All posts tagged Roman Britain

Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe (1982)

This is a good, chunky selection of British writing from the Second World War, poems and stories and essays either written and published during the actual conflict or memoirs of wartime experiences published a little later. It consists of 400 densely-printed pages in the Penguin paperback, and features work from some 56 authors: 18 prose writers and 37 poets.

Poets (37)

Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Henry Reed, Edith Scovell, Henry Treece, Herbert Cory, C. Day-Lewis, Terence Tiller, George Barker, John Pudney, Charles Causley, Roy Fuller, Roy Campbell, Alun Lewis, W.J. Turner, W.R. Rodgers, Sidney Keyes, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, Rayner Heppenstall, Keith Douglas, R.N. Currey, Alan Rook, Fancis Scarfe, Timothy Corsellis, Kathleen Raine, F.T. Prince, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, William Empson, Stevie Smith, Vernon Watkins, David Gascoyne, Paul Dehn, T.S. Eliot, G.S. Fraser, Stephen Spender, W.J. Turner.

Short stories (9)

Elizabeth Bowen, William Sansom, William Chappell, Fred Urquhart, James Hanley, J. Maclaren-Ross, V.S. Pritchett, Glyn Jones, Elizabeth Berridge.

Factual memoirs/reportage (5)

Bryher – recalls her impressions of Blitz London upon her return to it from Switzerland
John Sommerfield – description of his squadron travelling through North-East India to the front line against the Japs in Burma
Richard Hillary – description of learning to fly a spitfire
Keith Douglas – how he disobeyed orders to rejoin his tank regiment in the desert west of Cairo
Denton Welch – a very home front story of being taken to meet the eccentric painter Walter Sickert

Essays (3)

By George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Virginia Woolf.

Structure

The pieces are divided into seven themed sections, being:

The City
The Sky
The Sea
Declarations
The Patient Khaki Beast (i.e the soldier)
Confessions and Conclusions
The Dark

Introduction

In his introduction the book’s editor, Ronald Blythe, explains that the 1930s was the decade of grand declarations, literary cliques and widespread left-wing or even communist confidence that the British establishment was about to be swept away in a wonderfully liberating revolution (traits I noted in my review of Robin Skelton’s Poetry of the Thirties).

The Spanish Civil War

However, a great deal of that fervour to change the world drained away during the three gruelling, disillusioning years of the Spanish Civil War (see my review of the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse) in which several of the youngest, keenest English poets were killed off and those who survived were thoroughly disillusioned, above all by the revelation of Stalin’s willingness to betray the revolutionary cause in order to further Russia’s national agenda.

(Stalin didn’t want there to be a successful communist revolution in Spain because he thought it would alarm and alienate the governments of France and Britain, which he needed to keep sweet as potential allies against the obviously growing threat from Nazi Germany. Therefore Stalin did not want there to be a successful revolution in Spain. It took British communist volunteers in Spain a long time to grasp the Realpolitik of the situation and when it did, disillusion was total.)

And then the outbreak of the Second World War all happened so quickly. The nationalist leader General Franco declared the Spanish Civil War over on 1 April 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed four and a half months later, on 23 August 1939, and one week later Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September.

The people of Europe, and their writers, artists and intellectuals, were thrown into six long years of chaos, bloodshed and holocaust. The world had never before seen destruction and mass murder on such a scale.

Retreat to the personal

Against this background of political disillusion (on the Left), a widespread feeling that the entire political class had let them down, and the universal sense of forces too vast to comprehend tearing the world apart, the writers who flourished during the Second World War retreated back to the personal.

If there was a common theme found across many of the writers during the Second World War, it was the notion that the entire world was being darkened by vast totalitarian movements devoted to wiping out the personal life, to exterminating the individual. Therefore, the greatest protest against the forces of darkness was to assert the importance of individual thoughts and feelings. As so often, W.H. Auden managed to summarise the mood perfectly in his famous poem, September 1 1939.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

But Auden had left Britain for America in January 1939, and so was hors du combat. The writers left in Blighty, men and women, either too old to serve or conscripted into the forces, all had to find their own ways of expressing themselves and showing their affirming flames.

So what you have in this book is a wide range of personal reactions to the disaster the world found itself in, writings which are hard to generalise about because they are often so distinctive, not to say idiosyncratic: from the obliquely poetic short story of Elizabeth Bowen, to the intensely religious verse of Edith Sitwell, from the brisk no-nonsense memoir of Bryher to the visionary description of a torpedoed ship going down by James Hanley, from John Sommerfield’s larky description of a long journey by train, paddleboat, train and lorry to the front line in Burma to William Sansom’s brilliant accounts of being a firefighter in Blitzed London, the collection is characterised by its variety of location and event and style.

The collection itself is obviously divided into two distinct forms, verse and prose, with prose further sub-divided into fiction and factual.

Poetry

Having lived through the experimental Modernism and free verse of the 1920s, and the reversion to much more traditional forms with regular stanzas and regular rhyme schemes of the 1930s, poets of the 1940s felt free to pick and choose from either approach as suited their purpose.

So there’s quite a variety of verse forms, but I think I’m right in saying not much of it feels new. Not formally. But in terms of content, there is much that feels new, and I think can be divided into two broad categories, the realistic and the fantastical.

The New Apocalypse and Neo-Romanticism

The war saw an intensification of an aesthetic strand which had existed throughout the 1930s, an interest in the English countryside reimagined as a place of spirits and gods and paganism and Christianity interpreted in its wildest, most apocalyptic shapes. This trend had overlapped with some of the spirit of 1930s Surrealism and had been a reaction against the lucid, rational and political concerns of the dominant school of Thirties poetry.

In the fateful year, 1939, the best writings from this tradition were brought together in a volume titled The New Apocalypse with the result that a ‘movement’ of sorts was named after the book. To quote Wikipedia:

The New Apocalypse (1939)… was edited by J. F. Hendry (1912–1986) and Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies The White Horseman (1941) and Crown and Sickle (1944).

The New Apocalyptics reacted against the political and social realism of the 1930s with its loving descriptions of factories and arterial roads and motorcycles and electricity pylons, and the belief that human nature was rational and could be rationally appealed to by rational argument. The name itself referenced D. H. Lawrence’s posthumous collection, Apocalypse (1931) and the poets in this tradition turned their backs on the Modern World and plunging into a heady stew of surrealism, myth, and expressionism. And then, of course, the world war broke out and quickly outdid their wildest imaginings of destruction, extreme situations and death.

George Barker

In this volume the Apocalyptics are represented by poems by Henry Treece and George Barker. Blythe includes a very useful 21-page section called ‘Notes on Contributors’ which gives potted biographies and select reading lists for all his authors, and spends half a page explaining Barker’s motivation: the preface to the Apocalypse volume spoke of ‘word explosions’, of their poetry’s ‘air of something desperately snatched from dream or woven around a chime of words, are the results of disintegration, not in ourselves, but in society…’ (G.S. Fraser, another founder member of the New Apocalyptics, quoted page 376).

But to be blunt, I dislike the examples of Barker’s poetry given here. If this is the best, I’m not impressed.

From Sacred Elegy by George Barker

From this window where the North Atlantic
Takes the crow in my mind home in a short line
Over the kissing fish in the wave, and the mine
Where the sailor clasps his death as mermaid like
Sex of a knife in the depth, from this window
Watching I see the farewelling seasons fall
Ever between us like rain. And the lachrymal
Memory, trailing its skirts, walks like a widow
Across those seas looking for home. O my Dido
Heart! Sail, sail the ships ever away from us all.

The phrasing and some of the obscurity which derives from it seems wilful. ‘Farewelling’ sounds like a schoolboy attempt to be interesting. The kissing fish in the wave seems pitifully inadequate to describe the Atlantic Ocean. The reference to Dido at the end kills it for me; falling back on classical references only highlights the main text’s weakness. Possibly, if you are predisposed to an anti-rational, pagan view of the world, this might ring your bell. But reading it in 2024, it felt strained and dated.

Henry Treece

Henry Treece is much more direct and therefore attractive:

From In The Beginning Was The Bird by Henry Treece

In the beginning was the bird,
A spume of feathers on the face of time,
Man’s model for destruction, God’s defence…

Though the third line is notably weaker than the first two (because over the top, grandiloquent, too much). And the word ‘spume’ instantly recalls W.B. Yeats’s much more powerful use of the same word in his wonderful poem Among Schoolchildren:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings…

Blythe’s note on Treece tells us that he went on to write an enormous number of books for children or young adults, often about the Dark Ages i.e. Arthur’s Britain, the Romans, the Vikings and so on. You can already feel that in this charming and simple poem.

Lincolnshire Bomber Station by Henry Treece

Across the road the homesick Romans made
The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;
Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead
In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,
Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.

And I wonder how the Romans liked it here;
Flat fields, no sun, the muddy misty dawn,
And always, above all, the mad rain dripping down,
Rusting sword and helmet, wetting the feet
And soaking to the bone, down to the very heart . . .

It’s a big idea, which I don’t have the scholarship to verify, but I wonder whether the 1940s Neo-Romantic urge to write about the mysterious countryside, pagan beliefs, spirits and so on, after the war went into children’s fiction, went into all those novels about Roman Britain, by authors like Henry Treece or Rosemary Sutcliffe, which I read as a boy in the 1960s.

Dylan Thomas

Some critics tried to lump George Barker and Dylan Thomas together as founders or exponents of a broader literary movement called ‘Neo-Romanticism’. This label works better in the world of art and painting than in literature. In painting there was a definite turning away from the urban towards nostalgic, if highly stylised, sometimes nightmarish, depictions of the English countryside, but a countryside under stress, prey to visions and strange atmospheres. Not Constable’s England at all. (Neo-Romanticism in art.)

But although critics tried to rope him into these movement, Thomas wasn’t interested. Dylan Thomas was just 24 when the war broke out and Blythe amusingly tells us that he took it as a personal affront, a calculated attempt by the world to blunt his promising career. Nevertheless, he produced some fiery, clanging verse responses to the war. Blythe acutely points out that in several of his most famous wartime poems (Ceremony After A Fire Raid and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London) Thomas ignores the statistics, the general headlines, and – as per Blythe’s thesis – zeroes in on the particular, in each case on one particular victim of the Blitz.

From A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death…

This is in a different class from the Barker. Nobody could compete with these ringing declarations. Thomas seemed to have tapped deep into the wellspring of some pagan power, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.

Edith Sitwell

Thomas may be associated with New Romanticism but he is sui generis, one of a kind, his grandiloquent poetry buttressed by the amazingly sonorous power of his readings. But out in the same paddock as Barker and Thomas were the more brittle but just as apocalyptic visions of Edith Sitwell. As Blythe points out, Sitwell’s wartime verse had travelled a long way since ‘the rhyming tomfoolery’ of the 1920s and the best of it uses Christian imagery to achieve a genuine sense of tragedy.

From Still Falls the Rain (The Raids, 1940: Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross,
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us…

T.S. Eliot

The godfather of Modernist poetry was T.S. Eliot and the war saw him complete the epic undertaking of the Four Quartets, four long meditations on death and history and society, underpinned by his complex and sophisticated understanding of Christian faith. They are Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940) The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

These poems are unlike anything before or since in their complexity of structure and interlinking themes and images. To briefly summarise, each one is set in a specific rural location (hence the names) and then uses a physical description of this location and its historical associations to weave a complex web of ideas about time, history, reality and religion.

The Quartets are among the absolutely top masterpieces of twentieth century poetry in English and Blythe makes the super-sensible decision to quote the fourth and final one, Little Gidding, in its entirety. Here is the second part of section 2, a sustained homage to Eliot’s hero, Dante, in which he envisions himself walking through the glass-strewn streets of London after an air-raid and encountering a mysterious strange, much as Dante walked through hell encountering strange figures in the flickering half-light.

From Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting…

Magnificent. Simple language, simple syntax, but a weird and brooding atmosphere leading up to the spooky final line…

Little Gidding online

Soldier poets

Away from the grandeurs of the London literary scene and its professional writers was the completely different category of soldiers, sailors and airman who wrote poetry and prose. The three most famous British poets of the Second World War are Keith Douglas (1920 to 1944), Alun Lewis (1915 to 1944) and Sidney Keyes (1922 to 1943). See how young they all died (24, 29, 21).

I have to say straight away that my favourite poet of the Second World War is Keith Douglas. It might not be a totally true generalisation, but it seems, working through this selection, that the further away you were from the fighting, the more gorgeous, visionary and surreal your writing became (Sitwell, Raine, Barker, Thomas), whereas the closer you were to the fighting, the more precise, detailed (and sometimes banal and everyday) the writing became, as soldiers, sailors and airman tried to nail down precisely what it felt like, to fly a Spitfire (Richard Hillary), to be aboard a torpedoed ship (James Henley), to be stuck in an infantry camp behind the lines during long hours of rainy boredom (Alun Lewis).

In this respect – in terms of clear, convincing description of what it’s like – Richard Hillary’s prose memoir of training as a Spitfire pilot, and Keith Douglas’s memoir of the war in the desert leading up to the Battle of El Alamein, are the standout pieces.

But it is striking that Douglas is the only author featured in this selection as both a poet and a prose writer. Something about his mentalité made him write memorably in both forms. For me, it’s his precision, his ability to get to the point. This doesn’t mean his poetry is prosey. It is as full of metaphor and vision as much other poetry. It’s just that the metaphor and imagery are subsumed, in his best poems, into a kind of laser-like accuracy.

From How to Kill by Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost…

The clarity and lack of any rhetoric or sentiment or bullshit, just what it is like to aim and shoot another human being.

It’s assisted by the preciseness of the half rhyme (also known as ‘imperfect rhyme’, ‘slant rhyme’, ‘near rhyme’ or ‘oblique rhyme’). Thus ball/kill; man/-pen; long/sang. As you read or hear it you sense that there’s a formal structure, a half-rhyme scheme, and yet the absence of exact rhymes prevents it from being predictable, makes it much closer to speech, like the speech of a man talking to you.

Of course it isn’t, and in fact lines like ‘This sorcery/I do’ has an Elizabethan feel to the syntactical reversal of the ordinary everyday phrase (‘I do this sorcery’) and the vocabulary.

The subtle half rhymes, the use of unexpected sentence structures, the ultra-modern subject matter and yet the knowing echoes of much older verse (are there echoes of Dr Faustus in ‘Being damned, I am amused’?) makes for an utterly modern read, rich in resonances and enjoyments.

Prose descriptions

Prose is more suited to descriptions of action. Thus two of the most vivid pieces are heart-in-the-mouth descriptions and/or stories of being a fireman during the Blitz by William Sansom. In both you are really right there as the vast flaming wall of a warehouse shivers and then topples towards him and his firefighting crew.

I liked John Sommerfield’s description of being part of a squadron which has to undertake an epic journey across North-East India by train and paddleboat and train again to get to the ravaged frontline with the Japanese in Burma.

What a lot of writers from the period share is a tremendous clarity of style and thought. Thus Richard Hillary comes across as very self-absorbed but he describes with wonderful clarity the experience of flying a Spitfire. Keith Douglas conveys with similar clarity the experience of being a tank commander in the excerpt from his memoir of war in the desert, Alamein to Zem Zem.

The memoir of London during the Blitz written by Bryher (pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman) is snobbish and self-serving (she keeps on about how she warned everyone about the Nazis since 1933 but would they listen? No, the fools) but also displays great clarity of description in her encounters with shop assistants or soldiers during the Blitz.

Essays

George Orwell

Rather as T.S. Eliot towers over the poets by virtue of the depth and breadth of his vision, in respect of clarity of thinking and prose style George Orwell towers over all the other prose writers. His essay in defence of P.G. Wodehouse (who foolishly and naively made a handful of radio broadcasts for the Nazis in 1940) is a masterpiece of clarity and honesty, and insights.

Orwell makes it clear he’s got hold of as many of Wodehouse’s writings as possible as well as the transcripts of his German broadcasts, and tried to clarify the events surrounding them i.e. he has done as much homework as possible. And then he proceeds to make a convincing case, based on the arguments that:

Wodehouse had no idea how his broadcasts would be interpreted
he had absolutely no political sense
he had been interned by the Germans for a year and so had missed the intensification of the conflict during 1940
that the fuss being kicked up about him was really a ruse by the media-owning classes (e.g. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail) to distract attention away from their own much more serious pro-Hitler, appeasement attitudes

But it’s not only the clarity of the argument but the many insights it throws up along the way which make it still such an interesting read. For example, Orwell shows how both American and German critics in different ways had completely misunderstood Wodehouse. They thought he was a merciless satirist of the English upper classes. Orwell shows how Wodehouse was a dyed-in-the-wool, public school member of those classes and that all his tomfoolery comes from inside the worldview and is full, ultimately, of love and respect for it.

Arthur Koestler

I’ve reviewed Koestler’s two most famous books, the novels Darkness at Noon (1940) and Arrival and Departure (1943). They contain much vivid detail but are a bit ‘muddy’ in their thinking by which I mean the logic of the arguments, specially in Darkness, are harder to remember than the plight of the central character (an old Russian Bolshevik in prison having been arrested as part of Stalin’s purges).

The Koestler piece here is his short essay The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) which gave its title to a collection of essays published at the end of the war. It goes some way to explaining why Koestler turned into such a bore, publishing some 25 volumes of essays and explorations in the coming decades and becoming steadily more irrelevant.

Koestler proposes a ‘spectrum of philosophies’ which stretch from ‘the Commissar’ at the materialist, scientific end of the spectrum to ‘the Yogi’ at the spiritual, metaphysical end. The Commissar wants to change the individual from outside, the Yogi wants to change the individual from within. This is precisely the kind of clever-sounding intellectual conceit which has bugger-all relevance to the real world and gives rise to a surprising amount of high-sounding verbiage in a short space. It sounds fine but everything it deals with – Fascism, Communism, Democracy, Art, Science – it does so in a shallow, superficial way. I found it unreadable and consider it the only actively bad piece in the book.

Short stories

Elizabeth Bowen

Broadly speaking, the closer they stick to the subject, the more effective the prose works tends to be. Not always, though. The selection kicks off, not with any scene of battle, but with a ghostly and evocative description of a young couple walking round London in the Blackout after a bombing raid has departed. The young woman explains to her soldier boyfriend that she makes sense of it all, the Blitz, the chaos, by imagining the city is the fantasy city of Kôr, mentioned in Henry Rider Haggard’s adventure novel, She.

After this arrestingly atmospheric opening scene the story shifts to the domestic embarrassment of the young lady having to take her boyfriend back to the poky, cramped flat she shares with a girlfriend, and everyone’s general embarrassment and inconvenience. Yet the story is full of sly insights and perceptions just on the edge of consciousness, a subtle poetry of the periphery.

At half past ten, in obedience to the rule of the house, Callie was obliged to turn off the wireless, whereupon silence out of the stepless street began seeping into the silent room.

It took me a moment to realise that ‘stepless’ means empty of people and therefore with no sounds of stepping, of people walking. It’s a tasty sentence and the story is full of just such odd obliquities. It made me want to read more Elizabeth Bowen.

Fred Urquhart

There are other striking experiments. Fred Urquhart (‘described by one critic as the foremost Scottish short story writer of the twentieth century’) is represented by a story about potato pickers in a part of deeply rural Scotland which I didn’t catch because I barely understood the intense dialect he has his characters talking in. It is a war story because it is set during the war and the tattie pickers observe planes flying overhead, which all leads up to the climax when a German bomber crashes and blows up a few miles away.

James Hanley

Far more experimental is James Hanley’s piece, Sailor’s Song, an account of a torpedoed ship going down and a handful of men surviving by clinging to a raft which ought to be grittily realistic but is actually done in the style of Walt Whitman, with both the Ship and the Sea singing, describing their song and the human characters referred to with a kind of Biblical anonymity.

Glyn Jones

A different tone is presented by Welsh short story writer Glyn Jones’s story, Bowan, Moragan and Williams, which is a larky portrait of a boy and his family and friends and friends’ families in a tight-knit Welsh community, where everyone is odd and eccentric. I particularly liked the friend’s relative who is so nervous of other people that he speaks in an increasingly shrill voice and jams the napkin ring into his eye socket as if it is a jeweller’s eyeglass. The war is peripheral to this gallery of likeable eccentrics.

Elizabeth Berridge

Not so the very short story by Elizabeth Berridge in which a woman’s flat in the city is burgled and smashed up (when she’s not there), but she’s been living for some time in a retirement home with a snug community of friends and, after going with the police to examine the wreckage, she enjoys embellishing the description on the train back to the retirement home, relishing the opportunity to make her friends’ flesh creep with this appalling example of society going to the dogs… Only to arrive at the home that night and discover it wildly on fire, having been bombed and all her friends killed. The starkness of the facts and the protagonist’s inability to process what has happened are beautifully captured.

Summary

Except for a handful of poems by the obvious gods – Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Douglas – the short stories are, on the whole, more varied and powerful than any of the poems. This last story by Berridge, stands symbol for the countless millions of people who, although physically unharmed, had their lives ruined and their minds scarred by the appalling, meaningless violence of war.

Credit

Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe was first published in 1966. References are to the revised 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

Second World War reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on March 8, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Poetry, Second World War

Tagged #democracy, A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London, Alamein to Zem Zem, Alan Rook, Alun Lewis, America, Annie Winifred Ellerman, apocalypse, Arrival and Departure, art, Arthur Koestler, Arthur's Britain, Battle of El Alamein, Blitz, Bryher, Burma, Burnt Norton, C. Day-Lewis, Cairo, Charles Causley, Communism, Confessions and Conclusions, Crown and Sickle, D.H. Lawrence, Daily Mail, Dante, Dark Ages, Darkness at Noon, David Gascoyne, Declarations, Denton Welch, Dido, Dr Faustus, Dylan Thomas, East Coker, Edith Scovell, Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Berridge, Elizabeth Bowen, Essays, Europe, F.T. Prince, Fancis Scarfe, fascism, Four Quartets, Fred Urquhart, free verse, G.S. Fraser, General Franco, George Barker, George Orwell, Glyn Jones, Henry Reed, Henry Rider Haggard, Henry Treece, Herbert Cory, Hitler, Holocaust, How to Kill, Introduction, J. Maclaren-Ross, J.F. Hendry, James Hanley, James Henley, John Pudney, John Sommerfield, Kathleen Raine, Kôr, Keith Douglas, Little Gidding, London, Lord Rothermere, Louis MacNeice, memoir, Mervyn Peake, Modernism, Nazi Germany, Nazi-Soviet Pact, Neo-Romanticism, North-East India, P.G. Wodehouse, Paul Dehn, Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, Plato, poems, Poland, R.N. Currey, Rayner Heppenstall, reportage, Richard Hillary, Robert Graves, Robin Skelton, Roman Britain, Ronald Blythe, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Roy Campbell, Roy Fuller, Russia, Sailor's Song, Science, Second World War, She, Sidney Keyes, Spanish Civil War, Spitfire, Stalin, Stephen Spender, Stevie Smith, Still Falls the Rain, stories, Surrealism, T.S. Eliot, Terence Tiller, The City, The Dark, The Dry Salvages, The New Apocalypse, The Patient Khaki Beast, the Romans, the sea, The Sky, The Vikings, The White Horseman, The Yogi and the Commissar, Timothy Corsellis, V.S. Pritchett, Vernon Watkins, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, W.J. Turner, W.R. Rodgers, Wales, Walt Whitman, Walter Sickert, war, William Chappell, William Empson, William Sansom, Writing In A War

Posted by Simon on March 8, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/08/writing-in-a-war-ronald-blythe/

The Life of Vespasian by Suetonius

This is a sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Vespasian by J.C. Rolfe, with a few comments of my own.

Summary (from Wikipedia)

Vespasian (9 to 79 AD) reigned as Roman emperor from 69 to 79 AD. The fourth and last emperor who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors, he founded the Flavian dynasty (consisting of himself and his sons Titus and Domitian) which ruled the Empire for 27 years (69 to 96). His fiscal reforms and consolidation of the empire created political stability, and he undertook a vast Roman building program.

Vespasian was the first emperor from an equestrian family and only rose late in his lifetime into the senatorial rank as the first member of his family to do so. Vespasian’s renown was based on his military success; he was legate of Legio II Augusta during the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 and pacified Judaea during the Jewish rebellion of 66 to 70.

In June 68, while Vespasian was besieging Jerusalem during the Jewish rebellion, Nero committed suicide and plunged Rome into a year of civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors. After Galba and Otho perished in quick succession, Vitellius became emperor in April 69. The Roman legions of Roman Egypt and Judaea reacted by declaring Vespasian, their commander, emperor on 1 July 69.

In his bid for imperial power, Vespasian joined forces with Gaius Licinius Mucianus, the governor of Syria, and Marcus Antonius Primus, a general in Pannonia, leaving his son Titus to command the besieging forces at Jerusalem. Primus and Mucianus led the Flavian forces against Vitellius in Italy, while Vespasian took control of Egypt. On 24 October 69 Vitellius’ army was defeated at the second Battle of Bedriaticum. It took another 2 months for the Flavian army to march to Rome and take it by storm. During the sack Vitellius was murdered by Vespasian’s soldiers, on 20 December 69, and the following day Vespasian was declared emperor by the Senate.

Little information survives about the government during Vespasian’s ten-year rule. He:

brought the campaign in Judaea to a successful conclusion
reformed the financial system of Rome
initiated several ambitious construction projects, including the building of the Flavian Amphitheatre, better known today as the Roman Colosseum

Through his general, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Vespasian increased imperial territory in Britain. Vespasian is often credited with restoring political stability to Rome following the chaotic reigns of his predecessors. After he died in 79, he was succeeded by his eldest son Titus, thus becoming the first Roman emperor to be succeeded by his natural son (all the emperors of the preceding Julio-Claudian dynasty had appointed their successors by adoption).

The Life of Vespasian by Suetonius

(1) The empire, which had been unsettled by the usurpation and violent death of four emperors (Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius) was at last taken in hand and given stability by the Flavian family. This house was obscure and without family portraits, yet it was one of which Rome had no reason to be ashamed (even though it is the general opinion that the penalty which Domitian paid for his avarice and cruelty was fully merited [he was to be assassinated in 96]).

Vespasian’s ancestor ,Titus Flavius Petro, a burgher of Reate and during the civil war a centurion or a volunteer veteran on Pompey’s side, fled from the field of Pharsalus and went home, where after at last obtaining pardon and an honourable discharge, he carried on the business of a collector of moneys. His son, surnamed Sabinus (although some say that he was an ex-centurion of the first grade; others that while still in command of a cohort he was retired because of ill-health) took no part in military life, but farmed the public tax of a fortieth in Asia. [A fortieth was a duty (portorium) of two and a half per cent on imports and exports.] And there existed for some time statues erected in his honour by the cities of Asia, inscribed ‘To an honest tax-gatherer’.

Later Petro carried on a banking business in the Helvetian country and there he died, survived by his wife, Vespasia Polla, and by two of her children, of whom the elder, Sabinus, rose to the rank of prefect of Rome, and the younger, Vespasian, was to become emperor.

Polla, who was born of an honourable family at Nursia, had for father Vespasius Pollio, thrice tribune of the soldiers and prefect of the camp [a position held by tried and skilful officers, especially centurions of the first grade] while her brother became a senator with the rank of praetor.

There is, on the top of a mountain near the sixth milestone on the road from Nursia to Spoletium, a place called Vespasiae, where many monuments of the Vespasii are to be seen, giving strong proof of the renown and antiquity of the house.

I ought to add the rumour that Petro’s father came from the region beyond the Po and was a contractor for the day-labourers who come regularly every year from Umbria to the Sabine district, to till the fields, but that he settled in the town of Reate and there married. Personally I have found no evidence for this, in spite of careful investigation.

(2) Vespasian was born in the Sabine country, in a small village beyond Reate, called Falacrina, on the evening of the fifteenth day before the Kalends of December [17 November] in the consulate of Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus and Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, five years before the death of Augustus [9 AD].

He was brought up under the care of his paternal grandmother Tertulla on her estates at Cosa. Even after he became emperor he used to visit the home of his infancy, where the manor house was kept in its original condition and he was so devoted to his grandmother’s memory that on religious and festival days he always drank from a little silver cup that had belonged to her.

After assuming the toga of manhood Vespasian for a long time made no attempt to win the broad stripe of senator, though his brother had gained it, and only his mother could eventually persuade him to bid for it. She at length drove him to it, but by sarcasm rather than entreaties or parental authority, since she constantly taunted him with being his brother’s ‘footman’. [This refers to the anteambulo who was a client who walked before his patron on the street and compelled people to make way for him.]

Vespasian served in Thrace as tribune of the soldiers. As quaestor he was assigned by lot to the province of Crete and Cyrene. He stood as a candidate for the aedileship, attaining it only after one defeat and then barely winning sixth place. He then stood for the praetorship, and was among the foremost candidates.

In his praetorship, Vespasian lost no opportunity of winning the favour of Gaius [Caligula] who was at odds with the senate, by asking for special games to celebrate the emperor’s victory in Germany and recommended as an additional punishment of the conspirators against the emperor, that they be cast out unburied. He also thanked the emperor, before the senate, because he had deigned to honour him with an invitation to dinner.

(3) Vespasian took to wife Flavia Domitilla, formerly the mistress of Statilius Capella, a Roman knight of Sabrata in Africa, a woman originally only of Latin rank. [This was a limited citizenship, taking its name from the old Latin cities and varying in different cases and at different times.] Later Flavia was declared a freeborn citizen of Rome in a suit before judges, brought by her father Flavius Liberalis, a native of Ferentum and merely a quaestor’s clerk.

By Flavia Vespasian had three children – two sons who were destined to become emperor after him, Titus and Domitian – and a daughter, Domitilla. Vespasian outlived his wife and daughter; in fact lost them both before he became emperor. After the death of his wife he resumed his relations with Caenis, a freedwoman and amanuensis of Antonia, and formerly his mistress. After he became emperor he treated her almost as a lawful wife.

(4) In the reign of Claudius, Vespasian was sent in command of a legion to Germany, through the influence of Claudius’s freedman and secretary, Narcissus. From there he was transferred to Britain, where he fought thirty battles with the enemy.

In Britain he reduced to subjection two powerful nations, more than twenty towns, and the island of Vectis [the Isle of Wight], partly under the leadership of Aulus Plautius, the consular governor, and partly under that of Claudius himself.

For this he received the triumphal regalia and, shortly afterwards, two priesthoods, besides the consulship, which he held for the last two months of the year. The rest of the time up to his proconsulate he spent in rest and retirement, through fear of Agrippina [Claudius’s fourth wife and mother of the emperor Nero], who still had a strong influence over her son and hated any friend of Narcissus, even after the latter’s death.

The administrative lottery then gave him Africa, which he governed with great justice and high honour, save that in a riot at Hadrumetum he was pelted with turnips. Unusually for a Roman governor he returned from the post none the richer, for his credit was so nearly gone that he mortgaged all his estates to his brother, and had to resort to trading in mules to keep up his position. [Suetonius’s text refers to him by the slang term mango, which was applied to a dealer in slaves, cattle, or wares which he tried to give an appearance of greater value than they actually possessed. The nickname implies that Vespasian’s trade was in mules.] As a result he became known as ‘the Muleteer.’

He is also said to have been found guilty of squeezing 200,000 sesterces out of a young man for whom he obtained the broad stripe against his father’s wish, and to have been severely rebuked in consequence.

When he accompanied Nero on his tour through Greece, Vespasian bitterly offended the emperor by either leaving the room while Nero was singing, or falling asleep if he remained. He was, as a result, banished, not only from intimacy with the emperor but even from his public receptions, so he withdrew to a little out‑of-the‑way town, until a province and an army were offered him while he was in hiding and in fear of his life.

There had spread over all the Orient an old belief that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world. The people of Judaea wrongly applied this prophecy to themselves (although, as later became clear, it referred to the future emperor of Rome) and so they revolted and, after killing their governor, routed the consular ruler of Syria as well, when he came to the rescue, and took one of his eagles.

Since putting down this rebellion required a considerable army with a leader of no little enterprise, yet one to whom such great power could be entrusted without risk, Nero chose Vespasian for the task, both as a man of tried energy and one not to be suspected of ambition due to the obscurity of his family and name.

Vespasian added to the forces in Judaea two legions, with eight divisions of cavalry and ten cohorts. He took his elder son, Titus, as one of his lieutenants, and as soon as he reached his province he attracted the attention of the neighbouring provinces by the way he at once reformed the discipline of the army. He fought one or two battles with such daring that in the storming of a fortress he was wounded in the knee with a stone and received several arrows in his shield.

(5) While Otho and Vitellius were fighting for the throne in Italy, Vespasian began to cherish the hope of imperial power which he had long nurtured because of the following portents:

On the suburban estate of the Flavii an old oak tree, which was sacred to Mars, on each of the three occasions when Vespasia was delivered of a child, suddenly put forth a branch from its trunk – obvious indications of the destiny of each child. The first was slender and quickly withered, and so the girl that was born died within the year; the second branch was strong and long and portended great success; but the third was the image of a tree.
Their father Sabinus, so they say, being further encouraged by an inspection of sacrificial victims, announced to his mother that a grandson had been born to her that would one day be a Caesar. But she only laughed, marvelling that her son should already be in his dotage, while she was still of strong mind.
Later, when Vespasian was aedile, Gaius Caesar, incensed at his neglect of his duty of cleaning the streets, ordered that he be covered with mud, which the soldiers accordingly heaped into the bosom of his purple-bordered toga. This some interpreted as an omen that one day, in some civil commotion, his country, trampled under foot and forsaken, would come under his protection and, as it were, into his embrace.
Once when Vespasian was taking breakfast, a stray dog brought in a human hand from the cross-roads and dropped it under the table. [The human hand was a symbol of power, and the word manus is often used in the sense of potestas or power.]
Again, when he was dining, an ox that was ploughing shook off its yoke, burst into the dining-room and, after scattering the servants, fell at the feet of Vespasian as he reclined at table and bowed its neck as if suddenly tired out.
Also, a cypress tree on his grandfather’s farm was torn up by the roots without the agency of any violent storm, then thrown down and, on the following day, rose again greener and stronger than before.
Vespasian dreamed in Greece that the beginning of good fortune for himself and his family would come as soon as Nero had a tooth extracted and on the next day it came to pass that a physician walked into the hall and showed him a tooth which he had just then taken out.
When Vespasian consulted the oracle of the god of Carmel in Judaea, the lots were highly encouraging, promising that whatever he planned or wished, however great it might be, would come to pass. One of his high-born prisoners, Josephus by name, as he was being put in chains, confidently declared that he would soon be released by the same man, who would then become emperor.

Omens were also reported from Rome:

Nero in his latter days was admonished in a dream to take the sacred chariot of Jupiter Optimus Maximus from its shrine to the house of Vespasian and from there to the Circus.
Not long after this, when Galba was on his way to the elections which gave him his second consulship, a statue of the Deified Julius of its own accord turned towards the East.
On the field of Bedriacum, before the battle began, two eagles fought in the sight of all and, when one was vanquished, a third came from the direction of the rising sun and drove off the victor.

(6) Yet Vespasian made no move (although his followers were quite ready and even urgent) until he was roused to it by the accidental support of men unknown to him and at a distance. Two thousand soldiers of the three legions that made up the army in Moesia had been sent to help Otho. When word came to them after they had begun their march that he had been defeated and had taken his own life, they none the less kept on as far as Aquileia, because they did not believe the report. There, taking advantage of the lawless state of the times, they indulged in every kind of pillage. Then, fearing that if they went back, they would have to give an account and suffer punishment, they took it into their heads to select and appoint an emperor, saying that they were just as good as the Spanish army which had appointed Galba, or the praetorian guard which had elected Otho, or the German army which had chosen Vitellius.

Accordingly the names of all the consular governors who were serving anywhere were taken up, and since objection was made to the rest for one reason or another, while some members of the third legion, which had been transferred from Syria to Moesia just before the death of Nero, highly commended Vespasian, they unanimously agreed on him and inscribed his name on all their banners.

When their action became known, Tiberius Alexander, prefect of Egypt, was the first to compel his legions to take the oath for Vespasian on the Kalends of July (1 July), the day which was afterwards celebrated as that of his accession. Then the army in Judaea swore allegiance to him personally on the fifth day before the Ides of July (11 July).

The enterprise was greatly forwarded by the circulation of a copy of a letter from the late emperor Otho to Vespasian (whether genuine or forged) urging him with the utmost earnestness to vengeance and expressing the hope that he would come to the aid of his country. It was further helped:

by a rumour which spread abroad that Vitellius had planned, after his victory, to change the winter quarters of the legions and to transfer those in Germany to a safer and milder service in the Orient
among the governors of provinces, by the support of Licinius Mucianus (governor of the neighbouring province of Syria) and, among the kings, by that of Vologaesus, the Parthian. The former (Mucianus), laying aside the jealousy which had created rivalry between them, promised Vespasian the support of the Syrian army; and the latter 40,000 bowmen

(7) Therefore Vespasian began another civil war by sending generals with troops to Italy while he crossed to Alexandria to take possession of the key to Egypt. Here he dismissed all his attendants and entered the temple of Serapis alone, to consult the auspices as to the duration of his power. And when after many propitiatory offerings to the god he at length turned about, it seemed to him that his freedman, Basilides, offered him sacred boughs, garlands, and loaves as is the custom there and yet he knew very well a) that no one had let him in, b) that for some time he had been hardly able to walk by reason of rheumatism, and c) was far away. And immediately letters came with the news that Vitellius’s army had been defeated at Cremona and the Vitellius himself slain at Rome.

