The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome

by Michael Parenti

“A provocative history” of intrigue and class struggle in Ancient Rome—“an important alternative to the usual views of Caesar and the Roman Empire” (Publishers Weekly).   Most historians, both ancient and modern, have viewed the Late Republic of Rome through the eyes of its rich nobility—the 1 percent of the population who controlled 99 percent of the empire’s wealth. In The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Michael Parenti recounts this period, spanning the years 100 to 33 BC, from the perspective of the Roman people. In doing so, he presents a provocative, trenchantly researched narrative of popular resistance against a powerful elite.   As Parenti carefully weighs the evidence concerning the murder of Caesar, he adds essential context to the crime with fascinating details about Roman society as a whole. In these pages, we find reflections on the democratic struggle waged by Roman commoners, religious augury as an instrument of social control, the patriarchal oppression of women, and the political use of homophobic attacks. The Assassination of Julius Caesar offers a whole new perspective on an era thought to be well-known.   “A highly accessible and entertaining addition to history.” —Book Marks

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Ancient History, Biography, Roman History, World History

289 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Michael John Parenti, Ph.D. (Yale University) is an American political scientist, academic historian and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at universities as well as run for political office. Parenti is well known for his Marxist writings and lectures. He is a notable intellectual of the American Left and he is most known for his criticism of capitalism and American foreign policy.

Reviews

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

How much did I like this book? Enough to go on Amazon and slap the daylights out of idiot negative reviewers 4 years after the fact. That's how much!

I should precede this review with the confession that I've been obsessively reading Roman History for the last few years. I've read nearly all the original sources that Michael Parenti drew on for his analysis of the Late Republic era of Rome, some of them twice. Chalk it up to the power of insomnia.

So partly this review is about reading history, just as Parenti's book is about writing history. When you embark on ancient history, the first historians you read seem dull and obscure, referring to events and personalities you've never heard of, or have heard of as vague heroic figures. As you read more you start to get multiple ancient viewpoints of a single figure. Julius Caesar: Kennedy-like reformer or cynical opportunist? Cicero: defender of the Republic or grasping tool of the supperrich? You begin to get a feel for Rome's march through time, from the increasingly unstable Republic to the thundering military dictatorship of imperial Rome. Above all, you get a growing sense that things are being left out.

With Sallust, Plutarch, Tacitus, Seutonius, Cicero and others, what's left out is the 99.9% of the population that are NOT wealthy politicians or generals. It's as if someone wrote the history of the United States but never mentioned anyone who earned less than $500,000/yr. The common people are usually depicted as violent, shiftless mobs who didn't have the good sense to get born into a wealthy family or make a ton of money. The nerve of them!

Michael Parenti chooses to focus exactly on this group of people. I've read estimates that in the late Roman Republic up to 70% of the population was either in slavery or impoverished urban proletariats on the dole. Who were they? How did they live? And most importantly, how did they get that way?

Parenti traces the current of attempted Populist reform and Elite repression that ended with Caesar's assassination and the Civil Wars that terminated the Republic. In doing so, he reveals Rome not only as the vicious war machine that we all know and love, but as a place where the ruling class turns the acquisitiveness and violence of its foreign policy on its own people.

Going through a long list of attempted reformers over the course of about a hundred years and their miserable ends, Parenti shows how the wealthy elites of Rome systematically impoverished, disempowered and, when necessary, murdered its more humble citizens in an insatiable pursuit of wealth. The starving masses depicted by gentlemen historians of Rome (all of them from the upper classes) didn't start that way: they were methodically created by the ruling class.

The elites had an excellent system for effecting this. Having started with a base of citizen/farmers, the elites endlessly engendered wars of conquest, in which small farmers formed the rank and file troops. Decisions of foreign policy rested with the elite, as did the command and spoils, but they reaped a double-benefit. As soldiers were killed or tied up in endless wars, their small farms failed, and those with the gold could scoop up the land sold by the desperate survivors. Thus, landholdings grew into vast latifundias worked by slaves brought home from the wars, and the newly-landless soldiers and their families had no choice but to move to Rome and try to scratch a living among the tenements and filthy streets of Rome's slums. These were the urban masses so despised by Cicero and others. Roman rhetoric, like that of our own times, characterized them as ignorant, lazy, shiftless and parasitic.

Parenti blames the lack of reporting of this aspect of Roman society to the class bias of the wealthy historians whose works have survived. This is one of his main points: that Roman historians gave the masses one last kick in the ass by refusing to personify them or tell their stories, and that historians since then have perpetrated this error because they, too, mostly come from a privileged class eager to accept that vision of the poor. (Edward Gibbon, for example, who wrote "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," sat in England's House of Lords). Parenti sets out to remedy this bias by recreating the class struggles between the Populi and the Optimates, often by reading liberally between the lines of the histories that have survived.

Critics attack Parenti for turning Roman history into his own vision of Marxist class struggle, but I would say just the opposite: it would be unrealistic NOT to look at Roman history, and ALL history from the viewpoint of Rich vs Poor. Certainly, the awareness of concentration of wealth as a destroyer of the commonwealth runs throughout every single Roman historian I've read (see my review of Plutarch). Sallust in particular, in his History of the Jugurthine War, is extremely straightforward about the bottomless avarice of the Roman elite and its devastation of the Republic. (He traces its beginning to the victory over Carthage, when Rome became the only superpower, which I find weirdly analogous to collapse of the Soviet Union) Many of the speeches in that work, or in his Cataline Conspiracy could have been given in an Occupy Wall Street conclave. To assert that such a view of history is "Marxist," is idiocy. It's just realistic. To assert that American society is immune to forces which have shaped every other human civilization is wishful thinking.

If Parenti's book has a weakness, it's that the author had to build his case with very limited historical material, for the reasons given above. I would also say that, while he found fault with many ancient authors, he could have been more cognizant of those instances where they really did see the big picture.

All in all, a thought-provoking and well-written volume for those interested in history, either ancient or present.

[Shishuraj · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck cicero, all my homies hate cicero

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of the best, most eye-opening books I've read in a long time. It illuminates for me one of the mysteries that has long puzzled me - the assassination of Julius Caesar. His death never really made sense to me in the context of the civil fighting that went on before and after him. Most people will say Caesar was killed because he was acting like a king, too big for his britches, made the wrong enemies, trusted his rivals too much, blah, blah, blah.

This book encouraged the reader to follow the money, and it described a Rome where the rich Romans were exploiting the crap out the populace - stealing their land, charging rents and interest rates that would make a loan shark blush, screwing over their veterans . . . basically the same shenanigans that American bankers and our elite are up to today.

Caesar tried to slow down this theft, just a little bit, and was assassinated, just one in a long line of popular Roman reformers before him. I don't know if we would call him a Democrat by today's standards, but his political faction, the populares, were met with violence and death by the plutocrats in the optimates party.

The book is an astounding rebuke not only of the rich kleptocrats who fought against Caesar, and the Gracchus brothers, and all of the other reformers who came before and were killed, but of the generations of historians that have come after and have basically taken the side of Cicero, Brutus, Cato, and Crassus against the people of Rome. Parenti exposes the subtle and extremely unsubtle bias towards these rich schemers in the writings of historians down the ages. For good measure, he exposes Cicero as a cowardly over-reactor, and the "Cataline Conspiracy" as the nothing-burger it seems to have been.

History echoes and rhymes, and being able to put Caesar's struggle and death in the context of the class struggle brings extraordinary explanatory power to bear. This is a well written, and important, book.

[Anndra Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Assassination of Julius Caesar piqued my interest when I listened to Parenti’s talk on the subject (on youtube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IO_L...), and the book was definitely an interesting read. It’s an attempt to construct a ‘People’s History’ of classical Rome, setting Caesar in a tradition of reformist populares rather than the typical Ciceronian reading of him as a power-hungry dictator. It is in fact a direct attack on those Parenti describes as ‘gentleman historians’ – a tradition of history written by the ruling class which he identifies as going right back to the Roman era itself. In fact, the book could have been given the alternative title of The Character Assassination of Marcus Tullius Cicero; Parenti is relentless in critique of Cicero and it’s a blast to read, although I’ve always loved reading academics and historians savaging each other in books and papers so your mileage may vary here I suppose. His meticulous deconstruction of the Catiline Conspiracy is especially good, with all of Cicero’s speechifying and rhetoric convincingly shown to be nothing more than self-serving dishonesty. The motives that various historians would have had for opposing Caesar are skilfully described and it’s hard to argue with any of this as it’s presented. Towards the end of the book Parenti fleshes this out with examples of how contemporary lower classes were described by historians of the 18th and 19th century, displaying a continuum of contempt for the 'parasitic mob' running from Roman commentators through to the gentleman historians of even the 20th century. He also attacks the opposition to 'presentism' (judging historical periods by anachronistic modern standards) as being selective in what it chooses to take as the viewpoint of the period it defends, and to be largely uncritical in examining the primary sources that do exist (almost all from members or partisans of the ruling class, and naturally carrying their viewpoint and biases). Instead he aims for a contextual historical approach, reconstructing the interests and lives and politics of the Roman lower classes as best as can be done with the limited information available. One example he points out is that we still have almost no idea of how the collegia - the workers' guilds - were organised, and must generally rely on aristocratic slanders of them as gangs of criminals to get any idea at all of how they operated.

