Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator

'Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator' presents us with (dialogue-free) dramatic reconstructions of the great Roman's life, accompanied by modern experts telling us what they deduce he was really thinking and feeling. It's the same approach recently used in 'The Rise of the Nazis'. That series was marred by its need to tell us at every instant that the Nazis were bad; this one is similarly didactic, and its message is that Caesar overthrew Roman democracy. But the Roman republic was never democratic, and had endured not because it was a platonic ideal of government, but rather that the political system existed as part of a set of broader societal norms that aligned its leaders and the people. Moreover, by the time of Caesar's ascent, it had been in a state of near-continuous crisis for almost a century, as the patricians of the senate enriched themselves and no longer respected limits to their power. The story of Caesar's rise and fall is a good one, but Caesar was a symptom of the republic's demise, rather than it's cause. When eventually Octavian became the first Roman emperor, he spoke of having restored the Roman "res publica", which was one part cheap rhetoric but one part true. You don't have to admire Caesar to realise the republic was rotten (which was why his death did not lead to its recovery, but rather to its final fall). But this series gives us none of this complexity. It's a wasted opportunity to shed some real light on history.