Finding historical analogies for the precarious state of American hegemony has been a favourite game of some political commentators in recent years. Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome? (2007) states the case most directly, but other major names – Chalmers Johnson, Niall Ferguson, and Amy Chua, to name a few – have also returned to the ancient past in an effort to understand the direction of America's future. As Maria Wyke points out in this rich and often fascinating book, however, such comparisons are nothing new, and what emerges most strikingly here is the frequency with which those comparisons have, for often radically different political and cultural purposes, centred on the specific figure of Julius Caesar (100–44 bc). Following a brief look back across Caesar's pre-twentieth-century American life (John Wilkes Booth exclaimed over Lincoln's fatally wounded body the very same phrase Brutus is supposed to have exclaimed over Caesar's: sic semper tyrannis – thus always to tyrants) the book turns to its main focus: the various ways in which the notorious Roman general persistently crops up as metaphor and analogy in modern American history. Much time is spent in the first section looking at Latin education before and during the First World War, and in particular how Caesar's famed commentary on the Gallic Wars, De bello Gallico, became both a classroom staple and (as a consequence) a crucial element in the cultural conditioning of America's youth. Wyke also spends a significant portion of the book tracing the production histories of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and while this can sometimes have the effect of confusing the important distinction between the reception of Caesar as historical figure and the reception of Shakespeare's work as such, it does convincingly show just how intertwined the historical and the theatrical Caesars became. From Orson Welles's celebrated antifascist staging of the play in 1937, to several major productions before and during the Iraq War in the early 2000s, Shakespeare's Caesar often became a kind of veiled American agitprop concerned with the timeless perils of unchecked authority and militarism.

Focussing on a single figure like this, and using him to make broad arguments about the reception of classical Rome in modern America, can tend to lead Wyke down some less certain interpretive avenues. There is occasionally a somewhat convenient metonymical slip between “Julius Caesar” himself and “ancient Rome” as a broader geohistorical notion, so that the former's more particular symbolic cultural function (as power-thirsty tyrant, most often) occasionally gets conflated with the wider sense of Rome as a byword for decadent imperialism. A photomontage from The Guardian in 2002 that shows George W. Bush as a generic Roman general is, by Wyke's own admission, the illustration for a piece discussing the historical analogy of “empire rather than emperor” (213). The figure of Caesar has frequently come to stand for Rome in a more general sense, as this book often demonstrates, but he has not always carried the full weight of that analogy on his own. Cicero, Caligula, and Nero, for instance, have been conjured at various points in American history to represent differing aspects of classical inheritance, while Roman civic architecture has also proven to be fruitful for filmmakers, advertisers, commentators and artists striving to evoke notions of republicanism or imperial ambition – or, quite often, just old-fashioned carnal debauchery.

This is, nevertheless, a detailed and intriguing book that strides confidently between classics, intellectual history, and performance studies in a way that affirms just how deeply the ancient world continues to shape the cultural landscape of the present. On the night of the most recent US elections back in November 2012, Rupert Murdoch's increasingly embittered New York Post greeted the inevitability of the President's reelection by tweeting its front cover for the next day: a stern looking Obama in a wreath and toga, beside the headline “Hail ‘O'Caesar.” They got cold feet in the end, and pulled it for the later editions (not, alas, for a better pun; the new headline said “Barack 4 More”), but it says a lot about the extraordinary persistence of Caesar as a universal shorthand for overbearing power, even two thousand years after his death. Infamy indeed.