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Simon & Schuster
March 2015
On Sale: March 3, 2015
352 pages ISBN: 1451668791 EAN: 9781451668797 Kindle: B00LD1S2YQ Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
The exciting, dramatic story of one of history’s most famous
events—the death of Julius Caesar—now placed in full context
of Rome’s civil wars by eminent historian Barry Strauss. Thanks to William Shakespeare, the death of Julius Caesar is
the most famous assassination in history. But what actually
happened on March 15, 44 BC is even more gripping than
Shakespeare’s play. In this thrilling new book, Barry
Strauss tells the real story. Shakespeare shows Caesar’s assassination to be an amateur
and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a
carefully planned paramilitary operation, a generals’ plot,
put together by Caesar’s disaffected officers and designed
with precision. There were even gladiators on hand to
protect the assassins from vengeance by Caesar’s friends.
Brutus and Cassius were indeed key players, as Shakespeare
has it, but they had the help of a third man—Decimus. He was
the mole in Caesar’s entourage, one of Caesar’s leading
generals, and a lifelong friend. It was he, not Brutus, who
truly betrayed Caesar. Caesar’s assassins saw him as a military dictator who wanted
to be king. He threatened a permanent change in the Roman
way of life and in the power of senators. The assassins
rallied support among the common people, but they
underestimated Caesar’s soldiers, who flooded Rome. The
assassins were vanquished; their beloved Republic became the
Roman Empire. An original, fresh perspective on an event that seems well
known, Barry Strauss’s book sheds new light on this
fascinating, pivotal moment in world history.
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