On the surface at least, Julius Caesar and Elmo make an unlikely pair. One was a Roman statesman, general, and historian who was immortalized in a Shakespeare play and who lived more than 2,000 years ago. The other is a slightly manic Muppet with mangy red fur and an orange nose, whose exact citizenship is unclear but whose last forwarding address was Sesame Street.
Yet both of these figures are expert practitioners of the same rhetorical maneuver: a fancy word for talking about oneself in the third person. When Julius Caesar describes his Gallic Wars exploits in his book he never uses or other first-person pronouns. Instead, he crafts sentences like “Caesar learned through spies that the mountain was in possession of his own men.” Likewise, when Elmo explains his commitment to the life of the
