Roman History Books and More

marcus aemilius scaurus princeps senatus

Marcus Aemilius Scaurus (c. 163 BC – c. 88 BC, consul of 115, princeps senatus in the same year) is portrayed in Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome and the subsequent volume in her series both as a stiff-necked patrician, enemy of Gaius Marius, and someone for whom the republic comes first; and who displays a vicious sense of humor.

Basic online information all goes back to a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry.

Plutarch talks about Scaurus briefly in his Moralia, On the Fortune of the Romans.

Mommsen summarizes him thus:

Marcus Aemilius Scaurus

A significant illustration of this is afforded by the chief of the senatorial party at this time, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus.  The son of highly aristocratic but not wealthy parents, and thus compelled to make use of his far from mean talents, he raised himself to the consulship (639) and censorship (645), was long the chief of the senate and the political oracle of his order, and immortalized his name not only as an orator and author, but also as the originator of some of the principal public buildings executed in this century.  But, if we look at him more closely, his greatly praised achievements amount merely to this much, that, as a general, he gained some cheap village triumphs in the Alps, and, as a statesman, won by his laws about voting and luxury some victories nearly as serious over the revolutionary spirit of the times.  His real talent consisted in this, that, while he was quite as accessible and bribable as any other upright senator, he discerned with some cunning the moment when the matter began to be hazardous, and above all by virtue of his superior and venerable appearance acted the part of Fabricius before the public.  In a military point of view, no doubt, we find some honourable exceptions of able officers belonging to the highest circles of the aristocracy; but the rule was, that the lords of quality, when they were to assume the command of armies, hastily read up from the Greek military manuals and the Roman annals as much as was required for holding a military conversation, and then, when in the field, acted most wisely by entrusting the real command to an officer of humble lineage but of tried capacity and tried discretion. In fact, if a couple of centuries earlier the senate resembled an assembly of kings, these their successors played not ill the part of princes.  But the incapacity of these restored aristocrats was fully equalled by their political and moral worthlessness.  If the state of religion, to which we shall revert, did not present a faithful reflection of the wild dissoluteness of this epoch, and if the external history of the period did not exhibit the utter depravity of the Roman nobles as one of its most essential elements, the horrible crimes, which came to light in rapid succession among the highest circles of Rome, would alone suffice to indicate their character.

tangentially: the blind traveler

Long before a blind man went up Mt. Everest, there was John Holman (1786–1857).   In  A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler, Jason Roberts narrates the astounding story of Lieutenant John Holman, who as a blind man traveled through much of the world on his own, and on very modest means.  Holman's service in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars had been cut short by a very painful form of rheumatism, and soon thereafter he was stricken by a sudden onset of total blindness.  He achieved an astonishing adjustment to his affliction, considering the times he lived in:  he went to university, even studying medicine;  and when his rheumatism flared up again, he went to the Continent on the advice of his doctors, the first of his several travels, which included a circumnavigation of the world.  With his utmost desire of independence, he succesfully evaded his younger brother who was supposed to accompany him, and from then on, he mostly traveled alone.

beyond zenobia: the roman near east

Beyond the time and geographic constraints of the Chronicle of  Zenobia, I recommend two books on the Roman Near East:

Fergus Millar:
The Roman Near East: 31 BC-AD 337 (Carl Newell Jackson Lectures)

G.W. Bowersock:
Roman Arabia
(from the 4th century BCE pre-Roman to the Age of Constantine)

   

Please use the comment feature for any further recommendations.

roman villas in the provinces

A post in rogueclassicism today,  Excavating a Commodan Villa  and the related website about the  Gayton Thorpe Villa Project  near King's Lynn in Britain, brought back memories of my visit to the Roman Villa in Ahrweiler, Germany in 2003,  and I brought that page up and updated it – there are always disappearing URLs, and new links if one is lucky, and I did find two of the latter ones:  even though they are in German, you can enjoy the photos.

So here is the villa rustica at Ahrweiler, and lots of photos, mine and others'.  Don't miss the miscellany page.

Model of the villa rustica

theodor mommsen at livius.org

livius.org now has a comprehensive article on the 19th century German historian Theodor Mommsen.

At the bottom of the page, Jona Lendering lists a biography of Mommsen in German by Stefan Rebenich,  Theodor Mommsen, Eine Biographie.   I wrote a review a while ago, and for German speakers, I can highly recommend it.

German Speakers may be also pleased to see that more works by Mommsen are available now in print.  If you go here and click on the author's name, you'll get them all.

I've blogged Mommsen earlier also.

