Julius Caesar

• 1. Introduction

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  Around the 10th or the 11th of January 49 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar led a single legion, the Legio XIII Gemina, across a small river called the Rubicon, the boundary marking the northern edge of Italy. According to Plutarch and Suetonius, he quoted the Athenian playwright Menander in Greek as he did so: "let the die be cast". That crossing began a civil war. It ended with one man holding near-unchallenged power over Rome. He was a general, a statesman, and an author, born on the 12th or the 13th of July 100 BC and killed on the 15th of March 44 BC. How does a man from a patrician family of modest political weight become dictator for life? Why would sixty senators, many of them his own former allies, decide he had to die? And how did a single Roman name come to mean emperor for the next two thousand years? The answers run through Gaul, Egypt, the floor of the Senate, and the alphabets of half of Europe.

• 2. An Ancient But Quiet House

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  The gens Julia claimed they had come to Rome from Alba Longa in the seventh century BC, after the third king of Rome, Tullus Hostilius, took and destroyed their city. They traced their line to Julus, son of Aeneas and founder of Alba Longa. Since Aeneas was a son of Venus, the clan claimed descent from a goddess. This divine pedigree was well established in public consciousness, even if its final form had not yet settled by the first century. The ancient bloodline did not translate into power. The Julii Caesares were not especially influential during the middle republic. The first man known to carry the cognomen Caesar was a praetor in 208 BC during the Second Punic War, and the family's first consul came only in 157 BC. Their fortunes recovered in the early first century, producing two consuls in 91 and 90 BC. There is no evidence Caesar was born by Caesarean section; such operations killed the mother, and his mother lived for decades afterward. His father married Aurelia of the influential Aurelii Cottae, served on the Saturninian land commission in 103 BC, and governed Asia as proconsul, likely in 91 to 90 BC. He died suddenly in early 84 BC, leaving his son to navigate a city torn by the rivalries of Marius and Sulla.

• 3. Defying A Dictator

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  Named flamen Dialis, a priest of Jupiter, during the dominance of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, the young Caesar married Cinna's daughter, Cornelia. After Sulla's victory in the civil war in 82 BC, Cinna's acts were annulled, and Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce her. Caesar refused, implicitly questioning the legitimacy of the annulment, then went into hiding until relatives and contacts among the Vestal Virgins interceded. Sulla's alleged remark that he saw "in Caesar many Mariuses" is apocryphal. Leaving Italy, Caesar served on the staff of the governor of Asia, Marcus Minucius Thermus, and traveled to Bithynia as a guest of King Nicomedes IV. At the Siege of Mytilene he won the civic crown for saving the life of a fellow citizen in battle. The Senate was supposed to stand when a holder of that crown entered a room, a privilege that whetted his appetite for honours. Captured by pirates on a voyage to Rhodes, where he sought the tutelage of the rhetorician Apollonius Molon, Caesar became the subject of a much-embellished story. Plutarch and Suetonius say he was freed for fifty talents, then returned with a fleet to execute the pirates. The figure is literary embellishment; Velleius Paterculus more plausibly says the pirates were sold into slavery. Caesar's appetite for distinction would soon carry him into the highest priesthood in Rome.

• 4. Building A Power Base

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  In 73 BC, while absent from Rome, Caesar was co-opted into the pontifices in place of a deceased relative. His quaestorship in 69 BC gave him a lifetime seat in the Senate. That same year, his aunt Julia, widow of the great Gaius Marius, died, and so did his wife Cornelia, shortly after bearing his only legitimate child, also named Julia. At Julia's public funeral, Caesar displayed images of Marius, whose memory had been suppressed after Sulla's victory. For much of this period Caesar was one of Pompey's supporters. He backed the lex Gabinia in 67 BC, granting Pompey an extraordinary command against Mediterranean piracy, and the lex Manilia in 66 BC, handing Pompey the Third Mithridatic War. As curule aedile in 65 BC he staged lavish games and restored the trophies Marius had won over Jugurtha and the Cimbri. In 63 BC he stood for both the praetorship and the post of pontifex maximus, head of the College of Pontiffs and the highest state religious official. He beat two influential senators, Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Publius Servilius Isauricus. After his praetorship he governed Hispania Ulterior, campaigning against the Callaeci and Lusitani, seizing enough plunder to clear the debts from his expensive campaigns. Hailed imperator, he returned in the summer of 60 BC to a choice between a triumph and the consulship, and chose the consulship.

• 5. The Three-Way Alliance

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  In 60 BC, Caesar reconciled two political foes, Pompey and Crassus, into a three-way alliance later misleadingly called the "First Triumvirate". Pompey wanted ratification of his eastern settlement and land for his veterans; Crassus wanted a bailout for tax farmers in Asia, many of them his clients. The alliance was finalised only around the start of Caesar's consulship of 59 BC. As consul, Caesar first published the minutes of the Senate and the assemblies, signalling its accountability to the public. His land bill met obstruction not on grounds of public interest but in opposition to his advancement. When his co-consul Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus threatened a permanent veto, a riot broke out, Bibulus' fasces were broken, and the bill passed. Bibulus then withdrew to his house and issued edicts in absentia, claiming to cancel all the days on which Caesar could hold votes. The lex Vatinia assigned Caesar Illyricum and Cisalpine Gaul for five years, and the Senate added Transalpine Gaul, subject to annual renewal. The picture of triumviral supremacy was misleading. The opposition of Bibulus and Cato built genuine revulsion against Caesar and his allies through the year, and caused them serious political difficulties. To seal the alliance, Pompey married Caesar's daughter Julia. That marriage would hold the partnership together until her death in childbirth around late August of 54 BC.

