Word: caesar
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...IMPERIAL-CAESAR, by Rex Warner (393 pp.; Atlantic-Little, Brown; $5), recalls the fact that, perhaps because he campaigned on their island in 55-54 B.C., British writers have been markedly fond of Julius Caesar. From Shakespeare to Shaw, they have drawn a quasi-Churchil-lian portrait of the Roman dictator-arrogant and domineering on occasion, but indomitable in adversity, magnanimous in victory, farsighted in policy. British Author Rex Warner, an old hand at translating Caesar, has set out to fictionize him. In doing so, he carries fondness a step farther and tries to quash the lingering suspicion that Caesar...
...night before the Ides of March. As in Warner's earlier volume, The Young Caesar, a restlessly wakeful Julius is musing -in flashbacks-over his career. Since the book covers the last 15 years of Caesar's life, he has a lot to muse over. First, Caesar remembers marching into Gaul, and Author Warner does ample justice to the tactics of the Gallic wars (as Caesar did in his own Commentaries), but considering that a million tribesmen were killed and another million taken prisoner, Warner's account of the campaigns is curiously bloodless. All the other facts...
Apart from pithy comments on soldiering, Warner's Caesar defends himself as a kind of imperial efficiency expert surrounded by captious, old-fashioned critics, including Cicero and Cato, who are blindly resisting change. He is an Organization Superman who wants to transform Rome from a forum of squabbling, parochial rivals to an orderly, centralized headquarters of empire. Argues Caesar: "A great empire could not be administered by relays of incompetent politicians. 'Liberty' meant nothing but restriction and inefficiency...
This, of course, is part of the great, continuing debate between democracy and tyranny. Like any reliable historical fiction, Imperial Caesar lacks the element of surprise, but it does move with the fateful tread of a great man's destiny...
...Said a shopkeeper in Welch (pop. 6,500): "I think he's stronger than Kennedy. He's more what the little people, like me, want-somebody who can help us out of this." Said Humphrey of his reception in the string of coal towns: "I felt like Caesar-one long triumphant procession...