History may be more than bunk, and more than one damn thing
after another, but unfortunately it does not consist of a
series of neat, comprehensible lessons; even those who do
know history appear doomed to repeat it. Still, the
temptation to draw occasionally sententious parallels
between present and past seems hard to resist, and the
historical period which by common consent seems most nearly
parallel to twenty-first century America is that of the end
of the Roman republic and beginning of the empire, with
George W. Bush usually compared either to Julius Caesar or
to the Emperor Augustus.
This theme has been the inspiration for Richard Nelson’s
Conversations in Tusculum, now playing at the Public
Theater with a dream cast that includes Brian Dennehy as
Cicero, David Strathairn as Cassius, and Aidan Quinn as
Brutus. It is 45 B.C.: Pompey is dead, Cato has killed
himself rather than submit to Caesar, and Caesar, now Rome’s
dictator, is in Spain wiping up the remnants of Pompey’s
supporters. Cassius, Brutus, and Cicero are at their
country estates in Tusculum, horrified at Caesar’s ascent
and their own apparent impotence to resist him. The
relationships between all these men are personal as well as
political, for Rome’s ruling class was tightly knit:
Brutus’s wife Porcia (Gloria Reuben) is Cato’s daughter and
her husband’s first cousin; Servilia (Maria Tucci), Brutus’s
mother (and Cato’s sister), has been acting as a sort of pimp
for Caesar—who incidentally is her own former