Original subtitles

He is perhaps the most famous ancient Roman of them all.

When his name is mentioned, we think of power, victory, and betrayal.

Julius Caesar changed his own world in unimaginable ways,

and he's left a pretty big mark on ours.

was born by C-section.

The C in C-section is actually short for Caesarean.

The whole story's almost certainly a myth,

but out of the millions of mums who give birth this way,

very few realise

is named after Julius Caesar, the most famous,

probably most notorious ancient Roman of the lot of them.

BABY BAWLS

There you are! Gosh!

10 lbs.

The name "Caesarean section"

Julius Caesar is still with us.

I'm going to find out how and why.

I'm about to come face-to-face with Julius Caesar.

Caesar was never called Emperor of Rome

but, in a way, he was the first one,

that the emperors had

over the next hundreds of years.

And his impact has lasted a lot longer than that.

This old Roman is still part of our everyday language.

For the first time,

He has given us some wonderfully grabby Latin phrases.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

I came, I saw, I conquered!

Getting that punch and simplicity

that still marks the modern political sound bite.

Yes, we can!

Make America great again!

I will track down the evidence

to show how Julius Caesar rose to the top...

We call it conquest but it was really genocide.

..uncover his tricks of the trade...

Like countless men

he became a master of the comb-over.

..and reveal how our modern leaders,

from dictators to elected politicians,

have used tactics and methods he first perfected 2,000 years ago.

Hail, Caesar! Come on!

Yes!

Modern Rome.

A city where loads of people still come

to catch a glimpse of a lost world.

And one Roman stars in more selfies than any other.

Julius Caesar.

biggest power-grabber of the lot.

The man who turned Rome from a democracy into a dictatorship.

And he would no doubt be thrilled to know that we still recognise him,

2,000 years later.

Can you tell me who this guy is?

Julius Caesar. That is Julius Caesar.

LAUGHING: It is.

But how much do we really know about him?

Can you tell me anything that happened to him?

It's been a long time

Do you know?

LAUGHING: Oh, no!

Emperor of Rome?

He was the boyfriend of Cleopatra?

He was indeed.

I know that he came over here for a certain reason.

Did he come to a good end? No, he came to a bad end.

And I can't remember why.

THEY LAUGH

Ooh, um...

..stabbed...

Was he stabbed? Was he assassinated?

Didn't his...brother...

Murder? Murder?

He was murdered.

He took it in the neck.

MARY LAUGHS

As they say.

I guess we have to start with a spoiler,

because if there's one thing

about Julius Caesar, it's the ending.

So, if you don't want to know the result, look away now.

It was the 15th of March, 44 BC.

And, according to contemporary accounts,

Julius Caesar was going to work.

still exists,

but we can get a glimpse of the ruins of the Senate house,

the building where he died.

When he gets to where the Senate is meeting, somewhere around here,

everybody's chatting and gossiping

At that point, one of his friends,

apparently wanting to ask him a favour,

goes over to his chair and pulls on his toga.

That's the signal.

Suddenly, 20 or more of them -

friends, colleagues, politicians -

Out come their daggers, and everyone has a go!

Into Caesar's face, his thighs, his chest.

Caesar fights back with the only weapon he's got.

It was his pen, and it's hopeless.

and everybody scarpers.

That's what everybody knows about Julius Caesar -

he gets killed.

He wasn't the only famous Roman to meet a bloody end,

but no other has captured our

The scene of Caesar's murder has been immortalised

in hundreds of paintings

and in William Shakespeare's tragedy, Julius Caesar.

It was in fact Shakespeare

who coined the famous phrase,

"You too, Brutus?" -

that Caesar is supposed to have cried out

when he saw one of his dearest friends wielding a dagger.

Words we still use today

as a shorthand for disloyalty and backstabbing.

a bit too often in modern politics?

But how and why did Julius Caesar end up,

literally and metaphorically, stabbed in the back?