Vespasian as yet lacked prestige and a certain divinity, so to speak, since he was an unexpected and still new-made emperor; but these also were given him. A man of the people who was blind, and another who was lame, came to him together as he sat on the tribunal, begging for the help for their disorders which Serapis had promised in a dream; for the god declared that Vespasian would restore the eyes, if he would spit upon them, and give strength to the leg, if he would deign to touch it with his heel. Though Vespasian had hardly any faith that this could succeed and therefore shrank from even making the attempt, he was at last prevailed upon by his friends and tried both things in public before a large crowd – and they worked!

And, at this same time, by the direction of certain soothsayers, some vases of antique workmanship were dug up in a consecrated spot at Tegea in Arcadia and on them was an image very like Vespasian.

(8) Returning to Rome under such auspices and attended by so great renown, after celebrating a triumph over the Jews, Vespasian added eight consulships to his former one. He also assumed the censorship and during the whole period of his rule he considered nothing more essential than first to strengthen the state, which was tottering and almost overthrown, and then to embellish it as well.

The soldiery, some emboldened by their victory and some resenting their humiliating defeat, had abandoned themselves to every form of licence and recklessness. The provinces, too, and the free cities, as well as some of the kingdoms, were in a state of internal dissension. Therefore Vespasian discharged many of the soldiers of Vitellius and punished many. But so far from showing any special indulgence to those who had shared in his victory, he was slow in paying them their lawful rewards.

To let slip no opportunity of improving military discipline, when a young man reeking with perfumes came to thank him for a commission which had been given him, Vespasian drew back his head in disgust, adding the stern reprimand: “I would rather you had smelt of garlic” and then revoked the appointment.

When the marines who march on foot by turns from Ostia and Puteoli to Rome asked that an allowance be made them for shoe money, not content with sending them away without a reply, he ordered that in future they should make the run barefooted, and they have done so ever since.

Vespasian made Roman provinces of Achaia, Lycia, Rhodes, Byzantium and Samos, taking away their freedom, and likewise of Trachian Cilicia and Commagene, which up to that time had been ruled by kings. He sent additional legions to Cappadocia because of the constant inroads of the barbarians, and gave it a consular governor in place of a Roman knight.

As Rome was unsightly from former fires and fallen buildings, Vespasian allowed anyone to take possession of vacant sites and build upon them, in case the owners failed to do so. He began the restoration of the Capitol in person [after the fire which broke out during the siege of his brother Sabinus – see Tacitus’s Histories for a detailed description of this event], was the first to lend a hand in clearing away the debris, and himself carried some of it off in a basket.

Vespasian undertook to restore the 3,000 bronze tablets which were destroyed with the temple, making a thorough search for copies. These included priceless and most ancient records of the empire, containing the decrees of the senate and the acts of the commons almost from the foundation of the city, regarding alliances, treaties and special privileges granted to individuals.

(9) Vespasian also undertook new works, the temple of Peace hard by the Forum and one to the Deified Claudius on the Caelian mount, which was begun by Agrippina but almost utterly destroyed by Nero. Also an amphitheatre in the heart of the city, a plan which he learned that Augustus had cherished. [This is the building we call the Colosseum, which was known as the Flavian amphitheatre until the Middle Ages.]

Vespasian reformed the two great orders [senators and knights], reduced by a series of murders and sullied by longstanding neglect, and added to their numbers, holding a review of the senate and the knights, expelling those who least deserved the honour and enrolling the most distinguished of the Italians and provincials.

Furthermore, to let it be known that the two orders differed from each other not so much in their privileges as in their rank, in the case of an altercation between a senator and a Roman knight, he rendered his decision: ‘Unseemly language should not be used towards senators, but to return their insults in kind is proper and lawful’ [i.e. a citizen could return the abuse of another citizen, regardless of their respective ranks].

(10) Lawsuit upon lawsuit had accumulated in all the courts to an excessive degree, since those of long standing were left unsettled through the interruption of court business during the civil wars and new ones had arisen through the disorder of the times. Vespasian therefore chose commissioners by lot to restore what had been seized in time of war, and to make special decisions in the court of the Hundred, reducing the cases to the smallest number, since it was clear that the lifetime of the litigants would not suffice for the regular proceedings.

(11) Licentiousness and extravagance had flourished without restraint so Vespasian induced the senate to vote that any woman who formed a connection with the slave of another person should herself be made a slave. Also that anyone who lent money to minors (meaning sons who were still under the control of their fathers, regardless of their age) should never have a legal right to enforce payment, that is to say, not even after the death of the fathers.

(12) In other matters Vespasian was unassuming and lenient from the very beginning of his reign until its end. He never tried to conceal his former lowly condition and often paraded it. Indeed, when certain men tried to trace the origin of the Flavian family to the founders of Reate and a companion of Hercules whose tomb still stands on the Via Salaria, he laughed at them for their pains.

So far was he from a desire for pomp and show that on the day of his triumph he did not hesitate to say: ‘It serves me right for being such a fool as to want a triumph in my old age, as if it were due to my ancestors or had ever been among my own ambitions.’

He did not even assume the tribunician power at once nor the title of Father of his Country until late. As for the custom of searching people who came to pay their morning calls to him, he gave that up before the civil war was over.

(13) Vespasian bore the frank language of his friends, the quips of pleaders, and the impudence of the philosophers with the greatest patience. Though Licinius Mucianus, a man of notorious unchastity, presumed upon his services to treat Vespasian with scant respect [claiming that, as leader of Vespasian’s army, he won Italy and Rome and, in effect, gave it to him], he never had the heart to criticize him except privately and then only to the extent of adding to a complaint made to a mutual friend, the words: ‘I at least am a man’ [implying that Mucianus was effeminate and unchaste].

When Salvius Liberalis ventured to say, while defending a rich client, ‘What is it to Caesar if Hipparchus had a hundred millions?’ he personally commended him. When the Cynic Demetrius met him abroad after being condemned to banishment, and without deigning to rise in his presence or to salute him, even snarled out some insult, Vespasian merely called him a dog.

(14) Vespasian was not inclined to remember or to avenge affronts or enmities, but made a brilliant match for the daughter of his enemy Vitellius, and even provided her with a dowry and a house-keeping outfit.

When he was in terror at being forbidden Nero’s court and asked what on earth he was to do or where he was to go, one of the ushers threw him out and told him to ‘go to Morbovia’ [a made-up name meaning ‘go to the devil’]. When the man later begged for forgiveness, Vespasian confined his resentment to words, and those of about the same number and purport.

Indeed, so far was he from being led by any suspicion or fear to cause anyone’s death that when his friends warned him that he must keep an eye on Mettius Pompusianus, since it was commonly believed that he had an imperial horoscope, he ignored them and made Mettius consul, guaranteeing that he would one day be mindful of the favour.

(15) It cannot be shown that any innocent person was punished save in Vespasian’s absence and without his knowledge, or at any rate against his will and by misleading him.

Although Helvidius Priscus was the only one who greeted him on his return from Syria by his private name of ‘Vespasian’ and, in his praetorship, left the emperor unhonoured and unmentioned in all his edicts, still Vespasian did not show anger until by the extravagance of his railing Helvidius had all but degraded him [meaning reduced him to the status of a common citizen].

But even in Helvidius’s case, though Vespasian did banish him and later order his death, he was most anxious for any means of saving him, and sent messengers to recall those who were to slay him; and he would have saved him, but for a false report that Helvidius had already been done to death. Certainly he never took pleasure in the death of anyone, but even wept and sighed over those who suffered merited punishment.

(16) The only thing for which Vespasian can be fairly censured was his love of money. For not content with reviving the taxes which had been repealed under Galba, he added new and heavy burdens, increasing the amount of tribute paid by the provinces, in some cases actually doubling it, and quite openly carrying on traffic which would be shameful even for a man in private life. He bought up certain commodities in order to distribute them at a profit.

Vespasian made no bones of selling offices to candidates and acquittals to men under prosecution, whether innocent or guilty. He is even believed to have deliberately advanced the most rapacious of his procurators to higher posts so that they might be the richer when he later condemned them. In fact, it was common talk that he used these men as ‘sponges’ because he ‘soaked’ them when they were dry and ‘squeezed’ them when they were wet.

Some say that Vespasian was naturally covetous and was taunted with it by an old herdsman of his who, on being forced to pay for the freedom for which he earnestly begged Vespasian when he became emperor, cried: ‘The fox changes his fur but not his nature.’

Others on the contrary believe that he was driven by necessity to raise money by spoliation and robbery because of the desperate state of the treasury and the privy purse. He testified to this at the very beginning of his reign by declaring that 40,000 millions were needed to set the state upright. This latter view seems the more probable, since he made the best use of his gains, ill-gotten though they were.

(17) He was most generous to all classes, making up the requisite estate for senators [this had been increased to 1,200,000 sesterces by Augustus] giving needy ex-consuls an annual stipend of 500,000 sesterces, restoring to a better condition many cities throughout the empire which had suffered from earthquakes or fires and, in particular, encouraging men of talent and the arts.

(18) Vespasian was the first to establish a regular salary of 100,000 sesterces for Latin and Greek teachers of rhetoric, paid from the privy purse. He presented eminent poets with princely largess and great rewards, and artists, too, such as the restorer of the Venus of Cos and of the Colossus.

(19) At the plays with which he dedicated the new stage of the theatre of Marcellus, Vespasian revived the old musical entertainments. To Apelles, the tragic actor, he gave 400,000 sesterces; to Terpnus and Diodorus, the lyre-players, 200,000 each; to several, a hundred thousand; while those who received least were paid 40,000, and numerous golden crowns were awarded besides.

Vespasian gave constant dinner parties, too, usually formally and sumptuously, to help the marketmen. He gave gifts to women on the Kalends (first) of March [the Matronalia or feast of married women] as he did to the men on the Saturnalia.

Yet even so he could not be rid of his former bed reputation for covetousness. The Alexandrians persisted in calling him Cybiosactes, the surname of one of their kings who was scandalously stingy.

Even at his funeral, Favor, a leading actor of mimes, who wore his mask and, according to the usual custom, imitated the actions and words of the deceased during his lifetime, having asked procurators in a loud voice how much his funeral procession would cost, and hearing the reply ‘Ten million sesterces,’ cried out, ‘Give me a hundred thousand and fling me even into the Tiber.’

(20) Vespasian was well built, with strong, sturdy limbs, and the expression of one who was straining. Apropos of which a witty fellow, when Vespasian asked him to make a joke about him, replied, ‘I will, when you have finished relieving yourself.’

Vespasian enjoyed excellent health, though he did nothing to keep it up except to rub his throat and the other parts of his body a certain number of times in the tennis court, and to fast one day in every month.

(21) This was Vespasian’s manner of life. While emperor, he always rose very early, in fact before daylight. Then, after reading his letters and the reports of all the officials, he admitted his friends, and while he was receiving their greetings, he put on his own shoes and dressed himself. After despatching any business that came up, he took time for a drive and then for a nap, lying with one of his concubines, of whom he took several after the death of Caenis. After his siesta he went to the bath and the dining-room. It is said that this was the part of the day when he was most good-natured or indulgent, so that the members of his household eagerly watched for these opportunities of making requests.

(22) Not only at dinner but on all other occasions he was most affable, and turned off many matters with a jest. He was very ready with sharp sayings, albeit of a low and buffoonish kind, so that he didn’t refrain even from obscene expressions.

Yet many of his remarks are still remembered which are full of wit, among them the following. When an ex-consul called Mestrius Florus called his attention to the fact that the proper pronunciation was plaustra (‘wagons’) rather than plostra, he greeted him next day as ‘Flaurus.’

When he was importuned by a woman, who said that she was dying for love for him, he took her to his bed and gave her 400,000 sesterces for her favours. Being asked by his steward how he wanted the sum entered in his accounts, he replied: ‘To a passion for Vespasian.’

(23) Vespasian also quoted Greek verses with great timeliness, saying of a man of tall stature and monstrous parts:

‘Striding along and waving a lance that casts a long shadow’ [Iliad 7.213.]

And of the freedman Cerylus, who was very rich, and to cheat the privy purse of its dues at his death had begun to give himself out as freeborn, changing his name to Laches:

‘O Laches, Laches,
When you are dead, you’ll change your name at once
To Cerylus again.’

But he particularly resorted to witticisms about his unseemly means of gain, seeking to diminish their odium by some jocose saying and to turn them into a jest.

Having put off one of his favourite attendants, who asked for a stewardship for a pretended brother, he summoned the candidate himself, and after compelling him to pay him as much money as he had agreed to give his advocate, appointed him to the position without delay. On his attendant’s taking up the matter again, he said: ‘Find yourself another brother; the man that you thought was yours is mine.’

On a journey, suspecting that his muleteer had got down to shoe the mules merely to make delay and give time for a man with a lawsuit to approach the emperor, he asked how much he was paid for shoeing the mules and insisted on a share of the money.

When Titus found fault with him for levying a tax on public conveniences, Vespasian held a piece of money from the first payment to his son’s nose, asking whether its odour was offensive to him. When Titus said, ‘No,’ he replied, ‘Yet it comes from urine.’

On the report of a deputation that a colossal statue of great cost had been voted him at public expense, he demanded to have it set up at once, and holding out his open hand, said that the base was ready.

He did not cease his jokes even when in apprehension of death and in extreme danger for when among other portents the Mausoleum opened on a sudden and a comet appeared in the heavens, he declared that the former applied to Junia Calvina of the family of Augustus, and the latter to the king of the Parthians, who wore his hair long. And as death drew near, he said: ‘Woe is me. I think I am turning into a god.’

(24) In his ninth consulship he had a slight illness in Campania and, returning at once to the city, he left for Cutiliae and the country about Reate, where he spent the summer every year. There, in addition to an increase in his illness, having contracted a bowel complaint by too free use of the cold waters, he nevertheless continued to perform his duties as emperor, even receiving embassies as he lay in bed.

Suddenly taken with such an attack of diarrhoea that he all but fainted, he said: ‘An emperor ought to die standing’, and, while he was struggling to get on his feet, he died in the arms of those who tried to help him. Vespasian died on the ninth day before the Kalends of July [23 June] at the age of sixty-nine years, seven months and seven days.

(25) All agree that he had so much faith in his own horoscope and those of his family, that even after constant conspiracies were made against him he had the assurance to say to the senate that either his sons would succeed him or he would have no successor.

It is also said that he once dreamed that he saw a balance with its beam on a level placed in the middle of the vestibule of the palace, in one pan of which stood Claudius and Nero and in the other himself and his sons. And the dream came true, since both houses reigned for the same space of time and the same term of years.

[Suetonius’s Life of Vespasian should be read alongside Tacitus’s Histories, which give a detailed account of Mucianus’ and Primus’s military campaigns in north Italy which led to the overthrow of Vitellius as well as the siege of Sabinus on the Capitol.]

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on January 13, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation, War

Tagged Achaia, aedile, Africa, Agrippina, Alexandria, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient world, anteambulo, Apelles, astrology, Augustus, Aulus Plautius, Basilides, Battle of Bedriacum, battle of Pharsalus, Byzantium, Caenis, Caligula, Campania, Cappadocia, Carmel, Cerylus, civil war, Claudius, Commagene, Cosa, Cremona, Cutiliae, Cybiosactes, Demetrius, Diodorus, Domitian, Domitilla, Falacrina, Favor, Flavia Domitilla, Flavian Amphitheatre, Flavius Liberalis, Gaius, Gaius Caesar, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, Galba, Germany, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Hadrumetum, Helvidius Priscus, Hipparchus, horoscope, Isle of Wight, J. C. Rolfe, Josephus, Judaea, Junia Calvina, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Laches, Legio II Augusta, Licinius Mucianus, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Loeb Classical Library, Lycia, mango, manus, Marcus Antonius Primus, Mestrius Florus, Mettius Pompusianus, Moesia, Mucianus, Narcissus, Nero, Nursia, Ostia, Otho, Pannonia, Parthian Empire, Polla, Pompey, portorium, potestas, praetor, Primus, Puteoli, Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus, Reate, Rhodes, river Po, Roman army, Roman Britain, Roman Egypt, Roman emperor, Roman Empire, Rome, Sabinus, Sabrata, Salvius Liberalis, Samos, second Battle of Bedriaticum, siege of Jerusalem, Spoletium, Statilius Capella, Suetonius Life of Vespasian, Syria, Tacitus, Tacitus Histories, Terpnus, Tertulla, the Capitol, the Colosseum, the Colossus, the Flavian amphitheatre, the Flavian dynasty, the Flavii, the Jewish rebellion, the Jews, the Matronalia, the Mausoleum, the Parthians, the Saturnalia, the Venus of Cos, the Vespasii, the Year of the Four Emperors, Thrace, Tiberius Alexander, Titus, Titus Flavius Petro, Trachian Cilicia, Translation, Umbria, Vectis, Vespasia, Vespasia Polla, Vespasiae, Vespasian, Vespasius Pollio, Via Salaria, Vologaesus, war

Posted by Simon on January 13, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/13/the-life-of-vespasian-by-suetonius/

The Life of Vitellius by Suetonius

A sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Vitellius by J.C. Rolfe, with notes and comments.

Summary

Aulus Vitellius (15 to 69 AD) was Roman emperor for eight months, from 19 April to 20 December 69. Vitellius was proclaimed emperor following the quick succession of the previous emperors Galba and Otho in the year of civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors. Like his direct predecessor, Otho, Vitellius attempted to rally public support to his cause by honouring Nero who remained widely popular in the empire.

Vitellius had been a companion of Tiberius’ retirement on Capri and there befriended Caligula. He was elected consul in 48, and served as proconsular governor of Africa in either 60 or 61. In 68, he was chosen to command the army of Germania Inferior. In January 69 he was proclaimed emperor by the armies of Germania Inferior and Superior, beginning a revolt against Galba. In Rome Galba was murdered in the coup of Marcus Otho and Vitellius then marched his army south to face Otho in battle. Vitellius defeated Otho’s army at the Battle of Bedriacum on 14 April 69 and, although he had enough troops in reserve and reinforcements on the way, Otho chose to commit suicide rather than fight on. With Otho out of the way the senate recognised Vitellius as emperor.

However, Vitellius’s claim to the throne was soon challenged by the legions stationed in the eastern provinces, who proclaimed their commander Vespasian emperor instead. Vespasian sent his armies through Greece and the Balkans into northern Italy where a complex series of military engagements followed, climaxing with a crushing defeat for Vitellius at the Second Battle of Bedriacum on 24 October 69.

Vitellius tried to abdicate in favour of Vespasian but was prevented by his political supporters, the praetorian guard and many of the people. This meant that instead of peacefully marching into Rome the armies of Vespasian had to fight their way into the city, with much destruction and loss of life. When Vespasian’s soldiers came upon Vitellius, he was lynched on 20 December 69.

The Life of Vitellius by Suetonius

(1) Different and widely varying accounts are given of the origin of the Vitellii, some saying that the family was ancient and noble, others that it was new and obscure, if not of mean ex traction. I should believe that these came respectively from the flatterers and detractors of the emperor, were it not for a difference of opinion about the standing of the family at a considerably earlier date.

