The Ancients - The Legacy of Julius Caesar's Assassination

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

The legacies of the Ides of March stretch from that very afternoon on March 14th 44BC to the modern day. From Roman times to the Medieval period, from Dante to Shakespeare, and from Brutus to the other infamous assassin he inspired in John Wilkes Booth, the echoes of Julius Caesar's assassination have continued to reverberate through time over the last two thousand years.In this episode, the last of our special four-part miniseries on the Ides of March, Tristan sits down with Professor Maria Wyke of University College London to find out more about the political, social and cultural legacies of the fateful day that led to the birth of the Roman Empire and so much more.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, here we are. We're at the end of our special mini-series of episodes all about the Ides of March this month.

This March. We've covered the assassination of Julius Caesar. we've covered the rise and fall of Brutus, we've covered Mark Antony versus the young Caesar aka Octavian. And now to wrap it all up we're going to be talking about the legacy of this infamous day in ancient history, the 15th of March 44 BC, the legacy of the Ides of March, the legacy of Julius Caesar's assassination. We're going to be covering a lot of ground. We're going to be going from Roman times to the medieval period, to the likes of Dante, to Shakespeare and the early modern period and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, et tu Brute, beware the Ides of March and all of that. But then we're going to be going on from there too. We're going to be talking about the role of

Brutus in America in particular, the role the role of brutus to famous or shall we say infamous figures such as john wilkes booth before then going down to the 20th and 21st centuries now to talk through all of this i was delighted to go and interview a couple of weeks back professor maria weick from ucl university college london headed over to Maria's office. We had a great chat. You're going to absolutely love this episode. It's a strong episode to wrap up our Ides of March miniseries. And one final note from me, and this is to heap praise on the whole Ancients team and their role in creating this special miniseries, because I'm just the tip of a huge iceberg when it comes to the Ancients and its production. We have the likes of Elena, our senior producer, Sophie, our producer assisting Elena,

and also the likes of Annie, Aidan and Shay, our key editors, our central editors. All of them have played critical roles in turning this incredible idea into a reality, this four-part series. They've all played their roles, whether it's talking to the experts or editing the podcasts or brainstorming the ideas and i'm incredibly grateful to have such a team around me it's a huge thanks to the ancients team for this first special mini series of episodes and don't worry i think we're going to be doing something similar in a future month down in 2022 stay tuned for for another special mini-series in a month sometime later this year. But that's enough rambling on from me. Without further ado, to talk all about the

legacy of the Ides of March, the legacy of Julius Caesar's assassination, is Maria. Maria, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Oh, it's a real pleasure. The legacy of the Ides of March, the legacy of this day and the assassination of Julius Caesar, it's fair to say it's carried on to the present day, more than 2,000 years later. It has. It has, absolutely. And it's very interesting to reflect on why that should be so and why we think in terms of the Ides of March, since we're in the vicinity of that great anniversary, and how Caesar and the assassination of Caesar has been a way of thinking through modern issues around politics, about when is it

acceptable to kill a leader rather than simply try and bring them down by political democratic means. And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular when there have been many political assassinations in the past millennia, why Caesar's has been the one that is brought up again and again as a way of thinking through those issues in different periods of time. Maria, is it quite important to stress right at the start that when you do have these hearkening back to the Ides of March and the assassination, if it's in regards to more modern politics, that this is quite a drastic thing to say because March metaphorically. So one can talk about, has their Ides of March come in relation to a political leader? Have they reached that point

when their authority is just absolutely no longer acceptable without necessarily implying that it's an invitation to assassination? But assassination is so key an element of the history of that moment and of Caesar and the physicality of it that, you know, what makes it so extreme as a metaphor to use about the present is that these are friends of Caesar's. These are many friends of Caesar's who stab him in a very bloody killing. And that was acknowledged even at the time that this was a bloody slaughter. And yet now, the eyes of March, the role of Brutus is turned to again and again. And sometimes it is to invite assassination or to think about brutal assassination. Sometimes it's more about a change of government.

Well, I definitely want to get more to more modern times as we progress, but let's start back in ancient times, as it were, because what was the significance of the Ides of March, of the assassination, for people in Rome, for Romans in Caesar's day? Well, obviously, before that Ides of March in 44 BC, the Ides of March just meant you're in the middle of March, you know, in terms of the Roman calendar. And it only became a day of significance subsequently. after the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius and their followers, had to flee Italy because of the groundswell of support for Caesar that they perhaps didn't anticipate, the numbers of people who did not see them as liberators, after they left Italy and were then pursued by the heirs of Caesar, Octavian and Antony, they then found themselves in a war between the conspirators'

heirs, and they minted a coin, the conspirators', which is really interesting because the coin has engraved on it the inscription indicating Ides of March. It also has two daggers to indicate the murder that they undertook. But between the two daggers, there's a cap. And it's a cap that for a Roman signifies slavery. It's the cap that a slave wears. So what that coin is doing is indicating that as far as the conspirators are concerned, the Ides of March represents the day that they freed Rome from slavery, that Caesar was Rome's tyrant, Rome's master, and he needed to be removed in order for Romans to again have a republican liberty. And if we carry on from there, Maria, so you mentioned you have this

depiction of the Ides of March on the conspirators' coinage, the liberators' coinage, but Octavian too during this time, does he also use the assassination almost, I guess, as justification for his rise to prominence at this time, avenging this assassination? Absolutely he does. He presents himself as the son of Caesar, Caesar who has now been deified, so he's the son of a god, even though he's actually the adopted son, but he presents himself as his father's avenger, and therefore in a sense naturalizes, domesticates the war he's now going to conduct against Brutus and Cassius, which is in fact a civil war, but is presented as this much more profound need

to avenge his father. But also he is taking on the role of leader of Rome and leader of Italy, and that therefore what he's also doing is avenging the appalling slaughter of the father of the country. That's another way in which he represents himself. And there are stories, he, when he becomes emperor and is known as Augustus, is often associated with a long period of stability in Rome and the Roman Empire after the death of the Republic at the point of Caesar's assassination. And yet it's not so well known that during the period of the war he fought against the liberators, he actually sacrificed some of his enemies on a pyre in honor of his father, Julius Caesar. So he could be as barbaric as you like and present that as

acceptable in the aftermath of the murder. I never knew that whatsoever. I never heard that story, Maria. I mean, so if we therefore go on from that, because I love to go through these different ages, as it were, and the legacy. I mean, does the legacy of the assassination of Caesar of the Ides in March 44 BC, does it remain significant following, let's say, Augustus becoming emperor, the start of the Roman Empire during during the Roman imperial period, does Caesar's assassination remain significant? Caesar is always complicated and difficult as a memory because Caesar could be used as the symbol of the foundation of empire. And as you move further and further away from the period of his death. So he is seen as the founder of empire and the initiator, if you like, of monarchy, perhaps more so than Octavian is to

begin with. So he has a complex place in Roman political thinking. His memory is not an easy one to utilize. So on the one hand, the emperors and his adopted son, Octavian to begin with, would obviously want to legitimate their position by virtue of their taking revenge for him, by virtue of their familial relationship with Caesar. So Octavian is his heir in a familial sense and also in a political sense. But you don't want to join yourself so closely to Caesar because Caesar was assassinated. And you need to find ways to ensure and continue your authority without accruing the intensity of hatred that Caesar must have stimulated. And you certainly don't want to call up the prospect that you too, like he, would find yourselves murdered by those who could no longer stand your political authority.

So to that extent, the emperors would draw on Caesar for some elements, such as his seeming military genius. He, in fact, undertakes genocide when he conquers Gaul, but the Romans see that as one of the great moments of expansion of the Roman Empire. So you can draw on that image of Caesar, the great dictator. You can draw on him as Caesar, the eloquent writer and orator. But you do rather try to avoid, if you're using him as a positive example, the Caesar who was assassinated. Is he sometimes used as a negative example? For instance, when certain emperors who follow him are assassinated in turn, is that when they sometimes turn to the assassination and say, he followed in Caesar's footsteps because he didn't have certain qualities, I presume?

Well, there's much debate in the centuries in Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar as to whether it was an acceptable act to kill him. And one of the issues was always that he seemed to aspire to kingship. For the Romans, his desire for kingship was far more important than his presenting himself as a god on earth. And it didn't matter how many temples that were created to him. What mattered is the crown, that he should try and wear a crown. rulers were very careful about how they represented themselves to avoid that sense that they were taking on a crown, becoming a king. And Octavian, his heir, works very hard to represent himself as in fact restoring the republic that supposedly Caesar had made so strong. Maria, that's so interesting because when you do look at the source material for the assassination

of Julius Caesar, the various sources that we have surviving, many of them written in the Roman imperial period, many of them focus in these episodes, these crown, these rex incidents, as it were. Does it really feel that during the imperial period, therefore, there was this rich amount of literature available which really told the story of what happened before Caesar's assassination and the assassination itself, and this idea that he was doing something that was very much taboo, which was reaching for the kingship. I think at the time of Caesar's assassination, we have the very moving documentation in the writings of Cicero of the various stages leading to the assassination and the various outrages that was stirred in Romans by his activities and why it was that Brutus and Cassius and the others felt

that this was no longer tolerable and that the only route out of this was to kill him. But subsequently, and perhaps not surprisingly under monarchical rule, there tends to be a reading of his murder as appalling, even if there are critiques of the way he governed and of the way he sought power and his aspirations to kingship. So it was possible to separate out what it was that caused the assassins to feel that they needed to kill him and the actual act of killing him. Fair enough indeed. I mean, if we talk about the assassins themselves a bit more, because you mentioned how Caesar, very complicated character, his legacy during the Imperial Roman period and beyond that. Is it the same for figures such as

Brutus? Are there positive views of him, but also negative views of him too? Yes, absolutely. There are still Romans who in later periods under the emperors might praise Brutus as a liberator from a certain kind of autocracy, but they need to be very careful in the ways that they do that. I mean, famously, we have the poet Lucan, who's writing an epic on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, and he's writing it under the reign of Nero. And in that epic, Caesar is the embodiment of an extraordinary energy and power, but also corruption and destruction of the Roman Republic. And it becomes possible to write about him in that way, perhaps because there's enough distance now between the time when

he was killed and the time in which Lucan's writing, because obviously it is a very subversive act to commemorate the struggle against Julius Caesar. So if we move on, therefore, in the legacy story, I want to touch on the medieval period for a bit now, Maria, and I know it's a huge question, but does the Ides of March, the assassination of Julius Caesar, does that remain a significant topic during the medieval period? Caesar becomes perhaps a little less important once we have Christianity in some ways. In others, perhaps just as important because he starts to be seen as the founder. He's perceived retrospectively to be the marker not just of the end of the Republic and the beginning of the imperial monarchy, but he's also seen as the turning

point between paganism and Christianity. And he is often seen as the embodiment of sort of earthly power parallel to the authority of God in heaven. And to that extent, you can find some really surprisingly celebratory versions of Julius Caesar in the medieval period, when he is presented as the embodiment of various kinds of virtues, because, and only because, he's seen as parallel to God in heaven. So there's the earthly domain, and there's the heavenly domain. And Caesar represents the earthly domain, God the heavenly, and he represents the sort of virtuous authority of, for example, even the Pope on earth. I feel here we need to mention briefly Dante. I mean, what does Dante do with Caesar? Well, interestingly, we might think it's odd to celebrate Caesar when we perceive him so much

nowadays as the autocrat, the aggressive imperialist in the extreme. But certainly in Dante's Inferno, we find that it's Brutus and Cassius who are being chewed in the mouth of Lucifer alongside Judas. So in terms of betrayal, the acts of Brutus and Cassius rank alongside those of Judas. And what makes the story, what partly makes that operational and work as a parallel is also because there were rumors in the ancient world that Brutus was the illegitimate son of Caesar. And so if Brutus stabbed Caesar, if Caesar rumor had it said et tu Brute and spoke to him in that way, it was because this was actually a parricide. And that then is seen as parallel to the relationship of Judas to Christ and how what they have done is betrayed their friend, their figure of importance. And that's

possible in Dante because Caesar represents this authority, this political authority on earth that has been damaged and destroyed by these betrayers. Well, you mentioned Et tu, Brute? So let's go to the source of Et tu, Brute. Let's go to Shakespeare and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, late 16th century. But Maria, if you're able to explain quickly, what's the whole context behind Shakespeare's Julius Caesar? So when does Shakespeare really decide to create this play? Well, we all find it very interesting when we look at the time that Shakespeare produced this play, staged the Globe in 1599, that this was a point at which Elizabeth I had now been ruling for, I think, almost 40 years,

was an autocrat and was suffering at this point, suffering. Well, she was the subject of some conspiracies. There was talk of rebellion against her. And it's at this point he stages his Julius Caesar, where, unlike a lot of the sources, Caesar is presented as in body a frail man, a man who Cassius had to save from drowning, a man who can't hear very well, a frail figure whose authority is quite different from his person. And yet it's the person that they have to kill in order to remove that authority. And what makes the play so interesting is that it raises questions to which it doesn't offer you any clear answers, questions along the lines of, is it ever acceptable to kill a person for political reasons, for the sake of your country? How far does an autocrat have to go before you might feel the need to stop them? What are the consequences of that kind of act? And what's significant about

the play and its meaningfulness in the period is that the death of Caesar occurs relatively early on in the play. And what interests Shakespeare to a considerable degree is not the person of Julius Caesar, but the consequences of trying to remove his authority. What happens to the conspirators, the various sort of inadequacies of the ways that they have thought through their conspiracies. So the whole play becomes an example of everything that can go wrong when you commit tyrannicide. That's so interesting. And so just kind of really to hammer home that, because I didn't really realise that at all. So one of Shakespeare's main aims as it were is to highlight you know the lack of for a lack of a better word a follow-through plan as it were

