Conservatives have lied about the actions and motivations of progressives since the time of Athens and Rome. It is time to begin looking at history with a more jaundiced eye, and from the perspective of the Caesar Factor: that fear and jealousy motivate the conservatives far more than avarice and anger motivate progressives.

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The Caesar Factor

by Richard Girard

"If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men's failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for work, a mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle?" William Makepeace Thackeray, The Four Georges, "George the Third" (1855).

"You all did love him once, not without cause." William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 2 (1599).

I was in session with my therapist last week, talking about people we admired in history. Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Lincoln were compared and contrasted with one another, as icons of our nation. I told my therapist that if I were wealthy, I would have busts of all these men in my home. I then told him that I would have a sixth bust that would probably shock him: Gaius Julius Caesar.

My therapist's jaw dropped, and asked why just as the time for our session expired. I told him we would discuss it next time. But if he wanted an answer sooner, he should read Michael Parenti's book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Rome, (2003).

Let me give you a synopsis of Parenti's book as background.

By the middle of the Second Century B.C.E., the Roman Republic's decline was clearly visible to everyone. Tiberius and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus saw-three decades before Caesar's birth-that the numbers of Rome's yeoman farmers, the core of Rome's army and middle class, were declining so rapidly that Rome would soon find it impossible to maintain its legions. They attempted land reform, a distribution of publicly held lands to Rome's poor. The Roman oligarchs (many of whom used the public lands illegally) caused the deaths of the Gracchi (Tiberius-murdered in 132 B.C.E., Gaius-who committed suicide after leading an insurrection in 121 B.C.E.) to prevent these reforms.

This concentration of wealth (until the Industrial Revolution wealth was measured by land ownership) forced Rome-during the multiple consulships of Gaius Marius-to recruit and equip troops who, contrary to tradition, were financially unable to equip themselves. Rome's wars became such a drain on the manpower of Italy, that the two legions Cicero raised in 52 B.C.E., were the last legions raised in Italy proper for almost one-hundred and twenty years (see Stephen Dando-Collins, Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome, Appendix A, ?2003).

Gaius Julius Caesar-known to most of us as Julius Caesar, or simply Caesar-has been the bête noire of plutocratic oligarchs for more than twenty centuries. The term Caesarism is used as a pejorative, denoting any form of "military or imperial dictatorship; political authoritarianism" (The American Heritage?Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition copyright 1992). Pro-aristocratic historians-which are the majority-have consistently, and effectively, dragged Gaius Julius Caesar's name through the mud. I would describe such slander as history's Caesar Factor.

Caesar was an extraordinary individual, even by modern standards. He was a multi-linguistic polymath; a charismatic and consumate politician; an outstanding legal advocate, orator and writer; and one of history's greatest military commanders. Combine the talents of Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, Winston Churchill, and George S. Patton, Jr. , and you have a rough approximation of the capabilities of Gaius Julius Caesar.

Caesar claimed descent from the Roman goddess Venus, and the ancient kings of Alba Longa, one of Rome's first acquisitions. He was also a member of one of Rome's oldest patrician clans (Julius was his nomen or clan name).

Caesar was the nephew by marriage of Gaius Marius, who was seven times Consul of Rome (the Republic's highest elected office), victorious commander against the Numidians, and the massive Germanic invasion of Italy and Gaul in the late Second Century B.C.E.. With this background, Caesar seemed destined, at first glance, to be one of the leaders of the oligarchic faction (or optimates) in the Roman Senate.

Unlike his contemporaries, Gaius Julius Caesar did not grow up on the hills that surround the Forum of Rome, where the majority of the patrician upper class lived. Caesar grew up in the squalor of the Subura, the South Central Los Angeles of ancient Rome. His parents owned one of the better insulas, or apartment houses, in what was the worst slum in Rome. The squalor of his childhood "playgrounds," as well as the poverty of his playmates, had a profound influence on the young patrician. This granted Caesar a degree of understanding of Rome's proletariat that his contemporaries conspicuously lacked.

Caesar was also influenced by his uncle, Gaius Marius, who led the democratic faction (or popularis) of the Senate at the time of Caesar's birth. Gaius Marius was a brilliant general, but as a "New Man" (homo novus, an individual who had no ancestors that had been a member of Rome's Senate), he was a ham-handed and somewhat clueless politician. Marius believed that the gratitude of Rome for his military victories would provide him with the needed political currency to carry through his program of land reform. Marius completely underestimated his optimate adversaries. His program of resettling the veterans of his wars in colonies on public land in Italy, as well as Rome's provinces, was stillborn.

In the First Century B.C.E., farm and other unskilled and semi-skilled labor in Italy were increasingly being done by slaves, the illegal aliens of ancient Rome. There was a grain dole for many of Rome's citizens, which provided free or low-priced grain for the poor. The Roman proletariat still had to purchase their own wine, olive oil, vegetables, etc., and pay for housing and clothing. Because slaves were doing so much of Rome's labor, most Roman citizens of the lower classes-including former legionaries-were living a hand-to-mouth existence.

In a move to alleviate this poverty, Caesar, while Dictator, founded new settlements for his veterans and 80,000 of Rome's poor. He also required landowners and businessmen to hire freemen as one-third of their total labor force on their latifundia (Roman plantations, see Parenti, op. Cit., chapter 8).

Caesar demonstrated a remarkable clemency for a man of his era, at least when fighting his fellow Romans. Many of Caesar's assassins were granted amnesty when, after Pharsalus and other battles between the legions of the oligarchs and Caesar, they were captured. Only when Caesar returned to Spain a second time, putting down a rebellion by Pompey's two grown sons, did he follow the traditional course of the ancient world by giving no quarter.

One of the most blatant examples of the Caesar Factor involved his contemporary opponents. They have been portrayed as freedom-loving republicans, stopping a tyrant from destroying the Roman constitution and enslaving the Republic's citizens. The reality is they-like so many of today's oligarchs-were individuals who did not hesitate to violate the constitution, laws, and traditions of the Roman Republic when it benefited them.

These "paragons" of Republican virtue, were not above bribing the electorate to win an election for their fellow optimates. Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger for example, would publicly condemn the practice of-and happily prosecute any popularis who was caught-buying even a single vote, while defending his fellow optimates' electoral bribery as being for the good of Rome.

Marcus Tullius Cicero spoke for the rights of Roman citizens, but as Consul he trumped up improbable charges of rebellion, attempted murder and treason against Lucius Sergius Catiline. Catiline was a recent convert to the popularis cause, and Cicero's opponent in the previous year's election for Roman Consul. Cicero also ordered the execution of five men (one of them a praetor, the second highest office in Rome) without trial for allegedly conspiring with Catiline, an act that was contrary to Roman law and tradition.

The "noble" Marcus Junius Brutus (to use Shakespeare's description) was one of the two or three richest men in Rome. He loaned money at an extortionate rate (as much as 48 per cent annually) to provincial cities so they could pay tribute to Rome's publicani (tax collectors). Brutus did not hesitate to illegally make use of Rome's legions to lay siege to a city or town in order to collect what they owed him (Parenti, op. Cit., chapter 7).

The optimates used "death squads" to murder their political opponents since the time of the Gracchi. They exploited the Roman proletariat, the provinces, and treasury. They undertook these crimes not out of love for Rome, but to advance their political career, increase their political clout, or add to their personal wealth. Brutus and his fellow assassins murdered Caesar not because he was a tyrant, but because he denied the optimates their traditional "rights" of murder, theft, and extortion.

Caesar's assassination by Rome's plutocrats spelled the end of the Roman Republic. His heir Augustus established the principate, a form of hereditary monarchy that marginalized the traditional political rights of both the Senate and the people of Rome. This provided a temporary degree of stability, but its reliance on the military, and the spark of madness that infected the Julio-Claudian dynasty, limited the length of that stability.

Caesar was-if we are to believe Suetonius and Plutarch-popular with the vast majority of Rome's lower and middle class citizens. No, he was more than popular: he was beloved.

It wasn't a blind infatuation: "the mob," "the rabble," (to use two of the kinder descriptions that the oligarchs have used to describe the mass of farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, laborers, tradesmen, and other members of the poor, working and middle class over the centuries) held Caesar to account even after he became Dictator of Rome.

The best-known instance was when Marcus Antonius (Shakespeare's Mark Anthony) thrice offered Caesar a kingly diadem during the Lupercalia (one of Rome's major religious festivals), an offstage event that Shakespeare made famous. The elimination of usurious interest rates-or more precisely, the renewed enforcement of existing law-together with the partial forgiveness of debts by Caesar, were a direct result of pressure by Rome's poor, working and middle classes on the Dictator (Parenti, op. Cit. Chapter 11).

No, the lower and middle classes of Rome loved Gaius Julius Caesar, and he loved them in return. Caesar understood that it was the people of Rome as a whole, not just the Roman Senate and the upper classes, who were truly sovereign. When Caesar was murdered, the masses of the Roman people threw everything they could find on his funeral pyre, even breaking into houses to find fuel for that fire. This affection continues today, twenty-and-one-half centuries after his death: bouquets of flowers are left at the Temple of Julius Caesar in Rome's ruined Forum every year on March 15th, the anniversary of his death (Parenti, op Cit., chapter 7).

As Shakespeare wrote, "The evil which men do lives on after them; the good oft lies interred with the bones." (Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 2.)

What has this to do with any of the problems we are currently facing in the United States? One of the underlying faults for the difficulties we face today is a modern version of the Caesar Factor. These are lies and myths perpetrated by conservative politicians, commentators and historians in order to give Americans false hope for their future prospects. These lies and myths include that it is possible for anyone to become President of the United States, fabulously rich, or achieve fame, regardless of their background, if they are willing to work hard and sacrifice.

