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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, Instant 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 is History, we have released an episode about the Eastern Front in the early months of 1914.
And it's Russia led by a Tsar 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 Julius 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 drug czar.
Yes.
Caesar would be a bit surprised, I think, to discover the kind of slight domestication of czar.
Well, it would be brilliant if 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 CE.
And I mean, we tend to read these lives as singletons.
I'm going to go and read Plutarch's Life of Caesar.
In fact, Plutarch wrote them as pairs, so he was always pairing a Greek and a Roman and then, at the end, comparing them.
And those comparisons that he made, He opts for a 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 um of great greeks and romans so i 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 Plutarch.
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.
The big contrast for me is we know something about Caesar.
With Alexander, you're always saying, 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, etc.
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 biographers, 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.
There's still plenty to argue about.
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 when we close our eyes and think about Rome, we think about marble Rome great shining, gleaming temples, etc.
We're before that.
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.
But if you'd come to Rome in 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 Julians ancient patrician family, which traces its ancestry all the way back to venus.
But they, they live in an area called the subara, which over time has been de-gentrified, hasn't it?
Yeah, i mean it's, i can't think of a modern equivalent, but um, it's.
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.
But most of not all, but most of the big bits of Roman imperial expansion have been 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.
So 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 emperour.
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 magistracies, 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 were in that political game.
But nobody, and this is the basic principle.
Nobody is for any length of time becoming above the others.
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 praetors, all these kind of various officials, they tend to like them to come from families that they know.
Yes yeah yes yes, i mean there's there's, even the most radical and caesar, in some ways, is going to turn out to be the most radical are from um 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, you know, well suited to running a small city state in 400 BC regular turnover of office, nobody kind of nobody having much power, but it's 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 essentially means levies, are starting to become private militias of generals who are overseas for lengthy periods of time.
The competition in Roman political life is turning bloody.
And there's a civil war when he's 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 a sense, what it does with Caesar.
Thanks for listening.
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Mary and I will be back next week with Gladiators and we'll be having a particular look at the story of Spartacus.
