What it is
The Life of Caesar is Plutarch's biography of Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE), paired in the Parallel Lives with the Life of Alexander — the two supreme men of action of the Greek and Roman worlds set against each other. The platform reads it as one of the principal channels through which later Europe came to understand the fall of the Roman Republic, and as Plutarch's fullest study of the relation between extraordinary ability and unappeasable ambition.
Its purpose and method
True to the manifesto of the Alexander preface, Plutarch reads Caesar through character. He dwells on the signs of the soul — Caesar's astonishing energy and clemency, his physical courage, his power to bind men to him, and the ambition that could not rest even at the summit. The platform reads the Life under character and power: Plutarch's Caesar is a man of genuine greatness whose defining passion, the craving to be first, drove him past the point any republic could contain, so that the same qualities that made him magnificent made him fatal to the constitution.
What it argues about Caesar and the Republic
Plutarch's Caesar is inseparable from the Republic's death. The Life traces the rise — the Gallic command, the crossing of the Rubicon, the civil war, the dictatorship — as the working-out of an ambition that the old civic order could no longer absorb. The platform reads it under ambition and downfall and decline: Plutarch shows the Republic falling not chiefly through institutional defect but through the collision of great men's ambitions, of which Caesar's was the greatest. The assassination, in Plutarch's telling, is the tragedy's hinge — the liberators destroy the man and cannot revive the Republic, opening the way to the empire instead.
Influence and citation
The Life of Caesar, with the companion Life of Cicero and the late-Republican Lives of Pompey, Crassus, Cato and Brutus, gave the European tradition its narrative of the Republic's last generation; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar comes largely from it through North. The platform reads it with the standard caution — Plutarch writes a century and a half after the events, weighing character over chronology — and develops the interpretation in Caesar through Plutarch.