I recently read a biography on him. I had to stop about 60-70% through because I came to dislike him so much. Apparently he was, if not clinically, my understanding of a narcissistic sociopath.
I did thrice offer him a kingly crown that he did thrice refuse, is this naracism?
Ceasar was a ruler for the people. He increased the citizens grain allotment (doubled it?), took many captives for Rome and put the ransom towards the general fund and left most of what he owned to the people in his will.
The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy.
>did thrice offer him a kingly crown that he did thrice refuse, is this naracism
It's politicking. He already had the power of a king, and knew the title would only harm him. It's why August called himself the "first citizen of Rome" rather than king or emperor. They weren't forgoing the power, just the title.
>The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy.
Augustus got to write history on him, and that provided an overly rosy view that wasn't heavily questioned for centuries, likely still providing a rosy view of him two millennia later.
Imperator (in English Emperor) was a title specifically invented by Augustus to avoid the title king. It might be roughly translated as "Commander", in a military sense.
That's definitely not correct. The first sentences in Wikipedia date its use to the Roman Kingdom and Republic, long before Augustus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator
...or as we'd say today, a typical "populist". I don't think there were any genuinely "good guys" among the Roman political elite just by process of natural selection. Politics in Rome was a cut-throat business, and much closer to an oligarchy or mafia state than what we understand today as a "republican democracy". I have no doubt that Caesar only had his own political advancement in mind with the ultimate goal to become an autocratic ruler when he pretended to care about the "people".
PS: all my own opinions of course, formed by reading the usual sources :)
As another "fan" of Caesar, I agree with this take. There's much to be appreciated about Caesar when looking at his strategies, tactics, politicking, etc. He was absolutely brilliant. But that was all born on the backs of using and abusing people (sometimes Roman, sometimes the people Romans conquered). This isn't unique to him and is just emblematic of Rome at the time, and its attitude towards itself, towards conquering, and towards non-Romans. To appreciate Caesar requires a certain amount of separating the artist from the art, and knowing that the good he did was more a means to and end rather than an end in-and-of itself.
Were there any famous or powerful Romans we might consider more liberal/progressive by modern standards? People who didn't believe in wantonly enslaving and plundering and conquering, or exploiting populist rhetoric, or otherwise abusing people. People who made reforms without ulterior motives (or at least with benevolence and empathy as some of the genuine motives).
(One can argue there aren't many powerful people like that even in modern times, but I can at least think of a few. Just wondering about Roman history, though.)
I thought the Gracchi brothers[0] might be an example of what you're looking for, but a quick skim of the wikipedia page (it's been almost two decades since I read their history properly) suggests that even they weren't examples of this.
Populism is a mixed term. But historically, it involves using majoritarianism to accumulate power and defeat systemic checks. It’s successful in the short run and damning in the long.
Explaining to a starving orphan (or more pointedly: veteran legionnaire) that they can’t have food because of the constitutional system of consular veto is basically unwinnable, which is why that situation is checkmate: if you fight for principles you’re heartless, and if you fight for what seems right you must become a dictator. Roman politics, by the late Republic, has reached this level of gridlock and imbalance where the only factions were a conservative establishment unwilling to accept any change and a populist wing populated with strongmen.
Put another way, Sulla and Caesar failed where Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR succeeded.
The "norms of the Republic" were constantly violated to enrich the elites of Rome, it was only when Ceasar violated them for the people was it a problem. It's a tale as old as time, sort of like low interest rates, it's a party until wages start to tick up then all of the sudden we have to do something about all this inflation.
> The "norms of the Republic" were constantly violated to enrich the elites of Rome, it was only when Ceasar violated them for the people was it a problem
There are high norms and low norms. (My terminology.) Low norms range from basic corruption to which sexual orientation is in vogue. High norms subvert how power is wielded. Equating these two is page one of populism. (You have a broad point in that crossing the Rubicon was a generational affair by Caesar’s point. But nobody was happy about it when Sulla did it either.)
> until wages start to tick up then all of the sudden we have to do something about all this inflation
This cannot be a serious reading of the data. Wages rose precipitously for a decade [1]. Even during the pandemic, while wages rose and stimulus reigned, measured inflation was low as were rates. When inflation started rising, rates remained low because the Fed thought it transitory. It’s only when it surged that the FOMC stepped in. The Fed was not only fine but thrilled with rising real wages.
> while wages rose and stimulus reigned, measured inflation was low as were rates.
Investors have been walking away with more and more of the productivity since about 1970 or so. Young people are less likely to own a home due to insane asset price increases during that time and the fed kept lowering rates in spite of this. They raised interest rates specifically to prevent a "wage price spiral" but had no problem with the price spiral around housing because wages weren't going up as well.
If CPI was accurate you'd have the same standard of living your grandfather had. A decent house on a single salary, pension, new car in the driveway. The modern young professional class lives in overpriced apartment blocks, a lot of them don't even own a car. The iPhone doesn't make the mandatory two income household with no assets lifestyle equivalent to what we had previously.
> If CPI was accurate you'd have the same standard of living your grandfather had. A decent house on a single salary, pension, new car in the driveway.
CPI speaks to price levels. It says nothing about standards of living, just cost. Nobody argues that if you were on the winning team, life in the 50s wasn’t great. Naturally, if you poll folks from different backgrounds, that rose tint fades a bit. Unfortunately, we don’t have fine-grained economic statistics from the 50s to today.
> wages are up and CPI is accurate why are living standards down
Living standards are not down over ten years. Statistically and, for me, anecdotally. I’m making no comparison over lifetimes because we haven’t been collecting e.g. real median household income over that interval.
Fortunately, it’s beside the point. You alleged “wages start[ed] to tick up then all of the sudden” rates were raised. That’s untrue. Wages were rising for a decade, including precipitously through the pandemic, before we did anything about it.
When economists say standards of living are higher they mostly mean life expectancy has increased and we have iPhones.
Go around at talk to some of the young people you know, are they willing to trade a few years at the end of their life and their iPhone to get out of student debt and own a home?
> When economists say standards of living are higher they mostly mean life expectancy has increased and we have iPhones
This is incorrect.
> talk to some of the young people you know
We’re paying down our debt and buying homes. We’re more stretched than our grandparents were at our age, but our objective quality of life is far superior. I wouldn’t give up modern telecommunications for a bigger house.
I own assets and am happy. (The home owning is often a source of stress that competes with my happiness.) The last ten years saw my prospects increase materially. I’ve also noticed as much in my friends with more blue-collar jobs. Statistics show a similar trend: broad gains with pockets of instability.
That's an overly reductive definition. Alistair Campbell defines it to include a deliberate turning "the people" against "the elites" and to exploit the ensuing discord.
It's an important part that this isn't a genuine concern, it's 100% manufactured by the populist for their own benefit. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, two populists, are both very much part of the "elite" they claim to rage against.
It's also important that this is done specifically to cause social problems they can exploit. They have no intention of actually fixing the problem they "identify" and will continue to blame new "elite" groups to obtain or maintain power.
This is a disgusting falsehood and I genuinely think you need to be ashamed of yourself for saying things like this. This "popular anger" is regularly directed against the most powerless in society. Look at the demonisation of LGBT+, ethnic minorities, refugees, Jews and traveller communities to name just a few.
To hold any notion that this "only a danger to those in power," you'd have to completely ignore huge swathes of recorded history. You'd also have to completely ignore the actual examples I gave of populists like Nigel Farage. The man who right now makes his career out of demonising refugees drowning in the English Channel.
I think you mentally inserted 'only' into that sentence.
Yes, certainly populists can be dangerous to all of those groups, as can elites. Political violence is certainly not limited to populists: indeed their contribution is small in historical terms.
> certainly populists can be dangerous to all of those groups
This is why you should be ashamed: that use of the word "can."
