Et Tu, Brute? by Jason Novak

Author:Jason Novak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

IF THIS BOOK shares anything with the literary tradition of ancient Rome, it would be through satire and farce, which thrived during the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. Roman satire was dominated by conservative voices lamenting the collapse of traditional standards. Chief among these were Horace and Juvenal, whose verse essays were conservative in their sentiment yet radical and pyrotechnic in style, much like a cartoon.

Et Tu, Brute? also has ancestors in the memento mori literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The best-known example is Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre, a collection of illustrated verses showing how nobody escapes the icy clutches of death.

When I started it, I thought this book would be a straightforward illustrated guide to the deaths of Rome’s emperors. I have, after all, long been fascinated by them. My first real awareness came from watching the I, Claudius TV miniseries, starring Derek Jacobi as the stammering emperor Claudius. I was enthralled with that show and would go around the apartment in bedsheets stuttering Jacobi’s lines. I’ll be glad if some readers learn some history from this book, although I’m not sure how useful such knowledge is. I like the film director Errol Morris’s addendum to the old adage: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it without an ironic sense of futility.”

But about halfway through my work, it dawned on me that it was really about death itself. By the end, I thought perhaps that with this book I was trying to win a battle with death, or at least tame it in my imagination. Now, as I sit a few drinks deep and nearly finished with the introduction, I realize that this may really just be a way to get even with all the teachers who told me in school that drawing Romans killing one another would get me nowhere. Well, it got me this book—one I’ve been practicing for in one way or another since first grade.

I hope you enjoy reading Et Tu, Brute? as much as I enjoyed drawing it. I’m sorry about all the violence.

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