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He is perhaps the most famous ancient Roman of them all. | 0:00:05 | 0:00:09 | |
When his name is mentioned, we think of power, victory, and betrayal. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:15 | |
Julius Caesar changed his own world in unimaginable ways, | 0:00:17 | 0:00:21 | |
and he's left a pretty big mark on ours. | 0:00:21 | 0:00:24 | |
Julius Caesar, as the story goes, was born by C-section. | 0:00:25 | 0:00:30 | |
The C in C-section is actually short for Caesarean. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:35 | |
The whole story's almost certainly a myth, | 0:00:37 | 0:00:40 | |
but out of the millions of mums who give birth this way, | 0:00:40 | 0:00:44 | |
very few realise that the whole procedure | 0:00:44 | 0:00:48 | |
is named after Julius Caesar, the most famous, | 0:00:48 | 0:00:53 | |
probably most notorious ancient Roman of the lot of them. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:56 | |
BABY BAWLS | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
There you are! Gosh! | 0:01:02 | 0:01:04 | |
10 lbs. | 0:01:07 | 0:01:08 | |
The name "Caesarean section" | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
is just one of the many ways Julius Caesar is still with us. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:19 | |
I'm going to find out how and why. | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
I'm about to come face-to-face with Julius Caesar. | 0:01:22 | 0:01:26 | |
Caesar was never called Emperor of Rome | 0:01:27 | 0:01:30 | |
but, in a way, he was the first one, | 0:01:30 | 0:01:33 | |
and he took all the powers that the emperors had | 0:01:33 | 0:01:36 | |
over the next hundreds of years. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:38 | |
And his impact has lasted a lot longer than that. | 0:01:38 | 0:01:42 | |
This old Roman is still part of our everyday language. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:46 | |
For the first time, we went across the Rubicon. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:49 | |
He has given us some wonderfully grabby Latin phrases. | 0:01:49 | 0:01:53 | |
Veni, vidi, vici. | 0:01:53 | 0:01:56 | |
I came, I saw, I conquered! | 0:01:56 | 0:02:00 | |
Getting that punch and simplicity | 0:02:00 | 0:02:02 | |
that still marks the modern political sound bite. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:05 | |
Yes, we can! | 0:02:05 | 0:02:07 | |
Take back control! | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
Make America great again! | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
I will track down the evidence | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
to show how Julius Caesar rose to the top... | 0:02:14 | 0:02:17 | |
We call it conquest but it was really genocide. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:21 | |
..uncover his tricks of the trade... | 0:02:21 | 0:02:24 | |
Like countless men over the last 2,000 years, | 0:02:24 | 0:02:28 | |
he became a master of the comb-over. | 0:02:28 | 0:02:30 | |
..and reveal how our modern leaders, | 0:02:32 | 0:02:34 | |
from dictators to elected politicians, | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
have used tactics and methods he first perfected 2,000 years ago. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:42 | |
-Hail, Caesar! Come on! ALL: -Hail, Caesar! | 0:02:42 | 0:02:47 | |
Yes! | 0:02:47 | 0:02:48 | |
Modern Rome. | 0:02:57 | 0:02:58 | |
A city where loads of people still come | 0:02:58 | 0:03:01 | |
to catch a glimpse of a lost world. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
And one Roman stars in more selfies than any other. | 0:03:06 | 0:03:11 | |
Julius Caesar. | 0:03:13 | 0:03:14 | |
A conqueror, a populist leader, the biggest power-grabber of the lot. | 0:03:14 | 0:03:20 | |
The man who turned Rome from a democracy into a dictatorship. | 0:03:20 | 0:03:25 | |
And he would no doubt be thrilled to know that we still recognise him, | 0:03:27 | 0:03:33 | |
2,000 years later. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:34 | |
Can you tell me who this guy is? | 0:03:35 | 0:03:37 | |
Yeah, that's Julius Caesar. | 0:03:37 | 0:03:38 | |
-Julius Caesar. -That is Julius Caesar. | 0:03:38 | 0:03:41 | |
LAUGHING: It is. | 0:03:41 | 0:03:42 | |
But how much do we really know about him? | 0:03:42 | 0:03:46 | |
Can you tell me anything that happened to him? | 0:03:46 | 0:03:48 | |
It's been a long time since I was at school. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:51 | |
Do you know? | 0:03:51 | 0:03:52 | |
-LAUGHING: -Oh, no! | 0:03:52 | 0:03:53 | |
Emperor of Rome? | 0:03:53 | 0:03:55 | |
He was the boyfriend of Cleopatra? | 0:03:55 | 0:03:58 | |
He was indeed. | 0:03:58 | 0:03:59 | |
I know that he came over here for a certain reason. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:02 | |
He wasn't meant to cross the river! | 0:04:02 | 0:04:04 | |
-Did he come to a good end? -No, he came to a bad end. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
And I can't remember why. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:08 | |
THEY LAUGH | 0:04:08 | 0:04:10 | |
Ooh, um... | 0:04:10 | 0:04:12 | |
..stabbed... | 0:04:12 | 0:04:14 | |
Was he stabbed? Was he assassinated? | 0:04:14 | 0:04:15 | |
Didn't his...brother... kill him, or something? | 0:04:15 | 0:04:20 | |
-Murder? -Murder? | 0:04:20 | 0:04:22 | |
He was murdered. | 0:04:22 | 0:04:23 | |
He took it in the neck. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:24 | |
MARY LAUGHS | 0:04:24 | 0:04:25 | |
As they say. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:27 | |
I guess we have to start with a spoiler, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
because if there's one thing most of us half-remember | 0:04:30 | 0:04:33 | |
about Julius Caesar, it's the ending. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
So, if you don't want to know the result, look away now. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:40 | |
It was the 15th of March, 44 BC. | 0:04:47 | 0:04:50 | |
And, according to contemporary accounts, | 0:04:50 | 0:04:52 | |
Julius Caesar was going to work. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:54 | |
Very little of Caesar's Rome still exists, | 0:04:57 | 0:05:01 | |
but we can get a glimpse of the ruins of the Senate house, | 0:05:01 | 0:05:05 | |
the building where he died. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:07 | |
When he gets to where the Senate is meeting, somewhere around here, | 0:05:07 | 0:05:11 | |
everybody's chatting and gossiping until Caesar takes his seat. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:16 | |
At that point, one of his friends, | 0:05:17 | 0:05:21 | |
apparently wanting to ask him a favour, | 0:05:21 | 0:05:23 | |
goes over to his chair and pulls on his toga. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:27 | |
That's the signal. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:29 | |
Suddenly, 20 or more of them - | 0:05:29 | 0:05:32 | |
friends, colleagues, politicians - surround him. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:36 | |
Out come their daggers, and everyone has a go! | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
Into Caesar's face, his thighs, his chest. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:46 | |
Caesar fights back with the only weapon he's got. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
It was his pen, and it's hopeless. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
There's mess and panic everywhere, and everybody scarpers. | 0:05:55 | 0:06:00 | |
That's what everybody knows about Julius Caesar - | 0:06:00 | 0:06:04 | |
he gets killed. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:05 | |
He wasn't the only famous Roman to meet a bloody end, | 0:06:07 | 0:06:10 | |
but no other has captured our imagination in quite the same way. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:15 | |
The scene of Caesar's murder has been immortalised | 0:06:17 | 0:06:20 | |
in hundreds of paintings | 0:06:20 | 0:06:22 | |
and in William Shakespeare's tragedy, Julius Caesar. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
It was in fact Shakespeare | 0:06:27 | 0:06:29 | |
who coined the famous phrase, "Et tu, Brute?" - | 0:06:29 | 0:06:33 | |
"You too, Brutus?" - | 0:06:33 | 0:06:34 | |
that Caesar is supposed to have cried out | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
when he saw one of his dearest friends wielding a dagger. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:40 | |
Words we still use today | 0:06:41 | 0:06:43 | |
as a shorthand for disloyalty and backstabbing. | 0:06:43 | 0:06:47 | |
Maybe something we hear a bit too often in modern politics? | 0:06:47 | 0:06:52 | |
But how and why did Julius Caesar end up, | 0:06:53 | 0:06:57 | |
literally and metaphorically, stabbed in the back? | 0:06:57 | 0:07:00 | |
How could a rich, but frankly not A-list aristocrat, | 0:07:03 | 0:07:06 | |
gain such power that the only way to get rid of him was to kill him? | 0:07:06 | 0:07:11 | |
The Rome that Caesar was born into in 100 BC | 0:07:14 | 0:07:18 | |
wasn't a bit like the ancient Rome we see in the movies. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:21 | |
It was super-powerful all right, but there was no Coliseum, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:26 | |
no gleaming white marble - all that came later. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:30 | |
Caesar's Rome was home to about a million people. | 0:07:30 | 0:07:34 | |
Most of them living in pretty squalid, low-rise brick buildings. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:40 | |
It was a sort of democracy. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:42 | |
That's to say, everybody had a vote - | 0:07:42 | 0:07:45 | |
apart from the women and the slaves - | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
but real power was in the hands of a few rich, aristocratic families | 0:07:48 | 0:07:54 | |
like Caesar's. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
How very different from now, eh? | 0:07:57 | 0:07:58 | |
So this was not yet the Rome ruled by emperors. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:04 | |
It was a democracy, | 0:08:04 | 0:08:05 | |
where power was never in the hands of one person for too long. | 0:08:05 | 0:08:10 | |
But Caesar would change all that. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:14 | |
Looking back on it, you can almost see his rise to power | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
as a brilliantly-executed strategy game. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:22 | |
A masterclass in how to be top, | 0:08:22 | 0:08:25 | |
and engineer the ultimate power grab. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:28 | |
One that would become a manual for leaders, right up to now. | 0:08:28 | 0:08:33 | |
And step one was simple - | 0:08:33 | 0:08:35 | |
rewrite your own history. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:38 | |
Caesar wasn't always marked out for success. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:42 | |
But, like all so-called great men, | 0:08:42 | 0:08:45 | |
almost every aspect of his early life | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
was eventually spun to suggest that he was. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:52 | |
In Caesar's case, right back to his birth, | 0:08:52 | 0:08:55 | |
C-section or not. | 0:08:55 | 0:08:57 | |
It's a kind of creation myth. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
The truth is that his early career was actually pretty ordinary. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:09 | |
Playing by the rules. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:11 | |
Like all Roman posh boys, he does a bit of military service, | 0:09:13 | 0:09:19 | |
he stands for a few political offices, | 0:09:19 | 0:09:22 | |
and we really don't know much about the details. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:26 | |
What we do know for sure | 0:09:26 | 0:09:28 | |
is he pretty soon becomes rather good at the gambits | 0:09:28 | 0:09:33 | |
and the strategy, | 0:09:33 | 0:09:35 | |
and he makes some really clever moves. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:40 | |
And, eventually, he starts to change the rules themselves. | 0:09:40 | 0:09:47 | |
And if he starts out as a little chap like this... | 0:09:47 | 0:09:51 | |
..he turns out to be pretty much like a king. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:58 | |
And according to a later legend, | 0:10:00 | 0:10:02 | |
there was a dramatic, life-changing turning point. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
In 69 BC, Caesar was sent to Spain | 0:10:10 | 0:10:14 | |
as an elected official of the Republic of Rome. | 0:10:14 | 0:10:18 | |
Like dozens of other young administrators, | 0:10:18 | 0:10:22 | |
he was taking his first big step on the Roman political ladder. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:26 | |
By this time, through a combination of conquest and alliance, | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
the power of Rome extended through the whole of Italy, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
into North Africa, the Middle East, | 0:10:39 | 0:10:41 | |
southern France, and most of Spain. | 0:10:41 | 0:10:44 | |
And it was on a tiny island off the coast of Spain, near Cadiz, | 0:10:45 | 0:10:49 | |
that Caesar was later said to have had the encounter | 0:10:49 | 0:10:52 | |
that changed the course of his life. | 0:10:52 | 0:10:55 | |
It was with the most glamorized - or to me the most murderous - | 0:10:55 | 0:11:00 | |
ancient Greek General of them all, King Alexander the Great, | 0:11:00 | 0:11:04 | |
who by the age of 33, had conquered half the known world. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:09 | |
The story goes that, somewhere around here, | 0:11:11 | 0:11:14 | |
Caesar actually came face-to-face | 0:11:14 | 0:11:17 | |
with a statue of Alexander the Great. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:20 | |
And he started to cry. | 0:11:20 | 0:11:22 | |
"Isn't it terrible," he said to his friends, "that at my age, | 0:11:23 | 0:11:28 | |
"Alexander was already king of so much of the world." | 0:11:28 | 0:11:33 | |
"But look at me. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
"I've done nothing at all remarkable!" | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
Yet. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
Nothing survives of the temple that once housed the statue. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
We don't even know if the whole story's true, | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
but it became a key chapter in Caesar's legend. | 0:11:50 | 0:11:55 | |
This is a much later attempt to capture the scene. | 0:11:55 | 0:11:59 | |
There's the statue of Alexander here, and Caesar's admiring it, | 0:11:59 | 0:12:04 | |
in his rather splendid red outfit | 0:12:04 | 0:12:06 | |
and some particularly natty shoes. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:09 | |
In fact, ever after, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:11 | |
artists and writers have reimagined this encounter | 0:12:11 | 0:12:15 | |
as a turning point in Caesar's life. | 0:12:15 | 0:12:19 | |
We all do it! | 0:12:19 | 0:12:21 | |
If you wanted, I guess I could give you the turning point | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
when I decided to become a classicist. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:27 | |
In reality, of course, it's all much more complex. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:31 | |
For me, and certainly for Caesar. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:34 | |
All the same, people have often fixed on this occasion | 0:12:34 | 0:12:39 | |
as the moment when Caesar became Caesar. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:44 | |
True or not, this is the symbolic moment | 0:12:44 | 0:12:48 | |
when Caesar the ordinary administrator | 0:12:48 | 0:12:51 | |
turned into Caesar the wannabe top dog. | 0:12:51 | 0:12:55 | |
If step one in Caesar's rise to power | 0:13:04 | 0:13:06 | |
was mythologizing his early life, | 0:13:06 | 0:13:09 | |
step two was winning the loyalty and devotion of the military. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:14 | |
It's something that he and later leaders would come to rely on. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
And ten years after that defining encounter with Alexander the Great, | 0:13:19 | 0:13:24 | |
he got his chance. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:25 | |
After a series of political trade-offs and backstage deals, | 0:13:31 | 0:13:36 | |
Caesar was elected Consul, | 0:13:36 | 0:13:38 | |
the highest political office there was at the time. | 0:13:38 | 0:13:41 | |
Only two were appointed each year, | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
and that made him one of the principal power brokers in Rome. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
And with that kind of political power came a big military command. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:54 | |
Caesar left Italy to lead the conquest of Gaul, | 0:13:54 | 0:13:58 | |
a vast territory that included | 0:13:58 | 0:14:00 | |
modern-day France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. | 0:14:00 | 0:14:03 | |
It was in Gaul that Caesar got to lay the foundations | 0:14:04 | 0:14:08 | |
on what all his later successes in some way would be built. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:13 | |
A loyal army. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:14 | |
One man who can help us see how he managed this is Admiral Lord West, | 0:14:16 | 0:14:20 | |
who understands Caesar's campaigns | 0:14:20 | 0:14:22 | |
from a rather different point of view to mine. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:25 | |
I met him - fittingly, I guess - | 0:14:27 | 0:14:29 | |
in the shadow of a Roman military memorial in Gaul. | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
Julius Caesar, I think, was a brilliant strategist. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:36 | |
He understood how he should divide and split up his enemies, | 0:14:36 | 0:14:39 | |
not fight too many of them at once, he understood | 0:14:39 | 0:14:41 | |
the political background that he was working against, | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
he had a very clear concept of what his aim was. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:48 | |
But what he manages to do, he manages to get those guys, | 0:14:48 | 0:14:52 | |
I mean, first of all, to slaughter the enemy, nastily. | 0:14:52 | 0:14:57 | |
How do you get people to do that? | 0:14:57 | 0:14:59 | |
