He errs who expects the madness of love to end;
Love that is true can know no measure…
In life I shall always be hers; in death
I shall be hers still.
(Book 2, elegy 15)
Robert Maltby’s introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of the elegies of Tibullus is outstanding in its clarity and authority and includes elements which make a good introduction to Propertius, too.
Maltby explains that in the last decades of the first century BC, Rome was home to a small cohort of leading Roman poets who took the Greek metre associated with elegies and which had come to be called ‘elegiacs’, and repurposed them as vehicles to describe very personal (or personal sounding) love affairs. Or, in Propertius’s words:
Priestlike I lead the way from the crystal spring
To adapt Italian rites to Grecian measures.
(3.1)
To repeat what I wrote in the Tibullus review:
What is an elegy?
The modern sense of ‘elegy’ as a lament for the dead only crystallised during the 16th century. Two thousand years ago, for the ancient Greeks and Romans the word had a much wider definition – elegies could cover a wide range of subject matter (death, love, war).
The defining feature of them was that they were written in elegiac couplets or ‘elegiacs’, which consist of a dactylic hexameter line followed by a dactylic pentameter line i.e. six ‘feet’ in the first line, five in the second. In English it looks like this, 6 beats, followed by 5:
My girl is now held hostage by a surly guard (6)
and her stout door is shut and bolted tight. (5)
I’ve often tried to banish pains of love with wine,
but sorrow turned the uncut wine to tears.
Obviously you’re not meant to say it out loud emphasising these beats, that would be silly. It’s just a structuring device, a convention, a code buried under the words, a rhythm you’re meant to be only dimly aware of, if at all, which gives a subliminal sense of regularity and rhythm.
The effect of a long line followed by a slightly shorter one was to create a kind of dying fall, repeated every two lines – hence its attraction for poets who wanted to write an elegy in our sense, a lament for someone who’d died, and the elegiac couplet was in fact the metre used for writing funeral inscriptions and sometimes examples of these were included in elegiac poems. However, the most famous of the Roman elegists copied the way that late Greek or Hellenistic poets had taken to using it to express personal and often ‘amatory’ subject matter.
The variation between the two lines helped to build the impression that elegiac couplets were more appropriate for the expression of ‘direct and immediate concerns’ i.e. the poet’s personal life, than a poem written entirely in hexameters, which was felt to be the metre for continuous narrative, as in Homer’s epics.
Catullus (84 to 54 BC) was the first Roman poet to co-opt the form from the Greek Hellenistic poets and adapt it to Latin for his scandalous love poems and execrations. Catullus was followed by Tibullus (55 to 18 BC, in his elegies), Propertius (50 to 16 BC in his elegies) and Ovid (43 BC to 18 AD, in a series of works, namely the Amores, Heroides, Tristia and Letters from Pontus).
Elegiacs as love poems
The classic Roman elegists used the form to write love poems, often surprisingly candid about their own love affairs. The convention quickly arose of devoting some or all of the poems to a Beloved Mistress, who receives the poet’s devotion despite being often capricious or antagonistic.
‘Your theme shall be flower-wreathed lovers at someone’s door,
And the signs they leave of their drunken flight through the night…’
(The Muse Calliope telling Propertius what his subject should be, book 3, elegy 3)
Catullus (b.84 BC) can be said to have invented many aspects of this convention in his poems to ‘Lesbia’, universally taken as a pseudonym for the Roman aristocrat Clodia Metelli with whom he (if the poems are to be believed) had a passionate affair and then an equally emotional falling-out. (Catullus and Lesbia are mentioned a couple of times by Propertius; he consciously compares his love for Cynthia with Catullus’s for Lesbia, 2.32, 2.34C).
In the next generation Tibullus (b.55 BC) is a little unusual in addressing elegiacs to three figures, two women and a boy. The dates of publication of Tibullus’s two books interlink with the first books by Propertius. Propertius (b.50 BC) is more typical in addressing most of his elegies to just the one figure, who he names ‘Cynthia’. A little later, Ovid (b.43 BC), wrote love elegiacs addressing a figure named ‘Corinna’, though there is widespread agreement that she probably didn’t exist but was a poetic convention.
In Maltby’s opinion Ovid rang pretty much every possible permutation on the use of elegiac as love poem and made it obvious that he was experimenting with the form for its own sake. Maltby thinks he used it up and hollowed it out and as a result the metre fell out of fashion.
Publishing in ancient Rome
Using the word ‘publishing’ gives a misleading impression. There were no printing presses in the West for another 1,500 years. ‘Publishing’ meant that a hand-written manuscript of the text was given to secretaries or amanuenses to copy out in full, by hand, on rolls of papyrus. These rolls were then rolled up and slipped into tubular containers. A library’ consisted of numerous tubes containing manuscripts.
As this implies, not many copies were made, generally scores, rarely into the hundreds. There was no question of making money from this process. The aim was a) if you were rich, to gain a reputation among the people who counted, the educated class or b) if you were less well-off (as Virgil, Horace and Propertius were) to win the patronage of a rich sponsor, as all three were lucky enough to do with Maecenas, who gave land, property and money to both Horace and Virgil.
Ronald Musker’s introduction
I read Propertius’s poems in the 1972 Everyman edition translated by Ronald Musker. In his introduction Musker points out that Propertius came from the equestrian class i.e. the second rank of the aristocracy below the senatorial class. His family had extensive lands in north-central Italy but, like many of his class and generation, lost a substantial amount during the enforced confiscations of Octavian after the Battle of Phillippi.
Too early you gathered up your father’s ashes;
And you had to accept a straitened hearth and home,
For many an ox had turned your rich lands over,
But the ruthless surveying rod took your wealth away. (4.1)
It also appears from one of the elegies, that a close relative or perhaps guardian was killed in the bitter localised civil war known as the Perugine War because it ended up with the rebels (led by Mark Anthony’s wife and brother) holed up and besieged by Octavian’s forces in the city of Perugia, near Propertius’s birthplace. Musker considers the trauma of these events may explain the tone of melancholy which recurs throughout his poems.
In Rome young Sextus Propertius was a friend of fellow poets Gallus and Virgil and, through them, was adopted by the renowned patron of the arts, Gaius Maecenas. His poems survive in 4 books containing around 92 poems. Actually the number varies because editors of book 2 in particular think some poems are jumbled together which must once have been separate poems and so snip and separate them; other scholars disagree; hence the difficulty of giving an exact number.
The translator, Musker, appears to have given each poem a tabloid-style title, which aren’t in the original. These are actually quite helpful in distinguishing between them and indicating the topic of each poem at a glance.
Book 1, 25 BC (23 poems)
Cynthia is the main subject, the first word of the first poem and mentioned in over half the other poems. The poems proceed through the set subjects and attitudes of the afflicted male love for his mistress, including mad declarations of love, promises to be true, lists of her achievements and perfections, jealousy of other men, despair at being abandoned, rage at being abandoned, laments on why women are so fickle and/or easily bought by rich men with shiny trinkets – and so on.
It includes a paraclausithyron i.e a poem describing the lover at the locked door of his beloved. Apparently, Propertius’s version of this is a novelty because he has the door itself speak – we get the door’s point of view, a rather cutting description of the wretched poet pining outside.
I noticed, reading Propertius, that the way these poets created the bulk of a poem, most of its content, is to address a friend, sometimes a rival or enemy – either calling them to witness aspects of your sorrow and affliction, or giving wise advice to them if they fall in love, or any other kind of address.
This conceit of addressing the poem to a pal a) makes it more dynamic b) makes it more like a speech than a solitary meditation. At many points a poem reminded me of Cicero’s legal speeches. All of them, without exception, make a case.
Also, addressing a friend in a poem makes it very public because you have to respect politeness and decorum. The two friends whose names crop up most frequently are Gallus and Tullus, apparently, historically verified real people.
Why, Bassus, by praising all these other girls
Must you try to change me… (1.4)
Put an end, my envious friend, to your tiresome talk… (1.5)
I am not afraid, my Tullus, to learn with you
The Adriatic’s moods… (1.6)
While you, my Ponticus, tell of the city of Cadmus… (1.7)
I told you, my scornful friend, that love would visit you… (1.9)
You, as your way is, Gallus, will be delighted
At my plight… (1.13)
I suppose it’s worth pointing out that the poet addresses a cohort or circle of friends and they are all men. A group of men talking about a woman, one woman’s behaviour. Hmmm. Very much a one-sided perspective, not just a guy talking about a girl but a buy recruiting all his mates to pile in behind him and back up his interpretation.
Although the Cynthia poems felt competent, the single poem which stood out for me was the ante-penultimate one, number 20, which Musker titles ‘Beware of the nymphs!’. This advises his friend, Gallus, on his love affair with a boy, warning him that the (unnamed) boy is so beautiful that he, Gallus, should keep him away from predatory girls, otherwise he’ll lose him, just as the legendary Hylas was lost to Naiads (spirits of the water) on the voyage of the Argonauts. Apart from 4 or 5 lines at the beginning and end, this is a verse description of Hylas’s story i.e. an extended fantasia into Greek legend, describing the way Hylas was sent off by Hercules to gather firewood but wandered too far and was seduced by the water nymphs while Hercules’ voice echoed wanly from afar. This was genuinely haunting.
This raises the issue of the extent to which Propertius not just incorporates Greek myth and legend into his poems, but packs them with mythological references (see below).
Book 2, 24 BC? (55 poems, including 10 or more ‘fragments’)
Book 2 for the first time features poems addressing Augustus’s great ‘minister for the arts’, Maecenas. He is described, rather unctuously, in the first poem as:
True heart alike in peace or war
and:
hope of the youth of Rome
And their envy, and my true glory in life and death…
Scholars deduce that the first book brought Propertius to Maecenas’s attention and in this second one he has become one of the great man’s circle. So not only does it address Maecenas himself but also, as was required, directly addresses Augustus.
Book 2 contains as many poems as 1 and 3 put together so some scholars think it actually combines 2 separate books. This is also suggested by the poor state of many of the poems in it. This has led some scholars to drastically rewrite the poems, taking bits which from poems where they seem out of place and stitching them into other poems where they seem to fit better. I can imagine this leads ultimately to a nightmare jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of fragments on the table in front of you as you rack your brains to recombine them in more ‘sensible’ ways.
Musker explains all this and concludes that, although many of these scholarly editions are intriguing for experts in the field, in this edition he rejects almost all of them. Because there is an alternative explanation – which is that Propertius deliberately made sudden swerves and juxtapositions in his verse, as policy. One of the elements that contributes to what Musker calls Propertius’s ‘elusiveness’ and has made him less popular in modern times that the far more sensible, down-to-earth Horace, or the scandalously sexy Catullus.
The subject matter of the poems is more varied though still circling round the figure of Cynthia. Several describe a rich rival who appears to have won her affections with jewels, and throw deep hatred his way. But then the next one might be another hymn of fulsome love and devotion. So the poems follow no order i.e you can’t make out a narrative, in fact they seem almost deliberately randomised.
Book 3, sometime after 23 BC (27, including 2 ‘fragments’)
The poems start to range in subject matter beyond simple love songs to tackle more public themes. For example, several invoke Augustus’s previous victories against Antony and Cleopatra and his current campaign in Parthia (3.4) (cf the long poem in book 4 celebrating the battle of Actium and repeatedly criticising Cleopatra).
There’s one very close to the royal family, lamenting the death of young Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus’s nephew, who he legally adopted then married to his daughter Julia, only for him to die in 23 BC, his twentieth year (3.18).There’s one on the standard topic of how Rome has become corrupted by foreign riches and let its shrines and temples fall into shameful disuse:
Proud Rome is falling, crushed by her own prosperity. (3.13)
Several of the early ones are recusatios, a stock type of poem in which the poet bashfully excuses himself from writing the grand epic poem about Rome’s heroic military victories which society expected, and instead gets a Muse or god to explain that the poet’s real vocation is love poetry.
Wars I would tell of in patriotic verses,
But, alas, how weak the notes that sound on my lips! (4.1)
He writes a long poem to Maecenas saying everyone has his own nature and his (Propertius’s) is emphatically not either going to war or writing about war. The only war he enjoys is the battle of love (‘love’s sweet strife’, 3.20B). In fact this is continuing a trend which began in book 2, with 2.34 actually mentioning Virgil as the great epic poem of Propertius’s time.
Cynthia still pops up. In some he celebrates Cynthia’s birthday (3.10), but overall he seems to be tiring of her, and the final poems declare himself well shot of her:
False is that trust of yours in your beauty, woman,
Whom my favouring eyes have long made overproud.
Yes, Cynthia, greatly indeed my love has praised you;
It shames me now that through my verses
You gained such fame. (3.24)
And the last poem in the book is an execration, calling down curses on her, and looking forward to her aging and withering and losing her beauty (3.25).
Book 4, published sometime after 16 BC (12 poems)
Book 4 contains only half the number of poems as book 1, leading some scholars to speculate that it may have been published posthumously, a tidying-up operation. Several of the poems imply that Cynthia is dead – in 4.7 her ghost complains to Propertius that her funeral wasn’t lavish enough.
The other poems move well beyond love poetry, addressing a variety of subjects. They include several ‘aetiological poems’, a genre which explains the origin of various Roman rites and landmarks. They’re longer than before, too. Many poems in book 1 were one page long. All those in book 4 are at least 2 pages long, some 3 or even 4.
- The poet describes the early history of Rome for 2 pages and the original rural appearance of Rome in terms very reminiscent of the Aeneid before the second half is spoken by a Babylonion priest predicting Propertius’s horoscope.
- The Etruscan god Vertumnus speaks, speculating about his own origins and purpose; he is a chameleon and can be male or female or take any role or profession.
- Two-page poem in which a young wife, Arethusa, writes to her husband, Lycótas, away at the wars, describing her sadness and devotion.
- Three pages describe the iniquity of Tarpeia, a vestal virgin back in the earliest days of Rome, when it was little more than a village, who falls in love with Tatius king of the neighbouring tribe of the Sabines; she betrays a secret path up the Palatine Hill into Rome but when Tatius marries her, as he promised, he gets his men to crush her with their shields for her treachery. This, supposedly, is the origin of the name of the Tarpeian Rock on the Palatine.
- Execration of a procuress named Acanthis, who incited his (unnamed) love to spurn the gods, whore after gold, reject his love, and so on.
- Three pages celebrating Augustus’s victory at the Battle of Actium. Always good policy to suck up to the emperor.
- Cynthia’s ghost comes back from the tomb to upbraid him on the evening of her funeral. At the end he tries to embrace her but her ghost vanishes into air which reminds me of the umpteen time the same thing happens in the Aeneid.
- To get his own back on Cynthia (see how the poems are not in any narrative order) the poet organises a little orgy with two hand-picked courtesans at the height of which Cynthia storms in, drives the girls out scratching and screaming, then demands complete submission from the poet, before fumigating the place. Then they have championship sex.
- Another poem describing what Rome looked like before it was founded i.e. was idyllic countryside – very reminiscent of book 8 of the Aeneid – here the backdrop for the legendary moment when Hercules stopped on the site only to have his cattle stolen by Cacus. The poem describes the Forum when it was just a grazing ground and explains the origin of the Great Altar which still stood in Propertius’s time. I wonder if it was Augustus and Maecenas’s pressure which led him to drop love poetry and turn to accounts of Rome’s founding legends.
- If a Roman military leader defeated the leader of the enemy in single combat and kept the latter’s arms and armour, these were called the spolia opima and brought back to be dedicated in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. It had only happened three times in Roman history and this poem describes those three great personal achievements, by Romulus, Aulus Cornelius Cossus (consul in 428 BC) and Marcus Claudius Marcellus (consul in 222 BC).
- The final poem is a touching address by the recently deceased Cornelia consoling her husband, Paullus Aemilius Lepidus (77 to 11 BC). This man’s father had been brother to the Lepidus who was in the Second Triumvirate alongside Anthony and Octavius. Not long after Cornelia’s death, he married Claudia Marcella Minor, a daughter of Octavia the Younger, sister of Augustus. So like the lament for Marcus Claudius Marcellus (3.18) this is by way of being an imperial commission. However, its stately beauty has led to it being described as the ‘queen of the elegies’ and it is commonly considered the best poem in the entire collection.
Musker’s translation
Having carefully explained what the Latin elegiac metre was, Musker then goes ahead and cheerfully ignores the strictness of it in his own translation. His versions are very free and all the better for it. Try and spot traces of the hexameter-pentameter combination in the following:
Whence, you ask me, come all my poems of love,
And my book that sounds on men’s lips its note of langour.
Calliope does not sing me these songs nor Apollo;
A girl provides me with all I have
Of poetic talent.
(2.1)
Instead of couplets defined by the elegiac metre, Musker uses the verse paragraph. Each poem, instead of presenting a solid column of verse –as they do in the original Latin – is divided into 3 or 4 or 5 verse paragraphs of 5 or 6 lines, the last one or two lines always notably shorter, maybe a kind of recreation of the ‘dying fall’ of the original. Thus:
Penelope, who was worthy of many suitors,
For twice ten years was able to live untouched;
To defer remarriage by feigning a womanly industry,
Then unwinding by nightly stealth the weft of the day.
And though, grown old with waiting, she had no hope
Of ever seeing Ulysses again,
She yet stayed true.
(2.9A)
This not being faced by a wall of verse, instead being able to read a paragraph at a time, makes the poems immensely more readable, as does Musker’s relaxed approach to metre
Conventions of the love poem
Scholars have suggested various real-life models for Cynthia but there is no consensus. As usual all we have to go on is hints within the poems and one remote historical reference.