Parenti vividly describes the social and economic conditions in Rome, with the chapter on the lives of slaves and foreigners and women and the urban poor being particularly good. He creates a better context for all the events of Roman history than any history book I’ve read before; I knew of them, but found it hard to relate to them or even see relevance. The greatest strength of this book is in showing the relevance these events have today, and how close the politicking and social struggles are to ones in our own time. The rhetoric used by Roman writers about the political situation, and about any agitation by the proles or reformism from tribunes and consuls, is startlingly close to the rhetoric still in use today. Parenti focuses heavily on material causes and pressures and his analysis is all the stronger for it.

The book is not flawless, though. Parenti cites things well throughout (and the book has an appendix critiquing the obfuscatory, pedantic and elitist use of sources common in other classical history, where abbreviated latinate titles are often used), but occasionally some of his source usage is questionable. He’s not a classicist by education and has relied on second-hand translations of source texts, which is permissible, but sometimes he presents things in a way which is either dishonest or surprisingly naïve. In the introduction he cites both the Pontic King Mithridates and the Caledonian chief Calgacus to back up how bad Roman imperialism was, and presents these as words written or said by each man respectively. In truth these come from Roman writings, and in the case of Calgacus he may not even have existed, being an invention of Tacitus for all we know; if he did exist then he certainly didn’t say anything about ‘making a desert and calling it peace’, for that was just Tacitus putting words in his mouth to make a political point about contemporary Rome. Parenti doesn’t exactly hide this - the quotations are footnoted and the reader is free to see that the citations are from Roman writings - but he presents them otherwise in the text and doesn’t engage with the implications that result from the fact that criticisms of Roman imperialism sometimes came from Romans. This particular example stood out, but there was also an instance of Parenti uncritically reporting something Caesar had said in the senate, with the source being a writer who lived more than a century after Caesar’s death. It's quite probable that there are more instances of this than the ones I spotted. These thankfully didn’t affect the wider points the book was making, and for the most part the source usage was a lot better, but it shook my confidence in the book a fair bit, especially since one of them came in the introduction of the damn book.

That aside, it's well worth reading (or at least listening to the lecture I linked at the start, which is adapted from parts of the book). I found it to be a refreshing and convincing alternative take on Roman history, and quite honestly ancient history could use more books like this.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Thesis of this book is that the murder of Caesar was not tyrannicide but treason. He was murdered by senatorial assassins because he was a popular leader and threatened their entrenched interests. Instead of seeing him as a dictator, see his death as the end of seeing shades of democracy in Rome as it became replaced by the kind of absolutist rule you see in later Europe. Like an animal killed for the price of its fur, Caesar was killed to regain the oligarchy’s monetary grip on the roman people. Caesar had been using state power for small farmers, debtors and the urban proletariat, instead of only for the 1%. Elite Romans stripped their own poor, and then the poor of conquered lands. This book is about the Late Republic from 133 BC to 40 BC. The elites saw Caesar handing out crumbs to the masses as the first step towards “class revolution.” We were taught that Cicero, Cato and Brutus were defenders of Republican liberty, while Caesar was some kind of tyrant and usurper, but this book shows Caesar was murdered for moving against power and privilege on behalf of the poor.

Don’t trust the big Roman names you heard of growing up: Cicero was an elite douche bag bent on politically repressing all non-elites. Gibbon was an elite Richie Rich who abhorred the “wild theories of equal and boundless freedom” of the French Revolution; he loved the British Empire and keeping colonists (in the future US) from getting liberties. Reading these two will keep you from seeing the real picture of Roman history. They won’t dwell on the bad bits like Roman rape, slaughter, sacked towns, burned crops, and over-taxed humans. Truth you will find from Rome’s enemies like Caledonian chief Calgacus who said, Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desolation and call it peace.” Note that most of the names of historical chroniclers we were told to respect back in college (Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus) were entitled men who thought little of the common man. Juvenal however does give glimpses of what the Empire was really like. In 1919, economist Joseph Schumpeter attributed to the Roman Empire something we see today with the paranoid foreign policy of the US: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack.”

Roman life: Nero after becoming emperor kills his mother, his aunt, ex-wife and half-brother. “Almost half of all Roman brides were under the age of fourteen.” Roman life rested on the backs of slaves – slaves were one third of Italy’s population. Ranking next above slaves were propertyless proletariat. There was no public transportation, so tenements existed all over, and these buildings frequently collapsed as they were poorly built. Everywhere on the streets were large dirty pots filled with urine used to clean cloth. Olive oil was used as soap, electricity and butter. At night, only wealthy with bodyguards or robbers went out. Many people used non-slaves for work because if they died or were injured on the job, you didn’t have to pay them. A dead slave meant loss of your investment. Under 2,000 rich people in Rome qualified as its 1%. This 1% was called the nobilitas – an aristocratic oligarchy who had many slaves and servants. They relied on getting their wealth through “reducing others to poverty.” Freeing one’s slave was less altruistic and more cutting them loose when they were too old to be productive. Just as with blacks under Jim Crow, all male slaves no matter how old were called “boy”. As Fredrick Douglass noted, “The slave who has a cruel master wishes for a kind one, and the slave with a kind master wishes for freedom.” If a slave killed his master, other Roman slaves in the household suddenly faced torture or execution for not guarding their master. Slaves were often raped by their masters. “Slavers regularly catered to pedophilic tastes selling young boys and girls for sexual purposes. Depilatories were used to remove the hair on a boy’s body, keeping him as young looking as possible.”

The Story: Crassus was Roman consul with Pompey. Crassus was also a rich slumlord who’s earlier claim to fame was in killing Spartacus and crucifying 6,000 of his men. Where do you even find enough wood beams to do 6,000 crucifixions? Certainly not at Home Depot. Who would make them all? I wonder if Jesus was one of the carpenters. “Jesus Christ, are you late again? Don’t make me cross. Make me a cross.” Crassus has his head cut off by Parthians, thus ends the First Triumvirate and begins a civil war. Pompey is threatened greatly by the well-deserved popularity of Caesar, and turns on him. Caesar offers peace and for them both to disband their armies. Pompey rejects all negotiation and forces Caesar’s hand. Caesar crosses the Rubicon with 5,300 men. Caesar had a long history prior of trying to make allies with former enemies, but Pompey refused that. Three months after Caesar enters Italy, he is still trying to make peace with Pompey, but Pompey was surrounded by dirt bags like Cicero always throwing fuel on the animosity. Caesar takes Rome and Pompey flees to Greece and Lepidus nominates Caesar as dictator. “Dio says that Caesar committed no act of terror while dictator” and instead reforms and empowerments of the common person. Caesar resigns his dictatorship, rules as consul, and chases Pompey to Egypt where the Ptolemies kill Pompey. Caesar is so upset he kills Pompey’s assassins and makes his part-time floozy Cleopatra a co-regent of Egypt. “I’ll diddle and you’ll dawdle”. Caesar also remotely rules Rome and Roman peace is restored when Pompey’s son’s in Spain are defeated. Caesar returns to Rome and is showered and given the title “imperator perpetuus.” At this height of power, Caesar will only have six months to live. Barely enough time to invent his famous salad.

