Who was Julius Caesar?

A noble family short of money

Gaius Julius Caesar was born in Rome in July 100 BC. His family was patrician, among the oldest in the city, and claimed descent from the goddess Venus, but it had little money and no recent glory. He was not born by caesarean section, whatever the story says: Pliny the Elder tells it of an early ancestor, and Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, lived until he was in his forties.

Family ties nearly killed him young. His aunt was the wife of the general Marius, and his own wife, Cornelia, was the daughter of Marius’s ally Cinna. When Sulla became dictator, he ordered Caesar, about eighteen, to divorce her. Caesar refused and went into hiding, sick with fever. Sulla finally spared him at the pleading of friends, with a warning:

Have your way and take him; only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.

Around 75 BC pirates seized him in the Aegean. He laughed at their ransom of twenty talents, told them he was worth fifty, and promised to crucify them. Once freed, he raised ships, caught them and kept his word.

Priest, consul, conqueror

He climbed Rome’s ladder of offices on borrowed money and a showman’s instinct. In 63 BC he was elected pontifex maximus, Rome’s chief priest, for life. When his wife Pompeia was touched by scandal, he divorced her, saying his family must be free even from suspicion. In 60 BC he made a private pact with Pompey and Crassus, and in 59 BC he was consul. Then came Gaul. From 58 to 50 BC he conquered roughly modern France and Belgium, bridged the Rhine, landed twice in Britain, broke Vercingetorix at Alesia and told it all, in the third person, in his Gallic War.

Civil war and dictatorship

Ordered to give up his army, he took one legion into Italy in January 49 BC, crossing the Rubicon. He beat Pompey at Pharsalus in 48 BC, followed him to Egypt and stayed for Cleopatra. The war took him across three continents. After crushing a king in Pontus, in today’s Turkey, within five days of arriving, he sent home a famous report:

In announcing the swiftness and fierceness of this battle to one of his friends at Rome, Amantius, Caesar wrote three words: “Came, saw, conquered.”

He was famous for pardoning enemies instead of killing them, and he reformed as fast as he fought. His calendar of 365 days, with a leap day every fourth year, began in 45 BC and, with a small fix in 1582, is still ours. His birth month, Quintilis, became July. In early 44 BC he was named dictator for life.

His death, and his name

To many senators a dictator for life looked like a king. On the Ides of March, 44 BC, they stabbed him to death at a Senate meeting. He was 55, “in the fifty-sixth year of his age,” as Suetonius puts it. The famous last words are Shakespeare’s, not his.

He was never emperor. His great-nephew and adopted son, Octavian, became Augustus, the first emperor, in 27 BC. But Caesar’s name became a title of power, and the German Kaiser and the Russian tsar both come from it. Suetonius even gives us his face: tall, fair, with keen black eyes, and so troubled by his baldness that he combed his thin hair forward and gladly wore the laurel wreath the Senate allowed him at all times.