Great Caesar's Ghost in the Penny Press!

A large part of the joy that comes from seeing a trained academic excel at book-reviewing comes from how antithetical those two endeavors are. Yes, in their purest forms, both are trying to teach people something, but given the necessary brevity of even the longest periodical piece, pedagogical aspirations must be narrow. And given the length and cost of school terms, academics expect to get more than one shot at getting their teaching done.

Not so the book reviewer! He has just those 2000 words (if that - so rarely more!) to cover a field, synopsize a book, and make a point about the two ... is it any wonder so many of them fail so miserably? And even those few who manage to succeed - can we really expect that in addition to everything else, they'll also be fun to read? It seems cruel.

So all hail the mighty Mary Beard, who manages to be both a genuine Oxford scholar of the Classics and one Hell of a good book reviewer! In the latest New York Review of Books, she takes a look at three recent books on our old enemy Gaius Julius Caesar, and even for those of you who haven't read the books in question, it's a safe bet Beard's piece makes better reading than any of them (I have read all three, and it does).

And as in so many families, it's the middle child who gets it the worst: the second of her three subjects, Philip Freeman's Julius Caesar, takes it on the teeth for any number of mistakes it's not wise to make in the presence of a Classics don. Beard sums up the choices open to prospective Caesar biographers:

"Caesar: good or bad?" is the question only just under the surface here. Modern commentators might express a similar dilemma somewhat differently. Where on the political spectrum between John F. Kennedy (who is part of the inspiration for Steven Saylor's Caesar, in his detective novels set in ancient Rome) and Robert Mugabe does Caesar most plausibly belong?

Having so elegantly set the terms, she then starts in on Freeman:

Where Freeman must resort to speculation, he tends to be liberal with his cliches (years "dawn," tribesmen are "fearless" or "fiercely independent," blood flows in "torrents"). And he is often inaccurate with the background details, large and small. I know of no evidence, for example, that Romans stored their boots and shoes in the vestibulum (entrance hall) of their houses, or that the pool of water regularly found in the atrium was intended as a fish pond.

But it's when Freeman refers to Caesar as a "boy from the slums of Rome who had fought his way to the top of the political ladder" that he draws Beard's sharpest ire:

This is preposterous. You might possibly tell some such story about Caesar's contemporary Cicero, who really was a "new man" on the Roman political scene - though even he had a comfortable background among the country gentry, rather than among the festering slums. No successful Roman politician in the first century BCE was poor, least of all those who championed the cause of the disadvantaged in the city. Caesar's career, and his rise to power, only make sense if you see him as a man endowed with all the hereditary prestige and advantages of old money. Smart and snobbish Julii, Caesar and his father (who had himself, after all, reached the praetorship, the second-highest office in Rome, after the consulship) would be appalled at Freeman's picture of their lowly background.

Nothing quite so bracing, is there, as a purely British-style 'This is preposterous'!

The same NYRB issue had lots and lots of other good stuff in it, though nothing quite so good as this (although the subject matter may bias me!) ... we'll have to cover more of it, in the days to come!

When We Were Gods

Our book today is When We Were Gods by Colin Falconer, and it treads the thrice-trod ground of the storied romantic entanglement of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt with ... well, really with the burgeoning Roman Empire, although specifically with two very different individual Romans: first an older and slightly grizzled Julius Caesar, envisioned by Falconer as a frustrated statesman dreaming of some last-minute glory, and second by Marc Antony, Caesar's one-time top enforcer, portrayed by pretty much everybody other than Falconer as an ambitious dupe Cleopatra first used than tossed aside.

This storyline has been revisited by writers of historical fiction ever since Plutarch made most of it up, two thousand years ago, and usually these writers manage to get only one out of the three main characters right (about the same ratio of success usually applies to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in Star Trek - and from what we've seen, we have every reason to expect that ratio to hold true in the upcoming movie, since in it, Kirk has been cast as a bland, blond nobody and McCoy has been cast with an actor easily fifteen years too old for the part, leaving the field clear for what we're certain will be a spot-on Spock).

