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Critics who fail to see through the very blindnesses Parenti challenges throughout this book are just proving his point. It is not, as "L. C" Robinson asserts above, that Parenti thinks everybody is wrong. Parenti's interest is not in some puerile (and typically American) debate over who is right and who is wrong, but rather a very fair and disinterested discussion about the consequences of crippling class stratification in ancient Rome and, as it turns out, throughout much of the history that followed. People like Mr.
Robinson speak from precisely the privileged perspective Parenti works so tirelessly to challenge here. It is unfathomable to people such as himself that there are those for whom education is a pipe dream, an unattainable aspiration prohibited by the financial situations into which they were born. From the days of Sallust, Seutonius and Polybius on down to Edward Gibbon, education was a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Literacy rates in ancient Rome were horrific; the vast majority of the population could neither read nor write. This insurmountable disadvantage persisted over thousands of years and continues even today, when there are only two ways by which an American kid gets a good education: rich parents, or a willingness to plunge oneself into tens of thousands of dollars into debt (I myself owe $ 57, 000 in student loans, which will not be paid off for 30 years).
In less developed nations, literacy rates remain as bad as they were in Caligula's day. Still, though, America's own literacy rate ranks just 48 th in the world (see Morris Berman's "Twilight of American Culture"). Of course, some of us are lucky enough to land a scholarship or grant, but that is too often like winning the lottery. People like Seutonius and Edward Gibbon were able to write history because they could afford to; they grew up in the upper classes where education was not only affordable but often taken for granted. Parenti's thesis is absolutely correct: history is written by the winners, the privileged and the fortunate.
Thus, the condemnation of the ancient Roman populace as an unwashed and filthy rabble persists not because it is fact, but because it is the only history that circumstances have allowed. It is one of history's most glaring ironies that the privileged classes of ancient Rome considered themselves morally superior to plebs and slaves, when it was THEY who orchestrated spectacles such as this one, described so poignantly by Parenti: "The ceremonies to dedicate Pompey's theater included a battle between a score of elephants and men armed with javelins... the slaughter of the elephants proved more than the crowd could countenance. One giant creature, brought to its knees by missiles, crawled about, ripping shields from its attackers and throwing them into the air. Another, pierced deeply through the eyes with a javelin, fell dead with a horrifying crash.
The elephants shrieked bitterly as their tormentors closed in. Some of them refused to fight, treading about frantically with trunks raised toward Heaven, as if lamenting to the gods. In desperation, the beleaguered beasts tried to break through the iron palisade that corralled them. When they had lost all hope of escape, they turned to the spectators as if to beg for their assistance with heartbreaking gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing... the audience was overcome by a feeling that these great mammals had something in common with humankind. " It was the plebs whose eyes could not bear what they saw; the senators and kings who forced it upon them, calculating these events specifically to distract the underprivileged from the practical woes that Caesar and the Gracchi (among others) attempted to ease with proposals for reform that culminated in so many assassinations at the hands of Roman society's chief beneficiaries. In the face of so many biased and classist historical texts, Parenti's book is as necessary an historical account of an extraordinary epoch as we have.
While casting Caesar in a more humane and progressive light than historians have allowed, Parenti never wavers in his sincerity, calling attention to Caesar's notorious brutality and the corruption that festered around him as much as he lauds the man's more civil pursuits. Parenti never claims that Caesar hoped for an egalitarian society; he only suggests that Caesar's proposals for reforms in land distribution, tax codes and interest rates provoked the bitter disdain of the rich and powerful. Compared to the quality of life available to plebs and slaves, these proposals were modest, even meager, compared to the real needs of ancient Rome's common people. Still, they might have lent some degree of comfort to the lives of those who had to use the urine of passersby to wash their clothes (As parenti explains, uric acid is still used today in common cleaning agents such as Borax) and crammed into unstable and claustrophobic apartment complexes, living with five other families in one room. That even these most modest of attempts at pacifying the underprivileged met with such scorn from Cicero, Marcus Brutus, Cassius and others makes an even more powerful testament of Parenti's book, which never turns a blind eye to Caesar's entire character merely to prove a point. This is the kind of sincerity and humanity one would expect from historians but so infrequently experiences. [/b]
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