He was so taken by the beauty of a nymph he spied one day a-bathing that the two intertwined forming a single being combining both sexes: the first Hermaphrodite.
Hermaphroditus, the legend goes, was the son of two deities, Hermes the Messenger and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. Much of the decisive action takes place at sea and the book itself-a mostly smooth blend of fact and intelligent imagination-resembles a form of hybrid rigging popular in the golden age of sail many centuries after Octavian-Julius Caesar’s nephew and adoptive son and heir, the future Caesar Augustus- defeated Mark Antony in a muddled naval engagement at Actium, thereby ending the Roman civil wars triggered by the assassination of Caesar.Īppropriately enough, the name of the rigging was inspired by a character from Greco-Roman mythology. The civil wars triggered by Julius Caesar’s assassination lasted fourteen years and form the backdrop for British author Peter Stothard’s clever, knowledgeable, sometimes idiosyncratic, and always evocative The Last Assassin.
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…the arduous task had so rashly undertaken, of restoring the commonwealth instead of restoring it, the death of a mild and generous usurper produced only a series of civil wars, and the reign of three tyrants whose union and whose discord were alike fatal to the Roman people. As Edward Gibbon pointed out in a little-read essay written after his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the conspirators had proved themselves woefully unequal to Within days of his death, the same fickle Roman mob that had passively acquiesced to Caesar’s murder was baying for the blood of the assassins. When, in his mid-fifties, not long before his assassination, he declared that, “I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory,” it was no idle boast. The man was that great rarity, a practical visionary.
This conception of government, and Caesar’s reorganization of Rome and Italy, completed the miracle whereby the youthful spendthrift and roisterer had become one of the ablest, bravest, fairest, and most enlightened men in all the sorry annals of politics. As one mid-twentieth-century historian summed it up with a touch of hyperbole,
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Caesar’s political vision, besides coming centuries earlier, covered a far wider base: all free adult males in a Roman Imperium already encompassing considerable chunks of Europe, Africa, and Asia-a military, cultural, and economic colossus unrivaled to this day. To give an idea of just how visionary this idea was in Caesar’s day, it was not applied by a major power in Western Europe until England’s so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, more than a millennium and a half after his death. What Caesar seems to have envisioned, many centuries before the concept even had a name, was a kind of constitutional monarchy. That commendable goal, after Caesar’s murder, remained on the back burner until it was finally undertaken as a massive public works project by one Benito Mussolini nearly two millennia later. He initiated a census for the whole Italian peninsula and introduced the “Julian” calendar, which remains the standard to this very day, and he had plans to drain the Pontine marshes to eradicate malaria. Although his political roots were populist, in the tradition of Marius and the Gracchi brothers, Caesar carried out a program of welfare reform that slashed the number of Roman citizens on the grain dole-the ancient Roman equivalent of a universal food stamp entitlement-by more than half (from 320,000 to 150,000) by imposing a means test. Almost all of his many promotions-including the erection of monuments in his honor, his virtual deification, and his proposed lifetime lease on executive power-had been sought through the proper channels, including action by a Roman Senate that he incrementally padded by such measures as placing all free-born Italians on the same legal footing as the citizens of Rome and enfranchising Cisalpine Gaul. Throughout his mature career, he adhered to a sound if somewhat cynical apothegm: “If you must break the law, do it to seize power in all other cases observe it.”ĮVEN IN the pursuit of power Caesar preferred, whenever possible, to do it by the book. He played many roles in his lifetime-youthful playboy, corrupt political machine boss, brilliant propagandist, conquering military hero on an epic scale, and an administrative reformer of genius, to name only a few.
Caesar, on the other hand, was a brilliant Renaissance man 1,500 years before there was a Renaissance.
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