Macrobius and the Saturnalia

Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius is known for writing 2 works in the 5th century: Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio; and the Saturnalia, the work which will primarily concern us here. A third work, De verborum Graeci et Latini differentiis vel societatibus, Differences and Similariites Between Greek and Latin Verbs, has been lost except for fragments.

Macrobius tells his readers that Latin is not his first language. Therefore it is safe to assume that he was not a native of the city of Rome. Where exactly he did come from, which positions he held in the Empire, and his exact dates are matters of considerable controversy. It is safe to assume that he was among the upper class of consuls, prefects and proconsuls. He may have been praetorian prefect of Italy in the year 430, or he may been proconsul of Africa in 410, or he may have been neither. It is fairly safe to assume that his first language was Greek.

The Saturnalia was a week-long Roman holiday celebrated around the winter solstice. In Macrobius' Saturnalia, learned gentlemen gather during the Saturnalia in the year 383 or earlier, and discuss matters of history, literature and philosophy, placing the work in the genre extending back to Plato's Symposium. Just as in the Symposium and other works, the tone of the discussion in the Saturnalia varies greatly, depending to a certain extent on factors such as the time of day, how much the characters have had to drink, whether they're being interrupted by other party guests, and so forth. Those involved in the learned discussion include Praetextatus; Symmachus, famed editor of Livy, who pleaded that pagan altars not be removed by Christian Emperors; Nicomachus Flavianus, who edited Livy alongside Symmachus; someone who is either Avienus the translator of Aratea or Avianus the writer of fables, although called Avienus in either case; and Servius, here a very young man, later famous as the commentator of Vergil.

Vergil is discussed far more than any other topic. Roman history and Roman festivals are discussed with great dignity. An example of some less dignified discussion has to do with the effect of the consumption of food and drink on people's appearance.

Estimates as to when the Saturnalia was written range from ca400 to ca435 or later. The earlier the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius was writing about people he knew personally, and perhaps even describing an actual event in his life. The later the date, the more likely it is that Macrobius is delivering a nostalgic vision of a life before the Christianization of the Empire, a time he knows only by hearsay. It is remarkable that Christianty is mentioned nowhere in the Saturnalia.

For scholars, the Saturnalia is, like Aulus Gellius' Noctes Attica, Quintilian's Rhetores Latini Minores, Severus' commentary on Vergil and Isidore's Etymologiae, an immensely valuable source of passages of ancient literature which are otherwise lost or controversially attested. It also holds a natural interest for those studying the last days of "pagan" Rome.

6 9th-century manuscripts of the Saturnalia survive, and hundreds of manuscripts altogether.

Ancient History is Still Almost Completely Unknown to Us

Something is always lost in translation. Always means: even with the very best translation, and greater loss the less good the translation is. I can assert this, but how can I demonstrate it to anyone who is monolingual? And of course everyone else can see it for themselves and doesn't need any explanation from me.

And so, it seems to me, you can only get so far in studying ancient history without learning at least a little bit of ancient languages. And when you study these languages, there's the point at which you realize how little of them from the ancient world is still known to us. We're piecing together a huge jigsaw puzzle with just a handful of pieces. And the pieces are badly damaged.

And this is why we get so excited over every single puny scrap of re-discovered ancient writing, and why students of ancient Greek have been so excited since the late 19th century.

To mention just a single example of the sparsity of the ancient writing which we now know: on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review in 2006, Eric Hamer asserts that "almost seventy-five percent of the extant Latin literature of the period 90-40 BC is written by" Cicero. Peter Knox and J.C. McKeown, in a piece published on the Oxford University Press in 2013, say something similar, namely that "seventy-five percent of what survives in Latin from Cicero’s lifetime was written by Cicero himself [...] There are no extant speeches, forensic or otherwise, by anyone but Cicero till AD 100."

By my count, the Loeb Classical Library currently offers 31 volumes of Cicero, and by my very rough estimate, they average about 500 pages of main text, for a total of a little over 15,000 pages. Divide in half because half of those pages are English translation, and we're left with 7500 pages of Cicero. Which means, if the estimates of Hamer, Knox and McKeown are good ones (and I think they are), that we're left with about 2500 pages of Latin literature, besides Cicero, from the time of the reigns of Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. Not 2500 pages of historical writing, but 2500 surviving pages -- small, Loeb-sized pages -- of writing of every type. Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, almost all of Sallust, and every one of their Latin-writing contemporaries but Cicero, from one of the most interesting, most intensively-studied eras in Roman history.

