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.

Penguins on Parade: Cassius Dio!

Some Penguin Classics leave you yearning for more - well, a great many of them do, but few more than the 1987 volume selection of the second century Greek historian Cassius Dio, here translated by the always-reliable Ian Scott-Kilvert. The book doesn't leave you yearning for more in the sense that it has any shortcomings (as with so many Penguin Classics, I'd be hard-pressed to find any critical or rhetorical shortcomings - I think these things are fairly well vetted before they ever see library shelves) but rather in the sense that's evoked by that dismaying word 'selection.'

Cassius Dio (or, as he's known to those of weak moral fiber, Dio Cassius) is the best ancient historian nobody's ever heard of. Oh, professional historians have cherished his work for centuries, but your average educated layman, somebody who might be able to rattle off 'Livy,' 'Tacitus,' and maybe even 'Suetonius' will draw a blank with Dio. Great dramatists (and melodramatists!) have delved in his text to fill out their own works, mainly because he provides them with ample raw material for speeches (we'll get to Dio's speeches in a moment), and to historians he's always been invaluable.

Such was his own goal from the outset. He was born around 163 in the provinces and came to Rome on the strength of his family's money to enter politics and begin climbing the civil ladder. His climb was quick - he entered the Senate under Commodus and became consul under Septimius Severus. He was an important functionary in the reign of Septimius' son Caracalla but disliked the new emperor (as, indeed, did practically everybody else) and took to spending more and more of his time researching and writing his epic Roman History, which began with Aeneas and crept forward, book after book, to the year 229 when he himself was consul again, this time with the emperor Alexander Severus as his fellow consul.

This was a monumental task, and he looked to some great examples - Thucydides and Polybius are his models, and an engaging cogency is his goal. This is annalistic history in the grand Roman manner, full of character portraits, carefully weighed evidence, moral lessons, and often masterful rhetorical exercises in the form of speeches put in the mouths of his characters - speeches that were either wholly invented or greatly elaborated from what Dio found in the records. A first-time reader of Dio will notice the speeches before anything else, and the more ideologically flexible of those readers will start to look forward to them, because Dio pours quite a bit of art into them. Even in Ian Scott-Kilvert's careful, particular translation for this Penguin edition, something of their fascinating 'what if?' nature comes through, as when clever young Octavian is exhorting his fellow Romans to turn against Marc Antony:

To sum up, if it were a matter of being called upon to cavort in some ridiculous dance or cut some erotic caper, Antony would have no rival - for these are the specialities in which he has trained himself. But when it comes to weapons and fighting, what has anyone to fear from him? The fitness of his body? But he has become effeminate and his homosexuality has worn him out. His piety towards our gods? But he has declared war upon them and upon his native land. His loyalty towards his allies? Everyone knows how he tricked and then imprisoned the king of Armenia. His kindness to his friends? We have all seen the men who have died a cruel death at his hands. His popularity among his troops? But who, even among them, has not condemned him? The evidence for this is the number of his soldiers who join us every day. I believe that all our citizens will do this, just as happened once before, when he was on his way from Brundisium to Gaul. So long as they hoped to get rich without danger, some where happy to take his side. But they will not choose to fight against us, their own countrymen, for what does not belong to them, least of all when by joining us they can protect their lives and their property without risk.

But even for those more fastidious modern readers who want such speeches left in historical novels where the last 200 years of historical practice have said they belong, there's plenty in Dio to give satisfaction. He's a conscientious writer, and like Livy long before him, he views it as his duty to report on the existence of wild theories regarding his topics, even if he himself doesn't believe those theories. He can exercise a very light touch in such matters, as when he arrives at the death of Augustus:

So Augustus fell sick and died. Some suspicion attached itself to Livia concerning the cause of his death, because he had secretly sailed over to the island of Planasia to visit Agrippa Posthumus, and it appeared that he was about to become completely reconciled with him. Livia was afraid, some people allege, that Augustus might bring him back to make him emperor, and so she smeared with poison some figs which were still ripening on the trees from which Augustus was in the habit of picking the fruit with his own hands. She then ate those which had not been smeared, and offered the poison fruit to him. At any rate, he fell sick from this or from some other cause. Then he sent for his associates, and told them all that he wanted to be done. Finally he declared, "I found Rome built of clay: I leave it to you in marble." In this saying he was not referring literally to the state of the buildings, but rather to the strength of the empire. And when he asked them for some applause, as comic actors do at the end of the mime, he was in fact mocking very aptly the whole life of man.

