“Beware the ides of March,” said the soothsayer to Julius Caesar in a certain Shakespeare play. The silver-haired Italian historian, archaeologist, and European TV personality Valerio Massimo Manfredi wrote a book titled The Ides of March (Idi di marzo) a few years ago, but a better option is Thorton Wilder’s 1948 epistolary novel by the same title, which is set in Rome during Caesar’s reign. Wilder referred to it as “a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic.” With this in mind, we decided to do a roundup of books on treachery and deceit in honor of this fateful day in history. The books fall into two categories: military and strategic deceit, or duplicitous relationships. Many times, though, there are components of both at work. All is fair in love and war, we suppose.
