> Nit pick: the Roman Empire was founded after the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar overthrew the senate.

Nit pick: the Roman Empire, in one sense, was founded while Rome was still ruled by the Republic; in this sense, the Empire is the metropole-periphery arrangement with Rome proper ruling as the metropole and the various provinces as peripheries.

In the other sense (the sense of the Empire as a form of government within the Rome rather than the relation between Rome and the provinces), the Roman Empire was founded when Caesar Augustus was granted a variety of lifetime powers by the Senate.

In either sense, it was not founded by (or during the life of) Julius Caesar.