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See you in hell, punk

Thomas Jones: Kai su, Brutus, 6 December 2018

Brutus: The Noble Conspirator 
by Kathryn Tempest.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 300 18009 1
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... Among​ Shakespeare’s tragedies Julius Caesar is unusual in not being named for its hero. By any conventional measure, the play is the tragedy of Brutus, over whose corpse his antagonist Antony declares at the end of Act V: ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all.’ Still, it makes sense that the tragedy of Brutus should be called Julius Caesar, since Caesar is the figure around whom Brutus’ story revolves ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: The life expectancy of a Roman emperor, 3 June 2004

... S.J. Leinbach) is a brief history of the empire structured around the deaths of its rulers, from Julius Caesar to Romulus Augustulus. Caesar wasn’t, strictly speaking, an emperor, but he did declare himself dictator for life and, in Meijer’s (or rather Leinbach’s) words, ‘paved the way’ for the ...

Anyone for Eternity?

John Leslie, 23 March 1995

The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead 
by Frank Tipler.
Macmillan, 528 pp., £20, January 1995, 0 333 61864 5
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... event. The situation which you and I observe has, as some of its past histories, worlds in which Julius Caesar never existed. It’s just that an overwhelmingly large proportion of its past histories include Julius Caesar. In the neighbourhood of the Omega Point, the perception of the past couldn’t involve ...

North/South

Padraig Rooney: Monaghan-Armagh, 7 February 2019

... this stretch of the Monaghan-Armagh border into a militarised zone. They flew over as I taught Julius Caesar in my old school. I associate the slow bits of the play with choppers flying into view – all eyes were on them, the class wrecked. Caesar as empire. The IRA as the conspirators. Sweet-talking Mark Antony ...

Aristocracies

M.I. Finley, 22 December 1983

Death and Renewal. Sociological Studies in Roman History: Vol. II 
by Keith Hopkins.
Cambridge, 276 pp., £19.50, May 1983, 0 521 24991 0
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... is the correct term. Occasionally there were nicely illustrative personal examples: both Julius Caesar and his assassin Brutus could claim membership of lineages that traced their high status back half a millennium. We call this ruling class an aristocracy, and the Romans themselves spoke of a nobilitas, though the word turns out to be much ...

A Frisson in the Auditorium

Blair Worden: Shakespeare without Drama, 20 April 2017

How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays 
by Peter Lake.
Yale, 666 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 0 300 22271 5
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... there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary political pertinence of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and even The Merry Wives of Windsor.The detection of real-life parallels in Shakespeare has a long and often embarrassing history. The practice was sufficiently entrenched by 1880 to be parodied by Swinburne, who ...

What is what

A.J. Ayer, 22 January 1981

Sameness and Substance 
by David Wiggins.
Blackwell, 238 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 631 19090 2
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... a belief in natural necessity. Wiggins, however, wishes to make it a necessary property of, say, Julius Caesar that he was a man, and consequently also necessary that he had the requisite constitution. Here he no longer carries me with him. There is indeed a problem about the interpretation of proper names, but whatever its correct solution, I believe ...

The Bad Julias

Emma Dench: Roman Children, 9 May 2013

Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within 
by Christian Laes.
Cambridge, 334 pp., £68, March 2011, 978 0 521 89746 4
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Children, Memory and Family Identity in Roman Culture 
edited by Véronique Dasen and Thomas Späth.
Oxford, 373 pp., £82, October 2011, 978 0 19 958257 0
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... as the Romans adjusted to dynastic succession at the end of the Republic. As the adopted son of Julius Caesar, Augustus held his first consulship at 19. Portraits emphasised his youth and the beauty that went along with it; he was seen as a reincarnation of Alexander the Great rather than Julius Caesar. The ...

Mr Big & Co

Denis Feeney: Roman Victory!, 21 February 2008

The Roman Triumph 
by Mary Beard.
Harvard, 434 pp., November 2007, 978 0 674 02613 1
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... way we think of Roman culture, the BBC/HBO television series Rome showed not one but two: that of Julius Caesar over Vercingetorix the Gaul in Season 1, and that of his adopted son over Antony and Cleopatra at the climax of Season 2. The main fun of watching the series was spotting how many things they could get wrong about the Romans in any given five ...

Cornelius Gallus lives

Peter Parsons, 7 February 1980

... quite different: five tattered scraps, with elegant Latin capitals. Individual words stood out: CAESAR was interesting. LYCOAL was sensational. Only one Lycoris occurs in Latin literature: she was the mistress, in life and in verse, of C. Cornelius Gallus, friend of Virgil, political suicide and literary ancestor of the European love sonnet. There is much ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Cleopatra’ , 8 August 2013

... think of as retakes of the Bernard Shaw and the Shakespeare versions of the queen’s life (first Caesar, then Antony), but became one as the costs escalated. It’s usually described as the American cinema’s most spectacular failure, because it signed the death warrant of the epic and nearly closed (did close for a while) Twentieth Century Fox, the studio ...

Homage to Scaliger

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 17 May 1984

Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship 
by Anthony Grafton.
Oxford, 359 pp., £27.50, June 1983, 9780198148500
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... of the ancient world. Born and brought up at Agen in the west of France, he was the son of Julius Caesar Scaliger, a Latin scholar of distinction, who claimed to be descended from those Della Scalas who were lords of Verona during the Middle Ages. So far as he was able, the elder Scaliger gave his son a thorough training: but he greatly preferred ...

Wilderness of Tigers

Michael Neill: Shakespeare’s Latin, 19 March 2015

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 281 pp., £16.99, September 2013, 978 0 19 968479 3
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... This is another version of Cymbeline’s concluding vision, which imagines how ‘Th’imperial Caesar [will] unite/His favour with the radiant Cymbeline’ so that ‘A Roman and a British ensign [may] wave/Friendly together.’ As the names of Cymbeline’s central couple are intended to remind us, somewhere behind its action lies the fiction of New ...

A feather! A very feather upon the face!

Amit Chaudhuri: India before Kipling, 6 January 2000

The Unforgiving Minute 
by Harry Ricketts.
Chatto, 434 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 7011 3744 4
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... Also a man might go far, as he himself had done, by strict attention to plays called Lear and Julius Caesar, both much in demand by examiners. Lear was not so full of historical allusions as Julius Caesar; the book cost four annas, but could be bought secondhand in Bow Bazaar for two. Still more important than ...

Unsex me here

John Bayley, 20 May 1982

Shakespeare’s Division of Experience 
by Marilyn French.
Cape, 376 pp., £12.50, March 1982, 0 224 02013 7
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... by half. Long ago the Atheist Society were rumoured to have taken as their motto a line from Julius Caesar: ‘There is no fellow in the firmament.’ Anyone else who believes anything strongly could do almost equally well. So it was only a matter of time before Shakespeare became a feminist. To do Dr French justice, though, she does not exactly ...

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