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

The assassination of Julius Caesar is an event that changedthe course of history of the known world. Even today, twothousand years after his assassination, Caesar still matters,and public discourse and popular culture are importantareas of his reception. In contrast to most historical casesthat 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 historicalreenactment, a cinematic appropriation, and a theatricalstaging in a prison. The research involved developing andcreating intersections between a wide range of theoreticalapproaches in order best to interrogate the contemporarycase studies of individuals who enact Caesar’s murder. Theproject is also complex because it involves different kindsof analysis of literary, ethnographic (itself both direct andindirect) and digital data, and it includes comparisonacross media (historical reenactment, prison theatre, film,digital) and across cultural communities (Romanreenactors, prisoners). In order to address theaforementioned questions I employ several methodologies:literary analysis, discourse analysis, and different methodsfrom the field of Cultural Anthropology (semi-structuredin-depth interviews, informal interviews, qualitativesurveys, participant observation and unobtrusiveobservation for data collection, and thematic coding,ethnography and thick description for data analysis).These performances of the dictator’s assassination entail asense of cultural heritage as a personal possession, heritageas therapy, heritage as shaping one’s national, local,political, social and gender identities. The historicalreenactment proves to be a celebration of Julius Caesar,Romanness and of Roman roots of the Italian nationalidentity and culture.