"Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar

The Pantheon in Rome was built by Hadrian

The fictionalised autobiography of Hadrian, one of the better Roman Emperors. He is old and dying and writes these memoirs of a way of advising Marcus Aurelius, whom he has designated as successor to his designated successor Antoninus Pius.

It is beautifully written, in crisp and elegant prose. There are some wonderful insights into the human condition (see Selected Quotes). But it is not a particularly entertaining example of historical fiction, like Hawker and the King's Jewel by Ethan Bale. This is no sword-and-sandals epic of the Roman Empire, no Gladiator or Ben-Hur or Spartacus. But it is thoughtful and, to the best of my knowledge, thoroughly researched. To that extent it reminded me of I, Claudius by Robert Graves and, like that novel, it suffers in that it has to stick to the history (which is sometimes just one damn thing after another) rather than being able to develop with plot, character and theme, like a novel can.

The chapter headings are in Latin, I have provided my best translations:

• Animula Vagula Blandula = Young soul, wandering, enchanting. This comes from the first line of a poem supposedly written by Hadrian in later life in which he asks the soul where it is going now it is leaving his body; it is a philosophical reflection on life and death.
• Varius Multiplex Multiformis = Varied, manifold and of many forms. This is a quote from the historian Sextus Aurelius Victor, used to describe Hadrian's curiosity and many talents.
• Tellus Stabilita = the firmly established earth. This was a phrase used by Hadrian on some of his coins with a depiction of the earth goddess Tellus, also known as Terra Mater or 'Mother Earth.
• Saeculum Aureum = The Golden Age. In the novel it refers to his time with his lover Antinous.
• Disciplina Augusta = military discipline. It was another phrase used on Hadrian's coins.
• Patientia = patience, endurance or suffering. Yet another legened from Hadrian's coins, these showing the figure of Patience seated and holding a shallow libation bowl and a staff. 

Selected quotes:

• “I have ... reached the age where life, for every man, is accepted defeat. To say that my days are numbered signifies nothing; they always were, and are so for us all. But uncertainty as to the place, the time, and the manner, which keeps us from distinguishing the goal toward which we continually advance, diminishes.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “I recall my childhood races on the dry hills of Spain, and the game played with myself of pressing onto the last gasp, never doubting that the perfect heart and healthy lungs would re-establish their equilibrium.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “An operation which is performed two or three times a day, and the purpose of which is to sustain life, surely merits our care. To eat a fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by the earth.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys ... until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favourite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “The most benighted of men are not without some glimmerings of the divine: that murderer plays passing well upon the flute; this overseer flaying the backs of his slaves is perhaps a dutiful sun; this simpleton would share with me his last piece of bread.” (Varius Multiplex Multiformis)
• “Different persons ruled me in turn ... I played host successively to the meticulous officer ... the melancholy dreamer ... the lover ... the haughty young lieutenant ... and finally the future statesman.” (Varius Multiplex Multiformis)
• “Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “I have a little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken, and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. ... Any law too often subject to infraction is bad.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “All nations which have perished up to this time have done so for lack of generosity; Sparta would have survived longer had she given her Helots some interest in that survival; there is always a day when Atlas ceases to support the weight of the heavens, and his revolt shakes the earth.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “The condition of women is fixed by strange customs; they are at one and the same time subjected and protected, weak and powerful, too much despised and too much respected. In this chaos of contradictory usage, the practices of society are superimposed upon the fact of nature, but it is not easy to distinguish between the two.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “From without came the few sounds of that Asiatic night: the whispering of slaves at my door; the soft rustle of a palm, and ... snores behind a curtain; the stamp of a horse's hoof; from farther away, in, the melancholy murmur of a song.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “On many points, however, the thinking of our philosophers also seemed to be limited and confused, if not sterile. Three-quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void.” (Disciplina Augusta)

November 2025; 237 pages

First published in French in 1951

I read a Penguin paperback translation into English by Grace Frick 'in collaboration with the author' which was issued in 1959 and reprinted in 1982

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin

Ravenna is a fascinating town. Founded as a safe retreat for the Roman emperors when Rome became vulnerable to barbarian attacks (a little like how Venice was founded as a refuge from later barbarian attacks), and the capital for Theodoric the Gothic king who held it as a more or less independent fief under Constantinople's hegemony it became the centre for the Italian foothold of the Byzantine emperor until it was eventually taken first by the Lombards and later by the Franks under Charlemagne. It thus spent four hundred years being the meeting place for the developing Latinate culture associated with the Roman Catholic papacy and the developing Byzantine culture associated with Constantinople. This culture clash led, as so often, to learning; it was the centre for an important early medieval medical school as well as the city in which Boethius flourished (and later died). 

Famous names kept appearing. As well as those above were Byzantine emperors Justinian, Leo the Iconoclast, and Irene, and others including Belisarius and Stilicho, Pope Gregory the Great , Gerbert of Aurillac and "the famous Queen Radegund" who is presumably the same as the saint celebrated in Canterbury's St Radegund's Car Park.

I found it hard going. As with many books such as this, I found that there was too much information. Ravenna is a fascinating city and there are some compelling personalities but to condense four hundred year into as many pages means that the canvas is overcrowded with incident. This happened and then this and then this; it was history as an overwhelming flood.

Furthermore, sometimes the sequencing seemed awry. For example, in chapter 28 Herrin tells us that the death of Johannicis was "monstrous" (when the emperor who ordered it is deposed) but it is not until chapter 30 that we revisit what happened and find out the manner of the death. I was frequently confused.

But in these books there are always little nuggets. I didn't realise that the Lombards were identified by their long bears (longobardi). Nor did I know that, according to the "Anonymous Cosmographer of Ravenna" "the sun does not hide behind huge mountains during the night, or sink belowe the waters of the Ocean, but returns to its seat in the East ... from Germania and Britannia, via the Baltic islands of the Fini, to the Caucasus, Scythia, Sarmatia and the Caspian Gates to Bactrian India." (Ch 27). And the iconoclasts in 726 were prompted by "a terrifying subaquatic volcanic eruption in the Segean [which] threw up a new island between Thera and Therasia ... [in which] monstrous deposits of ash and solid lava were borne to the shores of the Aegean in a tsunami" (Ch 32)

Selected quotes:

• "The pattern of son following father into the same priestly profession is one common to early medieval Europe; popes Boniface, Felix III and Agapitus were all sons of priests, and Silverius (the short-lived pope of 536-7)was the son of Pope Hormisdas." (Ch 15)
• "Two canons were devoted to appropriate Christian art, the first stipulating the human depiction of Christ rather than his symbolic representation as the Lamb of God, and the second forbidding any artistic representation that might generate improper feelings." (Ch 28)
• "The first Christian icons adopted the same format of small wood panels, similar to the portraits of ancient gods that have survived in the dry conditions of Egypt." (Ch 32)
• "The veneration of images of Christian holy figures ... had always been distinguished from idolatry ... The invisible God could never be represented and was always to be worshipped spiritually." (Ch 32)
• "A particular Byzantine institution, a bride-show ... Officials were duly sent around the empire to find only the most beautiful girls, who had to conform to particular measurements - the Cinderella story of the shoe that fits makes its appearance here." (Ch 36)
• "Irene ... removed her son from power by having him blinded." (Ch 37)

Ultimately I felt that this book failed to do justice to an absolutely fascinating period of history, with the establishment of the Christian church and the early battles for orthodoxy, with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and with the arrival of the Islamic caliphate.

November 2021; 400 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"I, Claudius" by Robert Graves

When is a novel not a novel? On the whole, I dislike rules. They tend to become rigid. When Christopher Booker postulates that there are Seven Basic Plots his thesis becomes so fossilised that he dismisses James Joyce's Ulysses as an inadequate story. The definition Jane Smiley uses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel is that a novel is "a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” By this definition, I, Claudius is clearly a novel. And yet I felt there was some key ingredient lacking.

I, Claudius is a retelling of the story of the first three emperors of Rome, as narrated by the fourth, Claudius. It is fundamentally a fictionalised history and, as such, is limited by the need to follow the facts. And as historian Arnold Toynbee said in 1957: "History is just ‘one damned thing after another’". This meant that the narrative, covering fifty incident-packed years, was immensely cluttered with details and events and anecdotes, and I lost any sense of pattern or theme. Characters came and went (often being put to death) so fast that I found it very difficult to empathise with any of them. Perhaps inevitably, given the scope of the book, the narrative distance was far off, like a long (far too long!) establishing shot in a film, and this further reduced my ability to empathise. Finally, the first person narration meant that what focus existed was on Claudius so the subsidiary characters became mere puppets. Lots of people died but it didn't affect me because I didn't care for any of them.

