In the room where Caesar died, there is blood pooling on the floor. It is oppressive and wet and the Senators make bright red footprints on the ground as they try and fail to step warily around it. They paint their hands red but the blood on their shoes is where their guilt truly lies. They wear their righteous indignation as a mask for their fear as they step quietly into the sunlight. Their footsteps make sticking sounds which echo as they leave the hall one by one. If a man has died and there is no one left to view the body, does he exist any longer?
This is the price of democracy – the blood and death and betrayal in this room. It fills the air with oppressive and weary heat. This is the price for every man’s voice. We pay it in blood, in the feel of murder in our hearts and the sting of iron and steel against flesh. We are the clawing masses, scrambling up the tunics of the men who rise above us. We claw and scratch, not until we have reached their height, but until they have reached our depths, sinking beneath ideals into the murky underworld of our demanding and vicious realism.
Caesar is dead and Rome will fall. The men he called friends will parade his death through the town, mocking our grief with their righteous indignation, not knowing that this democracy demands of us to be the lesser men. We cannot live in the world we create out of death. The walls are built high with corpses, the buildings constructed with bone and the rivers made red and flowing with blood and tears and sweat. It is easy to follow the will of the people when the only ones there are those that can stand the stench of dead bodies in the bright and pulsing sunlight.
Utopias are ghost towns built by men with guns and ideals and arrogance. They are carefully warded with dark, navy magic that binds them together with their triumph and their guilt. It guards them against those that palm their guns with disgust, with fear that sits heavily in their hearts. They offer their own deaths up, to time and space and fate as it carves its way through human history. They who fear themselves more than they fear the bright light of Caesar will become more than either he or his murderers can comprehend. Their stories are the old woman who comes with a cloth and a bucket and methodically strips the stone floor of its memory. The red pools are gone. Death has been chased away by true honor and not just by its voice.
So let slip the dogs of war, that they may tear the throats of tyrants and thieves and cowards alike.
