So as I mentioned, in reading N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God, I find that Wright mentions a number of sources, writers and historians, in building a fleshed-out picture of the ancient world a few decades BCE. The Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius Tranquilis is one of those sources. After a tiny bit of digging, I chose the classic translation by Robert Graves. Here are some things I learned this week:
1. Julius Caesar was apparently very ambitious. The noble Brutus may have been right on that point after all.
2. People knew Julius Caesar was a wild one from the jump, but they just kept moving him around to various positions of power until he finally started a civil war.
3. Bribery was apparently not just common, but also not a secret and an openly acknowledged means of winning the vote. It was also apparently not unheard of to shut down rivals with active threats of bodily harm on the senate floor.
4. Roman senators managed to live lives of great and widely known personal and political scandal even in the absence of modern social media.
5. Caesar made and lost and bought a lot of friends and allies over the course of his career. One can only imagine that in real time it would have been nearly impossible to foretell the outcome, but in hindsight, his ability to woo the people was one of the biggest keys to his success.
These things may have been obvious to others already but somehow, in my naive imagination, I had envisioned grave and austere sages sitting in a circle of elevated seats in a gallery overlooking a stately stone auditorium, reasoning passionately but without violence until the dramatic and unforeseen betrayal and Caesar's cry, "Et tu, Brute?" This, along with several descriptions of various suicides, conflicts, and untimely ignominious deaths of other prominent figures of Roman antiquity is starting to drive home the fact that the ancient world I was taught to revere was a hard, and at times, rather hopeless place. (Praise God for Jesus!)
I think that it would be really useful if a greater emphasis on history was renewed, and taken in context with how we have arrived at our current location, particularly in the West. (I also believe it would be even more effective if we paid more attention to the histories of cultures that have often been ignored, suppressed, or reframed, and that the interplay of the narratives of dominant and subdominant groups would shed a lot of light on the situation, if we cared to listen.) It would be even better if we could take those lessons and reexamine our current state. The social and political circumstances that led to Caesar's rise to power, and his role as the last link between a tenuous republic and an Empire that conquered the world, have had many analogies over the centuries, and it would be shortsighted to imagine that it could never happen again...
