[Caesar: Hero Or Villain]

On 5/15/2012 at 11:27 PM, caesar novus said:

Must we hold rome fully accountable for the excess of a wiley ambitious caesar? Expanding frontiers tend to attract those with inner demons, and caesar feared death on the return from gaul and eventually rome meted that righteously out. Think of other border situations, like where the outsiders yearned to trade with rome or sign up for their army. Or when they would join with rome to defend against common enemy invaders.

 

Maybe rome gets blamed too much for things out of their control. Similar smearing happens today. Some u.s. armed incursions into canada were done by local militias to the horror of the federal govt, which had no troops to stop them yet got the blame. The trail of tears forced march of eastern u.s. indians to the west was forbidden by the supreme court, but president jackson brazenly and illegally did it anyway... he, rather than the country is to blame.

I wouldn’t be so quick to compare a classical republic to a modern nation state. Jackson ran on an explicitly populist platform (much like Caesar, I might add). His whole thing was deriving power from the common working man, and it’s not like he had a squeaky clean record before his presidency. Saying someone who ran explicitly on a platform of giving political power to the masses doesn’t speak for you is like asking your friend to get you whatever they’re getting and then getting pissed off when they don’t get what you wanted. Who do you think voted for him? All the wealthy land owners who had their votes devalued?

[Caesar: Hero Or Villain]

I’m by no means an expert on Roman history, but I figured I’d say my piece on this. Firstly, I don’t think that he was a bloodthirsty dictator or a bleeding heart populist. The way I view him, he was a product of his time and an agent of his system. He lived in a society that valued ‘honorable’ warfare, conquest, pride, and strength in the sense of one’s ability to initiate change. I realize that Roman and Hellenic culture were very different, but I would say a great example of this is how the Greeks saw their heroes as opposed to how we see them now. You never see Greek heroes save innocent people, or spare the weak, or anything we would consider “good”, because they saw a great man (and I do mean man, sorry ladies the Greeks kinda sucked) as someone with the ability to do the impossible more than someone with a strong moral compass. In addition to that, the concept of time over periods of hundreds or thousands of years didn’t really exist to people in that period the same way it does to us. They didn’t have that luxury. So when looking at something like the extermination of a culture or people group, I’d say that it’s unfair to hold someone like Caesar to the same standard as someone like hitler, who could understand the concept of a culture ceasing to exist and what that means. However, what Caesar did to the Gauls was monstrous, even if he can’t be held fully responsible or wasn’t fully aware of the impact of his actions. Caesar did what every other Roman boy before and after him had been raised to do; use every tool at his disposal to raise himself upward. It’s not Caesar’s fault that the Republican values blew up in their faces. I think that if someone were to meet Caesar today, they would call him a genocidal, pompous, sexist, rapey, crooked old man. But at the same time, I think that anyone who can reach the pinnacle of the world they live in and leave that large of an impact on the world for that long after their life is worthy of immense respect, if not adoration. It’s absurd to look at someone who basically the entire western world idolized for 2000 years and say “he sucked. Why would anyone like him?” But at the same time, we study history to learn from the past, and clearly respecting just ambition and strength doesn’t work out very well. Sorry if this was kind of rambling, I’m not exactly sober or well rested 😅