Volume 35, Number 8 · May 12, 1988
'Here was a Caesar!'
By Jasper Griffin
The Education of Julius Caesar: A Biography, A Reconstruction
by Arthur D. Kahn
Schocken Books, 514 pp., $28.50
Caesar
by Christian Meier
Severin and Siedler (Berlin), 592 pp., 45 DM
What should one find interesting in ancient history? Rising popular interest in the ancient world concentrates naturally on spectacular works of art, towering achievements, and strong personalities. In doing so it is true to the world picture of the ancients themselves; truer, perhaps, than the interest that is nowadays more respectable among professional academics, who prefer subjects either more sociological and anonymous or more abstract and structural. A reviewer in a recent number of the Journal of Roman Studies makes the contrast neatly. 'The old-style political history of idealism and opportunism, skulduggery, military brilliance, turning-point events and so on' is only one way of looking at things: 'a serious alternative [is]…cultural horizons, social structures, systems of explanation and decision-making reflected in religious forms, questions of self-definition and changing habits of allegiance.'[*]
Review, 4810 words
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