by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
In November and December 2023, America’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) co-produced a three-part miniseries on the life and political career of Julius Caesar. Called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, it was re-run in April 2024. I’m convinced that the filmmakers, including producer/director Emma Frank, at least partially intended audiences to see a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Though Frank and her writers avoided using Trump’s name, they obviously intended us to see Caesar and Trump as comparable. Both were leaders who used populist appeals to destroy a long-established republic and set themselves up as absolute dictators – though in Trump’s case his rise was short-circuited and won’t be completed unless and until he wins back the Presidency on November 5, 2024.
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On Tuesday, April 2 I watched a couple of quite interesting shows on PBS, though I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t put on the next episode of the fascinating documentary mini-series The Invisible Shield about public health in America. Instead they aired the first in a three-part mini-series about the life of Julius Caesar (Andonis Anthony) called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m beginning to wonder if PBS has started showing only the first episodes of mini-series like this on air as a loss leader to get us to pay for their “Passport” streaming subscription service, which we’ll need to watch the rest of the episodes. (I also find it ironic that three of the four big network streaming services all have names beginning with “P”: NBC’s “Peacock,” CBS’s “Paramount Plus” and PBS’s “Passport.” The only one that doesn’t is ABC, since they’re owned by the Walt Disney Company and so their streaming service is “Disney Plus.”) The creators of “High Priest,” the first episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator (the show’s directors are Emma Frank and Richard Pearson but no writers are credited on imdb.com), don’t go overboard on the obvious parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they’re unmistakably there. Both were men who went out of their way to destroy an existing republic to further their own personal and political ambitions. Both did so by appeals to “the people”; Caesar by embracing the causes of commoners who weren’t sharing in the riches the Roman Republic was acquiring, and in particular the veterans who were fighting Rome’s wars and weren’t getting jack for it in compensation.
One of Caesar’s big strategies in winning popular favor was putting on the biggest round of gladiatorial contests Rome had ever seen, and bolstering the appeal of his games by offering huge banquet tables filled with food. Since admission to the games was free (the ancient Roman formula for keeping the people happy and content with their lot was “Panem et circenses” – “bread and circuses”), the food was also free, and Caesar of course made sure to publicize his involvement in providing it big-time so the people would remember just who had fed them so generously and they’d vote for him in upcoming elections. The show begins with Caesar determined to win the title of Pontifex Maximus, the head of Rome’s official religion, who was elected by popular vote, even though he was only 37 when the title fell vacant and the other two candidates were both older. To fund his games and his Pontifex Maximus candidacy he’d borrowed money from Crassus (Carlo Spano), then the richest man in Rome and a notorious creditor from hell who wasn’t above sending goon squads to assault physically people who owed him money and fell behind on their payments. Caesar had at least one determined opponent in the Roman Senate: Cato (Orlando Brooke), a traditionalist defender of the Roman Republic and its constitution against Caesar’s power grabs. After an attempted coup d’état led by Catiline collapsed in 62 B.C., Caesar called for the permanent imprisonment of the conspirators instead of their execution, but as this documentary points out Rome didn’t have a prison system at the time and the only punishment for crime short of execution was house arrest. Cato opposed this, called for the execution of Catiline’s men and hinted that Caesar had been part of the plot.
When Caesar allied himself with the Roman general Pompey (Antony Gabriel) and supported Pompey’s call to give his principal soldiers land grants, Cato regarded this as a violation of the Roman constitution and mounted an early version of the filibuster, speaking for hours against the bill so it could not be voted on. Caesar was eventually elected consul, the head of state under the Roman Republic, but he didn’t serve alone: there were actually two consuls, each supposedly there to check the power of the other, and Caesar’s running mate for the other consulship, Lucius Lucceius, lost to one of Caesar’s bitterest political enemies, Marcus Calpurnius Biblius. When Biblius joined Cato in opposing Pompey’s bill to grant land to his veterans, Caesar had thugs beat him up on the Senate floor and drag him away. Caesar next announced that he and two other men, Pompey and Crassus, would rule Rome as a so-called “Triumvirate,” effectively blocking his opposition by including two men who were known to hate each other. He also solidified his position by arranging a marriage between Pompey and Caesar’s daughter Julia. Then he was appointed to command a Roman army intent on the conquest of Gaul (modern-day France), and that’s where this episode ended. Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is one of those tacky half-documentaries, half-dramatizations the History Channel is big on: we see actors playing the various characters of ancient Rome but don’t actually hear them. Instead we hear from various British talking heads, including historians Tom Holland, Shashama Malik, Andrew Frederic Wallace-Hadrill and Federico Santangelo, as well as former British Member of Parliament Rory Stewart, who seems to be there mainly to talk about Caesar as a politician and compare him to modern-day leaders.
