All posts tagged military history

Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy (2014) – 1

Augustus was one of the most successful rulers of all time. He rescued Rome from the recurring collapse of its political institutions into civil war which dogged the years 100 to 30 BC, and established an entirely new form of government – what he called the ‘principate’ but which came to be called imperial rule – which went on to last for 250 years. Even after the empire collapsed in the West, its ghostly image lived in for a further thousand years in Byzantium.

Augustus ruled longer than any other Roman ruler, whether king, dictator or emperor. He nearly doubled the size of the empire. His reforms endured for centuries. It beggars belief that he entered the toxic jungle of Roman politics when he was just eighteen years old and proceeded to outwit and defeat all his opponents, defeating some in war, having some murdered, forcing others to commit to suicide, to emerge as the unchallenged ruler of the greatest empire Europe has ever seen.

Augustus’s name

First, the name. He was born Caius Octavius. On being adopted as Julius Caesar’s heir he took his legal father’s name, becoming Caius Julius Caesar. In the decade after Caesar’s assassination he slowly dropped the Caius, sometimes operating under the exact same name as the dead general, sometimes adding the title Imperator at the start of his name. Mark Antony commented that he was ‘a boy who owed everything to his name’ which was certainly true at the start. When Caesar was deified by the senate, Octavianus added ‘son of the divine Julius’ in some contexts. Finally, in 27, he was awarded the made-up title ‘Augustus’ by the senate.

In other words, maybe the most important thing about Augustus is his shape-shifting changes of identity. He played the Name Game as deftly as he played the terrifying power politics of the Republic. And when it ceased to be a republic and he established himself as the sole authority figure, he was again careful not to use the name king (heaven forbid) or even empire and emperor. Instead he used the semi-official term princeps meaning ‘first citizen’ to describe himself and principate to describe the kind of political system he proceeded to build around him.

Goldsworthy says he will use the name Julius Caesar to refer to him, but I think that’s pretty confusing. Although I take the point that only his enemies called him Octavianus, I will use the more usual tradition of calling him Octavian until he is awarded the title Augustus.

Goldsworthy says historians tend to divide history into neat periods, having the Republican era end with the assassination of Julius and starting the Augustan era with the defeat of Antony at Actium. This has the effect of underplaying the key period from 44 to 31 BC which Octavian spent mostly in Rome or Italy, consolidating his grip on power by establishing favourites, contacts and clients who he placed in positions of power at all levels.

Dr Adrian Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy was (born in Wales in 1969, educated at private school and Oxford) is a historian specialising in the Roman army and Roman history (although he has also written half a dozen historical novels set during the Napoleonic wars). According to his introduction to this book, it was while developing his interest in the Roman army into a blockbuster biography of Julius Caesar (2006) that he became aware of the glaring absence of a good, scholarly but accessible biography of the latter’s adoptive son and heir, Caius Octavianus, known to history as the emperor Augustus (63 BC to 14 AD), inventor of the Roman Empire. So he wrote it.

It’s a big book, 607 pages long, including a 100 pages of bibliography, notes, index, a glossary of terms, a list of key personages, and a series of intimidatingly complicated family trees of the key players. But beyond this, it is also an outstanding introduction to the rules and practices surrounding Roman power.

Augustus’s father

In the opening 50 pages in particular, as Goldsworthy describes the promising career of Augustus’s father (Caius Octavius, born 100 BC and steadily rising through the ranks of the cursus honorem and just about to stand for consul when he died of a sudden illness in 59) he interweaves masses of background information about the Roman constitution, customs and conventions, which make the book a useful introduction to all aspects of the Rome of the late Republic.

Background facts

I found his explanation of the precise way in which elections to the different magistracies were held particularly enlightening (the election of the praetors pages 41 to 43), but he also gives to-the-point explanations of:

  • Roman marriage (a Roman husband had only to utter the phrase ‘take your things for yourself’ – tuas res tibi habeto – to separate from his wife, p.163)
  • the meanings of the words optimates (the best men or aristocracy), populares (aristocrats pandering the populist agenda such as free food allowance, forgiveness of debts or land distribution), plebs (the majority of people, defined in contrast to the patricians, or ‘best’ or more noble families) (p.51)
  • the property qualifications needed to be a member of the equites or knightly class
  • the absence of any political parties and so the way Roman society was structured around bonds of obligation between patrons and clients

He explains exactly which officials were involved in Roman trials and how the court was physically laid out (p.43). (Cicero thought so highly of Caius Octavius’s conduct as praetor supervising trials that he wrote to his brother Quintus telling him to copy his example, p.44.) He explains how the role of provincial governor was notoriously regarded as a way to get rich quick by extorting taxes and bribes from Rome’s subjects (p.45).

Training boys He tells us how boys of aristocratic families from the age of five were encouraged to observe their fathers going about their business, receiving clients, attending the senate. Within a year or so they began physical exercise on the Campus Martius and learned to ride a horse, throw a javelin and fight with sword or shield.

Education There were about 20 schools in Rome, for those who could afford them, though the really rich would hire a grammaticus, a teacher of language and literature, to tutor their sons in reading and writing at home (p.55).

Background He gives very clear accounts of the events which formed the background to preceded Gaius’s career, namely the civil war between Marius and Sulla in the 80s, then the rise of the boy wonder general Pompey in the 70s, the rebellions of Lepidus and Sertorius, the disaffection which led up to the conspiracy of Catilina in 63 BC which was the same year Pompey returned from his military command against Mithridates in Asia and ostentatiously disbanded his army at Brundisium, thus demonstrating his democratic bona fides.

Unlike Mary Beard’s rambling history of Rome, which organises itself around a succession of irritating rhetorical questions, Goldsworthy just gets on and tells you interesting stuff, very interesting stuff, in plain no-nonsense prose, which is why I found this an addictive read.

More background facts

Women’s names Roman women kept their name throughout their lives and did not change it at marriage. Generally they only had one name, unlike aristocratic men who had three (the praenomen, nomen and cognomen, sometimes with a nickname added), hence Julia, Fulvia, Terentia, Tullia. They were generally given a female version of the clan name, hence Caius Julius Caesar’s sister was called Julia and Marcus Tullius Cicero’s daughter was named Tullia (p.23), Titus Pomponia’s daughter was called Pomponia (p.356) and so on.

If there were two daughters they were given the same name and the aftername major or minor, meaning in this context, older and junior. If many daughters, they were sometimes numbered: Julia 1, Julia 2, Julia 3 and so on. Thus Augustus’s mother, Atia, was so called because it was the gens or family name of her father, Marcus Atius Balbus. She probably had an older sister, who had the same name, and so was sometimes called Atia Secunda.

Marriage alliances Marriage was a tool of political alignment or social advantage, consolidating links between (generally powerful) families. Hence Pompey’s marriage to Caesar’s daughter, Julia, and Octavius marrying his sister, Octavia, off to Mark Antony (p.35).

Personal abuse was the common coin of political exchanges (p.33) in fact high political discourse and, by extension the courts, were characterised by astonishing levels of ‘violent and imaginative abuse’ (p.131).

Publicans There was a profession of men who undertook state contracts such as collecting taxes in subjugated provinces. These were called publicani, a term which is translated as publicans in the King James version of the New Testament.

Personality Having just read some courtroom speeches by Cicero, it is relevant to read that in the many elections held for official office throughout the Roman year, the electors rarely if ever voted for a clearly articulated political programme or policies, but far more on the basis of character (plus a hefty amount of bribery) – more or less as jurors at trials were subjected to much more argumentation about the defendant’s (and the prosecuting and defence attorney’s) characters, than about any actual facts or evidence (p.37).

Clients The importance to politicians of being accompanied at all times by a crowd of clients, who waited outside your front door from early morning, some of whom you admitted for audience, the rest following you as you emerged and made your way down to the forum and to the senate house. If eminent or notable men were in this attending crowd, all the better (p.39).

These ties of family, clan and class were not incidental but intrinsic to Roman society:

Men rose to high office through the support of new or inherited friendships and bonds of patronage, and by marriage alliances. (p.356)

The praetors Each year eight praetors were elected, seven of them to preside over the seven courts of quaestiones established by the dictator Sulla, the eighth to be praetor urbanus with wide-ranging legal powers.

Prosecuting Goldsworthy confirms D.H. Berry’s account in his introduction to Cicero’s defence speeches, that a) since there was no equivalent of the Crown or State legal cases could only be brought by individuals and b) prosecuting was seen as invidious, unless one was defending family pride or there was a really gross example of wrongdoing – and so accusers tended to be young men out to make a name for themselves with one or two eye-catching prosecutions, before settling into the more congenial and socially accepted role of defence counsel, exactly the career Cicero followed (p.43), a point repeated on page 281:

Prosecution was generally left to the young, and had long provided an opportunity for youthful aristocrats to catch the public eye at an early stage in their careers.

The rabble rouser Publius Clodius Pulcher’s support came largely from the collegia or guilds of tradesemen (p.57).

Aristocratic funerals were public events, designed to impress and remind everyone of a family’s antiquity and noble achievements for the state, commencing with a ceremony in the forum and then a procession to beyond the city walls where the cremation was carried out (p.65).

The toga is, on the face of it, a simple item of clothing: a roughly semicircular cloth, between 12 and 20 feet long, worn draped over the shoulders and around the body. It was usually woven from white wool, and was worn over a tunic. But there were at least half a dozen types or styles, several of which had important social meanings:

  • the toga virilis or ‘toga of manhood’, also known as toga alba or toga pura was a plain white toga, worn on formal occasions by adult male commoners, and by senators not holding a curule magistracy: it represented adult male citizenship and its attendant rights, freedoms and responsibilities
  • the toga praetexta, a white toga with a broad purple stripe on its border, worn over a tunic with two broad, vertical purple stripes, the formal costume for:
    • curule magistrates in their official functions
    • freeborn boys before they came of age
    • the strip indicated the wearer’s protection by law from sexual predation and immoral; a praetexta was thought effective against malignant magic, as were a boy’s bulla, and a girl’s lunula, amulets they wore round their necks
  • the toga candida or ‘bright toga’, from the Latin adjective candida, meaning pure white, a toga rubbed with chalk to a dazzling white and worn by candidates for election
  • the toga picta or ‘painted toga’, dyed solid purple, decorated with imagery in gold thread and worn over a similarly-decorated tunica palmata, this was worn by generals in their triumphs

Courtesans Goldsworthy explains something which had slightly puzzled me in the plays of Plautus and Terence, which is that, above and beyond the many brothels in Rome, there was a class of high-end courtesans ‘who needed to be wooed and cared for in expensive style’ (p.69). In England in 2022, I imagined that a client pays for a courtesan and then can have his way, but the comedies of Plautus and Terence depict courtesans as being every bit as independent and strong-willed as a mistress.

