Julius Caesar’s assassins were widely regarded as heroes in Rome

It’s not as if Julius Caesar wasn’t warned about the Ides of March. Somebody thrust a written prediction of the assassination at him as he marched to the Senate on the fateful day. Alas for Julius, as Peter Stothard notes in this gripping, gorgeously written new account of the killing and its consequences, the dictator stuffed it away, unread, into the folds of his toga. Secreted in the folds of his colleagues’ togas were the daggers that would shortly destroy him.

The major themes of Roman (and therefore European) history are here writ large: tyranny vs freedom; politics vs self-preservation. We are at a crossroads in time when, if this one event had happened differently, everything might have changed. Stothard explores the familiar ground with fresh, engaging and learned eyes, displaying a novelist’s knack for redolent and evocative detail, from cicadas and lizards to the press and horror of battle.

Caesar was a tyrant, or near enough: he had a golden throne and his own priest, and he was even offered a crown; which, of course, he magnanimously refused. But did he do so because he really didn’t want to be a king, or because he was testing the crowd? His powers as dictator for life were extensive. The Romans, or at least a large section of the aristocrats, were anti-monarchical: they had booted out their kings, the Tarquins, hundreds of years earlier, and they wouldn’t stand for such quasi-regal shenanigans now.

The conspirators longed for the ideals of the Roman republic, where each arm of power was constrained. At first, they communicated in code, discussing the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius on power and liberty: it was much safer to talk at tangents. Stothard is excellent on the machinations and the murmurings that recruited the killers (including a somewhat dubious Cicero, who wouldn’t do the bloody deed himself but was quite happy to hang about outside while it was happening).