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The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus – 1

The more I think about history, ancient or modern, the more ironical all human affairs seem.
(Annals of ancient Rome by Tacitus, page 127)

Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56 to 120 AD)

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman historian and politician. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians. He held high official positions, being consul in 97 and governor of Anatolia in 113.

His two major works – the Annals and the Histories – cover the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus (14 AD) to the death of Domitian (96 AD), although there are substantial gaps in the surviving texts.

Saint Jerome stated that The Histories and Annals together amounted to 30 books. Scholars traditionally assign 16 books to the Annals and 14 books to the Histories. Of the 30 books mentioned by Jerome only about half have survived.

Three other, lesser works by Tacitus survive in their entirety:

  • a dialogue about oratory, in which two lawyers and two literary men discuss the claims of oratory against literature (published 102)
  • a study of Germany and the German tribes (the Germania, published about 98)
  • a biography of his father-in-law, Agricola (the Agricola, published about 98)

Incomplete

The Annals were Tacitus’s final work. The Histories, although published earlier, cover the later part of his period, from 68 to 96 AD. The Annals, though published later, cover the earlier period, from the end of the reign of Augustus, through those of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, covering the years 14 to 68 AD, the year when Nero committed suicide.

But the absolutely key thing about the Annals is that half of them are missing. There are dirty great gaps in the narrative, big holes in the story.

We have the first part, a good continuous narrative from the end of Augustus’s reign (14) through most of Tiberius’s rule (14 to 37) in detail. But the text breaks off after the death of Tiberius and the entire reign of Caligula (37 to 41) and the first six years of Claudius (41 to 47) are missing. The narrative then resumes for the last seven or so years of Claudius (47 to 54) and the entire reign of Nero (54 to 68), at which point the narrative of the Annals connects with that of the Histories.

The best

Tacitus’s is the earliest and best account we have of this crucial period in western history. We do also possess the biographies of the first 12 emperors by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69 to 122), Tacitus’s younger contemporary, which cover the exact same period and were published around 120 AD; and it’s true that Suetonius was an imperial secretary (to Hadrian) and so had access to imperial archives and was able to amass much curious and colourful material in his biographies. But Suetonius followed the conventions of his time in thinking ‘biography’ a much less serious genre than ‘history’ and so didn’t attempt the deeper analysis and wider scope which Tacitus achieves.

The other main source for this period is the Greek historian Lucius Cassius Dio (155 to 235) who wrote a vast history of Rome from its foundation up to his own time in no fewer than 80 volumes. But Michael Grant, the translator of the Penguin edition of the Annals, considers Dio ‘pedestrian’ and lacking ‘the imagination to grasp the affairs of the early empire’.

So although there are these two other sources, nonetheless Tacitus:

is the best literary source for the events of the early principate that we possess.

The purpose of history

Like everyone in the ancient world, Tacitus thought writing had a moral purpose. Grant’s introduction spends some time untangling the complicated relationship in Tacitus’s time between history, rhetoric and philosophy.

For a start all these genres – poetry, history, tragedy and comedy, eulogy and lyric poetry – were pioneered by the ancient Greeks. The Romans only began to copy these genres hundreds of years after the Greeks had brought them to a first perfection. (The first Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote his Histories about 430 BC, whereas the first Roman historian, Cato the Elder, wrote his Origines 250 years later, about 180 BC.)

Grant tells us that history, as a genre, grew out of poetry. First came Homer and Hesiod (700 BC?) and only centuries later, the first of the Greek historians – Thucydides b.460 and Herodotus b.430. For a very long time ‘history’ was regarded as a subsidiary form of literature.

This explains the elements of the dramatic found in Tacitus, for example the extended speeches he gives characters at various points which, scholars think, were almost all entirely invented by Tacitus. He attributed to leading characters in the narrative beautifully structured speeches which expressed the kinds of things they ought to have said at the most dramatic or pivotal moments.

And from the tradition of Greek tragedy comes an urge to make events seem tragic and terrible. You can feel this at moments in the narrative where, after trundling through a list of law cases and official appointments, Tacitus returns to the year’s activities of Tiberius or Nero and, suddenly, the narrative takes on a more colourful, sometimes stricken, tone, as he talks up the appalling reign of terror which Tiberius assembled or the terrible acts of the sadist and murderer Nero. You can almost hear him cranking up the horror. Which is why some scholars question whether things really were as bad under Tiberius and Nero as Tacitus claimed or whether some, at least, of the horror is included for dramatic effect.

Alongside drama went didacticism, the urge to teach and instruct, which grew, according to Grant, in popularity in the Greek world from the 4th century BC onwards. Tacitus takes a deeply moral line. He is concerned not only with recording everything which happened in a specific year, but giving his opinion about it.

Tacitus’s history is a succession of issues by which I mean a record of each year’s military campaigns, appointments of officials, promulgating of laws, prosecuting of officials or criminals, the character of particular officials (governors, generals, the emperors themselves) and so on – all of which Tacitus gives his opinion about. It is a very opinionated history.

Tacitus is in no doubt that the fundamental purpose of his writing is didactic. The aim of history is to teach men to know themselves better and behave better by showing them great examples – of good and terrible behaviour – from the past.

It seems to me a historian’s foremost duty to ensure that merit is recorded and to confront evil deeds and words with the fear of posterity’s denunciations.
(p.150; book 3, 64)

Which brings us to another massive topic, which is rhetoric, the art of persuasion, in writing and speaking. Rhetoric was the central element of the educational syllabus of the well-educated in the ancient world, and was explained in a stream of famous and complex manuals.

Thus a writer like Cicero, in his De legibus, says that history’s first concern may be recording the truth, but very close afterwards comes the need to a) persuade his audience and b) to sound well. This brings us back in a circle to history’s origins as a child of poetry. By Tacitus’s time it had travelled a long way from its parent but hadn’t shaken off the expectation that the historian would, as well as being a good researcher of facts, be an artist of prose.

Hence (to repeat a bit) the importance of the set-piece speeches Tacitus invented for his historical personages. The speeches are not only appropriate for the personage and the situation, they exploit the personage and the situation to put on a good show – in order to demonstrate the author’s skill at making a case, and to tickle the taste buds of the educated Roman audience who enjoyed savouring and judging well-made rhetoric and oratory.

Many of the set-piece passages in Tacitus were almost certainly written to be declaimed i.e. read aloud to an audience trained to its fingertips in the art of rhetoric, who would spot and appreciate the author’s various tricks and skills.

Conceived as accurate depictions of what actually happened, written in order to promote good behaviour and deprecate bad behaviour, Tacitus’s writings also had an interest in bringing out dramatic moments and presenting successive cases and arguments with all the skills of an orator. (For example, the passage in book 1, sections 7 to 10, where Tacitus puts the case for, and then the case against, Augustus’s achievements.) It’s a colourful, rich and often highly artistic combination.

Sententiae

Alongside and accompanying this overtly didactic aim, Tacitus from time to time throws in sententiae or pithy comments on history, society and human nature. these were a well-known part of his style and were quoted and excerpted for a millennium and a half afterwards. However, the modern reader may feel that, beneath their air of profundity, they are often strangely anodyne.

So the avenging of Germanicus ended. Contradictory rumours have raged around it among contemporaries and later generations alike. Important events are obscure. Some believe all manner of hearsay evidence; others twist truth into fiction; and both sorts of errors are magnified by time. (p.128, book 3, section 18)

It would be easy to enjoy and dismiss the sententiae without realising their true significance. Tacitus is trying to understand human nature by stepping back and commenting on aspects of what he sees, which arise naturally from his subject matter (the origins of tyranny) or his researches (how very prone people are to believe all kinds of rumours and lies).

He is investigating the nature of what is remembered, and why, and how fictions so quickly arise to fulfil people’s expectations.

Sejanus, too much loved by Tiberius and hated by everyone else, passed for the author of every crime; and rumours always proliferate around the downfalls of the great. For such reasons even the most monstrous myths found believers…My own motive in mentioning and refuting the rumour has been to illustrate by one conspicuous instance the falsity of hearsay gossip, and to urge those who read this book not to prefer incredible tales – however widely current and readily accepted – to the truth unblemished by marvels.
(p.162, book 4, section 9)

Fairly obvious though they seem to us, these kinds of reflection on human nature and the psychology of society was much rarer in ancient times. Although they were to some extent expected in history as a genre, it is always fascinating to read these occasional insights, not into society as such, but into how ancient authors thought about their society and about social change.

No chapter markers

I read the Annals in the translation by Michael Grant published by Penguin in 1956. It is a clear, forceful translation making for an enjoyable read (if you like Roman and military history) but with one massive flaw. Most Roman texts were divided by the author into numbered sections which modern editors, not entirely accurately, often call ‘chapters’.

The Annals and Histories are divided into these numbered sections, which are themselves gathered into ‘books’. But Grant or his editor took the decision not to include these chapter numbers in the text, which is inconvenient. It would have been useful to know which book and which section various events occur in.

Robert Graves’s translation of Suetonius and Kenneth Wellesley’s translation of Tacitus’s Histories, both for Penguin, do keep the section numbers in –so that every other paragraph or so starts with a number – and this allows you to compare their texts with other translations available online by referring to these numbers. You can go straight to the precise section of the other translations and make comparisons very easily. And, when I quote a sentence or two in my blog, I can cite the precise section it occurs in, for everyone’s convenience.

You simply can’t do that with the Grant translation. The book number and chapter number are given in the header at the top of each page, but this covers all the contents of both pages and so is very imprecise, and leaves you having to guess which chapter number applies to a particular paragraph. Very irritating.

Annalistic

What is an annal, anyway? Merriam-Webster defines an annal as ‘a record of the events of one year’ and annals in the plural as a record of events arranged in a year-by-year sequence. Thus Tacitus proceeds, rather pedantically, a year at a time. This means he doesn’t describe long-running themes which ran over successive years, as a whole. Instead he tells you everything which happened in 14 AD. Then everything which happened in 15 AD. And so on.

Sources

1. Apparently, the initial scaffolding of the work was based on annual notices called the ‘Records of the Priests’. These were primarily religious in nature but since the Roman year was packed with celebrations and festivals a lot of the other business of the state (elections, wars, trials) began to be mentioned and then actively recorded in the Records. By the second century BC historians who used these sources had become known generally as the Annalists. They provide an obvious precedent for Tacitus’s work.

2. Tacitus also mentions searching ‘histories and official journals as part of his researches (p.120), a note from Grant telling us this latter refers to the acta diurna which began to be kept in the year of Julius Caesar’s first consulship (59 BC).

3. He also, like Suetonius, at some points refers to stories he himself heard from those alive at the time, and so gives a version of Piso’s eventual death ‘given by people who were alive when I was young’ (p.126).

4. And he balances the written record with hearsay, the oral tradition which is so often lost and so is valuable that Tacitus recorded:

In describing Drusus’ death I have followed the most numerous and reputable authorities. But I should also record a contemporary rumour, strong enough to remain current today…’ (p.163, book 4 section 10)

(This rumour was that Sejanus not only seduced Drusus’s wife, Livilla, into becoming his lover and helping him poison her husband, Drusus – but also seduced Drusus’ eunuch, Lygdus, to help in the conspiracy.)

Sallust

Grant sees the key figure in the Roman tradition before Tacitus as being Sallust, author of a lost history as well as studies of the Jugurthine War and the Catiline conspiracy, which have survived. Sallust was popular because of the drama and energy of his narratives, spliced with exciting speeches, most notably the long speeches he attributes to Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger in the Catiline conspiracy – combining artistry and rhetoric.

‘Next’

This explains why one of the key words in Grant’s translation is ‘next’. Tiberius did this. ‘Next’ x and y were installed as consuls for the year. ‘Next’ the Senate debated a motion to prosecute this or that governor. ‘Next’ there were rebellions by the following tribes on the following borders of the empire. ‘Next’ Tiberius announced a new policy to enforce z.

The summary of each year opens by naming the consuls for that year:

  • In the next year the consuls were Servius Cornelius Cetegus and Lucius Visellius Varro… (p.165)
  • In the following year the consuls were Cossus Cornelius Lentulus and Marcus Asinius Agrippa… (p.173)

And ends with a brief list of notable figures who died during it:

  • At the end of the year two notable Romans died… (p.134)
  • Two eminent men died this year…’ (p.155)

And so on. On one level it is a record of events which really is just ‘one damn thing after another’. As I got into the text I realised that, although broad chapter titles Grant assigns to big blocks of narrative (see below) are zippy and dramatic, it would make a lot more sense to layout the narrative by year, starting a new ‘chapter’ with each year to really bring out the year-by-year annalistic nature of the text.

By ‘everything’ I mean a fairly narrow, limited range of concerns. Tacitus frequently refers to his own researches in state records. The point being that his narrative appears to be based on the brief records which Roman officials had been keeping for centuries of a) appointments to the key magistracies; b) debates and decisions of the Senate, regarding new laws or the prosecution of leading figures for breaching various laws; c) military campaigns; d) important court cases, often the prosecution of provincial governors for corruption.

Tacitus lays out a list of these kinds of events for each year and then expands on them, giving further background where required, especially about the individuals concerned, their family and character, and explaining what happened in each instance. These kinds of things form what you could call the background hum of the narrative.

No social or economic history

There is very little about a subject which has become central to modern history, which is economics. The ancients had little or no understanding of economics. Like his peers, Tacitus will say ‘in this year there was a shortage of wheat or grain’ and that food prices went up or there was scarcity leading to riots, prompting the emperor to intervene and buy up huge amounts to be distributed cheaply to the population of Rome. But that’s about it.

And there’s nothing at all about the lives or experiences of the common people, except for occasional references to the mob or riots. It is very much a personal history of the very top echelons of society, the senatorial class and the so-called ‘knights’. And it is a moral history of their personal attitudes and behaviour.

The emperors

But laid over the top of the background hum of the year-to-year events is what you could call the juiciest element of the Annals, which is the cumulative portrait of the emperors being (since we lack Caligula altogether) Tiberius, Claudius and Nero.

The most famous biographer of this period, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69 to 122) has left us, among copious other writings, a famous set of biographies of the first 12 emperors (Lives of the Caesars) which covers the exact same period as Tacitus’s Annals and Histories. The two works can be read side by side.

Suetonius’s biographies are relatively brief (40 or so pages in the Penguin translation). After a shortish chronological section detailing the objective historical events of their reigns, Suetonius moves onto personal aspects of his subjects, arranged like a PowerPoint presentation under specific headings (personal attributes, appearance, wives and offspring and so on) under which he groups facts or events to illustrate each of his topics. These often contain juicy gossip and quirky facts (such as Augustus’s distinctive birthmarks or his habit of wearing a big floppy hat when he went out to protect him from the sun) which make them pithy and memorable.

Tacitus, by contrast, presents us with one long continuous narrative. This means there is a great deal more content, especially in two particular areas: domestic policy and military campaigns.

Suetonius lists the aspects of the emperors and then illustrates them by anecdotes, jumping around place and time to provide evidence. Tacitus, by contrast, proceeds, in a slightly plodding way, through the key events of each year, as he’s derived them from studying the official records of the senate, the elections, the law courts etc. And out of this list of events grows his analysis of the emperor. The prosecution of this or that official brings out this side of the emperor. The handling of a military campaign highlights that side of his personality. And so on. Far more historical information.

Books and titles

As I’ve mentioned Grant doesn’t structure his narrative by the books and sections of the original text. Instead he creates his own ‘chapters’, giving them titles (which I’m pretty sure aren’t in the original). The aim is to add drama and give his narrative the feel of a novel. They are:

Part one: Tiberius

  1. From Augustus to Tiberius (book 1, sections 1 to 15)
  2. Mutiny on the Frontiers (book 1, sections 16 to 49)
  3. War with the Germans (book 1 section 49 to book 2 section 26)
  4. The First Treason Trials (book 2 sections 27 to 52)
  5. The Death of Germanicus (book 2 section 53 to book 3 section 19)
  6. Tiberius and the Senate (book 3 sections 19 to 76)
  7. ‘Partner of my labours’ (p.158) [about Sejanus] (books 4 and 5)
  8. The reign of terror (book 6)

Part two: Claudius and Nero:

  1. The fall of Messalina (book 11)
  2. The Mother of Nero (book 12)
  3. The fall of Agrippina (book 13 to book 14 section 13)
  4. Nero and his helpers (book 14 sections 14 to 65)
  5. Eastern settlement (book 14 sections 1 to 32)
  6. The burning of Rome (book 15, sections 32 to 47)
  7. The plot (book 15, sections 48 to 74)
  8. Innocent victims (book 16)

Tiberius

Unlike sociable Augustus, Tiberius comes over as ‘profoundly secretive’ (p.140), ‘cryptic’ (p.143) ambiguous and unpredictable. In his introduction Grant points out that Tacitus attributes to Tiberius all the qualities of a villain of melodrama, the stock tyrant of ancient literature: he is portrayed as unjust, sensual, cruel and, above all, suspicious and cunning.

Livia

His mother, Augustus’s widow, Livia – who was given the ominous title ‘the Augusta’ – is, if anything, worse, a monster of malicious manipulation. It’s often difficult to spot the moment at which the transition takes place, but quite often, when reading about these two, you realise the text has turned into a pantomime and the audience is meant to be booing and hissing the baddies.

Germanicus

Every panto needs a hero and this deep tendency – to cast things into dramatic shape – explains the tremendous shininess with which the young prince, Germanicus, is depicted, Tacitus emphasising his graciousness, openness, honesty, his ability to get on with people and his great military victories in Germany, in order to contrast all of this with Tiberius’s negative versions of the same virtues, with Tiberius’s surliness, suspicion, duplicity, holing up in Rome (and then retirement to Capri).

Germanicus in Germany

In his notes Grant brings out something I had sensed or felt in the narrative but wasn’t sure about, which is that Germanicus’s campaigns in Germany (against the Cherusci, led by Arminius, the Chatti, the Marsi and other rebel tribes), dramatic and extended through they were, were ultimately an expensive waste of time resulting in no permanent conquests or treaties.

The most memorable part of these early books is Tacitus’s descriptions of the very hard-fought battles in the mud and undergrowth of the endless German forest and then, above all else, the terrific description of the huge storm in the North Sea which wrecked Germanicus’s fleet, which destroyed many ships and drowned many soldiers. Tacitus’s account has a Hollywood blockbuster feel to it (pages 87 to 88).

 The North Sea is the roughest in the world and the German climate the worst. The disaster was proportionately terrible – indeed, it was unprecedented. (p.87)

All the more horrifying that Tacitus presents the evidence for and against the widely held suspicion that Germanicus was poisoned by the governor of Syria, Cnaius Calpurnius Piso, where Germanicus had been sent to lead the military campaign in Armenia. (Germanicus dies on page 113, book 2 section 69, warning his wife against Tiberius’s malevolence.)

Tiberius’s decline

The headline story of Tiberius’s reign (14 to 37) is that it was in two parts. While he was finding his feet Tiberius was cautious and stuck to the letter of the law, abiding by all of Augustus’s decisions. But slowly, slowly, in a score of ways – through the way he managed and cowed the Senate, made appointments to the army, in his spiky relations with his biological son (Drusus) and adopted son (Germanicus), in his revival of the treason law (p.73) and encouragement of informers and spies (‘It was a sort of contagion, like an epidemic’, p.203), and especially on his growing reliance on the creepy figure of Lucius Aelius Sejanus, head of the Praetorian Guard – Tiberius became slowly more tyrannical.

Although the treason trials (for ‘crimes’ as trivial as swearing in the vicinity of a statue of Augustus) began as early as 16 (p.90), Tacitus cites 23 AD as the year when Tiberius’s rule began to deteriorate (p.159, book 4, section 3) and he is quite brutal in describing the total compliance which Tiberius created:

The impressiveness of the Republican facade only meant that the slave-state, which was to grow out of them, would be all the more loathsome. (p.77, 1.77)

Tiberius is so important to Tacitus because it was under him that the weakness and corruption of one-man rule became clear. Tiberius set the pattern that later autocrats and tyrants copied.

It was under Tiberius that freedom suffered its most fatal losses. (Grant, Introduction, p.21)

Augustus had spent half his life in the Republic and had the immense skill to retain a tactful facade of republicanism even as he took more and more control of things. And he was canny with people.

He seduced the army with bonuses and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians. He attracted everybody’s goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace. Then he gradually pushed ahead and absorbed the functions of the senate, the officials and even the law. (p.32, book 1 section 1)

Tiberius was high-minded and principled in many ways but lacked Augustus’s social and interpersonal skills. Cold and distant, he alienated people.

What Tiberius said, even when he did not aim at concealment, was – by habit or nature – always hesitant, always cryptic. (p.39, 1.10)

And had never known the republic. All he knew was his own wishes, which slowly became an unreliable guide to rule by and the result was a slow descent into a reign of terror. As he has a character say:

‘In spite of all his experience of public affairs, Tiberius was transformed and deranged by absolute power.’ (book 6, section 48)

As witnessed by the fact that it was widely believed that he conspired in the deaths of his adopted (and too popular) son, Germanicus (widely held to have commissioned Piso to poison him out in the Middle East) and then of his own son, Drusus, who Tacitus frankly claims was poisoned by Tiberius’s creature, Sejanus (p.161, book 4, section 6).

The first couple of books focus, memorably and vividly, on Germanicus’s campaigns in god-forsaken mud and forest of tribal Germany. But the institution Tacitus most analyses is the Senate, recording event after event, debates, and decisions, and consular elections, which step by step mark its descent into grovelling sycophancy towards the increasingly terrifying emperor. It is from Tacitus that we learn that Tiberius frequently left the Senate muttering, ‘Men fit to be slaves!’ (p.150)

Tiberius retires to Capri, 28 AD

Finally Tiberius quit the Italian mainland and, in 28 AD, retired to the island of Capri where he stayed holed up for the last 11 years of his life (he died in 37 AD, aged 77). He no longer attended the senate, as he had done assiduously, or the law courts, as he had done, inspiring fear and intimidation. Now all government business was conducted by letter.

Access to him was harder now. It was only procurable by intrigue and complicity. (p.194)

Tacitus thinks he did it partly to get away from his nagging mother, Livia, partly because he genuinely found the daily task of attending the senate or the law courts and so on gruelling. And partly to indulge the sensual lusts and perversions which became harder to control as he aged.

For his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrolled activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversions were invented. (p.200 cf p.202)

And so on. More details are given in Suetonius’s deliberately scandalous Life of Tiberius.

Death of Livia, 29 AD

She was a compliant wife to Augustus but an overbearing mother to Tiberius. Tacitus thinks part of his motivation in retiring to Capri was to be free of her endless nagging. (That and his wish to indulge his disreputable personal behaviour.) With her death Tiberius’s restraint was thrown to the wind.

Now began a time of sheer crushing tyranny. (p.196)

Tiberius and Sejanus began to persecute Germanicus’s widow, Agrippina (the Elder). He sent a letter to Rome denouncing her and her son, Nero Caesar, Tiberius’s daughter-in-law and grandson.

Here there is a gap in the text covering two years. During those key years, first Agrippina (Germanicus’s widow), Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar (her young sons) were exiled, and Nero Caesar died. More seismically, Tiberius began to suspect his right-hand man, Sejanus, instrumental in so many plots against his enemies, to be conspiring against Tiberius himself. So Tiberius had him arrested in the senate and executed. At which point Sejanus’s divorced wife revealed to Tiberius that it was Sejanus and his lover Livilla (Drusus’s own wife) who had conspired to poison Drusus (Tiberius’s son). After this was revealed Livilla died, either killing herself or executed.

The fall of Sejanus was brutal but so was the aftermath. Previously consuls and senators and aristocrats had vied with each other to fall in with the emperor’s henchman to curry favour. Now all that arse-licking came to be regarded in a diametrically opposite light and many who had associated with Sejanus were now accused of being part of his plot to overthrow the emperor.

Frenzied with bloodshed, the emperor now ordered the execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity, there they lay, strewn about – or in heaps. (p.209)

With great brutality Sejanus’s two young children were executed. Tacitus reports that, since capital punishment for a virgin was forbidden, she was first raped by the public executioner, then garotted. Both their bodies were then thrown onto the Gemonian steps (where the bodies of criminals and the disgraced were thrown in ignominy; p.199).

The deaths Germanicus’s widow, Agrippina the Elder (p.212) and then of two of her children: Nero Julius Caesar was accused of treason, declared by the senate an enemy of the state, banished to the island of Pontia where he was either killed or encouraged to kill himself in 31.

His brother, Drusus Caesar, Tiberius’s grandson was accused by Cassius Severus of plotting against Tiberius. He was imprisoned and confined to a dungeon on the Palatine in 30. He starved to death in prison in 33 after, according to Tacitus, being reduced to chewing the stuffing of his mattress.

This left young Gaius as their only surviving brother and at an early age he was sent to be Tiberius’s companion on Capri. Here he learned thorough-going debauchery from the old man and how to recognise and manage his moods. He was to succeed Tiberius on the latter’s death in 37 and is known to history by his nickname, Caligula.

The long description of Tiberius ends with ever-increasing terror, with scores of senators and knights accused of all kinds of crimes and queuing up to commit suicide. Tacitus describes Rome as awash with blood and piled with bodies which must have been an exaggeration. But it felt like that to those who lived through it.

Gaius Vibius Marsius is accused of adultery and decides to starve himself to death. Tacitus gives him a grim speech explaining to his friends that he doesn’t want to hang on the last few weeks until the obviously ill emperor dies, because he prophesies that the reign of Tiberius’s successor will be even worse (p.225).

The deaths of Nero Julius Caesar and his brother, Drusus Caesar left Tiberius Gemellus, the son of Drusus and Livilla, the grandson of the Emperor Tiberius, as hair. In 35 Gemellus, along with his cousin Gaius, were named joint-heirs by Tiberius. Upon Tiberius’s death in March 37, Gaius assumed the throne and had Gemellus killed (or forced to kill himself) in late 37 or early 38.

Degenerate times

Tacitus shares the universal belief among all ancient writers that the world was going to the dogs and that the age they were living in was witness to unprecedented degeneracy. Decline and fall. Sallust complained about the degenerate times he was describing in the 50s BC and Tacitus expresses exactly the same feeling 150 years later.

I am aware that much of what I have described, and shall describe, may seem unimportant and trivial. But my chronicle is quite a different matter from histories of early Rome. Their subjects were great wars, cities stormed, kings routed and captured. Or, if home affairs were their choice, they could turn freely to conflicts of consuls with tribunes, to land- and corn-laws, feuds of conservatives and commons. Mine, on the other hand, is a circumscribed, inglorious field. Peace was scarcely broken – if at all. Rome was plunged in gloom, the ruler uninterested in expanding the empire. (p.173, book 4, section 31)

The futility of tyranny

As part of the general reign of terror and intimidation of every form of free speech and opinion, in 25 the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus was charged with, in his Histories, praising Brutus and describing Cassius as ‘the last of the Romans’. Cremutius put up a stirring defence in the senate (probably another speech invented by Tacitus), went home and starved himself to death. Which prompts Tacitus to reflect:

The senate ordered his books to be burned by the aediles. But they survived, first hidden and later republished. This makes one deride the stupidity of people who believe that today’s authority can destroy tomorrow’s memories. On the contrary, repressions of genius increase its prestige. All that tyrannical conquerors, and imitators of their brutalities, achieve is their own disrepute and their victims’ renown.
(p.175, book 4, section 35)

Tacfarinas

Credit

Michael Grant’s fluent, energetic translation of Tacitus’s Annals was published by Penguin Books in 1956. References are to the revised 1971 edition, as reprinted in 1988.

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by Simon on December 14, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/tacitus-annals-1/

Plutarch’s lives of Marius and Sulla (translated by Rex Warner)

Now the generals of this later period were men who had risen to the top by violence rather than by merit; they needed armies to fight against one another rather than against the public enemy.
(Doleful reflections of the Amphictyons of Delphi upon being ordered to hand over all their treasure to the Roman general Sulla who was besieging Athens: Life of Sulla, chapter 12)

1. Plutarch’s Life of Caius Marius (157 to 86 BC)

Plutarch’s life of Marius is divided into 46 brief sections. Rex Warner’s translation of Plutarch in the Penguin edition is relaxed and chatty. Very clear, very readable. However it is not available online whereas the 1920 Loeb Classical Library edition is. So, for practical purposes, I’ll quote Loeb.

As for the personal appearance of Marius, we have seen a marble statue of him at Ravenna in Gaul,​ and it very well portrays the harshness and bitterness of character which were ascribed to him. For since he was naturally virile and fond of war, and since he received a training in military rather than in civil life, his temper was fierce when he came to exercise authority.

Plutarch brings out very vividly the successive rivalries during the Jugurthine War (112 to 106 BC) between Metellus, Marius, and his quaestor Sulla. The Roman army comes over as an engine of fierce rivalries. But although Plutarch describes some of Marius’s military victories, in Numidia (112 to 106 BC) and then against the Cimbrian and Teutons who threatened to invade Italy from Gaul (113 to 101 BC) what really impresses is the second half of the life, and especially the final years when Marius fell from military and political favour and was eventually outlawed from Italy and had to go on the run, in disguise.

These final sections of his adventures on the run (35 to 45) read more like a boy’s own adventure story than history. The modern histories I’ve read refer to Marius’s brief exile only in general terms whereas in Plutarch we meet the captains of the ships which smuggle him out of Ostia, then dump him further down the Italian coast, the peasants who take him in and try to hide him, his betrayal and arrest to the authorities. We meet the Cimbrian soldier who is ordered to kill him but can’t bring himself to do so because, in the darkened bedroom, he sees Marius’s eyes darting fire and hears the voice of a god warning him against such a wicked deed. And so on. It’s like something out of the Arabian Nights more than history, more even, than biography.

Superstitions

Rex and other commentators emphasise Plutarch’s focus on the individual, on character, and call him ‘the first of modern biographers’ (p.9). None of them mention the ubiquity of superstition, prophecies and the uncanny i.e. the irrational, in his narratives. Thus in Marius alone:

  • as Marius prepares to sail back from Africa to Rome a soothsayer predicts great things (8)
  • in the campaign against the Cimbri and Teutones Marius has a Syrian prophetess named Martha accompany him in a litter (17)
  • the story that his army was accompanied everywhere by two vultures (17)
  • over the Italian cities of Ameria and Tuder flaming spears and swords are seen in the sky moving as if in actual battle (17)
  • from the massed ranks of the enemy arose an unearthly wailing (20)
  • heavy rain often follows a major battle because the supernatural powers want to hallow and cleanse the earth (21)
  • Fortune or nemesis or natural necessity, call it what you will, some force always ensures the enjoyment of any great success is never unalloyed or pure (23)
  • the incident of Fannia’s donkey who ran out to drink water from a spring near where Marius was being held by his escort, stopped directly in front of him, let out a tremendous bray, then went frisking past him – from which Marius drew the conclusion that his escape would be by sea

And:

When he was quite young and living in the country, Marius had caught in his cloak a falling eagle’s nest, which had seven young ones in it; at sight of this, his parents were amazed, and made enquiries of the seers, who told them that their son would be most illustrious of men, and was destined to receive the highest command and power seven times. (36)

  • when a Cimbrian soldier went into Marius’s bedroom to kill him he saw a pair of mighty eyes darting flame at him and a voice as of a god saying: ‘Man, does thou dare to slay Caius Marius?’ (39)

The grotesque

A sprinkling of what must surely be grotesque exaggerations, notably the wildly improbable description of the mass suicides of the Cimbri civilians once their menfolk were defeated

The fugitives were driven back to their entrenchments where the Romans beheld a most tragic spectacle. The women, in black garments, stood at the wagons and slew the fugitives — their husbands or brothers or fathers, then strangled their little children and cast them beneath the wheels of the wagons or the feet of the cattle, and then cut their own throats. It is said that one woman hung dangling from the tip of a wagon-pole with her children tied to either ankle, while the men, for lack of trees, fastened themselves by the neck to the horns of the cattle, or to their legs, then plied the goad, and were dragged or trampled to death as the cattle dashed away. (27)

In their hurry to claim for Plutarch all kinds of proto-modern interests in character and psychology, Rex and others simply ignore the much more prominent traits of primitive superstition and a garish, vulgar fascination with grotesque violence.

Thus Plutarch dwells lovingly on the scenes in Rome once Marius has returned from exile, seizes power along with Cinna, and unleashes a tidal wave of vengeful violence:

Headless trunks thrown into the streets and trampled under foot excited no pity, though everybody trembled and shuddered at the sight. The people were most distressed however, by the wanton licence of the Bardyaei, as they were called, who butchered fathers of families in their houses, outraged their children, raped their wives, and could not be checked in their career of rapine and murder until Cinna and Sertorius, after taking counsel together, fell upon them as they were asleep in their camp, and transfixed them all with javelins. (44)

Gory enough for you?

The ludicrous

And then incidents which are so wildly improbable as to be ludicrous. Take the incident of the faked diarrhoea. Marius fell in with a rabble rousing demagogue who didn’t hesitate to murder his political opponents, Saturninus. Marius attempts to keep the respect of the senate but also stay in with Saturninus, a balancing act which is epitomised one night:

For when the leading men had come to him by night and were trying to incite him against Saturninus, without their knowledge he introduced Saturninus into the house by another door; then, pretending to both parties that he had a diarrhoea, he would run backwards and forwards in the house, now to the nobles and now to Saturninus, trying to irritate and bring them into collision. (30)

2. Plutarch’s Life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138 to 78 BC)

Sulla served as captain of cavalry under Marius in the Jugurthine War. To his bravery was attributed the final negotiations which led to the capture of Jugurtha and Sulla was embittered when Marius received the credit and triumph for it. Sulla was tasked with fighting the Social War (91 to 87 BC) and when Marius, in Rome, managed to manoeuvre Sulla out of leadership of the army set to head off to deal with Mithradates in Turkey, Sulla rejected the senate’s decision, let his men kill the senate’s envoy and marched on Rome.

Why Sulla failed

Rex gives admirably brief, one-page introductions to each of the lives (generally pointing out how Plutarch ignores the profound historical importance of this or that event in order to focus on trivial anecdotes or shallow moralising). Therefore it is Rex who sums up Sulla’s political agenda, once he’d become dictator (82 to 78 BC) and why it failed, more briefly and better than any other account I’ve read.

After marching on Rome to seize power twice, with an intervening period of anarchy and bloodshed under Cinna (87 to 84 BC), Sulla set out to make the republic safe by ensuring the situation which led to the anarchy could never happen again. These he took to be:

  • the ability of the tribunes of the plebs to veto laws suggested by the patricians and senate, which sounds fine in theory, but in practice tribunes were all too often bribed by powerful interests to derail senatorial rule
  • the struggle between senate and equites for control of the courts, which again unravelled into political powerplays
  • the consecutive consulships of overmighty rulers (in the recent past the consecutive consulships of Marius in 107, 104, 103, 102, 101, 100)

So Sulla:

  • abolished the legislative powers of the tribunate and debarred those who held it from higher office
  • restored the courts to full control of the senate
  • revived the lex annalis which set minimum ages to hold each of the magistracies in the so-called cursus honorum and required fixed periods between people holding each post

It was a valiant effort but, as Rex points out, it was blind to the fact that the chief threat to the republic came not from any law or aspect of the constitution but from a reality which transcended them, which was the advent of proconsuls appointed for long periods of time to prosecute distant wars whose armies came to owe more allegiance to them than to the state – the conversion of Roman armies into something closer to private armies answerable to charismatic warlords.

The obvious examples were Marius, Sulla himself, Pompey then Caesar, then Mark Anthony and Octavian and the era of instability and collapse exactly matches the rise of this new phenomenon.

Plutarch’s Sulla

Predictably, Plutarch focuses on gossip and anecdote:

  • Sulla had a famously bad complexion, covered in blotchy spots.
  • Though he came from a patrician family, it was very down at heel and he spent a dissolute young manhood with dancers and actors and cross-dressers and comedians. Throughout his life, strict and stern in public, once he sat down at a banquet he reverted to a monstrously debauched and bohemian character.

And, once again, a blizzard of superstitions, omens and prophecies:

  • A certain man in the retinue of Orobazus, a Chaldaean, after looking Sulla intently in the face, and studying carefully the movements of his mind and body, and investigating his nature according to the principles of his peculiar art, declared that this man must of necessity become the greatest in the world, and that even now the wonder was that he consented not to be first of all men. (6)
  • Sulla himself relates that when he was dispatched with an army to the Social War, a great chasm in the earth opened near Laverna, from which a great quantity of fire burst forth and a bright flame towered up towards the heavens; whereupon the soothsayers declared that a brave man, of rare courage and surpassing appearance, was to take the government in hand and free the city from its present troubles. And Sulla says that he himself was this man, for his golden head of hair gave him a singular appearance, and as for bravery, he was not ashamed to testify in his own behalf, after such great and noble deeds as he had performed.
  • When Sulla had set out for his camp on unfinished business,​ he himself kept at home and contrived that most fatal sedition, which wrought Rome more harm than all her wars together had done, as indeed the heavenly powers foreshadowed to them:
    • for fire broke forth of its own accord from the staves which supported the ensigns, and was with difficulty extinguished
    • and three ravens brought their young forth into the street and devoured them, and then carried the remains back again into their nest
    • and after mice had gnawed consecrated gold in a temple, the keepers caught one of them, a female, in a trap, and in the very trap she brought forth five young ones and ate up three of them
    • but most important of all, out of a cloudless and clear air there rang out the voice of a trumpet, prolonging a shrill and dismal note, so that all were amazed and terrified at its loudness. The Tuscan wise men declared that the prodigy foretokened a change of conditions and the advent of a new age (7)
  • While the senate was busied with the soothsayers about these prodigies, and holding its session in the temple of Bellona, a sparrow came flying in, before the eyes of all, with a grasshopper in its mouth, a part of which it threw down and left there, and then went away with the other part. From this the diviners apprehended a quarrelsome dissension between the landed proprietors and the populace of the city and forum; for the latter is vociferous like a grasshopper, while the former haunt the fields (like the sparrow). (7)
  • After he had offered a sacrifice, Postumius the soothsayer learned what the omens were, and stretching out both hands to Sulla, begged that he might be bound and kept a prisoner until the battle, assuring him that he was willing to undergo the extremest penalty if all things did not speedily come to a good issue for him. (9)
  • It is said, also, that to Sulla himself there appeared in his dreams a goddess whom the Romans learned to worship from the Cappadocians, whether she is Luna, or Minerva, or Bellona. This goddess, as Sulla fancied, stood by his side and put into his hand a thunder-bolt, and naming his enemies one by one, bade him smite them with it; and they were all smitten, and fell, and vanished away. Encouraged by the vision, he told it to his colleague, and at break of day led on towards Rome. (9)
  • Mithridates, who was staying at Pergamum, was visited with many other portents from Heaven, and that a Victory with a crown in her hand, which the Pergamenians were lowering towards him by machinery of some sort, was broken to pieces just as she was about to touch his head, and the crown went tumbling from her hand to the ground in the midst of the theatre, and was shattered, whereat the people shuddered, and Mithridates was greatly dejected. (11)

And so on and very much on. And The Grotesque:

Nearby is Apollonia, and in its vicinity is the Nymphaeum, a sacred precinct, which sends forth in various places from its green dell and meadows, streams of perpetually flowing fire. Here, they say, a satyr was caught asleep, such an one as sculptors and painters represent, and brought to Sulla, where he was asked through many interpreters who he was. And when at last he uttered nothing intelligible, but with difficulty emitted a hoarse cry that was something between the neighing of a horse and the bleating of a goat, Sulla was horrified, and ordered him out of his sight. (27)

Fairy tales

At Fidentia, when Marcus Lucullus, one of Sulla’s commanders, with sixteen cohorts confronted fifty cohorts of the enemy, although he had confidence in the readiness of his soldiers, still, as most of them were without arms, he hesitated to attack. But while he was waiting and deliberating, from the neighbouring plain, which was a meadow, a gentle breeze brought a quantity of flowers and scattered them down on his army; they settled of their own accord and enveloped the shields and helmets of the soldiers, so that to the enemy these appeared to be crowned with garlands. This circumstance made them more eager for the fray, and they joined battle, won the victory, killed eighteen thousand of the enemy, and took their camp. (27)

Fortunate Sulla

Plutarch emphasises the Sulla himself was happy to attribute much of his success to Fortune rather than his own personal merits or achievements. So in the matrix of opinions about what constitutes a Successful Man which the Parallel Lives amount to, Sulla stands at one extreme of the spectrum, a superstitious man who attributed much to Fortune. Hence his own insistence on the agnomen (‘a fourth name occasionally given as an honour to an ancient Roman citizen’) ‘Felix’, superficially meaning ‘happy’ but at a deeper level meaning ‘lucky’ – more than lucky, in the deepest sense of the word, fortune-ate. Fortune rich. Fortune full.

Slaughter in Athens 86 BC

Apart from the civil war and street fighting in Rome, what comes over more vividly from this account than others I’ve read, is the unmitigated slaughter Sulla inflicted on Athens after a prolonged siege in which he had devastated the surrounding territory. ‘There was no counting the slain’. The blood flowed under the city gates (14).

Proscriptions in Rome

The mass murder in Rome of Sulla’s enemies who he included on lists of ‘proscriptions’ brings to mind Stalin sitting up late into the night going through long lists of names, putting a tick or a cross next to who should live or die.

Sulla now busied himself with slaughter, and murders without number or limit filled the city…He also proscribed anyone who harboured and saved a proscribed person, making death the punishment for such humanity, without exception of brother, son, or parents, but offering anyone who slew a proscribed person two talents as a reward for this murderous deed, even though a slave should slay his master, or a son his father. And what seemed the greatest injustice of all, he took away the civil rights from the sons and grandsons of those who had been proscribed, and confiscated the property of all. Moreover, proscriptions were made not only in Rome, but also in every city of Italy, and neither temple of God, nor hearth of hospitality, nor paternal home was free from the stain of bloodshed, but husbands were butchered in the embraces of their wedded wives, and sons in the arms of their mothers. (31)

Mass murder at Praeneste

Meanwhile Marius the younger, at the point of being captured slew himself; and Sulla, coming to Praeneste, at first gave each man there a separate trial before he executed him, but afterwards, since time failed him, gathered them all together in one place — there were twelve thousand of them — and gave orders to slaughter them all. (32)

Metrobius

Plutarch’s life ends where it began, with comments on Sulla’s private behaviour and liking for louche, lowlife, bohemian company. Despite having a series of respectable wives, in the usual Roman fashion, Sulla also:

consorted with actresses, harpists, and theatrical people, drinking with them on couches all day long. For these were the men who had most influence with him now: Roscius the comedian, Sorex the archmime, and Metrobius the impersonator of women, for whom, though past his prime, he continued up to the last to be passionately fond, and made no denial of it.

Mass murderer, sacker of Athens, failed attempter to restore the Republic, and lifelong lover of a female impersonator.

A grisly end

Then comes the kind of moralising conclusion which delighted the ancients and then the Christians, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Plutarch claims that in his final illness Sulla was literally eaten alive by worms.

By this mode of life [his decadent lifestyle] Sulla aggravated a disease which was insignificant in its beginnings, and for a long time he knew not that his bowels were ulcerated. This disease corrupted his whole flesh also, and converted it into worms, so that although many were employed day and night in removing them, what they took away was as nothing compared with the increase upon him, but all his clothing, baths, hand-basins, and food, were infected with that flux of corruption, so violent was its discharge. Therefore he immersed himself many times a day in water to cleanse and scour his person. But it was of no use; for the change gained upon him rapidly, and the swarm of vermin defied all purification. (36)

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Posted by Simon on April 29, 2022

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Cataline’s War by Sallust (42 BC)

Cataline’s War

As far as we know this was the first of Sallust’s historical works, written in 42 BC (maybe). It’s shorter than The Jugurthine War, with 61 brief ‘chapters’, apart from the two longer chapters containing the famous speeches to the Senate of Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger (51 and 52).

Summary

(Chapters 1 to 4) Introductory meditation on the importance of mind and reason in human affairs. Animals only have their bodies but humans have Mind and Reason and so should make the most of them. Sallust combines this insistence on Reason with the claim that human societies have declined: if only they were all and everywhere ruled by virtus or ‘mental excellence’, but in fact:

sloth has usurped the place of industry, and lawlessness and insolence have superseded self-restraint and justice…Thus the sway is always passing to the best man from the hands of his inferior.

Men who merely serve their bodies eat and sleep their way through life, leaving no trace, like cattle. Of ‘wakened’ men, some serve by deeds, some by words, and Sallust says that, of the latter, he considers writing history a particularly eminent achievement of the mind.

Sallust tells us that when he was a young man he was ambitious for public life, only to discover that ‘shamelessness, bribery and rapacity held sway’. But when he quit public life he didn’t want to rusticate but to use his mind. So he resolved to fulfil ‘a cherished purpose’ which worldly ambition had distracted him from, and to write a history of the Roman people, or at least portions of it. He was attracted to the Catiline conspiracy due to the extraordinary nature of the crime. So much for the Introduction.

(5) The character of Lucius Sergius Catilina, know in English as Catiline. From the start he had ‘an evil and depraved nature’. ‘Reckless, cunning, treacherous…violent in his passions.’ His disordered mind ever craved the monstrous, incredible, gigantic.’

But, importantly, it wasn’t his character alone which condemned Catiline – it was the fallen nature of the times which allowed such a character to flourish. This is a kind of dialectical theory: events are formed by a combination of bad individual character and the lax nature of the society which lets it flourish. Catiline is the result of the combination of bad character and ‘the corruption of public morals’.

(6 to 7) A digression on the founding of Rome: Aeneas, Romulus and Remus and then the city’s growth, the doughty quality of its warriors, alliances with other tribes. At first kings ruled wisely, but when corruption (inevitably) crept in and monarchy degenerated into ‘a lawless tyranny’, then the Romans created the system of paired consuls (in 509 BC according to legend). The aim was very consciously to prevent one person from ever having absolute power and the arrogance which goes with it. This freedom bred brave fighting men who competed fiercely with each other to win glory (7).

(8) He makes the point that Athens’ fame is greater than her deeds really warrant because she had educated men to write timeless histories about her achievements.

(9) He gives a laughably idealised view of ‘the good old days’ when upstanding morals, harmony and justice ruled and greed was unknown and the Romans ruled by ‘kindness’. When Romans were ‘lavish in their offerings to the gods, frugal in the home, loyal to their friends’.

(10 to 13) But then Rome grew big and rich, and when she defeated Carthage (in 146 BC), Fortune grew cruel and intervened to confuse her affairs. Hence the lust for money and power, the two roots of all evil.

Finally, when the disease had spread like a deadly plague, the state was changed and a government second to none in equity and excellence became cruel and intolerable.

(11) Sulla set a bad example. All men began to rob and pillage. The army was demoralised by the luxury of the Eastern nations they conquered. They learned to pillage homes and temples.

(12) Riches and greed made them lose their modesty and chasteness. Look at the temples of our forefathers, adorned with piety; compare them with the vast palaces of the modern nobles, overflowing with pillaged loot.

(13) The super-rich of his day (meaning Lucullus and Pompey) have carved waterways through mountains to feed their fishponds and build villas jutting out over the sea. Indulgence of all passions: men who dress as women, women who sell themselves. Gluttony.

(14) This, then, was the corrupt setting in which Catiline flourished. The wantons, gluttons, gamesters and criminals that he attracted. And if he did know anyone honest, they quickly became corrupted by his company.

(15) Catiline had many affairs. Lastly he is thought to have murdered his stepson in order to marry Aurelia Orestilla. Some say it was guilt at this which hastened his conspiracy.

(16) Catiline set up a veritable school of corruption for young men. Finally he conceived the idea of overthrowing the government for two reasons: 1. he was hugely in debt 2. a large number of veterans of Sulla’s wars had burned through their spoils and property and were ready for war. There was no army in Italy, Pompey being away in Syria. So he had motive and opportunity.

(17) From June 64 onwards Catiline sounds out likely co-conspirators. Sallust gives a list. Many said Marcus Crassus was connected, out of his rivalry with Pompey.

(18 to 19) The so-called First Conspiracy of Catiline 66 BC. A number of desperate men coalesced round Gnaeus Piso and a plan to assassinate that year’s consuls and overthrow the Senate. The date for action was set for January, then February, 65 but nothing came of it.

(19) Crassus who knew Gnaeus Piso was a desperate man had him sent as praetor to Hither Spain. In the event Piso was murdered by his own cavalry in Spain, though whether he was cruel and unjust to the locals and his own men, or whether Pompey put them up to it, who knows.

(20) Back to 64 BC and Sallust has Catiline give a (presumably largely fictional) speech to the conspirators. Sallust has him characterising the ruling class of Rome as rich and tyrannical and he and his conspirators as yearning for freedom and himself as a humble servant to be used for their liberation. Demagogic rhetoric.

(21) When they press him to be more specific, Catiline offers his listeners ‘abolition of debts, the proscription of the rich, offices, priesthoods, plunder, and all the other spoils that war and the license of victors can offer’. The most interesting idea is the way he revived memories of Sulla whose second dictatorship was a time of state-sanctioned murdering, plundering and looting.

