While I respect OP's right to block any interaction they want with their post, I will reiterate here: do not make the mistake of framing the assassins of Caesar as somehow Brilliant Protectors of Democracy.
Rome was not a free democracy in any way that we'd recognize as such. Their system was overwhelmingly rigged to maintain the power of the wealthy (yes I mean worse than this one, yes no I really do in fact mean that, however bad you think now is increase by like the power of ten), and had begun to break down into mob violence and populism well before Caesar was even a twinkle in his mother's eyes, and had already gone through more than one period of mass political violence and murder including violent purges and executions at the whim of a military dictator (ahhhh, Sulla).
The Senate was NOT elected by the people of Rome, and this is a very deep misunderstanding of how the Senate worked. They were INTENSELY wealthy landholders, started out as only patricians (inherited nobility, for the sake of brevity) and only later admitted EXTREMELY WEALTHY plebian families, and they were appointed by consuls. For life.
Technically, consuls were elected. Technically. But the voting in the Centuriate Assembly was by weighted voting BLOCS and it was done in an open vote - aka everyone knew who you were voting for - and the weight was OVERWHELMINGLY weighted towards the elite. Who were usually….. either from senatorial families….or aligned to them.
The Roman Senate was NEVER an elected body and it was NEVER a democratic government. It was ALWAYS a body built up of the richest and most powerful men from the richest and most powerful families of Rome, the ranks from whom the kings had been pulled before that office was ended, and their concern for "equality" was that of making sure that no other person of this rank could be above any others.
This was a group of oligarchs who were REALLY MAD that another of their number had successfully bypassed THEIR stranglehold on power via ruthless and clever manipulation of the unlanded masses of the actual City of Rome and most importantly of the Army, and become more powerful than they were, threatening their hold on the system and their claim on tradition, stabbing the heck out of him.
A couple generations previously they’d also freaked out, broken up their benches, attacked the guy who was at the head of a land reform movement that would have given farms back to the landless instead of letting it be bought up to add to the huge slave worked estates of the Senate and Equestrians, and beat him to death and threw him into the Tiber.
Don’t get me wrong: Gaius Julius Caesae was trash and his nephew was HORRIFYINGLY cold bloodedly ruthless in his subsequent quest for absolute power.
But the Senate were also trash and IF Rome had ever even briefly managed to truly serve even all its own native born people rather than being merely a brutal oligarchy rather than brutal monarchy, it was WELL over by the time Caesar got used as a pincushion.
And this is important because the use of the sanitized and tidied up version of Rome as a propaganda/cultural ideal was deliberate and specific and is also a favourite of certain flavours of the extreme right wing (Mussolini was big on the Roman Senate, actually).
If you want to draw any lesson from the Ides of March, it's that a system built substantially on political violence against opponents, based on their ability to inspire the loyalty of the masses within a population point based on the desperation of said masses to actually eat and have shelter (which is what Caesar was very good at offering, because he was rich as fuck), hinging on the loyalty of a military that saw itself as tied to its generals rather than its society, is always gonna end in a bloodbath of murder and a subsequent horrifying civil war and unrest, and we really shouldn't aspire to copy that at all.
snowghoul
blakekathryn
titsay
annaxmalina
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vaporwave
theartofmadeline
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