Julius Caesar, with Mary Beard

0:06Hello everyone, it's Tom Holland here and I have teamed up with the Great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history. And today we're looking at Julius Caesar. Here's a short extract of that episode. Hello everybody and welcome to the third of our special members bonus interviews with the great Mary Beard, national treasure, world's most famous classicist and presenter of her own podcast, Instant Classics. And Mary, today we move from Greece to Rome and we move to one particular figure, clearly the most famous Roman of them all.

0:54And it's actually, people will be watching this if they're getting it straight away in the middle of October. So hello, middle of October. But we're actually recording this on a day when, on The Rest is History, we have released an episode about the Eastern Front in the early months of 1914. And it's Russia, led by a Tsar, against Germany, led by a Kaiser. And it's amazing that just over a century ago, Europe was full of people who were named after Julius Caesar, who is the subject of today. Absolutely. I mean, Caesar has kind of branded his name onto modern politics. And we still do that in the UK.

1:33hey, we have a drug czar. Yes. Caesar would be a bit surprised, I think, to discover the kind of slight domestication of czar. Well, it would be brilliant if the government held an inquiry into Latin in schools and they had a Caesar, a Caesar czar. Yes. Maybe one day it will happen. I mean, Caesar is very different from what we looked at Alexander the Great last time. And Caesar and Alexander the Great have often been compared. By Plutarch, the great biographer. Plutarch, when he's doing his series of lives of people of the past, writing the second century CE. And, I mean, we tend to read these lives as singletons.

2:20I'm going to go and read Plutarch's life with Caesar. In fact, Plutarch wrote them as pairs. So he's always, always pairing a Greek and a Roman. and then at the end comparing them. And those comparisons that he opts for are really interesting, but one of the most obvious ones is he's got Alexander the Great for his Greek half and Julius Caesar for his second half. Because they are both great military conquerors. But I think, I mean, Plutarch has quite a few military conquerors in his repertoire of great Greeks and Romans. So, I mean, I think there's the kind of added extra that you get with them.

3:06Well, you know, Plutarch is on the same wavelength as us in thinking, right, who are the really big guys here? And just on Alexander, we're doing Caesar. That's exactly Plutarch. I mean, an obvious contrast between Caesar and Alexander. Alexander rules by right. He's a king. Julius Caesar is a citizen of a republic. And another major contrast, which is very salient for how we're going to be talking about him today, is that we have far more contemporary sources for Julius Caesar, which is brilliant. We have letters, we have speeches and we have histories, commentaries by Caesar himself. Yeah, I mean, the big contrast for me is we know something about Caesar.

3:55I mean, with Alexander, you're always saying, why would he have done that? Well, actually, in Caesar's case, we have autobiography. I mean, we call them the commentaries on the war in Gaul, et cetera. But it's essentially autobiography. And we have people, contemporary observers. And then we have both from the pen of Plutarch, but also from, you know, your favourite Roman biographer, Tom. Your lad. We have independent biographies. not quite birth to death because ancient biographies are never quite that. But still, we've got a systematic account written a century or so later, but much closer in time than anything we have for Alexander.

4:40So there's still plenty to argue about. Lots of gaps. But we're on firmer ground here. So he's very satisfyingly born in 100 BC, so it's always very easy to remember that. Can you give us a sketch of the city and the world into which he's born? Well, the visual image of the city I think is quite interesting because when we close our eyes and think about Rome, we think about marble Rome and great shining, gleaming temples, etc., piazzas. We're before that. So Rome is still in 100 BC a city of brick and local stone. So it's not grand, it's smelly, it's crowded. It's coming up to, not quite reached yet, a population of a million people.

5:33So it's huge. But if you'd come to Rome in 100 BC and you'd been brought up in Alexandria and Egypt or Athens, you would have thought, this is a bit squalid. Yes. And Julius Caesar, the house of the Julians, ancient patrician family, which traces its ancestry all the way back to Venus. But they live in an area called the Subara, which over time has been degentrified, hasn't it? Yeah. I mean, I can't think of a modern equivalent. But it's not glam in any way. Accept that, flip that, and by 100 BC, this rather unimpressive slum is ruling the Mediterranean world. that most of, not all, but most of the big bits of Roman imperial expansion have been done.

6:35And Rome is ruling the Mediterranean world from Spain to Turkey. And it remains a republic. How significant is it that Caesar is born into a republic? I think it's hugely significant. What's always a puzzle about Rome, or the way we speak about Rome, is the two senses of the word empire. So you've got empire meaning all the places we have conquered, and you've got empires being a city and an empire ruled by an emperor. Caesar, in fact, marks the cusp, the turning point between republicanism and one man rule. but he's brought up in a political structure which is built on a detestation of monarchy and that's quite important eventually for Caesar and a commitment to power sharing and to no one amongst the traditional elite getting really above the others.

7:44I mean it's a hugely competitive society. The rich and powerful at Rome are competing to hold offices that we call magistracies, but they're not particularly to do with law. And from that, to gain military office too, because military office and political office are absolutely hand in hand. And you've got a relatively small number of families who were in that political game, but nobody, and this is the basic principle, nobody is for any length of time becoming above the others. I think that it is, and that's why it's not really a democracy. I think calling it a democracy is misleading. The people, the ordinary people, and there are many, many, many more of those than the elite, do have some power.

8:37There are popular assemblies in which the Romans decide, for example, whether to pass this or that law, whether to go to war or not. So the people do have that tremendous influence. It's their votes that make it possible for somebody to become an official. And there's a kind of weird thing that the people, the populace, tend to like their magistrates, so the consuls who are the top two, their praetors, all these kind of various officials. They tend to like them to come from families that they know. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, even the most radical, and Caesar in some ways is going to turn out to be the most radical, are from old established families.

9:24I think, though, that what is puzzling and what is the problem, really, of Rome at this point is that they've got, on the one hand, they've got this vast territorial empire. but they are trying to run that empire on an infrastructure which was well-suited to running a small city-state in 400 BC, regular turnover of office, nobody having much power, but is woefully unsuited to really dealing with the issues and the problems that inevitably come with a large empire. And one of those problems is that legions, which essentially means levies, are starting to become private militias of generals who are overseas for lengthy periods of time.

10:22The competition in Roman political life is turning bloody and there's a civil war when he's a young man and he actually ends up on the wrong side of that civil war. I mean, Rome's boiling and in the end it's going to boil over, which is really in a sense what it does with Caesar.

11:04with gladiators and we'll be having a particular look at the story of Spartacus.