(22) Sallust reports that people say that Sallust then bound the conspirators to him by passing round ‘bowls of human blood mixed with wine’. This implies the blood came from somewhere so, a human sacrifice (?).

(23) Quintus Curius, a man guilty of many shameful crimes whom the censors​ had expelled from the Senate because of his immorality, boasts to his mistress Flavia about this big important conspiracy he’s involved in, and then Flavia blabs to others. The rumour spreads and motivates many nobles to support Cicero for the consulship (elected in 64 to hold it in 63 BC).

(24) Cicero’s election alarms Catiline who intensifies his efforts: he stockpiles weapons at strategic locations. Men borrow and the few women supporters prostitute themselves to raise money. Catiline plans to win the city slaves to his side then set fire to Rome.

(25) The character of the leading woman accomplice, Sempronia, a gifted, well-educated woman who was immoral and unchaste, ‘had often broken her word, repudiated her debts and been privy to murder.’

(26) Despite all this, Catiline stood for the consulship for the following year, 63. Soon after taking up his consulship (i.e. January 63) Cicero got Quintus Curius to reveal the conspiracy to him. Cicero surrounds himself with a bodyguard. The day of the election comes and Catiline fails to be elected consul, making him all the more desperate.

(27) Catiline sends conspirators to various key locations, plans fires, calls a second conference of conspirators and identifies Cicero as their main obstacle.

(28) Gaius Cornelius, a knight, and Lucius Vargunteius, a senator, offer to pay a formal call on Cicero and then kill him. Curius blabs this plan to Flavia, who tells Cicero, who then makes sure not to be at home to visitors the next morning i.e. the time of the planned assassination visit.

Meanwhile, the Catiline emissary Manlius in Etruria works on various constituencies:

  • the general population, ripe for revolution because of penury and resentment at having lost their lands under Sulla
  • brigands of various nationalities
  • some members of Sulla’s colonies who had been stripped by prodigal living of the last of their great booty

(29) Cicero presents details of the plot before the Senate which takes the extreme step of awarding him extraordinary powers.

(30) Lucius Saenius reads a letter from Faesulae, stating that Gaius Manlius had taken the field with a large force on the twenty-seventh day of October. Rumours of subversive meetings, transportation of arms, and insurrections of slaves at Capua and in Apulia. The Senate sends generals to these locations and offers rewards for information, that gladiators be mustered and a watch kept at key points in Rome.

What all this really brings home is the consequences of not having an independent police force which acts for the good of the state but instead having to rely on the mustering of specific cohorts of troops under ad hoc leaders or generals. Far more unreliable and uncertain.

(31) Am atmosphere of fear and anxiety spreads across Rome. Catiline decides to face it out and comes to the Senate on 3 November when Cicero delivers a brilliant speech against him. Catiline makes a speech declaring his nobility and honesty and slurring Cicero as a low-born immigrant. But he is shouted down by the Senate and yells back that he will put out his own personal fire through a general conflagration.

(32) Catiline sneaks out of the city that night to join Manlius and his forces in Etruria, leaving behind conspirators to recruit more to the cause.

(33) Gaius Manlius sends a delegation from his army to Marcius Rex with a message which Sallust quotes in full, justifying the rebels as simply seeking their own safety and freedom from impositions.

(34) Quintus Marcius replies that the rebels must lay down their arms and put their case to the Senate. Catiline sends letters to nobles claiming that everything was slander by his enemies and he was leaving for exile in Massilia in the best interests of the state.

(35) But he sent a very different letter to Quintus Catulus, which is quoted in full. He claims to be: ‘Maddened by wrongs and slights, since I have been robbed of the fruits of my toil and energy and was unable to attain to a position of honour’ and so taking up arms on behalf of the poor and oppressed everywhere.

(36) Catiline arrives at Manlius’s camp and distributes arms. When it hears this the Senate declares Catiline and Manlius traitors and gives a deadline for the other conspirators to surrender. But none do and Sallust is moved to wonder at the obstinate wickedness of men who wanted to ruin Rome at the height of its peace and plenty, a plague of wickedness.

(37) Sallust reflects that Rome was like a cesspool which attracted the poorest, meanest elements, and this huge throng of the poor were roused by Catiline because they had nothing to lose and longed for change. Again, the insurrection of Sulla is mentioned as a time when poor or mediocre men suddenly saw their fortunes transformed. Poor labourers from the country hoped for better things. And men of the party opposed to the Senate wished for anyone else in power. In other words, there’s quite a list of disaffected groups which Catiline appealed to.

(38) Since the restoration of the tribunes of the plebs powers (Sulla took them away in 81, Pompey restored them in 70 BC) many populist rabble rousers had arisen who promised the people anything in order to get into power. But then Sallust is just as critical of many nobles who defended the Senate but for their own selfish reasons.

(39) Pompey’s restoration had left the rich, the few, with more power – control of the consulship, the provinces, the army and the law courts. Sallust thinks this power might have been destabilised in Catiline’s conflagration allowing a Great Man to take advantage of the situation. He doesn’t name names but probably means either Crassus or Caesar. Throughout the crisis Lentulus worked to gain supporters for the conspiracy from all classes.

(40) Lentulus gets Publius Umbrenus to approach the envoys of the Allobroges, a Gaulish tribe, to see if they will join. When they complain about the unfairness of Roman rule over them, Umbrenus takes them to the house of Decimus Brutus and discloses the conspiracy to them.

(41) The Allobroges ponder whether to join or not but decide not to and inform Quintus Fabius Sanga, their nation’s main patron in Rome, who alerts Cicero. Cicero tells them to feign interest, play along, and try and extract the names of all the conspirators.

(42) There were disturbances in Hither and Further Gaul and at places in Italy, as of bad planning and bad management by the conspirators, and the magistrates arrest many.

(43) The plan is firmed up: when Catiline arrives at Faesulae with his army, Lucius Bestia, tribune of the commons, should convoke an assembly and denounce Cicero which would be the signal for a general uprising: fires were to be set at twelve important points in the city to create confusion; Cethegus was to assassinate Cicero; other assassinations to be carried out; the eldest sons of several noble families to kill their fathers. Then all the supporters to leave the city and join Catiline’s army.

(44) The Allobroges meet again with the conspirators and demand signed proofs of their commitment. They are to leave the city accompanied by Titus Volturcius of Crotona.

(45) Knowing of all this Cicero sent some praetors and their soldiers to arrest the Allobroges and Volturcius at the Milvian Bridge.

(46) Cicero was uncertain how to behave. But he has the signed evidence he needs, now, and had the praetors bring the leading conspirators in Rome to him (being Lentulus, Cethegus, Statilius and Gabinius) and took them to the Temple of Concord where he convoked the Senate. Then he presented before them all the written and verbal evidence.

(47) When Volturcius was offered amnesty he spilled the beans, gave an exact account of the plans and mentioned other senior conspirators. Lentulus tries to deny everything till his letter is read out incriminating him. Ancient Rome not only had no police but no public prison, so the suspects had to be handed over to individual private citizens to be held pending trial.

(48) With the revelation of the plot the commons swing behind Cicero as saviour and execrate the conspirators.

(49) Lucius Tarquinius is arrested on his way to Catiline, brought before the Senate and, once offered a pardon, tells the same story as Volturcius, detailed: the intended fires, the murder of loyal men and the march of the rebels. He also implicated Crassus, who he says sent a message to Catiline that very day. Great discussion of whether this is true, but the Senate declares it a lie, and Sallust himself mentions that he heard Crassus declare it was a libel concocted by Cicero.

(50) Despite their arrest the ringleaders get their freedmen and slaves to scour the streets trying to raise insurrection. The Senate had by now had another session and declared the prisoners guilty, as well as half a dozen other senior nobles. What should be done with them? The consul-elect for the following year, Decimus Junius Silanus, says death. Julius Caesar influences many when he rejects the death penalty and says they just need to be tightly guarded.

(51) Sallust gives what claims to be the full verbatim speech of Caesar to the Senate, by far the longest chapter in the book at 43 lines and a rhetorical set piece. It echoes Sallust’s insistence at the start of the text that man is at his best when he uses pure intellect unclouded by passion and bias. Caesar says passion, fear, revenge must not motivate the Senate’s decision. Men will remember the conspirators’ end more than their malfeasance. Therefore the Senate must act clearheadedly in its own interests. They will be setting a precedent. They must consider how it will appear to aftertimes. Once you start punishing people without due process of law, you set a ball rolling which you can’t control. Caesar, also, invokes the memory of Sulla’s dictatorship and how the very people who welcomed his first few proscriptions found themselves caught up and executed in later ones. (cf the French Revolution.) This is why the Porcian laws had been passed, which exempted Roman citizens from degrading and shameful forms of punishment, such as whipping, scourging, or crucifixion.

Caesar sums up by recommending that the guilty men have their property confiscated and be held in strongholds in free cities, in other words in the nearest thing the Romans had to prisons.

(52) Caesar’s speech is then followed by a similarly long set-piece speech from Marcus Porcius Cato: he says they all know him as a scourge of luxury and decadence. He asks if they are ready to throw away their wealth and security. He introduces the idea that, although they have some of the conspirators in custody, Catiline himself and his army is still at large beyond Rome, in fact there are several armed groups around Italy still capable of attaching the city. If they show themselves soft now that will encourage the remaining conspirators. Therefore, although they had not actually got round to committing any acts of treason, Cato argues that the prisoners should be treated as if they had and executed.

(53) Cato’s argument wins. Senators who had been swayed by Caesar are won over by Cato. The guilty men are sentenced to death.

But then Sallust goes off on an extended digression. He describes how he has often read about and meditated on Roman history and why a small poor town managed to conquer the world. He became convinced it was due to the merit of specific citizens. In his time he has only known two of the first rank, Caesar and Cato. And so now he gives us a comparative portrait of both.

(54) Caesar became great though compassion and generosity, Cato through his stern righteousness. ‘One was a refuge for the unfortunate, the other a scourge for the wicked.’ It is interesting that he dwells on Caesar’s clementia or forgiveness, a quality Caesar was at great pains to promote.

(55) Digression over, we return to the narrative. Immediately following the Senate’s decision, Cicero in person led the guilty men to a dungeon called the Carcer, the so‑called ‘Mamertine Prison’, near the north-western corner of the Roman Forum. Here Lentulus, Cethegus, Statilius, Gabinius, and Caeparius were brought and the tresviri capitales (minor magistrates who had charge of prisons and executions and performed certain police duties) executed them by strangulation / hanging / garroting (the words used vary in different translations).

(56) Meanwhile, in central Italy, Catiline joined his force with Manlius’s to make up a force of two legions, albeit poorly armed. The loyal general Antonius pursues them from one camp to another.

(57) But when news arrived at Cataline’s camp that the chief conspirators had been executed in Rome, many began to desert. Cataline led the remainder north with a view to crossing the Alps. The loyalist Antonius is joined by Quintus Metellus Celer, with three legions. Seeing he is trapped between the enemy army and the mountains, Catiline addresses his men in a set piece exhortation:

(58) He starts by basely accusing Lentulus of cowardice. Then he says they’re trapped between two armies so must fight their way out. Once again Catiline casts himself and them as freedom fighters battling the oppression of the privileged few. There is no escape. They have to fight and sell their lives dear.

(59) The disposition of each army for the battle.

(60) It was a hard fight. Catiline proved himself ‘a valiant soldier and… skilful leader.’ When his centre was broken and he realised he is losing, Catiline plunged into the thick of the fight and was cut down.

(61) It is striking that Sallust’s account began with such an extended passage about the corruption of the times, and the decline of Roman morality, and then lingers on Catiline’s wretched corruption – and yet it ends with a hymn to the bravery of the soldiers on both sides who fought and fell like true men. It’s an incongruent ending.

Thoughts

No police

Any force could only be achieved via soldiers. In other words, the army plays such a prominent role in politics and the history of the Republic because there was no other force, no other source of authority and enforcement on the streets. This explains the extraordinary wrecking impact of the street gangs led by Publius Clodius Pulcher and Titus Annius Milo in the 50s, but it indicates a profound weakness at the centre of the Roman state.

Lack of courts and prisons

Cicero doesn’t know what to do with his defendants and has to convene the Senate to ask their advice. And then the Senate doesn’t know what to do with them, either. Classicists love their subject because of the dignity and sophistication of the people they describe and yet, stepping back, you can’t help thinking that Rome’s civic arrangements were pitifully inadequate to requirements. They were, quite literally, making it up as they went along, and this is part of the explanation for the sense of the ramshackle stumbling from one crisis to another which characterises the last 50 years of the Republic.

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by Simon on April 25, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 25, 2022

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The Jugurthine War by Sallust (41 BC)

The Jugurthine War by Gaius Sallustius Crispus is divided into 114 short numbered sections, generally referred to as ‘chapters’, although most of them are only a page or less in length. Sallust probably wrote it in 41 BC after he had abandoned a career in politics.

Summary

(Chapters 1 to 4) Introduction.

(5 to 6) Jugurtha’s family and Jugurtha’s character. He was the illegitimate nephew of the King of Numidia, Micipsa (ruled 149 to 118 BC). (Numidia consisted of the northern and coastal territory of what is now the modern state of Algeria.)

(8) Jugurtha is seconded to the Roman army of Scipio Aemilianus which is fighting against the Numantians. Jugurtha quickly learns warcraft and becomes popular with the army and Scipio.

(9) Alarmed at Jugurtha’s prowess, King Micipsa decides that, upon his death, he will divide his kingdom between his natural sons Adherbal and Hiempsal, and Jugurtha.

(12) Micipsa duly dies in 118 BC and his kingdom is divided up as he wished, but Jugurtha swiftly moves to have the younger son, Hiempsal, assassinated.

(13) Jugurtha turns to attack Adherbal and the latter flees to Rome to ask for help.

(14) Fearing the Senate will take Adherbal’s side, Jugurtha sends ambassadors to Rome, who confront Adherbal in the Senate-house, where Adherbal makes a speech.

(15 to 16) Bribed by Jugurtha, the Senate decides not to punish him but to divide Numidia between Jugurtha and Adherbal. Jugurtha bribes Roman officials to make sure he gets the more fertile western part of Numidia.

(17 to 19) Digression: a description of the geography and inhabitants of Africa which, as far as I can see, is fanciful and worthless.

(20 to 21) 113 BC Jugurtha invades Adherbal’s part of the kingdom, defeats him and besieges him in Cirta.

(22) Roman deputies arrive to broker a peace deal but Jugurtha ignores them.

(23 to 24) Adherbal’s distress prompts him to write a letter to the Senate.

(25 to 26) Jugurtha ignores a second Roman deputation, this time headed by Marcus Scaurus, a respected member of the aristocracy, takes Cirta and puts Adherdal to death along with Roman merchants who happened to be in the city, thus scandalising Roman public opinion.

(27 to 28) 111 BC The Senate decides Jugurtha has gone far enough, votes for war and sends one of that year’s consuls, Lucius Calpurnius Bestia to warn him.

(29 to 30) Jugurtha bribes Calpurnius and makes a treaty with him, according to which he hands over his war elephants and pays a trivial fine, a treaty which key figures in the Senate, also in receipt of bribes, proceed to ratify.

(29 to 30) But when the treaty is discussed at Rome the tribune Gaius Memmius spearheads popular opposition to it and demands an inquiry.

(33 to 34) Jugurtha is summoned to Rome and realises it is wise to attend. But while there he a) bribes tribunes of the plebs to veto proceedings so he is not called to testify to the Senate; and b) manages to arrange the assassination of his cousin and rival, Massiva. Heavily bribed, the Senate again wanted to look the other way but was forced by popular outcry to order Jugurtha to quit Italy (instead of throwing him in prison).

(35 to 36) 110 BC Spurius Postumius Albinus, successor to Calpurnius as consul, renews the war but lacks energy to drive it home, before returning to Rome and leaving his brother, Aulus Postumius Albinus, in command.

(37 to 38) Aulus allows himself to be lured into the desert where he is defeated, losing half his army. The other half is forced to ‘pass under the yoke’ in a disgraceful sign of submission. Aulus is forced to conclude a dishonourable treaty with Jugurtha.

(39) Outraged, the Senate annuls the treaty and sends back Albinus to continue the war.

(40 to 41) The people demand an inquiry into the conduct of a whole series of nobles who have clearly been bribed by Jugurtha to repeatedly let him go free or signed corrupt treaties with him. Sallust gives a summary of the opposing popular and senatorial factions.

