Quotes: Roman Papers I-VII (1934-1989) by Ronald Syme

NB. The order is chronological, at least roughly, by first publication or, in case of lectures or addresses, the date they were delivered. The Roman numeral denotes the volume, the Arabic number the specific paper. Both are given according to the seven volumes of Roman Papers:

 

Volume I (1979) – 35 papers (nos. 1–35)

Volume II (1979) – 24 papers (nos. 36–59)

Volume III (1984) – 41 papers (nos. 60–100)

Volume IV (1988) – 23 papers (nos. 1–23)

Volume V (1988) – 19 papers (nos. 24–42)

Volume VI (1991) – 47 papers (nos. 1–46 + 45A) and a Preface

Volume VII (1991) – 12 papers (nos. 47–58)

 

Counting the Preface, altogether 202 pieces of Roman scholarship destined to remain relevant as long as anybody is interested in ancient Rome. Sources are given according to the information supplied by the editors, Ernst Badian (I–II) and Anthony Birley (III–VII). As before, footnotes limited to modern studies of modest value are omitted. All translations from Latin and Greek are taken from the Loeb Classical Library; those from French, German and Italian are courtesy of Google.

 

VI.1 From Octavian to Augustus [1934]

Review of M. A. Levi, Ottaviano Capoparte (2 vols., Florence, 1933),

Classical Review xlviii (1934), 76–8.

‘La miglior definizione che di questo libro si può e si deve dare è questa: un libro vivo.’ [The best definition that can and must be given of this book is this: a living book.] This is the opinion of the publishers, and it may be accepted. Not that we have here a specimen of the ‘brighter biography’ – scholars who are familiar with Professor Levi’s earlier studies in Roman history will not need to be told that this is a work of solid erudition and permanent value, to be bought, not borrowed. There is therefore all the more reason to rejoice that the book is well printed and exceedingly cheap.

The subject is the political history of Rome from the assassination of Caesar the Dictator to the final triumph of his adoptive son. That it makes a long is not to be wondered at, considering the bulk of the ancient authorities. But it is not clogged with detail. The author has invoked concision and excision with a sure touch.

[...]

The political history of these years is not a subject easy to treat with complete success. The very fullness of the ancient and modern accounts is something of a deterrent – scholars can be pardoned for turning rather to fields where the evidence is a thin and weedy growth, and to paths where few have trodden, although, as Carcopino somewhere reminds us, it is the beaten tracks that have the most ruts. Another reason which has sometimes contributed to a neglect of this period is the gap which often severs the study of the Republic from that of the Empire. Eager for the further shore, the student of the Empire is tempted to take the quickest ferry across the streams of Chaos and Night. And so the interval between Caesar and Augustus appears to be merely a ‘period of transition’ – as though the Principate of Augustus were less so! Moreover, when we read the history of these years, it all seems so ‘inevitable’ – ἔδει γὰρ εἰς Καίσαρα πάντα περιελθεῖν [since it was destined that everything should come into Caesar’s hands] (Plutarch, Antony 56). But was it? We must forget the future. As Mr Tarn so empathically states when discussing the Fourth Eclogue, the Empire and the Aeneid were ‘things of which in 40 Virgil knew nothing, and of which we must know nothing either’ (JRS xxii, 1932, p. 154).

On the whole it may be said that Levi skirts these dangers with skill and success. Differences of opinion there always will be in a subject of such scope, such variety and such permanent interest. It would be a poor compliment to a scholar of Levi’s eminence if a reviewer confined himself to praise. Laudations belong to the dead.

We sometimes suspect that that adequate justice has not been done to M. Antonius. Was he from the beginning ‘progrediente verso il dominio personale’ [progressing towards personal mastery] (i, p. 89, cf. 185)? Many of the actions of Antonius in 44 B.C. were conditioned simply by the fact that he was consul, the legal head of the government. Whatever the future might bring, he had to make provision for the present – and we would not depreciate his exertions in the cause of order and concord now and later. If anybody advanced steadily towards sole and personal power it was the young Octavian. Levi inclines to the view that the disturbances in 41 B.C. which culminated in the Perusine War were secretly encouraged by Antonius, eager to rid himself of his partner, if he could do so without the personal responsibility (ii, p. 24 and p. 112). But the evidence – as well as probability – seems against this, especially the attitude of the generals of Antonius in Italy, Ventidius, Plancus, and Pollio. Their action – or rather their significant inactivity – during the siege of Perusia is not mentioned by Levi. Yet it belongs much more to the category of politics than that of military operations. If Antony tried to rid himself of Octavian in 41 B.C., why did he not show more energy in the attempt? To be sure, some soldiers in Perusia inscribed their sling-bullets with the name ‘M. Antonius imperator’ (ii, p. 19): but we do not know whether this – like the inelegant remarks about Fulvia hurled back by the besiegers – was done with official sanction. Nor would it matter a bit if it was – the only new fact which the glandes Perusinae prove is the baldness of L. Antonius, and even that may be an unfriendly exaggeration. The loyalty of M. Antonius to his triumviral colleague both now and later is surprising but apparently genuine. Levi should have refrained from referring in a footnote to evidence which might prove  that in 37 B.C. shortly before the Treaty of Tarentum Antonius was secretly supporting Sex. Pompeius. ‘Cfr. le monete di Antonio di quell’ epoca, trovate a Olbia in Sardegna, e che forse provano che ancora allora Antonio aiutava finanziariamente Sesto Pompeio’ [Antony’s coins from that period, found at Olbia in Sardinia, which perhaps prove that Antony was still providing financial support to Sextus Pompeius at that time], etc. (ii, p. 61). That, the coins could not prove.

Especially welcome is Levi’s reasoned insistence on the importance of the religious moment and his reconstruction of the hopes and fears that prevailed in Italy in the years of confusion. It is a characteristic of his method and of its merits that he does not stray into long digressions about the Fourth Eclogue. It is a piece of bad luck that Tarn’s brilliant and convincing identification of the ‘wonder-child’ as the expected son of Antony and Octavia came too late to be mentioned – as it surely would have been. The East receives its full share. There is authority, it is true, for calling the meeting of Antonius and Cleopatra at Tarsus an ‘ierogamia’; compare especially Plutarch (Antony 26), καί τις λόγος ἐχώρει διὰ πάντων ὡς ἡ Ἀφροδίτη κωμάζοι παρὰ τὸν Διόνυσον ἐπ᾿ ἀγαθῷ τῆς Ἀσίας [And a rumour spread on every hand that Venus was come to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia]. Yet this may hinder rather than help the understanding of history. When Antonius left his Aphrodite in 40 B.C., who knew whether he would return? Nor did he, until nearly four years had elapsed, and he had in the meantime contracted a marriage which showed some promise of permanence.

To a modern reader the proscriptions form a distasteful chapter of history. It is easy to condemn them – and he who seeks to justify them may incur the charge of making divine Klio ‘procuress to the Lords of Hell’. They must be understood in their context. Rice Holmes’s robust comments on the role of Octavian in the proscriptions were unfortunately marred by a piece of rank pragmatism. ‘To support his colleagues was a part of the price which he had to pay for attaining the power that enabled him to become one of the greatest benefactors of mankind’ (The Architect of the Roman Empire i, p. 71). What if that sickly and sinister youth had fallen at Philippi or perished in the sea off Sicily? The clemency of Caesar makes the behaviour of the Triumvirs the more odious. Levi points out that the triumph of Caesar and the triumph of the Caesarian party (as represented by the Triumvirs) were very different things. ‘Con l’avvento del triumvirato no si fonda un regime. È un partito che conquista lo stato e aspira al dominio stabile: il triumvirato, strumento di una fazione, è organo collegiale, quindi impersonale, non ha la possibilità nè il compito di cercare la conciliazione e non teme il sangue... Il triumvirato agiva in nome di una nuova legalità cui gli avversari erano estranei, rappresentava il nuovo stato’ [The advent of the triumvirate did not mark the founding of a regime. It was a party that captured the state and aspired to enduring dominance: the triumvirate – the instrument of a faction – was a collegiate, and thus impersonal, body; it had neither the capacity nor the mandate to seek reconciliation, and it did not shrink from bloodshed... The triumvirate acted in the name of a new legality to which its adversaries were alien; it represented the new state.] (i, p. 230).

Here we have our Ottaviano Capoparte. Let us hope that he will soon be followed by an Augusto Principe. The bimillenary [1937] is fast approaching of the year [63 B.C.] that witnessed the consulate of Cicero and the birth of Octavian. That Augustus should not then be amply commemorated in Italy would be neither fitting nor credible.

 

VI.7 An Anachronistic Ovid [1947]

Review of H. Fränkel, Ovid; A Poet between Two Worlds

(Sather Classical Lectures, vol. xviii, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1945),

Journal of Roman Studies xxxvii (1947), 221

If Ovid is to be described as ‘a poet between two worlds’, which are those two worlds? Suitable and perhaps instructive contrasts might be discovered in the life of the poet and the history of the times. Thus Italy and Rome – the generation of Ovid’s grandparents among the Paeligni belonged to the confederate revolt against the tyrant city. Or Republic and Monarchy – the infant born on 20 March, 43 B.C., Hirtius and Pansa being consuls, might have a technical and tenuous claim to have ‘seen the Republic’. Or again, the familiar ‘two generations’ in the handbooks of Latin literature, first the useful and praiseworthy characters, seasoned by civil war and able to impart lessons of civic virtue, then the epigoni who got their education easily in the atmosphere of the peace. Ovid, of course, is the coryphaeus of the decadents, and their scapegoat.

The book here under review announces a portentous antithesis, an all but Messianic theme. Ovid is a Precursor. ‘Without knowing of his own mission, Ovid was one of those to help prepare the passage from Antiquity to Christianity’ (p. 5). It is not at once evident why this claim should be made for Ovid rather than for anyone else. Let it be conceded that ‘the poetry had a special and lasting appeal to the Christian era’ (p. 3), that he was more widely read than any other Latin poet in the Middle Ages. Why not? Ovid’s popularity explains itself – gay tales and easy Latin. And if, in more polished ages, a taste for Ovid has not always been found incompatible with the duties of the clerical profession, it is never invoked as a reinforcement of organized devotion or private piety.

The unconscious missioner is detected in certain statements of Ovid about the relations between lover and lover, especially the merging of their identities in a ‘mystic union’. Professor Fränkel discerns a ‘fundamental shift... in the history of the human mind’ which ‘makes possible a new kind of sympathy between fellow human beings, that kind which we justly are accustomed to associate with Christianity’ (pp. 21 f.). The cardinal instance occurs in the abject contrition confessed by the lover (Amores, i 7) – after he has administered a beating to his lady.       

Ovid possessed a refined and delicate sensibility, a gift of sympathetic understanding often perceptible behind the gloss, the glitter, and the cynicism of his society verse. A friend and a guide, he wants to emancipate the fair sex from dullness and squalor, to teach elegance and happiness by text and precept. See especially the alert and amusing study of Brooks Otis, ‘Ovid and the Augustans,’ TAPA lxix (1938), 188 ff. The larger claims of Professor Fränkel fall short of proof – or plausibility.

Much labour has gone to the writing of this book, it contains much valuable material about Augustan poetry and about the life and works of Ovid – even the topography of the Dobrudja and the ichthyology of the Black Sea are handsomely treated. Copious Ovidian extracts are supplied – in prose translation. The advantage to be gained from thus taking a poet out of his language as well as out of his time is not at all evident. Professor Fränkel states that the purpose of his investigation is to reinvigorate the study of Ovid, ‘to recover some of the ground the critics of the last century have lost’ (p. 2). The confidence felt in the superior insight of the blessed twentieth century, however, seems a little excessive. We observe, not so much an advance on the nineteenth, as a further regression from the eighteenth, an age that understood the poet, for it had the requisite social milieu, and the literary medium – the heroic couplet.

Deliberate frivolity is no doubt repellent to many whose business is with the literature and the history of Europe. Repellent or not, it happens to be present in some of the documents. Ovid is a wit, a humourist, a parodist. That is what he tried to be, and he succeeded. Never was there a more perfect harmony between style and subject. It is a pity that ‘modern thought’ presumes to molest Ovid.

Ride, si sapis, o puella, ride:

Paelignus puto dixerat poeta.

 

VI.10 Who Was Tacitus? [1957]

Harvard Library Bulletin xi (1957), 185–98.

Of all writers, ancient and modern, Tacitus is among the most ruthless and subversive. It was his design to penetrate and expose the arcana of men and governments. That procedure compels a question. The author is reticent, if not evasive. What is his own secret? What are the sentiments behind the narrative, the eloquence, and the drama? Who was Tacitus?

[...]

Some may accept Tacitus as primarily a moralist. Perhaps they read into his words much more than the author intended. Others will confess their perplexity. The lessons that Tacitus is supposed to inculcate are by no means clear or unequivocal. On the one side, liberty and dignity. On the other, the precepts of a statecraft that a time-server, a politician, or a tyrant might be happy to annex and exploit. His works, so some argue, are morally dangerous, not to be recommended for the instruction of the young. Napoleon (it will be recalled) denounced the historian as a traducer of the human race.

How much in Tacitus is the garb of fashion and convention? And what is left, when the integument is stripped? The attempt to discover the true opinions of the historian and to fathom his personality is extremely hazardous.

[...]

The irony of Tacitus pervades whole episodes in the Annals, such as the interchange of letters between Tiberius and his minister Sejanus. Or it may be compressed into a curt phrase. There is also sarcasm in Tacitus, and his sarcasm took a sharper edge from Tiberius. Authors often undergo the influence of their subject-matter, and it would be worth speculating what the historian owed to Tiberius as a result of that long frequentation, that close symbiosis. Another emperor, it might seem, deepened and widened his sense of humour. This was Claudius Caesar, erudite, pompous, or silly. There was rich material in the public pronouncements of  Claudius, and Tacitus exploits it.

[...]

Tacitus wears a grim, impersonal mask. He will not relent even for the innocent Britannicus, in whom some incautiously discovered the promise of future virtues. Tacitus expresses his doubts. A proud reserve was congenial to the nature of Tacitus, or had become so. The fifteen years of the tyranny of Domitian might well leave their mark on a senator. According to Tacitus, those who emerged from the ordeal were maimed in spirit, dazed and blunted. Yet Tacitus himself had not been condemned to silence all the time, and he had made a good career. Other senators were in a like case. Not all of them (and perhaps not Tacitus) deserve commiseration. Pliny, in the last years of the reign, benefited by a more conspicuous advancement. Pliny conceived no anger or remorse – his letters seem to betray no sign of any lasting effect on his character.

Exile or a setback can be the making of a historian. Even the enhancement of a grievance will help. Sallust would have been nowhere but for the vicissitudes in his career. When he turned to authorship for consolation, he almost acknowledged the benefit. Tacitus may have been uncomfortably aware of his own good fortune, oppression being a useful school for historians if it does not extinguish them.

Public life at Rome was enough, even without the experience of tyranny and oppression. Deceit and pretence held sway, with many hazards for a man who strove to rise by talent, and there was fierce competition everywhere among the orators. Success – and Tacitus had been very successful – brought on envy and detraction. Tacitus, who loathed subservience, and who had every reason for pride in what he achieved, expresses an almost morbid fear of ostentation. He may have encountered trouble or discomfort in his career from the rancorous and the pretentious. The senatorial life predisposed the historian to universal suspicion about human motives. It made him eager to go beneath the surface, to show up hypocrisy, to demolish every comforting belief. Yet for all that, it does not follow that Tacitus was harsh and gloomy as a person.

From the writings, something may after all be inferred about his nature: pride and intensity, the admiration of grandeur, a feeling for colour and movement. The imagery is vivid and violent. Disharmony appears to dominate, yet the structural quality of the author’s intelligence stands out clearly in the perfectly turned episode and no less in the far-reaching design. An acute sense for words is paired with an unerring memory. Hence echo and allusion everywhere, favouring the play of wit and malice. Tacitus selects words, or discards them, imperiously. The choice reflects antipathies that are not merely verbal, and even obsessions. Wilful, contemptuous, and over-conscious of the effort of style, a writer who could summon the unfailing resources of wide reading, who had formed the habit of documentary inquiry, and who was ferociously accurate in small details, Tacitus may easily in his personal dealings have become censorious and unbearable.

What could be known about those matters? In the Dialogue, a work written (it may well be) when the historian was already immersed in the turbulent theme of civil war, there is tact and poise and tolerance. Various passages in the Annals show a gift for rendering contrary opinions in a spirit of equity. Moreover, his personal inclination towards the humane solution can often be divined. He was an old man now. Age hardens and embitters, but Tacitus is careful not to appear querulous about innovations or hostile to youth.

Nothing could disprove that he was robust, at least intermittently cheerful, perhaps not unhappy as a husband. If his portrayal of angry and domineering women is lively enough to excite suspicion, on the other side will be set the compassion and the pathos that go out to women, the victims of emperors, like Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, or Pompeia Paullina, the wife of Seneca. Conjecture is vain about the historian’s manner of living. What nothing else could disclose is revealed by a casual item in one of the letters of his friend Pliny: that Tacitus was a keen huntsman.

[...]

Tacitus writes according to the spirit and categories of the past. What is his relation to the present? Does he come from the old aristocracy or the new? And, if the new, will his patria be sought in Italy or in the provinces?

