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The silent women of Rome by M.I Finley (1965)

Obviously the issues of women, gender, sexuality, ‘the body’ and so on have come to dominate academic discourse in the humanities over the last 30 years or so. Before it was fashionable, 60 years ago, the classicist M.I. Finley wrote a thoughtful essay on the role of women in ancient Rome, which must have seemed fairly radical in its time but has itself come to be criticised by modern feminist historians.

M.I. Finley

Finley himself is an interesting character. He was born in 1912 in New York City to Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzenellenbogen, so was Jewish. Young Finkelstein was precociously intelligent and graduated from Syracuse University at the age of 15, and took another degree at Columbia University. He then taught at Columbia and City College of New York, where he was influenced by members of the Marxist Frankfurt School who had fled Nazi Germany and were working in exile in America. About 1945 he changed his name to Finley, nobody seems to know why, maybe to forestall antisemitism.

Finley was teaching at Rutgers University when, in 1951, he was named by a witness before the House Unamerican Activities Committee as a communist. He was then summoned before the committee and, when asked whether he was a communist, took the Fifth Amendment, like many other fellow travellers. J. Edgar Hoover leaned on Rutgers and, after the affair had dragged on for 3 years, Finley was eventually dismissed.

So he emigrated to Britain where he was quickly appointed university lecturer in classics at Cambridge, elected to a fellowship at Jesus College, and eventually rose through the hierarchy to become Master of Darwin College (1976 to 1982). He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1971 and knighted in 1979, becoming Sir Moses Israel Finley. He died in 1986.

The silent women of Rome

Finley’s essay has a straightforward aim: to lament the passive, repressed, largely voiceless role of aristocratic women in ancient Rome, using a number of examples, laws and situations to do so.

To start with he says that not many names of Roman-era women are remembered: the most famous woman from the period, Cleopatra was neither Roman nor Egyptian but Greek. As to Roman women, how many of them are remembered? Messalina, Agrippina, Catullus’s Lesbia, some legendary women such as Lucretia or, going way back, Dido.

[This is obviously a weak way to begin, with purely anecdotal summary of ‘famous women’ and no actual evidence.]

Obviously, most societies have been patriarchal and suppressed women but Finley asserts it’s hard to think of any other great civilised state ‘without a single really important woman writer or poet, with no truly regal queen…no patron of the arts.’

He then moves on to a more careful consideration of the evidence which he places under five headings:

through the erotic and satirical poetry of the late Republic and empire, ‘all written by men’
through the historians and biographers, ‘all men’ and attracted to salacious scandal
through the letter writers and philosophers, ‘all men’
through painting and sculpture, inscribed tombstones and religious monuments
through innumerable legal texts

So Finley, with his left-wing credentials, is fully aware of the patriarchal slant of his sources and that they record ideals and stereotypes ‘formulated and imposed by middle- and upper-class Roman males.’ For his day (1965) this feels like a full-on, left-wing, feminist mindset, and you’d have thought he anticipated a million feminist plaints by lamenting that what will always be missing from histories of Rome is the voices of women themselves.

For a start, until late in Roman history, women didn’t have individual names. The names they were given were the family name with an ‘a’ added, so that a daughter of the Claudii gens was named Claudia, of the Julii gens, Julia, and so on. In this spirit sisters were given the same name and only distinguished by the addition of ‘elder’ and ‘younger’, or ‘first’, ‘second’ etc. In the case of marriage between paternal cousins, mother and daughter could easily end up with the same names. For example, Augustus’s daughter was named Julia because he and she came of the Julii clan, and her daughter (Augustus’s grand daughter) was also named Julia.

This in itself is a staggering fact, really worth stopping to take onboard. Roman women didn’t have individual names. As Finley goes on to say, it’s as if Roman society as a whole wished to emphasise that girls and women were not genuine individuals but only offshoots of male-dominated families.

In fact he goes on to point out that although the word familia is Latin it never meant to Romans what it does to us nowadays. Familia either meant all the persons under the authority of the head of the household, or all the descendants from a common ancestor, or all one’s property, or all one’s servants – never our modern notion of the small nuclear family. ‘The stress was on a power structure, rather than on biology or intimacy.’

The Roman paterfamilias need not even be a father; the term was a legal one and applied to any head of a household. Biological children were excluded if illegitimate, whereas the practice of legal adoption was very common (two famous examples being Publius Clodius Pulcher having himself adopted by a plebeian family; and Julius Caesar’s adoption of his great-nephew Octavius).

Theoretically a paterfamilias’s power over his wife, sons and daughters and son’s wives and children, over all his slaves and property, was absolute. In law it was the power of life or death. A Roman woman was rarely if ever, at any point in her life, not in the legal power of a man.

Roman legislators and lawyers devoted a lot of space to precise definitions of the status of all possible permutations of family members (in the extended sense). This was because the family, in this extended sense, was the basic building block, the foundation, of their society. Not just women had highly defined places, but children, sons, heirs, and so on. Finley explains that strict rules were enacted prohibiting certain kinds of marriage: between a Roman citizen and a non-citizen; or between a Roman of the senatorial class and a citizen who had risen from the class of freemen (former slaves).

We miss the full picture if we concentrate only on women. The Roman state sought to regulate and control all social relationships.

Finley’s essay then uses the complex family life of Octavian/Augustus to demonstrate the absolute power of the paterfamilias at arranging the lives and marriages of all those in his power; but this strikes me as not a useful example because the greatest, longest-serving emperor is just about the least representative example you can imagine, and it’s all available in any life of Augustus, anyway.

Finley then goes back a bit in time to guesstimate that the submissive role of women in the Roman state was very ancient, and certainly by the time Hannibal was defeated (about 200 BC) all the elements were in place of the social situation Augustus tried to manage.

Male infidelity was widely accepted. Husbands could have mistresses, multiple partners and illegitimate children. ‘There was no puritanism in the Roman concept of morality.’ When you think about it this follows naturally from the central axiom that all that concerned the state was the efficient management of family legal matters; beyond carrying out their legal functions and duties towards the state, what people got up to in their ‘private lives’ was their own affair.

Throughout his long rule Augustus wasn’t concerned with reforming what we, the heirs to Christianity, think of ‘morality’, so much as social order. Above all he was concerned that not enough upper-class citizens were getting married and having children. Childlessness was an abrogation of responsibilities to the state. The licentious living he saw becoming more common around him wasn’t completely reprehensible in itself, but to be criticised insofar as it indicated a dereliction of duty to the state which he saw it as his responsibility to protect and maintain. Augustus disapproved of the Roman aristocracy living debauched lives because they were spending money on themselves which they should have been investing in their children and The Future of Rome.

There was nothing at all holy about marriage, as the chopping and changing of Augustus’s own marital career and of umpteen aristocrats amply demonstrated. This explains why divorce was easy and commonplace. It was a purely legal transaction. Marriage was important because:

it ensured the creation of the next generation of citizens
it ensured the smooth transition of property from one generation to the next
the entire social hierarchy depended on cleanly defined lineage and descent within families, which themselves needed to be clearly defined as patrician or plebeian or knightly in order to take their place in the systems of political management and control

So marriage was really important in ancient Rome from a social, economic, political and legal point of view. But hardly at all from a moral or emotional point of view, the two ways in which we have been increasingly taught to view it over the past 200 years, maybe since the so-called Romantic revolution around 1800 began to change a lot of attitudes in favour of the primacy of personality and emotion over duty and sacrifice.

Finley has a digression about the laws of marriage governing soldiers. These kept changing, as soldiers’ terms of service were themselves changed and developed, eventually becoming so complicated it resulted in an entire specialised area of Roman law.

Having discussed the aristocracy at some length, Finley then goes on to speculate about the condition of women in the working class. We know next to nothing about them but the chances are they were a lot more free of the social codes and restrictions imposed on aristocratic women because a) they had to work, and probably helped their husbands in a wide variety of trades and b) the rapid expansion of the slave trade and the slave population after the destruction of Carthage (146 BC), along with the surprisingly generous Roman habit of freeing slaves, meant that an ever-increasing proportion of the free population was directly descended from slaves, almost certainly giving them a drastically different notions about marriage norms than the aristocracy.

Mortality was higher among women than men. It is estimated that of the population which reached the age of 15 (i.e. evaded the high infant mortality) more than half the women were dead by forty, in some places, by 35. Women were a lot more likely to die due to a) multiple childbirths without any modern medicine b) sheer exhaustion of bearing children, rearing them, and working.

Divorce was easy and men often remarried. You can see how this would enormously complicate the legal situation around heirs, property, citizenship and so on. Hence the jungle of legislation.

And yet (Finley says, swinging his train of thought into a new groove), there is evidence that aristocratic Roman enjoyed some autonomy. They attended dinner parties and certainly the many festivals and games. Many Roman writers report the stimulating conversation of educated women in mixed company. Ovid in The Art of Love gives extensive advice on how to make the best of themselves, advising women of this class to dress and primp properly, to sweeten their breath, to walk gracefully and dance well, to cultivate the best poetry. This makes them sound quite free and independent in their behaviour.

Finley comes to his final thought: How did respectable Roman women of the level of education implied by Ovid and others find outlets for their repressed energies?

1. Religion

Roman religion was very patriarchal. Traditional Roman religion was based on the household gods and public rituals and men controlled both. There was a handful of female cults, such as the women-only Bona Dea, but all religious festivals were led by men and even the famous Vestal Virgins were under the direct supervision of a man, the pontifex maximus.

A big change came with the solidification of the empire and the great influx into Rome of eastern mystery cults, many of them carrying the entirely unroman concepts of personal communion with the god and personal salvation. Although some of these gods were completely closed to women (such as the military cult of Mithras) others offered women status and agency like they’d never had before.

The most notable example of these was the cult of Isis, who subsumed a world of other goddesses and cults (and which Ovid complains about in some of his poems). One of the hymns to Isis says: ‘You gave women equal power with men.’ This explains why the cult of Isis was one of the most obstinately resistant to the rise of the new cult of Christ as the latter spread around the Mediterranean during the later first century AD.

Christianity itself was a very mixed blessing for women. Women played a crucial role in the life of Jesus. His mother, Mary, quickly assumed cult status. Jesus was genuinely open-handed about the role of women. Take the woman her community is about to stone for adultery. Jesus saves her and shames the vengeful men.

Women quickly held office in the early church, not in ultimate power but as assistants, deacons and sacristans, assisting in ceremonies as well as taking a lead in charitable works. It was the Empress Helena who ‘found’ the true cross in Palestine and brought it back to Rome. A good proportion of the early martyrs were women i.e. women were allowed to be memorialised as martyrs, to be remembered as saints, and their relics worked just as many miracles, as men did. Here was a true holy equality.

But then, alas, St Paul. Paul thrashed out the theology of Christianity but at the expense of embedding it deeply back into the traditional Jewish teachings which Jesus had seemed to escape. In chapter 14 of his first letter to the congregation at Corinth he says:

‘Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.’

From the floating repertoire of ancient documents indicated by the Dead Sea Scrolls, the early Christians selected the ones which they thought best bolstered their case, assembling them into a library which eventually came to be called The Old Testament. Much of it was a reversion to a harsher, Jewish concept of the deity than Jesus seemed at many moments to believe. Over coming generations the strange and ominous legend of Adam and Eve came to assume the severity of doctrine, and became an irrefutable accusation with which hundreds of generations of misogynists could bad-mouth and shut down women.

One unintended consequence of Pauline thought was the new emphasis it put on virginity. In our times we think the obsessive importance assigned by generations of Christians to the virginity of a bride ludicrously repressive and bigoted. But if you think about it from the point of view of a 12, 13 or 14 year old girl in a Roman household, who knows she is doomed to be married off to someone she might never have met, who might be four times her age, purely as a business and legal transaction – then a new cult which rejects this bartering of women, and declares that the holiest thing a woman can do is devote her life to Jesus and eternal virginity, maybe in a community of like-minded women – you can see how in many cases this might have been experienced as a wonderful liberation from patriarchal tyranny. An escape route.

Convents began to be set up soon after the first monasteries and offered a way for women to walk out of the entire male-dominated society in a way they hadn’t been able to since Rome was founded. A huge subject but Finley’s brief discussion is suggestive.

2. Entertainments

Much smaller in conceptual terms, but still significant, was the way women were allowed to be spectators in theatres and at games. Finley tells us that gladiators became ‘pin-ups’ for Roman women, ‘especially in the upper classes’. It would be good to see the evidence for this.

3. Imperial women

Finley rather spoils the effect with his third area of female agency, by reverting to the anecdotal level of the opening of his essay, and telling us that many of the women at the top of the next few hundred years of Roman Empire ‘revealed a ferocity and sadism’ that were not often matched by their menfolk. They never held direct power, but they pulled many of the strings for their husbands and sons, brothers and lovers. Well, if feminists want strong independent women, here are some of the most ferociously strong and determined women we have any record of.

Finley tries to interpret the behaviour of this handful of bloodthirsty women as a ‘rebellion’ against the suppression of almost all women almost all the time. Unfortunately, it comes over more as a certain type of sexist stereotyping without any consideration of the fact that strong women everywhere have been subjected to poisonous character assassination. I.e. that much of what male society and its male historians wrote about them may be vicious rumours or simply untrue.

Shame. Finley was very ‘on message’ and sympathetic to Rome’s repressed women up to this very last point.

Thoughts

This is a deeply intelligent, very interesting, well-written essay. It has an elegantly arresting introductory remark about Cleopatra and then moves with a steady, fluent logic through a series of highly interesting points. Agree or disagree with his thesis, it is beautifully written.

It is very persuasive about the topics it addresses. But it can be seen that, at various points, it veers away from a strict consideration of its title; the passage on the marriage laws for Roman soldiers feels some distance from ‘the silent women of Rome’, the extended passage about Augustus and his women is interesting but can hardly be taken as representative of Roman society at large.

The anti-Finley debate

A few minutes surfing on the internet turns up the fact that Finley’s essay was contested by feminists.

The Reverend Dr. J. Dorcas Gordon of Knox College, Canada, in her book ‘Sister or Wife? 1 Corinthians 7 and Cultural Anthropology’, gives a summary of the feminist responses to Finley’s essay, which she calls ‘controversial’.

According to her, there is a relatively straightforward spectrum of views, with one school holding that women in Rome lived passive repressed lives in the shadows of their fathers or husbands (the Finley view), but quite a few more modern revisionists insisting the exact opposite.

These latter are represented by Sarah Pomeroy who, in her pioneering 1975 feminist book, ‘Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity’, argued that changes in Hellenistic society produced many emancipated but respected upper-class women. She argues that Roman matrons had a much bigger range of choices in their roles and lifestyles, as well as more of an influence on the cultural and political life of their society, than Finley allows.

Gordon goes on to produce pages of evidence showing women having more agency in the ancient world than the Finley side of the debate claims, evidence including history, moral anecdote and exempla, slander, funerary inscriptions.

In Hellenistic Egypt we know that women bought and sold real estate as well as movable property. We know from Cicero’s abundant correspondence that his wife, Terentia, had considerable freedom of action in the areas of finance, politics and matchmaking.

There is evidence that women, despite an explicit ban, argued their cases in the law courts, namely Afrania, wife of a senator and Hortensia delivering a speech before the triumvirs. Servilia was the long-time mistress of Julius Caesar and mother of Brutus and all her contemporaries took her political influence of for granted. Cicero depicts a woman friend, Caerellia, as independently wealthy and a noted intellectual. Everyone was intimidated by Augustus’s formidable wife, Livia.

An inscription from Corinth recognises Junia Theodora who bestowed gifts of money on the city and citizens. More surprisingly an inscription speaks of a certain Hedea racing a chariot and winning at the Isthmean Games of 43 AD. Inscriptions from Asia Minor memorialise wealthy Greek women who civic and federal magistracies and priesthoods. Women with estates and all sorts of businesses were attested at Pompeii.

And so, considerably, on.

The major engine for new historical interpretations

In the end, Dorcas suggests, it depends how you interpret the evidence. Obviously that is true, but I’d go a step further to point out something obvious, to me at any rate, which is: the outcome of many debates in the humanities depends not so much on how you interpret the evidence, but on what evidence you consider; on what evidence you admit to the field of debate.

Time after time, when reading modern history books which claim to be ‘overturning conventional wisdom’ or ‘subverting established beliefs’ blah blah, it turns out that they’re not doing so by presenting startling new evidence; more often than not they are using evidence which has always been known about by scholars, but not previously considered part of the debate; things the experts knew about but nobody had considered including in the body of evidence used in this particular debate.

If the complete corpus of historical evidence can be likened to a landscape, the landscape itself rarely changes – what changes, and sometimes drastically, is which features of the landscape historians choose to pay attention to; which bits of evidence we include and prioritise.

Since you and I can never hope to acquire total mastery of all the evidence from the ancient world on this or any number of other issues (the experiences of slaves, the experiences of gladiators, the experiences of the working classes, the experience of farmers, the experiences of business men) we are, in effect, at the mercy of scholars and their changing interests. Our knowledge of ‘history’ is restricted by the ever-changing fashions for this or that kind of evidence among the historians we read.

Now almost contemporary historians are convinced that we need to be more inclusive, need to pay attention to the lives of women, or black people, or other previously excluded groups. While fine and admirable in itself, this attitude can also be seen as just the latest wave, the latest refocusing of attention and evidence which will, itself, be eclipsed by further waves in the decades to come.

In other words, nothing like a ‘true’ understanding of history is ever possible. Because the study of history covers such a huge area, and historians for decades have been expanding the fields of evidence to include previously ignored groups, any modern read is doing well if they can get a grasp on the history of a period as it is generally understood today i.e. as it is interpreted and conceived for our times by the congeries of historians of our day.

But even if you could wriggle free of the preconceptions and assumptions of our age, penetrating through the veil of how events are presented by contemporary writers is virtually impossible, because as you go further back in time you don’t encourage any kind of truth, all you encounter is previous generations of historians interpreting events in terms of the ideologies, moral values, social needs of their times, biased by all their preconceptions and prejudices.

The thing itself – the objective, ‘true’ and definitive account of events – can it ever be reached, does it even exist? I don’t think so. It’s bias, interpretation and ideology all the way back to the original sources and documents which, themselves, are (fairly obviously) biased and limited. From ever-changing mosaics of evidence historians create narratives which are acceptable to us and our concerns.

Credit

The silent women of Rome by M.I Finley was published in 1965. It was included in a collection of essays by him titled Aspects of Antiquity, published by Penguin books in 1968. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 24, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Feminism

Posted by Simon on October 24, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/24/the-silent-women-of-rome-m-i-finley/

The Eclogues by Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, generally referred to in English simply as Virgil (or Vergil), was the greatest Roman poet. He wrote three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic poem, the Aeneid.

Historical background

Virgil was born in 70 BC, in the consulships of (the bitter rivals) Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gnaius Pompeius. When Virgil was 7, Cicero was consul and managing the Catiline conspiracy. When he was 10, the rivals Pompey and Crassus were reconciled by Julius Caesar who formed them into the behind-the-scenes alliance which later came to be called the First Triumvirate.

The 50s BC in Rome were characterised by the street violence of rival political gangs led by Publius Clodius Pulcher and Titus Annius Milo. For most of the decade (58 to 50) Julius Caesar was racking up famous victories in his campaign to conquer all of Gaul. In 53 Crassus’s army was destroyed by the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae and he was killed, ending the triumvirate.

At the end of the 50s, the 18 year old Virgil arrived in Rome to find a career. Throughout 50 BC the political crisis grew deeper and, eventually, in January 49, Caesar illegally led a legion of his Army of Gaul across the river Rubicon, thus triggering civil war with Pompey and the senate. Virgil was 21.

This civil war dragged on for 5 long years, dividing families, laying waste tracts of land which armies marched across despoiling, with a series of battles in which Romans killed Romans at locations around the Mediterranean, until Caesar’s final victory in Spain at the Battle of Munda in March 45.

Caesar returned to Rome and began administering the empire, briskly and efficiently. Soon after he had had himself made dictator for life, he was assassinated in March 44. Virgil was 26. But removing the dictator did not bring the moribund forms of the old Republic back to life, as the conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, had hoped. Instead it inaugurated another 13 years of political instability, with the arrival in Rome soon after the assassination of Caesar’s adoptive son and heir, Gaius Octavius, complicating an already fraught situation.

After initially fighting against Caesar’s former lieutenant, Marcus Antonius, Octavius made peace with him in November 43, inviting a third military leader, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, to form what became known as the Second Triumvirate. Virgil was now 27.

In 42 BC the combined forces of Antony and Octavian defeated those of Brutus and Cassius at the Battle of Philippi (where the poet Horace led a legion on the losing side).

The second triumvirate lasted a long time, from 43 to 31 BC, although the partners often fell out, fiercely criticised each other and sometimes threatened open conflict. Antony assigned himself rule of the eastern Mediterranean in which capacity he a) embarked in 36 BC on an ill-fated attempt to invade the Parthian Empire, which ended in complete failure; and b) based himself in the capital of Egypt, Alexandria, where he famously had a long relationship with its queen, Cleopatra, fathering 2 children by her.

In 36 a war against Pompey’s surviving son, Sextus, who obstinately held the island of Sicily and was using his fleet to attack Roman ships, provided the pretext Octavius needed to accuse Lepidus of ineffectiveness and corruption and send him into internal exile in Italy. Virgil was 34.

The second triumvirate had become a duumvirate and very unstable, with Octavius using Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra to paint him as undignified, unroman, unpatriotic. Eventually Octavius declared open war on Antony, marching his forces to meet Antony’s legions in Greece, and defeating his fleet at the naval Battle of Actium, in September 31, after Cleopatra famously led her small contingent away from the battle, prompting the latter to follow her and abandon his own sailors to defeat.

The ill-fated couple returned to Alexandria and, when Octavius approached the city with his legions, both committed suicide.

Not only was Octavian now the only one of the triumvirate left but, after the long 18 years of almost continual civil war since Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he was the only figure with any authority left in Roman politics.

With astonishing assurance he proceeded to transform the constitution of the old Republic into the shape of what would become the Roman Empire, with him at its centre holding all the strings. Virgil was 39 when Octavius emerged as the strongest figure in Rome, and 43 when, 4 years later, the senate awarded him the title by which he is known to history, ‘Augustus’. His entire adult life had been lived against a backdrop of war, dispute and destruction.

The Oxford University Press edition

The 1930s poet Cecil Day Lewis made translations of The Georgics in 1940 and of The Eclogues in 1963. These (fairly dated) translations are still available in a nifty Oxford University Press paperback, with a 1983 introduction by academic R.O.A.M. Lyne (both, like most classicists, educated at private school and Oxbridge).

Virgil the poet

Let Athena dwell in the cities she has founded. For me the woodlands.
(Eclogue 1, line 62)

Between 42 and 39 Virgil wrote ten short poems known as the Eclogues. In the introduction to this OUP volume, R.O.A.M. Lyne explains that Virgil’s explicit model was the Greek poet Theocritus (300 to 260 BC). Theocritus wrote a variety of poems but is famous for his idylls and bucolics. The word idyll is Greek and originally meant simply ‘little scene’ or ‘vignette’. In Theocritus’s hands, an idyll became a short poem describing an idealised view of country life among peasants, farmers and especially shepherds. A bucolic is a similar form, describing idealised peasant life in the country.

Theocritus helped establish the long literary tradition whereby apparently artless depictions of idealised country life turn out to be the opposite of naive and simple-minded but often the most sophisticated verse of all. Theocritus’s shepherds display a surprising ability to quote previous poets or refer to Greek legend and seem to spend far more time reciting beautifully formed verse to each other than tending their flocks.

Theocritus stands at the start of that tradition that pretending to rural simplicity is nearly always associated with sophisticated and aristocratic audiences who like to take a break from their more serious urban responsibilities with fantasies of country living. Look at the elaborate form and demandingly allegorical content of Spenser’s Faerie Queene or the 18th century’s endless paintings of shepherds and swains. Vide Marie Antoinette’s fondness for dressing up as a shepherdess.

Virgil takes the already sophisticated form Theocritus had developed and adds a whole new range of subterranean depths to it. His stretching of the form he inherited is indicated by the very first eclogue in the set. This deals, albeit tangentially, with a controversial aspect of contemporary Roman policy (see below). Other poems address the turmoil of romantic love with a disruptive intensity not found in Theocritus.

An indication of his difference is that Virgil didn’t use Theocritus’s term, idyll, but called his poems eclogues, eclogue in Latin meaning ‘draft’, ‘selection’ or ‘reckoning’. By the Middle Ages the terms idyll, bucolic and eclogue had become almost synonymous.

Eclogue 1

A dialogue between Tityrus and Meliboeus. Tityrus describes having been up to Rome to petition ‘the young prince’ to keep his family land. The prince grants his petition and so Meliboeus is a ‘fortunate old man’, whereas Tityrus laments that he and many like him will be dispersed to Scythia, ‘bone-dry Africa’, even to Britain, ‘that place cut off at the world’s end (line 66).

This poem was probably written in 41 BC, when Octavian was arranging the demobilisation and settlement around Italy of soldiers who had fought for him and Antony in the campaign to defeat the assassins of Julius Caesar, which climaxed in the Battle of Philippi (October 42 BC). Antony went on to sort out the East while Octavian was given the unwelcome task of settling the demobbed veterans. He carried out the very unpopular policy of dispossessing current farmers from their land in order to assign it to veterans (who often had no clue about running a farm, something Meliboeus bitterly points out in this poem):

To think of some godless soldier owning my well-farmed fallow,
A foreigner reaping these crops!

And laments that this is what the civil wars have brought them to:

…To such a pass has civil
Dissensions brought us: for people like these have we sown our fields.

So the first eclogue may be cast as a Theocritan idyll, and feature descriptions of idealised country scenery and farming practices – but it makes no bones about dealing with very contemporary politics, unfair state policy, unfairness and bitterness.

Eclogue 2

By contrast the second eclogue consists of the soliloquy or monologue of the shepherd Corydon who burns with love for the ‘handsome boy’, Alexis. Corydon boasts of his ability with the Pan pipes, the fertility of his flocks, and the idyllicness of the lives they could live together…but to no avail.

And, again, although the poem is deceptively dressed in rural imagery, the feeling is intense:

Yet love still scorches me – love has no lull, no limit. (line 68)

It’s worth pointing out that this is an explicitly homosexual poem, which did Virgil no harm at all with his patron, Maecenas nor his emperor.

Eclogue 3

The third eclogue feels different, again. It features rough and tumble squabbling between Menalcas and Damoetas, which leads up to Damoetas suggesting they hold a singing contest to decide who’s best.

At which point the poem turns from consisting of Virgil’s standard hexameters into alternating series of four-line, four-beat stanzas which have much shorter lines, a lyric format which Day-Lewis captures by making them rhyme.

The wolf is cruel to the sheep,
Cruel a storm to orchard tree,
Cruel is rain to ripened crops,
Amaryllis’ rage is cruel to me.

Eclogue 4

A dramatic departure from the stereotypical idea of an easy-going chat between shepherds, this eclogue is an extremely intense, visionary poem prophesying the birth of a divine baby who will usher in a Golden Age, peace on earth and describes a new age of peace and plenty when farm animals mind themselves and there is enough for all.

Later, Christian, commentators took this to be a prediction of the birth of Christ (about 40 years after the poem was written) and this was part of the mystique that grew up around Virgil in the Middle Ages, one reason why Dante chose him to be his guide through Hell in his long poem, the Divine Comedy.

Chances are, however, that Virgil had a much more mundane practical event in mind. The alliance between Octavian and Antony following Caesar’s assassination was very ropey indeed, and kept needing patching up. One such occasion was the Pact of Brundisium, agreed in 40 BC, whereby, among other provisions, Antony agreed to marry Octavian’s sister, Octavia (a betrothal portrayed in Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra). According to this interpretation, the ‘saviour child’ of this poem is the son everybody hoped would be born of this union, who would usher in a post-civil war era of peace and plenty.

In the event, the alliance wore very thin before Octavius eventually declared war on Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC, leading to their naval defeat at the Battle of Actium and their double suicide soon thereafter. Thus, the cynical reader may conclude, all hyperbolic expectations of a New Age tend to be brutally disappointed by real world politics.

Eclogue 5

In a completely different mood, back in the land of idylls, shepherds Menalcas and Mopsus bump into each other and decide to have a singing contest, taking turns to sing poems they have written about the lovely Daphnis.

Eclogue 6

Two naughty shepherds (Cromis and Mnasyllus) come across the old drunk, Silenus, in a cave and tie him up, but he insists on singing a series of strophes absolutely packed with references to Greek mythology, a kind of 2-page summary of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Eclogue 7

Goatherd Meliboeus relates how Daphnis called him over to listen to a singing competition between Corydon and Thyrsis, who proceed to take turns singing 12 4-line rhyming stanzas.

More sweet than thyme, more fair than pale ivy,
More white to swans you are to me:
Come soon, when the bulls through the meadows are homing,
Come soon, if you love me, my nymph of the sea!
(lines 37 to 40)

Eclogue 8

Another singing competition, this time between Damon and Alphesiboeus, and this time, instead of alternating short verse, each takes it in turn to sing a page-long poem made of longer, rhyming stanzas, each ending with the same line repeated as a refrain. Damon’s verses go like this:

A child you were when I first beheld you –
Our orchard fruit was chilled with dew –
You and your mother both apple gathering:
Just twelve I was, but I took charge of you.
On tiptoe reaching the laden branches,
One glance I gave you and utterly
My heard was ravished, my reason banished –
O flute of Maenalus, come, play with me!

Alphesiboeus’s verse is more interesting: it describes the magic, witchcraft, incantations and magic objects the narrator creates and casts in order to get his beloved, Daphnis, to return to him:

These keepsakes he left with me once, faithless man:
They are things that he wore – the most precious I own.
Mother earth, now I dig by my door and consign
Them to you – the dear keepsakes that pledge his return.
Make Daphnis come home from the city, my spells!

This also appears to be an explicitly gay poem, a man keening for his male lover.

Eclogue 9

This is another poem lamenting the unfair and divisive policy of land sequestration. Two out of the ten poems are on this subject. Sad Moeris complains to Lycidas that an outsider has taken over his farm and made him a servant on his old land and that’s why he is now driving his (the new owners’) goats to market.

Interestingly, Lycidas says he’d heard that the intercession of the poet Menalcus had prevented the land appropriation going ahead. Not so, replies bitter Moeris. But the interesting point is: is this a reference to Virgil’s attempts to moderate the land confiscation policy by appealing to Augustus? And a sad reflection on his failure?

MOERIS:… But poems
Stand no more chance, where the claims of soldiers are involved,
Than do the prophetic doves if the eagle swoops upon them.

This touches on the broader point of Virgil’s ambiguity: his verse is very finely balanced between political allegory, factual description and poetic fantasia. It hovers and shimmers between different layers of meaning.

Meanwhile, the two characters manage to get over their initial bitterness and swap fragments of poems they themselves have written or other people’s lines which they remember. Lycidas points out that the wind has dropped, the lake waters are still. It’s a golden opportunity to stop their trudge to the market town and recite to each other their favourite old songs. At which point the poem ends.

Complex effects. Although the rural setting and the simple names and many of the homely details about goats and plants and whatnot frankly derive from his Greek model, the emotion or psychological effect is more complex and multiflavoured than Theocritus.

Eclogue 10

A poem dedicated to Virgil’s friend, Caius Cornelius Gallus, politician and poet. He wrote elegies devoted to a fictional female figure, Lycoris who, the note tells us, is probably a code name for the courtesan Cytheris, also Mark Antony’s lover. (Shades of Catullus’s beloved Lesbia, being the code name of Clodia, lover of umpteen other young Roman men. Roman poets and their aristocratic affairs).

The translation

I liked Day Lewis’s translation well enough, it is light and clear, as the examples I’ve quoted demonstrate. I suppose you could quibble about the slight unevenness of register: some of his phrasing uses the vague, rather stagey diction of so much translationese:

Let us honour the pastoral muse of Damon and Alphesiboeus,
Whose singing, when they competed together, left the lynxes
Dumbfounded, caused a heifer to pause in her grazing, spellbound,
And so entranced the rivers that they checked their onward flow.
(Eclogue 8, opening lines)

It’s clear enough but not really what any actual modern poet would write. Anyway, my point is that this slightly stiff style comes a cropper in the many places where Day Lewis attempts a more demotic, matey note:

I’m driven from my home place but you can take it easy…

I have two roes which I found in a dangerous combe…
Thestylis has been begging for ages to take them off me…

‘Bumpkin! As if Alexis care twopence for your offerings!’

I wonder when the last time was that any English speaker used the word ‘bumpkin’ in a literal, serious sense? Or:

‘Watch it! What right do you have to lecture a chap!’

‘You desperado, while his mongrel was barking his head off!’

‘Strike up if you have a song to sing, I’ll not be backward…’

‘I’ll not be backward’ – of course I understand the meaning, I just kept being brought up short by Day Lewis’s well-meaning 1950s slang. Maybe it’s in the original: maybe the Virgil has a variety of tones, from the tragically lovelorn to the banter of farm workers. But this unevenness is definitely a feature of the Day Lewis translation.

Scansion

Scansion means the method of determining the metrical pattern of a line of verse. Latin (and French and Italian) verse uses patterns based on the number of syllables in a line and the different ‘lengths’ of each syllable. English poetry, rather more crudely, is based on the number of beats in each line. In English poetry each beat is at the heart of a ‘foot’, and each foot can have 1, 2 or 3 other unstressed syllables either before or after the beat. Thus a iambic pentameter is a line made up of five beats and so five ‘feet’, with each ‘foot’ made up of two syllables, the beat falling on the second one, di dum. A ‘foot’ with two syllables with the stress falling on the second one was called, by the ancient Greeks, a iamb, and so a iambic pentameter is a five-beat line, consisting of five feet, all of them in the form di dum.

Di dum di dum di dum di dum di dum.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

But I struggled to figure out the metre of many of Day Lewis’s verses. First off, the eclogues are not all written in the same style. Day Lewis varies the verse forms a lot. There appears to be a long form line for the basic narrative sections, which he varies when the various shepherds and goatherds go into their singing competitions. But I found it difficult to scan even his basic form. Take the opening of Eclogue 4:

Sicilian Muse, I would try now a somewhat grander theme.

This seems to me a regular iambic heptameter i.e. seven beats.

Sicilian Muse, I would try now a somewhat grander theme.

But the next two lines throw me:

Shrubberies or meek tamarisks are not for all: but if it’s
Forests I sing, may the forest be worthy of a consul.

If the first line is intended to have only 7 beats in it, surely it would end on ‘if’. Not only do these lines not have 7 beats but the beat is difficult to assign. Is it shrub-be-ries or shrub-ries? Either way that appears to be a trochee i.e. a foot which starts with the beat instead of having it second.

Maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe Day Lewis writes a loose long line which occasionally falls into the regularity of a heptameter but just as often skips round it. Maybe it’s designed to shimmer round regularity just as Virgil’s allegories and political meanings shimmer into view then disappear again.

At the start of the book Day Lewis writes a brief note about his approach to translation, which mentions that in some of the singing competitions between shepherds he uses ‘rhythms of English and Irish folk song’. This explains the stimulating variety of verse forms found throughout the book. Some of them have a regularity I enjoyed, but I found others puzzling and a bit irritating:

The fields are dry, a blight’s in the weather,
No vine leaves grow – the Wine-god is sour –

So far I read these as having four beats per line (and so tetrameters), with variation in the feet i.e. they’re not all strict iambs. But having got into that swing, the next 2 lines (and there are only four; this is a quatrain) threw me by having five beats, but beats which don’t occur in any neat way:

Shading our uplands – but when my Phyllis comes here,
Green shall the woodlands be, and many the shower.

I wondered whether he was using the Latin technique of literally counting the syllables in each line and ignoring the beats, but I don’t think it’s that, since the first line has 10 syllables, the second 9, the third 12 and the fourth 12. Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but I found this lack of regularity in Day Lewis’s verse irksome and distracting.

Competition

All the histories I’ve read of the period describe the escalation of once-sensible rivalry between Rome’s leading men into increasingly violent, bitter and unforgiving conflict. It becomes almost an obsession of Tom Holland’s account, which blames out-of-control, toxic political rivalry for the Republic’s collapse.

That was my first thought when I realised that, far from idyllic peace and tranquility half of the poems describe and enact poetic competitions. Now I know that the competing goatherds aren’t bribing the voters and having each other’s supporters beaten up in the streets, as in the chaotic final decades of the Republic, nothing like that, the competitions are presented as amiable, good-hearted exercises (Eclogues 7 and 8). Still. Its presence in these would-be idyllic poems suggests that competition was a fundamental category which informs / underpins / infects absolutely every aspect of Roman existence.

Credit

The Eclogues by Virgil were translated into English by Cecil Day Lewis in 1963. I read them in the 1999 Oxford University Press paperback edition.

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by Simon on August 24, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation

Tagged Alexandria, Alexis, Alphesiboeus, Antony and Cleopatra, Augustus, Battle of Actium, Battle of Carrhae, Battle of Munda, Battle of Philippi, Beat, Britain, Brutus, bucolic, Caius Cornelius Gallus, Cassius, Catullus, Cecil Day-Lewis, Cicero Catiline conspiracy, civil war, Cleopatra, Clodia, competition, Corydon, Crassus, Cromis, Cytheris, Damoetas, Damon, Dante, Daphnis, Day-Lewis, Divine Comedy, eclogue, Edmund Spenser, Egypt, Faerie Queene, First Triumvirate, foot, Gaius Octavius, Gaul, Gnaius Pompeius, Greek mythology, heptameter, hexameters, homosexuality, Horace, iamb, Iambic pentameter, idyll, Julius Caesar, land confiscation, land sequestration, Latin, Lepidus, Lesbia, Lycidas, Lycoris, magic, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Marcus Antonius, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marie Antoinette, Meliboeus, Menalcas, Menalcus, Metamorphoses, metre, Mnasyllus, Moeris, Mopsus, Octavia, Ovid, Oxford University Press, Pact of Brundisium, Pan pipes, Parthian Empire, poetry, Pompey, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Publius Vergilius Maro, R.O.A.M. Lyne, River Rubicon, Roman literature, Roman poetry, Roman Republic, scansion, Second Triumvirate, Sextus Pompeius, Shakespeare, Sicily, Silenus, syllable, the Aeneid, the Eclogues, the Georgics, Theocritus, Thyrsis, Titus Annius Milo, Tityrus, Tom Holland, trochee, Vergil, Virgil

Posted by Simon on August 24, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/08/24/eclogues-virgil/

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.

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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/

Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)

‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)

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

Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.

I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:

Tiro’s memoirs

As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:

I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)

A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.

Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).

Sources

Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.

Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:

Part one – Exile (58 to 47 BC)

‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.

The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.

They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.

Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).

Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.

But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).

Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)

Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).

Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).

Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).

Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.

Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.

Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).

Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).

But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).

Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)

The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.

Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).

The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)

Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).

Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.

First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).

And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.

Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).

He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).

Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.

After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.

And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.

Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.

But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).

Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).

(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).

Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):

politics is the most noble of callings
there is no nobler motive for entering public life than the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men
no individual or combination of individuals should be allowed to become too powerful
politics is a profession not a pastime for dilettantes
a statesman should devote his life to studying the science of politics in order to acquire all the knowledge that is necessary
that authority in a state must always be divided
that of the three known forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and people – the optimum is a combination of all three, since kings can be capricious, an aristocracy self-interested, and an uncontrolled multitude is a mob

Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission

Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators

detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)

Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).

En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).

In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.

Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.

Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.

So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.

Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.

Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.

Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.

Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.

It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).

The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.

And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:

out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)

In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).

Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.

Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.

Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).

Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).

In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.

Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.

It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.

‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)

The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).

Part two – Redux (47 to 43 BC)

They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).

He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.

Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).

Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).

Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.

Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).

His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).

Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:

On the fear of death
On the endurance of pain
On the alleviation of distress
On the remaining disorders of the soul
On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:

to desire nothing too much
to be content with what you have
to be entirely self sufficient within yourself so that whatever you lose, you can carry on regardless
to do no harm
to realise it is better to suffer an injury than inflict one
to acknowledge that life is a loan from nature which must be paid back at any time

‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).

Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.

Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.

Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.

Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).

Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).

Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).

Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.

On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.

Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.

Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:

A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)

Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)

So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).

The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).

Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.

Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.

One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.

An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.

Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).

Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.

Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.

He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).

Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).

It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).

Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).

It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.

Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).

Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).

Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.

BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).

But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.

A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.

The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.

It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.

Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)

In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.

When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:

That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)

And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.

Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.

At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).

Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).

Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).

Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.

A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:

the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)

So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.

At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).

Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.

It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.

They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).

They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.

Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.

They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.

They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.

The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).

Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.

They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).

Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.

All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.

My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)

The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.

It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.

And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.

Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.

Key words

Politics

As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.

There is always this to be said of politics: it is never static. (p.51)
‘Nothing in politics can be planned in advance for seven years.’ (p.137)
It is the most important rule in politics always to keep things moving. (p.433)

But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.

Power

I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.

And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.

It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.

With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).

And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.

It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.

Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.

The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.

The law

A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.

Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.

Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.

So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:

‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)

War atrocities

As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:

Dyrrachium is still recovering from the fate ordained by the Senate in the 150s, namely razed to the ground and its entire population of 150,000 sold into slavery
Harris makes room for a scene in which Tiro reads through Caesar’s Commentaries on his Gallic Wars and works out that by Caesar’s own account, he has been responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 Gauls and Germans in just one campaigning season (p.45)
Metellus Nepos reads out a despatch from Caesar to the senate in which the great man admits that of the 65,000 strong army of the Nervii only 500 were left alive (p.70)
Caesar’s lieutenant wins a great naval battle against the Celts, has their leaders executed and their entire nation sold into slavery. (p.147)
Caesar lures 430,000 members of the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes across the Rhine and then annihilates them. (p.148)

It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.

Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.

Family ties

The stern republican Brutus was the nephew of the stern moralist Marcus Portius Cato (140).
Julius Caesar married off his daughter Julia to Pompey.
Mark Antony was the stepson of Publius Lentulus Sura, one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death. One among many sources of enmity between the two men.
Cassius Longinus was married to Brutus’s sister.
Domitius Ahenobarbus was married to Cato’s sister.
The consul Marcus Philippus was married to Caesar’s niece (142).
Octavian was Caesar’s great-nephew.

Dated diction

In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.

I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.

Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.

It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.

‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).

On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?

Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.

When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:

‘What an utter villain that fellow is.’ (Cicero about Crassus, p.154)
‘The man’s ingratitude is unbelievable!’ (Milo on Pompey, p.178)
‘I am delighted to meet you! My wife has always talked of you most fondly.’ (Dolabella to Tiro, p.296)

Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.

I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)

Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.

Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.

The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.

But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.

Scraps

Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).

Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).

Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).

Credit

Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. All references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.

The Cicero trilogy

Robert Harris reviews

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

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by Simon on July 29, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Politics, Thriller

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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/dictator-robert-harris/

Imperium by Robert Harris (2006)

‘Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses?’
(Cicero defending his fascination with politics to his secretary, Tiro, in Imperium, page 263)

What you notice first about this book are a) its length (480 pages) and b) the blank flatness of its style. Here’s how it opens:

My name is Tiro. For thirty-six years I was the confidential secretary of the Roman statesman Cicero. At first this was exciting, then astonishing, then arduous, and finally extremely dangerous. During those years I believe he spent more hours with me than with any other person, including his own family. I witnessed his private meetings and carried his secret messages. I took down his speeches, his letters and his literary works, even his poetry – such an outpouring of words that I had to invent what is commonly called shorthand to cope with the flow, a system still used to record the deliberations of the senate, and for which I was recently awarded a modest pension. (p.3)

Very clear, plain and factual, with a complete absence of literary effects or colour. Opening my review of Harris’s 2016 thriller Conclave to extract the list of my reviews of Harris’s other novels, I see this is exactly what I thought about that work, too, so I might as well quote myself:

A cliché can be defined as a thought or description which you’ve read or heard so many times before that it slips past the eye or ear with the minimum amount of disturbance, barely registering, like soothing background music in a hotel lift or lobby. It is designed not to detain you but speed you on your way to your business appointment.

This is true of a great deal if not most of Harris’s writing – it is smooth and effective without stirring any ripples. If you pause for thought, it is at what he is reporting – documentary explanations of the personalities and politics of 1st century BC Rome – but never the way he reports it. As befits a man who worked for decades in high level journalism, Harris’s English is unfailingly clear and lucid, a servant of the subject matter, never drawing attention to itself.

Harris isn’t an awful writer, he is a very good writer, but of a kind of clear and rational prose which is almost devoid of colour. This is very effective when conveying factual information (and his novels tend to be packed with factual information which needs to be written out as clearly as possible in order for the reader to understand what is at stake). But it leaves something be desired when it comes to character, setting or atmosphere.

