Julius Caesar and the Roman People

Robert Morstein-Marx (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Julius Caesar and the Roman People
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Country
United Kingdom
Published
26 August 2021
Pages
700
ISBN
9781108837842

Julius Caesar and the Roman People

Robert Morstein-Marx (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic’s traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms and institutions, but because Caesar’s extraordinary success mobilized a determined opposition which ultimately preferred to precipitate civil war rather than accept its political defeat. Based on painstaking re-analysis of the ancient sources in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the participatory role of the People in the republican political system, a strong emphasis on agents’ choices rather than structural causation, and profound scepticism toward the facile determinism that often substitutes for historical explanation, this book offers a radical reinterpretation of a figure of profound historical importance who stands at the turning point of Roman history from Republic to Empire.

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