Some argue that his ancestry is illustrious, deriving not merely from the nobilitas of the Republic, but from the patriciate itself, the ultimate aristocracy of the city of Rome; and they suppose him to belong to a branch of the Cornelii that languished in obscurity for long generations.

The miracle of supreme literary genius emerging among the patricians at this late season or at any season would stagger the best disciplined of credulities. War and politics, honour and privilege: such were the preoccupations of the patricians in their great age; and in their decline, they kept up the fight for wealth and dignity. Literature was never their business, not even a refuge or consolation. Poetry and history were supplied by imported talent: Italian under the Republic, it is provincial under the Empire.

That is not the major embarrassment. It takes search and effort to identify a patrician among the contemporaries of Cornelius Tacitus. The class is all but obsolete. Various families returning to prominence in the alliance of the Caesarian dynasty enjoyed a brief renascence, but hazardous and calamitous, verging to total extinction when the line of Caesar Augustus terminated with Nero. Only one of the patrician houses is still registered on the consular record of Tacitus’ time. It happens to be the Cornelii. Several branches survived, but inferior, of no consequence save to the student of genealogy. As might be expected and postulated, they possess inherited and distinctive cognomina: no family of the patrician Cornelii ever owned to the cognomen ‘Tacitus’. Tacitus belongs, not to the decayed and impotent nobilitas, but to the class now dominant at Rome, the class that has supplanted both the old Roman aristocracy and the aristocratic Caesars of the Julian and Claudian line.

The elder Pliny knew a Roman knight called Cornelius Tacitus, financial agent of the government in Gallia Belgica and the two Germanies. Few indeed have doubted that this is the parent of the senator. In the preface to his Histories, Tacitus plainly states that he owns his rank as a senator to the Emperor Vespasian. These Cornelii are patently a new family, rising through the favour of the Caesars and discovered at the moment of transition.

Caesar Augustus protected Rome and Italy from the menace of the East, from Antonius and the foreign woman. But Augustus and his successors were not able (or willing) to protect the Roman state from invasion by Italians from the North and men from the provinces of the West. Before long, first with officers in the army and procurators, then with senators and consuls, an impressive contingent comes from three territories – from the Transpadane tract of Northern Italy, from Gallia Narbonensis, and from Spain. These regions, showing wealth and vitality in the last age of the Republic, furnished decisive resources of power in the struggle for mastery at Rome. Dragged into faction and civil war in the train of the monarchic party leaders, the new Romans (colonial, natives, and mixed in origin) find scope for talent and ambition when the Principate is established. They surge irresistibly forward under the patronage of the dynasty.

Transpadane Italy, Narbonensis, or Spain: somewhere in this provincial and dynamic zone should be sought the patria of Cornelius Tacitus. To narrow the quest, various arguments could be invoked. As for Spain, nothing in his writings shows a special interest or knowledge. Transpadane Italy might appear more attractive, in view of Tacitus’ friendship with the younger Pliny. Yet there is no proof. The letters fail to disclose any single item that could convince. Pliny published no fewer than eleven missives to the address of Cornelius Tacitus; nothing about ‘Italia nostra’ as a common loyalty, no mention of any mutual friends as linked by a common origin in the North. Pliny’s letters reveal something of the circle of friends in which Tacitus moved. They do not reveal all of them. Furthermore, when Tacitus wrote his Dialogue, it is worth noting that he dedicated the treatise not to his friend Pliny but to another man, a certain Fabius Justus. Nothing links Fabius Justus to Northern Italy – he is perhaps rather from Spain or Narbonensis. In the paucity of personal details about Tacitus, the identity of his wife becomes of singular importance. She was a daughter of Julius Agricola from the colonia of Forum Julii in Narbonensis. In the Roman upper class, Italian or provincial, marriages were commonly contracted in order to link families of local consequence and to join estate to estate. Was not Tacitus a Narbonensian?

[...]

Tacitus writes of the Gallic lands with knowledge, discernment, and sympathy. Were his origins thence derived, nobody would expect to see it announced by a writer who discards personal concerns, insisting upon the majesty of history and the validity of his own exposition. Any allusion will be discreet or even ironical.

One of the episodes that Tacitus singles out is the admission of native chieftains from Gaul to the Roman Senate by Claudius Caesar. He had the imperial oration before him, and he operates in two ways. First, he invents a scene in the council of the Emperor, and reproduces criticism of Claudius’ proposal. The protests of the councillors are rhetorical and exaggerated. They appeal to anger and pathos, they invoke past history, their arguments are crude, feeble, or spurious. So Tacitus intended, for he made them up. Tacitus had no high opinion of the Emperor Claudius, but in this instance he is clearly on his side. He improves the oration and recasts it. One item is notable: the reference to Roman senators coming from the lands of the West. Claudius is made to say: ‘The Balbus family is good enough, who came from Spain, and there were men no less illustrious from Gallia Narbonensis; their descendants are among us, they do not yield to us in devotion to Rome.’

The irony is restrained and impressive. When Tacitus wrote, colonials and provincials from the Latin West wore the purple of the Caesars. There was only one higher pinnacle: literary renown. To that also the epoch of Trajan and Hadrian might confidently aspire. Men and dynasties pass, but style abides.

 

VI.14 Thucydides [1962]

Proceedings of the British Academy xlviii (1962), 39–56.

Thucydides is rigorous in subordinating the things he deems of slight importance to his own conception, whereas other transactions are selected, enhanced, and invested with exemplary significance. His method was devised for dealing with contemporary history – to make it rational and intelligible. But Thucydides is emboldened to carry it backwards into the remote past, sifting the ancient legends of Hellas and even interrogating Homer. So far, the conscious master of historical method. But, as the recent age can show, experts in this important science are not always adequate when it comes to writing narrative, or building an historical structure.

The historian in classical antiquity is not always tied and restricted by his narration because he has to record events year by year. He has certain devices which are worth looking at. They enable him to escape from the shackles of the annalistic method. Further, they may furnish a clue to his preoccupations, and perhaps to his psychology. These devices are the digression and the speech.

In Thucydides (one suspects) the digression is often there because he wants to correct other people. For example, the matter of the tyranny at Athens comes up again in Book VI. It is dragged in on the thinnest of pretexts (vi 53, 3); it discloses special interests of the historian and demonstrates his method, down to the citation of two inscriptions, one at Athens, the other at Lampsacus. Book I contains long digressions on the vicissitudes of Themistocles and of Pausanias, which can be justified in various ways, because Thucydides weaves them in cunningly. None the less, a suspicion arises. Certain items in the adventures of Pausanias and of Themistocles had already passed into legend, or had been uncritically retailed by other people. Thucydides is eager to correct and convince. (As for the Medism of Pausanias, however, he may have been off his guard. He recounts a number of questionable particulars, and even reproduces a letter, ‘subsequently discovered’, in which the Regent of Sparta offered to take in wedlock the daughter of Xerxes (i 128, 7). It looks as though Thucydides relied on Spartan informants – who had much to cover up and explain away. Herodotus, that is the irony, is a safer guide about Pausanias.)

However, it is the speeches that serve the especial function. A historian can produce a speech almost anywhere he likes. This is highly relevant for Tacitus, likewise a wilful and autocratic writer. Let us take the example of somebody else: the author of Acts. A speech is introduced not at the point where St Paul was most successful, i.e. at Corinth, but somewhere else – at Athens, before the Areopagus. It is a master stroke for the author of Acts to place St Paul there, at the centre and throne of Greek civilization.

Similarly, Thucydides. He will insert a pair of speeches that lead to no action whatsoever. For example, at Camarina in Sicily, giving the contrasted arguments brought to bear on one of the neutral states (vi 76–87). Here as elsewhere the historian is eager to expound a general problem that goes beyond the mere time and place.

The speeches emphasize the leading themes in Thucydides’ conception of the war. And (as so often in Tacitus) speeches have a structural function. One observes especially the debate about Mytilene, the debate about the Plataeans, or that strange product, the dialogue between Athenian generals and deputies of the island Melos.

But the speeches are closely knit to the narrative, and the guiding intelligence of the historian is present all through, though he refrains from obtruding his own personality and sentiments. He is all the more dangerous and all the more powerful for that reason. As Hobbes says in the preface to his translation: ‘Thucydides is justly accounted the most politic historiographer that ever writ.’

In the doctrines of Thucydides the Sophists and the Enlightenment have a large part. It is permissible to label as sophistical certain stylistic tricks of the historian deriving from their methods. Parallel also is his antithetic type of mind, his way of stating intellectual theses in their extreme form. Hence some of the speakers are frank and unashamed when they expound the principles of self-interest that guide the conduct of states. The Athenian envoys at Sparta coolly proclaim that it was fear,honour, and advantage that set Athens on the road to empire. Not once, but twice (i 75, 3; 76, 2). It need not pass belief that those who spoke for an imperial people in its great age were open, overbearing, and even didactic. They had something to be proud of. They scorned understatement and the normal hypocrisies. Thucydides sharpens the reality, but he may not always have distorted it. He goes much farther than this, however, in the Melian Dialogue, that antiphonal sermon on power. When the ingenuous islanders appeal to justice, to the gods, to their tie with Sparta, the Athenians convict them of deficient understanding. Heaven is on the side of force. What the Athenians invoke is an eternal law; they did not invent it, and Sparta cannot help the people of Melos, for Sparta has not command of the sea (v 105, 2; 109).

Thucydides is a cruel and ruthless writer. Look at what happens to those characters in his History who make appeal to the gods-the unfortunate Plataeans, the people of Melos, or the Athenian general, Nicias, in the retreat from Syracuse. There Nicias asserts a preposterous plea: it is reasonable to expect that the gods will now be merciful, having exhausted their resentment (vii 77, 4).

Such, in brief, is the extreme doctrine of Thucydides. He insistent to demonstrate that things must be as they are in the behaviour of states. Intellectually it appears that he approves. But it is an error to assume that he condones the enormities he describes. The author and the man may not be the same person.

 

VI.15. Three English Historians: Gibbon, Macaulay, Toynbee [1962]

The Emory University Quarterly xviii (1962), 129–40.

These are three portentous names. Historians can be used and exploited for all sorts of reasons. One of them is the subject-matter of their narrations. There is something else: the political and social ideas of the periods in which they lived. And here fate or chronology has served up these three individuals opportunely: Gibbon representing the eighteenth century, the age of enlightenment, Macaulay the liberal and progressive English nineteenth century, and Toynbee a different age – the twentieth century. Three historians from three centuries – that is a long stretch of time. From another point of view the interval is not so long. Gibbon was born in 1737 – that is about 150 years before the birth of Arnold J. Toynbee.

As I have defined them, these historians have their dominant features, without much resemblance. There are certain things in common, however, especially between the first two. One of them is the scant place which the teaching of history or the holding of professorships held in their lives. We must recall that the organized study of history is a new thing in the world. There were, to be sure, chairs of history in Europe before the nineteenth century. But that age witnessed, towards its middle years, the development of a system: schools of history in the universities, the seminars, the institute, the Ph.D., and so on. Each of these three men had an education at the traditional English universities. Yet I shall be arguing that their debt is not considerable to those academies or to the professional study of history.

[...]

In other respects, one wonders about the beneficent influence of classical studies on Arnold J. Toynbee. One of the most peculiar notions is his general view of Greco-Roman civilization. To him, this is all one civilization, Hellas and Rome. Not all of those who study Roman things would gently acquiesce in this notion. Anyhow, the strange thing is that he puts the beginning of the decline of ancient civilization at the end of the fifth century B.C., as a result of the war of the Peloponnesians against the maritime empire of Athens. But surely this is peculiar and anomalous. Is it not due to various facts of Toynbee’s earlier life and interests, namely the preoccupation with fifth-century Athens, or neglect of the study of Imperial Rome? It is all very well to talk about the external proletariat, the barbarians on the borders and so on, or hold learned discourse about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire. That was a process which lasted several centuries, about four centuries. Would it not have been more instructive to ask what was it that held this world structure together for such a long period?

[...]

When we turn to Toynbee, we must marvel at the width and depth of the erudition. Doubts must arise about the uses to which it is put. Toynbee from time to time describes his method as ‘our well-tried empirical method’. Toynbee claims to be using for history and human behaviour one of the categories of the natural sciences. Surely history is repugnant to these categories. The notion of scientific history is an absurdity unless by ‘scientific’ we simply mean being as accurate and comprehensive as possible. What the natural sciences have provided is evidence of the regularity of phenomena, and their predictability. Can that hold for history? Are we not always tempted to ask ‘could not the thing have been otherwise, very easily’?

[...]

The notion is abroad – not only in Europe but in this continent – that Toynbee is a historian of enormous penetration and sweep, but the professionals, the men of textbooks and seminars and graduate theses, are rather limited people, pedestrian and grubbing for facts; and, of course, they find from time to time in their own special small fields that Toynbee is rather inadequate. Yet, perhaps, the reluctance of the professional historians nowadays to be led along these devious paths to doom is due not to their specialized studies but to their general good sense and humanity. They do not believe that the whole of human history can be divided up into twenty-two civilizations; that you can establish historical laws; that you can predict. Further, some of them, such as the excellent Dutchman [Pieter Geyl], are revolted and shocked at Toynbee’s attitude to West European civilization. Not only his assumption that it is going downhill, but also the disturbing phenomenon that he seems rather glad. Perhaps his joy was premature.

On that theme, to be sure, much more can be said. There is a study of Geyl, in which the describes Toynbee as ‘Toynbee the Prophet’. There is also a by no means urbane essay on Toynbee by Trevor-Roper in the English periodical Encounter, four or five years ago. I shall have to confess where my sympathies lie. They lie with the narrative historians Gibbon and Macaulay, not with the saints and thinkers who are eager to use history for our amendment or for our punishment.  

 

VI. 25 Fictional History Old and New: Hadrian

A James Bryce Memorial Lecture, 10 May 1984 (Somerville College, Oxford, 1986).

To begin with questions of method or definition is feeble and tedious. Nevertheless, the title adopted for the present discourse demands some prolegomena. One might select ‘our well tried empirical approach’, the term which was used by A. J. Toynbee – and abused by him. That is, examine the anatomy and behaviour of several specimens.

In Herodotus there is fiction as well as legend, but Herodotus is not the author of it. ‘Fictional history’ cannot exist before the creation of history itself. In fact, the thing emerges in the near sequel to Herodotus and Thucydides, very promptly.

In the vicinity of the year 390 a certain Ctesias composed the annals of early Iran. Ctesias was a doctor at the Persian court and had recourse to the royal archives, so he said. In consequence he was able to publish the full story of an early dynasty ruling over the Medes. One of those kings was called Arbaces. Quite so. Arbaces is one of the Persian generals at the recent battle of Cunaxa, and later satrap of Media. Ctesias was present at that battle. From the origin onwards, invented names and bogus documentation are the hallmarks of fictional history.

About thirty years after the audacious exploit of Ctesias, Xenophon was moved to emulation. He came out with a long romance, the Cyropaedia. The central character is the Persian monarch; and a few satraps or others belong to history. For the rest, names either taken from the writer’s own time or ostensibly Iranian.

Xenophon exerted great influence on the Greek novel, largely because of a sentimental episode: Abradates and the beautiful Panthea. Centuries later Habrocomes and Anthea are characters in the novel composed by Xenophon f Ephesus (himself a pseudonym).

Some have defined Cyropaedia as a historical novel. That was easy, and incautious. A distinction can be drawn. In the novel, the setting may be historical, but the central character, or characters, are invented. That holds for Flaubert’s Salammbô, in spite of the mass of material about Carthage, such as that drawn from Polybius’ account narrating the revolt of the mercenaries.

The historical novel may be described as legitimate and harmless. The intent is to convey entertainment in the first place, although not always avoiding instruction in social or political doctrines; and the author can seldom dissemble his own milieu and opinions.

By contrast, fictional history is the simulation of history, and it may involve impersonation. For example, the Julian of Gore Vidal, whatever be the quality of the scholarship.

A further criterion is the purpose of the writing, or the motive behind it – and the author’s own professions come into the count. Reference can no longer be delayed to Robert Graves. That is, to his King Jesus, which sold more than a hundred thousand copies. His recent biographer came out with a firm statement, namely ‘the fact that Graves believed what he was writing to be the historical truth’.[1] That disclosure is quite alarming for estimate of the biographer no less than the author. The life and travels of a pagan saint and worker of miracles supplies a suitable parallel, namely Apollonius of Tyana, as related by the sophist Philostratus. It was composed in an age of credulity, but there is no reason to fancy that Philostratus himself believed that he was recounting mere truth.

[...]

There is something else. Antiquity shows a plethora of fiction in the form of letters and biographies, many of them never intended to deceive, either at first sight or for long. And literary hoaxes can be detected, with double delight to the perpetrator. He fools the reader – and then allows the reader to see that he has been fooled. To this class belongs, so some are now coming to believe, the sequence of imperial biographies knows as the Historia Augusta: the unavoidable introduction to Hadrian. For a time the term ‘forgery’ enjoyed favour with erudite critics. It was superficial and misleading.

