Peter Stothard’s
The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar offers a deft blend of narrative history and intelligent historical fiction in following the fates of Julius Caesar’s killers.
Peter Stothard,
The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 274 pp., $27.95.
HISTORY IS mainly a matter of unforeseen outcomes yielding unintended consequences. The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC offers a striking case in point. Hoping to bring back the (largely imaginary) good old days of the early Roman Republic, a privileged, patrician clique of Roman senators led by Gaius Cassius Longinus (Shakespeare’s “lean and hungry” Cassius) and Marcus Brutus (Shakespeare’s “noblest Roman of them all”) murdered a brilliant soldier-statesman in what they convinced themselves was a heroic act of tyrannicide. In fact, it offered a reminder that all rogues led to Rome. Although he carefully avoided involv