How could a rich, but frankly not A-list aristocrat,

to get rid of him was to kill him?

The Rome that Caesar was born into in 100 BC

wasn't a bit like the ancient Rome we see in the movies.

It was super-powerful all right, but there was no Coliseum,

all that came later.

Caesar's Rome was home to about a million people.

Most of them living in pretty squalid, low-rise brick buildings.

It was a sort of democracy.

That's to say, everybody had a vote -

and the slaves -

but real power was in the hands of a few rich, aristocratic families

like Caesar's.

How very different from now, eh?

So this was not yet the Rome ruled by emperors.

It was a democracy,

of one person for too long.

But Caesar would change all that.

Looking back on it, you can almost see his rise to power

as a brilliantly-executed strategy game.

A masterclass in how to be top,

the ultimate power grab.

One that would become a manual for leaders, right up to now.

And step one was simple -

rewrite your own history.

Caesar wasn't always marked out for success.

But, like all so-called great men,

of his early life

was eventually spun to suggest that he was.

In Caesar's case, right back to his birth,

C-section or not.

It's a kind of creation myth.

The truth is that his early career

Playing by the rules.

Like all Roman posh boys, he does a bit of military service,

he stands for a few political offices,

and we really don't know much about the details.

What we do know for sure

rather good at the gambits

and the strategy,

and he makes some really clever moves.

And, eventually, he starts to change the rules themselves.

And if he starts out as a little chap like this...

pretty much like a king.

And according to a later legend,

there was a dramatic, life-changing turning point.

In 69 BC, Caesar was sent to Spain

as an elected official of the Republic of Rome.

young administrators,

he was taking his first big step on the Roman political ladder.

By this time, through a combination of conquest and alliance,

the power of Rome extended through the whole of Italy,

southern France, and most of Spain.

And it was on a tiny island off the coast of Spain, near Cadiz,

that Caesar was later said to have had the encounter

that changed the course of his life.

It was with the most glamorized -

ancient Greek General of them all, King Alexander the Great,

who by the age of 33, had conquered half the known world.

The story goes that, somewhere around here,

Caesar actually came face-to-face

Alexander the Great.

And he started to cry.

"Isn't it terrible," he said to his friends, "that at my age,

"Alexander was already king of so much of the world."

"But look at me.

"I've done nothing

Yet.

Nothing survives of the temple that once housed the statue.

We don't even know if the whole story's true,

but it became a key chapter in Caesar's legend.

This is a much later attempt

There's the statue of Alexander here, and Caesar's admiring it,

in his rather splendid red outfit

and some particularly natty shoes.

In fact, ever after,

artists and writers have reimagined this encounter

in Caesar's life.

We all do it!

If you wanted, I guess I could give you the turning point

when I decided to become a classicist.

In reality, of course, it's all much more complex.

All the same, people have often fixed on this occasion

as the moment when Caesar became Caesar.

True or not, this is the symbolic moment

when Caesar the ordinary administrator

the wannabe top dog.

If step one in Caesar's rise to power

was mythologizing his early life,

step two was winning the loyalty and devotion of the military.

It's something that he and later

And ten years after that defining encounter with Alexander the Great,

he got his chance.

After a series of political trade-offs and backstage deals,

Caesar was elected Consul,

the highest political office

Only two were appointed each year,

and that made him one of the principal power brokers in Rome.

And with that kind of political power came a big military command.

Caesar left Italy to lead the conquest of Gaul,

modern-day France, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

It was in Gaul that Caesar got to lay the foundations

on what all his later successes in some way would be built.

A loyal army.

managed this is Admiral Lord West,

who understands Caesar's campaigns

from a rather different point of view to mine.

I met him - fittingly, I guess -

in the shadow of a Roman military memorial in Gaul.

was a brilliant strategist.

He understood how he should divide and split up his enemies,

not fight too many of them at once, he understood

the political background that he was working against,

of what his aim was.

