The Die Is Cast

About This Book

He crossed a small river in the cold of January and the Roman Republic never recovered. For four hundred years Rome had been governed by its laws, its Senate, and its horror of kings. Gaius Julius Caesar — patrician, gambler, debtor, general, and the finest Latin writer of his age — turned that Republic into a monarchy in all but name, and paid for it with twenty-three wounds on the floor of the Senate.

Here is the whole life, told whole: the boy from the Subura who defied Sulla; the young man captured by pirates who laughed at his own ransom; the aedile who bought Rome with borrowed money; the general who conquered Gaul and buried a million people under his own dispatches; the man who crossed the Rubicon rather than surrender his dignity; who chased Pompey to the sands of Egypt and found Cleopatra; who reformed the calendar the world still keeps; who pardoned his enemies until they killed him for it.

Drawing on Caesar's own Commentaries, Cicero's letters, and the great biographers from Plutarch to the present, this is the story of one man and the Republic he broke — with the machinery of Roman politics made clear, the legends weighed against the evidence, and the most famous death in history reconstructed hour by hour.