Who Was The Real Julius Caesar? | Julius Caesar Revealed with Mary Beard | Odyssey

he is perhaps the most famous ancient roman of them all when his name is mentioned we think of power victory and betrayal julius caesar changed his own world in unimaginable ways and he's left a pretty big mark on ours julius caesar so the story goes born by the c-section the c in c-section is actually short for caesarea the whole story is almost certainly a myth but out of the millions of bubbles who give birth this way very few realize that the whole procedure is named after julius caesar the most famous probably the most notorious ancient roman of the lot of it [Music] the name caesarean section is just one of the many ways julius caesar is still with us i'm gonna find out how and why i'm about to come face to face with julius caesar caesar was never called emperor of rome but in a way he was the first one and he took all the powers that the emperors had over the next hundreds of years and his impact has lasted a lot longer than that this old roman is still part of our everyday language for the first time we would have crossed the rubicon he has given us some wonderfully grubby latin phrases fanny vd vicky i came i saw i conquered getting that punch in simplicity that still marks the modern political sound bite yes we can take back control make america great again i will track down the evidence to show how julius caesar rose to the top we call it conquest but it was really genocide uncover his tricks of the trade like countless men over the last 2000 years he became a master of the comb-over and reveal how our modern leaders from dictators to elected politicians have used tactics and methods he first perfected two thousand years ago [Music] modern rome a city where loads of people still come to catch a glimpse of a lost world and one roman stars in more selfies than any other julius caesar a conqueror a populist leader the biggest power grabber of the lot the man who turned rome from a democracy into a dictatorship and he would no doubt be thrilled to know that we still recognize him two thousand years later can you tell me who this guy is julius caesar julius caesar that is julius caesar it is but how much do we really know about him can you tell me anything that happened to him it's been a long time since i was at school do you know the emperor of rome he was the boyfriend of cleopatra he was indeed i know that he came over here for a certain reason he wasn't meant to cross the river did he come to a good end no he came to a bad end and i can't remember the lie [Laughter] oh um stabbed was he stabbed was he assassinated didn't his brother kill him or something either murder he was murdered he took it in the neck as they say i guess we have to start with a spoiler because if there's one thing most of us half remember about julius caesar it's the ending so if you don't want to know the result look away now [Music] it was the 15th of march 44 bc and according to contemporary accounts julius caesar was going to work very little of caesar's rome still exists but we can get a glimpse of the ruins of the senate house the building where he died when he gets to where the senate is meeting somewhere around here everybody's chatting and gossiping until caesar takes his seat at that point one of his friends apparently wanting to ask him a favor goes over to his chair and pulls on his token that's the signal suddenly 20 or more of them friends colleagues politicians surround him out come their daggers and everyone has a go into caesar's face his thighs his chest caesar fights back with the only weapon he's got it was his pen and it's hopeless there's mess and panic everywhere and everybody's scarpers that's what everybody knows about julius caesar he gets killed he wasn't the only famous roman to meet a bloody end but no other has captured our imagination in quite the same way the scene of caesar's murder has been immortalized in hundreds of paintings and in william shakespeare's tragedy julius caesar it was in fact shakespeare who coined the famous phrase et tu brute you too brutus that caesar is supposed to have cried out when he saw one of his dearest friends wielding a dagger words we still use today as a shorthand for disloyalty and backstabbing maybe something we hear a bit too often in modern politics but how and why did julius caesar end up literally and metaphorically stabbed in the back how could a rich but frankly not a-list aristocrat gained such power that the only way to get rid of him was to kill him the realm that caesar was born into in 100 bc wasn't a bit like the ancient rome we see in the movies it was super powerful all right but there's no coliseum no gleaming white marble all that came later caesar's rome was home to about a million people most of them living in pretty squalid low-rise brick buildings it was a sort of democracy that's to say everybody had a vote apart from the women and the slaves but real power was in the hands of a few rich aristocratic families like caesar's how very different from now eh so this was not yet the rome ruled by emperors it was a democracy where power was never in the hands of one person for too long [Music] but caesar would change all that looking back on it you can almost see his rise to power as a brilliantly executed strategy game a master class in how to be top and engineer the ultimate power grab one that would become a manual for leaders right up to now and step one was simple rewrite your own history caesar wasn't always marked out for success but like all so-called great men almost every aspect of his early life was eventually spun to suggest that he was in caesar's case right back to his birth c-section or not it's a kind of creation myth the truth is that his early career was actually pretty ordinary playing by the rules like all roman posh boys he does with a military service he stands for a few political offices and we really don't know much about the details what we do know for sure is he pretty soon becomes rather good at the gambits and the strategy and he makes some really clever moves and eventually he starts to change the rules themselves and if he starts out with a little chap like this he turns out to be pretty much like a king and according to a later legend there was a dramatic life-changing turning point in 69 bc caesar was sent to spain as an elected official of the republic of rome like dozens of other young administrators he was taking his first big step on the roman political ladder by this time through a combination of conquest and alliance the power of rome extended through the whole of italy into north africa the middle east southern france and most of spain and it was on a tiny island off the coast of spain near cadiz that caesar was later said to have had the encounter that changed the course of his life it was with the most glamorized well to me the most murderous ancient greek general of them all king alexander the great who by the age of 33 had conquered half the known world the story goes that somewhere around here caesar actually came face to face with a statue of alexander the great and he started to cry isn't it terrible he said to his friends that at my age alexander was already king of so much of the world but look at me i've done nothing at all remarkable yet [Music] nothing survives of the temple that once housed the statue and we don't even know if the whole story is true but it became a key chapter in caesar's legend this is a much later attempt to capture the scene it's the statue of alexander here and caesar is admiring it in this rather splendid red outfit and some particularly natty shoes in fact ever after artists and writers have reimagined this encounter as a turning point in caesar's life we all do it if you wanted i guess i could give you the turning point when i decided to become a classicist in reality of course it's all much more complex for me certainly for caesar all the same people have often fixed on this occasion as the moment when caesar became caesar true or not this is the symbolic moment when caesar the ordinary administrator turned into caesar the wannabe top dog [Music] if step one in caesar's rise to power was mythologizing his early life step two was winning the loyalty and devotion of the military it's something that he and later leaders would come to rely on and ten years after that defining encounter with alexander the great he got his chance [Music] after a series of political trade-offs and backstairs deals caesar was elected consul the highest political office there was at the time only two were appointed each year and that made him one of the principal power brokers in rome and with that kind of political power came a big military command caesar left italy to lead the conquest of gaul a vast territory that included modern-day france belgium and luxembourg it was in gaul that caesar got to lay the foundations on which all his later successes in some way would be built a loyal army one man who can help us see how he managed this is admiral lord west who understands caesar's campaigns from a rather different point of view to mine i met him fittingly i guess in the shadow of a roman military memorial in gaul julius caesar i think was a brilliant strategist he understood how he should divide and split up his enemies not fight too many of them at once he understands that the political background that he was working against he had a very clear concept of what his aim was but what he manages to do he manages to get those guys just i mean first of all to slaughter the enemy nastily how do you get people to do that because that must be part of the secret basically he they felt he was part of them he he took the same risks he led from the front uh he understood about the fighting and you're right it was visceral and unpleasant and nasty killing 10 000 people in those days meant you had to kill with a sword or a stabbing right up kill 10 000 people um but he made each one of them feel that they were individuals he won he won there's nothing like having a man who wins to be your commander if you have a man who's your command who keeps winning you jolly well like that and when you look at that totality then it's a cohesive and they felt part of something bigger is that what generals do now is it always the same well the morale and the focus on the individual is is as important today as it was then i mean that actually is crucial if you don't do that you will not win i want you to be absolutely frank on this one you've got scruffy prof here do you think you could turn her into a good soldier and how i think because you have a belief in certain things and a focus i think i could make you be quite unpleasant on the battlefield to somebody else there goes my pacifist credentials a stroke but what was it like for the ordinary squaddy to fight for caesar there's one curious museum treasure that offers us an unexpected glimpse of the world of the roman battlefield from the bottom up i've waited for ages to get my hands on these strange little things because they give us one of the few glimpses we can get of what life was like for the ordinary soldier in an army camp in caesar's day because what these are are the ancient equivalent of bullets they're called sling bolts and you put them at the end of the cord you wore the cord let the bullet go and it does its deadly work but what's really interesting about them is that they've got either scratched on them or more often molded actually into the lead they've got messages to take to your enemy now we're in a way familiar with that bombs in world war ii often had rather rude messages scrawled on the side run out of run that kind of thing these roman ones are actually rather ruder but this one says puffy k the only way you could translate that i suppose is um your bucket from a very academic point of view this one's the most interesting it's aimed at one of the women one of the prominent women on the other side called fulvia you can see her name there very clearly and it says petto i'm going for the landicam of fulvion that is the first example in latin of the use of the word clitoris i'm going for fulvia's clitoris now it's blokish it's rude i think we also have to remember that these were really deadly weapons deadly is right in less than five years caesar and his men had marched and fought their way some fifteen hundred kilometers to gray northern gall we know about this campaign in minute detail because in one of the most amazing survivals from the ancient world we still have caesar's own step-by-step account and one description above all underlines the brutality and the obedience of his men as they fought a battle against native tribes caesar describes this battle in detail he talks about his own lightning speed and how he met the enemy at confluentium at the confluence of two rivers he hemmed them in so that they despaired being able to flee away fugar desperata and a large number of them magno numero were killed the rest threw themselves in flumen into the river goes on to say that this tribe and once numbered over 400 000 people and he implies that there were not very many left archaeologist nico roymans has identified the location of the battle and its grisly legacy caesar describes a dramatic massacre here taking place in 55 bc and we indeed have this kind of archaeological material in huge quantities you can really see just how deadly caesar's campaigns were when you look at the fines that you've got here it's a human skull of an adult male about 60. this man has actually had his face cut off yeah with a sword there's a single sword blow this is part of a female skull and there is a hole here above one of the eyes caused by a spearhead or a sword point so the casualties include then women and children we have also bones of children it was disquiet as a battle by caesar but in fact it was one mass one large massacre it was an attempt to to massacre the complete population here it tends to make real some of the claims that people now make that what caesar was doing in in gaul um it was we call it conquest but it was really genocide yeah i think we can use that um this was a landscape of terror more or less killing fields yeah yeah killing fields in that mid first century bc [Music] julius caesar has always had the number one reputation as great conqueror he's a towering hero among generals ancient and modern but my problem is it's such a sanitized view of ancient warfare it's easy enough to glorify a conquering general like caesar 2000 years ago when you don't see the collateral damage when you don't see the innocent victims you don't hear their voices you don't even know their names now we watch the maimed children in hospital on our televisions that makes it a lot harder to glorify conquest but leadership isn't only about conquest it's about commanding the unquestioning loyalty of your men and caesar's men would follow him to the ends of the earth in 55 bc caesar decided to cross the channel and check out what the land he could see on the other side was all about almost a hundred years before roman armies actually conquered britain caesar became the first roman we know to have set foot on british soil he landed here in kent this wasn't conquest it was exploration more like a moon landing really because for the romans britain really was beyond the final frontier when they got here they did actually find themselves face to face little blue men now it was in fact julius caesar who's given us the first surviving eyewitness account of us and there's good news in it for the people of kent this is some of what he's got to say uh and all the people there by far the most sophisticated humanism are those who inhabit kent which is a seaside region not very different from gaul but all the britons die themselves with wood which gives them a blue color that makes them really awful to look at horidoras in battle they let their hair grow long and every part of their body is shaved except their head and their upper lip they're mustachioed now i don't really recognize myself in that description but that really is the first time that the british enter real history caesar's writings didn't just record events his accounts cast him as a roman hero a kind of soldier adventurer and that's where their true purpose comes in they are propaganda for a contemporary roman audience it was if you like step three in caesar's handbook for would-be leaders set the news agenda caesar had the problem all politicians have how do you keep yourself in the public eye how do you get your message across today that's done by twitter 24 hour news and the internet caesar had none of that but that's where those step-by-step accounts of his conquests come in because i don't think that they were written just to help out historians 2 000 years later those accounts actually make pretty odd reading now because he didn't write i