Watching this BBC doco on "Eight Days That Made Rome" and the host is making out that Caesar's crossing the Rubicon & march on Rome was a bad thing....This is the problem with the Ciceronian legacy. Cicero's endemic popinjay-ness found a natural host in the BBC & related places

This irks me about the BBC pronunciation culture - in English, the historian Suetonius is pronounced Sue-Tone-E-Us....In the hands of this BBC lady, he becomes, Sweet-To-Nius. But Caesar in Latin is pronounced Kayzer (hence Kaiser & Tsar) but we Anglos pronounce See-Zar

Will simply say, yet again, that when Caesar marched on Rome, a good century of dynastic political corruption and plundering of the Republic’s offices meant that Caesar, even without his legions, was always pushing at an open door, due to popular disgust with the status quo

Caesar also was a very imposing figure who would lead by example - he was in the thick of it https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1276130046898388994

TL:DR of Rome 1stC BC: the Ciceros & flogs like Cato - who pretended there was nothing wrong with the late Republic - is why Caesar had such support. Average Roman (even the middle classes) had been disenfranchised & decided they had nothing to lose when Caesar marched on Rome.

BBC miseducation here avoiding obvious: Caesar’s march on Rome was never solely about him - there was a huge part of Roman and outer Italian society esp farmers and the equestrians, even the minor nobles, who knew the Republic’s rampant corruption could no longer be tolerated

The Roman Republic's fate was sealed when Roman customs & mores ("Mos Maiorum") were cast aside by an ever increasingly corrupt and self-interested political class. Caesar did not end the Republic-he was simply the vehicle for those many Romans whose Republic had long since died.

The Roman Republic was never (at all) about equality - what killed it in the century from the Gracchi to Caesar was an entrenched, vile & corrupt political class ie a collapse in virtue and standards. Caesar was simply pushing at an already wide open door when he marched on Rome.

"There was a dream that was Rome" etc etc. #SPQR