Alternate History The Pirates Kill Julius Caesar

Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
In this scenario when Julius Caesar is captured by the pirates for ransom. They after a few hours get the feeling that if he is left alive they might die. So they cut him down with swords and throw his body overboard. They then do the smart thing of getting the fuck out of dodge and set sail for what will become Portugal. A few days later a merchant ship comes upon Caesar's floating corpse and take his body back to Rome. How does this turn of events affect the Roman Republic and it's future.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
It is quite possible that very little changes in the general. Simply some other warlord arises from the infighting between Roman warbosses and things progress as in OTL ...
Would agree with this assessment that someone else simply takes Caesar's place, and they might not be nearly as merciful to their defeated rivals as he was. Ironically, Pompey would be pretty well-positioned to be the Caesar substitute (as far as 'kicking the Optimates' teeth in' goes) in this scenario - he was never a doctrinaire Optimate in the vein of say, Cato the Younger, and despite being initially aligned with Sulla he and the Optimates actually became enemies (even without that whole 'First Triumvirate' dealio, Pompey had been racking up way too many successes for their comfort) until Caesar started looming large over both of them.

Pompey also has built-in 'Augustus' replacements (the ones to establish a lasting empire after his death) in the form of his sons, especially Sextus Pompey who seems to have been quite competent in his own conflict with the Second Triumvirate. In turn I'd imagine Crassus, Rome's richest man who was a more consistent Optimate and a rival of Pompey's until Caesar started mediating between the pair, will step up to take Pompey's historical place as the Senate's champion against the Populares.

The Roman Republic was already pretty much a walking corpse after the murders of the Gracchi brothers and Sulla & Marius' violent bout, and removing Caesar does nothing really to alleviate the root causes of its terminal crisis. What Cato and the other Optimate hardliners hoped to achieve basically amounted to trying to revive someone who's already braindead - and there were more ambitious generals than just Caesar lining up to pull the plug on the poor bastard's life support.
 

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Would agree with this assessment that someone else simply takes Caesar's place, and they might not be nearly as merciful to their defeated rivals as he was. Ironically, Pompey would be pretty well-positioned to be the Caesar substitute (as far as 'kicking the Optimates' teeth in' goes) in this scenario - he was never a doctrinaire Optimate in the vein of say, Cato the Younger, and despite being initially aligned with Sulla he and the Optimates actually became enemies (even without that whole 'First Triumvirate' dealio, Pompey had been racking up way too many successes for their comfort) until Caesar started looming large over both of them.

Pompey also has built-in 'Augustus' replacements (the ones to establish a lasting empire after his death) in the form of his sons, especially Sextus Pompey who seems to have been quite competent in his own conflict with the Second Triumvirate. In turn I'd imagine Crassus, Rome's richest man who was a more consistent Optimate and a rival of Pompey's until Caesar started mediating between the pair, will step up to take Pompey's historical place as the Senate's champion against the Populares.

The Roman Republic was already pretty much a walking corpse after the murders of the Gracchi brothers and Sulla & Marius' violent bout, and removing Caesar does nothing really to alleviate the root causes of its terminal crisis. What Cato and the other Optimate hardliners hoped to achieve basically amounted to trying to revive someone who's already braindead - and there were more ambitious generals than just Caesar lining up to pull the plug on the poor bastard's life support.

If I'm not mistaken, that's basically the scenario outlined by @Skallagrim in response to my "Sulla Kills A Young Julius Caesar" POD from the General AH Thread. Guess there's more than one way to arrive at the same outcome, huh? :unsure:
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
If I'm not mistaken, that's basically the scenario outlined by @Skallagrim in response to my "Sulla Kills A Young Julius Caesar" POD from the General AH Thread. Guess there's more than one way to arrive at the same outcome, huh? :unsure:
Huh. Pretty much, yeah. By the time Caesar was of any relevance, the old Republic was already done for - a victim of its own success in many ways, all the structural issues of a city-state trying to manage an empire spanning the Mediterranean were coming to the fore while its out-of-touch and increasingly blatantly exploitative elite was also struggling to remain afloat amid volatile internal politics ripe for exploitation by ambitious generals, who in turn had already begun to engage in civil strife. If it wasn't Caesar & Augustus who finished it off, it always would have been someone else at some other point in time.
 

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Huh. Pretty much, yeah. By the time Caesar was of any relevance, the old Republic was already done for - a victim of its own success in many ways, all the structural issues of a city-state trying to manage an empire spanning the Mediterranean were coming to the fore while its out-of-touch and increasingly blatantly exploitative elite was also struggling to remain afloat amid volatile internal politics ripe for exploitation by ambitious generals, who in turn had already begun to engage in civil strife. If it wasn't Caesar & Augustus who finished it off, it always would have been someone else at some other point in time.

More likely than not, yes.

Hard to prognosticate, exactly, but even if we leave aside a “Populist Pompey” scenario, there’s no telling how many future leaders perished in Sulla’s purges and civil war with Marius. After all, Caesar came within a hair’s breadth of being purged himself, so it’s not inconceivable that a plethora of “could’ve-been Caesars” perished too early to play the role this one, lucky survivor did IOTL.
 

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