Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jun 26, 2024A look at episode 2 of the first series/season of HBO’s Rome drama. Once again we talk about the actual history and how the characters, events and institutions are presented in the series. This time this includes Antony becoming tribune of the plebs, as well as a meeting of the Senate and Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
Vidcaps taken from the dvd edition, so copyright belongs to HBO.
October 10, 2024
HBO’s Rome – Ep. 2 “How Titus Pullo brought down the Republic” – History and Story
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September 22, 2024
History and story in HBO’s Rome – S1E1 “The Lost Eagle”
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jun 12, 2024Starting a series looking at the HBO/BBC co production drama series ROME. We will look at how they chose to tell the story, at what they changed and where they stuck closer to the history.
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August 24, 2024
QotD: How did the Romans themselves view the change from Republic to Empire?
The Romans themselves had a lot of thoughts about the collapse of the republic. First, we should note that they were aware that something was going very wrong and we have a fair bit of evidence that at least some Romans were trying to figure out how to fix it. Sulla’s reforms (enforced at the point of a much-used sword) in 82-80 BC were an effort to fix what he saw as the progressive destabilization of the the republic going back to the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus (133). Sulla’s solutions were hamfisted though – he assumed that if he annihilated the opposing faction, crippled the tribunate and strengthened the Senate that this would resolve all of the problems. Cicero likewise considered reforms during the 50s BCE which come out in his De re publica and De legibus. The 50s were a time of political tumult in Rome while at the same time the last years of the decade must have been loomed over by the knowledge of an impending crisis to come in 49. Cicero was never in a position to enact his idealized republic.
Overall the various Romans who contemplated reform were in a way hindered by the tendency of Roman elites to think in terms of the virtue of individuals rather than the tendency of systems. You can see this very clearly in the writings of Sallust – another Roman writing with considerable concern as the republic comes apart – who places the fault on the collapse of Roman morals rather than on any systemic problem.
We also get a sense of these feelings from the literature that emerges after Augustus takes power in 31, and here there is a lot of complexity. There is quite a lot of praise for Augustus of course – it would have been profoundly unwise to do otherwise – but also quite a lot of deep discomfort with the recent past, revealed in places like Livy’s deeply morally compromised legends of the founding of Rome or the sharp moral ambiguity in the final books of Vergil’s Aeneid. On the other hand, some of the praise for Augustus seems to have been genuine. There was clearly an awful lot of exhaustion after so many years of disruption and civil war and so a general openness to Augustus’ “restored republic”. Still, some Romans were clearly bothered by the collapse of the republic even much later; Lucan’s Pharsalia (65 AD) casts Pompey and Cato as heroes and views Caesar far more grimly.
We have less evidence for feeling in the provinces, but of course for many provincials, little would have changed. Few of Augustus’ changes would have done much to change much for people living in the provinces, whose taxes, laws and lives remained the same. They were clearly aware of what was going on and among the elite there was clearly a scramble to try to get on the right side of whoever was going to win; being on the wrong side of the eventual winner could be a very dangerous place to be. But for most regular provincials, the collapse of the Roman Republic only mattered if some rogue Roman general’s army happened to march through their part of the world.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: August 6, 2021: Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living Standards, and Zombies!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-08-06.
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August 17, 2024
Caesar Marches on Rome – Historia Civilis Reaction
Vlogging Through History
Published Apr 23, 2024See the original here –
• Caesar Marches on Rome (49 B.C.E.)
See “Caesar Crosses the Rubicon” here –
• Caesar Crosses the Rubicon – Historia…#history #reaction
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August 4, 2024
Caesar Crosses the Rubicon – Historia Civilis Reaction
Vlogging Through History
Published Apr 22, 2024See the original here – Caesar Crosses the Rubicon (52 to 49 …
#history #reaction
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February 9, 2024
His Year: Julius Caesar (59 BC)
Historia Civilis
Published Jul 5, 2016
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November 12, 2023
Who Destroyed The Library of Alexandria? | The Rest is History
The Rest is History
Published 21 Jul 2023Step back in time with renowned historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland as they embark on an enthralling journey to explore the enigmatic tale of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction. Join them as they uncover the who, what, and why behind one of history’s greatest losses.
#LibraryOfAlexandria #DominicSandbrook #TomHolland
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October 6, 2023
QotD: The “Marian Reforms” to Roman legions
In short, the things that are supposed to have happened here are:
- (Tactical-Organizational) A shift in battle tactics from the two-century maniple (c. 120 men) to the six-century cohort (c. 480 men) as the primary tactical unit on the battlefield,1 as well as the primary organizational unit of the Roman army. Elements of the older Polybian legion persist in names and titles.
