Why did Caesar have to die--and why did his death solve nothing?
The plot was confused, the execution bungled, and within hours
different versions of the event were circulating. It was the end of
republican Rome and the beginning of the Roman Empire--and yet
everything about it remains somewhat mysterious.
Beginning with this legendary political assassination,
immortalized in art and literature through the ages, Greg Woolf
delivers a remarkable meditation on Caesar's murder as it echoes
down the corridors of history, affecting notions and acts of
political violence to our day.
Assassins Brutus and Cassius dined with their fiercest enemies
within days of the murder--and were then hunted down and killed.
After the murder neither conspirators nor Caesar's partisans knew
how to react. From these beginnings this book follows the
normalization of assassination at Rome, cataloguing the murder of
Caesar after Caesar and recording the means, methods, and motives
of the perpetrators. How was the Roman Empire so untouched by these
events? And how had the Republic contained such violence between
friends for so long? Woolf shows how Caesar's death--and the
puzzled reactions to it--points back to older ethics of
tyrannicide.
When is it justified to kill a head of state? Does
extra-judicial execution provide answers worth the cost of the
ensuing chaos? Ranging among texts by Cicero, Suetonius, and
Seneca, plays by Shakespeare and Corneille, and the ideas of Michel
Foucault and Francis Fukuyama, Woolf pursues these questions
through the ages. His book tells us not only how, but why, Caesar's
Vast Ghost still holds us spellbound.
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