Gladiator II trailer reaction

Naval combat in the Colosseum in Gladiator II

On Tuesday, the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II appeared on YouTube. I immediately watched it and opened up a draft post here on the blog. A few thoughts:

I’ve been skeptical of a sequel to Gladiator for as long as Scott and friends have been talking about it. Not only was Gladiator a great movie and a perfect standalone story, it was—like Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean—lightning in a bottle, a lucky product of the planned, the unforeseen, and the ability of imaginative craftsmen to adapt to unique circumstances. Recreating the magic of such a great movie for a sequel would not only be unnecessary, I thought, it would probably prove impossible. It hasn’t helped that some of the leaked proposals for a follow-up were insane. Add to this the aging Sir Ridley’s increasingly unconcealed indifference to history and Napoleon’s thudding arrival last year and I hope you’ll understand why I wasn’t excited to learn, in the middle of all that, that Gladiator II was finally shooting.

Well, now that a trailer has arrived I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

Gladiator II picks up the story of Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Commodus’s sister and Maximus’s love interest in the original, about twenty years later. When we last see him in Gladiator he’s leaving the sand of the arena where Maximus and Commodus have just killed each other. Now he is, per the trailer and scraps of information online, living in North Africa. Apparently he is captured in an amphibious raid by a Roman army under Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and sold into slavery as a gladiator, where he follows his hero Maximus’s example by taking the fight to Rome via the Colosseum.

Lucius’s owner and trainer is Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who appears to have a similarly intimidating semi-mentor role to that of Proximo in the original. Macrinus has designs on political power, which is currently wielded by brothers and co-emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger). Bloodsport ensues.

What most surprised me about this trailer is the extent to which it recaptures the feel of the original. Gladiator had a look you could smell. The sharp, sun-drenched palettes, the sand and grit, the backlit smoke, the lavish textiles, the metal that looks hot to the touch, and the towering classical architecture are all present in Gladiator II. The seamless fit of this with the original’s style, more than anything else, made me excited for this movie.

This is, of course, playing to Scott’s strong suit. None of it means that the story will adequately support the visuals. (See again Napoleon.) Scope is guaranteed, but depth?

Other observations:

• I’m honestly thrilled to see more of the Colosseum, including its famous mock naval battles—complete with dolphins? sharks?—and a beast fight. When you learn about the Colosseum in school this is the stuff you really wish you could see. And this sample looks great.

• Speaking of the beast fight, the segments with the rhino reveal the starkest visual difference between this and the original: obvious CGI. Gladiator had some but here, nearly a quarter century later, it’s more apparent. The rhino looks pretty great but Lucius’s little tumble doesn’t.

• I like the nods to Maximus’s arms and armor. A proper Roman touch, and a nice callback to Maximus and Lucius’s scene in the original.

• Marcus Acacius’s amphibious attack looks rather too much like the climactic fight in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Potential unintentional comedy.

• Plotwise, this really looks like a rehash of Maximus’s story from the original. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I hate to see a great movie followed up twenty-four years later with the standard same-but-different sequel plot.

• Hans Zimmer has not returned to compose the score, which is a bummer. I’m curious to see whether Harry Gregson-Williams, a fine composer, repurposes some of Zimmer’s themes or writes entirely new music.

• “The greatest temple Rome ever built: the Colosseum.” Great line. I’m reminded of an observation my undergrad Rome professor made: you can learn a lot about a civilization by looking at the buildings it spends the most time and effort on and that dominate its skyline. In the Middle Ages it was the castle and the cathedral. Today it’s the skyscraper. In Rome it was the arena.

Okay, history stuff:

• I expect no attempt at accuracy. Like the original, I plan to enjoy this as a good movie and nothing more—provided it’s a good movie.

• Geta and Caracalla were real emperors who ruled together following the death of their father, Septimius Severus (r. AD 193-211). Geta was assassinated, presumably at his older brother’s bidding, after less than a year of co-rule, so that places the events of this movie in AD 211. Caracalla ruled another six years, though, and has entered history as a byword for imperial cruelty and bloodthirstiness alongside Caligula and Nero. Presumably his fratricide will play some role in the film.

• Caracalla was eventually murdered while on campaign and succeeded by Macrinus, Denzel Washington’s character. The real Macrinus was Berber rather than black, a fact internet comment sections are already full of fulmination about, and reigned a little over a year. At least one production still of Washington sitting on what looks like a throne has been released. After being murdered in his turn, Macrinus was succeeded by Elegabalus, a notoriously perverted teenage tyrant who has been the subject of a recent move to spin him as a “transgender woman.” Gladiator II is probably already biting off more than it can chew, history-wise. Lord help us if the filmmakers go there.

• Geta and Caracalla get a stereotypical depraved Roman emperor look, with an uncanny resemblance to John Hurt’s Caligula in I, Claudius. They creeped my wife out when I showed her the trailer.

• Marcus Acacius has a rather presentist line about not wishing to “waste another generation of young men for their [Geta and Caracalla, presumably] vanity.” You’ll have to look hard to find someone outright defending Caracalla—who, in addition to his personal violence and cruelty, also debased the coinage and granted citizenship to nearly everyone in the Empire—but he didn’t campaign pointlessly. Scott’s modern posturing creeping in, as usual.

Verdict: cautiously optimistic.

So we’ll see. I don’t precisely have high hopes for Gladiator II but the trailer looks good and I’ll certainly be there when the film opens in November.

Julian the Apostate: cage-stage pagan

From Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, by Philip Freeman, a concise and insightful passage that I want to file away for teaching Western Civ.

Of Julian’s attempts to use his imperial power to reform and reinvigorate paganism and to craft a “universal paganism he hoped would defeat Christianity”—a paganism filtered through his highly symbolic philosophical interpretations that would be applicable everywhere, a rather condescending vision of “the common people of every village” in “childlike innocence” offering “an occasional pigeon to their local gods and pray[ing] for gentle rain and health . . . while philosophers and intellectuals would seek the higher mysteries of the Good”—Freeman writes:

But [Julian’s] austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed.