did this and then i did that and then i did the other what you wrote was caesar did this and then caesar did that now that could be because he was frightfully pompous but much more likely as he wrote this stuff to be read out in rome directly to the roman people by one of his staff when he was hundreds of miles away let's give it a try friends romans countrymen i am bringing you dispatches from goal caesar as always hurries ahead to be in the very midst of the battle you can spot him from the distinctive color of his uniform but caesar again as always goes ahead to harass the enemy he sends them packing impressed yes triumphant stuff and i'll bring you more news soon hail caesar come on hail caesar hail cedar [Applause] in his written accounts caesar gave the romans in the streets something and somebody to celebrate you might say he whipped up national pride and never more successfully than in one particular report of a later victory writing the story down and reading it out isn't enough caesar absolutely grasped the value of a good sound bite sami vidi leaky i came i saw i conquered these must be the most famous words that caesar ever wrote they're probably the most famous words in the whole of the latin language they've got tremendous zing rhythm and every point i won i can't think of them as the forerunners of some of our best slogans yes we can education education education even caesar's contemporaries were impressed with a punch and the genius brevity it's all a lot less than the average tweet come to think of it i might actually send it to the world's most famous tweeter at potus there you are donald mr president please enjoy caesar knew exactly how important it was to get your message across directly to the people it's something that robert harris who has written about ancient and modern politics gets very well caesar he also he didn't write quite as much as you but he he wrote a huge amount who was very unusual in the ancient world in surviving and what do you make of them well i think they show that he was a master of propaganda so if one imagines what it must have been like when the herald or whoever appeared in the forum the crowd gathering people going come on look let's see what he's done now and the things that he was doing of course were because someone said landing in britain was like the trip to the moon it was astonishing that one of their citizens was doing this so a lot of ordinary people they really like to hear that you know they really like to see their leaders are cutting it out there and anyone who gets in their way gets it you know make rome great again uh it seems to be the kind of message that's coming through these commentaries of course you know it's quite a common phenomenon for politicians to refer to themselves in the third person you know look at president trump he often refers in tweets to president trump has done this or the other and cedar's appealing to the socially excluded just like some modern populists exactly and the more outrageous he was the more people he killed the more he flaunted his own misdemeanors the better they liked him one of the things you want to do if you're in either caesar or trump's position is kind of bypass the rest of the political structure and speak to the citizens directly yes what he did which i think is very modern is that although he was himself immensely wealthy he nevertheless managed to appeal over the head of what he called a rotten and corrupt elite all great dictators in a way or charismatic leaders uh i think address their followers directly and they stage manage very carefully the form in which they do it obviously hitler with his rallies caesar the same and would all will be different without him yes i think that caesar is one of the architects of the modern world i have no doubt that the world would have been of a different place if if julius caesar hadn't been born and there aren't many figures in history of whom that can be said by 50 bc caesar could say that the job in goal was more or less done [Music] he had the love of the people at home and the loyalty of his army a dangerous combination it made his fellow politicians back in rome increasingly nervous [Music] victory and gaul brought new problems for caesar the metropolitan elite in rome who were a pretty conservative bunch decided that his military job was over they thought that he'd gone all together too far too fast and that his appeals to the roman people were dangerous they had in mind to get him back and to impeach him for legal irregularities real or imagined committed years before caesar had been backed into a corner either he went home to face prosecution or he stayed in gaul against orders a rogue general it was catch 22. faced with that dilemma and to protect what he was always calling his dignitas his dignity he decided to lead his loyal troops across the border between gaul and italy and to march on rome it was effectively the start of civil war the border lay on the line of a river the river rubicon for a roman general to cross this border and march his troops on rome was almost unthinkable like some commander-in-chief rolling his tanks onto parliament square or capitol hill that was caesar's make or break moment he chose to gamble everything and take on the political establishment it's really step four in getting to the top spot your opportunity for the power grab and take it oddly enough caesar doesn't say a word about this moment in his own writings which is a rather guilty silence i suspect but there were loads of roman stories about what was going on in his head at the time the anxieties the dreams the godly apparitions