Juvenal Satires

Juvenal wrote just 16 satires but they are considered among the best and most influential in Western literature. Tackling them now, for the first time, I discover that his poems are considerably more strange, gnarly and uneven than that reputation suggests, and also that the man himself is something of a mystery.

Potted biography

Decimus Junius Juvenal was probably born around 55 AD, the son of a well-off freedman who had settled in Aquinum near Monte Cassino, 80 miles south-east of Rome. According to two stone inscriptions found in the area, in 78 a ‘Junius Juvenal’ was appointed commander of a cohort and served in Britain under Julius Agricola (father-in-law of Tacitus the historian). The supposition is that this is the same Juvenal as our author, but scholars disagree. The satires contain a number of surprisingly detailed references to life in Britain which seem to reinforce this view, but…Nothing conclusive. (Introduction, pages 16 to 18)

The same inscription describes the return of this Junius Juvenal to Rome in 80, when he was made a priest of the deified Vespasian. A year later, in 81, Domitian became emperor and it is likely that Juvenal cultivated his position in society, writing verses. But in 93 a lampoon he’d written caused offence and he was exiled to Egypt (at least that’s what some scholars believe; Introduction p.18 to 20).

After Domitian’s assassination in 96, it seems that he was allowed back to Rome. Another decade passed and then, in 110-112 he published his first book of satires, containing satires 1 to 5.

  • Book 2 (published around 116 AD) consists of the long sixth satire against women.
  • Book 3 (around 120) consists of satires 7 to 9.
  • Book 4 (around 124) contains satires 10, 11, 12.
  • Book 5 (around 130) contains satires 13 to 16.

The dates of these publications are deduced from what seem to be contemporary references in some of the poems and are themselves the subject of fierce debate.

Unlike the satires of his predecessors in the genre, Horace and Statius, Juvenal’s satires contain no autobiographical information. They are hard, external, objective.

Contemporary references to Juvenal are few and far between. Martial’s epigrams contain three references to a ‘Juvenal’, the longest being epigram 18 in book 12 where Martial writes to someone named Juvenal, as to an old friend, gloating that while his friend is still living in noisy, stinky Rome, he (Martial) has retired to a beautifully quiet farm back in his native Spain. Scholars assume this is the same Juvenal, though there is no proof beyond the text itself.

The earliest satires are bitter and angry. In the later ones a change of tone is noticeable. Scholars assume this is because he went from being an utterly penniless poet, dependent on the good will of patrons handing out dinner invitations or a small portula or ‘dole’, to somehow acquiring a moderate ‘competency’. We learn from these later poems that he owned a small farm at Tivoli (satire 11) and a house in Rome where he entertained modestly. How did he acquire these? Did a grateful emperor gift them to him, as Augustus gave Horace a farm and a pension? We don’t know.

Scholars estimate that books 4 and 5 appeared in 123-5 and 128-30. It is likely that he survived the emperor Hadrian to die around 140, having lived a very long life. (Green refers to him as ‘the bitter old man from Aquinum’, p.10).

Soon after his death sometime in the late 130s, Juvenal’s work disappears and isn’t mentioned by anyone until the 4th century when he begins to be cited by Christian writers. Lactantius established the tradition of regarding Juvenal as a pagan moralist with a gift for pithy phrases, whose scathing contempt for corrupt pagan and secular society could be usefully quoted in order to contrast with the high-minded moral behaviour of the Christian believer – a tradition which was to hold true for the next 1,500 years.

Peter Green’s introduction

If you’ve read my notes on Peter Green’s translations of Ovid you’ll know that I’m a big fan of his. Born in 1924, Green is still alive, a British classical scholar and novelist who’s had a long and lively career, latterly teaching in America. Green’s translations of Ovid are characterised by a) long, chatty, informative, opinionated notes and b) rangy, freeflowing, stylish translations. Same here.

At 320 pages long, the Penguin edition of the Green translation feels like a bumper volume. This is because, with characteristic discursiveness, it starts with a 54-page introduction, which summarises all scholarly knowledge about, and interpretations of, the satires. And then each of the satires are immediately followed by 6, 7 or 8 pages of interesting, chatty notes.

I found Green’s introduction fascinating, as usual. He develops a wonderfully deep, complex and rewarding interpretation of Juvenal and first century Rome. It all starts with an explanation of the economic, social and cultural outlook of the rentier class.

Rentier ideology

At its most basic a rentier is ‘a person living on income from property or investments’. In our day and age these are most closely associated with the large number of unloved buy-to-let landlords. In ancient Rome the class system went, from the top:

  1. the emperor, his family and circle
  2. the senatorial class and their family and clan relatives
  3. beneath them sat the eques, the equestrian or knightly class

To belong to the senatorial class required a net worth of at least a million sesterces. To belong to the equestrian order required at least 400,000 sesterces.

Beneath these or attached to them, was the class Juvenal belonged to – educated, from a reputable family with maybe roots in the regional administrative class, who had come to Rome, rejected a career in the administration or the law courts, preferred to live by their wits, often taking advantage of the extensive networks of patrons and clients. Both Martial and Juvenal appear to have chosen to live like this. They weren’t rentiers in the strict sense of living off ‘income from property or investments’; but they were rentiers in the sense of not working for a living, not having a profession or trade or position in the administration.

Thus their livelihood depended on the existing framework of society remaining the same. Their income, clothes, property etc , all derived from finding wealthy patrons from the classes above them who endorsed the old Roman value and lived up to aristocratic notions of noblesse oblige i.e. with great wealth and position comes the responsibility to look after men of merit who have fallen on bad luck or don’t share your advantages i.e. supporting scroungers like Martial and Juvenal.

What Juvenal’s satires promote, or sometimes clamour for, is the continuation of the old Roman social structures and the endurance of the good old Roman (republican) virtues.

His approach to any social problem is, basically, one of static conservatism. (Introduction, p.23)

Green sums up the characteristic beliefs of the rentier class as:

  • lofty contempt for trade and ignorance of business
  • indifference to practical skills
  • intense political conservatism, with a corresponding fear of change or revolution
  • complete ignorance of the economic realities underpinning his existence
  • a tendency, therefore, to see all social problems in over-simplified moral terms (p.26)

The rentier believes that, because they are ‘good’ and uphold the ‘old values’ and traditional religion and so on, that they deserve to be rewarded with the old privileges and perks. They cannot process the basic reality of life that just being good, won’t make you rich.

And so the enemy of this entire worldview, of all its traditional values and relationships, is change, and especially economic change.

For in the century leading up to Juvenal’s time, Rome had not only transitioned from being a republic to becoming a full-blown empire but had also undergone sweeping economic changes. The old family farm, which was already a nostalgic fantasy in the time of Virgil and Horace, had long been obliterated by vast latifundia worked by huge gangs of shackled slaves.

But far more importantly, there had arisen an ever-changing and ever-growing class of entrepreneurs, businessmen, merchants, loan sharks, import-export buffs, hustlers and innovators who swarmed through the capital city, the regions and provinces. Sustained peace (apart from the disruption of the bad year, 69) had brought undreamed of wealth. Money, affluence, luxury was no longer restricted to the emperor, his family and the better-off senatorial classes, but had helped to create large numbers of nouveaux-riches. And these people and their obsession with money, money, money seemed to have infiltrated every aspect of Roman society.

It is this which incenses Juvenal and drives him to paroxysms of bile. He wants social relations in Rome to stay the same, ideally to revert to what they were in the fabled Golden Age, before money ruined everything. It is these floods of unprincipled money and the luxury, corruption and loss of traditional values which they bring in their wake, which obsess Juvenal. It expresses itself in different ways:

Money

Money is the root of all evil. It corrupts all social relationships.

Patron and client

Applied to Juvenal’s specific social position as an educated dinner-scrounger, parasite and hanger-on, he is incensed that the Grand and Noble Tradition of patron and client, which he likes to think applied some time back in the Golden Age, has now been corrupted and brought low by a flood of unworthy parasites among the clients, and the loss of all noble and aristocratic feeling among the patrons.

One of his recurring targets is the decadent aristocrat who has betrayed the upper-class code, whose money-mad, sexually profligate behaviour – adultery, gay sex, appearing on stage or in the gladiatorial arena – undermines all the old values Juvenal believes in.

Business

Green makes the excellent point that very often writers who find themselves in this position, dependent on charity from patrons, don’t understand how money is actually made. They’ve never run a business, let alone an international import-export business, so have only the vaguest sense of what qualities of character and responsibility and decision-making are required. This explains why Juvenal’s portraits of the nouveaux riches are so spiteful but also generalised. Somehow these ghastly people have become filthy rich and he just doesn’t understand how. With no understanding of the effort involved, of the changes in the Mediterranean economy or transport and storage or markets which are involved, all Juvenal has to resort to is abuse. The most hurtful spiteful sort of abuse is to attack someone’s sex life.

Sex

The thought of other people having sex is, for many, either disgusting or hilarious. Sex has always been an easy target for satirists. Conservatives like Juvenal, concentrate all their disgust at the wider ‘collapse of traditional values’ onto revulsion at any form of sex which doesn’t conform to traditional values (the missionary position between a married heterosexual couple). Hence the astonishing vituperation levelled at the vast orgy of deviant sex which Juvenal thinks Rome has become. He singles out a) deviant sex practiced by straight people, such as fellatio and cunnilingus; b) homosexual sex and in particular the stories of men and boys getting married: the way these couples (allegedly) dress up in the traditional garb of bride and groom, use the same priests reciting the traditional wedding ceremony etc, drives him to paroxysms of fury.

As so often with angry men, Juvenal’s vituperation is especially focused on the sexual behaviour of women, and indeed Book 2 consists of just one satire, the unusually long sixth satire against women. As Green points out, the focus of Juvenal’s fury is not women in general but aristocratic women for falling so far short of the noble values they should be upholding. What drives Juvenal mad is that their sexual liaisons are with men from the lower classes such as gladiators or actors. He contrasts their irresponsible promiscuity with the behaviour of women of lower classes who actually bear children instead of having endless abortions, and would never dream of performing on the stage or in the arena. There is a great deal of misogyny in the sixth satire but Green suggests that it is driven, like all his other anger, not quite by woman-hating alone but by the failure to preserve traditional values.

Immigrants

As mentioned several times, Rome saw an ‘invasion’ of new money and entrepreneurial rich. What gets Juvenal’s goat is how many of them are foreigners, bloody foreigners, coming over here, buying up our grand old houses, buying their way into the equestrian class, even running for public office, bringing their bloody foreign religions. A virulent strain of xenophobia runs alongside all Juvenal’s other rages and hates, in particular hatred of Egyptians who he particularly loathes. A recurrent hate figure is Crispinus (‘that Delta-bred house slave’, p.66) who, despite originating as a fish-hawker from Egypt, had risen to become commander of the Praetorian Guard!

Freedmen

Alongside loathing of the newly rich and foreigners goes hatred of freedmen, jumped-up social climbers who come from slave families or who were once slaves themselves! My God! What is the city coming to when ex-slaves rise to not only swanky houses on Rome’s grandest hills, but even become advisers to emperors (as Claudius, reigned 41 to 54, had notoriously let state affairs be run by a small coterie of freedmen.) Unhampered by the dignified self-restraint and lofty morality of the old Romans, these base-born parvenus often acquired immense fortunes and thrust themselves into positions of great political power.

This, of course, is precisely the type who Petronius nails with his extended description of the grossly luxurious dinner party of the upstart arriviste Trimalchio, in his Satyricon.

It was not just economic and social power: Juvenal raged against the fact that he and his shabby-genteel friends were kept out of the seats reserved for Knights at the theatre and the games, while the same seats were filled with the sons of pimps, auctioneers and gladiators! They were everywhere, taking over everything! What could any decent person do, he argues in satire 1, except write bilious anathemas of these crooks and careerists and corrupters?

Bad literature

I find it the most predictable and least amusing thread in the satires, but it is a recurring theme that literature itself has been debauched by the collapse of these values. Somehow the old world of mythology, ancient myths and legends, all the twee genres of pastoral and idyll which accompanied them, none of these are appropriate for the current moronic inferno which faces the poet.

All this is entertainingly expressed in Satire 1 which is a justification of his approach i.e. rejecting all those knackered old mythological tropes and forms (idyll, epic, what-have-you) because these are all forms of escapism, in order to write blistering broadsides against the actual real world which he saw all around him.

In other words, wherever he looked, from the details of his own day-to-day livelihood to the counsels of the highest in the land, to the private lives of pretty much every citizen of note, Juvenal was aghast that a tide of money and corruption had tainted every aspect of Roman society, destroying the old aristocratic values, undermining traditional religion, destroying family values, turning the place into an Oriental bazaar run by foreigners who have imported their filthy decadent sexual practices.

Solutions?

Do Juvenal’s 16 satires offer a solution or alternative to this sorry state of affairs? Of course not. The satirist’s job is to flay abuses not fix them. Insofar as a solution is implied by the 16 satires, it is a return to traditional old Roman values and virtues. But as with so much satire, the pleasure comes not from hopes of solutions and improvements, but from sharing the sadistic glee of the demolition. He is a caricaturist, creating a rogues’ gallery of outrageous portraits.

Juvenal does not work out a coherent critique of institutions or individuals: he simply hangs a series of moral portraits on the wall and forces us to look at them. (p.43)

Philosophy

In a similar vein, Green points out that, at moments the poems appear briefly to espouse formulas from one or other of the three main philosophies popular in Rome at the time (Stoicism, Epicureanism and Cynicism), but never enough make you think he understands or cares for them. Generally they’re referred to in order to mock and ridicule their practitioners, as in the extended passage in Satire 3 which accepts the conventional view that most philosophers are homosexual and then exaggerates this idea for comic effect.

An unstructured torrent of bile

Juvenal’s lack of any theory of society or economics, any understanding of business, his lack of any coherent philosophical framework, all these go to explain the lack of structure which critics have always lamented in the satires.

Instead of coherent argument, Juvenal is notorious for bombarding the reader with powerful, vitriolic, scabrous images in paragraphs or couplets which often bear little relation to each other. Each satire has a broad subject but, within it, Juvenal’s ‘thought’ jumps all over the place. Juvenal:

picked a theme and then proceeded to drive it home into his reader’s mind by a vivid and often haphazard accumulation of examples. He is full of abrupt jumps…and splendidly irrelevant digressions. (p.44)

He obtains his effects by the piling up of visual images, paradoxical juxtapositions rather than step-by-step development. (p.46)

A principle of random selection at work, a train of thought which proceeds from one enticing image to another like a man leaping from tussock to tussock across a bog. (p.47)

Green points out that, in addition, although we have many manuscripts of the satires, all of them contain textual problems and issues – at some points there appear to be gaps in the logic of sentences or paragraphs, some passages or lines seem to be in the wrong place.

This has made Juvenal’s satires, over the centuries, a happy hunting ground for generations of editors, who have freely cut and pasted lines and passages from where they sit in the manuscript to other places where editors think they make more sense. Editors have even made up sentences to connect two passages which contain abrupt jumps. Green in his introduction laments that this is so, but himself does it quite freely, with interesting notes explaining each of his edits.

The point is that the problematic nature of all the manuscripts only exacerbate the issue which was always there, which is that Juvenal’s poems lack the kind of logical discursive narrative you find (up to a point) in ‘architectonic’ poets such as Horace or Ovid. Instead they generally consist of illogical but fantastically angry, vivid bombardments of bile and imagery.

The best attitude in a reader, then, is not to look for cool, considered argument, which simply isn’t there; it’s to sit back and enjoy the fireworks. The pleasure is in watching a clever, learnèd man, with advanced skills in writing verse, exploding with anger and bile.

Juvenal’s style

Green mentions ‘Juvenal’s technical virtuosity; his subtle control of rhythm and sound effects, his dense, hard, verbal brilliance.’ (p.7) According to Green few Roman poets can equal his absolute control over the pace, tone and texture of a hexameter, and no translator can hope to capture the condensed force of Juvenal’s enjambed hexameters, his skilful rhythmic variations, his dazzling displays of alliteration and assonance and onomatopoeia (p.59).

He goes on to elaborate that Juvenal’s use of Latin was ‘distilled, refined, crystallised.’ Of the 4,790 words used in the satires now fewer than 2,130 occur here once only and nowhere else. His entire lifetime’s work amounts to barely 4,000 lines. Rarely has a writer’s oeuvre had less spare fat. This helps to explain the number of Juvenal’s pithy phrases which went on to become well-known Latin tags:

  • quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (satire 6) = ‘who will guard the guards themselves?’, also translated as ‘who watches the watchers?’. The original context dealt with ensuring marital fidelity by setting watchers to guard an unfaithful wife, but the phrase is now used to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power
  • panem et circenses (satire 10) = ‘bread and circuses’, meaning to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or policy but by diversion, distraction, by satisfying the basest requirements of a population
  • mens sana in corpore sano (satire 10) = ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’, the phrase is now widely used in sporting and educational contexts to express that physical exercise is an important part of mental and psychological well-being

The 16 satires

Book 1

Satire 1: A justification for satire (171 lines)

He’s sick to death of rubbish poets declaiming the same exhausted stories about old mythology. He too has cranked out suasoria in the school of rhetoric. Why is he writing satire in the mode of old Lucilius? With Rome overrun by money and vulgarity, what else is there to do? Then gives a long list of types of social climber, frauds, embezzlers, men who rise by screwing rich old women, or pimp out their own wives, forgers carried round in litters, chiselling advocates, sneaky informers, the young buck who squandered his inheritance on horses, the lowly barber who used to shave Juvenal but is now as rich as any aristocrat, the distinguished old lady who’s an expert in poisoning. Everyone praises honesty, but it’s crime that pays.

Why, then, it is harder not to write satires, for who
Can endure this monstrous city and swallow his wrath?

Since the days of the flood has there ever been
Such a rich crop of vices? When has the purse
Of greed yawned wider?…Today every vice
Has reached its ruinous zenith…

Though talent be wanting, yet
Indignation will drive me to verse, such as I or any scribbler
May still command. All human endeavours, men’s prayers,
Fears, angers, pleasures, joys and pursuits, these make
The mixed mash of my verse.

An extended lament on the corruption of the relationship of patron and client, and all the thrusting crooks who now join the morning scrum outside a patron’s house for the ‘dole’, including many who are actually wealthy, but still scrounge for scraps. Describes the typical day of a client i.e. hanger-on, trudging round Rome after their patron, getting hot and sweaty and hungry. He rages against the greedy patron who feeds his cadgers scraps while he gorges on roast boar and peacock. One day he’ll have a heart attack but nobody will care.

He ends by saying Lucilius in his day felt confident of shared civil values to name the guilty men; in Juvenal’s day, naming an imperial favourite or anyone with pull could end you up as a burning torch illuminating the games. Better not name names, better restrict himself to using only the names of the dead, safer that way.

Satire 2: Against homosexuals and particularly gay marriage (170 lines)

The hypocrisy of bogus moralists, people who quote the great philosophers, who fill their halls with busts of the great thinkers, but don’t understand a word. Most philosophers are effete fairies. He prefers the eunuch priest of the Mother goddess, at least he’s open about it. Just recently Domitian was reviving laws about public morality while all the time tupping his niece; he forced her to have an abortion which killed her.

He has a courtesan address one such manicured, perfumed moralist for his hypocrisy, going on to say men are far worse than women; women wouldn’t dream of licking each other’s parts; accuses men of pleasuring their boy lovers ‘both ways’. She laments how most women, when they marry, have to take second place to a favoured boy or freedman.

He describes the scandalous advocate who prosecuted a case before the public wearing see-through chiffon, ‘a walking transparency’. It’s a slippery slope which leads to involvement in the secret rites of the Mother Goddess, for men only, who wear elaborate make-up, wear women’s clothing, use women’s oaths and ‘shrill, affected voices’. Throws in an insulting comparison to ‘that fag of an emperor, Otho’ who fussed over his armour in front of a mirror.

What about the young heir who went through a wedding ceremony with a trumpeter? Or the once-honourable priest of Mars who dresses up in ‘bridal frills’.

O Father of our city,
What brought your simple shepherd people to such a pitch
Of blasphemous perversion?

When men marry men why doesn’t great Mars intervene? What’s the point of worshipping him if he lets such things happen? Mind you, they can’t have children, so can’t preserve the family name (and, Juvenal appears to suggest, do try magic remedies so that the passive homosexual can get pregnant. Can that possibly be true, can ancient Romans have really thought a man can get pregnant?)

Juvenal goes on that what’s worse than holding a wedding ceremony to marry another man was that this blue-blooded aristocrat then took up a trident and net to fight in gladiatorial games. This really seems to be the most outrageous blasphemy of all, to Juvenal.

A digression to claim that nobody in Rome now believes in the ancient religion, Hades, Charon the ferryman and all that. But if they did wouldn’t the noble dead, fallen in so many battles to make Rome great, be scandalised to welcome such a degenerate aristocrat into their midst? Wouldn’t Hades itself need to be purified?

Yes, even among the dead Rome stands dishonoured.

Even the barbarians at Rome’s borders are not so debauched; although if we bring them as prisoners to Rome, they soon learn our decadent, effeminate ways and, when released, take our corruption back to their native lands.

Satire 3: Unbricius’ monologue on leaving Rome (322 lines)

His friend Umbricius is leaving Rome to go and live in Cumae. He’s jealous. He gives Umbricius a long speech in which he says he leaves Rome to fraudulent developers, astrologers, will-fixers, magicians, the go-betweens of adulterous lovers, corrupt governors, conspirators. Above all he hates Greeks, actually Syrians with their awful language, flutes and tambourines and whores. Sly slick dexterous Greeks from the islands can turn their hand to anything. These are the people who now wear the purple, precede him at dinner parties, officiate at manumissions. They can blag anyone, which explains why they’re such great actors, especially in women’s roles. Mind you, no woman is safe from a Greek man in the house, ‘he’ll cheerfully lay his best friend’s grandmother.’

This morphs into the misery of the client or hanger-on to dismissive rich men. He describes being kicked out of a prime seat at the theatre to make way for a pimp’s son, an auctioneer’s offspring or the son of a gladiator because they have more money. A plain white cloak is fine for the provinces, but here in Rome we must beggar ourselves to keep up with the latest decadent fashions.

And the misery of living in apartment blocks which are falling down or liable to fire at any moment. (Umbricius implies he lives on the third floor, as Martial does in one of his epigrams.) If your block goes up you lose everything, compared to the rich man; if his house burns down he is flooded with presents and financial aid to rebuild it from clients and flatterers and connections.

No, Umbricius advises to buy the freehold on a nice place in the country rather than a rented hovel in Rome. The worst of it is the noise at night from all the wagons wending through the winding alleyways. Insomnia’s causes more deaths among Roman invalids than any other cause. He gives a vivid description of the muddy, jostling misery of trying to get through Rome’s packed streets without being involved in some gruesome accident.

Walking at night is even worse, with the risk of being brained by a falling roof tile or drenched in slops chucked out the window by a housewife. And then the possibility of being beaten up by some bored, drunk bully. Or the burglars. Or some ‘street apache’ who’ll end your life with a knife.

So farewell Rome, he begs the author won’t forget him and, when he goes back to his home town for a break, will invite him round to celebrate a country festival.

Satire 4: A mock epic of the turbot (154 lines)

Starts off by ridiculing Crispinus for buying a red mullet for the ludicrous price of 60 gold pieces. Then morphs into a mock epic celebrating a fisherman in the Adriatic who catches an enormous giant turbot and carries it all the way to Rome to present to the emperor. This 100 lines of mock epic poetry contains a mock invocation to the Muses, extended epic similes etc. Then – and this appears to be the real point of the poem – it turns into a list of the emperor Domitian’s privy councillors, each one a crook or sadist or nark or creep.

Satire 5: Trebius the dinner-cadger (173 lines)

Is dinner worth every insult which you pay for it?

In the miserable figure of Trebius Juvenal lists the humiliations the ‘client’ must undergo in order to wain a grudging, poor quality ‘dinner’ from his patron (here called Virro), at which he will be offered the worst wine, rocky bread and humiliated by sneering slaves, served half an egg with boiled cabbage while the patron eats a huge crayfish with asparagus garnish.

Now if you had money, if you got yourself promoted to the Equestrian Order, then at a stroke you’d become Virro’s best friend and be lavished with the finest food. As it is, he serves you the worst of everything out of spite, to amuse himself. He wants to reduce you to tears of anger and frustration.

Don’t fool yourself that you are his ‘friend’. There is none of the honour of the old Republican relationship of patron and client. He simply wants to reduce his clients to the level of a buffoon, the stupidus of Roman pantomime who has his head shaved and is always being kicked or slapped by his smarter colleagues. He wants to make you an abject punchbag.

Book 2

Satire 6: Don’t marry (661 lines)

Postumus, are you really taking a wife?
You used to be sane…

Wouldn’t it be quicker to commit suicide by jumping out of a high building or off a bridge? Surely boys are better: at least they don’t nag you during sex or demand endless gifts or criticise your lack of passion.

Juvenal gives a funny account of the Golden Age, when humans lived in cave and women were hairier than their menfolk, their big breasts giving suck to tough babies. But long ago Chastity withdrew to heaven and now infidelity and adultery are well-established traditions.

Fidelity in a woman! It’s be easier to persuade her to have an eye out than keep faithful to one man! Posh women are mad for actors and entertainers. If he marries his wife will make some flute player or guitarist or gladiator father to his children.

He profiles Eppia the senator’s wife who ran off to Egypt with a gladiator, abandoning her children and her country. Then a searing portrait of Messalina, the nymphomaniac wife of Claudius, who snuck off to a brothel where, wearing a blonde wig and gilded nipples, she let herself be fucked by all-comers, all night long. A profile of Bibula who has her husband in thrall and goes on monster shopping sprees which morphs into a dig at Queen Berenice who lived for many years in an incestuous union with her brother, Agrippa of Judaea.

What point a beautiful wife if she is proud and haughty. Juvenal cites Niobe who was so vain she called down disaster on herself and her 12 children.

Modern girls doll themselves up like the bloody Greeks and express themselves with Greek language which (apparently) reeks of the bedroom.

Our provincial dollies ape Athenian fashion, it’s smart
To chatter away in Greek – though what should make them blush
Is their slipshod Latin. All their emotions – fear,
Anger, happiness, anxiety, every inmost
Secret thought – find expression in Greek, they even
Make love Greek-style.

It may be alright for schoolgirls to act this way, but Roman women in their eighties!

A flurry of sexist stereotypes: Women want money money money. They’ll take control of household spending, veto your business plans, control your friendships. She’ll force you to include her lover’s in your will.

Yet another shocking insight into Roman’s and their slaves when it’s played for laughs that a husband will order ‘crucify that slave’ and Juvenal paints it as typically feminine of a wife to want to know why, what the slave has done, before they’re hustled off to be crucified.

And the mother-in-law! She’ll egg her daughter on to every sin, adultery, spending all your money. Women are behind virtually all law suits, and insist on defending or prosecuting. And what about women athletes! And women fencers! And women who want to fight in the ring, ‘helmeted hoydens’, gladiatresses!

But bed is the place where wives are at their worst, endlessly bitching, about your boyfriends or imaginary mistresses, all the time hiding letters from her lover or making plans to visit her mother as an excuse to meet her lover. Bursting into tears if you accuse her, but quick to insist it was always an open marriage if you find her out.

What triggered all this corruption? In the good old days of relative poverty wives were too busy working, cooking, cleaning, darning to play the whore. All this wickedness is the result of a ‘too-long peace’. The world Rome conquered takes its revenge by afflicting Rome with Luxury, from which all vices spring, money – filthy lucre – leading to ‘shameless self-indulgence’.

He accuses religious festivals: the Floralia which celebrates fertility with phallus images and prostitutes; the worship of Venus; the mysteries of the Great Goddess whose frenzied worship makes women wet between the thighs, get drunk, bump and grind – then they call in the slaves to fuck them and if there aren’t any slaves, a donkey will do. The shrine of Isis might as well be called the brothel of Isis.

Gladiator trainers keep the gay ones segregated from the straight, but in a rich woman’s house queers are encouraged, man with kohl-ringed eyes, see-though clothes and hairnets. Mind you, half of them turn out to be straight after all, and well able to give your wife a good stuffing.

Juvenal accuses a specific fag of being a straight man in disguise. His friends tell him it’s best to lock up a wife and bar the doors. And here comes one of Juvenile’s most famous quotes. Yes, by all means lock up your wife and put a guard on the doors but will keep guard on the guards? ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ They, also, will be bribed by your whore wife to turn the other eye when her lover calls. Or will screw her themselves.

He profiles a generic aristocratic woman, Ogulna, who’s mad about the games and attends with a big expensive entourage, example of women who spend everything you have then get you into debt.

Then the wives who love eunuchs, if they’ve been neutered the right way they still can get erections and no worries about abortions! Especially the big bull black ones!

Women will lavish your money on music, musicians and musical instruments. The temples are packed with woman asking the gods to favour this or that performer or actor or gladiator or whatnot.

But they’re not as bad as the flat-chested busybody, who runs round town, buttonholing men, interrupting their conversations, an expert on every subject under the sun. overflowing with gossip about politics or military campaigns. Then goes off to the baths after dark, works out with weights, has a massage from an expert who oils her and makes her climax. Making her guests wait till she arrives late and proceeds to drink gallons on an empty stomach then spew it up all over the dining room tiles.

Worse is the bluestocking who holds forth about literature at dinner, comparing Virgil and Homer. God how he hates a female pedant and grammarian, always correcting your speech, ‘a husband should be allowed his solecisms in peace’.

Juvenal gives a description of the elaborate process of an upper class woman putting her make-up on, looking ridiculous in face-pack and thick creams at home, reserving her ugliness for her husband. The kind of woman who has her wool-maid or cosmetician or litter bearers flogged till they bleed while she fusses about her eye make-up or the hem of a gown.

God, the number of helpers and assistants required just to do her hair till it stands up like a ridiculous pomade.

Then a passage ridiculing the absurd requirements of foreign religious cults and superstitions, Bellona, Cybele, requiring total immersion in the Tiber, crawling across the field of Mars on your hands and knees, going a pilgrimage to Egypt. Or admires the shaven-headed devotees of the dog god Anubis who run through the streets wailing for dead Osiris. Or a palsied Jewess arrives ready to interpret the secret laws of Jerusalem.

Then the fortune tellers, Armenians and Syrians, or the Chaldean astrologers, all knowing they’ll get a credulous hearing from the rich woman of the house, the kind of woman who won’t make any decision, who won’t accompany or agree with her husband unless her astrologer says it’s written in the starts, or the augur tells her it’s written in the entrails of some chicken or pigeon or puppy.

Poor women go to the races to consult palmists or phrenologists, but at least they actually bear children, keep their pregnancies to full term. Not like rich women with their drugs to be made sterile or prompt abortions. Well, it could be worse, you could find yourself ‘father’ to a black child, obviously not yours, obviously fathered by a slave or gladiator.

If you start forgetting things, chances are you’re being poisoned by your wife. After all, emperors’ wives have poisoned their husbands and so set an example to us all! Beware step-mothers, scheming to kill the biological son and promote their boy. He cites the example of Pontia, daughter of Petronius, who is said to have poisoned her own two sons.

He doesn’t mind the old myths about women who murdered in a white hot frenzy; what he loathes is modern matrons who cold-bloodedly scheme to do away with husbands or stepsons and care about their lives less than they do about their lapdogs.

Book 3

Satire 7: The misery of a writer’s, but especially a teacher’s, life (243 lines)

Modern poets in Juvenal’s day would make a better living opening a bakery or becoming an auctioneer. The emperor (probably Hadrian who came to power in 118) has let it be known he’s looking for poets to patronise, but the run-of-the-mill writer looking for a decent patron, forget it! The modern patron begrudges funding even a small recital in an out of town hall. After all, he’s probably a poet himself and ranks his work higher than yours!

It’s a very contrast between the lofty diction the modern poet aspires to and the sordid reality of his own life, forced to pawn his coat and dishes for his next meal. Horace on the old days, and Lucan more recently, could write magnificent verse because they weren’t hungry.

He gives an interesting sketch of the poet Publius Papinius Statius and how popular his public recitals were of his great epic, the Thebaid, reeled off in his mellifluous voice. But even has to make a living by flogging libretti to the head of the ballet company. Because:

Today the age
Of the private patron is over; Maecenas and co.
Have no successors.

Does the historian make any more, slaving away in his library, covering thousands of pages? No.

What about lawyers, huffing and puffing and promoting their skills? Look closely and you’ll see a hundred lawyers make less than one successful jockey. He profiles an aristocratic advocate, Tongilus, ‘such a bore at the baths’, who is carried about in a litter by 8 stout Thracian slaves. For what’s valued in a court of law is a dirty great ring, flash clothes and a bevy of retainers. Eloquence is dead. Juries associate justice with a flashy appearance. Cicero wouldn’t stand a chance.

What about teachers of rhetoric, wasting their lives getting boys to rehash tired old topics in stale old catchphrases. Better to drop logic and rhetoric and become a singer, they get paid a fortune.

Juvenal profiles a typical nouveau riche building private baths and a cloister to ride his pampered horses round and a banqueting hall with the best marble and ready to cough up for a first class chef and a butler. But a teacher of rhetoric for his son? Here’s a tenner, take it or leave it.

Really it’s down to luck or Fortune as the ancients called her, ‘the miraculous occult forces of Fate’. Luck makes a first class speaker or javelin thrower, if Fortune favours you can rise from teacher to consul.

In the olden days teachers were respected, even Achilles still feared the rod of his tutor Chiron as he turned man; but nowadays pupils are likely to beat up their teachers who go in fear. God, why be a teacher stuck in some hell-hole cellar before dawn, working by the light of filthy oil lamps, trying to knock sense into pupils who answer back, and all for a pittance, from which you have to give a cut to the boy’s attendant to make sure he even attends lessons?

And if the pupils are awful, what about the parents? Expecting each teacher to be a 100% expert in all knowledge, buttonholing him on the way to the baths and firing off all kinds of impossible questions. All for a pittance which, nine times out of ten, you’ll have to go to court for just to get paid.

Satire 8: Family trees and ‘nobility’ are worth nothing next to personal virtue (275 lines)

What good are family trees?

What good is tracing your family back through venerable ancestors if your own life is a public disgrace?

You may line your whole hall with waxen busts, but virtue,
And virtue alone, remains the one true nobility.

And:

Prove that your life
Is stainless, that you always abide by what is just
In word and deed – and then I’ll acknowledge your noble status.

Unlike the other satires which are often strings of abuse and comic caricatures, this one has a thread of argument and logic and is addressed to a named individual, Ponticus who is depicted as preening himself on his ‘fine breeding’..

Juvenal claims nobility is as nobility does. A racehorse may come from the noblest ancestry imaginable but if it doesn’t win races it’s pensioned off to work a mill-wheel. Just so, claiming respect for having been born to a particular family is ludicrous. Instead, show us one good deed in order to merit our respect.

Lots of the most useful work in the empire, from soldiers on the frontier to the really effective lawyers in the city, are done by ‘commoners’. He is surprisingly programmatic and non-ironic in listing the virtues:

  • be a good soldier
  • be a faithful guardian
  • be an honest witness in law cases
  • be a good governor:
    • set a limit on your greed and pity the destitute locals
    • have staff that are upright and honest (not some corrupt long-haired catamite)
    • have a wife above suspicion not a rapacious harpy
  • observe the law
  • respect the senate’s decrees

This leads into a lament for the way Rome used to govern its colonies wisely, but then came ‘the conquistadors’, the looters, Anthony and his generation, and its been rapacity, greed and illegal confiscations ever since.

Then Juvenal goes on to flay aristocratic wasters, dissipating their fortunes with love of horseracing and gambling, to be found among the lowest possible company down at the docks; or reduced to acting on the stage (clearly one of the most degraded types of behaviour Juvenal can imagine). Or – absolute lowest of the low – appear in the gladiator fights and he names a member of the noble Gracchii clan who shamefully appeared as a retiarius.

This leads to a profile of the most scandalously debased of leaders, Nero, with his insistence on performing as a musician and singer onstage, not only in Rome but at festivals across Greece. Super-noble ancestry (membership of the gens Sergii) didn’t stop Lucius Sergius Catilina planning to burn Rome to the ground and overthrow the state. It was an upstart provincial, Cicero, who saved Rome. Or Marius, man of the people, who saved Rome from invasion by Germanic tribes in 102 and 101 BC.

Achievement is what counts, not family. Juvenal ends with a surprising general point, which is that the very first settlement of Rome was carried out by Romulus who then invited men to join him, men who, according to the Roman historian Livy, were either shepherds, or escaped convicts and criminals. Ultimately, no matter how much they swank, all the ‘great and noble’ Roman families are derived from this very ignoble stock.

Satire 9: Dialogue with Naevolus the unemployed gay gigolo (150 lines)

According to green some scholars think this was an early work, added in to bulk out the book. This is one explanation of why it is, unlike any of the other poems, in dialogue form. A character named Juvenal swaps dialogue with a character named Naevolus.

Juvenal starts by asking why Naevolus, previously a smart man-about-town, a pick-up artists who shagged women by the score (and their husbands too, sometimes) is now so long-in-the-mouth, pale, thin and unkempt.

Naevolus explains that his time as a gigolo has ground to an end and brought him few returns, specially since he was working for a very tight-fisted gay patron, Virro (presumably the same dinner party host who enjoyed humiliating his hangers-on in satire 5). Virro seems to have got bored of him and dumped him.

There is an extremely graphic moment when Naevolus describes how difficult it was having to stuff his hard cock up Virro’s anus, till he was ‘stopped by last night’s supper.’ Yuk.

The dialogue becomes a dialogue-within-a-dialogue as Naevolus imagines a reproachful conversation with Virro. Why does he, Naevolus, have to send his rich patron gifts on his birthday? What’s Virro going to do with his huge estates when he dies, will Naevolus get even a little cottage?

As it is Naevolus doesn’t have enough to clothe and feed his one lousy slave. Naevolus reproaches Virro that he not only had to service the fat man but his wife too!

I sired you a son and a daughter: doesn’t that mean
Anything to you at all, you ungrateful bastard?

(In the Roman context this means Naevolus has only provided Virro with heirs, but with the legal advantages of being a father.) So Juvenal interrupts to ask what Virro says in his own defence. Nothing, apparently, he’s too busy looking for Naevolus’s replacement, a mere ‘two-legged donkey’. Suddenly Naevolus gets nervous. He begs Juvenal not to whisper a word of all this, or Virro will have him bumped off, knifed or poisoned, or his house burned down.

Juvenal mocks the idea that a master can keep any secret from his slaves who will, in turn, blab to everyone they meet. There’s no such thing as secrecy in a slave society.

So Naevolus asks what Juvenal advises him to do. Juvenal replies a) there’ll always be more customers for him, b) ‘chew colewort; it’s a fine aphrodisiac.’

the poem ends with Naevolus saying he doesn’t want much, but then – surprisingly – including in his list of modest requirements a pair of brawny Bulgarian porters to carry him in a chair, a silver engraver and a portraitist, all of which seem wildly extravagant and commentators have worried about for the past 1,900 years.

Book 4

Satire 10: The vanity of human wishes (366 lines)

This is the comprehensive overview of the futility of human ambition which formed the basis for the 18th century English author, Samuel Johnson’s great poem, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated‘.

Mankind is gripped by a self-destructive urge. What man was ever guided by Reason? Any man with belongings is the toy of Fate. He invokes Democritus the laughing philosopher and Heraclitus the weeping philosopher and goes on to mockingly describe the progress of a modern consul through the streets preceded by his lictors. Democritus thought the worries of the people as absurd as their joys, the gods listen to neither. So what should we ask the gods for?

He gives Sejanus as an example, not only of Fortune turning her wheel to bring the second highest figure in the land down into the gutter, but at the fickleness of the change, since there was no legal process involved, it all resulted from one single letter from Tiberius in Capri to the Senate. And the mob? They don’t care for proof or law, they just cheer the victors and jeer the losers. They all rushed to kick Sejanus’s corpse or pull down his statues, but if Tiberius had dropped dead of a heart attack, the same mob would have been cheering Sejanus to the rafters as the new emperor. Fickle.

In the olden days, when their votes were vital for the election of consuls, praetors, governors and so on, the public took an interest in public affairs. But in 14 AD Tiberius transferred the election of magistrates from the popular assemblies to the senate, with the far-reaching consequences that Juvenal describes. After nearly a century of non-involvement, now the catchphrase is ‘who cares?’ Now there’s only two things that interest the people: bread and the games. (Another famous tag, panem et circenses in the Latin.)

No, he’d rather be the small-time governor of some sleepy backwater, with no glory but no risk, than rise to the giddy heights of a Sejanus only to be be dragged to his death. Same goes for the first triumvirate, Pompey and Crassus and Julius Caesar – lust for ultimate power took them to giddy heights and then…catastrophic fall, miserable murder.

Setting off on a tangent, Juvenal claims what everyone seeks is eloquence, the gift of swaying crowds, but look what happened to the two greatest orators of all time, Cicero was beheaded at the insistence of his arch enemy Anthony, and the great Demosthenes was forced to commit suicide.

How many national leaders thirst for glory, for the spoils of victory, for triumphs and a triumphal arch.

The thirst for glory by far outstrips the pursuit of virtue.

Vladimir Putin thinks murdering thousands of men, women and children is a price well worth paying for restoring Ukraine to the Russian motherland. Killing pregnant women is worth it to get a place in the history books. ‘The thirst for glory by far outstrips the pursuit of virtue.’

Yet countries have come to ruin
Not once but many times, through the vainglory of a few
Who lusted for power, who wanted a title that would cling
To the stones set over their ashes…

Or take Hannibal, one-time conqueror of the Mediterranean, vaingloriously vowing to capture Rome but, in the end, routed from Italy, then defeated in Africa and forced into exile to become the humiliated hanger-on of ‘a petty Eastern despot’ eventually, when his extradition was demanded by Rome, committing suicide by poison.

Same with Alexander the Great, at one point commanding the entire known world, next moment filling a coffin in Babylon. Or Xerxes whose exorbitant feats of engineering (a bridge across the Hellespont, a canal through the peninsula of Mount Athos) all led up to complete military defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC and Xerxes’ miserable return to Persia.

Juvenal makes one of his jump cuts to a completely different theme, the triumph of old age over all of us. Men start out full of hope and individuality and all end up looking the same, senile sexless old dodderers. All your senses weaken, you can no longer appreciate music, you fall prey to all kinds of illnesses.

And senility. Old men forget the names of their servants, their hosts at dinner, eventually their own families, and end up disinheriting their children and leaving everything to a whore whose expert mouth has supplied senile orgasms.

But if you live to a ripe old age, as so many people wish, chances are you’ll witness the deaths of everyone you loved, your wife, your siblings, maybe your own children. ‘Perpetual grief’ is the reward of old age. Examples from legend: Nestor outliving everyone he loved; Peleus mourning his son; if only Priam had died in his prime he wouldn’t have seen all his sons killed and his city destroyed. And Mithridates, and Croesus.

Then he turns to specific Roman examples: if only Marius had died after his triumph for defeating the Teutons instead of going on to humiliation and then tyranny; if only Pompey had died at the peak of his powers instead of being miserably murdered in Egypt.

Then the theme of beauty. Mothers wish their daughters to be beautiful and their sons handsome but beauty brings great risks and he cites Lucretia raped and Virginia murdered by her own father to keep her ‘honour’. Then handsome young men generally go to the bad, become promiscuous, sleep around, and then risk falling foul of jealous husbands. Even if he stays pure and virginal, chances are he’ll fall foul of some middle-aged woman’s lust, just look at Hippolytus and Phaedra.

Or take the case of Gaius Silius, consul designate, who Claudius’s third wife, Messalina was so obsessed with she insisted they have a public wedding, even though she was already married to Claudius, precursor to a coup. With the inevitable result that when Claudius found out he sent the Praetorian Guard to execute both Silius and Messalina. (The story is told in Tacitus’s Annals 11.12 and 26.)

Juvenal concludes the poem by answering the question he asked at the start of it, what should we pray to the gods for? Answer: nothing. Leave it to them to guide our destinies without our intervention. The gods give us what we need, not what we want. Humans are led by irrational impulses and blind desires so it follows that most of our prayers are as irrational as our desires. But if you must insist on making silly sacrifices and praying for something, let your requirements be basic and practical. Ask for:

a sound mind in a sound body, a valiant heart
Without fear of death, that reckons longevity
The least among Nature’s gifts, that’s strong to endure
All kinds of toil, that’s untainted by lust and anger…
…There’s one
Path and one path only to a life of peace – through virtue.
Fortune has no divinity, could we but see it; it’s we,
We ourselves, who make her a goddess, and set her in the heavens.

So that’s the context of another of Juvenal’s most famous quotes or tags, mens sana in corpore sano – it comes at the end of an enormous long list of the futilities of seeking long life or wealth or power or glory. It is the first and central part of Juvenal’s stripped-down, bare minimum rules for living.

Satire 11: Invitation to dinner at Juvenal’s modest place in the country (208 lines)

This starts out as a diatribe against spendthrifts, against the young heirs who take out big loans and blow it all on luxurious foods. If you’re going to host a dinner, make sure you can afford it.

This leads into an actual dinner party invitation Juvenal is giving to his friend Persicus. He lists the menu and assures him it’s all ‘home-grown produce’: a plump tender kid ‘from my farmstead at Tivoli’; mountain asparagus; eggs still warm from the nest; chicken; grapes, baskets of Syrian pears and Italian bergamots, and apples.

[This mention of the farmstead is what makes Green and other commentators deduce that Juvenal had, by this point, ceased to be the impoverished and consequently very angry satirist of the earlier works, has somehow acquired a ‘competence’ and so his tone is more mellow.]

Juvenal says even this relatively modest menu would have appeared luxury in the good old republican days, and lists various high-minded old Roman heroes (Fabius, Cato, Scaurus, Fabricius) and the tough old Roman legionaries they led, uncorrupted by luxury and money, who ate their porridge off earthenware bowls. Those were the days.

The gods were closer back then, their images made of humble baked clay, not gold, and so they warned us e.g. of the approaching Gauls.

How changed is contemporary Rome whose aristocrats demand obscene levels of luxury in food and ornamentation. Nothing like that for Persicus when he comes round, there won’t be a pupil of Trypherus’s famous school of cuisine where students are taught the correct way to carve antelope, gazelle and flamingo!

His slaves, likewise, are honest lads dressed practically for warmth, a shepherd’s son and a ploughman’s son, not smooth imported Asiatics who can’t speak Latin and prance around in the baths flaunting their ‘oversized members’.

[Green notes that the Roman historian Livy dates the introduction of foreign luxuries to the defeat of the Asiatic Gauls in 187 BC. Whereas Sallust thought the introduction of corrupt luxury dated from Sulla’s campaign in Asia Minor in the 80s BC. Whatever the precise date, the point is the author always thinks things started to go to hell a few generations before their own time.]

And don’t expect any fancy entertainment like the Spanish dancers who wiggle their bums to arouse the flagging passions of middle-aged couples, no such obscene entertainment in his modest home, no, instead he’ll have a recitation of Homer or Virgil.

Like Horace, Juvenal tells his guest to relax. Discussion of business is banned. He won’t be allowed to confide his suspicions of his wife who stays out till all hours, or the ingratitude of friends. ‘Just forget all your troubles the minute you cross my threshold.’

Let all Rome (the Colosseum seated 300,000 spectators) go to the Megalesian Games (4 to 10 April) and cheer the Blues and the greens (chariot racing teams) and sweat all day in an uncomfortable toga. Juvenal prefers to let his ‘wrinkled old skin’ soak up the mild spring sunshine at his nice place in the country.

Satire 12: A storm at sea (130 lines)

The first 20 or so lines describe to a friend a series of sacrifices Juvenal is going to make, and the even bigger ones he wishes he had the money to make. Why? To celebrate the safe arrival in harbour of a dear friend of his, Catullus (not the famous poet, who died 170 years earlier, in 54 BC).

Juvenal gives a vivid description of a storm at sea, ending with the sailors seeing ‘that lofty peak so dear to Ascanius’ in diction which evokes Virgil’s Aeneid with no irony or mocking. And he’s just as sincere when he returns to describing how he’ll burnish his household gods, make oblations to Jupiter, burn incense and so on.

Up to this point this combination of devout piety and picturesque description are very much not the viciously angry Juvenal of the Roman streets that we are used to. But in the final 30 or so lines Mr Angry reappears a bit, to make the distinction between his genuine, devout sacrifices and those of legacy hunters and it turns into a stock diatribe against this class of parasites who seek out the wealthy but childless and do anything, including making extravagant sacrifices for them when they’re ill, in the hope of being included in their wills. May all their tricks and scams work but ‘May they love no man and be loved by none.’

[Incidentally, this last section has a passage about elephants, saying the legacy-hunters would sacrifice elephants if they could but none live naturally in Italy except for those of the emperor’s personal herd, near modern Anzio. Elephants are mentioned in quite a few Juvenal poems. At some level they fascinated him, maybe because they’re the biggest animal and so attracted a poet interested in extremity and exaggeration.]

Book 5

Satire 13: The futility of revenge, the pangs of a guilty conscience (249 lines)

On putting up with life’s vicissitudes. Juvenal reproaches someone called Calvinus for making a big fuss and going to court about a loan not being repaid. Doesn’t he realise the age he’s living in? Honour long since departed. It’s not like it was back in the good old days, in the Golden Age when there were only a handful of gods who dined modestly, back in those days youth respected the elderly, everyone was upstanding and dishonesty was vanishingly rare. The decent god-fearing man is a freak like the sky raining stones or a river issuing in milk.

While guilty people, whether they believe in the gods or not, tell themselves they’ll be OK, the gods won’t get round to punishing them yet and so on. In fact many make a histrionic appeal to the gods to vouchsafe their honesty, banking on ‘brazen audacity’.

Juvenal mentions the three philosophies current in his day, Cynicism, Stoicism and Epicureanism, only to dismiss them all. Instead he mocks Calvinus for making such a fuss about such a common, everyday bit of dishonesty and goes into a list of far worse crimes starting with the temple robbers who steal devoted statues or plate and melt them down or sell them off. Think of arsonists or poisoners or parricides. If you want to find the truth about human nature you should visit a courtroom.

Many unusual things are taken for granted in the appropriate context, for example big breasted women in Upper Egypt or blonde, blue-eyed men in Germany, or pygmies in Africa. Well, so does this kind of embezzlement or fraud feel completely at home in its natural setting, Rome. What’s the point of pursuing his legal vendetta. Rise above it.

Benign
Philosophy, by degrees, peels away our follies and most
Of our vices, gives us a grounding in what’s right or wrong.

[This is surprisingly reflective and thoughtful of Juvenal, supporting the thesis that the poems are in chronological order and the later ones reflect middle-age and having come into some property and generally stopped being so vitriolically angry at the world.]

He goes on to say that paying off scores is for the small-minded. Anyway, people who break laws and commit crimes are often punished most of all in their own minds, by their own guilt. ‘The mind is its best own torturer.’ He gives examples of people who suffered the pangs of conscience but what’s striking is:

  1. how didactic he’s become; instead of depicting bad behaviour with satirical glee, now he’s lecturing the reader on good behaviour
  2. how much he sounds at moments like a Christian, preaching about the power of conscience; when he says that he who meditates a crime is as guilty as he who commits one, he sounds like Christ (‘I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ Matthew 5. verses 27 to 28)

The guilty man is wracked with conscience, can’t eat or drink or sleep. In fact it turns into a vivid proto-Christian depiction of the miseries of Guilt, interpreting the weather as signs from God, the slightest setback as punishment, the slightest physical ailment as payback.

Satire 14: The disastrous impact of bad parenting (331 lines)

Again this satire has a direct addressee, Fuscinus. Juvenal takes the theme that parents hugely influence their children, generally for the worse. ‘Bad examples are catching.’ By the time he’s seven a boy’s character is fixed for life. He gives examples of terrible parents starting with ‘Rutilus’ who is a sadistic brute to his slaves.

[As with so much Roman literature, the examples of brutality to slaves tend to eclipse all the subtler argumentation: here, Rutilus is described as ordering a slave to be branded with a red-hot iron for stealing a couple of towels.]

Or the girl who’s brought up into a life of adultery and sexual intrigues by her mother. We are all corrupted by examples of vice in the home. This is a spur to good behaviour – that our bad behaviour is quickly copied by our children.

All this turns into a surprisingly preachy lists of dos and don’ts and turns into almost a harangue of bad parents, telling them to set better examples.

For some reason this leads into a short passage about the Jews who Juvenal sees as handing on ridiculously restrictive practices, circumcision and avoiding certain foods, along with taking every seventh day off for idleness, to their children. So Judaism is taken as an example of parents handing down bad practices to their children in an endless succession.

Then a passage attacking misers, characterising them especially by their recycling scraps of leftover food at revolting meals. And insatiable greed for more land, the kind of men who won’t rest till they’ve bought up an estate as the entire area cultivated by the first Romans. Compare and contrast with pensioned off Roman legionaries who are lucky to receive 2 acres of land to support themselves and their families.

then he invokes the old mountain peasants and the wisdom of living simply and plainly on what a small parcel of land provides. [This strikes me as straight down the line, entry level, the good old days of the Golden Age clichés, such as centuries of Roman writers had been peddling.]

The logical corollary of praising the simple lives and virtues of his farming forefathers, is dislike and contempt for the vices of luxury which are attributed to foreigners, especially from the exotic East.

[I always thought Edward Said, in his lengthy diatribe against ‘Orientalism’, should have started not in the 18th century, but 2,000 years earlier, with the ancient Greeks writing pejoratively about oriental despotism (with Persia in mind), a discursive tradition which was handed on to the Romans who also associated decadence and luxury with the East (Cleopatra of Egypt, Mithridates of Pontus and so on), centuries of stereotyping and anathematising the East and the Oriental to which Juvenal adds his own contribution and which was merely revived, like so much other ancient learning, in the Europe of early modernity – xenophobic clichés and stereotypes which were dusted off and reapplied to the Ottoman Empire.]

Juvenal then gives an interesting portrait of the ambitious father of a modern youth, recommending all the ways he can get on and rise in the world, studying to become a lawyer, or aiming for a career in the army, or becoming a merchant. Juvenal reprimands this made-up figure, telling him to lay off inculcating greed and deceit quite so early; his kids will learn it all by themselves in good time. ‘But’, claims the made-up father, ‘I never taught my son his criminal ways!’ Yes, replies Juvenal, but you taught him the principles of greed at an early age, and all the rest follows. You set the spark, now watch the forest fire rage out of control.

And you’ll have created a peril for your own life. For such a greedy offspring will grow impatient to see his parent snuff it so he can inherit his patrimony.

In the final passage he compares the life of a merchant with that of a tightrope walker at the circus and says watching greedy merchants trying to juggle their many deals is far more entertaining. He mocks harbours packed with huge merchant ships, prepared to go to the ends of the earth and beyond to make a profit.

Juvenal goes so far as to say these far-trading merchants are mad, as mad as mad Ajax at Troy, mad to risk his life and fortune and for what? Little silver coins printed with someone else’s head. One minute he’s at the prow of his mighty ship, laden with precious cargo; next moment it’s sunk in a storm and he’s clinging to the wreckage. Only a madman would commit his life and wealth to capricious Fortune and then…he’s a beggar in the streets, waving an artist’s impression of the storm which ruined him at passersby. Right at the end he cites Diogenes the Cynic, who abandoned all earthly possessions in order to have a calm mind. Compared to the merchant who risks losing everything and even drowning at sea:

The tub of the naked Cynic
Diogenes never caught fire: if it broke, he could pick up another
The following day – or put some lead clamps in an old one.
Alexander perceived, on seeing the tub and its famous
Occupant, how much happier was the man who desired nothing
Than he whose ambitions encompassed the world, who would yet
Suffer perils as great as all his present achievements.

And he concludes with another straight, unironic recommendation of the bare minimum required by philosophers and the old Roman tradition, in phrasing very similar to the barebones advice at the end of satire 10.

If anyone asks me
Where we’re to draw the line, how much is sufficient, I’d say:
Enough to meet the requirements of cold and thirst and hunger
As much as Epicurus derived from that little garden,
Or Socrates, earlier still, possessed in his frugal home.

Satire 15: In praise of kindness (174 lines)

Addressed to Volusius of whom we know nothing. The poem opens by reviewing the fantastical beliefs of the Egyptians in their animal gods, then takes a comic view of Odysseus’s telling of his adventures at the court of King Alcinous whose guests, if they had any sense, would dismiss such a pack of lies.

The point of this introduction is to contrast fantastical myths and legends with what Juvenal now intends to tell us about which is a real-life atrocity which happened in the recent past. In fact, Peter Green in a note tells us it took place in 127AD. Juvenal goes on to describe the rancorous feud which broke out between the neighbouring towns of Ombi and Tentyra (real neighbouring towns in ancient Egypt).

the fighting becomes savage, involving thousands. One of the leading Ombites stumbled, fell and was immediately seized by the Tentyrans who tore him to pieces and ate every morsel. This gives rise to a digression about cannibalism practiced by the Spanish in the besieged town of Calagurris who were reduced by starvation to eating human flesh. Then onto the Tauri in Crimea who worshipped Artemis by making human sacrifices of travellers who fell into their hands.

But the Tauri don’t actually eat the victims they kill and the Spaniards had the excuse of starvation. nothing excused the horror of contemporary men tearing each other to pieces and eating each other’s raw bodies. It triggers an outburst of virulent xenophobia.

And then, to our complete surprise, Juvenal turns mushy. Describing these horrors turn out to have been preparation for a hymn to tenderness and kindness.

When nature
Gave teas to mankind, she proclaimed that tenderness was endemic
In the human heart: of all our impulses, this
Is the highest and best.

We weep at funerals of children, or to see adolescents in court cases. ‘What good man…thinks any human ills outside his concern?’

It’s this
That sets us apart from the dumb brutes, it’s why we alone
Have a soul that’s worthy of reverence, why we’re imbued
With a divine potential, the skill to acquire and practice
All manner of arts…

Who are you, O wise Stoic teacher, and what have you done with the angry, fire-breathing Juvenal?

When the world was still new, our common Creator granted
The breath of life alone, but on us he further bestowed
Sovereign reason, the impulse to aid one another…

Juvenal identifies this God-given sovereign reason with everything noble and altruistic in man, proof of his difference from the animals and that he has a soul. This makes him a Stoic, doesn’t it?

Then, right at the end, the poem returns to the disgusting story of the Egyptian torn apart and eaten raw, and laments that man, blessed with all these gifts, creates swords and spears, man alone of the animals, goes out of his way to kill and massacre his own kind.

Satire 16: The military life (60 lines; incomplete)

The final satire in the series is incomplete. It is addressed to one Gallius, about whom nothing is known. Were all Juvenal’s addressees fictional or real people? No-one knows.

the poem obviously set out to ironically praise the great advantages of the soldier’s life. First is that you can beat up anyone you like and either be too intimidated to take legal action against them or, if you do, you’ll end up in a military court where the judge and jury will find for the soldier and you’ll end up being beaten up a second time.

Next advantage is that, whereas most people caught up in law suits have to endure endless delays and adjournments, a soldier will get his case seen straightaway. Plus, if you earn money as a soldier it is exempt from control by your father (which other earnings aren’t). The reverse; doddering old fathers court their sons to get a cut of their pay…

Here the poem simply breaks off. Scholars speculate that Juvenal died before he completed it. or maybe the emperor Hadrian censored this mocking of the Roman army. But Green sides with the Juvenal expert, Gilbert Highet, who thinks the earliest version of the manuscript, from which all surviving manuscript copies derive, early on lost its final few pages.

Common tropes

1. Juvenal’s position really is based on a profound belief that the olden days were best, the Golden Age of Saturn, when Rome’s ancestors lived in mud huts and farmed small allotments, and lived frugally, and taught honour and respect to their sons and daughters.

Mankind was on the decline while Homer
Still lived; and today the earth breeds a race of degenerate
Weaklings, who stir high heaven to laughter and loathing.
(Satire 15)

2. The logical corollary of thinking his primitive ancestors knew best is Juvenal’s virulent xenophobia, blaming Rome’s decline into luxury and decadence on the corrupting wealth and example of foreigners, especially the tyrannies of the East (note p.238).

3. As usual, I am left reeling by the casual way he describes the brutal, savage, sadistic treatment meted out to Roman slaves. Branded with a red-hot iron for stealing a few towels, crucified for speaking out of turn, horse-whipped for trivial mistakes serving dinner. What a brutal, cruel, inhumane society. ‘Cato, in his Res Rustica, recommends the dumping of worn-out horses’ harnesses and worn-out slaves in the same breath,’ (p.276)

Thoughts

Very simply, Juvenal is the Lionel Messi of satirists, producing high-octane, intense, bitterly angry and often very funny masterpieces of the genre.

Second thought is that Augustus had Ovid exiled, supposedly for the amorality of his ‘Art of Love’ which is a guide for pick-up artists. How things had changed a hundred years later when Juvenal not only mentions the places to hang out if you want to pick up women (or boys) but goes way, way beyond Ovid in his depiction of a pungently promiscuous society with, apparently, no consequences from the powers that be.

Summary

Final thought is that this is another brilliant volume from Peter Green, containing not just a zingy, stylish translation from the Latin but also long and fascinating introduction, and then encyclopedic notes which are full of fascinating titbits of information, opinion and insight. Of course most editions of ancient texts have notes, but Green’s are distinguished by their length and engaging chattiness. Here’s a random selection of brief but typical nuggets:

  • Women swore by Juno. (page 83)
  • After the sack of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 AD many Jews made their way to Rome and eked out a living as fortune tellers or beggars. (99)
  • No wheeled traffic was allowed in Rome for ten hours after dawn, so the city was incredibly noisy all through the night as farmers and merchants drove their carts through the narrow cobbled streets. (102)
  • Any of the (six) vestal virgin caught having sex was buried alive. (111)
  • Nine days after a funeral, offerings of eggs, salt and lentils were left on the grave of the deceased. (125)
  • It is hard to realise the influence which the Roman ballet (or pantomimus) exerted on Roman citizens. It was not only immensely popular but formed a centre for violent factions like those of the chariot races and sometimes led to riots and bloodshed. (153)
  • The secret rites of the Bona Dea were held at the home of one of the consuls. It was attended by women only. The house owner and all male slaves had to leave the premises. Even statues or images of men were covered up to protect the secret ceremonies. (156)
  • Eclipses of the moon were said to be caused by witchcraft. Beating pots and pans was said to put the witches off their wicked spells. (158)
  • A lawyer who won a case could advertise the fact by hanging palm branches outside his door.
  • People who survived a shipwreck often commissioned a painting of the event either to hang in a temple as an offering or to display to passersby in the street, if they were begging. (246)
  • the emperor kept a herd of elephants on a ranch at Laurentum, near Ardea. (248)

Among his many fascinating comments, one theme stood out for me:

Useless natural history

It’s odd that 2,000 years of writers or scholars in the humanities continue to quote, praise or base their writings on the literature or philosophy of the ancient world, when the ancients’ knowledge of the natural world, the world around them, its geology, and geography, and weather, and all the life forms we share the planet with, was fantastically ignorant.

As Green points out in a note, it is staggering that all the ancient authors whose writings have survived held ludicrous and absurd beliefs about animals and nature which you’d have thought the slightest actual observation by any rational adult would have disproved in a moment (note, page 238).

No, elephants do not get rid of their over-heavy tusks by thrusting them in the ground (satire 11). No, sparrows are not more highly sexed than other birds (satire 9). No, cranes flying south do not engage in pitched battles with pygmies in Ethiopia (satire 13). No, stags do not live to over 900 years old (satire 14).

‘A collector of natural history fallacies would do quite well out of Juvenal’ (note, page 291).

It is testament, maybe, to the way their culture preferred book learning to even the slightest amount of actual observation. And on a par with their credulous belief in no end of signs, omens and portents. Not only are these reported in all the histories as preceding momentous occasions but most official ceremonies in Rome, including whether to do battle or not, depended on the reading of the weather or flight of birds or entrails of sacrificed animals. It was an astonishingly credulous culture.

Only with Francis Bacon in the 1600s do we have an author who bravely declares that we ought to throw away most ancient ‘learning’ and make our own scientific observations about the phenomena around us. Such a long, long time it took for genuinely rational scientific method to slowly extract itself from deadening layers of absurd and nonsensical ‘learning’.


Credit

Sixteen Satires by Juvenal, translated by Peter Green, was published by Penguin Classics in 1967, then reprinted with revisions in 1973. Page references are to the 1982 paperback edition.

Related links

Roman reviews

Moral letters by Seneca

What do you need to be a good man? Willpower.
(Letter 80, section 4)

Whatever you do, keep death in mind.
(Letter 114, section 27)

You must embed these thoughts deep in your heart, Lucilius.
(Letter 7, section 12)

Stoicism

The thing about Stoic philosophy is how wrong its premises are and how banal its teachings.

Stoics believed there is a God, that the universe or Nature is God, or God suffuses Nature. Human beings were created by God with a spark of Divine Reason within us. Our job is to clear away all the clutter of work, society, gossip, all relationships, friends and family, all the clamour which clogs up our lives, including all our own passions and emotions, love, anger and so on – in order to cultivate this fragment of the Divine Reason in each of is and, by doing so, bring our lives into alignment with the values of the universe/God. Then, by cultivating detachment from all earthly worries and passions, by strengthening our minds, we can prepare for the worst the world has to throw at us and defuse the ultimate terror, the fear of death.

That’s it. You can vary the wording and multiply the precepts with lots of specific examples (avoid gossip, avoid crowds, eat moderately, don’t get drunk, treat everyone with respect – ponder with the worst possible outcomes so nothing surprises you, analyse every situation with detachment), but it’s that simple and, after the initial novelty has worn off, that boring.

Seneca

The Roman author, tutor, Stoic philosopher, politician and immensely rich man, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC to 65 AD) is called Seneca the Younger because his father (54 BC to 39 AD) – author of a collection of reminiscences about the Roman schools of rhetoric (which survives) and a history of Roman affairs from the beginning of the Civil Wars until the last years of his life (which is lost) – had the exact same name, so is known as Seneca the Elder.

Seneca the Younger, much more famous than his father, is sometimes just referred to as Seneca.

Seneca wrote a prodigious amount; later critics said too much. E.F. Watling, in his Penguin edition of Seneca’s plays, says that his best-loved works are the letters he wrote to one specific friend, Lucilius. Seneca himself titled these the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’), also known in English as the ‘Letters from a Stoic’. Seneca wrote this collection of 124 letters at the end of his life, from approximately 63 to 65 AD, after he had largely retired as tutor and adviser to the Emperor Nero, a post he’d held since 49 – sixteen years.

The letters are addressed to Lucilius Junior who was then procurator of Sicily and is known to posterity only through Seneca’s writings. (Seneca also dedicated his dialogue On Providence and his encyclopedic Natural Questions to this same Lucilius.)

Scholars fret about whether these were ‘real’ letters, and what the structure of correspondence was – did Seneca only respond to questions sent him by Lucilius? Where is Lucilius’s half of the correspondence? etc. But whether or not they were ever part of a ‘real’ correspondence, it is clear that Seneca wrote these letters with a wider readership in mind. They contain numerous carefully crafted passages obviously aimed at posterity and are structured so as to cover a wide range of subjects dear to Stoics. The 124 letters were published grouped together into 20 ‘books’.

Philosophy as therapy

The letters amount to a series of short moral lessons, designed to help Lucilius achieve the wisdom and peace of mind (‘a calm and correct state of mind,’ Letter 4) promised by Stoic doctrine. In order to do this the letters focus on the traditional themes of Stoic philosophy such as removing oneself from the crowd; cultivating a contempt of death; learning to endure the ups and downs of life; acknowledging virtue as the supreme good, and so on.

The key point which the translator of the Oxford University Press edition, Elaine Fantham, makes in her introduction, is that the letters do not amount to a systematic exposition of Stoicism. Almost the reverse. They are like a series of lessons on ad hoc, specific topics, often beginning with an everyday experience and then extracting from it an insight or type of behaviour which Seneca tells Lucilius he can adopt in order to improve himself. Each letter contains ‘a little bit of profit’ (5) – like instalments in a self-help correspondence course.

Seneca wrote the letters not to promote a complete finished system of thought: he wasn’t necessarily interested in extrapolating a comprehensive system. As Fantham says, Seneca put moral impact before intellectual debate. He ‘puts the ability to avoid fear and desire ahead of any intellectual expertise’ (note, page 298). Seneca gave the work a new type of name, Epistulae Morales, and wrote them with a moral purpose to promote moral behaviour.

Philosophy is not a skill shaped for popular appeal or for display; it does not consist of words but of deeds…it moulds and shapes the mind, arranges one’s life, controls one’s actions, points out what is to be done and what to be avoided. (16)

Thus Seneca instructs Lucilius not about this or that point of abstract philosophical doctrine – but over and over again tells him that he must repeat certain thoughts in order to put them into practice, to make them part of his everyday waking thoughts.

Only Philosophy will wake us up, it alone will shake off our heavy sleep, so dedicate yourself wholly to it. (53.8)

Possibly the most consistent lesson (repeated so many times it gets a little boring) is cultivating a ‘contempt’ for death. When death comes it is over; it is nothing. We need to live with the idea of our death all the time, to get accustomed to it, so as to eliminate all fear and anxiety about it:

  • Let us order our minds so that we wish for whatever circumstances demand, and especially let us think about our ends without sadness. We need to be prepared for death before we are prepared for life. (61.3)
  • The more men have accustomed themselves to hardship, the more easily they will endure it. (76.34)
  • Whatever has been long anticipated comes as a lighter blow. (78.29)
  • Everyone approaches a hazard to which he has long squared himself with more courage and resists harsh events by contemplating them in advance. (107.4)

This accustoming to death takes effort so we must ‘practice thinking this over each day’ (4.5) and ‘ensure that what is now an urge becomes a lasting disposition’ (17.6).

Virtue does not come to a mind unless it is trained and taught and brought to its highest condition by constant exercise. (90.46)

Repeat, practice, memorise. The letters are lessons in how to think, in how to live life in order to maximise calm and reason, mental or psychological exercises which must be learned through constant repetition.

  • You must persist and build up strength by constant diligence until what is now a good intention becomes a good state of mind. (16.1)
  • These are things we must learn, in fact learn by heart. (123.17)

In this respect, the OUP is a good edition because Fantham precedes every letter with a short summary of its main topics, of its time and place of composition, and how it relates to other letters on the same topic. This is extremely useful. (Mind you, the 1917 translation by Richard Mott Gummere which is available online has something the Fantham edition hasn’t, which is attributing each letter a title such as ‘On saving time’, ‘On discursiveness in reading’ and so on. I imagine these titles aren’t in the original but they are extremely useful in remembering at a glance which letter is about what.)

There is some background information about Roman society, but not as much as you’d hope for, certainly nothing like the chatty detail you get in Cicero’s wonderful letters (Seneca consciously distances himself from Cicero’s style and gossipy subject matter in letter 118).

Like all Roman writers, Seneca now and then cites famous Roman heroes or historical figures as examples of ‘virtue’ (notably Marcus Porcius Cato, who committed suicide in 46 BC, as the example of fortitude in the face of death; or Gaius Mucius Cordus who unflinchingly put his hand into a fire to prove his bravery).

There is a description of the lives of the super-rich at Baiae (51), a fascinating portrait of the conditions of slaves (47), a vivid comparison of the spartan bathhouses of old with their modern luxurious equivalents (86), a description of the grand retinues of foreign slaves rich people insist on travelling with (123), a description of viticulture and grafting techniques (86). Mostly, though, the letters are disappointing from a social history point of view. Philosophy is drab.

This Oxford University Press edition does not contain all of the letters – it contains 80 out of 124 (introduction p.xxxv) – but still claims to be the largest selection available in print.

Epistolary traditions

In a throwaway remark, Fantham indicates that there were two types of letter, two epistolary traditions: the philosophical letter of advice (pioneered by Epicurus, born 341 BC, and into which these letters fall) and chatty personal correspondence (Cicero, born 106 BC). [She doesn’t mention a third type which occurs to me, which is the crafted verse epistle as epitomised by Horace’s Letters or Ovid’s Black Sea Letters.]

The problem of suicide

A major stumbling block is Seneca’s worldview, the classical Roman worldview, which promotes suicide as a noble, honourable and virtuous response to all kinds of social humiliations, setbacks, not least the threats from tyrannical power.

It is a noble thing to die honourably, prudently and bravely. (77)

Part of the reason for cultivating a contempt for death, for having death continually in your thoughts, is so that, when the moment comes, it will feel like only a small additional step to fall on your sword or open your veins in a hot bath.

How many people death has been useful to, how many it frees from torture, poverty, laments, punishment, weariness. We are not in any man’s power when death is in our power. (91.21)

The historical model Seneca invokes repeatedly is Cato, who committed suicide in 46 BC two years into the civil war, when he was governor of Utica, a city in North Africa, as Julius Caesar’s army was closing in. Cato killed himself to deprive Caesar of the power of either executing him or (more likely) humiliatingly pardoning him, meaning he would ignominiously owe the rest of his existence to a tyrant.

Desiring neither option, Cato stabbed himself. In the event failed to kill himself, a doctor was called who patched up his stomach wound, gave him medicine, put him to bed. In the night Cato placed his fingers into the stomach wound, ripped it open, and proceeded to pull out his intestines until he died of shock. This is held up by Seneca as exemplary behaviour.

This makes sense within the long Roman tradition of preferring honourable suicide to dishonour, but it is just not a worldview any modern person shares and Cato is not a role model any modern person would wish to copy. Of course, this strand in Seneca’s writings is magnified by the fact that Seneca himself did something similar, committing suicide on the orders of the emperor Nero, his one-time pupil, in an exemplary fashion, calmly dictating notes about Stoic resilience as he bled to death in a hot bath.

Thus he has gone down as a hero of high-minded Stoicism but there are numerous objections to this notion. One is that plenty, thousands, of other Roman notables killed themselves over the centuries, famous examples being Anthony and Cleopatra, and they weren’t Stoic philosophers. So Seneca’s high-minded end wasn’t unique, far from it, it was a very common behaviour among the aristocratic class in the ancient world, and not only under the Empire but the Republic, too.

So a) it was far from being an act unique to ‘philosophers’ but b) it is obviously something very remote indeed from modern society. Sure, people still kill themselves. But not many people kill themselves at the command of an emperor, or to demonstrate their high-minded command over their destiny and a Stoic rising above the petty concerns of life and death. This whole worldview is so remote as to be science fiction.

There seems to me something perverse, almost creepy, about a philosophy which is constantly preparing its followers for death and for suicide. The words ‘death’ or ‘die’ recur on every page. I infinitely prefer Horace’s encouragement to enjoy life to the full while we can.

Come, let’s
Go to the cave of love
And look for music in a jollier key.
(Horace Odes, book 2, poem 1)

Themes in the letters

Despise death

We start to die from the day we are born. When we die there is nothing. There was nothing before life and there will be nothing after. So be not afraid.

  • What I am recommending to you is not just a remedy for this disease but for your whole life: despise death. (78.5)
  • First free yourself from the fear of death. (80.5)

Freedom

Despising death means we are free from the threats of tyrants or society. What is the worst they can do to us if we despise the worst, consider it nothing? Nothing can harm the calm and virtuous mind. By welcoming whatever will happen, it creates its own freedom no matter what the external circumstances. With typical extremity of metaphor or rhetoric, Seneca continually contrasts freedom, not with being bogged down or caught up or hampered by obligations – such as most of us encounter in real life – but with full-on hardcore Roman slavery:

  • You ask what is liberty? To be enslaved to no object, no necessity, no chances, to reduce Fortune to a level field. (51.9)
  • We must busy ourselves with our studies and the sources of wisdom…this is how we should rescue our mind from a most wretched enslavement and restore it to liberty. (104.16)
  • We have enslaved our spirit to pleasure whose indulgence is the beginning of all evils. (110.10)

Now it makes sense that Seneca uses as metaphor the slavery which was, arguably, the central fact of Roman life. But as with the way his mind, when he wants to imagine examples of adversity, leaps straight towards images of torture and execution, it’s another example of the extremity of metaphor and argument which underpins his ‘philosophy’ and makes so much of it feel so alien to the modern mind.

True friendship

Gauge a man before making him a friend. Be cautious, test out friends. But once someone is a friend, bind them to you, share everything with them. True friends share everything, including misfortune. Seneca says you have to learn to be a friend to yourself.

Avoid crowds

‘Shun whatever pleases the common herd’ (8). One iniquitous example can adversely affect you. A crowd presents all kinds of bad examples. People are emboldened to behave badly in crowds. So withdraw into yourself and study philosophy, but not so conspicuously as to draw attention or criticism. Don’t draw attention to your retirement and quietism. Quietly disappear.

Your body

A great and cautious man separates his mind from his body and spends the better part of his time with his better and divine part. (78.10)

Provide it only as much as needed to preserve good health. Avoid excess. Consume as much plain drink as required to quench thirst, as much plain food as to quench hunger, the minimum clothes to protect you from the elements, a house sufficient to protect you from the weather.

Devote some days to eating as little as possible. Become familiar with the bare minimum needed to keep alive and healthy (so that if exile to a bare rock or sudden incarceration befall you, your body is ready for much reduced circumstances).

Don’t exercise to excess. Do as much as needed to keep healthy. Reserve your energy for cultivating the mind.

As to physical pleasures, avoid them like the plague; they enslave the body and then the mind.

  • Uproot pleasures and treat them with absolute loathing. (51.13)
  • First of all we must reject pleasures; they make men weak and effeminate and demand too much time and effort. (104.34)

Your house

Your house should be a size and contain only as much as needed to protect you from the elements. Despise ornament and decoration.

Possessions

Have as few as possible. ‘No one is worthy of God unless he despises possessions.’ (18.13) Have them, but adopt a mindset where you could happily dispense with all of them, where they are all taken from you and you don’t care a jot, because you are secure in the untroubled citadel of your mind.

Enough

Don’t overdo it: don’t mortify your body, don’t insist on eating bread and water, living in a hut, neglecting your body, like the Cynics who, following Diogenes, set out to punish their bodies. Live comfortably and sensibly, just not to excess.

  • So correct yourself, take off your burdens and shrink your desires within a healthy limit. (104.20)

How to be content

And cultivate contentment by being happy with what you’ve got.

  • I will tell you how you can recognise the healthy man: he is content with himself. (72.7)
  • This is what philosophy will guarantee you, something which nothing surpasses: you will never be dissatisfied with yourself. (115.18)

Excess

Similar to his thoughts about suicide and anger, in that it sounds reasonable of Seneca to tell his follower not live to excess, but what Seneca has in mind is Roman excess, the off-the-scale lavishness and baroque luxury of the Roman emperors and the richest in the known world (as described in the letters from the fashionable resort of Baiae, 49, 51).

  • Too many amenities make the spirit effeminate…The stricter discipline of a simpler place strengthens the mind and makes it fit for great undertakings. (51.10-11)

The general point is not so much that indulgence is morally bad in itself: but that people enslave themselves by indulging the pleasures of the senses, deform their minds, make themselves into addicts, by coming to rely on excessive behaviour, on excessive drinking, excessive eating, excessive sex, excessive gambling.

It’s not so much that moderation is good in itself but that it stops you developing addictions and so becoming enslaved to them. Moderation leaves your mind free to focus on more important, ‘higher’ things. Moderation sets you free from all the snares of the senses.

That is why:

We ought to concentrate on escaping as far as possible from the provocations to vice. One’s mind must be hardened and dragged away from the enticements of pleasure. (51.5)

Anger

Quite apart from the letters, Seneca wrote no fewer than three treatises on anger. Fantham makes a really profound point about this which depends, again, on the profound difference between us and Roman society. This is that Roman emperors had complete power over all citizens, and all citizens had complete power over huge numbers of slaves. In this society an angry citizen could order his slave to be tortured or killed, just as an angry emperor could order anyone he fancied to be exiled, thrown into gaol, tortured or executed. Therefore controlling anger was much, much more important than it is in our society. Anger is not a good emotion with us but could have catastrophic consequences in Seneca’s world.

The mind

‘Nothing deserves admiration except the mind’ (9). The mind alone is worth cultivating. No other skills, activities, pastimes are worth cultivating.

  • Control your mind so as to bring it to perfection in the most calm condition, a mind which feels neither what is taken from it nor added to it, but keeps the same disposition however affairs turn out. (36.6)
  • A great and cautious man separates his mind from the body and spends much of his time with his better and divine part. (78.10)

Moral behaviour

Imagine the most moral, honourable person you can. Then imagine they are watching everything you say or do.

Fear, anxiety, stress

All these are caused by worry that the worst is going to happen. Well, imagine the worst has happened. Live with the worst, imaginatively – prepare yourself for the worst. Once you dispel anxiety about unnamed and exaggerated fears, you can get rid of the panic and examine the issue rationally, restoring order and calm to the mind, allowing Reason to operate unhampered by over emotions.

Philosophy

Philosophy, for Seneca, isn’t the working out of a complex system or ideology: it is a psychological or spiritual practice. It is an exercise to attain an attitude, cultivated with the sole aim of making its practitioner mentally strong and resilient against tyranny, suffering and death.

Philosophy is not a skill shaped for popular appeal or for display; it does not consist of words but of deeds. It is not taken up to make sure the day passes with some enjoyment, to take the boredom out of leisure; it moulds and shapes the mind, arranges one’s life, controls one’s actions, points out what is to be done or avoided; it is seated at the helm and steers the course of those adrift among treacherous shoals. Without it no man can live without fear or anxiety; countless things occur each hour that need the advice which we must seek from philosophy. (16.3)

Philosophy may include technical aspects such as types of argument and syllogism (which he consistently ridicules and dismisses for its pedantry) but, far more importantly, Seneca sees ‘philosophy’ as a kind of mental fortress, a psychological redoubt:

So withdraw into philosophy as far as you may; she will protect you in her bosom and in her shrine you will be safe. (103.4)

In doing so, it can raise us above the level of mere mortals:

This is what philosophy promises me, to make me equal to a god. (48.11)

Slavery

As you might expect Seneca admonishes Lucilius to treat his slaves as equals because they are as human as you or I:

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave. (47.10)

But, just as predictably, Seneca doesn’t actually recommend actually freeing them. (In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Juvenal’s Satires, Peter Green says this attitude was typical of Stoics: ‘[Juvenal] attacked wanton cruelty to slaves, but did not query the concept of slavery itself (another characteristically Stoic attitude.)] Introduction, page 23)

Letter 47 is fascinating for giving an extended description of the types of functions slaves performed in an aristocratic household and the brutal punishments they were liable to for the slightest infraction.

(It is a secondary consideration that in the long letter 90, a detailed list of the technical achievements and innovations which make up civilisation, Seneca despises them all and considers all of them – agriculture and irrigation and milling grain to make bread and architecture and glass windows and all the rest of it – only worthy of slaves and freedmen [who, apparently, largely made up the artisan class of Rome] and so far beneath an aristocrat like himself and his friend Lucilius. Aristocrats needed to rise above these slave occupations in order to practice the only thing worthwhile activity for humans, to cultivate the mind, perfect reason, acquire wisdom, so as to rise above passions and fear of death. That is the primary aim of the letter, but in order to make the point what comes over is a contempt for the artisan class, for engineers and innovators and craftsmen, which makes me dislike Seneca even more. His assumption is that all the achievements of the thousands of people who had perfected all aspects of civilisation and raised it to the luxurious heights of his day only matter insofar as they allow him to perfect his wonderful mind. It’s a privileged narcissism which is, in its own arrogant way, every bit as corrupt as the decadent court of the arch-egotist Nero.)

Self-help slogans

The book is stacked with improving and inspiring thoughts of the kind which have become over-familiar in the subsequent 2,000 years, particularly the last 50 years or so of self-help books.

  • I think it is the first proof of a stable mind to be able to pause and spend time with oneself. (2.1)
  • The best measure of wealth is to have what is necessary and the next best, is to have enough. (2.5)
  • The man at ease should take action, and the man at action should take ease. (5)
  • Who is well born? The man well set up by nature for virtue…it is the spirit that makes one noble. (44.5)
  • Nature made us teachable and gave us an imperfect reason but one which can be perfected. (50.11)

Although Seneca’s long porridgey paragraphs have the heavy feel of ‘philosophy’, the quality of the argumentation is often weak and many of the actual injunctions feel more like daytime TV, self-help guru-talk than Hegel or Hume. Once or twice he came close to the banal catchphrase mocked in the old TV sitcom, Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em: ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’

I rejoice that you are studying with perseverance and abandoning all else for this one thing, to make yourself a better man each day. (5.1)

Critique

As with all philosophy, and especially ‘moral’ philosophy, there is no end to the debate, discussion, critique and commentary which the Letters from a Stoic have spawned over the past 2,000 years. A handful of themes struck me:

1. Simplistic values

The most obvious, for me, is the extreme difference in the social context between Seneca and us and in particular his concept of negative life events. For Seneca a bad turn of events is an ever-present threat under the tyranny of imperial rule. It is associated with prison, torture, enslavement and all the other dire possibilities of life under arbitrary Roman emperors such as Nero. Thus there is a misleading simplicity to most of his meditations. When he imagines something bad, it’s being thrown into prison or tortured or executed by the emperor. The conception of negative life events which he uses to underpin his entire Stoic system is disconcertingly simple and extreme – exile, torture, death – and so the mental lesson he is teaching is concomitantly simplistic: prepare your mind to be strong and noble under torture or the threat of death (see the harping on about torture and death in letters 67 and 70).

But not many modern readers of the letters are going to have the same concerns – that they will thrown into prison, tortured or forced to commit suicide at the whim of a Roman emperor. The worst things I can imagine happening to me are: being in a life-changing accident i.e. becoming wheelchair-bound or having a stroke; being diagnosed with a terminal or life-changing illness; something bad happening to my loved ones, especially my children. But my day-to-day worries are more humdrum, recalcitrant, fiddly, frustrating: worried about my performance at work, this or that bit of the house needs maintenance, I’m worried about money, about not being able to pay my bills – fuel bills, heating bills, food bills.

I know Stoic thought can be applied to these modern circumstances i.e. I should try to cultivate mental detachment and resilience so I am ready to face bad events and rise above them. But the extremity and the simpleness of the situations Seneca describes and which form the basis of his entire philosophy (arbitrary arrest, torture, execution) rarely if ever occur in modern Western life and so all his much-repeated lessons rarely if at all apply to me. Modern life is more complex and multi-faceted than Seneca’s philosophy allows.

Seneca’s ‘philosophy’ is worth reading as an extremely vivid insight into the mindset of the Stoic classes during the tyranny of Nero but is, in my opinion, of limited use or value to modern readers leading modern lives.

2. Hypocrisy

I’ve just read Tacitus’s Annals where Seneca is described as being one of the richest men in Rome, with mansions as big as Nero’s and gardens even bigger, hundreds of servants, immense wealth in gold and assets. (In fact Seneca’s extreme wealth became proverbial to later generations: Juvenal’s tenth satire describes how Seneca, ‘grown too wealthy’ lost his magnificent gardens.) So it’s pretty ironic, knowing the man was a byword for obscene wealth, to read Seneca’s continual recommendation of the plain, simple life, eschewing pleasure and cultivating virtue. It’s easy advice for the ridiculously rich to give. The hypocrisy is summed up by a character in John Marston’s 1603 play, The Malcontent, which Watling quotes:

Out upon him! He writ of temperance and fortitude, yet lived like a voluptuous epicure and died like an effeminate coward. (The Malcontent, Act 3, scene 1, line 28)

Not quite accurate (Seneca definitely did not die ‘like an effeminate coward’) but the first half, the epicure accusation, has force. This point was epitomised, for me, in a throwaway remark of Seneca’s in a letter which is intended to be about exercise and physical frailty:

I have just returned from my ride. I am just as tired as if I had walked as far as I have been sitting. It is an effort to be carried for a long time, and I rather think the effort is greater because riding is contrary to nature. (55.1)

It is an effort to be carried for a long time. (In a sedan chair, presumably.) Well, what about the slaves who were doing the carrying? Bet it was a bit of an effort for them, too. Seneca’s writings cannot escape from the taint of the astonishing level of privilege enjoyed by his class in general, and the extraordinarily privileged lifestyle enjoyed by him – according to Tacitus the richest man in Rome – in particular.

3. How Christians appropriated Stoic rhetoric

Many of the lessons Seneca spells out to Lucilius are very familiar from the long tradition of Western moralists, from Erasmus, through Montaigne, on into the Enlightenment and then diffused out into the broader culture by thousands of Victorian moralists.

