This is Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar — the biography sitting behind Shakespeare and most later portraits of the man. Plutarch, a Greek writing around 100 AD, paired famous Greeks with famous Romans so you could compare their characters. He sets Caesar opposite Alexander the Great: two conquerors whose deaths did not end the argument about them.

A thin, ambitious aristocrat borrows his way to the consulship — one of the two officials elected to run Rome for a year — takes Gaul in ten years, crosses the Rubicon (the little river a general was not supposed to bring an army over), and dies on the Senate floor. He reformed the calendar, pardoned too many enemies, and found that mercy does not disarm a conspiracy. One career ended a republic. Later ages never stopped arguing what he was: tyrant, reformer, or the man who made empire look like destiny.