Caesar100 - 44 BC
 aius Julius Caesar, general, dictator, and statesman,
changed the course of the history of the Greco-Roman world decisively and irreversibly. Caesar's gens, the Julii, were patricians and traced their lineage back to the goddess Venus. In 78 Caesar went to Rhodes to study oratory under Molon. En route he was captured by pirates. Caesar raised his ransom, raised a naval force, captured his captors, and had them crucified.  All this he did as a private individual holding no public office.
In 69 or 68 Caesar was elected quaestor. In the same year his wife, Cornelia, died. Caesar afterward married Pompeia, a distant relative of Pompey. Caesar was elected one of the curule aediles for 65, and he celebrated this by unusually lavish expenditure with borrowed money. He was elected pontifex maximus in 63. By now he had become a controversial political figure.
After his praetorship in 62 he obtained the governorship of Southern Spain for 61-60. His creditors did not let him leave Rome until Crassus had gone bail for a quarter of his debts; but a military expedition beyond the northwest frontier of his province enabled Caesar to win loot for himself as well as for his soldiers, with a balance left over for the treasury. This partial financial recovery enabled him, after his return to Rome in 60, to stand for the consulship for 59.
Caesar now succeeded in organizing an irresistible coalition of political
bosses. Caesar, who had assiduously cultivated Pompey's friendship, now entered into a secret pact with him. Caesar's master stroke was to persuade Crassus to join the partnership, the so-called first triumvirate. Early in 59, Pompey sealed his alliance with Caesar by marrying Caesar's only child, Julia. Caesar married Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso.
As consul, Caesar introduced a bill for the allotment of Roman public lands
in Italy, on which the first charge was to be a provision for Pompey's
soldiers. Another act gave Caesar Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum. When the governor-designate of Transalpine Gaul suddenly died, this province, also, was assigned to Caesar at Pompey's instance. Cisalpine Gaul gave Caesar a military
recruiting ground; Transalpine Gaul gave him a springboard for conquests
beyond Rome's northwest frontier.
Between 58 and 50, Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul up to the left bank of
the Rhine and subjugated it so effectively that it remained passive under
Roman rule throughout the Roman civil wars between 49 and 31. Rome's military superiority lay in its mastery of strategy, tactics, discipline, and military engineering. In 55 he bridged the Rhine just below Koblenz to raid Germany on
the other side of the river, and then crossed the Channel to raid Britain. A second raid followed in 54. The crisis of Caesar's Gallic war came in 52. The peoples of central Gaul found a national leader in Vercingetorix, who wanted to avoid pitched battles and sieges and to defeat the Romans by cutting off their supplies. A Roman attempt to storm Gergovia was repulsed and resulted in heavy Roman losses. Caesar then was able to besiege Vercingetorix in Alesia. This town was a position of great natural strength, and a large Gallic army came to relieve it; but this army was repulsed and dispersed by Caesar, and Vercingetorix then capitulated. Another rebel force stood siege in the south in the natural fortress of Uxellodunum until its water supply gave out. Caesar had the survivors' hands cut off. He spent the year 50 in organizing the newly conquered territory. After that, he was ready to settle his accounts with his opponents at home. He used part of his growing wealth from Gallic loot to hire political agents in Rome.
The triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus was patched up in April 56 at a conference at Luca. It was arranged that Pompey and Crassus were to be the consuls for 55 and were to get laws promulgated prolonging Caesar's provincial commands for another five years and giving Crassus a five-year term in Syria and Pompey a five-year term in Spain.
The issue was whether there should or should not be an interval between the
date at which Caesar was to resign his provincial governorships and,
therewith, the command over his armies and the date at which he would enter
his proposed second consulship.
One of the consuls for 50, Gaius Claudius Marcellus, obtained resolutions from the Senate that Caesar should lay down his command but that Pompey should not lay down his command simultaneously. January 49 the Senate received from Caesar a proposal that he and Pompey should lay down their commands simultaneously, but the Senate resolved that Caesar should be treated as a public enemy if he did not lay down his command. On January 10-11, 49, Caesar led his troops across the little river Rubicon, the boundary between his province of Cisalpine Gaul and
Italy proper. Crossing the Rubicon Caesar should have spoken the famous words "alea iacta sit" (let the dice be cast). He thus committed the first act of war.
Caesar's success in building up his political power had made the
champions of the old regime so implacably hostile to him that he was now
faced with a choice between putting himself at his enemies' mercy or
seizing the monopoly of power at which he was accused of aiming. The first bout of the civil war moved swiftly. In 49 Caesar drove his opponents out of Italy and then crushed Pompey's army in Spain. Toward the end of 49, he followed Pompey across the Adriatic and won a decisive victory at Pharsalus on August 9, 48. Caesar pursued Pompey from Thessaly to Egypt, where Pompey was murdered by
an officer of King Ptolemy. Caesar wintered in Alexandria, fighting with
the populace and dallying with Queen Cleopatra. In 47 he fought a
brief local war in northeastern Anatolia with Pharnaces, king of
the Cimmerian Bosporus, who was trying to regain his father Mithradates'
kingdom of Pontus. Caesar's famous words, Veni, vidi, vici ("I came, I saw,
I conquered"), are his own account of this campaign.
Caesar then returned to Rome, but a few months later, now with the title of
dictator, he left for Africa, where his opponents had rallied. In 46 he
crushed their army at Thapsus and returned to Rome, only to leave in November for Farther Spain to deal with a fresh outbreak of resistance, which he crushed on March 17, 45, at Munda. He then returned to Rome to start putting the Greco-Roman world in order. He had less than a year's grace for this huge task of reconstruction before his assassination in the Senate House at Rome on March 15, 44 (the Ides of March). "Et tu, Brute?" ("You too, Brutus?") was Caesar's expression of his particular anguish at being stabbed by a man whom he had forgiven, trusted, and loved. According to Suetonius Caesar spoke his last words in Greek, saying "You too, my son?" If Caesar had not been murdered in 44, he might have lived on for 15 or 20 years. His physical constitution was unusually tough, though in his last years he had several epileptic seizures.
Caesar's calendar, the Julian calendar, is still partially in force in the Eastern Orthodox Christian countries; and the Gregorian calendar, now in use in the West, is the Julian, slightly corrected by Pope Gregory XIII.
|