Caesar's Women (Masters of Rome #4) by Colleen McCullough

Caesar's Women is the story of Gaius Julius Caesar's rise to prominence in his world, beginning with her return to Rome in 68 B.C. prepared to dominate a new battlefield - the Roman Forum. The wars he fights within it are waged with words, plots, schemes, metaphorical assassination. Today's ally may be tomorrow's foe; everything shifts and changes within this political arena. But Caesar sets out to prove that he is the master of this battlefield too, one he shares with other men whose names have lasted down the centuries, names like Cicero and Pompey the Great.

Caesar's victories are not limited to the Forum, however. Penned inside Rome for these memorable ten years, he also conquers Rome's noblewomen. Among his victims if the powerful and vindictive Servilia, mother of a youth called Brutus; their passionate, enduring, and destructive affair is a major influence in the shaping of Brutus's future life. Then there are the women to whom Caesar is patriarch: his mother, his daughter, and Rome's revered Vestal Virgins. Yet the one thing he never gives to any of the women who love him or want him is himself. To Caesar, love is just another weapon in his political arsenal. He is as willing to sacrifice his daughter on the altar of his ambition as he is ready to seize other means of moving towards his ultimate goal - to be the greatest of all Rome's First Men. 

Was he villain, or was he hero? That argument is still being debated today, for Caesar has never ceased to fascinate the passing generations for millennia.
Caesar's Women reveals the man behind the legend, and displays a world that, despite the alien trappings, echoes our own too closely for comfort.

In the pantheon of best-selling authors, Colleen McCullough is without peer. From the heights of The Thorn Birds to the finely rendered Tim, no one has created more excitement. The first three novels in her Masters of Rome series have all led up to this book: Caesar in his ascension. But Rome is as much a place of women as of men, and no one knows Rome's women quite as Caesar does. Here is the dramatic story of Julius Caesar and the Republic of Rome: a world that loved him, resented him, fought to destroy him - but never managed to ignore him.