Very Good not Great

This engaging addition to the saga of the first five volumes can still take its place in the classical tales of Ancient Rome but did seem to lose its way on occasion. Fact and fiction cleverly melded with enough action to be satisfying though the continual genealogy detail lost me a bit. Still a good read and very impressive in historical detail.

My poor Caesar. Obviously, you knew it was coming but it was still gut-wrenching, nonetheless. McCullough’s twist is that Antony is not Caesar’s right hand man, but is fully aware of the assassination attempt and in support of it, thinking he will inherit. I started researching that, and apparently, McCullough isn’t alone in her supposition.

That’s one thing I love about this entire series: McCullough jam packs so much information and ideas that every few pages, I’m inclined to stop and look stuff up. It’s like a history course on the end of the Roman Republic. It’s fascinating. And the ideas she’s given me to think about! Wanting people to do the right thing, and behave the right way, for governments to operate correctly and can that ever be legislated? Can morality ever be impacted through legal means? Her Caesar basically wants to save the world through right, proper behavior. But too many others don’t. They want to serve themselves. Can that ever be accomplished? It’s given me a lot to ponder on long car rides.

There’s one final book, a kind of add-on, written at the bequest of the fans, but this was the true culmination of the Masters of Rome series and what a way to go!

I love the Masters of Rome series dearly, it’s probably my favourite book series, but the author was so enamoured of the character of Caesar and praised him so lavishly that by this book it was something of a relief to see him die.

This historical fiction series is worth reading- stick with it. The reader gets the non-fiction, the real characters set in the author's personal creative landscape where she recreates the characters and invents a few fictional ones in a setting that could make this a compelling read. You will meet the young Octavian who changes dramatically into this new person after his adoptive father's (Julius Caesar) death. Octavian grows and rises into the Emperor Augustus Caesar.
The story of Julius Caesar shines through; the plot to kill him and then the actual murder- the death- the reader would have heard several times before but this is the author's adaptation and we are drawn in. Aware of the rivalry between Octavius and Mark Anthony, the reader wonders how will she present this in the shadow of Caesar's death, of suspicion and animosity, and fear that he might be next.
If you know the story of Julius Caesar, you know that his first wife was Cornelia and their daughter was Julia who became the fourth wife of Pompey.
Colleen McCullough's 'fictional' name for Cornelia is Cinnilla. The reader is drawn into the setting with Caesar and Cleopatra lying in bed. Cleopatra is six months pregnant. Caesar says' "I love you as my wife, my daughter, my mother, my aunt."

Then he takes her to see the results of a burned Alexandria. He assures her that all the books destroyed would be replaced. Cleopatra was more distraught over the loss of the books that the heart-wrenching spectacle of all the starving women and children. Vegetation burned, waterfalls dried up but sculptures and paintings were saved.

Caesar wanted Cleopatra to know what was important in the rebuilding Alexandria. ".... Only when Alexandria's people are served can you spend money on public buildings and temples."

He continued, ".... And when I have destroyed what I have left behind will benefit future generations in far greater measure than the damage I did, the lives I ended or ruined."

Such beautiful writing excused the mistakes here and there.

"Do you think, Cleopatra, that I don't see in my mind's eye the sum total of devastation and upheavel I've caused? Do you think I don't grieve?.... I say again, Pharoah rule your subjects with love, and never forget that it is only an accident of birth that makes you different from one of those women picking through the debris of this shattered city. You deem it Amun-Ra who put you in your skin..... I know it was an accident of fate."
What ever Caesar did was out of conscious decision.

Here, the author describes the scene with passion. The beauty of her dialoguing. The reader understands who Caesar is. Cleopatra understands too. The dialogue is sweeping and rich with information that brings the scenes to life, describing the manner in which Caesar delegated as "commander-in-chief", and he made his imprint wherever he went and the people listened and obeyed with respect.

McCullough knows the stories and all the characters seem to be in her head. Some sentences are confusing and clumsy making the paragraph difficult to follow.
Example:
"Brutus was a particularly difficult problem for Caesar, who had taken him under his wing after Parsalus, out of affection for his mother, Servilia, and out of guilt of breaking Brutus's engagement to Julia in order to ensnare Pompey- it had broken Brutus's heart, as Caesar well knew. But, thought Calvinius, Caesar hadn't the slightest idea what kind of man Brutus is when he took pity on him after Pharsalus. He left a youth. He picked up the relationship twelve years later.
McCullough is trying to tell us that Brutus is a now a wimp. (?)

This sentence:
"Unaware that a pimply youth now a pimply man of thirty-six, was a coward on a battlefield and a lion when it came to defending his staggering fortune."
It disrupted the flow of the narrative for me as I attempted to fix it.
That night sleepless on Cleopatra's enormous goose-down bed, her warmth tucked against him in the mild chill of Alexandria's so-called winter, Caesar thought about the day, the month, the year..... etc etc. Then she adds... .....And a business proposition from a queen determined to save her people in the only way she believed they could be saved, by conceiving the son of a god. Believing that he, Caesar was that god. Bizarre. Alien.


However McCullough's dialogue is rich and masterful and there lies her strength in storytelling.

Prepare for a very long read and for me personally, I tried to decipher what was real and what wasn't in the midst of the clumsy sentence structure- Was this work a rushed piece? It is a longer wider journey covering so many characters (actually too many) and not as simple to figure out as in Cleopatra's Daughter by Michelle Moran. This historical novel spurred me to study the history behind her writing. I think it all depends on when you read a book and for me, McCullough's book Caesar's Women was a challenge as I've already convinced myself of the history of Caesar. I enjoyed her book, The First Man in Rome but I read it about ten years ago and I was a lot more patient and again this spurred me on to looking for the history, the facts having created an impressive scene in my mind.

McCullough covered Roman politics weaving this within the drama of the day, which makes a good introduction to that era, to Rome for young readers- probably high school. (This was published in 2002).
I commend Colleen McCullough (1937 - 2015) and this production.

A good non-fiction is A J Langguth's A Noise of War: Caesar, Pompey, Octavian & the Struggle for Rome.

First half = 3 stars. Second half = 5 stars. Overall then = 4 stars.

First half was repetitive and overly-explanatory. Perhaps the author especially intended this 6th part to cross-function as a standalone novel because some things were explained that I literally just read about in the last part. Whatever the reason, it made my reading experience dull.

Got tired of Caesar even though he was cool. His most interesting moments were his interactions with Octavius. Otherwise, we just see how people completely loved him or completely hated him, no nuance. His climactic death finally propelled the plot into an arena of fierce competitors: Cicero, Antony, Cassius, Brutus, and the awesome Octavius.

Loved Octavius, though I wish I was more convinced of his motives. His dream to rule Rome seemed arbitrary compared to the grounded ambitions of Sulla, Marius, and Caesar.

I was expecting more out of Cleopatra, but she didn't bring much to the table. The author describes all the non-Roman rulers in similar ways: cruel, impulsive, and foolish. At some point, all these non-Roman characters (especially the Eastern ones) blend into one boring archetype. I don't know the history so I can't argue against the accuracy, but it definitely would have been more enjoyable if these characters had more depth.

Some parts of the final civil war dragged on a bit, but overall the second half was exciting.

Memorable moments: Cato's march across Africa, Caesar's comet (it actually happened!), Octavius's negotiations, Brutus' sinking head, Servilia shoving hot coal down Porcia's mouth to kill her, Cato pulling out his intestines to kill himself.

Great book, almost felt like a finale (looks like the author intended it be so). Anticipating the next part.

This book series makes history cool

The sixth book in the series of novels dealing with the late Roman Republic makes the reader wonder about the effect that individuals have on the course of history. This final book in the series (although there is a follow up novel) leaves us with the great "what ifs" of history. What if Caesar had not been assassinated and had accomplished his plan to extend Roman influence as far east as India? What would the Middle East look like today, 20 centuries later? What if Roman influence had extended into eastern Europe? What if Caesar had lived and realized his plan of bringing diverse peoples and tribes together to cooperate and prosper in one large organized unit stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean? What sort of world would we be living in today in the 21st century? Of course big dreams for changing the status quo always produce immense push back, that's simply the way human nature works, sort of an extension of Newton's Law that a body at rest wants to stay at rest; the same thing applies to human institutions. As usual, McCullough does an excellent job of taking us into the minds of the people involved, something pure history usually never does, and we realize that we have more in common than we might want to believe with people who lived 20 centuries ago. What if we could learn the lessons they and their history could teach us?

I love this series; I've learned so much and they've been pleasant reads. The author does an amazing job of weaving facts into a compelling story. I've read about Caesar from youth as a peripheral character in the first books to a young politician, military man and finally an august leader. But I know how this must end and I admit that I felt sadder and sadder as the inevitable loomed and finally took place. But the author brought forth a new protagonist, selected by Caesar as his adopted heir, in young Augustus who is amazingly precocious for his age. How he guides himself in the aftermath is brilliant. Now I'm looking forward to the next book which is, sadly, the final installment. I highly recommend this series.

This sixth volume covers the tail end of the Pompeian war and Caesar’s brief period of unchallenged power in Rome. I enjoyed it more than the previous three in the series, mainly because McCullough eases up a bit on Caesar as the cocky golden boy surrounded by malignant idiots. They get him here, right enough, but first she finally succeeds in humanising her hero and making him sympathetic. There’s a nice sense of weary futility catching up with a supremely talented man who has finally achieved the pinnacle of power only to find that what he sought just isn’t there.

Cato was always one of the most successful of McCullough’s characters – just about the only major opponent of Caesar we are allowed to take seriously – and she sends him off with a bang here. His march through the Libyan desert and subsequent command at Utica are among the best things in the entire series. The disarray of the conspirators after Caesar’s assassination is also very well handled.

She takes the story down to Philippi, where she had originally intended to call a halt. I’m looking forward to the belated coda Antony and Cleopatra with some curiosity, because I’m not sure that her Antony and (especially) Octavian have been particularly convincing characters thus far. Putting such cavils in context, I felt this particular volume was as successful as the first two - which is praise indeed.

I've read all the other Master of Rome books by McCullough and I've enjoyed everyone of them. For the most part she seems to have an accurate account of the time period that she writes about. At times, particular events have several different stories and so she picks the one that is more interesting. Who is going to know for sure, right? There are different sources which have different accounts depending where the author's sympathies lie and the accuracy is typically unknown.

Anyway, reading McCullough is an easy way of learning about the last decades of the Roman republic.

The only problem I have with her novel is the number of characters that interact with the protagonists of the story, some of whom have the same names. I found the way to deal with it was to reference Wikipedia and look up those characters which allowed some context to return. I wish that she had had included an index of the characters so that when a character appeared, disappeared and then reappeared again it would be easy to refer back through the novel to find the first or any other references that would be interesting to look up. However, her book does not have this useful index and we are stuck either reading backwards (very hard to do) or looking up the historical character in other sources like Wikipedia to find out who these characters were and how they fit in the historical story.

All in all, I enjoyed the book. It got me interested in the last days of the Roman republic and the beginnings of the emperor system that replaced the republic. After finishing the book, I had this sudden urge to reread Julius Caesar by Shakespeare now that I knew more about that period of the Rome and sure enough the characters that Shakespeare has in his play were introduced in by McCullough. I am rereading Julius Caesar from a whole different knowledge place and its making the reading much more enjoyable, since now I understand where the characters are coming from.

Why four stars instead of five? Well, as I alluded earlier, the story is confusing at times because we can lose track of the characters as the appear and disappear and then reappear again and there was no way of getting reminded why they existed. Other than that, it was an interesting and enjoyable novel.

As I staggered to the end of this massive series (2 million words? 3 million?), my main takeaway was that this author's primary strength is not fiction-writing or storytelling or the delineation of characters, for these books are deficient in these categories. What she brings is research prowess and zeal for her subject. McCullough was reputed to have thousands of books on ancient Rome in her personal library, and her Masters of Rome series is saturated with details that are surely mostly genuine. If you're an ancient-Rome buff, there's lots here to learn.

But her zeal, in a way, is puzzling; for apart from Julius Caesar, whom she seems to idolize, and Octavian, for whom she appears to have a qualified respect, she sees, or anyway depicts, the denizens of ancient Rome, including its most outstanding figures, as a collection of ridiculous oafs. Scene after scene is presented as a low comedy of crude selfishness and dim-witted dialogue. These are men who "giggle," "squeak," and "purr."

My theory is that the author had one or more previous lives in ancient Rome, and felt driven to revisit and document that time. As for the ideal reader of these books, I would say it's a person who is interested in learning about ancient Rome, but who can't be bothered to read history. It would also help if that person were not an experienced reader of fiction.

The superior Roman fiction. McCullough aimed at this book being the last in the series on the end of the Republic of Rome, but later wrote part VII, Anthony and cleopatra, which is a very good book as well, but this episode, with the murder of Ceasar and, especially, the outwitting of Anthony by the young Augustus and his friends, great stuff. Insightful, smart, well researched, and interesting all the way. Maybe making this book obligatory reading for everyone under 20 might help people get a feel for destiny.