circular tower, about 50 ft. high, the summit of which overhangs its base about 9 ft. Before the middle of the 15th century it had ceased to be a fortified residence and was used as a prison, which was also the case in the time of Leland (1535), who describes it as in a ruinous state. It is still, however, one of the most extensive and imposing ruins of the kind in the kingdom.
The town grew up around the castle but never received a charter or had a governing body. In 1661 the corporation of Cardiff complained of Cardiff’s impoverishment by reason of a fair held every three weeks for the previous four years at Caerphilly, though “no Borough.” Its markets during the 19th century had been chiefly noted for the Caerphilly cheese sold there. The district was one of the chief centres of the Methodist revival of the 18th century, the first synod of the Calvinistic Methodists being held in 1743 at Watford farm close to the town, from which place George Whitefield was married at Eglwysilan church two years previously. The church of St Martin was built in 1879, and there are Nonconformist chapels. Mining is now the chief industry of the district. (D. Ll. T.)
CAESALPINUS (Cesalpino), ANDREAS (1519–1603), Italian natural philosopher, was born in Arezzo in Tuscany in 1519. He studied anatomy and medicine at the university of Pisa, where he took his doctor’s degree in 1551, and in 1555 became professor materia medica and director of the botanical garden. Appointed physician to Pope Clement VIII., he removed in 1592 to Rome, where he died on the 23rd of February 1603. Caesalpinus was the most distinguished botanist of his time. His work, De Plantis libri xvi. (Florence, 1583), was not only the source from which various subsequent writers, and especially Robert Morison (1620–1683) derived their ideas of botanical arrangement but it was a mine of science to which Linnaeus himself gratefully avowed his obligations. Linnaeus’s copy of the book evinces the great assiduity with which he studied it; he laboured throughout to remedy the defect of the want of synonyms, sub-joined his own generic names to nearly every species, and particularly indicated the two remarkable passages where the germination of plants and their sexual distinctions are explained. Caesalpinus was also distinguished as a physiologist, and it has been claimed that he had a clear idea of the circulation of the blood (see Harvey, William). His other works include Daemonum investigatio peripatetica (1580), Quaestionum medicarum libri ii. (1593), De Metallicis (1596), and Quaestionum peripateticarum libri v. (1571)
CAESAR, GAIUS JULIUS (102–44 B.C.), the great Roman soldier and statesman, was born on the 12th of July 102 B.C.[1] His family was of patrician rank and traced a legendary descent from Iulus, the founder of Alba Longa, son of Aeneas and grandson of Venus and Anchises. Caesar made the most of his divine ancestry and built a temple in his forum to Venus Genetrix; but his patrician descent was of little importance in politics and disqualified Caesar from holding the tribunate, an office to which, as a leader of the popular party, he would naturally have aspired. The Early
years.Julii Caesares, however, had also acquired the new nobilitas, which belonged to holders of the great magistracies. Caesar’s uncle was consul in 91 B.C., and his father held the praetorship. Most of the family seem to have belonged to the senatorial party (optimates); but Caesar himself was from the first a popularis. The determining factor is no doubt to be sought in his relationship with C. Marius, the husband of his aunt Julia. Caesar was born in the year of Marius’s first great victory over the Teutones, and as he grew up, inspired by the traditions of the great soldier’s career, attached himself to his party and its fortunes. Of his education we know scarcely anything. His mother, Aurelia, belonged to a distinguished family, and Tacitus (Dial. de Orat. xxviii.) couples her name with that of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, as an example of the Roman matron whose disciplina and severitas formed her son for the duties of a soldier and statesman. His tutor was M. Antonius Gnipho, a native of Gaul (by which Cisalpine Gaul may be meant), who is said to have been equally learned in Greek and Latin literature, and to have set up in later years a school of rhetoric which was attended by Cicero in his praetorship 66 B.C. It is possible that Caesar may have derived from him his interest in Gaul and its people and his sympathy with the claims of the Romanized Gauls of northern Italy to political rights.
In his sixteenth year (87 B.C.) Caesar lost his father, and assumed the toga virilis as the token of manhood. The social war (90–89 B.C.) had been brought to a close by the enfranchisement of Rome’s Italian subjects; and the civil war which followed it led, after the departure of Sulla for the East, to the temporary triumph of the populares, led by Marius and Cinna, and the indiscriminate massacre of their political opponents, including both of Caesar’s uncles. Caesar was at once marked out for high distinction, being created flamen Dialis or priest of Jupiter. In the following year (which saw the death of Marius) Caesar, rejecting a proposed marriage with a wealthy capitalist’s heiress, sought and obtained the hand of Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, and thus became further identified with the ruling party. His career was soon after interrupted by the triumphant return of Sulla (82 B.C.), who ordered him to divorce his wife, and on his refusal deprived him of his property and priesthood and was induced to spare his life only by the intercession of his aristocratic relatives and the college of vestal virgins.
Released from his religious obligations, Caesar now (81 B.C.) left Rome for the East and served his first campaign under Minucius Thermus, who was engaged in stamping out the embers of resistance to Roman rule in the province of Asia, and received from him the “civic crown” for saving a fellow-soldier’s life at the storm of Mytilene. In 78 B.C. he was serving under Servilius Isauricus against the Cilician pirates when the news of Sulla’s death reached him and he at once returned to Rome. Refusing to entangle himself in the abortive and equivocal schemes of Lepidus to subvert the Sullan constitution, Caesar took up the only instrument of political warfare left to the opposition by prosecuting two senatorial governors, Cn. Cornelius Dolabella (in 77 B.C.) and C. Antonius (in 76 B.C.) for extortion in the provinces of Macedonia and Greece, and though he lost both cases, probably convinced the world at large of the corruption of the senatorial tribunals. After these failures Caesar determined to take no active part in politics for a time, and retraced his steps to the East in order to study rhetoric under Molon, at Rhodes. On the journey thither he was caught by pirates, whom he treated with consummate nonchalance while awaiting his ransom, threatening to return and crucify them; when released he lost no time in carrying out his threat. Whilst he was studying at Rhodes the third Mithradatic War broke out, and Caesar at once raised a corps of volunteers and helped to secure the wavering loyalty of the provincials of Asia. When Lucullus assumed the command of the Roman troops in Asia, Caesar returned to Rome, to find that he had been elected to a seat on the college of pontifices left vacant by the death of his uncle, C. Aurelius Cotta. He was likewise elected first of the six tribuni militum a populo, but we hear nothing of his service in this capacity. Suetonius tells us that he threw himself into the agitation for the restoration of the ancient powers of the tribunate curtailed by Sulla, and that he secured the passing of a law of amnesty in favour of the partisans of Sertorius. He was not, however, destined to compass the downfall of the Sullan régime; the crisis of the Slave War placed the Senate at the mercy of Pompey and Crassus, who in 70 B.C. swept away the safeguards of senatorial ascendancy, restored the initiative in legislation to the tribunes, and replaced the Equestrian order, i.e. the capitalists, in partial possession of the jury-courts. This judicial reform (or rather compromise) was the work of Caesar’s uncle, L. Aurelius Cotta. Caesar himself, however, gained no accession of influence. In 69 B.C. he served as quaestor under Antistius Vetus, governor of Hither Spain, and on his way back to Rome (according to Suetonius) promoted a revolutionary agitation
- ↑ In spite of the explicit statements of Suetonius, Plutarch and Appian that Caesar was in his fifty-sixth year at the time of his murder, it is, as Mommsen has shown, practically certain that he was born in 102 B.C., since he held the chief offices of state in regular order, beginning with the aedileship in 65 B.C., and the legal age for this was fixed at 37-38.
