Locating the Tyrant

I liked the HBO series Rome from 2006 - or possibly earlier - and that's probably why I parodied it in 2007 and again last week when I borrowed it from the library. I hope they have more seasons of it available here. Don't worry about the repeated scripts from the past. They will eventually give way to new work and this time we can hit them hard as soon as they try to steal it. A lot of work went to waste before I could enjoy this security. Too much, I think. If an artist has to surrender his first five LP's and the first two thousand pages of his writings before he can share his work without interference, it isn't likely that there will be anything left for him at the end of it. It's really a stupid, destructive policy that stands to discourage future talent from creating and sharing new work. Fucking pricks should all be in prison. (May 2, 2014:) But I don't want to get too sidetracked with what I need to share of the thoughts provoked by watching this production. The first season focused on the legacy of Julius Caesar. Here was a man who was intelligent and who loved the people. As an insider to the power scheme at the time he knew what needed to be done to return Rome to its former prosperity after too much money and power fell into too few hands in the Senate. The senators were envious of Caesar for outmatching all of them with his achievements in expanding the Roman Empire into Gaul (France and Spain) and for winning the love of the common people. They accused him of tyranny because he wanted to force them to hand over their wealth to paid employees instead of letting slaves do everything. He wanted the senators to pay for large, expensive public projects to help revitalize the Roman economy and improve the living standard of all citizens. And he stacked the Senate with new appointees, diminishing the power of the standing ones. Most Romans would praise Caesar before they called him a tyrant, but the senators had enough money and influence to sway an army to their side. Caesar crushed this force but he did not execute his vanquished opponents. Instead he offered them friendship. In return they stabbed him to death on the Senate floor. Here in my country we had a prime minister who declared marshal law in his first term of office in the early 1970's to control an uprising in Quebec. He kept winning elections right into the 1980's. To me a tyrant must be first and foremost unpopular. A man who is loved by the people does not 'make himself king', as the Roman senators feared. The people make him king. And if the Roman senators cared about the people as much as Caesar did, they would have let Caesar pursue his benevolent dictatorship. The Roman senators had their own private interests at heart with every accusation of 'tyranny'. Today I believe that rich men still fear anyone who independently wins love from the population. I should elaborate on my earlier reference to 'riches' as the tyrant, to explain why riches are not popular. Riches derive their value from scarcity. Their payoff goes to the fewest hands possible. This makes riches unpopular by simple arithmetic. On the other hand, things like military success or great works of music or comedy pay off the whole dependent population. So I got a lot from watching this series. And now I know why Caesar was vulnerable on the day he was assassinated. It's because Lucius Vorenus wasn't by his side to protect him. This newly appointed senator with superior fighting skills abandoned Caesar after someone whispered a terrible secret in his ear about his son's true father. He had to go home at once and push his wife off a balcony. Otherwise, Caesar might have survived to accomplish many more great things.
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© 2014. Statements by David Skerkowski. All rights reserved.