The Ides Of March...And Fiction About It

 Yesterday was the Ides of March and everyone was talking about it, both on Twitter and in the newspapers. The newspapers were talking about it because of a political stoush happening here in Melbourne; after the conservatives were wiped out in Western Australian elections on the weekend, our own conservative opposition held a leadership spill, which failed, even though the leader has a popularity rating of 15% in Victoria. But the papers and tweeters enjoyed talking about the coincidence of the date. 

Coin with Caesar on one side,Venus on the other.

And I was busy editing and pruning a story on this very subject. 

In my alternative universe, the Greek myths and some others were more or less true. More or less because various creatures from the myths roam the earth,  but are species, not the individuals from the myths. Gaius Julius Caesar is rescued from assassination by his ancestress, Venus, who leaves an automaton built for her in his place. 

But Venus, while she cares about him, wants him, in exchange, to stop special animals being rounded up and taken to Rome for the Games. 

I figured that if there were hydras, centaurs, etc, the Romans would have hunted them to extinction.

I was also intrigued by the huge success Caesar, not a physically attractive man, had with women. His lovers included patricians and Queens(not just Cleopatra). What if he had that success because the goddess of love/lust, mother of Aeneas, was his ancestor? His family did claim descent from Aeneas and Venus. 

I like this story, but I’m having to prune it savagely. Kill my darlings, so to speak. If I hadn’t written all those words I would never have finished it, so I did, but 9300 words was way too long for an anthology asking for 5000 words. I’m hoping that “around 5000 words” will be able to be stretched, but not by much. If you want to sell a story, you follow the rules. So far, I’ve cut around 3000 words, still not enough. But I may just have to rewrite altogether to get it down to even “around” 5000 words convincingly. Wish me luck! 

Creative Commons

Meanwhile, there are quite a few historical novels in which he appears as a character. Colleen McCullough’s Masters Of Rome series, for example, is a lot of thick as a brick tomes. That one is seen from the viewpoint of a number of historical characters, but Caesar is one. It starts with his parents and family. 

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is the one we all know best, of course. An interesting piece. Shakespeare’s Brutus is a decent man who feels he has to live up to his ancestor who wouldn’t allow kings to return to Rome. But Shakespeare can’t write approvingly of getting rid of a ruler, not with Elizabeth as Queen. Well, yes, there was Richard II, but I don’t imagine she was happy about that. At the end of Julius Caesar, he is honoured as the only member of the assassins who did it for the right reasons. 

Here is a link to books on this theme, reviewed on Goodreads.

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/julius-caesar

He appears regularly in the Asterix comics, in which the Gauls of Asterix’s village are the only ones not conquered by the Romans. In Asterix In Britain, the Romans are able to defeat the Britons by invading on the weekend and during hot water breaks(the Britons don’t yet have tea).

Just one more which I have read was Taylor Caldwell’s A Pillar Of Iron, though the hero of that was Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was of his generation and, in this novel, goes to school with him. 

That was years ago, and she somehow managed to sneak in some Christianity before it began... 

Anyone have a favourite Julius Caesar book? Including the ones he wrote, of course!