Because that must be part of the secret. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:01 | |
Basically, they felt he was part of them. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:04 | |
He... He took the same risks, he led from the front, | 0:15:04 | 0:15:08 | |
he understood about the fighting. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:09 | |
And you're right, it was visceral and unpleasant and nasty. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:12 | |
Killing 10,000 people in those days meant | 0:15:12 | 0:15:14 | |
you had to kill with a sword or a stabbing. | 0:15:14 | 0:15:16 | |
You right out killed 10,000 people. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
But he made each one of them feel that they were individuals. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
He won, he won! | 0:15:22 | 0:15:23 | |
There's nothing like having a man who wins to be your commander. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:26 | |
If you have a man who is your commander who keeps winning, | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
you jolly well like that. And when you look at that totality, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
then it's a cohesive unit. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:33 | |
And they felt part of something bigger! | 0:15:33 | 0:15:35 | |
Is that what generals do now? | 0:15:35 | 0:15:37 | |
Is it always the same? | 0:15:37 | 0:15:38 | |
Well, the morale and the focus on the individual | 0:15:38 | 0:15:42 | |
is as important today as it was then. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:44 | |
I mean, that actually is crucial. | 0:15:44 | 0:15:45 | |
If you don't do that, you will not win. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:47 | |
I want you to be absolutely frank on this one. | 0:15:47 | 0:15:49 | |
You've got scruffy prof here. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:52 | |
Do you think you could turn her into a good soldier? And how? | 0:15:52 | 0:15:54 | |
I think, because you have a belief in certain things and a focus, | 0:15:56 | 0:16:01 | |
I think I could make you | 0:16:01 | 0:16:02 | |
be quite unpleasant on the battlefield to somebody else. | 0:16:02 | 0:16:05 | |
There goes my pacifist credentials at a stroke! | 0:16:05 | 0:16:09 | |
But what was it like | 0:16:12 | 0:16:14 | |
for the ordinary squaddie to fight for Caesar? | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
There's one curious museum treasure that offers us an unexpected glimpse | 0:16:18 | 0:16:24 | |
of the world of the Roman battlefield from the bottom up. | 0:16:24 | 0:16:27 | |
I've waited for ages to get my hands on these strange little things. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
Because they give us one of the few glimpses we can get | 0:16:35 | 0:16:39 | |
of what life was like for the ordinary soldier | 0:16:39 | 0:16:42 | |
in an army camp in Caesar's day. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:46 | |
Because what these are | 0:16:46 | 0:16:48 | |
are the ancient equivalent of bullets. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:50 | |
They're called sling-bolts, | 0:16:50 | 0:16:52 | |
and you put them at the end of a cord, you whirl the cord, | 0:16:52 | 0:16:56 | |
let the bullet go, and it does its deadly work. | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
But what's really interesting about them is that they've got, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:04 | |
either scratched on them or more often | 0:17:04 | 0:17:07 | |
moulded actually into the lead, | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
they've got messages to take to your enemy. | 0:17:10 | 0:17:14 | |
We're in a way familiar with that. | 0:17:14 | 0:17:17 | |
Bombs in World War II often had rather rude messages | 0:17:17 | 0:17:21 | |
scrawled on the side, you know, "Run, Adolf, run." | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
That kind of thing. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:26 | |
These Roman ones are actually rather ruder. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:30 | |
This one says "pathice". | 0:17:30 | 0:17:33 | |
The only way you could translate that I suppose is... | 0:17:33 | 0:17:36 | |
"You're buggered." | 0:17:36 | 0:17:38 | |
From a very academic point of view, | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
this one's the most interesting. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:42 | |
It's aimed at one of the women, | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
one of the prominent women on the other side, called Fulvia. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
You can see her name there very clearly. | 0:17:48 | 0:17:50 | |
And it says, "Peto" - I'm going for - the "landicam" of Fulvia. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:57 | |
That is the first example in Latin | 0:17:57 | 0:18:01 | |
of the use of the word clitoris. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
"I'm going for Fulvia's clitoris." | 0:18:04 | 0:18:07 | |
Now, it's blokeish, it's rude. | 0:18:07 | 0:18:10 | |
I think we also have to remember | 0:18:10 | 0:18:12 | |
that these were really deadly weapons. | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
Deadly is right. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:21 | |
In less than five years, | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
Caesar and his men had marched and fought their way | 0:18:23 | 0:18:27 | |
some 1,500 km to grey Northern Gaul. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:32 | |
We know about this campaign in minute detail, | 0:18:33 | 0:18:37 | |
because in one of the most amazing survivals from the ancient world, | 0:18:37 | 0:18:40 | |
we still have Caesar's own step-by-step account. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:44 | |
And one description above all | 0:18:45 | 0:18:47 | |
underlines the brutality and the obedience of his men | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
as they fought a battle against native tribes. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
Caesar describes this battle in detail. | 0:18:56 | 0:18:59 | |
He talks about his own lightning speed, | 0:18:59 | 0:19:02 | |
and how he met the enemy "ad confluentem" - | 0:19:02 | 0:19:07 | |
at the confluence of two rivers. | 0:19:07 | 0:19:10 | |
He hemmed them in | 0:19:10 | 0:19:12 | |
so that they despaired of being able to flee away. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
"Fuga desperata!" | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
And a large number of them - "magno numero" - were killed. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:24 | |
The rest threw themselves "in flumen" - | 0:19:25 | 0:19:30 | |
into the river. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:32 | |
Goes on to say that this tribe | 0:19:33 | 0:19:35 | |
had once numbered over 400,000 people, | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
and he implies that there were not very many left. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:42 | |
Archaeologist Nico Roymans | 0:19:44 | 0:19:46 | |
has identified the location of the battle, and its grisly legacy. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:51 | |
Caesar describes the dramatic massacre here | 0:19:51 | 0:19:55 | |
taking place in 55 BC, | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
and we indeed have this kind of archaeological material | 0:19:58 | 0:20:02 | |
in huge quantities. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:03 | |
You can really see just how deadly Caesar's campaigns were | 0:20:03 | 0:20:08 | |
when you look at the finds that you've got here. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:11 | |
It's a human skull of an adult male, about 60. | 0:20:11 | 0:20:15 | |
-This man has actually had his face cut off with a sword. -Yeah, indeed. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:20 | |
With a single sword blow. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:22 | |
This is part of a female skull, | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
and there's a hole here above one of the eyes | 0:20:25 | 0:20:28 | |
caused by a spearhead or a sword point. | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
So the casualties include, then, women and children? | 0:20:31 | 0:20:36 | |
We have also bones of children. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:39 | |
It was described as a battle by Caesar, | 0:20:40 | 0:20:42 | |
but in fact it was one large massacre. | 0:20:42 | 0:20:45 | |
It was an attempt to massacre the complete population here. | 0:20:45 | 0:20:50 | |
It tends to make real some of the claims | 0:20:50 | 0:20:53 | |
that people now make, that what Caesar was doing in Gaul was... | 0:20:53 | 0:20:58 | |
We call it conquest, but it was really genocide. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:02 | |
Yeah, I think we can use that term. | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
This was a landscape of terror, more or less. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
-Killing fields. -Yeah, yeah, killing fields. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:10 | |
In that mid-first century BC. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
Julius Caesar has always had | 0:21:18 | 0:21:20 | |
the number-one reputation as great conqueror. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:23 | |
