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 ...

Play the game

Michael Kulikowski: Cleopatra, 31 March 2011

Zenobia of Palmyra: History, Myth and the Neo-Classical Imagination 
by Rex Winsbury.
Duckworth, 198 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 7156 3853 8
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Cleopatra: A Life 
by Stacy Schiff.
Virgin, 368 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 0 7535 3955 2
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... Republic only to the extent that it advanced their own ambitions for total domination. Whatever Caesar and Pompey, Cato and Scipio, Brutus and Cassius, Antony and Octavian were fighting for within the puzzling framework of Roman logic, they were all more or less the same viewed from the Greek perspective: terrifying and predatory, to be sure, but also ...

Mantegna’s Classical World

Charles Hope, 19 June 1980

The ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ by Andrea Mantegna in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court 
by Andrew Martindale.
Harvey Miller, 342 pp., £38, October 1979, 9780905203164
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... certainly have been shown the nine canvases by Andrea Mantegna illustrating the Gallic triumph of Julius Caesar, which then as now were usually called the Triumphs of Caesar. But it is unlikely that anyone in Mantua would have told her that these pictures were primarily of historical interest, or that they were ...

Diary

Mary Beard: Set in Tunisia, 14 December 2006

... piazza includes a suitably imposing senate house, temples of Castor and Pollux, of Vesta and of Julius Caesar, plus some more or less convincing Roman statues (one dumpy bronze horse ought to have been sent back to its maker – and certainly would have been by any Roman of taste). The whole thing is lined by two great porticoes, lookalikes of the ...

How are you finding it here?

Patrick Sims-Williams: Celts, 28 October 1999

The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? 
by Simon James.
British Museum, 160 pp., £6.99, March 1999, 0 7141 2165 7
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... to Asia Minor, but the greatest concentration known to classical writers was in Gaul. In fact, Julius Caesar found that a large group of Gauls actually ‘called themselves Celtae’. A corollary of this was that ancient geographers distinguished between Celtica, meaning the Continental mainland, and the various offshore islands such as Britain and ...

Odysseus’ Bow

Edward Luttwak: Ancient combat, 17 November 2005

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity 
by J.E. Lendon.
Yale, 468 pp., £18.95, June 2005, 0 300 10663 7
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... of the earlier Republic, of which very much less is known than of the late Republican legions of Julius Caesar, let alone those of the Principate that are so abundantly documented by every species of physical evidence: intact portions of standardised fortresses, forts and outposts that allow the confident reconstruction of a great number of more ruined ...

A Good Girl in Africa

D.A.N. Jones, 16 September 1982

Double Yoke 
by Buchi Emecheta.
Dgwugwu Afor, 163 pp., £3, September 1982, 0 9508177 0 8
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The Aerodrome 
by Rex Warner.
Bodley Head, 304 pp., £6.95, July 1982, 9780370309262
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AVery British Coup 
by Chris Mullin.
Hodder, 220 pp., £6.95, September 1982, 0 340 28586 9
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An Ice Cream War 
by William Boyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 370 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 241 10868 3
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Tempting Fate 
by Michael Levey.
Hamish Hamilton, 220 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 241 10801 2
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... school library, a book for girls like herself, not for brainless ninnies: it was Rex Warner’s Julius Caesar. The incident is recalled by Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome, another account of the clash between the messy, human values of the village and the deadly, idealistic standardisation imposed by the idea of progress, here represented by a dedicated ...

How to End a Dynasty

Michael Kulikowski: Rehabilitating Nero, 19 March 2020

Nero: Emperor and Court 
by John Drinkwater.
Cambridge, 483 pp., £32.99, January 2019, 978 1 108 47264 7
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... pedantry of Claudius.It owed its resilience to a helpful failure to be explicit about the system. Julius Caesar had been assassinated in 44 bc because both his friends and his enemies feared, with good reason, that he intended to make himself king, a title hated by republican aristocrats with a nearly superstitious fervour. Augustus, however, disclaimed ...

Night Jars

Thomas Jones: ‘The North Water’, 14 July 2016

The North Water 
by Ian McGuire.
Scribner, 326 pp., £14.99, February 2016, 978 1 4711 5124 8
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... man’, it’s hard not to suspect him of having Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar in mind. Sumner, meanwhile, for all his pretensions to cerebral aloofness – he watches his first whale hunt from the crow’s nest – is ready to get his hands dirty when he thinks he needs to. There’s a fight with the crew of another ship ...

Syme’s Revolution

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 24 January 1980

Roman Papers 
by Ronald Syme, edited by E. Badian.
Oxford, 878 pp., £35, November 1980, 0 19 814367 2
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... this view was furnished by the works of Cicero. The great reforming leader was the dictator Caesar, the hero of Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte; his heir and successor was Augustus, the restorer and reformer of the Republic. Eduard Meyer, in a famous book published in 1922, preferred to make Augustus the successor, not of ...

Jamming up the Flax Machine

Matthew Reynolds: Ciaran Carson’s Dante, 8 May 2003

The ‘Inferno’ of Dante Alighieri 
a new translation by Ciaran Carson.
Granta, 296 pp., £14.99, October 2002, 1 86207 525 5
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... explains his date of birth: ‘nacqui sub Iulio, ancor che fosse tardi’ (‘I was born under Julius Caesar, albeit late’). The two Latin words interrupt the miraculous transmutation of the classical poet into a speaker of contemporary Italian, creating a sudden lapse in time. The Commedia’s Italian is also divided internally. Dante’s work of ...