![]() Stothard says this philosophical dimension to the assassination and ensuing civil wars sometimes gets overlooked. Stothard vividly narrates how Epicureanism served as a mobilizing philosophy among the assassins, even as they argued over whether the true Epicurean would go so far as to assassinate Caesar, who was, after all, a Roman consul. Yet he shared a philosophy with many of his fellow plotters, namely the enlightened, anti-superstition school of Epicureanism, which held that the gods, if they existed at all, were far away and not interested in human affairs, and that people should use their reason to moderate their passions, thereby avoiding pain and achieving inner peace-a fashionable philosophy among the educated classes of Rome during this period. Parmensis was one of these “smaller people,” a back-bencher in the plot against Caesar who managed to outlast his 18 fellow assassins, outliving Brutus and Cassius by 12 years. The picture looking up from the bottom, or from the side, can often get you closer to the experience of people who were there on the spot than pretending that you're Julius Caesar or Brutus.” If you look at the same event from the point of view of the smaller people, it makes you see the bigger players in a new way. “The history of the major men has been told so many times,” says Stothard. Stothard uses the tale of Parmensis-“one of the lesser wielders of the daggers on the Ides of March, one of the common herd of conspirators,” as he writes in the book-to evoke the ways that ordinary citizens throughout the Mediterranean would have experienced or understood the extraordinary events unfolding all around them. Yet the story of this marginal figure reveals a great deal about the bigger changes of the period, as Stothard elegantly demonstrates. ![]() BuyĬlaudius Parmensis' name will be unfamiliar even to those who know a fair bit about the fall of Rome's nearly 500-year-old republic and the beginnings of its imperial phase. It is a history of a hunt that an emperor wanted to hide, of torture and terror, politics and poetry, of ideas and their consequences, a gripping story of fear, revenge and survival. The Last Assassin dazzlingly charts an epic turn of history through the eyes of an unheralded man. The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar In his new book, The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar, Peter Stothard, former longtime editor of the London Times and the Times Literary Supplement and the author of several books about the ancient world, rescues these minor men from historical obscurity and uses their fates to tell the most page-turning account in recent memory of this otherwise well-trodden history. Less widely known is the fate of the “minor” assassins of Caesar: those who played important roles in the plot, and throughout the ensuing civil wars, but who don't make a big splash in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra. The history of the end of the Roman Republic-the sweeping battles on land and sea, the poignant historical ironies and above all the iconic men who shaped the course of history-is well known. ![]() Parmensis had taken refuge in Athens, where he wrote poems and plays, enjoyed literary acclaim among the Athenians and kept one ear pricked at all times to the steps of an approaching assassin. Yet at least one thorn remained: a seaman named Claudius Parmensis, the last living participant in the plot against Julius Caesar. Thus, the assassins who sought to thwart one dictator inadvertently paved the way for another. No one left, it seemed, could challenge Octavian's absolute power. ![]() In September of 31, Octavian's forces routed those of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Once they had eliminated their shared enemies, of course, Antony and Octavian turned on each other. In 35, allies of Octavian and Antony captured and executed Sextus Pompey, heir to Pompey Magnus-Julius Caesar's political brother-turned-arch-nemesis-whose naval forces had been harrying them. In October of 42, the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony, Caesar's former deputy, triumphed over those of Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius, the two men who had led the plot, at Philippi. Octavian, the young man named by the assassinated Julius Caesar as son and heir in his will, had long been consolidating power while hunting the conspirators who stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate 14 years earlier.Īlready, a half-dozen of the assassins had fallen. By 30 B.C., the aspiring Roman dictator Octavian had dispatched all the meaningful enemies who stood between him and absolute rule over the fraying Roman republic. ![]()
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