Daniel Mendelsohn on John Williams's 'Augustus': “Like the best works of historical fiction about the
classical world....Augustus suggests the past without presuming to re-create
it.”
John Gray on John Williams: "... Happily Williams was not, in
the end, a writer of ideas. His books are not edifying lectures dressed up as
fiction. What he does is give access to the lives of others. This novel of an
aged emperor will be intensely illuminating to anyone who is ready to put
modern morality aside for a moment in order to acquire a little knowledge of
himself or herself. Augustus and Julia inhabit a world that shared none of the
grand hopes that nowadays are supposed to be definitively human. But the Roman
emperor and his daughter were human all the same, facing conflicts between
ambition and family, self-realisation and ideal commitment not greatly
different from those with which many people struggle today. The genius of this
astonishing American writer is that he shows how lives that seem utterly
strange can be very like our own."
John Williams, Augustus: VIII. Letter: Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius (13 B.c.): "...What you seem so unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the old Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the deed of horror; that the appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos; that the call to liberty and freedom closed the minds, even of those who called, to the facts of privation, suppression, and sanctioned murder. We had learned that we had to do what we did, and we would not be deterred by the forms that deceived the world...."
courtesy: copyright holders of the cover