But what he manages to do, he manages to get those guys,

I mean, first of all, to slaughter the enemy, nastily.

How do you get people to do that?

Because that must be

Basically, they felt he was part of them.

He... He took the same risks, he led from the front,

he understood about the fighting.

And you're right, it was visceral and unpleasant and nasty.

Killing 10,000 people

you had to kill with a sword or a stabbing.

You right out killed 10,000 people.

But he made each one of them feel that they were individuals.

He won, he won!

There's nothing like having a man

If you have a man who is your commander who keeps winning,

you jolly well like that. And when you look at that totality,

then it's a cohesive unit.

And they felt part of something bigger!

Is it always the same?

Well, the morale and the focus on the individual

is as important today as it was then.

I mean, that actually is crucial.

If you don't do that, you will not win.

on this one.

You've got scruffy prof here.

Do you think you could turn her into a good soldier? And how?

I think, because you have a belief in certain things and a focus,

I think I could make you

battlefield to somebody else.

There goes my pacifist credentials at a stroke!

But what was it like

for the ordinary squaddie to fight for Caesar?

There's one curious museum treasure

of the world of the Roman battlefield from the bottom up.

I've waited for ages to get my hands on these strange little things.

Because they give us one of the few glimpses we can get

of what life was like

in an army camp in Caesar's day.

Because what these are

are the ancient equivalent of bullets.

They're called sling-bolts,

and you put them at the end of a cord, you whirl the cord,

let the bullet go,

But what's really interesting about them is that they've got,

either scratched on them or more often

moulded actually into the lead,

they've got messages to take to your enemy.

Bombs in World War II often had rather rude messages

scrawled on the side, you know, "Run, Adolf, run."

That kind of thing.

These Roman ones are actually rather ruder.

This one says "pathice".

translate that I suppose is...

"You're buggered."

From a very academic point of view,

this one's the most interesting.

It's aimed at one of the women,

one of the prominent women on the other side, called Fulvia.

very clearly.

And it says, "Peto" - I'm going for - the "landicam" of Fulvia.

That is the first example in Latin

of the use of the word clitoris.

"I'm going for Fulvia's clitoris."

Now, it's blokeish, it's rude.

that these were really deadly weapons.

Deadly is right.

In less than five years,

Caesar and his men had marched and fought their way

some 1,500 km to grey Northern Gaul.

in minute detail,

because in one of the most amazing survivals from the ancient world,

we still have Caesar's own step-by-step account.

And one description above all

underlines the brutality

as they fought a battle against native tribes.

Caesar describes this battle in detail.

He talks about his own lightning speed,

and how he met the enemy "at the confluence" -

He hemmed them in

so that they despaired of being able to flee away.

"Desperate flight!"

And a large number of them - "great number" - were killed.

The rest threw themselves "into the river" -

Goes on to say that this tribe

had once numbered over 400,000 people,

and he implies that there were not very many left.

Archaeologist Nico Roymans

has identified the location of the battle, and its grisly legacy.

the dramatic massacre here

taking place in 55 BC,

and we indeed have this kind of archaeological material

in huge quantities.

You can really see just how deadly Caesar's campaigns were

when you look at the finds

It's a human skull of an adult male, about 60.

This man has actually had his face cut off with a sword. Yeah, indeed.

With a single sword blow.

This is part of a female skull,

and there's a hole here

caused by a spearhead or a sword point.

So the casualties include, then, women and children?

We have also bones of children.

It was described as a battle by Caesar,

but in fact it was

It was an attempt to massacre the complete population here.

It tends to make real some of the claims

that people now make, that what Caesar was doing in Gaul was...

We call it conquest, but it was really genocide.

This was a landscape of terror, more or less.

Killing fields. Yeah, yeah, killing fields.

In that mid-first century BC.

Julius Caesar has always had

the number-one reputation as great conqueror.

ancient and modern.

But my problem is, it's such a sanitized view of ancient warfare.

