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.

Penguins on Parade: The Anger of Achilles!

Some Penguin Classics are distinctly odd, but there's nothing wrong with that. The field of books is limitless, after all, and it's never possible to tell right at the moment of publication that a particular book has all the earmarks of a classic.

Those earmarks don't change and haven't changed since the first human drew his own hand on a cave wall by the flickering light of a bison-fat lamp. A classic must be true to itself, must follow its own logic without regard fro the world around it – it's that very egocentrism that will seal it off from the shocks of time and allow it to speak to every successive generation (panderers get fame and money enough to build their Thames-side mansion and entertain in style, but they steal no marches on Helicon and are often as not forgotten before there's even decent ivy on their tombstones).

Classics must also have power, and strangely enough, power isn't always easy to spot – especially after a lapse of many years. That's why my hat's off to the editorial team at Penguin Classics for consistently finding gems big and small that do, in fact, possess power enough to justify the attention of all posterities. Some of their choices mystify me, and others seems self-evident – but the odd ones always delight.

Certainly there could be few odder choices from the whole of the 20^th century than The Anger of Achilles by Robert Graves. He first published the book in 1959 calling it a 'translation' of Homer's Iliad, although a quick scan of the first few lines will suffice to show it's not quite that:

Sing, Mountain Goddess, sing through me

That anger which most ruinously

Inflamed Achilles, Peleus' son,

And which, before the tale was done,

Had glutted Hell with champions – bold,

Stern spirits by the thousandfold;

Ravens and dogs their corpses ate.

For thus did ZEUS, who watched their fate,

See his resolve, first taken when

Proud Agamemnon, King of men,

An insult on Achilles cast,

Achieve accomplishment at last.

It's not the rhymed couplets that are the problem here – after all, they were good enough for Pope. No, it's that 'Mountain Goddess' right there in the first line where “Muse” should be that tips the reader off to the fact that this version of the Iliad will be … well, rather heavily interpretive. Who the Hell is this “Mountain Goddess”? Who the Hell knows?

Some of you may already be familiar with the outline of Graves' life, but for those of you who aren't there's only one sentence of any real import in figuring that life out: in 1929, Robert Graves decamped for Majorca, bought a rambling mountain-top ranch, and proceeded to live there for the rest of his life. He wore fraying white shorts, he wore fraying straw bonnets, he drank from dawn until moon-set, and he conducted a peppy correspondence. In other words, he went nutty as a fruitcake.

The bulk of his good poetry was written before he Majorca'd himself, as was his classic memoir Good-Bye To All That. Then he came into the possession of far too much unstructured personal time. Some of it he put to good use – the world of letters would be a poorer place without Hercules My Shipmate or Count Belisarius, and of course the landscape of historical fiction would be virtually unrecognizable without I, Claudius and Claudius the God. But if a man takes himself to Majorca and holes up on the outskirts of a respectful but uncomprehending village, he deprives himself of the one sure safeguard against mental instability: the presence of knowledgeable old friends who'll refer to him as a jackass on a regular basis. Without that safeguard, even the most intellectually formidable men will soon become positive aphasic with mania. In fact, it happens to the smart ones first.

In between the creditable works of historical fiction, there flowed increasingly from Graves' pen a species of prose that bore all the hallmarks of its author possessing no jelly on his toast. Graves delved far too deeply into the twisted by-ways of Greek and Near Eastern mythology, and he emerged from this safari with hundreds of theories about ancient Greek history and mythology that, well, you won't find anywhere else. The first real expression of these carefully-diagrammed lunacies happens in the two volumes of his The Greek Myths – structurally one single book and hands-down the strangest book written in the 20^th century. And it was just the warm-up for such impenetrably, lavishly wacko wonder-works as King Jesus and especially The White Goddess.

Not far from those thickets of bubbly to that “Mountain Goddess” crack, and the casual way it's dropped in there is the surest sign that Graves knew perfectly well not all his dogs were barking; that casual tone is the lure, the little tease designed to prompt the unsuspecting listener to ask, “Mountain Goddess? Why, what can you mean by that?” - after which the Sage of Majorca is off to the races with his various ethnographic proofs the Greek cult of the Muses originated in Indo-European mountain-worship, or some such claptrap.