Propertius mentions that Cynthia is a descendant of the Roman poet Hostius. He frequently compliments her as docta puella meaning ‘learned girl’. He tells us that she herself was a writer of verse. This kind of autobiographical clue-hunting strikes me as pointless. Even when you have confirmed that Lesbia was a codename for Clodia…does it change anything? If anything, it reduces the impact of the poems, which they gain from being about a shadowy unnamed woman.
Instead, the poems are artifices; they rehearse a number of postures or attitudes or emotions related to love affairs. These may or may not ever have been ‘genuine’ or related to ‘a real person’ but it’s a question of taste whether you need to believe that to enjoy them. I don’t.
Poems are verbal machines designed to evoke psychological states in the reader; some of these might be mimetic, directly replicating the emotion described in the poem. But once you’ve read a certain number of poems and start to recognise the same topics recurring in the same treatment, at least part of your mind becomes capable of detachment, regarding even the most moving poem as a verbal artifact, a device.
Mythology
Apparently, Propertius is often criticised because of his excessive use of references from myth and legend. For example, elegy 2.6 kicks off with a flurry of mythological comparisons: he cites three of the most famous courtesans from ancient times and the crowds of men who flocked around them and then claims they were all nothing compared to the hordes of men who swarm at Cynthia’s door. In other words, it is a poem about male jealousy.
The house of Laïs at Corinth, though at her door
All Greece paid court, was never thronged like yours;
Thaïs, famed by Menander and once the darling
Of Athens, attracted no such swarm;
Nor yet did Phrynë, enriched by all those lovers
So that she could have re-erected
Demolished Thebes. (2.6)
In his introduction Musker defends Propertius against the charge of introducing too much mythological matter into his poems. His defence is:
- The ancients thought through mythology. Lacking anything remotely like a modern scientific understanding of the laws of nature, their extremely dense and multi-layered mythology provided not exactly rules or laws but stories from history which suggested underlying tendencies, among humans and among the fate which seems to hover over them. Mythology helps to make sense (albeit a chaotic and violent sense) of the world.
- Sheer swank. Propertius’s jealousy risks coming over as petty, small-minded, unaristocratic. But if he devotes a paragraph to comparing himself and Cynthia to figures from myth and legend then he obviously flatters her, bigs himself up, and turns a personal peeve into what sounds like the grand statement of some general law rather than a trivial tiff between pampered layabouts.
Personally, I enjoyed Propertius’s use of mythology. In Horace the mythological references often felt dragged in – I think it’s because Horace is such a regular guy, his entire schtick is about living for the moment and enjoying life in a very realistically described Rome, his is such a down-to-earth, sensible philosophy, that Achilles and Apollo seem wildly out of place in it.
Whereas Propertius from the start is more intense and shrill, a little more hysterical and extreme, and so his use of myth and legend genuinely helps to expand and enhance the poems, gives them size, like adding echo to a voice track.
The Romans expected their lovers to give them prominent love bites (note to 4.3, p.220, and 4.5).
Credit
Poems of Propertius, translated by Robert Musker, was published by Everyman books in 1972. All references are to the 1972 paperback edition.
Books & Boots 
Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy (2014) – 1
Augustus was one of the most successful rulers of all time. He rescued Rome from the recurring collapse of its political institutions into civil war which dogged the years 100 to 30 BC, and established an entirely new form of government – what he called the ‘principate’ but which came to be called imperial rule – which went on to last for 250 years. Even after the empire collapsed in the West, its ghostly image lived in for a further thousand years in Byzantium.
Augustus ruled longer than any other Roman ruler, whether king, dictator or emperor. He nearly doubled the size of the empire. His reforms endured for centuries. It beggars belief that he entered the toxic jungle of Roman politics when he was just eighteen years old and proceeded to outwit and defeat all his opponents, defeating some in war, having some murdered, forcing others to commit to suicide, to emerge as the unchallenged ruler of the greatest empire Europe has ever seen.
Augustus’s name
First, the name. He was born Caius Octavius. On being adopted as Julius Caesar’s heir he took his legal father’s name, becoming Caius Julius Caesar. In the decade after Caesar’s assassination he slowly dropped the Caius, sometimes operating under the exact same name as the dead general, sometimes adding the title Imperator at the start of his name. Mark Antony commented that he was ‘a boy who owed everything to his name’ which was certainly true at the start. When Caesar was deified by the senate, Octavianus added ‘son of the divine Julius’ in some contexts. Finally, in 27, he was awarded the made-up title ‘Augustus’ by the senate.
In other words, maybe the most important thing about Augustus is his shape-shifting changes of identity. He played the Name Game as deftly as he played the terrifying power politics of the Republic. And when it ceased to be a republic and he established himself as the sole authority figure, he was again careful not to use the name king (heaven forbid) or even empire and emperor. Instead he used the semi-official term princeps meaning ‘first citizen’ to describe himself and principate to describe the kind of political system he proceeded to build around him.
Goldsworthy says he will use the name Julius Caesar to refer to him, but I think that’s pretty confusing. Although I take the point that only his enemies called him Octavianus, I will use the more usual tradition of calling him Octavian until he is awarded the title Augustus.
Goldsworthy says historians tend to divide history into neat periods, having the Republican era end with the assassination of Julius and starting the Augustan era with the defeat of Antony at Actium. This has the effect of underplaying the key period from 44 to 31 BC which Octavian spent mostly in Rome or Italy, consolidating his grip on power by establishing favourites, contacts and clients who he placed in positions of power at all levels.
Dr Adrian Goldsworthy
Goldsworthy was (born in Wales in 1969, educated at private school and Oxford) is a historian specialising in the Roman army and Roman history (although he has also written half a dozen historical novels set during the Napoleonic wars). According to his introduction to this book, it was while developing his interest in the Roman army into a blockbuster biography of Julius Caesar (2006) that he became aware of the glaring absence of a good, scholarly but accessible biography of the latter’s adoptive son and heir, Caius Octavianus, known to history as the emperor Augustus (63 BC to 14 AD), inventor of the Roman Empire. So he wrote it.