We have a book of Quintus Elogius addressed to Quintus Vitellius, quaestor of the Deified Augustus, in which it is written that:

the Vitellii were sprung from Faunus, king of the Aborigines, and Vitellia, who was worshipped as a goddess in many places
that they ruled in all Latium
that the surviving members of the family moved from the Sabine district to Rome and were enrolled among the patricians
that traces of this stock endured long afterwards in the Vitellian Road, running from the Janiculum all the way to the sea, as well as in a colony of the same name, which in ancient days the family had asked the privilege of defending against the Aequicoli with troops raised from their own line
that when, afterwards, a force was sent into Apulia at the time of the Samnite war, some of the Vitellii settled at Nuceria,
that after a long time their descendants returned to the city and resumed their place in the senatorial order

(2) On the other hand, several have written that the founder of the family was a freedman, while Cassius Severus and others say further that he was a cobbler and that his son, after making a considerable fortune from the sale of confiscated estates and the profession of informer, married a common strumpet, daughter of one Antiochus who kept a bakery, and became the father of a Roman knight. But this difference of opinion may be left unsettled.

In any event, Publius Vitellius of Nuceria, whether of ancient stock or of parents and forefathers in whom he could take no pride, unquestionably a Roman knight and a steward of Augustus’s property, left four sons of high rank with the same name and differing only in their forenames: Aulus, Quintus, Publius and Lucius. Aulus, who was given to luxury and especially notorious for the magnificence of his feasts, died a consul, appointed to the office with Domitius, father of the emperor Nero. Quintus lost his rank at the time when it was decided, at the suggestion of Tiberius, to depose and get rid of undesirable senators.

Publius, a member of Germanicus’ staff, arraigned Gnaeus Piso, the enemy and murderer of his commander, and secured his condemnation. Arrested among the accomplices of Sejanus, after holding the praetorship, and handed over to his own brother to be kept in confinement, he opened his veins with a penknife but allowed himself to be bandaged and restored, not so much from unwillingness to die as because of the entreaties of his friends; and he met a natural death while still in confinement.

Lucius attained the consulate and then was made governor of Syria where, with supreme diplomacy he not only induced Artabanus, king of the Parthians, to hold a conference with him, but even to do obeisance to the standards of the legion. Later he held, with the emperor Claudius, two more regular consulships and the censorship. He also bore the charge of the empire while Claudius was away on his expedition to Britain. He was an honest and active man but gained a bad reputation because of his passion for a freedwoman which went so far that he used her spittle mixed with honey to rub on his throat and jaws as a medicine, not secretly nor seldom, but openly and every day.

Lucius also had a wonderful gift for flattery and was the first to begin to worship Gaius Caesar as a god; for on his return from Syria he did not presume to approach the emperor except with veiled head, turning himself about and then prostrating himself.

To neglect no means of gaining the favour of Claudius, who was a slave to his wives and freedmen, Lucius begged of Messalina as the highest possible favour that she would allow him to take off her shoes. And when he had taken off her right slipper he constantly carried it about between his toga and his tunic and sometimes kissed it. He also honoured Claudius’s powerful advisers, Narcissus and Pallas, by cherishing their golden images among his household gods. It was Lucius who made the famous remark, ‘May you often do it,’ when he was congratulating Claudius at the celebration of the Secular games.

(3) Lucius died of a paralytic stroke on the second day after he was seized, leaving two sons (begotten of Sestilia, a most worthy woman and of no mean family) and having lived to see them consuls both in the same year, and for the whole year, since the younger succeeded the elder for six months. On his decease the senate honoured Lucius with a public funeral and with a statue on the rostra with this inscription: ‘Of unwavering loyalty to his emperor.’

The emperor Aulus Vitellius, son of Lucius, was born on the eighth day before the Kalends of October (or, according to some, on the seventh day before the Ides of September) in the consulship of Drusus Caesar and Norbanus Flaccus (15 AD).

His parents were so aghast at his horoscope as announced by the astrologer that his father tried his utmost, while he lived, to prevent the assignment of any province to his son; and when he was sent to the legions and hailed as emperor, his mother immediately mourned over him as lost.

Vitellius spent his boyhood and early youth at Capri among the wantons of Tiberius, being branded for all time with the nickname ‘Spintria’ and suspected of having been the cause of his father’s first advancement at the expense of his own chastity.

(4) Stained by every sort of baseness as he advanced in years, Vitellius held a prominent place at court, winning the intimacy of Gaius (Caligula) by his devotion to driving and of Claudius by his passion for dice. But he was still dearer to Nero, not only because of these same qualities, but because of a special service besides. For when he was presiding at the contests of the Neronia and Nero wished to compete among the lyre-players but did not venture to do so although there was a general demand for him and accordingly left the theatre, Vitellius called him back, alleging that he came as an envoy from the insistent people and thus gave Nero a chance to yield to their entreaties.

(5) Having in this way through the favour of three emperors been honoured not only with political positions but with distinguished priesthoods as well, Vitellius afterwards governed Africa as proconsul and served as curator of public works, but with varying purpose and reputation.

In his province he showed exceptional integrity for two successive years, for he served as deputy to his brother who succeeded him. But in his city offices he was said to have stolen some of the offerings and ornaments from the temples and changed others, substituting tin and brass for gold and silver.

(6) Vitellius married Petronia, daughter of an ex-consul, and had by her a son Petronianus, who was blind in one eye. Since this son was named as his mother’s heir on condition of being freed from his father’s authority, he manumitted him, but shortly afterwards killed him, according to the general belief, charging him with attempted parricide and alleging that (his son’s) guilty conscience had led him to drink the poison which he had mixed for his intended crime (of murdering Vitellius).

Soon afterwards Vitellius married Galeria Fundana, daughter of an ex-praetor, and from her too he had a son and a daughter, but the former stammered so that he was all but dumb and tongue-tied.

(7) Galba surprised everyone by sending Vitellius to Lower Germany. Some think that it was due to Titus Vinius, who had great influence at the time and whose friendship Vitellius had long since won through their common support of the Blues (one of the teams in the chariot races). But since Galba openly declared that no men were less to be feared than those who thought of nothing but eating, and that Vitellius’s bottomless gullet might be filled from the resources of the province, it was clear to everyone that he was chosen rather through contempt than favour.

It is notorious that when he was about to set off he lacked means for his travelling expenses and that his need of funds was such, that after consigning his wife and children, whom he left in Rome, to a hired garret, he rented out his house for the rest of the year. And that he took a valuable pearl from his mother’s ear and pawned it to defray the expenses of his journey.

He had to resort to false accusation to get rid of the throng of creditors that lay in wait for him and tried to detain him, including the people of Sinuessa and of Formiae whose public revenues he had embezzled. For he brought an action for damages against a freedman who was persistent in demanding what was due to him, alleging that he had been kicked by him, and would not let him off until he had squeezed him to the tune of 50,000 sesterces.

On Vitellius’s arrival in Germany the army, which was disaffected towards the emperor and inclined to mutiny, received him gladly with open arms as if he had come to them as a gift from the gods, since he was the son of a man who had thrice been consul, in the prime of life, and of an easy-going and lavish disposition.

Vitellius took care to boost good opinion of himself by recent acts, for throughout the march he kissed even the common soldiers whom he met and at the posthouses and inns he was unusually affable to the mule drivers and travellers, asking each of them in the morning whether they had breakfasted and even showing by belching that he had done so.

(8) As soon as he had entered the camp, Vitellius granted every request that anyone made and even of his own accord freed those in disgrace from their penalties, defendants of suits from their mourning, and the convicted from punishment. Therefore hardly a month had passed, when one evening the soldiers took him from his bedroom, just as he was, in his common house-clothes, and hailed him as emperor. Then he was carried about the most populous villages, holding a drawn sword of the Deified Julius, which someone had taken from a shrine of Mars and handed him during the first congratulations.

He did not return to headquarters until the dining-room caught fire from the stove and was ablaze and then, when all were shocked and troubled at what seemed a bad omen, he said: ‘Be of good cheer; to us light is given,’ and this was his only address to the soldiers.

When he presently received the support of the army of the upper province too, which had previously transferred its allegiance for Galba to the senate, he eagerly accepted the surname of Germanicus, which was unanimously offered him, put off accepting the title of Augustus, and forever refused that of Caesar.

(9) Hearing of the murder of Galba [15 January 69] Vitellius settled affairs in Germany and made two divisions of his forces, one to send on against Otho, and the other to lead in person. The former was greeted with a lucky omen at the start, for an eagle suddenly flew towards them from the right and after hovering about the standards, slowly preceded their line of march. But, on the contrary, when he himself began his advance, the equestrian statues which were being set up everywhere in his honour on a sudden all collapsed with broken legs, and the laurel crown which he had put on with due ceremony fell into a running stream. Later, as he was sitting in judgment on the tribunal at Vienna, a cock perched on his shoulder and then on his head. And the outcome corresponded with these omens for it turned out that he was not by his own efforts able to retain the power which his lieutenants secured for him.

(10) Vitellius heard of the victory at Betriacum and of the death of Otho (16 April 69) while he was still in Gaul, and without delay by a single edict he disbanded all the praetorian cohorts, as having set a pernicious example, and bade them hand over their arms to their tribunes. Furthermore, he gave orders that 120 of them should be hunted up and punished, having found petitions which they had written to Otho, asking for a reward for services rendered in connection with Galba’s murder. These acts were altogether admirable and noble, and such as to give hope that he would be a great prince, had it not been that the rest of his conduct was more in harmony with his natural disposition and his former habits of life than with imperial dignity.

For when he had begun his march, Vitellius rode through the middle of the cities like a triumphing general, and on the rivers he sailed in most exquisite craft wreathed with various kinds of garlands, amid lavish entertainments, with no discipline among his household or the soldiers, making a jest of the pillage and wantonness of all his followers. For not content with the banquets which were furnished them everywhere at public expense, they set free whatever slaves they pleased, paying those who protested with blows and stripes, often with wounds, and sometimes with death.

When Vitellius came to the plains where the battle was fought and some shuddered with horror at the mouldering corpses, he had the audacity to encourage them by the abominable saying that the odour of a dead enemy was sweet and that of a fellow-citizen sweeter still. But nevertheless, the better to bear the awful stench, he openly drained a great draught of unmixed wine and distributed some among the troops.

With equal bad taste and arrogance, gazing upon the stone inscribed to the memory of Otho, he declared that he deserved such a Mausoleum, and sent the dagger with which his rival had killed himself to the Colony of Agrippina, to be dedicated to Mars. He also held an all-night festival on the heights of the Apennines.

(11) Finally, Vitellius entered Rome to the sound of the trumpet, wearing a general’s mantle and a sword at his side, amid standards and banners, with his staff in military cloaks and his troops with drawn swords.

Then showing greater and greater disregard for the laws of gods and men, he assumed the office of high priest on the day of Allia, held elections for ten years to come, and made himself consul for life. And to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind what model he chose for the government of the state, he made funerary offerings to Nero in the middle of the Campus Martius, attended by a great throng of the official priests. And when, at the accompanying banquet a flute-player was received with applause, he openly urged him ‘to render something from the Master’s Book as well’, and when he began the songs of Nero, Vitellius was the first to applaud him and even jumped for joy.

(12) Beginning in this way, Vitellius regulated the greater part of his rule wholly according to the advice and whims of the commonest of actors and chariot-drivers, and in particular of his freedman Asiaticus. This fellow had immoral relations with Vitellius in his youth but later grew weary of him and ran away. When Vitellius came upon him selling posca at Puteoli, he put him in irons, but at once freed him again and made him his favourite. His vexation was renewed by the man’s excessive insolence and thievishness and he sold him to an itinerant keeper of gladiators. When, however, he was once reserved for the end of a gladiatorial show, Vitellius suddenly spirited him away, and finally on getting his province set him free. On the first day of his reign Vitellius presented Asiaticus with the golden ring at a banquet, although in the morning, when there was a general demand that Asiaticus be given that honour, he had deprecated in the strongest terms such a blot on the equestrian order.

(13) But Vitellius’s besetting sins were luxury and cruelty. He divided his feasts into three, sometimes into four a day – breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and a drinking bout – and he was readily able to do justice to all of them through his habit of taking emetics. Moreover, he had himself invited to each of these meals by different men on the same day, and the materials for any one of them never cost less than 400,000 sesterces.

Most notorious of all was the dinner given by his brother to celebrate the emperor’s arrival in Rome, at which 2,000 of the choicest fishes and 7,000 birds are said to have been served. He himself eclipsed even this at the dedication of a platter, which, on account of its enormous size, he called the ‘Shield of Minerva, Defender of the City.’ In this he mingled the livers of pike, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos and the milt of lampreys, brought by his captains and triremes from the whole empire, from Parthia to the Spanish strait.

Possessing an appetite that was not only boundless but also regardless of time or decency, Vitellius could never refrain, even when he was sacrificing or making a journey, from snatching bits of meat and cakes amid the altars, almost from the very fire, and devouring them on the spot, and in the cookshops along the road, viands smoking hot or even those left over from the day before and partly consumed.

(14) Vitellius delighted in inflicting death and torture on anyone whatsoever and for any cause whatever, putting to death several men of rank, fellow students and comrades of his, whom he had solicited to come to court by every kind of deception, all but offering them a share in the rule. This he did in various treacherous ways, even giving poison to one of them with his own hand in a glass of cold water, for which the man had called when ill of a fever.

Vitellius spared hardly one of the money-lenders, contractors, and tax-gatherers who had ever demanded of him the payment of a debt at Rome or of a toll on a journey. When one of these had been handed over for execution just as he was paying his morning call and at once recalled, as all were praising the emperor’s mercy, Vitellius gave orders to have him killed in his presence, saying that he wished to feast his eyes. In another case he had two sons who attempted to intercede for their father put to death with him.

A Roman knight, who cried as he was being taken off to execution, ‘You are my heir,’ he compelled to show his will and, reading that one of the man’s freedmen was put down as joint-heir with himself, he ordered the death of both the knight and the freedman.

Vitellius even killed some of the common people merely because they had openly spoken ill of the Blue faction, judging that they had ventured to do this from contempt of himself and in anticipation of a change of rulers.

Vitellius was especially hostile to writers of lampoons and to astrologers and whenever any of them was accused, he put him to death without trial. He was particularly incensed because after a proclamation of his in which he ordered the astrologers to leave the city and Italy before the Kalends of October, a placard was at once posted, reading: ‘By proclamation of the Chaldeans, God bless the State! Before the same day and date let Vitellius Germanicus have ceased to live.’

When his mother died, Vitellius was suspected of having forbidden her being given food when she was ill, because a woman of the Chatti, in whom he believed as he would in an oracle, prophesied that he would rule securely and for a long time, but only if he should survive his parent. Others say that, through weariness of present evils and fear of those which threatened, she asked her son for poison and obtained it with no great difficulty.

(15) In the eighth month of his reign the armies of the Moesian provinces and Pannonia revolted against Vitellius, and also the provinces of Judaea and Syria, the former swearing allegiance to Vespasian in his absence and the latter in his presence. Therefore, to retain the devotion and favour of the rest of the people, there was nothing that Vitellius did not lavish publicly and privately, without any limit.

Vitellius held a levy in Rome, promising those who volunteered not only their discharge upon his victory but also the rewards and privileges given to veterans after their regular term of service. Later, when his enemies were pressing him hard by land and sea, he opposed to them in one quarter his brother with a fleet manned by raw recruits and a band of gladiators, and in another the forces and leaders who had fought at Bedriacum. And after he was everywhere either worsted or betrayed, he made a bargain with Flavius Sabinus, the brother of Vespasian, that he should have his own life and a hundred million sesterces.

As the tide turned against him, Vitellius declared from the steps of the palace before his assembled soldiers that he withdrew from the rule which had been given him against his will. But when all cried out against this, he postponed the matter and, after a night had passed, went at daybreak to the rostra in mourning clothes and with many tears made the same declaration, but from a written document.

When the people and soldiers again interrupted him and begged him not to lose heart, vying with one another in promising him all their efforts in his behalf, Vitellius again took courage and by a sudden onslaught drove Sabinus and the rest of the Flavians, who weren’t expecting an attack, into the Capitol. Then he set fire to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and destroyed them, viewing the battle and the fire from the house of Tiberius, where he was feasting. [Suetonius’s account should be compared with Tacitus’s much longer and more detailed account of the same events in his Histories.]

Not long afterwards he repented of his action and throwing the blame upon others, called an assembly and took oath, compelling the rest to do the same, that there was nothing for which he would strive more earnestly than for the public peace.

Then he took a dagger from his side and offered it first to the consul, and when he refused it, to the magistrates, and then to the senators, one by one. When no one would take it, he went off as if to place it in the temple of Concord. But when some cried out that he himself was Concord, he returned and declared that he would not only retain the steel but would also adopt the surname Concordia.

(16) Vitellius also persuaded the senate to send envoys with the Vestal virgins to sue for peace or at least to gain time for conference.

The following day, as he was waiting for a reply, word was brought by a scout that the enemy were drawing near. Then he was at once hurried into a sedan with only two companions, a baker and a cook, and secretly went to his father’s house on the Aventine, intending to flee from there to Campania. Presently, on a slight and dubious rumour that peace had been granted, he allowed himself to be taken back to the palace. Finding everything abandoned there, and that even those who were with him were making off, he put on a girdle filled with gold pieces and took refuge in the lodge of the door-keeper, tying a dog before the door and putting a couch and a mattress against it.

(17) The advance guard of the Flavian army had now forced their way into the city and, since no one opposed them, were ransacking everything in the usual way. They dragged Vitellius from his hiding-place and when they asked him his name (for they did not know him) and if he knew where Vitellius was, he attempted to escape them by a lie. Being soon recognised, he did not cease to beg that he be confined for a time, even in the prison, alleging that he had something to say of importance to the safety of Vespasian. But they bound his arms behind his back, put a noose about his neck, and dragged him with rent garments and half-naked to the Forum. All along the Sacred Way he was greeted with mockery and abuse, his head held back by the hair, as is common with criminals, and even the point of a sword placed under his chin, so that he could not look down but must let his face be seen.

Some pelted him with dung and ordure, others called him incendiary and glutton, and some of the mob even taunted him with his bodily defects. He was in fact abnormally tall, with a face usually flushed from hard drinking, a huge belly and one thigh crippled from being struck by a four-horse chariot when he was in attendance on Gaius (Caligula) as he was driving. At last, on the Stairs of Wailing, he was tortured for a long time, then killed and dragged off with a hook to the Tiber.

(18) Vitellius met his death, along with his brother and his son, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, fulfilling the prediction of those who had declared from the omen which befell him at Vienna that he was destined to fall into the power of some man of Gaul. For he was slain by Antonius Primus, a leader of the opposing faction, who was born at Tolosa [modern-day Toulouse].

[Suetonius’s Life of Vitellius should be read alongside Tacitus’s account of the same events in his Histories.]

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on January 11, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation, War

Tagged Aequicoli, ancient Britain, ancient Rome, ancient world, Antonius Primus, Artabanus, Asiaticus, assassination, Augustus, Aulus Vitellius, Battle of Bedriacum, Biography, Caligula, Capri, Cassius Severus, coup, Decadence, Domitius, Drusus Caesar, emperor Claudius, Flavius Sabinus, Formiae, Galba, Galeria Fundana, Germania Inferior, Germanicus, gluttony, Gnaeus Piso, history, J. C. Rolfe, Latin, life of Vitellius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Loeb Classical Library, Luxury, Marcus Otho, Moesia, Narcissus, Nero, Norbanus Flaccus, Nuceria, Otho, Pallas, Pannonia, Petronia, Petronianus, Praetorian Guard, Publius Vitellius of Nuceria, Puteoli, Quintus Elogius, Quintus Vitellius, river Tiber, Roman army, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman history, Roman literature, Rome, Second Battle of Bedriacum, Sejanus, Sestilia, Sinuessa, Spintria, Suetonius, suicide, Syria, Tacitus, Tacitus Histories, temple of Concord, temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Capitol, the Chatti, the Deified Julius, the Flavians, the Forum, the Neronia, the Parthians, the Sacred Way, the Secular Games, the Stairs of Wailing, the Vitellii, Tiberius, Titus Vinius, Tolosa, Toulouse, Translation, Vespasian, Vitellius Germanicus, Year of the Four Emperors

Posted by Simon on January 11, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/11/the-life-of-vitellius-by-suetonius/

Histories by Tacitus

Biography

Publius Cornelius Tacitus, generally referred to simply as Tacitus, was a Roman statesman and historian. He lived from 56 to 120 AD. Like many Roman writers he had an eminent career in politics and public service. He started his career under the emperor Vespasian (ruled 69 to 79) and entered political life as a quaestor in 81 or 82 under Titus (ruled 79 to 81). He became praetor under Domitian (ruled 81 to 96) in 88 and then a quindecimvir, a member of the priestly college in charge of the Sibylline Books and the Secular Games.

Tacitus gained acclaim as a lawyer and as an orator, then served in the provinces from about 89 to about 93, either in command of a legion or in a civilian post. He became suffect consul (someone appointed to replace an elected consul who had vacated their office before the completion of their year-long term) in 97, during the short reign of Nerva (ruled 96 to 98).

It was about this point that he embarked on a career as a writer, producing two historical monographs – a biography of his father-in-law Julius Agricola which, because the latter had served as governor of Britain, contains much interesting information about the tribes and geography of ancient Britain; and the Germania, an ethnographic study of the tribes of Germany, both published in 98.

Tacitus returned to public life during the reign of the emperor Trajan (98 to 117). In 100 he and his friend, Pliny the Younger, prosecuted Marius Priscus (proconsul of Africa) for corruption. Priscus was found guilty and sent into exile. Pliny wrote in a letter a few days later that Tacitus had spoken ‘with all the majesty which characterises his usual style of oratory’.

Tacitus spent the next decade or so researching his two major works, the Histories and the Annals but in 112 to 113 was back in public service, recorded as holding the highest civilian governorship, of the Roman province of ‘Asia’ i.e. western Turkey. He probably died in the 120s, though the precise date is not known.

The point of recounting all this is to emphasise that Tacitus understood military and political power from the inside. He was a noted public speaker, lawyer and prosecutor, and held senior administrative posts. This profound understanding of all aspects of the Roman political system explains why Tacitus’s histories feel so authoritative and rich. He is speaking from deep experience of how Roman government worked, along with all the scheming, backstabbing and politicking which accompanied it.

The Histories

Together, the Histories and Annals were designed to give a continuous, year-by-year history of Rome under the rule of the first 12 emperors, from the death of Augustus to the death of Domitian i.e. from 14 to 96 AD, taking in the ten emperors in between (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian).

Tacitus composed the Annals second but they deal with the earlier period, Augustus to Nero (14 to 68). He composed the Histories first but they deal with the later period, Galba to Domitian (68 to 96).

Both books are missing large sections. The Annals is missing a big chunk in the middle, covering the last two years of Tiberius, the entire reign of Caligula (37 to 41) and the first six years of Claudius (41 to 47). Very frustrating.

But the Histories are even more mutilated. Originally 12 or 14 books in length, all that survive are the first four books and part of the fifth so that, instead of the 30 or so years from 68 to 96, all we have is just the first two years of his intended period, namely a brief summary of 68, all of 69 and some of 70.

The 1964 Penguin Classics paperback translation by British historian Kenneth Wellesley (1911 to 1995) is 260 pages long. That’s a lot of pages for just 2 years, so straightaway you know the Histories are going to cover the period in great detail.

If it’s a shame that we’ve lost most of the Histories and thus Tacitus’s accounts of Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, looking on the bright side, what we do have is a detailed account of a pivotal moment, the so-called Year of Four Emperors, 69 AD, when, following Nero’s suicide in June 68, four successive military leaders contested the imperial throne.

Nero was the last representative of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which had ruled Rome since 27 BC, but it was not only a dynasty that was overthrown; such was the chaos that it looked to contemporaries as if the unified, centralised structure of the Roman Empire itself might come to an end.

Four emperors died violently:

Nero in June 68, suicide (1. 4)
Galba in January 69, murdered by soldiers (1.41)
Otho in April 69, suicide (2.49)
Vitellius in December 69, murdered by soldiers (3.85)

Synopsis

Nero overthrown

In summer 68 reports reached Nero that the governor of the province of Gallia Lugdunensis, Gaius Julius Vindex, had rebelled against him. In order to gain support Vindex declared he was rebelling in support of the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, Servius Sulpicius Galba. The commander of the Germania Superior army, Lucius Verginius Rufus, remained loyal to Nero and led his army against Vindex and appears to have beaten him at the battle of Vesontio, where Vindex was killed. But in the meantime, momentum had shifted to Galba. Other army leaders swung behind him and the senate declared for him. Abandoned by the legions in Italy, Nero fled to a villa outside Rome and, hearing hostile troops approaching, committed suicide rather than be dragged back to Rome and executed.

Reign of Servius Sulpicius Galba (8 June 68 to 15 January 69)

So the senate declared for Galba and he undertook the long march from Spain to the capital, where he was acclaimed emperor in June 68. However, Galba was:

old – he was 70 when he came to power
ruled badly and inconsistently, swayed by a cabal of corrupt advisers
didn’t pay the army as generously as it was expecting, especially the all-important Praetorian Guard which, as a result, turned against him (1.4)c

More importantly, on 1 January 69, the same day that Galba took the office of consul alongside Titus Vinius, the legions of Upper Germany refused to swear loyalty to the new emperor. They toppled the statues of Galba and demanded that a new emperor be chosen. The following day, the soldiers of Lower Germany also refused to swear their loyalty and proclaimed the governor of their province, Aulus Vitellius, as emperor.

In a bid to secure his position, on 10 January Galba held a ceremony to adopt the 31-year-old Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus as his successor but it didn’t work. Just 5 days later, on 15 January, Galba was murdered by the Praetorian Guard (1.41). His successor, Piso, fled to the Temple of Vesta, but was dragged out and killed (1.43). Their heads were cut off and paraded round on pikes.

Reign of Marcus Otho (15 January to 16 April 69)

Tacitus’s account describes in detail how his successor, Marcus Otho, based in Rome, organised the conspiracy to assassinate Galba. Otho had been close to the centre of power for over a decade. He had initially been a friend and courtier of the young Nero, but Nero had an affair with and eventually married his wife, Poppaea Sabina, so had had Otho was dispatched to be governor the remote province of Lusitania in 58.

According to Tacitus Otho ruled Lusitania moderately for a decade. In the turmoil of summer 68, Otho allied himself with Galba, who was governor of neighbouring, Hispania Tarraconensis, and he accompanied Galba on his march to Rome, not unreasonably expecting a reward for his support. He was, therefore, aggrieved when Galba overlooked him to adopt Piso.

However, all these personal motives were dwarfed when Otho, now appointed emperor, read Galba’s imperial correspondence and for the first time realised the scale of the revolt of the army in Germany. Vitellius was leading his legions on a march on Rome à la Galba. Otho made an effort to negotiate, offering Vitellius a share in ruling the empire. When this was rejected, he assembled a fleet to control the coast and led his legions north where they undertook savage attacks on the civilians in the region.

Tacitus gives a detailed account of the movements of the legions of the various armies, Vitellius’s under the ambitious Aulus Caecina Alienus, Otho’s under Suetonius Paulinus. Paulinus defeated Caecina at a battle near Cremona but Caecina was then joined by the other Vitellian army led by Fabius Valens for the key battle of the campaign which took place at Bedriacum on 14 April 69.

It was a disaster for Otho’s forces, with the historian Dio Cassius claiming that 40,000 Roman soldiers were killed on both sides. (Tacitus makes the interesting point that in a civil war there’s less point, in fact it’s illegal, to take prisoners and ransom to their families, as you can in war against foreigners. So you might as well just kill them.) The next day Otho’s forces surrendered and swore allegiance to Vitellius (2.45).

Otho had retained substantial forces at his main base at Brixellum, a few miles from the battlefield and they advised him to fight on but Otho, reluctant to be responsible for more Roman lives lost, chose to commit suicide. Otho was mocked during his life for his debauched lifestyle and flamboyant homosexuality. But his suicide struck the true Roman Stoic note and was remembered and praised. Tacitus treats Otho’s death nobly and gives him a stirring speech to his men (2.46 to 49):

It may be that others have held the principate longer, but I shall make sure that no one quits it more courageously.

(A note on the Roman cult of suicide: Tacitus claims that a number of troops committed suicide beside Otho’s funeral pyre, and at the other Othonian camps both high and low committed suicide in order ‘to share his glory.’)

Reign of Aulus Vitellius (19 April to 20 December 69)

With Otho dead, Vitellius continued his march on Rome, where he made a triumphal entry and was recognized as emperor by the Senate. Tacitus then enjoys himself hugely recounting the multiple instances of Vitellius’s disgraceful debauchery, spending fortunes on games and entertainments, listening to whoever flattered him most, letting the troops he’d brought to the capital run rampant and lose all discipline. Among the numerous executions and appointments, Vitellius failed to defuse the long-running rivalry between the two generals who had won his victory at Bedriacum, Caecina and Valens.

Indeed, as Tacitus repeatedly points out, it proved to be easier to claim the throne than to hold onto it. Vitellius’s claim was soon challenged by the legions stationed in the East (Judaea and Egypt) who proclaimed their commander, Titus Flavius Vespasian, emperor instead.

Vespasian had a formidable reputation as a military commander, having played a key role in Claudius’s invasion of Britain in 43, and he was involved in suppressing the Jewish rebellion (which had started in 66) when Nero committed suicide.

Leaving his son (and future emperor) Titus, in charge of the siege of the Jews in Jerusalem, Vespasian recruited the governor of Syria, Mucianus, and Marcus Antonius Primus, a general in Pannonia, to his cause, and sent them to march on Rome, the third such march by Roman legions in 12 months.

Vespasian himself was in Egypt securing its vital grain supply when his troops entered Italy from the north-east under Primus’s leadership. With his determination, personal courage and charisma, Primus emerges as the ‘hero’, as Wellesley puts it, of book 3 of the Histories. After a confused series of clashes and manoeuvres, Primus’s legions defeated Vitellius’s army at the second battle of Bedriacum on 24 October 69. They then stormed and sacked the nearby town of Cremona in scenes of chaos, rapine and then fire. Tacitus is ashamed of the utter destruction wrought by Roman troops on a venerable Roman city (3.33).

Meanwhile the two generals who had led Vitelius to the throne, Caecina and Valens, both abandoned him in different ways. Caecina led the first Vitellian forces north but betrayed them and his emperor by going over to the Vespasians. Valens was slow to leave Rome and when he learned of the defeat of the Vitellians at Bedriacum he abandoned his legions and took ship to Monaco, with a plan to enter Narbonensian Gaul and raise a general rebellion of the Gaulish and German tribes against Vespasian. As Tacitus comments, this would have been catastrophic if it had succeeded (3.41) but it didn’t. Valens’s ship was overtaken by a flotilla of fast Vespasian galleys. With his capture the wind went out of the Vitellian forces:

With the capture of Valens the whole Roman world rallied to the winning side. (3.44)

Tacitus emphasises that Vitellius still had ample forces around Rome and if he had crossed the Apennines to attack the exhausted Flavian troops before reinforcements had arrived, could quite possibly have won. But he hadn’t a clue about military matters and surrounded himself with flattering courtiers who refused admittance to the centurions and commanders who could have given him sound advice (3.56).

Tacitus describes the confused scenes in Rome when Vitellius came down from the palace dressed in black, made an impassioned speech to the people, but was prevented by them, the Praetorian Guard and the German auxiliaries, from abdicating as he wanted to. (3.67-68) If his wish had been carried out much bloodshed and destruction would have been avoided.

If Vitellius had found it as easy to convert his follower as to give way himself, the army of Vespasian would have entered the capital without bloodshed. (3.66)

But Vitellius’s supporters’ obstinacy meant that the Flavian forces had to fight their way into Rome, destroying property and spreading carnage as they went.

The extraordinary story of Sabinus and Domitian

Vespasian had an older brother, Titus Flavius Sabinus, who had had a successful public career. Throughout the year he had remained in Rome as successive rulers rose and fell. Staying with him was his nephew, Vespasian’s younger son, Domitian. Tacitus tell us that Vitellius was well aware of their presence but took no action against them so that his, Vitellius’s, extended family, living in various provinces, would also be unharmed.

But Sabinus wasn’t stupid and had reached out to the anti-Vitellian factions in the nobility and, when news came that Vitellius had abdicated, he mobilised these individuals and cohorts (‘the leading senators, a number of knights and representatives of the urban troops and of the watch’) and they declared for Vespasian as emperor. Then came the news that Vitellius had been forced to remain in power and the position of Sabinus’s little troupe became desperate. Scuffles between the opposing forces turned into fighting and Sabinus led his force up to the Capitoline Hill where they barricaded themselves in, where he was joined by his family and Domitian.

There followed an intense siege of the hill by the pro-Vitellian forces (3.71). Nobody knows whether it was the attackers or defenders who resorted to fire but somehow a fire started and spread to surrounding buildings, above all the venerable Temple to Jupiter the Best and Greatest. This ancient building, full of tributes and testimonials from centuries of Roman history and military achievement, was burned to the ground.

This was the most lamentable and appalling disaster in the whole history of the Roman commonwealth. (3.72)

Eventually the Vitellians stormed the hill, while panic-stricken Flavians fled or hid or disguised themselves. Sabinus was seized along with his lieutenant, Quintius Atticus, put in chains and dragged before the now-powerless emperor who spoke calmly to them but was unable to stop them being dragged off by the impassioned mob, which stabbed and hacked Sabinus to death, cut off his head and threw his body onto the Gemonian Steps. Thus the end of a great Roman patriot, one among thousands of victims of Vitellius’s inability to rein in his own followers.

The fate of his nephew, Vespasian’s son and the future emperor Domitian, is even more colourful. As the besiegers broke in, Domitian hid in the house of the caretaker of the temple. Helped by a freedman he put on ‘a linen mantle’ and pretended to be a priest in order to get through the lines and then hide at the house of one of the family dependants. Once Vespasian was in power, Domitian demolished the caretaker’s house and built a small temple to Jupiter the Preserver. When he himself became emperor, he had a bigger temple erected to Jupiter the Guardian, with a statue depicting himself ‘under the protecting arm of the god’ (3.74).

So Primus’s legions were forced to fight their way into Rome with much bloodshed and destruction and, seizing the forlorn emperor-in-name-only Vitellius, they dragged him to the same Gemonian Steps where Sabinus’s body had been thrown a few days earlier, and there hacked him to death, on 20 December 69.

Throughout book 3 Tacitus describes how the Flavian side, although generally victorious in battle, was guilty of disagreement and delay, especially how Primus waited for the arrival of Mucianus and his Syrian troops. Other leaders heard of Vitellius’s abdication and thought the war was over. Tacitus finds it hard to apportion blame, but the combined effect was delay which was ‘fatal’ and had ‘tragic’ consequences of ‘unrelieved disaster’ i.e. the siege of the Capitol, the burning of the temple, the execution of Sabinus, and the eventual storming of Rome. The advance guard attacked the city walls on the evening of 19 December 68.

Next day the Flavian armies forced entry to the city at various gates amid scenes of rape and massacre. Tacitus vividly describes how the fighting took place in front of the entire population which watched it like spectators applauding a mock battle in the arena (3.83). Next day Domitian came out of hiding and was awarded the title Caesar but real power rested with the head of the conquering army, Antonius Primus. Within a few days the governor of Syria, Municianus arrived, and power shifted to him as official representative of Vespasian. Tacitus shows how the day-to-day business of politics i.e. speechifying, backstabbing, conspiring, senators prosecuting each other, carried on unchanged.

Reign of Vespasian (July 69 to June 79)

Vespasian ruled for ten years, establishing the Flavian dynasty (which lasted 27 years) which consisted of himself, his eldest son Titus (79 to 81) and second son, Domitian (81 to 96), survivor of the escapades on the Capitoline Hill. In fact Vespasian was the first Roman emperor to be succeeded by his biological son; the succession of emperors in the Julio-Claudian dynasty had all been by adoption. Vespasian:

reformed Rome’s financial system of Rome
brought the campaign against the Jews to a successful conclusion with the sack of Jerusalem in 70 and the mass suicide of Jewish resisters at Masada in 74
initiated ambitious construction projects including commissioning the Flavian Amphitheatre, better known today as the Roman Colosseum

Civilis’ revolt

But Tacitus doesn’t get round to any of this in what we have of his account. Instead, book 4 of his narrative focuses on developments in Germany. Here, months before the Flavian forces had even triumphed in Italy, a Romanised Batavian prince named Gaius Julius Civilis led a rebellion of German and Gaulish tribes which, at one point, threatened the complete independence of Gaul from Rome.

Tacitus describes the complex sequence of events by which Civilis united the tribes and then their attacks on Roman strongholds (notably the long siege of the Roman camp of Vetera), along with the appalling mismanagement on the Roman side, punctuated by mutinies by dissident soldiers (4.12 to 37).

Back in Rome

Tacitus cuts back to Rome to describe the start of the new year (70 AD) and the nominal consulships of Vespasian and his son Titus. However, as both were still absent in the East, it was Vespasian’s 18-year-old Domitian who found himself titled ‘Caesar’ and officiating at the first meetings of the Senate. Tacitus lists the usual senate business of making speeches, arguing about who was guilty of what crimes and betrayals during the reigns of Nero, Galba, Otho and Vitellius, feuds and prosecutions.

Vespasian, still in Egypt supervising Rome’s corn supply, was told bad things about Domitian arrogating too much power to himself, which threatened to turn him against his son, but this is the peg for Titus to make a speech asking clemency for his brother, on the basis that emperor’s needed to keep family close and well as the only true support they had (4.52). Tacitus then describes the reconsecration of the great temple of Jupiter (4.53).

More Civilis’ revolt

The interlude in Rome over, Tacitus returns to Julius Civilis’s rebellion on the Rhine (4.55 to 80). This continues to be very complex, in terms of the continually changing alliance between the tribes and their leaders (Civilis, Classicus, Tutor), the multiple military encounters at different locations, and the fact that one Roman legion is persuaded to defect to the tribals.

Despite setbacks the Romans won a hard-fought battle when the German coalition (the Batavi, Ubii, Lingones, Bructeri and Tencteri) attacked the Roman camp at Augusta Treverorum (Trier). The Roman commander was Quintus Petillius Cerealis who rallied his troops to hold the narrow bridge over the Rhine before counter-attacking and destroying the German camp (4.77). But there were other German and Gaulish forces scattered around the Rhineland, not least in Cologne, so the war was far from over.

Book 4 ends with a few short passages describing Vespasian’s ongoing sojourn in Egypt and some anthropology about the origin of the popular god Serapis, but the war on the Rhine far from resolved.

Book 5

The Jews

The fifth book, of which only the first 26 chapters survive, opens by ignoring the situation in Germany and shifting the scene about 2,000 miles East to Jerusalem. The Jews had risen against Roman rule in 66 AD. Tacitus picks up the story at the start of 70 AD as Vespasian dispatches Titus to Judaea to undertake the siege of Jerusalem. This would fall amid general bloodshed in August of that year although Tacitus’s history breaks off before then.

First though Tacitus treats his readers to an extended history of the Jews, review of their religion and traditions which, as Wellesley puts it, is a ‘fascinating farrago of truth and lies’ (introduction, page 14). But Tacitus gets it right about the Jews’ seven-day week, their monotheism, their fierce attachment to discriminatory customs such as circumcision, eschewing pork, not ‘marrying out’ and so on.

All this leads up to a description of Titus, having pacified the rest of Judaea, arriving before the impressive walled city of Jerusalem which itself contains the citadel within a city of the Temple complex. The city is packed with refugees from the other Jewish cities Roman armies had reduced, and Titus sets about mounting a siege in the approved Roman fashion. (5.13)

Back to Civilis’ revolt

At this point the text leaves Titus to return to the war in Germany. Here there are many more battles and skirmishes between Civilis’s tribes and Romans, including a close escape when Cerealis’s camp is invaded. But the Romans survived and attacked the island in the Rhine estuary where the Batavians lived, devastating it.

As summer turned into autumn Cerealis kept up a flow of secret correspondence with the Germans offering them peace and a return to the status quo ante. The chiefs of the German tribes are coming to realise that they cannot defeat the Romans and have been led into a ruinous unwinnable war by Civilis. The narrative breaks off as Civilis calls Cerealis to a conference at either side of a ruined bridge at Nabalia and begins to justify his actions…

In other words we don’t get to see Titus conclude the siege of Jerusalem or Vespasian set sail for, let alone arrive at, Rome.

The Agricola

In 78 Vespasian appointed as governor of Britain Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who aggressively expanded Roman territory far into Scotland. In the same year the young historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus married Agricola’s daughter. Twenty years later, in an act of filial duty, Tacitus wrote a biography of Agricola which survives in its entirety and contains much invaluable information about the first century British, their tribes and customs. This book, the Agricola, was published around 98 AD. It was the first of his historical works.

Tacitus shares his editorial decisions

A very winning habit of Tacitus’s is to share with the reader the balance of the evidence in front of him and his opinions about it, particularly when it is questionable. He steps out of his narrative, as it were, and we get a strong sense of his personality, brisk, logical, hard-headed:

Though I feel that a wilful search for old wives’ tales and the use of fiction to divert the reader is quite inappropriate in a serious work of this type, I hesitate all the same to be sceptical about events widely believed and handed down. (2.50)
Historians of this war who wrote during the Flavian dynasty have flatteringly described the motives of these men as ‘concern for peace’ and ‘patriotism’. My own view is that in addition to a natural instability of character and the cheapening of loyalty which was a consequence of their betrayal of Galba, a jealous fear that rivals would outpace them in Vitellius’s affections induced them to ruin Vitellius himself. (2.101)
I find that some widely read historians vouch for the truth of the following story…(3.51)

Tacitus tells us (3.25) that for the detail of the fighting he follows the account of Lucius Vipstanus Messalla, a Roman of senatorial status, who was directly involved in the war, being temporary commander of the legion VII Claudia stationed in Moesia which entered the civil war on the Flavian side, and who wrote an account of the war once it was over. This history is now lost but young Tacitus befriended the older man and used it as one of the prime sources for this history.

Sententiae

Sententia is the Roman word for the kind of pithy general statement about human life, the universe etc that we call by the names proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims or apophthegms. The plural form is sententiae. 1) A sententia is a general reflection on life which can arise from the previous narrative, acting as a kind of summary, summarising events or someone’s character in a pithy generalisation. So after describing the differing views among the army and its commanders in the East, he summarises:

Thus there were good men and bad, but for a variety of reasons and with equal enthusiasm all of them wanted war. (2.7)

2) A bit more squarely in the definition is this example where Tacitus describes the feverish rumours in Rome as Vitellius marched against Otho and then explains it by using a generalisation that his elite, crowd-despising, aristocratic audience would heartily endorse:

The cheers and cries of the crowd followed the usual pattern of flattery in being overdone and insincere…The passion for self-abasement operated as it does among domestic slaves, for each individual was prompted by selfishness and the decencies of public life now meant nothing. (1.89)

Hear hear, old chap. In fact the emptiness of public acclamation and the crassly craven behaviour of all mobs is a recurring theme and you can hear in Tacitus’s voice the scorn of a republican lamenting the hollow mob rule which the imperial form of government encouraged:

This was merely the accepted tradition whereby any emperor, no matter who he was, was acclaimed with extravagant applause and empty demonstration. (1.32)
[The defeated Othonian army turn on their leaders, blaming everyone except themselves.] This, of course, is typical of the mob. (2.44)
[On the entry of the despicable Vitellius into Rome] The lower classes are irresponsible and unable to discriminate between counterfeit and true. Adept in offering the usual flattery, they shouted and yelled their approval. (2.90)
In moments of fear the voice of wisdom and the gossip of the mob are listened to with equal alacrity. (3.58)

3) Or a sententia can be included in a flow of argument as a kind of proof. An author may cite a sententia summarising a common opinion or experience, with a view to winning the reader over to his point of view or recruiting the reader to his framework, his analysis:

Suspicion and hatred must always be the reaction of rulers towards the man talked of as the next in succession. (p.35)
Man’s character is such that he will always prefer to believe in mysteries. (1.22)
The ordinary man always goes from one emotional extreme to the other. (2.29)
Men are more inclined to repay injury than kindness. (4.3)
As good men derive their effectiveness from their virtues, so those who are really evil, derive theirs from their vices. (3.77)

This type assert a view of human nature or society which he uses as evidence to bolster his interpretation.

4) Or Tacitus may sometimes be consciously creating new generalisations to express his point of view. This was part of the new, briefer, more pithy style expected of Silver Age authors. (In Latin literature the Golden Age is said to have lasted from 70 BC to 18 AD, especially the long reign of Augustus, 27 BC to 14 AD; while the Silver Age is said to be the period from about 18 to 133 AD.)

Cicero write long, flowing, declamatory prose. Tacitus also writes long sentences, but more packed with information than concern for writerly balance. And they are frequently punctuated by shorter, pithy reflections and summaries. With sententia:

No one has ever made good use of power evilly gained. (1.30)
As is so often the case with brazen falsehoods, certain individuals asserted that they had been present when the deed was done and had witnessed it. (p.40)
Once killing starts it is difficult to draw the line. (1.39)
Discipline, however inflexible in peace-time, is relaxed in civil conflicts, where agents are ready to discourage disloyalty on either side, and treachery goes unpunished. (1.51)
There are always courtiers who keep an eye open for an emperor’s displeasure. (2.38)
Revolution and strife put tremendous power into the hands of evil men, whereas peace and quiet call for good lives [or ‘the practice of virtue]. (4.1)

Tacitus frequently made me smile with his droll comments on human nature. On several occasions emperors tried to smother bad news about defeats in the field, but banning rumour only ’caused it to multiply’. (3.54) That Homo sapiens, eh? Those mobs, those crowds, those foolish fickle humans.

Pithy

Sometimes Tacitus is just wonderfully brief and punchy.

A war of boundless havoc seemed imminent. (3.15)
Venutius inherited the throne, and we the fighting. (3.45)
[Of Vitellius] Emperor no longer, he was merely the cause of the fighting. (3.70)

Conclusions

1. Instability of the emperor

Tacitus draws the major conclusion from all these events right at the beginning: the revolt of Gaius Julius Vindex and then Galba revealed the secret of the principate which had been concealed throughout the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which was that: it was possible for an emperor to be chosen from outside Rome (1.4). More specifically, it set the pattern for centuries to come, of new emperors being acclaimed by provincial armies then marching on Rome to establish their claim.

For some periods of time ‘dynasties’ endured which ordered the succession through biological or adopted relatives. But throughout 400 year history of the Roman Empire from this year onwards, simmering beneath the appearance of stability, was the threat of the violent rise of a provincial leader to overthrow the central imperial power.

2. Instability of the army

The second conclusion, closely related to the first, is that the troops were motivated not by ideology or loyalty but, above all, by the promise of loot. Time after time in the 280 pages of this narrative, commanders, governors and emperors are threatened by their own men, surrounded, mobbed, shouted at, with the soldiers’ goal almost always being the same: loot. Vitellius was unable to control the praetorian guard or German auxiliaries in Rome, and then Antonius Primus was unable to stop the sack and fire and massacre of the triumphant army as it ransacked every house looking for valuables or women to rape.

As the narrative proceeds Tacitus gives evermore examples of the terrible discipline into which all the legions and cohorts, on all sides, seemed to fall.

The troops clamoured for immediate action and threatening their officers had by now become a habit. (4.34)

3. Permanent war

Stepping back a bit, I might be missing the wood for the trees because I suppose the biggest take home from this long text is that Rome was a military empire engaged in almost constant warfare. All of Rome’s politicians and statesmen were expected to take command of armies engaged in real warfare at the drop of a hat (even Cato in North Africa, even Cicero during his year in Asia). It was a militaristic culture in which the activity of war dominated all aspects of politics and culture to an extent I don’t think we moderns can really understand.

Reading experience and translations

Once you bed down into it, Tacitus’s account is gripping. He is, after all, reporting a very dramatic series of events:

The story upon which I embark is one full of incident, marked by bitter fighting, rent by treason and even in peace, sinister. (1.2)

The course of events allows him to stage melodramatic scenes and give stirring speeches to key characters at decisive moments. But he is a master of narrative. Possibly because the subject matter itself is gripping and fast-moving, but I found the Histories a much more enjoyable read than the more diffuse and sometimes repetitive Annals (all those informers, all those treason trials, all those forced suicides – even Tacitus himself admitted to getting bored with his own narrative).

Take the couple of chapters describing the abortive rising of Sabinus and the other pro-Flavians when they thought Vitellius had abdicated, which leads into the siege of the Capitoline Hill, the fire destroying the Temple of Jupiter, Sabinus arrest and lynching and the daredevil escape of young Domitian. This is a wonderfully dramatic and exciting story and Tacitus tells it clearly and vividly.

Some of the narrative’s power must be down to Wellesley’s translation which enlivens the bare Latin with colloquial English phrases (‘old wives’ tales’, ‘run for the hills’, ‘discipline went to pieces’ 4.1, ‘he was the last man to make trouble’, 4.38, ‘Marcellus looking daggers, Crispus all smiles’ 4.43) which really bring the narrative to life, giving it a more popular, colourful vibe than I suspect a literal translation would.

Also, it appears that at least some of the pithiness which I so enjoy derives from Wellesley. Here’s Anthony Kline’s translation of the first phrase of book 3 chapter 79. I assume Kline gives a literal translation of the Latin which explains why it is rather flat and factual.

Antonius reached Saxa Rubra (nine miles north of Rome) by the Flaminian Way late at night but now too late to bring relief.

And here’s Wellesley’s version:

The night was far advanced before Antonius, marching to the rescue down the Flaminian Way, reached Saxa Rubra. It was too late. (3.79)

You can see that Wellesley has altered it in several ways, two of which stand out. 1) ‘The night was far advanced’ sounds like a boy’s own adventure trope, on a par with ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ It introduces a dash of Victorian adventure story flavour. 2) Where Kline has the flat ‘but now too late to bring relief’ Wellesley makes this phrase into a separate, clipped sentence, creating the taut, laconic style of a thriller. He does this throughout the text, sprinkling tough punchy little sentences which convey an enjoyable sense of narrative threat and suspense:

The explosion was not long in coming. (4.32)

In other words, Wellesley’s translation (as far as I can tell) tends to turn Tacitus into a gripping adventure story and ripping yarn, which is part of what makes his version such a compelling read. Along with Rolfe Humphries’ Englishing of Lucretius and Peter Green’s versions of Ovid, it’s one of the most enjoyable translations I’ve read.

Credit

The Histories of Tacitus, translated by Kenneth Wellesley, was published by Penguin Books in 1964. All quotes are from the 1986 revised paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on January 4, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History, Translation

Tagged ancient Egypt, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, Anthony Kline, Antonius Primus, Augusta Treverorum, Augustus, Aulus Caecina Alienus, Aulus Vitellius, Battle of Bedriacum, battle of Vesontio, Biography, Brixellum, Caecina, Caligula, Capitol Hill, Capitoline Hill, civil war, Civilis' revolt, Claudius, Cologne, Cremona, Dio Cassius, Domitian, Egyptian gods, emperor Titus, emperor Trajan, emperor Vespasian, Fabius Valens, Flavian Amphitheatre, Flavian dynasty, Gaius Julius Civilis, Gaius Julius Vindex, Galba, Gallia Lugdunensis, Gaul, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Golden Age, Hispania Tarraconensis, history, homosexuality, Judaea, Judaism, Julio-Claudian dynasty, Julius Agricola, Jupiter the Guardian, Jupiter the Preserver, Kenneth Wellesley, Latin, legion VII Claudia, Loeb Classical Library, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, Lucius Verginius Rufus, Lucius Vipstanus Messalla, Lusitania, march on Rome, Marcus Antonius Primus, Marcus Otho, Marius Priscus, Masada, military coup, Mucianus, Narbonensian Gaul, Nero, Nerva, Otho, Pannonia, Penguin classics, Peter Green, Pliny the Younger, Poppaea Sabina, Praetorian Guard, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Quintius Atticus, Quintus Petillius Cerealis, Rolfe Humphries, Roman Britain, Roman Colosseum, Roman history, Roman literature, Rome, sack of Jerusalem, sack of Rome, Saxa Rubra, Secular Games, Sententiae, Serapis, Servius Sulpicius Galba, Sibylline Books, siege of Jerusalem, Siege of Vetera, Silver Age, Stoic philosophy, Stoicism, suffect consul, suicide, Syria, Tacitus, Temple of Vesta, Temple to Jupiter the Best and Greatest, the Agricola, the Annals, the Batavi, the Bructeri, the Flaminian Way, the Gemonian Steps, the Germania, the Histories, the Jews, the Lingones, the Rhineland, the Tencteri, the Ubii, Tiberius, Titus, Titus Flavius Sabinus, Titus Flavius Vespasian, Titus Vinius, Trajan, Translation, Trier, Valens, Venutius, Vespasian, Vitellius, war, Year of Four Emperors

Posted by Simon on January 4, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/04/tacitus-histories/

Nero: the man behind the myth @ the British Museum

Surprisingly, given his notoriety, this is the first major exhibition in the UK devoted to the Roman Emperor Nero or, to give him his full name, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

Marble bust of Nero. Italy (around AD 55) Photo by Francesco Piras © MiC Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Cagliari

Nero’s predecessors

Nero was the fifth Roman emperor, his predecessors having been:

Augustus, who overthrew the Roman Republic, established the principate and reigned 27 BC to 14 AD
Tiberius (14 to 37 AD)
Caligula, star of the 1979 porn movie starring Malcolm McDowell (37 to 41)
Claudius, star of the famous TV series based on the novels by Robert Graves (41 to 54)

Last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

Nero, born in 37 AD, reigned from 54 to 68, 14 years, from the ages of just 16 to 30, so he was very young. He was the last male descendant of Rome’s first emperor Augustus (his great-great grandson and so his death marked the end of what came to be called the Julio-Claudian dynasty. It was later claimed that during his reign he had his own mother killed, Agrippina, who had schemed to help her son to the succession, then did away with his first wife and allegedly his second wife.

The Great Fire of Rome

The Great Fire of Rome occurred during Nero’s reign, in AD 64. For 9 days the flames rampaged through Rome utterly destroying 3 of its 14 districts. Later accounts claim Nero watched it from the vantage point of his palace, singing to the accompaniment of his lyre. Some later sources claim that Nero deliberately started it in order to flatten Rome so he could rebuild it more magnificently, not least by constructing his enormous Golden Palace.

Wars and rebellions

During his reign Nero had to deal with:

a major uprising by British tribes led by Queen Boudica which seriously threatened Roman rule in this distant colony (60 to 61 AD)
ongoing war against the mighty Parthian Empire on Rome’s eastern border
then, in 66, a major insurrection of the Jewish population in Palestine which was to drag on for four years until the Romans finally suppressed it in 70 AD, razing much of the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, including the temple of Solomon, and dispersing its Jewish population, a key event in the rise of Christianity

The Pisonian conspiracy

There had been simmering discontent with various aspects of Nero’s rule among Rome’s traditionalist, aristocratic families, and a number of low-level conspiracies to overthrow him. The most serious came in 65, centred on Gaius Calpurnius Piso who aimed to have Nero assassinated and replace him. The conspiracy involved at least 40 individuals, all of whom were executed, forced to commit suicide or sent into exile.

The Galba revolt and suicide

In 68 Gaius Julius Vindex, the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, rebelled against Nero’s tax policies. Lucius Verginius Rufus, the governor of Germania Superior, was ordered to put down Vindex’s rebellion. In an attempt to gain support from outside his own province, Vindex called upon Servius Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, to join the rebellion and to declare himself emperor in opposition to Nero. This set in train a series of events which led to Galba leading his forces on Rome.

Abruptly the Senate, who had always been resentful of his populist and unorthodox policies, abandoned Nero, declaring him a public enemy, and the leader of his own bodyguard went over to Galba.

Nero fled to a villa outside the city and, when he was told soldiers from the Senate were coming to arrest him and drag him to the Forum where he would likely be beaten to death, he ordered a loyal servant to kill him. It was 9 June 68.

Civil war

Far from securing a peaceful transition of power, the removal of Nero led to a series of short-lived civil wars or military battles for supremacy among a succession of provincial generals in what came to be known as the ‘Year of Four Emperors’, being:

Galba, governor of western Spain, murdered in January 69
Otho, governor of northern Spain who supported Galba, but then overthrew him, before committing suicide in April 69
Vitellius, governor of Germania Inferior, who overthrew Otho and ruled for 9 months till he was executed December 69
Vespasian, general of the armies in the East, who marched on Rome, overthrew Vitellius and founded the Flavian dynasty, which ruled from 69 to 79 AD

Once order had been restored by Vespasian, the Roman Senate excised Nero’s memory from official records, his images were defaced or destroyed in a ritual process known as damnatio memoriae, and his name was vilified in order to to legitimise the new ruling dynasty which emerged from the chaos, the Flavian dynasty.