This makes it much less surprising that historians and philologists studying this era rely so much on later writers like Suetonius, and non-Latin writers such as Plutarch. What choice do they have? They must take what they can find, wherever they can find it. Studying Roman history or Latin literature, one can only go so far with just Latin, before beginning to keenly feel the lack of Greek.

For that matter, one can only go so far in studying ancient Greek history or literature without a grasp of Arabic. And for that matter, Coptic and Armenian and Syriac and Hebrew and ancient Persian each can fill in significant missing pieces of the puzzle.

And how much more light would be shown upon the ancient Mediterranean if more writing in Phoenician had survived, or if we could read Etruscan. And I've left out many of your favorite languages: Sumerian! you're shouting, or Hittite! and quite rightly so, and still more languages. We have still so very far to go. We haven't yet scratched the surface of the history of the Classical ancient world. We've learned so much, and there's so very far yet to go.

Ronald Syme Redux

Seven years ago, I published on this blog a post in which I declared, among other things, that I found the prose of Ronald Syme to be unreadable.

In that post, I jokingly speculated whether there had been something wrong with Syme's medulla oblongata, and mocked his prose style thusly:

"Syme irritates me with the over-use of periods. Which unnecessarily breaks up medium- to long-sized sentences. Into smaller ones. Which in turn leads to the above-mentioned conjecture. About the poor man's lower brain stem. A medical speculation not necessarily to be taken seriously. And not the only stylistic affection of Syme's which annoys me. But to find the others, I'd have to read more Syme. Which I really don't want to do. So suffice it for now to say that the turnip would use twelve periods after the last semicolon above. By the time I would use one. If I were not mocking him."

Ronald Syme, for those of you still wondering, lived from 1903 to 1989 and was among the the 20th century's most prominent Classical scholars and historians of ancient Rome. In fact, in the years since writing the above-mentioned dismissal of him on the grounds of unreadability, I kept coming across his name in the work and footnotes of other scholars, so often and with such positive remarks that I finally decided, quite recently, that I had to try again to read his work, that I had no choice, that surely the problem was with me and not with the way Syme wrote.

Whatever my problem was, it's now gone, to my amazement. I now find that my above-quoted satire of his prose is quite unfair, because far from all of his sentences are extremely short, and those which are I now find to be justifiably so. I now find Syme's prose quite good, witty, extremely erudite, polished, elegant -- in short, suddenly, my opinion of his writing now much more closely resembles the opinion of the rest of the world, and my earlier distaste is now mysterious to me, as it surely must have been to anyone else who'd noticed it.

I had two of Syme's books laying around, The Roman Revolution, first published in 1939, and Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, first published in 1968. I devoured the former with great delight and am now struggling, with just as much delight, with the subtleties and many, many footnotes of the latter. I had already begun to, as Edward Gibbon put it, "dive into the ocean" of the Historia Augusta. Now, unlike Gibbon, I have the very best guide to the flora and fauna of that ocean.

As has the rest of the world, for the past half-century. I apologize to the rest of the world, and to Syme's memory, for taking so long to catch up.

In case you're wondering what the Historia Augusta are: they are a collection of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, purported compiled by six authors writing in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Or, as the world has gradually been figuring out since Hermann Dessau had a major breakthrough in the late 19th century, they are a parody of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, written by one jokester in the late 4th century or later. Back when they were considered to be historical writing, the more perceptive of later historians, such as Gibbon, were constantly cursing them for the many errors they contained. Now, when they're seen as historical fiction with a satirical bent, as many papers and volumes and conferences are devoted to them, as speculation rages about who actually wrote them and when, we're able to see more and more delicious jokes in them. They are, as Syme says, a "garden of delights."

