This is as true today, when California Shakespeare Theater and artistic director Jonathan Moscone make the object of the play our own time as much as Caesar's. In Cal Shakes's first season offering, a paralleling of ancient Rome and the world's latest empire permeates the production design. The centerpiece of John Coyne's set, which has a kind of Las Vegas majesty about it, is an enormous billboard dominated by a bust of Caesar (L. Peter Callender), while Katherine Roth's fetching costumes offer a sci-fi blend of toga and 21st-century business chic, more Romulan than Roman.

The actors, too, strike decidedly American poses. As the play opens, Caesar and the Roman masses are basking in the former's recent military triumph, while a group of conspirators ultimately led by Marcus Brutus (Charles Shaw Robinson) plots to murder the man whose unprecedented power threatens to destroy the republic. Coconspirator Cassius (the excellent James Carpenter) wears large metal-rimmed glasses that, with his businessman's hair, give him the look of a deeply disgruntled ACLU attorney (albeit one supported by camouflaged cadres brandishing M-16s and night-vision scopes). The equally appealing Robinson as a quiet, philosophical Brutus could pass as a Democrat from Wisconsin. Callender's charismatic Caesar, meanwhile, an adept and sympathetic mixture of megalomania and insecurity, is a media-savvy political genius who gives off, while in domestic repose, an almost Brat Pack cool (which puts him right at home in Las Vegas). And his loyal Marc Antony (a robust Andy Murray) is a sort of all-American in coliseum garb, with the power of the demagogue to convert the public into a murderous mob.

If Elizabethans were inclined to relate to the imperial aspects of the story, and to lionize Caesar, Americans have traditionally seen the play as an allegory of republican virtue over tyranny, with Brutus its hero. This tendency goes back to the country's founders, who self-consciously emulated the model they found in the ancient republican. But Brutus is also deeply flawed, wedded to abstractions that move his loyalties from people to ideas and leave him out of touch with reality. At least as understandable is Cassius's opposition to Caesar, which, though often dismissed as mere envy, stems from the trampled dignity of a freeborn individual. In Cassius's wooing of Brutus to the side of the conspirators, his republican sentiments sound a typically American note of self-reliance: "Men at some time are masters of their fate / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

But do Americans still side automatically with Brutus and Cassius? Lip service to democratic values can't hide the current fascination with empire present not only in Washington, D.C., but also increasingly in the culture at large. Far from looking to Jesus Christ for guidance, those in power today (and those swayed by them) seem much more interested in what Julius Caesar had to say, at least metaphorically speaking. And if there's a moral dimension at all to their embrace of J.C. (à la prattle about a Pax Americana pacifying and civilizing an unruly planet), it usually smacks of self-serving afterthoughts in calculations of power for power's sake.