I have been amusing myself latterly with reading the voluminous letters of Cicero. They certainly paint the picture of an exalted patriot, while Caesar is traitorous by comparison. However, when the enthusiasm from Cicero’s obvious brilliance and principles subside, I have ask myself, what actually was that government which the virtues of Cicero were so zealous to restore, and the ambition of Caesar to subvert? And if Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring, what could he, even from the height of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?

Every facet of Rome was so steeped in corruption, vice and venality, and nobody had done more than Caesar to corrupt it, what could even Cicero, Cato, or Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country? They had no ideas of real republicanism or good government themselves, just their plutocratic Senate. Worse, the people had no real desire for liberty.

We may well understand Caesar as the midwife of Caligula, and Nero, and Commodus. Of civil wars wrought by dynastic disputes. I share Cicero's assessment that Caesar was the "murderer of the fatherland." But what exactly was the system that Cicero backed? An old boy’s club? A nest of greed and hedonism that speciously traced its origins back to a legendary and virile past? It certainly wasn’t a republic like what we have, in which provincial sovereignty and federal sovereignty are symbiotic, in which there are far more barriers to pecuniary corruption than had existed in Cicero’s Rome. The real tragedy to me was that a man as brilliant as Cicero not just failed to save the republic, but he could not even conceive of a way to arrest its decline, and just wanted to see the failing system limp onward endlessly.

>>25296571
>Thomas Jefferson
And then he pulls the exact same shit on the Federalists for the exact same reasons

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>>25296381
I'm going with Michael Parenti
Caesar was definitely one with the people

>>25296579
He wrote that letter to Adams after his term as president.

>>25296571
America was different from Rome in that the finance class and the slave-owning class were often at odds. In Rome, the patricians were both.

Jefferson identified his class with the virtuous Roman farmer but this was an erroneous comparison, he was closer to the patrician who owned acres and acres of many families due to debts. He couldn't see it because his class was perpetually in debt.

>>25296728
I do not respect bald "people"

The important thing is that both authors recognize Cato as history's first lolcow.

>>25296571
>ctrl+f Spartacus
>not found

>>25296571
>And if Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring, what could he, even from the height of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?
That was Augustus and his public morality campaign was a flop

>a cross dressing man indirectly led to the overthrow of the Republic
Drives one to ponder

>>25296728
Perfect example of holding a legitimately good take for the most hilariously wrong reasons
>one with the people
You mean the veter- Nevermind, all actual socialist states were like that. Just a red feudal gibsmedat club for the military. That's actually probably the worst thing Caesar did, at least the one bad thing.

Sorta interesting how elites importing countless millions of migrants for slave labor and suppressing dissenting lower class native elements has already happened in late republican Rome.

>>25300415
Late Empire too, at least in the West. They quite literally both outsourced and privatised the army, similar to how Gulf states with the Kafala system do.

I would fuck Caesar too.

>>25296571
>We may well understand Caesar as the midwife of Caligula, and Nero, and Commodus
The retards who stabbed him midwifed that