Best Books on Julius Caesar.
His name is eternal, but what books should you read to learn about the man that is Julius Caesar?
When you hear Ancient Rome you think of Julius Caesar. They are on the verge of being interchangeable. Caesar is Rome and Rome is Caesar. Therefore, to understand this great civilisation you must learn about who the man was and why his name will never be forgotten.
This is far from being an exhaustive list, but merely a place to begin. There are many great books which cover Caesar but the ones I have chosen are must reads.
The first place to start is with a book by the man himself and The Civil War, published by Penguin Classics, is brilliant. There’s a clarity to Caesar’s writing that makes it easy to forget you’re reading someone who lived two thousand years ago. He writes with the precision of a soldier. Every sentence feels deliberate, stripped of extravagance but loaded with intent. It’s history told by the man at the centre of it all. Caesar is calm, confident, and utterly convinced of his own necessity. Buy Now at GreatHistoricalBooks.com.
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To understand the man that is Caesar you need to read an outside account that spans his entire life. Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar is a definitive modern biography that captures the scale of the man’s life without ever losing sight of the person behind the legend. Goldsworthy writes with clarity and balance, unpacking the politics, ambition, and brutality that defined Caesar’s rise. It’s detailed but never dry. You come away with a sense of just how calculated Caesar was. A man who understood power not as a tool, but as a destiny. Buy Now at GreatHistoricalBooks.com.
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An essential read is Plutarch’s Roman Lives, published by Oxford World’s Classics. It offers a perspective shaped as much by moral reflection as by history. Rather than focusing on tactics or politics, Plutarch examines character, exploring what drove these men and what eventually undid them. Alongside Caesar, he writes of other great figures of Rome, including Pompey and Sulla, each given the same careful scrutiny. His portrait of Caesar feels both admiring and uneasy, as if even he couldn’t quite decide whether greatness and ruin were really two sides of the same coin. Buy Now at GreatHistoricalBooks.com.
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The most recent edition of Caesar’s Gallic War, translated by Cynthia Damon for the Loeb Classical Library in 2025, deserves acknowledgement. Caesar writes at the height of his power, chronicling campaigns that extended Rome’s reach across Gaul. The writing is sharp and controlled, every sentence meant to inform, impress, and justify. You can sense the man behind the victories is ambitious, disciplined, and acutely aware of how history would remember him. It reads as both a military record and a subtle act of self-promotion, offering insight into a general for whom strategy and legacy were one and the same. Buy Now at GreatHistoricalBooks.com.
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As previously mentioned, this list is far from exhaustive and covers just four books. However, to understand the great man that is Julius Caesar you cannot go wrong with any of these. From my perspective, if you want to understand Ancient Rome you cannot do this without reading about Julius Caesar. He embodies the spirit of this great civilisation through his ambition which he forcefully makes a reality. At the same time, the tragedy that befell Caesar is also one that is intertwined with the history of Rome itself, as we see through the fall of the Roman Republic. You could say that without tragedy there can be no glory. If there is one man that truly represents this then it is no other than Julius Caesar himself.
Click here to read the article on Substack – Acta Diurna by GreatHistoricalBooks.com.