Annual Ides of March Email

The Annual Ides of March Emails

I have an obsession with Roman history. One result of this obsession is that, since 2010, I have had an annual tradition of spamming pretty much everyone I know every March 15th with an email telling the story of Julius Caesar and the significance of his assassination in 44 BCE. I revise it every year, and it has grown a bit baroque over time. The ones so far are shown below in reverse chronological order so that you can see how they have changed over time. Enjoy!

2024

Dear friends, acquaintances, students, mentees (Hi Sarah, Lazaro, Max, Haylie, Kushi, and Spends!) and people I once sat next to a plane to London (Hi, Vivian!),

Explanation:
It's that time again... Most of you know me by now, and thus are expecting this, but some might be wondering why you are getting this mass email along with many people you don’t know. Essentially, while many people send a yearly holiday letter, I send a yearly Ides of March email that re-tells the story of Julius Caesar and why his assassination was important. It says nothing about my doings, and that is for the best, because my doings are pretty boring. (Well, I am now the Director of Graduate Education Innovation in the Department of Microbiology, Genetics, and Immunology at MSU, which means I get to teach fun classes to incredibly amazing grad students, and that’s a pretty cool development, I think.) I send this email to pretty much everyone I have an email address for, and whom I know from at least one friendly conversation that led to me getting the person’s email address. However you got on my list, you will likely be getting this email until you or I die. It is a bit of a silly tradition, I know, and I sometimes have to fight my social anxiety problems to actually send it. (It’s less of a problem this year because Brian Klaas reassured me that such quirks are a good thing, and he just published a great book called “Fluke”, so he clearly knows things. Thanks, Brian!) However, even silly traditions are important because they mark time and give some sense of meaning. Plus, this email usually leads to catching up with many of you, and that is always good. And of course, it is all in good fun and provides reminders of just how interesting and important history is, which is important to keep in mind. As always, should anyone so desire, I will honor "opt out" requests. To everyone else, greetings! It is good to prattle on at you again and let you know that I am still alive. I hope you are all well, happy, and thriving.

And, now, we begin…
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Friends, Romans, countrypersons, and all sentient beings of any form or origin…

Today is the 15th of March. To the Romans, the day marked the middle of the month of Martius, which was named after Mars, the god of war. Why Mars? Because it was the month during which the weather usually improved enough to allow the legions to go off to war again. The Romans did not number their days as we do. In their system, the date was denoted as “Ides de Martius,” better known as the Ides of March. Dates seldom linger in the common public consciousness over centuries, much less over more than two millennia, and yet the Ides of March is a date that has to at least some degree. For the most part, wherever you are from, the Ides of March rings a bell, even if you can’t say exactly why. That bell sounds because a profoundly important event occurred on the Ides of March, one that shifted the course of history and led to the world in which we live. We know of the Ides of March, because it was the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome in 44 BCE, 2068 years ago, today.

Caesar himself, too, lingers in the public consciousness still today. Or, rather, an image of him lingers – an image that has been tumbled, worn down, shaped, and modified over the ages by time and telling, the complexity of the man who was transformed into the simplified archetype and myth that has been and is now. When Caesar brought up today, as he still is most every day in some way, it is as a cautionary tale, a mythic figure of legendary ego, bloodthirst, and hunger for power who made himself dictator and emperor, and in the process brought down the Roman Republic that had stood for almost 5 centuries. The reality is much more complicated. Caesar was egotistical and lusted for power and glory, yes, but that was also true of all men of high rank in Rome. He was ambitious and he oversaw killings on a monumental scale, but he was far from mad, and, while responsible for millions of deaths, they occurred during large-scale wars. That is not to absolve him of moral responsibility for them, but at least he didn’t have people killed because he found it funny, like Caligula later did. Caesar wasn’t even all that bloodthirsty. In fact, he was assassinated in large measure because he preferred to forgive, and not kill his enemies.

It is true that Caesar was a dictator, but he wasn’t the first Roman emperor. He did end the constitutional government of the Roman Republic, though, in his defense, the Republic had been tottering and collapsing for almost a century when he came into power. The Republic had even been more or less brought down before by a man who was far more brutal than Caesar, though he then rebuilt it as he saw fit, called it a day, and either retired or died. The difference with Caesar is really that he sought to go all the way with transforming the Republic, was more talented than those who had gone before, and, of course, there was his nephew and heir. That fellow was a boy named Octavian, who was perhaps more talented than his uncle, and certainly far, far more ruthless. As we shall see, upon clearing the field of all who would oppose him, he took the name “Augustus”, became the first emperor, and completely remade the Republic into a veiled, military-backed monarchy while saying he was just recreating the Republic as it had been.

So, who was Caesar, really? What did he do? Why was he assassinated? And what did his supposed last words of “et tu, Brute” really mean? (Those weren’t his last words, by the way.) It’s a complicated, fascinating, and important story, which is why, tradition and perversity aside, I send it out each year. You can choose to go on and read it all, because it is an amazing story, but I understand if you decide not to, for life is quite busy. The nutshell version is this: Caesar was a real person. He was an aristocrat from an old family who was possessed of immense talent and genius. He was complicated, complex, had little need for sleep, was one of the most impressive military leaders in history, did an unbelievable amount in 55 years of life, delivered the death blow to a 500-year-old republican system of government, and was murdered by a bunch of conservative old men who owed their lives to him. And he was so, so much more, too! There is a reason why we still have a month called July in his honor. (Just as there is a reason why August is still named after his nephew.)

Before I start, I think it is important to make clear that Caesar was not remotely a “good guy”, even if he was far from being in the ranks of the worst people Rome, much less history, ever produced. He was spoiled, he was entitled, he was a nepo baby, he had a lot handed to him, and he managed a lot of what he did because he had rich friends. Though he was not the sociopath that Augustus showed himself to be, Caesar rarely let petty notions of morality or ethics get in the way of him doing whatever he wanted to do. For reasons of ego and ambition, he started wars that killed millions. His conquest of Gaul bordered on outright genocide. He eventually became phenomenally rich by looting entire nations and selling hundreds of thousands of civilians from those nations into slavery. He incited a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Romans and eviscerated the Republic essentially out of pride. When he was assassinated, he was planning another war that would have taken him to India and back, and would have killed millions more. He was charming and brilliant, and you could have had some great conversations with him, but he was emphatically not a good person. That said, he was neither Caligula, who killed people for the fun of it, nor Commodus, who was pretty clearly clinically insane, nor was he Constantine, the sainted emperor who killed most of his own family purely for ambition’s sake. Caesar had red lines and boundaries, while many of his successors did not.

Now, onto the story…

Once upon a time…

On July 12, 100 BCE Aurelia Caesar delivered a son. Contrary to myth, this welcoming did not involve a Caesarean section. We know this because there’s no record of anyone surviving a C-section until the 1580s, and Aurelia is known to have lived until 54 BCE. Following Roman custom, the child was given the same name as his father, Gaius Julius Caesar. Roman names typically had three parts like this, which often baffled non-Romans.

The first name was the praenomen, or the personal name, what one was usually called by one’s intimates. “Gaius”, meaning “one who rejoices”, was thus likely what Caesar was called as a child.

The second name was the nomen, or the family, or gens, name. The gens “Julia” was very old, and claimed to descend from Julus, son of the Trojan demigod Aeneas, and thus the grandson of the goddess Venus. This claim of connection to both the Trojan War and divine origin was common among old and aristocratic families. The family seems to have originated not in Rome, but in the neighboring city of Alba Longa. They moved to Rome as refugees in the 7th century BCE after the Roman Kingdom destroyed Alba Longa for the terrible crime of merely existing.

The third name was the cognomen, and it specified the branch of the family to which a person belonged. The origin of the Caesari branch of gens Julia is obscure at best. The ending “-ar” indicates that it is likely of Sabine, rather than Roman, origin, but no one knows for sure. Cognomens were often given as somewhat cruel nicknames, and it’s possible that “Caesar” comes from a word meaning “hairy”, and had been given because the men tended to be bald. Caesar himself would later put out the story that the name came from an ancestor who had single-handedly killed an elephant, the word for which, he claimed, was “caesi” in the Punic language. No one really knows now, but they didn’t know back then, either. As with many things in history, it made for a good story, and that was good enough.

Caesar’s family was old and counted many distinguished members who had held high positions in the Roman state. However, it was also extremely poor, and those distinguished members had died centuries before Caesar was born. It was thus not very powerful. Indeed, when Caesar was born, his family was living in Rome’s crowded and notoriously dangerous slum neighborhood of Subura. Given that they lacked land and maintaining themselves in the aristocracy precluded them from engaging in trade, during his childhood, Caesar’s family made its living by renting out apartments and storefronts in high-rise (meaning up to 9 stories) tenement buildings that they owned. (i.e. They were slumlords.) This situation led to Caesar growing up under conditions in which he learned from early on how to talk and relate to most anyone of any background or station. He thus developed street smarts and people skills informally while still receiving the standard in-depth classical education of an aristocrat. And so he came up also studying the Greek and Roman classics while also learning to speak fluent Greek, as any educated person was expected to. He was a precocious child, marked by startling intelligence, lightning quick learning, and what seems to have been a photographic memory. He was also a voracious reader, and soon gained a skill few of the time had: silent reading. He was regarded with suspicion all of his life because of this ability, as anyone who would acquire knowledge from written texts without making others privy to it was clearly trying to hide something.

Despite the family’s poverty, Caesar’s father still managed to win election to high office in the government of the Republic. These offices then allowed him to climb the cursus honorum, or course of honor, the ladder of achievement by which a Roman gained distinction and proved his worth. While serving in successive offices, he came into the orbit of one of the giants of the age, Gaius Marius.

Marius was a brilliant general with a storied military career that included campaigns in Numidia alongside his protégé, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. These military achievements led to his being elected to the highest office of state, the consulship, in 107 BCE. The consuls held more or less the power that had once been wielded by the kings of Rome prior to the establishment of the Republic. Because Romans had hated and feared kings since getting rid of theirs in 509 BCE, there were always two consuls to divide their power, and they only served for a single year. Usually. Marius would change that precedent.

Upon coming into office, Marius decided that there was a need for more soldiers. Whereas earlier soldiers were expected to have a certain amount of wealth so as to equip themselves, Marius eliminated the property requirements for military service, and began recruiting volunteers from the lowest of the Roman classes, the proletarii. This reform would have two consequences. First, it alleviated the Republican military’s chronic shortages of manpower. Second, because soldiers were not paid by the state, it led to their loyalty being to their generals, who would pay them and give them opportunities for plunder. The reform was thus another major crack in the Republic’s foundations.

Marius had many plans and ideas for what to do with the armies, and he soon got a chance to further them when reports came to Rome of a mass migration toward Italy of some 750,000 people of two large barbarian tribes from northern Europe. Seeing Marius as the Republic’s only hope, he was granted an unprecedented four more successive consulships so he could defeat the threat. Marius thus oversaw further recruitment from the proletarii and a wholesale reorganization of the legions, changing their basic fighting structure into the one that would go on to conquer the entire Mediterranean basin. With this newly redesigned army full of hundreds of thousands he had trained himself, Marius defeated the migrating tribes in a pair of massive battles in 102 BCE.

Caesar the elder and Marius had been linked since Marius had married his sister, Julia, in 110 BCE, but they became close during this time, which brought him close to the center of Roman political power. The new position brought risks, too, as Marius came into conflict with his old lieutenant, Sulla. The conflict arose in the wake of the Social War of 91 – 87 BCE, during which Rome’s Italian allies rebelled after demanding and then being denied citizenship. Rome would later relent, but not until after tens of thousands had died and dozens of cities had been burned to the ground. Sulla had distinguished himself leading Roman armies in the war, and Marius grew jealous of his mentee’s glories, leading him to look for opportunities to reclaim his star despite his advancing age.

Marius saw his chance after the Social War’s conclusion, when Rome’s eastern provinces were threatened by Mithridates, king of Pontus. (Mithradates is a remarkable figure. He was skilled at poisoning enemies and managed to rule for decades despite regularly poking the Romans with a stick and getting beaten by them in return.) Marius wanted to command the military response, but Sulla, now consul, was given it instead. After Sulla left to organize his army in the east, Marius had his allies in the Senate pass a law transferring the eastern command to him, after which he sent word to Sulla to stand down. Sulla, however, did not stand down. Instead, contrary to all precedent, he turned his armies around and marched against Rome. Lacking an army of his own, Marius fled the city. Sulla oversaw new elections, executed some of Marius’s supporters, and then again went east. At this point, Marius returned to Rome, and, with his supporters, took the city, purged the Senate, and had the old man elected consul for a seventh time. (Marius supposedly insisted on this because a bird had once promised him seven consulships, and you can’t argue with birds. The ancient world was weird.) More than a bit paranoid, Marius and his allies secured their position by a wholesale slaughter of Sulla’s supporters. Marius’s paranoia also led him to be suspicious of his great-nephew, the 13-year-old Caesar. As Gaius Julius Caesar the elder had died while putting his shoes on one morning in 85 BCE, the young Caesar was now head of his family and holder of its political power. Marius sought to neutralize Caesar before he could cause any problems by appointing him to be the high priest of Jupiter (the Flamen Dialis). This priesthood carried odd prohibitions, including forbidding its holder from touching iron or spending the night outside of Rome. As those restrictions would preclude a military career, which Caesar very much wanted, he was not happy with the development.

Fortunately for Caesar, subsequent developments gave him options. First, Marius died shortly afterward. More importantly, Sulla returned from the east after defeating Mithridates and sacking Athens for the heck of it, and marched on Rome again, in a foul mood and a lust for vengeance. In 82 BCE, after a brief but bloody civil war, Sulla entered the city. In total power, Sulla rooted out all Marians, seized their property, and had them all executed. In all, at least 9000 were killed over several months as informers turned in more and more names. He was helped in this by a number of lieutenants, including Gnaeus Pompeius, a young, bloodthirsty noble who came to be known as “Magnus”, or “the Great”, mainly because he started calling himself that and ordering others to do so, too. Caesar himself was among those Sulla targeted, but his relatives included many of Sulla’s supporters, and they intervened to save his life. Sulla is reported to have said in his memoirs that sparing the boy was among his regrets. (“In this Caesar, there are many Mariuses,” he supposedly said.) He did, however, see fit to strip Caesar of his priesthood. In case Sulla changed his mind, the now 18-year-old Caesar went east to serve in the military, where he, to everyone’s surprise, proved to be a talented soldier who rapidly earned a distinguished record in the field.

The next year, Sulla had himself declared dictator so he could rule by decree. He went about restructuring the Republic, setting strict age, term, and waiting time limits on the high offices of state. He also stripped power from the office of tribune, which had been designed to protect and give voice to common people, and completely reformed the Senate to ensure that its membership was largely made up of his supporters. Sulla’s overall idea was to temper ambitions, ossify the system, entrench conservative power, and prevent the rise of anyone like Marius (or himself) ever again. Satisfied, Sulla stepped down, and lived a brief life of intense debauchery before dying in 78 BCE at the age of 60. His reforms would not last, largely because he had created a precedent that one could easily change the constitution at a whim, and that precedent would be capitalized on in the coming decades to undo his changes and introduce others that made the state increasingly hard to govern. He also, of course, set a precedent of using military force to ensure political victory, which Caesar himself would one day follow. In the end, what Sulla did was further legitimize violence a political means and boosted conservative efforts to stand against fundamental reforms that could have preserved the Republic.

After Sulla died, Caesar decided it was safe to return to Rome and rejoin society, and so he went back west. It was not an easy trip. While crossing the Aegean, Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held for ransom. Caesar was insulted by the paltry size of the ransom, and told the pirates that he would see them all crucified. The pirates saw this as a joke from the young man, but he wasn’t joking. As soon as he was freed, Caesar hired a team of mercenaries to track down, capture, and crucify the pirates. Caesar had, however, come to like the pirates, so he showed them the mercy of cutting their throats before they were placed on the cross. This would not be the first time that Caesar would demonstrate that he usually meant what he said.

Once back in Rome, Caesar returned to Subura. Penniless after the pirate adventure and Sulla’s confiscation of his family’s fortune, Caesar embarked on a legal career, during which he focused on rooting out corruption. The career was short, but he did endear himself to the common people and he learned effective oratory. After a further short stint in the eastern military, he began seeking offices. In 69 BCE, he was elected quaestor, as a part of which he spent two years examining Roman officials in Spain. While there, Caesar supposedly came across a statue of Alexander the Great. Caesar was at that point the same age that Alexander had been when he died. Caesar wept at realizing this, for Alexander had by his death conquered Persia, come to rule everything from Greece to India, and to be worshiped as a living god. Caesar looked at his life in shame, feeling that he had accomplished nothing. He resolved to change that.

After returning to Rome in 67 BCE, he sought new political connections by marrying Sulla’s granddaughter, Pompeia. (He would later divorce her in 61 BCE on an odd pretext. Roman religion included a women-only cult of Bona Dea, which included an important ritual from which men were banned. Pompeia took part in this ritual that year, when the observance was tainted by the attendance in drag of the notorious playboy, Clodius Pulcher. Caesar is rumored to have also illegally attended in drag, but, unlike Clodius, he didn’t get caught. In any case, because Pompeia had been at a ritual that had been desecrated, Caesar divorced her, saying that “Caesar’s wife must be above reproach”. Yes, this really happened.) In 65 BCE, he used those connections, plus gigantic bribes, to get himself elected aedile, the next office on the political ladder. Aediles had various duties, one of which was to provide lavish games and entertainments for the people, which could then be parlayed into support for higher office. Caesar, of course, did an excellent job with his games, and thus won support that, together with even more gigantic bribes, got him elected Pontifex Maximus, or Chief Priest. That position led to new connections, which, together with even larger bribes, led to election to the office of praetor. The praetorship was mainly a judicial office, which Caesar didn’t much care for, but it did carry a major perk: after completing a year’s term of office, praetors were appointed provincial governors. Being a governor was a plum assignment because it meant that one could extract wealth from the provincial residents. Caesar decided to kill two birds with one stone, and maneuvered to become governor of western Spain, where there was active fighting to pacify the indigenous population. He was thus able to win some military glory to burnish his reputation, while also making money off of plunder and taxes.

Before Caesar could leave for Spain, however, he had to deal with the massive debt he had run up from all of the bribes he had paid out to win his offices. This was necessary because his debt was large enough that his creditors refused to let him leave the city. Caesar’s solution was to work out a deal with Marcus Licinius Crassus. One of the wealthiest men in history, Crassus had built a fortune equivalent to $2 trillion, in part by working with Sulla to steal inheritances, but mostly from land speculation and a clever extortion scheme. (He bought all of the city’s fire brigades. When a building or house caught fire, Crassus’s people would show up, and offer to buy the house at a low price in return for putting the fire out. If the property owners refused, they let the structure burn down, and then bought the land for a much lower price. In this way, he became the largest landholder and landlord in Rome.) Caesar got Crassus to pay some of his debts, guarantee others, and in return promised to provide him with political support for later endeavors. Part of this included support in opposing the political ambitions of Pompey, whom Crassus hated. Having dealt with his debt situation, Caesar went off to Spain.

In Spain, Caesar had planned to fight, and he did. During his time there, he conquered two native tribes and sold tens of thousands into slavery. The victories also allowed Caesar’s men to hail him as “imperator”, or “victorious general”, which made him eligible for a triumph upon his return. (Triumphs were massive parades through Rome to display loot and conquered peoples, during which a victorious general was treated as a god for a day. They were intoxicating ego boosts, and everyone wanted one.) His mission accomplished and his time up, Caesar then went home to Rome to celebrate his triumph, but he ran into a problem: He wanted to run to be one of the two consuls for the year 59, but to do so, he would have to give up his military command and enter Rome as a civilian, which would preclude a triumph. Reluctantly, Caesar prioritized running for higher office, and swore that he would get his triumph later. With Crassus’s support, he paid even more titanic bribes to gain the votes he needed to win the consulship.

Once in office, Caesar feverishly got down to work. First, he brokered a truce between Crassus and Pompey, partnering with them to form what came to be called the “First Triumvirate”. The three together had the resources, talent, ambition, and, importantly, money to run the Republic as they pleased. To seal things, Pompey married Caesar’s daughter, Julia. Caesar also proposed a popular law to distribute the vast public lands to the Roman poor, which endeared him to the common folk. However, Caesar’s partner in the consulship for the year, Bibulus, hated the law, and spent the full year of his term trying to block it from being enacted. Caesar got the law through by playing constitutional hardball, which guaranteed him the support of the common people, but also the enmity of the conservatives in the Senate. He particularly provoked the ire of a profoundly sour, profoundly hateful, and profoundly conservative man named Cato, who publicly made it his life’s mission to punish Caesar pay, no matter what. This enmity would have consequences, one of which was that Caesar could never risk being a private citizen again, lest he be prosecuted and exiled. Keep that in mind, because it’s important.