Great Caesar's Ghost

I began to feel a little bit of polylinguistic sophistication when I discovered -- don't ask me when. I'm terrible when it comes to remembering when various events of my life happened. It could have been 20 years ago, it could have been 30 -- not only that "Kaiser" was the German word for "Caesar," but that the Germans, although spelling it differently, were pronouncing the name correctly, while we Anglophones, with very few eccentric exceptions, were not. It was around the same time that I learned that both the Greek Byzantine Emperors, from the 4th century until 1453, and the German Holy Roman Emperors from 800 to 1806 called themselves Caesar, as did the Austrian Emperors from 1804 to 1919, and the German Emperors -- often the only ones meant by English-speakers when they say "Kaiser" -- from 1871 to 1918.

Some time after this discovery -- do not ask me how long after -- I learned that "Tsar" was Russian for "Caesar." Still later, I learned that the rulers of Bulgaria called themselves Tsars from the 10th to the 14th century, and then again in the 20th century, and that the last reigning Tsar of Bulgaria, 80-year-old Tsar Simeon II, who ruled as a minor in the 1940's and was Bulgaria's Prime Minister from 2001 to 2005, has not yet formally renounced the title of Tsar.

After the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman Sultans included among their titles "Qaysar-i Rūm," "Caesar of Rome."

To be clear: all of those leaders, those of Byzantium, of the Holy Roman Empire, of medieval and 20th-century Bulgaria, of Imperial Russia, of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Austrian and German Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, called -- and in at least one case, call -- themselves Caesar, not because they thought the named sounded cool or anything like that, but because they, and probably others of whom I am still unaware, were quite seriously claiming to be the political heirs of Julius Caesar.

Why? In this case, as with most questions to do with politics, there are few logical reasons. Julius Caesar was the sole ruler of Rome for less than 5 years. Ah, but his actions as ruler were unique? Name one. We'll wait.

Caesar's successor, his actual heir Octavianus, who changed his named to Augustus, and added Caesar to his name, beginning a long-lasting custom, was the sole ruler of Rome for over 40 years, and ruled in a much more absolute manner than Caesar had. Caesar's predecessors Sulla and Pompey each ruled longer than he did.

I think the first first part of the reason for the lasting nature of the power of Caesar's name has not to do with his rule, not to do with his life at all, but with his death. He was stabbed to death in the Senate, by Senators. Assassinations don't get much more dramatic than that. Augustus used that drama, as he so skillfully used so many things and so many people, to increase his own power. Augustus, without a doubt, ended the Roman Republic and founded the Roman Empire. It has very often been remarked that Augustus ended the Republic while constantly insisting that he was upholding it, fooling no one from his time to our own while achieving tremendous feats of change. If political titles were distributed logically, then thousands of years' worth of monarchs would have been known as Augustus -- and it's true that many of the Caesars were also called Augustus, but, with a lack of egotism quite rare among emperors, Augustus saw to it that Caesar's name was going to remain the most prominent.

Why? perhaps because, with an even greater lack of ego, Augustus saw that Caesar had been charismatic, and that he himself was not. This gave him the opportunity to enhance his own power by glorifying someone else. How many great politicians have ever been able to choose between power and glory? That choice is more one for a monk than for a politician.

But I'm just guessing, just as one has to guess whether Augustus foresaw the pax romana and valued an end to civil war over his power. Just as one has to guess so often about his motives.

There was a sphinx on Augustus' signet ring and in official portraits of him. Was this to commemorate his victory over Cleopatra? Yeah, maybe.

Ethnic Diversity and Racism in Ancient Rome

A brouhaha has erupted in Britain about ethnic diversity and racism in ancient Rome: Alt-right commentator gets 'schooled' by historian over diversity in Roman Britain, and now people are arguing about who got schooled by whom and who is or isn't alt-right.

I don't know who is or isn't alt-right or who got schooled by whom, and I also don't know how racist or ethnically-diverse ancient Rome was.

I do know that here, as seemingly always and everywhere, a lot of people are making up a version of history which suits them, rather than actually studying history.