- (Organizational) A shift from poorly paid conscript soldiers drawn from Rome’s propertied class (the assidui) drawn up through the dilectus to the use of volunteers drawn from Rome’s property-less poor (the proletarii or capite censi) who served as effectively professional soldiers, lacking any other means of subsistence.
- (Organizational) The practice of granting land and/or citizenship to Roman soldiers on discharge as a regular feature of Roman service.
- (Organizational) The end of the light infantry velites and Roman citizen cavalry (the equites) as part of the legion, as a product of the next point making such wealth distinctions unimportant.
- (Logistical) The introduction of state-supplied equipment (in place of self-supplied equipment) which enabled the mass-recruitment of the proletarii, as they no longer needed to be able to afford their own equipment, as part of a reform ascribed by some scholars to Gaius Gracchus (trib. 123-2).
- (Equipment) The introduction of a new design of pilum with a wooden rivet designed to break on impact with enemy shields (Plut. Mar. 25).
- (Equipment) The prioritization of the aquila, the eagle standard, over other standards in the legion (Plin. NH 10.16), often framed as the aquila fully replacing these other standards.
- (Equipment) The introduction of the furca, a Y-shaped pole for carrying the soldier’s pack (the sarcina), leading to better legionary logistics.
As we’re going to discuss, some of these things happened – but not because of Marius – and some of them didn’t happen at all. So how on earth did this idea of a big “Marian Reform” end up so pervasive in how we (used to) understand the Roman army of this period? The answer really has a lot to do with gaps (lacunae) in our sources. For the early second century, we have two really quite good sources on Roman military activity, Livy and Polybius. But both give out by mid-century,2 leaving us relatively blind until Julius Caesar‘s comentarii (de Bello Gallico and de Bello Civili) suddenly give us a massive infusion of information as we can see Caesar’s army functioning often in quite minute detail.
And we see what seem to be quite different armies! Caesar is using cohorts as tactical and operational units, rather than maniples. His armies don’t seem to have any citizen cavalry in them and they seem to be very loyal to him; he’s using a lot of non-citizens in auxiliary roles in a way that we know will become very standard in the imperial period (eventually making up half the army by Tiberius‘ reign). And indeed, moving forward, the legions of the early empire end up a lot more visible to us, both because of the literary evidence (Tacitus!) and also because, as they become more stationary on fixed frontiers, they leave forts and inscriptions and other evidence we can see far more clearly than the ever-moving armies of the Roman Republic.
And then into that there is Gaius Marius. Remember that our sources in this period are a bit patchier, without a strong continuous narrative (but with a lot of sources so we generally have someone for most of it). But Marius gets a lot of focus because of his roles in the civil wars and his spectacular seven consulships, and the one thing we are told quite clearly about him is that in 107 when he raised his first consular army he broke tradition by accepting volunteers from the proletarii (Sall. Iug. 86.1; Plut. Mar. 9.1). The temptation then to see that substantial change (which, to be clear, our sources are exaggerating for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment) as connected to all the other changes from the “Polybian” legion to the “Caesarian” legion and thus to assume that Marius is doing all of them, reading far too deeply into a few lines of Sallust and Plutarch (the latter not generally a particularly good guide on military affairs).
And I should note finally at the outset that this all also plays into a tendency in our sources generally: ancient authors really like narratives where one particular aristocrat can be credited with making major reforms or innovations as an expression of their particular virtue. We’ve talked about this with Lycurgus, but it shows up consistently with rulers supposedly introducing new weapons and new practices as big, top-down reforms that, on closer inspection, turn out to be gradual changes we can see signs of happening over quite some time. It’s an understandable if irritating bias of habit for authors whose purpose in writing is the education of aristocrats on how to be leaders – every big change has to be a product of the character and leadership of aristocrats (even when it wasn’t). Plutarch, especially, of all ancient authors, loves these sorts of just-so stories and guess who we are heavily reliant on for the life of Gaius Marius? But until relatively recently, historians were often far more willing to accept these sorts of just-so stories than they should have been (in part because late 19th and early 20th century historians shared some of those same assumptions about elite leadership and in part because singular reforms make for compelling stories).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.
1. Note that the size of the century has changed, from 60 to 80 as well.
2. Polybius’ history, already incomplete as we have it, ends, while Livy’s continuous narrative which originally went through the first century cuts out almost completely in 167, leaving us with just summaries of his work.
