aquila

Well put. I'd add only minor points : on the subject of Caesar facing trial, I refer back to a point I made in another forum, that the possibility or probability of uncontrollable violence between street proxies held risks for Caesar's strategy. Fear of assassination notwithstanding (he would have been much better guarded than Drusus) Caesar's primary concerns will have been political : his victories had made him more popular than anyone else, the opposition was still largely fragmented and tainted in popular eyes by a century or more of clumsy and sometimes venal policy and he'd made considerable efforts to recruit members of the middle and upper classes to his cause, both to broaden and deepen his network of allies and I suspect to blunt any optimate suggestion that the monied classes would regret allying with him; his later refusal to cancel all debts shows that he caved in to populist demands only when it suited him. Had there been rioting in the streets and sacred precincts during the spectacle of the trial Middle Rome's deepest instincts would have kicked in : Pompeius and the Senate would have garnered acclaim (and support) for crushing the violence while Caesar and his partisans would have been blamed for the property damage and loss of innocent life, regardless of whether or not they'd been foolish enough to order it. Ultimately a trivial consideration, if he considered it at all, but better for him to skip the intro while he could claim optimate intransigence, march on Rome with a feared and battle-hardened legion and rely on his reputation for generalship, invincibility and luck to buy him time and space. The alternative, after all, was to have his reputation and record attacked in public, where his scribes wouldn't have had a monopoly on recording his exploits; had he then fled to his legions and called them to arms it might have looked like the last throw of a desperate and guilty man and the optimates would have been able to hold up their tacit or real victory to the cautious centre and Caesar's weaker partisans; if it doesn't already exist perhaps a new thread looms on how the legions and the populares would have reacted to his assassination in camp. At the end of the day I can't quite agree with you that Caesar ultimately ruined Rome, and believe me I do feel for what could and should have evolved over the past two thousand years if only intellect had won out over the sword and the myth : I live in a Europe where every little corner of the continent and its islands is still projecting itself as something special rather than part of a single community. While we must blame the criminal for the crime, we must also be severe with those who allow criminality to flourish, and there is blame to attach to all classes in the Republic in the century or more before Caesar's rise. Could good and wise men have rescued the Republic ? Yes, if only there'd been more of them, or at least one with Caesar's stature among the Roman people. Unfortunately Scipio Africanus Major was long dead.

OK--you got me. Against the men, women, and children of Gaul, Caesar was merely guilty of stealing, enslaving, beheading, crucifying, torturing, or plain slaughtering thousands upon thousands of innocents, people who posed no threat to Rome whatever, who paid taxes, who engaged in trade, and who were very often baited into opposing her. Caesar's decision that the Gallic tribes could never govern themselves peacably certainly sounds like the opinion of a racist, but technically Caesar was not guilty of genocide. I should also mention that among the conquering nations of the ancient world, Roman conquest (even under Caesar) brought more benefits than brought by other conquerors. Still...Caesar was a very bad man. Friend Cato, in another place you asked me to defend Caesar, but by the time I found this one others had made a better fist of it than I ever could. Don't think that I admire Caesar, the principate or for that matter the optimates as benevolent and wise statesmen; my point was and is that in his world Caesar and what followed him were as inevitable as a landslide after heavy rain on a deforested hill. Yes, the Republic should have survived, but it didn't because it was governed - as the world always has been - by imperfect human beings whose limited knowledge left them largely inadequate for the task they set themselves. A fair point, I hope, but you're free to declare me a public enemy and force me across the Muskingum to defend my dignitas and protect my allies in.....well, why not Montana ? Any excuse will do.

Nations can achieve greatness without military conquest. Indeed they can, but how many have and - relevant to our area of interest - how many enlightened Roman leaders could have maintained an enlightened policy of trade-over-war ? While the theory of annual elections and term limits has a certain attraction the constant turnover makes consistent policy difficult. We'd need a much more mature and intelligent society than our own, let alone the Roman, to make it stick.

