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Since Brutus was one of history’s losers, the ancient accounts of his life are often Augustan versions: Augustus, formerly known as Octavian, was the great-nephew of, and heir to, Julius Caesar. ¹ The Greek and Latin writers had different reasons for writing their various accounts, and these undoubtedly colour their portrayals: they are often politically biased and so favour one of the protagonists in an episode over another propaganda plays an important part since the surviving versions will mostly be those approved by the victorious, and so we do not often hear the views of the losers of history accounts may simply be slanted towards one version of history because of the ancient sources to which they themselves had access, since we must remember that many of these ancient historians and biographers are not contemporaries but are writing more than a century after their subject’s existence furthermore, we must keep in mind that other accounts to which they refer may no longer exist for us to check and verify the details.
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When writing, and indeed reading, a historical biography, particularly one concerning a figure from more than 2,000 years ago, we must be aware of many factors affecting the real truth. This book aims to reach further back than this celebrated Elizabethan version to consider instead the accounts of the ancient historians and biographers, in order to achieve, as far as possible, a historically accurate portrait of this pivotal figure of the late Roman Republic. While Marcus Junius Brutus is a figure with whom most of us are familiar, this is chiefly as a product of the playwright, Shakespeare, as portrayed in his great tragedy, Julius Caesar.
#Collatinus brutus full#
As the first dedicated biography in over thirty years, this full and balanced reconsideration of this significant Roman republican is long overdue.
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Indeed, he has rarely been considered on his own merits, instead featuring as part of the biographies and studies of other leading political figures of the time, especially those of Julius Caesar, Cicero, and Octavian.
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While his actions played a pivotal role in Roman history, ultimately, although completely unintentionally, bringing about the downfall of the Roman republic, Brutus has often been neglected. This biography instead considers Brutus in his historical context, gathering details from ancient evidence and piecing together, as much as possible, his whole life. Furthermore, any interest in Brutus has tended to focus only on events surrounding his most legendary act: Caesar’s murder. The extraordinary life of the “noblest Roman of them all.”Īlthough Marcus Junius Brutus is one of the most famous, or infamous, conspirators of Rome and the ancient world, if not of all time, knowledge of this historical figure has principally been passed to the modern world through the literary medium of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Julius Caesar.