He's a towering hero among generals ancient and modern. | 0:21:23 | 0:21:28 | |
But my problem is, it's such a sanitized view of ancient warfare. | 0:21:28 | 0:21:33 | |
It's easy enough to glorify a conquering general like Caesar | 0:21:33 | 0:21:37 | |
2,000 years ago, when you don't see the collateral damage. | 0:21:37 | 0:21:42 | |
When you don't see the innocent victims, | 0:21:42 | 0:21:44 | |
you don't hear their voices, you don't even know their names. | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
Now, we watch the maimed children in hospital on our televisions. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:54 | |
And that makes it a lot harder to glorify conquest. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:59 | |
But leadership isn't only about conquest - | 0:22:00 | 0:22:03 | |
it's about commanding the unquestioning loyalty of your men. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:07 | |
And Caesar's men would follow him to the ends of the earth. | 0:22:07 | 0:22:12 | |
In 55 BC, Caesar decided to cross the Channel and check out | 0:22:12 | 0:22:17 | |
what the land he could see on the other side was all about. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:21 | |
Almost 100 years before Roman armies actually conquered Britain, | 0:22:23 | 0:22:28 | |
Caesar became the first Roman we know | 0:22:28 | 0:22:32 | |
to have set foot on British soil. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
He landed here, in Kent. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:37 | |
This wasn't conquest, it was exploration. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:43 | |
More like a moon landing, really. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:45 | |
Because for the Romans, | 0:22:45 | 0:22:47 | |
Britain really was beyond the final frontier. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:51 | |
And when they got here, | 0:22:51 | 0:22:53 | |
they did actually find themselves face-to-face with little blue men. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:58 | |
Now, it was in fact Julius Caesar who has given us | 0:22:58 | 0:23:04 | |
the first surviving eyewitness account of us. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:09 | |
And there's good news in it for the people of Kent. | 0:23:09 | 0:23:13 | |
This is some of what he's got to say. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:15 | |
SHE TRANSLATES: Out of all the people there, | 0:23:15 | 0:23:17 | |
by far the most sophisticated - humanissimmi - | 0:23:17 | 0:23:21 | |
are those who inhabit Kent, | 0:23:21 | 0:23:24 | |
which is a seaside region, not very different from Gaul. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:28 | |
But all the Britons dye themselves with woad, | 0:23:28 | 0:23:32 | |
which gives them a blue colour | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
that makes them really awful to look at - | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
horridiores - in battle. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
They let their hair grow long, and every part of their body is shaved | 0:23:40 | 0:23:45 | |
except their head and their upper lip. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:48 | |
They're moustachioed. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:49 | |
Now, I don't really recognise myself in that description, | 0:23:49 | 0:23:54 | |
but that really is the first time | 0:23:54 | 0:23:58 | |
that the British enter real history. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:01 | |
Caesar's writings didn't just record events. | 0:24:07 | 0:24:11 | |
His accounts cast him as a Roman hero, | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
a kind of soldier-adventurer, | 0:24:14 | 0:24:17 | |
and that's where their true purpose comes in. | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
They are propaganda for a contemporary Roman audience. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:24 | |
It was, if you like, step three | 0:24:25 | 0:24:28 | |
in Caesar's handbook for would-be leaders - | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
set the news agenda. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:32 | |
Caesar had the problem all politicians have. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:37 | |
How do you keep yourself in the public eye? | 0:24:37 | 0:24:40 | |
How do you get your message across? | 0:24:40 | 0:24:42 | |
Today, that's done by Twitter, 24-hour news, and the internet. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:47 | |
Caesar had none of that. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
But that's where those step-by-step accounts of his conquests come in. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:56 | |
Because I don't think that they were written | 0:24:56 | 0:24:59 | |
just to help out historians 2,000 years later. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:03 | |
Those accounts actually make pretty odd reading now | 0:25:05 | 0:25:09 | |
because he didn't write, "I did this, and then I did that, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:11 | |
"and then I did the other." | 0:25:11 | 0:25:13 | |
What he wrote was, "Caesar did this! And then Caesar did that!" | 0:25:13 | 0:25:17 | |
That could be because he was frightfully pompous, | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
but much more likely is he wrote this stuff to be read out in Rome, | 0:25:21 | 0:25:27 | |
directly to the Roman people, by one of his staff, | 0:25:27 | 0:25:31 | |
when he was hundreds of miles away. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:34 | |
Let's give it a try. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:36 | |
Friends! | 0:25:37 | 0:25:39 | |
Romans! | 0:25:39 | 0:25:41 | |
Countrymen! | 0:25:41 | 0:25:42 | |
I am bringing you dispatches from Gaul! | 0:25:42 | 0:25:49 | |
TRANSLATING: Caesar as always, hurries ahead | 0:25:49 | 0:25:53 | |
to be in the very midst of the battle! | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
You can spot him from the distinctive colour of his uniform. | 0:25:56 | 0:26:02 | |
But Caesar, again, as always, | 0:26:02 | 0:26:06 | |
goes ahead to harass the enemy! | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
He sends them packing! | 0:26:09 | 0:26:12 | |
Impressed? | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
THEY CHEER Yes! | 0:26:14 | 0:26:16 | |
Triumphant stuff! | 0:26:16 | 0:26:19 | |
And I'll bring you more news soon. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:23 | |
Hail Caesar! | 0:26:23 | 0:26:25 | |
-Come on! ALL: -Hail Caesar! | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
Hail Caesar! | 0:26:28 | 0:26:29 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:26:29 | 0:26:31 | |
In his written accounts, | 0:26:35 | 0:26:37 | |
Caesar gave the Romans in the streets | 0:26:37 | 0:26:39 | |
something and somebody to celebrate. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:43 | |
You might say he whipped up national pride. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:47 | |
And never more successfully | 0:26:47 | 0:26:49 | |
than in one particular report of a later victory. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:52 | |
Writing the story down and reading it out isn't enough. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:56 | |
Caesar absolutely grasped the value of a good sound bite. | 0:26:56 | 0:27:01 | |
Veni, vidi, vici. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:05 | |
I came, I saw, I conquered. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:09 | |
These must be the most famous words that Caesar ever wrote. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:13 | |
They're probably the most famous words | 0:27:13 | 0:27:16 | |
in the whole of the Latin language. | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
They've got tremendous zing, rhythm, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:22 | |
and they're really to the point. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:25 | |
I won! | 0:27:25 | 0:27:26 | |
I kind of think of them | 0:27:28 | 0:27:29 | |
as the forerunners of some of our best slogans. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:34 | |
Yes, we can! | 0:27:34 | 0:27:36 | |
Education, education, education! | 0:27:36 | 0:27:40 | |
Even Caesar's contemporaries | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
were impressed with the punch and the genius brevity. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:47 | |
It's all a lot less than the average tweet! | 0:27:47 | 0:27:51 | |
Come to think of it, I might actually send it | 0:27:51 | 0:27:55 | |
to the world's most famous tweeter. | 0:27:55 | 0:27:58 | |
@Potus... SHE LAUGHS | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
There you are, Donald. Mr President. | 0:28:05 | 0:28:08 | |
Please enjoy. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:10 | |
Caesar knew exactly how important it was | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
to get your message across directly to the people. | 0:28:20 | 0:28:24 | |
It's something that Robert Harris, | 0:28:24 | 0:28:26 | |
who has written about ancient and modern politics, gets very well. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:31 | |
Caesar - he didn't write | 0:28:31 | 0:28:32 | |
