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It is easy to make a biography of Julius Caesar exciting; it is not so easy to make it accurate, inclusive and acute. Yet Christian Meier achieves all this, in a book aimed at scholars and readers with no classical background. Consequently, nothing is taken for granted. The potential drawback is that matters disputed in academic circles are presented as unchallenged fact. This is a potential drawback because Meier does go to considerable lengths to transcend the usual narrative stereotypes - crucially so, given that the history of the late republic is unusually prone to the easy conceptual categories of ambition, tyranny, and moral decline. He does this by providing welcome background information on society and politics, and by giving free rein to his imagination. So he does not rule it inappropriate to speculate on Caesar's liaison with Cleopatra as providing him with a degree of emotional companionship he had not experienced since the death of his daughter Julia. In discussing the crossing of the Rubicon at the start of the book to set out the main parameters of the argument, Meier is very much the modern biographer, suggesting motivations and assessing personality on the basis of the extant, romanticised accounts. This vivid sense of Caesar as a personality is maintained throughout - he is depicted as an "outsider", determined to put self-interest and survival before the Roman people or the greater good.

Meier's decision not to cite sources is intended to avoid an "extensive critique" of primary and secondary material. This is a missed opportunity in an otherwise excellent study, because he is therefore never obliged to deal with one crucial question, and never obliged to make his reader consider it either - namely, "how much of what we 'know' about Caesar is likely to be true?" Thus material from Cicero is given the same weight as historical evidence as, say, anecdotes from Plutarch and Suetonius, who were writing more than a century later. The fact that his second chapter provides a compelling glimpse of the traditions that accrued around the man shows that Meier is far from uninterested in such shifts of historical perception; and indeed he repeatedly warns his reader not to view the ancient events only from a modern perspective. The oversimplification that follows from this is especially marked when his account is based on Caesar's own writings. So when Caesar explains the crossing of Rhine as intended to discourage the Germans from invading Gaul, Meier does not criticise this claim by elaborating the symbolic and political value of breaching a frontier of empire. Nor is he cynical enough about Caesar's version of what happened at Vesontio and Gergovia. On the other hand, he shows clearly how Caesar wrote with an eye to posterity; and even more importantly he argues convincingly that the way Caesar describes events in Gaul is "essentially how he understood them". This disposes at a stroke of the misguided view that the Gallic war was a work of systematic simulation and dissimulation.

Meier's account makes it plain that there has never been any convincing justification for Caesar's refusal to lay down his Gallic command in 50bc. Equally vividly he shows us Caesar backed in to a corner by intransigent political enemies given no alternative but to fight.

Caesar was no mere machinating tyrant set on supremacy at any price to the republic. He is better understood as a charismatic and pivotal figure in a "configuration of events" that made the end of the republic inevitable. The book ends where it must, with the Ides of March - by now the reader is fully persuaded of the inevitability of this violent and bloody death. Meier has given a rich variety of materials and approaches for interpreting Caesar. Yet he would probably be the first to acknowledge that even after so much compelling argument, we are still left with an insoluble enigma, with Caesar as "the man who was a mystery to us all".

Carolyn Hammond edited and translated Caesar's Gallic War for Oxford World's Classics.