Julio César

Part historical figure, part legend, Gaius Julius Caesar was one of the great figures of antiquity and a complex individual: a brilliant and Machiavellian politician, a brilliant, lucky and implacable general, an accomplished leader of men with a hectic sentimental life... An image so distorted for the propaganda that Caesar himself spilled to posterity in his Commentaries as well as for the successive layers of ornament that, from Antiquity to the present, historians have been adding to the life of Divine Julius. Sifting between reality and legend is what Patricia Southern, author of books such as The Roman Army of the Lower Empire or Augustus, proposes to show that Caesar's life was extraordinary, yes, but that it was far from being an ineluctable trajectory, with a destiny inevitable, but it was the relentless character of the character and his decisions -in addition to more than one wink from the goddess Fortuna- that led to that. If before the consulship of him in 59 a. C. Caesar was just another senator, in the following fifteen years an extraordinary succession of political maneuvers and military campaigns led him to accumulate immense power, more than any Roman had ever gathered, pointing to the unipersonal government that his adoptive son Octavio finally established . From the youth of a vain and petulant patrician to his murder, perhaps the most famous assassination in history, Patricia Southern manages to immerse us in the hectic last decades of the Roman Republic, accompanying Caesar in his eight years of interrupted campaigns in Gaul, in the civil war against Pompey and the optimates that led him to travel the Mediterranean and fight from Egypt to Hispania, and also to become intimate with Cleopatra, the last pharaoh. To follow the life of Julius Caesar is to peek into a convulsive time and life, mixed with legend, but which this book clears up to shed light on the man behind the myth.