Tom Holland fills in my ancient Roman blanks

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 2003

One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing, with titles and composers attached, the very same classical music core repertoire that I had first been exposed to in my infancy. So that’s what that is, I would cry out with joy, as yet another familiar tune would finally identify itself as whichever overture or symphony or concerto it was. Lost chord after lost chord, found.

Reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon has been a similarly joyous experience.

After my infancy of listening to the BBC Third Programme, there followed an expensive education during which I absorbed only bits and pieces of what was being said. I emerged from this education with a fairly thorough understanding of the Bible and its various contents, even as I became ever more unconvinced by its claims. Geography and post-1066 English history were a solid enough basis for further reading and learning. But when it came to the ancient world, the pieces of the puzzle were too few to join up, the fragments of the picture too closely associated with the grind of being made to learn Latin and Greek, which for me never really got beyond word games. I recall being awarded ninety eight percent for a “Latin verse” exam. Even then, I knew that my achievement, such as it was, had nothing to do with poetry. As far as ancient Roman history was concerned, most of what I emerged with from my Latin lessons was a jumble of mysterious names, such as Labienus, Cotta, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates. Much was made in my Latin lessons of Rome’s subjugation of Britain, but only a vague version even of that really stuck.

At some point I acquainted myself with an approximation of the Hannibal story, with its epic crossing of the Alps, its equally amazing massacres of various legions at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae (216BC), and later Hannibal’s defeat, in 202BC at Zama, which was the one where Scipio Africanus left gaps in his line for Hannibal’s elephants to charge uselessly through.

Later on, further pieces of the puzzle landed on the still largely empty table. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for instance, and then Anthony and Cleopatra. I devoured Robert Graves’s I Claudius and Claudius The God, but mostly because of the evil Messalina’s exploits and because of all the gladiatorial gore. Not that long ago, I finally watched the movie Spartacus all the way through. More recently, I got hooked on Rome, the recent TV soap opera. But I missed the beginning of that, and was never really sure where the boundary was there between fact and fiction. (Verenius? Pullo? Still don’t know about them.) But it was still only bits and pieces. More big names had piled up in my head, like Crassus (Laurence Olivier in Spartacus), and I now knew rather more about Pompey (Kenneth Cranham in Rome). But I only caught these personages in the middles and ends of their careers. Given that Pompey’s career ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar, how did he get to be called Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great?

For me, the joy of reading Rubicon is that the blanks have at last been filled in. Joy may seem an odd word to describe reading about events which involved so much suffering and disaster, both to Romans and to their enemies. But now that it has all happened, we might as well enjoy it. It would have been no fun to have been in a legion at Carrhae (53BC), say, where the career of Crassus came to its abrupt and appalling end, but me having a grand old time learning about it all isn’t going to make things any worse for anybody. And I really did enjoy this story. At no point while reading it was I ever bored or tempted to skip things. Seriously, it has been a long time since I have read a book with such rapt attention to what it was saying, with so little attention to what page number I had reached, and with such genuine disappointment when it stopped. After an approximate history of Rome from the year dot (dot for the Romans being 753BC by our reckoning), Holland gets seriously stuck into the story at around the time of the final destruction of Carthage (146 BC). He ends with the triumph of Octavian, who became Augustus in 27BC and consolidated his power in the few years after then. So, not much about Hannibal, and nothing at all about lost legions in Germany.

Holland uses our Christian dating system rather than the Roman one of the time, which makes sense, for us. But I would have liked occasional references to what date the Romans thought it was, given that they could not themselves prophecy the date of Christ’s birth and work backwards, fond though they were of prophecies. There are occasional references to decades like the “fifties”. But since presumably the Romans talked about their own recent decades with their own dates, much as we talk about our recent decades, I would have liked occasional references to the Roman way with dates, even if it might have confused me.

I could probably think of other quibbles if I really worked at it, but the truth is that I come not to bury this book but to praise it, and judging by all the adulatory reviews attached to the beginning of it I’m not the only one, which reassures me that it is probably good history as well as just good writing.