When his term as consul ended, Caesar and his allies got him assigned to be proconsular governor of northern Italy, southern Gaul (France), and part of Spain. As soon as his time in office ended in 58 BCE, Caesar took up his governorship, and ran to avoid being prosecuted. It was now that he really began to make his name. As I mentioned earlier, governorships were great for a man in debt, given the endless opportunities for graft and extortion. And then there were, if a governor was so inclined, opportunities to start military conflicts on flimsy pretexts that could bring more treasure. Caesar, of course, very much wanted military conflict. In his case, he ginned up a pretext for a war with the Celtic tribes who lived in the unconquered parts of Gaul, formed new legions, and marched into Celtic territory. This began 8 years of what came to be called the Gallic Wars. I won’t go into these in detail, but it resulted in some harrowing military adventures, including the siege of Alesia, in which Caesar’s army besieged a Celtic city while being besieged by a Celtic army. (There are photos of cool dioramas online.) Over the course of the war, Caesar would conquer all of what is now France, and parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Germany, and Switzerland. It also involved the slaughter of over a million people, and the enslavement of several hundred thousand more. Just to say he did it, Caesar also made a brief incursion into Britain, which was impressive because Romans regarded that the gray island of eternal rain as a bit like Mordor.

The Gallic Wars made Caesar fantastically rich, brought him enormous military experience, and allowed him to cultivate several legions filled with tens of thousands of battle-hardened veterans who were fanatically loyal to him. We know a lot about what Caesar did over these years because he wrote regular dispatches to the people back home. These reports were masterpieces of propaganda that were read publicly, and later compiled into a book that we still have in its entirety, which we now know as Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. (If you’ve taken Latin at all, at some point you have to translate parts of this book. It begins, ”Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…”, or “Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts”. This opening is seared into the brain of anyone who has had a Latin class in the last 2000 years. As an aside, the one time I went to a dance club in college was for the birthday of one of my closest friends, Laurie. I sat in a corner and read an English translation of Caesar’s Commentaries for about an hour before I couldn’t take how loud the club was. In retrospect, this was absurdly in character for me, and it says something that Laurie has never picked on me for it, even though I very much deserve it. Thanks, Laurie!)

A proconsular governorship is only supposed to last a year, but Caesar had Crassus and Pompey back in Rome to make sure he had as much time as he needed to finish his work. Caesar ended up staying in Gaul for 8 years, and he would have stayed longer, but Crassus did something stupid. Crassus, you see, was very jealous of his partners’ military glory. After all, Pompey had rid the Mediterranean of pirates, and Caesar had conquered Gaul. By contrast, Crassus’s greatest military achievement had been crushing the Spartacus revolt and crucifying 6000 of the rebels. Given Roman attitudes toward enslaved persons, few regarded that as much of an achievement. Crassus thus decided to outdo his partners: he would conquer Parthia. Heir to the old Persian empire, Parthia was Rome’s greatest rival. Parthia was the age’s other superpower, and the two empires generally accepted that neither could conquer the other, no matter how many petty wars they might fight. Crassus figured that Parthia couldn’t really be that strong, and so he used his own fortune to buy, outfit, and train an army of 40,000 soldiers, and he then marched east. But Parthia was a well-organized state with a large, sophisticated, well-led military organized around heavily armored cavalry that was difficult for Roman legions to counter. Moreover, their borderlands were very hot and very dry. In other words, attacking Parthia was not like beating up on some random German tribe. Moreover, Crassus was a poor general. He allowed himself to be led astray by guide in the pay of Parthia, which led to him leading his army into a desert ambush by Parthia’s most elite cavalry units at Carrhae. Given that he was, again, a poor general, and had done a bad job of training his soldiers, the battle was a disaster for Crassus. More than 20,000 Romans were killed and 10,000 were taken prisoner. Crassus then stupidly walked into another ambush, allowed himself to be captured, and was summarily executed, allegedly by having molten gold poured down his throat.

With Crassus dead, the Triumvirate was no more, and the bonds between Caesar and Pompey began to snap. It didn’t help that Julia had died in 54 BCE. (Fascinating fact: Pompey genuinely loved Julia. This was regarded as scandalous, and other aristocrats mercilessly made fun of him for it. Aristocratic men were supposed to generally dislike their wives for the sake of appearance, love being an unseemly emotion.) Pompey thus began to turn against Caesar and align himself with the conservative Senatorial factions. Things came to a head in 50 BCE, when Pompey and the Senate ordered Caesar to give up his armies, return to Rome, and face prosecution. Caesar did not want to do this, and tried his best to broker a compromise with Pompey. While he nearly did so, Cato, hellbent on seeing Caesar brought low, relentlessly blocked any peaceful resolution.

Seeing no other recourse, on January 10, 49 BCE, Caesar took one of his legions, and marched it to the river Rubicon. This river, the location of which is unknown, marked the border between Italy and Caesar’s province. It was illegal for a governor to take an army into Italy. Indeed, it was high treason. This is one of history’s great hinge points. Caesar supposedly rode his horse to the edge of the river, and paused in thought. He could turn around and try to find some way out of the situation, leave his army and, at worst, face exile from polite society, or he could cross and start a civil war. Ever the gambler, Caesar made his decision, proclaimed, “alea iacta est”, or “the die is cast”, and led his army across into Italy. So began what has come to be called Caesar’s Civil War.

Back in Rome, Pompey realized a major oversight: he had no army with which to oppose Caesar. The conservatives had assumed that the power of the law would be sufficient to stop Caesar from marching upon them, but they did not realize something that Pompey himself had once noted: what were laws to men with swords? After all, law crumbles if not believed in, but force and iron were undeniable reality that did not require belief. Lacking another option, Pompey convinced the Senate to flee. The plan was to go to Greece and prepare an army while his lieutenants launched an uprising in Spain to distract Caesar. Caesar put his lieutenant, Marcus Antonius (i.e., Mark Antony), in charge of Italy, went to Spain, ended the uprising there in less than a month, and went after Pompey. On July 10, 48 BCE, Caesar met Pompey in battle at Pharsalus in northern Greece. Though Caesar was outnumbered, his 23,000 men were hardened veterans, and they easily sliced through Pompey’s 50,000 new recruits. Pompey himself barely managed to run away with a small retinue.

Pompey made his way to Egypt to seek help from the Pharoah, Ptolemy XIII. In the meantime, Caesar went back to Rome, got himself elected consul again, and then himself went to Egypt with part of his army. Unfortunately for Pompey, Ptolemy wanted to cozy up to Caesar, and he had the general executed. When Caesar arrived, Ptolemy presented him with the gift of Pompey’s head. Caesar was not amused. He had hoped to pardon his former partner and brother-in-law to demonstrate his clemency. (Ptolemy was the product of 300 years of inbreeding severe enough to make the Habsburgs blush, so we should probably forgive him if his thinking was not the best.) In revenge, Caesar allied himself with a rival for the Egyptian throne: Ptolemy’s sister-wife, Cleopatra VII. In the ensuing civil war, Caesar’s forces defeated Ptolemy and installed Cleopatra as Pharaoh. After that, Caesar went on vacation, taking a long, leisurely cruise along the Nile, along the way beginning an affair with Cleopatra that would continue until his death and produce a son, Caesarion.

After leaving Egypt, Caesar undertook a series of campaigns to mop up Pompey’s remaining forces in Anatolia, Africa, and Spain. He finally returned to Rome in 45 BCE, where Antony had been ruling in his absence. Once back at the capital, Caesar really got down to business. In an unassailably strong position, he pardoned his remaining enemies and made it clear he did not wish to rule by force. He was elected consul again, this time not with bribes, but by ordering it done. However, he felt that consular power would be insufficient for his needs, so also had himself made dictator for 10 years. He also took a precaution in case anyone got ideas: he had himself invested with tribunal powers that included being considered bodily sacrosanct and illegal and unholy to harm in any way. To celebrate his many victories, he participated in a series of triumphs. These won him much acclaim and favor from the common people, save for the final one, which celebrated his victories against other Romans in the civil war, and was considered unseemly at best. While the commoners loved him, the rich and powerful were bitterly resentful. They were angry at having been pardoned, for one thing. It was condescending. Moreover, Caesar’s endless acquisition of powers and offices had impeded their own political progress along the cursus honorum.

In power, Caesar proved to be remarkably effective and efficient, and he used his power to institute a lot of needed changes. The Republic was not in good shape, and its government was shaky in part because the structures built to rule a city-state were not well-suited to running a large empire. Caesar thus engaged in a far-ranging series of reforms. He reformed the calendar, creating the Julian Calendar, of which our Gregorian one is but a minor modification, reformed the Senate, launched land reforms, settled more of the poor on farms of their own, reformed the welfare system, regulated luxuries, and passed a powerful and sophisticated anti-corruption law that remained in force for over a thousand years. He expanded the government by creating more offices of state, and, importantly, he gave himself the power to name those new magistrates. He expanded the Senate by adding provincial supporters of his, and had plans to expand citizenship to better unify the empire. In part because it was now full of his supporters, the Senate was fairly obsequious and sought Caesar’s favor with a variety of honors. One was to rename Caesar’s birth month of Quintillis “Julius” in his honor, which is where we get “July”. They named him imperator again, and proclaimed him pater patriae, or “Father of the Country”. This practice of gratuitous granting of honors would carry over later to be a part of the investiture of new emperors. Caesar did not know it, but he was setting precedents that would hold for the next 1500 years of Roman history.

Despite how busy he was governing, Caesar soon got bored. He missed the excitement of being on campaign and leading armies in the field. He is alleged to have hatched a plan to outdo Alexander at last. This entailed gathering an army of 100,000, which he intended to take east in the late spring of 44 BCE to conquer Persia and extend Roman power to the Indus valley. He would then march north, and come back around the Black Sea to conquer all of what is now eastern and central Europe. It is unlikely that anyone could have made this work, but Caesar had good luck and was a genius, so who knows? We will never know because it never happened. Caesar’s big mistake at this point was deciding that, to secure his power in Rome while he went abroad, he needed to be elevated to the still higher office of king. This was a step too far. Romans hated even the notion of kings. Though he never actually got around to allowing himself to be named king, his flirting with the idea threw the Senatorial conservatives into a tizzy. To make matters worse, Caesar arrogated to himself the prerogative to remain sitting when other senators were gathered. This might seem minor, but it was something the old kings had done, and had been forbidden for centuries. After pardoning them, keeping them out of office, diluting their power, helping the poor, taking a lot of high titles, flirting with becoming king, and ruling by decree, Caesar having the temerity to sit down in their presence was the last straw. A cabal of sixty senators, led by Cassius, Casca, and Caesar’s dear friend, Brutus, a descendant of the person who had overthrown the last king, started plotting an assassination.

The cabal realized that they needed to strike soon, for if Caesar set out with his army, their chance would be gone. They decided that they would call a session of the Senate on the Ides of March, have Caesar come, and then they would all stab him to death. According to legend, portents and a soothsayer had warned Caesar of that day, the latter telling him famously to “beware the Ides of March” some days earlier. When the day came, and he was still alive, Caesar again met the soothsayer, and mocked him saying, “the Ides have come and I still live!” “Aye,” the soothsayer replied, “but they’ve not yet gone.” Whether or not this happened, Caesar went to the meeting of the Senate, which was gathered in the Theater of Pompey because the old Senate house had been burned down during the street fighting of the civil war. Convinced of his invincibility at this point, Caesar came without his bodyguards.

As the session started, the cabal struck. A senator named Cimber grabbed Caesar by his shoulder. Caesar turned and glared at him, saying, “This is violence!” Another, Casca, then slashed at his neck. Blood now drawn, the rest joined in. Caesar fought back until Brutus took his turn. Brutus, whom Caesar had loved as a son and had named as his alternate heir, was the one who made Caesar realize that all was lost. (Supposedly, it was to Brutus that Caesar said, in Greek, “And you, too, my son?” This has been interpreted as a mournful question, but it was also the first part of a popular saying that translates as, “I’ll see you in Hell, punk!” That version seems more realistic.) Caesar tried to run but tripped over his toga. Once he was down, he was stabbed repeatedly. He died in a pool of blood beneath a statue of Pompey. Afterward, he was subjected to the first autopsy recorded in Western medical history. The report concluded that he had been stabbed twenty-three times, but that only one wound had been mortal. That one had been enough.

The assassins, jubilant and calling themselves the Liberators, ran through the city, cheering and calling out that they had freed the Republic. They soon realized that they had badly misjudged the situation. The populace did not rejoice. They were angry. Very, very angry. The conservative aristocracy might have hated Caesar, but the commoners loved him as their protector and champion. Those who were not angry were scared and hid in their houses, because they could see that Rome was a powder keg, and that the masses just needed the slightest spark to erupt into violence… Coming to realize this, too, the Liberators barricaded themselves on the Capitoline hill and waited.

Enter Antony… As Caesar’s lieutenant, Antony was well positioned to lead the Caesarian faction in the city. Having 6,000 soldiers at his back, Antony tried to resolve the situation by using them to intimidate the Senate into confirming all of Caesar’s appointments and reforms and making him ruler of Rome in exchange for pardoning the Liberators. However, Antony soon ran into a problem: when Caesar’s will was read on March 19, it was discovered that he had declared that his primary heir would be his 18-year-old nephew, Gaius Octavius, whose name was to be changed to Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. (Octavius thus became Octavian, the first of many changes of his name.) This meant that Antony had an immediate rival for power, and he had to ensure that he had the masses on his side.

Antony made his move on March 20, when he delivered the eulogy at Caesar’s public funeral. In his speech, famously imagined by Shakespeare, Antony whipped the crowd into a murderous frenzy. They built a massive pyre, upon which they cremated Caesar’s body. The pyre’s fire soon went out of control and burned down a large section of the central city. Then they then went after the assassins and laid siege to their homes. Antony used this as an excuse to get the assassins out of Rome, and then used the power of the crowd to appropriate much of Caesar’s estate, taking what had been intended to go to Octavian, the soldiers, and the people of Rome. He also passed a number of laws, ostensibly left behind by Caesar, which showered gifts on the soldiers, binding them closer to him. The intent was to sideline Octavian. This did not work as planned. Octavian was young, but he had, without anyone noticing, trained at his uncle’s side for years. He was just as brilliant as his uncle, but far more ruthless, cold-blooded, and possibly even sociopathic.

Antony’s actions offended many in power, who began to see him as the tyrant that Caesar never was. Octavian skillfully played against these feelings, and borrowed heavily to pay out the bequests Caesar had intended for the soldiers and people, winning them to his side. At the same time, those who distrusted Antony started investing Octavian with powers so that he could be used to subvert Antony. This, of course, played into Octavian’s hands, as he sought to use that support to neutralize Antony and gain power. Octavian also began a concerted attack on Antony for having pardoned the assassins, set the orator Cicero to making speeches denouncing Antony, and had the Senate proclaim him a public enemy. This resulted in a brief civil war between Octavian and Antony. Some in the Senate took the opportunity to invest the assassins with a measure of power with the intent of restoring the Republic, but this step did not work out, and simply led to most of the ones behind the attempt being quickly disposed of.

In May of 43 BCE, Antony and Octavian reconciled with the intent of making a united front to oppose the assassins and their allies. When the Senate balked at rescinding the declaration of Antony as a public enemy, Octavian proclaimed himself consul and marched on Rome. After crushing Senatorial opposition, Octavian and Antony further negotiated with each other and brought in Caesar’s former third in command, Marcus Lepidus. In November, the three formed the Second Triumvirate, which was essentially a 3-person dictatorship, the entire goal of which was to secure power and avenge Caesar’s death. They started by proscribing all of the remaining supporters of the assassins, putting them to death, and taking all of their wealth. (As a gift to Antony, Octavian also had Cicero executed.) They also formally declared war on the assassins, who had gathered a large army and taken over the eastern provinces. To further whip up public hatred toward the assassins, in 42 BC, Octavian had the Senate declare Caesar a god, making him able to call himself “son of the god”, and making the assassins guilty of deicide. (His name now became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Divi Filius.)

The latest round of civil wars lasted less than a year. In October of 42 BCE, the Triumvirate’s 100,000-man army met the Liberator’s 100,000-man army at the town of Pharsalus in Greece, and routed them. The civil war effectively ended there. While Antony chose to follow Caesar and be merciful to the defeated, Octavian had learned another lesson from his uncle’s death. Octavian instead killed as many as he could and had Brutus’s dead body beheaded. This established a pattern of how Octavian would deal with foes.

Save for Sicily, where Pompey’s son, Sextus, held power, the Triumvirate now ruled the Roman world, and divided it between them. Lepidus, the junior member, was given North Africa, Octavian was given Spain, and Antony took most of the rest, choosing to rule from the East. Antony ended up spending the next several years dealing with eastern problems, putting down conflicts in Judea and campaigning against Parthia. During this time, he also became romantically involved with Cleopatra, who saw him as an easily manipulated drunk. (Which he was.) The distraction allowed Octavian to start consolidating power in the west, slowly but surely taking control of all western provinces and taking up the reins in Rome itself. After Lepidus attempted to take Sicily for himself after defeating Sextus Pompey, Octavian dissolved the Triumvirate, and began a propaganda campaign to turn the people and state against Antony. This worked well, in part because Antony had come to be so closely linked to Cleopatra, and the Romans generally distrusted the Egyptians.

Though Antony attempted a propaganda war of his own, Octavian’s was savvier, and he succeeded in gaining support to go after Antony in the east. As a new civil war began, a third of the Senate went east to support Octavian, believing that Antony’s greater experience and Cleopatra’s immense wealth would win in the end. They were wrong. The war did not last long. In September, Octavian’s navy met Antony and Cleopatra’s at the Greek port of Actium, and defeated it completely. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt, while Octavian absorbed Antony’s remaining forces into his own. Octavian now controlled the only navy in the Mediterranean and over 100 legions. Wielding near absolute power, Octavian invaded Egypt in 30 BCE, leading to Antony and Cleopatra each committing suicide in turn.

Octavian now ruled supreme and uncontested. He did not repeat his uncle’s mistake of showing mercy. He instead proscribed, executed, and seized the property of everyone who had so much as said something negative about him. All of them. He killed Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son with Caesar. He annexed Egypt as his personal property. He consolidated all the power of the Roman state by having himself named to every major office simultaneously, and then making the armies swear personal loyalty to him, and him and him alone. This, of course, caused problems because others resented not being able to achieve high offices. Octavian had a plan for that. In 27 BCE, Octavian made a public show of returning all of his powers to the Senate, and laying down his offices. The Senate, in return, made a show of giving him the new title of, “Augustus,” meaning “Revered One” or “Majesty”. (A new name, too. He officially became Imperator Caesar Augustus.) The new title just so happened to carry all of the same powers of all the offices that Octavian had just resigned. In gratitude for his display of humility, the Senate renamed the month of Sextillis “Augustus” in his honor. We now call this month “August.”

Augustus was now a monarch in all but name, but he knew he couldn’t say he was anything like a king. No, he was just the humble “First Citizen”, or “Princeps”. (A word from which we get “prince.”) The Republic still existed, he insisted. In fact, he had restored it to what it had been before the preceding century of tumult, he said. Indeed, the Roman empire formally insisted it was the Roman Republic throughout its entire existence. (Anthony Kaldellis, a Byzantine scholar who is my preeminent academic crush – sorry Rich – makes a good case in “The Byzantine Republic” that Rome remained a republic to the end of the Byzantine era in 1453, albeit a monarchical one ruled by an emperor who could transcend the law.) Just the same, the state was something very different than it had been, and most realized this. The Roman Republic of old was gone, and the Roman Empire now held sway over the western world. Augustus made the new settlement stick, with one-man rule amidst the trappings of republican government and a neutered Senate by managing to live despite fragile health until 14 CE. Entire generations thus grew up knowing peace under Augustus, who had brought an end to decades of civil war.

Maintaining the ruse that he was not a monarch made succession tricky for Augustus, of course. He had to find an heir, have the Senate grant him offices and power that would slowly legitimize him to become the new Augustus when he died. He could not just pass on power like a monarch. After several candidate successors died before he did, August was finally followed in power by his heir and adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero. This was accomplished by the cumbersome process of having the Senate formally confer on Tiberius all the same titles and powers. In due course, Tiberius was succeeded by Caligula, and he by Claudius. Power thus stayed in the Julio-Claudian family, only losing it when Nero committed suicide in 69 CE. Here the lack of formal succession procedures necessitated by the illusion of a republic caused the first of many civil wars of imperial succession. After three others had tried, the general Vespasian won, and his sons would then rule. The succession issue was never figured out, as much a consequence of Caesar’s assassination as the position of emperor itself. But succession nonetheless always managed to happen, even though recurrent civil wars caused centuries of problems. Emperor followed emperor, the chain growing longer*, with dozens of men and at least five women ruling in turn until the last of them, Constantine XI, died fighting the Ottomans as they breached the walls of Constantinople on May 29, 1453 CE. Those many emperors included in their number many excellent rulers, many good ones, many middling, a few very bad ones, and a few who were clearly insane, but the empire got lucky on the whole.