Senate hours The senate was not allowed to sit after dusk. As the sun set senators knew it was time to wind up a debate. This explains how Marcus Porcius Cato was able on numerous occasions to filibuster or talk non-stop, refusing to sit down, until dusk came and the session had to end, in order to prevent decisions being passed which he objected to (p.107).

Centurions Goldsworthy is at pains to bust various myths, for example the one that centurions were experienced old bloods raised from the ranks to become a kind of sergeant major figure. Wrong. They ‘were men of property and often came from the aristocracies of the country towns of Italy’ (p.123).

Piety (pietas in Latin), the honour owed to gods, country and especially parents, was a profound and very Roman duty. [Augustus] proclaimed his own pietas as he avenged his murdered father. (p.158)

Pietas was a virtue central to Rome’s sense of identity and the neglect of proper reverence due to the old gods of the Roman people was symptomatic of the moral decline of recent generations, so evident in the decades of discord and violence. (p.224)

Moral explanations of everything As I explained in reviews of Plutarch and Cicero’s speeches, lacking any of the numerous theories which we nowadays use to explain social change and development, all the Romans had was a very basic recourse to notions of morality:

Moral explanations for upheaval came most readily to the Roman mind, and so restoration must involve changes in behaviour, conduct and a reassertion of a good relationship with the gods who had guided Rome’s rise to greatness. (p.224)

Auguries In a sense, you can see the rich paraphernalia of auguries, soothsayers, oracles and so on as reflecting the same complete absence of rational theory. Completely lacking the modern infrastructure of statistics, data, social trends, as we use them to analyse and manage the economy, trade, population, illness and even military encounters, the ancients were thrown back on two extremely primitive vectors of explanation – the moral character of Great Men, and the moods or wishes of the capricious gods.

Animal sacrifice (p.331)

Decimation was the traditional punishment, though already antiquated by Octavius’s day, of punishing a mutinous or cowardly legion by having one man in ten beaten to death and the rest shamed by receiving barley – food traditionally given to slaves and animals – instead of wheat (p.177)

Spolia opima (‘rich spoils’) were the armour, arms, and other effects that an ancient Roman general stripped from the body of an opposing commander slain in single combat. The spolia opima were regarded as the most honourable of the several kinds of war trophies a commander could obtain, including enemy military standards and the peaks of warships.

Caesar’s scruples By the time Octavius, Antony and Lepidus had raised armies to back them up, with Cassius and Brutus raising armies in the East and Sextus Pompeius in control of Sicily i.e. in the late 40s BC, the issue which triggered the civil war between Caesar and Pompey – whether Caesar was allowed to enter Italy with his army of Gaul – had vanished like dew, become completely irrelevant in a world where first Octavius, then Antony, not only marched legions on Rome, but put it under military occupation. All the pettifogging precision of the debates about Caesar’s rights and privileges were ancient history within less than a decade (p.178)

Antony’s drunkenness Many of the leading politicians were also authors, pre-eminently Caesar. Mark Antony published just the one book, De sua ebrietate (‘On his drunkenness’) a touchy defence admitting that he liked getting drunk buy denying accusations that he was ever under the influence while performing official or military duties. Sadly, like the autobiographies of Sulla and Augustus himself, it has not survived (p.185).

Aged 33 When he was 33, Julius Caesar encountered a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain, and according to Plutarch and Suetonius either burst into tears or heaved a heavy sigh and explained to his colleagues that by his age Alexander had conquered the known world whereas he, Caesar, had achieved nothing. By sharp contrast, Goldsworthy points out how, with the deaths of Brutus and Cassius, Anthony and Cleopatra, by 30 BC Octavius, himself now widely known as Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, had done the same – making himself master of Rome and unrivalled ruler of the Mediterranean world (p.194). He commanded 60 legions, more than any Roman commander in history (p.204).

Special commands The wonderfully intricate and carefully balanced Roman constitution was a marvel of checks and balances, but it also led, increasingly in the late Republic, to blockage and inaction, as rival political leaders preferred to stymy each other’s initiatives regardless of the best interests of the Republic. Which is why the state found itself reverting increasingly to giving Special Commands to (particularly military) commanders, such as Pompey received to sort out the pirates, then sort out King Mithridates. And which, unconsciously, as it were, prepared both the senate and the people to the idea that rule by one man (Augustus) was more likely to get things done than the increasingly fractious rule of consuls, tribunes and the rest of it (p.235).

Augustus was able to make things happen. If he was not involved then the inertia which had characterised senatorial government for so many years seemed to return. (p.276)

Images In the long years of his rule Augustus worked hard to ensure that his image became more widespread around the Mediterranean than the images of any other individual, whether human or divine. It was on every coin, created in mints all round the empire, and depicted in thousands of statues he had erected in towns and cities everywhere. We have far more images of Augustus than any other figure from the ancient world (250 statues survive and countless coins).

He was everywhere, his name, image or symbols on monuments in the heart of Rome, in the towns of Italy and throughout the provinces. (p.305)

And yet he single-handedly overthrew the longstanding Roman tradition of very realistic sculpture which depicts figures such as Marius, Sulla, Caesar or Pompey with distinctive features, jowls and wrinkles, with pomaded quiffs or thin combovers or whatever – Augustus swept this all away and ensured the image of him was standardised around the empire, to depict an idealised image of the nations’ ruler, handsome, authoritative and tall, and above all in the prime of manhood, young and virile and decisive.

Statue of Augustus found in 1863 nine miles from Rome in the suburb of Prima Porta. Note the depiction on his breastplate of the return to Rome of the legionary standards seized by the Parthians in victories over Crassus and Antony, but returned to Augustus in 20 BC

Among the thousands of images of Augustus which survive none deviate from this strict model, there are no images of him as a middle-aged or old man (p.256). And yet we know from Suetonius how far removed from reality this image was: in real life Octavius was shorter than average, with bad teeth, and a skin so sensitive that far from strutting round in military armour he preferred to be carried about in a litter and wore a broad-brimmed floppy hat to protect himself from the sun (Goldsworthy p.300; Suetonius Augustus, 82).

Temper Augustus had a bad temper, something he learned to control in later life. One of his tutors, the Greek teacher of rhetoric Athenodorus, told him that every time he lost his temper, ‘recite the alphabet before you speak’ (p.202).

Goldsworthy’s military expertise

Goldsworthy began his career as a military historian of the Roman army. His first publications were:

  • The Roman Army at War 100 BC (1996)
  • Roman Warfare (2000)
  • The Punic Wars (2000)
  • Fields of Battle: Cannae (2001)
  • Caesar’s Civil War: 49 to 44 BC (2002)
  • The Complete Roman Army (2003)

His summaries of the hectic political events which led up to the assassination of Caesar (15 March 44 BC) and then the confused manouevrings of the various parties in the years that followed are always good and clear, and he also gives, as mentioned above, a continual feed of clear, useful background information about all aspects of the Roman state.

But with the outbreak of the wars which Octavius was directly involved in, from about page 100 onwards, the narrative gives more space and time to explaining the campaigns and battles and the military background than previously – the number of legions, their actual likely strengths, their supply lines and so on. Suddenly a good deal more military history is included.

Several things emerge from this: for a start size mattered:

In the civil wars of these years there was great emphasis on mass, on simply fielding more legions than the opposition. There was also a well-entrenched Roman belief that throwing numbers and resources at a problem ought to being success. (p.165)

A commander’s prestige relied more on the number of his legions than the precise total of soldiers under his command, so there was a tendency to raise lots of units, which in turn had the added advantage of giving plenty of opportunities to promote loyal followers to the senior ranks. (p.125)

Another key and surprising fact which emerges is that the Roman armies weren’t that good. Good enough to defeat chaotic barbarians, maybe, but just because they were Romans didn’t guarantee quality. Goldsworthy goes out of his way to highlight that Mark Antony was very much not the great military leader later historians mistake him for, having had quite limited experience of command. Several examples: none of the four main commanders at the Battle(s) of Philippi (3 and 23 October 42 BC), Mark Antony, Octavius, Cassius or Brutus, had anything like the experience of Pompey or Caesar. Moreover they had, as explained above, all devoted a lot of energy to raising large armies without making sure that they were particularly well trained; in fact new recruits were by definition the opposite; easily spooked and ready to run.

This was a war fought by large and clumsy armies, where none of the senior officers had any experience of warfare on so grand a scale. On each side the armies remained to a great degree separate, loyal only to the leader who paid them. They formed up beside each other, but they were not integrated into a single command. (p.138)

This all explains why Philippi was such a confusing mess:

Cumbersome and essentially amateur armies given poor leadership, or none at all, turned the First Battle of Philippi into a draw. (p.141)

This is very important information but it’s the kind of thing which is often skipped over in political histories which concentrate solely on the political machinations between rivals. And yet Roman history is pre-eminently military; it was a highly militarised society in which the entire aristocracy was trained and motivated to achieve glorious victories in war.

The greatest service to the Republic was to defeat a foreign enemy. (p.173)

That quite a few of these military leaders were actually incompetent is something which is glossed over in other accounts but foregrounded in Goldsworthy’s.

This explains, for example, the wretched destruction of Marcus Licinius Crassus’s badly led and undisciplined army in Parthia in 53 BC; and also sheds light on Antony’s almost-as-disastrous defeat in the same territory in 36 BC (this is a summary from Wikipedia):

As Antony marched his huge army of 80,000 soldiers into Parthian territory the Parthians simply withdrew. In order to move faster, Antony left his logistics train in the care of two legions (approximately 10,000 soldiers), which was attacked and completely destroyed by the Parthian army before Antony could rescue them. Antony pressed his army forward and set siege to the provincial capital but failed to take it and by mid-October had to withdraw. The retreat was mercilessly harried by the Parthians. According to Plutarch, eighteen battles were fought between the retreating Romans and the Parthians during the month-long march back to Armenia, with approximately 20,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry dying during the retreat alone.

And so, from page 100 or thereabouts, Goldsworthy with his military historian hat on gives us descriptions of various campaigns which aren’t disproportionately long but longer than a political historian without his specialist military knowledge would have given:

  • Antony’s siege of the senatorial army in Mutina, pages 115 to 120
  • the build-up to the decisive Battle of Philippi, from page 134
  • the campaign against Sextus Pompeius in Sicily, pages 165 to 168
  • Octavius’s campaign in Illyria, pages 174 to 178
  • Antony’s big military disaster in Parthia, pages 172 to 173
  • Antony’s defeat at the Battle of Actium, pages 188 to 192

Goldsworthy makes another interesting point which is that, ideally, the Romans didn’t negotiate:

For the Romans, true peace was the product of victory, ideally so complete that the same enemy would never need to be fought again…Conflicts ended with absolute victory, the Romans dictating the terms, and not in compromise or concessions. (p.197)

This helps to explain the way that, in Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, he was continually looking for excuses to crush new enemies: the slightest provocation or incursion was all he needed to justify punitive invasions and crushing conquest (p.226) which his critics in Rome (notable Cato the Younger) thought unwarranted and illegal.

Peace was celebrated but it was a Roman peace, following on from military victory…[a] peace of unchallenged Roman dominance. (p.359)

On the one hand this unremitting drive for total victory explains the sense of an unstoppable military machine which peoples all round the Mediterranean experienced. But on the downside, it explains the bitterness and the brutality of their civil wars, for they brought the same drive for total victory to their wars among themselves (p.197).

They don’t swamp the book at all, but Goldsworthy gives more detail about the state and nature of the armies and combatants in these and many other confrontations than a purely political historian would give, and, as always with Goldsworthy, it is presented in a clear, factual way and is very interesting.

Octavius’s escapades

Goldsworthy sheds a shrewd sidelight on the various narratives of this time which have come down to us. In a lot of the official narratives put out by Octavius’s side during this early, battle-strewn part of his life, mention was made of the future emperor’s lucky escapes, when he was nearly hit by a javelin, or escaped from some fire with only singed hair, or was only slightly hurt when a siege drawbridge he was leading troops across collapsed.

Goldsworthy makes the shrewd point that in his great-uncle and adopted father’s copious accounts of his wars in Gaul, Caesar rarely makes an appearance in the fighting (though once or twice he does seize a standard or shield and charge to the front, rallying his troops). In Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars the events – Caesar’s relentless steamroller sequence of victories –are allowed to speak for themselves and are all the more impressive for it.

By complete contrast, many of the battles and campaigns Octavius was personally involved in were far more mixed or problematic or failures in outcome – and so the narrative genre is completely different, and is concerned with how Fortune Smiled on our gallant hero as he pulled off a series of close shaves and narrow escapes. This focus on Our Lucky Hero also conveniently concealed the fact that, when he did win, Octavius almost always owed his victory to talented subordinates (above all the tremendously competent and reliable Marcus Vipsania Agrippa). No Caesar he, and he early realised it but learned to turn it – like everything else – to his advantage. (p.169)

Cleopatra

Goldsworthy’s half a dozen myth-busters include quite a big one about queen Cleopatra. Contrary to Egyptian nationalists, Cleopatra was Greek, came from a Greek family, had a Greek name and spoke Greek. There is, according to Goldsworthy, no evidence that she was very interested in the traditional Egyptian gods, but instead cleaved to the Hellenistic gods which held sway around most of the Mediterranean.

Second, she was in essence no different from the numerous other kings, rulers and tetrarchs scattered around the Eastern Mediterranean, generally struggling with family feuds and civil wars at home, who tried to curry favour with whichever Roman ruler was uppermost. Cleopatra’s main achievement was to prostitute herself out to not one but two of them, having affairs with and children by Julius Caesar (a son who she named Caesarion but Caesar never showed interest in) and then with Mark Antony (twins who she named Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, in 40 BC, and a third, Ptolemy Philadelphus, in 36 BC).

When Mark Anthony committed suicide on the approach of Octavius’s army to the capital, Alexandria, the 29-year-old survivor prepared herself for another seduction and impregnation:

She had always been a loyal ally of Rome, and would no doubt exploit her subjects just as enthusiastically for his benefit as she had for Julius Caesar and Antony. (p.192)

Goldsworthy argues that Cleopatra’s prominence in history is at least in part due to Octavius’s propaganda. It is factually correct that she had a long affair with Antony which lasted to the end of his life, and the children, and that the departure of her ships from the naval engagement off Actium prompted Antony to withdraw and thus lose the battle – but at the same time it suited Octavius very well indeed to exaggerate what to a patriotic Roman audience were all the negative aspects of the situation: that Antony was in thrall to a woman; that he had deserted his noble, long-suffering Roman wife, Octavia; that he let his administrative and military decisions be swayed by a female – all anathema to Roman values (p.192).

Change in narrative tone

Somewhere after page 200 (maybe with the start of Part Four on page 217) the narrative undergoes another subtle change in feel or vibe. The subject matter becomes more…pedestrian. It took me a while to realise why this was but Goldsworthy himself explains it on page 281:

The historian Dio lamented that it was harder to recount events after Augustus’ victory in the Civil War than it was before, since so many key decisions were taken in private and unrecorded, while much that was in the public domain was merely an empty ceremony.

That’s what it is. In the dozen or so accounts I’ve read of the troubled century from 133 to 27 BC there were always multiple players and combatants, vying for political power, either within the bounds of the constitution or spilling over into conflict, all having to stand for election, make speeches in the senate or addressing the popular assemblies or writing accounts of their doings or speeches – historians are able to give often very detailed accounts of political manoeuvrings and positionings because there are so many players involved and many of them left records or we have good accounts from contemporary or near contemporary historians.

Then Augustus wins total victory and it all goes quiet. By the time he has won he is the last man standing: Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, Antony, one by one all the great men of the previous generation were killed or killed themselves, leaving Octavius the sole figure on the stage.

He was very careful not to have himself declared dictator, as the ill-fated Caesar did, but to work through the channels of the Republican constitution, to continue to have elections of consuls and tribunes carried out, it was just that he arranged for himself to be elected ten years in a row and arranged who was to be his partner consul. There continued to be a senate, larger than ever in terms of numbers, all holding debates and speaking in the time-honoured way except that none of their debates carried any weight and many of the recorded speeches are eulogies to the princeps as he had himself called, a steady roll call of titles and awards which a grateful nation kept giving him.

Previously we had Pompey and Caesar and the senate all squabbling like ferrets in a sack and historians can calculate what each player’s motives were, and interpret each one’s moves, declarations and so on. And then… a great smothering blanket settles over Roman political life because only one man made the decisions. We have a record of the decisions but why he made them, what his thinking was, remains a matter of speculation.

Which is why all biographies of Augustus circle round to the same conclusion: that he was a mystery, an enigma, unknowable, in a way that Caesar and Pompey and Crassus and Cicero feel highly knowable. He wrote an autobiography but that has vanished. All we have is the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a monumental inscription composed 35 paragraphs, grouped into four sections – political career, public benefactions, military accomplishments and a political statement – which manage to smother the turbulence and problems of what turned out to be the longest rule by any Roman emperor (45 years) into a series of bland, corporate achievements. It sounds like this:

Wars, both civil and foreign, I undertook throughout the world, on sea and land, and when victorious I spared all citizens who sued for pardon.

And:

I pacified the Alps, from the area closest to the Adriatic Sea all the way to the Tuscan Sea, without waging an unjust war against any tribe. (quoted p.334)

We have this and the biographies of later historians, namely Suetonius (69 to 120 AD), which capture snippets of gossip and factoids, but the rest…is a record of decisions by one of the colossi of history whose ‘true character’, despite hundreds of thousands of analyses, remains a mystery.

Pronunciation

The Latin pronunciation is:

  • praetor – pry-tor
  • quaestor – kwy-stor
  • Julius Kye-zer
  • Kikero

But if, in English, we say Julius Sea-zer, then it follows that all Latin words with ‘ae’ should be pronounced ‘e’ – hence preetor, queestor and so on.

Credit

Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy was published in 2014 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All references are to the 2015 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

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Posted by Simon on August 17, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/08/17/augustus-from-revolutionary-to-emperor-adrian-goldsworthy-1/

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.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on February 4, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 4, 2022

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

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) 2

As I explained in my review of the introduction to SPQR, Beard is a little too academic to be truly popular, yet not scholarly or intellectual enough to be truly challenging.

By ‘not scholarly’ I mean that although she certainly mentions the scholarly debates around key issues from the historiography of ancient Rome, she rarely goes into enough detail to make us really understand what’s at stake (unlike Richard Miles in his history of Carthage who can’t come across a scholarly debate without explaining it at length, accompanied by copious, and often very interesting, footnotes and extensive references).

By ‘not very  intellectual’ I mean her book contains discussions and debates about themes and issues from the period, but nothing truly thought provoking, nothing you wouldn’t expect to find in a book about ancient history (the early years are shrouded in legend, it was a very sexist culture, Roman society was very militaristic) – no surprises, no new slants or opinions, and certainly no overarching conceptual framework for her analysis. Instead, there are lots of interesting bits and bobs about archaeological finds or social history, gossip about well known figures, speculation about the early history, fairly predictable things about Caesar, the civil wars, the rise of Augustus. Ho hum.

What you very much do get a lot of is rhetorical questions. Beard is addicted to asking rhetorical questions, not one rhetorical question, but little clumps of two or three rhetorical questions which all come together like buses on a rainy day. But asking rhetorical questions doesn’t make her an intellectual, it makes her a standard teacher using a standard teaching technique.

How far is it useful to see Roman history in terms of imperial biographies or to divide the story of empire into emperor-sized (or dynasty-sized) chunks? How accurate are the standard images of these rulers that have come down to us? What exactly did the emperor’s character explain? How much difference, and to whom, did the qualities of the man on the throne make? (p.399)

Asking lots of high-sounding questions gives people the impression you’re brainy without you actually having to do any real thinking.

Superficial

More important, for me anyway, is the way Beard mentions famous events only to skate over them. Although SPQR is a long book, it is frustratingly superficial. Early on in the narrative I found her account of both the Catiline Conspiracy (63 BC) and the legend of Romulus and Remus (750s BC?) patchy and disconnected. She’s interested in this or that bit of the story, tells a bit in order to illustrate problems with the established narrative or as a pretext to bring in recent archaeological findings – but she rarely gives you a good, simple, clear description of the complete event. I had to look up both the Catiline conspiracy and the story of Romulus and Remus on Wikipedia in order to get a proper, coherent account of both, and in order to fully understand the issues which Beard only patchily explains.