This is one of the hardest things to impress upon a group of students when teaching ancient Greek and Roman religion. Even the non-religious among people today are so deeply influenced by the last fumes of the Abrahamic faiths that they struggle to conceive of a “religion” with no scriptures, no ethical content, and no standard “beliefs” to speak of. Alternately, often simultaneously, they struggle to conceive of ancient paganism as having any practices either. To them paganism is a set of myths, which they’ve probably gotten third-hand from Percy Jackson anyway.

I’ve commonly heard of religious converts, especially within Christianity to different doctrinal camps and especially to Calvinism, described as going through a “cage stage”—i.e. a period when they would be better off locked in a cage until they can calm down—in which they are rabidly, irrationally, monomaniacally obsessed with studying and sharing their new theological framework. Certainly Freeman’s description of Julian seeking “to lay out in sometimes tedious intellectual terms the philosophical foundations behind his religious reforms” sounds like some of the Calvinists I’ve known.

As a convert from Christianity back to paganism via the urbane schools of Hellenistic philosophy, he seems to have come to the imperial purple in his own sort of cage stage—from which he never returned.

How often do I think about Ancient Rome?

Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari—a favorite painting, inaccurate in detail but capturing the spirit and drama of the moment

Every day.

Seriously—every day. And really, what did you think my answer would be? When my wife heard about this online trend she just laughed. She didn’t even bother asking me.

Why do guys think about the Romans so often? I can’t speak for every man—and I may be especially unrepresentative because I teach history for a living—but I think that while it must have something to do with the rich mixture of drama and violence, the personal and the political, the depraved and the philosophical, the great crowd of examples both to emulate and condemn, and the momentous and long-lasting consequences and sheer range of events encompassed by Rome’s history, another part of it must surely be how familiar Rome sometimes feels.

That’s true not only in the sense that we in the West are, in a sense, part of a cultural familia with many branches and in-laws but a clear lineage all the way back to Rome, but in the more usual sense. On some level, no matter how strange they are, you know these people. I often tell my students that one of the joys of studying the Late Republic is the soap opera feeling that not only does everyone in this rather upstart city know everyone else, we can know them all, too, and vicariously participate in their upheavals. Some enterprising guy out there could make a fortune with a Roman fantasy league.

That’s my two denarii, anyway. I could say a lot more, but that would be less fun.

Instead, since I lured y’all here with what is basically a meme, let me offer something of more value. If you too think about Rome and want more to think about, more deeply and fully and with more of that delicious detail, let me offer a short list of my favorite books on Rome. This is by no means exhaustive and I could have made the list much longer; these are just my personal favorites and the books that have benefited me most over the years.

General histories and biographies

Roman Realities, by Finley Hooper—My college Rome class’s textbook, this is an older survey but it holds up, being well-written, comprehensive, and judicious in its judgments.

Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, by Lesley Adkins and Roy A Adkins—This is a reference work rather than a proper history, but it’s a fantastically rich resource, covering everything from the gods, the structure of the Republic’s government, and the organization of the army to town names, baby names (a pretty short section), and holidays. I’ve consulted my copy regularly for nearly twenty years.

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, by JE Lendon—This is a broad study of Greco-Roman warfare from Homer to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, so only half of it is about the Romans, but it’s excellent—one of the most helpful and insightful books I’ve read in this area.

The Punic Wars and Cannae: Hannibal’s Greatest Victory, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two excellent books on the period that first got me hooked on Roman history. The former is an excellent study of all three wars by a master military historian, and the latter is a good short book about the most famous battle of the wars and possibly of all of Roman history. I recommend either depending on how long you like your books.

Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon, by BH Liddell Hart—A short older biography of one of my favorite Roman figures, the victor of the Second Punic War, who is often overshadowed by the enemy he defeated.

The Spartacus War, by Barry Strauss—An excellent short history of the greatest slave rebellion in the Republic. Strauss writes engaging, approachable prose and exercises masterful command of the sources, making this a book I often recommend to students.

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt—A favorite biography of my favorite Roman. Deeply researched, well written, and admiring but measured in its portrait of Cicero. Because Everitt situates him in his complicated historical context so well, and with such precision and clarity, I often recommend this book as an introduction to the end of the Republic.

Caesar: Life of a Colossus and Augustus, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Two magnificent biographies of the two men, father and adopted son, more responsible than anyone else for the destruction of the Republic and the longevity of the Empire. Goldsworthy, in addition to being an excellent researcher and writer, has good judgement and avoids extremes in his interpretations.

The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination, by Barry Strauss—Another excellent book from Strauss, this time covering the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, the assassination and its aftermath, and the fates of the conspirators, only one of whom died a natural death.

Pax Romana: War, Peace, and Conquest in the Roman World, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A sweeping but detailed study of how the Romans built their empire and carved peace out of chaos. I reviewed this book for University Bookman some years ago, one of my first paid writing jobs. You can read that here.

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm—A look at the irony of one of Rome’s most selfish and perverted emperors having studied under one of its greatest apostles of reason and moderation. A really fascinating and engaging book.

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A detailed study of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of the early medieval world. Preview of coming attractions.

Rome for kids

Pompeii: Buried Alive! by Edith Kunhardt, illustrated by Michael Eagle—A very good Step Into Reading chapter book with great illustrations and a narrative that builds a palpable but kid-friendly sense of dread. Includes a little bit about the archaeological discovery of Pompeii and the fact that Vesuvius is still active.

The Romans: Usborne Starting Point History, by Phil Roxbee Cox, illustrated by Annabel Spenceley—I think this one may, sadly, be out of print, which is a shame. I got a used copy for my kids years ago and it’s a favorite. Includes nicely-illustrated two-page spreads about many facets of Roman life and some nice cutaways of Roman buildings.

The Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Rome, by John Malam, illustrated by Mike Foster—Another used acquisition, this one is from Scholastic and has even more extensive coverage than the Usborne book, plus a lot more attention to overall historical context with timelines, maps of the city and empire, and more.

Rome in Spectacular Cross-Section, by Stephen Biesty—Having grown up on books of plane schematics, Usborne books, and David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, I adore cross-sections. Biesty’s books are among the best I’ve ever seen. This is a huge picture book with vast, intricately detailed illustrations of major Roman buildings including the Colosseum, the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, a Roman bath, and more. It’s amazing. Unfortunately it also appears to be out of print, but your local library may have a copy. That’s how we enjoy it.

Detectives in Togas and The Mystery of the Roman Ransom, by Henry Winterfeld—Two of the books that first introduced me to Rome, these are children’s novels about a group of Roman schoolboys who solve mysteries. Set in a vaguely defined period of the early Principate, they’re not rigorously historically accurate but are leavened with nice period details and a good sense of the spirit of the era. They’re also a lot of fun—I remember devouring them sometime around 4th grade.

Rome in fiction

Pompeii, by Robert Harris—A brilliant historical thriller that uses dramatic irony—we all know exactly what’s going to happen even as the characters struggle to figure it out—to devastating effect. This is the Roman novel I recommend most often to students.

Vindolanda, The Encircling Sea, and Brigantia, by Adrian Goldsworthy—This trilogy set in Roman Britain in the first years of the reign of Trajan follows the adventures of centurion Flavius Ferox, a native Briton of the Silures. Goldsworthy uses his mastery of the Roman world, the Roman army, and Roman Britain specifically to great effect, setting his dramatic action-mystery stories in a rich, complicated, detailed world.

Augustus, by John Williams—An epistolary novel covering the life of Augustus from his rise to power to his final years, with all the ups and downs and personal tragedies in between. I don’t agree with Williams’s interpretation of some things (his take on Cicero is pretty cynical) but this is a brilliantly executed novel.

I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves—Everyone knows and loves these, but what can I say? These are brilliant, fun, dramatic, and moving novels written with great energy, wit, imagination, and a love for the details and the larger-than-life characters of Roman history. They’re classics for a reason.

Helena, by Evelyn Waugh—A profound, moving, and thematically rich historical fantasy about the mother of the first Christian emperor of Rome that follows her from girlhood in Britain to old age in quest of the True Cross.

And before I hand the reins over to the Romans themselves, let me mention my own modest Roman fiction, the novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, about the final hours of my favorite Roman.

The Romans in their own words

Aeneid, by Virgil—The pinnacle of Latin epic and a stirring story of family, nation, and manhood, the Aeneid has been justly admired by everyone from Dante to CS Lewis, who wrote of it: “With Virgil European poetry grows up.” I’ve most recently read the translation by David Ferry but would also recommend those of Robert Fagles, Allen Mandelbaum, and Stanley Lombardo. I have Sarah Ruden’s well-regarded translation on standby for my next readthrough.

Metamorphoses, by Ovid—Most of the “Greek” myths you’ve heard come, in some form, from Ovid. Not my favorite epic but a striking experiment with many beautiful and moving episodes.

The Early History of Rome and The War with Hannibal, by Livy—These are the titles of two of the four extant volumes of Livy as published by Penguin Classics. I’m particularly attracted to these stories of formative catastrophes, whether of a village hanging on to existence by its fingernails or a republic weathering the worst storm yet in its history.

The War Against Catiline, by Sallust—A short history of a crucial moment in the careers of Cicero, Caesar, and Crassus and in the death throes of the Republic. A fresh new translation for Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series titled How to Stop a Conspiracy is a great read.

The Gallic War, by Julius Caesar—When Jordan sat down to write this list, Caesar’s commentaries were among the very first things he thought of.

On Duties, On Old Age, and On Friendship, by Cicero—Three excellent long essays on philosophical, moral, and ethical topics that are all full of wisdom and mean a lot to me. There’s much more Cicero I could recommend, but these three are my absolute favorites. The latter two, retitled How to Grow Old and How to Be a Friend, are two of the best volumes in the Princeton UP series mentioned above. I reviewed How to Grow Old on the blog here.

The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius—If the myths you vaguely remember come from Ovid, the stories of debauched and greedy emperors almost certainly come from here. Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, translated Suetonius for Penguin Classics.

Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus—I love all of Tacitus but I have read and reread these short treatises for pleasure many times. Agricola is a story of native rebellion and a successful Roman campaign in Britain and Germania, by some assessments the first work of ethnography in history, is of particular interest to me, with its fascinating and tantalizing catalog of different German tribes.

The Golden Ass, by Apuleius—A hilarious romp in which a Greek merchant named Lucius is transformed into a donkey by a witch. Lucius, who is immediately stolen by bandits, then spends years observing the behavior and listening to the stories of ordinary people in the age of the Empire. Stories within stories, absurdity, violence, tragedy, a handful of over-the-top poop jokes, and a happy ending make this some of the most fun Roman literature that has survived.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you find something good to read here. In the meantime, keep Rome in your thoughts and establish peace, spare the humbled, and conquer the proud.

A thesis

The following started as only semi-serious off-the-cuff pontification in my Instagram “stories.” I’ve expanded on it and fixed a lot of autocorrect “help” along the way.

A favorite web cartoonist, Owen Cyclops, shared the following on Instagram this morning:

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A post shared by owen cyclops (@owenbroadcast)

If you’re unfamiliar with semiotics, which I discovered via Umberto Eco late in high school, here’s the first bit of Wikipedia’s intro:

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. The meaning can be intentional, such as a word uttered with a specific meaning; or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition.

