The right-wing sector of the internet is currently incensed about a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that depicts the Roman despot with gold bathroom fixtures, orange hair, and a Slavic wife. It amounts to a call for violence against Trump, they say. Since a left-wing nut case has just taken potshots at a set of Republican Congressmen, and my aim in this blog is to analyze contemporary politics from a Pagan viewpoint, I guess I pretty much have to write about this.
Caesar’s assassination is one of the few historical events that almost everyone is familiar with, and we might consider why that’s so. It’s not like other autocrats haven’t been bloodily offed on occasion. Yet those have tended to be straightforward cases of hatred, insanity, or rival claims to the throne. The complex motivations and ambiguous moral judgments surrounding this particular political murder have rendered it a topic of endless fascination and debate.
Plutarch was Shakespeare’s chief source. The historian wrote Lives not only of Caesar himself, but also of Marcus Brutus, the most prominent of the assassins, and of Marc Antony, Caesar’s leading avenger. He also wrote bios of such figures as Pompey and Crassus, Caesar’s rivals and partners in crime, and Cicero and Cato, who were alive at the time of the assassination and had to wrestle with its after-effects. Other writers, in both Greek and Latin, likewise treated this subject.
Plutarch and the others had no doubt that Caesar meant to found a monarchy and rule despotically. He probably wanted to be made a king and was displeased that the people were resistant. Moreover, the ancient historians acknowledged that Brutus, at least, had a sincere, patriotic desire to preserve Rome’s traditional republican form of government. He was an idealist. His intentions were pure.
Nevertheless, the killing of Caesar was morally problematic – first, because of the treachery involved. Several of the conspirators – including the ringleaders, Brutus and Cassius – had fought against Caesar in the earlier civil wars and had been pardoned by him. By the brutal norms of the political warfare of the time, they shouldn’t have been alive, but Caesar was merciful, at least to his fellow Romans.
More importantly, the murderous deed was futile. If the point of killing Caesar was to restore the Roman Republic, it failed spectacularly. The decade-long internecine war triggered by the assassination brought to power Caesar’s nephew, Octavian – who changed Rome from a Republic to an Empire, and himself into the Emperor Augustus, by two simple expedients: (1) eliminating Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and anybody else in his way, and (2) not calling himself a king.
Furthermore, Brutus’ project may have been undone by his own idealism – first, by his decision to avoid excessive bloodshed by not killing Antony at the same time as Caesar, and second, by his generous willingness to let Caesar’s primary henchman give the funeral address. After the battle of Philippi, Brutus might’ve escaped and continued the struggle, but he chose suicide, rather than subject the Roman people to the rigors of more civil war. Of course, as Plutarch observes, if he wanted to spare the Romans from civil war, he shouldn’t have assassinated Caesar in the first place.
To Plutarch, the lesson was clear. If Rome was destined to be ruled by a tyrant, it was best the tyrant be Caesar, who was at least intelligent and not vindictive; and if the conspirators were pure-hearted idealists who desired something better, they were fated to be pushed aside by more ruthless competitors in the struggle for power. To do good through violence is a complicated matter, it seems.
Shakespeare’s play basically reflects this classical viewpoint. Shakespeare never moralizes, so there’s no pat statement of the lesson to be learned. He lets us draw our own conclusions. I suppose you could reckon that Brutus is so noble that his intention matters more than his meager achievement. I don’t see it that way.
So, what about the production that’s ruffled so many feathers on the right? One casting decision that hasn’t received much attention, is that all of the assassins’ roles (except for Brutus) are played by black actors. I’d guess this is no accident, but rather an acknowledgement of the kind of people most likely to want a Trump-like potentate removed from the scene – and that means the production is in fact a caution to them, of the folly of trying to uphold democratic norms by forcible means. Conservatives are too dimwitted to perceive this important nuance, but the play’s producer has said as much. I don’t think very many of Trump’s antagonists really have a serious desire to see him knifed to death. But American leftists have lately manifested enough intolerance and proclivity for violence to merit a warning on that score.
Let’s imagine – may the Goddess prevent it – that some misguided anarcho-eco-feminist-of-color did somehow manage to terminate the Don. Isn’t it fairly obvious that Trump dead – a martyred hero – would be a far greater threat to American democracy, and to the progressive agenda, than Trump alive, tweeting absurdities from the White House? His spirit would forever haunt our political system to the discomfort of liberals – the way the ghost of Caesar haunted Brutus in the play. And he’d be replaced in the Presidency by someone just as bad.
If Trump is Caesar, Octavian awaits.
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