Gaius Julius Caesar was born in 100 BCE into a patrician family of waning fortune. By forty-two he had risen through Rome's political ladder to consul, and by forty-eight he was governor of three provinces; over the next nine years he conquered the whole of Gaul (modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and Switzerland) and twice crossed the Channel into Britain. Recalled by a hostile Senate that demanded he disband his army, he stopped his legions on the bank of the Rubicon — the small river that marked the edge of Italy — paused for a long moment, said 'alea iacta est' (the die is cast), and crossed in arms. The civil war that followed left him sole master of the Roman world. He was named dictator perpetuo, dictator for life, in February 44 BCE; one month later, on the , sixty senators including his protégé Marcus Brutus stabbed him twenty-three times at the foot of Pompey's statue. He died at fifty-five. His adopted son Octavian — Augustus — would within thirteen years end the Republic and found the Roman Empire; for the next 1,500 years, the title 'Caesar' would mean 'emperor' from the Atlantic to the Bosphorus.
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General · Statesman · Dictator of Rome
Julius Caesar
100 BCE – 44 BCE
The Roman general whose crossing of the Rubicon ended the Republic — and whose name became the title of every emperor who followed.
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