In Our Time - Julius Caesar

Episode Date: October 2, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life, work and reputation of Julius Caesar. Famously assassinated as he entered the Roman senate on the Ides of March, 44 BC, Caesar was an inspirational general who conquered much of Europe. He was a ruthless and canny politician who became dictator of Rome, and wrote The Gallic Wars, one of the most admired and studied works of Latin literature. Shakespeare is one of many later writers to have been fascinated by the figure of Julius Caesar.With:Christopher Pelling Regius Professor of Greek at the University of OxfordCatherine Steel Professor of Classics at the University of GlasgowMaria Wyke Professor of Latin at University College LondonProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 49 BC, a Roman army marched south from the Alps and crossed the Rubicon, a shallow river which marked the northern border of the territory controlled by the city of Rome. The army was led by a young general called Julius Caesar, and when he crossed the Rubicon, he ignited a series of civil wars that led eventually to the overthrow of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar could be the ultimate case study for the view that history is made by great men.

He extended the borders of Roman power to the English Channel, introduced political reforms that echo down to the present day, and left accounts of it all that are considered high points of Latin literature. He's also famous for the manner of his death, murdered on the steps of the Senate in one of the most notorious political assassinations in history. But was Caesar a power crazed tyrant, or a mission? restatesmen, willing to do whatever it took to see through much-needed reforms.

With me to discuss Julius is are Maria Weike, Professor of Latin at University College London. Chris Pelling, Regis Professor of Greek at the University of London, at the University of Oxford, sorry, and Catherine Steele, Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow.

So we've got the blooms out, the boobs out of the way. I would like to start this again, but it's life. Okay, Maria. Can you, Caesar lived in a picture, historians called the late republic. What was the state of Rome at that time? Well, Caesar was actually born in about 100,

100 years before Christ, and in fact not quite so young when he crossed the River Rubicon, but he was growing up and maturing in the 90s and the 80s, and that was perhaps the best of times and the worst of times for a man of his gifts and his ambitions for power and fame to live. It was the worst of times because he was born into a family that found themselves on the wrong side of a continuing struggle in the late Republic between the traditional ruling aristocracy and the people. In his first 20 years, he would have lived through violent clashes and sustained wars between Romans and non-Romans and between even,

And even between Romans. You mean non-Roman? You don't mean in Rome. Non-Roman to Rome. I mean people who lived in Italy but did not have Roman citizenship. Which was most of them. Yes, exactly. Rome as such is a relatively small part of the Italian peninsula. But these wars and these violent struggles are taking place

because there is a desire to gain access to the power and the wealth and the privilege that comes with being a citizen of the Roman Empire. and when he was about 12, a general and leader of the aristocratic party marched on Rome. When he was 17, that general became a dictator and attempted to restore the power of the Senate and slaughtered his enemies. And Caesar was vulnerable because he was one of that man's relatives, relatives of one of that man's enemies, I should say. We're still talking about the Republic at this time, rather than about the empire. and the empire begins after the death of Caesar, although it might look like an empire before then.

What sort of power was Roma? What power did you have at this time? Well... It was a state in the peninsula, and what else? Well, one of the reasons why it was the best of times for someone like Caesar is because of the opportunity to be a general in the Roman world, because Rome was now also an empire.

It was a Republican empire. possessed provinces in other parts of the world. During this period, wars were being fought from Spain right over to Syria, from wars with the Germans in the north down to Africans in the south. This period being what? Because you've got to be specific here,

because he comes into a particular moment and does particular things. So what is this period? Well, the period, as I mentioned, the 90s and the 80s. We're back going, he's 10 to 20. Yes, yes. So in the period before he takes action,

there are already wars. So they're fighting to get an empire in different parts of what we now call Europe, even though they were only a small part of what we now call Italy. Yes. Well, they were growing and growing and they already had provinces in, for example, in southern France. So they didn't possess total, they had allies in Italy. They had people in Italy who were not citizens, but they also had provinces. So Rome is expanding and expanding, giving citizenship out across the Mediterranean. So briefly, what impact did this empire have on this? state. So you have a smallish state in the peninsula with empire burgeoning. Yes. What impact did it have on the

feeling that that state had about itself? Well, that's a very good point because it's one, it's regarded as one of the reasons why in the end the Roman Empire had such difficulties that as it expanded and expanded, it didn't have the right kind of concentrated administration to govern the huge territories that that it was now taking over. Catherine Steele, would you tell us more about Julius Caesar's family and its standing in Roman society and how that helped him? Well, the Juli Kaisare's were patrician in status,

which means that Caesar could claim dissent from the families that had been powerful in Rome even before the expulsion of the kings, and in his case, of course, dissent back to Aeneas and threw him to Venus. But by this point, the late republic, patrician status had ceased to be of any of very much political consequences.