Having read four histories of ancient Rome which all feature passages about Cicero, Sallust’s Catiline War in which he plays a starring role, Plutarch’s Life of Cicero and a selection of Cicero’s letters, I feel pretty familiar, if not slightly bored, by the actual content of the book i.e. the setting, characters and main events of Republican Rome from 79 to 64 BC (the exact dates are indicated on the title pages of the novels two parts).

For me, already over-familiar with the course of events, the interest was not in the narrative as such, but in the way Harris ‘brings the history alive’ by vividly imagining particular moments. These are hardly great literature but they have an uncanny knack of ringing true and, slowly, subtly, without you realising it, placing you right there, in the houses of the great, in the forum and senate house and numerous other locations of ancient Rome, watching the characters interact, the voters queue up on the dusty Field of Mars, the scrum of senators waiting outside the senate house, the night time stink coming from the public dumps just beyond the city walls, Cicero’s habit of tossing a leather ball from hand to hand as he thinks, or working a crowd of clients, pressing the flesh and greeting everyone by name.

The prose is as interesting as tap water, style-wise, but quite quickly the sheer intelligence Harris brings to his descriptions of ancient Roman power politics and the deftness with which he describes scenes and settings, really draw the reader into the narrative.

Ticking the boxes

Having just read Plutarch’s Life of Cicero and Cicero’s letters, I recognise well-known anecdotes or remarks popping up throughout the novel. It feels slightly, to someone familiar with the source texts, as if Harris made a list of key anecdotes about and descriptions of Cicero and then found places to insert them into his text. It has a slightly mechanical feel. Thus we get mention of:

Cicero’s habit of making witty jokes about people which mortally offended them, thus making unnecessary enemies (pages 62, 296, 325, 326, 347, 403)
how Marcus Licinius Crassus got rich by sending his people to wherever a fire had broken out in Rome and offering to buy their houses from the owners at rock bottom prices then, when they’d sold them, sending in his fire brigade to put out the fires and make a massive profit on the properties (pages 79 and 306)
Cicero’s touchiness about his lowly provincial origins (p.97)
the fact that the leading lawyer in Rome, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, owned a statuette of the sphinx, the subject of one of Cicero’s wisecracks as reported in Plutarch’s life (pages 237 and 444; Plutarch’s Life of Cicero chapter 7)
the anecdote in Plutarch of pushy young Gnaeus Pompeius telling the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla that more people worship the rising than the setting sun (p.218)
the much-told story of how Caesar was captured by pirates and, after he was eventually ransomed and released, returned with Roman soldiers, tracked down all his captors and supervised their crucifixions (p.287)
the anecdote in Plutarch of the raven flying over the forum when Pompey was acclaimed to the special command to eliminate the pirate threat, and which was killed by the roar of approval from the crowd, dropping stone dead out of the sky (p.324 and Plutarch’s Life of Pompey chapter 25)

There’s a steady stream of these little flash bulbs going off in the narrative, as one by one anecdotes from the sources are deftly inserted into the text and ticked off the list.

Politics

But the real subject of the novel is not Cicero’s life but politics.

Harris was famously close to the Blair family during Tony Blair’s years as leader of New Labour. Although not directly involved in politics he saw how power and personality played out at the highest levels, experience which underpins The Ghost, his 2007 novel about a fictional Labour Prime Minister and his wife, which is blatantly based on Tony and Cherie Blair. That novel was published just a year after this one and you can’t help thinking they were worked on simultaneously, insights into the nature of power allotted to one or other of the closely related texts as appropriate.

All this is relevant because political power is also the subject of Imperium. It’s a novel about power and Harris takes every opportunity to really imagine what the exercise of power would have looked and felt like in ancient Rome. Harris’s descriptions can perhaps be categorised into implicit and explicit descriptions.

1. By explicit all I mean is explicit comments on and about the nature of power. Tiro’s narrative is littered with apothegms and reflections on the exercise of power, which are phrased in such a way that they could apply to Westminster today or to any place where power is exercised:

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them. (p.2)
‘The first rule in politics, Tiro, never forget a face.’ (p.29)
‘Sometimes if you find yourself stuck, in politics, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.’ (p.58)
As every fool knows, the quickest way to get to the top on politics is to get yourself close to the man at the top. (p.76)
Politics is a country idiot, capable of concentrating on only one thing at a time. (p.77)
There are certain politicians who can’t stand to be in the same room as one another, even if mutual self-interest dictates that they should try to get along…This is what the Stoics fail to grasp when they assert that reason rather than emotion should play the dominant part in human affairs. I am afraid the reverse is true, and always will be, even – perhaps especially – in the supposedly calculating world of politics. (p.84)
I have frequently observed this curious aspect of power: that it is often when one is physically closest to its source that one is least well informed as to what is actually going on. (p.90)
No one can really claim to know politics properly until he has stayed up all night, writing a speech for delivery the following day. (p.132)
There are few forces in politics harder to resist than a feeling that something is inevitable, for humans move as a flock and will always rush like sheep towards the safety of a winner. (p.188)
‘The trouble with Lucius is he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.’ (p.234)
The work gave Cicero his first real taste of what it is to have power – which is usually, when it comes down to it, a matter of choosing between equally unpalatable options – and fairly bitter he found it. (p.235)
Cicero knew that the way to a great man‘s confidence, curiously enough, is often to speak harshly back to him, thus conveying an appearance of disinterested candour. (p.271)
Is this not the dream of every proud and ambitious man? That rather than having to get down in the dust and fight for power, the people should come crawling to him, begging him to accept it as a gift? (p.292)
How important appearance is in politics. (p.296)
The journey to the top in politics often confines a man with some uncongenial fellow passengers and shows him strange scenery. (p.301)
You can scheme all you like in politics, the gesture seemed to say, but in the end it all comes down to luck. (p.333)
It is dangerous in politics to find oneself a great man’s whipping boy. (as Cicero began to find himself ‘owned’ by Pompey, p.340)
What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them! (p.394)
‘Cicero, you disappoint me. Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?’ (p.398)
‘The ability to listen to bores requires stamina, and such stamina is the essence of politics. It is from the bores that you really find things out.’ (p.405)
It is always said of elections, in my experience, that whichever one is in progress at the time is the most significant there has ever been. (p.469)

As mention of Tony Blair suggests, quite a few of these sayings about politics could be applied to the contemporary British political world which Harris had seen at first hand. The kind of generalised rules Tiro articulates are designed to be widely applied. Thus when he has Cicero say:

‘The most fatal error for any statesman is to allow his fellow countrymen, even for an instant, to suspect that he puts the interests of foreigners above those of his own people.’ (p.251)

it made me think of how Jeremy Corbyn was monstered in the Tory press for his associations with the IRA and Hamas i.e. was accused of being unpatriotic. When Tiro describes the hysterical fear triggered in Rome when pirates attacked and burned the port city of Ostia, and how Pompey and Caesar describe this as a new kind of threat, international, with no centralised power structure, which must be crushed – it was impossible not to hear echoes of the kind of rhetoric which filled thousands of articles and op-eds about al-Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11 (p.268).

Tiro’s thoughts are designed to make the reader hover, equivocally, between the ostensible setting of Rome 70 BC and London 1990s or 2020s. If there’s any consistent ‘literary’ effect in the book, maybe it’s this.

2. What I mean by implicit is the way Harris brilliantly captures the dynamics of power as it plays out in personal confrontations, in dramatic scenes and situations cleverly constructed to demonstrate how power politics really works in practice; how cunning political operators handle themselves and manipulate others. Thus:

The meeting with Lollius Palicanus who represents Pompey’s interest and tries to persuade Cicero to join up to Pompey’s cause. (p.61)
The meeting with Crassus outside Rome after the latter had crushed the Spartacus rebellion and crucified 6,000 of the rebel gladiators along 350 miles of the Appian Way. That’s all very Hollywood, but the point of the scene is the way the two men, intellectually and psychologically, sound each other out, assess each other, sparring and disagreeing while on the surface remaining immaculately polite, all while Tiro looks on. (p.81)
The way Cicero is invited to Pompey’s first big levée in the city after returning from his successful campaigns in Spain, and then only cursorily greeted by Pompey in a lineup like the cast meeting a royal at a movie premiere. It is a memorable image of the relationship between true, exceptional power (Pompey) and a rather desperate aspirer (Cicero). (p.97)
The entire extended description of the trial of Gaius Verres amounts to Cicero creating power from his oratory and the wealth of evidence he has amassed, and then wielding it against Verres along with the lawyer he has bought (Hortensius) and the corrupt senators he has bribed until they are all swept away in mob anger at the governor (Verres’s) scandalous, criminal behaviour. (chapter 9, pages 203 to 238)
‘There is as much skill in knowing how to handle a meeting of ten as in manipulating a gathering of hundreds.’ (p.290)
‘He leaned in close and moistened his lips; there was something almost lecherous about the way Crassus talked of power.’ (p.309)

And then the climax of the plot, the sequence of events leading up to Cicero’s big meeting with the grandest of Rome’s aristocrats and the Faustian pact he enters into with them in order to get elected consul, is an elaborate, multi-levelled and quite thrilling dramatisation of power in action, dirty deals, betrayals, compromises and all.

Imperium

Hence the title of the book. The plot centres on Cicero as described by his loyal freedman and secretary Tiro, but its real subject is power, how to win it, use it and keep it, as the narrator Tiro himself explains on page 2 with its hokey reference to the opening of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. ‘Arms and the man I sing’, wrote Virgil. Harris writes:

It is of power and the man that I shall sing. By power I mean official, political power – what we know in Latin as imperium – the power of life and death, as vested by the state in an individual.

I looked up the Wikipedia definition:

In ancient Rome, imperium was a form of authority held by a citizen to control a military or governmental entity. It is distinct from auctoritas and potestas, different and generally inferior types of power in the Roman Republic and Empire. One’s imperium could be over a specific military unit, or it could be over a province or territory…In a general sense, imperium was the scope of someone’s power, and could include anything, such as public office, commerce, political influence, or wealth.

Tiro writes that:

Whenever I picture the word imperium it is always Pompey who comes to mind. (p.326)

But the same is true of half a dozen of the other characters who each exemplify really dizzying, intimidating top-level power in action – the terrifying Crassus, slippery Caesar, suave Publius Clodius Pulcher or half-mad Catiline. The whole novel is heady with the aroma of power and the endless threat and risk from the machinations of super-powerful men. Harris doesn’t need much literary styling because the subject matter itself is so psychologically powerful.

The plot

The text is divided into two parts:

Part one – Senator (79 to 70 BC)

This introduces the narrator, Marcus Tullius Tiro, freed slave and secretary to up-and-coming lawyer and aspiring politician Marcus Tullius Cicero. Tiro tells us he is writing his memoirs as he approaches the ripe old age of 100, long after Cicero and everyone else he will describe is dead. (Since Tiro tells us he was aged 34 in the year Cicero won the Verres case (p.230), which was in 70 BC, then 65 years later, the date must be 5 BC, well after the Roman Republic disintegrated and was replaced by the sole rule of Augustus, who established the template for the emperors who followed.)

Part one quickly jumps over Cicero’s early career, describing his sojourn in Athens where he learned oratory from the best teachers available, his election to the senate, and then the one-year governorship he served in Sicily, followed by his return to Rome and election as aedile.

But the majority of part one is devoted to Cicero’s involvement in the prosecution of the Roman governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, for outrageous corruption and extortion, showing how it all began when a Sicilian whose business had been ruined by Verres arrives on Cicero’s doorstep, and following the subsequent twists and turns as Cicero and Tiro get drawn into his ‘case’, eventually travelling to Sicily to assemble evidence, and how the case itself gets tangled up in the bitter rivalry between Rome’s two strong men, the great general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and the menacing plutocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Part one ends with Cicero overcoming all the vested interests facing him and triumphantly winning the Verres case. Along the way we have been introduced to key politicians and leading figures in Cicero’s personal life, his fearsome wife, Terentia, and beloved daughter, Tullia, his support network of brother Quintus Tullius Cicero and cousin Lucius. And enjoyed Harris’s well-researched descriptions of various aspects of life in ancient Rome, from the squalid apartment blocks known as insulae to the richest mansions, the festivals and triumphs, with special emphasis on the forms and rituals surrounding elections to public posts and ill-tempered debates in the senate.

Part two – Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)

The first part had a really strong central subject in the Verres case. Part two is a bit more diffuse. It starts by giving an insider’s view of the machinations surrounding the senate’s decision to appoint Pompey to a special command to deal with the threat from pirates, against the opposition of the aristocratic party, most of the senate and, most menacing of all, Crassus.

Then the narrative settles onto Cicero’s attempts to be elected one of Rome’s 8 praetors and, once he achieves that position, his manouevring for the ultimate prize, election as consul. Many obstacles present themselves but none as big as the enmity of the half-mad Lucius Sergius Catilina.

The novel develops into a genuinely nerve-wracking thriller as Tiro is smuggled into a secret meeting of Caesar, Crassus, Catiline and others who have developed a master plan to take over the running of the state and then make huge sums by selling off state land and taking over Egypt. Cicero then attends a late-night private meeting of Rome’s senior aristocrats, informs them about this plot and persuades them, reluctantly, that the only way to foil it is to give Cicero their vote in the consular elections, and it is this election which forms the climax of the second part.

Harris has this great knack of generating genuine excitement in a narrative – not anything to do with his style, but with the intelligent laying on of facts and his vivid depiction of the psychology of power politics. The result is that the novel builds to a real climax in the form of a thriller-style conspiracy which Cicero cleverly turns against the conspirators by revealing it to the aristocrats in exchange for their support.

And then…Cicero has won! Achieved his lifetime’s ambition. He is a consul, one of the two most powerful men in Rome for a year. And the book ends with a little family celebration on the roof of his house underneath the stars, where his entourage learn the details of the deal he made with the aristocrats and the compromises he will have to make during his time in power. Politics is nothing if not the art of compromise, dirty deals in smoke-filled rooms.

Imperium is the first in a trilogy of novels about Cicero’s career so the reader can be confident that the consequences of this deal will be described in the second book of the trilogy, Lustrum. Anyone who knows about Cicero, knows that it was during his year as consul that the Cataline conspiracy erupted, one of the most dangerous and florid events in late Republican Rome. Wow, what a feast of political intrigue for Harris the political novelist get his teeth into!

The multi-layered connectivity of Roman politics

From a factual point of view, one thing comes over very strongly in this novel which is often missing from the history books and this is the tremendous importance of family, clan, tribe and social connections among Rome’s elite in creating the very complex political ‘system’ or just situation, seething with competition and rivalry.

Elections in ancient Rome were a complicated business:

The Centuriate Assembly elected the highest offices of consul, praetor, and censor. This assembly divided all adult male citizens into 193 centuries organised into tiers by rank and property, with the equites or knights at the top and the unarmed and unpropertied at the bottom. Which century voted first was decided by lot and the winning century was called the centuria praerogativa (p.471)
Quaestors and curule aediles were elected by the Tribal Assembly, while tribunes and plebeian aediles were elected by the Plebeian Council. The electorates for both these assemblies were divided into 35 tribes or geographical units of voters. Harris names and gives pen portraits of the important tribes in his description of the election of Cicero as aedile (pages 198 to 200).

A really important point to grasp is that all votes were not equal. The votes of the wealthy and upper classes counted for a lot more than the votes of the average citizen. In the Centuriate Assembly the oldest established tribes voted first and their votes counted for more.

As well as tribes, the city was divided into wards. Each of these had community meeting halls and community (or gang) leaders, who could turn their members out if you needed a crowd, to jeer at a trial or cheer a triumph or jostle senators on their way into the senate house.

The novel gives a vivid description of the ‘voting syndicates’ based on local wards, which had organisers and which could be bought at a price (the precise, elaborate and well established method of bribing these syndicates is described in detail on pages 406 to 408).

The reader is made aware of the way these tribes and wards fed into political situations and calculations.

But sitting above this complicated electoral system was the intricate web of family connections which dictated or rather, made up Roman politics. It had arguably two aspects.

1. Like any aristocracy, the Romans had very ancient, super-well-established families which could trace their origins right back to the legendary times when the monarchy was overthrown (about 500 BC). Their authority was bolstered by their family’s track records in holding office and this was made visible because the atriums of the worthiest families contained wax busts of the ancestors who had held public office, in particular the consulship. These busts could be removed from the home and paraded by the proud descendant at festivals or political events.

The Togatus Barberini, a marble sculpture from first-century Rome depicting an unknown Roman of noble birth holding effigies of his ancestors in either hand

Let’s take a detour into structural linguistics for a moment:

Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. A diachronic approach considers the development and evolution of a language through history.

The Roman upper classes can be considered in both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. I’ve just outlined the diachronic perspective, namely the history of each family and its eminent members. But the ruling class must also be seen synchronically in terms of its alliances in the present.

2. Thus someone like Cicero, trying to play the political game, had to be aware not only of the histories of all the most eminent families, but also of the super-complicated mesh of marriage alliances, of uncles, aunts, first and second cousins which connected families and factions at the highest level.

In addition to the complex interlinking of powerful families by marriage went the uniquely Roman custom of adopting someone from a different family into yours, but not in our modern sense of adopting a baby or toddler. It meant adopting a full-grown adult from one family into another. To take two famous cases, Publius Clodius Pulcher came from a very distinguished and ancient family but in a demonstration of aristocratic eccentricity, in the 50s had himself adopted by an obscure plebeian family so that he could be elected tribune of the plebs. More famously, Octavian was adopted by Julius Caesar as his heir, a legal position he used to maximum advantage when he arrived in Rome after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC.

Laid on top of this was political alliances which came in at least two flavours: First, as a rule, the aristocracy stuck together and thought of themselves as the optimates or best people (hero figure Sulla, contemporary leader Quintus Lutatius Catulus). Anyone who opposed them was liable to be tarred as populares i.e. upstart representatives of the ever-unruly ordinary people of Rome, unpredictable, cowardly, ignoble (hero figure Marius, contemporary star Caesar).

But of course, the unrelenting competition for power of the ambitious often cut across class divides. Thus the psychopathic Cataline (‘A jagged streak of violent madness ran through Catalina like lightning across his brain’, p.351) who ended up trying to lead an abortive rebellion came from one of the oldest patrician families in Rome, gens Sergia. In his frustrated furious ambition to seize power he ended up allying himself with the working classes and political outcasts of all kinds.

His younger contemporary, Clodius, also came from one of Rome’s oldest and noblest patrician families, the Claudia gens. But, again, lust for power and a certain aristocratic perversity, led him to get adopted by an obscure plebeian so that he could be elected tribune of the plebs, which is why he changed his middle name from the aristocratic ‘Claudius’ to the more plebeian ‘Clodius’.

In addition to all this was the complicated system of clients and patrons. Rich and influential Romans acquired clients who they had done or would do favours for in return for their political or financial support, and so whose patron they would be. Powerful individuals such as Crassus, Caesar or Pompey were continually working behind the scenes to acquire and cultivate networks of hundreds of clients. Nothing came for nothing. All the deals which businessmen, lawyers, politicians and military commanders were doing all the time created new alliances, new networks of clientilism and patronage.

So as you read about figures in Republican Rome, you have to be aware that they operated in a society where people were individuals but also came enmeshed in a tribe, a clan, a family, with both a particular family history and the complexity of recent familial alliances (through marriage or adoption), as well as their position in the simmering conflict between optimates and populares, as well as their calculated commitments to this or that powerful patron.

Taken together these elements or strands created the fantastically complex matrix of history, family, class, financial, legal and political obligations which Tiro at one point (in a rare departure from Harris’s use of the plainest of plain English) describes as the ‘webwork’ of Roman society.

It’s into this webwork of 1st century BC Rome that the book swiftly plunges the reader, and a great deal of the pleasure of reading it derives from getting used to this multi-levelled game of allegiance and obligation which Cicero (and everyone else) finds themselves playing all their adult lives. With the whole thing acutely observed by the clever but non-participating eye-witness, Tiro.

Family connections

Publius Clodius Pulcher’s biography demonstrates the complex interlinking at the top of Roman society. His elder brothers were Appius Claudius Pulcher, consul in 54 BC, and Gaius Claudius Pulcher, praetor in 56 BC and subsequently governor of Asia. His sisters included Claudia, the wife of Quintus Marcius Rex, Claudia Quadrantaria, the wife of Celer, and Claudia Quinta, the wife of the fantastically successful general Lucius Licinius Lucullus.

Through his family, Clodius was closely connected with a number of prominent Roman politicians. His brother-in-law, Lucullus, was consul in 74 BC, while brother-in-law Celer was consul in 60, and the latter’s brother, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos, in 57. Mucia Tertia, a half-sister to the Caecilii, was the wife of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and later Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, praetor in 56 BC. A half-brother, Publius Mucius Scaevola, was a pontifex, while his brother Quintus was an augur, and tribune of the plebs in 54.

So anyone who tangled with Clodius had to be aware that he was also going to provoke some or all of his extended network of family members and spouses, who each had their own positions of power, ambitions and networks of clients to consider. Matrices and intricate webworks of alliance, patronage and position, in every direction…

Aspects of ancient Rome

The hubbub as senators gathered in the senaculum before entering the chamber for a debate.
Sumptuous description of Pompey’s grand triumph. (p.115)
The look, feel and smell of rundown apartment blocks.
The stench of decay coming from the public dump outside the Esquiline Gate. (p.193)
Detailed description of the melée on the Field of Mars on election day. (pages 196 to 200)

Harris has Tiro describe Catullus as ‘that cruellest of poets’ (p.307).

Cicero describes Tiro as his second brother (p.428).

Lowering

Right at the end of the book I realised what it is I find so depressing about Harris’s books. Not a word in any of his political books hints for a moment that politics is about making a fairer, juster, safer world, could be about plans for building a better society, helping the vulnerable, righting historic wrongs, supporting hard-working families, planning carefully for the future etc. In Harris’s discourse none of this exists.

‘The trouble with Lucius is he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.’ (p.234)

Like the outstanding political journalist he was, Harris sees politics is just another career, like medicine or the law. Tiro (like the narrator of Harris’s novel of contemporary politics, Ghost) never mentions policy or political programmes, what is best for Rome and its people, but thinks only in terms of individual politicians, their scams and strategems, and the special buzz you get from being in the room with the big beasts as they are making seismic decisions.

It’s depressing because in this world of professional politicians and their journalistic hangers-on nothing ever changes and nothing ever will. A succession of charismatic crooks, desperate wannabes, blustering liars, and bullying blowhards will create coalitions of supporters enough to scrabble their way to the leadership of their parties, then do anything, say anything, make any promise and cook up any impractical policy, in order to ensure good headlines in tomorrow’s papers and cling onto power for another day.

