Gaius Julius Caesar Posters

It is difficult, now, to separate the most famous Roman of them all from the most famous author of them all. For twenty generations, the Julius Caesar defined by Shakespeare has overwhelmed all other images of Caesar, so that it it is difficult to imagine the living man himself. Yet Shakespeare's Caesar, taken solely as biography, is deeply flawed. Caesar is portrayed as overtopping all his contemporaries, yet is also humorless, pompous, even self-importantly fearful; all attributes which friends and enemies in his own time would have found perplexingly off-base.

There is no hint of the personal charm, wit and magnetism for which he was notorious; of the cold-eyed conqueror who could tell a defiant subordinate that it was easier to kill him than to have to say so; of the teenage rebel refusing to do the bidding of the killer-dictator, Sulla; of the intellectual second only to Cicero as a speaker and writer. The man himself was infinitely more complex and interesting than Shakespeare's version. Perhaps that is why, both because and in spite of Shakespeare, he is simply the best-recognized Roman in history.

"...a man who had become strongly committed to the popular cause and highly experienced in the exercise of power, was murdered in the senate-house by Brutus and Cassius out of jealousy of his immense power and out of longing for the traditional constitution. The people in fact missed him more than they had anyone else; they went round hunting for his killers, gave him a funeral in the middle of the forum, built a temple on the site of the pyre, and still sacrifice to him as a god."

Appian, I, 4.

When Caesar died in 44 BC, a great comet soon troubled the skies over Rome. No more superstitious people ever lived: even those who had bitterly opposed him and murdered him outside Pompey's Theater were awed by the implications when the heavens themselves "blazed forth the death of princes." Soon thereafter, for the first time in Roman history, a living man was deified; in the process, the man himself was lost to history.

In his own lifetime and ever since, Caesar the man - not the god or the legend - remains inscrutable. Historians ever since have pointed out the difficulty in reconciling the many and conflicting pictures of the private and public man. The statues, busts, and coins that have come down to us show similar, confusing faces. This biography attempts to sketch the significant facts we know about Caesar's life and death. The interpretation of the facts must be left to each person seeking Caesar.

Caesar's life and accomplishments cannot be understood without the context of his great contemporaries, Cicero, Pompey, Crassus, Cato the Younger, Brutus, Antony. The Gracchi began it; Sulla and Marius helped make the times what they were. Biographies of these men can be found under "Contemporaries." His military campaigns, including Alesia, the expeditions to Britain, Pharsalus and Dyrrhachium, can be found under "Battles, as well as the campaigns of the the Gallic Wars.