However, while Julius Caesar was not an emperor, his end would set a pattern. Most emperors would die violent deaths, mostly by assassination. Ironically, this, too, was a consequence of the lack of a set succession mechanism owing to Caesar’s assassination. Without a legitimate means of succession, it was legal to kill an emperor and take power for oneself, so long as you had enough support to keep the position. By the Byzantine era, imperial political theory coalesced on there being a firm theological and Christian reason for it: God officially decided who was emperor. If you were doing a bad job, He empowered someone to take power from you. If you got to be emperor and you did well enough to remain emperor, then God clearly thought you worthy to rule. The system worked surprisingly well to ensure that the incompetent would not rule for long. As Kaldellis notes, this system meant that the Roman empire had the most stable governmental system in the history of the Western world, even if there was more turnover in the top spot than in any other country. And it all traces back to Caesar.

That is the story. That is why this day is important. On March 15, 44 BCE, a great, complicated man who wrote poetry, read a lot, studied language, and was great at conversation, leading soldiers, bribing people, making laws, and more was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in spirit. His assassins killed him, but his legacy lived – and lives – on. The particulars of his actions, death, and legacy have shaped all of Western history since, down to the day and world in which we live. Now you know. (Or have been reminded of again, assuming you read this every year.)

May this find you all safe, well, and not stabbed!

All the best,
Zack

*The full list, excluding several dozen usurpers:

Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian (who badly needed a hug), Nerva, Trajan the Greatest, Hadrian the Mercurial, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius the Good, Commodus the Terrible, Pertinax, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta, Macrinus, Diadumenian, Elagabalus the Bizarre, Alexander Severus, Maximinus Thrax the Giant, Gordian I, Gordian II, Pupienus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Philip the Arab, Decius, Hostilian, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius II Gothicus, Quintillus, Aurelian the Man of Iron, Ulpian Severina, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carus, Carinus, Numerian, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, Constantius I Chlorus, Valerius Severus, Constantine I the Murderous, Maxentius, Licinius, Valerius Valens, Maximianus II, Constantine II, Constantius II, Constans I, Julian the Philosopher (beloved, tragic Julian), Jovian, Valentinian I (Who once threw a temper tantrum so unhinged that it killed him), Valens, Gratian, Valentinian II, Theodosius I (who is called “The Great”, but was really quite terrible), Honorius, Arcadius, Theodosius II, Constantius III, Valentinian III, Petronius Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Libius Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos, Romulus Augustulus, Marcian, Leo I, Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus the Incompetent, Anastasius I, Justin I, Justinian I the Great (and Theodora), Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurice, Phocas the Tyrant, Heraclius, Constantine III, Heraklonas, Constans II, Constantine IV, Justinian II, Leontios, Tiberius III, Justinian II (again), Philippikos, Anastasius II, Theodosius III, Leo III, Constantine V, Artabasdos, Leo IV, Constantine VI, Irene, Nikephoros I, Staurakios, Michael I, Leo V, Michael II, Theophilos, Michael III The Drunkard, Basil I, Leo VI the Wise, Alexander, Constantine VII the Purple-Born, Romanos I, Romanos II, Nikephoros II Phokas the White Death of the Saracens, John I Tzimiskes, Basil II the Bulgar Slayer, Constantine VIII, Zoe, Romanos III, Michael IV, Michael V, Theodora, Constantine IX, Michael VI, Isaac I, Constantine X, Michael VII, Romanus IV, Nikephoros III, Alexios I, John II, Manuel I, Alexios II, Andronikos I, Isaac II, Alexios III, Isaac II, Alexios IV, Alexios V, Theodore I, John III, Theodore II, John IV, Michael VIII, Andronikos II (the bloody stupid), Michael IX, Andronikos III, John V, John VI, Andronikos IV, John V (again), John VII (the hated by Anthony Kaldellis), John V (again), Manuel II, John VIII, and Constantine XI the Immortal and Ever-Reigning, Who Sleeps in Marble and Shall One Day Return.

2023
Friends, Romans, countrypersons, sentient beings of all forms and origins…

Today is the 15th of March. To the Romans, the day marked the middle of the month of Martius, which was named after Mars, god of war, because it was the month in which the weather usually permitted the resumption of warfare after the winter break. The Romans, however, did not number their days as we do. In their system, the date was denoted as “Ides de Martius,” better known as the Ides of March. Dates seldom linger in the common public consciousness over centuries, much less over millennia, and yet this one does… And it does because it marked a profoundly important occurrence that powerfully shaped the course of events that led to the world in which we live. We know of the Ides of March, because it was the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, 2067 years ago, today.

Caesar himself, too, lingers in the public consciousness still today, but in a form tumbled and worn down by time and telling, complexity transmuted into simplicity, and a man into an archetype and a myth. Indeed, when he is brought up today, as he still is, it is as the epitome of the egotistical, bloodthirsty, power-crazed tyrant who declared himself dictator and emperor, and so brought about the end of the Roman Republic. The reality is much more complicated. Caesar was egotistical and sought power, yes, but so were all people in the upper reaches of power in Rome. He was ambitious and he directed killings on a monumental scale, but he was far from mad, and the death he wrought was in the context of warfare. He was not bloodthirsty, and, indeed, he died in part because he didn’t like killing his enemies. He was a dictator, but he wasn’t the first Roman emperor. He did, though, end the constitutional government of the Roman Republic, but that structure had been teetering for about a century. Others had brought down the government before, but they then restored it. The difference with Caesar is really that his nephew and heir was a boy named Octavian, who completed the destruction and then built something new in its place, taking the name of “Augustus”, and becoming the first emperor, though he didn’t call himself that and he claimed that he had merely restore the Republic. So, who was Caesar, really? What did he do? Why was he assassinated? And what did his supposed last words of “et tu, Brute” even mean? It’s a complicated, fascinating, and important story, which is why, tradition and perversity aside, I send it out each year. Choose, if you wish, to read on for it all in summary. If not, I understand. The nutshell version is this: Caesar was a real person. He was an aristocrat from an old family who was possessed of immense talent and genius. He was complicated, complex, had little need for sleep, was one of the most impressive military leaders in history, he did an unbelievable amount in his 55 years of life, set delivered the death blow to a 500-year old republican system of government, and was murdered by a bunch of conservative old men who owed their lives to him. And he was so, so much more, too! There is a reason why we still have a month called July in his honor. (Just as there is a reason why August is still named after his nephew.)

It is important to note before starting that Caesar was not remotely a “good guy”, even if he was far from being in the ranks of Rome’s worst, much less history’s. He was spoiled, he was entitled, he was a nepotism baby, he had a lot handed to him, and he managed a lot of what he did because he had rich friends and eventually stole enough to be rich himself. Though not the sociopath that Augustus was, petty notions of morality rarely, if ever got in the way of him doing what he wanted to do. For reasons of ego and ambition, he started wars that killed millions and bordered on genocidal. His fortune was largely made by selling hundreds of thousands of civilians from the nations he conquered into slavery. He incited a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Romans and eviscerated the Republic essentially because he didn’t want to be humiliated by his peers. When he was assassinated, he was planning another war that would have taken him to India and back, and would have killed millions more. He was charming and brilliant, and you could have a great conversation with him, but he was emphatically not a good person. That said, he was neither Caligula, who killed people for the fun of it and genuinely was clinically insane, nor was he Constantine, the sainted emperor who killed much of his own family purely for ambition’s sake. Caesar had his limits, while others did not.

To the tale… Once upon a time…

Caesar was born on July 12, 100 BCE to Gaius Julius and Aurelia Caesar. Contrary to myth, he was not born by Caesarean section. We know this because Aurelia lived until 54 BCE, and there’s no record of anyone surviving a C-section until the 1580s. As was common, he was given his father’s name. His first name was Gaius, meaning “one who rejoices”, and that is likely what he was called as a child. “Julius” was his family name, while “Caesar” specified a specific branch of his family. The family, gens Julia, was very old, and claimed to descend from Julus, son of the Trojan demigod Aeneas, and grandson of the goddess Venus. They thus claimed connection to both the Trojan war and to divine descent, which was common among nobility. The family was originally from a nearby city, Alba Longa, but moved to Rome in the 7th century BCE after the Romans destroyed it for the crime of existing. The origin of the name of the Caesari branch of the family is obscure at best. The ending “-ar” indicates that it is likely of Sabine, rather than Roman, origin, but no one knows for sure. Caesar himself would later put out the story that the name came from an ancestor who had single-handedly killed an elephant, which, he claimed, was “caesi” in the Punic language. No one really knows now, but they didn’t know back then, either.

Caesar’s family might have been old and counted many honored ancestors in its lineage, but it was also poor, recently undistinguished, and not very powerful. He grew up in Rome’s crowded, and notoriously dangerous slum neighborhood of Subura. Lacking lands and forbidden from engaging in trade to remain in the nobility, during his childhood, Caesar’s family made its living by renting out apartments and storefronts in high-rise (meaning up to 9 stories) tenement buildings that they owned. This upbringing led to him learning very early on how to talk to and charm anyone of any background or station. Despite the family’s relative poverty, he received an in-depth classical education that included the classics and instruction in the Greek language that was considered the sign of an educated person. Even as a child, he was known to be startlingly intelligent and learned extremely quickly, helped along by what seems to have a photographic memory. A voracious reader, he quickly developed the skill of reading silently. At the time few were able to do so, and this ability to acquire knowledge without making others privy to it was regarded suspiciously.

Despite their poverty, Caesar’s father still managed to win election to public offices, which allowed him to climb the cursus honorum, or course of honor. While serving in these offices, he came into the orbit of one of the giants of the age, Gaius Marius. A brilliant general, Marius had a storied military career, which included campaigns in Numidia alongside his protégé, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, which led to his election to the highest office of state, the consulship, in 107 BCE. (Consuls served one years, and there were two of them. Between them, they shared more or less the power that the kings of Rome had had prior to the founding of the Republic. Serving as consul was the ultimate honor.) Finding a need for more soldiers, he eliminated the property requirements for military service and began recruiting volunteers with promises of plunder. (This alleviated the Republic’s chronic shortages of soldiers, but it also had the effect of turning the loyalty of the soldiery away from the Republic, which would not pay them, to their generals, who would. Another crack in the Republic.) Having proved his ability repeatedly, the Republic looked to Marius when reports started coming in of a mass migration of two northern European barbarian tribes toward Italy. To allow him to have the authority to defend the Republic against the mass of some 750,000, Marius was awarded the consulship an unprecedented four more times in a row. All the while, he recruited more of the poor and completely overhauled the legions in structure and function, turning them into the force that would later conquer much of the world. The reforms worked, and he defeated the migrating tribes in a pair of massive battles in 102 BCE. It was during this time that Caesar the elder first became close to Marius, and thus got closer to the center of power in the Republic. They formalized their alliance later when Marius married Caesar’s sister, Julia, and Caesar himself was married to the daughter of Marius’s closest ally. This alliance benefited both families, but it ran into trouble as Marius’s trajectory went a bit off and he came into conflict with his old lieutenant, Sulla, in the wake of the Social War of 91 – 87 BCE, during which Rome’s Italian allies rebelled when denied citizenship. (After the war, with tens of thousands dead, and many cities destroyed, Rome granted the allies citizenship out of mercy.)

The conflict between Sulla and Marius is really what began the full fracturing of the Republic that would result in Caesar’s eventual dictatorship. After the Social War, Rome’s provinces in the east were being threatened by Mithridates, king of Pontus. Marius wanted to command the military response, but Sulla, now consul, was given it instead. After Sulla left to organize his army in the east, however, Marius had an ally pass a law giving the eastern command to him, after which he sent word to Sulla to stand down. Sulla did not stand down, but marched his army against Rome, contrary to all precedent. Marius fled. After seeing to new elections and executing some of Marius’s supporters, Sulla then went east again. With Sulla gone, Marius and his supporters took over Rome, and had Marius elected consul for a seventh time. (Marius supposedly insisted on this because a literal bird had once promised him seven consulships. The ancient world was weird.) At this point, more than a bit paranoid, Marius and his allies engaged in a wholesale slaughter of Sulla’s allies in the city. Marius also came to be suspicious of the 13-year-old Caesar, too. Now head of his family after his father died suddenly while putting on his shoes one morning in 85 BCE, Marius sought to neutralize Caesar by appointing him high priest of Jupiter (Flamen Dialis). This priesthood carried odd prohibitions, including forbidding its hold from touching iron or spending the night outside of Rome, which would prevent Caesar from ever having a military career.

Somewhat fortunately for Caesar, events undid Marius’s shackles. Partly, this was because Marius died shortly afterward. More importantly, Sulla returned from the east, having defeated Mithridates and sacking Athens for good measure, and now marching on Rome, in a foul mood and with vengeance very much on his mind. In 82 BCE, after a brief but bloody bout of civil war that dragged on for a while afterward, Sulla entered the city. In total power, Sulla rooted out all Marians, proscribed them, seized their property, and put them to death. In all, at least 9000 were killed over several months as informers turned in more and more names. He was helped in this by a number of lieutenants, including Gnaeus Pompeius, a young, bloodthirsty noble who came to give himself the sobriquet “Magnus” just because he could. (Hence how we know him in English as “Pompey the Great”.) Caesar himself was among those Sulla targeted, but, fortunately, his relatives included many of Sulla’s supporters, and they persuaded him to be merciful. Sulla is reported to have said in his memoirs that sparing the boy was among his regrets. (“In this Caesar, there are many Mariuses,” he supposedly said.) He did, however, strip Caesar of his priesthood and nullified his marriage. In case Sulla changed his mind, the young Caesar, age 18, went east to serve in the military, where he, to everyone’s surprise, demonstrated great talent and soon accrued a distinguished record in the field.

The next year, Sulla had himself declared dictator, and he went about restructuring the Republic, setting strict age, term, and time separation limits on when the offices of the cursus honorum could be held. He also stripped power from offices intended to protect and give voice to common people, and completely reformed the Senate, ensuring that its membership was wholly tilted toward his supporters. The idea was to temper ambitions, ossify the system, entrench conservative power, and prevent any career like Marius’s from ever occurring again. Satisfied, Sulla stepped down, and soon died. His reforms would not last. His precedent of changing the constitution to serve his whims would be capitalized on in the coming decades to undo his changes and then some. And, of course, he also set a precedent of using military force to ensure political victory, which, of course, Caesar himself would one day follow. In the end, what Sulla did was further legitimize violence a political means and boosted conservative efforts to stand against fundamental reforms that could have preserved the Republic.

After Sulla died in 78 BCE, Caesar decided it was safe to return to Rome and rejoin society, and so he set out west. The return trip was not without incident. While crossing the Aegean, Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held for ransom. Insulted by the low ransom being asked for him, Caesar told the pirates that he would see them all crucified, which they thought was a joke. It was not a joke. After he was freed, Caesar promptly hired a team of mercenaries to track down, capture, and crucify the pirate band. As a mercy, and out of friendship, Caesar did have their throats cut before they were placed on the cross. Caesar usually meant what he said, something he would demonstrate repeatedly.

Once back in Rome, Caesar returned to Subura. Penniless after Sulla had confiscated his family’s fortune, he embarked on a legal career, focusing on prosecuting corruption. The career was short, but he did endear himself to the common people and he learned effective oratory. After a further short stint in the eastern military, he began seeking offices. In 69 BCE, he was elected quaestor, as a part of which he spent two years examining officials in the province of Hispania. While there, Caesar supposedly came across a statue of Alexander the Great. The same age then that Alexander was when he died, Caesar wept. Alexander had by that point conquered Persia, held sway over everything from Greece to India, and was worshiped as a living god. By contrast, Caesar felt he had accomplished nothing in his life, and he resolved to start moving at a faster pace.

After returning to Rome in 67, he sought new political connections by marrying Sulla’s granddaughter, Pompeia. (He would later divorce her in 61 BCE in the wake of the Bona Dea scandal. Worship of Bona Dea included a women-only ritual, which Pompeia took part in. However, a notorious playboy, Clodius Pulcher, infiltrated the ritual in drag, and was caught. Apparently, Caesar was there in drag, too, but didn’t get caught. In any case, because Pompeia had been at a ritual that had been desecrated, Caesar divorced her on the pretext that, “Caesar’s wife must be above reproach”. Yes, this really happened.) In 65, he used those connections, plus gigantic bribes, to get himself elected aedile, the next office on the political ladder. Aediles had various duties, one of which was to provide lavish games and entertainments for the people, which could then be parlayed into support for higher office. Caesar, of course, did a good job with his games, and thus won support that, together with even more gigantic bribes, got him elected Pontifex Maximus, or Chief Priest. That position led to new connections, which, together with even larger bribes, led to election to the office of praetor. The praetorship was mainly a judicial office, which Caesar didn’t much care for, but it did carry a major perk. After the term of year, praetors, like other high officers, were appointed provincial governors. These were plum assignments, as they offered the chance to extract wealth from the provincial residents. Caesar maneuvered to govern western Spain, as there was active fighting there, and he could thus win some military glory, which would add to his reputation and his pocketbook.

Before Caesar could leave for Spain, however, he had to deal with the massive debt he had run up from all of the bribes he had paid out to win higher and higher offices. The debt was large enough that his creditors simply refused to let him leave the city. Caesar’s solution was to work out a deal with Marcus Licinius Crassus. One of the wealthiest men in history, Crassus accrued the equivalent of $2 trillion, in part from working with Sulla to steal inheritances, but mostly from land speculation and a clever extortion scheme. Well, it could be called a scheme. He bought all of the city’s fire brigades. When a building or house caught fire, Crassus’s people would show up, and offer to buy the house at a low price in return for putting the fire out. If the property owners refused, they let the structure burn down, and then bought the land for a much lower price. Caesar got Crassus to pay some of his debts, guarantee others, and in return promised to provide him with political support for later endeavors. Part of this included support in opposing the political ambitions of Pompey, whom Crassus hated. The debt situation taken care of, Caesar went off to Spain.

In Spain, Caesar had planned to fight, and he did. During his time there, he conquered two native tribes and sold tens of thousands into slavery, which provided him with funds that allowed him to pay off his debts. More importantly, the victories allowed Caesar’s men to hail him as “imperator”, or “victorious general”, which made him eligible for a Triumph upon his return. (These were massive parades through Rome to display loot and conquered peoples, during which a victorious general was treated as a god for a day. They were intoxicating ego boosts, and everyone wanted one.) His mission accomplished and his time up, Caesar then went home to Rome to celebrate his triumph, but he ran into a problem. He wanted to run to be one of the two consuls for the year 59, but to do so, he would have to give up his military command and enter Rome as a civilian, which would preclude getting a triumph. Reluctantly, Caesar prioritized running for higher office, swearing to get his triumph later. He thus paid even more titanic bribes to ensure him the votes to win the consulship. The money for said bribes, of course, came from Crassus.

Once in office, Caesar got to work. First, he brokered a truce between Crassus and Pompey and partnered with them to form what came to be called the “First Triumvirate”. The three together had the resources, talent, ambition, and, importantly, money to run the Republic as they pleased. To seal things, Pompey married Caesar’s daughter, Julia. Caesar also proposed a popular law to distribute the vast public lands to the Roman poor, which endeared him to the common folk. However, Caesar’s partner in the consulship for the year, Bibulus, hated the law, and spent the full year of his term trying to block it from being enacted. Caesar got the law through by playing constitutional hardball, which guaranteed him the support of the common people, but also the enmity of the conservatives in the Senate. Especially hot in his hatred was a profoundly sour, profoundly hateful, and profoundly conservative man named Cato, who vowed to make Caesar pay, no matter what. This would have consequences. One consequence was that Caesar could never risk being a private citizen again, lest he be prosecuted and exiled, and that would then have further consequences.

When his term ended, Caesar and his allies got him assigned to be proconsular governor of northern Italy, southern Gaul (France), and part of southeastern Europe. As soon as his time in office ended in 58, he took up his governorship and ran to avoid being prosecuted. It was now that he really began his climb from fame to historical giant. As I mentioned earlier, governorships were great for a man in debt, given the endless opportunities for graft and extortion. And then there was, if a governor wished, opportunities to start military conflicts on flimsy pretexts that could bring more treasure. And Caesar did, indeed, wish for military conflict. In his case, ginned up a pretext for a war with the Celtic tribes who lived in the unconquered parts of Gaul to the north. Caesar thus formed new legions, and marched into Celtic territory. And so began the 8 years of what are now called the Gallic Wars. I won’t go into these in detail, but it resulted in some harrowing military adventures, including the siege of Alesia, in which Caesar’s army besieged a Celtic city while being besieged by a Celtic army. It also led to the slaughter of over a million people, the enslavement of several hundred thousand more, and the conquest of all of what is now France, as well as parts of what are now Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Germany, and Switzerland. Just to say he did it, Caesar also made a brief incursion into Britain, which was impressive because Romans regarded that wet island as a bit like Mordor. Over the course of the wars, Caesar became fantastically rich, gained enormous military experience, and cultivated a large army of several legions filled with battle-hardened veterans who loved him fanatically, and would happily die for him. We know a lot about what Caesar did over these years because he wrote regular dispatches to the people back home. These reports were masterpieces of propaganda, were read publicly, and were later compiled into a book that we still have in its entirety, which we now know as Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. (If you’ve taken Latin at all, at some point you have to translate parts of this book. It begins, ”Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…”, or “Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts”. This opening is seared into the brain of anyone who has had a Latin class in the last 2000 years.)

A proconsular governorship is only supposed to last a year, but Caesar had Crassus and Pompey back in Rome to make sure he had as much time as he needed to finish his work. Caesar ended up staying in Gaul for 8 years. He would have been there longer, but Crassus did something stupid. Jealous of the military glory that his two partners had garnered, Crassus wanted some himself. Pompey had rid the Mediterranean of pirates, while Caesar had conquered Gaul, but Crassus’s greatest military achievement had been crushing the Spartacus revolt and crucifying 6000 of the rebels, which wasn’t considered to have been much of an achievement. So Crassus looked to outdo his partners by conquering Rome’s great rival to the east: Parthia (Persia). Crassus thus used his immense fortune to buy and outfit an army of some 45,000 soldiers, and marched east. Parthia was a well-organized state with a large, sophisticated, well-led military organized around heavily armored cavalry that was difficult for Roman legions to counter, and the environment of the region was very hot and very dry. Being led astray by guide in the pay of Parthia, Crassus stumbled into a pitched battle with the Parthians at Carrhae, Syria. Lacking experience and having green soldiers, the battle was a disaster for Crassus. More than 20,000 Romans were killed, 10,000 were taken prisoner, and Crassus, stupidly walking into an ambush, was himself captured and executed, allegedly by having molten gold poured down his throat.

With Crassus dead, the Triumvirate was no more, and the bonds between Caesar and Pompey began to snap. It didn’t help that Julia had died in 54. Pompey began to turn against Caesar. Things came to a head in 50 BCE. Now aligned with the conservatives and seeking to neutralize his opponent, Pompey and the Senate ordered Caesar to give up his armies, return to Rome, and face prosecution. Caesar did not want to do this. He tried to broker a compromise with Pompey, and he nearly did so. Cato, however, was hellbent on seeing Caesar brought low, and prevented any peaceful resolution. And so, on January 10, 49 BCE, Caesar took one of his legions, marched it to the river Rubicon. This river, the location of which has since been lost, marked the border between Italy and Caesar’s province. It was illegal for a governor to take an army into Italy. Indeed, it was high treason. This is one of history’s great hinge points. Caesar supposedly rode his horse to the edge of the river, and paused in thought. He could turn around and try to find some way out of the situation, leave his army and, at worst, face exile from polite society, or he could cross and start a civil war. Ever the gambler, Caesar made his decision, proclaimed, “alea iacta est”, or “the die is cast”, and led his army across into Italy. Caesar’s Civil War had begun.
Back in Rome, Pompey realized that he had no army with which to oppose Caesar. The conservatives had assumed that the power of the law would be sufficient to stop Caesar from marching upon them, but they did not realize something that Pompey himself had once noted: what were laws to men with swords? The law is a lie agreed upon, but force and iron were undeniable reality that did not require common belief. Lacking another option, Pompey convinced the Senate to flee with him to Greece to prepare an army while his lieutenants launched an uprising in Spain to distract Caesar. Caesar put his lieutenant, Marcus Antonius (i.e., Mark Antony), in charge of seeing to Italy, went to Spain, ended the uprising there in less than a month, and went after Pompey. On July 10, 48 BCE, Caesar met Pompey in battle at Pharsalus in northern Greece. Though Caesar was outnumbered, his 23,000 men were hardened veterans, and they easily sliced through Pompey’s 50,000 new recruits. Pompey himself barely got away.

Pompey eventually made his way to Egypt to seek help from the Pharoah, Ptolemy XIII. In the meantime, Caesar went back to Rome, got himself elected consul again, and came after Pompey. Unfortunately for Pompey, Ptolemy wanted to cozy up to Caesar, and he had the general executed. When Caesar came to Egypt after his opponent, Ptolemy presented him with the gift of Pompey’s head. Caesar was not amused. He had hoped to pardon his former partner and brother-in-law to demonstrate his clemency. Given that Ptolemy was the product of 300 years of inbreeding severe enough to make the Hapsburgs blush, his thinking was not the best. In revenge, Caesar allied himself with a rival for the Egyptian throne: Ptolemy’s sister and wife, Cleopatra VII. In the ensuing civil war, Caesar’s forces defeated Ptolemy and installed Cleopatra as Pharaoh. After that, Caesar took a vacation, which entailed a long cruise of the Nile while engaging in an affair with Cleopatra that would continue until his death and produce a son, Caesarion.

After leaving Egypt, Caesar undertook a series of campaigns to mop up Pompey’s remaining forces in Pontus, Africa, and Spain. He finally returned to Rome in 45 BCE, where Antony had been ruling in his absence. Once back at the capital, Caesar really got down to business. In an unassailably strong position, he pardoned his remaining enemies who had not taken up arms against him and made it clear he did not wish to rule by force. He was elected consul again, this time not with bribes, but by merely ordering it done. However, he felt that consular power would be insufficient for his needs, so also had himself made dictator for 10 years, and had himself invested with the powers of a tribune of the plebs, which included being deemed sacrosanct and illegal/unholy to harm in any way. To celebrate his many victories, he celebrated a series of Triumphs. These won him much acclaim and favor from the common people, all except the final one, which was celebrated for his victories against other Romans in the civil war, which was not looked upon kindly. While the commoners loved him, the rich and powerful were bitterly resentful. They were angry at having been pardoned, for one thing, as they saw this as condescending to them. Moreover, Caesar’s endless acquisition of powers and offices had barred their political progress along the cursus honorum, while his government reforms eroded their power.

While Caesar was technically a tyrant, he was a good one, and he used his power to do a long list of good and needed things. The Republic was not in good shape, and its government was shaky in part because the structures built to rule a city-state were not so good at running a large empire. Caesar thus engaged in a far-ranging series of reforms. He reformed the calendar, creating the Julian Calendar, of which our Gregorian one is a minor modification, reformed the Senate, launched land reforms, settled more of the poor on farms of their own, reformed the welfare system, regulated luxuries, and passed a powerful and sophisticated anti-corruption law that remained in force for a thousand years. He expanded the government by creating more offices of state, and, importantly, he gave himself the power to name those new magistrates. He expanded the Senate by adding provincial supporters of his, and had plans to expand citizenship to better unify the empire. In part because it was now full of his supporters, the Senate was fairly obsequious and sought Caesar’s favor with a variety of honors. One was to rename Caesar’s birth month of Quintillis “Julius” in his honor, which is where we get “July”. They named him imperator again, and proclaimed him pater patriae, or “Father of the Country”. This practice of gratuitous granting of honors would carry over later to be a part of the investiture of new emperors. Caesar did not know it, but he was setting precedents that would hold for the next 1500 years of Roman history.

Despite his busy government, Caesar also found himself bored. He missed the excitement of campaigning and leading armies in the field. He hatched a plan to outdo Alexander at last. This entailed gathering an army of 100,000, which he intended to take east to conquer Persia out to the Indus valley, then march north, coming around the Black Sea to conquer all of what is now eastern and central Europe. It is unlikely that anyone could have made this work, but Caesar had good luck and was a genius, so who knows? We will never know because it never happened. Caesar’s big mistake at this point was deciding that, to secure his power in Rome while he went abroad, he needed to be elevated to still higher office: king. This was a step too far. Romans hated even the notion of kings, and had since the last Roman king had been run out of town in 509 BCE, when the Republic was proclaimed. Though he never actually got around to allowing himself to be named king, that he was flirting with the notion alarmed the remaining conservatives in the Senate. To make matters worse, Caesar arrogated to himself the prerogative to remain sitting when other senators were gathered. This might seem minor, but it was something the old kings had done, and had been considered forbidden for centuries. Believe it or not, Caesar sitting down was the last straw. A cabal of sixty senators, lead by Cassius, Casca, and Caesar’s dear friend, Brutus, a descendant of the person who had overthrown the last king, to start plotting.

The cabal realized that they needed to strike soon, for if Caesar set out with his army, their chance would be gone. They decided that they would call a session of the Senate on the Ides of March, have Caesar come, and then they would all stab him to death. According to legend, portents and a soothsayer had warned Caesar of that day, the latter telling him famously to “beware the Ides of March” some days earlier. When the day came, and he was still alive, Caesar again met the soothsayer, and mocked him saying, “the Ides have come and I still live!” “Aye,” the soothsayer replied, “but they’ve not yet gone.” Whether or not this happened, Caesar went to the meeting of the senate, which was gathered in the Theater of Pompey because the old Senate house had been burned down during the street fighting of the civil war. Convinced of his invincibility at this point, Caesar came without his bodyguards. This was a mistake.

As the session started, the cabal struck. A senator named Cimber grabbed Caesar by his shoulder. Caesar turned and glared at him, saying,” This is violence!” Another, Casca, then stabbed at his neck. Blood now drawn; the rest joined in. Caesar fought back until Brutus took his turn. Brutus, whom Caesar had loved as a son and had named as his alternate heir, was the one who made Caesar realize that all was lost. (Supposedly, it was to Brutus that Caesar said, in Greek, “And you, too, my son?” This has been interpreted as a mournful question, but it was also the first part of a popular saying that translates as, “I’ll see you in Hell, punk!” That version seems more realistic.) Caesar tried to run but tripped over his toga. Once he was down, he was stabbed repeatedly. He died in a pool of blood beneath a statue of Pompey. Afterward, he was subjected to the first autopsy recorded in Western medical history. The report concluded that he had been stabbed twenty-three times, but only one wound was mortal. One, but it was enough.

The assassins, jubilant and calling themselves the Liberators, ran through the city, cheering and calling out that they had freed the Republic. The “Liberators” soon realized that they had badly misjudged the situation. The populace did not rejoice. They were angry. Very, very angry. The conservative aristocracy might have hated Caesar, but the commoners had loved him as their protector and champion. Those who were not angry were scared and hid in their houses. Because they knew that the masses just needed someone to call them to violence… Realizing this, the Liberators barricaded themselves on the Capitoline hill and waited.

Enter Antony… As Caesar’s lieutenant, Antony was well positioned to lead the Caesarian faction in the city. Having 6,000 soldiers at his back, he tried to resolve the situation by using them to intimidate the Senate into confirming all of Caesar’s appointments and reforms and making him ruler of Rome in exchange for pardoning the Liberators. This plan began to work out, but Antony ran into a problem: when Caesar’s will was read on March 19, it was discovered that his primary heir had been declared to his 18-year-old nephew, Gaius Octavius, whose name was changed to Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, or Octavian. This meant that Antony had an immediate rival for power, and he had to ensure that he had the masses on his side.

Antony made his move on March 20, when he delivered the eulogy at Caesar’s public funeral. In his speech, famously imagined by Shakespeare, Antony whipped the crowd into a murderous frenzy. They built a massive pyre, upon which they cremated Caesar’s. The fire, however, burned out of control, destroying a section of the city. Then they set their sights on the “Liberators”, laying siege to their homes. Antony used this as an excuse to get the Liberators out of Rome, and then used the power of the crowd to appropriate much of Caesar’s estate, taking what had been intended to go to Octavian, the soldiers, and the people of Rome. He also passed a number of laws, ostensibly left behind by Caesar, which showered gifts on the soldiers, binding them closer to him. The intent was to sideline Octavian. This did not work as planned. Octavian was young, but he had trained at his uncle’s side. He was just as brilliant as his uncle, but far more ruthless and cold-blooded, possibly even sociopathic.

Antony’s actions offended many in power, who began to see him as the tyrant that Caesar never was. Octavian skillfully played against these feelings, and borrowed heavily to pay out the bequests Caesar had intended for the soldiers and people, winning them to his side. At the same time, those who distrusted Antony started investing Octavian with powers so that he could be used to subvert Antony. This, of course, played into Octavian’s hands, as he sought to use that support to neutralize Antony and gain power. Octavian also began a concerted attack on Antony for having pardoned the Liberators, set the orator Cicero to making speeches denouncing Antony, and had the Senate proclaim him a public enemy. This resulted in a brief civil war between Octavian and Antony. The Senate took the opportunity to invest power in the Liberators and their allies to try to renew the Republic, a step that did not work out.

In May of 43 BCE, Antony and Octavian reconciled with the intent of making a united front to oppose the Liberators and their allies. When the Senate balked at rescinding the declaration of Antony as a public enemy, Octavian proclaimed himself consul and marched on Rome. After crushing Senatorial opposition, Octavian and Antony further negotiated with each other and brought in Caesar’s former third in command, Marcus Lepidus. In November, the three formed the Second Triumvirate, which was essentially a 3-person dictatorship, the entire goal of which was to secure power and avenge Caesar’s death. They started by proscribing all of the remaining supporters of the Liberators, putting them to death, and taking all of their wealth. (As a gift to Antony, Octavian also had Cicero executed.) They then declared war on the Liberators, who had gathered a large army and taken over the eastern provinces. To further whip up public hatred toward the Liberators, in 42 BC, Octavian had the Senate declare Caesar a god, making him able to call himself “son of the god”, and making the Liberators guilty of deicide.

The latest round of civil wars lasted less than a year. In October of 42 BCE, the Triumvirate’s 100,000-man army met the Liberator’s 100,000-man army, and routed them. The civil war effectively ended there. While Antony chose to follow Caesar and be merciful to the defeated, Octavian dealt harshly with them, killed many, and even had Brutus’s dead body beheaded. This established a pattern of how Octavian would deal with foes.

Save for Sicily, where Pompey’s son, Sextus, held power, the Triumvirate now ruled the Roman world, and divided it between them. Lepidus, the junior member, was given North Africa, Octavian was given Spain, and Antony took most of the rest, choosing to rule from the East. Antony ended up spending the next several years dealing with eastern problems, putting down conflicts in Judea and campaigning against Parthia. During this time, he also became romantically involved with Cleopatra, who saw him as an easily manipulated drunk. (Fair.) The distraction allowed Octavian to start consolidating power in the west, slowly but surely taking control of all western provinces and the reins in Rome itself. After Lepidus attempted to take Sicily for himself after defeating Sextus Pompey, Octavian dissolved the Triumvirate, and began a propaganda campaign to turn the people and state against Antony. This worked well, in part because Antony had come to be so closely linked to Cleopatra. Romans generally distrusted the Egyptians, after all.

Though Antony attempted a propaganda war of his own, Octavian’s was savvier, and he succeeded in gaining support to go after Antony in the east. As a new civil war began, a third of the Senate went east to support Octavian, believing that Antony’s greater experience and Cleopatra’s immense wealth would win in the end. They were wrong. The war did not last long. In September, Octavian’s navy met Antony and Cleopatra’s at the Greek port of Actium, and defeated it completely. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt, while Octavian absorbed Antony’s army’s left behind into his own. Octavian now controlled the only navy in the Mediterranean and over 100 legions, and he now pursued the fugitive couple, invading Egypt in 30 BCE. In due course, Antony committed suicide, and then Cleopatra did, too.

Octavian now ruled supreme and uncontested. He resolved to not repeat his uncle’s mistakes. Caesar forgave his enemies. Octavian did not. He instead killed them and seized their estates. All of them. He killed Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son with Caesar. He annexed Egypt, not for Rome, but as his personal property. He consolidated all the power of the Roman state in himself by holding every major office simultaneously, and then making the armies swear personal loyalty to him, and only to him. This, of course, caused problems, because other resented not being able to achieve high offices. Octavian had a plan for that. In 27 BCE, Octavian made a public show of returning all of his powers to the Senate, and laying down his offices. The Senate, in return, made a show of giving him the new title of, “Augustus,” meaning “Revered One” or “Majesty”. The new title just so happened to carry all of the same powers of all the offices that Octavian had just resigned. In gratitude for his display of humility, the Senate renamed the month of Sextillis “Augustus” in his honor. We now call this month “August.”

The Republic was no more. Granted, Augustus officially declared that he had restored the Republic. He was a monarch in all but name, but he knew he couldn’t say he was anything like a king. No, he was just the humble “First Citizen”, or “Princeps”. (A word from which we get “prince.”) The Republic still existed, he insisted. Indeed, the Roman empire formally insisted it was the Roman Republic through its entire existence. Anthony Kaldellis makes a good case in “The Byzantine Republic” that Rome remained a republic to the end of the Byzantine era in 1453, albeit a monarchical one ruled by an emperor who could transcend the law. Just the same, the state was something very different than it had been. The Roman Republic of old was gone, and the Roman Empire now held sway over the western world. Augustus made the new settlement stick, with one-man rule amidst the trappings of republican government and a neutered Senate by ruling until 14 CE. Entire generations thus grew up knowing peace under Augustus, and that he had brought an end to decades of civil war. Maintaining the ruse that he was not a monarch made succession tricky, of course. He had to find an heir, have the Senate grant him offices and power that would slowly legitimize him to become the new Augustus when he died. He could not just pass on power like a monarch. After several candidate family members died before he did, August was finally followed in power by his heir and adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero. In due course, Tiberius was succeeded by Caligula, and he by Claudius. Power thus stayed in the Julio-Claudian family, only losing it when Nero committed suicide in 69 CE. Here the lack of formal succession procedures necessitated by the illusion of a republic caused the first of many civil wars to decide a new emperor. The general Vespasian won, and his sons would then rule. The succession issue was never figure out, as much a consequence of Caesar’s assassination as the position of emperor itself. But it was always figured out, even as the recurrent civil wars caused centuries of problems. Emperor followed emperor, the chain growing longer*, with dozens of men and at least five women ruling in turn until the last of them, Constantine XI, died fighting the Ottomans as they breached the walls of Constantinople on May 29, 1453 CE. Those many emperors included in their number many excellent rulers, many good ones, many middling, a few very bad ones, and a few who were clinically insane, but the empire was lucky on the whole. However, though Julius Caesar was not an emperor, his end would set a pattern. Most emperors would die violent deaths, mostly by assassination. Ironically, this, too, was a consequence of the lack of a set succession mechanism owing to Caesar’s assassination. Without a legitimate means of succession, it was legal to kill an emperor and take power for oneself, so long as you had enough support to keep the position. By the Byzantine era, political theory coalesced on there being a firm theological and Christian reason for it: God officially decided who was emperor. If you were doing a bad job, the He empowered someone to take power from you. If you got to be emperor and you did well enough to remain emperor, then God clearly thought you worthy to rule. The system worked surprisingly well to insure that the incompetent could not long rule. As Kaldellis notes, this system meant that the Roman empire had the most stable governmental system in the history of the Western world, even if there was more turnover in the top spot than in any other country. And it all traces back to Caesar.

That is the story. That is why this day is important. On March 15, 44 BCE, a great, complicated man who wrote poetry, read a lot, studied language, was great at conversation, leading soldiers, bribing people, making laws, and more was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in spirit or consequence. His assassins killed him with their knives, but his legacy lived on. The particulars of his actions, death, and legacy have shaped all of Western history since, down to the day and world in which we live. Now you know.

May this find you all safe, well, and not stabbed!