should he shouldn't he but ultimately caesar gave us the phrase crossing the rubicon to mean taking a daring gamble and going past the point of no return alia yakta est he's said to have declared the die is cast or i roll the dice and it's all up in the air now the funny thing is that no one knows exactly where the river was it was benito mussolini the italian dictator who came to power in the 1920s who decided that this slightly underwhelming stream was the rubicon in his march on rome he was trying to reconstruct exactly the route taken by julius caesar in a way to cast himself as the new caesar but in reality mussolini took the train caesar's crossing of the rubicon has long been seen as a symbol of single-minded determination and risk-taking and not just by mussolini for caesar's fellow politicians it was of course an act of aggression a coup d'etat and it plunged rome into civil war [Music] the fighting dragged on across the roman world for years but to all intents and purposes caesar had control of the city itself within a matter of months he was elected dictator a perfectly traditional office in ancient rome reserved for times of crisis which placed power in the hands of a single individual for a short time caesar took that power for a year and now effectively ruled rome it's easy to imagine that caesar crosses the rubicon one minute and gets assassinated the next but actually it's what happens in the five years in between that's so crucial and he's facing all the problems that victors in civil wars always face what do you do with those you've defeated what do you do with your supporters because you've no doubt promised them loads and you've now got to deliver and how do you make sure you stay in power some of the strategies he uses are easily recognizable to us he invests in infrastructure or at least he promises to so there's walls and bridges he drains the swamps and he has a program of song clearance and new towns and he looks out for the ordinary roman with food rations we take some measures to deal with what we call the credit crunch the bottom line of all this is strength and stability but he's also flooding the city with his own image the idea is that there should be a statue of him in every single temple and what he's doing is making rome his showcase [Music] caesar was turning into a dictator in the modern sense and by that i don't just mean winning power by killing people and commanding fear i mean he was changing the world in which he lived putting himself at the center of it and he understood the importance of getting his image out there it's a technique we recognize well the face of the beloved leader pasted across every available surface from newspapers to flags and billboards it was pioneered by caesar who had his busts sent everywhere and it's true that we do still see his face everywhere but actual portraits done from life are almost impossible to find perhaps the orders had not been completed by the time of his death perhaps they were thought to be hot property and destroyed after his assassination but then in 2007 archaeologists in france found something intriguing it was one of those discoveries that made the headlines it's only a few years ago an archaeologist was diving right here searching for remains on the riverbed he's down there and he spots a bit of marble it brings it up to the surface still dripping takes a closer look and then shouts out which can only be translated as me it's caesar [Music] i'm about to come face to face with julius caesar today the bust is on display in the archaeological museum in all hello or bonjour this is about as up close and personal to julius caesar as you can get question is what kind of image in this portrait is caesar trying to project of himself and i think one thing's for sure is it's not glam and he's got a really wrinkled furrowed brow kind of saying you know i'm working terribly hard on behalf of the state and behalf of rome thinking through politics and his neck is really craggy and wrinkly with a big adam's apple this is not kind of youthful idealism this is sort of middle-aged to elderly bloke style but yes as a sculpture the holy grail of classical archaeology for centuries and centuries archaeologists have tried to track down a portrait of caesar done in his lifetime and here you are or are you the problem is it's very hard to tell whether this really is caesar after all there's no name on him if we want to pin down his portraits all we can do is what the archaeologists are all did match them up with portraits of him that are very clearly labeled and guess what we have hundreds of those there's actually only one way of knowing what julius caesar looked like and that's by looking at the tiny little images on his coins which are named but these coins were much more revolutionary than they seem we take it absolutely for granted that we'll find the queen's head on our currency and we assume that one obvious type of political propaganda is seeing the mug shot of the dear leader blasted everywhere but julius caesar was the first person to get into that he was the very first person in the west systematically to put his head on the coinage it must have been actually quite shocking every time you went to pay for a glass of wine or for a takeaway or for the ancient equivalent of a cup of coffee you were paying with him that's to say romans went around with julius caesar in their pockets i did try voila some people may have found the idea of carrying caesar's face around in their pockets a bit big-headed the ordinary romans loved him he was seen as the anti-establishment candidate not part of the roman metropolitan