Populists always target vulnerable people. They're the easiest groups to direct public anger without fear of reprisal against themselves.
> indeed their contribution is small in historical terms.
You then follow up with this gem. This, again, is to completely ignore multiple genocides that populists directly caused. Simple example: The Holocaust.
The label is in itself mildly interesting, because if looked at from a different perspective, then populist simply means democratic ( popular, because that is what people want ). Amusingly, it is not that dissimilar to how liberal works ( in itself, the word is not 'bad', but it was made 'bad' ).
> populist simply means democratic ( popular, because that is what people want )
Democracy is what the people want. Majoritarianism is blindly doing what most people want. Populism involves majoritarianism, and both imply the failure of democracy. (This happens fast in a system of elections with no checks and balances.)
Um, what? "The people" is not a single entity, and does not "want" things. Individual people want things. So if democracy is "what the people want", then democracy does not exist.
> "The people" is not a single entity, and does not "want" things. Individual people want things. So if democracy is "what the people want", then democracy does not exist
Congratulations, you’ve found the fatal flaw in millennia of thinking on the topic.
What “the people” want is unknowable. That is the point and paradox. Democracy is a system for balancing individual wants against individual needs, enabling each majority while protecting every minority. It’s a system of trade-offs which eludes poetic summation. It dies when we get caught up in word play over pragmatic concerns, or when someone claims to speak singularly for what “the people” want.
> democracy does not exist--since no actual system has ever actually done these things
It exists as much as Newtonian gravity. It’s an ideal because we’re defining it in its idealised form.
Political systems aspire to sets of ideals. Some emphasise stability; their leaders are Machiavellian. Some aspire to democratic ideals. Democracy per se is a simplification, as all political systems must be to fit into a textbook, but that doesn’t make it less real. Just difficult to summarise.
It’s a deep debate beyond a quip or HN comment. I wasn’t trying to define democracy, just delineate it from majoritarianism, with which it’s unfortunately commonly confused.
They claim to, but I have yet to see one that actually does, except for the Machiavellian case you mention, where the leaders are quite open about the fact that they're looking out for their own interests and let the chips fall where they may as far as the impact on anyone else. If you can call that an ideal.
> It’s an ideal because we’re defining it in its idealised form.
Even if I take your idealized form as you state it and put aside my previous objections, when I ask myself what kind of system in human history has actually come closest to doing what you describe, what I get is an ultra-libertarian free market system with a government that is as weak as possible--at any rate, in which any government that exists does not have a monopoly of force and cannot expect to enforce its edicts against people that disagree with them. Historical examples include Saga period Iceland and some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early to mid 1700s, before the British decided to tighten up on the colonies after the French and Indian War.
In other words, if your ideal really is "democracy" as you describe it, historical experience shows that governments take you away from that ideal, not towards it.
It is not what most people want, that’s majoritarianism, a known failure mode for democratic systems. The majority voting to execute the 10% whose views they don’t believe in is fine, electorally, but bankrupt, democratically.
> Caesar only had his own political advancement in mind with the ultimate goal to become an autocratic ruler when he pretended to care about the "people".
Oh, exactly like 90% of modern politicians then...
Roman politics, one could even say culture, had a fundamental flaw in equating military competence with political savvy. (Our modern analog is commercial and governance.)
Sulla and Marius and Pompey and Caesar personally raised armies, legitimately and then otherwise. This gave every Roman commander a practical veto unthinkable in modern politics.
Actually, I think it could be said that Pompey did it illegitimately before he did it legitimately (legitimately meaning: with the support of the sitting government in Rome), raising troops in support of Sulla's invasion force. Of course, legitimacy is a bit strange in the Sulla-Marius years.
> don't think there were any genuinely "good guys" among the Roman political elite just by process of natural selection
Cicero comes pretty close. Would also note that Sulla, despite being awful, eventually gave up the title of dictator after enacting constitutional reforms. (Naturally, the killing his political opponents bit backfired.)
