Thursday, June 3, 2010

Lepidus: Unfairly Treated?

I'm currently reading Lepidus: The Tarnished Triumvir by Richard D. Weigel, and I gotta say, I dig it.

Marcus Aemelius Lepidus has always seemed like a rather fascinating character to me, he's all over accounts of the Late Republic, but he's nearly always given short thrift. He's relegated to the sidelines of the struggle for supremacy that engulfed the Late Republic and nobody really seems to really care what he's up to.

Maybe that's why, then, I kinda looked for a book such as the one I'm reading at the moment. Weigel argues that Lepidus is unfairly treated in most accounts of his life, as well as modern commentaries, owing to two central factors: he irritated Cicero and he challenged Octavian (later Augustus).

I'll put a fuller review up here once I've finished reading the book, but it's certainly an interesting topic. Especially so as I am re-watching HBO's Rome and the somewhat cerebral and "sidelined" Lepidus makes a mandatory appearance (as he does so frequently) but he is ever so slightly mocked, derided and essentially made unimportant.

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