All language subtitles for Julius.Caesar.Revealed.2018.720p.WEBRip.x264.AAC-[YTS.MX]

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

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

Julius Caesar changed his own world
in unimaginable ways,

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

Julius Caesar, as the story goes,
was born by C-section.

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

The whole story's
almost certainly a myth,

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

very few realise
that the whole procedure

is named after Julius Caesar,
the most famous,

probably most notorious
ancient Roman of the lot of them.

BABY BAWLS

There you are! Gosh!

10 lbs.

The name "Caesarean section"

is just one of the many ways
Julius Caesar is still with us.

I'm going to find out how and why.

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

Caesar was never
called Emperor of Rome

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

and he took all the powers
that the emperors had

over the next hundreds of years.

And his impact has lasted
a lot longer than that.

This old Roman is still part
of our everyday language.

For the first time,
we went across the Rubicon.

He has given us some wonderfully
grabby Latin phrases.

Veni, vidi, vici.

I came, I saw, I conquered!

Getting that punch and simplicity

that still marks the modern
political sound bite.

Yes, we can!

Take back control!

Make America great again!

I will track down the evidence

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

We call it conquest
but it was really genocide.

..uncover his tricks of the trade...

Like countless men
over the last 2,000 years,

he became a master of the comb-over.

..and reveal how our modern leaders,

from dictators
to elected politicians,

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

Hail, Caesar! Come on!
ALL: Hail, Caesar!

Yes!

Modern Rome.

A city where loads of people
still come

to catch a glimpse of a lost world.

And one Roman stars in more selfies
than any other.

Julius Caesar.

A conqueror, a populist leader, the
biggest power-grabber of the lot.

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

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

2,000 years later.

Can you tell me who this guy is?

Yeah, that's Julius Caesar.

Julius Caesar.
That is Julius Caesar.

LAUGHING: It is.

But how much
do we really know about him?

Can you tell me
anything that happened to him?

It's been a long time
since I was at school.

Do you know?

LAUGHING: Oh, no!

Emperor of Rome?

He was the boyfriend of Cleopatra?

He was indeed.

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

He wasn't meant to cross the river!

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

And I can't remember why.

THEY LAUGH

Ooh, um...

..stabbed...

Was he stabbed? Was he assassinated?

Didn't his...brother...
kill him, or something?

Murder? Murder?

He was murdered.

He took it in the neck.

MARY LAUGHS

As they say.

I guess we have to start
with a spoiler,

because if there's one thing
most of us half-remember

about Julius Caesar,
it's the ending.

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

It was the 15th of March, 44 BC.

And, according
to contemporary accounts,

Julius Caesar was going to work.

Very little of Caesar's Rome
still exists,

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

the building where he died.

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

everybody's chatting and gossiping
until Caesar takes his seat.

At that point, one of his friends,

apparently wanting
to ask him a favour,

goes over to his chair
and pulls on his toga.

That's the signal.

Suddenly, 20 or more of them -

friends, colleagues, politicians -
surround him.

Out come their daggers,
and everyone has a go!

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

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

It was his pen,
and it's hopeless.

There's mess and panic everywhere,
and everybody scarpers.

That's what everybody knows
about Julius Caesar -

he gets killed.

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

but no other has captured our
imagination in quite the same way.

The scene of Caesar's murder
has been immortalised

in hundreds of paintings

and in William Shakespeare's
tragedy, Julius Caesar.

It was in fact Shakespeare

who coined the famous phrase,
"Et tu, Brute?" -

"You too, Brutus?" -

that Caesar is supposed
to have cried out

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

Words we still use today

as a shorthand for disloyalty
and backstabbing.

Maybe something we hear
a bit too often in modern politics?

But how and why did
Julius Caesar end up,

literally and metaphorically,
stabbed in the back?

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

gain such power that the only way
to get rid of him was to kill him?

The Rome that Caesar was born into
in 100 BC

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

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

no gleaming white marble -
all that came later.

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

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

It was a sort of democracy.

That's to say,
everybody had a vote -

apart from the women
and the slaves -

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

like Caesar's.

How very different from now, eh?

So this was not yet the Rome
ruled by emperors.

It was a democracy,

where power was never in the hands
of one person for too long.

But Caesar would change all that.

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

as a brilliantly-executed
strategy game.

A masterclass in how to be top,

and engineer
the ultimate power grab.

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

And step one was simple -

rewrite your own history.

Caesar wasn't always
marked out for success.

But, like all so-called great men,

almost every aspect
of his early life

was eventually spun
to suggest that he was.

