Roman History Books and More

marcus livius drusus the younger

Marcus Livius Drusus the Younger, tribune of 91, is much featured in Colleen McCullough's The Grass Crown, our current read.  He was the son of Marcus Livius Drusus, the tribune of 122, censor of 109, and adversary of Gaius Gracchus;  nephew of Publius Rutilius Rufus;  brother-in-law and later adversary of Quintus Servilius Caepio, son of the Gold of Tolosa;  uncle of the half-siblings Servilia and Cato the Younger;  and grandfather of the empress Livia – but knowledge of him is nonetheless sketchy and contradictory.  It doesn't help that Livy's text survives in a limited form only.

tangentially – harry turtledove aka h.n. turteltaub

For Harry Turtledove (known to me mainly as H.N. Turteltaub) fans, a blog and a new alternative history novel: 

Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment & Trial of John F. Kennedy, Written by Harry Turtledove & Bryce Zabel  or:  What if John Kennedy survived Dallas?

Mr. Turtledove holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine History, and according to Wikipedia (obviosuly approved by Turtledove as it's linked from his blog), as H.N. Turteltaub he not only wrote the Byzantine novel Justinian – about the 7th century Justinian – which at one time we discussed in our reading group, but also this 4th century BC Hellenistic Traders Series set shortly after the death of Alexander the Great:

a perseus lament

This is one of my occasional laments, such as my earlier one on footnotes/endnotes.

This time, it's Perseus Digital Library.

Since they have switched to Version 4.0, things have gotten worse rather than better.  Some texts haven't moved to 4.0 yet, so one still may have to search the old site, and of the mirror sites, only Berlin is still working.  And of course, as usual, most of the time the little thingy on my browser keeps churning and churning and churning, despite a new fast laptop…

(Chicago mirror has switched to 4.0, but at this writing won't load.)

When do they ever get their act together?

The reason for what is more of a rant than a lament?  Cicero's letters in English.  I've given up for now as I don't have unlimited time. <VBS>

mommsen’s history at the time of “the grass crown”

For Theodor Mommsen fans who’d like to follow him while reading  The Grass Crown, here he is online at  History of Rome, Book Fourth, The Revolution.

It runs more or less parallel to the novel  from about Page 80 to Page 121 - Death of Marius.

More on Theodor Mommsen in this blog

image © Irene B. Hahn

publicani, tax farming

In Roman Asia Province, more than in any other part of the late republic, tax farming brought great grief to the populace.  In our current read, The Grass Crown, both Mithridates and Gaius Marius in his Asian travels are told about this problem, the latter by Rutilus Rufus, then legate to the governor Quintus Mucius Scaevola.  These two officials exposed the scandal and rectified the situation, to the dismay of the equites tax farmers back in Rome.  Scaevola survived relatively unscathed, but Rutilius Rufus, lacking connections, was tried for and convicted of extortion and had to go into exile.  For this he choose the very place of his alleged crimes, Asia Province, where he was warmly welcomed and spent the rest of his life.  More on this from Mommsen in my earlier post.

Smith's Dictionary at LacusCurtius of course covers the Publicani.  Most of the linked citations are in Latin though.

mithridates VI eupator revisited

In the beginning of  The Grass Crown, Colleen McCullough gives us a masterly creation of the early Mithridates (also known as Mithradates).  His devious personality, his cruelty, his ruthless determination, and also his trying to puzzle out the Romans, not the least Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who, each encountering him in Cappadocia, manage to intimidate him.

Mithridates (132-63 BCE), King of Pontus from 120 to 63, became a competing power with the Romans in what the latter called “Asia,” due to expansionist aims on both sides.

Jonah Lendering has the best online information starting with this page.

For more, go to my earlier post, when we read Sulla the Fortunate by G.P. Baker in 2006.

next chats: “the grass crown”

In our continuation of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, we have now arrived at  The Grass Crown.

The novel covers the time from Sulla’s failed attempt to reach the praetorship in 98 BC through the death of Gaius Marius in 86 … wide coverage of the events leading up to and of Social War … the sad trials of the Livius and Cato Salonianus families … beginnings of the first Civil War … introducing King Mithradates in a big way … the tax farmer issue.

We also meet Marcus Tullius Cicero for the first time, the young Gnaeus Pompeius, and the precocious Gaius Julius Caesar.

We will probably split the readings as follows:

April 4:  Books I through III (or IV?)
April 18:  Books (IV?), V and VI
May 2:  Book VII to the end

Background reading (more to come)
Reading List for 2007

falco alert

Lindsey Davis's The Iron Hand of Mars is our book for 12 December this year. BBC Radio is going to broadcast a dramatisation of it over six weeks starting on 6 April from 11:30 a.m to 12 noon (presumably BST (GMT +1).  More details here (scroll down).

The BBC Radio website also still has available an interview with Lindsey Davis which was broadcast on 20 February 2007.

the amphitheatre at pompeii

The amphitheatre at Pompeii (Photo © Mary Ann Sullivan, see below) was the first Roman stone amphitheatre, built around 80 BC according to the OCD, probably soon after Sulla imposed a colonia on the ancient city.  It was called spectacula by its builders.  It seated around 20,000 people.  It was closed by the Senate in AD 59 after a riot.

Tacitus, in Annals 14.17 reports:

[14.17] About the same time a trifling beginning led to frightful bloodshed between the inhabitants of Nuceria and Pompeii, at a gladiatorial show exhibited by Livineius Regulus, who had been, as I have related, expelled from the Senate.  With the unruly spirit of townsfolk, they began with abusive language of each other;  then they took up stones and at last weapons, the advantage resting with the populace of Pompeii, where the show was being exhibited. 

gladiators: the thracian (thraex)

Quintus Honorius Romanus aka Taurus, our hero in James Duffy's Sand of the Arena, mostly fights as a Thracian.  This fighter is described in Duffy's introduction to his book (Download duffy_intro.pdf), as

A lightly armored fighter carrying a small square shield (parmula) and curved sword (sica). His helmet crest often bore the image of a griffin fixed to the front.

Roman Gladiatorial Games from CUNY shows an image on this page, the third one down on the right.  If you click on it, you can clearly see the crested helmet.  This image is also on the informative  Culture I page at the same website.

toynbee on historical novels

I'd like to share these observations by Arnold J. Toynbee on historical novels, via David Derrick’s Toynbee Convector:

It is difficult to achieve success in writing “historical” plays and novels, i.e. plays and novels in which the social background is not that of the writer or of the public for whom he is writing.  The effort to resuscitate an alien social background seldom produces effects that do not seem either shoddy or laboured.  The reason is that social facts, when presented as a setting for personal relations, must be sketched in with a touch which is at the same time light and sure;  and this touch is difficult to achieve except when the artist is portraying social facts with which he is intimately acquainted at first hand.

[however…] read on

With today's proliferation of historical novels, the question arises:  Does the above still hold true, and if so, to what extent?

Postscript:  This may be an awkward way to pose this question.  Maybe the observation is more true than ever, given today’s tendency towards “political correctness”?

google books on gladiators & the roman amphitheatre

Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games By Roland Auguet

Blurb:  "Cruelty and Civilization" offers an in-depth look at the Roman games as a force vital to the functioning of an Empire. Gladiatorial combats, chariot races and other spectacles were a kind of public opiate for the citizens of Ancient Rome. These rites gave rhythm and excitement to daily life in the Empire. From one year to the next, the Roman citizen lived in anticipation of the next games; through them he was able to forget the mediocrity of his own condition as well as his political enslavement. The most minutely organized productions were staged at vast expense, and Rome developed cults for arena champions, who were simultaneously idols and outcasts, doomed to a bloody death. Roland Auguet not only reconstructs in detail the conduct of these spectacles (gladiatorial combats, the sacrifice of prisoners to wild beasts, the chariot races, the combats between man and beast or beast and beast), but also analyzes the feelings of the crowd and the calculations of its rulers. He explainswhy the games dominated the life of the city. Examining the games in the context of a broader study of Roman customs, this book provides a synthesized view of how Roman civilization was to a large degree based on the games.

A review

a book on gladiators: the sorrow of the ancient romans

An interesting read, both as Google Book and in print: The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster.

