What “new and true” can possibly still be said about Gaius Julius Caesar? A fair question. Even if one were to take a parochial view of the scholarship (for much of the most important work has been published in German), no fewer than four full-scale English-language biographies were published by top-rank scholars between 2006 and 2009, not to mention a weighty (and worthy) Companion to Julius Caesar also published in 2009, two interesting introductions pitched mainly to undergraduates and the general reader in 2015 and 2016, and now two book-length studies that emerged in 2017 and 2019 on the coming of the civil war.Footnote ¹ A “companion” to the writings of Julius Caesar and a new compendium of his works with contextual essays covering a wide range of issues, historical, biographical, and historiographical, have recently appeared as well as an entire book devoted to Caesar’s first consulship.Footnote ² Caesar’s own account of “his” civil war has recently become an especially fertile field for scholarly activity with the appearance of a new critical edition of the text together with its companion volume and a handful of monographs in English.Footnote ³ Since 2006 at least three important books have appeared on the reception of Caesar from the Augustan Principate to his status as a cultural icon today, while his assassination remains an ever-popular subject of books intended for a wider, nonspecialist readership.Footnote ⁴ We now even have a book that contests the traditional diagnosis of Caesar’s illness as epilepsy, opting instead for a series of small strokes.Footnote ⁵ The cascade of publications is overwhelming, impossible for any one scholar to master in full. Our culture’s appetite for the story of the Roman dictator ensures that it will ever be fed, and doubtless never sated. This bodes well in general for another Caesarian project, but makes it difficult to stand out in such an eye-catching crowd.

This is not yet another biography of Julius Caesar. We have enough of them already, and anyway, if biography is a narrative of character, I doubt whether we have the necessary material to write one.Footnote ⁶ My interest here is not biographical but historical. What is distinctive about this book, I hope, is that it is founded on a combination of two crucial underlying premises, each of them the result of the development of historical scholarship on the late Roman Republic over the past half-century or so (although this analytic work has not always been well represented in the synthetic narratives that continue to be produced), and each of them still somewhat controversial. These are, in brief, the following: (1) that the Roman Republic was not an “oligarchy,” as was so long supposed as a matter of course, but a participatory republican political order in which the People were partners with the aristocracy not only in steering political events but, more fundamentally, in determining what the Republic was and should be (which entails further that Cicero, whose voice has tended to shape not only our views of the dominant narrative of the Late Republic but even of the nature of the Republic itself, can hardly be taken to speak for the Roman People, or even for senators as a whole); and (2) that the teleological perspective that (often insidiously) dominates our narratives of both the “fall of the Republic” and that of Julius Caesar’s political career is deceptive, and should be consciously challenged at every step. My hope and expectation in undertaking this project, which has proven so much more time-consuming than I originally imagined, is that a careful review of a selection of the key moments in Caesar’s political career – many of which have become so encrusted by the standard teleologies and traditional interpretations of the late-republican crisis that it is difficult to see them in a new light – will yield a substantially new picture of this most controversial of ancient Roman historical figures. It should also cast light on the crises of his day, and on the beginning of the series of civil wars that would eventually transform the “Republic” into the “Empire.”

Let us briefly review these premises.

The so-called democracy debate sparked by Fergus Millar’s provocative articles of the 1980s is still percolating through scholarship and has not reached a definitive new orthodoxy.Footnote ⁷ Few have been convinced by Millar’s classification of the Roman Republic as “a form of democracy,” though of course the argument is bedeviled by the difficulty of defining this procrustean concept in a way that is acceptable to all. However, prevailing opinion among scholars over the past couple of decades generally acknowledges that popular participation in deliberation, decision-making, and ideology construction exerted a far more important influence on political events than had been accepted when we ourselves were students and giants such as Ronald Syme and Ernst Badian presided over what J. North facetiously called the “frozen waste theory of Roman politics.” According to that conception, which had a stranglehold over the field at least in the Anglophone world until the revolution prompted by Millar, the People, not only in their deliberative function as participants in public assemblies (contiones) but also as voters who passed all legislation, elected all magistrates, and delivered a verdict in some trials, could safely be left out of the analysis of republican political life because these were regarded essentially as meaningless formalities (not unlike the lopsided and often near-unanimous “votes” that occur in many authoritarian and totalitarian regimes) whose outcome was determined elsewhere by coalitions of nobles and other powerful senators.Footnote ⁸

It can fairly be said that this “theory” is dead, but consensus has not settled upon a replacement. On one hand Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp accepts the broad freedom of Roman voters from formal relationships of dependency (e.g. the famous patron-client system) but still sees politics as dominated by the aristocracy, and therefore fruitfully explores how the Roman nobility won the “willing obedience” of the citizenry by projecting an image of meritocracy, wisdom, and success that produced a general consensus in favor of noble, even “oligarchic” domination of the Republic.Footnote ⁹ Henrik Mouritsen, however, minimizes the political role of the citizenry, interpreting the popular assemblies not as actual decision-making bodies but as smallish groups of “Roman gentlemen” enjoying the perks of their leisure by listening to speeches and voting, and predisposed to ratify whatever the promulgator of a bill put in front of them in “a highly formalised and carefully choreographed ritual.”Footnote ¹⁰ This is not the place to engage in detailed rebuttal; for my purpose here, it will suffice to point out that if the senatorial elite enjoyed the kind of “domination” that Hölkeskamp supposes, or had the kind of stranglehold on voting assemblies that Mouritsen believes it did, then we should not be able to count more than thirty occasions between 140 and 50 BC on which voting assemblies forced through “popular” legislation in the teeth of a strong senatorial consensus.Footnote ¹¹ Clearly, the People in their constitutional aspect were hardly so deferential and submissive as many scholars have supposed. “Fear of the People” was a well-known and quite effective phenomenon in the Late Republic, not infrequently prompting the Senate despite its own objections to take action in the People’s interest, or preventing it from opposing their will.Footnote ¹² It was in fact long-established practice, validated by historical traditions such as the fifth-century Secessions of the Plebs, that the Senate ultimately had to yield to a sufficiently strong expression of the will of the sovereign People.Footnote ¹³

