The Rise and Fall of
Julius Caesar

The boy who nearly didn’t survive

Marble bust believed to depict Julius Caesar in his younger years, 1st century BC.

Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain

He was born on July 13, 100 BC, into the patrician gens Julia — a family that claimed divine descent from Venus through the Trojan prince Aeneas. In Rome, lineage was everything. But lineage without money was a polished invitation to irrelevance, and the Julii, for all their ancient blood, were not wealthy. Caesar’s father died when he was sixteen, leaving the teenager to navigate Rome’s lethally competitive aristocracy on charm, wit, and borrowed credit.

His first real brush with death came not on a battlefield but in a political purge. When the dictator Sulla swept to power in 82 BC and began his notorious proscriptions — lists of enemies to be hunted and killed — Caesar found his name in dangerous proximity to the condemned. His connection to Sulla’s great enemy Marius, whose daughter had been Caesar’s aunt, made him a target. Friends and family pleaded for his life. Sulla, reportedly, spared him but issued a warning that would echo through history: “In this Caesar there are many Mariuses.”

Caesar fled to Asia Minor to serve as a military tribune, which is where he first revealed the instinct for self-dramatization that would define him. In 75 BC, while crossing the Aegean, his ship was seized by Cilician pirates who demanded a ransom of twenty talents of silver. Caesar was insulted. He told them they had underestimated him and insisted they demand fifty. While awaiting ransom, he lived among his captors for thirty-eight days — composing poetry, exercising, sleeping soundly — and cheerfully informed them that once he was free, he would return and crucify them all. They laughed. They shouldn’t have. The moment the ransom was paid, Caesar raised a fleet, hunted them down, recovered the silver, and crucified every one of them. He showed mercy only in one form: he had their throats cut first, so they wouldn’t suffer too long on the crosses.

Politically, he climbed the cursus honorum — Rome’s prescribed ladder of public offices — with calculated patience and ruinous generosity. As aedile in 65 BC, he staged gladiatorial games so lavish that the crowd adored him and his creditors despaired. He spent what he didn’t have, borrowed what he couldn’t repay, and bet everything on the logic that power, once obtained, would solve the problem of debt. He was right.

In 63 BC he won election as pontifex maximus — Rome’s chief priest — defeating two far older rivals in a race nobody expected him to win. When he left for the polling place that morning, he told his mother: “Today you will see your son either as pontifex maximus, or as an exile.” The gamble worked. At thirty-seven, he held Rome’s most prestigious religious office, and the residence that came with it on the Sacred Way finally gave him a home worthy of his ambitions.

Vanity, charm, and the private Caesar

Ancient sources are surprisingly candid about Caesar’s insecurities. He was tall and well-built, with dark, sharp eyes — but he was going bald, and he hated it with an intensity his contemporaries found almost comical. He combed his thinning hair forward to cover the crown. Historians noted that of all the honors the Senate heaped upon him, the one he cherished most was the perpetual right to wear a laurel wreath. The wreath wasn’t piety. It was coverage.

He dressed distinctively — wearing his senatorial toga with sleeves long and loosely belted, in a style conservatives found dangerously effeminate. Sulla had noticed this years earlier and warned associates to beware of “the badly-belted boy.” Caesar knew exactly what he was doing. Unconventional dress was a signal: I play by different rules than you.

His sexuality was equally unconventional by Roman standards. He had three wives — Cornelia (whom he refused to divorce even under Sulla’s orders), Pompeia, and finally Calpurnia — plus a celebrated affair with Cleopatra VII and liaisons with numerous aristocratic women. But ancient sources also record that in his youth he had a relationship with Nicomedes IV, the king of Bithynia, that went beyond diplomacy. His enemies never let him forget it. In the bawdy soldiers’ songs sung during his triumphal processions, legionnaires openly mocked him as “the queen of Bithynia.” Caesar let the songs play. He understood that the best response to mockery you cannot suppress is to refuse to be diminished by it.

He was, by all accounts, magnetic. Cicero — who admired and feared him in equal measure — wrote that Caesar had “a most agreeable personality… exquisite politeness.” He remembered names. He read people. He laughed easily and at himself first. But beneath the charm was a processor working constantly: every conversation calculated, every kindness invested, every insult filed away. He had an extraordinary capacity to compartmentalize — to be at ease in a room full of people who wanted him dead, then draft military orders while simultaneously dictating letters to a secretary. Plutarch records that Caesar could manage four things simultaneously.

He also suffered from what ancient writers called the “falling sickness” — epilepsy. At least two seizures were witnessed in public: one during a speech, one on campaign. He managed these with the obsessive control of a man who knew he could not afford to appear weak. No ancient source records him ever acknowledging the condition directly.

Eight years in Gaul: genius and atrocity

Vercingetorix throws down his arms at Caesar’s feet after the fall of Alesia, 52 BC. Lionel Royer, 1899.

Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain

In 60 BC, Caesar stitched together the most audacious political arrangement Rome had seen: the First Triumvirate. He, Pompey — Rome’s greatest living general — and Crassus, its wealthiest citizen, coordinated their power informally, illegally, and with devastating effect. Caesar leveraged the alliance to secure the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul for 58 BC. When the governor of Transalpine Gaul died unexpectedly, he got that province too. He had been handed a license to build an army — and he understood exactly what to do with it.

Over eight years, Caesar subjugated all of modern-day France and Belgium, raided Britain twice, crossed the Rhine into Germanic territory, and fought in over fifty battles. He was not a cautious commander. He was a fast, aggressive, improvisational one who terrified enemies partly by appearing where they least expected, marching his legions at speeds that seemed impossible and striking before defenders could concentrate.

The human cost

The numbers are staggering, and they come from Caesar’s own pen. He reported killing approximately one million Gauls and enslaving another million in his wars. Modern historians debate the figure — some believe it is inflated for propaganda — but even a fraction of it represents one of the largest demographic catastrophes in the ancient world. The siege of Avaricum in 52 BC was explicitly genocidal: Caesar allowed his soldiers to massacre the entire population of 40,000 after the town fell, after Gauls had massacred Roman traders in reprisal months earlier. The Druids — priests, scholars, the intellectual class of Gaul — were systematically eliminated.

Against this: Caesar suffered genuine near-defeats that reveal how close the whole project came to unraveling. At Gergovia in 52 BC, he ordered a premature assault on Vercingetorix’s hilltop fortress and was thrown back with severe losses — a rare and humbling failure. It emboldened the Gallic coalition assembling against him.

Alesia — the siege that defined him

The decisive confrontation came at Alesia, a fortified hilltop in central Gaul. Vercingetorix — the brilliant young Arverni chieftain who had achieved something unprecedented, uniting Gaul’s fractious tribes against Rome — retreated into Alesia with roughly 80,000 warriors and waited for a massive relief force. Caesar did something that has astonished military historians ever since. He built a continuous ring of fortifications — circumvallation — completely encircling the hill: 18 kilometers of walls, ditches, watchtowers, and iron-spiked traps. Then, knowing the relief army was coming, he built a second ring facing outward — contravallation — to protect his besieging force from attack in the rear.

For weeks, Caesar’s army sat between two enemies, fighting on both fronts simultaneously, outnumbered, running short on food. The relief force, reportedly 250,000 strong, attacked the outer ring repeatedly. Vercingetorix sortied from within. Caesar rode along his lines in a scarlet cloak — a deliberate display of visibility designed to inspire his men — and held both rings. When the Gallic relief army finally broke and fled, Vercingetorix surrendered. He rode out alone the next morning, in full armor, circled Caesar’s tribunal on horseback, dismounted, and sat at his feet in silence. He would spend six years in a Roman prison before being strangled at Caesar’s triumph.

Caesar the writer: warfare as literature

While campaigning in Gaul, Caesar wrote. Not dispatches alone — books. The Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven volumes covering his campaigns year by year, remains one of the most widely read works of Latin prose in history, still assigned in school curricula across the world nearly two thousand years after it was written. It was, almost certainly, political as much as historical: a continuous campaign of public relations addressed to Romans who needed to be reminded that their absent general was winning gloriously on their behalf.

The prose style is extraordinary. Caesar wrote in the third person — “Caesar ordered,” “Caesar observed” — with a cool, declarative precision that creates a peculiar effect: the author seems absent from his own account, recording events with journalistic detachment, even as everything in the narrative is arranged to flatter Caesar’s judgment. Cicero, one of antiquity’s finest stylists and no friend of Caesar’s politically, wrote that the Commentarii were “admirable — straightforward and graceful… stripped of all oratorical adornment.” He meant it as the highest compliment available.

Beyond the wars: Caesar composed poetry, now lost. He authored two books of grammatical theory, De Analogia, arguing that Latin should be regularized. He wrote a polemic against Cato the Younger, an attack on a man he despised. He was apparently a significant orator — Cicero ranked him second only to himself, which in Cicero’s estimation was very close to first. He delivered a famous eulogy for his aunt Julia that included the claim of divine ancestry from Venus — a bold move even by Roman standards — and is said to have used it partly to rehabilitate the memory of Marius, deeply controversial but beloved by the Roman poor.

He was, in short, a man of genuine intellectual seriousness who used writing the way he used everything else: as a tool of power.

Cleopatra: the queen who understood him

Marble portrait of Cleopatra VII, 1st century BC. Altes Museum, Berlin.

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.5

When Caesar arrived in Alexandria in pursuit of Pompey in 48 BC, he found a kingdom at civil war with itself. Cleopatra VII, twenty-one years old, had been ousted from the throne by her younger brother Ptolemy XIII and his advisors. She was in exile east of the city with an army she couldn’t quite deploy. Caesar installed himself in the royal palace and waited.

According to Plutarch — and this detail is almost too perfect not to be true — Cleopatra had herself smuggled into the palace rolled up inside a carpet or a linen sack (accounts differ on the exact vessel), carried by a single loyal servant past the guards, and deposited at Caesar’s feet. She was twenty-one. Caesar was fifty-two. They became lovers that night.

What is remarkable about their relationship is how clearly, across the ancient sources, you can see two extraordinarily intelligent people recognizing something of themselves in the other. Cleopatra spoke nine languages — the only Ptolemaic ruler in three centuries to bother learning Egyptian — and had a mind for statecraft as acute as Caesar’s. She needed Roman military support to reclaim her throne. He needed Egypt’s grain reserves and treasury to fund his wars. But what began as clear-eyed calculation evidently became something more complicated.

Caesar fought the Alexandrian War — a brutal, nearly fatal urban conflict in which he was at one point forced to swim from a burning dock to avoid capture — partly to restore Cleopatra as co-ruler. Then, improbably, he stayed in Egypt for months, sailing the Nile with her on a gilded barge. He had wars left to fight. He stayed anyway.

In 47 BC, Cleopatra gave birth to a son she named Caesarion — “Little Caesar.” Caesar never publicly acknowledged the boy as his, but he never denied it, and the name was not accidental. In 46 BC, she came to Rome with the child and stayed as Caesar’s guest across the Tiber. The Roman aristocracy was scandalized. Caesar was married to Calpurnia. Cleopatra was a foreign queen. And the boy sitting in Caesar’s villa bore his name.

The relationship fed the conspiracy against Caesar as much as anything else he did. If he was making himself a king — and the Romans were terrified he was — then Cleopatra was his queen, and Caesarion was his heir. The idea of a dynastic monarchy with an Egyptian consort was not merely politically offensive. It was an existential affront to everything the Republic claimed to stand for.

Crossing the Rubicon: the die is cast

The political crisis had been building for years. The First Triumvirate had collapsed — Crassus was dead at the catastrophic Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, and Pompey had drifted to the Senate’s side. Caesar’s enemies in Rome were moving to strip him of his command the moment his term expired, leaving him as a private citizen — and therefore prosecutable for the legal irregularities of his decade in Gaul. The Senate issued an ultimatum: disband your army, or be declared a public enemy.