What most Americans don’t realize is that the Framers of the Constitution never intended for the United States to be a democracy; they created a republic and consciously modeled it on the Roman Republic. James Madison made the distinction clear in No. 10 of the Federalist Papers (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp), in which he wrote, “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” As Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator makes clear, this was a debate carried out in ancient Rome as well: the Roman government in Caesar’s time was divided between the Populares, who sought to reach past the official organs of government (particularly the Roman Senate) and appeal directly to the people for support; and the Optimates, who believed in a hierarchy of elites and particularly in a Senate that, in Madison’s words, would “refine and enlarge the public views” and serve as the “medium” that would keep political conflict within legitimate bounds and limit the power of the people.
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On Tuesday, April 9 I watched the second episodes of two PBS mini-series that at first I had feared they wouldn’t show over the air but just make you subscribe to their streaming service, “Passport,” to be able to watch. One was “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” the second show in the three-part miniseries on the life and political and military career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m not sure how much the original producers (Evih Efue, Emma Frank, Helen Hunt, Alexander Leith and Adam Turner), directors (Emma Frank and Richard Pearson) and writers of this show were motivated by the parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they are clear and unmistakable. Both Caesar and Trump were utterly unscrupulous, both were motivated by political ambition and greed, both were secular and highly licentious individuals who cloaked themselves in the guise of religiosity (before he was elected Consul, one of the two executives at the head of the Roman Republic, Caesar first ran for and won the office of Pontifex Maximus, essentially the pope of Rome’s multitheistic religion), and both systematically upended and ultimately destroyed republics that had lasted for centuries. In Rome’s case the Republic had lasted for 500 years – twice as long as America’s experiment in representative government – until Caesar came along to wreck it. Part one of this series, “High Priest,” ended with Caesar’s first term as Consul (the Consulship lasted only one year and there were two of them, ostensibly to check each other’s power; the framers of the U.S. Constitution copied much of it from the Roman Republic but decided to make the President just one person and give him a four-year term; Alexander Hamilton wanted the President elected for life, but that was the biggest battle he lost at the Constitutional Convention because George Washington, who was obviously going to be the first President, wanted a periodic chance to decide whether he still wanted the gig) and his appointment as governor of Gaul (modern-day France).
Part two was called “Veni, Vidi, Vici” after the famous message Caesar sent to the Roman Senate at the conclusion of his conquest of Gaul – it meant, “I came, I saw, I conquered” – and his successful resistance to the efforts of members of the Senate in general and his main political enemy, Cato, in particular. One point Frank, Pearson and whoever wrote the narration for the show made was that both as consul and as a provincial governor, Caesar was immune for prosecution for any crimes he might commit in those offices – he essentially had what Trump is currently seeking from the U.S. Supreme Court – and so the only way his enemies in the Senate could stop him was if they could first strip him of his Gallic command. That posed a problem for them because Caesar was regularly sending letters to Rome detailing how well his war was going. Later he collected these into a book called Commentary on the Gallic Wars (the bane of Latin students ever since) in which he wrote about himself in the third person so people hearing the tales (remember this was not only before the age of printing but before most people could read, so they relied on town criers to tell them what was in the book: essentially the audio books of their time) would forget that the portrait of the great hero Julius Caesar had been created by Caesar himself. Caesar’s conquests in Gaul made him one of the most popular political figures in Rome, and he aligned himself with the Populares, the faction in Rome’s government which sought to undercut the authority of the Senate by presenting as many issues as possible directly to the people by vote. Caesar also aligned himself with another Roman general, Pompey, and his principal financial backer, Crassus, to form what became known as the First Triumvirate.
Each of the three got themselves appointed to govern a Roman province: Caesar got Gaul, Pompey got Spain (though he ruled it by remote control and stayed in Rome, which seems to me would have been a lot more difficult then than it is now) and Crassus got Parthia (ancient Mesopotamia and modern-day Iran). Unfortunately for Crassus, while Caesar was sweeping to victory in Gaul (albeit by committing war crimes; one of the things his enemies in the Senate wanted to remove him for was breaking a treaty with one of the Gallic tribes and massacring 400,000 of them), Crassus got his ass kicked by the Parthians. They literally beheaded him, and though Caesar had got Pompey and Crassus elected as co-consuls to succeed him, Crassus’s death unraveled Caesar’s political position in Rome. As the only surviving consul, Pompey decided his political future lay in allying himself with the anti-Caesar faction in the Senate. Pompey had previously married Caesar’s daughter Julia to cement the alliance between them, but Julia got pregnant, had a miscarriage and not only died herself but took the baby with her. Caesar tried to keep Pompey on board with their alliance by offering him his grand-niece as a second wife, but Pompey essentially said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode ends with Caesar about to break one of the main laws of the Roman Republic: the ban on taking one’s own private army into Rome. Things get complicated when one of Caesar’s agents, Clodius – one of the 10 “Tribunes of the People,” an office created during an earlier period of instability in the Roman Republic to ensure that the people had a voice in their government in case the consuls and the Senate got too powerful and flouted the popular will – decides to strike out on his own.