Cicero invented the conspiracy of Catiline, had Roman citizens put to death without trial, and was a warrior on the side of the oligarchy (the Optimates) all his life, despite the fact that they despised him.
Sulla was a reactionary mass murderer.
In the end, through Caesar, the Populares won, despite decades of political killings on behalf of the Optimates to defend their theft of public land.
The “extent of the exaggeration is unclear and still debated; most classicists agree that the conspiracy occurred as broadly described – rather than being a Machiavellian invention of Cicero's – but concede that its actual threat to the republic was exaggerated for Cicero's benefit and to heighten later dramatic narratives” [1]. Think: Giuliani invoking 9/11 at every turn of conversation.
> had Roman citizens put to death without trial
The Senate let him by passing the SCU [2]. He was quelling a rebellion and Rome had no jails. Again, not unblemished good guy, but given the circumstances, within the shadow of doubt.
> literally appointed and was a warrior on the side of the oligarchy (the Optimates) all his life
This is a callous reading of his policy views. He advocated for stability. He wasn’t Roman patrician elite, and had experienced what political instability in Rome meant in the countryside. He had loose alignment with Rome’s conservatives, but in a pragmatic way, and was on good terms with Caesar and even Octavian.
The Cicero-Giuliani comparison is hilarious, and not bad at all now that I think about it.
Re SCU and the Conspiracy: that the SCU was first used against the Gracchi tells you something about its political motivations. The Senate was always a bastion of the Roman plutocracy. Also the SCU has been retconned, somewhat, by Cicero's partisans. It was invented late, during a bitter class war, and certainly doesn't count as one of the ancient traditions of the Roman republic.
Most Roman historians were knights: most classical historians were gentlemen. This profoundly shapes our view of Roman history.
Historia Civilis's summary of the crown incident is convincing to me.
> It's highly dramatic, and it seems to have played out a little too perfectly. In my opinion it's pretty clear that Antony and Caesar coordinated the whole thing ahead of time. Cicero reached the same conclusion. ...
> Some say that this Lupercalia incident was Caesar testing the water. If the crowd had been into it, he would have accepted the diadem. Others say that this was a performative rejection of the crown, staged so that he could continue to wield his other king-like powers as he wished.
> I'm kinda in the first camp. Caesar was vain. He liked being flagrant and wearing his Triumphator outfit during festivals. He liked his special little golden chair that was definitely not a throne. He liked all of the pomp and circumstance. My feeling is that in his heart, he wanted a crown.
> The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy.
The people who killed him lost. Caesar Augustus, caesar's adopted son, ultimately prevailed. The history we get from that era is mostly the one that julius caesar himself wrote and what his allies wrote. As churchill said, history will be kind to me because I intend to write it. That's why millenia after caesar's death, everywhere from Russia (czar) to germany ( kaiser ) exalt him. Dante didn't put caesar in the mouth of satan in the center of hell. Dante put Brutus and Cassius in the mout of satan for eternity. You yourself quoted a shakespearean play that praises caesar and denigrates his killers.
Brutus is reviled like Judas or Benedict Arnold. It's a name that lives in infamy.
My degree is in Classics and this was something I found frustrating. It's clear that Imperial Rome under Augustus was a more egalitarian and meritocratic society than the oligarchical one which preceded it. But I honestly came away from tutorials being surprised at the extent that my tutors seemed genuinely convinced by the arguments made by that deposed oligarchy that Rome had become "less free".
No they didn’t. The primary sources for Julius Caesar’s life are Julius Caesar writing about his own campaigns, Plutarch, Suetonius and Appian. None of the conspirators wrote any history that has survived.
They literally turned this man into a God after he died! By 42BC the Senate considered him a God. His successor adopted his name and called himself Gaius Julius Caesar because he wanted to be associated with the name. Many Roman emperors adopted the name Caesar. And German kaiser, Russian tsar and Turkish kaiser-i-Rum all refer to this one man.
