![]() ![]() He read it quietly and then tucked it into his toga. While this was going on a slave arrived in the Senate to deliver a message to Caesar. Cato, a bitter opponent of Caesar, took this as indicating that Caesar was secretly in league with the conspirators and stood to denounce him in colourful terms. Caesar followed this by arguing for their banishment instead. One anecdote early on I found peculiarly endearing: At the height of the Catiline conspiracy crisis Cicero addressed the Senate demanding the death penalty for the conspirators. But there was more than that: I was surprised by just how much I came to like Caesar. Certainly, as Goldsworthy points out, Caesar had a more dramatic life than almost any other human being who ever lived, from his conquest of Gaul, to his crossing of the Rubicon, to the delivery of Cleopatra to his bedchamber in a laundry basket, to his assassination in the Senate. ![]() So I started reading and was quickly hooked. I felt that this was something of a character flaw for an erudite chap of the 21st Century. I started reading this book because I felt I should: I realised I didn’t have a fully formed opinion of Julius Caesar, other than Shakespeare’s negative portrayal of him. ![]() Summary: an extraordinarily gripping account of one of history’s most dramatic lives ![]()
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May 2023
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