‎Trine Arlund Hass, Rubina Raja (eds)‎
‎Caesar's Past and Posterity's Caesar‎

‎, Brepols, 2021 Paperback, xii + 248 pages, Size:216 x 280 mm, Illustrations:42 b/w, 11 col., 1 tables b/w., Language: English. ISBN 9782503591308.‎

Reference : 65422

‎Summary Gaius Julius Caesar was the first to design a forum in his family's name. The forum itself had two focal points - a temple to Venus Genetrix and an equestrian statue of Caesar himself - carefully juxtaposed to create a narrative of a strong, enterprising, and controversial sovereign to whom legitimacy was granted by his divine lineage and links to Rome's mythical founders. Through this design, the expansion of the older Forum Romanum thus became a promotion of Caesar himself in a clever show of identity politics. It was a bold - and ultimately fatal - undertaking, and it demonstrates a political vision that not only divided his contemporaries but that has continued to drive scholarly debate, with Caesar variously realized as a mirror for Antiquity, a representative of an age, and a ruler to be examined in relation to all applicable dilemmas and conflicts. This important volume offers new insights into the legacy of Julius Caesar by focusing on two central questions: how did he use the past to construct his own persona as head of the Roman State and Empire? And how has he been remembered - and used - by posterity? Contributions from a range of fields, among them archaeology, classical studies, and history, engage with these questions as they explore Caesar's own self-fashioning through his use of city space, rituals, wars, history, and literature, as well as tracing how he and his actions have been understood, justified, criticized, and used in the centuries since his death, from late antique literature to nineteenth-century drama. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures List of Abbreviations The Man behind the Sources: Caesar's Past and Posterity's Caesar - TRINE ARLUND HASS and RUBINA RAJA I. Caesar and his Time The Role of the Romans' Early History in the Late Republican Period - SINE GROVE SAXKJ R Caesar and the Pomerium of Rome - PAOLO LIVERANI Shaping Caesar's Past for Posterity: Caesar d. f. Augustus - KARL GALINSKY Creating Memories in and of Urban Rome: The Forum Iulium - RUBINA RAJA and JORG RUPKE The Invention of Civil War Writing: The (Curious?) Case of Caesar - CARSTEN HJORT LANGE II. Caesar in Antique Historiography - in Retrospect Caesar's Place in the Course of Tiberian Historiography - BRIDGET ENGLAND Caesar the Orator in Retrospect - HENRIETTE VAN DER BLOM Between Dynast and Legitimate Monarch: Imperial Reflections of Julius Caesar - JESPER MAJBOM MADSEN Julius Caesar in Western Late Antiquity - GIUSEPPE ZECCHINI III. Post-Antique Historiography and Modern Perceptions Should They Rot in Hell? Fifteenth-Century Discussions of Brutus and Cassius - and Caesar's Murder - MARIANNE PADE Lurking in the Jacobean Shadows: Historicity and Topicality of the Character of Julius Caesar in Ben Jonson's Catiline: His Conspiracy - MIRYANA DIMITROVA A Bad Tyrant Born to Command: N. F. S. Grundtvig's Representation of Caesar in the Handbook of World History (1833) - TRINE ARLUND HASS Ancient Contemporary History and Enlightened Philosophy of History: Caesar and Voltaire as Models for Frederick the Great's Historiography - THOMAS BISKUP Lessons in History: Bernard Shaw's Discomforting Caesar - MARIA WYKE The Forum of Caesar: A Historiographical Review - NIKOLINE SAUER‎