Later on she refers to Pyrrhus, the Greek general who invaded southern Italy, giving rise to what became called the Pyrrhic War (280 to 275 BC). Pyrrhus won several victories but at such a cost in lives and material that they gave rise to the expression ‘Pyrrhic victory’. But Beard says very little about who Pyrrhus was, why he attacked, about the progress of his military campaigns or describe any of the costly victories which gave rise to the saying. To learn more about Pyrrhus and his wars I had, again, to look him up on Wikipedia. Ditto Spartacus, ditto the Jugurtha, ditto the Roman constitution, ditto Scipio Africanus, and so on.

Beard’s account of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy which lasted 15 years and was the core of the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC) is insultingly brief at barely 2 pages (pages 175 to 176). It almost made me want to throw this book away and reread Richard Miles’s fascinating, long, rich, detailed and subtle account of the same subject.

From the 300s through to the defeat of Carthage in 146 BC Rome was almost continuously at war. Beard mentions some of these wars, and occasionally specific names, such as Mithradates king of Pontus, float to the surface for half a page or so, but many are given the briefest mention, many aren’t mentioned at all, and for none of them, none whatsoever, do you get a proper account of the military campaign. There are no descriptions of battles anywhere in the book.

If you are looking for a military history of Rome, the most militaristic state in the ancient world which built its empire on phenomenal military success, this is not it. If you’re looking for a diplomatic history of Rome i.e. a description and analysis of the strategic thinking, alliances and manoeuvres behind the wars, how the geopolitical thinking of Rome’s rulers changed and evolved over time, this is definitely not it. Occasional reference is made to the Roman gods, but not much to their attributes or worship. If you’re looking for a book about Roman religion, this isn’t it. There are lots of passages describing recent archaeological discoveries and the light they shed on this or that aspect of early Rome – for example archaeologists’ discovery under the ancient Lapis Niger section of the Forum of a stone block on which a very ancient form of Latin seems to refer to a rex or king. The block is dated to about 570 BC and so would appear to be exciting confirmation that Rome did indeed have kings at exactly the period when tradition says Romulus founded a series of ancient kings. Interesting. But this, like other similar passages, pop up almost at random. If you’re looking for a thorough archaeological history of Rome, this is not it either.

Instead SPQR proceeds by examining issues and problems in Roman historiography, introduced by flurries of rhetorical questions (which all-too-often go unanswered). Overall the text proceeds in broadly chronological order, but Beard jumps around a bit, coming back to the same subjects 20 or 30 pages after you thought we were done with them. She is also very given to repetition – some favourite scenes recur three or four times (Claudius telling the Senate that Gaulish leaders should be allowed to become consuls or the fact that Trajan was from Spain and Septimius Severus from Africa, the notion that Spartacus’s rebellion must have included more than just gladiators to have lasted so long – each of these idées fixes is mentioned four or five times, as are many others).

The result is an often confusing mix of sudden bursts of straight history interspersed with nuggets of recent archaeology, occasional profiles of specific people (for some reason the Gracchi brothers Tiberius and Gaius get extensive treatment, pages 221 to 233) all embedded in a kind of academic tide which keeps rising to a surf of academic questions before setting off onto new issues and investigations. Rather than a chronological account, it’s more like a series of articles or mini essays, arranged in a roughly chronological order.

Social history, sort of

There’s a lot of soft social history, specifically in chapter eight ‘The Home Front’ (pages 297 to 336) about Roman attitudes and customs, traditional ideas and beliefs – though done in a very limp way. I’ve just read a sentence where she adds a parenthesis explaining that the poor in ancient Rome didn’t have as much money as the rich. Maybe this book is targeted at people who need to have it explained to them that the poor, on the whole, by and large, don’t have as much money as the rich.

The specific context is she’s explaining that women in ancient Rome, though subject to umpteen restrictions which we (pretty obviously) would find intolerable, in fact had more independence than women in ancient Greece or the Near East.

The contrast is particularly striking with classical Athens, where women from wealthy families were supposed to live secluded lives, out of the public eye, largely segregated from men and male social life (the poor, needless to say, did not have the cash or space to enforce any such divisions). (p.307)

I suppose this is a useful point to make, but maybe it could have been made in a subtler way, not the rather crude formulation that the poor didn’t have as much cash as the rich. It feels like she’s bolted on the parenthesis not because it says anything useful for the reader, but because Dame Mary wants us to know that she’s really desperately concerned about the poor. Again and again you read things which ought to be interesting but which, through her banal turn of phrase or clunky thinking, are turned to lead.

Feminism, sort of

We know that Beard is a feminist because she tells everyone she meets, mentions it in all her TV shows and media appearances, and in tweets and lectures, and has written a book about Women and Power.  She flourishes her feminist credentials early on with little sequence of huffy points about sexism in ancient Rome:

  • In the middle of the first century BCE, the senate was a body of some 600 members; they were all men who had previously been elected to political office (and I mean all men – no woman ever held political office in ancient Rome). (p.32)
  • Catiline’s defeat was nonetheless a notable victory for Cicero; and his supporters dubbed him pater patriae, or ‘father of the fatherland’, one of the most splendid and satisfying titles you could have in a highly patriarchal society, such as Rome. (p.35)
  • The ‘people’ was a much larger and more amorphous body than the senate, made up, in political terms, of all male citizens; the women had no formal political rights. (p.36)
  • The writers of Roman literature were almost exclusively male; or, at least, very few works by women have come down to us…(p.37)

I mock them as ‘huffy not as a sexist jibe but a jokey description of the way they’re such obvious and superficial points to make. Because she doesn’t go any deeper into any of these ideas, these throwaway remarks just come over as cheap shots. Like the reference in brackets to the poor, they don’t seem designed to tell the reader anything useful about ancient Rome so much as to let the reader know that Dame Mary is a feminist, goddamit, and proud of it and nobody is going to shut her up and Down with the patriarchy and Sisters are doing it for themselves. As profound as a t-shirt slogan.

Having got this off her chest in the opening section, Beard’s feminism largely goes to sleep for the rest of the book. She reverts to telling us the long history of legendary, proto-historical, historical, republican and imperial Rome entirely from a male point of view.

Some feminist historians I’ve read reinterpret history entirely from a female point of view, subjecting the patriarchal structures of power to the intrinsic sexism of the syntax of the language to bracing, deeply thought-through, radical reinterpretations of history which make you stop and reconsider everything you know. There is absolutely none of that in Beard’s account. Beard’s much vaunted feminism feels like a few cherries blu tacked onto a narrative which could have been written by a man about men. Her ‘feminist’ account of women in ancient Rome is a big disappointment. Apart from the occasional moan that everything was run by men, SPQR could have been written fifty years ago.

Early on she points out the (fairly obvious) fact that two of the founding legends of ancient Rome involve rape, being the abduction of the Sabine women and the rape of Lucretia. Some other, less famous turning points in Roman history, wee also marked by accusations of sex crimes. Now there’s obviously something going on here, and I’m sure a half decent feminist theorist could take us deep into the psychological and cultural and political sub-texts and interpretations this is open to. But Beard doesn’t. It’s frustrating.

The only sustained consideration of women in ancient Rome comes when she pauses her (superficial) historical narrative for a chapter about everyday life in Rome at the time of Julius Caesar (Chapter Eight: The Home Front), which kicks off with fifteen or so pages about women (pages 303 to 318). But she manages to make even this sound dull and utterly predictable: Girls were often married off young, girls were forced to make marriages advantageous to their families (p.309). Once married:

The proper role of the woman was to be devoted to her husband, to produce the next generation, to be an adornment, to be a household manager and to contribute to the domestic economy by spinning and weaving. (p.304).

More or less the same as in ancient Persia or India or China or medieval anywhere, then. The only real surprise is the point mentioned above, that women in ancient Rome enjoyed relatively more freedom than in ancient Athens. They could, for example, freely attend mixed dinner parties, which would have been scandalous in Athens (p.307).

In fact the most interesting point in the passage about women in ancient Rome was the casualness of Roman marriage. There could be a big expensive ceremony if you were rich but there didn’t need to be and there was no sense of the Christian sacrament which the last 2,000 years have drummed into us. Instead, if a couple said they were married, they were, and if they said they were divorced, they were (p.303)

That’s interesting but you can see how it’s what you could call a ‘trivial pursuit fact’, quite interesting, but devoid of any theoretical (feminist) underpinning or detail. She gives no history of the evolution or development of Roman marriage. I bet there are entire scholarly books devoted to the subject which make fascinating reading but here there are just a few sentences, an ‘oh that’s interesting’ fact, and then onto the next thing. A bit later, writing about the high infant mortality in ancient Rome, she writes:

Simply to maintain the existing population, each woman on average would have needed to bear five or six children. In practice, that rises to something closer to nine when other factors, such as sterility and widowhood, are taken into account. It was hardly a recipe for widespread women’s liberation. (p.317)

I see what she’s getting at, but it just seems a really crass and wholly inadequate conclusion to the train of facts she’s been listing.

A lot of the text consists of pulling out facts like this at the expense of a continuous narrative – chapter eight includes a couple of pages describing how a wealthy man’s Roman house was more a vehicle for public display and business meetings than what we’d call a home:

On the atrium wall, a painted family tree was one standard feature, and the spoils a man had taken in battle, the ultimate mark of Roman achievement, might also be pinned up for admiration. (p.324)

This is kind of interesting in the way the rest of the book is, ho hum, kind of interesting, no big revelations. A bit of this, a bit of that, padded out with feminist tutting and hundreds of rhetorical questions.

[Plutarch’s Parallel Lives] were a concerted attempt to evaluate the great men (and they were all men) of Greece and Rome against each other…(p.501)

(There ought to be a term in rhetoric for the tag which so many feminist writers and columnists add to everything they wrote – ‘(and they were all men)’ – as if adding it to any sentence about almost any period of history anywhere in the world up till about 50 years ago, really comes as much surprise to anyone or changes anything. The ‘all men’ tag, maybe. To dress it smartly in Latin, the omnes homines tag.)

Is SPQR too full of rhetorical questions?

One irritating aspect of her approach is Beard’s fondness for writing little clumps of rhetorical questions of exactly the type which work well in a TV documentary or maybe a lecture hall but feel like padding in a written text:

How did Cicero and his contemporaries reconstruct the early years of the city? Why were their origins important to them? What does it mean to ask ‘where does Rome begin’? How much can we, or could they, really know of earliest Rome? (p.52)

But if there is no surviving literature from the founding period and we cannot rely on the legends, how can we access any information about the origins of Rome? Is there any way of throwing light on the early years of the little town by the Tiber that grew into a world empire? (p.79)

Is it possible to link our investigations into the earliest history of Rome with the stories that the Romans themselves told, or with their elaborate speculations on the city’s origins? Can we perhaps find a little more history in the myth? (p.86)

Did someone called Ancus Marcus once exist but not do any of the things attributed to him? Were those things the work of some person or persons other than Ancus but of unknown name? (p.95)

Whose liberty was at stake? How was it most effectively defended? How could conflicting versions of the liberty of the Roman citizen be reconciled? (p.129)

What kind of model of fatherhood was this? Who was most at fault? Did high principles need to come at such a terrible cost? (p.150)

Why and how did the Romans come to dominate so much of the Mediterranean in such a short time? What was distinctive about the Roman political system? (p.173)

How influential was the popular voice in Roman Republican politics? Who controlled Rome? How should we characterise this Roman political system? (p.189)

If this was the kind of thing that came from Rome’s ancestral home, what did that imply about what it meant to be Roman? (p.207)

Clumps of rhetorical questions like these crop up throughout the text, to be precise on pages 52, 62, 65, 70, 77, 79, 80, 86, 95, 99, 110, 115, 129, 131, 137, 146, 150, 151, 153, 166, 173, 180, 182, 188, 189, 205, 207, 212, 225, 226, 234, 241, 244, 251, 255, 256, 266, 277, 281, 291, 293, 299, 301, 312, 326, 330, 331, 332, 333, 336, 341, 346, 352, 354, 358, 377, 384, 389, 395, 399, 412, 414, 415, 426, 440, 480, 510, 517 and 520.

I suppose this is a standard teaching technique. I imagine a Cambridge Professor of Classics, whether in a classroom or lecture hall, often proceeds by putting rhetorical questions to her students and then setting out to answer them. Maybe it’s a common device in other factual books. But not quite to this extent, not so many clumps of so many questions. It begins to feel as if history exists mainly to provide professors of history with the opportunity of asking lots of rhetorical questions. After a while it gets pretty irritating, especially when the questions often aren’t even answered but left hanging in your mind…

What kind of act had he been playing all those years?… Where was the real Augustus? And who wrote these lines? These questions remain. (p.384)

Banal ‘ideas’

When she proudly presents us with so-called ‘ideas’ they are often disappointingly obvious and banal. I’ve mentioned above the point she makes that the poor don’t have as much money as the rich. Elsewhere she remarks that:

Civil war had its seedy side too. (p.300)

Or:

Hypocrisy is a common weapon of power. (p.358)

Well, yes, I kind of suspected as much. Here’s another Beardesque remark:

There is often a fuzzy boundary between myth and history (p.71)

It’s not untrue, it’s just limp. Quite a massive amount more could be made of this point by someone with brains and insight but not in this book. As it happens the same phrase recurs 400 pages later:

There was always a fuzzy zone where Roman control faded gradually into non-Roman territory (p.484)

And this echo made me realise that this, like other similar statements throughout the book, are not  really ‘ideas’ at all. They’re not the conclusions of a train of thought, they’re the axioms she starts out with – and my God, aren’t they boring?

  • Cultural identity is always a slippery notion…(p.205)
  • Elites everywhere tend to worry about places where the lower classes congregate… (p.456)

They’re not quite truisms but they are pretty obvious. I wish I’d noticed them earlier and made a collection because the ones I read in the final stretch of the book have the amusing tone of a schoolmistress lecturing rather dim children. It was like being back at infants school. For example, she tells us how early legends of Romulus claim he didn’t die but was covered by a cloud and disappeared:

crossing the boundary between human and divine in a way that Rome’s polytheistic religious system sometimes allowed (even if it seems faintly silly to us) (p.73)

I enjoyed that sensibly dismissive tone of voice – ‘seems faintly silly to us’. I imagine sentences like this being read in the voice of Joyce Grenfell, a no-nonsense, jolly hockeysticks, 1950s schoolteacher telling us how frightfully silly these old Romans could be! At other moments you can hear her telling the children to pay attention because she’s about to make a jolly important point which she wants us all to write down and remember:

It is a fallacy to imagine that only the poor write on walls. (p.470)

Yes, Miss.

Contrived comparisons

Beard has made ten or so TV documentaries and written the accompanying coffee table books and I can well imagine how she was encouraged at every step to insert ‘contemporary comparisons’ for events or aspects of life in ancient Rome in order to make them more ‘accessible’ and ‘relevant’ to the average viewer. Maybe this kind of thing does work for some people, but there are at least three risks with this approach:

1. Contemporary comparisons date

What are initially ‘contemporary’ comparisons quickly go out of date. Time moves on at a relentless pace (it’s odd having to point this out to a professor of a historical subject) so what were once surprising and illuminating comparisons between events in the ancient world and bang up-to-date contemporary events quickly lose their relevance. In my last review I mentioned her reference to the 1990s TV show Gladiators or the 2000 movie Gladiator which, far from shedding light on her subject, now themselves require a footnote to explain to younger readers what she’s on about. I think something similar applies to many of her other ‘cool’ and edgy comparisons (she uses the word ‘edgy’ at one point).

(Incidentally, if you wanted to learn anything about gladiators in ancient Rome, forget it, once again this isn’t the book for you. Spartacus is mentioned a couple of times in passing (pages 217 to 218 and 248 to 250) but always folded into a bigger, vaguer academic discussion of the class wars which racked Italy. Beard isn’t at all interested in gladiators’ lives or training or the battles fought during the uprising. Instead she uses it to explain the modern theory that Spartacus didn’t lead gladiators alone but rallied a lot of the rural poor and lower middle class to his cause. Gladiators fighting beasts to the death in the colosseum are mentioned half a dozen times but always in passing, in the context or urban planning or urban pastimes etc.)

Beard opens the narrative with a description of the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state in the 60s BC. She tries to make this more relevant or accessible by mentioning ‘homeland security’ and ‘terrorism’ a lot.

Over the centuries the rights and wrongs of the conspiracy, the respective faults and virtues of Catiline and Cicero, and the conflicts between homeland security and civil liberties have been fiercely debated…(p.49)

But the US Homeland Security Act was passed in 2002 and, although terrorism will be with us forever, the distinctive atmosphere of paranoid fear of Islamic terrorism which was very widespread in the 2000s seems, to me, nowadays, to have virtually disappeared. Far more important for the era we live in now, in 2022, was the financial crash of 2008 which led governments around the Western world to implement a decade of ‘austerity’ policies which bore down hardest on the most vulnerable in society, leading to widespread resentment. It was arguably this resentment which found an outlet in the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, decisions which dominated British and American politics for the following 4 years. And then, of course, everything was superseded by the coronavirus pandemic.

Obviously Brexit, Trump and Covid are not mentioned in a book published in 2015. But that means that the book itself, and what were once bang up-to-date ‘modern’ comparisons, are already starting to have a faded, dated quality. Time marches on and comparisons which might have seemed useful in connecting ancient history to contemporary events inevitably age and date, become irrelevant and, eventually, themselves become obscure historical references which need explaining. I smiled when I read the following:

The [Catiline] ‘conspiracy’ will always be a prime example of the classic interpretative dilemma: were there really ‘reds under the bed’ or was the crisis, partly at least, a conservative invention? (p.48)

‘Reds under the bed’? See what I mean by dated? Apparently this phrase originated in the United States as far back as 1924 although it only became common parlance during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the late 1940s. It’s a phrase Beard might have picked up when she was young in the 1970s, certainly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but this ‘contemporary’ reference, included in a bid to make the story more ‘accessible’, nowadays itself requires explaining to anyone under the age of 30.

Something similar happens when, later in the book, she tries to make the writings of the emperor Marcus Aurelius seem more relevant and contemporary by excitedly pointing out that one of his big fans is Bill Clinton (p.399). When I ask my kids who Bill Clinton is they look at me with blank faces; after all, his second term as US president ended in 2001.

Same again when she casually refers to the (often bloody) transition from rule by one emperor to the next one as ‘regime change’ (pages 403 and 414), a phrase which, I believe, was popularised at the time of the Iraq War and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, almost twenty years ago.

In Beard’s mind these might be useful comparisons which make the text more ‘accessible’, but all they do for the reader in 2022 is reveal how dated and ageing her entire frame of references is, here and throughout the text, in multiple ways.

2. Patronising

Carefully inserting comparisons to ‘contemporary’ events or culture in order to try and make ancient history more understandable, relatable and relevant runs the risk of sounding patronising and Beard sometimes does sound condescending. She frequently addresses the reader as if we’ve never read any history or know anything about the ancient world (or life in general: carefully explaining that poor people don’t have as much money as rich people, or that not everyone who writes graffiti on walls is poor).

I won’t go so far as to call her attitude ‘insulting’ but you can see why the general attitude betrayed in casual comparisons, asides and parentheses put me off. By contrast, Richard Miles in his book about ancient Carthage, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, treats his readers like adults, in fact more than adults because he takes you right into the heart of scholarly debates about the events he’s describing, giving extensive notes and making countless references to scholarly articles on the subject, which all make quite a lot of demands on the average reader.

But I’d rather read something which asks me to strain my faculties, which requires me to master the detail of conflicting scholarly interpretations of historical facts, I’d rather feel that I’m being stretched than, as with Beard, be subject to a succession of rhetorical questions, staged discussions, dated comparisons all larded with rather obvious truisms and banal comments.

3. Strained

In my first review I mentioned special pleading. What I was trying to express is the way Beard never knowingly neglects an opportunity to throw in a reference to modern life or use a modern phrase (homeland security, domestic abuse, people trafficking) to try and link whatever bit of ancient Rome she’s describing to modern headlines and issues. I’ve described how these comparisons can be both dated and patronising, but they can also come over as strained and contrived, missing the point of modern example and confusing our understanding of the ancient event.

So when Cicero turns up at a poll with an armed guard and wearing a military breastplate under his toga, this breach of etiquette was:

rather as if a modern politician were to enter the legislature in a business suit with a machine gun slung over his shoulder’ (p.29).