You have to love that 'at any rate'! A workhorse phrase, and yet it speaks volumes here! Scott-Kilvert is to be commended for preserving so subtle an effect.

No, the problem with this Penguin edition of Cassius Dio is that it tries for theme over thump. This volume covers the reign of Augustus only - books 50-56 of Dio. But the whole Roman History spanned some eighty books, of which at least a dozen more survive more or less intact - and we have excellent Byzantine summaries of most of the rest. Reading and re-reading this present volume, I can't help but yearn for more, for a Penguin Classics Cassius Dio that's a 'Steve book' - 1500 pages long, lovingly annotated, absolutely as much of Dio as the unkind fates have seen fit to leave us. When I look over at the monster edition Penguin put out a few years ago of Domesday Book (and don't worry, all of you who've requested that I write about that volume - it's coming! they're ALL coming!), when I consider how that same printing-run and forests of paper could have been used instead for just the Dio mega-volume I'm imagining ... well, when I think of those things, I school myself in patience. It could happen, some day. I'd buy it.

Domitian and the Senatorial Order!

Our book today is Domitian and the Senatorial Order, a Prosographical Study of Domitian's Relationship with the Senate, A.D. 81-96, which was written in 1979 by Brian Jones for the American Philosophical Society and reprinted in 1993 by UMI Books on Demand, an outfit that used to make xerographic reprints of worthy academic treatises, back before Google Books was even a synaptic twinkle in some programmer's head. Before interlinked Internet databases - and before cheap, high-quality scanners - services like UMI were a great boon to scholars, since ten years ago Jones' study would have been exceedingly difficult to obtain except perhaps through a series of interlibrary loans slightly less complicated than re-threading somebody's lymphatic system.

A great boon but not a free one - Domitian and the Senatorial Order cost me $57 back when I bought it in 1995 - that's the equivalent of roughly $4,500 in today's money! At the time, I was writing a novel on one of Domitian's five-star generals (the future emperor and all-around nice guy Trajan), so the cost seemed justifiable. All I was expecting was a highly detailed account of just what the book's title describes: the nuts and bolts of Domitian's reign, as opposed to the scandal-and-tyranny tabloid accounts that have been popular ever since Suetonius.

Domitian has consistently received a bad rap from historians. Even less than a full generation after his death, he was already getting the full Kitty Kelly treatment from Suetonius for being evil, conniving, grandiose, and insane ... and later historians almost uniformly followed suit. Domitian's father, the emperor Vespasian, was a rock-solid plainspoken country bumpkin who managed to come out on top after the notorious "Year of the Emperors" that followed the assassination of Nero. Otho, Galba, and Vitellius all made a play for the purple, and all failed - leaving Vespasian and his two sons - handsome, vain, stupid Titus and dour, vain, intelligent Domitian - in charge of Rome.


Eventually Vespasian died, of natural causes (during which time he famously quipped, "Oh fuck - I think I'm becoming a god"), and Titus succeeded him. Titus, although rather fonder of his own face than is becoming, was a good egg with rotten luck - during his two brief years as emperor, half of Rome burned down and Vesuvius erupted, not to mention the fact that even though his father was one of the healthiest human beings in history, Titus himself died of a fever.

Or diiiiiiiiiiid he? Cue the rumor-mill about Domitian, who a) took over the empire and b) immediately became suspected in certain quarters of having poisoned his older brother. The typical summary of Domitian is Nixonian: beetle-browed, essentially dark-hearted, corrupted by power, eventually heading for downfall while suspecting everybody around him of wishing him ill.

I bought Domitian and the Senatorial Order hoping for nothing more than a clear laying-out of the facts involved in such a summary. So imagine my pleasant surprise when I found the book to be sharply wonderful - not content to summarize at all but rather intent on stripping away every layer of suspicion and innuendo connected with Domitian and basing all inquiry on the relatively ample array of early sources and on a dash of common sense, rather than a bucket of insinuation. Domitian and the Senatorial Order is a marvelous work of extended historical research, grounded on a huge amount of study and presented with a clarity that almost amounts at times to panache.


