Quick questions on Caesar's dictatorship and reforms: HSC Ancient History

For all the controversy over his power, Caesar used it to push through a broad and largely practical reform programme in the short time available to him.

In deliberate contrast to Sulla's proscriptions, Caesar made clementia (clemency) a public policy, pardoning defeated enemies rather than killing them. He spared prominent Pompeians, including Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius, and allowed exiles such as Marcus Marcellus to return, an act Cicero praised in the speech Pro Marcello (46 BC).

The Roman lunar calendar had drifted badly out of step with the seasons. Advised by the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, Caesar replaced it with a solar calendar of 365 days, with a leap day added every fourth year. To realign the seasons, 46 BC was stretched to 445 days, the "year of confusion," and the new calendar took effect on 1 January 45 BC.

Faced with a debt crisis and radical demands for total cancellation (novae tabulae), Caesar chose the middle path. Creditors had to accept property at its pre-war valuation and deduct interest already paid from the principal, easing debtors without wiping out credit. This deliberately disappointed radical populares, and Caesar suppressed the agitation that followed.

Caesar refounded the long-cursed sites of Carthage and Corinth as Roman colonies and, according to Suetonius (Divus Iulius 42), sent out around 80,000 citizens to overseas colonies. This resettled his discharged soldiers and drained surplus poor from Rome without the destabilising confiscations of the past.

He granted full Roman citizenship to the Transpadane Gauls of Cisalpine Gaul, resolving a long-running grievance, and extended it to communities in Spain and Gaul and to doctors and teachers resident in Rome, widening the citizen body and rewarding loyalty.

Caesar raised the Senate from about 600 to roughly 900 members, admitting his own supporters, Italians and some provincials, including Gauls, prompting hostile lampoons about "trousered" barbarians in the Senate house. He also increased the number of junior magistrates (praetors up to sixteen, and more quaestors and aediles), partly to reward followers and partly to staff an expanding administration.

He built the Forum of Caesar (Forum Iulium) with its temple of Venus Genetrix (dedicated 46 BC) and the Basilica Julia, and planned grander projects: draining the Pomptine marshes, cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, and a great public library under Varro, several left unfinished at his death.