Karl von Piloty’s “The Murder of Caesar” (1865, oil on canvas).Courtesy Landesmuseum Hannover. Both Dante and Shakespeare, who understood political instability, would tip the scales in favor of Caesar’s character against his assassins as would Shaw and the 1963 film “Cleopatra.” In reality, Caesar pitted the mob against the so-called elites and destroyed those he deemed “other,” paying the ultimate price.
The tagline of the PBS series “Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator,” is “Nearly five centuries of ancient Roman democracy were overthrown in 16 years by one man.”
Will we even get to 250 on July 4, 2026? Here’s how Time magazine summarized two interviews with former President Donald J. Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants for a cover story.
Read MoreSeeing President Obama atop the Acropolis in Athens – talking about democracy then and now – made me yearn to get back to Greece in memory. On the fifth day of the Times Journeys’ “The Legacy of Alexander the Great” tour, we visited Philippi, which looms large in Greco-Roman history. The city was originally founded by Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II, hence the name, but it is perhaps most noteworthy for two different moments in history – the victory of Julius Caesar’s supporters Octavian and Mark Antony over his assassins Brutus and Cassius, and the imprisonment of St. Paul, who brought his nascent mission to the Gentiles there.
At the Archaeological Site of Philippi, we looked upon heights where the battle – a turning point as Rome pivoted from republic to empire – is said to have taken place. Fortunately, we didn’t climb them but instead wandered amid the later Roman ruins that included an amphitheater. There John, the thespian among us, amused the group by striking melodramatic poses. ...
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“I hate looksism,” I told my friends the other night at dinner, though truth be told, I’m as guilty of it as the next person.
I was reminded of this while reading an article in the May 24 edition of The New York Times’ Arts section titled, “What Matters More, the Singer’s Shape, or Her Sound?”, in which critics Anthony Tommasini and Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim spoke with reporter Michael Cooper about the brouhaha over Tara Erraught’s appearance – emphasis on the word “appearance” – as Octavian in the Glyndebourne music festival’s production of Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”
For the uninitiated, “Der Rosenkavalier” is an easy-on–the-eyes-and -ears opera about an older woman learning to let go of her young lover. (It has a justly famous waltz that makes gorgeous use of sequential phrases, played by the orchestra’s string section, which George Balanchine used to cap off his glittering ballet “Vienna Waltzes.”)
The older woman, called the Marschallin, is one of those glamorous soprano roles, sung by the likes of Renee Fleming. At Glyndebourne, it was filled fetchingly by Kate Royal. The lover, Octavian, is a pants role in which a mezzo has to pretend to be a handsome youth. Erraught, who apparently sang gloriously, is a woman with a classic pear shape, which neither lends itself to pants nor suggests slim-hipped James Deans. And the (male) critics let her have it, signaling out her “puppy fat.”
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s analysis got to the heart of the problem for those critics...
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