This book turned out to be some much better than expected. It’s an epistolary novel in which the last year of Julius Caesar is constructed primarily through his letters to (an invented) secluded friend Lucius Turrinus, and occasionally other figures such as his aunt, Cleopatra and Clodia Pulcher. Ideas on religion, fate, the impact of individuals and world affairs, even love are explored with a verve found in the best classics. And of course the reader’s knowledge of the Caesar’s inevitable fate lend everything a particular tension.

I have always been more interested in Augustus but Wilder has managed to make this historical figure live for me.