Numbers come from somewhere

Yesterday on Substack, a young Orthodox Substacker whose work I usually appreciate, feeling perhaps a bit too eager to pause over and reconsider what felt like an epiphany, shared the following:

Caesar was declared divine for killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more. In the pagan world, Hitler would have been numbered among the gods.

There are a lot of factual problems (not least that this is not why Caesar was divinized) and dubious assumptions built into this note, which is framed as an even more dubious hypothetical (“would have”) anyway, and it was handled pretty thoroughly by responses like this one.

But what proved unexpectedly helpful to me was its use of the one million figure. I’ve seen this statistic repeated over and over again by people trying to paint Caesar as a war criminal—a category that would have been nonsensical in the ancient world—or guilty of genocide, which is itself a loaded and dubious term. I’ve idly wondered where they’re getting this number, statistics from the ancient world being so totally, notoriously unreliable. This time I decided to look into it.

The claim that Caesar “kill[ed] a million Gauls and enslav[ed] a million more” ultimately comes from three passages in sources that post-date Caesar by a generation or more. Here are all three relevant portions in approximate chronological order:

• Valleius Paterculus (19 BC-AD 31), Roman History, II, 47: “During this period, including the years which immediately followed and those of which mention has already been made, more than four hundred thousand of the enemy were slain by Gaius Caesar and a greater number were taken prisoners.”

• Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23-79), Natural History, VII, 25: “In addition, too, to the victories gained by him in the civil wars, one million one hundred and ninety-two thousand men were slain by him in his battles. For my own part, however, I am not going to set it down as a subject for high renown, what was really an outrage committed upon mankind, even though he may have been acting under the strong influence of necessity; and, indeed, he himself confesses as much, in his omission to state the number of persons who perished by the sword in the civil wars.”

• Plutarch (c. AD 50-c. 120), Parallel Lives: Caesar, 15: “For although it was not full ten years that he waged war in Gaul, he took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand to hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.”

That’s it. Whatever sources these historians used, if any, are long since lost. Of these, the closest to Caesar’s own lifetime gives by far the lowest casualty figure. All of them are approximations, a point made especially clear when they write about prisoners.

I ran these sources down thanks to the bibliography in Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus. After summarizing the statistics we get from the three sources above, Goldsworthy notes that:

It is hard to know the basis for any of these numbers. The figures given for enemy casualties in the Commentaries on the Gallic War do not add up to such a great total, while Caesar’s account of the Civil War often did not mention such things. It is questionable that numbers for losses amongst the Gaulish tribes were known with precision, although it may just have been possible to calculate from records the number of prisoners taken and sold into slavery. Probably these numbers are exaggerated, but still give some indication of the appalling human cost of Caesar’s victories.

Goldsworthy is a careful scholar and an expert military historian—an area often lacking in other classicists—and his Caesar is the book on this subject, as far as I’m concerned. His caution in accepting the one-million figure is warranted and well-explained.

There are other surviving figures that can indicate something of the devastation of the Gallic Wars; Goldsworthy notes in the same passage that the total tax Caesar levied on his entire province in 50 BC was lower than the funds required for a forum he built. But is that because of devastation or disparities in property values and population density? With factors like these unknown, the surviving numbers can only suggest. Absent our sources’ sources, we can only speculate about demographics and statistics, and even that speculation must be based on what the sources do tell us, however little we choose to trust them. (Here is a very skeptical take on the numbers in Caesar’s Commentaries specifically that should give you some sense of the scope of the problem; it’s not just about battle casualties.)

The obvious point of comparison—the one invoked by our Substacker in the first place—is the death toll of the Holocaust. Certain kinds of skeptics operating under ulterior motives will question the standard figure of six million Jews, but for the Holocaust we have mountains of data available—prewar and postwar population figures, logistical documentation, military and industrial reports, and the Nazis’ own plans and records. (Read Nikolaus Wachsmann’s excellent KL for a deep dive.) For Caesar’s Gaulish victims we have this handful of sources.

One might call ancient historians’ stats and figures “vibes-based.” But lest we feel too proud of ourselves, that’s essentially what that Substacker was doing, too. That note was designed as a zinger, not to provide an accurate picture of history. Which is too bad, because the Christianity-shaped chasm separating even secular modern ethics from Caesar’s is important to acknowledge.

Numbers come from somewhere. It is worth finding out where and, even more importantly, the limits of their usefulness—especially when they are consistently deployed as some kind of gotcha.

The Half-Hearted

This fifth John Buchan June continues with The Half-Hearted, Buchan’s earliest novel with a contemporary setting, a story that ranges from Scotland to the mountains of northern India and concerns politics, espionage, love, and the tragedy of missed opportunities.

The Half-Hearted, appropriately, takes place in two parts. In the first, a young Scottish laird named Lewis Haystoun returns to his homeland after years abroad. He is beloved on his estate and among the locals and famous throughout the British Empire for his recently published travel book about the uncharted mountains of Kashmir. While fishing one day he meets Alice Wishart, the daughter of a successful merchant who has moved to the area. Alice had read Lewis’s book before moving to Scotland and has heard great things of him from his family and friends. Lewis and Alice are both smart, adventurous, and independent, and their attraction to each other is immediate.

And yet they never quite synchronize their attraction. Every time they meet some awkwardness intrudes—a misstep in manners, or Lewis, not wanting to appear too forward, erring on the side of formality, which suggests indifference to Alice, or some other misunderstanding. Their interest in each other survives, but only barely, and each missed opportunity further damages their shared hopes and Alice’s high regard for Lewis.

