Caesar: A Biography [Paperback]

Christian Meier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 1997

As politician and diplomat, writer and lover, but above all as a military genius, Julius Caesar is one of the perennially fascinating figures in history—Boswell called him ”the greatest man of any age.” Christian Meier’s authoritative and accessible biography is the definitive modern account of Caesar’s life and career, setting Caesar’s life story against the rich political and social background of the Late Roman Republic.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Christian Meier is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Munich. He is one of Europe’s leading authorities on the Late Roman Republic and is the author of The Greek Discovery of Politics and The Political Art of Greek Tragedy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (January 31, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 046500895X
• ISBN-13: 978-0465008957
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dense but often illuminating, September 27, 2001

By 

Ralph Miller (Vallejo, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Caesar: A Biography (Paperback)

Having some familiarity already with Roman history, I probably did not suffer as many may do reading this book if they do not know already the outlines of the era. Meier has the weaknesses of the Germanic intellect: he is longwinded, dense, and fuzzy at the edges, sometime rhapsodizing incoherently for pages about Some Big Concept he has contrived to explain Caesar's force and character. On the other hand, some of his ideas are compellng, especially his elaborate (and thematic) treatment of The Outsider as exemplified by Marius and Sulla, both of whom later served as models for Caesar.

But certain things are just fudged over, and left unclear. I only discovered by reading at the same time in Finley Hooper's "Roman Realities" (o.p.; get it out of the library) that Clodius, who was a wild man and sometime ally/enemy of Caesar, as well as Cicero and others, was the same Clodius who forced Caesar to divorce his wife Pompeia when Clodius allegedly tried to seduce her by dressing as a female slave and infiltrating Caesar's house. This is only symptomatic. The whole Catilinarian conspiracy is similarly befogged with intrigue, which of course it was at the time; but it is the duty of the historian to clarify such events.

All in all, I much prefer Michael Grant's book on Caesar, which is now o.p. too. However, it was shorter, more succinct, and not as rich in speculation as Meier's. This book is very thought-provoking at times, but don't rely on it to give you a coherent picture of this time. For Caesar's remarkable personality, though, it's probably the best.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars "Caesar" -- an antidote for insomnia, July 7, 2008

By 

Lee E. Probst (Tucson, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Caesar: A Biography (Paperback)

If you are troubled by insomnia, by all means buy this book. Put it on your night stand and you may find that it will solve your problem. However, in the end you may prefer pills. The author may well be one of the leading experts on ancient history as the book jacket claims. He is a professor at the University of Munich. But one thing is for sure - he is never at a loss for words. A specialist may enjoy reading all of his long winded questions, his endless pros and cons, and his speculations, but I did not. I labored through the roughly 500 pages and, at the end, felt nothing so much as relief and deliverance. Unless you really relish an expert's pontificating and moralizing, I would suggest that you can easily skip the first fifty pages and maybe the first one hundred. However be forewarned, that is only the beginning. There is more of the same - lots more.

I slogged through it all, but I did not feel that I had learned very much, beyond the fact that the author is anything but a fan of Julius Caesar. He beats the reader to death with his "inside-outside" theory, his moralizing and philosophizing, but there is very little in the way of hard facts or substantive biography. To be sure, there may be very little information on Caesar's life still extant; however, one still has to contend with some five hundred pages! And I was struck by the fact that there are no foot notes and it is necessary to wait to the first afterward before the author condescends to let the reader know about some of his sources. And in the second afterward, the author admits that he has discovered a salient piece of evidence which tends to put his view of Caesar into question, but immediately denies the importance of same.

I am not an expert on the subject at hand or the period, but for my money the author asks too much. He seems to expect that the reader will simply accept his view of Caesar. Rather than admit that he simply doesn't know something, he continually speculates, guesstimates, and assumes that the reader will be convinced of his conclusions, vague though the latter are. I suspect that the author has lived too much in the shadow of Hitler to render an impartial estimate of Caesar. Even if Meier is 100% correct, there is the little matter of Caesar's legacy. Little things like the fact that the French and the Spanish speak a romance language today (and the Germans do not). Or the fact that all of his successors used the title of Caesar and that it continued on into the German and Russian Empires of the Kaisers and Tsars. Or even the fact that our calendar today is his revision and known as the Julian calendar. The author does, at one point, grudgingly concede that Caesar was brilliant and may have been the greatest military commander in history, but he committed the supreme sin in Meier's eyes of failing to embrace the values of the Republic. (This while conceding that the Roman Republic was past saving.) While condemning Caesar for his brutality, and in spite of his many acts of clemency, he passes over Sulla's slaughter of thousands lightly, explaining that after all Sulla did it to help the Republic! According to Meier, Caesar, had no idea of how to solve the problem of a failing government other than autocracy - ironically, precisely the solution reached after his death and some fifteen years of civil war, by Octavius (Augustus). At least no known idea. In brief, I was not persuaded by the author's thesis. I would infinitely prefer a biography of Caesar if it could be written by Anthony Everitt whose "Cicero" and "Augustus" biographies are at least readable. Everitt is reader friendly. Meier is not.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well told., November 19, 2002

By 

nto62 (Corona, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Caesar: A Biography (Paperback)

Caesar, by Christian Meier is a no nonsense treatise on the life of Julius Caesar and the political maelstrom which surrounded it. Here, Meier strips the veneer away to show a man truly great, but also truly flawed.

From Caesars birth to the inevitable Ides of March, Meier educates, analyzes, and explains the person, the time, and the place with remarkable skill and detail. This isn't an edge-of-your-seat sort of reading experience. Instead, it is a comfortably patient, thought provoking book of tremendous scholarly value. Meier artfully avoids a teleological viewpoint striving successfully to explain what Caesar, Cicero, Cato, Pompey, et al, thought and saw then. We note clearly that their experience was much different than what we might see through 2000+ years of reflection.

Of particular interest is the juxtaposition between the Republic of Rome and Caesar. His thirst for recognition and the weakness of the Senate to shunt it presents paradox after paradox as Caesar struggles to control the political game. In the end, both Senate and Caesar submit to an undesired civil war. From there, the power struggle continues as does the edification of the reader.

Though the book may plod in places, these instances are brief and rare. It is well worth the time of any serious reader interested in early Rome and one of the most famous men in recorded history.