La Mort de César (ca. 1859–1867) by Jean-Léon Gérôme.In a curious way, Julius Caesar isn’t the most important figure in The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination. The moral of Barry Strauss’s story, the point of it all, belongs instead to a thin, sickly young man in Caesar’s entourage—a grandnephew named Octavian—who would wend his way through the political crisis of Julius Caesar’s murder in 44 B.C. to become Caesar Augustus, ruler of the known world. The irony is almost unbearable: In the name of ridding the republic of a dictator, the incompetent assassins managed only to give Rome an emperor. “The Ides of March changed the world,” as Strauss notes, “but not as the men who held the daggers that day planned.”
The Peace of Despotism
John Williams warns readers of Augustus in his introduction that “if there are truths in this work, they are the truths of fiction rather than of history.” He will be “grateful to those readers who will take it as it is intended—a work of the imagination.” But how do “the truths of fiction” differ from those of history? Aristotle famously considered poetry to be more philosophical than history because it reveals “the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily,” rather than simply recording what particular individuals once said or did. If Aristotle…
Roman Liberties Lost
G.K. Chesterton once said “the act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice.” Finding our own time still more ill-disposed towards vindicating almost any virtue, I was puzzled at first to find so little exhilaration in Valentina Arena’s Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Republic. This is the more unfortunate because Arena is dealing with what, to me, is the issue for the Romans: the corruption and confusion of their civic virtues between 70 and 52 B.C. Arena’s contextualist methodology, witnessed by a heavy reliance on Quentin Skinner throughout and…