Further complicating matters, Lewis has a rival, Albert Stocks. Alice meets Stocks when she first arrives in Scotland and he shows immediate interest in her, but Stocks, a Radical politician, is a dull, unimaginative plodder. He is unattractive without being repellant, boring without being rude, and, above all, persistent.

Worse, Stocks defeats Lewis in an election. Lewis had only been convinced to run as a candidate by his more political friends, who appealed to his sense of duty. His obvious unwillingness to run and poor performance while campaigning almost convince Alice of his lack of courage and commitment—what she refers to as half-heartedness.

The story of Alice, Lewis, and Stocks reaches its climax during a picturesque country outing. While climbing a headland above a moorland pool, Alice and Lewis begin to connect at last, but the bank gives way beneath Alice and she falls into the river. Lewis, startled, does not react in time. Stocks does. Plunging instantly into the river, he hauls Alice to safety. Lewis, though thankful for Alice’s rescue, resents Stocks and blames himself intensely for that moment of unpreparedness and hesitation. Perhaps he is a coward, one of the half-hearted.

It’s this event—and that moment—that drive the first half of the novel to its conclusion and lead Lewis into the second.

In Part II, some of the geopolitical problems Lewis’s friends discuss offhandedly in Part I bring Lewis back to Kashmir. Thanks to his previous travels and familiarity with the area, he has been recruited for an intelligence-gathering mission. The authorities have already heard rumors of tribal disturbances and potential frontier uprisings and the Russians on the other side of the impassable, as yet unmapped interior mountains are reportedly massing troops. With the British army spread thin and consisting mostly of sepoy troops in small, vulnerable outposts, the imperial authorities need to know what precisely is going on, and need to know soon.

Forlorn and hopeless, as Lewis and Alice were only able, at last, to speak plainly to each other about their love once it was too late, Lewis hopes to redeem himself here, to show himself driven and courageous and capable of the unhesitating self-sacrifice required of the full-hearted man. Kashmir, where he made his name, will give him ample opportunity. This time he will not miss it.

The Half-Hearted was published in 1900, when Buchan was twenty-five and recently graduated from Oxford. It is shorter and more tightly plotted than his two previous books, the historical adventures John Burnet of Barns and A Lost Lady of Old Years, and is unusually psychologically acute. Buchan’s characters were always believable but seldom presented with such scrutiny of their thoughts. The vicissitudes of Alice and Lewis’s failed courtship, especially the reversals of Alice’s feelings with each new obstacle and misunderstanding, are realistically painful. These two people would be perfect for each other—would be.

The first half of the novel, though well-plotted, moves slowly, while the second half blazes past. Neither of these observations is a criticism—I enjoyed The Half-Hearted at a leisurely pace (which is why there was an uncharacteristic delay between this month’s first review and this one). Buchan’s nature writing is especially beautiful and the comedy of manners playing out in the upper class drawing rooms and moorland picnics of Scotland was enjoyable to imagine. There is even some humor, as when a nouveau riche visitor proves herself a bigger snob than the actual aristocrats. Fans of Richard Hannay will also appreciate the brief appearance of a Lady Clanroyden, whom one must assume is Sandy Arbuthnot’s mother.

That said, Buchan’s abilities as an adventure and thriller writer are apparent in the shift from Part I to Part II. Once Lewis has returned to Kashmir and received his mission, the novel steadily intensifies right up until the moving final pages. The intricacies of frontier espionage, the grueling nature of long-distance travel, the hazards of mountaineering, and the heroism of the desperate last stand all factor in, and all are thrilling.

It’s striking how much of Buchan’s later work is prefigured in The Half-Hearted. With a brave, noble character who willingly takes a loss for the sake of a woman and enters into realistically dangerous espionage work, I was reminded of Buchan’s underappreciated interwar novel A Prince of the Captivity. Its emphasis on the role of the lone, capable, honorable man racing against time is familiar from any number of other novels, from Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps to Midwinter and even Buchan’s more literary work like Witch Wood. Most resonantly, its plot of a man seeking redemption from his failings on a selfless task in a far-off rugged land bring to mind Buchan’s final and most moving novel, Sir Edward Leithen’s swansong, Sick Heart River.

The Half-Hearted is not as good as any of those later books but still has unique qualities that recommend it, not least its doomed romance. It is impossible to read about Alice and Lewis without feeling the agony of their near miss. While not rising to the level of Buchan’s best work, The Half-Hearted is an enjoyable read and an interesting early meditation on themes Buchan would elaborate and improve upon for the next forty years.

Gordon Wood, RIP

I was sorry to learn of the death of the great historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, two days ago, and even sorrier to learn of the circumstances. Aged 92, he deserved a better ending, but none can doubt he leaves behind a great scholarly legacy. Since his death I’ve seen lots of tributes and recommendations of his most famous books—the kind large enough to be called tomes, influential enough to be called monumental, magisterial, definitive—but I’d like to acknowledge a small personal debt and recommend a less celebrated book.

When I graduated from Clemson sixteen years ago I received an MA in European History. I had taken Dr Edwin Moïse’s class on Vietnam as part of my focus on military history, Dr Rod Andrew’s seminar on American historiography as an elective, and read the late Sir John Keegan’s then-new The American Civil War: A Military History but otherwise didn’t touch US history—and hadn’t since my sophomore year of college. But at my very first teaching job as an adjunct at Greenville Tech my department head plopped a US History I course in my lap.

If you’ve heard that the best way to learn something is to teach it, it’s true. Completely. I learned more about American history over that first year or so than in all my studies up to that point. For the first time I began to form a coherent overall picture of everything from Columbus and Jamestown to Appomattox. Part of the joy I discovered in teaching—which I never could have predicted I would end up doing for a living—was the feeling of suddenly getting it, of the material clicking for me. A large part of my work since then has been communicating that joy to my students.

But I had a healthy self-doubt and didn’t want to fall prey to Dunning-Kruger. I knew enough to know how little I knew, and spent a lot of time checking myself, probing for gaps and holes in the narrative I was perceiving and presenting, and wanting to make sure I was getting things right.

This is where Gordon Wood comes in. I have a lot of those famous books that I’ve read or dipped into as needed—The Radicalism of the American Revolution (c. 450 pages), Empire of Liberty (c. 780 pages), and The Purpose of the Past (300 pages on historiography)—but as I taught the Revolution for the first time I picked up his little 200+ page survey for the Modern Library Chronicles series, The American Revolution: A History.

This book was a godsend—short, well-written, approachable, and measured. The great test of the historian is to be both comprehensive and brief, and Wood demonstrated that favorite insight of Herbert Butterfield, that “The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.” I still recommend it to students who want a good scholar’s take on the Revolution but don’t want to tackle the 800-page behemoths popular among buffs.

But most importantly, it reassured me. Over and over I read in Wood what I had arrived at and presented to students. I was not comforted that Wood agreed with me, but that I had worked my way into a position that accorded with a great authority. I was doing something right. I hadn’t lost my way among the details as I scrambled to form a big-picture interpretation. Wood settled my anxiety that, having been forced to return to American history, I could and understand and teach it. His work gave me confidence and made me a better teacher. For that I’m still grateful.

Gordon Wood, scholar, writer, and teacher, RIP.

I highly recommend The American Revolution: A History if you’d like a short, readable introduction to the topic (something I’m always interested in for any subject in the hopes of recommending it to students). For a valuable recent service from Wood, here’s his critique of the 1619 Project. And for a more personal appreciation and reminiscence from a former PhD student, here’s Clemson’s C Bradley Thompson on how Wood, who was his dissertation advisor, shaped him as a scholar.

Reign of Fire and stories worth preserving

Gerard Butler and Christian Bale in Reign of Fire (2002)

Last week film criticism YouTuber Like Stories of Old posted an interesting video on mediocre or bad movies that nevertheless—and often despite themselves—had one moment of insight or genius that changed the way he thinks. It’s an interesting selection. I thought I’d offer one of my own.

Reign of Fire came out the summer I graduated from high school. It wasn’t particularly good but I was sufficiently impressed to buy it on DVD and watch it once or twice more. Between the initial glow of seeing a big screen spectacle like this and the decision to trade the DVD in for credit somewhere a few years later, one scene always stood out. I still think about it twenty-four years later.

Briefly, Reign of Fire takes place in a near-future scenario in which dragons, long thought mythical, turn out to be real and dormant beneath the earth. Construction on the London Underground reawakens one and brings about apocalypse. Decades later, small bands of survivors live in the ash, struggling to grow crops without attracting the dragons’ destructive attention and fearing to go above ground. One such group is led by Christian Bale and Gerard Butler. They eventually fall in with a wild-eyed Matthew McConaughey as a dragon-hunting Kentucky National Guardsman* who has somehow made it to Britain with tanks and helicopters and has a theory about how to wipe out the dragon species. This goes way over the top, as you might imagine, but the scene that stuck with me happens before all of this develops.

In this early scene, Bale and Butler entertain the children of their little colony. Gathered in candlelight within the ruins of the castle where they shelter, the two act out a swordfight. Butler calls himself the White Knight. Bale, breathing heavily, calls himself the Black Knight. He forces Butler to his knees and demands that he join him. Butler refuses; the Black Knight killed his father.

In case you hadn’t guessed it by this point, they’re reenacting The Empire Strikes Back.** The children watch, rapt, and gasp at the Black Knight’s following revelation.

The scene is barely a minute long and more evocative and poignant than anything else in the movie. Here, in the ruins of civilization, an old story has survived to entertain a generation that never knew the world that produced it. It was preserved because it was worth preserving and continues to entertain despite the limitations of its new medium.

That’s the immediate import of the scene, but its broader implications have kept me thinking about it ever since. How much of our culture will survive into the future, and in what form? How will it mutate? Given a longer timeframe than that in the movie, what will Bale and Butler’s White Knight and Black Knight look like, and what new details might be added to the story? And—given that their group of survivors, though isolated, is not the only one out there—how is Star Wars remembered elsewhere, if at all?

I saw Reign of Fire long before discovering the Volsung saga or the Nibelungenlied but it primed me for encountering a tradition that emerged in catastrophe and diverged and changed in different ways over centuries. It got me thinking about the fragility of our stories, who keeps track of old things in a culture that has lost so many of them, how they go about it, and the value of preserving them.***

What Reign of Fire taps into for the space of a minute is the emotional and even theological register—in addition to a candlelit medieval chapel we get intentional insert shots of haloed saints—of A Canticle for Leibowitz. It does so apparently accidentally and then backs off, but that one moment struck a chord with me that has lasted to the present. For that reason alone I still think of Reign of Fire with some fondness.

Watch that scene and appreciate it, then watch this compilation of Rifftrax zingers and have a good laugh.

* That’s how I remember it, and I don’t care to fact check this particular item.

** An uncharacteristically clever YouTube comment on the scene suggests this scene as a question for Trivial Pursuit: “In what movie did Christian Bale play Darth Vader?”

*** Throughout my college years, especially as I started reading things like Gregory of Tours and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, I toyed with an idea for a novel called The Chronicle of the King of Atlanta. It would take place in a post-apocalyptic South divided and warred over like 6th-century Western Europe and be written as both an official annal and the memoirs of its author, one of the few literate people left. It never happened, but I still think about that imagined world regularly.