Can I just be a little bit more explicit about patrician status? Did that mean they inherited property, inherited rights? What did it mean? Mail-line descent, no property essentially, no particular political rights because from one of the great conflicts in the early republic is plebeian struggle for political equality. So by this period, there's no political advantage

to having patrician status in many cases. It's a slight disadvantage. but it does mean you can claim dissent right back to the start of the Republic and that still seems to have a cachet in political circles. How did he use that? Interestingly, he doesn't behave like a conventional aristocrat in many ways. He doesn't play hugely on his nobilitas or at least he combines that appeal to the past with real populism.

Maria has already mentioned his links with the opponents of Sulla, the dictator. His aunt Julia married Marius. who was a new man, no political background, no ancestry, but a great general, who became a real hero in Rome at the end of the second century BC by defeating the Celtic tribes. His mother, Aurelia, was also of use to him because she was plebeian, but she had three brothers, all of whom reached the consulship, the chief magistracy, and it's protection from them that helped Caesar.

So he combines dynastic cachet with new types, of power to help him get a start in political life. There's much talk of this populism or what it does. Can you give listeners an indication now as to how he represented that, what he did about that? He emphasised his relationship with Marius. When his aunt Julia died, he gave a funeral speech, which played on that. Where possible, he supported popular rights and laws in favour of the people. Such as.

In 63, he was behind a prosecution that asserted people's right to trial. That is not arbitrary execution. Big stuff. Yeah, by hulking back to events some years in the past. And again in 63, when it came to the Catalinarian conspiracy, that coup against Rome, which the consul Cicero took such a part in putting down, it's Caesar who speaks against execution and almost sways the Senate debate. And that's a popular thing to do.

Yes. Because the basis of that is saying magistrates cannot exercise arbitrary power over citizens. Citizens deserve a trial. Do we know, do we think this is a calculated reaching out for a sort of part? He was. I think absolutely. Where's your evidence? Really, if one looks at the range of options he had, okay, he didn't have to become a populist. He could have followed a much more conventional career, relying on oratory. relying on military success in order to build up towards high office. And he uses those tools.

He is a good public speaker. He does take what opportunities he has for military service. But he's also doing some very distinctively populist things that you wouldn't expect and that his contemporaries aren't necessarily doing. What do we know about his personality in those early years? Well. Early year, yeah. I mean, I think for a sort of man to take over half the world

across the rubicon, can still be called a young general. I'm not young in a real sense. Okay, early career, can we get some, before it becomes famous? It's awfully difficult because all our evidence about the young Caesar comes from later biographical writers who are writing knowing full well that he does become. So everything's significant? I think it's... Can you pick out a few things that you think are significant?

In terms of the real Caesar or in terms of the telling of the story? You're going to have to make that out for yourself, I mean. What do you think is important for us to know about the significant of his earlier life? Deep distrust of the Senate, I think, as a result of having been on the wrong side of the civil war between Sulla and Caesar. Some pretty scarifying experiences.

He's on the run in his adolescence. He comes under pressure to divorce his wife as a late teenager because she's on the wrong side. So I think some fairly major... a trauma psychologically as a relatively young man. And I think it's from that that we can trace a lot of this huge ambition. And a sense, perhaps, that whatever Sulla did as dictator wasn't enough. I mean, shortly before his death, he's supposed to have said Sulla didn't know his ABC,

by which he's assumed to understand Sulla resigned supreme power. And of course, Cesar never did that. Okay, Chris Pelling, we come to one of the first big defining thing. about Caesar as the Julius Caesar that had handed down to us, the Gallic Wars. How did he get involved in them? Well, it may almost have been

not quite by mistake, but not quite expected, as this all happens when he's consul, in some ways getting to the peak of a normal career in 59, and the provinces that a consul would go on to