(43 to 44) The Senate finally appoints a capable military commander, Quintus Metellus, who proceeds to retrain and rediscipline the lax army of Africa (109 BC). He picks his senior officers on merit rather than good family connections, and so appoints the former tribune Gaius Marius to a senior command. Sallust gives a brief profile of Marius, the man who was to dominate Roman politics in the years after the war.

(46) Spurning Jugurtha’s bribery and offers of peace, Metellus marches into Numidia.

(47) Metellus establishes a garrison in Vacca and talks some of Jugurtha’s lieutenants into deserting him.

(48 to 54) Metellus’s lieutenant, Rutilius, puts to flight Bomilcar, the general of Jugurtha, but Roman stragglers are picked off by Jugurtha’s forces.

(55) Metellus’s success is celebrated in Rome.

(56) Metellus besieges the town of Zama, Marius repulses Jugurtha at Sicca.

(57 to 60) Metellus’s camp is taken by surprise by Jugurtha’s forces.

(61) Metellus raises the siege and goes into winter quarters. He persuades Bomilcar to come over to the Roman side.

(62) Metellus makes a treaty with Jugurtha, who breaks it.

(63 to 65) Profile of Marius who is ambitious for the consulship. When the patrician Metellus pooh-poohs his ambitions, Marius becomes resentful and schemes against his commander. In the years to come experiences like this will help to define Marius as the leader of a ‘Popular’ or ‘People’s’ party.

(66 to 67) The Vaccians surprise the Roman garrison and kill all the Romans except for Turpilius, the governor.

(68 to 69) Metellus recovers Vacca and puts Turpilius to death for treachery.

(70 to 72) Bomilcar and Nabdalsa conspire against Jugurtha but Jugurtha discovers their plot.

(73) Finally, Metellus gives Marius leave to return to Rome where he successfully campaigns to be elected consul and is given command of the army in Numidia i.e. replacing Metellus.

(74) Meanwhile, Metellus defeats Jugurtha who flees to the town of Thala (108 BC).

(75 to 76) Metellus pursues Jugurtha who abandons Thala, and Metellus takes possession of it.

(77 to 78) Metellus receives a deputation from Leptis who explain its strategic and economic importance.

(79) History of the Philaeni.

(80 to 81) Jugurtha collects an army of Getulians and wins the support of Bocchus I, King of Mauritania and Jugurtha’s father-in-law. The two kings march towards the town of Cirta.

(82 to 83) Upon hearing that Marius has been appointed to replace him, a very irritated Metellus ceases prosecuting the war, reverting to diplomatic efforts to separate King Bocchus from Jugurtha.

(84 to 85) Back in Rome, a description of Marius’s popularity with the people of Rome and scorn for the nobility i.e. a man after Sallust’s heart. Marius gives a very long speech to the people castigating the Optimates (the nobility) as apathetic, resting on the laurels of their ancestors and haughtily despising Marius for being a ‘new man’ i.e. not coming from an ancient and venerable family. Then he sails for Africa.

(86 to 87) 107 BC Marius arrives in Africa, where Metellus hands over command without actually having to meet him.

(87 to 88) Reception of Metellus in Rome and the plans of Marius.

(89 to 91) Marius marches against Capsa and takes it.

(92 to 94) Marius gains a fortress which the Numidians thought impregnable after a junior soldier discovers a secret way up the hill it’s built on.

(95 to 96) Arrival of the quaestor Lucius Cornelius Sulla in Marius’s camp, his character and ambitions. The rivalry between these two men will become the central thread of Roman politics.

(97 to 98) Jugurtha and Bocchus’s massed armies attack Marius and catch him by surprise. The Roman army is forced to form protective circles to survive.

(99) As night falls the Numidians retire to a badly organised camp and at dawn Marius, having rallied the Roman troops, surprises them and routs them with great slaughter.

(100) Marius’s vigilance and discipline.

(101) Marius fights a second battle at Cirta against Jugurtha and Bocchus and gains a second victory over them (106 BC).

(102) Marius receives a deputation from Bocchus and sends Sulla and Manlius to confer with him.

(103) King Bocchus intends to send ambassadors to Rome but before they leave Africa they are set upon and stripped by robbers. They take refuge in the Roman camp and are entertained by Sulla during the absence of Marius.

(104) Bocchus’s ambassadors finally make it to Rome. The answer which they receive from the Senate.

(105 to 107) Bocchus invites Sulla to his camp for a conference.

(108 to 109) Negotiations between Sulla and Bocchus.

(110 to 113) Speech of Bocchus to Sulla and Sulla’s reply. In sum: Bocchus is persuaded to betray Jugurtha.

(114) Jugurtha is invited to Bocchus’s camp expecting another of their comradely meetings. Instead he is arrested and then taken in chains to Rome. All his followers are massacred. For bringing the war to an end Marius is awarded a formal triumph through Rome (104 BC), much to the enduring resentment of Sulla who feels it was he who carried out all the dangerous negotiations.

For his treachery, Bocchus is awarded the western half of Numidia and made ‘a friend of the Roman people’. Jugurtha is dragged through the streets as part of Marius’s triumph and then dies in a Roman prison.

Thoughts

Corruption

Rome fought many wars. Sallust chooses to describe the Jugurthine war because it exemplifies his central theme of the decline and fall of the Roman aristocracy and state. Even at the time it became a running scandal that the war dragged on for such a long time because Jugurtha successfully bribed officials who were sent to negotiate with him and then, when he actually visited Rome, enough senators and tribunes to prevent any serious steps being taken against him.

Marius and Sulla

As this summary shows, the two key figures who were to dominate Roman politics for the next 20 years, down to 78 BC – Marius and Sulla – first served together, got to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and built up grudges against each other, during the protracted campaigns of the Jugurthine War, and Sallust’s digressions to give us portraits of each man are historically important, given the roles they were to go on and play during the civil war between them.

Patchy

Sallust’s descriptions of Africa’s geography and peoples are worthless hearsay and legend. Woodman expresses the general puzzlement of scholars at the fact that we know that Sallust actually served in Africa and yet his description of the territory is terrible. And he served in the army in Africa, and yet the same goes for his descriptions of military manoeuvres and battles, particularly the long drawn-out Battle of the Muthul, which are obscure and confusing.

Autopsy

Incidentally, his brief description of Sallust’s puzzling ignorance of African geography also highlights the odd way with words of the editor and translator of the Penguin edition of Sallust, A.J. Woodman. Woodman ponders whether Sallust had an ‘autoptic’ view of Africa and had performed an ‘autopsy’ (page xxi). I don’t think I’d ever read the word ‘autoptic’ before and never come across ‘autopsy’ referring to geography. On looking them up I learned that ‘autoptic’ means ‘seen with one’s own eyes; belonging to, or connected with, personal observation’ and, in this context, an ‘autopsy’ can mean a personal survey of a place or event.

So Woodman is technically correct to use the words autopsy and autoptic to discuss the extent to which the digression describing the geography of Africa in the Jugurthine War is based on Sallust’s first-hand experience, or was copied from secondary sources.

Odd use of the word, though, isn’t it? And, along with his misleading use of ‘prowess’ to translate virtus (described in the previous blog post) and other oddities, Woodman’s lexical eccentricity eventually drove me from reading the Penguin translation altogether. I read the older translations which are available online.

War crimes

I couldn’t help being disturbed by the Roman war crimes which Sallust describes. The Roman army behaved abominably. For example, at the end of 107 BC Marius made a dangerous desert march to Capsa in the far south where, after the town surrendered, he executed all the inhabitants, men, women and children. This kind of thing happens several times.

Sallust always justifies and explains these tactics, giving the impression they were not standard, that they were part of a deliberate strategy of intimidation or terror. Nonetheless, especially given the time when I was reading Sallust – as Putin’s Russia continued to devastate Ukraine, murdering innumerable innocent civilians – these ancient acts read like inexcusable atrocities and war crimes.

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by Simon on April 22, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Ancient history, History, War
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Posted by Simon on April 22, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/22/the-jugurthine-war-sallust/

Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus 86 to 35 BC)

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (86 to 35 BC), is the first Roman historian by whom a complete work survives – we know the names of earlier Roman historians but none of their works have come down to us. In fact, we have just two works by Sallust, being his account of the Catiline Conspiracy of 63 BC and the Jugurthine War of 112 to 106 BC.

A third work, the Histories, covered the period from 78 (the year the dictator Sulla died) to 66 BC, taking in the war against Sertorius (72), the campaigns of Lucullus against Mithradates VI of Pontus (75 to 66 BC), and the victories of Pompey in the East (66 to 62). Invaluable as this material would be, nothing of the Histories survives except a fragment of book 5, describing the year 67 BC, and scattered quotes in later works.

His two surviving works are relatively brief – Cataline 44 pages and Jugurtha 86 pages long in the 2007 Penguin paperback edition, edited and translated by A.J Woodman. Throw in a detailed introduction, notes, index and a couple of maps, and it adds up to a tidy little 204 page-long paperback.

In his own time and ever since, Sallust’s brief oeuvre has been famous for two things: a terse style much given to archaic vocabulary and phrasing; and his insistent moralising.

Theories of history

The editor and translator, A.J. Woodman echoes critics quoted on Sallust’s Wikipedia article who all emphasise that Sallust relies on a moralising interpretation of history. He attributes the prolonged failure to end the Jugurthine War on the corruption and willingness to be bribed of numerous Roman officials, and the Catiline conspiracy on the same kind of falling away from Rome’s venerable notions of honour and duty among its ruling class.

Critics point out that Sallust therefore misses the deeper social and economic causes of the events he describes, interpretative paradigms which the last couple of hundred years of economic, sociological, historical and political theorising have elaborated to sophisticated heights.

He doesn’t even take into account the clash of personalities, which was obvious enough to contemporaries (for example, Cicero) and should have informed Sallust’s accounts.

I see what the critics mean but I’m inclined to take Sallust as he is – I mean, to read and enjoy Sallust for what he says rather than what he doesn’t. There’s no shortage of modern histories of the Roman Republic which overflow with economic, sociological, Marxist, feminist or other schools of interpretation. Throw in the findings of modern archaeology, the study of contemporary texts from other cultures, numismatics and so on, and modern scholars often know more about ancient events than contemporaries did – and are certainly able to spin more elaborate and sophisticated analyses of them than the ancients could.

It’s always seemed obvious to me that the value of ancient (so-called) histories is not to reach a ‘true’ account of events because a) they are frequently littered with exaggerations (of casualties in battles), made-up speeches and bizarre omens and b) modern editors routinely point out their factual errors and elisions, to the extent of getting the dates of key events or names of people wrong.

I’ve always read them not for a strictly accurate account of what happened so much as to get a sense of the meaning the events they describe had for their contemporaries – not so much what happened, but how they thought about what happened. What it all meant to them. How they made sense of human existence, human actions, big historical events. They did this in ways very different from us, but it’s precisely those differences which shed light both ways, bringing out the subtly but profoundly different world they lived in, and also helping to understand the (sometimes taken for granted) bases of our own worldview.

Historiographical motifs

There is another factor at play, here. Woodman devotes a section of his introduction to explaining the simple fact that ancient historians often didn’t describe what happened because half the time they didn’t know what happened and went by hearsay and folk tradition.

Instead you often find ancient historians describing what should have happened. When two great generals confronted each other in battle, everyone knows the outcome i.e. who won, but the ancient historian garnished his account with a lengthy set speech from each general setting out their aims and motivation, probably calling on the gods to help him.

To take a well known example. Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56 to 120 AD) in his profile of his father-in-law, the general Gnaeus Julius Agricola, describes him leading Roman legions against Caledonian tribes somewhere in Scotland, a long list of places they trudged through and minor skirmishes against tribes whose names Tacitus may or may not have got correct. The campaign leads up to a climactic battle, which, again, he may or may not describe accurately, but either way is a bit boring. What has made the scene live forever is that Tacitus invented a Caledonian chieftain, giving him the name Calgacus and, on the eve of the battle, gives him a great long speech to inspire his troops, which includes vivid accusations against the Romans and their ideology of imperialism. There now! Much more dramatic and satisfying.

Same in Sallust. In the case of the Cataline conspiracy actual speeches were given in the Senate during the days of the crisis (November and December 63 BC) and official records and eye witnesses survived which Sallust could consult. But for the Jugurthine War (112 to 106 BC), by the time Sallust was writing in about 40 BC, all eye witnesses were dead.

To really drill home this point, Woodman quotes Cicero. He summarises Cicero’s description of the central role of what he calls inventio in oratory, particularly in prosecuting a case in the courts. Cicero defines inventio as ‘the devising of matter true or lifelike which will make a case appear convincing‘ (On Invention 1.9, quoted in Woodman’s introduction, page xxiii). Woodman then applies this interpretation to Sallust’s practice, concluding that ‘a significant portion of his narrative was the product of “invention”‘ (p.xxiv).

Sallust wanted his accounts to be powerful, convincing and persuasive – and so it can be shown that he gave protagonists, at key moments, long moralising speeches which a) they probably never gave and b) which echo similar speeches in the works of previous historians (especially the Greek historian, Thucydides, who Sallust borrows from extensively). He is not recording objective history, he is reworking well established literary motifs to make his history more convincing and dramatic.

In other words, Sallust is one of those ancient historians who thought of writing history more as an art form than as an objective attempt to record ‘the truth’.

Moralising

This brings us to Sallust’s moralising. In a nutshell, Sallust took the entirely traditional view that Rome had declined from the former greatness of its glorious past and that the age he lived in was uniquely corrupt, depraved and fallen, a very, very common view of human existence, shared throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages and among pub bores down to the present day.

Like his contemporaries, Sallust had been buffeted by the chaos of the 50s (which happened to be the years when he held political office – quaestor in 55, plebeian tribune in 52, expelled from the Senate by Appius Claudius Pulcher in 50 BC).

With the coming of civil war in 49 Sallust opted, wisely as it turned out, to support Caesar (unlike Cicero who made the mistake of backing Pompey). In fact, in 46 BC Sallust served as a praetor and accompanied Caesar on his African campaign, so he was significantly more than an armchair supporter and actively involved in Caesarian campaigning.

Nonetheless, in the absence of modern sociological theories of historical causation, Sallust’s view of history is cast entirely in terms of personal morality. For Sallust history consists of, and is entirely driven by, the moral or immoral behaviour of great men. His three works can be threaded on this single principle:

  1. The pitiful failure of Rome to end the Jugurthine war was caused by – and symptomatic of – the increasingly venal, selfish and amoral Roman nobles and officials of his day.
  2. The Catiline Conspiracy represented the complete abandonment of the Roman ideals of loyalty, duty and devotion to the state in the shape of the vile traitor Catiline.
  3. The preface to the Histories repeats the accusation of personal irresponsibility, greed and corruption against the Roman nobles, taking an even more pessimistic view of Tome’s moral collapse than the two monographs.

This approach to history was widely shared in the ancient world. The idea was not to present a definitive ‘truth’ about events, but to present them in such a way as to instruct the present. Rather than invoke impersonal forces such as economic or social developments, a historian like Sallust is presenting the good or bad behaviour of high profile individuals from the past as lessons in morality for the present. The aim of this kind of history is to make us behave better, and if that requires colouring and dramatising events, well so be it.

Translating ‘virtus’

By contrast with the decline and fall which he sees everywhere, Sallust posits a quality which stands as polar opposite to the corruption of the Roman ruling class and which he calls virtus. Vir is the Latin for ‘man’ (hence ‘virile’ meaning ‘manly’) and therefore virtus describes the qualities and attributes of an ideal (Roman) man (loyalty, devotion to family, duty to the state, military ability and so on).

Unhappily, in my view, Woodman translates this key word, virtus, as ‘prowess’. The dictionary definition of ‘prowess’ is ‘skill or expertise in a particular activity or field,’ so I can see what he’s driving at, but I still think it’s too narrow? ‘Prowess’ by itself doesn’t immediately convey all the attributes of the ideal man in the way virtus obviously does for Sallust. Maybe it’s one of those instances in making a translation where leaving the word in the original language might have been best, because its frequent repetition would have allowed the reader to build up multiple meanings accrued from its various contexts. Slowly the reader would have been taught by the text what Sallust’s multiple uses of virtus mean to him.

It’s worth mentioning all this because the word and concept virtus occurs on virtually every page of the Jugurthine War, sometimes multiple times per page. It is an absolutely central theme in Sallust’s discourse, so the reader is reminded several times a page of the shortcomings of Woodman’s preferred term of ‘prowess’.

