Julius Caesar's Rise To The Republic | Tony Robinson's Romans | Timeline

The stabbing happened just a few yards from here. It was a frenzied attack, 23 stab wounds inflicted by the same number of assassins. It's one of the most notorious murders in history and it determined the course of Western civilization. And even though it occurred over 2,000 years ago, we still know the exact date that it happened. It was the 15th, or as it was then known, the Ides of March. And the murder victim was, of course, Julius Caesar. Caesar's been called the greatest man who ever lived, a truly superhuman figure who was a brilliant general, a great writer, and a man of the people. After his death, they mourned him in their thousands. So how come he ended up on the wrong end of the assassin's dagger? What made people hate him so much? I've come here to Rome to try to find the real Caesar, the man behind the myth, one of the most complex, driven people in the whole of human history. To follow in Caesar's footsteps is to embark on an epic journey. From ancient Egypt to the uncharted island of Britain, he came, he saw, and he conquered. By terms brutal and brilliant, he changed the map of Europe. But more importantly, he transformed Rome itself from a republic into an empire. Above all, he was the man who terminally destroyed the old system. Julius Caesar celebrates how many people he kills. He celebrates a triumph that he killed a million people. He was really one of Europe's great geniuses, but basically flawed and look at the cost for everyone else. Rome was the center of Caesar's universe. But when he was born here in 100 BC, nobody could have predicted that he would one day reign supreme amongst the elegant temples and colonnades of the Roman Empire while in that direction, he conquered what is now known as the Sabura. It was in dirty, crime-ridden Sabura with its multi-story tenement blocks that Julius Caesar first saw the light of day. But he wasn't exactly one of the street kids who roamed the slums. The aristocratic Caesars traced their roots back to the founding fathers of Rome. They'd lost a lot of money, but the baby's three names tell us that he's of noble birth. His first name was Gaius. Julius and Caesar were both family names. But the name Caesar, which means cut, has led to the first fiction about him. In ancient times, great men had remarkable births and the legend grew that he'd been cut from his mother's womb. The myth gives us the name by which we still know the operation, the Caesarian section. It's a good story, but in fact, Caesar was born quite normally. They did do the operation in those days, but only to save the life of the child. The mother never survived. And we know that Caesar's mother was still alive when he was 40. In 100 BC, the most special thing about the young boy was his aunt Julia. She'd recently boosted the family fortunes by marrying a charismatic politician called Marius. That marriage determined Caesar's political colors for life. Caesar's noble roots made him eligible later in life to sit in the Senate House here in the Forum, where his fellow aristocrats ran Rome like a private club. But by the first century, the Senate had split into bitter factions. Siding with Marius put all the Caesar family firmly on one side of the political divide. Julius Caesar's early life is dominated by a civil war which is between two army commanders, and almost like sort of preempts what he's going to do. And he's not in the group which won, basically. So again, he's in the aristocracy, but there's the possibility of his death at any point. As the power struggle slid into anarchy, the 17-year-old Caesar got a terrifying taste of the reality of Roman politics. A powerful general from the other factions swept into Rome and appointed himself as emergency dictator to settle the unrest. His name was Sulla. To deal with political opponents, he invented the fiendish system of proscription. It works something like this. Instead of wasting energy arresting and killing people himself, Sulla put up lists of names in public places. These people were then fair game. Anyone who killed them got a reward. 1,600 leading citizens were purged in the first wave of murders, and more followed. Some people were just dragged out of their houses and kicked to death in the streets. And one of the names on these ominous public lists was Julius Caesar. He went underground, changing houses almost daily, relying on a network of discreet family friends. In the fetid swampy back streets, he caught malaria. As he sweated it out, favors were called in. Political neutrals brokered a deal with Sulla. They secured a pardon on the condition that the teenager come out of hiding to face the dictator. Sulla was a large, menacing man with a blotchy face. He turned to the teenager who defied him. What he saw was a tall, slim young man with piercing black eyes who, even when he was looking at the most powerful man in Rome, wasn't going to give any concessions to tradition. Instead of the normal short-sleeved