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Michael Kulikowski: Cleopatra, 31 March 2011

Zenobia of Palmyra: History, Myth and the Neo-Classical Imagination 
by Rex Winsbury.
Duckworth, 198 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 7156 3853 8
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Cleopatra: A Life 
by Stacy Schiff.
Virgin, 368 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 0 7535 3955 2
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... Republic only to the extent that it advanced their own ambitions for total domination. Whatever Caesar and Pompey, Cato and Scipio, Brutus and Cassius, Antony and Octavian were fighting for within the puzzling framework of Roman logic, they were all more or less the same viewed from the Greek perspective: terrifying and predatory, to be sure, but also ...

Mantegna’s Classical World

Charles Hope, 19 June 1980

The ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ by Andrea Mantegna in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court 
by Andrew Martindale.
Harvey Miller, 342 pp., £38, October 1979, 9780905203164
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... certainly have been shown the nine canvases by Andrea Mantegna illustrating the Gallic triumph of Julius Caesar, which then as now were usually called the Triumphs of Caesar. But it is unlikely that anyone in Mantua would have told her that these pictures were primarily of historical interest, or that they were ...

Diary

Mary Beard: Set in Tunisia, 14 December 2006

... piazza includes a suitably imposing senate house, temples of Castor and Pollux, of Vesta and of Julius Caesar, plus some more or less convincing Roman statues (one dumpy bronze horse ought to have been sent back to its maker – and certainly would have been by any Roman of taste). The whole thing is lined by two great porticoes, lookalikes of the ...

How are you finding it here?

Patrick Sims-Williams: Celts, 28 October 1999

The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? 
by Simon James.
British Museum, 160 pp., £6.99, March 1999, 0 7141 2165 7
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... to Asia Minor, but the greatest concentration known to classical writers was in Gaul. In fact, Julius Caesar found that a large group of Gauls actually ‘called themselves Celtae’. A corollary of this was that ancient geographers distinguished between Celtica, meaning the Continental mainland, and the various offshore islands such as Britain and ...

Odysseus’ Bow

Edward Luttwak: Ancient combat, 17 November 2005

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity 
by J.E. Lendon.
Yale, 468 pp., £18.95, June 2005, 0 300 10663 7
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... of the earlier Republic, of which very much less is known than of the late Republican legions of Julius Caesar, let alone those of the Principate that are so abundantly documented by every species of physical evidence: intact portions of standardised fortresses, forts and outposts that allow the confident reconstruction of a great number of more ruined ...

A Good Girl in Africa

D.A.N. Jones, 16 September 1982

Double Yoke 
by Buchi Emecheta.
Dgwugwu Afor, 163 pp., £3, September 1982, 0 9508177 0 8
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The Aerodrome 
by Rex Warner.
Bodley Head, 304 pp., £6.95, July 1982, 9780370309262
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AVery British Coup 
by Chris Mullin.
Hodder, 220 pp., £6.95, September 1982, 0 340 28586 9
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An Ice Cream War 
by William Boyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 370 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 241 10868 3
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Tempting Fate 
by Michael Levey.
Hamish Hamilton, 220 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 241 10801 2
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... school library, a book for girls like herself, not for brainless ninnies: it was Rex Warner’s Julius Caesar. The incident is recalled by Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome, another account of the clash between the messy, human values of the village and the deadly, idealistic standardisation imposed by the idea of progress, here represented by a dedicated ...

How to End a Dynasty

Michael Kulikowski: Rehabilitating Nero, 19 March 2020

Nero: Emperor and Court 
by John Drinkwater.
Cambridge, 483 pp., £32.99, January 2019, 978 1 108 47264 7
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... pedantry of Claudius.It owed its resilience to a helpful failure to be explicit about the system. Julius Caesar had been assassinated in 44 bc because both his friends and his enemies feared, with good reason, that he intended to make himself king, a title hated by republican aristocrats with a nearly superstitious fervour. Augustus, however, disclaimed ...

Night Jars

Thomas Jones: ‘The North Water’, 14 July 2016

The North Water 
by Ian McGuire.
Scribner, 326 pp., £14.99, February 2016, 978 1 4711 5124 8
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... man’, it’s hard not to suspect him of having Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar in mind. Sumner, meanwhile, for all his pretensions to cerebral aloofness – he watches his first whale hunt from the crow’s nest – is ready to get his hands dirty when he thinks he needs to. There’s a fight with the crew of another ship ...

