History Lessons

Julius Caesar (full name Gaius Julius Caesar) was one of the most popular and most influential leaders in Rome. He was a great military leader who was able to transform the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
When Caesar was born the senators ruled the Roman Republic. They were a corrupt group that made their rulings based on their greed to have more power and their hope that one day they would become the praetor or consul. These two positions would give them the ability to command an army.

Caesar became a praetor in 62 BC – but much of the senate were not happy with this decision because they felt that he was too ambitious and therefore too dangerous. It was for this reason that they tried their hardest to keep him from entering the consulship and they deprived him of a triumph after his praetorian command in Spain (61-60 BC). They were not able to stop him for long. In 59 BC he also became consul.

Much of the thanks for this achievement should be given to Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great) who had just come back from a campaign which had doubled the income of the Roman treasury and gained three new provinces to the empire. Because of this he had popular support and his voice carried great weight with the public at large. Because of Pompey, however, to become a leading person in Roman politics you had to have more then just an ordinary triumph.

It was because of this that Caesar, during his consulship, pushed through a special law giving him a five-year command in Cispine Gaul and Illyricum, both provinces in the empire covering North Italy and the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia. Caesar saw this as a great opportunity to extend the empire either into Gaul or in the Balkins. While in Gaul, the most important section of the Roman Army, positioned at the German border, was under his control.

He was a brilliant military leader and lead many campaigns:

• 58 BC -The Helvetic Campaign
• 57 BC -The Belgic Campaign
• 56 BC -The Venetic Campaign
• 55 BC -The German Campaign
• 54 BC -The British Campaign

Caesar wrote about all of the campaigns and went into great detail because he was using them as a way to gain political and public acclaim. After each book was finished he would send it off to the Rome so that the people would read of his exploits and remember who he was.

Caesar had all the acclaim he could hope for and the triumph to back it up, however, to get the position he felt his achievements deserved, he had to take his troops across the River Rubicon and in doing so declare civil war on the state and Pompey. Pompey, the person who had got Caesar to where he was, was sent to stop him but failed. General Pompey fled to Egypt while Caesar entered Rome in triumph as Dictator. The battle for Rome continued for five years of bloody fighting. He was assassinated by a group of senators, possibly in support of Pompey or possibly for some gain of their own, on the Ides of March 44 BC, below a statue of Pompey.