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Consider the Giraffe

Katherine Rundell, 19 November 2020

... bc) ends on a plea: ‘Let the work be what you like, but let it be one, single thing.’ When Julius Caesar brought a giraffe back to Rome from Alexandria in 46 bc (a gift, some said, from Cleopatra), the Romans, like Horace, saw a creature made of two parts. Cassius Dio wrote in his Historia Romana that it was ‘like a camel in all respects except ...

Tyrannicide

James McConica, 21 January 1982

Buchanan 
by I.D. McFarlane.
Duckworth, 575 pp., £45, June 1981, 0 7156 0971 8
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... Peter Ramus, Henri Estienne, his collaborator and printer in a variety of works, and to Julius Caesar Scaliger, who held him in high regard. As these connections suggest, although his associates in these years were Catholic, ‘the evidence,’ in McFarlane’s words, ‘points to Buchanan’s association with a great number of people who, to ...

Everyone, Then No One

David Nasaw: Where have all the bowler hats gone?, 23 February 2006

Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat 
by Neil Steinberg.
Granta, 342 pp., £12, August 2005, 1 86207 782 7
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... of masculinity … but there is something effeminate about being caught wearing one. Thus while Julius Caesar certainly wore a hat, he wasn’t carved into stone wearing it.’ His grossest generalisation is that ‘the decline of hats’, which Kennedy represented but did not cause, was ‘a result of the shift of American society from a network of ...

Caesar’s body shook

Denis Feeney: Cicero, 22 September 2011

Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic 
by Peter White.
Oxford, 235 pp., £40, August 2010, 978 0 19 538851 0
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... to his friend Atticus (‘Ad Atticum’), his brother Quintus (‘Ad Quintum Fratrem’) and Caesar’s assassin, Marcus Brutus (‘Ad M. Brutum’). Lost for centuries, the letters enraptured Petrarch, providing him with a moment of first contact not unlike that of Howard Carter peering through the hole into Tutankhamun’s tomb and murmuring that he ...

Four-Day Caesar

Mary Beard: Tacitus and the Emperors, 22 January 2004

Tacitus: Histories I 
edited by Cynthia Damon.
Cambridge, 324 pp., £17.99, December 2002, 0 521 57822 1
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... his aristocratic forebears (as Galba is made to note) included Pompey the Great, whose defeat by Julius Caesar in the civil wars of the 40s BCE heralded the advent of one-man rule. The adoption scene, in other words, makes a wonderfully suggestive opening to a narrative whose next stages will principally be concerned with imperial succession. Scratch ...

Cleopatra’s Books

Mary Beard, 8 February 1990

The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World 
by Luciano Canfora, translated by Martin Ryle.
Radius, 205 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 09 174049 5
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Herodotus 
by John Gould.
Weidenfeld, 164 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 9780297793397
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... Arabs – rejecting en route the common view that it did not survive the fires in the city when Julius Caesar was besieged there in 48 BC. But underlying this apparently straightforward story is a much more complex set of problems: the connection of the library with despotic power; the role of the library in preserving (or failing to preserve) a ...
... disloyalty goes back much further than these spy novels of the 1970s. The first important text is Julius Caesar. In a broader view, Western culture has accorded an extraordinary standing to certain political subversives. The two men we think of as the towering examples of selfless virtue, Christ and Socrates, were put to death for political crime. It ...

Give her a snake

Mary Beard, 22 March 1990

Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions 
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
Bloomsbury, 338 pp., £16.95, February 1990, 0 7475 0093 2
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... have chosen to portray her in a strikingly wide range of contexts and poses: Cleopatra meets Julius Caesar; Cleopatra’s banquet; Cleopatra dissolves her pearls in a cup of vinegar; Cleopatra mourns in front of Antony’s tomb. But despite this variety, one thing suffices in any painting to identify a woman as Cleopatra: her snake. There is no need ...

Like Fabergé Eggs

Serafina Cuomo: The Antikythera Mechanism, 26 April 2018

A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World 
by Alexander Jones.
Oxford, 288 pp., £22.99, March 2017, 978 0 19 973934 9
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... living there would doubt that this sphere was the work of a rational being?A year later, Julius Caesar was assassinated and the res publica plunged into renewed chaos, after decades of intermittent civil war. In the midst of these storms, Cicero’s belief that man-made models of the universe, like Posidonius’ sphere or the Antikythera ...

Badmouthing City

William Fitzgerald: Catullus, 23 February 2006

The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition 
translated by Peter Green.
California, 339 pp., £15.95, September 2005, 0 520 24264 5
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... appear in Catullus’ work, but, unlike Lesbia, under their own names. Catullus’ father counted Julius Caesar among his friends. That did not prevent Catullus from writing some virulent invective against the great man and his entourage, especially his chief engineer, Mamurra. Mamurra appears under the pseudonym Mentula (‘Prick’) in several of ...

When Demigods Walked the Earth

T.P. Wiseman: Roman Myth, Roman History, 18 October 2007

Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History 
by Denis Feeney.
California, 372 pp., £18.95, June 2007, 978 0 520 25119 9
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... have also revealed an Iron Age cemetery below the Capitoline (in what was later the Forum of Caesar), analogous to the one discovered a century ago beside the Sacra Via below the Palatine (next to the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina). The natural inference is that there were two communities, each with its own burial ground; there may well have been ...
Ngaio Marsh: A Life 
by Margaret Lewis.
Chatto, 276 pp., £18, April 1991, 0 7011 3389 9
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... She puts on Hamlet (in modern dress), Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and others, and forms close relationships with many of the young actors; much later one describes having an audition with her as the equivalent to ‘playing Pip to a time-resistant Miss Havisham’. A tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1949 ...

Death of the Hero

Michael Howard, 7 January 1988

The Mask of Command 
by John Keegan.
Cape, 366 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 9780224019491
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... over the choice of which eyebrows may be raised. Where are the traditional Great Captains – Julius Caesar, Tamerlane, Gustavus Adolphus, Marlborough, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Moltke, even Montgomery or MacArthur? There seems something almost perverse in Keegan’s deliberate avoidance of the beaten track. But he is in fact no more concerned ...

Short Cuts

Ferdinand Mount: Untilled Fields, 1 July 2021

... us that Georgian Britain is a terrific place to live. Tracing the progress of Britain since Julius Caesar, he describes the present as ‘the happiest and most fortunate period of them all’. The division of labour had produced ‘that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. In fact, it was now ‘a common ...

Diary

Jean Sprackland: In the Mud, 6 October 2011

... a real monster, standing two metres high at the shoulder and weighing about a thousand kilograms. Julius Caesar wrote about it in The Gallic Wars, describing it as ‘a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, colour and shape of a bull’. Because it has been extinct for hundreds of years, the prints found here are prized for the ...

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