Ides of March

Thanks to the spirit of revolution spreading from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and to a more limited extent to places like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco, we’ve seen what it looks like when popular movements challenge military dictators. Sometimes, the result is Egypt, and sometimes, the result is Libya.

It is March 15. This is a day commemorated and most famous for the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Most people are familiar with the events, in no small measure thanks to William Shakespeare’s play which nearly every high school student is made to read. I think it’s worth a moment’s reflection, though, to think about what lessons this episode from history tells us about the nature of governmental power, and of challenges to it. Contemporarily, it gives us a perspective from which we can better see why Egypt looks one way and Libya looks another.

I’ll assume most readers are familiar with at least the basic history and events of what many scholars call the Roman Revolution, a century-long transformation of the system of government in Rome beginning traditionally with the agrarian reforms sponsored by Gaius Gracchus and culminating with the granting of the name “Augustus” to Octavius Caesar by the then-docile Senate. The Roman Revolution is a terrible and fascinating object of study for modern folk in liberal democracies because in it, we see an example of a representative government morphing into autocracy.

The Incompetent Republic

The first thing to understand, though, is that is not how the contemporaries of the day saw it. While those who did not swallow Augustus’ rather transparent propaganda did see that the Republic had become transformed into the effective rule of one man over the entire apparatus of the state, few thought this was a particularly bad thing. The ancient forms of government were not representative of the population as a whole; they were representative of the elites. Nor were the ancient forms intended to be representative at all, they were intended to be meritocratic and in practice were small-d democratic, with systems put in place to filter the more able men from the less, and simultaneously also to keep men within the same general levels of merit from ever exceeding one another.

The result was a diffusion of political power among a body of wealthy men who rather quickly Peter Principled themselves into prominent positions for which they were generally at best only marginally competent, within a complex system of checks and balances that in retrospect seems intentionally designed for policy and judicial gridlock. Roman history is replete with examples of consuls disagreeing with their colleagues about appropriate governmental strategy, and sometimes policies would change from day to day and then back again on the third day, based on whatever power-sharing relationship the consuls were able to work out.

The Senate, allegedly only an advisory body, divided itself up into factions and parties based almost purely on personalities and appearances and almost never on anything like genuine differences in policy — one faction would widely condemn the lex Julii as an existential threat to the liberty and freedom of all Roman citizens, and the next year praise warmly the lex Pompeius as a fundamental safeguard of freedom and safety, while the policies within each of the respective bills was functionally identical. Tribunes would, could, and did walk about vetoing anything anyone else in government did that they disliked; self-appointed prosecutors would invoke the power of the judiciary to harass political opponents whether crimes had been committed or not; judges held show trials in which the evidence of the cases at issue was functionally irrelevant and the lawyers’ primary jobs were to lobby behind the scenes to out-bribe the other side.

With elections for various offices taking place on a functionally constant basis, the Romans would well have understood the modern phrase “continuous campaign.” Since elections could readily turn violent once political bosses realized that street violence could sway control of government, it was not thought that constant elections were a manifestation of public order but rather that they had become a threat to public safety. The results of enduring these rapidly-cycling threats, as noted above, were generally men lacking in ability assuming responsibilities that they neither wanted nor were able to discharge with competence, and instead treating their time in office as a combination of a social mark of prestige to which they were entitled and an opportunity for personal enrichment through graft and corruption.

Legitimacy Through Precedent

The second thing to understand about Julius Caesar is that he was not a political innovator. He was, instead, the culmination of a number of other trends that had started back in the time of the Gracchi. Nothing he did — not even his crossing of the Rubicon to march his army on Rome, not even his assumption of the office of dictator with a longer-than-traditional term — lacked prior political and historical precedent.

• Sulla had marched his troops on Rome and assumed an extended dictatorship.
• Marius had assumed multiple successive consulships and made use of street thugs to keep the Senate docile.
• Tiberius Gracchus had used agrarian land reform to buy the loyalty of the military.
• Pompey had been given an extraordinary military commission and authorized to use lieutenants to actually execute his military commands, and had unilaterally negotiated treaties on behalf of Rome without any particular authorization to do so.
• Lucullus had enslaved entire nations of people and sold the bulk of them into the market for his own enrichment.
• Cicero engineered the judicial murder of his political enemy, whose actual criminal culpability prior to Cicero’s entrapment was questionable at best.
• Crassus had used ethically questionable business tactics to acquire massive wealth and hire private armies loyal to him personally rather than to the state.

So when Caesar was accused of acting like a king, he could always riposte his critics by pointing to other Romans before him who had done all the same things he was doing but who were for some reason held up as upright, outstanding citizens to be respected and honored  by their peers; why, then, should Caesar be made an object of vilification?

