Rating: 
Summary: Yes, Most Historians ARE Wrong, Despite Parenti's Bias
Review: In response to Robinson, Erkko, and Doran, let me begin by saying I am someone who finds Parenti's present-day writings a bit tedious and predictable along the class-warfare front. Thus, I approached his "Assassination" with some trepidation.
Fact is, however, I was deeply troubled by the widespread love of Cicero and Cato among both scholars of ancient Rome and many modern historians, since I independently came to the conclusion that these two "best men" of Rome were despicable characters who sought to excuse mass murders in the Sulla era. Parenti doesn't try to constantly wage class warfare on behalf of the plebs; he doesn't say that everyone is wrong except himself (in fact, singling out some writers like Jane Gardner for praise); rather, he says that Cicero and his ilk are often defended because historians share the belief that brutal aristocracies often have to defend false forms of democracy to prevent the riff-raff from gaining power. When you read many of the direct quotes of both members of the Senate and the later classic writers who defended them, you see the same shallow defense that promoted the British empire in the 19th century, and continues to promote the U.S. empire today.
Parenti by no means sees Ceasar as free from blame; he merely wants to point a well-deserved and long-overdue finger of blame at Caesar's accusers. And thank God that finger of blame is there.
This is a short and by no means exhaustive book, but it is not tied down by the type of Marxist analysis we might expect from Parenti. It is fresh, insightful, and willing to poke fun of centuries of historians who don't make their biases obvious. Mr. Robinson, the issue is not that "everyone is wrong but Parenti." And the issue is not, as some critics of the politically correct might suggest, that the minority writers want to hold that all "dead white guys" are wrong. Rather, the important point Parenti makes is that the vast majority of historians, from ancient cultures to our own, structure their alliances and prejudices to favor class interests that they do not make clear to readers. Parenti's is only a partial correction in this regard.
Rating: 
Summary: Reclaiming the past to claim the present
Review: As Michael Parenti so carefully documents in this brief but welcome remedial history, clearly, the assassination of Julius Caesar was meant to kill the policies by killing the man, but also wound up killing the very Republic in whose name the deed was done, with an aristocratic Senate of hypocrites ostensibly opposing the dictatorship of a populist Caesar (whatever his class origins and personal ambitions) only to meekly accept a later, undemocratic one of patrician emperors.Parenti may be forgiven, then, his hyperbole in characterizing Caesar's rule, a la Karl Marx, as a "dictatorship of the proletarii," perhaps regarding the historical role of the Roman plebs as greater than it actually was. However, he doesn't distinguish well enough between the proletariat proper and the lumpen proletariat of Rome, notwithstanding the difficulties of interpreting the history of both from secondhand and sometimes unreliable, negative or self-serving sources. And surprising that Parenti, of all people, would in passing rely on a secondhand interpretation of Marx (of all people, routinely distorted by dedicated enemies on the right and frequently misunderstood by nominal adherents on the "left"), considering Parenti's evident familiarity with and position toward Marx's writings, rather than quote directly from a letter in 1877 where Marx in fact does not regard Rome's proletarianized plebs rustica in the negative manner of the "gentlemen historians" Parenti so rightly criticizes throughout, rather comparing their "abject" plight with that of "poor whites" in the U.S. South. But overall, Parenti understands that a false image of the past is often invoked by illiberal academics and politicians to justify the reactionary policies of the present; meaning that the struggle to correct the historical record is not a mere dead matter of abstract scholarly interest to an elite few, but a very relevant one of potentially concrete impact on the living masses and the planet we inhabit.
Rating:
Summary: Sincere and Heartbreaking Historical Document
Review: Critics who fail to see through the very blindnesses Parenti challenges throughout this book are just proving his point. It is not, as "L.C" Robinson asserts above, that Parenti thinks everybody is wrong. Parenti's interest is not in some puerile (and typically American) debate over who is right and who is wrong, but rather a very fair and disinterested discussion about the consequences of crippling class stratification in ancient Rome and, as it turns out, throughout much of the history that followed.
