ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603290098
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY GEOFF SEAMANS
CAESAR, A BIOGRAPHY. By Christian Meier. BasicBooks (HarperCollins). $30.
Ancient Rome was not 20th-century Europe or contemporary America; Christian Meier, professor of ancient history at the University of Munich, is too good a historian to claim otherwise. Indeed, some of his most intriguing insights in "Caesar, A Biography" are about the differences between antiquity's and modernity's ways of viewing themselves and their worlds. Even so, Meier's study of Julius Caesar, first published in Germany in 1982 but not published in English translation in this country until now, raises questions with provocative implications for the modern world.
Caesar brought to an end a Roman republic that had endured for centuries. Yet both Caesar and his internal foes claimed to hold dear the republic. How could this happen? Partly, Meier suggests, because the Romans didn't think as we do today in terms of evolution and progress. They might perceive that republican institutions were in trouble, even that they were in some form of temporary suspension. But they couldn't imagine the death of a republic that they assumed, in their present-mindedness, would always exist because (to them) it always had.
Other worrisome aspects of the Rome of the first century B.C., however, strike chords more familiar to the modern world: turbulent violence; the corruption of republican institutions; the failure of the old order to adjust to Rome's expansion; the purchase of popularity through lavish spending on public entertainments; the organization of politics along lines not of party and principle, but of personal ambition and ever-shifting alliances.
Into this milieu stepped Caesar. True, Meier acknowledges, Caesar was by lineage and position a member of the ruling class. But Meier portrays him as an outsider to Roman society who, in the intensity of his quest for personal achievement, went beyond the traditional constraints that other ambitious Romans consciously or unconsciously respected. The seeds for this were planted in boyhood; they flowered as Caesar - contrary to Roman foreign policy-waged an unprovoked war of aggression against the tribes of Gaul.
The emergence of a Caesar may have been a necessary condition for the republic to fall, but Meier doesn't make it a sufficient condition. The failure of republican institutions to strike a workable balance between change and stability, to control violence, to distribute power in orderly fashion made the republic vulnerable. Different as was ancient Rome from the modern world, such issues continue to demand humankind's attention.
Geoff Seamans is associate editor of this newspaper's editorial page.
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