With two reviews of books written by lively British authors fixated on Cicero published in the last
ten days, I here offer a link to one of Robert Harris's political thriller
DICTATOR which appeared in last week's GUARDIAN and a pre-print of Mary Beard's eagerly
anticipated SPQR, the paywalled version of which appears in the current Prospect
Magazine.
Roman literary theorists
admired writing that plunged readers into the thick of the action—in medias res—rather than boring them
with introductory preambles. Mary Beard plunges her reader, from the first page
of chapter I, into one of the most familiar but undoubtedly exciting episodes
in Roman history. It took place in 63 BCE. The orator and statesman Cicero exposed
what he said was a revolutionary conspiracy. It was led by the disaffected
aristocrat Catiline, whom Cicero accused of plotting to assassinate all the
elected magistrates of Rome, set fire to the city’s buildings, and cancel all
debts indiscriminately. Beard writes
with her customary energy, charm and intensity, resurrecting the titanic
personalities who struggled to control Rome while its Republican constitution was
hurled into its agonising final death throes. She uses contemporary terms like
‘homeland security’ to make the unfamiliar accessible. Her ambivalence towards
Cicero—brilliant, prolific, brave, eloquent, but vain and obnoxiously
self-pitying—is palpable. By the end of the chapter we are primed to take the
story forward to the next phase in the demise of the Republic—the assassination
of Julius Caesar and the climactic conflict between Mark Antony and Octavian,
soon to become Augustus. But Beard chooses instead to disorient us completely.
In chapter II she abruptly transfers us
back many centuries to the very beginnings of Rome, or rather its mythical
origins in the stories of Romulus and Remus and of the rape of the Sabine
women. All except the final two chapters then take a broad historical sweep,
structured in a conventional chronological order stretching from archaeological
finds dating to as early as 1000 BCE all the way to 212 CE. But the reader
inexperienced in the Romans will undoubtedly be confused by the way she begins her
transhistorical account.
The sense of chronological
disorientation is, I think, a deliberate policy. The version of the early
history of Rome which has come down to us was mostly filtered by later Roman
writers, both Cicero and authors working under Augustus—Livy, Propertius,
Virgil and Ovid. Beard is laudably keen
that we see the early history as not only gappy and inconsistent but artfully manipulated
to suit the political agendas of these later writers. But the effect is one of
confusion, instigated in her very first sentence, ‘Our history of ancient Rome
begins in the middle of the first century BCE’. By ‘Our history of Rome’ she intends to mean ‘My history of Rome’, but any Roman history novices will assume her
meaning is that ‘The history of Rome’
commences at that date.
Beginners will then spend the next five
chapters struggling to assimilate the successive waves of data about the preceding
centuries—the kings of Rome, the consolidation of the Republican regime, the widening of Rome’s horizons in the fourth and third centuries BCE, the
expansion of the empire, the violent upheavals of the ‘new politics’ at the
time of the Gracchi in the late second century down to the tumultuous and terrifying slave revolt led by
Spartacus in 73 BCE. ‘We’ do not rejoin Cicero until nearly half-way through
Beard’s narrative, in chapter seven, where he is now taking on Verres, the governor of Sicily accused of corruption. But
that confrontation preceded Cicero’s
denunciations of Catiline, with which ‘we’ had begun ‘our’ history. As a
Classics graduate I know some Roman history, but must admit to intermittent
bewilderment. I would actually recommend any new recruit to the legions of
Roman history enthusiasts to begin on p. 78 with Beard’s enthralling account of
the archaeological evidence for early habitations in the Roman area. These
include the remains of a two-year-old girl, found in a coffin beneath the forum
in a dress decorated with beads; in the 1980s archaeologists unearthed the sort
of house she might have lived in north of the city, a small timber edifice with
a primitive portico. It contained the remains of the earliest known domestic
cat in Italy.
Beard is always at her best breathing life
into the material remnants left by the ancient inhabitants of the Roman world,
as in her prizewinning 2008 book Pompeii:
the Life of a Roman Town. One of her
hallmarks is an exceptional ability to remain up-to-date with all the most
recent archaeological discoveries, and communicate their contents and
significance in a lively and user-friendly manner. The public has been waiting eagerly
for SPQR since her engaging BBC documentary
series Meet the Romans, broadcast in 2012. The greatest virtue
of SPQR is her ability to choose
individual objects or texts and tease out from them insights into Roman life
and experience—these range from the enigmatic ‘black stone’ found in the forum
inscribed with words including ‘KING’, to the Mausoleum of Augustus; they
include a relief sculpture depicting a poultry shop, complete with suspended chicken
and caged rabbits, and an exquisite figurine of a dancer imported from India.
The book contains 26 glossy images and more than a hundred others embedded in
the text, every one adding an exciting dimension to her colourful chronicle.