It's easy enough to glorify a conquering general like Caesar

2,000 years ago, when you don't see the collateral damage.

the innocent victims,

you don't hear their voices, you don't even know their names.

Now, we watch the maimed children in hospital on our televisions.

And that makes it a lot harder to glorify conquest.

isn't only about conquest -

it's about commanding the unquestioning loyalty of your men.

And Caesar's men would follow him to the ends of the earth.

In 55 BC, Caesar decided to cross the Channel and check out

the other side was all about.

Almost 100 years before Roman armies actually conquered Britain,

Caesar became the first Roman we know

to have set foot on British soil.

He landed here, in Kent.

it was exploration.

More like a moon landing, really.

Because for the Romans,

Britain really was beyond the final frontier.

And when they got here,

they did actually find themselves

Now, it was in fact Julius Caesar who has given us

the first surviving eyewitness account of us.

And there's good news in it for the people of Kent.

This is some of what he's got to say.

Out of all the people there,

by far the most sophisticated - most humane -

are those who inhabit Kent,

which is a seaside region, not very different from Gaul.

But all the Britons dye themselves with woad,

that makes them really awful to look at -

horridiores - in battle.

They let their hair grow long, and every part of their body is shaved

except their head and their upper lip.

They're moustachioed.

in that description,

but that really is the first time

that the British enter real history.

Caesar's writings didn't just record events.

His accounts cast him as a Roman hero,

and that's where their true purpose comes in.

They are propaganda for a contemporary Roman audience.

It was, if you like, step three

in Caesar's handbook for would-be leaders -

set the news agenda.

all politicians have.

How do you keep yourself in the public eye?

How do you get your message across?

Today, that's done by Twitter, 24-hour news, and the internet.

Caesar had none of that.

accounts of his conquests come in.

Because I don't think that they were written

just to help out historians 2,000 years later.

Those accounts actually make pretty odd reading now

this, and then I did that,

"and then I did the other."

What he wrote was, "Caesar did this! And then Caesar did that!"

That could be because he was frightfully pompous,

but much more likely is he wrote

directly to the Roman people, by one of his staff,

when he was hundreds of miles away.

Let's give it a try.

Friends!

Romans!

Countrymen!

I am bringing you dispatches

TRANSLATING: Caesar as always, hurries ahead

to be in the very midst of the battle!

You can spot him from the distinctive colour of his uniform.

But Caesar, again, as always,

goes ahead to harass the enemy!

Impressed?

THEY CHEER

Yes!

Triumphant stuff!

And I'll bring you more news soon.

Hail Caesar!

Come on! ALL: Hail Caesar!

Hail Caesar!

In his written accounts,

Caesar gave the Romans in the streets

something and somebody to celebrate.

You might say he whipped up national pride.

And never more successfully

of a later victory.

Writing the story down and reading it out isn't enough.

Caesar absolutely grasped the value of a good sound bite.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

that Caesar ever wrote.

They're probably the most famous words

in the whole of the Latin language.

They've got tremendous zing, rhythm,

and they're really to the point.

I won!

I kind of think of them

some of our best slogans.

Yes, we can!

Education, education, education!

Even Caesar's contemporaries

were impressed with the punch and the genius brevity.

It's all a lot less than the average tweet!

I might actually send it

to the world's most famous tweeter.

@Potus...

SHE LAUGHS

There you are, Donald. Mr President.

Please enjoy.

Caesar knew exactly how important it was

directly to the people.

It's something that Robert Harris,

who has written about ancient and modern politics, gets very well.

Caesar - he didn't write

quite as much as you, but he wrote a huge amount,

world in surviving.

And what do you make of them?

Well, I think they show that he was a master of propaganda.

So if one imagines what it must've been like when the herald or whoever

appeared in the forum,

people going, "Come and look! Let's see what he's done now!"

And the things that he was doing, of course, were, as someone said,

landing in Britain was like the trip to the moon.

It was astonishing that one of

So a lot of ordinary people, they really liked to hear that.

They really like to see their leaders are cutting it out there

and anyone who gets in their way gets it.

You know, "Make Rome great again"

that's coming through these commentaries.

Of course, you know, it's quite a common phenomenon

for politicians to refer to themselves in the third person.

Look at President Trump.

"President Trump has done this, that, or the other."

And Caesar's appealing to the socially excluded,

just like some modern populist politicians. Exactly,

and that the more outrageous he was,

the more he flaunted his own misdemeanours,

the better they liked him.

So one of the things you ought to do

if you're in either Caesar or Trump's position

is kind of bypass the rest

and speak to the citizens directly.

Yes, what he did, which I think is very modern,

is that although he was himself immensely wealthy,

he nevertheless managed to appeal over the head of what he called

All great dictators, in a way,

or charismatic leaders,

I think addressed their followers directly,

and they stage-manage very carefully the form in which they do it.

Obviously, Hitler with his rallies,

And would our world be different without him?

Yes, I think that Caesar is one of the architects of the modern world.

I have no doubt that the world would've been a different place

if Julius Caesar hadn't been born,

history of whom that can be said.

By 50 BC, Caesar could say that the job in Gaul was more or less done.

He had the love of the people at home and the loyalty of his army,

a dangerous combination.

It made his fellow politicians

Victory in Gaul brought new problems for Caesar.

The metropolitan elite in Rome,

who were a pretty conservative bunch,

decided that his military job was over.

They thought that he'd gone

and that his appeals to the Roman people were dangerous.

They had in mind to get him back and to impeach him

for legal irregularities, real or imagined,

committed years before.

Caesar had been backed

Either he went home to face prosecution,

or he stayed in Gaul against orders, a rogue general.

It was catch-22.

Faced with that dilemma

and to protect what he was always calling his dignitas, his dignity,

across the border between Gaul and

Italy, and to march on Rome.

It was effectively the start of civil war.

The border lay on the line of a river, the River Rubicon.

For a Roman general to cross

on Rome was almost unthinkable,

like some Commander-in-chief rolling his tanks onto Parliament Square

or Capitol Hill.

That was Caesar's make-or-break moment.

He chose to gamble everything and

It's really step four in getting to the top -

spot your opportunity for the power grab and take it.

Oddly enough, Caesar doesn't say a word about this moment in his own

writings. There's a rather guilty

But there were loads of Roman stories

about what was going on in his head

at the time. The anxieties, the dreams, the godly apparitions.

Should he? Shouldn't he?

But ultimately,

Caesar gave us the phrase "crossing

gamble and going past the point of no return.

"The gamble is cast," he's said to have declared.

"The die is cast."

Or, "I rolled the dice, and it's all up in the air now."

exactly where the river was.

It was Benito Mussolini,

the Italian dictator who came to power in the 1920s,

who decided that this slightly underwhelming stream

was THE Rubicon.

In his march on Rome,

the route taken by Julius Caesar,

in a way to cast himself as the new Caesar.

But in reality, Mussolini took the train.

Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon has long been seen as a symbol of

and risk-taking.

And not just by Mussolini.

For Caesar's fellow politicians,

it was, of course, an act of aggression,

a coup d'état.

And it plunged Rome into civil war.

The fighting dragged on

But to all intents and purposes,

Caesar had control of the city itself within a matter of months.

He was elected dictator,

a perfectly traditional office in ancient Rome reserved for times of

crisis, which placed power

for a short time.

Caesar took that power for a year, and now effectively ruled Rome.

It's easy to imagine that Caesar crosses the Rubicon one minute

and gets assassinated the next.

But actually,

in between that's so crucial.

And he's facing all the problems

that victors in civil wars always face.

What do you do with those you've defeated?

What do you do with your supporters?

them loads,

and you've now got to deliver.

And how do you make sure you stay in power?

Some of the strategies he uses are easily recognisable to us.

He invests in infrastructure,

So there's walls, bridges, he drains the swamps.

And he has a programme of slum clearance and new towns.

And he looks out for the ordinary Roman with food rations.

And he takes some measures

the credit crunch.

The bottom line of all this is strength and stability.

But he's also flooding the city with his own image.

The idea is that there should be a statue of him

in every single temple.

his showcase.

Caesar was turning into a dictator in the modern sense.

And by that, I don't just mean winning power by killing people

and commanding fear,

I mean he was changing the world

putting himself at the centre of it.

And he understood the importance of getting his image out there.

It's a technique we recognise well -

the face of the beloved leader pasted across every available

surface from newspapers

It was pioneered by Caesar, who had his bust sent everywhere.

And it's true that we do still see his face everywhere.

But actual portraits done from life are almost impossible to find.

Perhaps the orders had not been

Perhaps they were thought to be hot property and destroyed

after his assassination.

But then, in 2007,

archaeologists in France found something intriguing.

It was one of those discoveries

It was only a few years ago,

an archaeologist was diving right here,

searching for remains on the riverbed.

He's down there, and he spots a bit of marble.

He brings it up to the surface,

takes a closer look and then shouts out,

“Damn, it’s Cesar!”

Which could only be translated as, "BLEEP me, it's Caesar."

I'm about to come face-to-face with Julius Caesar.

in the archaeological museum in Arles.

Hello. Or hello.

SHE GIGGLES

This is about as up close and personal to Julius Caesar

as you can get.

The question is, what kind of image

project of himself?

I think one thing's for sure, is it's not glam.

He's got a really wrinkled, furrowed brow, kind of saying,

"I'm working terribly hard on behalf of the state,

thinking through politics!"

And his neck is really craggy and wrinkly,

with a big Adam's apple.

This is not the kind of youthful idealism.

This is sort of middle-aged, elderly bloke style.

the Holy Grail of classical archaeology.

For centuries and centuries,

archaeologists have tried to track down

a portrait of Caesar done in his lifetime.

And here you are.

The problem is it's very hard to tell whether this really

is Caesar.

After all, there's no name on him.

If we want to pin down his portraits,

all we can do is what the archaeologists at Arles did -

that are very clearly labelled.

And guess what?

We have hundreds of those.

Hello Mrs. Hello Mrs.

Glass of white wine, please. Yes.

So. THANKS.

knowing what Julius Caesar looked like,

and that's by looking at the tiny little images on his coins,

which are named.

But these coins were much more revolutionary than they seem.

that we'll find the Queen's head

on all the currency,

and we assume that one obvious type of political propaganda

is seeing the mugshot of the dear leader plastered everywhere.

But Julius Caesar was the first

He was the very first person in the West systematically

to put his head on the coinage.

It must have been actually quite shocking.

Every time you went to pay for a glass of wine,

or for a takeaway,

of a cup of coffee,

you were paying with him.

That's to say, Romans went around with Julius Caesar in their pockets.

Madam, the bill, please.

Two euros and eighty. So.

I regret,

I did try!

So. In the euro. Thank you, thank you.

THANKS.

Some people may have found the idea of carrying Caesar's face around in

their pockets a bit big-headed, but ordinary Romans loved him.

as the anti-establishment candidate,

not part of the Roman metropolitan elite.

And he knew the value of keeping the people happy,

what a later Roman satirist would describe as "bread and circuses".

people on a spectacular scale.

It was 100 years before the Colosseum was built,

so he gave his gladiator shows here, in the Forum.

But the point was that Caesar's shows

than anyone had ever given before.

And so, too, were his public banquets.

Once, he gave a free feast to the Roman people,

with some frightfully posh fish on the menu,

all laid out on 22,000 tables.

feel like it was a vast, free outdoor restaurant.

All courtesy of Julius Caesar.

But in the Forum, you could find more than fights and feasts.

