“... of those contests: Aeschylus and Xenophon fought the Persians before writing about them, as Julius Caesar did the Gauls, and Tacitus’ contemporaries the Jews and Germans. In contrast to the modern mythic imagination, which tends to depict contests for world domination as Manichean battles against monstrous opponents (as in The Lord of the ...”

“... 1828 thanks to a book by Amédée Thierry. Then in 1865 Vercingétorix (originally an invention of Julius Caesar, who needed to construct a foil to himself) was given a statue by Napoleon III at the presumed site of the battle of Alésia, where he lost to the Romans; and finally the Third Republic turned him into a founding hero of the Republic ...”

“... in Rome. I have heard them in the basement of Pompey’s theatre, singing about the career of Julius Caesar in Latin, to the tune of ‘My Darling Clementine’ – and seen them, on the Appian Way, reading Horace as he rails about the miseries of the journey to Brundisium. More than forty male students every year give up alcohol, drugs, tobacco and ...”

“... were back again. ‘Marie Tempest starred in The Truth at the Comedy, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in Julius Caesar at Her Majesty’s, and at the Hicks Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue Gerald du Maurier was scoring an immense success, the night his new daughter was born, in a light comedy entitled Brewster’s Millions.’ And so the influences of Childhood ...”

“... of one or two letters – vowels, inevitably – this can seem almost plausible, as when the great Julius Caesar Scaliger compares the phonomimetics of O and I and decides that ‘the figure [O] comes from a representation of the circle of the mouth, whereas the I, which notates the shrillest sound, appears without either hump or belly.’ But even if we ...”

“... in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York theatregoers in the 1930s and who, when not spooking radio listeners as the voice of the Shadow (an invisible detective ‘who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men’), threw his fellow ...”

“... in A Just View of the British Stage (1724), which shows, next to a privy, pages from Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Congreve’s The Way of Ye World, hanging ready for application. Kurlansky briefly describes paper clothes as ‘completely impractical and nonviable’, and it’s true that the shortcomings are considerable ...”

“... who wanted to reclaim public lands lost to private encroachment since the colony’s foundation by Julius Caesar. The density and detail of Roman land administration was unlike anything else in antiquity, or in the premodern world as a whole. How they managed it is clear enough at the technical level. Roman agrimensores (‘land measurers’, also known ...”

“... also against its more active enemies, is vital to our better health. It cannot be done by forcing Julius Caesar or A Midsummer Night’s Dream on fifteen-year-olds; many will despise them, and others will be misled into thinking that Shakespeare is, after all, not a difficult writer. If they must have one of the plays Coriolanus would be better; the ...”

“... succeeded beyond its or anyone’s wildest dreams. Kennedy in the movie is associated with Julius Caesar, Hamlet the Elder, Christ and Tennyson’s dying king. He is a youthful King Arthur, and nothing short of his return from Avalon will save us. Visual allusions to Hollywood populism in the vein of Frank Capra are in this sense quite ...”

“... have their own story of commercialisation to tell: they were planned by Julius Caesar as a vast, purpose-built hall for electoral voting, but at the very moment the democratic Roman Republic was giving way to a style of autocratic government that dispensed with popular elections and they were speedily converted into an arena for ...”

“... the Habsburgs as hereditary archdukes of Austria, bolstered by letters supposedly written by Julius Caesar and Nero. The most outrageous of these fakes, the ‘Pseudo-Henry’, was immediately denounced as a forgery, by Petrarch among others, but the emperor of the day grudgingly went along with most of it. Archduke Rudolf soared on, rebuilt St ...”

“... villa, believed to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a follower of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. Although Cicero claimed that Piso had so perverted the Epicurean principle of pleasure that he was not a ‘teacher of virtue, but an enabler of lust’, the Herculaneum papyri ...”

“... frankness in telling his critics exactly how and when to get fucked. A two-fingered two-liner to Julius Caesar declares that he doesn’t care whether Caesar’s ‘hide’ is white or black, after which Williams mocks up a Microsoft Outlook alert to make sure Caesar has got the ...”

“... books. John Barleycorn must die a second death, when bankers rule, as Spengler shows, till Caesar comes. Jones’s skills have not exactly deserted him: there is still the historical knowledge, the talent for allusion and association, and some distinctive phrase-making. However, the blending of voices expressing shared experiences that gave In ...”