What Roman military hero do you admire most?

[Crispvs]

"He at least was trying to better the lot of the common people"

I am not sure I could agree with you there. He certainly made use of the common people to get what he wanted when he could not rely on the men of his own class to give it to him, and he certainly made sure his soldiers loved him, but let's not forget that he also plunged Rome into several years of civil war. He reason for doing so, according to his own writings, was that his personal honour had been offended.

Whatever the reality of the sustainability of the republic, Caesar was a ruthless opportunist. When requested, Pompey disbanded his army when he returned from the East, even though he was in a position to do what Sulla had done a few years before. Caesar, on the other hand, when in the same position a few years later, decided to start a series of civil wars, confident that the veteran army he brought back from Gaul would bring him early successes and put his opponents on the back foot, even if those soldiers would soon need to be retired. Civil wars are very rarely good for the common people. As a case in point, at the culmination of one phase of these civil wars, the victorious Young Caesar and Anthony turned the populations of no less than sixteen Italian cities out of their own towns in order to settle their retiring veterans. I dould that the people of these cities had any reason to think of Caesar and his family as people who helped the common man. A decade and a half earlier Caesar had also re-enfranchised a number of notorious street gangs in Rome. This gave him political muscle of the kind the Nazi Party liked to use in the late 1920s and early 30s, but I very much doubt that it endeared him to the rank and file of the population. Let's not forget also that when he had the popular assembly vote him powers and provinces, Caesar made sure he had men who had formerly been soldiers in Pompey and Crassus' armies standing around with cudgels to intimidate people into voting the way Caesar wanted them to. This is quite similar to the way Robert Mugabe won the 1980 election in Zimbabwe and has maintained control ever since.

Caesar certainly had many admirers but I don't think the admirers in his own day outnumbered his admirers in later generations which did not have such direct experience of him.

That said, and following on from Theo's list of heroic qualifications, he had won the Civic Crown, which does prove that he was capable of acts of personal heroism on the battlefield.

Crispvs