All the best,
Zack

*The full list, excluding several dozen usurpers:

Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan the Greatest, Hadrian the Mercurial, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius the Good, Commodus the Terrible, Pertinax, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta, Macrinus, Diadumenian, Elagabalus the Bizarre, Alexander Severus, Maximinus Thrax the Giant, Gordian I, Gordian II, Pupienus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Philip the Arab, Decius, Hostilian, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, Quintillus, Aurelian the Man of Iron, Ulpian Severina, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carus, Carinus, Numerian, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, Constantius I Chlorus, Valerius Severus, Constantine I the Egomaniacal, Maxentius, Licinius, Valerius Valens, Maximianus II, Constantine II, Constantius II, Constans I, Julian the Philosopher (beloved, tragic Julian), Jovian, Valentinian I then One Who Died During a Temper Tantrum, Valens, Gratian, Valentinian II, Theodosius I the So-Called Great, Honorius, Arcadius, Theodosius II, Constantius III, Valentinian III, Petronius Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Libius Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos, Romulus Augustulus, Marcian, Leo I, Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus the Incompetent, Anastasius I, Justin I, Justinian I the Great, Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurice, Phocas, Heraclius, Constantine III, Heraklonas, Constans II, Constantine IV, Justinian II, Leontios, Tiberius III, Justinian II (again), Philippikos, Anastasius II, Theodosius III, Leo III, Constantine V, Artabasdos, Leo IV, Constantine VI, Irene, Nikephoros I, Staurakios, Michael I, Leo V, Michael II, Theophilos, Michael III, Basil I, Leo VI the Wise, Alexander, Constantine VII the Purple-Born, Romanos I, Romanos II, Nikephoros II Phokas the White Death, John I Tzimiskes, Basil II the Bulgar Slayer, Constantine VIII, Zoe, Romanos III, Michael IV, Michael V, Theodora, Constantine IX, Michael VI, Isaac I, Constantine X, Michael VII, Romanus IV, Nikephoros III, Alexios I, John II, Manuel I, Alexios II, Andronikos I, Isaac II, Alexios III, Isaac II, Alexios IV, Alexios V, Theodore I, John III, Theodore II, John IV, Michael VIII, Andronikos II, Michael IX, Andronikos III, John V, John VI, Andronkos IV, John V (again), John VII, John V (again), Manuel II, John VIII, and Constantine XI the Immortal and Ever-Reigning, who shall one day return.

2021
Friends, Romans, countrypersons, sentient beings of all forms and origins…

Today is the 15th of March. To the Romans, the day was the Ides of Martius, meaning “the middle of the month of Mars”. (You’ll notice that the month is named after the Roman god of war. It got that name because it was the month in which the season for warfare began. So, essentially, “Ides de Martius” means “the middle of the month in which we go out to start killing people and taking their land again”.) So, yes, this is the Ides of March, made famous and still remembered, if dimly, for being the day on which one of the major turning points in world history took place: the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, 2066 years ago today.

Caesar was a complex figure, but much of that complexity has been warn away by popular culture. All that is left is the sense that Caesar was some sort of archetypical egomaniacal, hyper-ambitious, bloodthirsty tyrant who made himself dictator of the Roman Republic and was then killed because tyranny. Oh, and that his last words translate to “and you, too, my son”, suggesting that his kid took part in killing him. Beyond that? Well, stuff happened, and eventually there was a different Caesar named Augustus who did something involving taxing the whole world that has something to do with Christmas. (He didn’t, and it doesn’t really.) There were emperors, Julius was one, they called themselves “Caesar”, and many of them were insane in colorful ways. Needless to say, there is much, much more to the story, and much, much more to Caesar himself. So, if you choose to read further, sit back, and let it all wash over you. (Otherwise, the TL;DR is “Caesar was real. He was brilliant and complicated, didn’t sleep, did A LOT of stuff over his life, conquered France, destroyed a 500-year-old governmental system, and was killed by a bunch of conservative old men, whom he had made the mistake of letting live. His last words, “et tu, Brute?” might actually have meant, ‘I’ll see you in Hell, punk!’ He was not an emperor, but his nephew and heir, Octavian, who named himself Augustus, was the first emperor. And the empire didn’t fall until 1453 CE, which ain’t bad as such things go.”)

Before I start, though, it is important to note that Caesar is a fascinating historical character, but he wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a “good guy”, if such things exist in history. He got away with a lot because he belonged to nobility and had rich friends. He was extremely amoral. (But not a sociopath, unlike Augustus.) He launched wars that killed millions and were borderline genocidal. He launched those wars purely to feed his own pocketbook, ego, and political ambitions. Much of the profit he made off those wars came from enslaving hundreds of thousands of civilians from conquered peoples. He brought down the Roman Republic more or less to avoid humiliation and provoked a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of his own countrypersons. When he was assassinated, he was planning another war that would have likely killed perhaps millions of more people, essentially because he wanted to see if he could outdo Alexander the Great. He might have been a charming fellow, but he wasn’t a good one. (That said, he was better than Constantine "the Great". He killed a lot of people, too, including much of his own family and pretty much ever ally he ever had, while still being venerated as a saint in some traditions.)

To the tale… Once upon a time…

Some basic facts:

He was not born by Caesarean section. Before modern aseptic medicine, C-sections were more or less universally fatal to the mother. The first solid record of a woman surviving a C-section wasn’t until the 1580s. Caesar was born on July 12, 100 BCE, which, had he been born by C-section, would have also been about when his mother, Aurelia, died. However, we know that Aurelia didn’t die until 54 BCE, which argues pretty definitively that he was delivered in the traditional manner. It is thus a myth that the procedure was named after Caesar. (The origin of the name is unclear.)

His full name was Gaius Julius Caesar, and no one called him “Julius”.
Romans typically had three names:
The Praenomen, which was essentially a first name.
The Nomen, or family name.
The Cognomen, or a sort of indicator of the branch of the family to which one belonged. They often started out as nicknames, often cruel ones, given to some ancestor that then stuck. (For example, “Cicero”, the cognomen of Marcus Tullius Cicero, means “chickpea”, likely referring to one of his ancestors having a cleft nose.)

“Gaius Julius Caesar” thus means “Gaius of the Caesar branch of the family of the Julii”. To break it down further, “Gaius” was a popular Roman name that meant “one who rejoices”. The Julii claimed descent from Julus, the son of Aeneas, the demigod Trojan hero born of the goddess Venus. (Thus making the family of divine blood.) The origin of “Caesar” is a bit of a mystery, and it was speculated that it came from an ancestor who:

Was born by Caesarean section.
Had killed an elephant (The Moorish word for elephant was “caesai”).
Had grey eyes, which in Latin is “oculis caesiis”.
Had thick hair, or “caesaries”.
Had no hair, and was called “caesaries” as a joke.

Caesar himself seems to have preferred the elephant explanation. Caesar had hereditary baldness, which makes me suspect number 5. To be honest, I find the idea that a bunch of rulers throughout history assumed titles that meant “hairy” to be hysterical.

The Story:
Caesar’s family was old and highly honored, but it was also poor and not very powerful. He grew up in Rome’s crowded, dangerous, crime infested slum of Subura. His family’s livelihood essentially came from being slumlords. This childhood among the poor seems to have played a role in Caesar’s noted trait of being able to talk to and bond with pretty much anyone, which served him quite well over his life. Despite his poor circumstance, Caesar’s family made sure that he received an excellent classical education that included learning Greek, which was the marker of an educated person. He was incredibly intelligent and precocious, read voraciously, and seems to have had a photographic memory. He even developed the then rare ability to read silently, which was regarded with suspicion throughout his life.

Caesar’s family fortunes changed for the better when his father allied himself to Gaius Marius. A brilliant general, Marius had reformed the legions, defeated a massive barbarian invasion, and held the top elected office of Consul an unprecedented six times. Marius turned a bit brutal later in life, and came to take the Consulship a seventh time, taking the office while his protégé and rival, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix was fighting Mithradites of Pontus in the East. The alliance with Marius was sealed by marrying him to Caesar’s aunt, Julia, while Caesar himself was married to the daughter of Marius’s closest ally. Marius, however, saw the boy as dangerous, and tried to neutralize him by making him the high priest of Jupiter at age 13. That priesthood came with some decidedly odd restrictions, including a ban on touching iron or staying the night outside of Rome, which would thus have precluded Caesar from ever engaging in military activity. However, Marius soon died of a stroke, and Sulla destroyed the remains of the Marian regime when he returned from the east. Sulla was actually the first Roman to march his army into Rome and declare himself dictator. Sulla saw his job as “restoring” the system that had been decaying for the past few decades so as to prevent the rise of another Marius (or Sulla, for that matter). As a part of his program of “de-Marianization”, Sulla launched a campaign to kill, proscribe, impoverish, and strip power from anyone he didn’t like or who he thought had been too friendly with Marius. As a part of this program, Sulla stripped Caesar of his priesthood and nullified his marriage. He considered just killing the boy, too, saying, “I see many a Marius in him.” However, Caesar’s mother’s family, who had supported Sulla, and the Vestal Virgins interceded and got Sulla to relent. Caesar, decided it would be safer to go elsewhere, so he left to join the army on a campaign in Asia Minor in 82 BCE.

To the surprise of everyone, Caesar turned out to be a very good soldier and accrued a distinguished record. Stayed in the east until Sulla died in 78 BCE, when he thought it was safe to go home again and rejoin polite society. His return trip included on of the most famous of his adventures. While on the way, he was kidnapped pirates and held for ransom. Caesar was insulted by the low ransom being asked for him, and told the pirates that he would see them all crucified. The pirates thought this was hilarious. What could the little dandy boy do to them? Well, eventually the ransom came through and Caesar was released… only to turn around, hire mercenaries, capture the pirates, and have them all crucified. (Out of mercy, because he had regarded the pirates as friends, Caesar had their throats cut before they were raised on crosses. Such a kind fellow!) Caesar usually meant what he said. The pirates were not the last to learn that the hard way.

After finally getting back to Rome to stay, Caesar started climbing the political ladder. In 69 BCE, he was elected Quaestor, which involved auditing other officials. In his case, he examined officials for about two years in what is now Spain. While there, Caesar supposedly came across a statue of Alexander the Great. Caesar was then about the same age that Alexander had been when he died, having conquered Persia, held sway over everything between Greece and India, and been worshiped as a living god. Caesar supposedly wept, feeling that he had accomplished nothing in his life by comparison. He thus resolved to keep a faster pace going forward.

After returning to Rome in 67, he sought new political connections by marrying Sulla’s granddaughter, Pompeia. (He would later divorce her, saying that “Caesar’s wife must be above reproach”. Why? She had been at a women’s only religious ceremony at which the playboy Clodius Pulcher had been caught attending in drag. Caesar likely was there, too, also in drag, but he wasn’t caught. That mattered little in finding a pretext to drop Pompeia.) In 65, he used those connections, plus gigantic bribes, to get himself elected Aedile, the next office on the political ladder. Aediles had various duties, one of which was to provide lavish games and entertainments for the people, which could then be parleyed into support for higher office. Caesar, of course, did a good job with his games, and thus won support that, together with even more gigantic bribes, got him elected Pontifex Maximus, or Chief Priest. (This office still exists, and is held by Pope Francis, because history is often bizarre.) He used connections from his new position to, with the help of still more gigantic bribes, win election to be Praetor, which was essentially a judicial office. Caesar didn’t much care about being a judge, but a perk of being Praetor was that it meant that, after the year of office was up, he would be assigned to govern a province. Caesar maneuvered to govern western Spain, where he could go on military campaigns and collect loot and glory.

However, Caesar faced the little problem of the massive debt he had accrued from paying out multiple rounds of giant bribes, and his creditors did not want him leaving Rome without paying them. This problem led to Caesar working out a deal with Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the wealthiest men in history. (How wealthy? Crassus’s fortune is estimated to be approximately equal to $2 trillion today. So multiple Elons wealthy. His wealth came from land speculation, as well as owing the city’s fire brigades. That meant that, when a person’s house caught fire, Crassus’s fire crews would offer to either buy the house on the cheap for their boss, or let it burn down. It wasn’t ethical, but it did make money.) Crassus paid some of Caesar’s debts and guaranteed others in return for his political support going forward. Just the same, Caesar left for Spain early so he couldn’t be prosecuted by angry creditors.

In Spain, as he had expected, Caesar got to fight, and conquered two native tribes, which won him slaves to sell and pay off debts. More importantly, the victories allowed Caesar’s men to hail him as “imperator”, or “victorious general”, which made him eligible for a Triumph upon his return. (These were massive parades through Rome to display loot and conquered peoples, during which a victorious general was treated as a god for a day. They were intoxicating ego boosts, and everyone wanted one.) Unfortunately, he had a conflict because he wanted to be elected one of the two Consuls for the year 59. Consulships were the highest office in the Republic, and allowed one to be half a king for a year. But to run for the office, he would have to leave his army and enter Rome as a civilian, which would mean no Triumph. Reluctantly, Caesar prioritized running for higher office. And, after paying bribes that dwarfed those he had paid out before, he won. He borrowed the money from Crassus, of course.

Once in office, Caesar got to work. First, he formed an official partnership between him, Crassus, and Gaeus Pompeius Magnus (i.e. “Pompey the Great”, “the Great” being a title he gave to himself.), a brilliant general and former favorite of Sulla’s. As the “First Triumvirate”, the three marshaled resources to run the Republic as they pleased. To seal things, Pompey married Caesar’s daughter, Julia. Caesar also proposed a popular law to distribute the vast public lands to the Roman poor. Caesar’s partner Consul, Bibulus, hated the law, and spent the full year of his term trying to block it from being enacted. Caesar got the law through anyway, which guaranteed him the support of the common people, and ensured that the conservatives in the Senate hated him. However, the enmity of the conservatives meant that he could never risk being a private citizen again, lest he be prosecuted and exiled. This would have consequences.

When his term ended, Caesar and his allies got him assigned as Proconsular governor of northern Italy, southern Gaul (France), and part of southeastern Europe. As soon as his time in office ended in 58, he took up his governorship and ran to avoid being prosecuted. It was now that he really began his climb to fame. Governorships like the one he had were great for a man in debt. There were endless opportunities for graft, extortion, and, if one wished, military conflict that would bring treasure. Caesar wished. Oh, did he wish! He quickly found excuses to start a war with the Celtic tribes who lived in the unconquered parts of Gaul. Caesar thus formed new legions and began 8 years of what are now called the Gallic Wars, during which he killed over a million people and conquered all of what is now France, and parts of what is now Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. He also made a brief incursion to “conquer” Britain, mainly so he could say he went there, as it was regarded as a bit like Mordor (only wetter) in the Roman imagination. Over the course of the wars, Caesar became fantastically rich and he also developed a fanatically loyal army of hardened veteran legionaries who would gladly die for him. We know a lot about what he did over these years because he wrote a book about his campaigns in installments that he had sent back to Rome to be read publicly. (We still have this book. All of it. You have to try to translate it when you take Latin class. It begins,”Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…”, or “Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts”. Latin class seres this into your brain so that it will never leave. It haunts my dreams.)

A proconsul is supposed to only govern for a year, but Caesar had been in Gaul for 8 years. He managed this because Crassus and Pompey back in Rome kept things aligned for to allow him to continue his work. But then, in 53 BCE, Crassus got himself killed. He had grown tired of the piddly power brought by $2 trillion, and decided he wanted military glory, too. He thus bought himself an army and marched east to conquer Parthia (Persia). It did not go well. In Syria he was beaten in battle, walked into an ambush, was captured, and the Parthians then killed him, allegedly by pouring molten gold down his throat. (Yes, this is where George R.R. Martin got that scene from.) Crassus’s death ended the Triumvirate. Moreover, Julia had died in 54, which meant that there was no longer anything tying Caesar and Pompey. Pompey began to turn against Caesar.

In 50 BCE, things came to a head. The Senate, led by Pompey, ordered Caesar to give up his armies, return to Rome, and face prosecution. Caesar didn’t want to do this. On January 10, 49 BCE, he took one of his legions, marched it to the river Rubicon, which marked the border of Italy. It was illegal to take an army across it. It was, in fact, treason. Caesar supposedly rose his horse to the edge of the river, paused in thought, and said, “alea iacta est”, or “the die is cast”, and led his army across. Upon hearing of this, Pompey convinced the Senate to flee with him to Greece to prepare an army while his lieutenants launched an uprising in Spain to distract Caesar. Caesar put his lieutenant, Mark Antony in charge of Italy, went to Spain, and proceeded to put down the uprising in less than a month. He then went in pursuit of Pompey. On July 10, of 48 BCE, his badly outnumbered veteran legions decisively smashed Pompey’s army at Pharsalus in northern Greece.

Pompey fled to Egypt to seek help from the Pharoah, Ptolemy XIII. In the meantime, Caesar went back to Rome, got himself elected Consul again, and came after Pompey. Unfortunately for Pompey, the Ptolemy wanted to curry favor with Caesar. Ptolemy thus had Pompey’s head cut off, and offered it to Caesar as a gift. Unfortunately, Caesar, who had wanted to pardon his old friend, was enraged by this gesture. (Ptolemy was the product of 300 years of inbreeding severe enough to cause nausea, so he wasn’t the brightest.) Caesar thus sided with Ptolemy’s sister (and wife), Cleopatra VII (yes, that one), in a civil war to overthrow him. After defeating Ptolemy at the Battle of the Nile in 47 BCE and installing Cleopatra as Pharaoh, Caesar took a vacation. He spent a long while cruising the Nile and enjoying an affair with Cleopatra, an affair he would continue and get a son, Caesarion, out of.

After a series of travels to mop up Pompey’s remaining forces in Pontus, Africa, and Spain, Caesar finally went back home to Rome in 45. Once there, he got busy again. He was in a surprisingly strong position when he returned, as he pardoned his enemies who had not taken up arms against him, and made it clear he did not wish to rule by force. He got elected Consul again, not with bribes, but by merely ordering it done. He also had himself made dictator for 10 years. He celebrated a series of Triumphs, all but one of which, for victories against other Romans, went over quite well and won him more favor with the common people. By contrast, the rich and power were bitterly resentful. Caesar’s endless acquisition of powers and government reforms rankled them further, not least because his occupying offices precluded them from doing so. Granted, he did a lot of good during this time. He reformed the calendar, creating the Julian Calendar, reformed the Senate, launched land reforms, reformed the welfare system, regulated luxuries, and passed an anti-corruption law that remained in force for a thousand years. He also reformed the constitution, created more offices of state, and gave himself the power to name magistrates. During this time, the Senate renamed Caesar’s birth month of Quintillis “Julius” in his honor, which is where we get “July”. He had plans, too, to expand citizenship and make the empire more unified. However, he also found himself bored and desiring for some real adventure. He thus began to gather a massive army with a plan to outdo Alexander by marching east to conquer Persia, then march north, coming around the Black Sea to conquer all of what is now easter and central Europe. This was a bit nuts, but, if anyone could make it work, it was Caesar. Unfortunately, he began to float the idea of being declared king. That was a step too far, as the Romans hated kings, and had since they had gotten rid of theirs five centuries earlier. He also had the temerity to not stand when other Senators were present, which was regarded as putting on royal airs. (By contrast, the emperor Diocletian would 300 years later require all who came into his presence lay on their bellies and grovel. Times change.) That set a cabal of 60 senators, led by Cassius, Casca, and Brutus, to plotting…

On the Ides of March, 44 BCE, Caesar came to a session of the Senate that was meeting in the Theater of Pompey despite ill omens and warnings of bad things coming. A soothsayer had reportedly warned him to “Beware the Ides of March” some days earlier. Caesar mocked him on the way to the Senate that day, saying “The Ides have come!” The soothsayer replied, “Aye, but they’ve not yet gone.” Caesar should have listened At the session, the cabal pounced. A senator named Cimber grabbed him by his shoulder while another, Casca, stabbed at his neck. The rest joined in, Brutus, whom Caesar loved as a son, and had named his alternate heir. (Supposedly, it was to Brutus that Caesar said, in Greek, “And you, too, my son?” This has been interpreted as a mournful question, but it was also the first part of a popular saying that essentially meant, “I’ll see you in Hell, punk!” Honestly, that seems more realistic.) Caesar tried to run but tripped over his toga. Once he was down, he was stabbed a total of 23 times. He died in a pool of blood beneath a statue of Pompey himself. An autopsy, the first recorded in Western history, established that only one of the wounds was mortal. The assassins, calling themselves the Liberators, ran through the city, cheering and calling out that they had freed the Republic. The populace did not rejoice. They were angry. Very, very angry, for they had loved Caesar as their protector and champion. Meaning that they just needed someone to call them to violence.

At Caesar’s funeral, Mark Antony made that call. He whipped the crowd into a murderous frenzy. They built a massive pyre for Caesar’s body to burn upon, started a large fire that soon burned out of control. Then they set their sights on the “Liberators”, laying siege to their homes. Antony smiled at it all and roused an army.

A new round of civil wars thus began. Antony allied himself with Caesar’s nephew, heir, and adopted son, a sickly, somewhat inhuman boy of 18 named Octavian. (And a flunky named Lepidus, but no one cares about him.) As the Second Triumvirate, they pursued the Liberators until they were crushed in a massive, 200,000 person battle at Philippi in Macedonia in 42 BCE. Antony then looked to consolidate power, for surely Octavian would be no problem to control.

Octavian was a problem to control. The boy was as brilliant as his uncle, but far, far more ruthless, cold-blooded, and possibly sociopathic. Caesar had been declared a god in 42, so Octavian began to publicly style himself “Son of the God”. While Antony took up with Cleopatra, Octavian consolidated his power in Rome and began a concerted propaganda campaign against his rival. Things finally broke in 33, when Octavian engineered Senatorial revocation of Antony’s titles and powers. The two then went to war. In 31, Octavian’s forces destroyed Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet at Actium, forcing them to fall back to Egypt. Octavian’s forces routed Antony’s at Alexandria, and Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.

