![]() It was true that Sextus Caesar, who was perhaps the dictator's uncle, had been one of the consuls for 91 and Lucius Caesar, one of the consuls for 90, was a distant cousin, whose son and namesake was consul for 64. The Julii Caesares did not seem to be in the running. The traditional competition among members of the Roman nobility for office and the spoils of office was thus threatening to turn into a desperate race for seizing autocratic power. It was evident that the misgovernment of the Roman state and the Greco-Roman world by the Roman nobility could not continue indefinitely and it was fairly clear that the most probable alternative was some form of military dictatorship backed by dispossessed Italian peasants who had turned to long-term military service. From 133 onward there had been a series of alternate revolutionary and counter-revolutionary paroxysms. The Roman governing class had consequently come to be hated and discredited at home and abroad. This class had been partly dispossessed by an economic revolution following on the devastation caused by the Second Punic War. ![]() Military manpower was supplied by the Roman peasantry. The whole Mediterranean world was, in fact, at the mercy of the Roman nobility and of a new class of Roman businessmen, the equites ("knights"), which had grown rich on military contracts and on tax farming. One of the perquisites of the praetorship and the consulship was the government of a province, which gave ample opportunity for plunder. The requirements and the costs of a Roman political career in Caesar's day were high, and the competition was severe but the potential profits were of enormous magnitude. Rome's victory over Carthage in the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) had made Rome the paramount power in the Mediterranean basin an influential Roman noble family's clients (that is, protégés who, in return, gave their patrons their political support) might include kings and even whole nations, besides numerous private individuals. This was a difficult task for even the ablest and most gifted noble unless he was backed by substantial family wealth and influence. It was also not rich or influential or even distinguished.Ī Roman noble won distinction for himself and his family by securing election to a series of public offices, which culminated in the consulship, with the censorship possibly to follow. The Julii Caesares traced their lineage back to the goddess Venus, but the family was not snobbish or conservative-minded. Though some of the most powerful noble families were patrician, patrician blood was no longer a political advantage it was actually a handicap, since a patrician was debarred from holding the paraconstitutional but powerful office of tribune of the plebs. By Caesar's time, the number of surviving patrician gentes was small and in the gens Julia the Caesares seem to have been the only surviving family. Caesar's calendar, the Julian calendar, is still partially in force in the Eastern Orthodox Christian countries and the Gregorian calendar, now in use in the West, is the Julian, slightly corrected by Pope Gregory XIII.Ĭaesar's gens, the Julii, were patricians i.e., members of Rome's original aristocracy, which had coalesced in the 4th century BC with a number of leading plebeian (commoner) families to form the nobility that had been the governing class in Rome since then. The old Roman calendar was inaccurate and manipulated for political purposes. ![]() This name has survived, as has Caesar's reform of the calendar. Even people who know nothing of Caesar as a historic personality are familiar with his family name as a title signifying a ruler who is in some sense uniquely supreme or paramountthe meaning of Kaiser in German, tsar in the Slavonic languages, and qaysar in the languages of the Islamic world.Ĭaesar's gens (clan) name, Julius (Iulius), is also familiar in the Christian world for in Caesar's lifetime the Roman month Quintilis, in which he was born, was renamed "July" in his honour. But Caesar's name, like Alexander's, is still on people's lips throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. The Greco-Roman society has been extinct for so long that most of the names of its great men mean little to the average, educated modern man. Gaius Julius Caesar celebrated Roman general and statesman, the conqueror of Gaul (58-50 BC), victor in the Civil War of 49-45 BC, and dictator (46-44 BC), who was launching a series of political and social reforms when he was assassinated by a group of nobles in the Senate House on the Ides of March.Ĭaesar changed the course of the history of the Greco-Roman world decisively and irreversibly.
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