Caesar is in some ways the easiest. Most writers offer up a variation on the slightly effete, bored, blank space conjured up by Rex Harrison in the famous movie. Here's a sample of Falconer on the man, in a section in which he visits the tomb of Alexander the Great with Cleopatra:

The Great One could have been a statue. His hands were crossed on his breast, his golden hair spread out around his head like flax. The skin had been highlighted with cosmetics, to give it a more natural hue, but beneath the embalmer's artistry the skin was like parchment. One of the nostrils was gone, knocked off by some accident, it was said. by one of her ancestors.
Ceasar was overwhelmed by what he saw. He had taken no more than a few steps into the chamber when he gasped and fell to his knees.
She was astonished. It was the first time she'd seen him in awe of anything. He is human after all, she thought. And what he most reveres is my own bloodline. Perhaps I have a greater hold on this man than I believe.
For a long time, he did not speak. Finally, he said, "He was far younger than me when he died, and yet he had conquered half the world."
"You are greater than he is," she whispered.
"How can I be greater? When I compare myself to him, I have achieved nothing."
"But you are still alive. Alexander is dead."
This seemed to cheer him slightly.

Cleopatra herself elicits slightly more original handling from Falconer (although it should be pointed out that his writing on all his many characters is really quite good, a good deal better than virtually all other such novels on this subject, most certainly including the latest over-Loebed doorstop from Colleen McCullough), as in this little peroration in which she tries to spell out to Caesar just exactly how important she is:

As queen I hold the monopoly on all of this. It is the queen who tells the peasants how much to plant, and the products are pressed in my factories. All that oil is mine. It is Cleopatra's grain that feeds the Mediterranean, and the tax on wheat is twenty million bushels a year. And there is so much you haven't seen. My papyrus plants make paper for the whole world. I have a monopoly on wool, a quarter share on all fish and honey sold in Egypt, a third share of all the grapes. I have salt and natron pits. I have gold mines in the south. I take a twelve percent duty on all goods that go up the Nile...

You go, girl!

However, as good as Falconer's book is - and it's very good, good enough to be recommended here at Stevereads - it stays true to the golden ratio: it only gets one of its three main characters exactly right, and it's the one most writers reliably get wrong. Falconer's Marc Antony is a lowbrow brute you can't help but like, a foul-mouthed soldier who's nevertheless more honest than everybody around him. That honesty does him no good - in fact, it dooms him - but it's at least enjoyable to read. Falconer's Antony is worth the price of the book, as in this bath house scene, where he and Cicero catch sight of young Octavian (the future 'Augustus' of the known world) cavorting:

"Octavian," Cicero muttered.
Antony examined him critically. "Look at him. Bottom as hard as a camp bed. Talking of beds, they say his friend Maecenas has camped there overnight once or twice."
The boy jumped into the hot water and disappeared from sight.
"They say he's Julius' favorite," Cicero murmured. "One day he might be named as his heir."
"That little bitch? He would make a Consul a good wife, certainly. But I doubt he shall ever amount to anything. The first rain and he sickens like a wet cat."

Of course Antony - and all his allies, including Cleopatra - turn out to be drastically wrong about Octavian's staying power, but that's a large part of the fun of revisiting this story so regularly, isn't it? We all know how it ends. It's up to each author to take the material up and make something interesting out of it. Shakespeare of course created one of his most lush and over-ripe masterpieces. Shaw crafted a play in which he himself more or less shuts up, always a noteworthy occasion. And Colin Falconer has made a novel well worth your time.

The Commentaries of Julius Caesar

Our book today is the Commentaries of Julius Caesar, the seven lengthy pieces of breathless historical fiction Julius Caesar had sent back to Rome (allegedly to the Senate whose alleged employee he allegedly was, although lo and behold, copies also found their way to eager publishers in the bookshops at the foot of the Janiculum) during the years of his illegally prolonged tenure making illegal brushwars all over the province of Gaul.

Let us tell you a thing or two about Gaius Julius Caesar, boys and girls. With the possible exception of Jesus of Nazareth, no figure in history has been so monumentally distorted as this one. For proper visualization purposes (and bowing to the Youtube generation), we need to you to cast your imaginations to 'The Office's scheming Dwight - but not Rainn Wilson, the relatively normal-looking guy who only looks ghastly every week because his chief comedic foil, John Krasinski, is so good-looking - no, rather the UK version, Mackenzie Crook - that's the face of Gaius Julius Caesar: ferret-eyed, gaunt-cheeked, explicitly, visibly duplicitous.

His father - an honorable man - died when he was young, more's the pity. His mother was a formidable woman who was entirely preoccupied with the enormous obstacles she faced simply staying alive and keeping her family in political play. This left young Gaius often in the care of his aunt, who was married to a monster named Marius.

In the generation before young Gaius, Marius had allowed all his military victories (which were hard-won and magnificent - Like Grant and Wellington, he was more of a large-scale systematic butcher than a great military genius, but it got the job done) and the acclaim of the Roman people to push him closer and closer to megalomaniacal insanity - and then finally to embrace it, marching his army (a tool he had entirely reshaped and forged in loyalty not to the Republic but to himself personally) on Rome and plunging the City into a week of purges and bloodshed.