I argue therefore for a nuanced conception of popular engagement in which senators were largely deferred to as experts in the running of the state (what one might call passive acquiescence by the plebs) but, when senatorial and noble failure became salient (e.g. during the Jugurthine and Cimbric Wars of the end of the second century, or again, during the rise of piracy and resurgence of Mithridates in the 70s and 60s), the voting citizenry was often aroused to action, checking (perceived) senatorial incompetence and arrogance and imposing its will on fundamental decisions of war-making as well as legislative remedies for (perceived) domestic problems.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, entirely in keeping with Polybius’s tripartite model of this fundamentally divided political system, members of the political elite elected to executive magistracies might themselves break ranks with their social peers in the Senate and turn to the power of the popular assemblies when it seemed expedient, or right and just, for them to do so.Footnote ¹⁵ These observations suggest a complex model of popular participation in the Roman Republic in which periods of relative quiescence, during which the popular assemblies largely deferred to the superior political wisdom (as it seemed) of their senatorial leaders, might be promptly succeeded by others of “insubordination” and “course corrections” imposed by the voting assemblies, led and often prompted by individual members of the political elite who, usually only temporarily, dissented on an ad hoc basis from the majority of their peers and superiors in the Senate. This dynamic bears more than a passing resemblance to the role of voters in today’s relatively passive indirect (representative) democracies and republics, and some of the crises the Late Republic underwent therefore bear more than occasional similarities to some of the crises of “democracy” in our own age, making the Roman Republic arguably a more fruitful model for study by modern theorists than the “glories” of ancient Athens.Footnote ¹⁶

Along with the thawing of the “frozen waste theory” and the new emphasis now put on the interventions of the popular assemblies in republican politics has come renewed attention to its ideological content, especially the speeches by which political leaders mobilized popular support and the values, principles, and goals that animated such speeches and therefore, presumably, at least in part motivated their audiences to act. T. P. Wiseman has rightly lamented a long, twentieth-century tradition of suppressing “the ideological content of republican politics,” though in fact this way of thinking was largely spent by that century’s end.Footnote ¹⁷ In this book I treat ideological issues both at the level of the individual bill or decree (Should there be an agrarian distribution? Should Caesar be recalled from Gaul?) and at the level of higher “constitutional” norm or principle (e.g. Where is the ultimate locus of decision, Senate or People? Must powerful senators be brought down to preserve “the Republic” and defend against dominatio?) to be central to the crises of the Caesarian age.

Since I have gone on record diagnosing an “ideological monotony” in the Late Republic this may seem to call for some clarification. The phrase “ideological monotony” was meant to express the demonstrable fact that “a nakedly ‘optimate’ stance was in straightforward contradiction with the contio as a rhetorical setting” but “not that all speakers sounded and behaved interchangeably when they climbed onto the rostra.”Footnote ¹⁸ It emphasizes the narrowness of the range of ideological positions that was brought specifically before the People and characterizes somewhat negatively the quality of public political argument, for an honest critique of popularis principles was essentially excluded by the circumstances of public deliberation. It expresses the fact that “popular” political values and principles went largely unchallenged in the public deliberation in the open Forum that led to decisive votes, which on one hand helped to sustain and reinforce popularis ideology, but on the other shifted the gravamen of debate from the public good (relatively uncontroversial) to a question of trust.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet none of this is meant to imply that there was no serious political argument or contestation in the public Forum, much less within the walls of the Senate. On the contrary, when we have evidence that laws were passed by the People, I assume (unless there are good reasons to the contrary) that a vote of the popular assembly does reflect a conscious choice by voters, not determined but at least informed by arguments that had been made to them, although of course voters were subject to all manner of rhetorical manipulation, and furthermore the institutions themselves were far from transparent mediators of the popular will.Footnote ²⁰

Thus I take seriously the popular perspective on the Roman Republic as revealed by their votes and imposed by the People in the form of laws and electoral choices.Footnote ²¹ And it is evident above all from those numerous occasions when a senatorial consensus was rejected by voters in the assembly that these “People” mobilized to impose their will not only where their material benefits were at issue (e.g. grain or land distributions) but where the People’s political rights (e.g. the rights of tribunes or the citizen’s “due process” right of provocatio) were at stake, or corresponding constraints on the power of the Senate (e.g. the reassignment of command of major wars). The very fact alone that these latter categories of strongly supported “popular” proposals outnumber that of material benefits by a ratio of about two to one bespeaks a politically conscious voting population rather than an impoverished and easily manipulated proletariat interested only in “handouts.”Footnote ²² In word certainly, and often in deed, the People were the final arbiters of political decision, using their votes to have the last word on legislation and (almost exclusively) choosing the magistrates and generals to lead them. In this specific sense we may call them “sovereign”: even Cicero proclaims before the Senate that the Roman People “held supreme power in all (political) matters.”Footnote ²³ We should finally shed the antiquated notion that a politician’s “popular” (popularis) stance responding to the interests and needs of the Roman People was in itself fundamentally at variance with the values and traditions of “the Republic.”Footnote ²⁴

Something more radical follows from this. Manifestly there are moments in the political narrative of the last two centuries of the Roman Republic when we sense the opening of a yawning gap between what one might loosely call “senatorial” and popular perspectives on the very norms and proper functioning of the Republic: consider, for example, the sharp and fundamental difference between Cicero’s oft-expressed view of the Gracchi brothers as subverters of the constitution who were justly struck down without any need for legal authorization and the “popular” one of those voters who flocked from “all Italy” to cast their ballots on the agrarian law, or those who defaced the Opimian Temple of Concord with a graffito characterizing the slaughter as an “act of madness,” or those who set up shrines at the locations where the two brothers were murdered.Footnote ²⁵ Why should we assume the superior representativeness or legitimacy of Cicero’s view, if the Roman Republic was composed not just of “the Senate” but also “the People of Rome” (Senatus Populusque Romanus), especially given the recognized primacy of the People in any matter on which they voted? If political legitimacy is ultimately and practically determined by society as a whole rather than a narrow elite, the popular conception of how the Republic worked and was supposed to work appears in fact to have the better historical claim to dominance, however philosophically superior Cicero’s more elitist or even Cato’s outright oligarchical views might be.Footnote ²⁶ This will have obvious implications for our assessment of the clash between Caesar and Bibulus in 59, or the dispute over Caesar’s ratio absentis that brought on the Civil War.

Correspondingly, the understanding has gained ground over the past couple of decades that Cicero cannot be regarded as the arbiter and touchstone of all things “republican.” Late-republican Roman history from about 66 to 43 is often referred to as the Age of Cicero, not without reason. The nearly one thousand letters, fifty-eight speeches, and numerous political, rhetorical, and philosophical essays that come down to us from the pen of this towering figure of Latin literature cast into shadow virtually all of other sources for this period, mostly much later biographies and historical narratives (Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian, all imperial), and even those are frequently influenced by the record Cicero left behind. (Sallust departs our story early with his Catilinarian Debate, but in any case his account of that crisis is itself strongly colored by the Ciceronian tradition.) The only other substantial contemporary source, the war Commentaries by Caesar himself, are tightly focused military narratives that, though of extraordinary interest due to the identity of their author, usually only indirectly cast light on events in the capital (with a few, often problematic exceptions). It is impossible to escape entirely the shadow that Cicero casts over the history of this period. Yet we must try.