Syme’s Revolution

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 24 January 1980

Roman Papers 
by Ronald Syme, edited by E. Badian.
Oxford, 878 pp., £35, November 1980, 0 19 814367 2
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... this view was furnished by the works of Cicero. The great reforming leader was the dictator Caesar, the hero of Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte; his heir and successor was Augustus, the restorer and reformer of the Republic. Eduard Meyer, in a famous book published in 1922, preferred to make Augustus the successor, not of ...

Jamming up the Flax Machine

Matthew Reynolds: Ciaran Carson’s Dante, 8 May 2003

The ‘Inferno’ of Dante Alighieri 
a new translation by Ciaran Carson.
Granta, 296 pp., £14.99, October 2002, 1 86207 525 5
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... explains his date of birth: ‘nacqui sub Iulio, ancor che fosse tardi’ (‘I was born under Julius Caesar, albeit late’). The two Latin words interrupt the miraculous transmutation of the classical poet into a speaker of contemporary Italian, creating a sudden lapse in time. The Commedia’s Italian is also divided internally. Dante’s work of ...

State Theatre

Peter Burke, 22 January 1987

The Rome of Alexander VII: 1655-1667 
by Richard Krautheimer.
Princeton, 199 pp., £16.80, November 1985, 9780691040325
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Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in 16th-century Siena 
by Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams.
Chicago, 245 pp., £21.25, October 1986, 0 226 65534 2
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... or even his empire (for ‘the Pope is the true Emperor,’ as the Medieval saying went, while Julius II was often compared to Julius Caesar). Visitors, however high their status, kissed the Pope’s feet, ‘adoring’ him like a god. Carried in a litter, cheered by crowds, he was the image of an absolute ...

Very very she

Margaret Anne Doody, 22 April 1993

The Works of Aphra Behn. Vol. I: Poetry 
edited by Janet Todd.
Pickering & Chatto, 481 pp., £55, September 1992, 1 85196 012 0
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Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works 
by Aphra Behn, edited by Janet Todd.
Penguin, 385 pp., £6.99, November 1992, 0 14 043338 4
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... has power over himself, his identity or even his name: Mr Trefry gave Oroonoko that [name] of Caesar, which name will live in that country as long as that (scarce more) glorious one of the great Roman, for tis most evident, he ... acted things as memorable, had they been done in some part of the world replenished with people and historians that might have ...

No Concubine

Mary Beard, 28 June 1990

The Oxford Book of Marriage 
edited by Helge Rubinstein.
Oxford, 383 pp., £15, March 1990, 0 19 214150 3
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The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia 
by Jack Goody.
Cambridge, 542 pp., £37.50, February 1990, 0 521 36574 0
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... not serve his argument very effectively by just quoting Porcia (wife of Brutus, the murderer of Julius Caesar), who is supposed to have shown a typically romantic or companionate attitude to marriage already in the first century BC: she is reported as saying to her husband that she married, ‘not as a concubine, to share only in bed and board, but as ...

Wallahs and Wallabies

Gilbert Phelps, 8 May 1986

12 Edmondstone Street 
by David Malouf.
Chatto, 134 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 7011 3970 6
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The Shakespeare Wallah 
by Geoffrey Kendal and Clare Colvin.
Sidgwick, 186 pp., £12.95, March 1986, 0 283 99230 1
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Children of the Country: Coast to Coast across Africa 
by Joseph Hone.
Hamish Hamilton, 258 pp., £12.95, March 1986, 0 241 11742 9
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... everything the same night to the stage of La Martinière Girls’ School, where we performed Julius Caesar and Henry V on Friday afternoon, then moved the entire equipment across the city to La Martinière Boys’ School, where we performed Macbeth and Henry V. At the end of it we were on our way again in a convoy of cycle-rickshaws to the ...

Ministry of Apparitions

Malcolm Gaskill: Magical Thinking in 1918, 4 July 2019

A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War 
by Owen Davies.
Oxford, 284 pp., £20, October 2018, 978 0 19 879455 4
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... the conjured spirit of the planet Mars. A spiritualist in Teddington, who interviewed Julius Caesar several times between 1909 and 1912, passed on Caesar’s warning of ‘red poppies in the smiling cornfields in the sun’. The Parisian celebrity Madame de Thèbes had long predicted the demise of Prussian ...

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