Veni, Vidi, Vici
The legacy of legacies forgotten and known
Legacy is an inextricable part of the human condition. In the face of insurmountable and inescapable finality, our lives are therefore dedicated to preserving and protecting our being. We have children out of a biological need to ensure the continuation of our bloodline and, in some way, to ensure that our legacy might live on after our demise. Legacy can be the folly of otherwise great men, whose rampant ambition clouds their judgment and ironically ensures that they are washed away in the tides of human history. Conversely, and yet just as powerfully, legacy can shrink the lives and actions of those who refuse to acknowledge life in its totality. The legacy of our species, the only intelligent life we know exists in the universe, is similarly complicated and clouded. The select few whose individual legacies survive for hundreds and even thousands of years are painted in blood and violence and lie upon the bodies of the nameless and the forgotten. What, then, is it to have a legacy? Is legacy found in notoriety or inward satisfaction? Can any man truly have a legacy if indeed all are forgotten?
I can think of few people better to exemplify the idea of legacy than Gaius Julius Caesar, a capable warrior and deft politician who, piece by piece, dismantled the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar lived over two thousand years ago, before Jesus Christ of Nazareth was born. The fact that I could have simply written "Caesar" and you would know who I am referencing is a testament to just how much he looms over our world. Caesar was not the richest man of his time, nor the most skilled in combat, nor the man who held the most land. By any single metric, Caesar was important but not known-for-millennia important. Yet here I am, typing on a laptop with technology so unimaginable to the Romans that it would appear, in every sense, magical, and writing about Gaius Julius Caesar. The reason Caesar, I believe, has captivated humanity for centuries is just how much of his life encapsulated the larger legacy of our species.
Caesar has escaped the ancient mystique that we so often place on the humans before us. The tendency to view histories peoples and places as zoo animals is a natural reaction to just how incomprehensibly similar and yet foreign these individuals are. They loved and laughed, killed and conquered, lived and died in much the same manner we do today. To think of these ancient people as people and not as "ancient" opens your mind dually to the realization of our own demise and to our likely inevitable erasure from history. Caesar has escaped that erasure of his own self, ironically through the erasure of others. Caesar’s legions in Gaul killed thousands, and the resulting carnage for Rome killed many more. While the statesmen and nobles of Rome politicked and enjoyed the fruits of wealth, Caesar spent years building his bloody throne. If war was not sin enough, Caesar attempted and largely succeeded in overthrowing a dysfunctional and oftentimes corrupt but still, in some way, democratic republic. Yet in the face of so much calamity, Caesar still escapes any particular demarcation in history and exists in largely his whole being.
Yet, I still believe if Caesar had ruled until his natural demise, we would not know his name nor his story. Many men took control over their civilizations through conquest and feuding, and many men are forgotten. Caesar’s legacy, I believe, was cemented on the fateful day of March 15, 44 BC, when, in the building named after the friend with whom he had ruled as consul and whom he had driven out of Rome to his death, Julius Caesar was murdered. Incredulous at the disintegrating republic and, more accurately, their disintegrating influence, roughly sixty senators participated in the killing of one of the most powerful men in the world. None more significant in the killing than Brutus, a man whom Caesar loved like a son, who had betrayed Caesar before but had been graciously forgiven, and who had himself loved Caesar as a brother, participated all the same. That moment, when Caesar saw Brutus, and Brutus figuratively and literally stabbed Caesar in the back, is where I believe Gaius Julius Caesar cemented his legacy not just in the eyes of the Roman people but for all people.
Brutus, consumed with his legacy himself, found it a moral necessity to betray the brother he loved for the republic he cherished. I imagine this legacy dominated his mind in the planning and execution of the assassination. If Brutus hoped to be known as the man who saved the Roman Republic from tyranny, he was to be disappointed. Instead of a swift return to democracy, the killing of Caesar ignited a bloody war between Romans that would further tear the state apart. Ultimately, though, Caesarians won out against the legions of the noble class. Brutus would die by suicide two years after the assasination, alone and defeated, falling on his sword and resigned to the fact that even in death Caesar had won. The Roman Republic had fallen and his legacy with it, with few other options other than to die by his own sword rather than that of a Caesarian soldier. On the cold marble of the Curia and the grassy hill of rural Italy, both Caesar and Brutus had their lives ended and legacies immortalized by blood.
Herein, the deaths of Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Julius Caesar are representations of what it means to have a legacy. Caesar, consumed by ambition and rewarded with power, built his legacy on his self first and foremost. Caesar’s men believed so greatly in his power and judgment that they died for him even after Caesar had himself passed. Brutus, however good a friend of Caesar, still believed in the communal legacy of the Roman Republic over any one man. In these institutions, Brutus saw immortality through organization, where Caesar saw weakness. Who was right? Challenging Caesar and his reign would ensure the violence and deaths of countless men and endanger the sanctity of Rome as a whole. Yet, to allow Caesar to march towards monarchy would undo the work of the gods and of the men who had provided so much prosperity for so long. Yet for however diametrically opposed these two men were in almost every facet, they shared two virtues that allowed them to build such a grand legacy, that being the action of progress and the meaning of work.
