Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and subsequently became dictator of Rome from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC.

Reforming the world

The Marian Reforms introduced to the Roman army by Roman general and politician Gaius Marius (157-86 BCE). These reforms transformed the Roman army from a semi-professional militia to a professional fighting force.

Property ownership had previously been a requirement to be a Roman soldiers, but now the recruitment of vast numbers of poor, propertyless plebeians would do almost anything to obtain land redistributed after Gaul was invaded. These new professional soldiers served for longer consecutive terms and were personally bound and singularly loyal to their commanders.

The threat of the German Cimbri and Teutoni tribes when they invaded Gaul in 109 B.C. with numerous successes allowed a free hand for generals of Tome to alter the nature of the army.

Marius' military restructuring proved itself during the war by 102 B.C. As a vast gathering of Germans neared the Alps one of the bloodiest battles in history took 130,000 lives, decimating the Teutones. A similar battle at Vercellae saw the slaughter of more than a 100,000. In a single war with three major battles almost 300,000 men were killed on a scale not seen.

These Celtic and Germanic tribes were migrating and traveled with their wives and children. Upon these massive defeats the women killed themselves and their children in order to avoid the growing slave markets. The remaining Cimbri and their allies, the Boii settled in southern Gaul and would eventual face Julius Caesar.

The structure of the army with the need for profitable wars through acqusition of land and wealth through the slave trade changed the perception of war. This would lead the way for Julius Caesar to use the military as one of the largest slave running operations in history as he invaded Gaul. The revenue from this operation amassed the wealth needed to finance his political aspirations by buy the loyalty of his troops and the Roman populous who were lavished with free bread and circuses.

Gallia divisa

"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"

Julius Caesar had held the offices of Pontifex maximus (64–44 BC), Consul (59 BC), Proconsul (Gaul, Illyricum) (58–49 BC), Dictator (49–44 BC), Consul (48, 46–44 BC), Dictator perpetuo (44 BC).

"He was a politician and statesman who eventually took supreme power in the Roman Republic and made himself a monarch in every practical respect, although he never took the name king," wrote historian Adrian Goldsworthy in his book "Caesar: Life of a Colossus(opens in new tab)" (Yale University Press, 2006).

"In his triumph in 46 [B.C.] Caesar listed the number of [enemy] soldiers killed in all his battles — thus not only in Gaul — as 1,192,000," wrote Kurt Raaflaub, emeritus professor of classics and history at Brown University, in the New England Classical Journal(opens in new tab) in 2021

"It was not only the Roman sword that inflicted death on the Gallic population. Large parts starved to death because the harvests were confiscated or destroyed and their settlements and farmsteads burned, or they froze to death when the legions drove them out of their settlements in winter and burned down buildings, villages and towns," Raaflaub wrote.

Caesar wrote that when the "Sigambri" fled from his army he "burned all their villages and houses, and cut down their corn,"^[1]

"I came, I saw, I conquered,"

Caesar was very willing to pardon his opponents and enemies unlike Sulla who had murdered Romans by the thousands.

"It is said that he [Caesar] received twenty-three [stab wounds]; and many of the conspirators were wounded by one another, as they struggled to plant all those blows in one body," wrote Plutarch.

"He [had] a large and gradually increasing political influence in consequence of his lavish hospitality and the general splendour of his mode of life," Plutarch

Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC in hopes of restoring the Republic. He was the maternal great-uncle of Octavius his adopted son and heir so Gaius Octavius was named his successor becoming Augustus Caesar.

The Rubicon

Crossing the Rubicon on the 10 of January 49 BC. would reveal Caesar's ultimate aspirations and mark a point of no return. In this moment of history the Roman Empire was born and the Republic was smothered in the bed of its own making. The world was forever altered.

When Julius Caesar stepped into the River Rubicon, he declared, “Jacta Alea Est.”, “Let the die be cast.”

Gaius Marius had reformed the Roman army and made the people drawn from the masses mercenaries in their own land as a professional army. These soldiers increasingly owed their loyalty to their generals rather than the more abstract idea of a citizen republic.

Power corrupts and powerful men became more powerful by altering the way they had done things before in the Republic. Now men were fielding their own private armies, and the last troubled years of the Republic had seen the Senate’s power crumble in the face of the ambition of Marius, and his rival Sulla. But the great degeneration within a Republic does not begin with its leaders but with the degeneration of the masses through legal charity.

Chronology

July 13, 100 B.C.: Caesar born in area of Suburra.

82 B.C.: Sulla become dictator of Rome; Caesar speaks out and flees Rome.

78 B.C.: Caesar returns to Rome when Sulla dies.

75 B.C.: Caesar goes to Rhodes to study oratory but but is captured by pirates and ransomed.

74 B.C.: Caesar returns to Rome and politics, using his family fortune to gain influence.

69 B.C.: Caesar's wife Cornelia dies but praises her to increase his popularity.

61-60 B.C.: Caesar serves as governor of Iberia, suppresses tribes who oppose Roman rule.

