ET TU, BRUTE? The murder of Caesar and political assassination. Greg Woolf.
256pp. Profile Books. Pounds 15.99. 1 86197 741 7
CAESAR'S LEGACY. Civil war and the emergence of the Roman Empire. Josiah Osgood. 450pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, Pounds 17.99 (US $29.99).
0 521 67177 9
THE SONS OF CAESAR. Imperial Rome's first dynasty. Philip Matyszak. 296pp.
Thames and Hudson. Pounds 18.95 (US $31.95). 0 500 25128 2
It was a run of more than 500 metres, with a steep little climb at the end of it, from the Senate-house in Pompey's Portico, where Julius Caesar had been murdered, to the Capitol. It can't have been easy to run in a blood-soaked toga while brandishing a sword and shouting out that the tyrant was dead and freedom restored. The adrenalin must soon have been spent when the cheering crowds failed to materialize. What sort of freedom, and for whom? And what sort of tyrant had he been, anyway?
According to Greg Woolf, in Et Tu, Brute?, "Jean-Leon Gerome's great canvas says it all". He refers to "The Death of Caesar" by Gerome in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, an image featured on all three of the very different books under review here about the consequences of the Ides of March. In fact, the painting says nothing at all of any use. In an architectural space that cannot decide whether to be a theatre or a basilica, the twenty-three conspirators, in spotless togas, hold up weapons that show no trace of blood; a single Senator remains seated and watches them leave; Caesar's corpse in the foreground has one small bloodstain.
Who could ever tell from this what issues were at stake?
Woolf's elegant little book is one of a series designed to illustrate the long-term significance of particular historical episodes. As the subtitle indicates, its main theme is political assassination in general, with a particular emphasis on its apparent acceptability as a foreign-policy option for Western democracies. The book is full of good sense, but a fashionable avoidance of chronological order makes it hard to trace a consistent argument.
Readers may well be puzzled to find only a single short paragraph on ideas of liberty in the Roman Republic, followed by fifteen pages on the palace plot against the Emperor Domitian, and no discussion of Shakespeare's play, but twenty-five pages on Addison's Cato and Corneille's Cinna, neither of which is about an assassination. More important, a Republic described in terms of powerful "generals" and a "popular party" will not help the uninformed reader to understand what Caesar stood for, why he was killed, or why he was deified.
