The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome

by Michael Parenti Narrated by David Stifel

Overview

"A provocative history" of intrigue and class struggle in Ancient Rome-"an important alternative to the usual views of Caesar and the Roman Empire"-Publishers Weekly.



Most historians, both ancient and modern, have viewed the Late Republic of Rome through the eyes of its rich nobility-the 1 percent of the population who controlled 99 percent of the empire's wealth. In The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Michael Parenti recounts this period, spanning the years 100 to 33 BC, from the perspective of the Roman people. In doing so, he presents a provocative, trenchantly researched narrative of popular resistance against a powerful elite.



As Parenti carefully weighs the evidence concerning the murder of Caesar, he adds essential context to the crime with fascinating details about Roman society as a whole. In this book, we find reflections on the democratic struggle waged by Roman commoners, religious augury as an instrument of social control, the patriarchal oppression of women, and the political use of homophobic attacks. The Assassination of Julius Caesar offers a whole new perspective on an era thought to be well-known.

Editorial Reviews

Bookmarks

A highly accessible and entertaining addition to history.

Publishers Weekly

Why did a group of Roman senators gather near Pompey's theater on March 15, 44 B.C., to kill Julius Caesar? Was it their fear of Caesar's tyrannical power? Or were these aristocratic senators worried that Caesar's land reforms and leanings toward democracy would upset their own control over the Roman Republic? Parenti (History as Mystery, etc.) narrates a provocative history of the late republic in Rome (100-33 B.C.) to demonstrate that Caesar's death was the culmination of growing class conflict, economic disparity and political corruption. He reconstructs the history of these crucial years from the perspective of the Roman people, the masses of slaves, plebs and poor farmers who possessed no political power. Roughly 99% of the state's wealth was controlled by 1% of the population, according to Parenti. By the 60s B.C., the poor populace had begun to find spokesmen among such leaders as the tribunes Tiberius Gracchus and his younger brother, Gaius. Although the Gracchi attempted to introduce various reforms, they were eventually murdered, and the reform movements withered. Julius Caesar, says Parenti, took up where they left off, introducing laws to improve the condition of the poor, redistributing land and reducing unemployment. As Parenti points out, such efforts threatened the landed aristocracy's power in the Senate and resulted in Caesar's assassination. Parenti's method of telling history from the "bottom up" will be controversial, but he recreates the struggles of the late republic with such scintillating storytelling and deeply examined historical insight that his book provides an important alternative to the usual views of Caesar and the Roman Empire. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Parenti (History as Mystery) presents the assassination of Julius Caesar as a class issue rather than the clash of personalities that is so often portrayed in literature. He takes this angle to accommodate his projected audience and to change the tide of how ancient history has been traditionally written, that is, from the perspective of the wealthy and powerful Roman senators. The author dubs the men responsible for perpetuating that practice "gentlemen historians"-rich and powerful upper-class chaps who were unlikely to question the senators' motives. Instead of viewing Caesar as a demagogue like his predecessors, Parenti in many ways aligns him with the Gracchae, the brothers killed in the late second century B.C.E. for attempting to thwart the senatorial oligarchy that ruled the Roman Republic. While ironically he agrees with Ernst Badian, a premier ancient historian (and something of an anti-Marxist), he breaks with him by complaining that there is a dearth of research on the so-called mob or rabble of Rome. Parenti would posit that the common people, by their actions, demonstrate an understanding of politics and were often artisans and skilled laborers who have long gone unrecognized. A novel approach, this is recommended for large public and academic libraries.-Clay Williams, Hunter Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Populist historian Parenti (To Kill a Nation, 2001, etc.) views ancient Rome's most famous assassination not as a tyrannicide but as a sanguinary scene in the never-ending drama of class warfare. His savagely entertaining brief begins with the Ides of March, 44 b.c., and returns to the details of the murder 170 pages later. The argument in between presents revisionist history at its most provocative. Employing the notion of "gentlemen historians" he advanced in History as Mystery (1999), Parenti writes as much about historiography as he does about historical events. Former and current patricians, the gentlemen historians are concerned with promoting the interests of their class, he contends, not in understanding the past. And so Parenti rips new ones for all those Roman "heroes" celebrated in Latin I and Ancient Civ-and in the GOP. Thus, Cicero is "a self-enriching slaveholder, slumlord, and senator"; Cato the younger, a money-grubbing apologist for political assassination. Julius Caesar, by contrast, despite his well-chronicled failures (he owned slaves and despoiled distant lands), was interested in the public welfare and thus a danger to the fat cats who purred in his presence while privately sharpening their claws. The author, who confesses to having little Latin, girds his argument with numerous examples of Roman populists (e.g., Tiberius Gracchus, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus) whose flesh yielded oh-so-easily to assassins' knives when share-the-wealth proposals made jittery the monied and the propertied. Parenti's account of Caesar's murder and its aftermath is a highlight, and his primer on the political strategies exercised by the Roman rich is sobering; much sounds distressinglycontemporary. Meanwhile, Shakespeare himself does not escape Parenti's scalpel: the Bard, he argues, picked the wrong side and forever labeled the naughty Brutus ("a usurer of the worst sort and a spoliator to boot") as noble. This lively, lucid tract reminds us that historians gotta have attitude as well as game.

