Julius Caesar was a Roman statesman, general, and writer who played a pivotal role in the events that led to the demise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. Born into a patrician family of modest means, he rose through the ranks of Roman politics through a combination of military genius, political cunning, and extraordinary ambition.
Early Life and Rise
Caesar was born into the gens Iulia, one of Rome's oldest patrician families, though one that had long since lost its wealth and political influence. His early career was conventional: military service in Asia Minor, where he was awarded the corona civica (civic crown) for saving the life of a Roman citizen in battle, then a quaestorship in Spain. What set him apart from the beginning was an almost reckless daring — famously, when captured by pirates in 75 BC, he laughed at their demands for ransom, insisted they raise the price (as beneath his dignity), and told them cheerfully that he would return and crucify them. He did.
His rise in Roman politics was rapid and expensive — Caesar borrowed heavily to finance the games, public works, and largesse that bought popular support. An alliance with Pompey the Great and Marcus Crassus, known to history as the First Triumvirate, gave him the leverage to win the consulship of 59 BC.
The Conquest of Gaul
Caesar's conquest of Gaul (58–50 BC) stands as one of the great military campaigns in history. Over eight years, he subjugated the Celtic tribes of modern-day France, Belgium, and parts of Germany and Britain, extending Roman territory dramatically and enriching himself and his soldiers with plunder. He fought more than thirty major engagements. He crossed the Rhine — twice — on bridges he built in ten days. He twice landed in Britain, the edge of the known world.
His account of these campaigns, the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, remains a masterwork of military history and Latin prose. Written in the third person — "Caesar did this," "Caesar ordered that" — it is also a masterwork of self-promotion. The wars were profitable, but the human cost was immense: ancient sources claim a million Gauls were killed and another million enslaved, though these figures are almost certainly exaggerated.
The siege and fall of Alesia in 52 BC, where Caesar trapped the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix and his relief army simultaneously — building two rings of fortifications, one facing inward, one outward — is among the most celebrated feats of military engineering in antiquity.
Civil War
The collapse of the Triumvirate — Crassus died at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, and Caesar and Pompey had become rivals — set the stage for civil war. When the Senate ordered Caesar to disband his legions in 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon River (the boundary of Roman Italy) with his army, uttering the famous words alea iacta est — "the die is cast." The act was technically treason. Civil war was now inevitable.
Caesar moved with characteristic speed. He seized Italy before Pompey could organize resistance. He defeated Pompeian forces in Spain. At Pharsalus in Greece (48 BC), he routed Pompey's much larger army. Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was murdered on the orders of the young Ptolemy XIII. When Caesar arrived and was presented with Pompey's severed head, he reportedly wept.
In Egypt he met Cleopatra VII, who had herself smuggled into his presence. They became lovers, and Caesar restored her to the Egyptian throne she had been expelled from.
Dictator Perpetuo
Back in Rome, Caesar was appointed dictator — initially for brief periods, eventually perpetuo ("in perpetuity") in 44 BC. He enacted sweeping reforms: he revised the calendar (the Julian calendar, which remained in use in the West until 1582, and in Russia until 1918), reorganized Roman debt, extended citizenship to provincial peoples, and planned massive infrastructure projects including draining the Pontine Marshes and cutting a canal through the Corinthian isthmus.
But his accumulation of power alarmed the senatorial aristocracy. Many feared that he intended to make himself king — anathema to Roman tradition. A group of senators, led by his old friend Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, formed a conspiracy.
On the Ides of March (March 15), 44 BC, Caesar was stabbed to death in the Theatre of Pompey, receiving twenty-three wounds. Only one, according to his doctor, was fatal. Eyewitnesses reported that as Brutus struck, Caesar said — in Greek, perhaps — kai su, teknon: "You too, child."
Legacy
The assassination, intended to restore the Republic, instead destroyed it. Caesar's adopted son Octavian — later Augustus — used his name and his inheritance to win the loyalty of Caesar's veterans, defeated his assassins and Mark Antony in turn, and established the Roman Empire. Every Roman emperor after him took the name "Caesar" as a title.
Caesar's name passed into the vocabulary of power across centuries: Kaiser in German, Czar (or Tsar) in Russian. His calendar shaped the Western world for sixteen centuries. His military writings are still studied in staff colleges. His life has been the subject of Shakespeare's most politically sophisticated play, countless biographies, and the greatest number of scholarly books devoted to any figure of the ancient world.
He was, by almost any measure, one of the two or three most consequential human beings of the ancient world — a man of whom it might be said, as his contemporary Cicero said of him in a different context, that in him "nature herself seemed to have done everything to create a perfect man."