Nine Lives (of the Poets): Horace!

Our book today is Archibald Campbell's big fat dense opinionated 1924 volume Horace, which is, pound for pound, my favorite book on Quintus Horatius Flaccus, that most beloved and approachable of Roman poets. So approachable, in fact, that Campbell's book had to win its spot in my heart against some incredibly fierce competition: there have been thousands of good books written about Horace in the last three hundred years, arguing over every single possible aspect of the poet and his work - from the details of his life to the order of his poems to his influence on every poet who's come after him.  W. Y. Sellar, Gil Highet, D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Eduard Fraenkel ... the list of first-rate scholars, writers, and popularizers who've taken Horace as their subject is very long. Campbell himself is alive to this fact (he himself was writing in Sellar's shadow) and fills his donnishly chatty book with reasons why Horace would enjoy such an appeal:

He is certainly a great artist; the purest Roman literature can show us, Virgil having more of genius and inequality. Horace has indeed, as I have remarked already, a strictly limited array of themes; though all are good ones. He has even, if my analysis of his form is not most grossly out - he has even, in by far the greater portion of his maturest and most characteristic work, but one single type of poem! Yet not even by his own custom can his infinite variety be staled. It is what he does that tells, and he hardly ever does the same thing twice. His subjects he repeats innumerably, he almost never repeats himself. What the ancients cared about in poetry was two things: the soul of the poem, and its body; the structure, and the surface; the composition, and the style. His treatment is always unique, his language always individual. He takes over all the conventions that were available for him; but he used them for his own ends; they are but a medium for his meaning. He cannot be translated; metre and language are fused into his work; the effect cannot be extricated from them.

But many writers sing Horace's praises - the fact that Campbell does that isn't the only reason I go back to his book over and over. No, the rest of the reasons are harder to pin down. I like the fact, for instance, that he under-estimates Horace ("Horace's poetry is good for this age; but not sufficient"), as so many scholars tend to do - it makes both him and Horace seem more human; I like the fact that he seems to have discovered the semi-colon about ten minutes before his book went to the printers and over-uses it like a child running wild on Christmas morning; I like the fact that his book is unapologetically soup-to-nuts, giving us Horace's life and times, a complete overview of poetry's place in the ancient world (an excursus he actually tells readers they can skip if they like! Let's hope none of them did!), and a full explication of everything Horace wrote; and I like the old-world certainty with which Campbell assumes his readers already know their Horace. That last one is a pleasure rapidly vanishing from the world of classical studies, if it isn't entirely vanished already: the assumption of classical knowledge on the part of the reader. Writers who make such an assumption might occasionally paraphrase things in French, but they'll feel no obligation to translate anything older:

We see, then, that the standpoint vulgarly known as classical is that which Horace is opposing; and more explicit proof soon follows. Horace, too, in his turn, appeals to the Greeks; but he uses the appeal of antiquity in the right way. In language which ought never to be forgotten he tells his generation that the great classics were in their own day great innovators:

quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset

quam nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?

That is unanswerable.

The same is true for Campbell's anecdotes (believe it or not - and in the context of the rest of this entry, how on Earth could you? - he's actually quite a funny writer, happily willing to tweak the noses of snobs and dilettantes alike), which gain their maximum punch through the fact that our author doesn't feel the need to stop and annotate them:

There is not getting over the fact that, as Pindar pointed out, Typhon does not like music; and people who do not care for music are generally, I think, not fond of Horace's Odes.

I'm not sure there are 100 readers left in the world today who would smile, as I did, at that reference - who would nod upon seeing it and then keep reading. Probably not everybody in Horace's own reading public got such a reference, but the audience he had always in his mind while he wrote understood him perfectly - or so he hoped.

Campbell goes over every single line of Horace with minute and comprehensive attention, and that, too, is refreshing. Sometimes the raw work of scholarship happening right in front of you is the perfect anecdote for an afternoon spent re-writing textbooks for schoolchildren. As noted, other studies of Horace have come and gone since this one was published ninety years ago, but work and thought and spirit like this are evergreen, or should be.

Penguins on Parade: Livy's First Book!

