It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 bc, is right in the middle of Rome, in Largo di Torre Argentina. When I was there, the tourists were only interested in the feral cats that stroll across the murder scene.
Jochen Bleicken shrewdly begins this long, occasionally heavygoing but unequalled biography with that murder. It’s only because Caesar appointed his great-nephew Gaius Octavius (known later as Augustus) as his adopted son and heir that the latter rose to such heights. But for that crucial adoption, Augustus wasn’t that posh. His real father was a praetor in Velitre, a little town in the Alban mountains; his mother was from a small-town, senatorial background. Upper class, yes; elite, ruling class, no.
That relatively ungrand beginning explains a lot about the hard-working, self-aware, self-denying character that propelled Augustus to greatness.
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