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