Woodman makes several other odd lexical decisions which undermine trust in his translation. Sallust repeatedly refers to the lack of action or energy with which the first Roman commanders prosecuted the war against Jugurtha. Woodman translates this quality as ‘apathy’ which, to me, conveys a completely different meaning; someone who is apathetic doesn’t care about anything, whereas someone who is inactive or is guilty of inaction is capable of more but is making a conscious decision not to act, and so is reprehensible. That’s much closer to the sense of what Sallust means.

Another peculiar translation choice is Woodman’s repeated use of the word ‘muscle’, the application of ‘muscle’, the use of ‘muscle’ in political or military situations, which makes his text sound like an American book about the mafia. I’d guess a better or more dignified translation would be ‘might’ or ‘manpower’.

In a nutshell, although I enjoyed Sallust, I came to dislike and distrust Woodman’s translation.

Mind versus body

Both Jugurtha and Catiline open with general remarks about human nature and, above all, how humans are separate from all other species by virtue of having mind, by the ability to think and reason. Here’s the opening of Jugurtha (in the 1896 translation by the Reverend J.S. Watson which is available online and doesn’t use ‘prowess’ to translate virtus):

The ruler and director of the life of man is the mind, which, when it pursues glory in the path of true merit [virtus], is sufficiently powerful, efficient, and worthy of honour, and needs no assistance from fortune, who can neither bestow integrity, industry, or other good qualities, nor can take them away. But if the mind, ensnared by corrupt passions, abandons itself to indolence and sensuality, when it has indulged for a season in pernicious gratifications, and when bodily strength, time, and mental vigour, have been wasted in sloth, the infirmity of nature is accused, and those who are themselves in fault impute their delinquency to circumstances.

If man, however, had as much regard for worthy objects, as he has spirit in the pursuit of what is useless, unprofitable, and even perilous, he would not be governed by circumstances more than he would govern them, and would attain to a point of greatness, at which, instead of being mortal, he would be immortalised by glory. (From the 1896 translation by the Reverend J.S. Watson)

The Catiline also opens with an extended passage explaining how humanity’s possession of reason behoves us to use it. Woodman here again uses ‘prowess’ in a dubious way whereas the Loeb Classical Library translation of 1921 (which can be found on the excellent LacusCurtius website) translates virtus as ‘mental excellence’. Where Woodman has:

The glory of riches and appearance is fleeting and fragile, but to have prowess is something distinguished and everlasting.

The Loeb edition has:

For the renown which riches or beauty confer is fleeting and frail; mental excellence is a splendid and lasting possession.

Which seems to me both more precise and more impressive. Or again, Woodman:

Ploughing, sailing and building are all dependent on prowess.

Loeb:

Success in agriculture, navigation, and architecture depends invariably upon mental excellence.

Woodman’s hangup with the word ‘prowess’, in my opinion, distort Sallust’s meaning on every page. Also, as a general rule. Woodman’s phrasing of English is worse. Woodman:

His eloquence was adequate, scant his wisdom. (5)

Loeb:

He possessed a certain amount of eloquence, but little discretion.

Which is a hundred times better – clearer, more vivid, more precise and also, paradoxically, more modern. ‘Scant his wisdom’ feels Elizabethan. Despite being a hundred years old the Loeb version is much clearer and more attractive and enjoyable, as prose than Woodman which is why I gave up reading the Penguin translation and read both books online.

After Carthage

One last point. Like many later Romans, Sallust thought the collapse in Roman honour, integrity etc set in at one very particular moment – after Carthage was conquered in 146 BC and Rome faced no more great enemies:

Before the destruction of Carthage, the senate and people managed the affairs of the republic with mutual moderation and forbearance; there were no contests among the citizens for honour or ascendency but the dread of an enemy kept the state in order. When that fear, however, was removed from their minds, licentiousness and pride – evils which prosperity loves to foster, –immediately began to prevail and thus peace, which they had so eagerly desired in adversity, proved, when they had obtained it, more grievous and fatal than adversity itself.

The patricians carried their authority, and the people their liberty, to excess; every man took, snatched, and seized what he could. There was a complete division into two factions, and the republic was torn in pieces between them.

Yet the nobility still maintained an ascendency by conspiring together for the strength of the people, being disunited and dispersed among a multitude, was less able to exert itself. Things were accordingly directed, both at home and in the field, by the will of a small number of men, at whose disposal were the treasury, the provinces, offices, honours, and triumphs while the people were oppressed with military service and with poverty, and the generals divided the spoils of war with a few of their friends. The parents and children of the soldiers, meantime, if they chanced to dwell near a powerful neighbour, were driven from their homes.

Thus avarice, leagued with power, disturbed, violated, and wasted every thing, without moderation or restraint, disregarding alike reason and religion and rushing headlong, as it were, to its own destruction. For whenever any arose among the nobility who preferred true glory to unjust power the state was immediately in a tumult and civil discord spread with as much disturbance as attends a convulsion of the earth. (Watson translation)

2,000 years later, many of the contemporary historians I’m reading, despite their use of much more sophisticated theories of history and society, and economic and social evidence, broadly agree. 146 BC, the year when Rome destroyed Carthage in the West and Corinth in the East (thus decisively taking control of all Greece) was the turning point. On this, a soldier who served under Caesar over 2,000 years ago and the most up-to-date scholar in a Cambridge college, agree.

Summary

To summarise, then: Sallust makes up most of his speeches, and maybe even some of the events he describes, in order to:

  • make his account more powerful and convincing
  • further his worldview or ideology – his scathing criticism of Rome’s nobles and senatorial class, his lament at the decline of Rome’s morality and behaviour
  • all with a view of instructing his readers and encouraging them, by showing the bad behaviour of people in the past, to behave better in the future

Roman reviews

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by Simon on April 20, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 20, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/20/sallust/

Aulularia (The Pot of Gold) by Plautus (c.200 BC)

Aulularia or the Pot of Gold

Aulularia literally means little pot but this play’s title is most often translated into English as ‘Pot of Gold’. It’s a classic ‘new comedy’ in that it is entirely domestic in focus and revolves around an obstructive father blocking a happy marriage of the younger generation although, as you’ll see, the focus is really on the psychological problems of the father, namely his monomaniacal miserliness, rather than his blocking tactics.

All the other characters are really incidental to milking the comic potential of this one obsessive old man. Thus the young ‘hero’ only appears three times and his daughter, Phaedria, the love interest, never appears at all, we just hear one line of her from inside Euclio’s house as she cries out in labour, something I was surprised by in this play but, once I came to read the same event occurring in other Plautus plays and even in plays by Terence, I came to realise was a stock convention.

From a translation/editorial point of view the most notable thing about this edition is that the editor, E.F. Watling, himself wrote i.e. invented, the final quarter of the play, which is missing from all manuscripts.

The plot

Prologue by Lar familiaris

Euclio is an old man and miser. His house is protected by a household god, Lar Familiaris, who knew his grandfather and father. This household god gives a prologue in which he explains that the grandfather was a miser who buried a pot of gold in the house. His son inherited the house but was mean and tight-fisted so the household god didn’t reveal his secret to him. When he died his son inherited, the current owner of the house, Euclio. He also is a tightwad, but his grown up daughter, Phaedria, is lovely to the god and brings offerings to his shrine almost every day and so the spirit has just revealed the pot of gold to Euclio solely so that the latter has a dowry with which his daughter can be married off.

For good measure, the household god tells us that she is already in love with the stereotypical handsome young man, Lyconides, that in fact they’ve slept together already. The god’s plan is for the old neighbour, the bachelor Megadorus, to propose marriage to Euclio, which will put the young man, Lyconides’s proposal in a favourable light and make it more likely to be accepted.

But in the short term the problem is that the discovery of a stash of gold in his house, far from delighting Euclio, has turned him into an over-sensitive, paranoid bundle of nerves, petrified that other people will discover it, steal it, are talking about it and conspiring behind his back. It is, he tells us, driving him off his head with worry (p.15).

Introducing Euclio

Which explains why the first scene opens with Euclio barging his elderly female slave Staphyla into the street and accusing her of spying on him. He threatens to beat her, send her to the gallows or poke her eyes out (!). She for her part is bewildered by his recent irrational tempers, which will make it all the harder to reveal to him that his daughter is pregnant!

Anyway, Euclio has to hustle off because the head of his ward is distributing a donation (no footnote to explain this, or any other historical references). Euclio is paranoid that if he doesn’t go along to claim his share everyone will realise he is rich, so he scuttles off.

Euclio’s neighbour Megadorus

The set consists of two houses next to each other. Out the front door of the other one emerges Euclio’s neighbour Megadorus being pushed by his sister Eunomia. Megadorus is a genial old confirmed bachelor. However, Eunomia gives him a hard time telling him it’s about time he got married. Megadorus nearly shrieks with horror and they argue. Finally, Megadorus says his sister can stop nagging him because, OK, yes, he will get married and he has his eye on someone – the beautiful daughter of his next door neighbour Euclio. Eunomia grudgingly accepts this and goes back inside.

At this moment along comes Euclio on the way back from his meeting and Megadorus politely greets him and starts chatting. But Euclio is convinced he’s only doing so because he’s heard about the pot of gold or is fishing for it and rudely bustles into his house to check the pot is still there.

Megadorus asks to marry Euclio’s daughter

He returns somewhat reassured, the conversation resumes and Megadorus makes his pitch, asking if he may have Euclio’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Ever paranoid, Euclio is convinced Megadorus, from a well off, high status family, is mocking him. Megadorus is politely trying to reassure him when Euclio hears the clink of a spade and breaks off to go running back into his house, convinced burglars are digging up and stealing the pot of gold.

When Euclio returns for a second time Megadorus reassures him that one of his men is digging in his garden, that must be what he heard. Anyway, does he agree to let him marry his daughter? Euclio does, but on the clear understanding that he is a poor man and so she comes with no dowry. Yes, yes, fine, says Megadorus, and they shake on it. And how about the ceremony? Can it be held later today? Certainly replies Euclio, setting up what will become the main setting or event of the second half, the preparations for a wedding party.

Strobilus and the cooks

We cut to a scene with Megadorus’s steward, Strobilus, who has been to market and returned with all the necessaries for a big feast, including live sheep, some flute-girls (Phrygia and Eleusium) and a couple of argumentative cooks, Anthrax (!) and Congrio. Strobilus has been ordered to split them up, assigning some to Euclio’s house to prepare the wedding feast, so he takes them round, knocks on the door and gets Euclio’s ageing serving woman Staphyla to accept them

Euclio comes home and, finding the door open and people’s voices inside immediately jumps to the conclusion that he’s being robbed. So he rushes inside and starts battering the cook and his assistants with a plank of wood. They all run out shouting, the cook Congrio running down into the audience, asking what the hell Euclio is doing while Euclio stands on stage shouting down at him that he’s a liar and a thief.

He nips back inside and re-emerges with the pot of gold under his cloak. Now he’s holding it he feels more confident and yells at the cook and his assistants to go back into his house and finish their work, which they grumblingly do.

Megadorus on the evils of dowries

Enter Megadorus who delivers an extended soliloquy about the evils of dowries, how a wife that comes with a big dowry expects her husband to treat her and lavish her with services from every kind of women’s parasite, the best clothes, make-up etc. No, there should be a national reform, dowries should be abolished, women should be married with no money so that they are entirely at the mercy and under the thumb of their husbands! (p.30).

Euclio thinks Megadorus must be after his gold

Euclio intrudes on this soliloquy but when Megadorus makes an ambiguous remark about his good fortune Euclio in his paranoia thinks he’s referring to the pot which Euclio is that moment holding under his cloak and becomes rude and angry. But I am sending you a lamb for the feast and cooks and flute girls and a casket of wine, says Megadorus – but Euclio ungratefully criticises each of these items. When Megadorus good humouredly says they’ll get rolling drunk tonight, Euclio in an aside tells the audience Megadorus wants him dead drunk so he can sniff out his gold and steal it. The play really should have been titled The Paranoid.

Well, Megadorus refuses to be made angry and goes into his house, leaving Euclio to tell us that he is going to stash his pot of gold in a shrine which has been onstage all this time, a shrine to Fide, the god of faithfulness. He goes into this little building.

Enter the canny slave

Enter the slave of Lyconides. Lyconides is the handsome son of Eunomia, Megadorus’s sister, making him Megadorus’s nephew. The slave is never given a name. He enters now and gives a little speech about how a good slave is always looking out for his master, anticipating h is needs, and heading off problems before they develop. Lyconides has just heard that his beloved Phaedria is contracted to be married to Megadorus and so has sent the slave to spy out the lie of the land and he takes a seat by on one side of the shrine of Good Faith.

At which point Euclio emerges by the other door from the shrine and gives a little speech explaining that he’s deposited his pot of gold in the shrine where it will be safe, then he heads off for his house. The slave overheard all this. ‘Well, well, well, a pot of gold, eh?’ So he goes into the shrine to find it.

Euclio and the slave fight

But at that moment Euclio comes running back, spooked by a raven which croaked on his left side, a bad omen. He runs into the shrine and of course discovers the slave who he sets about beating and hitting and accusing of being a thief, dragging him out of the shrine and onto the stage, where he fires accusations at him and thoroughly searches under his cloak and under his shirt. But the slave doesn’t actually have the pot, finally extricates himself from Euclio’s clutches and goes off cursing him.

Euclio emerges with the pot of gold and decides he’s going to bury it in a lonely grove of Silvanus outside the walls, and he sets off. The slave overheard this and rejoices, saying he’ll hide, watch where Euclio buries it, then steal it. It’ll serve him right for beating him!

Lyconides and his aunt Eunomia

Enter the young lover Lyconides talking with his mother Eunomia and telling her how much he loves Phaedria. At that moment they both her Phaedria shouting from inside Euclio’s house in her labour pains. She is giving birth! (This is very unlike the traditional comedy idea of the sweet virginal young maiden.) Lyconides begs his other to talk to her brother, Lyconides’ uncle, Megadorus, and see if he can be persuaded not to marry Phaedria after all. Eunomia agrees, and goes into Megadorus’s house to talk to him.

The slave has the pot of gold

Enter the slave bouncing with glee because he did, indeed, follow Euclio, watch him bury his pot of gold and depart, and then stole it. He is holding it now! He hears Euclio approaching and runs off.

Enter Euclio in the utmost misery, out of his mind with unhappiness. He went back to where he’d buried the pot and, of course, discovered it gone. Now he’s run onstage hysterical, and accuses everyone of stealing it, with a lot of fourth wall-breaking interaction with the audience, asking if they’ve stolen it or know who’s stolen it, and where it’s gone etc?

Lyconides asks to marry Euclio’s daughter

At this moment young Lyconides exists his uncle’s house and bumps into Euclio and there is a classic comic misunderstanding. Lyconides mistakenly thinks that Euclio is in such a state because he has discovered his daughter is having a baby, whereas he is of course, distraught about losing the pot of gold.

So there’s a page of comic verbal misunderstanding where Lyconides abjectly apologies for taking what is ‘his’ (Euclio’s) and laying his hands on ‘his property’ and there’s no excuse except he was drunk, and so on – with Lyconides referring to getting drunk and sleeping with Euclio’s daughter while Euclio thinks he’s referring to his gold!

The misunderstanding comes to an end when Euclio demands his property back and Lyconides, of course, can’t give back the girl’s virginity. Now Lyconides announces the startling news that he has persuaded his uncle not to marry Phaedria but to let him, Lyconides, marry her instead. The clinching argument being, of course, that she just happens to be having Lyconides’ baby right now!

Euclio is appalled, and further appalled to learn he will be attending the wedding as a grandfather as Phaedria is giving birth just about now. So off he goes back into his house.

The slave tells Lyconides he has the pot of gold

At which point the slave enters, very pleased with himself. He announces to Lyconides that he’s found a four-pound pot full of gold and stashed it back at their place and – now can he have his freedom?

(It’s worth stopping to reflect how many times slaves do this in Plautus, do a good deed for their masters, discover a fortune or secure the virgo for him – and immediately request their freedom. Did the millions of slaves in the ancient world live in hope of doing the one good deed which persuades their master to free them? Or is this entirely a stock situation and standard sentiment in comic plays – the slave who’s always banging on about being set free?)

Anyway, Lyconides rudely rejects the suggestion at which point the slave abruptly changes his tune and says he was just joking. Lyconides orders him to get the bloody pot of gold but his slave leaps out of his reach and runs off.

