this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Rough Roman Memes
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The quote cuts out the best part. Cato saw Ceasar reading the letter and accused him of conspiring with someone outside the senate. So Caesar happily handed him his sister's love letter to assert his dominance.
(Although my headcanon is that he really was conspiring with someone, and the "love letter" was just a façade)
IMHO you can't go wrong assuming that writers from the Principate are either leaving something out or adding something to make Caesar or his political progeny look better... though once opinion begins to be divided on who really is carrying forward the legacy of Caesar and Augustus, shit gets interesting again.
Dunno about that. Several of our sources during the Principate are hostile towards Caesar himself, in part due to openly identifying more with his ultraconservative opposition.
Any examples off the top of your head? I guess I am thinking more of chroniclers and "proto-historians" who would have thrived after Augustus solidified control of the entire state apparatus, but I am legitimately happy to have my horizons broadened.
I checked to make sure. I remembered Dio as more hostile than he was, though he certainly has some condemnation, he's on the whole pro-Caesar, while I remembered him as more negative. Suetonius relates positive and negative stories about him, but regards his assassination as just. Plutarch is more in-line with what I was thinking.
I would've sworn to passages in one of Tacitus's works heavily critical on Caesar, but if they exist, Google is too fucked to give quick access, and I don't have the energy to paw through all of Tacitus's works to find a few paragraphs that probably aren't even the focus of the chapter.
Maybe I'm thinking of letters rather than histories?
No worries. I've probably got the autobiography more in my mind anyway, and current events have probably biased me on the side of presuming propaganda. 😂
Still perfectly plausible either way, that ol' Ivlivs handed the letter over as a pure flex or as CYA and a flex.