Roman History Books and More

q. caecilius metellus pius

Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius (Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology) was a scion of the prolific gens caecilia, ally of Sulla, proconsul in Spain fighting Sertorius, and Pontifex Maximus.

I have blogged him and them in the past: the gens caecilia and the metelli – metellus pius, so consider that post a refresher as we read Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough.

cn. pompeius magnus (pompey)

Cn. Pompeius Magnus (better known to the English speaking world as Pompey), the unofficial "first triumvir" and later adversary of C. Julius Caesar, is one of the more intriguing, exasperating, and tragic figures of the late republic.

Our current read, Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough, opens with a young and cocky Pompey  eagerly offering his troops to Sulla to march against Rome and follows his career through March 69 BCE, when he becomes consul for the first time, side-stepping the cursus honorum in typical Pompey fashion.

Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology has a lenghty discourse on him, beginning here.  N.S. Gill has a number of links at Pompey - Cn. Pompeius Magnus, such as Pompey's Wives.

In print there is Pompey the Great: A Political Biography by Robin Seager.

jacquetta hawkes

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography website has a biography of the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, which should be available at least until the end of this month, if not into January 2008 as well.

on translating fiction

Being bi-lingual and interested in languages and literature, I have or so I like to believe, a fine ear (or eye) for literary translations in the languages I know.  Here is a recent experience:  A short while ago, I read The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, a history of classical music in and of the 20th century.  Excellent!  Related blog, with musical examples.  The author relates that a number of American musicians/composers have read Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuehn As Told by a Friend. This sent me back to my library to re-read the novel, in the original German, about a composer who makes a Doctor Faustus-like deal with the Devil and eventually sinks into insanity, coinciding with the turmoil of the 1920s in Germany and the rise of Nazism.  The novel is a tour de force in prose, and I wondered how this could actually be translated into English without loosing its impact.  Not very well, I decided, after I had borrowed the above linked 1997 edition, translated by John E. Woods.  As a matter of fact, I could not bring myself reading much of the book, it was too painful.  Somewhere out there, there is a translation authorized by Thomas Mann, but it's out of print. 

The question though is, do translations ever work satisfactorily?

the essay: greek and roman voices

BBC Radio 3 is offering a series of talks in two-week blocks giving perspectives on Greek and Roman literature. Last week was Homer and this week is Horace. The subjects in January will be Thucydides and St. Augustine. The subjects in March will be Euripides and Tacitus. Promised for the future are: Sappho, Herodotus, Plato, Juvenal, Cicero, and Virgil.  Each programme will be available on the internet for one week after the broadcast.

Further details

latest mccullough book out: antony and cleopatra

The latest – and presumably final – book in Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series is out:

Antony and Cleopatra, A Novel

It covers the period from 41 to 30 BCE, and ends with an epilogue, "Metamorphosis"  (i.e., Gaius Caesar into Augustus), 29 to 27 BCE.

Cover image
of the UK edition

'fortune's favorites': divvying up the discussions

Our next read, Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough is a thick book and we decided to discuss it in three stages. My recommendation about how to divide this:

• January 2:  Synopses [of  the two prior volumes], Parts I & II
  (The synopses are a nice refresher and also a great help for those who have not read the prior books in the Masters of Rome series).
• January 16: through Part V.
• February 6:  through the end.

a little history of this reading group

In connection with the upcoming McCullough read, and talking about it to a visitor yesterday, it came back to me that this reading group, with a rather different venue and readership, started out in 1995 with McCullough!  The Internet was in its infancy then as far as the average person was concerned, with that average person being on AOL, which at the time was rather community oriented and had quite a number of reading groups.  I found one on history, and we soon discussed First Man in Rome.  After that, half of the group wanted to continue with the series, the other half didn't.  So we branched off, and I was "elected" leader . . .

