More than two millennia have passed since Brutus and his companions
murdered Julius Caesar--and inaugurated his legend. Though the assassins
succeeded in ending Caesar's dictatorship, they could never have
imagined that his power and influence would only grow after his death,
reaching mythic proportions and establishing him as one of the central
icons of Western culture, fascinating armchair historians and
specialists alike. With Caesar, Maria Wyke takes up the question of
just why Julius Caesar has become such an exalted figure when most of
his fellow Romans have long been forgotten. Focusing on key events in
Caesar's life, she begins with accounts from ancient sources, then
traces the ways in which his legend has been adapted and employed by
everyone from Machiavelli to Madison Avenue, Shakespeare to George
Bernard Shaw. Napoleon and Mussolini, for example, cited Caesar's
crossing of the Rubicon in defense of their own dictatorial aims, while
John Wilkes Booth fancied himself a new Brutus, ridding America of an
imperial scourge. Caesar's personal life, too, has long been fair
game--but the lessons we draw from it have changed: Suetonius derided
Caesar for his lustfulness and his love of luxury, but these days he and
his lover Cleopatra serve as the very embodiment of glamour, enticingly
invoked everywhere from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to the hit HBO
series Rome. Caesar is the witty and perceptive work of a writer who
is as comfortable with the implications of Xena: Warrior Princess as
with the long shadow cast by the Annals of Tacitus. Wyke gives us a
Caesar for our own time: complicated, hotly contested, and perpetually,
fascinatingly renewed.
