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Historia Civilis

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The Assassination of Julius Caesar
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    • Teen Spirit

    Teen Spirit

    Lost in Ever After
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    He/Him
    Realized we don't actually have a thread for this series. Historia Civilis is a Youtube series that explains things, mostly the history of the Rome but occasionally things like the Government of Sparta as well, using fairly simple if strangely compelling drawings. For a while he's been covering the Julius Caesar but today he finished that series up with...well.



    Overall I quite like watching him as he does a lot to expand upon events and explain the context behind them.
     
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    • The various "His Year" videos are all excellent. Really an account of Roman political history year by year. Of Roman political history going increasingly crazy that is, including some darkly funny absurdities, like during the "Nobody's Year" video.
     
    Can Monarchs Commit Crimes
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    • Another video's up, this time about the political problems surrounding the end of the English Civil War. First item on the docket - is King Charles a big fat traitor and can we kill him for it?

    tbh I'm shocked it took the Brits this long to start with the head-chopping - when King Louis tried to do the same thing in the French Revolution they didn't spend almost a year with hand-wringing over whether or not a king can betray the nation.
     
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    • TheArcanist said:
    tbh I'm shocked it took the Brits this long to start with the head-chopping - when King Louis tried to do the same thing in the French Revolution they didn't spend almost a year with hand-wringing over whether or not a king can betray the nation.
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    The French Revolution was over a century later, and that century saw the Enlightenment, the rise of the bourgeoisie as a social and cultural power, contract theory, and the success of republicanism in America. It's not a matter of where, but when.
     
    TheArcanist said:


    Another video's up, this time about the political problems surrounding the end of the English Civil War. First item on the docket - is King Charles a big fat traitor and can we kill him for it?

    tbh I'm shocked it took the Brits this long to start with the head-chopping - when King Louis tried to do the same thing in the French Revolution they didn't spend almost a year with hand-wringing over whether or not a king can betray the nation.
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    Well that was mostly because the french king and government lived in the same city while Charles II spent most of his time on the southern coast of England, plus all these arguments happened then as well and nobody missed the parallels. Hell louise XVI apparently read a biography of Charles II in prison and I have heard arguments by historians that louise became so flexible that nobody trusted him because he was afraid of being as inflexible as Charles.
     
    Teen Spirit said:


    More on Charles I
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    It sounds to me like the main problem that the High Court faced was that it was not willing to take the final step towards an actual revolution - the argument 'I'm the King, no court can legally challenge me!' could be easily countered with 'Yeah, about the monarchy... we're abolishing it and all of its privileges, you're just Citizen Stuart now.'

    Alas.
     
    TheArcanist said:
    It sounds to me like the main problem that the High Court faced was that it was not willing to take the final step towards an actual revolution - the argument 'I'm the King, no court can legally challenge me!' could be easily countered with 'Yeah, about the monarchy... we're abolishing it and all of its privileges, you're just Citizen Stuart now.'

    Alas.
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    The problem being that (as seen by the crowd in the video) that was extremely unpopular whith the people so the court gust claiming popular sovereignty would look so farcical it might gust create yet another civil war.
     
    c.j. said:
    The problem being that (as seen by the crowd in the video) that was extremely unpopular whith the people so the court gust claiming popular sovereignty would look so farcical it might gust create yet another civil war.
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    I mean, the route they did end up taking put them in the same place - with Cromwell and his allies executing the king - but the route they took was pretty dumb, because it made what was essentially the same claim as I did(that the current political order considered the monarchy subordinate to the popular will), but couched it in language that made the claim look weak and flimsy.

    ...which might have been by design, because let's be honest, Cromwell's faction was an elitist clique that didn't want to abolish their private property or their own aristocratic privileges, which would've been the next logical step in that sort of revolutionary thought.
     
    The conspirators remind me of John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Lincoln. Both expecting the people to hail them for killing a tyrant, not realizing they were so blinded by their own ideology and bias that they didn't notice the man they saw as a Tyrant (To clarify, Caesar was a tyrant, Lincoln obviously wasn't) was quite beloved by the people. Though the conspirators had the additional problem of the Roman Republic being dead in all but name by that point, the idea of restoring it, particularly the idea of the conservatives who contributed so much to it's destruction, restoring it was laughably naive at best. Rule of law had broken down too much. Too many things had just become too easy to ignore. Killing Caesar just lead to Octavian, killing Octavian would have possibly lead to Mark Anthony or someone else, etc etc etc.
     
    I'm not a fan of Cicero's conservative politics(because let's be real he was quite conservative, he just wasn't pathologically so like Cato), but I do very strongly respect how much he cared about the Republic as an institution - to the point that he was willing to put his life on the line(and ultimately lost it) to try and save it from falling apart.

    It was rotten and corrupt, but it was a hell of a lot better than whatever this is. Bribing friends and family to murder each other so you can steal their wealth is about the worst possible way you can run a society.
     
    I am a big fan of the channel but I think in the last video he should have gone into a bit more depth of for example Octavians (possible) motivations, as it stands his initial coup really comes out of nowhere and even his later actions could really do with some explanation behind them.
     
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    Yeah, it feels very biased how Octavian marching on Rome is framed as just a thing he randomly did FOR SOME REASON.

    Cicero got played, dude. Just take the L on that one.
     
    I mean, it seems pretty clear to me. Octavian wanted power. That's all there is to it. Just as Lepidus and Marc Anthony as well. That is the explanation for all their moves. Just three power hungry warlords, nothing more.
     
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