were defined before he becomes consul in fact. And it looked originally as if he was going to be going to Illyricum, which is in the Balkans. So when you get to be a consul, they say you can have this territory as part of the job

description. You can go on to that territory afterwards and a province is the area which you will then have control of and it can be a job to do as much as an area and there was talk of giving him a what seemed to be a very lucrative and unprist

job in Italy. But okay, if this initially became as then a Lyricum, but there's already the notion of at least some parts of Gaul, but when the prospect of getting Gaul, which would originally be the southern part of Gaul, already under Roman

control comes into play, he would have welcomed it. And this is where he launches. Gaul offered much more opportunity of glory. And its glory is what an awful lot of this is about. So what did Italy own in Gaul at the time that he went there?

It was what was called the province, which is really the very much, well, province in a sense is where it comes from. And a bit up the Rhine. Yeah, so the southern, something like called a third of France, I suppose, it obviously had connections with the rest of Gaul as well. There were traders going there.

There had been a certain amount of trouble in Gaul, in the last few years. In particular, there was now the notion of one of these big troop movements, Catherine mentioned the Celtic troop movements of the late second century BC. This is now the Helveti on the move coming across Gaul, coming across France. And Caesar really seizes the opportunity to confront those. And it ends in, well, actually one of the bloodiest afternoons in history. history. We, I mean, truth of the actual casualty figures are all, it's very difficult to know

if they had accurate figures at all. They probably come back originally from placards carried on his triumph. But there was talk of something approaching 100,000 dead, probably at least very high five figures dead on the battlefield of Bibrak day, early in 58. This is, you know, a higher carnage than first day of Assam. And it goes on. on like that. The final numbers were probably over a million dead and that's over a pretty high proportion of a male population of Gaul.

It was a bloodbath. And he kept winning, didn't he? And he kept taking these... Can you just give the listener Samandia how much territory he took over in Gaul and how important that was for the future of Rome? A lot. And really all of what we know call

of France. His technique was to find a reason, often an excuse, to penetrate fairly deep into the, as it were, unconquered territory, win a victory, as far up as Belgium in the second year of his command, and then proclaim the territory behind as now pacified and expect the tribes in those areas to submit. And if they didn't, they were called rebels, even if this was really the first encounter they'd have.

We're talking about a period of years, aren't we, and during which he wrote his commentaries, his famous seven volumes, his own view of his exploits, which we can talk about later as may. Obviously self-serving, but how self-serving is another matter, but these are remarkable documents.

Well, they are, and there's some dispute about how they got back to Rome. Some people think it was written by book by book and sent back every year. Some people think it's more of a piece. But there they are, yeah. But there they are. And it is, again, his claim for glory, written in that very distinctive third person,

which when Shakespeare comes over, sort of Caesar shall go forth. Danger knows full well that Caesar is more dangerous than he. It's aping that third person quality. And it's, I mean, the effect of that is remarkable. It's quite difficult to say exactly what it is, but you certainly get the idea of Caesar, the all-knowing general,

and Caesar the all-knowing narrator. they sort of feed off one another way. Did he call it the wars in Gaul? It's probably his commentary. It's his own memoirs, as it were, which will be at least based on the accounts he'd given to the Senate. It won't be exactly the same form, but it apes some of those sort of war communicate type of forms at some point.

And Rea Wach, so this man is turning into, to a military monster in Gaul for many years. He crosses Oceania, the outer sea, Mediterranean's the inner sea, Oceania's the Outer Sea, and he comes to Britain. Nothing much to be gained here, so it goes back after saying Vanie Vidi-Dvici, which turned into a song.

That was somewhere else, actually. Yeah, and then while is away, obviously the political situation in Rome is developing quickly, partly because of the power of these massive generals with their great armies. Can you tell us more something about Pompey and his opposition to Caesar back in Rome?

Absolutely. And one of the reasons that Caesar was writing, the commentaries that Chris was talking about, was precisely because he needed to send back to Rome information that indicated what magnificent things he was doing for the benefit of the people and the state. That needed to be known because all these years he's absent from Rome. So his problem is that being absent, he needs networks of alliances to support his political interests,

because ultimately the generalship is not something he wants to do for life. He wants to come back to Rome. He wants to be a consul again. He wants to take on power in the heart of the empire. And how is he see Pompeius as his great rival while he's away in Belgium and Britain? Well, interestingly, to begin with, just before he goes to Gaul, they enter into an alliance where they unite their network. works of supporters to enable them to both achieve the things that they want to.

