'A gripping history' Mary Beard 'A political thriller, and a human story that astonishes' Hilary Mantel 'Atmospheric and gripping, and [his] scholarship is impeccable' Greg Woolf Many men killed Julius Caesar. Only one man was determined to kill the killers. Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, exacted vengeance on the assassins of the Ides of March, not only on Brutus and Cassius, immortalised by Shakespeare, but all the others too, each with his own individual story. The final man left alive was one of the lesser known, Cassius Parmensis, a poet, playwright and sailor who chose every side in the dying republic's civil wars except the winning one. For fourteen years he was the most successful at evading his hunters. THE LAST ASSASSIN dazzlingly charts an epic turn of history through the eyes of an unheralded man. It is a hunt that an emperor wanted to hide, of torture and terror, politics and poetry, of ideas and their consequences, a gripping story of fear, revenge and survival.