A lot of the fun of this book is that Tom Holland uses the skills of a novelist to get you inside the heads of his many characters. He continually switches point of view, at one moment telling you how things seemed to whichever big shot he is talking about, and the next moment telling you how it all seemed to that big shot’s contemporaries. In manner he is almost identical to another fine historian and populariser of recent years, Simon Schama. Indeed, I quite often found myself reading this book with Schama’s voice in my head, what with Schama having done lots of history on the telly, but Holland’s voice being, for me, unknown. I shouldn’t be surprised to encounter Holland on the telivision in the future.

Holland says that if Schama hadn’t already taken the title Citizens (for his book about the French Revolution), he would have called his book that.

There are all sorts of things about ancient Rome which I now understand a whole lot better.

I understand Roman marriage customs better. I knew, or maybe I just assumed, that Roman grandees married for reasons of political calculation, to firm up a political alliance. But what I had not appreciated was that they would divorce for similar reasons. When one alliance had served its purpose, and another one was required with someone different, the old wife would be dispensed with and a new one acquired. In such a world, a woman was liable to remain a lot closer to her father, and to her original family generally. Marriage was liable to be temporary but a blood tie was permanent. The great love of Cicero’s life, for instance, apart from the Roman Republic itself, was his daughter Tullia, who died, from the complications of childbirth (the female equivalent of dying in battle), just before he himself was assassinated (43BC).

Cicero had been just a name to me, until now. “Did Cicero speak?” “Aye Cicero spoke. Greek.” (Julius Caesar). But who was he? Why did he matter? Holland’s description of the immense importance of legal proceedings, and of the people who could sway them with their oratory, made this a lot clearer. Law court proceedings were as vitally important and as unpredictable and fraught with duplicity as was warfare itself, and Cicero was, simply, the finest law court stroke political orator of his generation. When he talked, people listened. This was a man who could ruin your entire career with one well aimed speech.

Another similarly elusive figure for me, until now, was Cato. Obviously an important and worthy chap, or why would these guys name themselves after him? But again, who was he, and why did he matter? Well, I won’t bore you with my summary of the answer. Suffice it to say that Holland did not bore me at all with his.

The bit of the Roman story that I learned most about that was new to me was happenings in what we now called the Middle East. Mithridates was for many years a huge thorn in that particular Roman side, until one of those admirable but lesser known Romans, the sort who was better at doing things than at getting the credit for it, by the name of Lucullus, got stuck into Mithridates. With an army that a smug opponent said was “too big to be an embassy but too small to be an army”, Lucullus nevertheless won a great victory over Mithridates, at Tigranocerta (69BC). Maybe you’ve heard of that one, but it was completely new to me.

Then Pompey showed up in the East, doing something his contemporaries apparently often accused him of doing, which was to skim off the credit after another Roman had done most of the serious hard work, what Americans now call the “heavy lifting”. Pompey subjugated the Far East for Rome, or at any rates persuaded Rome that he was responsible for this. Hence the Magnus in his name.

Pompey apparently did the same to Crassus, after Crassus had all but destroyed the great slave revolt lead by Spartacus. A few of the slaves fled north, nearer to Rome, from defeat in the South of Italy by Crassus (71BC). These survivors did not, by the way, include Spartacus himself. He, unlike Kirk Douglas in the movie, died in that last big battle. But Pompey mopped up the last survivors of the revolt and cleaned up on the credit.

What I got from reading Holland’s book was a sense, at last, of how these mighty potentates – Pompey, Crassus, Julius Caesar of course – got started out as potentates. In Republican Rome there was really no line to be drawn between politics and entrepreneurship, a state of affairs captured beautifully by something Crassus apparently said, that you couldn’t be considered rich until you could afford to support an army out of your income. You got started by being born into one of those aristocratic clans. You ran for high political office, and won. And then you speculated, and accumulated. You financed military adventures, and then, if all went well, you profited from them.