From the Publisher

"Scintillating storytelling and deeply examined historical insight. . . . An important alternative to the usual views of Caesar and the Roman Empire."
— Publishers Weekly

"A highly accessible and entertaining addition to history. . . . It breathes contempt for the rich of ancient Rome and their apologists hiding in classical studies departments today."
— Bookmarks

"A novel approach."
— Library Journal

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176465105
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/15/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,062,716

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Gentlemen's History: Empire, Class, and Patriarchy

Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!

—Julius Caesar Act I, Scene 2

The writing of history has long been a privileged calling undertaken within the church, royal court, landed estate, affluent town house, government agency, university, and corporate-funded foundation. The social and ideological context in which historians labor greatly influences the kind of history produced. While this does not tell us everything there is to know about historiography, it is certainly worth some attention.

Historians are fond of saying, as did Benedetto Croce, that history reflects the age in which it is written. The history of seemingly remote events vibrate "to present needs and present situations." Collingwood made a similar point: "St. Augustine looked at Roman history from the point of view of an early Christian; Tillemont, from that of a seventeenth-century Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century Englishman ..."

Something is left unsaid here, for there is no unanimity in how the people of any epoch view the past, let alone the events of their own day. The differences in perception range not only across the ages and between civilizations but within any one society at any one time. Gibbon was not just "an eighteenth-century Englishman," but an eighteenth-century English gentleman; in his own words, a "youth of family and fortune," enjoying "the luxury and freedom of a wealthy house." As heir to "a considerable estate," he attended Oxford where he wore the velvet cap and silk gown of a gentleman. While serving as an officer in the militia, he soured in the company of "rustic officers, who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners of gentlemen."

To say that Gibbon and his Oxford peers were "gentlemen" is not to imply that they were graciously practiced in the etiquette of fair play toward all persons regardless of social standing, or that they were endowed with compassion for the more vulnerable of their fellow humans, taking pains to save them from hurtful indignities, as real gentlemen might do. If anything, they were likely to be unencumbered by such sentiments, uncomprehending of any social need beyond their own select circle. For them, a "gentleman" was one who sported an uncommonly polished manner and affluent lifestyle, and who presented himself as prosperous, politically conservative, and properly schooled in the art of ethnoclass supremacism.

Like most other people, Gibbon tended to perceive reality in accordance with the position he occupied in the social structure. As a gentleman scholar, he produced what elsewhere I have called "gentlemen's history," a genre heavily indebted to an upper-class ideological perspective. In 1773, we find him beginning work on his magnum opus, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while settled in a comfortable town house tended by halfa-dozen servants. Being immersed in what he called the "decent luxuries," and saturated with his own upper-class prepossession, Edward Gibbon was able to look kindly upon ancient Rome's violently acquisitive aristocracy. He might have produced a much different history had he been a self-educated cobbler, sitting in a cold shed, writing into the wee hours after a long day of unrewarding toil. No accident that the impoverished laborer, even if literate, seldom had the agency to produce scholarly tomes. Gibbon himself was aware of the class realities behind the writing of history: "A gentleman possessed of leisure and independence, of books and talents, may be encouraged to write by the distant prospect of honor and reward: but wretched is the author, and wretched will be the work, where daily diligence is stimulated by daily hunger."

As one who hobnobbed with nobility, Gibbon abhorred the "wild theories of equal and boundless freedom" of the French Revolution. He was a firm supporter of the British empire. While serving as a member of Parliament he voted against extending liberties to the American colonies. Unsurprisingly he had no difficulty conjuring a glowing pastoral image of the Roman empire: "Domestic peace and union were the natural consequences of the moderate and comprehensive policy embraced by the Romans. ... The obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and permanent. The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay even the wish, of resuming their independence. ... The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom." Not a word here about an empire built upon sacked towns, shattered armies, slaughtered villagers, raped women, enslaved prisoners, plundered lands, burned crops, and mercilessly overtaxed populations.