Some Penguin Classics get overshadowed by others, and that's certainly the case with the Aubrey De Selincourt translation of the first five books of the Roman historian Livy. This volume was done in 1960, but when readers think "DeSelincourt" and "Livy," they think of that translator's fantastic, reads-like-a-novel Penguin Classics volume titled The War with Hannibal, the praises of which we've sung often here at Stevereads. That Hannibal volume is a kind of masterpiece, but even so, The Early History of Rome deserves its day in the sun.

This is the story of Rome's earliest mytho-history, from the foundation of the city and the tale of Romulus and Remus to the Gallic invasion of 386 b.c. Here are the Tarquin kings and the virtuous virgins and the squabbling in-fighting and the oversized characters like Coriolanus who so profitably fed the imagination of Shakespeare that he sometimes doesn't even bother to change Livy's words as he's purloining them.

The reason for this is the superb drama of Livy's prose. He himself concentrates on that drama in an appealingly unashamed way - as R. M. Ogilvie points out in his introduction, Livy had no political occupation or administrative duties; the purpose of his entire life was to write, and despite the stories we read of his public readings at Rome being sparsely attended, he clearly wrote to be enjoyed. He appears to have led no public life other than that of a working historian - he came to Rome from Padua at an early age, and when he was around 30 he began work on the great history that would consume his life: a sprawling, cinematic work of 142 books, of which only 35 survive. He write his prose epic for forty years with the full encouragement of the emperor Augustus (who jokingly accused him of Pompeian loyalties), and when he died in a.d. 17 he was famous throughout the Roman world (there's an anecdote about a man from Cadiz, with which I shall not trouble you, since you've undoubtedly read about it elsewhere).

35 books isn't much. For those of us who've read them over and over for the sheer fun of it, the number is heartbreaking. But there's a consolation to be taken in these first five books of the Ab Urbe Condita. Livy started here, after all, and these five books were meant as a rhetorical unit. They were proofread, indexed, and sold separately from the rest of the work, even when the rest of the work was well advanced and garnering fans of its own. Something about these elemental stories of Rome's chaotic founding (stories Livy transmuted from the mostly Greek originals he came across and denied using) held a narrative appeal that retained its strength for long centuries after their storyteller was gone. In Livy's later sections dealing with Rome's consolidation of power in Italy and the Mediterranean, there are many spots where the master nods - but in The Early History of Rome there's scarcely time to take a breath between one incredibly charged moment and the next.

Take the example of the rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, a human drama so stark that even De Selincourt's Edwardian circumlocutions fail to blunt it:

"My body only has been violated. My heart is innocent, and death will be my witness. Give me your solemn promise that the adulterer will be punished - he is Sextus Tarquinius. Hi it is who last night came as my enemy disguised as my guest, and took his pleasure of me. That pleasure will be my death - and his, too, if you are men."

The promise was given. One after another they tried to comfort her. They told her she was helpless, and therefore innocent; that he alone was guilty. It was the mind, they said, that sinned, not the body: without intention there could never be guilt.

"What is due to him," Lucretia said, "is for you to decide. As for me I am innocent of fault, but I will take my punishment. Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent or unchaste women to escape what they deserve." With these words she drew a knife from under her robe, drive it into her heart, and fell forward, dead."

Her father and husband were overwhelmed with grief. While they stood weeping helplessly, Brutus drew the bloody knife from Lucretia's body, and holding it before him cried: "By this girl's blood - none more chaste till a tyrant wronged her - and by the gods, I swear that with sword and fire, and whatever else can lend strength to my arm, I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius the Proud, his wicked wife, and all his children, and ever again will I let them or any other man be King in Rome."

Or the scene from the story of Coriolanus where he confronts his mother before the walls of the city he's intending to sack for its insolence to him - a scene that will be familiar to lovers of Shakespeare but in Livy's hands lacks not one bit of the Bard's pathos:

"I would know," she said, "before I accept your kiss, whether I have come to an enemy or to  son, whether I am here as your mother or as a prisoner of war. Have my long life and unhappy old age brought me to this, that I should see you first an exile, then the enemy of your country? Had you the heart to ravage the earth which bore and bred you? When you set foot upon it, did not your anger fall away, however fierce your hatred and lust for revenge? When Rome was before your eyes, did not the thought come to you, 'within those walls is my home, with the gods to watch over it - and my mother and my wife and my children'? Ah, had I never borne a child, Rome would not now be menaced; if I had no son, I could have died free in a free country! But now there is nothing left for me to endure, nothing which can bring to me more pain, and to you a deeper dishonour, than this. I am indeed an unhappy woman - but it will not be for long; think of these others who, if you cannot relent, must hope for nothing but an untimely death or life-long slavery."

