NO!
i come to this web site for news.
not for michael jackson
not for old pictures of celebrity funerals,
please get back to your roots. you are too young a website to stray this far.

Celebrity funerals?
Good grief.
Is there nothing but Michael Jackson worth reporting?
Entertainment tonight will have plenty of coverage of poor Jackson.
Cannot everyone else let it go and look at the reall news impacting us today?
No?
*sigh*

Real news? Really?
I gave up on thinking I'd get substantial news from TDB months ago. Ever since they let Ms McCain and the likes put their blabber here.....TDB has become my ET meets McCall's. Except, you know, without the good fiction contributors like Cather and Fitzgerald.......

Just a thought: if you're going to throw in the random ancient funeral to show precedent, you might want to get a few things right: 1) Caesar was an "imperator" (general), not an emperor in the modern sense, and his official title was "perpetual dictator". This distinction is important because Caesar is significant as the Roman who made it possible to consolidate full power around a single individual, which was eventually his great-nephew. 2) Be very careful with ancient sources; you used Appian, a 2nd-century Alexandrian, who has his uses, but, maybe didn't fact-check everything. Caesar was killed during a special meeting in the Theater of Pompey in the Campus Martius, not in the Senate House. It may very well be that the Senate House wasn't even finished at the time of Caesar's death in 44 because of another crazy funeral -- that of Clodius Pulcher in 52 -- whose murdered body was dragged into the Senate House, and frenzied mourners set fire to the whole building.

Besides, the creepiest part is that the temple to the Deified Julius was built on the site of the cremation. It's almost like celebrity worship, but with an official priesthood (and a healthy tradition of Hellenistic god-kingship to back it up...)!

How many of those famous dead molested young boys? Inquiring minds want to know.

Now, now.
One cannot expect sensationalist reporting to also be historically accurate.
Besides, Caesar wsn't the first to consolidate power in one individual.
He was the first to do it in a so-called republic.
Which we are no longer.