It seems that people are so anxious to be sure that racism was unknown in ancient Rome that they've even taken to translating "white" and "black" out of Catullus' notorious 93rd poem: "Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere/ nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo." ("I don't care much about pleasing you, Caesar, or knowing whether you are white or black." This short poem was Catullus' response to an invitation to dinner by Caesar.) As Caesar said, "Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt." ("Men gladly believe what they wish to be true.") And Caesar's bonmot applies equally to those who underestimate the prevalence of racism in ancient Rome and those who overestimate it, rather than examining the evidence with an open mind. And it applies as well to those who are convinced that Jesus was "black" and also to those who are convinced he was "white" (I contend that his historical existence is uncertain and his appearance completely unknown), and to everyone else who claims to be studying history when what they are actually doing is making uninformed pronouncements on historical subjects with closed minds and little information.

If I had translated Caesar as "People gladly believe[...]" instead of "Men gladly believe[...]," I would've been editing out his sexism, which he shared with almost all ancient Roman men of whom we know, a sexism which is much more obvious and plain than the degree to which ancient Romans were or were not racist.

Have people already begun to present a non-sexist version of ancient Rome?

I feel very lonely at times when I consider how very few people care at all about getting an accurate view of historical subjects.

Theodor Mommsen

One Nobel Prize in Literature I won't be complaining about is the one given to Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) in 1902. The list of this guy's accomplishments is not merely impressive, it's frighteningly vast. In fact, I don't know if there has been a complete list of his accomplishments: there are so many of them, you're bound to miss a few.

The work for which he may be most widely-known, and the one singled out by the Swedish Academy, is his Römische Geschichte, his history of Rome, the first edition of which was published in 1854 and 1855, when Mommsen was in his late 30's. Before that, he had been a journalist for a short while, and a law professor at the University of Leipzig, a position from which he was fired in 1850 because of his involvement in the revolution of 1848-49. He held other academic positions after that, most notably the chair of Ancient History at the University of Berlin, to which he was appointed in 1858.

Mommsen kept revising and expanding the Römische Geschichte, with the 9th edition appearing in 1902, the year he turned 85 and received the Nobel Prize. A 1998 paperback edition from dtv based on the 9th edition has over 2750 pages in 8 volumes.

According to his bio on the Nobel Prize website, Mommsen felt contempt for Cicero. If this is true, it makes me so happy. I was beginning to think I was the only one who had ever felt contempt for Cicero. The Nobel page sez:

"His contempt for the senatorial oligarchy and the «weakling» Cicero, as well as his boundless admiration for the energy and statesmanship of Julius Caesar, for a long time dominated the standard view of the history of that era."

That dominated the standard view for a long time? and this is the first time I'm hearing about someone else who just can't stand Cicero? Hm. Someone's gotten something wrong here. Might be me.

Onward. The Römische Geschichte was just one of Mommsen's accomplishments. He made an edition of the Corpus Juris Civilis or Justinian Code, the summary of ancient Roman law made in the 6th century under the Emperor Justinian, an edition which is still widely used by lawyers and scholars of things legal today. In addition, he wrote many books and articles on Roman law, and was considered the leading authority of his time on the subject.

He edited and made great contributions to the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, a catalog of ancient Roman inscriptions. An inscription is writing on a hard surface, such as stone, metal or wood, as opposed to writing on a soft surface such as paper or parchment. In the case of ancient Rome, many of the inscriptions are words carved into stone. The first volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, often referred to as the CIL, appeared in 1853, the year Mommsen turned 36, and the year before the first part of the first edition of his Römische Geschichte appeared. The CIL is still being updated, and currently contains about 180,000 items.

Technically, words which appear on coins are inscriptions; however, the CIL does not include Roman coins; however, Mommsen wrote extensively about Roman coins and was considered the leading authority of his time on the subject.

In addition, from 1875-1903 Mommsen was one of the directors of the MGH, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a vast series of publications of Medieval German writing in all genres: histories, chronicles, letters, theologies, charters, laws, etc, etc, which defines both "Medieval" and "German" very broadly. In the MGH, Mommsen was the director and one of the leading editors of the Auctores Antiquissimi division, which is devoted to Late ancient and Early Medieval authors. (That's right: is, not was, because, like the CIL, the MGH is still publishing new editions today.)

Mommsen edited many Latin works in addition to those in the MGH, and was considered one of the greateast classical scholars of his time.

In addition, Mommsen was a member of the Prussian Parliament, first with the National Liberal party, and the with the Liberal party, or "Secession," which broke away from the National Liberals.

And, like everyone else who's attempted to summarize Mommsen's achievements in a couple of pages, I've probably left some major items out.

Here's Some REAL Info About Ancient Historians

Michael Paulkovich will no doubt have many objections to the following. Besides it being obvious that I am a part of The Plot, I am referring to a book of history which is several decades out date; even Cambridge agreed that it was, and so published a completely overhauled edition



between 1970 and 2005. The first edition was published between 1924 and 1939, and I'm referring to vol X of that edition, first published in 1934: The Augustan Empire, 44BC -- AD70, pages 866 through 876, the section entitled Appendix: The Literary Authorities For Roman History. My copy is from the 4th corrected printing, from 1966. The thing is, although this volume is out of date, all 126 of Paulkovich's authors were well-known to historians in 1934, and the texts by those authors recovered since the 1930's might add up altogether to a page or so of fine print. Maybe. (A page of fine print suspiciously lacking any mention of Jesus.)

A more detailed list of sources, both ancient and modern, including things like inscriptions and coins, is provided on pages 893 through 993. What we've got on pages 866-876 is a discussion of the ancient Latin and Greek writers who could reasonably be called historians, plus a few others who help to round out our picture, who wrote about the Roman Empire between 44BC, when Julius Caesar was killed, to AD70, when the Jewish Rebellion was crushed and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

This Appendix, unlike Paulkovich's attempt to cover some similar ground, is very helpfully divided into non-existent sources and existing sources. Whoever wrote the Appendix, S A Cook, F E Adcock, M P Charlesworth or some combination of the three (they edited vol X), gives an account of how much influence each non-existent source -- each source which we know was written, but which has disappeared sometime during the past 2000 years so that we can't read it today -- may be expected to have had upon the existing sources, the stuff we can read (cause it exists).

For example, it is noted that the now-vanished History of Asinius Polllio was a major source for Appian's work.

For example, books 116-142 of Livy's history, which cover the period 44-9BC, are gone, but there are several condensed versions of those books made by others which are available to us. Condensed to around 1/100 of the length of the original, for example, in the case of the



periochae. Note also, that Livy is of course an existing source in that a great deal of his work survives, but a non-existent source for the period 44BC -- 70AD.

For example, the author or authors of the Appendix give the opinion that we cannot know much more for certain about the historians Aufidius Bassius and M Servilius Nonianus than their names and that they wrote histories covering parts of the period.

So: the non-existent historians writing in Latin listed here for the history of the Roman Empire from 44BC -- 70AD, mentioned because of their possible, likely or certain influence on the existing sources, are, in Latin, Asinius Polllio, Livy, Aufidius Bassius, M Servilius Nonianus, A Cremutius Cordus, Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus, Pliny the Elder, Bruttedius Niger, Cn Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus, Seneca the Elder, Julius Secundus, Pompeius Planta and Tib Claudius Balbillus. Then there are listed some non-historians who may have contributed to the works of historians existent or non-. Then come three historians writing about the period in Greek whose work is missing, Nicolaus, Timagenes and Phlegon.

On to those who wrote about the period whose work we can read: in Latin, Cicero, Augustus, Velleius Paterculus, Valerius Maximus, Tacitus, Suetonius; then some who condensed the work of others centuries later: Florus, Eutropius, Aurelius Victor and Orosius. Then technical works by Vitruvius (a delightful writer)



on architecture, by Frontinus on aequaducts and military strategy and by Vegetius (4th century) on military matters in general.

There remains in the Appendix a discussion of 5 illustrious Greek authors whose work has to do with the Empire from 44BC -- AD 70, Strabo, Philo, Josephus, Plutarch and Dio Cassius, plus a few more who lived and wrote between the 6th and 11th centuries.

No doubt some of you have been snorting contemptuously for some time now and saying, "You think yr so damn smart?! All you did was summarize a dozen pages from a dang book!"

Yr darn tootin that's all I did! And the reason why that's all I did was to give you an idea of how easy it is, if you know where to look, to get a general idea of the written sources available to us -- before we get to things like the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Oxyrhynchus and Fayim and Nag Hammadi and inscriptions (words carved into stone) and coins and so forth -- which cover the history of the Roman Empire from 44BC -- AD70. That's the entire Empire over the course of 114 years, an era which is covered much more minutely by surviving sources than many another ancient epoch before and after. 114 years for an area reaching from England to the Red Sea, not just 33 years in an area about 1/10th the size of Wyoming, an area which interested most of the writers mentioned above about as much as Wyoming interests most of the writers on the east and west coasts today.

