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![[Caesar's Women]]( ../images/caesarswomen.gif)
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For those whose knowledge of Julius Caesar is limited to fuzzy remembrances of the play by Shakespeare, Colleen McCullough's full-scale portrait of the Roman emperor will be a delight and a revelation-ambitious, thoughtful, cold, passionate, resourceful, reckless, and thoroughly believable.
Caesar's Women, fourth in McCullough's series of linked but self-contained novels about ancient Rome, continues a marvelous re-creation of men and women--dead two thousand years ago and more--whose actions, whether for good or for ill, are still capable of capturing our interest and engaging our loyalties.
(The three previous novels are The First Man in Rome, The Grass Crown, and Fortune's Favorites.)
At center stage in the present novel is Julius Caesar-on the threshold of his star-fated climb to greatness. His destiny, he believes, is to change the world; against him, as supporters of the status quo, are virtually the entire Roman nobility.
McCullough is at her best in dramatizing, through crisp dialogue and action, the complicated and involuted power plays between Caesar and his Senate rivals--Bibulus, Cato, and Cicero. And she is masterful in her ability to delineate, in telling vignettes, the quick flash of insight, the sudden moment of decision.
In one memorable Senate debate scene, Cato so resoundingly excoriates Caesar's ally, Pompey, that the entire assembly (with the exception of Pompey) erupts into applause at such a glorious piece of extemporaneous invective. Even Caesar finds it hard work "to sit impassive, hands down at his sides. . . . Oh, masterly! Oh, to have lived to hear it was a privilege!" And then he notices Pompey: "Ye gods, the foolish man was taking the hysterical applause personally. . . . Not until that moment did Caesar realize the extent of the insecurity and hunger to be approved of inside Pompey the Great."
"There are those who despise the 'novelization of history,' " McCullough writes, "but as a technique of historical exploration and deduction it has something to recommend it-provided that the writer is thoroughly steeped in the history of the period concerned."
If ever a writer of historical novels has been thoroughly steeped in the history of her subject, it is Colleen McCullough. Her Roman novels are based on 13 years of research and each comes provided with maps, a specially adapted glossary, and painstakingly realistic illustrations of the major characters.
With regard to Caesar's Women, McCullough notes, "Only the richness of the ancient sources has permitted me to dwell more fully in this volume upon the role of Roman women in noble Roman life. . . ." In particular, the novel focuses upon the roles of three Roman women whose lives and destinies are intertwined with Caesar's own life and fate: Aurelia, Caesar's mother; Servilia, his mistress; and Julia, his daughter. McCullough presents it all: intrigues, infidelities, discreet liaisons, marriages for power or position and concomitant divorces to achieve that same power or position.
Few of us in Western Civilization may consciously acknowledge it, but we have strong bonds of kinship with a society that once dominated the known world and even today colors our languages, our laws, our customs, our ideals. Colleen McCullough's enthralling series of novels tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Caesar's Rome. One looks forward with anticipation, and with little patience, for the next volume, tentatively entitled Let the Dice Fly
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James William Brown is the author of a novel, Blood Dance (Harcourt Brace). He lives in southeastern Massachusetts.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.