Rome and Us #4: Assassinations and New Rulers

Moral justification. Even Roman emperors craved it if their predecessor was assassinated. Even back then, the new emperor didn’t want to be seen as a power-hungry murderer. And so, as Mary Beard muses in SPQR, one never knows what the truth was in Roman history:

“(The previous emperor) may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.”

 

This is a pattern that continues even today:

“The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were… demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters.”

 

Every contender couches his reasons behind ideals (“Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”, said Brutus). Yet killing a dictator rarely achieves the change its proponents hope for:

“What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war to choose between rival emperors (Augustus or Mark Antony).”

 

Sadly, even when the intent of a political assassination is to genuinely remove a dictator, what follows has not changed since Roman times:

“If the assassination of Julius Caesar became a model for the effective removal of a tyrant, it was also a powerful reminder that getting rid of a tyrant did not necessarily dispose of tyranny.”

Think of Iraq post-Saddam. Or Libya post-Gadaffi. American Presidents from Bush to Obama obviously never learnt from Roman history…

 

With great power comes great responsibility. Augustus, after winning the succession war with Mark Antony, understood he still needed the Senate:

“No sole ruler ever really rules alone… Someone had to command the legions, govern the provinces, run the corn and water supplies and generally act as the deputy of the emperor who could not do anything.”

And:

“As is often the case with regime change, the new guard is more or less forced to rely on a carefully reformed version of the old guard, or – as we have seen in recent history – anarchy can result.”

Iraq is a prime example of anarchy when you eliminate the old guard altogether. India, on the other hand, is a great example of the benefits of tweaking the old guard (British institutions) instead of dismantling it altogether.

 

In all matters of governance and power, the lessons from Rome seem timeless.