Watling’s reconstruction

At this point the original manuscript breaks off and the last eight pages, about a quarter of the Penguin text, has been ‘reconstructed’ by Watling. In his introduction he explains that manuscripts of plays by Plautus and other authors had ‘arguments’ added by later Roman editors, which summarised the entire plot. From these we know that Euclio recovered his money and made a present of it to his daughter and future son-in-law. On that slender basis Watling has concocted his own final scenes. It means we can’t use anything in these final 8 pages as evidence.

Watling’s reconstruction is much more lucid and logical than the plays often are. Thus in his next scene Megadorus encounters Lyconides and, instead of stumbling into even more convoluted complications, they both simply explain the situation to each other, namely: Megadorus has neatly got out of marrying Phaedria, which he was only doing to please his pushy sister, and Lyconides has gotten Euclio to agree to him, Lyconides, marrying her. So on the face of it the plot is resolved.

The pair cook up a resolution which is more balanced and elegant than those of Plautus’s actual plays. When Lyconides says he’s a shrewd idea his slave has stolen Euclio’s pot of god, Megadorus explains there’s a way that one simple pot can produce great happiness for three people: if Lyconides gets it back off his slave he can a) set his slave free for his good work, b) restore it to Euclio who will be delighted, c) it can be used as a dowry to accompany Phaedria and d) all this gets Megadorus off the hook of getting married which is the last thing he wants to do!

Lyconides runs off to find his slave, leaving Megadorus onstage as Euclio emerges from his house, chucking out all the cooks and their kit and yelling at them that the wedding’s off! He tells Megadorus that he and his family have made this the worst day of his life and goes on to accuse him of stealing his pot. Megadorus calmly demurs, saying it wasn’t him but he thinks he knows who did steal it.

And there is a comic quibble as Euclio turns to tell the cooks to finish dousing the fires, pack up and leave, upon which Megadorus immediately countermands his orders, and tells the cooks to go back into Euclio’s house and finish preparing the wedding feast – leaving Euclio muttering and grumbling that he is no longer even master in his own house!

But at that moment Lyconides enters with his slave and carrying the famous pot of gold. Euclio doesn’t see it, just turns his back and refuses to speak to Lyconides. So the latter hands the pot of gold to his uncle and asks Megadorus to present it to Euclio. He persuades Euclio to turn back to him and hands it over. Euclio is, of couse, ecstatic! He goes to thank Lyconides but Lyconides says it was actually his slave who found it and wished it returned (we know this isn’t true, but it sounds good) and that’s why, Lyconides declares, he has set his slave free!

There’s some comic business when Euclio recognises the slave as the lad who was hanging about the shrine of Good Faith and who he in fact beat up not so long ago. The slave is on the verge of telling the truth about how he followed Euclio, stole his pot of gold and very much didn’t want to give it back, but Lyconides nudges him and the slave remembers he’s only just been given his freedom and falls in line with the official story.

In a comic touch Euclio fulsomely thanks him for his honesty and, after poking around in the pot, gives him the smallest possible coin as a reward.

Lyconides then tries to move the conversation onto the topic of the marriage and suddenly, abruptly, Euclio hands him the pot. He has a charged little speech in which he declares how unexpectedly coming into a fortune has brought him nothing but misery. He’s been on tenterhooks of fear and anxiety every since it was discovered. Now he gladly hands it over to Lyconides as dowry for his daughter, saying: ‘Spend it wisely, my boy’. And now, for the first time in ages, he will be able to sleep soundly at night.

With that they turn to go into Euclio’s house to celebrate the wedding feast, till Lyconides nudges his uncle, asking hasn’t he forgotten something. Oh yes – Megadorus turns to address the audience, tells them he would gladly invite them to the feast but there isn’t quite enough for 600, so he merely wishes them good feasting once they get home and for their thanks and applause.

Thoughts

Greed

Well the soul-corrupting effect of greed is obviously the main theme, depriving the miser of sleep, making him over-sensitive to every sound and, above all, ruining his relationships with his fellow men, exemplified in the appalling way he treats his old housekeeper, Staphyla, the cooks, his neighbour, everyone. Greed isn’t just a personal failing, it is a socially destructive vice.

Freedom-wanting slave

Next and most striking for me is the role of slaves in all these plays, the way they all soliloquise to the audience about wanting their freedom, with some even achieving freedom as a reward for good deeds. Was real life like this? Were slaves always whining about wanting to be set free?

Invisible women

It is striking that the ‘love interest’ of the play, Euclio’s daughter Phaedria, doesn’t even appear onstage, though she does have the grand total of one line to cry out as she’s giving birth.

It would be easy to take a feminist view and write that women, young women in particular, are treated like commodities to be traded among the men. This is true as far as it goes, but is arguably only a sub-set of the larger truth which is that everyone is treated like a commodity by the author, pushed and positioned by the plot, often into very unlikely behaviour, and dropping out of sight once they’ve served their purpose, solely at the service of the plot and to get a laugh.

Improbabilities

In fact the silent woman issue is overshadowed by the huge improbability that Euclio lives with his adult daughter and has failed to notice that she is heavily pregnant. Compounded by the wild idea that she gives birth during the play itself and yet this a) doesn’t interfere with the smooth running of the plot, which carries on regardless and b) doesn’t interfere with the attitudes of Megadorus or Lyconides. I.e. his lover has just given birth to his child but he is utterly indifferent to the fact and more concerned with tying up the plotline around the pot of gold.

All the characters are mechanical functions of the plot which is itself a machine designed to elicit laughs.

In his introduction Watling says all this is excused in an actual production of the play by what he calls ‘optique du theatre’, a phrase I hadn’t read before and apparently means that logical holes in a plot are obscured by the immediate impact of scenes on stage. Later he refers to this as Plautus’s impressionistic technique whereby any kind of event, speech or joke is exploited for and justified by its immediate effect, regardless of logical inconsistencies.

Therefore the invisible woman Phaedria crying out in childbirth has no subtle implications. It is just used to intensify that particular moment onstage, to emphasise the housekeeper Staphyla’s momentary panic about what to do. Once that moment and that scene is over the entire issue of giving birth and the existence of a baby are simply forgotten in the headlong momentum of the performance.

The dowry

But in regard to women, another striking element is the important of the dowry. Living in a dowry-free society it’s almost more difficult for me to understand the concept that when a young woman got married she had to be accompanied by a large cash sum, than slavery. The notion that a woman can only be married if she is accompanied by a cash lump sum and that, if she can’t, it is a great shame on her, her father and the entire family (as in this play and also in Trinummus) comes from a world beyond my comprehension.

Ubiquitous and yet very casual slavery, and the way young women are treated like commodities and must be accompanied in marriage by a dowry – these are two elements which bring me up short every time they feature in a Plautus play.

By Hercules!

Characters swear by Hercules on pages 14, 21, 23, 28, 38 and 42, although they do invoke other deities, too, mainly Jupiter.

But Plautus wasn’t alone. From what I’ve read, Hercules was a dominating cultural presence all round the Roman world. Hercules is also the only deity invoked in Plutarch’s Life of Marius:

When [Jugurtha] had been thrust down naked into the dungeon pit, in utter bewilderment and with a grin on his lips he said: “Hercules! How cold this Roman bath is!” (Marius 12)

In Sallust’s Jugurthine War Hercules is said to have led an army in Spain (18) and also to have founded the Numidian city of Capsa (89).

Hercules’ ubiquitous presence around the Mediterranean is explored and explained at length in Richard Miles’s history of Carthage.

Moliere

Like all Plautus’s plays Aulularia was translated and/or copied by numerous other writers over the millennia. The most famous reincarnation of the miser Euclio is the miser Harpagon in the 17th century French playwright Molière’s 1668 version of the story, L’Avare (which is simply French for The Miser).

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on March 21, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Comedy, Play, Slavery, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on March 21, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/21/aulularia-the-pot-of-gold-plautus/

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) 4. Republican timeline

This is a timeline of the Roman Republic, cobbled together from various sources with some details added from Mary Beard’s history of Rome, SPQR.

As you can see, it consists almost entirely of wars because Rome was one of the most aggressive and relentlessly militaristic states in the ancient world, which is the basic reason for its eventual world domination. And when, by about 80 BC, they’d run out of people to conquer, they started fighting each other.

Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life and Roman writers organised the history of this period…around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day.

…the Roman tradition [viewed] war as the structuring principle of history…

The Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life…somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year…(SPQR, pages 176 to 177)

What this list – far from complete and omitting many battles – indicates is the unremittingly violent, warlike environment Rome inhabited, and the relentlessness of its armies and leaders who, no matter how many times they lost battles – and they lost a lot more than you’d expect – always found new men and new resources and came back harder.

The early legendary material is well covered in Mary Beard’s book and the main wars are at least mentioned. But she gives very superficial, if any, explanations of most of the wars with hardly anything about strategies and campaigns, and nothing at all about specific battles, even the most famous (Cannae, Carrhae, Pharsalus, Actium). I had to look up the detail of all of them online.

Again and again it struck me as odd that Mary Beard has made it her life’s work to study a society whose values and history, whose militarism, violence, aggression, patriarchal sexism and toxic masculinity she is so obviously out of sympathy with.

This is one reason why, as a disapproving feminist, her account of the Republic is so patchy and episodic given that the Republic’s history is, on one level, a long list of wars and battles and setbacks and conquests.

Another reason is that the men in charge in Rome changed on an annual basis as new consuls were elected and held power for just one year. Compared to the late republic and imperial era when successful generals held power, and carried out military strategy for years, this makes the wars of the Republic even more complicated to record and remember.

As a historian I can see that you face a choice between going into each war in enough detail to make it strategically and militarily understandable – in which case you will have written an incredibly detailed and very long military history of Rome. Or doing what Beard does, which is write a kind of thematic social and political history of Rome (with lots of archaeology thrown in) which only dips into the wars briefly, fleetingly, when they help you to demonstrate a particular point about the evolution of Roman society and politics.

I can see why, for practical and editorial reasons she’s taken the latter route but still, Rome without the wars – numerous and confusing though they are – is a bit like Hamlet without the prince.

Timeline

8th century BC

753 BC: The legendary founding date of Rome.

750?: Rape of the Sabine women. Plenty of young men were flocking to his new settlement, but Romulus needed women to breed. He approached local tribes for brides but was turned down. Eventually he invited a group from a local tribe, the Sabines to a feast and, at an arranged signal, young Roman men started carrying the marriageable away. This led to war but then to a notable event. As the two sides lined up to fight the Sabine women intervened between them pleading for peace. The men put down their weapons and made peace, Romulus agreeing to share his kingship of Rome with the Sabine leader, Titus Tatius. So the abduction is important – but so is the peacemaking ability of the women.

The French painter Jacques-Louis David chooses to depict ‘The Intervention of the Sabine Women’ between their avenging fathers and brothers on one side, and their new Roman husbands on the other, rather than the more famous ‘rape’, in this painting from 1799.

753 to 510: Seven kings The quarter-millennium rule of the seven legendary kings of Rome. Some traditions mention other sub-kings who ruled in gaps between the big seven, and even Livy’s traditionalist account emphasises that the kingship didn’t simply progress by primogeniture i.e. to the eldest son, but was sometimes elected or chosen by the people.

But as Beard explains, modern archaeology suggests the traditional tale of a quarter millennium of legendary kings was used to glamorise and cover what, in reality, probably amounted to the slow coalescing of small communities of herders and cattle farmers led by local chieftains.

6th century BC

534 to 510: Reign of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, last king of Rome. Tarquin was expelled after the people revolt and overthrow him, traditionally said to have been caused by one of his privileged sons raping a worthy Roman matron, Lucretia, at dagger point.

509: Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (literally ‘Jupiter the Best and Greatest’) also known as the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus because it was built on the Capitoline Hill. Dedicated to the Capitoline Triad consisting of Jupiter and his companion deities, Juno and Minerva, it was the oldest and most prestigious temple in Rome till it burned down in 83 BC during Sulla’s violent occupation of Rome. It became the traditional place for victorious generals to place trophies. Also lost in this fire were the Sibylline Books, a collection of oracles in Greek hexameters, that were purchased from a sibyl or prophetess by the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, and were consulted at moments of crisis through the history of the Republic and the Empire.

5th century BC

495: After losing a prolonged struggle to regain his throne, Tarquinius Superbus, last king of Rome, dies in exile at Cumae.

484: The first temple of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) is dedicated in Rome’s Forum Romanum by Aulus Postumius following his victory over the Latins (the tribe who occupied the county surrounding Rome) at the Battle of Lake Regillus.

450: The number of Roman quaestors is increased to four and opened to plebians.

449: The Twelve Tables, the earliest examples of Roman law, are compiled. They were the result of agitation by the plebeian class, who had hitherto been excluded from the higher benefits of the Republic. The law had previously been unwritten and exclusively interpreted by upper-class priests, the pontifices. They formed the basis of Roman law for 1,000 years. The Twelve Tables were inscribed on bronze and publicly displayed so that unwritten law restricted to a ruling class was converted to written law accessible to all.

440: Roman quaestors are chosen by the assembly rather than by the consuls.

4th century BC

390: Battle of the Allia (11 miles north of Rome) at which the Senones, a Gallic tribe led by Brennus, crushed a Roman army and subsequently marched to and occupied Rome. Later historians describe the city as being out to fire and sword: ‘no living being was thenceforth spared; the houses were rifled, and then set on fire’ (Livy Book 5). The traditional date is 390, modern scholars have adjusted this to 387. The Gaulish Sack of Rome led to fear of Gaulish armies or marauders which lasted centuries.

Rome spent the next 32 years fighting the Volsci, the Etruscans and the rebel Latin cities.

366: Institution of the role of praetor, a title granted by the government of Ancient Rome to a man acting in one of two official capacities, as i) the commander of an army or ii) as an elected magistrate.

348: Plague strikes Rome.

343 to 341: First Samnite War, the Samnites being a tribe from central Italy, was the result of Rome’s intervention to rescue the Campanian city of Capua from a Samnite attack.

340 to 338: The Latin War (the Latins being another nearby tribe). Victory for Rome.

337: Until this year praetors were chosen only from among the patricians. In 337 eligibility for the praetura was opened to plebeians.

334: Rome signs a peace treaty with the Senones tribe i.e. the Gauls who sacked Rome.

326 to 304: Second Samnite War was the result of Rome’s intervention in the politics of the city of Naples and developed into a contest over the control of central and southern Italy.

3rd century BC

298 to 290: Third Samnite War:

297: Third Samnite War: Celts and Samnites join forces and defeat the Romans at the Battle of Camertium.

295: Third Samnite War: In a battle lasting all day, Romans narrowly defeat a force of Celts and Samnites at the Battle of Sentinum, the decisive battle of the war.

294: Third Samnite War: A Roman army led by Lucius Postimius Megellus defeats an army from Etruscan Volsinii.

285 to 282: Rome defeats the Celts in Italy. Rome’s dominance in central Italy is secured.

284: Gauls of the Insubres and Boii tribes defeat the Romans at the Battle of Arretium.

283: Rome decisively defeats the Senones at Picenum. Rome defeats the Etruscans and Celts at the Battle of Lake Vadimo.

280 to 272: Roman war against Tarentum in southern Italy. Upon victory, Rome’s dominance in lower Italy is secured.

280: The Romans conquer the Etruscan cities of Tarquinia, Volsinii and Vulci.

264 to 241: First Punic War. Carthage cedes Sicily to Rome.

241 to 238: Rebellion of the mercenaries. Unpaid mercenaries under the leadership of Mathos and Spendios rebel against Carthage. Despite their peace treaty, Rome takes the opportunity to strip Carthage of Sardinia and Corsica.

229 to 228 Rome fights Illyrian pirates. Queen Teuta pays tribute to Rome.

225: Two Roman armies surround and defeat a Celtic army at the Battle of Telamon.

223: Romans successfully campaign against the Celtic tribes of Cisalpine Gaul.

222: Rome conquers Cisalpine Gaul (modern-day Provence, France).

222: The Celts are defeated at the Battle of Clastidium by Roman forces.

219: Illyrian coast is under Roman control.

218 to 201: Second Punic War the main feature of which is Hannibal Barca bringing an army from Spain along the south of France and over the Alps into Italy where it remained for fifteen long years, and the non-confrontational, attritional tactics of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, surnamed ‘Cunctator’.

216: The Battle of Cannae, Hannibal inflicts the worst ever military defeat in Roman history at Cannae 200 miles south-east of Rome (p.180). The authorities consulted the famous Sibylline Books and, on their recommendation, two Gauls and two Greeks were buried alive in the main marketplace (p.180). Hannibal ante portas meaning ‘Hannibal at the gates’. Hannibal Barca, Carthaginian general, directly threatens the city of Rome, but cannot advance due to lack of supplies and reinforcements.

c. 215 to 216: The Boii crush a Roman army 25,000 strong at Litana. Victory was partly achieved by pushing cut trees down on top of the Romans as they marched.

