The Assassination of Julius Caesar
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: Controversial retelling of the fall of the Roman Republic
Nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, there is a lot to dissuade the serious reader of Roman history in Michael Parenti's "The Assassination of Julius Caesar". A radical commentator on contemporary society and historical memory, Parenti applies a "Marxian-lite" analysis of the late Republic. In hearing a talk he once gave, one comment he made stands out; "One of the great pleasures of learning history is not the learning it but the unlearning of preconceived notions". To that end he has an axe to grind with historians of the era and, in the first chapter, he names names and takes few prisoners. The effect of all this is to put the reader off a bit. I was taken aback as Parenti railed against the "gentlemen historians" and the class based prism that they have used to interpret the assassination of Caesar.
The question Parenti sets out to answer is not who killed Caesar, that is well established, but why. His answer is that the conspirators were representative of the most reactionary elements of a conservative Senate and the wealthy class interests they defended. To Parenti the domestic policies of the late republic were the politics of class warfare. Landed interests expropriated land from citizen-soldiers away on war, voted themselves subsidies and lowered their own tax burden. Lower class citizens were denied a majority of the wealth flowing into the Republic (the result of new conquests) and deprived of their small farms with little but the tribunes to protect their interests.
Attempts by reformers such as the Gracchi were seen as a usurping of the republic's institutions, most importantly the Senate. To Parenti the senatorial exhortations to uphold the "rule of law" were natural; the Senate passed the laws, the laws benefited their class. The elimination of the threat of reformers became a quest for many of the ruling class and these self-styled "optimates" resorted to inciting the populace and "death squads" to eliminate those seen as radicals.
The book reserves a special chapter for Cicero, and it isn't pretty. An excerpt reveals the extent of Parenti's view of the Roman Senator; "A self-enriching slaveholder, slumlord and senator Cicero deplored even the palest move towards democracy". A hypocrite when it was warranted, Cicero was a staunch opponent of the Roman "masses" and of Caesar. The author paints Cicero...