quite as much as you, but he wrote a huge amount, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:36 | |
which is very unusual in the ancient world in surviving. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:40 | |
And what do you make of them? | 0:28:40 | 0:28:42 | |
Well, I think they show that he was a master of propaganda. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:45 | |
So if one imagines what it must've been like when the herald or whoever | 0:28:45 | 0:28:48 | |
appeared in the forum, the crowd gathering, | 0:28:48 | 0:28:50 | |
people going, "Come and look! Let's see what he's done now!" | 0:28:50 | 0:28:53 | |
And the things that he was doing, of course, were, as someone said, | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
landing in Britain was like the trip to the moon. | 0:28:56 | 0:28:59 | |
It was astonishing that one of their citizens was doing this! | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
So a lot of ordinary people, they really liked to hear that. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:06 | |
They really like to see their leaders are cutting it out there | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
and anyone who gets in their way gets it. | 0:29:10 | 0:29:13 | |
You know, "Make Rome great again" | 0:29:13 | 0:29:15 | |
seems to be the kind of message | 0:29:15 | 0:29:17 | |
that's coming through these commentaries. | 0:29:17 | 0:29:19 | |
Of course, you know, it's quite a common phenomenon | 0:29:19 | 0:29:22 | |
for politicians to refer to themselves in the third person. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
Look at President Trump. He often refers in tweets to | 0:29:25 | 0:29:28 | |
"President Trump has done this, that, or the other." | 0:29:28 | 0:29:31 | |
And Caesar's appealing to the socially excluded, | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
-just like some modern populist politicians. -Exactly, | 0:29:34 | 0:29:38 | |
and that the more outrageous he was, the more people he killed, | 0:29:38 | 0:29:42 | |
the more he flaunted his own misdemeanours, | 0:29:42 | 0:29:45 | |
the better they liked him. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:47 | |
So one of the things you ought to do | 0:29:47 | 0:29:49 | |
if you're in either Caesar or Trump's position | 0:29:49 | 0:29:51 | |
is kind of bypass the rest of the political structure | 0:29:51 | 0:29:55 | |
and speak to the citizens directly. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:59 | |
Yes, what he did, which I think is very modern, | 0:29:59 | 0:30:02 | |
is that although he was himself immensely wealthy, | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
he nevertheless managed to appeal over the head of what he called | 0:30:05 | 0:30:08 | |
"a rotten and corrupt elite". | 0:30:08 | 0:30:11 | |
All great dictators, in a way, | 0:30:11 | 0:30:13 | |
or charismatic leaders, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:16 | |
I think addressed their followers directly, | 0:30:16 | 0:30:18 | |
and they stage-manage very carefully the form in which they do it. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:23 | |
Obviously, Hitler with his rallies, Caesar the same. | 0:30:23 | 0:30:27 | |
And would our world be different without him? | 0:30:27 | 0:30:31 | |
Yes, I think that Caesar is one of the architects of the modern world. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:37 | |
I have no doubt that the world would've been a different place | 0:30:37 | 0:30:40 | |
if Julius Caesar hadn't been born, | 0:30:40 | 0:30:43 | |
and there aren't many figures in history of whom that can be said. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:46 | |
By 50 BC, Caesar could say that the job in Gaul was more or less done. | 0:30:52 | 0:30:57 | |
He had the love of the people at home and the loyalty of his army, | 0:31:00 | 0:31:04 | |
a dangerous combination. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:06 | |
It made his fellow politicians back in Rome increasingly nervous. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:11 | |
Victory in Gaul brought new problems for Caesar. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:19 | |
The metropolitan elite in Rome, | 0:31:19 | 0:31:21 | |
who were a pretty conservative bunch, | 0:31:21 | 0:31:24 | |
decided that his military job was over. | 0:31:24 | 0:31:27 | |
They thought that he'd gone altogether too far too fast, | 0:31:27 | 0:31:31 | |
and that his appeals to the Roman people were dangerous. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:36 | |
They had in mind to get him back and to impeach him | 0:31:36 | 0:31:40 | |
for legal irregularities, real or imagined, | 0:31:40 | 0:31:44 | |
committed years before. | 0:31:44 | 0:31:46 | |
Caesar had been backed into a corner. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
Either he went home to face prosecution, | 0:31:49 | 0:31:52 | |
or he stayed in Gaul against orders, a rogue general. | 0:31:52 | 0:31:56 | |
It was catch-22. | 0:31:56 | 0:31:59 | |
Faced with that dilemma | 0:31:59 | 0:32:00 | |
and to protect what he was always calling his dignitas, his dignity, | 0:32:00 | 0:32:05 | |
he decided to lead his loyal troops across the border between Gaul and | 0:32:05 | 0:32:11 | |
Italy, and to march on Rome. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:15 | |
It was effectively the start of civil war. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:17 | |
The border lay on the line of a river, the River Rubicon. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:25 | |
For a Roman general to cross this border and march his troops | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
on Rome was almost unthinkable, | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
like some Commander-in-chief rolling his tanks onto Parliament Square | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
or Capitol Hill. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:38 | |
That was Caesar's make-or-break moment. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:41 | |
He chose to gamble everything and take on the political establishment. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:46 | |
It's really step four in getting to the top - | 0:32:46 | 0:32:49 | |
spot your opportunity for the power grab and take it. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:54 | |
Oddly enough, Caesar doesn't say a word about this moment in his own | 0:32:54 | 0:32:58 | |
writings. There's a rather guilty silence, I suspect. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:02 | |
But there were loads of Roman stories | 0:33:02 | 0:33:05 | |
about what was going on in his head | 0:33:05 | 0:33:07 | |
at the time. The anxieties, the dreams, the godly apparitions. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:13 | |
Should he? Shouldn't he? | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
But ultimately, | 0:33:16 | 0:33:17 | |
Caesar gave us the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" to mean taking a daring | 0:33:17 | 0:33:23 | |
gamble and going past the point of no return. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:29 | |
"Alea iacta est," he's said to have declared. | 0:33:30 | 0:33:33 | |
"The die is cast." | 0:33:33 | 0:33:34 | |
Or, "I rolled the dice, and it's all up in the air now." | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
The funny thing is that no-one knows exactly where the river was. | 0:33:38 | 0:33:43 | |
It was Benito Mussolini, | 0:33:43 | 0:33:45 | |
the Italian dictator who came to power in the 1920s, | 0:33:45 | 0:33:49 | |
who decided that this slightly underwhelming stream | 0:33:49 | 0:33:53 | |
was THE Rubicon. | 0:33:53 | 0:33:55 | |
In his march on Rome, | 0:33:56 | 0:33:58 | |
he was trying to reconstruct exactly the route taken by Julius Caesar, | 0:33:58 | 0:34:03 | |
in a way to cast himself as the new Caesar. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:08 | |
But in reality, Mussolini took the train. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:11 | |
Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon has long been seen as a symbol of | 0:34:15 | 0:34:18 | |
single-minded determination and risk-taking. | 0:34:18 | 0:34:22 | |
And not just by Mussolini. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:25 | |
For Caesar's fellow politicians, | 0:34:26 | 0:34:28 | |
it was, of course, an act of aggression, | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
a coup d'etat. | 0:34:31 | 0:34:32 | |
And it plunged Rome into civil war. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
The fighting dragged on across the Roman world for years. | 0:34:38 | 0:34:41 | |
But to all intents and purposes, | 0:34:42 | 0:34:44 | |
Caesar had control of the city itself within a matter of months. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:49 | |
He was elected dictator, | 0:34:49 | 0:34:51 | |
a perfectly traditional office in ancient Rome reserved for times of | 0:34:51 | 0:34:55 | |
crisis, which placed power in the hands of a single individual | 0:34:55 | 0:34:59 | |
for a short time. | 0:34:59 | 0:35:02 | |
Caesar took that power for a year, and now effectively ruled Rome. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:08 | |
It's easy to imagine that Caesar crosses the Rubicon one minute | 0:35:08 | 0:35:12 | |
and gets assassinated the next. | 0:35:12 | 0:35:14 | |
But actually, | 0:35:14 | 0:35:15 | |
