Peril and Politics, Past and Present

One thing about Rome: it’s full of reminders that politics has always been an ugly business. As if that’s needed these days.

While America battles its way through an increasingly bizarre and dangerous election season, I was in Italy on the day of the Trump-Harris “Dilly in Philly” match-up, trying to reassure myself that no matter what happened, this too would pass.  It seemed an opportune moment to visit the Largo di Torre Argentina, one of the more recent entries on the Eternal City’s itinerary of antiquities, having opened to the public for the first time last year. The site contains not only four ancient temples, but also the Curia di Pompey, where Julius Caesar was famously assassinated in 44 BC. You probably lent your ears to  Shakespeare’s take on the story somewhere back in high school.

Acting on fears that Caesar was diminishing the role of the Senate and planning to assume a role of “king”, a group of more than sixty Senators attacked the leader at a meeting of the Senate. With an almost operatic level of excess, they stabbed Caesar 23 times—pretty well eliminating the “unfortunate accident” defense.

For his part, Caesar should have seen it coming.  Shortly after receiving an ominous tip that the date of March 15 would bring trouble, the self-declared “dictator for life” spied the two conspiracy leaders, Cassius and Brutus, deep in conversation. “What do you think Cassius is up to? I don’t like him. He looks pale,” Caesar commented—which is a perfectly Italian character analysis if there ever was one.

The site of the bloody deed is rather ignobly located just off the bus-laden, unshaded Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, where tourists trudge wearily past pizza counters and stores selling plastic swords and shields. Caesar’s nephew and successor Octavian declared the grounds a cursed place, and that was before anyone built one of Rome’s busiest thoroughfares there.

Octavian closed the Curia when he took power, but if it was meant to be an act of respect to his uncle, it didn’t work out exactly that way. A latrine was placed there instead. In an example of one dictator looking out for another, it was Mussolini’s archeological ambitions that led to the re-discovery of the site in the late 1920’s.

Always hoping to tie the Fascists to the glories of the ancient Empire, Il Duce intended to excavate the area, but ran out of money. By the middle of the 20th century, the site had become a refuge for stray cats. It wasn’t until 2019, when the jeweler Bulgari stepped up with a million euro donation, that the ruins would be made accessible to visitors.

To be honest, the Curia di Pompey itself is not a terribly evocative sight. It looks like the setting of a modernist Shakespeare production: a bare stage, with a few tufo stones and  some architectural remnants scattered around for effect. The Largo di Torre Argentina is dominated by the monumental columns of the Temple of Fortuna. By comparison, the spot where Caesar was stabbed could pass for the temple’s not too tidy back porch.

But that’s because the Curia is only a small part of a massive theatre complex, most of which is now buried below the modern day Teatro Argentina and the neighborhood around it. Earlier that morning, I passed through Campo de’ Fiori and wandered into an arched tunnel snaking between two buildings. Only when I stepped inside did I notice that the entire passageway was elaborately frescoed. A sign on the wall revealed that the Passetto del Biscione was also part of this same ancient theatre construction— a corridor leading from the public square outside into the theatre itself.

Now here was some real drama.  I could picture Caesar or his adversaries striding through the tunnel like prizefighters heading from the locker room into the ring.

After my visit to Caesar’s stomping grounds, I stopped by the Biblioteca Angelica, a public library dating back to the 1500’s.  If history has a smell, it’s what hits you when you enter this leather and parchment palace, filled with aged books stacked to the sky and a collection of elaborately decorated globes from the Age of Discovery.

As beautiful as those globes are, they’re also a testament to the limits of any particular generation’s knowledge and to the ever-shifting balance of power between nations. Do those old maps depict a world order now largely lost to time? Ours will too one day. Maybe not as far in the future as we hope.

In the end, the assassination of Julius Caesar, undertaken to protect the Roman Republic, accomplished exactly the opposite, plunging the country into a civil war that brought the Republic’s downfall. Proof perhaps that not only do the ends never justify the means, but that the ends usually wind up being the opposite of what we were trying to do anyway.

Standing in the silent library, I was reminded that after all of the raging speeches, power struggles and political conniving, the only elements of any society that seem to endure for long are what’s created, what’s learned, and what’s left to those who follow. Amidst the inevitable sound and fury of the next few weeks, that might not be a bad criteria for shaping our political decisions.

And for those aspiring to power, it’s probably worth keeping in mind that even if you exit at the top of your game— and a thousand years later are memorialized by literature’s greatest of all time — the place where you spent your last hours can still wind up covered in mud and used as a cat refuge. History is cruel; glory is fleeting.  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.