Throughout this chapter, I have explored some of the causes and the purposes of what has been called the ‘‘analogico-historical method’’37 for interpreting American foreign policy and its recent transformations, a method which appeared in political debate in print and then online through the course of the twentieth century and which has taken on an extraordinary vigor in the early years of the twenty-first. Whereas the analogy with Roman Empire has come to belong both to the right as well as the left of the political spectrum (a boast as well as a condemnation), the twinned analogy with Julius Caesar has been deployed almost exclusively in critical key. This is not only as a result of what Caesar was (insofar as it can be discovered from his own writings and other ancient sources),38 but also of what he has become in the political discourses of Europe and the United States.39
As foil for western traditions ofrepublicanism, Julius Caesar has come to symbolize the moment of greatest danger to the Roman Republic. He was its ruin. His selfinterested ambition led him to usurp senatorial authority by arms. His designs on monarchy led to the establishment of the rule of emperors. The expansion of empire and the centralization of power led ultimately to Rome’s fall. Caesar has been index and embodiment of a devastating turning point in history.40 Caesarian analogy thus generates, legitimates, and renders more plausible an especially vivid representation of American politics. It paints a portrait of its foreign policy in the bright reds of a bloody imperialism, its president in the deep purples of a ruthless tyranny. It constructs this moment in the early years of the twenty-first century as equal in historical significance to that when the Roman Republic collapsed. It ennobles those politicians and pundits who utilize it with the gravitas of a brave American Cicero or Cato, and links them back to their own nation’s Founding Fathers (who had used the analogy before them) as new guardians of that republican legacy.41
Curiously, however, although the analogy with Roman Empire has been strongly predictive and bleakly apocalyptic on many occasions in its use, the Caesarian analogy has rarely been pressed for the particulars of Caesar’s bloody end. Rarely, that is, until the months and years after the invasion of Iraq, until, that is, debate shifted toward the uncertain issue of a post-invasion settlement. First hints can be discerned in an article by Brad Warthen which was released on March 31, 2003 (only twelve days after the invasion) by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Information Services, a leading information provider to American print, television, and electronic media. He begins:
George W. Bush has crossed his Rubicon, and he has taken us with him. Julius Caesar set world history on a new course when he took his legion into Italy in defiance of the Senate. President Bush has taken an equally irrevocable step by entering the Tigris and Euphrates basin to wage war in spite of UN objections.42
While the author goes on to claim that he welcomes this development - with great power comes the responsibility to act and only Bush is single-minded enough to pull it off - he acknowledges that this, perhaps even more than previous turning points in history, creates problems, not just opportunities: ‘‘This Rubicon is wider than the one Caesar crossed.’’ Current problems are likely to last, but Bush could not. More explicitly, and aggressively, Denise Giardina argued in an editorial which featured in the Charleston Gazette on May 12, 2003 that Bush had ‘‘assumed the mantle of Julius Caesar. He is in the process of ruining the American republic and establishing an American/corporate empire.’’ The president should be impeached and stand in the dock to be tried for war crimes.43
Perhaps only within the relative safety - the pastness, the theatricality, the tradition, the cultural authority - of performances of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has it been possible to touch upon Caesar’s assassination as a lesson about contemporary events, for fear of appearing literally to advocate the president’s assassination.44 In recent years, two notable modern-dress productions of the play were staged, coinciding roughly with the Ides of March and with the second anniversary of the invasion, in which an American flavor was injected into Roman (and, of course, Renaissance) politics rather than the other way around. One was directed by Deborah Warner at the Barbican Theatre in London. Audiences could observe that the mise-en-scene of the play’s battle scenes closely mimicked on stage one of the photographs of the Iraq war that had been inserted in their programs in between details of the production. In the program, coordinated by the presence of the color purple on facing pages, a photograph of a smiling Bush in the combat uniform of the US airforce was also placed side by side with a quotation from Act 2.1 of the play: ‘‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.’’ A few pages along, coordinated now in yellow, the photograph of a soldier at the ready in Iraq was placed facing a quotation from 4.3: ‘‘You have done that you should be sorry for.’’ While in press interviews the director suggested in passing a possible connection between the excessive authority of Caesar and that of Bush, these other analogical strategies would seem instead to be indicating a lesson for Bush in Brutus, namely, the danger of failing to consider carefully and be well prepared for the aftermath of assassination, the dreadful consequences of tyrannicide.45 The other production, directed by Daniel Sullivan at the Belasco Theatre, New York, achieved considerable press coverage for its casting of the Hollywood film star Denzel Washington as Brutus. Again the mise-en-scene was suggestive of modern-day battle, with explosive sound effects of gunfire and overhead helicopters, costumes of business suits and camouflage fatigues, props of assault rifles and photo ID security badges. The assassination, however, was located in a boardroom, and off stage. On at least one occasion, the star of the production attempted explicitly to fix a much more provocative analogy for the play’s potential audiences. According to the New York Times for April 3, 2005, in interview Washington pulled out a photograph of the president surrounded by his inner circle and asked who would lead the rebellion ‘‘if he decided he wanted to make himself King, like Julius Caesar.’’ Asked by the interviewer who would be Brutus, he replied: ‘‘the obvious one is Colin Powell.’’46
While the analogical strategies employed for these modern stagings of Shakespeare could well be regarded as merely superficial devices for the generation of publicity and good box office, they are nonetheless indicative of the continuing attraction of Caesar as a mechanism for reflecting upon American politics and its global repercussions in the twenty-first century. Toward the end of the twentieth century, in his study of the traditions of republicanism and Caesarism, Peter Baehr argued that Julius Caesar and the Roman world were now disappearing from political discourse, and fading from the social memory of the West.47 Although his concern was largely with sustained discussion of Caesar in political theory, and mine has been with passing reference in popular political debate, I hope that this chapter has begun to demonstrate that in the early years of the twenty-first century Caesar has by no means vanished from the imagination of western culture.
World History
