Report from the End Times

It's conventional for accounts like this to provoke analogies (real or imagined) to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  But I'd say a more plausible, if equally facile, comparison might be to the end of the Roman Republic--a gaggle of loosely intertwined clans all striving for eminence in a polity which from many perspectives wasn't really governed at all.     Readers who have not chucked their copies of Roland Ronald Syme may want to dust them off for a refresher.

Gilleland Reads Syme so We Don't Have To

Well actually, I did read Ronald Syme's Roman Revolution a couple of years back with profit and a somewhat qualified pleasure. Syme is shrewd and sardonic and on occasion witty. But he carpet-bombs you with detail, as if to say: hey, I really know what I am talking about.

I believe, I believe. But we are lucky to have the services of that great benefactor to humankind, Michael Gilleland, who has shelled all the black Symean walnuts and pried out the meat. I could copy them, but go read them in their natural habitat here.

I Have No Idea Why I am Doing This

I have been not-tagged by an anti-meme. Michael Froomkin directs (link):

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Roger, copy that. Here goes:

His [Marc Antony’s] relations with Octavianus did not improve. Neither trusted the other. To counter that danger and outbid his rival the consul went further with his Caesarian and popular policy.

The book would be Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, which I quoted earlier. It is the summer of 44 BC. Caesar is dead; Brutus has fled to Greece. Against the entreaty of his family, the 19-year-old Octavianus (not yet Augustus) has taken up his role as heir. Octavianus and Marc Antony take the first tentative steps to size each other up.

Honest, it gets more interesting later.

Since I was not tagged, I will follow my non-tagger’s example and not tag.

Baby Needs a New Pair of Provinces

Augustus—C. Julius Caesar Octavianus, Caesar Augustus—first and greatest emperor of the whole Roman Empire, descendant of Julius Caesar, the “august” one—liked to shoot crap. See Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution. 376 (Oxford Paperback ed. 1986).

Ronald Syme, and HBO's Rome

Having caught a bit of HBO’s Rome (on DVD), I hauled out my old copy of The Roman Revolution by Sir Ronald Syme. First published in 1939, it’s apparently still in print, which is no small achievement for an academic history of any density, not to say one whose footnotes are mostly in Latin. Even aside from the footnotes, it’s not an easy read—not, at any rate for a reader unblessed by a classical education: Syme pretty much presumes you know the outlines of the story already, and he is not going to insult your intelligence by retailing the supermarket-tabloid stuff. Also, perhaps inevitably for an academic history of this date, Syme taken a fair amount of abuse from later scholarship—the canonical response is Erich Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974).

Yet that is the odd thing about some historical writing: people still read Tacitus and Gibbon on Rome, without entertaining any illusion that they speak the last word on their subject. Indeed, if they capture any zeitgeist, it is that of their own time, not of their subject’s.

I don’t suppose Syme is a Tacitus (or even a Gibbon) but I think he deserves a place at the table. His style is compact, aphoristic—Tacitean. And his general pessimism about the fortunes of free institutions is bound to find an audience in the current market.

Executive summary of Syme: the Roman Republic was corrupt and in decay; a revolution was inevitable and in a sense, even necessary. Executive summary of Gruen: not so, the Republic was durable, and could have endured. It’s a cop-out to say that there is “probably truth on both sides,” but history is a complex business, so the chances are that there is truth on both sides—or at least enough truth in Syme to help sustain his appeal. Some fragments:

On “the assassins”—Brutus, Cassius and company:

They stood, not merely for the traditions and institutions of the Free State, but very precisely for the dignity and the interests of their own order. Liberty and the laws are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.

—Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution 59 (Oxford U Paperback 1960)

On the young Octavian, later Augustus:

Exuberant ambition mated with political maturity is not enough to explain the ascension of Octvianus A sceptic about all else, Caesar the Dictator had faith in hs own star. The fortune of Caesar survived his fall. On no rational forecast of events would his adopted son have succeeded in playing off the Republican cause against the Caesarian leaders, survived the War of Perusia and lived to prevail over Antonius in the end.

—Id,., 114

On the legend of Actium, as a public relations triumph:

Of the ability of Cleopatra there is no doubt: her importance in history, apart from literature, is another matter. … Created belief turned the scale of of history. The policy and ambitions of Antonius or of Cleopatra were not the true cause of the War of Actium; they were a pretext in the strife for power, the magnificent lie upon which was built the supremacy of Caesar’s heir and the resurgent nation of Italy. Yet, for all that, the contest soon assumed the august and solemn form of a war of ideas and a war between East and West. Antonius and Cleopatra seem merely pawns in the game of destiny. The weapon forged to destroy Antonius changed the shape of the whole world.

—Id,., 274-5

A footnote: HBO’s Rome in the end tracks Syme rather well. Syme doesn’t give you the horndoggery or the torture porn, but for the general political structure, somebody on the writing team must have had a copy of Syme near at hand.