Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar, The

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His declaration as to why he had divorced his wife Pompeia, when questioned in the trial against Publius Clodius Pulcher for sacrilege against Bona Dea festivities (from which men were excluded), in entering Caesar's home disguised as a lute-girl apparently with intentions of a seducing Caesar's wife; as reported in Plutarch's Lives of Coriolanus, Caesar, Brutus, and Antonius by Plutarch, as translated by Thomas North, p. 53 Ma tutto viene fatto per puro opportunismo e calcolo economico: si temono più le migliaia di schiavi asiatici che la spada di Pompeo, capaci col loro numero di far crollare il prezzo degli schiavi locali e, di riflesso, di mandare sul lastrico piccoli contadini e artigiani, avvantaggiando di fatto gli onnipotenti latifondisti della classe senatoria e impedendo alle banche, ossia alla city, di rientrare dei loro crediti e investimenti. He had inaugurated a new era. Before him Rome had been a city with a few scattered colonies. He was the one who founded the Empire. He had codified the law, reformed the currency and even modified the calendar on the basis of scientific knowledge. His Gallic campaigns, which had taken the Roman flag as far as distant Britain, had opened up a new continent to trade and civilization. His statue had its place with those of the Gods, he had given his name to cities as well as a month in the calendar, and the monarchs added his illustrious name to their own. The history of Rome had found its Alexander. It was already apparent that he would become the unattainable model for every dictator. Sunt item, quae appellantur alces. Harum est consimilis capris figura et varietas pellium, sed magnitudine paulo antecedunt mutilaeque sunt cornibus et crura sine nodis articulisque habent neque quietis causa procumbunt neque, si quo adflictae casu conciderunt, erigere sese aut sublevare possunt. His sunt arbores pro cubilibus: ad eas se applicant atque ita paulum modo reclinatae quietem capiunt. Quarum ex vestigiis cum est animadversum a venatoribus, quo se recipere consuerint, omnes eo loco aut ab radicibus subruunt aut accidunt arbores, tantum ut summa species earum stantium relinquatur. Huc cum se consuetudine reclinaverunt, infirmas arbores pondere adfligunt atque una ipsae concidunt.

As quoted in The Adventurer No. 69 (3 July 1753) in The Works of Samuel Johnson (1837) edited by Arthur Murphy, p. 32 Roma için sistemli sömürü yöntemleri bulan ve uygulayan, çağdaş emperyalist düzenin ilk harçlarının atıldığı kılıç ve hisse senedi işbirliğini, böl ve yönet politikalarını tarihte ilk uygulayan bir insan anlatılıyor. Bertolt Brecht, The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar (2016), p. 23; quoted in Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language (2019) by Nicola Gardini, p. 72 Clive Foss, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption, London: Quercus Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1905204965, p. 148 Rome officially became an Empire on 16 January 27 BC, when the Senate awarded Octavian – an adopted son of Julius Caesar – the title of Augustus. Prior to this the Republic had been tortured by two decades of bloody civil wars; in the course of these, in 49 BC, Caesar had seized power and ruled as a military dictator. Yet Caesar was an autocrat both of his time and ahead of it, and on 15 March 44 BC – the Ides of March – he was murdered – direct reward, said the scholar and bureaucrat Suetonius (c. AD 70-130), for his vaunting ambition, in which many Romans perceived a desire to revive the monarchy. ‘Constant exercise of power gave Caesar a love for it,’ wrote Suetonius, who also repeated a rumour that as a young man Caesar dreamed of raping his own mother, a vision soothsayers interpreted as a clear sign ‘he was destined to conquer the earth.’Once we have seen this, we can be shown the social space again; the third driving shot shows more of the residential streets which appear towards the end of the second shot, and more of the use of the pavement as a social space that we saw there. The shops are smaller. A Communist election poster, which appeared fleetingly above a corner café as the biographer drove away from the market square, is pasted up throughout these streets. He [Caesar] declared in Greek with loud voice to those who were present 'Let the die be cast' and led the army across. He was reportedly quoting the playwright Menander, specifically "Ἀρρηφόρῳ" ( Arrephoria, or "The Flute-Girl"), according to Deipnosophistae, Book 13, paragraph 8, saying «Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος» ( anerrhíphtho kúbos). The Greek translates rather as " let the die be cast!", or "Let the game be ventured!", which would instead translate in Latin as iacta ālea estō. According to Lewis and Short ( Online Dictionary: alea, Lewis and Short at the Perseus Project. See bottom of section I.). History Lessons (1972), based on Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar, placed history in relation to modern political life. As Marxist dialecticians, Straub and Huillet created severe cinematic critiques of capitalism in a manner that paralleled the works of Brecht in the theatre. Straub once stated: “I don’t know if I’m a Marxist. I don’t know, because there are so many ways to be Marxist. I haven’t read all of Marx. Marxism is a method, it’s not an ideology.” Bu kitabında edebi bir kaygı gözetmediği anlaşılıyor, hedefi herkesin övgü ve hayranlıkla söz ettiği Sezar’ın efsaneliğinin sorgulanması olduğu açıkca belli oluyor. Demokrasi ve Cumhuriyet’in o günkü anlamlarıyla nasıl işlediğini, Sezar’ın ve Çiçero’nun demokrasi anlayışları, rüşvet, politik ayak oyunları ve sınıfsal ezilmişlikleri o güzel üslubuyla anlatıyor Brecht. Brecht reminds his readers of the need for constant vigilance and critical suspicion towards the great figures of the past. In an echo of his dramatic theories, the audience is confronted with its own task of active interpretation rather than passive acceptance -- we have to work out our own views about Mr Julius Caesar.