tunic, he'd got long sleeves with fringes, and he wore his belt slung low, hipster style. If he couldn't dress properly, what other customs might he try and break down? Sulla must have wished he'd never let him off. He turned to those who'd negotiated the pardon and made a telling prediction. All right, he said, have it your way. But I'm warning you, this young man who you're so desperate to protect, one day he's going to bring down the very system that we want to preserve. A lot of what we know about Caesar is written much later by people who already knew what he'd achieved. Sulla's prophetic statement was probably made up with the benefit of hindsight. In 83 BC, there were far bigger problems threatening Rome than one outrageously dressed teenager. And the main problem was the system itself. For 600 years, Rome had been governed as a republic, ruled by aristocratic senators who were all volunteers and changed jobs every year. It had worked well, but then Rome expanded from a simple city-state to control an empire that spanned the Mediterranean. The structure that was designed for local government couldn't cope with running a global superpower. As it expanded, Rome had switched from voluntary national service to having a professional army to protect and run its dominions. But after making Rome rich, these soldiers retired with nothing. The already crowded city was overflowing with vast numbers of angry veterans living in poverty and demanding a pension. So-called crowd-pleasers like Caesar's uncle Marius were reformers who wanted to redistribute land to provide for the soldiers. Others saw any change as an assault on tradition. There was, for about the last century of the republic, a continuous conflict between what we can call conservatives and reformers. But they don't have political parties. There isn't such a thing as a reform party. There's no clear understanding of this is the way the reform party wants to go and this is the way that the conservatives are trying to stop it. What you have is a clash of systems of authority. Caesar's own clash with authority meant that Rome was still not safe for him. His family packed him off abroad, doing junior jobs and improving his education. This foreign travel was meant to give him a low profile, but it led to one of the most extraordinary events of his whole career. He was still only 25. With a small retinue of servants, he was sailing to Rhodes for a course in the art of rhetoric, or public speaking, from a Greek master. As his ship crept round the coast of Greece, it was boarded by pirates and Caesar was kidnapped. The pirates must have thought they'd hit the jackpot. When you demand a ransom, you don't expect your victim to start trying to negotiate upwards. But when they told him that they wanted 20 talents of silver, Caesar treated the amount with contempt. 20, he said, I'm worth more than that. Make it 50. 50 talents is almost a ton of silver. It would take nearly a month to collect. His men sailed off to try and raise some money from the local banks while Caesar remained on board. He didn't want to waste his time, so he practiced public speaking on the pirates. They thought this was a joke and barracked him. And when he swore he'd see them hanged, they laughed and laughed. When the money arrived, the pirates let Caesar sail away to the nearby port of Miletus. It was a fatal error. At Miletus, he hired a squadron of ships and men out of his own pocket, returned and found the pirates still at anchor. He captured them, reclaimed the ransom and took them back to the provincial capital. When he found that the governor seemed more interested in taking a bribe in order to let them go free rather than punishing them, Caesar took the law into his own hands. He kept his promise of justice and had every single one of the pirates crucified. He'd spent a month in their company larking around and joking with them. So as an act of mercy and for old time's sake, he had their throats cut first. This savage punishment and gambling with his own life was Caesar's way of making sure of headlines back in Rome. Romans are always competing for. They call it fama, fame, gloria, dignitas. And just think of what Roman life is like. Here we are in the Roman forum and the Roman ruling class get there by being voted for by people. And it's an even more direct relationship than with modern politicians. I mean, maybe the media expose modern politicians in some ways, but they constantly have to see these people face to face and they have to make an impact on them. So they're all in the business of arousing cheers. Making his own PR. Absolutely. They're as concerned with spin as any modern politician. But Caesar had strong competitors for Rome's attention. He was about to run up against a man called Spartacus. Julius Caesar had begun life like a boy's own hero. On the run from death squads one minute, battling pirates the next. And in 73 BC, he was enlisted to fight another epic figure, Spartacus, a gladiator who was at the centre of a slave