I'll have to check them out at some point - they sound a bit more balanced than McCullough's series that we discussed a while ago.

I agree up to a point with your remarks on Caesar - he could have retired from political life, walked away and written his memoirs or something. Like Cincinnatus. But that would've left his allies and his reforms hanging. I do think after all those years in the field and in the political arena, he was genuinely concerned about that, and realized that he could only protect his allies and ensure his legionaries received their land, by retaining sufficient power. And in the highly polarized climate of the day, nothing less than a permanent consulship, or dictatorship, would do the job.

To put it another way, at the time of the Rubicon, perhaps it really was too late to give up power. From a saving the Republic point of view, things went south long before that, probably even before Caesar's entry into politics, in the Marius and Sulla era.