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
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

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