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In the second half of the 1^st century BC Julius Caesar played a key role in the collapse of the Roman Republican system and the creation of a monarchy which was to dominate Europe and the West for five hundred years and the Eastern Mediterranean for one and a half millennia.  Indeed, he gave his name to autocracy (Kaiser, Tsar). Caesar bewitched his contemporaries, both friend and foe, and has gone on to have an extraordinary hold over the imaginations of people down to the present.

 

When Jeremy Paterson was asked to contribute a chapter on ‘Caesar the Man’ to the first large-scale reassessment of Caesar and his reputation for a generation, his initial reaction was to refuse.  As a student of social and economic change, he was sceptical of ‘Great Man Politics’; but he also had doubts about whether we have the sort of information beloved by modern biographers for recreating the personality of Julius Caesar.  In his lecture, he will consider the problems of writing biography and along the way will touch on such matters as sex, drink, male fashion, effective multitasking, and attitudes to baldness in the Roman world.

 

Jeremy Paterson is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of Historical Studies. He has been at Newcastle since 1972 and is a magpie in his research interests, taking up anything that fascinates: wine in the ancient world, society and economy, Cicero, imperial courts, and how to persecute Christians. He has held many posts at Newcastle including Dean of Arts and for more than the last decade has been Chair of the Public Lectures Committee, which is responsible for the ‘Insights’ programme.

 

Members of the audience are cordially invited to take a glass of wine with the speaker after his lecture.