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

C-section or not.

It's a kind of creation myth.

The truth is that his early career
was actually pretty ordinary.

Playing by the rules.

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

he stands for
a few political offices,

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

What we do know for sure

is he pretty soon becomes
rather good at the gambits

and the strategy,

and he makes
some really clever moves.

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

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

..he turns out to be
pretty much like a king.

And according to a later legend,

there was a dramatic,
life-changing turning point.

In 69 BC,
Caesar was sent to Spain

as an elected official
of the Republic of Rome.

Like dozens of other
young administrators,

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

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

the power of Rome extended through
the whole of Italy,

into North Africa, the Middle East,

southern France, and most of Spain.

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

that Caesar was later said
to have had the encounter

that changed the course of his life.

It was with the most glamorized -
or to me the most murderous -

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

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

The story goes that,
somewhere around here,

Caesar actually came face-to-face

with a statue of
Alexander the Great.

And he started to cry.

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

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

"But look at me.

"I've done nothing
at all remarkable!"

Yet.

Nothing survives of the temple
that once housed the statue.

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

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

This is a much later attempt
to capture the scene.

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

in his rather splendid red outfit

and some particularly natty shoes.

In fact, ever after,

artists and writers
have reimagined this encounter

as a turning point
in Caesar's life.

We all do it!

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

when I decided
to become a classicist.

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

For me, and certainly for Caesar.

All the same, people have often
fixed on this occasion

as the moment
when Caesar became Caesar.

True or not, this is
the symbolic moment

when Caesar the ordinary
administrator

turned into Caesar
the wannabe top dog.

If step one in
Caesar's rise to power

was mythologizing his early life,

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

It's something that he and later
leaders would come to rely on.

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

he got his chance.

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

Caesar was elected Consul,

the highest political office
there was at the time.

Only two were appointed each year,

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

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

Caesar left Italy
to lead the conquest of Gaul,

a vast territory that included

modern-day France, Belgium,
and Luxembourg.

It was in Gaul that Caesar
got to lay the foundations

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

A loyal army.

One man who can help us see how he
managed this is Admiral Lord West,

who understands Caesar's campaigns

from a rather different
point of view to mine.

I met him - fittingly, I guess -

in the shadow of a Roman military
memorial in Gaul.

Julius Caesar, I think,
was a brilliant strategist.

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

not fight too many of them at once,
he understood

the political background
that he was working against,

he had a very clear concept
of what his aim was.

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

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

How do you get people to do that?

Because that must be
part of the secret.

Basically, they felt
he was part of them.

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

he understood about the fighting.

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

Killing 10,000 people
in those days meant

you had to kill with a sword
or a stabbing.

You right out killed 10,000 people.

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

He won, he won!

There's nothing like having a man
who wins to be your commander.

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

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

then it's a cohesive unit.

And they felt part of
something bigger!

Is that what generals do now?

Is it always the same?

Well, the morale
and the focus on the individual

is as important today
as it was then.

I mean, that actually is crucial.

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

I want you to be absolutely frank
on this one.

You've got scruffy prof here.

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

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

I think I could make you

be quite unpleasant on the
battlefield to somebody else.

There goes my pacifist credentials
at a stroke!

But what was it like

for the ordinary squaddie
to fight for Caesar?

There's one curious museum treasure
that offers us an unexpected glimpse

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

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

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

of what life was like
for the ordinary soldier

in an army camp in Caesar's day.

Because what these are

are the ancient equivalent
of bullets.

They're called sling-bolts,

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

let the bullet go,
and it does its deadly work.

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

either scratched on them
or more often

moulded actually into the lead,

they've got messages
to take to your enemy.

We're in a way familiar with that.

Bombs in World War II often had
rather rude messages

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

That kind of thing.

These Roman ones
are actually rather ruder.

This one says "pathice".

The only way you could
translate that I suppose is...

"You're buggered."

From a very academic
point of view,

this one's the most interesting.

It's aimed at one of the women,

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

You can see her name there
very clearly.

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

That is the first example in Latin

of the use of the word clitoris.

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

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

I think we also have to remember

that these were
really deadly weapons.

Deadly is right.

In less than five years,

Caesar and his men had marched
and fought their way

some 1,500 km
to grey Northern Gaul.

We know about this campaign
in minute detail,

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

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

And one description above all

underlines the brutality
and the obedience of his men

as they fought a battle
against native tribes.

Caesar describes this battle
in detail.

He talks about his own
lightning speed,

and how he met the enemy
"ad confluentem" -

at the confluence of two rivers.

