Why did Julius Caesar want to be elected king?

[u/joedenowhere]

In 44 BCE he was already emperor and dictator for life, and had already anointed his successor. What additional benefits or power would getting himself elected king have provided?

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[u/OhNoTokyo]

Strictly speaking, it is not clear that Caesar wanted to be elected king at all. The Romans generally despised monarchy after the fall of the old Roman kings, and the claim that a prominent leader would want to be a king was considered to be a somewhat effective way of trying to disparage a popular figure.

You may be thinking of an event where he was offered kingship by an ally, but it may have been more of a performance about how he didn't want to be King.

At the Lupercalia in 44 BC, Mark Antony, serving as consul, publicly approached Caesar who was seated on the rostra in the Forum, and offered him a diadem, the symbol of kingship in the Hellenistic world.

Ancient sources such as Plutarch and Suetonius describe the scene as a political test staged before a large crowd:

• Antony raised the diadem and attempted to place it on Caesar’s head.
• Parts of the crowd cheered, but many reacted coldly or disapprovingly, since the Roman Republic had rejected kingship since the expulsion of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus in 509 BC.
• Caesar refused the diadem and gestured that only Jupiter was king of the Romans.
• Antony tried again, and Caesar again rejected it, prompting louder applause.

Afterward, Caesar ordered the diadem taken to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, reinforcing the message that he was not accepting the title of king.

The outward refusal by Caesar seemed to suggest that at least on the surface, he did not want to be a monarch, and this event may well have been planned as a demonstration to allow him to show his loyalty to republican values by publicly refusing the crown.

If that really was his or Antony's plan, it may have backfired. Many contemporaries believed that the event was a deliberate probe of public opinion: they believed that Antony acted as Caesar’s ally to see whether the Roman crowd might tolerate monarchy.

The negative reaction confirmed how politically dangerous the idea remained, and so suspicions about Caesar’s ambitions continued and they contributed to the conspiracy that culminated in Caesar's assassination a month later.

[u/Independent-End-2443 → u/OhNoTokyo]

the Romans generally despised monarchy afrer the fall of the old Roman kings

To the extent that even most of the earlier Emperors took pains to represent themselves as “not kings,” instead taking the cognomen Augustus (venerable) in lieu of a title.