De Selincourt's translations rolls on magnificently from page to page, and the reader is swept along. Penguin Classics has four volumes of Livy (and in my library of dream-volumes from Penguin - a library whose contents we'll get to by-and-by - they come out with one hugely satisfying plump big trade paperback of all four of those volumes together), and as noted, The War With Hannibal is the best of them, the most vivid and exciting and pivotal in terms of real, verifiable history. But The Early History of Rome takes a close second place and is utterly fascinating in its own right - not only for the drama of its stories but for the uncanny window it opens into how one very intelligent man thought the Romans under Augustus might want to see themselves - or their ideal selves.

All Roads Lead to Murder!

Our book today is Albert Bell's 2002 mystery novel All Roads Lead to Murder, and it's a perfect illustration of a fact that might sometimes get obscured in the omnivorous whirligig of Stevereads: there are countless books out there I've never read! Countless books, in fact, that I've never even seen. Every single trip I take to the Boston Public Library is a voyage of discovery for me – and I've been prowling their aisles since the days when I was lunching regularly with Oliver Wendell Holmes (translation for the rest of you: a long time). Part of the vertiginous joy of reading for me is that very knowledge that there's so much more out there.

Perfect case in point: in Open Letters recently, while reviewing a murder mystery starring ancient Roman dilettante and letter-writer Pliny the Younger, I opined that it was amazing no writer had thought to make him the star of a murder mystery before now. I've read a vast, heaping number of novels set in ancient Rome (and written one! Prospective publishers may begin their bidding war now!) - in my hubris, it never occurred to me that I might have missed one, when in fact I've doubtless missed many thousands.

The one I missed was a doozy! After my review appeared, I was duly informed that at least one other author had, in fact, written a murder mystery starring Pliny the Younger: Albert Bell. His novel All Roads Lead to Murder appeared in 2002, and, prince that he is, he sent me a copy (most writers in such a circumstance would have sent me their dog's latest nighttime surprise in a plastic baggie – but then, I suspect Mr. Bell is a good deal more civilized than most writers)(not that this is difficult …).

I'm glad he did, for the best, simplest reason: All Roads Lead to Murder is fantastic.

And Pliny the Younger is indeed the star: the novel takes place when he's still a young man, still making his way in Roman society (and still grieving the recent loss of his famous polymath uncle, Pliny the Elder, in the Vesuvius disaster) – but already set in a lot of his ways, as young men will be. The story finds him and his traveling companion Tacitus – the great Roman historian, only here still comparatively young and known mainly as the son-in-law of the famous governor of Britain Julius Agricola – traveling to Smyrna in a group that includes all kinds of future suspects: the adherents of an exotic religious cult, two old Jews who might just belong to a religious cult themselves (the elder is a certain doctor named Luke, if that gives you any hint), a well-to-do Roman lout, his slaves, and his various cronies, etc. The group has no sooner settled in lodgings in Smyrna than one of their members is found dead in his room with his heart carved out of his body. The provincial governor is away, and for local administration Smyrna has the usual bureaucratic mess characteristic of that part of the world even today – so Pliny (dragging Tacitus along) takes it upon himself to investigate.

Bell does every single thing right in this engrossing book, starting with keeping his star player believable. Pliny the Younger published a large collection of his correspondence during his lifetime, and although all of it was pumiced and holystoned as close to self-aggrandizement as he could make it, the collection is still infinitely revealing – and the person it reveals was, shall we say, fallible. It would be a capital mistake to change that for the sake of producing a more conventional hero, and Bell never comes near to doing that. Instead, his Pliny is given to offhand comments like “Slaves and horses – they both have to be broken to be useful. But you don't want to crush the spirit.” When one character calls him a “high and mighty bastard,” we can't help but agree. Hell, almost on the book's first page, the easy-going Tacitus asks him, “Why can't you just relax and stop being such a prig?” It's a line good for a chuckle, because Pliny never does relax in the course of the book. You get the impression he wouldn't know how; it's a trait he shared with his illustrious uncle, whose memory hovers over this book like a ghost, as when Pliny contemplates his memories of the man:

What difference does it make? The end of both men – of all men – is the same. The day will come when Apelles' wife and children will no longer remember just what he looked like, what his voice sounded like. He will 'live' only in the name which his son bears. Poor Cornutus didn't leave even that much to keep his memory alive. I find each day that my uncle's visage is dimmer in my mind. He was fortunate to have written so much. He is 'alive' even for people, like Luke, who never met him. That kind of legacy is the closest we can come, I think, to immortality. It's what I hope to achieve with my life.

