In “The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans,” the Greek historian Plutarch profiles the ancient world’s most prominent — I hesitate to say greatest — luminaries by using the technique of contrasting pairs. He teams the Roman ruler Julius Caesar with Alexander the Great, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror of the Persian Empire. It’s an inevitable pairing, because Caesar and the subsequent Caesars, or Roman emperors, saw Alexander as the ultimate measure of military might and leadership. He conquered a multicultural empire that stretched 22,000 miles from the Balkans to India. He ruled that empire by keeping local authority in place. He never lost a battle. (Indeed, Caesar’s fascination — and subsequently his associate Mark Antony’s — with Cleopatra can be attributed partly to her descent from Ptolemy I, Alexander’s general, and her keeping of Alexander’s grave in Alexandria.)
But the model of Alexander would prove limited for Caesar and the subsequent Caesars, the first four of whom, the so-called Julio-Claudian kings, had some familial relationship to him. For despite his hegemony over the democratic Greek city-states, or maybe because of it, Alexander remained an autocratic king descended from many autocratic kings. Whereas Julius Caesar’s dictatorship for life grew out of Rome’s republicanism with a small “r.”
Alexander was never going to be anything but a despot, a benevolent despot in some ways, but a despot nonetheless. Whereas Caesar’s power resulted from his pitting the adoring masses against the elites, his use of thuggery, his demonization and destruction of people who weren’t Roman citizens and the failure of the Roman Senate to bring him to justice for war crimes through their own cowardice, divisiveness and venality.
Ring a bell? It all plays out to chilling, prescient effect in the PBS series “Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator,” whose tagline is “Nearly five centuries of ancient Roman democracy were overthrown in 16 years by one man.”
Will we even get to two and a half centuries on July 4, 2026? Here’s how Time magazine summarized two interviews with former President Donald J. Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants for a cover story:
“…He would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.
“He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
If it sounds like a dictatorship, well, Trump says some Americans are fine with that. His followers portray him as a latter-day Robin Hood or Jesus himself. But didn’t Robin Hood rob the rich to give to the poor? Perhaps Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal were among the underserved. And where are the humility and compassion of Jesus? Where’s the self-sacrifice?
Instead we have Caesarism, the rule of strongmen — as opposed to strong men — beloved by Napoleon Bonaparte and Benito Mussolini and prevalent around the world today. Eventually, the people tire of their strongmen, but that does not necessarily spell a turn or return to democracy. Caesar’s assassination on March 15, 44 B.C. by members of the Roman Senate led to more civil war and the rise of the empire under his grandnephew and heir Octavian (Augustus).
Violence is not the answer, as the students protesting Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War have yet to discover. But violence is often the question. Why do people commit violent acts? Often it’s because they lack the time, talent , training, technique and temperament for nuanced thinking and action, for considering opposing viewpoints, for seeing life as more than a zero-sum game. So they lash out or leave governance to others. But governance is every citizen’s responsibility.
“Democracy has to be constantly fought for,” the human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti says in “Julius Caesar.” “If we take it for granted, a new Caesar will come.”