2,518 Years Ago Today -- More or Less --

September 13, 509 BC is the traditional date of the dedication of the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. 509 BC, according to tradition, is also the year in which the last king, known as Tarquinius Superbus, "Tarquinius the Haughty," was exiled from the city and the Roman Republic was established. To us it would have looked much more like a very exclusive oligarchy than a real republic, but it had some advantages over the monarchy, and over the Empire which would come centuries later. Leaders were elected, albeit by a small group of aristocrats, and they served short terms. Typically two co-rulers, consuls, were elected yearly. If they were unsuitable -- to this small group of aristocrats -- then it was only a short wait until their terms expired. They didn't have to be assassinated. "Regnatum Romae ab condita urbe ad liberatam annos ducentos quadraginta quattuor." writes Livy at the end of Book 1 of his history of Rome. "The rule of Romans by kings (lasted) two hundred and forty-four years from the founding of the city until their liberation."

244 years, from another traditional date, that of the founding of Rome in 753 BC, to 509. The story the ancient Romans told of the founding of their city sounds very much like a legend: Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers and founders of the city, were raised by a she-wolf. While the boundaries of the city were being laid out, Remus jumped playfully back and forth over the boundary-line, and for this lack of respect for the awesome solemnness of the occasion, Romulus killed him. None of it sounds very true to life. By the time we get to Tarquinius the Haughty and the beginning of the republic, the traditional story has started to sound much less legendary and much more life-like, but it's hard to know what parts may be true. After Rome was sacked by Gauls led by Brennius in -- or around -- 390 BC, the chronology seems much more solid, there seems to be now something which we can call a reliable historical record, with the consuls listed for each year and so forth. Maybe there were similar records before the attack by Brennius, in the form of inscriptions, monuments and written records, which the Gauls either destroyed or carried off. Or perhaps the Romans only started keeping meticulous records after this invasion -- perhaps in part as a psychological defense mechanism against the trauma of the destruction of their city. Keeping exact dates for historical events, whether these dates are reliable or not, can help citizens to feel that their state is solid and secure.

If Americans feel inclined to chuckle at the Romans for so carefully preserving, even in the sophisticated age of Cicero and Caesar, Augustus and Livy, an early history which may have been mostly myth, with Romulus and Remus, and insisting that they knew the exact day when an important temple was dedicated, I would urge them to ponder things like George Washington shopping down a cherry tree and and throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac. We're not so different from them.

History of Ancient Rome, Condensed Version, Part II

Around the middle of the 2nd century BC there began a great struggle over the question of whether the lower classes in Rome, the plebians, were to be given more rights and powers. Two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Graccus, proposed things like taking some land from the aristocratic families, the patricians, and distributing it more widely among the general population. They were both killed by the patricians and their followers, but their example lived on. Other politicians made careers by proclaiming that they were on the side of the masses. To what extent they really were, and how much it was just talk, was a much-debated question then, as it still is today about populist politicians. Whatever their platforms and whatever their real motivations, the conflicts between leading politicains became more and more synomymous with battles between leading generals and their armies. Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Catullus, Pompey and other contenders for the leadership of Rome came and went, and the conflicts between them came to be more and more full-scale wars. Romans had always been opposed to any monarch ruling them, but occasionally someone was appointed dictator for a short period of time in order to deal decisively with a period of chaos and strife. Julius Caesar, who always presented himself as a champion of the masses, held the dictatorship very briefly in 49 BC, then again for a year from 48 to 47, then in 46 he was appointed dictator for ten years, and then early in 44 he was named "dictator in perpetuity." He was being heaped with other honors and titles and looking more and more like a king, which disturbed a lot of people as it seemed to violate Rome's democratic traditions and principles, and so less than two months after being named dictator in perpetuity, he was assassinated by a group of senators.

It had looked as if Caesar's dictatorship might have ushered in a period of tranquility in Rome. His death at the hands of senators, however, initiated another period of intense and bloody civil conflict, which finally ended when Octavian, Caesar's grand-nephew and chosen heir, defeated his last opponents, Marc Anthony and his partner the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, in 30 BC. In 27 BC the senate voted to give Octavian the name and title Augustus. The beginning of the Roman empire, the end of the republic, is said by many to have begun at that moment. However, Augustus was known as Caesar Augustus, and as all emperors after Augustus were also called Augustus, so also all the title of Caesar was given to all heirs to the imperial throne, making the case for placing the beginning of the empire in the brief reign of Caesar. Whether one marks the end of the republic at 44 BC or 27 BC or sometime in between, the pretense that Rome was not a monarchy, that the emperor ruled with the senate, not over it, and at their pleasure and under their control, persisted for another several centuries.

The good thing about a monarchy is that one person can make decisions about the running of a state much more quickly and simply than a group of people. Groups tend to argue, to squabble, to draw decisions out and bog things down. The bad thing about monarchy, of course, is that the quality of the decisions made on behalf of the state is entirely dependent upon one person, who may or not be competent, wise or sane. This problem is compounded if the monarch is absolute, and not removable by any group more or less representative of some concept of the people, and compounded again if the monarch is not elected, but appointed by the previous monarch, who may very well be blinded by familial affection, or if the monarchy automatically goes to an eldest son or what have you. Augustus seems to have been a very competent monarch indeed, so competent and far-sighted that the system of government he put in place in large part compensated for the incompetence of some members of his family who succeeded him. The period of time beginning with his reign and lasting for over two centuries is known as the pax romana, the Roman peace. Rome kept fighting other states and expending its territory, but within its expanding borders, things in fact were relatively peaceful during this period, and people and goods could move about in relative safety.

During this whole time, as apparently at all times all over the world, some writers had little or nothing to do with politics, some were not politicians themselves, but passionately took sides in political contests, and some were politicians. Caesar wrote twobooksabout his military exploits which have been widely read from his time to ours. (They may not be as widely read today as a century or so ago, when Caesar was often thought of as an ideal role model for boys.) Caesar's occasional partner, sometimes his rival, Cicero, had a combination of political success and high literary reputation equaled by no one else I can think of except Winston Churchill -- although Cicero was a lawyer by trade, not a soldier like Churchill, and although I think that Cicero is overrated as a writer and that Churchill is not. Those who really like Cicero must be delighted that so very very many of his letters, speeches and philosophical works, a whole shelf's worth, have survived intact to our day. Lucretius wrote a wonderful book-length poem, de rerum natura,dealing with belief in God (He was against it.) and science and philosophy (He was for them, especially the Epicurean philosophy which taught that it was wisest to stick to a small group of good friends and let the rest of the world screw itself up.)

During Augustus' reign, two leading poets were Vergil, who wrote the Aeneid, the poem about the mythical beginnings of Rome to which I refer at the start of Part I, and who seems to have been compelled to praise Augustus in a particularly lavish manner -- although who can say how sincere the praise may have been -- and Ovid, a particularly apolitical person who nonetheless fell afoul of Augustus, we don't know how, although the leading theory is that he made a dirty joke about a female member of Augustus' family. For this, Ovid, the quintessential Roman urbanite, was banished to a fort on the Black Sea, on the Wild East frontier of the empire, for the rest of his life. His two greatest poems are the Metamorphoses,dealing with those Greek dieties and myths which had been adopted by the Romans, and the Fasti,a calender of the native Roman religious festivals.

The slavish praise of Vergil (and others) and the banishment of Ovid point to a dark side of the pax romana, a humorless demand that the emperor be not just obeyed, but worshiped, as a god.

History of Ancient Rome, Condensed Version, Part I

We -- or at least, I -- don't know very much about the history of Rome before about 500 BC. But I will mention a couple of things from the Roman legends of the time before 500 BC, because I think they shed some light on the way things were in Rome. First of all, the Romans believed -- if they believed in their traditional legends. How seriously did they take these legends? Good question! -- that they were descended from a Trojan, Aeneas, the hero of Vergil'sAeneid, who, because of his valiant behavior during the Trojan War, was set free by the conquering Greeks, to wander hither and yon in Vergil's poem, which copied Homer's Odysseyvery closely, until he found a new home among the Latins, the precursors of the Romans, just as in Homer's poem Odysseys must wander long before regaining control of his home of Ithaca.