Historian Tom Holland said in the show, “Clodius, for years, had served as Caesar's agent, enforcing Caesar's interests in Rome, and Clodius learnt from Caesar that power can come directly from the people. Clodius elevates this to a whole new level. Political order in the streets of the capital rapidly starts to collapse.” When Clodius is assassinated brutally by a lynch mob, his widow Fulvia decides to stage his funeral in front of the Senate. She builds a pyre and burns his body, and the fire spreads to the Senate building, destroying it. Caesar is able to stop the Senate’s latest attempt to end his provincial governorship of Gaul by bribing another tribune to block it; or, failing that, to pass a bill stripping both Caesar and Pompey of their armies. The show ends with Caesar literally at the Rubicon River, which marked the boundary between Gaul and Rome. Already his enemies in the Senate had essentially declared him a political exile and threatened to prosecute him if he marched his army into Rome, but he did anyway, kicking off a new civil war that would ultimately lead to Caesar’s appointment as a permanent dictator (Dictator perpetuo) in 45 B.C. and his assassination a year later. The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is a grim and all too timely warning of how fragile a republic can be in the face of an authoritarian – a Caesar, a Hitler, a Putin, a Trump – determined to destroy it and with enough popular support to be able to pull it off.
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On Tuesday, April 16 PBS showed “Ides of March,” the last in a three-part mini-series on the life and career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’ve long suspected the producers of this show (the BBC in association with PBS and various other companies) were deliberately out to make a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Both Caesar and Trump essentially slammed their way into absolute political power and overthrew long-established republics (500 years in Caesar’s case, 250 years in Trump’s) by total unscrupulousness and utter indifference to social norms, as well as direct appeals to “the people” against the “elites” who were supposedly ham-stringing the political system so it could not deliver what “the people” really wanted. Of course, Caesar’s playbook has been used time and time again by both Right-wing and Left-wing demagogues in various countries ever since: in France by Robespierre and later Napoleon, in Germany by the Kaiser (whose title, like “Czar,” derives from “Caesar”) and then by Hitler, in Russia by Lenin, Stalin and eventually Putin, along with other modern-day tyrants like Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Victor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (until he lost power seeking re-election and, like Trump, claimed that the election had been “stolen” from him and staged a coup to try to retain power), Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy (representing a party that’s the lineal descendant of the first Fascists led by Benito Mussolini in 1922) and others around the world. The PBS.org home page for “Ides of March,” https://www.pbs.org/video/ides-of-march-xkgyxs/, describes it thusly: “As Caesar takes control of Rome and consolidates his grip over the Republic, his ambition turns to tyranny. A handful of senators plot to end his rule in the only way they can: by taking his life. But will it be enough to save the Republic?”
The first two episodes, “High Priest” and “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” his slogan upon winning the war in Gaul – modern-day France – that cemented his position as the most powerful man in Rome), told a story of how a man with no particular sense of morality made and then broke alliances with others to pursue his own path to power. I remember a history book I studied from in grade school which presented Caesar as an altogether positive figure – it had chapter headings reading “The Sickness of Rome” and “The Physician: Julius Caesar” – but that’s decidedly not how this show, produced and directed by Emma Frank, sees him. The ancient Roman constitution (which, like the current British constitution, was unwritten and relied mostly on an agreed-upon set of political and social norms which Caesar deliberately upended) provided for an office called Dictator in which the Roman Senate could appoint someone and give them absolute power. But it was only supposed to be for a limited time, at most six months. The Dictator was only appointed in case of a national emergency – usually an attack from an enemy – and was supposed to relinquish power and hand it back to the elected officials as soon as the emergency was over. Not for Caesar: he first demanded an appointment as Dictator for ten years – which the Senate reluctantly gave him with the proviso that it would have to come up for renewal every year – and then he demanded to be made Dictator for life. Caesar also demanded that he sit at the head of the Senate, between the two elected Consuls that were the Roman heads of state – essentially declaring himself above the law and the ultimate authority over Rome. Among the powers he took for himself was the ability to appoint the magistrates, who served under the consuls and essentially ran the Senate, instead of allowing them to be elected directly. Caesar also had made for himself a gold version of the laurel wreath Roman consuls traditionally wore around their heads as a symbol of their authority, and to many observers it looked like a crown.