This was the seedy city centre of Caesar's Rome,

pick up a prostitute,

or simply hang out and watch the world go by.

The Forum was also the place where Rome put itself on display.

It was here that big Roman funerals happened.

just over there.

And it was through here that the soldiers marched with their generals

after some particularly big or bloody victory.

My guess is that Caesar's squaddies

must really have enjoyed

when they passed this way.

"Romans, lock up your wives," they sang,

"the bald adulterer is back in town!"

I'm sorry to say, gentlemen,

but most Romans thought that baldness was rather silly

So when Caesar began to thin on top,

he was awfully keen to cover it up.

Like countless men over the last 2,000 years,

he became a master of the comb-over.

But he had other tricks up his sleeve.

to wear a laurel wreath

on any occasion he fancied,

Caesar was absolutely delighted,

not so much because it was a very special honour,

but because it allowed him to cover up that bald patch.

Thank you.

You look Cesare. Thank you.

Caesar may have been embarrassed by his baldness,

but my guess is he'd be quite flattered to be called an adulterer.

Rome was certainly a macho culture.

It was full of willy-waving,

must've been decidedly unsavoury.

But even in Rome, Caesar was a bit of an extreme case.

Was there anyone in the city he hadn't slept with?

Women, men.

And not just in Rome.

He had an affair with Cleopatra

with Mark Antony.

Makes me think of big men ever since.

They can't keep their hands off women or off power.

It wasn't long before Caesar decided that a year

perhaps wasn't a long enough term

Perhaps ten years would be better.

And with that kind of time span, he began to think bigger.

What strikes me is how Caesar's virtues came to reinforce his power.

One of the qualities he always boasted about was his mercy,

He had a history of surprising acts of kindness.

But there's more to that than meets the eye.

As for his defeated enemies in the civil war,

they must've expected that they'd be strung up in the Forum.

publicly pardoned

in what was almost a general amnesty.

But of course, that kind of mercy is always authoritarian.

And it's only the powerful who could issue pardons.

But more to the point, it tells us

Not that he was kind,

but that he was colossally self-confident.

And it was this colossal self-confidence

that was to leave a permanent mark on our world.

You see, we think of dictators

state terror,

secret police, mass killings.

In fact, dictators have much cleverer strategies.

The most successful of them change the natural order,

so that what wasn't natural before now seems it.

I bet that not many people know that our month of July

takes its name from Julius Caesar.

The Romans decided to rename the month that had been called rather

unsexily Quintilis as Julius or July,

But that is as nothing to Caesar's real legacy -

the modern Western calendar.

Before Julius Caesar,

the Roman calendar year had weirdly been only 355 days.

That wasn't actually long enough,

they had to add another month in.

The problem was they were pretty hopeless at doing the calculations,

so the months of the calendar got increasingly out of sync with the

natural seasons.

What I mean is that it would be

and you'd want to celebrate your harvest festival,

but the vines would only be just coming in to leaf.

Or it would be in the middle of apparently wintry December,

and there'd be bunches of grapes

Caesar solved this.

With the help of a few tame scientists,

he pulled the plug on the old system

and he launched the 365-day year that we now have.

In all kinds of ways, it was a

But it also reveals something that only dictators can do -

change time.

As one of his friends wryly observed,

"He'll be bossing the stars in the sky around next."

Caesar was becoming a dictator

a man who puts himself above the political process,

a man who reorders the world around him, a man who can change time.

And he used public celebrations to reflect his status,

though we can dictate certain

This is a version of a 15th-century painting which shows just how

preoccupied later ages were, too,

with the image of the triumphant Caesar.

What you've got here is Julius Caesar thinning a bit on top,

triumphal chariot.

And there's placards and spoils and loot being processed

through the streets in front of him.

But there's a moral here, too,

in these figures, Caesar on the chariot,

who's about to crown him with a laurel wreath.

