Most people know two things about Julius Caesar: he got stabbed on the Ides of March, and he said something in Latin about coming and seeing and conquering. Both are true, more or less. But they sit at the very end of a career that was, up until that point, one long string of unlikely recoveries from apparently fatal situations. Caesar spent much of his life on the edge of ruin. He just kept not falling off.
Before he was famous
Gaius Julius Caesar was born around 100 BC into a patrician family that had not been politically important for generations. His aunt married Gaius Marius, the general who reformed the Roman army, and that connection made the young Caesar an enemy of Sulla when Sulla seized power in the 80s BC. Sulla reportedly told his allies that in Caesar he saw "many a Marius," which was not a compliment. Caesar went into hiding for a while and was eventually spared, though Sulla advised people around him to watch out for the young man.
He was also staggeringly in debt for most of his early career. To win elections and stage the public games that Roman voters expected, he borrowed enormous sums. By the time he stood for the consulship in 59 BC, his creditors were so worried about losing their money if he failed that some of them actually funded his campaign. It was good politics and terrible banking.
Before that, as governor of Further Spain in 61 BC, Caesar conducted a military campaign energetic enough to earn him a triumph back in Rome. He gave it up to run for consul instead, since Roman law required candidates to be present in the city. That trade captures him well: he wanted the political prize, not the ceremonial one.
The First Triumvirate and the Gallic Wars
The consulship in 59 BC came through an informal alliance with two of the most powerful men in Rome: the general Pompey and the financier Crassus. Together they are known as the First Triumvirate, though the Romans had no formal name for it. The three men needed each other. Caesar needed money and the army command that followed the consulship. Pompey needed his veterans' land grants ratified. Crassus needed various business interests protected. They made it work.
Caesar got the command of Gaul, and from 58 to 50 BC he used it to conquer a territory roughly equivalent to modern France, Belgium, and parts of Switzerland and Germany. He wrote about it himself, in the third person, in The Gallic Wars: a piece of military history that doubles as one of the most effective political self-promotion campaigns in ancient history. His dispatches to Rome were read in the Forum. He was building a reputation while building an empire.
By the time he was done, he had fought perhaps a million Gauls and enslaved a comparable number, by ancient estimates. His own account is selective about the uglier parts.
Crossing the Rubicon
The Rubicon was a small river in northern Italy that marked the boundary between the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper. Roman law forbade a general to bring his army across it. In January of 49 BC, after the Senate ordered him to disband his legions or be declared a public enemy, Caesar crossed it anyway.
The phrase has meant a point of no return ever since. The ancient sources suggest Caesar himself knew exactly what it meant. Suetonius records him saying, as he reached the bank, iacta alea est: "the die is cast." Pompey, who had been Caesar's ally and then his rival, fled to Greece. The civil war that followed was brief. Caesar won it in roughly four years, defeating Pompey's forces even after Pompey was murdered in Egypt in 48 BC.
Dictator perpetuo and the Ides of March
By 44 BC Caesar held the title dictator perpetuo: dictator in perpetuity, with no term limit. Roman dictators were an old Republican institution, meant for emergencies, always temporary. Stripping the "temporary" from the job title was either a practical solution to Rome's chronic instability or a declaration that the Republic was finished, depending on who you asked. A large group of senators, including his friend Brutus and his former ally Cassius, decided they had heard enough.
On March 15, 44 BC, they stabbed him 23 times in the Theatre of Pompey, during a Senate session. The physician Antistius, who examined the body, reportedly concluded that only one wound had been fatal. The others, delivered by men who had never killed anyone before, missed the vital spots. It is a grim kind of fact.
What he actually left behind
Caesar's immediate political legacy was chaos: 14 more years of civil war before his adopted heir Octavian emerged as the first emperor, Augustus. But his longer legacy is extraordinary for its reach. He reformed the Roman calendar, replacing the old lunar system with a solar one of 365 days and a leap year every four. The Julian calendar, as it became known, remained in use in most of Europe until the 1500s, and the Gregorian calendar that replaced it is only a minor correction to his original work.
The name Caesar became a title. The German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar both descend from it directly. Every emperor who ruled Rome after Augustus took the name as part of his title. When you think about the Roman Empire, you are thinking about something that in large part exists because Julius Caesar forced it into being, then got himself killed before he could run it.
There is also the question of what he was actually like. Plutarch and Suetonius both wrote detailed lives of him within a century or two of his death. Adrian Goldsworthy's modern biography works through those sources carefully. The picture that emerges is of a man who was genuinely brilliant, genuinely ruthless, and genuinely charming, and who seems to have believed, without much self-doubt, that what was good for Julius Caesar was good for Rome. It is not an unfamiliar type. He just happened to be correct often enough that it is still hard to say he was wrong.
Sources: Suetonius, Life of the Deified Julius; Plutarch, Life of Caesar; Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (Yale University Press, 2006).
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