Why Caesar?

In European civilization, I think it's a true statement to say that the most famous historical figure, second only to Jesus, is Julius Caesar. He's been hero-worshipped more or less continuously since he led his army into Gaul — except for one unfortunate incident involving sixty or so of his political rivals and a lot of knives.

If you think about it, this is really weird. Other historical figures go in and out of fashion. Today's hero is tomorrow's villain. But Caesar has been reinterpreted in every era.

In Imperial Rome, he was literally deified, and all the subsequent emperors used his name as their title. They all claimed his power, his popularity, and his legitimacy. A few even deserved it.

With the decline of Roman paganism and the triumph of Christianity in Europe during the Middle Ages, you'd expect a guy who was a pagan god to fall out of favor. But nope. He was honored as one of the Nine Worthies, the greatest heroes of antiquity, the Bible, and Christendom. A virtuous pagan and a paragon of chivalry. Emperors in Germany and Constantinople still claimed his authority.

When Dante wrote his Divine Comedy and described a journey through Hell, at the bottom layer was the three-headed figure of Satan, frozen in ice up to his waist and eternally gnawing on history's three greatest traitors. Who were those three villains? One was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. The other two were Brutus and Cassius — two of Caesar's assassins. For Dante, stabbing that one particular Roman politician is as awful as betraying God.  

Another literary genius took up Caesar three centuries later. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is perhaps the most "nuanced" view of Caesar in literature. The man himself gets the usual hero-worship, but Shakespeare doesn't shy away from depicting the gangsterism of his political followers, and shows Brutus as having honorable and patriotic motives. Still, the play is named after Caesar and that's who the audience shows up to see.

The intellectual and political movement known as the Enlightenment was enamored of all things Roman, so Caesar remained as popular as ever. Especially in Italy, where a rather self-interested Roman politician was reinvented as a symbol of national unity and liberation from foreign rule. It must have gnawed at Italian leaders and thinkers of that era to see some Habsburg German sitting in Vienna, calling himself "Kaiser" and lording it over most of northern Italy.

In the Twentieth Century, Caesar's most avid admirer was another Italian politician, whose career was less glorious but did follow much the same trajectory. One would think that association with Italian Fascism would lower Caesar's stock, but that didn't happen. In America he got reinvented as a populist reformer, a proto-FDR brutally killed by "reactionary" Senators.

There are any number of explanations for his invincible popularity. The fact that a hundred generations of educated men in Europe grew up reading about Caesar in Plutarch didn't hurt. Nor did the fact that most of those men also read Caesar's own account of the Gallic Wars.

One must conclude that in addition to being a military genius, Caesar was also the greatest self-promoter in history. His reputation outlived him, his family, and his civilization, and shows no sign of abating. I guess he earned it.

Comments

[MadRocketSci]

I actually have a lot to say about this, but I'll have to wait until after work.

I don't think people have ever been morally sane.

[MadRocketSci]

(A bit of a ramble: Feel free to delete it if you don't want your comment section overwhelmed. It's a combination of something triggered by your post and other observations of mine that has been percolating for a while.)

A few days ago I was reading some tedious bit of nonsense about some "Marxist scholars" backstabbing each other in some dismal college over some argument about the minutia of whatever drivel Marx or Engles decided to bang out on a typewriter in the 1860s. Day ending in y.

Then it sort of hit me: This isn't just annoying and absurd, it's actually a bit of a recurring tragedy about the way humans think. These poor maleducated kids were spending their finite lives obsessing over the details of some **** guru's sophomoric ramblings rather than living their *own* lives, thinking their *own* thoughts, or maybe learning something that cashes out somewhere in an ability to effect their world. Maybe their own thoughts would be just as dumb, but they would be *theirs*. They'd have a chance at novelty, rather than tracing and retracing, and carefully photocopying ideological nonsense, generation unto generation, and imagining that mastering that arbitrary ball of noise amounted to knowledge!

[MadRocketSci]

Hero worship, religion, ideology, politics: None of these things are what they should be - they're all scrambled up in the human brain into this horrible mess that may have allowed our bronze-age God-king to beat their bronze-age God-king, but also cripples and stunts the majority. Why should these kids feel that the standard by which their thoughts should be judged be conformity to a doctrine spat out by $guru? The gurus probably felt no need to justify their output to anyone, these "scholars" feel that anything not traced back to authority is invalid.

Was reading a bit of Neitzsche the other day to see what the fuss was about. Thus Spake Zarathustra: He just starts boldly asserting whatever the heck he feels like. He commits grand theft of the epistolic style and goes riding off into his own imagination. The work is sort of an assertion that *it's okay to do that*. I'd like to think that if he was self-consistent enough about his egoist philosophy, (No guarantees there, it's a personality type) that he would be horrified at the thought that 200 years later there would be Neitzsche scholars spending a 10 year PhD arguing over the minutiae of his ramblings.

[MadRocketSci]

If in my professional career, I end up discovering something and being well thought of by humanity, great! If in 20 years, 200 years, (horrors) 1000 years, people are building statues in my honor and obsessing over what I ate for breakfast, I'd want to kick them. I'd want to know what happened to the intervening centuries of human life and why they don't have accomplishments of their own overshadowing any triviality from my era.

Semi-topical Leonardo da Vinci quote (yes, I'm aware):

“I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks ! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.

Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy:— on experience, the mistress of their Masters. They go about puffed up and pompous, dressed and decorated with [the fruits], not of their own labours, but of those of others. And they will not allow me my own. They will scorn me as an inventor ; but how much more might they— who are not inventors but vaunters and declaimers of the works of others – be blamed.”

[MadRocketSci]

One more random observation that may have some relevance to your Godel operation setting:

It seems to me that any civilization that is sufficiently old and broad will need to find a way to reward independent reinvention, if they don't want inventiveness, or the ability to solve novel problems to die out under the sheer weight of prior art. There already seems to be a moral disapproval of reinvention and attempted originality, and a reification of whoever got somewhere first. (Caesar in the case of torpedoing a republic.)

There is originality, and originality. In the first sense, it's getting somewhere before anyone else gets there. In the latter case, it's the ability to get somewhere under your own power - to reach conclusions and solve problems. The latter is fundamental, and the former is a historical accident.

Our civilization, from copyright and the patent system, to how academic credit is rewarded, is set up to reward the former (getting there first). Enough generations of that, and you make scientist or inventor an impossible career, because you won't be able to gain anything until crossing a vast gulf of picked over ground.

[MadRocketSci]

(Re Caesar and torpedoing a republic, perhaps the honor goes to Pericles and Alcibiades)

There's also the matter of indexing. Give infinite grad students infinite time and infinite typewriters, and eventually you find yourself in Luis Borges Library of Babel. An infinite library containing all possible books representable with a given character set actually contains no information: The effort required to search for any given book *is* the effort to author it.

In a 10000 year old civilization, you may not be there, but the indexing problems become severe quickly. How long until reinvention is actually *more efficient* than finding out if anyone had solved the problem before? Scholastics vs. Cowboy Coders ...