The biographer had very sound methods for sourcing so I don’t think we can just dismiss what we now know about him. As an example he slept with the wives of the senators as a sport. He may have been effective in governing but he comes across as a despicable human being.
He, Octavian, and Marc Antony overthrew the republic. He made himself into a bad guy.
Coming from a patrician family (the Julii, through his father; his mother was of more significant birth), he was hardly a man of the people. He took a traditional Patrician path to power (priest, war, tribune, governor, imperator, author, senator ...)
The fact that Pompey and Cicero were patricians is irrelevant. None of them really had the interest of the masses at heart. Increasing the grain allotment made Caesar no more a man of the people than becoming a tribune had. Augustus did much more in that regard (he personally paid off the public debt!) and he was no man of the people either.
Stalin submitted his resignation from the role of secretary general I believe 6 or 7 times, and all times the resignation was refused. What's your point?
Also, wasn't the guy who wrote history on him his nephew and protwge?
Even by the standards of 2000 years ago, Caesar was at best controversial (in the view of many Romans at the time, he essentially destroyed the country) and most of the emperors were widely loathed (note that it was a position with an extremely low life expectancy; they tended to be assassinated).
In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers. Although being incredibly full of yourself seems to have been going around at the time. Cicero was quite fond of quoting himself to back up an argument.
> In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers.
He's a precursor to Churchill who wrote "history will be kind to me because I intend to write it". But then again, alexander the great was a precursor to caesar since alexander brought a team of writers with him to write about or invent his great exploits. Alexander was said to bemoan the fact that Odyseus had the great Homer but he himself had no one as great as Homer to write about him. Imagine having a large team of the best greek writers glorifying everything you do and still feeling cheated because none of them is Homer.
From Alexander to Caesar to Churchill to Trump, regardless of whatever else they were and your opinions of them, they were great self-promoters.
Julius Caesar demonstrated some characteristics that could be associated with narcissism. He had a strong desire for power, a high level of ambition, and a considerable concern with his public image. We should also take into consideration that these traits were common among Roman political figures and military leaders of the time.
Additionally, many of our understandings about Caesar's personality and actions come from historical accounts, some of which were written by his contemporaries who had their own political agendas, and others were written long after his death. Therefore, these accounts may not provide a completely accurate or unbiased view of his personality.
I'd like to note that the moral and ethical standards for the upper echelons of Roman society was very different than today's western standards. Different traits were championed. For example, "De Bello Gallico" (On the Gallic War,) is not a neutral historical account; it was written by Caesar for a Roman audience and aimed to defend and promote his actions. His conquest of Gaul would amount to genocide in a modern context but the Roman Public (the common people), at the time didn't seem to mind too much and thought his actions heroic.
Sounds like most people in power. Think a bit about a long path one has to go through to come to such power, all the backstage fights, quid pro quo deals, backstabbings. Normal straight balanced happy folks normally don't stand a chance. What you see usually is carefully made up PR personna tailored to given target audience.
That narcissistic part is more variable but helps ie with public speeches, it can be also worse, ie sadistic.
Someone has to sit in the chair and pretend to be in control of the uncontrollable. And its usually the clueless or the insane. My boss calls them the mindlessly ambitious. You need them cuz the other side has them too. Keeping them on a leash and fully occupied so they don't destroy the universe is called the Central Economic Problem.
What sort of personality did you expect the man responsible for the Gallic Wars to have? He was a genocidaire, a slaver, a rapist, and more. All of these 'great' historical leaders were murderous shits when viewed from a modern perspective. The 'nicest' Roman Emperor was an utterly terrible human being by our standards. But that doesn't mean there is no benefit to learning about them.
Does this come as a surprise? I can't imagine anything different from someone who believes themself to be competent and justified to be an autocrat as Caesar did. In fact I would be very surprised to find an example of someone who aspires to autocracy who doesn't have narcissistic/sociopathic traits.
