From Scripps News:

Like other months, July has witnessed mostly anonymous births, a few notorious ones and a handful of illustrious and even commendable personages. And of those of lasting eminence, one name stands out above the others -- so much so that July was named after him.

Gaius Julius Caesar, born of a patrician Roman family on July 12, 102 B.C., rose to a renown unexcelled by any other Roman leader. Indeed, Caesar's name was then adopted by 11 subsequent emperors of Rome in a vain attempt to emulate his glory. Long after the Roman Empire had been superseded by yet other realms, the very name still carried imperial authority and was adopted by the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. The word, in early German, was translated as "kaiser" and in distant Russia, transformed into the word "tsar."

Caesar, who had decisively cast dice long before Las Vegas was invented, still invades the classrooms as children learn a "dead language" called Latin and discover from Caesar's own commentaries that all of Gaul, for unknown reasons, was divided in three parts; and further -- with an awesome economy of words -- that he came, he saw and, inevitably, he conquered.

Caesar's murder, in 44 B.C., advertised widely by Shakespeare, has made assassination almost fashionable. The bard said of mighty Caesar's death: "When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

Even Matthew commented on the ubiquity of the secular authority of those called Caesar when he quotes Jesus as saying "to render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's."

So awesome has been the influence of great Caesar that even a banal date in March, the ides, has now assumed great symbolic meaning.

Many a human, with visions of greatness, has named himself Caesar; from Cesare Borgia to the great chef Caesar Cardini, who, in a burst of culinary genius, devised a special salad in 1924 that now bears the name. Pliny the Elder, the ancient Roman author and archivist, repeated the tale that Caesar was not born like mortals but was extracted from his mother's womb through a surgical incision on his mother's abdomen -- thus a Caesarean section.

The author is a dean emeritus of medicine, so I think it's fair to link to our previous post(s) on the subject casting doubt on the use of the term prior to the sixteenth century ...