The "Tusculum portrait", a rare bust of Julius Caesar in his lifetime.
Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC) was a Roman general who helped transform the Roman Republic into an Empire. From the late 60s Caesar allied with Crassus and Pompey to dominate Rome. Their populist tactics were opposed in the Senate by conservatives such as Cato and Cicero. Caesar conquered Gaul, and in 55 BC he led the first Roman invasion of Britain. These achievements threatened Pompey, further upset by the death of Crassus. When Caesar ordered his legions across the River Rubicon in 49 BC, he began a civil war through which he became sole leader of the Roman world. He began reform of Roman society, centralizing the bureaucracy of the Republic and was proclaimed "dictator in perpetuity." Some senators, led by Marcus Brutus, assassinated him on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 BC, hoping to restore the constitutional government of the Republic. However, the result was a series of civil wars, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Empire by Caesar's heir Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar.
Shakespeare found ancient Roman politics safer than English history - there was trouble over the deposition precedent in a scene in his Richard II. Nevertheless, Shakespeare was still not simply interested in the final tragedy of Julius Caesar's life, but in the high cost of any major political transition as seen in the destructive civil and international wars involved in the Roman Republic's evolution into an empire. So Caesar's death in Act III Scene 1 is not the climax of his play, which only comes with the emergence of his heir Octavius, who who gets the last word in the play (and later becomes emperor as Augustus Caesar after an international war with Antony and Cleopatra as Shakespeare shows in his sequel). This evolution parallels other costly successions in many of Shakespeare's history plays and tragedies.
Photo by Tataryn 77. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).
