Michael Parenti's (hereinafter P) Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003) argues that "the Senate [recte senatorial] aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests" (p 2). He attempts to show this by connecting Caesar's assassination to a "a line of political murders dating back across the better part of a century" (p 3; P means 133–44 BC) starting with the Gracchi and transmitted through yet another supposed century-long fight between "optimates" and "populares".

P's narrative, however, cherry picks so selectively that all is left are the pits. What remains forms a story akin to imperialist history: an event happens; ignore why; say the empire was forced to react. But instead of subverting such blinded fantasies, P merely inverts them: like an empire suppressing causeless revolts, his heroes never bear any responsibility.

Ironically for a book with this title, Caesar's assassination is the topic of less than a tenth of the book. P wants to attribute the liberatores' plot to Caesar's attempts to secure "limited benefits for small farmers, debtors, and [recte the] urban proletariat, at the expense of the wealthy few" (p 3). But the sections on Caesar do little beyond assertion and feeble post hoc propter hoc hand-waving to show a connection between Caesar's economic policy and the liberatores' motives. P's dismissals of the liberatores' stated reasons for the assassination are largely empty rhetoric and blatant lies about the meanings of Latin words. Lay readers will find much which they ought not believe; they will also not find much they ought to know.

Method and models

The first chapter blasts history as written from the perspective of "gentlemen". To show a "glimpse of the empire as it really was" (p 19) which P supposes to reveal behind the "political biases of ancient historians" (p 18), P quotes two men (pp 16–17), Mithridates VI of Pontus – the mass murdering invader of Greece – and Calgacus. P's much vaunted self-study (p 9) seems of little use. Or, if it is of use, then it is in forcing readers to draw false conclusions as – directly after consigning Sallust to the "gentlemen" – P omits that it was the Roman senators Sallust (Hist 4.69M) and Tacitus (Agr 30) who made up Mithridates' and Calgacus' speeches. P's "glimpse" is really the ancient historians themselves.

Reading through the first and second chapters, it becomes clear how P intends to use his evidence. After giving much discussion to the paucity of sources and the need to use them critically (pp 10–11), he ignores it in favour of taking all negative sources (eg Juvenal) uncritically while omitting or dismissing all others. These chapters, however, are only bad in parts: P's most compelling criticisms are quotes of 19th and early 20th century historians' apologia for ancient slavery and oppression. These have some value if put into context; P, with great care, avoids this at all costs.

There are some errors in the third chapter's overview of the middle republic's expansion (eg P misplaces Hannibal's defeat at Zama into Italy) but they are inconsequential. The more difficult reading is P's uncritical acceptance of Plutarch and Appian's narrative of rural destruction. Rosenstein's Rome at war – showing conclusively that Appian and Plutarch are wrong and that soldiering was compatible with Roman agriculture – may not have been published in 2003, but the papers that went into it were. It seems they too eluded P's self-study.

P's grasp on the republican constitution is shaky, a problem when his political history depends on a solid understanding thereof. Contra P, the Gracchi did not prefer the comitia tributa because it was weighted for the people (p 50), they preferred it because it was the sole legislative assembly. Only a single example of centuriate (not P's "centurial") legislation appears in the late republic and the centuries' legislative function is functionally obsolete. To further his narrative, P then casts the quaestors as senior to the plebeian tribunes, though in basically every career (see MRR 2 index) this is reversed. The causal chains that follow from these inventions, on Roman politicians' incentives, have little to do with reality.

On page 54, P presents the "optimates" and "populares" as conservative and reform parties, a topic against which I have written many times before: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The tl;dr is that the more you know about the Roman Republic, the more these fantasy political parties dissolve. It is in the details – who supports whom at trials; politicians rapidly switching "sides"; grain doles and land distributions enacted by both "reformers" and "conservatives"; how all politicians asserted their defence of the people and their well-being (ie Morstein-Marx Mass oratory (2004)'s "ideological vacuum") – that they collapse. Someone saying "optimates" and "populares" were parties is how one says one knows nothing about republican politics without saying that phrase verbatim.

From the Gracchi to Caesar

P's discussion of Tiberius Gracchus starts by calling Plutarch "surprisingly sympathetic" (p 60), a strange claim when it is well established that Plutarch drew from pro-Gracchan sources. See literature review at Santangelo Topoi 15 (2007) p 469. P miscasts the senate, contra senators personally, as leading the attack on Tiberius (p 66; the consul presiding refused to act) but otherwise the facts are not terribly contorted as is expected from a lazy copying, revealed by certain suspiciously similar turns of phrase, of Perrin's Loeb translation. P's criticisms of modern historians, however, are off-base. While modern historians have said Tiberius was "tactless", "transgressing traditional observances", etc (p 63), this is in the context why Tiberius was murdered: what historians judge negatively are the miscalculations which ended in Tiberius' death and not Tiberius himself. His attack (pp 65–66) on Lintott's CAH² 9 statement that Tiberius' tactics rather than programme caused his death works only by omitting that when the law passed the oligarchy did nothing and that after he died the oligarchy… did nothing. Those facts are in P's book but never thought through. P could have read them; he certainly wrote them.

P's account continues with land reform "entirely undone" (p 66). That we have archaeologically uncovered the Gracchan cippi (boundary stones) across Italy is of no matter (see CIL 1, 642): beyond uncritical acceptance of all things bad, by this point a reader discovers P's main method: the novel innovation of pretending difficult contradictory evidence does not exist. And so Gaius Gracchus' pro-senatorial policies – sole senatorial control of provincial assignments; censorial letting of tax contracts (see OCD⁴ sv) – also go unmentioned, as do the reasons (armed occupation of one of the hills of Rome) for the first senatus consultum ultimum (p 68).

The next incident, that of Saturninus (pp 70–71), again employs P's novel innovation. That Saturninus and Glaucia murdered a rival consular candidate at the elections before occupying the Capitol to force through a law to permit Glaucia's candidacy is not convenient. See OCD⁴ sv "Appuleius Saturninus, Lucius". It is not in the book. That Saturninus and his mob was suppressed by Marius, whom P places as a popularis on the same page (p 71), is inconvenient. It is not in the book. Analysis of Drusus' political position is confined to "reformer" when his prosopography shows alliances across the oligarchy. Sulpicius' killing of the consul's son and the violent expulsion of both consuls from the city in 88 are never mentioned. Cinna's war after Sulla's departure, Marius' purge of the city, Cinna's domination thereof, and Marius' son's purge carried out on the floor of the senate are inconvenient facts. They make P's reformers and "democrats" – cf Morstein-Marx Julius Caesar (2021) p 580 "such exotic creatures [democrats] did not exist in Roman public life" – look like opportunists and murderers; these facts too are not in the book (p 73). In their absence, P reduces each event to caricature, robbed of explanation, so P can rail against the "optimates"' fictitious "death squads" (p 71).

P paints Sulla as restoring the (bad for P) old republic. This view is no longer widely held. Sulla is now recognised as having attempted to reform the republic into one governed by strict laws. Flower Roman republics (2010) pp 117ff. The Social War or its effect on Italy or the army – topics of substantial research – are largely ignored. Cato's law expanding grain subsidies in late 63 is never not here mentioned (Edit. It is mentioned in a separate chapter on p 144). But Clodius is focused on heavily and cast as a heroic defender of the plebs by forming "organisations... on a paramilitary basis" (p 76). P omits how those paramilitary organisations ground the state to an anarchic standstill (52–54 BC) and skips to Clodius' lethal chance encounter with Milo (p 78) before indulging in conspiracy theories of a Milonian plot on Clodius' life (pp 80–81). P asks rhetorically "could it really be that the reformers' tactics were so disquieting as to justify mass murder by the... optimates' death squads?" (p 82). Certainly, the answer is no, when all the negative consequences (death, anarchy, chaos) of those tactics are fastidiously concealed. Gracchus and Sulpicius' laws for land distribution and tribal distribution, which P praises, P never notes as having gone into long-term effect.

P's description of the "Catiline [recte Catilinarian] conspiracy" (ch 5) – ie that it was made up by Cicero – largely plagiarises the narratives of Waters Historia 19 (1970) pp 195–215 and Seager Historia 22 (1973) pp 240–48. A comparison of P's citations and those of the two papers shows substantial overlap; the little attribution done is confined to exactly three citations in endnotes. I suppose P's dismissive attitude of modern historians drives him to conceal the shame of copying them. P ignores the responses to Waters and Seager: Phillips Historia 25 (1976) pp 441–48; McGushin Bellum Catilinae: a commentary (1977). Perhaps cognisant of the weakness of his stolen arguments (though P still manages to mangle a few of the timing details), P's rhetoric attempts to make up for the weaknesses of assertion, dismissal, and invention. Such attempts are insufficient.

Caesar

What continues through chapters 6 through 8 is a tendentious biography of Caesar. P fills it with so much puffery it is difficult to wade through without laughter. Chapter 7, for example, starts with five lines of compliments beginning with "outstanding qualities, a commanding figure, uncommonly intelligent, attractive, and utterly charming..." (p 131). P indulges us in the dumb blonde™: "his looks and manner detracted from the effect of his intellectual prowess" (pp 115–16). How P has turned the one contemporary depiction of Caesar in middle age – the Tusculum portrait – into Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides is, I hear, of great interest in Hollywood.

