Imperial Caesar
By his very ruthlessness, Julius Caesar made himself indispensable to the State he had largely been responsible for disrupting. Peter Green assesses the Caesarian legend he left behind him, as well as its malign influence upon later ages.
This twentieth century has not been overkind to the myth of the Great Captains. The gilt is wearing a little thin today on Alexander and Hercules: and who would now try to make a hero out of Lysander? Hector, perhaps, still moves us in England; but then we have always had a weakness for noble failures and the heroic last stand.
Julius Caesar stands somewhere between these two extremes: both his achievements and his nobility have taken on an ambivalent quality with time. The bimillennium of his death, celebrated a few years ago, did not exactly produce a full or over-enthusiastic memorial press. Things would have been very different if he had died a hundred years earlier. What a paean of praise would have rung out from the Germany of the Hohenzollerns, and from the British empire on which the sun, so far, had never set!
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