ABSTRACT
Julius Caesar has come to symbolize two momentous and conjoined transitions in world history. His life was on the threshold of both, and for both he could be made to claim, however anachronistically, some responsibility. The first transition was from the "pagan" to the Christian world; the second was from the Roman Republic to Augustus' Principate and thence to Empire. This chapter focuses on Caesar's apotheosis in some currents of the Western tradition, and on the manner in which his name was associated both with the rise of the Empire and Christianity. From the early fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, Caesar's name was repeatedly invoked by European and American "republican" thinkers, or by those who at least subscribed to a republican reading of Roman history, as an object of vilification. "Republican" traditions are heterogeneous across time and space, shaped by the historical moment and the broader political culture in which they find expression.
