The ides of march

Friday

Roger Kimball

What America should heed from Julius Caesar’s assassination

It being the Ides of March, I thought it might be worth reflecting briefly on the most famous event that occurred on this day: the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. One of the great ironies surrounding that bloody event is that, for all of the upheaval it occasioned, it failed utterly in its stated purpose. The conspirators sought — or said they sought — to overthrow a dictator and restore the Republic.  “The Republic,” “the Republic,” “the Republic”: that was the phrase they uttered ad nauseam. But the Roman Republic, devised to govern a city state, was overwhelmed by the cosmopolitan responsibilities of empire. By Caesar’s day, the Republic was a tottering and deeply corrupt edifice.

ides of march caesar

Monday

Alexander Larman

Elections are always better in the movies

As the midterm elections loom, there is the usual excitable commentary about what it all means. Every voter will have their own heroes and villains, the dashing white knight and the looming bogeyman. The complexities of the wider sociopolitical issues at hand will be subsumed to simple questions: will the results encourage Trump to run in 2024? Is this curtains for Kamala’s presidential ambitions? These are, of course, over-simplifications of difficult and nuanced issues. This is why the movies have inevitably dealt better with the drama (and farce) of fictitious — or at least fictionally disguised — election campaigns.