My own page with various links.

a jewish temple in egypt

While reading Colleen McCullough's The October Horse,  I came across this passage (page 116):

In the southeast of the Delta lay the Land of Onias, an autonomous enclave of Jews descended from the High Priest Onias and his followers, who had been exiled from Judea for refusing to prostrate themselves flat on the ground before the King of Syria; that, Onias had said, they did only to their God. King Ptolemy VI Philometor gave the Onians a large tract of land as their own in return for an annual tribute and soldiers for the Egyptian army. The news of Cleopatra's generosity had spread to the Land of Onias, which declared for her in this civil war and made it possible for Mithridates of Pergamum to occupy Pelusium without a struggle; Pelusium was full of Jews and had strong ties to the Land of Onias, which was vital to all Egyptian Jews because it held the Great Temple. This was a smaller replica of King Solomon's temple, even to a tower eighty feet tall and artificial gulches to simulate the Vales of Kedron and Gehenna.

Intrigued by the idea of there having been another temple besides the one in Jerusalem, I did a bit of googling and came to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906) entry for Leontopolis,  which gives Josephus as the source of our information about this temple.

the gold of tolosa

In our current read, First Man in Rome, there is the sad but hugely entertaining story of the Gold of Tolosa.  When I first read the book many years ago and didn't realize the tremendous research that Colleen McCullough had done, I questioned the historicity of the event and had to do some research of my own.

Basically, the story is that Quintus Servilius Caepio, proconsul in 105 BCE,  found near Tolosa in Southern Gaul a huge hord of gold and silver, supposed to have been seized by the Gauls in Delphi in 279 BCE (but see Strabo below) and to have been under a curse.   Caepio reported the discovery of the treasure to the Senate,  but the gold mysteriously disappeared on its way to Rome, and soon after, Caepio, in an arrogant behaviour, contributed to the disastrous Roman defeat in the Battle of Arausio.  He was eventually prosecuted for the theft of the gold which was never recovered, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in Smyrna, where he presumably enjoyed the spoils of his ill gotten gains.  The alleged curse certainly continued to visit his son Quintus Servilius Caepio, brother-in-law of the tribune Marcus Livius Drusus.   He barely escaped an accusation of maiestas while quaestor, and a quarrelsome man, got in disputes with Drusus and with the princeps senatus Marcus Aemilius Scaurus.  He perished in the Social Wars,  after the Marsic general Quintus Poppaedius Silo had drawn him into an ambush.

Cicero refers to the events in On the Nature of Gods, Book III:  Consider other judicial inquiries, the one in reference to the gold of Tolosa . . .

the works of tacitus online

Googling for the prior post brought me to The Works of Tacitus (at Sacred Texts/The Classics), a parallel text of Latin and the English translation, the latter albeit a 19th century one by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb.

But here you indeed have Tacitus all-in-one!

two roman women: aurelia cotta and livia drusa

When Colleen McCullough wrote her Masters of Rome series, she was fortunate to have two women and contemporaries as her subjects who became the mothers of famous and/or notorious offspring:  Aurelia Cotta (Gaius Julius Caeasar) and Livia Drusa (Servilia, Caesar's later long-time mistress, and Cato the Younger).

Due to ancient historical tradition, which largely ignored women, not much is really known about those two, thus McCullough had the fiction writer's liberty to create two captivating personalities out of just a few bare facts and writers' comments.

Aurelia Cotta (120 BC-54 BC) was the daughter of a Rutilia and the consul of 144, Lucius Aurelius Cotta.  Rutilia is assumed to have been a sister of Publius Rutilius Rufus.  After her husband's death, she married his brother, Gaius Aurelius Cotta, and as a result, Aurelia had three half-brothers, who later became consuls:  Gaius Aurelius Cotta in 75 BC, Lucius Cotta in 74 BC and Marcus Cotta in 65 BC.  Aurelia married Gaius Julius Caesar (the Elder), and her only son was the famous Gaius Julius Caesar.   She also had two daughters, one of them the grandmother of Augustus.

Plutarch calls Aurelia a woman of discretion (Lives, Julius Caesar). Tacitus, in Dialog on Oratory: Book 1 [20], writes:

Thus it was, as tradition says, that the mothers of the Gracchi, of Cæsar, of Augustus, Cornelia, Aurelia, Atia, directed their children's education and reared the greatest of sons.  The strictness of the discipline tended to form in each case a pure and virtuous nature which no vices could warp, and which would at once with the whole heart seize on every noble lesson.

a nonfiction book on zenobia

In a comment below, Judith Weingarten, the author of  The Chronicle of Zenobia: The Rebel Queen, highly recommends this book:

Palmyra and Its Empire:  Zenobia's Revolt against Rome
by Richard Stoneman
University of Michigan Press
Reprint edition (March 15, 1995)

Richard Stoneman, a Senior Editor at Routledge, has published numerous books on the ancient world and on travel in the Eastern Mediterranean.  There is a long list at Amazon if you click on the author link in the above title.

publius rutilius rufus

Publius Rutilius Rufus (c.158 BC – after 78 BC, junior consul in 105) was an honorable Roman statesman, orator, stoic, and historian, and most likely great-uncle of Gaius Julius Caesar.