As Claudius says of another historian: "He had no critical sense and wrote miserably, the facts choking each other like flowers in a seed-bed that has not been thinned out." (Ch 5)

This changed in the last few chapters which deal with the assassination of Caligula. Here the pace slowed down, the focus became much closer, and I started to get involved. But that was the exception.

There are other moments through the book when the focus becomes close and individual conversations are reported and they stood out like cherries in stodge (even if one of them was a somewhat academic discussion of the nature of history).

It made me wonder how Tolstoy managed to get people involved with his characters in War and Peace and I think that his secret was to have a small core cast of characters, a third person 'omniscient' narrator, and to tell his story (even the battle) almost entirely through close focus scenes. 

In short, I didn't think I, Claudius worked as a novel and I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. 

Selected quotes:

• "Others prophesy, indeed, but seem more inspired by Bacchus than by Apollo, the drunken nonsense they deliver" (Ch 1)
• "With riches came sloth, greed, cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, effeminacy, and every other un-Roman vice." (Ch 1)
• "Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus." (Ch 2)
• "She had a faculty for making ordinary easy-going people feel acutely conscious in her presence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings." (Ch 3)
• "The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again." (Ch 3)
• "He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about." (Ch 5)
• "The Empire was very big and needed more officials and senior army officers than the nobility and gentry were able to supply, in spite of constant recruiting to their ranks from the populace. When there were complaints from men of family about the vulgarity of these newcomers, Augustus used to answer testily that he chose the least vulgar he could find." (Ch 7)
• "The cleverest leader is one who chooses clever people to think for him." (Ch 7)
• "You can always tell a Paduan. By bathing in the water of the spring or drinking it – and I’m told that they do both things simultaneously – Paduans are able to believe whatever they like and believe it so strongly that they can make anyone else believe it. That’s how the city has got such a wonderful commercial reputation." (Ch 9)
• "There are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth." (Ch 9)
• "The tax-collector exercised his right of seizing good-looking children from the villages which could not pay and carrying them off to be sold as slaves." (Ch 11)
• "To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration." (Ch 12)
• "As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned." (Ch 22)
• "My mother had always been very economical, and in her old age her chief delight was saving candle-ends and melting them down into candles again, and selling the kitchen refuse to pig-keepers, and mixing charcoal-dust with some liquid or other and kneading it into cakes which, when dried, burned almost as well as charcoal." (Ch 27)
• "All theatre-pieces are much the same except to connoisseurs" (Ch 30)
• "Mad, Caesar? You ask whether I think you Mad? Why, you set the standard of sanity for the whole habitable world." (Ch 32)
• "‘It’s a very difficult thing, you know, Claudius,’ he said confidentially, ‘to be a God in human disguise'." (Ch 32)

November 2021

As a history of Rome it reminded me of Livy's Early History of Rome which is full of exhausting detail. If you want to read about the Roman emperors read Suetonius The Twelve Caesars or the brilliant Dynasty by Tom Holland.

I, Claudius, together with its sequel, Claudius, the God, won the 1934 James Tait Black memorial prize. It was selected by Time magazine as one of the hundred best novels since Time began (1923)

Other reviews:

• Annie on goodreads described it as an "endless, joyless recitation of facts and events"
• Peter on goodreads says that "Robert Graves does a great literary impersonation of a rambling bore"
• Taka on goodreads calls it "432 pages of dense and complicated Roman history, 98% of which is told in a narrative instead of rendered in scene".
• lethe on goodreads described it as "all telling, not showing"
• Isaac Cooper on goodreads abandoned it. "The marriages, cousins, uncles, wives, divorces, conspiracies and characters are shot at you one after the other. ... Claudius recounts the various exploits of Rome like he’s merely ticking off a checklist."

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Golden Ass" by Apuleius

Written between 150 and 180 CE, this is the only Latin novel that has survived in its entirety. It is a bawdy picaresque which follows the adventures of a young nobleman called Lucius whose flirtation with magic results in him being transformed into a donkey who is then stolen by a gang of bandits. He then undergoes a series of adventures and is told a number of stories. 

In many ways the novel is a collection of stories, of which the longest details the love affair of Cupid and Psyche, one of the few Hero's Journey type legends that have a young girl as the protagonist. Collections of stories are common in early fiction, such as Boccaccio's Decameron, The Thousand and one Nights, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Most modern novels structured in this form have a stronger overarching narrative, as does the Golden Ass. I'm thinking of books like:

• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• Love and other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward

The success or failure of such a book depends partly on the strength and coherence of the interconnections and partly, (mostly?) on the quality of writing.