Octavian now ruled supreme. The consummate student of power, he did not repeat his uncle’s mistakes. He did not forgive his enemies. Forgiven enemies can kill you. Instead, he killed them and took all their stuff. He killed Caesarion and took Egypt as his personal property. He effectively consolidated all power in himself by holding every major office of state simultaneously and made the armies swear loyalty to him and him alone. In 27, he made a show of returning power to the Senate, which made of show of begging him to take it back, along with a new title, “Augustus”, or “Revered One”. The month of Sextillis was renamed “Augustus” in his honor, too, to accompany that of “Julius”. The Republic as it was, was no more. The Republic would officially still exist, of course. Indeed, Anthony Kaldellis makes a good case that Rome remained a Republic to the end of the Byzantine era, albeit a monarchical one ruled by an emperor who could transcend the law. The Roman Empire was thus born. Augustus would be followed by his heir and adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero, and then many more men and even (officially) four women*, until the last, Constantine XI, died defending the walls of Constantinople on May 29, 1453 CE. Julius Caesar was not an emperor, but he set a pattern, as most of the emperors would die violent deaths, frequently being murdered. (There was no set means of legitimate succession, so it was technically legal to kill one and takes his power for yourself, so long as you could get the army, people, and aristocracy, in that order, to accept you. In the Byzantine era, political theory precluded a set means of succession, as God was officially the one who decided if you got to rule. If you managed to get and keep the throne, it was thought, then clearly God wanted you there. It was a system that worked surprisingly well.)

That is the story. On March 15, 44 BCE, a great, complicated man who wrote poetry, read a lot, studied language, was great at conversation, leading soldiers, bribing people, making laws, and more was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in spirit or consequence. His assassins killed him with their knives, but his legacy lived on. Indeed, it lives on still, for the world in which we live today was born from it. So take some time to remember it all!

May this find you all safe, well, lacking in any knife wounds.

All the best,
Zack

*Deep breath, go!

Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Pertinax, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta, Macrinus, Diadumenian, Elagabalus, Alexander Severus, Maximinus Thrax, Gordian I, Gordian II, Pupienus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Philip the Arab, Decius, Hostilian, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, Quintillus, Aurelian, Ulpian Severina, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carus, Carinus, Numerian, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, Constantius I Chlorus, Valerius Severus, Constantine I the so-called Great, Maxentius, Licinius, Valerius Valens, Maximianus II, Constantine II, Constantius II, Constans I, Julian the Philosopher, Jovian, Valentinian I, Valens, Gratian, Valentinian II, Theodosius I, Honorius, Arcadius, Theodosius II, Constantius III, Valentinian III, Petronius Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Libius Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos, Romulus Augustulus, Marcian, Leo I, Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus, Anastasius I, Justin I, Justinian I, Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurice, Phocas, Heraclius, Constantine III, Heraklonas, Constans II, Constantine IV, Justinian II, Leontios, Tiberius III, Justinian II (again), Philippikos, Anastasius II, Theodosius III, Leo III, Constantine V, Artabasdos, Leo IV, Constantine VI, Irene, Nikephoros I, Staurakios, Michael I, Leo V, Michael II, Theophilos, Michael III, Basil I, Leo VI, Alexander, Constantine VII, Romanos I, Romanos II, Nikephoros II Phokas, John I Tzimiskes, Basil II, Constantine VIII, Zoe, Romanos III, Michael IV, Michael V, Theodora, Constantine IX, Michael VI, Isaac I, Constantine X, Michael VII, Romanus IV, Nikephoros III, Alexios I, John II, Manuel I, Alexios II, Andronikos I, Isaac II, Alexios III, Isaac II, Alexios IV, Alexios V, Theodore I, John III, Theodore II, John IV, Michael VIII, Andronikos II, Michael IX, Andronikos III, John V, John VI, Andronkos IV, John V (again), John VII, John V (again), Manuel II, John VIII, and Constantine XI the Immortal

2021
Friends, Romans, countrypersons, gentlebeings…

Today is the 15th of March. To the Romans, it was the Ides of Martius, meaning “the middle of the month of Mars”. Yes, this is the Ides of March. We, of course, know this day because of Shakespeare, and his play about one of the most significant events in Western history: the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, 2065 years ago today.

For the most part, people only “know” that Caesar was some hyper-ambitious, bloodthirsty tyrant who made himself dictator of the Roman Republic, and that a bunch of people that included someone he thought of as a son killed him. They might then have some sense that, sometime afterward there was some guy named Augustus Caesar and emperors, some of whom were insane in occasionally colorful ways. The story’s more complicated than that, as was Caesar himself, for he was, certainly ambitious and killed a lot of people, but he was much more, too.

So… Once upon a time…

Some basic facts:

His Birth: Caesar was born on July 12, 100 BCE. He was not born by Caesarean section. We know this because his mother, Aurelia, lived until 54 BCE, and C-sections were almost universally fatal to the mother. Indeed, we don’t have any decent evidence of any woman surviving one until the late 16th century, and the mortality rate was 85% as late as 1865. He was born the regular way, I promise.

The name Gaius Julius Caesar, explained. Roman names traditionally had three parts: The Praenomen, which was essentially a first name. The Nomen, or family name. And Cognomen, which was traditionally a nickname, often a mean one, that became the hereditary name for a branch of a family. Hence, “Gaius Julius Caesar” means “Gaius of the Caesar branch of the family of the Julii”. “Gaius” was a popular Roman name that meant “one who rejoices”. The Julii claimed descent from the goddess Venus, through her son, the demigod hero, Aeneas, and his son Julus. Where the name “Caesar” came from is unclear. Various speculations include that there was an ancestor who either: 1. Was born by Caesarean section. 2. Had killed an elephant at some point, an elephant in Moorish was “caesai”. 3. Had grey eyes, which in Latin is “oculis caesiis”. 4. Had thick hair, or “caesaries”. 5. Was actually bald and was called “caesaries” as a joke. Caesar himself seems to have preferred the elephant explanation. (Caesar was bald, which makes me suspect number 5. I like it and 4 if only because it would mean that a bunch of rulers throughout history assumed titles that meant “hairy”, which is funny.)

The Story:

Caesar’s family was old, but not wealthy and not very powerful. He grew up in the Subura, which was a slum. His parents made their way in part by being slumlords. Nonetheless, Caesar received an excellent classical education, including learning Greek. He was incredibly intelligent and precocious. He inhaled knowledge and literature. Indeed, he was talented enough that he learned a rare skill for the time: the ability to read silently. Until the end of his life, people found this ability suspicious. After all, you only read silently if you don’t want others to know what you’re reading, right?

Caesar’s family fortunes changed for the better when his father allied himself to Gaius Marius. Marius was a brilliant general who reformed the legions, defeated a massive barbarian invasion, and later took over Rome while his protégé and rival, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix was fighting Mithradites of Pontus in the East. Caesar’s aunt, Julia, married Marius, while Caesar was himself married to the daughter of Marius’s closest ally, Cinna, to seal the alliance. Possibly seeing him as dangerous, Marius had Caesar made the high priest of Jupiter at age 13, which, owing to the weird restrictions on the office, would have precluded him from any military activity. The situation did not last long. Marius died and his regime was overthrown when Sulla returned from the east, took the city with his army, and had himself officially made dictator to “restore” the system to prevent another Marius (or him). As a part of his program, Sully launched a bloody campaign of reprisals and proscriptions that included stripping Caesar of his priesthood and nullifying his marriage. He also considered just killing the boy. (“I see many a Marius in him,” Sulla said of the boy.) Caesar’s mother’s family, who had supported Sulla, and the Vestal Virgins interceded and got Sulla to relent. Caesar, figuring (rightly) that it would be safer elsewhere, left to join the armies fighting in Asia Minor in 82 BCE.

Caesar turned out to be a very good soldier and accrued a distinguished record before he found out that Sulla had died in 78 BCE and decided to return to rejoin polite society. During his return he stumbled into one of the more interesting stories he accrued over his life: he was kidnapped by pirates, who held him ransom. The pirates found the young man amusing, especially his insistence that they were asking an insultingly low price for him and his jokes that he would have them all crucified. After he was ransomed, Caesar hired a fleet, captured the pirates, and had them crucified. When he said he was going to do something, he did it.

Following a second stint fighting in the east, Caesar finally made it back to Rome to begin climbing the political ladder. In 69 BCE, he was elected Quaestor, which involved auditing other officials. He served his time in office in Hispania for about two years. During his time there, he is said to have run across a statue of Alexander the Great, who had been roughly Caesar’s age then when he died after conquering Persia, pushing Macedonian power to India, and being declared a living god. Caesar supposedly wept at having done so little in his life. He resolved to step it up going forward.

After returning to Rome in 67, he married Sulla’s granddaughter, Pompeia, for her political connections. (This is the one he later divorced, saying that “Caesar’s wife must be above reproach”, because she had been at a women’s only religious ceremony at which the playboy Clodius Pulcher had been caught attending in drag.) In 65, he used those connections, and a whole lot of bribes, to get himself elected Aedile. Aediles did various things in the Republic, but the main thing was that they put on lavish games and entertainments for the people to gain support for higher office. Caesar did a good job with his games, and, with the support they won for him, plus a lot of bribes, he won election as Chief Priest, or Pontifex Maximus, an office that Pope Francis now occupies, strangely enough. (History is weird.) During that year he may or may not have been involved in a bungled attempt by a conservative senator to take over the Republic that January 6 kinda sorta echoed. In any case, he used that position, plus a lot of bribes, to win election as a Praetor, which was essentially a judicial office. The important thing to Caesar was that it was an office that, after the term was up, got one assigned to govern a province the next year. Caesar got himself assigned to govern western Spain, which was good because it promised the possibility of military victories. Caesar was looking forward to it.

There was a problem, though. He was in massive debt because of all the money he had to borrow to pay bribes, and his creditors didn’t want him to slip town. So Caesar worked out a deal with Marcus Licinius Crassus. One of the wealthiest men in history, Crassus had a fortune that is estimated to be approximately equal to $2 trillion today. Crassus paid some of his debts and guaranteed others in return for his political support going forward. Even so, Caesar left for Spain early so he couldn’t be prosecuted by angry creditors.

In Spain, as he had expected, Caesar got to fight, and conquered two native tribes. These victories allowed his men to hail him as “imperator”, or “victorious general”, and made him eligible for a Triumph upon his return. (These were parades for victorious leaders, at which all their loot was shown to the people and they were treated as gods for a day. Everyone wanted one of these.) Unfortunately, he had a conflict because he wanted to be elected one of the two Consuls for the year 59. Consulships were the highest office in the Republic, and basically allowed one to be half a king for a year. But to run for the office, he would have to leave his army and enter Rome as a civilian, which would mean no Triumph. Reluctantly, Caesar prioritized running for higher office. And, after paying bribes at level that scandalized everyone, he won. (You will notice that Roman elections weren’t exactly idealistic things.) He, of course, borrowed the money from Crassus.

Once in office, Caesar got to work. First, he formed an official partnership between him, Crassus, and Gaeus Pompeius (i.e. Pompey the Great. He gave himself the title “the Great”, incidentally.), a brilliant general and former favorite of Sulla’s. As the “First Triumvirate”, the three decided to marshal their money and influence to essentially run the Republic as they pleased. To seal things, Pompey married Caesar’s daughter, Julia. Caesar also proposed a popular law to distribute the vast public lands to the Roman poor. Caesar’s partner Consul, Bibulus, hated the law, and spent the full year of his term pulling a McConnell and trying to block it from being enacted. Caesar got the law through anyway, guaranteeing him support among the common people, and ensuring that the conservatives in the Senate would be out for his head. The latter of those two consequences mean that he could never risk being a private citizen again, lest he be prosecuted and exiled. That would have consequences, too.

When his term ended, Caesar and his allies got him assigned as Proconsular governor of northern Italy, southern Gaul (France), and part of southeastern Europe. As soon as his time in office ended in 58, he took up his governorship and ran before he could be prosecuted. It was now that he really began his climb to fame. Governorships like the one he had were great for a man in debt. There were endless opportunities for graft, extortion, and, if one wished, military conflict that would bring treasure. Caesar wished. He used pretexts to provoke a conflict with the Celtic tribes of central, unconquered Gaul. Caesar formed new legions, and began 8 years of what are now called the Gallic Wars. These wars killed over 1 million, but allowed him to conquer what is now France, and parts of Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. He also made a brief incursion to “conquer” Britain, mainly so he could say he went to that dark, damp island of terrors. And, over the course of it all, he trained a fanatically loyal army of hardened veteran legionaries who would gladly die for him. Oh, and he wrote dispatches back to Rome to keep everyone, especially commoners, appraised of his exploits. (This is the book that begins,”Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts” that you have to translate if you take Latin. I will never stop dreaming “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…” from time to time.)

A proconsul is supposed to only govern for a year, but Caesar had been in Gaul for 8 years. He managed this because Crassus and Pompey back in Rome kept things aligned for to allow him to continue his work. But then, in 53 BCE, Crassus got himself killed. He had grown tired of the piddly power brought by $2 trillion, and decided he wanted military glory, too. So he bought himself an army and marched east to conquer Parthia (Persia). It did not go well. In Syria he beaten in battle, let himself walk into being capture, and then was killed, allegedly by the Parthians pouring molten gold down his throat. Crassus’s death ended the Triumvirate. Moreover, Julia had died in 54, which meant that there was no longer anything tying Caesar and Pompey. Pompey began to turn against Caesar.

In 50 BCE, things came to a head. The Senate, led by Pompey, ordered Caesar to give up his armies, return to Rome, and face prosecution. Caesar didn’t want to do this. So, on January 10, 49 BCE, he took one of his legions, and crossed the Rubicon. The river was the border of Italy, and it was illegal for a general to cross it with his armies. Caesar supposedly rose his horse to the river, paused in thought, and then, always the gambler, said, “alea iacta est”, or “the die is cast”, led his army across. Upon hearing of this, Pompey convinced the Senate to flee with him to Greece to prepare an army while his lieutenants launched an uprising in Spain to distract Caesar. In response, Caesar put Mark Antony in charge of Italy, went to Spain, and proceeded to put down the uprising in less than a month. He then went in pursuit of Pompey. On July 10, of 48 BCE, his badly outnumbered veteran legions decisively smashed Pompey’s Senatorial army at Pharsalus in northern Greece.

Pompey fled to Egypt to seek help from the Pharoah. Caesar went back to Rome, got himself elected Consul again, and pursued Pompey. Unfortunately for Pompey, the Pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, had Pompey assassinated to curry favor with Caesar, to whom he offered the dead man’s head. Caesar was not happy with this, as he had wanted to pardon Pompey. (Ptolemy was the product of 300 years of inbreeding so severe that it would have made a dog breeder blush, so he was doing his best.) Caesar sided with Ptolemy’s sister (and wife), Cleopatra VII (yes, that one), in a civil war to overthrow him. After defeating Ptolemy at the Battle of the Nile in 47 BCE and installing Cleopatra as Pharaoh, Caesar took a vacation. He spent a long while cruising the Nile and enjoying an affair with Cleopatra, an affair he would continue and that would bring him a son, Caesarion.

Caesar then went on a whirlwind military campaign in the Levant and Anatolia to put down a rebellion by Pontus, and then on to Africa, where he destroyed the last of Pompey’s rebellious supporters in the Senate. He then went to Spain, where he defeated another set of Pompey’s partisans. And then it was finally time to go home.

Caesar returned to Rome in 45, where he had been elected Consul again, as well as dictator for a term of 10 years. He was in a surprisingly strong position when he returned, as he pardoned his enemies who had not taken up arms against him, and made it clear he did not wish to rule by force. He celebrated a series of Triumphs, one of which was for his victories against fellow Romans, which didn’t go over well. The others did, though, at least with the common people. Not so much the Senators, many of whom were getting bitterly resentful. Caesar’s endless acquisition of powers and government reforms rankled them further. Granted, he did a lot of good during this time. He reformed the calendar, creating the Julian Calendar that the Orthodox Church still uses, reformed the Senate, launched land reforms, reformed the welfare system, regulated luxuries, and passed an anti-corruption law that remained in force for centuries. He also reformed the constitution, created more offices of state, and gave himself the power to name magistrates. During this time, the Senate renamed Caesar’s birth month of Quintillis “Julius” in his honor, which is where we get “July”. He had plans, too, to expand citizenship and make the empire more unified. And, as mentioned earlier, he planned to gather a massive army to march east, conquer Persia out to India, and then come back by marching north of the Black Sea and bringing all of Eastern Europe under Roman control. To solidify his position further, he even floated trial balloons of being declared king. That was a step too far, as the Romans hated kings, and had since they had gotten rid of theirs five centuries earlier. That set a cabal of 60 senators to plotting…

On the Ides of March, 44 BCE, Caesar came to a session of the Senate that was meeting in the Theater of Pompey despite ill omens and warnings of bad things coming. At the session, the cabal pounced. A senator named Cimber grabbed him by his shoulder while another, Casca, stabbed at his neck. The rest joined in, including Marcus Brutus, whom Caesar loved as a son, and had named his alternate heir. Caesar tried to run, but tripped over his toga, and, once he was down, he was stabbed a total of 23 times. He died in a pool of blood beneath a statue of Pompey himself. An autopsy, the first known in Western history, established that only one of the wounds was mortal. He could have lived, had he not received that one. The assassins, calling themselves the Liberators, ran through the city, cheering and calling out that they had freed the Republic. The populace did not rejoice. They were angry. Very, very angry, for they had loved Caesar as their protector and champion. Meaning that they just needed someone to call them to violence.

At Caesar’s funeral, Mark Antony made that call. He whipped the crowd into a murderous frenzy. They built a massive pyre for Caesar’s body to burn upon, started a large fire that soon burned out of control. Then they set their sights on the “Liberators”, laying siege to their homes.

A new round of civil wars began. Antony allied himself with Caesar’s nephew, heir, and adopted son, a sickly boy of 18 named Octavian, and a flunky named Lepidus. As the Second Triumvirate, they pursued the Liberators until they were crushed in a massive, 200,000 person battle at Philippi in Macedonia in 42 BCE. Antony then looked to consolidate power, for surely Octavian would be no problem to control.

Octavian was a problem to control. The boy was as brilliant as his uncle, but far, far more ruthless and cold blooded. Moreover, as Caesar had been declared a god in 42, he could style himself “Son of the God”, which was good PR. While Antony took up with Cleopatra, Octavian consolidated his power in Rome and began a concerted propaganda campaign against his rival. Things finally broke in 33, when Octavian engineered Senatorial revocation of Antony’s titles and powers. The two were soon at war. In 31, Octavian’s forces destroyed Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet at Actium, forcing them to fall back to Egypt. Octavian’s forces routed Antony’s at Alexandria, and Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.

Octavian now ruled supreme. He was determined not to repeat his uncle’s mistakes. He did not forgive his enemies. Forgiven enemies can kill you. So he killed them first and took all their stuff. He killed Caesarion and retained Egypt as his personal property. He effectively consolidated all power in himself and made the armies swear loyalty to him and him alone. He held every major office simultaneously. In 27, he made a show of returning power to the Senate, which gave it back to him, along with a new title, “Augustus”, or “Revered One”. The month of Sextillis was renamed “Augustus” in his honor, too, to accompany that of “Julius”. The Republic as it was, was no more. The Republic would officially still exist, of course. Indeed, Anthony Kaldellis makes a good case that Rome remained a Republic to the end of the Byzantine era, but it wasn’t what it was. It was now a monarchical republic. The Roman Empire was born. August would be followed by his heir and adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero, and then many more men and even three women*, until the last, Constantine XI, died defending the walls of Constantinople on May 29, 1453 CE.

That is the story. On March 15, 44 BCE, a great, complicated man was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in spirit or consequence. His assassins killed him with their knives, but his legacy lived on. Indeed, it lives on still, for the world in which we live today was born from it. So take some time to remember it all!

May this find you all safe, well, and neither holding knives or bearing knife wounds.