Buchan’s Augustus

To my surprise and joy, today marks the beginning of my fifth John Buchan June here on the blog. When I began this project five years ago it was a bit of a lark, a way to reclaim my birth month from other, more obnoxious themed celebrations. Since then it’s become a major part of my reading and intellectual life, has put me in touch with some wonderful people, and has become one of my favorite seasons of the writing year.

As I’ve run short on Buchan’s novels—I hope to cover the last few I haven’t read this month—I’ve branched out into his short stories and non-fiction. In the last couple years I’ve read two of his short biographies: a literary-critical introduction to Sir Walter Scott and a pithy, elegant little life of Julius Caesar. Today I start John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s best full-size biographies: Augustus.

I won’t recapitulate Augustus’ life in detail here. Buchan begins with the boy Octavian, whose background of an unassuming equestrian ancestry and close relation to the most charismatic and powerful man of the day would prove surprisingly advantageous in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. Named his adopted son and heir in Caesar’s will, Octavian seemingly came from nowhere but was well-connected enough—thanks to those family ties to Caesar—and sober enough—thanks to that middle-class upbringing—to step into the role and navigate its numerous immediate hazards.

Among these were the courting of his favor and largesse by numerous people with ulterior motives and the rivalry created with Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s most trusted subordinates, the moment he was named as heir. Caesar’s assassins were still at large and fellow-travelers like Cicero, respected by the senatorial partisans and implacably hostile to Antony, hoped to use moral suasion and appeals to tradition to bring young Octavian to their side. But Octavian and Antony reconciled, revoked the amnesty given to the assassins, and proscribed political enemies they had formerly shielded from each other. A bloodbath ensued, “the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record.” Cicero was murdered, Brutus and Cassius killed themselves following military defeat, and Rome passed beyond the possibility of restoring the Republic.

Perhaps, anyway. That’s a what-if game that Buchan doesn’t really play, which is appropriate to his subject. He presents the future Augustus as canny and cautious, a man whose lack of imagination served him well in a situation too complicated and treacherous to treat with romance or fantasy.

This becomes most apparent in the latter half of Augustus, after civil war has again broken out, Octavian has defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and offered to relinquish his dictatorial power only to have it reaffirmed and expanded by the Senate. Now the Princeps, first citizen, he begins what to Buchan is his true work—rebuilding, restructuring, shoring up, and strengthening for the long haul.

Two things distinguish Augustus as both a biography and a work of literature. The first is Buchan’s scholarship. Those who rate Buchan as a mere entertainer and skilled craftsman of adventure stories miss an important aspect of the man. Deeply educated in and passionate about the classics, his knowledge of Greek and Roman literature informed his entire life and undergirds even his fiction—most obviously in novels about relict paganism like The Dancing Floor or Witch Wood but also in the education, moral framework, and long historical perspective shared by his heroic characters.

But his love of the classics was not limited ready quotations or the encyclopedic familiarity of the amateur. He had a sharp understanding of historiography. In the preface of Augustus he explains his use of the available sources, their biases and limitations, and makes his judgments clear throughout. He uses them critically, carefully dissecting and comparing in order to construct as a true a picture of events as possible—not with the intense ideological skepticism to which we have grown accustomed in many of our classicists—and complements the literary sources with the latest findings from the still-growing fields of archaeology and papyrology. Augustus, as a work of history, is meticulously constructed and judicious in its use of evidence. It holds up, and would pair well with a more recent biography by a scholar of similar sensibility, like Adrian Goldsworthy’s Augustus: First Emperor of Rome.

Buchan’s scholarship, like his writing, is excellent but not showy. Several chapters late in the book offer thematic looks at the Empire under Augustus. One examines Augustus’s family and friendships, another the social and religious reforms Augustus, with limited success, attempted to institute, but the most interesting is an imaginary tour of the Empire from east to west. Buchan impresses upon the reader not only the geography of the Augustan world but the immense variety encompassed by it—ancient, thriving, desirable Egypt; the slightly past-prime glories of Greece; the villages and smithies of Gaul; rugged, fragmented Spain; the difficulties and dangers of travel by sea; and rumors of other faraway places like Britain and future troubles among the Germans beyond the Rhine and, much more subtly and of an entirely unprecedented kind, Judaea.

The second great strength of Buchan’s Augustus, and one of the traits that most distinguishes it from modern histories of the same period, is its pervasive emphasis on character. Personality, virtues, and vices matter to Buchan, as do the cultures that produce them. People are not ciphers moved about by sociological forces and statistical trends beyond anyone’s understanding. Choices are not an illusion, but reveal character and have consequences.

Augustus therefore abounds in incisive character sketches. I wrote last month about Buchan’s final assessment of Cicero, but his portraits of other key players like Brutus, Agrippa, Cleopatra—whom he rightly takes down a peg—the poets Virgil and Horace, Augustus’s wife Livia, his ne’er-do-well daughter Julia, the brutish, shortsighted Antony, and, late in the story, Varus enliven the story and drive its events.

Perhaps the two best are of Augustus’s lifelong friend, ally, and lieutenant, Agrippa, and of Augustus himself. Upon Agrippa’s death, Buchan sums him up not only as a skilled combat leader but an able logistician and administrator whose friendship with Augustus made everything the latter achieved possible and yet nursed no resentments or private ambitions. Indeed, Buchan notes that even “gossiping Roman annalists, who found specks on every other sun, never suggested scandal or criticism about his public or private life,” living simply and honestly even after victory over Antony and the rise of Augustus to undisputed preeminence. That Augustus could enjoy the friendship and loyalty of a man like Agrippa, Buchan writes, reflects well on both.

“Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid, he is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

As for Augustus, the book is his, and Buchan’s most compelling character sketch is that which emerges over the course of the entire book. The contrast with Julius Caesar, whose late career and death drive the early chapters and first bring Octavian to prominence, is striking. Where Caesar was stirring, robust, magnetic, and driven by almost visible flashes of genius, Augustus was physically brittle, cagey, cautious, and lacked imagination in the way one might enjoy poetry while never being carried away by a daydream. Crucially, this son of the workaday equestrian class was always ready for the long, arduous work of building and lacked the aristocratic Caesar’s ego and destructive simplifying impulse. The difference between the uncle and adopted heir was that between boldness and prudence. Buchan explicitly invokes Aristotle’s phronesis. “Close-lipped, tenacious, cautious and yet intrepid,” he writes, Augustus “is amazing, but he is not attractive. . . . He took desperate risks, but only after meticulous calculation. He is the least romantic of great men.”

Buchan published Augustus in 1937, shortly after being appointed Governor-General of Canada by King George V. Buchan’s long concern for the fragility of civilization and the hard work of governing, unblurred by any illusions about human nature, are at the forefront of this work. Having reluctantly accepted his new position but dutifully embraced its burdens, it is easy to see why the principled, nose-to-the-grindstone character of Augustus appealed to him. (I will also not be the first to point out that, like Augustus, Buchan suffered immensely from recurrent lifelong illnesses, another point of kinship.) The result is one of Buchan’s best non-fiction books. Augustus was both critically well-received, even being adopted as a classroom text by one of the classicists he consulted, and commercially successful.

Last year I took some issue with Buchan’s presentation of Julius Caesar. I think his portrait of Augustus, which is sympathetic and admiring but by no means uncritical, especially with regard to the compromises Octavian made to survive early on, is impeccable. Where Caesar manipulated and destroyed, Octavian inherited a mess and, as Augustus, made the best of it. Buchan’s assessment that it was only because of Augustus that something of Rome remained to be destroyed by the barbarians centuries later is traditional but surely correct.

Buchan avoids making Augustus about his own time—“History does not repeat itself except with variations, and it is idle to look for exact parallels,” a point I wholeheartedly endorse—but he does pause over the present in the final paragraphs. “Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin,” he writes, in words that will be familiar from early in his fiction career, “and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires.” The problems of Buchan’s day were not new; Augustus had faced them before in different form. But what troubled Buchan was the willingness of many moderns to cast off the hard work of self-governance, to “experiment with unknown forces” like shameless wars of aggression as a means of strengthening society and the hitherto undiscovered science of racial purity, and to embrace mob politics and dictatorship.

Imagining a resurrected Augustus surveying the world in 1937, Buchan concludes on a chilling note: “when this expert in mechanism observed the craving of great peoples to enslave themselves and to exult hysterically in their bonds, bewilderment would harden to disdain in his masterful eyes.”

The same must certainly be true—with variations—ninety years later. This is reason enough to read Augustus, but that it is also a fine work of history, an insightful study of human character, and a brilliantly readable narrative from a great author are the chief reasons to seek it out, enjoy it, and learn from it.

* * * * *

As mentioned previously, I read Augustus in a reprint by House of Stratus, a publisher that seems to be defunct, but the entirety of Buchan’s book is available in a carefully presented online version from the University of Chicago, with helpful additional commentary and footnotes by the scholars who transcribed it, here. This by itself is a testament to the virtues of Buchan’s book.

I hope to read another of Buchan’s major biographies—likely Oliver Cromwell, which will make even tougher demands on my sympathies than Julius Caesar—before the end of the month. Stay tuned, and thanks for joining me for another John Buchan June.

Learning outside one’s field and sharing enthusiasm

Roman historian Adrian Goldsworthy, who maintains an underrated YouTube channel that I’ve recommended on Substack before, dropped a new video this morning. It’s a conversation with historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, whose book Persians: The Age of the Great Kings has been sitting high on my to-read stack for a while.

The conversation is informative and, since Goldsworthy and Llewellyn-Jones know each other from way back, a lot of fun, but Goldsworthy’s introductory remarks have some especially good insights. Noting that Persian history lies well outside the usual area covered by his channel, Goldsworthy notes

It’s slightly different from a lot of the stuff we tend to talk about and a lot of my own interest, but it’s complimentary, and the more you learn about different periods of history and how we try to understand them the greater the benefit for whatever your own focus is. It helps you to have that perspective of—sometimes it inspires you to ask slightly different questions to a topic that otherwise has become very familiar. It might suggest different approaches, different ways of using the evidence, or different types of evidence.

The same way a reader might alternate—as I do—a diet of spy thrillers with the occasional sci-fi novel or a string of mysteries with a western, it’s both refreshing and helpful for a historian to read outside his own field for precisely the reasons Goldsworthy lays out. It can give you new eyes, or at least clear the intellectual cobwebs away. Indeed, as Llewellyn-Jones discusses in the course of their conversation, his own approach to the classical past began with a theatre background and changed as he encountered and investigated new topics—Penelope’s veil in the Odyssey is an intriguing one—with surprising connections to each other.

Goldsworthy also points out the value of making history accessible to a public that always has an appetite for it:

“[I]f you can’t share that enthusiasm, share the excitement, and share some of that understanding . . . you’re less than useful.”

It’s all very well studying the past, coming to understand things, but if you can’t share that enthusiasm, share the excitement, and share some of that understanding—I think the awareness that this is fascinating, lots of people would be interested in this, it tells us important things about ourselves as human beings, it helps us to understand the world better, but unless you can actually communicate that, you’re less than useful.

He notes that courses on ancient history are popular with students and have no problem with enrollment. Such courses, however, are unpopular with the powers that be for non-academic reasons.

