Roman history, rich in event and drama as it is, will always possess something of the quality of the very best science fiction: the narrative of a world that can seem, on occasion, as unsettlingly familiar as it is strange.
For reasons unknown, I bought a bunch of Roman history books a while back. I seem to revisit the period every ten years or so. Tom Holland is a noted author of popular histories, and I believe I have a few of his books. I sometimes hit speed bumps in his work, as he is profoundly Christian and that, on a couple of occasions, has led to statements in his books that I remember having been stalled by. Not here. Although I suspect that the alienness of Roman culture he alludes to here is part of his own perspective in having previously identified his own ethical structures as Greek or Roman before deciding they were in fact Christian.
That said, a successful general painting his face red before a triumph is something that didn’t make it to most modern filmed versions of Roman history, I think. That’s a wonderful fact, and, like the best popular histories, Holland makes the most of those curiosities of lost societies.
Indulgence threatened potency. Gladiators, in the week before a fight, might need to have their foreskins fitted with metal bolts to infibulate them, but citizens were supposed to rely on self-control.
Holland loves an ancient writer. I once had a brief Twitter conversation with him after I got his translation of Herodotus for Xmas one year. And this period he’s writing about gives him Cicero (whom, in my head, I can now only see as David Bamber from the tv series ROME):
Cicero, who admired Cato deeply, could nevertheless bitch that ‘he addresses the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than the shit-hole of Romulus’.
And, perhaps most amusingly to me:
‘It’s now definite that there isn’t an ounce of silver in the whole of Britain,’ Cicero reported a few months later, ‘nor any prospect of loot apart from slaves. And even then,’ he added sniffily, ‘it’s hardly as though you’d expect a slave with a decent knowledge of music or literature to emerge from Britain, is it?’
A hundred and twenty years ago, Europeans were still calling us “The Land Without Music.”
It fairly rips along, this book, and there were periods where I would have liked it to slow down and get into some more detail. But it is a work of popular history, so it needs pace and broad strokes and details that charm or amuse rather then get into the crunchy minutiae:
Caesar’s libido had long been a source of hilarity to his men: ‘Lock up your wives,’ they would sing, ‘our commander is bad news/He may be bald, but he fucks anything that moves.’
Not that Holland doesn’t stop and think. It is a deeply considered book, and its thoughts and conclusions are complex, distilled rather than diluted for the popular-history form.
The unique achievement of Augustus, however, was the brilliance with which he colonised both. His claim to be restoring their lost moral greatness to them stirred in the Romans deep sensibilities and imaginings that at their profoundest could inspire a Virgil, and make their landscape once again a sacred and myth-haunted place.
I can’t imagine a more readable or charming account of this particular period of Roman history.
“A sacred and myth-haunted place.” I love that.
RUBICON, Tom Holland (UK) (US+)
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