A strong sense of drama also sustains Adrian Goldsworthy’s “Caesar: Life of a Colossus” and Anthony Everitt’s “Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor.” Both are out to tell a good story.

Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Graves and many others have mined this era for its epic incident and human pathos. 14, after more than 40 years of rule, Augustus had come near outliving the Republic’s very memory, and by destroying, co-opting or intimidating the city’s old governing elite into submission, he delivered Rome into the hands of the emperors. As victor in his own civil wars, Augustus maintained an ostentatious facade of Republican government, while keeping real power in his own grasp. History bore out Caesar’s prophecy, largely through the wiles of his grand-nephew and adopted son, the ruthlessly ambitious youth who was to become Caesar Augustus. A new civil war will break out under far worse conditions than the last.” “I have long had my fill of power and glory but should anything happen to me, Rome will enjoy no peace.

“It is more important for the state than for myself that I should survive,” he had told friends. When a crowd of Roman senators cut down the dictator Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 B.C., they imagined that their daggers had saved the obsolete but tenacious oligarchy known as the Republic.

Adrian goldsworthy cesar