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The Roman Republic by Michael Crawford (second edition, 1992)

No, not the Michael Crawford, star of the 1970s TV series Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. His version of the Roman Republic would have been hilarious. “Ooooh, Brutus!”

No, this Michael Crawford is the English historian, born in 1939 and still with us, privately educated (like most classicists – St Paul’s and Oxford) who nonetheless takes a solidly socialist view of history. Page two of his preface states that:

I continue to believe that the principal reason for the destruction of Republican government at Rome was the neglect of the legitimate grievances of the population by the governing classes…

The use of ‘continue to believe’ implies that he valiantly persists in his views despite stiff opposition, an impression he goes on to compound by telling us, rather naively and over-earnestly:

…just as I continue to believe that a socialist framework offers the only eventual hope for the survival of our own world. (page vi)

‘Eventual’ is a funny choice of word and, like ‘continue’, hints at an embattled state of mind, of taking a heroic stand against a sea of opponents. (This is also an early indication of Crawford’s often idiosyncratic prose style and oblique way of describing important events.)

Crawford’s earnest socialism might have made sense in 1978 when the first edition of this book was published, but had gone out of style by 1992 when this second edition arrived – a year after the Soviet Union collapsed and the oppressed nations of Eastern Europe were freed from Russian tyranny. Mrs Thatcher had been stabbed in the back by her own MPs in late 1990 but it wasn’t until 1997 that John Major’s useless Conservative government was replaced by Tony Blair’s pazazzy New Labour – which proceeded to destroy forever the kind of socialism Crawford believed in, aligning the left with globalising neo-liberal economics, financial deregulation, public-private partnerships, university tuition fees and the galloping inequality which has brought us to our present happy situation.

Reading Crawford’s little preface makes me sad for all the good people who thought they could make the world a better place and have resoundingly failed. As a result, although the events he describes took place over 2,000 years ago, an air of forlornness hangs over the entire text.

The Roman Republic

It’s not a very good book. Crawford rushes. He squeezes too much information into gangling sentences or long paragraphs. Nothing is gone into in enough detail. Take this example:

Not altogether surprisingly, there were those in Carthage who did not regard the verdict of the First Punic War as final; the creation of an empire in Spain and the acquisition thereby of substantial military and financial resources were followed by Hannibal’s invasion of 218 (the Roman tradition attempted to make the entirely justified attack on Saguntum by Hannibal into the casus belli, in order to salve its conscience over the failure to respond effectively to the appeal by Saguntum to Rome). (p.50)

Bloody long sentence, isn’t it? And useless as factual exposition. With just a little bit more effort Crawford could have given us a separate sentence or two describing the establishment of the Carthaginian empire in Spain by Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, how Hannibal assumed the mantle of command when his father died in 228 BC, and how a series of clashes with the Romans eventually led the Carthaginians to conclude that the only way to solve the ‘Rome problem’ was a direct attack on Italy, which Hannibal launched in 218.

One more sentence could have explained the importance of the battle of Saguntum a lot more clearly. As it is Crawford devotes nearly 40 words to it but somehow manages to not only not explain what happened, but to make it more obscure than if he’d never mentioned it.

Most of Crawford’s book is like this: it contains plenty of facts but a) you can tell that a lot of context and explanation and details are missing, and b) it’s all told arsey-versey, meaning in a ‘wilfully confused and disorderly’ way.

Because I already know the outlines of the story from the other three histories of Rome I’ve read I am able to decipher Crawford’s clipped and contorted references, but it became very tiresome. He gives no sense of Hannibal’s campaign in Italy; he gives no sense of the civil war between Marius and Sulla; he gives no sense of why Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) was such a spectacularly successful general; his account of Caesar’s command in Gaul is so brief as to be non-existent; his coverage of the Catiline conspiracy is risible; his explanation of Cicero’s exile is impenetrable unless you happen to already know the facts and issues; his mentions of Clodius give no sense at all of the street violence unleashed by his gangs or why it led to Pompey being awarded sole power to bring peace to the streets of Rome; and so on and so on. All this is mentioned but nowhere properly explained. As a narrative history of the Roman Republic, this book is rubbish.

The Fontana History of the Ancient World

This volume is the first part of The Fontana History of the Ancient World so maybe Crawford was given a specific period and a tight page limit and this explains the text’s cramped contortions. The book has just 200 pages into which to cram a history which theoretically covered 720 years from the legendary founding of Rome in 753 BC through to the rise of Octavian in the 30s. It also has to contain a timeline, four appendices, half a dozen maps, a list of further reading and 4 separate indices. Maybe that’s why it feels so rushed and superficial. But the lack of space doesn’t explain Crawford’s strange style and often crabbed and obscure way of trying to explain events. That’s just crap.

Schematic

If the book’s weakness is its lack of narrative depth or proper full explanation of events, its strongest parts are where it is most schematic – brief and pithy as a PowerPoint presentation. The chapter headings give a sense of this high-level, schematic approach:

  1. The sources
  2. Italy and Rome
  3. The Roman governing classes
  4. From Italian power to Mediterranean power
  5. The conquest of the East
  6. The consequences of empire – the governing classes
  7. The imperial power
  8. The consequences of empire – the governed
  9. Reform and revolution
  10. Rome and Italy
  11. The end of consensus
  12. The world turned upside down
  13. The embattled oligarchy
  14. The militant dynasts

Good titles, aren’t they? But each of these chapter is too short – 10 pages on the sources, 5 and a half on early Rome’s rise to eminence among the patchwork of Italian tribes, 8 and a half on the ruling class. And the same goes for the four appendices:

  1. The Roman assemblies
  2. The Roman army
  3. Equites
  4. The special commands

They look good but they are 3-and-a-half, one-and-a-half, two-and-a-half and one-and-a-half pages long, respectively. Too short, too allusive to explain anything properly.

Main themes

Crawford tell us his main idea is that the collapse of the Republic was caused by “the neglect of the legitimate grievances of the population by the governing classes” but already in the introduction he undermines his own thesis when he attributes the collapse to two other causes, both of which are more persuasive to me, namely:

1. “The failure to develop communal institutions for the maintenance of order” – when the Senate and the tribunes or popular assemblies fell out there was no institution or way to arbitrate the disputes. Together with the absence of any police force or independent judiciary, this meant whoever ruled the streets or led the biggest army could a) seize power, as in the civil war between Sulla and Marius in the 80s BC or b) more insidiously, create an atmosphere of lawlessness and hooliganism as created by Publius Clodius Pulcher in the 50s.

2. The mad competitiveness between very rich, very ambitious members of what Crawford, throughout the book refers to as the Roman ‘oligarchy’. (Oligarchy is defined as: ‘control by a small group of powerful people.’)

Crawford quotes Aristotle as saying that, so long as it remains united, an oligarchy is impossible to overthrow – but once members fall out with each other, then collapse can come very suddenly. In Crawford’s view, the collapse came about because of:

1. The wealth generated by the hugely expanded Roman empire was unprecedented and put unprecedented power for bribery and corruption into the hands of the super-rich.

2. The long periods for which eminent generals (Marius, Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Caesar) led their men created super-generals, super-leaders, whose rivalries involved entire armies, and, as per point 1, the Republic simply had no way to arbitrate between them (p.25).

In the last forty years of the Republic, the Senate found itself having to award more and more special commands to leading generals (Pompey received most) to allow them to deal with logistical or military problems which were too large, spread out over too long a time period or too far away, for the existing machinery of one-year consuls and regional governors to handle.

Thus Pompey was given a special command to deal with the ongoing pirate problem in 67, immediately followed by a special command to deal with the unending war against Mithridates VI in Asia. The growing reliance on special commands was symptomatic of how the institutions of the republic couldn’t cope with the challenge of running an empire.

Who was the Roman oligarchy?

So who were the “governing classes” which Crawford refers to in his introduction? Chapter 2 gives a pithy overview.

Soon after the overthrow of the monarchy in about 510 BC, the Roman ruling class decided to ensure they were never again ruled by the caprices of one man, so they took two steps:

1. they divided executive power between two officials, the consuls and

2. they had them elected, and for one year only – enough time to carry out official duties and for one military campaign season, then their time was up and someone else took over

Those seeking election generally had to have held more junior positions in what developed into a ladder or stepping stones of official positions. These offices of ‘magistracies’ evolved over the years but, given the human tendency to multiply bureaucracies, remained surprisingly few.

They were, in rising order of responsibility, the posts of quaestor, aedile and praetor. These positions were referred to collectively as the magistracies. This sequence of public offices was called the cursus honorum. Candidates for the magistracies had to canvas the people at annual hustings. They were elected by all adult males who had property enough to be included in the regular census carried out for this purpose which had originally been established to assign men to appropriate ranks in the citizen army.

Hence another elected post, that of censor, responsible for keeping the list of citizens a) eligible to vote and b) assigned to the appropriate rank in the army, up to date.

To be eligible to join the army a citizen needed to be a member of the assidui i.e. to achieve a basic property qualification (p.97). The assidui were divided into five classis or ranks, according to their assets, and it was the job of the censors to keep this list of citizens, their property and their ranking up to date.

The senate consisted of all the men who had previously held office as a magistrate. Senate derives from the Latin word senex which simply means old man, on the assumption that mature men who had held office gave good advice.

The single most important thing to grasp about Roman politics is that the senate did not make laws. It was a solely advisory body – although it arrogated to itself certain policies, specifically financial policy and military strategy. Anybody intending to create legislation was expected to consult the senate, which could and did hold extensive debates for and against legislation, suggesting amendments, improvements or that laws be rejected. But the senate didn’t actually pass the laws. It relied on the popular assemblies to propose and vote on actual laws.

Members of the same small group of families held magistracies and eminent positions in the state for hundreds of years. These were the patricians who monopolised the important magistracies and the various religious offices and half a dozen priesthoods (which were also elected).

The patricians distinguished themselves from the plebs or plebeians, who supposedly came from more recent, less ancient and venerable families. But within a century or so of the overthrow of the kings the plebs agitated to have a say for themselves, campaigns which eventually led to the creation of an assembly where the plebs could discuss their issues, the concilium plebis, and the creation of the post of tribune of the plebs. The tribune’s original function was to protect citizens from arbitrary actions by the (mostly patrician) magistrates. Over the years the number and powers of the tribunes slowly expanded.

In 342 BC the plebs broke through a glass ceiling and won the legal right to stand for the consulship  alongside patricians. The consequence was the growth of a mixed patrician-plebeian nobility because, by the 300s, the leading plebeian families were not at all common working people but had developed into a class of very wealthy families in their own right (‘the plebeian leadership was rich and ambitious’, p.28).

This mixed patrician-plebeian nobility is what Crawford means when he (frequently) refers to the ‘oligarchy’ (‘control by a small group of powerful people.’)

The history of the Roman republic is the history of the fierce rivalry between a relatively small number of men at the core of this patrician-plebeian oligarchy, as they were forced to express it through the channels of a) election to a magistracy b) success as a military commander c) success as governor of an overseas province.

It was a complicated and sensitive mechanism which, by its last century, was riddled with bribery and corruption and, as mentioned above, fierce competition between its members for power and status which repeatedly spilled over into street violence. In the final 50 years it escalated into armed rebellion and civil war between Roman legions loyal to rival Strong Men.

Roman flexibility

Although they went on about their legends and traditions, one of the most notable things about the Roman state and culture was their flexibility.

Constitutional flexibility As provinces were acquired and something like an empire came into being, the Roman oligarchy expanded the number of magistracies sitting under the consulship, increasing the number of quaestors and praetors i.e. they were flexible in adapting their constitution.

Cultural flexibility From about 200 BC onwards the Roman elite took an increasing interest in Greek art, architecture, literature and philosophy, and frankly copied it (as in the plays of Plautus and Terence), and slowly developed their own versions and distinct styles.

Citizen flexibility But both these aspects rested on the ancient Roman custom of incorporating peoples into their state. Thus the conquest of the many tribes of Italy by one city state didn’t result in their miserable subjugation, but by the carefully calibrated award of Roman citizenship to tribes and communities around the country. When Rome went on to conquer foreign lands (starting with Sicily in the 240s) she made no demands that the population change their religion, culture or laws – they simply had to offer up young men for the Roman army (p.74).

The openness of Rome to outsiders was one of the sources of her strength in Italy (p.78)

It was this ability to incorporate foreign lands, foreign peoples, the best of foreign cultures and even their gods and religions, which underpinned a thousand years of success.

The impact of empire on the Roman ruling class

It’s worth making the minor point that all the historians talk about Rome having an ’empire’ well before the end of the Republican period and before they had actual emperors. In the talismanic year 146 BC the Romans crushed Carthage in the west and Corinth in the East, thus confirming their hegemony over the Mediterranean. The defeat of Carthage handed over the latter’s territories in north Africa and Spain to Rome, and after Rome defeated the Achaean League in 146 BC she used Greece as a jumping off point for greater involvement in ‘Asia’ (modern day Turkey) and across the sea in Egypt.

An empire in fact well before it became an empire in name.

Extreme wealth

Crawford’s thesis is simple: the phenomenal wealth which could be extracted from these overseas territories (‘generals and governors abroad had almost limitless opportunities for illegitimate enrichment’, p.74), plus the prestige attached to military success and the public triumphs awarded to victorious generals, led to increasing disparities among the ruling elite: some became phenomenally rich and successful, others less so.

The enormous power wielded by Roman magistrates operating far from senatorial oversight led to grave abuses; the wealth acquired from office by some members of the oligarchy separated them spectacularly from the rest and enabled them to bribe their own way and that of other members of their family to further office. (p.84)

The conquest of the Greek East from 200 BC onwards provided ready access to Greek artistic and intellectual skills and techniques and to wealth on a staggering scale. (p.85)

He quotes the Roman saying that a provincial governor needed to screw not one but three fortunes out of his unfortunate subjects: one to repay the money he borrowed to pay his election expenses; one to bribe the jury at the trial for corruption he would inevitably face when he got back to Rome; and the third one for the traditional reason – to have the wherewithal to fund the conspicuously rich lifestyle demanded by his class (p.171), a particularly conspicuous example being the successful general Lucius Licinius Lucullus. By the 60s:

Provincial government not only provided men with wealth and connections on a scale unimagined a generation earlier; the great commands placed in their hands for a time almost regal power and led to their being showered with symbolic honours appropriate to that power. Here again Pompeius surpassed all his predecessors. (p.176)

So, as the first century BC progressed, at the very top of the Roman oligarchy, competition for the consulship, for governorship of a province or generalship of an army overseas, became increasingly fierce and bitter because the rewards became increasingly mind-boggling.

It was bitter rivalry about who would lead the Roman military campaign against Mithridates VI of Pontus in modern-day Turkey, which precipitated the civil war between Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla starting in 88 BC. It was failure to agree a mechanism whereby Caesar could lay down command of his army in Gaul and transition to being a consul in 49 which led to the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. It was the failure of the centuries-old institutions of the Republic to control and mediate the rivalry between these super-powerful men, and then between Octavian and Mark Antony after Caesar’s assassination, which led, after repeated collapses, to its complete replacement by the rule of one strong man.

Seen in this light, the domestic policies of the oligarchy throughout the 2nd century and into the 1st century, consisted of the oligarchy’s attempts to moderate and police itself, to hold this power in check. It had created a machine of awesome power which it could no longer control.

The decade 59 to 49 saw competition between the leading members of the oligarchy reach such an intensity that it destroyed the framework in which competition operated or had meaning. It burst out as the naked use of force. Might could only be met with might and could only lead to the triumph of one man only, Octavian.

The land problem

This much is maybe obvious. Crawford’s left-wing perspective comes out in his insistence that the ‘people’ played a leading role in the process. He claims they did this in two inter-related ways. First, was the land problem. In a nutshell, in the last 150 years of the republic the ordinary peasant farmer was driven off the land in ever-increasing numbers. The richest patricians relentlessly bought up land, exploiting the harsh money-lending and debt laws which penalised ordinary farmers.

This explains why there were so many attempts to redistribute land and to enact some form of debt relief over those 150 years. Take C. Laelius’s proposal in 140 that land be redistributed to the needy in order to raise them up to the property qualification required by recruitment into the army, thereby improving it, (p.91). Or Tiberius Gracchus’s proposals for redistributing land from the wealthy to the landless in 133. Crawford devotes a chapter to describing in detail the process of land appropriation by the rich and the various attempts by reformers to stem the tide (pages 94 to 106).

They mostly failed and the net result was the creation of huge estates (which came to be called latifundia) owned by very rich landowners, and the driving of hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers off the land and into the towns, where they created shanty towns and formed the mobs susceptible to popular rabble rousers.

Thus the rise of the super-rich not only destabilised their own class, the oligarchy, but indirectly contributed to the rise of the mob mentality which increasingly dominated Roman politics in the last 50 years of the republic.

The lynching of Tiberius Gracchus

Crawford goes along with all the other historians I’ve read who say that the public lynching of the reformer Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC marked a turning point because for the first time laws, justice and deference gave way to brute violence. His younger brother was similarly massacred along with hundreds of his followers a decade later, but it was really the long and bitter Social War of the 90s which led directly into the civil war of the 80s, and to the appalling politically motivated murders commissioned by both Marius and Sulla, which made politicised street violence an accepted event.

A generation later, the street violence between the gangs led by Clodius and Milo destabilised politics throughout the 50s. And it was Mark Antony’s speech in the forum the day after Caesar’s assassination, displaying Caesar’s body and reading out his will, which roused the mob to a fury and to go off and torch the houses of the conspirators, thus driving them to flee from Rome, putting them on the back foot and guaranteeing that Antony and his group in the oligarchy would triumph.

The point is these successive outbreaks of constitutional collapse were partly enabled by the growth of a large class of urban proletariat, mobs of the unemployed or underemployed, former farmers driven off their land, embittered and ready for anything. It explains the appeal of Catalina’s vague promises to overthrow the entire state and start again to large numbers of the urban poor.

And we know from Cicero’s letters that even Octavian, who was to be the last man standing at the end of this series of ruinous civil wars, went out of his way to make himself liked by the mob.

In a sentence: the population displaced from the land and herded into the cities provided the raw material of aggrieved proles which the unprecedentedly powerful and homicidally competitive oligarchs were able to manipulate for their advantage.

Slavery

There was a third element: slavery. As conquest followed conquest in the 2nd century, as entire cities and peoples were conquered and some (not all) sold into slavery, there developed a tidal wave of slavery. This had two effects: one was that the economy didn’t need the peasant farmer any more; slaves could farm huge latifundia virtually for free. Second was a ratcheting up of the luxury living of the urban rich, and even the well-off middle classes, once their houses became full of slaves who did all kinds of work and services for free. The Roman historian Appian wrote:

‘So the powerful became very rich and slaves spread all over Italy.’ (quoted on page 102)

There was probably a third effect as well, which was the slave trade itself, which Crawford says really got going in the 140s i.e after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth. Easy to overlook the slaves and the simple fact that they created a vast amount of economic value for little overhead. The trade made slave traders very rich, but transformed the lives of Roman citizens of all but the lowest classes. (p.102).

‘When the Romans became rich after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth they used enormous numbers of slaves…’ (Roman historian Strabo quoted on page 131)

The growing use of slaves led to three slave wars or risings, in 135 to 132, 104 to 100, and 73 to 71. The Greek island of Delos became the centre of the slave trade in the eastern Mediterranean . It was said it could receive, sell and dispatch tens of thousands of slaves every day! (p.131).

Conclusion

This is a poor book, which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Its take-home message is straightforward: it is bad, sometimes fatal, to the peace and viability of a society to let some of its members become disproportionately rich or powerful. Extreme wealth not only corrupts individuals but destabilises entire societies. A largely ignored message still relevant to us inhabitants of the ‘advanced’ economies of the West.

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Posted by Simon on July 22, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/the-roman-republic-michael-crawford/

The Civil War by Julius Caesar – 1

Fortune, which has great influence in affairs generally and especially in war, produces by a slight disturbance of balance important changes in human affairs.
(The Civil War Book 3 chapter 68)

I picked up this 1967 Penguin paperback of Julius Caesar’s Civil Wars, translated by Jane Gardner, in the sensible A format size (18 cm by 11 cm) with reassuringly browned paper, in a second hand bookshop for just £2. Though nearly 60 years old it has fewer scuff marks and scratches than a book I recently bought ‘new’ from Amazon, ‘destroyer of books’, whose cover was smeared, scuffed and scratched.

This Penguin volume actually contains four ‘books’:

  • The Civil War, the longest text at 112 short ‘chapters’ or sections (often no more than paragraphs), making up 130 Penguin pages
  • The Alexandrian War (78 sections, 42 pages)
  • The African War (98 sections, 49 pages)
  • The Spanish War (42 sections, 22 pages)

Only the first of these is nowadays thought to have been written by Caesar. The second is generally attributed to one of Caesar’s lieutenants, Aulus Hirtius, who had written the eighth and final book in The Gallic Wars, the final two by someone who was an eye witness but of lower military rank and a lot lower literary ability than Caesar.

However, the four texts are always included together because, whatever their shortcomings, they are clearly conceived as a set, taking the reader through the entire civil war, from Caesar’s crossing the river Rubicon a little south of Ravenna in January 49 BC, through to the final mopping up of Pompeian forces in 45.

Having read numerous accounts of the civil war, I think the single most important fact (which often doesn’t come over) is that within a few weeks of Caesar entering Italy with his army of Gaul, his opponent, Gnaeus Pompeius, fled Rome and fled Italy. We know from Cicero’s letters on the subject that even at the time, his allies and supporters thought this was a mistake and so it proved to be, handing mainland Italy and the capital over to Caesar almost without a fight (this narrative describes a handful of sieges and confrontations before almost all the towns and cities and army units in Italy simply went over to Caesar’s side).

Pompey’s flight a) handed Rome and Italy over to Caesar and b) meant that the civil war would be fought on foreign soil, eventually in all the provinces Rome ruled, meaning (from west to east) Spain, north Africa, the Province (the south of France featuring the major port of Marseilles), Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor.

Despite Caesar defeating Pompey’s main army at the battle of Pharsalus in central Greece in August 48 and Pompey’s flight to Egypt where he was murdered a month later, in September 48 – nonetheless, forces loyal to Pompey and led by his sons fought on in Spain, Africa and Asia. This explains why the civil war(s) continued for another 3 years and why the main text, The Civil War, which ends with the death of Pompey, needed to be continued with the three subsequent shorter texts, and why each of them focuses on a particular arena of the later stages of the war.

Gardner’s introduction

Jane Gardner gets straight to the point with a solid factual introduction to the fraught background to the outbreak of civil war between Caesar and Pompey in 49 BC. I was struck by the way she goes back 80 years to start her historical background with two key events:

  1. The attempt by Tiberius Gracchus to implement major land reform, which led to his assassination by conservative elements of the Senate in 133 BC
  2. How Gaius Marius got himself appointed consul for five years in a row (104 to 100 BC) to deal with the threat from barbarian tribes who threatened to invade Italy from the north.

1. The killing of Gracchus was the first time the forces competing in the Roman state spilled over into political violence.

2. Marius’s career showed that the system of annually changing magistrates and proconsuls was becoming too limited for Rome’s farflung military needs. (Julius Caesar’s aunt married Marius. His father and brother supported Marius. He grew up in the shadow of Marius’s populares party and narrowly avoided execution when the dictator Sulla, representing the optimates, took power in 82.)

Gardner gives a good brief overview of the events which led to the formation of the Triumvirate which Caesar set up between himself, Pompey and Crassus (60 BC); how he used this to secure his posting as proconsul to Cisalpine Gaul (swiftly expanded to include Transalpine Gaul); how friction in the triumvirate led to its renewal at a big conference at Luca in 56; and how it was undone by two hammerblows:

  1. The death in 54 of Caesar’s daughter, Julia, who he had married to Pompey and acted as a family tie between them.
  2. The death of Crassus during his ill-fated campaign in Parthia 53.

In Gardner’s hands, the centre of the story is Pompey’s inability to make his mind up. The same self-knowledge teetering on reticence which led him to peacefully disband his army on returning from the East in 62 plays out less positively in his inability to really make his mind up how to behave in the growing political crisis of the late 50s.

In Gardner’s account it is Pompey’s lack of decisiveness which creates the crisis of uncertainty and vacillation which Caesar eventually cuts through by crossing the Rubicon and creating a state of civil war. If Pompey had grasped the nettle and agreed with Caesar’s suggestion that they both lay down their commands at the same time and meet to discuss their issues, peace could have been preserved. But Pompey left it to others – senators such as Marcus Marcellus and Lucius Lentulus – to make proposals and counter-proposals which Caesar found unacceptable, until it was too late.

Eventually Caesar felt his position was so threatened that he decided to make a lightning strike from Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy), where he legitimately held command, into Italy proper, where he very much didn’t. The river Rubicon separated these two territories. So crossing the Rubicon with one of his legions was illegal and universally interpreted as an attack on the government and constitution of Rome.

How it was written

During the eight years of his command in Gaul Caesar had got into the habit of writing commentarii or reports on each campaigning season, summarising his military campaigns, in brisk no-nonsense factual accounts. He had these sent to Rome to, in effect, justify his (often dubious) actions. These were probably dictated to secretaries while he was on the move, amid the numerous other correspondence and paperwork he dealt with. There are eight of them, one for each year of his command, and taken together they make up the document known as The Gallic Wars.

Having established the habit and method for doing this, it seems likely Caesar simply continued it to document the new conflict, which continued more or less without a break from his Gallic campaigns.

The Civil War

Caesar’s paranoia: ‘What is the aim of all these preparations but my destruction?’

At the start of his narrative Caesar deals briefly with the politics, with his offers and attempts at negotiations with the Senate, but it quickly falls into another litany of towns besieged and Pompeian forces which come over to his side, very similar in feel to the Gallic Wars.

Admittedly there isn’t the total destruction, massacres, selling into slavery and hostage-giving which characterised the Gallic Wars. But it is a general’s view of things i.e. a long list of territories and cities and towns which need to be taken and then secured by posting loyal officers in them.

A note on the army

A cohort contained 480 men. A legion contained ten cohorts. When you add in officers, engineers and cavalry (120 men plus horses) a legion numbered about 5,000 men.

The text of The Civil War is divided into three ‘books’, volumes or parts, each of which is further sub-divided into short numbered sections, conventionally referred to as ‘chapters’.

Part 1: The struggle begins (87 chapters)

(N.B. These dramatic titles don’t exist in the original text. They are inventions of the editor of the Penguin edition.)

1 to 6: Intransigence at Rome

Haste and confusion characterised every transaction. (5)

Quick summary of the hasty and confused debates in the Senate at the end of 50 BC, with the anti-Caesar faction calling for JC to be sent an ultimatum to lay down his command before negotiations could begin about his future. Caesar wanted to be allowed to stand for the consulship in his physical absence. He wanted to be elected consul because it would give him immunity from all prosecution for a year. Most of the Senate refused this idea because it was unprecedented and unconstitutional. Caesar read this refusal as a deliberate ploy so that when he laid down his command in Gaul and returned to Rome as a private citizen, he would be vulnerable to prosecution by his many enemies for his many dubious actions in Gaul. Senators like Cato had made it crystal clear he would launch a legal action against Caesar the second he set foot in Italy. Hence Caesar’s demand that he be given a consulship / legal immunity. But the legitimists, traditionalists and his actual enemies all rejected this. Impasse.

Caesar also learned that the end of 50 and start of 49 was seeing widespread conscription of soldiers across Italy. Pompey’s mouthpiece in the Senate, Scipio, tells them Pompey is ready to defend the state. When the Senate meets outside the city (because Pompey as a proconsul [of Spain] is not allowed within the city limits) Pompey tells them he has command of 10 legions and is ready to defend the state. The Penguin notes tell us this presumably means the 2 legions he had withdrawn from Caesar ostensibly to be sent to the East but which hadn’t left Italy yet; seven legions loyal to Pompey in Spain; and one under Domitius. (The fact that so many of Pompey’s legions were in Spain explains why Spain would turn out to be a main crucible of the war).

Caesar goes to some lengths to single out the treatment of the tribunes of the plebs, Mark Antony and Gaius Scribonius Curio. When they continued to lobby the Senate in Caesar’s favour, the most vehement senators threatened them with violence, and they were roughly manhandled out of the building, convincing both to disguise themselves and flee north to join Caesar. In constitutional terms they had been deprived of their right of veto and Caesar tries to give his agenda a gloss of respectability by saying one of his war aims is the restoration of the tribunes’ rights.

Caesar describes his demands as moderate and just, and implies that all his enemies had vested interests of one kind or another, not least securing positions of power from which they could extract bribes. He says all the year’s appointments to governorships, proconsulships and so on were hurried and unconstitutional.

7 to 15: Caesar reacts

Caesar assembles his men and pleads his cause. The Senate has:

  1. seduced Pompey and led him astray, although they have always been friends and he has helped Pompey win positions
  2. removed the right of veto from the tribunes, something never done before
  3. declared a state of emergency when there is no emergency
  4. insulted his reputation and achievements as the pacifier of Gaul

So the troops all clamour to right these wrongs and protect his reputation. Caesar moves his legions south to Ariminum just within his province (of Cisalpine Gaul). Here he receives envoys from Pompey who remind him they have been friends and tell him to put his own grievances aside for the good of the state. Caesar adds to his list of grievances:

  1. having his command in Gaul ended 6 months early
  2. the voted will of the people that he stand for the consulship in absentia being overturned
  3. his proposal for a general demobilisation being ignored

(9) Caesar makes counter-proposals:

  1. Pompey should go to his allotted province i.e. Spain
  2. they shall both demobilise their armies
  3. there shall be a general demobilisation throughout Italy
  4. free elections to all magistracies
  5. a face to face meeting with Pompey at which everything can be settled

When these demands are presented to Pompey and the consuls at Capua, Pompey replies that Caesar must return to Gaul, disband his army and only then will Pompey go to Spain. But until he does so, the Senate will continue with a general levy of troops throughout Italy (10).

Caesar rejects these demands as unfair, not least because no date would be set for Pompey’s departure, so he would be left in Italy with his two legions indefinitely. And Pompey’s refusal to meet and talk indicates lack of goodwill. So Caesar places cohorts in the towns surrounding Arretium and the narrative becomes a description of towns seized for his side (Pisarum, Faunum, Ancona).

Iguvium comes over to him. He sets off to take Auximum which is held by Attius Varus and the narrative settles down into a long list of small Italian towns and little known Roman officers who hold them. Caesar is at pains to emphasise that when he took towns he thanked the populations and, more often than not, let the officers who’d opposed him go free, as in the case of Lucius Pupius.

