Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator: Part 1: "The High Priest" (13 Education Group, WNET, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 2) I watched a couple of quite interesting shows on PBS, though I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t put on the next episode of the fascinating documentary mini-series The Invisible Shield about public health in America. Instead they aired the first in a three-part mini-series about the life of Julius Caesar (Andonis Anthony) called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m beginning to wonder if PBS has started showing only the first episodes of mini-series like this on air as a loss leader to get us to pay for their “Passport” streaming subscription service, which we’ll need to watch the rest of the episodes. (I also find it ironic that three of the four big network streaming services all have names beginning with “P”: NBC’s “Peacock,” CBS’s “Paramount Plus” and PBS’s “Passport.” The only one that doesn’t is ABC, since they’re owned by the Walt Disney Company and so their streaming service is “Disney Plus.”) The creators of “High Priest,” the first episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator (the show’s directors are Emma Frank and Richard Pearson but no writers are credited on imdb.com), don’t go overboard on the obvious parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they’re unmistakably there. Both were men who went out of their way to destroy an existing republic to further their own personal and political ambitions. Both did so by appeals to “the people”; Caesar by embracing the causes of commoners who weren’t sharing in the riches the Roman Republic was acquiring, and in particular the veterans who were fighting Rome’s wars and weren’t getting jack for it in compensation.

One of Caesar’s big strategies in winning popular favor was putting on the biggest round of gladiatorial contests Rome had ever seen, and bolstering the appeal of his games by offering huge banquet tables filled with food. Since admission to the games was free (the ancient Roman formula for keeping the people happy and content with their lot was “Panem et circenses” – “bread and circuses”), the food was also free, and Caesar of course made sure to publicize his involvement in providing it big-time so the people would remember just who had fed them so generously and they’d vote for him in upcoming elections. The show begins with Caesar determined to win the title of Pontifex Maximus, the head of Rome’s official religion, who was elected by popular vote, even though he was only 37 when the title fell vacant and the other two candidates were both older. To fund his games and his Pontifex Maximus candidacy he’d borrowed money from Crassus (Carlo Spano), then the richest man in Rome and a notorious creditor from hell who wasn’t above sending goon squads to assault physically people who owed him money and fell behind on their payments. Caesar had at least one determined opponent in the Roman Senate: Cato (Orlando Brooke), a traditionalist defender of the Roman Republic and its constitution against Caesar’s power grabs. After an attempted coup d’état led by Catiline collapsed in 62 B.C., Caesar called for the permanent imprisonment of the conspirators instead of their execution, but as this documentary points out Rome didn’t have a prison system at the time and the only punishment for crime short of execution was house arrest. Cato opposed this, called for the execution of Catiline’s men and hinted that Caesar had been part of the plot.

When Caesar allied himself with the Roman general Pompey (Antony Gabriel) and supported Pompey’s call to give his principal soldiers land grants, Cato regarded this as a violation of the Roman constitution and mounted an early version of the filibuster, speaking for hours against the bill so it could not be voted on. Caesar was eventually elected consul, the head of state under the Roman Republic, but he didn’t serve alone: there were actually two consuls, each supposedly there to check the power of the other, and Caesar’s running mate for the other consulship, Lucius Lucceius, lost to one of Caesar’s bitterest political enemies, Marcus Calpurnius Biblius. When Biblius joined Cato in opposing Pompey’s bill to grant land to his veterans, Caesar had thugs beat him up on the Senate floor and drag him away. Caesar next announced that he and two other men, Pompey and Crassus, would rule Rome as a so-called “Triumvirate,” effectively blocking his opposition by including two men who were known to hate each other. He also solidified his position by arranging a marriage between Pompey and Caesar’s daughter Julia. Then he was appointed to command a Roman army intent on the conquest of Gaul (modern-day France), and that’s where this episode ended. Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is one of those tacky half-documentaries, half-dramatizations the History Channel is big on: we see actors playing the various characters of ancient Rome but don’t actually hear them. Instead we hear from various British talking heads, including historians Tom Holland, Shashama Malik, Andrew Frederic Wallace-Hadrill and Federico Santangelo, as well as former British Member of Parliament Rory Stewart, who seems to be there mainly to talk about Caesar as a politician and compare him to modern-day leaders.

What most Americans don’t realize is that the Framers of the Constitution never intended for the United States to be a democracy; they created a republic and consciously modeled it on the Roman Republic. James Madison made the distinction clear in No. 10 of the Federalist Papers (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp), in which he wrote, “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” As Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator makes clear, this was a debate carried out in ancient Rome as well: the Roman government in Caesar’s time was divided between the Populares, who sought to reach past the official organs of government (particularly the Roman Senate) and appeal directly to the people for support; and the Optimates, who believed in a hierarchy of elites and particularly in a Senate that, in Madison’s words, would “refine and enlarge the public views” and serve as the “medium” that would keep political conflict within legitimate bounds and limit the power of the people.