The Altes Museum in Berlin holds a bust of Julius Caesar in Egyptian graywacke — a stone that gives it the distinctive cold gray-green color that earned it its museum nickname, the Grüner Caesar, the Green Caesar. It was acquired in Paris in 1787, carved sometime between 1 and 30 AD, and it is posthumous: made after Caesar’s death, showing him in a toga as a statesman rather than as a general or dictator, classically idealized in the manner of early imperial portraiture. The eye inlays are modern restorations. The shadow it casts on the red wall behind it is an accident of museum lighting that happens to be accurate — Caesar and his shadow, the man and the myth that outlasted him by two thousand years and counting.

The 1963 Cleopatra directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz — or rather, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and then by Mankiewicz after Mamoulian was fired, with extensive interference from the studio and the cast throughout — cost approximately forty-four million dollars, which was enough to nearly bankrupt Twentieth Century Fox, take four years to complete, survive the death of one director, the illness and near-death of its star, and the most extensively documented off-set romance in Hollywood history. The resulting film runs for four hours and seventeen minutes in its complete version. It is simultaneously one of the most expensive disasters in studio history and a more interesting film than its reputation suggests.

Cleopatra VII Philopator was the most politically capable ruler the Ptolemaic dynasty produced, and she failed anyway. This is not a contradiction. She operated in a political environment — the Roman civil wars of the late first century BC — where even the most capable maneuvering could not fully compensate for the structural weakness of a client kingdom dependent on whichever Roman faction happened to be ascendant. She made the best choices available to her at each decision point. The choices were not enough. Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC, the year of her death.

On August 9, 48 BC — the same calendar date, by a coincidence historians have noted, as the Battle of Adrianople 426 years later — Julius Caesar’s army defeated Pompey’s at Pharsalus in Thessaly, ending the civil war between them in a single afternoon and ending the Roman Republic as a functioning political institution in any meaningful sense. The Republic would survive in form for another seventeen years, until Augustus completed its constitutional conversion. But Pharsalus was where it ended in fact, because Pharsalus eliminated the only man with the political authority, military reputation, and institutional support to contest Caesar’s supremacy on terms the existing system could legitimate.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, has been painted repeatedly across five centuries of European art, and the accumulated versions constitute a case study in how the same historical event can be made to mean entirely different things depending on the visual choices made around it. The event is fixed: Caesar was killed in the Theater of Pompey by a group of senators. The meaning of the event — was it tyrannicide or murder, liberation or catastrophe — has been contested ever since, and the paintings rehearse that contest in visual terms.

The calendar you use today is a Roman calendar. The twelve months, the seven-day week borrowed from Near Eastern sources and transmitted through Rome, the numbering of the years from a fixed point that eventually became the Christian era — all of these are features of the system that Julius Caesar reformed in 46 BC and that the Catholic Church adjusted in 1582 with modifications so minor that most countries now use what is, in its essentials, the calendar Caesar commissioned. You wake up on a Tuesday in October because a Roman dictator in the first century BC decided to align the civil year with the solar year, and his solution was good enough to last two thousand years.