Word: caesar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Speak Truth of Caesar...
...pleased that you reported Professor Highet's remarks in the Nov. 12 issue . . . Mr. Highet regards Caesar as "a crook and a traitor" because he believes in political liberty and dreads the appearance in this country of a man of Caesar's intelligence and ambition. Dante regarded Caesar as the savior of the temporal world and the human counterpart of the divine Christ, because Dante believed in a world state, abhorred the misery caused by international wars, and had himself experienced the brutal anarchy of the Italian democracies...
...betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader ... It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome . . . Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the state. When they do-down with the state, say I, which means that the state would down...
...Julius Caesar's Commentaries, the primer of classical scholarship, said Highet, is a case in point. "I happen to think that Caesar is a crook and a traitor.* The reason I think so is that he trained a personal army in order to assassinate democracy in his own country. His book is full of evasions and alterations of facts. It's really a propaganda document, but most students are given the impression that Caesar was merely setting down the facts...
...Caesar's contemporaries often used even stronger language. In I, Claudius, Author Robert Graves reproduces the mood, if not the exact language of a song Caesar's legions sang returning from Gaul: "Home we bring the bald whoremonger;/Romans, lock your wives away...