Julius Caesar walks into a bar and orders a martinus.
“Don’t you mean martini?”
“If I wanted a double I would’ve said so.”
————–


The people who founded Rome looked no different than hundreds of other wandering tribes in Europe at the time, nomadic hunter-gatherers led by a chieftain. The area in which they’d decided to settle, however, was fertile, easily defensible, and strategically located for trade. The people thrived, the camp grew into a village, then into a city. The chieftain became a king, the population grew to the point a senate had to be established to represent the will of the people, and to handle administration.

However, the king still held absolute power. Like any other monarchy in history, there were good kings and there were bad kings, but there really is no such thing as a good king. A benevolent tyrant is still a tyrant, and a bad king is even worse.

During the reign of a particularly bad king, a group of senators formed a conspiracy. There should be no more kings, Rome should be a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Sounds noble, but since the Senate allegedly represented the people, what they were really saying was, a king shouldn’t be in charge, the Senate should rule. They hatched a plan to assassinate the king. One of the conspirators was a senator named Brutus.

Their plan succeeded. The corpse of the king still warm, they swore a sacred oath: from that point on, there would never be another king in Rome. If anyone ever threatened to become one, it was the duty of the Senate to murder that person just as coldly as the last king.

The Republic would continue to be stable for over four hundred years from that point. Then came a true crisis: Julius Caesar. He was immensely popular with the people, the Senate was not. The common man viewed the Senate as corrupt and bogged down with bureaucracy. Caesar used his popularity and strength to chip away at the system of checks and balances long established by the Senate to prevent anyone from achieving absolute power, until he had become king in all but name only.

A group of senators, having reached their breaking point, formed a conspiracy. They remembered their oath, their responsibility. Caesar had to die, and in a spectacular fashion, to send a message to any other would-be tyrants. One of these conspirators was a senator named Brutus, a direct descendant of the man of the same name who had killed the last king of Rome, because history is fucking cool.

Their plan succeeded and on a day in March, Caesar died alone in a pool of his own blood on the Senate floor, having suffered dozens of stab wounds. Ironically, by trying to save the Republic, the conspirators had doomed it. Caesar’s murder would lead to two civil wars. Caesar would not become king, but his adopted son Octavian would become Emperor, and Emperors would continue to rule for the next and final four hundred years of the empire.

Anyway, no idea why Rome is so much on my mind lately. Perhaps it’s because we’re approaching the Ides of March.