
In studying Roman history, I was taught to admire Cicero’s eloquence, to demonize Caesar’s ambition, and to accept the traditional narrative that the fall of the Roman Republic was an inevitable tragedy caused by Caesar’s rise to power.
After all, he was the man who destroyed the Republic, right?
He wasn’t a hero. He was the villain, a tyrant in the making.
That is, until I picked up The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History by Michael Parenti.
Parenti isn’t a classicist, but his unflinching Marxist lens offers a perspective on Roman history that is refreshingly honest and sharply critical.
For someone like me, it was like a switch had been flipped.
Parenti challenges nearly everything I thought I knew on the subject.

The Old Story We All Know
The classics I studied were filled with grand stories of powerful men—Cicero, Virgil, and, of course, Caesar—who stood as pillars of Roman greatness. In the classroom, Cicero was a principled orator, a man trying to save Rome from the chaos around him.
But, as Parenti shows, Cicero wasn’t the hero he seemed to be.
Behind the scenes, he was a manipulative opportunist, a slumlord with ambitions far less noble than we were led to believe.
Parenti exposes the cracks in the marble statues we’ve been taught to venerate.
Similarly, Julius Caesar was painted as the villain.
We’ve always been told that his ambition ended the Republic.
But Parenti flips the script. Caesar wasn’t the destroyer of the Republic—he exposed its rot.
Rather than being a self-serving tyrant, he was a populist, a leader who stood against the entrenched elite.
In Parenti’s telling, Caesar wasn’t seeking to destroy the Republic; he sought to reform it, to give power back to the people.

Parenti’s New Perspective
One of the most striking elements of Parenti’s analysis is how he examines the economic forces at play in the Roman Republic.
As a Marxist historian, Parenti frames the late Republic not as a battle of personalities but as a struggle between the ruling elite and the people they exploited.
Caesar, in this context, is not just another power-hungry dictator—he’s a man who sees the deep injustices of the system and tries to correct them.
The Senate, made up of wealthy landowners and aristocrats, had long controlled the Republic.
They used their power to enrich themselves while the plebeians, the common people, struggled to survive.
Caesar, who came from an aristocratic family, understood this.
But unlike other elites, he used his influence to challenge the old order.
Through his reforms, including land redistribution and debt relief for the poor, Caesar directly threatened the power of the Roman oligarchy.
Table: Parenti’s Caesar vs. the Traditional Narrative
Traditional Narrative | Parenti’s View |
---|---|
Caesar was a power-hungry dictator. | Caesar was a reformer who challenged the elite. |
Caesar’s ambition destroyed the Republic. | Caesar exposed the Republic’s inherent corruption. |
Cicero was a hero, fighting for the Republic. | Cicero was a manipulative opportunist. |
The Senate was the guardian of Roman democracy. | The Senate was an oligarchy that exploited the poor. |
Caesar’s assassination saved Rome. | Caesar’s death preserved the status quo. |

Nostalgia for a Simpler Time
As I read Parenti’s book, I couldn’t help but feel a touch of nostalgia.
There was a time, back in college, when I believed the narrative that I was taught in every class.
It was easy, comforting, even romantic to think of Caesar as the villain.
The story fit neatly into the mold of historical tragedies. It was the story of a Republic falling because of its own corruption, a story that mirrored so many others throughout history.
But that was before I knew about the deeper forces at play—the class struggles, the manipulation of the elite, the economic tensions that fueled the political drama.
There’s a certain melancholy in seeing that the figures you admired were not as noble as you once believed.
Caesar, Cicero—both of them were men shaped by their time, playing by the rules of a society that rewarded those with power.
But while the history I had learned before felt comforting in its simplicity, Parenti’s work feels like an awakening.
It’s not just history rewritten; it’s history revealed in its raw, messy truth.