They have an additional character, Crassus, who provides pretty much the money for the three of them. And Pompey joins hands with Caesar, if you like. In fact, he marries Caesar's daughter to strengthen this union because he came back from a whole series of fantastic victories in the East and then found that the Senate was refusing to fulfill the decisions that he had made there. So he joins with Caesar. That lasts for a few years.

They renew their alliance partway through the period that Caesar is in Gaul, and he is able to renew his command there. But then Julia, the woman who unites the two of them together, dies in 54. And Pompey by then is beginning to extract himself from his relationship with Caesar. Catherine Steele, behind this, the tectonic issues behind this, are getting colossal armies and they're Roman citizens in a republic

are thinking these men are a threat to the Republic of Rome because of their great armies so in not ever letting them back into Rome with the armies they've got to leave the armies and come into Rome and be ordinary enough citizens whatever it is. This is the fight

and these people don't want to they want some most of the books he's a particular wants to bring his army with him now the biggest demonstration of that and its phrase we all now have in 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Now, how important was that for him and for Rome and for the state of the Republic?

Hugely important, particularly on a symbolic level. And you just tell us what the Rubicon is. The Rubicon is a small river which marks the boundary between Italy and Sysalpine Gaul. Sysalpine Gaul is part of modern Italy, but it's Gaul this side of the Alps from a Roman perspective. Caesar had legitimate military authority in Gaul.

He did not have legitimate military authority in Italy. So the act of taking his army across the Rubicon into Italy, that's war. It's crucial, isn't it? It's absolutely crucial. You are not going to stop us being a Democrat. No, a republic. Yes, but not everybody is opposed to Caesar in 49. Not everybody wants war.

What is interesting about the manoeuvrings which lead up to 49 is it's a relatively small faction in the Senate who are completely intransigent. And when it finally comes to a vote in late 50, there's a vast majority even within the Senate who want peace, who want both Pompey and Caesar to disband their armies. By that point, neither Pompey nor Caesar is going to pay any attention to that. But we need to remember that Pompey is at the heart of a relatively small faction even within the Senate. And Caesar has a great deal of popular support in 49.

So there we come to the beginning of the Civil War. Chris Pelling. Now then, can you just give us some idea of the power, the force of that and how it was initiated? Well, as Catherine said, there's a tremendous movement for peace. And there's a lot of things that can still happen in those last days before war break. We're talking about 50, 49. 50 is the last days of 50.

I mean, Pompey is now with the senatorial faction. But they must have known they would find it. It was difficult to rely on him. After all, as Marie had mentioned, there was a time when Pompey had come back to Caesar. And they had not treated Pompey very well in the past. There were all sorts of options still on the table. Why hadn't they treated him very well?

In what one? Oh, this was, again, as you were saying, Melvin, when he, the returning general, coming from great moments of glory in the east, and coming with an army, and this is back in the late 60s, and he had disbanded his army, rather than holding Rome to ransom,

with the expectation that his army would get land, would get settled, that he would get proper appreciation, and had been really stabbed in the back. That's why he'd had to come in with Caesar in the first place, back in the consulship, to get land for his own veterans. Pompey had no great reason to be gratitude, to be grateful to these people.

So there was lots of, of things on the table back there. The intransigence, Kachrin was mentioning, they wanted to force it. They wanted to make their case that even if you're Caesar, just as 10 years earlier, even if you're Pompey, you can't hold Rome to ransom.

They were anxious to force it. They had their general in their pocket, but they were lucky that Pompey was with them. Anything could happen still. But okay, they did force Caesar's hand, probably to go further than, he wanted to, though not than he was prepared to. He crosses the Rubicon, we're into civil war,

and as we're all saying, this is an absolutely massive move. It's a massive, and just so he crosses the Rubicon, and the Romans say you can't do that. So do they call on Pompey to oppose him? Is that a declaration of war on his part, in effect? Well, again, there's lots of peace moves, even in the first month of January. All things are still on the table,

but yes, it is effectively now war. So what does he do now? What Caesar does, he moves very quickly. Pompey has got to recruit new troops. Caesar has got his own battle-hardened veterans. He's moving down. By March of 49, Pompey has decided, very controversially, but he's going to abandon Italy.

He's going to move east, as so often Roman civil wars end up by being fought in Greece or Macedonia. One side goes east. then the rhythm of the things is that it's all thawed out on the Greek mainland or somewhere around there. It all then leads up to the battle, the first big battle, not the only big battle of the Civil War, which is Farsallus in 48. And Caesar wins that, perhaps unexpectedly. It could easily have gone both ways.

In some ways, up to that point, Pompey and his troops, even though they were less experience and Cesar's was having the better of the campaign. He was outmaneuvering Caesar. Caesar was desperate to force a battle. He does manage to force it, or Pompey allows it, for whatever reasons at Farsallus. On the day, it goes Caesar's way. It could easily have gone the other way.

And Maria Weike, the Civil War, they hound each other through the embryonic, fairly new, Roman world, including Caesar spending a spell nine months or something, in Egypt. That's right. He pursues Pompey, who has fled the battle. Pompey tries to get refuge in Egypt.

When Caesar arrives, he finds that Ptolemy the 13th has delivered the head of Pompey to him as a gift. And Caesar is said to have wept at such an ending to such a great man. But then he stays in Egypt for nine months. And here we learn about a rather different sort of Caesar. We've spoken about Caesar, the general and the statesman. but he was also known as extremely extravagant and rather debauched. He was a collector of gems and of mistresses. He was described as every man's woman and every woman's man.

And here he arrives in Egypt. He settles in the royal palace of Alexandria and finds that he is in the middle of a conflict between Ptolemy the 13th and his sister-wife, Cleopatra, who has been thrown out of the palace. And then it's pure Hollywood, isn't it? Well, then it gets really good. Is it true that she turned up, is it true that she went across in the skiff and got in her back entrance palace?

And her servant carried her in a carpet bag. Think Elizabeth Taylor. It's just great. I know, absolutely. I thought they'd made it up. But no, they'd copied it from what really. She got out of the carpet bag. He fell for her and wouldn't leave for nine months.

Yes. So, well. Chris Panley wants me to check here. Well, she is, she's revealed from this bag. She is about 22. a real aspirant to power. She wants to get rid of her brother, and extremely clever.

He's now in his later 50s, perhaps a little jaded. We are told... No, well, because clearly not, because we then have stories of love, endless banquets, tourists trip up the River Nile, the birth of a boy called Caesarian.

All this happens in the ninth month period. Scholars do speculate that he... He might have stayed there for nine months, not because he was distracted by love, but because Egypt was immensely wealthy, had been on the side of Pompey, and Caesar needed to reclaim it. But that's the other version. Can I sell how Chris's interruption?

Oh, I'm fascinated by carpets. It's Cleopatra in the carpet. And Maria carefully said bag, and that I'm afraid is right. What the original makes it clear, what it is, in fact, is it's a sort of kit bag, actually. the word is what's used for the sort of kit bag that a sailor or soldier would put their straw bedding in and throw on the ground, throw the bedding on the ground,

then throw the bag on top of it. And these bags were quite big. There's stories of people being smuggled in them elsewhere. Now where does carpet come from? It in fact comes from an 18th century translation of Plutarch where carpet is being used in a fairly obsolescent sense, even near. It's of a throw. It's a sort of thing that you throw on top of a bed or on top of a table,

just as they would have thrown that on top of a bedding. And so carpet was very quickly got misinterpreted as being carpet as we would think. And I hate to take a romance out of it. Much as I'm enjoying the digression on your erudition on carpets, I think if we turn back to Caesar at this point, Well, I'm so just spoiling for you. Catherine, can you, he won the Civil War, Caesar. Yes.

