by Barry Strauss, 2015, Simon & Schuster, New York

This book was our men’s book club selection for March.

Perhaps this book is more enjoyable to those with a greater interest in ancient history, but I think that one of my difficulties in staying with it has more to do with the author’s failure to relate the assassination of Caesar to larger, overarching themes in history.  Strauss does go into a brief discussion of the chaos that followed immediately after Caesar’s murder, but he doesn’t offer many clues as to what was the actual significance of the act in terms of world history.  What if Caesar had died of natural causes?  Would the same result have occurred or would there have been another probable outcome?

Another difficulty of the book for me is the attempt to capture the personalities of the individuals involved when there is such scant evidence remaining (with the possible exception of Cicero, whose voluminous writings give us a pretty good picture of the man).  To me, most of these individuals remain mere shadows of the men and women they once were.

I think I had the same problem when I read the book, Cleopatra, and found that most of the information presented was supposition on the part of the author (which is understandable given the few scraps of evidence remaining).  I just can’t seem to get my arms around these figures of history as individual personalities, despite these authors’ attempts to portray them as living, breathing human beings.  This is probably my issue as many readers seem to enjoy these portrayals, but I am much more comfortable with biographies and histories written about more recent persons and events.

The book seemed well researched and I learned some things about how the assassination transpired, but I had a hard time sticking with it.