And keep in mind — all of the names mentioned above were the men of real ability and talent. None of them could claim a career free from legal or ethical blemish. Competence and rectitude, as Cicero discovered during his governorship of Sicily, counted for very little indeed. Public perception of greatness — showmanship — mattered more. But the same offices these men held were also held by others such as Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Lucius Lucceius, Quintus Caeceilius Metellus Celer,  Aulus Gabinus, and others — names now long-forgotten to history because the men to whom they belonged did so little of note.

Such, then were the products of the republican system — either important governmental offices held by mediocrities who distinguished themselves from one another only in the degree of their personal cupidity in soliciting bribes, or the government actively subverted by men of competence who to a man overtly pushed to expand their personal power well beyond the limits imposed upon their offices by the traditional constitution. Such had been the case for as long as anyone could remember; the olden days of truly public-spirited and unselfish leaders such as Cincinnatus or Coriolanus or Scipio Africanus were seen as legendary and long-gone (although one suspects that even for the Romans, the good old days weren’t really all that good).

Caesar’s Pitch and the Assassins’ Absent Alternative

Given that as a choice, the Romans voted with their public support, and chose ability over tradition, action over inaction, and meritocracy over aristocracy. When Caesar marched on Rome, he was (mostly) welcomed as the savior of what was still good about being a Roman, someone who offered reform at a time that continuity seemed to hold little promise for anything tangibly good. And most scholars do not take strong issue with the proposition that even if Caesar hadn’t marched on Rome and made himself dictator, some other general would eventually have done so within a generation of his doing so — indeed, the real question is not whether someone would have done what Caesar did, but rather what took him so long.

The issue for the assassination was whether in seizing power and instituting significantly more autocratic reforms to the government, Caesar also represented a threat to liberty. For elite Romans, the answer was probably mixed. Caesar was perfectly willing to tolerate people who disagreed with his ideas and had a talent for co-opting the better elements of opposition ideas. He also was willing to forgive former political enemies, so long as they did not take further action against him. Cicero would have found his head on a pike a long time before he actually did had he been as overt opposing Caesar as he subsequently was in opposing Antony. In terms of personal liberties, the only real threat Caesar offered his fellow Romans was that of political reprisals — which Cato found to his discomfort.

At the same time, the form of government was transforming, and those who traditionally had held a share of the levers of power were being functionally disenfranchised. Caesar had consolidated power within himself and his political machinery to such an extent that he had effectively co-opted every branch of government under his personal control. From an efficiency standpoint, he was able to get a lot done. But if you wanted to participate in government, it was becoming Caesar’s way or the highway.

Then, of course, there was that whole civil war thing. Romans fighting Romans from Spain to Egypt, over five years, resulting in half of the men of ability being killed off and the other half being subsumed into Caesar’s political machine. A huge drain on the public treasury, which in the process became amalgamated into Caesar’s personal fortune. While Caesar did his best to obscure fault for the civil war, the fact of the matter is that he was the one who marched on Rome, he was the one who defied a Senatorial order, he was the one who at the end of the day started the fighting. He won in the end, but he sacrificed a substantial amount of political legitimacy by starting it in the first place.

And as Cicero could have told Caesar, appearances mattered. Caesar stopped caring about appearances after a time. Having climbed to the top of the heap, and achieved personal political power unparalleled since the time of Tarquinus Superbus,* he dispensed sometimes even with the outward form of elections and simply appointed his minions to what had been elective offices; he not only held the power of dictator but used it openly; he eschewed the humble garb and demeanor of a public servant and instead adopted lavish personal fashions and stylings (purple togas, tall red boots, diadems, all of which to people in that culture were indicators of royal status) that underlined rather than donwnplayed his actual status as the king in all but name. It would be as if President Obama began walking around with a wide red, white, and blue sash over his suit along with a bunch of medals and other bling. Caesar justified some of it with rather flimsy claims like the boots helped him with bad ankles. Falling in love with the Queen of Egypt and having a son with her, then importing the Queen to hang out just outside the city and appearing with her as his consort — bad PR. The whole Antony-offering-the-crown stunt was kind of the last straw.

So what, exactly, were the assassins hoping to achieve? This has been debated for a long time and of course we’ll never know because so few of them were able to record anything of note about their motivations afterwards. They claimed to have been acting in the best interests of Roman liberty. Not for nothing did they pick Brutus as their figurehead, but also not for nothing was the real ringleader Cassius, a man who was not at all shy about his own desire to acquire personal political power. Also not for nothing was the actually-principled (if personally disagreeable) Cato excluded from the conspiracy; Cato would have blown the secrecy since he would not have countenanced murder, even the murder of his hated political opponent Caesar.

If they were just making a bid for power for themselves, the conspirators succeeded as best they could. They created a power vacuum and then made a play to fill it themselves. They didn’t count on the political agility of Antony and Octavian to also move in and take a piece of that power. They lost, but if their objective was to create that opportunity, they would have been unable to complain (fairly) that they had never had a shot at the top.