Right. Now then. Why did he win the Civil War? He could keep going longer than anybody else. One of the things in your notes, can I just in a check on? And then you talk, is that you keep saying close run battle, close thing. But he always wins. Yes. Not everybody expected to him to do, but I think Chris has mentioned the key point,

which is he had an army who he'd been working with for a years. Very loyal veterans but also very experienced and that depth of experience the Pompeian side the senatorial side had great difficulty in matching. What is striking however is their ability to keep regrouping. They are defeated in Greece

in 48. The survivors flee to Africa. This is Pompey survivors, yeah. Pompey survivors flee to Africa set up a new base there. Cato the Younger, one of their leaders. Caesar has to follow them to Africa. He wins that battle

But again, he cannot destroy the senatorial faction. They move to Spain, set up base there. He has to pursue them to Spain. Big climactic battle in 45. And we often think that's the end of the civil war. And that's the point at which Caesar goes back to Rome and it's his last campaign. But Pompey's younger son, Sextus, survives even the Spanish campaigns

and continues as a focus of Republican resistance, if you like, for best part of another decade. So let's bring the Republic notion back, into it, Maria. So these two men are fighting each other, as it were, for supremacy. Well, that's what they're fighting for. It's a civil war. How's the Republic, sitting in Rome,

looking out over the barracks, thinking, I wonder what's going to happen to us? I think there's a great fear about the consequences of this conflict. I think there's a fear also a recognition among senators that Rome is changing,

that Rome is losing its republicanism, that these generals have taken room over and that loyalty now is not loyalty to the state, but to your general. And so there is a real anxiety when Caesar comes and he goes to, because he keeps on campaigning all the time from 45 through to his assassination and is surrounded by unelected advisors. He gets himself made a dictator. which is actually a rather different term, just to be another academic issue here about bags and carpets, dictator is not quite what we think of it today

because dictator then meant a nominated leader who could take control, have absolute authority, no veto over them in a short period of crisis, but then they have to step down. So what Caesar does is he gets himself elected as a dictator, nominated, I should say. That looks like it's still part of Republican strategies. But then later he becomes a dictator for a year, later again for more years.

Eventually, he's declared dictator for life. And it's at these points that senators see quite how Rome is changing. And he starts an ambitious project of reform, which ties in with what you were saying about his earlier intentions, calculations, ambitions to look after the people. Yes. I'm not sure we can quite talk of a programme of reform in a systematic fashion. It's not quite the same as what Sulla does to entirely reshape the Republic back in 82-81,

but there's certainly a lot of legislative activity in this period. Some of it is responding to immediate pressing problems. Money supply, debt relief, settlement to veterans. Those are all issues that Caesar can't evade. He has to do something about them. But there are longer-term planning. There's a major reform of the calendar. There is, as Maria was mentioning, changes to how the Senate works.

part of that is pragmatic. The empire is now so big, you can't run it on the number of magistrates you used to have. So he raises the number of magistrates, that in turn makes the Senate bigger. So there's a good administrative reason for it, but of course a big Senate means lots of opportunities for patronage. Caesar also takes on the power of nominating magistrates. So a major assault on the principle of free elections. And that's a real change to Republican norms. And sorry, just one final point is,

whole range of measures to make Caesar look distinctive within Roman politics, so culminating in his becoming a god. But even before that, there's a huge range of ways in which he's made to look spectacular in terms of his attendance, costume and so on. I'd like to come to the god in a minute or two, but

Chris Pelling, can we just explore? Say a bit more about these reforms, these changes he wanted to make. How significant were they? And how planned were they? I mean, did he mean to follow through? is just chucking out a sop?

Was it bread and circuses? There's a certain amount of bread and circuses and trying to ensure that the popular support, which has always been there, it remains solid. How planned they were? I think Catherine's right, but it isn't a great single scheme to put things right. There are a lot of little

schemes, and some of them bigger and longer lasting than others. Some of them, more of them are political in some sense than one might expected. I think the calendar even. Why do you think the calendar is significant? Well, the calendar was certainly in a mess.

By this time, the calendar, the monthly and yearly calendar was something like a third of a year out. The number of days in the year in the calendar was about ten short. And this was handled by

putting into calorie months at not at random intervals. Why did Caesar think this was a bad thing? Well, they'd been managed for political reasons that if you are a magistrate, you can often welcome having a few extra months in your year to get things done, get things done in your interest.

Sort of time off the year. And certainly you may want to stop your opponent having extra time in his year, so it had become very politicised. Why did he want to change it? Well, partly in a sense, actually, to take the politics out of it and certainly take the politics out of it for possible opponents.

