The Moral of Caesar [The Republic Was Dead Already]

The New Criterion ^ | May 2015 | Roger Kimball

[Avoiding_Sulla]

Caesar's death was more than the end of an extraordinary life; it was the end of an era.

Karl Theodor von Piloty, The Murder of Caesar (1865), oil on canvas

“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.

[snip]

I have always been slightly puzzled about what exactly Caesar did to rouse the murderous fury of men, many of whom, after all, had been loyal supporters and, in some cases, friends. Yes, Caesar had had himself named dictator, but Rome had had plenty of dictators. True, the emergency office was supposed to be limited to six months and Caesar had that modified to “dictator in perpetuity.” That raised eyebrows, as did his posthumous “deification” by the Senate. Yet I suspect that Adrian Goldsworthy was right when he observed that “it was not so much what Caesar was doing as the way he was doing it that bred discontent amongst the aristocracy.” And, remember, the conspiracy against Caesar was largely an aristocratic coup, not a popular uprising.

[snip]

Caesar did understand the importance of maintaining the outward forms of republican government even as he exercised autocratic rule. But he was not nearly as adroit in maintaining that sham—er, that public appearance—as Augustus would be when he assumed power. Patience was not conspicuous in Caesar’s character. As is so often the case in political life, it was the small things that sealed his fate. Following the historian Livy (who died in 17 AD), Barry Strauss lists three “last straws.”

[snip]

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.

[snip]

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.

The events that Barry Strauss chronicles took place more than two thousand years ago. But their significance continues to resonate, if only we have ears to listen. Toward the end of The Death of Caesar, Strauss quotes my favorite line from Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay the same, a lot of things are going to have to change.” The Roman Republic had to change if it was going to endure. That insight escaped the wit of the conspirators and their allies. A look at the world today suggests that this is a paradox we neglect at our peril.

[The following is shortened by snips, but is too long to be treated as an excerpt by FR software.]

[central_va]

You are a Lincoln lovin’ fascist. Figures.

[Sherman Logan]

I’ll let those reading these posts draw their own conclusions.