To put the matter in a summary fashion. This product is the main source for a long span of imperial history, from 117 to 284, from Hadrian to the accession of Diocletian. It purports to be the work of six named biographers, writing at different times during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine – but none of them claiming to write in collaboration.[2]

Much of it is of poor quality. That was long evident. Edward Gibbon called the biographers ‘scullions’. Of set purpose he normally eschewed their names, referring in footnotes to ‘Hist. August.’. Bad biography and dishonest history, that was not the end of the matter. The true nature of HA remained elusive, not discerned until, after assiduous scholarship and much pride in ‘Wissenschaft’, the nineteenth century was verging to its close.

In the year 1889 a young man, Hermann Dessau (then aged thirty-six), came out with a firm bold thesis: not six authors but one, and he was writing towards 400. Dessau brought ruin and perturbation. The magnets and mandarins of historical science did their best to counter or evade his conclusions. Long and fatiguing controversy ensued, with many stubborn rearguard actions. It is only in the recent time that a fairly wide measure of acceptance emerged. That is, single authorship and the dating (to the vicinity of 400). And finally, the computer is now enlisted.

Not indispensable, some will maintain.[3] The style spoke already, and the characteristic devices of the impostor on show in different sections of the HA: bogus documents and over two hundred invented persons – including no fewer than thirty-five historians or biographers cited as authorities but nowhere else on attestation.

Along with emperors, the HA furnished several lives of princes and pretenders, termed by modern scholars ‘the subsidiary Vitae’ (but not at all subsidiary to the author’s purpose). These Vitae are fiction all but total – equalled in that respect, but surpassed in skill and audacity by certain biographies depicting later rulers. The Vita Taciti is a palmary specimen. In fifteen pages of Teubner text, about half a page of factual material – and no names authentic save those of emperors. According to one of the fabrications, the emperor claimed descent from the historian; he ordered images of Tacitus to be placed in all public libraries; he enjoined that ten copies of the books be made each year.

That engaging particular could not fail to entice earnest scholars: testimony unique and precious (so it seemed) to the way in which the Latin classics were preserved and transmitted in that most obscure period, the third century. On the contrary, a sign of the author’s own interests, of the literary renaissance in his own time.

An item in the biography of Hadrian is also revealing. When that ruler composed the volumes about his own life, he assigned them to some of his scholarly freedmen, with instructions to publish, but under their own names.[4] That is to say, the author was all too familiar with impersonation – and with multiple impersonation, himself wearing in turn the masks of six biographers.

[...]

In the year 1951 appeared Mémoires d’Hadrien (dedicated to the youth Marcus Aurelius, the Annius Verus whom Hadrian styled ‘Verissimus’), written by Marguerite Yourcenar. Not her real name, and the lady, Belgian by birth, was an American citizen and is now member of the French Academy. For a time the book failed to arouse interest among the erudite. After translations into Dutch and German, a notice appeared in the Revue archéologique of 1954.

The genesis and incentives of this remarkable book (one of the fruits of a classical education, be it noted, but not acquired in any university) should excite curiosity. It is satisfied, although not completely, by the author herself in the recent volume Les Yeux ouverts (1980). Briefly as follows. The original inspiration goes a long way back, to a visit paid to Tivoli in 1923, when she was twenty years of age. In the sequel sundry literary projects occupied her attention, among them a life of the poet Pindar. And she was drawn to the figure of Antinous, the beautiful Bithynian youth, to whom Hadrian became devoted. In fact, in 1929 or 1930 Mlle or Mme Yourcenar made approach to the publisher Grasset, proposing a biography of Antinous.

After which, a long efflux of time. In 1948 the author discovered in an old trunk a number of early manuscripts (some to be destroyed); and she set to work on the Mémoires. In that season, so Mme Y. Affirms, she was under influence from hopes inspired by the United Nations.

Valuable information is vouchsafed concerning her other writings and her opinions about life and letters. Hadrian is the subject of a number of remarks. For example, Antinous is described as ‘le grand moment de la vie d’Hadrien’; Hadrian is credited with ‘enthousiasme religieux’; and the reader is reminded that this emperor was an Andalusian.[5]

For present purposes, this source will be waived. The work should be allowed to speak for itself. As Albertine somewhere declared, ‘c’est la bonne solution, la solution élégante’ [it’s the right solution, the elegant solution].

The reign of Hadrian embraced a span of twenty-one years (117–38), including two long journeys, the first from 121 to 125, the second from 128 to 134. Any who try to narrate it run into trouble from the outset. For this period the history of Cassius Dio is extant only in epitome, including a large measure of anecdotal material. The main source is the Vita Hadriani in the Historia Augusta.

This biography is a peculiar and repellent amalgam. Four strands are detected without effort. First, four items that derive ultimately from the autobiography of Hadrian. Second, a basic source, favourable to the ruler, or at least neutral. It has been drastically abbreviated, notably in the account of the journeys – but at the same time it betrays additions and accretions. Third, Marius Maximus, cited four times – and more can be divined. Marius is the author who continued Suetonius. Writing about ninety years after the death of Hadrian, he composed the biographies of the Antonine emperors with malice and with many scandalous anecdotes. Not being able to report much evil of Marcus, he defamed his consort, Faustina. Fourth, the impostor himself. His hand is revealed at an early stage. For example, Hadrian consults the ‘sortes Vergilianae’ and lights upon a suitable text that promises him the supreme power – or, as some say, the passage came from the Sibylline verses. The author goes on later to develop the fantasy that shrines in various countries emitted oracular responses in the form of quotations from Virgil; and he likes to adduce variants, thus demonstrating the industry and integrity of a true scholar.

The Vita Hadriani is torment enough. There is also the Vita Aelii, the biography of the man whom Hadrian adopted as his son and heir. Mostly fiction, pure and unadulterated. Not but that ingenious scholars have been emboldened to reconstruct history with aid from some of the fictions.

[...]

The necessity of the preceding remarks will now become apparent. Mme Y. was careful to subjoin an appendix of nine pages explaining her methods and her sources, both ancient and modern.[6] That exposition reveals a disturbing fact: she wrote in total unawareness of problems inherent in the Vita Hadriani. ‘Spartianus’, one of the named and notorious ‘Six’, is accepted without disquiet as the author of the Vita. That biography, one learns, is ‘l’un des textes les plus solides’ [one of the most solid texts] in the Historia Augusta. Less substantial, to be sure, is the Vita Aelii, ‘oeuvre plus mince’ [thinner structure], but of Hadrian’s heir it offers ‘une image singulièrement plausible’ [a strikingly plausible image]. It is superficial, but so was Aelius Caesar.

Finally, verdicts on both Cassius Dio and ‘Spartianus’. Those writers, although not remarkable as historians or biographers, were close indeed to reality, to the ‘fait vécu’, so the reader is informed. Modern researches have corroborated their statements more often than not – ‘le plus souvent de façon saisissante’ [most often in a striking manner].

The author terminates by mentioning books and learned papers she has consulted, to a total of more than forty, some of them remote or recondite. There had been no good popular biography of Hadrian since that of Gregorovius (in 1880), so she states. That affirmation, by the way, rules out an English scholar B. W. Henderson (1923), let it be observed, although not from parochial reasons or necessarily for censure. On the other hand, Mme Y. accords great value to Wilhelm Weber, who in 1931 acquired the chair once held by Mommsen at Berlin. Why not, be it asked. They selected this man to contribute the chapter on Hadrian in the Cambridge Ancient History, Volume XI (1936) – no doubt from regard for foreign scholarship and the comity of nations.

But enough. Bibliography is not the theme – and anyhow it should be kept down. Something else is in cause.

The author chose to explain her methods. But for that, her claims to exact erudition, and hence to authenticity in detail and in presentation, would not be open to question. The book would stand by its own quality as an imaginative evocation: duly acclaimed and admired, not least for grace and power of style, fluent and vivid, yet severe and classic – and archaic. Never a word or an expression to betray the middle years of the twentieth century. A non-contemporary manner conveys advantage to historians in any age. They too are fabricators and creators of illusion.

Method and validity, that is the present theme. The author went to great pains in assembling a large variety of minor characters: slaves, freedmen, doctors, sophists, poets, and so on, drawn from the most miscellaneous of sources. Many in her selection are felicitous, notably Pancrates of Alexandria, who composed a poem about Hadrian and Antinous. And high praise will go to the emphasis, repeated several times, on Arrian of Nicomedia, soldier and author, Roman senator and governor of the military province of Cappadocia. A better man, one agrees, than the eloquent sophist Polemo (p. 232).

The plain question abides. In a book of over three hundred pages, what is the proportion between fact and fiction? The author proffered a statement. She proposed to indicate ‘certains des points, assez peu nombreux, sur lesquelles on a ajouté à l’histoire, ou         modifié prudemment celle-ci’ [some of the relatively few points on which the story has been supplemented or cautiously modified] (p. 311).

