The Assassination of Julius Caesar Historical Document
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: Sincere and Heartbreaking Historical Document
Critics who fail to see through the very blindness's Parenti challenges throughout this book are just proving his point. It is not, as "L.C" Robinson asserts above, that Parenti thinks everybody is wrong. Parenti's interest is not in some puerile (and typically American) debate over who is right and who is wrong, but rather a very fair and disinterested discussion about the consequences of crippling class stratification in ancient Rome and, as it turns out, throughout much of the history that followed.
People like Mr. Robinson speak from precisely the privileged perspective Parenti works so tirelessly to challenge here. It is unfathomable to people such as himself that there are those for whom education is a pipe dream, an unattainable aspiration prohibited by the financial situations into which they were born. From the days of Sallust, Seutonius and Polybius on down to Edward Gibbon, education was a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Literacy rates in ancient Rome were horrific; the vast majority of the population could neither read nor write. This insurmountable disadvantage persisted over thousands of years and continues even today, when there are only two ways by which an American kid gets a good education: rich parents, or a willingness to plunge oneself into tens of thousands of dollars into debt (I myself owe $57,000 in student loans, which will not be paid off for 30 years). In less developed nations, literacy rates remain as bad as they were in Caligula's day. Still, though, America's own literacy rate ranks just 48th in the world (see Morris Berman's "Twilight of American Culture"). Of course, some of us are lucky enough to land a scholarship or grant, but that is too often like winning the lottery.
People like Seutonius and Edward Gibbon were able to write history because they could afford to; they grew up in the upper classes where education was not only affordable but often taken for granted. Parenti's thesis is absolutely correct: history is written by the winners, the privileged and the fortunate. Thus, the condemnation of the ancient Roman populace as an unwashed and filthy rabble persists not because it is fact, but because it is the only history that circumstances have allowed. It is one of history's most glaring ironies that the privileged classes of ancient Rome considered themselves morally superior to plebs and slaves, when...