May 5, 2015 03:17 PM
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm...aesar-8152
EXCERPT: “No country was ever saved by good men,” Horace Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.” I thought often of Walpole’s remark while reading Barry Strauss’s thrilling account of the assassination of Julius Caesar, which is full of robust men going to incarnadine lengths.
[...] One of the great ironies surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar is that, for all of the upheaval it occasioned, it failed utterly in its stated purpose. The conspirators sought to overthrow a dictator and restore the Republic. “The Republic,” “the Republic,” “the Republic”: that was the phrase they uttered ad nauseam. But the Roman Republic, devised to govern a city state, was overwhelmed by the cosmopolitan responsibilities of empire. By Caesar’s day, the Republic was a tottering and deeply corrupt edifice. As Caesar himself put it, cynically but not inaccurately, “The Republic is nothing, merely a name without body or shape.” By killing Caesar, the conspirators merely hastened the Republic’s collapse. Strauss quotes Emerson (who wasn’t wrong about everything): “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” The assassins thought that by killing Caesar they had killed tyranny. They hadn’t. Removing Caesar did nothing to remove Caesarism, i.e., absolute rule by one man, which, as Strauss points out, emerged from the bloodbath of the Ides of March unscathed. “The world without Caesar,” he notes, “was still a world about Caesar.”...
[...] Caesar’s funeral was a huge spectacle that ended in a riot. The poet Helvius Cinna, a people’s tribune, was a supporter of Caesar, but the crowd mistook him for the praetor Cornelius Cinna, one of the conspirators. They beat him to death and decapitated him, parading the head through the street.
There is a twofold moral to The Death of Caesar. One concerns the military. Like Marius and Sulla before him, Caesar was able to control Rome because he controlled the army. His legions were loyal first of all to him, not to Rome. The conspirators sought to overturn that dominance of the military in civic affairs but failed—because they did not dominate the military. Strauss notes the irony that “only the legions could save the Republic from being run by legions.”
The second moral is this: revolutions are impossible to manage. The announced goals of the conspirators were moderate: to remove a dictator and restore the prerogatives of the Senate. But revolutions, as Strauss mordantly observes, are hard on moderates. Within a year, Octavian and Antony had effective control of Rome. They cancelled the amnesty for the conspirators. Then the proscriptions began anew. Property was summarily confiscated and heads rolled, including Cicero’s. In December 43, the great orator was apprehended in his villa in Astura, on the coast south of Rome, while trying to escape to Macedonia to meet up with Brutus and Cassius. We know the name of the centurion who nabbed him: Herennius. When Cicero saw the soldier approaching his litter, he stopped, told him to get on with the job, and bravely stretched out his neck. Herennius slit his throat, struck off his head, and, on Antony’s orders, cut off his hands. The gory trophies he sent back to Rome. The oft-told story that Fulvia, Antony’s wife, set Cicero’s head on her knees and repeatedly stabbed his tongue with a hairpin may be apocryphal, but then again it may not. We do know that Cicero’s head and right hand, which had penned the hated Philippics denouncing Antony, were nailed to the Speakers’ Platform in the Forum. Cicero thought the Republic could be restored. He was wrong. The Roman Republic was a political mechanism that had outlived itself. Removing Caesar brought not restoration but revolution, followed by civil war and the resurgent dominance of Caesarism....
EXCERPT: “No country was ever saved by good men,” Horace Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.” I thought often of Walpole’s remark while reading Barry Strauss’s thrilling account of the assassination of Julius Caesar, which is full of robust men going to incarnadine lengths.
[...] One of the great ironies surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar is that, for all of the upheaval it occasioned, it failed utterly in its stated purpose. The conspirators sought to overthrow a dictator and restore the Republic. “The Republic,” “the Republic,” “the Republic”: that was the phrase they uttered ad nauseam. But the Roman Republic, devised to govern a city state, was overwhelmed by the cosmopolitan responsibilities of empire. By Caesar’s day, the Republic was a tottering and deeply corrupt edifice. As Caesar himself put it, cynically but not inaccurately, “The Republic is nothing, merely a name without body or shape.” By killing Caesar, the conspirators merely hastened the Republic’s collapse. Strauss quotes Emerson (who wasn’t wrong about everything): “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” The assassins thought that by killing Caesar they had killed tyranny. They hadn’t. Removing Caesar did nothing to remove Caesarism, i.e., absolute rule by one man, which, as Strauss points out, emerged from the bloodbath of the Ides of March unscathed. “The world without Caesar,” he notes, “was still a world about Caesar.”...
[...] Caesar’s funeral was a huge spectacle that ended in a riot. The poet Helvius Cinna, a people’s tribune, was a supporter of Caesar, but the crowd mistook him for the praetor Cornelius Cinna, one of the conspirators. They beat him to death and decapitated him, parading the head through the street.
There is a twofold moral to The Death of Caesar. One concerns the military. Like Marius and Sulla before him, Caesar was able to control Rome because he controlled the army. His legions were loyal first of all to him, not to Rome. The conspirators sought to overturn that dominance of the military in civic affairs but failed—because they did not dominate the military. Strauss notes the irony that “only the legions could save the Republic from being run by legions.”
The second moral is this: revolutions are impossible to manage. The announced goals of the conspirators were moderate: to remove a dictator and restore the prerogatives of the Senate. But revolutions, as Strauss mordantly observes, are hard on moderates. Within a year, Octavian and Antony had effective control of Rome. They cancelled the amnesty for the conspirators. Then the proscriptions began anew. Property was summarily confiscated and heads rolled, including Cicero’s. In December 43, the great orator was apprehended in his villa in Astura, on the coast south of Rome, while trying to escape to Macedonia to meet up with Brutus and Cassius. We know the name of the centurion who nabbed him: Herennius. When Cicero saw the soldier approaching his litter, he stopped, told him to get on with the job, and bravely stretched out his neck. Herennius slit his throat, struck off his head, and, on Antony’s orders, cut off his hands. The gory trophies he sent back to Rome. The oft-told story that Fulvia, Antony’s wife, set Cicero’s head on her knees and repeatedly stabbed his tongue with a hairpin may be apocryphal, but then again it may not. We do know that Cicero’s head and right hand, which had penned the hated Philippics denouncing Antony, were nailed to the Speakers’ Platform in the Forum. Cicero thought the Republic could be restored. He was wrong. The Roman Republic was a political mechanism that had outlived itself. Removing Caesar brought not restoration but revolution, followed by civil war and the resurgent dominance of Caesarism....