Caesar, and Caesarism, Now

Even in the twenty-first century, Caesar remains alive in the rhetoric of US politics. Transmuted through the demands of partisanship, new Caesars are seen as the saviors of a traditional republican order now under threat from institutional senescence and cultural decay, instead of the enemy of ancient national virtue that Shakespeare’s Brutus sees and fears. In fact, a short history of invocations of Caesar in popular culture identifies him with a lust for power for its own sake, increasing dissociation from notions of a public, collective good, and a commitment to cruelty and violence as normal means of conducting business. The capacity for deep emotion, the struggle for self-mastery, and the rhetorical self-consciousness that mark Octavius Caesar’s rise to sole power in Antony and Cleopatra are irrelevant to many modern understandings of what Caesarism means. It should not be surprising that we can observe differences between the ways modern framers of political meanings use Roman historical models to support their own notions of rightful civic dominance and the ways early modern dramatists understood Caesar and Caesarism to be relevant to the politics of their own day. Ironically, however, distorted contemporary praise of Caesarism often works to demonstrate early modern republicans’ worst fears of an unprincipled dictator’s seizure of power.