He was adored by the man in the street for all those things. Julius Caesar was masterful, artful and above all, powerful. This man would become the last dictator of the Roman Republic, paving the way for the great Roman Empire. He was a brilliant strategist on the battlefield, an astute politician, and an avid historian. He was a man of the people, a populist who helped military veterans and initiated land reform. If you are looking for quotes from Julius Caesar along with a biography, this article will be very helpful. I hope you will find this article very helpful. This page was created in 1997 last modified on 21 April 2020.Hello everyone, I have gathered most of the Julius Caesar Quotes with biography. A good start is the Cambridge Ancient History, volume IX of the second edition (1994), "The last age of the Roman Republic", edited by J.A. There's an awful lot of modern literature on the subject, although most of it deals with details. For the struggle over Caesar's inheritance, he is undoubtedly our most important source. In the first quarter of the third century, the Greek historian Cassius Dio based part of his description of the fall of the Roman Republic (books 36-44 of his Roman History) on Livy. It is possible that Plutarch used this text when he wrote his biographies: his Life of Caesar has already been mentioned, but biographies of Brutus, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Crassus, Mark Antony and Pompey are most informative too. The books on Caesar by the historian Titus Livius (59 BCE - 17 CE better known as Livy) have not survived, but excerpts are still extant. Perhaps he is also the author of a Letter to Caesar, in which the author suggests some reforms. On Caesar's behavior in 63, our most important source is The Catiline Conspiracy by Caesar's partisan Sallust, or -to use his full name- Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-34 BCE). Cicero's speeches are very informative, especially On the provinces for the consuls, For Marcellus, For Ligarius and the Philippic speeches against Mark Antony. The same selection was made in the collections of Cicero's Letters to Friends and Letters to Brutus. As these letters were rediscovered during the reign of Caesar's descendant Nero (who was emperor 54-68 CE), several unbecoming letters about Caesar were not published. To a large extent, his Letters to Atticus are private correspondence and they give us first-rate information about the political life in Rome in Caesar's days. The correspondence of Cicero cannot be dismissed. It should be given flesh with other information, for which Caesar's own writings are very important. These two biographies give us the outline of Caesar's life, a mere skeleton. His biography is meant as a counterpart to a Life of Alexander the Great: consequently, the moral is totally different, namely that Greeks and Romans have much more in common than they want to admit. Of course, this makes him one of the most interesting authors of antiquity, but sometimes he seems to portray his emperors a nuance too black.Īnother moralist is the Greek author Plutarch of Chaeronea (45-120 CE), who was a few years younger than Suetonius and covered more or less the same ground. To show this, he is fond of stories about cruelty and sexual deviations. Suetonius' moral is clear: if a man has the total freedom and the absolute power of a Roman emperor, he must be strong indeed if he wants to remain honest. He uses it critically: for example, about Caesar's death circulated a story that he had expected the assault, but was shocked to discover that Brutus was one of the conspirators, and that his last words were '"You too, my son?" Suetonius makes clear that he has some doubts about this anecdote.ĭescribing someone's life is a meaningless thing to do, unless there is some moral to be learned. The biographer was in charge of the imperial archives under the emperor Hadrian (who ruled 117-138): in this capacity, Suetonius had access to some of the best possible information. Most entertaining is the biography by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, which is the first of the Lives of the twelve Caesars.
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