The Rise And Death Of Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar

Kal’el L. Felder

Frank A. Salamone

5/5/2014

Western Civilization 1648

Julius Caesar was a politician and general of the late Roman Republic, who vastly extended the Roman Empire before seizing power and making himself dictator of Rome, paving the way for the imperial system. Which eventually led to a senatorial coup, and the assassination of Julius Caesar, on the Ides of March. Which also led to the power struggle in Rome shortly after his death, leading to the end of the Roman Republic.

Julius Caesar was believed to be born around the 13th and 14th of July in Rome, 100 BC. Caesar did come from an aristocratic family, but he was far from rich in his youth, and father, Gaius Caesar, died when he was 16, making him becoming much closer towards his mother, Aurelia. While he was growing up in Rome, at the time it was in much disorder and was unstable. It struck Caesar, around the time of his father’s death; he began or would take things into his own hands and do something about this instability and in doing so married Cornelia, the daughter of a noble. His marriage to Cornelia had drawn the ire of Rome’s dictator, Sulla, and ordered the two to divorce or risk losing his property. Caesar ultimately refused this, and sought refuge in the military and served in the province of Asia and on to Cilicia.

Soon after the death of Sulla, Caesar returned to Rome, beginning his career in politics as a prosecuting advocate. Caesar was a very cunning individual; temporarily he relocated to Rhodes while he was studying in Philosophy, while he was there, he was kidnapped by pirates, but he displayed tenacity, his negotiation skills and counter-insurgency tactics, he convinced the captors to raise the ransom they had on him, and re...

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...play. Where the plot Shakespeare’s play included the events leading up to his assassination of Caesar and also as much of the subsequent war, in which the deaths of the conspirators organized a sort of revenge for the assassination. In 1599, when the play was first performed, Queen Elizabeth I had sat on the throne for nearly forty years, enlarging her power at the expense of the aristocracy and the House of Commons. As she was then sixty-six years old, her reign seemed likely to end soon, yet she lacked any heirs (as did Julius Caesar). Many feared that her death would plunge England into the kind of chaos that had plagued England during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. In an age when censorship would have limited direct commentary on these worries, Shakespeare could nevertheless use the story of Caesar to comment on the political situation of his day.