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.

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.

Emperor!

Our books today form the "Emperor" series written by Conn Iggulden - all the paperbacks of which bear the same ominous blurb, "If you liked Gladiator, you'll love Emperor!"

I liked Gladiator, but a blurb such as that on a piece of Roman historical fiction is indeed ominous - because Gladiator was almost pure fantasy, playing almost as fast and loose with the facts of Roman history as the HBO series "Rome" did ... and seemingly advertising a similarly cavalier attitude toward facts is a mighty odd way of praising a historical novel.

Or maybe it isn't. Why do we read historical fiction, anyway? Since it's not solely to bone up on the facts of history (for which, er, boning we have many first-rate history books, including many that've had their day in the sun here at Stevereads), it stands to reason we come to this type of fiction for more - we want the writer to take all that historical research and do what the historian can't: neaten it, sharpen it, use it, in a way the ordinary sprawl of daily life would make impossible.

Virtually everybody who's ever written historical fiction quickly comes to this realization, and then they start doing things with the facts (scholars for the last four hundred years have been saying this very quality makes ancient writers like Livy - who liberally sprinkle their allegedly historical accounts with long speeches and long interior monologues that can't possibly be accurate - the forefathers not of history but of historical fiction)(which is mighty condescending thing to say, but I can't help but wonder how Livy would have responded to it). They start shaping the facts to fit the stories they want to tell. This is a very different thing from simply making mistakes about the facts.

It can be a maddeningly fine line. In the first half of The Alienist, Caleb Carr draws a vivid, memorable portrait of Theodore Roosevelt - but he's constrained by the historical record of Roosevelt's days as New York Police Commissioner. But in the second half of The List of 7, Mark Frost hauls Roosevelt onstage and has him chomping on a cigar, something the real Roosevelt never did - and Frost does this because he wanted to stress the 'big and bluff' side of Roosevelt's personality, in one scene. Same man, same facts, two different writers going to two different lengths to make their stories work.

Clearly, Carr's method is better. To the fullest extent possible, the facts you read in historical fiction should correspond reliably to the facts you'd find in Gibbon or Parkman. Custer shouldn't be described as tall if he was short; Jugurtha shouldn't be described as black if he was only swarthy; Cleopatra shouldn't be described as beautiful, period, since every ancient source and her own coins agree she wasn't. It might look as though that places intolerable restrictions on responsible historical fiction, but that's the wrong way of seeing it: think of it instead as a test for the cleverness of the author. The trick is to come up with ways to let the 'fiction' trump the 'historical' without doing it irreparable violence.

There are some tried-and-true methods for doing this, the easiest and most popular of which is to cast the whole of your story into some setting, some special circumstance, that you can come right and say would never, of course, find its way into the historical record (usually, books like this feature a scene toward the end in which one character stands up the table and says, "Gentlemen, we must never speak of this to anyone"). In Goodnight, Sweet Prince, David Dickinson wants his main character to solve the murder of Queen Victoria's grandson Prince Eddy - but Prince Eddy died of pneumonia, which is unhelpful. So Dickinson links Prince Eddy and his murderer with a scandal and has the Royals cloaking the whole thing in obfuscation - which is not only plausible but gives him an entirely free hand. I, Claudius, The Sword of Pleasure, and countless other novels give us the creaky-but-effective gimmick of the lost or doomed-to-be-lost secret manuscript (emboldened, no doubt, by the fact that such manuscripts have always, in fact, existed in real life - by happy chance, we have not only the official, public things Procopius wrote, for instance, but also the secret account he couldn't stop himself from writing, even though its discovery would have meant his very messy execution).

Another reliable way to write such books is to find some blank space in the historical record - and then swarm in to fill it. Iggulden does exactly this in his "Emperor" books, because despite the fact that Julius Caesar is one of the most famous individuals in the history of the world, we don't really know all that many details about his boyhood and youth. Iggulden knows this and freely admits in his Author's Notes that he's made liberal use of his imagination - a canny move that both exonerates him from anything readers might dislike and effectively de-emphasizes the very large amount of research that went into these books.

He's clearly angling for a wide popular audience, and there's nothing wrong with that. He almost always refers to his characters by one name only (and what he considers 'first' names - Agrippa is 'Marcus,' for instance, and of course Caesar himself is 'Gaius'), he centers everything on the vicissitudes of one boy growing up into a man, and he loads the books with action sequences - and he's quite good at writing action sequences.

He keeps everything small-focus and personal, as when our young heroes are enlisted in the army of General and Dictator Marius:

At first, the main roads emptied as the early-rising workers stood well back for the soldiers. Gaius could feel their eyes on them and heard angry mutters. One word was repeated from hard faces: "Scelus!" - a crime for soldiers to be on the streets. The dawn was damp and cold and he shivered slightly. Marcus too looked grim in the grey light and he nodded as their eyes met, his hand on the hilt of his gladius. The tension was heightened by the clatter and crash as the men moved. Gaius had not realised how noisy fifty soldiers could be, but in the narrow streets the clank of iron-shod sandals echoed back and forth. Windows opened in the high apartments as they passed, and someone shouted angrily, but they marched on.

