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An introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid by W.A. Camps (1969)

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
(‘There are tears of things and mortal things touch the mind’)
(Aeneid Book 1, line 462)

The Aeneid’s structure

The first six books describe wandering, the second six books describe war.

The first six books are set on or near the sea, the second six books are set on land.

The first six books copy a lot from Homer’s Odyssey, the second six books copy a lot from Homer’s Iliad.

The first half focuses on Carthage, leading to the death of Dido, the second half focuses on Latium, leading to the death of Turnus. (In fact, it’s not quite as neat as that because Dido dies at the end of book 4, leaving book 5 to describe the funeral games for Anchises and book 6 the journey to the underworld, so the deaths of Dido and Turnus don’t perfectly bookend each half.)

Historical background

Virgil lived through stormy and decisive political times. He was born in 70 BC only 15 or so years after the end of the Social War, a 4-year-long bitter and needless fight between Rome and various tribes and peoples of Italy who demanded full Roman citizenship. In the end Rome acquiesced and gave it them. The precise relationship between Rome and the other local tribes is implicit in the whole idea of Aeneas coming as an immigrant and stirring up a huge ruinous war between its existing inhabitants, and then is specifically addressed right at the end of the Aeneid when Juno demands equal rights for the Latins vis-à-vis the newcomers from her husband Jupiter, as a condition of giving up her vicious vendetta against the Trojans.

Then Virgil was 21 when civil war broke out in 49 BC between Caesar and Pompey. He saw what it was like for the Roman ruling class to be split right down the middle and many men die pointlessly, as, arguably, all the terrible deaths in the second half of the Aeneid are, ultimately, pointless and unnecessary.

Then Virgil was 26 when Caesar was assassinated and Rome plunged into a further 15 years of instability and recurring civil wars, before Octavian finally brought peace by defeating Antony in 31 BC, as Virgil turned 40.

The price of peace

Virgil composed the Aeneid over the 10 or so years from 29 BC to his premature death in 19 BC. After a life lived against a backdrop of unending civil strife you can see why Virgil would desperately have wanted peace and order to be restored and pinned his hopes for that outcome on the new rule of Augustus. But you can also see why one of the Aeneid‘s main themes is the price that has to be paid for the final arrival of peace and order, and it is a very, very high price in tragedy and bloodshed. Hecatombs of the dead. So many brave young lives cut short. Aeneas wins his place in the promised land of Hesperia, but my God what a trail of death and destruction he leaves behind him.

Aspects of patriotism

All elements in the poem are multi-levelled and dense with allusiveness. Thus the poem’s patriotism is plain for everyone to see, and yet is effective because it works at so many levels. Central is the plot itself, Aeneas’s journey to Italy to found a new city and new people. The gods repeatedly reassure him of the future greatness of the Roman people. He sees a procession of eminent Romans in the underworld at the end of book 6. The figure of Augustus appears here, and as the central figure on the shield his mother gives him at the end of book 8, as well as being invoked several other times, crystallising the hopes of the world.

But it also works in a host of other ways. Most poignantly and hauntingly when we discover that King Evander’s little township is built on the site of the future Rome and that he and Aeneas are walking through the landmarks of the greatness that is to come. But also in the mention throughout the poem of beliefs and customs which first came with the Trojans or, conversely, are already practiced by the Arcadians or the Latins:

they Latins are referred to as ‘the people of the Roman gown’
the Roman custom of covering the head at sacrifice is enjoined on Aeneas by the seer Helenus before his arrival in Italy (3.403)
the exhibition of horse drill known to the Romans as lusus Troiae is demonstrated by Ascanius and the young horsemen during the funeral games for Anchises (5.596)
Aeneas promises to inaugurate the tradition of the Sibylline Books (6.71)
the practice of opening or closing the doors of the temple of Janus in times of war already exists in Latium (7.601)
the worship of Hercules at the great altar in the cattle market which existed in Virgil’s time is said to already exist when Aeneas arrives in Latium (8.268)

So the poem’s patriotism is shouted from the rooftops in the shape of the plot and in the multiple predictions but also threaded subtly into a fabric of hints and allusions.

A political poem?

Camps surprises me by claiming the Aeneid is not a political poem. He deploys the kind of sentimental humanism found throughout post-war Anglophone literary criticism, deflecting analysis off into fancy fondling about morality or spirituality:

The Aeneid is in no sense political propaganda, for it is not in its nature a political poem. The Rome that is its inspiration is not conceived in terms of a political system; and the background against which the humans in the story act and suffer is provided not by contrasting political ideas but by the working of the historical process and the conflict of spiritual powers. (p.2)

This is plain wrong, isn’t it? It’s as if someone who wrote a long poem in praise of Nazi rule over occupied Europe claimed that it wasn’t a political poem because the Nazi rule it praises ‘is not conceived in terms of a political system’. Well, it doesn’t need to be. If politics in the broadest sense is defined as how a society chooses to run itself, then this poem explicitly says that Rome will reach its height when it is ruled by the enlightened dictator Augustus, and that the Roman people are destined to rule the entire known world – and are justified in doing so because of their unique skill at ruling justly.

Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples — for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
(6.1,151 to 1,154)

This prophecy of Anchises is only the most famous of several passages which justify Roman conquest and rule over the entire world. The Aeneid is a hymn to Roman hegemony. Nothing could be more political. Claiming it is ‘not in its nature a political poem’ because it doesn’t go into the nitty-gritty of the constitution or describe any particular ‘political system’ or discuss political parties is being disingenuous or naive. Try telling any of the peoples Rome had conquered, whose towns they had destroyed and populations they’d sold into slavery (read Caesar’s Gallic Wars) that writing an elaborate poem justifying Rome’s eternal rule over the entire known world was not a political statement and watch them laugh in your face.

Clearly your answer to the question, ‘Is the Aeneid a political poem?’ depends on how you define ‘politics’, but there’s also another level or type of definition of politics in play here: this is the issue of taking sides during a civil war. This, also, is a glaring ‘political issue’: whether one is on the side of, say, the nationalists or the republicans during the Spanish Civil War could hardly be a more political and politicised decision.

Well, in the civil war with Antony, Virgil hugely comes down on the side of Augustus and writes it into his poem. In the epic scene where Vulcan forges a mighty shield for Aeneas he depicts on it the Battle of Actium where Augustus defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and the narrator throws in criticisms of the doomed lovers. And the shield then goes on to celebrate Augustus’s unprecedented three triumphs over his political and military opponents.

It beggars belief that Camps thinks that this hugely committed work of propaganda is ‘in no sense political propaganda’ solely because it ‘is not conceived in terms of a political system.’ As I’ve been writing this I’ve realised I myself am missing another way to argue against him, which is to point out that he is wrong even on his own terms: that the entire poem is ‘conceived in terms of a political system’, namely – the imperial rule of Augustus. Rule by an emperor emphatically is a political system and this poem consistently and repeatedly predicts and celebrates this political system.

Copying the Greeks

Virgil wrote three great works. In each of them he copied Greek originals. The Eclogues copy the Idylls of Theocritus, the Georgics copy the Work and Days of Hesiod, the Aeneid very closely copies the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. Camps claims Virgil is not stealing – he is reconciling the two cultures.

Camps lists some of the major plot devices he is indebted to Homer for:

an extended sea journey packed with adventures – the Odyssey
enmity of a god who hates the hero drawing out the journey to extended length – the Odyssey
councils of the gods in heaven – both Odyssey and Iliad
descent to the underworld – the Odyssey
funeral games – the Iliad
massive, sustained war featuring a siege and many detailed battle scenes – the Iliad
the aristeia in which a warrior reaches the peak of their excellence before being cut down – the Iliad
the blacksmith god creating a suit of armour and a shield decorated with emblematic events for the hero – the Iliad
strong female warrior (Camilla) – the Iliad
a foray into the enemy camp by night – the Iliad
retirement of the protagonist in whose absence the other army comes right up to the allies’ base and threatens to storm it and win the war – the Iliad
hero’s beautiful young friend killed by the main antagonist, a loss which drives the hero to psychopathic vengeance – the Iliad
climactic single combat between two epic heroes – the Iliad

(Camps gives a much longer list of direct copying on page 81.) Camps says that Virgil used Homer to supply ‘a deficiency in the possibilities of his own imagination’ (p.9) but it’s bigger than that: the Aeneid doesn’t borrow elements from Homer’s epics, it couldn’t have existed without them. They provide the entire historical background, the entire worldview of gods interfering in the lives of mortals, the entire concept of a long poem focusing on an epic hero, and almost all the significant events. ‘Borrowing’ or ‘copying’ aren’t adequate enough words for the wholesale reincarnation of Homer’s epics in Virgil’s work, and in a later chapter Camps seems to acknowledge this:

To a very large extent the story told in the Aeneid is made by remoulding Homeric materials, as well as owing to Homer the broad motifs which govern its design. (p.82)

The process of composition

Camps devotes an appendix to describing some of the short biographies of Virgil which were written after his death. Suetonius wrote one, now, unfortunately, lost. The best early one which survives is by Aelius Donatus and Camps presents a translation of the full text (6 pages long).

Donatus and fragments from other biographies tell us that Virgil’s method in composing poetry was to make a complete prose summary of the entire story before he began writing any verse. Donatus says that every morning Virgil dictated some verses to a secretary for as long as inspiration lasted, then, after lunch, spent the afternoon working over what he had dictated, sometimes whittling a mass of verses down to just a handful of lines, sometimes just one. Apparently, Virgil compared the process to the ancient folklore notion that a mother bear gave birth to formless lumps of life and then literally licked them into shape (p.117).

(In fact, Donatus describes this as Virgil’s method in writing the Georgics but everyone has silently agreed that this is probably how he composed the Aeneid as well.)

Crucially, Donatus says that Virgil did not compose the poem by starting at the beginning and working through. Instead, he was inspired to versify particular ad hoc scenes as the inspiration took him, sometimes composing later scenes years before earlier ones. This explains all sorts of discrepancies which a close reading of the poem brings to light, notably the lack of linking and smoothing passages, for example the abrupt ending of the famous book 6, and the even more abrupt ending of the entire poem.

Moreover, Donatus tells us that the poem contains many lines of poor quality, as well as lines which are metrically incomplete which Virgil deliberately left in because he needed the padding and structure to get onto the more finished sections, but would have returned to improve had he lived.

The violence

I think my view of the poem has been very strongly skewed by the hyper violence of the second part of the poem. The orgies of testosterone-fuelled slaughter which it describes with such relish strongly affect my impression of the first half, so that I remember mainly the violence – for example, the extended description of the fighting at the sack of Troy. Camps wants us to feel soft and sentimental about the book-long love affair with Dido but what I mainly remember from book 4 is:

the murder of Dido’s husband and the unhappiness of his ghost
the self slaughter of Dido, who does it in the Roman way, falling on her sword
Dido’s extended curse on the Romans and getting her people to swear eternal enmity, an enmity which will lead to three ruinous wars and then the eventual sack of Carthage, the killing of tens of thousands of soldiers and the selling of her entire people into slavery

Similarly, I take the point that the journey to the underworld is genuinely weird and spooky, and Aeneas encounters many strange sights, that his pity for suffering humanity especially aroused by the sight of the pitiful shades waiting to be ferried across the river Styx and then his doleful reunion with the shade of his father.

But for me this all tends to be eclipsed by the shiny vision of the procession of his Roman descendants and, when you look at this list of Great Romans, what are they famous for? What all Romans are famous for, their military victories. David West in his 1991 Penguin edition has a handy little appendix which lists the figures Aeneas sees in the procession of Great Romans:

Silvius the warrior king
Brutus, famous for expelling the last kings and executing his two sons when they tried to restore them
the Decii, father and son, famous for giving their lives to win victory in two wars
Torquatus, led an army against the Gauls and executed his own son for disobeying orders
Lucius Mummius who not only sacked Corinth in 146 but utterly destroyed it as an example of Roman power
Aemilius Paullus credited with the conquest of Greece for defeating Pyrrhus king of Epirus
Cornelius Cossus defeated a foreign king in single combat
Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, the reforming tribunes, both of whom were murdered in the streets of Rome along, in the latter case, with thousands of their supporters
Scipio Africanus Maior defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama
Scipio Africanus Minor leading the army which sacked, utterly destroyed Carthage and sold its 50,000 inhabitants into slavery
Fabricius who led an army against Pyrrhus
Fabius Maximus Cunctator, the general who delayed and delayed confronting Hannibal in Italy
M. Claudius Marcellus killed a Gaulish chieftain in single combat

This is (not quite all) the people who feature in Aeneas’s vision of his glorious descendants, and what do they all have in common? Violence and killing. Slaughter. Rome was hyper-violent state, engaged in almost non-stop war (the Gallic Wars) and when they weren’t destroying other peoples’ cities (Corinth, Carthage, Gaul) they fought with terrible ferocity among themselves (Pharsalis, Philippi, Actium).

If any contemporary Roman set out a pageant of their glorious history, what would it consist of? Except a litany of wars and battles. It was a phenomenally militaristic state. Even the humanist’s favourite, Cicero, not only went to serve as governor on Cilicia but led his army in a siege and battles. Even the sternly principled Cato sided with Pompey in the civil war and was made governor of north Africa where he managed the military campaigns. Holding a senior magistracy at any time in Roman history almost inevitably entailed leading a Roman army.

Camps’s attempts at a moral interpretation undermined by the violence

Maybe I’m getting this way wrong, but I read Camps’s introduction from end to end and I think it gives a deeply misleading impression of the Aeneid. He devotes a chapter to Aeneas, then one to Dido and Turnus, and these overflow with sensitive empathy for their sufferings and the deeply ‘moral’ choices which they face.

But the poem I read venerates power, might, military strength, masculinity, supreme ability in battle and its centre stand two awesome killing machines, terminator-figures, Aeneas and Turnus who rampage across the battlefield beheading, belimbing, skewering and butchering anyone who stands in their way.

This is one of the reasons I dislike the moralising tone of humanist literary criticism, because it distorts the facts, it deceives and lies. You can read Camps’s book from end to end and get no sense of the piles of bodies, bloody gore and funeral pyres which clot the poem, and end up thinking it’s a Henry James novel making sensitive discriminations about moral scruples. It really isn’t.

At the end of Camps’s chapter about Aeneas, he does, eventually, concede, that there is a bit of fighting, and, OK, Aeneas is a bit brutal. He lists some examples. On the battlefield at the height of his rage Aeneas taunts a victim with the thought that his body will lie unburied; he consigns some of the prisoners they’ve taken to be executed in cold blood to adorn Pallas’s funeral.

There’s more like this but Camps deliberately omits it. Instead he goes out of his way to exonerate his vision of a caring, sharing, sensitive hero, these brutalities:

are altogether at variance with the hero’s usual humanity, and indeed with the standards of the poet’s civilised contemporaries.

Rubbish. A quick checklist of Augustus’ behaviour refutes this, not to mention a scan of Caesar’s record in Gaul, Roman behaviour in Carthage or Corinth or in the Wild East of Asia Minor. Camps limply goes on to concede that ‘the Roman world was not a gentle one’ [sic], and then devotes a paragraph to trying to justify Aeneas’s brutal, bloody execution of an unarmed prisoner on his knees at the end of the poem. He claims that this execution ‘would seem to Virgil’s readers poetically just’. Right at the end of his introduction, he returns to the fact that the entire poem builds up to this ominous and disturbing conclusion, the enraged murder of Turnus, and finds it:

strangely discordant with the normally disciplined humanity of Aeneas (p.142)

But reading Camps’s efforts to explain away this glaring, brutal event I thought: ‘But what if…what if the brutal killing, maiming and taunting, the sending for execution and murderous mayhem Aeneas enacts at the end of the Aeneid is NOT the temporary aberration Camps tries to explain away? What if it is the real Aeneas coming through and showing his “civilised contemporaries” what the real Rome is really like and it is – a killing machine?’

To be really crude, Camps is an apologist for a poem glorifying a mass killer and a violent empire.

The animal sacrifices

You don’t have to be a vegetarian to be disgusted by the vast number of animals who are ritually slaughtered on almost every page of the Aeneid, led to the place of sacrifice and having their throats cut so their hot blood splashes over the altar by the gallon. Thousands and thousands of animals are butchered in the name of religion, in fact, in practical terms, animal butchery is their religion, both Trojans and Latins.

You know the line they’ve been putting on movie credits for decades, ‘No animals were harmed in the making of this movie’? Well, thousands of animals were slaughtered, had their throats slashed while they were alive and fully conscious, in the making of this poem.

Two points. 1. Again, this is the kind of really obvious in-your-face aspect of the text which a ‘moralising’ critic like Camps completely ignores. It’s just not there for him, because his ideology that literature must be about humanistic morality and sensibility simply prevents him from registering what is in front of him. As soon as I see a critic (of literature or art or film or whatever) mention the words ‘moral’, ‘morality’, ‘moral choices’ etc I know they are going to give a distorted and inaccurate account of the work under consideration, because their obsession with ‘moral values’ restricts them to just one narrow aspect of the characters and the text and blinds them, like the blinkers on a carthorse, to everything else which is going on around them, to the totality of the work.

Anyway, Camps doesn’t have the ‘moral’ awareness to even register that the cruel slaughter of thousands of sentient animals might be wrong.

But 2. The relentless animal slaughter plays a really important role in the fabric of the poem by making the human slaughter seem natural. It desensitises you. If you’ve already waded through lakes of animal blood, spurting from slashed throats, it makes the butchery of human beings just that bit more assimilable. The entire poem becomes a welter of blood and gore.

As I said, I’m aware that this is also a biased and partial view and that there are plenty of passages of delightful description, Aeneas’s sensitivity and sea nymphs frolicking in the waves etc. I am just pointing out what Camps’s supposedly thorough introduction to the poem completely omits from its account.

Virgil’s multi-levelled and holey theology

Christian theology has spent 2,000 years trying to reconcile the paradox that, while on the one hand God is all-knowing and so knows the future as well as the past, on the other hand, the theology of reward and punishment only makes sense if humans have free will. If everything is foreordained, then I have no free will, and therefore cannot be guilty or innocent of my actions. Therefore cannot be sent to hell or heaven. Whereas Christian theologians and hierarchies and organisations, very much do want to emphasise our free will precisely in order to threaten us with punishment in the afterlife and keep us in line.

Now the same problem is raised by the Aeneid only in a much more intense form because at every step of the way, at almost every decisive moment, it is the gods’ intervention which makes things happen. Venus makes Dido fall in love with Aeneas, going to some lengths to do so, luring Aeneas’s son into a copse where she puts him asleep and replacing him at Dido’s reception feast for Aeneas with her other son, Eros god of love, assuming the form of Eros entirely to soften her spinsterhood and make her fall for the Trojan. And then it is Venus who, at the end of their affair, comes to Aeneas in a dream and tells him he must get up and rouse his companions and load his ships and leave Carthage right now.

Similarly, the entire action of the second half of the book, the entire war between the Trojans and the Latins, with the enormous destruction and loss of life on both sides, only takes place solely because Juno makes it happen, commissioning the Fury Allecto to fire up the Latins against the peace treaty with the Trojans.

And yet, throughout the poem, the narrator also assigns praise and blame to individual actors, and they themselves debate their guilt and responsibility. For example, Aeneas tells Dido it is not his fault that he is running off and abandoning her: sed me iusa deum – the nasty god made me do it.

It would be interesting to read a clever analysis which explained what we know of Roman theology and sets Virgil’s depiction of the issue within that framework of belief. Camps sketches out the issues in his chapter 5 but doesn’t tell us anything which wasn’t already obvious from the poem.

For me the key to thinking about this problem is suggested by something Camps explains at the start of his book, which is to do with Virgil’s method of composition. Namely, it was episodic. (Camps uses the Latin word particulatim which means ‘piecemeal’, p.125). According to Donatus’s Life of Virgil, the poet first wrote out a prose version of his story but then chose not to work through it in order, but to work up particular ad hoc scenes from different parts of the narrative into verse.

And in doing so, he focused on producing as intense and vivid a scene as possible for the scene’s sake and we know that this sometimes led to discrepancies between episodes; characters behave inconsistently or say one thing in one scene, another in another; characters are introduced who we have already met and so on.

(Camps mentions the two apparently different deaths of Palinurus, who, at the end of book 5, plunges down into the sea, drowning, but in book 6 is said to have swim to shore, p.125. Or there are the two completely different versions of how Helen reacts to the sacking of Troy a) hiding in terror 2.567, or b) out confidently leading the Greeks around the city in book 6. He gives more examples of this kind of contradiction in appendix 4.)

Well, Virgil’s theology can be thought about in the same way as his method of composition, namely that he is not expounding a consistent and thought-through theology in the manner of Tertullian or Augustine; rather he is writing a dramatic poem and all that matters is the intensity of particular episodes. The momentary impact is the thing. Therefore it creates a great dramatic effect to show Juno or Venus interfering almost all the way through the narrative. But at other moments, on the human plane, mortals may discuss their decisions and implications in human terms of agency and responsibility. And because Virgil is concerned with creating whatever is most effective at any particular point, he isn’t concerned with trying to reconcile the theological contradictions thrown up by these different approaches.

In fact there are at least three levels at work in the poem, because above the continual interfering of the gods, which is continually described, sits another force – this is the power of fate or the Fates. This isn’t described but referred to at various points, mainly by the gods themselves. Nothing at all, not even Jupiter, can change what is destined and fated. He and the other gods can only interfere with what, in the end, are details, but the overall Fate and Destiny of everyone is fixed and unalterable.

Thus Juno herself is made to admit that she cannot change Aeneas’s ultimate destiny to settle in Italy and found the Roman race; she can only delay it. Which she does, at the cost of thousands of needless deaths including, ironically, that of her own favourite, Turnus.

On this view, you can pray to the gods, and the gods are depicted answering some (though not all) prayers (mortals can never be sure which ones will be answered and which ones won’t). But no prayers can alter the fixed outlines of Fate.

Fate has built the matrix with bands of steel. Nothing can change or alter them. But within the matrix, individual gods are free to mess about with details, to delay, to alter, to bend – but never to change the fundamental ends.

It’s in this context that Camps makes the shrewd point that the gods themselves pursue their own ends. The gods are as selfish as mortals, maybe more so. Only Jupiter rises above their endless squabbles and tries to adjudicate fairly but, as many readers have observed, he is only an intermittent presence in the poem: Juno and Venus are much more prominent, Juno most of all. The Aeneid could accurately be called the Book of Juno, or The Book of Juno’s Anger.

To anyone who takes this mirage, ‘morality’, seriously, the gods in Virgil are quite demonstrably monsters of immorality, cruel, thoughtless, heartless, irresponsible – like children. Any real consideration of the pagan gods of antiquity eventually suggests why they had to be superseded by the Christian god. They were just not worthy of serious intellectual consideration. And they are fundamentally indifferent to human life, breath-takingly callous. Serious consideration of the pagan gods led philosophers to sets of beliefs like Epicureanism or Stoicism, very different ideologies but alike in their aim of trying to eliminate the role of the gods in human life. Paganism tends towards a brutal indifference to human existence.

Compare and contrast that with the intense feeling of personal salvation which Christianity offered its believers. As Camps puts it, ‘the promise of the new kind of religion is evidence of the terrors of the old’ (p.49).

Anyway, the existence of these three levels of action allows Virgil to switch between them as it suits his narrative ends. Jupiter apologises to Juno, saying his hands are tied by Fate. Aeneas apologises to Dido, saying his hands are tied by the gods, and so on.

How are humans meant to know what the devil is going on? Via the welter of omens, signs and prophecies which the text is full of. These are the channel of communication between the three levels.

