Stroud: The History Press (2016) p/b 127pp £6.99 (ISBN 9780-50961318)
The History Press series in which this new biography of Caesar has appeared is called pocket Giants. W. devotes barely more than half a page (pp. 112-13) to answering the question of whether Caesar indeed qualifies as one. Even those who take a far less positive view than the one he puts forward here will easily agree on Caesar’s major historical importance and outstanding intellectual power. W.’s appraisal comes at the end of a very compact, swiftly paced, and tersely argued discussion, in which he makes a point of avoiding famous anecdotes and detailed military narratives in order ‘to stick to what is important’ (112). There certainly is plenty of importance in this little book. What appears to be central to W.’s concerns is the role that Caesar played in the political history of his time. W. has been one of the most forceful advocates of the democratic reading of Roman Republican politics over the last four decades or so, and Caesar’s trajectory is squarely explained within that interpretative framework.
Caesar is a committed advocate of the primacy of the Roman People (W. uses the capital P throughout) against a greedy, profligate, and incompetent oligarchy; his allegiance is consistently recognised and valued by the People, and his rise to solitary hegemony is made possible by overwhelming popular support, and is indeed fully in keeping with the wishes of People. His assassination, far from being an attempt to liberate the Republic from autocratic rule, is a sacrilege committed by a clique of senators, in open breach of an oath of loyalty. Even though an ‘honest man who believed in the rule of law’ (p. 78) like Cicero may have rejoiced at the news of Caesar’s death, the Ides of March were essentially about the reaction of a clique of arrogant plutocrats: as we are warned more than once, ‘big money corrupts everything’ (pp. 17, 33). Besides being a champion of the poor and the deprived, Caesar was set on curtailing the ‘socially divisive’ impact of ‘conspicuous consumption’ (p. 89): his sumptuary legislation was led by that ambition.
W.’s reading is impressively coherent: his Caesar has no flaws, makes no mistakes, never shows any hesitation whatsoever. Some aspects of his life and career that many have regarded as crucial are either dismissed as irrelevancies (the clash with Bibulus in 59 BC, or Caesar’s own reliance on heavy expenditure) or left out altogether (the Lupercalia of 44 BC), in a treatment that necessarily has to be selective (cf. p. 76). Yet W. never leaves us in doubt on where he stands, and he develops his interpretative approach to its full potential. As ever, he is a formidably engaging writer, and virtually every page has the merit of casting new light on a given piece of evidence, or a well-rehearsed problem.
This is probably the most laudatory account of Caesar ever produced by a serious scholar since Jerôme Carcopino’s, albeit from an altogether different, and far more productive, historiographical perspective. It is a discussion that will spur much dissent in many quarters—but no student of the late Republic should overlook it.
Federico Santangelo—Newcastle University
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