T.P. Wiseman
Julius Caesar is in the news again. In the USA, some on the far right have taken “Red Caesar” (that’s Red for Republican) as their model for the necessary demolition of the “corrupt radical-left ruling elite” known to everyone else as the American democratic system. On this side of the water, traditional conservatives unnerved by recent events have used Caesar as an awful warning, the charismatic election-winner whose success brings about civil war and autocracy. That was the gist of Ferdinand Mount’s recent book Big Caesars and Little Caesars, and now Rory Stewart has used the BBC’s much-hyped mini-series Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator to deliver the message in person, conspicuous among the contributing experts for his emphatic moral seriousness. “The awful lesson is this,” he says (at the start of each episode, so we don’t forget), “that in the end a populist can corrupt the entire state.”
Stewart takes the part of Caesar’s most principled opponent, Marcus Cato:
“He sees Caesar a bit like we might today see Donald Trump or Bolsonaro, as a populist, in other words somebody who claims to be speaking on behalf of the people, but is in fact just using that as a way to destroy the constitution and take power for themselves.”
Cato thought Caesar was aiming at tyranny, and Stewart thinks so too. Some big, broad-brush concepts are in play here, without much attempt at definition. It’s worth asking what Roman ‘populists’ stood for, why they should be a threat to the constitution, and what sort of behaviour counted as tyranny.
The Roman Republic was much admired. When the philosopher Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC described the Romans as “wonderfully well governed”, no doubt he had in mind the murderous internal strife characteristic of Greek city-states (brilliantly analysed in the third book of Thucydides’ history), which the Republic had managed to avoid. The Romans of that time valued equality among citizens, and controlled conspicuous wealth with a regular audit by ‘censors’ who assessed each citizen’s property and moral worth. At the political level (res publica meant “the people’s business”), the competing interests of rich and poor were kept at a non-violent level by two particular institutions.
On the one hand, the assembly that elected the senior executive magistrates (who were also military commanders) was deliberately weighted in favour of property-owning voters; on the other hand, abuse of executive power could be checked by the plebeian tribunes, who had the right of veto and could bring offenders to trial before the people. The tribunes were also the normal initiators of legislation, which was voted on by the people as a whole, usually (but not always) with the guidance of the Senate, a respected advisory body of ex-magistrates that did not itself have any legislative, judicial or executive powers.
That system served the Romans well until the astonishing success of their citizen armies gave them control over lucrative overseas territories. An enormous increase in wealth, very unevenly distributed, fatally weakened the traditional egalitarian ethos, as precisely noted by the historian Sallust:
igitur primo imperi, deinde pecuniae cupido crevit: ea quasi materies omnium malorum fuere. namque avaritia fidem, probitatem ceterasque artis bonas subvortit; pro his superbiam, crudelitatem, deos neglegere, omnia venalia habere edocuit.
The growing desire first for power, then for money, gave rise to all kinds of wickedness. It was avarice that undermined trust, honesty and all other good qualities, and taught instead arrogance, cruelty, neglect of the gods and the belief that everything could be bought.
The corruption of the Roman ruling class was most spectacularly manifested in 133 BC, when the tribune Tiberius Gracchus, having brought in legislation to limit the privatisation of public assets by the rich, was beaten to death by a group of senators while presiding over a popular assembly. The crime was never punished: arrogance and cruelty prevailed, and later historians of the republic (Cicero, Sallust, Velleius, Appian) specified that moment as the turning-point, the start of the ideological conflict between optimates and populares that brought Rome to disastrous civil war.
These two terms roughly translate ‘aristocrats’ and ‘democrats’, as in Greek political theory, but it is important to understand that the populares were conservatives, defending traditional popular sovereignty, and the optimates were a radical oligarchy, claiming unfettered authority for the Senate and magistrates. The most ruthless of them, Lucius Sulla, took Rome by military force (Caesar was twelve years old at the time) and stripped the tribunes of their political powers. That reversal, after 400 years, of one of the basic elements of the Republic was itself reversed in 70 BC by the consuls Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) and Marcus Crassus, aided by the young Caesar, who was just beginning his political career.
There was no hint of any of this in the BBC docudrama. Stewart simply assumed that the optimates were conservatives, and the Senate a representative legislature like the House of Commons: “What Cato stands for is the old Roman constitution… He asserts that the Senate will continue to rule the country as it should.” Pompey? “A billionaire celebrity coming in and throwing his weight around.” Crassus? “A disgusting billionaire who made his money in the most unscrupulous fashion.” Caesar? “A disgrace in every single way: he’s immoral, he’s irreligious, and he’s a potential tyrant.” One has every sympathy with Stewart’s all-too-legible subtext, but as Roman political history it’s a travesty.
It shouldn’t matter – but it does, because of how the story ends. Stewart’s hero Cato was defeated in the civil-war showdown (by an army of Roman citizens, remember!), but stole the publicity with a histrionic suicide in 46 BC. Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, as he states in the first book of the Civil War commentaries, “to defend myself against the slanders of my enemies, to restore the plebeian tribunes who have been driven out of the city, and to free the Roman People from the oppression of a factious oligarchy.”
The optimates’ denial of the tribunes’ rights was a deliberate provocation; their claim to be defending the Republic against tyranny was a cynical lie. After Caesar’s victory all the senators swore an oath to protect his safety, but a group of optimates led by Cato’s son-in-law, the ‘honourable man’ Marcus Brutus, broke their oath and murdered him.
Not a word from Rory Stewart about the morality of political assassination – or indeed from any of the experts, who included a former Shadow Attorney General and a former Director General of MI5. Nor did anyone mention the reaction of the Roman people, whose furious indignation, manifested at Caesar’s funeral, eventually resulted in the judicial condemnation of the assassins and the empowerment of three elected commanders to carry out the court’s verdict. The Republic did not “collapse”, as the programme alleged. It fought back, and the conspirators died as outlaws.
The issues are just too important to be turned into one-sided melodrama. Remarkably, even the Trumpian Republicans are better informed. Caesar did indeed, as they recommend, take up arms against a corrupt elite within the Republic. What they don’t mention is that the corrupt elite was the radical right.
Peter Wiseman has spent the last 60 years teaching and writing about the Roman Republic. His book Julius Caesar, which will give you references to the primary sources, was published by the History Press in 2016, and The House of Augustus (read it before you watch the BBC’s sequel!) by Princeton University Press in 2019. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Exeter.