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August 7, 2023
The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
Published 24 Apr 2019
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QotD: How do we determine Roman dates like “46 BC”?
Now the Roman calendar is itself kind of a moving target, so we can start with a brief history of that. At some very early point the Romans seem to have had a calendar with ten months, with December as the last month, March as the first month and no January or February. That said while you will hear a lot of folk history crediting Julius Caesar with the creation of two extra months (July and August) that’s not right; those months (called Quintilis and Sextilis) were already on the calendar. By the time we can see the Roman calendar, it has twelve months of variable lengths (355 days total) with an “intercalary month” inserted every other year to “reset” the calendar to the seasons. That calendar, which still started in March (sitting where it does, seasonally, as it does for us), the Romans attributed to the legendary-probably-not-a-real-person King Numa, which means in any case even by the Middle Republic it was so old no one knew when it started (Plut. Numa 18; Liv 1.19.6-7). The shift from March to January as the first month in turn happens in 153 (Liv. Per. 47.13), probably for political reasons.
We still use this calendar (more or less) and that introduces some significant oddities in the reckoning of dates that are recorded by the Roman calendar. See, because the length of the year (355 days) did not match the length of a solar year (famously 365 days and change), the months “drifted” over the calendar a little bit; during the first century BC when things were so chaotic that intercalary months were missed, the days might drift a lot. This problem is what Julius Caesar fixed, creating a 365 day calendar in 46; to “reset” the year for his new calendar he then extended the year 46 to 445 days. And you might think, “my goodness, that means we’d have to convert every pre-45 BC date to figure out what it actually is, how do we do that?”
And the answer is: we don’t. Instead, all of the oddities of the Roman calendar remain baked into our calendar and the year 46 BC is still reckoned as being 445 days long and thus the longest ever year. Consequently earlier Roman dates are directly convertible into our calendar system, though if you care what season a day happened, you might need to do some calculating (but not usually because the drift isn’t usually extreme). But in expressing the date as a day, the fact that the Gregorian calendar does not retroactively change the days of the Julian calendar, which also did not retroactively change the days of the older Roman calendar means that no change is necessary.
Ok, but then what year is it? Well, the Romans counted years two ways. The more common way was to refer to consular years, “In the year of the consulship of X and Y.” Thus the Battle of Cannae happened, “in the year of the consulship of Varro and Paullus,” 216 BC. In the empire, you sometimes also see events referenced by the year of a given emperor. Conveniently for us, we can reconstruct a complete list of all of the consular years and we know all of the emperors, so back-converting a date rendered like this is fairly easy. More rarely, the Romans might date with an absolute chronology, ab urbe condita (AUC) – “from the founding of the city”, which they imagined to have happened in in 753 BC. Since we know that date, this also is a fairly easy conversion.
Non-Roman dates get harder. The Greeks tend to date things either by serving magistrates (especially the Athenian “eponymous archon”, because we have so many Athenian authors) or by Olympiads. Olympiad dates are not too bad; it’s a four-year cycle starting in 780 BC, so we are now in the 700th Olympiad. Archon dates are tougher for two reasons. First, unlike Roman consuls, we have only a mostly complete list of Athenian archons, with some significant gaps. Both dates suffer from the complication that they do not line up neatly with the start of the Roman year. Olympiads begin and end in midsummer and archon years ran from July to June. If we have a day, or even a month attached to one of these dates, converting to a modern Gregorian calendar date isn’t too bad. But if, as is often the case, all you have is a year, it gets tricky; an event taking place “in the Archonship of Cleocritus” (with no further elaboration) could have happened in 413 or 412. Consequently, you’ll see the date (if there is no month or season indicator that lets us narrow it down), written as 413/2 – that doesn’t mean “in the year two-hundred and six and a half” but rather “413 OR 412”.
That said, with a complete list of emperors, consuls and Olympiads, along with a nearly complete list of archons, keeping the system together is relatively easy. Things get sticky fast when moving to societies using regnal years for which we do not have complete or reliable king’s lists. So for instance there are a range of potential chronologies for the Middle Bronze Age in Mesopotamia. I have no great expertise into how these chronologies are calculated; I was taught with the “Middle” chronology as the consensus position and so I use that and aim just to be consistent. Bronze Age Egyptian chronology has similar disputes, but with a lot less variation in potential dates. Unfortunately while obviously I have to be aware of these chronology disputes, I don’t really have the expertise to explain them – we’d have to get an Egyptologist or Assyriologist (for odd path-dependent reasons, scholars that study ancient Mesopotamia, including places and cultures that were not Assyria-proper are still called Assyriologists, although to be fair the whole region (including Egypt!) was all Assyria at one point) to write a guest post to untangle all of that.