Another category in which the Golden Ass might be considered is as a picaresque in which case it might be compared with

• Candide by Voltaire
• Brazil by John Updike

The Golden Ass is even more imaginative than Candide in getting its characters into impossible scrapes and then coming up with a marvellous escape. It is similar to Candide in the nice little asides which the author interpolates: "Forgive this outburst! I can hear my readers protesting: 'Hey, what's all this about? Are we going to let an ass lecture us in philosophy?'" (C 17) It certainly outdoes Candide in the Pythonesque fecundity of the author's imagination. It is incredibly colourful, utterly bonkers, and rather bawdy. A great read, brilliantly translated by the late, great Robert graves.

Some of my favourite moments:

• "I lay prostrate on the floor, naked, cold, and clammy with loathsome urine. 'A new-born child must feel like this', I said to myself. 'Yet how different his prospects are! I have my whole life behind me, not in front of me'." (C 1)
• "How daintily, how charmingly you stir that casserole: I love watching you wriggle your hips. And what a wonderful cook you are! The man whom you allow to poke his finger into your little casserole is the luckiest fellow alive. That sort of stew would tickle the most jaded palate." (C 2)
• "Cupid, that very wicked boy, with neither manners nor respect for the decencies." (C 7)
• "The first lamp was surely invented by some love who wished to prolong all night the passionate delights of his eye." (C 8)
• "The old sages had been right to speak of Fortune as blind and even eyeless, because of the way she rewards the unworthy or the positively wicked. She never shows the least sense in selecting her favourites: indeed, she even prefers men from whom, if she had any eyes in her head, she would feel to recoil in disgust." (C 10)
• "She was malicious, cruel, spiteful, lecherous, drunken, selfish, obstinate, as mean in her petty thefts as she was wasteful in her grand orgies, and an enemy of all that was honest and clean." (C 13)
• "You know the proverb: no crime discovered, no crime committed." (C 15)
• "Soon a golden sun arose to rout the dark shadows of night ... and the calm sky shone with its own deep blue light." (C 18)

Great fun. January 2021; 247 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Pompeii" by Mary Beard

The archaeological evidence from the city of Pompeii, buried for two thousand years by an eruption of neighbouring volcano Vesuvius, is assessed to provide evidence for daily life in the Roman world. The main message from this book is that the Romans weren't as homogenous as they are normally portrayed and that individuality reigned. How they did things in this city does not necessarily tell you how they did things elsewhere. What happened at the time that Pompeii was buried does not necessarily reflect what happened during the other many centuries of Roman Republic and subsequently Empire. And what one citizen or slave does is not the same as how another lives their life.

The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of narrative about the disaster. I suppose this has been covered elsewhere but it is the tabloid stuff. And I am not that interested in archaeology. So some of this book was rather hard going.

Nevertheless, there are some fascinating moments:

• "The hint of 'officer class' prejudices in many modern archaeologists who have so confidently equated social mobility and the rise of new money with revolution or decline." (Introduction)
• "Pompeii stood at the heart of a region - known, then and now, as Campania - where, long before the Romans came to dominate, indigenous peoples speaking the native Oscan language rubbed shoulders with Greek settlers." (C 1)
• "The town of Baiae, across the Bay from Pompeii, had become by the first century BCE a byword for an upmarket, hedonistic resort." (C 1)
• "It is hard to belive that all those Pompeians whoi lived in a single room above their shop, with not always adequate lavatory facilities, never found it convenient simply to piss in the streets." (C 2)
• "For us, it is the rich who visit restaurants, the poor who cook economically at home. At Pompeii, it was the poor who ate out [because they didn't have kitchens]." (C 2)
• In Pompeii, as in other early modern cities, "the mansions of the rich rubbed shoulders" with shops and workshops. (C 2)
• "If by 'poverty' we mean 'destitution', then there were very few poor in the ancient world: for the simple reason that destitution was the first step on a fast track to death." (C 3)
• "A tombstone from Rome ... includes the following piquant observation: 'wine, sex and baths ruin our bodies, but they are the stuff of life'" (C 7)
• "The conventions of bathing brought everyone down to size. Bathing naked, or nearly naked ... the poor were in principle no different from the wealthy - possibly healthier and of finer physique." (C 7). I related this to Acts of Undressing by Barbara Brownie.
• "The emperor Hadrian ... was visiting the baths one day (for even emperors might bathe in public ...) he noticed a retired soldier rubbing his back against the wall ... the man explained that he could not afford a slave to rub him down. So Hadrian gave him some slaves and the cost of their maintenance. Returning on a later occasion, he found a whole group of men rubbing their backs on the wall. ... He suggested they should rub each other." (C 7)
• "The hot tubs in the bathing suite itself must have been a seething mass of bacteria ... Roman medical writer Celsus offers the sensible advice not to go to the baths with a fresh wound ('it normally leads to gangrene')" (C 7)
• "The repeated slaughter of animals by humans to gods was an emblem of the hierarchy of the cosmos, with humans in the middle between beasts on the one hand and the divine on the other." (C 9)
• "In the 1760s, the Temple of Isis was among the first buildings fully excavated on the site ... Exotic and a little bit sinister, it gave Mozart, who visited Pompeii in 1769, ideas for the Magic Flute." (C 9)

A comprehensive study. October 2019; 316 pages

Books to check out
Satyrica by Petronius

"Amo, Amas, Amat ... and all that" by Harry Mount

This book endeavours to convince its readers of the joys of learning Latin and, along the way, to teach, in a remorselessly traditional way,  the grammar and vocabulary necessary to undertake some translations. I thought that the second aim rather undermined the first. Had I wished to undertake the learning of Latin I would have purchased one of the teaching courses available, a Latin dictionary, and a Latin grammar. For all his delightful anecdotes, many describing his own education at private schools, the interesting asides and the somewhat waspish pillorying of celebrities such as Paul Gascoigne and Jeffrey Archer (Mount is clearly a Classics Master manque), the large chunks of rote learning required made this book too severe to be fun.

And I have a problem with the rigour expected on Latin students. Mount makes the point that Latin is, to all intents and purposes, now a dead language and that therefore there is less "wriggle room" is translating it. But Latin was a live language for well over a thousand years and there were at least three ages of literary Latin (Golden, Augustan, and Silver). To suggest that Latin did not evolve and mutate in that time is like suggesting that Chaucerian English and modern English are the same. I find it difficult to understand how someone can be so definite about the 'correct' way to decline a noun or the correct spelling of any Latin word. Did Romulus write the rules and then all Latin authors slavishly followed him? Or have we discerned the rules from an analysis of the surviving corpus? And were they really all slavishly adhering to the same standards?

At the start of the book, Mount is firmly on the side of the sceptics. He extols a book about Venice that avoids the "Accademia" and "four million Tintorettos"(p 17)He points out that Latin "was a language that people once used to talk about the weather and their sex lives; people laughed and cried in Latin." (p 25) He points out that "to say you need to understand Latin to understand English ... is as crazy as saying you need to understand Anglo-Saxon, German and Norman French to understand English." (p 27) He labels those who use Latin where there is a perfectly suitable English word as Wankers who only want to show off. “Since you can't split a Latin infinitive, because it's a single word, you shouldn't do it in English, or so the pedants say. That seems bloody stupid to me - Latin and English are two different languages.” (p 125). And he loves colloquial translations. “Who's ever said, ‘Sejanus, needing to be promoted, enjoined the centurions to go by, with or from home?’ Much better to say, ‘Sejanus was so desperate to curry favour with the emperor that he told all the centurions to quit the city by nightfall’.” (p 38)

But in the end he still wants you to learn all the declensions and the conjugations and the tenses and the genders and the gerunds and passives and the whole lot.

Towards the end there are a whole lot of grammatical terms, some of which are really rather useful, and an awful lot of phrases from Latin that we use nowadays, most of which I knew.

At the end of the book, Mount mourns the decline in the learning of Latin. As with so many other classicists, he misses the point. Latin, he proclaims, is worth learning by virtue of the access it grants you to some wonderful writing. I would not dispute that. But, Mr Mount, ars longa, vita brevis (which Mount tells me is a saying from Hippocrates although I always assumed that this gentleman spoke Greek). There are so many things that are worth learning and life is short. It is wonderful that my mate Fred, who lent me this book, is translating the Aeneid from Latin into English for fun. But I am really glad that I studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge. I suspect Mr Mount considers the Sciences, and Engineering, and Maths to be functional subjects but, Harry, they are subjects that offer entrance to worlds of beauty and enchantment as much as Poetry or Latin or History or Art Appreciation. Or football, for that matter. We humans have created many things of beauty. Who am I to say that Physics satisfies the soul more than Latin? But when I watch a drunkard spit at a light bulb which subsequently shatters and I find I can understand the sequence of events in terms of a number of scientific sub-disciplines I do experience a little joy which is essentially spiritual. And who is Mr Mount to suggest that the thrills he experiences in translating Latin are more profound that that? And who are either of us to feel superior to a football spectator whose soul is moved and whose life is validated by a moment of sporting brilliance? No, Harry. The decline in the learning of Latin is not because on an inherent philistinism in modernity but because of the increase in so much of the competition. Schoolchildren don't learn less. They now learn other things.

And the decrease in rigour between O-level and GCSE is because GCSEs are designed to be qualifications that everyone can access. You were lucky to go to a private school. Most people aren't. But they deserve an education too. And they deserve, if they so wish, to study Latin. If you refuse to make it accessible, don't be surprised if it withers away.

Here are some interesting facts I gathered along the way:

• “The word ‘candidate’ evolved from the fact that Roman candidates for election wore togas covered in white chalk dust to make them stand out in a crowd.” (p 44)
• “The gerund is ... a way of turning a verb into a noun: so the gerund of ‘I love’ is ‘loving’.” (p 76)
• “The gerundive is ... a verbal adjective, meaning, ‘needing to be kissed/electrocuted/ glued’.” (p 77)
• “The name Amanda is also a gerundive, meaning ‘a girl that must be loved’.” (p 77)
• “Of course, bloody Wilfred Owen ripped the line off for his poem, Dulce et Decorum est, in 1917. Got shot a fortnight before the armistice. Serves him bloody right. That's what happens to boys who plagiarise.” (p 91)

And some interesting Latin words that I didn't know as well as I thought I did:

• Codex: "Originally spelt caudex, it meant 'tree trunk'. Came to be used to mean a book of wooden tablets" and by extension a manuscript.
• "Locum tenens - a substitute" later shortened to locum but also frenchified into "lieu-tenant"
• Pari passu: "two enterprises being treated in the same way"
• Passim "everywhere"
• Quis custodiet ipsos custodes was used by Juvenal to refer to "the problem of finding men to guard women suspected of infidelity"
• "Re ipsa loquitur - the thing speaks for itself": self-evident
• "Vade mecum - go with me"
• "Velis nolis" is the origin of will-ye nill-ye subsequently willy-nilly.

This book had many lovely moments but it hasn't convinced me to relearn Latin. August 2018; 269 words

"Dynasty" by Tom Holland

This is the story of the first Roman Emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

The First Chapter, The Children of the Wolf, sketches the early history of Rome from Romulus and Remus (did Remus freely offer his life as a sacrifice when Romulus was building Rome or was he murdered by his twin brother?), through the expulsion of the kings, through to the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, politician and brilliant general who enslaved all of Gaul and invaded Britain too, Pompey the Great, brilliant general whose quasi private armies built an empire in the middle east, and Crassus, fabulously wealthy banker and brilliant general whose defeat and death at the hands of the Parthians unbalanced the triumvirate into a civil war finally won by Caesar. And then comes a remarkable piece of writing in which Holland describes the pivotal events of 15th February 44BC, "a few days after Caesar's appointment as 'Dictator for Life'," (p 24) the feast of the Lupercal. "The date was a potent one, both joyous and haunted ... stalked by the dead, who had been known to mark the festival by rising from their graves and roaming the streets. ... In the mouth of the [Lupercal] cave, below the branches of the sacred fig tree, oiled men known as Luperci, naked save for a loincloth of goatskin, stood shivering in the winter breeze. Also maDe of goatskin were the thongs they held in their hands, and which women on the crowds below, many of them stripped to the waist, would invariably blush to see waved in their direction. Naturally, it took a certain physique to carry off a loincloth - and especially so in February." (pp 24 - 25) Even so, Marc Antony, a forty year old magistrate, had joined the Luperci. The Luperci ran through the streets, whipping the half-naked women with their thongs "on a day when the human mingled with the wolvish, the carnal with the supernatural" (p 26). And when Antony runs down the Forum to the Rostrum he encounters Caesar on a golden throne "dressed in the ancient costume of the city's kings: purple toga and calf-length boots in fetching red leather."  (p 26) Antony then presents Caesar with a laurel diadem. "A few desultory rounds of applause greeted the gesture. Otherwise all was leaden silence. Then Caesar, after a pause, pushed the diadem away - and the Forum echoed to tremendous cheering ... And so the experiment failed." (p 27) And one month later, Brutus, descendant of the Brutus who had chased Rome's last king from the city, led the assassination of Caesar. "And wolves, in lofty cities, made the nights echo with their howls." (p 28)Tremendous writing: political theatre mingled with sex and superstition: can you get a more potent mix?

Chapter Two is entitled Back to the Future. We learn about the chaos of civil war following the assassination of Caesar: first between the new triumvirate of wealthy nigh priest Lepidus, Marc Antony and youthful nobody (but Caesar's heir) Octavian; next when the triumvirs fell out. Aristocratic Livia was wife to Tiberius Nero who aligned himself with Antony in an Italian revolt against Octavian: soon the young couple with their baby Tiberius were fleeing, first to Sicily, next to Greece "before being forced on the run again. As they made their escape through a forest, a fire broke out. Livia's dress was left charred. Even her hair was singed." (p 45). Months later she was shagging Octavian and a divorce was quickly arranged. Tiberius Nero, exchanging an unfaithful wife for a pardon for rebellion, "gave his former wife away" at the wedding! (p 46)

The soldiers who had fought for Octavian were now rewarded with land confiscated from enemies or non-combatants (shades of Zimbabwe). This was in towns outside Roman that had once been her neighbours, then her possessions and were coming to be co-cities of the Republic even though the peoples were sometimes primitive, such as the Marsians "whose singing could make snakes explode." But the land confiscations and continuing piracy brought famine to Rome, threatening the regime to the extent that when the bodies of those killed in riots were slung into the Tiber "gangs of desperate thieves waded out and stripped them bare ... Nothing was left them save to scavenge corpses."

Despite the rumours about the sexual promiscuity of Octavian (now renamed Augustus) himself, Roman citizens were expected to control themselves. "Unchecked sexual appetites, while only to be expected in a woman - or, of course, a Greek - were hardly appropriate to a citizen  ... No man could be reckoned truly a man who was the slave of his own desires. Playboys who chased after married women were well known to be womanish themselves. The Princeps, it was whispered, smoothed his legs by singeing off their hairs with red-hot nut shells." (p 100) Ovid, the poet, on the other hand was a young man who enjoyed sex "When Ovid strolled up to Apollo's temple ... it was not to admire the architecture. He was scoping out girls." (p 105) After all, the phallus was "everywhere to be seen" and "much admired. A generously endowed man hitting the bath-house might well be greeted with 'a round of nervous applause'." (p 106) But sex was for men and whores. Cuckolding another citizen carried ferocious penalties: death for the woman and death or castration for the man. "For a man to shave his armpits was ... simply good manners but to .... depilate the legs was disgusting, plain and simple. Body hair was the mark of a man." (p 108) The feast of Liber, however, allowed sexual license. "Everybody slept with everybody else" (p 112) although Julia, daughter to Augustus and wife to his consigliere Agrippa, when asked how her sons looked so much like their father joked "because I only ever take on passengers after the cargo-hold has been loaded." (p 122).

One of the keys to the success of Augustus was that he mapped out the poor districts of Rome, focusing his attention on the cross-roads, where he organised the local authorities, including the Vigiles "crack squads of firefighters ... mandated to police the streets as well as to put out conflagrations." (p 140).

Chapter 4 is about Tiberius, a very interesting character. A successful general and the step-son of Augustus, Tiberius was an organiser, an administrator, a thorough and painstaking man, with very little charisma, a highly aristocratic attitude and a dislike of the mob. Protesting not to want to be Emperor he nevertheless managed to rule by terror which included starving to death several members of his own family. When he retired to Capri he took many aristocratic children as hostages. They were then used as performers in pornographic stage shows and "obliged to pose as prostitutes, to hawk for business like the lowest class of sex worker, to perform sometimes three or four at a time". (p 253)

Chapter 5 is about Caligula, who grew up at his uncles pornographic court on Capri. Caligula was his nickname because as a toddler he became the idol and the mascot of the military camp which his dad, Germanicus, was in charge of. Utterly unlike the austere Tiberius, Caligula staged games and shows and courted the popularity of the masses; at the same time he terrorised the Senate. "What Capri had been to Tiberius, the whole of Rome was now to his heir: a theatre of cruelty and excess" (p 287) He killed and tortured, he tormented parents by making them view the death of one of their children and then kept them subservient because they had other children, he brought Capri to the Palatine Hill and made the aristocratic women and children hostages have sex with paying plebs. But he tormented one member of his guard too far and the man assassinated him.

