Caesar in the USA

Abstract

Was Julius Caesar a reformer or a tyrant? Is he relevant or a relic? Caesar has had a prominent presence in American culture and politics from the colonial period through the present day, and that presence has regularly been debated. Maria Wyke's study examines how ancient Rome's most prominent figure was put to use in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Wyke's book is organized chronologically, beginning with a look at how Caesar's Gallic Wars and William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar were taught in secondary schools in the early 1900s and concluding with an analysis of how the imagery of Caesar and the Roman army was employed to criticize George W. Bush and his foreign policy. It is a vast undertaking, which Wyke briskly covers in 238 pages of text. She gives particular emphasis to secondary education and the centrality of Caesar as the standard author read in second-year Latin classes. Teachers in the early twentieth century, as now, faced the challenge of getting fifteen-year-olds interested in reading accounts of ancient battles in faraway places, and these educators often felt compelled to justify reading Gallic Wars for reasons other than the straightforward style that makes the text accessible to those just beginning to learn the language.