Caesar life of a colossus pdf

Register for free and fill in the data. Get eBook Caesar: Life of a Colossus. Results Caesar: Life of a Colossus. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries. The best introduction to Caesar and his world that is currently available. It has drama, intrigue, affairs, spectacular battles, brilliant politics, and a charismatic central figure.

Moreover, it is a solid work that brings to life the rich world of the Mediterranean in the decade before Christ. It's better than any book I've ever read on him, and more incisive.

Hindery Jr. A clear and captivating picture of the man who forever changed Rome. His narrative style is easy, free flowing, and anything but dry. Highly recommended. Highly readable. Mazzeno, Magill's Literary Annual.

It is an absorbing book about a fasinating personality. This is a great book. It is essentially a mini-history of Rome from to 44 B. The pace and craft of this book was masterful and absolutely brilliant. Aug 25, aPriL does feral sometimes rated it it was amazing Shelves: biography , academic-notations , war-war-war-and-more-war , history , favorites , non-fiction. The author uses all available historical sources and puts in order the known information into a cohesive timeline.

The result is an excellent biography. Goldsworthy often compares two or more sources together as well, noting all of the sources and guessing sometimes which one is the more likely version if they diverge. Caesar himself was helpful to later researchers of his life in that he published several books about his military campaigns which have survived millennia literacy rules!

Archeologists have found the actual sites from debris and descriptions. Caesar usually included everything, softening very few incidents or mistakes. Apparently he omitted some events of personal courage, but maybe involved admirers were embellishing real or imagined stories. However, Caesar was clearly an amazing leader in both personal charisma and in military finesse whether his contemporaries loved or hated him.

He also tried to invade England! Romans lived to instigate fights and defend in constant warfare. I am not exaggerating. If the top politicians of Rome were not marching to conquer foreign countries, they were marching to do battle with each other. He was a genuine multitasker phenomenon and a genius of military tactics and political maneuvers - a brainy intellectual with the energy and physical strength of someone years younger.

Rome was infested with power-seeking families and men for centuries! Intense violence in Rome was often begun by Roman military leaders who invaded Rome with their personal armies trying to kill political enemies!

Assassination attempts were often threatened and made. Most politicians had personal bodyguards. In Rome, politics was all about every Senator being for himself. Caesar was one of the many of this ilk, but he was attempting to make politics more fair and safe, changing laws and proposing more equitable management of the distribution of land and the just enforcement of laws other historical Romans worked at making life better for commoners too.

He promoted free speech, seeing that his writing as well as his usual behavior, whatever the narrative of his works or that distributed by his enemies, the description of his life would work in his favor.

Being a military genius was not something a man could fake, after all, being seen by thousands of troops and in having the spoils of war to display on his return. Most common Romans were fans. If Politics was a food, it was one which all important Romans had to eat wholeheartedly three times a day with constant intermittent snacks!

Military prowess was important for all Roman politicians. The path to dominating Rome politically was primarily through having and keeping your own personal military force. Caesar claimed Venus founded his family. However, inexplicably, when Caesar had finally gathered all of the threads of Roman power in his hands, he dismissed his bodyguards!

We all know how this ended. It was a little bit like how Shakespeare imagined, but the killers, backed up in the conspiracy of the murder by sixty - sixty! Goldsworthy reveals all. Caesar at age fifty-six definitely had become a dictator with all power voted him by the common people and by publicly kowtowing or genuinely admiring senators.

But while Caesar demanded recognition of his dominance, his actions also showed a lifelong commitment to duty and justice and fairness. The book has an extensive Bibliography. It also has a very useful Chronology, a Glossary, an Abbreviation list, huge Notes and Index sections.

I highly recommend this book for history and military campaign fans. Mar 15, Ilias rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , bio. I really enjoyed Caesar: Life of a Colossus, since it was a better biography of Caesar than my previous reads.

Caesar was indeed a colossus of his time and this book rightfully portrays him as such. View 2 comments. Aug 20, Jerome rated it it was amazing. Goldsworthy writes with flair and with a good command of the subject matter, doing an excellent job of bringing to life one of the most celebrated and vilified characters of ancient and Western history.

He paints an excellent portrait of both Caesar and the times he lived in. Goldsworthy does a great job of both stripping away the myth of Caesar and conveying the drama of his times.

In some cases, Cae Goldsworthy writes with flair and with a good command of the subject matter, doing an excellent job of bringing to life one of the most celebrated and vilified characters of ancient and Western history. He had no grand plans for reforming the republic, but was still incredibly ambitious and talented, a rational statesman and a superb military leader. He was a charismatic figure able to compel his troops to legendary loyalty. He was very vain and still very good-humored.

He also never shrank from a challenge. He was loyal to his troops and a womanizer of epic proportions. He was willing to fight a civil war to protect his honor, smashing the warring factions and ensuring they answered only to him except when they were stabbing him to death.

A strong and well-written biography. Arguably, Julius Caesar has always been ancient history's most popular figure. Goldsworthy's biography, we are told, is wider in scope than other accounts. Whereas many books concentrate on Caesar the military tactician, others deal with the rise and fall of his dictatorship. What we have here is a life that claims to combine the man's political career with his military campaigns. But is that enough to pad out a full life?

Most biographies succeed or fail neither by strict adherence to fact, nor by spinning the good yarn. Where an author has to dig out hidden truths, then such facts may have something spicy to add. And where the telling of the tale reflects the legendary nature of its protagonist, then the story may benefit from spicier writing. In the case of a well-known figure from ancient history, especially the most famous of all, the biographer is faced with two main obstacles.

First comes the difficulty of finding out anything new. Secondly, when a tale has already been told many times, detaching the plausible from the mythologised takes precedence over constructing new narrative.

It's interesting that Goldsworthy draws only sparingly on Caesar's own Commentaries, preferring third hand accounts. But surely the reports he sent from the campaigns in Gaul, which were published more of less annually in Rome, would have been widely read at the time?

According to Cicero, the author tells us, even tradespeople were fond of reading. Furthermore, Caesar was renowned for the clarity of his writing - making it easier for the less educated, and therefore I think we should simply assume he was a popular author in his lifetime. Although he didn't write an actual autobiography, like Sulla his predecessor as dictator ; I think it's necessary to distinguish between the way Caesar saw himself and the way others recalled him.

At this point, I pray to digress and delve into my own motives for reading a biography of such a remote figure. I often read these accounts of real people's lives as a sort of antidote to my fiction reading. It intrigues me to see how well or ill character is conveyed by words alone; and I qualify that point of view by stating I come from the first generation brought up in the television age I was born in and remember watching Popeye cartoons at the age of three or four.

The virtual window of inscribed words on a page whether of clay tablet, papyrus roll, paper book or e-reader screen was established long before the time of Julius Caesar. Caesar himself made unique contributions to the body of writing, not only by publishing the Commentaries his own accounts of his military campaigns, he was also a poet and critic.

Biographers, therefore, are able to use his own writing — and that of contemporaries such as Cicero — to base much of their texts on. We also have two thousand years' worth of commentaries on those commentaries to help us decipher them. When we pick up any book purporting to be a life of Julius Caesar, therefore, I think we are entitled to expect a fine distillation not just of the grapes of truth if such a phrase may be pardonned but the true essence of the man.

Goldsworthy's method, especially in the first third of his book, is to extrapolate Caesar's youth and early career from a wide-ranging of reading around the subject. He conjectures on the likely upbringing the boy would have received as a member of an old but somewhat undistinguished branch of the aristocratic Julii clan.

He then fills in the backstory of Sulla's dictatorship, which began when Caesar was about fifteen years old. The known facts give the first inklings of the young man's character: his dandiness, defiance and courage. Goldsworthy's caution prevents him from drawing too fine a portrait, though; and when he recounts the young adventurer's expedition to Bythinia incidentally located in the very part of modern Turkey where I live he is confronted with one important unknown fact. Did Caesar have a homosexual affair with King Nicomedes?

Though there is no other suggestion that Caesar was anything other than heterosexual and the prolific seducer of other men's wives , he was still issuing denials of the affair in the year of his assassination, four decades later! These are the facts. It's all very well to assume Caesar, as a youth, received the same education as every other scion of the rich.

That level of research could be summarised without quotes from Suetonius writing on Caesar himself or Cicero writing about another young man. What stands out in Caesar's case? Where precisely were his estates? What local legends survive of him? What is known of the gardens he was to bequeath in his will? I believe there must be things of this kind worthy to include, no matter how dubious the sources may be. Temples were erected to him and all kind of relics would have been dug out and revered.

Still being in living memory, anyone who knew him would have contributed to this lore. For comparison, take the life of Jesus Christ, who was far less well-known, yet many little snippets of his family story came out after his death. For example, during the flight to Egypt, Joseph is believed by Coptic Christians to have worked as a carpenter on the Fortress of Babylon in Old Cairo. In the decades after Julius Caesar's death, I am sure thousands of stories were told and many places identified with him.

But this book is not based on field research, which is a great shame. We need to know more of his background than just the supposed shape and colour of his toga.

Other ways of getting at the real man could have included a comparative study of the sculpture. Roman artists followed the realism of their Greek masters and though not exactly a warts-and-all approach, neither was Roman stone portraiture ever more than lightly idealised or stylised. Caesar's portrayal in contemporary literature is undoubtedly biased towards the writer's politics.

There is a short round-up of Caesar in literature towards the end of Goldsworthy's book, but nothing like the comparative study I would have expected. Gielgud's portrayal of Shakespeare's Caesar, which I saw at the National Theatre in London, , was somewhat elderly and patrician the actor himself was probably too old by then , but I seem to remember it was greeted as a classic performance.

Caesar, was responsible for his own myth-making, and his efforts to promote himself have reverberated down the centuries. Any narrative that ends in the pre-known sudden death of its protagonist is bound to be overshadowed by a Faustian cloud; especially a text like Goldsworthy's, which blithely reminds us what is going happen to its protagonist every fifty or so pages. Yet it does not follow that as soon as Caesar crossed the little Rubicon river with the XIIIth Legion an act of civil war , that his committal of treason therefore doomed him.

It is no coincidence that so many of Caesar's words and actions whether real, invented or associated have similarly entered international parlance and culture. A few months later, returning in triumphal to Rome, the expression was written out on placards and carried in procession and was taken to mean ALL of his conquests. Yet Caesar, then dead, remained aloof from the implication.

The myth he built around himself continued to grow long after his death, robbing the assassins of their justification. Throughout the book, the initials BC are used, which I can't bother objecting to as date marker. The alternative BCE, though it is more politically correct, still refers to the Gregorian calendar itself a revision of a calendar introduced by Julius Caesar , and anchors history to a Romano-Christian world view.

What niggles me is the Faustian countdown effect of constantly referring to these dates. Goldsworthy even talks about BC decades as though they existed. Well, yes, of course ten year periods did exist, but not in the way we count them back from the estimated birth year of Jesus Christ. The Romans had their own anno primo though never fully agreed on from which Julius Caesar lived in the eighth century.

By constantly mentioning years in the countdown BC timetable, Goldsworthy alienates us from the mental set of the Romans. When we get into the middle and latter thirds of the book, the narrative is dominated by Caesar's military campaigns in Gaul and the Civil War, the true military bias of the book is revealed. Generals throughout history whether of the field or armchair variety have studied Caesar's campaigns and Napoleon Bonaparte's commentaries on Caesar's set piece battles are mentioned several times.

Caesar's luck, especially in recovering from his own mistakes, seems to have been a major feature of the campaigns he waged. Also, his caution, which probably cost him more victories than defeats, preserved him to fight another day.

Of life on his campaigns, Goldsworthy gives interesting details. For example, that Caesar would often stay with local Celtic nobles rather than in his own camp.

That horses were fed on seaweed when all other fodder was used up. And that barley or even roots were sometimes made into bread for the legionnaires. What Goldsworthy fails to do, I think because he always prefers to reserve final judgement, is to summarise the main qualities of Caesar's war fighting succinctly enough.

And yet, all the evidence is in the book. Firstly, he was a front-line general who shared the risks of combat and thereby gained the devotion of his soldiers. As a youngster, he went East, organised local militias along Roman lines, and achieved modest successes against poorly-led opposition. Later on, in Gaul, again pitching well-trained troops against semi-wild native warriors, time and time again he overcame divided enemies.

Finally, forced to fight against Roman legions in the civil war, he lost almost everything - except his head. Against a tired Pompey, the twelve years he had spent leading armies in the field gave him a significant edge and total victory in the end. It may come as no surprise to the reader that Caesar suffered from epilepsy, and Goldsworthy does mention the bare facts. However, I would expect a biographer worth his salt to have investigated the incidence of epilepsy amongst other figures from military, political and literary history.

Then, by comparing Casear's situation with their's, at least we could have had a better idea of what he and his followers were up against. Nowhere does Goldsworthy make it clear that Caesar's ability to compromise with his fellow Roman aristocrats would, in the end, prove his downfall. His dictatorship was never the tyranny that Sulla's was, he didn't have people rounded up and killed. He wanted genuine reform: land redistribution to the less well off, the prosecution of corrupt officials, the reward of loyalty, even democracy.

He was not vengeful, never dismissed the Senate or blocked elections to the various offices of state. Few could have borne him real grudges. It was simple jealousy, with which the Roman republic was rife and which he practised as much as most , that set men against him.

Jealousy was even encouraged by the system. Elections for the highest offices of state being held every year was just incompatible with a growing empire.

Having already expanded far beyond the city-state it was founded as, Rome risked the same fate Athens had suffered four centuries before. An empire needs both strong central AND devolved local government. When appointments were made on a yearly basis and new governors took months to arrive at their territories, there was bound to be discontinuity and corruption. As long as men were able to fight amongst themselves for favours, they would do so to the detriment of the common good.

That's not to suggest Caesar was too saintly for his own good. He and the rest of the Roman nobility were a blood-thirsty lot, which Goldsworthy's book bears witness to and apologises for. What distinguished the Romans from their Gaulish, Egyptian and German neighbours was their organisational skill; meaning they were able to work together in a way unique in the ancient world.

Co-operating as soldiers on campaign, they divided the labour of foraging, construction work and actual fighting in a manner that confounded their enemies. In times of war and peace they were business people, traders, settlers, opportunists, you could almost say proto-capitalists — slave-drivers without ethical qualms. In the upshot, Caesar's assassination differs not from any St Valentine's Day massacre type of peer justice. All Caesars, whether big-hearted Julius' or snidey little Edward G.

Robinson's, live and die by the sword of jealous brothers-in-arms. View all 4 comments. Feb 24, Heinz Reinhardt rated it really liked it. Gaius Julius Caesar is the most famous Roman to have ever lived. In part this is because his own writings have survived and are known to us, and he was himself a very good writer.

However, it was also the sort of man that he was as well. Caesar was an intellectual, a politician of rare genius, a dutiful soldier and Roman patriot, an inveterate and shameless ladies man who slept with the wives of numerous other men and the famous Cleopatra, and a man who knew how to turn a phrase to manipulate th Gaius Julius Caesar is the most famous Roman to have ever lived. Caesar was an intellectual, a politician of rare genius, a dutiful soldier and Roman patriot, an inveterate and shameless ladies man who slept with the wives of numerous other men and the famous Cleopatra, and a man who knew how to turn a phrase to manipulate the masses.

But above all else, Caesar was one of the greatest generals to have ever lived. Adrian Goldsworthy's finest work is this biopic, focused on the political and military aspects of the subject, of Julius Caesar and the world In which he lived. While most of us think of Caesar as the man who turned Rome from a Republic into an Empire, Goldsworthy shows that this is not only not true it is a persistent myth amongst the lesser read in ancient history , but that the truth of what Caesar really did was far more complex, and nuanced, than what most believe.

I will definitely recommend this book to history, biography lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download.