He hemmed them in

so that they despaired of being able
to flee away.

"Fuga desperata!"

And a large number of them -
"magno numero" - were killed.

The rest threw themselves
"in flumen" -

into the river.

Goes on to say that this tribe

had once numbered
over 400,000 people,

and he implies that there were not
very many left.

Archaeologist Nico Roymans

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

Caesar describes
the dramatic massacre here

taking place in 55 BC,

and we indeed have this kind of
archaeological material

in huge quantities.

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

when you look at the finds
that you've got here.

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

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

With a single sword blow.

This is part of a female skull,

and there's a hole here
above one of the eyes

caused by a spearhead
or a sword point.

So the casualties include, then,
women and children?

We have also bones of children.

It was described as a battle
by Caesar,

but in fact it was
one large massacre.

It was an attempt to massacre
the complete population here.

It tends to make real
some of the claims

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

We call it conquest,
but it was really genocide.

Yeah, I think we can use that term.

This was a landscape of terror,
more or less.

Killing fields.
Yeah, yeah, killing fields.

In that mid-first century BC.

Julius Caesar has always had

the number-one reputation
as great conqueror.

He's a towering hero among generals
ancient and modern.

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

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

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

When you don't see
the innocent victims,

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

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

And that makes it a lot harder
to glorify conquest.

But leadership
isn't only about conquest -

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

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

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

what the land he could see on
the other side was all about.

Almost 100 years before Roman armies
actually conquered Britain,

Caesar became the first Roman
we know

to have set foot on British soil.

He landed here, in Kent.

This wasn't conquest,
it was exploration.

More like a moon landing, really.

Because for the Romans,

Britain really was
beyond the final frontier.

And when they got here,

they did actually find themselves
face-to-face with little blue men.

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

the first surviving
eyewitness account of us.

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

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

SHE TRANSLATES:
Out of all the people there,

by far the most sophisticated -
humanissimmi -

are those who inhabit Kent,

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

But all the Britons
dye themselves with woad,

which gives them a blue colour

that makes them
really awful to look at -

horridiores - in battle.

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

except their head
and their upper lip.

They're moustachioed.

Now, I don't really recognise myself
in that description,

but that really is the first time

that the British enter real history.

Caesar's writings
didn't just record events.

His accounts cast him as
a Roman hero,

a kind of soldier-adventurer,

and that's where their true purpose
comes in.

They are propaganda for
a contemporary Roman audience.

It was, if you like, step three

in Caesar's handbook
for would-be leaders -

set the news agenda.

Caesar had the problem
all politicians have.

How do you keep yourself
in the public eye?

How do you get your message across?

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

Caesar had none of that.

But that's where those step-by-step
accounts of his conquests come in.

Because I don't think that
they were written

just to help out historians
2,000 years later.

Those accounts actually make
pretty odd reading now

because he didn't write, "I did
this, and then I did that,

"and then I did the other."

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

That could be because
he was frightfully pompous,

but much more likely is he wrote
this stuff to be read out in Rome,

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

when he was hundreds of miles away.

Let's give it a try.

Friends!

Romans!

Countrymen!

I am bringing you dispatches
from Gaul!

TRANSLATING: Caesar as always,
hurries ahead

to be in the very midst
of the battle!

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

But Caesar, again, as always,

goes ahead to harass the enemy!

He sends them packing!

Impressed?

THEY CHEER

Yes!

Triumphant stuff!

And I'll bring you more news soon.

Hail Caesar!

Come on!
ALL: Hail Caesar!

Hail Caesar!

APPLAUSE

In his written accounts,

Caesar gave
the Romans in the streets

something and somebody
to celebrate.

You might say
he whipped up national pride.

And never more successfully

than in one particular report
of a later victory.

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

Caesar absolutely grasped
the value of a good sound bite.

Veni, vidi, vici.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

These must be the most famous words
that Caesar ever wrote.

They're probably
the most famous words

in the whole of the Latin language.

They've got tremendous zing, rhythm,

and they're really to the point.

I won!

I kind of think of them

as the forerunners of
some of our best slogans.

Yes, we can!

Education, education, education!

Even Caesar's contemporaries

were impressed with the punch
and the genius brevity.

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

Come to think of it,
I might actually send it

to the world's most famous tweeter.

@Potus...

SHE LAUGHS

There you are, Donald. Mr President.

Please enjoy.

Caesar knew exactly how important
it was

to get your message across
directly to the people.

It's something that Robert Harris,

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

Caesar - he didn't write

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

which is very unusual in the ancient
world in surviving.

And what do you make of them?

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

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

appeared in the forum,
the crowd gathering,

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

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

landing in Britain was like
the trip to the moon.

It was astonishing that one of
their citizens was doing this!

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

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

and anyone who gets in their way
gets it.

You know, "Make Rome great again"

seems to be the kind of message

that's coming through
these commentaries.

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

for politicians to refer to
themselves in the third person.

Look at President Trump.
He often refers in tweets to

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

And Caesar's appealing
to the socially excluded,

just like some modern
populist politicians. Exactly,

and that the more outrageous he was,
the more people he killed,

the more he flaunted
his own misdemeanours,

the better they liked him.

So one of the things you ought to do

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

is kind of bypass the rest
of the political structure

and speak to the citizens directly.

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

is that although he was himself
immensely wealthy,

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

"a rotten and corrupt elite".

All great dictators, in a way,

or charismatic leaders,

I think addressed
their followers directly,

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

Obviously, Hitler with his rallies,
Caesar the same.

And would our world be different
without him?

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

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

if Julius Caesar hadn't been born,

and there aren't many figures in
history of whom that can be said.

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

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

a dangerous combination.

It made his fellow politicians
back in Rome increasingly nervous.

Victory in Gaul brought new problems
for Caesar.

The metropolitan elite in Rome,

who were a pretty conservative
bunch,

decided that his military job
was over.

They thought that he'd gone
altogether too far too fast,

and that his appeals
to the Roman people were dangerous.

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

for legal irregularities,
real or imagined,

committed years before.

Caesar had been backed
into a corner.

Either he went home
to face prosecution,

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

It was catch-22.

Faced with that dilemma

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

he decided to lead his loyal troops
across the border between Gaul and

Italy, and to march on Rome.

It was effectively
the start of civil war.

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

For a Roman general to cross
this border and march his troops

on Rome was almost unthinkable,

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

or Capitol Hill.

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

He chose to gamble everything and
take on the political establishment.

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

spot your opportunity
for the power grab and take it.

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

writings. There's a rather guilty
silence, I suspect.

But there were loads
of Roman stories

about what was going on in his head

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

Should he? Shouldn't he?

But ultimately,

Caesar gave us the phrase "crossing
the Rubicon" to mean taking a daring

gamble and going past
the point of no return.

"Alea iacta est,"
he's said to have declared.

"The die is cast."

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

The funny thing is that no-one knows
exactly where the river was.

It was Benito Mussolini,

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

who decided that
this slightly underwhelming stream

was THE Rubicon.

In his march on Rome,

he was trying to reconstruct exactly
the route taken by Julius Caesar,

in a way to cast himself
as the new Caesar.

But in reality,
Mussolini took the train.

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

single-minded determination
and risk-taking.

And not just by Mussolini.

For Caesar's fellow politicians,

it was, of course,
an act of aggression,

a coup d'etat.

And it plunged Rome into civil war.

The fighting dragged on
across the Roman world for years.

But to all intents and purposes,

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

He was elected dictator,

a perfectly traditional office in
ancient Rome reserved for times of

crisis, which placed power
in the hands of a single individual

for a short time.

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

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

and gets assassinated the next.

But actually,

it's what happens in the five years
in between that's so crucial.

And he's facing all the problems

that victors in civil wars
always face.

What do you do
with those you've defeated?

What do you do with your supporters?

Because you've no doubt promised
them loads,

and you've now got to deliver.

And how do you make sure
you stay in power?

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

He invests in infrastructure,
or at least he promises to.

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

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

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

And he takes some measures

to deal with what we'd call
the credit crunch.

The bottom line of all this
is strength and stability.

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

The idea is that there should be
a statue of him

in every single temple.

And what he's doing is making Rome
his showcase.

Caesar was turning into a dictator
in the modern sense.

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

and commanding fear,

I mean he was changing the world
in which he lived,

putting himself at the centre of it.

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

It's a technique we recognise well -

the face of the beloved leader
pasted across every available

surface from newspapers
to flags and billboards.

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

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

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

Perhaps the orders had not been
completed by the time of his death.

Perhaps they were thought to be
hot property and destroyed

after his assassination.

But then, in 2007,

archaeologists in France
found something intriguing.

It was one of those discoveries
that made the headlines.

It was only a few years ago,

an archaeologist
was diving right here,

searching for remains
on the riverbed.

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

He brings it up to the surface,
still dripping,

takes a closer look
and then shouts out,

"Putain, mais c'est Cesar!"

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

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

Today, the bust is on display

in the archaeological museum
in Arles.

Hello. Or bonjour.

SHE GIGGLES

This is about as up close
and personal to Julius Caesar

as you can get.

The question is, what kind of image
in this portrait is Caesar trying to

project of himself?

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

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

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

"on behalf of Rome,
thinking through politics!"

And his neck is really craggy
and wrinkly,

with a big Adam's apple.

This is not the kind
of youthful idealism.

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

But, yes, as a sculpture,

the Holy Grail
of classical archaeology.

For centuries and centuries,

archaeologists have tried
to track down

a portrait of Caesar done
in his lifetime.

And here you are.

Or are you?

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

is Caesar.

After all, there's no name on him.

If we want to pin down
his portraits,

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

match them up with portraits of him
that are very clearly labelled.

And guess what?

We have hundreds of those.

Bonjour, Madame. Bonjour, Madame.

Verre de vin blanc, s'il vous plait.
Oui.

Voila. Merci.

There's actually only one way of
knowing what Julius Caesar
looked like,

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

which are named.

But these coins were much more
revolutionary than they seem.

We take it absolutely for granted
that we'll find the Queen's head

on all the currency,

and we assume that one obvious type
of political propaganda

is seeing the mugshot of the dear
leader plastered everywhere.

But Julius Caesar was the first
person to get into that.

He was the very first person
in the West systematically

to put his head on the coinage.

It must have been
actually quite shocking.

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

or for a takeaway,

or for the ancient equivalent
of a cup of coffee,

you were paying with him.

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

Madame, l'addition, s'il vous plait.

Deux euros quatre-vingts. Voila.

Je regrette,
je ne prends pas le Cesar.

I did try!

Voila. En l'euro. Merci, merci.

Merci.

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

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

He was seen
as the anti-establishment candidate,

not part
of the Roman metropolitan elite.

And he knew the value
of keeping the people happy,

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

Caesar was generous to the Roman
people on a spectacular scale.

It was 100 years
before the Colosseum was built,

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

But the point was
that Caesar's shows

were on a bigger and better scale

than anyone had ever given before.

And so, too,
were his public banquets.

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

with some frightfully posh fish
on the menu,

all laid out on 22,000 tables.

It must've made the Forum

feel like it was a vast,
free outdoor restaurant.

All courtesy of Julius Caesar.

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

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

what you came to grab a take away,
pick up a prostitute,

or simply hang out
and watch the world go by.

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

It was here that big Roman funerals
happened.

In fact, Caesar was cremated
just over there.

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

after some particularly big
or bloody victory.

My guess is that Caesar's squaddies

must really have enjoyed
taking the mickey out of him

when they passed this way.

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

"the bald adulterer
is back in town!"

I'm sorry to say, gentlemen,

but most Romans thought
that baldness was rather silly

and a little bit embarrassing.

So when Caesar began to thin on top,

he was awfully keen to cover it up.

Like countless men
over the last 2,000 years,

he became a master of the comb-over.

But he had other tricks
up his sleeve.

When he was granted the right
to wear a laurel wreath

on any occasion he fancied,

Caesar was absolutely delighted,

not so much because
it was a very special honour,

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

Grazie.

Perfetto.

You look Cesare. Grazie.

Caesar may have been embarrassed
by his baldness,

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

Rome was certainly a macho culture.

It was full of willy-waving,

and the locker-room chat
must've been decidedly unsavoury.

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

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

Women, men.

And not just in Rome.

He had an affair with Cleopatra

long before her dalliance
with Mark Antony.

Makes me think of big men
ever since.

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

It wasn't long before Caesar decided
that a year

perhaps wasn't a long enough term
as dictator.

Perhaps ten years would be better.

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

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

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

or clemency.

He had a history of surprising acts
of kindness.

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

As for his defeated enemies
in the civil war,

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

Instead, they found themselves
publicly pardoned

in what was almost
a general amnesty.

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

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

But more to the point, it tells us
something about Caesar himself.

Not that he was kind,

but that he was colossally
self-confident.

And it was
this colossal self-confidence

that was to leave
a permanent mark on our world.

You see, we think of dictators
as people who rule by fear -

state terror,

secret police, mass killings.

In fact, dictators
have much cleverer strategies.

The most successful of them
change the natural order,

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

And Caesar was the master.

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

takes its name from Julius Caesar.

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

unsexily Quintilis as Julius,
or July,

and so it's been ever since.

