Caesar's Soliloquy:

...If what he has given us is more pedestrian it is also more trustworthy and may be more useful...

...We ourselves are concerned to learn all we can of the causes and course of revolution and dictatorship...

...The device is awkward and implausible, but its advantages outweigh fictional verisimilitude...

...what remains enigmatic is the personality...

...But Warner's honesty and his faithfulness to the exigencies of his form exact their price, both in respect to history and in respect to biography...

...For Caesar to anticipate our own experience and interest would be violent anachronism...

...It is not that we are ignorant of Caesar's career: for the crucial decade of his life we have his own Commentaries, and these are supplemented by revealing materials in such contemporary writers as Cicero, Catullus and Sal-lust...

...And yet, undoctored and unadorned as the story is, the sheer excitement and rapidity of events must carry the reader breathless to the end...

...Furthermore, no man who truly possesses these qualities can himself speak of his demonic verve, his wit, his warmth, his magnetism...

...Presumably to create proper atmosphere Warner emulates the style of an old-fashioned translation of a Latin author...

...Warner deals honestly with his readers not only in presenting a just distillation of sources and scholarship but also in communicating the tenseness and urgency of events...

...Warner's book is in the form of a long soliloquy spoken by Caesar during the sleepless hours before the Ides of March, with his wife Calpurnia sleeping uneasily beside him...

...Caesar's political maneuvers, like his battles, were indeed momentous in their effects upon history and have become text-book paradigms for both political revolution and the art of war, but they are not the basis for his claim to our continuing interest...

...What we are shown, in the handful of heroes who survive, are the clay feet and the sustaining armatures provided by interested parties to keep the figures erect...

...They do appear in some fictional treatments which take larger liberties with the sources, notably in Sir Pierson Dixon's recent Farewell Catullus...

...I may judge from the experience both of past and present times," wrote Edward Gibbon, "that the public are always curious to know the men who have left behind them any image of their minds: the most scanty accounts of such men are compiled with diligence and perused with eagerness...

...It is because Caesar has become a symbol that he demands our attention...

...The devoutest partisan of Caesarism can no longer class Brutus and Cassius with Judas Iscariot, as Dante did, and neither can its devoutest enemy glorify the tyrannicides as public benefactors...

...It cannot be, as some have held, that the public career is in fact the fullest expression of the personality and all of Caesar that matters, for Caesar was neither monolith nor monochrome, but supple and varied, and an artist in human relations as in language...

...What were the qualities of Caesar that made it possible for his image to be transformed into a symbol...

...So eager is he not to omit that the uninitiated reader must find many passages opaque...

...But to complain of their absence in Warner's book is merely to repeat that he has not attempted to write a conventional historical novel...

...We have the full biographies of Plutarch and Suetonius, based on good sources and written within a century and a half of Caesar's death...

...Society rather than its leaders are held responsible for change: If the particular individual associated with a given movement had not come forward, some other must soon have done so...

...No secular figure has evoked greater curiosity and eagerness than Caesar, and in none has diligence been so baffled...

...Reviewed by Moses Hadas Jay Professor of Greek, Columbia University RATIONALIST AND DEMOCRATIC ages tend to whittle down the roster of movers and shakers who have been traditionally credited with altering the course of human history...

...he does, in his soliloquy, analyze the motives and temperaments of the parties to the struggle and he does adumbrate his own ideal, but he cannot, as a detached observer with a Thucydidean temper might, formulate permanent laws of revolution and dictatorship...

...Yet these qualities are reflected if not expressly attested in the sources, and are indeed the key to Caesar's achievements as well as his personality...

...In her Hadrian's Memoirs Marguerite Yourcenar represented another fascinating Roman emperor as reviewing his life fully and frankly on his deathbed...

...Many have depicted plausible Caesars but none is surely Julius, for the public facade is not easily penetrable...

...We know the career and we know the personage...

...In a word...

...It is from the recorded encounters in his career that his personality must be extrapolated, as Shakespeare and Shaw and a hundred others have done...

...Of the two elements requisite for historical fiction Warner is more concerned with information than with imagination...

...Ideally only Caesar himself, not in memoirs written for publication but in candid and unbuttoned intimacy, can give us the antecedent intellectual and psychological factors which motivated his conduct...

...His book is a creditable and useful companion to the short biographies of Caesar by John Buchan and Alfred Duggan, his predecessors...

...It is such an ideal desideratum that Rex Warner has sought to supply...

...Caesar is one of the handful who cannot be dismissed...

...His crowded pages manage to find places for virtually every relevant bit of information about Caesar, and each fact or opinion he records can be documented from ancient sources or reputable modern commentators...