Our world has seen popes murdered and rulers hung, saints butchered and presidents assassinated, but no killing has captured the minds, or excited the pens, of historians quite like that of Julius Caesar. Cut down at the prime of his power, the life of this remarkable Roman has been memorialized by kings and scholars, warriors and playwrights, elevated into legend by the passage of two-thousand years and countless civilizations. But though it may be history's most famous murder, do we actually know what happened? Do we grasp the motivations which drove Brutus and his cohorts to such drastic and fateful actions? Mr. Dando-Collins thinks not.
Drawing upon all the available sources, The Ides is Mr. Dando-Collins' attempt to reconstruct the day of Caesar's murder, March 15th, 44 BC, a day that began with portents and ended with the death of the dictator of Rome though the traditional accounts get it mostly right with regard to the identities of Caesar's murderers -- a band of pro-republican senators lead by his friend Marcus Junius Brutus --, and rightly finger the where -- the Roman Forum, the heart of Roman government --, the why, the how, and the fallout, argues the author, are much more contentious. For one thing, historians has largely turned its admiring eye from Caesar's sins, preferring to think of him as a great man of history. And yet, Julius Caesar was a tyrant who used his position as the governor of a province of the Roman Republic to gain fame and fortune by conquering Gall. These military expeditions, which were not sanctioned by Rome, earned him enmity from the senate, enmity that Caesar leveraged into a Roman civil war in which he was victorious. Having killed his greatest rivals for power, Caesar appointed himself dictator of Rome for life, the king of a so-called republic.
Caesar's authoritarianism gave birth to the conspiracy to kill him. The liberators, as they termed themselves, hoped to strike a blow for the Roman Republic by killing Caesar and handing political power back to the Roman senate. But while the murder was carried off, and while the Roman public initially supported the liberators, events soon turned against Caesar's murderers when, with the reading of Caesar's will, Antony revealed to the public that Caesar had left each citizen within the city at the time of his death a substantial sum of money. With public opinion swaying against them, the liberators fled, hoping to raise armies and excise, as a cancer from the body of Rome, Antony and the young Octavian, Caesar's lieutenant
and Caesar's rightful heir, Unable to exploit the enmity between Antony and Octavian, Brutus and his cadre were ultimately overwhelmed, their armies slaughtered by the forces commanded by the two, rising autocrats. These defeats forever swept away true, republican rule in Rome and converted antiquities greatest republic into a powerful and voracious empire.
The Idesis an admirable reconstruction of Caesar's death, its aftermath and the consequences the murder had for Rome. But while the author brings some clarity to specific points about the murder and rightfully re-focuses our attention upon Caesar's autocratic actions, he falls into the same trap of many of his sources. There are far too many declarative statements here for a factual account of a murder that happened 2,000 years ago and for which we have no physical evidence. All Mr. Dando-Collins has to go on are the various accounts of that murder, cross-referenced to extract some kind of composite truth. But a composite truth is not truth. The author never speaks to this distinction, preferring to represent his account as the authoritative version of a murder that occurred more than 80 generations prior to his birth. Notwithstanding this arrogance, The Ides is an informative look at the men who, in their attempt to liberate Rome from Caesar's authoritarian control, wound up catalyzing the fall of the very republic they loved so much, their deaths surrendering it to empire.
Educational and entertaining, The Ides is a thorough account of a pivotal moment in western history. Well worth the read, even if it must be taken with a full measure of skeptic's salt. (3/5 Stars)
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