People don’t think about it much today, but Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth were nearly contemporaries. Roman Senators stabbed Caesar to death 44 years before the year of Jesus’ birth. At that time, those 44 years were roughly one human lifespan.
Like a certain ex-president, Julius Caesar was a highly successful demagogue. Unlike his modern counterpart, Caesar was also a victorious conquering general and a noted author of history. Historians and students of Latin still read his Gallic Commentaries today.
But Caesar’s assassination didn’t stop the disastrous decline on which his creative demagoguery had set Rome. The Pompeiian Civil Wars he set in motion, plus lead in the pipes from which the Roman emperors and elite drank, sealed ancient Rome’s fate. Rome stumbled on—as a brutal Empire, not a democracy—for another few centuries. Then it fell to…
