A history book that opens with a “Cast of Characters” leaves the reader feeling a trifle uneasy. Surely history books, being real life rather than melodrama, feature not “characters” but — and do excuse the technical term — “people”?
Even more alarmingly, this history of Julius Caesar is subtitled, with gravelly voice-over excitability, The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination. Within a few pages it has described the Roman leader as “dark-eyed and silver-tongued, sensual and violent”, a phrase more Danielle Steel than Caesar’s Gallic Wars. The early omens, in short, hint at tosh.
It isn’t. This history of Caesar by the American academic Barry Strauss is a romp, yes, but a glorious one, through the final months of Rome’s most famous ruler. And if this book tends towards hyperbole then, well, so did its subject. This, after all, is a soldier so ruthless that to conquer Gaul he killed one in three of their adult males; a politician so sexually charismatic (and omnivorous) that one disapproving senator described him as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman”; and a ruler so influential that his name, in the forms of “tsar”, “kaiser”, and “czar”, survives to this day as a byword for total power.
And, of course, in an odd way he is also known for total impotence. Because if there is one thing that — largely thanks to Shakespeare — we all know about Caesar it is that on the Ides of March of 44BC, the leader was surrounded by a group of his friends and assassinated and that his final words were “et tu, Brute”. Unfortunately, what we know is often wrong: the truth is in even more dramatic than Shakespeare made it, perhaps even melodramatic.
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Understandably. What dramatist would have the courage to create the sort of plot in which the murdered man, the night before he is killed (this very night, in fact, March 14) would sit down at dinner and discuss what sort of death he preferred? Who would dare to write a far-fetched scene in which Caesar concluded he would like “a sudden and unexpected” death? And surely no one outside the realms of Brazilian soap opera would allow for the possibility that Brutus was not just Caesar’s murderer, but his son — then make Caesar’s final words “Kai su, teknon”, Greek for “And you, my child”?
All this happened — and more besides. Death seems to have been stalking Caesar’s thoughts for some time. “I have lived long enough for nature or for glory,” he declared in 46BC. This was odd: he had finally achieved all he had hoped. Caesar came from a grand family, but an impoverished one and success was by no means assured. In his early thirties he fell at the foot of a statue of Alexander the Great and wept because by his age Alexander had conquered the whole of the known world, whereas he, Caesar, had managed to do little more than become a civil servant in Spain.
By the night of that dinner party everything had changed. In the intervening years he had beaten his great enemy Pompey and conquered Gaul, Egypt, Cleopatra and, effectively, Rome: he was declared dictator in perpetuity in 44BC. There were other, better honours. In his youth he had been a dandy whose too-long sleeves had scandalised the senate; in middle age he began balding and vainly took to combing his hair forward to hide this. One new honour allowed him to wear a laurel wreath whenever he liked. “Of all the honours voted him by the senate,” wrote the gossipy historian Suetonius, “there was none which he received or made use of more gladly.”
Neither Caesar’s wreath nor his power pleased other Roman aristocrats quite so much. The first half or so of this book is spent analysing in fascinating detail who was in the conspiracy. (One nugget: the conspirators wanted neither “rash youths nor infirm elders”. Men of about 40, as Brutus and Cassius were, were preferred and sought out.)
Strauss then goes on to give one of the most riveting hour-by-hour accounts of Caesar’s final day I have read, perfectly capturing those tantalising twists and turns of fate that continued up to the very last moments of Caesar’s life. On his way in to his final meeting of the senate, for instance, Caesar saw the augur who had predicted his death would happen by this date. The Ides of March, said Caesar to him in triumph, had come. “Aye,” said the augur, “they have come but not gone.”
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Hours later, Caesar would be dead, his final words spoken, the blood from his 23 stab wounds pooling at the foot of a statue of his adversary Pompey. Melodrama, perhaps, but also true. And an absolutely marvellous read.
The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination by Barry Strauss, Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £16.99. To buy this book for £15.29, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134