Rome, city, Italy: Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar

After Sulla's retirement his lieutenant Pompey emerged as a popular champion. He abolished some of Sulla's reactionary measures, suppressed Mediterranean piracy, and made himself master of Rome. His defeat of Mithradates VI brought Pontus, Syria, and Phoenicia under Roman dominion.

On Pompey's return from the East, he found an ally for his ambitions in Julius Caesar, a popular democratic leader of the best patrician blood. With Marcus Licinius Crassus to furnish the funds, Pompey and Caesar formed the First Triumvirate (60 b.c.), and Caesar departed to make himself immortal in the Gallic Wars. Within ten years Caesar and Pompey fell out; Pompey joined the senatorial party, and Caesar (as the champion of the people and of republican legality) led his devoted army against Pompey. Pharsalus was the result (48 b.c.), and Caesar was master of Rome.

He governed through the old institutions, with wisdom and vigor. His territorial additions were the most important ever made, for his conquest and organization of Gaul placed Rome in the role of civilizer of barbarians as well as ruler of the older world. The age of Caesar was a great period in Roman culture, and the cosmopolitan Roman was considered the ideal. Greek was the language of much of the empire, and Greek literature became fashionable. Even more influential was Greek thought, which served to destroy Roman religion and to open the Romans to the Eastern cults, which were enormously popular for years. Cicero, an urbane lawyer and philosopher of broad culture, was typical of the period.

At the death (44 b.c.) of Caesar, the territories ruled by Rome included Spain (except part of the northwest), Gaul, Italy, part of Illyria, Macedonia, Greece, W Asia Minor, Bithynia, Pontus, Cilicia, Syria, Cyrenaica, Numidia, and the islands of the sea, and Rome completely controlled Egypt and Palestine. The rule of Caesar marked an epoch, for it completed the destruction of the republic and laid the foundations of the empire.

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