Sublime

Caesar was duly elected consul for 59 BCE and, among a series of measures that strongly resembled the programmes of earlier, radical tribunes, sponsored legislation on behalf of the other two. He also secured a military command for himself in southern Gaul, to which a vast area on the other side of the Alps was soon added.

Sometime around 10 January 49 BCE, Julius Caesar, with just one of his legions from Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, the river that marked the northern boundary of Italy.

Caesar also became part of the calendar, as well as rewriting it. It may not have been until after his assassination that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius, our July, after him;

Leaving Gaul in early 49 BCE, Caesar famously crossed the river Rubicon, which formed the boundary of Italy, and marched towards Rome. Forty years had made a big difference. When Sulla turned his army on the city, all but one of his senior officers had refused to follow him. When Caesar did the same, all but one stayed with him.

But Augustus became something no Roman had been before: the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces, who appointed their major officers, decided where and against whom the soldiers should fight, and claimed all victories as by definition his own, whoever had commanded on the ground.

Sulla was the first dictator in the modern sense of the term. Julius Caesar would be the second. That particular version of political power is…

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Julius Caesar was murdered on 15 March 44 BCE, the Ides on the Roman dating system.

Caesar launched, for example, a large number of new overseas colonies to resettle the poor from the city of Rome, following up Gaius Gracchus’ initiative with a successful foundation at Carthage. It was this, presumably, that allowed him to get away with reducing the number of recipients of free grain by about half, to 150,000 in all.