It’s a big book, 607 pages long, including a 100 pages of bibliography, notes, index, a glossary of terms, a list of key personages, and a series of intimidatingly complicated family trees of the key players. But beyond this, it is also an outstanding introduction to the rules and practices surrounding Roman power.
Augustus’s father
In the opening 50 pages in particular, as Goldsworthy describes the promising career of Augustus’s father (Caius Octavius, born 100 BC and steadily rising through the ranks of the cursus honorem and just about to stand for consul when he died of a sudden illness in 59) he interweaves masses of background information about the Roman constitution, customs and conventions, which make the book a useful introduction to all aspects of the Rome of the late Republic.
Background facts
I found his explanation of the precise way in which elections to the different magistracies were held particularly enlightening (the election of the praetors pages 41 to 43), but he also gives to-the-point explanations of:
He explains exactly which officials were involved in Roman trials and how the court was physically laid out (p.43). (Cicero thought so highly of Caius Octavius’s conduct as praetor supervising trials that he wrote to his brother Quintus telling him to copy his example, p.44.) He explains how the role of provincial governor was notoriously regarded as a way to get rich quick by extorting taxes and bribes from Rome’s subjects (p.45).
Training boys He tells us how boys of aristocratic families from the age of five were encouraged to observe their fathers going about their business, receiving clients, attending the senate. Within a year or so they began physical exercise on the Campus Martius and learned to ride a horse, throw a javelin and fight with sword or shield.
Education There were about 20 schools in Rome, for those who could afford them, though the really rich would hire a grammaticus, a teacher of language and literature, to tutor their sons in reading and writing at home (p.55).
Background He gives very clear accounts of the events which formed the background to preceded Gaius’s career, namely the civil war between Marius and Sulla in the 80s, then the rise of the boy wonder general Pompey in the 70s, the rebellions of Lepidus and Sertorius, the disaffection which led up to the conspiracy of Catilina in 63 BC which was the same year Pompey returned from his military command against Mithridates in Asia and ostentatiously disbanded his army at Brundisium, thus demonstrating his democratic bona fides.
Unlike Mary Beard’s rambling history of Rome, which organises itself around a succession of irritating rhetorical questions, Goldsworthy just gets on and tells you interesting stuff, very interesting stuff, in plain no-nonsense prose, which is why I found this an addictive read.
More background facts
Women’s names Roman women kept their name throughout their lives and did not change it at marriage. Generally they only had one name, unlike aristocratic men who had three (the praenomen, nomen and cognomen, sometimes with a nickname added), hence Julia, Fulvia, Terentia, Tullia. They were generally given a female version of the clan name, hence Caius Julius Caesar’s sister was called Julia and Marcus Tullius Cicero’s daughter was named Tullia (p.23), Titus Pomponia’s daughter was called Pomponia (p.356) and so on.
If there were two daughters they were given the same name and the aftername major or minor, meaning in this context, older and junior. If many daughters, they were sometimes numbered: Julia 1, Julia 2, Julia 3 and so on. Thus Augustus’s mother, Atia, was so called because it was the gens or family name of her father, Marcus Atius Balbus. She probably had an older sister, who had the same name, and so was sometimes called Atia Secunda.
Marriage alliances Marriage was a tool of political alignment or social advantage, consolidating links between (generally powerful) families. Hence Pompey’s marriage to Caesar’s daughter, Julia, and Octavius marrying his sister, Octavia, off to Mark Antony (p.35).
Personal abuse was the common coin of political exchanges (p.33) in fact high political discourse and, by extension the courts, were characterised by astonishing levels of ‘violent and imaginative abuse’ (p.131).
Publicans There was a profession of men who undertook state contracts such as collecting taxes in subjugated provinces. These were called publicani, a term which is translated as publicans in the King James version of the New Testament.
Personality Having just read some courtroom speeches by Cicero, it is relevant to read that in the many elections held for official office throughout the Roman year, the electors rarely if ever voted for a clearly articulated political programme or policies, but far more on the basis of character (plus a hefty amount of bribery) – more or less as jurors at trials were subjected to much more argumentation about the defendant’s (and the prosecuting and defence attorney’s) characters, than about any actual facts or evidence (p.37).
Clients The importance to politicians of being accompanied at all times by a crowd of clients, who waited outside your front door from early morning, some of whom you admitted for audience, the rest following you as you emerged and made your way down to the forum and to the senate house. If eminent or notable men were in this attending crowd, all the better (p.39).
These ties of family, clan and class were not incidental but intrinsic to Roman society:
Men rose to high office through the support of new or inherited friendships and bonds of patronage, and by marriage alliances. (p.356)
The praetors Each year eight praetors were elected, seven of them to preside over the seven courts of quaestiones established by the dictator Sulla, the eighth to be praetor urbanus with wide-ranging legal powers.
Prosecuting Goldsworthy confirms D.H. Berry’s account in his introduction to Cicero’s defence speeches, that a) since there was no equivalent of the Crown or State legal cases could only be brought by individuals and b) prosecuting was seen as invidious, unless one was defending family pride or there was a really gross example of wrongdoing – and so accusers tended to be young men out to make a name for themselves with one or two eye-catching prosecutions, before settling into the more congenial and socially accepted role of defence counsel, exactly the career Cicero followed (p.43), a point repeated on page 281:
Prosecution was generally left to the young, and had long provided an opportunity for youthful aristocrats to catch the public eye at an early stage in their careers.
The rabble rouser Publius Clodius Pulcher’s support came largely from the collegia or guilds of tradesemen (p.57).
Aristocratic funerals were public events, designed to impress and remind everyone of a family’s antiquity and noble achievements for the state, commencing with a ceremony in the forum and then a procession to beyond the city walls where the cremation was carried out (p.65).