The gentlemen historians who lived during antiquity painted much the same idyllic picture, especially of Rome's earlier epoch. The theme they repeatedly visited was of olden times as golden times, when men were more given to duty than luxury, women were chaste and unsparingly devoted to their family patriarchs, youth were ever respectful of their elders, and the common people were modest in their expectations and served valliantly in Rome's army. Writing during the Late Republic, Sallust offers this fairy tale of Roman times earlier than his own: "In peace and war ... virtus [valor, manliness, virtue] was held in high esteem ... and avarice was a thing almost unknown. Justice and righteousness were upheld not so much by law as by natural instinct. ... They governed by conferring benefits on their subjects, not by intimidation."

A more realistic picture of Roman imperialism comes from some of its victims. In the first century B.C., King Mithridates, driven from his land in northern Anatolia, wrote, "The Romans have constantly had the same cause, a cause of the greatest antiquity, for making war upon all nations, peoples, and kings, the insatiable desire for empire and wealth." Likewise, the Caledonian chief Calgacus, speaking toward the end of the first century A.D., observed:

[Y]ou find in [the Romans] an arrogance which no reasonable submission can elude. Brigands of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. The wealth of an enemy excites their cupidity, his poverty their lust of power. ... Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desolation and call it peace. ... [Our loved ones] are now being torn from us by conscription to slave in other lands. Our wives and sisters, even if they are not raped by enemy soldiers, are seduced by men who are supposed to be our friends and guests. Our goods and money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors. ... We Britons are sold into slavery anew every day; we have to pay the purchase-price ourselves and feed our masters in addition.

For centuries, written history was considered a patrician literary genre, much like epic and tragedy, concerned with the monumental deeds of great personages, a world in which ordinary men played no role other than nameless spear-carriers, and ordinary women not even that. Antiquity gives us numerous gentlemen chroniclers — Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian, Dio Cassius, Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus, Josephus, and Tacitus — just about all of whom had a pronouncedly low opinion of the common people. Dio Cassius, for one, assures us that "many monarchs are the source of blessings to their subjects ... whereas many who live under a democracy work innumerable evils to themselves."

The political biases of ancient historians were not interred with their bones. Our historical perceptions are shaped not only by our present socioeconomic status but by the ideological and class biases of the past historians upon whom we rely. As John Gager notes, it is difficult to alter our habitual ways of thinking about history because "without knowing it, we perceive the past according to paradigms first created many centuries ago." And the creators of those ancient paradigms usually spoke with decidedly upper-class accents.

In sum, Gibbon's view of history was not only that of an eighteenth-century English gentleman but of a whole line of gentlemen historians from bygone times, similarly situated in the upper strata of their respective societies. What would have made it so difficult for Gibbon to gain a critical perspective of his own ideological limitations — had he ever thought of doing so — was the fact that he kept intellectual company with like-minded scholars of yore, in that centuries-old unanimity of bias that is often mistaken for objectivity.

To be sure, there were some few observers in ancient Rome, such as the satirist Juvenal, who offer a glimpse of the empire as it really was, a system of rapacious expropriation. Addressing the proconsuls, Juvenal says: "When at last you leave to go out to govern your province, limit your anger and greed. Pity our destitute allies, whose poor bones you see sucked dry of their pith and their marrow."

In 1919, noted conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter presented a surprisingly critical picture of Roman imperialism, in words that might sound familiar to present-day critics of U.S. "globalism":

... That policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.

Still, the Roman empire has its twentieth-century apologists. British historian Cyril Robinson tenders the familiar image of an empire achieved stochastically, without deliberate design: "It was perhaps almost as true of Rome as of Great Britain that she acquired her world-dominion in a fit of absence of mind." An imperialism without imperialists, a design of conquest devoid of human agency or forethought, such a notion applies neither to Rome nor to any other empire in history.

Despite their common class perspective, gentlemen historians do not achieve perfect accord on all issues. Gibbon himself was roundly condemned for his comments about early Christianity in the Roman empire. He was attacked as an atheist by clergy and others who believed that their religion had flourished exclusively through divine agency and in a morally flawless manner. Gibbon credits Christianity's divine origin as being the primary impetus for its triumph, but he gives only a sentence or two to that notion, being more interested as a secular historian in the natural rather than supernatural causes of the church's triumph. Furthermore, he does not hesitate to point out instances of worldly opportunism and fanatical intolerance among Christian proselytes. Some readers may find his treatment of the rise of Christianity to be not only the most controversial part of his work but also the most interesting.

