grander but feels, in the daily experience of it, entirely different: he is always subject to revision, always looking over his shoulder at the man above him, always conscious that his judgments can be overruled and his decisions unmade.

“Power at the top of a great hierarchy is, paradoxically, less fully experienced than power at the top of a small one. The village headman governs; the second consul negotiates. To govern, however modestly, is a more complete form of authority than to advise the governor of the world.”

Caesar, of course, did not stay in the village. He went to Rome and was not content to be second there either. This is the other truth in his remark — that a man capable of making it is a man incapable of acting on it. The ambition that can so clearly diagnose what it craves is not, for that reason, any more able to restrain itself. Caesar saw that the desire to be first was insatiable, saw the mechanism of his own nature as clearly as any philosopher, and then, with perfect consistency, allowed that nature to run its course to its end.