Caesar in the USA: Popular Culture, Classical Reception, American Identity

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Julius Caesar is arguably the most famous classical figure of them all. Associated with a sharp turning point in the history of western civilization from republic to empire, he quickly took on monumental, quasi-mythic proportions. In the history and culture of the United States of America, in particular, Caesar is ubiquitous. Deployed at the outset to demonize the British king as tyrant, he surfaces at the start of the twenty-first century to lionize the American president as general, charismatic leader, and tough imperialist. This project begins with Caesar in the New World at the point when resistance to British rule turns into revolution and a new nation is founded. The Roman dictator has had an important function in the formation of American national identity and in the discourses of patriotism and of treason which circulated from the late eighteenth century right through the nineteenth. Caesar is there, where politicians, military historians, and journalists address revolution, nationalism, the establishment of a constitution, the centralising powers of the presidency, civil war, empire, or political assassination. From this starting-point, moving through a broadly chronological series of detailed case studies from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, I analyse the reception of Caesar in the USA as a set of intriguing intersections between the history of ancient Rome, the reception of antiquity, high and popular culture, and American social and political history. These case studies will demonstrate how Caesar has become a rich resource in American culture through which to support or challenge revolution, dictatorship, military might, imperialism, and political assassination, and, from a more personal perspective, to promote public virtues (such as leadership and risk taking), to excite private vices (especially luxury and gambling), to shape provocative ethnic identities (the 'Caesars' associated, for example, with Italian and African American identities), or to entertain. By means of the investigation of Caesar's reception in the USA, this research project also aims to explore the modern reception of Classics itself; to demonstrate the intersection of classical reception with issues of national and personal identity; and to interrogate the relationship between high and popular culture. This monograph will be the first full-length study of the person of Caesar {rather than the play by Shakespeare) in American culture. It seeks to enhance understanding of the importance of Caesar to western culture and of ancient Rome to modern America. It also sets out to explore the specificity of modern receptions of antiquity, and the place of antiquity in the formation of national and personal identities.