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THE ASSASSINATION OF JULIUS CAESAR: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF ANCIENT ROME Michael Parenti (2003). New York: New Press, 267 pages, $ 17.95, ISBN 1565847970
This book is about ancient Roman history. It will interest anyone who has taken a course in Western Civilization or the New Testament or stumbled through introductory Latin or read the classics in translation. It is anchored around the political life of Julius Caesar (102-44 BC). Its author, Michael Parenti is in the Italian-American, working class intellectual tradition that makes the best use of their ancient heritage.
The book puts into class-conscious context the political, social and economic history of ancient Rome. It takes on the 95% of historiography, ancient and modern, which venerates the established order in the era of the Republic (510-27 BC) and laments its supposed demise during the period of the Empire (27 BC-476 AD).1 This establishment historiography depicts Caesar as a dictator and demagogue, and his assassination as a defense of the Republic. The plebs or Roman workers are viewed as a parasitic mob, a rabble interested only in bread and circuses.
In contrast, Parenti argues that Caesar's assassination was one incident in a line of political murders of popularly supported reformers. In his view, despite their traditional depiction as a lazy, criminal mob, the plebs largely consisted of hardworking laborers with their own political and economic concerns.
That The Assassination's type of class analysis has hit its mark is testified to by the protests against it.2 Parenti shows that for the past 500 years the merchant-landlord class has perpetuated the worship of its Roman senatorial counterpart in scholarship and has institutionalised it in academia. Illustrative is the work of the Harvard-based historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood. He mistakenly represents the Roman republican ideology of the early American merchant-landlord revolutionaries as the thinking of the colonial working class majority.
In contrast to the Gordon Wood version of Roman republican history, the progressive academic, Gary Nash has shown that the beliefs of the American colonial workers were more aligned with communism than with capitalism. Nash comments:
The political ideas of the majority of Americans who toiled with their hands, as farmers in the countryside, as artisans, mariners, and laborers in the towns, were not, of...