Julius Caesar Biography

(born July 12/13, 100? , Rome [Italy]—died March 15, 44 , Rome) celebrated Roman general and statesman, the conqueror of Gaul (58–50 ), victor in the Civil War of 49–45 , and dictator (46–44 ), who was launching a series of political and social reforms when he was assassinated by a group of nobles in the Senate House on the Ides of March.

Caesar changed the course of the history of the Greco-Roman world decisively and irreversibly. The Greco-Roman society has been extinct for so long that most of the names of its great men mean little to the average, educated modern man. But Caesar's name, like Alexander's, is still on people's lips throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. Even people who know nothing of Caesar as a historic personality are familiar with his family name as a title signifying a ruler who is in some sense uniquely supreme or paramount—the meaning of Kaiser in German, tsar in the Slavonic languages, and qayar in the languages of the Islamic world.

Caesar's gens (clan) name, Julius (Iulius), is also familiar in the Christian world; for in Caesar's lifetime the Roman month Quintilis, in which he was born, was renamed “July” in his honour. This name has survived, as has Caesar's reform of the calendar. The old Roman calendar was inaccurate and manipulated for political purposes. Caesar's calendar, the Julian calendar, is still partially in force in the Eastern Orthodox Christian countries; and the Gregorian calendar, now in use in the West, is the Julian, slightly corrected by Pope Gregory XIII.

Family background and career

Caesar's gens, the Julii, were patricians; i.e., members of Rome's original aristocracy, which had coalesced in the 4th century with a number of leading plebeian (commoner) families to form the nobility that had been the governing class in Rome since then. By Caesar's time, the number of surviving patrician gentes was small; and in the gens Julia the Caesares seem to have been the only surviving family. Though some of the most powerful noble families were patrician, patrician blood was no longer a political advantage; it was actually a handicap, since a patrician was debarred from holding the paraconstitutional but powerful office of tribune of the plebs. The Julii Caesares traced their lineage back to the goddess Venus, but the family was not snobbish or conservative-minded. It was also not rich or influential or even distinguished.