it's what happens in the five years in between that's so crucial. | 0:35:15 | 0:35:20 | |
And he's facing all the problems | 0:35:20 | 0:35:22 | |
that victors in civil wars always face. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:24 | |
What do you do with those you've defeated? | 0:35:26 | 0:35:28 | |
What do you do with your supporters? | 0:35:28 | 0:35:30 | |
Because you've no doubt promised them loads, | 0:35:30 | 0:35:32 | |
and you've now got to deliver. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:34 | |
And how do you make sure you stay in power? | 0:35:34 | 0:35:36 | |
Some of the strategies he uses are easily recognisable to us. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:42 | |
He invests in infrastructure, or at least he promises to. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:47 | |
So there's walls, bridges, he drains the swamps. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:53 | |
And he has a programme of slum clearance and new towns. | 0:35:53 | 0:35:59 | |
And he looks out for the ordinary Roman with food rations. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:03 | |
And he takes some measures | 0:36:03 | 0:36:05 | |
to deal with what we'd call the credit crunch. | 0:36:05 | 0:36:07 | |
The bottom line of all this is strength and stability. | 0:36:07 | 0:36:12 | |
But he's also flooding the city with his own image. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:17 | |
The idea is that there should be a statue of him | 0:36:17 | 0:36:20 | |
in every single temple. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:22 | |
And what he's doing is making Rome his showcase. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:27 | |
Caesar was turning into a dictator in the modern sense. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:34 | |
And by that, I don't just mean winning power by killing people | 0:36:34 | 0:36:38 | |
and commanding fear, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:40 | |
I mean he was changing the world in which he lived, | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
putting himself at the centre of it. | 0:36:43 | 0:36:46 | |
And he understood the importance of getting his image out there. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:51 | |
It's a technique we recognise well - | 0:36:51 | 0:36:53 | |
the face of the beloved leader pasted across every available | 0:36:53 | 0:36:57 | |
surface from newspapers to flags and billboards. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:01 | |
It was pioneered by Caesar, who had his bust sent everywhere. | 0:37:01 | 0:37:06 | |
And it's true that we do still see his face everywhere. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:12 | |
But actual portraits done from life are almost impossible to find. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:18 | |
Perhaps the orders had not been completed by the time of his death. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:23 | |
Perhaps they were thought to be hot property and destroyed | 0:37:23 | 0:37:26 | |
after his assassination. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:27 | |
But then, in 2007, | 0:37:30 | 0:37:31 | |
archaeologists in France found something intriguing. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:35 | |
It was one of those discoveries that made the headlines. | 0:37:38 | 0:37:41 | |
It was only a few years ago, | 0:37:41 | 0:37:43 | |
an archaeologist was diving right here, | 0:37:43 | 0:37:47 | |
searching for remains on the riverbed. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
He's down there, and he spots a bit of marble. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:54 | |
He brings it up to the surface, still dripping, | 0:37:54 | 0:37:58 | |
takes a closer look and then shouts out, | 0:37:58 | 0:38:03 | |
"Putain, mais c'est Cesar!" | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
-Which could only be translated as, -"BLEEP -me, it's Caesar." | 0:38:06 | 0:38:11 | |
I'm about to come face-to-face with Julius Caesar. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:31 | |
Today, the bust is on display | 0:38:34 | 0:38:36 | |
in the archaeological museum in Arles. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:38 | |
Hello. Or bonjour. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:42 | |
SHE GIGGLES | 0:38:42 | 0:38:44 | |
This is about as up close and personal to Julius Caesar | 0:38:45 | 0:38:48 | |
as you can get. | 0:38:48 | 0:38:50 | |
The question is, what kind of image in this portrait is Caesar trying to | 0:38:50 | 0:38:55 | |
project of himself? | 0:38:55 | 0:38:56 | |
I think one thing's for sure, is it's not glam. | 0:38:56 | 0:39:00 | |
He's got a really wrinkled, furrowed brow, kind of saying, | 0:39:00 | 0:39:04 | |
"I'm working terribly hard on behalf of the state, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:08 | |
"on behalf of Rome, thinking through politics!" | 0:39:08 | 0:39:11 | |
And his neck is really craggy and wrinkly, | 0:39:11 | 0:39:16 | |
with a big Adam's apple. | 0:39:16 | 0:39:18 | |
This is not the kind of youthful idealism. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:22 | |
This is sort of middle-aged, elderly bloke style. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:26 | |
But, yes, as a sculpture, | 0:39:27 | 0:39:29 | |
the Holy Grail of classical archaeology. | 0:39:29 | 0:39:33 | |
For centuries and centuries, | 0:39:33 | 0:39:35 | |
archaeologists have tried to track down | 0:39:35 | 0:39:39 | |
a portrait of Caesar done in his lifetime. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:44 | |
And here you are. | 0:39:44 | 0:39:46 | |
Or are you? | 0:39:49 | 0:39:51 | |
The problem is it's very hard to tell whether this really | 0:39:51 | 0:39:55 | |
is Caesar. | 0:39:55 | 0:39:56 | |
After all, there's no name on him. | 0:39:56 | 0:40:00 | |
If we want to pin down his portraits, | 0:40:00 | 0:40:02 | |
all we can do is what the archaeologists at Arles did - | 0:40:02 | 0:40:06 | |
match them up with portraits of him that are very clearly labelled. | 0:40:06 | 0:40:11 | |
And guess what? | 0:40:11 | 0:40:13 | |
We have hundreds of those. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:14 | |
-Bonjour, Madame. -Bonjour, Madame. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
-Verre de vin blanc, s'il vous plait. -Oui. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:21 | |
-Voila. -Merci. | 0:40:21 | 0:40:25 | |
There's actually only one way of knowing what Julius Caesar looked like, | 0:40:25 | 0:40:29 | |
and that's by looking at the tiny little images on his coins, | 0:40:29 | 0:40:35 | |
which are named. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:37 | |
But these coins were much more revolutionary than they seem. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:42 | |
We take it absolutely for granted that we'll find the Queen's head | 0:40:42 | 0:40:46 | |
on all the currency, | 0:40:46 | 0:40:48 | |
and we assume that one obvious type of political propaganda | 0:40:48 | 0:40:52 | |
is seeing the mugshot of the dear leader plastered everywhere. | 0:40:52 | 0:40:57 | |
But Julius Caesar was the first person to get into that. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:03 | |
He was the very first person in the West systematically | 0:41:03 | 0:41:08 | |
to put his head on the coinage. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:12 | |
It must have been actually quite shocking. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:15 | |
Every time you went to pay for a glass of wine, | 0:41:15 | 0:41:19 | |
or for a takeaway, | 0:41:19 | 0:41:21 | |
or for the ancient equivalent of a cup of coffee, | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
you were paying with him. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:26 | |
That's to say, Romans went around with Julius Caesar in their pockets. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:34 | |
Madame, l'addition, s'il vous plait. | 0:41:34 | 0:41:35 | |
-Deux euros quatre-vingts. -Voila. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:38 | |
Je regrette, je ne prends pas le Cesar. | 0:41:38 | 0:41:42 | |
I did try! | 0:41:42 | 0:41:44 | |
-Voila. En l'euro. -Merci, merci. | 0:41:44 | 0:41:48 | |
Merci. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:50 | |
Some people may have found the idea of carrying Caesar's face around in | 0:41:51 | 0:41:55 | |
their pockets a bit big-headed, but ordinary Romans loved him. | 0:41:55 | 0:41:59 | |
He was seen as the anti-establishment candidate, | 0:42:02 | 0:42:06 | |
not part of the Roman metropolitan elite. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:10 | |
And he knew the value of keeping the people happy, | 0:42:10 | 0:42:13 | |
what a later Roman satirist would describe as "bread and circuses". | 0:42:13 | 0:42:18 | |
Caesar was generous to the Roman people on a spectacular scale. | 0:42:18 | 0:42:24 | |
It was 100 years before the Colosseum was built, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:27 | |
so he gave his gladiator shows here, in the Forum. | 0:42:27 | 0:42:32 | |
But the point was that Caesar's shows | 0:42:32 | 0:42:35 | |
were on a bigger and better scale | 0:42:35 | 0:42:37 | |
than anyone had ever given before. | 0:42:37 | 0:42:40 | |
And so, too, were his public banquets. | 0:42:40 | 0:42:45 | |
Once, he gave a free feast to the Roman people, | 0:42:45 | 0:42:50 | |
with some frightfully posh fish on the menu, | 0:42:50 | 0:42:54 | |
all laid out on 22,000 tables. | 0:42:54 | 0:42:59 | |
It must've made the Forum | 0:42:59 | 0:43:01 | |
feel like it was a vast, free outdoor restaurant. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:06 | |
All courtesy of Julius Caesar. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
But in the Forum, you could find more than fights and feasts. | 0:43:13 | 0:43:17 | |
This was the seedy city centre of Caesar's Rome, | 0:43:17 | 0:43:21 | |
what you came to grab a take away, pick up a prostitute, | 0:43:21 | 0:43:24 | |
or simply hang out and watch the world go by. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:27 | |
The Forum was also the place where Rome put itself on display. | 0:43:29 | 0:43:34 | |
It was here that big Roman funerals happened. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:38 | |
In fact, Caesar was cremated just over there. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:42 | |
And it was through here that the soldiers marched with their generals | 0:43:42 | 0:43:47 | |
after some particularly big or bloody victory. | 0:43:47 | 0:43:52 | |
My guess is that Caesar's squaddies | 0:43:52 | 0:43:56 | |
must really have enjoyed taking the mickey out of him | 0:43:56 | 0:44:00 | |
when they passed this way. | 0:44:00 | 0:44:02 | |
"Romans, lock up your wives," they sang, | 0:44:02 | 0:44:06 | |
"the bald adulterer is back in town!" | 0:44:06 | 0:44:10 | |
I'm sorry to say, gentlemen, | 0:44:26 | 0:44:28 | |
but most Romans thought that baldness was rather silly | 0:44:28 | 0:44:32 | |
and a little bit embarrassing. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:34 | |
So when Caesar began to thin on top, | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
he was awfully keen to cover it up. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
Like countless men over the last 2,000 years, | 0:44:40 | 0:44:44 | |
he became a master of the comb-over. | 0:44:44 | 0:44:47 | |
But he had other tricks up his sleeve. | 0:44:47 | 0:44:50 | |
When he was granted the right to wear a laurel wreath | 0:44:50 | 0:44:54 | |
on any occasion he fancied, | 0:44:54 | 0:44:56 | |
Caesar was absolutely delighted, | 0:44:56 | 0:44:59 | |
not so much because it was a very special honour, | 0:44:59 | 0:45:03 | |
but because it allowed him to cover up that bald patch. | 0:45:03 | 0:45:07 | |
Grazie. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:10 | |
Perfetto. | 0:45:11 | 0:45:12 | |
-You look Cesare. -Grazie. | 0:45:12 | 0:45:14 | |
Caesar may have been embarrassed by his baldness, | 0:45:17 | 0:45:21 | |
but my guess is he'd be quite flattered to be called an adulterer. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:27 | |
Rome was certainly a macho culture. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:29 | |
It was full of willy-waving, | 0:45:29 | 0:45:32 | |
and the locker-room chat must've been decidedly unsavoury. | 0:45:32 | 0:45:37 | |
But even in Rome, Caesar was a bit of an extreme case. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:42 | |
Was there anyone in the city he hadn't slept with? | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
Women, men. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:48 | |
And not just in Rome. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:50 | |
He had an affair with Cleopatra | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
long before her dalliance with Mark Antony. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:57 | |
Makes me think of big men ever since. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:01 | |
They can't keep their hands off women or off power. | 0:46:01 | 0:46:05 | |
It wasn't long before Caesar decided that a year | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
perhaps wasn't a long enough term as dictator. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
Perhaps ten years would be better. | 0:46:13 | 0:46:16 | |
And with that kind of time span, he began to think bigger. | 0:46:16 | 0:46:19 | |
What strikes me is how Caesar's virtues came to reinforce his power. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:27 | |
One of the qualities he always boasted about was his mercy, | 0:46:27 | 0:46:30 | |
or clemency. | 0:46:30 | 0:46:31 | |
He had a history of surprising acts of kindness. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:36 | |
But there's more to that than meets the eye. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
As for his defeated enemies in the civil war, | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
they must've expected that they'd be strung up in the Forum. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
Instead, they found themselves publicly pardoned | 0:46:47 | 0:46:51 | |
in what was almost a general amnesty. | 0:46:51 | 0:46:54 | |
But of course, that kind of mercy is always authoritarian. | 0:46:56 | 0:47:01 | |
And it's only the powerful who could issue pardons. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:05 | |
But more to the point, it tells us something about Caesar himself. | 0:47:05 | 0:47:09 | |
Not that he was kind, | 0:47:10 | 0:47:13 | |
but that he was colossally self-confident. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:15 | |
And it was this colossal self-confidence | 0:47:21 | 0:47:24 | |
that was to leave a permanent mark on our world. | 0:47:24 | 0:47:28 | |
You see, we think of dictators as people who rule by fear - | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
state terror, | 0:47:33 | 0:47:34 | |
secret police, mass killings. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
In fact, dictators have much cleverer strategies. | 0:47:37 | 0:47:41 | |
The most successful of them change the natural order, | 0:47:41 | 0:47:45 | |
so that what wasn't natural before now seems it. | 0:47:45 | 0:47:50 | |
And Caesar was the master. | 0:47:50 | 0:47:52 | |
I bet that not many people know that our month of July | 0:47:52 | 0:47:57 | |
takes its name from Julius Caesar. | 0:47:57 | 0:48:01 | |
The Romans decided to rename the month that had been called rather | 0:48:01 | 0:48:05 | |
unsexily Quintilis as Julius, or July, | 0:48:05 | 0:48:10 | |
and so it's been ever since. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:12 | |
But that is as nothing to Caesar's real legacy - | 0:48:13 | 0:48:17 | |
the modern Western calendar. | 0:48:17 | 0:48:19 | |
Before Julius Caesar, | 0:48:22 | 0:48:24 | |
the Roman calendar year had weirdly been only 355 days. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:30 | |
That wasn't actually long enough, so every few years, | 0:48:30 | 0:48:34 | |
they had to add another month in. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:36 | |
The problem was they were pretty hopeless at doing the calculations, | 0:48:36 | 0:48:40 | |
so the months of the calendar got increasingly out of sync with the | 0:48:40 | 0:48:45 | |
natural seasons. | 0:48:45 | 0:48:47 | |
What I mean is that it would be what you thought was September, | 0:48:47 | 0:48:51 | |
and you'd want to celebrate your harvest festival, | 0:48:51 | 0:48:53 | |
but the vines would only be just coming in to leaf. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:56 | |
Or it would be in the middle of apparently wintry December, | 0:48:56 | 0:49:01 | |
and there'd be bunches of grapes all over the vineyard. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:04 | |
Caesar solved this. | 0:49:04 | 0:49:07 | |
With the help of a few tame scientists, | 0:49:07 | 0:49:09 | |
he pulled the plug on the old system | 0:49:09 | 0:49:12 | |
and he launched the 365-day year that we now have. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:18 | |
In all kinds of ways, it was a really useful and practical reform. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:23 | |
But it also reveals something that only dictators can do - | 0:49:23 | 0:49:29 | |
change time. | 0:49:29 | 0:49:31 | |
As one of his friends wryly observed, | 0:49:31 | 0:49:34 | |
"He'll be bossing the stars in the sky around next." | 0:49:34 | 0:49:38 | |
Caesar was becoming a dictator in our sense of the word - | 0:49:40 | 0:49:44 | |
a man who puts himself above the political process, | 0:49:44 | 0:49:47 | |
a man who reorders the world around him, a man who can change time. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:53 | |
And he used public celebrations to reflect his status, | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
though we can dictate certain anxieties. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:01 | |
This is a version of a 15th-century painting which shows just how | 0:50:02 | 0:50:08 | |
preoccupied later ages were, too, | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
with the image of the triumphant Caesar. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:13 | |
What you've got here is Julius Caesar thinning a bit on top, | 0:50:13 | 0:50:18 | |
sitting on his elaborate, triumphal chariot. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:23 | |
And there's placards and spoils and loot being processed | 0:50:23 | 0:50:26 | |
through the streets in front of him. | 0:50:26 | 0:50:29 | |
But there's a moral here, too, | 0:50:29 | 0:50:32 | |
in these figures, Caesar on the chariot, | 0:50:32 | 0:50:35 | |
and this slave standing behind him, | 0:50:35 | 0:50:39 | |
who's about to crown him with a laurel wreath. | 0:50:39 | 0:50:43 | |
