The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome
by Michael Parenti
The New Press, 2003
276 pages, $43 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Julius Caesar, supreme commander of the Roman Republic, should have followed the local augur's advice to "beware the Ides of March". Twenty-three stab wounds later, on March 15, 44 BCE, Caesar's body lay dead on the floor of the Roman Senate.
The prevailing view of historians, classical scholars and the entertainment industry, argues Michael Parenti in The Assassination of Julius Caesar, is that the Senator-assassins were defending republican liberty from the dictator, Caesar.
This orthodoxy is evident in sources from Shakespeare, whose play Julius Caesar operates within the paradigm of "Republic good, Caesarism bad", to Hollywood, whose blood and sword epic Gladiators, although set two centuries after Caesar's death, has a similar take on the Roman Senate. "We are asked to believe that the Senate was populated by public-spirited men devoted to the people's welfare", comments Parenti.
The view of the people as a mindless, bloodthirsty mob, interested in only "bread and circuses", is also common to stage, screen and academic treatise. The whole centuries-long treatment, however, of Caesar's assassination and its political context, argues Parenti, is "anti-people's history".
Caesar ruled at the end of the Late Republic period (133 BCE-40 BCE). This was a century of political struggle between the land and slave-owning aristocracy (patricians) and the urban and rural working "free" masses (plebeians). The Late Republic was a mixture of poverty and its alleviation, of popular democratic protections and elite power. People's tribunes were elected each year by citizens' assemblies to protect popular rights from the most powerful governing body, the Roman Senate, which was dominated by the wealthiest aristocrats.
The aristocrats, however, divided into two groups, the majority optimates (defenders of the status quo) and a minority of populares (reformers sympathetic to the poor). Julius Caesar was a leading populare — the last in a long line of Late Republic reformers beginning with brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who proposed a mild redistribution of wealth and moderate infringements on aristocratic power.
The Gracchi were called dangerous demagogues by patrician ideologes, including Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero is much revered by classicists, and his histories and recorded speeches provide much of the available history from the period. The Gracchi brothers were assassinated, along with thousands of their supporters, by the Senate optimates and their death squads.
Parenti chronicles the violent ends of all 13 major populares before Caesar. The defenders of republican "democracy" were also happy to call in the strongman-dictator when required. In 82 BCE, Lucius Sulla marched his army into Rome, slaughtering tens of thousands of the followers of the pro-masses Cornelius Cinna, setting up a dictatorship and a regime of inquisitorial terror, rolling back the powers of the people's tribunes and making the rich even richer.
Caesar had been born to a patrician family that opposed Sulla. After Caesar refused to pledge himself to the reactionary cause, Sulla had the defiant youth arrested. Caesar escaped, however, returning after Sulla's death to a Rome in popular ferment, winning various public offices, culminating in the supreme office of consul in 58 BCE.
While Caesar commanding Roman armies in Europe, however, the Senate appointed his fellow consul Pompey as sole consul. Forced to arms, Caesar took Rome unopposed in 49 BCE, his popularity high.
Caesar shared many of the sins of his class. He was a slaveowner and imperial conqueror. He treated women as negotiable marriage objects. He was no revolutionary, ever cool to radical demands to share all wealth and power amongst poor citizens. But, like other reformers before and after him, Caesar was seen as a traitor to his class. From 46-44 BCE, Caesar "attempted to deal with unemployment, poverty, unfair taxes, excessive luxury consumption, land redistribution, rent gouging, usury, debt relief and overall aristocratic avarice".
Caesar capped slave numbers to compel the employment of more "freedmen", he placed limits on individual wealth, and waived a year's rent for poor tenants. He introduced progressive taxation on luxuries, established public libraries, granted religious freedom to Rome's Jews, restored the tribunes' authority and maintained the grain dole.
Caesar responded to popular pressure for reforms, believing them to be both just and beneficial to Rome by reining in the excesses of the rich who became his enemies because "more for the many meant less for the few". Some oligarchs hatched a conspiracy to rid Rome of the danger. With a back-up complement of gladiators in an adjoining building, the senators struck the knife blows that killed Caesar.
They had arrogantly underestimated Caesar's popularity, however, and Rome's plebeians exploded into angry disturbances which were violently suppressed. Popular sentiment, however, remained set against the assassins, who fled Rome. A triumvirate including Marc Antony (Caesar's co-consul) and Octavian (Caesar's adopted son) took power. They hunted down the assassins until a shift in the balance of class forces enabled Octavian to seize dictatorial power as emperor in 31 BCE, bringing the Roman Republic, with its limited but real popular freedoms, to an end, initiating 400 years of Roman military domination of Western Europe.
Rome's affluent class liked this arrangement because it protected their privileged interests, but their narrow self-interest had to be prettied up for public consumption. Their ideological task centred on presenting the assassination of Caesar not as "ugly class expediency" but as a blow for "honourable Republican virtue". Their ideological heirs have risen handsomely to the challenge.
Top of the banana bunch of "gentlemen historians" is Edward Gibbon, whose 1773 book, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is a revered authority on ancient Roman history. Gibbon was a prosperous English landed conservative with a history to match. He looked kindly on ancient Rome's violently acquisitive aristocracy, presenting an idyllic picture of an aristocracy-enriching Roman empire "free from sacked towns, shattered armies, slaughtered villagers, raped women, enslaved prisoners, plundered lands, burned crops and mercilessly overtaxed populations".
Gibbon, like most classical historians before and after him, shares a conception and practice of history as a "patrician literary genre", a vehicle for an elitist view of history as the "monumental deeds of great personages" in which ordinary men are merely "nameless spear-carriers" and women not even that. Their historical perceptions are shaped by their class ideology. Gibbon had half a dozen servants, opposed the French Revolution and its "wild theories" of freedom and equality, and portrays Caesar as a black-hat of Roman history. Cicero was a slaveowner, slumlord and anti-democrat who, with contemptuous class hauteur, sneered at the Roman poor as "dirt and filth" and looked favourably on the assassination of their reforming leader as a "noble enterprise".
It is historians like this, from and for the ruling class, who have monopolised the recorded history of antiquity in which the rich rule because they should, and when the exploited mobilise against class injustice, they become "the mob" — fickle, lawless and given to unreasoning passions. The few glimpses they allow of popular action, however, tantalise us with a view of the poor masses as politically aware, playing a crucial (if much ignored) role in the ancient, and ongoing, struggle for economic and political democracy.
Through such ruling-class history, the Roman oligarchs and their senate come down to us as defenders of people's liberty instead of the defenders of elite interests that they were. Caesar comes down to us as a tyrant, not the leader of a popular struggle. The people of Rome themselves, the anonymous masses upon whose shoulders the reformers stood, "come down to us hardly at all, or most usually as a disreputable mob". But it is these "spear-carriers" and film-set extras of Rome to whom we are linked by a history of class struggle. Parenti's accessible and satirically sharp people's history of Rome eloquently strengthens these links.
From Green Left Weekly, February 11, 2004.
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