(14) The ease with which towns go over to Caesar causes panic at Rome where the two consuls raid the treasury then travel south to join Pompey at Capua, where he is stationed with his two legions. Arguably, the authorities’ abandonment of Rome meant the war was lost from the start.

Caesar continues marching south towards Asculum which was being held by Lentulus Spinther who, hearing of his approach, flees; Lucilius Hirrus similarly abandons Camerinum. But Lentulus rallies the remaining forces of both and takes them to Corfinium, which was being held by Domitius Ahenobarbus.

16 to 23: The siege of Corfinium

Caesar moves with characteristic speed and comes across Domitius’s forces dismantling a bridge over the river before they’ve finished the job, fights them off, and forces them into the town. Domitius is an effective opponent. He reinforces the town defences, sends a message to Pompey telling him to bring legions to surround Caesar, and addresses his men.

Sulmo, a town 7 miles away, is being held by the senator Quintus Lucretius and Attius but Caesar sends Mark Antony there and the townsfolk gladly open their gates and the troops go over to Caesar, who incorporates them into his own forces and lets Attius go free.

Caesar spends days building siege works. Domitius receives a reply from Pompey who refuses to come to his help, saying it would jeopardise his cause and no-one asked him to go to Corfinium. So Domitius deceitfully tells his troops Pompey is on his way, while making a plan with his closest advisors to secretly flee the town.

Word leaks out and the soldiers decide to abandon such a two-faced leader, arrest Domitius and send messages to Caesar saying they’re prepared to surrender. Caesar is wary of sending his troops into the town that night lest they loot it, so he sends the envoys back and maintains the siege. At dawn Lentulus asks for a private interview, is let out of the town and taken to Caesar who takes the opportunity (in the narrative) to reiterate his demands. He:

  1. does not intend to harm anyone
  2. wants to protect himself from the slanders of his enemies
  3. to restore the expelled tribunes to their rightful position
  4. to reclaim for himself and the Roman people independence from the power of ‘a small clique’

Are these the demands of ‘a revolutionary proconsul who placed his own dignitas above his country’? Discuss.

In the morning Caesar orders all the senators and magistrates hiding in Corfinium to be brought to him. He protects them from the jeers and insults of the soldiers, berates them for giving no thanks for the benefits he’s brought them and then, quite simply, lets them go. He has all the soldiers in the town swear allegiance to him. The magistrates of the town bring him 6 million sesterces but Caesar simply gives it back to Domitius to prove he is not interested in financial gain.

24 to 29: Pompey leaves Italy

Pompey had already abandoned Rome. Now he moves quickly to Canusium and then onto Brundisium, then, as now, the port for ships to Greece.

Caesar follows him, picking up Pompeian forces who abandon their leaders on the way. Caesar discovers the two consuls and most of Pompey’s army have taken ship for Dyrrachium, leaving Pompey inside Brundisium with 20 cohorts.

Caesar immediately starts building a great breakwater to block the port, but continues to send envoys to Pompey requesting a face-to-face meeting. Characteristically, Pompey doesn’t grasp the nettle but hides behind the constitutional nicety that, in the absence of the 2 consuls (who have fled) he is not authorised to negotiate.

In Caesar’s version, it is Pompey’s inability to take responsibility and engage in the kind of face-to-face discussions they had during the triumvirate which condemns Rome to civil war.

Caesar’s patience wears out, he realises he’s never going to get a sensible reply, and finally decides to conduct an all-out war (26).

The ships which had ferried Pompey’s first contingent to Greece now return and Pompey makes plans to  embark the second and final cohort of troops. He fills the town with booby traps and a light guard on the city walls while the rest of the troops embark. At the last minute the guards are called and run down to the port, as the ships are setting off. Caesar’s men scale the walls, are helped by the townspeople to evade the traps, and some make it onto the water and capture two of Pompey’s ships which had gone aground on a breakwater.

Strategically, the best thing for Caesar would have been to pursue Pompey as quickly as possible but for the simple fact that Pompey had commandeered all the ships and waiting for new ones to be sent from Sicily or Gaul would lose the advantage. Meanwhile, most of Pompey’s legions were in Spain where a lot of the country’s nobles owed Pompey big debts of gratitude (for making them Roman citizens).

30 to 33: Caesar’s Senate

Accordingly Caesar sends lieutenants to Sardinia and Sicily which the Pompeian governors promptly flee.

Caesar’s noted enemy, Cato the Younger, governor of Sicily, makes a public speech about how Pompey had deceived him and the Senate into believing they were ready for war when they weren’t at all, and then flees to Africa, where the Pompeian Attius Varrus has taken control.

Having made his deployments Caesar goes to Rome and makes a long repetition of his complains directly to the remaining senators (32). He asks them to join him in governing Rome, otherwise he’ll do it by himself. But no-one volunteers to go as emissary to Pompey as they are afraid, and one of the tribunes has been suborned to filibuster events as long as possible, and so Caesar gives it up as a bad job and heads off for Gaul.

34 to 36: Resistance at Massilia

In the Province Caesar learns that Domitius has seized Massilia. Caesar makes a speech to the elders of Massilia who promise neutrality but meanwhile Domitius takes control, requisitioning ships from neighbouring ports. Caesar orders ships to be built in nearby ports then leaves Gaius Trebonius in charge of the siege of Massilia and marches on towards Spain.

37 to 55: The first Spanish campaign – Ilerda

The complex deployment and redeployment of Pompey’s lieutenants to the different provinces of Spain, which leads up to the siege of Ilerda, held by the Pompeian Lucius Afranius.

This is the first full-blown military encounter of the war and is described in Caesar’s usual technical detail, with siegeworks, attack and counter-attack. The river running past the town, the Sicoris, plays a key role, especially when there’s heavy rainfall and it and another river flood and wash away the bridges, leaving the Roman forces trapped between them, cut off from supplies of corn which, in any case, were short at this time of year. When a train of senators, magistrates, cohorts and cavalry arrive to join Caesar, they are prevented by the flooded rivers and attacked by Afranius’s forces.

All this is talked up by Afranius’s supporters and word spreads to Rome that the war is virtually over, which encouraged more to go over to Pompey’s side. But Caesar has boats made in a lightweight style he had seen in Britain, ferries enough of his troops over the flooded river to set up a base and then build a bridge from both sides. His cavalry attack a party out foraging Pompeians then fight off an enemy cavalry attack.

56 to 58: The naval fight at Massilia

The Pompeians under Domitius had built 17 warships while Caesar’s force under Decimus Brutus had hurriedly built far less at an island near Massilia. Domitius attacks. Caesar describes the composition and strengths of the opposing forces. Despite bad odds Caesar’s forces prevail.

59 to 80: Spain – a war of attrition

The situation swiftly changes:

  1. the bridge has allowed Caesar’s force full mobility
  2. five important local tribes switch allegiance to Caesar
  3. and promise to deliver corn, thus solving the crisis in provisions
  4. optimistic rumours that Pompey was marching through north Africa to cross into Spain to reinforce his garrisons prove to be untrue (60)

Afranius and his colleague Petreius worry that they’re going to be cut off and so decide to abandon Ilerda and move deeper into Celtiberia, where the reputation of Pompey will guarantee support. They build a bridge across the Ebro 20 miles away just as the river hemming Caesar in becomes fordable. (To be honest, it is pretty difficult making sense of these complicated and often obscure descriptions of flooded rivers, bridges and fords.)

Caesar’s forces protest that they are hanging around while the enemy gets away, so Caesar selects the weakest to stay behind and guard the camp and the strongest to ford the river, which they just about manage to do. He forms them up and they pursue the fleeing Pompeians. They come up to them within a few miles of mountains, where both sides make camp.

Next day Caesar takes his men by a roundabout route to get to the bridge across the Ebro first. Afranius’s forces at first jeer them for fleeing the battlefield until they slowly realise they are going to be cut off. There follows complex manoeuvring to seize the high ground and the first of the mountain passes. Caesar’s forces massacre some of the Pompeian cavalry. Caesar’s men are all for finishing them off but Caesar thinks he can win without bloodshed and gives himself a speech saying he wants to avoid the deaths of citizens if at all possible. His army mutters and disagrees.

Next day some of the Pompeians are harassed when going to fetch water, so the leaders decide to build a protective rampart from their camp down to the water and go to supervise it. In their absence there is a mutiny with soldiers of all ranks, up to and including Afranius’s own son, fraternising with Caesar’s forces, calling out to friends, asking if they will be well treated if they surrender.

When Afranius hears all this he is ready to fall in with the capitulation. Petreius, on the other hand, stays resolute and with a small cavalry bodyguard descends on the fraternising soldiers, killing as many of Caesar’s as he can. He then tours the army, begging them not to abandon Pompey their leader; has the entire army, by centuries, repledge its oath of allegiance to him; and calls for anyone harbouring Caesarian soldiers to hand them over, before having them publicly executed in front of his soldiers. By terrorising his troops, Afranius restores discipline.

In his own camp Caesar shows his famous clemency, ordering soldiers from the opposing camp to be not punished but protected. And many chose to stay on with his side and Caesar was careful to show them honour. The Pompeians are running out of food and finding it hard to access water so they decide to march back to Ilerda. Caesar harasses their rearguard all the way.

81 to 87: The Pompeians capitulate

Caesar forces the Pompeians to make camp a distance from water, sets up his own camp and starts making siegeworks. On the second day the Pompeians come out to offer battle but a) Caesar doesn’t want unnecessary bloodshed and b) he doesn’t think there’s sufficient space (2 miles) between the camps to enforce a decisive victory. In the event, despite being impressively drawn up, neither side offers battle and at sunset they both withdraw to their camps.

Caesar sends his cavalry ahead to secure the ford over the river Sicoris thus cutting off the Pompeians from their intended route. At which point, starving and thirsty, the Pompeian leaders sue for peace, at a public meeting held in sight of both armies. Caesar makes a long speech in which he recapitulates the wrongs he has endured and the broader historical picture in which he claims that an army has been maintained in Spain (which is at peace and hardly needs it) purely to attack him. He lists other innovations whose sole purpose has been to threaten and attack him at the will of a ‘clique’ in Rome.

In a magnanimous display of clemency Caesar announces his only condition for peace is the disbanding of this Spanish army and everyone can go free. The location of demobilisation is set as the river Var. The Pompeian army cheer, as they had expected punishment of some sort, and clamour to be demobilised sooner rather than later. Caesar promises to supply them corn till they reach the Var and compensate all soldiers for any property lost to his men.

A third of the army was disbanded in the next 2 days, the rest marched under escort to the Var and was disbanded there. Caesar is at pains to convey his consistent humanity and clemency.

Part 2: Securing the West (44 chapters)

1 to 16: The siege of Massilia

Caesar’s lieutenant Gaius Trebonius continues the siege of Massilia. Pompey sends Lucius Nasidius with a fleet of ships to help out. These join forces with Lucius Domitius and Caesar describes a big sea battle which the Caesarean fleet of Decimus Brutus wins.

Caesar gives a very detailed description of the siege works his men build against the wall of Massilia which eventually weaken it. Envoys from the city come out and plead for mercy from Trebonius and beg to wait the return of Caesar. The result is a ceasefire during which both sides slacken off. Until some of the besieged garrison, that is, make a sortie with firebrands and successfully burn down one of the besieging towers. This makes the besiegers return to construction with a vengeance and less inclined to forgiveness.

17 to 21: Spain – surrender of Varro

In Further Spain Pompeian governor Marcus Varro hesitates which side to support until he hears misleading news of Pompeian victories at Ilerda and Massilia, whereupon he comes down fiercely on the Pompeian side, persecuting towns and individuals said to sympathise with Caesar.

Caesar for his part wants to return to Italy but knows he must finish the job in Spain or it will remain a Pompeian stronghold in his rear. In the event the plans of the Pompeian governor Marcus Terentius Varro are overthrown as town after town of Hither Spain declares for Caesar till eventually Varro surrenders to Caesar without a fight all his forces and money.

Caesar holds councils at Corduba and elsewhere, rewarding towns and communities. He puts Quintus Cassius in charge of the province and travels back to Massilia.

22: Massilia capitulates

Two defeats at sea, the undermining of their walls, starvation and an outbreak of pestilence convince the inhabitants of Massilia (called Massiliotes) to surrender. Their governor Lucius Domitius escapes by ship. Caesar accepts Massilia’s submission, leaves two legions to guard it and hastens back to Rome.

23 to 36: Africa – Curio’s campaign

Caesarean Gaius Scribonius Curio’s campaign in Tunisia against the Pompeian Publius Attius Varus. Curio is over-confident of success, only taking 2 of the 4 legions Caesar gave him to Africa. Here he camps opposite Varus’s camp outside Utica and has an initial success when his cavalry routs some of Pompey’s.

Now a lot of Curio’s men came from the Pompeian forces which surrendered at the siege of Corfinium. Varus has one of his men ride up and down opposite Curio’s lines, reminding them of their original oath to Pompey. This gives rise to rumours and dissension within Curio’s army and his advisers are split between forcing an attack on Utica or withdrawing to their original camp, Castra Cornelia, along the coast.

Caesar depicts Curio giving a speech to his advisers saying he’ll take neither course of action, and then addressing his troops at length, saying it was their example of abandoning Pompey which helped turn over Italy to Caesar, how Caesar has won 2 provinces in Spain, plus Massilia, pointing out that they didn’t desert their general Lucius Domitius, it was Lucius Domitius who deserted them. And lastly asking whether he has been a good and fair general to them.

This rouses them so much that on the following day they brave a difficult ravine between the two armies to take Varus’s forces by storm and force him right back, to abandon his camp and take refuge in the town.

37 to 44: Curio’s last stand

Then Curio hears that king Juba of the Numidians is approaching and withdraws his legions from the advanced camp back to Camp Castra, and sends to Sicily for food. The camp would be very well positioned to stand a long siege, but when Curio hears the king himself has been distracted by a tribal war and is only sending his lieutenant, Saburra, with a smaller force he willingly believes it. At nightfall Curio sends all his cavalry to ambush Saburra at the river Bagradas, which they successfully do.

Curio receives the triumphant cavalry back with their prisoners and loot as proof of victory and leads his infantry out in the middle of the night with the plan to force march to attack Saburra while the latter is still in confusion. What he doesn’t know is that King Juba very much is marching his way and that, when he hears of Saburra’s setback, he sends him 2,000 of his best cavalry and continues his infantry march to join him.

With the result that Curio’s force confronts Saburra’s forces in full battle order. Curio is victorious wherever he attacks but a) his on cavalry is slow and tired and b) his men are outnumbered. Reinforcements from the king continually arrive until Curio is surrounded. He sees a nearby hill and orders his men to gather there to make a stand, but enemy cavalry possess it first, at which point Curio’s men give up. His officers encourage him to flee the field but he says he couldn’t face Caesar after losing the army he gave him and so fights on till he’s killed.

Back at Camp Cornelia the rest of Curio’s forces panic and, when the quaestor Marcus Rufus tries to organise an orderly departure by ship, the men panic and swamp the boats, sinking many and discouraging the other ships from coming into harbour. Only a handful of officers and centurions make it aboard and so back to Sicily alive. The rest surrender to Varus.

Next day when King Juba arrives and sees cohorts of survivors in front of Utica he declares them his spoils of war and has them all executed. Varus is too weak and scared to prevent him.

End of Part 2. Part 3 is summarised in the next blog post.

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The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 3

It is nearly always invisible dangers which are most terrifying. (VII.84)

This second half of the Gallic Wars is much more exciting than the first. In the previous four books the Romans steamrollered over everyone they encountered in a rather monotonous way. Here they experience the catastrophic loss of an entire legion and then the fierce siege of Quintus Cicero’s camp, i.e. for the first time you feel the contingency and risk involved in the entire project. And both events are carefully crafted to feature dramatic episodes of a kind not found in the first four.

Book 5: The second rebellion

The book title was supplied by the editors of the Penguin edition and refers to the revolt of the Belgic tribes.

1 to 8: Illyricum and Gaulish rebels

At the end of each campaigning season in Gaul, Caesar spends the winter in Cisalpine Gaul attending to administration. He also visits the third province he’s in charge of, Illyricum. Here he stamped on the Pirustrae tribe who had allegedly been raiding over the border into Roman territory. Representatives of the tribe met him to tell him it wasn’t them, and delivered hostages as he demanded.

By this point we’re getting used to certain things.

  1. This is a world made up of scores and scores of tribes who co-exist uneasily, continually liable to be invaded or go invading themselves.
  2. Raiding other tribes’ territories seems to be a common occurrence so presumably is a standard way of making a living, acquiring land or loot.
  3. Caesar has a standard methodology. Where possible, meet and threaten representatives of the erring tribe. If they persist in troubling the peace, attack and defeat them. Either way, you insist on them sending hostages to be kept as security against good behaviour.

This handful of options are repeated endlessly. In the spring Caesar returns to Gaul where he has to sort out the Treveri, a tribe living close to the Rhine whose leaders have failed to come to the annual conference of Gallic tribes. Turns out two rivals are vying for leadership, Caesar supports Cingetorix.

He rides on to Portus Itius, from where the invasion is to be launched. Tellingly, he takes leaders of most of the Gaulish tribes with him. The most dangerous of these is Dumnorix, ambitious leader of the Aedui. When Caesar insists he accompany him to Britain, Dumnorix begins spreading rumours to the other chiefs that they’ll all be killed in Britain. The sailing is delayed 4 weeks by a contrary wind, towards the end of which Dumnorix left the damp with some Aeduin cavalry. Caesar immediately delayed the sailing and sent troops to recapture Dumnorix, buy force if necessary. Dumnorix did indeed put up a fight, drew his sword and told his followers to protect him. So the Roman cavalry killed him. End of disruptive influence.

9 to 25: Second expedition to Britain

Caesar had ordered his troops over the winter to build a massive fleet eventually consisting of 600 troopships and 28 warships. He sets sail with five legions (about 25,000 soldiers) and 2,000 cavalry. Including private ships they hired, the Romans appeared over the horizon with 800 ships, an enormous force. No wonder the defending Britons decided to retire to higher ground.

They disembarked without event, set up a camp, then Caesar marched the majority 12 miles or so inland till they came to a Briton camp. The Seventh Legion stormed it and forced the Britons to flee but Caesar brought them back to work on the camp.

They set out again to confront the Britons but were informed of a large storms and when he returned Caesar saw it had damaged lots of boats. he drew them further up on the beach, ordered repairs made, sent orders to Titus Labienus back in Gaul to start building more.

He gives an overview of the British which is a bit random. He includes the plausible notion that the coastal areas have been settled by incomers from the continent with trivia such as, the natives think it wrong to eat of hare, fowl, and goose although it’s alright to keep for pastime or pleasure. He also makes the wildly inaccurate claim that the climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the cold seasons more moderate. I don’t think so.

He gives a wildly inaccurate description of the geography of Britain, making it out to be a huge triangular island off the west coast of France extending down to opposite Spain. It’s a great mystery how the Romans managed to conquer anywhere without decent maps.

He mentions that the British paint themselves with woad so have blue bodies. But then goes on to say they share wives between groups of ten or 12 men. This is the kind of wildly improbable legend that disfigures to much of the ostensibly ‘factual’ writing of the ancient world.

Back to the present, he describes a lightning British attack on the camp which takes them by surprise and causes casualties. The British fight well, making use of chariots and loose formations which replace each other ad lib.

Next day he sends legions foraging but once again the Britons attack in numbers. It’s hard fought but this time the legions turn them and chase. The Britons scatter and never again attack in such a unified way.

The Britons had united under the leadership of one chieftain, Cassivellaunus. He withdraws his forces north of the Thames which the Romans traverse and continue fighting, with Cassivellaunus hiding his chariots in the woods, till opportunities present for raids.

Envoys arrive from the Trinovantes. Their young leader Mandubracius had already crossed the Channel to seek Caesar’s protection after his father was killed by Cassivellaunus. Caesar demands from Mandubracius hostages and corn, but when these are brought, lets him go.

When other tribes see how fairly Mandubracius was treated, they send envoys seeking Caesar’s protection, being the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi. He learns that Cassivellaunus has retreated to famous stronghold built in a good defensive position. Caesar lays siege to it and storms it from its weakest side. Meanwhile Cassivellaunus had sent orders to four allied tribes to attack the Roman camp in Kent, but the Romans repel the attack, kill many attackers and capture a tribal leader.

Summer is nearly over and Caesar decides to return to Gaul. So while he was in the ascendent and the Britons demoralised, he demanded hostages and set an annual tribute for Cassivellaunus to pay Rome. And not to attack the British tribes which had allied with Rome. Then he marches the legions to the coast and into the ships and so back to Gaul.

Given the size of the invasion fleet (800 ships!) which indicated that it was a serious attempt to permanently conquer at least the southern part of Briton, you can’t help concluding the invasion – both the invasions – were a failure.

26 to 37: Revolt of Belgic tribes and massacre of the 7th Legion

Caesar distributes his legions and generals with various tribes. The Eburonians rebel and attack a Roman camp. Ambiorix tells the Romans that a Gaul-wide agreement has been made to launch a concerted attack on all the Roman forces and moreover a group of German mercenaries has crossed the Rhine. So he warns them to leave their camp and promises them safe passage through his territory.

The Romans are surprised but it makes sense that the Eburonians wouldn’t rebel on their own. So, what to do? Caesar gives a dramatic set piece debate among the two commanders, Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta who says stay put, and Quintus Titurius Sabinus who trusts Ambiorix and recommends that they leave (28 to 29).

Sabinus wins the argument and the legionaries are told to pack their most important belongings and set off. Catastrophe ensues. The Gauls wait till the legion has entered a deep narrow defile then bottles them up at either end and starts to massacre them. At one point Ambiorix asks the two Roman generals to a meeting. Cotta refuses to go but Sabinus leaves the fight to climb a hill and approach Ambiorix. He and his centurions are ordered to lay down their weapons, which they do. But as they approach Ambiorix they are surrounded and then killed. The Gauls raise a shout and fall on the remaining Romans with renewed fury. Cotta and most of the force are killed. The remnant make it back to the camp where, that night, seeing they are surrounded, they all commit suicide. A handful of survivors make it to Titus Atius Labienus’s camp to tell the story.

It is thought that some 6,000 legionaries died in this colossal blunder. The massacre happened at Atuatuca in modern Belgium.

38 to 58: Siege of Quintus Cicero

Emboldened, Ambiorix rallies allied Gaulish tribes, and led a ‘huge mass’ of the Eburones, the Nervii, the Aduatuci and their allies and dependents against the camp of Quintus Tullius Cicero. This was somewhere on the river Sambre and about 80 miles from the camp Caesar had made at Amiens. The Gauls made a surprise attack as the legionaries (as so often) were out gathering firewood etc, but they fought a fighting retreat back to the camp. This the Gauls surrounded and invested. They had with them defectors and Roman prisoners who showed them how to build the kind of siege towers and earthworks the Romans used, so these were built and turned against their inventors.

The Gauls called a parley and offered Cicero the same deal they’d offered Sabinus i.e. to lay down their arms and walk away in peace. But Cicero is not as foolish as Sabinus and makes a defiant reply, telling the Gauls that if they lay down their arms he will send to Caesar who will judge them for their rebellion. And so the siege continues. On the seventh day a fierce gale blows up and the Gauls shoot flaming arrows into the camp which burn down a lot of the huts.

Cicero sends a series of messengers to try and get through to Caesar, but all of them are caught and some of them tortured in view of the camp. Eventually a native Gaul makes it through the blockade and to Caesar’s camp, to whom the news of Cicero’s siege comes as a shock. He immediately sends a message to Marcus Licinius Crassus at his camp 24 miles away telling him to march to meet him. Same to Gaius Fabius and Labienus. Labienus writes back that the entire force of the Treveri were upon him and so, on balance, it was too risky for him to leave his camp. Caesar approves this decision and sets off with just two legions to raise the siege on Cicero’s camp.

By a series of forced marches Caesar quickly reaches Cicero’s camp and sends word through a native messenger that he is near. The Gauls lift the siege and turn their forces to face Caesar, some 60,000 warriors (49). Caesar has 7,000 men (49). With the enemy only 3 or so miles away Caesar orders the building of a camp, only smaller than usual, and instructs the soldiers to run around and given an air of panic and fear. This lures the Gauls out into the open and then up to this camp which they start besieging. But they had barely begun engaging when Caesar ordered his infantry to flood out by side gates and the cavalry to sally out and attack the flanks. Taken by surprise the Gauls fled and the Romans were able to cut them down.

Then he marches to relieve Cicero. He is astonished to see the size and number of siege engines the Gauls had built and then to discover that almost all the defenders had been wounded and fought bravely. He publicly congratulates Cicero and all his men, carefully speaking to individual centurions and tribunes to thank them. He addresses the disaster of the massacred legion and assures them it was down to Sabinus’s error, unlike the resolute leadership of their own Cicero.

Caesar’s victory goes some way to rallying the Romans and, more importantly, their Gaulish allies. But nonetheless the tribes are in a ferment, all sending each other messages discussing alliances and attacks. Caesar realises he must winter in Gaul to keep an eye on the situation. Caesar calls meetings with the heads of various tribes, partly by threats, partly by promises, keeps them peaceful. The Aedui and the Remi remain the staunchest allies.

But the Senones try to murder their king, Cavarinus, who had been friendly to the Romans. Indutiomarus leader of the Treveri is particularly rebellious. He sends messages to the German tribes across the Rhine enticing them to war with the Romans, but none sign up, replying that they’ve learned their lesson.

In Gaul Indutiomarus is more successful in recruiting a large force from miscellaneous tribes, attracting to his standard exiles and criminals, training them, procuring horses and so on. Once he feels strong enough he calls an armed convention of the Gaulish tribes at which he a) outlaws Cingetorix, his son-in‑law and rival for leadership of the Treveri; and b) declares his intention to rally the Senones, the Carnutes and several other tribes, to march through the lands of the Remi and laying them waste, before going on to attack the camp of Labienus.

Indutiomarus with his massed forces approaches and invests Labienus’ camp. The latter feigns timidity and reluctance, all the while awaiting his opportunity. He recruits cavalry from nearby friendly tribes and keeps them all hidden in the camp, while Indutiomarus and his men ride up to the walls, yell and jeer and throw spears and abuse the Romans. At the end of a day like this, the Gauls are turning to ride away, with a false sense of security, when suddenly from two gates Labienus launched forth all his cavalry. Anticipating the enemy would scatter in confusion, Labienus carefully instructed his men to resist attacking anyone else but all of them to find and kill Indutiomarus. He put a big price on his head and sure enough some of his soldiers intercepted Indutiomarus at the ford of a river, killed him, cut off his head and brought it back to Labienus.

When they learned this, all his allies among the Eburones and Nervii flee, talk of rebellion is dowsed down and that winter found Gaul quiet.

Book 6: (53 BC)

1 to 8: Further revolt in Gaul

Caesar tasks three generals with raising new recruits and asks Pompey to send him the legion he recently raised in north Italy. He hears news of northern tribes conspiring to rebel and so makes a lightning attack on the Nervii, capturing cattle, prisoners and ravaging the countryside. When he convokes the annual conference of Gaulish leaders, the Senones, Carnuti and Senones refuse to attend, indicating their hostility. Caesar marches quickly on the Senones forcing their leader, Accio, to back down and hand over hostages.

Then he marches into the country of the Menapii in the far north, burning farms and villages and taking cattle and prisoners till their leaders were forced to sue for peace and hand over hostages in the usual way.

Meanwhile the Treveri, led by relatives of Indutiomarus, had gathered a large force of infantry and cavalry to attack Labienus. Labienus feigned fear and then pretended to leave the camp, luring the Treveri across the river onto flat ground this side. Once they were over he inspired his soldiers to turn and fight them, trapped by the river. Much killing. The Treveri submitted and the Germans they’d invited to come join them decided to stay on the other side of the Rhine.

9 to 10: Caesar crosses the Rhine, retreat of the Suebi

Another Rhine crossing:

  1. to punish the Germans who had sent the Treveri reinforcements
  2. to prevent Ambiorix finding asylum there

The Ubii swear it wasn’t them and he spares them. Investigation suggests it was the Suebi. The Suebi gather their men at a stronghold and await. Caesar’s men quickly build another bridge and he crosses it.

11 to 20: Description of the Gauls

Digression on the nature of Gaulish society. How the advent of the Romans reordered things to bring the Aedui and Remi into prominence. The Gauls fought every year among themselves. The Druids practised human sacrifice, sometimes in wickerwork giants which they set on fire (16).

When the father of a house, who is of distinguished birth, has died, his relatives assemble, and if there be anything suspicious about his death they make inquisition of his wives as they would of slaves, and if discovery is made they put them to death with fire and all manner of excruciating tortures.

Their funerals, considering the civilisation of Gaul, are magnificent and expensive. They cast into the fire everything, even living creatures, which they believe to have been dear to the departed during life, and but a short time before the present age, only a generation since, slaves and dependents known to have been beloved by their lords used to be burnt with them at the conclusion of the funeral formalities. (VI.19)

21 to 28: Description of the Germans

More primitive. Fewer gods, they only worship things they can see like sun, moon and fire. Sex in young men is frowned upon for stunting their growth. Land is redistributed each year to stop them becoming to land-bound and also to enforce a sort of equality. Obsession with war. When a chief proclaims a war anyone who resiles is shunned. They lay waste the land around each tribe.

The Gauls used to be more warlike than the Germans and at points crossed the Rhine and conquered. But being closer to Roman territory they’ve got used to trading and fine products unlike the Germans who remain more isolated and warlike.

He gives one of those characteristically ludicrous descriptions of the natural world, imputing to the great forest of Hyrcania a massive extent (true enough) and a number of fantastical animals.

The Penguin editor suggests that this long digression about Gauls and Germans was placed her to distract from the fact that Caesar’s second incursion across the Rhine, like the first one, achieved little tangible result. When the Germans retreat into the forest, Caesar doesn’t have the provisions to follow them and so, er, retreats back over the bridge, destroying the German end and placing a watchtower and guards on the Gaulish side.

29 to 44: Caesar returns to Gaul

Right up in the north, against the Rhine, is the territory of the Eburones led by Ambiorix. Caesar marches against them, sending ahead Gaius Volcacius Tullus with the cavalry. These go very fast and surprise Ambiorix off his guard with only a few men. However these hold off the Romans while Ambiorix saddles up and flees into the forest. He sends out messages telling every man for himself and many flee and hide.

The Segni and Condrusi come to Caesar and plead that not all Germans in Gaul are conspiring. They aren’t and give hostages and make peace.

Caesar makes his base at Atuatuca, then divides his forces in three and takes his force to ravage the land of the Eburones. Germans across the Rhine hear that there’s a free-for-all and cross the river 30 miles downstream of Caesar’s base, to join in. But prisoners tell them the Romans base is at Atuatuca, full of loot and poorly defended.

Cicero had been left in Atuatuca and initially kept the men penned up in case of attack. But after a week the frustrated men need to get out and the troops need corn so Cicero lets a detachment go collect some, and another detachment take out the animals for exercise. Inevitably it’s at this moment that the Germans appear, mounting a fierce attack, causing chaos. While a fierce fight goes on at the gates of the camp, the detachments sent to fetch food – raw recruits and servants – fell into a panic. Experienced centurions helped them form and wedge shape and make it back to the camp, but another detachment initially took to a nearby hill, then changed its mind and came back down into the flatlands where it was destroyed.

Failing to break in the Germans break off the engagement and ride back to the Rhine. Hysteria grips the Roman camp and rumours spread that Caesar and the other legions have been wiped out, until Caesar himself returns and restores order.

The Penguin edition notes that Cicero clearly deserved a bollocking but Caesar treats him very gently, listing all the extenuating circumstances he can think of. This is because his brother, the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, back in Rome, is still a political force who Caesar needs to keep onside.

This is reminiscent of the panic at Vesontio back in I.39. Caesar supervises widespread burning and ravaging of the country, with the deliberate intention of starving the inhabitants. An enquiry into the rebellion of the Senones and Carnutes concludes that it was instigated by Accio, who is executed in the traditional Roman manner i.e. scourged and hanged.

Penguin point out that by holding courts, judging and executing leaders like this Caesar was behaving like the governor of an accredited Roman province which Gaul very much was not. It was arrogant (and illegal) behaviour like this which raised so much opposition back in Rome.

Book 7: The rebellion of Vercingetorix (52 BC)

By far the longest book.

1 to 7: General conspiracy of the Gauls — Vercingetorix chosen as leader

The murder of Publius Clodius in January 52 BC led to increased political turbulence in Rome. The Gauls, hearing of this, took advantage to conspire to overthrow the invader and regain their liberty. The Carnutes lead the rebellion and sack the town of Cenabum, killing the knight Gaius Fufius Cita, in charge of managing trade.

This inspires the leader of the Arverni, far away in the south of free Gaul, abutting on the Roman Province, one Vercingetorix. Background to Vercingetorix, namely his father was at one point premier chieftain of all Gaul but was executed for seeking to be king. When Vercingetorix proclaims his ambition to kick out the Romans, his uncle and other chiefs expel him from their capital, Gergovia, but Vercingetorix takes to the road recruiting followers and building up a following. Eventually he returns to Gergovia, takes over his tribe and sends out messages for a major, allied rebellion. He enforces ferocious discipline on his recruits:

compelling waverers by severity of punishment. Indeed for the commission of a greater offence he put to death with fire and all manner of tortures; for a lesser case he sent a man home with his ears cut off or one eye gouged out, to point the moral to the rest and terrify others by the severity of the penalty.

In Italy Caesar hears of numerous tribes forming alliances constellated around Vercingetorix’s leadership. Vercingetorix moves his forces into the territory of the Bituriges.

8 to 14: Caesar moves suddenly against the Arverni

But Caesar surprises Vercingetorix by clearing the snow from a pass through the Cevennes and approaching him from an unexpected direction. He leaves Brutus in charge of his camp and makes a forced march to Vienne. He picks up two legions and marches in through the territory of the Aedui into that of the Lingones, where two legions were wintering. Hearing all this Vercingetorix returns to the country of the Bituriges, and from there heads to assault Gorgobina, a stronghold of the Boii.

This is the longest book of the 8 and is all like this, two leaders criss-crossing ancient Gaul, doing deals with, or being double crossed by, numerous tribes, sending out legions or detachments or squads of cavalry under lieutenants. The names of tribes and locations Caesar passes through, allies with or fights gets very confusing. In brief: Caesar takes three Gaulish towns, Vellaunodunum, Cenabum and Noviodunum.

15 to 31: Siege, defence, and capture of Avaricum

Vercingetorix had suffered 3 defeats in a row so holds a conference of his allies and persuades them to adopt a scorched earth strategy, withdrawing before the Romans and destroying all towns, villages, fields and crops in their paths, with a view to starving them. But the Bituriges went down on their knees and begged him not to burn Avaricum, their fairest town.

So Vercingetorix relents, but Caesar besieges it, for 25 days building an elaborate rampart wall and two huge siege towers. When the population of the town tries to sneak out one night, Caesar takes it, puts it to flame and massacres the 40,000 inhabitants.

Caesar adjudicates leadership contest between rival leaders of the Aedui. But the one he chooses betrays him, a week later telling his people that the Romans have massacred their army, so they have no choice but to go join Vercingetorix and fight for freedom.

34 to 53: Siege of Gergovia

The chief oppidum (fortified town) of the Arverni.— abandoned, after severe repulse. Impulsiveness of the troops who do not hear the recall, continue up the hill to storm the stronghold but are repulsed when the enemy muster with overwhelming numbers. — 46 centurions 700 men

This was the one and only military defeat Caesar suffered at the hands of the Gauls in 8 years. Caesar gives speech reprimanding men and insisting on discipline and then withdraws from Gergovia, marching back along then crossing the river Allier.

54 to 57: Caesar moves against the Aedui.

58 to 62: Labienus, successful against the Parisii, joins him.

63 to 74: General revolt of the Gauls under Vercingetorix.

They attack Caesar, but are defeated, not least because of Caesar’s German cavalry, and retire to Alesia, a town of the Mandubii. Caesar leaves two legions to guard his baggage and swiftly pursues Vercingetorix, killing 3,000 of his rearguard. Three Aeduin traitors are brought to Caesar.

68 to 89: The siege of Alesia

The Gauls retreat inside this stronghold. Caesar orders his troops to construct massive siege-works eleven miles in length, featuring 11 camps and 23 forts. After a confused fight between the opposing cavalries, Vercingetorix adopts the following strategy: he orders his cavalry to leave in the dead of night from a gate which isn’t yet covered by the Roman siegeworks, and to ride to their respective tribes and to raise all men of military age and bring them back, all in the name of a Final Battle which will achieve National Liberation. Meanwhile, all grain is confiscated and Vercingetorix adopts a daily ration for his 80,000 men, which should last a month or so of siege, until the reinforcements from the tribes arrive.

Details of Caesar’s astonishingly complex and thorough siegeworks which face both in and out.

Schematic side view of the Roman siege works at Alesia, 52 BC

The Gauls hold a national convention at which the tribes allot armed forces to send to Alesia, with various factions resiling and bickering. Eventually an astonishing force of 260,000 sets off, but by this stage Alesia’s food supplies have run out.

Caesar describes a meeting of the leaders inside Alesia and gives a speech – presumably entirely fictional – to Critognatus, a noble Avernian who, after a long prologue, recommends cannibalism (77)! It is also notable as belonging to that genre of speeches which Roman authors attributed to their enemies, in which the enemy eloquently describes the crushing servitude and slavery imposed by the Romans.

The weak and old and wives and children are expelled from Alesia and trek over to the Romans to beg them for food. But the Romans barely have enough to feed themselves and refuse the refugees food or permission to pass. So they are caught in no man’s land to starve.

The Gaulish hoard arrives, much to the joy of the besieged who throng the barricades to watch the battle. Caesar places all his infantry around the 11 mile siegeworks then sends his cavalry against the Gaulish cavalry. The Romans suffer casualties before an attack by German cavalry breaks the Gauls and chases them back to their main camp.

A day later a co-ordinated attack from the relieving force triggers a sortie by the besieged and the Romans find themselves hard pressed. But they are defeated by the Romans firing from their strong defences, and fall into the complex web of trenches, booby traps filled with spiked poles and so on. They are forced to withdraw while the besieged are still trying to fill in the first trench of the inner siegeworks, so the latter retreat back into the town, too.

The Gauls then mount an attack on the one Roman camp which isn’t integrated into their defensive circuit, while the besieged again sally forth. (The complexity of the siegeworks and the peril and anxiety of the repeated attacks remind me of the atmosphere at another famous French siege, Dien Bien Phu in French Indo-China, March to May 1954.)

Caesar sends Labienus with reinforcements to the hilltop camp, sends Brutus with reinforcements to the strongest point of the sallying army, then leads reinforcements in person. The forces attacking the hilltop hesitate, then Labienus sallies forth with the cohorts he had picked up. Caught between these cohorts and Caesar’s cavalry, the Gauls panic, break ranks and are slaughtered.

Sedulius, commander and chief of the Lemovices, was killed; Vercassivellaunus the Arvernian was captured alive in the rout; seventy-four war‑standards were brought in to Caesar; of the vast host few returned safe to camp.

Vercingetorix conceded defeat to the tribal leaders inside Alesia. Kill him or surrender him alive, as they wish. The leaders go under flag of truce to Caesar, who sits in front of his fortifications. Vercingetorix is handed over, all the chiefs lay down their arms. Caesar puts the Aeduin and Arvernian prisoners to one side to use as bargaining chips with their tribes, then distributes all the captures Gauls to his army as loot, one Gaul to one Roman.

(I think what this means is each Roman soldier then gets his prisoner to contact his family and demands a ransom for their safe return. So equivalent to cash.)

Caesar then receives the submission of all the tribes, and carefully allots legions and commanders in the territories of the main tribes for the winter. When news of this comprehensive victory reaches Rome, a public thanksgiving of twenty days was granted.

Book 8

This final book was not written by Caesar but by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius. He was a legate of Caesar’s army of Gaul from 58, and crossed the Rubicon with him in January 49. He fought for Caesar during the civil war, and was appointed governor of Transalpine Gaul in 45. In other words a senior figure.

Preface

Hirtius addresses his friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus, another friend of Caesar’s, serving under him as chief engineer (praefectus fabrum) in Gaul. Balbus was said to have attended the very select dinner Caesar hosted, along with Sallust, Hirtius, Oppius and Sulpicus Rufus on the evening of the day when he crossed the Rubicon.

He explains to Balbus that he is continuing the Commentaries because they don’t link up with Caesar’s own account of the Civil; War. He says he has finished the third of the latter books, set in Alexandria, and has now set to filling the blank between book 7 and the outbreak of civil war by supplying a book 8. But it has been hard work to match Caesar’s clear elegant style and also the speed and alacrity with which he wrote.

1 to 48: (51 BC) End of the revolt in Gaul

Winter of 52 to 51 Caesar hears that the Gauls are plotting again. Alesia proves they cannot defeat the Romans when the latter’s forces are united, but might be able to pick off the legions scattered around the country in different tribal regions.

At the end of December Caesar set out on a lightning march and caught the Bituriges in the fields (it’s not actually likely they would be tilling their fields in the depths of winter, is it? Is this a stock literary convention of this genre?) Anyway, Caesar captures thousands but then lets them go and, when they see him being similarly merciful to nearby allied tribes, the Bitiruges decide to submit and give hostages.

Carnutes dispersed, Bellovaci defeated. Dumnacus besieges Lemonum, but without success. The Armoric states subdued. Drappes captured. Uxellodunum besieged and taken by Caesar. Exemplary punishment, the captured have their right hands chopped off. Labienus’ successful operations against the Treveri. Commius subdued.

49 to 55: (50 BC) Caesar and the Senate

Caesar’s triumphal reception by cities and colonies. He returns to the army in Gaul. A description of his opponents in the Senate. Caesar returns to Italy.

Thoughts

Political consequences

1. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were fought to a) clear his debts b) bring him glory and political power.

2. But in doing so he went far beyond his brief as proconsul – dealing with the leaders of free Gaul as if he was governor of a conquered province, invading Britain (twice) and crossing the Rhine, far exceeding his authority. This prompted growing criticism in Rome throughout his eight-year command. And it was this which created the mounting political crisis about whether he would ever be prepared to lay down his command and return to Rome as a normal citizen – the ultimate result being that he was too scared to do so and, instead, crossed the Rubicon into Italy with his army thus triggering five years or ruinous civil war

The war itself

1. Interesting to learn how universal the exchange of hostages was – the standard procedure to ensure peace, not only with the Romans but among the Gaulish tribes themselves.

2. The relentless Roman victories of the first four books get a bit boring. Book 5 is far more dramatic and exciting, when the massacre of Sabinus’ legion and the siege of Quintus Cicero for the first time introduce a real sense of risk and uncertainty and pave the way for the epic account of the struggle against Vercingetorix in book 7.

3. The invasion of England cost a huge amount of time and money and resources and, in the end, seems completely futile. He took away hostages from southern tribes but, presumably that lapsed when Caesar returned to Rome a few years later. Nowhere was settled, no bases or camps, no trading. Seems like an expensive folly.

Anti-imperialism

One of the interesting things about the text is the way it contains its own anti-argument. Caesar’s entire account takes it for granted that rule by Rome is best for the Gauls. And yet fairly regularly he puts into the mouths of Gaulish leaders as direct speech, or attributes to them in indirect description, the wish to be free men in their own land, living under their own laws.

It’s not an unreasonable wish. And every time you read it, you think, ‘Just what right did Caesar think he had to ravage, burn, pillage, and endlessly fight all these peoples?’ Maybe he thought he was bringing ‘peace’ to a territory plagued by endless internecine violence but it’s hard to see how the endless campaigning and fighting and burning and selling into slavery which the Romans brought was an improvement. It consistently feels worse.

Slavery

Interesting when one of the chiefs, Ambiorix, complains that hostages given by his family were being treated ‘like slaves’ and put in chains (V.27). And, of Gaul in general:

Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing naught of themselves, never taken into counsel. The more part of them, oppressed as they are either by debt, or by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongdoing of the more powerful men, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles, who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves. (VI.13)

At numerous other towns the inhabitants were captured and sold into slavery. But then so were some the captured Romans. Caesar says Britain is famous for half a dozen exports to the continent, among which are slaves.

In other words, slavery was current throughout Gaul, Britain and the land of the Germans, so well beyond ancient Greece or Rome. Was there any part of the known world where slavery wasn’t practised two thousand years ago? Was slavery universal?

Eternal war

The Gauls fought among themselves every year. The Britons fought among themselves until Caesar’s incursion temporarily united them. The Germans lived for war. The Italians went on aggressive campaigns every year and spent half their time fighting each other. In Africa Jugurtha, in Asia Mithridates and the Parthians, in Egypt civil war. War everywhere, every year, all the time, forever.

The stupidity of war

Men fighting, I get. It’s what we do, what we’ve always done. But some incidents highlight the sheer brainless stupidity of war and the terrible, futile, stupid cost to civilian victims, women and children. The height of lunacy is reached in book 7 when Vercingetorix persuades the Averni, to burn down their own towns and destroy their own crops all in the name of freedom and victory. Reminiscent of General Westmoreland’s famous quote during the Vietnam War, that the Americans had to destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it. Or Vladimir Putin’s determination to ‘save’ eastern Ukraine by utterly devastating it.

War crimes

In descriptions of other Roman campaigns I’ve wondered whether what the Romans did amounted to war crimes. Yes, is the short answer. Massacring the populations of entire towns, including women and children, is a war crime.

Caesar’s sustained eight year campaign of destroying towns, massacring their inhabitants or sending them off into slavery, have caused many moderns to compare his actions as a genocide. If a genocide is defined as the systematic attempt to wipe out a particular ethnic group, then no, he just wanted every tribe in Gaul to submit, not to exterminate them.

On the other hand, when tribes or towns did hold out, it appears, from his often very casual references, that he did consciously raze towns to the ground and either massacre or enslave entire populations, most notably at the town of Avaricum, and then at Uxellodunum (VIII.44). Or:

Caesar thought that the next best way of obtaining the satisfaction that his honour demanded was to strip the country of inhabitants, cattle and buildings so thoroughly that any of the Eburones who had the good fortune to escape would loathe Ambiorix for bringing such calamities upon them and never allow him to return. Detachments of legionary or auxiliary troops went all over the country killing or capturing large numbers of the natives, burning the homesteads, and carrying off plunder, until it was completely devastated. (VIII.25)

There’s a revealing moment early in book 8 when Hirtius mentions that the population of the Carnutes are still living in makeshift tents and shacks, as all the towns in their territory have been razed to the ground (VIII.5).

At moments like this you see a vast landscape where all the towns, villages, fields and crops have been destroyed, leaving the survivors to scrape a living in pathetic shelters beside burned-out fields, and you realise this is what the Romans meant when they said they brought ‘peace’.

The scarlet cloak

Caesar always wore the scarlet cloak (paludamentum) of a commander-in‑chief (VII.88).

Video

A useful video summary.

Related link

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The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 2

Propaganda

The fundamental thing to grasp about Caesar’s Gallic Wars is that they were not at all what we think of as ‘history’. The Latin word he uses was commentarii which, apparently, means something like ‘report’. Each of the 7 ‘books’ whuch make up the Gallic Wars covers one of the years when he campaigned in Gaul and each one is like an end-of-term, or in this case, end-of-campaign-season report, back to his masters, the Senate and the people of Rome.

Thus they are written for a particular audience and are designed to achieve a certain effect. This is to justify Caesar’s behaviour. Legally, he had been tasked with simply administering 3 existing provinces: Illyricum (the east coast of the Adriatic) Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) and Transalpine Gaul (the area based round France’s Mediterranean coast, also known as ‘the Province’).

But he wanted glory and and so had his sights set on conquering further north into Gaul. But he couldn’t do this legally or on his own initiative. He had to wait till he had pretexts. This is why the seven commentarii are at such pains to emphasise that it was always the bad guys, the naughty Gaulish or Germanic tribes (the Helvetii, the Suebi, the Belgae) who moved first and to make it clear that Caesar was simply responding to aggression in order to maintain the peace and preserve the security of the Province.

But this interventionism was controversial and provided Caesar’s enemies back in Rome with plenty of ammunition to prosecute him for exceeding his authority. The Gallic Wars are a detailed attempt to head off those accusations and present his case, his justifications, to the widest possible audience.

They are the self-justifying propaganda of a conquering general seeking to influence his compatriots, and need to be read with this very much in mind.

Description of Gaul

First some basic facts: at 58 BC when Caesar was appointed governor, on the Italian side of the Alps, stretching from the mountains to the river Rubicon was the province the Romans called Cisalpine or Hither Gaul. On the other side of the Alps they controlled what they called Transalpine or Further Gaul, often simply referred to as The or Our Province. This covered the entire Mediterranean coast of France and extended inland a bit, up the river Rhone, and east up as far as Lake Geneva.

Beyond this lay what you could call ‘Free Gaul’ which Caesar famously describes as being divided into three parts, inhabited by 1) the Aquitani in the southwest 2) the Gauls of the biggest central part, who in their own language were called Celtae, and 3) the Belgae, in the north, extending from Paris to the Channel in the north and the Rhine in the east. (In the map below the Province is named Narbonensis, another alternative name for the Roman-controlled south of France).

Map with the approximate location of pre-Roman Belgic Gaul shortly before the Roman conquest, according to an interpretation of Caesar (source: Wikipedia)

Caesar deploys the familiar trope that Rome’s influence was n some way effeminising. He notes that the Belgae were:

the bravest, because they are furthest from the civilisation and refinement of the Province, and merchants least frequently resort to them, and import those things which tend to effeminate the mind; and they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war.

Caesar gives the names of lots of tribes and generalises about which are Gauls or Celts or German in origin, but pretty much all his terms and labels are contested by modern scholars because a) other ancient historians give different accounts of origins and languages and b) the modern evidence of linguistic studies and archaeology often contradict all of them. I.e. it is a complex and contested field of knowledge which is easy to get lost and perplexed in.

The Roman army

All the editions of the Gallic Wars contain an appendix on the Roman army. Since the reforms of Caius Marius around 100 BC, the army was divided into legions. Each legion contained 6,000 men, divided into 10 cohorts of 600 men, each divided into 3 maniples of 200 men, each made up of 2 centuries of 100 men, commanded by a centurion. Each legion had from 300 to 600 cavalry attached, but these were often foreign recruits and no general relied on them for their main battle plan. Caesar never does.

Tears

There’s a surprising amount of sentimental weeping. Men weeping. Rough, tough warriors and leaders weeping. Women weeping and wailing for their menfolk.

1. 20 With many tears Diviciacus embraced Caesar, and began to beseech him not to pass too severe a judgment upon his brother.

1.20 While he was making this petition at greater length, and with tears, Caesar took him by the hand and consoled him…

1.31 The petition was granted, and they all threw themselves in tears at Caesar’s feet…

Book 1 The expulsion of the intruders (58 BC)

[Note: the following chapter titles are not in the original. They appear to have been added by the translator of the Penguin edition, S.A. Handford. The numbers in round brackets refer to the chapters or sections which each book is divided into and which are numbered in the original.]

Chapter 1: Description of Gaul, its geography and inhabitants

As above.

Chapters 2 to 29: Campaign against the Helvetii

This was Caesar’s first campaign against a Gaulish tribe and, in a sense, the template for his entire subsequent involvement in Gaul.

Caesar claims the leader of the Helvetii, a tribe which lived on the Swiss plateau north of Lake Geneva, were being incited by one of their leaders, Orgetorix, to invade and conquer the rest of Gaul. Orgetorix conspired with leading men in two other tribes to overthrow their rulers, declare themselves kings, and carve up Gaul between them. Orgetorix was summoned to a trial by the seniors of his own people but avoided punishment by turning up with some 10,000 retainers and slaves. He got off, but at some later time perished, possibly by his own hand.

But he had inspired the other leaders with his plan and they burned their houses and crops and set off on a mass migration into Gaul.

Caesar repels the Helvetii going through the Province, forcing them to retreat back into their own territory, take the northern route up through the mountains and into the country of the Aedui. The Romans engaged them at the Battle of the Arar which led to negotiations with Liscus, Dumnorix and Diviciacus.

Second battle, near Bibrax. Retreat and surrender of the Helvetii.

30 to 54: Campaign against Ariovistus and the Suebi

Ariovistus was a leader of the Suebi and allied Germanic peoples. Ariovistus had led his people across the Rhine, fought and defeated the Aedui, seized a third of the Aeduan territory, settling 120,000 Germans there.

Caesar attends a general assembly of the Gauls where Diviciacus, head of the Aeduan government and spokesmen of the Gauls, complains to about Ariovistus’ conquests and the hundreds of Gaulish hostages he has taken. Unless Caesar does something the Aedui will be forced to migrate. Then, true to form, they all start crying.

When Diviciacus had delivered this speech all who were present began with loud weeping to seek assistance from Caesar.

So Caesar sees it as a) his duty to protect a Roman ally, the Aedui, but b) is well aware that confronting Ariovistus will also bring him glory and consolidate his hold over the army.

Caesar makes overtures to Ariovistus which are rebuffed. He marches to and takes the town of Vesontio but here some of the army is overcome by panic. The Gauls tell them the Germans are tall super-soldiers:

men of a mighty frame and an incredible valour and skill at arms; for they themselves [the Gauls] at meetings with the Germans had often been unable even to endure their look and the keenness of their eyes. So great was the panic, and so suddenly did it seize upon all the army that it affected in serious fashion the intelligence and the courage of all ranks… (1.39)

Caesar quells this potential mutiny with a long address concluding that he will march on the enemy with just the loyal Tenth Legion if necessary, with the result that his troops are roused and restored.

Caesar invites Ariovistus to a conference. He makes clear demands: that Ariovistus bring no more of his people across the Rhine, that he and his allies restore the hostages they had taken from the Aedui, and they undertake not to make war against them.

At the meeting with Ariovistus Caesar puts his proposals and Ariovistus haughtily rejects them. Ariovistus is given a powerful speech saying he never attacked the Aedui, Roman friendship is a sham and he’d make a lot of friends back in Rome if he were to kill Caesar on the spot. By this stage some of the Suebians are throwing stones and trying to provoke Caesar’s entourage so the latter withdrew. Next day Caesar sent Gaius Valerius Procillus for further parlay but, as they later discovered, he was immediately arrested and put in chains.

Ariovistus’ army moves off and Caesar tails him till both make camp barely 600 yards from each other. Ariovistus has a much larger force and Caesar realises he is surrounded. The Germans are reluctant to do more than skirmish and Caesar learns this is because their holy women are saying they shouldn’t engage in full battle before the next full moon. He gets some legions to build an advance camp then, next day, leads his legions against Ariovistus’s camp. This turned into the Battle of the Vosges, 58 BC.

The Germans advance towards them with such speed that the Romans don’t have time to use their pilums (spears) but are forced to plunge into hand to hand fighting. The Roman centre is being pushed back when Publius Licinius Crassus grasped what was happening and brings the infantry reserve into action in support of the Roman left. This developed into a general attack on the flank which broke the Germans who turned and ran for the river Rhine 15 miles away.

Many, including Ariovistus himself, managed to cross the river in boats or by swimming. The rest were cut down by Roman cavalry, including both of Ariovistus’s wives and one of his daughters. The ambassador Caesar had sent a few days earlier, Gaius Valerius Procillus, was rescued unharmed to Caesar’s great personal delight but described how his captors had cast lots three times, in his presence, to decided whether he should be burned to death now or later.

So the Suebi had retreated back over the Rhine and were broken as a military threat for the time being. Caesar claims that most of Ariovistus’ one-hundred and twenty thousand men were killed. Caesar winters his army in the land of the Sequani and returns to Hither Gaul to hold assizes. End of first campaigning season.

Book 2 Conquest of the Belgic tribes (57 BC)

Chapters 1 to 33: The Belgae

Caesar hears rumours that the Belgae are hatching a plot against the Roman people. He takes the two legions of Cisalpine Gaul and heads north. Delegates of the Remi, the Belgic people closest to Gaul, come to Caesar, declare their loyalty, but explain the rest of the Belgae’s plans. The Belgae were an originally Germanic people who crossed the Rhine and settled. When the Cimbri and Teutoni were migrating south the Belgae fought them off and gained a reputation for fierceness.

The Remi delegates give a summary of the different Belgic tribes, their numbers and leaders. Soon after this the Belgic horde besieges a Remi town called Bibrax. Caesar sends Numidian and Cretan archers and Balearic slingers to help relieve the siege and the Belgae abandon it.

The two camps line up opposite each other. The Belgae go to try and cross the river Aisne and storm a Roman outpost, but get bogged down and the Romans massacre them. The majority of the Belgae decide to retreat and return to their separate tribal homelands but their withdrawal turns into a rout and the Romans massacre the rearguard.

Caesar besieges Noviodunum, main town of the Suessiones. Overawed by the Romans’ siege engines, they surrender and hand over hostages, including sons of their king, Galba.

Caesar then marches on Bratuspantium, the main town of the Bellovaci, whose inhabitants quickly come out to surrender. The Aedui intercede on the Bellovaci’s behalf, saying they had been duped into rebellion and asking Caesar to show his customary clemency. Caesar does so, accepting 600 hostages and all their weapons. Then he marches on to the territory of the Ambiani who also immediately surrender.

The Nervii, however, under their leader Bogduonatus, resolved to fight and recruited allies including the Atrebates and Viromandui. Caesar marches into their territory and learns their plans. He starts making a camp on a plain by the river Sambre (modern scholars identify this with the river Selle). With great speed the Nervii attacked the Romans making camp and almost overwhelmed them, leaving them no time to properly arm. The battle was on a knife edge.

Caesar grabbed a shield, made his way to the front line and quickly organised his forces while the commander of the Tenth Legion attacked the Nervian camp. Then the two legions who ‘d been guarding the Roman baggage train arrived and helped to turn the tide of the battle. The Nervii are almost completely wiped out, reduced from a fighting force of 60,000 to 500 (28).

The Nervii’s allies, the Aduatuci, had been en route to join them. If they’d arrived in time they probably would have secured a Roman defeat. But hearing of the Nervii defeat they turned round and marched back to their own territory, concentrating their population in one town which they fortified. Caesar besieges it. When they see the siege towers being moved towards the town the Aduatuci decide the Romans must be aided by divine powers to build and move such juggernauts and so beg for clemency and agree to hand over all their weapons.

However, they had treacherously kept a third of their weapons and that night sallied forth and attacked the Roman camp. The Romans rallied and killed about 4,000 Aduatuci after which they retreated back into the town. Next morning the Romans broke down the town gates and took the town, selling the entire population of 53,000 into slavery.

34: Suppression of the ocean states

Caesar had sent Publius Crassus against the tribes which lived alongside the great Ocean i.e. the Atlantic, being the Veneti, Venelli, Osismi, Curiosolitae, Esubii, Aulerci and Redones, and Crassus now reported that they had all been brought into subjection to the power of Rome.

35: Fifteen days’ thanksgiving in Rome for Caesar’s achievements

The end of the campaign season. Caesar’s victories being peace to all Gaul and are known to tribes beyond the Rhine who sue for peace, sending hostages and promising to obey. As he does at the end of each campaign season, Caesar puts his troops into winter quarters and returns to see to his other provinces, namely Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum.

Book 3 The first rebellion (57 BC)

1 to 6: Servius Galba

This is at the tail end of 57, after the campaign season had ended. Caesar deputes Servius Galba to secure a pass over the Alps. Galba signs peace treaties with neighbouring tribes and with just two cohorts set about building a camp at a high settlement named Octodorus. The Seduni and Veragri treacherously attack. They take the Romans by surprise and there is fierce fighting until a brave centurion Caesar picks out by name suggests a sally and the Romans run out the sides of their fort and attack the enemy flanks, routing them. Maybe a third of the enemy were killed, 10,000. Worried about supplies, Galba decided to strike camp and marched his forces down into the safe territory of the Allobroges.

7 to 16: Campaign against the Veneti 56 BC

Suddenly revolt breaks out among the Veneti. They lived in Brittany, had a good fleet and imposed taxes on anyone using their waters. Roman legates had been dispatched to liaise with the Veneti and surrounding tribes and these were all now taken hostage.

Caesar divides his forces, sending them to different parts of Gaul to ensure peace with conquered tribes, then takes the main force west against the rebels. Advantages for the Veneti: their towns are right on the coast, often separated from the land at high tide; they are excellent seafarers and can navigate better than the Romans. Caesar gives a description of Veneti ships, their advantages over Roman ships.

Nonetheless the Roman fleet defeats the Veneti fleet of about 200 ships by the use of grappling hooks on poles to break the enemy rigging and leave their ships defenceless.

