@Imperious:
Even by his era’s standards, Caesar was a criminal.
Exactly: Some people also feel the pope is the devil. Some people felt Caesar was good and other felt he was bad. Then and today.
When WW1 ended people felt the kaiser was bad, now he got replaced by Hitler who was a thousand times worse. IN 1,000 years the Kaiser will be another mere product of his age. Hitler will still be bad.
The Roman Republic had laws, it had legal mechanisms for determining “right” and “wrong” in the eyes of the state. Caesar flagrantly violated the law. This, by definition of the word, made him a criminal. This really isn’t something up to interpretation.
I could care less if he was a good or a bad leader, but I must insist that he was a criminal. I mean, George Washington was a criminal, too - a traitor, in the legal sense of the word.
@Imperious:
It seems reasonable to try people according to their own laws.
Well it could lead to disastrous results to think that this means that the ‘laws’ themselves are just and not also a product of the times. IN 1,000 years most of our laws will be considered barbaric and again some will feel they are just fine, while new “Hitlers or Caesars” will invent a new set of them and claim the same rationale. Back and forth.
Laws are not platonic ideal forms, but changing, altering definitions based on the current situation. Things working that way offer more evolution and dynamism.
No I think it leads to very fair results. If historians, or history aficionados at least, insist upon making moral judgements about ancient figures, then it is unjust to try them according to modern standards. It’s like figuring somebody’s net worth in 1826 dollars and not adjusting for inflation.
Today we have far stricter laws of war, notions of human dignity, etc. Powerful figures in the past did not have to take those into account when they made their decisions. But it might still be reasonable to say that military figure X was a traitor to his country because he overthrew the legal authorities upon his return from a military campaign, in spite of laws against it.