Many are unaware that King Redbad was the first anti-Marxist. That fact would not become well-known until a millennium later, when Marx lived and wrote, but the Frisian King did file a preemptive trademark petition with the Vatican.
I feel like you’re grinding an axe against me ever since I told you what my political beliefs are. I never said the Romans were Marxists or that they ever thought anything like that. I only said I thought wealth inequality contributed to their republic’s dissolution into the empire. Earlier in the republic, men had been given absolute power for specific purposes and they gave it back after they were done. There was a strong republican (small r) sense of civic duty which might also be called Roman patriotism. I was only saying in that other post that extreme wealth inequality and a more and more powerful upper class who cared less and less for the plebes who were increasingly powerless despite their numbers probably contributed to the cultural changes that allowed the acceptance of an dictator to take over. That’s not my doctoral thesis. It’s just an amateur assessment, which is how you should take anything I say. I just like to think.
You and I do disagree about some of the Roman facts and I do think some Marxian (not Marxist) atavism has crept into your thinking, but that is not the origin of my post here. I am making fun of another poster in other threads who often reduces all modern problems to a Marxist-vs-Virtuous-Folk fairy tale.
There's no reason you would know that, however, so I apologize. I am definitely not poking fun at you here.
You should see my copy of Shakespeare that I read when I was BYUI. I saw atheism and anti-religious maxims everywhere and feign imagined that Shakespeare was one of us. I have phases of atavism when I discover something new that was previously forbidden to me by my conservoMormon culture, but it always moderates again as I get a feel for it in context. I never stop learning.
Yes, Shakespeare is like that: so very rich, amenable to so many different interpretations. It is what the church claims of the temple: you learn something new every time you go through it.