All the best,
Zack

*Ready? Here we go:

Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Pertinax, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta, Macrinus, Diadumenian, Elagabalus, Alexander Severus, Maximinus Thrax, Gordian I, Gordian II, Pupienus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Philip the Arab, Decius, Hostilian, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, Quintillus, Aurelian, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carus, Carinus, Numerian, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, Constantius I Chlorus, Valerius Severus, Constantine I, Maxentius, Licinius, Valerius Valens, Maximianus II, Constantine II, Constantius II, Constans I, Julian the Philosopher, Jovian, Valentinian I, Valens, Gratian, Valentinian II, Theodosius I, Honorius, Arcadius, Theodosius II, Constantius III, Valentinian III, Petronius Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Libius Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos, Romulus Augustulus, Marcian, Leo I, Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus, Anastasius I, Justin I, Justinian I, Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurice, Phocas, Heraclius, Constantine III, Heraklonas, Constans II, Constantine IV, Justinian II, Leontios, Tiberius III, Justinian II (again), Philippikos, Anastasius II, Theodosius III, Leo III, Constantine V, Artabasdos, Leo IV, Constantine VI, Irene, Nikephoros I, Staurakios, Michael I, Leo V, Michael II, Theophilos, Michael III, Basil I, Leo VI, Alexander, Constantine VII, Romanos I, Romanos II, Nikephoros II Phokas, John I Tzimiskes, Basil II, Constantine VIII, Zoe, Romanos III, Michael IV, Michael V, Theodora, Constantine IX, Michael VI, Isaac I, Constantine X, Michael VII, Romanus IV, Nikephoros III, Alexios I, John II, Manuel I, Alexios II, Andronikos I, Isaac II, Alexios III, Isaac II, Alexios IV, Alexios V, Theodore I, John III, Theodore II, John IV, Michael VIII, Andronikos II, Michael IX, Andronikos III, John V, John VI, Andronkos IV, John V (again), John VII, John V (again), Manuel II, John VIII, and Constantine XI the Immortal

2020
Some of you might be getting this for the first time. If so you, might be wondering, “did he really send out a mass email for the Ides of March?” The answer to that question is: “Yes. He did. He does it each year.” If you are getting it at all, though, you have met me at some point and know me to some degree, so you probably shouldn’t be surprised.

I won’t assume all of you are on Earth. One never knows. The resident Terrans receiving this, however, are likely noticing the pandemic sweeping the world. We are living through history. Granted, that is always the case, because history is not a thing that pauses. However, this is more clearly history than is typical. So take a moment to step away from history in the making to think again of the history upon which the current moment is built…

Friends, Romans, countrymen, Terrans, and sentient beings of all stripes, lend me your ends for the yearly remembering. I come not to bury, but to describe and praise…

Today is the 15th of March. The name comes from the Romans, who called this month “Martius”, after Mars, god of war, for this was the point at which the season of new military campaigns began. The number of the day would have been meaningless to the Romans, however. They didn’t number their days as we do. They instead gave the days names that referenced their position within the month. The “Kalends” was the first day of the month, and the fifth was the “Nones”. The second was then called the “ante diem quartum Nonas”, or “the fourth day before the Nones.” It was a bit cumbersome, but the Romans liked to be precise and descriptive in pretty much everything. We, of course, no longer use this system, and few know the Roman words for the days of the month. Save for one, that is. The name for the middle of the month a great many of those living the Western world know rather well, not least because some guy named Shakespeare mentioned it prominently in a play once upon a time. The middle of the month is the “Ides”. This is the Ides of March. It should ring a bell.

The Ides of March exists in our lexicon because of what happened 2064 years ago today, in the year 44 BCE by our calendar. On that day, Gaius Julius Caesar was violently murdered by a conspiracy of 60 senators. The conspirators called themselves the “Liberators”, and argued that they acted to liberate the Roman Republic from a tyrant who aimed to become king. True, he likely did want to be king, and, yes, he could be considered a tyrant, but the story is rather more complicated than all that.

We should back up a bit. At the time he was assassinated, Caesar held two major positions in the government. He was one of the two consuls, typically the highest magistrate of the Republic, as well as being in the extraordinary and previously unheard-of office of “Dictator in Perpetuity”. This is where the story usually starts, but how did he get to be in those positions?

Caesar had previously served as Consul in 59 BCE. During his year in office, he had, among other things, passed a law that granted public land to military veterans. This earned him the bitter hatred of the conservatives filling the Senate of the time, who saw all public land as theirs by right. (They were also disturbed by his ability to read silently, which was seen as something only an untrustworthy person could do.) They resolved to prosecute Caesar for treason and have him exiled for that affront. With the help of his wealthy backers, who included the great general, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great), and Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in history, Caesar escaped prosecution by getting named proconsular governor of northern Italy, as officials were immune from prosecution. (Incidentally, Pompey named himself “the Great”. Crassus’s estimated net in today’s terms is hard to assess, but his income exceeded that of the government, and estimates have ranged from ~$168 billion to ~$2 trillion. Let’s just say that he was well off.) Caesar went off to his quiet corner of the Republic in 58 BCE, and his enemies bided their time for his year in the office to end. But it didn’t end. Through a series of events that Caesar engineered, his time in office did not stay quiet and did not stay a year. As it happened, he took his opportunity to conquer part or all of what is now France, Belgium, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and Great Britain (kinda). It was all a defense conquest, of course. We know a great deal about it because Caesar wrote the history of his deeds. (If you have taken Latin, you had to translate part of it, and likely can’t get the opening line, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…” out of your head.) His time in office was extended again and again by the work of Pompey and Crassus back in Rome.

But all things end. First, Julia, Caesar’s daughter, who had been married to Pompey to seal their alliance, died in 54 BCE. Then Crassus got himself killed in Syria in 53 BCE when he decided to add military glory to his wealth and invaded the Parthian Empire. (He wasn’t a good soldier. He got himself captured, and was executed by the Parthians by pouring molten gold down his throat. And, yes, that is where George R.R. Martin got the idea for how he killed off Viserys in Game of Thrones.) Without Julia and Crassus binding him, Pompey came increasingly under the sway of the conservatives and turned against Caesar. In 50, Pompey led the Senate in recalling Caesar to give up his office and face prosecution.

Caesar had other plans. He came with his army on January 10, 49 BCE to the Rubicon, a river that marked the boundary of his province, and past which it was illegal for him to take his soldiers. According to history, he rode to the edge of the water, paused a moment, and declared “iacta alea est”, “the die is cast” as he decided on the greatest gamble of his life. He ordered one of his legions, Legio XIII Gemina, to follow him south to the city. It was breaking the law, but he had an army, and what are laws, anyway, to those who have armies? Facing exile or perhaps even execution, Caesar felt he had no choice. So began what came to be called “Caesar’s Civil War”.

When the Senate heard of what Caesar had done, they panicked. They gave themselves over to Pompey to defend them. Pompey evaluated the situation, and decided that it was untenable to remain in Rome. He convinced the Senate to flee with him to gather an army from the provinces. It looked at first as though this would work, and Pompey soon had himself ~45,000 infantry and cavalry. He met Caesar, who had but ~23,000 men, at Pharsalus. But Caesar’s men were hardened veterans from his conquests, and Pompey’s raw recruits. Caesar defeated Pompey decisively, and Pompey fled again, this time to Egypt to seek aid from Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII. Caesar pursued, hoping to convince his former son-in-law to give up in exchange for a pardon.

Unfortunately for Pompey, Ptolemy saw how the wind was blowing and had him beheaded to curry Caesar’s favor. Caesar wept upon finding out the news. In vengeance, he overthrew Ptolemy and installed his sister, Cleopatra VII as Pharaoh. Caesar stayed a while in Egypt, sorting things out, and taking time for a romantic cruise with Cleopatra on the Nile, during which time he sired a son, Caesarion.

After leaving Egypt, Caesar mopped up what resistance lingered, campaigning in northern Africa, Spain, and what is now Turkey. During it all, he wrote the history of the civil wars to ensure that history got the correct story. He also instituted a reform of the calendar he had designed with Greek mathematicians and astronomers during his time with Cleopatra in Alexandria. This was the origin of the Julian calendar that was used in the west until it was replaced in 1582 by the Gregorian calendar that we still use. (The Orthodox Church, of course, sticks to the Julian Calendar.) Eventually, Caesar returned in victory to Rome in 45 BCE, there to celebrate an unprecedent four consecutive triumphs, those intoxicating military parades in which a conquering general was treated to a day of being revered as a god.

It was at this point that, now that he was fully in charge, that Caesar had himself declared Dictator for Life. To help foster peace and bolster his position, he pardoned almost everyone in the Senate who had taken Pompey's side. He did well with his position. He passed many reforms, including what was probably the most effective law against corruption in history, one that remained in effect for centuries. He made himself formally above the consuls, gave himself the powers of the Tribune of the Plebs, which made his person sacrosanct, expanded the Senate to better reflect the make up of the Republic, and reformed the morals of the Republic. In gratitude for his efforts, the month of his birth, Quintilis, was renamed “July”. (This is why we don’t have “Quintember”.)

But Caesar was a restless man. He hated being in one place for too long and yearned to again march forth with his armies. He began to plan the greatest military campaign in history. He would conquer the East. Caesar had long looked up to Alexander the Great, who conquered Persia, Afghanistan, and part of India before he died in Babylon at 32. Caesar read of Alexander’s exploits, and once in his 30s wept as he said to his friends, "Do you think I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?" Caesar now would outdo Alexander. He planned to assemble a vast army of over 100,000 and march out to conquer and incorporate into the Republic, Persia, Afghanistan, the Caucuses, Ukraine, Poland, and the whole of Germany before coming back to Rome. But it was not to be...

If Caesar was going to accomplish that plan, he needed to firm up his position. He began to float the idea of being crowned king. But Rome hated kings, having thrown off theirs almost 500 years before after the last one had raped a noble’s wife. The very notion of a king was loathsome. It was just a trial balloon for a move to stabilize things and prevent renewed civil war, but it was enough to spur some to action. Senators, many of whom had been pardoned by Caesar, and hated him for it, began to conspire. Led by Gaius Cassius Longinus, and including Caesar’s dear friend and pseudo-son, Marcus Junius Brutus the Young, the cabal of 60 senators decided to stop Caesar before he left to become unstoppable.

On a pretext, they led him to a session of the Senate in the Theater of Pompey. At the appointed time, a conspirator grabbed Caesar by the shoulder. Caesar glared at the man and said, "why this is violence!". At that point, the cabal closed in, stabbing wildly, leaving Caesar to die in a pool of blood beneath a statue of Pompey. Afterward, the first autopsy known to history found that Caesar had sustained 23 knife wounds, only one of which was fatal. (He likely died of blood loss from them all together. 23 deep holes are lot for a single body to take.)

Thus did die a great man and leader. Of an ancient family said to descend from Venus, he showed greatness early one. At 16 he was named high priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximum. As a young 25-year old man, he had been kidnapped by pirates, who held him hostage. They came to see him as a sort of mascot, and laughed when he told them that he was worth more than they were asking for his return. They laughed harder when he told them he would return to kill them all when he was released. After he was released, he assembled a task force, pursued the pirates, and captured and executed them. From that exploit, he went on to be senator, aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul, champion of the people, triumvir, reformer of laws, one of the greatest military leaders in history, four times awarded a triumph, conqueror of Gaul, Britain, and Pontus, Supreme Pontiff, and first and only Dictator for Life of the Roman Republic. He was also an engineer, writer, poet, grammarian, essayist, historian, and formulator of the Julian calendar. He was impressive.

The wealthy and corrupt assassins left the theater and Caesar's body, holding their knives up high and declaring themselves the Liberators who set the Republic free once more. But their cheer soon left them, as they were greeted not with cheers, but silence and dread. The people of Rome locked themselves in their homes, realizing what was to come. Caesar's supporters in short order set up a statue of Caesar in the Forum that displayed all the 23 knife wounds. At Caesar's funeral, his lieutenant, Marcus Antonius, whipped the crowd into a frenzy of bloodlust and vengeance by reading to them of the vast sums of money that Caesar had bequeathed to them. Enraged, the common people set a vast funeral pyre that spread to burn many buildings. The "Liberators", seeing the writing in the flames, fled the city.

The Liberators' actions had sounded the Republic's death knell. Marcus Antonius and Caesar's great nephew and adopted son, Octavian, soon launched a new civil war to avenge the divine Julius. The war lasted more than year, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Romans, and ended with the total defeat of the Liberators. The final battle was near the Greek city of Philippi. There some 410,000 soldiers fought, making it one of the largest battles of the the world saw before the 20th century. In the aftermath, Octavian and Antony had Caesar declared a god.

A large empire can be too small for two ambitious men, and Antonius and Octavian later clashed in yet another civil war. Cleverer and far more sober, Octavian, now officially named "Imperator Caesar Divi Filius" (Triumphant Caesar, Son of the God), triumphed over his older, more experienced former colleague. Octavian beat the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, leaving them to flee to Egypt. Octavian pursued them, and they committed suicide. In the aftermath, Octavian laid claim to all of Egypt, bringing it into the Republic as his personal property. (That, incidentally, made Octavian the actual wealthiest person in history, which a net worth of over ~$14 trillion.) He declared the Republic “restored”. And it was, but he made it a far different thing. Neater. Tidier. More stable. For one thing, he held every major office of state simultaneously, unifying all civil power in himself. At the same time, he personally commanded every Roman soldier, who each took an oath to him and him alone. But he was modest in his supreme power, taking only the humble title of “Princeps”, or First Citizen. (This is where the word “prince” comes from, so maybe not so modest.) In gratitude, the Senate, of what was left of it, granted him a new, simpler name: Augustus. They also renamed the month of Sextilis in his honor, giving us our “August”. (Which is why we don’t have “Sextember”, though perhaps it is for the best. Think of the giggles if we did.)

Augustus learned much from his adopted father. Unlike Julius, who had forgiven his enemies and so died from their blades, Augustus had everyone who crossed him killed. He thus died an old man in 14 CE. After his death, he was declared a god, the “Divine Augustus”, and was worshiped into the 4th century before Christians destroyed his temples. He was succeeded by his adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero. He, in turn, was then followed by several dozen more men and even three women*. The line ended only in 1453, when Constantine XI fell in battle as the Turks took Constantinople on May 29, 1453 CE. History is wrought from particulars built one atop the other. On March 15, 44 BCE, a great, complicated man was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in spirit or consequence. His assassins killed him with their knives, but his legacy lived on. Indeed, it lives on still, for the world in which we live today was born from it. So take some time to remember it all!

May this find you all well, and neither holding knives or bearing knife wounds,
Zack

*Ready? Here we go:
Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Pertinax, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta, Macrinus, Diadumenian, Elagabalus, Alexander Severus, Maximinus Thrax, Gordian I, Gordian II, Pupienus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Philip the Arab, Decius, Hostilian, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, Quintillus, Aurelian, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carus, Carinus, Numerian, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, Constantius I Chlorus, Valerius Severus, Constantine I, Maxentius, Licinius, Valerius Valens, Maximianus II, Constantine II, Constantius II, Constans I, Julian the Philosopher, Jovian, Valentinian I, Valens, Gratian, Valentinian II, Theodosius I, Honorius, Arcadius, Theodosius II, Constantius III, Valentinian III, Petronius Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Libius Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos, Romulus Augustulus, Marcian, Leo I, Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus, Anastasius I, Justin I, Justinian I, Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurice, Phocas, Heraclius, Constantine III, Heraklonas, Constans II, Constantine IV, Justinian II, Leontios, Tiberius III, Justinian II (again), Philippikos, Anastasius II, Theodosius III, Leo III, Constantine V, Artabasdos, Leo IV, Constantine VI, Irene, Nikephoros I, Staurakios, Michael I, Leo V, Michael II, Theophilos, Michael III, Basil I, Leo VI, Alexander, Constantine VII, Romanos I, Romanos II, Nikephoros II Phokas, John I Tzimiskes, Basil II, Constantine VIII, Zoe, Romanos III, Michael IV, Michael V, Theodora, Constantine IX, Michael VI, Isaac I, Constantine X, Michael VII, Romanus IV, Nikephoros III, Alexios I, John II, Manuel I, Alexios II, Andronikos I, Isaac II, Alexios III, Isaac II, Alexios IV, Alexios V, Theodore I, John III, Theodore II, John IV, Michael VIII, Andronikos II, Michael IX, Andronikos III, John V, John VI, Andronkos IV, John V (again), John VII, John V (again), Manuel II, John VIII, and Constantine XI the Immortal.

2019
For those who are getting this for the first time, yes, I do send an annual Ides of March email. Really, this shouldn't surprise you.

It's that time again! Friends, Romans, countrymen, peoples of all nations lend me your ears for the annual eulogy...

Today is the 15th of March, the middle of the month, originally called Martius, named by the Romans after the god, Mars, because it was the beginning of the new season of warfare. The Romans did not number the days of the month as we do, but instead gave them names referring to their place in the month. The first day of the month was the "Kalends" and the fifth the "Nones", so the second was called "ante diem quartum Nonas", or "the fourth day before the Nones". The Romans were nothing if not precise and rigorously descriptive. We rarely remember this system of dating, though most in the Western world know the name for the middle of the month quite well, for it was named the "Ides". We know this because of the Ides of March.

It was 2063 years ago today, that the most famous and consequential assassination in human history took place. On that day Gaius Julius Caesar was struck down by a cabal 60 senators. Why? The assassins called themselves liberators, declaring that they had freed the Republic from the blight of a man who wished to be king. Yes, he probably did seek to be a king, but the story is more complicated...

Caesar had recently won came to be called "The Great Roman Civil War" or "Caesar's Civil War", which had started on January 10, 49 BCE, when he, in violation of Roman law, crossed both the actual and proverbial Rubicon. with part of the army with which he had just conquered Gaul, which included all or parts of the modern nations of France, Belgium, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany. Why? Caesar's time as a proconsul was coming to an end, and under Roman law, a man who left office could again be prosecuted, while an officeholder could not. The Roman Senate, which was made up of conservatives who loathed Caesar for many, many, many reasons, had illegally declared him an enemy of the people and made clear that they intended to try him for treason and horrendous crimes like passing a law to give land to military veterans while he had been Consul in 59 BCE. (The wealthy conservatives saw the public lands as rightfully theirs.) Facing execution, or worse, exile, Caesar felt he had no choice. He realized he had an army, and what, really, is a law, in any case? According to history, he rode his horse into the Rubicon, and paused briefly before declaring "iacta alea est", or "the die is cast", and motioning for the single legion with which he was traveling, Legio XIII Gemina, to follow him south.

The Senate, in terror at what was happening, put themselves in the hands of the great general, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. (i.e. Pompey "the Great" - a title he had given himself.). Pompey, until recently Caesar's ally and son in law, declared that the Senate should flee Rome with him to gather an army from the provinces. This plan did not work out as Pompey expected, and he was decisively defeated by Caesar in 48 at Pharsalus, his recruits no match for Caesar's hardened veterans. Pompey fled to Egypt to seek aid, where he was killed by the Pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, to curry Caesar's favor. Caesar followed, but was angry at the murder. He had looked forward to pardoning his old rival. Indeed, Caesar is recorded to have cried at Pompey's death. Partly out of vengeance he deposed Ptolemy in favor of his sister, Cleopatra VII. After sorting out Egypt (and taking a pleasure cruise down the Nile with Cleopatra), Caesar mopped up lingering resistance over the next couple of years, fighting campaigns in northern Africa, Spain, and Anatolia (Turkey), before coming home to Rome to declare victory in 45. It is notable that while he was doing this he also took time to write a history of the civil war and reform the calendar. This was the origin of the Julian calendar that was used in the West until the Gregorian calendar replaced it in 1582. (And which the Orthodox Church still uses.)

Now fully and unquestionably in charge, Caesar had himself declared Dictator for Life. To help foster peace and bolster his position, he pardoned almost everyone in the Senate who had taken Pompey's side. But Caesar was a restless man who longed again for action and glory. He immediately began to plan to undertake a conquest of the east. This was a longtime dream of his. In his early 30s Caesar read of Alexander's epic conquest of all the lands from Greece to the Indus valley before his death at age 32, and wept, telling his friends, "Do you think I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?" Now in a position to potentially outdo Alexander, Caesar planned to assemble a vast army of over 100,000 and march out with it to conquer Persia, Afghanistan, the Caucuses, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany, incorporating them into the empire. But it was not to be...

Led by Gaius Cassius Longinus, the senatorial cabal, many of whom Caesar had pardoned, as well as Caesar's dear friend, Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, decided for various reasons to stop Caesar before he left. They lured him to a session of the Senate in the Theater of Pompey. At one point, a conspirator grabbed him by the shoulder. Caesar glared at the man and said, "why this is violence!". At that point, the cabal closed in, stabbing wildly, leaving him to die in a pool of blood. Ironically, Caesear died right beneath a statue of Pompey. The first known autopsy in history was performed on the body. Caesar had sustained 23 knife wounds, only one of which was fatal. Of course, he likely died of blood loss from them all together. (23 deep holes are lot for a single body.)

Thus did die a great man and leader, defeater of pirates when only a boy, high priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, senator, aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul, champion of the people, triumvir, reformer of the land laws, instituter of laws against corruption that stood for a millenium, victorious general, one of the greatest military leaders in history, four times awarded a triumph, conqueror of Gaul, Britain, and Pontus, engineer, poet, grammarian, essayist, historian, supreme pontiff, first and only dictator for life of the Roman Republic, formulator of the Julian calendar, and namesake of the month of Julius, now called "July".

