Caesar _ Allan Massie

 I started with Massie's Antony, reviewed here at the end of February, and now I'm onto Caesar.   Historically I'm obviously out of sequence, in terms of Massie's bibliography I'm not so sure.   It matters not: Shakespeare rendered them as standalone stories, so we can't quibble when Massie follows suit.

As with Antony, the story is in the hands of a peripheral character, though not as peripheral as the secretary-slave Antony.   Our narrator here is Decimus Brutus ("Mouse"), general, admiral, adviser and assassin, not to be confused with his cousin and fellow assassin Marcus Brutus ("Markie").   Mouse is being held captive by the Gauls, some time after the assassination, and is writing his memoir.   He recalls meeting Caesar as a young lad - Caesar was leaving Mouse's mother's bedchamber, having done what Caesar was always doing with other men's wives.   Mouse goes on to cross the Rubicon with Caesar and accompanies him to Egypt where Mouse also has a fling with Queen Cleopatra.

But back in Rome, as Caesar is planning to invade Parthia, Mouse begins to doubt the hero's judgment.  Caesar is dictator for life but plans on passing power to his nephew Octavian, with Mouse as his guardian.  Surely this is a form of kingship, which in turn means an end to the Republic and a loss of freedom for Roman citizens?

Mouse gets sucked into a conspiracy led by his father-in-law Cassius.   Mouse is tasked with bringing in his cousin Markie, which he ultimately does.   No one, however, can get Antony or Lepidus to pick a side.   Cicero, the veteran windbag, is excluded from the plot; whatever the outcome, he will orate in favour of the winners.

The trick with retelling a tale where we all know what happened is to find a way of maintaining the suspense.   Massie succeeds - I won't say how, obviously, only that it worked for me.   I like Massie's Roman novels a great deal and will certainly track down the others.   I may well even seek out his work in other periods.

Antony - Allan Massie

 Allan Massie, who died earlier this month, wrote a tetralogy about major Roman figures, Augustus, Caesar, Tiberius and Mark Antony.    Obviously there must be overlap between them, however Antony, the last to be written but the first I have read, gives no clue as to how Massie deals with it.

Antony certainly stands alone.   It starts with Caesar's murder and ends with Mark Antony's suicide, a period of fourteen years in which Antony ruled half the empire, won, lost and won back Cleopatra and got through several wives.   Yet it is a crisp, short book, only 210 pages.   In practice it is two books with shared content.   Antony, at the end of his career, is dictating a memoir to his slave and secretary Critias.   Antony is depressed and drinking heavily.   When he loses interest or passes out Critias takes over commentary and narrative.   Critias has been in Antony's service from birth; he has been all over the Roman world with him; but Critias is a slave not a warror, he plays a part in the politicking but no part at all in the warmaking.   Antony is an instinctive politician but a magnificent soldier.   Critias is a fastidious homosexual.   Antony is bi.

I was enthralled.   Yes, I am reasonably familiar with all these Romans with complicated names, less so with some of the battles they are involved in.   Massie is a reliable guide and an exceptionally gifted writer.   I shall be reading more.

The Ides of March - Thornton Wilder

So what have we here? An epistolary novel by an author who was highly respected in his lifetime but who has since fallen into total neglect. A history which the author admits, on page 1, has been dicked about with - to the extent that the outrage which hangs over everything else here, actually happened a decade and a half earlier. The author even goes so far as including anonymous attacks on Caesar which actually come from the Spanish Civil War - a slight anachronism of a mere two thousand years. The result?


Brilliant. I loved it. There is so much going on here. We have the arrival of Caesar's lover, Cleopatra, in Rome. We have the connivance of the local femme fatale Clodia Pulcher and her crazed brother. We have Caesar's fortnightly journal-letter to his old friend Turrinus in self-imposed seclusion on the Isle of Capri. I have never heard of Turrinus - is he perhaps another invention? In the novel, though, he becomes a constant, slightly eerie presence. It is hinted that he was horribly mutilated during Caesar's Gallic campaign, hence his seclusion - yet during the novel it becomes apparent that he is willing to receive visitors, some of whom he hasn't seen for decades. We see nothing of his replies to Caesar though the contents of letters to others are referred to. Does he really exist or is he another of Caesar's devious, secretive schemes?


The letters tend to be formal, and Wilder adds notes to enforce the illusion they are real. Yet he manages to create vivid characters in them. Cleopatra comes across very well, her exoticism demonstrated, and Wilder has fun with the women of Rome trying to decide if she is beautiful or not. Also stunningly brought to life is the young iconoclast poet Catallus and his premature death.


For me, the final perfect touch was the use of a direct quote from Tacitus - the only 'real' document in the dossier - to cover Caesar's assassination.


I don't know about other works by Thornton Wilder, but Ides of March is good enough in his own right to warrant restoration to the canon of great Twentieth Century American literature.

Dictator - Robert Harris

Dictator is the concluding third of Harris's Cicero trilogy (the others being Imperium and Lustrum). Unsurprisingly, given that it purports to be the lost biography of the great man written by his slave and later freedman Tiro, it ends with Cicero's brutal murder on the orders of Octavian/Augustus in 43BC. It is therefore the volume that deals with the period of Roman history that most of us are most familiar with, the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, his assassination, and the subsequent battle for supremacy between Octavian, Mark Antony and the Zeppo Marx of the Triumvirate, poor old Lepidus.

The trilogy is an awesome achievement. Vast amounts of research must have been done, yet Harris wears his acquired learning lightly. He is especially good at playing off Cicero's philosophical writing against his political opportunism - at one stage or another Cicero manages to suck up to all the major players without once recognising his own duplicity. As a party politician myself, I couldn't help but place him in the Independent camp, a chancer who will jump aboard any passing bandwagon and insist - at very great length - how it was his idea in the first place.

The murder is a historical gift of an ending to all his machinations, betrayed by an off-the-cuff witticism.

Our true hero, however, is Tiro. It is he who sees and reports all the flaws in his employer's character whilst remaining doggedly loyal to him throughout their long, shared life. Tiro is how Harris deploys his masterful gifts as a storyteller. Dictator in itself is not as good as, say, An Officer and a Spy; it is infinitely better than The Ghost. The trilogy as a whole is probably Harris's greatest achievement in fiction.  His new novel, Conclave, doesn't appeal - can it possibly be as good as Paulo Sorrentino's The Young Pope, now showing on Sky Atlantic? Checking through the page of 'Also by' I notice I haven't read (or, frankly, heard of) The Fear Index. Maybe that is where I should head next.