The key to surviving such lures is not to fall for them, and fortunately, The Anger of Achilles has plenty enough to recommend it so that you can ignore any and all pretty shiny lures in order to soak up the narrative vigor with which Graves renders the age-old story. When you do start reading it, the thing you'll notice first is that this version is a combination of prose and verse – the rhymed couplets only make up a tiny proportion of the whole text, the rest being straightforward entirely readable prose. Graves justified it this way:

I have … followed the example of the ancient Irish and Welsh bards by, as it were, taking up my harp and singing only where prose will not suffice. This, I hope, avoids the pitfalls of either an all-prose or an all-verse translation, and restores something of the Iliad's value as mixed entertainment.

This is yet more lunacy (poetry lapsing into prose except for the really poetic bits? Song lapsing into speech except when things are really exciting? To put it mildly, Graves never heard anything like that in Ireland or Wales), but it's also beside the point: the main point is that it all somehow works, probably because Graves could exercise a pitch-perfect ear for dramatic timing, when he felt like it. When his Anger of Achilles breaks into verse, damned if it doesn't lend the whole segment a sudden whoosh of drama. You'll get caught up in this distant cousin to Homer – it's certainly one of the 20^th century's most distinctive renderings, and it'll do you good to read it. Just remember: whenever any character starts talking about 'our Holy Mother,' just start whistling for a few paragraphs, until things go back to semi-normal.

Den of Wolves!

Our book today is Den of Wolves, the first book in a new ancient Rome series by Luke Devenish called “Empress of Rome.” Den of Wolves came out in Britain two years ago when the success of HBO's “Rome” sparked a mini-revival of historical fiction set in Rome, and it's being released in the US in a nicely plump, well-designed trade paperback with a cover showing a sultry woman staring straight at the reader with a look of blank determination.

The woman might be doing stand-in duty for Livia Drusilla, the wife of Augustus, the mother of Tiberius, and one of the main characters of this volume, which spans events from Livia's childhood to AD 19 in the reign of her son Tiberius. Although the story is narrated by Iphicles, a slave, it's very much the story of the leading figures of Rome during its transition from Republic to Empire. Livia is just a girl when her father is girding himself to go off to the Senate and join the men who will assassinate Julius Caesar – and she's becoming an old woman when the book ends, having taken us through the story of the premature death of Tiberius' brother Drusus, the family life of his widow Antonia and her children, the rise of Tiberius in Roman politics, the birth and upbringing of his son Castor, the glory days of Germanicus and his haughty wife Agrippina and his creepy son Caligula, and of course the rise and rise of Octavian, who later took the name Augustus and shares some time with Livia in the spotlight of this first volume.

As that cast of characters and thumbnail of setting and action will indicate to those of you who read Roman historical fiction at all, Devenish has chosen for the first volume of his trilogy some extremely well-trod ground, and everybody will be able to identify the owner of the boots in question. Yes, this novel is full of the exact same people doing the exact same things for the exact same reasons as a certain other Roman historical novel – I, Claudius by Robert Graves. Considering the fame and fortune of Graves' book (and its less successfully-conceived sequel), Devenish has got to be given credit for approaching his subject at all, let alone diving into a series of books.

The signature feature of I, Claudius is Graves' picture of Livia as a great Moriarty-like figure at the heart of her webs of intrigue, moving relatives and strangers around Rome as though they were pieces on an invisible chess board. It's an ingenious reading of Tacitus and Suetonius, and it works in most readers' minds because they came to the book after the epic “Masterpiece Theatre” production in which the serpentine Sian Phillips performed a Livia for the ages. Taking on such material yourself, for a novel of your own, is ambitious almost to the point of effrontery.

Stylistically, there can be no comparison between the books. And even in terms of narration, Devenish takes a gamble by making his main character a slave – perhaps a bigger gamble than he realizes, since most people living in Western countries today have no real conception of how any slaves get treated, much less how slaves in the ancient world got treated. All through the first part of his book, he has the sassy, smarter-than-is-good-for-her Livia deliver barbed comments to her astonished servant:

Livia was still gazing at me, open in her mockery now and aiming it wholly at me.

 “Do you believe the Great Mother's prophecies to be true, Iphicles?”

 I was chilled that she could ever doubt my faith. “Of course I do, domina – I hard them with my own ears. I believe every word,” I replied.

 Livia laughed. “Well, I don't.”

 My shock increased tenfold and the six frightened and confused Tonsores tried to concentrate only on Livia's hair. To her they weren't even there. She was focused completely on me.

 “Domina,” I whispered, “they were the Great Mother's words ...”

 “All shit,” said Livia.

 I nearly fell back against the wall.

 “Well, maybe not all shit,” she went on. “One or two had some potential – the ones where I give birth to the kings. But not the other rubbish.”

 I was stunned by such blasphemy.

 “What's the matter?” Livia asked, enjoying the look on my face. “Have I shocked you, Iphicles?”

 “Yes, domina,” I said.

 “Then your attitude toward such things is ridiculously old-fashioned,” said Livia. “But what else should I expect from a slave? Gods are not to be feared and cringed at. They're to be respected, certainly, but only for the purposes of self-preservation. We shouldn't love the gods – that sort of mindless devotion would embarrass them – and we should never take everything they say for granted. We're not simple-minded fools and the gods know that.”

 I could only stare dumbly at her, the sacrilegious words beyond my comprehension.

The problem here is twofold: first, obviously, our narrator is an idiot (and our author is severely underconfident – how many times do we need to be told who's in this exchange of dialogue between two people?). But second and equally tough to resolve: no highborn Roman citizen would ever have dreamt of engaging in philosophical badinage with their personal slave, any more than a modern-day Anaheim stock-broker's wife would seek out the fifty-year-old Hispanic father of five who tends her garden and unburden herself of her latest religious epiphanies. Such scenes bid fair to ruin the credibility of the whole book. Graves chose as his narrator Claudius, a noble-born member of the Roman elite who is able to be a fly on the wall at all the great moments in his history by virtue of the fact that everybody thinks he's an fool. It's a fun old gambit, but it incontestably works better than poor credulous Iphicles listening at ajar doors.

About half-way through this first volume, Iphicles becomes the slave of Plancina, the squawky wife of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, and Devenish subtly shifts his narrative focus onto higher ground, often moving entirely to the unmoored third-person that should have been the book's voice from the start (individual narrators lend an inviting sheen of intimacy to a historical novel, so they're very tempting for writers who don't want to intimidate their audience … but the book is often better without them). Even so, there are problems, as in this exchange between Tiberius' son Castor and the mysterious young man Tiberious has brought back to Rome with him after long foreign campaigns:

“And what about your own father, Sejanus? Where is he?”

 Sejanus wouldn't give Castor the pleasure of seeing him looked shamed by this question. “I have no father,” he said.

 “You are a bastard, then?”

 “I'm alone. I don't know who my parents are or were. I don't know anything.”

 “I do,” said Castor. “You're a slave.”

 Sejanus didn't show the deep anger he felt. “I'm not a slave,” he said finally. “I was an apprentice to the Greek physician as a freeborn child. I'm Italian. My status has been recognised by your father. I'm free – I'm no-one's slave.”

 Castor had flaunted his supremacy and needed nothing more now. “My mistake,” he said. He could afford to be welcoming – or rather, he could afford to make a show of it. “Well be friends then, Sejanus? What do you say to that?”

 Sejanus said what he could only say. “I'd like that.”

 

It's a bad thing when reading pages of a historical novel makes you want to take out your corrective red pen, and Devenish provokes that reaction far, far too often. Not only is this passage needlessly convoluted (Sejanus follows up “I don't know anything” with a veritable fountain of stuff he knows), and not only is it heavy-handed (can even the least Rome-cognizant reader have any doubt, after reading this passage, that Sejanus is going to kill Castor at his earliest possible opportunity?), but it has that otherworldly-awful clunker of a line, “Sejanus said what he could only say,” when the correctly-phrased line, “Sejanus said the only thing he could,” is a mere synapse away.

Fortunately – even amazingly – passages like these don't scupper the book. Den of Wolves isn't I, Claudius; it's not even remotely trying to be literature (although the author rather touchingly expresses his admiration for the aforementioned Tacitus and Suetonius, I very much doubt they'd have returned the sentiment). But it's breezy and fast-paced and extremely inviting despite its author's obvious research. The acid test here will be Livia, and she passes it: we get a three-dimensional emotional accounting of how her life slowly changes her. And Devenish has benefited by being among the eighty gazillion people who've watched “Masterpiece Theatre”: many of his Livia's best lines read like they were written to be purred by Sian Phillips. The rest of “Empress of Rome” - featuring, as it must, the fall of Tiberius, the rise of Caligula, and the eventual emperorship of Claudius himself – can be honestly anticipated.

Unless the author decides to write his future historical novels set in other time-periods, that is. Perhaps a big, sprawling novel about a Southern belle on the eve of the American Civil War?