Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar was born in 100 BCE into a patrician family that, despite its ancient lineage, had fallen on leaner political times. By the time of his death on the Ides of March in 44 BCE, he had conquered an area roughly the size of modern France and Belgium, rewritten the Roman calendar in a form that survived until the sixteenth century, broken the power of the Senate, and made himself dictator of the most powerful state on Earth. He had also, along the way, written two of the most lucid works of military history ever composed, seduced or allied himself with two of the ancient world's most formidable rulers, and sparked a sequence of events that would turn the Roman Republic into an empire. In any single one of these careers — general, statesman, writer, reformer — he would be considered extraordinary. He pursued all of them simultaneously.

His political rise was calculated and relentless. He aligned himself with the popular cause, spending lavishly on public games and spectacles to build a following among ordinary Romans. He formed the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, the two most powerful men in Rome, which gave him the consulate in 59 BCE and, crucially, the military command in Gaul that would make him untouchable. He understood, with the cold precision that characterized everything he did, that in Rome real power was built not in the Senate but in the legions, and that a general who had conquered new territory could not be touched by political enemies at home while he still commanded his army in the field.

The Gallic Wars

From 58 to 50 BCE, Caesar waged a series of campaigns across Gaul that transformed Rome's territory, his own legend, and the history of Western Europe. He fought the Germanic Suebi, crossed the Rhine on a bridge built in ten days and then destroyed it as a statement, led two expeditions to Britain — the first Roman commander to do so — and crushed a massive Gallic uprising under Vercingetorix at the siege of Alesia in 52 BCE, where he simultaneously besieged a fortified hilltop and built a second ring of fortifications facing outward to hold off a Gallic relief army of a quarter-million men. It was one of the most audacious feats of military engineering in history. He documented all of it in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, written in the third person with a coolness that remains unsettling — a masterpiece of self-promotion dressed as objective reporting.

"I came, I saw, I conquered." — Julius Caesar, on his swift victory at Zela, 47 BCE

Crossing the Rubicon

When his command expired and his enemies in Rome moved to prosecute him, Caesar faced a stark choice. Roman law forbade a general from bringing his army into Italy proper; the Rubicon river was the designated boundary. In January 49 BCE, Caesar crossed it with a single legion. "The die is cast," he said — or so the historians report. It was an act that instantly made him an outlaw and triggered a civil war, but he had calculated that half-measures would destroy him and that boldness might yet save him. He was right. Pompey, caught unprepared, fled to Greece. Caesar pursued him, won the decisive battle of Pharsalus in 48 BCE, and emerged as master of the Roman world.

In Egypt he met Cleopatra, who had herself smuggled into his presence wrapped in a carpet, and became her ally and lover. He spent months in Alexandria before pressing on to mop up resistance across Asia Minor, North Africa, and Spain. He returned to Rome as dictator and moved at speed: he reformed the calendar from the lunar system the Romans had been mismanaging for centuries to a solar calendar of 365 days with a leap year every four years — the Julian Calendar, which the world used until 1582 and which survives in the Orthodox Church today. He redistributed land, reformed the courts, extended Roman citizenship, and began rebuilding Carthage and Corinth.

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