One of those few additions conceded by Mme Yourcenar is her describing Arrian’s wife as ‘une jeune Athenienne, fine et fière’ [a young Athenian woman, slender and proud] (p. 313, cf. p. 226). The lady, it is stated, is ‘un personnage historique’. Only so far as descendants of Arrian are on valid conjecture.

The same label attaches to Marullinus, a Hadrianic ancestor, with the note that ‘les circonstances de sa mort sont imaginaires’ [the circumstances of his death are imaginary] (p. 311). Recourse to the text discloses a full and picturesque portrayal of this character (pp. 31 ff.). Marullinus, devoted to astrology, was ‘un grand vieillard émacié et jauni par l’âge’ [a tall, emaciated old man, yellowed by age], and Hadrian’s grandfather. A senator, he had a modest public role during the reign of Titus. Among other things he tried before his death to initiate young Hadrian in the science of the stars – but with no success (p. 33).

To that specimen of artistry, it is hardly necessary to subjoin Acilius Attianus, Hadrian’s Prefect of the Guard. He is equipped with an ailing wife, with married daughters – and with a taste for fine cuisine, Greek cameos, and young dancing girls (p. 107).[7]

Corroborative detail of this type is essential to fictional history. Otherwise it could not exist. Mme Yourcenar, however, insists on playing down her own talent. In a recent interview she came out with a firm pronouncement: ‘I tried not to go further than the few facts we have.’[8]

Few facts indeed – and fewer still when the Vita Hadriani and the Vita Aelii have been put under rigorous scrutiny. On the other hand, frequent distortion of the testimony, caused at the outset by concealment on the part of governments and their agents, and in the sequel to be enhanced through credulity or malice. Something is known about society gossip and about the habits of the biographer Marius Maximus.

That being so, it will be expedient to look at a number of items or episodes where the dearth of reliable evidence encourages constructive fiction – or, as sober historians style the process, ‘rational conjecture’. When other practitioners take that path, it becomes ‘idle or barren speculation’.

Equity demands that the opinions of certain historians in the recent time be adduced. On comparison, the Mémoires d’Hadrien may not fare too badly.

(1) Hadrian’s origin. As the biography states, the emperor was born at Rome. It furnishes the day and the month (26 January) and the year by consuls (i.e. 76).[9] A senator’s son normally saw the light of day at the metropolis (or in the suburban vicinity), unless, as was also normal, the wife accompanied him on occupations abroad. For example, Constantine was born at Niš, whereas the ‘origo’ of the family lay on the Danube, as Julian the Apostate reports, who was his nephew.

The town of the Aelii is Italica, which lies close to Seville. Confusion between the patria and the actual place of birth occurs in inferior compilers in late antiquity. More recent writers have not been exempt.

The region is of prime fame in the history of Rome. The province Baetica may with propriety be termed ‘the old dominion’, exhibiting long since the thickest immigration of Italians, with in the forefront Ulpii, Dasumii, and others, names never heard at Rome as long as the Republic endured. On another count, Baetica stood for energy, prosperity, innovation. In short, a combination of Virginia and California.

Something should be made of this when assessing Hadrian. Observe what happens. Let Wilhelm Weber have his say:

Hadrian’s strength was born of the mingling in him of old-Italian and Iberian and perhaps African-Semitic blood; the ocean, the plain, now luxuriant now sun-stricken, and the sluggish river of the south-western edge of the empire left their mark on his family and his childhood.[10]

That is, authentic ‘Blut and Boden’. Not to be equalled by any writer anywhere. Nevertheless, Stuart Perowne, the author of a biography, does his best. He presents Hadrian as ‘this child of the Andalusian plain, the athlete and huntsman of the Sierra who could not be expected to find himself at home in Domitian’s capital’.[11] Mme Yourcenar, while rich in invention about Hadrian’s early years, avoids the exuberance of Weber. Not but that, in the recent volume, she insists that Hadrian was an Andalusian.[12]

[...]

In the foregoing comments, much of the criticism may appear excessive when brought to bear upon a masterpiece of fictional history. The critic in his turn becomes vulnerable, being petulant or pedantic. One recalls with alarm the experts in Semitic philology and archaeology who mustered to assail Salammbô. Yet Flaubert made the effort, unusual then or since, to see Carthage from the inside.

Mme Yourcenar has essayed the same for a Roman emperor. The Hadrian who emerges may appear sententious, didactic, prolix. No matter. The style redeems him, uniform and enchanting.

Style is not enough, even when corroborated with insight and with much industry. The facts were few, and the author tried not to go beyond them. Such was the profession. The finished product contradicts. In view of the plethora of fabrications, it ‘fails to satisfy or to silence our reason.’[13]

Mémoires d’Hadrien deserved to inspire emulation. Thirty years later appeared the autobiography of Mme de Maintenon, that sublime adventuress. This time the impersonator was in a more fortunate posture: over two thousand letters which, along with contemporary memoirs, supply language as well as substance. Hence an ample volume.[14]

In another country Mémoires won influence, but of a different kind. The English translation came out before long (in 1954). It occurs in the select bibliography subjoined to the entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary – which entry, be it observed, has other peculiar features.[15]

The reference is to the appendix in the book, dealing with the author’s sources and procedures. Some disquiet is aroused by this commendation addressed to the innocent young, or to their instructors – especially if, may happen in these days, they are largely monoglossic. If The Memoirs of Hadrian are in consequence read for the wrong reasons, grave misconceptions of a general order concerning Roman society and imperial government are in danger of being encouraged and propagated.[16]

 

VI.32 Exotic Names, Notably in Seneca’s Tragedies [1987]

Acta Classica xxx (1987), 49–64.

How poetry exploits the names of remote regions, that is an attractive theme. For best effect, those terms should be general rather than specific, and above all not be obtruded in plethora. Such at least are the maxims enounced in a cursory but percipient survey of several English poets.

In excesses none equalled the Latins: use, abuse, misuse. Their habits allow a pervasive indifference to precision of nomenclature; and they encouraged the ignorance and lack of intellectual curiosity otherwise all too prevalent in the educated class. Whence firm censure. 

 

VI.35 Oligarchy at Rome: A Paradigm for Political Science [1988]

Diogenes cxli (1988), 56–75.

The language of politics knows ‘good words’ and ‘bad’. One criterion is obvious. The former lend themselves to fraud and deception, the latter mean what they say. The prime specimen is oligarchy.

Terminology and categories avow an ancient tradition. For the Greeks it went back to Herodotus. He presents the notorious debate which a group of Persian noblemen brought up, ensued on the three forms of government, namely the rule of the one, the few, the many.

In the sequel that facile and popular definition was subverted by Aristotle in his Politics. Alert to facts and to varieties, Aristotle discovered four kinds of oligarchy, four of democracy. More important, a type that lay in between, combining the best features of each. He styled it politeia. That is, genuine republican government; the best of all in his verdict – and not a mere theory or ideal.

Before long emerged the notion of the ‘mixed constitution’. It comprised the three elements (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy), functioning by checks and balances and thereby conducive to stability. Thus the Spartan system, so some opined.

Polybius took up the notion and applied it to Rome when he analysed the institutions that brought success to the Republic in the Second War against Carthage and thereafter won dominion over the world. Cicero followed suit in the books De re publica, and the doctrine was destined to a long history. It acquired potency in the eighteenth century through writings of Montesquieu, and a visible culmination. In the year 1787 sagacious men constructed the Constitution of the United States.

Isolated criticism of the ‘mixed constitution’ had intervened, it is true. Thus the historian Tacitus in curt dismissal; the thing was not easy to achieve or likely to last. Thomas Hobbes was hostile, ordaining that individual and ultimate sovereignty must exist in any commonwealth; and for Tocqueville ‘Le gouvernement qu’on appelle mixte’ [The government known as mixed] had always seemed ‘une chimère’ [a chimera].

In forming his diagnosis, Polybius could benefit from the various experience of a general and a diplomat, enhanced by exile and a prolonged residence at Rome, consorting with members of the governing class. Not so good, however, his addiction to theory. Polybius duly defined the three elements (Consuls, Senate, People) according to their powers and their functions. Excellent so far. But it would be requisite to ask pertinent questions. How were candidates for office selected, who determined the matters to be submitted to votes of the people? And further, who made decisions on policy, who gave instructions to the consuls?

In practice, the Senate, being a life-long body, had clear preponderance over magistrates and popular assemblies. But the Senate is not the adequate answer. As in later ages, the composition of that body has to be taken into account. In a total of about three hundred members it was dominated by two overlapping categories.

