American Caesars

In measured but engaging prose, Maria Wyke charts the reception of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, two texts that shaped and reflected American values across the long twentieth century. As the seven chapter headings reveal, Wyke is not merely chronicling: “Maturation,” “Americanization,” “Militarism,” “Dictatorship,” “Totalitarianism,” “Presidential Power,” and “Empire” point to abiding American concerns or obsessions. Whether she is discussing secondary education, stage and film history, or U.S. foreign policy, Wyke’s careful research will leave readers in her debt.

After an initial glance at allusions to Caesar before 1900, Wyke begins in earnest in the first decade of the century, when Latin studies were at their peak. At this time, education was “recognized as a technology of government, and schools as institutions of the nation and agents of child socialization. . . . Americanization became a fundamental mission” (p.12). Americanization included a “quasi-religious” belief that studying Latin accounts of Roman wars was beneficial.

Reading the Bella Gallica was a highly gendered enterprise. Woodrow Wilson in 1888 said, “Boys like generals, like fighting, like accounts of battles” (p. 25). And before World War I, “Latin was Caesar, and Caesar was Latin” (p. 28). Teaching was selective, generally omitting Caesar’s violations of truces and his “deceit, propaganda, cruelty and aggression” that reduced the population of Gaul by a million souls and enslaved a million more within a decade. Promoting Caesar as the “great general and founder of a lasting empire” had the material benefit of maintaining Latin’s prominence in American curricula.

“An American girl . . . would be hard put to see herself” among the pictures of Roman or Gallic officers parading past lessons on passive verb forms or nolo and velo (p. 29). Nevertheless, the proportion of female students rose in these years. Advocacy of Latin meant, it seems, vouching for the historicity of Caesar’s narrative and its “lessons for life,” (p. 38) even if these seemed underwhelming: using resources with care, exercising caution, and staying on the defensive. Caesar was, after all, “the greatest of all the Romans” (p. 40), a Roman Lincoln.

From that first decade, too, ethical issues in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—literature as a “moral mirror” (pp. 13, 52)—have captivated Americans. Was Brutus a “shallow idealist” (p. 51) or an “honorable patriot” (p. 49)? After three presidential assassinations within four decades (Lincoln, 1865; Garfield, 1881; McKinley, 1901), opinions differed. Caesar’s status as role model was complicated by the First World War. The Kaiser (note the name), who’d said, “I think I have a mission to destroy Gaul, like Julius Caesar” (p. 81) was demonized. After America entered the war, the Gallic leader Vercingetorix was “resurrected . . . as both a French and an American hero” (p. 82). Italian and U.S. films, on the other hand, did portray Caesar heroically, both in Italy and in U.S. cities. From 1914 on, celluloid Caesars were central to American popular culture.

In the same period, the centrality of Latin was coming under fire from progressive educators and from critics who considered the Gallic Wars overly militarist and “more likely to destroy than to build faith in democratic freedoms” (p. 97). The effect, however, was gradual. In the period up to and through World War II, the Gallic War continued to play a major role in American high schools, and the ideal target student was an adventurous athletic youth, as female teachers insisted in countless articles. Promotion often rested on “topical yet insubstantial connections between past and present” (p. 102).

At the same time, the Bella Gallica were being used to promote fascism in Italy, where Mussolini was “fused” (p. 105) with Caesar. Through 1935, the press—Hearst newsreels and the New York Times—promoted Mussolini, though occasional naysayers such as the brilliant George Seldes warned that he was dangerous. Only after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 did Times reporters begin to portray Mussolini’s version of Caesar as a dangerous dream. In November 1937, New York’s...