Caesar is an endlessly fascinating figure. Like Trump he created a brand, and his brand was himself. Romans were telling stories about Caesar, his revenge upon a band of pirates, his witticisms, his ego, his womanizing, long before he came to power. A brilliant writer and a military genius, he is the outstanding secular figure, with perhaps the exception of Alexander, in antiquity. However, his historical function was to be the gravedigger of the Republic.
The assassins murdered Caesar in an attempt to restore the Republic, a completely futile effort. The Republic had degenerated into Roman generals using their armies to gain control of the State, swords ruling instead of ballots. This state of affairs had existed for two generations prior to Caesar acting as the undertaker for a political system which had already expired at the hands of those who should have been its guardians. Did Shakespeare in his brilliant Julius Caesar, have republican leanings? Unlikely since he lived at a time of almost universal monarchies in Europe. Parliament had become a rubber stamp under the Tudors, but Shakespeare may well have been sharp enough to discern the few scattered signs that this was beginning to change. He gives the conspirators some good lines, but it is clear that they are attempting an act of political necromancy that is bound to fail, as the so easily manipulated Roman mob, doubtless patterned after London mobs with which Shakespeare had experience, demonstrates. Shakespeare always hates mobs and anarchy, and, in the end, that is all the conspirators can produce.
Although the speech of Brutus is overshadowed in Shakespeare’s play by the immediately following speech of Mark Antony in which he skillfully rouses the fury of the mob against the assassins, I have always had a warm spot in my heart for that of Brutus. Our ancient sources indicate that he was a pure-hearted lover of Rome and the Republic. He did not hate Caesar, but he realized that if Caesar lived the Republic would be gone forever. The Republic had been dying long before the birth of Brutus, shredded by political violence, endless civil wars and class strife. Caesar, the permanent dictator, merely dispatched a Republic that was already a corpse. All of that however does not detract one whit from the nobility of Brutus. From the Roman Republic our Founding Fathers would derive many of their concepts for liberty under law when they crafted our Republic. It was an institution worth fighting to preserve even though the struggle, as I suspect Brutus probably realized, was hopeless.
James Mason gives a good rendition of the speech of Brutus in Julius Caesar (1953). Dante placed Brutus in the triple maw of Lucifer at the bottom of Hell, along with his co-conspirator Cassius, and Judas the betrayer of Christ. I pray that the noble Brutus, if there is a portion of Hell for great pagan souls as Dante wrote, is there instead.
I’ve been studying the 21st section (paragraphs 82 through 85) in Cicero’s De Officiis in lingua Latina. A brief summary from an on-line translation is below. The line “Capitalis Eteocles vel potius Euridipes, qui id unum, quod omnium sceleratissimum fuerit, exceperit” is loosely translated as, “Our tyrant deserved his death for having made an exception of the one thing that was the blackest crime of all.” But it’s really a comparison of Caesar with the mythical Eteocles who was a king of Thebes, the son of Oedipus. Oedipus killed his father Laius and married his mother without knowing his relationship to either. When the relationship was revealed, he was expelled from Thebes. The rule passed to his sons Eteocles and Polynices. However, because of a curse from their father, the two brothers did not share the rule peacefully and died as a result, ultimately killing each other in battle for control of the city. I think Cicero was being very harsh. Nevertheless, here is that summary:
Our tyrant deserved his death for having made an exception of the one thing that was the blackest crime of all. Why do we gather instances of petty crime – legacies criminally obtained and fraudulent buying and selling? Behold, here you have a man who was ambitious to be king of the Roman People and master of the whole world; and he achieved it! The man who maintains that such an ambition is morally right is a madman; for he justifies the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their hideous and detestable suppression glorious. But if anyone agrees that it is not morally right to be kind in a state that once was free and that ought to be free now, and yet imagines that it is advantageous for him who can reach that position, with what remonstrance or rather with what appeal should I try to tear him away from so strange a delusion? For, oh ye immortal gods! can the most horrible and hideous of all murders – that of fatherland -bring advantage to anybody, even though he who has committed such a crime receives from his enslaved fellow-citizens the title of “Father of his Country”? Expediency, therefore, must be measured by the standard of moral rectitude, and in such a way, too, that these two words shall seem in sound only to be different but in real meaning to be one and the same.
What greater advantage one could have, according to the standard of popular opinion, than to be a king, I do not know; when, however, I begin to bring the question back to the standard of truth, then I find nothing more disadvantageous for one who has risen to that height by injustice. For can occasions for worry anxiety, fear by day and by night, and a life all beset with plots and perils be of advantage to anybody?
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I shall also add that if any attempt succeeds in murdering Trump to preserve “democracy” will have the unintended consequence of descending our Republic into a dictatorship.
I forgot to specify above the 21st section of Book III of De Officiis. Apologies.
Ah, the Ancient World. This is my favorite period.
Theodore Ayrault Dodge thought that Hannibal was the greatest general of antiquity, possibly of all time, but I haven’t read his works in over a decade. I do remember he considers Caesar the weakest of the three great commanders of the Ancient World, but of the three the greatest man in totality.
Don, I do think your admiration for Brutus is misplaced though. He was well known to conspire with governors to loan local populations money to pay their taxes, but charge exorbitant rates in interest, in some cases over 50%. In one particularly brutal case Brutus had an agent surround Salamis and lock the councilmen up and starved them to death until they payed up. Five starved to death. It was only stopped when the governor, Cicero, stopped the agent’s action, and restructured the loan’s terms. Brutus had to hide his part in this, but he was furious with Cicero.
Brutus’s break with Caesar came when Caesar began to forbid loan interest over 10%.
Two Books I recommend:
“The Last Generation of the Roman Republic” by Erich Gruen
“Julius Caesar and the Roman People”
By Robert Morstein-Marx
Brutus was not without flaws Steven, and the Roman taxation system in the empire lent itself to such abuses, but he shines compared to most of his generation in his devotion to the Republic. Cicero greatly praised Brutus in his works, especially in his look at Roman orators, in which he has Brutus act as one of his two interlocutors.
I have read Dodge with amusement and edification, and I have all his works in my library, but he always remained a soldier rather than an historian, although his work in military history from antiquity to his own century was pioneering for the 19th century.