12/10/2023 0 Comments Julius ceasar biographyThere had been brief periods in Roman history when there had been single autocratic rulers before, but the assassins had this idea that he was going to be different. “For Romans, how you died was a very important summation of how you had lived”īut they all had this fear that Caesar, even if he wasn’t yet a tyrant in 44 BC, was going to become a tyrant and a single autocratic ruler of Rome. One of them was upset that Caesar had stolen some lions he had planned to put in a circus show. There were lots of different personal reasons. Others killed him because they were jealous of other people who hadn’t been as close to Caesar in the hard days in Gaul, but who seemed to have done almost as well as they had. They felt ashamed of having been pardoned. Some didn’t like him because he pardoned them and made them feel, by his famous clemency, that somehow he was holding that over them. One of them didn’t like him because he’d slept with his wife. Some hated him because they hadn’t become as rich under his watch as they felt he’d promised them they would be, or they’d hoped to be. They each had slightly different motives, some of which are related to aspects of Caesar’s own character. But it turned out that some of those friends, for various reasons, were also his greatest enemies, so much so that they were prepared to kill him. What does that campaign to get back at his assassins tell us about the early establishment of his myth and reputation?Ĭaesar had many friends, as people who get to the top always do. Your book, The Last Assassin, deals with the pursuit of Julius Caesar’s assassins by his supporters, most notably his adopted son, Octavian, who would go on to become Emperor Augustus. And the consequences of his death meant that no one ever forgot him. His death cemented what he’d written about what he had done. For Romans, how you died was a very important summation of how you had lived. With words he established his place in the minds of his fellow Romans and of millions of people later by saying what he’d done-just as his death defined him for other writers.īy being assassinated he set a standard for thinking about the motives and consequences of assassination. More importantly, he was a great writer in plain and elegant Latin. It was quite usual for educated Romans to speak Greek. But, if he did, it would have probably been in Greek. By crossing it with his army, in January 49 BC, he broke the rules designed to keep victorious armies away from Rome, began a civil war and gave the world a new term for an act from which you couldn’t go back.įour years later, he might have said something like, ‘ Et tu Brute,’ when he saw that one of his assassins on the Ides of March was the much loved son of his mistress. He had two goes at invading Britain, 55 and 54 BC, and was knocked back both times-more by the weather than the Britons.Īnd yes, he did cross the Rubicon, which was a shallow stream between Gaul and Italy. No, he didn’t conquer Britain-even though his skill as a self-propagandist has often led people to think that he did. Yes, he did conquer Gaul-between 58 and 50 BC-killing maybe a million Gauls in the process, also getting too rich and too powerful for traditional Roman politics to cope with him. He was then assassinated and said: ‘ Et tu, Brute?’ As a non-Classicist, I think he conquered Gaul and Britain, and brought the Roman Republic to an end by crossing the Rubicon. Perhaps, before we discuss your selection of books about Julius Caesar, you might briefly outline who Caesar was. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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