Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman, Simon & Schuster, May 2008, 416 pages.
Mr. Freeman writes on his website:
Julius Caesar was one of the greatest heroes of human history-or one of
its most pernicious villains, depending on who you believe. Many of the
American Founding Fathers despised Caesar as the evil genius who
overthrew their beloved Roman Republic. The medieval poet Dante
assigned him a blessed afterlife among the most virtuous pagans while
sentencing his two leading murderers, Brutus and Cassius, to the lowest
levels of Hell. Shakespeare tried to have it both ways, praising both Caesar and the
conspirators who slew him. Modern scholars have been equally divided
concerning Caesar's legacy. Some have seen him as a paradigm of the
just ruler, but in the wake of twentieth-century dictators and
devastating wars, other historians have turned a cold eye on a man who
caused the death of so many and established the rule of emperors over
elected magistrates.
Continue reading "new julius caesar biography out" »
We have two chats planned for June about the works of the poet Ovid (Wikipedia, handle with care). With the limited time we have, I think it's best to concentrate on his two major works:
*If anyone wishes to discuss the other works, I offer another chat in between, on June 11. I'm especially interested in the poems and letters from exile (Tristia, Ex Ponto, Ibis). And there are also the Fasti.
Continue reading "ovid: reading schedule for june" »
Josiah Osgood, in his Caesar's Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire, an excellent complement to Syme's The Roman
Revolution, writes about coin hoards during the time of the proscription.
These hoards have been discovered in Italy and he points out the obvious: The increased frequency of finds from the times of upheaval indicates that buried coins were not recovered because their owners most likely perished.
He cites M. Crawford (1969) "Roman Republican coin hoards."
Continue reading "coin hoards from the times of the civil wars and the triumvirs' proscriptions" »
I said earlier that Hermann Broch's The
Death of Virgil is a difficult and ambitious book. In the appendices to my German edition, the author discusses his work at length at various stages and revisions. He worked on it for seven years, from 1938 to 1945.
There is a brief description of the novel (or poem as the author insists it is) at Wikipedia (as usual, handle with care). English readers will have the comfort to know that the translation by Jean Starr Untermeyer, a friend of Broch's, was closely supervised by the author. He himself also addressed the difficulty of translating this work in the above appendices.
Continue reading "more on hermann broch's 'death of vergil' " »
Again, I'm spending time in doctors' and hospital waiting rooms, drinking vile stuff – well actually no so vile, nowadays they mask the barium with a fruit smoothie taste – and waiting for the stuff to work through my body before a CT-scan. In circumstances like these, ambitious nonfiction is not the thing to read. (My apologies to Mary B.)
However, keeping in with the "Roman Revolution" theme, I grabbed an old favorite, David Wishart's I, Virgil – unfortunately it seems to be seriously out of print right now. For those readers who know Wishart only from the Marcus Valerius Messala Corvinus mystery novels, with their wine-swilling hero and his anachronistic modern gumshoe language, this 1995 novel would come as a real surprise.
Continue reading "reading about the augustan era: novels of virgil" »
This blog is an adjunct to The Roman History Reading Group which meets on the first and third Wednesday of each month except August in our chat room (with download instructions for both Mac and Windows users), from 9:30 to 11:00 p.m. US EST. (This means that in Asia and Australia/Pacific, it's daytime.) Here is a world time clock as a general assistance for non-USAns.
On April 16 and May 7 & 21 we will discuss The Roman
Revolution by Ronald Syme. (April 2 was canceled)
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