I asked this question a month ago but didn't get a response so thought I'd try again!
For more context, I've just finished reading Tom Holland's Rubicon which is the first and only thing I've ever read on Ancient Rome.
I feel that he spent a huge amount of time giving a general narrative of the history of the Republic, focussing a lot on the generation preceding Caesar and then Pompey & Caesar.
I feel I have a pretty decent grasp of events and some of the indirect causes of the fall, e.g. the precedents set by Sulla and his civil wars vs Marius etc etc.
I also understand the narrative around Caesar's rise to prominence, his early political wins, his proconsulship and general amazing winning of glory in Gaul.
But I felt like he (Holland) really raced through the next phase and even though I've literally just read it, I don't really have an appreciation for why Caesar felt he had to march into Rome to defend himself, or why Pompey was opposed to him at this time (although I get that much of the Gallic wars were illegal - is that all it is?).
I also don't have an appreciation for the narrative after Caesar defeated Pompey - how /why did he end up dictator for life and what was the impact of this? Holland mentions this only as an after thought and all of a sudden Caesar has all of Rome in his palm and he's a living God, er what? Did normal Roman's generally think this good or bad? Why was he considered a tyrant?
I know I'm asking a lot here but if someone could help slot these things into place that would be great. I did do a search on here but the topics relating to Caesar are so many and so spurious its easier to ask a new question. That said I'm happy to be pointed to some other thread if someone knows about one.
Many thanks.
I've just finished reading Tom Holland's Rubicon
I'm just going to get this out of the way. Burn that book! Burn it with fire!
That's all the emotion I can muster on the topic anymore. Holland has a crowd of critics around here (I'm one!) that go after him for anything from political soap boxing to lack of detail to being flat out wrong on things we know. You can run a search and get plenty of criticism.
There are also some people around here who think for all his faults he's a good introductory text.
I'm not going to go through that argument again; you should be able to find it easily with a search. I think it came up in a thread last week, for instance.
Ok, on to the real question. Why was Caesar a tyrant, and how did he end the republic?
Second one first. The assumption here is that Caesar ended the republic. I don't think that's clear. There are several points at which people might argue the Republic fell. Here's Tacitus' sketch of Roman history from the beginning of his Annals:
Freedom and the consulship were established by Lucius Brutus. Dictatorships were held for a temporary crisis. The power of the decemvirs did not last beyond two years, nor was the consular jurisdiction of the military tribunes of long duration. The despotisms of Cinna and Sulla were brief; the rule of Pompeius and of Crassus soon yielded before Caesar; the arms of Lepidus and Antonius before Augustus; who, when the world was wearied by civil strife, subjected it to empire under the title of "Prince."
The point, it seems to me, is that the introduction of the title Princeps is the point that Tacitus takes as a strong break with Roman tradition (Augustus didn't really introduce the title, but whatevs, Tacitus). Later on he mentions Brutus and Cassius as having the last army of the republic, after Actium the old morality died, Augustus revolutionized the state, things went from bad to worse. Woe is Tacitus!
But that's just one perspective. Velleius Paterculus knew Tiberius and served under Tiberius, and he thought he lived in a republic. He is often accused of being a shill for Tiberius, and certainly he understands a res publica to be something different that Cicero would have thought it was, but I am nervous about dismissing him as a propagandist or a political newb - I would rather take him at his word and as a representative of the senatorial class of the first century AD.
On the other hand, Cicero as early as 55 seems to think the republic is on its deathbed if not already buried. this is from a letter he wrote to Lentulus Spinther:
For those objects which I had at one time in view, after having held the highest offices and endured the greatest fatigues--the power of intervening with dignity in the debates of the senate, and a free hand in dealing with public affairs—these have been entirely abolished, and not more for me than for all. For we all have either to assent to a small clique, to the utter loss of our dignity, or to dissent to no purpose. My chief object in writing to you thus is that you may consider carefully what line you will also take yourself. The whole position of senate, law courts, and indeed of the entire constitution has undergone a complete change. The most we can hope for is tranquility: and this the men now in supreme power seem likely to give us, if certain persons shew somewhat more tolerance of their despotism.
Modern scholars have a whole list of potential dates for the end of the Republic. I would suggest the republic ended with the passage of the lex de imperio Vespasiani in 70 AD, that assigned powers and titles to Vespasian in a legal context which had been informal or held piecemeal by the Julio-Claudians, but I'm a bit out in left field with that opinion. Others say crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC, the assassination in 44, Actium, 31, or 29, or 27.
So we have a number of possible dates for the ending of the republic, only a few of which involve Caesar.
Why was he a tyrant? It's pretty clear to me it was his treatment of the senate. When the senate wouldn't work with him he turned to the assemblies to get his legislation passed, he was monopolizing offices - he was consul a shocking number of times, extraordinary dictatorships, so on and so forth. He didn't stand up once to greet senators in the forum. He added more magistrates, so those honors were not as exclusive as they once had been. Not to say that the senate had always dominated political life in Rome, but Caesar did a lot to make the senate accessible to a wider group of people and would find ways around them if he had to.
You must remember though that Caesar had his own senatorial friends; he wasn't operating alone against the entire Roman political system. Meier thought the only way the republic could be saved from the administrative mess it had become after Sulla was for Caesar to do his thing and retire - Cassius and Brutus, in this view, put the nail in the republic's coffin when they stabbed Caesar. I think Meier's phrase was something like "the assassination of Caesar wasn't just a sin, it was a mistake." Anyway, whether you think Caesar deserves the title "tyrant" I think will depend on your own politics more than the historical facts.
Frankly, besides what /u/LegalAction says, I think you'd be best served just reading a better book. Rubicon really isn't very good, and Holland simply doesn't understand the way that politics within the city worked, which leads to serious issues when he tries to suggest causality and stuff like that. I'd recommend Meier's book, which /u/LegalAction already mentioned (although for some reason Meier doesn't include any references, which I still don't understand) or Gelzer's, but both of those are probably going to be way to hard to understand if Rubicon was the only thing you've ever read on Roman history. Goldsworthy's book on Caesar is an okay place to start, much better than Holland at least, although Goldsworthy also doesn't really understand Roman politics as well as he makes out. But reading a better book would definitely help in the understanding of the period, you've asked so many questions that I don't think it's even possible to provide you with an answer that will satisfy you on here, and a lot of your questions would be answered perfectly well by simply reading something better