Word: caesarism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When Sulla became dictator of Rome, one of the names published on his proscribed list was that of Caius Julius Caesar, a tittering young sophisticate whose debaucheries were many but whose only political crime had been joining Sulla's opponents. Clever and consumingly ambitious, Caesar dodged and bribed his way out of Italy, and even after his friend's had won for him Sulla's contemptuous pardon he was wise enough not to return till after Sulla's death. While Caesar was cultivating the arts of a courtier in Asia (Author Bentley has him companioning...
When Rome was no longer too hot to hold him Caesar soon established himself there as one of the shrewdest schemers of a conspiratorial day. He fished to such good purpose in Rome's troubled waters that eventually he caught the great Pompey and the millionaire Crassus in his net, became with them one of the three rulers of the Roman world. Then he went off to make his military reputation in Gaul and Britain. Returning at the head of a victorious army, he gave the signal for civil war when he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome...
Author Bentley, without disallowing history's whispers that Caesar was a rake, minimizes the details. Readers who expect a luscious Egyptian interlude with Cleopatra do not know their Bentley. Cleopatra makes only one appearance-fully clothed and middleaged. Caesar's most constant mistress was Servilia, Brutus' mother, and of her Author Bentley contrives to make a somehow noble Roman matron, though she was twice married and continually unfaithful to both husbands. The other chief figures in the story appear as conventional history reports them: Pompey, a handsome, courageous, slow-minded soldier; Cicero a henpecked, opportunistic politician with...
...farewell to liberty but hail to the chief is the tenor of Fletcher Pratt's biography of the great Julius. Hail, Caesar!, an uncritical popularization like his informal history of the U. S. Civil War (Ordeal by Fire), is written with a slapdash chattiness that often sinks to sophomoric levels. In his laudable attempts to English the dead Latin facts, Author Pratt sometimes makes his English livelier than lucid: "He was disposed to hold grievance that the Senate had not protected him to point and edge, and a snarling shuttlecock of 'Your fault' began to grow...
Emphasis of Hail, Caesar! is less on politics or persons than on war. Author Pratt denies that Caesar was ever a pervert, even for policy; he mentions Caesar's mistress Servilia only in passing. For Caesar's rapid imposition of New Deal legislation on Rome he has nothing but implicit praise. Two-thirds of the book is devoted to a play-by-play account of Caesar's campaigns-a summary which leads Author Pratt to the surprising conclusion that Caesar "never became great as a soldier.'' He was not even a good soldier; his tactics...