Customer Reviews

The Education of Julius Caesar: A Biography, a Reconstruction

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I found Kahn's book fascinating, although I agree with an earlier reviewer that I regret he could not keep his personal politics more out of his book - irritating, but a small caveat when there is so much of use here. It's as if Kahn is too prone to project Rome in 60 BC onto the U.S. in, say, 1935. I've read many books on Caesar (including C. Meier's rather romantic German version) and in many ways, I enjoyed Kahn's more than any except Gelzer (who is still the best). Kahn has his finger on almost every significant event in Caesar's (and the late Republic's) life and is able to work through the facts both thoroughly and logically. In fact, the book is almost overwhelming in its detail. Agreed, he is one of the "pro-Caesar" faction - which seems almost by definition to mean, he's anti-Optimate. Well, it's the rare historian of Caesar who can manage not to take sides on this subject, the very issue that tore the Republic apart. Read the book with the realization that you have a fine bio of Caesar here, accurate and thorough, but more than slightly prejudiced against the Roman Senate that so thoroughly detested and tried to destroy Caesar and you will do very well.

Kahn's style is slightly stiff at times but otherwise this is an excellent piece of work. Gaius Julius Caesar was a complex, brilliant man and this book leaves you wondering what the Roman world could have become had he not been struck down before he had finished his work. He was murdered 3 days prior to his planned trip to conquer Parthia (Persia)and make a trade route (w/ Roman paved roads) to India. The only real shortcoming to this work is in the area of his personal life. G.J.C.'s uncle was the brilliant consuler and tactician Gaius Marius, he was distantly related to Sulla the dictator, was raised in the Roman version of housing projects by a brilliant and devoted mother, had 3 legal Roman wives, a mistress (Marcus Brutus' mother) and a supposed fling with Cleopatra. However, Kahn devotes minimal time to G.J.C.'s personal life and how it related to his career. Match this book with Colleen McCullough's outstanding 5-part series "The First Man In Rome" and you get a really clear picture.

FORGET THE ALLEGATIONS OF BIAS AND LEFTISM BY SOME PREVIOUS REVIEWERS. In 40 years of studying the Roman Republic, I find this book to be the best review of Caesar and his times ever written. Kahn does a compelling job of tracing and demonstrating the people, events, knowledge, and institutions that shaped and were modified by Caesar. Especially if you are a Ciceronian, you need to read this book; no writer on Rome since Kahn's book was first published can write without reference to this work, even if to disagree.

I read this when it was first issued, and I go back to it again and again. I also recommend it to those who want a readable and full introduction to Late Republican life.

'The Education of Julius Caesar' is a solid biography of Caesar and an excellent overview of late republic political history. Khan writes with a lucent style and great technique to tell Caesar's story. For example, throughout the book Kahn contrasts Caesar's Epicureanism to the optimates' Stoicism; something I've never seen done in a Caesar biography before. He uses this contrast to highlight that Caesar's life was more than a political power struggle; it was also a philosophical struggle.

My only warning--if you know next to nothing about Caesar's life or late roman republic politics don't start here. While the book is extremely detailed it doesn't do a great job of showing where cities are located (there are no maps), or explaining the political curus honorum. It's easy to get a praetor, tribune, aedile, censor, consul, and everything else mixed up if you've never studied it before. I'd recommend Colleen McCullough's excellent 'Masters of Rome' before reading this.

Overall--an excellent biography of Caesar, well written, and great style.

I have read a number of books about Caesar, Cicero, and their times. While I am no academic, and may have missed any less-obvious factual errors in any of the books I have read (assming such errors exist), Kahn's book is by far the best and most compelling book I have read on the period. I could not put it down. It brings Caesar and his fellow countrymen alive, explains their motivations and actions in a way I could understand with my life-experience today, and seems to get at the heart of what made not only Caesar but also Cicero and their peers tick. Yes, Kahn seems to have concluded that Caesar was more worthy of acclaim than many of his peers, but the more I have read about this era and the peopel who inhabited it, the more I have concluded that Kahn is probably correct. While Caesar certainly had personal and selfish motivations for his actions, and was capable of what we today would consider incredible brutality, he seems to have acted more ethically and morally (given his times) than the self-absorbed, wholly self-interested, and back-stabbing Cicero and many of their peers! If you are interested in Caesar or his times, definitely give this book a try!

What's wrong with the Education of Julius Caesar? In a word, Arthur Kahn can't seem to keep his Leftist political biases from coloring his evaluation of the Late Republic. His prejudices seep in on virutally every page in which the Senate is discussed. This is not to say that the Senators where saints; far from it. But they were men of their time, who had been raised in a political community that indoctrinated them into it's beliefs just as every other society does. Kahn seems to ignore this in his zeal to paint the "oligarchs", as he calls them, in a bad light. This is illegitimate, as anyone who understands the structure of the Roman state in that era must know. The Romans had a nomialist theory of the state. Rather than thinking that Rome as a poltical community was some kind of larger whole, over and above it's citizens, the Romans believed that Rome was nothing but the assembly of the Roman people as private persons. This is the reason they based citizenship and voting rights on wealth. Since they did not have a very sharp and differentiated notion of political as opposed to private life, they could not find a basis for evaluating one apart from the other. Thus, a rich man was literally more of a citizen than a poor one, because he had more of the Republic than the poor man did, due to his extensive property. We regard this as bizarre, but no one in Rome seems to have thought twice about it. A result of this identification of the personal and the political is the radical fusion of the personal interests of the rulers with those of the state. That is why the Senators reacted so violently to reform attempts - they knew no vision of politics that would enable them to see any degradation of their posiiton as anything other than an attack of Roman society itself. They simply could not differentiate their own positions of power from the State. This is what Kahn ignores. In page after page, he portrays the Senate as a gang of cynical, ruthless misers out to strip everyone else to the bone while hiding their crimes under the name of patriotism. In truth, these sad little men just didn't know any better. Kahn ignores this, and thus projects his own class-warfare ridden politics onto men who lived two millenia ago.

If you want a good biography of Caesar, try Christian Meier's "Caesar", availble at Amazon.com, instead.

I was attracted by the title. Caesar's education is his actual experienc in dealing with people. He was brilliant and would have done a lot for Rome. He "could read without moving his lips!" Contrary to Shakespeare he refused the crown. He was killed because he was about to redistribute the land. In capitalist societies sooner or later the most aggressive own all the land/wealth. It happened in Athens and Sparta. The Israelites established the Jubilee to compensate for this. At that time all debts were cancelled and land returned to former owners and slaves set free. I found this much more interesting and exciting than Thucydides!

Why would anyone write a biography of a historic figure and use a cartoon of a baboon on the cover? Can that be the face of the author?

I doubt that the greatest general and statesman of ancient times looked like a baboon. More likely it's a leftist biographer.

Don Norton