My mum used to tell us kids, ‘Moderation in everything’. You don’t need to read Seneca to already know half of his nostrums and tags. I suggest that much of it seems so familiar because Stoic teachings were taken over wholesale by the early Christians and formed the basis of much Christian everyday morality. Obviously not the bits specific to Christian theology (the Fall, Original Sin, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection etc) but the fundamental theist worldview is often indistinguishable from Christianity:

  • No one is worthy of God unless he despises possessions. (18.13)
  • God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. (41.1)
  • What is enough for God is not too little for masters. (47.18)
  • The place which God occupies in this universe is the place which mind occupies in man. (65.24)
  • God comes to men. Indeed, what is actually nearer, he comes into men. No mind is good without God. (73.16)
  • Whatever is good for us our God and father placed at hand. (110.10)

My point is that in the advice about day-to-day living, the Christians appropriated Stoic teachings so completely that the advice to Lucilius to cultivate the mind, avoid the crowd and their superficial entertainments, practice virtue, despise the knocks of Fortune and cultivate a contempt for death – all these are the familiar background hum of Christian morality, the subjects of hundreds of thousands of Sunday sermons and public lectures, recycled on radio phone-ins and daytime TV and millions of self-help columns in magazines and newspapers and books. Which explains why when we moderns come to read Seneca we are so rarely surprised and so often find his nostrums familiar and reassuring.

4. Repetition

Above all, like any good teacher, he repeats the same key points again and again, in different formulations, approached from different angles, but coming back again and again to the same fundamental idea: rise above the fortuitous events of your life; rise above all emotions and attachments; cultivate ‘philosophy’, which means a Buddhist detachment from everyone else and even from yourself; live with the idea of death so continually that it eventually presents no fears. And then you will have conquered yourself, your fear of death and you will be…free.

  • I am forcing my mind to focus on itself and not be distracted by outside events…The real calm is when a good state of mind unfolds. (56.6)
  • The wise man is full of joy, cheerful and calm, undisturbed. He lives on equal terms with the gods…The wise man’s mind is like the universe beyond the moon: there it is always fine and calm. (59.14)
  • Abandon those distractions which men have rushed to enjoy; abandon riches, which are either a danger or a burden to their possessors; leave the pleasures of body and mind, which soften and weaken you; abandon ambition, which is a bloated, hollow and windy condition with no limit. (84.11)
  • There is only one way the dawn can come: if a man takes in this knowledge of things human and divine and does not just sprinkle it over himself but but steeps himself in it; if he goes over the same things repeatedly (110.8)

But repetition is not argumentation. Despite Seneca using the word ‘philosophy’ all the time, this isn’t really philosophy at all. It is, as I’ve said, more like exhortation to a good frame of mind, moral uplift, encouragement to develop a tough attitude, therapy for the anxious, a self-help manual. And incredibly repetitive.

Unvexed by terrors and uncorrupted by pleasures we shall dread neither death nor the gods. We shall know that death is not an evil and the gods do not exist for evil. What harms us is as weak as what is harmed; the best things lack the power to harm. What awaits us, if we ever emerge from these dregs to the sublime and lofty region, is peace of mind and liberty free from the errors which have been driven out. What does that liberty consist of? Not fearing men or gods; wanting neither what is base nor excessive; having the greatest power over oneself. It is an incalculable good to become one’s own master. (75.17-18)

5. Family and friends

In nearly 300 pages of relentless insistence that we rise above all attachments and emotions, nowhere does he mention family (in just one letter, 104, he mentions his wife, Paulina).

Family was a very big thing indeed for noble Romans, so it’s a striking absence in the context of Seneca’s own time. But regarded as instructions for modern readers, his insistence on boiling your life right down to a relentless focus on cultivating your virtue and your indifference to death completely ignores the scores of relationships most people have in their lives, starting with their family.

Most modern therapy involves getting to grip with your childhood experiences and your relationship with your parents. But parents, spouses or children are completely absent from Seneca’s teachings. His Stoicism is an impressively selfish concern, in which he endlessly exhorts Lucilius to forget about everyone but himself, to focus on his own mind and anxiety of death etc, to think about no-one but me me me.

This makes his ‘philosophy’ inapplicable, in practice, to anyone who has parents, partners or children and really cares for them, is involved in their day-to-day wellbeing and, especially when it comes to children, to their little triumphs or setbacks. None of that for Stoic Seneca. He is in his study toughening up his mind by envisaging torture in every detail so as to be able to rise above it, when the time comes.

But it struck me that this deliberate ignoring of family sheds light on and helps to explain the humanistic obsession with friendship. Seneca’s letters on the importance of having one, key soulmate-level friend are one of the sources for the obsession with friendship which is a central theme of humanist writings from the 15th century onwards.

Friends know that they have everything in common…the true friendship which neither hope nor fear nor self-interest can sever, the friendship with which men die and for which they die. (6.2)

It’s possible to interpret this obsession with Perfect friendship as the Stoic replacing the messy, uncontrollable web of family relationships, with all its unpredictable ups and downs, with One Relationship with One Special Friend. To use the modern buzzword, it’s a very controlling approach. When you read the great humanist works on this subject (Cicero, Montaigne, Bacon) what comes over is that you are only going to meet one or two soulmates in your life and that you will become identical in interests and affections with this one special person. In a science fiction kind of way, you and the True Friend of humanist tradition will become one person.

So, to put it crudely, humanist teaching about friendship a) is a way of ducking the uncontrollable mess of family ties and responsibilities and b) ends up with you looking in a mirror. Solipsistic narcissism.

Horace

As Roman ‘moralists’ go, I prefer Horace. He’s lighter, funnier, his affable tone is more persuasive, more inspiring for me, than Seneca’s dour and relentless lecturing. Seneca sounds like the tutor he was:

I hereby order you to be slow in speaking. (40.14)

Whereas Horace sounds like a friend offering gentle advice:

Try not to guess what lies in the future, but,
As Fortune deals days, enter them into your
Life’s book as windfalls, credit items,
Gratefully…
(Horace, Odes, book 1, poem 9)

Seneca thinks of himself as embattled – quick! time is short! the enemy is at the door! focus on the essentials!

  • I am being besieged right now…the enemy is at our backs…I need a heroic spirit (49.9)
  • Fortune is waging war with me but I will not do what she orders, I will not accept the yoke. (51.8)
  • A real man prefers his sleep to be broken by a bugle than a chorus. (51.12)

This sense of the world as a battlefield, a fight, a struggle against countless enemies all trying to seduce your God-given soul, was inherited by Christianity. It dominates the letters of St Paul who wrote the most influential letters in Christendom, and used rhetoric similar to Seneca when he urged his followers to ‘fight the good fight’ (First letter to Timothy).

To understand Paul, we must grasp that he is at war, with the angels of heaven at his back. The Acts of the Apostles is, at its base, a power-struggle between Christ and Satan, wrenching whole peoples away from Satan’s grasp. (Jesus Walk Bible Studies)

In contrast to this worldview of unrelenting embattled paranoia, Horace writes a letter to a friend inviting him to come round and try the new wine they’ve just bottled on his estate. There’ll be other friends there, and they’ll stay up late together laughing and joking. Seneca’s remedy for the fickleness of human existence is to be continually, constantly thinking about death all the time.

Give me courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable…Say to me when I lie down to sleep: ‘You may not wake again!’ And when I have waked: ‘You may not go to sleep again!’ Say to me when I go forth from my house: ‘You may not return!’ And when I return: ‘You may never go forth again!’

Well, you may win the lottery this weekend. You may run down the escalator and bump into the woman of your dreams. If you start speculating about things which may happen, the sky’s the limit. In which case – why focus only on the bad things which ‘may’ happen. Lovely things ‘may’ happen, too. Pondering Seneca’s use of the conditional to dwell only on the most extreme negative outcomes (torture, execution) makes the reader realise how much he is obsessed with the dark side of life, and so insists that we be brutally harsh with ourselves:

  • Cast out whatever desires are lacerating your heart and if they cannot be pulled out any other way then you must tear out your heart with them. In particular, uproot pleasures and treat them with absolute loathing. (51.13)
  • We believe pleasure is a moral failing…Pleasure is a shameful thing. (59.1-2)

What a stupid attitude. Horace has an equally frank acceptance of how time is limited and we are hurrying towards our deaths, but he draws the exact opposite conclusion, which is: carpe diem, enjoy the moment. Instead of considering yourself under siege from wicked temptations so that you have to harden your heart against all affection, think of life as a blessing, bless every moment it brings you, and savour the fleeting pleasures. Horace gets my vote.

Last word to Martial

Martial book 11, epigram 56, begins, in the translation by James Michie:

Because you glorify death, old Stoic,
Don’t expect me to admire you as heroic…

And ends ten lines later:

It’s easy to despise life when things go wrong;
The true hero endures much, and long.


Credit

Selected Letters of Seneca, translated and introduced by Elaine Fantham, was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 2010. All quotes are from this edition.

Related links

Roman reviews

Tristia by Ovid

How wretched to live among tribal natives
for him whose name was once a household word.
(Tristia book 4, poem 1, lines 67 and 68)

What I seek is not praise but pardon.
(Tristia book 1, poem 7, line 31)

There’s nothing we own that isn’t mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind.
(Tristia, book 3, poem 7, lines 43 and 44)

America-based British academic Peter Green has published an impressive number of books about the ancient world – numerous histories and essays, along with many translations from ancient Greek and Latin.

Among these are two volumes of translations of the Roman poet Ovid for Penguin books: a portmanteau volume titled The Erotic Poems of Ovid, which includes Amores, The Art of Love and The Cure for Love, and this volume, The Poems of Exile, which includes Ovid’s last two works, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Letters from the Black Sea’).

These fairly long works (Tristia 103 page, Letters 90 pages) were, as the title suggests, written during Ovid’s 10-year-long and miserable exile at a town called Tomis, on the Black Sea (now the coastal resort of Constanca in Romania).

(Apparently it is important to distinguish between exile (deportatio) – where the banished person lost their Roman citizenship and all their property – and Ovid’s condition, which was the lesser punishment of relegatio, whereby he retained his citizenship and his property – very important for the ongoing life of his wife and daughter back in Rome, see note p.225 among others.

Ovid’s career

Born in 43 BC Ovid was a fluent and prolific poet who made his reputation with a series of books about love, treated in a cynically witty, urbane style:

  • first there was a set of letters supposedly written by women from myth and legend (the Heroides)
  • then the stylish Amores (‘Love poems’) which followed in the line of elegiac love lyrics pioneered by Catullus and developed by Tibullus and Propertius. The Amores were published in 16 BC
  • but most successful, and scandalous, was the Ars Amoris (‘The Art of Love’) which I thought might be a philosophical-moral treatise but turns out to be an extremely cynical, worldly guide to picking up women, preferably married women, for an illicit affair, closer to the world of Tinder and modern pickup artists than Plato or Castiglione. The Ars Amoris was published around 1 BC

Around the age of 40, Ovid made a significant shift in subject matter to produce the vast Metamorphoses, an encyclopedic collection of ancient myths and legends linked by the common topic of physical transformation i.e. tales of men and women who were changed by the gods or magic or fate into flowers, trees, animals, rivers and so on.

The poem contains flattering references to the emperor Augustus (who effectively ruled Rome single handed between 27 BC and his death in 14 AD) and leads up to a description of the apotheosis (conversion into a god) of Augustus’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar and then fulsome praise of Augustus himself. Metamorphoses was published in 8 AD.

Ovid was half way through writing a work which contains even more flattering references to Augustus and his extended family, the Fasti, a long poetic account of the Roman calendar which sets out to explain the origins and aspects of Rome’s numerous religious festivals, anniversaries and important dates – when he received an angry summons to the emperor’s personal presence, was given a fierce dressing down and instructed to pack his bags because he was being sent into exile (or to be precise relegatio). He was ordered to go and live in the wretched frontier town of Tomis, in the only partly-pacified province of Moesia, on the coast of the Black Sea in modern-day Romania.

Born in 43 BC, Ovid was 51 in late 8 AD when he was sent into exile.

Ovid’s exile

Why? What had he done which was so outrageous? For the last ten years of his life (8 to 18 AD) Ovid wrote these two books – 50 or so letters in which he pleaded with all his friends back in Rome to beg the emperor to change his mind and rescind his banishment, and 50 or so poems in which he gave poetic expression to the changing moods of an exile. But although he refers to the causes of his exile quite a few times, he never specifies exactly what it was.

To be precise, Ovid attributes his exile to two causes. One was that his recklessly cynical and amoral pickup guide The Art of Love offended against the very serious efforts of Augustus to restore traditional morality among Rome’s aristocracy, particularly when it came to marriage – banning adultery and rewarding fidelity and especially the parenting of children who should be brought up in a traditional, settled married environment. The Art of Love, as a guide to how to start and maintain adulterous affairs, flew straight in the face of everything Augustus was trying to achieve.

But Ovid himself thinks Augustus’s citing of this poem as a cause for exiling him was a smokescreen for a deeper reason. This he refers to repeatedly as his error but, infuriatingly, tells us his lips are sealed and he won’t explain it. For 2,000 years scholars have been forced to speculate.

Political – maybe was present at discussions about a coup to overthrow Augustus; maybe he was a witness to a secret marriage of Julia – either way Ovid’s hints imply that he himself was never part of a conspiracy, never carried out any action: but that he witnessed something and then, apparently, failed to report it.

The Tristia are accessible and enjoyable

I really struggled with Anne and Peter Wiseman’s prose translation of Ovid’s Fasti, several times thinking I’d have to give up reading the work altogether. It was only when I switched to A.S. Kline’s online verse translation that I was able to finish wading through the often very obscure and confusing text.

By contrast Peter Green’s verse translations of the Tristia and The Letters from Pontus are a delight to read. Above all, unlike long sections of the Fasti, it’s obvious what they’re about. Whether he’s describing the long stormy journey by sea to Tomis, or sending his book back to Rome, or praising his wife for her loyalty, or castigating an old friend for abandoning him, or begging Augustus for forgiveness, or saying his frivolous love poetry didn’t deserve to bring such a harsh fate down on their author’s head – the subject matter is obvious and the development of the argument almost always easy to follow.

Peter Green’s translation

This is immensely helped by Peter Green’s fresh, zingy, accessible translation. In fact there are two very strong points about this edition. One is the translation, which has an enjoyably flexible, rolling rhythm about it. The second is Green’s notes. Wiseman’s notes for the Fasti were sensible but fairly brief, restrained, limited. By contrast Green’s notes are almost long as the texts themselves (Tristia text 103 pages, Green’s notes 90 pages).

Green is gloriously unbuttoned, chatty, opinionated, fluent, garrulous. Tristia is divided into 5 books and each book gets a page or so of introduction explaining when it was written, describing Ovid’s changing tone of voice and approach as the books progress.

Then each poem in each book gets a page introduction to itself, before we get onto notes for specific references: these introductions describe what the poem is about, how it differs from other poems or echoes or repeats certain themes, how it riffs off this or that ancient genre or trope. Green freely discusses contemporary history, Ovid’s family relationships, the climate and people of Tomis, the theories of other scholars (for example, whether the poems are arranged in careful order or are more random) and so on, in a buttonholing garrulous manner which I found immensely interesting and entertaining.

And it is all immensely helpful for understanding how the tone and approach of the books changed over the long 10 years during which they were written; at understanding the genres or rhetorical conventions of Latin poetry which they invoke, copy or modify; for understanding the complex matrix of cross references Ovid sets up between them; and, on the simplest bucket level, understanding the historical events, the real historical people or the mythical personages which the poems refer to.

Instead of a set of standalone, isolated factual explications, Green’s notes are more like one vast essay of commentary and explication. His notes are easily as interesting to read as the poems.

Book 1 (11 poems)

1.1 (128 lines)

Little book – no, I don’t begrudge it you – you’re off to the City
without me, going where your only begetter is banned!

This is the envoi to book 1 and addresses the book as a sentient being which he is sending to Rome to argue on his behalf. This was an established literary convention (used by Catullus and Horace among others) but differs from its predecessors in introducing the recurrent theme that the book will argue for forgiveness and an end to his exile.

1.2 (110 lines)

‘You gods of sea and sky’ – what’s left me now but prayer? –
‘Don’t, break up our storm-tossed ship:
don’t, I beseech you, endorse great Caesar’s fury!’

Description of the violent storms which Ovid endured on his journey by ship across the Mediterranean in December 8 AD, with some poking fun at traditional descriptions and epic conventions around describing storms at sea.

1.3 (102 lines)

Nagging reminders: the black ghost-melancholy vision
of my final night in Rome,
the night I abandoned so much I dearly treasured,
to think of it, even now, starts tears…

Ovid paints the scene of his departure from Rome, the weeping and wailing of his servants and family, especially his (third) wife. With typical irony (and mocking epic convention) he compares himself briefly to Aeneas leaving Troy. More to the point he emphasises that his error was a mistake and not a deliberate crime.

1.4 (28 lines)

Dipped now in Ocean, the She-Bear’s stellar guardian
is stirring up stormy seas: yet here am I
constrained, not by my will, to plough the Adriatic…

Another description of his stormy journey, notable for the description of the figurehead of Minerva at the prow of the ship (Roman and Greek vessels carried painted figureheads of gods, to whom the crew prayed if they got into trouble).

1.5 (84 lines)

Friend, henceforth be reckoned the foremost among my comrades,
who, above all others, made your fate your own,
who first, I recall, when the bolt struck, dared to support me
with words of comfort…

Ovid praises the handful of friends who stuck by him when most of his fairweather friends bolted as soon as Augustus’s wrath struck his home. This passage, and Ovid’s plight generally, remind me much of Oscar Wilde’s sudden, fateful reversal of fortune, from talk of the town to almost complete abandonment by all but a handful of real friends:

Before my house’s downfall
visitors thronged the place, I was à la mode
if not ambitious. The first tremor sent them running…

In the second half of the poem Ovid wittily but bitterly compares himself to Ulysses who made a long and painful journey by sea, but the poet uses the extended comparison to bring out obvious differences, namely that Ulysses was a rough tough warrior, whereas Ovid is a sensitive poet unused to rough conditions; and that Ulysses was heading home to his loving wife and family whereas Ovid is heading away from everything that he loves.

1.6 (36 lines)

Not so dear was Lyde to the Clarian poet, not so truly
loved was Bittis by her singer from Cos
as you are deeply entwined, wife, in my heart…

In praise of his wife’s loyalty, including the (repeated so often as to become hackneyed) comparison with Ulysses’ loyal wife, Penelope. It ends with another theme which was to be repeated scores of times, the notion that his exile has killed off his former self, old Ovid is dead, and the old poetic exuberance borne of his high-flying social life is extinguished – but still the old dead suffering ex-poet can still squeeze out a few last lines:

Alas, my verses possess but scanty strength, your virtues
are more than my tongue can proclaim,
and the spark of creative vigour I once commanded
is extinct, killed off by my long
misfortunes. Yet in so far as our words of praise have power
you shall live through these verses for all time.

1.7 (40 lines)

Reader, if you possess a bust made in my likeness,
strip off the Bacchic ivy from its locks!
Such signs of felicity belong to fortunate poets:
on my temples a wreath is out of place.

A poem to a friend who’s stuck by Ovid, but which is really about the condition of the works Ovid leaves behind him in Rome. The poem claims that Ovid threw his copy of the Metamorphoses into the fire, and that it was unfinished, had yet to have a final revision:

…because the poem was still unfinished, still
in rough draft… it lacks my final hand:
a job snatched from me half-done, while still on the anvil,
a draft minus the last touch of the file.

1.8 (50 lines)

A poem of bitter reproach to an old friend who dumped him when trouble struck, scholars identify as the poem Macer, related to Ovid’s third wife, with whom he travelled through Greece and Asia Minor when he was a student. The poem opens with the rhetorical trope called adynaton meaning ‘impossibility’, similar to the modern saying ‘when hell freezes over’.

Back from the sea now, back to their sources shall deep rivers
flow, and the Sun, wheeling his steeds about,
run backward; earth shall bear stars, the plough cleave heaven,
fire shall give forth water, and water flames,
all things shall move contrary to the laws of nature,
no element in the world shall keep its path,
all that I swore impossible will happen now: there’s nothing left
that I can’t believe. This I prophesy after my betrayal by that person
who, I’d believed, would aid me in my distress…

1.9 (66 lines)

Reader, should you peruse this work without malice, may you
cross life’s finishing-line without a spill!

A poem to a faithful friend, notable for reminding friends who hesitate to support him that Augustus has demonstrated a capacity for clemency and respects those who stay loyal to friends and cause, even if they opposed him. Ovid says he wishes now he had never taken up the wretched art of poetry, seeing as where it’s led him. And repeats other recurring tropes: that the cynical amorality of the Ars Amatoria had nothing to do with his own private life which was chaste and faithful; and that it was a joke, a joke for God’s sake.

1.10 (50 lines)

I have (may I always keep!) blonde Minerva’s protection: my vessel
bears her painted casque, borrows her name.

In contrast to the earlier poems about storms at sea, this is a poem in praise of the good ship Minerva which brought him to a harbour in eastern Greece where they docked, Ovid unloaded and continued his journey by land, but the second half of the poem is an envisioning of the voyage back the ship will take, studded with famous placenames and historical references and calling down blessings on the good ship Minerva.

1.11 (44 lines)

Every word you’ve read in this whole book was written
during the anxious days
of my journey: scribbling lines in mid-Adriatic
while December froze the blood…

A poem highlighting the contrast between the lazy peaceful couch on which he composed his great works back in Rome, and the storm-tossed ship on which he tried to write poems on the blustery, brine-drenched journey East.

If these lines fall short – as they do –
of your hope: they were not written, as formerly, in my garden,
while I lounged on a favourite day-bed, but at sea,
in wintry light, rough-tossed by filthy weather, spindrift
spattering the paper as I write.

Book 2 (578 lines)

Book 2 stands out because instead of a set of 10 or so shorter poems it is one longer poem of 578 lines. Green cites earlier scholars who consider the poem a suasoria, meaning:

Suasoria is an exercise in rhetoric: a form of declamation in which the student makes a speech which is the soliloquy of an historical figure debating how to proceed at a critical junction in his life. (Wikipedia)

Or maybe a legal argument, to be presented in court. It consists of:

  1. the exordium – attempt to placate the judge (Augustus) (lines 1 to 26)
  2. the propositio – outlining the speaker’s aim (27 to 28)
  3. the tractatio – the handling or treatment in which the case is unfolded at length (29 to 578); this can be sub-divided into:
    1. probatio or proof of evidence (29 to 154)
    2. epilogus 1 or first conclusion, entering a plea for mitigation of sentence
    3. refutatio or rebuttal of the charge (Ovid argues that his poetry never corrupted anyone because to the pure all things are pure and to the corrupt, anything is corrupt) (207 to 572)
    4. epilogus 2 or second conclusion, again calling for clemency

In other words, even more than

Book 3 (15 poems)

These poems were composed in 9 to 10 AD. The first excitement of the journey into exile, undertaken in December 8 AD and vividly described in book 1, is over. He has spent one winter in Tomis and now knows the role freezing bitter cold is going to play in his life. And it is dawning on him that this exile isn’t for a year or so, isn’t a game which will come to an end – but is the bitter condition for the rest of his days.

3.1 (82 lines)

‘I’m an exile’s book. He sent me. I’m tired. I feel trepidation
approaching his city – kind reader, lend a hand.’

Book 3 poem 1 repeats the conceit of book 1 poem 1 in conceiving the book as envoy except that whereas in book 1 Ovid had been outside the book, sending it as the author, this poem speaks in the voice of the book itself. This allows the book itself to find its way through Rome in order to seek out readers, a library to stay in, and the palace of the great Augustus (who, for the umpteenth time, Ovid begs for forgiveness). In so doing, the poem provides an interesting and historically useful guide to the layout of the Rome of his day. He is as conscious as ever of the role the Ars Amoria plays in his personal disaster, something so well known that he has his book tell anyone encountering not to fear:

‘Have no fear: I won’t turn out an embarrassment to you:
no instructions about love, not one page,
not a syllable. So bleak my master’s misfortunes, he shouldn’t
try to camouflage them with light verse,
though that sport of his green years, that frivolous disaster
he now – too late, alas! – detests and condemns.
See what I bring you’ll find nothing here but lamentation,
verse matching its circumstances…’

The book’s tour of Rome, appropriately, at Asinius Pollio’s library

3.2 (30 lines)

So it was my destiny to travel as far as Scythia,
that land lying below the Northern pole,
and neither you, Muses, not you, Leto’s son Apollo,
cultured crowd though you are, gave any help
to your own priest…

Ovid makes the theme clear: he is a soft poet, not used to a hard life (‘an escapist, born for leisured comfort’), his erotic poetry was a joke, a pose, he was never a libertine in real life (‘my poetry’s more wanton than my life’). But now all that’s dead and gone.

The journey to Tomis was so stormy and colourful it helped to distract him from the misery of exile, even inspired him a bit. But now the hard fact of exile has hit him and his existence has settled into a monotonous drudge – it’s cold, it’s boring and it’s dangerous. Now ‘weeping is my only pleasure’. Now he yearns for death.

In the poem he knocks at the door of his own sepulchre door, which he finds stubbornly shut against him. (Green makes the typically illuminating comment that this is an inversion of the trope of the paraclausithyron, the image of the poet keeping watch morosely outside the locked door of his beloved, well established in the elegiac tradition and which Ovid had himself used in the Amores.

3.3 (88 lines)

If perhaps you’re wondering why this letter’s drafted
by another’s hand, I’ve been, am, sick,
sick, and at the unmapped world’s remotest limits,
scarce certain of my survival.

Ovid is ill and depressed. He lists the tribulations of exile: cold climate, impure water, depressing landscape, no proper housing, bad diet, no doctors to treat his illness, no friends’ conversation to distract him. He addresses his wife, swearing she’s the only woman he thinks about, he said her name during the delirium of his illness. He imagines his death. He writes his own epitaph.

3.4A (lines 1 to 46)

Ah friend, my dear care as always, though in harsh circumstances
first truly assayed, after my world’s collapse,
if you’ve any respect for the lessons experience has taught me,
live for yourself, keep far from all great names…

A poem to an unnamed friend, advising him to live a discrete, retired life, not to make grand acquaintances, not to fly too high lest, like poor Ovid, he be blasted by Jove’s thunderbolt. (The comparisons of Augustus with Jupiter, and the decision to exile Ovid falling on him like the god’s thunderbolt, appear in virtually all the poems, quickly becoming a part of their standardised litany of complaint.) He warns his friend to:

Live without rousing envy, enjoy years of undistinguished
ease and delight…

3.4B (lines 47 to 78)

A region that neighbours the polar constellations
imprisons me now, land seared by crimping frost…

The poem begins by lamenting the frozen waste he finds himself in, such that Rome and its familiar landscapes now linger on only in his memory. Next to them, his wife, whose image haunts him. And then his loyal friends. He asks them not to forget him, to do what they can to lend a hand to his cause.

3.5 (56 lines)

Our friendship was new and slight: you could have denied it
without any trouble. (You’d have not, I think,
embraced me more closely had my vessel been driven
on by a favouring wind.)

While some of his old friends have abandoned him, the (unnamed) addressee of this poem stuck by him despite being a new acquaintance. Ovid thanks and praises him, then asks that he use his eloquence to argue his cause before the emperor.

Again and again and again Ovid insists he did no wrong, he merely witnessed something and failed to report it: he committed no crime except simply having eyes. Here there’s one of the longest passages describing this, 10 lines of exculpation, emphasising that he committed an error but – as he repeats just as often – shying away from explaining the nature of this ‘error’. God, I can see why it’s driven 2,000 years of scholars mad with frustration.

3.6 (38 lines)

The bond of friendship between us, carissimo, you neither
wish to dissimulate, nor could if you so wished…

To his best friend, praising his loyalty, saying he’s shared everything with him – except the nature of the ‘offence’ which got him banished. If he’d shared it, his friend would have joined him in exile, indicating what a toxically powerful secret it must have been.

He repeats the claim that he, Ovid, didn’t do anything, merely witnessed something – so that it’s his eyes which are to blame. He says that even to hint at his crime would be ‘great risk’. He says it is better buried in deepest night. He asks his friend to help and intercede on his behalf with angry Jupiter.

3.7 (54 lines)

Go quickly, scribbled letter, my loyal mouthpiece,
and greet Perilla for me. Her you’ll find
either sitting in the company of her sweet mother
or among her books and poems…

A sweet and touching poem to his step-daughter, Perilla (his wife’s daughter by an earlier husband), now a young woman. Surprisingly, it turns out that she is a poet too, her talent spotted and nurtured by her dad. They often read their poems to each other. He praises her and tells her, if she’s worried about his fate, that she’ll be fine so long as she doesn’t set out to teach anyone about love (Ovid’s writing of The Art of Love having been given out as the official reason for his banishment).

It ends with a triumphant assertion of the supremacy and triumph of art. Age may wither her, the emperor’s punishment has blasted him – everything can be taken from them, and yet:

There’s nothing we own that isn’t mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind.
Look at me – I’ve lost my home, the two of you, my country,
they’ve stripped me of all they could take,
yet my talent remains my joy, my constant companion:
over this, Caesar could have no rights…

Caesar will die, yet so long as Rome exists, Ovid will be read. It must have been an optimistic claim, made to keep his spirits up and yet, 2,000 years later, amazingly… it’s true!

3.8 (42 lines)

Now I wish I were high aloft in the car of Triptolemus
who flung the untried seed on virgin soil…

He wishes for the paraphernalia of various mythological figures so he can fly back to Rome, then pulls himself up short. Fool! Instead of old legends he should be petitioning the real Augustus in the here and now. If not to end his exile at least to move him somewhere else. The wretched climate, the lack of all amenities and civilised companionship is sapping his spirit, making him ill. God, why didn’t Augustus just kill him outright and be done with it?

3.9 (34 lines)

Here too, then, there are – who would credit it? – Greek cities
among the wild place-names of barbary: here too
colonists, sent out from Miletus, founded Greek outposts
on Getic soil…

An aetiological poem i.e. one which explains a modern custom, practice or place name in terms of a myth or legend. In this case Ovid derives the name of his exile town, Tomis, from the old story that the witch Medea, having fled her homeland, saw the sail of the ship of her father, Aeëtes, approaching and, in panic, conceived a plan to delay him so she could make a getaway. The plan? To rip to shreds her brother and scatter his body parts about the shore, thus forcing her father to collect them together for a proper funeral pyre. In Latin the (false) etymology relates tomé, a noun meaning the act of chopping up, with Tomis.

Green’s notes tell us that a) aetiological poems were a speciality of the Hellenistic poet, Callimachus (305 to 240 BC) and b) Roman aetiological poems almost always get the etymology and derivation of words wrong. Odd that we, 2,000 years later, know more about their customs and, especially their language, than they did.

3.10 (78 lines)

If anyone there still remembers exiled Ovid, if my
name survives in the City now I’m gone,
let him know that beneath those stars that never dip in Ocean
I live now in mid-barbary, hemmed about
by wild Sarmatians, Bessi, Getae, names unworthy
of my talent!

A long vivid poem giving a rare description of what Tomis was actually like, or the landscape around it. To be precise Ovid focuses on the bitter freezing winter weather and the way the many mouths of the river Danube which enter the Black Sea close to the town freeze over. Not only that but the sea itself freezes: he knows, he’s walked on frozen waves.

But it’s worse, it’s not just that it’s cold: normally the river acts as a barrier against barbarian tribes but when it freezes they can ride over it and raid nearby villages. Some peasants flee, leaving their farms and possessions to be looted by the raiders. Some are shackled and led off to slavery. Some die in agony because the raider’s sharp arrowheads are dipped in poison. What they can’t steal, the barbarians burn to the ground.

3.11 (74 lines)

Whoever you are, vile man, who scoff at my misfortunes,
and with bloody zeal fling charges at me – you
were born from the rocks, by wild beasts’ udders nurtured
with flints, I’ll swear, in your breast…

A bitter recrimination against some (unnamed) enemy who is bad mouthing and savaging his character back in Rome. Why make a miserable man more miserable? Ovid laments the coldness, the isolation, he can’t speak the natives’ language, he suffered cruelly on the journey out, now he lives in terror of the violent tribesmen. O vile calumniator, why hit an unfortunate man when he’s down?

3.12 (54 lines)

West winds now ease the cold: at the year’s closure
a longer-than-ever winter must yield at last,
while the Ram (that bore Helle – and dropped her) now equalises
the hours of darkness and light…

March 10 AD. The first half of the poem is a vivid celebration of the sights and sounds of spring back in Rome and the Italian countryside, spring flowers, children playing in the fields, men exercising, the roar of crowds at the theatre.

Then the volta or ‘turn’ to contrast his sad isolated existence. For Ovid Spring means the very slow thaw of the ice, some water runs a bit free in the cistern. Wine left outside no longer freezes solid in the bottle. The Danube flows again and the Black Sea becomes navigable and so, once in a blue moon, a ship may arrive from Rome and Ovid will avidly question the captain for even the slightest scraps of gossip which can, for a moment, revive his link to his long-lost homeland.

3.13 (28 lines)

My birthday god’s here again, on time – and superfluous:
what good did I get from being born?
Cruel spirit, why come to increase this wretch’s years of exile?
You should rather have cut them short…

The Greeks considered the genethliakon or ‘birthday poem’ a genre in its own right, with its own rules and stock imagery. It’s here to mark Ovid’s birthday. He was born on 20 March 43 BC so, if this poem was written in 10 AD, he was 53.

But Ovid deliberately reverses all the conventions of the birthday poem. For example, he curses the birth god (the natalis) who oversaw his birth. It would have been more merciful to have let him die as a baby, or never be born at all, rather than endure this misery. Instead of the customary toga and ritual thanksgivings on his birthday, he’d prefer an altar of death.

3.14 (52 lines)

Patron and reverend guardian of men of letters, you always
befriended my talent – but what’s your attitude now?
In the days before my downfall you used to promote me –
and today?

Scholars consider the addressee of this poem to have been Caius Julius Hyginus, director of the Palatine library, patron of young poets, and a close friend in the old days back in Rome. The poem echoes the themes of books and libraries announced in poem 3.1, in other words they form bookends ti the volume.

Ovid hopes Hyginus is still supportive of his work. Books are like children, they can remain behind in the city even when the father is exiled. Ovid refers to the fact that his erotic poems (The Art of LiveThe Cure For Love) have been banned and removed from all libraries, but hopes the others are read.

Interestingly, he is at pains to emphasise that the Metamorphoses was left unfinished (a claim which consciously or unconsciously compares him with Virgil’s famously unfinished masterpiece, the Aeneid).

Then he turns to the present book, ‘a missive from the world’s end’, and asks Hyginus to be indulgent and remember the context of its writing: Ovid fears his talent has withered, he has forgotten his Latin, here in a place surrounded by barbarian tongues and threatened every day with violent attack, he worries all his stylishness has been rubbed off him. Please make allowances.

Book 4 (10 poems)

4.1 (106 lines)

Whatever defects there may be – and there will be – in these poems,
hold them excused, good reader, by the times
in which they were written. An exile, I was seeking solace,
not fame…

In the envoi to book 4 Ovid asks the reader’s indulgence, and to consider the miserable exile. His only true and steadfast companion is his Muse. He tells us how slaves, chained rowers, slave girls, manual labourers, sing songs to pass the time, as did the legendary figures Orpheus and even Achilles, sulking in his tent.

And so Ovid in exile. He ought to curse the avocation which led him to write the love guide which led to his downfall, but he can’t: he’s hooked. Writing transports him away from his miserable situation, drugs him, like the potions which numbed the lotus eaters.

What is he drugging himself from? The horrible situation of living in a walled defensive town liable to attack at any moment from barbarian tribes. He describes the way the way the alarm goes and he has to buckle on a sword although he’s 60 years old! He repeats the description of the way the raiders capture, shackle and lead off to slavery local farmers, or just shoot them with poisoned arrows and leave them to die.

Once again he laments that there is no-one at all to read his poems to who will understand them let alone appreciate them. Sometimes he waters the paper with his tears. Sometimes he crunches them up and throws them in the fire. What has survived he presents in this book and craves our indulgence.

4.2 (74 lines)

Already fierce Germany, like all the world, confronted
by the Caesars, may well have bent her knee
in surrender…

He imagines the full panoply of celebrations surrounding what he assumes must be Tiberius’s victories in Germany, including the sacrifices in temples and the great public triumphant procession through Rome, all under the guiding vision of beneficent Augustus.

The poem switches to meditate on the process of imagination itself, by which he is imagining and visualising all this, for his imagination, his mind’s eye, can go where he, alas, never again can.

4.3 (84 lines)

He asks the stars of the new constellation to turn their eyes upon his wife, ‘sweetest of wives’. He hopes she is missing him. Then addresses her directly and asks a series of rhetorical questions itemising her grief (when she looks at his untouched pillow in their marital bed, does she weep?)

Yet, to be honest, he wishes he had died. Then she would have something simple and pure to weep over, instead of his agonising shame, and the fact that he lives, but forever inaccessible to her. She supported him and was so proud of his achievements, for so long. Please don’t be ashamed of him, now. Defend him. Intercede for him.

4.4 (88 lines)

O you who with your high birth and ancestral titles
in nobility of character still outshine
your clan, whose mind mirrors your father’s brilliance
while retaining a brilliance all your own…

An appeal to Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus, the eldest son of Ovid’s patron (recently deceased), Messalla Corvinus. Ovid sings Valerius’s praises but as the poem proceeds it becomes clear he never really knew the boy and is trying to curry favour because of the connection with his (now dead) father.

This leads Ovid into embarrassed contortions, and apologies, before going on to the usual litany of self-exculpation (‘it wasn’t a crime, it was an error‘) before begging Valerius to intervene with Augustus to ask for his exile to be, if not revoked, that at least he be moved somewhere better, safer from raids by barbarians, hot for blood and plunder, some of whom are cannibals.

4.5 (34 lines)

A sycophantic poem addressed to Messalinus’s younger brother, Marcus Valerius Cotta Maximus although, as with all the Tristia the addressee is not explicitly named – because Ovid knew it would do nobody any good to be associated with his disgrace, his exile, his crime. This young man was loaded and well connected. Ovid politely, discreetly, begs for his help.

Do what you safely can: rejoice in your heart that I’m mindful
of you, that you’ve been loyal to me; still bend,
as now, to your oars to bring me succour…

4.6 (50 lines)

Believe me I’m failing; to judge from my physical condition
I’d say my troubles have a scant
future remaining – I lack my old strength and colour,
there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones;
yet sick though my body is, my mind is sicker
from endless contemplation of its woes…
(lines 39 to 44)

Two winters have passed (of 9 and 10 AD) so scholars think this poem was written in 11. Ovid is tired, worn down, sick in mind and body, and has one hope left – ‘that my troubles may be soon cut short by death’.

4.7 (26 lines)

Twice has the Sun approached me after the chills of icy
winter, twice rounded his journey off
through the sign of the fish.

The sign of the Fish enters the Sun in February so scholars date this poem to 11 AD. Ovid reproaches a dear old friend (unnamed like all the addressees of these poems) for not writing to him, hoping he has written, but that the letters have got lost on the long, fraught journey to the outer reaches of the empire.

4.8 (52 lines)

Already my temples are mimicking swans’ plumage,
and hoary age bleaching my once-dark hair;
already the frail years are on me, the age of inertia,
already my infirm self fins life too hard…

He has grown old. Ships, racehorses, charioteers, old soldiers, all these get to be pensioned off – why not an old poet? Why can’t an old poet be set free from his miserable exile and allowed to return?

At my time of life I shouldn’t be breathing this alien
air, or easing my thirst at Getic wells,
but dividing my days between those peaceful country gardens
I once possessed, and the pleasures of human life,
the human round…

4.9 (32 lines)

Ovid is ferociously angry with an unnamed enemy who has been bad-mouthing the powerless poet back in Rome. Ovid calls down vengeance on him – ‘then luckless sorrow will perforce take arms’ – and promises that his angry words will travel the world and last for generations to come – as they, indeed, did.

Although
I’m sequestered on this wasteland where the northern stars circle
high and dry above my gaze, nevertheless
my clarion message will go forth to countless peoples,
my complaint shall be known world-wide;
whatever I say shall be heard, across deep waters;
my lamentation shall find a mighty voice.

4.10 (132 lines)

This is the best known of all the 100 or so exilic poems for the simple reason that it is a versified autobiography, detailing Ovid’s early life and career, his decision to choose poetry and art over a career in public service, then the inevitable story of his erotic poetry – emphasising, as always, the clear distinction between his promiscuous poetry and his respectable personal life. And then on to his notorious ‘error’ and so into exile.

He dwells on the deaths of his elder brother, which left him maimed. Later the deaths of his father then mother, and he thinks them lucky to have led long blameless lives. Maybe from Elysium they can hear him when he assures them (for the umpteenth time) that his exile was caused by an error not a crime.

When a youth the older poets were like gods to him. Old Macer read him his latest poems. Propertius and he had ‘a close-binding comradeship between us’. Horace, ‘that metrical wizard’, held them spellbound to the sound of the lyre. Virgil he only saw, never spoke to. Tibullus died young, before he could make his acquaintance. He thinks of the elegiac poets as being, in chronological order, Gallus (whose entire oeuvre is lost), Tibullus, Propertius then himself (interesting that he doesn’t mention Catullus).

He lists his three marriages, the first wife ‘worthless and useless’, the second wife died young, and now his long third marriage. His daughter makes him a grandfather. He is growing old when the thunderbolt falls, and he is sent into exile.

The cause (though too familiar to everyone) of my ruin
must not be revealed through testimony of mine.

After a long and gruelling journey (again and again he compares himself to Ulysses) he arrives in his wretched place of exile and now, his only remaining solace is writing poems, when he can. Again, he repeats the idea that everything else is lost, but his talent, his gift, and the Muse which brings it, remain.

Book 5 (15 poems)

Yet another Black Sea booklet
to add to the four I’ve already sent!

The fifth and final book of Tristria is different in tone from the previous four, more resigned, more limited in ambition, with less zest and irony. More tetchy, irritated, and desperate. Only one poem is descriptive (i.e describes Tomis). The other 13 are all addressed to specific individuals, half of them to his wife (more than in the previous four books put together) begging them all to get Augustus to revoke his exile or, at least, assign him somewhere warmer, safer and closer to Rome.

His references and analogies become increasingly repetitive. In every single poem he repeats that he did nothing wrong, he committed no bloodshed, it was a simple ‘error’, he merely witnessed something by accident, by mistake.

In every poem Augustus is compared to Jupiter (reasonably enough). Ovid repeatedly compares himself to Capaneus, one of the heroes of the war against Thebes who, as he led the attack on one of the city’s gates shouted that not even Jupiter could stop him now, so Jupiter promptly zapped him with a thunderbolt.

Or to Philoctetes, suffering from a wound which would never heal, for ten long years abandoned on the inhospitable island of Lemnos.

5.1 (80 lines)

I don’t correct these poems, let them be read as written:
they’re no more barbarous than their place of birth.

He warns his reader that this is not a book of sexy, frivolous poems as by Gallus, Tibullus or Propertius. They are grim and bleak, like his circumstances: ‘A dirge best fits a living death’.

He imagines a critical reader wondering why he’s bothering to write such depressing poems, and defends it as a form of crying out in pain, an action he then defends by giving half a dozen mythological examples of legendary figures crying out in unendurable pain.

He defends his erotic poetry against the charge of immorality by pointing out the only person who ever suffered because of it was him.

(Green makes the droll point that, alone of all the Augustan poets Ovid was singled out for immorality therefore undermining Augustus’s reforming legislation about marriage; and yet, as far as we know, Ovid was the only one of the famous poets to be married: neither Virgil (gay), Horace (promiscuous bachelor), nor Propertius were.)

5.2 (78 lines)

To his wife, increasingly desperate, sick and depressed.

It’s a barbarous land that now holds me, earth’s final outpost,
a place ringed by savage foes.

He accuses his wife of not putting herself out as she should on his behalf. Has she deserted him, like everyone else? He tells her to approach the emperor directly. If she won’t then he will and at line 45 the poem changes to a hymn of praise to Augustus. All the double-edged irony and wit which you can discern in the earlier references to Augustus has evaporated. Now he is on his knees, spouting extravagantly excessive praise and openly begging.

O glory, O image of the country that flourishes through you,
O hero to match the very sphere you rule.

He says it’s not the cold, nor the lack of culture among a people none of whom speak Latin, it’s the fear of attack by uncivilised barbarians, living in a small settlement protected only by one low wall, that he’s seen fighting at close quarters, that he lives in constant anxiety and insecurity. He begs Augustus to move him to some less terrifying place of exile.

5.3 (58 lines)

A poem celebrating Bacchus, god of wine, on his feast day, the Liberalia, 17 March (described in Ovid’s poetic version of the Roman calendar, the Fasti) then asking him to intercede with Augustus.

5.4 (50 lines)

From the Black Sea’s shore I have come, a letter of Ovid’s,
wearied by sea-travel, wearied by the road.
Weeping he told me: ‘See Rome, for you it’s not forbidden –
alas, how better far your lot than mine!’