And we know from Roman writers that what this slave did throughout the | 0:50:43 | 0:50:48 | |
procession for every victory parade was he whispered into the ear of the | 0:50:48 | 0:50:54 | |
general all the time, "Remember you're a man, remember you're a man, | 0:50:54 | 0:50:59 | |
"remember you're a man." | 0:50:59 | 0:51:01 | |
The idea was that anybody who had this kind | 0:51:01 | 0:51:05 | |
of lavish ceremonial would be very likely to forget | 0:51:05 | 0:51:10 | |
that they were just an ordinary human being. | 0:51:10 | 0:51:13 | |
So this, in a way, | 0:51:13 | 0:51:15 | |
is a reminder to Julius Caesar not to get above himself. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:20 | |
All the same, Caesar was aware of the popular power of a good military | 0:51:20 | 0:51:26 | |
parade, something later leaders have been quick to adopt. | 0:51:26 | 0:51:30 | |
Even in the democratic West, | 0:51:33 | 0:51:35 | |
displays of military might have long been part of our national tradition, | 0:51:35 | 0:51:39 | |
from Trooping the Colour to Bastille Day. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
Caesar's power over Rome by now seemed almost absolute. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:49 | |
His military image only strengthened his popular appeal. | 0:51:49 | 0:51:53 | |
He was central to almost every aspect of Roman life. | 0:51:53 | 0:51:56 | |
Statues put up later would emphasise this power and authority. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:02 | |
Like this one, still standing in Rome's City Hall, | 0:52:02 | 0:52:06 | |
overhearing traffic regulation and planning disputes. | 0:52:06 | 0:52:10 | |
But it's what's written underneath in this modern inscription | 0:52:10 | 0:52:14 | |
that's even more to the point, | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
because it gives Caesar his official title - | 0:52:16 | 0:52:21 | |
dictator perpetuus. | 0:52:21 | 0:52:24 | |
He's dictator forever. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
Now, the Romans wouldn't have found the word dictator remotely shocking. | 0:52:27 | 0:52:32 | |
It was a title given to an entirely traditional short-term office | 0:52:32 | 0:52:39 | |
that was used for coping with particular emergencies. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:43 | |
What they would have found shocking is the idea that Caesar took that | 0:52:43 | 0:52:48 | |
power forever. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:50 | |
It's a bit like how we would feel about someone being elected | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
Prime Minister for life. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:58 | |
And it's in that way that Caesar has given us the modern sense | 0:52:58 | 0:53:04 | |
of the word dictator. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:06 | |
What happened is that Caesar made sure that his term as dictator was | 0:53:09 | 0:53:14 | |
extended, not just from one year to ten years, but to forever. | 0:53:14 | 0:53:19 | |
The dictatorship was only one way | 0:53:21 | 0:53:23 | |
in which Caesar disrupted Roman politics. | 0:53:23 | 0:53:27 | |
Roman democracy was based on free elections, | 0:53:27 | 0:53:31 | |
but Caesar managed to make sure that you knew the outcome in advance. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:37 | |
And he found all kinds of ways of putting himself above the rest | 0:53:37 | 0:53:41 | |
of the political class. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:44 | |
It wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to the women and men in | 0:53:44 | 0:53:47 | |
the Roman street, | 0:53:47 | 0:53:49 | |
but his fellow politicians got very worked up | 0:53:49 | 0:53:53 | |
when he couldn't be bothered to rise from his chair | 0:53:53 | 0:53:56 | |
when they came into the room. | 0:53:56 | 0:53:58 | |
And anyway, that chair was beginning to look suspiciously like | 0:53:58 | 0:54:03 | |
a golden throne. | 0:54:03 | 0:54:05 | |
For Caesar's enemies, | 0:54:07 | 0:54:09 | |
his appointment as dictator perpetuus effectively, | 0:54:09 | 0:54:13 | |
well, crossed the Rubicon. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:14 | |
It was a watershed - | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
the point at which leader became tyrant, | 0:54:20 | 0:54:23 | |
a subversion of the ideals of freedom and democracy. | 0:54:23 | 0:54:26 | |
He may have been popular with the people | 0:54:28 | 0:54:31 | |
and he may have commanded the loyalty of the army, | 0:54:31 | 0:54:35 | |
but for Caesar, | 0:54:35 | 0:54:36 | |
the price of tyranny was paid in blood here, in the Senate House. | 0:54:36 | 0:54:40 | |
Perhaps this should be the real lesson for modern leaders. | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
Be careful what you wish for - | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
too much power comes at a cost. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:52 | |
And there's always somebody waiting in the wings. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:55 | |
The version that we have of Caesar's assassination makes it a heroic and | 0:55:00 | 0:55:05 | |
successful fight for freedom against tyranny. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:08 | |
In reality, it was nothing of the sort. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:12 | |
For a start, if it was freedom for anyone, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:16 | |
it was for a few privileged politicians. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
Ordinary Romans wept at Caesar's death. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:23 | |
But you also can't really call it successful. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
The problem of assassinations always is that it's easy enough to take the | 0:55:27 | 0:55:33 | |
guy out, it's a lot harder to know what to do next. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:38 | |
Assassins always risk bringing about the very thing they thought | 0:55:38 | 0:55:42 | |
they were fighting against. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:44 | |
In this case, once the deed was done, | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
the conspirators turned out to have no forward plan. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
What they got was civil war, | 0:55:52 | 0:55:56 | |
which ended up producing one-man rule, | 0:55:56 | 0:55:59 | |
emperors, or, if you like, dictators forever after. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:05 | |
So Caesar's assassination only served to strengthen | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
the very thing it meant to destroy. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:15 | |
The upshot was that Rome fell under the absolute rule of one man - | 0:56:15 | 0:56:20 | |
Caesar's heir and great-nephew Octavian. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:24 | |
The Republic of Rome was now ruled by an emperor. | 0:56:24 | 0:56:28 | |
What I'm interested in is that people come | 0:56:28 | 0:56:32 | |
and they still leave these offerings on... | 0:56:32 | 0:56:34 | |
This is where Julius Caesar was cremated. | 0:56:34 | 0:56:36 | |
And so what they do is...round here is... | 0:56:36 | 0:56:38 | |
The temple of Julius Caesar, they put up after his death. | 0:56:38 | 0:56:42 | |
And so you've got flowers and occasional c... | 0:56:42 | 0:56:45 | |
Look, there's coins. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:47 | |
Caesar would forever after be celebrated | 0:56:47 | 0:56:50 | |
as the originator of the imperial dynasty. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:54 | |
All later emperors took his name. | 0:56:58 | 0:57:00 | |
From that moment on, Caesar wasn't just a surname any more, | 0:57:00 | 0:57:04 | |
it became synonymous with leader. | 0:57:04 | 0:57:06 | |
And not only in Roman times. | 0:57:09 | 0:57:11 | |
The term tsar and Kaiser go back to, you've guessed it, Caesar. | 0:57:11 | 0:57:16 | |
And leaders ever since have done more than just take his name. | 0:57:17 | 0:57:21 | |
For good or bad, | 0:57:21 | 0:57:23 | |
they have used the template he created to ground their own rule. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:27 | |
Even now. | 0:57:27 | 0:57:29 | |
And more than 2,000 years after his bloody assassination, | 0:57:29 | 0:57:34 | |
Julius Caesar is still with us in all kinds of surprising ways. | 0:57:34 | 0:57:40 | |
So every time you put your hand in your pocket for some loose change, | 0:57:40 | 0:57:44 | |
or have a party in July, | 0:57:44 | 0:57:46 | |
each time you consult the calendar, or hear a snappy political slogan, | 0:57:46 | 0:57:51 | |
when you next think about a caesarean section, | 0:57:51 | 0:57:55 | |
or here a political betrayal described as backstabbing, | 0:57:55 | 0:57:59 | |
spare a thought for the man who inspired all this and more. | 0:57:59 | 0:58:04 | |
I've always been a bit allergic to the idea of Julius Caesar, | 0:58:04 | 0:58:08 | |
the great conqueror. | 0:58:08 | 0:58:10 | |
But if you have to choose just one Roman | 0:58:10 | 0:58:13 | |
who's still absolutely embedded in the way we think, | 0:58:13 | 0:58:18 | |
talk, act and judge, | 0:58:18 | 0:58:21 | |
then it's got to be Gaius Julius Caesar, | 0:58:21 | 0:58:25 | |
dictator perpetuus. | 0:58:25 | 0:58:28 | |
You can kill him, but you can't get rid of him. | 0:58:28 | 0:58:32 |