I found that Cicero was fond of repeating certain phrases and these I learned to reduce to a line or even a few dots – thus proving what most people already know, that politicians essentially say the same thing over and over again. (p.14)

Harris’s journalistic cynicism may be intelligent and witty, and the speed of the narrative as it builds up to the big conspiracy at the end is certainly thrilling. But to any thinking reader it is also pretty dispiriting.

If you’re right in the thick of the political vortex it is no doubt tremendously exciting, and this novel powerfully projects Harris’s first-hand knowledge of the nail-biting psychology of power 2,000 years back onto the dramatic political career of Cicero. Countless memoirs testify to how thrilling it can be to be right in the thick of the political world, talking to the leaders of nations as they wage the daily struggle to stay in power, please the people and shaft their rivals. But you only have to walk out of the room, down the corridor and out into the fresh air to suddenly find the hype and hysteria surrounding most politics pathetic and squalid.

And if you’re a citizen of the country unlucky enough to be ruled by these bloviating blunderers, then there is no excitement at all, but depressed resignation at the spectacle of the unending bickering and mismanagement of idiots.

The visceral thrill of the political manoeuvrings which Harris describes so well make it easy to lose sight of the basic fact that the personal rivalries described in Imperium destabilised the late Roman Republic for decades, eventually leading to nearly 20 years of civil war and social upheaval, deaths, destruction, starvation, ruin.

Politics in our own time has given us Brexit, the mismanagement of the Covid crisis, widespread corruption, now a pointless war in Ukraine and a global food crisis. The stupidity of human mismanagement, which some people dignify with the term ‘politics’, never ends.

The Cicero trilogy

Robert Harris reviews

Cicero reviews

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Complete list of my Roman reviews

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by Simon on July 25, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History, Novel, Thriller

Tagged 9/11, adoption, Al Qaeda, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Appian Way, Appius Claudius Pulcher, aristocracy, auctoritas, Æneid, Brexit, Caesar, Catiline War, Catullus, censor, centuria praerogativa, Centuriate Assembly, Cherie Blair, Cicero, clientelism, consul, corruption, COVID-19, curule aediles, diachrony, equites, Esquiline Gate, fiction, Field of Mars, Gaius Claudius Pulcher, Gaius Marius, Gaius Verres, gens, gladiators, Gnaeus Pompeius, Hamas, historical novel, Imperium, insulae, IRA, Jeremy Corbyn, knights, Life of Cicero, linguistic analysis, Lollius Palicanus, Lucius Sergius Cataline, Lucius Sergius Catilina, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Tullius Tiro, New Labour, novel, optimates, Ostia, patronage, pirates, plebeian aediles, Plebeian Council, plebs, Plutarch, Politics, populares, potestas, praetor, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, Republican Rome, Robert Harris, Roman history, Roman politics, Roman Republic, Sallust, senaculum, Senate, Sergius Catalina, Sicily, Spartacus, Sulla, synchrony, Terentia, The Ghost, thriller, Tiro, Tony Blair, Tribal Assembly, Tullia, Ukraine, Virgil, voting syndicates

Posted by Simon on July 25, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/imperium-robert-harris/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Roman Republic

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fontana History of the Ancient World

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

Schematic

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

The sources
Italy and Rome
The Roman governing classes
From Italian power to Mediterranean power
The conquest of the East
The consequences of empire – the governing classes
The imperial power
The consequences of empire – the governed
Reform and revolution
Rome and Italy
The end of consensus
The world turned upside down
The embattled oligarchy
The militant dynasts

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

The Roman assemblies
The Roman army
Equites
The special commands

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

Main themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who was the Roman oligarchy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman flexibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

The impact of empire on the Roman ruling class

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

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

Extreme wealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The land problem

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

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

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

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

The lynching of Tiberius Gracchus

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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by Simon on July 22, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Slavery

Tagged Achaean League, aedile, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Appian, Aristotle, assidui, Caesar, Catiline Conspiracy, censor, classics, Clodius, Concilium Plebis, consulship, Corinth, cursus honorum, Delos, Eastern Europe, equites, financial deregulation, First Punic War, Fontana History of the Ancient World, Gaius Marius, Gallic Wars, Gaul, Gnaeus Pompeius, Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal, history, John Major, Julius Caesar, land reform, latifundia, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, Lucullus, magistracies, Marius, Mediterranean, Michael Crawford, Milo, Mithridates VI, Mithridates VI of Pontus, Mrs Thatcher, neo-liberal economics, New Labour, North Africa, Octavian, oligarchy, patrician-plebeian oligarchy, patricians, Plautus, plebeians, plebs, Pompey, praetor, Publius Clodius Pulcher, quaestor, Roman army, Roman Empire, Roman history, Roman Republic, Saguntum, Senate, senex, Sicily, Slavery, Social War, socialism, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Soviet Union, Spain, special commands, Strabo, Sulla, Terence, The Roman Republic, Tiberius Gracchus, Tony Blair, tribune of the plebs, university tuition fees, urban proletariat

Posted by Simon on July 22, 2022

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

Pro Milone by Cicero (52 BC)

All five speeches in the Oxford University Press selection of Defence Speeches by Cicero are given extremely thorough and wonderfully lucid introductions by the volume’s editor and translator, D.H. Berry. Pro Milone has the longest introduction of the lot, at 12 pages of small font, i.e. a lot of content because there’s a lot to explain.

The trial of Titus Annius Milo, generally referred to as Milo, was held between 4 and 7 April 52 BC. He was charged with the murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher. While he was prosecuted by the usual number of three advocates – Appius Claudius Pulcher, Marcus Antonius and Publius Valerius Nepos – he was defended by just Cicero.

Publius Clodius Pulcher

For a change the background is fairly simple. From the late 60s onwards Clodius had established himself as a rabble-rousing tribune of the people who developed a wide popular following and developed tough street gangs to intimidate and beat up his opponents. He first clashed with Cicero when the latter testified against him at his trial for dressing up as a woman in order to infiltrate the rites of the goddess Bona Dea being held in Julius Caesar’s house (because Caesar held the office of pontifex maximus) in December 62.

From that point onwards Clodius sought revenge and his gangs took to intimidating Cicero on numerous occasions. In 58, Clodius was elected tribune of the plebs and passed a law declaring anyone who had put to death Roman citizens without a trial guilty of treason. This was targeted solely at Cicero who, as consul in 63 BC, had followed the advice of the senate and had five leading members of the Catiline conspiracy put to death. Despite the support of the senate, the letter of the law defined Cicero as a criminal liable to the death penalty and so he was forced to flee into exile in Greece. 18 months later, in 57, the political atmosphere in Rome changed and he was allowed to return.

During his absence Clodius’s street gangs for the first time met their match in equal and opposing groups of fighters organised by ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who held the post of tribune. Milo arrested some of Clodius’s men, was attacked by his gangs, attempted to prosecute Clodius for violence and, when that failed, recruited gangs of his own to meet violence with violence.

In 56 Clodius brought Milo to court but the trial was broken up by brawling and not reconvened. When Cicero defended another tribune he used the opportunity to issue a rallying cry to patriots to gather round patriots such as Milo and against traitors such as Clodius. The two became close allies. Milo provided bodyguards to protect the builders who were rebuilding Cicero’s house (after Clodius had it demolished during his exile) from Clodius’s gangs who were attacking them.

In April 56 Cicero delivered a blistering attack on Clodius and especially his sister, the notorious Clodia, as part of his defence of Marcus Caelius Rufus (referred to as as Caelius) in the speech known as Pro Caelio. Clodius’s hatred grew even deeper and resulted in several violent incidents, but Clodius’s main enemy was Milo.

In late 53 both Milo and Clodius stood for office, Milo for consul, Clodius for praetor. Cicero strongly backed Milo’s campaign since, as consul, he would be able to control Clodius. But every attempt to hold elections was foiled by outbreaks of violence and 52 opened with no magistrates elected.

The murder of Clodius

It was only a few weeks into the year, on 18 January 52, that Milo and his entourage encountered Clodius and his followers on the Appian Way outside Rome heading in opposite directions. They passed in surly silence but the rearguard of both gangs provoked each other and started fighting. It spread and became a general melee. Clodius was wounded with a spear and taken to a nearby inn at which point Milo was faced with the choice between leaving a wounded and infuriated enemy alive or doing away with him for good. So he had his men drag Clodius into the road and finish him off, leaving the body.

Milo’s trial

Having been done various favours by Milo over the years Cicero felt duty bound to speak in his defence. His presentation was seriously hampered by booing and catcalls from Clodius’s followers and it is said that Cicero didn’t manage to finish. In any case the facts were generally agreed and Milo was convicted. He hurriedly went into exile in Massilia, modern Marseilles. Subsequently Cicero polished his text and had it published. It was his last surviving court speech and is widely considered his masterpiece.

What makes it twice as interesting is that it is the only speech by Cicero for which we have an independent and separate account, by a first century AD scholar named Quintus Asconius Pedianus (3 to 88 AD) and that Asconius’s account drastically differs from Cicero’s. Its existence suggests the extent to which Cicero manipulated the facts and distorted the narrative (lied) in his speeches.

Some people thought the best line of defending Milo would have been to claim that eliminating Clodius was in the interests of public peace and order. Marcus Junius Brutus wrote and circulated the speech he thought should have been given along these lines. But instead Cicero decided to base his entire long speech on the premise that Clodius knowingly set a trap for Milo, who was therefore justified in defending himself. However, according to Asconius the encounter on the Appian Way was an accident and the outbreak of violence was an accident.

Asconius’s version

Berry includes in this edition a translation of Asconius’s version, his summary of the events surrounding Clodius’s murder and of the trial itself (and of the trials of Clodius and Milo’s associates which followed). In fact he recommends that the reader read it first, before reading Cicero’s account. It is a trim ten pages long.

Berry points out the key substantive difference between Cicero and Asconius, namely Cicero says Clodius planned an ambush which Milo heroically defended himself from, while Asconius (and, in the event, the jury) believed it was sheer luck that led to a purely accidental meeting on the Appian Way.

But there’s another way in which Asconius’s account sheds light on Cicero’s –it is brief and to the point. It is arranged in a simple chronological order, dealing with the background, the events on the day, and the complex arrangements regarding Roman law which led up to the trial itself. In many places it reads like a Wikipedia article. Asconius doesn’t mention himself once.

All this is, of course, in striking contrast to what I’ve learned to think of as Cicero’s style, which is:

wordy, very wordy, gabby and verbose
rarely if ever addresses the facts, and if it does you barely notice because they are drowned in:
a never-ending stream of self-glorifying self-promoting references to himself, to his great achievement in saving the state during the Cataline crisis, to his importance as a mentor and role model for the young, to his tastes in literature, to the hard work he’s put in to becoming Rome’s leading advocate, and so on and so on
barrages of references to Great Romans From The Past: to Scipio Aemilianus and Gaius Laelius and Quintus Metellus and Cato the Elder, and so on and on, great names yoked into his discourse in order to boost it, make it sound more patriotic and weighty
cluttered and repetitive: his defence of Archias is short by his standards but still manages to repeat certain claims 3 or 4 times; arguments and related sub-arguments pop up unexpectedly, with no apparent logic and then, a few pages later, pop up again
melodrama: in every trial Cicero makes out that the entire future of Rome, and all its citizens and women and children and their great heritage is at stake! and that only acquitting the noble defendant – a man ‘who has done more for his country than any other man in history’ (76) – can save the nation from ‘national calamity’! This unrelenting hyperbole must have gotten pretty tiring.

In contrast to all this, Asconius’s style and presentation is a wonderful breath of fresh air and makes you realise that not all ancient writing needs to be as verbose, overwrought, self-indulgent and confusing as Cicero’s.

Here’s Cicero:

So give me your attention, gentlemen, and lay aside any fear you might have. For if you have ever had the power of judging loyal and valiant men, if you have ever had the power of judging meritorious citizens, and if specially selected men from the most distinguished orders have ever been given the opportunity of demonstrating, by their actions and their votes, that approval of valiant and loyal citizens which they have so often expressed in the past by looks and words; if that is how it is, then you have at this moment complete power to decide whether we who have always upheld your authority should linger on in adversity for all time, or whether, after being persecuted for years by the most degraded citizens, we are at long last to be revived by your good selves, and by your honour, your courage and your wisdom. (4)

Here’s Asconius:

Milo was travelling in a coach with his wife Fausta, the daughter of Lucius Sulla the dictator, and his friend Marcus Fufius. Following them was a large column of slaves and also some gladiators, including two well-known ones, Eudamus and Birria. These were moving slowly at the rear of the column, and started an altercation with Publius Clodius’s slaves. As Clodius looked back menacingly at the disturbance, Birria pierced his shoulder with a spear. Then a fight began, and more of Milo’s men ran up. The wounded Clodius, meanwhile, was carried into a nearby inn in the territory of Bovilla. (32C)

I appreciate that Cicero was working within a specific genre – the advocate’s speech – that oratory had a host of rules, that the audience expected a show of rhetorical fireworks and that, in this respect, Cicero’s over-ripe performances were following convention and pleasing the crowd. And that, by contrast, Asconius’s commentary is just that, a scholarly text conforming to a completely different set of conventions and required to be precise and factual. But my God, what a relief it is to turn from Cicero’s gluttonous grandiloquence to Asconius’s spartan diet of bread and water.

Two versions of Cicero’s speech

Berry devotes several pages of his introduction to making a key point about the text. The version we have is a document Cicero heavily revised and reworked after the trial. Evidence for this comes from two sources. Firstly Asconius and the noted 1st century orator Quintilian both refer to the original version Cicero actually delivered at the trial – they’d both read it – and distinguish it from the text we have.

Secondly, Berry is the latest in a long line of scholars to detect a noticeable change in the text: the first two-thirds of the speech are favourable to the then-most powerful man in Rome, former general Gnaeus Pompeius, generally known as Pompey the Great:

‘the wise and fair-minded Gnaeus Pompeius’ (2)
‘a man of lofty and almost divine mind’ (21)
‘a man of the highest principles’ (21)
‘the exceptional carefulness of Gnaeus Pompeius’ (65)
‘so very brave a man as Gnaeus Pompeius’ (66)

But around section 70, Pompey becomes more the focus of the speech and for the final third the references to him become notably hostile. Berry thinks this is because the first two-thirds are close to what Cicero delivered on the day, when the outcome of the trial still hung in the balance and it made sense to suck up to Pompey. The final third of the second version of the text was composed after it had become clear that Pompey in fact supported the prosecution and (tacitly, in the background) helped Milo be convicted. Hence the switch in tone from sucking up to critical.

The speech itself

It takes up 40 pages in the OUP edition and is divided into 105 sections. The central point is that Cicero chose to frame the events as Clodius having set a trap for Milo and so the response of Milo and his entourage was justified self-defence. He says:

it was Clodius who set a trap for Milo (6) and repeatedly tries to narrow the entirety of the case down to this one point, that either Clodius or Milo set a trap, and it was Clodius (31)
if it is agreed that Clodius set a trap, then it is no crime for a Roman to kill a criminal if his house is being burgled, or he is being assaulted or sexually attacked – a bandit may be lawfully killed (11) – and gives a roll call of Eminent Romans who have killed enemies but still been honoured (8, 9, 10)
it is a natural law which needs no encoding, that a man may use violence to defend himself if attacked (10)
he states and then repeats the claim that, by killing Clodius, Milo did the state and the people a favour, to ‘the benefit to our country, the benefit to you, and the benefit to all loyal citizens’ (30)
it was just the latest in a long line of services Milo has performed ‘for our country’
the senate has repeatedly spoken in favour of Milo (12)

Cicero asks who had the most motive for setting a trap? The obvious answer is Clodius, for Clodius was running for the office of praetor whereas Milo was running for consul and showed every sign of being elected. Now if they’d both been elected, Milo would have cramped Clodius’s (no doubt treasonous plans) at every turn – so Clodius had a clear and obvious reason for eliminating Milo. Whereas, now that he has been brought to trial for Clodius’s murder, Milo’s position is in deep jeopardy: in other words Milo had no motive for killing Clodius, quite the contrary, his murder has jeopardised his career and even his life (34).

Having established, to his own satisfaction, that the case boils down to which of the 2 men planned to ambush the other, Cicero compiles a dozen or more ways in which the time and location and make-up of the two entourages all favoured Clodius, so he was the obvious planner and trapper.

Cicero’s speech is laced with the usual references to Great Romans in order to big up his speech, to make it seem more weighty and prestigious by associating his case with Famous Men, something which really counted in this super-patriotic society.

In a related way, he continually makes the case sound as if it’s not about the guilt of just one man, but that the entire fate of the state – and therefore of the entire world (19) – is at stake. This is a familiar Cicero strategy, to make it sound as if the entire world will collapse if his man isn’t acquitted.

And both lines of argument are also connected with Cicero’s relentless flattery of the jury:

‘specially selected men from the most distinguished orders’ (4)
‘the most distinguished men from all the orders’ (5)
‘the brightest luminaries from the most distinguished orders’ (21)

Indeed the final phrase of the entire over-ripe performance is unfettered sucking up to the jury of ‘those who are the best, the wisest and the most brave.’ (105)

Above all else, Cicero’s speech is full of endless references to himself, to his tangled history with Clodius – with an extended description of how it was Clodius’s intimidation which (unfairly) drove him into exile in 58 – and all after he had saved the state, single handed, by his own quick thinking (36 and 73 and yet again at 82).

There is something more than ludicrous about Cicero’s endless self glorification and self justification, his references to the way ‘the entire people of Italy was united by concern for his welfare’ (38), and the later passages which repeatedly refer to his exile and then ‘my restoration’ (39, 68 and 87 and 88).

The reader learns to shiver at the familiar words ‘And as for me, gentlemen…’ which introduce yet another variation on what a hero he was single-handedly saving the state during the Cataline crisis, how unjustly he was terrorised into exile by Clodius, and how ‘all of Italy’ and ‘the entire Roman people’ celebrated his return. One of the most frequent words in a speech by Cicero is ‘me’.

And so it comes as no real surprise, but is still vaguely ludicrous that the final passage in the entire speech is an extraordinarily long eulogy not to Milo, but to himself!

But as things are, Titus Annius, there is one consolation that sustains me – the thought that there is no duty of love, support, or devotion in which I have failed you. I have incurred the hostility of the powers that be for your sake; I have exposed my body and my life many times to the weapons of your enemies; I have abased myself as a suppliant before many people for your sake; I have risked my own property and possessions, and those of my children, by throwing in my lot with yours; and today, if any violence has been arranged, of if there is to be any life and death struggle, then I claim it as my own. What, then, does that leave? What more can I do for you, to repay your services to me, except to consider your own fortune, whatever it may be, my own? I shall not refuse it. I shall not say ‘No’. (100)

Several times Cicero refers to the tears in his eyes as he speaks (‘I can no longer speak for tears’, 105). This is a histrionic performance. He was on a stage. He was playing a tragic death scene, playing to the crowd, tugging the heartstrings of the jury, using every rhetorical and psychological and dramatic trick to align his own auctoritas and his noble self-sacrificing actions with those of Milo, trying to make them both out to be ‘saviours of their country.’

But wait! Cicero has more to say about himself! He always does:

How unhappy I am! What appalling luck I have had! You succeeded, Milo, in obtaining the help of these men in recalling me to my country; shall I be unsuccessful in obtaining their help to keep you in yours? What shall I say to my children, who count you as their second father? What shall I say to you, brother Quintus, who are now far away, but who shared those difficult times with me? That, in attempting to protect Milo’s welfare, I was unable to obtain the help of the very men who had helped Milo to secure my own welfare? Unable in what sort of cause? One that was approved by all the nations of the world. Unable to protect Milo’s welfare from whom? From those who had felt the greatest relief at the death of Publius Clodius. And on whose advocacy? My own. (102)

What terrible crime did I devise or what awful deed did I commit, gentlemen, when I tracked down, uncovered, exposed and expunged those indications of our impending destruction? All my troubles, and those of those close to me, derive from that source. Why did you want me to return to Rome? Was it so that I could watch the expulsion of those by whom my restoration was secured? I beseech you, do not let my return be more painful to me than my departure was! For how can I consider myself restored if I am to be separated from those who were responsible for securing my restoration? (103)

Subsequent trials

One last important thing: because it is so widely considered Cicero’s ‘masterpiece’ and is often read or studied by itself, a false impression is created of Pro Milone as sitting in splendid isolation like a statue on a plinth. It is salutary, then, to learn from the introduction (and from Asconius’s account, which devotes its last 2 pages to the fact) that the Milo trial was immediately followed by a succession of further trials, all related to the events of that day, and that Cicero was just as involved in these trials as in the Milo one.

Far from his world falling apart when Milo was convicted – as his histrionic performance stated – Cicero merely went back to his study and knocked out another defence speech. And another. And another.

Thus, although Milo was found guilty in the trial we’ve been following, and packed his bags and went into exile overnight, he was, in his absence, the subject of three further trials:

Milo prosecuted for electoral malpractice (bribery) – convicted in his absence
Milo prosecuted under the law on illegal association – convicted in his absence
Miilo prosecuted under a different law about illegal violence – convicted in his absence

But the battle between Milo and Clodius’s followers raged on in the courts:

Milo’s gang leader, Marcus Saufeius – the man who actually supervised the attack on the inn where Clodius had taken refuge and his actual murder – was tried and acquitted by just one vote – and he was defended by Cicero and Caelius.
Saufeius was then immediately retried, under an alternative law about illegal violence, was again defended by Cicero, and again acquitted, this time by a larger majority.
Meanwhile, Clodius’s gang leader, Sextus Cloelius, was prosecuted for taking Clodius’s body into the senate building on the day of his funeral, which resulted in the building being set on fire, and was convicted by a near unanimous verdict.
A number of other Clodians were tried and convicted.
A Clodian ex-tribune, Quintus Pompeius Rufus, was prosecuted by Caelius for the burning of the senate house, convicted and went into exile – Cicero was delighted because Pompeius had been spreading the lie that Cicero had organised Clodius’s murder.
Then another Clodian ex-tribune, Titus Munatius Plancus Bursa, was prosecuted by Cicero, also for responsibility in the burning of the senate house, convicted and went into exile.

