The Rest Is History - Julius Caesar, with Mary Beard

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

What is the main difference between Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great? When did Julius Caesar become one of the major players of the Roman Republic? What was the true nature of Caesar’s relationship with Cleopatra? How did he manage to defeat his enemies to become Dictator of Rome for life? And, how did he finally meet his violent, blood-spattered end?  In the third episode of this exclusive new series on ancient history, Tom is joined again by the world renowned classicist Mary Beard, to discuss Julius Caesar: the legendary Roman general who changed Rome forever, and doomed himself along the way… _______ Twitter:@TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Producer: Tabby Syrett Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude  Video Editor: Jack Meek  Social Producer: Harry Balden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the restishistory.com and join the club. That is, the rest is history.com. Hello, everyone, it's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes. on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history.

And today we're looking at Julius Caesar. Here's a short extract of that episode. Hello everybody and welcome to the third of our special members' bonus interviews with the great Mary Beard, National Treasure, world's most famous classicist and presenter for her own podcast, Instableness. classics. And Mary, today, we move from Greece to Rome and we move to one particular figure. Clearly the most famous Roman of them all. And it's actually, people will be watching this if they're getting it straight away in the middle of October. So hello, middle of October. But we're actually recording this on a day when on the rest of history, we have released an episode about the Eastern

Front in the early months of 1914. And it's Russia led by a czar. against Germany led by a Kaiser. And it's amazing that just over a century ago, Europe was full of people who were named after Julia Caesar, who is the subject of today. Absolutely. I mean, Caesar has kind of branded his name onto modern politics. And we still do that in the UK.

We have a, you know, a drug czar. Yes. Caesar would be a bit surprised, I think, to discover the kind of slight domestication of Tsar. Well, it would be brilliant if, you know, there was, the government held an inquiry into Latin in schools, and they had a Caesar, a Caesar czar. Maybe one day it will happen. I mean, Caesar is very different from what we looked at Alexander the Great last time. And Caesar and Alexander the Great have often been compared.

By Plutarch, the great biographer. Plutarch, when he's doing his series of lives of people of the past, writing the second century C.E. And I mean, we tend to read these lives as singletons. I'm going to go and read Plutoc's life of Caesar. In fact, Plutoc wrote them as pairs, so he was always, always pairing a Greek and a Roman, and then at the end comparing them.

And those comparisons that he opts for are really interesting, but one of the most obvious ones is he's got Alexander the Great for his Greek half and Julius Caesar for his second half. Because they are both great military conquerors. But I think, I mean, Plutarch has quite a few military conquerors in his repertoire of great Greeks and Romans. So, I mean, I think there is, there's the kind of added extra that you get with them. Well, you know, Plutarch is on the same wavelength as us, isn't he, in thinking, Right. Who are the really big guys here?

And just on Alexander, we're doing Caesar. That's exactly Pluto. I mean, an obvious contrast between Caesar and Alexander. Alexander rules by right. He's a king. Julius Caesar is a citizen of a republic. And another major contrast, which is very salient for how we're going to be talking about him today, is that we have far more contemporary sources for Julius Caesar, which is brilliant.

We have letters, we have speeches, and we have histories, commentaries by Caesar himself. Yeah, I mean, the big contrast from me is we know something about Caesar. I mean, with Alexander, you're always saying, well, why would he have done that? Actually, in Caesar's case, we have autobiography. I mean, we call them the commentaries on the war in Gaul, et cetera. But it's essentially autobiography, and we have people. contemporary observers. And then we have both from the pen of Plutarch,

but also from, you know, your favourite Roman biographer, Tom, your lad. We have independent biographists, not quite birth to death, because ancient biographies are never quite that. But still, we've got a systematic account written a century or so later, but much closer in time than anything we have, for Alexander. So there's still plenty to argue about it. Lots of gaps. But we're on

firmer ground here. So he's very satisfyingly born in 100 BC. So it's always very easy to remember that. Can you give us a sketch of the city and the world into which he's born? Well, the visual image of the city I think is quite interesting because our, you know, when we close our eyes and think about Rome, we think about marble Rome and great shining, gleaming temples, etc. Piazzas. We're before that, you know, so Rome is still in 100 BC a city of brick and local stone. So it's not grand, it's smelly, it's crowded, it's coming up to, not quite reached yet, a population of a million people, so it's huge. Yeah. But it's, If you'd come to Rome and 100 BC and you'd been brought up in Alexandria and Egypt or Athens, you would have thought, this is a bit squalid.

Yes. And Julie sees the house of the Julian's ancient patrician family, which traces its ancestry all the way back to Venus. But they live in an area called the Subura, which over time has been de-gentrified, hasn't it? Yeah, I mean, I can't think of a modern equivalent. But it's not glam in any way, except that, flip that. And by 100 BC, this rather on the impressive slum is ruling the Mediterranean world that most of, not all, but most of the big bits of Roman imperial expansion have been done and Rome is ruling the Mediterranean world from Spain to Turkey.

And it remains a republic. How significant is it that Caesar is born into a republic? I think it's hugely significant. What's always a puzzle about Rome or the way we speak about Rome is the two senses of the word empire. So you've got empire meaning all the places we have conquered. And you've got empires being a city and an empire ruled by an emperor. And Caesar, in fact, marks the cusp, the turning point between republicanism and one-man rule.

But he's brought up in a political structure which is built on a detestation of monarchy, and that's quite important eventually for Caesar, and a commitment to power sharing and to no one amongst the traditional elite getting really above the others. I mean, it's a hugely competitive society, the rich and powerful at Rome are competing to hold offices that we call magistresses, but then not particularly to do with law. and from that to gain military office too because military office and political office are absolutely hand in hand and you've got a relatively small number of families

who are in that political game but nobody and this is the basic principle nobody is for any length of time becoming above the others and I think that and it is And that's why it's not really a democracy. I think calling it a democracy is misleading. The people, the ordinary people,

and there are many, many, many more of those than the elite do have some power. There are popular assemblies in which the Romans decide, for example, whether to pass this or that law, whether to go to war or not. So the people do have that tremendous influence. It's their votes that make it possible for somebody to become an official.

And there's a kind of weird thing that the people, the populace, tend to like their magistrates, so the consuls who are the top two, their priters, all these kind of various officials. They tend to like them to come from families that they know. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, there's even the most radical, and Caesar in some ways is going to turn out to be the most radical,

are from old, established families. I think, though, that what is puzzling and what is the problem, really, of Rome at this point, is that they've got, on the one hand, they've got this vast territorial empire. But they are trying to run that empire on an infrastructure which was well suited to running a small city-state in 400 BC, regular turnover of office, nobody kind of, nobody having much power, but is woefully unsuited to really dealing with the issues and the problems that inevitably come with a large empire. And one of those problems is that legions, which, I mean, essentially means levies, are starting to become private militias of generals who are overseas for.

for lengthy periods of time. The competition in Roman political life is turning bloody. And there's a civil war when he's, you know, a young man. And he actually ends up on the wrong side of that civil war. I mean, Rome's boiling. And in the end, it's going to boil over, which is really, in the sense, what it does with Caesar. Thanks for listening.

You can subscribe to The Rest Is History Club at The Rest is History.com. to hear the whole episode, to hear the whole series, in due course, and to get a massive, insanely brilliant range of other benefits. Mary and I will be back next week with gladiators and we'll be having a particular look at the story of Spartacus.