Yes, his behavior was flashier than theirs, and he accepted honors they had never taken. Sulla had had the title, which was in the Roman context a perfectly respectable one. Pompey had done it before him, and Sulla before Pompey, and Cinna before Sulla. Did he know it? Did he even know that he had done it? Caesar was not the first person to have seized pre-eminence in Rome. We know that Julius Caesar overthrew the Roman Republic. Modern historians are acutely conscious that history is read backward, but lived forward. Napoleon Bonaparte’s self-conscious emulation of Caesar did not help the Roman’s reputation, and neither did the proliferation of ever more horrific dictatorships in the 20th century.īut since 1950, Caesar has begun to receive a better press. Indeed the most famous line from Daniel Webster’s last great Senate speech, on the compromise of 1850, is “Hear me for my cause” - a quotation from Shakespeare’s version of the speech Brutus gives the Roman crowd in defense of Caesar’s assassination. Calhoun, or a Henry Clay rose to speak, they modeled their paragraphs, their sentences, even their posture on the classical orators - and they very likely saw in their mind’s eye opposite them, not the wigs and hats of Westminster or the spittoons of Washington, but the marble benches of the Senate house. When a Burke, a Sheridan, a Chatham, a Daniel Webster, a John C. English readers in particular identified with the aristocratic republic that rose to global empire. Livy, Cicero, and Tacitus formed the basics of the classical curriculum, and their celebration of ancient Roman liberty shaped the minds of educated young Englishmen and Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is a long English-language historiographic tradition that despises Caesar. (Goldsworthy is best known as a Roman military historian, author of a much-praised history of the Roman army that I have bought but not yet read.) What I can say is that Goldsworthy’s Caesar that vividly retells the familiar story while doing full justice to both the political and the military sides of the story.

You’d think by now there was nothing left to say!Īnd candidly, you’d need a better knowledge than I possess to evaluate in which precise ways, if any, Goldsworthy advances the scholarship of Caesar beyond its previous resting place. Can there possibly be any justification for a new biography of Julius Caesar?Īdrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus is by quick reckoning the third published in English in just the past 10 years.

Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy