The duty of vengeance fell on his adopted son and heir, whom an absurd modern convention insists on calling "Octavian". The young man's name was, of course, Caesar, and even his enemies soon got used to calling him that. Submission to the convention is the one complaint I have about Caesar's Legacy, Josiah Osgood's superb account of the "missing years" 43-29 bc: of all Caesar's legacies, that of his name was the most significant and the most lasting.

Osgood sets out to do what the young Claudius was forbidden to do by his mother and grandmother (Mark Antony's daughter and Caesar Augustus' widow) -give a "frank and truthful" account of the years of civil war that followed the Roman People's grant of supreme power to Antony, Lepidus and the young Caesar, to hunt down the killers of the deified Julius, and destroy them.

In fact, Osgood begins immediately after the murder, with Cicero, in April 44 bc, receiving a letter from his son in Athens.

(Fourteen years later, the young Cicero would become the young Caesar's colleague in the Consulship, to preside over the Senate's decrees of thanksgiving for the defeat and death of Antony.) By close and intelligent readings of very different types of contemporary evidence, Osgood makes the reader understand the horror of those years in the lives of ordinary Romans, an achievement worthy of his model, The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell (1975), and of the great predecessor whose influence he cites with just appreciation, The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme (1939). His mastery of a very wide range of modern scholarship is matched by an admirably direct and accessible style.

Caesar's Legacy is a historical work of real distinction.

New evidence, duly emphasized by Osgood, allows us to infer the terms of the oath of allegiance which empowered the young Caesar -not so young now: in his thirty-second year -to command the forces of the Roman People against Antony and Cleopatra, without holding any elected office. That personal endorsement, independent of the traditional, and continuing, structures of the Republic, is one of the two innovations that enabled the young Caesar to establish his authority on a permanent basis and eventually pass it on to his own adopted son, and thus formalize the dynastic quasi-monarchy of the Roman Principate.

The other was the Senate and People's grant to Julius Caesar's heir, in 27 bc, of Proconsular authority over almost all the provinces in which legions were stationed. That gave him effectively permanent control not only of the frontier armies but also of the elite corps known as the "Praetorian cohorts", a command he later deputed to two "Praetorian Prefects". Under his successors, the Prefects of the Praetorian Guard would hold more power in Rome than anyone but the princeps himself.

You would never guess any of that from Philip Matyszak's The Sons of Caesar.

Matyszak's bland and derivative account of "imperial Rome's first dynasty" takes the form of mini- biographies of Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero. It offers neither historical insight nor narrative urgency, and its concept of a dynasty is fatally weakened by a confused notion of what counts as a Roman aristocratic family. To put it gently, an author who believes that there was a "Julio-Claudian clan" in the first century bc, and that Galba was adopted by the wife of Augustus, may fairly be described as historically challenged.