The first car shot may have appeared to be an arbitrary selection of arbitrary events; the point of the second car shot, taken in the same way and possibly on the same day, is that none of what we are seeing is arbitrary. All of it is determined by the kinds of calculations we heard outlined in the preceding interviews; calculations about how to maximise profits, and calculations about how the consequences of these calculations are to be survived. The interviews are theory or cause, the city is practice or effect. There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley. Caesar was and is not lovable. His generosity to defeated opponents, magnanimous though it was, did not win their affection. He won his soldiers' devotion by the victories that his intellectual ability, applied to warfare, brought them. Yet, though not lovable, Caesar was and is attractive, indeed fascinating. His political achievement required ability, in effect amounting to genius, in several different fields, including administration and generalship, besides the minor arts of wire pulling and propaganda. In all these, Caesar was a supreme virtuoso.From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time." The Civil War, Book III, 68; variant translation: "In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes."

It's Brecht. His "historicization" abounds here. The best historical novels are the ones that have that special power to conjure a mist while you read them, immediately convincing the reader that while familiar, these characters aren't quite modern people (insofar as historical novels taking place in Ancient times). There isn't this mist here. Brecht's novel is an allegory of his social context in early twentieth century. But... while superior novels like The Ides of March (Thornton Wilder), Augustus (John Williams) and Memoirs of Hadrian (Marguerite Yorcenar) conjure the magic of "reviving things past" (developing thus an authenticity to it's characters), truth is they mostly portray the lives of aristocrats and their musings, literary and philosophical: difficult to see the lives that existed in the streets, in the INSULAE, the slaves, the urban poor and their day-to-day lives. In this novel, Brecht shows us the worries of the underprivileged people, the bars, the desperate drive to not die of starvation, the corruption of the electoral system due to the Plebs selling their votes to make ends meet and the organizing of the underclass in urban clubs so as to mobilize their political power. Another fascinating aspect that Brecht imposes in this work is the reality of economic considerations taken by agents who react to economic incentives and circumstances. This is an insight that both classical liberals and marxists share. Of course, Cicero was an arrogant and (what we would call today) elitist man to whom the plight of the urban poor was not an important matter. This reality of roman patricians elitist attitudes, Brecht reveals to us. But Cicero was also a gifted writer and philosopher. This Brecht doesn't quite shows us. Perhaps it is true, though, that pagan morality, as Paul Johnson says it, was an empirical morality. What serves the maintenance of the roman state and the cult of traditional gods, goes. A brutal world, no christian morality here. I also don't doubt that Cicero cared, in his own way, for the Res Publica. Brecht's novel is superior in the matter of showing the reality of material deprivation in ancient times, but still... it feels too modern, too anachronistic. Gli affari del signor Giulio Cesare fu pubblicato sessanta anni fa, qualche mese dopo la morte di Bertolt Brecht avvenuta nel 1956. Nel romanzo si immagina che un giovane storico, a venti anni dalla morte di Giulio Cesare, volendone scrivere un'apologia, si rechi dall'ex banchiere Spicro, avendo saputo che era in possesso dei diari di Raro, il segretario di Giulio Cesare. Ma dai diari apprende aspetti di Cesare inaspettati: l’uomo tanto osannato era un donnaiolo impenitente e viveva al di sopra dei propri mezzi, tanto che per ripianare i propri debiti non aveva altro mezzo che quello di passare, dietro compenso, da una parte all’altra degli schieramenti politici. The interviewees’ distance from the city’s bustle is in line with the villas and retreats of Brecht’s text, and also with reality. Gilberto Perez ends his long essay on the film with the suggestion that Spicer’s “modern counterparts” are to be found “lurking in the streets of Rome”, 3 but this is an idealization; when not safely out of earshot, they have no need to lurk. A recent study found that 22, 000 of London’s flats have been kept vacant by their owners. The residential streets seen in the second and third car shots have long since been gentrified. 4 The former legionary was glad to go to war, even on the losing side, because he had three brothers, and what land they had was not enough for all of them. Suetonius: The Life of Julius Caesar (Latin and English, cross-linked: the English translation by J.C.Rolfe) Reported as Caesar's last words, spoken to Marcus Junius Brutus, as recorded in Divus Iulius by Suetonius, paragraph 82; this gave rise to William Shakespeare's famous adaptation in Julius Caesar: "Et tu, Brute? — Then fall, Caesar!"Note left on a statue of Caesar in Rome, prior to the Ides of March, as reported in Suetonius, in The Twelve Caesars, as translated by Robert Graves (1957), Divus Iulius ¶ 80 Julius Caesar, a radical aristocrat of unbounded ambition, and a successful commander and politician, gained wealth and glory by conquering Gaul, then won supreme power in a civil war. He destroyed the Roman Republic and seemed to be moving toward monarchy, but was assassinated before he could complete his plans.