Caesar marched south instead.

On the night of January 10, 49 BC, he stood on the north bank of the Rubicon — the boundary no general was permitted to cross with an army — with a single legion. According to Suetonius, he hesitated, spoke privately of what he was about to unleash, then quoted a line from the Greek comedian Menander: “The die is cast.” He crossed. Italy lay open. Pompey had not prepared defenses. The Senate fled Rome in panic. Caesar entered the city without firing an arrow.

• 49 BC
  The RubiconLeads the 13th Legion into Italy. Senate flees Rome. Caesar enters without a fight.
• 48 BC
  Battle of PharsalusDefeats Pompey’s army — nearly double his size — through tactical genius. Pompey flees to Egypt and is assassinated.
• 47 BC
  Veni, Vidi, ViciAfter crushing Pharnaces II at Zela in four hours, sends Rome the most economical military dispatch in history.
• 46 BC
  Julian Calendar introducedCommissions astronomer Sosigenes to redesign Rome’s chaotic lunar calendar. His 365.25-day system governs Europe until 1582.
• 45 BC
  Dictator PerpetuoNamed permanent dictator. Wears triumphal purple always. His statue placed among the kings in the temple of Quirinus.

What Caesar actually did with power

Most narratives about Caesar treat his dictatorship as a mere prelude to the assassination. This misses something important: in the roughly eighteen months he ruled Rome without serious opposition, Caesar governed with remarkable energy and produced reforms that lasted for centuries — reforms that reveal a man with a genuine governing vision, not simply a conqueror who wanted a throne.

The calendar was the most enduring achievement. The Republican calendar was a political instrument — priests and magistrates manipulated its intercalations for partisan advantage, and by Caesar’s time it had drifted nearly three months out of sync with the solar year. In 46 BC, Caesar commissioned the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes to redesign it entirely. The result — 365 days, with a leap year every four — was introduced on January 1, 45 BC, after a corrective “year of confusion” of 445 days needed to realign seasons. The Julian Calendar governed European timekeeping for over sixteen centuries.

Beyond the calendar: Caesar extended Roman citizenship to communities in Cisalpine Gaul, integrating the Italian peninsula more fully than any previous reform. He expanded the Senate from 600 to 900 members, adding loyalists from across the empire including provincial Gauls — scandalizing the old guard but reflecting a genuinely expansive vision of what “Roman” could mean. He passed debt relief legislation, reformed grain distribution in Rome, established veteran colonies from Spain to Asia Minor, planned an enormous library, drafted a codification of Roman law that he did not live to complete, and began large infrastructure projects including the draining of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome — a project not actually completed until Mussolini’s era.

His detractors said he was turning Rome into a monarchy. His supporters said he was the only man capable of solving problems the Republic had allowed to fester for a century. Both were almost certainly right.

The morning Rome decided to kill him

The Death of Julius Caesar — Vincenzo Camuccini, 1804–05. Oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.

Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain

The conspiracy formed in the winter of 45–44 BC, quietly, in private gardens and drawing rooms. At its center were two men with very different motives. Gaius Cassius Longinus was a practical political operator who had fought for Pompey, been pardoned by Caesar, and remained deeply resentful of what he saw as Caesar’s slow erasure of the Republic. Marcus Junius Brutus was something more complicated: Caesar’s own protégé, rumored by some ancient sources to be his illegitimate son (through his mother Servilia, one of Caesar’s most enduring lovers), and a man who had spent his life constructing an identity around Stoic principle and ancestral duty. His ancestor — the legendary Lucius Junius Brutus — had expelled Rome’s last king five centuries earlier. The weight of that precedent was crushing, and Cassius knew exactly which nerves to press.

