Peter Stothard

A well-researched and very interesting account of the pivotal period beginning just prior to the assassination of Julius Caesar and then continuing for approximately the next decade - during which time Octavian, Marc Anthony and others jostled for ultimate leadership while systematically eliminating all of Caesar's assassins.

As a fan of Republican Rome I thought this work was truly a page turner. By any standards, the characters involved are some of the most compelling in history. I appreciated the author's attempt to present a point of view of the assassins which is often completely overlooked.

My only complaint is that the author, unlike Caesar, sometimes drifted from a concise style, instead unnecessarily using passive instead of active tenses and writing in a vague and flowery fashion that could sometimes be difficult to read.

Nonetheless, the book is an excellent account of this fascinating period.… (meer)

Shakespeare gave us an abiding image of Caesar. Pompey promoted himself as the second coming of Alexander the Great. But when it comes to the mysterious third man who pulled the strings and turned the gears of politics in first-century BC Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus has only himself to blame for historical obscurity.

Eighteen years after rising to the public’s attention for ending Spartacus’ revolt, Caesar’s one-time banker and Rome’s former head of state departed for the Tigris and Euphrates with mad imperialist designs of annexing Parthia to Rome. An otherwise comfortable life of wealth and privilege ended with Crassus’ head being used as a prop on a Parthian stage. Peter Stothard profiles the life of this arrogant, ego-inflated, posh middle-aged Roman in Crassus, his slim, unapologetically top-down biography of Caesar and Pompey’s lesser-known but no-less-influential contemporary.

Stothard styles Crassus history’s ‘first tycoon’, but from the details of Crassus’ life, it’s hard not to regard him as an archetypal antihero and classical-era dinosaur: a real-estate mogul who acquired his wealth by profiting off collapsed tenements in Rome, a womaniser ‘accused of seducing a Vestal Virgin’ and a businessman who was particularly ‘innovative when understanding human capital’, so Stothard says, noting Crassus’ penchant for ‘buying and training the smartest of the enslaved’ to be his property managers. If historical writing has shifted attention from the privileged and powerful in recent years, hovering over the lives of outsiders and the disenfranchised, Crassus yanks that pendulum right from its socket.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Douglas Boin is Professor of History at Saint Louis University and the author of Alaric the Goth (W.W. Norton, 2020).… (meer)

This was not the book I expected it to be, but a worthwhile read for all that. The Senecans has as much to do with Wapping and the journalistic-literary life of the pre-internet age as it does with Margaret Thatcher, Latin or the Stoics; most of all it has to do with Stothard himself. The result is fascinating, but perhaps not for the reasons advertised. The narrative is discursive, 'literary' rather than 'journalistic', and suggests the influence of the peerless W.G. Sebald (down to the unglossed photographs interspersed throughout the text). Despite its flaws, the book's greatest weakness is neither Stothard's style nor his subject, but his oblique approach to the people and events he discusses. Stothard makes it clear that he never wanted to write a conventional political 'memoir', but there are times when his tendency to write 'around' events rather than explicating them is frustrating. Peter Stothard has so much to say – about the Brighton bomb, the siege of Wapping, the 'corridors of power', even book collecting – but one feels that he is only scratching the surface here. The Senecans makes the reader wish to know more about the four tenuously-connected advisors of the title, and the experience of a press empire fighting the unions, but this must be sought elsewhere.… (meer)