The picture that emerges from Jones' account is radically different from the one most histories show: here is a Domitian who's stiff and prickly, yes, but not the embodiment of pure evil. Here's a Domitian who's got a healthy sense of his own entitlement, yes (his father and brother had both been emperors, after all), but not somebody intent on ignoring the Senate (when he wasn't capriciously murdering its members). And most importantly, here's a Domitian who for the most part was a conscientious domestic and imperial architect and bureaucrat, not a frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic ala Caligula.

Jones marshals his facts with consummate skill, but it's the opinions he bases on those facts that make the book so fascinating. Take for instance an event that happened in the middle of Domitian's reign that could have been real trouble: in 89, Lucius Antonius Saturninus, commander of the two legions stationed in Upper Germany, seized the legion treasuries and revolted against Domitian. This was as serious as a heart attack: Saturninus had a well-financed command of two legions of frontier-hardened veteran troops poised within striking distance of Rome - Domitian's own father had taken the empire from Vitellius with less. The commander of Lower Germany rushed to the scene of the revolt (in modern-day Mainz, which I can never visit without thinking of it as Moguntiacum) and quelled it - with Domitian's other star general, the aforementioned Trajan, rushing north to join in the quelling. Historians have traditionally asserted two things about the revolt of Saturninus: that the Senate secretly organized it, and that it therefore marked a turning point in Domitian's relations with the Senate - for the worse, since legend has always had it that Domitian had several Senators connected with the revolt executed.

Jones finds no actual evidence for either of those assertions, and in addition to all the considerable textual evidence he assembles to undermine them, he also has his own brain and a working knowledge of how human beings behave. When Trajan later became emperor, the supercilious Pliny the Younger composed a long address of praise - the Panegyric - which he addressed to Trajan in full audience of the Senate. Jones doesn't need to look much further than this carefully-preserved work to find some inadvertent vindication of Domitian:

One of Pliny's statements is of particular interest in assessing the extent of senatorial influence in the revolt. In his account of Trajan's military prowess, he alludes to his hero's role in suppressing the uprising, yet neglects to avail himself of the opportunity to accuse Domitian of a widespread massacre of senators, even though the Domitianic "wave of terror" is one of the regular themes of the Panegyricus. Perhaps Trajan's readiness to come to Domitian's aid prompted Pliny's reticence. But, if any senators had been involved in the conspiracy against the emperor or had been executed as a result of their participation in it, Pliny would not have made the slightest reference to Trajan's part in the suppression of the revolt, and, in front of the emperor himself and a senatorial audience, would have been more discreet.

Against the familiar charge that Domitian often dilly-dallied on important military matters (bolstered, no doubt, by the fact that he didn't go charging off to squash Saturninus himself), Jones again brings to bear that same powerful combination of masterly research and plain common sense, as in the question of how agile Domitian was in responding to military reverses in Germany. Jones concentrates on the decision to evacuate the great fortress-complex at Inchtuthil and has this to say:

Situated at the mouth of Dunkeld gorge some eleven miles to the north of Perth, this fortress extended over a fifty-acre site, and contained, inter alia, sixty-four large barracks and 180 storerooms, but it was never completed. The evacuation took place soon after 86, since no later coins have been uncovered, and must have been sudden, for in a single pit alone, over a million unused nails have been found. It is difficult to imagine more vivid evidence of Domitian's ability to take decisive action rapidly.

Of course, unlike his father and his brother, Domitian was assassinated - and the same quasi-historical tradition that so easily supposes Senatorial conniving in the revolt of Saturninus has always made the same suppositions of Senatorial involvement in the assassination plot. With calm, methodical precision, Jones dismantles this tradition as well, and by that point in Domitian and the Senatorial Order I was half-way wanting to write a novel about Domitian himself instead of Trajan. Jones' book is a perfect example of what great historical writing should be - it has a place in my library on the same shelf as The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, The Senate of Imperial Rome, The Emperor in the Roman World, and of course The Roman Revolution.

I'd urge you all to go right out and buy yourselves a copy, but for three considerations: 1) it should be stressed that this isn't beginner or even intermediate-level history - it never crosses Jones' mind to translate his Latin, and there are no helpful factual glosses anywhere, 2) the thing is, as hinted, a trifle difficult to find, and 3) in another ten years, you'll be able to have it - and all the secondary material you need (including a fluency in Latin) - directly burned into your forebrain, so why waste the effort now?