He was a spokesman for the ordinary people of Rome, who rallied around him time and again, but he profited enormously from his conquests and lived opulently. He made alliances with his rivals and then discarded them when it suited him. Born into a noble family that had long been in decline, he advanced his career cunningly, beginning as a priest and eventually becoming Rome’s leading general.
He possessed great courage, ambition, honor, and vanity. Julius Caesar was a complex man, both hero and villain. But, as Philip Freeman describes in this fascinating new biography, Caesar was also a brilliant orator, an accomplished writer, a skilled politician, and much more. He is best known as the general who defeated the Gauls and doubled the size of Rome’s territories. He shaped Rome for generations, and his name became a synonym for “emperor”-not only in Rome but as far away as Germany and Russia. More than two thousand years after his death, Julius Caesar remains one of the great figures of history. In other words, Rome needed a dictator.A fascinating, comprehensive biography of the cunning Roman conqueror Julius Caesar. "The rector needed to have the power to depose and punish generals and governors who didn't behave themselves.
"Caesar believed that ending corruption was not something you could do by moral persuasion you needed real power," says Billows. Caesar liked the rector idea but wanted to take it a step further. The only way to root out corruption was to replace the incompetent elites with skilled governors and generals, some recruited from outside of Rome in its expanding foreign provinces.Ĭicero, the great writer and orator, argued that the best way to keep corrupt officials in line was to install a rector of impeccable personal standing to act as a kind of supreme judge. "The corruption problem wasn't institutional or systemic, argued Cato the Younger, but a moral one."Ĭaesar thought that was nonsense. "Cato the Younger, the leading conservative, insisted that the traditional governing system ruled by the elites was absolutely fine as it was," says Billows.
0 kommentar(er)
