I believe this came up in another thread, so please forgive me if I'm repeating myself...
Parenti's book, The Assassination Of Julius Caesar A People's History of Ancient Rome, takes the stance that our view of Caesar has been colored by the Gentlemen Historians who are both our main sources and interpreters of Ancient Rome. These historians, with few exceptions, have painted Caesar as a tyrant and despot, who used the people only as a means to an end. Parenti, on the other hand, believes that Caesar was killed precisely because he was a champion of the people who intended to carry through the reforms first put forth by the Gracchi brothers.
Holland is not in complete opposition to this view of Caesar, and yet as I read Rubicon I had the distinct impression that Holland favored the more "traditional" view of Caesar and the Senators (Cicero, Cato, etc.) rather than Parenti's. I can not point to any one particular quote or passage, but rather to a general sense of how he tells the story of the Republic's fall.
Both books were written at about the same time, so neither could use the other as source or counter point.
I did enjoy Rubicon very much. It is full of wonderful bits, like the popularity of building expensive ponds in one's villa to cultivate exotic shell fish, and it is written in a lively and easily accessible style aimed squarely at the general public.
On the other hand I believe Parenti makes a good case for viewing all previous historians of Ancient Rome with a critical eye. Some will, no doubt, disagree with his assessment of these venerated historians (Gibbons et.al.) but I think his points are well made.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Caesar.html
Most historians, both ancient and modern, have viewed the Late Republic of Rome through the eyes of its rich nobility. They regard Roman commoners as a parasitic mob, a rabble interested only in bread and circuses. They cast Caesar, who took up the popular cause, as a despot and demagogue, and treat his murder as the outcome of a personal feud or constitutional struggle, devoid of social content. In The Assassination of Julius Caesar, the distinguished author Michael Parenti subjects these assertions of "gentlemen historians" to a bracing critique, and presents us with a compelling story of popular resistance against entrenched power and wealth. Parenti shows that Caesar was only the last in a line of reformers, dating back across the better part of a century, who were murdered by opulent conservatives. Caesar's assassination set in motion a protracted civil war, the demise of a five-hundred-year Republic, and the emergence of an absolutist rule that would prevail over Western Europe for centuries to come.
Parenti reconstructs the social and political context of Caesar's murder, offering fascinating details about Roman society. In these pages we encounter money-driven elections, the struggle for economic democracy, the use of religion as an instrument of social control, the sexual abuse of slaves, and the political use of homophobic attacks. Here is a story of empire and corruption, patriarchs and subordinated women, self-enriching capitalists and plundered provinces, slumlords and urban rioters, death squads and political witchhunts.
The Assassination of Julius Caesar offers a compelling new perspective on an ancient era, one that contains many intriguing parallels to our own times.
http://www.amazon.com/Rubicon-Last-Year ... 038550313X
Ancient history lives in this vivid chronicle of the tumultuous events that impelled Julius Caesar across the one small river that separated the Roman Republic from cataclysmic civil war. With the narrative talents that have established him as a prominent radio personality and novelist, Holland pulls readers deep into the treacherous riptide of Roman politics. To show how Caesar eventually masters that tide--if only temporarily--Holland first traces the bloody career of the ruthless dictator Sulla, who rescues an imperiled Republic even as he breaches its founding traditions. Those breaches deeply disturb the moralist Cato, but the indulgent luxury of a post-Sullan world suits Caesar well enough: a popular favorite, he sets the fashion in loose-fitting togas--and waits for his fated opening. Recounting Caesar's eventual seizure of power in pages as irresistibly cadenced as the legionnaires' march, Holland probes the tragic ironies that quickly expose the bold conqueror to idealistic assassins, who themselves soon perish in the rise of the Augustan Empire. Not a work for scrupulous scholars, but a richly resonant history for the general reader. Bryce Christensen
Perhaps other members of our forum who have read these books will be good enough to weigh in with their thoughts and observations.
I believe you will find both books worthy of your time and efforts to seek out and read.
Narukami
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