Customer Reviews

A Noise of War: Caesar, Pompey, Octavian and the Struggle for Rome

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I bought this book for two reasons: Pompey's campaign against the Cilician pirates (5 pages) and the bibliography (8 pages). While I was a little disappointed in the brief coverage of the campaign, I was not disappointed in the bibliography (I have ordered several books from it already).

Readers should understand that this is not an extensive volume on the history of Rome during the lives of Caesar, Pompey and Cicero. It is, however, a wonderfully told brief overview of those times. Consider this as a starting point for the novice to Roman history in the first century BC. The author writes in an easy style that makes the book very readable. Langguth makes the occasional effort to get inside the heads of the various protagonists, but for the most part confines his efforts to presenting the details of history as is appropriate for an overview history. The history is told in sequential order skipping back and forth between the main personae and traces their rise to power and eventual fall from grace. There is just enough detail to whet the appetite for more.

For further reading on Caesar and the times try Caesar by Christian Meier. P-)

I read this book and liked it very much. Langguth dedicated this book to his high school Latin teacher who transcended a mechanical and arcane study of grammar and syntax and inspired the author and his fellow students with the history, "the story" if you will, of this long lost age which was so similar in many ways to our own. Prior to the Prostestant reformation and to a substantial extent even until 1965, Biblical scripture itself was the more or less the sole province of learned scholars and clerics who were privileged to know what had become an obscure academic and dead language. The story of the Gospel, the basic message, became obscured, if not somewhat lost, in pedantic and hair-splitting disputes over textual interpretations in the tradition of the pharisees of Jesus' day. It is in this context that Langguth seeks, as he explains in his Introduction, to bring the secular Scripture of the classics and its cultural legacy to the plebeian reader as was done with Holy Scripture begining five centuries ago. Thus, while Langguth's book is not perfect from an academic standpoint from which it does not pretend to proceed in any strict sense (for example no years known as B.C. ever existed in real time, that calendar was retroactively imposed centuries later), it is still actually more historically accurate than Shakespeare's accounts of these events and much more readable. This book is a good introduction to the history of this age and can be followed by a study in English translation of Plutarch to whom Langguth is largely faithful.

Considering the author did such a good job with the American Revolution in "Patriots," this book was a big disappointment.It lacks depth and is riddled with errors, e.g.,Cicero gave a great speech in defense of Milo; Crassus described as a "rich merchant". I was really annoyed with the author's use of the term "patrician" when the more correct term would be "Optimate" (hint: not all nobles were patricians).