"Sully will cut your eyes out!" one man howled before slamming his door shut.

The books follow Caesar from his young boyhood to the edge of world-domination, and they've taken their share of lumps from critical readers (who were no doubt primed by that Gladiator tag ... future editions of the books really ought to drop it), but this is partly because the books are Roman historical novels, a particular sub-genre that tends to bring out the petty-ass factchecker in otherwise easygoing readers. Such readers are unlikely to be satisfied by anything less than notarized videotape.

The rest of you might want to give the "Emperor" books a try. They're quite entertaining.

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?

The Ways of War in the Penny Press!

Our last look at the Penny Press in 2008 features two accounts of the shot and fray of war - and some of the perils attendant in writing about it!

In the 18 December London Review of Books, Thomas Laqueur turns in a long and extremely thoughtful review of Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Sorrow and Mark Neely's The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction. Faust's book he loves ("a spectacularly good book," which sounds a little like a contradiction), and Neely's book frustrates him with its central tenet that the American Civil War was neither so bloody nor so destructive as 150 years of historians have rejoiced in saying it was.


I thought Faust's universally-praised book was almost hysterically overwrought, and I thought Neely's book was simply dull - you would never read a long, detailed exegesis of either one of them on Stevereads (much less Open Letters). But Laqueur is always worth reading, even when I don't agree that his subjects are worth reviewing. In this case I think he might be a little too hard on Neely, taking him to task for relativizing what he never meant to belittle. For instance, Laqueur has little patience with Neely's subtraction from the overall mortality of the Civil War the many thousands of deaths from infection and disease, although it's hard not to agree with a reviewer when he's making his points so calmly and eloquently:

The 225,000 Union and 194,000 Confederate soldiers who died from disease were just as dead as their comrades. They too left survivors bereft; they too filled graves, probably in disproportionate numbers because their bodies were more easily identified and recovered. More important, death from disease or exposure is not an act of God but a real consequence of the violence of war. It would be very odd to exclude those who died of cold and hunger in Napoleon's or Hitler's Russian campaigns if one were trying to quantify their human cost.

Likewise, over in the 12 December TLS, W. V. Harris reviews two volumes in the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare series - Volume One, on Greece and the Rise of Rome, and Volume Two, on Rome from the Late Republic to the Late Empire. Here, also, there's disparity and a little literary bloodletting (this being the TLS, the latter is significantly less delicate than in other review organs).

Some of Harris' observations are a little wobbly, as in his lengthiest digression:

At the Battle of Pydna, for instance, the commander Aemilius Paullus is said to have thrown a precious Roman standard in among the Macedonian enemy, which in effect obliged the legionaries under Paullus' command to drive the enemy back in order to retrieve it. .... Unimaginable in a modern army, this sort of behaviour was apparently quite common in Republican Rome.

Not so common: military commanders who tried such melodramatic stunts risked a great deal, and certainly a general as experienced as this particular Aemilius Paullus never actually did it. But I'd argue that it isn't so unthinkable in a modern army, or at least its modern equivalent isn't. And that equivalent wouldn't be 'throwing a standard in among the enemy, thereby forcing your men to more greatly endanger themselves to retrieve it' but rather 'imitating Alexander the Great' - who pulled that stunt (and the much riskier one of the personally leaping into the press of his enemies himself, thereby forcing his men to rescue not just the standard but the standard-bearer) quite often. And if we generalize that to 'imitate the great stories of what battlefield courage is supposed to be,' the thing becomes easily imaginable, even in modern-moment Iraq.



But that's a quibble, and it shouldn't keep us from Harris' own bloodletting, this time in the form of a classic lightning-quick TLS knife-thrust. He's running down the various merits of some of the Roman volume's better essays when the knife suddenly goes in:

At the other extreme is a chapter on Rome's early international relations marked by quite breathtaking vapidity.

Eeep. Perhaps fortunately for all involved, the writer of that chapter isn't named. The morbidly curious will have to Google it on their own.

These two forays into military history and the reviewing of military history form our last look at the Penny Press in 2008. It hasn't exactly been a banner year for periodical reading. Harper's has been almost relentlessly inconsequential; GQ and Esquire have amped up their gadget-and-g-spot coverage, at the expense of anything else (ditto Men's Journal and Outside); Vanity Fair has become thinner and slighter; The New Republic has become shriller; The New York Review of Books has become almost distractingly more political; worst of all, The Atlantic's move and recent redesign have combined seriously to undercut its intellectual heft.

