Written in a letter with which Caesar informed the Roman Senate of his victory over Vercingetorix in 52 BC Said when crossing the river Rubicon with his legions on 10 January, 49 BC, thus beginning the civil war with the forces of Pompey. The Rubicon river was the boundary of Gaul, the province Caesar had the authority to keep his army in. By crossing the river, he had committed an invasion of Italy.

Reported as Caesar's last words, spoken to Marcus Junius Brutus, as recorded in Divus Iulius by Suetonius, paragraph 82; this gave rise to William Shakespeare's famous adaptation in Julius Caesar: "Et tu, Brute? — Then fall, Caesar!" The first car shot may have appeared to be an arbitrary selection of arbitrary events; the point of the second car shot, taken in the same way and possibly on the same day, is that none of what we are seeing is arbitrary. All of it is determined by the kinds of calculations we heard outlined in the preceding interviews; calculations about how to maximise profits, and calculations about how the consequences of these calculations are to be survived. The interviews are theory or cause, the city is practice or effect. T]he rule of Caesar, although during its establishment it gave no little trouble to its opponents, still, after they had been overpowered and had accepted it, they saw that it was a tyranny only in name and appearance, and no cruel or tyrannical act was authorized by it; nay, it was plain that the ills of the state required a monarchy, and that Caesar, like a most gentle physician, had been assigned to them by Heaven itself. Therefore the Roman people felt at once a yearning for Caesar, and in consequence became harsh and implacable towards his murders...It is, after all, well known that impulsive and inexperienced people are often terrified by false gossip and impelled to take inconsiderate action, making their own decisions about what should actually be matters of state. His declaration as to why he had divorced his wife Pompeia, when questioned in the trial against Publius Clodius Pulcher for sacrilege against Bona Dea festivities (from which men were excluded), in entering Caesar's home disguised as a lute-girl apparently with intentions of a seducing Caesar's wife; as reported in Plutarch's Lives of Coriolanus, Caesar, Brutus, and Antonius by Plutarch, as translated by Thomas North, p. 53 Sed fortuna, quae plurimum potest cum in reliquis rebus tum praecipue in bello, parvis momentis magnas rerum commutationes efficit; ut tum accidit.

Rome officially became an Empire on 16 January 27 BC, when the Senate awarded Octavian – an adopted son of Julius Caesar – the title of Augustus. Prior to this the Republic had been tortured by two decades of bloody civil wars; in the course of these, in 49 BC, Caesar had seized power and ruled as a military dictator. Yet Caesar was an autocrat both of his time and ahead of it, and on 15 March 44 BC – the Ides of March – he was murdered – direct reward, said the scholar and bureaucrat Suetonius (c. AD 70-130), for his vaunting ambition, in which many Romans perceived a desire to revive the monarchy. ‘Constant exercise of power gave Caesar a love for it,’ wrote Suetonius, who also repeated a rumour that as a young man Caesar dreamed of raping his own mother, a vision soothsayers interpreted as a clear sign ‘he was destined to conquer the earth.’ Sunt item, quae appellantur alces. Harum est consimilis capris figura et varietas pellium, sed magnitudine paulo antecedunt mutilaeque sunt cornibus et crura sine nodis articulisque habent neque quietis causa procumbunt neque, si quo adflictae casu conciderunt, erigere sese aut sublevare possunt. His sunt arbores pro cubilibus: ad eas se applicant atque ita paulum modo reclinatae quietem capiunt. Quarum ex vestigiis cum est animadversum a venatoribus, quo se recipere consuerint, omnes eo loco aut ab radicibus subruunt aut accidunt arbores, tantum ut summa species earum stantium relinquatur. Huc cum se consuetudine reclinaverunt, infirmas arbores pondere adfligunt atque una ipsae concidunt. Giulio Cesare, il grand'uomo, descritto dal punto di vista dal suo segretario e revisore dei conti (l'autore del diario che un giovane avvocato romano, pregno di ideali e di retorica, decide di consultare per scrivere un biografia sul grand'uomo di cui sopra) e da quello del funzionario che era stato il suo pignoratore (e che possiede i diari). Much of the original dialogue of Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika was retained in Class Relations (1984), though each scene was pared down to the essentials, usually with only one actor on screen at a time. In 1987 Straub-Huillet took on another unfinished work, Frederic Hölderlin’s play The Death of Empedocles, which they shot five times, with three of the versions shown at various festivals.I came, I saw, I conquered". Written in a report to Rome 47 B.C., after conquering Pharnaces at Zela in Asia Minor in just five days, as quoted by Plutarch in Life of Caesar, a work written in Greek ( ἦλθον, εἶδον, ἐνίκησα). This is also reported to have been inscribed on one of the decorated wagons in the Pontic triumph in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Julius, by Suetonius in Latin ( veni, vidi, vici). As quoted in The Adventurer No. 69 (3 July 1753) in The Works of Samuel Johnson (1837) edited by Arthur Murphy, p. 32 Jean-Marie Straub, film director, screenwriter and producer, born 8 January 1933; died 19 November 2022

Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary historical novel presents an aspiring scholar's efforts to write an idealized life of Julius Caesar twenty years after his death. But the historian abandons his planned biography, confronted by a baffling range of contradictory views. Was Caesar an opportunist, a permanently bankrupt businessman who became too big for the banks to allow him to fail – as his former banker claims? Did he stumble into power while trying to make money, as suggested by the diary of his former slave? Across these different versions of Caesar's career in the political and economic life of Rome, Brecht wryly contrasts the narratives of imperial progress with the reality of grasping self-interest, in a sly allegory that points to the Weimar Republic and perhaps even to our own times. Huillet died in 2006. Still faithful to their dual vision, Straub continued to make short films in the same manner, based on the writers they both cherished, including The Inconsolable (2011), drawn from the Orpheus and Eurydice legend. History Lessons (1972), based on Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar, placed history in relation to modern political life. As Marxist dialecticians, Straub and Huillet created severe cinematic critiques of capitalism in a manner that paralleled the works of Brecht in the theatre. Straub once stated: “I don’t know if I’m a Marxist. I don’t know, because there are so many ways to be Marxist. I haven’t read all of Marx. Marxism is a method, it’s not an ideology.” In Fortini/Cani (1976), the Italian writer Franco Fortini examined his thoughts on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, took the form of six dialogues between mythological figures on the partisan movement in Piedmont during the second world war. Although Straub said: ‘“I try to make as little fuss about my life as possible”, a fair amount is known about him. He was born in Metz, north-east France, and organised a film society in his home town while in his teens. When he was at school, during the Nazi occupation, German was the official language and children were forbidden to speak French in public. He later referred to this experience in the short film Lorraine! (1994), based on a novel by Maurice Barrès.Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption, London: Quercus Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1905204965, p. 148 Il grand'uomo, che fu prima di tutto politico (e che unicamente come tale è visto dai grandi suoi contemporanei, almeno all'inizio della sua sfolgorante vita) della parte democratica negli anni della gioventù, che scala le vette del potere romano fra errori, intrighi, fulminazioni e, ovviamente, un oceano di debiti. Tra tutti gli squali che nuotano nell'acquario, è tuttavia quello che ha realmente e maggiormente a cuore la sorte del popolo minuto, non attraverso elemosine sotto forma di distribuzione di grano, ma con l'obiettivo di risolvere una volta per tutte l'annosa questione agraria - e Brecht, da buon comunista, ne ha in fondo umana simpatia, come ce l'ha dell'altro grande sconfitto di questo racconto, ossia ovviamente Catilina e la sua mancata rivoluzione. On passing through a village in the Alps, as attributed in Parallel Lives , by Plutarch, as translated by John Langhorne and William Langhorne (1836), p. 499

Once we have seen this, we can be shown the social space again; the third driving shot shows more of the residential streets which appear towards the end of the second shot, and more of the use of the pavement as a social space that we saw there. The shops are smaller. A Communist election poster, which appeared fleetingly above a corner café as the biographer drove away from the market square, is pasted up throughout these streets. Inscription on the triumphal wagon reported in The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, as translated by Robert Graves (1957). The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar describes the narrator's attempt to write an idealised account of Caesar twenty years after his death. But the historian abandoned his planned biography, confronted by a baffling range of contradictory views. Was Caesar an opportunist, a permanently bankrupt businessman who became too big for the banks to allow him to fail - as his former banker claims? Did he stumble into power while trying to make money, as suggested by the diary of his former slave, an account of everyday life complete with intrigues, chance encounters and mundane household affairs?

Tertulla was the wife of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and the mother of his two sons. [1] Biography [ edit ] Gli affari del signor Giulio Cesare fu pubblicato sessanta anni fa, qualche mese dopo la morte di Bertolt Brecht avvenuta nel 1956. Nel romanzo si immagina che un giovane storico, a venti anni dalla morte di Giulio Cesare, volendone scrivere un'apologia, si rechi dall'ex banchiere Spicro, avendo saputo che era in possesso dei diari di Raro, il segretario di Giulio Cesare. Ma dai diari apprende aspetti di Cesare inaspettati: l’uomo tanto osannato era un donnaiolo impenitente e viveva al di sopra dei propri mezzi, tanto che per ripianare i propri debiti non aveva altro mezzo che quello di passare, dietro compenso, da una parte all’altra degli schieramenti politici. From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time." Consuesse enim deos immortales, quo gravius homines ex commutatione rerum doleant, quos pro scelere eorum ulcisci velint, his secundiores interdum res et diuturniorem impunitatem concedere. The interviewees’ distance from the city’s bustle is in line with the villas and retreats of Brecht’s text, and also with reality. Gilberto Perez ends his long essay on the film with the suggestion that Spicer’s “modern counterparts” are to be found “lurking in the streets of Rome”, 3 but this is an idealization; when not safely out of earshot, they have no need to lurk. A recent study found that 22, 000 of London’s flats have been kept vacant by their owners. The residential streets seen in the second and third car shots have long since been gentrified. 4 The former legionary was glad to go to war, even on the losing side, because he had three brothers, and what land they had was not enough for all of them.