Ovid repeats the conceit of having the poem speak in the first person as a letter, all the way from the shores of the Black Sea to the (unnamed) recipient in Rome, a letter able to go where he, alas, cannot, sealed with a signet ring wet with his tears.

But he emphasises that he accepts he was wrong, accepts punishment, like a broken horse doesn’t strain against the leash. He just wishes the great god who punished him will show mercy.

The letter rehearses Ovid’s grievances and bitter experiences before going on to describe the addressee as his best friend, remembering how he stuck by him when almost everyone else abandoned him, how he visited Ovid and wept and tried to console him for his sad fate.

5.5 (64 lines)

A poem to his wife. It’s her birthday so he describes going through the rituals to celebrate a birthday, namely wearing a white toga, building an altar from turf, hanging a woven wreath, lighting a fire and sprinkling wine and incense on it. He sends her a fleet of good wishes, may she have a long untroubled life. He says she has a strength of character to match Penelope or Andromache, she is a paragon of ‘uprightness, chastity, faithfulness’.

He introduces a series of classical comparisons with the thought that all those famous women from antiquity were famous because of their husband’s suffering and their loyalty – Andromache, Penelope, Evadne (wife of the recurring figure of Capaneus, blasted by Jupiter), Alcestis, Laodamia.

But she doesn’t deserve to be famous for her husband’s suffering and her share of it, and so the poem ends with a plea to Augustus to forgive him, for his wife’s sake if not his own.

5.6 (46 lines)

Poem to an unnamed friend. Ovid recriminates the friend for dropping him, now he’s in trouble, now he’s become a ‘burden’. Ovid compares him unfavourably to a raft of mythological figures famous for their loyalty. For the umpteenth time he invokes a familiar set of similes to indicate the sheer number of woes he suffers, as numerous as reeds which soak sodden ditches, or bees on Mount Hybla (famous for its honey), or ants carrying grains to their nest, or grains of sand on the seashore, or ears of wheat in a field.

5.7A (lines 1 to 24)

A short letter to an unnamed friend in which he describes himself as wretchedly miserable and gives a rare description of the native inhabitants, great hordes of tribal nomads, Sarmatians, Getae, hogging the road on their horses, each bearing a bow and quiver full of poisoned arrows, fierce faces, harsh voices, shaggy hair and beards, quick to argue and stab each other with the knives in their belts.

These are the people Ovid lives among, the elegant esteem he won for his light love verses back in Rome long, long forgotten and irrelevant in this harsh environment and violent, illiterate society.

5.7B (lines 25 to 68)

Some scholars divide the poem in two, because this second half switches from describing the grim natives of Tomis and whirls us back to Rome where he hears that his poems are now recited and applauded on the stage (the translator, Peter Green, speculates that this is for the pantomimi where an actor declaimed verses while dancers danced; sounds like ballet).

He curses his poetry which got him into such trouble, and yet he has nothing else. Here in this windswept waste amid violent, illiterate tribals, writing poetry is the only consolation he has, the only last slender link with distant Rome and his former life.

Then about language: not a single person in Tomis speaks Latin, none. Some speak a very debased form of Greek, legacy of when the town was founded centuries ago by Greeks. But most speak only the local tribal tongues. When he talks to anyone it is in pidgen-Sarmatian. He worries not only that he’s lost his style, in the absence of Latin speakers to listen to and comment on his poems – he worries that he’s forgetting Latin. And so he spends his time conversing with himself and doing writing exercises and writing these poems, holding at bay the collapse of his language skills and talent.

Thus I drag out my life and time, thus
tear my mind from the contemplation of my woes.
Through writing I seek an anodyne to misery: if my studies
win me such a reward, that is enough.

5.8 (38 lines)

Angry poem to an unnamed person who has been spreading malicious lies about him, a ‘vile wretch’ than whom no-one is lower. Once again Ovid curses this person, then emphasises the non-criminal nature of his error, praises the emperor’s clemency (hoping against hope), and hopes for the end of his exile and recall.

The early part of the poem is an interesting invocation of the goddess Fortune, whose wheel is always turning, and Nemesis, ‘hot for revenge’. Ovid says he has certainly been brought from the pinnacle of fame to miserable exile, but what makes his unnamed critic so confident the same thing won’t happen to him?

For Ovid hopes that Augustus will apply his mercy and recall him, at which point the critic will be amazed to see his face, one day, in Rome and then Ovid knows things which will secure that his critic is sent into exile!

5.9 (38 lines)

A poem to a friend who stayed loyal, Ovid claims more or less the only friend who stayed loyal and so he wishes he could a) name him (but that is forbidden for the friend’s own safety), b) devote every poem he ever writes in future to his friend’s praise.

The poem is factually interesting because it (unconsciously) brings to the fore the thought that whatever Ovid did (his notorious error) may actually have merited death. Therefore his relegatio already exemplified Augustus’s mercy, and that this may account for why no further mercy(i.e. relenting and letting Ovid return; even moving his place of exile to somewhere less inhospitable) may have been impossible for Augustus.

Behind all this is the most common interpretation of his fate which is that it was tied to something he saw being enacted in favour of Julia and her so-called ‘party’, meaning the aide of the extended Augustan family which wanted the succession to pass to a male on her side of the family.

Tiberius had had two sons by Julia, Augustus’s daughter – Gaius and Lucius, who died in 4 and 2 AD, respectively. Agrippa Postumus, Julia’s son by her first husband, Agrippa, had been unadopted and exiled in 7 AD. Julia herself was sent into exile in 8 AD, the same year as Ovid, ostensibly for immorality and widespread adultery, though conspiracy theorists from that day to this speculate that she was involved in some kind of plan to overthrow Augustus and replace the heir apparent with someone from her side of the family, or possibly a male contender who she married in the hypothetical secret marriage that Ovid hypothetically witnessed or knew about but didn’t report.

Both the Roman historians, Cassius Dio and Suetonius refer to a series of plots in the final years of Augustus’s rule, the most serious in the spring or early summer of 8 AD. Green thinks Ovid’s error was some kind of passive involvement in one of these (note p.212).

Thus the speculation engendered by Ovid’s frustrating failure, in over 100 poems of exile, to spell out what his offence was.

If it was a secret marriage, or a vow, or some kind of ceremony binding the Julia party, this explains the unremitting opposition to Ovid of the man who emerged during these years as the (reluctant) heir apparent, Tiberius, and of his scheming mother, Augustus’s second wife, Livia.

If Ovid’s error had somehow proved him sympathetic to the Julia party then not only was this the reason for his relegatio but explains why Livia made quite sure that Augustus, even if he contemplated mercy, never enacted it. And that when Tiberius came to power in 14 AD, Ovid stood no chance.

It explains why Ovid never mentions Tiberius in any of the 100 exile poems, but does mention Germanicus and Drusus, heirs in the Julian line. (Indeed, in exile Ovid reworked the first book of the unfinished Fasti to introduce a new dedication to Germanicus, Tiberius’s nephew, who Augustus had forced him to adopt in 4 AD – presumably in the hope that he would intercede with Augustus.)

It explains something which comes over in the notes – though not explicitly in the poems – which is that his friends back in Rome, in varying degrees, saw the way the wind was blowing, saw that Tiberius’s rise to power was becoming unstoppable, and so shifted allegiance to the coming man.

For all his contacts back in Rome, then, defending Ovid not only risked angering the old and visibly ailing emperor Augustus, but alienating the new master.

5.10 (52 lines)

Ovid tells his addressee he’s been in Tomis for 3 winters, watching the Danube freeze over. He ponders time: has time in general slowed down or is it only for him? In which case, is time subjective? (Well, the experience of it obviously is).

Once again he laments his location and, above all, the endless threat from marauding tribes whose only language is rape and pillage and the feeble defences (a good defensive site and a low wall) which is all that stands between Tomis and violent death. Their poisoned arrows litter the streets. Farmers dare not farm for they will be raided at any moment. Over half the population of the town are tribals, their chest-length hair, their shaggy bears, their trousers, fill him with loathing.

He knows that the townspeople regard him as the outsider, the oddity, with his soft hands and strange foreign language. Here he is the barbarian. OK, he admits, maybe it was right for him to be exiled…but to a place like this? It is cruel.

5.11 (30 lines)

The poem starts out feeling terribly sorry for his wife who, he’s learned, has been called ‘the wife of an exile’ as a deliberate insult. He grieves at the shame he’s brought upon her and tells her to be steadfast.

Then he switches, for the umpteenth time, to consider his fate. He does this to try and console his wife by making a fine legal distinction, namely that the emperor could have had him a) executed or b) fully exiled (deportatio), deprived of all rights and Roman citizenship. Instead Ovid was c) given the milder punishment of relegatio and so has retained life and estates and civil rights; to that extent, the emperor showed clemency, a punishment fitting his error, not a crime. To that extent the bastard who called his wife ‘the wife of an exile’ was wrong. So there! Little comfort, the modern reader might feel, to his lonely, distant wife.

Then in a move which feels pitifully grovelling, Ovid turns to praising the emperor, claiming his decision was just and mild, and that is why he devotes his poems to praising him:

Rightly then, Caesar, and to the very best of their powers
my poems (such as they are) proclaim your praise…

But if the interpretation that Ovid had seen something (as he repeatedly says, he didn’t do anything, his error was simply to witness, to see something) which somehow linked him with the Julia party, implicated him in a secret marriage or plan or collaboration which, in effect, was a conspiracy against the emperor and his chosen successor, Tiberius – if this was the case then it’s sadly obvious to the reader that absolutely no amount of grovellingly sycophantic hymns to Augustus would ever change Ovid’s plight. And they didn’t

5.12 (68 lines)

Reply to a friend who appears to have told him to buck up and write poems. Ovid sullenly replies there are two kinds of poems, the best ones, the real ones, require happiness and peace of mind to emerge, as inspiration (a commonplace of Roman poetry also mentioned by Horace, Tacitus, Juvenal among others). Here, in the grim outback, surrounded by barbarian tribesmen, the best he can do is squeeze out these exile elegies which are, in reality, mere vehicles for his complaints and grievances.

As to cheering up, should Priam have had fun fresh from his son’s funeral, should Niobe have held a party after all her children were killed?

Chief among the Forces undermining the peace of mind needed for composition are fear, constant fear of attack and violent death. Beside, long rusting has eaten away his talent. He is a field that’s been long unploughed and returned to stones and weeds. He is a rowboat kept out of the water that has cracked and rotting. So that explains the poor quality of the poems he now sends to Rome, such as this one itself.

Finally, a young poet is fired by ambition for renown, to be famous, numbered among the immortals. Now all that has soured to nothing. Now he wishes to be unknown, never to have been famous. His poems got him into this mess. He bitterly blames the Muses for ever inspiring him.

No-one in his remote outpost, a place of savage jabber and animal outcry’, even understands Latin, let alone the wonderful refinements and tricks he brought to it. Lastly, he admits his inspiration does still drive him to write – but he still has his standards and most of it ends up in the fire. Only ‘scraps of my efforts’, such as this very poem, survive because they have a practical purpose.

[What, 2,000 years of fans and scholars have wondered, were those poems he consigned to the flames about and how good were they? Unless this is another trope, developed solely for literary purposes, to illustrate his feelings of disgust and failure, just as he claims to have consigned his own draft of the Metamorphoses to the flames in 1.7. (note p.214)]

5.13 (34 lines)

Of all the Tristia poems this one is most like a letter in format, starting with the standard salutation (‘Good health and greetings from Ovid in his outback’) ending with the standard ‘Farewell’. In between the short poem addresses a loyal friend, possessed of ‘oak-touch loyalty’, complaining that:

  • he’s sick, the mental illness has penetrated his body, to give him a searing pain in his side (Green and scholars suspect pleurisy, triggered by the freezing climate)
  • this friend doesn’t send him enough letters to alleviate his bleak isolation

Ovid hopes the friend has not forgotten him, it’s merely the errancy of the postal service not delivering the letters. He remembers their many happy conversations, talking late into the night. Now letters between them can recreate that intimacy and intelligence. Please write.

5.14 (46 lines)

The final poem in the volume is to his wife, ‘dearer to me than myself’. It’s odd because it defines her, praises her, for sharing his suffering; it is this, her role as wife to a famous poet and tragic figure, which will make her immortal, just like Penelope, Andromache and Alcestis, Evadne and Laodameia.

To be good when there are no tribulations is easy; but to be faithful, as she has been, after the wreck of a god’s thunderbolts, ‘that is true married love/that’s loyalty indeed.’

He praises her continually and now – the poem veers in subject matter – wants her to return his devotion by appealing on his behalf. It is a sincere love poem, and that he ends the entire book with it is moving – even though a modern critic, particularly feminist, may find it objectionable, the extent to which he defines his wife solely in relationship to him. But then, he was in a dire situation.

Terms of rhetoric

Green is chatty, loquacious, garrulous, sprinkling his introductions and notes with foreign phrases (not just Latin – French and the like), references to modern poets (T.S Eliot crops up a lot [pages 217, 220, 224], so we can deduce he is an influence on Green’s translating style) and mention of ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical devices. These always interest me but I have a terrible memory for them. So here’s an (incomplete) list:

  • adynaton – a figure of speech in the form of hyperbole taken to such extreme lengths as to insinuate a complete impossibility: ‘pigs will fly’ (note p.216)
  • apologia – a formal written defence of one’s opinions or conduct
  • chiasmus – (‘to shape like the letter Χ’) reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words: ‘By day the frolic, and the dance by night’
  • circumlocution – the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea; in ancient poetry it refers to poets’ habit of referring to people in terms of their relationships to someone else (‘the son of…’, ‘the wife of…’ etc) or to a place (‘the Phrygian hero’); this can often make ancient poetry difficult to read – it’s particularly common in Ovid’s Fasti which is why I found it such a demanding read (note p.219)
  • genethliakon – a poem in honour of a birthday in association with a gift or standing alone. Callim.
  • hysteron proteron – a figure of speech consisting of the reversal of a natural or rational order: ‘putting the cart before the horse’ (note p.218)
  • laudatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in praise or commendation of someone or something
  • propemptikon – a poem that wishes a departing friend or relative all the best for a prosperous trip overseas, such as 1.1
  • recusatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in which the poet says he is unable or disinclined to write the type of poem which he originally intended to, and instead writes in a different style; the Hellenistic poet Callimachus introduced the trope of saying his poetic gift was too modest to attempt great epics, so he would write frivolous love poems instead, and this trope was copied in Augustan Rome by Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid
  • synkrisis – the juxtaposition of people or things with the aim of comparing them: a famous exampe is the juxtaposition of the long speeches by Caesar then Cato in Sallust’s account of the Catiline conspiracy
  • variatio – varying a theme with digressions, examples and so on
  • zeugma – (note p.220) any case of parallelism and ellipsis working together so that a single word governs two or more other parts of a sentence: ‘She filed her nails and then a complaint against her boss’

Conclusion

After struggling through both the Metamorphoses and especially the FastiTristia came as a welcome relief. Although a hundred pages long in the Penguin translation, it’s made up of short, discrete poems which you can pick up and read in a few minutes. You can immediately grasp what they’re about, what he’s saying, and immediately empathise with his feelings.

All this is hugely helped by Peter Green’s easy-going, demotic translations and his free approach to rhythm and metre which means you barely notice you’re reading poetry, in the best sense, meaning each poem flows smoothly, seems well phrased and expresses its meaning, conveys its purpose, easily and enjoyably. Surprisingly accessible and enjoyable.

And strongly helped by the fact that the editorial apparatus around the poems is so ample and informative. Not only the introduction to the entire volume, but the extremely useful introductions to each individual poem accompanied by useful notes, but also a long Glossary of named individuals and places. Altogether it makes for a full and thorough and rich and informative experience. Other translations are available, but this is one of the best, most compendious, most enjoyable volumes of Roman literature that I’ve read.


Credit

Peter Green’s translation of Tristia by Ovid was published by Penguin books in 1994. All references are to this 1994 paperback edition.

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The Epistles of Horace book 2

If only my powers matched my yearning…
(Epistles Book 2, number 1)

The ancient Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (universally referred to as ‘Horace’ in the English-speaking world) wrote two books of epistles.

The first one, published in 21 BC, contains 20 shortish poems on a variety of subjects. The second one, published some ten years later in 11 BC, differs in two ways. First, it contains just three poems, but they’re long ones: whereas epistle 1.8 is 17 lines long and 1.9 is just 13 lines, the first two epistles in book 2 are 270 lines and 216 lines long, respectively, and the third one is nearly as long as the two preceding ones put together (476 lines). The second difference is that, whereas the 20 odes in Book 1 are varied in subject matter, the three longer poems in Book 2 are all very much on the same subject – poetry.

Epistle 1 (270 lines)

This poem is addressed personally to Augustus and is a defence of modern poetry.

Horace opens with a panegyric to Augustus and his achievements (bringing peace, re-establishing the rule of law etc) and says that, unlike earlier heroes of Rome, Augustus hasn’t had to wait till he’s dead to be worshipped: the population realises his importance while he’s still alive.

But then it turns out he’s said all this to make the point that when it comes to poetry, the Romans take a very different view from how they regard their leader. Instead of valuing the new for its achievements they obsessively worship the old and fusty, using age alone as a measure of quality. He lists the first Roman writers, from Ennius in epic to Terence in comedy, and says these are the writers the Roman population venerate as if they could never be improved upon. But they’re wrong. Many of those pioneering works are crude and clumsy but people persist in venerating them and rubbishing much better work, purely because it’s new.

It makes me annoyed that a thing should be faulted, not for being
crudely or clumsily made but simply for being recent.

People venerate and defend the old works because it’s what they grew up with and understand, which leads them to frown on new works because they don’t properly understand them.

What if the Greeks had only venerated the old and stifled innovation? We wouldn’t have most of the works we now enjoy and which the Romans can copy so freely.

Then Horace changes tack somewhat and laments the fact that Rome is undergoing a craze for writing poetry; everyone’s at it, even he, who had sworn to pack it in, is up before dawn calling for pen and parchment. But they’re all amateurs! You wouldn’t take medicine from someone who wasn’t a doctor or ask someone who wasn’t an experienced sailor to take the helm of your yacht: so why should you read verses by a complete amateur?

On the upside, one thing that can be said for proper poets is they live very modestly. Horace never cheats, fights, causes social strife –, on the contrary, he is content to sit quietly, reading and scribbling, living off pulses and second-rate bread. Here is how the poet serves his country:

The poet shapes the tender faltering speech of a child,
already turning the ear away from coarse expressions.
Later he moulds the disposition by kindly maxims,
using his voice to correct cruelty, envy and temper.
He recounts noble actions, equips the new generation
with old examples, and brings relief to the poor and sick.
Where would innocent boys and girls who are still unmarried
have learnt their prayers if the Muse had not vouchsafed them a poet?
The choir asks for aid and feels the deities’ presence;
by the poet’s prayers it coaxes heaven to send us showers;
it averts disease and drives away appalling dangers;
it gains the gift of peace and a tear of bumper harvests.
Song is what soothes the gods above and the spirits below.

I’ve quoted this passage at such length for two reasons. One is to refute Horace’s optimistic claim for the poet, that:

He recounts noble actions, equips the new generation
with old examples

Is that true of Catullus, with his spiteful lampoons of helpless victims, with his hate poems against Lesbia after she dumped him? No. It’s not even true of Horace himself, whose 104 odes I have just read and which are about drinking, parties, the joys of the countryside, advice to friends about affairs, poems of longing for beautiful young boys, and so on.

To claim his own poetry is full of noble actions designed to instruct the next generation is ludicrous. A lot of it is just tittle-tattle and gossip, entertaining but hardly educational. In other words, this is the kind of stock, boilerplate excuse poets trot out to justify their profession to the public when the reality of what they write is often wildly different.

But the second reason is sociological. It would be easy to end the quote at the word poet, as if writing poetry were a solitary activity to be enjoyed by solitary readers. It certainly is this, but the final five lines are interesting because they put the act of poetry in a much more public context. Remember that Augustus commissioned Horace to write a hymn to be sung by a choir at the opening of the Secular Games, which Augustus revived in 17 BC. By a choir! Learning his words and learning to sing them to (presumably) an ancient melody.

And what could a public hymn to be sung by a choir in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands of Roman citizens possibly be about but an invocation of the gods and plea for peace and plenty? So I included this latter half of the quote to show the intensely public and social side of the poet’s role in ancient Rome. (I was going to write ‘very unlike our own times’ when I remembered the stunning performance by poet Amanda Gorman at Joe Biden’s inauguration as president in January 2021.)

Horace changes tack again to give a brief history of Roman poetry. The native Roman tradition began with coarse rural songs sung at country festivals of marriage or harvest. These became so wild and often abusive that they eventually had to be reined in and restricted by laws. Only late in their history did the Romans become aware of the centuries-old tradition of Greek poetry, overflowing with sophistication, a wide variety of metres, a number of well worked-out genres and conventions. Only after the final Punic War and crushing of Carthage in 146 BC did educated Romans think of imitating the sophisticated Greeks, and even then moments of ‘farmyard’ vulgarity still came through.

This morphs into contempt for current Roman taste. Horace thinks Plautus’s comedies were feeble with poor characterisation of his various stock types (I genuinely enjoyed Plautus’s comedies). But he is appalled by the modern theatre which doesn’t even stage plays any more so much as pageants and spectacles, featuring bears or boxers – a cross between pantomime and the circus. Nonetheless, Horace is full of admiration for playwrights who write proper plays and evoke genuine deep emotions: that’s something he could never do.

Then he switches tack again and brings Augustus back to the poet who writes not for a fickle audience but for the individual reader. Now it’s true that poets are sometimes their own worst enemies, and he gives an interesting list of the ways they can screw up:

  • thrusting a book on Augustus when he is tired or worried with important concerns of state
  • being oversensitive to criticism of even a single line
  • when, in a reading, they repeat a favourite section without being asked
  • when they moan that their excellence goes unrecognised
  • when they arrogantly assume that as soon as Augustus hears they’re writing something, he’ll immediately summon them to court and make them a gift to relieve their financial worries

Nonetheless, it is important to choose the right poet, qualified and able poets, to celebrate your successes. A long paragraph tells the story of Alexander who patronised a third rate poet, Choerilus, and so, alas, was never immortalised in verse. Horace then flatters Augustus for his excellent choice of chief poets, namely Virgil and Varius.

Horace draws to a close by wishing that he, too, could write epic poetry about Augustus’s achievements, describing ‘the Parthian foe overawed by your imperial Rome’ but alas, he is not talented enough: ‘If only my powers matched my yearning’. But he would be rash to embark on a task so far beyond his abilities.

I don’t understand the final 11 lines. I think the general idea is that it is better to have no lines at all written about you than to be remembered for being memorialised in hilariously bad verse. It would be embarrassing and might even be fatal!

All this I take to be yet another grovelling apology to Augustus for not writing him some grand, noble and dignified Poem, and instead offering short, ad hoc poems which play to Horace’s talent for moral sermons and gossipy odes.

Epistle 2 (216 lines)

Is addressed to Julius Florus and is a long apology by Horace for not writing lyric poetry.

But I had barely got going before, once again, as so often in Roman literature, I stumbled over the slavery issue. Epistle 2.2 opens with 20 lines describing the imagined sales patter of a slave trader, describing the merits of a young man he’s selling. It’s obviously designed to be comic in the way a modern comedian impersonating the bluster of a second-hand car trader could be done for comic effect. Horace has his slave trader make his sales pitch a bit more plausible by admitting that, ok, the slave for sale isn’t perfect: once or twice he dodged his work and hid under the stairs ‘for fear of the strap on the wall’ i.e. of being whipped (which was the standard punishment for slaves, in Republican Rome in the 20s BC as in European sugar plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries).

The point of this elaborate analogy is that Horace tells Florus that the slave trader of the anecdote was being honest about his merchandise’s flaws – and that, in the same way, he, Horace, was being open and honest when he told Florus, as he was leaving for duty in the army abroad, that he, Horace, is lazy and was unlikely to send letters as often as Florus demanded, and also was unlikely to send him as many poems as he hoped.

He, Horace, was quite frank about this, so why is Florus now upbraiding him? That’s the point of the opening anecdote…But I’m thinking about the slave boy cowering under the stairs, waiting for the master to come after him with the blood-stained whip…

If slavery matters, it matters everywhere, at any time, and to all peoples who have been enslaved.

Forcing myself back into the ‘civilised’ ‘cultured’ world of Horace’s poetry, the epistle now cuts away from this anecdote to give us another vignette, this time about one of Lucullus’s poor soldiers who’d saved up a nice sum of money. One night someone stole it. Next day, bubbling with rage, the aggrieved soldier flung himself at the enemy and dislodged them from a well-defended position. For this act of bravery he was acclaimed, decorated and given money. At which point he stopped being angry. So that when the general came to him a few days later to ask him to lead a similar assault on another fort, the soldier refused. If you want someone to lead a suicidal attack, the yokel told the general – find someone who’s just been robbed.

Horace then cuts away again, this time to a passage of autobiography: He tells us he was raised in Rome, went for further education in Athens, but was caught up in the civil wars and recruited into Brutus’s army (which was based in Greece) and found himself commanding a legion at the Battle of Philippi, where he saw the line break and be massacred, so flung away his shield and ignominiously legged it (as he had already described in ode 2.7. All this is by way of saying that when he finally fetched up back in Rome, discovering his father was dead and his land confiscated, he wangled a minor job in the Treasury and took to writing verses, inspired by ‘Lady Poverty’.

The point of this digression being that Horace is like the soldier who had his wallet stolen. When he was poor, he was highly motivated and turned out verse at speed. But now he is successful and well enough off to suit his needs, like the soldier once he’d made his pile, he doesn’t need to return to the fray.

He takes another tack at justifying the same thing, saying his slowing down in writing poems is due to age. Age strips away all our pleasures, fun, sex, parties and sport. Now it’s denuding him of his ability to write poems.

The poem is turning into a litany of excuses. His next excuse is that, even if Horace did write some new verse, it’s impossible to please everyone: take three guys and the chances are one will like lyric poetry, one iambics and one ‘the tangy wit of Bion’s homilies’. So, what kind of poem should Horace write or avoid?

He then changes tack to make another excuse: How can Florus expect him to write poems while living amid ‘the storms of city life’ in Rome? There are two types of distraction: people, who endlessly demand attention, want him to be their patron, do business with him or are ill and demand visits. The second is the sheer racket: building works, wailing funeral processions, lumbering carts, mad dog barking, how can a man concentrate on writing verse?

He changes the subject again to mock the literary world, full of writers lavishing extravagant praise on each other, and in particular of poets, ‘that hypersensitive species’. He recalls putting up with recitals from terrible poets and replying tactfully. But now he breathes a sigh of relief that that period is over, his work is done, and he doesn’t have to listen to another word.

Too many modern poets praise their own work, regarding each line as sacred. Horace, by contrast, says the true poet is as stern as a censor, cutting any word ‘deficient in lustre or lacking solidity’ or which he deems unworthy of honour. He will revive worthy old words from the time of Cato, which have fallen into disuse and he will adapt new ones, where needed. Thus his work will flow strong and clear like an unpolluted river, enriching the land with his wit and the wealth of his language.

But then, it’s best to abandon verse altogether. It’s a children’s activity. Instead seek the good life:

instead of hunting for words to set to the lyre’s music
to practice setting one’s life to the tune and rhythms of truth.

I don’t fully understand the next 30 lines or so but I think they are a version of Horace’s core moral message, which is that we should be content with what we need and not be greedy, not hanker after unnecessary wealth or luxury.

I shall enjoy what I have and draw on my modest supplies
as needed…

We shouldn’t waste our lives scheming to make money and then splashing it around wastefully. Instead we should:

make the most of the short and beautiful time

What started in a tone of abject apology to Florus for not having kept up his side of the correspondence or sent the poems he promised, has somehow turned right around to become quite a harsh criticism of his friend. Quite rudely, he says possessing a thicker wallet doesn’t appear to have made Florus any the wiser. Florus claims he isn’t a miser, but Horace rather accusingly asks whether he’s banished the other vices, related to miserliness. Is his heart no longer obsessed with futile ambition, or with fear of death? Does he treat dreams and prophecies as the jokes they are, or live in superstitious fear of them? Florus should be improving his mind and morals, living sensibly. In a brutal last few lines, Horace concludes:

If you can’t live as you ought, give way to those that can.

Epistle 3 – The Art of Poetry

Epistle 3 has a special place in literary history as it is clearly quite different in length and ambition from the other epistles and quite early on was extracted and published by itself with the title Ars Poetica or The Art of Poetry.

The epistle is addressed to Horace’s friend Lucius Calpurnius Piso (a Roman senator and consul) and his two sons and forms a long and wide-ranging meditation on the rules and conventions applying not only to the kind of lyric poetry Horace himself wrote, but, above all, to plays.

What struck me most was the structurelessness of it. There’s no introduction or explanation or laying out of the themes. Instead Horace launches right in, in the conversational tone, and rather haphazard structure, of the epistles rather than the academic tone of a treatise.

Horace kicks off by explaining the importance of unity and simplicity by imagining the case of a painter who painted a human head on a horse’s body, a body which was itself covered in feathers and ended in a fish’s tail. How absurd everyone would find that. Well, that’s because an artist should observe decorum and restraint. Don’t just tack beautiful passages about temples or rainbows onto a work if it’s about something else.

Make what you like, provided the thing is a unified whole.

Horace himself tries to be brief and smooth, though he admits often failing at both.

Writers must give thought to what subject and format suits their powers, rather than attempt something they’re incapable of. If you choose a theme within your scope, the rest should follow. It should become obvious what to leave in and what to leave out.

Do not be afraid of simple and obvious words. Often they are best. Invent new words reluctantly. New terms imported from Greek are acceptable if kept to a minimum. Language is like trees. The old leaves (words) wither and fall, to be replaced by new ones. In the long run, our entire civilisation will crumble and fall, so how can we keep our language from changing and evolving?

Usage is king. Usage determines the meaning and validity of words. Use the language the men of your time use.

Horace briefly explains the advent of different metres for the various kinds of poetry: epic, elegiac, dramatic, and lyric.

Everything has its appropriate place and ought to stay there.

So the first job of the poet is to learn about the different genres, their histories, the appropriate subject matter for each, their format in terms of metres, their diction.

But correctness is only the beginning. A poem must be attractive, it must evoke the listener’s emotions. It must match the words to the emotion being portrayed or the audience will burst out laughing.

Follow the tradition regarding well known characters, for example the heroes of the Trojan war or the gods. If you dare to innovate a character, making him or her consistent. ‘You’d be well advised to spin your plays from the songs of Troy’ i.e. rely on tried and trusted characters from legend.

My Roman friends, I urge you:
get hold of your Greek models and study them day and night.

The good writer doesn’t start with bombastic invocations and promises. Chances are you won’t be able to live up to it. The mountains will labour and give birth to a mouse! The good writer hurries the reader into the middle of things (in media res) as though they are quite familiar.

Horace gives an entertaining review of the ages of man, entertaining in that classical sense of pleasingly reiterating obvious clichés and stereotypes. The old man is:

morose and a grumbler, he is always praising the years gone by
when he was a boy, scolding and blaming ‘the youth of today’…

So attribute behaviour and views to characters which are appropriate for their stage and situation in life.

Some actions should be presented onstage, for things seen make much more of an impression than things merely described. However, there are events which shouldn’t be described but must take place offstage and be reported, for example Medea killing her own children or Atreus killing, cooking and serving up his brother’s sons to him at dinner. (Hannibal Lecter has been on my mind and this line reminds me of how modern American culture deliberately, consciously, drives a coach and horses through norms of restraint and decorum.)

He then gives very strict rules about plays. All plays should contain exactly five acts. Do not let a god intervene. You can have a fourth character but they should not speak (thus following very strictly the convention of ancient Greek theatre.) The chorus should take the place of an actor, sing between the acts, but only of subjects which are tightly relevant to the plot. The chorus should side with the good and give them advice, and try to restrain the bad.

Horace gives in to his own stereotype of the ‘grumpy old man’ and laments the good old days and simplicity of Greek drama. Back then the ‘pipe’ then was a simple instrument which performed simple ditties because the theatre was relatively small and not packed, and the audience had ‘honest hearts, decent and modest.’

But victories brought wealth which encouraged (presumably he’s talking solely about Athens here) the Athenians to allow drinking in daytime, allowing greater liberty in tunes and tempos, encouraged actors to dress up in more and more sumptuous costumes and ‘mince’ across the stage, the tunes of the lyre became more complex and the delivery of moral homilies became more complex and obscure.

Horace attributes the word ‘tragedy’ to the Greek tragos, meaning goat, and ‘satire’ to the mythical figure of the half-goat satyr.

In Greek theatre three tragedies were performed in succession, and were followed by a comic to lighten the mood and lead into festival and celebration. This satyric drama was not the same as comedy and had its rules and restraints. Horace warns against having gods or heroes who feature in the tragedies dragged onstage and mocked in the satyr play.

If he ever wrote a satyr drama, it would mix high and low, blending ‘familiar ingredients’. The artifice would be in creating seamless joins, ‘such is the power of linkage and joinery’. But don’t be crude: cultured ‘knights’ i.e. semi-aristocracy, are repelled by jokes from the streets and back alleys.

Horace turns to (briefly) consider specific metres, considering ‘feet’ such as the iamb (da-dum) and the spondee (dum-dum).

Not for long, though because he moves on to give a brisk history of the origin of the dramatic genres. Thespis invented tragedy and was followed by Aeschylus who elaborated it. This was followed by Old Comedy which became, however, too abusive and violent and so had to be reined in by law.

Roman playwrights have copied the Greeks and left nothing untried; they have often been at their best when they’ve departed from Greek models. But their weakness is carelessness. A good work should be like fingernails, trimmed and filed to a perfect shape. Some writings have encouraged writers to believe that the true poet is mad and so they’ve cultivated eccentricity instead of studying.

Horace sees himself as a grindstone which sharpens the steel but takes no part in its creation. Hence this epistle of advice. At bottom, the fundamental basis for writing is Good Moral Sense.

Moral sense is the fountain and source of proper writing.

The Greeks had this. Study Socrates. Be clear on what is due to your country and friends; what is involved in loving a parent, brother or guest; what is the conduct required of a judge or senator; what are the duties of a general. This way you will know the correct sentiments and speech to give to these kinds of characters when you present them. The playwright should look to real life for examples of behaviour and speech.

A play with attractive moral comments and credible characters may work onstage even if it lacks finish and polish and style. The basic subject matter wins assent.

One problem is that, unlike the Greeks, the Romans are a money-grubbing nation, and he gives a little vignette of children being taught their fractions.

The aim of the poet should be to instruct and delight. To do so: keep it brief. Old people in the audience want morals; young dandies appreciate style. To please both, make your work useful and sweet (utile et dulce), blending help and delight.

That said everyone makes mistakes, and he can forgive blots of style in an otherwise good-hearted work. Even Homer nods.

The raison d’etre for a poem is to please the mind. It’s alright to have average lawyers or generals. But a poem, in order to justify its existence, should be as excellent as possible. Therefore, read your works to good critics, to Horace himself if you can, but then…sit on it for 9 years. Then take it out and reread it and edit and trim it coming it to cold and mature.

You can always delete what hasn’t been published; a word let loose is gone forever.

A brisk summary of the founding of civilisation by Orpheus, Amphitryon and so on. The establishment of laws and boundaries. Homer inspired to battle. Song was the medium for oracles. Poems sought a king’s favour, or celebrated the end of a season’s work. Therefore, don’t be ashamed to study the tradition.

Is it a gift or craft which makes good poetry? Both. Olympic athletes train hard for their supremacy. So do musicians. Why is it only poetry where any amateur can put forward shoddy offerings and claim himself to be a genius?

Quite a funny passage describing the rich man surrounded by flatterers who announces he has written some verses, does anyone want to hear them? Of course the flatters jump to attention and turn pale with emotion, weep, or laugh and cheer, as required by the verse. Doesn’t mean it’s any good. Beware of flatterers.

He remembers how honest his friend Quinctilius was. If you read him your verses he’d honestly tell you  which bits to amend. If you swore you’d tried already, he’d recommend you go back to the drawing board and try to express it some other way. An honest friend honestly points out your errors and so saves you from being laughed at if you publish rubbish.

After all this description of sense and hard work and clarity of thought, Horace ends, very incongruously, with 20 or so lines describing the ‘madness’ of the poet, who wanders the fields, head in the air, reciting his lines, and if he happens to fall into a deep well, who’s to say he didn’t do so on purpose! Consider Empedocles, so irrational he threw himself into the volcano of Mount Etna.

So why is a wretched poet condemned to write poetry? Is it punishment for some gross act of sacrilege like ‘pissing on his father’s ashes’. Did he profane a holy place?

All this seemed very out of place with Horace’s usual calm, even tone, and I began to suspect it was comic hyperbole, when, in the last few lines, he claims that a poet is like a wild bear which has smashed the bars of its cage and scattered everyone, cultured or not, by the threat of reciting. The wild poet threatens to grab anyone who comes within reach, in a fatal bear hug, and then read them to death!

Yes. I think this entire final passage is intended to be ironic, a satire on the popular stereotype of the poet – which is completely unlike the careful, studious, hard-working figure the preceding 450 lines had gone to such lengths to describe.


Credit

Niall Rudd’s translation of the Epistles of Horace was published by Penguin books in 1979. All references are to the 2005 Penguin paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Lustrum by Robert Harris (2009)

The senate was not the arena for brute force. The weapons here were words, and no one ever knew how to deploy words as well as Cicero. (p.184)

‘What are the only weapons I possess, Tiro?’ he asked me, and then he answered his own question. ‘These,’ he said, gesturing towards his books. ‘Words. Caesar and Pompey have their soldiers, Crassus his wealth, Clodius his bullies on the street. My only legions are my words. By language I rose and by language I shall survive.’ (p.402)

This is the middle novel in the Robert Harris’s ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.

Cicero is an excellent historical figure to dramatise for at least two reasons.

1. We know more about Cicero than any other figure from the ancient world. a) He wrote a prodigious amount, not only his speeches as an advocate but books about oratory, philosophy, politics and morality, most of which have survived. when he writes about Cicero, Harris has an unprecedented amount of primary source material to refer to. b) The extraordinary survival of some 1,000 letters from and to him, many from the leading figures of the day such as Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius, Marcus Junius Brutus, Marcus Antonius, Gaius Octavius and others. Harris says as much in his Author’s Note, where he says he’s used, where possible, Cicero’s own words from letters or speeches (for example Cicero’s lament at feeling lonely after his brother and best friend both leave Rome, page 344, which is, I think, a direct quote from one of Cicero’s letters).

2. The second reason is that Cicero was right at the heart of the web of allegiances and alliances which made up the toxic politics of the last decades of the Roman Republic. He was consul at the time of the Cataline conspiracy, he was important enough to be invited to join the first triumvirate in 60; when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49, Cicero was one of the half dozen figures in Rome whose opinion he really valued. In the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination Cicero advised the killers and, after they were defeated, he became a sort of mentor to Caesar’s heir, young Octavian and a bitter opponent of Mark Antony.

No other figure was as central to the high politics of the age or left such an extensive documentary record.

Tiro the narrator

As I thoroughly explained in my review of the first novel in the trilogy, Imperium, the novels are narrated by Cicero’s slave and private secretary Tiro, a real-life figure who Cicero devoted several letters to praising and thanking and who we know was responsible for editing and publishing Cicero’s letters after his death.

I had been his secretary for sixteen years by this time and there was no aspect of his life, public or private, with which I was not familiar. (p.13)

In other words, Tiro is the perfect person for a narrator, the amanuensis and secretary to Cicero, observer and analyst of his behaviour as Dr Watson is to Sherlock Holmes.

The premise of all three books is that Tiro is writing his memoirs long, long after the events he recounts, just a few years before the start of the Christian era and Tiro is a very old man of nearly 100. The three novels are represented as the memories of this old man, looking back at particularly high points in the life of his lord and master, as he himself witnessed and recorded them at the time.

Two parts

The first novel was in two parts. Part one, ‘Senator (79 to 70 BC)’, led up to Cicero’s career-making prosecution of a corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres. Part two, ‘Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)’ covered his campaign to be elected consul, which becomes entangled with a major plot by Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus to stitch up control of the Roman state. Taken together it covers 15 years.

This book covers the next five years in Cicero’s life and career (which explains the title, the Latin word lustrum referring, among other things, to the religious sacrifice offered every five years by the state officials known as ‘censors’ and so, by extension, to a period of five years. This is clearly explained in  an epigraph to the book and is referenced in the text on page 392). Once again the novel is divided into two parts:

Part one – Consul

This covers the dramatic and fateful year of 63 BC and gives a compelling and thrilling description of the slow escalation of the crisis which developed into Lucius Sergius Catalina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state. I’ve described the events in my review of Sallust’s Cataline War, but Harris brings it astonishingly, vividly, harrowingly to life, unforgettably conveying the astonishing, unbearable pressure Cicero came under, as the lead consul in Rome, of proving the existence of the conspiracy and then punishing the conspirators.

The climax of the Cataline conspiracy is the agonised decision to execute the five patrician senators who were foolish enough to be Cataline’s accomplices in the city and allow themselves to be caught (Cataline himself was hundreds of miles away, safely protected by the army raised by his colleague Manlius). It was an agonising decision because the executions were carried out without a formal trial, solely on the basis of a vote in the Senate, and this rash act would come back to haunt Cicero.

Part two – Pater Patriae

This covers the next four years, 62 to 58 BC, describing a number of key events which followed in the aftermath of the conspiracy. Beneath a blizzard of more overt incidents and challenges, the two underlying themes are the unstoppable rise of Caesar and his creation of the First Triumvirate (in 60 BC), and the concomitant rise of the slippery young demagogue Publius Claudius Pulcher, aided by his clever sexy sister, Clodia.

No words can convey the vividness with which Harris describes both the key players in late re[publican power politics, but also the gripping shifts in the endless political powerplay which Cicero finds himself trying to ride and survive.

The book contains many thrilling, nerve-biting scenes, but maybe the most shocking or heart-stopping is the moment when Caesar, doubly powerful in his roles of pontifex maximus and consul, forces the senator Lucius Lucullus to apologise for opposing him in the senate on his knees, commanding he do so like an outraged monarch, and the old general, realising he has no choice and creakily sinking to his knees to beg forgiveness of the dark-eyed force of nature which is Caesar, and the entire senate looking on in silent impotence (p.408).

The book rises to a climax as Clodius triumphs, being first adopted by a plebeian family, then winning the tribuneship, proposing a range of populist measures (a free grain dole for every family) before moving in on his old enemy, Cicero, by proposing a bill accusing him of murder in having the Cataline conspirators executed without a trial and enacting that:

It shall be a capital offence to offer fire and water to any person who has put Roman citizens to death without a trial. (p.417)

This innocent-sounding measure spells death for all around Cicero, his wife, his household and all his friends. The only way not to imperil all of them is to flee the city as quickly as possible and so that is how the second novel ends,

Power

Above all these books are about power, political and personal and Harris brilliantly and thrillingly conveys the world of the Rome’s senior aristocracy where every meeting, every dinner, every conversation is dominated by politics, not just chat about the powerful but every meeting between the social elite was politics: the jungle of social rivalry never stops and never ends.

‘From now on everything is to be written down.’
‘Yes, Senator.’
‘We’re heading into dangerous waters, Tiro. Every reef and current must be charted.’ (p.28)

Because every single reef and current conceals threat, power plays, the strategies and power plays of immensely rich and powerful people like Caesar (with his ‘divine recklessness), Crassus and Pompey, the populares or populists, on one side, and the leaders of the optimates or aristocratic party such as Quintus Lutatius Catulus, Quintus Hortensius (Cicero’s rival to the title best lawyer in Rome) and father of the senate, Vatia Isauricus.

In this way he cut through the posturing and sentiment to the nub of the issue which was, as it always is, power. (p.49)

Ancient and modern

One of the features of the first book was the way the narrator, Tiro, Cicero’s freed slave and secretary, not only loyally described all the events, meetings, conversations and so on which he witnessed, but also drops in comments and reflections – on people, places and situations. Above all Harris has him drop generalisations about the nature of power, especially political power, which are carefully phrased so that they can be applied to contemporary British politics as much as to ancient Roman politics. The result is a pleasant psychological shimmer, where the reader registers the comment’s appropriateness to the plot but also realises it can be applied to much more recent events.

  • Sura was a man of great ambition and boundless stupidity, two qualities which in politics often go together. (p.18)
  • It is one of the tricks of the successful politician to be able to hold many things in mind at once and to switch between them as the need arises, otherwise life would be insupportable. (p.31)
  • ‘Unfortunately,’ replied Cicero, ‘politics is neither as clean as a wrestling match, nor played according to fixed rules.’ (p.80)
  • The really successful politician detaches his private self from their insults and reverses of public life, so that it is almost as if they happen to someone else. (p.81)
  • ‘This is the business of politics – to surmount each challenge as it appears and be ready to deal with the next.’ (p.92)
  • ‘In politics one cannot always pick and choose one’s enemies, let alone one’s friends.’ (p. 114)
  • ‘There’s nothing more fatal during an election campaign than to appear unconfident.’ (p.124)
  • There are times in politics, as in life generally, when whatever one does is wrong. (p.137)
  • Once a leader starts to be laughed at as a matter of routine, he loses authority, and then he is finished. (p.147)
  • Politics has loyalties all of its own and they greatly supersede those to in-laws. (p.164)
  • There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events. If my work has a moral, this is it. (p.186)
  • ‘You sometimes have too many scruples for the dirty business of politics, Tiro. (p.280)
  • Sometimes in politics a great weakness can be turned into a strength. (p.293)
  • He had learned from Cicero the tricks of political campaigning: keep your speeches short, remember names, tell jokes, put on a show; above all, render an issue, however complex, into a story anyone can grasp. (p.294)
  • It was yet another lesson to me in politics – an occupation that, if it is to be pursued successfully, demands the most extraordinary reserves of self-discipline, a quality that the naive often mistake for hypocrisy. (p.337)
  • ‘In politics how things look is often more important than what they are.’ (p.341)
  • Up to that point Cicero had been treating the Spaniard with a kind of friendly disdain – as a joke figure: one of those self-important go-betweens who often crop up in politics. (p.353)
  • ‘We both know how politics is played. Sooner or later failure comes to us all.’ (p.431)

Like the descriptions mentioned below, these sententiae are superficially intelligent, insightful and compelling but many, on a moment’s reflection, melt like a snowball in sunshine. They are very like the truisms and bromides (‘a trite statement that is intended to soothe or placate’) which pad out opinion columns in newspapers and magazines, which you nod agreement to then can’t remember half an hour later. For example, saying it is in the nature of politics to deal with one thing another another, is not very different from how you have to cope with one thing after another in your work, in being a parent, or life in general.  It is in the nature of the thriller, as a genre, to present a heightened simulacrum of reality which grips and thrills your imagination at the time of reading, but which you can barely remember a few days later.

A checklist of references

Having read my Plutarch and Suetonius, as well as modern historians who reference other ancient sources, I’m familiar with attributes and anecdotes about many of the key players, not only Cicero, but Caesar, Crassus, Pompey and so on. It is entertaining to watch Harris slip them into his narrative at appropriate moments, like hearing a composer slip snippets of popular songs into a symphony. Thus:

A variation on the much-repeated story that Caesar burst into tears because by the age when Alexander the Great died, having conquered the known world, Caesar had achieved nothing (referenced on p.25, and then reprised but this time with Cicero being the one mournfully wishing he’d matched Alexander on p.145) (Plutarch’s Life of Caesar chapter 11, Suetonius’s Life of Caesar chapter 7.)

Caesar telling his mother he will return pontifex maximus or not at all (p.85) (Plutarch’s Caesar, chapter 7, Suetonius’s Caesar, chapter 13).

The most famous courtesan in Rome (Flora) saying she never left Pompey’s house without bite marks on her neck (p.336) (Plutarch’s Life of Pompey, chapter 2).

Actually there aren’t as many of these as there are in the first novel (or I missed some). Rather more obvious is Harris quoting directly from set piece speeches which were recorded and have survived from antiquity, namely Cicero’s ferocious attack on Catiline in the senate, and the debate about whether to execute the conspirators featuring diametrically opposed speeches from Caesar (advocating clemency and life imprisonment) and Cato (immediate death penalty) which, I think, are sourced from Sallust’s account.

When Caesar as consul drives his fellow consul to retreat to his house but continues to pass laws, Cicero is said to have quipped that the laws were being passed by the joint consulship of Julius and Caesar (p.369) (Suetonius’s Life of Cesar, chapter 20).

Realistic in two ways

The novel is vividly imagined and hugely pleasurable to read in at least three ways:

1. Sensual

The smell, the feel, the noise, the sight of Rome, its streets and people, the crowd cheering a procession, the packed and dusty Field of Mars on election day, the crowd of the white toga-wearing elite waiting outside the Senate house, the queue of clients outside every senator’s door, Cicero’s breath visible on a cold December morning, the chirping of cicadas on a hot Italian evening – the novel presents a steady stream of vividly imagined scenes which bring ancient Rome vibrantly alive (as they say).

The vivid Caesar’s pokey house in a rundown neighbourhood, or Cicero and Tiro’s visit to Lucullus’s stupendous luxury villa overlooking the Bay of Naples (p.107).

2. Socio-political

But more important is the detailed descriptions Harris gives of Roman processes and rituals, religious, social and political.

Now that Cicero is consul there are more scenes set specifically in the Senate and Harris makes this feel eerily like the House of Commons with a great central aisle separating two sets of stepped benches occupied by the opposing parties, the patricians and the populists.

  • the strange and spooky taking of the augury on the morning Cicero assumes his post as consul
  • the inauguration of the two new consults accompanied by prayers, the slaughter of a sacred bull, flags and trumpets (p.45)
  • the weird details of the Latin Festival held on the Alban Mount (p.57)
  • the dignified funeral procession for the old pontifex maximus, Metellus Pius (p.81)
  • the triumph of Lucullus (p.127)
  • the hot dusty crowd packing the Field of Mars to elect next year’s consuls and praetors (p.142)
  • the preparations for the Feast of the Great Goddess (p.211)

This vivid imagining of set pieces of the Roman constitution and procedures exceeds anything I’ve read in any other book. Harris really explains what went on at the ceremonies, how they looked and felt and smelled.

It is fascinating to read his account of the chief augur taking the auguries on the eve of his consulship and then the importance of auguries preceding all other state events, such as sessions of the Senate or elections on the Field of Mars.

It is fascinating to follow the precise sequence of rituals, prayers, the order of procession and so on involved in a classical Roman triumph up to and including the ritual strangling of the foreign kings and captives by the carnifex or public executioner (p.128).

It is illuminating to read the description of a Roman wedding, the wedding of Cicero’s beloved daughter Tullia, aged just 14, to Gaius Frugi of the Piso clan (p.146).

The ceremony of adoption, even it is the travesty conducted under coercion of Clodius being adopted as a plebeian so he could stand as a tribune (pages 386 to 387).

3. Drama

Then there are scenes which are just thrillingly dramatic:

The dramatic ambush of the conspirators on the Mulvian Bridge (pages 203 to 207).

The description of the trial of Publius Clodius Pulcher for blasphemy at which he scandalously bribes the jurors to acquit him despite his obvious guilt (pages 304 to 320).

The dramatic trial in which Cicero’s once-time pupil Marcus Caelius Rufus confidently crushes Cicero’s defence of his corrupt partner as consul, Caius Antonius Hybrida (pages 369 to 384).

The reassuring familiarity of thriller tropes

So far I haven’t conveyed how immensely enjoyable this book is. It is well written, packed with interesting facts about ancient Rome, steeped with insight and intelligence into the workings of power and influence.

Harris makes it live through a hundred vividly imagined details – his description of Caesar’s ancient, venerable but shabby house in the now rundown neighbourhood of the Subura; Caesar’s distinctively dry rasping voice (p.29); Cicero and Tiro’s atmospheric visit to the augurs who take them up onto the roof of their building to observe the prevailing winds and the flight of birds.

The narrative starts at the end of December, just as Cicero is about to commence his year as consul and Rome is experiencing unusual snowfall, so the whole city is white with snowdrifts, vividly described.

A feature of thrillers is the action is all in the events and their threatening, thrilling implications, rarely in the prose style. The prose generally has to be as plain and transparent as possible in order to clearly and quickly explain the facts and let the reader thrill to their accumulating threat and implications.

Therefore thrillers are not afraid of clichés. It’s like a painter painting pictures long after the era of painting has died, because there continues to be a market for painting long after all possible avenues and permutations of painting have been exhausted.

In the same way, despite a hundred years or more of experimentation designed to expand, subvert or blow up the novel as a literary form, the thriller genre continues to thrive, generating endless new novels telling similar stories and using time-honoured techniques and phraseology. Just because there is no longer a literary avant garde doesn’t mean books don’t continue to sell. In fact more novels are sold every year than ever before in human history, just as there are more TV shows and more movies than ever before. More of everything.

There has to be an arresting opening sentence and event:

Two days before the inauguration of Marcus Tullius Cicero as consul of Rome, the body of a child was pulled from the river Tiber, close to the boat sheds of the republican war fleet. (opening sentence)

An evil antagonist:

‘Damn Caesar!’ said Cicero suddenly. ‘There’s nothing dishonourable about ambition. I’m ambitious myself. But his lust for power is not of this world. You look into those eyes of his, and it’s like staring into some dark sea at the height of a storm.’
(Lustrum, page 34)

The baddies confront each other in tense standoffs:

Catalina’s eyes glittered and his large hands contracted into fists. ‘My first ancestor was Sergestus, companion of Aeneas, the founder of our city – and you dare to tell me to leave?’ (p.169)

And the phenomenally charged confrontation right at the end between a miserable, defeated Cicero being hounded out of his beloved Rome and Julius Caesar, brisk in his shining armour, mustering his legions to set off for his command in Gaul. When Caesar offers Cicero the legateship with him which would ensure his safety from prosecution, Cicero realises he must turn it down:

‘Thank you for your consideration,’ replied Cicero, ‘but it would never work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because…what is wicked about you Caesar – worse than Pompey, worse than Clodius, worse even than Catalina – is that you won’t rest until we are all obliged to go down on our knees to you.’ (p.439)

Sudden alarms:

I was woken by fists pounding on the front door. I sat up with a start. I could only have been asleep for a few moments. The distant hammering came again, followed by ferocious barking, shouts and running feet. (p.148)

And the hero realising a conspiracy is afoot:

Cicero grabbed my arm. ‘So the actual crime will be to help keep me alive? They won’t even give me a trial.’ (p.418)

All very, very well done and yet, somehow, utterly predictable. The cosy familiarity of thriller tropes extends down to the level of individual sentences and metaphors. These are good in their way, but utterly familiar and slip down like an iced drink by the swimming pool at a Mediterranean resort. Here is Tiro’s description of Rome in the depths of winter:

The smoke from the altar fires was curling above the temples. I could smell the saffron burning, and hear the lowing of the bulls awaiting sacrifice. As we neared the Arch of Scipio I looked back, and there was Rome – her hills and valleys, towers and temples, porticoes and houses all veiled white and sparkling with snow, like a bride in her gown awaiting her groom. (p.44)

‘Like a bride in her gown awaiting her groom’ – a metaphor which has been around as long as fiction, for centuries, predigested and processed by the reader with barely a flicker of recognition.

Portraits of Rome

Speaking of Rome, I slowly realised that Harris describes Rome so regularly, in different seasons and moods, that it is obviously part of a concerted strategy to make ‘Rome herself’ a character in the novel. This wasn’t so apparent in Imperium (or I just missed it) but seems to me a deliberate tactic in this novel. At the same time I think these descriptions demonstrate the reliance of this kind of thriller on cliché and stereotype. There are never any surprises; things always exactly fit the mood and needs of the narrative.

The strategy is apparent from the start, when Harris paints an opening picture of Rome as the capital of a great Mediterranean empire but nonetheless stricken with social and economic turmoil, resulting in a decadent febrile atmosphere – which, of course, suits the writer of a tense thriller down to the ground.

Such was the state of the city on the eve of Cicero’s consulship – a vortex of hunger, rumour and anxiety; of crippled veterans and bankrupt farmers begging at every corner; of roistering bands of drunken young men terrorising shopkeepers; of women from good families openly prostituting themselves outside the taverns; of sudden conflagrations, violent tempests, moonless nights and scavenging dogs; of fanatics, soothsayers, beggars, fights. (p.8)

Then, here is Tiro’s description of Rome in midsummer:

It was one of those endless hot summer days when the sun seems reluctant to sink, and I remember how still it was, the motes of dust motionless in the shafts of fading light. On such evenings, when the only sounds even in the city are the drone of insects and the soft trilling of the birds, Rome seems older than anywhere in the world; as old as the earth itself; entirely beyond time. (p.130)

‘One of those endless hot summer days’ – see what I mean be generic description: this sentence could come from any one of hundreds of thousands of popular novels. Here is Tiro’s description of Rome at the height of the Cataline panic:

By the time Cicero set off for the temple, tightly protected by lictors and bodyguards, an atmosphere of real dread hung over the city, as tangible as the grey November mist rising from the Tiber. The streets were deathly quiet. Nobody applauded or jeered; they simply hid indoors. In the shadows of their windows the citizenry gathered, white-faced and silent, to watch the consul pass. (p.182)

Here is Tiro’s description of Rome on the night Cicero finally confirms the Catiline conspiracy to the senate:

We stepped out from the library onto the narrow terrace. Down in the valley, the effect of the curfew was to make Rome seem as dark and fathomless as a lake. Only the Temple of Luna, lit up by torches on the slope of the Palatine, was distinctly visible. It seemed to hover, suspended in the night, like some white-hulled vessel descended from the stars to inspect us. (p.226)

Good, isn’t it? Efficient, effective and highly atmospheric but, for me, ultimately, soulless. Harris’s prose tastes of chrome. It feels a beautifully designed, expensive sports car, recently washed and gleaming in the sun. Perfect of its kind.

Terentia

We get to know all the characters well, from the public figures such as Caesar, Crassus, Hortensius, Catalina, Clodius, Cato, Lucullus, Metellus, through to members of Cicero’s household, his brother Quintus and above all his fearsome wife Terentia. Harris steadily builds up a portrait of Terentia as not conventionally attractive but radiating personality and determination and fierce in argument.

It was around this time that Terentia began to play an important role in Cicero’s consulship. People often wondered why Cicero was still married to her after fifteen years, for she was excessively pious and had little beauty and even less charm. But she had something rarer. She had character. She commanded respect, and increasingly as the years went on he sought her advice. She had no interest in philosophy or literature, no knowledge of history; not much learning of any sort, in fact.  However, unburdened by education or natural delicacy, she did possess a rare gift for seeing straight through to the heart of a thing, be it a problem or a person, and saying exactly what she thought. (p.98)

Cicero had married Terentia for her money and it was her money which funded his successful campaigns to  gain magistracies and so enter the senate. Harris rarely mentions her without adding to the impression of fearsome redoubtability:

  • Was Caesar hinting by this remark that he wanted to seduce Terentia? I doubt it. The most hostile tribe of Gaul would have been a less gruelling conquest. (p.24)
  • I must not forget Terentia, who carried a heavy iron candle-holder at all times, and who would probably have been more effective than any of us. (p.177)
  • Terentia had the coolest head present. (p.421)

This gives the impression of painting a character, the kind of thing which people like in their fictions – except that it is all very familiar, the politician’s wife as fearsome termagent, the protagonist’s wife the only person he’s truly afraid of. It feels like another fictional cliché. One of the descriptions of Terentia raising merry hell in Cicero’s household for some reason triggered a memory of Les Dawson dressed as a northern housewife, wearing a hairnet over her curlers and brandishing a rolling pin ready to pick a fight with her henpecked husband.

Tricks of oratory

Harris has Tiro from time to time share with us Cicero’s tips for delivering an effective speech. Presumably these are taken from Cicero’s writings about oratory.

  1. Cicero’s first law of rhetoric, a speech must always contain a surprise. (p.52)
  2. The bigger a crowd is, the more stupid it is.
  3. When addressing an immense multitude it is always good to invoke the supernatural and call on the gods. (p.73)

Finally

All the texts we have from republican Rome were written by the elite. Not aristocrats, necessarily, but nonetheless from the wealthy, slave-owning upper classes. (As a side issue it’s notable that two of the most memorable writers from the period did not belong to this class, but were men on the make, Cicero and Caesar, whose writings were motivated, in part, by the need to prove themselves and improve themselves and lift themselves up into the ruling class. The writings of both men are heavy with self-promotion. LinkedIn literature.)

In all these thousands of pages we never hear the voices of ‘ordinary’ people, meaning farm workers, labourers, shopkeepers, businessmen, merchants, tax collectors and the millions of ordinary people who populated the Roman Empire.

Which makes it all the more striking that the narrator of all three of these Cicero novels is a slave. Well educated, highly literate, shrewd and tactful, Tiro is an idealised narrator and it is only occasionally that he reminds us that he is not free. He is utterly reliant on his master for food, lodging and protection and must obey his orders at all times.

Tiro’s character is ‘dramatised’ a bit more in this novel than the previous one because Harris gives him a love interest, namely a slave girl in the household of the super-rich retired general, Lucullus. She is called Agathe and is assigned to Tiro to give him a bath and massage after his long journey to Lucullus’s palace to deliver a message (not in his own right, only because he is Cicero’s secretary) and proceeds, easily and casually, to have sex with him, as nubile young women often do in thrillers written by men, from James Bond downwards.

Tiro glimpses Agathe on a couple of other occasions (pages 307) and on the final occasion is saddened to see she is so worn out with slave life that all her softness and beauty has gone. She doesn’t even recognise him (p.424). But it’s not a major plot strand, in fact it’s very minor, but her presence serves to bring out what may be obvious but I’ll say anyway: the entire Cicero trilogy, consisting of over 1,200 pages, is a slave’s eye view of republican Rome.

I don’t want to belabour the point but it is a mark of the thriller’s lack of depth or seriousness, its determination to remain no more than an intelligent poolside read, that Tiro’s condition as a slave and dependent is from time to time mentioned but the state of slavehood, the central fact of the narrator’s life, is nowhere really explored.

Two or three times Tiro mentions he’d like to gain his freedom and set up on a nice little farm. Three quarters of the way through the book, Cicero’s brother, Quintus, about to set off for a governorship in Macedonia, promises Tiro his freedom when he returns (p.324).

And right at the very end, as Cicero is being forced into exile, he magnanimously gives Tiro his freedom and tells him to leave him, as being in his presence jeopardises his life. But Tiro promptly rejects the offer of freedom and pledges to remain Cicero’s slave, secretary and confidante, as the pair, along with a couple of other (unnamed) slaves, scuttle through the midnight streets to elude Clodius’s henchmen, bribe their way out of one of the city’s gates, and set off into exile.

This is a very moving scene to end the long narrative on and yet…To me what was striking was that… these are novels written by a slave in which the condition of slavery is never really broached or investigated or dramatised or experienced.

Tiro mentions that he’s a slave, as you might mention needing to buy a new car or get your roof fixed. It is referred to half a dozen times as a fact. But the condition of slavehood is never really adequately dramatised or investigated, the psychology of slavery not at all. Tiro remains to the end a timid version of the sensible, intelligent but perpetually impressed Dr Watson-style sidekick, in awe of his large-than-life master, observant, obedient and respectful.

This is an immensely enjoyable book, on multiple levels. But the absence of meditation on this subject is a reminder of the limited ambitions and rewards of the thriller as a genre.

Catullus

The poet Gaius Valerius Catullus was, during the period covered by the novel, madly in love with Clodia, sister of the disreputable Publius Clodius Pulcher who is a central figure in part two, and wife of Metellus Celer. Harris makes a sly reference to Catullus without mentioning him by name, designed to please the cognoscenti, having Celer tell Cicero, who’s come round on a social call, after Clodia is quite rude to him before walking off:

‘Well, there it is. I wish she talked to you as much as she does this damned poet who’s always trailing round after her…’ (p.340)

A reference to Catullus, for anyone who’s read a bit around the subject. Probably the book contains more sly amused references like that, not all of which I got.


Credit

Lustrum by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2009. All references are to the 2010 Arrow paperback edition.

The Cicero trilogy

Robert Harris reviews

Roman reviews

The life of Brutus by Plutarch

(1) Marcus Brutus was said to be a descendant of the Junius Brutus who overthrew the last king of Rome in 709 BC. But unlike his ancestor who has harsh and unbending, Marcus Brutus was civilised and softened by philosophy and literature. Contemporaries attributed all that was good in the conspiracy to Brutus and all that was bad to his colleague Gaius Cassius Longinus.

(2) Brutus’s mother was Cato’s sister. Cato was his uncle. He had a higher esteem for him than any other Roman. Brutus was good friends with many philosophers, some of whom stayed with him, He was a devotee of Plato and the Old Academy. His letters demonstrate great literary style.

(3) He accompanied his uncle Cato on a mission to Cyprus.

(4) Plutarch in a huge jump skips right the way over Brutus’s boyhood and young manhood, and skips all the political travails of the 60s and 50s to arrive at the breach between Gnaeus Pompeius (usually referred to in English as Pompey) and Julius Caesar in 50 BC. Everyone expected Brutus to side with Caesar as Pompey had had his father executed, but he reasoned that Pompey represented the public good and so sided with him. He sailed to Cilicia but had nothing to contribute there so journeyed to Illyricum to meet Pompey who had just fled from Italy and was greeted by the great man who paid him the honour of getting to his feet. Even here he continued to spend most of  his time with his books.

(5) It is said that Caesar commended his officers to look out for Brutus during the Battle of Pharsalus. This was because Brutus was the son of Servilia who, although married to Cato, was madly in love with Caesar so that Julius had some grounds for believing Brutus might be his own son. Plutarch tells the same anecdote he used in the life of Cato, only told less well here – that when Caesar and Cato were speaking in the senate about the Catiline conspiracy, Caesar was handed a note which Cato excitably declared must be a message from the conspirators. So Caesar nonchalantly handed it over to Cato who realised it was a love note from his own sister to Julius. 1-0 Caesar.

(6) After Pharsalus Brutus fled to Larissa and wrote to Caesar who was delighted and asked him to join him. They discussed whither Pompey might have fled and Brutus’s opinion influenced Caesar towards Egypt. Plutarch says he was an effective public speaker who achieved his ends by reasoning and noble principles.

When Caesar travelled to Africa to fight Cato and Scipio he appointed Brutus governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and he proved an exemplary governor.

(7) Cassius was married to Brutus’s sister, Junia. But they became rivals running for praetorship of Rome in 47. Caesar hears them speaks and makes the decision. Brutus could have been Caesar’s top confidante but the colleagues of Cassius warned him not to succumb to the tyrant’s flattery.

(8) Plutarch repeats the anecdote he tells in the life of Caesar, that when the latter was told that Mark Antony and Dolabella were plotting revolution, he said it was not the fat and long-haired fellows that troubled him, but the pale and lean ones, meaning Brutus and Cassius, a story used by Shakespeare.

So Plutarch argues that, if he had waited, Brutus might have inherited from Caesar. But he was fired up by Cassius who had no noble scruples about tyranny and liberty, but just hated Julius. Plutarch attributes this, improbably, to the incident of the lions of Megara which Cassius had lined up to be part of games he was staging as aedile, but which Caesar, on taking Megara, appropriated.

(9) Plutarch says this interpretation is wrong and that Cassius had always been opposed to tyranny and calls to witness a story about how Cassius as a boy thrashed the son of the then-dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla, at school. Brutus was exhorted to conspire against Caesar by flocks of supporters who left messages at the tomb of his ancestor and graffiti on monuments and so on, as listed in his life of Caesar.

(10) And so it becomes very important to the conspirators that they secure the support of Brutus as he was widely seen as a man of principle and would lend the murder dignity. So Plutarch imagines the scene where Cassius inducts Brutus into the conspiracy, writing the dialogue as for a movie and ending when the two men kiss and embrace, in perfect agreement.

(11) Short anecdote about Caius Ligarius, a declared enemy of Caesar. Brutus comes to visit him when he’s ill and when he mentions it is a bad time to be ill Ligarius twigs that something’s up, sits up in bed and declares: “Nay, Brutus, if thou hast a purpose worthy of thyself, I am well.”

(12) They recruit conspirators. Not Cicero, because he is too timorous and pernickety. Nor Statilius the Epicurean and Favonius the devoted follower of Cato. But the other Brutus, Albinus, because he was maintaining lots of gladiators in Rome. They were all won over by Brutus’s reputation for integrity. They manage to keep it a close secret, despite the many signs of ill omen (which Plutarch records extensively in his life of Caesar).

(13) During the day Brutus keeps tight control of himself but at night he is troubled and anxious. His wife, Porcia, was the daughter of Cato and realises something is wrong. One day she takes some nail scissors and deeply gashes her thigh. Then she makes a long speech about how she isn’t just some concubine brought to warm his bed, but the daughter of a famous man reared to endure hardships and determined to share her husband’s joys and sufferings. Then shows the wound in her thigh to prove it. Then Brutus lifts his hands to heaven and hopes his undertaking will be worthy of his noble wife.

(14) They decide to do it at a meeting of the senate because then all the important they need to pledge allegiance to liberty will be on the spot. It is apparent (though I’m not sure I’ve read it anywhere) that the senate met in different buildings i.e. moved around central Rome. This meeting, for the 15th March 44, was scheduled to take place in the Curia Pompeii, a part of the big theatre complex Pompey had built a decade earlier. Hence the big statue of Pompey which Caesar ends up collapsing against.

On the big day Brutus straps on his dagger and walks to the portico of Pompey where he meets the other senators, either waiting or conducting the business of praetors i.e. adjudicating petitions from a crowd of applicants.

(15) A list of misunderstandings and encounters on the morning which nearly wreck the plot. A paragraph devoted to the anxiety of Porcia who keeps racing to the door to hear news, becomes pale and faints and her women shriek that she’s dead and the rumour spreads to the senate and appals Brutus but he determines to carry on. I.e. Plutarch’s usual procedure of cranking up the melodrama.

(16) Highly detailed depiction of the scene. Caesar arrives late, delayed by his wife and soothsayers. He travels by litter which is more private. He is engaged at the door to the room by Popilius Laenas who speaks to him for some time and all the conspirators think they are being betrayed. But he is merely asking for something at great length.

(17) The detail that Trebonius engaged Antony in conversation outside the hall (apparently, this is wrong but like so much Plutarch, is highly dramatic). The precise manner in which they gather round Caesar’s chair, led by Tullius Cimber pleading for his brother in exile, Caesar becomes irritated and tries to shake them off at which point Tullius tears his toga from his shoulder and Casca stabs him and calls to his brother in Greek to join him. Caesar castigates Casca, then is inundated by other blows but when he sees Brutus draw his dagger, covers his face with his toga and submits. The body is riddled with cuts, there is blood everywhere and the conspirators injure each other in their enthusiasm.

(18) Very vivid description of the way the other senators panicked and thronged the exists. Brutus had made it quite clear no-one else was to be killed; it wasn’t to be a Sulla-esque bloodbath but a return to liberty. This was even extended to Antony who was unpopular and arrogant, but Brutus hoped that, with the tyrant removed, he would come over to their side. Mistake number one.

The murderers walked to the Capitol sporting their daggers. Rumour and panic among the people but when it became clear there wasn’t to be a massacre they thronged to hear the speech by Brutus which was noble. They applaud and bring him down and take him to the Rostrum to further address them. The mood changes when Cinna addresses the crowd. He’s not popular and the murderers withdraw to the Capitol.

(19) Next day the senate met and Antony, Plancus, and Cicero moved a vote of amnesty. Antony gives his son to the conspirators as a hostage and this gives them the confidence to leave the Capitol.

Cassius was taken home and entertained by Antony, Brutus by Lepidus, and the rest by their several comrades or friends. Early next morning the senate assembled again. In the first place, they gave a vote of thanks to Antony for having stopped an incipient civil war; next, they passed a vote of commendation for the followers of Brutus who were present; and finally, they distributed the provinces. It was voted that Brutus should have Crete, Cassius Africa, Trebonius Asia, Cimber Bithynia, and the other Brutus Cisalpine Gaul.

(20) Antony argues that Caesar’s body should be carried to his funeral and his will read to the people. Cassius is vehemently opposed but Brutus, out of gentleness of spirit, agrees. This was the second mistake. The will:

When it was found that the will of Caesar gave to every Roman 75 drachmas, and left to the people his gardens beyond the Tiber, where now stands a temple of Fortune, an astonishing kindliness and yearning for Caesar seized the citizens.

When Antony commenced his eulogy he realised the crowd was in a sentimental mood and so changed his tone and held up Caesar’s toga, showing the many places the daggers had torn it. At this the crowd went nuts and stormed local shops, dragging out wooden objects to make an ad hoc funeral pyre for the body; then took brands from it and ran off to the houses of the murderers and set them on fire.

The story of Cinna the poet who had a bad dream about Caesar the night before but nonetheless, the next day went along to the funeral and was mistaken by the mob for the Cinna who was one of the conspirators and was torn to pieces. Oh dear. Not the dignified gratitude which Brutus and Cassius had expected at all. The opposite: bloodlust fury.

(21) This incident is important because it was this which convinced the conspirators to flee Rome, despite the senate trying to bring to justice the mobsters who had attacked their houses. Unexpectedly Brutus continued to perform his role as praetor in laying on lavish games (I thought the aediles did this). And in the absence of Brutus and all the other conspirators it is Antony who emerges as the strong man in control.

(22) Everything is transformed with the arrival of Octavian.

He was pursuing his studies at Apollonia when Caesar was killed, and had been awaiting him there after his determination to march at once against the Parthians. As soon as he learned of Caesar’s fate, he came to Rome, and as a first step towards winning the favour of the people, assumed the name of Caesar and distributed to the citizens the money which had been left them by his will. Thus he deposed Antony from popular favour, and by a lavish use of money assembled and got together many of Caesar’s veteran soldiers.

Hit the ground running, very smart, very strategic. When Cicero eventually opted to support Octavian Brutus wrote him a long bitter letter saying he had no principles but just preferred a tyrant who would be nice to him.

(23) “Already one faction was forming about Octavius, and another about Antony, and the soldiers, as though for sale at auction, flocked to the highest bidder.” Against all is expectations Brutus finds himself driven out of Italy and goes to Greece. His wife, Porcia accompanied him before turning back for Italy and Plutarch paints a tear-jerking scene of departure and Brutus’s words of praise for his strong wife.

(24) Brutus sails on to Athens and purports to be socialising with philosophers but in fact sent out to the commanders of armies around Greece to recruit them for the cause of liberty. He meets Cicero’s son and praises him as a hater of tyranny. But at a feast he makes an odd quote from Homer which seems to indicate he sees himself as doomed by fate. Did he? Or is this the literary tradition, the kind of thing he ought to have said?

(25) Brutus rounds up various forces throughout Greece. Brutus marches his forces to Epidamnus but falls ill.

(26) The garrison of Epidamnus brings food to Brutus wherefore he treats the city well. Fighting between the forces of Brutus and Caius Antonius until the former has the latter surrounded in a marshy region and prevents his men massacring them and persuades them to come over to him. For a long time he respects Caius Antonius until he discovers he is conspiring to subvert Brutus’s officers and so has him locked up.

(27) News arrives that Octavian is consolidating power, has had Antony evicted from Italy, is canvassing for the consulship illegally. When he sees how unpopular this is he changes tack, sends envoys of friendship to Antony. But still gets himself elected consul at the ridiculously young age of 20. As soon as Octavian is consul he promotes prosecutions against Brutus, Cassius and the rest who are tried in absentia, and exemplary sentences intimidated out of the juries. Then, very briskly:

After this, the three men, Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus, were reconciled with one another, distributed the provinces among themselves, and sentenced to death by proscription two hundred men. Among those put to death was Cicero.

(28) The importance of family, kinship and friendship networks demonstrated by this sentence:

When tidings of these events were brought to Macedonia, Brutus felt compelled to write to Hortensius commanding him to kill Caius Antonius, on the plea that he was thus avenging Cicero and Brutus Albinus, one of whom was his friend, and the other his kinsman. For this reason, at a later time, when Antony had captured Hortensius at the battle of Philippi, he slew him on the tomb of his brother.

In mid-43 Brutus crossed into Asia where he performed the role of governor, adjudicating between native kings. He wrote to Cassius saying they shouldn’t settle into exile but be raising armies to return to Rome and ‘free’ it. Now they met at Smyrna, strong in arms.

(29) An extended description of the character of Brutus who even his enemies admitted was motivated by the highest motives of liberty. Just a shame that hardly anyone else was, including most of the population of Rome. Brutus:

The virtues of Brutus, as we are told, made him beloved by the multitude, adored by his friends, admired by the nobility, and not hated even by his enemies. For he was remarkably gentle and large-minded, free from all anger, pleasurable indulgence, and greed, and kept his purpose erect and unbending in defence of what was honourable and just.

(30) Cassius takes Rhodes, Brutus campaigns against the Lycians with many battles, namely the siege of Xanthus.

(31) When Xanthus catches fire Brutus orders his troops to put the fire out but the Xanthians in a kind of frenzy assist in the burning down of their town. Plutarch goes to town, describing little children who throw themselves into the flames, mothers jumping from the battlements and so on. Maybe there was a fire but folk legend and Plutarch’s fondness for the gruesome have added the rest.

(32) Brutus’s clemency dealing with the city of Patara compared with Cassius’s extreme exactions from Rhodes.

(33) Plutarch repeats the story told in the life of Pompey about h ow the council of young king Ptolemy deliberated what to do when Pompey approached Egypt and were persuaded by the arguments of the rhetorician Theodotus to kill him. How everyone involved in the murder was, in their turn, killed on Caesar’s orders, except this Theodotus who fled to a wretched life traipsing round Asia. Well, Brutus chanced across him and had him killed. No-one dies a natural death in these stories.

(34) In early 42 Brutus and Cassius met with their huge armies at Sardis. they lock themselves into a tent and fall into a furious argument, enumerating the list of wrongs each has done the other. All their followers have been forbidden from intervening but Marcus Favonius knew no fear and pushed his way through the throng outside the tent and insisted on going in and jokingly quoting some verse from Homer who has old Nestor say:

“But do ye harken to me, for ye both are younger than I am.” (Iliad book I 259)

This makes Cassius laugh and, although Brutus tries to have Favonius ejected, breaks the ice. That night there is a feast of the uneasy allies which Favonius gatecrashes and barges his way into the place of honour.

(35) Brutus and Cassius disagree about whether to publicly shame their officials when they catch them behaving corruptly, in this case embezzling public funds. The story is told to show Brutus the more principled of the two.

(36) Plutarch tells us Brutus needed little sleep but worked or conversed until very late. This is prologue to a repeat of the story told in the life of Caesar about how very late one night he hears someone come into his tent and turns to see a monstrous and fearful shape standing at his side who announces that he is his evil genius and will meet him at Philippi.

(37) Next morning Brutus tells Cassius about his vision and Plutarch gives Cassius an extended passage describing the philosophy of the Epicureans, namely that the senses and the imagination of man are infinitely malleable and so it was a product of his fantasy.

(38) They march across Greece till they face the armies of Antony and Octavian. ‘The plains between the armies the Romans call Campi Philippi.’

(39) As usual, Plutarch gleefully describes the various ill omens before the battle of Philippi:

  • the lictor brought Cassius his wreath turned upside down
  • in a procession at some festival, a golden victory belonging to Cassius, which was being borne along, fell to the ground, its bearer having slipped
  • many carrion birds hovered over the camp daily, and swarms of bees were seen clustering at a certain place inside the camp

All these incidents began to weaken Cassius’s Epicurean rationalism and also demoralised the soldiers. The leaders disagreed: Cassius wanted to drag the war on and wear down their opponents; Brutus wanted to get on with it and lessen the damage to Rome. Also, men were deserting to the other side. So Cassius was won round to giving battle the next day.

(40) That night Brutus dines and goes to bed but Cassius dines with intimate friends and is unusually quiet. Plutarch gives him a speech telling one friend, Messala, that he is in the same plight as Pompey, venturing the destiny of his country on one battle.

At daybreak a scarlet tunic is displayed before the tents of Brutus and Cassius which is the sign for battle. The pair are given a noble dialogue about death. Brutus tells Cassius that when he was younger he blamed Cato for killing himself and not being man enough to face whatever the fates had in store. Now he’s changed his mind. On the ides of March he gave his life for his country. Since then he has lived a life of liberty. If they lose, he will ‘go hence’ with praise for Fortune. Cassius embraces him and thus emboldened they prepare for the battle.

(41) The Battle of Philippi October 42 BC. Antony’s men were building elaborate fortifications to keep Cassius from the sea. Ocatvian was absent from the field with illness. Both were surprised when Brutus and Cassius’s men let out a great shout and ran forward. They did so in bad order and almost immediately lost touch with their neighbouring legions, but the right wing outflanked the cavalry and stormed Octavian’s camp, massacring some Lacedaemonians and wrecking Octavian’s litter leading to rumours that he was killed.

(42) According to Plutarch the defeat was down to miscommunication. Brutus’s legions were completely victorious and took the enemy camp. But Cassius’s wing was routed and the enemies took his camp.

And one thing alone brought ruin to their cause, namely, that Brutus thought Cassius victorious and did not go to his aid, while Cassius thought Brutus dead and did not wait for his aid.

(43) What happened on Cassius’s wing. He is beaten back, his forces panic and break, he makes for a hillside, sees cavalry riding towards him, can’t make out if they’re friend or foe, sends out an officer, Titinius, to find out. This man is surrounded by whooping horsemen so that Cassius thinks he has been captured. In fact it is cavalry send by Brutus celebrating finding a colleague unharmed. But under the impression that all is lost, Cassius retreats to his tent.

Here the account becomes very characteristically Plutarchian, for he reminds us that Cassius was quaestor with Marcus Crassius on his catastrophic expedition into Parthia in 53 BC. Ever since he survived that debacle he has kept by him a freedman named Pindarus. Cassius drew his robes over his head, bared his neck and instructed Pindarus to strike. So Pindarus cuts his head off. By the time Titinius returns to the camp on the hill it is to find all his generals weeping and wailing. Cursing his tardiness at returning and bringing the good news that the cavalry were Brutus’s, Titinius draws his sword and stabs himself.

(44) When Brutus hears of Cassius’s death he has the body decorated and sent to Thasos for funeral. From which one deduces we are no longer still in the heat of the battle. Brutus addresses Cassius’s men and tries to lift their spirits and gives them generous payment. He was the only one of the four generals (Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Octavius) who wasn’t defeated, but he threw away his victory by letting his soldiers loot the enemy camp.

(45) The losses on both sides. When Antony is brought the robe and sword of Cassius he is energised to fight again the next day. But the two camps Brutus is commanding have lots of problems, his own guarding numerous prisoners of war, Cassius’s men demoralised by their defeat and resentful of a new commander.

(46) Brutus tries to motivate Cassius’s demoralised men by promising them they can loot two cities, Thessalonica and Lacedaemon. This is the one time Brutus did this kind of thing, mostly he was careful to preserve the cities he passed by or took submission from. But these were desperate times and he had to do whatever he could to motivate Cassius’s surly soldiers.

(47) Octavian and Antony were in an even worse state, for their camp was on low lying land prone to flooding by the frequent rains, water which immediately froze (it was October). Moreover a large fleet Octavian had ordered from Italy was intercepted by Brutus’s fleet and destroyed. If Brutus had learned of this he probably wouldn’t have fought, because his camp was in the better position, he had more provisions and control of the sea to bring food and reinforcements. Plutarch slips into sententious mode:

But since, as it would seem, the government of Rome could no longer be a democracy, and a monarchy was necessary, Heaven, wishing to remove from the scene the only man who stood in the way of him who was able to be sole master, cut off from Brutus the knowledge of that good fortune.

(48) More omens, inevitably:

  • the foremost standard was covered with bees
  • of its own accord the arm of one of the officers sweated oil of roses, and though they often rubbed and wiped it off, it was of no avail
  • just before the battle two eagles fought a pitched battle with one another in the space between the camps, and as all were gazing at them, while an incredible silence reigned over the plain, the eagle towards Brutus gave up the fight and fled
  • and the story of the Ethiopian who, as the gate of the camp was thrown open, met the standard-bearer, and was cut to pieces by the soldiers, who thought his appearance ominous

(49) As he reviews his troops he notices how ill at ease and reluctant they are and even as his army lines up a notably brave soldier defects to the enemy. It’s now or never so Brutus decides to attack at 3pm. Brutus’s wing is triumphant but Cassius’s command spread their line too thin and are overwhelmed and then Brutus’s army is surrounded and massacred. Many fine Romans lost their lives etc, not least Cato’s son.

(50) The story of Lucilius who, as darkness falls, sees Brutus being chased by barbarian horsemen and so pretends to be him, crying out that he is surrendering and asking to be brought to Antony. The barbarian cavalry is delighted and so is Antony to hear his great opponent is coming but then is thrown into doubt about how to greet him. When he sees it is this man Lucilius he is hugely relieved, and although Lucilius makes a speech saying he is prepared to accept death for his deception, Antony in fact grants him his life, welcomes him and he becomes one of his most loyal adherents.

(51) Brutus escapes with loyal officers and takes refuge by a stream by a big rock. There is an incomprehensible anecdote about a soldier who is sent twice to fetch drinking water. Statyllius promises to cut his way through the enemy and make his way to the camp and light a flaming torch if it is safe to return. After a while they see a blazing torch raised because Statyllius managed to reach the camp but… he never returned, being struck down on the return journey.

(52) Night comes on and Brutus asks each of his companions to help him kill himself but they all refuse. Then he shakes all their hands and thanks Fortune to be left surrounded by such loyal men and considers himself lucky to be leaving behind a reputation for honesty and virtue which none of those who conquered him would have. Then he got another old friend to hold a sword steady while he plunged onto it and so died.

(53) A lot of Plutarch’s account seems to derive from an account by Messala, the comrade of Brutus, an eye witness. After Brutus’s death he went over to Octavian who found all the Greeks loyal.

Antony had the body of Brutus wrapped in his best robe and burned on a pyre, then sent the ashes home to his mother Servilia. (Suetonius, by contrast, says that the head of Brutus was sent to Rome to be thrown at the feet of Caesar’s statue.) Brutus’s wife Porcia now wanted to die but she was closely watched by all her friends till she found the opportunity to snatch up hot colas from a fire, swallow them and kept her mouth firmly closed till she died.

Plutarch ends his account very inconsequentially by stating that this might, in fact, be wrong, since a letter exists purporting to be from Brutus in which he chides them for neglecting her when she was ill and so driving her to her death while he was still alive. If this letter is genuine, that is. Who knows.

Thoughts

Plutarch excels himself at jumping right over Brutus’s family, boyhood, young manhood, political career or education in order to leap straight to the start of the civil war in 49.


Related links

Roman reviews

The Life of Mark Antony by Plutarch

This is one of the longest lives at 87 chapters, longer than Sertorius (27), Crassus (33), Cicero (49), Brutus (53), Caesar (69), Cato the Younger (73) or Pompey (80). Dates and other information in square brackets are not in Plutarch but content I’ve added in to make the account more accurate.

Plutarch’s life of Marcus Antonius

(1) Marcus Antonius [83 to 30] came from an undistinguished family. His grandfather was murdered during the purges of Marius in 87 BC. Plutarch tells an anecdote about how, when a friend came asking for money, all his father could give him was a bowl, and that when his wife discovered it was missing she threatened to torture all the slaves to find it until his father confessed to having given it away. (Torture all the slaves? So the references to torturing slaves to  establish something, as jokily referred to in the plays of Plautus and Terence, is based on common practice.)

(2) His mother was Julia, a third cousin of Julius Caesar. When his father died, his mother remarried Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, an eminent man of noble family who was always in debt due to his extravagance and so had got lured into the Catiline conspiracy. He was one of the conspirators caught in the capital about whom the famous debate in the senate was held (where Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger put opposing views, namely clemency versus execution, as described in detail in Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy). As a result of Cato’s violent argument, Lentulus was summarily executed on the orders of Cicero, consul at the time. According to Plutarch, this explains Antony’s violent hatred of Cicero who he would, 20 years later, directly cause to be executed. Thus does the whirligig of time being in his revenges.

A promising youth, Antony fell under the influence of Gaius Scribonius Curio, who debauched him with wine and women till he was massively in debt and Curio’s father banned him from the house. Then he fell in with Publius Clodius Pulcher, the street demagogue and rabble rouser. He acquired so many enemies that he thought it wise to leave Italy for Greece, where he studied military tactics and oratory. Interestingly, Plutarch tells us that Antonius adopted:

the Asiatic style of oratory, which was at the height of its popularity in those days and bore a strong resemblance to his own life, which was swashbuckling and boastful, full of empty exultation and distorted ambition.

So by chapter 2 we know where Plutarch’s sympathies lie. With Brutus the liberator and Cato the principled, against Caesar the tyrant and Antony his swaggering lieutenant. OK. Good.

(3) Antony accompanies Grabinius to Syria as captain of his horse and distinguishes himself in a siege against Aristobulus at Jerusalem in 57 BC. He plays a leading role in the campaign to restore King Ptolemy XII Auletes to the throne of Egypt after he’d been dethroned by his people. For example, capturing the city of Pelusium. (Cato 35, Pompey 49) Something which, presumably, endeared him to Ptolemy’s daughter, Cleopatra, when he was to meet her 15 years later.

(4) “He had also a noble dignity of form; and a shapely beard, a broad forehead, and an aquiline nose were thought to show the virile qualities peculiar to the portraits and statues of Hercules.” He liked to play on his putative descent from Hercules. He dressed casually, was boastful and banterish, all this produced goodwill and reputation among the soldiers, helped by ‘his liberality, and his bestowal of favours upon friends and soldiers’.

(5) When the crisis between Caesar and Pompey came to a head, Curio, with money provided by Caesar, got Antony elected tribune of the plebs in 50 BC [following straight on from Curio’s own term]. During the crisis Antony played a key role at crucial moments. In January 49 he read out Caesar’s letter to the senate with his proposals for a compromise. It was he who suggested the further compromise that both Caesar and Pompey lay down their arms simultaneously, but this proposal was rejected by the consuls and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus (not the same Lentulus as the one involved in the conspiracy) expelled Antony from the Senate building by force and threats.

Which is why Antony changed into the clothes of a slave and headed to Caesar’s camp by the river Rubicon, there to brief him that all compromise was impossible. (Pompey 58, Caesar 30) It was the hounding of Antony in his capacity as tribune which made it possible for Caesar to dress up his motivation for invading Italy as being in part to restore the rights of the tribunes i.e. to dress up personal ambition in lofty rhetoric about rights and customs. [See the opening chapters of Caesar’s Civil War.]

(6) It was this which allowed Cicero to write, in his Philippics against Antony, that he was the prime cause of the civil war, which is, of course, silly, and Plutarch goes on to say so, and to explain that Caesar was not a man to do anything on a whim. No:

that which led [Caesar] to war against all mankind, as it had led Alexander before him, and Cyrus of old, was an insatiable love of power and a mad desire to be first and greatest.

Not a fan, then.

After Caesar crossed into Italy and drove Pompey across the Adriatic to Macedonia, he lacked the ships to follow and so turned around and headed to Spain to quell the Pompeian legions there, leaving Rome to Lepidus, who was praetor, and Italy and the troops to Antony, in his capacity as tribune of the people.

Antony curried favour with the troops by living with them and sharing their exercises and making generous gifts of money, but he was impatient with administering justice and gained a reputation for sleeping with other men’s wives. In other words, he did a lot of damage to Caesar’s cause.

(7) Nonetheless Caesar was right to put his faith in him as a general. Early in 48, having crushed Spain, Caesar has marched his army all the way back into Italy and rustled up the ships to transport them across the Adriatic. He was besieging Pompey’s army at Dyrrhachium in the Balkans with limited forces and sent word for Antony to send reinforcements. And Antony did a very good job by embarking 20,000 men and escaping the blockade of Brundisium being carried out by Lucius Scribonius Libo. He sailed them down the Macedonian coast in a storm but managed to find a safe port and so brought his forces safely to Caesar – the forces with which Caesar was to win the decisive Battle of Pharsalus later that summer.

(8) Antony distinguished himself at two engagements, where he stood and rallied fleeing troops, and Caesar gave him the decisive command of the left wing at the Battle of Pharsalus. [This is skipped over here because Plutarch describes it at length in his life of Pompey, chapters 68 to 73]. After Caesar won and had himself appointed dictator, he set off in pursuit of Pompey to Egypt, but made Antony his Master of Horse and sent him back to Rome. This post was second only to dictator and when the dictator was absent, as Caesar was, Antony was effectively in complete control.

(9) But while Caesar is away Antony shocked Rome with his loose living, his drunkenness, his heavy expenditures, his debauches with women, his spending the days in sleep or wandering about with an aching head, or attending the nuptial feasts of mimes and jesters. He has a falling out with Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who he thought had had an affair with his wife, so he drove the latter from his house. When Dolabella proposed a law for the abolition of debts and sought to enact it by force and seized the Roman Forum, Antony responded by unleashing his soldiers upon the assembled masses, killing hundreds. – The civil war had taught them nothing. Political street violence wouldn’t go away (at least not until the arrival of the ultimate strong man).

(10) When Caesar returned to Rome he disapproved of Antony’s actions, pardoned Dolabella and chose Lepidus rather than Antony to be his co-consul the next year. (Antony, in fact, was stripped of all official positions and received no appointments for the year 46 or 45 BC.)

Anthony took to wife Fulvia, the widow of both the demagogue Clodius and the hellraiser Curio, who was a tough woman and determined to reform him. Plutarch waspishly claims that Cleopatra owed her a debt because Fulvia house-trained Antony and made him ready to be ruled by a woman. [Before you get too impressed, remember this is the woman who delighted in seeing the severed head and hands of Cicero, executed in December 43 and sparked a full blown war with Octavian in 41.]

An anecdote: Antony goes to meet Caesar on  his return from Spain, but then news breaks that Caesar is dead. So Antony made his way back to Rome disguised as a slave (an echo or repeat of his flight from Rome at the start of 49) and in disguise gained admittance to his own house claiming to be a slave with a message. He hands it to Fulvia who tearfully begs for news about her beloved Antony, at which point he drops his disguise and embraces her.

(11) When Caesar returned from victory in Rome, from all the men who went to meet him it was Antony he honoured and had accompany him in his ‘car’ back to the capital. Plutarch continues the idea of rivalry with Dolabella, claiming Caesar wanted to hand over power to him but Antony vehemently opposed it. Plutarch repeats the story about Caesar being warned about Antony and Dolabella and replying that it wasn’t these fat men who worried him, it was the pale and thin ones, indicating Brutus and Cassius. [Told less convincingly than in the lives of Caesar (62) or Brutus (8).]

(12) A repeat of the story of how Antony was taking part in the annual festival of the Lupercalia and ran with a diadem to the rostra where Caesar was sitting, had his fellow athletes lift him up and place the diadem on Caesar’s head. Some applauded but when Caesar pushed it away the whole crowd applauded. This happened several times before Caesar stood in displeasure, pulled the toga from his throat and said anyone who wanted could strike him there and then. It’s an odd story, isn’t it, with a folk legend aptness but also a deep implausibility. And the related anecdote that unknown hands hung wreaths  on the heads of Caesar’s statues, which were then torn down by the tribunes. All this is told better in Caesar 61.

(13) The conspirators discuss inviting Antony to join. Trebonius shared a tent with Antony as they both accompanied Caesar back to Rome, hinted at the idea and Antony firmly refused. At which they switched round to considering killing Antony along with Caesar – a neat illustration of the way that, once you’ve crossed the line into deciding you need to kill people to get rid of the ‘tyrant’ and the ‘dictator’, it quickly becomes a list. In fact, Brutus is held up as the man of principle who insists that nobody else is harmed. Fearing Antony’s popularity and position, they nonetheless arrange for some of their number to engage Antony outside the senate hall so he is not present when the deed is done.

(14) In this account the actual assassination of Caesar takes up one short sentence. Fair enough; it is described in great and dramatic detail in the life of Caesar [chapters 63 to 69]. Anthony flees into hiding but when he realises the conspirators are harming no-one else but are holed up on the Capitol, he comes out of hiding, gives his son to them as a hostage guaranteeing safe passage, and then entertains the assassins to dinner. In the senate he proposes an act of amnesty and a distribution of provinces among Brutus and Cassius and their partisans.

In the immediate aftermath Antony was widely thought to have acted with immense wisdom to calm the risk of civil war.  But everything changed when he made the official funeral address over Caesar’s body.

At the close of his speech shook on high the garments of the dead, all bloody and tattered by the swords as they were, called those who had wrought such work villains and murderers, and inspired his hearers with such rage that they heaped together benches and tables and burned Caesar’s body in the forum, and then, snatching the blazing faggots from the pyre, ran to the houses of the assassins and assaulted them.

This one act split the city, terrified the assassins into fleeing and, in effect, restarted the civil war.

(15) The assassins fled Rome. Caesar’s wife gave Antony his fortune to dispense with and all his papers. Antony implemented Caesar’s wishes but went further, appointing magistrates who suited him, acting increasingly autocratically.

(16) Octavian It was at this point that 18-year-old Octavian arrived in Rome, a son of Caesar’s niece. When Octavian asked for the money Caesar had left him, in order to distribute the payment of 75 drachmas which Caesar had enjoined, Antony ridiculed the boy for being a mere stripling, and also blocked his attempt to become a tribune. But Octavian allied with Cicero and others of the anti-Caesar party and Antony began to fear him, so held a summit conference, gave into his demands, and was reconciled. Briefly. For then Antony learned Octavian was touring the country drumming up old soldiers and recruiting an army.

(17) Cicero was the most powerful man in Rome and got the senate to declare Antony a public enemy while he was out of the city conducting a siege. Plutarch says this drove Antony and his army out of Italy and over the Alps and they suffered hardships and starvation, but this brought out the best in him, as adversity always did, and the soldiers admired him for sharing their privations.

(18) When Antony’s army came close to camp near to Lepidus‘s the latter, who owed Antony many favours, surprised him by being reluctant to acknowledge him. He came to Lepidus’s campy dishevelled and unshaven and won the sympathy of the troops. Many of Lepidus’s soldiers implored him to usurp their commander and take over but Antony insisted Lepidus be treated with respect and when their armies united he did so. This inspired Munatius Plancus also to join him so that he crossed the Alps into Italy with 17 legions of infantry and 10,000 horse.

(19) Octavian had realised he couldn’t treat with Cicero because the latter was a man of principle, so realised he had to come to an accommodation with Antony. So Octavian, Antony and Lepidus met on an island where ‘they divided up the whole empire among themselves as though it were an ancestral inheritance’. The Second Triumvirate. They all wanted to get rid of political enemies but agreeing a list presented great difficulties. Octavian gave up Cicero to Antony, Antony gave up Lucius Caesar (Antony’s uncle) to Octavian, Lepidus gave up Paulus his brother. ‘Nothing, in my opinion, could be more savage or cruel than this exchange.’

(20) Plutarch has it that the soldiers demanded additional tokens of their alliance so Octavian married Clodia, a daughter of Antony’s wife Fulvia. As a result of these agreements, 300 men were proscribed and put to death, including Cicero. [Wikipedia has 2,000 Roman knights and one third of the senate.] Antony ordered his head and right hand be cut off, the one he had used to write his savage criticisms of Antony with, and nailed to the rostra in the forum [Cicero 48]. In the Gallic Wars Caesar remarked on the Gauls’ ‘barbaric’ practice of sticking the heads of defeated enemies on poles around their camps. How is this different? What could be more savage and barbarian?

(21) Antony emerges as the most powerful of the triumvirate but makes himself very unpopular for his dissolute living. And because he had bought up the house of Pompey [only recently and tragically dead] and the people were upset to see it closed against commanders, magistrates and ambassadors and filled instead with mimes, jugglers and drunken flatterers.

The triumvirate not only sold the properties of those they slew, but brought false charges against their wives and heirs in order to confiscate their belongings. They instituted new taxes, and plundered the  treasure deposited with the Vestal Virgins.

Then Octavian and Antony led their armies into Macedonia against Brutus and Cassius, leaving Rome in charge of Lepidus.

(22) This short chapter deals with the campaign of Octavian and Antony in Greece against Brutus and Cassius, describing but not mentioning by name the crucial two battles at Philippi in October 42, mainly to bring out how it was Antony who was victorious while Octavian was sick in his tent and his forces lost their part of the battle. [Brutus and Cassius’s campaigns in Greece, the long buildup to the battle, the battle and its aftermath are described in great detail in Plutarch’s life of Brutus, taking up the final third of the text, chapters 38 to 53, which is why he skimps it here.] In Plutarch’s account Cassius commits suicide after the first battle, Brutus after the second.

In the negotiations of the triumvirate it was Antony who insisted that Cicero was killed. In revenge Brutus ordered Hortensius to execute Antony’s own brother, Caius. In revenge, Antony had Hortensius executed on his family tomb. Thus the logic of civil wars.

(23) After the battle Octavian, still sick, returns to Rome, while Antony remains in Greece, raising money and enjoying himself, gaining a reputation as a philhellene, listening to learned debates, attending games, giving money to Athens.

(24) In 41 Antony left Lucius Censorinus in charge of Greece and he and his army crossed into Asia meaning the Eastern, Greek-speaking part of what is now Turkey. Here he was greeted as conqueror, lavished with gifts and women and lapsed into his former lifestyle of debauchery. His tax gatherers milked the territory till a brave local politician complained that they had already given Antony 200,000 talents, now he was demanding more. Which gave him pause.

For Antony was simple and slow, quick to forgive, lavish of gifts, but easily flattered and deceived by his subordinates.

(25) Enter Cleopatra who:

roused and drove to frenzy many of the passions that were still hidden and quiescent in him, and dissipated and destroyed whatever good and saving qualities still offered resistance.

Antony sends to her to attend him in Cilicia to explain her support for Cassius. Antony’s messenger, Dellius, on meeting her immediately realises his boss will be enslaved by such a lustrous woman, now at the peak of her beauty [born in 69 BC, in 41 she was 28].

(26) Cleopatra first meets Antony by sailing down the river Cydnus to his camp. This inspires the single most gorgeous description in Plutarch who says she sailed up:

the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple, its rowers urging it on with silver oars to the sound of the flute blended with pipes and lutes. She herself reclined beneath a canopy spangled with gold, adorned like Venus in a painting, while boys like Loves in paintings stood on either side and fanned her. Likewise also the fairest of her serving-maidens, attired like Nereïds and Graces, were stationed, some at the rudder-sweeps, and others at the reefing-ropes. Wondrous odours from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.

Antony asked her to come meet him but Cleopatra refused and told him to come meet her. And he obeyed.

(27) A chapter on the character of Cleopatra, tactfully observing that she was no necessarily the most beautiful of women, but she had an ineffable charm and wove a magic every time she spoke.

(28) Instead of preparing for war against the Parthians, Antony sank into oriental sloth, went to Alexandria with Cleopatra and spent his time in feasting and drinking. Plutarch includes a very rare snippet of autobiography which hints at the personal sources of information for his biographies.

Philotas, the physician of Amphissa, used to tell my grandfather, Lamprias, that he was in Alexandria at the time, studying his profession, and that having got well acquainted with one of the royal cooks, he was easily persuaded by him (young man that he was) to take a view of the extravagant preparations for a royal supper. Accordingly, he was introduced into the kitchen, and when he saw all the other provisions in great abundance, and eight wild boars a-roasting, he expressed his amazement at what must be the number of guests. But the cook burst out laughing and said: “The guests are not many, only about twelve; but everything that is set before them must be at perfection, and this an instant of time reduces. For it might happen that Antony would ask for supper immediately, and after a little while, perhaps, would postpone it and call for a cup of wine, or engage in conversation with some one. Wherefore,” he said, “not one, but many suppers are arranged; for the precise time is hard to hit.” This tale, then, Philotas used to tell; and he said also that as time went on he became one of the medical attendants of Antony’s oldest son, whom he had of Fulvia, and that he usually supped with him at his house in company with the rest of his comrades, when the young man did not sup with his father. Accordingly, on one occasion, as a physician was making too bold and giving much annoyance to them as they supped, Philotas stopped his mouth with some such sophism as the: “To the patient who is somewhat feverish cold water must be given; but everyone who has a fever is somewhat feverish; therefore to everyone who has a fever cold water should be given.” The fellow was confounded and put to silence, whereat Antony’s son was delighted and said with a laugh: “All this I bestow upon thee, Philotas,” pointing to a table covered with a great many large beakers. Philotas acknowledged his good intentions, but was far from supposing that a boy so young had the power to give away so much. After a little while, however, one of the slaves brought the beakers to him in a sack, and bade him put his seal upon it. And when Philotas protested and was afraid to take them, “You miserable man,” said the fellow, “why hesitate? Don’t you know that the giver is the son of Antony, and that he has the right to bestow so many golden vessels? However, take my advice and exchange them all with us for money; since perchance the boy’s father might miss some of the vessels, which are of ancient workmanship and highly valued for their art.” Such details, then, my grandfather used to tell me, Philotas would recount at every opportunity.

(29) Astonishingly, Antony liked to dress up as a slave and go round the streets of Alexandria, looking through people’s doors and mocking them. And Cleopatra accompanied him in these merry jaunts! She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him, and watched him as he exercised himself in arms. The Alexandrians said that he used the tragic mask with the Romans, but the comic mask with them.

He was fishing once, and had bad luck, and was vexed at it because Cleopatra was there to see. He therefore ordered his fishermen to dive down and secretly fasten to his hook some fish that had been previously caught, and pulled up two or three of them. But the Egyptian saw through the trick, and pretending to admire her lover’s skill, told her friends about it, and invited them to be spectators of it the following day. So great numbers of them got into the fishing boats, and when Antony had let down his line, she ordered one of her own attendants to get the start of him by swimming onto his hook and fastening on it a salted Pontic herring. Antony thought he had caught something, and pulled it up, whereupon there was great laughter, as was natural, and Cleopatra said: “Imperator, hand over thy fishing-rod to the fishermen of Pharos and Canopus; thy sport is the hunting of cities, realms, and continents.”

(30) Eventually the real world intruded on these larks. His wife and brother had become enemies of Octavian and been forced to flee Italy. Meanwhile, Labienus, Caesar’s best lieutenant in Gaul, who had gone over to Pompey and then escaped East after Pharsalus, was leading a Parthian army into Asia. Antony set off to engage Labienus but received messages from Fulvia.

[Fulvia had become involved in a full-blown conflict with Octavian which is known as Fulvia’s civil war or the Perusine war, because it ended up with Octavian besieging the forces of Fulvia and Antony’s younger brother, Lucius Antonius, in the Italian town of Perusia, modern Perugia.]

Plutarch has Antony changing direction to meet her but she died en route to meet him. [Wikipedia, by contrast, says Octavian took Perusia but spared both Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, sending the latter into exile at Sicyone near Corinth where she promptly died of disease.] Either way, when Antony arrived in Rome, he was able to restore friendship with Octavian by blaming any dissension on his headstrong wife.

The triumvirs divided up the empire, making the Ionian sea a boundary, assigning the East to Antony and the West to Caesar and giving Africa to Lepidus. They then arranged either to be consuls themselves or arranged for their friends and allies to have senior offices. So the Republic was in effect dead.

(31) In order to cement their alliance, Antony married Octavian’s half sister, Octavia, who was recently widowed. The senate passed a law allowing her to marry in less than the legal requirement of 10 months mourning. It’s one among many examples of the way the laws and the senate operated on a micro level to adjust things for fellow members of the small Roman elite.

(32) Pompey’s son Sextus Pompeius inherited command of his big fleet. Antony and Octavian meet him at Misenum, where they make peace [August 39]. As he is entertaining them on his flagship, a senior officer of Sextus’s whispers in his ear that they could cut their ropes, set sail, execute them, and Sextus would become ruler of the Roman world. But Sextus chooses integrity and rejects the idea.

(33) Antony sends Antony sent Publius Ventidius Bassus on ahead into Asia to oppose the Parthians while he has himself made Pontifex Maximus, as Julius had been. The partnership between Octavian and Antony functioned but Antony consistently came off worse in all their deals, even when things were decided (improbably enough) by throwing dice or cockfights (!). A soothsayer tells Antony to avoid Octavian.

Antony leaves Rome for Greece taking Octavia who has borne him a daughter. In Athens he learns that Ventidius had conquered the Parthians in battle [of the Cilician Gates] and slain Labienus [39 BC]. Antony takes part in traditional Athenian games.

(34) A more detailed description of Publius Ventidius’s successes against the Parthians which go some way to redeeming the disastrous defeat of Crassus in 53 BC. in 40 BC the Parthians invaded Syria led by Pacorus, the son of King Orodes. Ventidius met Pacorus’ huge army [in the Battle of Cyrrhestica] where he inflicted an overwhelming defeat in which Pacorus was killed [38 BC].

Ventidius doesn’t pursue them into their own land as he is worried about Antony’s jealousy, and when Antony arrived with an army, he takes over Ventidius’s siege of Antiochus of Commagené in the city of Samosata, which in fact goes very badly, leaving Antony chagrined. He sends Ventidius back to Rome for a triumph.

Plutarch makes a general point that other generals flourished under Antony or that he was more successful in campaigns conducted by those under him, namely: Ventidius against the Parthians, Sossius in Syria, and Canidius who conquered , who was left by the Armenians.

(35) Tensions had been building between Octavian and Antony who sailed for Italy with 200 ships but sent his wife on ahead of him, and when Octavia met Octavian she pleaded with him not to make her a widow, and so the two imperators were reconciled again, for the time being…

So they ate and conferred in peace, then Octavian gave Antony two legions to pursue his wars in the East while Octavian set off to quell remaining Pompeians in Sicily. Antony left Octavia and his children with Octavian.

(36) But in Asia Antony fell back into his old infatuation with Cleopatra. In October 41 he called her to attend him in Cilicia and made her a gift of ‘Phoenicia, Coele Syria, Cyprus and a large part of Cilicia…and.. the balsam-producing part of Judaea and all that part of Arabia Nabataea which slopes toward the outer sea’. Antony set up or removed monarchs, punished nations and ruled like an eastern potentate. He acknowledged his children by Cleopatra, and granted her numerous honours. In 40 she bore him two children. All this scandalised conservative Roman opinion.

37 to 52: the Parthian War

(37) In 38 BC Phraates put his father Hyrodes, king of Parthia, to death, and many nobles fled Parthia. Antony assembles a vast army, including the forces of many vassal kings, against Phraates but Plutarch tells us he mismanaged everything in his haste to win quick victories so he could get back to Cleopatra.

(38) For example, in his haste he left behind a number of state of the art siege engines in Armenia in charge of Statianus and 10,000 men. But this meant that when he laid siege to Phraata, a large city, in which were the wives and children of the king of Media a) the siege dragged on needlessly, but b) Phraates attacked the waggon camp back in Armenia, massacred the soldiers, killed Statianus and destroyed the engines. A calamity.

(39) The Parthians then march up to the besieged city, Antony lifts the siege and marches off, pretending to flee, but then turns and engages the Parthians in perfect battle order. They see them off, attacked first by the cavalry then the infantry and follow the Parthian army for many miles, but are disheartened to see how few of them they’ve killed. Then the Medes in their own camp turn traitor and attack them.

(40) It is a long punitive campaign. Some Parthian soldiers ride alongside Romans and tell them they and their king Phraates respect them, but despise Antony for relying on fear and famine rather than fighting. Eventually Antony decides to break camp and retreat. He is too downhearted to address his men but gets Domitius Ahenobarbus to do it.

(41) A  man of the Mardian race offers to guide the Roman army back, emphasising that they should avoid the open plain and cleave to hilly country. Antony is not sure whether to trust him, till the Mardian offers to be put in chains as he guides them, so they agree. On the third day the Mardian notices a dyke has been cut to pour water across then Roman path and predicts an ambush, giving Antony enough time to prepare his legions and fight it off.

(42) Having cracked the strategy for fighting them off, Antony puts his army in the shape of a hollow square with slingers and cavalry on the outside and succeeds in fighting off the notorious Parthian cavalry for four days. But Antony makes the bad decision of letting Flavius Gallus lead an attack against the Parthians and, when he gets cut off, sending only small detachments to reinforce him which all get massacred. Eventually the entire Roman army wheels round to attack the Parthians, but it was a defeat.

(43) 3,000 dead and 5,000 wounded. Plutarch is typically sentimental, saying Antony went to visit the sick and they all with tears in their eyes assured him they were fine and would be happy so long as great Antony makes it to safety i.e. testament to his popularity.

(44) The Parthians camp near the Roman camp. Antony makes a speech berating those who have fled but asking for any punishment for transgressions to come down on his head so long as his army can be victorious.

(45) The Parthians continue to harry the retreating Romans. The Romans begin to starve and experiment with unknown vegetables. One of these is a herb which drives the eater mad, producing a mad obsession to turn over and move stones, and then death.

(46) Once again some individual Parthians fraternise with Roman soldiers and say their army, too, is exhausted and hungry. But a local named Mithridates came offering advice and showed one of Antony’s lieutenants hills in the distance and told him the entire Parthian host is waiting there to ambush them.

(47) Thus warned that the road through the deserts would leave them exposed, Antony holds a council of advisers and opts to take the path through the mountains, short of water though this would leave them. The Parthians attack their rear while the troops in the van fall on a river and start drinking but the water is salt and poisonous, causing stomach cramps.

(48) The Romans march on, assured by their guide that once they cross the next river the Parthians won’t pursues them. A garbled passage seems to imply that some of the Romans attacked and looted their own baggage train. There is such confusion that Antony calls one of the freedmen in his body-guard, Rhamnus, and tells him that, when he gives the order, he is to run Antony through then cut off his head. Weeping and lamentation from his entourage. But their guide swears the river is close and word comes that the disorder in the rearguard is caused by their own forces, and everyone cheers up.

(49) The Parthians continue to harass their rearguard, raining down arrows till they arrive at The River and cross it at which point the Parthians (supposedly) unstrung their bows and praised their bravery. Would be lovely to hear the Parthian version of all this. Finally they cross the river Araxes into the kingdom of Armenia and drop to the ground and kiss it. Although they promptly fall ill of dropsies and dysenteries.

(50) Antony undertakes a review and discovers 20,000 of his infantry and 4,000 cavalry have perished. (These numbers are always suspiciously round.) More than half from disease, which sounds the right kind of amount from modern accounts of the impact of disease and famine. Plutarch says Antony blamed their defeat on Artavasdes the Armenian who had led back from Media 16,000 horsemen who would have made all the difference in encounters with the mounted Parthian cavalry.

(51) They marched on to the coast at Sidon through snowstorms and lost another 8,000 men. Here Antony was beside himself with impatience to see Cleopatra.

(52) The king of the Medes falls out with the king of the Parthians and sends word to Antony that he is ready to join him on another campaign against the Parthians. This is music to Antony’s ears because it was precisely the  lack of Medean cavalry which he blamed for his previous failure.

(53) In 35 Octavian gave permission to his sister, Antony’s wife, to sail east with a fleet carrying extensive supplies. Antony wrote her telling her to stop at Athens, at which point she realised he wanted her out of the way while he consorted with Cleopatra. And Cleopatra realised her rival wanted to engage in battle. So Cleopatra loses weight and takes to simpering when Antony is there and pining when he’s not, and is backed up by a host of sycophants who tell Antony Octavia only married him as a matter of public policy. And so Antony puts off the war to go to Alexandria to see Cleopatra.

(54) Octavia returns to Rome where she continues to live in her absent husband’s house, raising their children, behaving nobly and honourably, and by doing so helping to highlight Antony’s disreputable behaviour. By contrast Antony dresses up in oriental royal costumes, holds an elaborate ceremony at which he distributes thrones and honours to Cleopatra, and her children, for all the world like an eastern king of kings.

(55) Octavian made sure to keep all these accusations before the senate and people, drip feeding scandal. Antony replies with his own accusations:

  1. Octavian seized Sicily from Pompey but never gave him a share of it
  2. Antony lent Octavian ships which he never gave back
  3. after ejecting their fellow triumvir Lepidus from office and degrading him, Octavian was keeping for himself the army, the territory, and the revenues which had been assigned to Lepidus
  4. Octavian had distributed almost all Italy in allotments, to his own soldiers, and had left nothing for the soldiers of Antony

Octavian replied:

  1. he had deposed Lepidus from office because he was abusing it
  2. he would share whatever he’d won in war with Antony whenever Antony should share Armenia with him
  3. Antony’s soldiers had no claim upon Italy, since they had Media and Persia

Playground squabbles.

(56) Antony gathers a huge naval force of 800 ships of which 200 are Cleopatra’s though he sends her back to Egypt. Cleopatra bribes his advisers to plead her case, that she needs to be by his side. So Antony relents and invites her to Samos where they party to the sound of theatre performances, music, banquets and processions. ‘How will the conquerors celebrate their victories if their preparations for the war are marked by festivals so costly?’

(57) Then on to Athens where there are more festivals and parties and Antony makes a great speech to Cleopatra, ostensibly on behalf of the city. Antony sends word to have Octavia ejected from his house and she leaves with all his children, to the great scandal of the people.

(58) It is 32 BC and Octavian is alarmed at Antony’s preparations for war. He is unpopular because he is enforcing high taxes, a quarter of income for citizens, and eighth for freedmen. If Antony had struck now he might have won the people, but he delayed. Then senior Antony officials who had been hounded out by Cleopatra maliciously told Octavian about Antony’s will. Octavian seized this from the Vestal Virgins and read it out to the senate. The most offensive provision was that he wanted to be buried in Egypt.

A man called Calvisius then made the following charges against Antony:

  1. he had bestowed upon Cleopatra the libraries from Pergamum, in which there were two hundred thousand volumes
  2. at a banquet where there were many guests he had stood up and rubbed her feet, in compliance with some agreement  they had made
  3. he consented to have the Ephesians in his presence salute Cleopatra as mistress
  4. many times, while seated on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them
  5. and once when Furnius was speaking, the ablest orator in Rome, Cleopatra was carried through the forum on a litter, and Antony, when he saw her, sprang up from his tribunal and forsook the trial and, hanging on to Cleopatra’s litter, escorted her on her way

(59) Cleopatra’s suspicion or jealousy of Antony’s entourage, many of whom she forces to flee.

(60) When Octavian was quite ready a law was passed to wage war on Cleopatra and remove from Antony the power he had handed over to her i.e. reclaim it for the Roman authorities. Octavian claimed Antony had been drugged and bewitched and was under the thumb of Cleopatra’s officials.

Plutarch gives us the usual litany of ill omens he claims occur before every war or battle:

  • Pisaurum, a city colonized by Antony situated near the Adriatic, was swallowed by chasms in the earth
  • from one of the marble statues of Antony near Alba sweat oozed for many days, and though it was wiped away it did not cease
  • in Patrae while Antony was staying there, the Heracleium was destroyed by lightning
  • at Athens the Dionysus in the Battle of the Giants​ was dislodged by the winds and carried down into the theatre
  • the same tempest fell upon the colossal figures of Eumenes and Attalus at Athens, on which the name of Antony had been inscribed and prostrated them
  • the admiral’s ship of Cleopatra was called Antonius; some swallows made their nest under its stern but other swallows attacked these, drove them out and destroyed their nestlings

(61) So war begins between Octavian and Antony. Antony had 500 fighting ships, 100,000 infantry soldiers and 12,000 horsemen and the tribute of all the kings in the east.

(62) But so in thrall is Antony to Cleopatra that he decides to fight the battle at sea, even though they are struggling to fully man their ships. These are high-sided with as many as ten ranks of oars and heavy and slow to manoeuvre. Whereas Octavian’s ships are fully manned and in perfect array. He invites Antony to come and dock at Brundisium and Tarentum and that he’ll withdraw a day’s march to allow Antony to land and arrange his forces perfectly for battle.

Antony replies by challenging Octavian to single combat; then to re-enacting the battle of Pharsalus. But while Antony was lying at anchor off Actium, where now Nicopolis stands, Caesar got the start of him by crossing the Ionian sea and occupying a place in Epirus called Toruné.

(63) Octavian’s fleet engaged Antony’s but Antony boldly had his rowers released and sent up top to look like soldiers and his ships drawn up in battle array so that Octavian was put off and withdrew. Antony sealed off watersources to prevent Octavian’s fleet watering. Domitius defected from Antony to Octavian but Antony generously sent his baggage, servants and friends after him.

Some allied kings defected. Canidius advises Antony to send Cleopatra away and abandon the naval strategy, drawing Octavian onto land where Antony has the bigger force and better track record.

But Cleopatra’s insistence that they fight a naval battle prevailed, even though she was already making preparations to flee. Octavian approves a plan to kidnap Antony as he walked on the shore and it nearly succeeded, they captured the man in front of him but Antony managed to get away.

(64) Antony burns all but 60 of the Egyptian ships and packs these with 20,000 heavy-armed soldiers and 2,000 archers. An old infantry centurion complains to Antony that naval battles are all very well for  Egyptians and Phoenicians but Romans fare best on land.

(65) Four days of rough winds and high seas but on the fifth, 2 September 31 BC the Battle of Actium took place. Antony exhorts his men and tells the captains to keep the ships in the narrow mouth of the gulf. At first Antony’s ships refused to budge and Octavian thought they were anchored, but then the more impetuous left their line to attack him. Excellent! His ships were smaller and lighter and more nimble and able to surround Anthony’s.

(66) There was little ramming because Antony’s ships were too slow and Octavian didn’t want to risk his. It was as if three or four of Octavian’s ships were laying siege to Antony’s monsters. The battle is in mid flow when Cleopatra’s 60 ships made sail and began to leave right through the battlefield. Abandoning all reason, betraying his soldiers and sailors and allies, as if bewitched, Antony leapt into a five-oared galley and made after her.

(67) He caught up with her and was taken aboard Cleopatra’s ship where he sat with his head in his hands after they’d docked at Taenarum. For three days he didn’t move until her women persuaded him to come ashore and be reconciled with her. The world lost for love.

Some of their friends arrive in heavy transport ships and tell them the fleet is destroyed but they still possess an awesome land force. So Antony wrote to Canidius ordering him to withdraw across Greece into Asia. And he hands over a big transport ship full of the rarest treasure to his friends, telling them to divide it up and make the best of their fortune.

(68) In fact his fleet held out for hours at Actium and was only overcome by a storm, while he abandoned nineteen legions of undefeated men-at‑arms and 12,000 horsemen. Madness. The greatest example in human history of a man who was pussywhipped, meaning: “Totally controlled, domineered, or emasculated by a woman.”

His men held out for seven days expecting Antony to return at any moment, but he didn’t and after their commander Canidius ran away in the night, they handed themselves over to Octavian. Octavian sails on to Greece where he redistributes the grain which Antony had stripped from them for his forces. And here again a second unusually direct bit of reminiscence by Plutarch:

My great-grandfather Nicarchus used to tell how all his fellow-citizens were compelled to carry on their shoulders a stipulated measure of wheat down to the sea at Anticyra, and how their pace was quickened by the whip; they had carried one load in this way, he said, the second was already measured out, and they were just about to set forth, when word was brought that Antony had been defeated, and this was the salvation of the city; for immediately the stewards and soldiers of Antony took to flight, and the citizens divided the grain among themselves.

(69) Antony reaches the coast of Libya, sends Cleopatra ahead to Alexandria, and takes to roaming around with just two companions. Plutarch says nothing about Antony’s state of mind but his actions betoken a ghost man, a man who has ruined his cause and his reputation and has nothing to live for. When the general commanding Antony’s forces in Libya defected to Octavian Antony tried to kill himself but is stopped by his friends.

Eventually he sails on to Alexandria where he discovers Cleopatra is engaged in a ridiculous scheme, namely to raise and drag her fleet along the course of the current Suez canal, from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea and thus go and colonise somewhere to escape conquest by Octavian. But the Arabs burned her boats and Antony convinced her he still had a land army so she desisted.

And now Antony forsook the city and the society of his friends, and built for himself a dwelling in the sea at Pharos, by throwing a mole out into the water. Here he lived an exile from men, and declared that he was contentedly imitating the life of Timon, since, indeed, his experiences had been like Timon’s; for he himself also had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends, and therefore hated and distrusted all mankind.

(70) A digression on the life and notorious misanthropy of Timon of Athens, clearly a legendary figure by Antony’s time.

(71) Canidius arrives to tell him what finally happened at Actium and the news that all the kings and tetrarchs and whatnot of the Middle East are defecting to Octavian. All he has left is Egypt. At which Antony abandons his depression and goes back into Alexandria where he embarks on a new round of feasting and partying, holding coming of age feasts for his children. Antony and Cleopatra establish a new society which they call Partners in Death. Cleopatra starts collecting rare poisons and experimenting with them on prisoners. the painless ones are too slow but the quick ones are very painful. After lengthy experimentation she settles on the venom of the asp.

(72) They send a petition to Octavian, Cleopatra asking that she be allowed to keep her children, Antony that he may go and live as a private citizen in Athens.

(73) Octavian wrote to Cleopatra that he would treat her well if she would kill or expel Antony. Plutarch shares some typical gossip, telling us that the leader of Octavian’s embassy was one Thyrsus, ‘a man of no mean parts’ who had frequent converse with Cleopatra till it made Antony jealous and he had Thyrsus strung up and flogged then sent back to Octavian. After that Cleopatra went out of her way to suck back up to Antony, celebrating her own birthday very modestly but Antony’s birthday with great splendour. Octavian was called back to Rome by Agrippa.

(74) The war is suspended for winter, but next spring Octavian advanced on two fronts, coming down through Syria and advancing east across Libya. Octavian hears that Cleopatra has built an extravagant tomb into which she has collected all her treasure and sends reassuring messages to her, because he is scared she will kill herself, set light to it and thus deprive him of his loot.

When Octavian is at the outskirts of the city Antony sallies force and fought brilliantly, routing Octavian’s cavalry and driving him back to his camp. Plutarch tells a typically waspish anecdote.

Then, exalted by his victory, he went into the palace, kissed Cleopatra, all armed as he was, and presented to her the one of his soldiers who had fought most spiritedly. Cleopatra gave the man as a reward of valour a golden breastplate and a helmet. The man took them, of course — and in the night deserted to Caesar.

(75) Antony makes Octavian a second offer of single combat. Octavian of course refuses so Antony insists on leading his army into battle. At feast the night before the battle, he tells his friends he will be victorious or die trying, while they all cry.

That night, as usual with Plutarch there are omens. Just the one this time which is that over the city a great music and noise is heard as of a Dionysian festival, but it is heard to move from the city centre towards the gate facing Octavian’s camp and then disappear. It was, people said, the god he had devoted his life to, Dionysius, abandoning him.

(76) On 1 August 30 BC Antony watches his fleet set out to engage Octavian’s but, at the last minute, raise their oars in peace, surrender, and be accepted into Octavian’s fleet. Also his cavalry defects. He fights with his infantry but they are defeated. He withdraws into Alexandria ranting that he has been betrayed by Cleopatra. Scared, Cleopatra retired into her refuge, had the doors locked and barred and messengers sent to Antony telling her he was dead.

Antony goes into his chamber, laments that he has been found wanting in courage to a woman, and orders his man Eros to kill him. Instead Eros kills himself. You just can’t get the staff. So Antony tries to stab himself but makes a hash of it. When he recovers he orders the bystanders to finish him off but they all run away. Until the secretary Diomedes arrives with orders to take Antony to her tomb.

(77) A peculiar scene. Antony is carried to Cleopatra’s tomb but she refuses to unbar the doors to let him in, instead insisting that he is laid on a bier and that she and her serving women haul him up using a rope and pulley system, even though this is extremely difficult for her. When they’ve finally got him inside, Cleopatra rents her clothes and beats her breasts and there’s blood everywhere, but he tells her he’s had a good life and to look out for herself.

(78) Antony dies and his sword is taken by a servant who shows it to Octavian.

When Caesar heard these tidings, he retired within his tent and wept for a man who had been his relation by marriage, his colleague in office and command, and his partner in many undertakings and struggles.

Octavian calls in colleagues and reads out his correspondence with Antony, emphasising how reasonable he had been and how rude Antony’s replies. Then Octavian sends Proculeius to negotiate with Cleopatra, anxious that she will burn her treasure and wanting her to adorn his triumph through Rome.

(79) Proculeius wangles his way into the tomb. He goes back accompanied by Gallus and while Gallus is keeping Cleopatra in conversation by the door, Proculeius uses a ladder to get up to that window, the window they hauled Antony in through, and then down the stairs and to the door and takes Cleopatra by surprise. She tries to stab herself with a small knife but Proculeius is too fast, seizes it, shakes her down to ensure she has no other weapons, then sends her under guard to Octavian.

(80) Now Octavian finally arrives in Alexandria, proceeds to a tribunal erected in the gymnasium. The population prostrate themselves in terror but Octavian says he holds them blameless and won’t punish them. At this crucial moment Plutarch rather spoils the effect by saying Octavian does it at least in part to gratify his companion, Areius the philosopher.

(81) As for the children of Antony, Antyllus, his son by Fulvia, was betrayed by Theodorus his tutor and put to death. Theodorus stole the precious stone the boy wore about his neck but when this was discovered he  was crucified. Cleopatra’s children, together with their attendants, were kept under guard and had generous treatment.

Caesarion, who was said to be Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar, was sent by his mother, with much treasure, into India, by way of Ethiopia. There Rhodon, another tutor like Theodorus, persuaded him to go back, on the ground that Octavian invited him to take the kingdom. And Octavian had him executed, after his mother died. One way of regarding this is barbaric. But it should be out in the context of the mass proscriptions Octavian enforced in Rome. His rule was characterised by large scale executions.

(82) Octavian allowed Cleopatra to bury Antony with lavish rites. Then she began to starve herself. But Octavian threatened the lives of her children and thus forced her to eke out a miserable existence.

(83) An interview between Octavian and Cleopatra at which she tries to justify her course of action but Octavian refutes her interpretations at every step. When a servant reveals that she is hiding away her jewellery she crossly slaps him and insists to Octavian that she is storing up women’s ornaments in order to send to Octavia and Livia to beg them to intercede for her. And so Octavian went away confident that she wanted to live. But she fooled him.

(84) One of Octavian’s entourage tells Cleopatra that his army is setting off for Syria and will be taking her, so she obtains permission to pour libations at Antony’s tomb one last tie and Plutarch give her a long sentimental speech.

(85) Cleopatra has a bath and then dinner. A man from the country arrives carrying a basket. The suspicious guards tell him to open it and are amazed at the size of the figs it contains. He bids them have a taste if they like so they let him pass. After her meal Cleopatra sends Octavian a written message, then has herself locked in her chamber with her two serving women. When Caesar opens the tablet and reads the message asking for her body to be buried next to Antony’s he knows what has happened and sends messengers to go instantly to prevent her. But they find Cleopatra lying dead upon a golden couch, arrayed in royal state.

And of her two women, the one called Iras was dying at her feet, while Charmion, already tottering and heavy-handed, was trying to arrange the diadem which encircled the queen’s brow. Then somebody said in anger: “A fine deed, this, Charmion!” “It is indeed most fine,” she said, “and befitting the descendant of so many kings.” Not a word more did she speak, but fell there by the side of the couch.

(86) Plutarch reports the 4 or 5 different versions of how she was poisoned, whether she stirred up the asp to make it angry, dipped her hand in the basket or took the snake out and applied it to her arm or breast. In Octavian’s triumph an ‘image’ (does this mean a model or effigy) of Cleopatra was included with the snake hanging from her, though Plutarch doesn’t say where exactly on her body.

Octavian was cross but admired her lofty spirit and so let her be buried with full rites next to Antony. Statues of Antony throughout Alexandria were torn down but those of Cleopatra were allowed to remain standing after one of her friends, Archibius, gave Caesar two thousand talents. She was 39, Antony was 55, they had been an item for 15 years.

(87) As in many a Victorian novel, Plutarch ends his narrative by tying up all the loose threads and telling us what happened to all Antony’s children and their descendants. He had seven children by three wives and their marriages and second marriages and intermarriages make for a complicated diagram. One of the two daughters he had by Octavia:

Antonia, famous for her beauty and discretion, was married to Drusus, who was the son of Livia and the step-son of Octavian. From this marriage sprang Germanicus and Claudius, Germanicus dying young but Claudius coming to the throne in the chaos after Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD.

Before Germanicus died he fathered Julia Agrippina, who, at age 13, was married off to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. They had a son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. 21 years later, with Ehenobarbus dead, Agrippina married the emperor Claudius. And Claudius, having adopted Agrippina’s son, gave him the name of Nero Germanicus. This was the Nero who came to the throne in 54 AD.

So Antony’s ‘blood’, if there is such a thing, ran on into the Julio-Claudian dynasty for several generations.

Learnings

Predestination

Plutarch is a fatalist. He believes everything is predestined to happen. Not very often, but at various key moments when central characters try to avert war or settle conflicts or lay high-minded plans, Plutarch is at hand to tell us that an implacable fate controls our ends.

It was destined that everything should come into Caesar’s hands. (55)

A maze of cross-references

The way that the lives refer to each other creates an evermore complex matrix of cross-references, which turn them into a complex meta-narrative, or a multi-stranded history.

Iraq, Iran and the West

At some point, reading about the inexorable opposition of the Parthian Empire to the Romans (i.e. ‘the West’) and learning that the Parthian Empire was roughly cognate with present-day Iraq and Iran – made me think of the never-ending conflict between those places and ‘the West’ in my day.

Modes of death of Plutarch’s eminent Romans

  • Marius (died a natural death aged 71)
  • Sulla (died a natural death aged 60)
  • Lucullus (died a natural death aged 61)
  • Crassus (died killed in battle aged 61)
  • Sertorius (assassinated aged 53)
  • Pompey (murdered aged 57)
  • Caesar (assassinated aged 55)
  • Cato the Younger (suicide aged 49)
  • Brutus (suicide aged 43)
  • Cicero (murdered aged 63)
  • Antony (suicide aged 53)

It’s the opposite of a scientific sample but you notice how the first three died of natural causes, although Marius and Sulla had been mass murderers; somehow there was the space for them to retire, as for lucky Lucullus. But from then onwards all the rest die violent deaths, and the third aspect of trend is the number of suicides. It feels like Rome no longer had room for many of its eminent men. They were no longer just killed in battle or assassinated but removed themselves from a world which no longer had room for the beliefs or values or causes they had supported. In a voodoo kind of way it’s as if the Republic liquidated itself.


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Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Younger

This is one of Plutarch’s longer biographies of eminent Romans, at 73 ‘chapters’ or sections.

Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Younger (95 to 46 BC), was a conservative Roman senator in the period of the late Republic. He made a reputation for being a stern, inflexible defender of the strictest interpretation of traditional ‘Roman’ values and a literalistic interpretation of the constitution. As such he was in effect a defender of the optimates party of traditional aristocrats and the senate as a body, against the growing power and political lobbying of the populares party, represented by others in the 80s and 70s but during the 60s and 50s increasingly represented by Julius Caesar. Cato saw Caesar as an over-ambitious autocrat who sought to tear up the traditional constitution and make himself tyrant and king, so he bitterly opposed him at every opportunity.

Ironically, the net effect of his stern speechifying and high-minded opposition to Caesar helped to create the impassible divide which arose between Caesar and Pompey (who he defected to and served during the civil war) and precipitated the civil war which overthrew the republic that he loved. When compromise was required, Cato offered inflexible opposition.

His suicide in north Africa, where he was one of Pompey’s governors, after Caesar had effectively won the province in 46 BC, was, in my opinion, not a noble end to a noble life but epitomised the political cul-de-sac he’d painted himself into. Compromise and mutual respect are the basic requisites for a functioning democracy.

The life

(1) Marcus Porcius Cato or Cato the Younger was a great-grandson of Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Censor, Cato the Elder and Cato the Wise (234 to 149). The Elder was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization, who was the first to write history in Latin with his Origines, a now lost work on the history of Rome.

Unusually Plutarch gives us something of Cato’s boyhood. Both his parents died leaving him, his sister and brother orphans. They were brought up by a maternal uncle. People noticed he was inflexible, harsh, not given to laughter though occasionally he smiled. He was a slow but steady learner, and Plutarch favours us with some 2,000 year old theory of education (based, apparently, on Aristotle).

(2) When he was 4 the Social War broke out and Pompaedius Silo, a representative of the rebels, visited Cato’s guardian’s house and humorously asked the children for their support. The others childishly agreed but Cato stared inflexibly silently in front of him, even when the visitor held him out the window as if to drop him. He took boyhood games very seriously.

(3) The dictator Sulla liked Cato and his half brother for their father’s sake and Cato’s tutor Sarpedon often took him to visit, till one day the 14-year-old asked why there were so many cries of torture and severed heads (!) carried from Sulla’s house and when his tutor explained everyone was too frightened to intervene, Cato angrily asked for a sword and said he’d rid his country of this scourge.

Cato’s devout attachment to his brother Caepio.

(4) He was made a priest of Apollo and moved out of his guardian’s house. He tried to put into practice Stoic philosophy and lived very plainly. He was a close companion of Antipater the Tyrian, a Stoic philosopher. He believed in a form of justice which was rigid and uncompromising.

(5) When the tribunes wanted to make changes to the Basilica Porcia which his famous ancestor had constructed, Cato was reluctantly drawn into defending it and opposing the move. Everyone commented on the stern maturity of his speech.

He took vigorous exercise, refused to ride a horse or be carried in a chair, exercised in cold or heat. Spartan.

(6) He was surprisingly unabstemious, though, and would stay up through the night, drinking and arguing with philosophers. He dressed so deliberately unostentatiously that it drew attention. When he came into an inheritance he shared it liberally with friends.

(7) He became betrothed to a woman named Lepida who had been dropped by Metellus Scipio but then Metellus changed his mind and wooed and won her which made Cato so furious he eased his mind by writing scathing verses against Metellus. Then he married Atilia, a daughter of Serranus.

(8) During the war of Spartacus (73 to 71 BC) Cato volunteered to serve since his brother was a military tribune. He displayed good discipline, self-control, courage in all emergencies and sagacity. When the commander, Lucius Gellius Publicola (consul in 72) awarded him honours Cato turned them down, saying he’d done nothing special. So he acquired a reputation as being clever and brave, but odd.

(9) In 67 he was appointed military tribune and sent to Macedonia, to serve under Rubrius the praetor. It’s fascinating to learn that he travelled to this post with fifteen slaves, two freedmen, and four friends. He was assigned a legion and won over the men by his unpretentious willingness to join in with all the tasks.

(10) Cato hears a Stoic philosopher named Athenodorus Cordylion, was living at Pergamum, he travelled there to persuade him to return with him to the army camp, which the latter did. Cato was more proud of this achievement than any military conquest.

(11) Cato’s brother fell sick at Aenus in Thrace. He made his way there as quickly as possible but his brother died before he arrived. People were surprised at his excess of grief and the huge amount he spent on the funeral rites, ‘not observing how much tenderness and affection was mingled with the man’s inflexibility and firmness against pleasures, fears, and shameless entreaties.’ In other words, Plutarch likes Cato.

(12) When he completed his military service the men saw Cato off with tears and embraces, which was unusual, On his journey through Asia he was very humble about his entrance to towns, didn’t do it with grand display and intimidate the local magistrates (which, by implication, was the norm).

(13) Plutarch tells the genuinely funny story of Cato entering Antioch in Syria to find a reception of young men in military cloaks or gala gowns and imagining it was for him. But when the city master of ceremonies stepped forward and greeted him it was to ask when Demetrius would be arriving – all this pomp was for him. Even funnier, Demeterius had at one stage been a slave of Pompey’s but Pompey was so in the ascendent that an ex-slave of his drew more of a grand welcome than Cato. Cato’s friends laughed about this all the way to their inn.

(14) When Cato arrived in Ephesus Pompey, who was there, made a big point of going to meet and greet him by hand, and praising his virtue to his face and behind it. But this was all in self interest, for Pompey never attached Cato to his entourage as he did other young men. Anyway, as a result of Pompey’s favour, the towns he subsequently passed through made a special effort to give him honours, though he asked his friends to ensure he didn’t fulfil the prediction of his friend Curio, that he would return from Asia more tamed.

(15) Deiotarus the Galatian repeatedly sends him lavish presents but Cato sends them back. Taking ship for Brundisium, his friends advise the ashes of Caepio should travel by another ship but Cato insisted they go in the same boat as him even though they turned out to have a difficult crossing.

(16) Back in Rome he is elected quaestor in 65 BC though not before making a careful study of the full constitutional roles and responsibilities of the office. Once instated he insisted on utter rectitude and obedience to the rule from his many clerks, who were used to pulling the wool over the eyes of new young officials. Cato sacked a leading clerk for embezzlement which led to a protracted law case.

(17) By his thoroughness Cato raised the office of quaestor to almost eclipse the consulship in dignity. He:

  1. made sure all debts to the public treasury were immediately called in, so that he could then make all the disbursements owed
  2. he weeded out false claims and decrees
  3. the assassins who murdered people on Sulla’s notorious proscription lists for money, and were widely loathed, he called to account, demanded the money back, upbraided them for their filthy acts, at which point many of them were arraigned for murder: for many people this closed the door on the shameful time of Sulla’s dictatorship (82 to 78 BC)

(18) He got to work early and left late. He set the state treasury on its feet. He attended the senate and popular assemblies to make sure slack politicians didn’t make promises of money they couldn’t keep. All in all he showed that the state treasury could be run honourably.

On the last day of office he was being accompanied home by a grateful crowd, when he heard that his boyhood friend Marcellus was trying to register a crooked remission of moneys so Cato turned right round, marched back to the treasury and, in Marcellus’s sight, expunged the application from the tablets, then took Marcellus home with home for dinner. Nothing personal, just inflexible application of the rules.

(19) Having held the quaestorship, Cato is automatically enrolled in the senate. Here he shows the same inflexible devotion to duty, arriving first, leaving last, and making sure he reads all notes and briefing papers, keeping across all details of all policies. Unlike many who drifted into it by accident, Cato

chose a public career as the proper task for a good man, and thought that he ought to be more attentive to the common interests than the bee to its honey. And so he was careful to have the affairs of the provinces and decrees and trials and the most important measures sent to him by his connections and friends in every place.

He soon became a byword for lecturing sternness and honesty. His name began to be of proverbial weight. Plutarch gives examples.

(20) When the time came to vote for tribunes despite his friends urging him to stand, Cato decided against and set off for one of his country estates to study philosophy. But on the way they encountered the entourage of Metellus Nepos on their way into town so Metellus could stand as tribune. At which Cato ordered his people to about turn and hastened back to Rome to contest the tribuneship in order to preserve the freedoms of the state.

(21) When he stood for the tribuneship many thought that, rather than seeking advantages for himself, he was conferring a gift on the role. In 63 he was elected one of the ten tribunes. He promptly lived up to his reputation for rectitude by prosecuting the consults elected that year to serve in the following years, Silanus and Murena, for bribery. It was the custom for the accused to hire a man to tail the prosecutor everywhere to see who he was talking to and what materials he was gathering. Murena’s hired man was soon impressed by Cato’s rectitude and eventually, if he asked Cato whether he was going about business for the trial that day, if Cato said no, he took his word and didn’t tail him.

Cicero was consul in 63 and defended Murena from Cato’s prosecution and got him off but it didn’t affect his respect for Cato’s honesty and he often consulted him, for:

in the tribunal and in the senate he was severe and terrible in his defence of justice, but afterwards his manner towards all men was benevolent and kindly.

(22) Two chapters on the Catiline conspiracy. Plutarch skips over all the details, to the debate about what to do with the conspirators Cicero has captured in the city. Plutarch focuses on Caesar’s speech advocating leniency for the conspirators i.e. that they be sent to various cities under house arrest until the conspiracy was completely quenched. Plutarch really comes out as anti-Caesar with these remarks:

Caesar now rose, and since he was a power­ful speaker and wished to increase every change and commotion in the state as so much stuff for his own designs, rather than to allow them to be quenched, he urged many persuasive and humane arguments.

That’s not how it comes over when you read Sallust’s reconstruction of Caesar’s speech in his account of the Catiline Conspiracy, which is sober and responsible. It also chimes with his lifelong practice of clemency and forgiveness first.

(23) But what Plutarch wants to get to is how many of the senate were swayed by Caesar until Cato stood up to speak and tore into Caesar as himself a traitor supporting traitors:

Caesar, he said, under a popular pretext and with humane words, was trying to subvert the state; he was seeking to frighten the senate in a case where he himself had much to fear; and he might be well content if he should come off guiltless of what had been done and free from suspicion, since he was so openly and recklessly trying to rescue the common enemies, while for his country, which had been on the brink of ruin, and was so good and great, he confessed that he had no pity; and yet for men who ought not to have lived or been born even, he was shedding tears and lamenting, although by their deaths they would free the state from great slaughter and perils.

So ferocious and impassioned that the senate voted overwhelmingly for immediate execution and Cicero led them away to the Roman prison and had them garrotted there and then. A rash impetuous act which would come back to haunt him in later years (when he was threatened with prosecution for having murdered these men without due legal process and so was terrified into going into exile in 58 BC).

Plutarch gives us an interesting little piece of social history by telling us that this was the only speech of Cato’s to have been recorded, and this is because Cicero was responsible for instituting the new practice of having a number of secretaries skilled at shorthand to record senate procedures. (Which is the central fact in Robert Harris’s trilogy of novels about Cicero.)

(24) Another quite funny anecdote. In the middle of Cato’s furious tirade against Caesar he observed a messenger come into the senate and hand Caesar a note, at which point he thunderously pointed this out to the senate and claimed it had something to do with the conspiracy, demanding he read it out. Caesar handed it over to Cato who read it and realised it was an erotic message from none other than his own sister, Servilia, to Caesar, who she was in love with (though he was married). Cato flung it back at Caesar. This is a lovely moment.

Plutarch goes on to state that Cato had bad luck with ‘his’ women: one sister gained a bad reputation for her carryings-on with Caesar, the other thrown out of her husband Lucullus’s house for infidelity, and his own wife Atilia ‘put away’ because of her ‘unseemly behaviour’. So Cato marries a daughter of Philippus, Marcia.

(25) The strange case of Quintus Hortensius, a man of splendid reputation and excellent character, who tries to persuade Cato to farm out to him his daughter who just happens to be married to another man, Bibulus. Why? To bind their families together and increase wise and virtuous offspring. Cato politely refuses. Things then become garbled as Plutarch states that Hortensius then asked for Cato’s wife in marriage. The fact that Cato agreed and that her father agreed, indicate that he had, or was about to, divorce her. Lots of divorces and remarriages among the Roman aristocracy.

(26) So Lentulus and the other conspirators are executed but Plutarch says Caesar continues to stir up unrest among the city’s poor and describes Cato as being wise and good in passing a law to expand the free grain distribution to the poor and landless.

It is 62 BC and Pompey is en route back to Italy from his triumphs in the East. Metellus has taken up the tribuneship and proposes a law asking Pompey to hurry back and protect the city. Cato at first politely declines and asks Metellus to reconsider. But when the latter takes advantage of his meekness, becomes angry and shouty, leaving witnesses with the sense that they’re both bonkers.

(27) The night before the vote the forum was filled with armed strangers and gladiators and servants with strong support from Caesar, who was praetor. That night Cato bravely walks with his friend Minucius Thermus through the throng of armed men to the temple of Castor and Pollux and pushes through the armed gladiators to eventually plonk himself in a chair between Caesar and Metellus who were conversing.

(28) The proposed law is read out but Cato snatches the paper out of Metellus’s hand. When Metellus continues to recite it from memory, Cato puts his hand over his mouth. So Metellus ordered the men at arms to come to his aid and some of the people pelted Cato with sticks and stones. Not a model democracy, was it?

(29) This brawl goes on for some time with Metellus attempting to read his law and some of the people threatening him. In the event Metellus fled from the people to the forum, made a long speech against Cato, and then fled the city altogether heading towards Pompey.

Switching subject, Lucullus had returned triumphant from the East in 66 but had been forced to wait for a triumph by the opposition of Caius Memmius who wanted to suck up to Pompey. Cato opposed this, partly because Lucullus was married to Cato’s sister. The importance of these marriage and family alliances and allegiances is difficult to capture but was a key element in Roman politics.

(30) Pompey as he approached Rome sent asking the senate if they could postpone the consular elections so he could canvass for Piso in person. The senate was inclined to agree but Cato vehemently disapproved. Seeing he was going to be an obstacle, Pompey then sent a message asking for the hand in marriage of Cato’s daughter for him and the other daughter for his son. When they heard this the women in question were delighted to make such high matches but Cato immediately refused and sent back that he wasn’t to be bought with marriage alliances. Plutarch, for once, is critical, and makes the kind of point I’ve made, which is that Cato’s intransigence brought about the very thing he sought to avoid:

However, if we are to judge by the results, it would seem that Cato was wholly wrong in not accepting the marriage connection, instead of allowing Pompey to turn to Caesar and contract a marriage which united the power of the two men, nearly overthrew the Roman state, and destroyed the constitution. None of these things perhaps would have happened, had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all, and add his power to that of another.

(31) Furthermore, Cato blocks Pompey’s wishes for a law distributing land to his veteran soldiers, and then blocks Caesar’s wish, on returning from Spain, to canvass for the consulship whilst remaining outside the city pending a triumph. Cato denied him this, too, by talking for an entire day and so talking the time out. But the effect of this scrupulous defence of principle was to drive Caesar and Pompey together and both to support the unscrupulous agitator Clodius. Again, by his scruples he brought about the thing he most opposed. Lucullus and Cicero are of h is party, but the new triumvirate outpowers them and Caesar is elected consul for 59.

(32) Plutarch describes the street violence encouraged by Cato’s opponents. With the help of this rioting Pompey’s land redistribution bill is passed after all along with an unusual clause compelling all senators to take an oath to uphold it. Inevitably, Cato refused to do this until persuaded into it by Cicero who said it was vanity to hold out against the general will, and that he needed Cato in Rome rather than in exile.

(33) Caesar introduces a law to divide almost all of Campania among the poor and needy. Of course Cato objects and so Caesar has him dragged off to prison. Plutarch alleges that it is by such shameless laws that Caesar curried favour with the people and so got himself awarded governorship of Gaul for five years despite Cato warning the people that they themselves were creating a tyrant.

(34) Caesar’s creature, Clodius, gets Cato sent against his will as governor to Cyprus and Ptolemy of Egypt, very obviously to get him out of the way to the clique can pursue their aims unobstructed. Clodius is particularly hot to hound Cicero out of Rome, something he couldn’t achieve if Cato were there.

(35) En route to the East Cato wrote to Cicero whose enemies were trying to get him banished to submit to the mood of the times. King Ptolemy of Egypt comes to see him and finds Cato full of wisdom, not least in his advice to have nothing to do with the rapacious crooks at Rome (Pompey and Caesar) and return to Alexandria and be reconciled with his people. Ptolemy in fact continues onto Rome but Plutarch has him (improbably) at the door of the first magistrate he visits groaning at his own weakness.

(36) Confusingly (for me at any rate) Plutarch then talks about an apparently different Ptolemy, ‘the Ptolemy in Cyprus’, who poisons himself. Cato hears this at Byzantium where he is supervising a peace (?) before he goes on to Cyprus and organises the auctioning of the king’s belongings. He insists on handling every aspect of this himself and so alienates a lot of his friends.

(37) An extended description of the falling out between Cato and his friend Munatius, who feels himself slighted. In the end they are reconciled with kindness and tears. This is a good example of an anecdote or passage which has nothing to do with politics or history, as such, but demonstrates Plutarch’s primary focus which is an interest in ‘the perception and manifestation of character‘.

(38) When Cato returned from the East he meant to present immaculate accounts of the enormous sum of money he was bringing back (7,000 talents of silver), but his account books were lost in unfortunate accidents which vexed him because he had wanted to display them as models and templates.

(39) Cato arrived back from the East in 56 BC and all Rome turned out to meet him, the senate and the people. Characteristically, Cato sailed right past his reception committee and to the docks, which irritated many. But he made up for it when he paraded the wealth he’d brought back through the forum, and he was awarded an extraordinary praetorship.

(40) In 57 BC Cicero had returned to Rome after an exile of 16 months. He promptly acted controversially by having all the records of Clodius’s acts as tribune destroyed, claiming that Clodius had been improperly elected through bribery. Surprisingly, Cato contradicted Cicero’s speech, saying it had not been illegal for Clodius to move from the patrician to the plebeian class, and arguing that if Clodius’s acts were to be erased so should his, Cato’s, in the East because his appointment was made by Clodius. This public disagreement caused Cicero to break off friendship with Cato for a long time.

(41) Plutarch briskly skips over the conference of the triumvirate at Luca. He calls it:

a conspiracy for the division of the supreme power and the abolition of the constitution.

It was where they agreed to make Crassus and Pompey consuls for the following year. Lucius Domitius is encouraged to put himself forward as a rival but Pompey’s thugs attack him one early morning as he is walking in the Campus Martius, killing a torchbearer and injuring others, including Cato who was with him.

(42) So Pompey and Crassus were voted consuls for 55 BC. But Cato didn’t give up his opposition and stood for praetor so he could oppose them from an official position. Plutarch describes the bribery and tricks Pompey used to prevent Cato’s election but he then gives a big address to the people expressing his fears about a tyranny and is followed home by a big crowd (as so often happens in these anecdotes).

(43) Caius Trebonius proposes a law assigning provinces to the consuls which Cato vehemently opposes, speaking against it at such length from the rostrum that he is dragged from it by his opponents, a fight breaks out, some people are killed (!). When another law is promulgated giving Caesar his command in Gaul, Cato makes a speech directly addressing Pompey saying he is unwittingly creating a burden which will crush him. But Pompey ignored him, trusting in his own power and fortune.

(44) Cato is elected praetor for 54 and tries to introduce a law eradicating bribery. This makes him unpopular with the mob who like being bribed, and he is pelted and jostled in the forum until he claws his way onto the rostrum and makes a principled speech which reduces the mob to silence. He institutes a bill whereby the candidates for election all give a deposit to Cato who then monitors the election and anybody caught cheating forfeits their deposit.

(45) His honesty shames the great men of the state who league against him. Clodius is back in Pompey’s orbit and regularly attacks him for corruption etc. Cato replies that he brought more treasure back from Cyprus by honest means than Pompey did from ravaging the East. Cato said Pompey had no right lending his legions to Caesar in Gaul without consulting the state as if they were his private possessions. And warns that he remains near Rome (i.e. didn’t take his governorship of Spain) in order to manage factions at elections as they were games.

(46) Cato ensures his friend Marcus Favonius is fairly elected aedile, the post which supervised games and entertainments, but Cato actually carries out a lot of the duties. People are amused by the way Cato rewards the players with humble gifts of food and fruit rather than elaborate gold and luxuries. He thought that to sport and entertainment, light and gladsome arrangements were appropriate.

(47) In 52 BC the street fighting of Clodius and Titus Annius Milo’s gangs and others became so extreme that elections to the magistracies were suspended. Opinion crystallised that Pompey needed to intervene with his army to restore order. When this was proposed in the senate to everyone’s surprise Cato supported it, with the simple argument that any government is better than no government at all.

(48) And so Pompey is appointed sole consul, floods the streets with soldiers, puts an end to political violence and safeguards the elections. A benign military dictatorship. He asks Cato to be his adviser. Cato, typically, says when he criticised him before it wasn’t out of personal malice and if he helps him now it won’t be to truckle favour, in both cases it is for the good of the state. He advises him against the retrospective prosecution of officials for winning their places by bribery, arguing that a) it will be difficult to know where to stop and b) it was unfair to punish people according to a law which didn’t exist when they acted.

Cato’s difficulty as a juror in trials where he couldn’t be suborned or bought and so was an unpredictable quality to both prosecution and defence.

(49) All this time Caesar is using the money and power he accumulates in Gaul to buy friends and influence in Rome. Finally it dawns on Pompey that he is becoming a threat. Cato decides to stand for the consulship to try and limit’s Caesar’s ambitions. Cato proposes a law that candidates must canvas in person, and not through middle men who distribute money and bribes, which alienates the populace who like money and bribes. Refusing to employ the common practices of a consul ingratiating himself with the people, he is not elected.

(50) Cicero upbraids Cato because, when the times required a man like him in power, he refused to change his principles and humble himself to stand for election, and so lost the opportunity to help the state. How much should a man compromise his principles in order to win power to enact his principles?

(51) It is reported in Rome that Caesar attacked Germans in Gaul during a truce, and massacred them. A great public celebration is called but Cato declares Caesar should be handed over to the Germans whose trust he breached. Caesar wrote a letter to be read out in the senate justifying his actions and execrating Cato at length. But this only gives Cato an opportunity to deliver a long, carefully evidenced indictment of Caesar’s behaviour and ambitions, so that the latter’s friends regret reading out the letter in the first place.

The senate consider it is well to find a replacement for Caesar but Caesar replies that he’ll only do that if Pompey lays down his arms. At which Cato points out that what he prophesied was coming to pass, that overmighty leaders with private armies were dictating to the senate rather than following the instructions of the government.

“Those things are come to pass which I foretold to you, and the man is at last resorting to open compulsion, using the forces which he got by deceiving and cheating the state.”

(52) Plutarch skips over the entire complex web of events which led to the escalating crisis between Caesar and Pompey, the ultimatums, the attempts at mediation, and skips suddenly to Caesar having crossed the Rubicon and occupied the town of Ariminum (January 49 BC). Cato says ‘I told you so’ and recommends that Pompey be supported in opposing Caesar. Pompey acknowledges that Cato was a prophet but fails to raise the armies he told everyone it would be so easy to raise and decides to flee Rome.

At this perilous moment Plutarch pauses to tell us about Cato’s private life, namely that he remarried the Marcia he had divorced and who subsequently married Hortensius, who had died, leaving her free again. Apparently Caesar made much of this in the virulent diatribe he wrote against Cato, claiming the latter in effect farmed his wife out to the wealthy Hortensius so that, when the latter died, he could remarry his wife and come into a fortune. Thus the Roman aristocracy, bickering among themselves.

(53) Cato opts to support Pompey and is sent as Pompeian governor to Sicily. But when he hears that Pompey has fled Italy for Greece he makes the droll remark that:

there was much inconsistency and obscurity in the divine government, since Pompey had been invincible while his course was neither sound nor just, but now, when he wished to save his country and was fighting in defence of liberty, he had been deserted by his good fortune.

As to being governor of Sicily, when a Caesarian force arrives under Asinius Pollio, Cato says he doesn’t want to lay waste the province with war and so sails to join Pompey in Greece. Here he made good policy suggestions, namely not to plunder a city that was subject to Rome, and not to put a Roman to death except on the field of battle. This brought to the party of Pompey a good repute, and induced many to join it.

(54) Cato is sent to Asia, whither he is accompanied by his sister, much reformed from her dissolute behaviour, and where he persuades Rhodes to declare for Pompey. At first Pompey is inclined to give Cato command of his huge fleet of some 500 ships, until it is pointed out to him that Pompey is not devoted to his cause but to Rome and that, the minute Caesar was defeated, Cato would be insisting that Pompey surrender his command, too. So he appoints Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus admiral.

But Cato proves an asset. When all the generals give speeches to the men before a big battle at Dyrrhachium, the soldiers listen lethargically, but when Cato addresses them and invokes all the ideas of patriotism and bravery and tells them the gods are watching he rouses them to a true fighting spirit and Pompey wins the battle.

(55) When Pompey marched his army into Thessaly, he left Cato in command of the supplies and men he left at Dyrrhachium, along with fifteen cohorts. After Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, Cato offered command of the fleet to Cicero, who refused, saying he wanted to return to Italy. But Pompey’s son, Gnaeus Pompey, was violently against anyone who deserted the cause, and might have killed Cicero had he left. Cato talked him into remaining and so probably saved his life (well, for the time being; nobody’s life is really saved, not forever).

(56) Guessing that Pompey had headed south Cato sailed to Africa with his fleet. In Libya he met Sextus Pompeius and learned of his father’s murder. Ashamed of abandoning men, Cato found himself taking command of the remaining Pompeian forces (reminding us how close, how very close, the military world was to all the Roman ‘statesman’ we read about. It was a totally militarised politics.)

He learns of other Pompeian forces under Juba the king and Attius Varus and resolves to join them. Cato shows all the signs of mourning (for Pompey) walks rather than rides a horse, only lies down to sleep, east sitting down.

(57) Cato tries to resolve the squabbles between the Roman commanders Scipio and Varus, and King Juba of the Numidians. He is punctilious about not taking command because he is only a pro-praetor whereas Scipio is a pro-consul.

(58) Scipio was going to give in to Juba’s request to have the city of Utica razed to the ground and it inhabitants slaughtered but Cato vehemently objected, got himself appointed governor of it to ensure its loyalty to the Pompeians. With his usual administrative flair he turns it into a storehouse for Pompeian forces in Africa. But his advice to Scipio, to play a waiting game and let Caesar tired himself in Africa, is ignored. Scipio mocks Cato locked up safe and secure in a walled city but when Cato offers to take his army to Italy to decoy Caesar back there, Scipio mocks this too. And Cato begins to realise Scipio is a rash and unreliable leader and would probably make himself tyrant, given half a chance.

All of which is grimly confirmed when messengers bring news of the Battle of Thapsus 6 April 46 in which Caesar demolished the much bigger army of Juba and Scipio and Varus.

(59) That night the population panics but Cato walks among them calming their fears. When day comes he assembles the 300 or so Roman citizens in the town, businessmen and moneylenders with the senators who had taken refuge there. (It is typical of the kind of insights you glean from these texts, that Plutarch calls these people Cat’s ‘senate’. Did this mean every town and city in a Roman province had its own ‘senate’ made up of the richest Roman inhabitants?)

Cato then makes a speech advising everyone to stay put and not flee, severally. And says it’s their free choice whether to switch to Caesar but he would admire and praise them more if they if they remained true to what he saw not as ‘Pompey’s side’ but the cause of Rome and its laws and traditions.

(60) Cato’s speech inspires the people to elect him their leader and use their goods and weapons and lives as he thinks fit. Someone suggests a law freeing all the slaves but Cato, with typically legalistic precision, says such a law would be illegal, but individual slave-owners can free them and all of military age will be accepted into the army. Both Juba (with the remnants of his army) and Scipio (with his fleet) send messages saying they await Cato’s decision what to do next.

(61) The senators manumitted their slaves but the leading 300 citizens were conflicted and Plutarch gives a paragraph of their thinking and reasoning why they want to hand themselves over to Caesar.

(62) Given these divisions Cato sends back to Juba and Scipio telling them not to come. But when a large number of allied cavalry arrive, Cato and the senators beg them to come inside the city and stay with them.

(63) The horsemen say they will but only if Cato drives out the ‘barbarian’ ‘fickle’ Phoenician people of Utica. Cato says he will consider it. When he returns inside the city the 300 have become bolder and complaining why they are being forced to oppose the undefeatable Caesar, and muttering more and more about the senators being responsible for their danger.

Then he hears that the cavalry force is riding away so grabs a horse and rides after them. They say come with us and be saved. Cato bursts into tears and begs them to come back to Utica if only for one day, to protect the senators.

(64) The cavalry take up positions inside Utica which is now really divided between the senators, who are with Cato, and the 300 businessmen, who want to surrender. Cato has decided to kill himself, since every future he can foresee is one of tyrants in which his beloved Rome is ruined. But he delays in his bid to reconcile the 300 and the senators. The 300 want to send messages to Caesar surrendering and offer prayers. Cato says by all means send messages but prayers are for the defeated and he is not defeated; he is triumphant in spirit, it is Caesar who has admitted his treacherous intent.

(65) As Caesar’s forces approach, Cato tries to keep order in the city, to ensure the senators’ safety, and to prevent the cavalry looting and killing. He tries to unite the people into accepting the treacherous 300, so they stand as one city. He helps those who want to flee embark from the harbour.

(66) Lucius Caesar offers to go as envoy to the great Julius and fall down at his feet to beg for Cato. But Cato says, No, this is his job. Instead they discuss how to save the 300. Then he gathers his son and family round him and takes a bath.

(67) He hosts a big dinner party after which literary and philosophical subjects are discussed, including the so-called ‘paradoxes of the Stoics’ which include the maxim that all good men are free and that the bad are all slaves. A peripatetic philosopher begins to object to this but Cato wades in and argues at length and fiercely for its truth. Only the good, like him, are truly free. The bad, like Caesar, despite all appearances to the contrary, are slaves. From his tone and words everyone realised he intended to kill himself.

(68) He walks with family and friends, embraces them all, and retired to his bedroom. Here he reads Plato on the soul but on glancing around discovers his sword is gone, His son removed it. He orders his slaves to find it, gets angry and hits them when they can’t, eventually his son arrives in floods of tears and Cato remonstrates with him for taking away his means of defence.

(69) He is left with just two friends and asks if they have been set there to talk him out of killing himself.

(70) These two friends burst into tears and leave. Then the sword is sent in, carried by a child. He sets it aside and rereads the Plato twice, then falls asleep. Then wakes up and sends an official, Butas, to check everyone who wanted has safely departed the harbour. His doctor he has bandage the hand he damaged punching his servant. Butas tells him most of those who wanted to depart have left but a strong wind and storm are blowing up.

When Butas has left Cato tries to kill himself but makes a weak blow with the sword and falls to the floor. His slaves and son rush in, weeping. The doctor tries to push his intestines which are spilling out of his abdomen back in, but when he realises what is going on, Cato pushes him away, tears at his own intestines and at the wound to make it bigger, and so dies. How disgusting. How undignified.

So, as with Pompey and Caesar and Cicero, Plutarch really lays on the domestic details in order to work his death scene up into one designed to spark strong emotion. Craftsmanlike, painterly.

(71) In an improbable show of unity which one suspects owes more to Plutarch’s partiality, he has the 300 and the townspeople all uniting in their love of Cato and declaring him the one free man. They dress his body richly, bury it near the sea and erect a statue which stands to this day.

(72) Soon after Caesar arrives at Utica, learns of Cato’s death and utters the famous words:

“”O Cato, I begrudge thee thy death; for thou didst begrudge me the sparing of thy life.”

But Cato didn’t want to live if it meant living at the whim of (people he thought) tyrants and of simultaneously having the sparing of his life turned into a great credit to Caesar’s reputation. No. He only really had one course of action.

(73) Coda about Cato’s son, who Caesar spared, as was his habit. Initially he became a figure of fun by having an affair with the wife of an eastern king, and Plutarch quotes some maxims or aphorisms made about him. But he ended well, dying fighting at Philippi against Caesar and Antony. His daughter married that Brutus who assassinated Caesar, was part of the conspiracy and died in the cause. And this expired the line of Cato.

Thoughts

Choosing sides

At various points in the reading you realise how difficult it is to know what to do in a society which is falling to bits. It wasn’t really a question of choosing sides because not until the final breakout of civil war were there two sides to pick from. Cato’s career demonstrates that the uttermost probity and honesty only take you so far. In the real world compromise has to be made on a host of occasions. A big example is when Cato surprised everyone by backing Pompey as sole consul in 52. Any government is better than anarchy.

But that, for me, raises the central issue. There are lots of interpretations, lots of scholarly reasons given, for the collapse of the republic, but in my opinion the fundamental one was the collapse of political discourse into street violence. Over the preceding generations it had become acceptable to physically attack your opponents and their supporters in the street. The problem was how to contain this violence, how to contain it within the realm of politics and stop it spreading over into the realm of violence.

Philosophy

Much is made of Cato’s devotion to philosophy, but it can be said of him as of so many other people who study the subject, that in the end they choose the school and philosophy which suits their temperament, which they were always going to choose. He was harsh and inflexible and sought to display little or no feeling, so he was drawn to stoicism which “teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions.”

Far from teaching ‘truth’, philosophy is like a huge breakfast buffet where you can tuck into whatever you fancy and mix and match at will, change your opinions, decide you fancy a fry-up instead of pastries. Or, to quote Bob Dylan, “People do what they want to and then think up reasons to justify their actions later.”


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Roman reviews

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.


Related links

Roman reviews

Letters of Cicero edited and translated by L.P. Wilkinson (1966)

This is an old book (published in 1966) containing 196 pages of Cicero’s most interesting letters, selected and translated by L.P. Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s introduction is a bit waffly but conveys the key facts: Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BC and rose to high office in Rome. Having studied philosophy and oratory in Greece, he went on to become the premiere lawyers and orator of his time. He then rose through the set series of official posts or magistracies (the cursus honorem), attaining the post of consul in 63 BC, aged 43. It was towards the end of that year that he had to deal with the notorious Cataline conspiracy.

After a brief exile in 58, to flee his political enemies, in the later 50s he played a key role in trying to effect a compromise between the partisans of Caesar and Pompey. In 51 he was sent to serve as governor of the province of Cilicia in the south of modern-day Turkey, a post he filled with conspicuous rectitude. But it meant he was absent from Rome as the great political crisis between Caesar and Pompey came to a head.

When civil war broke out in January 49, Cicero agonised about choosing a side and eventually plumped for Pompey, still hoping the latter could become the leader who could restore what Cicero optimistically called the ‘harmony of the orders’, and so followed Pompey and his army when they crossed the Adriatic to Greece. After Caesar decisively defeated Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus in August 48, Cicero returned to Rome, where he reluctantly acquiesced in the dictatorship of Caesar.

It is from this period of withdrawal from political life that date most of his written works, including books about oratory, law, the ideal republic, on the duties of the citizen, the nature of the gods and many more.

After the assassination of Caesar in March 44, Cicero threw himself behind the cause of the dictator’s 18-year-old great-nephew, Octavian, in opposition to the crude and brutal Mark Antony, against whom he wrote several vitriolic diatribes. This proved to be a miscalculation, for only a year later Octavian made peace with Antony to form the Second Triumvirate (along with Lepidus), the three partners drew up lists of political enemies to be ‘proscribed’, and Antony put Cicero at the top of his list of opponents to be killed. And so he was.

Cicero’s correspondence

Cicero’s correspondence is ample but slow to get going. There’s nothing from his youth or young manhood i.e. the 90s, 80s or 70s BC. The first letter dates from 68 BC but between that date and 65 there are only eleven letters. There’s nothing from his early career as a lawyer or his campaign to be elected consul. The latter is a particular shame as his consulship, in the year 63, coincided with the conspiracy of the senator Catiline to overthrow the state, which Cicero was instrumental in uncovering. Cicero was instrumental in rounding up the ringleaders (in Rome; Catiline himself remained at large in Italy) and then took the lead, after a fiery debate in the senate, in executing them. (See Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy and Plutarch’s Life of Cicero.)

Cicero’s correspondence doesn’t become continuous until the year after his consulship, in 62 BC. But from that year until July 43 (when Cicero was executed on the orders of Mark Anthony) more than 900 letters survive, about 835 by him and 90 addressed to him. Of his own letters, half (416) were addressed to his friend, financial adviser, and publisher, Titus Pomponius Atticus, who he describes as:

my constant ally in public affairs, my confidant in private, my partner in every conversation and project.

He wrote so many letters to Atticus because the latter had (very wisely) withdrawn from Rome altogether to live in Athens. In fact ‘Atticus’ is a nickname referring to Pomponius’s preference for Greek culture. Cicero’s other 419 letters are to a wide range of friends, acquaintances and relatives, some 94 named individuals in all.

It is important to note that Cicero and Atticus were not only friends of long standing (possibly they went to school together) but had the further tie that Cicero’s brother, Quintus Tullius Cicero, was married to Atticus’s sister, Pomponia – although it was an unhappy marriage, something Cicero refers to in some of his letters.

Wilkinson

Wilkinson’s introduction is a bit waffly, generalising about how loveable Cicero is and so on, fondly indulgent of his narcissism as most other commentators are. Wilkinson is much better in the short linking passages which precede each batch of letters, generally only a couple of paragraphs long but in which he briefly explains the historical context of each batch and what we know of the events Cicero is describing, from other sources. These linking passages are concise and fascinating.

In the moment

Cicero’s letters are so interesting for two reasons. I suppose the obvious one is that he was a central, or central-ish, figure in the high politics of the last decades of the Roman Republic. I found it dazzling that he writes letters to, and receives replies from, all the key players – Pompey, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Brutus and Octavian.

But he could have done this and the letters still be boring. The real secret of their appeal is Cicero’s immense and eloquent involvement in the politics of his time and because his letters plunge you into the moment. All the histories of late republican Rome which I’ve read, ancient or modern, are written with the benefit of hindsight i.e. they often mix up events with their consequences, giving a sense that events were fore-ordained, fated to happen and are a foregone conclusion, regarding them as done and dusted and fodder for thematic analysis.

Wilkinson’s brief introductions, by contrast, give you a snappy resumé of events up to the moment when the next batch of letters start, and then plunge you into the present of the letters in which none of the characters know what is going to happen next.

And all sway forward on the dangerous flood
Of history, that never sleeps or dies,
And, held one moment, burns the hand. (from To a writer on his birthday by W.H. Auden)

As we read the letters, we are living in the dangerous present, alongside Cicero, sympathising with his efforts to figure out what the hell to do, given the immense press of fast-moving events. As the letters progress, they become more and more dramatic and immersive, and genuinely gripping, as gripping as any thriller.

Political parties?

One thing which surprised me in Wilkinson’s introduction is how confidently he talks about political parties with a capital P – the People’s Party, the Senate Party, the Knights Party. Obviously these were not political parties in the modern sense. All the authorities emphasise this. Instead they were loose and flexible affiliations, generally clustered around powerful individuals, because that was the structure of Roman society at large. The Roman ruling class was based on the notion of rich patrons who were surrounded by a host of ‘clients’, who benefited from their largesse and in return offered services. It was a subtle, complicated, ever-changing flux of relationships – personal, familial, military and political.

Given all this, I was surprised to read Wilkinson very much using the language of ‘parties’ and surprised at how acutely it shed light on events which had been more personalised in other accounts. All the accounts I’ve read tend to focus on individuals and their rivalries and hatreds, for example between Marius and Sulla. But Wilkinson recasts this in terms of ‘parties’.

Thus he sees the rivalry between Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla as not only a fierce personal and professional rivalry (which it undoubtedly was) but as a struggle between the People’s Party of the former and the Senatorial Party of the latter. He explains how Gnaeus Pompey at first appeared to follow in Sulla’s footsteps but, during the 70s, left the Sullan cause and helped pass a series of laws which rolled back all the laws Sulla put in place at the end of the 80s to try and bolster the power of the senate.

Alongside Pompey, was Marcus Licinius Crassus (born 115 BC, so 9 years older than Cicero) the richest man in Rome, who Wilkinson puts at the head of the Equites or Knights, the class of often very rich businessmen who sat, as it were, just beneath the senate in terms of power and prestige.

And coming up on the outside was the young, but poor, and extremely ambitious Julius Caesar, born in 100 BC and so 6 years younger than both Pompey and Cicero. By temperament, and family ties (his aunt had been Marius’s wife) Caesar was the rising star of the People’s Party.

Pompey sponsored a bill which removed control of the juries in trials from the Senate and gave a third of juries to the Equites, thus securing the support of the Knightly Party. And then, after being awarded enormous powers to rid Rome of the pirate scourge 67 BC, Pompey won such overwhelming popularity with the People that he was given huge powers to go east and deal with the ongoing problem of King Mithradates VI of Pontus in 66.

When you see Crassus, Pompey and Caesar as not only extremely ambitious individuals, but as representatives of interest groups or ‘parties’, it makes even more sense that in 60 BC Caesar persuaded the other two to join him in an informal pact to manipulate elections and laws and award each other official positions which suited their interests – the first triumvirate.

Cicero’s initial hopes for Pompey

Wilkinson begins his collection with a letter from Cicero to Pompey, written in 62, the year after Cicero’s consulship (when, as he never stopped reminding people, he claimed to have more or less single-handed saved Rome from overthrow by Catiline and his conspirators).

At this point, before the triumvirate was set up, Cicero was still hero-worshipping Pompey and hoping that he would become an enlightened leader and centre of a circle of intellectuals (such as himself). More importantly that Pompey could straddle the interest groups of the different parties (senate, knights and people) and so effect what Cicero called ‘the harmony of the orders’ i.e. put an end to the continual conflict between the different ‘parties’ and reconcile them to work together for the good of Rome.

Pompey had dramatically demonstrated his dedication to the constitution when, upon returning to Italy from his triumphs in the East, he didn’t march on Rome as Marius and Sulla had done, but simply disbanded his army and returned as a private citizen at the beck of the senate. Good man.

(This first letter establishes a recurring theme of the correspondence which is Cicero’s enormous sense of his own importance. Cicero never loses an opportunity to brag at length how the whole world recognises how he single-handedly saved the state during the Cataline crisis.)

Thus, in this first letter, he expects that, despite his (Pompey’s) recent letter to him (Cicero) being restrained and distant, nonetheless, once he arrives in Rome and learns what a hero Cicero is, he (Pompey) will be all the readier to allow Cicero to consort with him in private and in politics. ‘Once you realise how heroically I saved Rome you will want to hang out with me’.

Timeline of Cicero’s letters

63 BC

Cicero serves as consul. November to December the Catiline conspiracy. After a debate in the Senate a vote was taken choosing to execute the known conspirators and, as a result, Cicero promptly led five of them to Rome’s gaol where they were garrotted without a trial. This prompt but rash action, in a moment of national crisis, was to haunt Cicero for the rest of his life and be used against him by his enemies who claimed it was illegal and itself deserving the death penalty. It was the threat of prosecution for it which sent Cicero into self-imposed exile in March 58. And it helps explain the boastfulness when you realise every time he mentioned it he was also in part exonerating himself, building up his defence with everyone he spoke to or wrote to.

62 BC

First letter to Pompey insisting he ought to take him (Cicero) seriously as the man who saved Rome the year before.

61 BC

January: Long gossipy letter to Atticus mentioned the scandalous affair of Publius Clodius Pulcher impersonating a woman to enter Caesar’s house during a women-only religious ceremony. Bitchy remarks about Pompey. June: Cicero describes the trial of Clodius in colourful terms. Cicero intervened to demolish Clodius’s alibi, thus making a mortal enemy who terrified him into exile three years later. From mid-61 to 58 Cicero missed the help of his brother, Quintus Cicero, who went to serve as governor of Asia Minor.

60 BC

January: Cicero complains to Atticus about not having anyone to trust. June: another letter about Clodius’s ongoing intrigues. He was rumoured to have had incestuous affair with his sister, Clodia, who features in the poetry of Catullus as his beloved ‘Lesbia’. Clodia was married to that year’s consul, Metellus. Cicero says she’s a disgrace and he ‘hates’ her.

Julius Caesar invited Cicero to join with him, Crassus and Pompey in what would become known as the Triumvirate. Cicero declined out of loyalty to the constitution.

59 BC

Julius Caesar takes up office for a year as consul. He brings in a Land Bill for the settlement of his servicemen. He ignored the opposition of the senate and vetos by the tribunes i.e. a clear indication that the triumvirate were going to ignore constitutional checks. Next, the tax collectors got a remission of one third on the price they’d paid to collect taxes in the East, to please their representative, Crassus. As his reward for organising all this, the other two arranged for Caesar to be made governor for 5 years of Cisalpine Gaul, Illyrium and Transalpine Gaul. Caesar also married his young daughter, Julia, to Pompey, in order to cement their political bond. She was 17 and Pompey was 47, but in fact he became devoted to her.

Summer: Cicero writes to Atticus telling him the actions of the triumvirate have created a climate of fear, disgust and universal despair at the loss of political freedoms and the state of ‘general servility’. Cicero tells Atticus how at the gladiatorial shows and the theatre Pompey is hissed and booed. Caesar offers Cicero a job as one of the 20 Land Commissioners deciding which land should be assigned to ex-soldiers, but Cicero realises it’s a trap i.e. will associate him with the regime and lose him the support of ‘loyalists’.

58 BC

The Triumvirate arrange for the patrician Clodius to be adopted into a plebeian family so he could be elected as one of the ten tribunes of the plebs. Clodius introduced laws which benefited them all. Caesar encouraged him to persecute Cicero because the triumvirs feared his continued opposition to them jeopardised their programme.

Thus it was that Clodius was encouraged to propose a law threatening exile to anyone who executed a Roman citizen without a trial. Cicero, having executed members of the Catiline conspiracy four years previously without a formal trial, was the clear target of this proposal. After senators and colleagues failed to offer him the assurances he needed, Cicero wisely departed Italy for Greece. A few days later Clodius put forward another bill formally exiling Cicero and confiscating his property. Cicero’s house on the Palatine Hill was destroyed by Clodius’ supporters, as were his villas in Tusculum and Formiae. On the ruins of the Rome house Clodius had a temple dedicated to Libertas built.

The more dangerous, because principles and unbending, opponent of the triumvirs, Cato, was, via another of Clodius’s proposals, sent as governor to Cyprus to get him out of the way.

[What strikes the casual reader of both the general background and Cicero’s letters is how immensely personalised this all was. It’s as if ‘the state’ only consisted of half a dozen people who make and break friendships like schoolboys in a playground.]

April: a letter to Atticus from Brindisi saying he’d love to come to Athens. A sad and moving letter to his wife, Terentia, who he calls the ‘best and most devoted of wives’. She has stayed behind in Rome to see their houses confiscated etc. Practical arrangements about what to do with their large staff of slaves now they have no house. Love to his wife and daughter (married to Piso) and little son, Marcus.

 57 BC

Caesar has gone to Gaul to take up what would turn into 8 years of successful campaigning (see Caesar’s Gallic Wars). Having created a leader of street gangs and proposer of strident laws in Publius Clodius Pulcher, Pompey found him impossible to control, and begins to lobby for Cicero’s return. Clodius’s gangs riot but Pompey helped set up a rival and opposing gang leader, Titus Annius Milo, and got him elected tribune of the plebs, who proposed a law repealing Cicero’s exile. The start of a five year period of unpredictable street battles between the rival gangs and supporters. For example, on 23 January 57, when Clodius tried to use a force of gladiators to block a move to recall Cicero from exile, Milo arrested Clodius’ gladiators. Milo was subsequently attacked by Clodius’ gangs. Milo attempted to prosecute Clodius for instigating this violence but was unsuccessful. The warfare between Milo and Clodius’s gangs became a feature of Roman life. But meanwhile, with the support of Pompey and that year’s consul, Lenthulus Spinther, Cicero’s exile – which he had spent mostly in Salonika – was ended.

September: letter to Atticus rejoicing at being back in Rome. Far more than that, it celebrates in hyperbolic terms what Cicero describes as widespread celebrations of his return, so that at every city and town he was feted by cheering crowds, received delegations of civic worthies etc. Cheering crowds at the gates of Rome, in the forum, on the Capitol. He is immediately back in the buzz of political life and makes a speech in support of a motion to award Pompey control of the corn supply, seeing as there’s a shortage. Fascinating detail of the way the consuls proposed the law giving Pompey control of the corn supply throughout the empire for 5 years, but then Messius introduced an amendment giving Pompey a fleet and army and complete authority over regional governors. Superpowers. This is evidence for the case that the Republic collapsed not because of a handful of ambitious men, but because it was no longer up to administering such a huge area. Anyway, he also hints that all is not well in his household, first hint of deteriorating relationship with Terentia.

November: description of how a mob led by Clodius knocked down Cicero’s half-rebuilt house then incited them to set fire to Cicero’s brother’s house and then ran amok through the city promising to free slaves who joined them. He describes how on 11 November he and his entourage were proceeding along the Sacred Way when Clodius’s gang appeared and produced stones, clubs and swords so that Cicero et al were forced to take refuge in a friend’s house and barricade themselves in.

Clodius is a one-man evidence for the argument that the collapse of law and order in Rome set the scene for the end of the republic. Cicero describes feeling resentfully jealous of Milo and his complete lack of scruples, Milo openly saying he will murder Clodius if he can (though it would be four more riotous years till he did).

56 BC

February: Letter to his brother Quintus describing the attempted trial of Milo. When Pompey attempted to speak for him, Clodius’s gang erupted in shouts and catcalling, then a near riot broke out and Cicero fled. In the following days there was a meeting of the senate, proposals that the riots amounted to sedition. Cato made a violent speech against Pompey who then stands and makes a measured reply. Cicero makes the shrewdest comment on Cato that I’ve read:

from the highest principles he sometimes does the state harm (p.39)

Pompey confides in Cicero that there is a conspiracy against his (Pompey’s) life. He thinks Crassus is encouraging Cato’s attacks while continuing to fund Clodius’s gangs. Cicero allies himself with Milo and the constitutionalists.

April: a sweet letter to Atticus asking him to send some of his slaves or servants who are expert at book management to help restore his library.

In April 56 Cicero made a career-changing mistake. He still thought he could break up the Triumvirate with a view to restoring traditional senatorial rule. The strategy he chose was to launch an attack on Caesar’s Land Bill, which sequestered land to give to his war veterans. But it had the opposite effect, for Pompey supported Caesar’s measure. Indeed it led to the entrenching of triumvirate power when Caesar called Pompey, Crassus and 120 senators to a meeting at Lucca in his province of Cisalpine Gaul, where the pacts behind the Triumvirate were reconfirmed. They agreed that Caesar’s command in Gaul was to be extended by a further five years, that Pompey and Crassus would be consuls for 55, the former with responsibility for Italy and Spain, but remaining in Italy to keep an eye on Rome while the latter went hunting for glory against the Parthian Empire in the East. He had for some years been complaining about the spinelessness of the ‘nobles’, especially when they failed to stand up to Clodius about his exile. Now his patience snapped and he washed his hands of the senatorial party (‘had they not led me on, then ratted and thrown me over…I must finish with them’), made his peace with the Triumvirate (‘let me endeavour to make friends with those that have power’) and retired from politics, concentrating on his writing (p.55).

May: The famous letter to the historian Lucius Lucceius unashamedly sucking up to him and suggesting he write an historical account of the Catiline conspiracy giving pride of place, of course, to Cicero’s heroic achievements in saving the state! Interestingly, he describes in detail his conviction that a mere chronicle of events is boring; what brings it alive is describing the vicissitudes of fortune, the rise, setbacks and triumphs of individuals. This is interesting in itself but indicates the gulf between the ancient and modern world: what interests us is analysis which is undertaken on the basis of a whole range of modern theories, economic, sociological, political, Marxist along with various schools of psychology. By contrast with the web of sophisticated interpretative theories which modern readers and commentators have at their fingertips, the ancients had just one: Fortune and its impact on the rise and fall of great men.

May: letter to Atticus bemoaning his situation whereby if he speaks out about what is right in politics, he is thought mad; if he agrees with the triumvirate, he is thought servile; if he says nothing, he feels crushed and helpless.

May: letters to Lentulus Spinther who, as consul in 57, supported Cicero’s return from exile and is now governor of Cilicia. Cicero describes how the triumvirate have succeeded in gaining their goals beyond their wildest dreams and how he is being realistic and attaching himself to Pompey. He laments that he once looked forward, after a lifetime of service, to giving independent advice in the Senate. But now that vision and world have disappeared. There is now only a choice between ‘humbly agreeing or disagreeing to no purpose.’ ‘The whole essence of the Senate, law courts and the State in general has changed’ (p.61).

55 BC

Cicero sent his brother, Quintus Tullius Cicero, to join Caesar in Gaul. Caesar repelled an incursion by two Germanic tribes and then made his first expedition to Britain. In November Crassus departed Rome to sail to Asia (Turkey) with a view to heading on to Syria to raise the forces for his ill-fated campaign against the Parthian Empire.

April: letter to Atticus from his country house in Cuma where he laments his impotence in politics but:

The more I am robbed of my relish for material pleasures by the thought of the political situation, the more comfort and recreation I find in literature. (p.61)

September: long letter to Marcus Marius giving descriptions of a festival which the former missed and Cicero says he would have hated, describing the bad plays, terrible acting and excessive props; the grimness of the gladiator games and animal hunts, with a word for how the killing of the elephants elicited not pleasure but horror.

54 BC

Cicero’s brother, Quintus Tullius Cicero, took part in Caesar’s second expedition to Britain, which is referred to in Cicero’s letters to him. Julius Caesar’s daughter, Julia, died, aged just 22, leaving her husband, Pompey, bereft. She had provided an important link between the two men and from this point they began to drift apart. Caesar tried to re-secure Pompey’s support by offering him his great-niece in marriage, but Pompey declined.

Spring: an uneasily sycophantic letter to Julius Caesar recommending a friend and colleague Gaius Trebatius Testa for service in Caesar’s army in Gaul.

June: letter to his brother Quintus Cicero. These letters reveal an effort by Cicero to really ingratiate himself with Caesar, to seek his friendship and approval. He regrets being slow to cultivate Caesar’s friendship and promises his brother he will now speed up. These letters with their record of who he’s recommending to who for what position or post, with whose support or opposition, take us into the network of friendships, family and professional and political obligations, alliances, rivalries and enmities which characterised Rome.

September: a famous letter to his brother describing the building works being done to the latter’s villa at Arce and problems with the builder, Diphilus.

October: fascinating letter to his brother describing progress on his book on politics, The Republic. He had cast it in nine books in the form of discussions between Scipio Africanus and his literary circle in the 120s BC. However, when he had it read out at his house in Tusculum in the presence of (the 32-year-old) Gaius Sallustius Crispus, the latter said it would have much more power if it was set in the present day and had Cicero himself as a speaker. This shook his confidence in his conception and he’s now reconsidering.

December: letter to Gaius Trebatius Testa who, as we saw, Cicero recommended to Caesar to be his legal counsel.

53 BC

In June 53 Marcus Crassus was killed leading Roman legions against the Parthian Empire at the Battle of Carrhae in Syria. (See the description in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus.) The Triumvirate was thus ended and became a duumvirate, with an uneasy peace between Caesar and Pompey lasting for the next four years. Milo made a bid for one of the consulships for 52 while Clodius was standing for the praetorship. Milo had won popular support by staging extravagant games and enjoyed the support of the Optimates but Pompey supported Clodius. Milo and Clodius’s supporters clashed in the streets leading to such a breakdown of order that the elections were declared void.

52 BC

In January 52 Milo and Clodius and their respective entourages met by chance on a provincial road outside Rome and a scuffle turned into a fight during which Clodius was wounded then killed. Clodius’s followers brought his body back to Rome and laid it in the Senate House which, after more rioting, they set fire to and burned down. As a result the Senate elected Pompey as sole consul for that year to restore order. Cicero was pleased that the man who had him exiled was now dead and, when Milo was brought to trial for murder, defended him in a speech which became famous, Pro Milone. True to the spirit of the times, though, Clodius’s supporters made such a racket and surrounded the proceedings in such number that Cicero was intimidated into delivering the speech poorly and it couldn’t be heard (though he took care to have it published soon after). Milo was convicted and sent into exile at Massilia.

Caesar was granted permission to stand for the consulship in his absence, being far away on campaign in Gaul – but a powerful party in the Senate wanted him both stripped of his command in Gaul and prevented from holding office back in Rome. Marcellus specified the date 1 March 50 for when Caesar should be relieved of his role. This was to become the crux which sparked the civil war.

51 BC

May: letter to Atticus complaining about the behaviour of his sister, Pomponia, to her husband i.e. Cicero’s brother, Quintus. ‘I never saw anything so polite as my brother or as rude as your sister’ (p.71).

Before he left for Cilicia Cicero secured Marcus Caelius Rufus, a clever unprincipled young man, to be his eyes and ears in Rome (see section, below).

May: first of Caelius’s letters explaining that he has sub-contracted writing out a really thorough account of all the acts of the senate and the assemblies, plus all stories, rumours, jokes and gossips, to another hand. This is just an accompanying letter with highlights.

June: letter to Atticus en route to Cilica, stopping over at Athens. He has behaved well and prevented his staff using their privileges to requisition or spend excessively. But oh he is not looking forward to this governorship.

June: letter to Gaius Memmius who was the dedicatee of Lucretius’s famous poem On the nature of the universe. It’s in fact a boring letter about the preservation of a building once belonging to Epicurus.

July: a suite of letters telling Atticus about the journey by boat from Athens via various islands to Epidaurus.

August: Caelius writes with news of the debate about the end of Caesar’s command in Gaul.

Cicero writes to Atticus saying his governorship commenced on his arrival in Laodicea on 31 July and he is bored to death. He describes the state of the province of Cilicia, which has been mulcted by his predecessor and Roman tax collectors: on all sides he hears complaints about the amounts demanded and the brutality of his predecessor as governor, Appius Claudius Pulcher, in punishing anyone who objected. As the natives have realised, Cicero is determined to be fair, they flock to him in adulation.

[It’s worth pausing a moment over this Appius Claudius Pulcher (97 to 49) because he’s such a good example of the way family ties were vital in understanding the minutiae of Roman politics and society. Appius Claudius Pulcher was head of the senior line of the most powerful family of the patrician Claudii. The Claudii were one of the five leading families (gentes maiores or ‘Greater Clans’) which had dominated Roman social and political life from the earliest years of the republic. He was also the elder brother of Publius Clodius Pulcher the rabble rouser who was responsible for driving Cicero into exile in 58. In the summer 55 Appius married his younger daughter to Pompey’s eldest son, Gnaeus Pompeius (born c.79 BC), thus ensuring his election to the consulate for the following year. He served as consul in 54, along with Cato’s brother-in-law Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Then he was proconsul for Cilicia for two years, 53 to 51, when Cicero took over. Elected censor in 50 with Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (cos.58), Appius was promptly prosecuted for electoral bribery by Cicero’s new son-in-law Publius Cornelius Dolabella. At some stage he had married his other daughter to Marcus Junius Brutus and so Brutus now came to his defence, along with the famous advocate, Quintus Hortensius, and he was acquitted. It’s important to note that Cicero was very cautious and politic both in his letters to Appius and in any comments about him because he knew he would need Appius’s support to be voted the triumph he so dearly hoped for. Thus the byzantine personal relationships of Roman society and politics.]

Letter to Appius laying out how friendly and positive Cicero has been, and reproaching Appius for refusing to meet him, moving to the furthers part of the province and taking the cohorts with him.

There’s a running thread in letters of Caelius to Cicero asking for panthers for the games which, as aedile, he is charged with arranging. Where are my panthers? Just give the orders for them to be captured. Caelius has sent people to arrange their transport back to Rome.

October: Caelius writes to tell Cicero the latest developments in Rome on the issue of whether Caesar can stand for consul in his absence. Caesar wants to do this is so he can pass straight from being commander of the army in Gaul to being consul without a break. If there is a break and he returns to Rome as a private citizen, he knows that his enemies have compiled a list of his alleged misdemeanours in Gaul and will immediately prosecute him, with the very real risk that he will be sent into exile and stripped of citizenship, thus ending his career.

November: letter to Caelius. It always comes as a surprise to realise how military these men are. Thus Cicero gives a detailed account of the military affairs of his province, his various campaigns against enemy peoples and the fact that his writing this letter from a Roman army which he is supervising in the siege of Pindenissus, on Mount Amanus (which he was to take after 57 days). This was the military campaign upon which Cicero was later to base his (repeated) request for a triumph to be held in his honour.

50 BC

Caelius writes to tell Cicero that Appius is being impeached for corruption during his governorship of Cilicia, but that Pompey (whose son is married to Appius’s daughter) is actively supporting him. [Later that year, in August, Cicero learns that his daughter, Tullia, fairly recently widowed, has married Publius Cornelius Dolabella. This placed Cicero in an awkward position because this same Dolabella led the prosecution of Appius for corruption at the same time as Cicero was trying to cosy up to him (Appius).]

February: a long letter to Atticus demonstrating in great detail Cicero’s attempts to be fair to natives in the case of the Roman moneylender Marcus Scaptius who was insisting on repayment of a debt from the people of Salamis on Cyprus at a rate of 48% compound interest. Cicero calls off the moneylenders soldiers, who had been threatening the Salaminians, and remits the interest to 12%.

May: a letter from Cato explaining why he proposed a vote of thanksgiving to Cicero in the Senate to recognise his good governance of Cilicia (p.94).

At the end of July Cicero’s governorship expired, he packed his bags and left Cilicia. But he didn’t reach Italy till November and Rome till January 49. During the second half of the year the political situation in Rome darkened. Various factions were lobbying for Caesar to return from Gaul and surrender his command, some in order that he could take up the consulship, some that he be arrested, or other types of legalistic intervention. The point being that everyone agreed that Caesar’s return would trigger some great crisis.

August: In a series of letters, Caelius gives a running commentary, explaining that the crux is that Pompey insists Caesar cannot take up his consulship until he has given up his army; but Caesar refuses to give up his army because only with it does he feel safe. Caesar has suggested that both he and Pompey give up their armies at the same time, but Pompey refuses. Impasse (pp.97 and 100).

October: Cicero writes to Atticus that he has received letters asking for his support from both Pompey and Caesar. The former he assesses as doing the right thing by the constitution, but the latter has incomparably the stronger army. So what should he do?

A comic note is introduced in the fact that, as the republic slides towards civil war, Cicero’s main concern is fussing to Atticus about lobbying the senate to be awarded a triumph for his campaigns in Cilicia.

Some of the letters describe the moment when Gaius Scribonius Curio went over to active support of Caesar, having been paid an enormous bribe to do so. Curio had been elected tribune and promptly used his veto to block any attempt to recall Caesar or separate him from his army. On 1 December 50 he proposed yet again that Pompey and Caesar lay down their arms simultaneously but it was vetoed by other tribunes. Instead Pompey accepted command of the army in Italy, just as Caesar was heading over the Alps with the army of Gaul. On the day his term of office expired (10 December) Curio went straight to Caesar at Ravenna and urged him to march on Rome. Caesar had his loyal supporter Mark Antony lined up to step into Curio’s shoes as tribune and continue supporting him.

December: At Pompeii Cicero met Pompey who was friendly and supportive of his request for a triumph. Pompey tells him his estrangement from Caesar is complete. In his last letter before civil war breaks out, Cicero laments that they should all have resisted Caesar before he was powerful. Now he is too powerful. But he equally laments that there is no obvious patriotic party in Rome, just different interest groups none of which have the Republic, as such, at heart.

49 BC

In early January, Pompey’s father-in-law, Scipio, proposed to the senate that Caesar be forced to lay down his military command in Gaul. The new tribunes, Mark Antony and Quintus Cassius, tried to use their veto against this but were physically ejected from the Senate. In fear of their lives, they fled Rome and reached Rimini on the north-east coast of Italy on 10 January. On the night of 11 January Caesar led his legions across the little river Rubicon. The significance of this was that the Rubicon formed the border between Cisalpine Gaul, where Caesar legitimately was governor and military commander, and Italy proper, where he was not, and where to lead legions was expressly against the law.

Cicero arrived in Rome after his long, roundabout journey back from Cilicia the next day, on January 12. His letters explode with drama as panic grips Rome and Pompey and his supporters first of all flee Rome to the south-east, then move on to Brundisium which they barricade and fortify, and then depart Italy altogether for north-west Greece.

During these feverish days Cicero sends letters to his faithful freedman and servant, Tyro, with updates on the situation, and to Atticus agonising about what to do. For me what stood out is a sentiment he repeats several times, which is the discovery that ‘on both sides there are people who actually want to fight.’ (p.108) This is the truth that dare not speak its name in liberalism: the college-educated middle class and women want peace; but there is always a significant minority who let themselves get worked up enough to declare peace shameful etc and determine to fight come what may, ‘Death or glory’ etc. Thus the eminently sane, rational and civilised Cicero is bewildered to discover ‘the amazing passion’ which has gripped so many of his acquaintance in Rome.

Very quickly Cicero realises ‘the improvidence and negligence’ of his side, of Pompey, the senate and the consuls, none of whom have made adequate preparations. He realises immediately that it was a fatal mistake for the Pompeians and constitutionalists to abandon Rome.

On 16 February he writes to Pompey himself, saying he is holding the area south of Rome he was tasked with (the senate divided Italy into provinces and assigned governors for the duration of the crisis). But he writes to Atticus fairly certain that Pompey will flee and, sure enough, on 17 March Pompey evacuated his army of 30,000, plus most of the senate, the 2 consuls and tribunes across the Adriatic to Greece. Cicero tells Atticus about a face to face meeting with Caesar who begged him to come to Rome to discuss the issue further. (Persuading Cicero to stay would be a big propaganda coup for Caesar and persuade many other waverers to say and thus validate his regime.)

In April Cicero decided to join Pompey but not because he thought it would save the republic, which he now regards as finished; or because he thought Pompey would win, having displayed such indecision and fear. But in case people think he is ungrateful to the man who helped end his exile.

April: Cicero’s friend Marcus Caelius is on Caesar’s side and writes an impassioned letter warning him not to go over to Pompey, especially at this point when it has become clear Caesar will win. What would be the point?

May: his beloved daughter Tullia had a baby boy, born prematurely. In June he wrote to his wife, Terentia, telling her he is aboard the ship which will take him across the Adriatic to join Pompey, and to go and stay in one of their country houses and so avoid the war areas.

48 BC

During the next few troubled years there are few letters. Having secured the flight of Pompey and his army, Caesar marched all the way to Spain where he defeated all of Pompey’s seven legions and secured the peninsula. In September he returned to Rome and undertook a suite of reforming legislation. In the spring of 48, having built up sufficient fleet, Caesar took his army across the Adriatic and besieged Pompey at Dyrrhachium. Here he suffered a confusing defeat so struck camp and headed east into Greece to relieve pressure on a Caesarian legion facing attack by Pompey’s father-in-law Scipio. Pompey shadowed Caesar and eventually, against his better judgement was persuaded by his camp followers of politicians, to give Caesar battle. He lost the battle of Pharsalus in August 48 and fled to Egypt where he was murdered. Cicero missed Pharsalus having remained ill at a camp on the coast. After the defeat, he opted not to join the hard core Pompeians – Labienus, Cato, Scipio and Pompey’s sons – but returned to Italy where he was grudgingly allowed to stay in Brundisium by Mark Antony who Caesar had appointed his deputy in Rome while he pursued the war in Egypt, Asia and Spain.

November: Cicero writes to Atticus bewailing his fate. How can he secure his return to Rome? He is worried about is family. He doesn’t regret joining Pompey and is upset by his miserable murder.

47 BC

June: To Atticus he says he understands Caesar is in a tight spot in Alexandria. Meanwhile he just wants to be allowed to leave Brundisium, no matter how angry the Caesarians are with him. He is saddened by news of Marcus Caelius Rufus.

Caelius sided with Julius Caesar against Pompey in the civil war, warning Cicero not to align his fortunes with Pompey. In 48 he was rewarded with the office of praetor peregrinus. However, when his proposed program of debt relief was opposed by the senate and he was suspended from office, he joined in a rebellion against Caesar which was quickly crushed and Caelius was killed.

Cicero is troubled by the divorce of his beloved daughter Tullia from Dolabella who turns out to be a swine. If Dolabella divorces her Cicero will get back the dowry he paid for her, which was not inconsiderable.

At the end of 47 Cicero divorced his wife of 30 years, Terentia. He has confirmed that she has been swindling him over money for years, and he is fed up with her bad temper. It’s worth noting she was a true religious believer and devout in her worship of the gods, something Cicero teased her about.

46 BC

After campaigns in Egypt, Asia Minor and Spain, Caesar finally returned to Italy. Here he met with Cicero and formally pardoned him, allowing him to return to Rome. He kept his head down, settled in his country estate at Tusculum, and devoted himself to literature. Many commentators think these among the most momentous years of western civilisation, for in the next three years he produced a series of works which invented philosophical discourse in Latin and popularised to the Romans and, later, for all western civilisation, the ideas of the great Greek philosophers.

In December 47 Caesar crossed to Tunisia to take on the Pompeian forces there. It took till April when he wiped them out at the battle of Thapsus. Cato, the great politician and inflexible moralist, committed suicide at the garrison city of Utica.

Cicero agonises about whether to deliver a eulogy for Cato, who was great but unwise. Any praise will only bring criticism on his head from the Caesarians.

April: letters to Marcus Terentius Varro, the polymath and a prolific author, giving the advice to lie low and study, to live with their books and, if they can no longer advise from the senate, to offer advice from the library and study.

July: five letters to Lucius Papirius Paetus, who has warned him about anti-Cicero gossip in Caesar’s circle, reassuring him that his policy, now that Caesar has triumphed utterly, is to do or say nothing to offend Caesar or his supporters. He discusses the merits of opening a sort of school for student orators, amid jokes about haute cuisine and eating peacocks, the kind of luxury talk Cicero absent from his letters till now. He describes a dinner party with unexpectedly celebrity company (Cytheris, a famous actress) and how, nowadays, deprived of political action and the freedom to speak his mind independently, there’s nothing he enjoys more than dining with friends, addressing his wit to whatever subject crops up and turning grumbling into laughter. In various ways he reformulates the same basic thought: that he is lucky to be alive and that they must obey the powers that be:

What will happen is whatever pleases the powers that be; and power will always be with those that have the arms. We ought therefore to be happy with what we are allowed. (p.139)

[The calendar: throughout 46 and 45 Caesar carried out widespread reforms. The most notable of these was reforming the calendar. Because of the discrepancy between the Roman year of 355 days and the actual solar year of 365.242 days, a large discrepancy had opened up, with the Roman calendar 2 months out of true. Caesar consulted mathematicians and had 67 extra days inserted between November and December 46, gave some of the months extra days to being the total up to 365, and instituted the idea of adding an extra day to the calendar every four years. A reform which survives, in essentials, to this day.]

45 BC

After defeat in north Africa the surviving Pompeians rallies in Spain, under the great survivor Titus Labienus and Pompey’s sons. At the end of 46 Caesar went there with an army and eventually brought them to battle and defeated them at Munda on 17 March 45.

To Cassius he writes a brief letter explaining his new mode of life, explaining that: ‘I am ashamed to be a slave, so I make a show of being busy over other things than politics’ (p.140)

In February his beloved daughter Tullia died, leading to a series of letters from condoling friends, Cicero’s replies, and then his plans to have a permanent shrine built to her.

March: long letter from Servius Sulpicius offering carefully thought through advice on managing his grief. Cicero movingly explains to him that he had lost everything else in life, all his public works and political actions and the law courts, everything, and Tullia was the one good thing left to him and now she is dead.

In all these letters Cicero refers to Caesar rather spookily as ‘he’ by whose patience and generosity they now live, creating the sense of an all-powerful dictator who suffers his subjects to live and a painful sense of having lost his freedom to say and do whatever he wants. Against this backdrop it is striking to have a letter (March) addressed directly to Caesar and recommending to his service a young man named Precilius.

More correspondence with Atticus about buying the land and paying for a mausoleum to be erected to Tullia. Then (May) he has clearly published a eulogy to Cato because he writes about the invective against Cato written by Caesar. He doesn’t give a summary or even any of the arguments, which is irritating because the invective has disappeared, but then Cicero’s letters contain almost nothing about the content of his or anyone else’s writings, a big omission.

May: Atticus seems to have suggested Cicero write a letter to Caesar full of advice but Cicero says he can’t bring himself to; not out of shame, although he is ashamed to be still alive, but because he can’t find anything to say. ‘I would rather he regretted my not writing than disapproved of what I wrote…’

June: a letter to Atticus about some of the philosophical discourses he’s working on and, as usual, he doesn’t discuss the philosophy at all, but just the mechanics of the writing, namely who to dedicate the work to (he is dedicating his dialogue On Aims to Brutus, as Atticus has advised) and swapping round the names of some of the characters who appear in other dialogues, to please figures like Varro, Catulus and Lucullus.

July: this theme continues in a letter he writes to Varro accompanying a copy of his dialogue, the Academica, explaining that he has cast him, Varro, as one of the chief speakers, himself (Cicero) one of the others. As usual there is no indication whatsoever of the content, the subject matter or the actual arguments.

July: he tells Atticus he attended a triumph given to Caesar in Rome, where the dictator’s statue was next to Victory’s. He had been nerving himself to write some kind of official letter of advice to Caesar, such as ought to come from such a distinguished statesman, but seeing this procession put him off.

December: Cicero describes to Atticus that Caesar came and stayed in person at one of his country homes. The throng was immense – he brought 2,000 soldiers! But Caesar was affable and polite, did some administrative work, walked along the seashore, had a bath and at heartily a well prepared meal. They kept off politics and discussed literature so nothing unwise was said and Cicero didn’t offend his guest and so the whole visit passed off without embarrassment. But he wouldn’t like it to happen again.

December: a letter to Manius Curius describing the scandalous incident whereby on the last day of the year, the sitting consul Quintus Maximus died in the morning and, hearing this, Caesar gave the consulship for the remainder of the year i.e. for the afternoon and evening, to a friend Gaius Caninius Rebilus. This allows Cicero to make a few weak jokes, such as: During Caninius’s consulship no-one had lunch. And: Such was Caninius’s vigilance that during his entire consulship he didn’t sleep a wink! But he declares himself sickened by Caesar’s contemptuous, offhand treatment of the great offices of state.

[Personally I find this attitude a little hard to credit and to sympathise with. It would make sense if the republic whose loss Cicero laments had been a Scandiniavian style paradise of social democracy. But even a reading of his letters indicates the political instability sometimes descending to chaos of the previous two decades, from the Catiline conspiracy through to the violent street fighting between Clodius and Milo’s gangs in the late 50s, with politicians routinely attacked in the street and fleeing for their lives. To a very senior political figure like Cicero ‘freedom’ might have a particular meaning, namely that he could speak out and play a role in the senate. But the reader suspects that to many ordinary Romans, peace and stability was more important than ‘freedoms’ none of them enjoyed, and that’s without mentioning the up to 20% of the population who were slaves. Persuasive though Cicero’s self pity can be, this is essentially rich man’s discourse.]

44 BC

Caesar’s assassination on 15 March in a meeting of the senate came as a great shock to Cicero. Although the conspirators ran out of the building waving their bloodsoaked daggers and shouting Cicero’s name (!) he was not approached to join the conspiracy and was, apparently, as surprised as everyone else. There is a gap around the event itself and the first letter we have is from 7 April, 3 weeks later.

[To my surprise he describes the assassins – or liberatores as they liked to style themselves – as ‘heroes’ who have behaved ‘most gloriously and magnificently’. He says the assassination ‘consoles’ him (p.160). At the same time the impression his letters give is of chaos in domestic politics, as the Senate votes to ratify all Caesar’s reforms but at the same time to declare an amnesty for the assassins. He shows the first signs of realising that assassinating the dictator won’t lead to the restoration of the republican constitution, but to a further sequence of civil wars because the republican constitution was irreparably broken. He also describes (albeit sketchily) something other accounts miss, which is the immediate impact of Caesar’s assassination on the empire. Thus war seems to be continuing against Parthia, but to everyone’s surprise there isn’t a widespread uprising in Gaul, whose leaders politely report to the Roman governor, Aurelius, that they will follow his orders. Having read Caesar’s long, gruelling account of his Gallic Wars, I am very surprised there was no uprising in Gaul and would be interested to read an explanation why.]

April: letter to Atticus lamenting the fact that by the second day after the assassination, which happened to fall on the feast of the Liberalia, it was already too late to move decisively to restore the republic, because on that day the Senate met and agreed that all of Caesar’s acts and laws should be confirmed, that his funeral be held in the Forum and his will read in public. Nobody suspected that Mark Antony would seize the opportunity to not only read the will, but show the mob Caesar’s body, and his toga gashed with bloody holes, and so inflame them that they would grab firebrands from the funeral pyre and run off to burn down the houses of the leading conspirators (and Cicero’s house, though he had no part in the conspiracy) with the result that the so-called liberatores (chief among them Brutus and Cassius) would be forced to flee the city they had supposedly liberated.

In April Octavian arrived in Rome, Caesar’s great-nephew who he had adopted as his legal heir. The Caesarians, led by Mark Antony, spurned him so he realised he’d have to worm his way up the ladder using the republicans. And so he curried favour with Cicero, among others.

April: letter to Atticus explaining that Octavian is staying with him and is surrounded by people breathing slaughter against the liberators. Already Cicero has a bad feeling that ‘our side’ will go under. Amazingly, he admits to wishing Caesar were still here because at least he had principles. In his absence Mark Antony is proposing all sorts of corrupt procedures, based on memos fraudulently claimed to have been signed off by Caesar, specifically a request to recall one Sextus Clodius from exile.

He writes in praise of Dolabella who had had a memorial to Caesar which his supporters had erected in the Forum demolished and its constructors thrown off the Tarpeian rock or crucified!

There’s a running thread of concern over his student-aged son Marcus, who is studying philosophy in Athens. Atticus gives reports of him, as does a friend, Trebonius, who looks him up in Athens. This is the same conspirator Trebonius who was tasked with keeping Mark Anthony in conversation outside the building where the other conspirators murdered Caesar.

June: he hears that the Senate will appoint Brutus and Cassius commissioners for supplying Rome with corn from Asia Minor and Sicily. Then he describes to Atticus the scene when he visited Brutus at his place in Anzio and, in front of the latter’s wife and children, was asked whether he, Brutus, should accept the Senate’s commission. He was in the middle of doing so when the impetuous Cassius burst in. Good God, it’s like a movie, it’s like being in the room with Lenin and Stalin arguing, it’s history at first hand. I am surprised to discover that Cicero thought Mark Antony should have been murdered at the same time as Caesar. Now he is emerging as the central political figure, but far more corrupt and tyrannical than Caesar had been. And the liberators who, as we’ve seen, he knows well and meets and advises, they have ‘No plan, no principle, no system’ (p.169).

Almost comically, there is a letter about Cleopatra who Cicero heartily disliked and found insolent and aloof. She had been staying in Rome under Caesar’s protection and fled the city when he was murdered.

There’s a slight oddity which is that the manuscript collections include 2 letters from Brutus and Cassius to Mark Antony. He was consul for 44 and they were praetors so they had to do business, but very uneasily since he had vowed to capture and execute them but had to acquiesce in the Senate’s decision to send them to governorships in Greece. They had asked Cicero whether they should return to Rome, even briefly, before they set out and he strongly advised against it.

August: Cicero tells Atticus he had set sail for Greece when a wind blew him back to Italy and he got messages of a big meeting happening in the Senate and none other than Brutus came to see him on foot. He praised Piso, Caesar’s father in law, who publicly stood up to Antony in the Senate.

Cicero returned to Rome but refused to attend the meeting of the Senate on 1 September when Caesar was officially deified. Antony made a furious speech criticising him for this. Cicero replied with a speech known as the first Philippic, because modelled on the famous speeches of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon. This prompted Antony to a furious invective and triggered Cicero’s second Philippic. This is important because this animus led Antony, the following year, to condemn Cicero to death.

September: Cicero writes to Cassius in Athens telling him Antony is seeking any excuse for a massacre and to have him killed, making it unsafe for him to visit the Senate. So we are right back to the days of street violence and extreme instability of the 50s before Caesar made himself dictator.

November: Cicero tells Atticus he has received a letter from Octavian outlining his plans, which is to bribe ex-servicemen to his cause, which Cicero takes to be opposing Antony, and inviting him to a secret meeting at Capua. Meanwhile Antony is marching 3 legions towards Rome. Cicero asks Atticus what he should do, who he should support, and whether he should leave his rural idyll for Rome as things seem to be coming to a head?

43 BC

In June 46 Antony had passed a decree declaring himself governor of Hither Gaul instead of Decimus Brutus. On November 28 he learned that two of the four legions he had summoned from Macedonia had gone over to Octavian, so he took the other two and marched north to Hither Gaul where he besieged Decimus in Modena. Cicero played an important role in Rome, supporting the two new consuls who took office on 1 January, Hirtius and Pansa, and rallying anti-Antony forces with his Philippics. He based his position on support for Octavian as the least worst option. War was declared on Antony on 2 February.

February: a letter to Trebonius wishing he had not taken Antony aside on the Ides of March but had arranged to have him murdered, too. Now Antony has marched north, Cicero describes his leading role in rallying the Senate and trying to reintroduce Republican practices. He now sees Octavian rallying the ex-servicemen and detaching 2 of Antony’s four legions as preventing the latter instituting a new tyranny.

In the next few months Cicero played a central role, co-ordinating efforts by republicans around the empire. He corresponded with Brutus in the Balkans, Cassius in Syria, Trebonius in Asia Minor, Cornificius in north Africa, Pollio in Spain, Plancus and Lepidus in Transalpine Gaul and Galba and Decimus Brutus in Hither Gaul.

He warns Brutus against mercy. ‘If you are going to be merciful, civil wars will never cease’ (p.185).

In April there were two battles at Modena. Mark Antony defeated Pansa but was worsted by Hirtius. Octavian defended the camp against Antony’s brother, Lucius. A few days later, Decimus Brutus sallied out from the city and defeated Antony though both consuls were killed. But Antony got away.

April: Cicero writes to Brutus telling him the news, and describing ‘the boy’ Caesar, remarkably mature and shrewd at 19. He hopes that as he matures, he will be guided by Cicero and the republicans. He then swanks that when news of the first victory at Modena was brought, the population of Rome came flocking round his house and carried him, cheering, to the Capitol and set him up on the rostrum.

Antony fled north over the Alps. Lepidus, Brutus’s brother-in-law, went over to him and was declared a public enemy.

June: Pollio, governor of Hispania, writes to explain that he has kept his legions loyal to the Republic, despite the efforts of Antony and his brother to bribe them away.

June: a very shrewd letter from Brutus to Atticus in which he criticises Cicero for recklessly encouraging Octavian. In short: he thinks Cicero, with good intentions, has ended up supporting a man who will turn out to be more of a tyrant than the one they overthrew. Brutus powerfully expresses the belief in the Republican system i.e. no man should be above the law, for which he was famous in his day and ever since.

July: Cicero’s last letter is a long one to Brutus explaining and justifying his policy, the core of which is support for Octavian, justifying the various honours and ovation he got the Senate to award him, on the basis that he is their bulwark against the corruption and tyranny of Antony, and that he, Cicero, can guide and control and moderate a young man of just 19 who likes to call him ‘father’. In all this, he would prove to be terribly wrong.

When the Senate refused to vote Octavian the proposed honours he marched his army back to Rome and demanded one of the consulships left vacant by the deaths at Modena, the other one for a kinsman, Pedius. He revoked the outlawry of Antony and Dolabella, and secured the condemnation of Caesar’s assassins, confirming Brutus in his fears. Having unoutlawed him, Octavian proceeded to meet Antony in November 43 on an island near Bologna and formed the second triumvirate with him and Lepidus. The three then drew up lists of political enemies to be proscribed i.e. murdered. Top of Antony’s list was Cicero. Octavian held out in defence of his ‘father’ for 2 days but gave in on the third. Cicero was tracked down to a country estate and murdered by bounty hunters on 7 December 43.

Wilkinson ends his text not with a summary or conclusion or analysis, but by excerpting the last few chapters of Plutarch’s life of Cicero, describing in the detail his final flight to the country, and his tracking down and decapitation by the assassins. His head and hands were cut off and taken to Rome where Antony had them nailed to the rostrum in the forum as revenge, being the head and hand which wrote the Philippic speeches which so incensed him. A visual image of the barbarity which Cicero fought against all his life but which always lay implicitly within the Roman culture he loved so much and which, in the end, did for him so brutally.

Thoughts

What an extraordinary record these letters are, what an amazing insight into the actual dynamics of power at the highest level, during one of the most intense and fascinating periods of world history. And what an amazing character Cicero emerges as, wise, foolish, passionate, ever-thoughtful, highly literate and educated, an effective administrator and military governor in Cilicia, a fluent and attractive writer and, in the end, tragically deluded by the ‘boy’ Octavian.


Themes

Cicero’s narcissism

As all the other sources I’ve read point out Cicero is hilariously self-obsessed. Quite quickly you get used to him describing how important he is, how he single-handedly saved the state during the Catiline Conspiracy, how wherever he goes crowds flock out to see him and call his name. He comes across as a pompous, fuss, narcissistic booby.

As a result it’s hard to take him very seriously as either a politician or philosopher. It beggars belief that this man who frets about his sister-in-law’s behaviour, about the number of statues in his country home, who insists that wherever he goes he is mobbed by crowds calling his name, was seriously invited by Caesar, Pompey and Crassus to join the triumvirate.

Philosophy and writings

As to philosophy, these is none in the letters. He refers to Epicurean and Stoic philosophers by name but only to gossip about meeting them, dining with them and so on. There isn’t a word about The Good Life or The Ideal Citizen or any of the other issues Cicero wrote formal essays about. He mentions that he is working on the texts, such as the six volumes of The Republic, but describes or explains none of the actual ideas.

This is a striking gap or lack. Keats’s letters shed all kinds of light on his poetic theories and practice; Cicero’s letters shed no light at all on the ideas expressed in his essays and dialogues. Possibly this is because they were all secondary, in the sense that he was basically copying out ideas developed by Greeks. He had few if any original ideas of his own and therefore didn’t need to discuss them or work them through with correspondents. He administered his philosophical and political ideas, as a good governor administrates his province.

Atticus

It is sweet and lovely to read Cicero’s many letters to his friend Atticus in which he swears deep friendship and affection. I can see why the correspondence inspired all those humanists of the Renaissance who wrote so many essays about the value of friendship.

Quintus Tullius Cicero

The letters to his brother about a) the latter’s sister, who was married to his best friend Atticus, b) endless building works to the latter’s mansion and c) his service with Caesar in Gaul and on the expedition to the new island of Britain, are fascinating and very human.

Marcus Caelius Rufus

Caelius, born in 82 BC was an orator and politician. He is famous for his trial for public violence in March 56 BC when Cicero defended him in the speech Pro Caelio which is widely regarded as one of the greatest pieces of oratory from the ancient world. He is recipient and author of some of the best letters, with Cicero routinely begging him for the latest gossip during his exile in Greece and governorship in faraway Cilicia. There is a comic running thread with Caelius pestering Cicero to supply him with panthers, exotic animals which he wanted for the games he was organising as curule aedile in 50 BC. Cicero refuses, saying paying from public funds for a panther hunt would be against the reputation for good government he is trying to create.

Roman mosaic showing a wild animal hunt in North Africa (third century AD) Musée Archéologique d’Hippone (Algeria)

Tiro

Cicero’s beloved freedman, secretary, amanuensis. After Cicero’s death it was Tiro who edited and published Cicero’s letters to the immense benefit of western civilisation. It’s logical that Robert Harris makes Tiro the narrator of his 2006 novel about Cicero, Imperium.


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