From this monster young Gaius soaked up lessons like a sponge: laws mean nothing, the Republic has no purpose other than your own personal enrichment, oaths are made to be foresworn. By making the legions permanently-staffed and funded things addicted to loot and loyal to individuals who could provide it, by flouting the law when it sought to rein in personal ambition, and most of all by ignoring, emasculating, or outright murdering the ruling aristocracy, Marius had laid the groundwork for a future in which these things would be done not just in times of national emergency but always, by everyone who could and felt like it. Gaius Julius Caesar saw this groundwork and surged into that future.

The way things worked in the Roman Republic, a nobleman served some pro forma time in the military and then began his climb up the ladder of civic advancement - quaestor, aedile, praetor, propraetor, consul, and proconsul. Each of these positions carried a wider scope of authority and called for a greater expenditure of money. Roman politicians weren't paid - quite the reverse: they spent to get to the top, to the consulate. Quaestors might get off lightly, only needing appease their private backers. But aediles, now that's where the sheer cost of succeeding in Roman politics began to separate the men from the boys; aediles had to sponsor public events and shows out of their own pocket, and although in the richest families could absorb these expenses with ease, most office-holders had to borrow heavily on their future prospects.

In fact, all Roman positions looked - and borrowed - heavily against the future, for a very good reason: the future could pay off anything. Consuls and proconsuls were assigned the government of each of Rome's many provinces, and while they were there, they controlled not only the lawful supervision of the province but the flow of its taxes and other revenues (and all the bribes that went along with them) - with virtually no Senatorial oversight from Rome. In this way one man could find himself poised directly at the spigot of a great geyser of money. He could, in short, find himself in a position not only to pay off his debts but also to make himself quite wealthy.

None of that was good enough for Gaius Julius Caesar, none of it happened fast enough, for one reason: money. Boys and girls, there has never been a human being in the history of mankind who could borrow money he couldn't pay back like Gaius Julius Caesar. If you were a junior aedile with deep pockets, a slum whore with a heart of gold, or a hognut vendor in the Livestock Forum, it didn't matter: Gaius Julius Caesar gently wanted whatever you didn't absolutely need for catsmeat sausages and your monthly rent. By the time he was a first-year praetor, he was, in modern equivalents, a staggering 2 million dollars in debt. By the time he reached his consulship, he was a mind-numbing three-quarters of a billion dollars in debt. In other words, even a normal run as governor of a province wouldn't come close to covering the debts he'd amassed on his climb to that august position. And even if he positively racked his province to wring from it every last drop it could yield, there was a risk: provinces could and often did petition the Senate to prosecute their governors for abuse when his term was over. Even in Rome, Caesar never lacked for enemies slavering to bring him to court.

There was a temporary protection, but it was absolute: the consulate. Sitting consuls (much like American presidents, although in practice, if not technically in theory) were immune from prosecution.

But we get ahead of ourselves: in 59 b.c. Gaius Julius Caesar was thinking of a lucrative province, a seed-ground from which to pay his debts and maybe even amass a fortune. But his enemies in the Senate tried to stymie him: when the assignment of provinces was handed out, he was given an empty brief, made governor of 'fields and forests' - just that, generally, with no specification. It meant ruin, and Caesar knew it better than anybody.

That's the tormenting thing about his whole career: at every stage, just before every enormous, world-worsening choice, it's possible, just possible, for even his worst detractors to think that horrible squeak-crack of an all-purpose excuse, that he did what he did out of pure self-preservation. Had he lived to write his memoirs, that's certainly what he himself would have maintained. Even absent that unbearable volume, there's evidence aplenty: everyone who knew him in the last decade of his life encountered the same thing: a deeply distasteful caul of self-pity.

But it isn't true. It isn't true, and it must be rejected, although we here at Stevereads are the only ones currently doing the rejecting. At every single crisis of his life, Gaius Julius Caesar had one set of choices, and one only: I can either be true to the traditions of right and rule and law that have given my whole world and the world of all my ancestors its structure and integrity, or I can do everything, conspire everything, arrange everything, and aim everything for myself, only for myself, for my own needs and my own bank account. The past, present, and future, the world and everything in it, v.s. just me, just me alone.

It's not a choice the present modern American world would have even a second's hesitation making, but once upon a time it was more difficult, and Caesar was the first to break faith with it. He chose himself always, in everything, against anything.

He got his 'forests and fields' appointment, and he did what he always did: he immediately thought - and acted - outside the law.

