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osprey_archerAncient Rome is one of my forever-interests, which often lies fallow for ages until a new book catches my eye. Thus, Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, which focuses on the first thousand years of Rome’s history, started with the mythological founding by Romulus and Remus (and the alternative mythological founder Aeneas), up through the reign of Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus.
It’s very interesting! Beard argues that, despite the traditional historiographic focus on the individual character of each emperor, in fact the emperor’s personality didn’t much matter for most residents of the Roman empire. For Ye Average Farmer out in Gaul, life may be disrupted if there’s a power struggle in between emperors (particularly if the legions get involved), but who is actually in charge is mostly a matter of a new statue in the market town and a new head on the coins.
This is not true of 20th century tyrants - it matters a lot whether Stalin or Khrushchev is in charge! - so I’m still chewing this over. Beard argues that the reason ancient Romans tend to focus on the emperor’s character is that the chroniclers tend to come from the very highest echelon of Roman society, where the emperor might be inviting you to dinner and/or putting your name on a hit list, in which case it very much does matter whether he’s a capricious bully. She recounts the story of one emperor who puckishly invited his guest to a dinner where all the food was black, served by black-robed attendants, and each place marked with a tombstone carved with the guest’s name…
The guests all went home quivering in terror. But the next morning, they received a nice present from the emperor: their tombstone from the dinner, plus the slave attendant who had served them the night before! Happy end, sort of. You can see why you’d be praying every day for that emperor to hurry up and kick it.
(Side note, people keep attempting to recruit me for DnD games, and I have a nascent character idea for a Petty Tyrant Deposed by Underlings Who Just Can’t Take One More Themed Dinner Party.)
The book is mostly focused on Roman high politics, but there is one chapter about the daily life of common people, which is full of fascinating tidbits. For instance, it was common for trades to have a sort of proto-guild that acted as a social club and rudimentary insurance company (if you die, your trade association will make sure you’re buried); these associations usually had both free and slave members, when at least one guild had the regulation that upon manumission, a newly-freed slave had to provide the guild with a cask of wine. Beard suggests this is for the “Yay! You’re free now!” party, which certainly sounds nice.
Also, Beard spends some time discussing gravestones, including “One peculiarly loquacious stone [that] commemorates a woman with white skin, lovely eyes and small nipples who was the center of a menage a trois that split up after her death.”
I mean, that’s a Rosemary Sutcliff novel right there.
I liked SPQR so much that I’ve decided to read more Mary Beard.sovay suggested Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, a slender volume which is not so much a biography of Jane Harrison (controversial Cambridge classicist, who left Cambridge in 1922 to live in Paris with the much younger Hope Mirlees) as an extended meditation about the nature of biography and the inevitability with which whole swathes of a life get left out.
In particular, Beard considers Harrison’s friendship (perhaps romance?) in the 1880s with Eugenie Sellers (later Strong), who later became an eminent classicist in Rome. In 1891 relations between the two women broke down completely, for reasons that are no longer recoverable, in part because Mirlees made no attempt to recover it when some of the principle actors (notably Sellers herself) were still alive.
After Harrison’s death, Mirlees appointed herself keeper of Harrison’s memory. She spent the fifty years after Harrison’s death intending to write a biography, which she never wrote, although she gathered an enormous amount of material for it. Beard suggests that this material is shaped around Mirlees’ preferred story of Harrison’s life: a series of disastrous involvements with men, ending in a few years of sapphic bliss with Mirlees. Sellers, a female rival, muddies the waters, and so she has to go.
It’s very interesting! Beard argues that, despite the traditional historiographic focus on the individual character of each emperor, in fact the emperor’s personality didn’t much matter for most residents of the Roman empire. For Ye Average Farmer out in Gaul, life may be disrupted if there’s a power struggle in between emperors (particularly if the legions get involved), but who is actually in charge is mostly a matter of a new statue in the market town and a new head on the coins.
This is not true of 20th century tyrants - it matters a lot whether Stalin or Khrushchev is in charge! - so I’m still chewing this over. Beard argues that the reason ancient Romans tend to focus on the emperor’s character is that the chroniclers tend to come from the very highest echelon of Roman society, where the emperor might be inviting you to dinner and/or putting your name on a hit list, in which case it very much does matter whether he’s a capricious bully. She recounts the story of one emperor who puckishly invited his guest to a dinner where all the food was black, served by black-robed attendants, and each place marked with a tombstone carved with the guest’s name…
The guests all went home quivering in terror. But the next morning, they received a nice present from the emperor: their tombstone from the dinner, plus the slave attendant who had served them the night before! Happy end, sort of. You can see why you’d be praying every day for that emperor to hurry up and kick it.
(Side note, people keep attempting to recruit me for DnD games, and I have a nascent character idea for a Petty Tyrant Deposed by Underlings Who Just Can’t Take One More Themed Dinner Party.)
The book is mostly focused on Roman high politics, but there is one chapter about the daily life of common people, which is full of fascinating tidbits. For instance, it was common for trades to have a sort of proto-guild that acted as a social club and rudimentary insurance company (if you die, your trade association will make sure you’re buried); these associations usually had both free and slave members, when at least one guild had the regulation that upon manumission, a newly-freed slave had to provide the guild with a cask of wine. Beard suggests this is for the “Yay! You’re free now!” party, which certainly sounds nice.
Also, Beard spends some time discussing gravestones, including “One peculiarly loquacious stone [that] commemorates a woman with white skin, lovely eyes and small nipples who was the center of a menage a trois that split up after her death.”
I mean, that’s a Rosemary Sutcliff novel right there.
I liked SPQR so much that I’ve decided to read more Mary Beard.
sovay suggested Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, a slender volume which is not so much a biography of Jane Harrison (controversial Cambridge classicist, who left Cambridge in 1922 to live in Paris with the much younger Hope Mirlees) as an extended meditation about the nature of biography and the inevitability with which whole swathes of a life get left out.In particular, Beard considers Harrison’s friendship (perhaps romance?) in the 1880s with Eugenie Sellers (later Strong), who later became an eminent classicist in Rome. In 1891 relations between the two women broke down completely, for reasons that are no longer recoverable, in part because Mirlees made no attempt to recover it when some of the principle actors (notably Sellers herself) were still alive.
After Harrison’s death, Mirlees appointed herself keeper of Harrison’s memory. She spent the fifty years after Harrison’s death intending to write a biography, which she never wrote, although she gathered an enormous amount of material for it. Beard suggests that this material is shaped around Mirlees’ preferred story of Harrison’s life: a series of disastrous involvements with men, ending in a few years of sapphic bliss with Mirlees. Sellers, a female rival, muddies the waters, and so she has to go.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-01 07:44 pm (UTC)Scholars who sit on masses of information, promising a magnum opus that never comes, also seem to be a thing. I remember my dad telling me about some scholar who had all this information on ... I want to say Faulkner, and was loath to even let other people see it because he himself was going to write a magnum opus--but that never came, and people worked around his obstructionism to get what material they came, and the academic world continued on without him. A warning about "let me just collect a few more sources" and also about not sharing.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 11:35 am (UTC)Yeah, it must be a form of writers block. You have ALL this material, and there's always more material to gather, and so you keep gathering rather than turning what you've got into a book... and the more you gather, the harder it is to organize...
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Date: 2023-08-02 11:54 am (UTC)