The phrase “usually called a meaning” should give you some sense of how arcane, abstract, and high-falutin’ this can get. Emphasis on abstract. But semiotics is not really my point, here. Owen’s cartoon brought Dr Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley to mind. Per Boswell:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

This is the “appeal to the stone.” Wikipedia classifies it as “an informal logical fallacy.” I don’t care. When confronted with academic disciplines that have descended to this level of abstraction, I join Dr Johnson’s stone-kicking camp.

At some point, something has to be real. Argument divorced from concrete reality simply turns into sophisticated dorm room bickering.* That’s what Owen’s cartoon captures so well—argue about the “meanings” of “signs” like carrot tops and foxholes all you want, the real carrot and the real fox are going to present an inarguable ultimate meaning to those rabbits. I refute it thus.

I was struck that Wikipedia’s article on Johnson’s stone-kicking compares this appeal to the reductio ad absurdum, which it also treats as a fallacy. Its full article on the reductio is more circumspect, classifying it as a legitimate line of argument, though I’ve always regarded the reductio more as a useful rhetorical device, a way of comically** setting the boundaries to an argument or of twisting the knife once the logic has worked itself out as impossible. But, tellingly, the article’s “see also” points us toward slippery slope. This is, of course, described not just as an informal fallacy but “a fallacious argument.” I contend that slippery slope is not a fallacy but, at this point, an ironclad empirical law of Western behavior.

And that’s what brought the late Kenneth Minogue to mind. In my Western Civ courses I use a line from his Politics: A Very Short Introduction, to impart to students that the Greeks and Romans were different from each other in a lot of fundamental ways. Chief among these differences was the Greek and Roman approach to ideas:

The Greek cities were a dazzling episode in Western history, but Rome had the solidity of a single city which grew until it became an empire, and which out of its own decline created a church that sought to encompass nothing less than the globe itself. Whereas the Greeks were brilliant and innovative theorists, the Romans were sober and cautious farmer-warriors, less likely than their predecessors to be carried away by an idea. We inherit our ideas from the Greeks, but our practices from the Romans.

Succinct, somewhat oversimplified, sure, but helpful to students who mostly assume the Greeks and Romans were the same, just with redundant sets of names for the same gods. It’s also correct. Minogue goes on to note that this mixed heritage manifests differently culture to culture, state to state, but that “Both the architecture*** and the terminology of American politics . . . are notably Roman.”

Were, I’d say.

So, a thesis I’ve kicked around in conversation:

Given Minogue’s two categories of classical influence, as the United States was founded along (partially but significantly) Roman lines by men who revered the Romans, a large part of our cultural upheaval has arisen as the country has drifted more Greek—becoming progressively more “likely . . . to be carried away by an idea.”

The emphasis has shifted from the Founders’ “Roman” belief in institutions governed by people striving for personal virtue to a “Greek” pattern of all-dissolving ideologies pursuing unachievable ends. This reflects both political and social changes. Like Athens, the US became more aggressive and more inclined to foreign intervention the more it embraced democracy not just as a system but as an end. And note the way that, when an ideal butts up against an institution in our culture, it’s the institution that’s got to go—as does anything that stands in the way of the fullest possible fulfilment of the implicit endpoint of the ideal. How dare you impede my slide down this slope, bigot.

And this is not a new problem. A whole history of the US could be written along these lines.

* During my senior year of college I once listened to two roommates argue over whether the Trix Rabbit was a “freak of nature.” This lasted at least an hour. Take away the humor and you’d have enough material for several volumes of an academic journal.

** Comically, because what’s the point of arguing if you can’t laugh the whole time? That’s not an argument, but a quarrel. See note above.

** Not always for the best, as I’ve argued before.

On ancient and medieval “propaganda”

It is commonplace among certain kinds of historians to refer to some ancient and medieval sources, especially anything produced at the behest or under the patronage of a king or nobleman, as “propaganda.” Among those that come to mind from my reading in the last couple years are Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the anonymous Life of King Edward (the Confessor), and Augustus’s Res Gestae Divi Augusti. And this is without taking into account the purely literary works that critics occasionally label propaganda, like the Aeneid.

Calling these sources “propaganda” seems to me wrongheaded and misleading for several reasons, foremost among them the anachronistic connotations embedded in the word itself.

While the word has innocent origins (and a quite interesting and revealing evolution) and it can, technically, still mean only “official information,” its technical sense, as with “Dark Ages,” has been almost entirely swamped by negative connotations. Labeling something “propaganda” immediately freights it with insinuation as to its origins and the ulterior motives of its creators. To me, the word propaganda suggests:

1—the direct involvement or oversight of a state or ruling power,
2—a carefully crafted and controlled programmatic message,
3—ideological motivation and rationalization for either distorting the truth or outright lying,

and, in terms of material conditions,

4—a means of mass production or at least mass dissemination, and
5—a corresponding mass readership.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of where propaganda comes from, what it’s for, and what it needs to do its work, and yet by these standards most ancient and medieval texts offhandedly labeled “propaganda” by modern historians would fall far short.

Just the culture of widespread literacy required by 4 and 5 would eliminate almost all sources before Gutenberg and from most of the following two or three centuries, and 1 and 2 are seldom as obvious from a face-value reading of such sources as some historians would like you to believe.

To take the examples I gave at the beginning of this post:

• In Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Asser himself asserts authorship, openly acknowledges his personal connection to his subject, and explains why he wanted to write about him. What is not clear is that Alfred was directing Asser (1) or dictating how he was to be presented (2). And what certainly is clear, given how books were produced during the 9th century, was that Asser could not publish or widely disseminate his version of Alfred’s life (4) and that only a small number of people like Asser—clergy, religious, and a small number of educated laymen like Alfred himself—would ever read it, nixing (5).

• Ditto the Life of King Edward, with the added uncertainties of who precisely commissioned the book and who wrote it, so that it is even more speculative to argue for (1) and (2). Further, the Life survives in one manuscript, which is empirical proof that even if whoever commissioned the book aimed at (4) and (5), they did not achieve it.

• Of the unscientific sample I referred to at the top, the one that comes closest to fitting the definition of propaganda suggested by the term is Augustus’s Res Gestae or The Deeds of Augustus. Here you have the emperor himself dictating the text (1), much of which is political in nature (2), and widely reproduced as a monumental inscription (4). But even here it is not clear how many people could read the Res Gestae even when it was available inscribed in a public place.

So much for the anachronistic implications of the term. But there is a deeper level of error to which calling an ancient or medieval source “propaganda” leads.

What is missing from all of the sources I worked through above but fundamental to all modern propaganda is (3), an ideological framework that either allows or requires lying. This is not to say that these sources are 100% truthful, but flattery, omitting awkward or controversial topics, or simply not knowing things and not recording them are not the same thing as ideologically motivated suppression or fabrication of facts.

Assuming ancient and medieval sources to have the same pragmatic relationship to the truth as modern propagandists (or, increasingly, historians) is a clear case of projection. Their ways were not our ways. As Orwell wrote on this topic in a passage I posted last year:

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. . . . A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. . . . Some of the facts . . . were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

Further—and this is especially the case for sources like the Life of King Alfred and Life of King Edward—the dearth of alternative or parallel sources for many of the events they describe means that even the forms of non-propaganda bias listed above can only be inferred. Guessed at. Speculated.

Which I think gets at what’s really going on with accusations that such sources are “propaganda.” Calling a source propaganda grants the historian permission to read between the lines and construct alternate histories purely negatively, with a kind of kindergarten “opposite day” hermeneutic that ends up as a license to fabricate. And the problem is only more pronounced in those periods when we have precisely the lack of sources that requires us to rely on those commissioned by kings or abbots or emperors.

By all means, approach sources produced through some connection to or the patronage of a king or ruler or other authority with caution, and always, always look for bias. (It’ll be there, though that doesn’t mean anyone is lying.) But avoid dragging in words with such strongly modern associations and implications, and certainly don’t use that as an excuse to concoct the “real” story behind the sources we actually have. That way lies bad history.

If only we had a word for that kind of untruthful, selective, ideologically motivated storytelling.

Athens and Sparta... Georgia

The Temple of Hephaestus and the Athenian acropolis c. 1870

Maybe it’s my background in British history, or just growing up in northeast Georgia, but I love placenames and the layers and layers of history you can discern as you dig through them.

The Georgia connection is important. Long ago, I noticed that not only did my homestate have an Athens, the city where I was born and where my family has deep roots, but a Sparta, too. And a Rome. And a Smyrna. And a Cairo.

When I began teaching US History almost ten years ago and regularly explaining the Founding generation’s love, admiration, and emulation of the classical world to students, I remembered these observations and connected them to things I had learned about other states since then—that Cincinnati, Ohio is named after a heroic dictator from the early days of the Roman Republic (and, implicitly, George Washington), that New York has even more Greek and Roman placenames, and so forth. And I developed a pet theory I would occasionally expound to students.

Give someone a lot of spare time and grant money, I thought, and the ability to map the locations and dates of founding of American cities with classical placenames, and I bet they’d cluster noticeably along the frontier of the Early Republic, roughly from the Washington to the Jackson administrations.

And, lo and behold, this week I came across a piece from Antigone, an online classical journal, entitled “Classical Place-names and the American Frontier.” This essay concerns upstate New York specifically, where the author notes 130 classical placenames in use by 1860:

An upstate New York itinerary could take you on a drive from Troy to Ithaca via Utica and Syracuse, with stop-offs off in Camillus, Manlius, Cicero, and Pompey. One could be buried under four feet of snow in Rome. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, lived in a log cabin in Palmyra. You can read the works of Homer or study the military tactics of Marcellus in places that bear their names.

And the author confirms precisely the guess I made about Georgia’s classical cities: “Classical place names were given to frontier settlements there in the years immediately following the War of Independence. As the frontier moved west, so too did the practice.” He goes on to explain the shady buyout of the Iroquois Confederacy’s land in the upstate and the influx of settlers coming northward and inland from the coast.

Looking at Georgia’s considerably fewer such names, you can still note the same pattern: an early city like Sylvania, founded in 1790, lies in well-established territory between Savannah and Augusta, itself a classical name by way of the Princess Augusta, King George III’s mother. Sparta, founded in 1795, is farther north and west. Athens, founded in 1806 as a college town with a name intentionally meant to evoke Plato’s Academy, is yet farther north and west of that.

The displacement of Indians plays a role here, too, albeit a generation later than in New York. Following the Indian Removal Act in 1830 you get Smyrna (1832) and Rome (1834) in former Cherokee territory in the northwestern corner of the state, beyond the Chattahoochee, and Cairo (1835) in the far southwest.

Look at these cities on a map and mark them in the order they were founded and you see a clear march upcountry from General Oglethorpe’s original enclave on the coast and the Savannah River.

Even Atlanta (1847), with its complicated history, fits this pattern, given its cod classical name (part feminine tweak of Atlantic, which is itself derived from Atlas, and part nod, probably coincidentally or indirectly, to Atalanta). Before taking the name Atlanta, the city was Marthasville (1843), and before that it was Terminus (1837). As the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes, Terminus “literally means ‘end of the line,’” an appropriate name since Terminus was established as mile marker zero on a new railroad built to connect the western interior of the state to the coast (there’s that westward, inland movement again). But it only means that because Terminus was originally a Roman deity who protected boundaries and property lines, a god of ends.

I’ve already started recommending this essay to students, not only because it gratifyingly confirms a pet theory but because it makes abundantly clear the pride of place the classical world had in the imagination of the Early Republic. And not only for obviously learned showoffs like Jefferson and Adams.

“It was part of a wider cultural movement to align the new Republic with Classical ideals,” the author notes, “but it was neither as organized nor as calculated as one might think.” Such naming conventions were not part of a top-down agenda but grassroots:

What is interesting about the Classical place names of upstate New York—and what previous historians who have addressed the subject have overlooked—is that many of them were chosen by the pioneers themselves. Except for the town names of the Military Tract, there was no government initiative or evident persuasion that lay behind their selection. The pioneers in their rough-hewn settlements—far from the centres of education in the coastal cities—were choosing to align themselves with the Classical past.

Even the hardbitten types moving to edge of civilization were well-versed in the classical past and its republican ideals and made those cultural priorities clear in the names they gave their settlements.

And their children. Georgia has both a Homer (1859) and a Homerville (1869). These were founded later than the other examples I’ve given and were named for prominent local men, and so only indirectly for the great blind bard, but consider when these men were born.

Of course, me being me, I couldn’t help but reflect on the change since then—given the option of naming things, Western civilization has gone from Utica and Troy and Ithaca and Rome to Boaty McBoatface and friends in two centuries.

I’ve marked a few cities on a Google Map and embedded it above. If you click through to the full map you can see the dates of each city’s establishment arranged in chronological order. Mouse over the list and the pins will light up in exactly the pattern described. I don’t have the time to do that with with all the New York and Ohio placenames mentioned in the Antigone piece but I hope someone will someday. An animated map would be a stellar classroom resource.

In the meantime, definitely read the entire essay. It’s a concise and insightful look at ordinary the relation Americans from an earlier era had to the classical past and should give us cause to reflect on our own relation to them.

Barbarians teaser reaction

There are a lot of movie trailers I’m pretty excited about right now: No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s final Bond outing, which looks great and has some genuinely beautiful cinematography just in the trailer; Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s second sumptuous and classically-styled entry in his Hercule Poirot adaptations; Dune, which despite—a very strong despite—Timothée Chalamet, looks utterly fantastic; and Mank, which doesn’t actually have a trailer yet, but it’s a David Fincher film about the production of Citizen Kane so I’m already on board.

But I’ve been too tired and busy this semester to post about any of those. What’s gotten me excited enough to get me off my duff and write a blog post is a completely unexpected teaser for a Netflix limited series, Barbarians.

Barbarians, based on the very stingy teaser trailer dropped by Netflix a few days ago, retells one of the most famous stories from ancient Rome—the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Fought in what is now northwestern Germany in AD 9, the battle destroyed three Roman legions in a trap sprung by an ostensible ally, the Roman-educated Germanic chieftain Arminius. The Romans’ German allies under Arminius lured the army, which was commanded by an inept general named Varus, into a militarily indefensible position and then turned on them. Ambushed while strung out in column through the dense, marshy forest, the Romans were picked apart and annihilated in detail. The emperor Augustus, only five years from his death at the age of 75, supposedly cried in anguish for Varus to “Give me back my legions!”

In keeping with my usual format for trailer reactions, a few notes and observations:

• The teaser certainly focuses on the battle aspect. IMDb tells me this is a six-episode series, so Netflix is definitely trying to sell us on the action first. I’ll be curious to see how much more of Arminius’s story the series tells. Let’s hope for a proper trailer soon.

• The Romans’ weapons and armor look surprisingly good although, again, this teaser doesn’t give us much. Most of the infantry are shown in what modern historians call the lorica segmentata, remains of which have indeed been found on the battlefield. The Kalkriese face mask, found on the battlefield by modern archaeologists and conjectured to be a ceremonial Roman cavalry mask, makes an appearance. I geeked out.

• But then there are some Germans with horns on their helmets. If we owed nineteenth century opera costumers royalties on this hooey they’d have some very, very rich descendants.

• Not a fan of the Uruk-hai facepaint. This may be based on an offhand observation about one Germanic group in Tacitus’s book Germania (see below), but that’s describing a tribe that lived in modern-day Poland, not the region the battle actually took place in. The wideshot of Arminius and his serried ranks of Germanic warriors standing at the edge of the forest looks like a shot from the beginning of Gladiator, which is not a good thing.

• Lots of inexplicable fire in the rather abstract battle shots we get in the trailer. We’ll see. Let’s just hope they don’t include any fire arrows.

• Even worse is the inclusion of a standard-issue Hollywood warrior chick (cf. Knightley, Keira in Arthur, King). This is one of the great sword-and-sandal action movie clichés of the last thirty years—second only to fire arrows. Germanic women did play an important role in battle, but it wasn’t as kickass fourth wave feminists covered in mud. It’s tiresome and silly. Stop it.

• Lots of fur, rough fabrics, unkempt hair, and subdued colors for the Germans. Let’s hope this is just due to the selection of clips for the teaser, most of which come from the battle itself. Otherwise, given the other items above, this is looking like another ancient movie full of mass-produced Movie Barbarians™. But I hope not. My ancestors may have run around naked, sacrificed people, and worshiped trees, but they did like bright colors and personal grooming.

• Much, much better, and definitely working to the movie’s advantage, is the atmosphere. The gloom and murk of the forest are exactly as described by the Romans, and the miserable weather that always played a role in Rome’s campaigns in Germany looks to be on full, glorious display here.

• Related: I love what we see of the cinematography here. Again—gloom, atmosphere, shallow depth of field. Bring it on.

• So far I haven’t mentioned that this is a German movie, in German—and Latin. As far as I can tell the German is modern Hochdeutsch, though. Still great to have a polyglot movie to reflect this aspect of the ancient world.

• That this is a German production is interesting in itself, and makes me wonder how precisely they will handle the Arminius story. Arminius has been used as a heroic symbol of German nationalism since the 19th century, and heroic nationalism is not something Germans do nowadays. This teaser has, as another site has put it, “serious Gladiator vibes.” I wonder if they will tread carefully in this regard, trying to avoid potentially stirring up old nationalistic images of the barbarian warlord, or attack into the ambush, so to speak, telling the story as straightforwardly action-packed and heroic without drawing direct attention to the Pan-German uses to which the story has been put. We’ll see, but this is a meta level of historical interest that could make Barbarians extra rewarding.

