save a horse, ride a roman politician [link to the full illustration/mild nsfw]

anyway, last week I was talking about how my old cassius design had white hair to contrast brutus, and that in The Comic I was considering having cassius go prematurely grey after carrhae for thematic reasons but decided against it. ultimately, a mistake because I've been thinking gay thoughts about it ever since. like, the hold this has on my mind.

so. cassius with some salt in his hair, so to speak, and

brutus' reaction

When you talk about Philippino history and then Roman history, as a Venezuelan it's been making me think about our history and like, I've always thought there's a lot of similarity there but now it's like...its so similar. Your house is haunted too! I always think about how we won wars against the colonizers but their ghosts are still there, and they still sit at the dinner table with us every night. Your work is so cool, I feel like I can extend that train of thought further through time. I've never been interested in Rome but now I kinda am!

Venezuela 🤝the Philippines: being haunted houses (colonized by Spain)

also that is so SO real, the ghosts really are with us!! THEY ARE AT!!! OUR DINNER TABLES!!!!! ngl, once you start noticing it, it's impossible to NOT notice how they've crawled into the spaces and just. stayed.

ancient Rome is so weird for it too, because if you asked me about it, I wouldn't immediately put ancient Rome down for haunting the Philippines, except for the fact that like Catholicism, it's fucking everywhere. it's gotten in the cracks and spaces between the walls. On the stage of theater, Nadres' Hanggang dito na lamang at maraming salamat: the main character is named after Julius Caesar

Closet Queeries, J. Niel C. Garcia

and so many people are named after figures from ancient Rome (I know enough Mark Anthonys I've run out of differentiating nicknames for everyone) that it rivals Catholic saints for naming conventions. neo classical architecture had it's moment in the sun in Manila, our ilustrados brought some of it back when they returned from Spain to call for reform, and then independence, and I am struggling to hold back a plague-infection comparison about that. like, something else crept in with Spain, and like Spain's ghosts, it Did Not Leave.

but on the other hand! there's a long, centuries long, tradition of using the events of the Fall of the Republic to discourse, discuss, to vent or call for action, current events. it provides a interlocutor when something hurts too much to say directly, it provides a stage to explore a tragedy that echoes in our own histories, it gives a script to voice an ideal that a government might otherwise put down. how many centuries have we used Brutus (and Cassius) to rail against Tyranny, and how many centuries with equal enthusiasm have people used Julius Caesar as a martyr to justify the rights of Kings and Empires? these things are equally as important (in a different way) from the ancient events that actually transpired. (this specific topic, of Brutus & the Assassination of Caesar and it's literary revivals in history, are the focus of The Brutus Revival, Manfredi Piccolomini)

and the cores of these things conflict with each other, but in that friction, it's like there's an invitation to sit down and think for a minute. to look back at history and feel it's immediacy in the present.

ANYWAY I got carried away, but I am glad!! that my stuff could make Rome interesting!!! I hope that you find new doors of thoughts to explore!!!!!!!