rebellion. Julius Caesar was a junior officer in the campaign against Spartacus. As the rebels retreated south through the countryside, the Romans moved to cut them off. Whatever the movies might say, there was never any hope of Spartacus succeeding. The sad fact is that the real life Spartacus wasn't a noble revolutionary, but a hopeless runaway who ended up as little more than a bandit. Thousands joined his rebellion, but they were rats in a trap. Caesar joined the Roman military machine as it advanced down the country, forcing the disorganised rebels into defeat and capture. There was absolutely no mercy for this assault on the established order. Along the Appian Way, 6,000 prisoners from the Spartacan revolt were crucified. Anyone travelling north from Naples to Rome would ride the last few miles to the accompaniment of screams and the stench of the tortured and the dying. For Caesar, it was no less than they deserved. Caesar was one of those who wanted reforms in Rome, but he was no revolutionary. As he'd already shown, he could be as ruthless as any of his fellow aristocrats in defending the rule of law and the status quo. But the Spartacus campaign was to be vital for Caesar's career in another way. When he was 32, Caesar took his place in the Senate on the lowest rung of the official Roman career ladder. Within the Senate, there was an ascending order of ranks you could be elected to, each with their own qualifying age. Caesar, like most of his contemporaries, wanted to reach the top and become consul. But Roman political life was a risky and expensive gamble. You needed money to get on, and Caesar didn't have it. Aristocrats on the make borrow huge amounts of money to finance their election campaign against the possibility of getting a province where they will extort back everything they've paid out. But of course, not everyone can get elected. So at every stage of the pyramid, you've got people falling off it and falling into debt. You've got desperate, desperate men. Caesar's commanding officer on the Spartacus campaign had been Marcus Licinius Crassus. Crassus was immensely influential, mostly because he was the richest man in Rome. He'd made millions as a crooked property baron and was quite happy to make huge loans to an ambitious young man like Caesar. Finance was vital to Caesar because he had to play catch-up. He started on the bottom rung two years after he could have done at the age of 32. He was a driven man, hungry for success. He was sickened when he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Cadiz. He realized that by his age, Alexander had conquered half the known world. To compensate, Caesar went into overdrive. As he climbed the ladder, he did everything to excess. Unlike politicians today, senators paid for their policies out of their own purse. When he was in charge of public entertainment, his games were bigger and better. When he had a job maintaining the Appian Way, he spent a fortune on repairs. The ordinary people loved him for it. On a personal level, he had to walk the walk. He was lavish with entertainment, gifts, and bribes. Caesar had the best of everything, wine, clothes, antiques, jewels, and women, especially women. Being married never stopped Caesar making other conquests. Back in Rome, Caesar was famous for being one of the most prolific adulterers ever. He slept with the wives of his enemies for information. He slept with the wives of his friends for fun. And sometimes he slept with his friends. He was so notorious that the famous poet Catullus wrote a poem about the varied and energetic sex life he shared with his chief of staff, Murmura. Perverted bedfellows, Caesar and Murmura compete against each other at serial adultery and pulling teenage girls. But private life and politics all needed funding. Besides legitimate expenses, Caesar also had to buy votes. Every election to every job meant a fresh advance from Crassus. Then in 63 BC, the lifelong post of Pontifex Maximus, the high priest, came up for grabs. It was an honorary but hugely influential job. Caesar was the rank outsider, but it was too good a chance to miss. Caesar risked everything to get elected. He put himself so deeply in debt that when he left home in the Sabura, he said to his mother, I'll either return as Pontifex Maximus or I'll be off in exile forever. It was a typical high-stakes gamble, and he brought it off. He got the job and the perks which went with it, including a house right in the middle of the Forum. Today, Caesar stands moral guardian of Rome's city council, but no political scandal can possibly match the vicious corruption of the Senate in Caesar's day. As a leading advocate of reform, Caesar was bound to provoke opposition. His archenemy in the Senate was Cato, a dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat who despised Caesar's populist agenda. Cato has his own political ambitions. Cato wants to make a name for himself, and he makes a name for himself as Mr Virtue. And he chooses to identify Caesar as Mr Vice. Now, Caesar is