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Now, with his new book, a biography of Julius Caesar, Goldsworthy has at last emerged from behind his palisade. Not entirely, of course — for Caesar was, among many other things, the most successful commander in Roman history, and much of Goldsworthy’s book is perforce concerned with his campaigns. The analysis of Caesar’s generalship is predictably excellent, and the account of the Gallic wars, in particular, has rarely been bettered. Even in Gaul, however, Caesar was never simply a soldier: no matter how dank the forests, no matter how remote the frontier, he always had one eye fixed back on Rome. Caesar slaughtered barbarians with the same panache and showmanship that he brought to everything he did. War was a means, not an end. The only true end was power.
As a result, the pursuit of Caesar’s glory-hunting obliges Goldsworthy to venture far beyond the parameters of the military camp, out into the streets, the assembly-points, and even the bedrooms of Rome. He brings to this task the same tireless aptitude for sifting sources that has been the hallmark of his work on military history, and yet there seems, nevertheless, something inhibited, almost — dare one say? — foot-slogging, about it. The sheer excitement of political life in the late Republic, to say nothing of the passions that ultimately tore it apart, are only sporadically evoked. The result is an impressively detailed book, but one that rarely, outside the account of the Gallic campaigns, comes alive.
And this, in a biography of Goldsworthy’s chosen subject, is peculiarly unfortunate, for Caesar was, to a degree that many of his countrymen found alarming in the extreme, almost demonically charismatic. A true Roman in his enthusiasm for trenches and ramps he may have been, but he was also famed — notorious even — for his celeritas: his dash, his speed. A figure profoundly implicated in one of the great turning points of world history merits a far bolder analysis than Goldsworthy can bring himself to provide. ‘Caesar was a great man,’ he states baldly in his introduction, a claim that, while it might have passed muster in the 19th century, can hardly help but raise an eyebrow now. That Caesar, despite our contemporary mistrust of the model of greatness which he bequeathed to the Western political tradition, nevertheless remains a figure of abiding fascination is a paradox well worth exploring. Goldsworthy’s biography, despite its many virtues, opts to sit the challenge out.
Fortunate timing, then, that a second book on Caesar, Et Tu, Brute?, should complement it so effectively. Slim where Goldsworthy’s biography is monumental, and focused, as its title suggests, not on Caesar’s life but on his death, it nevertheless ranges far and wide, embracing Mark Chapman as well as Brutus, Frederick Forsyth as well as Cicero. Greg Woolf himself, as the author of a wonderfully rich study of early Roman Gaul, has shown that he is not averse to the patient accumulation of detail; but now, with his new book, he has opted instead for an almost Caesarean display of celeritas and audacity. The result is a telling irony, for by expanding his study of the Ides of March into nothing less than an analysis of the role that violence has played in politics throughout the millennia, Woolf serves to imbue his Caesar with a glamour and sense of relevance that Goldsworthy’s far more detailed portrait lacks.
Neither, of course, is complete. Books have been written about Caesar for over 2,000 years: testimony to how much remains mysterious about this most accomplished and charming of autocrats. ‘Your spirit,’ Cicero told him, ‘has never been content within the narrow confines which nature has imposed upon us.’ It still soars free today.
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