First, the high aristocracy, or nobiles by a convenient and valid distinction (although not a legal term). They belonged to families that had held the consulate and tried to keep it in monopoly. In which ambition the nobilitas was normally seconded by the voters, who tended to choose their patrons and the known names.

Second, the small company of the ex-consuls, whose enduring auctoritas might outweigh potestas, the legal attribute of the annual magistrate. In their ranks may be detected the ‘real government’ of the Republic. Those two categories fail to receive recognition in the analysis of Polybius (at least so far as extant). Or did he not perhaps take their significance for granted? He was much in the company of old Cato and the youthful Scipio Aemilianus. Nor would he remain unaware of clientela, pervasive in society and in the commonwealth.

[...]

The imperial Republic broke the Kingdoms east of the Adriatic and in a short space (fifty-three years, as Polybius stated more than once) acquired a world dominion. That was the achievement of an oligarchy, the governing order precisely, not merely the social upper class, the men of birth, wealth, education (Aristotle’s brief definition).

In the study of oligarchy through the ages Rome annexes primordial value. Yet Rome had not been accorded much attention by adepts of political history in the recent time. Toynbee abode under the spell cast on boy and youth by Hellas in the classical period. Again, when Popper wrote about The Open Society and its Enemies, he failed to see that Rome in its development from a city to an empire vouchsafed clear and manifold enlightenment.

The reason is not far to seek. There was a dearth of writers to write about. Distrust of abstract thought was ingrained in the Romans; and when books of philosophy came to be composed in the language of the Latins, they would not go very deep, or, if extending to political science, be much more than expositions of traditional wisdom.

Roman institutions were patently superior to anything the world had seen. Hence no use and no need for guidance from clever or sapient foreigners. As Cato proclaimed, single legislators produced in one act the constitutions of Greek cities whereas Rome was built on the sagacity of many statesmen and the long efflux of time.

That superiority became a necessary habit of thought. It was not called in question when the season of turmoil and instability arrived, and no impulsion arose to subvert it. When civil strife engendered the monarchy, the Caesars themselves conceived feelings of guilt and remorse; and few traces of discovered of any express and sustained apologia in terms of doctrine.

On the contrary approach, when facts and behaviour are inspected, the history of the Romans reveals and declares a remarkable coherence in what can be called ‘political thinking’. Many of those who write about political thought in antiquity glide with fatal ease from Aristotle to Augustine.   

[...]

If Rome is adduced for parallels in behaviour, sharp and distinctive contrasts should not be omitted, not all of them deriving from the absence of monarchy as the fount of honour. They bring out the civic stamp in what began as a military aristocracy and subsisted in a governing class, the like of which the world has not seen. As elsewhere, negative criteria impart instruction. Half a dozen specimens may be briefly registered.

First, the Republic knew no titles taken from the holding of property or otherwise variable.

Second, no heraldry, no ornamental attire – and no wearing of uniforms within the precincts of the city. Only the broad purple stripe on the toga for senators, the narrow stripe for the second order in society (the Equites). The service of the state determined rank.

Third, no duelling. Anger and quarrels found an outlet in the courts of law or in senatorial debates.

Fourth, no capital punishment for offences against religion or the state. Instead, voluntary retreat into exile was permitted.

Fifth, no insistence on descent by blood. Failing sons, heirs was taken from families on social parity.

Sixth, no bastards in high office, like the dukes or cardinals on show in France and Spain. The offspring of irregular unions lapsed to the plebs. But the consequence of adultery among the eminent might be masked by connivance – or suspected in an adoption or a testament.

 

VI.0 Preface to the Italian edition of Colonial Élites [1988]

Dated 14 July 1988, published in Tre élites coloniali (Milan, April 1989).

Along with the project of an Italian translation came the amicable request to supply a new preface. The three lectures, delivered in Canada in January of 1958, were the third in a sequence recently ordained at McMaster University to commemorate the Reverend H. P. Whiddon (1871–1952). To crown a long and varied career (he had, for example, been a minister in the Baptist Church and Member of Parliament), this energetic scholar became the second founder of McMaster. When its chief executive officer, he was able to remove the institution from Toronto and lodge it on the flank of a rising centre of industry and commerce. That is, Hamilton, distant about 50 kilometres. The growth of both university and city bears witness to his prescient strategy.

As was intimated to the speaker selected, the Whiddon Lectures of 1958 should not be devoted to ancient history but should embrace topics of a general character. A solution at once offered in the field of comparative studies. Why not extraneous recruitment of the governing class in different climes and ages?

That central theme had been slighted by Toynbee in his vast and elaborate compilation. His predilection went to the ‘internal proletariat’. Nor had Rome carried any appeal for Popper when composing The Open Society and its Enemies.

Three decades elapsing, it may afford modest instruction to evoke the genesis and inception of the three lectures – and I cannot avoid here and there the intrusion of the ‘odious pronoun’. For the first of them, ‘The Spanish Romans’, the incentive was obvious, the choice ready to hand. I had recently given Tacitus to the Clarendon Press (early in September 1956). In that work the concluding section of the second book bore for the title ‘The New Romans’ (Chapters XLIII–XLV). It set forth the ascension and eventual triumph of the city aristocracies issuing from favoured regions in the provinces of the Roman West, by extraction Italian, native, or mixed. In other words, Andalusia and Catalonia, Languedoc and Provence. There lay the patriae of the nexus of families that formed at Rome, uniting the ancestors of the third imperial dynasty: the ‘Antonines’, from Trajan to the son of Marcus Aurelius.

Of set purpose the work had for climax the class and provenance of Cornelius Tacitus – a necessary device of structure which aroused perplexity in several critics. Whereas some had supposed Tacitus Italian, perhaps from Transpadana, or even (supreme anomaly) a ‘Roman of Rome’, whether from the ancient patriciate or of libertine stock, I was impelled to advocate a native and provincial origin: from Narbonensis, the region of Julius Agricola, the father of his wife.

It becomes suitable to subjoin a revelation. The general thesis originated in a much earlier season, as by-product from the study of warfare and geography of Roman roads and even of ‘geopolitics’. Writing about the frontier campaigns under Caesar Augustus (Rhine, Danube, Balkans) for Volume X of the Cambridge Ancient History (to be published in 1934), I was drawn to the identity and social class of the generals – notably the novi homines, heirs to the low-born marshals who came up in the wars of the revolutionary epoch that led forward to the composition of the whole governing order in its progressive supplementation.

In those years, scholars in France and England were giving assiduous attention to the oration of Claudius Caesar preserved on two tablets of bronze at Lyon (and put to good employ by the historian Tacitus). The emperor when censor brought into the Senate some of the ‘principes’ from the Gaul which Caesar had conquered, i.e. ‘Tres Galliae’; and to justify the innovation he came out with a variety of arguments, some of them tenuous or equivocal.

In their operations, erudite critics betrayed certain misconceptions, notably concerning an ostensible ‘ius honorum’. Moreover, they were preoccupied with Gaul and with the action of Claudius, eccentric to the main line of history, premature, and a destined to lapse in its effects.

Proceeding thus, they neglected to take into account the regular inflow, noteworthy since the Augustan times, from Narbonensis and from Spain. It was soon to be augmented through the patronage exercised by the ministers of Nero: the Corduban Seneca and Burrus the Guard Prefect (from Vaison in Provence). The partnership (the fancy is not idle) foreshadows Trajan, the emperor from Italica, close to Seville, who took to wife a lady from Nîmes. Rich Andalusia had received long ago abundant immigration from Italy, as the personal names demonstrate. In fact, ‘the old dominion’, a blend of Virginia and California.

Hence an impulsion to rectify. I therefore went to work on The Provincial at Rome. Of which the first draft exists, disposed in fifteen short chapters. Never revised or amplified for publication.[17]

The project was diverted by The Roman Revolution. That enterprise, begun in the early summer of 1936, was completed in September of 1938 (under urgency and not without defects). The book saw the light of day in the first week of the following September, opening a turbid epoch.

After an interval supervened a further diversion. The chance acquisition of a text at Istanbul produced a large harvest of Strabonian studies. Asia Minor and problems concerning the province Galatia had in fact engaged the author’s curiosity since 1933, first of all in relation to three consular generals of Caesar Augustus.[18] These Strabonian items could (and perhaps should) have issued in a volume.[19]

However, other avenues attracted, with a reversion to imperial history and the theme of ‘capax imperii’ which linked the aristocratic Marcus Lepidus (so styled in terminal conversations attributed to Caesar Augustus) and the proclamation of Trajan. And a temptation supervened to go forward from Trajan to Hadrian. It was then resisted, but emerged later on.

An affection for Latin literature reviving, with the ‘lungo amore’ for Tacitus which went back to adolescence and never abated,[20] it was appropriate to combine the two aspects (the annalist and the writer). Hence the large book which entailed much industry through a decade. Portions of ‘The New Romans’ were designed to introduce the exposition. The original plan comprised fifteen chapters.[21] No repining for the change of structure.