elite and he knew the value of keeping the people happy what a later roman satirist would describe as bread and circuses caesar was generous to the roman people on a spectacular scale it was a hundred years before the colosseum was built so he gave his gladiator shows here in the forum but the point was that caesar's shows were on a bigger and better scale than anyone had ever given before and so too were his public banquets once he gave a free feast to the roman people with some frightfully posh fish on the menu all laid out on 22 000 tables it must have made the forum feel like it was a vast free outdoor restaurant all courtesy of julius caesar but in the forum you could find more than fights and feasts this was the seedy city center of caesar's rome where you came to grab a takeaway pick up a prostitute or simply hang out and watch the world go by the forum was also the place where rome put itself on display it was here that big roman funerals happened in fact caesar was cremated just over there and it was through here that the soldiers marched with their generals after some particularly big or bloody victory my guess is that caesar's squaddies must really have enjoyed taking the mickey out of him when they passed this way romans lock up your wives they sang the bald adulterer is back in [Music] town [Music] i'm sorry to say gentlemen but most romans thought that baldness was rather silly a little bit embarrassing so when caesar began to thin on top he was awfully keen to cover it up like countless men over the last 2000 years he became a master of the comb-over but he had other tricks up his sleeve when he was granted the right to wear a laurel wreath on any occasion he found it caesar was absolutely delighted not so much because it was a very special honor but because it allowed him to cover up that bold patch perfetto you little chaser caesar may have been embarrassed by his baldness but my guess is he'd be quite flattered to be called an adulterer rome was certainly a macho culture it was full of willy waving and the locker room chat must have been decidedly unsavory but even in rome sees it was a bit of an extreme case was there anyone in the city he hadn't slept with women men not just in rome he had an affair with cleopatra long before her dalliance with mark anthony makes me think of big men ever since they can't keep their hands off women or off power it wasn't long before caesar decided that a year perhaps wasn't a long enough term as dictator perhaps ten years to be better and with that kind of time span he began to think bigger what strikes me is how caesar's virtues came to reinforce his power one of the qualities he always boasted about was his mercy or clemency he had a history of surprising acts of kindness but there's more to that than meets the eye as with defeated enemies in the civil war they must have expected that they'd be strung up in the forum instead they found themselves publicly pardoned in what was almost a general amnesty now of course that kind of mercy is always authoritarian and it's only that powerful who could issue pardons but what is the point it tells us something about caesar himself not that he was kind but that he was colossally self-confident [Music] and it was this colossal self-confidence that was to leave a permanent mark on our world you see we think of dictators as people who rule by fear state terror secret police mass killings in fact dictators have much cleverer strategies the most successful of them change the natural order so that what wasn't natural before now seems it and caesar was the master i bet that not many people know that our month of july takes its name from julius caesar the romans decided to rename the month that had been called rather unsexily twink tillis as julius or july and so it's been ever since but that is as nothing to caesar's real legacy the modern before julius caesar the roman calendar year had weirdly been only 355 days that wasn't actually long enough so every few years they had to add another month in the problem was they were pretty hopeless at doing the calculations so the months of the calendar got increasingly out of sync with the natural seasons what i mean is that it would be what you thought was september and you'd want to celebrate your harvest festival but the vines would only just be coming into leaf or it would be in the middle of apparently wintry december and there'd be bunches of grapes all over the vineyard caesar solved this with the help of a few tame scientists he pulled the plug on the old system and he launched the 365-day year that we now have in all kinds of ways it was really useful and practical reform but it also reveals something that only dictators can do change time as one of his friends riley observed he'll be bossing the stars in the sky around next caesar was becoming a dictator in our sense of the word a man who puts himself above the political process a man who reorders the world around him a man who can change time and he used public celebrations to reflect his status though he can detect certain anxieties this is a version of a 15th century painting which shows just how preoccupied later ages were too with the image of the triumphant caesar what you've got here is julius caesar thinning a bit on top sitting on his elaborate triumphal chariot and there's placards and spoils and loot being processed through the streets in front of him but there's a moral here too in these figures caesar on the chariot and this slave standing behind him who's about to crown him with a laurel wreath now we know from roman writers that what this slave did throughout the procession for every victory parade was he whispered into the ear of the general all the time remember you're a man remember you're a man remember you're a man the idea was that anybody who had this kind of lavish ceremonial would be very likely to forget that they were just an ordinary human being so this in a way is a reminder to julius caesar not to get above himself all the same caesar was aware of the popular power of a good military parade something later leaders have been quick to adopt even the democratic west displays of military might have long been part of our national tradition from tripping the color to bastille day caesar's power over rome by now seemed almost absolute his military image only strengthened his popular appeal he was central to almost every aspect of roman life statues put up later would emphasize this power and authority like this one still standing in rome city hall overhearing traffic regulation and planning disputes but it's what's written underneath in this modern inscription that's even more to the point because he gives caesar his official title dictator perpetuous he's dictator forever now the romans wouldn't have found the word dictator remotely shocking it was a title given to an entirely traditional short-term office that was used for coping with particular emergencies what they would have found shocking is the idea that caesar took that power forever it's a bit like how we would feel about someone being elected prime minister for life and it's in that way that caesar has given us the modern sense of the word dictator what happened is that caesar made sure that his term as dictator was extended not just from one year to ten years but two forever the dictatorship was only one way in which caesar disrupted roman politics roman democracy was based on free elections caesar managed to make sure that you knew the outcome in advance and he found all kinds of ways of putting himself above the rest of the political class it wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to the women and men in the roman street but his fellow politicians got very worked up when he couldn't be bothered to rise from his chair when they came into the room and anyway that chair was beginning to look suspiciously like a golden throne [Music] for caesar's enemies his appointment as dictator perpetuous effectively well crossed the rubicon it was a watershed the point at which leader became tyrant a subversion of the ideals of freedom and democracy he may have been popular with the people and he may have commanded the loyalty of the army but for caesar the price of tyranny was paid in blood here in the senate house perhaps this should be the real lesson for modern leaders be careful what you wish for too much power comes at a cost and there's always somebody waiting in the wings [Music] the version that we have of caesar's assassination makes it a heroic and successful fight for freedom against tyranny in reality it was nothing of the sort for a start if it was freedom for anyone it was for a few privileged politicians ordinary romans wept at cedar's death but you also can't really call it successful the problem of assassinations always is that it's easy enough to take the guy out it's a lot harder to know what to do next assassins always risk bringing about the very thing they thought they were fighting against in this case once the deed was done the conspirators turned out to have no forward plan what they got was civil war which ended up producing one-man rule emperors or if you like dictators forever after so caesar's assassination only served to strengthen the very thing it meant to destroy the upshot was that rome fell under the absolute rule of one man caesar's heir and great nephew octavian the republic of rome was now ruled by an emperor what i'm interested in is that that people come and they still leave these offerings this is where julius caesar was cremated and so what there is around here is that it's a temple of julius caesar they put up after his death and so you've got flowers and occasional all these coins caesar would forever after be celebrated as the originator of the imperial dynasty all later emperors took his name from that moment on caesar wasn't just a surname anymore he became synonymous with leader and not only in roman times the term tsar and kaiser go back to you've guessed it caesar and leaders ever since have done more than just take his name for good or bad they have used the template he created to ground their own rule even now and more than 2 000 years after his bloody assassination julius caesar is still with us in all kinds of surprising ways so every time you put your hand in your pocket for some loose change or have a party in july each time you consult the calendar or hear a snappy political slogan when you next think about a caesarean section or hear a political betrayal described as backstabbing spare a thought for the man who inspired all this and more i've always been a bit allergic to the idea of julius caesar the great conqueror but if you have to choose just one roman who's still absolutely embedded in the way we think talk act and judge then it's got to be gaius julius caesar dictator perpetuous you can kill him you can't get rid of him [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 265,238

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, julius caesar, mary beard, roman history, the real julius caesar, roman caesar, ancient rome, roman history documentary, mary beard romans, rise of julius caesar, roman emperor

Id: -7JN15HqVVk

Length: 58min 51sec (3531 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021