60 B.C.: Caesar, Crassus and Pompey form triumvirate to rule Rome.

59 B.C.: Caesar's daughter Julia marries Pompey.

58-50 B.C.: Caesar campaigns in Gaul and England successfully.

54 B.C.: Pompey's wife Julia and her child die.

53 B.C.: Crassus is killed in a disastrous defeat fighting the Parthians.

January 49, B.C.: Caesar crosses the Rubicon and marches on Rome.

49–45 BC: Caesar's Civil War between Julius Caesar and the Optimates initially led by Pompey

August 9, 48 B.C.: Caesar defeats Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus in Greece; Pompey flees to Egypt.

September 48 B.C.: Pompey killed by Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy XIII; Caesar is presented with the head and is reportedly disgusted at the way Pompey was treated.

September 48 B.C. – January 47 B.C.: Caesar restores Cleopatra VII to power. Ptolemy XIII fights against Caesar and Cleopatra's forces but is killed.

June 47 B.C.: Caesarion, the son of Caesar and Cleopatra VII, is born. Caesar doesn't acknowledge the child as his own.

45 B.C.: Caesar implements new calendar system in Rome that has 365 days in a year and an extra day in February every four years.

January 44 B.C.: Senate names Caesar "dictator for life."

March 15, 44 B.C.: Caesar is stabbed to death in the Roman senate.

In 50 BC the Senate ordered Caesar to disband his army and return to Rome, where he was banned from running for a second consulship and would be on trial for treason and war crimes following his unlicensed conquests in Gaul.

In 36 BCE his adopted son Octavian seized upon the precedent in his struggles as triumvir; in the constitutional settlement of 23 BCE as Augustus he formalized his tenure of annually renewable tribunicia potestas, henceforth reckoning his years of rule by it. This assumption of tribunician power, alongside enhanced imperium, definitively established the legal basis of his principate, and that of subsequent emperors for at least the next three and half centuries. Augustus also secured grants of tribunicia potestas for his sons-in-law Tiberius.

The plebeian tribunes’ rights expanded, gradually extending beyond their core functions of assisting members of the plebs against patricians and magistrates evolving into a social welfare state feeding the indolent masses with free bread and circuses.

In the mid-2nd century BCE [[Polybius] observe that “the plebeian tribunes are always obligated to carry out the resolve of the people (demos), and especially regard their will,” and as such have earned the fear of the Senate (6.16.5). There was a power struggle in Rome as the generally unwritten constitution of Rome morphed in their appetite for power and benefits.

In 81 BCE Sulla as dictator, as part of a more general reform of the Roman administrative system, sought definitively to deregularize and weaken the plebeian tribunate by (apparently) barring incumbents from further political office and limiting their ability to move legislation freely, perhaps insisting on the Senate’s prior approval for plebiscites (as was the situation before 287 BCE); significantly, he left their defensive power of intercessio intact, which he clearly viewed as vexatious but must have had no practical way to eliminate (sources in Broughton, MRR II 66). After Sulla’s death (in 78 BCE), his measures stirred up tribunes to mount fierce opposition, and by 70 BCE they saw their rights and powers fully restored by a consular law (see MRR ΙΙ‎ 127 for the sources). In the 60s and 50s BCE, the tribunes are notable for their willingness to use the full negative powers of their office in the service of the factional politics of the day, with relentless use of especially intercessio against the Senate’s decrees and legislation in all the assemblies, even the (largely ceremonial) lex curiata (see Cic. Fam. 1.9.25, 54 BCE).

From Late Republic to Early Principate Caesar, who in marching on Rome in 49 BCE had ostentatiously represented himself as a champion of tribunician sacrosanctity, on his victory received an extraordinary grant of tribunicia potestas without having to hold the office of the tribunate itself (48 BCE, awarded for life in 44 BCE: Cass. Dio 42.20.3, 44.5.3). It was a startling measure—Caesar himself was a patrician—that (misleadingly) made tribunicia potestas seem roughly analogous to imperium, which since 327 BCE could be extended or awarded to non-magistrates. Caesar’s adopted son and political heir Octavian (see Augustus) seized upon the precedent in his struggles as triumvir, procuring tribunicia potestas, or at least the tribunes’ sacrosanctity, for himself in 36 BCE, which was apparently renewed or somehow modified in 30 BCE (Cass. Dio 49.15.5–6, 51.19.6–7). Strikingly, in 35 BCE Octavian managed to have tribunician inviolability, which by this time extended beyond protection from physical assault to encompass also verbal defamation, granted also to his half-sister Octavia as well as to his wife Livia (Dio Cass. 49.38.1). It was a clear sign that he intended even then to establish a dynasty. A final and consequential stage came in the constitutional settlement of 23 BCE, when as Augustus he ostentatiously gave up his habit of holding consecutive consulships (an office which he had secured for each of the years 31–23 BCE) in exchange for tenure of full tribunicia potestas (Cass. Dio 53.32.5–6). In the event he had it renewed each year for the rest of his life, a total of thirty-seven times (see Res Gestae 10.1), and used it to date individual years of his reign, counting from 23 BCE. In addition to the sacrosanctity, this status gave Augustus the ability to convene and preside over the Senate, pass legislation in the assembly of the plebs (a privilege he exercised for his moral legislation of 18 BCE: see marriage law, Roman), and veto public actions; it also effectively established him in the tribunate’s customary role as protector of popular interests. It is generally agreed that Augustus’s assumption in 23 BCE of tribunician power, alongside enhanced imperium (established to command a super-province of all armed provinces, with the capability of intervening also in those nominally in the power of the Senate) definitively established the legal basis of his rule, and that of all subsequent emperors through the early 4th century CE. Tacitus in a capsule history of Augustus’s tribunicia potestas (Tac. Ann. 3.56) flatly considers it as a device for the emperor to assert his supremacy in the state without taking an invidious title such as king or dictator. The plebeian tribunate itself continued under Augustus and well into the imperial period (it is mentioned as late as the 5th century CE: Cod. Theod. 1.6.11 and 2.1.12), but it came firmly under the control of the emperors and already by the end of the 1st century CE the office could be deemed of little consequence (Plin. Ep. 1.23.1).

Significantly, after the settlement of 23 BCE, Augustus arranged to have extraordinary tribunicia potestas conferred also on his successive sons-in-law. Agrippa married Augustus’s widowed daughter Iulia in 21 BCE, and in 18 BCE received tribunician power for five years (renewed in 13 BCE), but died in 12 BCE (Cass. Dio 54.12.2 and 28.1). Augustus in 11 BCE then forced his stepson Tiberius to divorce and marry Iulia (Cass. Dio 54.35.4), and in 6 BCE procured for him tribunician power for five years (Cass. Dio 55.9.4)—shortly before removing him to Rhodes (where Tiberius seems to have employed the coercive aspects of that power: Suet. Tib. 11) until 2 CE. On the death in 2 and 4 CE respectively of Lucius Iulius Caesar and Gaius Iulius Caesar (sons of Agrippa and Iulia whom Augustus adopted as heirs but never offered tribunicia potestas), Augustus now adopted Tiberius and secured for him tribunician power for ten years as well as imperium as a proconsul, each renewed in 13 CE (Cass. Dio 55.13.1 and Vell. Pat. 2.103, Cass. Dio 56.28.1). The practical effect of these grants was clearly to designate Tiberius as the successor to the principate and facilitate his future transition to the role (see Tac. Ann. 1.3 and especially 3.56); when Augustus died on 19 August 14, Tiberius was immediately able to act as de facto emperor. Augustus’s actions served as a productive precedent for a long series of subsequent emperors; in this way the tribunician power became a central element in the Empire’s institutional history.

Imperial Practice after Augustus From the start, Tiberius as emperor stressed that tribunicia potestas provided a legal basis for his succession and rule (see Tac. Ann. 1.7); in inscriptions and coins that show his titulature. “Caligula,” Claudius, and Nero on their accessions each received from the Senate the tribunicia potestas, none saw fit to designate a partner in the honor.

Marcus Cocceius Nerva did the same for Trajan when adopting him in October 97, and Hadrian for both Lucius Aelius Caesar and (after his death) Antoninus Pius on their adoptions in 136 and 138, respectively.

The Senate long remained in control of granting tribunicia potestas to emperors on their accession, as is shown by the cases of the usurpers Gaius Pescennius Niger Iustus and Decimus Clodius Septimius Albinus in 193–194, neither of whom claimed to possess it. In principle, emperors held tribunician power for life, but still had to have it renewed each year. Writing in the 3rd century, Dio (53.17.10) states that renewal came at the same time the plebeian tribunes took office, that is, 10 December. The actual record, despite many problems of detail, in general tends to confirm this statement; standard practice starting with Trajan (in 102) through at least Alexander Severus (reigned 218–235) was for emperors to date their first tribunician year from the day of their acclamation (dies imperii) until 9 December, and then define each succeeding year as running from 10 December to the following 9 December. What principles informed the change of tribunician date after 235 are harder to divine, for by 247 Philip I was using 1 January, and in 253, Valerian and his son Gallienus in their joint reign employed a date that fell between 15 August and 10 September. The practice of routinely noting an emperor’s iterations of tribunician power, and perhaps conferment of the grants themselves, ended with Constantine I (reigned 311–337).

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Footnotes

↑ Caesar wrote (translation by W. A. McDevitte & W. S. Bohn).

[1] Caesar wrote (translation by W. A. McDevitte & W. S. Bohn).

[1]

Julius Caesar

Contents

Gaius Julius Caesar

Reforming the world

Gallia divisa

The Rubicon

Chronology

Footnotes

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Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar

Reforming the world

Gallia divisa

The Rubicon

Chronology

Footnotes

Navigation menu

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