I think there is a certain amount of Caesar mine who just liked getting things right and it had been known I mean what was remarkable about the calendar was not the mathematics I mean it had been known for a long time what the right number of years a year was

but getting it in such a way that it would be regular and it would have some sort of concordance with a number of festivals in the year so you didn't wreck all the traditional festivals which were all booked of a calendar before we get to the death of Caesar which is one of the most famous things

about him. He became a god but not a king Maria. Can you briefly tell us, for most of us nowadays, you think, well, the gods are a bit higher up than a king? So how did that work? Well, in the Roman world, king is much worse than God. King is, there are such things as living gods.

You could see them around in different parts of the empire in the Greek East. They were used to having monarchs who were also divine, as was Cleopatra. But king was a completely different thing because the whole sort of legend, the whole myth about Rome was that it had been founded as a kingdom. Romulus was a king,

but then the kings had been expelled and the republic was born through the ancestor of Brutus, who had killed the last king. Rome could never have a king again, and the big mistake that, one of the mistakes that Caesar seems to have made, is not just to take on some of the attributes of a god, but to take on the attributes of a king. So he was given the honour of being at official ceremonies, being able to wear the old ceremonial clothing of a king, a purple cloak, long red boots, a laurel wreath, which incidentally he liked because it covered his baldness.

But he had all these features that looked as if he was aspiring to kingship. And then there are key events leading up to the assassination that are moments when it looks as if he is aspiring to kingship. quite publicly. And perhaps the last and the most well known, the moment when we hit our Shakespearean play, is the Lupercal, the fertility festival, where three times Mark Anthony tries to put a diadem on his head,

which is a laurel wreath with white ribbons in it, a sign of monarchy. And three times Caesar refuses it because the crowd are crying out against it. Is that it, Chris Belling, is that the key reason for the assembled friends of him? to assassinate him on the eyes of March in 44 BC. I think kingship is very important. I mean, it's a bit unclear exactly what is happening

at that Lupecalia episode. Perhaps he's... Well, the other reasons why he was unpopular and they were against him by that time? They... It depends who they are. It looks as if it's quite widespread. It's not just a few people in the Senate.

It's people talking about 60 or 80 people, probably in quite a lot of upper-class society. It was, again, some of the intransigence were still intransigent, certainly the trampling on Republican sensibilities. You can see him trying to define his position, as we were saying, trying to define his own place within that state. And it was going to be a special state. it was certainly offending those sensibilities. And perhaps he was making a display at the lipicalia of not wanting the crown,

but even so, there was so much damage by then. It does look as if he was pretty uncompromising, striking a pretty uncompromising note in those early months of 44, and he was getting it wrong. Catherine Steele, how did the assassination, was the assassination of a turning point in Roman history? No, I don't think it was. The assassins thought that it ought to be.

be, they thought they could re-establish the Republic and that that is what would happen. But the move towards autocracy had gone too far. Caesar had men around him who thought they could be the next Caesar. And Anthony, who was the other consul, Mark Anthony, one of the consuls in 44, immediately moves to try and claim Caesar's position. He takes Caesar's papers and cash box and asserts his authority as the sole surviving consul. Caesar has a great nephew who pops up. That's the man we know as Octavian, but he was very keen to call himself Caesar.

19? Yes. Quite a boy. Yes. So you have a period of a year, at least, in which individuals who want supreme power are grappling with the Senate, trying to work out what the next way forward is going to be,

and it turns out to be more and more civil war. And ends up with an emperor. Now, we've got a few minutes left. Can you give, listen to some of the... of what you think his characters like. We've talked about him in action, in circumstances, moving through this or that battle. How would you describe?

Misciving with you, Chris Belling. Decisive and uncompromising. Very shrewd. I knew what he wanted, whereas Pompey was prepared to make compromises with the opposition, wanted to be, would have been very happy to be accepted

as number one in a grateful state. Caesar wasn't prepared to make that sort of compromise. Always sure of himself, you'd say. Yeah. Yes, certainly. Maria, what about you? Well, it always has to say good things about Caesar because you always feel you're then on the side of all the Tsars and the Kaisers and the Napoleons and the Mussolini's. But one has to admire his ruthlessness, his sharp focus, his utter charisma, the way that he could pull in loyalty and keep loyalty and the speed with which he was able to achieve everything that he decided. to do.

