Roman – WARREN ELLIS LTD

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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An entertaining whistlestop tour of a few hundred years of Roman history.

As a coda to the destruction of Macedon, a Roman embassy was sent to Alexandria where the new Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, was taking advantage of the political chaos that had enveloped the kingdom, in order to try to conquer Egypt. They met at Eleusis, not far from Alexandria. As Antiochus approached, the chief Roman ambassador, Gaius Popillius Laenas (himself a former consul and brother of the man who had been so abominable to the Ligurians), is said to have drawn a circle around him with his cane, telling Antiochus that before he stepped out of it he would have to decide whether or not to leave Egypt and accept peace with Rome.

This is the same Eleusis that was home to the Eleusinian Mysteries, which have long fascinated me.

Cassius’ early history include the view that Faunus – often considered a native Italian divinity with prophetic powers – was actually a man whom Evander, the oldest Greek settler in Latium, had met when he arrived there and called a god. Similarly, Hercules was really a robust farmer of Greek extraction, who had likewise lived in Latium but before the arrival of Evander; while the Greeks who allowed Aeneas to pass freely through their ranks because they so respected him created the concept of sacrosanctity – the inviolability of a person.

There’s probably a story there. Sacrosanctity was extended from there to Roman tribunes, the administrators elected by the people for the people.

Rome’s last king, Tarquinius Superbus, invent(ed) crucifixion.

I’ve got a hundred Kindle notes from this book. The benefit of the whistlestop tour is that Potter can strew the book with many many wonderful little facts.

Vespasian arrived in Rome in the autumn of AD 70 and would not leave Italy again. Concentrating his energies on restoring the state finances, ruined by Nero and the subsequent wars, he would also oversee some massive construction projects in Rome and the restructuring of the imperial defences. He would be long remembered for his creative approach to revenue enhancement (including a urinal tax),

The drawback is that very few people are around for more than a couple of pages, and in some sections it becomes a welter of Roman names that appear once or twice and are never seen again, so it can be difficult to keep things straight. That said, it’s a lovely primer for this crucial period, a period I’d largely forgotten about in the decades since I last read Roman history seriously, and I’m definitely better set to finally attack Tom Holland’s RUBICON.

THE ORIGIN OF EMPIRE, David Potter (UK) (US+)

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Tag: Roman

RUBICON, Tom Holland

THE ORIGIN OF EMPIRE: ROME FROM THE REPUBLIC TO HADRIAN (264 BC – AD 138), David Potter