Make Rome great again! Presenting the murder of Julius Caesar in the time of Facebook

The assassination of Julius Caesar is an event that changed the course of history of the known world. Even today, two thousand years after his assassination, Caesar still matters, and public discourse and popular culture are important areas of his reception. In contrast to most historical cases that deal with Caesar’s assassination, most recent cases, analyzed in this thesis, take the event down to the personal, individual, highly subjective, local level: a historical reenactment, a cinematic appropriation, and a theatrical staging in a prison. The research involved developing and creating intersections between a wide range of theoretical approaches in order best to interrogate the contemporary case studies of individuals who enact Caesar’s murder. The project is also complex because it involves different kinds of analysis of literary, ethnographic (itself both direct and indirect) and digital data, and it includes comparison across media (historical reenactment, prison theatre, film, digital) and across cultural communities (Roman reenactors, prisoners). In order to address the aforementioned questions I employ several methodologies: literary analysis, discourse analysis, and different methods from the field of Cultural Anthropology (semi-structured in-depth interviews, informal interviews, qualitative surveys, participant observation and unobtrusive observation for data collection, and thematic coding, ethnography and thick description for data analysis). These performances of the dictator’s assassination entail a sense of cultural heritage as a personal possession, heritage as therapy, heritage as shaping one’s national, local, political, social and gender identities. The historical reenactment proves to be a celebration of Julius Caesar, Romanness and of Roman roots of the Italian national identity and culture.