That said in most cases all of this work has largely been done and so it is a relatively rare occurrence that I need to actually back convert a date myself. It does happen sometimes, mostly when I’m moving through Livy and have lost track of what year it is and need to get a date, in which case I generally page back to find the last set of consular elections and then check the list of consuls to determine the date.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
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June 20, 2023
QotD: When kings and emperors become gods
Divine rulership was not universal however – it was subject to cultural context. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was the Living Horus, a physical incarnation of the divine; when he died he became Osiris, the ruler over the underworld. The mystery of the duality whereby a Pharaoh was both a specific person (and might be a different person in the future) but also the same god each time seems to owe something to the multipart Egyptian conception of the soul. Naram-Sin, an Akkadian King (2254-2218 B.C.) represents himself as divine (shown by his having horns) on his victory stele; future kings of Akkad followed suit in claiming a form of divinity, albeit a lesser one than the big-time great gods.
But in Mesopotamia, the rulers of Akkad were the exception; other Mesopotamian kings (Sumerian, Babylonian, etc) did not claim to be gods – even very great kings (at least while alive – declaring a legendary ruler a god is rather more like a divine founder figure). Hammurabi (king of Babylon, c.1810-c.1750 B.C.) is shown in his royal artwork very much a man – albeit one who receives his mandate to rule from the gods Shamash and Marduk. Crucially, and I want to stress this, the Achaemenid kings of Persia were not considered gods (except inasmuch as some of them also occupied the position of Pharaoh of Egypt; it’s not clear how seriously they took this – less seriously than Alexander and Ptolemy, quite clearly). The assumption that the Persians practiced a divine kingship is mostly a product of Greek misunderstandings of Persian court ritual, magnified in the popular culture by centuries of using the Persian “other” as a mirror and (usually false) contrast for European cultures.
But the practice that my students often find most confusing is that of the Roman emperors. To be clear, Roman emperors were not divinized while they were alive. Augustus had his adoptive father, Julius Caesar divinized (this practice would repeat for future emperors divinizing their predecessors), but not himself; the emperor Vespasian, on his deathbed, famously made fun of this by declaring as a joke, “Alas! I think I’m becoming a god” (Suet. Vesp. 23.4). And yet, at the same time, outside of Rome, even Augustus – the first emperor – received cult and divine honors, either to his person or to his genius (remember, that’s not how smart he is, but the divine spirit that protects him and his family).
I think it is common for us, sitting outside of these systems, to view this sort of two-step dance, “I’m not a god, but you can give me divine honors in the provinces and call me a god, just don’t do it too loudly” as fundamentally cynical – and to some degree it might have been; Augustus was capable of immense cynicism. But I think it is possible to view this relationship outside of that cynicism through the lens of the ideas and rules we’ve laid out.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-15.
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February 15, 2023
Ancient Rome’s Naked Fertility Festival (Lupercalia)
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Feb 2022
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January 18, 2023
The Roman Army, With Adrian Goldsworthy
Well That Aged Well
Published 12 May 2021In this episode we take a look at the Roman Army, and its comanders. What made the Roman Army so efficent? Was it the practice? The motivation? Their courrage? Or was it more to it? Find out in this week’s episode of “Well That Aged Well”, With Erlend Hedegart.
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December 27, 2022
Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome
In The Critic, Bijan Omrani reviews Crassus: The First Tycoon by Peter Stothard:
If you are feeling despondent about the dismal quality of the current generation of politicians, it may be some comfort to remember that even in the golden age of Rome such complaints were legion.
The poet Horace wrote at length about how the ruling class had gone downhill. Once, there had been paragons of virtue such as Cincinnatus, who after saving Rome as dictator laid down his power without demur and returned to live on his humble farm; or the consul Regulus, who refused to make any concessions after being captured by the Carthaginians, although he knew they would torture him to death. Instead of these titans, the modern age had brought forth a base generation. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome and subject of this new biography, was foremost among them.
The formidable influence wielded by Crassus in the final years of the Roman Republic — he was an ally, and rival, of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great — came not by way of old-fashioned heroics and victories on the battlefield. His methods were recognisably modern. Peter Stothard characterises him as a “disrupter of old rules, fixer and puller of the puppet strings of power”. His tools were money and the economy of favours. He employed them with a coldness, ruthlessness and level of calculation that makes him unappetising, but deeply compelling. Stothard’s description of him as “The First Tycoon” is apt. He is the sort of character one might expect to find wearing red braces in a New York boardroom, rather than a brocaded toga in the Roman Forum.
By origin, Crassus was a member of one of Rome’s blue-blooded families. His pursuit of political influence by means of business rather than military prowess would seem at first sight unexpected, given the traditional prohibition against the senatorial aristocracy engaging in trade. Yet, the turmoil of Crassus’s formative years overturned these niceties. The last sight he had of his father, who had served as a consul, was of his head on a spike in the Forum.
He was a victim of the perennial strife that plagued Rome at the beginning of the 1st century BC, caused by imbalances in wealth and tensions between Rome and wider Italy, not to mention discord over land, military and constitutional reforms. With the death of his father and two of his brothers, Crassus had to flee Rome and hide in a cave for eight months in Spain, where his family still had allies. It is doubtless these upheavals — similar to those of Julius Caesar, who lost his father young and had to go into hiding during this chaos — led Crassus to seek an inviolable security, regardless of whether he trampled on old Roman conventions and upset others to do so.
When the aristocratic faction seized power in the late 80s BC, Crassus was able to return to Rome. There, he pursued every commercial method, no matter how disreputable, to accumulate wealth. It satisfied not only his needs for security but, as Stothard argues, it was also a way of seeking revenge for the death of his father. He bought up the properties of those families allied to the earlier populist regime which had just been displaced.
These came at a knock-down price, as the families had been outlawed, with some executed and others sent into exile. Crassus appears to have been on a committee which determined the loyalty of citizens to the new government and appears not to have scrupled to condemn those whose property he coveted. His other prime method for enlarging his portfolio was to buy up cheaply buildings that were on fire, or else in the path of a fire. He organised his slaves along military lines, using them with relentless efficiency to acquire, rebuild and sell on property for a huge profit.
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December 9, 2022
Caesar versus Cato
In The Critic, Daisy Dunn reviews Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato destroyed the Roman Republic by Josiah Osgood:
If there was one thing the Romans did well — aside from sanitation, irrigation and concrete — it was polemic. Cicero composed fourteen fiery Philippics against Mark Antony in the 40s BC, and Catullus jibed at Julius Caesar so profusely in his poems that he had to issue an apology. Less famous, but equally explosive, was Caesar’s own collection of vitriol. The Anticato survives today only in fragments, but according to an ancient satirist, it was originally so long that it took up two scrolls and almost outweighed the penis of Publius Clodius Pulcher, apparently among the best-endowed politicians in Rome.
Caesar wrote it shortly before he became dictator, with the intention of denigrating the memory of Marcus Porcius Cato, “Cato the Younger”. For years the two men had been locked in furious rivalry. Caesar blasted Cato as cold and miserly. Cato despaired at Caesar’s profligacy and tireless womanising. If Caesar was louche in his barely-belted toga and exotic unguents, Cato was positively austere — a prime hair-shirt candidate — with his bare feet, rustic diet, extreme exercise and strict sexual mores; it was most unusual for a Roman to make his wife the first woman he slept with.
Few would argue with Josiah Osgood, Professor of Classics at Georgetown, when he describes Caesar and Cato as opposites. Even Donald Trump and Joe Biden have more in common than they did. Caesar was the nephew of the wife of Gaius Marius, the populist enemy of Sulla, who as dictator had thousands of Italians proscribed and killed in his bid to restore the authority of the Senate. Cato could count Sulla as an old family friend. Caesar belonged to a well-established Roman family and claimed descent from Venus via her son Aeneas. Cato’s family was Sabine, and his most famous ancestor was a mere mortal in the shape of the plebeian writer and highly conservative statesman Cato the Elder.
The differences between Caesar’s and Cato’s personalities mattered because they reflected the differences in their visions for Rome. Osgood sums these up as “an empire wielding its power for the people” (Caesar) versus “a Senate protecting the people from the all-powerful empire builders” (Cato). It is little wonder they came to blows.
Osgood takes the tense relationship between Cato and Caesar as the central focus of his book. He argues that their feud has been overlooked as a contributing factor to the civil war that erupted in 49 BC and brought the Roman Republic crashing to the ground. Blame for this war has more usually been placed on the collapse of the First Triumvirate — an illegal alliance for power forged between Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great and Marcus Licinius Crassus in 60 BC — and the breakdown in relations between Caesar and Pompey in particular. But all wars have long-term and short-term causes. For Osgood, the dispute between Caesar and Cato was significant in at least the medium term.
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