On March 15, 44 BCE, approximately sixty senators surrounded Julius Caesar in the Theatre of Pompey and stabbed him twenty-three times. He was the most powerful man in the Roman world. He had conquered Gaul, defeated Pompey, been declared dictator perpetuo, and was in the process of remaking the Republic into something that looked suspiciously like a monarchy. His friends decided to stop him. It did not work. Within two years, the Republic they were trying to save was dead, and Caesar's adopted son was running everything. The assassination is the part everyone remembers. The life that preceded it is the part that matters.

He Conquered a Continent to Pay His Debts

Caesar was brilliant, ambitious, and broke. Before Gaul, he was a politician so deeply in debt that his creditors could have destroyed him. He needed a military command that would generate enough plunder and enough glory to make him untouchable. Gaul provided both. The Gallic Wars lasted eight years and resulted in the conquest of roughly modern-day France, Belgium, and parts of Germany and Britain. Historians at the University of Oxford have estimated that Caesar's campaigns resulted in the death or enslavement of over a million people. He wrote his own account of the wars, De Bello Gallico, in the third person, a literary choice that made genocide sound like weather. The book was propaganda. It was also brilliantly written. Caesar described complex military operations with a clarity that military academies still study. He described the customs of the Gauls and Germans with an anthropologist's eye. He described his own decisions as inevitable. Everything he did, according to Caesar, was the only reasonable thing to do. This is a useful skill for a man who was doing unreasonable things on a continental scale.

He Crossed the Rubicon and There Was No Going Back

In 49 BCE, the Senate ordered Caesar to disband his army and return to Rome as a private citizen. If he obeyed, his enemies in the Senate would prosecute him. If he disobeyed, he was declaring war on the Republic. He marched his army across the Rubicon River, the legal boundary of his command, and said the die is cast. Classical scholars at Princeton University have argued that the crossing of the Rubicon was less a dramatic moment of decision than the inevitable result of a political system that had been breaking down for a century. Rome's Republic was designed for a city-state, not a Mediterranean empire. The institutions could not contain the ambitions they had created. Caesar did not break the Republic. He walked through a door that was already open. The civil war that followed was brief. Pompey fled to Egypt and was murdered. Caesar pursued him, had an affair with Cleopatra, returned to Rome, and accepted powers that no Roman had held since the kings were expelled five hundred years earlier. He reformed the calendar. He extended citizenship. He planned public works. He did not pretend to be a servant of the Republic. The Republic pretended not to notice. Twenty-three stab wounds later, the pretense ended. The men who killed him wanted to restore the Republic. What they got was an empire. Caesar won the argument by dying.