Julius Caesar: Life, Wars, and Assassination
Gaius Julius Caesar is one of the most famous individuals in Western history. A Roman general, politician, and writer, he conquered Gaul, defeated his rival Pompey in a civil war, was made dictator for life, and was assassinated by a group of senators on the Ides of March, 44 BCE. His death did not restore the Roman Republic, as the conspirators had hoped; it plunged Rome into another round of civil wars that ended only with the rise of his adopted son Octavian as the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The month of July is named after him. The word “caesar” became a title for the Roman and later German emperors. The French Republican calendar briefly used a month named after him. The word “czar” in Russian is derived from his name.
This cluster page is a guided tour of Caesar’s life: his youth, his early political career, his conquest of Gaul, his civil war against Pompey, his dictatorship, and his assassination. It links out to the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the Ides of March page.
The Early Life of Caesar
Caesar was born on 12 or 13 July 100 BCE into the patrician Julian clan, which claimed descent from Iulus, the son of the Trojan prince Aeneas and therefore from the goddess Venus. The Julians were an old and distinguished family, but by the first century BCE they were politically and financially marginal. Caesar’s father died when he was sixteen, and he was raised by his mother Aurelia.
In his youth, Caesar was briefly engaged to a wealthy woman, but the engagement was broken off. He married Cornelia, the daughter of the radical politician Cinna, and they had a daughter, Julia. When the dictator Sulla took power and demanded that Caesar divorce Cornelia, he refused and had to flee Rome to avoid Sulla’s proscriptions. He was eventually pardoned, served as a junior officer in Asia and in Cilicia, and returned to Rome as a rising politician.
The Ascent to Power
Caesar climbed the Roman political ladder (cursus honorum) in the conventional way. He was a military tribune, a quaestor in Spain, an aedile in Rome (he spent lavishly on public games, putting him deeply into debt), a praetor, and in 60 BCE the consul. He formed the First Triumvirate, an informal political alliance with the general Pompey and the wealthy Crassus, that dominated Roman politics for almost a decade.
The alliance began to fray after Crassus died at the disastrous Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE, and after Caesar’s daughter Julia — Pompey’s wife — died in childbirth in 54 BCE. Caesar and Pompey drifted into open hostility, and in 49 BCE Caesar marched his Thirteenth Legion across the Rubicon, the small river that marked the legal boundary of Italy. The crossing started a civil war that would last four years and destroy the Roman Republic.
The Gallic Wars (58–50 BCE)
Before the civil war, Caesar spent almost a decade conquering Gaul (modern France, Belgium, and parts of Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands). The Gallic Wars, which Caesar wrote up himself in seven books of Commentarii de Bello Gallico (often still used to teach Latin), were the formative experience of his career. He fought the Helvetii, the Belgae, the Nervii, the Veneti, the Germans of Ariovistus, and most famously the coalition led by Vercingetorix, the Arvernian chieftain who united the Gauls in a last desperate revolt in 52 BCE.
Caesar besieged Vercingetorix at Alesia, built a double circumvallation (walls facing both out and in), and starved the defenders into surrender. The conquest of Gaul was brutal: by Caesar’s own (probably exaggerated) figures, a million Gauls were killed and another million enslaved. The victories made Caesar fabulously wealthy and gave him an army of battle-hardened veterans who were loyal to him personally rather than to the Roman state.
The Civil War (49–45 BCE)
Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE and marched south on Rome. Pompey, the Senate, and the consuls fled to Greece. Caesar, who had only one legion with him, took Rome in a matter of weeks, and then pursued Pompey across the Adriatic. The decisive battle came at Pharsalus in Thessaly in 48 BCE, where Caesar’s much smaller force defeated Pompey’s larger army. Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was murdered by advisers of the boy-king Ptolemy XIII. Caesar arrived in Alexandria a few days later, sided with the queen Cleopatra (whose older brother was her husband and her rival), and eventually defeated Ptolemy in a brief Alexandrian War.
Caesar spent the next two years fighting the Pompeians in Africa and Spain. The battle of Munda in 45 BCE, in southern Spain, was the last major battle of the civil war, and Caesar returned to Rome as the undisputed master of the Roman world.
The Dictatorship (49–44 BCE)
Caesar was careful to preserve the forms of the Republic. He was elected consul, then made dictator, and eventually dictator perpetuo — dictator for life. He passed a series of reforms: the calendar reform that gave us the Julian calendar (the basis of the modern calendar), land grants for veterans and the poor, the extension of Roman citizenship to the towns of northern Italy, and the establishment of new colonies.
He also accumulated unprecedented power. The Senate gave him a host of new titles, including imperator, princeps, parens patriae (father of the country), and a long list of priestly offices. His image was placed on Roman coins, and a temple was decreed to his divine genius. A statue of him was set up with the inscription “To the Unconquered God.” To his contemporaries, it looked less like the restoration of the Republic and more like the establishment of a monarchy in all but name.
The Assassination (44 BCE)
A group of about sixty senators, led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, decided to kill Caesar before he could be formally crowned king. The conspirators chose the Ides of March (15 March) 44 BCE, the day the Senate was to vote on making Caesar king of the provinces outside Italy. Caesar was warned of the plot (according to Suetonius, his wife’s nightmares were taken as omens, and his friend the soothsayer Spurinna had warned him to “beware the Ides of March”). He went to the Senate anyway, and was stabbed to death in the Theatre of Pompey at the foot of the statue of his rival.
The full story of the assassination is told in The Ides of March: Caesar’s Assassination.
The Aftermath
The conspirators had hoped that killing Caesar would restore the Republic. Instead, Caesar’s death plunged Rome into another fourteen years of civil war. Caesar’s loyal lieutenant Mark Antony allied with Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son Octavian, defeated the conspirators at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, and then quarreled with Octavian. The final war of the Roman Republic was fought between Antony and Octavian, with Antony allied to Cleopatra of Egypt. Octavian won at the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, and became Augustus, the first Roman emperor, in 27 BCE.
Caesar the Writer
Caesar was not only a general and politician but also a clear and elegant writer. His Gallic War and Civil War commentaries, written in the third person as dispatches to the Roman people, set a standard of military prose that has been admired ever since. He also wrote a treatise on Latin grammar, a collection of aphorisms, and a poem about the campaigns of his uncle. The Latin of the Gallic War is so clear that students have been using it to learn Latin for two thousand years.
The Legacy of Caesar
The list of things named after or derived from Caesar is almost endless. The month of July, the title of emperor, the word czar, the city of Caesarea, the medical term Caesarean section, the political term autocrat (from the Greek translation of dictator perpetuo). His political career, his military genius, his assassination, and the speeches and writings that survive from him have made him one of the most recognizable figures in Western history.