Next time, call him Nero

Tim Newman quotes a tweet by Oliver Kamm occasioned by this NYT story:

New York’s Public Theater lost financial support from two high-profile corporate donors, Delta Air Lines and Bank of America, on Sunday amid intense criticism of its production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” which depicts the assassination of a Trump-like Roman ruler.

To which Kamm responded:

Arts subsidy from tax revenues matters. If it’s up to corporate sponsors, controversial productions won’t get made.

So Trump as Caesar is the epitome of controversial, the apex of courageous and the acme of original. At this realization, boredom set in. Suddenly succor came from unexpected quarters:

Criticism of the play reached a fever pitch on Sunday when Fox News reported that it “appears to depict President Trump being brutally stabbed to death by women and minorities.”

They know how to turn a phrase, the folks at Fox News. But how come that no one mentioned the God Emperor Trump meme? As for “Empress Melania,” it sounds about right: there were a few imperial consorts with Greek names in the 200s and 300s.

Geographically, Slovenia is made up of bits of three Roman provinces – Noricum, Dalmatia and Pannonia – and of Venetia et Histria, a region of Roman Italia. The capital, Ljubljana (Laibach), stands on the site of Emona, a city in ancient Italia, but Melania’s native Novo Mesto is just across the border in Pannonia or Dalmatia.