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Et Tu, Brute?!

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The Assassination of Julius Caesar by Mariano Rossi (1731-1807)

I have just finished reading an interesting book that sheds light on how rhetoric influenced the way people acted in ancient Rome. J. E. Lendon’s That Tyrant Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World shows that public speechifying was the dominant mass medium of the time and affected the laws and, in many respects, the way people acted.

Lendon used as his prime example the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar by Brutus, Cassius, and their associates. In Chapter Four, he discusses eight reasons why the whole conspiracy had been a shambles:

  • Decimus Brutus had armed gladiators near the Senate House of Pompey. Why did they not kill Caesar?
  • Why did all the conspirators in the Senate House want to stab Caesar themselves, producing a confused melee?
  • Why did the conspirators do nothing about Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus, or any other followers of Caesar, not even arrest them for kid-glove treatment if the fastidious Brutus insisted? It was especially leaving Antony alive that Cicero later regarded as “childish.”
  • Why did Brutus think that after the assassination he would be able to address the Senate? Why did he not expect the senators, most of them loyalists of Caesar, to be terrified of the deed?
  • Why were the conspirators apparently surprised by the panic their deed caused in the city?
  • Why did the conspirators go up the Capitoline Hill?
  • Why did the conspirators spend March 16 giving speeches in the Forum?
  • Why, other than descending to give speeches, did the conspirators apparently have no plans for what to do after they ascended the Capitoline Hill, given that the reactions of Lepidus, Antony, their troops, and Caesar’s veterans could have been predicted?

In his book, Lendon deals with each of these questions in great detail. As I read his book, I suddenly saw that public speaking in ancient Rome was the equivalent of our social media, and that the conspirators who, at Donald Trump’s urging, marched on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were being misled in much the same way that Brutus and his co-conspirators were by the conventions of ancient rhetoric.

Heisenberg at Dealey Plaza

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The Elusive Umbrella Man

The Elusive Umbrella Man

After the rain of the day before, November 22, 1963 dawned bright with nary a cloud in the sky. It was a fateful day for America, as John F. Kennedy was about to take a bullet in the neck from a known or perhaps an unknown assassin. In the footage of the event, not only from Zapruder but from a whole pack of bystanders, there is a single man in the crowd holding aloft an umbrella. The so-called “Umbrella Man” has become one of the mysteries of that day. So mysterious that documentary filmmaker Errol Morris made a fascinating six-minute film on the subject which you can see by clicking below:

It is worth seeing this video, because, in my opinion, it is about one of the great mysteries of life. Author John Updike foresaw this when the wrote the following lines in The New Yorker in December 1967:

We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses—gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth. The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.

Errol Morris and his interviewee, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, understood this implicitly when they made the film. They even found the mysterious umbrella man and talked to him. It turns out his umbrella was a silent protest against John F. Kennedy’s father, Joseph, who was U.S. Ambassador at the Court of St. James in England. It seems the umbrella man thought him a Nazi appeaser. But that didn’t keep the rumor mills from spinning on.

Today there are a number of assertions believed by a great number of people that Barack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya and who attended a madrassa in Indonesia, that the Second Amendment allows Americans to carry high powered military rifles, that Jesus taught us that people of the LGBT persuasion should be persecuted, and that abortion-mad Chinese feast on human fetuses.

Even when proofs and evidence are produced, people will still hold on to their beliefs. They have been told these things by people whom they trust, and who are you to shake their world?