Not outside the law, exactly, but outside the sway of the Senate, which amounted to the same thing in the eyes of the aristocracy. The Senate was the ruling body of Rome, yes, but the actual grotty business of lawmaking often fell to a semi-official individual called a Tribune of the Plebs. This individual wasn't strictly part of the Senate but could, with the support of the popular assemblies, tell that august body what to do. There's no equivalent in American politics, only near equivalents: imagine Oprah or Rush Limbaugh having not just popular but actual political standing on the issues of the day, although that still doesn't really capture the element of danger that was always present whenever the general populace (the plebs) of Rome was involved.

In any case, a Tribune of the Plebs could push through laws and loopholes, and Caesar had a tame one in his pocket. Using this man, Caesar had himself appointed governor of both Nearer Gaul and Illyricum, and a little later he got Further Gaul as well, and his proconsulship was extended for five years.

And what years they were - years of constant aggression against unoffending tribes, years of near-constant warfare everywhere, breaching the Rhine, even famously and ridiculously venturing to Britain. Constant warfare was necessary - not to protect Rome and pacify the province, as Caesar would steadily maintain, but to justify the existence of his command in the first place.

It was towards the end of this period that the Commentaries were probably written, just prior to the crisis that would forever destroy the old world of Rome. Caesar was at the heart of that crisis, of course: in order to stay solvent and continue to stave off his million creditors (not to mention avoiding prosecution by his million enemies), Caesar knew he had to stand for consul in 48. But the law was clear: he had to return to the City in person, without his army. From Gaul he attempted to push through a change in this state of affairs, again using Tribunes of the Plebs to get it done. But they were stopped, largely by the efforts of Lucius and Sextus Domitius Ahenobarbus, and Caesar was commanded to return alone.

In response, he led his legions across the Rubicon onto Italian soil, and civil war began.

And what about the book itself, the Commentaries, we hear you asking? Regardless of what you think of its author, is the book itself any good?

Good might be stretching things, although as the first example in history of the campaign biography, it's certainly interesting. Caesar throughout refers to himself in the third person, and he is always the calm center of wisdom in the midst of chaos. He is never hurried, never mystified, and most of all never wrong. The style is sparse to the point of being epigrammatic, Caesar's conceit being that the work was just a collection of notes for some future historian to use in writing the Gallic War's full history. But sparse or no, the pages brim with euphemisms, evasions, and lies. Take for instance Caesar's dealings with the two rival chieftains of the Treveri, Indutiomarus and Cingetorix. Indutiomarus proposes an alliance with Caesar, and Caesar agrees. Here's the version of events in the Commentaries:

Caesar was well aware of the reason for Indutiomarus' words, and of what was holding him back from the path he'd initially taken. Nevertheless, to avoid being forced to waste the campaigning season among the Treveri when he was eager to go to Britain, he told Indutiomarus to come to him with 200 hostages. Once they arrived, including his son and all his relations (Caesar asked for these by name) he reassured Indutiomarus and urged him to remain loyal. At the same time, he contacted the leaders of the Treveri and one by one convinced them to support Cingetorix. He did this because Cingetorix, whose loyalty to Caesar had always been plain, deserved the favor, but also because he thought it important for Cinegetorix to be as powerful as possible among his own people. Indutiomarus took this reduction of his influence very poorly. Previously he had been hostile in his intentions toward us, but now he was aflame with indignation.

Translation: Caesar betrayed Indutiomarus, after an ostentatious show of good faith, in favor of a lesser rival Caesar knew he could control. One additional reason for the 'indignation' of Indutiomarus, a reason never mentioned by Caesar? He never got his hostages - including his son - back.

And what about the book's climax, the great 'rebellion' (as if that word could possibly apply to resisting invaders in your own country) of Vercingetorix? Even in Caesar's own account, the desperate heroism of the man comes through. True, in the Commentaries he hever had a chance, despite having united almost all the tribes of Gaul and with stirring oratory and personal valiance convinced them that he represented their last and best chance to repell the Romans. In Caesar's version, there are no surprises: Caesar is calmly prescient of everything and always ready with a cunning counter-strategy and overwhelming military force. From this book a reader would never guess how close Vercingetorix came to pulling it off.

Maybe that's just as well - certainly it's the way of the world: the victors write the histories, and they take no pains to besmirch their own reputations. Certainly nobody did this more industriously or more successfully than Caesar, which is why generations of schoolchildren are still being marched through this execrable piece of hypocrisy, while the lays and ballads of the Gauls have fallen to silence.