For some reason the phrase ‘machine gun’ made me think of Tintin in 1930s Chicago and cartoon gangsters. Maybe it’s a useful comparison, but there’s also something cartoonish and childish about it and – my real beef – nifty comparisons like this often mask the way Beard doesn’t explain things properly. Although she spends quite a few pages on it, and compares it to modern concerns about terrorism and ‘homeland security’ and ‘regime change’, Beard never really properly, clearly explains what the Catiline Conspiracy actually was. I had to look it up on Wikipedia to get a full sense of it. Too often she’s more interested in rhetorical questions and cartoon comparisons and then in rushing off to discuss the issues this or that event raises, than in actually, clearly, lucidly explaining the thing she’s meant to be telling us.

In 63 BC the Senate issued a law allowing Cicero to do whatever was necessary to secure the state (which meant rounding up and executing the Catiline conspirators). But in case we didn’t understand what this means, Beard explains that this was:

roughly the ancient equivalent of a modern ’emergency powers’ or ‘prevention of terrorism’ act (p.30)

Maybe this helps some readers but, like so much of what she writes, a detailed understanding of the thing itself, the event in the ancient world, its precedents and meanings, are sacrificed for a flashy modern comparison.

Trivial pursuit facts

Obviously Beard is hugely knowledgeable about her chosen subject, I’m not denying that for a minute. And so the book does contain a wealth of information, if you can bite your tongue and ignore the patronising tone, the banal generalisations and the limp ‘ideas’. Some examples from the first half of the book include:

– The first century BC is the best documented period of human history before Renaissance Florence, in the sense that we have a wealth of documents written by leading players giving us insights into their lives and thoughts (p.22).

– The towering figure is Cicero, not in terms of military achievement (in this warlike society he was not a warrior, he was a lawyer and orator) or political achievement (he took the losing side in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey and met a wretched fate) but because so many of his writings have survived. It is possible to get to know him better than anyone else in the whole of the ancient world (pages 26 and 299). This explains why Cicero crops up throughout the book, since he wrote so copiously and so widely about earlier Roman history, customs, religion and so on. It explains why the chapter about social life and the Roman house depends heavily on Cicero – because we have lots of detail about his buying and selling of properties, loans and rents, even down the details of him buying statues and furniture to decorate them.

Julius Caesar had a healthy appetite because he followed a course of emetics, a popular form of detoxification among rich Romans which involved regular vomiting (p.302).

The traditional colour for brides in ancient Rome was yellow (p.303).

Some random Latin words

The Romans referred to themselves as gens togata meaning ‘the people who wear the toga’ (p.32).

The English word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means whitened and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns (p.32) (compare our use of the English word candid which comes from the same root).

The Latin word for female wolf, lupa, was also a slang term for prostitute. So could it be that the old tale about Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf actually referred to a female sex worker? (Nice suggestion. Probably not.)

The English word palace derives from the early 13th century French word palais, from the Medieval Latin palacium (source of the Spanish palacio, Italian palazzo) which all stem from the Latin palatium, which derives from from Mons Palatinus, ‘the Palatine Hill’, one of the seven hills of ancient Rome, where Augustus Caesar’s house stood (the original ‘palace’) and was later the site of the splendid residence built by Nero (pages 59 and 418).

Lots of political bodies in countries round the world are called senates, copying the Roman word and idea. The word Senate derives from the Latin senex meaning old man. The original idea, developed in the 3rd century BC, was that everyone who had held a public office (as consul, magistrate, quaestor and so on) at the end of their term went to sit in the Senate where they could use their experience of public life to judge new laws or directives issuing from the Assemblies or consuls.

Crime and punishment

Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment (p.35).

Later writers thought the rot set in with the defeat of Carthage 146 BC

In the 40s BC Gaius Sallustius Crispus, known as Sallust, wrote an essay about the Cataline conspiracy in which he claimed the conspiracy was symptomatic of Rome’s moral decline. He claimed the moral fibre of Roman culture had been destroyed by the city’s success and by the wealth, greed and lust for power that followed its successful crushing of all its rivals. Specifically, he mentions the final destruction of its old rival Carthage in 146 BC and the emergence of Rome as the paramount power in the Mediterranean as the moment when the rot started to set in (page 38 and 516).

Slavery (pages 328 to 333)

All slaves are enemies – Roman proverb

In the mid first-century BC there were between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy, about a fifth of the population. There was a huge variety of slaves, of functions and origins. Slaves could be enemy soldiers or populations captured in war, the children of established slaves, or even abandoned babies rescued from the municipal rubbish dump. Some slaves wore rags and were worked to death in silver mines, some wore fine clothes and acted as secretaries to rich Romans like Cicero. In wealthy households the line between an educated, well treated slave and other staff was often paper thin. The Latin word familia referred to the entire household, including both the non-free and free members (p.330).

  • servus – Latin for slave
  • libertus – Latin for freed slave

Beard refers to slavery for half a page on page 68 and then devotes five pages in chapter eight. The facts she relates are interesting enough – it’s interesting to be told about the great variety of types and statuses of slave in ancient Rome, how some were considered members of the family, how easy it was to free them (although the authorities introduced a tax which had to be paid when you did so).

How the Roman policy of freeing slaves (manumission to use the English word derived from the Latin term) who could then go on to acquire full civic rights was unique in the ancient world.

That in Ancient Rome, a slave was freed in a ceremony in which a praetor touched the slave with a rod called a vindicta and pronounced him or her to be free. The slave’s head was shaved and a special kind of hat, the pileus or liberty cap, was placed on it. Both the vindicta and the cap were considered symbols of Libertas, the goddess representing liberty.

It’s interesting to think that the sheer rate at which Romans freed slaves who originally came from faraway places as defeated soldiers or captives, over the long term contributed to Rome becoming one of the most ethnically diverse places in the ancient world (p.330)

That the Greek island of Delos was one of the great commercial hubs of its day which was inextricably linked with it also being a centre of the Mediterranean slave trade.

But five and a half pages are hardly enough to cover such an engrained, scandalous and essential part of Roman history and culture. Like so much else in the book, the facts she gives are interesting enough but, ultimately, all a bit…well…meh.

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.

Roman reviews

7 Comments
by Simon on January 31, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, History
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Posted by Simon on January 31, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/31/spqr-history-of-ancient-rome-mary-beard-2/

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 by Sean McMeekin (2015)

This is a very good book, maybe the definitive one-volume account of the subject currently available.

McMeekin’s earlier volume, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918, although full of solid history, was conceived and structured as an entertainment, using the erratic history of the Berlin to Baghdad railway project as a thread on which to hang an account of the German High Command’s attempt to raise a Muslim Holy War against her enemies, Britain and France, across the entire territory of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, into Persia and Afghanistan.

It had a chapter apiece devoted to the quixotic missions which the Germans sent out to try and recruit various Muslim leaders to their side, very much dwelling on the colourful characters who led them and the quirky and sometimes comic details of the missions – which, without exception, failed.

In Berlin to Baghdad book McMeekin had a habit of burying references to key historic events in asides or subordinate clauses, which had a cumulatively frustrating effect. I felt I was learning a lot about Max von Oppenheim, the archaeological expert on the ancient Middle East who was put in charge of Germany’s Middle East Bureau – but a lot less about the key events of the war in Turkey.

Similarly, as McMeekin recounted each different mission, as well as the various aspects of German policy in Turkey, he tended to go back and recap events as they related to this or that mission or development, repeatedly going back as far as the 1870s to explain the origin of each thread. I found this repeated going over the same timeframe a number of times also rather confusing.

This book is the opposite. This is the book to read first. This is the definitive account.

In 500 solid pages, with lots of very good maps and no messing about, following a strict chronological order, McMeekin gives us the political, military and diplomatic background to the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in the First World War, a thorough, authoritative account of those disastrous years, and of their sprawling aftermath through the disastrous Greco-Turkish War (1919-23) ending with the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July 1923, which established the modern republic of Turkey and brought that troubled country’s decade of tribulations to an end.

McMeekin suggests that the bloody decade which stretched from the first of the two Balkan Wars in 1912/13 through to the final peace of the Greco-Turkish War as, taken together, constituting The War of The Ottoman Succession.

Gallipoli

This is the first detailed account of the Gallipoli disaster I’ve read, which clearly sets it in the wider context of a) the broader Ottoman theatre of war b) the First World War as a whole. I was a little shocked to learn that the entire Gallipoli campaign was in response to a request from Russian High Command to draw Ottoman troops away from the Caucasus, where the Russian High Command thought they were being beaten.

One among many bitter ironies is that the Russians were not, in fact, being defeated in the Caucasus, that in fact the Battle of Sarikamish (December 1914 to January 1915), which the Russian leadership panicked and took to be a rout, eventually turned into the worst Ottoman defeat of the war.

But the Russians’ panicky request to the British at Christmas 1914 was enough to crystallise and jog forward British ideas about opening a second front somewhere in Turkey. From a raft of often more practical options, the idea attacking and opening up the Dardanelles (so British ships could sail up to and take Constantinople, and gain access to the Black Sea) soon acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own.

Armenian genocide

As with Gallipoli, so McMeekin also presents the Armenian Genocide in the context of the bigger picture, showing, for example, how the Christian Armenians did rise up against their Ottoman masters in the eastern city of Van, and did co-operate with the attacking Russians to expel the Ottomans and hand the city over, and so did justify the paranoia of the Ottoman High Command that they had a sizeable population of fifth columnists living in potentially vital strategic areas.

For it was not only in the far East of the Empire, in Armenia, a fair proportion of the Armenian population of Cilicia, over on the Mediterranean coast, was also prepared to rise up against the Ottomans, if provided with guns and leadership from the British (pp.223-245).

So McMeekin’s measured and factual account makes it much more understandable why the Ottoman High Command – under pressure from the ongoing British attack at Gallipoli, and terrified by the swift advances by the Russians through the Caucasus – took the sweeping decision to expel all Armenians from all strategically sensitive locations.

None of this excuses the inefficiency they then demonstrated in rounding up huge numbers of people and sending them into the Syrian desert where hundreds of thousands perished, or the gathering mood of violent paranoia which seized local authorities and commanders who took the opportunity to vent their fear and anxiety about the war on helpless civilians, which led to localised pogroms, execution squads and so on. But it does help to explain the paranoid atmosphere in which such things are allowed to happen.

