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

by Michael Parenti

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 these pages, 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.
 
“A highly accessible and entertaining addition to history.” —Book Marks

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565849426
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	08/30/2004
Series:	New Press People's History
Pages:	276
Sales rank:	153,852
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Parenti is the author of sixteen books including History as Mystery, The Terrorism Trap, Democracy for the Few, Against Empire, Dirty Truths, Blackshirts and Reds, and America Besieged. His work has been translated into twelve languages. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Tyrannicide or Treason?	1
1.	Gentlemen's History: Empire, Class, and Patriarchy	13
2.	Slaves, Proletarians, and Masters	27
3.	A Republic for the Few	45
4.	"Demagogues" and Death Squads	59
5.	Cicero's Witch-hunt	85
6.	The Face of Caesar	113
7.	"You All Did Love Him Once"	131
8.	The Popularis	149
9.	The Assassination	167
10.	The Liberties of Power	187
11.	Bread and Circuses	205
Appendix	A Note on Pedantic Citations and Vexatious Names	223
	Notes	229
	Index	261

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

A highly accessible and entertaining addition to history.

Bookmarks

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.

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews