Thread by @BretDevereaux

Apparently in a recent podcast a pair of fairly influential thinkers on what may be fairly called the far-right mulled over the idea that the USA might need an 'American Caesar.'

This is a stunningly awful idea and betrays tremendous ignorance of, y'know - actual Caesar? 1/x

I'm not going to delve into the aboslutely nutty politics of this (for that, see the excellent work of my friend and intellectual historian of American conservatism, @Joshua_A_Tait , e.g.: thebulwark.com/anti-democrati…).

But I do think it is worth discussing Caesar. 2/x

Julius Caesar tends to get a bit of a soft glow in popular memory, in part because it was *profoundly* impolitic for later ancient writers to criticize Caesar strongly when living under the regime set up by his nephew.

But ho boy, the 'age of Caesar' suuuucked. 3/xx

First, a necessary clarification because this confusion is common: 'Caesar' becomes a title eventually. This is not because of Julius Caesar, it's because of his nephew, Octavian, who takes the name when he is adopted by Julius Caesar. 4/xx

That trend - adoption and name change - continues long enough that 'Caesar' becomes a title. But Julius Caesar was never emperor (again, that's the nephew), nor did he transition Rome into an empire or set up a lasting regime. 5/xx

Now let's remove that soft glow. Julius Caesar was a violent, lawless man - even by Roman standards - a genocidaire who had no real vision for reforming the Roman state apart from his own self-aggrandizement.

How can I say that? Because it's true. Let's begin.
6/xx

Caesar's manifest lawlessness is well established. He gained his consulship through stunning levels of illegal bribery (Plut. Caes. 19.1). 7/xx

He promptly sidelined his colleague through the use of mob violence (Suet. Caes. 20.1; Plut. Caes. 14.9) and then proceeded to violate Rome's religious laws to push bills through. When a senator tried legally to complain, he arrested him on no charges (Seut. Caes. 20.4).

8/xx

Caesar's conduct, while it often had popular support, was so notorious for its lawlessness that every subsequent action he took was based on the sure knowledge that if he ever became liable for prosecution, he'd be immediately convicted and exiled. 9/xx

To be clear, that's not by the senate; Rome has jury trials in this period. Caesar knows he can't win before a jury of his peers and has no intent of ever facing one.

The trick is that Roman generals are immune to prosecution, which leads us to the genocide. 10/xx

Caesar gets himself assigned Gaul as a province. At this point he's deeply in debt and also must continuously maintain a command to avoid prosecution for all of the laws he broke. 11/xx

So Caesar proceeds to go on a ten-year rampage of blood in Gaul, attacking the Helvetii, who were friendly and pointedly had avoided entering Roman territory. Caesar's action appears utterly unprovoked, though he does his best to disguise this in his Comentarii. 12/xx

As @PenarthKate notes in her book on these campaigns, "the conquest of Gaul was an aggressive war of expansion led by a general who was seeking to advance his career and standing amongst his peers." 13/xx

To do that, Caesar needed a big war, with lots of loot and captives and so he makes sure he has that. There is robust debate about the degree to which Caesar's numbers can be trusted (some are outlandish)... 14/xx

...but certainly by Caesar's own account the quantity of killing and enslavement amounted to genocide. Caesar's claims to have killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands of people out of a region which probably only had a total population of perhaps 5m. 15/xx

Anyway, so Caesar butchers people who weren't even enemies of Rome for political gain for 10 years until 49, when his command is set to be up. Since that would make him liable for prosecution for all of the crimes he did, he decides to overthrow the republic instead. 16/xx

That precipitates a civil war which really doesn't end until almost 14 years after Caesar's death (he dies in 44).

It turns out to be an *exceptionally* bad time, for everyone. 17/xx

Almost every Roman prominent at the time of Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 is dead by the end of the conflict in 31, nearly all of them dying violently. While Caesar himself makes a great show of his clemency (he even prints it on coins)...18/xx

...and tends to pardon captured opponents, a lot of his enemies - Gnaeus Pompey, Cato the Younger, Metellus Scipio, etc. are either killed in battle, commit suicide rather than be captured, or (in Pompey's case) are assassinated (in a misguided effort to curry favor). 19/xx

But Caesar makes effectively no plans on how to institutionalize his rule on victory - he instead ends up offending the senate and too openly toys with being king (Seut. Caes. 79; Plut. Caes. 61), which leads to his assassination. 20/xx

To be clear, Caesar was fairly popular, but Caesar being king was not - the crowds cheered when he made a show of refusing the crown (one rather assumes, given the episode, he had wanted them to cheer that he accept it, but they did not, Plut. Caes. 61.5-10). 21/xx

In power as dictator, then dictator perpetuo (dictator-forever) Caesar did a lot of stuff, though it is hard to say he had a coherent political program. He mostly did what was popular in order to maintain his evidently fragile position. 22/xx

What he most certainly didn't do was put Rome on a firm foundation. Upon his assassination in 44, his lieutenants, pardoned foes, former friends and his own adopted son Octavian promptly set in to murdering each other in a 14-year-long bloodbath. 23/xx

It's hard to really describe in brief just how traumatic this all was to the Romans, but you get a sense of it by the way the people of Rome absolutely *panic* whenever they think Octavian might die or give up power.

The fear of the bad old days of civil war was intense. 24/xx

So there it is, Julius Caesar - bloody and lawless, an almost entirely negative presence in Roman history. It would be up to his nephew to try to put Rome back together after Caesar's pride and ego shoved it into the abyss. 25/xx

At some point if I can get a moment to myself, I might write all of this up in a more coherent form and pitch it somewhere.

But in any event, wishing for an 'American Caesar' would be embarrassingly and laughably sophomoric if it wasn't so damned dangerous. end/26