Re: [Marxism] How Rome's endless "war on terror" ended up -- an ahistorical thought for today

[Shane Mage <shmage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Feb 7, 2009, at 2:25 PM, Mark Lause wrote:
>
> The references to Roman history and the dangers of Ceasarism, etc.
> were widely understood and accepted at one point in our history.
> Regrettably, nowadays, this has all become Greek....or Latin.


Not so "regrettably," perhaps, since that political "classicism" was  
explicitly antidemocratic, taking as its ideal hero Marcus Tullius  
Cicero the mouthpiece for the reactionary Roman magnates self- 
identified as the "Boni" (good men) or "Optimates" (best men).  It  
loathed the Popularist tradition in Republican Rome, symbolized by the  
Gracchi (a "lex agraria" was the worst nightmare of the Founding  
Fathers) and with particular hatred for Caesar, the revolutionary  
Popularis leader whose reformist program would have preserved a  
modernised Republic if his dictatorship had not been cut short at the  
Ides of March.



Shane Mage

> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos

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