By his very ruthlessness, Julius Caesar made himself indispensable to the State he had largely been responsible for disrupting. Peter Green assesses the Caesarian legend he left behind him, as well as its malign influence upon later ages.
Peter Green introduces Hesiod, a Boeotian farmer who, towards the end of the eighth century B.C., wrote his poem known as The Works and Days. His cantankerous, radical, earthy views present a remarkable contrast to the stylised grandeur of the contemporary Homeric vision of Greek society.
Peter Green meets the satirists of the Roman Empire, and is presented with a picture of a world in corruption and decline. Yet the Empire outlasted its bitterest critics by several hundred years.
Both before and after the fall of the Republic, Roman satirists give us an extraordinarily vivid picture of the society in which they lived, with its materialism, its opportunism, its unceasing pursuit of power and wealth.
Lesser breeds without the law? In a revealing new study of the Hellenistic world in the three centuries after Alexander carved out an empire in the East, Peter Green argues that condescension and cultural arrogance rather than a mission to civilise marked Greek reaction to the population they ruled over.