By February 44 BC, the conspirators numbered around twenty-three senators. They called themselves the Liberatores. They fixed the date — the Ides of March, March 15 — because Caesar would attend a Senate session before leaving for a Parthian military campaign. It had to be then.

The omens Rome could not ignore

In the final days, the warnings accumulated with the persistence of a nightmare. A soothsayer named Spurinna had warned Caesar months earlier to beware the Ides of March. Calpurnia, his wife, dreamed that his statue ran with blood and that she held his murdered body in her arms. A servant reported hearing supernatural sounds in the night. Augurs found the sacrificial animals’ entrails missing a heart — an omen of death to be taken seriously by any Roman. Decimus Brutus — himself one of the conspirators, among Caesar’s closest confidants — dismissed each warning in turn and personally escorted Caesar to the meeting, joking that the gods couldn’t mean to hold such a great man captive to an old woman’s dream.

On the steps of the Curia, Caesar passed Spurinna. “The Ides of March are come,” Caesar said, perhaps triumphant. “Aye, Caesar,” said the soothsayer quietly. “But not yet gone.”

Inside the chamber, the conspirators surrounded him under the pretense of presenting a petition. Tillius Cimber took Caesar’s toga and pulled it from his neck — the signal. The first blade, Casca’s, came from behind at the shoulder, too shallow. Caesar grabbed it with his hand and cried out. Then the others came from every direction. In the chaos, the conspirators were wounding one another in the press of bodies. Caesar spun, fought, pulled his toga over his face so he would die decently covered. He fell against the base of Pompey’s statue and received twenty-three wounds. The physician Antistius, examining the body afterward, concluded that only the second blow — between the first and second ribs — had actually been fatal.

The Senate fled screaming. The conspirators walked into the Forum holding their daggers above their heads, shouting “Liberty!” The streets emptied. Rome locked its doors. The Republic was over, though almost nobody understood that yet.

What the conspirators got catastrophically wrong

The Liberatores had planned the assassination meticulously and the aftermath not at all. They had assumed Rome would celebrate. They had made no provision for governing, no plan to restore the Republic’s shattered institutions, no agreement on what would happen the day after. Cicero — who knew about the conspiracy but was deliberately excluded from it, perhaps because even the conspirators knew he would dither — wailed afterward that they had had the courage of men and the wisdom of children.

Mark Antony held the key. Caesar’s most loyal lieutenant had been lured out of the Senate meeting on a pretext by the conspirators, sparing his life. When he stood over Caesar’s body afterward, he reportedly said nothing, made no threats, accepted the conspirators’ assurances. Then he requested one thing: the right to speak at Caesar’s public funeral.

Brutus agreed. This was his final, fatal miscalculation.

Antony’s funeral oration — which Shakespeare immortalized three centuries later, but which was entirely real and reportedly devastating — was a masterpiece of crowd manipulation. He read Caesar’s will aloud in the Forum: 75 denarii to every citizen, Caesar’s private gardens opened to the public forever. He displayed the bloodied toga, pointing to each tear. He produced a wax effigy on a rotating platform, slowly turned so the crowd could see all twenty-three wounds. By the time Antony finished speaking, the crowd had stopped celebrating liberation. They were hunting the conspirators with torches. Brutus and Cassius fled Rome within days. They would die at Philippi three years later, their cause finished.

The supreme irony was almost perfectly cruel. By killing Caesar, the conspirators had produced exactly the outcome they were trying to prevent. Caesar had been reluctant enough to formalize his monarchy that scholars still argue about whether he ever fully intended it. The chaos his death unleashed made a strong central executive not merely desirable but desperately, urgently necessary. The man who filled that role was Gaius Octavius Caesar — Caesar’s eighteen-year-old great-nephew and adopted heir — who dismantled the Republic as completely as Julius ever could have, wrapped the destruction in the careful language of tradition, called himself Augustus, and ruled for forty-four years. The senators had killed Caesar to save the Republic. They had given the world the Empire instead.

How well do you know Julius Caesar?

Six questions — ranging from the well-known to the genuinely obscure. See how many you can get right.