“This inquiry into the collective psychology of the ancient Romans speaks not about military conquest, sober law, and practical politics, but about extremes of despair, desire, and envy. Carlin Barton makes us uncomfortably familiar with a society struggling at or beyond the limits of human endurance. To probe the tensions of the Roman world in the period from the first century b.c.e. through the first two centuries c.e., Barton picks two images: the gladiator and the ‘monster’. ”

the amphitheatre in rome at the time of nero

In his Sand of the Arena, James Duffy commits two anachronisms, backwards and forwards, when, in AD 67, he has the now combined Pompeian and Glevian gladiator troupe fight the Roman Imperial School in the Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri, and has them reside in the barracks of the Ludus Magnus.

The amphitheatre of Taurus was destroyed in the Great Fire of 64, and the Ludus Magnus was built adjacent to the Amphitheatrum Flavium, the Colosseum, by the the Flavian emperors.

The question arises:  Was the amphitheatre of Taurus replaced before the Colosseum was built, and did Nero built one before or after the fire?  The information is somewhat conflicting.

two books on nero

Researching the emperor Nero's amphitheatre (more on this soon), I searched through the two more recent books on Nero which I own.

Again, I was struck by the brilliance of Edward Champlin’s Nero (2006 paperback edition), which is at heart, or so I think, a psychobiography.  Here is a Bryn Mawr Review.

The other one is Miriam Griffin’s  Nero:  The End of a Dynasty, revised edition 1996, of which she writes:  “This study is intended to be a hybrid, biographical in its concentration on the Emperor's personality and problems, historical in its analysis of his fall in terms of the interaction of that personality with the political system.  Nero's reign is here examined from two standpoints: first, his own inclinations and the way his expression of them was affected by his particular circumstances and the advice of others;  then the pressures inherent in the Principate, pressures which were bound to condition any ruler's conduct even if he was not continuously aware of them.”

gladiatorial posters & souvenirs

In the book Sand of the Arena, when the Quintus’ group comes for the “North-South” games to Pompeii, there are advertisement notices all over the place.  Here is a  transcript of notice posters from Pompeii, such as

Twenty pairs of gladiators belonging to Decimus Lucretius Satrius Valens perpetual flamen of Nero Caesar son of Augustus and ten pairs of gladiators belonging to the son of Decimus Lucretius Valens will fight at Pompeii on April 8,9,10, 11 and 12, there will be a beast hunt and there will be awnings. Aemilius Celer wrote this on his own by moonlight.  (from LVDVS GLADIATORVS)

venatio, venator, bestiarius

In our current read, Sand of the Arena, the Ethiopian venator Lindani spectacularly saves the lives of the proconsul’s family in the arena at Londinium, after an antelope buck crashes into the audience.

[As it so happens, Mary Beard today reports on a field trip with her Roman Britain class to London and links to a nice page of the London amphitheatre.]

The venatio (hunt) was a popular spectacle during gladiatorial games, usually as a warm-up to the main event.  The trained hunter, like our Lindani, was called venator, as opposed to the bestiarus, who was mainly animal fodder.

a footnote to my earlier post on the colosseum

A footnote to my post on the Colosseum last year: 

JL pointed out in a comment today that Mary Beard has co-authored a book on the Colosseum:

The Colosseum (Wonders of the World)
by Keith Hopkins & Mary Beard

morituri te salutamus – not

morituri te salutant or morituri te salutamus is commonly described as the opening rite of a gladiatorial fight.

However, I came across the following in JSTOR (limited access):

Morituri Te Salutamus, H. J. Leon
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association Vol. 70 (1939), pp. 46-50, about the salute, Claudius'€™ Naumachia on Lake Fucinus, and naumachiae in general.

According to the author, the descriptions of the salute in the Claudian event by Suetonius (morituri de salutant) and Cassius Dio (moriture te salutamus)  are the only ancient references to the salute of the gladiators, and it was actually uttered by the naumacharii, as an appeal in the hope of winning the emperor's sympathy.  Tacitus is silent on the salute.

naumachia

A naumachia was the reenactment of a naval battle in a basin or on a lake, a popular albeit costly – and for the participants deadly – entertainment of the masses in ancient Rome.  The term naumachia was also used for the location at which the games took place.

Our current read, Sand of the Arena, opens with an imaginative happening of the naumachia of Nero – “…he also exhibited a naval battle in salt water with sea monsters swimming about in it”  according to Suetonius’ Life of Nero.