This, like all myths, incorporate a small portion of the truth into a given tale. In the case of the American success story, the myth-makers can always point to someone who "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps," and achieved some extraordinary degree of success. The reality is that such people are the exception, and not the rule.

Another myth perpetrated by our modern optimates, is that all government programs are inherently more inefficient and costly, than if they were done by the private sector.

The most extreme plutocrats, disciples of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, hold it as an article of faith that all government programs (except maybe the government's military and law enforcement establishments) constitute some form of socialism and, by extension, a loss of individual freedom.

This leads to one of our optimates greatest lies: that freedom and free enterprise are identical. Hannah Arendt (On Revolution, chapter 6, 1963) said it perfectly: "When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. . . . Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness". . . has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."

The real underlying cause of poverty, world wide, is that there are oligarchs in every nation who have a vested interest in keeping as many people in poverty as they can, including the "cheap labor conservatives" in this country. It is far easier to control and exploit an illiterate, despairing populace that is kept at the edge of starvation and destitution, than a well fed, confident and literate citizenry.

I am certain that I will hear cries of "class warfare," and "you hate the rich," from our nation's current crop of plutocrats and wannabes. It was the rise of the American middle class after the Second World War, and their growing insistence that equal rights be applied throughout the American legal and political system, that stirred the forces of reaction in the United States. The growing political and economic power of the middle class, combined with the reduction in the number of Americans living in poverty (by becoming part of the middle class), that frightened men like Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, Antonin Scalia, and Pat Robertson. The empowerment of the poor and middle class, led to the founding of the Conservative Counterrevolution. They have openly worked to undermine the basis for the middle class in America since Ronald Reagan took office.

The plutocrats started the class war, I simply intend to help end it.

I don't hate the rich. There is not enough time in the world for me to hate any human being. But I can and do hate the plutocrats' sense of entitlement. I despise their arrogance, their conceit, and their condescension. They believe that merely being wealthy entitles them to rights and privileges above and beyond that of other citizens of the United States of America.

I think that Gaius Julius Caesar realized Rome's danger (just as I and many others have with the United States) if the extreme imbalance of wealth in Rome, what we call today "the income gap," continued. Caesar had the examples of the Plebeian Secessions in the early days of the Republic, as well as the struggles for democracy in Athens, to guide his analysis. The concentration of economic and political power, without checks or balances, always poses a threat to any form of constitutionally limited republic.

This danger exists in America today. We must change direction before we are permanently saddled with an oligarchic, totalitarian government. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush family and the other American plutocrats do not love the American Republic, and its Constitution, any more than Cato, Cicero, or Brutus loved the Roman.

Naomi Klein, in her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt, that the oligarchs have been perfecting their methods for using the economy of a nation as a means to trick that nation's citizens into accepting a plutocratic, corporate dictatorship. Or as Mussolini described it, a fascist state.

What I fear, is that the plutocrats (and their corporate proxies) are preparing to apply the lessons they have learned in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa to the western democracies, in order to cement their domination of the world.

If the American dollar crashes (and that appears to be the direction it is headed), the United States will be thrown into an economic crisis. The rest of the world could be pulled into the abyss with us by the simple expedient of our bombing Iran, especially if nuclear weapons were used. If this occurred, and the plutocrats and their tame institutions (corporations, banks, etc.) were prepared, they might offer a return to economic stability in exchange for political control. If that happens, say goodbye to the social safety net, as Milton Friedman's wet dream of a completely unregulated free market comes back into being, dragging us back (socially and economically) to 1890.

If this happens, people around the world must tell the plutocrats not only no, but hell no!

We must not trade our rights as free human beings for short term stability and comfort. The wealthiest among us must be made to pay their fair share of the tax burden, and that includes their corporate proxies. Large estates (anything over ten million 2007 U.S. dollars) should be taxed heavily in order to prevent and reverse the establishment of a hereditary aristocracy in the United States, a danger both Jefferson and Madison warned us against.

If the primary purpose of government is, to paraphrase Voltaire, redistributing a nation's wealth; our sole choice is whether we move the money from the rich to the poor or the poor to the rich. Ronald Reagan and his successors want to make the rich richer. Gaius Julius Caesar knew that for Rome to maintain any of its traditional institutions and liberties, the wealth (when it became that concentrated) needed to be redistributed from the rich to the poor. Not to the point of equality, but to the point where the rich could no longer run roughshod over the majority of Roman citizens and their rights.

If I must choose between these alternatives, the way of plutocrats like Brutus, Reagan and Bush, or the way of the so-called traitors to their class, the Presidents Roosevelt and Gaius Julius Caesar, the choice is obvious:

Ave, Caesar!

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'