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It is difficult, now, to separate the most famous Roman of them all from the most famous author of them all. For twenty generations, the Julius Caesar defined by Shakespeare has overwhelmed all other images of Caesar, so that it it is difficult to imagine the living man himself. Yet Shakespeare's Caesar, taken solely as biography, is deeply flawed. Caesar is portrayed as overtopping all his contemporaries, yet is also humorless, pompous, even self-importantly fearful; …

…Roman in history. When Caesar died in 44 BC, a great comet soon troubled the skies over Rome. No more superstitious people ever lived: even those who had bitterly opposed him and murdered him outside Pompey's Theater were awed by the implications when the heavens themselves "blazed forth the death of princes." Soon thereafter, for the first time in Roman history, a living man was deified; in the process, the man himself was lost to history.