People like Mr. Robinson speak from precisely the privileged perspective Parenti works so tirelessly to challenge here. It is unfathomable to people such as himself that there are those for whom education is a pipe dream, an unattainable aspiration prohibited by the financial situations into which they were born. From the days of Sallust, Seutonius and Polybius on down to Edward Gibbon, education was a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Literacy rates in ancient Rome were horrific; the vast majority of the population could neither read nor write. This insurmountable disadvantage persisted over thousands of years and continues even today, when there are only two ways by which an American kid gets a good education: rich parents, or a willingness to plunge oneself into tens of thousands of dollars into debt (I myself owe $57,000 in student loans, which will not be paid off for 30 years). In less developed nations, literacy rates remain as bad as they were in Caligula's day. Still, though, America's own literacy rate ranks just 48th in the world (see Morris Berman's "Twilight of American Culture"). Of course, some of us are lucky enough to land a scholarship or grant, but that is too often like winning the lottery.
People like Seutonius and Edward Gibbon were able to write history because they could afford to; they grew up in the upper classes where education was not only affordable but often taken for granted. Parenti's thesis is absolutely correct: history is written by the winners, the privileged and the fortunate. Thus, the condemnation of the ancient Roman populace as an unwashed and filthy rabble persists not because it is fact, but because it is the only history that circumstances have allowed. It is one of history's most glaring ironies that the privileged classes of ancient Rome considered themselves morally superior to plebs and slaves, when it was THEY who orchestrated spectacles such as this one, described so poignantly by Parenti:
"The ceremonies to dedicate Pompey's theater included a battle between a score of elephants and men armed with javelins . . . the slaughter of the elephants proved more than the crowd could countenance. One giant creature, brought to its knees by missiles, crawled about, ripping shields from its attackers and throwing them into the air. Another, pierced deeply through the eyes with a javelin, fell dead with a horrifying crash. The elephants shrieked bitterly as their tormentors closed in. Some of them refused to fight, treading about frantically with trunks raised toward Heaven, as if lamenting to the gods. In desperation, the beleaguered beasts tried to break through the iron palisade that corralled them. When they had lost all hope of escape, they turned to the spectators as if to beg for their assistance with heartbreaking gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing . . . the audience was overcome by a feeling that these great mammals had something in common with humankind."
It was the plebs whose eyes could not bear what they saw; the senators and kings who forced it upon them, calculating these events specifically to distract the underprivileged from the practical woes that Caesar and the Gracchi (among others) attempted to ease with proposals for reform that culminated in so many assassinations at the hands of Roman society's chief beneficiaries. In the face of so many biased and classist historical texts, Parenti's book is as necessary an historical account of an extraordinary epoch as we have. While casting Caesar in a more humane and progressive light than historians have allowed, Parenti never wavers in his sincerity, calling attention to Caesar's notorious brutality and the corruption that festered around him as much as he lauds the man's more civil pursuits. Parenti never claims that Caesar hoped for an egalitarian society; he only suggests that Caesar's proposals for reforms in land distribution, tax codes and interest rates provoked the bitter disdain of the rich and powerful.
Compared to the quality of life available to plebs and slaves, these proposals were modest, even meager, compared to the real needs of ancient Rome's common people. Still, they might have lent some degree of comfort to the lives of those who had to use the urine of passersby to wash their clothes (As parenti explains, uric acid is still used today in common cleaning agents such as Borax) and crammed into unstable and claustrophobic apartment complexes, living with five other families in one room. That even these most modest of attempts at pacifying the underprivileged met with such scorn from Cicero, Marcus Brutus, Cassius and others makes an even more powerful testament of Parenti's book, which never turns a blind eye to Caesar's entire character merely to prove a point. This is the kind of sincerity and humanity one would expect from historians but so infrequently experiences.
Rating:
Summary: As Goes Rome...
Review: History is long dead, so who really cares what happened in ancient Rome? Surely there is some reason that it remains a staple of our educational curriculum. Perhaps it is because the more one learns about Rome, the more one understands about our own society and government. The lens of history permits us to take a less biased view of events. We gain an understanding of patterns and processes that, we suddenly realize, are applicable to our own situation in the present. This value of history, of course, depends on the impartiality of the history itself. Otherwise, history can be a powerful tool in warping our perceptions--both of the past and the present.
Michael Parenti addresses these issues with a fine mix of political science and history in "The Assassination of Julius Ceasar". The subtitle is perhaps more descriptive of the book itself--"A People's History of Ancient Rome". Parenti does a brilliant job providing the background to the assassination itself. He paints Rome as a world much different than that normally portrayed in history textbooks. He takes us beyond a mere alternative interpretation of the events, however, into a historiological diatribe against the aristocratic historians who have, until now, portrayed Rome in a very warm light.
