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I was at the old Roman Forum on the Ides of March. People had left flowers at the death site. Some people still admirer and mourn him.
by peter303 5y ago
I was at the old Roman Forum on the Ides of March. People had left flowers at the death site. Some people still admirer and mourn him.
- whakim 5y agoI don't think the reputation of Caesar as a "man of the people" can survive true interrogation. Caesar was a master propagandist, but perhaps more importantly many of our sources postdate him and come from a world in which he'd been literally deified.
- panick21_ 5y agoIt depends. If you have strong oligarchy that is trying to be superseded by a strong man that is trying to weaken the oligarchy, that strong man often has intensive to do thing for the people and pull them on his side. Not sure if we have enough evidence but it makes political sense.
- droopyEyelids 5y agoPart of Julius Caesar's tyranny was his work to cancel the debt of common people and redistribute land- Debt owed to wealthy (the senate), and land 'owned' (seized from the public) by the wealthy (the senate). Depending on what aspects of history you learned, there could be good reason to put a flower on his grave. https://www.jstor.org/stable/292075 https://www.jstor.org/stable/292075 here's a bit on Lex Agraria, though focused on the earlier one from Tiberius https://www.britannica.com/topic/land-reform/History-of-land-reform#ref320303 https://www.britannica.com/topic/land-reform/History-of-land...
- 21723 5y agoPart of Julius Caesar's tyranny was his work to cancel the debt of common people and redistribute land- Debt owed to wealthy (the senate), and land 'owned' (seized from the public) by the wealthy (the senate). That's not "part of [his] tyranny." That's a good thing that he did. He was also a tyrant in some ways, because people are complicated, and lots of people do a fairly even mix of good and bad.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- monkeycantype 5y agoAt risk of over explaining, I think the parent commenter agrees with you. The word tyranny is likely used because that word conveys the impression most people formed in school history classes of his actions - actions which motivated his peers to to assassinate him. But the comment finishes with : "there could be good reason to put a flower on his grave." Indicating that the actions described as 'tyranny' might in fact be actions we would agree with, and that the assassins may not be the heroes of the story.
- bawolff 5y agoAlso, historically the word tyrant didn't solely mean "evil" so much as someone who subverted the existing power structures. Nonetheless, i'm sure the people who had their property redistributed were pretty unammused.
- ypzhang2 5y agoThis seems to be the “popular” narrative but the actual truth seems to be much more nuanced. Labeling the senate as a block for example misses a large part of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s7p2dk/how_much_of_an_economic_populist_was_caesar_really/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s7p2dk/how_m...
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoTheres been talk about alternative search engines recently abd the prwctice of putting ’reddit' in google searches. Feels like you could do a better 'medium' just by locating angry rants left by enthusiasts and experts on reddit. Or the thing where you scrape HN for all links to a book/site.