As a principled political measure, however, they failed. They did not re-open the Roman government to liberty and open elections. They simply placed in question, once again, the issue of who would dominate the government. Would it be them or the pro-Caesar faction? When the Caesarians won out, they divided amongst themselves and kept on fighting, Highlander-like, until there was only one man left standing.

Why didn’t the conspirators win out? They failed to properly cultivate the support of the military before they made their decapitation strike, and in a harmonious miscalculation, they failed to make a political pitch that suggested that the people in general would be better off for what the conspirators had done than they had been under Caesar. They simply assumed that the military would be loyal to Rome rather than to Caesar. Some of them were. Most, though, wanted a leader to follow; the concept of nationalism had eroded over the course of generations of terrible government. The conspirators promised the old form of government back, and the soldiers had seen what the old form of government did (resisting giving land as a form of military pension, mainly).

On a wider note, the conspirators didn’t have anything to point to or offer to explain how the people in general would be better off under a restored republic than they had been under Caesar. Again, they simply assumed that people wanted the old government back and had not  bothered to consider that the old form of government was no longer one that had much to recommend it. Caesar monopolize power, to be sure, but in exchange he brought law and order, peace (at least at home) and at least the potential for prosperity. Competent government, in other words. The conspirators had no clue about how to provide competent government — to be fair, maybe they did, but they didn’t give the appearance of it.

What’s more, the conspirators didn’t count on Caesar having cultivated leaders of decent quality to be part of his command structure, so that when Caesar got taken out of the picture, someone else was able to step in and take over. They should have foreseen this; indeed, legend has it that they made overtures to Antony despite their personal dislike of him, because they thought it would be useful to have him on the inside helping them out.

The Arab Revolutions Of 2011

What does this tell us about our modern world? When autocrats are challenged, the challengers need to have something to offer in place of the deposed leader that’s better than the status quo. Egypt and Tunisia were successful in part because the autocratic governments of those countries had little of substance to offer. Egypt in particular is potentially a rich nation and everyone knows it, but the people there didn’t feel very rich. What’s more, they could look to Iraq, and see that democracy was more or less working there and that nation had recovered from years of war to achieve something that is beginning to look like the rule of law and prosperity. Democracy, in other words, looked like a viable alternative and the government offered nothing back.

Mubarak, moreover, made the Caesar move and demonstrated public arrogance rather than making a pitch for why Egyptians would have been better off with him still running the show. Compare this to Qadaffi, who blames a somewhat incoherent conspiracy of “foreign mercenaries” and Al-Qaeda for the revolution. This is, by all evidence available, a Big Lie. But it offers a reason why Libyans should side with Qadaffi — it appeals to their sense of nationalism and their desire for law and order.

Also unlike Mubarak, Qadaffi has managed to mostly hang on to the loyalty of the military. In Egypt, the protesters solicited the political support of the military. The military, in turn, demonstrated a degree of professionalism and political autonomy, and decided that the lawful thing for it to do was to stay out of the political clash between Mubarak and the crowds in Tarhir Square. The Libyan military remained either afraid of or loyal to Qadaffi. The rebels in Benghazi were not able to convince a critical mass of the military leadership that the presumably democratic government they would institute would be better for the military than Qadaffi’s regime is.

And there is always the possibility, uncomfortable as it is for us in the U.S. to consider, that Qadaffi is actually providing what the Libyans think is good government. Mubarak had ceased to do so, but if Qadaffi offers safety, order, and an increasing standard of living (with Libya’s oil wealth), that will look like good government. Qadaffi, then, is the “smart Caesar” while Mubarak was the “arrogant Caesar.”

I think that “celebrating” the Ides of March is not the right thing to do. Reflecting on it is. The assassination of Julius Caesar was a mixed blessing for Rome at best. What it mainly accomplished was another generation of civil war. Rome became an autocracy, ultimately a military dictatorship, despite the efforts and desires of the assassins to re-institute republican government. Could they have succeeded? Yes, if they had made a better pitch, shown some ability to provide a better government than Caesar did. It’s easy to glorify Caesar in his stunning competence and abilities; it’s easy to glorify the assassins for their ideals and abhorrence of one-man rule.

But the lessons for today are that those who would take power must have some idea of what beneficial use they are going to make of it once they have it, especially with respect to what they will do with the military. At the end of the day, the military is the ultimate arbiter of any coup, revolution, revolt, rebellion, junta, or decapitation. A successful attempt at regime change will present both a generalized and a military-specific articulation of why the new government will be better than the old.

* Note how the cognomen “Superbus” has a double meaning — we call something “superb” if it is excellent at its task, or competent, but the favored translation of the term is “arrogant.”