Friends, Romans, Enemies : A NOISE OF WAR: Caesar, Pompey, Octavian and the Struggle for Rome, <i> By A. J. Langguth (Simon & Schuster: $25; 384 pp.)</i>

Anyone who went to high school on the college preparatory track in the ‘50s or ‘60s should feel grateful to A.J. Langguth. In one fast moving, lucid and dramatic book, he has told the story of those Romans we found so baffling in our teens: Caesar, whose “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars,” with their graphic descriptions of siege warfare and the extermination of prisoners, bored us in Latin 2; Cicero, whose mellifluous speeches against Verres and Catiline tormented us in Latin 3; Brutus, Marc Antony and all the other noble Romans whom we met assembled over the protagonist’s body in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (English 3). What we encountered as difficult texts, that had to be unscrambled, word by word and line by line, he has turned into events to think about and flesh-and-blood people to investigate.

Langguth’s theme is one of the most dramatic ones in world history. Like many historians before him, he tells the story of how the Roman republic collapsed, to be replaced by the empire of Augustus and his successors.

Starting in the early years of the first century B.C., with the dictatorship of Sulla, he brings his chief actors on stage at once. Caesar, the hard-eyed young aristocrat who refused to divorce his wife Cornelia at Sulla’s command, comes first. He is flanked, here and throughout, by his two great rivals: Cicero, the “new man” from Arpinum whose schooling in Greek literature and brilliance as a public speaker made him a powerful political figure even though he lacked the military virtues Romans esteemed most, and Pompey, the ambitious young soldier who slaughtered lions and elephants, as well as men, in Libya, to instill fear of Rome, but wept when his men threatened to mutiny in order to defend him.

All three reached manhood in a time of crisis. The social and economic changes that accompanied Rome’s expansion through the Mediterranean world and beyond had strained its political system and corrupted its public life. Appeals to ancient virtue and republican tradition sounded hollow to frightened aristocrats and embittered commoners alike.

Some leaders--such as the Gracchi and Marius, Caesar’s uncle Marius--looked for support among the disenfranchised, promising to find them land, relief from debts and citizenship. Others--such as Sulla--sided with the patricians and the privileged, when they promised to defend against the mob.

Both sides treated politics as an extension of war by other means. Enemies were attacked by legal and illegal means, their lands and goods confiscated, their heads stuck up on spears in the forum. Military command took on more and more political importance, as volunteer soldiers gave their prime loyalty to the general who led and paid them--and promised a rich payoff at the end of a major campaign--rather than to the Roman state. Fear spread that Rome might undergo some unheard of disaster; that the ancient republic, with of tradition, its virtues from the earth.

Against this background Langguth lets the careers of his three protagonists unroll. Like a skilled weaver, he makes all three lives and fates--along with those of wives and relatives, friends and supporters--into a colorful and coherent tapestry. He follows the stunning rise of Caesar, showing how the young man whose best-known qualities were his sexual virtuosity and compliance became a ruthless military leader, one who shrank from no necessary measure, from torching the great city of Alexandria to executing or enslaving whole Gaulish nations who ventured to defend their own territories.

He traces Cicero’s political and rhetorical achievements, laying out the political background to the speeches we read in school as examples of fine Latin and exposing the personal motives that often inspired Cicero’s lofty, passionate arguments. And he describes--this time without the aid of personal testimony--Pompey’s equally colorful adventures as general, master builder, impresario of spectacles and manipulator of the law, whose courage expressed itself in grand gestures like his disbanding of his own army before returning to Rome in 62 B.C.

Along the way we meet other fascinating figures: Crassus, the legendary rich general who met his death in Parthia, where his enemies made his corpse drink molten gold; Cato, the most upright Roman of them all, who defied a gang of gladiators, unarmed, to denounce his enemy Nepos in the Forum and eventually committed suicide by tearing out his intestines with his own hands to avoid capture and humiliation; and of course Antony and Brutus.

The story rises to at least points of climax. A first took place in 63 and 62 B.C., when Cicero, serving as consul, confronted Catiline, who tried to win political power as the leader of a coalition of young aristocrats and the poor, the bankrupt and the discontented of Italy. Cicero accused Catiline of plotting to slaughter his enemies and seize power. In the teeth of Caesar’s efforts to bring about a compromise, he isolated his enemy and forced him into an active rebellion that ended with his death in battle--only to find himself subjected to sharp criticism for his savagery with his enemies and outflanked by opponents who saw more clearly than he the need to recognize the grievances of the poor.

A second was reached in the ‘50s, when the triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus held power in an uneasy balance, and Caesar’s program of political reform and military confrontation with the Gauls carried all before it, forcing even Cicero to compromise with his enemies.

The third--and most dramatic--one fell in the ‘40s, when open conflict broke out between Pompey and Caesar. Pompey, defeated after some striking early successes, fled to Egypt, where he was murdered. Caesar, after defeating all enemies in Gaul, Egypt and elsewhere in Africa, returned to Rome, held a spectacular series of triumphs, paid off his army and reformed everything from the calendar to the law courts--but found himself confronted on the Ides of March by a ring of conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius, who feared that he planned to make himself Rome’s first king in centuries even though he had refused the title, and killed him brutally.

Caesar’s death did his enemies little good. His great-nephew Octavian, young, efficient, and often merciless, fought and defeated Caesar’s killers, Brutus and Cassius. Then he dealt with his sometime ally Marc Antony. Stately suicides, long celebrated by historians, poets and painters, removed Brutus, Antony and Cleopatra from the stage. Cicero died too, at the hands of soldiers sent by Antony, whom he had denounced in fiery speeches, his Phillipics.

After years of searing tension and outbreaks of civil war, the republic was as dead as its statesmen. The political field lay open to Octavian, who would in time make himself Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and transform Rome itself into the marble maze of wonders whose ruins still inspire awe.

Langguth tells the story with efficiency and dispatch, scattering much fascinating information along the way about everything from food to religion in late Republican Rome. A number of small mistakes don’t seriously mar his achievement as narrator. Yet the book does not fully live up to the demands of its imposing, terrible theme. Langguth’s prose--though clear and correct--is flat, lacking color and studded with stale words and phrases. He fails to bring his main characters to life--much less the fantastic city they fought for, with its toppling apartment buildings, crowded as modern Hong Kong, its elaborate and sometimes bizarre public rituals, and its ancient stones stained with the blood of executed enemies of the state.

More seriously still, Langguth flattens out his protagonists’ minds. Ever attentive to the pragmatic and the momentary, he misses the real commitments to traditional Roman images and institutions and new Greek images and symbols that sometimes inspired not only Caesar and Cicero, but Octavian as well. His accounts of the tormented idealists Cato and Brutus are particularly leaden, and his Cicero comes off as vain, skittish and a terminal ditherer (true, he was all of those things; but he was also far more). Langguth, in other words, tells only one side of a complex story, emphasizing practical needs and immediate desires rather than the symbols for which--as we know all too well--men are even likelier to kill than they are for money and power.

Not a great book, this; but a quick-paced, useful overview of a great subject. It kept my attention in hard chairs and on bouncy buses, in the course of a vacation in rural Greece. And it’s a godsend to those of us who have wondered ever since 10th grade what really made Cicero so upset with Catiline, if Caesar really said “Et tu, Brute?” to his killer, and how Caesar, Cicero, Pompey and Brutus all managed to play parts in one great, coherent drama.