Does no one tire of this old tale of progressive Caesar fighting alone for badly-needed reforms? Does no one yawn at this yarn of an evil Senate, one full of aristocrats who no doubt eat poor babies for fun and profit? Why who needs Frank Capra? We've already got "Mr. Caesar Goes to Rome"! Think about this for a second. When exactly did Julius Caesar make these supposedly people-loving reforms? After he had himself appointed DICTATOR FOR LIFE. If Julius Caesar were really such the darling of the people, why couldn't he run for office like everyone else? If the people loved Caesar for his reforms, why didn't they elect more allies for Caesar? If Julius Caesar were really so concerned about the enfranchisement of the plebs, why did he have to hand-pick their representatives in the Senate, the tribunes? If the Senate were really such an opponent of the rights of the people and so willing to subvert their own laws, why didn't they abolish the veto power of the tribunes? If these laws of Julius Caesar were really the products of progressive thinking and superior political acumen, why were they ignored by his loyal allies? And if Caesar were not responsible for the death of the Republic and the Republic were dying for a century before Caesar was even born, why was the Republic --like a Phoenix--able to recover time and time again, only to die decisively once Julius Caesar came along? Isn't it possible that Julius Caesar simply used the poor, like a pimp uses his whores, to get what he wanted--viz., absolute power and everlasting fame? He got what he wanted. Must we endlessly repeat his propaganda? Might I add a smidge of Ciceronian equivocation to this one ? I do feel that painting Caesar as one thing or the other is a little limiting. To tick off the questions above, then : Caesar couldn't run for office again because as soon as he lost legal immunity on his return from his military command he'd be hauled before the courts, where the optimates reckoned they could have him condemned and exiled, or at least humiliated; Caesar was unwilling to take that kind of insult, and if you were in his calligae you would've reacted the same way. If he had been put in front of a court his supporters on the street would have been sucked into violent clashes with the gangs controlled by the optimates and the very public loss of life and property damage might well have harmed or destroyed his judiciously cultivated reputation as a man who cared for his fellow cititzens, thereby killing the public support he wanted to counter the optimates' deeper pockets. Far better to kill on a battlefield, where there are very few onlookers to question your version of events and the winner writes the history. Why didn't the people elect more allies and why did he have to hand-pick tribunes ? Be fair : both sides bought elections, and the optimates seem to have got there long before Caesar was born by putting up a dupe to oppose Gracchus. At the end of the day elections were won by spending power, both cash-in-hand and through patrician pressure on clients in the lower classes. Why didn't the Senate simply abolish the tribunes' veto power ? Well, it was strictly speaking an advisory body which could only issue advice and Sulla's abolition was reversed by Crassus and Pompeius, apparently to enormous acclaim. It's one thing to bribe and intimidate voters on a complex land distribution law which most wouldn't or couldn't have read, but to remove tribunes' right to veto - or rather their right to protect plebs against the oligarchy, as they'd have seen it - you need overwhelming force and you need to keep the sword poised forever; in short, a militant timocracy. Given that the optimate alliance was a fragmented and ever-shifting circle of competing families rather than a united party they could only have been kept together by another Sulla; an optimate dictator for life. As for Caesar's loyal allies abandoning his thinking, they were allied to him because he was a winner and a man who could bestow important favours on him, not because they shared his politics; the idea that Marcus Antonius was his friend because they were both pleb-loving freedom fighters is almost as laughable as the idea that the plebs should be grateful to the optimates for illegally holding vast tracts of public land. More to the point is that the eventual winner - Octavianus and the new regime which grew around him - made a virtue of upholding Caesar's acts; Octavianus was simply more astute than Caesar, who seems not to have grasped that fellow aristocrats would feel insulted rather than grateful that he'd spared their lives. And finally the Phoenix analogy. The Republic was indeed resilient; it could and might easily have buckled many times in the past, not least during the Gracchan troubles, during the Hannibalic war, and during the secessions of the plebs in the very early days, but at those times there was probably very little consensus on what should replace the old system, and the fault lines (land distribution and the disruptions after the Social War were the long term keys to Caesar's ascent) weren't as obvious. If, when you leave the army, you can return to your family smallholding and make some kind of living then big city politics and politicians don't affect you much; if your land's torched in war and your family drifts into the city to try to feed itself while you're away, leaving the land to be claimed by those who have the money and the slaves to work it - and a complaisant legal system to keep it when you return - then you become voting fodder for amoral patricians, whether they claim to be populists or devout Republicans. Rust takes time to do its damage; rather than ask why the Republic stood for so long, ask why, if it was as strong and pure as some maintain it was, was it never revived ?

I was about to slap you silly, I also agree that Nero was a horrible politician( only thing he ever learned was assassination). Can't recommend highly enough Richard Holland's 'Nero : The Man Behind the Myth' (Sutton Publishing, UK) for a new and convincing perspective on the most maligned emperor in Roman history. (His 'Augustus : Godfather of Europe' is also excellent.) Nero was certainly the wrong man for the job, but would any of our leading Stoics care to confess what they'd have done if they'd been the teenager handed control of Rome, its treasury and its starstruck women, or should we move that discussion to the baths ?

They've clearly gone to town on the sets and the costumes, and while some of the lines make me wince I'm more worried about some of the casting. Ciaran Hinds has the dignity, but there's no hint of the personal charm or the pitiless political genius for which Caesar was famous; nothing about him makes me think that an army would follow him to India and back. Pity they couldn't stretch to Christopher Walken.