Caesar gets himself assigned Gaul as a province. At this point he's deeply in debt and also must continuously maintain a command to avoid prosecution for all of the laws he broke. 11/xx
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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At some point if I can get a moment to myself, I might write all of this up in a more coherent form and pitch it somewhere. But in any event, wishing for an 'American Caesar' would be embarrassingly and laughably sophomoric if it wasn't so damned dangerous. end/26
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So you’d reject the interpretation that Caesar was a genuine populare (who also saw fit to help himself)?
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You mean a true popularis (as in a politician in the pattern of the Gracchi)? He had that reputation and certainly some of his reforms fit the mold very well. He did a big partial-debt-forgiveness, for instance.
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