So there’s definitely some Hollywood stuff in here, even glimpsed in snatches in this very short teaser, but there’s also a lot of great-looking material. If the authenticity of the setting, costumes, and reconstruction of the battle are top notch and, very importantly, crafted to support a well-written—and, hopefully, accurate—story dramatized through good performances, it could more than outweigh the nonsense.

Barbarians has potential. Here’s hoping.

More if you’re interested

In the meantime—while we wait for a proper trailer and for the show itself—a few reading and viewing recommendations:

Wikipedia actually has a good list of primary and other ancient sources on the battle. Among the most detailed are the accounts of Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Paterculus. Tacitus also wrote about the Germans more generally in Germania, sometimes regarded as the first ethnographic study. These are good reading. As I tell my students, ancient historians are still good to read because, unlike the authors of modern textbooks, they were obliged to be interesting.

The Battle that Stopped Rome, by Peter S. Wells is one of the authoritative books on the subject, with comprehensive but lucid explanations of the archaeological evidence that helped historians find the original battlefield and a good explanation of the significance of Arminius’s victory in Roman history.

The story of the location of the battlefield after almost 2,000 years is a fascinating one in itself. Here’s a short version of the story from Smithsonian.

Osprey Publishing has two excellent books on the subject: Teutoburg Forest, AD 9, by Michael McNalley, and Roman Soldier vs. Germanic Warrior: 1st Century AD, by Lindsay Powell, part of Osprey’s Combat series that offers detailed comparisons of the two belligerent sides and a series of illustrative case studies. Both books feature gorgeous, lavishly detailed paintings by Peter Dennis, along with the trademark maps, photographs, and informative sidebars of Osprey guides.

For a blast from the past, you can also watch the History Channel’s “Decisive Battles” episode on the Teutoburg Forest, recreated using the Rome: Total War gaming engine, on YouTube here.

How to Grow Old

I originally wrote and posted this review of De Senectute on Goodreads after I read it in March of 2017. I have fond memories of carrying this little book in my pocket on a trip to the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia for my daughter’s birthday. Now, three years later, with two more children, a lot more grey on my chin, and the Riverbanks Zoo closed to prevent the spread of coronavirus, I revisited Cicero’s wonderful meditation and found it just as uplifting, enlightening, and challenging as before. I share my slightly emended original review with y’all in hopes that it will be beneficial and that some of y’all will check the book out.

“Those who lack within themselves the means for living a blessed and happy life will find any age painful.”

Late last year I found grey in the stubble on my chin. This year I’ve started sprouting grey hairs at my temples. Time and age catch up to us all, and for modern people—to judge by a perennially fruitful field of advertising—the discovery of grey hair, or crow’s feet, or a newly creaky joint, marks the beginning of a crisis. The same was apparently true in the ancient world, judging by the forceful arguments against bemoaning old age in Cicero’s De Senectute, loosely rendered here as How to Grow Old.

Cicero wrote On Old Age in early 44 BC, as he entered his 60s. One would imagine Cicero had more to worry about than growing old—in the twenty years since saving the Republic from the Catiline conspiracy, he had found himself marginalized and finally ousted from the Roman political scene. His friends or allies in the Civil War fell one by one as Caesar, whom he steadfastly opposed, carried all before him in the Civil War. Finally, his beloved daughter Tullia had died the year before. Cicero devoted this time to philosophical reflection, completing this book—one in a rapidly appearing series of works—just before Caesar’s assassination, which began a fresh round of strife that resulted in Cicero's murder.

Cicero set his dialogue in the illustrious past, before present troubles, which still intruded most notably in his choice of speaker: Cato the Elder, the revered great-grandfather of Cicero's sometime political ally Cato, who had disemboweled himself in Utica in 46 BC rather than be captured, forgiven, and used as a human prop for Caesar's propaganda purposes. The elder Cato had fought in the Second Punic War alongside Scipio Africanus—whose adopted grandson is one of Cato's young conversation mates in the dialogue—and lived well into his eighties. He lived on as a Roman ideal to more than just his great-grandson, and Cicero here makes him a spokesman for wise and dignified old age.

Much of Cato's advice rotates around the Stoic poles of Nature and Reason (already giving this book a significant edge over most current self-help advice on growing older). The right use of Reason, Nature’s great gift to man, brings man into alignment with Nature, and enables a life of virtue. This seemingly abstract idea helps make sense of much of the misery that the aging experience, and points to the real truth about the challenge of growing older: it all comes back to character.

Cato tackles four major objections to aging: the denial of an active life (both physical and mental), the weakening of the body, the deprivation of sensual pleasure (especially sex), and—the big one—the ever nearing threat of death.

The answers to these objections stem from a deeply wise observation—aging well begins in youth. A once athletic man who mourns himself as dead when he loses the spryness of youth has had his priorities wrong from the beginning. A person mourning the inability to fulfill all their appetites never really knew what those appetites were for, and allowed them to master him. And people who fear death will never really be happy in any age, because death can come at any time—it is simply harder to ignore in old age. “Since death threatens us at every hour,” Cato asks, “how can anyone who is afraid of it have a steadfast soul?”

Cicero sprinkles imagery from nature (by way of Nature) liberally, particularly of the seasons. Granted that a person has lived virtuously as a youth and can approach aging properly, he will see that old age is simply another season, a season with pleasures, duties, and honors of its own. Cicero may not use these words, but a lifestyle appropriate to or befitting old age—Reason corresponding to Nature—is key. If weakness of the body is appropriate to old age, so is the wisdom of accumulated years. The fretful elderly who keep Viagra in business are, in Cicero’s mind, still mastered by an appetite appropriate to an earlier season, and create their own misery by their unwillingness to appreciate old age on its own terms.