This was an especially sore point among many Romans because originally Rome had been ruled by kings, only the seventh and last one, Tyrannus Superbus (whose name has entered the language as the word “tyrant,” meaning an unscrupulous and evil absolute ruler) was deposed in a coup led by a direct ancestor of Brutus, who in 44 B.C. had wormed his way into Caesar’s inner circle. “It's a quite extraordinary thing, a really, really explicit contravention of Roman customary practice,” says retired history professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on the program about Caesar’s demand to be made dictator for life. “The entire idea of the non-monarchical state is that no one has power in perpetuity.” Another historian interviewed for the program, Tom Holland, says, “Caesar's preponderance has made the traditional function of the Senate, the role of the helmsman guiding the ship of state, essentially irrelevant. Caesar is too impatient, too unsubtle not to let his fellow senators know that he knows this.” Holland mentions Brutus’s role in the plot to kill Caesar. The Roman Senators who want to get rid of him know they have to do that by March 15 – the so-called “Ides of March” holiday – because right after that Caesar is scheduled to leave on another military campaign against the Parthian empire (mostly in modern-day Iran, though at its height it stretched from Turkey to Afghanistan and Pakistan and encompassed the so-called “Fertile Crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq as well). Caesar, says Holland, “sees Brutus as if he's a son who he's looked after, cherished, and promoted. Now, Caesar promises Brutus fantastic things. He's gonna get a key appointment this year, and this will all put him on track for a consulship in the future as well. It’s a really bittersweet moment for Brutus. On the one hand, he is climbing that ladder of offices. The consulship is in reach. But at the same time, he doesn't like the fact that Caesar is centralizing all of this power around himself. But in the end, he's able to shrug it off because at the moment, he's benefiting from the system.”
Caesar tests the waters of whether the Roman people are ready to accept him as, essentially, a king by staging an elaborate ceremony in which his loyal and trusted assistant, Mark Antony, will offer him a diadem – essentially a crown – instead of the gold replica of a laurel wreath he’s been wearing. But when he notices that the audience reacts negatively at the sight of Caesar being offered a crown, he gets the message and pushes the damned thing away. Caesar gets at least two warnings of his impending assassination, one from a priest named Spurinna and one from his wife, Calpurnia, who’s had a dream about him being assassinated in the Senate and pleads with him not to go. But one of the conspirators against him, Decimus – a long-standing ally of Caesar but one who, like Brutus and fellow conspirators Cassius and Cicero, has got disillusioned with him – goes to Caesar to convince him to attend the latest session of the Senate after all. “Decimus says to Caesar, ‘This is behavior unbecoming of you,’” Holland explains. “‘What – what am I supposed to go and tell the Senate? That you're scared of shadows, that you're obedient to a woman's importunities? This is not behavior appropriate to Caesar.’” So Caesar goes to the Senate and gets knifed to death by 20 to 30 people, each of whom decided to take a role in the assassination so it could not be blamed on any one person. Unfortunately, the death of Caesar does not restore the Roman Republic; after yet another Roman civil war Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian takes absolute power and declares himself Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. The Roman Empire, like the Republic, lasts for 500 years in the West (and another 1,000 in the East as the Byzantine Empire, which splits off from its parent and holds out until 1453, when it’s conquered by the Ottoman Turks), and Rome becomes the paradigmatic historical example of a self-governing society that collapsed through the greed and hunger for power of a single determined individual.
The historians interviewed for the “Ides of March” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator make this point explicitly in the closing minutes of the documentary. Tom Holland says, “I think the tragedy of the Roman Republic is that its greatest man, the man who in so many ways exemplified all its qualities to an absolute pitch of achievement, those achievements brought the Roman Republic crashing down into rubble.” Classics professor Jeffrey Tatum says, “When Julius Caesar commenced his political career, he could never have imagined that the Roman Republic would come to an end, and he certainly couldn't have imagined that he would be the agent that brought that about. And yet, that's what happened in a very short time. What are the lessons for modern representational systems that are not nearly so old? Could modern democracy collapse? Perhaps we simply take our political norms for granted.” Rory Stewart, a former British cabinet member, says, “There was a moment where the Roman Republic seemed the most perfect political state on earth. Then it had got itself into trouble. And this reminds us a bit of our own period. From about 1989, democracy was on the rise. The number of democracies in the world doubled, and then a period of deep, deep uncertainty began, including the rise of populism. And it's in that environment authoritarianism thrives, that strong men come forward to challenge democracy.” British constitutional lawyer and scholar Shami Chakrabarti says, “I think the Caesar story really is a wake-up call. Democracy has to be constantly fought for. If we take it for granted, a new Caesar will come.” And it seems quite likely, given his ability to overcome obstacles that would have sunk the political careers of lesser men and the almost god-like adulation he receives from millions of Americans, that the new Caesar has indeed arrived and his name is Donald Trump.
