| It feels like a good time for a dramatic reading of Julius Caesar. Specifically, Marc Antony’s soliloquy in Act III, scene 1 when he is alone with Caesar’s just-executed corpse and imagines himself as an avenging monarch who would “cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war.” Here’s a thing I learned recently: In ancient Rome, havoc was not a state of disorder that happened to get wreaked. It was an official military order. A commander of a battlefield army crying HAVOC! was directing his troops to break rank and go pillage. Go plunder. Go burn it down. Make mayhem. Start the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. The quotation marks in the script that Shakespeare added around “havoc” indicate that the speaker is not expressing fear that chaos may bubble up in the political vacuum created by Caesar’s assassination. He is plotting to bring it about. Understanding havoc as a top-down plan makes more terrible the other imagery in Marc Antony’s dark speech in which he foresees all of Italy consumed by “domestic fury and fierce civil strife” and prophesies of an aggression so widespread and relentless that the civilian population will lose empathy (“all pity choked”), become inured to violence, and hence pacified: Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war. The imperative word havoc gives it away. The soldier Marc Antony isn’t Cassandra, warning about a coming reign of terror. In his monologue, he is sharing the recipe for it, actively imagining all the elements his campaign will include as he prepares to seize power and, under the guise of revenge, secure his own ambitions. Cruelty will be the point. The passivity inflicted by the cruelty will be the result. We are now living in a time of havoc. It’s relentless. It is cruel. It’s dehumanizing. It’s violent and will get more violent. It is everything, everywhere, all at once.
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