Theodor Mommsen writes in Book 57 of his History of Rome:

In this respect [Quintus Metellus] was so far free from the prejudices of his order that he selected as his lieutenants not men of rank, but the excellent officer Publius Rutilius Rufus, who was esteemed in military circles for his exemplary discipline and as the author of an altered and improved system of drill…

announcement: bingley to be guest author of this blog

I'm pleased to announce that ‘Bingley Austen’ has agreed to become a guest author on this blog.  Here is his introduction:

I first became interested in the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome as a child in England through re-tellings of myths.  When I started grammar school just before my 12th birthday Latin was still a compulsory subject. I enjoyed the lessons and found I was good at it, so it seemed natural a year later, when we were offered the choice of Greek, German or Russian as our 3rd language to choose Greek.  When the time came to start 'A' level study (at age 16), I chose Greek, Latin and Ancient History.

For the most part, I abandoned Classics at university but did manage to squeeze in courses on Ancient Greek religion and Greek and Roman drama.

Despite not continuing with formal study of Classics I still maintained a keen interest in anything to do with Greece and Rome.  After a series of office jobs, I became an EFL teacher. That took me to SE Asia, where I now live and work as an editor and translator.

Apart from reading the occasional novel set in Greece or Rome, I didn't have much chance to follow my interests in classical civilisation out here until I got Internet access in the mid 1990s, and at about the same time Jakarta got some big English-language bookshops.  One of the first forums I joined encouraged us to take pseudonyms in the form of character + author, hence Bingley Austen (I couldn't really see myself as Darcy).

Bingley will blog about any things classical that may take his current fancy, beyond the books the group is reading.

Welcome, Bingley!

elcesaites, elchasaites, helkesaites

In Zenobia, the Warrior Queen, the narrator Simon and his friend Taimsa, who study at Apamea, encounter one Alcibiades, who preaches the doctrine of the Elchasaites.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Elcesaites were a sect of Gnostic Ebionites, whose religion was a wild medley of heathen superstitions and Christian doctrines with Judaism. Hippolytus (Philosophumena, IX, 13-17) tells us that under Callistus* (217-222) a cunning individual called Alcibiades, a native of Apamea in Syria, came to Rome, bringing a book which he said had been received from Parthia by a just man named Elchasai (’Elchasaí; but Epiphanius has ’Elksaí and ’Elkessaîoi; Methodius, ’Elkesaîos, and Origen, ’Elkesaïtaí). The contents of the book had been revealed by an angel ninety-six miles high, sixteen miles broad, and twenty-four across the shoulders, whose footprints were fourteen miles long and four miles wide by two miles deep. Read on.

*Callistus was the Bishop of Rome.

Related is Catholic Encyclopedia: Apocrypha, A long article with a comments on each Apocryphal book. Classified according to origin, and the e-text Apocryphal Acts of The Apostles, Edited From Syriac Manuscripts in The British Museum and Other Libraries by W. Wright, LL.D., Ph. D., 1871.

JSTOR has an article The Acts of the Apostles by A.F.J. Klijn.

brooklyn museum: jewish mosaics, photos

Finally got a few photos of the exhibit, see brooklyn museum: jewish mosaics from the roman empire and more.

Click on images to enlarge









Photos © Dave Kush

philadelphia orchestra at tanglewood

Yesterday, on a perfect day – sunny, absolutely blue sky, and pleasantly cool – I did another trip up to Tanglewood to listen to the Philadelphia Orchestra under its music director Christoph Eschenbach playing  Beethoven  (The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43, Ballet Music and Symphony No. 8 in F major);  and Tchaikovsky's  Symphony. No. 5 in E minor.

It was loud!  I'm kidding …  It was a great performance.   After a nice and briskly played Prometheus, we got to the meat with Beethoven's Symphony No. 8, which is somewhat of a tour de force of exuberance, jests and jokes. I found some online program notes.

zenobia, the rebel queen

I'm currently reviewing the first in a trilogy of historical novels, The Chronicle of Zenobia: The Rebel Queen, by archaeologist and author Judith Weingarten (her website).   In length comparable to Colleen McCullough…

Zenobia was the third century CE queen of Palmyra.

Women's History at About.com has a biography of the queen, as has Wikipedia.

