"A New Way of Conquering"

Here's the first paragarph of my Oxford essay. If you want to read more, follow the link at the bottom of this post.


Jeff Martinek
Missouri Southern State University
17 July, 2005
Submitted to Dr. Steve Kershaw
Oxford University


“A New Way of Conquering”: Julius Caesar, Populism, and the Roman Media Environment


The civilization created by the Greeks and Romans was the first on the earth's surface which was founded upon the activity of the common reader; the first to be equipped with the means of adequate expression in the inscribed word; the first to be able to place the inscribed word in general circulation; the first, in short, to become literate in the full meaning of the term, and to transmit its literacy to us.
--- (Eric Havelock.)


Julius Caesar’s accusation of “political illiteracy” directed toward his rival and one-time tormentor Sulla is generally discussed in terms of its direct political implications: Sulla treated his own dictatorship as a temporary measure and resigned once he had accomplished his goals; while Caesar, who doubtless could not begin to imagine an end to his goals, would never return to civilian life. But I would like to focus instead on Caesar’s use of illiteracy as the ultimate charge to level at a fellow Roman statesman. I do so because it throws into sharp relief the issue of Rome’s “media environment” and its connection to power, domination, administration, and reform in late republican Rome. Though vast libraries have been filled with works treating Roman society in all its manifestations----from its politics, architecture, religion, social stratifications, etc.---the admittedly limited research I was able to conduct over the past week seems to indicate that rather less has been done on this topic. In the essay that follows, I will attempt to draw together what I have been able to uncover and discuss it in terms of what is sometimes called the “Toronto School” of media theory, whose most famous (or infamous) exemplar is Marshall McLuhan, coiner of the much-abused epigram “the medium is the message.” My goal is to make a case for the value of attending carefully to the forms of media available for the encoding, transmission, decoding, and storage of information in any given society and then to look more closely at how such tasks were accomplished at Rome, especially as regards Julius Caesar and his colleagues (the Populares) and the rival party, the Optimates. I will contend that much of the substance of the struggle between Optimates and Populares (or, more broadly, between a conservative, reactionary, aristocratic politics and a populist, progressive, liberal one) can be discerned in the way the two parties treated information and its circulation. In the example of Caesar, I contend, the world for the first time saw what Caesar himself once called “a new way of conquering” (both domestic and foreign, physical and psychological) territory through mastery of all the most modern forms of media available at the time. In a word, we see in Caesar a new type of powerful public personae---what we might term today the “media-savvy” chief executive: a combination of pop star, P.R. master, and visionary thinker whose mastery of communicative skills and its machinery allows him manage a constant stream of data “input” and to address multiple audiences at once, retaining “the vision thing” whilst remaining constantly flexible and hence able to “maintain course” during uncertain times.

Read the whole thing here.