This engagement finished the campaign against the Veneti and the whole sea‑coast…they surrendered themselves and all they had to Caesar. He decided that their punishment must be the more severe in order that the privilege of deputies might be more carefully preserved by the natives for the future. He therefore put the whole of their senate to the sword, and sold the rest of the men as slaves. (3.16)

17 to 19: Operations of Titurius Sabinus against the Venelli

The Venelli rebelled against Rome, led by Viridovix who had lured the Aulerci, Eburovices and the Lexovii to put their ‘senates’ to death and join him. The Venelli surround the camp of Quintus Titurius Sabinus and try to tempt him out for a fight but he stalls. Then he briefs a Gaul to pretend to be a deserter and go to the camp of the Venelli and tell them Caesar is in trouble in the West and so Sabinus will try to sneak out of the camp that night to go help him.

Based on this false intelligence the Venelli march en masse up to Sabinus’s camp but he surprises them by sortying from the sides and setting his cavalry on them before they’re ready. Tired after their forced march and confused by the Roman tactics, the Venelli are massacred.

20 to 27: Operations of Publius Crassus in Aquitania

Publius Crassus leads a legion into Aquitania to take on the Sontiates. He engages in open battle then besieges their town which, when it looks like it will fall, the Aquitani surrender. A brotherhood of elite fighters led by Adiatunnus attempt a sortie but are fought back and surrender.

Crassus then tackles the Vocates and the Tarusates. He takes a town within days of besieging it and this so alarms the natives they send for help over the Pyrenees and veterans of Quintus Sertorius’s campaigns come to help. (See my summary of Plutarch’s Life of Sertorius.)

Alarmed at the rise in enemy numbers and that they would soon control the roads and corn supply, Crassus came out of the town next day to fight. The enemy refuse to engage so Crassus marches up to their camp and starts investing it, building ramps up the walls, throwing weapons. Then the cavalry report that the rear gate is inadequately secured and the Romans storm it. The enemy fought free into open country where the Roman cavalry followed and slaughtered them.

As a result of this victory over the strongest force the Aquitani could muster, Crassus received the surrender of the Tarbelli, Bigerriones, Ptianii, Vocates, Tarusates, Elusates, Gates, Ausci, Garumni, Sibuzates and Cocosates.

28 to 29: Operations of Caesar against the Morini and Menapii

The Morini and Menapii were the only unconquered peoples left in all Gaul. Caesar decided to mop them up before winter. But they adopted tactics unusual for the Gauls and retreated into their marshlands. Caesar ordered the construction of a camp nearby but, not for the first time, the natives rushed out and attacked while the Romans were building it.

The Romans fought them off and during the next days Caesar ordered them to fell all the trees and create a mighty rampart. The enemy retreated into the forest but it began to rain continuously and Caesar’s own army needed shelter, so he ordered them to burn the enemy’s fields and villages and buildings and then led them to winter quarters.

Book 4 Invasions of Germany and Britain (55 BC)

1 to 4: Description of the Suebi, Ubii, Usipetes and Tencteri

This was the year of the consulship of Pompey and Crassus as arranged at the conference of the Triumvirate at Luca.

The Usipetes and Tencteri cross the Rhine into Gaul with many men. They explain they have been pushed out of their own land by the Suebi, the most powerful of the German tribes. The Suebi wear the barest of clothes, bathe in cold rivers, have no agriculture but live by hunting, have tremendous freedom, scorn riding horses with saddles, ban merchants who bring wine and other womanish products.

5 to 15: Operations of Caesar against the Usipetes and Tencteri

Caesar hastens to the area and discovers the Usipetes and Tencteri have pushed aside the local Gauls, destabilising the area. Negotiations with their leaders, who bullishly say they don’t want to attack but will defend themselves if necessary. A few days later they send another deputation talking peace but, as they withdraw, 600 or so of the German cavalry attack the Romans. This surprise attack sees a number of Roman casualties and demoralisation before the main force of the infantry appears and the Germans withdraw.

This treacherous attack gives Caesar the moral advantage and when another deputation comes a few days later he promptly detains them (13) and marches double fast the 8 miles to the German camp which he immediately storms. The warriors are taken by surprise, mixed up with the women and children and all begin to flee back towards the Rhine. Here they are caught in the junction of the Rhine and Moselle and large numbers are killed. The remainder put themselves under Caesar’s protection. In other words, a crushing victory.

[The detaining of the envoys was clearly against the rules of war and Caesar’s enemies fiercely criticised it. A note in the Penguin edition tells us that Cato the Younger called for Caesar to be stripped of his command and handed over to the Germans for punishment. There was no chance of this extreme view being carried out but it is symptomatic of the extremely embattled political situation back in Rome which Caesar’s reports were designed to influence.]

16 to 19: Caesar crosses the Rhine

Caesar is careful to give reasons for crossing the Rhine since he, arguably, shouldn’t have been in Gaul at all and certainly not crossing the Rhine into new country. These are:

  1. To make German tribes less inclined to invade Gaul by making them afraid of the threat in their own lands.
  2. German tribes he’d sent envoys to had cockily said the Rhine was the limit of Roman sovereignty: he wanted to prove them wrong and worry them.
  3. The Ubii, the only German tribe who had made peace with Rome and given hostages, begged him to come over and free them from the oppression of the Suebi.

Detailed description of the engineering involved in building a bridge over the Rhine (17). It takes 10 days from starting to collect the wood to the army crossing over into the territory of the Sugambri. The Sugambri have fled into the forest. Caesar burns all their villages, farms and crops.

He marches into the territory of the Ubii to reconfirm their friendship. The Ubii tell him the Suebi have gathered all their fighting men into a central position in their territory and are awaiting battle. But Caesar’s aim was not to conquer more territory but simply to warn the Germans what was possible to act as a deterrent from them crossing into Gaul. So after 18 days he crossed back over the bridge and had it destroyed behind him.

20 to 36: First expedition to Britain

In invading Britain Caesar was, again, exceeding his authority and so his text emphasises his justifications:

  1. In all campaigns against the Gauls they had received help from the Britons (this seems extremely unlikely and a blatant excuse).
  2. He wanted to spy out the lie of the land, the size of the island, its harbours and resources etc.

Caesar marches into the territory of the Morini, closest to Britain. He sends a ship under Volusenus to do a reconnaissance and, having heard the rumours, the first British tribes send envoys to him offering submission. The Morini themselves send envoys and hostages and submit.

Caesar assembles 80 transports and warships for the infantry and a further 18 for the cavalry. The remainder of the army was to mount operations against the Manippi and resistant factions of the Morini.

The landing was hard. The first place they came to they could see the enemy lining the cliffs and able to throw spears down onto a narrow beach. So they put out again and drifted seven miles or so further down the Channel before beaching again (23).

The Roman army faced real difficulties, for they had to leap off the ships while still in quite deep water, weighed down with heavy arms, get a footing and fight uphill through water. The enemy by contrast was on horses used to the terrain and water, fighting downhill into the struggling Romans.

Caesar ordered the lighter warships to be firmly beached on the right flank of the battle and soldiers use slings, bows and artillery on the enemy flank. This succeeded. While the battle hung in the balance the man holding the eagle of the Tenth Legion declared he was going to do his duty by his general and leapt into the water, thus rallying the others. The battle was scattered and confused but eventually his troops got a foothold and were able to reassert discipline. However, the cavalry ships had not yet set out from Gaul and without his cavalry Caesar wasn’t able to convert repelling the enemy into a victory.

But, the Romans having established a beachhead, the Britons send envoys suing for peace. They admit that when the man Cesar chose as envoy, Commius of the Atrebates, first arrived they had arrested him and put him in chains. Now they humbly apologise for their mistake and promise to send hostages.

Four days later the 18 transports carrying the cavalry set out but are caught in a storm so some turn back, some get lost, some keep out to sea to avoid being shipwrecked. Later that night a storm hits the transports which are anchored. ‘Several ships went to pieces; and the others, by loss of cordage, anchors, and the rest of their tackle, were rendered useless for sailing.’ 12 ships were lost.

Seeing this and calculating that the Romans won’t be able to get reinforcements, the Britons decide to renege on their deal with Caesar and revert to war. Meanwhile Caesar ordered the remaining ships to be repaired with spare parts from the 12 which were wrecked and equipment brought over from Gaul to do this.

Elements of the Seventh Legion were out collecting corn when they were attacked. Caesar took the rest of his troops from their camp and came to their rescue. Caesar makes a point of describing the skilful way the Britons use their chariots.

He fights off the attackers and decides not to escalate the engagement into a full battle but withdraws to the Roman camp. But the Britons had sent messages in all directions and gathered a huge number of armed men. So a second battle takes place which is briefly described – the Romans win, drive the enemy from the field, burn their villages and crops, then withdraw again to their camp.

Next day deputies from the tribes come to sue for peace and Caesar demands they hand over hostages. He orders these to be brought to him on the continent because that evening Caesar sets sail back to Gaul.

37 to 38: Defeat of the rebellious Morini — subjection of the Menapii

One troop of about 300 had landed back in Gaul and were marching to camp when they were attacked by a large contingent of the Morini, who had been at peace with the Romans when Caesar had left Gaul. The Romans formed a square and soon as he heard about it Caesar sent cavalry to relieve them. The combined force beat off the Morini and pursued them, killing many.

Next day Caesar sends his most trusted lieutenant, Titus Labienus, against the Morini. Previously the Morini had retreated to their marshes but it’s been a hot summer and the marshes have all dried up. So they surrendered.

As for Quintus Titurius and Lucius Cotta, the lieutenant-generals who had led legions into the territory of the Menapii, they did not return to Caesar until they had laid waste all the fields of the natives, cut down the corn-crops, and burnt the buildings, because the Menapii had all hidden in their densest forests.

Great deal of wasting and burning, isn’t there? Which has led some modern historians to accuse Caesar of genocide. Some historians have totalled up the number of Gauls killed at over a million, in a land with a population of only a million or so. Arguments about numbers killed or enslaved quickly become highly technical (and Caesar may well have been exaggerating throughout his accounts to big up his achievements) – but you can see their point.

Even the most detached reading of the text begins to weigh you down with the sheer numbers of people killed, the towns razed to the ground, the populations sold into slavery, the villages and all the agricultural land destroyed. As Tacitus has his (probably fictional) Scottish chieftain declare of the Romans, in his account of Gnaeus Julius Agricola’s campaigns in Britain a hundred years later, in the late 70s AD:

‘They make a desert and call it peace.’

When the Senate received Caesar’s dispatches for the year they declare twenty days’ thanksgiving in Rome for his achievements.

Slavery

The usual fate of the inhabitants of a captured town was to be sold into slavery. A great part of Roman war profits came from the sale of people, as well as of property.
(note to page 227 in the Oxford University Press edition)

The practice of slavery among the native Gauls, and what it meant to be sold into slavery by the Romans, and how far towns and peoples would go to avoid such a fate, strike me as being of huge importance in understanding the native societies Caesar was attacking, the fears of those peoples and their motivation in repeatedly rising up against Roman rule.

And yet the issue of slavery is mentioned nowhere in the introductions of either Hammond nor Gardiner. They both go on at length about the well-known political political situation in Rome, which is covered in numerous other books, and yet completely ignore this huge elephant in the room.

Video

A useful video summary of Caesar’s campaigns.

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The life of Julius Caesar by Suetonius (120 AD)

Suetonius

Not much is known about Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, generally referred to as Suetonius. He was born around 70 AD, probably in a town in modern-day Algeria. He may have taught literature for a while, he seems to have practiced the law. He is recorded as serving on the staff of Pliny the Younger when the latter was governor of Bithynia in north Turkey in 110 to 112 AD. Subsequently he served on the staff of emperors, being in charge of the emperor’s libraries under Trajan and then managing the emperor Hadrian’s correspondence. Pliny describes him as a quiet and studious man devoted to his writing. He wrote The Lives of Illustrious Men, 60 or so biographies of poets, grammarians, orators and historians, almost all of which has been lost (except for short lives of Terence, Virgil and Horace).

The Lives of the Caesars, by contrast, has survived almost in its entirety (it is thought that only some of the opening sections of the first life, Caesar, are missing). As it says on the tin, The Lives of the Caesars includes biographies of the first 12 Roman emperors, being:

  • Julius Caesar
  • Augustus (ruled 31 BC to 14 AD)
  • Tiberius (14 to 37 AD)
  • Gaius (Caligula) (37 to 41)
  • Claudius (41 to 54)
  • Nero (54 to 68)
  • Galba (68 to 69)
  • Otho (69)
  • Vitellius (69)
  • Vespasian (69 to 79)
  • Titus (79 to 81)
  • Domitian (81 to 96)

(It may be worth pointing out that Nero’s suicide in 68 led to a period of anarchy in which a succession of generals seized power. Three of them ruled for only a few months each –Galba from June 68 to January 69; Otho from January to April 69; and Vitellius from April to December 69 – before Vespasian seized power and stabilised the situation, ruling from 69 to 79. Which is why 69 came to be called The Year of Four Emperors.)

Suetonius realised that the genre of biography needed to strike out in a different direction from history, not least because of the overpowering example of Publius Cornelius Tacitus, whose Annals and Histories describe the reigns of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and the Year of the Four Emperors. (Taken together, Suetonius and Tacitus are our only major sources for this critical, formative period in the history of the western world.

So Suetonius departed from the strictly chronological approach of the historians, and of his younger contemporary, the biographer Plutarch (46 to 120), and a chose a different method. Suetonius only briefly covers the facts of the lives before moving to more personal, non-political material about his subjects, classified and arranged according to subject matter. Although this sounds dry the result is the opposite; the inclusion of lots of juicy gossip and anecdotes, delivered with a deadpan, non-judgemental expression.

In his introduction to the Penguin edition, the renowned classicist Michael Grant (1914 to 2004) points out that Suetonius’s main contribution to the genre was that he moved away from the traditional eulogistic treatment of dead great men to take a more ‘astringent’ and ‘disenchanted’ view (lovely words).

Above all, he avoids the heavy moralising of earlier writers (Sallust with his heavy moralising and Plutarch with his negative opinion of Caesar, both spring to mind). Suetonius assembles evidence for and against his subjects – then leaves it for the reader to decide.

Penguin still publish the translation they commissioned in the 1950s from the famous novelist and poet Robert Graves, a writer who is just as charming and gossipy as Suetonius (see his wonderful memoir Goodbye To All That).

The Life of Caesar

Just as with Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar, Suetonius’s life appears to be missing the first section, about the great man’s family and boyhood. Why? Did Augustus suppress them as he is said to have suppressed Caesar’s juvenile writings, in order to manipulate and burnish the legend of his adoptive father?

The Life consists of 89 short sections which fill 40 pages of the Penguin translation.

(1) Aged barely 18, Caesar married Cornelia, daughter of the consul Lucius Cornelius Cinna, of Gaius Marius’s party. The dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla demanded that Caesar ‘put her away’ i.e. divorce her, but Caesar obstinately refused and had to go into hiding from Sulla’s wrath. Eventually friends of his persuaded Sulla to relent, at which he spoke the much quoted words: “Have your way and take him but bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding. There are many Mariuses in this fellow Caesar.”

(2) He went to serve in Asia as aide-de-camp to the provincial governor Marcus Thermus. When sent to  raise a fleet in Bithynia he spent so much time with king Nicomedes that a rumour spread he was having a homosexual relationship with him. [A reputation for philandering was to follow Caesar cf his affair with Cleopatra.]

(3) He was serving another commander in Cilicia (southern Turkey) when the death of Sulla in 78 BC opened up the political scene and he hurried back to Rome, He was offered a place in the revolt of Marcus Lepidus but doubted the latter’s chances and turned it down.

(4) He brought a law suit against Cornelius Dolabella but it failed and to escape the resulting ill feeling he headed off to Rhodes to study under the noted orator Apollonius Molo. But en route he was captured by pirates and held to ransom. When his family and friends coughed up the required amount (50 talents = 12,000 gold pieces) Caesar promptly hired some ships and soldier, tracked down the pirates and had them all crucified. Then continued on to Rhodes to study.

(5) On Caesar’s return to Rome he helped the Assembly undo aspects of Sulla’s constitutional reforms, for example restoring the veto of the tribunes of the plebs.

(6) During his quaestorship in 69 BC he delivered eulogies to his aunt Julia [the one who had married the general and ruler of Rome Gaius Marius] and wife Cornelia, in which he lost no opportunity to remind everyone that his extended family or clan, the Julii, claimed descent from Aeneas and through him to the goddess Venus.

He next married Pompeia but divorced her after the strange (and irritatingly ubiquitous) story about Publius Clodius Pulcher disguising himself as a woman to enter Caesar’s house during the women-only rites for the goddess Bona.

(7) As quaestor he was sent to help govern Spain, In Gades he was seen to sigh on seeing the statue of Alexander the Great, vexed that, at the same age as Alexander when he died, he had done nothing of note. [In Plutarch the same story is told except Caesar bursts into tears.] He had a dream of raping his mother which the soothsayers interpreted as meaning he was destined to conquer the Earth, ‘our Universal Mother’.

(8) He laid down his quaestorship and visited the citizens living beyond the river Po who complained that they weren’t granted full Roman citizenship and might have raised them in revolt had not the authorities brought in fresh legions. In other words, he was an impatient ambitious young man looking for a cause.

(9) He was elected aedile in 65 BC. Suetonius then reports that Caesar conspired with Rome’s richest man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, to overthrow the government, to storm the Senate, massacre as many senators as possible, have Crassus installed as dictator with Caesar his Master of Horse or deputy, and a couple of other conspirators as consuls. Apparently Crassus got cold feet and the plan fell through. Suetonius mentions another conspiracy, with Piso, to raise rebellion in Rome, the Po valley and Spain simultaneously. Suetonius knows these are scandalous accusations and so names three other historians as his authorities. None of this is mentioned in Plutarch.

(10) As aedile Caesar put on spectacular shows. In fact he assembled so many gladiators for public fights that his opponents thought he was going to use them for political violence and rushed through a law limiting the number of gladiators that anyone might keep in Rome.

(11) Ambition. Caesar tried to get control of Egypt by popular vote following the outcry after Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, officially a friend and ally of Rome, was overthrown – but the aristocratic party foiled his attempt. [All this is context for his involvement in Egypt and Cleopatra 20 years later.] In revenge he restored statues of the anti-aristocratic Marius throughout central Rome. He also prosecuted bounty hunters who had brought in the heads of those proscribed under Sulla.

(12) He presided over the trial of Gaius Rabirius.

(13) He won the position of pontifex maximus, getting deeply into debt in order to bribe the people. Suetonius repeats the oft-told story that, on the morning of his election, as he set off to the polls, he told his mother he would return as pontifex or not at all [generally taken to mean he would be in so much debt that if he didn’t win the post, he’d be forced to flee the city.]

(14) The Catiline conspiracy Caesar spoke against the death penalty for the conspirators and swayed most of the Senate till Marcus Porcius Cato (also known as Cato the Younger) stood up and spoke sternly in favour of the death penalty. [A full transcript of these dramatic speeches, albeit probably made up, is given in Sallust’s Cataline’s War.]

Suetonius goes beyond previous accounts in adding the dramatic detail that when Caesar persisted in his call for clemency, a troop of Roman knights threatened him and even drew their swords and made  threatening passes with them so that his friends had to rally round and shield him. Only then did he yield the point, withdraw, and for the rest of the year didn’t revisit the Senate House.

This sounds like an artistic touch, like a deliberate prefigurement of his assassination 20 years later.

(15) On the first day of his praetor­ship he called upon Quintus Catulus to render an account owing to the people touching the restoration of the Capitol, but abandoned it when the aristocratic party of senators, who had been accompanying the newly elected consuls to the Capitol, returned to the Senate building.

(16) He supported Caecilius Metellus, tribune of the commons, in bringing some bills of a highly seditious nature in spite of the veto of his colleagues. Even when the Senate ordered him to cease and desist, he persisted until they threatened him with violence at which point he dismissed his lictors, laid aside his robe of office, and slipped off to his house.

All these stories bespeak the rebellious obstinacy of the man and the turbulence which surrounded him.

(17) He then got into trouble by being named among the accomplices of Catiline by an informer called Lucius Vettius and in the senate by Quintus Curius. Caesar strongly refuted the claims, not least by pointing out how he had alerted Cicero, consul and lead magistrate in Rome, of the conspiracy and so was decisive in getting is quelled. He secured the conviction and imprisonment of both informers.

(18) After securing the governorship of Further Spain he left hastily before formally confirmed in post in order to avoid his, by now, numerous and clamouring creditors. He restored order in the province but returned hastily to Rome to claim a triumph. He also wanted to be consul for the following year and couldn’t do both. After agonising, he entered the city, thus losing the triumph, in order to contest the consulship.

(19) Caesar was elected consul but not with the partner he wanted, as the aristocracy lobbied hard and bribed heavily to ensure that one of their party, Marcus Bibulus, was elected as his partner consul. The optimates then offered him the most trivial and demeaning governorship possible, of ‘woods and pastures’, which in practice meant guarding the mountain-pastures and keeping the woods free from brigands.

Frustrated, Caesar worked behind the scenes to reconcile the most successful general in the land, Pompey, and the richest man, Crassus, to come to a behind the scenes arrangement to share power and secure each other’s aims. This came to be called the First Triumvirate.

(20) As consul Caesar immediately passed a law that the proceedings both of the senate and of the people should day by day be compiled and published. He also revived a by-gone custom, that during the months when he did not have the fasces an orderly should walk before him, while the lictors followed him. He brought forward an agrarian law too and when his partner consul opposed it, drove him from the Senate by force, terrorising him into remaining in his house for the rest of his term.

Caesar had in effect made himself sole ruler. A joke went round that official documents, instead of being signed by the two consuls i.e. “Done in the consul­ship of Bibulus and Caesar” were marked “Done in the consul­ship of Julius and Caesar”. Many a true word spoken in jest. Suetonius gives examples of Caesar’s peremptory behaviour:

  • he divided public land among twenty thousand citizens who had three or more children each
  • when the tax collectors asked for relief, he freed them from a third part of their obligation but warned them from bidding too recklessly for contracts in the future
  • he freely granted to anyone whatever they took it into their heads to ask
  • Cato, who tried to delay proceedings, was dragged from the House by a lictor at Caesar’s command and taken off to prison
  • when Lucius Lucullus was too outspoken in his opposition, he filled him with such fear of malicious prosecution that Lucullus actually fell on his knees before him
  • because Cicero, while pleading in a court case, deplored the times, Caesar transferred the orator’s enemy Publius Clodius that same day from the patricians to the plebeians, something Clodius had vainly been striving for for ages
  • he bribed an informer to declare that he had been encouraged by certain men to murder Pompey, and to name them in public; however, the informer bungled the task and to cover this attempt to incriminate the entire body of his political enemies, Caesar had the would be informant poisoned

(21) As previously discussed, marriage in ancient Rome was an important way of creating political alliances. Caesar now married Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso, who was to succeed him in the consul­ship, and married his own daughter, Julia, to Gnaeus Pompeius, to cement their partnership.

(22) With these influential backers in place Caesar now lobbied to be awarded the governorship of Gaul, not the ‘woods and pastures’, figuring, like so many Roman governors, that it would a an excellent location in which a) to gain military glory b) fleece the natives and grow rich.

At first by the bill of Vatinius he received only Cisalpine Gaul with the addition of Illyricum but then the Senate, fearful that the people would lobby violently, decided to add Gallia Comata as well. Suetonius passes on a juicy anecdote that, later, among friends, he celebrated his success over his enemies and said he would use it to mount on their heads with a pun meaning a) clambering over their heads b) mounting their penises.

When someone insultingly remarked that that would be no easy matter for any woman, he replied in the same vein that Semiramis too had been queen in Syria and the Amazons in days of old had held sway over a great part of Asia.

(23) As soon as his consulship ended some praetors tried to bring legal proceedings against him for misconduct but Caesar managed to bribe his way out of this and thenceforward took pains to be on good terms with all succeeding magistrates, getting them to vow and even sign pledges not to prosecute him.

[This is how Roman politics worked. Academics explain the process of voting for candidates but not enough attention is paid to what appears to be the almost inevitable consequence of office which is someone will try and prosecute you. While canvassing for office candidates had to spend a fortune bribing the voters and, after leaving office, had to spend a fortune bribing succeeding officials not to prosecute them. Forget morality – it was just a crazily unstable system.]

(24) Suetonius has the motivation behind Caesar calling a meeting of the Triumvirate in Luca, in 56, being that Lucius Domitius, candidate for the consul­ship, was threatening to remove him from the generalship of the armies in Gaul. He called Pompey, Crassus and a third of the Senate to head this off and, in exchange for favours to his partners, had his command in Gaul extended by 5 years.

(25) Suetonius summarises Caesar’s 9 years in Gaul:

  • he reduced the entire area to a province and imposed an annual tribute of 40 million sestercii
  • he was the first to build a bridge over the Rhine and attack the Germans on their home turf
  • he invaded Britain, exacting money and hostages

In all this time he suffered only three setbacks:

  • in Britain, where his fleet narrowly escaped destruction in a violent storm
  • in Gaul, when one of his legions was routed at Gergovia
  • on the borders of Germany, when his lieutenants Titurius and Aurunculeius were ambushed and slain

[In fact, by Caesar’s own account, he suffered more close shaves than that.]

(25) After the murder of Clodius the Senate voted for just one consul to hold office and gave it to Pompey. This seems a little garbled. I thought Pompey was awarded sole consulship in light of the ongoing riots between the rival gangs of Clodius and Titus Annius Milo.

Caesar now began lobbying to be awarded the consulship at the moment he relinquished his command in Gaul in 50 BC. He began to campaign lavishly, he:

  • began to build a new forum with his spoils from Gaul
  • announced a massive feast in memory of his daughter
  • he announced massive gladiatorial games and paid for gladiators to be trained
  • he doubled the pay of the legions for all time
  • whenever grain was plenti­ful he distributed it to the people

Populism. When he had put all Pompey’s friends under obligation, as well as the greater part of the Senate, through loans made without interest or at a low rate, he lavished gifts on men of all other classes.

(28) How he curried favour with foreign princes, sending troops or money or hostages as appropriate. He paid for public works for the principle cities throughout the empire. [Plutarch doesn’t make mention of this global campaign. Is it a later inflation of the legend?]

Nonetheless, events moved towards their crisis. The consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus proposed that, since peace was finally established in Gaul, Caesar be relieved of his command but forbidden from standing as consul in that year’s elections. The precise opposite of what Caesar wanted.

(29) The following year Gaius Marcellus, who had succeeded his cousin Marcus as consul, tried the same thing but Caesar by a heavy bribe secured the support of the other consul, Aemilius Paulus, and of Gaius Curio, the most reckless of the tribunes. He proposed a compromise, that he give up eight legions and Transalpine Gaul but be allowed to keep two legions and Cisalpine Gaul until he was elected consul.

(30) At the crisis intensified, Caesar crossed the Alps to Cisalpine Gaul and halted at Ravenna. When the Senate passed a decree that Caesar should disband his army before a given date and the tribunes Mark Antony and Quintus Cassius exercised their privilege and vetoed it, not only did the Senate ignore the veto but hounded the tribunes out of town with the threat of violence.

Why did he cross the Rubicon? Pompey later said it was he couldn’t afford to complete all the great works he’d promised and so wanted a state of disruption. Others said he knew he would be prosecuted for breaking umpteen laws during his first consulship. Cato hugely exacerbated the problem by taking an oath swearing he would impeach Caesar the minute he lay down his command. The simplest reason is he knew he would be tried, found guilty of something and permanently exiled.

(31) The story of how he decided to cross the Rubicon and sent his troops ahead but himself spent all day very publicly around Ravenna and in the evening attended a party, to allay suspicions. Only at the end of the evening did he harness a carriage and race to meet his troops.

(32) As he and his troops hesitated a being of wondrous stature and beauty appeared, snatched a trumpet from one of the soldiers, strode across the river and sounded the war-note with mighty blast from the other side. If only all corporate decisions were made that way.

(33) He harangued the soldiers with tears and tore his tunic and waved his hand around. This latter gave rise to a misunderstanding for he wore his senator’s ring on his left hand and the soldiers who couldn’t hear him thought he was offering them each a fortune to fight for him.

(34) He overran Umbria, Picenum, and Etruria, took prisoner Lucius Domitius, who was holding the town of Corfinium, let him go free, then proceeded along the Adriatic to Brundisium, where Pompey and the consuls had taken refuge. He tried but failed to prevent them sailing in a fleet across to modern day Albania but had no ships of his own to follow, so marched on Rome, taking it. Here he dealt peacefully with his remaining enemies, before setting off for Spain in order to defeat Pompey’s strongest forces, under command of three of his lieutenants – Marcus Petreius, Lucius Afranius, and Marcus Varro – which he did with surprising speed.

(35) Suetonius makes very light indeed of what happened next, describing Caesar’s assembly of a fleet, transport of his army across the Adriatic, the four month siege of Dyrrhachium, then following Pompey’s army into Thrace where he soundly defeated him at the battle of Pharsalum in one sentence. He followed the fleeing Pompey to Egypt where he arrived to discover he had been murdered by Egyptian officers who thought it would please him, and then became embroiled in an inconvenient war, bottled-up in the city of Alexandria. He was eventually triumphant over the army of the pharaoh who fled and was never heard of again, so that Caesar was able to leave Egypt in control of Ptolemy’s sister, Cleopatra.

Then he sums up the separate campaigns in Asia, Africa and Spain thus:

From Alexandria he crossed to Syria, and from there went to Pontus, spurred on by the news that Pharnaces, son of Mithridates the Great, had taken advantage of the situation to make war, and was already flushed with numerous successes; but Caesar vanquished him in a single battle within five days after his arrival and four hours after getting sight of him, often remarking on Pompey’s good luck in gaining his principal fame as a general by victories over such feeble foemen. Then he overcame Scipio and Juba, who were patching up the remnants of their party in Africa, and the sons of Pompey in Spain.

[Suetonius is a man in a hurry. All this is covered in vastly more detail in Caesar’s own account of the War in Alexandria, and whoever wrote the accounts of the campaigns in north Africa and Spain.]

(36) In all the civil wars Caesar suffered not a single disaster except through his lieutenant.

(37) Having ended the wars, he celebrated five triumphs, the first and most splendid was the Gallic triumph, the next the Alexandrian, then the Pontic, after that the African, and finally the Spanish, each differing from the rest in its equipment and display of spoils. He mounted the Capitol by torchlight with forty elephants bearing lamps on his right and his left. In his Pontic triumph he displayed among the show-pieces an inscription with just three words, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” not even bothering to describe the events of the war or the key battle (the battle of Zela, August 47 BC) but emphasising what he himself considered his outstanding quality which was amazing speed, of approach and attack.

(38) As examples of the astonishing liberality of these top leaders, Suetonius states that:

To each and every foot-soldier of his veteran legions he gave 24,000 sesterces by way of booty, over and above the 2,000 apiece which he had paid them at the beginning of the civil strife. He also assigned them lands but was careful not to dispossess any of the former owners. To every man of the people he gave 10 pecks of grain and the same number of pounds of oil plus the 300 sesterces he had promised at first, and 100 apiece because of the delay. He remitted a year’s rent in Rome to tenants who paid 2,000 sesterces or less and in Italy up to 500 sesterces. He added a banquet and a dole of meat, and after his Spanish victory two dinners for everyone.

[The reader is awed by the wealth of these super-rich people, but also at the kind of society in which this was a recognised convention or way of proceeding.]

(39) Having covered the war against Pompey and his heirs with laughable superficiality, Suetonius devotes twice as much space to describing the lavish games Caesar paid for. It is worth quoting at length because its impact derives from its scale.

1. He gave entertainments of diverse kinds: a combat of gladiators and also stage-plays in every ward all over the city, performed too by actors of all languages, as well as races in the circus, athletic contests, and a sham sea-fight. In the gladiatorial contest in the Forum Furius Leptinus, a man of praetorian stock, and Quintus Calpenus, a former senator and pleader at the bar, fought to a finish. A Pyrrhic dance was performed by the sons of the princes of Asia and Bithynia. 2. During the plays Decimus Laberius, a Roman knight, acted a farce of his own composition, and having been presented with five hundred thousand sesterces and a gold ring,​ passed from the stage through the orchestra and took his place in the fourteen rows.​ For the races the circus was lengthened at either end and a broad canal​ was dug all about it; then young men of the highest rank drove four-horse and two-horse chariots and rode pairs of horses, vaulting from one to the other. The game called Troy was performed by two troops, of younger and of older boys. 3. Combats with wild beasts were presented on five successive days, and last of all there was a battle between two opposing armies, in which five hundred foot-soldiers, twenty elephants, and thirty horsemen engaged on each side. To make room for this, the goals were taken down and in their place two camps were pitched over against each other. The athletic competitions lasted for three days in a temporary stadium built for the purpose in the region of the Campus Martius. 4. For the naval battle a pool was dug in the lesser Codeta and there was a contest of ships of two, three, and four banks of oars, belonging to the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets, manned by a large force of fighting men. Such a throng flocked to all these shows from every quarter, that many strangers had to lodge in tents pitched in streets or along the roads, and the press was often such that many were crushed to death, including two senators.

(40) Caesar reformed the calendar, adding a few days to make it last the 365 days of the solar year, with an extra day added every fourth year, such as we still do, 2,000 years later.

(41) He filled the vacancies in the senate, enrolled additional patricians, and increased the number of praetors, aediles, and quaestors, as well as of the minor officials. Half the officials were elected in the old way, half were directly appointed by him.

(42) Details of more of his reforms, including how long citizens were allowed to live overseas, who was allowed to travel. He made a partial attempt to sort out the problem of indebtedness which seems to have been one of Rome’s most enduring social problem. He dissolved all guilds, except those of ancient foundation. He increased the penalties for crimes.

(43) 1. He administered justice with the utmost conscientiousness and strictness. Those convicted of extortion he dismissed from the senatorial order. He imposed duties on foreign wares. He denied the use of litters and the wearing of scarlet robes or pearls to all except those of a designated position and age, and on set days. 2. He enforced the laws against extravagance, setting watchmen in the market to seize and bring to him dainties which were exposed for sale in violation of the law. Sometimes he sent his lictors and soldiers to take from a dining-room any articles which had escaped the vigilance of his watchmen, even if they had already been served to the guests.

(44) Caesar’s grand public schemes involved:

  • to build a temple of Mars bigger than any in existence
  • to build a theatre of vast size, sloping down from the Tarpeian rock
  • to reduce the civil code to fixed limits and the vast, prolix mass of statutes down to only the best and most essential
  • to open to the public the greatest possible libraries of Greek and Latin books
  • to drain the Pontine marshes
  • to build a highway from the Adriatic across the summit of the Apennines as far as the Tiber

Militarily, he planned to check the Dacians, who had poured into Pontus and Thrace then to make war on the Parthians by way of Lesser Armenia.

[Remember I mentioned that Suetonius departed from the basic chronological methodology of his predecessors by adding descriptions of his subjects’ characters by category? Well, sections 45 to about 77 of the Life of Caesar do just that, pausing the (often very superficial) account of Caesar’s life story to look at a range of his qualities or characteristics.]

Before I speak of Caesar’s death, it will not be amiss to describe briefly his personal appearance, his dress, his mode of life, and his character, as well as his conduct in civil and military life.

(45) “He is said to have been tall of stature with a fair complexion, shapely limbs, a somewhat full face, and keen black eyes. Sound of health, except that towards the end he was subject to sudden fainting fits and to nightmare as well. He was twice attacked by the falling sickness​ during his campaigns. 2. He was overnice in the care of his person, being not only carefully trimmed and shaved, but even having superfluous hair plucked out.”

[Hence his reputation, as a young man, of being a dandy.]

“His baldness was a disfigurement which troubled him greatly since he found that it was often the subject of the gibes of his detractors. Because of this he used to comb fhis thin hair forward from the crown of his head. Of all the honours voted him by the senate and people he welcomed none more gladly than the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath at all times since it covered his baldness.”

(46) He is said to have built a country house on his estate at Nemi at great cost but then torn it down because it did not suit him in every particular even though he was, at the time, poor and in debt. It was said that he carried tesselated and mosaic floors about with him on his campaigns [!].

(47) “He was an enthusiastic collector of gems, carvings, statues, and pictures by early artists. Also of slaves of exceptional figure and training at enormous prices, of which he himself was so ashamed that he forbade their entry in his accounts.”

(48) “He was so punctilious in the management of his household that he put his baker in irons for serving him with one kind of bread and his guests with another. He inflicted capital punishment on a favourite freedman for adultery with the wife of a Roman knight, although no complaint was made against him.”

(49) His early ‘friendship with King Nicomedes dogged the rest of his career, giving rise to no end of homophobic quips and insults.

(50) His affairs with women were described as numerous and extravagant. He seduced the wives of many senators and even Pompey’s wife Mucia. “But beyond all others Caesar loved Servilia, the mother of Marcus Brutus, for whom in his first consul­ship he bought a pearl costing six million sesterces.” Some people said that Servilia prostituted her own daughter Tertia to Caesar.

(51) That he behaved the same in Gaul is suggested by one of the many bawdy songs his soldiers sang about him in the Gallic triumph: “Men of Rome, keep close to your consorts, here’s a bald adulterer.”

(52) He had affairs with foreign queens, the most notable of course being Cleopatra. It is said that he would have followed her in a barge up the Nile to Ethiopia but his soldiers rebelled. He lavished her with presents and titles and she bore his son, Caesarion.

The extraordinary suggestion that Helvius Cinna, tribune of the commons, admitted to friends that he had a bill drawn which Caesar had ordered him to propose to the people in his absence, making it lawful for Caesar to marry what wives he wished, and as many as he wished, “for the purpose of begetting children.” [He sounds like an African dictator.]

That he had a bad reputation both for shameless vice and for adultery is suggested by the fact that the elder Curio in one of his speeches called him “every woman’s man and every man’s woman.” [Bisexual and shamelessly promiscuous.]

(53) He drank little, was never drunk, and cared little about food.

(54) In Gaul and Spain he shamelessly sacked towns which had surrendered in order to loot them. At first this was to pay off his monster debts but eventually he accumulated so much god “he didn’t know what to do with it”. In his first consul­ship he stole 3,000 pounds of gold from the Capitol, replacing it with the same weight of gilded bronze. He made alliances and thrones a matter of barter, for he extorted from Ptolemy alone nearly 6,000 talents. Later on he met the heavy expenses of the civil wars, his triumphs and entertainments by the most bare-faced pillage and sacrilegious looting of temples.

(55) Caesar equalled or surpassed both the greatest generals and the greatest orators in history. His prosecution of Dolabella placed him in the first rank of advocates and Cicero asked in his Brutus whether his readers knew of a better speaker than Caesar, of anyone who spoke so wittily with such a wide yet precise vocabulary.

(56) Caesar left memoirs of the Gallic war and the civil war with Pompey. The author of their continuations into a history of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish Wars is unknown; some think it was Oppius, others Hirtius, who also supplied the final book of the Gallic War.

Cicero thought the accounts were “naked in their simplicity, straightforward yet graceful, stripped of all rhetorical adornment, as of a garment” and obviously written to supply material to others.

The orator, poet, playwright, literary critic, and historian Gaius Asinius Pollio thought they had been left incomplete and that Caesar intended to revise and polish them. Also that they were flawed because Caesar was biased in the description of his own accounts and too readily believed his subordinates’ accounts of their doings.

(57) He was highly skilled in arms and horseman­ship, and of incredible powers of endurance. He moved at incredible speed, sometimes covering 100 miles in a day, sometimes arriving at his destination before the messengers sent to warn of his coming.

(58) He was careful and cautious, about crossing to Britain, about crossing the Rhine, about crossing from Brundisium to Dyrrachium.

(59) No regard for religion ever turned him from any undertaking, or even delayed him.

(60) He joined battle, not only after planning his movements in advance but on a sudden opportunity, often immediately at the end of a march, and sometimes in the foulest weather, when one would least expect him to make a move.

(61) He rode a remarkable horse with feet that were almost human for its hoofs were cloven in such a way as to look like toes. This horse was foaled on his own place and the soothsayers foretold that its master would one day rule the world.

(62) When his army gave way, he often rallied it single-handed, planting himself in the way of the fleeing men and grabbing them one by one and turning them to face the enemy.

(63) He was famous for his presence of mind in a crisis.

(64) “At Alexandria, while assaulting a bridge, he was forced by a sudden sally of the enemy to take to a small skiff. When many others threw themselves into the same boat, he plunged into the sea, and after swimming for 200 paces, got away to the nearest ship, holding up his left hand all the way, so as not to wet some papers which he was carrying, and dragging his cloak after him with his teeth, to keep the enemy from getting it as a trophy.” [This seems to derive the War in Alexandria.]

(65) He valued his soldiers neither for their personal character nor for their fortune, but solely for their prowess, and he treated them with equal strictness and indulgence.

(66) When they were in a panic through reports about the enemy’s numbers, he used to rouse their courage not by denying or discounting the rumours, but by falsely exaggerating the true danger.

(67) He did not take notice of all his soldiers’ offences or punish them by rule, but he kept a sharp look out for deserters and mutineers. This he chastised them most severely, shutting his eyes to other faults.

(68) His men were fantastically loyal to him and looked after each other. When captured they refused to go over to the other side. They fought fanatically.

(69) They did not mutiny once during the ten years of the Gallic war. In the civil wars they did so now and then, but quickly resumed their duty. Caesar discharged the entire ninth legion in disgrace before Placentia, though Pompey was still in the field, reinstating them unwillingly and only after many abject entreaties, while insisting on punishing the ringleaders.

(70) How he handled the Tenth Legion which clamoured to be released from duty and which he humiliated by calling them ‘citizens’, making them beg to be reinstated as citizens again.

(71) His rescue of Masintha, a youth of high birth, against king Hiempsa.

(72) His friends he treated with invariable kindness and consideration.

(73) He readily forgave his enemies including Gaius Memmius, Gaius Calvus and the poet Valerius Catullus.

(74) Even in revenge he was merciful. Suetonius claims that when Caesar tracked down the pirates who had held him captive and had them crucified, he ordered their throats cut first so they didn’t really suffer.

(75) He repeatedly spared the lives of enemies, promoted some to high offices, in battle refused to kill his prisoners when the opposition killed theirs, and so on.

(76) On the other hand, he was intolerably puffed up with pride and accept excessive honours, such as:

  • an uninterrupted consul­ship
  • the dictator­ship for life
  • the censor­ship of public morals
  • the forename Imperator
  • the surname of Father of his Country
  • a statue among those of the kings
  • and a raised couch in the orchestra

He allowed honours to be bestowed on him which were too great for mortal man:

  • a golden throne in the House and on the judgment seat
  • a chariot and litter carrying his image in the procession at the circus
  • temples, altars, and statues beside those of the gods
  • an additional college of the Luperci
  • and the calling of one of the months by his name

He ruled by personal whim appointing officials with total disregard for law and precedent.

(77) A selection of some of his ‘arrogant’ sayings such as that the ‘state’ was a name without a body and that Sulla made a mistake when he lay down his dictatorship.

(78) The event which caused most ill feeling was when the Senate approached him in a body with many highly honorary decrees and Caesar received them before the temple of Venus Genetrix without rising. Some think he was held back by Cornelius Balbus, others that he felt one of his epileptic fits coming on and didn’t dare rise, but the story is widely attested as a prime example of him arrogantly thinking himself above the state.

(79) Kingship The events and rumours which led people to think he seriously aimed at becoming king, the one thing anathema to all Romans:

  • at the Latin Festival someone placed on his statue a laurel wreath with a white fillet tied to it symbolising kingship. When two tribunes ordered that the ribbon be removed from the wreath and the man taken off to prison, Caesar rebuked and deposed them. He claimed this was because he had been robbed of the glory of refusing it but from that time on he could not rid himself of the odium of having aspired to the title of monarch
  • the famous quip, when asked if he wanted to be king, that “I am Caesar and no king”
  • at the feast of the Lupercalia, when Mark Antony several times attempted to place a crown on his head as he spoke from the rostra, he put it aside and at last sent it to the Capitol, to be offered to Jupiter Optimus Maximus
  • reports that he planned to move to Alexandria, taking with him the resources of the state and leaving Rome in the charge of deputies
  • the rumour that at the next meeting of the Senate Lucius Cotta would announce as the decision of the college of fifteen priests that, since it was written in the Sybilline Books that the Parthians could only be conquered only by a king, Caesar should be given that title

(80) Examples of the resentment of the people at Caesar’s adoption of absolute power [Suetonius doesn’t give us details of when he made himself dictator and the powers it gave him]. Thus:

  • when Caesar admitted foreigners into the Senate, a placard was posted telling no-one to point out the way to the Senate House “to a newly made senator”
  • rude verses were made up and sung accusing Caesar of promoting Gauls
  • Caesar appointed Quintus Maximus as consul in his place for three months, but when Quintus was entering the theatre, and his lictor called attention to his arrival in the usual manner, a general shout was raised: “He’s no consul!”
  • someone wrote on the base of Lucius Brutus’ statue, the man who drove the last kings from Rome: “Oh, that you were still alive”

Thus there was widespread popular feeling against Caesar and this encouraged different groups of conspirators to coalesce into one big conspiracy, which eventually totally 60 men. Various times and places were discussed until a meeting of the Senate was called for the Ideas (15) of March and the plan coalesced.

(81) Just as much as Plutarch, Suetonius takes bad omens seriously enough to record them in detail:

  • at Capua settlers in the new colony found in some old tombs a bronze tablet saying that when these bones were moved, a son of Ilium shall be slain at the hands of his kindred and avenged at heavy cost to Italy [son of Ilium because a) that was the Greek name for Troy b) Caesar’s family, the Julii, claimed descent from Aeneas, a prince of Troy]
  • the herds of horses which he had dedicated to the river Rubicon when he crossed it, and had let loose without a keeper, stubbornly refused to graze and wept copiously
  • when Caesar was offering sacrifice, the soothsayer Spurinna warned him to beware of danger, which would come not later than the Ides of March
  • on the day before the Ides of March a little bird called the king-bird flew into the Hall of Pompey with a sprig of laurel, pursued by others of various kinds from the grove hard by, which tore it to pieces in the hall
  • the night before his murder he dreamt now that he was flying above the clouds, now that he was clasping the hand of Jupiter
  • his wife Calpurnia dreamed that the pediment​ of their house fell, and that her husband was stabbed in her arms

Which is why he hesitated to go to the Senate House that morning but Decimus Brutus, who was in on the conspiracy, kept urging him not to let the Senate down, so eventually he left his house and set off. Several people handed him notes warning him of the conspiracy but he merely held onto them without reading.

Finally, it is said that he laughed at Spurinna and calling him a false prophet, because the Ides of March had come and he wasn’t harmed – but Spurinna replied that they had indeed come, but they had not gone.

(82) Description of the precise order of who stabbed him where. Compare and contrast with Plutarch. What always amazes me is that in a such a heavily militarised society where almost every adult male had served in the army, it took 23 stab wounds to kill him. Everyone fled the scene leaving the body and it was left to three slaves to place it on a litter and carry it home to his wife.

The conspirators had intended to drag his body to the Tiber, confiscate his property and revoke his decrees but they forebore through fear of Marcus Antonius the consul, and Lepidus, the master of horse. [Unlike Plutarch’s version where they ran out of the Senate House crying “Liberty! Freedom!”]

(83) Suetonius has Caesar’s will being opened and read at Mark Antony’s house: he allotted three quarters of his fortune to his sisters’ grandson, Gaius Octavius, and Lucius Pinarius and Quintus Pedius to share the remainder. At the end of the will he adopted Gaius Octavius into his family and gave him his name. To the people he left his gardens near the Tiber for their common use and three hundred sesterces to each man.

(84) Suetonius gives a very different account of Caesar’s funeral which omits Antony’s inflammatory reading of the will and displaying the bloody toga to the mob, which infuriated them. Suetonius gives s detailed description of the gilded shrine which was made after the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix, within which was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain. And that Antony had the decree of the Senate read out by which Caesar was deified, to which he added very few words of his own [unlike Plutarch, where it is Antony’s sustained impassioned speech which rouses the crowd to vengeance.

While his friends debated where the pyre should be lit, in another supernatural moment;

on a sudden two beings​ with swords by their sides and brandishing a pair of darts set fire to it with blazing torches, and at once the throng of bystanders heaped upon it dry branches, the judgment seats with the benches, and whatever else could serve as an offering.

Angels, apparently.

(85) Inflamed with anger the mob ran to set fire to the houses of the conspirators Brutus and Cassius, but were repelled. They came across the harmless poet Helvius Cinna in the street and, mistaking him for the conspirator Cornelius Cinna, tore him to pieces and paraded his head on a spear. [Suetonius doesn’t mention it but it was this incident which persuaded the conspirators to flee Rome, thus handing the city over to their enemy, Mark Antony.]

The people set up in the Forum a solid column of Numidian marble almost twenty feet high and inscribed upon it, “To the Father of his Country.” At the foot of this for years afterwards they made sacrifice, made vows, and settled disputes by an oath in the name of Caesar.

(86) Some of his friends thought Caesar no longer wanted to live due to failing health. This would explain why, despite the mounting rumours and ominous portents, he dismissed the armed bodyguard of Spanish soldiers that formerly attended him and went to the Senate unprotected.

It is reported that he said that it wasn’t for his own sake that he should remain alive – he had long since had his fill of power and glory – it was because if he were killed, the commonwealth would have no peace but be plunged into strife under much worse conditions. Which is precisely what happened.

(87) Everyone agrees Caesar himself had a horror of a long lingering death and wanted one which was sudden and unexpected.

(88) Caesar was 56 when he died and was swiftly deified, not only by a formal decree, but also in the hearts of the common people. At the first of the games which his heir Augustus gave in honour of his apotheosis, a comet shone for seven days in a row.

It was voted that the hall in which he was murdered be walled up, that the Ides of March be called the Day of Parricide, and that a meeting of the Senate should never be called on that day.

(89) Hardly any of his assassins survived him for more than three years or died a natural death. They all perished in various ways — some by shipwreck, some in battle; some took their own lives with the self-same dagger with which they had stabbed Caesar.

Comparisons

In comparison with Plutarch, Suetonius really skimps on the details of both the political intrigue and the military campaigns. Instead you get the character profiling about his horse and haircut and so on in chapters 45 to 77. For the intense debate in the Senate about the Catiline conspirators, read Sallust. For Caesar’s achievements in Gaul read his own account, ditto the civil war with Pompey. Cicero’s letters give a vivid feel of what it felt like living under Caesar’s dictatorship i.e. stifled and numb.

Like Plutarch, like plenty of commentators at the time and ever since, Suetonius seems conflicted in his opinion about Caesar, supplying plenty of evidence that he was an extravagant and arbitrary dictator, but also lamenting the impiety of his murder.

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Posted by Simon on June 1, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/01/life-of-julius-caesar-suetonius/

Eunuchus (The Eunuch) by Terence (161 BC)

‘Whatever’s happened here, it wasn’t my fault.’
(The cowardly servant Parmeno to his master Demea, page 212)

In her introduction, the editor and translator of the Penguin edition, Betty Radice, observes that The Eunuch was Terence’s most popular play and is also the most Plautine of his plays, as if these are coincidental facts. When I opened the The Ghost by Plautus I was laughing by the end of the first page. By contrast, wading through Terence’s play, The Self-Tormentor, made me want to stop reading Terence altogether, it was so contrived, impenetrably complex, and without a single laugh in the entire text. Plautus is my man.

Fortunately, The Eunuch is a lot clearer and a lot funnier than The Self-Tormentor. According to Suetonius’s life of Terence, it was performed twice in one day at the Megalensian Games in 161 BC and won its author 8,000 sesterces, ‘the highest fee ever paid for a comedy’. Like all Plautus and Terence’s plays, it is based on a Greek original, in this case by the Greek playwright Menander.

Incidentally, this play is apparently the earliest surviving Latin text to use the word ‘eunuch’, making it an important resource for academic histories of the (very varied roles played by) ‘the eunuch’ in the ancient world.

The plot

As usual, the scene consists of a street and two houses, showing the front doors of Demea, father of two errant sons, and Thais, a courtesan. As usual, the worthy father, Demea, is struggling to cope with two sons who have made inappropriate love matches: Phaedria is in love with a courtesan, Chaerea is in love with a slave girl.

Phaedria and Parmeno

Parmeno is the elderly family servant. When Phaedria tells him he is mad with love for Thais, Parmeno tells him to grow up, pay up and get rid of her.

Enter Thais

Phaedria goes weak at the knees. Thais apologises to him for locking him out of her house the day before but then goes on to give some key exposition. Thais says her mother came from Samos and lived on Rhodes. A merchant made her a present of a little girl stolen from the area where the play is set, Attica. The little girl knew her father and mother’s name but not where she came from or whether she was free or slave. The merchant had bought her off pirates who claimed to have stolen her from Sunium. This kidnapped girl was brought up alongside Thais as her sister. Then Thais found a ‘protector’, a soldier, Thraso, who brought her here to Athens (where the play is set) and set her up as his courtesan. is soldier, Thraso, then went off to Caria and Thais has found a new protector/sponsor/lover in Phaedria. And that brings the backstory up to date.

But there’s more. Recently Thais’s mother died, leaving the house and goods to her brother, including the foster sister. Since the latter was pretty and could play the lyre, Thais’s brother put her up for sale and, in a spectacular coincidence, she was bought by Thais’s very same protector, the soldier Thraso. He has recently returned to Athens, intending to give Thais the girl as a servant but, when he found out that Thais has been seeing another man (i.e. Phaedria) Thraso changed his mind. He won’t come to see her or hand over the slave girl while Phaedria is on the scene.

So now she gets to the point: will Phaedria agree to lie low for several days so that Thraso can resume his position as her lover, and give her the gift of the slave girl – so that Phaedria can then do a good deed and track down the girl’s family and return her to them?

Phaedria is angry. He thinks it’s all a story to cover wanting to go back to the soldier. Hasn’t he bought her everything? Only yesterday he paid 2,000 drachmas for an Ethiopian slave girl and a eunuch Thais said she wanted. Doesn’t he buy her whatever she wants?

Thais begs, pleads and wears him down and eventually Phaedria promises to leave town for a couple of days so the soldier can return and give Thais the slave girl. But he begs her to remain loyal in her heart. Then Phaedria turns and walks back into his father’s house. Nothing especially funny about this, is there?

Thais tells the audience one further fact, which is that she thinks she’s already identified and contacted the slave girl’s brother and he’s coming to meet her (Thais) today to discuss the matter. Then she goes into her house.

Re-enter Phaedria and Parmeno

Phaedria weeps and wails but we aren’t to take his anguish seriously; he is played for a figure of fun. He instructs Parmeno to fetch the eunuch and Ethiopian slave girl and give them to Thais and to keep an eye on his rival. Then he shoulders his bag and walks offstage, planning to stay out of town for the two days he agreed with Thais.

Enter Gnatho

Gnatho is the bumptious servant of the soldier Thraso. He is bringing the slave girl Pamphila to give to Thais. Parmeno is impressed and says the slave girl is even more beautiful than Thais.

Gnatho soliloquises, saying how proud he is of his status and profession of sponger and hanger-on. He gives a little explanation of the key requirements of the trade, namely to agree shamelessly with whatever your patron says.

The old servant Parmeno overhears all this, then cocky Gnatho spots him and likes the way he looks glum, indicating that he and his master (Phaedria) are not doing well with Thais. Good. Gnatho shows off the slave girl to Parmeno and teases him and then goes into Thais’s house. Having delivered the slave girl, he makes a few choice comments to Parmeno then exits.

Enter Chaerea

Chaerea is Demea’s other son, younger brother to Phaedria. He is a very young man in a frenzy about his new love. Parmeno overhears him talking, rolls his eyes, and pities his poor master (Demea) for having two such lovestruck puppies for sons. Chaerea announces he’s in love with a plump and juicy girl. Parmeno asks how old. 16. Parmeno rolls his eyes. As Chaerea goes on to describe falling in love with her in the street, and that she was accompanied by one of those spongers, Parmeno realises he’s talking about Pamphila, the slave girl who Gnatho has just delivered to Thais.

Parmeno explains all this and that she’s been given as a present to Thais by her soldier lover. ‘What, the rival to his brother?’ says Chaerea. ‘Yes,’ replies Parmeno. Parmeno goes on to explain that Phaedria is giving Thais the old eunuch he brought home yesterday. Not that smelly old man, Chaerea says. How unfair it is that he’ll get to be under the same roof with the fair Pamphila etc.

At which Parmeno jokes that maybe he, Chaerea, could pretend to be a eunuch and gain access to Thais’s house. YES, shouts Chaerea, yes, he can wear a eunuch outfit and pretend to be the gift from Phaedria to Thais. That way he can be close to his new beloved all day long, yes, YES! And he bundles Parmeno into Demea’s house to help dress him up as a eunuch, despite all the latter’s protestations that it was only a joke, he didn’t mean it seriously, he’ll be the one to suffer when it’s all found out etc.

Enter Thraso

Thraso is the middle-aged soldier and lover of Thais. He is a version of that well-established type, the miles gloriosus, full of sound and fury about his brave military exploits, while in fact being a pompous coward and bore.

Thraso enters accompanied by his sponger, Gnatho. Parmeno hears them arrive and opens Demea’s front door to spy on them. He watches while Gnatho shamelessly sucks up to Thraso, laughing at all his bad jokes and nodding at his stories about being the favourite of the king of Caria.

GNATHO: Heavens above, what wisdom! Every minute spent with you is something learned. (p.202)

Thraso asks Gnatho whether Thais loves him and the sponger, of course, insists that she is devoted to him i.e. reassuring Thraso’s delicate ego, as spongers are paid to do.

Enter Thais

Thais enters from her house and encounters Thraso and Gnatho. The soldier says he hopes she likes the slave girl Gnatho gave to her a bit earlier on and invites her for dinner. Parmeno takes the opportunity to present Phaedria’s gifts to Thais. He calls for the Ethiopian slave girl to be brought out, and Thraso and Gnatho make comedy insults about how relatively cheap she looks. Then Parmeno has Chaerea dressed as a eunuch brought out and presented to Thais. She is struck by how handsome Chaerea is, as are Thraso and Gnatho. I think Thraso makes a joke to the effect that, given half a chance, he’d have sex with this handsome eunuch (p.186).

Thais takes her new properties into her house while Thraso tries to mock Parmeno for having a poor master, but Parmeno easily gets the better of him, and strolls away. Gnatho quietly laughs at Thraso being mocked but hurriedly adopts a straight face when Thraso turns to him.

Thais re-enters with an elderly woman slave, Pythia. Thais tells Pythia to take good care of the new acquisitions and that, if Chremes turns up, to tell him to wait. Then she goes off to dine with Thraso and Gnatho, leaving the stage empty.

Enter Chremes

Chremes is the young man who Thais thinks is the next of kin of the slave girl she grew up with and who Thraso has just given to her, Pamphila. He enters and delivers a long speech explaining he’s puzzled why Thais contacted him, asked him a load of questions about a long lost sister, and then asked him to come see her today. He wonders whether Thais is going to pretend that she’s the long lost sister, but Chremes knows the sister would only be about 16, and Thais is much older, so it can’t be her.

Chremes knocks on the door, Pythia opens it and asks Chremes to wait for her mistress but he, suspicious and irritated, says no, so Pythia calls for another servant to take Chremes to see Thais at Thraso’s dinner, and they exit.

Enter Antipho

Antipho is a friend of Chaerea’s. A bunch of the lads had decided to club together for dinner and Chaerea’s meant to be organising it but he’s disappeared, so the lads chose Antipho to find him and ask what’s going on. At just this moment Chaerea emerges from Thais’s house but dressed as a eunuch so Antipho is understandably astonished. But Chaerea explains to him the whole scam, how he’s madly in love with the young slave who’s just been given to Thais as a present, how Parmeno suggested he pretend to be the eunuch Phaedria planned to give to Thais, how it’s worked like a dream, how he’s even been tasked with looking after her, how she’s had a bath and emerged fragrant and beautiful.

Chaerea goes on to explain how all the other serving girls left them to go off and bathe so he…locked the door and…apparently had sex with Pamphila!

This is quickly skipped over as Antipho is interested in the dinner. Chaerea says he rearranged it to take place at Discus’s house. Antipho invites Chaerea to come to his place and change out of the eunuch’s clothes first, and off they both go.

Enter Dorias

Dorias is a maid of Thais’s. She’s just come back from the dinner party where things turned sour. When Chremes turned up, Thais insisted he be brought in. But Thraso thought he was a rival for Thais’s affections, got very angry and insisted that Pamphila be brought in, in retaliation. Thais insisted that a slave girl should not be invited to a dinner and so they had a big argument.

Enter Phaedria

Phaedria should, of course, be at the family farm in the country, as he’d promised Thais. But he couldn’t keep away and has come all the way back to town, casual-like, just to catch a glimpse of his beloved.

Enter Pythias

Which is the exact moment when Pythias, Thais’s head slave, comes bursting out of her house, livid with anger. She explains to an astonished Phaedria that the eunuch who he, Phaedria, recently gave to Thais was no eunuch at all but has raped Pamphila, tearing her clothes and messing her hair. She’s inside now, in floods of tears. Pythias blames Phaedria but Phaedria disavows any knowledge that the eunuch was not a eunuch, and says he’ll go look for the eunuch straightaway. Maybe he’s in the family home, so he goes into Demea’s house to see.

Re-enter Phaedria

Phaedria almost immediately re-enters dragging the real eunuch, Dorus, out of his house. Dorus is wearing Chaerea’s clothes (Chaerea having insisted they do a swap) so Phaedria mistakenly accuses him of stealing his brother’s clothes and making ready to flee. But when he presents Dorus to Pythia and Dorias, Thais’s servants, they both claim never to have seen him before. This is not the rapist!

They all cross-question the eunuch who quickly explains that Parmeno and Chaerea came and ordered him to swap clothes with Chaerea, then they both left. Now they all understand. Chaerea impersonated the eunuch in order to be near Pamphila and then raped her.

Phaedria is terribly embarrassed. It looks like he might be in on the scam, and it certainly reflects badly on his family. So in an aside he tells Dorus to reverse his story and deny everything he’s just said. When the bewildered man does so, Phaedria says the man is an obvious liar and he’ll take him into his house to ‘torture’ him to find out the truth

Re-enter Chremes

Pythias and Dorias are just wondering whether to tell Thais about all this when Chremes re-enters. He’d got drunk at Thraso’s dinner party and now he makes a bit of a pass at Pythias (Thais’s female head slave) who primly fends him off. Instead she extracts from Chremes the fact that there was a big argument at Thrasos’s dinner party.

Enter Thais

Thais is still angry from the argument at Thrasos’s dinner party. She warns her servants that Thraso is on his way to reclaim Pamphila but that he’ll do so over her dead body. She’ll have him horsewhipped first.

First of all she briskly tells Chremes that Pamphila is his long lost sister. Not only that, but Thais hereby gives her to him, free, gratis. Chremes is immensely grateful though not quite as surprised or emotional as you might expect.

Then Thais tells Pythias to hurry inside and fetch the box of ‘proofs’ which prove Pamphila’s identity. But just then Thraso approaches.

Thraso is, of course, a seasoned soldier, albeit a bullshitting braggart. Thais instructs Chremes to stand up to him and hands him the proofs of Pamphila’s identity that Pythias has just fetched out of the house. There is comedy in the way Chremes is a complete milksop, refuses to face Thraso and wants to run off to the market to fetch help, but Thais physically restrains him and tells him to be a man.

THAIS: My dear man, you’re not afraid are you?
CHREMES: [visibly alarmed]: Nonsense. Who’s afraid? Not me. (p.200)

Thais and all her people go into her house.

Enter Thraso and followers

Enter Thraso and Gnatho with six followers. There is quite a funny parody of a military campaign, with Thraso bombastically issuing complex orders for storming Thais’s house to his motley crew of incompetent ‘soldiers’. Thais and Chremes appear at a window overlooking the action. Chremes is fearful while Thais gives a fearless and comic commentary on Thraso’s cowardly and ineffectual ‘military’ orders.

Thraso now parleys with Thais at her window. He reminds her that she promised him the next couple of days, no? And has gone back on her word? So that’s why he wants Pamphila back.

Now Chremes steps forward and confronts Thraso with the new facts: Pamphila is a) a free-born citizen b) of this region, Attica and c) Chremes’ sister. Therefore she cannot be anyone’s property. Thraso thinks he’s lying, but Chremes sends for the box of proof documents.

This is sort of funny if we buy into the play’s premises, but it is also a fascinating slice of social history on a huge subject, namely the definition and rights of free citizens and slaves in the ancient world.

Disheartened Thraso hesitates about what to do next. At which point his parasite, Gnatho, suggests they make a tactical withdrawal on the basis that women are well known for being perverse and so, if Thraso stops asking for something (which is making Thais obstinate), if he changes his approach, maybe Thais will change hers and come round. Rather doubtfully, Thraso calls off the ‘assault’ and he and his men all leave.

Enter Thais and Pythias

With Thraso gone, Thais turns her thoughts to Pamphila who she has discovered in her house with torn clothes and inconsolably weeping i.e. having been raped. Thais is furious with Pythias for letting it happen but Pythias explains that they’ve established it wasn’t the eunuch Phaedria gave her who raped Pamphila, it was Phaedria’s younger brother impersonating the eunuch who did it. At which point the culprit, Chaerea himself, strolls onstage, wearing the eunuch’s clothes.

Enter Chaerea

Chaerea had gone along to Antipho’s house to change for the lads’ party, but Antipho’s parents were home so he was scared to go in and has returned to Thais’s house by backstreets in case anyone recognises him. Now he sees Thais standing in her doorway and momentarily hesitates but decides to brazen it out and continue in character as the eunuch Dorus, so he steps forward.

But after a few exchanges of him pretending to be Dorus, Thais drops all pretences and calls him by his real name, Chaerea. About this point it began to dawn on me that Thais is the real ‘hero’ of this play, easily the most manly, resolute, strong and decisive character on the stage – and that, by the same token, all the men (Thraso, Chremes, Chaerea) are weaker and feebler and morally flawed than she is.

Thais and Chaerea come to an arrangement. Chaerea insists he meant no disrespect to Thais and that he genuinely loves Pamphila. Grudgingly, Thais accepts his apology, despite the scorn of her aggrieved servant, Pythias. In fact, Chaerea grovellingly offers to put himself completely under Thais’ guidance. She is a strong woman.

At this point they both see Pamphila’s brother Chremes approaching and Chaerea begs to be let inside so he can change out of his shameful costume. Thais laughingly agrees and they all go into her house.

Enter Chremes and Sophrona

Sophrona was Chremes’ and Pamphila’s nurse when they were small. Chremes has shown her the tokens Pamphila had and the nurse recognised them all. Now he’s brought the nurse along for the final ‘recognition scene’. The servant Pythias welcomes them and tells them to go into Thais’ house.

Enter Parmeno

As mentioned, Thais has emerged as the main driver of the plot. Usually it’s the cunning slave, in this case Parmeno, but in this play he has been totally overshadowed by Thais’ control of the narrative.

There follows a carefully staged and prepared scene in which Parmeno gets his comeuppance. He had swaggered onstage feeling very pleased with himself because his ruse (disguising Chaerea as the eunuch) had secured Chaerea his beloved, and he had also educated the young man in the ways of courtesans and their wicked ways (by which he is casting a slur on the house of Thais who is, we are reminded, a courtesan by trade).

Pythias, the angry housekeeper overhears all this, including the slur on her mistress and household, and decides to take Parmeno down a peg or two. She comes onstage pretending not to see Parmeno and lamenting and bewailing. When Parmeno asks her what the matter is, Pythias tells him that the young man he introduced into Thais’s household, Chaerea, assaulted Pamphila but now it has emerged that the latter is a free citizen, and has a well-born brother, and the brother has found out and had Chaerea tied up and is about to administer the traditional punishment for adultery and rape – castration!!!

Parmeno is devastated and thrown into a complete panic about what to do, specially when Pythias goes on to tell him that everyone blames him for what’s happened, and are looking to punish him, too. At this moment they both see the two errant sons’ father and Parmeno’s master, Demea, coming up the street. Pythias advises Parmeno to tell Demea everything, before disappearing back onto Thais’ house.

Enter Demea

Parmeno greets his old master and tells him everything (one son in love with Thais, the other in love with a slave woman who’s in Thais’s house, impersonated a eunuch to gain admission, was caught in a rape and is tied and bound and about to be punished). Suitably appalled, Demea rushes into Thais’ house to rescue his son.

Enter Pythias

Re-enter Pythias crying with laughter. Oh, she tells the audience, the comedy of misunderstandings she has just seen! And only she understood why Demea was in a panic about his son being castrated (because she’d just invented it). Hardly able to speak for laughing, she tells Parmeno she properly took him in and made him look a right fool. Now both son and master are furious with him, Parmeno, blaming him for everything. She stumbles back into the house, helpless with laughter.

Enter Thraso and Gnathos

The braggart soldier and his parasite. Thraso has decided to throw himself on Thais’ mercy but they haven’t gone far before Chaerea bursts out of Thais’ house, delirious with happiness. He rushes up to a surprised Parmeno and hugs him and calls him the ‘author and instigator and perfecter’ of all his joys. Obviously the ‘recognition scene’ has just taken place and Pamphila has been confirmed as a free citizen of Attica and therefore an entirely eligible woman for Chaerea to marry. Also, Thais has agreed to marry Phaedria, and thus put herself and her household under Demea’s protection and patronage. It is an entirely happy ending for both sons and the father.

Parmeno dashes into Demea’s house and returns with Phaedria who they tell the good news: he is going to be married to his beloved Thais!

Thraso and Gnatho have overheard all this and Thraso drily remarks that it looks like all his hopes of winning Thais have been dashed. For once Gnatho can’t find words of sycophantic support. But Thraso asks him to make one last sally and see if he can remain in Thais’s good books, if only as a friend. Gnatho extracts a promise from Thraso that, if he pulls this off, Thraso’s house and table will be open to him (Gnatho) for evermore, which Thraso agrees to. Then Gnatho goes up to the two happy brothers.

Phaedria’s first response of Thraso’s offer of friendship is to tell Thraso to clear out and if he ever sees him in this street again, he’ll kill him (!).

Gnatho asks him to calm down, ushers Thraso aside, and speaks confidentially to Phaedria. He proposes a very cynical offer. He suggests that Phaedria accepts Thraso as his rival i.e. a sort of official lover for Thais. ‘What? Why?’ Phaedria asks.

Because Thraso is such a dimwit he presents no threat whatsoever to Thais and Phaedria’s love, but he is very prodigal with gifts and money. These he will lavish on Thais and thus keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed and which, let’s face it, Phaedria can’t afford. Hmm. The brothers confer. It is quite a tidy plan and they agree on it.

Lastly, Gnatho asks if he can be accepted into their circle of friends. Again the brothers agree, and with that, Gnatho mockingly presents them with Thraso! ‘For the laughs and everything else you can get out of him’ (p.218).

Gnatho calls Thraso over and announces that the deal has been struck. Thraso recovers his composure and starts to strut and swank, and the two brothers laugh at his pompousness and foresee years of milking him for his money and mocking his pretensions.

And that is the end. Phaedria abruptly turns to the audience, asks for their applause and they all go into Thais’s house.

*******

Dark thoughts

The Eunuch has plenty of genuinely funny moments, the increasingly funny role of the bombastic soldier Thraso, the comedy swapping of the eunuch’s identity, Chremes’ cowardice, Pythias’s humiliation of Parmeno and so on.

But at the same time, I struggled to get past the ‘otherness’ of Roman society. I can’t really get past the way the entire story rest on the buying and selling of slaves and giving and receiving them as gifts.

Then, when Chaerea rapes the sleeping Pamphila, the entire tone changed for me, and I found it difficult to find anything after that very funny.

And the casual way Phaedria remarks that the only thing which will extract the truth from Dorus is ‘torture’, the casual way Pythias declares that Chaerea is about to be castrated, and the casual references to the way slaves are routinely whipped as punishment – once again I found myself being brought up short and the smile being wiped right off my face by the casual references to hyper violence (torture, whipping, chains, even crucifixion) in these Roman plays.

Sunny thoughts

If you can manage to put those dark thoughts aside then, yes, this is a funny play, by far the funniest of the three I’ve read so far. I think this is because, even though the plot is quite convoluted, of two things:

  1. Once the backstory of the abandoned slave girl and the two brothers in love with two girls is established, everything follows reasonably logically from those premises.
  2. Second reason is that the scenes are quite long and leisurely meaning that – crucially, for me at any rate – the characters thoroughly explain what is going on, what is happening and what they intend to do. For example, the idea for Chaerea to dress up as a eunuch develops quite naturally out of Parmeno’s joke suggestion which then, as it were, gets out of hand. This scene has great psychological and/or comic realism, in the sense that all of us know the experience of making a jokey, off-hand remark which our interlocutor picks up and takes far more seriously than we’d intended, and which we then regret ever mentioning. 2,200 years ago the same experience was common enough to be a comic gag in onstage.

Compare and contrast these two attributes with Terence’s play The Self-tormentor where the plot very much does not follow from the basic premise, but is 1. the result of a whole series of ad lib schemes dreamed up by the naughty slave Syrus and 2. which he keeps to himself; which he does not explain; which may well keep the characters comically in the dark about what he’s up to, but also had the result that I couldn’t follow what was happening half the time and so gave up on the play and almost gave up on Terence as a whole.

The Eunuch restored my faith in Terence as a comic playwright and confirmed my determination to continue and read all six of his plays.

Credit

Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies, edited and translated by Betty Radice.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on April 13, 2022  •  Permalink
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https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/13/eunuchus-the-eunuch-terence/

Phormio by Terence (161 BC)

Editor and translator Betty Radice says there is no other character in surviving Roman plays quite like Phormio, the central protagonist of this play. He is an entrepreneurial trickster supreme. He offers his services to the two young ‘heroes’ for the sheer pleasure of exercising his expertise. Phormio is a comedy of intrigue as light and fast-moving as a French farce.

It is based on The Claimant, a play by the Greek playwright Apollodorus.

Phormio was performed at the Roman Games held in September 161 BC. The play is, as always, set in a street in front of houses but, unusually, three houses instead of two – those of the two mature men, the brothers Demipho and Chremes, with the addition of the house of Dorio, a slave dealer.

The plot

Enter Davos the slave dealer

Davos has come to repay a small debt owed to the slave Geta. He soliloquises on how unfair it is that slaves have to scrimp and save from their meagre rations to buy presents for their owners and their relatives who are completely oblivious of the effort involved.

Enter Geta

Geta is servant to his master Demipho. He appears at Demipho’s door, spots Davos, takes the debt owed, then launches into a lengthy bit of exposition. His master, Demipho, has an older brother, Chremes. Both these mature men went abroad at the same time and left him, Geta, in charge of their sons, Demipho’s son Antipho and Chremes’ son Phaedria.

Both of them promptly gave trouble. Phaedria fell in love with a lute player who works for the pimp Dorio (whose house is onstage) but doesn’t have a penny to ‘pay’ for her. [Does that mean she’s a sex worker? The status of some of the unfree women is often obscure.] Then Antipho falls in love with a beautiful young free citizen, Phanium, whose mother has just died leaving her penniless. But he was in a bind because his absent father (Demipho) would certainly disapprove on his return.

Geta goes on to explain the role of Phormio, the fixer supreme. They appealed to Phormio for help and Phormio said that, since the law requires that female orphans must be married to their next of kin, he, Phormio, will pretend to be a friend of Phanium’s father and take out a summons claiming Antipho is the next of kin. The court will decide Antipho has to marry Phanium, they’ll get married and when Demipho returns it will a) be a fait accompli b) if he’s angry, he can blame Phormio, who won’t care.

And that’s what’s happened and so Antipho and Phanium got married. But now Geta is understandably anxious about what his master will say when he gets back, having put Geta in charge of the boy.

And Phaedria his master? Still pursuing his hopeless suit. Well, a letter’s just arrived from him and Geta is just off to the post office to collect it. He bids Davos farewell, calls for his wife to come and take the money bag Davos gave him, then exits to the post office.

Enter Phaedria and Antipho

The two young men are gloomy. Antipho is very anxious how his father will react to a marriage he didn’t approve. Phaedria isn’t very sympathetic. He points out that Antipho has all that a young man could dream of – marriage to the beautiful, free, wellborn woman he loves. Whereas he, Phaedria, has to hang around the horrible pimp Dorio begging for a rare sighting of his beloved.

Enter Geta

Geta returns in a great state from the harbour and tells the boys that, as you might imagine, Antipho’s father has returned from abroad and will be home any minute. Antipho is thrown into a panic. Phaedria and Geta both try to calm him and tell him to say he was forced to marry Phanium by the court. Nothing he could do. But Antipho panics and runs off.

Geta and Phaedria agree to confront the old man and stick to the story about the law courts forcing Antipho to marry.

Enter Demipho

Demipho is tired after a long journey and has already heard the new about his son so enters ranting about filial disobedience and disrespect. Geta and Phaedria are to one side and overhear Demipho wondering what excuses they’ll dream up, and he anticipates the way they’ll blame it all on some court decision. Oops. Rumbled.

Phaedria steps boldly forward to brave Demipho’s wrath and defend his cousin. Then Geta steps forward and also takes Demipho’s criticism. But he points out that a slave can’t be a defendant in court nor give evidence so he quite literally could do nothing about the court case. Demipho insists on seeing the man who represented the girl in the case i.e. the trickster Phormio. So he sends Phaedria to go and fetch Antipho and Geta to go and fetch Phormio, then goes into his house.

Enter Phormio

Phormio immediately presents himself as a smart and self-confident young man. Geta has briefed him on the problem and Phormio delivers a long speech about his confidence in his own abilities.

Enter Demipho and three legal advisers

Phormio and Geta see Demipho come on but carry on a staged conversation as if he’s not there. Phormio makes a loud pretence of knowing Demipho’s cousin (who he’s just invented) a fine, upstanding, hard working but poor man named ‘Stilpo’. Phormio pretends to be indignant that Demipho has ‘cast him off’. Geta, for his part, pretends to defend his master as an honourable man.

Eventually they pretend to notice that Demipho is there, Geta exaggerates how much he’s been defending his master, and Phormio steps forward to shame Demipho for dropping this (entirely fictional) cousin Stilpo.

Demipho of course denies any knowledge of this Stilpo, but Phormio pushes on, saying he gave full details of his life and lineage to the court.

Demipho points out that the law says the next of kin of a female orphan should either be forced to marry her or to give her a dowry which will allow her to marry. Demipho promptly pulls out 500 drachmas and offers them to Phormio, saying that – assuming he is some kind of kin to this woman – this dowry quits his legal obligations and frees his son.

Phormio rudely points out that the court dealt with his son not him, since Demipho is beyond marrying age. This infuriates Demipho and Phormio enrages him even more by calmly suggesting they make up and be friends. On the contrary, Demipho never wants to see him again in his life.

Phormio then points out that a beautiful daughter-in-law will be a consolation in his old age. But Demipho says he is determined to kick her out of his house. At which point Phormio plays tough and says that, as her guardian, if any wrong is done her, Phormio will taker Demipho to court. And he saunters off, well pleased with himself.

Demipho orders Geta to go into his house and see if Antipho has come home yet. Then he turns to his three advisers.

The three lawyers

Demipho asks his three lawyers what they think and there is a purely comic scene in which they all hesitate to make a judgement, then give bland assurances, but say it is a difficult case and generally leave Demipho more confused than before he asked them. Then they exit. Demipho decides to go down to the docks and wait for his brother, who is also due home soon. He exits.

Enter Antipho

Antipho is anxious by nature. He enters soliloquising about his worries. Geta greets him and explains that his father knows all about it but Phormio put up a staunch defence aided, ahem, by yours truly.

Enter Phaedria and Dorio

They enter from Dorio’s house and are arguing. Phaedria is begging Dorio for the favour of spending some time with his beloved, Pamphila the lute girl. He tries every argument ‘eternal gratitude’, ‘friend of worthy family’ but Dorio sees through it all and says no, reducing Phaedria to tears. Phaedria sees Antipho and once again draws the contrast between them, telling him how very lucky he is. For it turns out that Dario has sold Pamphila. Phaedria is trying to persuade Doria to wait three days till he can raise the money to match the purchase price, 3,000 drachmas.

After Phaedria, Antipho and Geta all pile into him, Doria concedes that, if Phaedria can match the purchase price by tomorrow morning, when ‘the captain’ is turning up to pay and take Pamphila, then he can have her. Tomorrow morning. That’s the deadline. And he bows and goes into his house.

Antipho says they must help him and pressures Geta to talk to his master, Antipho’s father, Demipho. Not likely, not after the trouble he’s already in about Antipho’s marriage.

Phaedria raises the stakes by declaring he will follow his beloved to the ends of the earth or else…die in the attempt! This melodramatic statement causes Antipho to pile more pressure on Geta who thinks hard and then…announces he has a plan! But he will need Phormio’s help.

Geta tells Antipho to go into his house to comfort poor Phanium. He and Phaedria will go to find Phormium, and so they exit.

Enter Demipho and Chremes

We learn from their conversation that Chremes is back from a trip to Lemnos where he went to collect his daughter. This is because he is a bigamist. While he married a wife in Athens and had a son Phaedria, he was also keeping a second wife on Lemnos who bore him a daughter. She had been complaining about being neglected so he went to attend to her but…discovered she had left, with her daughter, to come to Athens to look for him. It puts Chremes in a quandary because if the girl turns up, he will be duty bound to provide a dowry and yet won’t want her to marry far outside the family because then he’ll have to reveal his relation to her, in which case his wife will find out he’s been keeping an alternative family, and will divorce him and take all his belongings.

(Well, you don’t need to be Einstein to work out that the daughter is going to turn out to be the Pamphila who Antipho has already married, which will relieve Chremes of the need to reveal his secret bigamy.)

Enter Geta

Geta is pleased as punch that Phormio, when he heard of Phaedria’s plight, immediately offered to help. But coming onstage, now, he sees that Chremes has arrived home. Uh oh, double trouble.

Geta steps forward and tells the two brothers the following story. He says he met Phormio and said that he knows how to fulfil everyone’s demands. That Demipho will drop any legal actions against Phormio if he agrees to a) accept the girl Phanium as his wife and b) a dowry from Demipho. ‘How much did he want?’ Demipho asks. ‘6,000 drachmas,’ Geta replies. Well, that’s too much. So Geta shrewdly drops ihis price, enumerating all the expense Phormio will have to go to and eventually settling on 3,000 drachmas.

Now this is precisely the sum Phaedria needs to buy Pamphila. Demipho angrily refuses but his brother, Chremes, comes to the rescue saying he’ll pay the dowry to Phormio, he has the cash now in the form of the rent he’s just collected on his wife’s property in Lemnos. Demipho and Chremes go into Demipho’s house to count out the cash.

Enter Antipho

Now early in this dialogue Antipho had opened the door and overheard everything. He is appalled that Geta seems to be bargaining away his beloved bride. Now he steps forward and confronts Geta. But Geta explains the plan. 1. Phormio will take the money from Demipho and promise to marry Phanium. 2. He will immediately give the money to Phaedria who can buy Pamphila off Dorio. 3. Phormio will come up with reasons to delay the wedding, augurs, superstitions etc until Phaderia’s friends have all chipped in to cover the 3,000 drachmas, then 4. Phormio will decide he doesn’t want to marry Phanium after all and give the 3,000 raised by Phaedria’s friends back to Chremes.

In other words, it is an elaborate form of loan, getting hold of 3,000 drachmas right now so Phaedria can buy Pamphila, then waiting for his friends to chip in the same amount, which Phormio will then give back to Demipho. Phaedria will get his girl. Antipho will remain married to his.

Antipho is still sceptical but Geta tells him to run off and tell Phaedria the plan, so he exits.

Re-enter Demipho and Chremes

They have the money. Demipho asks Geta to take him to Phormio. Chremes tells Demipho on his return to come and get his wife, who will go to see the girl Phanium and explain to her that she’s being passed on to Phormio, he’s a better match for her anyway, and this way she gets a dowry. Women are better at explaining that sort of thing. So Geta takes Demipho off to see Phormio.

Enter Sophrona

Enter Sophrona, ‘the old nurse’, from Demipho’s house. She starts lamenting that she’s made a terrible mistake in fixing up her mistress’s marriage. When Chremes sees her he is overcome with fear, and goes up to her. She says hello and refers to him as ‘Stilpo’ the name Phormio used all those scenes ago. Chremes begs her to keep her voice down and never use that name.

Aha. So she’s the nurse of his secret daughter, the result of the bigamous marriage on Lemnos. Clearly Stilpo was the name he used with this second family. But what is she doing here, Chremes asks. And where are ‘the others’ i.e. his second wife and their daughter?

Sophrona replies that the mother is dead, leaving them penniless, so she did the best she could and got the young mistress married to a fine gentleman. Yes but why is she coming out of Demipho’s house? The husband is the son of the owner. Obtusely, Chremes is astonished to learn that Antipho has two wives (takes one to know one). Then she explains, no, just the one. Antipho has married his secret daughter!

Chremes is delighted! This is exactly what he wanted to bring about, marrying his secret daughter to the son of his brother, thus keeping it all in the family with no messy revelations about his secret family. He couldn’t have hoped for better! There is a god (or gods)!

Chremes takes the old woman into Demipho’s house to learn more.

Enter Geta and Demipho

Well they gave Phormio the 3,000 drachma dowry as arranged and he promised to take Phanium off their hands. Geta plants the seed of doubt that he might not stick to his word, being a shifty so-and-so. Demipho tells Geta to go into Demipho’s house and tell Phanium that Demipho’s wife will be along in a minute with something to tell her. He goes into his house to fetch his wife.

Geta worries how it’s all ultimately going to pan out but goes into Demipho’s house to reassure Phanium that she is not going to be packed off to marry Phormio.

Enter Demipho and Nausistrata

Nausistrata is Chremes’ wife. Demipho has fetched her in order to go in and tell Phanium the news that she is being divorced from Antipho and packed off to marry Phormio. Demipho’s explaining what she has to do when Nausistrata lets slip that her husband is useless at managing her estates. Her father used to make 12,000 drachmas a year out of them. Now it’s much less. Demipho is dazzled by this revelation. I think it is the first indication that his brother has been concealing his income or using some of it for another purpose…

Enter Chremes

From Demipho’s house in a state of high excitement. He has, of course, just had an interview with his real daughter, Phanium, who he hasn’t seen for years, and established the wonderful solution to all his problems which is her marriage to his brother’s son, Antipho. Therefore he has to tell Demipho that the whole plan of giving her a dowry in order to marry her to Phormio…has been called off.

Except that he has to announce this news and justify it to Demipho with his wife present, the very wife he wants to conceal his bigamous affair from. Oops. Tricky. So there’s a page of deep anxiety / comedy while Chremes tries to get Demipho to stop asking so many awkward questions while his wife’s there.

Eventually, Demipho stops asking questions and Nausistrata, puzzled but resigned to the imponderable way of men, accepts that the girl is not now being packed off, which is just as well because she always liked her, and goes back into her house.

Chremes checks the door is shut and only now can tell the full truth to an astonished Demipho. But it’s too secret to talk about here in the open, so he hustles his brother indoors.

Enter Antipho

Anxious Antipho is pleased for his cousin, Phaedria, who now has his girl, but more anxious than ever about his own situation.

Enter Phormio

As at his last appearance Phormio is supremely pleased with himself. He lists the successes of his plan: he got the dowry money; paid off Dorio; took possession of the girl; handed her over to Phaedria whose dreams have come true.

Antipho reveals that he’s onstage and goes up to Phormio, and hears the good news confirmed. What is Phaedria going to do next? Take a leaf out of Antipho’s book and go into hiding from his father. And ask Antipho to defend him to his father just as, at the start of the play, Phaedria defended Antipho. Parallelism. Symmetry. Double plot.

Enter Geta

Very excited, proclaiming the blessings which have been showered on his master. The other two are non-plussed then increasingly frustrated at their inability to get Geta to spit it out. Finally, he comes out with it. Antipho’s wife is his father’s brother’s secret daughter and therefore…his step-cousin! And he’s been sent by the father’s to find Antipho and hustle him into their presence. And with that they both go into Demipho’s house.

Leaving Phormio onstage to have a brainwave about how he can permanently diddle the old men out of their money. He exits.

Enter Chremes and Demipho

Demipho and Chremes are agreeing that they need to find Phormio as soon as possible and reclaim their 3,000 drachmas now that there’s no need for him to marry Phanium. Phormio overhears this and anyway knows the truth of the situation from Geta, so he steps forward to confront them with a confident smile.

When they tell him the deal’s off and they want their money back he enjoys play-acting the aggrieved partner. He says he has cancelled all his other engagements to make way for the wedding. And paid for the feast. And invited guests. And turned down the other woman he was attached to, making humiliating apologies to her family. He can’t go back on any of that! It was to help them that he broke with a woman who was bringing him the same sum. So they are grievously wronging him. They fall to haranguing each other:

DEMIPHO: You hand over my money!
PHORMIO: You hand over my wife!

They threaten to take him to court to reclaim their money. It’s at this point that Phormio very suavely plays his trump card. He knows, he sweetly says, of a certain gentleman who kept a second family on the island of Lemnos, kept it completely secret from his loving wife and the wider community. Wouldn’t it be unfortunate if word about this immoral secret were somehow to leak out…

Chremes turns white, panics, and insists Phormio can keep the dowry, Hush money. Blackmail. Phormio’s word is to tell them to stop behaving like a couple of children. He’s about to walk away and that would have been that except that Demipho thinks they’re giving up too easily. He tells Chremes that now the secret is out his wife is bound to hear about it sooner or later, best if he braves it out and tells him herself. Demipho will support him and intervene to see them reconciled and this way they’ll get their money back (it’s clearly the money that’s motivating him).

Phormio overhears all this and comes back and accuses them of being a right pair of monkeys, continuing to cheat him after they’d made yet another deal. And he starts walking towards Chremes’ house and starts yelling out his wife’s name, Nausistrata.

The two fathers grab him, threaten to punch him or knock his teeth out or put an eye out. As they try to restrain him Phormio says he’ll see them in court for assault and continues to shout out Nausistrata’s name at the top of his lungs.

Enter Nausistrata

All this noise fetches Nausistrata out of her house. The fathers release Phormio who smiles broadly. He tells Nausistrata to touch her husband, she’ll find him frozen to stone. Amusingly, Chremes is so scared of her wrath he can only stammer at her to ignore everything he, Phormio, says.

But despite Chremes’s stammering and Demipho’s interventions, Phormio now proceeds to tell Nausistrata that on Lemnos her beloved husband married another woman and had a daughter, another family. Nausistrata is horrified and asks Demipho if it’s true.

Shamefacedly Demipho admits that it is but tries to make excuses: that Chremes was drunk, it only happened once, he never slept with her again etc. Oh, and now the woman’s dead in any case.

Nausistrata asks if she was worth this betrayal. She asks Demipho if she deserved this. She asks Demipho to repeat all she has been for her wretched husband during the decades. And can she ever trust him again. If a man does this once, and his wife isn’t getting any younger, will it happen again? And does this explain all his long ‘business trips’ to Lemnos? And does this explain why the rents from her property have been so low? Half the income was going to support his bigamous family?

Demipho can only mumble assent. Chremes is so petrified he can’t speak. Phormio has a broad smile on his face. Well done, Demipho. Things had all been agreed and signed off but you had to interfere!

Demipho can only say that Chremes has confessed and now begs for mercy.

Phormio realises he needs to step in sharpish to save his money. He now tells Nausistrata that he tricked her husband out of 3,000 drachmas so he could but a lute girl and marry her. Nausistrata doesn’t mind, she is still obsessed with revenge on Chremes and so she icily asks him whether he has the cheek to reprimand his son seeing how he behaved. At least his son only intends to have one wife! Unlike certain lying, cheating, philandering husbands she could mention!!

Nausistrata is now in the driving seat. She announces she will see her son, Phaedria, and abide by his decision. She asks Phormio’s name and he tells her and points out that he is a friend of the family and a very good friend of her son’s, and she thanks him and says that in future she will do what she can to further his interests. So Phormio a) doesn’t have to repay the 3,000 drachmas b) comes out smelling of roses with the real power behind the throne, Nausistrata.

Phormio has one last request: may he come to dinner? ‘Certainly,’ replies Nausistrata. ‘First go and fetch my son,’ so Phormio darts over to where Phaedria has been loitering by the side of the stage and escorts him, along with Nausistrata, into their house. Demipho follows a little behind, with Chremes, utterly ashamed and diminished, slowly following behind last of all.

Thoughts

The play proceeds, very like The Eunuch, like the peeling away of the layers of an onion. There’s the initial concern with the affairs of the two young lovers; interest slowly transfers to the details of the scams and tricks, in this case devised by Phormio; but by the end the focus has shifted to centre on a strong decisive woman who takes charge of everything and puts almost all the menfolk to shame, Thais in The Eunuch, Nausistrata in this play.

Credit

Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies, edited and translated by Betty Radice.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on April 11, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 11, 2022

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Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor) by Terence (163 BC)

‘I can’t understand it all’
(Menedemus at the climax of the plot, page 148, and he isn’t the only one)

The Self-Tormentor is based on an unnamed original by the Greek playwright Menander.

As usual the stage is a bare minimum, showing the front doors of two houses. In this play, however, they are not in the town but farmhouses in the countryside in Attica, the Greek region which contained Athens.

This is the least dramatic of Terence’s plays and relies on the dialogue to convey the complicated plots and counterplots of the characters.

Now listen with open minds, don’t interrupt, and allow me to present a play which doesn’t depend on action. (Prologue, page 102)

The self-tormentor of the title is the old father, Menedemus. Three months before the actions starts, he sent his son off to the wars and has been racked with guilt ever since.

The plot

Chremes and Menedemus

Chremes comes out of his front door as Menedemus walks by. The latter is in rough working clothes, looking exhausted, carrying a heavy hoe. Menedemus stops him, says this is the first time they’ve had a chance to talk since Menedemus bought the farm next to Chremes’s. Why does he work so hard? No matter how early Chremes is up or late he goes to bed he sees Menedemus labouring in the fields on his own. It’s feels not so much like he’s working hard, more that he’s tormenting himself. Why?

With tears in his eyes, Menedemus tells his story: he has a grownup son, Clinia. An old lady moved to the neighbourhood with a beautiful young daughter. Clinia fell madly in love with her but instead of being happy and supporting his son, Menedemus was on his case all the time, telling him to stop mooning about and being useless. Menedemus tells him that at his age he, Menedemus, was a poor man trying to find his way in the world, and so went off to serve a foreign king in Asia Minor. In the end he wore his son down with his nagging so much that Clinia did the same, upped and left and went to fight abroad.

At which point Menedemus was overcome with guilt. He looked round at his servants waiting on his every need in his big house and thought of his son in some squalid camp abroad and couldn’t bear it. So he auctioned off his slaves and all his property, sold his house and bought the land and farmhouse next to Chremes. And here he works his fingers to the bone and torments himself every day, imagining that making himself miserable will correct the wrong he’s done.

I’ve made up my mind that I can lessen the wrong done to my boy by making myself miserable. (p.106)

Chremes listens with tears in his eyes, tries to cheer Menedemus up, but the latter picks up his hoe and stumps off into his own house.

It was the tears in his eyes which made me realise in a flash that Terence is sentimental. In a play by Plautus no character has tears in their eyes unless it’s tears of rage or tears of hilarious laughter. By contrast, in Terence characters feel deeply for each other, are considerate of each other’s feelings, apologise to each other, see each other’s point of view. To revisit the Wikipedia quote about sentimental novels of the 18th century:

Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters. They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance both emotions and actions. The result displays the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect and flatters the reader who is assumed to be refined and sensitive enough to appreciate the characters’ refinement and sensibility.

It is in this dialogue that the famous Terence quote about nothing human being alien from me occurs – Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. It is on page one of the play, and during this little dialogue, that Menedemus asks:

MENEDEMUS: Chremes, can you spare a moment from your own affairs to listen to someone else’s – even if they don’t really concern you?
CHREMES: I’m human, so any human interest is my concern. (p.104)

So. Far from being a bold statement of a sweeping philosophical principle, this much quoted phrase turns out to be the kindly comment of one old boy to another one, encouraging him to open up and share his worries about his son. Completely different from how it reads out of context. And a bit disappointing.

Clitipho and Clinia

Anyway, Chremes is about to go into his house when he is surprised to see his son, Clitipho, coming out of it and speaking to someone inside. And even more surprised when his son reveals that he’s talking to Clinia, the Menedemus’s son, the boy whose unknown whereabouts prompted Menedemus’s commitment to a life of self-mortification. Turns out Clitipho met him disembarking from a ship and brought him here, as the two have been friends since they were boys.

When Chremes says they must tell the boy’s father at once, Clitipho cuts him off and tells him that poor Clinia is confused about what to do: he is still madly in love with the girl but respects and doesn’t want to upset his father. He’s sent his slave, Dromo, to the house of his beloved, Antiphila, and Clitipho sent their family slave, Syrus, to accompany him.

Chremes goes into his own house to meet Clinia and also to finalise preparations for a dinner party he’s hosting this evening.

Clitipho soliloquises

Leaving Clitipho alone onstage to soliloquise and tell us his friend is lucky compared to him because his beloved is honest and true. Whereas he, Clitipho is in love with a haughty mistress who demands gifts and presents which he can barely afford. Also wise words about how fathers judge their sons by the fathers’ feelings now, at their mature age, rather than remembering what it was like to be a young man and being more forgiving.

Enter Clinia

Clinia comes out of Chremes’ house, a bundle of nerves about seeing his beloved.

Enter Dromo and Syrus

Clinia and Clitiph see their slaves, Dromo and Syrus, approaching from the port, and further behind them a train of slaves carrying baggage. They overhear Dromo and Syrus complaining about the big baggage train they’re bringing and miserable Clinia jumps to completely the wrong conclusion – he concludes that the plain and simple girl he left behind, Antiphila, has found a rich lover who has lavished her with gifts, hence the huge baggage train.

No no no, said Dromo. The reverse. When they got to the house Antiphila shares with her old servant they found them living in puritan poverty and plainness. It’s an insight into the Roman ideal of the chaste, virginal woman: sitting quietly weaving; no guests; plainly dressed; no elaborate hairdo; no jewels. And as soon as the slaves told her that Clinia was back she burst into tears of joy (tears again) and hastened to return with them so Clinia is reassured that she’s still the simple girl he fell in love with.

Syrus surprises Clitipho by telling him they’ve also fetched his lady love, the haughty Bacchis. Clitipho isn’t pleased but Syrus explains that he has a plan: they’ll pretend that Bacchis is Clinia’s beloved. The boys are confused and Syrus tells them both to trust him.

Clitipho desperately wants to embrace Bacchis but Syrus insists he hides his love and bundles him onto Chremes’ house.

Enter Bacchis and Antiphila

Bacchis makes a speech praising Antiphila’s honesty and virtue. It’s a good example of the way Terence’s characters speechify at each other, delivering fine and noble sentiments in clear and lucid prose. It was this clear style which was so admired and copied in centuries to come, but makes for rather dull reading.

Anyway, Bacchis in effect praises Antiphila as the noblest and truest of women, while her suitor hides and overhears. Then he comes out of hiding and runs over to Antiphila who is overcome with emotion and swoons into his arms. Syrus observes all this but then hustles them all into Chremes’ house, presumably for the big dinner party which Chremes mentioned right at the start.

Next morning: enter Chremes

Chremes delivers a little soliloquy saying he’s resolved to tell miserable old Menedemus that his son has returned, and is even now in his (Chremes’) house.

Enter Menedemus

From his house, next door, and Chremes goes straight up to him and tells him his son has returned and is in his (Chremes’) house. Menedemus is overjoyed and wants to see him but Chremes counsels caution, saying his son is hiding and still scared of him. Menedemus wants to be all forgiveness but Chremes says he should be manly and resolute. He goes on to describe the woman his son (Clinia) has fallen in with under the misapprehension that Bacchis is Clinia’s beloved, for she is fussy and haughty and insisted on the best food and wine. If it wasn’t obvious before, you realise Bacchis exists to provide a foil and contrast with simple, honest, homely Antiphila.

Chremes then goes on to outline to Menedemus how he must behave, which was quite complicated and required exactly the concentration that editor Betty Radice warns about. Chremes warns Menedemus that if he’s too kind and forgiving, Clinia, Bacchis and the naughty slave Syrus will take advantage of him and milk him dry. Therefore he must playact being stern.

Menedemus sententiously remarks on how other people so often see our troubles and the solution far more clearly than we do. Chremes tells him to go home and lie low. Exit Menedemus.

Enter Syrus

A complicated dialogue with Chremes. When Syrus praises young Clinia and blames his father Menedemus for being tight with his money as the reason Clinia ran away from home, Chremes surprises him by blaming the family slave for not coming up with a clever ruse to satisfy both of them. To Syrus’s surprise, Chremes admits that, on occasion, he approves of slaves deceiving their masters (p.124). Chremes eggs Syrus on to devise a scheme to help Clinia and Menedemus be reconciled. Syrus warms to his task. Chremes goes into his house.

Enter Chremes dragging Clitipho

Now Chremes has been told that Bacchis is Clinia’s expensive, haughty beloved. So he’s just gone back into his house and discovered his own son, Clitipho, with his hand down Bacchis’s front and is outraged at his son’s terrible disrespect for his best friend. Syrus is furious that Clitipho has lost the self control he drummed into him a few scenes earlier and thus jeopardised the entire plan.

Syrus realises he’s got to pack Clitipho out of the way while he finalises his plan for inveigling Clinia with his father so, with Chremes’ approval, he pushes him offstage and tells him to go for a walk.

Now the plot gets so complicated I didn’t completely understand it. Syrus tells Chremes that Bacchis lent Antiphila’s mother 1,000 drachmas and with Antiphila as security. Antiphila’s mother died and Antiphila now owes Bacchis the money. Syrus lies that Bacchis is demanding the money from Clinia in exchange for which he can have the girl, Antiphila.

Syrus tells Chremes that he will now go to see Menedemus and explain the situation but add the new information that the girl, Antiphila, is in fact a well born woman who was kidnapped from Caria, so that if Menedemus buys her he will do very well out of the deal.

I don’t understand how Menedemus can buy a free woman. Or is Antiphila a slave? I hadn’t realised. But how she can be a slave if she’s well born and rich?

Chremes warns Syrus that he knows what Menedemus will say, he’ll refuse. That, replies Syrus, is exactly the response he wants. Is it, replies Chremes, mystified and I, also, had no idea what was going on. Comedy should probably be comprehensible.

Enter Sosastra

Sosastra is Chremes’ wife. She enters with the family nurse. She says this is the very ring they gave to their baby daughter when they exposed her [exposed her? abandoned her to die??] and sends the nurse back inside.

Now she comes up to Chremes and delivers some vital back story. Remember that time she was pregnant and Chremes told her to get rid of the child if it was a girl [!]. Well, she didn’t, after bearing it, she gave it to an old lady from Corinth to expose. Now she’s learned that the woman from Corinth disobeyed, and raised the girl as her own.

Chremes is furious for some very revealing reasons (p.131):

  1. his wife disobeyed him
  2. the old woman ‘might have made a living out of the child’ – does that mean pimped her out for sex?
  3. or she might have sold the child into slavery – is that worse than exposing her to die?

Anyway, Sosastra now tells Chremes that she gave the old lady a ring for the child and the girl who accompanied Bacchis to their house was wearing this ring. Syrus lets out a cry! Antiphila must be Chremes daughter, thought dead.

Chremes orders Sosastra to accompany him indoors where they’ll investigate further.

Syrus soliloquises

Syrus is alone onstage and soliloquises that if Antiphila is a free-born woman that dashes his plans for extracting money from Menedemus by getting the latter to buy her [I still don’t follow the details of this, or why, indeed, Syrus is trying to extract money from him; I thought all that was needed was a nice reconciliation between father and son who are both desperate to be reconciled; Syrus’s schemes just seem to be introducing needless complexity into a fairly simply situation.]

Enter Clinia

Clinia is over the moon that his beloved has turned out to be a) free born, and so a worthy bride b) Chremes’ long-lost daughter and so eminently acceptable to his father, Menedemus.

Yes, yes, says Syrus, but what about his friend, Clitiphon? They’ve got to keep up the pretence that Bacchis is Clinia’s beloved for Chremes’ benefit [I really don’t understand why and if they do, it’s only because Syrus cooked up this hare-brained scheme in the first place.]

Clinia objects that if he goes on pretending Bacchis is his beloved, it will wreck his plans getting Chremes to let him marry Antiphila. It will look very odd switching from one woman to Chremes’s daughter so suddenly.

Enter Bacchis

Bacchis soliloquises that she is very angry with Syrus for persuading her to take part in this charade with the promise of 1,000 drachmas. Oh. Is this why Syrus needs to extract 1,000 drachmas from Menedemus? Because he needs it to pay Bacchis? Why did he promise her this money in the first place?

Very loudly she tells her maid to hurry to a neighbouring farmhouse where her ‘captain’ is staying and tell him she’s being held here against her will. [This refers to the fact which Syrus told us earlier that he and Dromo discovered Bacchis being wooed by a captain who she was winding up and offering her favours for in return for money.

Going back and rereading the earlier scenes I see that Clitiphon was struggling to please his mistress, Bacchis, because she demands money from him and he’s penniless. Now I think I understand. Syrus is not only trying to reconcile Clinia and his father and pair Clinia off with Antiphila – he is at the same time attempting to win for Clitiphon his hoity-toity beloved, Bacchus, by giving her money as if from (penniless) Clitiphon. And he had planned to extract this money from Menedemus by getting him to buy Antiphila on the understanding she was a rich free-born woman who…? What? Would reimburse him for setting her free?

I still don’t fully understand. This ‘comedy’ is harder than a work of philosophy.

Now Syrus bangs on the door of Menedemus’s house and gets his slave, Dromo, to come out. Syrus tells Dromo to go into Chremes’ house and gather up all Bacchis’s maids and baggage and transfer it all into Menedemus’s house. In Plautus’s comedies, part of the fun came from fully understanding the scams the clever slave is pulling, and so being able to judge the risks, and spot instantly when something is going (comically) wrong.

Here, I haven’t a clue why Syrus is transferring Bacchis and her maids to Menedemus’s house and am waiting impatiently form someone to explain what the hell is going on.

Enter Chremes

Syrus greets Chremes and assures him the little plan he encouraged him to put in place earlier is coming to fruition. So Syrus proceeds to explain that Clinia has told his father, Menedemus, that Bacchis is not his mistress but Clitipho’s. Clinia is also telling his father that he has seen the newly discovered daughter, Antiphila and fallen in love with her and wants her hand in marriage.

Syrus asks Chremes to go along with this apparent pretence and agree to give Antiphila’s hand in marriage to Clinia because then Menedemus will give his son Clinia money to pay for the wedding – so this motivation of extracting money from Menedemus is becoming more obviously the central plank of Syrus’s schemes.

Chremes hesitates but Syrus hastens to add it will only be for a day, just pretend. Anyway, if he won’t do it there’s still the matter of the 1,000 drachmas which is owed to Bacchis, the loan made to the old woman with Antiphila as security. Syrus is sure someone as noble as Chremes will want to pay it off, and Chremes agrees to give Bacchis the money asap. Syrus slyly comes up with excuses why it will be better for his son Clitipho to give Bacchis the money, so Chremes goes into his house to fetch it.

Enter Clitipho

Exhausted from his walk and angry with Syrus for his stupid schemes until Syrus explains that his father is about to give hi the money he can give to Bacchis. Clitipho hugs him with delight as Chremes comes out of his house. He hands over the money to Clitipho who is thunderstruck and Syrus tells him to hurry into Menedemus’s house to present it to Bacchis. They both go into M’s house.

Enter Menedemus

As in all these plays, the convention is that someone coming out of a house is still talking to someone inside. In this case Menedemus is shouting to his son that he is delighted to learn that his son is not in love with the expensive courtesan Bacchis; it’s a great relief.

Menedemus announces to Chremes that his son, Clinia, is in love with Chremes’ rediscovered daughter and wants to marry her. Chremes explains that this is all a deception and a scam to extract money from him, Menedemus. Chremes tells Menedemus to go back into his house and tell Clinia Chremes agrees to the wedding. They both go into their respective houses

Menedemus returns a few minutes later and has a little soliloquy in which he admits that he himself is a bit slow and could be described as a blockhead or nitwit, but not as thick as Chremes.

What interest me about this little speech is that it isn’t about love or money, it’s about intelligence and keeping up with complex scams. It seems to me to be a comment on the play it is set in, a comment on the demands required of an audience to keep up. I failed. At various points I’ve had no idea what is going on and have had to go back and reread passages and refer to notes to understand.

Chremes comes out of his house and the two old men reconvene. Menedemus is now convinced his son is telling the truth when he says he wants to marry Antiphila, whereas Chremes shakes his head and thinks Menedemus is being conned. Except we, the audience, know he’s not, so the laugh is on Chremes. If you can call it a laugh.

Menedemus goes on to explain that Clitipho is definitely in love with Bacchis. He had a room assigned to them with a bed and they both nipped straight in, locked the door and started making love. Chremes is appalled, because he has seen how ruinously expensive Bacchis is. Chremes is determined to block their love and all of a sudden we realise their positions have been cleverly reversed. At the start of the play it was Menedemus lamenting his pig-headed obstinacy which had driven his son away and Chremes advising him to be forgiving and kind. Now it is Chremes who in his anger and anxiety wants to block his son’s love affair and says he doesn’t care if his son goes off ‘to the ends of the earth’ i.e. is making exactly the same mistake as Menedemus did.

MENEDEMUS: It’s scandalous: you give advice to others and are sensible abroad but you can’t help yourself at home. (p.146)

Changing the subject Menedemus asks what dowry Chremes will give with his daughter. After a pause Chremes says he’ll offer for a dowry everything he owns as that will shut his son up and realise he can’t be milked. Menedemus is surprised and puzzled but goes into his house to fetch the young people.

Enter Clitipho and Syrus

Fetched by Menedemus, who goes back into his house. Chremes confronts his son and tells him that he is giving everything he owns as dowry to Clinia, because he doesn’t trust his son who he’s seen lavishing money on a demanding mistress. He can always apply to Clinia if he needs money.

He effectively disowns Clitipho and casts Syrus off and walks back into his house.

At this point Syrus cooks up another scam. I have come to heartily loathe Syrus and his scams and find them the opposite of funny. They are contrived and sometimes incomprehensible. Now Syrus tells Clitipho to go into his parents house and ask them whether he is really their won at all, they have been so quick to cast him off. Surely his mother will spring to his defence. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly clever or likely plan, and Clitipho isn’t very keen, but he reluctantly goes into his parents’ house. Syrus disappears back into Menedemus’s house.

Enter Chremes and Sosastra

They have a dialogue I don’t really understand which ends with Chremes saying there’s no doubt Clitipho is Sosastra’s son, they share all the same faults. This is just hurtful and the opposite of comedy.

Clitipho comes out and begs them, in genuine anguish, to acknowledge that he is their son. Sosastra insists he is and Chremes too. But then Chremes proceeds to deliver a page-long dressing down of Clitipho for his lazy, loose-living, and for bringing into their house a greedy courtesan. Clitipho is reduced to miserable shame. He hates himself. Not that funny, is it? He begs his father to forgive him.

Enter Menedemus

Menedemus enters the scene, determined to intercede between Chremes and his son and make the former relent. Menedemus, Sosastra and Clitipho all beg him to forgive the boy. Reluctantly he says he will, on one condition. Anything, says Clitipho. That he marries respectably. Clitipho reluctantly agrees. Sosastra suggests a neighbour’s daughter but Clitipho rejects her as ugly and spotty.

Clitipho has a counter-suggestion, a girl he likes quite a lot, the daughter of our neighbour Archonides. Chremes agrees. Clitipho asks one favour: that his father forgives Syrus. Chremes cheerfully agrees and the play ends just like that. No regret at losing Bacchis who he’s made such a fuss about, no big reconciliation scene between Menedemus and his son, no marriage, no welcoming the audience to the marriage feast. It just ends as abruptly as someone turning off the radio. Very odd.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

Terence’s most famous quote occurs on page 2 of this play. It means literally:

I am a human being; of that which is human, I think nothing estranged from me.

More smoothly as:

I am human, and think nothing human is alien to me.

I prefer the implications of the latter because it reinforces one of my core principles, which is a frank acceptance of human nature in all its gruesomeness. We are, after all, only animals which, through a quirk of evolution, happen to be able to ‘think’, sort of, sometimes.

Most history is horrific, most humans are disappointing, many are terrifying. We must make the best of life based on a realistic assessment of human history and behaviour. Denying these realities distorts our understanding of human nature, human history and human society, and undermines assessments of what realistic change and reform we can hope to effect.

Therefore I accept it, accept it all, all human behaviour, the killers and rapists, the paedophiles and génocidaires, the greedy billionaires and the drug addict muggers, alongside the sugar and spice and all things nice which the sentimental, naive and wilfully blind want human nature to consist of, and the huge territory between the extremes, where people are confused, uncertain, generally nice but sometimes stressed, angry or inexplicable. And that is what this quote means to me – signifying a complete, Nietzschean acceptance of the gritty reality of human nature.

Radice, on the other hand, translates it in the play as:

I am human, so any human affair is my concern.

Which may be a true translation but whose last few words seems to me to drastically expand the thought, making it far more pro-active and empathetic than my preferred version. Radice’s translation implies that all human affairs are my concern i.e. that I ought to be actively involved in them. It turns it from the detached and rather analytical acceptance of my version into a motto for Amnesty International.

Anyway:

1. It is a surprise and a letdown to encounter the phrase in its actual context and realise it comes from a very homely, domestic context, that of one old father lending an ear to his friend who wants to share his worries and guilt about his grown-up son.

2. Unintended by Terence, the phrase acquires a whole new resonance when you read it in the context of a play where the idea of exposing unwanted female babies to die was not only accepted as a common, socially acceptable activity, but was the basis for a popular comedy. One of the peculiar pleasures of the plays of Plutarch and Terence is you think you’ve got a handle on them, you think you are relating to the characters and their situations, when the bubble is burst by reference to one of the completely alien customs and assumptions which underlie their society such as the universal acceptance of slavery, of violent punishments, the silence and invisibility of so many of the women, or the universally accepted habit of abandoning babies on rubbish dumps.

In a way he hadn’t imagined at all, Terence’s phrase can be taken to refer to the way we, as 21st century readers, accept these alien conventions and practices – while utterly deprecating them with our conscious or moral minds, we nonetheless put our objections to one side and imaginatively accept them – in order to be able to relate to the characters and the plots of these plays and make it worthwhile bothering to read them at all.

Credit

Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies, edited and translated by Betty Radice.

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by Simon on April 8, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Comedy, Play, Slavery, Theatre

Posted by Simon on April 8, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/08/heauton-timorumenos-the-self-tormentor-terence/

Andria (The Girl from Andros) by Terence (166 BC)

‘There’s scarcely a man to be found who’ll stay faithful to a woman.’
(Mysis the servant)

‘A father shouldn’t be too hard on his children whatever their faults.’
(Chremes)

The astonishingly detailed production notes, attached to the play in antiquity, tell us that Andria was first performed at the Megalensian Games in 166 BC. It is based on an original but unnamed play by the Greek playwright, Menander.

The set consists, as usual, of the front doors of two houses set next to each other, the house of Simo, father of the hero, and of Glycerium, the young female ‘love interest’

Back story

The play is set in Athens. There are two middle-aged men, Simo and Chysemum. Simo has a son, Pamphilus. Pamphilus has seduced and impregnated a young woman named Glycerium and has promised to marry her. But his father, Simo, has other ideas and has promised Pamphilus in marriage to the daughter of his friend Chremes, Philumena.

Everyone has always assumed that Glycerium was the sister of the girl she came to Athens with three years earlier, who was named Chryses. They came to Athens together from the island of Andros (hence ‘the girl from Andros’). Chryses set up as a courtesan and acquired a devoted following of young gentlemen. Sadly, she got sick and died just before the action of the play starts.

It was at the funeral of Chryses that Pamphilus first publicly revealed his loved for Glycerium when the latter ventured a little too close to the funeral pyre on which her friend was burning, and Pamphilus promptly leapt forward, embraced her, pulled her back and ended up kissing her in full sight of all the other mourners. His father, Simo, witnessed this and was appalled.

Meanwhile, young Pamphilus has a friend, Charinus, who is himself in love, with a young woman named Philumena, the daughter of Pamphilus’s father’s friend, Chremes. That’s what the ‘double plot’ means in practice – two young men in love with two young women; both in similar plights which are then ‘treated’ differently by the plot.

It’s worth noting that Glycerium, Pamphilus’s lady love and, in a sense, the crux of the plot, never actually appears onstage. She does, however, have one line – when she cries out from inside her house as she gives birth (exactly like Phaedria, another invisible love interest, does in Plautus’s Aulularis).

But this is one more line than Charinus’s lady love Philumena, the daughter of Chremes, is awarded, as she never appears at all. They are almost invisible cogs in the machine of the plot.

Rather than the love interests, the central figure of the play, as so often, is the canny slave, in this case Pamphilus’s slave, Davos, who devises a cunning plan to rescue his master and unite him with his girl. This plan goes badly wrong to begin with but he manages to recover it at the last minute, so that the play ends with a happy marriage.

The plot

Sosia and Simo

Simo, the father, explains the backstory of the play to the elderly family freed slave Sosia: the story of Chryses coming to Athens, her success in garnering lovers, how Simo knows that his son Pamphilus hung round in their set but wasn’t actually in love with her. How Simo’s neighbour Chremes has offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to Pamphilus, and that today is the day set for the wedding feast.

Simo goes on to say that a few days after he and Chremes sealed the deal, this neighbouring courtesan Chryses passed away. Simo attended the funeral and it was there that he saw his son dash forward to prevent Glycerium getting too close to Chryses’ pyre. Then Chremes got to hear about Pamphilus’ love for Glycerium and so called off the wedding of Pamphilus and his own daughter.

Sosia is confused: if the wedding has been called off, how come caterers are arriving and setting up for the wedding feast? Simo replies that he has two very specific aims: one, if Pamphilus refuses to take part in the wedding feast he’s staging, then he’ll have a real reason to rebuke him; two, if his rogue of a servant Davos has any tricks up his sleeve, Simo hopes he’ll deploy them here, at the fake wedding, rather than at the real one. [This slightly convoluted logic explains why a wedding feast is in preparation, even though the bride’s father, Chremes, has cancelled her participation in it.]

So the upshot of this rather complicated story is that Simo wants Sosia to supervise the setting up of the feast and keep his eye open for scams. So, with these instructions the freed slave Sosia goes through the door into Simo’s house.

Enter Davos

Davos is Pamphilus’s smart young slave who will emerge as the main driver of the play. Simo warns him that if he tries to pull off any smart tricks to help Pamphilus, Simo will have him whipped senseless then sent to the mills. As with all of Plautus’s plays, I am appalled at the way extreme violence is routinely threatened to all the slaves and for laughs! Simo exits leaving Davos alone onstage.

Davos soliloquises

Davos explains he wants to help his master, Pamphilus, but is understandably worried about getting into trouble with his actual owner, Simo – the man who just threatened him with a whipping!

Davos goes on to explain that Pamphilus and Glycerium are behaving like naughty children, specially as Glycerium is pregnant. They’re promoting the story that Glycerium isn’t Chryses sister at all, that she was shipwrecked as a baby off the coast of Andros. She was in the care of a merchant and they were both taken in by a kindly local. The merchant then died leaving the local to raise the orphan girl Glycerium alongside his own daughter, Chryses. But – and this is the important point – not only are the girls not sisters, but Glycerium is a freeborn Athenian. This, apparently, really matters. If she was the daughter of a slave and had grown up to become a courtesan, she would be no fit wife for a wealthy man’s son like Pamphilus. But if it can be proven that she is freeborn, that changes everything. She would be a worthy bride.

Having explained all this to the audience, Davos exits.

Enter Mysis

Mysis is a maid of Glycerium. She comes out of Glycerium’s house, as so often in these plays, calling back something to someone inside. She is being sent to fetch a noted midwife, Lesbia, to handle the delivery of Glycerium’s baby.

Enter Pamphilus

Pamphilus has heard from his father that the latter has organised his wedding today, without even telling him! He rants and raves and says he is cursed since he can’t refuse his father but doesn’t want to go through with marriage to a woman he doesn’t love.

Mysis steps forward and Pamphilus asks how her mistress i.e. Pamphilus’s beloved, Glycerium, is. Mysis replies that Glycerium is scared to death of giving birth and that she’ll be abandoned by Pamphilus. Upset, Pamphilus swears he will stick by her. He quotes the deathbed scene in which ailing Chrysis left Glycerium to Pamphilus’s care to protect and look after.

PAMPHILUS: Oh Mysis, Mysis, the words Chryses used of her are forever written in my heart. (p.51)

Pamphilus regards it as a sacred duty. Exit Mysis to fetch the midwife, Pamphilus moves to the side of the stage.

Enter Charinus

Enter Charinus and his servant Byrria. Charinus is Pamphilus’s best friend. He is in love with Philumena, who is a) the daughter of Chremes, Simo’s best friend and b) the very woman Pamphilus is supposed to be marrying today. He has just heard the news about the wedding feast and is distraught. Byrria is his down to earth slave, delivering cynical punchlines to Charinus playing the distraught lover.