I could point out the same thing about military history (which is where my background overlaps with Goldsworthy’s somewhat). I’ve twice proposed development of an American Military History course that is listed as a possibility in the South Carolina Technical College System, each time making it to the curriculum committee stage before being shot down. I have no doubt it would be a popular class, not only because the well-known general interest in military history but also because some of our transfer students go to schools like Clemson with well-established ROTC programs. Maybe the third time is the charm.

Another significant topic of their conversation is the danger posed to Llewellyn-Jones’s program at Cardiff University. I’ll leave it at that but will note that it’s fun to hear some seasoned historians talk smack about administrators.

I haven’t quite finished the entire video but it’s been a pleasant and interesting discussion so far. I strongly recommend it. I’m hoping to pick up a copy of Goldsworthy’s latest, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece, for my birthday next week and I mean to start Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians soon. Give their conversation a listen or a watch.

Tossed-off trifles and top one-hundreds

The Guardian’s recent “100 Best Novels of All Time” list caused quite an understandable hullaballoo, it being broadly agreed—and obvious—that the list is terrible. The Guardian’s explanation of the list’s rationale and method didn’t really help, either.

All of this occasioned a lot of talk about this list, any such list, and novels in general, and while I saw a lot of thoughtful observations and critiques—including the question, which I’ve raised before, of whether something as broad and protean as “the novel” can be meaningfully sorted and discussed this way. But the best response came from Joel J Miller, who crowdsourced a better list through an open thread on his Substack. Each commenter could submit five to seven novels for inclusion, with Joel tabulating and weighting the entries for a new top hundred. You can look at the finished list here. It’s much, much better.

I commented with my own seven at the last minute, and found myself contending with some of the questions occasioned by the Guardian’s list in the first place. The Guardian’s list was for English-language books but was open to literature translated into English from any language. Huh? Joel’s was for novels, and yet I saw multiple people nominating the Iliad and Odyssey—an elementary mistake.

I ended up limiting myself to a pretty strict definition of novel and only books originally written in English. But even within those parameters I faced a more fundamental question: what precisely does best mean? What do I think the best novels in English are?

To be more specific, I paused over the work of Charles Portis. I certainly wanted to include him in my seven and my gut said to nominate Gringos, but I had already seen a few other commenters nominate True Grit and the herd mentality of such things, the desire to bandwagon in order to game the process, intruded. Maybe Gringos is better—I’m still undecided—but True Grit had a better chance of making it into the top one-hundred. Having had the question occur to me at all made whatever choice I would make feel inauthentic.

Which brought to mind a line from Douglas Murray I quoted in the course of my very first John Buchan June:

There are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table. But one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.

True Grit is undoubtedly the Portis novel most people would be familiar with. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print but was quite literally something he dashed off while sick to entertain himself. Meanwhile, possibly greater novels like Witch Wood, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River, much beloved of the few of us who look beyond the first couple Hannay novels, are pretty much neglected by the wider public. Likewise with Gringos, the discovery of which almost seems a rite of passage for serious Portis fans.

I wouldn’t call True Grit or The Thirty-Nine Steps “trifles” by any means; Portis and Buchan were too brilliant to trifle, and even their lesser books—say Masters of Atlantis or The House of the Four Winds—are more interesting than the best books by lesser writers. The competition, I suppose, is between best-known, favorite, and the elusive best. I wound up just listing my favorites by a few favorite writers. I suspect most of the other commenters did the same.

Joel’s list has Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion well ahead of Emma, the book I’d rate Austen’s best, and, as I’ve mentioned before, Poe’s best-selling book in his own lifetime was a writer-for-hire textbook about seashells. It is strange to consider the vagaries of what a writer is remembered for.

For what it’s worth, my seven, in no particular order:

• The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

• Emma, Jane Austen

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

• True Grit, Charles Portis

• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

• Witch Wood, John Buchan

I had a hard time coming up even with these seven. This morning I woke up and realized I wanted to include Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, or perhaps Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday. Too late. I also felt guilty including no fiction by CS Lewis, and another part of me strongly wished to include at least one Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, or John Le Carré. Ask me on another day and I might come up with an entirely different seven—though Lord of the Rings and one of Portis’s will probably be on there.

I suppose the real takeaway—all controversy about such lists aside—is that we should be thankful there is so much good literature to choose from. Maybe I’ll just have to make my own top one-hundred.

The Inklings Detective Agency

A couple weeks ago I was grateful to receive a copy of John R Kelly’s debut novel The Inklings Detective Agency. We follow each other on Instagram and he had referred me to his publisher as someone who might enjoy the book. He was right.

The novel takes place across three weeks in December 1936. Michaelmas Term has ended and Oxford is preparing for the Christmas holiday. In the opening chapter, Pembroke College don JRR Tolkien is late for the weekly meeting of the Inklings at the Eagle and Child pub. When he arrives the Lewis brothers, CS “Jack” and Warren “Warnie” Lewis, are absent, down with a mild cold at their house outside town, but other members including Adam Fox and Hugo Dyson are there to introduce Tolkien to a special guest. The stocky older man who slips into the room where they usually meet has heard of the Inklings through some unnamed source and believes they can help him solve a mystery. Not just any mystery—though the Inklings, before the events of his novel, have dabbled in solving minor local crimes—but a murder.

Multiple murders, in fact. Two British lords have died under curious circumstances in the last few months. The causes of death were written off as accident or suicide but the Inklings’ guest is certain both were murdered. Both died on a full moon and both were members of a small secret society dedicated to the occult and made up of other members of the British elite. The other members fear for themselves now, especially with another full moon approaching.

