To Julius Caesar on bias, perspective and deification.

Book 2, letter 18

Part 2 of 4

To Julius Caesar on bias, perspective and deification.

I can't tell you what the story of the Raven and the Buddha means, but I also think that not all stories are about answers.

Your story, Caesar, and all the Caesars who came after you....well, I've only just begun to learn.

If you didn't plan your own assassination, then the lessons we learn from your life are very different. Perhaps your murder was just popular custom. The Roman senate had been murdering popular leaders for a hundred or more years by the time they got to you. Your death actually appears to be par for the course. You strove to become a tyrant, and when you reached too far, your enemies slew you. Pretty straight forward.

But then there was all that money, and all that land that you left to the people in your will.

It all seems planned, like your real goal was immortality, and you didn't care if you had to be killed in order to achieve that goal.

Yet, in a blunt and blood spattered sequence, Brutus killed you, then Marc Antony killed Brutus, then Marc Antony killed himself and Octavian took over Rome, becoming the first Emperor. That might be a ridiculously simplified summary of events, skipping over years and years of civil war, but it illustrates something of the nature of the times; violent military force proved itself more powerful than civil process. As Pompey said, “Stop quoting the law to us, we carry swords.”

Pompey

Public opinion on your life is not so much divided, as it is diverse. There are hundreds of books about you, scholars from all over the world debate and discuss the evidence, there are plays, and movies, and novels and even comic books and children's cartoons about you. Which is to say that your story is a difficult one to untangle from the bias of your contemporaries, as well as from the perspectives of modern society.

Bias and Perspective.

Is hubris the over extension of bias? Is bias, self confidence taken beyond a measure of balance? If I am confident in Cicero's, or Plutarch's or anyone's opinion of you, am I not simply adopting another's bias? It actually seems impossible to separate the truth from fantasy in the epic tale of the decline of the Roman Republic. Our lives are made up of facts and feelings and events and stories and we are as often mislead by our own assumptions as we are guided correctly by confident assertions of fact. So what is the difference between bias and perspective, when confidence so often leads to prejudice and blind assumptions?

It would be so much easier if I could just hate you Caesar, but your story is far too complex to allow bias to dictate my feelings.