Thousands of years later action and meaning are still inseparable from any semblance of a legacy. Unfortunately, though, we have still as a people failed to truly understand how important a life with meaning and a legacy with purpose are. The unfulfillment of modern careerist lives is indeed so gnawing due to how brazenly these facets of fulfillment are rebuked. There is little action in the modern-day workplace. Consumed by bureaucracy and paralyzed by risk, most workdays end at the same place they began. Action invites risk, which, to those who hold the keys and wear the crowns, is an unnecessary threat to their survival. To those of us not in such positions, though, the stagnancy of management creates an unescapable blasé attitude towards the place you spend your most cogent hours in. In this middling environment is where any potential of action goes to die. Not too bad to quit but not too good to feel like you are doing anything of substance, most of our workweeks simply, and quietly, waste away. The tragedy of inaction is that we lose our ability to remember what action feels like, what it does to us when we work on things that move forward at our pace and on our schedule. Years go by, and our very definition of what action really is changes so dramatically that we delude ourselves into thinking we really are making change at a pace we want.
If action is easy to forget, meaning is hard to capture. Meaning is intrinsically tied to your personal identity, which itself changes over time. The person you are at twenty is, by all intents and purposes, a completely different person than the one you are at forty. Ironically, the only thing that stays the same for most of us as we age and change is our work. So many of us are robbed of meaning because we have deluded ourselves into thinking we have invested too much in X company or Y industry to leave it. The reality, though, is that the less you as a person find meaning from work, the more you are going to allow whatever talent you may have in that field to atrophy. You will be outpaced by those who still hold the meaning of the job and find joy from progression of the skill rather than fear due to stagnation. The tragic reality of so many of us is the belief that work is inherently not meaningful, when in reality there is, perhaps more than anything, no greater meaning than working at something you love.
Money is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable in this instance. Money attempts to replace the frustration of inaction with amiable patience. It tries to not ignore but entirely redefine meaning entirely as a quantitative number rather than a spiritual calling. Money, constructed by humans, attempts to join action and meaning in the inherent. Make no mistake, money is an inherent part of our lives, and to say otherwise is naive and flatly wrong. Money, though, is an inherent part of living but not being alive. Money provides the roof over your head and the food you eat, and that is as much a fact of life as the air we breathe. Our awareness of the logistic inherency of money is manipulated into a spiritual bribe against our conscience. We know we need it, but we never have a specific quantity in mind, so just as we could create and strive for our goals, we instead create and strive for an arbitrary amount of money.
The medical approximation of why people hoard is “a strong emotional attachment to possessions, often driven by anxiety, fear of loss.” We look at the images of houses filled with what we see as junk and trash and wonder just how these people got like this. Why did they not stop themselves? Amazingly, though, we look at those who hoard wealth in an entirely different light. No, they are not driven by fear and anxiety; they are successful and capable people who we should look up to solely due to their extravagance. So emotionally attached to the number in a bank account that spending of any kind becomes financial sacrilege. There is no difference between the old man who stacks newspapers up to the ceiling and the man who has given his life to the dollar. Both realize, often early on, how damaging this habit is, and both fear that the habit is too ingrained to even be attempted to remove. Both, sadly, will often realize that the fight was not unwinnable and the habit unbreakable too late.
Legacy in the modern world is far from impossible, and I would argue is easier to achieve than ever. You are not the son of a farmer outside Rome whose entire life will either be plowing a field or fighting on a battlefield. What took Caesar a year to travel from Gaul to Rome would take the modern individual just three hours. We are afforded extraordinary convenience in our lives and the ability to move places and meet people at such a rate that is entirely alien to the ancient world. Meaning and action only require an acknowledgment from yourself that something is wrong and that something can be fixed. You are not a prisoner of a job or the dollar unless you, and only you, make yourself to be. You can either ignore this responsibility and blame a system in which you have no real want to change, or you can begin to find your purpose and build your legacy.
Death cannot be avoided, and what comes next cannot be known. Death came for Caesar in the same brutality that it came for the men his legions killed in Gaul, in the same way it came for Pompey after fleeing Rome, and in the same way it came for Brutus on a hill in Italy. All three, though, empowered by action and secured by meaning, found a legacy that is to be admired. There are many more that we do not know of who have had meaning in their work and action in their lives, and they are just as much a part of the human legacy as any of these three historical giants. When the last human forgets Caesar, his legacy will remain eternal because he has etched his name on the pantheon of humanity in a time when many simply would not or could not. Your Rome awaits you; you just have to find it.
“And you, son?”- Reported as Caesar's last words, spoken to Brutus