Word: caesar
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When Sulla became dictator of Rome, one of the names published on his proscribed list was that of Caius Julius Caesar, a tittering young sophisticate whose debaucheries were many but whose only political crime had been joining Sulla's opponents. Clever and consumingly ambitious, Caesar dodged and bribed his way out of Italy, and even after his friend's had won for him Sulla's contemptuous pardon he was wise enough not to return till after Sulla's death. While Caesar was cultivating the arts of a courtier in Asia (Author Bentley has him companioning...
...HAIL, CAESAR!-Fletcher Pratt-Smith & Haas...
With the same workmanlike technique she used in her novels of Yorkshire mill-towns, Phyllis Bentley last week turned back 2,000 years, retold the old story of Julius Caesar, his rise and fall. Though her version lacked the imaginative freshness of such historical novels as Robert Graves's on the Emperor Claudius or Lion Feuchtwanger's on Josephus, and neither added to nor subtracted from history's blackboard, it furnished modern readers with a stirring, up-to-date account of one of Rome's greatest true stories. Author Bentley also hoped that her factual record...
When Rome was no longer too hot to hold him Caesar soon established himself there as one of the shrewdest schemers of a conspiratorial day. He fished to such good purpose in Rome's troubled waters that eventually he caught the great Pompey and the millionaire Crassus in his net, became with them one of the three rulers of the Roman world. Then he went off to make his military reputation in Gaul and Britain. Returning at the head of a victorious army, he gave the signal for civil war when he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome...
Author Bentley, without disallowing history's whispers that Caesar was a rake, minimizes the details. Readers who expect a luscious Egyptian interlude with Cleopatra do not know their Bentley. Cleopatra makes only one appearance-fully clothed and middleaged. Caesar's most constant mistress was Servilia, Brutus' mother, and of her Author Bentley contrives to make a somehow noble Roman matron, though she was twice married and continually unfaithful to both husbands. The other chief figures in the story appear as conventional history reports them: Pompey, a handsome, courageous, slow-minded soldier; Cicero a henpecked, opportunistic politician with...