Fortunately, the mighty TLS remains the same. And Open Letters keeps getting better and better. So there's hope, in the Penny Press.

The Rise of the Roman Empire

Our book today is The Rise of the Roman Empire (for want of a better title) by the first century b.c. historian Polybius, a Greek living among the best and brightest of his Roman conquerors.

Polybius was born sometime toward the end of the third century b. c. at Megalopolis, in primitive, untamed Arcadia, which belonged to the venerable Achaean League of states. His family was prominent, and he received an excellent though old-fashioned education in the old Arcadian way: hunting and drinking and boy-chasing, with very little emphasis placed on the pallid disciplines of the library and the lamp. We don't know at what point those disciplines began to exert their own pull of young Polybius' mind; it may have been around 182 b.c., when the young man was given the singular honor of bearing the ashes of Philopoemon (one of the greatest of all Achaeans) in funeral procession. Certainly at some point, probably shortly afterwards, Polybius wrote a massive biography of Philopoemon, now lost to us but very well known to ancient writers.

Epic composition wasn't his only accomplishment in those murky early years, however; by 170 b. c. Polybius had become prominent enough in the Achaean League to achieve the rank of commander of cavalry, and this was a problematic thing to have on your resume at the time, since the Romans had been at war with Macedon for a couple of years. When Macedon was defeated, in 168, the Romans swept through the whole of the Peloponnese with political retributions, including summoning about a thousand Achaeans into custody in Italy, including Polybius.

Most of these detainees - none of whom was ever given a trial or even much of a reason for their detainment, other than their nationality and being on the losing side - were given quarters of varying degrees of comfort in southern Etruria, but Polybius was luckier: for sixteen years, he was under the most genteel of house-arrests in custody of the family of Aemilius Paulus, the commander of the forces that had finally defeated Macedon. The great man's young son was Publius Scipio, with whom Polybius developed a friendship and working relationship, a mentorship of remarkable depth and flexibility. Scipio and brother Fabius suddenly found in their midst this man of immense experience and hard-won wisdom, and perhaps it's only natural they felt a bit of rivalry for his attention. In fact, Polybius could date his friendship with young Scipio to some surprising comments Scipio made to him after dinner one day, comments dealing directly with that rivalry, all of which Polybius himself relates to us:

One day when the three of them were leaving Fabius' house, Fabius happened to turn off toward the Forum, while Polybius and Scipio walked off in a different direction. As they were walking along, Scipio, blushing a little, asked Polybius in a hesitant voice, "Sir, why is it that when you're at a meal with my brother and me, you address all your comments to him, all your questions and conversation to him, not noticing me at all? It's starting to look as though you have the same opinion of me as everybody else: that I'm withdrawn and lazy, that I'm not a proper gung-ho Roman just because I don't plead cases in the law courts. 'His family doesn't need that kind of representative, people say, and it really irritates me."

Polybius was shocked by the young man's comments, for the boy was only eighteen years old. "By Jove, young Scipio," he replied, "what are you saying? You mustn't think such things - I don't do the things you say because I have a poor opinion of you, far from it. It's just that your brother is the older, and I assumed you shared the same thoughts and reactions. I'm amazed to hear different, and I'm delighted to learn that you're bothered by the possibility people might think you unworthy of your family - it shows you have spirit. I would be very, very happy to devote myself to helping you change that impression, helping you act and think in ways worthy of your ancestors."

Scipio might have been young, but he was no fool: he accepted gladly and used Polybius as a close advisor for the rest of the man's life, although always allowing him the freedom to travel, explore, and write on his own. Though thus deeply enmeshed in Roman affairs, Polybius never stopped caring about Greece and his beloved Achaean League - although their fractiousness and frequent lack of judgement predictably exasperated him. The great ancient travel-writer Pausanius records an inscription he saw in Lycosura: "Greece would never have suffered if she' listened to Polybius, and it was only through him that her suffering was relieved."

Polybius' subject is the rise of Rome to unparalleled power in the Mediterranean and beyond, a rise he follows through the epic events of the First Punic War and the Second Punic War, with liberal and lengthy digressions along the way for a wide variety of subjects (perhaps the most famous - and certainly the most excerpted - of which is his treatise on the Roman constitution, a treatise that cast a long shadow on the events of ensuing centuries, up to and most certainly including the American Revolution). His style is less fluid than that of Roman historian Livy (whose surviving works cover a great deal of the same subject matter), but his historical method - pursued at a time when the idea was still in its comparative infancy - is much more satisfyingly rigid.

There is no popular edition currently in print of all that survives in the single manuscript of Polybius, but the Penguin Classic (as is so often the case), translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, will serve nicely as an introduction to the man and his work. That has been the bedrock task of the Penguin Classic series for lo, these many decades, and here as always they do their work admirably. Oxford World's Classics, so far as we know, never got around to Polybius, but you should!