Historical Lives

I ruled Egypt for twenty two years by refusing to be anyone's junior partner, first striking my brother's name from the decrees, then binding Rome's two greatest men to my bed and my treasury to keep my dynasty alive. When the war for the east was lost at Actium, I chose the manner of my own ending rather than walk in a Roman parade.

I heard voices in a garden when I was thirteen and let them lead me out of my father's fields to a king who had lost his kingdom. I rode at the head of armies, put a crown on a hesitant prince, and was sold, tried, and burned by nineteen. I signed a paper to save my life, then took it back, and chose the fire.

I conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon against my own Republic, and broke Pompey on the field at Pharsalus to become master of Rome. I pardoned my enemies, took the title dictator for life, and let those same pardoned men put twenty-three blades into me at the foot of my rival's statue. My name outlived the Republic I buried and became the word every Roman ruler after me would wear.

I tore Hegel off his idealist hinges and turned him against the factory floor, then spent forty years in exile trying to prove that industrial capitalism carried its own gravediggers. I wrote a manifesto that lit a continent, defended a slaughtered workers' government in Paris, and left the book meant to arm the working class unfinished on my desk.