Here I am thinking not so much of the obvious distortions created by Cicero’s personal perspective from a distinct locus of time and circumstance that was hardly representative of senators as a whole – that is that he was a “new man” (homo novus) whose standing rested not on noble heritage, military achievements, or awesome auctoritas but upon his eloquence and his canny political leadership as consul togatus in the crisis of 63, subsequently “betrayed” by the “optimates” whose savior he styled himself to be, sent into humiliating exile by a tribune and the Roman People for his violation of law and tradition, later a committed advocate of peace, even of accommodation with a victorious Caesar, and finally a zealous defender of the morality of the assassination and leader of a powerful attack against Caesar’s first potential successor. Such a brief résumé alone gives a hint of the specificity of the Ciceronian perspective and how questionable it can be to extrapolate from his many lamentations (or exultation) over current events to senators as a whole; attentive readers of Cicero’s letters will be familiar with how remarkably closely Cicero’s pronouncements about the “ups and downs” of the Republic (mostly downs) track the vicissitudes of his own personal fortunes.Footnote ²⁷ More fundamentally, however, scholars have often been inclined to adopt Cicero’s perspective on the very nature of the Republic itself as if in such matters he could speak for his entire society. But it should give us pause to consider for a moment just how dubious it would be to do the same with a modern politician’s views, even those of an eyewitness participant possessed of commanding authority such as Winston Churchill, not to mention lesser figures who have nevertheless put their stamp on an age (e.g. Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan). Cicero may fairly be thought of as, on the whole, a moderate senator, as is shown by his arguments in the De legibus in support of “popular” institutions like the tribunate or the (mostly) secret ballot, or his strenuous efforts to mediate the looming crisis of the Caesarian Civil War. Yet the Roman Republic was “the Senate and People of Rome” (SPQR – a formula interestingly inverted in its first two epigraphic appearances in the second century BC), and an important implication of the resurgence of the People as a political agent in recent scholarship (as described earlier in this chapter) is that the job of defining the nature or norms of the Republic cannot properly be left to senators alone.Footnote ²⁸ Scholars raised on Cicero’s doctrines of senatorial hegemony, the common people’s deference to their betters, and the need from time to time for the state’s “defenders” to eliminate trouble-making demagogues by means of extralegal violence if necessary, may think it quite natural to equate “the Republic” with “dominance of the Senate,” but what portion of politically active Roman citizens – the audience of the contio, urban political crowds, and voters – would have agreed with them?Footnote ²⁹ We should be careful not to ascribe to an entire body politic a clear consensus on such matters. The voice of the Roman People too must be heard, which was not always in harmony with Cicero’s.Footnote ³⁰

One of my objectives in writing this book has been to show how a proper integration of the popular perspective into an account of Julius Caesar opens up the possibility of critique and revision of the canonical picture both of the man and of the final years of the Republic that has developed over the years. No longer should the classic Ciceronian-senatorial analytical frame of Caesar’s career be adopted as the “republican” view, as has been done so frequently, with inevitable distortion of key disputes such as that about the validity of Caesar’s consular legislation or his claims and demands in 50–49. Once one internalizes the idea that the “republican system” was in essence an equilibrium of elite power holders policed by defenders of the Senate’s authority armed with a dazzling array of obstructionist weapons it is no great step to interpret the rise of Caesar as an existential danger to that system. Instead, I would urge us to be receptive to an alternative, more popular view (but not, perhaps, for all that alien to most senators): that the “republican system” itself traditionally rested upon the community’s proper allocation of honor (honor also in Latin, or dignitas), an essential part of the system of rewards and punishments that Polybius back in the second century had called “the bonds by which alone monarchies and states (πολιτεῖαι) are held together.”Footnote ³¹ The People’s exclusive right to confer honor was the engine that drove the republican “meritocracy,” and in such matters they were sovereign. We are told that when the consuls tried to block a popular wave of enthusiasm to elect Scipio Aemilianus consul for 147 although he was some five years below the legal minimum age and at the time only a candidate for aedile, “the demos” (the People) cried that “by the laws handed down from Tullius and Romulus the People were the judges of elections, and … they could set aside or confirm whichever they pleased of the laws pertaining to this matter.”Footnote ³² (A tribune followed up with a threat to deprive the consuls of the power to hold an election unless they “joined with the People [εἰ μὴ σύνθοιντο τῷ δήμῳ],” at which point the consuls and the Senate folded their hand and gave in.) Similarly, from the “popular” republican perspective, laws of the Roman People that deeply touched their interests could not simply be overruled by a senatorial decree, as notoriously occurred when Cicero executed the “Catilinarian” conspirators – an act illegally authorized by the Senate and legitimately punished by the tribune P. Clodius five years later.Footnote ³³ An attempt such as this one to interpret Caesar as a republican leader necessarily entails taking the popular element of the Roman republican system seriously. The disinclination to do so in the past has inevitably tended to narrow the scope of interpretation of Caesar’s political interventions, implicitly trivializing them from the outset as nothing more than demagogic machinations rather than as responses (typical in principle for Roman elite actors) to the perceived needs and demands of Roman voters, shaped by traditional norms to which virtually all Roman citizens subscribed to a greater or lesser degree.Footnote ³⁴

As will be evident from my emphasis thus far on voters and voting, the “people” I am speaking of in this book are “the People” as a constitutional agent (hence the capitalization) – that is the people who showed up to vote in the assemblies to elect the magistrates who would lead them and pass the laws that would bind them: Polybius’s demos or Sallust’s and Cicero’s populus or plebs, a variable and complex collective correspondingly difficult to define more precisely in sociological terms.Footnote ³⁵ Unlike, for instance, the paradigmatic popularis politician P. Clodius, Caesar is not known to have possessed an organized urban network that he could mobilize to dominate the streets, the Forum, or the assemblies.Footnote ³⁶ Caesar’s following, if he had one in a strict sense rather than simply enjoying “popular favor,” is therefore impossible to analyze in the kind of fine-grained detail that has been done with Clodius’s “gangs.” On some occasions it is apparent that he enjoyed substantial support from distinct sectors of society (e.g. the urban plebs or the soldiering class, townspeople, and councilors of Italy), and this will be duly noted in what follows, but in general it should be understood that “the Roman People” most often referred to in this book are the anonymous mass of Roman citizens below the senatorial and equestrian levels of society whose political role was expressed most commonly and significantly in the assemblies of the city of Rome, but also as citizen soldiers and townspeople of Italy on those occasions when they became significant determinants of political events.Footnote ³⁷ I do not intend to imply here that the Roman People generally, or in any of these instances, thought and acted as one, and in fact I have written elsewhere of the “fundamental indeterminacy of the Popular Will,” with specific reference to the confused immediate aftermath of Caesar’s assassination before reflections on the traumatic events reached a tipping point.Footnote ³⁸ It may be possible in the future to develop a more sociologically nuanced analysis of Caesar’s constituencies among the varied populations of Roman Italy than is found here, but at present it is often impossible to avoid speaking in rather general terms if we wish to trace the role “the Roman People” played in Caesar’s political career.