214 to 205: First Macedonian War: Traditionally, the Macedonian Wars include the four wars with Macedonia, plus one war with the Seleucid Empire, and a final minor war with the Achaean League of Greece. All together they span the period 214 to 148.

The Greek peninsula and west coast of what is now Turkey were characterised by numerous states jostling for position. The triggers for war were some smaller states asking Rome for protection against the two largest powers in the region, the Macedonian Kingdom and Seleucid Empire. The first war ran in parallel to the First Punic War i.e. Rome was fighting on two fronts.

In 216 King Philip V of Macedon had allied himself with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who was roaming at large through Italy. Rome dispatched an army eastwards which did little more than skirmish with Macedonian forces and seize minor territory along the Adriatic coastline. Rome wasn’t interested in conquest, but in keeping Macedon too busy to send forces to join with Hannibal. The war ended indecisively in 205 BC with the Treaty of Phoenice.

205: On the recommendation of the Sybilline Books, in response to the ongoing Punic War, a poor harvest and other ill omens, an image of Cybele/the Great Goddess was transferred from Asia Minor to Rome. Weirdly, the goddess turned out to take the form of a black meteoric stone accompanied by a retinue of self-castrated, self-flagellating, long-haired priests (p.179).

204: Scipio Africanus sails to North Africa to take the Second Punic War directly to the enemy (p.182). After he had defeated the Carthaginians in two major battles and won the allegiance of the Numidian kingdoms of North Africa, Carthage ordered Hannibal to return to protect the mother city, thus ending his 15-year campaign in Italy without a decisive victory.

202 October: Scipio wins the decisive Battle of Zama, destroying the Carthaginian army. Rome imposes a punitive peace treaty. Hannibal survives but goes into exile in the eastern Mediterranean. It was at this point that Publius Cornelius Scipio was given the agnomen or ‘victory name’ Africanus, so he is often referred to as Scipio (family name) Africanus (victory name) to distinguish him from other members of his (eminent) family.

201: As part of peace treating ending the Second Punic War, Sicily is definitively made a Roman province.

2nd century BC

200 to 196: Second Macedonian War: In the resulting Treaty of Tempea, Philip V was forbidden from interfering with affairs outside his borders, and was required to relinquish his recent Greek conquests. At the Olympiad in 196 Rome proclaimed the ‘Freedom of the Greeks and relapsed into its former apathy.

193: The Boii are defeated by the Romans, suffering, according to Livy, 14,000 dead.

192 to 188: Seleucid War Antiochus III, ‘the Great’, sixth ruler of the Seleucid Empire, invades Greece from Asia Minor. Various Greek cities appealed to Rome for help and a major Roman-Greek force was mobilised under the command of the great hero of the Second Punic War, Scipio Africanus, which landed and started inflicting defeats.

191 to 134: Various resistance movements against Rome in Iberia.

190: Roman army under Scipio defeats Antiochus III at the Battle of Magnesia. Apart from his other crimes, Antiochus was harbouring Rome’s long-term enemy, Hannibal (p.176).

c. 188: Treaty of Apamea Kibotos establishes peace with the Seleucid Empire and Rome plus its allies, such as Pergamon and Rhodes. The Seleucids have to evacuate their forces from Asia Minor and to pay a huge war indemnity.

172 to 168: Third Macedonian War: Philip of Macedon’s son, Perseus, challenges Rome and is defeated.

168: Roman legions smash the Macedonians at the Battle of Pydna. Twice Rome had withdrawn from Greece, leaving the city states to their own devices, assuming there would be peace, but instead facing renewed threats. So now Rome decided to establish its first permanent foothold in the Greek world. The Kingdom of Macedonia was divided by the Romans into four client republics.

154 to 139: Viriato leads the Lusitanians against Rome.

150 to 148: The Fourth Macedonian War Macedonian pretender to the throne Andriscus was destabilizing Greece. The Romans defeated him at the Second Battle of Pydna.

149 to 146: Third Punic War: Despite the fact that Carthage had obeyed all the provisions of the treaty which ended the Second Punic War, hawks in the Senate wanted to finish her off for good. When Carthage broke the treaty by retaliating against Masinissa king of the neighbouring Numidians’ repeated raids into Carthaginian territory, the hawks took this as an opportunity to declare war. Rome sent an army of 50,000 men then demanded that the Carthaginians must hand over all of their armaments and warships.

Carthage agreed to this humiliating demand, but when Rome went on to insist that they burn their city to the ground, relocate inland and change from being a seafaring, trading people to becoming farmers, the Carthaginians rebelled and broke off negotiations. The Roman army settled down for a siege of the city which dragged on for two long years. In the spring of 146 the besiegers, led by Scipio Aemilianus (an adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus) broke into the city which they burned and ransacked for 6 days, finally selling the 50,000 survivors into slavery, and razing the city to the ground.

The remaining Carthaginian territories were annexed by Rome and reconstituted to become the Roman province of Africa with Utica as its capital. Roman Africa became a major source of foodstuffs for Rome for centuries to come.

146: The Achaean War Following on from the fourth Macedonian war, the Achaean League mobilised for a new war against Rome. It was a foolish idea the historian Polybius blames on the demagogues of the cities of the league. The Achaean League was swiftly defeated and, as an object lesson, Rome utterly destroyed the city of Corinth in 146, the same year that Carthage was destroyed. To try to ensure peace Rome divided Macedonia into two new Roman provinces, Achaea and Epirus. From this point onwards Greece was ruled by Rome.

139: Law introduced the secret ballot.

137: 4,000 Celtiberians trap a force of 20,000 Romans at the Siege of Numantia, forcing their surrender.

135 to 132: First Servile War in Sicily, led by Eunus, a former slave claiming to be a prophet, and Cleon from Cilicia.

133: Rome captures Numantia, ending Iberian resistance.

133: Attalus III, the last king of Pergamon, bequeathes the whole of his kingdom to Rome.

133: The plebeian Tiberius Gracchus proposes sweeping land reforms which are so bitterly opposed by aggrieved landowners that he is murdered, bludgeoned to death. 70 years later Cicero saw this murder and the year 133 as opening up the fault lines of Roman society between two groups he calls the optimates and the populares (though modern scholars doubt the existence whether these really existed as organised groupings).

125: Rome intervenes on behalf of Massalia against the Saluvii Celts.

121: Gallia Narbonensis becomes a Roman province.

112 to 106: The Jugurthine War Numidia was a north African kingdom roughly covering the northern coastal part of what is now modern-day Algeria is. When the old king died the kingdom was disputed between his two sons and Jugurtha, his ambitious nephew.

111: Jugurtha murders his main rival along with many Roman merchants in a Numidian town. The Roman populace cried out for revenge but the event triggered an amazing sequence of delays caused by Jugurtha’s wholesale bribery and corruption of envoys sent to parley with him and then, once he’d gone to Rome, of various senators and officials dealing with him. The way Jugurtha was able to bribe and cajole his way out of various tight spots came to be seen as symbolic of the endemic corruption which had infected the body politic and inspired a vitriolic history of the war by this historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually referred to as Sallust, writing a generation after the events (86 to 35 BC).

113 to 101: The Cimbrian War The Cimbri were a Germanic tribe who, in one account, hailed from Denmark and went trekking through Germany and down towards the Danube. Local tribes allied to the Romans asked for help and Rome sent an army under the Roman consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo which was annihilated.

109: Cimbrian War: the Cimbri invade the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis and defeat the Roman army there under Marcus Junius Silanus.

108: Jugurthine War: Gaius Marius elected consul and given command of the army against Jugurtha.

107: Jugurthine War: the Tribal Assembly awards command of the Roman army in north Africa to the very ambitious general Gaius Marius Lucius Cornelius Sulla as his quaestor.

107: Cimbrian War: The Romans are defeated by the Tigurini, allies of the Cimbri. The Cimbri defeated another Roman army at the Battle of Burdigala (Bordeaux) killing its commander, the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravalla.

106: Jugurthine War: The Second Battle of Cirta Romans under Gaius Marius with quaestor Lucius Cornelius Sulla as cavalry commander, defeated a Numidian-Mauretanian coalition led by King Jugurtha and king Bocchus and captured the Numidian capital of Cirta.

105: Cimbrian War: Battle of Arausio where Cimbri, Teutons, and Ambrones divide a huge Roman army (80,000 men plus support personnel) led by two  rivals, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus and the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio. Only Caepio, Maximus and a few hundred Romans escaped with their lives across the river choked with corpses. The Battle of Arausio was the costliest defeat Rome suffered since Cannae and the losses and long-term consequences were far greater.

104 to 100: Second Servile War in Sicily, led by Athenion and Tryphon.

104: Cimbrian War: Rome declared a state of emergency and the constitution was suspended to allow Gaius Marius, the victor over Jugurtha of Numidia, to be elected consul for an unprecedented five years in a row, starting in 104. He was given free rein to build a new army and took the opportunity to make sweeping reforms in structure, organisation, recruitment, pay and strategy. Marius created a professional standing force composed of able-bodied but landless volunteers. Meanwhile the Cimbri unaccountably lost the opportunity to invade Italy while Rome was without an army, instead trekking to Iberia where they experienced their first defeats.

102: Cimbrian War: The Cimbri along with several other allied tribes finally invaded Italy, dividing their forces into two distinct armies which took separate routes south. Marius defeated the army of the Teutons and Ambrones at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

101: Cimbrian War: The main body of the Cimbri penetrated north Italy and ravaged the valley of the Po. Marius waited for reinforcements and then took on the Cimbri at the Battle of Vercellae near the confluence of the Sesia River with the Po on the Raudine Plain. The Cimbri were virtually annihilated, both their highest leaders, Boiorix and Lugius, fell, their womenfolk killed both themselves and their children in order to avoid slavery, bringing the Cimbrian War to an end. The war had two massive consequences:

  1. The end of the Cimbrian War marked the beginning of the rivalry between Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla who had served under Marius during the Jugurthine War, and served during the Cimbrian War as military tribune. Their rivalry eventually led to the first of Rome’s great civil wars.
  2. Following the victory at Vercellae, and without first asking permission from the Senate, Marius granted Roman citizenship to his Italian allied soldiers. Henceforth all Italian legions became Roman legions and the allied cities of the Italian peninsula began to demand a greater say in the external policy of the Republic. This led eventually to the Social War.

So the final part of the Cimbrian War sowed the seeds of civil strife in Italy for the next 15 years.

1st century BC

91 to 87: The Social War between Rome and its Italian allies who wanted Roman citizenship and an equal share in power. Only won by Rome granting citizenship and other rights to the allies. Once achieved, this hastened the Romanisation of the entire Italian peninsula but was a bitter and destructive internecine struggle.

89 to 63: Mithridatic Wars against Mithridates VI, ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus in northern Anatolia.

88 to 87: First Civil War between Marius and Sulla. First march on Rome by Sulla.

83: Sulla’s second march on Rome. Mass proscriptions i.e. lists of Sulla’s political enemies to be hunted down and liquidated. Not quite Stalin’s Russia, but similar in intent.

80: Sulla is persuaded to give his junior general, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus known as Pompey, his first ‘triumph’ in Rome.

73 to 71: Rebellion of Spartacus also known as the Third Servile War.

71: Pompey is granted his second ‘triumph’ for his victories in Spain.

70: Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, generally referred to as Crassus, are made consuls.

67: The Gabinian Law is passed, giving Pompey extraordinary power to deal with pirates in the Adriatic.

66: The Manilian Law is passed, giving Pompey extraordinary power to deal with Mithridates VI of Pontus.

64: Galatia becomes a client state of Rome.

63: Pompey defeats the Seleucid Antiochus XIII and incorporates Syria as a province of the Roman empire.

62: Pompey returns to Italy, and disbands his army upon landing.

61: Cicero’s accuses Catalinus of being the ringleader of a coup attempt. Pompey holds another ‘triumph’ in Rome celebrating his military achievements in the East.

60: Gaius Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus make a behind-closed-doors deal to share power between them, bypassing traditional constitutional arrangements, a moment later writers lamented as sealing the fate of the republic. It comes to be known as the First Triumvirate, or the Gang of Three as Beard jokily calls it.

58 to 51: Under the terms of the triumvirate, Pompey campaigns in the east, Caesar conquers Gaul.

58: Caesar attacks the Helvetii while on migration and defeats them.

58 to 57: Cicero is exiled from Rome.

56: The navies of Rome and the Veneti Gauls clash resulting in a Roman victory, the first recorded naval battle in the Atlantic Ocean.

55: Caesar attempts to invade Britain.

54: Caesar successfully invades Britain but then withdraws to Gaul. The island will be decisively conquered under Claudius.

54: Ambiorix of the Eburones tribe destroys around 9,000 Roman soldiers at the Battle of Atuatuca, up towards the modern French border with Belgium, one of the most serious setbacks suffered by Julius Caesar during his conquest of Gaul.

53: Rome loses the Battle of Carrhae to the Parthians, on what is now the border between southern Turkey and Syria. Crassus, one of the Triumvirate, is captured and executed by the Parthians.

52: Julius Caesar is defeated at the Battle of Gergovia in south-central France by Vercingetorix.

52: After becoming trapped and besieged at Alesia, Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar.

51: Caesar’s successful siege of Uxellodunum ends the Gallic War.

49: Burebistas sends Acornion of Dionysopolis as ambassador to negotiate an alliance with Pompey.

49: Caesar decides to march back from Gaul into Italy to dispute ultimate power with Pompey. According to tradition the ‘die is cast’ for war when he leads his legions across the river Rubicon. Civil war between Caesar and Pompey begins.

48: The Battle of Pharsalus the decisive battle of Caesar’s Civil War fought near Pharsalus in central Greece. Although Pompey enjoyed the backing of a majority of Roman senators and the larger army, his forces were massacred by Caesar’s legions, battle hardened from their long wars in Gaul. Pompey survived the battle and fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated on the orders of Ptolemy XIII who thought it would please Caesar.

46: The Bellovaci unsuccessfully rise against Roman rule in Belgica. Caesar holds a ‘triumph’ through Rome in which he displays peoples he has defeated and loot he has taken. The parade featured floats with people posing in dramatic tableaux, and placards, one of which read pithily: veni, vidi, vici – I came, I saw, I conquered. This referred to Caesar’s quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela, in Turkey, up towards the Black Sea, in 47 (SPQR p.290). The historian Suetonius says Caesar used it in his triumph but the biographer Plutarch says he used it in a report to the Senate. Either way it’s indicative of the way the phrase was still quotable 150 years later and a token of Caesar’s skill as a writer, rhetorician and self publicist.

44: The Allobroges unsuccessfully rise against Roman rule in southern Gaul.

44: Caesar becomes dictator for life. On the ‘Ides of March’ (15th) he is killed by conspirators including Brutus and Cassius. Octavian, son of Caesars niece Atia, is posthumously adopted as his heir.

43 to 36: a Second Triumvirate is set up by Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), Gaius Octavius (Octavian) and Marcus Lepidus, in opposition to the assassins of Caesar, chief among them Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus (p.341). Following the innovation of Sulla in the 80s, the triumvirate draws up a long list of proscriptions i.e. people they want to see liquidated. The list includes the most eminent writer of Latin prose, Cicero, who is caught trying to flee, and beheaded in 43 (p.341).

42: Octavian and Antony defeat Republicans under Brutus and Cassius at the Battle of Philippi (Greece)

36: Octavian strips Lepidus of all power but the purely ceremonial Pontifex Maximus (supreme priest). Lepidus dies of old age in 12 BC, leaving Mark Anthony, allied with Cleopatra of Egypt, as Octavian’s main enemy.

33: The Belgic Morini and the Celts of Aquitania unsuccessfully rise against Roman rule.

31: 2 September Battle of Actium. Octavian defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII of Egypt.

29: Octavian’s ‘triumph’ displays images of the people he defeated in the East along with such vast amounts of loot that it took 3 days to process through central Rome.

27: Octavian is given extraordinary powers and the name Augustus by the Roman Senate. Although many of its constitutional forms live on for centuries, the Republic is in effect dead, and historians date the start of the Roman Empire from either 31 or 27.

Credit

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard was published in 2015 by Profile Books. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on February 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/02/04/spqr-mary-beard-4-republican-timeline/

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