Pliny and Tacitus have a wonderful chemistry – it's a brilliant choice in Bell's part to give the 'sidekick' role to a man very likely more intelligent than Pliny himself: it forces us to concentrate on Pliny's other characteristics, like his tenacity and the unconventional modes of thinking he learned from his uncle. The inconvenient fact that the pre-modern world had nothing much in the way of forensics or investigative procedure is handled with perfect deftness – Pliny goes about tracking down the truth much as you or I would, with his hands and his brain and his best guesses, and it's all wonderfully convincing.

Bell is a classicist and a scholar of the ancient world, and when I read that, I trembled. Such men are dangerous – they have lean and hungry looks and often take a dagger to dramatics without even meaning to. But even after a single chapter, I breathed easier – Bell knows his facts, yes, but his primary concern here is storytelling.

The best illustration of this comes half-way through the book. The governor of the province has returned to take over the murder investigation, and a beautiful slave-girl has been fingered as a likely source of information. She and her family have a tangled and tragic history with Pliny and his uncle, and he feels both guilty and intrigued by her strength of character, so he's horrified when the course of Roman justice begins to take the path it always does: whenever a crime happens to a person of quality, the first thing you do is torture the slaves for information. So we get a scene in which, over Pliny's protests, the governor orders the slave-girl strung up right there in the room to be whipped.

Reading that far, I groaned inwardly – because Bell had painted himself into a dramatic corner. The facts of the Roman world make only one outcome of such a scene possible – but the far older dictates of drama say: your hero doesn't stand idle while the innocent suffer. When the Roman soldier raises his fist with the whip in it, I knew the only thing Bell could have Pliny do was nothing at all.

So imagine my pleasure when he has his Pliny do the only thing he should do first: he grabs the hand holding the whip. It's a little moment, passing quickly (after he's admonished, he leaves the room and the torture commences), but a classicist with no ear for the stage, no heart for drama, wouldn't even have seen how crucial it was, much less worked it right. I'm not sure, but I may have applauded just a bit, the first time I read it.

All Roads Lead to Murder was followed in 2008 by a second Pliny-Tacitus adventure, The Blood of Caesar. This one takes place in Rome itself and features an Emperor Domitian who's every bit as monstrous as history portrays him and yet recognizably human as well (it's a beguiling bit of characterization, and there are many, many bits like it in the book). The plot involves twists and turns of high statecraft reminiscent of I, Claudius, and all the dramatic strengths of All Roads Lead to Murder are here again, only sharpened and strengthened.

I can't recommend these two books strongly enough. Any fan of fiction set in ancient Rome will love them; any murder mystery aficionado will love them; any classicist who's head isn't firmly up their aqueduct will love them. I missed them fair and square (effective self-promotion, rather charmingly, doesn't seem to be our author's strong suit), but you now have no such excuse: go to Amazon or BN.com right now, today, and buy a copy of each – buy a couple of copies, because I guarantee you'll want to give them to readers you know.

And while you're at it, kindly help me to correct the only problem I can find with these books: there are only two of them! In a publishing world where so many murder mysteries aren't fit for lavatory duty, Albert Bell has seen fit to give readers only two adventures of young prig Pliny and his surprisingly libertine friend Tacitus, and that's just not right. So email the author and tell him to write a third book in the series post haste. Nag him via snail mail. If you live near him, harangue him at the Piggly-Wiggly. A writer of his caliber (and playfulness! All Roads Lead to Murder has dozens of impish anachronistic allusions, including a hilarious little nod to “The Tell-Tale Heart”) must have no rest, no relaxation: he must be firmly in harness all the time in the service of his demanding readers.

I'm now one of those readers, and all I want for Christmas is another one of these fantastic books.

The Ides!

Our book today is Stephen Dando-Collins’ new work of history, The Ides: Caesar’s Murder and the War for Rome (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). When last we saw Dando-Collins anywhere in the vicinity of Open Letters, he was being good and properly mauled by angry young freelancer Ascanio Tedeschi, who read his previous book, Blood of the Caesars, with mounting incredulity and rage. At one point in his scathing attack, Tedeschi makes some passing comment to the effect that Dando-Collins had previously written fairly worthy histories – that it was only this particular one that was aneurysm-inducing. But Tedeschi didn’t dwell on those other histories; he was hot on the trail, slavering for the blood of an author who’d overstepped all bounds of believability. Editorial policy at OLM is to first check to see that a freelancer has all their rhetorical ducks in a row – and then to stand back, let them hammer away at their victims, and try not to get any of the viscera on the furniture.

But the fact is, Dando-Collins has written some interesting, worthy histories in his career (his accounts of various Roman legions are meticulously researched and quite interesting), and his latest, The Ides, is therefore a return to form. At no point does he hypothesize that, for instance, it was a stand-in for Caesar who was killed on that bloody Ides of March; at no point does he speculate that perhaps all of the assassins were illegitimate offspring of Caesar. In fact, The Ides contains very little speculation at all – it’s mostly just sturdy summarizing done almost exclusively from ancient sources, with a little modern historiography thrown in and quite a bit of intense scrutiny of timelines and possible motivations. Dando-Collins seems to invite ambivalence with the first of his endnotes, in which he enigmatically reminds us, “The noted British historian Sir Ronald Syme once said that if history is to be written at all, it must be written with the violent and complex reality of serious fiction” – but The Ides is almost entirely facts, and even the quasi-philosophical theorizing is fairly harmless:

Caesar opened historical floodgates, washing away the old democratic system. Modern scholars suggest that the republican ideal for which Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero gave their lives was an illusion, that one strongman or another would always rise to power within Rome’s republican system. Perhaps so. But after taking power, Sulla soon bowed to the system and retired, and Pompey was tamed by it. Only Caesar overthrew the system, and buried the ideal. And to this day many a patriot, misguided or not, still will give his or her life for an ideal.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on 15 March 44 B.C. took about ten minutes from start to finish, and Dando-Collins has a whole book to fill, so there’s quite a bit more of this ‘perhaps so, perhaps no’ type stuff, including the age-old school-debate topic of whether or not it was wrong for Brutus & Co. to kill him in the first place. The assassins said they were acting in defense of Rome, removing a man who’d become a monster – and Dando-Collins is ready to mostly agree with them:

There can be no escaping the fact that by any definition Caesar was a tyrant: he gained power in a bloody premeditated coup; employed brutal force; suppressed democracy; and, brooking no opposition, ruled through fear. Furthermore, he may have been a tyrant suffering from brain disease who had come to think of himself as immortal. However, at a distance of more than two thousand years, and without an accurate medical diagnosis, we can only speculate on the state of his mental health.

(That bit about Caesar’s mental health is the closest the author comes to an outlandish theory this time around; he wonders if in addition to – or perhaps even instead of – being epileptic, Caesar had some kind of brain imbalance that would account for several of his recorded behaviors)(That there was never a more completely, horrifyingly mentally balanced human being in the history of the world is patently clear from the ancient first-hand evidence, and no doubt Dando-Collins sees that, but as noted, he’s got a book to fill up)

And there are some good insights here, stuff that will entertain and intrigue the student new to these matters, including a little speculation on that other age-old question – what did the assassins really want:

The most striking thing about the more than sixty assassins is that inputting their lives on the line to join the conspiracy, none asked for anything; all were content simply to take the appointments that Caesar had laid out for the next five years. They merely wanted to be ride of Caesar, the man Cicero described as “odious.” Only a barely concealed hate of Caesar and a driving lust for his removal can explain why the assassins were blind to what would follow his death.

No, there’s nothing in The Ides to incite the anger of a passionate young freelancer. This is a sturdy, well-done recounting of a pivotal event in Roman history, and any reader not already familiar with this very familiar material could do a lot worse than to choose this book as their introduction to it. Just don’t tell Tedeschi.