Caesar's Past and Posterity's Caesar

Book excerpt: Gaius Julius Caesar was the first to design a forum in his family's name. The forum itself had two focal points--a temple to Venus Genetrix and an equestrian statue of Caesar himself--carefully juxtaposed to create a narrative of a strong, enterprising, and controversial sovereign to whom legitimacy was granted by his divine lineage and links to Rome's mythical founders. Through this design, the expansion of the older Forum Romanum thus became a promotion of Caesar himself in a clever show of identity politics. It was a bold--and ultimately fatal--undertaking, and it demonstrates a political vision that not only divided his contemporaries but that has continued to drive scholarly debate, with Caesar variously realized as a mirror for Antiquity, a representative of an age, and a ruler to be examined in relation to all applicable dilemmas and conflicts. This important volume offers new insights into the legacy of Julius Caesar by focusing on two central questions: how did he use the past to construct his own persona as head of the Roman State and Empire? And how has he been remembered--and used--by posterity? Contributions from a range of fields, among them archaeology, classical studies, and history, engage with these questions as they explore Caesar's own self-fashioning through his use of city space, rituals, wars, history, and literature, as well as tracing how he and his actions have been understood, justified, criticized, and used in the centuries since his death, from late antique literature to nineteenth-century drama.