Sometimes a god personally explains something to Aeneas, but far more often it is the shade of a dead mortal (Hector or Anchises) who can explain things up to a point but not the full picture. This up-to-a-pointness is really striking: ghosts and spirits are continually telling Aeneas just so much of his future and, when he wants to know more, fading into smoke.

At other times it is the mute symbolism of some sign or portent like a comet in the skies or a swarm of bees or the eagle carrying off a swan who is beaten off by all the other birds – in other words, portents which mortals are forced to interpret and guess at.

My position is that none of this amounts to a worked-out theology on the analogy of Christian theologies. The opposite. Although these elements fill the text to bursting, they don’t indicate a coherent worldview, but one that is cheerfully incoherent: one which is ragged and flexible enough for the characters and narrator to switch between at least 3 levels of belief: belief in a Fixed and Unchangeable Fate, belief in the continual intervention of the gods, and belief in man’s free will which is sufficient to allow him to carry out free actions which can, accordingly, be judged within a ‘moral’ framework.

The overlap and interplay of the different systems is one of the things which keeps the poem dynamic and varied, keeps the reader in a continual sense of flux and uncertainty.

Furens

Alongside the multiple levels of destiny, goes a kind of dualistic theory of human nature. Dido and Turnus have two modes of being: their ‘normal’ selves and themselves possessed. In their states of possession they are associated with a range of frenetic adjectives, to wit: amens, turbidus, fervidus, ardens, furens, trepidans, in a state of inania, furor and violentia.

Furor in particular is applied to Dido a dozen times and Turnus half a dozen times. And Aeneas, after the death of Pallas, becomes a man ‘possessed’ on the battlefield. If you felt so inclined you could read the entire poem through the vector of frenzied possession just as much as by Camps’s limp metric of ‘morality’.

The poetry

It’s difficult to follow Camps’s chapter about the verse itself (chapter 7) unless you can not only read Latin but have a good feel for it as a medium of expression. I did Latin GCSE but have nowhere near the ability to judge it as poetry. Some key points which come over from Camps’s account are:

Vocabulary Virgil used a consciously ‘poetic’ diction, on the model of Milton in Paradise Lost or Tennyson in Idylls of the King, with a sprinkling of words from earlier poetry and archaic forms to give it sonority and authority.

Syntax Flexible, sometimes an adjective whose meaning attaches to one noun is grammatically attached to another; two nouns related by a verb have their normal relationship inverted; a phrase is compressed by omitting a term of meaning, letting the reader supply it; sometimes grammar as well as meaning is understated or omitted and the reader needs to supply it, too. These and other tactics create:

flexibility in writing lines and passages
compactness

But Camps says that, more distinctive than either of these is Virgil’s coining of highly expressive original phrases out of very basic words. Alongside their power goes a certain ambiguity. This has meant that many phrases of Virgil’s can be extracted from their original context and acquire new, more powerful meanings. Take lacrimae rerum.

Aeneas has been washed up on the coast of Africa and welcomed into the new city of Carthage and now he is looking at a mural in a Carthaginian temple dedicated to Juno that depicts battles of the Trojan War and the deaths of his friends and countrymen. He is moved to tears and says ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’.

Apparently, even in the original Latin, this phrase is grammatically ambiguous and can equally mean, ‘There are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind’ or, ‘There are tears of things and mortal things touch the mind.’

Either way, the phrase went on to have a tremendous afterlife, being widely quoted in later writers as pithily summing up the sadness of human existence. Then, in the early twentieth century, it began to be used on Great War memorials, thus entering wider consciousness. It’s one example of the way Virgil’s just-so selection of very ordinary words was done in such a way as to pack an eerily powerful – and enduring – punch.

Pederast

The single most striking thing in Camps’s book is not by him but is in Aelius Donatus’s short Life of Virgil which Camps includes in its entirety in an appendix. In the early section about his appearance and nature, Donatus writes:

He was somewhat inclined to pederasty, [his particular favourites being Cebes and Alexander, whom he calls Alexis in the second Eclogue. Alexander was given to him by Asinius Pollio. Both of them were well-educated and Cebes wrote poetry himself.] (p.115)

Donatus then goes on to report the rumour that Virgil had a relationship with an apparently notable woman named Plotia Hieria, but that she denied it in later life. Apart from that ‘his conduct and demeanour were so respectable’ that at Naples he acquired the nickname Parthenias, an adjective applied to Athena and meaning chaste and virginal.

Three points. 1. This entirely chimes with several of the Eclogues which describe passionate love between some of the poems’ idealised young shepherds and are plainly homoerotic. 2. The fact that ‘Alexander’ was a gift shows that the young men in question were slaves. Virgil had gay relationships with his male slaves. Slavery.

3. It’s interesting how Donatus’s description moves easily from describing his fondness for male slaves to his rumoured affair with a Roman matron. I.e. the homosexuality had the same kind of value or scandal value as a rumoured ‘straight’ affair i.e. merited a sentence or two, but not worth making any fuss over.

It’s a demonstration of the point made in M.I. Finley’s essay about women and marriage in ancient Rome, that what mattered more than anything else was the legal integrity of the official family, and in particular the legal status of sons and daughters to ensure the efficient heritance of property, titles and lineage. As long as these legal forms were observed, then there was considerable leeway in how citizens (mostly men) (mis)behaved.

Credit

An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid by W.A. Camps was published by Oxford University Press in 1969. All references are to the 1984 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Roman writers

De rerum natura by Lucretius
Poems of Catullus translated by Peter Whigham
The Eclogues by Virgil
The Georgics by Virgil
The Aeneid by Virgil – books 1 to 3
The Aeneid by Virgil – books 4 to 6
The Aeneid by Virgil – books 7 to 9
The Aeneid by Virgil – books 10 to 12
Introductions to the Aeneid – 1. W.F. Jackson Knight
Introductions to the Aeneid – 2. Allen Mandelbaum
Introductions to the Aeneid – 3. David West
An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid by W.A. Camps (1969)

Salâmmbo by Gustave Flaubert (1862)

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by Simon on September 14, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literary criticism, Poetry

Tagged Aelius Donatus, Aemilius Paullus, Africa, Alexander, Alexis, Allecto, An Introduction to Virgil's Aeneid, Anchises, ancient religion, ancient Rome, Animal sacrifice, Antony, Antony and Cleopatra, aristeia, Ascanius, Asinius Pollio, Augustine, Augustus, Battle of Actium, Battle of Zama, Brutus, Camilla, Carthage, Cebes, Christian theology, Cicero, classic literature, classics, Cornelius Cossus, David West, Dido, Eclogues, epic poem, epic poetry, Epicureanism, Eros, Fabius Maximus Cunctator, Fabricius, Funeral games, Furens, Gaius Gracchus, Gallic Wars, Georgics, Great War, Greek literature, Hannibal, Helen of Troy, Hercules, Hesiod, Homer, homosexuality, Idylls of the King, Iliad, Italy, Janus, journey to the underworld, Julius Caesar, Juno, Jupiter, King Evander, King Pyrrhus, lacrimae rerum, Latin, Latium, literary criticism, Lucius Mummius, lusus Troiae, M.I. Finley, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Milton, Odyssey, pagan gods, paganism, Pallas, Paradise Lost, Parthenias, patriotism, pederasty, Philosophy, Plotia Hieria, poetic diction, poetry, Pompey, religion, River Styx, Roman citizenship, Roman Empire, sack of Carthage, sack of Corinth, sack of Troy, Scipio Africanus Maior, Scipio Africanus Minor, Sibylline Books, Silvius, Slavery, slaves, Social War, Stoicism, Suetonius, suicide, sunt lacrimae rerum, Tennyson, Tertullian, the Decii, the Furies, the Gauls, Theocritus, Theology, Tiberius Gracchus, Torquatus, toxic masculinity, Tragedy, Translation, Trojans, Turnus, Venus, verse, Virgil, vocabulary, W.A. Camps, Work and Days

Posted by Simon on September 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/14/an-introduction-to-virgils-aeneid-w-a-camps/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Roman Republic

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fontana History of the Ancient World

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

Schematic

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

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

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

The Roman assemblies
The Roman army
Equites
The special commands

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

Main themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who was the Roman oligarchy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman flexibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

The impact of empire on the Roman ruling class

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

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

Extreme wealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The land problem

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

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

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

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

The lynching of Tiberius Gracchus

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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by Simon on July 22, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Slavery

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

Posted by Simon on July 22, 2022

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

Pro Archia by Cicero (62 BC)

Pro Archia is the shortest of the five speeches contained in the excellent Oxford University Press edition of Defence Speeches of Cicero, edited and translated by D.H. Berry (2000). It’s barely 12 pages long and yet even this slip of a thing requires a detailed three-page introduction from Dr Berry. In it he explains that: Aulus Licinius Archias was born plain Archias in Antioch in Syria in the mid-120s. As a young man he established himself as a poet and travelled round the eastern Mediterranean writing poems to order. In 102 he arrived in Rome and was welcomed into the home of Lucius Licinius Lucullus where he tutored the two young sons. He was sought out by other noble Roman families.

During this period Cicero himself took instruction from Archias (among his other achievements, Cicero was no mean poet) and explains in the speech that gratitude for his old teacher was one reason why he took the case.

As a result of the Social War, most of the tribes and towns of Italy were granted Roman citizenship, under a series of franchise laws. Archias took advantage of these laws to adopt full Roman citizenship, taking the Roman style name Aulus Licinius Archias, the Licinius a tribute to the family who took him in and sponsored him.

Archias accompanied the general Lucius Lucullus to Asia when the latter was put in charge of managing the war against King Mithridates, 73 to 67 BC. Although successful Lucullus lost the confidence of his troops and was replaced, much to his chagrin, by the charismatic general Gnaeus Pompeius (generally referred to as Pompey in English), who wound up the campaign and claimed the credit. Lucullus commissioned Archias to write a poem praising his conduct of the war.

In 65 the tribune Gaius Papius passed a law expelling from Rome all non-citizens who did not have a fixed residence in Italy. In 62 Archias was named in a prosecution alleging he was not a proper citizen and so should be expelled.

Berry explains that Archias had, in fact, done everything necessary under the social laws to gain full citizenship and that therefore scholars have seen the prosecution as politically motivated. it is thought the prosecutor, Grattius, was an agent of Pompey’s who was continuing his vendetta Lucullus by attacking the latter’s pet poet. Alternatively, maybe Grattius undertook the prosecution on his own initiative to curry favour with Pompey.

Therefore, as so often, the case was not a narrowly legal matter, but was embedded in the fraught power politics of the time. The case for Archias’s citizenship was so straightforward that Cicero deals with it in the first few pages. Thereafter he shifts the entire debate away from laws or politics and onto the subject of literature. Thus he was deftly able to avoid alienating either side in the feud – doing the Lucullus family a favour by defending their poet, but without casting any aspersions on Pompey, who is mentioned only once, in a deliberately flattering way (24).

Cicero’s self-centredness and patriotism

This is the third Cicero speech I’ve read and I’ve gotten used to what I at first thought was his immense self-centredness but I’m coming to realise must have been the accepted style – that the speaker dwells at inordinate length on his own experiences and character and his motives for taking the case, his relationship with the accused and so on.

The other thing which is becoming apparent is the immense amount of space devoted to naming famous Romans. These Romans may be forebears of the prosecutor or accused, or people involved in the case for one reason or another, but, as a rule, Roman literature involves an inordinate number of references to previous generations of eminent Romans. If a lot of Cicero’s texts repeatedly refer to himself, this self-centredness is mimicked, at a higher level so to speak, by the way the texts are so very Roman-centric (see below).

The modern reader is tempted to skip past these sections in order to get to the meat, but I am coming to realise their importance in creating a kind of fabric of authority in a text or speech. It is often blatant name-dropping but with the purpose of adding weight and lustre to a client’s case by associating him with great men from the past.

Section by section synopsis

(1) Cicero tells the jury he owes a great deal of his ability as an orator to early training with Achias.

(2) It may seem illogical, given that Achias is not an orator but a poet, but Cicero tells the jury he has always been interested in all branches of culture, which are ‘linked by a sort of common bond’.

(3) He flatters his auditors, describing the magistrate as an excellent man, the jury as a most excellent jury and apologises that he is using a style not conventionally used in a law court, to ‘speak more freely on cultural and literary matters’ than is usual.

(4) He gives a brief resume of Achias’s life: born in Antioch (‘to high ranking parents’); as soon as he reached maturity, devoting himself to literary composition; then plying his trade around the Med, exciting admiration wherever he went.

(5) Arriving in south Italy, Achias was celebrated wherever he went and awarded citizenship of various cities. Arriving in Rome during the consulship of Marius and Catulus he was taken in by the Lucullus household.

(6) A typical display of eminent names: Cicero says Archias was sought out by Quintus Metellus Numidicus and his son Pius, Marcus Aemilius, Quintus Catulus and his son, Lucius Crassus, and was on close terms with the Luculli, Drusus, the Octavii, Cato, and the Hortensii.

(7) Cicero tells that, travelling back from Sicily with Marcus Lucullus, they passed through the town of Heraclea where they took advantage of the law of Silvanus and Carbo to legally make him a citizen. He fulfilled all the requirements and presented himself before the praetor Quintus Metellus to be registered.

(8) Thus, by section 8 of this 32-section speech, Cicero has made his case: Achias cannot be convicted of fraudulently behaving like a citizen because he is a citizen which can be proved by reference to the register of Heraclea – and the citizens who have come from Heraclea to vouch for him – and to ‘a man of the highest standing and the greatest possible conscientiousness and honour’, Marcus Lucullus, who is here in court to testify. Cicero says he could rest his defence right there, after only 3 or 4 minutes of speaking.

(9) Cicero concedes that the town records of Heraclea were destroyed in the Social War but what need for them beside the witness of the town itself. If the prosecution wants proof of Archias’ residence in Rome then this can be presented thanks to the conscientious record-keeping of Metellus, which he goes on to describe.

(10) Two difficult-to-grasp points: Cicero sarcastically says that, when numerous other Greek towns were handing out citizenship to unworthy artisans, he supposes places like Tarentum were unprepared to grant citizenship to one who had gained the greatest glory! This is clearly a kind of exasperated sarcasm but its point is a little lost on us. Then Cicero says Archias didn’t take advantage of the other lists in which he was enrolled but insisted on being counted as a Heraclean – ‘under circumstances such as these, is Archias really to be driven out?’ It’s also a little hard to see the point of this fact, maybe it displays Archias’s nobility in not slipping in as a citizen of umpteen south Italian towns. Both points feel very secondary to the basic key facts he established in sections 7 and 8.

(11) He addresses a specific point of the prosecution that Archias’s name is missing from the census roll. Cicero simply states that at the last census Archias was on campaign with general Lucius Lucullus and that during the census before that he was also absent with Lucullus.

An additional fact: during the period the prosecution alleges Archias was not a citizen, he made a will according to Roman laws, took inheritances left him by Roman citizens and was nominated for a reward from the treasury – i.e. behaved in numerous ways as a Roman citizen and was accepted by other Roman citizens as such.

(12) It is at this point that the speech suddenly detours into a consideration of literature and Archias’s literary importance. Cicero does this, as so often, in a surprisingly personal way, baring his breast and speaking in a vainglorious way:

Yes, I for one am not ashamed to admit that I am devoted to the study of literature… Why should I be ashamed, gentlemen, given that in all the years I have lived, my private pastimes have never distracted me, my own pleasures have never prevented me, and not even the need for sleep has ever kept me away from helping anyone in his hour of danger or of need?

This is pure self-promotion, isn’t it? With a touch of wholly spurious self-dramatisation.

(13) Surprisingly, Cicero then goes on for another paragraph, saying no-one can blame him if he spends the time others devote to sport or games or pleasures on literary study – especially if the study results in the powers of oratory which he puts to the use of his friends in adversity. Why, you might reasonably think, is Cicero clogging up a short speech about Archias’s citizenship with a lengthy apologia of his own penchant for studying literature?

(14) More self promotion as Cicero explains that only the example of great men recorded in literature inspired him to expose himself ‘to so many great struggles and to the daily attacks of desperate men, which I have been facing for the sake of your security.’

(15) Cicero invents a rhetorical question from a fictitious critic, asking whether the great men he invokes were experts in literature. This allows Cicero to concede that many of them probably weren’t but that, nonetheless:

When a natural disposition which is noble and elevated is given in addition a systematic training in cultural knowledge, then something remarkable and unique comes about.

(16) As mentioned above, Cicero then gives a list famous Roman forebears as evidence of the importance of literature to leading Romans of times gone by. He names the younger Africanus, ‘a godlike man’ [who we know Cicero made the key figure in several of his philosophical writings, on the gods, on the republic and on friendship], Gaius Laelius [central speaker in On friendship], Lucius Furius and Cato the Elder. So the study of literature definitely added to the wisdom and honour of these great men.

But he adds a second point, that even if the study of literature did not lead to statesmanlike qualities, still it should be recommended because:

this form of mental relaxation broadens and enlightens the mind like no other.

Whereas other forms of relaxation may be appropriate for specific times and places and age groups, literature is universal:

The study of literature sharpens youth and delights old age; it enhances prosperity and provides a refuge and comfort in adversity; it gives enjoyment at home without being a hindrance in the wider world; at night, and when travelling, and on country visits, it is an unfailing companion.

(17) It may be that some have no taste for literary achievement but surely they can recognise it in others? The great actor Roscius had died earlier that year (62) and was universally mourned when he died and yet he only entertained with his body, with his external self. How much more should ‘extraordinary motions of the mind and quickness of intellect’ be celebrated?

(18) Cicero then testifies to having seen Archias on countless occasions extemporise poetry on the topics of the day. And his written compositions have been acclaimed as equal to the ancients.

Should I not love such a man, should I not admire him, and should I not think it my duty to defend him by every means possible?

As so often, the client is the intended subject of the sentence and yet, somehow, the main presence is Cicero himself, booming his virtue. He goes on to give the standard account of a poet’s divine inspiration which was already, in his time, a stock cliché and would last another 2,000 years:

A poet is created by nature itself, activated by the force of his own mind, and inspired, as it were, by a kind of divine spirit. Rightly does our own great Ennius call poets ‘sacred’ because they seem to us to be marked out by a special gift and endowment of the gods.

(19) Even barbarian races respect their poets. Rocks and deserts have responded to the poet’s voice. Wild animals are turned aside by his singing. Cicero asks, in a typically plangent rhetorical question, whether the excellent race of Romans, alone, will ‘remain unmoved by the voice of a poet’?

He elaborates the point: various cities have competed to claim the great Homer as a citizen, long dead though he is. Is Rome to turn away a great poet who is not only alive, but belongs to Rome both by law and his own choice?

Third point: Archias has devoted much of his time in Rome to celebrating the Roman people. For he wrote a long poem about Marius’s war against the Cimbri, which the general, despite not caring about poetry, was said to like.

(20) And the value of poets is indicated by the way great men have vied to be celebrated by them. Themistocles wanted to hear his exploits celebrated by singers or performers; Marius thought his achievements would be made famous by the poet Lucius Plotius.

(21) Continuing the point, Cicero says that Archias has written a long poem celebrating the war against Mithridates, shedding glory not only on the commander in chief Lucullus, but also on the entire Roman people.

You can see how this is a convenient fact for Cicero because he then goes on to itemise some of the great victories, battles, sieges and so on of the war, all carried to success under the excellent Lucius Lucullus, mentioning his name four times. Sucking up is a crude term, but Cicero was doing it to the great general who was, of course, present in court. Maybe he turned and gestured to him at each name call. Maybe the crowd cheered each namecheck.

Back to the speech, Cicero draws the conclusion that all this writing up of heroic Roman military achievement means that Archias deserves the people’s gratitude:

Those who use their talents to write about such events serve therefore to increase the fame of the Roman people.

(22) It is really important to grasp just how patriotic Cicero was (see the deeply patriotic motive which runs throughout his tract De republica). Here he clarifies that the fancy words about a poet being created by nature and being ‘sacred’ are really only valid when he is praising Rome:

The praises of a poet shed glory not only on the person who is praised, but on the reputation of the Roman people also.

Because this is what all human beings desire:

We are all motivated by the desire for praise, and the best people are the ones who are most attracted by glory.

He repeats the idea that the Roman poet Ennius not only praised great men like Maximus, Marcellus and Fulvius, but shed glory on the whole Roman people and so their ancestors bestowed citizenship on him – are the jury, then, to disenfranchise this citizen of Heraclea who has been sought by so many cities as their own?

(23) A rather garbled passage in which he starts by saying that Greek literature is far more widely spread than Roman, then continues to say that literature not only records deeds of glory but thereby acts as an incentive to men to be heroic.

(24) Thus Alexander the Great kept a bevy of writers with him to record his deeds while in our own day Pompey conferred citizenship on Theophanes of Mitylene because he had written about him, and before his soldiers who shouted a great hurrah because they realised that they shared in the praise and glory of their leader.

(25) Cicero tells a funny story about Sulla who was handed a laudatory poem by the author, scanned it, then awarded him the value of the property he was auctioning at the time on condition that he never wrote another line. But the point is: would Archias have failed to gain citizenship from Sulla?

(26) Or would he have failed to gain citizenship from Quintus Metellus Pius who has given citizenship to so many others and once listened to some rather crude poets from Corduba? Because everyone is motivated by a desire for praise.

(27) More stories about great Romans: Decimus Brutus decorated the entrances to his temples and monuments with poems by Accius; Fulvius took Ennius with him when he went to fight the Aetolians and devoted the spoils of Mars to the Muses. How is this relevant? Because if generals have barely laid down their armour before they are honouring the names of poets, how much more so should jurors who wear the toga of peacetime.

(28) Characteristically, Cicero then decides to share even more about himself and let the jurors know that his exploits during the heroic year of 63 are even now being written up by Archias into an epic poem! For if you take away praise and glory what incentive does anyone have to get involved in great undertakings?

(29) If people had no concept of posterity they would never do anything great or crush themselves under obligations and work. It is the notion that our fame and glory will live on after our deaths which motivates the truly great.

(30) If great men take care to leave behind statues depicting their mere bodies, shouldn’t they take even more trouble to leave a record of their thoughts and deeds? As usual, Cicero adverts back to himself and his own sense that, even as he performed his heroic deeds, he was motivated by the thought that they would live on to aftercomers.

(31) A stirring peroration which summarises all the points to date.

(32) Cicero briefly explains that his speech has been in two parts: the technical part in which he dealt with the accusation, and then the slightly more unusual part where he digressed to discuss his client’s literary achievement and literature in general. He hopes the court will forgive his speaking on this subject.

Thoughts

Pro Archias is often considered important because of its discussion of literature but, as this summary indicates, that’s a little misleading; it would lead the reader to expect an essay about the origins or manner of Roman poetry, but there’s none of that, really. Instead what we get, in my opinion, is an explanation of the social function of poetry, and above all, the purpose of poetry in serving the Roman state, in praising great military leaders, in shining glory on Rome’s great military victories, in incentivising young men to emulate the great military deeds of their forebears.

Cicero is often talked about by his fans as if he is a sensitive, liberal figure and he often is – passages in this speech can be quoted out of context to make him sound like a completely contemporary professor of poetry. But surely, deep down, the evidence of De republica, De legibus and all these speeches is that Cicero has more in common with Kipling‘s notions of a hyper-patriotic literature designed to celebrate Victorious Generals and serve the Great Cause of Empire!

Credit

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

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by Simon on July 15, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation

Posted by Simon on July 15, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/15/pro-archia-cicero/

Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Younger

This is one of Plutarch’s longer biographies of eminent Romans, at 73 ‘chapters’ or sections.

Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Younger (95 to 46 BC), was a conservative Roman senator in the period of the late Republic. He made a reputation for being a stern, inflexible defender of the strictest interpretation of traditional ‘Roman’ values and a literalistic interpretation of the constitution. As such he was in effect a defender of the optimates party of traditional aristocrats and the senate as a body, against the growing power and political lobbying of the populares party, represented by others in the 80s and 70s but during the 60s and 50s increasingly represented by Julius Caesar. Cato saw Caesar as an over-ambitious autocrat who sought to tear up the traditional constitution and make himself tyrant and king, so he bitterly opposed him at every opportunity.

Ironically, the net effect of his stern speechifying and high-minded opposition to Caesar helped to create the impassible divide which arose between Caesar and Pompey (who he defected to and served during the civil war) and precipitated the civil war which overthrew the republic that he loved. When compromise was required, Cato offered inflexible opposition.

His suicide in north Africa, where he was one of Pompey’s governors, after Caesar had effectively won the province in 46 BC, was, in my opinion, not a noble end to a noble life but epitomised the political cul-de-sac he’d painted himself into. Compromise and mutual respect are the basic requisites for a functioning democracy.

The life

(1) Marcus Porcius Cato or Cato the Younger was a great-grandson of Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Censor, Cato the Elder and Cato the Wise (234 to 149). The Elder was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization, who was the first to write history in Latin with his Origines, a now lost work on the history of Rome.

Unusually Plutarch gives us something of Cato’s boyhood. Both his parents died leaving him, his sister and brother orphans. They were brought up by a maternal uncle. People noticed he was inflexible, harsh, not given to laughter though occasionally he smiled. He was a slow but steady learner, and Plutarch favours us with some 2,000 year old theory of education (based, apparently, on Aristotle).

(2) When he was 4 the Social War broke out and Pompaedius Silo, a representative of the rebels, visited Cato’s guardian’s house and humorously asked the children for their support. The others childishly agreed but Cato stared inflexibly silently in front of him, even when the visitor held him out the window as if to drop him. He took boyhood games very seriously.

(3) The dictator Sulla liked Cato and his half brother for their father’s sake and Cato’s tutor Sarpedon often took him to visit, till one day the 14-year-old asked why there were so many cries of torture and severed heads (!) carried from Sulla’s house and when his tutor explained everyone was too frightened to intervene, Cato angrily asked for a sword and said he’d rid his country of this scourge.

Cato’s devout attachment to his brother Caepio.

(4) He was made a priest of Apollo and moved out of his guardian’s house. He tried to put into practice Stoic philosophy and lived very plainly. He was a close companion of Antipater the Tyrian, a Stoic philosopher. He believed in a form of justice which was rigid and uncompromising.

(5) When the tribunes wanted to make changes to the Basilica Porcia which his famous ancestor had constructed, Cato was reluctantly drawn into defending it and opposing the move. Everyone commented on the stern maturity of his speech.

He took vigorous exercise, refused to ride a horse or be carried in a chair, exercised in cold or heat. Spartan.

(6) He was surprisingly unabstemious, though, and would stay up through the night, drinking and arguing with philosophers. He dressed so deliberately unostentatiously that it drew attention. When he came into an inheritance he shared it liberally with friends.

(7) He became betrothed to a woman named Lepida who had been dropped by Metellus Scipio but then Metellus changed his mind and wooed and won her which made Cato so furious he eased his mind by writing scathing verses against Metellus. Then he married Atilia, a daughter of Serranus.

(8) During the war of Spartacus (73 to 71 BC) Cato volunteered to serve since his brother was a military tribune. He displayed good discipline, self-control, courage in all emergencies and sagacity. When the commander, Lucius Gellius Publicola (consul in 72) awarded him honours Cato turned them down, saying he’d done nothing special. So he acquired a reputation as being clever and brave, but odd.

(9) In 67 he was appointed military tribune and sent to Macedonia, to serve under Rubrius the praetor. It’s fascinating to learn that he travelled to this post with fifteen slaves, two freedmen, and four friends. He was assigned a legion and won over the men by his unpretentious willingness to join in with all the tasks.

(10) Cato hears a Stoic philosopher named Athenodorus Cordylion, was living at Pergamum, he travelled there to persuade him to return with him to the army camp, which the latter did. Cato was more proud of this achievement than any military conquest.

(11) Cato’s brother fell sick at Aenus in Thrace. He made his way there as quickly as possible but his brother died before he arrived. People were surprised at his excess of grief and the huge amount he spent on the funeral rites, ‘not observing how much tenderness and affection was mingled with the man’s inflexibility and firmness against pleasures, fears, and shameless entreaties.’ In other words, Plutarch likes Cato.

(12) When he completed his military service the men saw Cato off with tears and embraces, which was unusual, On his journey through Asia he was very humble about his entrance to towns, didn’t do it with grand display and intimidate the local magistrates (which, by implication, was the norm).

(13) Plutarch tells the genuinely funny story of Cato entering Antioch in Syria to find a reception of young men in military cloaks or gala gowns and imagining it was for him. But when the city master of ceremonies stepped forward and greeted him it was to ask when Demetrius would be arriving – all this pomp was for him. Even funnier, Demeterius had at one stage been a slave of Pompey’s but Pompey was so in the ascendent that an ex-slave of his drew more of a grand welcome than Cato. Cato’s friends laughed about this all the way to their inn.

(14) When Cato arrived in Ephesus Pompey, who was there, made a big point of going to meet and greet him by hand, and praising his virtue to his face and behind it. But this was all in self interest, for Pompey never attached Cato to his entourage as he did other young men. Anyway, as a result of Pompey’s favour, the towns he subsequently passed through made a special effort to give him honours, though he asked his friends to ensure he didn’t fulfil the prediction of his friend Curio, that he would return from Asia more tamed.

(15) Deiotarus the Galatian repeatedly sends him lavish presents but Cato sends them back. Taking ship for Brundisium, his friends advise the ashes of Caepio should travel by another ship but Cato insisted they go in the same boat as him even though they turned out to have a difficult crossing.

(16) Back in Rome he is elected quaestor in 65 BC though not before making a careful study of the full constitutional roles and responsibilities of the office. Once instated he insisted on utter rectitude and obedience to the rule from his many clerks, who were used to pulling the wool over the eyes of new young officials. Cato sacked a leading clerk for embezzlement which led to a protracted law case.

(17) By his thoroughness Cato raised the office of quaestor to almost eclipse the consulship in dignity. He:

made sure all debts to the public treasury were immediately called in, so that he could then make all the disbursements owed
he weeded out false claims and decrees
the assassins who murdered people on Sulla’s notorious proscription lists for money, and were widely loathed, he called to account, demanded the money back, upbraided them for their filthy acts, at which point many of them were arraigned for murder: for many people this closed the door on the shameful time of Sulla’s dictatorship (82 to 78 BC)

(18) He got to work early and left late. He set the state treasury on its feet. He attended the senate and popular assemblies to make sure slack politicians didn’t make promises of money they couldn’t keep. All in all he showed that the state treasury could be run honourably.

On the last day of office he was being accompanied home by a grateful crowd, when he heard that his boyhood friend Marcellus was trying to register a crooked remission of moneys so Cato turned right round, marched back to the treasury and, in Marcellus’s sight, expunged the application from the tablets, then took Marcellus home with home for dinner. Nothing personal, just inflexible application of the rules.

(19) Having held the quaestorship, Cato is automatically enrolled in the senate. Here he shows the same inflexible devotion to duty, arriving first, leaving last, and making sure he reads all notes and briefing papers, keeping across all details of all policies. Unlike many who drifted into it by accident, Cato

chose a public career as the proper task for a good man, and thought that he ought to be more attentive to the common interests than the bee to its honey. And so he was careful to have the affairs of the provinces and decrees and trials and the most important measures sent to him by his connections and friends in every place.

He soon became a byword for lecturing sternness and honesty. His name began to be of proverbial weight. Plutarch gives examples.

(20) When the time came to vote for tribunes despite his friends urging him to stand, Cato decided against and set off for one of his country estates to study philosophy. But on the way they encountered the entourage of Metellus Nepos on their way into town so Metellus could stand as tribune. At which Cato ordered his people to about turn and hastened back to Rome to contest the tribuneship in order to preserve the freedoms of the state.

(21) When he stood for the tribuneship many thought that, rather than seeking advantages for himself, he was conferring a gift on the role. In 63 he was elected one of the ten tribunes. He promptly lived up to his reputation for rectitude by prosecuting the consults elected that year to serve in the following years, Silanus and Murena, for bribery. It was the custom for the accused to hire a man to tail the prosecutor everywhere to see who he was talking to and what materials he was gathering. Murena’s hired man was soon impressed by Cato’s rectitude and eventually, if he asked Cato whether he was going about business for the trial that day, if Cato said no, he took his word and didn’t tail him.

Cicero was consul in 63 and defended Murena from Cato’s prosecution and got him off but it didn’t affect his respect for Cato’s honesty and he often consulted him, for:

in the tribunal and in the senate he was severe and terrible in his defence of justice, but afterwards his manner towards all men was benevolent and kindly.

(22) Two chapters on the Catiline conspiracy. Plutarch skips over all the details, to the debate about what to do with the conspirators Cicero has captured in the city. Plutarch focuses on Caesar’s speech advocating leniency for the conspirators i.e. that they be sent to various cities under house arrest until the conspiracy was completely quenched. Plutarch really comes out as anti-Caesar with these remarks:

Caesar now rose, and since he was a powerful speaker and wished to increase every change and commotion in the state as so much stuff for his own designs, rather than to allow them to be quenched, he urged many persuasive and humane arguments.

That’s not how it comes over when you read Sallust’s reconstruction of Caesar’s speech in his account of the Catiline Conspiracy, which is sober and responsible. It also chimes with his lifelong practice of clemency and forgiveness first.

(23) But what Plutarch wants to get to is how many of the senate were swayed by Caesar until Cato stood up to speak and tore into Caesar as himself a traitor supporting traitors:

Caesar, he said, under a popular pretext and with humane words, was trying to subvert the state; he was seeking to frighten the senate in a case where he himself had much to fear; and he might be well content if he should come off guiltless of what had been done and free from suspicion, since he was so openly and recklessly trying to rescue the common enemies, while for his country, which had been on the brink of ruin, and was so good and great, he confessed that he had no pity; and yet for men who ought not to have lived or been born even, he was shedding tears and lamenting, although by their deaths they would free the state from great slaughter and perils.

So ferocious and impassioned that the senate voted overwhelmingly for immediate execution and Cicero led them away to the Roman prison and had them garrotted there and then. A rash impetuous act which would come back to haunt him in later years (when he was threatened with prosecution for having murdered these men without due legal process and so was terrified into going into exile in 58 BC).

Plutarch gives us an interesting little piece of social history by telling us that this was the only speech of Cato’s to have been recorded, and this is because Cicero was responsible for instituting the new practice of having a number of secretaries skilled at shorthand to record senate procedures. (Which is the central fact in Robert Harris’s trilogy of novels about Cicero.)

(24) Another quite funny anecdote. In the middle of Cato’s furious tirade against Caesar he observed a messenger come into the senate and hand Caesar a note, at which point he thunderously pointed this out to the senate and claimed it had something to do with the conspiracy, demanding he read it out. Caesar handed it over to Cato who read it and realised it was an erotic message from none other than his own sister, Servilia, to Caesar, who she was in love with (though he was married). Cato flung it back at Caesar. This is a lovely moment.

Plutarch goes on to state that Cato had bad luck with ‘his’ women: one sister gained a bad reputation for her carryings-on with Caesar, the other thrown out of her husband Lucullus’s house for infidelity, and his own wife Atilia ‘put away’ because of her ‘unseemly behaviour’. So Cato marries a daughter of Philippus, Marcia.

(25) The strange case of Quintus Hortensius, a man of splendid reputation and excellent character, who tries to persuade Cato to farm out to him his daughter who just happens to be married to another man, Bibulus. Why? To bind their families together and increase wise and virtuous offspring. Cato politely refuses. Things then become garbled as Plutarch states that Hortensius then asked for Cato’s wife in marriage. The fact that Cato agreed and that her father agreed, indicate that he had, or was about to, divorce her. Lots of divorces and remarriages among the Roman aristocracy.

(26) So Lentulus and the other conspirators are executed but Plutarch says Caesar continues to stir up unrest among the city’s poor and describes Cato as being wise and good in passing a law to expand the free grain distribution to the poor and landless.

It is 62 BC and Pompey is en route back to Italy from his triumphs in the East. Metellus has taken up the tribuneship and proposes a law asking Pompey to hurry back and protect the city. Cato at first politely declines and asks Metellus to reconsider. But when the latter takes advantage of his meekness, becomes angry and shouty, leaving witnesses with the sense that they’re both bonkers.

(27) The night before the vote the forum was filled with armed strangers and gladiators and servants with strong support from Caesar, who was praetor. That night Cato bravely walks with his friend Minucius Thermus through the throng of armed men to the temple of Castor and Pollux and pushes through the armed gladiators to eventually plonk himself in a chair between Caesar and Metellus who were conversing.

(28) The proposed law is read out but Cato snatches the paper out of Metellus’s hand. When Metellus continues to recite it from memory, Cato puts his hand over his mouth. So Metellus ordered the men at arms to come to his aid and some of the people pelted Cato with sticks and stones. Not a model democracy, was it?

(29) This brawl goes on for some time with Metellus attempting to read his law and some of the people threatening him. In the event Metellus fled from the people to the forum, made a long speech against Cato, and then fled the city altogether heading towards Pompey.

Switching subject, Lucullus had returned triumphant from the East in 66 but had been forced to wait for a triumph by the opposition of Caius Memmius who wanted to suck up to Pompey. Cato opposed this, partly because Lucullus was married to Cato’s sister. The importance of these marriage and family alliances and allegiances is difficult to capture but was a key element in Roman politics.

(30) Pompey as he approached Rome sent asking the senate if they could postpone the consular elections so he could canvass for Piso in person. The senate was inclined to agree but Cato vehemently disapproved. Seeing he was going to be an obstacle, Pompey then sent a message asking for the hand in marriage of Cato’s daughter for him and the other daughter for his son. When they heard this the women in question were delighted to make such high matches but Cato immediately refused and sent back that he wasn’t to be bought with marriage alliances. Plutarch, for once, is critical, and makes the kind of point I’ve made, which is that Cato’s intransigence brought about the very thing he sought to avoid:

However, if we are to judge by the results, it would seem that Cato was wholly wrong in not accepting the marriage connection, instead of allowing Pompey to turn to Caesar and contract a marriage which united the power of the two men, nearly overthrew the Roman state, and destroyed the constitution. None of these things perhaps would have happened, had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all, and add his power to that of another.

(31) Furthermore, Cato blocks Pompey’s wishes for a law distributing land to his veteran soldiers, and then blocks Caesar’s wish, on returning from Spain, to canvass for the consulship whilst remaining outside the city pending a triumph. Cato denied him this, too, by talking for an entire day and so talking the time out. But the effect of this scrupulous defence of principle was to drive Caesar and Pompey together and both to support the unscrupulous agitator Clodius. Again, by his scruples he brought about the thing he most opposed. Lucullus and Cicero are of h is party, but the new triumvirate outpowers them and Caesar is elected consul for 59.

(32) Plutarch describes the street violence encouraged by Cato’s opponents. With the help of this rioting Pompey’s land redistribution bill is passed after all along with an unusual clause compelling all senators to take an oath to uphold it. Inevitably, Cato refused to do this until persuaded into it by Cicero who said it was vanity to hold out against the general will, and that he needed Cato in Rome rather than in exile.

(33) Caesar introduces a law to divide almost all of Campania among the poor and needy. Of course Cato objects and so Caesar has him dragged off to prison. Plutarch alleges that it is by such shameless laws that Caesar curried favour with the people and so got himself awarded governorship of Gaul for five years despite Cato warning the people that they themselves were creating a tyrant.

(34) Caesar’s creature, Clodius, gets Cato sent against his will as governor to Cyprus and Ptolemy of Egypt, very obviously to get him out of the way to the clique can pursue their aims unobstructed. Clodius is particularly hot to hound Cicero out of Rome, something he couldn’t achieve if Cato were there.

(35) En route to the East Cato wrote to Cicero whose enemies were trying to get him banished to submit to the mood of the times. King Ptolemy of Egypt comes to see him and finds Cato full of wisdom, not least in his advice to have nothing to do with the rapacious crooks at Rome (Pompey and Caesar) and return to Alexandria and be reconciled with his people. Ptolemy in fact continues onto Rome but Plutarch has him (improbably) at the door of the first magistrate he visits groaning at his own weakness.

(36) Confusingly (for me at any rate) Plutarch then talks about an apparently different Ptolemy, ‘the Ptolemy in Cyprus’, who poisons himself. Cato hears this at Byzantium where he is supervising a peace (?) before he goes on to Cyprus and organises the auctioning of the king’s belongings. He insists on handling every aspect of this himself and so alienates a lot of his friends.

(37) An extended description of the falling out between Cato and his friend Munatius, who feels himself slighted. In the end they are reconciled with kindness and tears. This is a good example of an anecdote or passage which has nothing to do with politics or history, as such, but demonstrates Plutarch’s primary focus which is an interest in ‘the perception and manifestation of character‘.

(38) When Cato returned from the East he meant to present immaculate accounts of the enormous sum of money he was bringing back (7,000 talents of silver), but his account books were lost in unfortunate accidents which vexed him because he had wanted to display them as models and templates.

(39) Cato arrived back from the East in 56 BC and all Rome turned out to meet him, the senate and the people. Characteristically, Cato sailed right past his reception committee and to the docks, which irritated many. But he made up for it when he paraded the wealth he’d brought back through the forum, and he was awarded an extraordinary praetorship.

(40) In 57 BC Cicero had returned to Rome after an exile of 16 months. He promptly acted controversially by having all the records of Clodius’s acts as tribune destroyed, claiming that Clodius had been improperly elected through bribery. Surprisingly, Cato contradicted Cicero’s speech, saying it had not been illegal for Clodius to move from the patrician to the plebeian class, and arguing that if Clodius’s acts were to be erased so should his, Cato’s, in the East because his appointment was made by Clodius. This public disagreement caused Cicero to break off friendship with Cato for a long time.

(41) Plutarch briskly skips over the conference of the triumvirate at Luca. He calls it:

a conspiracy for the division of the supreme power and the abolition of the constitution.

It was where they agreed to make Crassus and Pompey consuls for the following year. Lucius Domitius is encouraged to put himself forward as a rival but Pompey’s thugs attack him one early morning as he is walking in the Campus Martius, killing a torchbearer and injuring others, including Cato who was with him.

(42) So Pompey and Crassus were voted consuls for 55 BC. But Cato didn’t give up his opposition and stood for praetor so he could oppose them from an official position. Plutarch describes the bribery and tricks Pompey used to prevent Cato’s election but he then gives a big address to the people expressing his fears about a tyranny and is followed home by a big crowd (as so often happens in these anecdotes).

(43) Caius Trebonius proposes a law assigning provinces to the consuls which Cato vehemently opposes, speaking against it at such length from the rostrum that he is dragged from it by his opponents, a fight breaks out, some people are killed (!). When another law is promulgated giving Caesar his command in Gaul, Cato makes a speech directly addressing Pompey saying he is unwittingly creating a burden which will crush him. But Pompey ignored him, trusting in his own power and fortune.

(44) Cato is elected praetor for 54 and tries to introduce a law eradicating bribery. This makes him unpopular with the mob who like being bribed, and he is pelted and jostled in the forum until he claws his way onto the rostrum and makes a principled speech which reduces the mob to silence. He institutes a bill whereby the candidates for election all give a deposit to Cato who then monitors the election and anybody caught cheating forfeits their deposit.

(45) His honesty shames the great men of the state who league against him. Clodius is back in Pompey’s orbit and regularly attacks him for corruption etc. Cato replies that he brought more treasure back from Cyprus by honest means than Pompey did from ravaging the East. Cato said Pompey had no right lending his legions to Caesar in Gaul without consulting the state as if they were his private possessions. And warns that he remains near Rome (i.e. didn’t take his governorship of Spain) in order to manage factions at elections as they were games.

(46) Cato ensures his friend Marcus Favonius is fairly elected aedile, the post which supervised games and entertainments, but Cato actually carries out a lot of the duties. People are amused by the way Cato rewards the players with humble gifts of food and fruit rather than elaborate gold and luxuries. He thought that to sport and entertainment, light and gladsome arrangements were appropriate.

(47) In 52 BC the street fighting of Clodius and Titus Annius Milo’s gangs and others became so extreme that elections to the magistracies were suspended. Opinion crystallised that Pompey needed to intervene with his army to restore order. When this was proposed in the senate to everyone’s surprise Cato supported it, with the simple argument that any government is better than no government at all.

(48) And so Pompey is appointed sole consul, floods the streets with soldiers, puts an end to political violence and safeguards the elections. A benign military dictatorship. He asks Cato to be his adviser. Cato, typically, says when he criticised him before it wasn’t out of personal malice and if he helps him now it won’t be to truckle favour, in both cases it is for the good of the state. He advises him against the retrospective prosecution of officials for winning their places by bribery, arguing that a) it will be difficult to know where to stop and b) it was unfair to punish people according to a law which didn’t exist when they acted.

Cato’s difficulty as a juror in trials where he couldn’t be suborned or bought and so was an unpredictable quality to both prosecution and defence.

(49) All this time Caesar is using the money and power he accumulates in Gaul to buy friends and influence in Rome. Finally it dawns on Pompey that he is becoming a threat. Cato decides to stand for the consulship to try and limit’s Caesar’s ambitions. Cato proposes a law that candidates must canvas in person, and not through middle men who distribute money and bribes, which alienates the populace who like money and bribes. Refusing to employ the common practices of a consul ingratiating himself with the people, he is not elected.

(50) Cicero upbraids Cato because, when the times required a man like him in power, he refused to change his principles and humble himself to stand for election, and so lost the opportunity to help the state. How much should a man compromise his principles in order to win power to enact his principles?

(51) It is reported in Rome that Caesar attacked Germans in Gaul during a truce, and massacred them. A great public celebration is called but Cato declares Caesar should be handed over to the Germans whose trust he breached. Caesar wrote a letter to be read out in the senate justifying his actions and execrating Cato at length. But this only gives Cato an opportunity to deliver a long, carefully evidenced indictment of Caesar’s behaviour and ambitions, so that the latter’s friends regret reading out the letter in the first place.

The senate consider it is well to find a replacement for Caesar but Caesar replies that he’ll only do that if Pompey lays down his arms. At which Cato points out that what he prophesied was coming to pass, that overmighty leaders with private armies were dictating to the senate rather than following the instructions of the government.

“Those things are come to pass which I foretold to you, and the man is at last resorting to open compulsion, using the forces which he got by deceiving and cheating the state.”

(52) Plutarch skips over the entire complex web of events which led to the escalating crisis between Caesar and Pompey, the ultimatums, the attempts at mediation, and skips suddenly to Caesar having crossed the Rubicon and occupied the town of Ariminum (January 49 BC). Cato says ‘I told you so’ and recommends that Pompey be supported in opposing Caesar. Pompey acknowledges that Cato was a prophet but fails to raise the armies he told everyone it would be so easy to raise and decides to flee Rome.

At this perilous moment Plutarch pauses to tell us about Cato’s private life, namely that he remarried the Marcia he had divorced and who subsequently married Hortensius, who had died, leaving her free again. Apparently Caesar made much of this in the virulent diatribe he wrote against Cato, claiming the latter in effect farmed his wife out to the wealthy Hortensius so that, when the latter died, he could remarry his wife and come into a fortune. Thus the Roman aristocracy, bickering among themselves.

(53) Cato opts to support Pompey and is sent as Pompeian governor to Sicily. But when he hears that Pompey has fled Italy for Greece he makes the droll remark that:

there was much inconsistency and obscurity in the divine government, since Pompey had been invincible while his course was neither sound nor just, but now, when he wished to save his country and was fighting in defence of liberty, he had been deserted by his good fortune.

As to being governor of Sicily, when a Caesarian force arrives under Asinius Pollio, Cato says he doesn’t want to lay waste the province with war and so sails to join Pompey in Greece. Here he made good policy suggestions, namely not to plunder a city that was subject to Rome, and not to put a Roman to death except on the field of battle. This brought to the party of Pompey a good repute, and induced many to join it.

(54) Cato is sent to Asia, whither he is accompanied by his sister, much reformed from her dissolute behaviour, and where he persuades Rhodes to declare for Pompey. At first Pompey is inclined to give Cato command of his huge fleet of some 500 ships, until it is pointed out to him that Pompey is not devoted to his cause but to Rome and that, the minute Caesar was defeated, Cato would be insisting that Pompey surrender his command, too. So he appoints Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus admiral.

But Cato proves an asset. When all the generals give speeches to the men before a big battle at Dyrrhachium, the soldiers listen lethargically, but when Cato addresses them and invokes all the ideas of patriotism and bravery and tells them the gods are watching he rouses them to a true fighting spirit and Pompey wins the battle.

(55) When Pompey marched his army into Thessaly, he left Cato in command of the supplies and men he left at Dyrrhachium, along with fifteen cohorts. After Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus, Cato offered command of the fleet to Cicero, who refused, saying he wanted to return to Italy. But Pompey’s son, Gnaeus Pompey, was violently against anyone who deserted the cause, and might have killed Cicero had he left. Cato talked him into remaining and so probably saved his life (well, for the time being; nobody’s life is really saved, not forever).

(56) Guessing that Pompey had headed south Cato sailed to Africa with his fleet. In Libya he met Sextus Pompeius and learned of his father’s murder. Ashamed of abandoning men, Cato found himself taking command of the remaining Pompeian forces (reminding us how close, how very close, the military world was to all the Roman ‘statesman’ we read about. It was a totally militarised politics.)

He learns of other Pompeian forces under Juba the king and Attius Varus and resolves to join them. Cato shows all the signs of mourning (for Pompey) walks rather than rides a horse, only lies down to sleep, east sitting down.

(57) Cato tries to resolve the squabbles between the Roman commanders Scipio and Varus, and King Juba of the Numidians. He is punctilious about not taking command because he is only a pro-praetor whereas Scipio is a pro-consul.

(58) Scipio was going to give in to Juba’s request to have the city of Utica razed to the ground and it inhabitants slaughtered but Cato vehemently objected, got himself appointed governor of it to ensure its loyalty to the Pompeians. With his usual administrative flair he turns it into a storehouse for Pompeian forces in Africa. But his advice to Scipio, to play a waiting game and let Caesar tired himself in Africa, is ignored. Scipio mocks Cato locked up safe and secure in a walled city but when Cato offers to take his army to Italy to decoy Caesar back there, Scipio mocks this too. And Cato begins to realise Scipio is a rash and unreliable leader and would probably make himself tyrant, given half a chance.

All of which is grimly confirmed when messengers bring news of the Battle of Thapsus 6 April 46 in which Caesar demolished the much bigger army of Juba and Scipio and Varus.

(59) That night the population panics but Cato walks among them calming their fears. When day comes he assembles the 300 or so Roman citizens in the town, businessmen and moneylenders with the senators who had taken refuge there. (It is typical of the kind of insights you glean from these texts, that Plutarch calls these people Cat’s ‘senate’. Did this mean every town and city in a Roman province had its own ‘senate’ made up of the richest Roman inhabitants?)

Cato then makes a speech advising everyone to stay put and not flee, severally. And says it’s their free choice whether to switch to Caesar but he would admire and praise them more if they if they remained true to what he saw not as ‘Pompey’s side’ but the cause of Rome and its laws and traditions.

(60) Cato’s speech inspires the people to elect him their leader and use their goods and weapons and lives as he thinks fit. Someone suggests a law freeing all the slaves but Cato, with typically legalistic precision, says such a law would be illegal, but individual slave-owners can free them and all of military age will be accepted into the army. Both Juba (with the remnants of his army) and Scipio (with his fleet) send messages saying they await Cato’s decision what to do next.

(61) The senators manumitted their slaves but the leading 300 citizens were conflicted and Plutarch gives a paragraph of their thinking and reasoning why they want to hand themselves over to Caesar.

(62) Given these divisions Cato sends back to Juba and Scipio telling them not to come. But when a large number of allied cavalry arrive, Cato and the senators beg them to come inside the city and stay with them.

(63) The horsemen say they will but only if Cato drives out the ‘barbarian’ ‘fickle’ Phoenician people of Utica. Cato says he will consider it. When he returns inside the city the 300 have become bolder and complaining why they are being forced to oppose the undefeatable Caesar, and muttering more and more about the senators being responsible for their danger.

Then he hears that the cavalry force is riding away so grabs a horse and rides after them. They say come with us and be saved. Cato bursts into tears and begs them to come back to Utica if only for one day, to protect the senators.

(64) The cavalry take up positions inside Utica which is now really divided between the senators, who are with Cato, and the 300 businessmen, who want to surrender. Cato has decided to kill himself, since every future he can foresee is one of tyrants in which his beloved Rome is ruined. But he delays in his bid to reconcile the 300 and the senators. The 300 want to send messages to Caesar surrendering and offer prayers. Cato says by all means send messages but prayers are for the defeated and he is not defeated; he is triumphant in spirit, it is Caesar who has admitted his treacherous intent.

(65) As Caesar’s forces approach, Cato tries to keep order in the city, to ensure the senators’ safety, and to prevent the cavalry looting and killing. He tries to unite the people into accepting the treacherous 300, so they stand as one city. He helps those who want to flee embark from the harbour.

(66) Lucius Caesar offers to go as envoy to the great Julius and fall down at his feet to beg for Cato. But Cato says, No, this is his job. Instead they discuss how to save the 300. Then he gathers his son and family round him and takes a bath.

(67) He hosts a big dinner party after which literary and philosophical subjects are discussed, including the so-called ‘paradoxes of the Stoics’ which include the maxim that all good men are free and that the bad are all slaves. A peripatetic philosopher begins to object to this but Cato wades in and argues at length and fiercely for its truth. Only the good, like him, are truly free. The bad, like Caesar, despite all appearances to the contrary, are slaves. From his tone and words everyone realised he intended to kill himself.

(68) He walks with family and friends, embraces them all, and retired to his bedroom. Here he reads Plato on the soul but on glancing around discovers his sword is gone, His son removed it. He orders his slaves to find it, gets angry and hits them when they can’t, eventually his son arrives in floods of tears and Cato remonstrates with him for taking away his means of defence.

(69) He is left with just two friends and asks if they have been set there to talk him out of killing himself.

(70) These two friends burst into tears and leave. Then the sword is sent in, carried by a child. He sets it aside and rereads the Plato twice, then falls asleep. Then wakes up and sends an official, Butas, to check everyone who wanted has safely departed the harbour. His doctor he has bandage the hand he damaged punching his servant. Butas tells him most of those who wanted to depart have left but a strong wind and storm are blowing up.

When Butas has left Cato tries to kill himself but makes a weak blow with the sword and falls to the floor. His slaves and son rush in, weeping. The doctor tries to push his intestines which are spilling out of his abdomen back in, but when he realises what is going on, Cato pushes him away, tears at his own intestines and at the wound to make it bigger, and so dies. How disgusting. How undignified.

So, as with Pompey and Caesar and Cicero, Plutarch really lays on the domestic details in order to work his death scene up into one designed to spark strong emotion. Craftsmanlike, painterly.

(71) In an improbable show of unity which one suspects owes more to Plutarch’s partiality, he has the 300 and the townspeople all uniting in their love of Cato and declaring him the one free man. They dress his body richly, bury it near the sea and erect a statue which stands to this day.

(72) Soon after Caesar arrives at Utica, learns of Cato’s death and utters the famous words:

“”O Cato, I begrudge thee thy death; for thou didst begrudge me the sparing of thy life.”

But Cato didn’t want to live if it meant living at the whim of (people he thought) tyrants and of simultaneously having the sparing of his life turned into a great credit to Caesar’s reputation. No. He only really had one course of action.

(73) Coda about Cato’s son, who Caesar spared, as was his habit. Initially he became a figure of fun by having an affair with the wife of an eastern king, and Plutarch quotes some maxims or aphorisms made about him. But he ended well, dying fighting at Philippi against Caesar and Antony. His daughter married that Brutus who assassinated Caesar, was part of the conspiracy and died in the cause. And this expired the line of Cato.

Thoughts

Choosing sides

At various points in the reading you realise how difficult it is to know what to do in a society which is falling to bits. It wasn’t really a question of choosing sides because not until the final breakout of civil war were there two sides to pick from. Cato’s career demonstrates that the uttermost probity and honesty only take you so far. In the real world compromise has to be made on a host of occasions. A big example is when Cato surprised everyone by backing Pompey as sole consul in 52. Any government is better than anarchy.

But that, for me, raises the central issue. There are lots of interpretations, lots of scholarly reasons given, for the collapse of the republic, but in my opinion the fundamental one was the collapse of political discourse into street violence. Over the preceding generations it had become acceptable to physically attack your opponents and their supporters in the street. The problem was how to contain this violence, how to contain it within the realm of politics and stop it spreading over into the realm of violence.

Philosophy

Much is made of Cato’s devotion to philosophy, but it can be said of him as of so many other people who study the subject, that in the end they choose the school and philosophy which suits their temperament, which they were always going to choose. He was harsh and inflexible and sought to display little or no feeling, so he was drawn to stoicism which “teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions.”

Far from teaching ‘truth’, philosophy is like a huge breakfast buffet where you can tuck into whatever you fancy and mix and match at will, change your opinions, decide you fancy a fry-up instead of pastries. Or, to quote Bob Dylan, “People do what they want to and then think up reasons to justify their actions later.”

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Plutarch’s life of Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC)

Cicero was what the Romans called a ‘new man’, meaning his family had no history of holding office and so qualifying for the senate. Yet he rose to become one of the most eminent Romans of his time, the leading advocate of his day and a key political player, first in preventing the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the state in 63 BC, and then in the increasingly fraught political atmosphere which led up to the outbreak of civil war between Caesar and Pompey in 49 BC.

But more than that, Cicero wrote a huge amount, across a range of genres (speeches, books on philosophy, politics, oratory, political pamphlets) an extraordinary amount of which has survived. As well as his formal publications there survive some 1,000 letters written by or to him, which were edited and published by his beloved freedman and secretary, Tiro, after his death.

The high point of Cicero’s life was the Catiline conspiracy in 63 BC, a massive co-ordinated conspiracy to overthrow the state in a mix of plebeian revolutionary and military coup. Cicero was responsible for identifying and arresting the ringleaders in Rome, then having them summarily executed.

When civil war came Cicero agonised over which side to choose but thought it his duty to stick with the supporter of traditional values, Pompey, against Caesar who had brought his army of Gaul across the river Rubicon to enter Italy illegally.

In the confused situation after Caesar was assassinated in March 44, Mark Anthony emerged as one of the key players but Cicero thought him completely unsuitable for public office or leadership and so wrote a series of vitriolic articles against him. This was to cost him his life for when Anthony made peace with his main opponent, Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, in 43, each of the parties made a list of opponents they wanted ‘liquidated’ and top of Anthony’s list was Cicero. Hired killers were sent to find him and cut off his head. Cicero made a career out of his fine, forceful prose style, but in the end it got him killed.

Warner’s introduction

In the Penguin paperback edition of six Roman biographies, titles The Fall of the Roman Republic, each life is preceded by a short one-page introduction by the translator, Rex Warner. These don’t introduce or focus on the subject i.e. Cicero in this case, so much as frankly assess Plutarch’s shortcomings as a biographer. So in the case of the Life of Cicero Warner points out that Plutarch:

makes no attempt to depict the problems facing a novo homo or new man
or to explain why Cicero alone of the new men of his generation rose to such giddy heights
fails to mention the chief problem facing Cicero upon his election as consul for 63 BC, namely that his candidature had received support from both Pompey (most powerful man in the populares interest) and his opponents among the aristocracy or boni
is careless and inaccurate in his account of Cicero’s quarrel with Clodius
completely ignores the complex political background of the 50s
fails to understand Cicero’s policy after Caesar was assassinated, which was to use the young Octavian to rid the state of Anthony, before dumping him (Octavian) and trying to restore the Republic – a strategy which conspicuously failed

On the plus side Plutarch:

had access to Cicero’s own works about his consulship and speeches and letters on the subject, none of which have survived, so his references to them are an invaluable source
gives some examples of Cicero’s inability to stop himself making witty quips which often offended people

The life

(1) Cicero’s parents. cicer is Latin for chickpea so some Romans thought his surname absurd but Cicero stated he wanted to make it honourable and famous.

(2) His mother’s nurse had a vision saying he would grow up to be a ‘blessing to Rome’ and as a boy he staggered his peers and other parents with his brilliance. As a teenager and young man he developed a reputation as the best poet in Rome, though this had been eclipsed by Plutarch’s time by the giants who came after him (Virgil, Horace, Ovid et al).

(3) He did a brief stint of military service under Lucius Cornelius Sulla in the Social War but then concentrated on studying with orators and philosophers. A young man named Roscius was angry that his father had been murdered via one of Sulla’s proscriptions and his house cheaply sold off to an ex-slave named Chrysogonus. When he made a fuss Sulla had him charged with murdering his own father. Cicero’s friends persuaded him that representing Roscius in court would kick start his career as a lawyer so he did and Roscius won his case. Cicero, though, was worried about Sulla’s anger and diplomatically went to Greece for two years to study with philosophers and orators (79 to 77 BC).

(4) The philosophers Cicero studied under and doctrines he came to favour, namely the New Academy. He worked hard at public speaking, taking lessons from some of the best practitioners in Greece and Asia (Minor).

(5) After Sulla died (in 78 BC) Cicero returned to Rome (in 77) and almost immediately made an impact as a lawyer and speaker. How painstakingly he studied elocution and delivery. He had a quick wit and turn of phrase but often carried it too far and acquired the reputation of being malicious.

(6) Appointed quaestor to Sicily at a time of grain shortages. Won over the natives for being ‘careful, just, and mild’. He brilliantly defended some young men charged with corruption and cowardice but, on returning to Rome, was disappointed that nobody had heard of this great triumph. ‘his excessive delight in the praise of others and his too passionate desire for glory remained with him until the very end, and very often confounded his saner reasonings.’

(7) He trained himself to remember the names of people and places. He secured the conviction of Verres for corruption in Sicily. Plutarch gives some examples of Cicero’s ready wit:

verres is the Roman word for a castrated boar, so when a freedman named Caecilius, who was suspected of Jewish practices, wanted to push aside the Sicilian accusers and denounce Verres himself, Cicero said: “What has a Jew to do with a Verres?”
Verres had a son who had the reputation of being little better than a prostitute so that when Cicero was accused by Verres of effeminacy he reploed, “This is the kind of language you should be saving for your son at home”
The leading lawyer Hortensius appeared for Verres and received an ivory sphinx as his reward so that when Cicero made an oblique reference to Hortensius and the latter declared that he had no skill in solving riddles, Cicero was able to reply, “Really? Despite having a sphinx in your house.”

(8) The Sicilians remained grateful for his good governance and when Cicero was made aedile (69) sent him so much food and livestock Cicero used it to lower food prices in Rome.

An assessment of Cicero’s many properties, legacies and the dowry he received with his wife. He wasn’t rich and often didn’t take fees for his legal work. He ate lightly and took regular exercise and was always conscious of his health.

(9) He was elected praetor in 66 and heard many law cases. The case of Licinius Macer and Cicero’s wisecrack to Publius Vatinius. His supervision of the case of Caius Manlius, a close supporter of Pompey’s.

(10) Now Plutarch comes to Lucius Sergius Catalina who came to represent the various elements in the city which wanted to overthrow the state. Plutarch echoes Sallust’s claims that Catalina corrupted all those around him with loose living, and that he created a cabal of conspirators by committing a human sacrifice and making them eat the flesh. His lieutenants raised mobs in Etruria and Cisalpine Gaul. Corruption and greed had undermined morale, as had the growing gap between rich and poor. Only a spark was needed to ignite this tinderbox.

It was against this backdrop that both optimates and populares were prevailed on to vote Cicero consul for 63 BC.

(11) In fact Cicero’s election owed a lot to the fact that Cataline himself stood for election and Cicero was a candidate both factions could agree on to keep Cataline out.

(12) Cicero faced a problem straightaway which was agitation by the tribunes of the plebs to set up a committee of ten with extraordinary powers, thus upsetting the constitution. Cicero managed to get this proposal rejected in the senate with some careful speeches. He got the other consul, Gaius Antonius, sent to govern Macedonia, leaving the management of Rome in his hands.

(13) Cicero’s career proved that politicians should use charm and eloquence to promote the good.

(14) Catiline now planned to take matters into his own hands before the return of Pompey from the East. His main supporters were people who had benefited from the disruptive times of Sulla, both nobles and soldiers. They wanted more anarchy and disruption. Catiline allied with Manlius, a soldier under Sulla. Cicero stood in the next consul elections, for 62, but Cicero called him to the senate and cross questioned him in front of everyone about rumours of a conspiracy. Cicero appeared at the hustings wearing armour under his toga and with a heavy bodyguard to alert the people that his life was in danger and this helped Catiline lose the consulship for the second time.

(15) Catiline begins organising his men in Etruria into cohorts and legions. Three of the top men in Rome came for a meeting at Cicero’s house, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Marcellus, and Scipio Metellus. Crassus had received an anonymous letter saying the time of blood was approaching and to flee the city. Cicero convened a meeting of the senate at daybreak and distributed the other letters Crassus had to their intended recipients. They all contained identical details of a plot. When the senate then heard that Manlius was mustering forces in Etruria it passed a law placing management of the city entirely in Cicero’s hands.

(16) Catiline orders conspirators Marcius and Cethegus to go to Cicero’s house and murder him. But one of them had told his lover Fulvia all about it and she warned Cicero who wouldn’t give the men admittance. Later that day Cicero convened the senate again and Catiline himself appeared in person to defend himself but no-one would sit near him. When he tried to speak he was shouted down whereupon Cicero ordered him to leave town, which he did with 300 followers and the fasces, symbol of a power he did not rightfully possess. He joined Manlius, they raised standards and had about 20,000 men under arms.

(17) Catiline’s agent in the city was Cornelius Lentulus, of noble birth but low living, who had been expelled from the senate. As well as greed and corruption Lentulus was influenced by prophecies that he would become Rome’s next ruler.

(18) Lentulus wasn’t taking half measures. His plan was to kill all the senators and as many of the other citizens as they could, burn down the city and spare no one except the children of Pompey; these they were to hold hostage pending a reconciliation with Pompey who was said to be on his way back from the East. A night was set for the great conflagration.

Enter two ambassadors from the Gaulish tribe of the Allobroges. The conspirators approached these and played on their grievances and claims of bad government by the Romans. They gave them letters to their senate as from Catiline asking their support in the coming revolution. Plutarch describes how Cicero contrived to seize the ambassadors, the letters and a conspirator sent to accompany them to their country, with the help of the Allobroges themselves.

It is notable that Sallust’s account of this sequence of events is much more clear and logical and persuasive than Plutarch’s, which is vague and confused.

(19) So next morning Cicero assembled the senate again and read out the letters and interrogated the conspirators. Caius Calpurnius Piso backed up the accusations and then report came that a huge cache of weapons had been found at Cethegus’s house. Them, granted immunity, the conspirator accompanying the Allobroges gave them complete details of the conspiracy. Lentulus and the other conspirators were convicted, relieved of their offices and placed under house arrest.

Plutarch then described Cicero leaving the senate, going to the house of a friend and deliberating what punishment to administer. He was reluctant to execute them because of the kindliness of his nature, because he didn’t want to seem to be abusing his power, because many were very well connected. But if he was lenient and let them live, he risked jeopardising the state. Anything less than death would probably only encourage their surviving collaborators.

(20) Cicero’s wife Terentia was supervising an annual religious ceremony at his house and a sign appeared to them:

The altar, it seems, although the fire was already thought to have gone out, sent forth from the ashes and burnt bark upon it a great bright blaze.

Terentia came to Cicero and advised against mercy and for the extreme penalty, as did his brother and a philosopher he consulted.

Next day there was yet another meeting of the senate to debate punishment and all the senators spoke for death until it came to Caesar.

(21) Caesar spoke eloquently for clemency and the prisoners to be imprisoned. Cicero’s friends supported this because it exposed Cicero to less censure. But then Cato the Younger spoke and a) cast suspicion on Caesar and b) angered and inflamed the senate and persuaded them to vote for death.

Sallust’s account of all this is infinitely more interesting, subtle and powerful.

(22) Cicero went with the senate to fetch the conspirators for they had been placed under supervision in various houses. One by one they were fetched, marched through the forum to ‘the prison’ and put to death. At the end of the day Cicero walked through the streets to his house with the people ‘calling him the saviour and founder of his country.’ The lengthy passage in Sallust which describes Catline’s behaviour after the punishment of the conspirators in Rome, his rallying of forces with Manlius and their extended military campaign which ended with losing a battle to the loyalist legions of two generals is all glossed over by Plutarch in a sentence:

For most of those who had flocked to the standard of Catiline, as soon as they learned the fate of Lentulus and Cethegus, deserted him and went away; and Catiline, after a conflict with his remaining forces against Antonius, perished himself and his army with him.

(23) Describes the enmity against Cicero of those who resented his power, most notably Caesar and how they tried to interfere with the oath-taking required at the end of Cicero’s consulship. But how Cato defended him and got the people to declare him Father of the Country.

(24) In subsequent years Cicero made himself unpopular by endlessly going on about Catiline and Lentulus and how he had saved the state. That said, he was generous in his praise of great thinkers of the past (Plato, Aristotle) and used his influence to protect and promote contemporary philosophers and orators.

(25) Another selection of Cicero’s witty quips, often at the expense of the very powerful. For example:

He gained great applause by an encomium on Marcus Crassus from the rostra, and then a few days afterwards as publicly reviled him, whereupon Crassus said: “What, did you not stand there yourself a day or two ago and praise me?” “Yes” said Cicero, “exercising my eloquence by way of practice on a bad subject.”

(26) Plutarch shares another dozen or so examples of Cicero’s witty sharp retorts causing offence and creating enemies, not least Crassus on the eve of the latter setting out for Syria (November 55). Jokes comparing people to slaves or for being ugly or dissolute. Funny but wounding, and creating many enemies.

(27) More examples:

When Faustus, the son of the Sulla (who was dictator at Rome and placarded many people for death) got into debt, squandered much of his substance, and placarded his household goods for sale, Cicero said he liked this placarding better than his father’s.

(28) The story of young Publius Clodius Pulcher dressing himself up as a woman in order to get into the house of Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, during the women-only religious ceremony in order to seduce her. Clodius got lost in the big house, was spotted by a maid who alerted all the women of the house who barricaded the doors against him. Caesar divorced Pompeia and had an action for sacrilege brought against Clodius.

(29) Cicero gave evidence Clodius at least in part because of his wife’s enmity towards Clodius’s sister who she thought had designs on Cicero. But he was a bad man. Witnesses came forward to claim Clodius had had sex with all three of his sisters. Despite all this Clodius was acquitted due to extensive bribery.

It was about this affair that Caesar made his famous quote that he didn’t divorce his wife because he believed her guilty of adultery, but because ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.’

(30) Having escape conviction, Clodius was elected tribune of the plebs in 58. It never ceases to amaze me how a) very small a pool of educated nobles there appeared to be, so that the same names go round and round offices and positions, in these narratives and b) how often they took each other to court, and c) how even obvious crooks with terrible reputations got elected. The other thing is how like a school playground ancient Rome seems to have been, with everyone currying favour with everyone else, and wanting to be in everyone else’s gang, and telling takes and bullying and bribing each other.

Clodius set about making himself popular by passing laws in the people’s interests, had large provinces allotted to the consuls, organised the poor into political clubs, and formed a big bodyguard of armed slaves.

Plutarch states that the three most powerful men in Rome at this time were Crassus, Caesar and Pompey (without mentioning anything about the triumvirate; does this indicate it was a label given by later historians?).

Plutarch’s account is incorrect in many details. For example, he says that Cicero lobbied for a post with Caesar setting out for Gaul but was talked out of it by Clodius who suddenly came onto him as his new best friend. Warner says Caesar offered him the post and Cicero rejected it. Plutarch says the rejection made Caesar cross and he turned against Cicero and also persuaded Pompey against him. See what I mean by the politics of the school playground. And now Cicero began to be vulnerable to his behaviour during the Catiline conspiracy in that he had eminent Roman nobles put to death without a formal trial.

Cicero puts on modest clothes, grows his hair and went about the streets as a supplicant of the people but Clodius now had control of street gangs and got them to catcall Cicero and pelt him with mud and stones.

(31) Although the senate and many young people supported Cicero, Clodius surrounded the senate house and menaced the senators and it began to look like Cicero would have to flee to protect himself. Cicero appealed to Pompey who he had helped at numerous points in the past; but Plutarch says Pompey was now married to Caesar’s daughter and so took his side and avoided Cicero (again Plutarch fails to mention the triumvirate).

Cicero consulted with many friends who gave conflicting advice, but in the end he decided to leave the city and set out one night on foot planning to head for Sicily.

(32) As soon as it was confirmed he had fled Clodius had a law passed formalising Cicero’s exile. Many people helped him on his journey but Plutarch mentions two Sicilians who had benefited from his help in the past who now spurned him, particularly the praetor of Sicily, Gaius Virgilius, who told him not to come there.

So he crossed Italy to Brundisium on the Adriatic coast and set sail for Albania and so on into Greece. Cicero became depressed in exile, contradicting all his claims to be a Stoic philosopher, and Plutarch makes a well-phrased point:

Public opinion has the strange power of being able, as it were, to erase from a man’s character the lines formed there by reason and study; and, by force of habit and association, it can impress the passions and feelings of the mob on those who engage in politics, unless one is very much on one’s guard and makes up one’s mind that in dealing with what is outside oneself one will be concerned only with the practical problems themselves and not with the passions that arise out of them.

(33) In his absence Clodius burned down his villas and his house in Rome and erected on the site a Temple to Liberty. He tried to auction the properties but no-one would buy them. When Clodius then turned his ire on Pompey, the latter had a change of heart and regretted acquiescing in Cicero’s flight. The senate went on strike and refused to ratify legislation. Street violence escalated till tribunes were wounded in the forum and Cicero’s brother was wounded (57 BC).

Another tribune, Titus Annius Milo decided to stand up to Clodius and brought forward legislation to have him prosecuted. Pompey occupied the city with troops and drove Clodius out then summoned the citizens to vote on letting Cicero return. It was carried unanimously, the senate wrote to thank all the cities which had offered Cicero hospitality and decreed his houses in Rome and the country should be rebuilt at public expense.

This is the behaviour of children, isn’t it? No adequate reason is given for all these changes of attitude among ‘the people’ – and what of Pompey’s ignoble and inconstant shilly-shallying?

After 16 months exile Cicero returned in triumph, crowds turned out to welcome him, in Rome even Crassus turned out, at the bidding of his son Publius who was a big fan.

(34) Soon as Clodius was out of town Cicero went to the capitol with a crowd and tore down and destroyed the tablets which recorded Clodius’s laws. Which caused controversy.

(35) With casual abruptness Plutarch then tells us that Clodius was killed by Milo (18 January 52 BC) or more precisely by his entourage in an affray on a road outside Rome. Milo was promptly charged with murder and hired Cicero to be his defence attorney but Plutarch goes on at great length about how nervous Cicero was, giving other examples of his timidity, specially as Pompey provided soldiers to surround and protect the court so as to prevent intimidation by Clodius’s gangs. Milo was convicted and went into exile in Massilia.

(36) In 53 BC, after the death of Publius Crassus in Parthia, Cicero was elected augur (proposed by Pompey and the lawyer Horntensius).

In 51 he was appointed governor to the province of Cilicia and went with great reluctance, because he thought it was his duty. He ruled with great fairness, reducing crushing interest rates, overseeing trials fairly, his home open to all petitioners. Plutarch describes the correspondence with young Marcus Caelius Rufus who asked him to send panthers to take part in games he was organising and Cicero’s reply that there were no panthers in Cilicia, letters which, amazingly, we can still read. After a year he returned to find Rome in the distemper which augured civil war.

(37) As Warner says, Plutarch gives no explanation at all of either the triumvirate, how it was set up and ruled throughout the 50s, nor of its collapse after Crassus’s death in Parthia in 53 and Pompey’s wife’s death in 54, and the growing sense that the two most powerful men, Pompey and Caesar, were engaged in a rivalry to the death.

Instead Plutarch leaps straight into Cicero’s efforts to mediate between both men who he knew well. Very casually and superficially the narrative suddenly leaps to Cesar invading Italy and Pompey precipitately fleeing Rome (49 BC). Plutarch relies heavily on Cicero’s letters as he cites the ones in which he begs Atticus for advice on what to do and then admits it (‘So much for the evidence of the letters.’). Cicero is insulted when Caesar writes to him through an intermediary rather than directly.

(38) Eventually Cicero abandons Italy and sails to join Pompey. He meets Cato who promptly tells him he has made a mistake and ought to have stayed in Italy without taking sides and made himself useful whatever the outcome. Good point. Cicero made himself unpopular by openly saying he regretted coming, criticising Pompey’s strategy and making his usual tactless remarks. As above, Plutarch then gives half a dozen examples of Pompey’s witty barbs.

(39) After Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus (9 August 48) Cato, who had control of the fleet, offered command to Cicero as an ex-consul. But Cicero turned it down and refused to have anything more to do with the cause, something that made Pompey’s son and friends threaten his life.

Cicero sailed to Brundisium and waited there for Caesar to finish other operations and land there. Then with great trepidation he went to see him. To his relief Caesar welcomed him, walked and talked with him and treated him as an honoured guest, praising his eloquence and writings. a) Caesar comes over as an attractive character b) he was also a writer and so maybe appreciated Cicero’s specialness.

He gives an account of Cicero giving a speech defending some associate of Caesar’s and moving so skilfully from emotion to emotion that Caesar’s body literally trembled and he dropped his papers. And the modern read asks themselves: Can anything like that possibly ever have happened or is it an almost fairy tale level of simple-mindedness.

(40) Plutarch describes the way that, after Caesar assumed power, Cicero dropped politics and the law and devoted himself to philosophy and writing, translating works of politics, ethics and philosophy, translating Greek terms into Latin for the first time. He stuck to his country estate at Tusculum, only rarely visiting Rome. He praised Caesar as required.

(41) Plutarch tells us Cicero planned to write a history of Rome but never found time. He divorced Terentia in 46 BC claiming she didn’t support him in his exile and didn’t look after their daughter. But critics mocked the way he promptly married a young woman named Publilia and claimed it was because she was rich and Cicero needed to pay off his debts. Then in 45 his beloved daughter Tullia died young. He was prostrate with grief.

(42) Plutarch mentions Cicero’s Philippics against Anthony in passing and skates even more lightly over the assassination of Caesar, simply saying Cicero had no part in it. Days after the killing Anthony addressed the senate arguing to preserve the peace and Cicero followed with a long eloquent speech arguing for an amnesty. But when the people saw Caesar’s body carried through the forum and saw his blood-stained toga and listened to Anthony’s speech they went mad with rage and seized torches and attacked the houses of the conspirators who had, sagely, already fled.

(43) Anthony began to fear Cicero was once again becoming a power in the state. He was tempted to accompany the new governor of Syria but the consuls pleaded with him to stay in Rome and support the state. He said he’d retire to Athens till they came into office and set off in July 44.

But then news came of a shift in the situation with the arrival in Rome of young Octavian, adopted heir of Caesar, in April 44. This prompted Anthony to shift his strategy, deciding to seek the support of the senate. Cicero was suddenly invited back and returned accompanied by cheering crowds etc (is this taken from his own self-serving letters?). But when Anthony invited him to a meeting Cicero, scared, refused to go, which threw Anthony into a fury.

(44) Then middlemen brought Octavian to Cicero and they negotiated a deal: Cicero would use his influence and powers of oratory on Octavian’s behalf and Octavian would use his money and soldiers to protect Cicero. Characteristically, instead of political analysis, Plutarch takes half a page to tell us that Cicero had a dream foretelling the next ruler of Rome in which he saw young Octavian very vividly, and met him as a boy and teenager and always took care to be polite. Well, if remotely true, that care now bore fruit.

(45) Cicero’s friendliness with Octavian was criticised by Marcus Junius Brutus, who thought it was self-serving. Warner adds a note repeating his idea that Cicero’s plan was to use Octavian to rid the state of Anthony, then replace Octavian himself.

Plutarch says Cicero’s power reached its height. He had Anthony expelled from Rome then sent the two consuls to fight him. Octavian persuaded the senate to award him the power and insignia of a lictor. Octavian defeated Anthony at the battle of Mutina 21 April 43 at which the two consuls were killed and their armies joined his. Now he was the most powerful man in Rome and the senate feared for the old constitution. So Octavian shrewdly met with Cicero and asked him to arrange for them both to be elected consuls, then he would submit to his older colleague. Who was using who?

(46) But as soon as Octavian was elected ‘suffect’ consul i.e. completing the time of a consul who had been killed, on 19 August 43, he paid no further attention to Cicero who realised he had been used. Instead Octavian went into alliance with Anthony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and divided up the government as though it were a piece of property. They drew up a list of 200 men who needed to be executed and Cicero’s name was on it. Anthony refused to join the alliance unless Cicero was killed and Lepidus backed him. The idea was each would sacrifice someone close and dear to them. On the third day Octavian gave in and agreed to Cicero’s murder. Homo homini lupus est.

(47) Cicero was at his country estate with his brother when he heard the news. They set out immediately for the coast with a view to joining Brutus in Macedonia. Plutarch wrings the scene for all the emotion he can, with the brothers frequently stopping their litters to condole each other in floods of tears etc. Eventually Quintus decided he had to return home because he had set out with no money. A few days later he was betrayed by his servants and murdered.

Cicero was carried to Astura where he found a ship which carried him down the coast but then he landed and began to head back to Rome, uncertain and afraid. He contemplated going to Octavian’s house and committing suicide on the hearthstone so as to draw down a curse on it, but then decided to return to the sea and go to Caieta where he had a villa.

Characteristically Plutarch intensifies the mood by describing an ill omen when a flight of crows rose up into the air and flew towards Cicero’s boat as it was being rowed ashore. But he made it to his villa in safety.

(48) The murderers had arrived. They found the villa and broke the doors down only to be told by one of Cicero’s servants that he had left by a secret path which wound down to the sea. The centurions intercepted his litter and Cicero with dignity stretched out his neck allowing them to murder him. At Anthony’s orders they cut off his head and the hands which had written the virulent addresses against Anthony known as the Philippics (and which Plutarch has told us absolutely nothing about).

(49) The head and hands were carried to Anthony in Rome who was organising an election. He cried out ‘let there be an end to proscriptions’, then had them nailed over the ships’ battering rams which adorned the Rostrum in the forum.

Gruesome

For some reason Plutarch, here, right at the tragic end of this great Roman figure, bolts on a macabre anecdote which trumps the Cicero hands and head one. He claims that the servant who told the centurions about Cicero’s getaway path was caught and handed over to Cicero’s bother’s wife (Pomponia) who forced him to cut off his own flesh bit by bit and roast it, and then to eat it!

This, indeed, is what some of the historians say; but Cicero’s own freedman, Tiro, makes no mention at all of the treachery of Philologus.

So why does Plutarch? Don’t you think the inclusion of this gruesome anecdote, which isn’t even accepted by the best witness, tells us everything you need to know about Plutarch’s audience, around 100 AD? I.e. its appetite for the gruesome and the macabre, along with melodramatic omens, prophecies and dreams, trumps any interest in responsible analysis and interpretation.

That said, the last two sentences reveal a taste for the sentimental which resonates to this day:

I learn that Caesar, a long time after this, paid a visit to one of his daughter’s sons; and the boy, since he had in his hands a book of Cicero’s, was terrified and sought to hide it in his gown; but Caesar saw it, and took the book, and read a great part of it as he stood, and then gave it back to the youth, saying: “A learned man, my child, a learned man and a lover of his country.”

Moreover, as soon as he had finally defeated Antony, and when he was himself consul, he chose Cicero’s son as his colleague in the office, and it was in his consulship that the senate took down the statues of Antony, made void the other honours that had been paid him, and decreed besides that no Antony should have the name of Marcus. Thus the heavenly powers devolved upon the family of Cicero the final steps in the punishment of Antony.

Rex Warner’s introduction to the Penguin edition emphasises and implicitly praises Plutarch’s commitment to artistry, to creating biographies as carefully crafted as paintings. OK. But the obvious consequence, which Warner, to be fair, points out, is that: a) many of these ‘effects’ pandered to the debased taste of 1st century imperial Romans and b) led Plutarch to focus on the sensational and sentimental aspects of his subject matter while skating over or omitting important historical, political and social issues which we’d desperately like to know more about.

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by Simon on May 11, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography

Posted by Simon on May 11, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/05/11/the-life-of-cicero-plutarch/

Plutarch’s life of Lucullus

Lucius Licinius Lucullus (118 to 56)

Summary

Lucullus was a Roman general and politician during the last century of the Roman Republic, closely linked by family ties and military service with the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Sulla both dedicated his memoirs to Lucullus and made him guardian of his son, after his death in 78 BC.

Lucullus’s adult life falls naturally into two parts. During 20 years of military and government service, he conquered a series of eastern kingdoms for Rome, specifically during the Third Mithridatic War (73 to 63 BC). The quality of his generalship impressed everyone and was widely studied by later soldiers.

However, the usual toxic Roman politics meant that, despite his achievements, Lucullus was abruptly relieved of his command and replaced by Pompey in 66 BC, whereupon he returned to Rome with fabulous wealth and devoted the last decade of his life to grandiose building projects and luxury living which shocked and amazed his contemporaries.

The life

He was tall and handsome, a powerful speaker, and equally able in the forum and the field. (33)

(Chapter 1) Plutarch emphasises that Lucullus came from a very good family and received a very good ‘liberal’ education and was a highly literate man in both Latin and Greek. In a sense his entire public and military career was to turn out to be a detour from his earliest, literary and philosophical interests. to which he was able to return on his retirement.

(2 to 3) Sulla employed Lucullus in the Social War (91 to 87 BC) and then in his campaign against King Mithridates IV in Greece, whence he was sent on an important mission to Egypt to fetch supplies for the Roman army in Greece. He had to run the gauntlet of the enemy blockade but was welcomed in Egypt (87 BC), collected supplies before undergoing a complicated journey back to Greece which involved encountering the enemy fleet, landing at various islands and besieging their cities.

(4) Having fought Mithridates to a draw, Sulla lay a heavy bill of compensation on the cities of Greece and ‘Asia’ i.e. Greece-facing Turkey, but Lucullus won popularity by applying it lightly and fairly. He also managed to be out East when Sulla returned to Italy in 83 BC and so avoided the blood Sulla shed in his vengeful ‘proscriptions’ against the defeated supporters of Gaius Marius.

(5) In 74 Lucullus was elected consul. He wanted to return to the East and so was unhappy to be allotted Cisalpine Gaul as his province. Above everything, he wanted to assure Pompey didn’t return from Spain, where he was engaged in fighting the insurgency of Quintus Sertorius, for he knew Pompey would be assigned to the East. Therefore, when Pompey called for more resources to fight Sertorius in Spain, Lucullus enthusiastically supported him.

(6) The governorship of Cilicia became vacant. The most influential man in Rome at the time was Cethegus and he had taken a noted courtesan Praecia as mistress. Therefore Lucullus paid court to Praecia who influenced Cethegus to get Lucullus command of Cilicia. He used this governorship to resume the war with Mithridates. The only possible rivals were Sulla (dead), Metellus (retired) or Pompey (tied up in Spain).

(7) In 74 BC Lucullus crossed into Asia and took control of the Roman armies there, latterly commanded by Gaius Flavius Fimbria. After a few years of peace, Mithridates had declared war again, not least by playing on the widespread resentment of Roman tax collectors who were still mulcting the cities for the punitive war reparations imposed by Sulla (20,000 talents).

Antique map showing Turkey divided into Roman provinces in the first century BC. Note how ‘Asia’ refers only to western Turkey; Bithynia and Pontus to the south coast of the Black Sea with Amisus, the town which Lucullus besieged and was set afire, on the coast of Pontus. Cilicia, Lucullus’s official governorship, is on the south coast of Turkey opposite Cyprus. And the whole region is bordered on the east by the kingdom of Greater Armenia, ruled over by King Tigranes.

(8) Lucullus’s fellow consul, Marcus Aurelius Cotta a, thinks he can take on Mithridates alone, but is heavily defeated, losing ships and men.

(9) Mithridates marched his army to take Cyzicus, a rich port town on the south coast of the Sea of Marmaria, surrounding it by land and blockading it by sea. Lucullus followed and camped his men around Mithridates’ camps.

The inhabitants of Cyzicus are fortified by a number of supernatural signs and omens (10). Mithridates’ soldiers beginning to suffer from hunger, he took advantage of Lucullus’s brief absence to send many away to Bithynia. But Lucullus took ten cohorts of infantry and his cavalry, set off in pursuit and brought the enemy to battle at the river Rhyndacus. Lucullus won: 6,000 horses and 15,000 men were captured, besides an untold number of beasts of burden. Mithridates hastened to leave by sea, leaving his generals to lead the rest of the land army to safety, but Lucullus attacked them at the river Granicus, capturing a vast number and slaying 20,000. On this campaign, it was said that no fewer than 300,000 camp-followers and fighting men lost their lives (11).

(12) Lucullus entered Cyzicus in triumph but then had a dream in which the goddess Aphrodite told him some of Mithridates’ ships were nearby at Lemnos, so Lucullus embarked his navy, caught the enemy ships, some at sea, and some drawn up on the shore, and defeated them.

(13) Mithridates escaped by ship to Pontus despite a large storm which wrecked much of his fleet and forced him to switch from a heavy merchant ship to a light brigantine. The storm was said to be owing to the wrath of Artemis of Priapus against the men of Pontus who had plundered her shrine and pulled down her image.

(14) Lucullus pursues Mithridates into Bithynia i.e. northern Turkey. His troops criticised him from dawdling but Lucullus is given a speech saying he actively wanted to give Mithridates enough time to recruit a new army because otherwise the Romans risked forcing Mithridates either a) into the Caucasus, a labyrinth of mountains it would be impossible to flush him out of or b) worse, into the arms of Tigranes the Great of Armenia, who happened to be Mithridates’ son-in-law.

(15) In 72 BC Lucullus brings Mithridates to battle at Cabira. Mithridates wins and puts the Romans to flight. Daunted at fighting further, Lucullus finds some local Greeks who guide his army into a mountain redoubt. But some Roman stragglers got into a fight with Mithridates troops over a stag, the forces on both sides increasing till the Romans fled. At which point Lucullus refused to engage in a full scale battle, but led a small force down which rallied his fugitives, made them turn and see of Mithridates’ men, before escorting them back to the camp. But here they were assigned the traditional punishment of runaways, namely to dig a 12 foot ditch in just their tunics.

(16) A Dandarian prince named Olthacus persuades Mithridates to let him go on an assassination mission against Lucullus, and he made his way to the Roman camp with marks of disgrace, as though shamed and outcast by the king. After a probation period, Lucullus admitted this prince to his table and councils. But on the big morning when Olthacus tried to gain entrance to Lucullus’s tent the latter happened to be asleep and his chamberlain wouldn’t give entrance to Olthacus, who rode back to Mithridates in frustration.

(17) Two separate Roman legates are sent to requisition grain. When Mithridates’ forces attacked them, both times the king came off worst. He decided to move camp but the soldiers rebelled and murdered Dorylaüs the general and Hermaeus the priest. Nonetheless, Mithridates moved his army but was nearly caught when Romans gave chase, until a mule came between them and the king, which was bearing gold, so the soldiers stopped to loot the treasure and let the king get away.

(18) The Romans liberated some of Mithridates’ hostages and many women including one of Mithridates’ sisters, Nyssa. The other two sisters, along with two of his wives, had been sequestered in faraway Pharnacia and Mithridates now ordered his eunuch, Bacchides, to go there and murder them. There follows a florid, sensationalist account of how they died:

Monimé fastened her diadem round her neck and tried to hang herself but it broke in two so she offered her throat to Bacchides to cut it.
Berenicé from Chios shared a cup of poison with her mother which killed the mother but wasn’t enough for Berenicé who was such a long time that Bacchides, who was in a hurry, had her strangled.
Of Mithridates’ two unmarried sisters, one drank off her poison with many abusive imprecations on her brother but the other, Statira, drank it off without saying a word.

(19) Lucullus comes to the town of Amisus and, once his troops break into part of it, the rest is set aflame by its governor, Callimachus to prevent their possession. Lucullus orders his men to put out the fires but they disobey him and ransack the town while it burns to the ground, reducing Lucullus to tears of frustration. Interestingly, he is quoted as saying he wanted to be like Fortunate Sulla who successfully ordered his troops to put out the fires they’d started as they entered Athens in 86 BC, but had ended up with the reputation of Mummius, who burned Corinth to the ground in 146 BC.

(20) With a lull in the fighting Lucullus set out to reform the cities of ‘Asia’ (i.e. western Turkey), specifically lightening the yoke of debt – a massive 20,000 talents – which Sulla had imposed on them which had caused all kinds of misery and social dislocation. Unscrupulous debt collectors or publicani by manipulating interest rates, had inflated this to 120,000 talents! So Lucullus passed some practical laws, reducing interest rates to 1%, forbidding the total interest to exceed the initial loan, and punishing lenders who added interest to the loan. Within four years all debts in the province had been paid off and justice restored, despite the lobbying of the publicani back in Rome.

(21) Mithridates takes refuge at the court of King Tigranes of Armenia whose pomp and tribute kings are described. Appius Clodius is sent as ambassador to demand the handing over of Mithridates, but Tigranes is irritated that Lucullus’s letter only refers to him as king instead of King of kings, and he refuses.

(22) In fact Tigranes had been keeping Mithridates in an outlying region of his kingdom. Now he summoned him. Tigranes inadvertently lets slip that one of Mithridates’ ambassadors to him, Metrodorus, had once candidly advised Tigranes not to send Mithridates the reinforcements the latter required. As a result Mithridates has Metrodorus killed and Tigranes regrets his words.

Plutarch slips in a reference to Amphicrates, the rhetorician, who was exiled from Athens and attached himself to Cleopatra, the daughter of Mithridates and wife of Tigranes, but speedily fell into disfavour, and, being excluded from intercourse with Greeks, starved himself to death.

(23) Lucullus restored the liberties of many Greek cities and blessed them with festivals and contests. As a result many celebrated festivals which they called Lucullea. But then he was summoned back to war and and laid siege to Sinopé, or rather, to the Cilicians who were occupying it. He took it and slaughtered 8,000 Cilicians.

Now Lucullus learns that Tigranes has allied with Mithridates and intends to invade Cilicia and advance on Asia. Lucullus wonders why Tigranes chose to do this now, when Mithridates is weak, rather than when he was at the peak of his powers.

(24) When Machares, the son of Mithridates, who held the Bosporus, sends Lucullus a crown valued at a thousand pieces of gold, begging to be included in the list of Rome’s friends and allies, Lucullus realises the war in the West is over. But he insists on taking the fight to his enemies in what Plutarch calls the ‘second war’ (starting 69 BC) and marches his very reluctant army all across Turkey and Syria to the Euphrates whose waters, at full flood when he arrived, miraculously lowered themselves overnight so the army could cross. He forces his army on across the Tigris and so into the territory of Tigranes.

(25) Tigranes sends a force against Lucullus led by Mithrobarzanes. It comes across Lucullus’s army as it was still making camp so Lucullus sent Sextilius sent at the head of sixteen hundred horsemen and about as many light and heavy infantry to engage Mithrobarzanes, who the Romans defeat and kill. Tigranes abandons Tigranocerta, that great city which he had built, and withdraws beyond the Taurus river but Murena, pressing hard on his heels, captured his baggage train and killed many of his Armenians.

(26) Lucullus commenced a siege of Tigranocerta, which was full of Greeks and other exiled peoples who Tigranes had forcibly resettled. Mithridates advised Tigranes not to engage Lucullus but Plutarch gives a long list of allies from the whole region who joined Tigranes and eventually gave him the confidence to attack.

(27) Plutarch lovingly describes the enormous array of the many allies and kings who’ve joined together to make Tigranes’ monster army. When they see Lucullus’s force divide, leaving Murena with 6,000 to maintain the siege while he, Lucullus, with 10,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry, they burst out laughing and compete with each other to mock the Romans and offer to finish them off with just their national cohort. Tigranes is said to have uttered a ‘famous’ quote:

“If they are come as ambassadors, they are too many; if as soldiers, too few.”

(28) In the event it was a famous Roman victory, Lucullus leading a charge against the heavily armoured Armenian cavalry who turn to escape but, in doing so, trample over their own infantry and cause such confusion the Romans massacre them. Supposedly over 100,000 enemy infantry perish and all their cavalry to the loss of only a hundred Roman wounded and five killed. Sure.

Plutarch then draws a reflection on Lucullus’s generalship, that he used delay and slowness to wear down Mithridates for years, but in this battle deployed lightning tactics to devastate Tigranes’ army.

(29) Mithridates, assuming that Lucullus would draw the battle out, hadn’t even arrived with the main forces. Now he encountered the survivors straggling back and then Tigranes himself, with whom he condoled.

Then Lucullus completes the siege of Tigranocerta, thoroughly looting its treasures and handing out a dividend to all his soldiers. He freed actors who had been abducted by Tigranes and got them to perform in plays celebrating his victory, and sent all the Greeks inside the city who’d been forcibly moved there back to their original cities, thus garnering much gratitude and popularity.

Lucullus then reveres the memory of Zarbienus, king of the Gordyeni, who had sent to offer friendship with Rome but was informed against and murdered, along with his wife and children, by Tigranes. Now Lucullus restored his body to his city and held proper funeral rites and lit the funeral pyre himself.

(30) Lucullus received an embassy from the king of Parthia requesting friendship but then discovered he was parlaying with Mithridates and Tigranes at the same time so decided to march against him. But when he sent for the remainder of his army to join him from Pontus they refused point blank and news of this demoralised the soldiers with Lucullus.

(31) So Lucullus abandoned his plan to attack Parthia and moved against Tigranes again, besieging Artaxata. Plutarch explains that this city was sited and constructed under the supervision of the famous Hannibal after he had fled from Carthage. Tigranes drew up another combined army to stop him but Lucullus crossed the river Arsania and destroyed the royal army.

(32) Lucullus set off in pursuit but the weather became very cold, snow and ice, difficult for horses and the army began to mutiny. So he returned west, descending to a plain where he took a large city named Nsibis.

(33) Lucullus’s luck turned against him. The soldiers had endured two winters in the open rather than occupy cities because Lucullus wanted to keep the friendship of the Greek population. The usual undermining critics in Rome led by Lucius Quintus, one of the praetors, who claimed Lucullus was prolonging the war to enrich himself.

(34) The troops were subverted by Publius Clodius, Luculla’s brother-in-law, who was aggrieved because he’d been overlooked for promotion. Plutarch summarises Clodius’s speeches in which he compared the soldiers’ endless tribulations here in the East, with the nice cushy lifestyle of Pompey’s ex-soldiers from the Spanish war who had, by now, been settled and given citizenship.

(35) In 67 BC a resurgent Mithridates defeated Fimbrius’s army and then the army of Triarius who took him on without waiting for Lucullus. But when Lucullus roused his army to march on Mithridates it rebelled. Lucullus was reduced to going from tent to tent arguing with individual soldiers, but they refused to fight any more. It was all he could to do keep his army together in their summer camp while Tigranes roamed Cappadocia ravaging it at will. In 66 BC the senate appointed Pompey leader of the army in the East with the result that the soldiers refused to obey Lucullus any more while they awaited their new commander.

(36) Pompey and Lucullus met in a village in Galatia, Lucullus aged 52, Pompey aged 40, the latter much the more famous having already won two triumphs. They were polite but didn’t get on, Pompey annulling most of Lucullus’s edicts and allowing him only 1,600 soldiers to take back to Rome.

Plutarch then interjects a two Big Historical Ideas:

If Lucullus had had the magic touch of inspiring love and loyalty in his troops he might have led them against the Parthian Empire which was, at this point, relatively small, and expanded Rome’s borders across Iraq to Iran. But he didn’t and left the border at the Euphrates and the Parthian Empire to grow into a redoubtable enemy.
When he did finally return to Rome and hold a huge triumph (although delayed for nearly three years by his political enemies), the sight of so much wealth and treasure inflamed the Roman imagination so that a man like Marcus Licinius Crassus came to identify the East with one thing only, loot. This inspired Crassus to undertake his ill-fated attack on the Parthian Empire which led to catastrophic Roman defeat at the battle of Carrhae in 53 BC and Crassus’s death soon after.

(37) Lucullus returned to Rome to find himself under attack from Gaius Memmius for prolonging the war. He was also prevented for some time from holding a triumph although when he did, it was magnificent and Plutarch describes it in detail.

(38) Lucullus divorced Clodia, who was ‘a licentious and base woman’ and married Servilia, a sister of Marcus Porcius Cato, but she turned out to be just as bad. Lucullus tolerated her immoral behaviour out of respect for Cato but eventually ‘put her away’.

The Senate hoped Lucullus would prove a political champion and oppose the growing dominance of Pompey and his clique but, maybe sensing that the political situation was too rotten, or just reckoning he’d earned retirement, Lucullus took no part in politics. Given the lamentable record of Marius and Sulla before him, you can’t help lauding his decision. Plutarch appears to agree and makes the interesting suggestion that:

a political cycle, too, has a sort of natural termination, and political no less than athletic contests are absurd, after the full vigour of life has departed.

(39) Instead Lucullus devoted the extraordinary wealth he’d amassed to the arts and luxury and fine living. He was a devotee of Latin and Greek literature and he amassed a great library in his villa. He allowed scholars to use his library and he patronised many poets and philosophers and this was imitated by other aristocratic Romans.

Lucullus was a great builder and built magnificent parks and villas, whose designs were very influential. During his campaigns in the East, the retired consul was impressed by the Persian tradition of horticulture. With his vast wealth he built a great park in the centre of Rome, that became known as the ‘Gardens of Lucullus’ and his gardens were important in the development of gardening in Europe.

He was interested in farming and introduced fruits such as the cherry into Rome and also experimented with aquaculture, especially fish ponds. Lucullus became infamous for his feasts and was a great gourmet.

Lucullus’s example inspired many members of the elite to abandon the traditional austere Republican lifestyle and to cultivate the arts, to collect manuscripts, build villas and gardens, a legacy which was to grow under the empire.

(40) His fine dining became legendary. Plutarch gives a quote from Pompey and Cato both satirising Luculla.

(41) These last chapters are taken up with tittle tattle and stories:

Once, when he was dining alone, and a modest repast of one course had been prepared for him, he was angry, and summoned the servant who had the matter in charge. The servant said that he did not suppose, since there were no guests, that he wanted anything very costly. “What sayest thou?” said the master, “dost thou not know that today Lucullus dines with Lucullus?”

Plutarch tells a story about Cicero (a good friend) and Pompey approaching Lucullus in the Forum and asking to be invited to dinner but insisting he serves only what he was going to have anyway. But Lucullus cleverly outwits them by telling his servant which room he wants to eat in and, because he has so many dining rooms and they all have a specific menu and size, the servant immediately knew what was required and so Cicero and Pompey were still staggered by the quality of the meal. Plutarch criticises this gross ostentation, comparing it with a barbarian.

(42) By contrast Plutarch praises Lucullus for assembling a huge library and throwing it open to all, in particular visiting Greek scholars. Lucullus was such a devotee of philosophy that Cicero wrote a summary of the doctrines of the Old Academy (which he favoured) put them into Lucullus’s mouth and titled the treatise Lucullus.

Although Plutarch has said Lucullus retired from political life that doesn’t seem to be strictly true. Thus Lucullus allied with Cato to prevent Pompey’s proposal for a generous distribution of lands to his soldiers, and this was one factor leading Pompey to form the alliance (or, as Plutarch puts it, ‘a conspiracy’) with Crassus and Caesar in 60 BC. Pompey filled the city with his armed soldiery and expelled from the forum the partisans of Cato and Lucullus to get this measure passed. An old man was then produced who swore that he had been hired by Lucullus to assassinate Pompey but nobody believed him and he was soon found dead, probably killed by the very people who put him up to it. Sounds like slippage back towards the bad old days of Marius and Sulla…

(43) All the more reason, then, for Lucullus to retire from increasingly poisonous public life to his library and his gardens. When Cicero was exiled in 58 BC (after a campaign led by Lucullus’s former brother-in-law Publius Clodius Pulcher), Lucullus retired completely. In his last days there were rumours that he lost his mind but Plutarch retails the story that he deteriorated due to drugs administered by his freedman, Callisthenes.

When he died in 56 BC the people lamented and wanted his body to be buried in the Campus Martius where Sulla was buried, but his brother prevailed on them to let the body be buried at Lucullus’s country estate at Tusculum.

Superstitions, prophecies and omens

When Lucullus had come within sight of the enemy and seen with amazement their multitude, he desired to refrain from battle and draw out the time. But Marius, whom Sertorius had sent to Mithridates from Spain with an army, came out to meet him, and challenged him to combat, and so he put his forces in array to fight the issue out. But presently, as they were on the point of joining battle, with no apparent change of weather, but all on a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies. In shape, it was most like a wine-jar, and in colour, like molten silver. Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated. This marvel, as they say, occurred in Phrygia, at a place called Otryae. (8)

The importance of dreams

All the leaders profiled by Plutarch have meaningful dreams which guide or succour them.

Whenever he had secret intelligence that the enemy had made an incursion into the territory which he commanded, or were trying to bring a city to revolt from him, he would pretend that the doe had conversed with him in his dreams, bidding him hold his forces in readiness. (Sertorius 11)

Lucullus called to mind the advice of Sulla, in his memoirs, which was to think nothing so trustworthy and sure as that which is signified by dreams. (Lucullus 23)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Superstitions

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

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

And:

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

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

The grotesque

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

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

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

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

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

Gory enough for you?

The ludicrous

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

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

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

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

Why Sulla failed

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

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

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

So Sulla:

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

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

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

Plutarch’s Sulla

Predictably, Plutarch focuses on gossip and anecdote:

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

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

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

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

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

Fairy tales

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

Fortunate Sulla

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

Slaughter in Athens 86 BC

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

Proscriptions in Rome

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

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

Mass murder at Praeneste

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

Metrobius

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

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

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

A grisly end

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

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

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by Simon on April 29, 2022 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on April 29, 2022

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Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland (2003) – 1

High speed and racy

As the corny ‘triumph and tragedy’ subtitle suggests, Holland isn’t aiming at originality or depth. He is aiming at writing a gripping, gung-ho, boys’ own adventure narrative history of the Roman Republic, and he does it very well indeed. Rubicon won a history prize, was shortlisted for several others, and opens with no fewer than five pages of laudatory reviews from a host of famous historians and authors (Ian McEwan, A.N. Wilson, Beryl Bainbridge Joanna Trollope), many of whom chose it as their book of the year. It was even described as ‘gripping’ by Boris Johnson, than which there can be no higher praise.

Despite all this puffery, for the first 40 or so pages I was quietly horrified at the casual speed with which Holland skips through Rome’s prehistory and early history:

In a memorable manoeuvre on page 6, we are in the 360s BC in one sentence and then, two sentences later, in the 260s BC. A century flashes past in the blink of an eye.

Rome’s epic conflict with Carthage, the three Punic wars which lasted off and on from 264 and 146 BC, are dispensed with in just two pages (7 and 8) with the third and final Punic war and the destruction of Carthage knocked off on just one page (page 34). By page 10 it is already the 140s BC and Rome has conquered Macedon (the most important kingdom in Greece), Sicily and a good deal of Spain i.e Holland has skipped over400 years of history in a few pages.

The Achaean War, which marked the final ascendency of Rome over Greece and climaxed in the brutal destruction of Greece’s most prosperous city, Corinth, in 146 BC (the same year Carthage was razed to the ground) is dealt with thus:

Meanwhile, just in case anyone was missing the lesson, a Roman army spent the same spring of 146 rubbing it into the noses of the Greeks. That winter a ragbag of cities in southern Greece had presumed to disturb the balance of power that Rome had established in the area. In a war that was over almost before it had begun, a Greek army was swatted like a bothersome wasp, and the ancient city of Corinth reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. (p.35)

As you can see, instead of detail or analysis the reader gets a cheerfully brisk, slangy summary, which sounds like a stagey narrator of a novel, mixing a kind of tabloid journalism with dated schoolboy slang (‘rubbing their noses in it’). ‘A Greek army was swatted like a bothersome wasp.’ How would you characterise that sentence? Prep school patois? Anyway, the book is like this from start to finish, written in a deliberately irreverent, casual, prep school slang and hyper-vivid vernacular. No wonder Boris liked it so much.

I thought Mary Beard’s history of Rome often skipped through military and political events without fully explaining them, but Beard feels like the Encyclopedia Britannica compared with Holland’s speed of light race through Rome’s early history.

The last century of the Republic

Things begin to make sense around page 40 when you begin to realise that Holland is very much not writing a complete history of the entire Roman Republic (509 to 31 BC). Indeed, Holland has skipped through the 650 or so years between Rome’s (legendary) founding in 753 down to the 90s BC in little more than 40 pages. (An approach confirmed by the timeline at the end of the book: this is seven pages long and whereas the first page covers the 620 years from 753 to 133 BC, the remaining six pages settle down and cover 123 BC to 14 AD in granular detail. There’s the strategy of the book, right there.)

No, it’s not at all a history of the Roman Republic – it’s a racy account of the Republic’s final century from, say, the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 down to Octavian’s victory over Mark Anthony in 31 BC.

Why? Because:

the last 100 years of the Roman republic is the period we have by far the best documentation for
during which we know most about the characters of political leaders, because they and their supporters or enemies left copious writings, histories, speeches and letters
and it’s also by far the most dramatic period, when then republican system began to break down, leading to a series of dictators and civil wars

The last twenty years of the Republic are the best documented in Roman history… (p.xxv)

Holland’s account deliberately skips the legendary founding (753), the era of kings (753 to 509), the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud (509) and the long evolution of Rome’s complex political and military administration (500s to 140s), in order to get to the juicy stories, melodramatic events and larger-than-life characters of its ill-fated last century.

Thriller style

Holland or his publishers realised there was a gap in the market for a history of Rome written as page-turning thriller. It really is written in a kind of prep school variety of lurid airport novel prose. As well as processing the content, it was entertaining to try and categorise some of the effects involved:

Ending paragraphs with a sentence. Then completing it in the next paragraph, for dramatic effect

No wonder that Sulla loathed him. / Loathed him and dreamed of winning the same greatness that Marius had won. (p.65)
Free Gaul prepared itself for war. / As did Caesar. (p.245)
Whatever happened the Republic would endure. / Or so everyone assumed. (p.257)
It was Caesar who had taught the Gauls what it meant to be a nation. Now that achievement threatened to destroy him. / Or so it seemed. (p.278)

Melodrama

Devastation shadowed the Mediterranean. (p.34)
The legions moved in for the kill. (p.34)
It was a moment pregnant with menace. (p.73)
The resulting goldrush was soon a stampede. (p.42)
Long-held grudges, never entirely extinguished, flared back into flames. Warfare returned to the Samnite hills. (p.50)
Various tribunes began to strip Lucullus of his provinces one by one, snapping at him like wolves on the trail of a wounded beast. (p.165)
The news spread like wildfire. (p.256)
Senators on the make, their nostrils filled with the scent of power, scrabbled for advancement. (p.260)
But still the whisperings would not be silenced. They could be heard throughout the feverish, troubled capital. (p.289)
As the Republic tottered, so the tremors could be felt throughout the world. (p.313)

Bombastic descriptions

Throughout the monarchies of the East, assorted royal poodles would jump whenever the Romans snapped their fingers… (p.37)
The arteries of empire were hardening with gold, and the more they hardened, so the more Rome squeezed out. (p.42)
The cities groaned under punitive exactions; the social fabric was nearing collapse; along the frontier, petty princelings snarled and snapped. Over the wounds of the ruined province [Asia in the 80s BC] Roman flies buzzed eagerly. (p.155)
The longing of the Romans for glory, which burned brightly within them and lit their city and indeed their entire empire with its flame, also cast flickering and treacherous shadows. (p.206)
The scent of [Pompey’s] failure hung like carrion-perfume over Rome. In the Senate scavengers whined and snarled with excitement. (p.256)

Pop psychology

Sulpicius was not a man lacking in principle. Causes mattered to him, even to the point of destruction. (p.67)
Pompey always had a nose for where the richest opportunities might lie. (p.91)
As ever with [Sulla], opportunism was the obverse of an icy conviction. (p.101)
Little could happen in Rome of which Crassus was not immediately aware, sensitive as he was to every tremor, every fluttering of every fly caught in his web. (p.140)
Pompey could fuss with territories as though they were counters on a gaming board, rearranging them as he pleased, handing out crowns, abolishing thrones, the still-boyish master of the fates of millions. (p.179)
As the two rival armies sparred nervously with each other, jabbing here, feinting there, [Anthony] was always in the thick of the action, dashing, tireless, the most glamorous and discussed man on either side. (p.319)
The female of the Ptolemaic species had always been deadlier than the male. (p.328)

And the sometimes obsessive iteration of stock phrases

The Venetian fleets, taken by surprise, were wiped out. (p.273)
The invaders were summarily wiped out. (p.273)
The garrison of one legionary camp was ambushed and wiped out. (p.277)
The senators in Pompey’s train, impatient for action, wanted Caesar and his army wiped out. (p.320)

Above all Holland’s really obsessive reiteration of his central idea, repeated literally hundreds of times, that all Roman aristocrats were bred and trained and lived for ‘glory’ – a word which appears on every other page.

It is Roman history rewritten by Lee Child. Or maybe by the scriptwriters of Dallas, with an occasional dash of Barbara Cartland or Jilly Cooper or writers who glory in posh, stereotyped and simplified characterisation.

A tiny epitome of this is Holland’s frequent use of the word ‘whore’. In the olden days we described these as ‘prostitutes’ and I remember the good work of the English Collective of Prostitutes back in the 70s and 80s in trying to change the law to protect its members. In our value-neutral, woke times we nowadays refer to them as ‘sex workers’. Holland’s insistence on using the word ‘whore’ is a small symptom of his determination not to write some fuddy-duddy, academic tome but a rollicking Texas barnstormer of an airport novel, where men are men and women are either high society hostesses or whores, goddamit!

The necropolises that stretched towards the coast and the south, along the Appian Way, were notorious for muggers and cut-price whores. (p.14)
[Naples] ancient streets had recently begun to fill with tourists, all of them keen to taste the Greek lifestyle – whether by debating philosophy, complaining to doctors, or falling in love with a witty, well-read whore. (p.48)
Throughout his life Sulla deployed his charm as a weapon, on politicians and soldiers as much as on whores. (p.70)
Sulla, who had spent his own twenties running after whores… (p.103)
It would have been as insulting for Cato to be labelled a demagogue as for a matron to be confused with a whore. (p.233)

Key players

But precisely because he does focus entirely on the action-packed 1st century BC, and dwells on the lurid and blood thirsty and over-the top personalities of the key players, you do certainly emerge (slightly punch drunk) with a much more vivid sense of the characters of the successive strong men who plunged the Republic into civil wars and internecine bloodshed.

In Holland’s account the swing year is 89 BC, a year of two wars. In Italy the widespread revolt of the Italian allies and confederates against Rome, demanding equal rights and freedoms under the law, had amounted to a cruel civil war, with ethnically identical Italian people massacring each other the length and breadth of the peninsula.

But the so-called Social War coincided with the revolt of King Mithradates of Pontus in Anatolia, which hugely raised the stakes. For a ruling class constantly athirst for glory, the prospect of victory in the Social War overlapped with the potentially huge riches to be won by whoever was chosen to go and reconquer the East.

Gaius Marius makes his first appearance on page 56 as the 60-year-old leader of the Roman army sent against the Italian rebels during the Social War, 91 to 87 BC. Marius was fabulously rich and successful, having held the consulship a record six times (p.65).

Gaius Pompeius ‘Strabo’ (p.58) ‘treacherous and brutal’ (p.117) very unpopular in Rome but led successful campaign against the Italians and so was a necessary ally for Sulla.

Lucius Cornelius Sulla (p.62) took over command in the Social War from Marius, leading a huge army of 13 legions which besieged and massacred the Italian rebels.

It’s with this cast that series one of Rubicon – having scooted through the previous 500 years of Roman history in the blink of an eye – really gets under way. For as Sulla brought the Social War to an end he fell into rivalry with his old commanding officer, Marius, about who would lead the army to Asia to defeat Mithradates. Sulla was elected war leader, but Marius politicked against him.

Sulla’s first march on Rome Briefly, Sulla was still campaigning against the Italians when he received the news that command of the army about to be sent to the East to fight Mithradates, and which he had lobbied hard to be given, had been rescinded and given to his arch rival, Marius. Not only that, but the staff officer who brought the message was to replace him in his command against the Italians. When Sulla announced this to his assembled troops and introduced the staff officer his men promptly stoned the messenger to death and clamoured for Sulla to lead them on a march on Rome. No Roman had done this before. Armies were meant to be in the trust of a consul, until he was replaced and handed over command.

The model of insurrection Sulla marked the advent of a completely new type of conflict, war, leadership and politics. The later civil war between Caesar and Pompey and then between Caesar’s assassins and the second triumvirate, followed the model of military insurrection, seizure of the capital and paying off of personal scores established by Sulla. There are two eras in the history of the Republic – Before Sulla’s march on Rome in 88 BC, and Afterwards (p.71).

Sulla’s coup Sulla busted laws and conventions by a) leading his legions on Rome b) crossing the holy boundary, the pomerium, within which no Roman was meant to bear arms (p.72) c) actually sacking the city, commanding his troops to retaliate with fire arrows against civilians chucking roof tiles down on them. And once he had established martial law and set his soldiers at all key points d) he set about executing his opponents. Lists were published and opponents hacked down in public buildings or the streets.

Sulla’s arch enemy Marius fled south and then across the sea to Africa, where he planned a comeback and revenge.

Lucius Cornelius Cinna was one of the two consuls elected in 88 BC after Sulla had taken Rome. Cinna publicly criticised Sulla but then was forced to make a pledge, along with his fellow consul Octavius, not to remove any of Sulla’s legislation (p.70).

Having massacred his opponents or driven them into exile, Sulla finally sailed with his army for the East to deal with Mithradates’ rebellion. Cinna, one of the two consuls he left behind, promptly reneged on his promise not to tamper with Sulla’s laws but was forced out of Rome by his fellow consul Octavius who stayed loyal to his absent master. Once Sulla was out of Italy, Marius returned, joined forces with Cinna, and they marched on Rome and seized power. Cinna’s fellow consul, Octavius, was hacked down in his consul’s chair and his head brought to Cinna who displayed it from the public Rostrum. These were not the ways of the old Republic.

Having returned to Rome, Marius arranged to hold an unprecedented seventh consulship but was an old man, exhausted after a life of fighting, took to debauchery and was dead in a few weeks. And so Cinna now emerged as the regime’s new ‘strongman’ (p.117). He arranged, contrary to all the rules, to hold the consulship for three years in a row, precisely the kind of sustained grip on power which the constitution was supposed to prevent.

In other words, all restraint had been lost and Roman politics had descended to warlordism and gang warfare. Political life had been ‘brutalised’ says Holland, in a phrase which reminds me of the immediate post-war years in the Weimar Republic. Once that element of street violence has entered the political domain it is very hard to remove it because you’ve shown people who are prepared to use it, that it works.

When, after three years of campaigning against Mithradates and rebellious Greek cities, Sulla wound up his affairs in Greece and gave notice of returning with his legions to Italy, Cinna tried to rouse Rome’s home legions to resist him, but the troops mutinied and, in confused circumstances, Cinna was killed. So both Marius and Cinna were dead.

On Sulla’s second march on Rome he was joined by the glamorous and fabulously successful young general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, who was to become known as Pompey the Great (p.90).

Also to his side came the scion of one of Rome’s most noble families, Marcus Licinius Crassus (p.89). Crassus’s father had opposed Marius and been murdered, as had his brother, and his entire family estates confiscated.

Marius had died but had been replaced by his confident and able son, who had rallied the anti-Sulla forces. In other words Rome’s ruling class was by the late 80s BC completely polarised between the group Holland calls ‘the Marians’ and Sulla and his supporters. The conflict between the two parties got mixed up with a final rebellion by the Samnites in the mountains east of Rome who took advantage of the confusion to launch an attack on Rome itself. Sulla hastened his march and, with crucial help from Crassus’s wing of the army, defeated the Samnites at the Battle of the Colline Gate, before marching into Rome for a second time, posing as its saviour and its undoubted ruler (p.92).

About 6,000 Samnite fighters had been taken prisoner or turned themselves in. Sulla ordered them penned up in the Field of Mars an then systematically slaughtered. Then he set about executing all his political opponents, first and foremost every member of the Marian party (p.99). An entire section of Rome’s political class was annihilated. Bounty hunters were paid to track down abscondees, who brought back their severed heads for Sulla to inspect before releasing the fee.

Huge estates were confiscated or passed into the hands of leading figures in Sulla’s party, most notoriously his vital left-hand man at the Colline Gate, Crassus. Sulla himself became the richest man in Roman history (p.101).

Sulla’s conservative revolution

Throughout his course of actions Sulla was convinced he was reforming the Republic and returning it to its purity. Holland describes how he set about trying to purify and rationalise the constitution. He did this by redefining the cursus honorum. He change the numbers of the main posts of office which aspiring politicians had to progress through (aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul, censor), set age limits under which they could not be held, defined the number of years gap between holding them. Since one of the political attacks on him had come from a tribune he passed a law declaring that anyone could still be elected tribune, but that anyone who had held the tribunate was ineligible for any further office In this and numerous other adjustments to the rules, he tried to ensure that the kind of bitter conflict which had led to his own rise, could never take place again.

In 81, with no warning, Sulla resigned his posts and abdicated his authority. He served as a conventional consul for one more year and then abandoned public life altogether. So feared was he, and so thoroughly had he extirpated his enemies, that he felt safe to abandon power, a move which puzzled later generations and historians to this day. He returned to the hard living of his youth, holding huge parties, frequenting the demi-monde, before dying, possibly of liver failure, in 78 BC (p.111). At which point the baton was passed on to a new, younger generation, two leading luminaries of which were Pompey and an ambitious young man named Julius Caesar.

Competition and glory

‘The clash of wits, the fight for pre-eminence, the toiling day and night without break to reach the summit of wealth and power…’ (Lucretius)

One massive point which comes over again and again is that Roman society was based on unbridled and unrelenting competition, especially for the ‘glory’ associated with victory in war.

It seemed self evident to them that the entire course of their history had been an evolution away from slavery, towards a freedom based on the dynamics of perpetual competition. (p.24)
Competitive elections were crucial to the self image as well as the functioning of the Republic. (p.25)
A system that encouraged a gnawing hunger for prestige in its citizens, that seethed with their vaunting rivalries, that generated a dynamism so aggressive that it overwhelmed all who came near it. (p.30)
…a state where ruthless competition was regarded as the basis of all civic virtue. (p.34)
the Roman desire to be the best (p.34)
Traditional Roman morality…fostered competition as the essence of life. (p.62)
In Rome a man was reckoned nothing to be nothing without the fame that accrued from glorious deeds. (p.64)
…a society where prestige was the principle measure of a man’s worth. (p.76)
Competition for honours had always been the lifeblood of the Republic (p.
…the Roman appetite for competition and glory. (p.109)
Hardness was a Roman ideal. The steel required to hunt out glory or endure disaster was the defining characteristic of a citizen. (p.111)
Child rearing, like virtually every other aspect of life in the Republic, reflected the inveterate Roman love of competition. (p.115)
Because he had simultaneously neutralised the tribunate and doubled the size of the Senate, [Sulla’s] legacy was one of increased competition. (p.123)
As they had always done, established families dominated the competition. (p.123)

Competition for military glory and the prestige of holding high office was drummed into every upper class boy from the youngest age. This culture of unrelenting competition served Rome well for centuries, transmitted to its army which never gave up, accepting defeat after defeat but always coming back with more men and arms and, ultimately, conquering all enemies.

However, Holland repeatedly makes the obvious point which arises from the Sulla era which is that, in the bitter rivalry which developed between Marius and his successful general Sulla, somehow this all-consuming competitiveness which had once been such a positive motivating force, turned rotten, spilled over from politicking into military coup, seizure of the capital itself, bloodbaths of enemies, and so on.

And once all these taboos had been broken, once all restraint had been lost, the same pattern was to recur again and again during the Republic’s last half century.

The Roman constitution

Holland regularly stops his headlong narrative to give explanations of various aspects of Roman political and social culture and the Roman constitution. Obviously, Mary Beard refers to this from time to time in her chronicle of Rome but, as is her way, often only explaining an isolated aspect of it in order to illustrate a broader point, more often than not leaving the reader frustrated. Holland is much more straightforward. He stops the narrative and explains stuff. I found this surprisingly useful.

And the way he does this – intermittently – is probably wise because the whole point of the Roman constitution (we learn) was that it was a chaotic, rickety inheritance of roles and positions and posts and elections, which had accumulated over the centuries, which the Romans themselves didn’t fully understand and outsiders found baffling i.e. you couldn’t really sit down and write one definitive description, it’s best approached from different angles and perspectives. And it changed over time. And during the period Holland describes, new laws were continually adjusting and tinkering with it.

The Republic was as full of discrepancies and contradictions as the fabric of the city, a muddle of accretions patched together over many centuries…the Republic was structured by rules as complex and fluid as they were inviolable. To master them was a lifetime’s work…The constitution was a hall of mirrors… (pages 24 to 25)
It was the nature of the Republic to thrive on complexity (p.94)
Then constitution, subtle and finely modulated as it was, had evolved to restrain any violent change. (p.99)
The Republic had many different traditions, confused and confusing and defying codification. (p.137)

Central to the system was the hierarchy of posts the politically ambitious could seek, the cursus honorum (course of offices), mentioned above, the one which Sulla comprehensively reformed.

The cursus honorum

Military service Anyone seeking political office was expected to have seen military service. The aspiring politician would serve in the Roman cavalry (the equites) or in the staff of a general who was a relative or a friend of the family. Military promotions or honours would improve his political prospects. A successful military career might culminate in the office of military tribune to which 24 men were elected by the Tribal Assembly each year.

Consuls Having ejected kings, the Romans took steps to ensure power was never again vested in one individual who ruled for a lifetime by vesting the most senior power in the state as residing in two consuls who were elected to serve for just one year (p.2). The minimum age was 42. Years in Rome’s history were identified not by a number but by the names of the two consuls elected for a particular year. Consuls were responsible for the city’s political agenda, commanded large-scale armies and controlled important provinces. They were accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard of twelve lictors who bore on their shoulders the bundle of strapped rods called fasces, symbol of their power (p.64). Candidates for the consulship had to put their names forward by the start of July (p.224). Every consul, once he had finished his year in post, was given a governorship aboard (p.225).

Aedile Aediles were responsible for maintenance of public buildings and regulation of public festivals.

Quaestor A quaestor served for a year as assistant to a more senior magistrate (p.101). Twenty quaestors served in the financial administration at Rome or as second-in-command to a governor in the provinces. They could also serve as the paymaster for a legion. Some of the quaestors were tasked with supervision of public games (p.198).

Praetor Junior in rank only to the consuls, a praetor was charged with administering the city’s laws, convening and presiding over sessions of the Senate (p.104). During the republic, six or eight praetors were elected each year to serve judicial functions throughout Rome and other governmental responsibilities. In the absence of the consuls, a praetor would be given command of the garrison in Rome or in Italy. Also, a praetor could exercise the functions of the consuls throughout Rome, but their main function was that of a judge. They would preside over trials involving criminal acts, grant court orders and validate ‘illegal’ acts as acts of administering justice.

A praetor was escorted by six lictors. After a term as praetor, the magistrate would serve as a provincial governor with the title of propraetor, commanding the province’s legions, and possessing ultimate authority within his province(s).

Two of the praetors were more prestigious than the others. The Praetor Peregrinus was the chief judge in trials involving one or more foreigners. The Praetor Urbanus was the chief judicial office in Rome with the power to overturn any verdict by any other courts, and serve as judge in cases involving criminal charges against provincial governors.

Tribune The tribunes has right of veto over bills they disliked and power to convene public assemblies to pass bills of their own. The post was considered sacrosanct and so tribunes were not allowed to leave Rome during their tenure (p.27).

The Senate A body of about 300 older men, elected to the Senate because they had held one of the other ‘magistracies’. The Senate didn’t actually make any laws but debated legal and political matters and issued decrees which had no binding force but the magistrates did well to take into account (p.37). During Sulla’s reign of terror he executed or drove into exile so many senators that the number fell to 100 but during the period of his reforming rule, he packed it with new blood, expanding its number to 600, and demolished the old Curia building and had a grand new Senate House built.

Censor The censorship was the single most powerful and influential position or magistracy, responsible for overseeing the census, held every five years to produce a detailed assessment of every household, its wealth and income and number of slaves and dependents, on which the elaborate hierarchies of Rome were based (p.96).

N.B. This series of posts is only one part in the jigsaw of the constitution. I haven’t mentioned the priesthoods, for example the priest of Jupiter, the father god of Rome, a post Julius Caesar held while still a boy. Or the pontifex maximus, the most prestigious post in the entire state, which a man held for life and came with a mansion on the Via Sacra, in the Forum, in the heart of Rome (p.199).

Nor any of the assemblies with their various rules for elections, the importance of ‘tribes’, tribunes or tribunals, or the densely structured economic and social hierarchies which applied to every citizen and determined their rights and votes and place in the grand scheme.

As Holland’s narrative proceeds, the scale of the bribery involved in each subsequent set of elections grows and grows in scale (e.g. p.225).

Other learnings

Rome was a squalid maze

Surprisingly, ancient Rome was a shambles of narrow dirty alleys and wiggly roads packed with people, horses and carts. Since the consuls only ruled for a year there was no long-term town planning which meant the city became a byword for narrow roads and alleys, temples, houses and tenement blocks called insulae looming over alleys full of mud and excrement (pages 15 to 18).

Clutter was the essence of the Republic. It spread everywhere that Sulla cared to look. It could be seen in the very appearance of Rome itself. (p.106)

Cicero has a famous quote on the state of Rome, when criticising the senator and moralist Cato the Younger (born 95 BC) which Holland translates as:

‘He addresses the Senate as if he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than Romulus’s shit-hole.’ (quoted on page 196)

[The more restrained H. H. Scullard translates this as Cicero complaining that ‘Cato talked as if he were in the republic of Cato, not in the sink of Romulus’, From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 138 BC to AD 68 by H. H. Scullard, page 117. L.P. Wilkinson in his translation of Cicero’s letters gives it as: ‘He talks as if he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than Romulus’s dunghill‘, page 39.]

As well as pausing his narrative to describe various aspects of the culture or constitution of Rome, Holland also stop periodically to give a page or two on the history and social and political function of various famous locations around the city. These are always interesting and the vivid thriller style which sometimes seems out of place in his political history works very well to bring these Roman places and the milling noisy crowds who filled them to life.

The Circus Maximus (pages 20, 122)

Right at the start of his account Holland explains how the legendary Romulus was said to have built his camp on what was to be named the Palatine Hill while Remus built his on the Aventine Hill a few hundred yards south. The triumph of Romulus marked the Palatine as the seat of Rome’s richest, later the hill of the emperors, while the Aventine became associated with the poor. It was to the Aventine that the disgruntled plebs went during the series of secessios – in effect, general strikes – when they were campaigning for equal civil rights.

The shallow valley between the two hills had been the site of games and then chariot races from time immemorial. It was the first and largest stadium in ancient Rome, measuring 2,037 feet in length and 387 feet in width and could accommodate over 150,000 spectators. As such it was one of the two big spaces in the city where citizens could meet and mingle and enjoy a sense of civic community. It was where politicians in power, magistrates or victorious generals could receive the cheers or boos of huge crowds (p.20). Games were organised by the class of magistrate called the aediles.

On page 122 Holland gives a brief but vivid description of the chariot races held in the circus. Although the building was huge the track itself was quite narrow with only width for four chariots and the turn at the end of each lap required the charioteer to steer close to the huge metal poles which defined the turn, the metae, without actually touching them with his chariot’s wheels, which would almost send chariot and him ricocheting to certain death.

The Forum (p.85)

Along with the Circus Maximus, the Forum was one of the two open spaces in the city where citizens could mingle freely. Originally a marsh, it was drained to provide a meeting place for squabbling tribes from the hills and so could be said to be the place where Romans learned to sort out their differences through political means. Like the rest of the city it was a jumble of discordant monuments. (p.85)

The Field of Mars (p.93)

Holland gives an excellent description of the Campus Martius and its central role in the republic’s political processes. It was originally, in this plain outside the city walls that citizens were taken and administered the oath which turned them into soldiers. Here they were ranked by wealth and status. At the top were those who could afford their own horse and so were named the equites. Below the equestrian class were five further classes ranked by wealth until you reached the lowest class, people who couldn’t even afford a slingshot and were named the proletarii.

Worth stopping a moment to consider this word: in the census the poorest citizens were defined as those who had little or no property except for their children. The Latin term for these was proles or ‘offspring’. So while the richest citizens could offer horses and arms, the poorest could only offer their proles as future Roman citizens available to colonise conquered territories – and so this class was called the proletarius (producer of offspring), singular, or proletarii in the plural.

Anyway, Holland explains how the Field of Mars evolved into the location of elections for the many magistrate positions or assemblies. The key building was the Ovile or ‘sheepfold’, an enclosure with gates and barriers, where citizens lined up to vote, richest at the front, poorest at the back. Exemplifying the Roman love of complexity, the precise order or procedure for voting was different in the case of each election or magistracy, with strict rules and protocols to be observed.

Holland gives a vivid description of the scene at a typical election, the hoisting of a flag, the blowing of trumpets, the enormous queues of shuffling citizens, the dust raised in the hot air, the tension for election days creating ‘one of the greatest excitements of Roman civic life’ (p.95). Then appearance of the candidates in their specially whitened togas (as Mary Beard tells us the word ‘candidate’ derives from the Roman for white, candidus, referring to these specially whitened togas). The milling crowd, the jeers and chatter and then, when the winning candidates were announced, cheers from their supporters and they were escorted off from the Ovile to the Capitol Hill to take up office.

In passages like these, Holland’s strategy of eschewing scholarly detail in favour of vivid description and atmosphere works very well indeed.

The Rubicon

The River Rubicon which Julius Caesar so grandly crossed with the Army of Gaul, thus decisively plunging the Republic into civil war, thus giving us a phrase we have used for centuries to indicate taking an irrevocable decision…this river was in fact so small and insignificant that nobody in later centuries, and even today, knows where it actually is.

Credit

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland was published in 2003 by Little, Brown. All references are to the 2004 Abacus paperback.

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by Simon on February 28, 2022 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on February 28, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timeline

8th century BC

753 BC: The legendary founding date of Rome.

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

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

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

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

6th century BC

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

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

5th century BC

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

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

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

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

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

4th century BC

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

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

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

348: Plague strikes Rome.

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

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

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

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

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

3rd century BC

298 to 290: Third Samnite War:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

219: Illyrian coast is under Roman control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2nd century BC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

154 to 139: Viriato leads the Lusitanians against Rome.

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

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

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

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

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

139: Law introduced the secret ballot.

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

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

133: Rome captures Numantia, ending Iberian resistance.

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

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

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

121: Gallia Narbonensis becomes a Roman province.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1st century BC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

64: Galatia becomes a client state of Rome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

58 to 57: Cicero is exiled from Rome.

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

55: Caesar attempts to invade Britain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit

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

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by Simon on February 4, 2022 • Permalink

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Tagged Achaean War, Africa, Allobroges, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Antiochus III, Antiochus the Great, Antiochus XIII, Aquae Sextiae, Aquitania, Asia Minor, Attalus III, Battle of Actium, Battle of Arausio, Battle of Burdigala, battle of Cannae, Battle of Carrhae, Battle of Lake Regillus, Battle of Magnesia, Battle of Philippi, Battle of Pydna, Battle of the Allia, Battle of Zama, Battle of Zela, Bellovaci, Boii, Brennus, Brutus, Carthage, Cassius, Catalinus, Celts, Cicero, Cimbri, Cimbrian War, Cleopatra of Egypt, Corsica, Crassus, First Civil War, First Macedonian War, First Punic War, First Samnite War, First Servile War, First Triumvirate, Fourth Macedonian War, Gaius Marius, Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Gallia Narbonensis, Gaul, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Great Goddess, Greece, Hannibal, Hannibal Barca, history, Iberia, Illyria, Jugurtha, Jugurthine War, Julius Caesar, Kingdom of Pontus, Latin War, Lepidus, Livy, Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravalla, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, Macedonian Kingdom, Marcus Junius Silanus, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marius Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Mark Antony, Mary Beard, military history, Mithridates VI, Mithridatic Wars, Morini, Numantia, Numidia, Octavian Caesar, optimates, Parthians, Pergamon, Pharnaces II, Philip V, Plutarch, Pompey, Pontus, populares, proscriptions, Publius Cornelius Scipio, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, Quintus Servilius Caepio, rape of Lucretia, Rape of the Sabine Women, Rebellion of Spartacus, Rebellion of the mercenaries, Roman Republic, Roman timeline, Rome, Romulus, Romulus and Remus, Sabines, sack of Corinth, sack of Rome, Sallust, Sardinia, Scipio Africanus, Second Battle of Cirta, Second Macedonian War, Second Punic War, Second Samnite War, Second Servile War, Second Triumvirate, Seleucid Empire, Seleucid War, Senones, Sibylline Books, Sicily, Social War, Spartacus, SPQR, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Suetonius, Syria, Tarquin Superbus, Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, Teutones, Third Macedonian War, Third Punic War, Third Samnite War, Third Servile War, Titus Tatius, Treaty of Phoenice, Twelve Tables, Utica, Vercingetorix, war

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) – 3 Historical overview

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard is divided into roughly three parts – the early legendary period (1200 to 500 BC), the republic (509 to 30 BC) and the empire (30 BC to where Beard chooses to end her account, in the year 212 AD).

It’s sort of predictable that most of the earliest history of ancient Rome, its foundation and early years, would be shrouded in legend and probably mostly fictional. It’s a more interesting point, and one Beard repeats a number of times, that a good deal of what you could call the early historical period, the 600s, 500s, 400s and even 300s BC, were still heavily distorted and fictionalised and glamorised by the authors of the first centuries BC and AD.

They projected the administrative ranks and classes and issues, the epic battles and even the grand architecture of the Rome of their own time, back onto earlier periods which probably consisted of little more than chieftains living in basic huts and leading cattle raids against nearby communities.

It was a world of chieftains and warrior bands, not of organised armies and foreign policy. (p.117)

For a fundamental learning to emerge from the first 200 pages of this book is that the first century BC and the first century AD were the classic period for great Roman writing, including the first extensive historical writing (Livy), detailed discussions of the Roman constitution and politics (Cicero), Catullus’s love poetry, Caesar’s accounts of his war in Gaul, plays, poetry and so on (p.214).

The point being that modern historians think that many aspects of the accounts written during these centuries about the founding and early history of Rome hundreds of years earlier are very misleading. The rulers, warriors, wars and battles of the early centuries were exaggerated to heroic proportions, mixed with legend, and highly moralised to provide improving, educational stories to a 1st century audience.

It is clear that much of the tradition that has come down to us, far from reality, is a fascinating mythical projection of later Roman priorities and anxieties into the distant past. (p.100)

(This core idea, and the word ‘projected’, recur on pages 97, 100, 108, 141, 205).

The traditional, grand and impressive history of the founding and early years of ancient Rome, as it was written up by Rome’s first century propagandists, was repeated for centuries afterwards, inspiring all subsequent histories, countless poems and paintings and plays throughout the Western tradition. It was only in the twentieth century, with the advent of modern archaeological techniques, that virtually all these stories came, not so much to be questioned (historians had been sceptical about some of the taller tales even at the time) but to be definitively disproved by the evidence in the ground.

This process goes on to the present day, with ever-more advanced technology and computer analysis (and DNA analysis of bones and remains) contributing to a comprehensive overhaul of our image of ancient Rome. If you Google books about ancient Rome you’ll quickly discover that ones published even as recently as 2000 are now considered out of date because the archaeology is moving at such a pace and shedding ever-newer light on Rome’s origins and early development.

Now, Beard does take a lot of this on board. Her narrative frequently grinds to a halt while she tells us about important, recent archaeological discoveries, complete with photos and descriptions. The problem for the reader is that Beard doesn’t give a good clear detailed account of what the traditional story actually was before setting out to question and undermine it. She’ll write that the famous story about x has been thrown into doubt by recent finds under the Forum and you, as the reader, go: ‘Hang on, hang on, what famous story about x?’

In fact she uses the word ‘famous’ very liberally and often to describe things I’ve never heard of. I appreciate that this is because they are ‘famous’ in the world of Classics and ancient history, but surely the whole point of the book is to try and bring this world to outsiders, to people who know very little about it apart from the handful of clichés and stereotypes we call ‘general knowledge’.

What follows is my notes for myself on the key events from the traditional version.

1. Aeneas 1200 BC

Ancient legends associate Rome with the arrival of Aeneas, exile from Troy, around 1200 BC (ancient Greeks and Romans dated the Trojan War to what we now call the 12th or 11th centuries BC). Aeneas settled in central Italy and founded the line which led, centuries later, to King Numitor the maternal grandfather of the twins, Romulus and Remus.

Numerous variations on the Aeneas legend exist and were extensively reworked in the historical period i.e. from the 2nd century BC onwards. The version best known to the post-Roman world derives from the Aeneid, the great epic poem by Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC to 19 AD). The Aeneid is maybe the most influential poem in Western literature (p.76).

The first six of the poem’s twelve books describe Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Rome, the second six describe Aeneas’s settlement in Italy in the region of what would (a lot later) come to be Rome. This process of settlement involved Aeneas in fierce fighting against local tribes (the Rutulians led by their king, Turnus) until he finally won the war, gained the territory and the hand of the beautiful Lavinia, daughter of another powerful local king, Latinus.

But Aeneas was not the actual founder of Rome. He founded a town he named Lavinium after his wife. It was his son, Ascanius, who was said to have founded another town in the area, Alba Longa, whose king, Numitor, some 400 years later, was to the maternal grandfather of the twins Romulus and Remus (p.77).

2. Romulus 750s BC

Beard speculates freely about the origins and meaning of the Romulus and Remus legend about the founding of Rome. Characteristically, she doesn’t explain it very well so I had to look it up on Wikipedia to get a clear understanding. Various versions are found in ancient texts, many of which contradict each other, but the consensus story is that:

Numitor was king of Alba Longa, a town a little south of what was to become Rome. He was overthrown by his brother Amulius. Numitor had a daughter, Rhea Silvia, who was a vestal virgin. She was made pregnant by the war god Mars and gave birth to twins. Seeing as they were descendants of the rightful (overthrown) king, Numitor, Amulius ordered the twins to be abandoned on the banks of the river Tiber (as Moses, Oedipus, Paris and so many other figures of legend are abandoned as children). Here they were discovered by a she-wolf who suckled them and kept them alive in a cave (later known as the Lupercal) until they were discovered and adopted by Faustulus, a shepherd and raised (like Paris) as simple shepherds. In time the twins grew into natural leaders of men and found themselves caught up in a conflict between Numitor and Amulius. They joined the forces of Numitor and helped restore him to his rightful throne of Alba Longa, during which process they were recognised as Numitor’s grandsons. Then they set off to found a city of their own, deciding to build it on the defensible hills by the Tiber where they founded Rome. They each set about building a citadel of their own, Romulus preferring the Palatine Hill (above the Lupercal cave), Remus preferring the Aventine Hill. When Remus mockingly jumped over the early foundations of Romulus’s wall, Romulus killed him (various versions supply other reasons why the pair fell out so badly). Romulus then went on to found the city of Rome, its institutions, government, military and religious traditions and reigned for many years as its first king.

Interpret this legend how you will. The story of founding brothers who fall out, with one murdering the other, is as old as Cain and Abel (p.64). And on this telling, Romulus and Remus are repeating the fraternal falling out of their grandfather and his brother, Numitor and Amulius. In my opinion these myths may be attempts by ancient peoples to structure and rationalise the kind of civil strife early societies were prone to.

Did any of this actually happen? Almost certainly not. The earliest written record of the legend dates from the late third century BC i.e. some 500 years after the events it purports to describe. Far from being a real person who founded Rome, Romulus is almost certainly a legendary invention and his name the result of what historians and linguists call ‘back formation’ i.e. starting with an established place and inventing a legendary figure who you claim it’s named after. Almost certainly ‘Roma’ came first and Romulus afterwards (p.71).

The suckling by the she-wolf is precisely the kind of odd, distinctive and uncanny detail of ancient myth which defies rationalisation. A quick amateur interpretation for a self-consciously warrior race like the Romans would be that the twins imbibed wolfish aggression and ferocity from their animal wetnurse. Same with their parentage, a vestal virgin (holiness and piety) impregnated by the God of War (speaks for itself).

Incidentally, what Beard refers to as the ‘famous’ statue of Romulus and Remus suckling from the she-wolf is a fake, in the sense that the figures of the suckling boys were made in the fifteenth century, a thousand years after the sculpture of the wolf.

Statue of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, currently in the Capitoline Museum. The statue is thought to be Etruscan, maybe from the fifth century BC while the twins are from the 15th century AD.

By the 1st century Roman historians had calculated a year for the founding of their city (in the third year of the sixth cycle of Olympic Games, p.71) and dated events ab urbe condita (AUC) or ‘since the city was founded’. Six hundred years later, in 525 AD when the monk Dionysius Exiguus first devised the system of dating events around the birth of Christ, into either ‘before Christ’ (BC) or ‘in the year of our Lord’ (anno domini or AD), he calculated the AUC date to be 753 BC, a Christian-era date which became enshrined in later tradition.

By contrast, during the republican period itself, historic events were dated by referring to the name of the consuls in power during a particular year. In the imperial period, government officials date events as in year 1, 2, 3 etc of each individual emperor. You can see why both these methods would eventually become very cumbersome, complicated and confusing. It’s surprising it took so long for the Christian authorities, in the shape of Dionysus, to come up with what, to us, appears the obvious, improved system.

3. The monarchy 750s to 509 BC

Seven improbably long-lived kings are said to have filled the period from 753 (the traditional date for the founding of the city) to 509 (the traditional date for the overthrow of the monarchy) (p.93, 96). Maybe seven kings to match the seven hills the city is supposedly founded on (?). Archaeologists and historians think the last 3 in the list were real people, but there’s debate over whether the first 4 were real or figures of legend:

Romulus
Numa Pompilius
Tullus Hostilius
Ancus Marcius
Tarquinius Priscus
Servius Tullius
Tarquinius Superbus

4. End of the monarchy / founding of the republic 509 BC

The outrageous behaviour of the last king, Tarquin the Arrogant, prompted the population of Rome to rise up, overthrow him, and establish a republic. The spark for the revolution was, from an early point, associated with the legend of the rape of Lucretia.

Lucretia was a noblewoman in ancient Rome. She was raped by the son of the last king, Sextus Tarquinius and, out of shame, committed suicide by stabbing herself (p.122-3). Lucretia’s noble family and their allies rose up against Tarquinius and drove him and his family out of Rome although he didn’t give up without a fight, sparking a war against him and his followers which lasted up to a decade (p.125). As with other early legends there are no contemporary accounts, in fact the first written accounts of the story are only given by the Roman historian Livy (born 60 BC) and Greco-Roman historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (born 59 BC) 450 years later.

There followed a period of transition during which it was agreed that the new republic would be ruled by an elected leader called a ‘consul’, himself advised by a ‘senate’ of elders and aristocrats. This quickly evolved into the notion of two consuls, each elected to serve for one year, a system Rome was to keep for the next 1,000 years. Collatinus, the husband of the raped suicide Lucretia was one of the first consuls (p.127).

Quite soon the Senate invented another innovation, the ability to elect a single leader, a ‘dictator’, to manage the republic during time of war. This was necessary because the early accounts describe how Rome was plunged almost immediately into a long series of wars with neighbouring tribes and people in Italy, for example the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Aquians, the Veii, the Senones, Umbri, Picentes and the Marsi.

5. The Conflict of the Orders 400s to 200s BC

In its earliest days political power was held by the wealthiest families, described as ‘patricians’ (Latin patricii) and sharply distinguished from the majority of the population who were described as ‘plebeians’ or ‘plebs’. Membership of the patrician class was hereditary and could only be achieved by birth.

The fifth century i.e. the 400s BC, were marked by a series of administrative reforms which slowly and arduously gave the plebeians equal power and say with the patricians (although it wasn’t until 366 that the first plebeian consul was elected).

The conflict between the patricians and plebeians in Rome is referred to as the Conflict of the Orders although, as Beard points out, the Latin ordines translates better as ‘social ranks’ (p.146). In our post-Marxist times it’s tempting to call it the Class War but that would also be wrong because a key point that emerges from Beard’s account is that the plebs in question weren’t necessarily poor: in fact many of them were richer than the patricians, it was more a question of nouveaux riches ‘new men’, who’d acquired military glory and/or wealth but were excluded from running the city by virtue of not being born into the right families.

The conflict took place over a very long period, from soon after the foundation of the republic, around 500 BC, down to 287 BC when patrician senators finally lost their last check over the Plebeian Council.

Really major moments were marked by a secessio when the entire population of plebeians left the city causing what was, in effect, a general strike. The first of these took place in 494, prompted by the plebeians’ widespread indebtedness to rich patrician lenders, and it successfully led to the establishment of a new body, the Concilium Plebis, and a new office of state, the tribunes of the people (tribuni plebis). There were at least five secessios.

Some of the main constitutional reforms from the period include:

450 BC drafting of the Twelve Tables, an early code of law (pages 139 to 145).

445 Lex Canuleia removing the ban on marriage between patricians and plebeians (lex is Latin for law, hence English words like ‘legal’)

443 BC The offices of the Tribuni militum consulari potestate were established. A collegium of three patrician or plebeian tribunes, one each from specific Roman tribes (the Titienses, the Ramnenses, and the Luceres) would hold the power of the consuls from year to year, subject to the Senate.

367 BC one of the consulships was opened to plebeians (p.148).

342 BC law passed making it mandatory for one of the two consuls to be a plebeian.

339 BC law passed making it mandatory for one of the two censors to be a plebeian

326 BC the system of enslavement for debt was abolished, establishing the principle that the liberty of the Roman citizen was an inalienable right (p.148).

300 BC half of the priesthoods (which were also state offices) must be plebeian.

287 BC Third Secession led to the Hortensian Law stating, among other things, that all plebiscites (measures passed in the Concilium Plebis) had the force of laws for the whole Roman state, removing from the Patrician senators their final check over the Plebeian Council. By depriving the Patricians of their final weapon over the Plebeians, it ensured that the Roman state didn’t become a democracy but rested firmly under the control of the new Patricio-Plebeian aristocracy.

The conflict marked the breakdown of the old aristocracy of birth and its replacement by an aristocracy based on i) the holding of political offices and ii) wealth, particularly land-based wealth. In Beard’s words, the Conflict of the Orders:

replaced a governing class defined by birth with one defined by wealth and achievement. (p.167)

The upshot of the Conflict of the Orders was not popular revolution but the creation of a new governing class, comprising rich plebeians and patricians. (p.189)

So it didn’t remove the hierarchical, class-based nature of Roman society, nor did it significantly improve the lives or prospects of the poorer members of society.

6. Consolidating power in Italy – Rome’s wars

This was a world where violence was endemic, skirmishes with neighbours were annual events, plunder was a significant revenue stream for everyone and disputes were resolved by force. (p.162)

Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life…the Roman tradition [viewed] war as the structuring principle of history…The Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life…somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year…(pages 176 to 177)

It was a world of political conflict, shifting alliances and continuous, brutal interstate violence…(p.194)

The ancient world consisted of tribes, kingdoms and empires almost continually at war with each other. Rome was to eventually emerge as the most effective fighting state in the Mediterranean region. But first it took a century of fighting their neighbours to emerge as the strongest power in central, and then all of, Italy. And then the series of Punic Wars (264 to 146) to wear down and eliminate their main rival in the central Mediterranean. Carthage. Here are some of the key moments:

Conquest of Veii 396

396 BC Roman forces led by the dictator Marcus Furius Camillus conquered the nearby town of Veii. This probably involved relatively small numbers on both sides but was mythologised by later writers as a heroic conflict up there with the Trojan wars. For Beard its significance is that Rome didn’t just beat another city, it annexed it along with all its land. Soon afterwards, the Veii and three local tribes were included in the list of tribes who were allowed to become Roman citizens. Conquest and assimilation were to be the basis for Rome’s winning formula. It is no coincidence that around the same time as this Roman soldiers first earned a salary (from the Latin for ‘salt’) i.e. they stopped being glorified private militias and became something much more organised, centrally funded and administered (p.155).

Gauls take Rome 390 BC

Brennus was a chieftain of the Senones tribe of Cisalpine Gauls (where Cisalpine means this side of the Alps i.e. in Italy, as opposed to transalpine meaning the other side of the Alps i.e. in modern France) (incidentally that explains the newish word cisgender, meaning someone whose sense of personal identity aligns with their birth gender, as opposed to transgender meaning someone whose sense of personal identity is different from their birth sex: you can see how cis and trans retain the sense they had in ancient times of this side and that side of a border, in this case a psychological one to do with gender identity.)

Back to Brennus: in about 390 BC he defeated the Romans at the Battle of the Allia and went on to take Rome, holding it for several months (pages 138 and 155).

Brennus’s sack of Rome was the only time in 800 years the city was occupied by a non-Roman army before the fall of the city to the Visigoths in 410 AD and beard spends some time describing the how the memory grew in shame and trauma over the years, was exaggerated and lamented by 1st century writers, and routinely used as a benchmark of scandal and humiliation with which to attack contemporary politicians.

Latin War 341 to 338 (p.158)

The Samnite wars (p.158)

Fought against communities in the mountainous parts of central-south Italy (p.158).

First Samnite War 343 to 341
Second Samnite War 326 to 304
Third Samnite War 298 to 290

By the end of the Samnite wars over half the Italian peninsula was under Roman control, either directly or through alliances (p.159).

(334 to 323 Alexander the Great conquers from Greece to India, p.158)

Pyrrhic war 280 to 275

From the incursion of Pyrrhus in 280 BC to the final crushing of Carthage in 146 Rome was continuously at war with enemies in the Italian peninsula or overseas (p.175).

The Greek king Pyrrhus invades southern Italy but, despite a series of victories, his forces become so depleted that he moved on to Sicily (278 to 275) before returning to the mainland and being conclusively defeated by the Romans. He survived the final battle and withdrew the remnant of his forces back to Greece (p.174).

The Pyrrhic War was the first time that Rome confronted the professional mercenary armies of the Hellenistic states of the eastern Mediterranean. Their victory sent waves around the eastern Mediterranean. As a result of the war, Rome confirmed its hegemony over southern Italy.

First Punic War 264 to 241

Rome against Carthage, fought almost entirely in the contested island of Sicily (p.175).

Second Punic war 219 to 202

When Hannibal Barca marched a Carthaginian army from Spain around the south of France and then over the Alps. This is covered in detail in Richard Miles’s book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, from which I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t a one-year campaign, but that Hannibal and his army criss-crossed Italy for fifteen years (p.175). The campaign was most famous for the epic Battle of Cannae in 216 where Hannibal destroyed a Roman army, inflicting a reputed 70,000 casualties (p.180-2).

First Macedonian war 215 to 205

The Macedon wars were triggered by fears that their king would cross the short stretch of sea to Italy to come to Hannibal’s aid. So a Roman army was sent to fight him (p.176).

Second Macedonian war 200 to 197

Syrian war 192 to 188

Under Scipio Asiaticus the Romans defeated Antiochus ‘the Great’ of Syria (who had, as it happens, given a refuge to Hannibal in exile from Carthage) (p.176).

Third Macedonian war 172 to 168

Final Roman victory in this war effectively gave Rome control over all mainland Greece (p.176 and 196). The Greek historian Polybius commented that, in the 50 years up to 168 Rome had conquered the entire known world (p.199). When Aemilius Paulinus returned from defeating king Perseus of Macedon, was given a ‘triumph’ in 167, it took three days for the procession of loot to pass through Rome, including so much silver coin that 3,000 men were needed to carry it in 750 huge vessels (p.201).

War in Iberia 155 to 133

Carthage occupied southern Spain, not least to exploit the vast silver mines there which were worked by up to 40,000 slaves (p.196). Hannibal was the son of the Carthaginian general who first conquered it, which explains why he set out from Spain, not Africa, to attack Rome. During these years Rome sent legions to finally defeat and expel the Carthaginians from southern Spain.

Third Punic war 149 to 146

Short struggle which ended with the Romans under Publius Cornelius Scipio breaking into Carthage, burning and razing it to the ground, carrying off the population that survived into slavery. For which Scipio acquired the name ‘Africanus’ i.e. African (Carthage being in north Africa, under what is the modern city of Tunis) (p.209).

War with Jugurtha 118 to 106

Described on pages 264 to 268 as an example of the way Rome’s old constitution struggled to cope with managing a Mediterranean-wide empire. The mismanagement of the war led Sallust to compose The War Against Jugurtha a devastating indictment of Rome’s failure to quell this north African ruler.

The Social War 91 to 87

From the Latin bellum sociale meaning ‘war of the allies’, when Rome went to war with its several of its autonomous allies or socii (pages 234 to 239). The allies had for some time wanted full Roman citizenship, an issue which became more and more bitterly divisive. Things came to a head when the consul Marcus Livius Drusus suggested reforms grant the Italian allies Roman citizenship, giving them a greater say in the external policy of the Roman Republic. The Roman senatorial elite rejected his ideas and he was assassinated. At which point the allies realised there was no hope of reform and communities across Italy declared independence from Rome. When the rebels took Asculum, the first city to fall to them, they slaughtered every Roman they could find. The wives of the men who refused to join them were tortured and scalped. To which Rome replied with equal brutality. And so four long years of what, in many places, was in effect a civil war. According to Beard, the Social War was:

one of the deadliest and most puzzling conflicts in Roman history (p.234)

After defeating the various allies, Rome did indeed grant citizenship to all of peninsular Italy, at a stroke trebling the number of Roman citizens to about a million. The Social War led to a complete Romanisation of Italy (p.217) and the nearest thing to a nation state that ever existed in the ancient world (p.239).

Civil wars

Which brings us to the era of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138 to 78 BC), Roman general and statesman who won the first large-scale civil war in Roman history and became the first man of the Republic to seize power through force. He was the first Roman general to march on Rome and take it by force, in 88, doing so to outlaw his enemy Gaius Marius. He did it again on his return from campaigning in the East, installing himself as dictator in Rome and embarking on a reign of terror which involved issuing proscriptions, or prices on the heads of thousands of men including a third of the Senate (pages 217 and 243). The point is that a general occupying Rome by force and bloodily wiping out his political opponents set a terrible precedent for the decades to come.

First Mithradatic war 89 to 85

The Greek king Mithradates VI of Pontus was to prove a comically irrepressible and obstinate foe (p.242).

Second Mithradatic war 83 to 81

It was during this war that General Sulla was appointed dictator by the Senate.

Third Mithradatic war 73 to 63

Revolt of Spartacus 73 to 71

Beard refers to Spartacus’s slave revolt three or four times (pages 217, 248, 249) but is not interested in the details of battles or outcomes. She uses it mainly to demonstrate modern ideas about the social make-up of the Italian countryside, in the sense that the rebellion can’t have lasted as long as it did if it was just slaves. Quite a lot of the rural poor and maybe lower middle classes must have joined it (page 217 and again on page 249).

Pompey the Great

During the 70s Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was manoeuvring to become the most powerful Roman general. In the scope of his ambition based on his enormous achievement in remodelling Rome’s entire possessions in the East, Beard thinks ‘Pompey has a good claim to be called the first Roman emperor’ (p.274). Complex politicking led in 60 BC to Pompey joining Marcus Licinius Crassus (the man who led the army which finally defeated Spartacus) and Julius Caesar in a military-political alliance known as the First Triumvirate (p.218 and 279). The point about it was the way it aimed to circumvent all the careful checks and balances of the old republican constitution in order to vest absolute and permanent power in the hands of just three men.

The 50s were a decade of complex jockeying for power as the two main players fought for Rome in their respective arenas, Caesar conquering Gaul, Pompey in the East. Crassus died at the disastrous Battle of Carrhae in 53 against Rome’s long-time eastern enemy, the Parthian Empire. His death began the unravelling of the uneasy partnership between Pompey and Caesar.

Julius Caesar

In 49 Caesar marched his army back into Italy and crossed the river Rubicon, committing to war with Pompey, a civil war which led to Pompey’s death in 48 but which dragged on until the last of his supporters were vanquished in 45.

At which point Caesar had emerged as by the far the most powerful politician and military figure in Rome and was looking forward to consolidating his power and implementing a widespread programme of reforms, when he was assassinated in March 44, plunging Rome into another 15 years of civil war.

P.S.

It’s worth reiterating and emphasising that Beard’s book is not a military history. She doesn’t give detailed descriptions of any battles, doesn’t detail the progress of any specific campaign or war. She only mentions wars as ammunition for discussions about the historical and social questions and issues which is what she’s far more interested in. So to repeat an example given above, she refers to the Spartacus rebellion 3 or 4 times but gives hardly any detail about the man himself, about the life or conditions of gladiators, doesn’t give any sense of the campaigns or battles involved in the three-year-long conflict. Instead it’s only briefly mentioned in the context of broader discussions of poverty, social ranks, relationships with Rome’s Italian allies and so on. If you’re looking for good accounts of ancient Roman wars, battles, generals and so on, this is emphatically not the book for you.

Credit

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

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by Simon on February 2, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History, War

Tagged ab urbe condita, AD, Aemilius Paulinus, Aeneas, Alba Longa, Alexander the Great, Amulius, ancient Greece, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Ancus Marcius, Antiochus the Great, Aquians, Archaeology, Ascanius, AUC, Aventine Hill, Æneid, Battle of Carrhae, Battle of the Allia, BC, Brennus, Caesar, Cain and Abel, Carthage, Catullus, Cicero, Cisalpine Gauls, citizenship, Civil Wars, classics, Collatinus, Concilium Plebis, Conflict of the Orders, consuls, Dionysius Exiguus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Etruscans, Faustulus, First Macedonian War, First Mithradatic War, First Punic War, First Triumvirate, Gaul, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Hannibal Barca, history, Hortensian Law, Iberia, Italy, Julius Caesar, King Numitor, Latin War, Latinus, Lavinia, legend, Lex Canuleia, Liberty, Livy, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Lucretia, Lupercal, Marcus Furius Camillus, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Livius Drusus, Mars, Marsi, Mary Beard, Mediterranean, Mithradates VI, myth, Numa Pompilius, Palatine Hill, patricians, Perseus of Macedon, Picentes, plebeians, plebs, Polybius, Pompey the Great, Pontus, Publius Cornelius Scipio, Publius Vergilius Maro, Punic Wars, Pyrrhic War, Revolt of Spartacus, Rhea Silvia, Richard Miles, Roman Empire, Roman history, Roman Republic, Romanisation, Romulus, Romulus and Remus, Rubicon, Rutulians Turnus, sack of Rome, Sallust, Samnite Wars, Samnites, Scipio Asiaticus, Secession, Second Macedonian War, Second Mithradatic War, Second Punic War, Senones, Servius Tullius, Sicily, Social War, Spain, Spartacus, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Syrian War, Tarquinius Priscus, Tarquinius Superbus, Third Macedonian War, Third Mithradatic War, Third Punic War, tribunes, Trojan War, Troy, Tullus Hostilius, Twelve Tables, Umbri, Veii, Vergil, War with Jugurtha

Posted by Simon on February 2, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/02/02/spqr-a-history-of-ancient-rome-mary-beard-3/

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All posts tagged Social War

The Aeneid’s structure

Historical background

The price of peace

Aspects of patriotism

A political poem?

Copying the Greeks

The process of composition

The violence

Camps’s attempts at a moral interpretation undermined by the violence

The animal sacrifices

Virgil’s multi-levelled and holey theology

Furens

The poetry

Pederast

Credit

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The Roman Republic

The Fontana History of the Ancient World

Schematic

Main themes

Who was the Roman oligarchy?

Roman flexibility

The impact of empire on the Roman ruling class

Extreme wealth

The land problem

The lynching of Tiberius Gracchus

Slavery

Conclusion

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Cicero’s self-centredness and patriotism

Section by section synopsis

Thoughts

Credit

Cicero reviews

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The life

Thoughts

Choosing sides

Philosophy

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Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC)

Warner’s introduction

The life

Gruesome

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Lucius Licinius Lucullus (118 to 56)

Summary

The life

Superstitions, prophecies and omens

The importance of dreams

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

Superstitions

The grotesque

The ludicrous

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

Why Sulla failed

Plutarch’s Sulla

Fairy tales

Fortunate Sulla

Slaughter in Athens 86 BC

Proscriptions in Rome

Mass murder at Praeneste

Metrobius