Far better biographies are found in Meier Caesar (1995), Goldsworthy Caesar (2006), and Morstein-Marx Julius Caesar (2021). Morstein-Marx's biography very rightly dismantles old myths like Caesar's supposedly contentious support of tribunician restoration after Sulla (p 115; see also Gruen LGRR (1995) p 28, "inevitability of reform" and "no perpetual confrontation... on the issue of tribunician reform" and "inescapable but innocuous"), restoration of Marian symbols (p 117), and victory in elections for pontifex maximus (p 118). None of these actions were out of line with contemporary politics: the movement to restore tribunician rights gained steam and succeeded in 70 BC (P never connects tribunician restoration to an organised political movement and brings it up, unhelpfully as something that just falls out of the aether, on p 120); few opposed the restoration of Marian monuments amid a wave of reconciliation; junior senators' victories in pontifical elections was well-precedented. These are not entirely blameworthy, however, as Morstein-Marx's book is rather recent. But of all presentations, P picks the one most supportive of the "Caesar myth". See Pelling Plutarch: Caesar (2011). Given the level of embellishment, I suppose this can be no surprise.

P's depiction of Caesar's first consulship in 59 BC frames Bibulus' religious objections as a "conservative veto" (p 121) instead of the largely ineffective obstructionism that it actually was. Morstein-Marx Julius Caesar (2021) pp 181ff. Following his previous practice of ignoring inconvenient facts, P completely omits Clodius' mob-induced anarchy – the chaos was severe enough to prevent the timely election of magistrates for almost two years – and casts Pompey's sole consulship as a power-grab for the "optimates". But P's partisanship is most on display when, in the midst of the civil war, P casts the comitia tributa, under Caesar's armed domination, as "judg[ing]" in a facile explanation if it is one "that the republic needed a legally constituted authority" (p 128) and therefore passing a law enabling Lepidus to name Caesar dictator. The legally constituted authorities, the consuls for the year 49, are never mentioned. Throughout, P accepts the legitimacy of Caesar's elections, likely conducted with one candidate for one post, without any comment.

Two large sections (pp 141–47) excoriate Cato and Marcus Brutus. Having read scholarly biographies of both men, I can say many of P's criticisms ring true. You would not know, reading P's book, that modern historians have long brought the same criticisms. The condemnation P gives, for hypocrisy, corruption, provincial robbery, and other sins, is reserved only for Cato and Brutus: Caesar's similar actions are excused. Brutus is a "spoliator... even Cicero was horrified" (p 147); but as to Caesar's sanguinary Gallic conquests, after a sanitised and highly minimised recounting (only "tens of thousands" – p 133 – of victims instead of the actual millions), P tells us to think instead on the poor Roman dead (p 134).

Caesar's further dictatorships documented in Dio – see Wilson Dictator (2021) – are entirely omitted. Chapter 6 ends with the fictitious title imperator perpetuus (p 129). P, in fact, takes pains to confuse imperator and dictator, gaslighting those who know Latin:

the Senate appointed him imperator for ten years. Imperator has been translated too often as 'dictator'... in early 44... he intended to occupy the office of consul for life with the new title of imperator perpetuus (p 163).

This passage is wrong in all ways. That dictator was Caesar's title is amply attested both by literary – Liv Per 116.2 (Caesar... dictator in perpetuum esset); Flor Epit 92 (perpetuusque dictator) – and contemporary numismatic evidence (CAESAR DICT PERPETVO). P's invention of a decadal consulship also conflicts with Plut Ant 11.2 showing Caesar was to resign his consulship in favour of Dolabella by mid 44 BC. Nor does P's claim that the Romans dated from the foundation of the city (called AUC; p 165) inspire confidence given the Romans never fixed with precision the year the city was founded.

Assassination and epilogue(s)

P starts off the assassination plot by ignoring that both Pompeians and Caesarians were members in large numbers: "a surprise participant... was Decimus Brutus" (pr 45) (p 168). But P, at least, dismisses the ancient fantasy that Brutus (Marcus Junius; pr 44) was Caesar's child because he too can count years. Eg Syme Historia 29 (1980) pp 422–37.

