Julius Caesar and the Roman People - Softcover

Morstein-Marx, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1108932088 ISBN 13: 9781108932080

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2023

Synopsis

Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms and institutions, but because Caesar's extraordinary success mobilized a determined opposition which ultimately preferred to precipitate civil war rather than accept its political defeat. Based on painstaking re-analysis of the ancient sources in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the participatory role of the People in the republican political system, a strong emphasis on agents' choices rather than structural causation, and profound scepticism toward the facile determinism that often substitutes for historical explanation, this book offers a radical reinterpretation of a figure of profound historical importance who stands at the turning point of Roman history from Republic to Empire.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Morstein-Marx is a Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge, 2004), Hegemony to Empire: The Development of the Roman Imperium in the East, 148-62 B.C. (1995), and co-editor of A Companion to the Roman Republic (2006).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108932088
• ISBN 13: 9781108932080
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 704