Caesar: The Man.... And Other Things

As I was reading the texts for this class, I took some notes on my thoughts and, since this is a blog post, thought I would share them.

Before reading the PDF and Plutarch, I had already known a lil' somethin' somethin' about our guy, Caesar. Cleopatra holds a huge place in my heart and her interactions with both Caesar and Antony made me develop an interest in them, as well. I have also watched HBO's Rome a million times and have a ton of non fiction on Ancient Rome (Read SPQR by Mary Beard. It's amazing!)

One thing I kept thinking of while reading about him for this class is that everyone knows this guy's name. Throughout these past couple of thousand years, we have made him immortal. Sure, he's a brilliant man and an excellent politician. But what I think gets lost in translation along the way, is that Caesar was just a man. He was a father, a husband (a couple of times), a womanizer, and a fierce friend. He was extremely ambitious and made it to the top and stayed there for quite some time. He made mistakes but also did great things. Now, I'm not saying everything he did was admirable but as someone who is human, I can see some areas where he made decisions for survival and some for politics.

Another thing that blows me away every time I think about it is that only a small percentage of ancient texts have survived. We may think we know everything about the ancient world, but the fact is that we don't. So much gets lost through years and years of war, fires, weather issues, etc. Every television show and movie portraying ancient Athens or ancient Rome may only be getting a small idea of what really went on. Could you imagine what the world would be like if we didn't have to study just the couple of ancient texts we have? What if we had a plethora of works that were still available to pour over instead of just guessing over ancient life like we do when read Homer? It seriously blows me away how much we don't have and what pieces of history we are missing as we move forward with our own history.

Lastly, since I'm a huge speculator on back stories (Come on guys, I mention this like every blog post), I can't help but think that either Caesar has got shitty friends or he was clueless about the people he surrounded himself with. I know he's not perfect and that there were some huge disagreements between him and Pompey even after Caesar gave him his daughter to marry. I mean, these best buddies went to war! Like, whaaat? And let's not even get me started about Brutus. Anyone else feel not a twinge of sadness when Brutus off'd himself after battle? No? Just me then? But I wish I could get a glimpse at Caesar's, the man not the ruler, mind as all this was going on. Did he feel betrayal? Or did he have a growing sense of impending doom? Or was he just "la-dee-da"-ing all over the place and was just focusing on the next best thing?

We'll never know but it's fun to speculate about!

What can I believe?

I can definitely trust the information that I read in my textbooks, right?  Aren’t they just filled with facts about what happened in the past? But where and who is all that information coming from?!?  I don’t know what to believe anymore!

That is definitely how The Daughter of Time is making me feel.  On Grant’s quest to discover the truth about Richard III, he realizes that different sources of history tell different accounts about the life of Richard.  There is no way he could know what ACTUALLY happened unless he lived during that time.  Yet, we are taught in schools with the aid of textbook and we are just supposed to trust what is written.  At the same time, our parents or teachers probably taught us: “don’t believe everything you see/read.” 

This is just like articles found on the internet.  While I’m scrolling through Facebook and reading a few of the articles that my friends’ shared, I usually make a conscious effort not to believe everything that I read.  I have fallen for those fake or misleading articles too many times.  But because we are taught not to believe everything we read, why do we still do it outside of the internet?  We shouldn’t automatically believe the words in our textbooks just because they are “scholarly” or educational tools.  The authors of history books were probably not present during the times they wrote about, so how can they be sure about anything?  They must have gotten their information elsewhere and there is no way of knowing what is true and what is false. 

On another note about this topic, we must be aware of author biases.  I was taught that every author has a bias and sometimes their biases show (even when trying to be as unbiased as possible.)  If this is the case, the authors of textbooks are biased too.  This means that readers might only get the information that the author believed or wanted to share, not the full story.  Maybe this was the case with the books written about Richard III.  It seems that people had very strong opinions about him, so that is why textbooks portray him as a villain. 

I think that The Daughter of Time is reinforcing a lesson that we all know very well.  We can’t be too quick to trust what we read.  Our textbooks cannot be completely accurate because the authors have not experienced all of history or know everything that happened.  Even biases can get in the way of the truth.