The final years of the Roman Republic are usually recounted from the top, through the eyes and ideals of the big winners and losers: Brutus, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian. The Last Assassin tells a different story: how the lesser men lived with the greater, how Caesar's many killers werehunted down by his would-be successors, and how, after an initial amnesty, they were prosecuted, tortured, and killed. Peter Stothard's latest work follows the life of Cassius of Parma, who was the last of Caesar's assassins to be captured and killed, fourteen years after the Ides of March. His namedoes not appear in history books, except as an academic footnote. He is only distantly related to that more famous Cassius (Gaius) to whom Shakespeare gave that "lean and hungry look." He is in the back row of the plotters, maybe as many as eighty, many of them Caesar's friends, who killed toprevent a tyranny, amongst many other reasons. For these fourteen years, Cassius Parmensis watched from the wings as all the killers of Caesar died. He took part in parts of the civil wars which are often neglected. He was a poet whose work survives in a single line, and a playwright whose work wassaid to have been stolen by and published by the man sent to kill him. He was a man of the Roman navy, never the senior service, who chose every side in the Empire's civil wars except the winning one. He ridiculed the future emperor in verse and foresaw his own death in a dream. | The Last Assassin by Peter Stothard, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters