Bork Bork Bork

I've built up enough of a backlog of media to post about that I'm breaking it down by theme to make the task less overwhelming. Today we have two books about Rome, starting with SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. This a solid, uncontroversial primer on Roman Republican and Imperial history, which balances sweeping overview with enough anecdotes and more intimate zoom-ins to keep things fun. Mary Beard takes a keen interest in the lives of ordinary Roman citizens as opposed to the elite few who dominate the written record; the challenge of finding sources life outside the elite literate sphere is self-explanatory, but Beard is very good at excavating narrative from the archaeological evidence (one of her other popular books, Pompeii, does this in even richer detail). She also offers good commonsense guidance on how to approach the written sources critically, especially those concerning the early monarchy, which loomed large in the later Roman memory but was so heavily exploited for political purposes (and the stories were so often blatantly fantastical - see the founding myth about abandoned twins being suckled by a wolf) that we have to see it as telling us more about the Roman Republic than about the pre-Republic period it claims to represent.

My main interest has always been in Augustus and the early Empire, and Beard's section on that felt sparse to me, though I can't tell whether it actually was sparse or whether I just know that material better than the other parts and so zipped through it faster. In either case, it's all fairly orthodox and nothing groundbreaking, but I'm probably never going to tire of hearing the tale of Augustus' career as Totally Not The Emperor! I'm A Regular Roman Guy! The First Citizen! An Upholder Of Republical Values And Restorer Of Ancient Customs! I Promise!!! retold, so. No real complaints.

Historical appetite whetted, I then read A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon. Until now I thought it was an immutable quality of books on Roman history that they would make me wistful for my undergrad days and my onetime dream of a career in academia. Not so! It turns out there are actually two kinds of books on Roman history: the ones that make me wistful, and the ones that make me think I would be quite happy if I never heard speak of another Roman for as long as I live, actually. It's not that any of the Roman social attitudes highlighted in this book were news to me. It's just that revisiting them all at once in such a concentrated way, with such minute focus on the grisliest details of the worst moral impulses gone as badly wrong as possible...well, it's a lot.

Because to be honest, and with no pretence at cultural relativity, the Romans did actually kind of fucking suck. Slaves were considered a type of livestock rather than a type of person. Women had some scraps of very provisional personhood, but violence against them was generally viewed as an exercise of legitimate power (if committed by a husband or father) or else as a crime of property damage against their husbands/fathers/families. Elite women were apt to be blamed for the death of any man who expired at home (never mind that Augustus was in his seventies and known to be in failing health; obviously he died because that evil SLUT Livia poisoned him!!!!!). Brutal public executions were all-ages entertainment. One guy organised a gladiatorial games in which, surviving accounts suggests, a condemned woman was raped to death by a bull in front of the audience. Another guy tried to have his slave fed to a tank of hungry sea lampreys for the crime of dropping a glass. (Please pause here to look up a picture of sea lampreys. Or, you know, don't.)

But setting aside all moral and marine revulsion, this is actually a very good and very entertaining book. Southon clearly knows her stuff, and behind the flippancy is some thoughtful scholarship on a) the way Roman values informed the use of violence at both state and individual levels, and b) the way those same values cloud the historical record through the underplayings, overplayings, baseless conjectures and straight-up falsehoods passed down to us by ancient sources.