The pendulum swung, as they do, and Chapter 6 (Io Saturnalia) is about Caligula's elderly uncle Claudius, previously passed over in the succession because he was lame and dribbly and altogether ill-fitting the Roman ideal of manhood. He understood the coup that had led to his succession and his first actions was to award massive bonuses to the Praetorian Guard, He then developed a sort of meritocracy in which powerful positions were given to men who had started out life as slaves, or the sons of slaves, such as Callistus, whose name meant 'Gorgeous'. Clearly, following the humiliations heaped on it by Caligula, the Senate's traditional exclusivity and rights were to be further eroded. "Everything we now believe to be the essence of tradition ... was a novelty once" (p 371 quoting Tacitus quoting Claudius) For example, despite the law saying that only slaves could be tortured, in the aftermath of a conspiracy against Claudius he employed torturers ("specialists skilled in the art of extracting information tended to be found among private firms of undertakers", p 311) against free men.

Claudius needed to boost his macho and virile image and launched campaigns against the Moors (who were renowned for "their high standards of dental hygiene" and "tribes so unspeakably savage that they ate flesh raw and thought nothing of drinking milk"); having conquered the Atlas Mountains their general Suetonius Paulinus was then sent to conquer Britain who "were, if anything, even more barbarous than the Germans. They painted themselves blue; they held their wives in common; they wore hair on the upper lip, an affectation so grotesque that Latin did not have a word for it." (p 315).

When  Nero took over, probably by poisoning Claudius having been made his heir and still too young to shave, he was ruled by his mother Agrippina. "Bitter and humiliated, Nero vented his fury in the readiest way available, by repeatedly sodomising his stepbrother. Rape was, of course, the most physically brutal means a Roman had of asserting his dominance over a rival." Shortly afterwards Britannicus, Nero's stepbrother and heir, choked to death at a feast.

Nero and his tutor Seneca were in charge of the world. "Seated as he was at the heart of the great web of Roman power, he only had to tug upon a single thread of it for villages at the far end of the world to be trampled down by soldiers, and women left bruised and bleeding." (p 368)

Rome was becoming a cosmopolitan city. This in itself engendered dislike of immigrants. As then, now. "Meanwhile ... in the teeming streets of a city whose population now numbered well over a million, many had begun to wonder what precisely it meant to talk of the Roman people. Rome ... had been founded on immigration. Exotic languages had been heard in the city for centuries. ... Yet even as many Romans saw in their city's diversity the homage paid by the world to its greatness, and a potent source of renewal, so others were less convinced. All very well to host immigrants, so long as they ended up Roman; but what if they preserved their barbarous ways, infecting decent citizens with their superstitions? ... A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman." (p 372)

As well as all this, this book has some great side issues:

• "Whether in his worsening health, in the person of a decrepit and toothless porter whom he had last seen as a handsome slaveboy, or in a clump of gnarled plane trees planted by his own hand in hoe youth, he found marks of decay everywhere." (p 379)
• "Everyone knew that people only ever suffered poverty because they deserved it." (p 324)
• The Praetorian Guard was named because it was the unit of a praetor, a commander.
• A legionary swore a sacred oath called the sacramentum.
• What have the Germans ever done for the Romans? The introduced Rome to "a curious concoction fashioned out of goat lard and ashes named 'soap' ... the miraculous product could give a hint of gold to even the dullest locks" although used to excess it might make you go bald.
• "Stepmothers in Rome were widely presumed to be malignant." (p 171)
• "It is in the nature of kings that they will hold good men in more suspicion than the bad, and dread the talents of others." (p 6; quoting Sallust The Conspiracy of Catiline)
• "Who ... could rival the Greeks when it came to the shaping of bronze or marble, the mapping of the stars or the penning of sex manuals?" (p 5)

Beautifully written by the man who has also written Rubicon (the prequel to this book, about Julius Caesar), Persian Fire (Darius the Mede and his mates), Millennium (about the year 1000) and In the Shadow of the Sword (an exploration of the origins of Islam). December 2016; 419 pages.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God