My Life As A Historian: The Ides of March Remembered

On this day in 44 B.C., thirty Senators assassinated Gaius Julius Caesar by knifing him to death as a mob in the Senate in Rome.

This event, dramatized by William Shakespeare in the play bearing the deceased's name, is the primary way this event is portrayed to us. Even in this decadent and decayed era, that memory remains in the Western mind, though how long remains to be seen.

The event was done in the event of stopping either the collapse of the Roman Republic or its overthrow by a hostile part. It did neither. It only made things worse, as now open political violence directly aimed at leading figures was on the table. Civil war--also dramatized in part by Shakespeare--would soon rock the Roman state and in its wake would rise the Roman Empire as we know it today.

This event echoed many times over the last two millenia, and ruling elites of the West remain cognizant of it--more or less-since. That said, today's elites are the least cognzant of the true depth of the lessons while wholly embracing the surface perceptions therein; we see this in the increasing alienation of the Western elites from not only the nations they claim to represent, but also their actual clients in the population. We see this in the politicization of the security and military institutions, and utter terror at being directly attacked by the very population they hate so much and yet remain dependent upon.

The assassination of Caesar was an attempt by an elite to preserve themselves against a popular upstart. Death only made a martyr of him. Today's assassinations are virtual more often than not precisely to avoid that problem, and intrigues now are too often an excercise in educated stupidity, but the results aimed for and (not) achieved remain the same.

It would have been better for the senators to recognize the untenability of their position and negotiated an acceptable peace with Caesar, but that didn't happen. This error repeats with every echo thereafter, leading from similar causes through similar errors to similar consequences.

To which I, being a historian, am again confronted with this:

Yet people wonder why I prefer to write science fiction.