Amazing that this thing now has been going for 12 years!  With various transformations and chat room venues, as well as sponsors when those were needed.  The first of these required every reading group to have a website, so I had to learn . . .  And the 'average person' was still so suspicious of the Internet and stuck to 'safe AOL,' that I lost almost all AOL members when the last AOL deal fell apart and we moved to the Internet at large.

online resources when reading "fortune's favorites"

There are plenty of online resources to help with reading our next book, Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough.

Aside from ancient sources, such as Plutarch (also here and here), Divus Julius by Suetonius, and Book 1 of Appian's Civil War, there are two exhaustive sites regarding Caesar:

• N.S. Gill at Ancient/Classical History at About.com: Articles on Gaius Julius Caesar and pages on this site with resources and biographies of Julius Caesar.
• Suzann Cross: Gaius Julius Caesar: The Last Dictator, A biography of Caesar and Rome, 100 - 44 B.C.  This includes biographies of Caesar's contemporaries.

N.S. Gill also has Sulla - Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 B.C.) and Pompey - Cn. Pompeius Magnus.

I'm sure there is more, and I'll blog it as I come across it. 

must cake, via cato the elder, junilla tacita, and apicius

In our current read, Venus in Copper, Falco, Helena Justina, and the Senator enjoy the must cake Falco bought from a street vendor.

Must cake is known to us via Cato the Elder's On Agriculture, specifically #121:

Recipe for must cake: Moisten 1 modius of wheat flour with must; add anise, cummin, 2 pounds of lard, 1 pound of cheese, and the bark of a laurel twig.  When you have made them into cakes, put bay leaves under them, and bake.

'venus in copper' and juvenal

Our current read, Venus in Copper, the third mystery in Lindsey Davis' Marcus Didius Falco mystery series, takes entirely place in Rome.  Falco is commissioned to prove that a certain Severina Zotica has murdered her previous husbands, and asked to prevent her from marrying and murdering a fourth.  Most of the characters in this drama with the usual twists and turns we've come to expect from Ms. Davis, are rich freedmen and freedwomen.  Meanwhile, Falco also has to deal with palace intrigues and Vespasian's son and co-ruler Titus, who pays him back a favor by presenting him with a turbot, resulting in a hilarious feast, with none other than Titus present.

Since just prior to this upcoming chat on Wednesday we discussed Juvenal's Satires, three of them vividly come to mind:

Satire 3: The Evils of the Big City
Satire 4: The Emperor's Fish (no English version online)
Satire 6: Roman Wives – Death is better than Marriage

(See also Bingley's post: prison)

a vote for latin

Op-Ed Contributor (New York Times)
A Vote for Latin
By HARRY MOUNT
Published: December 3, 2007
None of today’s leading presidential candidates studied Latin at a high level. How things have changed since the founding fathers.

AT first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach us a thing or two about. As they themselves might have said, “Roma urbs aeterna; Latina lingua aeterna.”  Read on

Latin Version: A Vote for Latin

"a good mystery: why we read"

From the New York Times:

Page Turner
A Good Mystery: Why We Read
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: November 25, 2007
At a time when books appear to be waging a Sisyphean battle against the forces of the Internet, the notion that someone could move from literary indifference to devouring passion seems, sadly, farfetched.

Image Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

prison

Happy, you would say, were the forbears of our great-grandfathers, happy the days of old which under Kings and Tribunes beheld Rome satisfied with a single gaol!  Juvenal Satire III lines 312-3 translated by G. G. Ramsay

The one jail was traditionally supposed to have been built by Ancus Martius, the fourth king of Rome, with an underground dungeon added by Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. It is here that Venus in Copper opens with Marcus Didius Falco having fallen victim to the wiles of his arch-enemy, Anacrites. Imprisonment of citizens does not seem to have been used as a punishment in Ancient Rome in Falco's day. The main function of the jail was as a place to keep state prisoners awaiting execution and people accused of crimes but unable to provide a surety to guarantee their appearance when their trial came up.