De Imperatoribus Romanis has a page on Vaballathus and Zenobia.

Stay tuned for more on the era, as I make my way through the book.

jugurtha, king of numidia

… and back we go to First Man in Rome.

Jugurtha, (c. 160–104 BC) was king of Numidia.  He was the grandson of Massinissa, whom we encountered when reading Pride of Carthage.  Jugurtha was a constant thorn in the side of Rome until he was defeated and captured by Marius and Sulla, and, after being paraded in Marius' triumph, executed.

The best online biography, as so often, is at livius.org.

Sallust, in his Jugurthine War [& the Conspiracy of Catilina], (online at Gutenberg), takes an extensive look at Jugurtha (Latin version).   However, he is more moralizing than accurate.  His introduction begins thus:

“Mankind unreasonably complain of their nature, that, being weak and short-lived, it is governed by chance rather than intellectual power; for, on the contrary, you will find, upon reflection, that there is nothing more noble or excellent, and that to nature is wanting rather human industry than ability or time.

tanglewood all-in-one

I'm trying to resolve some image opening issues in Mozilla Firefox and Netscape, meaning that right now I can only put 10 posts on the frontpage for it to work.

Thus here are my Tanglewood posts together for easier access (you may also go to the  Arts, Music, Movies  & Theatre Index):

shostakovich string quartets
an orgy of mozart at tanglewood (can't get the URL to work, sigh - go to Arts, Music, Movies  & Theatre Index)
a stravinsky performance and three (living) composers
a little music education
hans graf conducting
the festival of contemporary music at the tanglewood music center (I)
the festival of contemporary music at the tanglewood music center (II), opera
the festival of contemporary music at the tanglewood music center (III), two concerti
the festival of contemporary music at the tanglewood music center (IV), the fromm concert
the sterling and francine clark art institute
all good things come to an end . . .

Addendum 8/14:  philadelphia orchestra at tanglewood

all good things come to an end . . .

My last, and by now very hot, day did come and it was time to say goodbye, Linda & Phil, see you next time!

One final look at the lake …

… and my home away from home

… and I was off, into 100 degree plus the farther I got south.

On the way,  I stopped to pick up some lunch at my tea dealer,  Harney & Sons Fine Teas, in Millerton, N.Y.   There they have a store, with a tasting room, a gift shop, and a nice little tea room, where they serve healthy and tasty sandwiches, and iced Chai.  The latter kept my going until I was home, where I barely  escaped  – by a couple of street blocks – a power failure caused by the excessive temperatures.

So back to reality.  With all the great music going on, the students having a ball, the rest of us enjoying ourselves, it was often easy to forget the horror that is going on half a globe away…

the sterling and francine clark art institute

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is probably one of the best small private museums in the country.  We never miss a visit while up in the Berkshires and never get tired of the permanent collection, which is detailed here.

The collectors Sterling and Francine Clark opened the museum in 1955.  Thus, last year the museum celebrated its 50th anniversary, and still does in The Clark: Celebrating 50 Years of Art in Nature and with 50 Favorites – you can view everyone of them online!  This summer's special exhibit pays a tribute to Sterling Clark and his brother Stephen, The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings – extensive online coverage of the exhibit.  The brothers originally collected similar art, but then Stephen earned Sterling's disdain when he started collecting moderns beginning with Cézanne, a period  Sterling could not relate to.  He considered some of Matisse's works “awful things”.

Later, the brother had a falling out over inheritance and did not speak to each other any longer.  While Sterling founded his museum, Stephen became involved with MOMA, and later gave part of his collection to that institution, as well as to other museums.  He also was the founder of the Fenimore Art Museum (American, folk, and native art) and the National Baseball Hall of Fame both in Cooperstown, New York where both brothers grew up.

This is the first time that collections by the brothers have been shown side by side (poor Sterling is probably revolving in his grave), and fascinating it is.  They both liked Renoir, as well as American painters such as Winslow Homer.  Sterling collected John Singer Sargent, Stephen preferred Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper.

The exhibit will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from May 22 through August 19,  2007.

In the permanent collection, there was a small special exhibit of a new acquisition, Delacroix and the Horse, which was shown opposite drawings (black and colored chalk on paper) and sculptures by Degas, which I did prefer over Delacroix.  Also a Toulouse-Lautrec, “The Jockey”.

Then, I went to look for my favorite (ghastly?) piano, designed by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Next to it hang “The Women of Amphissa”, and another one which we had not seen before, “Preparations for the Festivities”.  For more on Alma-Tadema see my earlier blog.  My friend loves the Singer Sargent Fumée d'ambre gris.

All in all a perfect day, escaping the heat…

11/11/06 postscript