This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor.

This is CBS I on the World. I'm John Batchelor. I take us immediately to 95 BCE, the birth of a young woman who becomes a centerpiece of a wonderful

new half-situation comedy, half-murdered tragedy. The book is Claudia, Claudia Champion of the

Republic. It's about an extremely well-born child who becomes the center of a drama that we know

as Julius Caesar. But this is approaching the same story with almost all the same cast from the

point of view of a young woman who grows up to marry and be proper as long as her husband lives.

Clodia.

Her last name tells a story also of her patronage, the Apian Way, or the aqueduct that feeds Rome.

I welcome the author, Douglas Boyne, a classicist, professor in St. Louis.

And it's important here to follow this story from the point of view of not Caesar,

who passes through many of these scenes, not Pompey, Caesar's rival.

Nothing that we recognize, including the murder of Caesar, is essential to the understanding of how we get to the drama that we know is the Roman Civil War.

Douglas, Professor, congratulations. This is wonderful. It's a pleasure. It didn't mean to interrupt you. It did jump the gun there for a second, but absolutely a pleasure to be back, John. Thank you for the praise.

Born 95 BC. Who is Claudia? What is her family to her? Good evening to you.

Good evening. She's a wonderfully privileged young girl from a family of six siblings who grew up in the

center of Rome in one of the most exclusive addresses that you could have in the city.

There were always kind of a house full of staff and enslaved to polish the dishware,

the dinnerware and clean the dishware.

And her family and her great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather can trace their lineage

back to the founding of the Republic. So she had an amazing,

I think, childhood growing up because every day she walked by the family tree in her house

that was painted on the wall. She got to see a line of ancestors that took her story

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