an incredibly controversial character right from the start, and I think one must assume that Caesar actually, as a personality, he relished controversy. He was never going to compromise with people. He just went all out for it. This wasn't the kind of friendly rivalry you sometimes see with professional politicians, but a bitter personal dislike. They both used dirty tactics. After one meeting here, Caesar narrowly avoided being killed by one of Cato's bodyguards. In his turn, Caesar used the mob to disrupt meetings. He'd organised so-called spontaneous protests when he didn't get his way, then he'd calm the mob down and tell them he didn't want to make any fuss, thus earning support from the Senate for his dignified behaviour. Caesar was nearing 40. Notoriously vain, he wore a laurel wreath to cover his thinning hair and had all his body hair plucked. And he was still broke. For his next promotion, he was appointed for a year as a governor in southern Spain, with a brief to combat the brigands that had been plaguing the province. Before he set off, his wagons were impounded by the bailiffs, and he had to touch Crassus for more money to get them out of hock. But for a hard-up senator, a foreign posting was a payback. In the provinces, he's rather like a mini-king. He's king of that area. He can make decisions, whatever decisions he really wants to, and there's almost an expectation of extortion when you go. You will always make money. Caesar fought a brilliant campaign against the brigands, and if he also accidentally attacked and looted a few innocent towns, Rome was willing to turn a blind eye. He liked a good victory. With success came the booty of war, enough to pay off his debts and to reward his men sufficiently well to ensure their future loyalty. He was supposed to stay in Spain till the end of the year, but he wanted to be where the action was. He cancelled his contract and returned to Rome. He'd been awarded a triumph there, but more importantly, elections were looming. He was about to mount the final rung on the Roman ladder of success, the consulship. Caesar came back from Spain to stand for election as consul, so he needed some of this. White cloth. Candida in Latin. To be a candidate, he had to come into the centre of Rome, dressed in white and apply in person. But at that time, this was a big problem for him because he'd also just been awarded a triumph, which was an official celebration for conquering generals, involving a big procession right up here through to the Temple of Jupiter in the middle of Rome. And Caesar's problem was that the rules said that a general couldn't come back into Rome till after the triumph had taken place. It was a clash of dates. The deadline for applications was before the triumph. Caesar hated to give up the chance of glory, but political power was what he craved most. He gave up his triumph and was duly elected consul. But his conservative opponents wouldn't let their arch-enemy have it all his own way. There were two consuls each year. They were supposed to work together, but Cato and Caesar's other enemies made sure that his fellow consul that year would be one of their own men, who'd act as an anchor on his ambitions. They chose Cato's son-in-law, Bibulus, which was a bit like pairing Ken Livingstone with Norman Tebbit and expecting them to work together. This kind of pettiness made Caesar vow that he'd never compromise with his opponents again. From now on, he'd bypass them. He did it by making a semi-official alliance with the two most influential figures in Rome, his money man Crassus and Pompey the Great. At the time, Pompey was the real superstar in Rome. He was only six years older than Caesar, but had had a brilliant military career and had already been consul. Through Crassus and Pompey, Caesar mobilised a network of support and votes. This alliance was known as the Triumvirate. All three had something to gain. I mean, Pompey can make sure that all his veterans turn up to vote, for instance. Simple as that. They can say, well, it's in your interest to do this, to support this man. So it can mobilise the support of a lot of people. He also gets the support of Marcus Crassus, partly because Marcus Crassus wants to have a new deal for the tax farmers of Asia. He's representing them. Here in the Senate, there was a set order of speaking, but Caesar always invited his chums Pompey and Crassus to speak first. He had his arch-enemy Cato arrested for speaking for too long and he intimidated the opposition with hired thugs. But number one on his hit list was his fellow consul Bibulus. When he tried to interrupt while Caesar was speaking, the hired thugs burst in and tipped a bucket of dung over his head. Caesar had a positive reforming agenda, but sleaze and his bully-boy tactics overshadowed everything he did. Bibulus went in fear of his life. He tried to get a state of emergency declared, and when this failed, he simply went home, locked himself in, and tried a novel method of blocking all political business. Bibulus would look out of his front door every morning and whatever the weather, even on a nice day like today, he'd say he'd seen a flash of lightning, which meant that the gods were displeased. This may seem daft, but actually it was a stroke of genius because it meant that just by turning up to work down at the Senate that morning, Caesar was breaking the law. If he tried to pass any legislation, it was illegal because it was going against the will of the gods. Just like a diplomat today, he couldn't be charged while he was still in office, but the moment he came back into Rome as a private citizen, he could be charged. Both sides are cheating. Of course they're cheating by the Roman rules because it is proper to use religious obstruction, but Bibulus is overusing it. And he's using it in an absurd fashion. And similarly, Caesar and many others used violence in a fashion that quite alarmed the Romans. Romans jokingly called this year the joint consulship of Julius and Caesar. As it drew to a close, Caesar had to make sure his next job kept him away from Rome and the threat of prosecution. The tradition was that consuls were rewarded with a plum job in the provinces after their year in office, with plenty of opportunities for making money. The fact that Caesar was a wanted man didn't matter. For Romans, observing the ancient traditions and upholding the honour of the consulship was paramount. His enemies voted him one minor post. Caesar ignored them and wangled the job he wanted. He took the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul, a lucrative province that also let him keep in close touch with his interests in Rome. He could have ended up as just another corrupt Roman politician, a footnote in history. Then fate intervened. His allotted province was south of the Alps, what's now northern Italy. North of the Alps was the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul, present-day Provence and Languedoc. That was the limit of the empire. Beyond it, the Gaulish tribes were causing trouble. A new Roman governor had already been appointed for Transalpine Gaul, but fortunately for Caesar, he died on the journey north. So it now made perfect sense for Caesar to be given that additional province as well, along with command of its troops, and it was that decision that turned Caesar the politician into Caesar the general. The Asterix stories are probably most people's closest contact with Gaulish culture, a general sense of jolly, meat-swilling Gauls giving the Romans the runaround. The Gauls are brave warriors, the violence is knockabout, and Caesar himself is a humourless little man with a big nose and even bigger vanity. It works because there's elements of truth, especially Caesar being vain. But ironically, we wouldn't know much about the Gauls' way of life if it weren't for Julius Caesar. The Gauls didn't leave any written record of how they saw themselves. Indeed, the only way that we know anything at all about the world in which Asterix lived is because of the person who destroyed it. Caesar wrote in detail about Gaulish customs and religion and habits, even while he was doing his best to replace them with what he thought of as civilisation. What the comic strip doesn't begin to convey is the brutality of that campaign. In 60 AD, there were 12 million Gauls. Caesar boasted that he killed a million of them and enslaved a million more. It all started with one small problem. The Romans lumped everyone beyond the empire together as barbarians. In fact, there were hundreds of different tribes each vying for position with the others. Contemporary coins show how the Gaulish tribes each had their own identity. The Parisii, who lived where Paris is today, the Arverni, who give their name to the Auvergne, and the tribe that caused the trouble, the Helvetii. What Caesar had to deal with was a major immigration problem. The Helvetii lived in what's now Switzerland. But when they were attacked by German tribes, they started migrating to south-west France. The easiest route south took them across a bridge over the Rhone at Geneva, down the Rhone Valley, and then cut west across Transalpine Gaul, Roman territory. To stop them trespassing, Caesar moved north at lightning speed. This is where the Rhone leaves Lake Geneva. The bridge that the Helvetii were flooding across was somewhere around here, where that island is. Caesar simply destroyed the bridge and left the Helvetii stranded on the north bank. Problem solved. His brief campaign was over. But as governments have found ever since, you can't stop desperate and determined immigrants by blocking one entry route. After that, the Helvetii found a more northerly route which completely bypassed the Roman Empire, so they were no longer Caesar's responsibility. But much to his delight, they started overrunning the lands of another tribe called the Aedui, who appealed to Rome for help against this new invader. Caesar immediately set off for their territory in what's now Burgundy. The headquarters of the Aedui was Bibracte, a vast hill fort in north Burgundy. As the migrant tribesmen camped out in the valley, Caesar arrived to fight his first battle in Gaul. The battle took place not far from here. Caesar moved forward in classic formation, three lines of troops against the Helvetii. The tribesmen, who were used to fighting man to man, fell back against the double hail of javelins towards that mountain over there. Caesar continued to advance. 