“... or even his empire (for ‘the Pope is the true Emperor,’ as the Medieval saying went, while Julius II was often compared to Julius Caesar). Visitors, however high their status, kissed the Pope’s feet, ‘adoring’ him like a god. Carried in a litter, cheered by crowds, he was the image of an absolute ...”

“... has power over himself, his identity or even his name: Mr Trefry gave Oroonoko that [name] of Caesar, which name will live in that country as long as that (scarce more) glorious one of the great Roman, for tis most evident, he ... acted things as memorable, had they been done in some part of the world replenished with people and historians that might have ...”

“... not serve his argument very effectively by just quoting Porcia (wife of Brutus, the murderer of Julius Caesar), who is supposed to have shown a typically romantic or companionate attitude to marriage already in the first century BC: she is reported as saying to her husband that she married, ‘not as a concubine, to share only in bed and board, but as ...”

“... everything the same night to the stage of La Martinière Girls’ School, where we performed Julius Caesar and Henry V on Friday afternoon, then moved the entire equipment across the city to La Martinière Boys’ School, where we performed Macbeth and Henry V. At the end of it we were on our way again in a convoy of cycle-rickshaws to the ...”

“... the conjured spirit of the planet Mars. A spiritualist in Teddington, who interviewed Julius Caesar several times between 1909 and 1912, passed on Caesar’s warning of ‘red poppies in the smiling cornfields in the sun’. The Parisian celebrity Madame de Thèbes had long predicted the demise of Prussian ...”

“... which our hero enrols as a gladiator in order to rescue the village bard, captured by Caesar); Astérix et Cléopatre (the basis for the new movie, ‘the most expensive French film ever made’, in which Astérix and friends visit Egypt and find themselves in a hilarious parody of Mankiewicz’s epic movie); Astérix chez les Bretons (in which a ...”

“... to the Roman Empire. In the summer of 54 BC, in one of his least successful military adventures, Julius Caesar marched briefly through Kent and Essex before returning to France. Not a single Roman soldier was left behind. Caesar rightly reserved his famous bon mot – veni, vidi, vici – for his campaigns in Pontus ...”

“... were witnessed; part of the value of the act was its ability to inspire others by self-display. Julius Caesar several times remarks that his soldiers perform more bravely when under his gaze; Roman authors of the early imperial period, on the other hand, examine the non-exemplary deaths of civil war. The heroes of Lucan’s poem Bellum Civile, for ...”

“... over this, as it does the awkward fact that the statesmen Machiavelli most admires, such as Julius Caesar and Cesare Borgia, came to sticky ends largely because people had come to hate them. There is a gusto about Machiavelli’s descriptions of notorious acts of treachery and brutality which goes far beyond the value-free analysis which is now so ...”

“... for example, when the actor playing Polonius was required to remember his previous performance as Julius Caesar. But where Middleton delights in the game for its own sake, Shakespeare gives it a characteristically metaphysical twist, with the uncanny hint that Heminges/ Polonius/Caesar is once again to die at the hands ...”

“... characters tended to be merely snobbish and effete, but by the time of his infamous performance as Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo (1964) the camp mannerisms were firmly in place. Twenty years later, in a mock-Barthesian essay on the Carry On series written as an April Fool’s joke for Sight and Sound, Gilbert Adair described Williams’s persona in these ...”

“... less than perfect present. To prove this point, his History moved slowly backwards from 1688 to Julius Caesar much, as one unfriendly critic commented, like a witch saying her prayers back to front. Lewis Namier, in turn, demolished a 19th-century mythology which had grown up about mid-18th-century politics, but his revisionism was prompted by ...”

“... the seventh century AD, the city’s fabled library had already seen at least one major fire. When Julius Caesar came to the aid of Cleopatra in her war against young Ptolemy XIII in 48 BC, he burned the ships in Alexandria’s harbour to prevent his enemy from taking the city by sea. In the ensuing conflagration, the warehouses along the docks also ...”

“... was sunny and frosty. Talked with people close to me about yesterday’s events. Read a lot about Julius Caesar. At 8:20 arrived in Mogilev.’ On 8 March 1917, the day after his abdication, his entry concludes: ‘I left Mogilev; a touching crowd of people saw me off. Four members of the Duma are co-travellers in my train! I’ve left for Orsha and ...”

“... with the cultural politics of the new Whig ascendancy – for example, in a sumptuous edition of Julius Caesar dedicated to the Duke of Marlborough, champion of Blenheim (1712), an eye-catching edition of Shakespeare by the future Whig laureate Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Addison’s heavily ideological tragedy Cato (1713), for which he paid more than ...”