The leading dramatis personae are evoked in stunning pen-portraits. Some
challenge received judgements and ask us to assess anew figures we thought we
already understood well. She is impressed by Pompey, who ‘has a good claim to
be called the first Roman emperor’. She is sceptical about Brutus’s real
commitment to Republican ideals. She sensibly refrains from trying to penetrate
the assiduously crafted public image of Augustus to the ‘real’ man and husband
behind the propaganda, although she admires some of his achievements. There are
finely tuned cameos in the tenth chapter’s whistle-stop tour of the fourteen
emperors who ruled between the death of Augustus in 14 CE and the assassination
in 192 of Commodus (the son of Marcus Aurelius who plays the villain in Ridley
Scott’s movie Gladiator). Although
there are mercifully few signs of the arch and provocative controversialism for
its own sake which used to be her sole irritating characteristic, Beard rightly
challenges the tradition of dividing the rulers of the Imperium Romanum into heroes and felons. The tradition, extending
back to the ancient annalist Tacitus and biographer Suetonius, was inherited
uncritically by Edward Gibbon in The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789). Beard
pleads, instead, for a less judgemental and more nuanced appraisal of the way
that the sensational ancient accounts of the emperors reveal the anxieties and
socio-political values of the imperial era. She also emphasises that for many
inhabitants of the empire, especially those living in the more farflung
territories, the personality of the incumbent of the imperial throne made little
difference. This is a wonderful, lucid and thoughtful section of the book and
should henceforward be required reading for anyone setting out to study Roman
emperors.
There is an attempt at a thematic rather
than historically linear approach in one central chapter, ‘The Home Front’,
where the discussion of family life and women is compromised by being focussed,
yet again, on Cicero, or rather Cicero’s relationships with his wives and
daughter. But the two other thematic
chapters—the last in the book—are outstanding. Here she abandons the
chronological structure altogether and looks at the rich/poor divide and the
experience of people living under the Romans but outside Rome. The luxurious
lifestyle of the wealthy, not just in Rome but across the empire, was
astounding: some owned not one but dozens of sumptuous villas, with central
heating and lavish murals, swimming pools and shady grottoes, all serviced by
armies of slaves. Some rich people paraded their wealth by indulging in
ostentatious feasting and pastimes; others made a point of subsidising public
amenities—libraries, theatres, gladiator shows—in order to ward off the dangers
posed by the inevitable envy and disgruntlement of the poor. Beard points out,
however, that much of the physical unpleasantness of life in ancient urban
centres was suffered by rich and poor alike: traffic jams, uncollected refuse,
disease, parasites, gangrene-infected water. She has a pitch-perfect ear for
class snobbery and the insults poured on the allegedly vulgar newly rich by the
educated or aristocratic. She writes movingly about the gravestones of ordinary
Romans, artisans and semi-skilled labourers, proudly informing posterity about
their expertise and achievements as bakers, butchers, midwives and fabric
dyers. She evokes well the squalid cafes and taverns where the poorer urban
classes played dice and caroused. Yet she makes us face the reality that the
majority of the empire’s 50 million inhabitants would have lived on small
peasant farms, struggling to extract much more than a subsistence livelihood
from their crops and livestock. There were few changes in agricultural technology
or fundamental lifestyle from the Iron Age to medieval times. The letter of Pliny
the Younger are a rich source of evidence for the relationship between Roman
governors and such ‘ordinary’ people of the provinces, in his case in Bithynia
and Pontus; Beard leads us from these
into a revealing discussion of the problems Roman governors faced in policing
their boundaries of empire (including Hadrian’s Wall) and how they largely tolerated
local religious practices and cultural diversity, although Christianity became
an exception.
The turbulent showdown between the Illyrian
Emperor Diocletian and the martyrdom-hungry Christians in the early fourth century is one of the many fascinating episodes in the history of the Romans
which Beard must exclude from her account by deciding to end it in 212 CE. Her
logic is impeccable: this was when the Emperor Caracalla made every free
inhabitant of the Roman Empire a Roman citizen, thus causing 30 million
individuals to ‘become legally Roman overnight’. Beard stresses the significance
of the erasure of the millennium-long boundary between the rulers and the
ruled—the completion of what she calls the Romans’ ‘citizenship project’, from
which we can still learn even though it subsequently failed and had always been
fundamentally blemished by slavery. Besides the history of Rome as it continued
in the third and fourth centuries CE, the element I most miss
in this volume is an attempt to get inside the minds of the remarkable ancient
Italians in terms of their philosophy and ethics. Beard writes well on
priesthoods and public religion, but is little interested in philosophy.
Despite her fixation on Cicero, who wrote philosophical treatises, she offers less
on the complex thought-world and extraordinary psychological
strengths—self-control, resilience, acceptance of uncompromising discipline,
fearlessness in the face of death, moral fortitude, high ideas and
principles—which many members of this tough and soldierly people drew from
their Stoic, Neoplatonic and Epicurean convictions. She is good on Virgil’s Aeneid as a political poem, but has
little to say about the earliest surviving Roman epic, Lucretius’ inspirational
Epicurean On the Nature of Things. I
finished SPQR hoping that we will one
day be treated to a Beard book on the inward contours of the Roman psyche.
As a Briton I am proud that
the idea that the goddess’s train of escorts were in fact green seems to have
been the invention of the English showman Elkanah Settle, whose spectacular
musical The World in the Moon (1697)
included five green men dancing in Cynthia’s lunar court, to music by Daniel
Purcell. 
