Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic

A dual biography of Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger that offers a dire warning: republics collapse when partisanship overrides the common good.

In Uncommon Wrath, historian Josiah Osgood tells the story of how the political rivalry between Julius Caesar and Marcus Cato precipitated the end of the Roman Republic. As the champions of two dominant but distinct visions for Rome, Caesar and Cato each represented qualities that had made the Republic strong, but their ideological differences entrenched into enmity and mutual fear. The intensity of their collective factions became a tribal divide, hampering their ability to make good decisions and undermining democratic government. The men’s toxic polarity meant that despite their shared devotion to the Republic, they pushed it into civil war.

Deeply researched and compellingly told, Uncommon Wrath is a groundbreaking biography of two men whose hatred for each other destroyed the world they loved.

Josiah Osgood is professor of classics at Georgetown University and holds a PhD from Yale University. A winner of the Rome Prize, he is the author of five books on Roman history and the translator and editor of How to Be a Bad Emperor, a 2020 edition of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. He lives in Washington, DC.