Shoudl Bush follow Caesar's example and become President for Life?

[Colin]

Further, he seems to be forgetting what happened to Ceasar the same year he declared himself dictator for life. Far from "ending the personal threat" to himself, his assumption of power directly and quickly led to his assassination at the hands of Brutus and other defenders of the Republic.

You need to read up on your Roman history; you've fallen into the trap that every dramatization of the events of the late Republic, from Shakespeare to HBO/BBC, has fallen into, that is thinking that Caesar was assasinated shortly after gaining power. In reality Caesar was in power for four years before his assasination in 44 BC. He had originally come to power in a coup d'etat in 48 BC. Caesar was, of course, not the first time this had happened in Rome, that would be the coups and counter-coups of the First Roman Civil War, sometimes called Sulla's civil war.

Also the people who wrote this article need to bone up on their Roman history. Caesar was actually what is known as a proconsul, a provincial governor, of Cisalpine Gaul, IIRC. He illegal led his forces into Gaul searching for fame and glory from conquest and although his triumphs soothed some tension between him and the central government many still called for his head. When the war was over he came back to Cisalpina a victor but the Senate would not grant him the triumph and recognition that was due to a conquerer, they demand that he come back to Rome and disband his army and Caesar considered that the most likely action that would take would be to try him for disobeying a direct order of the Senate and waging an illegal war. So he decided that it would actually be less risky for him to just march his army on Rome take out the Senate and Pompey and declare himself Dictator just as his father-in-law Sulla had done.

I don't know what can be said about the article beyond the fact that I hope this is satire and if it isn't then I hope these people are a small minority even in the Family Security Matters team of idiots. They did take this article off of their website which shows that they disapprove of it in some way. I mean praising Caesar, nuking Iraq, genocide of Muslims, sure this wasn't written by the ghost of Slobodan Milosevic?

[Colin]

Further, he seems to be forgetting what happened to Ceasar the same year he declared himself dictator for life. Far from "ending the personal threat" to himself, his assumption of power directly and quickly led to his assassination at the hands of Brutus and other defenders of the Republic.

You need to read up on your Roman history; you've fallen into the trap that every dramatization of the events of the late Republic, from Shakespeare to HBO/BBC, has fallen into, that is thinking that Caesar was assasinated shortly after gaining power. In reality Caesar was in power for four years before his assasination in 44 BC. He had originally come to power in a coup d'etat in 48 BC. Caesar was, of course, not the first time this had happened in Rome, that would be the coups and counter-coups of the First Roman Civil War, sometimes called Sulla's civil war.

Collin,

It's one L, I don't take kindly to people spelling my name wrong.

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Well you are correct in saying that Caesar was proclaimed Dictator for life in 44 however he was declared Dictator - rei gerendae causa, or Dictator for the Remainder on Account of the Matters of State (a rather loose translation on my part), a de facto Dictator for Life though I will grant you that the actual proclamation of his Dictatorship for Life was probably the "killing blow" to his fortunes.

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Plutarch is, in my opinion, rather overrated and he's only used as widely as he is because he fills in a gap in the chronical. If I want pleasant conversation I would call my sister or talk with my own friends. I come on to the forum so a few of the bars of civility are lifted though I try to keep a rather curteous nature about my conversations here. It is impossible to have a thoroughly civil debate about politics or even about some matters of history unless you dissect the matter down to its most theoretic levels. I can say, though, that I especially hate it when people give this sort of non-chalant, "oh I'm above all this" sort of nonsense to their rebuttals. It actually makes me angrier then someone coming out and throwing every slur and put down in the book at me because it's more insulting than outright slander. If you were truely above the ho-hum debates you wouldn't have added the seething whiff of anger and resentment in your prior post.

You are correct that I was mistaken, I thought that you considered, like many people that I have met, that Caesar's reign was short and that, within a year of his crossing the Rubicon, he was a dead man. To see this impression in entertainment you need not look any further than the great playwright himself, William Shakespeare, who, in Julius Caesar, makes it appear to his audience that the action is taking place quite quickly instead of the years that it took in reality. I'm sorry if I insulted your intelligence but I am often suprised by how little many people known about certain areas of history.