Charinus and Pamphilus

Pamphilus moves back to centre stage and Charinus confronts him. Begs him not to marry Philumena today, as he himself is in love with her. Tells Pamphilus if he married Philumena it is the last he’ll see of him. Pamphilus quickly assures Charinus he is not in love with Philumena and has no intention of marrying her if he can help it. They make a pact: Pamphilus will do everything he can to avoid marrying Philumena if, at the same time, Charinus does everything he can to win her.

Enter Davos

Davos is excited to find his master and Charinus. He thinks he has the solution to their problems. He’s been hanging round Chremes’ house and there’s absolutely no preparation for a wedding there. So he tells Pamphilus and Charinus that the wedding feast is a fake. Simo is faking a wedding feast so that, if Pamphilus pulls out, he can land all the blame on him.

Charinus is delighted to learn it isn’t a real wedding, but Davos points out that just because Pamphilus is not marrying Philumena doesn’t necessarily mean Charinus will win her. He needs to go and ‘canvas’ her father’s friends. [Interesting insight into ancient marriage practices.]

Davos now proposes his plan. He tells Pamphilus to agree to the marriage. That way his father can have absolutely no reproach against him. ‘But what if I end up accidentally being married to Philumena?’ Pamphilus protests. Davos insists there’s no danger of that, because Chremes won’t let her marry him, because of his public display of affection for Glycerium. With Davos’s plan,:

  • Pamphilus will gain his father’s good wishes
  • all the blame for the failed wedding will fall on Chremes
  • and his father will be all the more favourable to finding him another bride

At that point they’ll manoeuvre him into accepting Glycerium. Pamphilus is understandably very doubtful about all this, but Davos talks him into it.

Enter Simo, shadowed by Byrria

Pamphilus’s father enters, but he is being tailed by Byrria, who’s been told by Charinus to follow him about and report everyone’s actions and responses. So he spies on the others while himself invisible.

1. When Simo tells Pamphilus that today is the day of his wedding, Pamphilus astonishes him by saying he will be guided by him in everything and will marry whoever he wants. Simo is astonished and Pamphilus meekly goes into the family house.

2. Byrria spied all thus, unseen, and is horrified because he thinks Pamphilus is reneging on his deal with his master. Byrria goes off to tell his master the bad news, leaving just Davos and Simo onstage.

Simo cross-questions Davos, convinced something is going on but Davos remains straight-faced and says he’s sure Pamphilus will obey his father. Davos tries to throw Simo off the scent by telling his son does have one grudge against him – that he’s tight with money and scrimping on this wedding feast. That nettles Simo.

Enter Mysis and Lesbia

Things are going just right when enter Mysis the serving girl who’s fetched Lesbia the midwife. As they go into Glycerium’s house they chatter for just long enough to blow up Davos’s plan, because Mysis tells Lesbia what a lovely young gentleman Pamphilus is, how he has sworn to remain loyal to her, and how she is about to have his baby!!!!

They enter the house and Simo explodes with indignation. But…at that moment Glycerium calls out in her labour pains to the goddess Juno Lucina and…Simo decides it’s all a con. It’s too contrived. She isn’t really having a baby, this is all some scam of Davos’s to horrify Chremes into cancelling the marriage.

Davos takes advantage of Simo’s misinterpretation to say that, ‘Yes, Simo is correct, it’s all a cunning scheme hatched by Glycerium to wreck the marriage and steal Pamphilus. Her next step will be to borrow a baby from somewhere and place it on Simo’s doorstep as if it is hers and Pamphilus’s.’

Simo thanks Davos for his loyal service and the latter goes into the house, leaving Simo to tell the audience that his next step is to ask Chremes to agree to hand over his daughter for the wedding.

Enter Chremes

Simo describes how he and Chremes have been friends since boyhood, and now he wants his daughter to marry Pamphilus. Chremes is sceptical, what about the foreign woman. Simo assures him that the young couple have fallen out, been trading insults, and so now is the time to quickly marry him to Philumena, and get him to redirect his affections into a respectable channel. Chremes asks how he knows this. Simo replies that Davos told him and he calls Davos out of his house.

Enter Davos

Simo tells Davis he has now, reluctantly, come round to trusting him and believes him when he says his son, Pamphilus, is a reformed character and definitely wants to marry Philumena. And that he’s just persuaded Chremes, here, to marry her off today! (Chremes exits to go home and prepare Philumena for the wedding.)

Davos keeps up a running commentary of asides to the audience in which he comically reacts to this disastrous news. Chremes agreeing to marry off his daughter?! The wedding going ahead?! This is a catastrophe. What can he do?

Exit Simo, enter Pamphilus

Simo goes into his house to tell Pamphilus the good news, while Davos laments that he’s going to get the blame for everything. And sure enough a few moments later Pamphilus bursts out of the house, furious. He accuses Davos of screwing everything up and asks him what punishment he thinks he deserves? Davos astonishes me by saying ‘Crucifixion’ (p.69). The casualness with which these violent punishments of slaves are tossed about never ceases to flabbergast me.

Enter Charinus

Charinus has just received Byrria’s mistaken report that Pamphilus intends to go ahead with the wedding, and now runs onstage to deliver a soliloquy on the perfidy of friends. Now he intends to find Pamphilus and heap abuse on him.

Pamphilus hears all this from the side of the stage then steps forward and apologises to Charinus. Charinus accuses Pamphilus of only falling in love with Philumena after he, Charinus, had declared his love for her. Pamphilus tells him he’s got it all wrong. It was Davos who persuaded him to agree to the marriage. They then both turn on poor Davos, who tries to defend himself, saying he’s a loyal slave and works day and night in his master’s best interests. Anyway, has anyone else got a better plan?

Enter Mysis

Mysis comes out of Glycerium’s house [the reader tries to ignore the absurdity of everyone discussing the inconvenience of Pamphilus’s foreign lover when her house is right next door to Pamphilus’s.] Mysis tells Pamphilus her mistress is desperate for him. Pamphilus assures Mysis that he will remain loyal to Glycerium no matter what.

During all this Davos comes up with another plan. He tells the two men he’s in a hurry to implement it so Pamphilus goes into Glycerium’s house to see his beloved. Charinus then pesters Davos to help him. Davos says his first loyalty is to his master but he’ll see what he can do. And Charinus exits, going home.

Davos tells Mysis to wait here for him and pops into Glycerium’s house. He re-emerges with the newborn baby and gives it to Mysis and tells her to lay it on Simo’s front door. He wants her to do it so that, later, if anyone asks him whether he did it, he can answer with a clear conscience that he didn’t.

Enter Chremes

But his cunning plan is interrupted when along comes old Chremes, father of the bride. Davos runs off, leaving Mysis alone.

Chremes is congratulating himself on having made all the preparations for the marriage of his daughter when he sees the baby on Simo’s doorstep. What is all this?

At this point Davos re-enters, talking out loud and pretending to have just come from the busy market. He spots the baby on the doorstep and loudly asks Mysis who the baby is and what it’s doing there (in order to persuade Chremes he has nothing to do with it). Davos cross questions Mysis very loudly for the benefit of Chremes who is listening. Mysis is bewildered by Davos asking questions he knows the answer to but he hisses at her to play along.

And so Chremes overhears Mysis explain that this baby is Glycerium’s and that Pamphilus is the father. Davos denies it and pretends to accuse Mysis of being part of a monstrous plot, saying the baby was smuggled in by the midwife and is not Pamphilus’s and is part of a plot to discredit Pamphilus and put Chremes off allowing his daughter to marry him.

Of course Chremes has overheard all this, in fact Davos staged the loud dialogue for his benefit. Now he steps forward and Davos play acts surprise that he’s been here all along. Chremes is predictably outraged by all he’s heard and insists on going into Simo’s house to confront him.

Enter Crito

At just this moment when things are hanging in the balance, enter Crito. He is a middle-aged man from Athens, cousin to the dead Chryses. He tells us that Chryses’ friend Glycerium appears to have inherited Chryses’ property but it should really go to him by rights. This is because Glycerium has always been thought of as Chryses’ sister but she isn’t. Crito is here to prove the story that she is not Chryses’ sister but an unrelated foundling. Of course he’s got a vested interest in doing so because then, as her nearest kin, he’ll get Chryses’ inheritance.

He’s already known to Mysis, who welcomes him and then takes him into the house to see Glycerium.

Simo and Chremes

Simo and Chremes come out of Simo’s house. Chremes is upset by what Simo is asking him, namely to marry his daughter to Pamphilus who is clearly in love with another woman – to marry his daughter into a loveless marriage, purely in an attempt to ‘reform’ young Pamphilus.

Chremes was willing to go along with it out of their old friendship, but now he hears rumours that the woman is a free citizen of Attica (the wider region surrounding Athens) and not only, that, but has had a baby by Pamphilus!

Enter Davos

At just this moment Davos comes out of Glycerium’s house rubbing his hands with glee because of the impact Crito’s arrival is going to have on everything.

Davos comes out the front door and stumbles into Simo and Chremes who promptly accuse him of lying when he said Pamphilus had argued with Glycerium, lying about their baby, and lying about Glycerium’s status as an Attican citizen.

Davos stutters with excuses and then blusters on about Crito having arrived and declaring that Glycerium is a free citizen of Attica, but Simo has had enough and calls out another one of his slaves, big lumbering threatening Dromo, to grab Davos and ‘string him up’ ready for a whipping. Dromo hustles Davos off into Simo’s house to be tied up.

At all these moments of physical threats to slaves I remember Mary Beard’s words that a working definition of a slave was someone you could offer physical violence to with no comeback (as long as it was your slave, that is).

Enter Pamphilus

Simo yells into Glycerium’s house for his son who comes out. They are both ready to give up. Simo is exhausted and tells his son that, since he is ready to disobey his father and shame his homeland in his infatuation with this woman, then why not just do it. He washes his hands of him (p.83).

SIMO: Why harass my old age with the folly of a boy like this?

Instead of yelping with joy, Pamphilus is overcome with remorse and offers to give up his beloved and do whatever his father wishes (p.84).

Simo accuses him of having arranged for this witness to appear to prove that Glycerium is freeborn as if it’s a really big deal. Pamphilus swears he hasn’t, that it’s only a coincidence and asks to call Crito out to prove so.

Chremes persuades Simo to accede to this wish. In fact it’s really notable how mellow and forgiving Chremes becomes. As father and son recriminate each other, Chremes intervenes to tell Simo he ought to be more forgiving. All the characters are, deep down, nice and well meaning.

Re-enter Crito

Turns out that Crito and Chremes know each other, so Crito’s bona fides are established from the start. Nonetheless, Simo is witheringly scornful and accuses him of being paid to bear witness that Glycerium is a freeborn woman because that makes Pamphilus’s marriage to her socially acceptable.

For his part, Crito gets very cross at being treated like a liar and proceeds to tell the key backstory which transforms the situation: 20 years ago a citizen of Attica was shipwrecked on the coast of Andros. With him was a small girl. The traveller lost everything in the wreck and the first person to offer help was the father of the little girl who grew up to be Chrysis. Well, this benefactor who helped the shipwreckees out was a relative of Crito (who is telling the story). The shipwrecked man died.

Suddenly Chremes becomes very interested and begs Crito to tell him the name of the shipwrecked man. When Crito reveals it was Phania, who claimed to be a citizen of Rhamnus, Chremes is thunderstruck: Phania was his brother! And he was taking Chremes’s young daughter to come and meet him (Chremes) when they were shipwrecked.

The identification is clinched when Pamphilus tells Chremes that Glycerium is not the girl from Andros’s original name – her original name was Pasibula. In other words – Glycerium is Chremes’s long-lost daughter!!!

At a stroke:

  1. Simo is reconciled to his son marrying Glycerium (‘The truth has reconciled me to everything’)
  2. Chremes is delighted to be reunited with his long-lost daughter
  3. Chremes is double delighted to have such a worthy son in law, Pamphilus, and offers him a dowry of 60,000 drachmas on the spot, which he accepts
  4. and Pamphilus:

Oh, I’m beside myself, my head’s in a whirl with hope and fear and delight at this marvellous, unexpected, immense good fortune! (p.86)

Pamphilus says Davos must help Glycerium over to their house for a celebration. ‘Oh, er, well, he’s a bit tied up,’ his father replies. He runs inside to get his slaves to untie him and a few moments later Davos comes out rubbing his arms and shoulders.

Charinus enters but unobserved by the other two, while Pamphilus is telling Davos that all his troubles are over – that Glycerium has been revealed as Chremes’s long-lost daughter and that both Chremes and Pamphilus’s dad have agreed to their marriage.

Davos is delighted, but not as much as Charinus for this means Pamphilus won’t be marrying Philumena after all, leaving her free for him!

Rush ending

The play ends in a spectacularly hurried flurry of phrases because Pamphilus announces they can’t wait for Chremes to come out of the house and have to go through the whole fol-de-rol of Charinus asking for the hand of his other daughter in marriage. Instead Pamphilus and Charinus both hurry into Glycerium’s house to fetch her to the feast, leaving Davos onstage to wind up with the extremely brief words:

You needn’t wait for them to come out again; the other betrothal and any other business will take place in there. Now give us your applause! (p.90)

Thoughts

Double plot

I’ve read that Terence’s contribution to dramaturgy was developing the ‘double plot’ which a) makes the plays more complicated and sophisticated b) gives more scope for comedy. But as you can see, although there’s a sort of parallel between the two young men Pamphilus and Charinus being in love with two young women, Glycerium and Philumena, it’s very one-sided. All the emphasis is on the Pamphilus-Glycerium story and Charinus only has a handful of scenes, in most of which he whines unattractively, and Philumena never makes an appearance.

Above all, none of it is very funny, certainly not as laugh-out-loud funny as Plautus. Probably in performance a lot of the scenes which feature asides, especially the ones featuring Davos, these might be funny if done well by a good comic actor. But there is nothing intrinsically funny in any of the scenes. It’s cleverly and elaborately constructed, it moves at a cracking pace, but it lacks the wisecracking, rackety, gagfest feel of a Plautus play.

Related to this is the way the characters are all, at bottom, nice and well meaning. Their opinions, like the two I’ve quoted as epigraphs to this review, are eminently sensible. This explains why Terence’s plays were recommended to be taught in schools by no less of an earnest figure than Martin Luther. The ending doesn’t come as a shock and comic surprise – it feels more like the inevitable conclusion given that everyone is so basically nice. There is no wicked baddie driving the action, just a few genuine misunderstandings and misaligned intentions which take a little sorting out and then everyone can be happy.

Credit

Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies edited and translated by Betty Radice.

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by Simon on April 4, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/04/andria-the-girl-from-andros-terence/

Pseudolus by Plautus (191 BC)

‘She was mine to do as I liked with.’
(Ballio the pimp about Calidorus’s lady love, the slave-courtesan Phoenicium, page 230)

Of the 20 or so plays by Plautus which have survived from antiquity, this is the longest. We have the precise date of production, 191 BC. As so often it is set in the street in front of two houses and the lead figure is a canny slave. Yet the real star of the show turns out to be Ballio, the wretched pimp.

Setup

Calidorus is the stock young man. He is in love with Phoenicium, who is a slave-prostitute ‘singing girl’ who belongs to the wretched pimp, Ballio. The play opens with Calidorus showing his father’s chief slave and loyal servant, Pseudolus, a letter he’s just received from Phoenicium telling Calidorus that she’s been sold by her master to a Macedonian officer who just has to complete the payment of 2,000 drachmas and will take her away forever tomorrow. After some banter, Pseudolus promises to devise some way of getting her back or else he’ll pay Calidorus 2,000 drachmas. They hide to one side as Ballio appears.

The plot

Enter Ballio

In one of the two houses onstage lives Ballio, the pimp. It’s his birthday today. He enters brandishing a whip and terrifying his male slaves. He calls them lazy good-for-nothings and whips at least one of them. Then he gives them all chores to do as he’s planning to hold a feast to impress some VIPs.

The slaves go off about their chores, then Ballio calls out his female slaves, presumably his ‘courtesans’ i.e. sex workers, among whom is Calidorus’s true love, Phoenicium. Ballio shouts at the women slaves that today he will set one of them free, but the criterion will be, which one can get her lover to bring him, Ballio, the most extravagant birthday presents. Otherwise what’s the point of keeping such a harem of greedy lazy slaves?

Ballio goes through each of his ‘girls’ by name, pointing out the sectors of the market they specialise, namely the corn merchants (Hedylium), the butchers (Aeschrodora), the olive oil men (Xystilis) and finally Phoenicium, who he characterises as a gentleman’s pet, always promising to bring him the fee for her freedom but never actually delivering it (p.224).

Ballio dismisses the women, while in their hiding place Calidorus and Pseudolus bicker about what to do. Ballio is just setting off for town with his boy when Pseudolus calls out to him. After some banter in which it becomes clear the Ballio knows and dislikes our boys, Pseudolus takes command of the conversation and says Calidorus is sorry for not having come up with the cash to buy Phoenicium. Ballio has no sympathy: he should borrow it from a friend or steal it from his father. After Calidorus has stopped being scandalised, Pseudolus takes the lead again and promises Ballio he’ll come up with the money somehow within three days.

Ballio teases Calidorus by telling him Phoenicium is not for sale…at which point Calidorus rejoices and says Ballio is a second Jupiter and he needs to send Pseudolus to buy a lamb whose giblets they can sacrifice to this wonderful fellow. But, Ballio continues, Phoenicium is not for sale because she’s already been sold (p.230).

In a comic passage Pseudolus and Calidorus stand either side of Ballio and call him every abusive term they can come up with, but it is water in a sieve, he doesn’t care: he happily admits he killed his own parents to avoid having to pay for their care, he is a worm and it doesn’t bother him. And in that spirit he tells them that the Macedonian officer has only put down 1,500 of the 2,000 drachmas he’s contracted to pay for Phoenicium. If the boys can being him, Ballio, the full 2,000 today, maybe he’ll change his mind. And with an evil grin he sets off for the market.

Pseudolus soliloquy 1

Pseudolus then explains to Calidorus that he has a cunning plan, but he needs Calidorus to provide a friend, an intelligent, reliable friend to play a role in his plan. So Calidorus exists to find one.

Pseudolus is left onstage to admit to the audience that he doesn’t have the slightest idea or plan he just wanted to get rid of Calidorus. Much more likely is that he might be able to wangle the 2,000 drachmas out of his master Simo, who just at this moment happens along with his neighbour Callipho.

Simo

Simo tells the audience his son Calidorus is the talk of the town, everyone knows he’s desperate to buy his courtesan girlfriend but doesn’t have the money. Callipho says he shouldn’t be so hard on his son after all he was a tearaway and libertine in his own youth. They both spot Pseudolus listening to them and approach and say hello.

A feature of this play is it is quite slow moving. This is because the characters spend quite a lot of time in extended conversation: first Calidorus and Pseudolus with Ballio, now Pseudolus with Simo and Callipho – extended pleasantries and banter. Basically Simo tells Pseudolus he knows all about his son’s plight and is well aware that Pseudolus is planning to extract 2,000 drachmas out of him, but assures him it won’t work. Pseudolus declares that, on the contrary, he will get it out of him, which both Simo and Callipho consider a cheeky threat.

CALLIPHO: ‘Ye gods! The man’s a living marvel – if he can be as good as his word.’

Not only that, Pseudolus assures the two sceptical old men that before the day is through he will have won not one but two victories: he is going to extract the 2,000 drachmas from Simo and he is going to remove the girl from Ballio’s grasp! Pseudolus says, if he manages in the former, will his master give him the money and his freedom? Reluctantly, Simo agrees.

Callipho finds all this very amusing and when Pseudolus announces he needs him for his plans, happily agrees to cancel his planned trip to the country to do so. What’s more, he cheerfully tells Pseudolus that if Simo refuses to give him the money he, Callipho, will. All very relaxed and amused. Callipho goes into his house, Simo goes off into town.

Pseudolus soliloquy 2

Pseudolus not only speaks directly to the audience, he breaks the conceptual fourth wall by talking about the play itself, saying he currently has no idea how he’s going to pull it all off but what’s a play without surprises, so he begs our indulgence while he goes for a think and, meantime, there will be a musical interlude.

Musical interlude with a flute player

Pseudolus re-enters and fools around making a speech in the grand style describing how he will mount a siege and storm the house of his enemy i.e. Ballio. He’s in mod flow when he spies someone coming, and hides.

Enter Harpax

Harpax is a soldier, the representative of the Macedonian officer who’s put a down payment on Phoenicium. He talks out loud as he tries to figure out which of these houses is Ballio’s which gives Pseudolus the opportunity to step forward and pretend to be Ballio’s steward, Syrus. Harpax says he’s come with a purse of the outstanding sum, 500 drachmas, plus a sealed letter and the personal token of his master, the Macedonian officer, as agreed with Ballio. Pseudolus says his ‘master’ Ballio is out right now, and tries to persuade him to give him the purse but Harpax isn’t that dumb. He does, on the other hand, give him the sealed letter to give to Ballio, before announcing he’s going back to his inn to have lunch and a nap and for Pseudolus to send a message to him when Ballio returns. And so he exits.

Pseudolus soliloquy 3

Pseudolus tells us this is the lucky break he needed and launches into extended philosophising about the best laid plans and Lady Luck and so on, when he spies young Calidorus returning with a friend.

Enter Calidorus and Charinus

Pseudolus likes putting on funny voices and so adopts a tone of royal grandiloquence to greet his master. But he quickly comes to have a low opinion of the friend, Charinus, who is nettled by his disrespect. Nonetheless he shows Calidorus the letter and token.

Pseudolus says he will need a man. A slave? suggests Charinus. Yes. Well Charinus just happens to know a slave his master has freshly sent from their country estate to here, in Athens, named Simia. Perfect. And is he a slippery eel and trickster? Yes. And might Charinus happen to have a soldier’s cloak at his house? Yes. Pseudolus has gained new respect for Charinus, he’s a veritable charitable institution.

The plan? They’ll dress up this newly arrived slave as a a soldier, give him the letter and token and 500 drachmas and he will pretend to the Macedonian’s man and secure Phoenicium from the pimp. Pseudolus tells the chaps to go and prepare him.

Pseudolus soliloquy 4

Two enjoyable features of the play:

  1. Pseudolus amusingly uses military metaphors to describe how he is laying sieges and strategems to take Ballio’s fortress by storm.
  2. Pseudolus in a very post-modern way keeps referring to the play he’s actually in. So when Calidorus and Charinus ask him how he got the better of Harpax, he simply replies that the audience has seen everything so there’s no point repeating it (p.245)

He also leaves the stage.

Ballio’s slave boy

A touching soliloquy from Ballio’s slave boy describing how being an ugly boy in a whorehouse is a miserable fate. Ballio threatened everyone with the whip if they couldn’t come up with fine presents for him, but he hasn’t got anything.

Ballio returns with a cook

Ballio has hired a cook and assistants for his feast. It is typical of this play that there’s quite a long passage of dialogue devoted entirely to fleshing out his character, in which Ballio insults the cook for being an evil looking wretch and the cook cannily defends himself by saying he is always last to be hired because is more expensive and better quality than the ruck.

As with the role of the ‘table companion’ in Menaechmi, this gives a vivid sense of the forum as the place where people went to be hired for jobs for the day.

Anyway, Ballio orders his ‘ugly boy’ to keep a sharp watch on the cook and his assistants to make sure he doesn’t pinch anything. When they’ve all gone into his house, Ballio gives a little soliloquy in which he explains that he bumped into Calidorus’s father in the market and the latter warned him that Pseudolus has got a cunning plan to wangle Phoenicium off him. So he’s going to tell all his slaves to be on the lookout for the tricky Pseudolus.

Pseudolus and Simia

Enter Pseudolus with Simia, the smooth, handsome young slave Charinus promised. He is dressed up in a soldier’s outfit and very pleased with himself, super confident of his ability to ‘fake and fiddle’, rather to Pseudolus’s irritation. Pseudolus keeps asking if he remembers what he is so say and Simia crossly says yes yes yes.

As with all the other scenes and exchanges in this play, the two pages of Pseudolus fussing over Simia and the latter getting increasingly irritated, are not really necessary to the plot, but add colour and depth.

Ballio comes out his front door, still fussing about the cook he’s hired and Simia steps boldly forward, pretending to be the soldier Harpax finding his way. Pseudolus stays in hiding, wincing at more or less every one of Simia’s cocky remarks. But, to cut a long story, short, Simia hands over the letter and token and succeeds in persuading Ballio that he is the emissary of the Macedonian officer. Ballio reads the letter (which is quite rude about him), Simia hands over the money, Ballio says, Right, come and get her, and they go into his house.

Pseudolus steps out of hiding. All is going well but his nerves are wracking, any number of things could still go wrong: his master might turn up, the real Harpax might turn up, or Simia might go over to the enemy for a cash reward!

In the event the door opens and Simia and Phoenicium emerge and are waved off by Ballio who goes back into his house. Pseudolus hurries to join them and says, Quick, quick, while the coast is clear! and so they make off. Worth noting that the military metaphors deployed by Pseudolus are echoed by Simia who is, of course, dressed as a soldier. The entire thing has a comic thread of military pastiche running through it.

PSEUDOLUS: ‘Forward march! For victory and the cup of triumph!’

Enter Simo

Simo is Calidorus’s father and the subject of the bet with Pseudolus. He now enters with a view to checking with Ballio how things are going. He says hello, they talk and Ballio is so confident that the deal has gone  his way he hustles Simo into making a bet with him: Ballio promises to give Simo 2,000 drachmas (and a girl thrown in) if Calidorus gets possession of the girl today. Simo has nothing to lose so he shakes on the bet.

When Simo asks what this Harpax was like, Ballio, like Pseudolus, breaks the illusion of reality by saying Harpax used the usual type of gags used in this kind of comedy, and was used the stock terms given to pimps in comedies. Part of the enjoyment is the way the comic characters know they are in a play, readily admit it and play up to it.

Anyway, Ballio assures him on his life that Pseudolus won’t be able to pull one of his tricks, it’s too late, he has handed over the girl to the Macedonian officer’s man, who was bearing his letter and token, there’s absolutely no way anything can go wrong.

Enter Harpax

Oops. At which point the real Macedonian emissary, Harpax, arrives. He gives a little speech about how the good servant is always thinking of his master’s best interests, even if he’s not physically there, giving orders. This is interesting because it’s almost identical to the speech on the same subject given by Messenio in Menaechmi – the point being it’s obviously a stock sentiment given to the Good Slave in this kind of play.

Anyway, he waited at the inn for the fellow claiming to be Ballio’s steward (in reality Pseudolus) to come and get him, but he never showed up so here he is, taking the initiative in carrying out his master’s orders.

So comic misunderstanding. At first Ballio sees a stranger approaching and tells Simo here’s business for his whorehouse. He’ll take his money and be glad. But then Harpax declares his is the emissary of the Macedonian and has the money for the girl. At which point, instead of realising he’s been diddled, Ballio chats aside to Simo and declares that this must be a fake soldier put up to it by that rascal Pseudolus – well, he won’t fool old Ballio!

Ballio and Simo proceed to take the mickey out of Harpax, grabbing his cloak and hat and sword, and saying his officer must have rescued him from prison and insinuating that he’s gay and generally ragging him under the assumption that he’s a fake. But, inevitably, they begin to falter as Harpax sticks to his story and goes on to say he gave his master’s letter and token to a slave from this very house, one Syrus. Then Ballio asks Harpax for a description of this ‘Syrus’ and Harpax describes Pseudolus to a t. It’s interesting to learn what Pseudolus is meant to look like:

HARPAX: Ginger hair, fat belly, thick legs, dark skin, big head, sharp eyes, red face and very large feet. (p.263)

With horror Harpax realises what’s happened. Pseudolus has had him after all. It was the earlier Harpax who was fake, this is the real one. Not only that but Harpax now insists on having his 2,000 drachmas back and Simo chips in, insisting on Ballio coughing up the 2,000 drachmas he confidently bet him 5 minutes earlier.

Ballio realises he is lost. Harpax insists on marching him off to the bank to collect his 2,000 drachmas. Ballio just has time for an aside to the audience, bleakly saying ‘birthday’? This is more like his death day!

Simo soliloquises

Left alone onstage Simo tells us he’s going to spring a surprise on Pseudolus, but not the kind of one you usually get in comedies like this, a surprise of whips and chains. No, he is full of admiration at the canny trick Pseudolus has pulled off, putting Odysseus’s trick which won the war at Troy in the shade. No, he’s going to get the 2,000 drachmas he wagered him and have it read to hand over next time they meet.

Drunk Pseudolus

And rather than any more dramatic encounters or revelations or dialogue, the play ends with Pseudolus staggering onstage, plastered, and drunkenly telling the audience what a fabulous feast they’re having inside. Calidorus has gotten married to Phoenicium, everyone’s drinking and singing at the wedding feast – and Pseudolus does a drunken little dance onstage.

Anyway, drunk though he is, he’s come to see his old master i.e. Simo, and now knocks on his door. Simo opens the door prepared to be gracious but Pseudolus, very drunk, embraces him and burps in his face. When Simo hands him the big sack of silver coins he owes him, Pseudolus at first plans to drag Simo through the streets, as in a victory triumph, humiliating him. But Simo gets down on his knees and begs not to be humiliated and so Pseudolus, in a lazy drunken way, says: Of course, not, can’t have that can we? And instead makes it clear he’s inviting the old ‘master’ to the wedding feast of his son.

At which point they stop and ask themselves, as they always do in Plautus’s plays – what about the audience, are you going to invite them? And, as usual, one of them points out there are far too many to invite to a little house, so the next best thing – would they kindly applaud?

Thoughts

Not at all ‘boy meets girl’ comedy, is it? ‘Clever slave outwits pimp’ doesn’t have quite the same ring, but that’s what this is.

Not only is it not a ‘boy meets girl’ story but the girl in question – I wanted to write ‘doesn’t even appear’ but she does appear, and she does at least have a name, unlike the ‘wife’ and ‘father’ in Menaechmi who remain unnamed cyphers. But it’s the briefest of appearances, walking once across the stage as she’s taken away by Simia-posing-as-Harpax.

I’ve pointed out that most of the characters in Plautus plays are pawns in the machinations of the plot, but it’s hard to deny that the female characters are very often the pawniest of the pawns.

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Pot of Gold and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1965.

Related link

Roman reviews

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by Simon on March 30, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Play, Slavery, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on March 30, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/30/pseudolus-plautus/

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