Plancus’s conviction, in particular, pleased Cicero. We have a letter to a friend in which he says the conviction of Plancus gave him more pleasure than the death of Clodius a) because he preferred justice to be done in a court of law than at swordpoint b) because it reflected well on his friend Milo but – and this is what is so characteristically Ciceronian about the letter and his reasons – because c):

I was especially pleased at the display of good-will towards me on the part of honest men in the face of an astonishing amount of pressure from a very grand and powerful personage [he’s referring to Pompey, who tried to defend Plancus]

As so often in his legal speeches, the whole thing ends up being about him. He goes on to say:

It is a great victory. No braver Roman ever lived than those jurymen who dared to find him guilty in spite of all the power of the very personage who had empanelled them [Pompey]. They would never have done that if they had not felt my grievance as their own.

There is something winningly boyish in Cicero’s complete inability to conceive of justice as an objective factual thing, and persistently see it in solely personal terms, of whether the great figures in the land, judges and juries are for him or against him.

Slavery

Few editors comment on it but I am continually appalled at the casual references to slavery in every one of these old Roman texts. I know slavery was universal and universally accepted, and the editors of all the books I’ve read generally take it for granted – but it never ceases to shock and upset me.

A moment in Asconius’s text is even more upsetting than usual, where he claims that, immediately after the fight on the Appian Way, Milo had travelled to Clodius’s country villa to find his son (presumably to kill him) but, finding the son had been taken away, interrogated the head slave, Halicor, by cutting off his limbs one by one, before going on to murder Clodius’s bailiff and two other slaves.

This incident is contained in the Asconius text that Berry includes in this edition and translates, but he nowhere mentions it and it doesn’t, of course, crop up in Cicero’s speech, which makes Milo out to be a noble and patriotic man, the saviour of his nation, a man who had ‘freed his country at his own personal risk’ (72).

But it’s moments like this, the steady trickle of throwaway references to how despicably slaves were treated in ancient Rome without free men blinking an eye, which make me feel physically sick and make all reference to the ‘civilisation’ of the ancient world seem like a mockery.

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by Simon on July 20, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Law, Translation

Posted by Simon on July 20, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/20/pro-milone-cicero/

Pro Caelio by Cicero (56 BC)

Background

Marcus Tullius Cicero gave the speech known as Pro Caelio on 4 April 56 BC in defence of his young protegé and one-time friend, Marcus Caelius Rufus, generally known as Caelius.

The full background to the trial is staggeringly complicated. It is explained in great detail and with admirable clarity by D.H. Berry, editor and translator of the excellent Oxford University Press edition of (five) Defence Speeches by Cicero (2000).

The Cataline conspiracy

In 63 BC Cicero was consul during the crisis of the Cataline Conspiracy i.e. the attempt of the disgruntled aristocrat to lead an armed overthrow of the Roman state. He was in north Italy raising an insurrectionary army when five leading conspirators, including some senators, were caught in Rome and implicated by letters and then confessed. Cicero led a debate in the senate about what to do with them which concluded by voting to execute them and Cicero led them straightaway to the state execution or carnifex who did the deed.

In the years that followed various of Cicero’s enemies developed the accusation that, because the five had never been granted a full (long and probably delayed) trial, they had been illegally killed – and that Cicero was therefore guilty of murder and treason (killing senators).

One of the lead proponents of this view was the nasty piece of work known as Publius Clodius Pulcher, an eccentric scion of the distinguished Claudius clan, who had arranged to be adopted by a plebeian family in order to stand for office as tribune of the plebs. He used this office to pass measures designed to appeal to the people and made rabble-rousing speeches. He developed a following of thugs who terrorised the streets of Rome and even beat up senators and other magistrates.

Cicero sent into exile

In 58 BC, while serving as tribune, Clodius got a law passed declaring it treason to have any Roman citizen put to death without a trial. Everyone knew this was directed at Cicero and his precipitate action in having the five high-ranking Catiline conspirators executed – so he swiftly packed up his things and went into exile, in Greece.

He was gone for a long, miserable 18 months during which Clodius had his house in Rome torn down and had a temple to Liberty build over the ruins, as well as having Cicero’s other properties around Italy looted and sacked.

But the mood in Rome changed. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known in English as Pompey, had acquiesced in Cicero’s exile but then Clodius got above himself and started attacking Pompey verbally and attacking some of his lieutenants in the street. Pompey and the other members of the triumvirate realised they’d let Clodius get out of control. Pompey signalled to his followers that he would support Cicero’s exile being ended and so a law was raised and passed declaring Cicero innocent of any wrongdoing.

So Cicero made a triumphant return to Brundisium and the a triumphant progress across south Italy feted in every town as the Father of the Nation. In his absence Clodius had not only destroyed his homes but sponsored mistreatment of his wife, Terentia. So the two men were at daggers drawn.

Marcus Caelius Rufus

Now to Marcus Caelius Rufus. Born in 82 BC, and so 24 years younger than Cicero, Caelius had been Cicero’s pupil and protégé, learning the arts of politics and oratory at first hand. In 63, however, he was intoxicated, like many others, by the revolutionary rhetoric of the half-mad Cataline and supported his bid to become consul (the same election which was won by Lucius Licinius Murena, who Cicero had defended in another famous speech).

He appears to have abandoned the Cataline cause when the latter when postal and decided to launch an all-out insurrection. Instead Caelius went off to serve as assistant to the governor of Africa from 62 to 60. Back in Rome he began to make a name for himself as a lawyer by launching a prosecution against Gaius Antonius Hybrida, the man who had been co-consul with Cicero in 63, and who had ‘led’ the army which finally defeated Catalina in the field.

Cicero didn’t much like Antonius but figured the state owed him a debt of gratitude and so defended him – but Caelius won the case, defeating his old master. Inspired by his success, Caelius moved to the smart set on the Palatine Hill and rented a room from Clodius, close to the residence of his sister, Clodia. Clodia’s husband had recently died (59 BC) and it was widely rumoured that Caelius became her lover.

As described above, in 58 Clodius held office as tribune and got Cicero exiled; 18 months later in 57 Cicero was triumphantly recalled. Then at the end of 57 or beginning of 56 Caelius broke with the Clodiuses. Did she dump him, did the men fallout? We don’t know, but Berry thinks the most likely reason is that Caelius had switched his political allegiance from the Clodii to Pompey, who was increasingly antagonistic to them. Whatever the exact reason, in their venomous way the brother and sister decided to take revenge.

Lucius Calpurnius Bestia

The proximate cause of the trouble was the trial of Lucius Calpurnius Bestia. Caelius was prosecuting Bestia for malpractice in the elections for the praetorship of 57, in which Bestia stood unsuccessfully. Now this Bestia had been on trial no fewer than four times previously, and Cicero had defended and got him acquitted on each occasion. So now he defended Bestia against his old protégé, Caelius, and won again. However, Caelius was not daunted. Bestia was planning to stand for the praetorship this year as well and so Caelius launched yet another prosecution against him.

But at this point Bestia’s son, Lucius Sempronius Atratinus, got involved. He realised the best form of defence is attack and so launched a pre-emptive prosecution against Caelius. If Caelius was convicted he would be unable to take forward his prosecution of Bestia. Atratinus needed to move fast to protect his dad and so launched the prosecution in the violence court (quaestio de vi) which, unlike other courts, sat during public holidays. (This fact would be central to Cicero’s speech.) And, crucially, Atratinus’s attack on Caelius attracted the support of Clodius and his sister. They agreed to be witnesses against Caelius and suggested some additional charges against him (see below for the charges).

Caelius was an experienced orator and so elected to defend himself – but he also managed to persuade the richest man in Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus to join him. Improbably, he also persuaded Cicero to join his defence. You’d have thought there was no love lost between Cicero and his protégé who had betrayed him twice over, once joining the diabolical Catalina, and then allying with his nemesis, Clodius. But it seems that Cicero invoked that timeless equation, my enemy’s enemy is my friend: anyone who Clodius hated must be worth defending.

Ptolemy XII of Egypt

There’s more? Yes, involving – bizarrely enough – the king of Egypt. In 80 BC Alexander of Egypt died and bequesthed his nation to Rome. The throne was usurped, however, by Ptolemy XII ‘Auletes’ who proceeded to rule with the nervous knowledge that at any moment Rome might step in to claim its prize. Thus he sucked up to the Romans at every turn, much to the dislike of his people. When the triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus and Pompey took power in 60 BC Ptolemy offered to pay them the huge sum of 6,000 talents in exchange for formal recognition of his title. But when he tried to collect it from h is people they rebelled and expelled him from the kingdom.

Ptolemy took refuge in Rome where he borrowed and got into debt lobbying and bribing Roman politicians to raise an army to restore him to power. But the Egyptians didn’t want him back and so in 57 sent a deputation of their best men, led by the Academic philosopher Dio, to put their case before the senate. Ptolemy’s response was to try and get the leading men assassinated, to organise an uprising against them when they stopped in Naples and to bribe slaves in the noble houses where they stayed in Rome to kill them.

At the end of 57 the senate finally found in Ptolemy’s favour but then someone found a reference in the Sibylline books which allegedly forbade it, so the senate rescinded its gesture. Pompey was lobbying to be appointed general in charge of restoring Ptolemy against his rebellious population when, early in 56, Dio was murdered.

Everybody suspected everybody else – the killing obviously suited Ptolemy who wanted the delegation to fail and Pompey who wanted the generalship of imposing Ptolemy on his reluctant people – and a number of prosecutions swiftly followed.

First an agent of Pompey’s, Asicius, was tried for the murder of Dio; Cicero defended him and he was acquitted.

Next we come to the case brought against Caelius by Atratinus. As we have seen this was predominantly motivated by Atratinus’s wish to have Caelius convicted so he wouldn’t be able to prosecute his (Atratinus’s) father, Bestia, for the sixth time. The Clodii were persuaded to join the prosecution against Caelius because a) they had a personal grudge against him, mixed up with the way he had ceased to be Clodia’s lover, nobody knows the details but it obviously left them both furious; and b) it was a way of getting at Pompey, who Clodius now hated.

The charges

The prosecution brought five charges against Caelius, all relating to the disturbances surrounding Dio’s embassy to Rome, namely:

the civil disturbances which affected the Egyptian delegation in Naples
assaults on the delegation at Puteoli
damage to the property of Palla (nobody knows who Palla is but presumably something connected with the above)
taking gold for the attempted murder of Dio and then the attempted poisoning of Clodia: in more detail the charge was that Caelius borrowed gold from Clodia under false pretences, with the intention of using it to bribe servants at the house where Dio was staying to murder him; then, when Clodia discovered what Caelius was planning, Caelius attempted to bribe some of her slaves to poison her in order to shut her up
the murder of Dio – Caelius was accused of being in league with Asicius to have Dio murdered (despite the illogic of the fact that Asicius had, by the time of the trial, been qcuitted – and by Cicero, who therefore had intimate knowledge of all the circumstances surrounding the murder

The preceding speeches

Prosecution

Atratinus spoke first and made an extended attack on Caelius’s character, calling him a ‘pretty boy Jason’, a loose-living, immoral lover of luxury, corrupt and used to committing bribery and violence.

Clodius Confusingly, Berry thinks the ‘Clodius’ who spoke at the trial was not the Clodius but someone who shared the name or a freed slave. We don’t have a transcript but it is likely he deplored the treatment of the Egyptian delegation, criticised Pompey for his support for the corrupt and unpopular Ptolemy, and referred to the evidence Clodia would give at the end of the trial to the effect that a friend of Caelius’s was caught handing poison to some of her, Clodia’s, slaves, having bribed them to poison her with it.

Lucius Herrenius Balbus closing the case for the prosecution, Balbus repeated the accusations of immorality against Caelius, and therefore his unfitness to be continuing the prosecution of Bestia (i.e. fulfilling the core aim of Atratinus who brought the prosecution in the first place.)

Defence

Caelius spoke in his own defence, wittily referring to Clodia as a ‘one-penny Clytemnestra’ i.e. a loose women who murdered her husband (she was suspected of poisoning him). We don’t have his speech either, but it is logical to imagine that he defended himself against all five of the charges.

Crassus ditto, presumably addressed the charges.

Cicero’s speech pro Caelio

Cicero was (as he preferred to be) the third and final of the three defence speakers.

Cicero takes advantage of the fact that the trial was taking place on the first day of the Megalensian games. While everyone else was watching the games in the circus the jury of 75 was stuck all day in the forum listening to this legal case. Therefore Cicero sets out to entertain them, by adopting a jocular tone throughout, telling jokes, impersonating famous people.

Above all it is a relentlessly ad hominem attack on the plaintiffs. In this respect it is a classic example of misdirection. Instead of answering any of the prosecution’s arguments, Cicero turns his speech into a) a defence of Caelius’s character but above all b) a devastating attack on one of the chief movers of the case, Clodia.

In this trial, members of the jury, everything has to do with Clodia, a woman who is not only of aristocratic birth, but notorious. (31)

an impetuous, capricious and angry woman (55)

With a woman like that anything is possible (69)

He is witheringly insulting. The prosecution had painted Rufus as a pretty-boy Jason, but in the ancient story Jason was seduced by the monster of anger and revenge, Medea, and so Cicero is not slow to compare Clodia to Medea, calling her the ‘Medea of the Palatine’ (18). He compares her to a prostitute (1, 37, 48, 49, 50, 57) and a sex-starved matron. He accuses her of incest (32, 34). He says the entire case only exists because of her ‘insupportable passion and bitter hatred’ (2), ‘to gratify the whim of a licentious woman’ (70), that it originates from:

a malevolent, disreputable, vindictive, crime-ridden, lust-ridden house (55)

and:

a household like this in which the lady of the house behaves like a prostitute, in which nothing that goes on is fit to be made public, in which perverted lusts, extravagant living, and all kinds of outlandish vices and outrages are rife (57)

The prosecution had calculated that Caelius would not reveal that he was actually Clodia’s lover and he apparently didn’t – but Cicero did, and depicted Clodia as a nymphomaniac who, if she was spurned, lied, bribed and cheater her way to revenge. Cicero admits their liaison but in such a way as to make Clodia seem the main mover of it, an immoral seducer and then, once spurned, a vengeful harpy. By sleight of hand, or deft presentation, Cicero manages to reveal the affair but have Caelius emerge unblemished. Thus Cicero didn’t address any of the charges, but dismissed them all as the pretexts of a deranged nymphomaniac.

He associates Clodia with Baiae, the southern resort which had become associated with decadence and immorality:

Baiae talks all right, and not only that, it resounds with this report – that the lusts of a single woman have sunk to such depths that she does not merely decline to seek seclusion and darkness with which to veil her immoralities, but openly revels in the most disgusting practices amid crowds of onlookers and in the broadest light of day! (47)

Cicero does address the two specific charges that Caelius took gold from Clodia under false pretences to pay for the murder of Dio, and that, when she found out, he tried to poison her. But he very effectively destroys the plausibility of both charges. Why on earth did she give him such a large amount of gold, unless he was her lover? And as to the entire story about Caelius attempting to poison Clodia when she discovered what he was really using the gold for, Cicero subjects this to a long forensic deconstruction, which demolishes every step of the supposed narrative as wildly improbable until the whole story collapses (56 onwards).

But he goes one further. He pounces on the entire notion of poison and makes the prosecution realise they made a terrible mistake raising it: because Clodia herself was suspected of poisoning her husband, and Cicero describes the death bed scene of this husband, Quintus Metellus, in harrowing detail and in a subtle way so as to implicate Clodia in his death – all in such a way as to completely distract attention away from Caelius.

But far longer is the passage where he ridicules the entire notion of Clodia recruiting men friends to wait concealed in the public baths till they say Lucinius hand over the famous box of poison to one of her slaves. Where are these brave hiders, Cicero asks. What are their names, why have they not been produced by the prosecution, where did they hide, in an actual bath or was there a wooden horse nearby, like at Troy? You can imagine the jury rocking with laughter. Over 2,000 years later it’s still funny and funnier because Cicero keeps piling on the comic exaggeration and ridiculous variations on the prosecution’s narrative, reducing it to smoking wreckage.

This itself is a triumph of the barrister’s manipulating art. But the OUP editor Berry makes a further point. The entire case had a very fraught political significance. The Roman public had been outraged by the shameless murder of an emissary from a foreign country who had come to live, unprotected, among them. It breached very profound codes of hospitality and civilisation. Everyone knew that Pompey supported Dio’s enemy, Ptolemy, and so the case had the serious potential to badly unravel and make Pompey very unpopular.

By focusing on Clodia alone, Cicero managed to contain this: he eclipsed the genuine outrage felt by many over the murder with a pantomime act. Personalising it depoliticised it. It also meant Cicero didn’t have to take a view either way, doing which would have risked alienating either the people or Pompey. Instead he ignored the charges and produced a Carry On entertainment which gave everyone a good laugh.

Each of the Cicero speeches in this volume has a moment when the argument ends, and the conclusion begins. Having read two of them I can begin to see how each speech ends with a description of the distressed family of the accused, and a sentimental appeal to the jury not to condemn the wife, children, mother or father of the accused to misery and shame, in Caelius’s case, Cicero paints a heart-breaking portrait of Caelius’s father as an old man with no-one else to look after him.

The result

Caelius was acquitted which allowed him, against Atratinus’s plans, to proceed with his prosecution of Bestia. Once again Cicero defended Bestia but lost. Bestia went into exile.

The next year, 55, Ptolemy was restored to the Egyptian throne by bribing the governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius with the eye-watering sum of 10,000 talents. On his return to Rome Gabinius was prosecuted for this, Cicero defended him but lost and Gabinius also was sent into exile.

Ptolemy ruled until his death in 51 when he divided the throne between his son, Ptolemy XIII and daughter Cleopatra VII. It was his deep involvement in the cause of their father, which led Pompey, after his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48, to decide to make his way to Egypt to seek sanctuary with Auletes son. This was a fateful decision because Ptolemy XIII’s advisers told him Julius Caesar would like it if he eliminated his rival – and so Pompey was brutally murdered as he set foot ashore in Egypt (Plutarch’s Life of Pompey, chapter 79).

Caelius was elected tribune in 52. This was the year when Clodius was finally murdered, by his longstanding rival Titus Annius Milo, and Caelius helped Cicero defend his killers (see another of Cicero’s best-known speeches, Pro Milone).

In 51 Cicero reluctantly acquiesced in being sent by the senate to be governor of Cilicia, now south-west Turkey. Caelius was elected aedile, in Rome, while he was away and any reader of Cicero’s letters is familiar with the way Cicero had him promise to send him all the news and gossip he could gather. Caelius memorably keeps needling Cicero to send him some panthers so he can make a splash at the public games which he, as aedile, was charged with organising.

When the civil war broke out Caelius made the right call and supported Caesar and was appointed one of the praetors. However, he put forward radical plans for debt relief against the wishes of his fellow praetors, which caused a riot and he was suspended from office. He fled Rome and, along with Milo, who he had helped defend 4 years earlier, tried to foment a revolt against Caesar, but they were both killed by Caesar’s troops. Few, if any, happy endings in ancient Rome.

Credit

Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

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by Simon on July 18, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Law, Translation

Posted by Simon on July 18, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/18/pro-caelio-cicero/

Introduction to the defence speeches of Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC), without the benefit of coming from a patrician or aristocratic family, rose by hard work to become the leading Roman lawyer and orator of his day. For a generation he dominated the Roman courts, usually appearing for the defence. We know of 88 law speeches he gave and an amazing 58 of them survive in whole or in part. The Oxford University Press publish an excellent paperback containing five of his most famous defence speeches.

(Note that the Latin word pro simply means ‘for’ and takes the ablative case i.e. changes the ending of words and names to ‘o’, so that the speech ‘for Caelius’ is known as ‘Pro Caelio’ and so on – unless the name ends in ‘a’, in which case it stays the same, or already ends in ‘o’ in which case it adds ‘ne’ to the end. These are examples of the kind of rules you have to learn when studying Latin.). The five features speeches are:

Pro Roscio Amerino: his defence of Quintus Roscius Gallus, falsely accused of murdering his father
Pro Murena: defence of the consul-elect Lucius Licinius Murena, accused of electoral bribery (39 pages)
Pro Archia: defence of the poet Archias, on a citizenship charge
Pro Caelio: of Marcus Caelius Rufus , ex-lover of Clodia Metelli, on charges of poisoning and violence
Pro Milone: defence of Titus Annius Milo, accused of murdering Cicero’s hated enemy Clodius

The most obvious thing about the speeches is how long they are. I’ve no idea how long a modern defence address is but Cicero’s speeches occupy 30 to 40 pages of an average paperback and must have taken some time to deliver, especially stopping for all the dramatic pauses, the appeals to the jury and the strategic bursting into tears (he refers to his own tears of grief in several of the speeches). Did he memorise them and deliver them without notes? That, also, is an impressive feat.

The next most obvious thing is how complex the background and context of each case is. If you look them up online, you discover that each of Cicero’s major speeches has an entire Wikipedia article devoted to it because each one requires a meaty explanation of the context of the case: where it stood in Cicero’s career, and then the (generally very complicated) background of the case, including biographies of all the main participants, which themselves only make sense when carefully located within the feverish and tortuously complicated politics of the late Roman Republic.

Many law cases brought in ancient Rome were not objective products of what we think of as ‘justice’ but were entirely motivated by personal rivalries, sparked by the never-ending competition for office, but often just personal feuds or vendettas.

There was no police force in ancient Rome and, crucially, no office of public prosecution, no Crown Prosecution Service such as we have in modern England. In other words, you didn’t take your grievance to the authorities, who then carefully assessed whether there was a case to answer and decided whether to bring a criminal or civil case against a suspect or defendant. None of that framework existed. So people (generally rich and well-connected people) brought cases against individuals off their own initiative, using their own interpretation of the law.

And many of the cases were what I think are, in modern law, called ‘vexatious’, meaning they were not attempts to achieve objective justice but were nakedly biased attempts to game the system in the prosecutor’s favour, often shameless attempts to get political rivals convicted, exiled or maybe even executed. And this was accepted because everyone else was gaming the system, too. Personally motivated accusations and counter-accusations and counter-counter-accusations were the normal procedure.

The courts were one of the principal arenas in which the business of politics in Rome was played out: if you wanted to get rid of a political opponent, you prosecuted him and brought about his exile; if you failed, he might then prosecute you.
(Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, Introduction p.xxvii)

It was also the case that no one could be prosecuted while holding political office. Therefore a lot of the fiercely competitive vying to be elected to ‘magistracies’ or political offices in late Republican Rome was motivated not by keenness to serve, but as a tactic to dodge prosecution.

