Julius Caesar

About this figure

Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was born into the patrician Julian family, which claimed - implausibly, but usefully - descent from the goddess Venus. His aunt Julia had married the general and seven-time consul Gaius Marius, a connection that made the young Caesar a marked man once Marius's rival Sulla seized power in Rome: ancient biographers say Sulla ordered him to divorce his wife Cornelia, daughter of the Marian consul Cinna, and only reluctantly spared his life, reportedly remarking that he saw "many a Marius" in the boy. Caesar spent his twenties and thirties building an ordinary, if ambitious, Roman political career - military service, a term as quaestor, election as aedile, then election as pontifex maximus in 63 BC - while running up enormous debts to finance his public standing.

His decisive break came around 60 BC, when he joined the general Pompey and the financier Crassus in an informal political alliance historians call the First Triumvirate. It carried him to the consulship in 59 BC and then to a multi-year military command over Gaul. Between 58 and 50 BC Caesar's legions subdued the Gallic tribes region by region, crossed briefly into Britain, and bridged the Rhine into Germany; his own dispatches home, later collected as the Commentaries on the Gallic War, turned the campaign into one of the most widely read works of Latin prose as well as a running argument, addressed to Rome, for his own indispensability. The alliance with Pompey frayed after the death of Caesar's daughter Julia, who was married to Pompey, and broke down once Crassus was killed campaigning against Parthia in 53 BC. Ordered by the Senate to disband his army and return to Rome as a private citizen, Caesar instead led his legions across the Rubicon into Italy in January 49 BC, opening a civil war that he narrated in turn in his Commentaries on the Civil War. (The Gallic War's eighth and final book was added afterward by another hand, traditionally identified as Caesar's officer Aulus Hirtius.)

Caesar broke Pompey's forces at Pharsalus in 48 BC; Pompey fled to Egypt and was murdered there before Caesar arrived. Caesar spent the following months securing Egypt - where he allied himself with Queen Cleopatra VII and, by most ancient accounts, fathered a son with her - before putting down the remaining Pompeian resistance in Africa and Spain by 45 BC. Rome's ordinary constitutional offices could not accommodate the scale of his power, and the Senate compensated by naming him dictator repeatedly, and finally dictator for life in early 44 BC. In his brief time at the head of the state he reformed the calendar (the Julian calendar, with later adjustment, is still the basis of the one in use today), extended Roman citizenship, resettled veterans and the urban poor in new colonies, and enlarged the Senate. On the Ides of March - 15 March 44 BC - a conspiracy of senators led by Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius stabbed him to death at a Senate meeting, judging his accumulation of power a mortal threat to the Republic. The assassination did not restore the Republic; it opened the round of civil wars that would end it for good.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.