‘The Last Assassin’ Review: Avenging a Conspiracy

The story of Caesar’s fall has been retold countless times, most notably by Plutarch and Shakespeare, but the events that followed that cataclysmic event in 44 B.C. are far less familiar, in part because they’re so complex. Caesar’s murderers, whose numbers may have ranged into the 30s, scattered in many directions after the Ides of March, when they realized their support at Rome was dangerously thin. Caesar’s avengers, led by Marc Antony and Octavian, took after them, but these two rivals for power were often at odds, each willing to partner with conspirators now and again to do the other harm.

The multi-pronged manhunt covers three continents and claims nearly a score of victims. The most notorious conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, took their own lives after losing the Battle of Philippi in 42 B.C. A less prominent figure, Gaius Trebonius, was the first conspirator killed, after two days of gruesome torture; Cassius Parmensis, a poet and playwright of small repute, was the last. This Parmensis is thus the “last assassin” of the book’s title, a man who lived to see Antony’s defeat at Actium, in 31 B.C., but fell victim the next year to the victorious Octavian (later known as Augustus).

A tale of such breadth and scope, with characters often shifting venue or changing political partners, would strike terror into many authors, but Mr. Stothard is a writer of rare talent. Former editor of both the Times of London and the Times Literary Supplement, he has a longstanding passion for the classical world and has used it as a touchstone in his previous memoirs and political studies. Here, in his first historical narrative, he weaves a tense, fast-paced tale from the many strands of a turbulent era. In an opening list of 13 assassins and five of their supporters, he lays out the path we will follow: All will meet their dooms, one by one, chapter by chapter.

Mr. Stothard makes Cassius Parmensis the central thread of this tangled skein, and not only for reasons of longevity. Parmensis was a literary man, an author of several tragedies. A single line of his plays has survived: nocte intempesta nostrum devenit domum, “late at night he came down to our house,” describing the prelude to the notorious rape of Lucretia by the Roman prince Tarquin. Mr. Stothard deploys this haunting verse at three points in his story, describing it as “the line of Cassius Parmensis that so fitted the fears of the time.” The refrain helps deepen the tragic tones of this tale.

Roman sources record that Parmensis was a student of Epicureanism, and this too seems to endear him to Mr. Stothard’s heart. “The Last Assassin” often explores Epicurean thought, which explained all phenomena according to physical laws and not the mythic forces that inspired dread. Since Epicureans thought of death as mere dissolution, rather than a journey to an afterlife, they found nothing fearful in it—or so they professed. When death actually loomed, as Mr. Stothard imagines, Parmensis too fell prey to monstrous visions.

“Rejecting the fear of death was a skill of logic, a lesson that could be learnt,” Mr. Stothard writes, as though inhabiting Parmensis’s thoughts. “Only the material was real. . . . He knew all that. He absolutely knew it. But then again, like all student Epicureans, Parmensis knew that knowledge was not enough.” The gap between philosophic ideals and lived realities forms an important theme of this book. (Strangely though, Mr. Stothard pays no attention to Stoicism, the principal creed that Brutus and other leading conspirators followed.)

Though not a scholar by trade, Mr. Stothard has grounded “The Last Assassin” in the historical sources for this era, as he discusses in an endnote. The letters of Cicero, many of which give intimate details of the day-by-day course of events, serve him well, as do the later works of Plutarch, Appian and Cassius Dio. But he freely departs from these sources to explore what certain people were thinking or feeling, or even to briefly look at the world through their eyes.

The torturer called the Samarian, employed in the attack on Gaius Trebonius, is a striking example. He is mentioned only once, obliquely, in a speech of Cicero. Yet Mr. Stothard devotes two riveting paragraphs to this shadowy figure: “He knew about heating knives, sharpening whips and hauling a human body on the rack of wood and iron that the Romans called a horse. He knew how to challenge deniers of the fear of death.”

This sort of free indirect discourse is more typical of fiction than ancient history, but Mr. Stothard wields it so expertly that only the most umbratic scholar would object. In the instance quoted above, he has clearly done his research on Roman methods of torture and uses the Samarian as an opportune way to share intriguing details. As with Plutarch, who is evidently not only a source but an inspiration, his focus is always on the human dimension of his story, the quirks and foibles of his huge ensemble cast.

“The Last Assassin” is by no means an easy read, especially for those who feel oppressed by a welter of polysyllabic names. But the vigor of Mr. Stothard’s prose, and the acuity of his insight, will propel many readers past all difficulties, into an ancient Roman world that is startlingly real.

Mr. Romm is the editor and translator of “How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving,” a sampling of Stoic wisdom.