(This rose to a kind of climax with the political impasse which developed when Caius Julius Caesar refused to give up his command in Gaul and return to Rome unless he could be promised the opportunity to run for consul in his absence [an election he knew he could bribe his way to winning]. His sole reason for doing this being to avoid the prosecutions for corruption and malpractice which he knew he would face if he returned to Rome as a private citizen. Caesar knew this would happen because stentorian Republicans like Cato had made umpteen speeches promising to prosecute him. Therefore he had no choice but to seek election in order to win immunity, and he could only run in his physical absence because he knew that, as soon as he entered Rome as a private citizen, he knew he’d be tried, multiple times until his enemies got the result they wanted. When the senate rejected all his and his supporters’ attempts to negotiate this deal, he was left with no alternative but to enter Italy backed by his legions for security – thus triggering the civil war.)

D.H. Berry’s introductions

So before the reader gets anywhere near the speeches themselves, you have to mug up on their very complex background. And that’s where the OUP edition of Cicero’s Defence Speeches is outstanding. The editor and translator D.H. Berry not only provides an excellent general introduction to the volume, giving us a thorough and vivid overview of Cicero’s life and how it entwined with the complicated political context of the 70s, 60s and 50s BC, before going on to explain at some length the quirks of the Roman legal system…

But he also precedes each of the speeches with an in-depth summary of the political context and specific events which gave rise to it. This sounds simple but is, in each case, impressively complicated and absolutely vital: without a full understanding of the context you wouldn’t know what Cicero was trying to achieve in each speech. Berry is excellent at not only explaining the factual background but the strategy and tactics Cicero adopts in each speech.

General introduction

There were two main types of oratory: ‘forensic’ (from the Latin forensis meaning ‘of the forum’, which is where the public law courts were sited, also known as judicial) and ‘deliberative’ (the display of public oratory in political assemblies).

The Roman first court or ‘public inquiry’ was only set up in 149 BC and was followed by the establishment of further courts set up to try specific types of cases. Juries were large (sometimes hundreds of citizens) and if no court existed for the type of case, the trial was held in front of the entire people in the forum.

The system grew piecemeal for the next 70 years or so until it was swept away by the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 81 BC. He set up seven courts, designed to try specific types of case, namely murder, forgery, extortion, treason, electoral malpractice, embezzlement and assault.

The make-up of juries was a subject of controversy for decades – as you can imagine, if many cases were politically motivated, then who was allowed to sit on the jury was vitally important to both sides – until a law of 70 BC decreed they should be made up of one third senators, one third equites (or knights) and one third ‘tribunes of the treasury’ (who seem to have been a minor sort of equites).

In the decades that followed, more permanent courts were added, such as one devoted to violence, and other ad hoc types were created as and when required, such as the ‘sacrilege court’ set up to try Publius Clodius Pulcher for his famous dressing-up as a woman to infiltrate the women-only celebration of the Bona Dea being held at Julius Caesar’s house in 61 BC.

There were no public prosecutors. A defendant was prosecuted by the man who brought the case against him and any advocates or eminent men he could persuade to join him. The scope for doing deals and sharing prosecutions with social or political allies who stood to gain from a victory were endless.

Something else surprising: successful prosecutors were awarded their victim’s marks of honour and acceded to their rank in the senatorial hierarchy. So, on the face of it, a very strong motive to bring a prosecution and win.

However, they didn’t gain respect from doing this, often the reverse, and prosecuting was generally seen as an invidious role, unless you were obliged to carry it out by civic or family duty or gross injustice. The role of defender was much more socially respected, which explains why in almost all of Cicero’s cases he appears for the defence. The general idea was to mount one spectacular prosecution to make your name, then seek the safety of defending (a career path Cicero explicitly recommends in Pro Caelio, 73).

Also surprising is that it was forbidden by law to pay a defence attorney. This law had been passed as long ago as 204 BC to prevent bribery, but in a roundabout way led to subtler corruption. Roman society functioned via complex webs of clients and patrons. Patrons gave protection and assistance to clients who in turn waited on their patrons in their houses, in the street, rallied support for them at elections and so on. (These scenes are described by Cicero himself in Pro Murena, 70.)

In a legal setting an advocate (actually called, in Latin, a patronus) was a continuation of this intricate web of allegiances. Cicero might choose to defend a client because he owed them favours (he defended men who had supported him during the Catiline crisis of 63) or to put someone in his debt. It was never done out of charity or public duty. Every relationship, every act in ancient Rome, had undertones of politics and power.

Another surprisingly important factor was personal charisma. Roman trials put less weight on the evidence (they didn’t have the tradition of presenting forensically objective evidence that we do) and much more on the character of the people involved. Often a legal speech spent more time assassinating the character of the accused, or the accuser, than querying any of the supposed facts.

And this extended to the character of the advocate himself. Many of Cicero’s speeches not only defend his client’s character and denigrate the character of the plaintiff, but they also viciously attack the character of the prosecuting attorneys. By the same token, all the speeches in the volume draw heavily on Cicero’s own character and record as part of the defence.

Cicero obsessively invokes the auctoritas he acquired after ‘saving the nation’ during the Catiline crisis, repeatedly describes the risks he ran, the danger he faced, his boldness of action.

In my own consulship I undertook a bold venture for the sake of yourselves and your children. (Pro Milone, 82)

He is not slow to remind everyone that Cato had called him ‘the Father of the Nation’. He does all this in order to bring his (he hoped) huge moral authority to bear on the case.

(For example, when he reminds the jury of his role in saving the nation and then uses this authority to personally vouch for Marcus Caelius Rufus’s good character in Pro Caelio, 77, let alone the half or dozen or more references to it throughout Pro Milone.)

[This emphasis on character and personality is not restricted to Cicero’s speeches. It permeates the histories written at the time. Lacking any theories of society or economics, otherwise intelligent men like Sallust, Plutarch and Suetonius fall back again and again on individual character as the primary engine of history and human affairs, in a manner which we, as heirs to 2,000 years of evermore sophisticated social theory, frequently find naive and simplistic.]

Trials took place in the open air (what happened if it rained?). The presiding magistrate and scribes sat on a raised platform (tribunal) at the front of the court, while the jury (probably) sat on benches slightly raised off the ground. The plaintiff, defendant, their advocates, legal advisers, friends and families sat in two groups to one side. And this diorama was open to the forum and to sometimes huge crowds of the general public who gathered to watch and follow every trial, especially if it was of someone eminent or promised juicy gossip.

Trials were more like theatre than we are used to. The defendant had to wear mourning clothes and not shave or wash for several days in order to present a piteous spectacle. Berry gives examples of defendants who refused to comply with this ridiculous convention and were promptly convicted, regardless of the proceedings, solely because of their affront to tradition.

The prosecution spoke first, laying out the case, then the defence rebutted the prosecution points – only then was any evidence presented. Oddly, to us, in some of Cicero’s speeches he guesses at what the evidence will be.

Slaves could be made to give evidence but only under torture. Nowhere does Cicero refer to the shocking inhumanity of this tradition, which sheds light on the fear of all the slaves in the ‘comedies’ of Plautus and Terence that they might find themselves being tortured if their master gets into any kind of legal difficulty.

The magistrates (praetors) overseeing a case often knew nothing about the law (praetors were elected to hold office for only one year). They simply kept the peace and ensured the rules were complied with. (Cicero is on record as complementing the father of the future Augustus, Gaius Octavius, for his fairness and calm in supervising trials.)

How many jurors were there? Evidence is mixed, but it seems to have been a surprising 75, 25 from each of the three categories mentioned above. Jurors were not allowed to confer and voted immediately after the evidence was presented in a secret ballot. They were each given a wax table with A for absolvo on one side and C for condemno on the other. They rubbed out the letter they didn’t want and popped the table in an urn, then a court official totted up the votes.

If a defendant was found guilty the official penalty was death. But since there were no police and the defendant was never in anyone’s ‘custody’, it was generally pretty easy for them to leave the court, the forum, pack up their things and go into voluntary exile. Before most Italian tribes were given Roman status in 90 BC, this might mean retiring to places like Praeneste (only 23 miles from Rome) but by the time Cicero was a prosecutor it meant having to leave Italy altogether. Massilia, the large thriving port on the south coast of Gaul (modern Marseilles) was a popular destination and was where both Verres, who Cicero successfully prosecuted for corruption, and Milo, who he failed to defend from prosecution for murder, ended up living out their lives in well-heeled exile there.

Rhetorical style

Following his extremely useful and informative summary of Cicero’s career and the apparatus of Roman laws, Berry gives an equally useful explanation of the rhetorical techniques Cicero used in his speeches.

Cicero’s prose style is highly artificial. Sentences are long, sometimes a third of a modern page, sometimes longer. The style is ‘periodic’, meaning the sentences only achieve closure and make their meaning clear right at the end. The result is suspense: the audience hangs on the orator’s words and the succession of subordinate clauses, waiting to find out whether the sentence will end as they expected (with a nice sense of completion) or will deliver a surprise (gasps of delight). You can see how, done well, this could enthral a crowd.

Sometimes clauses are in pairs, to create balance, either/or.

‘For it is not my enemies who will take you away from me but my dearest friends; not those who have on occasion treated me badly, but those who have always been good to me,’ (Pro Milone, 99)

Sometimes they come in threes, to provide a crescendo effect. Pairs and trios create a balanced civilised effect. By contrast, sometimes his sentences pile up 4, 5, 6 7 short clauses to create a machine gun effect, to create something more feverish and frantic.

‘No witness, no accomplice has been named. The entire charge arises out of a malevolent, disreputable, vindictive, crime-ridden, lust-ridden house.’ (Pro Caelio, 55)

Cicero took great care to make sure his clauses ended with certain rhythms. Apparently these cadences were named, categorised and taught by teachers of oratory, although Berry doesn’t list or explain any, and they’re not really detectable in English translation.

The jurors and the public watching the trial knew all about these techniques and assessed speakers on their skill at deploying them. Cicero tells an anecdote about a crowd bursting into applause at an advocate’s particularly elegant turn of phrase.

In addition to rhythm a trained orator could deploy:

Anaphora

The repetition of words or phrases in a group of sentences, clauses, or poetic lines.

If you restore Caelius to me, to his family, and to the country, you will have a man who is dedicated, devoted and bound to you. (Pro Caelio 80)

Asyndeton

The omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses, as in ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.

Apostrophe

A speech or address to a person who is not present or to a personified object. Cicero frequently addresses the spirit of dead, venerable Romans, or addresses the spirit of murdered Clodius, or addresses figures not physically present in the court (such as Pompey, directly addressed in Pro Milone).

Exclamation

For example, ‘O gods!’ the speaker pretending to give way to moments of emotion.

Alliteration, assonance and wordplay

Berry assures us these are everywhere present in Cicero but it is, of course, impossible to judge in translation.

Metaphor

One consul handing over to another informs him of the current challenges and issues in much the same way that the captain of a ship putting into port tells the captains of ships just setting out about the weather and pirates (Pro Murena, 4). A metaphor which is revived later in the speech, in the extended comparison of elections to unpredictable ocean currents or storms in (35 to 36).

Rhetorical strategies

At a higher level than specific tricks of rhetoric are larger-scale rhetorical tactics.

Appropriating the prosecution

Often he repeats the points the prosecution has made in order to rebut them. He does this by quoting them but often twisting the points in such a way as to suit himself, to tee up the kind of rebuttal he wants to make – as when he repeats a series of points allegedly made by Cato in Pro Murena, 67 onwards).

Inventing opposition points

One step beyond twisting prosecution points is inventing possible objections to what he’s saying in order to easily counter them. There are hundreds of instances along the lines of:

‘You will no doubt ask me, Grattius…’ (Pro Archia, 12)
‘Someone will surely ask…’ (Pro Archia, 15)

In which he attributes to the opposition lines of attack which he then easily refutes.

Rhetorical questions

Why do I mention his mother and his home when the penalty of the law deprives him of his home, his parent, and the company and sight of his friends? Shall the poor man go into exile, then? Where? To the east, where for many years he serves as a legate, led armies and performed heroic deeds? (Pro Murena, 89)

If Caelius had really given himself up to the kind of life that is alleged, would he, when still a young man, have brought a prosecution against an ex-consul? If he shied away from hard work, if he were enslaved to pleasure, would he do battle here every day, go in search of personal enmities, bring prosecutions, and run the risk of being prosecuted himself? And would he also maintain for so many months now and in full view of the entire Roman people a struggle for one of two things – his own political survival or glory? (Pro Caelio, 47)

Mimicry

As when Cicero imagines the feelings of soldiers called on to vote for Murena and remembering his many achievements in the army of the East (Pro Murena, 36) or mimics the voices of sceptical voters on election day (Pro Murena, 45).

Or the great sequence in Pro Caelio where he pretends to be one of Clodia’s ancestors brought back from the dead to thunder against her immoral behaviour.

There’s another type of mimicry. Surprisingly, the defendant was not allowed to speak at their own trial and so Cicero sometimes speaks for them, in the sense of putting words into their mouths and telling the jury, this is what X said to me, these are his very words.

This is notable at the climax of Pro Milone where sections 94 , 95 and 98 purport to be the sad but stoic speech of Milo himself.

If you combine this technique with ‘apostrophe’, addresses to people either absent or dead, you can see why the speeches are highly dramatic in the sense that there are a surprising number of characters in them, not as in a play, obviously, but being named, addressed, invoked and even attributed whole speeches which are then performed in another voice.

Changing the subject

In Pro Milone Cicero doesn’t bother denying that Milo was responsible for the murder of Clodius, but tries to shift the ground of argument to the issue of whether Milo was acting in justifiable self defence. Specifically, he argues that the incident wasn’t a random accident but a carefully contrived ambush by Clodius and so his client was only responding as Great and Eminent Romans Throughout History had responded i.e. by defending himself. This strategy failed and Milo was convicted.

Invoking famous men

In all the speeches Cicero invokes the memory of Great and Noble Romans from history who he says behaved like his client. It is a variation on invoking his own auctoritas.

Closely related is the Appeal To Patriotism. All of the speeches invoke the idea that jury must acquit his client because The Very Existence of the State is at stake!

‘In this trial you hold the whole country in your hands!!’ (Pro Murena, 83)

Invoking the sad family

At the end of Pro Murena and Pro Caelio Cicero invokes the tragic spectacle of the defendant’s family, his aged father, his weeping mother or wife, on their knees, begging for their son or husband or father to be freed and their family happily reunited.

The Appeal to the Romans’ very strong sense of Family Values seems to have been a tried and trusted, standard strategy (Pro Caelio, 79 and 80).

Crying

In several of the speeches Cicero refers to the fact that he himself is weeping, crying at the spectacle of such a valiant, heroic, brave, virtuous, patriotic, dutiful and wonderful person having been brought low by his fiendish enemies and so utterly deserving of vindication and acquittal that he, Cicero, cannot help bursting into floods of tears, he cannot see the jury, he cannot see the court, he can barely speak for grief!

‘But I must stop now. I can no longer speak for tears…’ (Pro Milone, 105)

Repetition

Obviously the rule of three, or using multiple clauses to say the same thing, or asking a series of rhetorical questions are all types of repetition. But a big feature of all the speeches which Berry doesn’t really address is their repetitiveness. Cicero often says he’s going to address a point, addresses it, tells us he’s finished with it, and yet several pages (a few minutes) later, brings it up again.

I can’t find the precise references now but in the three longest speeches, he has a tendency to make a point, wander off to something completely different, then revert to the same point later. This was the single factor which made reading them difficult for me, the sense that they didn’t have a clear logical flow – a beginning, middle and end – but on the contrary, I found all the speeches rambling and digressive and often hard to follow, with no higher level logic.

Conclusion

The cumulative effect of all these techniques is that the speeches, especially when written down and published (as Cicero took care to have done) are emphatically not the language of ordinary speech. The orator has done a lot of work preparing them and he expects the audience to do some work to appreciate them. It is intended to sound ‘theatrical and high flown’ in Berry’s phrase. The fact that I found them long-winded and often quite confusing maybe says more about my taste, shaped as it is by the 20th century taste for laconic brevity, than Cicero’s verbose and long-winded achievement.

P.S. Adrian Goldsworthy’s comments

Dr Adrian Goldsworthy’s big biography of Augustus contains lots of factual asides about aspects of late Republican Rome. Some of these concern the law and provide context to these speeches:

Legal attacks could easily end a career and so were far more high-stakes than in our society (p.94).

Goldsworthy gives an example of the rhythm of Cicero’s sayings in Latin. This was a throwaway remark he made about young Octavius, laudanum adulescentum, ornandum, tollendum – which means ‘we will praise the young man, reward and discard him’ – and, apparently, caused a serious breach in their relations (p.122) – but it’s one of the few examples I have of the rhythm of Cicero’s language in Latin.

He reinforces the notion 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 (Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy p.43). He repeats the point 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.

Goldsworthy refers to ‘the aggressive and abusive tone common in Roman trials’ which we’ve seen plenty of evidence of (p.280).

Above all, Goldsworthy makes the most devastating single point about Cicero’s speeches with striking simplicity:

A glance at Cicero’s speeches is enough to show the readiness with which Roman advocates distorted the truth. (p.278)

For all his pontifications about Justice, for all his exhaustive descriptions of Law epitomising Reason In Action – Cicero was a highly professional and convincing liar.

Credit

Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

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by Simon on July 11, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Law, Translation

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The Life of Mark Antony by Plutarch

This is one of the longest lives at 87 chapters, longer than Sertorius (27), Crassus (33), Cicero (49), Brutus (53), Caesar (69), Cato the Younger (73) or Pompey (80). Dates and other information in square brackets are not in Plutarch but content I’ve added in to make the account more accurate.

Plutarch’s life of Marcus Antonius

(1) Marcus Antonius [83 to 30] came from an undistinguished family. His grandfather was murdered during the purges of Marius in 87 BC. Plutarch tells an anecdote about how, when a friend came asking for money, all his father could give him was a bowl, and that when his wife discovered it was missing she threatened to torture all the slaves to find it until his father confessed to having given it away. (Torture all the slaves? So the references to torturing slaves to establish something, as jokily referred to in the plays of Plautus and Terence, is based on common practice.)

(2) His mother was Julia, a third cousin of Julius Caesar. When his father died, his mother remarried Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, an eminent man of noble family who was always in debt due to his extravagance and so had got lured into the Catiline conspiracy. He was one of the conspirators caught in the capital about whom the famous debate in the senate was held (where Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger put opposing views, namely clemency versus execution, as described in detail in Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy). As a result of Cato’s violent argument, Lentulus was summarily executed on the orders of Cicero, consul at the time. According to Plutarch, this explains Antony’s violent hatred of Cicero who he would, 20 years later, directly cause to be executed. Thus does the whirligig of time being in his revenges.

A promising youth, Antony fell under the influence of Gaius Scribonius Curio, who debauched him with wine and women till he was massively in debt and Curio’s father banned him from the house. Then he fell in with Publius Clodius Pulcher, the street demagogue and rabble rouser. He acquired so many enemies that he thought it wise to leave Italy for Greece, where he studied military tactics and oratory. Interestingly, Plutarch tells us that Antonius adopted:

the Asiatic style of oratory, which was at the height of its popularity in those days and bore a strong resemblance to his own life, which was swashbuckling and boastful, full of empty exultation and distorted ambition.

So by chapter 2 we know where Plutarch’s sympathies lie. With Brutus the liberator and Cato the principled, against Caesar the tyrant and Antony his swaggering lieutenant. OK. Good.

(3) Antony accompanies Grabinius to Syria as captain of his horse and distinguishes himself in a siege against Aristobulus at Jerusalem in 57 BC. He plays a leading role in the campaign to restore King Ptolemy XII Auletes to the throne of Egypt after he’d been dethroned by his people. For example, capturing the city of Pelusium. (Cato 35, Pompey 49) Something which, presumably, endeared him to Ptolemy’s daughter, Cleopatra, when he was to meet her 15 years later.

(4) “He had also a noble dignity of form; and a shapely beard, a broad forehead, and an aquiline nose were thought to show the virile qualities peculiar to the portraits and statues of Hercules.” He liked to play on his putative descent from Hercules. He dressed casually, was boastful and banterish, all this produced goodwill and reputation among the soldiers, helped by ‘his liberality, and his bestowal of favours upon friends and soldiers’.

(5) When the crisis between Caesar and Pompey came to a head, Curio, with money provided by Caesar, got Antony elected tribune of the plebs in 50 BC [following straight on from Curio’s own term]. During the crisis Antony played a key role at crucial moments. In January 49 he read out Caesar’s letter to the senate with his proposals for a compromise. It was he who suggested the further compromise that both Caesar and Pompey lay down their arms simultaneously, but this proposal was rejected by the consuls and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus (not the same Lentulus as the one involved in the conspiracy) expelled Antony from the Senate building by force and threats.

Which is why Antony changed into the clothes of a slave and headed to Caesar’s camp by the river Rubicon, there to brief him that all compromise was impossible. (Pompey 58, Caesar 30) It was the hounding of Antony in his capacity as tribune which made it possible for Caesar to dress up his motivation for invading Italy as being in part to restore the rights of the tribunes i.e. to dress up personal ambition in lofty rhetoric about rights and customs. [See the opening chapters of Caesar’s Civil War.]

(6) It was this which allowed Cicero to write, in his Philippics against Antony, that he was the prime cause of the civil war, which is, of course, silly, and Plutarch goes on to say so, and to explain that Caesar was not a man to do anything on a whim. No:

that which led [Caesar] to war against all mankind, as it had led Alexander before him, and Cyrus of old, was an insatiable love of power and a mad desire to be first and greatest.

Not a fan, then.

After Caesar crossed into Italy and drove Pompey across the Adriatic to Macedonia, he lacked the ships to follow and so turned around and headed to Spain to quell the Pompeian legions there, leaving Rome to Lepidus, who was praetor, and Italy and the troops to Antony, in his capacity as tribune of the people.

Antony curried favour with the troops by living with them and sharing their exercises and making generous gifts of money, but he was impatient with administering justice and gained a reputation for sleeping with other men’s wives. In other words, he did a lot of damage to Caesar’s cause.

(7) Nonetheless Caesar was right to put his faith in him as a general. Early in 48, having crushed Spain, Caesar has marched his army all the way back into Italy and rustled up the ships to transport them across the Adriatic. He was besieging Pompey’s army at Dyrrhachium in the Balkans with limited forces and sent word for Antony to send reinforcements. And Antony did a very good job by embarking 20,000 men and escaping the blockade of Brundisium being carried out by Lucius Scribonius Libo. He sailed them down the Macedonian coast in a storm but managed to find a safe port and so brought his forces safely to Caesar – the forces with which Caesar was to win the decisive Battle of Pharsalus later that summer.

