The Empire Builders
These rulers oversaw historic feats and bloody follies.

Reviewed by Tracy Lee Simmons
Sunday, December 24, 2006

CAESAR

Life of a Colossus

By Adrian Goldsworthy

Yale Univ. 583 pp. $35

AUGUSTUS

The Life of Rome's

First Emperor

By Anthony Everitt

Random House. 377 pp. $26.95

O nce, when writing an essay on Roman generals, I asked a teacher why we couldn't refer to perhaps the greatest of them as "the late Julius Caesar." That's the way people customarily talked about the dead. Why not Caesar? "Because he is too dead," came the amused reply. It wasn't only the gap of two millennia since Caesar's death that rendered the word "late" unnecessary. To call a man of such greatness and fame "the late Julius Caesar" would be laughably pedestrian. Caesar remains too dead.

Few majestic figures of the classical world will be more familiar than those two Roman mega-men, Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus. The die of their biographies, it would seem, is cast. Barring any stupendous, revision-making discoveries in newly unearthed papyri or archeological digs, one would think we've known for centuries pretty much all there is to know about them. But somehow, there is always more to say.

As it turns out, modern books on Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus written for general readers are not all that plentiful, but two new biographies of these massive personalities now make creditable bids to become standard works. The authors differ in training and temperament but share a passion for enlivening ancient times for contemporary readers. Adrian Goldsworthy hails directly from the academy, with formidable works behind him -- most notably The Complete Roman Army and The Fall of Carthage-- while Anthony Everitt published a well-received biography of Cicero five years ago, once served as secretary general of the Arts Council for Great Britain and has made himself an acclaimed journalist.

Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) stands, in one sense, as history's great spoiler, the betrayer of republican ideals, the grand reminder that cooperative, democratic government is perpetually in danger of unraveling. It was he who, after earning success on the battlefield, launched his political career as a popular scion of a patrician family, patiently scaled the public ladder from quaestor to praetor to consul, formed the First Triumvirate with Crassus and Pompey, and, after more bloodshed -- a million Gauls were supposed to have been killed in the conquest of their lands -- took down the Roman Republic he had served and made himself its dictator. As with so many strong men since, it wasn't ideals that he believed in but power. Yet his life was not a brute victory of tactics over tact. The man who put in place the Julian calendar was among history's greatest practitioners of military strategy and political craftsmanship. He knew how to break an army, but he could also broker a deal.

Caesar, as Goldsworthy demonstrates, possessed a gift for adaptation that any resilient politician must have. That talent gets amply, episodically detailed from raw youth to his assassination on the Ides of March. We're shown the charm of the conspiratorial player-politician, but Goldsworthy, fundamentally a military historian, emphasizes Caesar the general over Caesar the statesman.

While making judicious use of the findings of recent scholarship, Goldsworthy clings to original sources -- including Caesar's own writings -- which aren't abundant but are colorful and rich. He speculates, though rarely with great risk; this book is primarily a work of synthesis, not analysis. The author is sound not only on the facts but on the super-facts -- the mythology -- about Caesar, and both get their due play.

Goldsworthy doesn't shine so well with talk about ideas and significance. His disinclination to engage in far-reaching conjecture can be a virtue in a work aiming to be nothing more than a chronicle of a man's life, though readers of a more ruminative bent may be left disappointed with the thinner point of view. Readers with a taste for polished prose may also find reason to balk, for his style is workmanlike at best. Goldsworthy is out to serve a large public, but one wonders if he does not often assume a bit too little of what intelligent people willing to tackle a lengthy biography of an ancient figure are likely to know ("The Julii were patricians, which meant that they were members of the oldest aristocratic class at Rome"). A spot of sensible, disciplined editing would have tightened this otherwise fine book and saved a couple hundred pages.

A life of the Emperor Augustus (63-14 B.C.) presents a telling follow-up to a life of Julius Caesar. For whereas Caesar sought to gain absolute power through guile and force, his grand-nephew Augustus had to consolidate that power among disparate lands and peoples and draw up new blueprints for a firm but flexible imperial authority. Augustus gave birth not so much to the idea of empire as to its techniques and trappings. He showed all to come how to wield power among far-flung lands. But he also showed how to temper and delegate it -- no slight achievement. What he built lasted for nearly 500 years. He gave his name to the Augustan Age, a time of relative tranquility (after his opponents were dispatched), grand construction projects (from temples to aqueducts) in the classical style, and liberal provisions for trade -- not to mention the lettered glories of Virgil, Ovid and Horace.

Anthony Everitt's life of Augustus exhibits a fidelity to ancient sources every bit as scrupulous as Goldsworthy's, but his is less the method of the historian and more that of the novelist, neatly fitting in character-sketching with vivid historical background.

All the stuff of adventure is here, from court intrigue to roving armies to shipwreck. Everitt tries not merely to recount action but to paint pictures, and some of them are exceedingly, pleasingly gaudy. That makes this biography fascinating and brisk to read. Each section flows like a breezy, informal lecture, chattily evoking time and circumstance to recreate the golden age of Roman life and culture. Yet what emerges primarily is not the portrait of an age but of one man -- one who, despite his consequence, has been a surprisingly murky figure down the centuries.

We get all the power and pageantry we could ask for in these two biographies. "Death is everything's final limit," one Latin aphorism has it, but the lives of these two Caesars show that to be not quite true. ·

Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of "Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin."