![]() ![]() The Julii Caesares traced their lineage back to the goddess Venus, but the family was not snobbish or conservative-minded. ![]() Though some of the most powerful noble families were patrician, patrician blood was no longer a political advantage it was actually a handicap, since a patrician was debarred from holding the paraconstitutional but powerful office of tribune of the plebs. By Caesar's time, the number of surviving patrician gentes was small and in the gens Julia the Caesares seem to have been the only surviving family. Caesar's calendar, the Julian calendar, is still partially in force in the Eastern Orthodox Christian countries and the Gregorian calendar, now in use in the West, is the Julian, slightly corrected by Pope Gregory XIII.Ĭaesar's gens, the Julii, were patricians i.e., members of Rome's original aristocracy, which had coalesced in the 4th century BC with a number of leading plebeian (commoner) families to form the nobility that had been the governing class in Rome since then. The old Roman calendar was inaccurate and manipulated for political purposes. This name has survived, as has Caesar's reform of the calendar. Even people who know nothing of Caesar as a historic personality are familiar with his family name as a title signifying a ruler who is in some sense uniquely supreme or paramount-the meaning of Kaiser in German, tsar in the Slavonic languages, and qaysar in the languages of the Islamic world.Ĭaesar's gens (clan) name, Julius (Iulius), is also familiar in the Christian world for in Caesar's lifetime the Roman month Quintilis, in which he was born, was renamed "July" in his honour. But Caesar's name, like Alexander's, is still on people's lips throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. The Greco-Roman society has been extinct for so long that most of the names of its great men mean little to the average, educated modern man. Celebrated Roman general and statesman, the conqueror of Gaul (5850 BC), victor in the Civil War of 4946 BC, and dictator (4644 BC), who was launching a series of political and social reforms when he was assassinated by a group of nobles in the Senate House on the Ides of March.Ĭaesar changed the course of the history of the Greco-Roman world decisively and irreversibly.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |