Books in Brief

The Young Caesar, by Rex Warner (Atlantic-Little Brown, $4.75). This novel is in the form of an autobiography supposedly written by Caesar on the eve of the Ides of March. Mr. Warner has read the sources carefully and even incorporates recognizable paraphrases from them in his text. Whether he understood the sources is another matter, for he nowhere tells what he is trying to do. If he is trying to portray the true character of the ruthless genius who assassinated the Roman Republic, Mr. Warner’s mind is hopelessly sophomoric. But if he is trying to produce a document that might have been concocted and circulated as boob-bait by Caesar’s partisans, he writes with commendable skill. Caesar, as we see from his Bellum Civile, would have been far more subtle, but the anonymous lieutenant who wrote the Bellum Africanum could have produced just such a document as this. And Rome’s “Liberals,” who were no less gullible than our own, would have believed every word of it!

R. P. OLIVER

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The Young Caesar, by Rex Warner (Atlantic-Little Brown, $4.75). This novel is in the form of an autobiography supposedly written by Caesar on the eve of the Ides of March. Mr. Warner has read the sources carefully and even incorporates recognizable paraphrases from them in his text. Whether he understood the sources is another matter, for he nowhere tells what he is trying to do. If he is trying to portray the true character of the ruthless genius who assassinated the Roman Republic, Mr. Warner’s mind is hopelessly sophomoric. But if he is trying to produce a document that might have been concocted and circulated as boob-bait by Caesar’s partisans, he writes with commendable skill. Caesar, as we see from his Bellum Civile, would have been far more subtle, but the anonymous lieutenant who wrote the Bellum Africanum could have produced just such a document as this. And Rome’s “Liberals,” who were no less gullible than our own, would have believed every word of it!

R. P. OLIVER