BPR Week in Review: Hail Caesar
Saturday, March 15th, 2025
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning, Research Director
It’s in Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that a soothsayer warns the great man to ‘Beware the Ides of March.’ Under the old Roman calendar, the ‘Ides’ were just the middle of the month. Before the Julian calendar moved the start of the year to January, the new year began with the first full moon in March (did you happen to see the eclipse of the ‘Blood Serpent Moon’ early Friday morning?)
In Scene 1 of Act 3, Casca strikes the first blow against Caesar. According to the Bard, the other conspirators in the assassination stabbed Caesar 33 times, which seems, literally, like overkill. Brutus strikes the final blow.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, this earns Brutus a special place in hell for having betrayed a benefactor. Dante and his guide Virgil descend to the ninth and lowest circle of hell, Cocytus, where they find a three-faced Lucifer waist-deep in ice, chewing on Judas Iscariot in his central mouth, Brutus in his left mouth, and Cassius in his right mouth. Thus always the betrayers.
You learn things like this as a literature major with a history minor. I also spent six months in Rome in college wandering the Forum and the museums and churches of the Eternal City. Before the Euro and before China had entered the WTO. What a time to be alive!
But it was just this week that I learned that under the law of the old Roman Republic, the office of Dictator was both legal and constitutional. Under emergency circumstances—a barbarian invasion or an internal threat to the Republic—one of Rome’s two Consuls (the Executive Branch of Roman government, in modern terms) could appoint a Dictator to take whatever measures were needed to resolve the crisis.
But there was a catch!
Dictators, by tradition, only stayed in office for six months. Any crisis lasting longer than six months was not an emergency but a product of poor leadership and/or bad policy. This is why declaring emergencies is still so popular and so dangerous—it justifies extraordinary limits on liberties (like the Covid lockdowns that began five years ago this week). ‘Temporary’ crisis measures often become permanent (like the income tax).
If a Dictator stayed in office beyond six months, Roman political tradition sanctioned their killing on the grounds they had become tyrants (Caesar had the Senate make him Dictator for Life, which turned out to be less than six months in the end). It wasn’t legal to kill a dictator. But it wasn’t immoral, in Roman political thought.
In any event, it was on this day in 44 BC that ‘the Liberators’ ended Caesar’s life. They would later lose their own. No one quite knows what to make of the story today. Who was the hero? Who was the villain?
Caesar was beloved by the working class of Rome, the plebeians, for his efforts to restore their economic fortunes and encourage land ownership. The Senate wanted him dead. Political violence became normalized in the name of justice and liberty. .
Perhaps not much has changed! In any event, it was an historic week in markets, with gold setting a new all-time high. You’ll find all the research we published this week below.
Enjoy!
Dan
When I made the attempt to bring my mom up to speed as to what had transpired in the world of politics before she died in 2017 she made the comment; execute the judges.
Old fashioned Italian problem solving I guess. I said to her, it doesn't makes us any better than those who commit the same. And why judges I asked.
"A message always needs sending and they set the law".
I miss her and my father who died prior, for his wisdom. Wish they were still around they would be disgusted at what has transpired. I can hear my dad now, "andiamo".