Bret Devereaux

So Caesar proceeds to go on a ten-year rampage of blood in Gaul, attacking the Helvetii, who were friendly and pointedly had avoided entering Roman territory. Caesar's action appears utterly unprovoked, though he does his best to disguise this in his Comentarii. 12/xx

As @PenarthKate notes in her book on these campaigns, "the conquest of Gaul was an aggressive war of expansion led by a general who was seeking to advance his career and standing amongst his peers." 13/xx

To do that, Caesar needed a big war, with lots of loot and captives and so he makes sure he has that. There is robust debate about the degree to which Caesar's numbers can be trusted (some are outlandish)... 14/xx

...but certainly by Caesar's own account the quantity of killing and enslavement amounted to genocide. Caesar's claims to have killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands of people out of a region which probably only had a total population of perhaps 5m. 15/xx

Anyway, so Caesar butchers people who weren't even enemies of Rome for political gain for 10 years until 49, when his command is set to be up. Since that would make him liable for prosecution for all of the crimes he did, he decides to overthrow the republic instead. 16/xx

That precipitates a civil war which really doesn't end until almost 14 years after Caesar's death (he dies in 44). It turns out to be an *exceptionally* bad time, for everyone. 17/xx

Almost every Roman prominent at the time of Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 is dead by the end of the conflict in 31, nearly all of them dying violently. While Caesar himself makes a great show of his clemency (he even prints it on coins)...18/xx

...and tends to pardon captured opponents, a lot of his enemies - Gnaeus Pompey, Cato the Younger, Metellus Scipio, etc. are either killed in battle, commit suicide rather than be captured, or (in Pompey's case) are assassinated (in a misguided effort to curry favor). 19/xx

But Caesar makes effectively no plans on how to institutionalize his rule on victory - he instead ends up offending the senate and too openly toys with being king (Seut. Caes. 79; Plut. Caes. 61), which leads to his assassination. 20/xx

To be clear, Caesar was fairly popular, but Caesar being king was not - the crowds cheered when he made a show of refusing the crown (one rather assumes, given the episode, he had wanted them to cheer that he accept it, but they did not, Plut. Caes. 61.5-10). 21/xx

In power as dictator, then dictator perpetuo (dictator-forever) Caesar did a lot of stuff, though it is hard to say he had a coherent political program. He mostly did what was popular in order to maintain his evidently fragile position. 22/xx

What he most certainly didn't do was put Rome on a firm foundation. Upon his assassination in 44, his lieutenants, pardoned foes, former friends and his own adopted son Octavian promptly set in to murdering each other in a 14-year-long bloodbath. 23/xx

It's hard to really describe in brief just how traumatic this all was to the Romans, but you get a sense of it by the way the people of Rome absolutely *panic* whenever they think Octavian might die or give up power. The fear of the bad old days of civil war was intense. 24/xx

So there it is, Julius Caesar - bloody and lawless, an almost entirely negative presence in Roman history. It would be up to his nephew to try to put Rome back together after Caesar's pride and ego shoved it into the abyss. 25/xx