(8) Antony distinguished himself at two engagements, where he stood and rallied fleeing troops, and Caesar gave him the decisive command of the left wing at the Battle of Pharsalus. [This is skipped over here because Plutarch describes it at length in his life of Pompey, chapters 68 to 73]. After Caesar won and had himself appointed dictator, he set off in pursuit of Pompey to Egypt, but made Antony his Master of Horse and sent him back to Rome. This post was second only to dictator and when the dictator was absent, as Caesar was, Antony was effectively in complete control.

(9) But while Caesar is away Antony shocked Rome with his loose living, his drunkenness, his heavy expenditures, his debauches with women, his spending the days in sleep or wandering about with an aching head, or attending the nuptial feasts of mimes and jesters. He has a falling out with Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who he thought had had an affair with his wife, so he drove the latter from his house. When Dolabella proposed a law for the abolition of debts and sought to enact it by force and seized the Roman Forum, Antony responded by unleashing his soldiers upon the assembled masses, killing hundreds. – The civil war had taught them nothing. Political street violence wouldn’t go away (at least not until the arrival of the ultimate strong man).

(10) When Caesar returned to Rome he disapproved of Antony’s actions, pardoned Dolabella and chose Lepidus rather than Antony to be his co-consul the next year. (Antony, in fact, was stripped of all official positions and received no appointments for the year 46 or 45 BC.)

Anthony took to wife Fulvia, the widow of both the demagogue Clodius and the hellraiser Curio, who was a tough woman and determined to reform him. Plutarch waspishly claims that Cleopatra owed her a debt because Fulvia house-trained Antony and made him ready to be ruled by a woman. [Before you get too impressed, remember this is the woman who delighted in seeing the severed head and hands of Cicero, executed in December 43 and sparked a full blown war with Octavian in 41.]

An anecdote: Antony goes to meet Caesar on his return from Spain, but then news breaks that Caesar is dead. So Antony made his way back to Rome disguised as a slave (an echo or repeat of his flight from Rome at the start of 49) and in disguise gained admittance to his own house claiming to be a slave with a message. He hands it to Fulvia who tearfully begs for news about her beloved Antony, at which point he drops his disguise and embraces her.

(11) When Caesar returned from victory in Rome, from all the men who went to meet him it was Antony he honoured and had accompany him in his ‘car’ back to the capital. Plutarch continues the idea of rivalry with Dolabella, claiming Caesar wanted to hand over power to him but Antony vehemently opposed it. Plutarch repeats the story about Caesar being warned about Antony and Dolabella and replying that it wasn’t these fat men who worried him, it was the pale and thin ones, indicating Brutus and Cassius. [Told less convincingly than in the lives of Caesar (62) or Brutus (8).]

(12) A repeat of the story of how Antony was taking part in the annual festival of the Lupercalia and ran with a diadem to the rostra where Caesar was sitting, had his fellow athletes lift him up and place the diadem on Caesar’s head. Some applauded but when Caesar pushed it away the whole crowd applauded. This happened several times before Caesar stood in displeasure, pulled the toga from his throat and said anyone who wanted could strike him there and then. It’s an odd story, isn’t it, with a folk legend aptness but also a deep implausibility. And the related anecdote that unknown hands hung wreaths on the heads of Caesar’s statues, which were then torn down by the tribunes. All this is told better in Caesar 61.

(13) The conspirators discuss inviting Antony to join. Trebonius shared a tent with Antony as they both accompanied Caesar back to Rome, hinted at the idea and Antony firmly refused. At which they switched round to considering killing Antony along with Caesar – a neat illustration of the way that, once you’ve crossed the line into deciding you need to kill people to get rid of the ‘tyrant’ and the ‘dictator’, it quickly becomes a list. In fact, Brutus is held up as the man of principle who insists that nobody else is harmed. Fearing Antony’s popularity and position, they nonetheless arrange for some of their number to engage Antony outside the senate hall so he is not present when the deed is done.

(14) In this account the actual assassination of Caesar takes up one short sentence. Fair enough; it is described in great and dramatic detail in the life of Caesar [chapters 63 to 69]. Anthony flees into hiding but when he realises the conspirators are harming no-one else but are holed up on the Capitol, he comes out of hiding, gives his son to them as a hostage guaranteeing safe passage, and then entertains the assassins to dinner. In the senate he proposes an act of amnesty and a distribution of provinces among Brutus and Cassius and their partisans.

In the immediate aftermath Antony was widely thought to have acted with immense wisdom to calm the risk of civil war. But everything changed when he made the official funeral address over Caesar’s body.

At the close of his speech shook on high the garments of the dead, all bloody and tattered by the swords as they were, called those who had wrought such work villains and murderers, and inspired his hearers with such rage that they heaped together benches and tables and burned Caesar’s body in the forum, and then, snatching the blazing faggots from the pyre, ran to the houses of the assassins and assaulted them.

This one act split the city, terrified the assassins into fleeing and, in effect, restarted the civil war.

(15) The assassins fled Rome. Caesar’s wife gave Antony his fortune to dispense with and all his papers. Antony implemented Caesar’s wishes but went further, appointing magistrates who suited him, acting increasingly autocratically.

(16) Octavian It was at this point that 18-year-old Octavian arrived in Rome, a son of Caesar’s niece. When Octavian asked for the money Caesar had left him, in order to distribute the payment of 75 drachmas which Caesar had enjoined, Antony ridiculed the boy for being a mere stripling, and also blocked his attempt to become a tribune. But Octavian allied with Cicero and others of the anti-Caesar party and Antony began to fear him, so held a summit conference, gave into his demands, and was reconciled. Briefly. For then Antony learned Octavian was touring the country drumming up old soldiers and recruiting an army.

(17) Cicero was the most powerful man in Rome and got the senate to declare Antony a public enemy while he was out of the city conducting a siege. Plutarch says this drove Antony and his army out of Italy and over the Alps and they suffered hardships and starvation, but this brought out the best in him, as adversity always did, and the soldiers admired him for sharing their privations.

(18) When Antony’s army came close to camp near to Lepidus‘s the latter, who owed Antony many favours, surprised him by being reluctant to acknowledge him. He came to Lepidus’s campy dishevelled and unshaven and won the sympathy of the troops. Many of Lepidus’s soldiers implored him to usurp their commander and take over but Antony insisted Lepidus be treated with respect and when their armies united he did so. This inspired Munatius Plancus also to join him so that he crossed the Alps into Italy with 17 legions of infantry and 10,000 horse.

(19) Octavian had realised he couldn’t treat with Cicero because the latter was a man of principle, so realised he had to come to an accommodation with Antony. So Octavian, Antony and Lepidus met on an island where ‘they divided up the whole empire among themselves as though it were an ancestral inheritance’. The Second Triumvirate. They all wanted to get rid of political enemies but agreeing a list presented great difficulties. Octavian gave up Cicero to Antony, Antony gave up Lucius Caesar (Antony’s uncle) to Octavian, Lepidus gave up Paulus his brother. ‘Nothing, in my opinion, could be more savage or cruel than this exchange.’

(20) Plutarch has it that the soldiers demanded additional tokens of their alliance so Octavian married Clodia, a daughter of Antony’s wife Fulvia. As a result of these agreements, 300 men were proscribed and put to death, including Cicero. [Wikipedia has 2,000 Roman knights and one third of the senate.] Antony ordered his head and right hand be cut off, the one he had used to write his savage criticisms of Antony with, and nailed to the rostra in the forum [Cicero 48]. In the Gallic Wars Caesar remarked on the Gauls’ ‘barbaric’ practice of sticking the heads of defeated enemies on poles around their camps. How is this different? What could be more savage and barbarian?

(21) Antony emerges as the most powerful of the triumvirate but makes himself very unpopular for his dissolute living. And because he had bought up the house of Pompey [only recently and tragically dead] and the people were upset to see it closed against commanders, magistrates and ambassadors and filled instead with mimes, jugglers and drunken flatterers.

The triumvirate not only sold the properties of those they slew, but brought false charges against their wives and heirs in order to confiscate their belongings. They instituted new taxes, and plundered the treasure deposited with the Vestal Virgins.

Then Octavian and Antony led their armies into Macedonia against Brutus and Cassius, leaving Rome in charge of Lepidus.

(22) This short chapter deals with the campaign of Octavian and Antony in Greece against Brutus and Cassius, describing but not mentioning by name the crucial two battles at Philippi in October 42, mainly to bring out how it was Antony who was victorious while Octavian was sick in his tent and his forces lost their part of the battle. [Brutus and Cassius’s campaigns in Greece, the long buildup to the battle, the battle and its aftermath are described in great detail in Plutarch’s life of Brutus, taking up the final third of the text, chapters 38 to 53, which is why he skimps it here.] In Plutarch’s account Cassius commits suicide after the first battle, Brutus after the second.

In the negotiations of the triumvirate it was Antony who insisted that Cicero was killed. In revenge Brutus ordered Hortensius to execute Antony’s own brother, Caius. In revenge, Antony had Hortensius executed on his family tomb. Thus the logic of civil wars.

(23) After the battle Octavian, still sick, returns to Rome, while Antony remains in Greece, raising money and enjoying himself, gaining a reputation as a philhellene, listening to learned debates, attending games, giving money to Athens.

(24) In 41 Antony left Lucius Censorinus in charge of Greece and he and his army crossed into Asia meaning the Eastern, Greek-speaking part of what is now Turkey. Here he was greeted as conqueror, lavished with gifts and women and lapsed into his former lifestyle of debauchery. His tax gatherers milked the territory till a brave local politician complained that they had already given Antony 200,000 talents, now he was demanding more. Which gave him pause.

For Antony was simple and slow, quick to forgive, lavish of gifts, but easily flattered and deceived by his subordinates.

(25) Enter Cleopatra who:

roused and drove to frenzy many of the passions that were still hidden and quiescent in him, and dissipated and destroyed whatever good and saving qualities still offered resistance.

Antony sends to her to attend him in Cilicia to explain her support for Cassius. Antony’s messenger, Dellius, on meeting her immediately realises his boss will be enslaved by such a lustrous woman, now at the peak of her beauty [born in 69 BC, in 41 she was 28].

(26) Cleopatra first meets Antony by sailing down the river Cydnus to his camp. This inspires the single most gorgeous description in Plutarch who says she sailed up:

the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple, its rowers urging it on with silver oars to the sound of the flute blended with pipes and lutes. She herself reclined beneath a canopy spangled with gold, adorned like Venus in a painting, while boys like Loves in paintings stood on either side and fanned her. Likewise also the fairest of her serving-maidens, attired like Nereïds and Graces, were stationed, some at the rudder-sweeps, and others at the reefing-ropes. Wondrous odours from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.

Antony asked her to come meet him but Cleopatra refused and told him to come meet her. And he obeyed.

(27) A chapter on the character of Cleopatra, tactfully observing that she was no necessarily the most beautiful of women, but she had an ineffable charm and wove a magic every time she spoke.

(28) Instead of preparing for war against the Parthians, Antony sank into oriental sloth, went to Alexandria with Cleopatra and spent his time in feasting and drinking. Plutarch includes a very rare snippet of autobiography which hints at the personal sources of information for his biographies.

Philotas, the physician of Amphissa, used to tell my grandfather, Lamprias, that he was in Alexandria at the time, studying his profession, and that having got well acquainted with one of the royal cooks, he was easily persuaded by him (young man that he was) to take a view of the extravagant preparations for a royal supper. Accordingly, he was introduced into the kitchen, and when he saw all the other provisions in great abundance, and eight wild boars a-roasting, he expressed his amazement at what must be the number of guests. But the cook burst out laughing and said: “The guests are not many, only about twelve; but everything that is set before them must be at perfection, and this an instant of time reduces. For it might happen that Antony would ask for supper immediately, and after a little while, perhaps, would postpone it and call for a cup of wine, or engage in conversation with some one. Wherefore,” he said, “not one, but many suppers are arranged; for the precise time is hard to hit.” This tale, then, Philotas used to tell; and he said also that as time went on he became one of the medical attendants of Antony’s oldest son, whom he had of Fulvia, and that he usually supped with him at his house in company with the rest of his comrades, when the young man did not sup with his father. Accordingly, on one occasion, as a physician was making too bold and giving much annoyance to them as they supped, Philotas stopped his mouth with some such sophism as the: “To the patient who is somewhat feverish cold water must be given; but everyone who has a fever is somewhat feverish; therefore to everyone who has a fever cold water should be given.” The fellow was confounded and put to silence, whereat Antony’s son was delighted and said with a laugh: “All this I bestow upon thee, Philotas,” pointing to a table covered with a great many large beakers. Philotas acknowledged his good intentions, but was far from supposing that a boy so young had the power to give away so much. After a little while, however, one of the slaves brought the beakers to him in a sack, and bade him put his seal upon it. And when Philotas protested and was afraid to take them, “You miserable man,” said the fellow, “why hesitate? Don’t you know that the giver is the son of Antony, and that he has the right to bestow so many golden vessels? However, take my advice and exchange them all with us for money; since perchance the boy’s father might miss some of the vessels, which are of ancient workmanship and highly valued for their art.” Such details, then, my grandfather used to tell me, Philotas would recount at every opportunity.

(29) Astonishingly, Antony liked to dress up as a slave and go round the streets of Alexandria, looking through people’s doors and mocking them. And Cleopatra accompanied him in these merry jaunts! She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him, and watched him as he exercised himself in arms. The Alexandrians said that he used the tragic mask with the Romans, but the comic mask with them.

He was fishing once, and had bad luck, and was vexed at it because Cleopatra was there to see. He therefore ordered his fishermen to dive down and secretly fasten to his hook some fish that had been previously caught, and pulled up two or three of them. But the Egyptian saw through the trick, and pretending to admire her lover’s skill, told her friends about it, and invited them to be spectators of it the following day. So great numbers of them got into the fishing boats, and when Antony had let down his line, she ordered one of her own attendants to get the start of him by swimming onto his hook and fastening on it a salted Pontic herring. Antony thought he had caught something, and pulled it up, whereupon there was great laughter, as was natural, and Cleopatra said: “Imperator, hand over thy fishing-rod to the fishermen of Pharos and Canopus; thy sport is the hunting of cities, realms, and continents.”

(30) Eventually the real world intruded on these larks. His wife and brother had become enemies of Octavian and been forced to flee Italy. Meanwhile, Labienus, Caesar’s best lieutenant in Gaul, who had gone over to Pompey and then escaped East after Pharsalus, was leading a Parthian army into Asia. Antony set off to engage Labienus but received messages from Fulvia.

[Fulvia had become involved in a full-blown conflict with Octavian which is known as Fulvia’s civil war or the Perusine war, because it ended up with Octavian besieging the forces of Fulvia and Antony’s younger brother, Lucius Antonius, in the Italian town of Perusia, modern Perugia.]

Plutarch has Antony changing direction to meet her but she died en route to meet him. [Wikipedia, by contrast, says Octavian took Perusia but spared both Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, sending the latter into exile at Sicyone near Corinth where she promptly died of disease.] Either way, when Antony arrived in Rome, he was able to restore friendship with Octavian by blaming any dissension on his headstrong wife.

The triumvirs divided up the empire, making the Ionian sea a boundary, assigning the East to Antony and the West to Caesar and giving Africa to Lepidus. They then arranged either to be consuls themselves or arranged for their friends and allies to have senior offices. So the Republic was in effect dead.

(31) In order to cement their alliance, Antony married Octavian’s half sister, Octavia, who was recently widowed. The senate passed a law allowing her to marry in less than the legal requirement of 10 months mourning. It’s one among many examples of the way the laws and the senate operated on a micro level to adjust things for fellow members of the small Roman elite.

(32) Pompey’s son Sextus Pompeius inherited command of his big fleet. Antony and Octavian meet him at Misenum, where they make peace [August 39]. As he is entertaining them on his flagship, a senior officer of Sextus’s whispers in his ear that they could cut their ropes, set sail, execute them, and Sextus would become ruler of the Roman world. But Sextus chooses integrity and rejects the idea.

(33) Antony sends Antony sent Publius Ventidius Bassus on ahead into Asia to oppose the Parthians while he has himself made Pontifex Maximus, as Julius had been. The partnership between Octavian and Antony functioned but Antony consistently came off worse in all their deals, even when things were decided (improbably enough) by throwing dice or cockfights (!). A soothsayer tells Antony to avoid Octavian.

Antony leaves Rome for Greece taking Octavia who has borne him a daughter. In Athens he learns that Ventidius had conquered the Parthians in battle [of the Cilician Gates] and slain Labienus [39 BC]. Antony takes part in traditional Athenian games.

(34) A more detailed description of Publius Ventidius’s successes against the Parthians which go some way to redeeming the disastrous defeat of Crassus in 53 BC. in 40 BC the Parthians invaded Syria led by Pacorus, the son of King Orodes. Ventidius met Pacorus’ huge army [in the Battle of Cyrrhestica] where he inflicted an overwhelming defeat in which Pacorus was killed [38 BC].

Ventidius doesn’t pursue them into their own land as he is worried about Antony’s jealousy, and when Antony arrived with an army, he takes over Ventidius’s siege of Antiochus of Commagené in the city of Samosata, which in fact goes very badly, leaving Antony chagrined. He sends Ventidius back to Rome for a triumph.

Plutarch makes a general point that other generals flourished under Antony or that he was more successful in campaigns conducted by those under him, namely: Ventidius against the Parthians, Sossius in Syria, and Canidius who conquered , who was left by the Armenians.

(35) Tensions had been building between Octavian and Antony who sailed for Italy with 200 ships but sent his wife on ahead of him, and when Octavia met Octavian she pleaded with him not to make her a widow, and so the two imperators were reconciled again, for the time being…

So they ate and conferred in peace, then Octavian gave Antony two legions to pursue his wars in the East while Octavian set off to quell remaining Pompeians in Sicily. Antony left Octavia and his children with Octavian.

(36) But in Asia Antony fell back into his old infatuation with Cleopatra. In October 41 he called her to attend him in Cilicia and made her a gift of ‘Phoenicia, Coele Syria, Cyprus and a large part of Cilicia…and.. the balsam-producing part of Judaea and all that part of Arabia Nabataea which slopes toward the outer sea’. Antony set up or removed monarchs, punished nations and ruled like an eastern potentate. He acknowledged his children by Cleopatra, and granted her numerous honours. In 40 she bore him two children. All this scandalised conservative Roman opinion.

37 to 52: the Parthian War

(37) In 38 BC Phraates put his father Hyrodes, king of Parthia, to death, and many nobles fled Parthia. Antony assembles a vast army, including the forces of many vassal kings, against Phraates but Plutarch tells us he mismanaged everything in his haste to win quick victories so he could get back to Cleopatra.

(38) For example, in his haste he left behind a number of state of the art siege engines in Armenia in charge of Statianus and 10,000 men. But this meant that when he laid siege to Phraata, a large city, in which were the wives and children of the king of Media a) the siege dragged on needlessly, but b) Phraates attacked the waggon camp back in Armenia, massacred the soldiers, killed Statianus and destroyed the engines. A calamity.

(39) The Parthians then march up to the besieged city, Antony lifts the siege and marches off, pretending to flee, but then turns and engages the Parthians in perfect battle order. They see them off, attacked first by the cavalry then the infantry and follow the Parthian army for many miles, but are disheartened to see how few of them they’ve killed. Then the Medes in their own camp turn traitor and attack them.

(40) It is a long punitive campaign. Some Parthian soldiers ride alongside Romans and tell them they and their king Phraates respect them, but despise Antony for relying on fear and famine rather than fighting. Eventually Antony decides to break camp and retreat. He is too downhearted to address his men but gets Domitius Ahenobarbus to do it.

(41) A man of the Mardian race offers to guide the Roman army back, emphasising that they should avoid the open plain and cleave to hilly country. Antony is not sure whether to trust him, till the Mardian offers to be put in chains as he guides them, so they agree. On the third day the Mardian notices a dyke has been cut to pour water across then Roman path and predicts an ambush, giving Antony enough time to prepare his legions and fight it off.

(42) Having cracked the strategy for fighting them off, Antony puts his army in the shape of a hollow square with slingers and cavalry on the outside and succeeds in fighting off the notorious Parthian cavalry for four days. But Antony makes the bad decision of letting Flavius Gallus lead an attack against the Parthians and, when he gets cut off, sending only small detachments to reinforce him which all get massacred. Eventually the entire Roman army wheels round to attack the Parthians, but it was a defeat.

(43) 3,000 dead and 5,000 wounded. Plutarch is typically sentimental, saying Antony went to visit the sick and they all with tears in their eyes assured him they were fine and would be happy so long as great Antony makes it to safety i.e. testament to his popularity.

(44) The Parthians camp near the Roman camp. Antony makes a speech berating those who have fled but asking for any punishment for transgressions to come down on his head so long as his army can be victorious.

(45) The Parthians continue to harry the retreating Romans. The Romans begin to starve and experiment with unknown vegetables. One of these is a herb which drives the eater mad, producing a mad obsession to turn over and move stones, and then death.

(46) Once again some individual Parthians fraternise with Roman soldiers and say their army, too, is exhausted and hungry. But a local named Mithridates came offering advice and showed one of Antony’s lieutenants hills in the distance and told him the entire Parthian host is waiting there to ambush them.

(47) Thus warned that the road through the deserts would leave them exposed, Antony holds a council of advisers and opts to take the path through the mountains, short of water though this would leave them. The Parthians attack their rear while the troops in the van fall on a river and start drinking but the water is salt and poisonous, causing stomach cramps.

(48) The Romans march on, assured by their guide that once they cross the next river the Parthians won’t pursues them. A garbled passage seems to imply that some of the Romans attacked and looted their own baggage train. There is such confusion that Antony calls one of the freedmen in his body-guard, Rhamnus, and tells him that, when he gives the order, he is to run Antony through then cut off his head. Weeping and lamentation from his entourage. But their guide swears the river is close and word comes that the disorder in the rearguard is caused by their own forces, and everyone cheers up.

(49) The Parthians continue to harass their rearguard, raining down arrows till they arrive at The River and cross it at which point the Parthians (supposedly) unstrung their bows and praised their bravery. Would be lovely to hear the Parthian version of all this. Finally they cross the river Araxes into the kingdom of Armenia and drop to the ground and kiss it. Although they promptly fall ill of dropsies and dysenteries.

(50) Antony undertakes a review and discovers 20,000 of his infantry and 4,000 cavalry have perished. (These numbers are always suspiciously round.) More than half from disease, which sounds the right kind of amount from modern accounts of the impact of disease and famine. Plutarch says Antony blamed their defeat on Artavasdes the Armenian who had led back from Media 16,000 horsemen who would have made all the difference in encounters with the mounted Parthian cavalry.

(51) They marched on to the coast at Sidon through snowstorms and lost another 8,000 men. Here Antony was beside himself with impatience to see Cleopatra.

(52) The king of the Medes falls out with the king of the Parthians and sends word to Antony that he is ready to join him on another campaign against the Parthians. This is music to Antony’s ears because it was precisely the lack of Medean cavalry which he blamed for his previous failure.

(53) In 35 Octavian gave permission to his sister, Antony’s wife, to sail east with a fleet carrying extensive supplies. Antony wrote her telling her to stop at Athens, at which point she realised he wanted her out of the way while he consorted with Cleopatra. And Cleopatra realised her rival wanted to engage in battle. So Cleopatra loses weight and takes to simpering when Antony is there and pining when he’s not, and is backed up by a host of sycophants who tell Antony Octavia only married him as a matter of public policy. And so Antony puts off the war to go to Alexandria to see Cleopatra.

(54) Octavia returns to Rome where she continues to live in her absent husband’s house, raising their children, behaving nobly and honourably, and by doing so helping to highlight Antony’s disreputable behaviour. By contrast Antony dresses up in oriental royal costumes, holds an elaborate ceremony at which he distributes thrones and honours to Cleopatra, and her children, for all the world like an eastern king of kings.

(55) Octavian made sure to keep all these accusations before the senate and people, drip feeding scandal. Antony replies with his own accusations:

Octavian seized Sicily from Pompey but never gave him a share of it
Antony lent Octavian ships which he never gave back
after ejecting their fellow triumvir Lepidus from office and degrading him, Octavian was keeping for himself the army, the territory, and the revenues which had been assigned to Lepidus
Octavian had distributed almost all Italy in allotments, to his own soldiers, and had left nothing for the soldiers of Antony

Octavian replied:

he had deposed Lepidus from office because he was abusing it
he would share whatever he’d won in war with Antony whenever Antony should share Armenia with him
Antony’s soldiers had no claim upon Italy, since they had Media and Persia

Playground squabbles.

(56) Antony gathers a huge naval force of 800 ships of which 200 are Cleopatra’s though he sends her back to Egypt. Cleopatra bribes his advisers to plead her case, that she needs to be by his side. So Antony relents and invites her to Samos where they party to the sound of theatre performances, music, banquets and processions. ‘How will the conquerors celebrate their victories if their preparations for the war are marked by festivals so costly?’

(57) Then on to Athens where there are more festivals and parties and Antony makes a great speech to Cleopatra, ostensibly on behalf of the city. Antony sends word to have Octavia ejected from his house and she leaves with all his children, to the great scandal of the people.

(58) It is 32 BC and Octavian is alarmed at Antony’s preparations for war. He is unpopular because he is enforcing high taxes, a quarter of income for citizens, and eighth for freedmen. If Antony had struck now he might have won the people, but he delayed. Then senior Antony officials who had been hounded out by Cleopatra maliciously told Octavian about Antony’s will. Octavian seized this from the Vestal Virgins and read it out to the senate. The most offensive provision was that he wanted to be buried in Egypt.

A man called Calvisius then made the following charges against Antony:

he had bestowed upon Cleopatra the libraries from Pergamum, in which there were two hundred thousand volumes
at a banquet where there were many guests he had stood up and rubbed her feet, in compliance with some agreement they had made
he consented to have the Ephesians in his presence salute Cleopatra as mistress
many times, while seated on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them
and once when Furnius was speaking, the ablest orator in Rome, Cleopatra was carried through the forum on a litter, and Antony, when he saw her, sprang up from his tribunal and forsook the trial and, hanging on to Cleopatra’s litter, escorted her on her way

(59) Cleopatra’s suspicion or jealousy of Antony’s entourage, many of whom she forces to flee.

(60) When Octavian was quite ready a law was passed to wage war on Cleopatra and remove from Antony the power he had handed over to her i.e. reclaim it for the Roman authorities. Octavian claimed Antony had been drugged and bewitched and was under the thumb of Cleopatra’s officials.

Plutarch gives us the usual litany of ill omens he claims occur before every war or battle:

Pisaurum, a city colonized by Antony situated near the Adriatic, was swallowed by chasms in the earth
from one of the marble statues of Antony near Alba sweat oozed for many days, and though it was wiped away it did not cease
in Patrae while Antony was staying there, the Heracleium was destroyed by lightning
at Athens the Dionysus in the Battle of the Giants was dislodged by the winds and carried down into the theatre
the same tempest fell upon the colossal figures of Eumenes and Attalus at Athens, on which the name of Antony had been inscribed and prostrated them
the admiral’s ship of Cleopatra was called Antonius; some swallows made their nest under its stern but other swallows attacked these, drove them out and destroyed their nestlings

(61) So war begins between Octavian and Antony. Antony had 500 fighting ships, 100,000 infantry soldiers and 12,000 horsemen and the tribute of all the kings in the east.

(62) But so in thrall is Antony to Cleopatra that he decides to fight the battle at sea, even though they are struggling to fully man their ships. These are high-sided with as many as ten ranks of oars and heavy and slow to manoeuvre. Whereas Octavian’s ships are fully manned and in perfect array. He invites Antony to come and dock at Brundisium and Tarentum and that he’ll withdraw a day’s march to allow Antony to land and arrange his forces perfectly for battle.

Antony replies by challenging Octavian to single combat; then to re-enacting the battle of Pharsalus. But while Antony was lying at anchor off Actium, where now Nicopolis stands, Caesar got the start of him by crossing the Ionian sea and occupying a place in Epirus called Toruné.

(63) Octavian’s fleet engaged Antony’s but Antony boldly had his rowers released and sent up top to look like soldiers and his ships drawn up in battle array so that Octavian was put off and withdrew. Antony sealed off watersources to prevent Octavian’s fleet watering. Domitius defected from Antony to Octavian but Antony generously sent his baggage, servants and friends after him.

Some allied kings defected. Canidius advises Antony to send Cleopatra away and abandon the naval strategy, drawing Octavian onto land where Antony has the bigger force and better track record.

But Cleopatra’s insistence that they fight a naval battle prevailed, even though she was already making preparations to flee. Octavian approves a plan to kidnap Antony as he walked on the shore and it nearly succeeded, they captured the man in front of him but Antony managed to get away.

(64) Antony burns all but 60 of the Egyptian ships and packs these with 20,000 heavy-armed soldiers and 2,000 archers. An old infantry centurion complains to Antony that naval battles are all very well for Egyptians and Phoenicians but Romans fare best on land.

(65) Four days of rough winds and high seas but on the fifth, 2 September 31 BC the Battle of Actium took place. Antony exhorts his men and tells the captains to keep the ships in the narrow mouth of the gulf. At first Antony’s ships refused to budge and Octavian thought they were anchored, but then the more impetuous left their line to attack him. Excellent! His ships were smaller and lighter and more nimble and able to surround Anthony’s.

(66) There was little ramming because Antony’s ships were too slow and Octavian didn’t want to risk his. It was as if three or four of Octavian’s ships were laying siege to Antony’s monsters. The battle is in mid flow when Cleopatra’s 60 ships made sail and began to leave right through the battlefield. Abandoning all reason, betraying his soldiers and sailors and allies, as if bewitched, Antony leapt into a five-oared galley and made after her.

(67) He caught up with her and was taken aboard Cleopatra’s ship where he sat with his head in his hands after they’d docked at Taenarum. For three days he didn’t move until her women persuaded him to come ashore and be reconciled with her. The world lost for love.

Some of their friends arrive in heavy transport ships and tell them the fleet is destroyed but they still possess an awesome land force. So Antony wrote to Canidius ordering him to withdraw across Greece into Asia. And he hands over a big transport ship full of the rarest treasure to his friends, telling them to divide it up and make the best of their fortune.

(68) In fact his fleet held out for hours at Actium and was only overcome by a storm, while he abandoned nineteen legions of undefeated men-at‑arms and 12,000 horsemen. Madness. The greatest example in human history of a man who was pussywhipped, meaning: “Totally controlled, domineered, or emasculated by a woman.”

His men held out for seven days expecting Antony to return at any moment, but he didn’t and after their commander Canidius ran away in the night, they handed themselves over to Octavian. Octavian sails on to Greece where he redistributes the grain which Antony had stripped from them for his forces. And here again a second unusually direct bit of reminiscence by Plutarch:

My great-grandfather Nicarchus used to tell how all his fellow-citizens were compelled to carry on their shoulders a stipulated measure of wheat down to the sea at Anticyra, and how their pace was quickened by the whip; they had carried one load in this way, he said, the second was already measured out, and they were just about to set forth, when word was brought that Antony had been defeated, and this was the salvation of the city; for immediately the stewards and soldiers of Antony took to flight, and the citizens divided the grain among themselves.

(69) Antony reaches the coast of Libya, sends Cleopatra ahead to Alexandria, and takes to roaming around with just two companions. Plutarch says nothing about Antony’s state of mind but his actions betoken a ghost man, a man who has ruined his cause and his reputation and has nothing to live for. When the general commanding Antony’s forces in Libya defected to Octavian Antony tried to kill himself but is stopped by his friends.

Eventually he sails on to Alexandria where he discovers Cleopatra is engaged in a ridiculous scheme, namely to raise and drag her fleet along the course of the current Suez canal, from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea and thus go and colonise somewhere to escape conquest by Octavian. But the Arabs burned her boats and Antony convinced her he still had a land army so she desisted.

And now Antony forsook the city and the society of his friends, and built for himself a dwelling in the sea at Pharos, by throwing a mole out into the water. Here he lived an exile from men, and declared that he was contentedly imitating the life of Timon, since, indeed, his experiences had been like Timon’s; for he himself also had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends, and therefore hated and distrusted all mankind.

(70) A digression on the life and notorious misanthropy of Timon of Athens, clearly a legendary figure by Antony’s time.

(71) Canidius arrives to tell him what finally happened at Actium and the news that all the kings and tetrarchs and whatnot of the Middle East are defecting to Octavian. All he has left is Egypt. At which Antony abandons his depression and goes back into Alexandria where he embarks on a new round of feasting and partying, holding coming of age feasts for his children. Antony and Cleopatra establish a new society which they call Partners in Death. Cleopatra starts collecting rare poisons and experimenting with them on prisoners. the painless ones are too slow but the quick ones are very painful. After lengthy experimentation she settles on the venom of the asp.

(72) They send a petition to Octavian, Cleopatra asking that she be allowed to keep her children, Antony that he may go and live as a private citizen in Athens.

(73) Octavian wrote to Cleopatra that he would treat her well if she would kill or expel Antony. Plutarch shares some typical gossip, telling us that the leader of Octavian’s embassy was one Thyrsus, ‘a man of no mean parts’ who had frequent converse with Cleopatra till it made Antony jealous and he had Thyrsus strung up and flogged then sent back to Octavian. After that Cleopatra went out of her way to suck back up to Antony, celebrating her own birthday very modestly but Antony’s birthday with great splendour. Octavian was called back to Rome by Agrippa.

(74) The war is suspended for winter, but next spring Octavian advanced on two fronts, coming down through Syria and advancing east across Libya. Octavian hears that Cleopatra has built an extravagant tomb into which she has collected all her treasure and sends reassuring messages to her, because he is scared she will kill herself, set light to it and thus deprive him of his loot.

When Octavian is at the outskirts of the city Antony sallies force and fought brilliantly, routing Octavian’s cavalry and driving him back to his camp. Plutarch tells a typically waspish anecdote.

Then, exalted by his victory, he went into the palace, kissed Cleopatra, all armed as he was, and presented to her the one of his soldiers who had fought most spiritedly. Cleopatra gave the man as a reward of valour a golden breastplate and a helmet. The man took them, of course — and in the night deserted to Caesar.

(75) Antony makes Octavian a second offer of single combat. Octavian of course refuses so Antony insists on leading his army into battle. At feast the night before the battle, he tells his friends he will be victorious or die trying, while they all cry.

That night, as usual with Plutarch there are omens. Just the one this time which is that over the city a great music and noise is heard as of a Dionysian festival, but it is heard to move from the city centre towards the gate facing Octavian’s camp and then disappear. It was, people said, the god he had devoted his life to, Dionysius, abandoning him.

(76) On 1 August 30 BC Antony watches his fleet set out to engage Octavian’s but, at the last minute, raise their oars in peace, surrender, and be accepted into Octavian’s fleet. Also his cavalry defects. He fights with his infantry but they are defeated. He withdraws into Alexandria ranting that he has been betrayed by Cleopatra. Scared, Cleopatra retired into her refuge, had the doors locked and barred and messengers sent to Antony telling her he was dead.

Antony goes into his chamber, laments that he has been found wanting in courage to a woman, and orders his man Eros to kill him. Instead Eros kills himself. You just can’t get the staff. So Antony tries to stab himself but makes a hash of it. When he recovers he orders the bystanders to finish him off but they all run away. Until the secretary Diomedes arrives with orders to take Antony to her tomb.

(77) A peculiar scene. Antony is carried to Cleopatra’s tomb but she refuses to unbar the doors to let him in, instead insisting that he is laid on a bier and that she and her serving women haul him up using a rope and pulley system, even though this is extremely difficult for her. When they’ve finally got him inside, Cleopatra rents her clothes and beats her breasts and there’s blood everywhere, but he tells her he’s had a good life and to look out for herself.

(78) Antony dies and his sword is taken by a servant who shows it to Octavian.

When Caesar heard these tidings, he retired within his tent and wept for a man who had been his relation by marriage, his colleague in office and command, and his partner in many undertakings and struggles.

Octavian calls in colleagues and reads out his correspondence with Antony, emphasising how reasonable he had been and how rude Antony’s replies. Then Octavian sends Proculeius to negotiate with Cleopatra, anxious that she will burn her treasure and wanting her to adorn his triumph through Rome.

(79) Proculeius wangles his way into the tomb. He goes back accompanied by Gallus and while Gallus is keeping Cleopatra in conversation by the door, Proculeius uses a ladder to get up to that window, the window they hauled Antony in through, and then down the stairs and to the door and takes Cleopatra by surprise. She tries to stab herself with a small knife but Proculeius is too fast, seizes it, shakes her down to ensure she has no other weapons, then sends her under guard to Octavian.

(80) Now Octavian finally arrives in Alexandria, proceeds to a tribunal erected in the gymnasium. The population prostrate themselves in terror but Octavian says he holds them blameless and won’t punish them. At this crucial moment Plutarch rather spoils the effect by saying Octavian does it at least in part to gratify his companion, Areius the philosopher.

(81) As for the children of Antony, Antyllus, his son by Fulvia, was betrayed by Theodorus his tutor and put to death. Theodorus stole the precious stone the boy wore about his neck but when this was discovered he was crucified. Cleopatra’s children, together with their attendants, were kept under guard and had generous treatment.

Caesarion, who was said to be Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar, was sent by his mother, with much treasure, into India, by way of Ethiopia. There Rhodon, another tutor like Theodorus, persuaded him to go back, on the ground that Octavian invited him to take the kingdom. And Octavian had him executed, after his mother died. One way of regarding this is barbaric. But it should be out in the context of the mass proscriptions Octavian enforced in Rome. His rule was characterised by large scale executions.

(82) Octavian allowed Cleopatra to bury Antony with lavish rites. Then she began to starve herself. But Octavian threatened the lives of her children and thus forced her to eke out a miserable existence.

(83) An interview between Octavian and Cleopatra at which she tries to justify her course of action but Octavian refutes her interpretations at every step. When a servant reveals that she is hiding away her jewellery she crossly slaps him and insists to Octavian that she is storing up women’s ornaments in order to send to Octavia and Livia to beg them to intercede for her. And so Octavian went away confident that she wanted to live. But she fooled him.

(84) One of Octavian’s entourage tells Cleopatra that his army is setting off for Syria and will be taking her, so she obtains permission to pour libations at Antony’s tomb one last tie and Plutarch give her a long sentimental speech.

(85) Cleopatra has a bath and then dinner. A man from the country arrives carrying a basket. The suspicious guards tell him to open it and are amazed at the size of the figs it contains. He bids them have a taste if they like so they let him pass. After her meal Cleopatra sends Octavian a written message, then has herself locked in her chamber with her two serving women. When Caesar opens the tablet and reads the message asking for her body to be buried next to Antony’s he knows what has happened and sends messengers to go instantly to prevent her. But they find Cleopatra lying dead upon a golden couch, arrayed in royal state.

And of her two women, the one called Iras was dying at her feet, while Charmion, already tottering and heavy-handed, was trying to arrange the diadem which encircled the queen’s brow. Then somebody said in anger: “A fine deed, this, Charmion!” “It is indeed most fine,” she said, “and befitting the descendant of so many kings.” Not a word more did she speak, but fell there by the side of the couch.

(86) Plutarch reports the 4 or 5 different versions of how she was poisoned, whether she stirred up the asp to make it angry, dipped her hand in the basket or took the snake out and applied it to her arm or breast. In Octavian’s triumph an ‘image’ (does this mean a model or effigy) of Cleopatra was included with the snake hanging from her, though Plutarch doesn’t say where exactly on her body.

Octavian was cross but admired her lofty spirit and so let her be buried with full rites next to Antony. Statues of Antony throughout Alexandria were torn down but those of Cleopatra were allowed to remain standing after one of her friends, Archibius, gave Caesar two thousand talents. She was 39, Antony was 55, they had been an item for 15 years.

(87) As in many a Victorian novel, Plutarch ends his narrative by tying up all the loose threads and telling us what happened to all Antony’s children and their descendants. He had seven children by three wives and their marriages and second marriages and intermarriages make for a complicated diagram. One of the two daughters he had by Octavia:

Antonia, famous for her beauty and discretion, was married to Drusus, who was the son of Livia and the step-son of Octavian. From this marriage sprang Germanicus and Claudius, Germanicus dying young but Claudius coming to the throne in the chaos after Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD.

Before Germanicus died he fathered Julia Agrippina, who, at age 13, was married off to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. They had a son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. 21 years later, with Ehenobarbus dead, Agrippina married the emperor Claudius. And Claudius, having adopted Agrippina’s son, gave him the name of Nero Germanicus. This was the Nero who came to the throne in 54 AD.

So Antony’s ‘blood’, if there is such a thing, ran on into the Julio-Claudian dynasty for several generations.

Learnings

Predestination

Plutarch is a fatalist. He believes everything is predestined to happen. Not very often, but at various key moments when central characters try to avert war or settle conflicts or lay high-minded plans, Plutarch is at hand to tell us that an implacable fate controls our ends.

It was destined that everything should come into Caesar’s hands. (55)

A maze of cross-references

The way that the lives refer to each other creates an evermore complex matrix of cross-references, which turn them into a complex meta-narrative, or a multi-stranded history.

Iraq, Iran and the West

At some point, reading about the inexorable opposition of the Parthian Empire to the Romans (i.e. ‘the West’) and learning that the Parthian Empire was roughly cognate with present-day Iraq and Iran – made me think of the never-ending conflict between those places and ‘the West’ in my day.

Modes of death of Plutarch’s eminent Romans

Marius (died a natural death aged 71)
Sulla (died a natural death aged 60)
Lucullus (died a natural death aged 61)

Crassus (died killed in battle aged 61)
Sertorius (assassinated aged 53)
Pompey (murdered aged 57)
Caesar (assassinated aged 55)
Cato the Younger (suicide aged 49)
Brutus (suicide aged 43)
Cicero (murdered aged 63)
Antony (suicide aged 53)

It’s the opposite of a scientific sample but you notice how the first three died of natural causes, although Marius and Sulla had been mass murderers; somehow there was the space for them to retire, as for lucky Lucullus. But from then onwards all the rest die violent deaths, and the third aspect of trend is the number of suicides. It feels like Rome no longer had room for many of its eminent men. They were no longer just killed in battle or assassinated but removed themselves from a world which no longer had room for the beliefs or values or causes they had supported. In a voodoo kind of way it’s as if the Republic liquidated itself.

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by Simon on June 22, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation

Tagged Actium, Alexandria, Amphissa, ancient Egypt, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, Anticyra, Antiochus of Commagené, antiquity, Antonia, Antyllus, Archibius, Aristobulus, Armenia, Artavasdes the Armenian, Asia, assassination, Athens, Battle of Actium, Battle of Cyrrhestica, battle of Pharsalus, Biography, Brundisium, Brutus, Caesar's Civil War, Caesarion, Caligula, Calvisius, Canidius, Cassius, Catiline Conspiracy, Cato, Cato the Younger, Charmion, Cicero, Cilicia, civil war, Claudius, Clodia, Clodius, Crassus, Curio, Dellius, dictator, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Drusus, Dyrrhachium, Ephesians, Epirus, Eros, Forum, Fulvia, Furnius, Gaius Marius, Gaius Scribonius Curio, Gallic Wars, Gauls, Germanicus, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, Gnaeus Pompeius, Grabinius, Hercules, history, Hortensius, Hyrodes, Iras, Jerusalem, Julia Agrippina, Julio-Claudian dynasty, Julius Caesar, king of Media, king of Parthia, King Orodes, Labienus, Lamprias, Lentulus, Lepidus, Lucius Antonius, Lucius Caesar, Lucius Censorinus, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Agrippina, Lucius Scribonius Libo, Marcus Antonius, Mark Antony, Misenum, Munatius Plancus, Nero, Nero Germanicus, Nicarchus, Octavia, Octavian, Pacorus, Parthian War, Parthians, Patrae, Pelusium. Cleopatra, Pergamum, Perugia, Perusia, Pharos, Philippics, Philotas, Phraata, Phraates, Pisaurum, Plautus, Plutarch, Proculeius, Ptolemy XII Auletes, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, Publius Ventidius Bassus, Rhamnus, river Araxes, river Cydnus, River Rubicon, Roman history, Sallust, Samosata, Second Triumvirate, Sextus Pompeius, Statianus, suicide, Syria, Taenarum, Terence, Thyrsus, Timon of Athens, Toruné, Translation, Trebonius, Ventidius, Vestal Virgins

Posted by Simon on June 22, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/mark-antony-plutarch/

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