McMeekin emphasises that, once it saw what was happening on the ground, the Ottoman leadership then tried to moderate the expulsion policy and explicitly forbade the punishment of Armenians, but it was too late: at the local level thousands of administrators and soldiers had absorbed the simple message that all Armenians were ‘traitors’ and should be shown no mercy. The net result was the violent killing, or the starving and exhausting to death, of up to one and a half million people, mostly defenceless civilians, an event which was used by Allied propaganda at the time, and has been held against the Turks ever since.

Siege at Kut

Again, I was vaguely aware of the British army’s catastrophe at Kut, a mud-walled town a few hundred miles (230 miles, to be precise) up the Tigris river, where an entire British army was surrounded and besieged by a Turkish army, in a situation reminiscent of the Boer War sieges of Mafeking and Ladysmith (pp.263-270, 290-293).

But McMeekin’s account helps you see how the Kut disaster was a climax of the up-to-that-point successful campaign to seize the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Shatt al-Harab, and to win towns as far north as Basra, Qurna and Amara.

He takes you into the British thinking strategic thinking behind the ill-advised decision to push on towards Baghdad, and explains why the Turks turned out to be better dug-in and better led around that city than we expected (p.269). There’s a fascinating thread running alongside the slowly building catastrophe, which was the extreme reluctance of the Russian commander in the field, General N.N. Baratov to come to our aid (pp.290-292).

In fact Russian tardiness / perfidy is a recurrent theme. We only mounted the Gallipoli offensive to help the bloody Russians, but when it ran into trouble and British leaders begged Russia to mount a diversionary attack on the Black Sea environs of Constantinople to help us, the Russians said the right thing, made a few desultory naval preparations but – basically – did nothing.

British take Jerusalem

Similarly, I vaguely knew that the British Army ‘took’ Jerusalem, but it makes a big difference to have it set in context so as to see it as the climax of about three years of on-again, off-again conflict in the Suez and Sinai theatre of war.

Early on, this area had seen several attempts by Germans leading Turkish armies, accompanied by Arab tribesmen, to capture or damage parts of the Suez Canal, which McMeekin had described in the earlier book and now tells again, much more thoroughly and factually. The capture of Jerusalem was the result of a new, far more aggressive British policy  of not just defending the canal, but of attacking far beyond it – known as the Southern Palestine Offensive of November to December 1917, carried out by the Egypt Expeditionary Force led by General Edmund Allenby.

Balfour Declaration

Similarly, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. I knew about this but hadn’t realised how it was related to the Russian Revolution. Apparently, world Jewish opinion was split for the first three years of the war about who to support because:

  1. Zionism, as a movement, was actually an Austro-German invention, the brainchild of Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl
  2. the World Zionist Executive was based throughout the war in Berlin
  3. most powerfully, the Western democracies were allied with Russia which had, from time immemorial, been the traditional enemy of Jews and Judaism

But the overthrow of the Tsarist government, and the transition to what everyone hoped would be more liberal democratic rule, tipped the balance of world Jewish opinion, especially in America, where the money came from (pp.352-3), against the Central Powers. The Balfour Declaration was a pretty cynical attempt to take advantage of this shift in Jewish opinion.

The Russian Revolution

God knows how many histories of the Russian Revolution I’ve read, but it was fascinating to view the whole thing from the point of view of the Ottoman Empire.

1916 was actually a good year for the Russians in the Ottoman theatre of war. They won a series of sweeping victories which saw them storm out of the Caucasus and into Anatolia, seizing Van and then the huge military stronghold at Erzerum.

And McMeekin shows how, even as the central government in faraway Petrograd collapsed in early 1917, the Russian Black Sea navy under Admiral Kolchak, chalked up a series of aggressive victories, climaxing with a sizeable naval attack force which steamed right up to the Bosphorus in June 1917.

But the collapse of the Tsarist regime in February 1917 had led to slowly ramifying chaos throughout the army and administration, and the the arrival of Lenin in the capital in April 1917, with his simple and unequivocal policy of ending the war, sowed the seeds of the complete collapse of Russian forces.

McMeekin leaves you with one of those huge historical what-ifs: What if the Russian revolution hadn’t broken out when it did – maybe the Russians would have taken Constantinople, thus ending the war over a year early and permanently changing the face of the Middle East.

The best history is empowering

As these examples show, this is the very best kind of history, the kind which:

  1. lays out very clearly what happened, in a straightforward chronological way so that you experience the sequence of events just as the participants did, and sympathise with the pressures and constraints they were under
  2. and places events in a thoroughly explained context so that you understand exactly what was at stake and so why the participants behaved as they did

McMeekin is slow to judge but, when he does, he has explained enough of the events and the context that you, the reader, feel empowered to either agree or disagree.

Empowerment – and this is what good history is about. 1. It explains what happened, it puts it in the widest possible context, and it empowers you to understand what happened and why, so you can reach your own assessments and conclusions.

2. And it has another, deeper, empowering affect which is to help you understand why things are the way they are in the modern world, our world.

McMeekin explains that, on one level, the entire history of the later Ottoman Empire is about Russia’s relationship with Turkey and the simple facts that the Russians wanted:

  1. to seize all of European Turkey, most of all Constantinople, to reclaim it as a Christian city to be renamed Tsargrad
  2. to make big inroads into eastern Turkey, creating semi-independent states of Armenia and Kurdistan which would be Russian protectorates
  3. the net affects of 1 and 2 being to give Russia complete dominance of the Black Sea and easy access to the Mediterranean

This is the fundamental geopolitical conflict which underlies the entire region. The intrusion into bits of the Empire by the British (in Egypt, Palestine and Iraq) or the French wish to colonise Lebanon and Syria, are in a sense secondary to the fundamental Russo-Turkish conflict whose roots stretch back centuries.

Competition for the Caucasus

McMeekin covers the ‘scramble for the Caucasus’ in the Berlin-Baghdad book but, as with the rest of the subject, it feels much more clear and comprehensible in this version.

It’s the story of how, following the unilateral declaration of peace by the Bolsheviks, the Germans not only stormed across Eastern Europe, sweeping into the Baltic nations in the north and Ukraine in the south – they also got involved in a competition with the Turks for the Caucasus and Transcaucasus.

In other words the Ottoman Army and the German Army found themselves competing to seize Armenia, Georgia, Kurdistan and, above all, racing to seize Baku on the Caspian Sea, important not only for its strategic position, but because of the extensive oil fields in its hinterland.

The story is fascinatingly complex, involving a British force (led by General Dunster) which at one point held the city for 6 weeks (the British got everywhere!) but was forced to withdraw by boat across the Caspian as the hugely outnumbering Turks moved in – and a great deal of ethnic conflict between rival groups on the spot, specifically the native Azeri Muslims and the Christian Armenians.

Events moved very quickly. Local political leaders across the region declared the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic which included the present-day republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia which existed from just April to May 1918, but the area around Baku was engulfed in ethnic violence – the so-called March Days massacres from March to April 1918 – and then in May 1918, the leading party in Baku declared independence as the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.

Nice for them but irrelevant as the Ottoman Army then routed the British and seized the city in September 1918. And only a few years later, most of these countries were reinvented by the Bolsheviks as Socialist Soviet Republics strongly under the control of Moscow, as they would remain for the next 70 years till the collapse of the Soviet Union (so in this region, the Russians won).

The end of the Great War…

The race for Baku was just one example of the chaos which was unleashed over an enormous area by the collapse of the Russian state.

But for McMeekin, it was also an example of the foolishness of the main military ruler of the Ottoman Empire during the entire Great War, Enver Pasha, who over-extended the (by now) under-manned and under-armed Turkish army, by dragging it all the way to the shores of the Caspian in what McMeekin calls ‘a mad gamble’ (p.400) ‘foolish push’ (p.409).

This left the Anatolian heartland under-defended when it suffered attacks by the British from the north in Thrace, from the south up through Palestine, and in Iraq – not to mention the French landings in Cilicia and Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast.

The Empire was forced to sign the Armistice of Mudros with Great Britain on 30 October and Ottoman troops were obliged to withdraw from the whole region in the Caucasus which they’d spent the summer fighting for.

… was not the end of the fighting

The war between France and Britain and the Ottoman Empire theoretically ended with the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. But McMeekin’s book is fascinating because it shows how invasions, landings, fighting and massacres continued almost unabated at locations across the Empire.

Specifically, it was a revelation to me that the Allied decision to allow the Greeks to land troops in the city of Smyrna on the Aegean coast turned out to be the flashpoint which triggered the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Disgruntled Ottoman officers had been gathering in central Anatolia, away from Constantinople, now occupied by the Allies, who bitterly resented the way the civilian politicians were handing over huge tranches of the Empire to the Allies. These men rallied in Eastern Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal, who became the leader of the hastily assembled Turkish National Movement.

And thus began, as McMeekin puts it, one of the most remarkable and successful political careers of the twentieth century, the transformation of Mustafa Kemal from successful general into Father of his Nation, who was awarded the honorific Atatürk (‘Father of the Turks’) in 1934.

Big ideas

As always, when reading a history on this scale, some events or issues leap out as new (to me) or particularly striking. Maybe not the ones the author intended, but the ones which made me stop and think.

1. The First World War ended in Bulgaria

Brought up on the story of the trenches, I tend to think of the war ending because the German Spring offensive of 1918 broke the Allied lines and advanced 25 miles or so before running out of steam, at which point the Allies counter-attacked, pushing the Germans back to their original lines and then ever-backwards as more and more German soldiers deserted and their military machine collapsed. That’s how it ended.

I knew that Bulgaria had surrendered to the Allies as early 24 September and that that event had had some impact on German High Command, but it is fascinating to read McMeekin’s account which makes the end of the First World War all about the Balkans and Bulgaria.

The British had had a large force (250,000) defending Macedonia and the approach to Greece from Bulgaria, which was allied with Austria and Germany. But the Bulgarians were fed up. In the peace treaties imposed on the new Bolshevik Russian government in May 1918 the Bulgarians got hardly any territory. When the Germans advanced into Ukraine the Bulgarians received hardly any of the grain which was seized. The Bulgarians are Slavs and so there was widespread sympathy for Russia while many ordinary people wondered why their young men were fighting and dying for Germany. And there was abiding antagonism against the Ottomans, their supposed ally, who Bulgaria had had to fight to free itself from and had fought against in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

All this meant that when an aggressive new French general, Louis Félix Marie François Franchet d’Espèrey, arrived to take command of Allied army in Macedonia, and sent exploratory probes against the Bulgarian line, discovered it was weak, and then unleashed a full frontal assault in the Vardar Offensive of September 1918, that the Bulgarian army and state collapsed.

