Analyzing Caesar’s Motivations and Emotions on the Banks the Rubicon
By Michael Sweet
Published Online, 2006
Introduction: Gaius Julius Caesar is among the most famous men in human history. His cognomen “Caesar” became synonymous with “emperor” or “king” within years of his death and has remained so for more than 2,000 years. Many books and films have been made about Caesar and the larger-than-life company he kept, but only the best of those try to understand him as man, instead of the cartoonish icon of Roman imperialism and genius. One of these insightful few is Meier’s (1982) Caesar: A Biography, translated from German by David McClintock. Meier’s book provides us with some wonderful insights into the relationship between Caesar and his cultural context, his emotional experience at a peak moment in his life, and his motivations for achieving what he did. This paper briefly sketches the contours of these topics, with the intention to understand Caesar as a man against a backdrop of emotion and motivation theory — not to investigate Roman history beyond an impressionistic view of how it can help us understand Caesar as a man.
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