The Romans passed lots of laws, but justice went to the biggest briber. Rome was a rigidly stratified society in which everyone tried to link to someone richer and more powerful. We now sentimentalize the Republic, but in Goldsworthy’s book it looks more like a gigantic racket. Goldsworthy draws on all these sources to create both a vivid biography and a study of a society reborn from its own collapse. But Rome’s chattering classes wrote endlessly about him, and historians like Plutarch drew on sources now lost. We don’t have much of his own writing apart from the Commentaries (I wish his book on clear style had survived). This is a shame, because Caesar’s life is remarkably well documented. Julius Caesar saved Rome from itself, and paid with his life for it.Īdrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: The Life of a Colossus is a superb modern biography of a man most us know only as a Shakespearean villain/victim. He could be brutal in the service of his policies, but also conciliatory. Kennedy, could compare with his adulterous conquests. No later womanizer, whether Casanova or John F. He understood male psychology so well that his legionaries begged to risk their lives for him.

He was a brilliant writer who - while fighting the Gauls - dashed off a book on writing clear, plain Latin. Great generals, including Napoleon, have studied his campaigns like awestruck schoolboys.

After more than 2000 years, he haunts us still.Ĭaius Julius Caesar, the epileptic son of an undistinguished patrician family, shook Europe to its core and shaped humanity’s future for at least two millennia.

Adrian goldsworthy cesar