Between the two, but not necessarily equally distant between the two. As you may have noted, I’m somewhat of a Caesar partisan, and have a more positive interpretation of the man than some others.

… but still less generous to him than his own accounts in the Commentarii. To hear him tell it, he never did anything wrong, never seized an opportunity that wasn’t purely military in scope, never broke faith with anyone. He just accidentally conquered all of Gaul because the Gauls kept betraying him without any cause whatsoever 😭

The truth is, at least by my interpretation, that Caesar was an immensely ambitious man who was willing to seize any believable pretext to further his own career and power. At the same time, that doesn’t make him particularly different, morally, than most of his enemies - Roman or barbarian - save that Caesar was immensely skilled at manipulating his enemies into positions where they had no choice but to accept a vulnerable position or seem unreasonable.

He probably did have a genuine core set of beliefs which guided his ambitions - in particular, he was a lifelong populare, a reformer in favor of the Roman poor. He seemed to operate with some basic sense of fairness and compromise when negotiating, was regarded as unusually merciful and egalitarian (by the standards of the time), loyal to his allies, and had a basic sense of due processes that was not shared by his eventual successors, Octavian/Augustus and Mark Antony.

Plus, he made plans for Rome’s first public library (and art gallery) - not for dignitaries and scholars, but for general access. Can’t say he’s ALL bad with a vision like that!

The library would not be started before he died, unfortunately - the idea lived on and was eventually completed through one of Octavian’s subordinates, but true to form, Octavian made a much more… propagandistic endeavor out of it, complete with book burnings and bans - including on some of Caesar’s own work.