The request is impressive enough, but the man offering the work is a yet greater surprise: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes himself, who is supposed to have died six years before.

The Inklings take the case and, once Tolkien visits Jack Lewis at home and fills him in on the details, their investigation begins. Learning more about the murders and, even more importantly, the victims and their connections through the secret society will take the Inklings to the theaters and working class flats of London, to the depths of the Bodleian Library, to a Christmas party hosted by the famed Detection Club, to a stately country house in the Cotswolds, and to a cold, gloomy castle on the banks of Loch Ness. Along the way they meet Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, and the sinister Aleister Crowley.

These historical and literary cameos and the place afforded even to obscure members of the Inklings like Fox, Dyson, Nevill Coghill, and Lord David Cecil give The Inklings Detective Club the feel of an Argonautica for 1930s British mystery fiction. Like Apollonius of Rhodes, Kelly assembles an all-star team of characters and enjoys bouncing them off each other. The plot is almost beside the point—but it’s still good, engaging and genuinely mysterious, only slowly revealing itself—as, like Jason and his Argonauts, one of the book’s joys is simply to imagine hanging out with this crowd.

Kelly also opens the book with an author’s note explaining that he has fudged the timeline. He gives Chesterton, who died before the story takes place, six extra months to live and Charles Williams, who had corresponded with Lewis during the 1930s, joins the Inklings in person a few years early. This lies within the bounds of dramatic license, I think, but also serves a plot purpose. Without spoiling anything, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reveals that he had faked his own death in 1930, it prepares us for other, more dramatic returns from the grave.

My only complaints: The Inklings, for a gang of academics and bourgeois professionals, seem to leap a little too easily into their roles as private eyes, and I could not accept Tolkien as the bad cop of the group, deceiving and leveraging evidence against a potentially useful witness. There were also a few too many anachronisms. A minor but revealing one: throughout, women are always referred to as Ms. regardless of marital status. (I first noticed this with Janie Moore, the woman who lived with Jack and Warnie Lewis until her death in 1951 and who was always “Mrs Moore” in writing.) I don’t know that the author can be blamed for this specific problem; it seems like the kind of thing an overzealous copyeditor might goof up. But the handful of little distractions like that distract precisely because the book is otherwise so thoroughly and vividly imagined—the locations, the travel (by car or, more charmingly, by train), the clothes, the wintry 1930s atmosphere.

And the most vivid and enjoyable part is certainly the characters. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Hugo Dyson seemed to me the best-realized of the Inklings, but two supporting characters steal every scene in which they appear. The first is Crowley, whom Kelly positions as a dark counterpart to Lewis and company. Crowley, an occultist notorious in his lifetime for his satanism and perverse lifestyle, is not as well known today but Kelly imbues him with an authentic air of degraded but intelligent wickedness. In what might be a sequel hook near the end, another character compares Crowley to Holmes’s Moriarty. I’d be up for just such a sequel.

The other standout supporting character is Dorothy Sayers, whose wry humor and puckish personality enliven the plot significantly through the middle of the book. If Tolkien and Lewis are the lead detectives in this case, Sayers is the worldly-wise informant who wants to help but also wants something in return. She’s great fun, and has more of a role to play in the story than one might immediately suspect.

The Inklings Detective Agency is a risky sort of book but enormously enjoyable to read. It’s a strong debut for Kelly and I hope he gets the chance to write many more such novels.

Buchan on Cicero

As previously mentioned, I’m already working toward this year’s John Buchan June. Right now I’m reading Buchan’s excellent 1936 biography Augustus. Last year I enormously enjoyed his concise and insightful Julius Caesar while dissenting from his overall positive interpretation of Caesar’s character and career; Augustus, which was published a few years later, I’m enjoying more wholeheartedly.

This is despite my misgivings about the fall of the Republic and Octavian’s role in it, of course. Buchan covers that well, including an incident I am especially interested in: the betrayal and murder of Cicero. Following an explanation, in Book II, Chapter 1, of Octavian and Antony’s reconciliation and their agreement to proscribe formerly protected political enemies—“the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record”—Buchan relates Cicero’s death this way:

Among the first to die was Cicero. He had little estate, only debts, but Antony could not forgive the lash of the Philippics. Plutarch has told the tale of that winter afternoon in the wood by the sea‑shore when the old man stretched out his frail neck to the centurion’s sword, and of that later day in Rome when the head was fixed by Antony's order above the Rostra, and “the Romans shuddered, for they seemed to see there, not the face of Cicero but the image of Antony’s soul.” He met his death in the high Roman fashion—the only misfortune of his life, says Livy, which he faced like a man. The verdict is scarcely fair; juster is the comment of the same historian that he was so great a figure that it would require a Cicero to praise him adequately.

A succinct but evocative description, and a good defense against Livy’s jibe. If you haven’t read Plutarch’s account, you can read that starting at section 47 here. And of course I dramatized this moment in my first novella.

Buchan continues with a broader reflection on Cicero’s character and times:

In the wild years when the Roman Republic fell, the thinker and the scholar does not fill the eye in the same way as the forthright man of action, and Cicero is dim in the vast shadow of Julius [Caesar]. His weaknesses are clear for a child to read, his innocent vanity, his lack of realism, his sentimentality about dead things, his morbid sensitiveness, his imperfect judgment of character, his frequent fits of timidity. The big head, the thin neck, the mobile mouth of the orator could not dominate men like the eagle face of Julius. He failed and perished because he was Cicero. The man of letters in a crisis, who looks round a question, cannot have the single-hearted force of him who sees the instant need. Yet it is to be remembered that he could conquer his natural timorousness and act on occasion with supreme audacity, a far greater achievement than the swashbuckling valour of an Antony.