A second guiding principle of this book is a strong skepticism toward the temptations of teleology and its twin sibling, hindsight. “Historians know the verdict in advance,” wrote Ronald Syme, “they run forward with alacrity to salute the victors and chant hymns to success.”Footnote ³⁹ Nowhere is this professional vice more frequently in evidence than when scholars discuss the end of the Roman Republic. Erich Gruen kindled a firestorm of criticism in 1974 with his carefully crafted argument in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic that, contrary to what had been taught for centuries, Rome’s political system was not on its deathbed in 50 BC.Footnote ⁴⁰ Michael Crawford responded caustically with a review entitled “Hamlet without the Prince”:

He has a point. Yet doubts also linger when we ponder Syme’s “hymns to success.” Ernst Badian responded to the Hegelian coloring of C. Meier’s Caesar with a thought experiment:

Is this obviously wrong? Can the explanatory power of history really depend essentially on however things turn out, which would seem to reduce it to a circular “just-so story”?

Though far from Rome, it is worth contemplating an actual case where within three decades the “verdict of history” reversed itself more than once. England’s first great republican political theorist, James Harrington, published his thinly veiled utopia, Commonwealth of Oceana, in 1656, during what would come to be known as the Interregnum, seven years after the execution of Charles I and the abolition by the “Rump Parliament” of both the monarchy and the House of Lords; but as fate or chance would have it, this was only three years before the stunning return of the Stuart heir from France. Harrington explained that crucial changes of the “balance” of property holding in England precipitated by the decline of the feudal nobility and the dissolution of the monasteries under the Tudors constituted the key cause of the Civil War by rendering England unfit for monarchy but ripe for a commonwealth:

Harrington had shown, he believed, that “the dissolution of the late monarchy was as natural as the death of a man … wherefore it remains with the royalists to discover by what reason or experience it is possible for a monarchy to stand upon a popular balance; or, the balance being popular, as well the oath of allegiance as all other monarchical laws imply an impossibility, and are therefore void.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He went so far as to predict that if the monarchy were restored in England it could last only a few years.Footnote ⁴⁵

“Until well into the winter of 1659–60” – that is three years after the publication of Oceana – “a betting man would have put money on the continuation of the revolution and of the exclusion of the monarchy,” writes a leading scholar of the Revolution, Blair Worden.Footnote ⁴⁶ But the Commonwealth crumbled with stunning swiftness and Charles II returned from exile in France the very next May. Twelve “commissioners” who had signed the death warrant for Charles I were hanged, drawn, and quartered, while Harrington himself was thrown into the Tower. (Though soon released, he descended into madness and ill health which plagued him until his death in 1677.) The speed and astonishing ease of Charles’s return and acceptance as king “made most men believe,” the pious Earl of Clarendon later averred, “both abroad and at home, that God had not only restored the king miraculously to his throne, but … in such a manner that his authority and greatness would have been more illustrious than it had been in any of his ancestors.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Contemporary royalist historians, Clarendon among them, saw the Stuart Restoration as nothing less than a manifest example of Divine Providence – God’s verdict in favor of “divine right” absolutism – with obvious implications for their interpretation of the fall of Charles I and the Interregnum.Footnote ⁴⁸

Yet the reorientation of “history” to fit the eventual outcome was not yet finished: the manifest “course of history” turned out to depend on where one decided to stop the clock. After the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 put an end to the Stuart line (definitively, as it would turn out), and with it “absolute monarchy,” Harrington’s arguments could be “revised … to fit the new circumstances.”Footnote ⁴⁹ So in 1700 the Whig thinker John Toland, publisher of Henry Neville’s Plato redivivus along with Harrington’s Oceana, could claim in his preface that the very doctrines Harrington had invoked to demonstrate “that England was not capable of any other Government than a Democracy” were now employed by Neville “to the redressing and supporting one of the best Monarchies in the World, which is that of England.”Footnote ⁵⁰ And with the ultimate triumph of the Whigs in the eighteenth century it became perfectly evident for all with eyes to see that the events of 1688 had demonstrated the practical necessity of “limited monarchy” in England. “By deciding many important questions in favour of liberty, and still more, by that great precedent of deposing one king, and establishing a new family, it gave such an ascendant to popular principles, as has put the nature of the English constitution beyond all controversy,” wrote David Hume, concluding his famous History of England in 1778.Footnote ⁵¹

The important lesson for us appears to be that historical outcomes cannot supply straightforward retrospective verdicts about the relative weight of the various causes that conduce to them. As Jonas Grethlein has pointed out recently, historical outcomes themselves also have a troubling way of changing their significance depending on the viewer’s vantage point in time: a change of telos, or end point, retroactively changes the teleology.Footnote ⁵² But how, without begging the question, can a development substantially posterior in time – by years, perhaps by decades, conceivably by centuries – retroactively change the causal structure of an event or process in the past? All that has changed is the point of perspective. And to the objection that one simply knows more about that causal structure as time passes (as the “significance” of an event supposedly becomes more evident), what independent evidence would exist to show, with any degree of real conviction, that this newfound “significance” is not itself merely an artifact of the change, just as a river that has jumped its banks and settled into a new course soon makes the new path it has cut the “natural” one to all appearances? Once the state of the world is changed by an event in an important way (say, for the purpose of argument, the assassination of Caesar), causal chains stretch out from that event that appear to lock it in place – not necessarily because of some inherent quality of the event itself, but perhaps rather because what has happened after it is causally dependent on it, in what is already a different state of the world.

Like the modern historian Niall Ferguson, then, I would take a leaf from the physicists’ “chaos theory” (for not even the scientists believe any longer in Laplacean determinism) and see history, in particular the history of events, as essentially “chaotic” in nature.Footnote ⁵³ Although the physical world remains deterministic in theory (twenty-three stab wounds still kill Caesar), in practice historical events are extremely sensitive to slight variations of initial conditions. As I wrote these words, a striking example came in the New York Times obituary of Stanislav Petrov, perhaps the most important person most of us have never heard of. On September 26, 1983, Petrov, then a forty-four-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet air defense forces and duty officer at the Serpukhov-15 early warning center, prevented a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR when, five minutes short of the expected time of detonation, he decided that the satellite warning of an incoming missile strike by five Minuteman ICBMs received by his command center outside Moscow was probably (!) due to a systems malfunction. “The false alarm was apparently triggered when the satellite mistook the sun’s reflection off the tops of clouds for a missile launch.”Footnote ⁵⁴ (The story itself was not widely known until it was revealed in a 1998 memoir by the former commander of Soviet missile defense.) To return to Caesar: if Mark Antony had not allowed himself to be turned aside at the door, if brave Marcius Censorinus and Calvisius Sabinus had been more successful in defending Caesar, or if the single death wound identified by his physician Antistius had not met its mark, does anyone really think subsequent history would have been essentially the same?Footnote ⁵⁵ Or, to take a negative example, during the rout of Caesar’s men at Dyrrachium in 48, if the panicked soldier who nearly killed Caesar as he tried to rally him had not been intercepted by a bodyguard, can anyone doubt that the course of history afterward would have been substantially different, perhaps drastically so?Footnote ⁵⁶ In historical events, as in chaotic physical processes, a slight variation in initial conditions at particularly delicate moments can produce wildly divergent results, and since those slight variations in initial conditions can hardly be controlled, predicted, or in historical contexts even fully known, we call them “chance.” And “chance” in this sense manifestly can have a powerful influence on history. Thus, as Syme suggests in the quotation with which I began this section, the fact that something happened does not mean that it had to happen (“the most elementary teleological error,” observes Ferguson), or even that it was most likely to happen.Footnote ⁵⁷ There is irreducible contingency in history, and it would actually be a serious distortion of history to fail to give it its due.Footnote ⁵⁸

Whether ultimately for good or ill, humans seem almost “designed” by evolution to overlook chance’s role in precipitating events and the developments that unfold from them.Footnote ⁵⁹ We are instinctive pattern seekers and tend to make sense of the world through stories – that is narratives – even (especially?) very simple or hackneyed ones, with characters whose motivations we feel we can understand, and which string together in a “meaningful” way the relatively few facts we actually have. “The confidence that people experience,” comments the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist/behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, “is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information … It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Narratives are (obviously) constructed on what we happen to know, not on what we don’t: Kahneman and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky dubbed this heuristic WYSIATI: “What you see is all there is.”Footnote ⁶¹ We know the end point (the telos) that the narrative seeks to explain; in seeking an explanation, we naturally sift through the known prior facts, casting aside those that don’t conduce to the chosen telos and seizing upon those that do. Furthermore, these facts have often already been selected by a process of cultural memory precisely because of their supposed explanatory power in reference to the stipulated telos. At each of these stages, those contingencies that might have been with equal or greater probability than what actually happened are trimmed off, so to speak, and lost to scrutiny, creating a narrative that is psychologically satisfying but logically circular. Kahneman pithily comments, “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”Footnote ⁶²

Kahneman’s disconcerting observation must be kept in mind when historians, as we inevitably will, protest with Crawford that hindsight is necessary in order to explain and understand the significance of events or changes. Historians as a class have a deep-seated “aversion to contingency” precisely because it threatens to undermine what we are after all trying to do – that is to explain the causes of things.Footnote ⁶³ Knowing what happened afterward is indeed a very useful clue. But historians are not always humble in the face of what we don’t know about the various causal strands in play in immensely complex interaction – of “our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance” in typical WYSIATI fashion. Take, for instance, the almost universal opinion (so it seems) of experts that although the Caesarian Civil War of course did not have to break out in 49 (why not in 48, or 45, or 42?), still some such cataclysmic event would necessarily have brought down the Republic within a few years anyway.Footnote ⁶⁴ I do not think anyone could really claim to know this with confidence or certainty. What we do know is that in 49 a civil war began that, in addition to whatever damage it wrought in itself, began a cycle of tightly linked civil wars that persisted – intermittently, but with great violence – for nearly two decades, including extraordinary traumas such as the assassination on the Senate floor, by men whose lives and fortunes he had spared, of a man whom many, perhaps most, living Romans thought of as one of the greatest heroes in their history; two battles on the Macedonian plain between two of the largest Roman armies ever assembled (some two hundred thousand legionaries); in Italy itself the proscription of perhaps three hundred senators and equites and the slaughter of many of them as they tried to escape; a revolt against the Triumvirs’ expropriations, then Perusia starved into surrender, burnt (apparently by one of its own citizens), and its leaders subjected to savage reprisals.Footnote ⁶⁵ Institutions do not run by themselves; they are animated by civil norms which rarely survive civil war (in itself the most extreme violation of civil norms imaginable) without crippling damage.Footnote ⁶⁶ “War is a harsh teacher,” and the civil wars of 49–31 appear quite sufficient in themselves to destroy the Roman Republic as a constitutional order – or to transform it into something else.Footnote ⁶⁷ Those who insist that the Republic could not have long survived even had the civil war of 49–45 not occurred overlook the tight causal nexus that binds that war with those that followed over the twenty-odd years to come – in particular, the violent emotion unleashed by Caesar’s assassination under conditions that encouraged vengeance by Caesar’s veterans, supporters, and heir – and to fall back on what seem to me to be entirely debatable counterfactual arguments of their own to defend their claim that the Republic’s institutions and norms would have failed shortly (perhaps within a generation or so) even without the Twenty Years’ War.Footnote ⁶⁸ (The counterfactual mode seems inescapable even for those who shun counterfactual history.)

