Rikhard Von Katzen Nov 06, 2018

liked it 's review

This book has a lot more action than the first. I find it slightly odd that various characters from the first book persist throughout the book even though their roles were invented in the first place.



One complaint is that, at this point in the series, Caesar doesn't have much of a personality. The book does a fair job of demonstrating that he conforms (idiosyncratically) to various Roman aristocratic virtues, but other than some rather over-the-top "you killed my dog, now you must all die!" motivations he seems to be drifting from victory to victory by accident. Hopefully as the author moves into territory more established by the histories (and propaganda) of Roman and Greek writers he will begin to trace out Caesar's motivations and interactions with other historical figures in a more varied light.



The battle scenes in this book are fine, they seem plausible. Many of the battles so far are only very briefly known from the histories of the period, and without going through it with a Cambridge History next to it I can not say whether they strictly match the scholastic consensus but they're not fantasy. Though the outcome of the battles are important in that they lead Caesar and others into certain military roles they're mostly remembered because of the huge amount of propaganda Pompey Magnus put out. Pompey and Crassus are probably the most interesting characters in this book.



The street urchin Augustus is a bit lulzy, too.



The bad guys in the book are almost too much, with lecherous Sulla the psychopath to the leper assassin. I would have preferred a more nuanced interpretation of their characters; even if they had made Sulla a lecherous psychopath without laying it on so thick he would have been more intimidating.



This book is interesting as a fictionalized biography of G. Julias Caesar. Though I have read accounts of his life in various history and military books there are a few others I want to read to compare to this one:



"Caesar: Life of a Colossus" by Adrian Goldsworthy, the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough (itself a fictional history of Caesar), "Augustus: the Biography" by Jochen Bleicken (for the elements of Octavian in this book); the "The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146-43BC" (Cambridge Ancient History v. 9), particularly about Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar.