Apries vs Julius Caesar

Caesar was born into a patrician family in 100 BCE, during the twilight of the Roman Republic. His lineage traced back to the goddess Venus, but his family had fallen from political prominence. Rome was a city of ambition, where men clawed for power through military glory, oratory, and ruthless alliances. Caesar grew up in a world of civil wars, Sulla’s proscriptions, and the collapse of old republican norms. His uncle Marius had been a populist general; his father died when Caesar was sixteen. From the start, he learned that survival meant audacity. Apries ascended the throne of Egypt in 589 BCE, inheriting a kingdom that had spent centuries recovering from foreign domination. The 26th Dynasty was a renaissance: Egyptians had reclaimed their land from Assyrian and Nubian rulers, and pharaohs like Apries’ father Psamtik II had restored temples, revived art, and reasserted Egyptian power in the Near East. But Egypt was a fragile state, squeezed between Babylon to the east and Greek colonies to the west. Apries was a pharaoh in the old mold, believing in divine kingship and the eternal order of Ma’at. He had not been forged in civil war but in the quiet halls of Memphis.

Caesar governed through a blend of clemency and calculation. He pardoned former enemies, reformed the calendar, granted citizenship to provincials, and launched public works that reshaped Rome. His military genius was tactical and strategic: at Alesia, he built fortifications around a fortified city and then built another ring to hold off a relief army, winning a siege that defied conventional logic. He wrote his own commentaries, shaping how history would remember him. His political wisdom lay in understanding that the Republic was dying, but he could not say so aloud. He centralized power without abolishing the Senate, creating a paradox that his assassins would try to resolve with daggers. Apries governed as a traditional pharaoh, but his military decisions revealed a man out of his depth. In 588 BCE, he sent an army to support King Zedekiah of Judah against the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. The Egyptian force temporarily lifted the siege, but Nebuchadnezzar returned, and Jerusalem fell. The Bible records this intervention as futile. Then, in 570 BCE, Apries dispatched an expedition to support the Greek city of Cyrene against Greek colonists—a bizarre and poorly planned campaign. His forces were decisively defeated, and the Egyptian army, humiliated and unpaid, rebelled. They proclaimed the general Amasis as pharaoh. Apries fled to Babylon, returned with mercenaries, and died fighting his own people.

Caesar was restless, brilliant, and utterly unsentimental. He could forgive enemies but never forget a slight. His personality drove him to take risks that would have destroyed lesser men, and it also drove him to ignore warnings—the soothsayer’s “Beware the Ides of March,” his wife’s dreams, the daggers beneath the togas. He believed in his own luck until the luck ran out. Apries was a man of his time: conservative, pious, and unimaginative. He did not innovate because innovation was not the pharaonic way. His personality was shaped by the belief that the gods would protect Egypt if he performed the rituals correctly. When the gods did not, he had no backup plan. He was not a villain or a fool—just a man who could not adapt.

Standing at the edge of their respective empires, both men fell to the same force: the betrayal of those they trusted. But Caesar’s fall was the climax of a story that still resonates, while Apries’ fall was the end of a quiet chapter. The difference was not talent or ambition—it was context. Caesar lived in a world that rewarded radical change; Apries lived in one that punished it. One man shaped his destiny; the other was shaped by his. In the end, history remembers not just what we do, but where and when we do it.