Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84546 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The man who virtually defined the West's concept of leadership comes alive in this splendid biography. Military historian Goldsworthy (The Complete Roman Army) gives a comprehensive, vigorous account of Caesar's conquest of Gaul and his victories in the civil war that made him master of Rome. But he doesn't stint on the nonmartial aspects of Caesar's life—his dandyism, his flagrant womanizing (which didn't stop enemies from gay-baiting him), his supple political genius and the flair for drama and showmanship that cowed mutinous legionaries and courted Rome's restive masses. Goldsworthy's is a sympathetic profile. In his telling, Caesar's massacres and group enslavements, though "utterly ruthless," are considered and pragmatic, not wanton, and the conqueror seems to possess a moderation and magnanimity that sprang from the same idealized self-image that fed his ambition. The author's vivid portrait of the late Roman Republic that Caesar toppled is correspondingly jaundiced: its politics are about nothing except the personal ambitions of powerful men, and chaos, corruption and violence reign beneath the ritualistic niceties of republican procedure. More compellingly than most biographies, Goldsworthy's exhaustive, lucid, elegantly written life makes its subject the embodiment of his age. 16 pages of b&w photos, maps. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
One of the most recognizable names to the ancient and modern worlds, Caesar is one of the few figures from the Roman Empire--Cicero and Augustus are two others--susceptible to modern biographical treatment. Caesar, by Christian Meier (1996), was the previous portrait. Goldsworthy is a historian of the Roman army, a credential vital to assessing the career of Caesar, conqueror of Gaul, instigator of a fateful civil war, dictator, and would-be conqueror of Parthia (modern Iraq) but for the Ides of March. Leaning on Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, Goldsworthy exhibits strong explanatory skill about military campaigns and about Caesar's rising but precarious political status at Rome. Accepting that Caesar crossed the Rubicon to stave off personal ruination, Goldsworthy's account of the ensuing war nevertheless does not absolve his opponents, Pompey and Cato primarily, from responsibility for the political impasse behind the war. In any case, Caesar sealed his military reputation with a rapid victory. Eternally intriguing history readers, the end of the Roman Republic receives astute analysis and dramatic narration in Goldsworthy's life of Caesar. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Adrian Goldsworthy is one of the new generation of young classicists who combine scholarship with storytelling to bring the ancient world to life. In his masterly new Caesar, he shows us the greatest Roman as man, statesman, soldier, and lover."-Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Simon Sebag Montefiore )

"It gives me great pleasure to give Caesar the strongest possible recommendation. Caesar was a complex character living in confusing times, but Adrian Goldsworthy tackles the subject with a vigor, thoroughness and clarity of purpose that the great man himself would have approved of."-Philip Sidnell, Editor, Ancient and Medieval History Book Club (London) (Philip Sidnell )

"Adrian Goldsworthy is one of our most promising young military historians today."-Sir John Keegan, author of The Iraq War (Sir John Keegan )

"Goldsworthy''s book will remain the definitive biography of Caesar for years to come."-Philip Matyszak, author of The Sons of Caesar: Imperial Rome''s First Dynasty (Philip Matyszak )

Customer Reviews

A Superior Telling
Prior to this Caesar biography we essentially had Shakespeare's version and, in modern times, Meier's as respectively the popular and definitive versions of Caesar's life. This new biography reminds us once and for all that Shakespeare's play is a dramatic butchery. And it makes by comparison Meier's version read like a dry text book bereft of the dramatic juice and blood that were in fact Caesar's life. As a coincidental aside, Goldsworthy lives up to his name as a biographical historian. It requires a master of both genres to weave together the complex political machinations and upheavals, ethnic infighting, cultural norms, economic compulsions, military dispositions, and personal ambitions in Caesar's Rome that helped form who he was as, ultimately, a man. As a fairly knowledgeable fan of Julius Caesar the historical figure I found this book enlightening. As a fan of Caesar the man, I found it completely enjoyable.

Good, informative but why, oh why?!
This is a book I would recommend to anyone with some curiousity about "how Rome worked"...provided the reader has a strong mental filter to separate fact from fiction. It is readable, and the author's English is delightful, in the sense that there is something of the turn of the Century (19th-to-20th - not 20th-to-21st) elegance in it. The focus is perhaps more on the "workings of Rome" than on Caesar's most important years affecting Rome - the author is a bit too shy to appear to "endorse a Dictator". And, this is the weakness of the book. It is somewhat like historical works published in the Soviet era in the Soviet Union or one of its satellites. (Yevgeniy Tarlé's works on Napolean and Talleyrand come to mind [ Bonaparte, ]. Superb history, but Tarlé, a Soviet author, must pay homage to dialectic materialism).. In this case the author cannot keep himself from paying homage to all the "important" concepts that make a British academic "politicaly acceptable". Why, oh why, do so many today contaminate their excellent work with the eager additions to show that their thinking, by they way, corresponds to what is required? In this respect, the Introduction is outright painful. Also, to be popular in the early 21st Century, we must write about sex, sex, sex... Of course, we are just speculating, and therefore to avoid any danger of being accused of mixing history with fiction, we put in some weasel-words when we have no sources... The reason why this otherwise excellent work does not get five stars is the author's self-demeaning with his eagerness to prove that he is Politically Correct.

Entertaining
This is a good book, though it lacks a little organization. It's linear and accumulative. The story is not that well broken down into smaller issues like different size pieces of a puzzle, rather it's more like an accumulation of identical logs or bricks that amount to the thick book we have here. Facts and dates just follow each other in sequence. The truth is the author has enough talent to not get too messy, though at times it is monotonous. A clearer structure and less blurry lines between issues, dates and locations could have helped. If you want to go back and find the exact page where a certain issue is dealt with, it is going to be hard.

Looks like a lot of cons but overall the book is readable thanks to its almost popular style, modern students friendly.

A note that meant a lot to me as a Spaniard, and that I can't help mentioning: "In 92 BC an edict closed down schools teaching rhetoric Latin, stating that instruction in Greek was superior, even for teaching a man to make speeches in Latin (...) this measure was in part intended to prevent the oratorical skills useful in public life from becoming too common, for such schools were not likely to have taken pupils from those families outside the Senate (...) so this continued the emphasis on what would be useful rather than on acquiring purely academic learning." This reminded me of the banning of the Spanish language in schools in Cataluña (Spain) for the partisan interests of the entrenched nazionalist class; a class that lives on well-paid government jobs and subsidies and is throwing overboard a whole cultural legacy that belongs to a larger community than their own clan.

A whole lot we still have to learn from history (and from books like this one), from Roman history specifically. Treat yourself and take sides between Cato and Caesar. But try to understand the other side too.