And we know from Roman writers that what this slave did throughout the

procession for every victory parade was he whispered into the ear of the

general all the time, "Remember

"remember you're a man."

The idea was that anybody who had this kind

of lavish ceremonial would be very likely to forget

that they were just an ordinary human being.

So this, in a way,

not to get above himself.

All the same, Caesar was aware of the popular power of a good military

parade, something later leaders have been quick to adopt.

Even in the democratic West,

displays of military might have long

from Trooping the Colour to Bastille Day.

Caesar's power over Rome by now seemed almost absolute.

His military image only strengthened his popular appeal.

He was central to almost

Statues put up later would emphasise this power and authority.

Like this one, still standing in Rome's City Hall,

overhearing traffic regulation and planning disputes.

But it's what's written underneath

that's even more to the point,

because it gives Caesar his official title -

perpetual dictator

He's dictator forever.

Now, the Romans wouldn't have found the word dictator remotely shocking.

traditional short-term office

that was used for coping with particular emergencies.

What they would have found shocking is the idea that Caesar took that

power forever.

It's a bit like how we would feel

Prime Minister for life.

And it's in that way that Caesar has given us the modern sense

of the word dictator.

What happened is that Caesar made sure that his term as dictator was

extended, not just from one year

The dictatorship was only one way

in which Caesar disrupted Roman politics.

Roman democracy was based on free elections,

but Caesar managed to make sure that you knew the outcome in advance.

of putting himself above the rest

of the political class.

It wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to the women and men in

the Roman street,

but his fellow politicians got very worked up

to rise from his chair

when they came into the room.

And anyway, that chair was beginning to look suspiciously like

a golden throne.

For Caesar's enemies,

his appointment as effectively a perpetual dictator

It was a watershed -

the point at which leader became tyrant,

a subversion of the ideals of freedom and democracy.

He may have been popular with the people

and he may have commanded

but for Caesar,

the price of tyranny was paid in blood here, in the Senate House.

Perhaps this should be the real lesson for modern leaders.

Be careful what you wish for -

too much power comes at a cost.

in the wings.

The version that we have of Caesar's assassination makes it a heroic and

successful fight for freedom against tyranny.

In reality, it was nothing of the sort.

For a start,

it was for a few privileged politicians.

Ordinary Romans wept at Caesar's death.

But you also can't really call it successful.

The problem of assassinations always is that it's easy enough to take the

to know what to do next.

Assassins always risk bringing about the very thing they thought

they were fighting against.

In this case, once the deed was done,

the conspirators turned out

What they got was civil war,

which ended up producing one-man rule,

emperors, or, if you like, dictators forever after.

So Caesar's assassination only served to strengthen

the very thing it meant to destroy.

the absolute rule of one man -

Caesar's heir and great-nephew Octavian.

The Republic of Rome was now ruled by an emperor.

What I'm interested in is that people come

and they still leave

This is where Julius Caesar was cremated.

And so what they do is...round here is...

The temple of Julius Caesar, they put up after his death.

And so you've got flowers and occasional c...

Caesar would forever after be celebrated

as the originator of the imperial dynasty.

All later emperors took his name.

From that moment on, Caesar wasn't just a surname any more,

it became synonymous with leader.

The term tsar and Kaiser go back to, you've guessed it, Caesar.

And leaders ever since have done more than just take his name.

For good or bad,

they have used the template he created to ground their own rule.

And more than 2,000 years after his bloody assassination,

Julius Caesar is still with us in all kinds of surprising ways.

So every time you put your hand in your pocket for some loose change,

or have a party in July,

or hear a snappy political slogan,

when you next think about a caesarean section,

or here a political betrayal described as backstabbing,

spare a thought for the man who inspired all this and more.

to the idea of Julius Caesar,

the great conqueror.

But if you have to choose just one Roman

who's still absolutely embedded in the way we think,

talk, act and judge,

then it's got to be

perpetual dictator

You can kill him, but you can't get rid of him.