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Maybe someday
47
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
2/100Critics
91/100Scholars
Author:
Peter Stothard
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Date:
November 1, 2020
In the spring of 44 BC, Julius Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, exacted vengeance on the assassins of the Ides of March, not only on Brutus and Cassius but all the others, too, each with his own individual story told hereâwith a special focus on the last left alive, Cassius Parmensis, a poet and sailor who chose every side in the dying Republic's civil wars except the winning one.
What The Reviewers Say
Stothard explores the familiar ground with fresh, engaging and learned eyes, displaying a novelist’s knack for redolent and evocative detail, from cicadas and lizards to the press and horror of battle.
... his taut historical narrative...exemplifies its darkly lyrical style. In prose that evokes (and often quotes) tragic verse, Mr. Stothard tells a grim tale that spans 15 chaotic years and 19 violent deaths.
Stothard...rescues these minor men from historical obscurity and uses their fates to tell the most page-turning account in recent memory of this otherwise well-trodden history.
Stothard makes a seemingly odd but ultimately wise organizational choice: He centers the bulk of his book on an assassin whose name will be unfamiliar to pretty much everybody except his fellow historians: Cassius Parmensis, an amateur philosopher and poet.