The wealthy and corrupt assassins left the theater and Caesar's body, holding their knives up high and declaring the Republic free once more, calling themselves the "Liberators". They were greeted not with cheers, but silence and dread as the people locked themselves in their homes, realizing what was to come. Caesar's supporters in short order set up a statue of Caesar in the Forum that displayed all the 23 knife wounds. At Caesar's funeral, his lieutenant, Marcus Antonius, whipped the crowd into a frenzy of bloodlust and vengeance for the the assassins, reading to them of the vast sums of money that Caesar had bequeathed to them. Enraged, the common people set a vast funeral pyre that spread to burn many buildings. The "Liberators", seeing the writing in the flames, fled the city.

The Liberators' actions had sounded the Republic's death knell. Marcus Antonius and Caesar's great nephew and adopted son, Octavian, soon launched a new civil war to avenge the divine Julius. The war lasted more than year, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Romans, and ended with the total defeat of the Liberators. The final battle was near the Greek city of Philippi, where some 410,000 fought, making it one of the largest battles of the the world saw before the 20th century. Caesar was declared a god in the aftermath.

A large empire can be too small for two ambitious men, and Antonius and Octavian later clashed in yet another civil war. Octavian, now officially named "Imperator Caesar Divi Filius", or "Triumphant Caesar, Son of the God", triumphed over his older, more experienced former colleague, and declared a "restoration" of the Republic. Granted, the Republic was different, with him holding all major offices of state simultaneously, thus wielding virtually all civil power. And, of course, he also commanded all Roman soldiers under arms, each of whom had taken oaths of loyalty to him alone. But he was modest, and took only the humble title of "Princeps", or First Citizen. (Yes, this is where "prince" comes from.) In gratitude, the Senate, what was left of it, granted him the new name of "Augustus" and renamed the month of Sextilis "Augustus" in his honor. (Hence our August). Having learned the lesson from his adopted father pardoning opponents did not eliminate threats, Augustus methodically killed everyone who might challenge him, and so ruled supreme for more than 4 decades. After his death in 14 CE, he, like his uncle before him, was declared a god, thereafter called "The Divine Augustus". He was succeeded by his adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero. Tiberius was then followed by several dozen more men (and 3 women)* until Constantine XI fell in the Turkish conquest of Constantinople on May 29, 1453 CE.

History is wrought from particulars built one atop the other. On March 15, 44 BCE, a great, complicated man was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in spirit or consequence. His assassins killed him with their knives, but his legacy lived on, and from it all was in time born the world in which we live.

Take a moment to remember.

May this find you all well, and neither holding knives or bearing knife wounds,
Zack

*Ready? Here we go:
Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Pertinax, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Geta, Macrinus, Diadumenian, Elagabalus, Alexander Severus, Maximinus Thrax, Gordian I, Gordian II, Pupienus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Philip the Arab, Decius, Hostilian, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, Quintillus, Aurelian, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carus, Carinus, Numerian, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, Constantius I Chlorus, Valerius Severus, Constantine I, Maxentius, Licinius, Valerius Valens, Maximianus II, Constantine II, Constantius II, Constans I, Julian the Philosopher, Jovian, Valentinian I, Valens, Gratian, Valentinian II, Theodosius I, Honorius, Arcadius, Theodosius II, Constantius III, Valentinian III, Petronius Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Libius Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos, Romulus Augustulus, Marcian, Leo I, Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus, Anastasius I, Justin I, Justinian I, Justin II, Tiberius II, Maurice, Phocas, Heraclius, Constantine III, Heraklonas, Constans II, Constantine IV, Justinian II, Leontios, Tiberius III, Justinian II (again), Philippikos, Anastasius II, Theodosius III, Leo III, Constantine V, Artabasdos, Leo IV, Constantine VI, Irene, Nikephoros I, Staurakios, Michael I, Leo V, Michael II, Theophilos, Michael III, Basil I, Leo VI, Alexander, Constantine VII, Romanos I, Romanos II, Nikephoros II Phokas, John I Tzimiskes, Basil II, Constantine VIII, Zoe, Romanos III, Michael IV, Michael V, Theodora, Constantine IX, Michael VI, Isaac I, Constantine X, Michael VII, Romanus IV, Nikephoros III, Alexios I, John II, Manuel I, Alexios II, Andronikos I, Isaac II, Alexios III, Isaac II, Alexios IV, Alexios V, Theodore I, John III, Theodore II, John IV, Michael VIII, Andronikos II, Michael IX, Andronikos III, John V, John VI, Andronkos IV, John V (again), John VII, John V (again), Manuel II, John VIII, and Constantine XI the Immortal.

2018
It's that time again! Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears for the annual eulogy...

In the Roman calendar, days of the month were not numbered, but given adjectival names. The first day of the month, for instance, was the "Kalends", and the second was the "ante diem quartum Nonas", meaning "the fourth day before the Nones", the Nones being the fifth day of the month. The most famous day of the Roman month in the modern world, is, of course, the Ides, which simply means "the middle of the month". We know the Ides while we have forgotten others because, of course, of the Ides of March.

Today is the Ides of March.

2062 years ago today, Gaius Julius Caesar, was assassinated by a cabal 60 senators. He had only recently wrapped up what has come to be called "The Great Roman Civil War" or "Caesar's Civil War". The war had opened in 49 BCE when he, in violation of Roman law, crossed both the actual and proverbial Rubicon with part of the army with which he had just finished conquered Gaul. (Gaul was made up of all of modern France, and all or parts of Belgium, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany.) He took this drastic action because the Roman Senate, made up of conservatives who loathed him for many reasons, had illegally declared him an enemy of the people, and, his term of office as a proconsul coming to and end, had made clear their intention to try him for treason and other crimes for, among other things, passing a bill given land to military veterans while he had been Consul in 59. (The wealthy conservatives saw the public lands as rightfully theirs.) Facing likely exile or execution, Caesar felt he had no choice in his actions, and, in any case, what is a law, really? The Senate, led by the great general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (i.e. Pompey, known as "the Great" at his own suggestion), until recently Caesar's ally and son in law, fled Rome in response to gather an army from the provinces. Pompey was decisively defeated by Caesar in 48 at Pharsalus, and fled to Egypt, where he was killed by the Pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, to curry Caesar's favor. (Caesar's favor was not curried. He had looked forward to pardoning his old rival. He is recorded to have shed tears at Pompey's death, and, partially out of vengeance, deposed Ptolemy in favor of his sister, Cleopatra. After sorting out Egypt (and taking a pleasure cruise down the Nile with Cleopatra), Caesar mopped up lingering resistance over the next couple of years, fighting campaigns in northern Africa, Spain, and Anatolia (Turkey), before coming home to Rome to declare victory in 45. Amidst it all, he had found time to write a history of the civil war and reform the calendar to create the Julian calendar that was used in the West until the Gregorian calendar replaced it in 1582.

Back in Rome, Caesar was declared Dictator in Perpetuity of the Roman Republic, and, to foster peace, pardoned most everyone in the Senate who had taken Pompey's side. Restless, he immediately began to plan for a grand campaign to conquer the east. Alexander the Great had conquered the lands between Greece and the Indus valley. Caesar, who upon reading a life of Alexander in his early 30s wept, saying to his friends, "Do you think I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?" (It should be noted that Alexander died at 32. Not many are so memorable so quickly.) Caesar planned to do Alexander several better. He planned to assemble a vast army of over 100,000, and use it to conquer Persia, Afghanistan, the Caucuses, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany, and incorporate them into the empire. Sadly, it was not to be...

Led by Gaius Cassius Longinus, the senatorial cabal, which included many of those whom Caesar had pardoned, as well as Caesar's dear friend, Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger decided for various reasons to stop Caesar before he left. They lured him to meet the Senate in the Theater of Pompey, where they wildly stabbed at him, leaving him to die in a pool of blood, ironically right beneath a statue of Pompey. The first known autopsy in history was performed on the body, which was found to have sustained 23 knife wounds. Only one wound was ruled fatal, though he likely died of blood loss from them all together. (23 holes are lot for a body to take.)

Thus did die a great man and leader, defeater of pirates when only a boy, high priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, senator, aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul, champion of the people, triumvir, reformer of the land laws, institutor of laws against corruption that stood for a millenium, victorious general, one of the greatest military leaders in history, four times awarded a triumph, conqueror of Gaul, Britain, and Pontus, engineer, poet, grammarian, essayist, historian, supreme pontiff, first and only dictator for life of the Roman Republic, formulator of the Julian calendar, and later declared a god and his birth month of Quintilis renamed "Julius" (July) in his honor.

The wealthy and corrupt assassins, calling themselves now the "Liberators", left the theater and Caesar's body, holding their knives up high and declaring the Republic free once more. They were greeted not with cheers, but silence and dread as the populous locked themselves in their homes. Following the autopsy, a statue of Caesar was set up in the Forum, displaying for all the 23 wounds he had been given. Enraged, the common people set a vast bonfire that burned many buildings. At Caesar's funeral, his lieutenant, Marcus Antonius, whipped the crowd into a frenzy of bloodlust and vengeance for the the assassins. The Liberators fled the city.

Rather than saving the Republic, the Liberators' actions had sounded its death knell. Marcus Antonius and Caesar's great nephew and adopted son, Octavian, soon launched a new civil war to avenge the fallen Julius. The war lasted more than year, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Romans, and ended with the total defeat of the Liberators. The final battle was near the Greek city of Philippi, where some 410,000 fought, making it one of the largest battles of the pre-modern world. Caesar was declared a god in the aftermath.

Antonius and Octavian later clashed in yet another civil war. Octavian triumphed over his older, more experienced former colleague, and declared a "restoration" of the Republic. Granted, the Republic was different, with him holding all major offices of state simultaneously, and thus wielding virtually all civil power. Of course, he also commanded all Roman soldiers under arms, all of whom took oaths of loyalty to him alone. But he was modest, and took only the title of First Citizen ("Princeps"). In gratitude, the Senate granted him the new name of "Augustus" and renamed the month of Sextilis in his honor (hence our August). Partly due to having learned the lesson from his adopted father that killing your opponents is safer than pardoning them, he ruled supreme for more than 4 decades. After his death in 14 CE, he, like his uncle before him, was declared a god. He was succeeded by his adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero, and then by several dozen more men (and 3 women) until Constantine XI fell in the Turkish conquest of Constantinople on May 29, 1453 CE.

History is wrought from particulars built one atop the other. On March 15, 44 BCE, a great, albeit complicated man was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in effect. With their knives, his assassins inflicted wounds from which flowed not only the man's lifeblood, but also the world in which we live.

Take a moment to remember.

May this find you all well, and bearing neither knives nor knife wounds,
Zack

2017
Today, March 15, is the Ides of March.

2061 years ago today, Gaius Julius Caesar, Dictator in Perpetuity of the Roman Republic, was assassinated by a cabal 60 senators in the Theater of Pompey. Led by Gaius Cassius Longinus, the treacherous group included Caesar's dear friend, Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, as well as many who had been spared by Caesar despite their support for Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in the civil war of 49 - 45 BCE. His autopsy, the first recorded in history, found that he had been stabbed 23 times, only one of which was fatal. And so did perish a great man and leader, defeater of pirates when only a boy, high priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, senator, aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul, champion of the people, triumvir, reformer of the land laws and laws against corruption, victorious general and great captain of history, four times voted triumphant, conqueror of Gaul, Britain, and Pontus, engineer, poet, grammarian, essayist, historian, supreme pontiff, first and only dictator for life of the Roman Republic, formulator of the Julian calendar, four times triumphant, namesake of the month of July. He was struck down while preparing an expedition to best Alexander the Great by conquering Persia, Afghanistan, the Caucuses, the Ukraine, Poland, and Germany with the aim of incorporating them into the empire.

His assassination sounded the death knell of the Republic, which fell into a new civil war in which his avengers, led by Marcus Antonius and his great nephew and adopted son, Octavian, clashed with the his assassins', rich and corrupt men who falsely called themselves the Liberators. The war claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Romans, and ended with the total defeat of the Liberators at the Battle of Philippi, in which some 410,000 fought, making it one of the largest battles of the pre-modern world. Caesar was declared a god in the aftermath.

Antonius and Octavian later clashed in a further civil war in which the latter emerged triumphant to "restore" the nation as a veiled monarchical republic with himself holding virtually all power in the guise of the humble Fist Citizen. In gratitude, the Senate granted him the new name of "Augustus" and renamed the eighth month of the year in his honor. After his death in 14, he, like his uncle before him, was declared a god. He was succeeded by his adopted son, Tiberius Claudius Nero, and then by several dozen more men (and 3 women) until the Constantine XI fell on May 29, 1453.

On March 15, 44 BCE, a great man was murdered, dying in flesh, but not in effect, and we live still in the world that flowed from that deed as surely as the man's blood.

Take a moment to remember.

2016
Today is the Ides of March.

On this day, 2060 years ago Gaius Julius Caesar, recently named Dictator for Life of the Roman Republic, was assassinated by a cabal 60 senators in the Theater of Pompey. The cabal was led by Gaius Cassius Longinus, and included some whom Caesar counted as dear friends, such as Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, and many whose lives Caesar spared despite their having supported Pompey in Caesar's Civil War. His autopsy, the first recorded in history, recorded him to have been stabbed 23 times. And so did perish a great man and leader, high priest of Jupiter Greatest and Best, senator, aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul, champion of the people, triumvir, reformer of the land laws, general, conqueror of Gaul, Britain, and Pontus, engineer, poet, grammarian, essayist, historian, supreme pontiff, first and only dictator for life of the Roman Republic, formulator of the Julian calendar, four times triumphant, namesake of the month of July. His assassination sounded the death knell of the Republic, which was soon embroiled in a new civil war in which his avengers, led by his old lieutenant, Marcus Antonius and his great nephew and adopted son, Octavian, clashed with the his assassins', who called themselves the Liberators. The war claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Romans, and ended with the total defeat of the Liberators at the Battle of Philippi, in which some 410,000 fought, making it one of the largest battles in history to that point. Caesar was declared a god in the aftermath. Antonius and Octavian later clashed in a further civil war in which Octavian emerged triumphant to "restore" the Republic with himself holding virtually all power as the humble Fist Citizen. In gratitude, the Senate granted him the new name of "Augustus" and renamed the eighth month of the year in his honor. After his death in 14, he, like his uncle before him, was declared a god.

On March 15, 44 BCE, a great man was murdered, and we live in the world that flowed from that deed as surely as the man's blood.

2015
On this day, 2059 years ago Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated, by 60 of his fellow senators, among whom were those he counted as friends. His autopsy, the first recorded in history, recorded him to have been stabbed 23 times. And so did perish a great man and leader, high priest of Jupiter Greatest and Best, senator, aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul, champion of the people, triumvir, reformer of the land laws, general, conqueror of Gaul, Britain, and Pontus, engineer, poet, grammarian, essayist, historian, supreme pontiff, first and only dictator for life of the Roman Republic, formulator of the Julian calendar, four times triumphant, namesake of the month of July, uncle and adoptive father of the Divine Augustus, afterward declared a god.

Spare a thought, if you will, for his passing.

2014
Remember dear friends that Gaius Julius Caesar, born in July of 100 BCE (In the year 653 since the founding of Rome), statesman, politician, High Priest of Jupiter Greatest and Best, consul, reformer, undefeated general, conqueror of Gaul, Belgium, Switzerland, Britain, and Pontus, writer, poet, grammarian, memoirist, historian, humanitarian, philanthropist, reformer of the calendar, elected dictator for life by the Roman Senate, was brutally assassinated 2058 years ago today, the Ides of March, 44 BCE, at the age of 55 by a duplicitous cabal of Senators he had forgiven and pardoned for their previous opposition. The findings of the autopsy, the first recorded in Western medicine, found him to have 23 stab wounds, only one of which was fatal. On January 1, 42 BCE, he was declared to a god, and was thereafter worshiped throughout the empire until the practice and veneration were banned in 392 CE under threat of torture and death. His adopted son, Gaius Octavian, known as Augustus, afterwards himself proclaimed a god, the first emperor, later renamed his birth month of Quintilis July in his honor. So set aside a moment today to remember a great man, around whom history pivoted, and whose words and doings echo still today.

2013
Remember dear friends that Gaius Julius Caesar, born in July of 100 BCE (In the year 653 since the founding of Rome), statesman, politician, High Priest of Jupiter Greatest and Best, consul, reformer, undefeated general, conqueror of Gaul, Belgium, Switzerland, Britain, and Pontus, writer, poet, grammarian, memoirist, historian, humanitarian, philanthropist, reformer of the calendar, elected dictator for life by the Roman Senate, was brutally assassinated 2057 years ago today, the Ides of March, 44 BCE, at the age of 55 by a duplicitous cabal of Senators he had forgiven and pardoned for their previous opposition. The findings of the autopsy, the first recorded in Western medicine, found him to have 23 stab wounds, only one of which was fatal. On January 1, 42 BCE, he was declared to have become a god, and was thereafter worshiped throughout the empire until the practice and veneration were banned in 392 CE under threat of torture and death. His adopted son, Gaius Octavian, known as Augustus, the first emperor, later renamed his birth month of Quintilis July in his honor. So set aside a moment today to remember a great man, around whom history pivoted, and whose words and doings echo still today.

2012
Friends, Lenski-ites, Family Members, lend my your eyes...

I come to praise and remind you of a great man that the world, sadly, lost 2055 years ago today in one of the greatest acts of perfidy the world has ever known. Gaius Julius Caesar, angelic scion of an ancient and distinguished line, was but 55 when he was struck down in the Theater of Pompey, where the Roman Senate was meeting while Caesar's money rebuilt their fire-ravaged chambers, by a conspiracy of 62 of his fellow Senators. Those scoundrels, whom he had graciously pardoned not long before after taking upon himself the terrible burdens of absolute power, had the temerity to inflict 23 knife wounds to that noble man, the last of which was fatal. Those evil men sought to eliminate the wise and generous rule of Caesar, and hereby restore the horridly corrupt old order that had served the so well, but they failed. Within two decades, all of the conspirators were dead, and Caesar's nephew, the divine Augustus, ruled supreme over a new order where Senators knew their proper place. (Often the grave, for the
dead wield no knives. If you want to have absolute power and die of old age, or of your wife poisoning you, it is best to not be forgiving.) Julius Caesar was given in death proper respect due him, and so he was declared a god, and his birth month of Quintilis given the name "Julius" in his honor.

So today remember that wonderful man, Senator, Flamen Dialis (sorta), friend to the common masses, lover, glorious general, conqueror of Gaul and Britain, dictator for life, reformer of the calendar, writer, lawgiver, grammarian, comforter of the queen of Egypt, god, and all around great guy. May he be an inspiration and a guide to you all in all things.

In memoriam, Gaius Julius Caesar. July, 100 BCE (653 AU) - March 15,
44 BCE (709 AU).

Yours,
Gaius Zacharius Davidius Blountus

2011
There was no Ides of March email this year. I defended my PhD dissertation on March 16th, so I was a bit busy and stressed. I still feel bad about neglecting my duty for such a silly reason.

2010
Hello everyone,

This is the Ides of March. On this day, 2053 years ago, Gaius Julius Caesar was murdered. Caesar was a statesman, a diplomat, a legislator, a hero to the masses, one of the greatest generals in history, the man who brought Rome 500 years of rule in what is now
France, a brilliant writer whose works are still studied, grammarian (he wrote a text on Roman grammar while on campaign that was in use for centuries, though it is now lost), reformer of the calendar, a priest, and, in general, likely as a good a great man of his sort could be. While preparing to conquer the Parthian empire (What is now Iraq, Iran, Armenia, and Afganistan), he was assassinated by a cabal of 60 senators who inflicted 23 knife wounds upon the great
man, only one of which was fatal. The senators represented a nobility whose time had passed, and took this action as a desperate grab to retain the power they had enjoyed for centuries, but had been eclipsed in recent decades, and faced complete destruction in a Rome that had a dictator for life with more concern for the commoners. Caesar was soon declared a god, his name gained great power, and his birth month of Quintilis was renamed in his honor, which is why "July" has its name. A civil war broke out. And from the chaos emerged a person little regarded before: Caesar's nephew, Gaius Octavian Thurinus, whom Caesar had named his sole heir. Through luck and cunning, this young man of only 17 emerged a decade later as the sole and complete winner of the struggle for the Roman Republic. We now know him by the name Augustus, name-sake of the month of August, and the first Roman Emperor.

On this day, 2053 years ago, the world changed forever. Out of the
blood that was spilled then, our world was born. Because it was, we
are. Remember today.

Zachary

PS Yeah, I know it's a bit hokey, but I really get a kick out of
this stuff.