Caesar's growing unpopularity after autumn 45 BC is documented almost unanimously in the ancient sources (the only dissenter is Nic Dam). Morstein-Marx Julius Caesar (2021) pp 528–30 connects this to Caesar's gutting of the grain dole by over a half, his handling of debts in favour of creditors, how his subordinates' massacre of citizens clamouring for debt relief had gone unpunished, his abolition of the poorest panel in the jury courts, and his practical abolition of free elections. P, after omitting or apologising for all those events, leaves no basis for Caesar's unpopularity in the months before March 44. What oblique suggestions of dissent there are, P dismisses without analysis as elite historians' wish fulfilment.

The assassination itself and its aftermath is not terribly mangled, though again, P effuses his description with so much melodrama that one can only read it by skimming whole paragraphs (a competent editor should have removed the fantastical forty-year flashback to Caesar's youth on p 177). He even confuses the members of the conspiracy to heighten the drama, baselessly accusing Aulus Hirtius, Gaius Vibius Pansa, and Lucius Munatius Plancus of participating in the plot, to label them as ungrateful recipients of Caesarian boons (p 189).

For a book entitled Assassination of Julius Caesar, the assassination itself seems a glorified cameo. P does very little to illustrate that Caesar's death emerged from attempts to secure "limited benefits for small farmers, debtors, and [recte the] urban proletariat, at the expense of the wealthy few" (p 3). P attempts, by voluminous assertion, to show that Caesar did things that benefited the poor (pp 149–55 and 157–62; the break is two pages where P deflects blame for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria – itself not important – from Caesar onto "Christ worshippers" p 155). Whether Caesar's reforms actually helped or empowered the poor is challenged both in the scholarship and by basic maths. What remains after removing P's sensationalism (eg the absurdly anachronistic "we might say [Caesar's] reign can be called a dictatorship of the proletarii" p 160) and misunderstandings of the republican constitution is a frantic waving of hands and, thereon, saying post hoc ergo propter hoc.

P's chapter on the assassination itself seems to touch a topic too well known for addition or omission (though P assumes rightly that a lay audience no longer reads Latin and so feels free to conflate dictator and imperator). This makes that chapter the weakest, for P must quote tyrannicide after tyrannicide praising the rekindling of liberty. While he argues that libertas meant economic exploitation, P can find no support other than assertion and feeble analogy to other incidents. These passages (eg p 194) are notably devoid of citations and filled voluminous invective against the senatorial aristocracy with not a few errors (eg a fictitious anti-Gracchan damnatio memoriae p 217). The senatorial aristocracy's private contempt for the poor does not an anti-distributionist killer motive make. The closest true argument P gives is twisting the meaning of Cic Att 14.6 from sympathy about unjust assignment of land to one of Caesar's freedmen ("I am vexed to the heart that the estate of a Sextilius is in the hands of a rascally Curtilius") into a complaint against all Caesarian acta in general. That Cicero disapproved of Caesar's acta is evident from Cic Phil 1.16; P seems unaware of the passage's existence but regardless it is irrelevant since Cicero was not part of the plot.

The last chapters attempt to buttress P's thesis by eliminating other possibilities. P believes Caesar's clemency vitiated any legitimate reasons to quarrel with him (p 190). Some historians believe the clemency itself marked Caesar as a master and to accept it was a humiliation which implicitly accepted that exalted position. See Plut Cat min 66.2. But when P says Caesar wanted to give those he pardoned "responsibilities and places of honour in his administration", he does not understand that is itself the problem: the political elite's sense of self-worth came from personal virtue evidenced by free choice in open election. Eg Morstein-Marx Julius Caesar (2021) pp 549–50. The honour is empty if it comes from a dictator's whim. People act for non-material reasons; this is one of them.

In the epilogue, P rails against the senatorial aristocracy as obdurate plutocrats waging a class war on the poor. He mentions how Cicero's war against Antony stalled for lack of money (p 197); instead of connecting this with a lack of support for the war among the rich, he concludes that the rich were irrational and incapable of using money and force – which P has spent the entire book buttressing by mention of bribes, plots, and death squads – to secure their goals.

The concluding pages on Augustus ignore attempts to reassert political independence during his reign, mishandle the comitia tributa (Augustus campaigned in person for his candidates in the traditional manner; popular elections were abolished by the next emperor Tiberius), and omit how by Augustus' time Roman society had been worn down by civil war. The omissions leave only P's narrative that the senate accepted Augustan oligarchy because it was not Caesarian redistributionism. But this is no surprise, P's main strategy for inconvenient facts is not to argue against them but simply to omit them; if we all knew as little as P does, we should doubtless find the classics as easy as he.

Edit summary. (2023-08-09) Incorporated suggestion from Zaldarie re Gruen 1974/95 and correction on Cato's grain bill in Dec 63 BC. (2023-08-09) Edited to clarify "Decimus Brutus" ≠ "Brutus".