Famous Orator Cicero: Back in school we were told to be well-educated, we should read Cicero. Too bad none of us were told what an elitist douche bag he was. Cicero equated all change as subversion. Any attempt to alleviate public misery, meant racing towards revolution. Cicero was also a slumlord who milked the poor through rental income from his shoddy properties. He said if your ship is in trouble, throw an old slave overboard before a good horse. Note that today, most classical historians want you to like Cicero over Caesar. They won’t tell you that back in the days of Rome, the commoners hated him – on the last day of his consulship an angry crowd booed him into silence for “executing Roman citizens without a trial.” As Michael writes, “Cicero deplored even the palest moves towards democracy.” “He regarded the people as akin to criminals and degenerates” seeing them as “simply out for revolution.” He referred to “the artisans and shopkeepers and all that kind of scum” and “my army of the rich.” He wrote to a confidant “My only policy now is hatred of the radicals.” “During his tenure in office, Cicero lifted not a finger on behalf of the people”, and opposed all reforms, debt-cancellations, and land distribution. Optimates like Cicero pretend to be protectors of the people while operating as their “expropriators.” His buddies all “opposed land reform, rent control, and debt cancellation”. Cicero told others with a straight face that Caesar would show no mercy in “killing off the nobility” and “plundering the well-to-do” and he urged “extreme measures” against Caesarian forces. Cicero was also a lying obsequious sack of shit telling Caesar, “I think of you day and night” and “we will promise you sentinels and bodyguards” and “protect you ourselves with our own breasts and bodies.”

Caesar: Napoleon, Alexander and Hannibal began as military leaders. Caesar began as a politician. For nine years, Caesar gained control of all of Gaul and part of Germany. Pompey doesn’t turn on Caesar until his own wife (Caesar’s daughter) Julia, dies. Caesar was the opposite of Cicero. Cicero was an “optimate” (your standard elitist scum bag) while Caesar was known as a “popularis” (one who sided with the common people). Caesar was easily the most popular popularis in Rome’s history which made him then the biggest threat to the optimates. Caesar could have become an optimate but clearly won the people’s affection by remaining a popularis, a reformer for the people. Just like the countless Latin American and African leaders in the past century who were replaced or murdered by the US for offering their own people land reform, Caesar’s instituted land reform was a direct threat to Rome’s optimates. Cicero hated land reform and said so the moment he had gained power. The murder of Caesar was a Candy Gram to the Roman public that any future vocal popularis would most probably meet Caesar’s fate.

Reformers before Caesar were routinely killed. Tiberius Gracchus wanted to give uprooted families a chance to work the land. Optimates hated him because they had many illegal land holdings suddenly at risk. A gang of hired thugs murdered him and 300 of his supporters. Tiberius’s law actually had offered compensation to the rich, but he was killed for attempting “to reverse the upward redistribution of wealth.” “In time, land reform was entirely undone.” Tiberius had a younger brother named Gaius Gracchus who became the second most famous popularis after Caesar. He became tribune, created wonderful reforms, and was known as a great moral guy. You can imagine where that was leading – in 121 B.C. Gaius and 250 of his supporters were massacred. To stifle dissent, another 3,000 democrats were executed. Note that Cicero immediately approved of the murders. St. Augustine (who we were told to read back in school) also hated reform, Tiberius, Gaius and the populares.

It’s hard to understand Roman history until you understand which famous ancient authors were known bootlickers of the 1%. These bootlickers (like Cicero and Plutarch) referred to Roman reformers as “reckless demagogues” to publicly dismiss their actions. After Gaius was murdered, four more famous reformers were murdered for their trouble. Clodius is stabbed repeatedly on a highway for advocating free grain for the proletariat. Cicero then serves as the attorney for the guy responsible for Clodius’s murder.

Sulla was a major asshole, an army commander, and a dictator who undid as many reforms as possible, and note that he got a thumbs up from Cicero. Rome has a history of optimate launched death-squad attacks on populares who dared take up a popular cause. Today, we are more civilized, we simply deny populares like Bernie Sanders critical access to voters while accusing them of being today’s equivalent of a “reckless demagogue”. Why kill the person if it’s easier for your PR department to quickly kill anyone’s reputation? Willie Horton, anyone? Whether then or now the threat for the 1% remains the same - economic democracy. Today’s billionaires want what Brutus, Cato, and Cicero then wanted, the “un-trammeled right to accumulate as much wealth as possible at the public’s expense.”

Cato: Followers of the Cato Institute today won’t dare look at Cato’s long history as yet another bootlicker for the 1%. Or that Cato was hypocritically corrupt, by railing against corruption and bribery he himself engaged in.

Brutus: Caesar pardoned Brutus and treated him well, yet Brutus still murdered Caesar because his reforms would require Brutus and the 1% to give up a small amount of their wealth to help the less fortunate. Brutus was a money-grubbing assassin known for charging a whopping 48% interest when the standard rate was 12%. He arrogantly demanded debt from a Cypriot town called Salamis, and besieged it’s town council “until five of the elders starved to death.” Even Cicero thought Brutus was an asshole.

Caesar Critique: He extorted a lot of money from King Ptolemy of Egypt. He stole gold from the capitol itself. He pillaged temples and sacked towns. He was known for “extravagant expenditures”. His worst atrocity was slaughtering almost 40,000 at Avaricum “sparing neither those infirm with age nor women and children.” His treatment of Gallic leader Vercingetorix was unconscionable. For the crime of wanting his people to be free, Caesar kept Vercingetorix chained for six years and then publicly executed him. When Caesar was young, King Nicomedes frequently nailed him up the ass leading Caesar’s troops to sometimes sing, “Caesar conquered the Gauls, and Nicomedes conquered Caesar.” He had a few homosexual experiences later in life which political enemy Cicero taunted him for.

Caesar Good Stuff: When Caesar was viewing a public ceremony, he was approached twice by Antony with a diadem wreathed with laurel. In full view of the huge audience, Caesar refused it both times. The crowd went wild, because the Roman people were no fans of kings. “The era of kings (753-509 BC) had been a time of autocracy and repression” still well remembered four centuries later. Between 46-44 BC, Caesar “founded new settlements for veterans of his army, and for 80,000 of Rome’s plebs”. He organized public entertainments and feasts, helped with traffic flow, road maintenance, drafted ways to keep the Tiber from flooding the city. Know that Rome’s history was written by its well-to-do who had the funds and leisure to write it all down, and these well-to-do had their economic bias. Caesar dramatically increased the penalty for killing a fellow Roman citizen and he made landowners have fewer slaves and hire more freedmen. Brutus must have hated that Caesar kept usury rates low and had restricted suing by creditors, and restricted what creditors can do to debtors. “Caesar was the first Roman ruler to grant the city’s substantial Jewish population the right to practice Judaism.” Caesar gave citizenship to medical practitioners and “professors of liberal arts”. If Caesar was a dictator, his true threat was that his was a “dictatorship of the proletariat” a.k.a. “ruling autocratically against plutocracy.” Caesar’s reputation was for bravery in battle and uprightness in peace; he had enthusiastic support from the majority of the polity.

If Caesar was murdered to bring back the Republic as often said, why did his death neither bring back the Republic, nor show his assassins to be treated as saviors? Two days after murdering Caesar, Brutus was writing Cassius and Brutus that they should all flee Italy for the island of Rhodes while things chilled down back at home. Cicero wrote that such fleeing was a great idea, as Rome was “in the hands of traitors”. When danger reared its ugly head, they quickly turned their tails and fled. Unlike dictators, Caesar had pardoned opponents “and even assigned them honors”; his policy was reconciliation instead of retribution. Caesar pushed money lenders and big landowners but not as much as some of the democrats around him. Caesar was killed for going far beyond his predecessors; personal ambition was deemed fine, but not egalitarian sympathies. Remember that his crime wasn’t that Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, but that he had crossed the class line. Throughout history, whenever that happened such a reformer was called a “self-promoting demagogue” or “power hungry” to turn people against him. Dio said Caesar’s murderers acted out of jealousy of his progress and reputation. Suetonius and Cicero both privately recognized that Caesar had gone out of his way to court his enemies. As a populare, Caesar had been shut out of the optimate clan because they could see that Caesar would not protect their elite interest first before that of Rome itself.

The first book I ever read on Rome was by Michael Grant, a modern-day optimate ass-kisser. Michael wrote that Caesar was killed because his assassins “categorically refused to accept” one-man rule. If that were true, Michael, why did Cicero write in a private letter that “What we want is a leader, and a man of moral weight, and a sort of controller.” If that were true, Michael, why were optimates opposing Caesar well before the first time he ran for consul in 60 B.C.? If that were true, Michael, why did the optimates happily “hand dictatorial power to Pompey (in complete violation of constitutional practice) during the disturbances of 52 B.C.?” Optimates then gladly gave Pompey a dictatorship with veto proof rule! Note that Optimates eagerly jettisoned republican principles for Pompey yet murdered Caesar for jettisoning the very same republican principles. And many of Caesar’s assassins had been beneficiaries of Caesar’s largesse – one assassin Caesar had appointed to rule Gaul and another one he had empowered to rule Asia. What? You only gave me Asia? How dare you – now you HAVE to die. Caesar was trying to turn enemies into allies – cooptation not proscription. He hoped to avoid elite enmity and vengeance. Related: enmity and vengeance - two common themes of Italian operas. Power gives up nothing without a fight, or as George Orwell wrote, “Power is not a means: it is an end.”

Note that historically many tributes to Caesar and other reformers (like Gaius Gracchi) were given by the Roman people, but they never gave one to Cicero, Cato, Sulla, Catulus, Milo, Brutus, Cassius, “or any other prominent senatorial conservative.” Sulla showed no mercy to former enemies, while Caesar often spared their lives and avoiding using terror. When you hear about Roman circuses for the masses, remember that lots of rich went to them as well. “All the best seats are reserved for the classes with the most money.” Women had the worst seats up top, and behind them was standing room for the poor.

Early Christianity Critique: Michael Parenti’s thought is that one of the BIG reasons for the Dark Ages is because the Catholic Church intentionally shut off the common man from books. In pagan days, Roman libraries had up to 500,000 books, but when Christianity took hold, laypeople were suddenly forbidden access to books; secular books were downgraded by the Church and pretty much disappeared. By the 6th century, most monasteries had only 200 to 600 books - rare is the small-town bookstore today that doesn’t stock more books than that. Almost all of the huge amount of old pagan literature is now gone because Christian elites wanted it so, and thus rarely copied it. “If it’s worth knowing, we’ll tell you about it in church. Tend to your field, and we’ll tell you what to think”. Think of the Dark Ages as “Christianity’s crusade to eradicate heathen culture and scholarship.” Cool. Great insight by Michael.

the rest of this review continues in the comment section... cheers...

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book focuses on the history leading up to Julius Caesar's assassination, and in particular the reformers, starting from the Gracchi's and the Roman Senate's consistent violent suppression of any attempts at reform.

Parenti does two things very well. First he points out the hypocrisy of ancient Roman writers, particularly Cicero, and how they claimed to be preserving the Republic when in fact they were merely preserving their own wealth and power. It is very important to keep this in mind when reading the ancient texts, because, as Parenti points out, we don't have any other point of view. Parenti also takes to task more modern classicists, and their embracing of the opinions and values of the ancient oligarchs, buying into the idea that the Roman Senate was fighting for anything larger than itself.

However, there were some ways that this book failed for me. First, while Parenti lays out the case that Caesar was a devoted reformer, it never quite convinced me. Second, Parenti is a big believer in the wisdom and nobility of the masses. This is a nice idea, but my opinion, the masses are just as prone to short sited policy and ideas as the rich. Finally, I quickly got tired of Parenti shouting his opinion on every page of the book, even though I am sympathetic to his politics (in general). I realize the book is written to appeal to progressives, but I thought his constant hammering on this undermined, for me, my ability to process the book. I thought that many, if not all of his arguments, could have stood on their own, without his shrill commentary. Every time I read his relentless attacks, it took me out of the history and the story he was trying to tell. I felt he could have made an effective case against both the classical writers, particularly Cicero, as well as their modern counter-points, and opened his book to a wider audience.

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting history of the Late Republic, with Caesar as the Jeremy Corbyn and Cicero as the Keir Starmer, or something like that haha. In Parenti's telling, Caesar was a populist who championed the interests of the poor and challenged the entrenched power of the optimate nobility.

[Rade · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Domestic peace and union were the natural consequences of the moderate and comprehensive policy embraced by the Romans…. The obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. “

This description is missing few pieces, most notably Rome being built on sacked cities, slaughtered villages, shattered armies, enslaved prisoners, raped women, plundered lands, burned crops, and population that has been overly taxed.

The above part is the part that is widely ignored by many scholars. A lot of times the people who write about this kind of history tend to embellish it, to take sides with those who were in power. If a person is well off, they will not talk about the lower class or even praise their will to live and fight for righteousness. No, they will mention lower class and talk about their despicable living conditions and their unwillingness to accept what they have. In fact, men like Cicero acknowledged the poor and said it was their fault for being the scum of the society.

The people in the lower class lived in horrible conditions, sometimes 5 to a small room. Most sold stuff in the market or used their skills of begging, juggling, and servicing men in any way that will keep the family afloat. On top of this they were heavily taxed, while the rich were getting richer by refusing to pay taxes on their lands.

For this reason, man like Tiberius Grachus emerged to help the lower class as well as ease the corruption spreading across Rome (or Rome controlled cities). He fought day and night and was still assassinated for his threat to the wealthy class.

Tiberius’s brother, Gaius, also wanted to create some kind of a reform in the republic, even after his mother begged him to not do it considering his word might could get him killed. As you can imagine he was also assassinated along with his 250 followers and additional 3,000 Democrats in 121 B.C, slaughtered like sheep by those that found his influence a bit too grand. He was big on not getting everyone to be equal, but to have the lower class have more political influence. Do you know who hated any type of revolt or push towards a reform for the lower class? That’s right, Cicero. Cicero was upper class and was featured a lot in the book. Most of his speeches are either about telling people that charismatic leaders fighting for the poor are a plague of the society or calling for elimination of such people.

Next, the book goes into the uprising of Caesar. From his early years to the years where he was looked upon as man possessing god-like powers, entire chapters are dedicated to him. He introduced the laws to “better the conditions of the poor”. From redistributing land (wealthy people hated this idea) to organizing entertainment events to remitting the rent for poor citizens for an entire year. On top of this he was a charismatic leader as well as fantastic political figure with a knack for helping others and finding way to do so that would benefit most. Unfortunately, he was ambushed by those who have gained importance during his reign. Most of his assassins got better political positions because of him yet they stab him in the back, believing the republic would be better off due to his death.

After he was killed, the assassins were not even arrested and were free to boast their accomplishments. The republic was never the same but this was probably due to higher class not knowing when they got a good thing going for them. In fact, as author repeatedly mentions, many account of history in general are written by those who take sides based on their own social standings. Nobody likes to take a stand with lower class, while many will argue that men like Caesar would have brought Rome to its knees, therefore arguing for justification of his assassination.

Overall a fantastic read that goes into many things that are widely ignored by most historians. I just wish this book was longer, even though sometimes it got a bit hard for me to understand.

[Kevin Carson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A refreshing change from the dominant tendency to take aristocratic framing of the period at face value (the austere virtue of the patricians, defense of republican liberty against demagogues and tyrants, etc.). In truth, the Senatorial classes under the Republic were like a cross between Eric Endicott and a Latin American landed oligarchy, and resorted to similarly lawless brutality whenever their extractive interersts were threatened. Virtually every leading figure of the populares, from the Gracchi to Marius to Caesar, met the fate of Allende and Jara at the hands of the Senatorial death squads.

[Eddie Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This arrived on the Ides of March, so I felt honour bound to read it over this weekend. Io Julius!

This is the kind of history book I enjoy. There is no mistaking the author's agenda - he wears his heart on his sleeve and enthusiastically charges against the enemy - the 'gentlemen historians' in his terminology, whether the ancient sources or their modern counterparts. In particular, he totally exposes Cicero as a toxic propagandist for the oligarchy and an adept at speaking from both sides of his mouth simultaneously. I no longer feel sorry for Cicero's sad end - if anything, Karma overtook the crafty weasel on that fateful day as he attempted to escape Rome.

Parenti covers over 100 years of late Roman Republic history - a period of sustained political crisis with a huge cast of characters and much complexity, yet he skilfully presents the essentials so as a reader you feel comfortable in the narrative in what is actually quite a short book.

His method seems to cleave quite closely to the ancient sources, exposing their internal contradictions but also mining them for under-noticed attitudes and events which devastatingly crush the rote conservatism of the pro-Optimates historians.

These types stress their honesty, probity, and devotion to constitutional niceties - all tosh, as Parenti ruthlessly exposes their rapacious avarice and murderous pursuit of their own class privileges at all costs.

Parenti rates the big JC as a 'good guy' (constitutionally speaking) - in his eyes Caesar sincerely wants to move the dial on Roman politics in favour of some mild restitution of Plebian rights and wealth redistribution through land reform. However, like all his populist predecessors, Caesar entirely misreads the optimates' determination to preserve their gains and ends up being assassinated.

Augustus rolls back Caesar's reforms in favour of the optimates. In the next 400 years, the Roman Senate does not attempt to restore the Republic even once. If they have a strong guy preserving their wealth, they are all too happy with a dictatorship.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Parenti never disappoints. A super engaging popular history of the late Roman Republic. He really goes after the "gentlemen historians' whose works on the period are considered the classic works, largely due to their strong biases in favor of the ruling class. Here, Parenti provides a completely different class perspective than we usually get of ancient Rome, and I learned a ton about Roman society that I didn't know before. Great book.

[Utku · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even before reading this book, I always thought Cato and Cicero to be self serving hypocrites. This book reinforced my admiration of Caesar as a historical character. Beautifully written. Highly recommended.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A refreshing take on the story of Julius Caesar. Parenti's thesis is one that's not traditionally told: Caesar's assassination had less to do with tyrannicide than it did straight political assassination by a conservative group of Senators who sought to eliminate popular reform and maintain their socioeconomic and political hegemony over a burgeoning Roman imperial power. I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that he's one hundred percent correct.

As evidence, Parenti traces the longer history of tribunal reform attempts beginning with the Gracchus brothers, placing Caesar's assassination in a larger context of attempts at land and citizenship reforms over two centuries. When approached in that way, a startling pattern emerges. It seems that the Optimate faction of elites in Roman society have a dirty habit of using death squads to eliminate reformers, cloaking their perfidy in the language of democratic ideals. After each assassination, the Optimates tighten political control and extend their economic reach while making sure that the literate world learns of their noble struggle against demagogues and would-be tyrants by controlling the narrative of events that follow. Probably some legitimately saw that the preservation of their interests was in the best interests of the republic as a whole. For those not sold on the argument, Parenti reveals the hypocrisy of both Optimate action and words on center stage - showing how willing they are to throw away "democracy" when they can rest assured that the person receiving power will promote their self-interest.

"When their class interests were at stake, the senators had no trouble choosing political dictatorship over the most anemic traces of popular rule and egalitarian economic reform. They seldom hesitated to depart from their own constitution when expediency dictated. Through the last eighty years of the Republic, they repeatedly invoked the senatus consultum ultimum, suspending all constitutional protections by raison d'etat. So common was their tendency to turn to one-man absolutism - even before the senatus consulted ultimatum - that Appian voices surprise about one occasion when they did not." (The Gracchus affair, when the Senate themselves "preserved their republican virtue by slaughtering Gaius and his followers.")

Why has the narrative been otherwise? Because it was dominated by a select few sources from the winning side and assembled mostly by individuals from the aristocratic class themselves who found the idea of popular democracy disdainful, whether it be Appian, Polybius or Gibbon. The most extant account of the period is by Cicero - hardly a neutral or trustworthy source (several preserved letters to friends show his deep-rooted superficiality and concern for his image. In one, he asks a friend composing a history to write kindly of him, even at the expense of going overboard, so that posterity would know how much he'd done for Rome). And so "in the highly skewed accounts of what is called history, Cicero, Brutus, Cato, and other oligarchs come down to us as the defenders of republican liberty; while Caesar - who tried to move against their power and privilege and do something for the poor - comes down to us as a tyrant and usurper."

What of Caesar himself? Surely, the view that he was a martyr for the poor is as equally erroneous as the view that he was a through-and-through tyrant. Parenti acknowledges many of Caesar's character failings while avoiding the black and white caricature that has dominated previous renditions of his life. He was certainly ambitious and he certainly had a massively inflated view of himself. But how does that make him any different than any of the other major figures of the late Republic? Surely the self-aggrandizing Cicero and the self-styled Pompey "the Great" could be said to exhibit the same tendencies that traditional historians have labeled so despotic in Caesar.

Parenti also does a fantastic job recreating the Roman socioeconomic world from the viewpoint of those who've been traditionally overlooked - devoting significant passages to women, slaves and the urban poor who are commonly lumped into the category of the mobs or the masses with proper aristocratic disdain.

Parenti's writing style is both "provocative and eloquent" in the words of Howard Zinn, and The Assassination of Julius Caesar could probably be more aptly titled A People's History of Republican Rome, emulating that materialist or Marxist historical approach made so compelling by Zinn himself in his survey of American history. Is it the whole story? No. But it's a desperately needed counterweight to the historical narratives that dominate discussion of this era of history.

In all honesty, it appeals to my own political proclivities and perhaps that's why I find it so refreshing. There's definitely a certain amount of selection bias and I just find that the perspective presented meshes with what I believe about the world. Someone less inclined toward a class-based view of society and history would probably be turned off and while I thoroughly acknowledge that Marx's key mistake in his interpretation of history is the discounting of other factors like culture, religious belief or just sheer human unpredictability, I do think that, to a large extent, people are driven by material interests. I think they seek to defend those interests more so than any other they may have in life, at least taken on a collective rather than individual scale. I think the lessons gleaned from dissecting the 'republican heroes' of Rome can teach us a lot about how American 'democracy' functions. And I think that Parenti's description of their pursuit of their self-interest should sound awfully familiar to people in just about every society today:

"Caesar seems not to have comprehended that in the conflict between the haves and have-nots, the haves are really the have-it-alls. The Roman aristocrats lambasted the palest reforms as the worst kind of thievery, the beginnings of a calamitous revolutionary leveling, necessitating extreme countermeasures...Such ruling-class rapacity rarely parades in naked form. Those ensconced at the social apex utilize every advantage in money, property, education, organization, and prestige to maintain their ideological hegemony over the rest of society. They marshal a variety of arguments to justify their privileged position, arguments that are all the more sincerely embraced for being so self-serving."

Parenti goes on to examine common elite arguments against ideas like redistribution of wealth. Each hitting home like a freight train. They present their privileged special interests as equivalent to the general interest. They argue that reforms like rent caps or welfare doles undermine the fiber of the recipients. They maintain that redistribution efforts impose ruinous costs on the entire society and not just to themselves. And when these arguments fail, they attack the motives and character of reformers.

Again, certainly not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but worth listing as required reading to get a completely different perspective on the murder of Caesar. Parenti does a fantastic job as a researcher and sources are thoroughly examined and listed comprehensibly. His historiographic work is readable to the average lay person and, like Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra, enlightening in and of itself. If I had to pick one book from my Roman history reading theme this year as my favorite, this would be it.

[Zach Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Parenti's task here is to place Julius Caesar into his proper historical and material context. Like all good Marxists, he does this by rejecting the Single Man view of history, instead demonstrating that there were people before him and people after him who sought similar reforms in Rome and were similarly met with state violence. As a sort of parallel analysis, he reminds us, much as Walter Rodney and E.H. Carr have, that (bourgeois) historians have material interest in presenting history as they do. But with courageous "People's Histories" from the likes of Howard Zinn, Gerald Horne, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and others, we can write and transmit histories that, rather than focus on the interests and actions of the elite, tell us of the struggles from below that challenge the existing order. There was essentially one historical vision of the 1st century BC in Rome (with minor variations) - that is, until Parenti settled the score.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was ok. it's definitely a "peoples" history in the same sense that zinn's book is, that it to say instead of an outright aristocratic perspective it presents a middle-of-the-road Great Society liberal's take on things, but ratchets up the fake populism and haughtiness to an unbearable degree. yes, caesar proposed mild reforms and this is why he was killed, but how about going after the entire roman system- the constant internal and external pillage, the utter reliance of the entire economy on less-than-chattel slavery etc. instead of just sniping at the edges of optimate privilege and praising the virtues of The Common Citizen?

[Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book dismantles the popular myth of Rome as the cradle of democracy and liberty, revealing instead a society where the vast majority lived in poverty while a small elite dictated laws to serve their own interests. Far from a shining model of republican virtue, Rome was a system where the few exploited the many.

We are often told Caesar was killed by “noble” Romans resisting tyranny. In truth, his assassins cloaked their motives in rhetoric about “freedom” and “restoring the republic,” when what they truly opposed were Caesar’s modest reforms that threatened their privilege. Rome had a long tradition of murdering populist leaders who sought even limited reforms—history’s verdict was always to slander the reformers and sanctify the oligarchs. This pattern persists today: populist movements are routinely dismissed as “radical,” “tyrannical,” or “unrealistic” whenever they challenge entrenched power.

What strikes me most are the parallels to our present. Today’s elites, like Rome’s, equate “freedom” with the unrestrained right to exploit others. When Microsoft faced antitrust prosecution, Bill Gates called it “Communism.” In Silicon Valley, corporations preach liberty and innovation while harvesting intimate data to manipulate behavior and maximize profit. “Dynamic pricing” schemes—where businesses charge more based on location, time, or even the weather—are modern versions of exploitation, defended with the same hollow appeals to “freedom.”

The backlash against FTC chair Lina Khan illustrates this continuity. For merely enforcing antitrust laws, she became the target of over a hundred hostile Wall Street Journal pieces, while politicians of both parties distanced themselves from her. Oligarchs, whether Roman or modern, close ranks when their dominance is threatened. They can tolerate emperors, strongmen, or even proto-fascists—so long as their own power remains untouched.

