The Bottom Line
Pros
- Battle coverage is suitable for military history novices
- Doesn't sugarcoat his colossus
- To help novices, takes firm stands on confusing areas instead of showing all sides
- Details are adequate for someone new to the field
Cons
- Very long
- Maps don't cover all areas
- Sometimes hard to follow
Description
- Diagrams of the battle formations.
- Shows Caesar as not always willing to share glory.
- Explains Labienus' defection in terms of his unwillingness to remain secondary.
- Times and people filled with complex contradictions.
- Presents the political/familial squabbles as contributing heavily to the civil war.
- Shows Caesar as a very human Roman whose crossing the Rubicon is based on one of his many failures - here, political.
- Covers all the major scandals of the period.
- Presumes familiarity with the Caesar of stage and screen.
- Diagrams clarify otherwise baffling battle movements.
- See Irene Hahn's Review.
Guide Review - Review of Goldsworthy's Caesar Life of a Colossus
Goldsworthy shows Julius Caesar as a man who could easily recover from setbacks and failures, such as those when in Gaul, against the Helvetii, Suessiones, Nervii, Minapi and Morini, Eburones, and more. In Britain, Caesar didn't even learn from his mistake of not paying attention to the elements and didn't accomplish much of anything in his two trips across the Channel. Caesar's earlier career as a prosecutor was equally ineffectual, but Caesar was making a name for himself. Success was getting rich, winning great glory, and creating an army that was personally devoted to him. By concentrating on the clay feet of Caesar, Goldsworthy gives a glimpse of what it must have felt like being under the spell of the "colossus."
There are other lesser themes that Goldsworthy highlights, including Caesar's lack of religiousness and a peculiar emphasis on the solemn oath as something sinister to Romans, which I think are mainly inserted to give the narrative continuity -- much needed in a long biography.
For me, the best part was the middle, where, by reading at the rate of probably less than five pages an hour, I was finally able to understand what happened during Caesar's Gallic campaigns through the surrender of Vercingetorix, although the details for the mopping up operations that followed -- including the cutting off of the hands of the men of Uxellodunum -- are skimpy.