From ‘The Spanish Romans’ the given transition led to ‘Spanish America’. Early reading of Prescott nourished a fancy for Mexico; and it was reinforced by enchantment with the narration of Bernal Diaz who, ending as a mere municipal magistrate in Guatemala, recounted the epic story of the Conquistadores, with the motives of ‘God, glory, and gold’.

It was therefore suitable that the lecture quoted Heredia, the Cuba poet. Other sonnets of the ‘Parnassian’, a master of lapidary and pictorial style, such as ‘Antoine et Cléopatre’ or ‘Tranquillus’ (who ‘décrit les noirs loisirs du vieillard de Caprée’ [describes the dark pastimes of the old man of Capri]), had appealed to a youth who in 1924 earned MA honours in French – and who in the sequel wavered for a time between modern languages and the classics.

In the event, I did not pay a visit to Spain until the year 1955. Long before that I had devoted much study to the military geography of the Peninsula, and a long paper, the product of chance (it was entailed by early recognition on the part of the editors of CAH, Vol. X, that something needed to be said about the campaigns of 26 and 25). In consequence three pages added to ‘The Northern Frontiers under Augustus’.

Spanish America I first came to know, albeit cursorily, in the year 1954. Namely, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, not without certain amount of ‘Reiselektüre’ [travel lectures]. At the University of Santiago, invited in passage to give a lecture, I spoke on ‘Three English Historians’.[22] Next, three weeks in Mexico (1963). Finally, and less instructive, Caracas in the year 1982, with a lecture entitled ‘Rome and the Nations’. Setting out from Bolivar (his bicentenary about to be celebrated), the text deals with Roman methods of government, with imperial Spain, with the manifold heritage bequested to Latin America.[23]

More arduous the third piece, ‘English America’. To begin with, sheer ignorance. The annals of the British Empire in any of its periods lacked seduction or incitement. As for literature, I had grown familiar in boyhood with novels as diverse as those of Jack London (The Valley of the Moon) and Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth). Not, however, the much esteemed Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick.

My first visit to the United States was postponed until September of the year 1956: an opportune semester at Harvard following on a week at Moscow, likewise a novel experience. The sojourn in New England was to have enduring and agreeable consequences.

Excellent books were available to lend substance to the historical content of the lecture. Above all, expert guidance from friends on both sides of the Atlantic.

The broad theme demanded restriction to the first two centuries of colonial America, with selective treatment of topics that conveyed contrasts or paradox. Thus the origin and the nature of the aristocracies that emerged at Boston and in Virginia (not neglecting religion and education, or the sending of numerous convicts to Virginia); the return of Harvard undergraduates in the first generation, to occupy posts in the armies of the Commonwealth as colonels and chaplains, and seats in Parliament; then, in the next century students at universities, Edinburgh surpassing either Oxford or Cambridge; and finally the contribution to political life and activity at the metropolis. The lecture concluded with cursory reflections on the prospects for concord or dissidence, emphasis being laid on the factor of distance rather than estrangement.

[...]

Colonial Élites had offered an attractive subject. Yet some regrets subsist. The opuscule called to be rounded off by conclusion of two other regions.

First, Canada. Towards the end, as illustrating the return of immigrants, occurred a veiled reference to the energetic Beaverbrook, a zealous champion of imperial union.[24] The name of Bonar Law might have been added, ephemeral in the leadership of the Conservative Party. In a brief prolusion on Canada a contrast of a different order would be appropriate, namely the original French component and the immigrant, mainly from Scotland. Nor would one miss the ‘Tories’, the loyalists expelled by the secession after 1776 of the Thirteen Colonies.

Second, Australia and New Zealand. The period and character of the settlement is significant, likewise the divergent provenance of the immigrants. Sundry consequences ensued and persist to this day. New Zealand was constituted as a colony in 1840; and a decade later the Canterbury settlement exhibited a cathedral of the Anglican Church, a university college, a school on the English model. Immigration derived almost exclusively from Scotland and from certain English counties, viz. Kent, Devon, Northumberland, as some of the place names attest. Not so many from London, the Midlands, Wales, Ireland. As a result, a fairly homogenous population, despite the diversity exemplified by the four main cities.[25] By 1900 the population numbered barely a million.

In defiance of distance, ties with the ‘old country’ remained close; and New Zealand was reluctant to acknowledge plenary independence as a nation, not ratifying the Statute of Westminster until 1950.

Australian origins have been amply advertised in the recent Bicentenary. Social attitude in the twin nations had benefited from advanced legislation applied by a liberal government; that did not break the dominance of the small farms (‘Jeffersonian’ by type). Colonists may either retain archaism (as in Quebec), or succumb to radical propensities.

The latter feature has marked the Australian. He exalts rebellion, originality, delight in metropolitan civilization – which is not found incompatible with convicts or bandits for national heroes. He therefore regards the others as provincial and retarded, prone to be over-deferential to England and English traditions. None the less, he will grant indulgence; he is happy to harbour those who from across the Tasman Sea (a mere 2,000 km.) are drawn to the pleasure and vitality of Sydney, a modern Babylon.

Moreover, memories of loyal response in two wars and exploits of military prowess bring them together. Nor will many fail to regret that the intellectual elite in Great Britain should join politicians and industrialists in renouncing pride and primacy of language and institutions, that the former imperial power which baffled the aspirations of Louis Quatorze, of Napoleon, of the German despot, should choose to be integrated into a heterogeneous ‘Europe’ of a dozen countries that includes Portugal and Greece.       

---

[1] M. Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves (1982), 393. Credulity is contagious.

[2] The contrary has been alleged. On a surface view not devoid of attraction, but contradicted by the texts.

[3] On which, and on cognate matters, ‘Controversy Abating and Credulity Curbed?’, London Review of Books (4–17 Sept 1980), 15 ff. = Historia Augusta Papers (1983), 209 ff.

[4] HA, Hadr. 16, 1.

[5] Les Yeux ouverts (1980), 164; 159; 104.

[6] Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951), 311 ff.

[7] The device recalls the lavish detail about diet and personal habits which the HA regularly supplies. But of superior quality.

[8] Quoted from the Observer (29 April 1984, p. 19).

[9] Hadr. 1, 3.

[10] CAH XI (1936), 325.

[11] S. Perowne, Hadrian (1960), 27. As later emerges, he resembled Prince Albert (ibid. 67).

[12] Les Yeux ouverts (1980), 104: ‘il faut bien songer qu’Hadrien était Andalou.’ [One must bear in mind that Hadrian was Andalusian.]

[13] Thus Gibbon on the poet Claudian.

[14] Francoise Chandernagor, L’Allée du Roi (1981).

[15] OCD² (1970), 486. Likewise in the brief notice of Antinous (ibid. 71).

[16] And, of minor consequence, vague geography. As witness the extension of the province Syria to include Smyrna and Pergamum (p. 225); Jerusalem styled ‘ce carrefour de routes’ [this crossroads] (p. 194); Hadrian’s villa, on the slopes beneath Mount Soracte (p. 264).

[17] Briefly referred to in the preface to Tacitus (1958). [It was published posthumously, edited by Anthony Birley, in 1999 by the University of Exeter Press.]

[18] Viz. L. Piso, Sulpicius Quirinius, Plautius Silvanus, in Klio XXVII (1934), 122 ff. Quirinius led on to his alleged governorship of Syria, to the census held in Judaea, to the ‘date of the Nativity’ (an empty problem). The paper was not reprinted.

[19] [They did, posthumously, as Anatolica (1995), ed. Anthony Birley.]

[20] And in the meantime made patent by pieces of Tacitean pastiche: published in The Oxford Magazine during the mid-thirties. [Here the editor, Mr Birley, invites to see “a later specimen (not previously published)” of Tacitean pastiche by Ronald Syme on pp. 647 ff. “below”, that is to say in the end of Roman Papers VII.]

[21] As explained to an audience at Toronto a dozen years ago. Not in fact written, let alone published.

[22] Namely, Gibbon, Macaulay, Toynbee (it was evident that Toynbee was not going to win). Delivered a few years later at Atlanta, whence Emory University Quarterly XVII (1962), 129 ff. = pp. 88-96 below [= VI.15, see above].

[23] Diogenes cxxiv (1983), 33 ff. = RP iv (1988), 62 ff. It should be added that most of these journeys were taken when I was Secretary General and then President of the Conseil International de la Philosophe et des Sciences Humaines.  

[24] A parallel was drawn, albeit imperfect, with achievements of Benjamin Franklin.

[25] Comparable in several respects with Wisconsin: a state in 1838, a university at Madison in 1850.