Other Historical Revisions
Parenti’s approach is reminiscent of the work of other historians who have sought to challenge traditional narratives.
Take Howard Zinn, for example, whose A People’s History of the United States reshapes the American past by focusing on the struggles of the oppressed rather than the victors.
Zinn, like Parenti, doesn’t just tell the stories of the great men who shaped history but looks at the bigger picture: the forces of class, race, and power that shaped the world.
In the realm of fiction, you could draw parallels to movies like The Godfather. In that film, the Corleone family is portrayed not as a collection of ruthless criminals, but as a family struggling to protect their own in a corrupt world.
Caesar, in Parenti’s version, is similarly positioned—not as a villain, but as a man trying to make sense of a broken system, even if his methods were often ruthless.

What Parenti’s Caesar Means Today
In a time when political corruption and class struggles seem more relevant than ever, Parenti’s examination of Caesar as a reformer rather than a tyrant offers lessons that transcend ancient Rome.
It challenges us to think critically about the power structures in our own societies and to question the traditional narratives that are presented to us.
I won’t pretend that I now see Caesar as an unblemished hero.
Parenti doesn’t give us that. Instead, he offers a much more nuanced perspective: Caesar was a man caught between ambition and genuine reform, a populist in a system that couldn’t afford to let him succeed.
And so, in the quiet of my reading nook, I made an unexpected decision.
The small ceramic bust of Cicero that had sat proudly on my shelf for years?
It was time for a change. It was time to replace it.
Explaining Parenti’s View on Caesar to a Kid
Imagine you’re reading a story about a big city, let’s say it’s called “Rome.” In this city, there are two groups of people: the really rich ones who own almost everything, and the regular people who have to work hard just to get by.
Now, there’s this guy named Julius Caesar.
At first, he’s just like other rich people, but he starts to notice that the regular people are really struggling.
They can’t get enough food or work, and the rich people don’t care much. They just want to stay rich and keep all the power for themselves.
Caesar thinks, “This isn’t right.” So, he tries to change things.
He wants to make life better for the regular people by giving them land and helping them with their debts.
But the really rich people don’t like this at all.
They’re scared that they might lose their power, so they don’t want Caesar to succeed.
Some of the rich people get together and decide the only way to stop Caesar is to kill him.
They think if they kill him, things will go back to how they were.
Parenti says that Caesar wasn’t a bad guy who wanted to rule everything. He was actually trying to help the regular people who had no voice. He didn’t ruin the city—he just showed how broken it really was.
This is different from the story you might have been told in school, where Caesar is the bad guy.
Parenti says it’s important to look at all the reasons behind what people do, not just the way things seem on the outside.

Conclusion
In The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History, Michael Parenti forces us to look beyond the history we’ve been handed, and into a narrative that feels unsettlingly familiar.
The strength of this book lies not just in its historical insight, but in how it reverberates with the present.
What if we are living in a world where the story could flip 180 degrees, where the very systems we think are working to help us are actually trapping us?
Consider big tech—this modern-day colossus that promises to “connect” us, to make life easier, more meaningful, more integrated.
But what if it’s not connecting us at all?
Instead, it’s isolating us, making us lonelier, more alienated, more depressed.
It offers the illusion of community while turning us into digital prisoners, constantly surveilled, endlessly commodified.
These companies pretend to be serving humanity, but what they are really doing is dehumanizing us, especially those at the margins.
They build their empires on our attention, our data, our time—leaving us fragmented and empty, trapped in an invisible cell of constant stimulation and despair.
And what if someone, like Caesar, stands up to challenge this system, this digital empire?
What if someone dares to expose the truth, to tear down the facade?
It’s a chilling thought.
We can imagine, with unsettling clarity, how those in power—just like the Roman aristocracy—would twist the narrative.
They would paint the truth-teller as a villain, a threat to the “order” they’ve constructed.
And just like Caesar, this voice of reason, this whistleblower, could be erased from history—discredited, silenced, eliminated.
After all, in a world that thrives on control, a threat to the narrative is a threat to the entire system.
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