I had a couple of questions from the plot of Julius Caesar (which I appreciate may not be entirely historical).
Firstly, Mark Antony offers Caesar a crown. How did Antony have the authority to do this? Wasn't Caesar essentially his boss?
Secondly, Caesar in his will leaves 75 drachmas to "every several man", as well as lands to be used as "common pleasures". Did this actually happen?
About that second question, Suetonius says,
To the people he left his gardens near the Tiber for their common use and three hundred sesterces to each man.
Augustus himself in the Res Gestae says,
I paid to the Roman plebs, HS 300 per man from my father's will
in addition to money of his own.
Converting sestertii to drachmae is interesting. I had thought that was the case because Shakespeare was working from Plutarch, who gives amounts of money in drachmae, but while Plutarch does mention Caesar leaving money to citizens in his will he doesn't specify the amount. A sestertius around 44 BC was a quarter of a denarius. Plutarch doesn't tell us what standard the drachmae he mentions are, but if it were a heavier standard 75 drachmae for 300 HS doesn't look outrageously wrong.
How confident are we about Augustus' word and Suetonius' information? Plutarch says the contents of the will were made public and people rioted in Rome about them, and Antony challenged the legitimacy of the will; it took Augustus (Octavian then) some time to get control of his adopted father's estate. It would be a very brazen lie if Augustus didn't pay out the promised funds, and Suetonius had access to the Julio-Claudian archive: if there was some evidence in there that Augustus didn't pay up Suetonius is the sort of gossip to tell us.
While there is always more to be said, /u/QVCatullus, /u/LegalAction and /u/XenophontheAthenian chimed in on a question about exactly this: