Word: wildering
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...IDES OF MARCH (246 pp.)-Thornton Wilder-Harper...
...Thornton Wilder's answer is that contemporaries, blinded by details, would have put together a different story from the one that history tells. The Ides of March is "a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic." Taking only a few liberties with the historical events, Author Wilder has imagined the documents he needs and made a police-court dossier that has plausibility (the kind of plausibility that Robert Graves achieved in I, Claudius) without pretense to truth. Wilder calls his novel a "suppositional reconstruction." The result is an amusing book, or, more...
...Guilty? An investigator armed with all the inside information that Author Wilder makes available for him should have no difficulty in deciding who instigated the crime. In this account, Brutus is a minor character. Cassius does not even appear. If they did not know about Brutus, readers might well decide that the real villain must have been Clodia Pulcher, a likely suspect if there ever was one, dissolute, clever, and already mixed up in one attempt on Caesar's life...
Caesar at Home. In Author Wilder's account, Caesar is a serious, capable executive who answers his letters promptly and fusses about the time he has to spend reading tiresome documents...
...best and most imaginative of Author Wilder's imagined documents are those written by the chief of Caesar's secret police, dealing with an attempt on Caesar's life after he has reluctantly agreed to attend Clodia's dinner. Wounded by assassins on the way, with two deep cuts in his right side reaching from his throat to his waist, Caesar nevertheless insists on going on, after his wounds have been bound with sea moss...