Caesar was famous for his hospitality and was often heavily in debt. He maintained Marian connections, and in 65 B.C., when he was aedile, he restored the triumphal monuments of Marius that had been dismantled under Sulla. He recognized the urban proletariat as one of the major sources of political power and cultivated this group assiduously.
Cultivated, charming, and handsome, vain about his appearance, he made his love affairs the talk of Roman society. In the following years Caesar emerged as one of the leading political and social personalities of Rome. Caesar was spared in the proscriptions that followed the victory of Sulla, even though he refused to divorce Cornelia, to whom he remained married until her death in 69. However, Marius died, and his followers were defeated by Caesar married Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, one of the leading Marians, and was nominated for the priesthood of flamen dialis. Caesar's family was related to the revolt's leader, Gaius Marius, and joined his faction.
GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR FIRST ROMAN EMPEROR FULL
He served as a young officer in Asia Minor and was quaestor (financial official) in Farther Spain (69 B.C.).Ĭaesar first rose to political prominence in the internal struggles that followed the revolt of Rome's allies-the "Social Wars"-after Rome refused to grant them full citizenship in 90. Caesar followed the traditional Roman practice of conducting some prosecutions in order to gain political attention. He was considered one of the most cultured and literate of Romans by such an expert as Cicero himself. However, in comparison with many other leading Roman families it had produced few distinguished people.Ĭaesar received the classic, rhetorically grounded education of a young Roman at Rome and in Rhodes. It was a patrician family on his father's side and therefore one of the founders of Rome and was entitled to certain traditional privileges and offices. The family could claim a long, if not overly distinguished, history. Caesar's mother came from plebeian stock. His father had been only a moderate political success, attaining the praetorship but not the consulship. Caesar saw these inadequacies of the Senate and used the problems and dilemmas of the period to create his own supreme political and military power.Ĭaesar was born on July 13, 100 B.C. The system also had no real answers for the growth of an urban proletariat and the mass importation of slaves. It could not control the armies and the generals and was unwilling to listen to the pleas of the Italian allies for equal citizenship and of the provinces for justice.
The senatorial oligarchy that ruled Rome was proving inadequate to deal with these new challenges. At the time of Julius Caesar's birth the political, social, economic, and moral problems created by the acquisition of a Mediterranean empire in the 3d and 2d centuries B.C.
0 kommentar(er)
