The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar
(Oxford, $28)
It takes a writer of rare talent to make a 2,000-year-old story feel urgent, said James Romm in The Wall Street Journal. But Peter Stothard’s new account of the assassination of Julius Caesar places readers in “an ancient Roman world that is startlingly real.” Stothard, a former editor of the London Times and Times Literary Supplement, tells much of the story from the perspective of Cassius Parmensis, the last of 19 assassins who were eventually tracked down and killed. But the manhunt for the traitors spanned 14 years and three continents, and Stothard uses it to track the unraveling of a mighty republic that had lasted five centuries. Though the events of that period remain complex, “the vigor of Stothard’s prose, and the acuity of his insight, will propel many readers past all difficulties.”
“Stothard is excellent on the machinations and the murmurings that recruited the kill