“Do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history,” warns N. N. Taleb, quite rightly.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hindsight is often invaluable; the danger is one of unreflective, simplistic reliance on hindsight, not that it is necessarily, inevitably deceptive. What is required above all is careful attention to those counterfactual possibilities (those, that is, of which we become aware: many, perhaps most, will be “submerged” below our vision) that suggest very different outcomes, and a healthy skepticism about the “grand narratives” that are often constructed on too little evidence in the usual WYSIATI fashion. In other words, we should always be prepared to exercise salutary skepticism against what may appear to be simply obvious. In fact, the unique nature of history, rooted in an unrepeatable past, requires us to be especially alert to the “alternative histories” that might have spun out from small changes in initial conditions (typically a human decision of some kind). The fact that historical inference (at least about events and their causes and consequences) cannot be tested against repeated experiments as is routine in the natural sciences means that the only test of our inferences will often be the care and sometimes the caution with which we assess the probability of outcomes different from the one that in fact ensued.Footnote ⁷⁰

Here a fraught methodological problem arises: if we allow consideration of counterfactuals, then what limit exists to control our most fanciful speculations? Ferguson argues that to make an intellectually respectable basis for entertaining counterfactuals we should limit ourselves to those that are in fact considered in our evidence.Footnote ⁷¹ But this seems too limiting even for Ferguson’s own argument, and applying this standard to ancient history would surely be too arbitrarily restrictive since the source material is so lacunose.Footnote ⁷² This would be to make counterfactual inferences too heavily dependent on the often arbitrary survival of evidence: they would spin out almost solely from the letters of Cicero. Counterfactuals such as “What if Cato in 62 to 60 BC had not simultaneously alienated both Pompey and Caesar as well as the publicani (publicly contracted tax gatherers) and their advocate, Crassus?” or “What if Bibulus had not resorted to an unprecedented theory of obstructionism against Caesar in his first consulship?” seem to me to be perfectly acceptable scenarios to contemplate, though I know of no ancient source that happens to attest explicitly to these alternatives. Counterfactual scenarios should indeed be limited to those that can be reasonably defended as realistic alternative possibilities – usually a human decision that evidently, given all our surviving evidence and our always incomplete knowledge of circumstances, might very well have gone the other way. Some of the charm of ancient history perhaps resides in the greater freedom granted to its practitioners not merely as a courtesy but of necessity.

More serious consideration of historical contingency as an antidote to our pattern-making instincts may help to put the whole story in a new light. A thought-provoking example from another historical period is Ferguson’s rebuttal of the “hindsight bias” of traditional accounts of the outbreak of World War I. Today “everyone knows,” it seems, that World War I was inevitable, a result of the entangled system of alliances that bound the major belligerents inescapably to war once the spark was applied by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. In such a frame, naturally, one takes more interest in the tangle than the spark. Yet, like today’s nuclear deterrence, the point of the entanglement was precisely to prevent war. In a paper published in 2006 Ferguson asked why the bond market, which like other financial markets was highly risk-averse, was much less affected by the acceleration of the war crisis in summer 1914 than one would think if war was seen as truly imminent by lots of very smart people with skin in the game.Footnote ⁷³ The answer must be that the risk of a major European conflict was generally perceived as low, controlled precisely by the system of alliances. “War, when it broke out in the first week of August, 1914, did indeed come as a surprise even to well-informed contemporaries. It was not the long-prophesied Armageddon depicted in so many histories.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As Ferguson and later C. Clark pointed out, the tangle of alliances was no “Doomsday Machine”: the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s aggressive response depended on the signals it received from Germany; Germany might, if better informed or less eager for a showdown, have assessed more accurately Russia’s likelihood of intervening to defend its Serbian “brothers” on largely sentimental grounds; Serbia’s government, by rejecting Austria’s ultimatum, gambled everything on Russia’s willingness to face a war with two major European powers; Russia’s efforts at the very last moment to avoid the armed conflict with Germany that would result are well known; and so on, right down to the question whether Britain would, when the stakes were so high, truly honor its alliance with France or actually throw itself into the conflict if Belgium’s neutrality were violated.Footnote ⁷⁵ Ferguson and Clark move us away from a largely impersonal “structural” explanation of the outbreak of the war to one that stresses specific human decisions – human choices – made under conditions of radical uncertainty. It was not inevitable that a Balkan conflict would fail to be contained as earlier ones had been but would instead explode into a catastrophic world war. “Mistakes were made,” and what in retrospect seems so notable is not how decision makers were trapped in a prison of their own making but how eagerly most of them embraced war as a solution.

To return at last to Rome, probably few today would still be so influenced by the impersonal, deterministic paradigm as to agree with Baron Montesquieu’s famous dictum: “If Caesar and Pompey had thought like Cato, others would have thought like Caesar and Pompey; and the republic, destined to perish, would have been dragged to the precipice by another hand.”Footnote ⁷⁶ But Erich Gruen’s controversial judgment that “Civil war caused the fall of the Republic, not vice versa” now no longer seems as radical as it once did.Footnote ⁷⁷ Gruen’s battle against the distortions of hindsight was timely, coinciding broadly with growing rejection of the nineteenth-century scientistic assumptions that had dominated hitherto. This is not the place to offer a résumé of the problems of the transformation of the Roman Republic, which demand to be revisited now that views of the nature and political culture of the Republic have significantly changed.Footnote ⁷⁸ For the purposes of this introduction it is enough to say that this book is written in the spirit of Gruen’s great work in the sense that it proceeds from profound philosophical skepticism toward the oft-repeated claim that the end of the Republic was imminent and inevitable. None of this is to deny preemptively that one could construct a plausible argument that various destabilizing conditions (periodic institutional dysfunction and frequent political violence, rural poverty, and powerful armies filled by supposedly disaffected peasants under the control of fairly unconstrained generals) made an imminent, serious explosion in 50–49 BC possible, if an occasion for serious political conflict supervened.Footnote ⁷⁹ My point is simply that this should not be lazily assumed on the obviously fallacious principle of “what happened had to happen,” but proven by better empirical arguments, which I think despite Gruen’s challenge has still not actually been done.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the meantime, it remains an open question whether the transformation of the Republic into the Empire is more meaningfully attributed to the ravages of twenty-odd years of nearly continuous civil war, as suggested earlier in this chapter, than to any inherent weaknesses of those institutions before the cycle of civil war began in January 49.

The Civil War itself is often treated as a nearly inevitable consequence of Caesar’s tumultuous first consulship in 59 – yet, if we are going to trace the roots of that traumatic conflict so far back, it is more plausibly seen not as the result of systemic failure but of the aggressively inept prior decision by Marcus Cato to take up an uncompromising “scorched-earth” line of opposition against not just Caesar (a relatively minor figure at the time), but simultaneously against Pompey the Great at the zenith of his power and influence.Footnote ⁸¹ Even so, as this book will show, numerous opportunities to prevent the explosion that came in January 49 were rejected by those intent on a violent confrontation; Cicero and the many senators who to varying degrees sought to resist the “rush to war” demonstrate that there was nothing inevitable about it. Nor can we assume that the Caesarian Civil War of 49–45 irreparably harmed the Republic rather than the much more atavistic descent into blood vengeance unleashed by the treacherous, savage killing of Caesar on the Senate floor by his friends and those whose lives he had spared. Moral outrage made this a particularly potent fuel to drive cycles of bloodshed.