for the conspirators for the liberators yes but in a sense that he's not saying think it through if you're going to assassinate it's it's but you know what makes it interesting is that's what he dramatizes that tyrannicide is enormously complex, morally ambiguous, and often resulting in catastrophe. I think a lot of critics of the play now situate it as a criticism of those who are thinking of tyrannicide, who are not taking into account how base and how difficult that can be and the consequences of the whole process. Some of the key features of the play that suggest that direction of travel are that the conspirators, the liberators, are seen immediately after the assassination of Caesar to start proscribing those who had been supporters of Caesar. That is to take their property and to

start organising a kind of death list. Now that is not a very celebratory image of assassination when you see that the assassins themselves are then moving on to a very violent containment of their enemy. And the other part of the play that's very distinctive is the scene in which soon after Antony has stimulated the mob through his friends Romans and countrymen speech. He's driven them to such anger that they're rising up to try and find the conspirators and to kill them. At that point, we see a scene in which a poet called Sinner is attacked by that mob and lynched by that mob because they think he is actually one of the conspirators, when he is not at all. He is a poet. And the implication of that is, again, asking the audiences to that play to think about how people respond to an assassination,

how people respond to a charismatic leader and look for another if that charismatic leader is removed. That is part of the problem of tyrannicide. And Shakespeare is presenting a critical image of the people that they will be easily swayed into rebellion against those who have seemingly liberated them. Making some irrational decisions and all of that. I mean, Maria, okay, so if we therefore focus on the assassination, the Ides of March assassination itself in Julius Caesar, how does Shakespeare depict, dramatize this event? Shakespeare makes it very tense because we see the day that the Ides have fallen. We know that Caesar is supposed to be going to the Senate House. He's about to embark on a campaign in Parthia. He has his dreams, which his wife Calpurnia sees as an indicator of threats against

him. And so he decides to stay home. So then someone has to come and lure him, if you like, to the Senate House. And when he gets there, the soothsayer famously, who has warned him before, said the Ides of March, he says to the soothsayer, the Ides of March have come. And the soothsayer said, oh, yes, but they, not the oh, yes bit, but they have not gone. In other words, there's still time for your destiny to be fulfilled on this day. So there's a lot of tension in the buildup. And then the actual murder itself follows the kind of plan in the primary sources, but indicates that there are many people involved, that at the final moment, the confrontation at its most climactic is between Caesar and Brutus. Caesar suddenly, and for the only time in the play, speaks in Latin, which would have effects on the British

audience, sort of make them think back to the historic Caesar. Et tu, Brute? implies even you, Brutus, you who were so much closer to me and triggering all the knowledge that audiences would have had of the rumor that this was Caesar's son. So then the killing of Caesar becomes especially distressing. And he falls at the foot of the statue of Pompey, which again seems to be very ironic because Pompey here represents the republic that Caesar had been destroying, as if it were deserved, but not a death of this kind. But it also has this extraordinary theatrical dimension, a sort of reflective dimension on itself as theatre. Because after killing Caesar, Brutus persuades Cassius that they need to bury their arms up to

their elbows in the blood of Caesar. They need to then show what they have done to the people so convinced is Brutus that they will be persuaded to celebrate such an act. And they talk about how this will be a moment that will be enacted again on the stages of the world in languages and times to come. And it's a kind of recognition of how incredibly powerful the scene is that if you imagine yourself in the audience at the Globe, the actors are saying, this moment, this moment will be played over and over again in stages, in different countries, in different periods.

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So she knows that this is going to come to a sticky end. With a whole lot of this in between. The knightly class is a group of people who have been chosen by God. Armor is a physical proof that that's literally true. With guests lined up at the drawbridge, it's time to let them in and begin the feast for your ears that is Gone Medieval, the podcast from History Hit, together by co-host Dr Kat Jarman and I, Matt Lewis. We've gone medieval and we're waiting for you to join us. The legacy of this particular play,

it's so significant in the telling of the assassination of Julius Caesar because, as you hinted at right there, it's been recreated, it's been adapted time and time and time again over the following centuries. Absolutely, and I think partly it's because in many countries, Shakespeare's plays, or particularly, obviously, Anglophone countries, Shakespeare's plays have always been key works that you had to study at school. And I was always interested in the presence of Julius Caesar in the culture of the United States because it's more surprising than in the UK perhaps. But Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has been performed a great deal in the United States and was the key Shakespeare text that children used to study in high school for

a large part of the 20th century. And when they studied it, they studied it as if it were an American play in the sense that it spoke to American values. And this was very much how the play was packaged to students in schools and also when it was performed on the American stage. And that goes back to the War of Independence. When the play was performed, even at the very beginnings of the War of Independence in the 1770s, it was performed as a play in which you could see Brutus the Liberator slaying the tyrant Julius Caesar. And the difficult scenes of the play were removed so that the storyline of liberty would be the key dominant tone of the play. And so it becomes this call to arms in the War of Independence to stage Shakespeare's play.

And then ever since became a play that in metaphor or in historical dress could tell a story about American politics. That's so interesting. So it very much feels like the Americans, they portrayed themselves as Brutus almost and Britain as the tyrant Caesar at that time, did they? Yes, absolutely. I mean, the reason why Shakespeare's play could work and be seen as an American play, as a call to arms, is because the United States, even before it was the United States, when it started to revolt against British government, saw George III as a Julius Caesar, who was a tyrant controlling the United States. And that therefore, what the United States needed was a Brutus to liberate itself from the Caesar

that was exploiting it. And you can see how that language was inscribed in American political culture and eventually in the War of Independence from a seal that you can find from the state of Virginia, which was produced during the War of Independence. And what it shows is, at the end of the War of Independence, the seal shows an image of virtue looking like a kind of Roman goddess, stamping on the figure of a Roman general with six sempiturines inscribed on the bottom, which is in folk memory, what was supposed to have been said by Brutus when he killed Caesar, thus to tyrants, this is what happens to tyrants. And that was inscribed on the seal of Virginia. So the implication was that Virginia was going to do to the King of

England what Brutus had done to Julius Caesar. That's so interesting. But I guess it's also interesting is how this Brutus depiction continues, even after America has won the War of Independence. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but it's John Wilkes Booth, the assassination of Lincoln. So this is an American president, but he also depicts himself as this Brutus figure then too. Absolutely, he does. And this is perhaps one of the most extreme uses of the Ides of March, extreme because it's used not just as a metaphor, not just as a performance to indicate a message to audiences about current politics. This is where it becomes real life. Because John Wilkes Booth had been in the Southern Militia during the Civil War,

he had played in many Shakespeare plays. His whole family were actors famed for their Shakespearean performances. Members of his family were named after Brutus. So it was sort of integral to the family vision of itself. When he decided to assassinate President Lincoln, he went to Washington. I guess he was probably disappointed that this wasn't the 15th of March. I believe it was about a month later in April that he managed to do it. But he got on the stage of a theatre where Lincoln was watching a play and then shot him. But when he was on the run, he kept a diary. And in the diary,

he spoke about himself as a Brutus who had removed Caesar. But in this case, it was an image of the Brutus of the South removing the tyrant of the North. So instead of an image of Caesar belonging to another country and tyrannizing America, this was now the North tyrannizing the South and the South needed to liberate itself from that. It's so interesting how the eyes are much in that Brutus Poterius we mentioned. It evolves over time as it were. And if we move into the start of the 20th century,

but I kind of like to keep on America for a bit longer because it seems around the time of the First World War, there's a new film that arrives in America, a reconstructed, shall we say, film a new film that arrives in America, a reconstructed, shall we say, film, which was originally shown in Italy, all about Julius Caesar. Now, first of all, if we focus on the original, Enrico Guazzoni's Julius Caesar, what is this, Maria? Yes, well, I was very interested in this film because I've always been very interested in popular culture representations of the past. But this film

was especially interesting in terms of what happened to it when it got to the United States because the director Guazzoni had produced an epic that was released in Italy around 1914 that was full of a very aggressive military imperialist rhetoric. It's a film that presents itself as a kind of melodrama to begin with. It tells the life story of Caesar, so it starts with him in love with his mistress, Seville, by whom he has an illegitimate son, takes you through the war in Gaul, his great achievements, his victories for Rome. These are all widely celebrated. The intertitles, the words that are on the screen as you go through the film often talk about Rome as the gilded eagle that has, with its irresistible claws, has destroyed the

wild war of Gaul or something like that. So all the language is a kind of rhetoric that is designed to offer to Italians a glorious history, a history of conquest, and to incite in them a desire and a love for war, because this is 1914, just at a point when Italy has declared itself neutral in the World War, but where many Italian nationalists want war, want war for Italy to strengthen its national identity. So you can watch this film about Caesar and see it as a celebration of a great leader tragically brought down by those who could not understand his achievements. I mean, does this central focus on Caesar at this time in Italy, I mean, does this central focus on Caesar at this time in Italy, does it help pave the rise for figures such as Mussolini, who will associate himself closely, won conqueror, Caesar as founder of empire. And that kind of vision of Caesar is very important in 1914 when that film is released because Italy has just been

taking territories in North Africa. So it has had a military involvement and now the nationalists want more. In the time of Mussolini, he too presents himself as like Caesar in this respect, not as someone who might potentially be brought down by assassins, because that's always the danger of taking on Caesar as a model. new Italian empire by taking over territories in Africa. So in fact, he invades Ethiopia and declares empire in 1936, and is presenting himself as a kind of Caesar figure in doing that. We'll come back to that in a second. But if we focus back on Grazzoni's film, first of all, because you mentioned that when it gets to America, there are alterations, alterations are made to it. What are these alterations? Well, some of them are in a way quite amusing to us now because the Italian film allowed Caesar to be a bit of a womanizer and he has his mistress Seville. He has other mistresses in the course of the film. When the film gets to the United States, they're given different names. A secret

erotic rendezvous with one of the mistresses in the Italian film becomes a marriage that he's having with his wife, Carpennia, in the American version. So they also completely remove the storyline that Brutus is his illegitimate son. There are much greater censorship rules in the United States. So all that element of the film has changed. But most noticeable is the language. And you often think the silent films are not having a language, but they've obviously got the words. And the music would undoubtedly have been changed as well. So when you see the film in the United States, when it was seen in 1914 onwards, you might get to the moment when the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix is surrendering to Caesar. Now, in the Italian version, that would be a moment of

utter celebration, the Gilded Eagle has conquered. But in the United States, and if it was shown in France, it could have well been played as a kind of tragedy, both musically and in terms of the language, where it simply says, Gaul lies vanquished at the feet of Rome, which is much less celebratory than the Italian version. And I would imagine some of those changes were made because that kind of Italian nationalistic warlike use of Caesar would not have played well in the United States, and they needed a different kind of Caesar for their purposes. Nonetheless, they still left the murder of Caesar, as you see it on the screen, as something profoundly tragic. And the film, both in Italy and in the United States, ends with a woman mourning his death. In Italy, it's his first true love, his mistress, Sevillea. In America, it's his wife, Calpurnia at this point, who is

mourning this great figure. That's so interesting in itself, because as we were talking earlier in the 19th and the 18th century America, where Caesar is this figure, you know, very much the opposite of Brutus. Brutus is championed as of such, but here it's almost as if they're now embracing Caesar to an extent with his portrayal in this movie. Yes, I think there was surprisingly little discomfort with that. And when I was investigating the film in the States, I came across a scrapbook full of clippings of reviews from newspapers all around the United States, talking about how this was often the first film that children had seen in some small little town in the 1920s, and that afterwards the children were dressing up in blankets and taking dustbin

lids and playing at being Caesar. And only one reviewer of the film in one of the cities said, should we be allowing our children to celebrate a figure of this kind, recognizing the earlier traditions for Caesar as a figure for critique and for concern in the United States history. But of course, in the United States, Caesar has also been the Caesar of the Gallic Wars and Caesar the military genius. And in military academies in the United States, you always had to read his commentaries and learn about him as one of the great generals of the ancient world. So there was room enough to celebrate him a little.

And by 1914, there had been parts of the United States or people in the United States who were celebratory of America as empire and its victories in the wars against Spain, which would accommodate the militaristic dimension of Caesar as something to celebrate, even if they would not have liked his political functions. We'll definitely get back to the United States in a bit, Maria. But if we could quickly go back to Italy and Mussolini and his whole portrayal of himself as Caesar. Now, of course, it doesn't end well for Mussolini, putting it lightly, let's be honest. But for those who were against Mussolini, the anti-fascists and that sort. Do we know whether they really try to portray,

towards Mussolini, saying your Ides of March will come or that your downfall will come soon? Is the Ides of March rhetoric, is it used by the people who are against Mussolini when he's in power and ultimately when he himself is killed? Mussolini himself, when the opportunity arises, moves away from associating himself with Caesar. I think in the awareness of that possibility, that threat, your Ides of March might come, a Brutus might arise. So that once empire has been declared in 1936, he starts to associate himself instead with Augustus, who has no history of that kind. There were classical scholars in the period, supporters of the regime, who were writing history books for children at schools who would compare very closely Caesar and Mussolini and talk about how both of them had crossed their

Rubicon, had removed the old corrupt government, had put in a new government for the benefit of the people, who had become a dictator in a very celebratory sense. Those classical scholars who thought differently, who were critical, often ended up having to go into exile because it was just too dangerous to use the language of Caesar against Mussolini in Italy. But that language was very much used against him outside Italy, where he was often described as a sawdust Caesar, in the sense that he sort of puffed himself up as a modern day Caesar, but he's made only of sawdust. It will all crumble. It's all a facade. It's just a performance, a show. He's sort of put on the battle armor of Caesar like it's a costume, but he's only an actor playing the role rather badly. So that

kind of language about him is used. And there are cartoons representing him as Caesar with a clown's nose on, suggesting he's no Caesar at all. Or if he is a Caesar, he might find that there are consequences. And around the same time, around the time of the World War II and just before, it seems elsewhere in Europe too. I'm thinking maybe it's Orson Wells and Thornton Wilder. There's a novel or a drama. These two figures, they also hearken to the Ides of March and this portrait of Caesar, do they? Yes. Yes, they do. I think the Orson Wells is very important if you're interested in how the Ides keep on reappearing on the modern day stage and why often Julius, for the first time, there were modern dress performances of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, but Orson Welles was the key step, the one that changed everything in

terms of what Shakespeare's play and his representation of the Ides could mean. Because because he staged the play in New York in a very modernist kind of streamlined way. So it looked like a rough urban landscape. The characters were dressed in modern day suits. When it came to the more military dimension, the second half of the play, they were wearing fascist clothing. the play. They were wearing fascist clothing. They were very much represented as a dictatorship that belongs to the present. So the performance of the assassination is presented as somehow speaking to the present. And there was a subtitle for the play called Death of a Dictator. And Orson Welles himself played Brutus, but he played Brutus as a kind of bumbling liberal,

a liberal who thinks, however reluctantly, that he must participate in the removal of this dictator without realizing that unless you prepare, unless you educate the public against characters of this kind, they will simply replace that dictator with another. And you can see how the relevance of that in the modern world when we've seen the rise of populism and of popular autocrats, why in the 1930s, it was very important for Wells to use Shakespeare to say not just, we should remove dictators, but we have to think about how you then prevent other dictatorships arising. And for him, one of the ways you do that is through theatre, is through getting audiences to see a play like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. But he made sure that the play was shaped to tell

the story of a Brutus who was problematic, a Brutus who was insufficient, and a Brutus who had not thought through what he was doing, but in order to make the audience think through what should be done. So is this really the spark from where on we see, you know, the play Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the assassination of the Ides being used as an opportunity to perform out modern political concerns? Absolutely. It's now so canonic to perform Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in modern dress that when I once saw it at the Globe, the Globe in London, I was taken aback because it was actually in Shakespearean costume and that was relatively unusual. But time and time again after Wells, the play has been put in modern dress and staged to be about dictatorships

in Southern America, dictatorships in Africa, dictatorships of white colonists. It's been used in all sorts of different contexts to address the issue of tyranny and of political assassination. What then becomes interesting is how is the play, which is so ambiguous, how is it performed? What elements of it are retained, which are making you have to think very carefully about the benefits or the disadvantages of assassination. Keeping on that, because as we go to the 21st century, I know this is something you've done a bit of work on especially, are there a couple of these plays which seem to emerge in the wake of the beginning of the Iraq War in the early 2000s? Yes, I was very struck about how Shakespeare's

play could be changed by directors in terms of its relationship to the present over the course of a very short period of time. So what I mean is that there was a production in the United States in 2002, where the direction of travel, again, it was all in modern dress, seemed to be an association, a parallel between Julius Caesar and Saddam Hussein, so that Brutus was a kind of figure for George Bush. In other words, is it appropriate? Is it acceptable? In what circumstances can one bring down, murder a tyrant? Is it ever the right thing to do? So the play was obviously raising some questions about how appropriate an invasion was, but where Caesar was the equivalent of Saddam Hussein. Now within a few years, in 2005, you find two productions of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar being performed, one in New York, one in London. And in each

case, there are changes being made to these kinds of analogies, such that Caesar seems now to be George Bush. And the question becomes, in what circumstances do you remove George Bush? And in these cases, it's much more metaphor than an invitation to assassination. But it's interesting that that shift has been made. And the way it's done is quite subtle. So for example, in the United States, Denzel Washington was playing Brutus, and he was showing an interviewer an image of George Bush in a magazine, and this was two years after the invasion and around March in the year. So, you know, a significant moment to put this sort of production on.

And he was saying, who would be the equivalent of the Brutus to bring down this dictator, now pointing at George Bush rather than Saddam Hussein. I mean, obviously, he was not thinking about that in terms of a literal assassination, but in terms of performing the political act of removing a tyrant. The British version I'm thinking of that was staged in London, it again had everybody in camouflage when you got to the second half of the play and the sounds of modern day warfare. But the program contained an image of George Bush in military combat on a ship where he was celebrating the work of the soldiers who were fighting in Iraq, and with quotations

pulled out of the play to imply that he was undertaking dreadful acts. He as a kind of dictator figure who needed to be removed. So the ground can sort of shift very much in terms of what political direction you want to take the play in. We're talking about that shifting political ground. If we go to current affairs today, we're talking actually, it's really interesting that we're talking about it today, Maria, because only a few days ago, there was an American senator, I believe it was Lindsey Graham, who was talking about Vladimir Putin. And I think he said, make sure I get the quotes right, but whether there was a Brutus in Russia at this moment in time. And it's so

interesting how Vladimir Putin now, he's been portrayed as a Caesar in the past, but now you've got someone openly, you know, once again, the legacy of the Ides of March is there because he is referring to this assassination of Julius Caesar today in 2022. Absolutely. But I think in a way, the language of the Ides of March is sort of safe costume to wear, if you like, of righteousness to avoid actually saying, is there no one in Russia now who will kill Putin? Because you're using it in that metaphorical sense, in that sense that it's been used for since the War of Independence when politicians in the United States were saying, where is the Brutus to the King of England? And it also suggests a

kind of dignity and authority to the United States now in its confrontation with Putin, because it's suggesting a kind of vision of the states as the potential liberator from tyranny, without going into too much of the sort of Plutarchan narrative of the way the conspirators slaughter Caesar like an animal being butchered. And you're trying to avoid that element of the ancient accounts and to think of the glorious narrative of liberty when you use language like that. Has it been really interesting to study all this, Maria, seeing how we say from the birth of the United States in the 18th century down to the present day, how there does seem to be this consistent referring back, not to Caesar as such, but to Brutus, the figure of Brutus. Yes, well, I think there are lots of ways in which Caesar is

invoked. And the way in which Caesar is invoked is most often to talk about the president of the United States. That's been a very common feature of political debate in the States since the time of the war of Iraq, well, actually since the fall of the Berlin War, and even slightly earlier than that, there was a real anxiety in the United States that the presidency was becoming imperial, that too much power is being focused in this president, who's also commander-in-chief of the American armed forces. So there you talk about the president as a kind of Caesar without necessarily engaging the rest of the narrative. This is the days before the Ides, if you like, where you're just criticizing

too much political authority. You're not necessarily laying claim to that 15th of March to come, and you're not necessarily saying we need to assassinate this figure. But George Bush was called a Caesar. Barack Obama was called a Caesar. There are multitudes of cartoons of Donald Trump on the web as a sort of rather orange-faced Caesar. But that's the president as a kind of Caesarian figure. Brutus is obviously, in some respects, much more, if you like, powerful and dangerous figure to evoke, because with Brutus comes the issue of murder and assassination. Absolutely, indeed. And I guess it's also really interesting, just before we completely wrap up, how these portrayals will continue in the future. What will Biden be portrayed as and so on and so

forth. I mean, Maria, this has been absolutely great. One last thing for me. I mean, how else is the Ides of March today significant? The Ides of March itself can be kind of quite isolated from the events that the complex political events that occurred on that day. I always remember, for example, an advertisement that was produced by the Times newspaper many years ago that showed Julius Caesar in the front of the image and behind him, these Roman senators coming towards him, behind him, without his knowing in a very sinister way. And it simply said, don't you wish you were ever better informed? And that was using the Ides of March simply to suggest a sense of ignorance and the potentiality of falling into some disaster if you didn't read the Times. So that's a really kind of extraneous way of using it.

But the Ides of March can, like crossing the Rubicon, can be used in all sorts of contexts these days. So powerful has it been as a day and an event and a performance on stage that it can be, you know, it's now circulating in all sorts of different ways. Well, this has been absolutely great. I'm sorry that we couldn't talk about art or more literature or music or even HBO's Rome, but we've covered so much ground over this talk, Maria. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great. Well, there you go. There was Professor Maria Wyke explaining all about the legacy of the Ides of March, the legacy of Julius Caesar's assassination. As I said at the start, huge praise to Team Ancient History Hit, as it were. Huge praise to Elena, to Sophie, to Aiden, to Annie and to Shay for their incredible work in turning this mini series into a reality.

Now that's March done. That's our special mini March series done as it were. If you want more ancients content in the meantime before we go on from here, well you know what to do. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below. Every week I write a little blurb for that newsletter explaining what's been going on in the ancient history hit world with Team Ancient History Hit in the TV and podcast world. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a good rating on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.