• 6. Conquering Gaul

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  The first engagement came in April 58 BC, when Caesar stopped the migrating Helvetii near Geneva by building a wall, then defeated them at the Battle of Bibracte. He defeated Ariovistus, king of the Suebi, at the Battle of Vosges, and survived an uprising at the Battle of the Sabis. Throughout, Caesar wrote his Commentaries, some ten volumes covering operations from 58 to 52 BC, acknowledged even in his own time as a Latin literary masterwork. The account is partial to him, excusing defeats and highlighting victories, yet it is almost the sole source for events in Gaul during this period. To mark the Rhine as a Roman frontier, Caesar built a bridge across it, an engineering feat meant to show Rome's reach. He led expeditions into southern Britain in 55 and 54 BC, an island the Romans regarded as a place of mystery and wonder. Late in 54 BC, the Eburones and Belgae ambushed and virtually annihilated a legion and five cohorts. The greatest challenge came from Vercingetorix of the Averni, who led an uprising across most of central Gaul. Caesar was first defeated at Gergovia, then besieged Vercingetorix at Alesia, became besieged himself, and finally forced the surrender. His reports were vital to keep the Senate from reassigning his command, and at Cicero's motion the Senate once voted him an unprecedented fifteen days of thanksgiving.

• 7. The Civil War

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  By 50 BC, the trust between Caesar and Pompey had disintegrated, and Pompey had realigned with the Senate. On the 1st of December 50 BC, a proposal that both men disarm won overwhelming support in the Senate, 370 to 22, but was not passed when a consul dissolved the meeting. On the 7th of January 49 BC, Caesar's supportive tribunes were driven from Rome, and the Senate declared him an enemy. He marched, leaving Pompey and many senators to flee south and then escape from Brundisium to Greece. After taking Pompey's Spanish provinces at the Battle of Ilerda, Caesar followed his rival into Greece and decisively defeated him at Pharsalus on the 9th of August 48 BC. Pompey fled to Egypt and was killed on arrival at Alexandria. Caesar landed three days later, on the 2nd of October 48 BC, and stayed to arbitrate the Egyptian civil war between the child pharaoh Ptolemy XIII and his sister Cleopatra. He began an affair with Cleopatra, defeated Ptolemy at the Battle of the Nile, and installed her as ruler. In late June she gave birth to their son, Caesarion. Then came Pharnaces, king in Crimea, whom Caesar crushed at Zela so quickly that he wrote veni, vidi, vici, "I came, I saw, I conquered". The war ground on at Thapsus on the 6th of April 46 BC, where Cato killed himself rather than accept clemency, and ended at Munda on the 17th of March 45 BC, a bloody battle Caesar narrowly won.

• 8. Dictator For Life And The Ides

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  Shortly before the 15th of February 44 BC, Caesar assumed the title dictator perpetuo, dictator for life, ending any hope that his power would be temporary. He had been appointed dictator some four times since 49 BC, but those titles were honours reflecting his dominance as victor over fellow Romans, not the source of his power. The Senate placed his portrait on coins, the first for a living Roman, and granted him royal dress, a golden chair, and statues in temples. The month of his birth, Quintilis, was renamed Julius. His reforms were practical rather than revolutionary, as Ernst Badian noted that he had "no plans for basic social and constitutional reform". He replaced the republican lunisolar calendar with the solar Julian calendar, raised the number of senators from 600 to 900, founded colonies on the sites of Carthage and Corinth, and cut the grain dole from 320,000 to around 150,000. Resentment grew. He deposed two tribunes who shut down attempts to call him rex, undermining his own justification for the civil war and angering a public that revered the tribunes. By February 44 BC there were some sixty conspirators, led by Brutus, who claimed descent from the Lucius Junius Brutus who drove out the kings, alongside Cassius, Trebonius, and Decimus Brutus. On the 15th of March, the Ides, in the Curia of Pompey, the conspirators approached his golden chair at the foot of Pompey's statue and stabbed him at least twenty-three times. Whether he fell in silence or asked Brutus kai su teknon, "you too, child?", is recorded differently. He died at once.

  The assassins seized the Capitoline hill, but the population received them coldly, and Antony soon inflamed the public against them. A seven-day cometary outburst in 44 BC was believed to mark Caesar's deification, and was named Caesar's Comet. His will left a generous gift to the plebs and named his great-nephew Gaius Octavius as principal heir, adopting him. On the 1st of January 42 BC the Senate declared Caesar a god, and the Temple of Caesar was begun on the site of his cremation, of which only the altar now remains. Octavian, later known as Augustus, defeated his rivals and by 31 BC held sole control, transforming the Republic into the Roman Empire as its first emperor. The cognomen itself became a title. Promulgated by the Bible's verse "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's", it passed into German as Kaiser and, through Old Church Slavic, into Tsar or Czar. The last Tsar in nominal power was Simeon II of Bulgaria, whose reign ended in 1946 and who is still alive in 2026. For roughly two thousand years, at least one head of state has borne his name. Of his own writing, only the war commentaries survive, including the seven books of The Gallic Wars long studied by first- and second-year Latin students. His lost works include a funeral oration for his aunt Julia and the "Anticato", his answer to Cicero's praise of the man who died at Utica rather than live under him.