Rating: 
Summary: A Masterfully Woven Story
Review: This is the culminating sixth volume of one of the most important historical novels of our generation. Beginning with "The First Man in Rome" and continuing through "The Grass Crown," "Fortune's Favorites," "Caesar's Women," "Caesar: Let The Dice Fly" and finally "The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra", McCullough has carried us from just before Julius Caesar's birth on through the civil war following his death.
In this extraordinary series it is possible to see the crisis a hegemonic power faces whose political system is incapable of coping with the opportunities and threats which unparalleled power have brought to it.
The corruption and decay of the Roman Senate, the rise of outside interests seeking to bribe and corrupt Rome, the growing crisis for Italians as reactionary elements in Rome refuse to extend citizenship and the reversion of violence both in the street and with the Army all serve as sobering examples for modern citizens to contemplate as they watch the kaleidoscopic changes in our world and our times.
McCullough has the natural story teller's ability to surround big ideas with living, breathing, plotting, conniving, loving and hating people who remind us that politics and history are made by humans, not by anonymous trend lines.
In "The October Horse," Caesar is finishing the civil war against Pompey's forces (especially against Cato the Younger), developing a liaison and an alliance with Cleopatra in Egypt and returning to Rome to begin to reform the system until his enemies assassinate him in the Senate. The book ends with his nephew Octavius and Mark Antony taking on the assassins in a victorious second civil war followed by the initial murmurings of competition between Octavius (Caesar Augustus to be) and Antony.
This novel is a rich feast of people, scenes and maneuvering that is well worth reading in its own right.
While I like "The October Horse" very much, I strongly recommend that anyone interested in seeing our own time in the context of historic developments first go back and read "The First Man in Rome" (Caesar's uncle Marius) and work their way through all six volumes.
This is a work of genius and it deserves to be very, very widely read.
Rating: 
Summary: Good ending for a good series
Review: This is the last book of Colleen McCullough's Rome series and in it she recaptures some of the zest and eyes open worldliness that made the first two books so wonderful. Cato is rehabilitated a bit in this book, as is Brutus. Caesar loses some of his lustre. The bits with Octavian were especially good, showing him to be very cool and calculating even as a young man.
Rating:
Summary: High-quality Literature
Review: This is the sixth and last book in a great series by Colleen McCullough on the Republican era of the Roman Empire. Every one of them maintained the same standard of high-quality literature. The dialog is crisp and highly intellectual. The historical facts painstakingly researched so that the history lesson alone is worth the purchase price.
She has done an outstanding job of research throughout the series. With numerous major characters and dozens of minor ones, she has breathed life into these people with remarkable depth and clarity. You'll get a much better understanding of historical characters. You might be particularly interested in meeting the real Cleopatra and Mark Antony-quite different from the Hollywood image these names usually conjure up.
The primary focus of The October Horse is the political intrigue leading up to the Ides of March, 44 B.C. Caesar is murdered two-thirds of the way through the book. After Caesar is killed McCullough seems to race through the next few years ending with the Second Battle of Phillipi in December, 42 B.C., where Cassius and Brutus were defeated by Antony and Octavian. As the author herself says in the Afterword, the Republican era ended with Julius Caesar. The reign of Augustus Caesar marked the beginning of the Imperium. This six-part series by Colleen McCullough, along with the works of Edward Gibbon and Robert Graves, will give you a good understanding of the Roman Empire.
This book, like all the others, is not an easy read. The Latin names and Roman titles can be very confusing. And the Roman numbering and calendar systems are not easy to figure out either. If you haven't read any of the previous books in the series and have little or no knowledge of the Romans you might be in for a hard time. But Americans should have a particular affinity for studying the Romans since, in so many ways, America is the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire. The Romans didn't care that much about the arts and sciences. They left that to the Greeks. The Romans valued military and political power, land and money. Sound familiar?
Rating:
Summary: My Review-Short and Sweet
Review: This was a fantastic series. Once you get past trying to learn all the latin names, the books capture you. I waited anxiously for each installment and soaked each book up on my vacations over the years. I am sad to see the series end but it was a good place to stop, especially since "I, Claudius" takes up the mantel from this series. Thanks Colleen...it was a great ride.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: Unlike many popular authors of multi-volume sagas, (who seem to be pressured by their publishers to produce a new installment every year), Colleen McCullough, in her final book on the late Roman Republic, does not disappoint. Although the story is familiar, she kept me enthralled. I was fascinated, for instance, by Cato, Brutus and even Cleopatra. Several reviewers have expressed the wish that McCullough continue writing about ancient Rome and follow the career of Octavian. I would suggest that she go back in time and take up the Punic Wars. Given how she made Marius, Sulla and Caesar come alive, can you imagine what she would do with Scipio Africanus, Aemilius Paulus and Hannibal?
Rating:
Summary: Good historical fiction
Review: Unlike Steven Pressfield's "Gates of Fire", Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series avoids moral or philosophical themes. McCullough takes all known historical facts about republican Rome and turns out a novel. Where there are gaps in what we know, she imposes her own interpretations and extrapolations, which all serve to develop her characterization of historical figures. All this makes for a rollicking good read. The Rome series spanned the life of Julius Caesar whose time to die has finally arrived; McCullough could not stretch him out for another novel. She gets the death scene right, presenting Caesar's fall with understated elegance, in spite the gore. Besides Caesar, we are treated to a legion of other characters: Cleopatra, Brutus, Mark Antony, Cato, to name a few, and also interesting completely fictional characters such as Caesar's Egyptian doctor Hap'fadne. But my favourite of all is Octavius. Octavius closes the series the end of the book, we are left with just a twenty five year gap before he reappears as Augustus in Robert Graves's "I, Claudius". It's interesting to note that McCullough wrote two non-Roman books between Caesar and October Horse. I suspect she was putting off killing Caesar because she had grown too fond of him. There is precedent: Alexandre Dumas went into a deep depression after killing Porthos in the last book of the Three Musketeers series.
Rating:
Summary: triumphal ending, but time to end this series
Review: With the close of this novel, the last in the series, I feel as if I have lost a good and trusty friend. In a word, these have been the best and most fascinating continuous historical novels that I have ever read. As with friendships, of course, they age: there is no question that McCullough has said her piece and done her thing and this is where it should stop: while the section leading to Caesar's assassination is wonderful, the aftermath in which the assassins are hunted down systematically or simply self-destruct has the feel of too abrupt a summary. Perhaps after a certain time her imagination will replenish itself, and a new series will follow. At the heart of the novel, in my reading, Caesar has taken on too much even for a man of universal genius (military, political, rhetorical, and in governance) and is exhausted and almost tired of living. As he deals defeat after defeat to his old foes, whom he hopes will survive to offer him an opposition that can strengthen him and help him refine his ideas, his vision for Roman society remains unsurpassed and more far-seeing than everyone else. He is also searching for an heir and communing with (the ugly) Cleopatra, who comes off as an intelligent, if rather conventional and brutal autocrat. He challenges her to think more broadly of the future, and attempts to transmit much of his vision to her in the few spare moments they have to talk. Then, as Caesar returns to the wreckage and chaos of a Rome rent by decades of civil war, he confronts the mismanagement of less gifted and visionary men in a towering rage, which makes him take on the enormous task of setting the capital back on its feet and creates new enemies. He is disappointed that no one of the stature of Cicero or his old Boni adversaries emerges. In McCulloughs' view, Caesar is the last great republican of a growing empire that requires autocracy to function with its immense size and complexity. Caesar's heir, who uses his inherited "godhead" with ruthless shrewdness, is a very different man: he is as cold-blooded as a cobra, vengeful rather than offering clemency to his Roman foes, and full of patient guile ("he doesn't need to die yet"); he is sickly rather than robust, and while handsome lacks the sexual magnetism of his mentor. While hardly a military genius like Caesar, he grows into political manipulation and subterfuge at an extremely tender age, which remains unexplained. The portrait is truly fascinating, a taste of the new system of government to come, but it is here that McCulloughs' energy begins to wane. The reader, at least in my case, cannot understand what he is planning and why he acts as he does in many instances. Thus, it is just the lightest taste of what this man will become and do. There are a number of personalities that continue to develop in this volume, most of whom meet their fates with all of the brutality one might expect from a semi-savage society. The reader sees Cicero, Brutus, Mark Anthony, Cato and many many others in novel and wonderful interpretations, all of it stimulating the desire to learn more. Sometimes melodramatic, McCullough has done her homework with the historical details and it is a feast for the imagination. While the finishing chapters are too brief, the writing remains solid, if unexceptional. This is not high literature, but very very good storytelling. Finally, through this coverage of politics and personalities, McCulloguh brilliantly succeeds in portraying Roman society in great depth, from the intrigues of the Forum to the mismanaged and brutalised subjects in the provinces. I will miss this series very much, but it was time for it to end, at least for now. Warmly recommended.
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