Review of reviews: Books

wax effigy of the fallen dictator was hoisted aloft and rotated to display his dagger wounds while an actor read out the names of his killers. Civil norms collapsed so quickly that the first assassin apprehended, Gaius Trebonius, was tortured for two days before soldiers decapitated him and booted his head about the street like a football. Parmensis fled, eventually landing in Athens.

His flight allowed him to outlive Brutus and Cassius by 12 years, said Ted Scheinman in SmithsonianMag.com. The two ringleaders took their own lives when their army was defeated in 42 B.C. But even in Athens, where he won praise for his poems and plays, Parmensis found little peace. His Epicureanism was no help when he began having nightmares about falling victim to a vengeful giant. His slaves reassured him nightly that there was no one waiting outside to kill him—“until one day, there was.” Julius Caesar’s great-nephew Octavius was by then the ruler of Rome and soon to be known as the Emperor Augustus. When his emissary swiftly beheaded Parmensis, the last of the assassins was dead. Unfortunately, “the world they had unwittingly created was just beginning.”