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.

Peguins on Parade! Herodotus and Suetonius!

Some Penguin Classics become classics in their own right – a remarkable thing to happen to what is, at heart, a workmanlike series of trots. Ordinarily, in such a series, the works stay the same but the translations come and go – they get supplanted regularly as scholarship advances and copyrights expire. Those of us who live and breathe the classics of ancient Greece and Rome have not only made peace with this endless procession but come to relish it – watching to see what new versions of our old friends each publishing season will bring. And each time a new and truly superb translation comes along, we wonder the same thing: not 'can this ever be topped' since there is no single pinnacle, but rather, 'will we see another translation of this work this good in this generation?'

Those who thought the Rawlinson Herodotus unsurpassable, for instance, learned their folly in 1954 when Aubrey de Selincourt produced his epochal translation, which had less of the rhetorical power of Rawlinson but a good deal more of the stylistic fun of Herodotus himself. The de Selincourt Herodotus became the Penguin Herodotus, and it stayed that way for decades, delighting amateurs and instructing countless students in the ways of the first and most enjoyable of historians. In its wit and sparkle, it too seemed unsurpassable – and Penguin Classics wisely decided not to try to surpass it.

But even the most beautiful mansions need the occasional facelift, and in 1996 Penguin enlisted John Marincola to provide just that for the de Selincourt translation. Marincola added or updated many of the appurtenances modern editors are expected to provide – a glossary, a bibliography, a new introduction conversant in the latest scholarship, etc. - and he had the courage to put a toe on the stage with de Selincourt himself: “Although I have made several hundred minor revisions to Aubrey de Selincourt's translation,” he tells us, “I have attempted to retain its distinctive character and readability.” Any reader dismayed by the sound of those 'several hundred minor revisions' might not like what follows any better:

Where I felt the translation had the wrong tone, I have made minor alterations. This, naturally, is more subjective, but I hope the effect will be to underline the seriousness of Herodotus' purpose without taking anything away from the delightfulness of his narrative.

But the proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes, and no reader familiar with de Selincourt's version (or over-familiar, as some of us perhaps are) will find its spirit violated anywhere here. Not only does the earlier translator's perfect expression of the historian's earnest attempts at accountability (a new idea, pioneered by Herodotus) remain:

Up to this point I have confined what I have written to the results of my own direct observations and research, and the views I have formed from them; but from now on the basis of my story will be the accounts given to me by the Egyptians themselves – though here, too, I shall put in one or two things which I have seen with my own eyes.

… but so do all the characteristic Herodotean moments in which our historian can't help himself and simply must express his personal curiosity over some detail in the narratives he's found in his research or been told by witnesses, as in this little detail on the march of Xerxes mighty army:

It was during this march that his pack-camels were attacked by lions, which came down from their haunts at night and never attacked either the men or any of the other animals, but only the camels. I marvel at what it could have been that made the lions ignore every other living creature and set only upon the camels – beasts which they had never seen, or had any experience of, before.

Around the same time de Selincourt was providing the reading world with his landmark translation of Herodotus – in the year 1957 – Robert Graves was doing likewise with the Roman biographer Suetonius, in a fluid and loquacious version that again would leave readers wondering what could ever rival it (indeed, in terms of sales figures, Graves himself provided the only rival on the playing field, with his own heavily Suetonian I,Claudius and Claudius the God). Graves grappled with the notorious difficulties of Suetonius and produced a version for the ages.

So why, then, asks acerbic classicist Michael Grant decades later in 1979, was he asked to edit it? Where another expert might have made the usual pro forma humble remarks (perhaps using the tried-and-true metaphor of a mansion needing a facelift), Grant decided to explain himself in terms arch enough to win the approval of Livia herself:

Because Robert Graves (who explicitly refrained from catering for students) did not aim at producing a precise translation – introducing, as he himself points out, sentences of explanation, omitting passages which did not seem to help the sense, and 'turning sentences, and sometimes, even groups of sentences, inside-out'. But I feel that Mr Graves has been much too modest in this willingness to exclude from his readership those who want greater verbal exactitude …

(Grant does himself no great credit when, elsewhere in his introduction, he praises Suetonius for his dispassionate objectivity – even Graves, the novelist/interpolator, wasn't willing to go quite that far)

This explanation scores borderline-nasty points, but it does so at the expense of accuracy – Suetonius is a small, localized nightmare to translate; cracking apart his flaccid prose and making it sensible in English often requires just the kind of wholesale re-alignment Graves took it upon himself to do. In cases like this, the results must speak for themselves with slightly louder a voice than, say, the translation into English of a novel written last month in crystal-clear French.

Luckily, Graves and Grant make a good team – good enough, in any case, so the welding job doesn't show at all. Suetonius will often come up with sentences that snake here and there in apparent chaos only to deliver a sting at the end, and in all cases, the Graves/Grant combination works to preserve the particular little jolt of pleasure that comes when reading such monstrosities, as in this little gem about Mutina, scene of one of Octavian's victories:

When Augustus heard that Mark Antony had been taken under Lepidus' protection and that the other military commanders, supported by their troops, were coming to terms with these two, he at once deserted the senatorial party. His excuse was that some of them had contemptuously called him 'the boy', while others had not concealed their view that, once publicly honored, he should be got rid of – to avoid having to pay his veterans and himself what they expected. Augustus showed regret for his former allegiance by imposing a heavier fine on the people of Nursia than they could possibly meet, and then exiling them from their city; they had offended him by erecting a monument to fellow citizens killed at Mutina, with the inscription: 'Fallen in the cause of freedom!'

In both these cases, Penguin Classics chose the exact right route to take with these monuments to the art of translation (a route not often taken in an age in which 'new' has increasingly been characterized as a synonym for 'better'): preserve them, but tastefully update them for new generations of readers. Those of us who've loved these versions for years can't help but be grateful, even as we scan the horizon for the next great successors. Which will, in their turn, be Penguin Classics.