First Caesar

FREEDOM, FAREWELL!--Phyllis Bentley --Macmillan ($2.50).

HAIL, CAESAR!--Fletcher Pratt--Smith & Haas ($3.50).

With the same workmanlike technique she used in her novels of Yorkshire mill-towns, Phyllis Bentley last week turned back 2,000 years, retold the old story of Julius Caesar, his rise and fall. Though her version lacked the imaginative freshness of such historical novels as Robert Graves's on the Emperor Claudius or Lion Feuchtwanger's on Josephus, and neither added to nor subtracted from history's blackboard, it furnished modern readers with a stirring, up-to-date account of one of Rome's greatest true stories. Author Bentley also hoped that her factual record of ancient autocracy would point a moral for the present.

When Sulla became dictator of Rome, one of the names published on his proscribed list was that of Caius Julius Caesar, a tittering young sophisticate whose debaucheries were many but whose only political crime had been joining Sulla's opponents. Clever and consumingly ambitious, Caesar dodged and bribed his way out of Italy, and even after his friend's had won for him Sulla's contemptuous pardon he was wise enough not to return till after Sulla's death. While Caesar was cultivating the arts of a courtier in Asia (Author Bentley has him companioning a pervert out of policy, implies he was not really that way himself), his rival Pompey was winning victories all over the place and becoming the darling of Rome.

When Rome was no longer too hot to hold him Caesar soon established himself there as one of the shrewdest schemers of a conspiratorial day. He fished to such good purpose in Rome's troubled waters that eventually he caught the great Pompey and the millionaire Crassus in his net, became with them one of the three rulers of the Roman world. Then he went off to make his military reputation in Gaul and Britain. Returning at the head of a victorious army, he gave the signal for civil war when he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome. Crassus was already dead; Pompey died miserably after Caesar's legions tore his army to pieces at Pharsalia. Caesar, "voted" dictator, was king in all but name. And when he fell, four years later, under the daggers of Brutus and Cassius, it was only to make way for the more thoroughgoing autocracy of Augustus.

Author Bentley, without disallowing history's whispers that Caesar was a rake, minimizes the details. Readers who expect a luscious Egyptian interlude with Cleopatra do not know their Bentley. Cleopatra makes only one appearance--fully clothed and middleaged. Caesar's most constant mistress was Servilia, Brutus' mother, and of her Author Bentley contrives to make a somehow noble Roman matron, though she was twice married and continually unfaithful to both husbands. The other chief figures in the story appear as conventional history reports them: Pompey, a handsome, courageous, slow-minded soldier; Cicero a henpecked, opportunistic politician with a gift for gab.

Not farewell to liberty but hail to the chief is the tenor of Fletcher Pratt's biography of the great Julius. Hail, Caesar!, an uncritical popularization like his informal history of the U. S. Civil War (Ordeal by Fire), is written with a slapdash chattiness that often sinks to sophomoric levels. In his laudable attempts to English the dead Latin facts, Author Pratt sometimes makes his English livelier than lucid: "He was disposed to hold grievance that the Senate had not protected him to point and edge, and a snarling shuttlecock of 'Your fault' began to grow up, which was interrupted by a message that plunged them all into the well of misery together. . . . The old man hardly seemed to care, numb to an aching misery, not so much that his ideals had died, but warped into forms unrecognizable to himself, and in the procedure twisted askew the axis of his private life." And even schoolboys still struggling-- with Caesar's Commentaries can tell Author Pratt he is wrong to write ''The Roman spell was broke," or ''The Gauls were beat."

Emphasis of Hail, Caesar! is less on politics or persons than on war. Author Pratt denies that Caesar was ever a pervert, even for policy; he mentions Caesar's mistress Servilia only in passing. For Caesar's rapid imposition of New Deal legislation on Rome he has nothing but implicit praise. Two-thirds of the book is devoted to a play-by-play account of Caesar's campaigns--a summary which leads Author Pratt to the surprising conclusion that Caesar "never became great as a soldier.'' He was not even a good soldier; his tactics were "infantile," his strategy "hackneyed and obvious"; he handled cavalry like an amateur. Having startled the reader into attention with this splash, Author Pratt then backs water, slowly at first. Caesar won his campaigns because he planned by campaigns, not by battles; he had phenomenal luck ("nobody could fight Caesar without making fatal mistakes"). And by the time he came to grips with Pompey for the mastery of the civilized world Caesar had become a pretty good soldier after all. "He made himself a great general by sheer thought." Now his tactics were "impromptu" but "dazzling." Readers closed the book feeling not unlike rubes whom another high-binding barker had fooled again.

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