Bust of Agrippina the Younger, younger sister of the emperor Caligula, niece and fourth wife of the emperor Claudius, and the mother of emperor Nero who, it was said, had her murdered in 59 AD.

The fabrication of Nero’s negative reputation

Nero has been for nearly two thousand years vilified as a monster who murdered his own mother, had Christians set alight to illuminate the games, who fiddled while Rome burnt and possibly started the great conflagration himself, who indulged his absurd fantasy that he was a great artist, and wasted a fortune on his overblown Golden Palace.

Nowadays, we live in a great era of revisionism and Nero’s is one among many reputations which are coming in for a major reconsideration. And, in the spirit of the times, this major exhibition sets out to overturn the traditional image of Nero the monster.

The curators’ contention is that Nero’s bad reputation image was a political and literary fabrication, invented generations later, in order to legitimise the overthrow of the Augustan dynasty and validate the authority of its successors, the Flavian dynasty (69 to 96 AD) and the Nerva–Antonine dynasty which followed (96 to 192).

In the words of the exhibition curator, Thorsten Opper: ‘The Nero of our common imagination is an entirely artificial figure, carefully crafted 2,000 years ago.’

Certainly the Roman historians who are our main sources for the lives of the emperors were writing a long time afterwards. Tacitus (56 to 120) wrote his histories between about 100 and 110 AD, 40 to 50 years after the events he depicts.

The other main authority is the Lives of the Emperors written by the historian Suetonius (lived 70 to 122), a gripping read, even after all these years, because of the juicy and scandalous gossip it contains about the first twelve emperors of Rome but, like Tacitus, several generations removed from the events he describes.

A century later Cassius Dio (155 to 235) wrote a vast 80-volume history of Rome from its legendary origins to his own time, which includes a summary of the reign of Nero. It is one of only three sources we have for the rebellion of the British warrior-queen Boudicca against Roman occupation in 60 to 61 AD.

The exhibition implies that all three of these main sources are not what we would nowadays think of as attempts at historical veracity, but narratives created much later in order to bolster the authority of the later dynasties by discrediting their predecessors. Seen in this way, Tacitus and Suetonius tell us as much about the conflicts among the elite of their own times as of Nero’s.

The curators make a series of claims to back up this theory, but they can all be subsumed under what is maybe the basic premise of the exhibition which is that: A whole host of new (and newish) archaeological discoveries shed more light than ever before on the attitudes and lives and opinions of people living in 50s and 60s Rome and, taken together, these undercut the idea that Nero was perceived in his own time as a vicious tyrant. If anything, these new discoveries tend to prove the reverse: that Nero was extremely popular during his life and long afterwards, among the common people of Rome and, particularly in the East of the Empire.

Evidence for a positive interpretation of Nero

So the curators set up a dichotomy which runs through the exhibition, between the written texts of later ‘historians’ which (they claim) are seriously compromised and biased, written to please sponsors in the tiny Senatorial elite – and the archaeological evidence which, in numerous ways, suggests the opposite: that demonstrates that many Romans liked and even worshipped Nero, during his lifetime and even after his death.

The evidence they bring is highly varied in style and weight:

They show how melodramatic speeches put into the mouth of Agrippina by the ‘historians’ Tacitus and Dio Cassius, as Nero supposedly stabbed her to death, are in fact copies of speeches from a play written soon after Nero’s death, Octavia, which itself adapted the entire scene from Seneca’s Oedipus, itself, of course, dependent on ancient Greek originals. In other words, Tacitus and Suetonius’s accounts are less to do with what we think of as ‘objective history’ and much more to do with tapping into well-established literary stereotypes and tropes, not least for producing high drama with its requirement for tearful victims and callous, cold-hearted villains.
Nero had nothing to do with starting the Great Fire of Rome nor singing during it, as he was absent in Antium at the time. On the contrary there is evidence that he made great efforts to shelter refugees from the flames and then organised the rebuilding of the city afterwards.
Talking of building, Nero inaugurated building schemes throughout Rome including the building of a new larger central market and also the rebuilding and expansion of the port of Ostia, popular with the people and merchants.
Nero certainly performed onstage but there is evidence that this was a popular move. He created a claque of followers, the Augustiani, who clapped and cheered his performances. Spinning his association with the theatre as a populist tactic reminded me of King Charles II, who was also criticised by the elite for his debauched lifestyle but was wildly popular with the general public. Was Nero the Charles II of his day?
Nero expanded the chariot races and other games held in the Circus, also very popular.
There are several exhibits focusing on Nero’s haircut. He initiated a new style of having his hair brushed forward and a little curled at the front. We know this from statues and know that other nobles followed him. He set a fashion. ‘I’ll have a Nero, please, Mario.’
Down at the more plebeian end of the scale, the exhibition displays some pro-Nero graffiti found on a wall and which the curators have blown up large and displayed on an exhibition wall. There’s also a caricature of Nero from the wall of a shop on the Palatine Hill, which the curators have entertainingly animated, so we can watch it slowly being drawn on a screen.
On a more elevated geopolitical plane, Nero continued to be popular in the East after his death. We know this because a succession of impersonators arose who used his name and reputation to gather followings and lead forces before, inevitably, being crushed by the army but still, why would anyone set themselves up as followers, devotees or reincarnations of the man unless he retained a high degree of popularity?

The Senate

The Roman Senate consisted of some 600 men from Rome’s oldest and most prestigious families. They saw themselves as guardians of traditions and values. The first room or space in the exhibition is devoted to an impressive raised platform maybe 50 feet long on which stand a series of lifesize statues or busts of the first Emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius) and some of the key female figures (Livia, Agrippina), behind them on the wall an enormous family tree of the Julian Dynasty.

Gallery of statues of emperors from the Julio-Claudian Dynasty (photo by the author)

As usual I found it challenging to follow the precise details of who married who, adopted who, murdered who and so on. But I was struck by a thread that ran through the labels for all of the figures and this was mention of the Senate and how each of the emperors sooner or later incurred the criticism of the oligarchy, the small number of hugely rich and influential senators who regarded themselves as keepers of Rome’s traditional values, many of whom thought they had as much right to the principate (as Augustus called his position) as the madman Caligula or the stammering wretch Claudius.

As you carry on reading the wall labels this undercurrent of Senatorial resentment keeps recurring. Nero’s appearances on the stage may have been popular with the plebs, but the aristocrats severely disapproved. Lowered the tone. Conduct unbecoming.

Agrippina, Nero’s mother, certainly seems to have been the powerful schemer historians depict and so – she brought down on herself the vituperative criticism of the Senate, which strongly disapproved of powerful women. The legend that Nero had his own mother murdered reflects badly on both of them, and so was a perfect propaganda slur.

The people may have approved of the new building works in Rome, but the Senate disliked the higher taxes required to fund them, and so on.

Slowly but consistently, the curators are making the point that there was always opposition to the very idea of a prince, a princeps, a supposed ‘first among equals’, to the very idea of what people eventually came to call the ’emperor’, right from the time of Augustus.

Augustus’s homicidal rule (he had some 5,000 men from Rome’s leading parties executed in order to enforce his power) was only grudgingly accepted because the ruling class was exhausted after two generations of fratricidal civil war.

But the upper class sniping and criticism never stopped and highly educated, highly ambitious men never stopped gossiping and scheming against the First Family, and paying lawyers, orators and ‘historians’ to undermine and defame them at every opportunity. This then, should be understood as the background to the parti pris accounts of Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio Cassius.

The point being that it wasn’t just Nero. The exhibition slowly, subtly builds up a picture of a political system which was seething with resentments and power struggles at every level. The reputation Nero acquired for being a monster was just the latest in a succession of insults and abuse which had been hurled at Tiberius and the supposedly perverted goings-on at his villa on Capri, at the outright insanity of Caligula, at the doddery ineffectiveness of Claudius, and so on. The very idea of an ’emperor’ was deeply resented.

The more you look into it, the more you realise that all opinions in such a society were party pris, biased, sponsored by and supporting particular factions in the never-ending struggle for supreme power.

It prompts the thought that maybe being Roman Emperor was simply an impossible job. Maybe it was impossible to try and balance all the forces and please everyone in such a strife-ridden society, trying to suppress the slaves on the estates as much as the rebellions which kept breaking out throughout the occupied territories, all the time watching your back for the unceasing threat of a coup or assassination closer to home. Maybe it’s this simple fact which explains why so many of them started out welcomed and hailed by writers and people, yet ended their reigns in paranoia and violence.

Wider context

And this brings me to the most important thing I want to say about this exhibition, which is this: the pre-publicity and the posters and the website and the title of the exhibition itself all promote this idea that the exhibition addresses this one big question: was Nero the monster posterity has made him out to be? (And answers, pretty solidly, No, he wasn’t).

But in fact, the exhibition is much bigger and more ambitious and more wide-ranging than that. It feels like it sheds light on an enormous range of subjects going far beyond the personality or role of one man. By the end you feel like you’ve been given a panoramic overview of an entire society, analysed at multiple levels, from high politics and military strategy, through colonial rule, the role of women, of slaves, theatre and the arts, architecture and town planning, right down to day to day implements such as lamps and mirrors and coins and jewellery.

It feels like a wonderfully informative and dazzling total immersion in every aspect of first century Roman culture.

Exhibits

The exhibition fills the Museum’s largest gallery, the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery. I’ve been to some shows, such as the Rodin one, where the gallery is fully lit and sparkles with Scandinavian clarity. For this exhibition the overhead lights are turned off and the different spaces are separated by dark wood panelling and gauze hangings to create a dark and brooding atmosphere. In this setting are displayed over 200 objects, large and small, which appear out of the gloom, beautifully mounted and lit.

The very first exhibit has been carefully chosen to set the tone. It is a bust of Nero which, we are told, started life as the likeness of a different emperor but was extensively remodelled in the 1660s. In what way? To make the image blunter, heavier, more sensual and crude. Why? Because the sculptor was following the by-then established myth of the sensual, murderous tyrant. It is symbolic of the way the curators think Nero’s image was systematically besmirched after his death.

Bust of Nero, marble with later alterations (AD 59 to 98) Roma, Musei Capitolini. Photo by the author

The exhibition includes numerous objects from the Museum’s own collection, alongside rare loans from Europe, and ranges from humble graffiti to grand sculpture, precious manuscripts, objects destroyed in the fire of Rome, priceless jewellery and slave chains from Wales.

The new archaeological finds include:

treasures hidden during the destruction of Colchester in AD 60 to 61 during Boudica’s Iceni rebellion
burned artifacts from the Fire of Rome in AD 64
evidence from the destruction of Pompeii which suggest a new understanding of Nero’s reign

Statues

Statues of Nero were erected throughout the empire, yet very few survive due to the official suppression of his image. A star piece in the exhibition is a bronze head of Nero, long-mistaken as Claudius, which was found in the River Alde in Suffolk in 1907. The head was part of a statue that probably stood in Camulodunum (Colchester) before being torn down during the Boudica-led rebellion.

Roman Britain

The so-called Fenwick Hoard was discovered in 2014 beneath the floor of a shop on Colchester High Street. The treasure was buried for safekeeping by settlers fleeing for their lives during Boudica’s attack. Among the items are Roman republican and imperial coins, military armlets and fashionable jewelry similar to finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

It’s impressive but it is dwarfed by two other exhibits in the same section. First there’s a map of Roman Britain which shows where the important mines were. Just like the conquistadors who conquered Central America in the 16th century, the conquering Romans came looking for resources of all kinds to exploit and these included mines which were worked with slave labour. The exhibition includes some massive lead ingots shaped and marked with stamps indicating they date from Nero’s reign, and invites us to consider the back-breaking slave labour which went into their production.

But the most striking exhibit is a big slave chain of the type used to shackle native Britons, as they were bought, sold, transported around the country to work the land and the mines. People forget that Roman society was first and foremost a slave economy. People really forget that Britain was famous in the first century for the quality of its slaves who were widely exported throughout the empire.

Iron slave chain from Llyn Cerrig Bach, Anglesey, Wales (100 BC to AD 78)

Later on we are told a spine-chilling story concerning slaves. In 61 a distinguished senator was murdered by one of his household staff. Despite protests from the populace, Nero backed the senate’s decision to uphold an existing law which stipulated that, if one slave committed a capital crime, all the enslaved members of the owner’s household must be executed, to act as a deterrent.

Brutality was all around, at every moment, in a strictly controlled, rigidly hierarchical society subjected to multiple types of power and enforcement.

Nero the performer

Famously, Nero was the first Roman emperor to act on stage and compete in public games as a charioteer. The exhibition includes some vivid depictions of these chariot races including oil lamps show a racing quadriga (four-horse chariot), a victorious racehorse and a triumphant charioteer, as well as mass-produced architectural panels showing details of the races, like this one in which a quadriga is approaching the turning posts at the end of the course. (Next to it the exhibition actually includes three life-sized replicas of these turning tall conical posts.)

Obviously, ancient Rome was also famous for its gladiator contests and the exhibition includes a selection of scary-looking gladiatorial weapons from Pompeii on loan from the Louvre. Nero set up his own gladiatorial school, the Iudus Neronianus. A famous gladiator of the day, Spiculus, later became the loyal commander of his bodyguards.

Sometimes rivalries connected to the games got out of hand. In AD 59, a violent riot erupted during a gladiatorial contest in Pompeii’s amphitheatre between opposing supporters from Pompeii and nearby Nuceria. The show includes a photo of a wall painting giving an aerial view of the event, showing the amphitheatre and people fighting in the arena and in the stands, as well as in the streets outside. Nero handed the investigation to the Senate, which issued Pompeii with a 10-year ban on holding gladiatorial games. Football hooliganism is nothing new.

Compare and contrast those bloody scenes with the rather less blood-thirsty spectacle of the ancient theatre. The show includes some large frescoes from Pompeii depicting actors and theatrical masks lend by Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Mind you, Roman tragedy could be a bloodthirsty affair, as the tragedies written by Nero’s tutor, the philosopher Seneca, amply demonstrate.

Fresco of a seated actor dressed as a king and female figure with a small painting of a mask, Italy (AD 30 to 40) With permission of the Ministero della Cultura ̶ Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

Aged 21, Nero first took to the stage as part of private games, but a few years later he performed publicly in Naples and then in Rome itself. This event was described in elite sources as unprecedented and scandalous, but contemporary evidence shows that Nero was hardly the first young man of good family to take part in public performances.

No doubt Nero thought of himself as a great artist – and the curators emphasise that he put a lot of time and energy into learning the play the cithara, or lyre, to professional standard – but his performances may also a political motivation, reaching out to the crowd, the plebs, the common people, showing he was one of them and enjoyed popular entertainment; part of his ongoing attempts to create and maintain a popular power base to balance the ever-present threat from the disapproving aristocracy. Again I think of Charles II, never really confident of his throne…

Nero created a group of supporters, the Augustiani which comprised knights and commoners alike, young men who accompanied Nero’s performances with rhythmic clapping and chants, steering the reactions of the audience. Not content to leave it at that, the curators have actually created a one-minute long aural recreation of these roisterers cheering and chanting in Latin, which plays from speakers directly above the theatre frescos.

In one of the show’s smaller pleasures, there’s a six-inch-high ivory carving of a Roman actor in the middle of a tragic performance. His pose and gestures are theatrical, you can see his face behind the stylised mask they all wore, but what was news to me was that the actors wore raised platform shoes called cothurni. He looks like a member of a Glam Rock band (admittedly, wearing a toga).

Relics of the Great Fire of Rome

One of the defining moments of Nero’s reign was the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which burned for nine days and laid waste to large parts of the city. Excavations in recent years have revealed the true extent of the ferocity and impact of the fire. As you might expect the exhibition includes a bit of peppy son-et-lumiere, with flickering red flames licking around a map of the city blocks affected with sound affects of a Big Fire. The prime exhibit is a big iron window grating, discovered near the Circus Maximus, which was twisted and warped by the fire’s intense heat.

As mentioned, Nero was for centuries blamed for the fire and not doing enough to quench it. Nowadays, opinion is that Nero a) was not even in Rome when it occurred b) took prompt steps to both rehouse those made homeless, but to rebuild Rome bigger and better.

The Domus Aurea

The exhibition devotes an entire section to the centrepiece of Nero’s building a new palace called Domus Aurea or Golden House. It shows us photographs of the surviving rooms, corridors and halls and displays fragments of the luxury frescoes and wall decorations which adorned it.

The elaborate designs and the use of precious materials such as exotic marbles, cinnabar and gold speak to the height of imperial luxury. Another display case shows a selection of silver cutlery, plates and mirrors, all top luxury items. It’s all housed in a distinct setting which is, unlike the rest of the exhibition, bright and well lit, to subliminally give us the impression that we have entered the villa itself. Clever.

Conclusion

The curators argue that the conclusion to be drawn from this wide survey of the archaeological evidence is that Nero was not the merciless, matricidal maniac of legend; that the physical evidence gathered here suggests, on the contrary, that Nero was widely admired among ordinary Romans due to his popular policies, his funding of and participation in extravagant games, his grand building projects, even his popular haircut, and that he remained popular, notably in the East of the Empire, long after his death.

In this version, the Domus Aurea was vast but large parts of it were open to the public. The great fire certainly happened but far from fiddling, Nero organised the rescue and rehousing of much of the population.

So the infamous legend which went down to posterity is the product of authors representing the view of the later Roman ruling classes and Senatorial factions who triumphed in the civil war which immediately followed his death.

Do I buy this new revisionist version? Difficult to say, maybe impossible for anyone who isn’t a real scholar of the times, and even the historians themselves (as so often) seem to disagree.

What I think is clear is that by the end of this huge and sumptuous exhibition, the narrow question ‘Nero: Man or Monster’ has been superseded by the awesomely wide-ranging and thought-provoking variety of artefacts on show, which inform you about all aspects of a society which was so completely, almost incomprehensibly, unlike our own. This is a really great exhibition.

Marble portrait of Nero, Italy (AD 64–68). Photo by Renate Kühling. Courtesy of State Collections of Antiquities and Glyptothek, Munich

This portrait dates to the last years of Nero’s reign. It was probably created to mark his 10-year anniversary as emperor. Nero’s forehead is framed by a row of curls and his hair is worn long, intended to convey a sense of vigour, refinement and god-like beauty. Contemporary poetry likened Nero to Apollo and Mars. His elaborate hairstyle set a new trend that remained fashionable for decades.

BC and AD

I thought that some time ago we all adopted the terms BCE and CE denoting ‘Before the Common Era’ and the ‘Common Era’ to replaced BC and AD, which were seen as too Christian, Eurocentric and uninclusive. So I was surprised to see BC and AD used universally throughout the exhibition.

