Could one single man possibly conquer all of France, along with Belgium, Germany (to the West of the Rhine) and Switzerland – a combination of territory that the Romans called Gallia, “Gaul”? Of course not. Yet we commonly say “Caesar beat the Gauls”, when we refer to the brutal conquest by the Roman legions of those enormous swathes of land in the 50s BCE.

When Bertolt Brecht reflected on that manner of speaking in his poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” nearly a century ago, he detected in it Capitalism’s disregard for the common people, more particularly the worker. It is for their sake that he pithily asked: “Did [Caesar] not have even a cook with him?” But Brecht’s focus was too narrow. For the coin has a flipside, and one equally problematic. We all have a tendency to individuate group efforts and to elevate exceptional individuals until they can “touch the stars with their heads” (to quote the Roman poet Horace, liberally); or rather, in Gaius Julius Caesar’s case, become a star in the firmament himself, as his contemporaries rumoured when a comet appeared in July of 44 (a few months after Caesar’s death) known as the Julian Star.

It is not all manner of speaking. Rome’s conquest of the Gallic territories was of momentous significance; and Caesar not only orchestrated the campaigns but subsequently rose on the back of them to a form of autocracy in Rome, playing an important part in the disintegration of the quasi-democratic Republic. Shakespeare’s influential Tragedy of Julius Caesar is based (as they say) on real events and persons. But the enormous consequences of his actions make it all the more crucial that the man and life be soberly viewed and recounted, that biographers and historians do not gaze at the star but keep their eyes on the ground, and that every step along his way be understood without leaping ahead to the general and autocrat that he would become. Unfortunately, ever since Caesar’s first biographies by Plutarch and Suetonius from around 100 CE, hindsight has seduced too many to write about Caesar as though he were “always … Caesar” already (“for always I am Caesar”, Shakespeare has him say).

This is one of the teleological fallacies that Robert Morstein-Marx confronts in his authoritative Julius Caesar and the Roman People. In this, he follows in the…