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The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome
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The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
What's new is not good and what's good is not new.
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Anyone familiar with the historical scholarship dealing with Julius Caesar and the late Roman Republic will find this book frustrating and disappointing -- not because that reader is wedded to some supposed "gentlemanly conservative" take on the fall of the Republic, but because this book is a maddening stew. Michael Parenti claims to be offering a new and iconoclastic view of Roman history, shattering a carefully-constructed myth designed to steal agency from the people and those who sought to help them and to celebrate as republican heroes the aristocrats and toadies who kept the people down. But the problem with his caricatured view of Roman historiography is that what's good about his book is not new and what's new about his book is not good.
What's new is his attempt to reinvent Caesar as some sort of revolutionary statesman seeking to bring justice to the Roman poor. It is not at all clear that Caesar was sincere about his populism or was a far more gifted manipulation of the people than, say, Catiline, the target not only of Cicero but of Sallust, a Caesarean historian who had little use for Catiline's supposed populism or for the posturing of Cicero, who brought Catiline down.
What's good here is really not new, and Parenti should be embarrassed by his attempt to persuade readers of his originality. Many fine scholars, such as Sir Ronald Syme [a true iconoclast] and Peter Brunt and Michael Crawford, already have shown that many of those who conspired against Caesar feared that he would unleash the plebeians against them and their entrenched privileges and locks on political power. So, too, Cicero has not wanted for criticw who have denounced him for self-congratulatory massaging of the record, or for cuddling up to those wielding power. Finally, many of the finest studies of this period emphasize the differences between Julius Caesar and his eventual successor Octravius who became Augustus. Augustus donned the mantle of Caesar and fastened a dictatorship on Rome under the guise of reviving and reforming the Republic -- but scholars have long abandoned the tendency to confuse the Augustan regime with what Caesar intended to found or perpetuate.
The problem, ultimately, is that we do not know what Caesar planned to do and we guess at his plans with the risk of falling on our faces -- in great measure because Caesar, as gifted a politician as any in history, navigated from point to point and never left or recorded a clear plan as to what he wanted his legacy to be, or his solution to the problems of Rome. It is as difficult and frustrating to seek Caesar's intentions as it is to find Lincoln's intentions for what he wanted to do and what he wanted the nation's policy to be after the end of the Civil War. In both cases, assassination almost certainly cost us any clear answer to these endlessly fascinating questions.
Thus, Parenti's claims to have revealed a new and clear understanding of Caesar's era and his fate fall to the ground. Readers should turn instead to Rom Holland's slightly over-jazzed but nonetheless entertaining RUBICON, or, for a more sober account, to the classic biography of Caesar by Matthias Gelzer or the recent life by Adriaon Goldsworthy. |
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