Finished Reading: “Caesar” by Plutarch

 

Plutarch described Caesar as “a spare man, had soft and white skin, was distempered in the head and subject to an epilepsy” who “used war as the best physic against his indispositions.” He dictated letters while on horseback, is thought to be the first to communicate in code and sailed into the Atlantic with an army for war. When sheltering during a storm, he gave up his place to make room for sick men. Caesar occasionally led battles on foot, saving his horse for parading after the battle. He piled up the dead into rivers to make them passable. “[A]nd the people’s fondness for Caesar gave an additional luster to successes achieved by him.” 

General Pompey’s (son-in-law of Caesar, former statesman of the Roman Republic, turned enemy) rivalry culminated in the Battle of Thessalia, or the so-called “Battle of Pharsalas” (in Greece), signaling end of the Roman Republic and the crises of the beginning of The Roman Empire. While Pompey’s assassination occurred in Egypt, Caesar would be assassinated four years later at The Theater of Pompey, in Rome “when he saw Brutus's sword drawn, he covered his face with his robe and submitted, letting himself fall, whether it were by chance or that he was pushed in that direction by his murderers, at the foot of the pedestal on which Pompey's statue stood, and which was thus wetted with his blood. So that Pompey himself seemed to have presided, as it were, over the revenge done upon his adversary . . .”

Among his other feats, Caesar, by consulting “the best philosophers and mathematicians of his time,” produced “a new and more exact method of correcting the calendar, which the Romans use to this day. . .”