Mary Beard

What Julius Caesar represents is the removal of liberty.

Now, they meant the removal of liberty from other members of the Roman elite, not from the poor old poor, right?

But that's what they're fighting for.

But in my retrospective view, there's a suspicion that the writing is already on the wall, honestly.

And I think one of the ways you can see that, a brilliant symbol of it, is that one of the signs of one man rule, one of the diagnostic signs of one man rule at Rome, is whether you put your living head on the coins.

Now, there's plenty of dead Roman heads on the coins for as long as you can trace.

But we take living heads on coins as something that is part and parcel of monarchy.

For the Romans, it was dangerously part and parcel of monarchy.

And the first person to have their living head on a regular coin issue minted in the city of Rome

Pompey had minted a few coins well away from Rome, but the first person to have their head on the Roman coinage was Julius Caesar.

And the first issue of this comes out, and it's not entirely unconnected, I think, only a couple of months before the guy's assassinated.

And in some ways, it's a symbol of that assassination.

It's a symbol of what prompts that assassination.

They're not putting him to death because they don't like his head on the coins, but they don't like his head on the coins because it symbolizes exactly what Caesar's up to.

I think it's absolutely fascinating that after the assassination, when the Romans try to have a bit of sort of peace and reconciliation and pretend it's business as usual, the main assassins, Brutus and Cassius, go out to actually take provincial commands

In the East, Brutus issues coins because he's going to pay his troops.

And one of the major functions of coinage in the ancient world wasn't to give you a small change in your pocket.

It was to pay the troops.

One of these issues of coinage has got Brutus' live head on the coins.

Now, as soon as the hero of liberation dies,