A second teleology that scholars have found even more irresistible (and neatly intersects with the first) concerns Caesar’s own career and goals. Syme’s comment about historians “knowing the verdict in advance” is doubly true, and doubly dangerous, for any student of Gaius Julius Caesar. The conception of Caesar as an aspiring autocrat who spent his life scheming to achieve that goal has over the centuries achieved something like the status of a cultural archetype (it is commonplace to compare US presidents to Caesar – with the intent to damn, not to praise them), and like all archetypes, this construct is hard to get out of our heads even as we approach the sources with what we feel is an open mind. As nearly all people think they know (and have thought they knew since the beginning of republican political theory), Caesar “marched on the Republic” and is widely held responsible for destroying it, while his heir and great-nephew Octavian is often seen as having completed his project of transforming the state into a stable autocracy.Footnote ⁸² The biographical tradition of Plutarch and Suetonius – both writing a century and a half after the fact, when the “verdict of history” had shaped their very world – expressed what would prove to be a highly influential teleology according to which Caesar was seen as seeking autocracy from the very beginning of his political life.Footnote ⁸³ On this view, the end determines the beginning, rather like Tacitus’s notorious portrait of the emperor Tiberius but without the dissimulation. This teleology dovetails perfectly with the other story about the “fall of the Republic,” which in its traditional version assumes that the Republic “had” to fall about now, with monarchy as the only viable “solution.” In fact, they reinforce each other, for Caesar is made to “see” the Republic for the anachronism it was and to strive actively to realize the necessary monarchic solution. A more recent twist on this old line has been to accept the former proposition but to deny that Caesar had any specific solution.Footnote ⁸⁴ And while it is true that contemporary scholars have been much less disposed to tell Caesar’s story as if its ending sets the goal toward which everything before it tends, I suggest that only by making full use of the revival of the “republican” paradigm in the study of the Roman Republic that has taken place over the past few decades can we banish the ghost of the old teleology.

A notorious utterance put in Caesar’s mouth by the imperial biographer Suetonius illustrates how difficult it is to extricate ourselves from the deeply entrenched view that he was at some point (before or after the Civil War) frankly committed to the suppression of the Republic: “The Republic [or ‘a state’?] was nothing, a name without substance or form” (nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie, Iul. 77). This shocking statement (and Suetonius certainly means it to be shocking) is often solemnly quoted by first-rate scholars as a kind of revelation of Caesar’s innermost thoughts: Matthias Gelzer, for example, ended his great biography with the quotation and a reflection on it, and nearly all modern biographers find the saying irresistible even as they acknowledge reservations about its authenticity.Footnote ⁸⁵ Others have devoted considerable ingenuity to decoding what Caesar actually meant.Footnote ⁸⁶ But we need to ask a more basic question: Who reported the alleged statement? Suetonius in this case happens to tell us, and the information turns out to be extremely relevant: T. Ampius Balbus, ultimately one of Caesar’s bitterest enemies, a known adherent of Pompey and his legate in the Civil War whose partisan pamphleteering (presumably around the beginning of the conflict) was so strident that it earned him the epithet tuba belli civilis, “war-trumpet of the Civil War.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In 46, the date of our last good evidence (a letter to him from Cicero), Balbus was hoping for Caesar’s pardon, having now turned to a safer, laudatory variety of literary activity; it is likely that one followed soon thereafter.Footnote ⁸⁸ Whether Balbus’s purported revelations (he is not known ever to have been close to Caesar) were published in a kind of propaganda tract during the outbreak of the Civil War or, as some think, only after Caesar’s assassination, it should be clear that no real weight should be given to this allegation by a notoriously outspoken enemy.Footnote ⁸⁹ There was a lively market in slander and invective about the powerful in late-republican Rome. Caesar proved to be a specially attractive target, but not even Cicero was spared denunciations such as “tyrant,” “king,” or “butcher.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Scholars of ancient rhetoric have learned not to take this kind of thing literally and we should too.Footnote ⁹¹ Perhaps biographers and historians have been so taken with the Caesar quotation because it fits their preexisting conception of the man – which it then, circularly, buttresses. Once that interpretation of the man is itself in question, however, it can offer no independent support or illumination.

This book offers a different view: that Gaius Julius Caesar saw himself, and was seen by many if not all of his contemporaries, as a great republican leader – a powerful combination, as Rome had seen before especially in the Scipiones, of patrician pedigree, “popular” politics, and stunning military achievement, with values and goals consistent with ancient republican canons of virtus, dignitas, and gloria, who measured himself and was measured by his contemporaries against models of leadership in the past rather than yet-unknown forms of autocracy that lay in the future (or, more precisely, in at least one of the indeterminate possible futures: the one that actually occurred).Footnote ⁹² Everyone will probably agree that Caesar possessed exceptional talents – he was an exceptional general, an exceptional speaker, even an exceptional writer, and by all accounts an exceptionally attractive personality, friend, perhaps even lover – but we should not suppose, for all these qualities, that he enjoyed a unique historical standpoint outside his time and place in the story of the Republic, exceptional foresight into the “course of history” and the imperial future, or an unconscious grasp of the movement of the Hegelian Weltgeist to give birth to “an independently necessary feature in the history of Rome and of the world.”Footnote ⁹³ Those who find it difficult to square Caesar’s ultimate elevation to the “Continuous Dictatorship” shortly before his assassination with a pre–Civil War career dedicated to distinguishing himself as a republican leader might ponder the even more paradoxical trajectory followed by Oliver Cromwell in and after the English Civil War. An unexceptional Member of Parliament for the borough of Huntington, Cromwell would become the military leader of the armies of Parliament against the king’s violation of the traditional English “constitution,” eventually see to his execution, and die, shortly after refusing the crown, as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland – virtually an absolute monarch. He professed an apparently quite sincere Puritan conviction that he had at every turn acted according to Divine Providence, but it is perfectly clear that he had not contemplated the removal, much less the execution, of the king, not to mention his own replacement of that monarch (though not as “king”), much before those events actually confronted him.Footnote ⁹⁴ Events have their own logic and open up possibilities that had never been contemplated, and would probably have been vehemently rejected beforehand.

In general, as the criminal courts do, in this study I have tried to be as resistant as I am able to “character evidence” – that is the very human tendency to feel we know somebody’s character traits well enough to treat that acquaintance as evidence in its own right when we interpret that person’s actions. People often feel they know Caesar quite well: an example, more explicit than most but not entirely unrepresentative, is Ridley’s suggestion that we can be sure, “if we know anything about his personality,” what would be Caesar’s choice among the alternatives he faced before crossing the Rubicon.Footnote ⁹⁵ One suspects that “we know” this because in fact that is what happened. But there is a good reason why the Common Law places such tight restrictions on “character evidence”: what we think we know about the character of a person who is not our intimate may be nothing more than prejudice, or wrongly inferred from the result, or – in the context of historical study – a communis opinio so long established that it seems hardly open to question. We must not, I insist, allow assumptions about Caesar’s “natural” inclinations, which are so easy to draw from hindsight and are inevitably but fallaciously colored by his assumption of the “permanent dictatorship” shortly before his assassination, to guide or determine our interpretations of his many actions and decisions over the two decades (roughly) that preceded that moment.

Much as I would like to establish a definitive new interpretation of Caesar as a historical figure, a more realistic goal for what follows would be to induce my readers to join me in a kind of thought experiment whose purpose would be to prompt a radical rethink by removing the encrusted patina of a hoary dominant narrative so persistent and enduring that it is hard even to envision any alternative, much less summon the will to challenge it. I hope to dismantle the tired, but still largely dominant dichotomy between Caesar and “the Republic” so that it may become possible to see him more clearly and accurately as a representative of Roman republican traditions of leadership in a regime combining popular power with aristocratic achievement. Caesar offers an illuminating test case for current debates about popular participation and the complex construction of republican legitimacy from popular as well as senatorial perspectives. These debates have been conducted thus far in a somewhat abstract way removed from the course of events; by painstakingly following Caesar’s tumultuous career we can put them to a more satisfying empirical test and reveal their explanatory power in a connected series of concrete historical moments.

The focus on Caesar, even in relation to the Roman People, will seem misguided to some. Let me try to reassure them. This book is not a covert plea for a return to nineteenth-century “great man history” according to which “all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Caesar and his political choices are of course very far from constituting the whole story of the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Empire, even of the crises of the 50s and 40s. Yet the experience of our own times may well convince us that men and women with their hands on the levers of power have often managed to wreak enormous havoc with institutions and human lives, and if that is so then they probably have also sometimes done some good. The hopes invested and the passions unleashed in our own national elections appear to prove that on the whole we are convinced that it actually does matter who is put in charge, even though we surely all recognize that deep, impersonal forces create the landscape in which leaders must operate, often blindly. But Julius Caesar played a central role in the crises of the 50s and 40s, and therefore a fresh look at his decisions and actions should cast considerable light on those crises, though it will of course not suffice alone as an explanation. This cannot be, and is not intended to be, a political history of the last two decades of the Republic: the actions of other major players, including his eventual rival Pompey as well as Cicero and Cato, are examined here only where they clearly impinge upon Caesar, and larger or deeper social and economic issues, interesting and important as they are, are subject to the same criterion of inclusion. A full reexamination of the transformation of the Republic (perhaps overdue) would require a much more comprehensive approach than I am able to offer here. Yet surely Caesar’s role is an important part of that story, and I hope that when that comprehensive reexamination comes this study will prove useful.

The eight chapters that follow are arranged in a chronological series but are not intended to form a connected biographical narrative. They focus on key historical rather than biographical moments that I believe to be central to the interpretation of Caesar as a republican political leader; you will read little or nothing here about his famous capture by pirates or his controversial and paradoxical (“if we know anything about his personality”) dalliance with the twenty-one-year-old Cleopatra in Egypt while the die-hard Pompeians regrouped in Africa. Various interesting topics that intersect with Caesar’s story must here be laid aside in order to preserve my intended focus: you will have to look elsewhere for an examination of his attitude and policy toward the Empire and the newly conquered domains east and west, including his many colonial projects, his Gallic or civil war campaigns, his qualities as a military tactician or strategist, his opinions on correct Latin usage or his (often alleged) Epicureanism, or the general topic of religious innovation, including the evolution of ideas about the deification of political leaders.

The book falls fairly evenly into two unequal halves broken by the coming of the Civil War in 50–49. I devote four chapters to each of these halves. In Chapters 2 and 3 I trace Caesar’s rise as a patrician senator attentive both to popular and aristocratic traditions of the Republic up through his famous intervention in the Catilinarian Debate and its controversial aftermath; in Chapter 4 I examine his consulship of 59, which is frequently seen as the beginning of the end, setting the Republic on its inevitable course to self-destruction, and in Chapter 5 I turn to his activities in Gaul as seen from the vantage point of the Senate and People in the capital.

The second half of the book revolves around the Caesarian Civil War, whose influence on the fate of the Roman Republic was undeniably powerful if not determinative. First, in Chapters 6 and 7, I examine the development of the crisis that led to the war and the confusing “phony war” in Italy that ensued after Caesar returned to Italy, when despite the notorious “crossing of the Rubicon” it remained unclear for months whether a civil war was truly on. In Chapters 8 and 9 I look at Caesar’s actions as leader and victor in the Civil War – first the famous but often misunderstood policy of “clemency,” then his actions upon his return to Rome after the conclusion of the civil wars, which most scholars regard as forcefully foreclosing all hope of return to functioning republican government. I shall suggest that Caesar’s focus in the months leading up to his assassination was on making the necessary preparations for his imminent Parthian war on an extremely tight time schedule rather than on constructing an autocracy, implicitly abolishing the Roman Republic. But I shall also argue that his preoccupied inattention to growing discontent, at both the popular and the senatorial levels, with the arbitrary actions he took toward this end made him vulnerable to an assassination that was justified, whatever the actual motives of perhaps sixty-odd conspirators, on plausibly “republican” grounds.

Caesar remains a fulcrum in Roman history, the nexus between the two great eras we refer to as “the Republic” and “the Empire.” When we study the Republic we always have Caesar in mind as the end point to which we seem to accelerate; when we examine the Empire we are always casting a glance back at his example and precedent. This I believe sufficiently justifies the kind of thorough reexamination offered in these pages. Caesar is deeply implicated in arguments about republicanism and tyranny, and the “fall of the Republic” is often blamed on him. He stirs strong passions even today, which are likely to be provoked by the mildly revisionist spirit in which this book is written and which will grate on some as “apologia.” Due to Caesar’s centrality in the narrative of the very late Republic, the material that underpins the traditional views is extraordinarily copious, and a large mass of source material is itself buried by the accumulation of centuries of scholarly interpretation. An alternative view of a “republican” Caesar must be built up incrementally over a series of chapters, and I respectfully suggest that readers judge the coherence and plausibility of the whole only once the account is complete.