Along with his class hauteur, the gentleman scholar is likely to be a male supremacist. So Gibbon describes Emperor Severus's second wife Julia Domna as "united to a lively imagination, a firmness of mind, and strength of judgment, seldom bestowed on her sex." Historians do take note of the more notorious female perpetrators in the imperial family, such as Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius, and Agrippina. They tell us that Agrippina grabbed the throne for her son Nero by poisoning her uncle andthen her husband, the reigning Claudius. Upon becoming emperor, Nero showed his gratitude to his mother by killing her. Nero was not what we would call a family man; he also murdered his aunt, his ex-wife, and a half brother who had a claim to the throne.

Except for a few high-placed and notably lethal females, Roman women are virtually invisible in the works of most gentlemen historians. Even when noticed, they are not likely to be seen as of any consequence. That there were no female historians to speak of in antiquity, nor for many centuries thereafter, only compounded the deficiency. In the last few decades, thanks mostly to the emergence of feminist scholarship, the research on Roman women has improved, despite the paucity of surviving data. Ordinary Roman women, we know, tended to die younger than their male counterparts because of malnourishment, mistreatment, exhaustion, and childbirth. Almost half of all Roman brides were under the age of fourteen, many as young as twelve, with consummation coming at the time of marriage even if before menarche. Women of all ages almost invariably lived under the rule of some male, be it husband, guardian, or paterfamilias (head of the extended family or clan).

Through much of Roman history, females were denied individually given names as well as surnames. Prominent gens names such as Claudius, Julius, and Lucretius gave forth the obligatory feminine derivatives of Claudia, Julia, and Lucretia. Sisters therefore all had the same name and were distinguished from each other by adding "the elder" or "the younger" or "the first," "the second," and "the third." Thus Gaius Octavius's daughters were Octavia the elder and Octavia the younger. Denying them an individually named identity was one way of treating females as family property, mere fractional derivatives of the paterfamilias.

Women of common caste performed much of the onerous work of society as laundresses, domestic servants, millers, weavers, spinners, and sometimes even construction workers, all in addition to their quotidian household chores. As far as we know, even when they labored in the same occupations as men, they were not permitted to belong to craft guilds. Bereft of opportunities for decent livelihood, some of the more impecunious females were driven to selling their sexual favors. Prostitution was given standing as an employment and taxed as such. Owning a brothel was considered a respectable venture by some investors. In general, the great mass of poor women had little hope of exercising an influence on political issues, though numbers of them must have participated in public protests.

The devoted, self-sacrificing wife was a prized character in Roman writing. Examples abound of matrons who faced exile or risked death to stand fast with their husbands. But Roman matrons could also be rebellious on occasion. As early as 195 B.C., they successfully pressured the magistrates to repeal the lex Oppia, a law passed during the austerity of the Second Punic War restricting the use of personal ornaments and carriages by women. That they would mobilize themselves in this willful manner sorely vexed many a patriarch.

By the Late Republic (approximately 80–40 B.C.) and during the first century of the empire, Roman matrons made a number of important gains relating to marriage, divorce, property rights, and personal independence. Some of them even owned substantial property, and administered commercial operations. During the civil strife following Caesar's death, the Second Triumvirate posted a list of 1,400 particularly wealthy women whose property was to be assessed. The women organized a protest in the Forum before the magistrates' tribunal, and demanded to know why they had to share in the punishment of the civil war when they had not collaborated in the crime. "Why should we be taxed when we have no share in magistracies, or honors, or military commands, or in public affairs at all, where your conflicts have brought us to this terrible state?" Whatever influence women exercised in business affairs, they never gained full civil rights, nor could they sustain much visibility on the political landscape.

Upper-class wives had the reputation of being overly generous with their sexual favors. Sallust clucks about the women who "publicly sold their chastity." Horace fumes about the matron who becomes well practiced "in lewd loves, then seeks younger adulterers, while her husband's at wine." Writing early in the second century A.D., Juvenal seems to anticipate the venomous misogyny that would soon pour from the pens of the Christian church fathers. Roman matrons, he tells us, are wanton hussies, engaged in their illicit pursuits at the expense of the hapless cuckolds who are their husbands. They have long discarded the virtuous devotions of their forebears, along with the "naturally feminine" traits of modesty, chastity, and domestic servitude. In like fashion, a historian from our own era registers his disapproval of the growing sway exercised by high-placed improvident women in the Late Republic whose "unwholesome influence" engendered a "growing license" and "did much to debase the moral and social standards of the day."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Assassination of Julius Caesar"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Michael Parenti.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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