Caesar and the Monarchy

Extract

The victories of Pharsalus, Thapsus, and Munda had left Caesar in a position of undisputed authority and, as the year 44 opened, the question in Roman minds must have been how Caesar intended to consolidate and perpetuate his position. His assassination on the Ides of March left his contemporaries with little indication of what political solution Caesar had devised, and left to subsequent historians of the period the intriguing problem of deducing from such evidence as the last few months of Caesar's life provide what his political intentions had been. The initial difficulty of this problem is to free one's mind from the simplifications and, indeed, distortions with which subsequent political thought has reported the critical events of Caesar's last months; for in most of western civilization, particularly the English-speaking portion, the popular impression of Caesar as a tyrant and the conspirators as democrats is almost ineradicable, thanks to the dramatic story of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.