Buchan is always attentive to personal character and this is an excellent insight. Cicero’s courage was rarer and of a different kind than that of a fearless brute like Antony, and therefore more virtuous. Physical confrontation cost Antony nothing; but Cicero knew, when confronting a Clodius or especially a Catiline, that he was in real danger and acted anyway.

Buchan continues his ascent to a final, sweeping consideration of the moral framework Cicero prefigured:

And let it be remembered, too, that it was Cicero’s creed which ultimately triumphed. His dream came true. His humanism and his humanity made him the prophet of a gentler world. The man to whom St. Augustine owed the first step in his conversion,⁠ who was to St. Ambrose a model and to St. Jerome “rex oratorum,” the scholar whose work was the mainspring of the Renaissance, has had an abiding influence on the world. While others enlarged the limits of the Roman empire, he “advanced the boundaries of the Latin genius.”

As much as I love Cicero, this is perhaps stretching it a bit—but only a bit. St Augustine, in a passage from the Confessions, Book III, that Buchan footnotes, invokes Cicero’s philosophical work as a praeparatio evangelica:

In the ordinary course of study, I fell upon a certain book of Cicero, whose speech almost all admire, not so his heart. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called Hortensius. But this book altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord; and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise, that I might return to Thee.

When I wrote my novella about Cicero’s death I was unaware of or had forgotten Cicero’s role in St Augustine’s life, but my narrator too ends with a nameless hope that Cicero’s example has seeded in him, a hope for a world purified by self-sacrifice. I’m heartened, all these years later, to know I wasn’t trying something too outlandish.

Buchan concludes the chapter covering Octavian and Antony’s rapprochement with a reflection on the relationship between Cicero and Octavian, concluding that the two had merely been using each other for political ends. I’m not sure it was strictly cynical, and I was surprised by this passage because Buchan’s own account suggests mutual respect if not affection between the older and younger man. But in the following chapter, reflecting on Brutus, whom Buchan views as entirely overrated thanks to Shakespeare, Buchan pays his final and finest tribute to Cicero:

Brutus was a rarer species, who both impressed and puzzled his contemporaries. . . . Brutus had a solemn condescending manner, a hard face, a pedantic style in speech and writing, and a stiff ungracious character. He was capable of extreme harshness, as he showed in his treatment of the Asian cities before Philippi, and he was to the last degree avaricious. There was little principle about him when his investments were in question, and he extorted forty-eight per cent from one wretched Cypriote community.⁠ His philosophy of life was not profound, and he died abjuring his creed.⁠ He was an egotist and a formalist, yet he won an extraordinary prestige, for to his contemporaries he seemed the living embodiment of certain ancient virtues which had gone out of the world. . . . History has by one of its freaks perpetuated this repute, and he remains the “noblest Roman” when in truth he was a commonplace example of aristocratic virtues and vices. Cicero was in a far truer sense the last republican.

Greatly enjoying this so far. I’ve emphasized Buchan’s insight into character here, but his lifelong interest in statecraft—heightened, no doubt, by becoming Governor-General of Canada during the writing of the book (the preface is signed and dated from Government House, Ottawa)—is also clearly on display and entirely appropriate to its subject.

I’m reading a paperback reprint from Stratus House, but you can find the entirety of Buchan’s Augustus online here.

On audacity and plausibility

Earlier this week I got the chance to catch up with my friend JP Burten. We were talking about a recent writing project of his that involves Bitcoin as a plot element and he noted, as an aside, that he doesn’t really know anything about cryptocurrency. Could’ve fooled me, I said. I found his use of it for the purposes of his story completely believable.

I related my own plausibility story. In Dark Full of Enemies, Colour Sergeant Graves, the commando team’s explosives expert, carries a small tin of thermite with him for improvisatory use. In the sabotage scenes leading to the novel’s climax, the team uses some of this to melt the steel doors of the dam shut, sealing in the main explosive charge and thwarting German efforts to counterattack and remove them. I put a lot of imaginative effort into this passage and was pretty pleased with it, especially as a chance to play with the Arctic winter setting and theme of darkness:

McKay took the tin and went to the end of the gallery. At the steel door he took out a wad of thermite, prepared by Graves at the Petersen house, and a match and squashed it into the gap in the jamb, just above the lock. He set the bolt and lit the thermite.

The little wad caught and burned white. Molten steel fizzled and guttered in sun-bright globs onto the floor. The tunnel lit up—McKay shut his eyes. He had not seen real light for days. Yellow metal coursed in runnels down the jamb, cooling as it went. A minute later, and only the lock still glowed. The rest of the door stood smoking, fused shut.

“I’ll be damned,” McKay said.

He set another pinch of thermite in the jamb just above the lower hinge, set it aflame, and left.

But—I have no idea whether that would work. I did research on thermite (and knew more about it then than I remember now) but never determined whether one could use it the way Graves does. And yet no one has ever called that out as unrealistic, even the technically-minded Tom Clancy fans who’ve taken a look at Dark Full of Enemies and enjoyed it. Whether it’s possible or not, it came across as plausible enough to work.

Per my discussion with JP, the writer can—and should—do research and plan and prepare, but sometimes what sells something questionable is pure confidence. Whether a technical detail like these two or a plot contrivance or coincidence, present it without blinking and it’ll seem plausible. Believability is the daughter of audacity.

This requires art and good judgement and is no substitute for actually knowing things but, like Graves’s tin of thermite, it’ll do in a pinch.

Our conversation was prompted by JP’s new novella Dead Drop, a followup to his mystery The 8-Bit Detective, an internet-age cozy mystery. Dead Drop is a fun, tightly constructed short read and available free on his website.