15,000 tribesmen who, until that moment, had been standing on the sidelines over on that hill, moved forward to attack Caesar's army. Calmly, he ordered his third line to wheel round and attack the new threat while he continued to advance towards the Helvetii. The result was victory on both flanks, a triumph of Roman organisation. Over the next few years, Caesar sliced his way through Gaul. With each conquest, he moved deeper into foreign territory. In 57 BC, he conquered the Belgic peoples in the northeast. They were threatened by the huge Roman presence to the south and united to fight it, thus giving Caesar the excuse he needed to invade. The next year, it was the turn of the Gauls in Normandy and Brittany to be overrun. Then Caesar moved across the country again to fight a German encroachment over the Rhine. In a lightning attack, he stormed the enemy camp and slaughtered men, women and children. Any survivors were chased to the Rhine, where they were cut down or drowned. But the massacre wasn't enough for Caesar. He wanted a much bigger and better PR victory. He decided to cross the Rhine and teach the Germans a lesson. The local tribes offered to ferry him across, but he wanted something much more spectacular. So he ordered a bridge to be built. The Rhine's 400 metres wide at Koblenz and six to eight metres deep. Caesar was determined to intimidate the tribes with a demonstration of what cutting-edge Roman technology could achieve. In just ten days, the Romans spanned one of the greatest rivers in Europe. And when they'd crossed it, what did they do? Well, the Germans ran away, so they spent 18 days destroying their crops and villages. And when they'd ensured famine, Caesar retraced his steps, destroyed the bridge and returned to Gaul. By 55 BC, Caesar was 45. What had started as a bit of troubleshooting had turned into a major conquest. In five extraordinary years, he'd more than rivalled Pompey the Great's military reputation, expanding Roman territory and, for the first time in his life, making a personal fortune. He'd gone to the limits of the known world. But his quest for glory would take him beyond those limits, to the remote island of Britain. Julius Caesar was a brilliant general who conquered all of what's now France and Belgium. How do we know? Because he tells us. The only point of the campaign for Caesar was to enhance his reputation in Rome. Military success was key to popularity with the people. News would have filtered out anyway, but Caesar wasn't content with second-hand accounts. Even though he was a full-time soldier, he spent all his spare time writing up his account of his military exploits in serialised form. A new book came out every year called The Gallic Wars. They're classics of Latin literature, but they're also history spun like a government press release in order to enhance his reputation. Caesar's Gallic Wars were a monumental achievement. Hundreds of pages of history written while fighting campaigns across the country. And not just written, written beautifully. The workaholic Caesar also wrote a book on Latin grammar. The Gallic Wars had to be an accurate account of events. Other Roman soldiers were writing home from the front and any outright lies would be exposed. Instead, Caesar's interpretation of why events happened and his role in them puts him in the most favourable light. Even at the time, opinion was divided about Caesar and his reputation. On the one hand, he was awarded an extraordinary 15 days of thanksgiving for his victories. On the other, there were those who were outraged at his treatment of the barbarians and demanded that Caesar should be handed over to the German tribes to be punished for the way he treated them. This is a Roman statue of a dying Gaul. Although he's recognisably barbarian, with his shaggy hair and the metal torque round his neck, he's portrayed with all the human dignity of a Greek hero. There were contemporary artists and philosophers who had a different attitude to Caesar's ruthless world view. Let's not forget that just a few decades after Caesar's assassination, Jesus Christ was articulating the message of Christianity and much of what was adopted by Christianity had already been articulated by philosophers like Plato, so there was an alternative view to this one of dog-eat-dog on a massive, organised and violent scale. Caesar's governorship lasted five years. In 55 BC, his time was up. In the Senate, Caesar's allies Pompey and Crassus were trying to get his posting extended for another five years to keep him out of Rome and away from prosecution. But Caesar had to show