BP and the BM

Odd that the British Museum which hurries, like all other museums and galleries, to keep up to date with woke imperatives about diversity and inclusion, which in its wall labels and official pronouncements is hyper-sensitive to issues of race and gender, is tone deaf to the greatest single issue of our times, climate change, and so continues to allow exhibitions to be sponsored by the multinational, fossil fuel-promoting corporation BP.

Ironic that an exhibition about the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned is supported by a corporation which is helping the planet to burn.

More British Museum exhibition reviews

More British Museum reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 12, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Exhibition, Slavery

Posted by Simon on June 12, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/12/nero-the-man-behind-the-myth-the-british-museum/

A History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede (732)

Bede’s life

Bede was a monk who spent most of his life in the monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth and its companion monastery, Saint Paul’s in what is now modern Jarrow, both situated in the Dark Age Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.

He lived from 672 to 735 AD. The honorific Venerable (as in ‘the Venerable Bede’) apparently derives from the tombstone erected some years after his death.

Bede was fortunate in that his monastery was run by the enlightened abbot, Benedict Biscop, and his successor, Ceolfrith, who both encouraged his historical studies.

It also contained probably the most extensive library in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Thus encouraged by kind sponsors and in a uniquely well-provisioned environment, Bede began to write, and went on to compose some 40 works, including commentaries on numerous books of the Bible, a life of St Cuthbert, lives of famous Saxon abbots, and so on. (He usefully provides us with a list of his works.)

But Bede is best-known for his masterpiece, regularly described as the first and greatest work of English history, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People). I have the old 1955 Penguin translation by Leo Sherley-Price, who translates the title as A History of the English Church and People.

Bede is called the Father of English History for several reasons:

He checked his sources, requesting documents and information from libraries in all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, correlating documents against each other, enquiring of eye-witnesses or descendants of eye-witnesses wherever possible. He clearly lays out his methodology in the introductory letter, and thus established a tradition of scrupulously checking the facts.
He describes in wonderful detail a period – from the Roman departure 410 until his own day, the 720s – for which we have pitifully little alternative material. Without his history there would be a big hole in our knowledge of the period and, since this was when our country was founded, he is an invaluable source for the earliest years of our nation.
Bede’s whole conception of History is wonderfully rounded. At a time when his contemporaries were struggling to produce the blunt line-for-each-year Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede set the events he reports in the contexts of Papal, European and wider British history, going backwards and forwards in time to situate events within broader historical themes as well, of course, as setting everything he describes within the overarching framework of God’s great redemptive plan for Man.

Structure of the Ecclesiastical History

The work is divided into five books, each of which covers a certain period. But the more important division is of each book into 30 or so one- or two-page chapters. These focus on one incident or theme (the miracles of so and so, the death of one bishop, the succession of another, and so on) and were obviously designed to provide good, practical meditations for his (entirely religious) audience to hear read out loud and ponder.

Leo Sherley-Price

Sherley-Price’s prose translation is crisp and brisk, presumably a faithful translation of Bede’s practical style. But the most striking thing about this translation is Sherley-Price’s attitude: he is himself a devout Christian and his beliefs come out in the introduction and (brief) notes, in a way a modern writer would not permit themselves. Thus his note on Pelagianism:

Pelagianism, ‘the British heresy’, denied the reality of original sin, and affirmed that man could attain perfection by his own efforts, unaided by the grace of God. This misconception is still strong today! [emphasis added]

In the introduction he gives a stout defence of miracles and the presence of the miraculous in the History:

Even when ruthless pruning has greatly reduced the number [of plausible miracles in the text], there remains an indissoluble core that cannot be explained by any known natural means, and attributable solely to the supernatural power of God displayed in and through His saints. And this is as it should be. For a true miracle (and who may doubt that such occur?) is not due to the supersession or inversion of the natural laws of the universe ordained by the Creator, but to the operation of cosmic laws as yet unrealised by man, activated by non-material forces whose potency is amply demonstrated in the Gospels. (Introduction, page 30, italics added)

These are confidently Christian words from a pre-1960s era which, in its own way, seems as remote to us today as Bede’s 8th century.

But the most telling sign of their datedness is, I think, not his Catholic faith as such – there’s no shortage of relic-kissing Catholics in 2013 – it is that Sherley-Price tries to make a rational, scientific distinction between improbable or forged miracles, and those which are undoubtedly the real thing. He thinks it is worthwhile to make this distinction and, in so doing, sounds like a member of the Brains Trust, like a reputable academic wearing a tweed jacket and puffing a pipe, debating atheism and belief with Bertrand Russell; he sounds like C.S. Lewis in his apologetic works, naively confident that you can reason someone into belief.

Our understanding of texts and discourses has leapt forward massively in the past 60 years.

The miraculous in Bede

In my opinion, Sherley-Price is missing the point by his nitpicking. The miraculous is the element in which Bede lives and breathes. God is all around him and his angels regularly appear to the people he is describing, to people he actually knows, with important messages and predictions.

Bede’s world is full of miraculous recoveries, holy rescues and blessed cures because God’s angels and saints are continually battling demons and spirits, the forces of the Old Enemy, who are at work everywhere and in everyone.

The miracles in Bede aren’t incidental; they are symptomatic of a world utterly drenched in the presence of God’s powers. To try and unpick the more likely from the less likely ones is to misread the coherence of the imaginative world, the worldview, the psychology, the culture which Bede inhabits. It is to apply absurdly flat and literalistic criteria to a world of wonders.

It is like undertaking a scientific assessment of which bits of magic in Harry Potter might actually be feasible. You are missing the point; the point is to abandon yourself entirely to the endless wonder and richness and unceasing miraculousness of Bede’s world, a world in which God always helps his saints and always punishes his sinners.

Some miracles

Book I, chapter 7 St Alban, sentenced to execution by the Roman authorities, can’t cross the packed bridge into Verulamium, so the river blocking his way dries up just as the Red Sea did. As the executioner decapitates Alban, his own eyes pop out.
1. 17 as Germanus sails to Britain, devils raise a storm and the ships are in peril of foundering so Germanus prays and sprinkles holy water on the waves, which puts the demons to flight and the storm passes.
1. 18 Using relics he’s brought from Rome, Germanus cures the blindness of a tribune’s young daughter.
1. 19 A fire threatens the house where Germanus is staying but he calls on the Lord and the flames turn back. Demons throw Germanus off his horse and he breaks his leg. In a vision an angel raises him and lo! his leg is healed.
1. 20 Picts and Saxons invade but bishops Germanus and Lupus organise the Britons into a defensive force. They call on the Lord and leap out of hiding shouting so effectively that the Saxons and Picts all run away, many of them drowning in the river.
1. 21 Germanus heals the crippled son of the chieftain Elaphius.
1. 33 The priest Peter is drowned off the coast of Gaul and buried by the locals in a common grave but God makes a bright light shine over the grave every night until the locals realise he is a holy man and bury him properly in a church in Boulogne.

The power of Christianity

The miracles are just the most striking way in which, for Bede and for all the early missionaries, bishops and believers he describes, Christianity works. It is better than paganism because its believers wield the real power which drives the universe, not the foolish, deluded voodoo of illiterate peasants who believe in amulets and spells and worship stones and trees.

For many profaned the Faith that they professed by a wicked life, and at a time of plague some had even abandoned the Christian sacraments and had recourse to the delusive remedies of idolatry, as though they could expect to halt a plague ordained of God by spells, amulets, and other devilish secret arts. (IV, 28)

Christianity is the Real Thing, it is the real magic that pagans only pretend to harness.

Believers in it win victories and become kings or emperors (as Constantine famously won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge after invoking Christ’s name), they heal the sick and raise the dead and cast out demons and do battle with devils and quench fires and bring down rain and make the crops grow. It is all the supernatural things paganism falsely claims to be – except it actually is.

Crediting witnesses, believing in miracles

Bede goes out of his way to tell us that he has many of these stories from people who knew the saints in question, that he personally has listened to their stories of angelic visitors and wrestling with devils and curing the sick and of coffins which magically resize themselves to fit the bodies of deceased saints.

An old brother of our monastery, who is still living, testifies that he once knew a truthful and devout man who had met Fursey in the province of the East Angles, and heard of these visions from his own mouth (Book III, chapter 19)

I have thought it fitting to preserve the memory of one of these stories, often told me by the very reverend Bishop Acca, who said that it was vouched for by some very reliable brethren of the monastery. (IV, 14)

Among those who told me this story were some who had actually heard it from the mouth of the man to whom these things happened, so that I have no hesitation about including it in t his history of the church as it was related. (IV, 23)

My informant in all these events was my fellow-priest, Edgils, who was living in the monastery at the time. (IV, 25)

Even if we disbelieve every story, we are impressed by Bede’s conception of the historian as one who seeks out eye witnesses, who listens, who writes it down.

Anyway, even our sceptical age is alive with urban myths, and still suffers from the profound irrationality and credulousness of human beings. There are still people who under stress clutch any straw, who pray and promise God they’ll believe in him, who believe it was their prayers that saved the plunging plane or their sick relative or clinched the extra-time winner.

But we also know about the Somme, the Holocaust, about 9/11, we know that vast massacres occur and no-one is saved and God is nowhere to be seen.

Personally, I apply David Hume’s Calculus of Probability to all accounts of miracles. Is it more likely that the vast and universal laws of Nature were suspended, often for childish and petty ends? Or that the people who claim to have experienced a miracle, simply have a need to appear important, or are propagandising for their faith, or are naive and credulous?

It will always be the latter. An entirely rational assessment will always militate against miracles. But where, then, is the point or pleasure in reading Bede or indeed any other Christian literature?

For me such Christian literature can still be immensely rewarding, you just have to suspend disbelief. You just have to make the effort to cast yourself back into that mental world. Indeed, that is precisely the point of reading old literature: to expand your mind.

Lots more miracles

Book IV, chapter 28 Cuthbert makes spring water appear on a barren hillside and crops to grow out of season.
IV 29 Cuthbert prophetically foretells his own death.
IV 30 Eleven years after his death Cuthbert’s body is found to be uncorrupted, soft and sweet.
IV 31 Brother Baduthegn suffers a paralytic stroke but drags himself to Cuthbert’s tomb where he dreams a great hand touches his wound and he awakens healed.
IV 32 Hairs from Cuthbert’s corpse cure the tumour on a brother’s eye.
V 1 The hermit Ethelwold calms a storm threatening to drown some monks.
V 2 Bishop John cures a dumb, scrofulous servant.
V 3 Bishop John cures Coenburg, a sick serving girl.
V 4 Bishop John cures the thane Puch’s wife.
V 5 Bishop John cures thane Addi’s servant.
V6 Bishop John cures a brother who foolishly races a horse, falls off and cracks his skull.
V 8 Archbishop Theodore foresees his own death in a vision.
V 9 Holy Egbert plans to evangelise the Germans but is prevented by God who sends visions and a storm.
V 10 Two missionaries to the Old Saxons are murdered by pagans but their bodies are washed upstream and a light shines over them every night till their companions find them and give them decent burial.

And so it goes on… To try to weight up the ‘valid’ miracles from the ‘invalid’ may be an interesting academic exercise but is pointless. Take out the miracles and there’d be nothing left. The entire story of the growth of the English church is, for Bede, miraculous and made up of miracle piled upon miracle.

Therefore, we should embrace the supernatural elements of Bede’s history unquestioningly, both as a vital component of his worldview, without which his whole history is pointless; and also because of the sheer pleasure it gives. How wonderful to live in this world of angels and demons! Surrender to its visions and what a wonderful, informative, imaginative, delightful book this is!

But what did the pagans believe?

Notoriously, and tragically, Bede (like all the Christian writers of the Dark Ages) tells us almost nothing about what his heathen and pagan opponents believed.

Worshiping trees, stones and rivers, wearing amulets and slaughtering horses seem to be part of pagan belief but we only glimpse these as throwaway asides. There are only a few exceptions, a few places where Bede paints a ‘conversion scene’ and allows us to see what the pagan worldview actually consisted of.

The most famous is in Book II, chapter 13, where King Edwin of Northumbria has already converted to Christianity but needs to take his nobles with him. He convenes a council (AD 627). They are sitting in the king’s large hall, illuminated by a huge fireplace and maybe other torches, but with glassless windows. And one of the king’s thanes uses their setting for a famously beautiful metaphor of human life.

Another of the king’s chief men signified his agreement and went on to say: ‘Your majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thanes and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.’

Yes, but what were they converting from? Bede doesn’t sully his book by telling us. Probably the mere act of writing down pagan beliefs would in some sense validate them. It might even conjure them up. Best left unmentioned, undescribed.

The conversion of King Sigbert of the East Saxons

There is another exchange, less poetic but, I think, more revealing in Book III, chapter 22:

About this time also, the East Saxons, who had once rejected the Faith and driven out Bishop Mellitus, again accepted it under the influence of King Oswy. For Sigbert their king, successor to Sigbert the Small, was a friend of Oswy and often used to visit him in the province of the Northumbrians. Oswy used to reason with him how gods made by man’s handwork could not be gods, and how a god could not be made from a log or block of stone, the rest of which might be burned or made into articles of everyday use or possibly thrown away as rubbish to be trampled underfoot and reduced to dust. He showed him how God is rather to be understood as a being of boundless majesty, invisible to human eyes, almighty, everlasting, Creator of heaven and earth and of the human race. He told him that he rules and will judge the world in justice, abiding in eternity, not in base and perishable metal; and that it should be rightly understood that all who know and do the will of their creator will receive an eternal reward from him. King Oswy advanced these and other arguments during friendly and brotherly talks with Sigbert, who, encouraged by the agreement of his friends, was at length convinced. So he talked it over with his advisers, and with one accord they accepted the Faith and were baptised with him by Bishop Finan in the king’s village of At-Wall, so named because it stands close to the wall which the Romans once built to protect Britain, about twelve miles from the eastern coast.

In the context of the Dark Ages this is gold dust. How fabulous to be told so much detail about these obscure kings, Oswy and Sigbert, about social intercourse between the kings of these early English kingdoms, about the relationship between a king and his advisers, about the geography of the region.

Christianity trumps paganism

But the core of the passage is the absolute crux of Bede’s History – the sheer majesty and breathtaking sweep, the intellectual, moral and imaginative scale and thoroughness and universality of Catholic Christianity compared with the thin, local, petty, shallow gods and practices of paganism.

For me this one chapter shows how Christianity was a VAST improvement on the limited, dark, unintellectual world of the pagan gods.

Miracles and all, if you compare the intellectual coherence of Bede’s position with the worldview of the pagan Poetic Edda, Christianity wins hands-down for its scope and thoroughness.

Thor throwing his hammer at giants is for children, the Last Battle between gods and giants is a fable for fatalistic warrior-kings.

Neither can stand comparison with the wonder and coherence of the Christian notion of one, all-powerful, all-loving Creator, with his flocks of angels ready to help the mightiest king or the lowliest serf to lead a more holy, just and – ultimately -–satisfying life. This vision offers hope to everyone.

One by one, the kings of Dark Age Britain who Bede describes, realised this mighty truth and bowed to the inevitable.

Little was Bede to know that just 60 years after his death in 732, furious straw-haired pagans were to appear from across the seas and do their damnedest to destroy everything he and his brothers had built up. But that is another story…

‘The Venerable Bede Translates’ John by James Doyle Penrose

Dark age reviews

Complete Dark Age reviews

Medieval reviews

Complete medieval reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on December 9, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Anglo Saxon, Books, Christianity, English literature, European History, History, Old English

Posted by Simon on December 9, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/a-history-of-the-english-church-and-people-the-venerable-bede/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 706 other subscribers
Topics
Afghanistan Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art Augustus book Britain British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero civil war Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Iraq Islam Italy Jews Julius Caesar Literature London Nazis New York novel Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex short stories Slavery South Africa Soviet Union Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Syria Tate Britain Tate Modern theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (143)
- Africa (112)
- America (93)
- American literature (31)
- Ancient history (142)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Archaeology (2)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (543)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (30)
- Biography (70)
- Biology (10)
- Books (775)
- British Empire (14)
- Buddhism (1)
- Cartoon (13)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (21)
- China (14)
- Christianity (76)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (151)
- Communism (23)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (13)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (4)
- Detective stories (30)
- drawing (1)
- English literature (111)
- Environment (8)
- Essays (14)
- European History (175)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (492)
- fairy tale (2)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (4)
- Feminism (32)
- Film (21)
- Flowers (4)
- France (63)
- French literature (44)
- German literature (3)
- Germany (23)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (74)
- History (457)
- Holocaust (14)
- Horror (10)
- Illustration (12)
- imperialism (24)
- India (4)
- Irish literature (16)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Japan (8)
- Latin America (11)
- Latin literature (2)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (69)
- Literature (153)
- Mathematics (6)
- Middle Ages (71)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (11)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (571)
- Novella (5)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (34)
- Philosophy (38)
- Photography (107)
- Play (80)
- Poetry (98)
- Politics (100)
- Prints (5)
- Psychoanalysis (18)
- Psychology (5)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (18)
- Russian literature (15)
- Saga (39)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (126)
- Sculpture (44)
- Second World War (103)
- Sex (37)
- Short stories (135)
- Slavery (46)
- Spy novel (65)
- Theatre (88)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (225)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (76)
- Travel writing (16)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (8)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (256)
- World War One (17)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Roman Britain

Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe (1982)

Poets (37)

Short stories (9)

Factual memoirs/reportage (5)

Essays (3)

Structure

Introduction

The Spanish Civil War

Retreat to the personal

Poetry

The New Apocalypse and Neo-Romanticism

George Barker

Henry Treece

Dylan Thomas

Edith Sitwell

T.S. Eliot

Soldier poets

Prose descriptions

Essays

George Orwell

Arthur Koestler

Short stories

Elizabeth Bowen

Fred Urquhart

James Hanley

Glyn Jones

Elizabeth Berridge

Summary

Credit

Related reviews

Share this:

The Life of Vespasian by Suetonius

Summary (from Wikipedia)

The Life of Vespasian by Suetonius

Related links

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Roman reviews

Share this:

The Life of Vitellius by Suetonius

Summary

The Life of Vitellius by Suetonius

Related links

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Roman reviews

Share this:

Histories by Tacitus

Biography

The Histories

Synopsis

Nero overthrown

Reign of Servius Sulpicius Galba (8 June 68 to 15 January 69)

Reign of Marcus Otho (15 January to 16 April 69)

Reign of Aulus Vitellius (19 April to 20 December 69)

The extraordinary story of Sabinus and Domitian

Reign of Vespasian (July 69 to June 79)

Civilis’ revolt

Back in Rome

More Civilis’ revolt

Book 5

The Jews

Back to Civilis’ revolt

The Agricola

Tacitus shares his editorial decisions

Sententiae

Pithy

Conclusions

1. Instability of the emperor

2. Instability of the army

3. Permanent war

Reading experience and translations

Credit

Related links

Roman reviews

Share this:

Nero: the man behind the myth @ the British Museum

Nero’s predecessors

Last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

The Great Fire of Rome