RaveSmithsonian MagazineStothard...rescues these minor men from historical obscurity and uses their fates to tell the most page-turning account in recent memory of this otherwise well-trodden history ... Claudius Parmensis\' name will be unfamiliar even to those who know a fair bit about the fall of Rome\'s nearly 500-year-old republic and the beginnings of its imperial phase. Yet the story of this marginal figure reveals a great deal about the bigger changes of the period, as Stothard elegantly demonstrates ... Stothard vividly narrates how Epicureanism served as a mobilizing philosophy among the assassins, even as they argued over whether the true Epicurean would go so far as to assassinate Caesar, who was, after all, a Roman consul.
