Julius Caesar

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life, work and reputation of Julius Caesar. Famously assassinated as he entered the Roman senate on the Ides of March, 44 BC, Caesar was an inspirational general who conquered much of Europe. He was a ruthless and canny politician who became dictator of Rome, and wrote The Gallic Wars, one of the most admired and studied works of Latin literature. Shakespeare is one of many later writers to have been fascinated by the figure of Julius Caesar.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Christopher Pelling No other episodes
  Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford
• Catherine Steel 5 episodes
  Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow
• Maria Wyke 8 episodes
  Professor of Latin at University College London

Reading list

• Roman Republics
  Harriet Flower (Princeton University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• Caesar
  Adrian Goldsworthy (Phoenix, 2007) Google Books →
• A Companion to Julius Caesar
  Miriam Griffin (ed.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Google Books →
• Always I Am Caesar
  W. Jeffrey Tatum (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) Google Books →
• Et tu, Brute? The Murder of Caesar and Political Assassination
  Greg Woolf (Profile Books, 2006) Google Books →
• Caesar: A Life in Western Culture
  Maria Wyke (Granta, 2007) Google Books →
• Caesar in the USA
  Maria Wyke (University of California Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays
  Horst Zander (ed.) (Routledge, 2005) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b04jlygw

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04jlygw

Auto-category: 937 (Ancient Rome and Roman Empire)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 49 BC, a Roman army marched south from the Alps and crossed the Rubicon, a shallow river which marked the northern border of the territory controlled by the city of Rome.