Old age’s honors include respect and wisdom, time for simply pleasurable work (for Cato, farming and learning Greek), study, thought, and conversation, and some much-appreciated stability after the stormy passions of youth. Of course, respect is not guaranteed—one thinks of the way the elderly are shunted to the side as quickly and efficiently as possible in our world—but a life well lived is its own reward, and will result in a person calm and content in the face of death. The approach of death—which is one of the things appropriate to old age, like the fall of ripe fruit from a tree—does not rob old age of its value, but rather gives it value by focusing one’s priorities. Lust and greed should fall away (“What could be more ridiculous than for a traveler to add to his baggage at the end of a journey?”) in favor of reflection on past blessings. (I was reminded of his assertion in an old legal case that gratitude “is not only the greatest, but is also the parent of all the other virtues.”) Cato concludes his arguments with a really interesting and moving discourse on his belief in eternal life.

I wasn’t really bothered to find grey hair on my head—on the contrary, I think it’s really interesting to watch it spread—but a lot of people are, and as our culture values youth and vitality to an idolatrous extent, On Old Age is a refreshing celebration of age.

Philip Freeman’s translation of De Senectute is free and brisk and a delight to read, as I’m sure Cicero’s original (which is presented on the facing page for one to pick through and compare) is in the Latin. His short introduction offers a simple breakdown of the main benefits of aging that Cato extols in the body of the dialogue. A few pages of succinct, helpful endnotes identify people or explain allusions within the dialogue.

* * *

If you enjoyed this review, please give Philip Freeman’s wonderful translation a read, or check out the other volumes in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series from Princeton UP, including another of my favorites, Cicero’s De Amicitia or How to Be a Friend. And please check out my novella about Cicero’s death, The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Thanks for reading!

The End of the World! on City of Man Podcast

Desolation from Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire

The final episode of the City of Man Podcast’s Ancient Asides series has arrived—it’s the end of the world as we know it! This episode covers the Roman Empire from the reign of Theodosius to the end of the empire in the west in 476 and the rise of the barbarian kingdoms that made medieval Europe, a story for another day.

You can view the shownotes here. Listen in via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps, or by clicking “play” on the embedded Stitcher player in this post.

Here’s a complete listing of the Ancient Asides series, in case you want to catch up. Links will take you to City of Man’s shownotes pages on the flagship podcast’s website:

• Ancient Asides 12: The End of the World as We Know It—On the fall of the Western Empire.

• Ancient Asides 11: The Fourth Century—On aftermath of Constantine’s reign and the slowly falling twilight of the empire.

• Ancient Asides 10: Constantine—On the most important and divisive emperor of the later empire.

• Ancient Asides 9: Diocletian—On imperial politics and the brief return of stability following the crisis of the third century.

• Ancient Asides 8: Heresy and Apologetics in the Early Church—On the growth and new challenges facing Christianity in its first centuries.

• Ancient Asides 7: The Early Church and the Book of Acts—On the first generations of the Jesus Movement.

• Ancient Asides 6: The Final Background to the New Testament—On the political and cultural context of the life of Christ and the birth of Christianity.

• Ancient Asides 5: The Roman Crisis—On Roman imperial government through the end of the third century.

• Ancient Asides 4: The Roman Emperors—On the successors to Augustus and their relative merits, demerits, and craziness

• Ancient Asides 3: The Roman Revolution II—On the death of Julius Caesar and the aftermath for Cicero, Antony, Octavian, and the Republic.

• Ancient Asides 2: The Roman Revolution—On the Republic in crisis, from the Punic Wars to the death of Julius Caesar.

• Ancient Asides 1: Roman Government—On the birth, early history, and development of the Roman Republic and the culture that undergirded it.

These episodes have been a labor of love for several years now, and I hope y’all have enjoyed listening to them as much as we enjoyed recording them. Please subscribe to City of Man if you haven’t already. Coyle and Ed are gracious and generous hosts and I was honored to be such a long-running guest on their show.

Thanks as always for listening. Until later, I’ll sign off with the words of St. Augustine’s City of God: “The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.”

The fourth century on City of Man Podcast

Emperor Julian “the Apostate”

The latest Ancient Asides episode of City of Man Podcast has arrived! Tune in to hear regular host Coyle Neal and I talk about the upheavals besetting the Romans between the reigns of Constantine and Theodosius. Topics of conversation include the aftermath of Constantine’s reign, the mounting pressures of the Germanic peoples on the Rhine-Danube frontier, the last-minute attempt to roll back the legalization of Christianity by Julian, and the catastrophic Battle of Adrianople.

I’m excited to listen to this one because—with a few semesters and the birth of another baby intervening—I can barely remember recording it. Listen in and we can be surprised together!

Visit City of Man on Facebook or the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s flagship website, and listen in via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps. I’ve also embedded the episode in this post for your convenience. You can read our shownotes and book recommendations here. Enjoy, and thanks as always for listening!

Constantine on City of Man Podcast

The City of Man Podcast’s Ancient Aside series returns with its tenth episode. In this episode, regular host Coyle Neal and I cover the life and reign of Constantine, one of the most consequential and controversial figures of the late Roman Empire—and in all of Western history. We talk about the post-Diocletian political context of Constantine’s career, his personal background, his military campaigns, his conversion to and patronage of Christianity, and much, much more.

You can see this episode’s shownotes here. Visit City of Man on Facebook or the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s flagship website, and listen in via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps. I’ve also embedded the episode in this post for your convenience. Enjoy, and thanks as always for listening!

Diocletian on the City of Man Podcast

The City of Man Podcast’s Ancient Aside series returns with its ninth episode. In this episode, regular host Coyle Neal and I cover Diocletian, the first great emperor after the imperial anarchy of the third century; his administrative reforms, including the creation of the Tetrarchy; his changes to the nature of the imperial office itself; his savage, empire-wide persecution of Christians; and our own crippling allergies.

Visit City of Man on Facebook or the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s flagship website, and listen in via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps. I’ve also embedded the episode in this post for your convenience. Enjoy, and thanks as always for listening!