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

the modern Western calendar.

Before Julius Caesar,

the Roman calendar year
had weirdly been only 355 days.

That wasn't actually long enough,
so every few years,

they had to add another month in.

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

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

natural seasons.

What I mean is that it would be
what you thought was September,

and you'd want to celebrate
your harvest festival,

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

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

and there'd be bunches of grapes
all over the vineyard.

Caesar solved this.

With the help
of a few tame scientists,

he pulled the plug on the old system

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

In all kinds of ways, it was a
really useful and practical reform.

But it also reveals something
that only dictators can do -

change time.

As one of his friends
wryly observed,

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

Caesar was becoming a dictator
in our sense of the word -

a man who puts himself
above the political process,

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

And he used public celebrations
to reflect his status,

though we can dictate certain
anxieties.

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

preoccupied later ages were, too,

with the image
of the triumphant Caesar.

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

sitting on his elaborate,
triumphal chariot.

And there's placards and spoils
and loot being processed

through the streets in front of him.

But there's a moral here, too,

in these figures,
Caesar on the chariot,

and this slave standing behind him,

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

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

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

general all the time, "Remember
you're a man, remember you're a man,

"remember you're a man."

The idea was that anybody
who had this kind

of lavish ceremonial would be
very likely to forget

that they were
just an ordinary human being.

So this, in a way,

is a reminder to Julius Caesar
not to get above himself.

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

parade, something later leaders
have been quick to adopt.

Even in the democratic West,

displays of military might have long
been part of our national tradition,

from Trooping the Colour
to Bastille Day.

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

His military image only strengthened
his popular appeal.

He was central to almost
every aspect of Roman life.

Statues put up later would emphasise
this power and authority.

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

overhearing traffic regulation
and planning disputes.

But it's what's written underneath
in this modern inscription

that's even more to the point,

because it gives Caesar
his official title -

dictator perpetuus.

He's dictator forever.

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

It was a title given to an entirely
traditional short-term office

that was used for coping
with particular emergencies.

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

power forever.

It's a bit like how we would feel
about someone being elected

Prime Minister for life.

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

of the word dictator.

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

extended, not just from one year
to ten years, but to forever.

The dictatorship was only one way

in which Caesar disrupted
Roman politics.

Roman democracy was based
on free elections,

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

And he found all kinds of ways
of putting himself above the rest

of the political class.

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

the Roman street,

but his fellow politicians
got very worked up

when he couldn't be bothered
to rise from his chair

when they came into the room.

And anyway, that chair was beginning
to look suspiciously like

a golden throne.

For Caesar's enemies,

his appointment as
dictator perpetuus effectively,

well, crossed the Rubicon.

It was a watershed -

the point at which leader
became tyrant,

a subversion of the ideals
of freedom and democracy.

He may have been popular
with the people

and he may have commanded
the loyalty of the army,

but for Caesar,

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

Perhaps this should be the real
lesson for modern leaders.

Be careful what you wish for -

too much power comes at a cost.

And there's always somebody waiting
in the wings.

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

successful fight for freedom
against tyranny.

In reality,
it was nothing of the sort.

For a start,
if it was freedom for anyone,

it was for
a few privileged politicians.

Ordinary Romans wept
at Caesar's death.

But you also can't really call it
successful.

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

guy out, it's a lot harder
to know what to do next.

Assassins always risk bringing about
the very thing they thought

they were fighting against.

In this case,
once the deed was done,

the conspirators turned out
to have no forward plan.

What they got was civil war,

which ended up producing
one-man rule,

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

So Caesar's assassination
only served to strengthen

the very thing it meant to destroy.

The upshot was that Rome fell under
the absolute rule of one man -

Caesar's heir
and great-nephew Octavian.

The Republic of Rome
was now ruled by an emperor.

What I'm interested in
is that people come

and they still leave
these offerings on...

This is where Julius Caesar
was cremated.

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

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

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

Look, there's coins.

Caesar would forever after
be celebrated

as the originator
of the imperial dynasty.

All later emperors took his name.

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

it became synonymous with leader.

And not only in Roman times.

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

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

For good or bad,

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

Even now.

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

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

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

or have a party in July,

each time you consult the calendar,
or hear a snappy political slogan,

when you next think
about a caesarean section,

or here a political betrayal
described as backstabbing,

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

I've always been a bit allergic
to the idea of Julius Caesar,

the great conqueror.

But if you have to choose
just one Roman

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

talk, act and judge,

then it's got to be
Gaius Julius Caesar,

dictator perpetuus.

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