John Green opens Crash Course's Rome episode with a specific claim: the common story that Julius Caesar single-handedly turned the Republic into an Empire gives him too much credit. Green traces the Republic's institutions first, the Senate and the ideal of the citizen-soldier embodied by Cincinnatus, before following Caesar's rise through the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, his consolidation of power, and his assassination on the Senate floor, stabbed twenty-three times. The episode then follows the scramble that came after, the Second Triumvirate of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus, and the power struggles that finally produced an emperor. Along the way Green fits in the Punic Wars, the origins of the Julian calendar, and the etymology of the term caesarian section, moving through several centuries of political change in under twelve minutes. His real point is that the shift from Republic to Empire was gradual, built on decades of military and political maneuvering rather than one man's ambition, with Caesar as accelerant rather than sole cause.