Speed seems a key thing, doesn't? His army move faster than anybody else's army. He seemed to outthink people as much as outgunned at them. Yes, and in his commentaries he often says Caesar arrived unexpectedly because he got there so much quicker than everybody else in everything that he did. But you have to be shocked by the cruelty he exhibited. And I think it's very important to understand that what he did in Gaul was genocide. Yes.

Of the Celts? Of the Celts, yes. Yes, that's a terrible thing to do. about you? The radical, radical intellectual grasp that the Republic as it stood wasn't working and that he could take advantage of that. And see supreme power.

He wanted to be king. He wanted... It's interesting... He wanted to be autocrat. He wanted to be number one. He wanted to be number one, yes. I'm slightly intrigued by this notion of luck because Napoleon wrote about it, didn't it?

Nepoleon famously said, what I'm wanting, my general is luck. And Caesar seemed to carry luck with them until the aides of March. Well, that'll do then, okay. Thank you very much indeed. Next week we're going to talk about the Battle of Talas in 751, when the Arabs fought the Chinese for the first time. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Actually, I just... I think that was a subject... wipeout of such an amazing civilization wasn't it? And yet he read very nice very well about the sort of cults when he was talking about the British, doesn't? How he admired

the poets, how he as I understand it's a lot of times I read it. He urged on them to write things down, because memory wasn't enough, but they wouldn't write things down. Am I on the right lines? Have I read some goofy piece that I shouldn't have read about Caesar here? Well, he also talks about the

Gauls. I mean, sometimes it's quite interesting that one of his rivals Versingeterex seems not dissimilar to him and that the way he's discussed is in terms of someone who united many different tribes and generals but aspired to too great an authority and so his rival in Gaul

is a little bit like him and they're kind of as the war proceeds they're sort of chasing each other around different parts of the country so he has admiration and he's aware of the skills and the power that some of the Gauls have. What we'd ever go on to, how much you think his commentaries were self-aggrandizing propaganda, and how much you think he's giving us a perfectly acceptable semi-objective overview?

It's both, isn't it? I mean, they're not going to be credible works if they contain obvious falsehoods. And the... The apparent objectivity, I mean, you're absolutely right, Chris. Surely it has to do with how you present material to the Senate, the objectivity of a general reporting. But at the same time, they are massively tendentious in what they leave out, particularly I think the Bellam-Keebler,

where there's some jiggery-pokery about how chronology is presented in the early months to make it look as if Caesar's more keen on peace than he probably was. There's kind of very... critical presentation of his opponents in the Senate to make them look like stupid warmongers who are trampling on the people's rights. But the other thing about his writings

that always strikes me is the extent to which he actually can let the objectivity slip and write very moving stuff. I think here of the death of Curio at the end of Book 2 of the Bellam Kiwila. That's one of his young lieutenants who goes to Africa and makes a complete mess of the campaign and is slaughtered to the last man.

And it's written with such pathos combined with the objectivity of his style. Absolutely. I think it's important that he doesn't have total control, total monopoly over the flow of information, even from Gaul. I mean, he was put on the spot in the Senate because of one particular bit of faithlessness in reneging on a deal.

And again, the intransigence, Cato was saying, we ought to follow an ancient Roman custom, give him up to these tribes. He hasn't been able to prevent that getting back and there were people on his own side, famously Labienus who is his number two really in an important way

who went over to Pompey who felt that eventually the claim of the Republic was greater than him. So he couldn't rely on total loyalty though he clearly had a charisma that commanded tremendous enthusiasm among his own men but he couldn't control everything that went back so he couldn't get away with saying

just anything. But yeah, there's and indeed even in a sense the actual creation of Gaul is part of a tendentiousness the feeling that Gaul is a unit with a Rhine as one firm boundary so Germans are different Britain's are different

Britain may well have been different so you've got the tremendous achievement of conquering one great thing Gaul and get a few extra bonus points as well for going even further crossing a Rhine getting into Britain

as well going beyond the bounds of what you've done to go get even more glory. I didn't get a sense of his ferocity from. He must have been a perrocious man, wasn't it? I mean, he was, I mean, killing. Extremely ruthless, especially on the battlefield. But clever as well, because one of the striking things politically that he did... Oh, Tom's here, so we're officially at an end, his Victoria,

so we can keep talking about it. Now we're officially at an end. There are many more radio for arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.ukh slash radio four.