there was still a job left to do. There was one undiscovered and unconquered realm still in Europe, a dank, misty island right on the edge of the known world. They called it Britain. One of the warring tribes there had appealed to Rome for help. It was the perfect opportunity. Caesar got his extension and prepared for an invasion. In these days, when you can pop across the Channel and back in a day, it's difficult to imagine what this meant to the Romans. It was like proposing a moon landing. The Channel's only 20-odd miles across, but for the Romans, who were used to sailing the mill pond of the Mediterranean, it was a huge barrier. In addition, the transports and troop carriers required to mount a full-scale invasion were a formidable logistical problem. Just the kind of mission impossible that Caesar had made his trademark. But in 55 BC, it was a desperate gamble for glory. It was near the end of the campaigning season and the winter storms were fast approaching. Caesar got separated from his cavalry by bad weather. Heedless, he pressed on with just his infantry on this ill-fated mission. British tribes tracked their progress along the coast, hurling insults and weapons. As he reached what's now Deal, Caesar could see he had a fight on his hands. But his main problem was actually landing. The deep-bottomed boats just couldn't get near enough. The infantrymen knew that they'd have to jump into the water in full kit and wade in under a hail of missiles thrown by the mounted tribesmen up there just waiting to attack. The normally fearless troops seemed paralysed. But the spell was broken by the standard-bearer who shouted, Jump, lads, if you don't want to lose our standard. At least history will know that one of us did our duty and he went over the side and into the water. The troops followed. The legions were surprised by the ferocity of the opposition. They had no cavalry to counter the Britons in their speedy war chariots. It wasn't Caesar's finest hour. The grand invasion turned into a survival exercise. His troops had a tough few weeks foraging for supplies, constantly fending off attacks from the natives before Caesar gave the order to return to Gaul. They were lucky to get back at all. Caesar's transports hadn't been properly beached and were wrecked by storms. Crammed into the surviving vessels, the troops limped back across the channel before winter closed in. But Julius Caesar wouldn't be beaten. The British invasion is the perfect example of Caesar's ability to live life on an epic scale. As soon as he was back in Gaul, he ordered 800 newly designed ships to be built before returning to Italy for a winter of politics and memoir writing. Then he went back to Gaul the following spring and ordered a full-scale invasion. But he wasn't just driven by wounded pride. Britain was renowned for its gold, silver and enormous pearls. Although anyone who lived here could have told him that what he'd actually find most of would be weather. He hadn't learnt his lesson from the year before. His fleet was again completely wrecked on the beach by storms. Undaunted, he left his engineers to repair them and, ordering replacements from France, he set out. This time it went a bit better, but Caesar still spent a frustrating few weeks marching through Kent unable to engage the Britons who made guerrilla raids then vanished. Had they known it, all the tribesmen had to do was wait until Caesar's supply lines were so stretched that he had to give up. But they didn't. The British army finally gave battle here on the banks of the Thames at Brentford. If there was anywhere they were going to be able to stop this strange mechanical fighting machine from an alien country, it was here, at the lowest fording point of the Thames. The British leader arrayed his forces over there, on the far bank in Woodland, with sharpened stakes in front of them for protection. Caesar knew that if he was going to beat them, he was in for a difficult crossing. His cavalry went in first, followed by the infantry, wading in right up to their necks. They took everything that the British could throw at them and when they finally got out the other side, dripping and in full armour, they launched such a heavy assault at the British that tribal resistance virtually crumbled. Caesar had got the victory he wanted, but his conquest was insubstantial. A PR exercise rather than a real invasion, he had neither the will nor the troops to keep an occupying force in Britain. Instead, he imposed an annual tax on the Britons. But as soon as they'd waved goodbye to his patched-up boats, they promptly forgot all about it. It would be 97 years before Roman standards were seen on British soil again. Within 15 years, Caesar had risen to the top of the political tree and conquered half of northern Europe. But his greatest conquests and challenges were still before him. The next 10 years would take Caesar from the killing fields of Greece to Cleopatra's boudoir. He'd rise so far, they'd have to coin a new word to describe him. Emperor.