Gaius Julius Caesar

Assembled from 27 blocks · 2 evidence · 35 related

1. Story
2. Proconsul, conqueror of Gaul and dictator, whose career demonstrated that a general with a loyal long-service army was stronger than the institutions meant to control him. He is included not as the empire's founder - he was not - but as the clearest case of the structural problem the Principate was built to solve: an army loyal to its commander rather than to the state. He also extended citizenship widely in Cisalpine Gaul and beyond, prefiguring the later logic of assimilation.
3. Knowledge
4. The Roman Legion
5. Gaius Julius Caesar
6. Connections
7. The Roman Legion
8. Caesar crosses the Rubicon
9. Assassination of Julius Caesar
10. Rome
11. Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)
12. The Roman Road Network
13. Hadrian's Wall
14. Augustus (Gaius Octavius / Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus)
15. Gaius Julius Caesar
16. Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)
17. The Punic Wars
18. Caesar crosses the Rubicon
19. The Augustan settlement: Octavian becomes Augustus
20. Construction of Hadrian's Wall begins
21. The empire reaches its greatest territorial extent
22. The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
23. Alaric's Goths sack Rome
24. Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
25. Evidence
26. A Greek hostage in Rome writing to explain how Rome conquered the Mediterranean in fifty-three years, Polybius supplies the main narrative of the first two Punic Wars and the classic analysis of the Roman constitution as a mixed regime. He is a near-contemporary but a partisan of his Roman patrons, and his fleet and casualty numbers are not independently checkable.
27. Augustan coinage circulated imperial titulature, portraiture and slogans (CIVIBVS SERVATEIS, SIGNIS RECEPTIS, AEGYPTO CAPTA) to a largely non-reading population across three continents. Coinage is the empire's highest-volume communication medium and one of its few genuinely empire-wide standardisations.