Who--apart from pop historians and journalists--calls Caesar an "economic populist?" The term doesn't even make sense in the Roman context, nor does the division of Roman society in an upper, lower, and middle class.

One could possibly make the claim that two of Caesar's programs were economically motivated and were uniquely or unusually targeted towards unlanded laborers in the city itself: his two land laws during his first consulship in 59, and his changes to the way debt was handled in the early years of the civil war. Neither argument holds up very well to scrutiny, if we're trying to paint Caesar (or anyone else in the Republic) as some sort of proto-modern social democrat, which is typically the way these things are treated in popular discourse. The fact of the matter is that more than two thousand years have passed since Caesar's time and ours, nor did Caesar's contemporaries live in a society that very much resembled our own. The ideological framework of the late Republic is too different from our own to make such one-to-one comparisons justifiable.

Caesar proposed, and passed, two land laws in 59 during his first consulship. Both, contrary to the prevailing story in pop history and the internet (which does not, as so often, reflect the modern consensus of the field in any way), seem to have been pretty generally popular at most levels of Roman society. Cicero discusses Caesar's first land law at Att. 2.3, and has a pretty even-handed reception of it. He doesn't consider it particularly questionable, and on the whole appears generally favorable. The idea that he might oppose it is due, he says to Atticus, to his desire to seem consistent with his course of supporting the "aristocratic" (ἀριστοκρατικῶς) cause that he maintained during his consulship four years earlier. In that year Cicero had been instrumental in shooting down a very similar tribunician land bill, which was unusual since consuls rarely interfered directly with the proposals of tribunes in public. That would seem to paint Cicero as some kind of an economic conservative, and indeed we modern people want to read ἀριστοκρατικῶς as being the same thing as capital-C Conservative. It's not. Only a year before, in 60, the tribune Flavius brought forward what seems to have been again a very similar land law. Cicero, we know from his letters, was a strong supporter of this law, and even advised Flavius on how to compose it and spoke publicly in support for it. So much for Cicero the economic conservative.

The matter of Caesar's first land law is also significantly misunderstood by pop and internet history. The land law was not some random thought that Caesar had to ingratiate himself with the urban laborers in Rome, nor was it implanted by Pompey to wrestle power from the state by granting his soldiers the rewards he had promised them. Caesar's first land law was a version of several proposed land laws going back to the year 70, when the senate issued a decree to distribute land to the veterans of the Sertorian War when they returned home. Various financial crises and other, more pressing matters kept that from happening, and by 63 the matter had been prolonged long enough that tribunes began to propose land laws to enforce the senate's decree. In other words, Caesar's first land law was the result of a consensus going back a decade. The dispute--and the reason why measures like the land bill of 63 did not pass--was entirely over how precisely the distributions would be handled. Nor was Caesar's first land law radical in any way. In fact, it was decidedly conservative compared to earlier measures, and especially compared to the land laws of the late 2nd century down to Saturninus' tribunate. Caesar's first land law intentionally left out the most significant swath of remaining public land, the ager Campanus surrounding Capua, which previous proposals had tried to distribute and which was a highly contentious subject. Land was not to be confiscated by the land commissioners, but purchased with public funds, based on existing sales prices rather than new evaluations. The funds needed would come from the distribution of plunder from Pompey's eastern conquests. This was, effectively, an extension of Ti. Gracchus' use of Attilus' funds to purchase equipment in accessory to his land law, except that unlike Gracchus, who brought this crucial financial bill straight to the people and alienated the senators who traditionally oversaw the treasury (and would continue to do so after Gracchus' death), Caesar left this in the hands of the treasury and the land commissioners, except in so far as that he supported the resolution of tribute figures and provincial boundaries in Pompey's conquered territory, which had been unresolved for some years. Indeed, Caesar even made himself ineligible to serve on the land commission, which was a significant objection to the earlier proposal of 63, whose land commission was expected to be headed by the proposing tribune himself.

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