From the primary sources--Cicero, Cato and Virgil--to the more recent giants of history such as Gibbon, Robinson and Tillemont, the accepted history of Rome has been passed down to us through an unbroken chain of wealthy aristocrats. Parenti points out their clear bias in interpreting issues of enlightened aristocracy, land reform and the plight of the commoner. He provides compelling evidence that this accepted, "gentleman's" history is strongly biased. He illustrates that this bias goes well beyond a few unkind words about "the ignorant masses" to outright reversal of the facts. Ultimately returning to the title, he demonstrates this egregious misrepresentation of history in the interpretations of the assassination of Julius Ceasar himself.
Ask most any student of history about ancient Rome and you will hear about the strong democratic institution of the Senate, and about how Julius Ceasar made himself the first emperor of Rome by destroying the power of this institution, leading to the downfall of the Republic and the rise of Empire. Brutus and his fellow patriots killed Ceasar in an act of tyranicide, a last-ditch attempt to rescue the republic for the people of Rome. Or so the story goes...
Never mind, for the moment, that Ceasar wasn't the first emperor (it was either Sulla or Octavian, depending on how you define Emperor). Never mind that the senate was never a democratic institution (but the tribal assembly of Rome was). Those commonly held beliefs are surely just simplifications to help us understand the big picture. At least we can remain confident in what we were taught about Ceasar himself?
As Parenti points out, Gaius Julius Ceasar was actually the last in a long line of populares, men who fought to prevent the exploitation of the populace by the aristocratic oligarchs in the senate. Like Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus before him, Ceasar attempted to pass a series of lex agraria, or land reform laws. There were actually very few private property owners in the Republic, with most land being leased to citizens to use as farm land. The oligarchs in the senate used their influence to ensure that nearly all leases to the small farmers were terminated, and the land was instead leased to themselves, virtually for free. Ceasar, and the other populares, attempted to break this stranglehold on arable land by passing land-reform laws that would return this public land to the general public. On 15 March, 44 B.C.E., the senators did what they had historically done when their priviledge and wealth was threatened: they assassinated those pushing for reform. Marcus Brutus, one of the ringleaders, was an aristocrat and wealthy landowner. He was acting in the interest of himself and of his class...not in the interest of what most would consider patriotism.
Parenti skillfully combines an alternative history and a lesson in historiography all while providing excellent food-for-thought for our current political situation. He writes in a lively style that is accessible and enjoyable to read. For those with a modest background and interest in either ancient Rome or modern politics, Parenti's "People's History of Ancient Rome" is highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Well researched and argued
Review: It's not really a book about Caesar's assassination. The description of that event is a small part of the book. Author, Michael Parenti is more interested in Caesar the reformer and how that got him killed. What impressed me about the book is the amount of praise that Parenti finds from the people toward Caesar and the amount of negative information that the author digs up about Cicero, Cato, Brutus and the other usual heroes of the saga. It's interesting because historians traditionally give Caesar's assassins credit for trying to save the Republic while Caesar is usually cast as the power hungry despot. Parenti reverses these roles. He asserts that Caesar's concern over average citizens put him at odds with the landed class and they killed him because he was bad for business. The hard part about the book is that Parenti seems to find no fault in the kinds of leaders that stir up the masses. Sure some of those leaders have good intentions, but just as many of them are using the needs of people to build a power base. It's the nature of politics and politicians. Parenti seems to take any social reformer as unselfish hero. This error is common among a certain world view and in extreme cases it's been used to explain the merits of butchers like Castro or Stalin. Parenti also uses phrases like class prerogatives and social justice, as if there were a form of justice unrelated to human beings. Those terms seem out of date in 2004 when it's been shown all over the world that statist economies cannot keep up with the free market. Countries that use more central planning have higher inflation and unemployment rates and the cost of living is always higher there. "Class prerogatives" and "social justice" may have been handy terms when the question of economies was up in the air. But in today's world they come off as jealousies rather than plans to make people's lives better. Parenti did convince me that Caesar probably had more positives than the average historian is willing to give him. Maybe his willingness to redistribute wealth had more to do with his death than popularly recognized. Still, I don't think Parenti makes a good case that Caesar the dictator was a better scenario than a free republic. I'd rather live in a free country where some people have more than I have, especially when I have more than the average person in the world. It's true for Americans today and for ancient Romans. The fact that I disagree with the conclusions doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the case that Parenti makes. This is a well researched book and it made me think analytically about things that I hadn't considered before. It also gave me an interest to read more about the classical world.
Rating:
Summary: Well researched and argued
Review: It's not really a book about Caesar's assassination. The description of that event is a small part of the book. Author, Michael Parenti is more interested in Caesar the reformer and how that got him killed. What impressed me about the book is the amount of praise that Parenti finds from the people toward Caesar and the amount of negative information that the author digs up about Cicero, Cato, Brutus and the other usual heroes of the saga. It's interesting because historians traditionally give Caesar's assassins credit for trying to save the Republic while Caesar is usually cast as the power hungry despot. Parenti reverses these roles. He asserts that Caesar's concern over average citizens put him at odds with the landed class and they killed him because he was bad for business. The hard part about the book is that Parenti seems to find no fault in the kinds of leaders that stir up the masses. Sure some of those leaders have good intentions, but just as many of them are using the needs of people to build a power base. It's the nature of politics and politicians. Parenti seems to take any social reformer as unselfish hero. This error is common among a certain world view and in extreme cases it's been used to explain the merits of butchers like Castro or Stalin. Parenti also uses phrases like class prerogatives and social justice, as if there were a form of justice unrelated to human beings. Those terms seem out of date in 2004 when it's been shown all over the world that statist economies cannot keep up with the free market. Countries that use more central planning have higher inflation and unemployment rates and the cost of living is always higher there. "Class prerogatives" and "social justice" may have been handy terms when the question of economies was up in the air. But in today's world they come off as jealousies rather than plans to make people's lives better. Parenti did convince me that Caesar probably had more positives than the average historian is willing to give him. Maybe his willingness to redistribute wealth had more to do with his death than popularly recognized. Still, I don't think Parenti makes a good case that Caesar the dictator was a better scenario than a free republic. I'd rather live in a free country where some people have more than I have, especially when I have more than the average person in the world. It's true for Americans today and for ancient Romans. The fact that I disagree with the conclusions doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the case that Parenti makes. This is a well researched book and it made me think analytically about things that I hadn't considered before. It also gave me an interest to read more about the classical world.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Themes - Poor Organization
Review: Michael Parenti does an excellent job of reminding us where history comes from and how important perspective is in history. His concept of the "gentleman historian" is very apt, as most of our understanding of the Late Roman Empire is derived from the surviving texts of the Roman aristocracy. This leads to partially skewed image of Rome and of the common citizens as being nothing more than an angry mob. However, along with being incredibly one-sided, Parenti ends up rambling on for 200 pages about this very idea, without making any other important conclusions. The book would more appropriatly named "The Assassination of the Gentleman Historian". I would suggest looking elsewhere for alternative viewpoints on the Late Roman Empire.
Rating:
Summary: Controversial retelling of the fall of the Roman Republic
Review: Nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, there is a lot to dissuade the serious reader of Roman history in Michael Parenti's "The Assassination of Julius Caesar". A radical commentator on contemporary society and historical memory, Parenti applies a "Marxian-lite" analysis of the late Republic. In hearing a talk he once gave, one comment he made stands out; "One of the great pleasures of learning history is not the learning it but the unlearning of preconceived notions". To that end he has an axe to grind with historians of the era and, in the first chapter, he names names and takes few prisoners. The effect of all this is to put the reader off a bit. I was taken aback as Parenti railed against the "gentlemen historians" and the class based prism that they have used to interpret the assassination of Caesar.
The question Parenti sets out to answer is not who killed Caesar, that is well established, but why. His answer is that the conspirators were representative of the most reactionary elements of a conservative Senate and the wealthy class interests they defended. To Parenti the domestic policies of the late republic were the politics of class warfare. Landed interests expropriated land from citizen-soldiers away on war, voted themselves subsidies and lowered their own tax burden. Lower class citizens were denied a majority of the wealth flowing into the Republic (the result of new conquests) and deprived of their small farms with little but the tribunes to protect their interests.
Attempts by reformers such as the Gracchi were seen as a usurping of the republic's institutions, most importantly the Senate. To Parenti the senatorial exhortations to uphold the "rule of law" were natural; the Senate passed the laws, the laws benefited their class. The elimination of the threat of reformers became a quest for many of the ruling class and these self-styled "optimates" resorted to inciting the populace and "death squads" to eliminate those seen as radicals.
The book reserves a special chapter for Cicero, and it isn't pretty. An excerpt reveals the extent of Parenti's view of the Roman Senator; "A self-enriching slaveholder, slumlord and senator Cicero deplored even the palest move towards democracy". A hypocrite when it was warranted, Cicero was a staunch opponent of the Roman "masses" and of Caesar. The author paints Cicero as rejecting reforms such as the moderate package put forth by Caesar as consul, engaging in a never-ending quest to promote and protect the privileges of the ruling class. Parenti even casts doubt on the validity of the Catilinarian conspiracy, questioning the sparse evidence given as proof. Years later Cicero's words and deeds were to come back to haunt him when hunted down by the triumvirate he was assassinated.
Enter Gaius Julius Caesar a member of a noble Roman family and the greatest Roman popularis. To Parenti, Caesar is ambitious but not to the degree historians have made him to be. As a young man he rejects Sulla's offer to pledge himself to the reactionary cause putting his own life in danger. After Sulla's death in 78 BCE Caesar returns to Rome and continues his rise through the Republic's institutions. As consul he introduced land reforms to ease the burden for the lower classes gaining support among them but seriously and permanently alienating members of the ruling elite. The result was that when Caesar finally made his bid for power that resulted in his dictatorship for life he had acquired a strong faction of dissenters who looked to his overthrow.
Parenti paints a picture of an ambitious Caesar with a program that included debt reduction, land reform for the poor, granting of citizenship to allied peoples and a conciliatory attitude to those who opposed him. Rather than an ambitious politico who wanted a crown, Caesar as dictator, in the author's view, was implementing reforms that would make the Republic more representative of the populace. His conciliatory attitude did little to dissuade his enemies' hatred of him and the outcome of the assassination comes as a reactionary response to the attacks on elite privilege rather than any defense of Republican virtues.
To Parenti the villains are both the ruling elites whose greed incited them to oppose then finally murder Caesar and the latter historians who have bought forward the idea of Caesar as a destroyer of the Roman constitution and the lower classes as dirty masses without the ability to know what was good for them. The dictum of not imposing contemporary values on historical situations means little to Parenti, and he states it freely as he recalls the suffering of slaves and the disenfranchised. He need not have done this, the fact that reformers such as the Gracchi, Drusus Flacus, Rufus Sartininius, Clotius and the institution of the tribune existed shows that there were contemporaries who understood the unfairness of the oligarchic Roman Republic.
In the end "The Assassination of Julius Caesar" is necessary read for anyone interested in the fall of the Republic. Readers may not agree with Parenti's sometimes radical notions nor his attacks on historians- both ancient and modern- of that age, but this is a book that will stimulate. For its radical but intelligently argued positions and unabashed willingness to name names it is a great, intellectually stimulating work.
Rating:
Summary: People's History for real
Review: Parenti's discussion of the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar is radically enlightening. His presentation, like a fork of lightning, illumines the history of Rome. It's real and revelatory. I understand the history as I never before did. I can relate it to my life experiences and give it heft and dimensions because Parenti writes of and documents very well the crucial forces that were at work. He makes clear what the "gentlemen historians" with their upper class biases have so muddled.
The words flow clear, the concepts easily grasped. He has a sweet way with words.
He adds a very useful appendix that enables one on their own to penetrate into the scholarly resources available.
An excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Other view of Rome
Review: This book has two main thrusts. The first is The Roman republic and many of it's revered figures weren't all they were cracked up to be. Examples include Cicero and Cato. Roman life was horrible for most of it's subjects. The upper class were strict constitutionalists when it served their interests (i.e. protection of status quo and wealth). However they were quick to break the constitution when threats to their status arose.
Next, the assassination of Julius Caesar is detailed not as the slaying of a tyrant, but as the slaying of a popular reformer, who could threaten the Senators way of life.
The author does not lack facts and cites many examples to back up his opinions. He'll tell you what he thinks, why, and then put in on solid ground with facts. That leads to my only complaint. I got bleary eyed reading about the long line of reformers the Senate did in (against the constitution it should be noted) prior to Caesar!
This book clearly shows how many revered Roman figures were not longing for a republic, but for any system, that would keep them elevated and the masses down. Emperors may have been anathema to a republic, but it kept the Senators in luxury... Hail Caesar!
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