Customer Reviews

Caesar: A Biography

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Meier writes a good book with, for the most part, many facts about JC and Rome and that era.

However he goes off on these tangents where he wants to prove some points. He declares that JC was an outsider and the republic was bound to fall. Yet he does not bring any proof of these 'facts' to this book. He uses the fact that the republic fell to show that what he said was true. I found this a useless part of the book and skimmed over many paragraphs of his rhetorical questions - Why would Caesar do this? Did he not know? yada yada yada.

I love facts. Give me names, dates, places, events. Leave your opinions in separate sections of the book not interwoven in the bio.

The main point Meier makes is that JC was an outsider to Rome's politics. While in fact he was the opposite. JC was as close to the inside as any of the others in the senatorial class. Meier fails to show a typical insider to contrast with this supposed outsider. Cato, Cicero, Pompey were no different than Caesar with respect to any question of a right to be in Rome or in the Senate. Meiere also fails to say exactly why he thinks JC is an outsider.

Another thing I did not like is the fabricated scenes Meier describes. Here is a bit where he talks of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (page 3 already) "There Caesar halted. He hesitated. Once again, beside the swiftly flowing river swollen by heavy rain, he reviewed the various arguments, then reiterated his decision. For a moment he once again took a detached look at the plan he had already embraced; what he had begun to set in train step by step now appeared to him as an awful vision. All the possible consequences of the enterprise presented themselves in their full horror. Contemplating them, he may have felt dizzy."

I think Meier is dizzy. Unless Caesar himself wrote this in some letter or as part of his Bellum Civile it should not be presented in this book. Meier's assumption of what Caesar might have thought is no better than what you or I or any student of the Roman era could think. My own opinion is that Caesar would have already thought of the consequences months earlier (and came to his decision to protect his honour) and that the Rubicon was only a symbol - there would be no ceremony for Caesar on the riverbank. He would have just ridden on by discounting the river's importance. It is nice to have some color in the book to try and bring the reader there but I think we get more of "what Meier would do if he was Caesar" than of what Caesar actually did or could have done.

Julius Caesar was a very complex person with many talents and abilities. Great general, brave leader, master politician, cruel and merciful, an honourable (honour seeking) man at the turning point of Rome where the republic becomes the empire. Meier gives us these pictures of the man, yet he then imposes his own opinions on the reader, which are at times too much to take. Read this book and make up your own mind.

The book is worth it for the 95% of it that is factual and interesting. The other 5% consist of boring opinions (if you do not agree with Meier like I do not) that go off on tangents and are not needed here. If I could edit this book I would put all of Meier's stuff at the end in its own chapter. Read Caesar's work first - Bellum Gallica and Bellum Civile (I read the first one here), and know something about the politics and history of Rome during the late Republic. Then read this book.

I recently reread this book after originally reading it probably 5 years ago. When I bought it, I was expecting it to be a sophisticated biography. It's more than that and less than that. It's less in that it is not a narrative biography where you are led through a story. There are some dense parts and it does help to know a decent amount about Roman history from Sulla to Augustus. However...

The book is so much more than a biography because it starts with a very simple question: Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon thereby consciously plunging all known civilization into a civil war that would lead to the deaths of thousands? I admire the author because he respects his subject enough to ask a modern question of him. Normally, we just assume that the ancients did things we would consider cruel and evil because that's the way things were back then. But, don't they deserve better than that? Well, Meier does better by Caesar. He spends the whole book describing the environment Caesar was immersed in, the problems the Romans faced, and the problems that Caesar faced. And yet, we are still left with the question: Why start a civil war? The opening section describing this question is worth the price whether you read all of Meier's answer or not. It's just a fundamentally interesting question from a human perspective and worth spending time thinking about...which is what Meier's book does...and what I think he wanted the reader to do also.

This book is really worth reading. Like one of the other reviewers, I feel compelled to write because of the the great diversity of ratings (2 to 5 stars). I have to admit that Julius Caesar is one of my heroes. That being said, I could tell that the author of this book didn't like Julius Caesar very much and it showed in his writing. I have wondered for many years about the late Republican Roman era. Was what happened inevitable? The author of this book gives political insights on this period of history and how Julius Casar fit in (or maybe didn't fit in with that outsider theory). I did not agree with all of the insights presented, but it made me think and rethink about why the Republic collapsed. Was the Principate/Empire really such a bad system? Robert Graves's Claudius would have said yes, but after reading this book, I come away with a different outlook on that because of the theories and facts that Meier presents.
On the other hand sometimes Meier gets tedious in what he seems to think Casar should have done. What should Caesar should done? not crossed the Rubicon, and let those pompous twits in the Senate strip him of his honors and property and force him into exile? Nobody acts entirely selflessly and Caesar was no exception. If the senate hadn't forced Caesar into crossing the Rubicon, maybe everything would have turned or different ort maybe not. Meier points out that the Republic had been in collapse for years before Caesar was born.
A thought-provoking read on the whole.

Some reviews of this book strike me as a bit off. The standard scholarly bio is Gelzer's; if you want footnotes and an academically limited perspective, go there.

What this book does is to try to imagine what it was like to be Caesar, to be a colleague or enemy of Caesar's---not in some fuzzy fictionalizing way, but in more subtle ways.

I've read both Gelzer and Meier, but Meier's account of Caesar made by far the greater impression. Certainly no "debunking" went on, that I could tell.

And the background on Rome, making it "Caesar's Life & Times" for one reviewer, was welcome to me, and an inseparable part of the author's effort to understand Caesar.

An admirably thorough book greatly diminished in impact by an unbearably dull writing style. This is a book for academics rather laymen interested in Caesar. When one has recently read history written by someone such as AJP Taylor, it is impossible to read a book as plodding as Meier's 'Caesar'.

I noticed that 1-star reviews and the overall 4 star review and I wanted to add my voice to the chorus here. If you want the STORY of Julius Caesar, look elsewhere. This is NOT a good introduction. I consider myself a smart guy, and I'm a lawyer, so I'm no stranger to reading long, technical documents. This book, however, is more like an essay than a biography.

What's the difference, you ask. Like other reviewers, I'd agree that there is a complete lack of specific detail and description of events. 70% of the book is statements like, "People with power tend to [insert conclusion]. Caesar was an expert at this." He goes on for page after page about causes, effects, and is decidedly amateurish psychology and every now and then throws in the SMALLEST kernel of fact about Caesar. It's a REALLY boring slog, which is mind-numbing because Caesar is one of the most interesting people ever, and his life was surely not lacking in interesting events, characters, or quotes.

This book is probably fun for people who know everything about Caesar and want to get together and talk about what "it all means" in the great scheme of things. The problem is that he skips over the real flavor of what HAPPENED to Caesar and what he did.

The first 150 pages or so barely mention Caesar, as they mention Pompey, Sulla and other powerful pre-JC politicians.

Avoid this one.

Caesear by Meier is a really amazing book. .... I have a huge library on Rome history, to which field I have dedicated an entire life, so I perhaps have some ground to say this is the very best book about the period ever written to date.