But Aeneas' settling with the Latins was still a few centuries before the -- legendary -- founding of the city of Rome proper. This occurred on April 21, 753 BC. The city was founded by the twins Romulus and Remus, who had been raised by a she-wolf. But Remus did not live to see the city completed, because as they were laying out the outlines of the city walls, he kept jumping back and forth over the lines in a playful manner, and so Romulus killed him. Because you weren't supposed to play with such important things.

From these legends you can see two important threads in Roman culture: an awed reverence before the achievements of Greece; and a particularly grim seriousness. Of course, you can't sum up any culture so simply: not all Romans were in awe of Greece, and not all were grimly serious. But those were prominent tendencies.

Actual Roman history starts around 500 BC, when the city of Rome threw off the overlordship of the Etruscan empire. The Etruscans, who once competed with the Greeks and the Phoenicians for mastery of the Mediterranean world, faded so thoroughly as Rome rose that their language, although conserved in many inscriptions, wriiten in letters taken from the Greeks and very similar to those of the Romans, is now undecipherable. They gave their name to the Italian region of Tuscany. The Romans, meanwhile, began to expand their power in a truly spectacular way. (From not long after 500 BC, when Rome consisted either only of a small town, or that town and a few square miles around it, dated the Twelve Tables, the earliest preserved version of Roman law. Law & order were always very big in Rome, and to this day, Roman law is still enthusiastically studied by lawyers.) By the mid-fourth century BC they had gone from a small town to the rulers of a third or so of the Italian peninsula; by the mid-third century they ruled almost all of the peninsula and were beginning to butts heads with the Greeks and the Phoenicians. The latter were referred to by this time as the Carthaginians, after their capital city on the northern coast of Africa, although the name by which we refer to Rome's wars with Carthage, the Punic Wars, is related to the word Phoenician. The Phoenician or Carthaginian language spoken around the time of Christ, when it remained a widespread lingua france in the Mideast, is usually referred to as Aramaic. It is still the first language of at least hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, I don't know for sure. And it is the liturgical languages of the Syriac Church which has millions of adherents. The language as it is used today is called Syriac, or Aramaic, or Assyrian. Why does the name of these people and their language keep changing? Good question!

In keeping with the general tendency of grim Roman seriousness, there is not much evidence of any well-developed native literature before 200 BC. We have the image of a people concentrated on law, commerce, war and other grimly serious things, with little interest in or even comprehension of literary pursuits. Still, the Romans admired the Greeks, and the Greeks were often anything but grimly serious. The earliest lengthy specimens of Latin literature of which we know are the comic plays of Plautusand Terrence,written in a style of Greek plays well-established in Alexandria. One may find it odd that the earliest known genre to flourish in Rome was comedy, or one may find it a natural reaction to an atmosphere which could be overly grim and stuffy. Not long after Plautus and Terrence, Luciliusestablished the genre of satire, which remained quite popular in Rome throughout the ancient period. (Which makes perfect sense to me: the more stuffy seriousness there is all around one, the more there is to make fun of, and the more readers will appreciate writers who do so.)

To return, sadly, from the joys of the muses to the grim political world: as I said, by the middle of the third century BC, Rome was almost as big as the entire Italian peninsula, big enough to begin to a serious rival to the Greeks and the Phoenicians/Carthagenians/Aramaics. The Carthagenian leader Hannibal put a crimp in the steady advance of Rome for a while, famously crossing into Roman territory from the north, over the Alps, and causing the Romans serious problems. But Rome eventually defeated Hannibal, and he was the greatest exception to a fairly steady progress of Roman expansion. By the middle of the second century BC, Rome was the biggest power in the mediterranean world, and as it continued to expand, the greatest threat to Rome gradually came to be, not any foreign power, but the fighting of Roman generals and politicians against each other. But despite assassinations and civil wars Rome continued to expand, until by 30 BC the entire coastline of the Mediterranean was under Roman control, and by the end of the first century AD Roman rule stretched from present-day northern England in the west to present-day Armenia and Iraq in the east.