This is where the Trump parallel becomes unavoidable. His destructive trade policies—tariffs imposed without any coherent industrial plan—produced inflation and stagnation, yet elites largely accepted them. Why? Because while ordinary people bore the costs, corporate monopolies remained protected. The powerful will put up with incompetence, demagoguery, even authoritarian drift, so long as their wealth and control are secure. The Roman elite tolerated dictators before and after Caesar, and today’s elites tolerate Trump for the same reason: he threatens the public good, not elite privilege. If forced to choose between democracy and their dominance, they will always choose dominance.

Caesar’s rise was a direct result of Rome’s elite refusing to implement reforms that enjoyed overwhelming popular support. The republic’s defenders were not opposed to dictatorship in principle—dictators came before and after Caesar without reprisal. They only opposed leaders who endangered their privileges. That dynamic is alive today: elites tolerate destructive policies, even when they harm the nation, because their monopolies and political influence remain intact. They would sooner embrace authoritarianism than cede the slightest share of power.

In this light, Caesar’s assassination looks less like the defense of liberty and more like the violent enforcement of oligarchic rule—a lesson with uncomfortable resonance in our own age.

4.7

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Parenti's book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome, might be read most profitably in conjunction with Goldsworthy's new biography, Caesar: Life of a Colossus. Parenti's work focuses on a specific issue--Caesar as "populist," murdered by wary elitists. Goldsworthy's book is much more detailed, provides much more context. Parenti's book can be viewed within the larger context.

Parent's thesis, outlined on page 3, is straightforward: "Caesar's sin, I shall argue, was not that he was subverting the Roman constitution--which was an unwritten one--but that he was loosening the oligarchy's overbearing grip on it. Worse still, he used state power to effect some limited benefits for small farmers, debtors, and urban proletariat, at the expense of the wealthy few."

Some other reviewers are appalled at this thesis and the manner in which Parenti writes. This is typical of Parenti's work more generally. He has a position and normally writes in such a way as to address that view in no uncertain terms. Some will appreciate this; others won't. But the question should not be whether or not one likes his passionate writing. The question should be: Does he make his case? This is why reading this book in concert with Goldsworthy's makes sense. In the latter volume, much the same theme is advanced, although presented in a much more nuanced, and, in fact, more convincing manner.

This book is most useful in laying out a perspective that is straightforward and not subtle. Sometimes, the lack of subtlety undermines the logic of the analysis. Still, the volume provides a thesis that places Caesar in a political context.

[Ramzey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book argues against contrary opinion among historians ancient and modern that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification by the assassins themselves. Miachael parenti presents a different view :The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceievd him to be a popular leader who threatned their priviliged interests. By this view, the deed was more an act of treason than tyrannicide, one incident in a line of political murders dating back across the better part of a century, a dramatic manifestation of long-standing struggle between opulent conservatives and populary supporterd reformers.

Many modern and ancident historians have distorted the history of the common people of rome and portrayed them as being little better than a noisesome rabble and rioutous mob. Wealthy romans made no secret of their fear and hatred of common people and anyone who infringed upon their class preogatives.

Shakespeare shared romans elite´s view of the common crowd as a mindless aggregation easliy led hither and thither, first adulating Pompey, then bowing to Ceaser, later hailing Brutus for saving them from Tyranny

The assaults on Julias Ceaser reminds me of the recent character assinations and assaults of Jermery Corbyn and Bernie Sanders in corperate media. I am sure the oligarchs in us and uk would do the same to them if they could.

I also learned Tiberius was reformer and that Cicero hated him and Julias Ceaser and the common people.

I also learned about the Cato institute, a conservative think tank in US is named after the man Cato who was an illustrious reactionary because he resisted Ceaser's rule and and supposedly championed "liberty". The narrow class interest of that liberty remains unacknowledged by Cato's admirers.


I also learned that Julias Ceaser was falsley accused of burning the library of Alexandria during his expedition to Egypt in 48-47 a charge tirelessy retierated by regiments of writers from Plutarch an down to modern-day biographers like Gelzer and Walter. Julias Ceaser did torch the Egyptian royal fleet in the harbor and a stock of scrolls stored on the dock may have been destroyed- But the waterfront fire was substantial distance from the library and did not cause a general conflagation in Alexandria, which would have been the only way the solidly built stone library could have been ignited.

Writing two centuries after Ceaser's death Florus says nothing about the Alexandrian library going up in flames, nothing only that the fire consumed "neighbouring houses and dockyards" And lucan who would not miss an oppurtunity to depict ceaser in the worst light , make no mention of the famous library . Writing only that the flames burned the fleet and some houses near the sea. No contemporary accounts allude to the library.


Blaming Ceasers for the great librarys destruction takes the blame of the real culprits fanatic christian worshippers led by bishop Thephilus in 391 AD. This was at a time when ascendant christian church shutting down the ancient academies and destroying libraries and books trhoughout the empire as part of a totalistic war against pagan culture. The burning of books, Luciano Canfora notes, "was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity" Bishop Theophilus demolished temple of Serapis.


The valueable library of alexandria was pillaged and destroyed and, near twenty years afterwards , the appeareance of empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkend by religious prejudice. The Christians also purged the Museuem, the main library over the next to centuries , so that by the time it was complelty destroyed by Islamic invaders in A.D. 641, it housed mostly patristic writings. Once christianity gained ascendancy as offical religion under Emperor constantine, Romes twenty-eight public libraries "like tombs was closed forever"

Though depicted as an oasis of learning amidst the brutish ignorance of the Dark Ages, the christian church actually was a major purveyor of ignorance. Christianitys crusade to eridicate heathen culture and scholarship not yet fully explored by latter day scholars was not only directed against historiography but carried over into the supression of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, anatomy, philosphy, litterature, theather, music and art. still, this factoid about Ceaser's burning of the axleandria library dies hard , as scores of historians , in their time-honerd fashion, uncritically retirare each others misinformation without benefit of indepdent investigation.

Pope gregory XIII slighlty modified the formula for leap years and set the date ahead ten full days, Aside from these few adjustments, the calender we use today is essentially the Julian version, owning far more to the efforts of Ceaser and his astronmers than to Gregory and his. But given Christianit's dominion over the western world, it comes down to us as the "Gregorian calender," with no tribute to renderd unto Ceaser.

[Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Parenti does not hold back in this book. And he has no fear whatsoever when it comes to challenging long-held sacred cows about the Late Republic of Rome and the 'noble' murder of Julius Caesar. Take the highly esteemed Cicero. It's hard to believe after reading the man in his own words (which Parenti quotes liberally), that so many scholars can hold such a man in such high regard. Slumlord, racist, massive egotist, opportunist, liar, flatterer, he epitomized everything that has come to be associated with the so-called 1%. And not only Cicero: practically the entire Senate was a den of vipers, affluent men from powerful families that prospered while the rest of Rome struggled to pay their rent, earn enough to feed their families, and just survive, many of them living in run-down slums owned by the likes of Cicero (who, by the way, thought it was 'not even a nuisance' when several of his collapsed, killing inhabitants - he had a profitable scheme in mind to make even more money). Combined with endless wars, rampant debt, and no jobs (the rich simply had slaves do the majority of the work - cheap labor), yeah, the common people had every reason to be pissed off.

So when a string of popular leaders in the last 100 years of the Republic cropped up with social reforms to ease the plight of the people (rent control, debt relief, land redistribution, jobs, food, etc.), they all met with the same fate: assassination. From Tiberius Gracchus to Julius Caesar, some 15 'populares' were cut down, along with thousands of their supporters. And yet historians old and new (what Parenti calls the 'gentlemen scholars', from Dio, Plutarch, and Suetonius to Gibbon, Mommsen, and more modern-day experts) have sided with the assassins and blamed the victims. This is one of the highlights of Parenti's book: the historians and scholars, in their own words, coming up with the lamest excuses for these atrocities, writing off the reformers as self-interested, power-hungry 'demagogues.' The irony being, of course, that it was the very Senators doing the killing who were self-interested and power-hungry. The reformers did what they did knowing full well the consequences. They could have easily toed the party line and achieved great wealth and power by simply doing what all the other wealthy elites did. But they didn't. They fought for justice and equality in a cruel world of extreme inequality. And they paid the price for such audacity.

Which brings us to Caesar. Parenti makes it perfectly clear that Caesar was anything but a power-hungry monster. He was a principled, intelligent reformer. And the people loved him for it. The gentlemen historians are quick to pounce on Caesar for his 'lust for power', and the unconstitutional method by which he achieved it. Yet they have nothing bad to say about all those former and later leaders (like Sulla and the emperors) who violated the unwritten Roman constitution. When Caesar breaks the rules non-violently, granting unprecedented clemency to his enemies, in the service of positive social reforms, it is the most depraved demagoguery. Yet when the optimates violate the constitution to block reforms, take away rights, and arm death squads to kill thousands of their rivals, they are merely defending the Republic. Parenti is quick to point this out, as well as other other double standards and examples of blatant hypocrisy.

There is just too much great information and commentary in this book to comment on in a short review. For example, the chapter on Cicero's witch-hunt against Catiline is a highlight: another display of the esteemed orator's utter paucity of decency and humanity. If you're interested in what was really going on in the Late Republic, and the truth about Caesar and his reforms, and the bigoted treachery behind his murder, do check this one out. The Assassination of Julius Caesar (****1/2) is a gripping, maddening, page-turner of a book. Kudos to Michael Parenti for setting the record straight and exposing the not-so-hidden mendacity of historians more concerned with preserving the myth of their own entitlement than with truth and justice.

[Tom Stamper · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not really a book about Caesar's assassination. The description of that event is a small part of the book. Author, Michael Parenti is more interested in Caesar the reformer and how that got him killed.
What impressed me about the book is the amount of praise that Parenti finds from the people toward Caesar and the amount of negative information that the author digs up about Cicero, Cato, Brutus and the other usual heroes of the saga. It's interesting because historians traditionally give Caesar's assassins credit for trying to save the Republic while Caesar is usually cast as the power hungry despot.
Parenti reverses these roles. He asserts that Caesar's concern over average citizens put him at odds with the landed class and they killed him because he was bad for business.

The hard part about the book is that Parenti seems to find no fault in the kinds of leaders that stir up the masses. Sure some of those leaders have good intentions, but just as many of them are using the needs of people to build a power base. It's the nature of politics and politicians. Parenti seems to take any social reformer as unselfish hero. This error is common among a certain world view and in extreme cases it's been used to explain the merits of butchers like Castro or Stalin.

Parenti also uses phrases like class prerogatives and social justice, as if there were a form of justice unrelated to human beings. Those terms seem out of date in 2004 when it's been shown all over the world that statist economies cannot keep up with the free market. Countries that use more central planning have higher inflation and unemployment rates and the cost of living is always higher there. "Class prerogatives" and "social justice" may have been handy terms when the question of economies was up in the air. But in today's world they come off as jealousies rather than plans to make people's lives better.
Parenti did convince me that Caesar probably had more positives than the average historian is willing to give him. Maybe his willingness to redistribute wealth had more to do with his death than popularly recognized. Still, I don't think Parenti makes a good case that Caesar the dictator was a better scenario than a free republic. I'd rather live in a free country where some people have more than I have, especially when I have more than the average person in the world. It's true for Americans today and for ancient Romans.

The fact that I disagree with the conclusions doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the case that Parenti makes. This is a well researched book and it made me think analytically about things that I hadn't considered before. It also gave me an interest to read more about the classical world.

[Jasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the overview of the Late Roman Republic that politically conscious social justice advocates didn't know they needed to read. It was at times frustrating to learn how old the ways the wealthy wield and accumulate power and fight for their class interests are.

The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification proffered by the assassins themselves. In this book I present an altnerative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests.

Despite the cliché that "history is written by the victors", our popular view of history remains largely unquestioned. I really appreciated the emphasis in this book to point out how our narrative of Caesar has been constructed for us by a lineage of white, upper-class, male historians, and sorts through these biases.

The chapters are well organized, to the point, and not overly long. The language isn't dumbed down but nor is it overly academic (a welcome change of pace after Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny). The author's passion for what he writes about comes through; at times he is drily humorous, sometimes he is a little snide, sometimes he incites compassionate feelings of injustice. It's a very readable book.

[Ben Peyton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the best book I've read all year. I can't recommend it enough.

This book is written so well and is so concise and fair and powerful that I can't really think of another book like it that I've read. It's the people's history of ancient Rome but, I think, it means a lot today. Not to fall into cliches about how history repeats its self or anything but there are a couple of important points I will take away this work. One, it is a huge reminder that history, like everything else, is influenced by the class biases of those who write it. It just so happens that those at the top of the class structure seem to be the ones who write history more than anyone else. Second, class struggle is a not a new thing or a thing from the recent past- it goes back all the way to the ancient past, and those who fought it back then are just as important as those now.

I really found this to be an amazing book. It might not be for everyone but I enjoyed it immensely.

[clara · Rating 1 out of 5]

✨1.5 stars✨

The Assassination of Julius Caesar was extremely tedious, except for chapter 9, and only brought me sadness. Reading this book made me unhappy. It's unacceptable.

Michael Parenti is not a bad writer, so why did I dislike this book so much? This isn't hypophora. I am wondering why he chose to write every chapter except 9 poorly. Chapter 9 is so good. It is interesting. It is structured. There is a plot. I was engaged. The other chapters are laundry lists and rants. Michael Parenti can write so well, and yet he simply declines. For the life of me I don't understand why.

I had to read this book for school and answer reading comprehension questions, so that definitely made me hate it. That's not a small part of it. I had to be continuously reading this book very slowly for over a month. And it drove me crazy.

Also, the Catiline conspiracy for sure happened. I don't know what this guy is on about.

[Rocky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wowowowowowo. Sooooo good. Wouldn’t recommend for everyone. However, if you’re into a bit of Roman history and a bit of hyper-class aware leftist historical critique then boy oh boy do I have a book for you. It’s incredibly digestible, honestly a super quick and fun read. Combats a lot of the common narratives about Julius Caesar and investigates as much as it can the interests of the Roman proletariat who’s stories are often disregarded in favor of the aristocratic elite. So so good.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

attempts to claim Julius Caesar as part of a populist tradition that I suppose we should regard as leftwing in comparison to the elitists otherwise on display. JC's populism is placed in a long tradition of similar politics in Rome. I'm not sure if that works or not, but it's damned interesting.

[Logan B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome” by Michael Parenti is a fascinating revisionist history of the late Roman Republic that challenges many of the preconceived notions of the decades leading up to and aftermath of the death of Gaius Julius Caesar. Parenti’s narrative casts Caesar and the Populari political party as liberal reformers fighting the Optimate establishment.

Even before Shakespeare cast him in his titular tragedy, Caesar has been classically portrayed as an ambitious tyrant who used a wave of popular support to overthrow the centuries old Republic of Ancient Rome. This version of events sees Brutus and the conspirators as luckless champions of republicanism who gave everything to try and save Rome from falling to despotism. Parenti, however, begs to differ. In his version of events, Caesar is an earnest liberal reformer who pushed back against the entrenched oligarchy of an aristocratic senate to improve the lives of the anonymous masses of Roman citizens. His assassination therefore wasn’t a heroic gesture to save the republic but a reactionary murder by the conservative elite to stop the erosion of their power.

It’s important to approach this book as a historical essay with a clear author’s thesis. It is well researched, persuasively argued, and clearly biased toward’s a specific viewpoint. It is not an objective telling of the events which is not a bad thing, far from it. I found Parenti to have a very convincing argument that overreaches at times which keeps me from being fully taken in by it. The fact is that Parenti is so pro-Caesar (going so far as to call him “incorruptible”) and the Populares that he barely touches upon their faults while being quick to eviscerate the Optimates like Cicero and Cato. Were Cicero, Cato, and the Optimates a self-serving ruling elite? Of course, it would be naive to think otherwise. They were after all career politicians in a society governed by a slave-owning patrician class. But does this mean that their opponents in the form of Caesar, Marius, and the Populares were beacons of progressive virtue without any selfish intent? Parenti seems to think so however I disagree. Men like Marius and Caesar do not elevate themselves to the highest offices of power and consolidate said power around themselves for purely altruistic purposes and the argument that it was to defend themselves from the entrenched oligarchy has its shortcomings. This is not to say that Caesar and the Populares didn’t achieve good things and particularly his platform of land reform was progressive even by today’s standards; however, they were guilty of many of the same moral sins as their Optimate foes. Where the Optimates had enacted political killings through the likes of Sulla’s proscriptions, Caesar co-instigated years of bloody civil war in the republic that eventually led to its downfall. The author also goes into scant detail on Caesar’s wars of blatant imperial conquest in Gaul which were overtly harmful to the native peoples living there. These are not the actions of a blameless paragon of virtue. Like many of the immortal figures of history, Caesar is a multifaceted figure that is not easily categorized. Can someone who takes absolute power and improves the lives of the citizenry be truly considered a tyrant or a democrat? Can you judge Caesar only on the merits of his lifetime without considering how his centralization of power paved the way for the Roman Empire and abusive authoritarians such as the likes of Caligula and Nero?

