Julius Caesar
The general who conquered Gaul and crossed the Rubicon, making himself dictator for life and breaking the 500-year Roman Republic.
He is the only Roman whose name became a word for supreme ruler in three different languages. Gaius Julius Caesar was a general and politician whose career shattered the 500-year-old Roman Republic and cleared the ground for one-man rule. He never held the title of emperor; no such office existed. But by the time a mob of senators stabbed him to death in 44 BC, he had concentrated so much power that the Republic could not be reassembled, and within a generation his heir was ruling as Rome's first emperor.
The climb
Caesar was born in 100 BC into an old but faded patrician family. He built his career as a populist, a leader of the populares who courted the common people against the entrenched senatorial elite, the optimates. Brilliant, charming, and massively in debt, in 60 BC he struck a private bargain with Rome's two most powerful men: Pompey, its greatest general, and Crassus, its richest man. Historians call it the First Triumvirate, an informal pact that carved up the Republic among the three of them. Caesar's share was a military command in Gaul.
Gaul and the Rubicon
Over eight years, from 58 to 50 BC, Caesar conquered all of Gaul, roughly modern France and Belgium. The campaign killed or enslaved perhaps a million people, made him fabulously rich, and gave him a hardened army devoted to him personally rather than to Rome. That combination of wealth, fame, and a private army made him intolerable to his rivals. When the Senate, now backing Pompey, ordered him to surrender his command and come home as a private citizen, where his enemies could prosecute him, Caesar faced ruin or war. In January 49 BC he led a single legion across the Rubicon, the small stream marking the northern boundary of Italy that no general was permitted to cross under arms. 'The die is cast,' he reportedly said. It was open treason, and it lit a civil war.
Dictator and the Ides
Caesar pursued Pompey across the Mediterranean and shattered his army at Pharsalus in Greece in 48 BC. Now master of Rome, he had himself appointed dictator, and finally, in early 44 BC, dictator perpetuo, dictator for life. He used the office to reform: most durably, he replaced Rome's chaotic lunar calendar with the 365-day Julian calendar, complete with leap years, which most of Europe would keep for more than 1,600 years. But a permanent dictator was precisely the thing the Republic had been built to prevent. On the Ides of March, the 15th, in 44 BC, a conspiracy of some 60 senators led by Brutus and Cassius surrounded him in the Senate and stabbed him 23 times. They were convinced they were killing a tyrant to rescue the Republic.
The echo
They accomplished the reverse. Caesar's murder set off yet another round of civil wars, from which his 18-year-old grand-nephew and adopted heir, Octavian, emerged as sole ruler. Octavian took the name Augustus and became, in everything but the word, Rome's first emperor. The Republic was over. Caesar's own name outlasted the Republic he broke: for centuries Roman emperors were styled Caesar, and the title passed down into the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar, both worn down from his family name. And to this day, to cross the Rubicon means to take the one step from which there is no turning back.