The toga is, on the face of it, a simple item of clothing: a roughly semicircular cloth, between 12 and 20 feet long, worn draped over the shoulders and around the body. It was usually woven from white wool, and was worn over a tunic. But there were at least half a dozen types or styles, several of which had important social meanings:
Courtesans Goldsworthy explains something which had slightly puzzled me in the plays of Plautus and Terence, which is that, above and beyond the many brothels in Rome, there was a class of high-end courtesans ‘who needed to be wooed and cared for in expensive style’ (p.69). In England in 2022, I imagined that a client pays for a courtesan and then can have his way, but the comedies of Plautus and Terence depict courtesans as being every bit as independent and strong-willed as a mistress.
Senate hours The senate was not allowed to sit after dusk. As the sun set senators knew it was time to wind up a debate. This explains how Marcus Porcius Cato was able on numerous occasions to filibuster or talk non-stop, refusing to sit down, until dusk came and the session had to end, in order to prevent decisions being passed which he objected to (p.107).
Centurions Goldsworthy is at pains to bust various myths, for example the one that centurions were experienced old bloods raised from the ranks to become a kind of sergeant major figure. Wrong. They ‘were men of property and often came from the aristocracies of the country towns of Italy’ (p.123).
Piety (pietas in Latin), the honour owed to gods, country and especially parents, was a profound and very Roman duty. [Augustus] proclaimed his own pietas as he avenged his murdered father. (p.158)
Pietas was a virtue central to Rome’s sense of identity and the neglect of proper reverence due to the old gods of the Roman people was symptomatic of the moral decline of recent generations, so evident in the decades of discord and violence. (p.224)
Moral explanations of everything As I explained in reviews of Plutarch and Cicero’s speeches, lacking any of the numerous theories which we nowadays use to explain social change and development, all the Romans had was a very basic recourse to notions of morality:
Moral explanations for upheaval came most readily to the Roman mind, and so restoration must involve changes in behaviour, conduct and a reassertion of a good relationship with the gods who had guided Rome’s rise to greatness. (p.224)
Auguries In a sense, you can see the rich paraphernalia of auguries, soothsayers, oracles and so on as reflecting the same complete absence of rational theory. Completely lacking the modern infrastructure of statistics, data, social trends, as we use them to analyse and manage the economy, trade, population, illness and even military encounters, the ancients were thrown back on two extremely primitive vectors of explanation – the moral character of Great Men, and the moods or wishes of the capricious gods.
Animal sacrifice (p.331)
Decimation was the traditional punishment, though already antiquated by Octavius’s day, of punishing a mutinous or cowardly legion by having one man in ten beaten to death and the rest shamed by receiving barley – food traditionally given to slaves and animals – instead of wheat (p.177)
Spolia opima (‘rich spoils’) were the armour, arms, and other effects that an ancient Roman general stripped from the body of an opposing commander slain in single combat. The spolia opima were regarded as the most honourable of the several kinds of war trophies a commander could obtain, including enemy military standards and the peaks of warships.
Caesar’s scruples By the time Octavius, Antony and Lepidus had raised armies to back them up, with Cassius and Brutus raising armies in the East and Sextus Pompeius in control of Sicily i.e. in the late 40s BC, the issue which triggered the civil war between Caesar and Pompey – whether Caesar was allowed to enter Italy with his army of Gaul – had vanished like dew, become completely irrelevant in a world where first Octavius, then Antony, not only marched legions on Rome, but put it under military occupation. All the pettifogging precision of the debates about Caesar’s rights and privileges were ancient history within less than a decade (p.178)
Antony’s drunkenness Many of the leading politicians were also authors, pre-eminently Caesar. Mark Antony published just the one book, De sua ebrietate (‘On his drunkenness’) a touchy defence admitting that he liked getting drunk buy denying accusations that he was ever under the influence while performing official or military duties. Sadly, like the autobiographies of Sulla and Augustus himself, it has not survived (p.185).
Aged 33 When he was 33, Julius Caesar encountered a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain, and according to Plutarch and Suetonius either burst into tears or heaved a heavy sigh and explained to his colleagues that by his age Alexander had conquered the known world whereas he, Caesar, had achieved nothing. By sharp contrast, Goldsworthy points out how, with the deaths of Brutus and Cassius, Anthony and Cleopatra, by 30 BC Octavius, himself now widely known as Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, had done the same – making himself master of Rome and unrivalled ruler of the Mediterranean world (p.194). He commanded 60 legions, more than any Roman commander in history (p.204).
Special commands The wonderfully intricate and carefully balanced Roman constitution was a marvel of checks and balances, but it also led, increasingly in the late Republic, to blockage and inaction, as rival political leaders preferred to stymy each other’s initiatives regardless of the best interests of the Republic. Which is why the state found itself reverting increasingly to giving Special Commands to (particularly military) commanders, such as Pompey received to sort out the pirates, then sort out King Mithridates. And which, unconsciously, as it were, prepared both the senate and the people to the idea that rule by one man (Augustus) was more likely to get things done than the increasingly fractious rule of consuls, tribunes and the rest of it (p.235).
Augustus was able to make things happen. If he was not involved then the inertia which had characterised senatorial government for so many years seemed to return. (p.276)
Images In the long years of his rule Augustus worked hard to ensure that his image became more widespread around the Mediterranean than the images of any other individual, whether human or divine. It was on every coin, created in mints all round the empire, and depicted in thousands of statues he had erected in towns and cities everywhere. We have far more images of Augustus than any other figure from the ancient world (250 statues survive and countless coins).
He was everywhere, his name, image or symbols on monuments in the heart of Rome, in the towns of Italy and throughout the provinces. (p.305)
And yet he single-handedly overthrew the longstanding Roman tradition of very realistic sculpture which depicts figures such as Marius, Sulla, Caesar or Pompey with distinctive features, jowls and wrinkles, with pomaded quiffs or thin combovers or whatever – Augustus swept this all away and ensured the image of him was standardised around the empire, to depict an idealised image of the nations’ ruler, handsome, authoritative and tall, and above all in the prime of manhood, young and virile and decisive.
Statue of Augustus found in 1863 nine miles from Rome in the suburb of Prima Porta. Note the depiction on his breastplate of the return to Rome of the legionary standards seized by the Parthians in victories over Crassus and Antony, but returned to Augustus in 20 BC
Among the thousands of images of Augustus which survive none deviate from this strict model, there are no images of him as a middle-aged or old man (p.256). And yet we know from Suetonius how far removed from reality this image was: in real life Octavius was shorter than average, with bad teeth, and a skin so sensitive that far from strutting round in military armour he preferred to be carried about in a litter and wore a broad-brimmed floppy hat to protect himself from the sun (Goldsworthy p.300; Suetonius Augustus, 82).
Temper Augustus had a bad temper, something he learned to control in later life. One of his tutors, the Greek teacher of rhetoric Athenodorus, told him that every time he lost his temper, ‘recite the alphabet before you speak’ (p.202).
Goldsworthy’s military expertise
Goldsworthy began his career as a military historian of the Roman army. His first publications were:
His summaries of the hectic political events which led up to the assassination of Caesar (15 March 44 BC) and then the confused manouevrings of the various parties in the years that followed are always good and clear, and he also gives, as mentioned above, a continual feed of clear, useful background information about all aspects of the Roman state.
But with the outbreak of the wars which Octavius was directly involved in, from about page 100 onwards, the narrative gives more space and time to explaining the campaigns and battles and the military background than previously – the number of legions, their actual likely strengths, their supply lines and so on. Suddenly a good deal more military history is included.
Several things emerge from this: for a start size mattered:
In the civil wars of these years there was great emphasis on mass, on simply fielding more legions than the opposition. There was also a well-entrenched Roman belief that throwing numbers and resources at a problem ought to being success. (p.165)
A commander’s prestige relied more on the number of his legions than the precise total of soldiers under his command, so there was a tendency to raise lots of units, which in turn had the added advantage of giving plenty of opportunities to promote loyal followers to the senior ranks. (p.125)
Another key and surprising fact which emerges is that the Roman armies weren’t that good. Good enough to defeat chaotic barbarians, maybe, but just because they were Romans didn’t guarantee quality. Goldsworthy goes out of his way to highlight that Mark Antony was very much not the great military leader later historians mistake him for, having had quite limited experience of command. Several examples: none of the four main commanders at the Battle(s) of Philippi (3 and 23 October 42 BC), Mark Antony, Octavius, Cassius or Brutus, had anything like the experience of Pompey or Caesar. Moreover they had, as explained above, all devoted a lot of energy to raising large armies without making sure that they were particularly well trained; in fact new recruits were by definition the opposite; easily spooked and ready to run.
This was a war fought by large and clumsy armies, where none of the senior officers had any experience of warfare on so grand a scale. On each side the armies remained to a great degree separate, loyal only to the leader who paid them. They formed up beside each other, but they were not integrated into a single command. (p.138)
This all explains why Philippi was such a confusing mess:
Cumbersome and essentially amateur armies given poor leadership, or none at all, turned the First Battle of Philippi into a draw. (p.141)
This is very important information but it’s the kind of thing which is often skipped over in political histories which concentrate solely on the political machinations between rivals. And yet Roman history is pre-eminently military; it was a highly militarised society in which the entire aristocracy was trained and motivated to achieve glorious victories in war.
The greatest service to the Republic was to defeat a foreign enemy. (p.173)
That quite a few of these military leaders were actually incompetent is something which is glossed over in other accounts but foregrounded in Goldsworthy’s.
This explains, for example, the wretched destruction of Marcus Licinius Crassus’s badly led and undisciplined army in Parthia in 53 BC; and also sheds light on Antony’s almost-as-disastrous defeat in the same territory in 36 BC (this is a summary from Wikipedia):
As Antony marched his huge army of 80,000 soldiers into Parthian territory the Parthians simply withdrew. In order to move faster, Antony left his logistics train in the care of two legions (approximately 10,000 soldiers), which was attacked and completely destroyed by the Parthian army before Antony could rescue them. Antony pressed his army forward and set siege to the provincial capital but failed to take it and by mid-October had to withdraw. The retreat was mercilessly harried by the Parthians. According to Plutarch, eighteen battles were fought between the retreating Romans and the Parthians during the month-long march back to Armenia, with approximately 20,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry dying during the retreat alone.
And so, from page 100 or thereabouts, Goldsworthy with his military historian hat on gives us descriptions of various campaigns which aren’t disproportionately long but longer than a political historian without his specialist military knowledge would have given:
Goldsworthy makes another interesting point which is that, ideally, the Romans didn’t negotiate:
For the Romans, true peace was the product of victory, ideally so complete that the same enemy would never need to be fought again…Conflicts ended with absolute victory, the Romans dictating the terms, and not in compromise or concessions. (p.197)
This helps to explain the way that, in Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, he was continually looking for excuses to crush new enemies: the slightest provocation or incursion was all he needed to justify punitive invasions and crushing conquest (p.226) which his critics in Rome (notable Cato the Younger) thought unwarranted and illegal.
Peace was celebrated but it was a Roman peace, following on from military victory…[a] peace of unchallenged Roman dominance. (p.359)
On the one hand this unremitting drive for total victory explains the sense of an unstoppable military machine which peoples all round the Mediterranean experienced. But on the downside, it explains the bitterness and the brutality of their civil wars, for they brought the same drive for total victory to their wars among themselves (p.197).
They don’t swamp the book at all, but Goldsworthy gives more detail about the state and nature of the armies and combatants in these and many other confrontations than a purely political historian would give, and, as always with Goldsworthy, it is presented in a clear, factual way and is very interesting.
Octavius’s escapades
Goldsworthy sheds a shrewd sidelight on the various narratives of this time which have come down to us. In a lot of the official narratives put out by Octavius’s side during this early, battle-strewn part of his life, mention was made of the future emperor’s lucky escapes, when he was nearly hit by a javelin, or escaped from some fire with only singed hair, or was only slightly hurt when a siege drawbridge he was leading troops across collapsed.
Goldsworthy makes the shrewd point that in his great-uncle and adopted father’s copious accounts of his wars in Gaul, Caesar rarely makes an appearance in the fighting (though once or twice he does seize a standard or shield and charge to the front, rallying his troops). In Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars the events – Caesar’s relentless steamroller sequence of victories –are allowed to speak for themselves and are all the more impressive for it.
By complete contrast, many of the battles and campaigns Octavius was personally involved in were far more mixed or problematic or failures in outcome – and so the narrative genre is completely different, and is concerned with how Fortune Smiled on our gallant hero as he pulled off a series of close shaves and narrow escapes. This focus on Our Lucky Hero also conveniently concealed the fact that, when he did win, Octavius almost always owed his victory to talented subordinates (above all the tremendously competent and reliable Marcus Vipsania Agrippa). No Caesar he, and he early realised it but learned to turn it – like everything else – to his advantage. (p.169)
Cleopatra
Goldsworthy’s half a dozen myth-busters include quite a big one about queen Cleopatra. Contrary to Egyptian nationalists, Cleopatra was Greek, came from a Greek family, had a Greek name and spoke Greek. There is, according to Goldsworthy, no evidence that she was very interested in the traditional Egyptian gods, but instead cleaved to the Hellenistic gods which held sway around most of the Mediterranean.
Second, she was in essence no different from the numerous other kings, rulers and tetrarchs scattered around the Eastern Mediterranean, generally struggling with family feuds and civil wars at home, who tried to curry favour with whichever Roman ruler was uppermost. Cleopatra’s main achievement was to prostitute herself out to not one but two of them, having affairs with and children by Julius Caesar (a son who she named Caesarion but Caesar never showed interest in) and then with Mark Antony (twins who she named Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, in 40 BC, and a third, Ptolemy Philadelphus, in 36 BC).
When Mark Anthony committed suicide on the approach of Octavius’s army to the capital, Alexandria, the 29-year-old survivor prepared herself for another seduction and impregnation:
She had always been a loyal ally of Rome, and would no doubt exploit her subjects just as enthusiastically for his benefit as she had for Julius Caesar and Antony. (p.192)
Goldsworthy argues that Cleopatra’s prominence in history is at least in part due to Octavius’s propaganda. It is factually correct that she had a long affair with Antony which lasted to the end of his life, and the children, and that the departure of her ships from the naval engagement off Actium prompted Antony to withdraw and thus lose the battle – but at the same time it suited Octavius very well indeed to exaggerate what to a patriotic Roman audience were all the negative aspects of the situation: that Antony was in thrall to a woman; that he had deserted his noble, long-suffering Roman wife, Octavia; that he let his administrative and military decisions be swayed by a female – all anathema to Roman values (p.192).
Change in narrative tone
Somewhere after page 200 (maybe with the start of Part Four on page 217) the narrative undergoes another subtle change in feel or vibe. The subject matter becomes more…pedestrian. It took me a while to realise why this was but Goldsworthy himself explains it on page 281:
The historian Dio lamented that it was harder to recount events after Augustus’ victory in the Civil War than it was before, since so many key decisions were taken in private and unrecorded, while much that was in the public domain was merely an empty ceremony.
That’s what it is. In the dozen or so accounts I’ve read of the troubled century from 133 to 27 BC there were always multiple players and combatants, vying for political power, either within the bounds of the constitution or spilling over into conflict, all having to stand for election, make speeches in the senate or addressing the popular assemblies or writing accounts of their doings or speeches – historians are able to give often very detailed accounts of political manoeuvrings and positionings because there are so many players involved and many of them left records or we have good accounts from contemporary or near contemporary historians.
Then Augustus wins total victory and it all goes quiet. By the time he has won he is the last man standing: Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, Antony, one by one all the great men of the previous generation were killed or killed themselves, leaving Octavius the sole figure on the stage.
He was very careful not to have himself declared dictator, as the ill-fated Caesar did, but to work through the channels of the Republican constitution, to continue to have elections of consuls and tribunes carried out, it was just that he arranged for himself to be elected ten years in a row and arranged who was to be his partner consul. There continued to be a senate, larger than ever in terms of numbers, all holding debates and speaking in the time-honoured way except that none of their debates carried any weight and many of the recorded speeches are eulogies to the princeps as he had himself called, a steady roll call of titles and awards which a grateful nation kept giving him.
Previously we had Pompey and Caesar and the senate all squabbling like ferrets in a sack and historians can calculate what each player’s motives were, and interpret each one’s moves, declarations and so on. And then… a great smothering blanket settles over Roman political life because only one man made the decisions. We have a record of the decisions but why he made them, what his thinking was, remains a matter of speculation.
Which is why all biographies of Augustus circle round to the same conclusion: that he was a mystery, an enigma, unknowable, in a way that Caesar and Pompey and Crassus and Cicero feel highly knowable. He wrote an autobiography but that has vanished. All we have is the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a monumental inscription composed 35 paragraphs, grouped into four sections – political career, public benefactions, military accomplishments and a political statement – which manage to smother the turbulence and problems of what turned out to be the longest rule by any Roman emperor (45 years) into a series of bland, corporate achievements. It sounds like this:
Wars, both civil and foreign, I undertook throughout the world, on sea and land, and when victorious I spared all citizens who sued for pardon.
And:
I pacified the Alps, from the area closest to the Adriatic Sea all the way to the Tuscan Sea, without waging an unjust war against any tribe. (quoted p.334)
We have this and the biographies of later historians, namely Suetonius (69 to 120 AD), which capture snippets of gossip and factoids, but the rest…is a record of decisions by one of the colossi of history whose ‘true character’, despite hundreds of thousands of analyses, remains a mystery.
Pronunciation
The Latin pronunciation is:
But if, in English, we say Julius Sea-zer, then it follows that all Latin words with ‘ae’ should be pronounced ‘e’ – hence preetor, queestor and so on.
Credit
Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy was published in 2014 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All references are to the 2015 paperback edition.
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Posted by Simon on August 17, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/08/17/augustus-from-revolutionary-to-emperor-adrian-goldsworthy-1/