The Bulgarian army surrendered, mutinied, part even declared an independent mini-republic, and the Bulgarian government was forced to sue for peace on 24 September 1918. When he heard of the Bulgarian surrender, the supreme leader of the German Army, Ludendorff, said they were done for. The Turkish generalissimo, Enver Pasha, said we’re screwed.

The collapse of Bulgaria gave the Allies command of the Balkans, allowing the channeling of armies south-east, the short distance to capture Constantinople, or north against the vulnerable southern flank of Austro-German territory.

In McMeekin’s account, the collapse of Tsarist Russia was certainly a seismic event but it didn’t, of itself, end the war.

The trigger for that event was the surrender of Bulgaria.

2. East and West

Another of the Big Ideas to really dwell on is the difference between the First World War on the Western Front and on the other theatres of war – the Eastern Front in Europe, but also all the warzones in Ottoman territory, namely Gallipoli, the Black Sea, Suez, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus.

Any English person brought up, like me, on the history and iconography of the Western Front, with its four-year-long stalemate and gruelling trench warfare, will be astonished at the dynamism and tremendously changing fortunes of the combatants on all the other fronts I’ve just listed.

Not only that, but events in the East were intricately interlinked, like a vast clock.

Thus it is one thing to learn that Serbia, the cause of the whole war, which Austria-Hungary had threatened to demolish in the first weeks of the war, was not in fact conquered until over a year later, in November 1915. So far, so vaguely interesting.

But it took my understanding to a whole new level to learn that the fall of Serbia to the Central Powers was the decisive event for Gallipoli. Because, while Serbia was holding out, she had prevented the Germans from shipping men and material easily down through the Balkans to their Ottoman ally. Once Serbia fell, however, the transport routes to Turkey were open, and this was the last straw for strategists in London, who realised the bad situation of the Allied troops stuck on the beaches of the Dardanelles could only deteriorate.

And so the decision to abandon the Gallipoli campaign and remove the troops from the beaches.

This is just one example from the many ways in which McMeekin’s account helps you see how all of these events were not isolated incidents, but how, all across the region from Libya in the West to the Punjab in the East, from the Balkans via Palestine to Suez, across Syria, down into Arabia, or up into the snowy Caucasus mountains, events in one theatre were intricately connected with events in all the others – and how the entire complex machinery was also influenced by events on the immense Eastern Front to their north, which ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Basically, the First World War in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, was vastly more complicated, dynamic and interesting than the war in the West. And also pregnant with all kinds of long-running consequences.

3. The ends of wars are incalculably more complex than the beginnings

Real peace didn’t come to Turkey till 1923. In this regard it was not unlike Germany which saw coups and revolutions through 1919, or the vast Russian Civil War which dragged on till 1922 and included an attempt to invade and conquer Poland in 1920, or the political violence which marred Italy until Mussolini’s black shirts seized power in 1922.

Across huge parts of the world, violence, ethnic cleansing and actual wars continued long after the Armistice of November 1918. In fact McMeekin goes so far as to describe the Battle of Sakarya (23 August to 12 September 1921) as ‘the last real battle of the First World War (p.456).

Thus the book’s final hundred pages describe the long, complex, violent and tortuous transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic, a story which is riveting, not least because of the terrible decisions taken by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, often against the advice of his entire cabinet, namely:

  1. to allow the Greek Army to occupy Smyrna, which led to riots, massacres, and outrage right across Turkey
  2. to occupy Constantinople on March 20 1920 – I had no idea British warships docked in the harbour, and British soldiers backed by armoured cars set up control points at every junction, erecting machine-gun posts in central squares – God, we got everywhere, didn’t we?

And bigger than both of these, the folly of the Allies’ approach of imposing a humiliating peace without providing the means to enforce it.

That said, America also played a key role. Much is always made of the Sykes-Picot Plan to divide the Ottoman Empire up between Britain and France, but McMeekin goes to great pains to emphasise several massive caveats:

1. Sazonov That, when it was drawn up, in June 1916, the Sykes-Picot Plan was largely at the behest of the pre-revolutionary Russian government which had more interest in seizing Ottoman territory than the other two combatants, so the plan ought, in McMeekin’s view, to be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picto Plan because of the dominant influence of Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.

2. Sèvres I was astonished to see that the Treaty of Sèvres (imposed on the new Turkish government in May 1920, reluctantly signed in August 1920) handed a huge amount of territory, the bottom half of present-day Turkey, to Italy – in fact pretty much all the contents of the Treaty of Sèvres are mind-boggling, it enacted ‘a policy of forcefully dismembering Turkey’ (p.447). As McMeekin brings out, a document better designed to humiliate the Turks and force them into justified rebellion could barely be imagined.

Map showing how the Ottoman Empire was carved up by the Treaty of Sèvres, not only between the French and British, but the Italians, Greeks and Russians as well (Source: Wikipedia, author: Thomas Steiner)

3. States That the key player in the final year of the war and the crucial few years after it, was the United States, with some plans being drawn up for America to hold ‘mandates’ over large parts of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia. Given a choice the native populations wanted the Americans in charge because they thought they would be genuinely disinterested unlike the colonial powers.

Here, as across Central Europe, it was a great blow when, first of all Woodrow Wilson had a stroke which disabled him (October 1919), and then the American Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations.

As the chaos continued, and as David Lloyd George listened to his influential Greek friends and supported a Greek army invasion of Smyrna on the Turkish coast (with its large Greek population), and then its pushing inland to secure their base, only slowly did I realise McMeekin was describing events which are nowadays, with hindsight, referred to as the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922.

I had no idea the Greeks penetrated so far into Anatolia.

Map of the Greco-Turkish War, blue arrows showing the advance of the Greek Army into undefended Anatolia and coming within 50 miles of the new Turkish capital at Ankara before being halted at the Battle of Sakarya (source: Wikipedia, author: Andrei Nacu)

And no idea that the Greeks were encouraged to the hilt by David Lloyd George right up until it began to look like they would lose after their advance was halted by the vital Battle of Sakarya just 50 miles from Ankara.

Nor that the Greeks then forfeited the backing of the French and British and world opinion generally, by the brutality with which they pursued a scorched earth policy in retreat, torching every town and village and railway and facility in their path, also committing atrocities against Muslim Turkish civilians. It’s gruelling reading the eye-witness descriptions of destroyed villages, raped women, and murdered populations. What bastards.

Mustafa Kemal’s impact on Britain

It was a revelation to me to learn that, once Kemal’s Turkish army had driven the Greeks back into the sea and forced the evacuation of Smyrna, and with his eastern border protected by a rock-solid treaty he had signed with Soviet Russia, Kemal now turned his attention to the Bosphorus, to Constantinople, and to Thrace (the thin strip of formerly Turkish territory on the northern, European side of the Straits), all occupied by (relatively small) British forces.

It was news to me that Lloyd George, backed by Winston Churchill, was determined that Kemal would not have either Constantinople or the Straits back again, and so a) wrote to the premiers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa asking them to contribute forces to a second defence of Gallipoli – they all said No – and b) the British public were by now so sick of the war in Turkey, and war generally, that they, and all the newspapers, roundly called for an end to British involvement – STOP THIS NEW WAR! shouted the Daily Mail.

And that it was this crisis which caused the collapse of the coalition government which had ruled Britain and the Empire since 1916.

The Conservatives abandoned the coalition, it collapsed, the Liberals split into two factions and the election of October 1922 resulted in not only a Conservative victory (344 seats) but the Labour Party emerging for the first time as the largest opposition party (142 seats), with the two factions of the Liberal party knocked into third and fourth place. The Liberals, even when they finally recombined, were never to regain the power and influence they enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century.

Thus, McMeekin points out with a flourish, Mustafa Kemal had not only divided the wartime Alliance (the French wanted nothing to do with Lloyd George’s foolish support for the Greeks) and atomised the Commonwealth (all those white Commonwealth countries refusing to help the Old Country) but ended the long history of the Liberal Party as a party of power.

Fascinating new perspectives and insights

Conclusion

Nowadays, it is easy to blame the usual imperialist suspects Britain and France for all the wrongs which were to beset the Middle East for the 100 years since the Treaty of Lausanne finally finalised Turkey’s borders and gave the rest of the area as ‘mandates’ to the victorious powers.

But McMeekin, in his final summing up, is at pains to point out the problems already existing in the troubled periphery – there had already been two Balkan Wars, Zionist immigration was set to be a problem in Palestine no matter who took over, Brits, Russians or Germans – Arabia was already restless with the Arab tribes jostling for power – Mesopotamia had been a hornet’s nest even during Ottoman rule, with the Ottoman authorities telling non-Muslims never to visit it. All this before you get to the smouldering cause of Armenian independence.

All these problems already existed under the last years of Ottoman rule, the British and French didn’t invent them, they just managed them really badly.

Ataturk’s achievement was to surgically remove all these problems from Ottoman control and delegate them to the imperial powers. He was clever, they were dumb, inheriting insoluble problems. He created an ethnically homogenous and ‘exclusionary state’ whose borders have endured to this day.

As a very specific example, McMeekin cites Kemal’s readiness to hand over the area around Mosul to British control, even though he was well aware of its huge oil deposits. He made the very wise assessment that the benefit of the oil would be outweighed by the disruptive issues he would inherit around managing the ethnic and religious conflicts in the region (between Kurds and Arabs, between Sunni and Shia Muslims). And indeed, the low-level conflicts of the region are alive and kicking to this day.

The Allies for 25 years struggled to rule Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Iraq and eventually withdrew in various states of failure. McMeekin’s mordant conclusion is that the ‘the War of the Ottoman Succession rages on, with no end in sight’ (p.495, final sentence).

For the clear and authoritative way it lays out its amazing story, and for the measured, deep insights it offers into the period it describes and the consequences of these events right up to the present day, this is a brilliant book.

Related reviews

Other blog posts about the First World War

Books

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Memoirs and fiction

Art & music

The Byzantine Empire

Which describe the first arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the region, their conquest of Anatolia, Byzantine territory and, finally, Constantinople itself.

1 Comment
by Simon on May 13, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Germany, Great War, History, Turkey, World War One
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Posted by Simon on May 13, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/the-ottoman-endgame-sean-mcmeekin/

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