Best Lines Of The Day

When The Wife and I went to Rome on our honeymoon, one of the places we went was the Temple of the Divine Julius, which was to the pagan Romans the site of Caesar’s apotheosis. Julius Caesar was assassinated very close to there, two thousand and fifty years ago.

Every day, someone goes to the Temple of the Divine Julius, and puts fresh flowers daily on what looks like a mound of dirt over a concrete block. Legend has it that this mound of dirt was where Caesar’s body was laid to rest before it was cremated and that his ashes remain in the concrete block, which was the core of what once was a glorious temple.

In some ways, seeing the fresh flowers there is even more jarring to see that than the big “N” emblem on bridges in Paris or a monument to German war dead from the second world war. Here was evidence that someone, alive today and living in Rome, still wants to see an autocratic government restored to power, and they are using the historical memory of Julius Caesar to embody that wish.

Our view of the assassination is forever tinted by the supremely well-crafted words of William Shakespeare. I say, his best lines from the play about the assassination of Caesar and his aftermath are:

Cassius:
Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Caesar:
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.

Antony:
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

Caesar:
The Ides of March have come.
Soothsayer:
Yes, but they have not yet gone.

Okay, the last is not so much profound as a powerful, chilling, and witty quip. But one that sticks out in the mind as you watch the doomed man walk to his death despite all the warnings available to him. The play also gave us phrases like “It’s all Greek to me” and “the most unkindest cut of all.”

An interesting and more recent analogy to this event would be the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, like Caesar, became a godlike heroic figure after his assassination. But remember that John Wilkes Booth cried “Sic Semper Tyrannis” when he shot Lincoln; to Booth and many others, Lincoln was a dictator and an enemy of freedom. I beg to disagree, despite the fact that Lincoln did many things highly suspect under the Constitution. Both were tremendously polarizing figures, who presided over civil wars in their great and powerful countries, and whose attempts to reconcile and move their nations on to the next challenges pretty much doomed them both.

It’s hard to say what a still-alive Caesar would have done back on the campaign trail against the Parthians in the late 40’s BCE. Perhaps Caesar would have conquered all of the lands around the Black Sea or he could have gone as far as Alexander and conquered all the way to the Indus, and exchanged emissaries with China, as his successors did. Or perhaps he would have run into the same problems as Crassus did before him and Trajan did after him with over-extended supply lines in Mesopotamia, and found his efforts stalled somewhere around Babylon (a little bit south and east of modern-day Baghdad).

It would be easy to say that Caesar’s death was a pivot point in history, especially if you think that further military glory was in Caesar’s future (he was assassinated when he was in order to prevent him from leaving Rome at the head of a new army to attack the Parthian Empire). In fact, the real pivot point was when he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome.

The assassination of Julius Caesar is one of the greatest exercises in futility in political history. No one profited — not Caesar’s allies, not his enemies, not the people as a whole, not the cause of liberty. Caesar’s assassins were politically clumsy in failing to seize power for themselves to create the government they preferred to Caesar’s rule. The result was many more years of civil war, killing, and strife which merely prolonged the inevitable at a bloody price. Someone was going to pick up the pieces of Caesar’s dictatorship and wear the laurels themselves. The assassins tried to effect massive political change and found themselves pitifully poorly-prepared for what happened when they let the genie out of the bottle.

It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot. But I will leave thoughts about modern political analogies to you, Loyal Readers. For now, I’m content to commemorate a significant date in history.