Shakespeare called Julius Caesar's assassin, Marcus Brutus, the "noblest Roman of them all," but there is no doubt that Julius Caesar himself is the most renowned Roman of them all probably the only Roman, apart perhaps from Pontius Pilate, whom the man in the street could identify. Caesar established no enduring political regime, but in popular memory he has overshadowed his nephew and (posthumously) adopted son Octavian, or Augustus, who was the actual founder of the Roman Empire. His very name has become the word for "emperor" in several languages (e.g., Kaiser; Czar). The following pages examine Caesar's public character and his role as military leader and politician in the last days of the Roman republic.
Gaius Iulius Caesar, to give him his proper Roman name, was born into an aristocratic Roman family in the turbulent later days of the Roman Republic, and his career cannot be understood without some grasp of the development of Roman political life through his lifetime, which culminated thirteen years after his death with the triumph of Augustus. Caesar himself was born at the beginning of the 1st century BC, traditionally in 100 BC, though some scholars have argued in favor of 102 BC (Fuller 56-59).
When Caesar was born, Rome was legally a city-state, though Roman power already extended around the Mediterranean. Most of Italy was grouped into nominally independent "allies," while outside Italy Roman control was exerted through a mixture of direct rule of provinces and alliances with "client states" or what we would today call satellites.
The string of Roman foreign victories that began with the Punic Wars of the 3rd Century BC had by the generation before Caesar's birth produced two fundamental political and social crises. The dislocations of war had tended to ruin smaller farmers, turning Italy into a land of dispossessed paupers or debt-burdened peasants on the one hand and immensely rich landowners on the oth...