Why Caesar?
In European civilization, I think it's a true statement to say that the most famous historical figure, second only to Jesus, is Julius Caesar. He's been hero-worshipped more or less continuously since he led his army into Gaul ��� except for one unfortunate incident involving sixty or so of his political rivals and a lot of knives.
If you think about it, this is really weird. Other historical figures go in and out of fashion. Today's hero is tomorrow's villain. But Caesar has been reinterpreted in every era.
In Imperial Rome, he was literally deified, and all the subsequent emperors used his name as their title. They all claimed his power, his popularity, and his legitimacy. A few even deserved it.
With the decline of Roman paganism and the triumph of Christianity in Europe during the Middle Ages, you'd expect a guy who was a pagan god to fall out of favor. But nope. He was honored as one of the Nine Worthies, the greatest heroes of antiquity, the Bible, and Christendom. A virtuous pagan and a paragon of chivalry. Emperors in Germany and Constantinople still claimed his authority.
When Dante wrote his Divine Comedy and described a journey through Hell, at the bottom layer was the three-headed figure of Satan, frozen in ice up to his waist and eternally gnawing on history's three greatest traitors. Who were those three villains? One was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. The other two were Brutus and Cassius ��� two of Caesar's assassins. For Dante, stabbing that one particular Roman politician is as awful as betraying God.
Another literary genius took up Caesar three centuries later. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is perhaps the most "nuanced" view of Caesar in literature. The man himself gets the usual hero-worship, but Shakespeare doesn't shy away from depicting the gangsterism of his political followers, and shows Brutus as having honorable and patriotic motives. Still, the play is named after Caesar and that's who the audience shows up to see.
The intellectual and political movement known as the Enlightenment was enamored of all things Roman, so Caesar remained as popular as ever. Especially in Italy, where a rather self-interested Roman politician was reinvented as a symbol of national unity and liberation from foreign rule. It must have gnawed at Italian leaders and thinkers of that era to see some Habsburg German sitting in Vienna, calling himself "Kaiser" and lording it over most of northern Italy.
In the Twentieth Century, Caesar's most avid admirer was another Italian politician, whose career was less glorious but did follow much the same trajectory. One would think that association with Italian Fascism would lower Caesar's stock, but that didn't happen. In America he got reinvented as a populist reformer, a proto-FDR brutally killed by "reactionary" Senators.
There are any number of explanations for his invincible popularity. The fact that a hundred generations of educated men in Europe grew up reading about Caesar in Plutarch didn't hurt. Nor did the fact that most of those men also read Caesar's own account of the Gallic Wars.
One must conclude that in addition to being a military genius, Caesar was also the greatest self-promoter in history. His reputation outlived him, his family, and his civilization, and shows no sign of abating. I guess he earned it.
