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JULIUS CAESAR: THE COLOSSUS OF ROME. By RICHARD A. BILLOWS. London: Routledge. 2009. Pp. xv, 312.
OF ALL THE PERSONALITIES OF ANCIENT ROME, Julius Caesar is arguably the most celebrated, certainly of the non-villainous variety. Soldier, statesman, and writer, his name is permanendy embodied in one of the months, a calendar system, and the old tides of some European monarchs, to say nothing of Canada's most popular cocktail, a salad, and a birth-method (the last two spuriously). His celebrity status is reflected by the stream of modern works devoted to him, nicely surveyed in Billows's opening chapter, and the appearance of at least two more books in English in the meantime, P. Freeman, Julius Caesar (New York 2008), and M. Griffin (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar (Oxford 2009), suggests that the Caesar industry is immune to recession. Readers from undergraduate to well-established scholar are well served, and new factual information is not likely to be forthcoming. Can yet another addition to the corpus be warranted? One justification would be that the writer brings a novel approach to the topic. On that score Billows does qualify. He adopts a deterministic approach to his subject, not in itself remarkable, but he pushes determinism to its furthest limits, perhaps even beyond, seeing Caesar as a phenomenon that simply had to happen. In adopting this approach, he overtly seeks to counter the thesis most notably espoused by Eric Gruen (The Last Generation of the Roman Republic2 [Berkeley 1994]) of a society that simply stumbled into civil war and of a Caesar whose aim was little more than acceptance by his peers as the first among equals....