The Deprogram

I only finished Parenti’s ‘The Assassination of Julius Caesar’ today and couldn’t believe it when I heard the news. Following quote really choked me up. Now even more combined with those sad news. What a legend. RIP.

“And the people of Rome themselves, the anonymous masses upon whose shoulders the populares stood, come down to us hardly at all, or most usually as a disreputable mob. They who struggled against all odds with all the fear and courage of ordinary humans, whose names we shall never know, whose blood and tears we shall never see, whose cries of pain and hope we shall never hear, to them we are linked by a past that is never dead nor ever really past. And so, when the best pages of history are finally written, it will be not by princes, presidents, prime ministers, or pundits, nor even by professors, but by the people themselves. For all their faults and shortcomings, the people are all we have. Indeed, we are they.” — Last paragraph from ‘The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome’