Julius Caesar

It is difficult, now, to separate the most famous Roman of them all from the most famous author of them all. For twenty generations, the Julius Caesar defined by Shakespeare has overwhelmed all other images of Caesar, so that it it is difficult to imagine the living man himself. Yet Shakespeare's Caesar, taken solely as biography, is deeply flawed. Caesar is portrayed as overtopping all his contemporaries, yet is also humorless, pompous, even self-importantly fearful; all attributes which friends and enemies in his own time would have found perplexingly off-base. There is no hint of the pe…