Parenti, while making an excellent persuasive argument, tries to paint Roman history in too much of a black/white dichotomy and ends up as one-sided as many of the “Gentleman Historians” he critiques. This book is best enjoyed as a counter argument to the more conventional histories of the era so an informed reader can draw their own conclusions. I commend Parenti for pushing back against traditional scholarship and recommend “The Assassination of Julius Caesar” to anyone who’s interested in exploring a fresh perspective on familiar events of the late Roman Republic. While I don’t 100% agree with Parenti, this work is easily the most thought provoking I’ve read all year.

[Elan Garfias · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is got to be one of the coolest history books I've come across. Retells the classic end of the Roman Republic and the reign of the Triumvirs but with class and social struggle firmly grounded as the driver of events. I was already vaguely pro-Caesar but this really drives home just how awful the Optimates were capable of being and gets into more detail than usual about Caesar's reforms. A lot of the language Parenti uses feels eerily like a description of twentieth century; the one that really drove this home was his description of "right-wing death squads" employed by the Senate. A full chapter is devoted to slavery, and another to the state of the plebs, which I have always found to be rather similar to the predicament of Revolutionary War veterans here in America. Again similarly, class narratives become much more complex and contradictory when we add in a constantly expanding frontier that can soften social struggles. For example, can war be "good" for the lower orders? Perhaps, for veterans allotted a nice plot of land in newly conquered territory and a few slaves of their own. Less so for the those who find themselves on the business end of a Gallic spear. Yet this is the terrain in which the Roman Populists found themselves, so let's meet them there. Though often framed as defenders of the constitutional order, the Senatorial class proved more then willing to be rather flexible with their principles, from accepting cheerleading Sulla's "death squads" to simply ignoring the two-consul rule. The champion of that class, Cicero, also gets his own chapter, which proves particularly illuminating as to the tactics the oligarchs were apt to use. I've always found a somewhat sympathetic character, doing everything right just as that was no longer enough, stubborn but principled, maybe a bit like a Franklin Pierce or a James Garfield. The portrayal of him here is rather different, and reminded me a bit of Alexander Hamilton: a newcomer willing to kiss whatever boot he has to to be taken seriously by the ruling class, yet despite his best efforts to please them, never will be. Parenti then examines in depth the Catalinarian conspiracy, and counter-examines the evidence with a depth I've never encountered. Apparently there is some deal of doubt among historians as to the validity of the Conspiracy, and the highly irregular (and patently illegal) way the trials were conducted point to something rotten about the whole thing. Was it invented out of whole cloth? Was it exaggerated? Was it a frame-up. The whole thing came across very Bush-like, with a war based on a lie and used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties. It was into this political context that Caesar inserted himself, and the closest political analogue to my mind is FDR: public works to reduce unemployment, food subsidies, labor codes, curbing elite power etc. More disturbingly, the entire Caesarian and Rooseveltian program ultimately rested on the war machine. The beneficiaries of these programs, the "urban mob," get their own chapter, and receive a more generous hearing than they would be apt to get among most historians. Unlike modern food stamps, which can be redeemed for a large variety of products in a grocery store, the Roman dole consisted of grain and oil, so recipients would still need to make their own bread. It wasn't like they got housing assistance or unemployment benefits (the occasional donative aside), so you don't really get any sort of "welfare queen" type situation. As to the bread and circus line used dismissively toward them, Parenti highlights the fact that the Senatorial elite were just as present, if not more so, at the games, so if we're dealing with barbarisms such as gladiatorial games or lion killings, it's more of a cultural taste than a class one. American political history is often likened to Rome, and that is no accident, yet this whole situation felt perhaps more similar to Weimar Germany, with armed partisans clashing on the street, and a ruling class increasingly willing to resort to extraconstitutional means to retain power. (Though the subsequent dictatorship was definitively of the Sullan, rather than the Marian, persuasion. Yet the behavior of the elites is certainly reminiscent of their modern American counterparts, screeching about liberty when threatened with the slightest checks on their power and infiltrating and capturing the agencies meant to regulate them. While Caesar was framed as taking away many of the Senate's "democratic rights," (and no doubt accruing many directly to himself), it seems he also made steps toward restoring the power of tribal and popular assemblies (I wish there were more of this described in the book). One is tempted to imagine what would have happened had the Senators given a little to keep a lot, as the more thoughtful and far-sighted contingent of the American capitalist class did by allying itself with the Democratic Party. Indeed, some did, and accrued more wealth than Cato or Cassius or Brutus could have dreamed of. Yet such willing concessions rarely come other by force. What does this mean for us? Roman plebs by and large didn't mourn the Republic because the Republic had long ago ceased to do anything for them. Caesar offered them something. I find it ironic that he was known to be so brutal in his war with the Gauls, many of whom had no quarrel with him. Yet with his enemies in Rome he was nothing but forgiving, and that proved to be his undoing. Perhaps more heads should have rolled when he had the chance. Had he used his dictatorial powers to their fullest extent, maybe it would be Brutus's blood that stained the Senate floor.

[tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A People’s History of Ancient Rome is probably the better primary title of this book, this book is not solely revolving around Caesar’s life and career. Parenti writes this in a manner that will be familiar if you’ve already read any Howard Zinn or any People’s History book.

Like the above mentioned, this is a critical, class-conscious revisioning of Late Republican Rome. Parenti gives brief but concise, critical overviews of different facets of Roman society: From slaves and their masters to the reformists and the entrenched oligarchy.

Mainstream historians would accuse Parenti’s and other critical author’s works as wrongfully imposing contemporary values onto the past. Parenti rebukes such an idea, for as far back as history has been recorded, mainstream history has consisted of primarily “Gentleman’s History” which Parenti defines as “a privileged calling undertaken within the church, royal court, landed estate, affluent town house, government agency, university, and corporate-funded foundation.”

Essentially, gentleman’s history has and continues to follow the trope ‘History is written by the winners’ which is a phrase taught to many students yet also being accepted as an okay way to learn about history. Parenti notes that gentleman’s historians simply ignore the sociopolitical context of the time periods they study and accept what these ‘winners’ have written as fact. These gentleman’s historians are falling for survivorship bias- any ancient history not directly written down cannot be taken seriously because we cannot easily find it in a library and cite quotations that our colleagues will be able to also find and agree or disagree with us.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar presents the argument that Caesar was not merely a self-interested, power hungry demagogue, aiming to destroy the republic so that he may establish himself as an autocrat, which is a popular view that has been propagated from the likes of Caesar’s contemporaries. Parenti presents Caesar in extremely favorable light: He is a masterful, savvy politician who is capable of incorporating reform when necessary to garner popular support, while also being the ultimate pragmatist and making concessions to and including the oligarchy in his cabinet to avoid angering them and risk losing his reform powers.

Caesar’s fatal flaw is that no amount of compromise and conceding would ever be enough to assuage the oligarchy’s deep, deep interest in preserving their wealth and power over the masses, to the point that even those that Caesar gave promotions or clemency to ended up being his backstabbers.

While I do not agree with all of the apologetics for all of Caesar’s actions that Parenti presents, I do recognize one important thing:

Caesar was more than simply a revolutionary man- he was a vehicle for the revolution in the Roman Republic that the masses loved and worshipped. He was the individual manifestation of their organizing, revolting, protesting, and desire for freedom and democracy. While I don’t believe in authoritarian rule as a means to overthrow a conservative oligarchy, I do believe that our present times call for all people to find their manifestation that they can channel their revolutionary spirit into, whether that be a role model, a community, an organization, a labor union, or any vehicle capable of producing revolutionary power.

Ultimately, Parenti notes how those oligarchs seemingly dedicated to the cause of restoring the republic had no plan to actually restore the republic. Once Augustus ushers in the Roman Empire, the senators have no more qualms about living under an autocratic despot who has taken away most of their power, simply because the industry of empire maintained their wealth and class privilege.

Those from the modern Western world will probably read this and draw many parallels between the situation in this book and many current events. While I do not subscribe to a universalizing Marxist worldview, it is clear that the Roman republic and later empire laid a foundation for the capitalist, imperial first world order that has dominated planet Earth ever since.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

My sister made fun of me for reading this, but she's a loser so I don't care.
As far as nonfiction goes, this was a pretty good book. Only about 220 pages of content, so not ridiculously and unnecessarily long like other books. I also learned a lot so that was good too.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gusta.