Julius Caesar did very well in Gaul, but it is interesting how the story played out. Caesar conquered Gaul. Hurrah! Gaul then united, and rose up in revolt. It was a quagmire! But, the Romans rather liked quagmires, because they were a chance to slaughter more foreigners and win more glory, which Caesar duly did. Which I sort of knew. What I did not know was the importance of drugs to the Gallic War. Wine, to be exact. The Romans made it. The Gauls loved it. And the Gauls used to sell one another into Roman slavery to finance their habit. I’m guessing that the Gauls were well aware of the strategic importance of their weakness, and of how it may even have cost them their liberty. Is it too fanciful to see in this story the origins of the modern French fascination with wine? Whatever the truth of that speculation, Caesar did very nicely for himself in Gaul. If, on the other hand, things went badly . . .

Crassus, the great nearly man of those times, although fabulously rich, never quite made it. He lunged for glory in the East, and got himself and his army destroyed at Carrhae. Before he died that day, he had to endure seeing his own son’s head paraded in front of him and his doomed army.

The Romans, until Augustus took command, prided themselves on never being ruled by one unchallengeable tyrant, this having been precisely the sentiment that the triumphant Julius Caesar had fallen foul of . (Caesar was killed 44BC.) The moment in their history, way back, when their King had been sent packing was a major part of their history and their self-image. And here lies another fascinating insight not just into Roman history but into history as such. The Romans, bossy and bloodthirsty though they were, spent a long, long time lording it over the lesser breeds while telling them that the difference between Rome and them was that Rome had no king. The Romans were citizens.

So, if you wanted to wind the Romans up, what did you do? That’s right, you called yourself a king. Mithridates, who became king of Pontus in 112BC, did it on a grand scale, and was the man who really got this idea going. Even pirate leaders called themselves kings. (Pompey flushed all the pirates out of the Mediterranean in 67BC.) Monarchy as revolution! This is not a notion that makes much sense to us, and until I read this book, such an idea had never even occurred to me. The Middle East being what it is, the political fantasies of that part of the world became suffused with ideas concerning this or that Great King, who would deliver the downtrodden from their downtroddenness, and generally give the Romans a good sorting out. This makes sense of much concerning Christianity that had hitherto not done so. King of the Jews? What was that about? Well, that was the kind of notion you naturally resorted to, if you were up against the Romans.

Meanwhile, the Romans in due course found themselves being ruled by an “Emperor”, a king in all but title.

While Rome was a small state in central Italy, the system of competitive political entrepreneurship served them well, extraordinarily well. The various players of the Great Game all knew that, ultimately, they were all on the same side. They all, in the end, pulled together. But once Rome started to rule Spain, and North Africa, and then the East, things flew apart and the centre couldn’t hold. Unless, they finally found themselves being told, the centre was all run by the one big boss.

Rome had no natural boundary between itself and its various colonial possessions, the way the Britain later did. For Rome, there were only such lines on the map as the Rubicon, the little river which was so small that nobody now knows where it is, which Caesar crossed with his army (49BC). This was breaking all the rules of Republican Rome, and it brought colonial power into the heart of the Roman political system. It was as if the Indian Army had entered Britain by nipping across the Channel.

I could go on, and on. I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, Queen Cleopatra (died 30BC). I hope I have made it clear that whereas I am in a position to enthuse about this book, I am in no position to judge its accuracy, to judge whether the lines dividing the established and proven, the plausible, and the merely speculative, are ever crossed without these boundaries being properly flagged up. I am, as already stated above, no classical scholar, and it was a relief to me that I was not expected to know any Latin. After reading this book, I immediately tried to read also that classic work of an earlier time, dealing with similar events, Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution. But with that book, written just before World War Two and published just after it, you are expected to know Latin. Worse, Syme’s book exudes the clear implication that all educated people already know most of this stuff, and that any book about such things was adding knowledge and subtleties of judgement to a mass of things that the reader already knew. So instead, I have been keeping my remainder shop eyes open (I bought Rubicon itself in such a shop for £3.99) for other more modern, post-Beatles, post-Latin-in-schools books about the Roman Empire, to learn more. The whole point of a work of popularisation like Rubicon is to make you want to dig deeper. That was certainly the effect it had on me.

So, although it probably wouldn’t do for Paul Marks: highly recommended.

I could, however, find no mention of Labienus, so about him I am still none the wiser. Was he perhaps one of Caesar’s lieutenants. Paul?