Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Julius Caesar.
The gallery
The Death of Caesar
Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1859–1867
Gérôme’s Walters canvas freezes the Ides: Caesar fallen, conspirators exiting the Curia. Academic history painting is the modern image of the dictator Ovid will soon lift to a comet — murder as the hinge before apotheosis.
On screen
Julius Caesar
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Mankiewicz’s Shakespeare film (Brando as Antony) keeps Caesar’s assassination and funeral as mid-century screen classics of the Roman dictator.
Cleopatra
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Rex Harrison’s Caesar opposite Taylor’s Cleopatra — Hollywood’s grandest staging of the dictator’s Egyptian years before the knives of the Senate.
In play
Metamorphoses XV (apotheosis of Caesar)
Ovid
Ovid’s poem — our atlas hinge — turns the murdered dictator into a star: Venus snatches Caesar’s soul to heaven as a comet, proof metamorphosis still happens in Augustan Rome.
Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s tragedy makes Caesar’s death and Antony’s funeral the English stage’s lasting dossier of ambition, friendship, and the Ides.