When you’re adapting Latin texts for use by the BBC, how do you bring them to life for today’s audience?
The thing about adapting texts is that the framework is there for you. essentially, all you’re doing is glorified hack work. but you need to cut it in such a way as to preserve both the structure of the narrative and the episodes within it that will give the listener, who may be unfamiliar with the text, some sense of why it is so powerful and why. which has had the impact not only throughout the centuries but also throughout the millennia. it is obviously more difficult to adapt a classical text than, say, a 19th century novel, simply because we are further removed from the Roman world.
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With all the changes in the world, do you think there are things we can still learn from Roman times?
I think the quality of great literature is that it contains eternal truths. it is like a kaleidoscope: our understanding of the text will change according to how we ourselves change. As for the lessons that can be drawn from Roman history, of course it will always be a mirror to the present, for the simple reason that what distinguishes Western civilization, particularly when compared to other great civilizations such as China or india or even the middle east, is that in the west we have had two cracks. we had the first one starting in bc and lasting until the collapse of the roman empire and then the second one, building on the ruins left by classical civilization, continuing to the present. and throughout our attempts to build a civilization, we are always overshadowed by the previous attempt, so we will find in Roman history what I suppose we find in science fiction: that there are points of resemblance enhanced and strange by the way they are also completely different.
Let’s look at some of your options. Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars provides the inside story of some of Rome’s greatest emperors.
I thought if I was going to choose five books on Roman history, I really had to choose a Roman historian because, for modern historians, Roman historians have always been the great model.
why is that?
because the classics are the classics. Throughout the middle ages, when people wanted to have a model, they looked back to the great Roman historians. I was thinking that possibly I should have chosen the man who I think is the greatest Roman historian, Tacitus, who is a kind of pathologist of vice, particularly the vice of autocracy. I think he is one of the great historians of all time. but I decided not to because my next two options are very much infused with the spirit of unspoken. so i thought i’d go for something a little lighter, which is tacitly what i guess a gossip magazine like the heat is for the times literary supplement.
“julius caesar is seen by many people as a very attractive figure; my own feeling is that he is actually much darker, bordering on psychopathy.”
The work of Suetonius is a collection of biographies of the first 12 Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar to Domitian. And it really did have a crucial sense of shaping our understanding of Imperial Rome as a place of vice and savagery and sexual depravity and violent, brutal, obscene splendor.
Which emperors in particular would make the headlines in one of today’s gossip magazines?
I think what would stand out would be the pranks of Caligula, who indulged in incest, forced prostitution, madness that would put…
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Any footballer to shame!
absolutely, or nero, who was actually better than caligula in having his mother killed and is said to have burned rome, although he probably didn’t.
And for you, which Roman emperor do you find most intriguing?
The one I find most intriguing wasn’t actually an emperor, but the first on Suetonius’ list: Julius Caesar. and that is simply because he has exerted such a magnetic appeal on future generations. his influence is clearly massive and many people see him as a very attractive figure. my own feeling is that it’s actually much darker, verging on psycho, but it’s that tension between the man who in his correspondence is witty and charming contrasted with the record of someone who brought unbelievable carnage and mayhem to gaul and then to his own people. And it’s that combination of creativity and destruction within him that I think makes him one of the all-time magnetic figures in world history.
Next is Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, considered by many to be a classic, but also a bit of a heavy read.
I think it’s considered heavy reading simply because it’s physically heavy. the most accessible version is that of the penguin that is presented in three large volumes. but the truth is that it is still incredibly readable. as I said before, it is modeled after Tacitus, who was famous for his sharp style, and careful balancing and modulation of sentences to generate irony. This is what Gibbon does as well, and it means that it’s not only amazing academic work, but compulsively entertaining as well. I truly believe that anyone who is prepared to give it a try will find themselves smiling throughout the entire process at least.
It was written in the 18th century, but do you really think it still has enduring appeal?
yes, and the interesting thing about gibbon is that his work is not only a masterpiece of eighteenth-century prose, but it shapes the terms of current historical debate. One of the ways he does this is because, for Gibbon, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire does not end with the collapse of the Empire in the West, which is the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. instead, it continues until the fall of constantinople in 1453 and even beyond.
The corollary to that is that in Gibbon’s story we don’t just have a story of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; we also get a history of the rise of the Muslim caliphate and the barbarian kingdoms to the west. what that does is give us a sense of how when civilizations fall, they inevitably clear the decks for other civilizations to rise up. That’s the kind of understanding that has taken historians a long time to grasp, and it means that the gibbon is now coming back into focus as someone who actually has something to teach.
ronald syme’s the roman revolution looks at the fall of the republic and the rise of augustus.
this again is an absolute classic that is fully informed by tacitus. he has this very scathing view of the way power works and operates. one reason is that it was not written at the height of the British empire – a time when British historians were quite interested in the workings of the Roman empire and strongly identified with the Caesars and all their works – but in the 1930 and published just as the second world war was beginning.
his portrait of caesar augustus in particular – he was julius caesar’s great-nephew, his adopted son and the man who ranked first among emperors and established an autocracy on the ruins of the republic – is a very wild and the reason for this is that he is writing aware of what is happening in soviet russia, in nazi germany and in particular in mussolini’s italy, because mussolini was very closely inspired by augustus.
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so syme comments on the dangers of dictatorships.
yes, but also the power of this is that it is a dispatch from the front lines of the dictatorship. so any notion that this is just ancient history, and therefore for that reason somehow removed from how politics works now is absolutely impossible to sustain when you read this and hear the details about how the romans They are reaching an agreement with Augustus and his regime. and Augustus’ henchmen are very recognizable figures.
Departing from some of the great figures of Roman history, Mary Beard’s Roman Triumph is a radical revision of one of Rome’s ancient ceremonies.
I chose this because many books on ancient Rome, mine included, generally like to tell stories that take bits of evidence and put them together to make a cohesive narrative. but there is also a deep pleasure in looking at some of the things we think we know about rome, or the myths we know aren’t really true, unraveling the mystery and examining the works and seeing what is there. this is what mary beard does in her book. She watches a “triumph,” which is a parade through the streets of Rome by a victorious general, where he parades the loot and captives he has taken on his campaign and is cheered by the people of Rome. this is the material that informs virtually every sword and sandal epic ever made, it’s there in asterix and it’s there in our english word triumph, and she looks at it and says, “are the ideas we have of him true? ? Are the ideas of the Romans who wrote about it true? it’s like removing paint: she removes layer after layer and the mystery and excitement of the book wonder what will be left at the end.
and what’s left?
I think it would spoil the excitement because that’s the point of the book!
but how does he manage to go back that far and genuinely know that what he’s revealing is correct instead of what was there before?
Well, you have to trust her. It’s like in any police novel you have to trust the detective. she is such an erudite yet artfully skeptical guide that as you read her you feel you can trust her to guide you through the maze she is exploring and point out what is true and what is not so when you reach her final conclusion , you are perfectly content to take their word for it.
It is very good to give a new vision of Roman history.
yeah, she probably wouldn’t want to be described like that, but she’s almost miss marple from roman history because she sees the heart of a mystery and how it works. she’s a scholar and there’s a sense that scholarship is somehow intimidating or scary or inaccessible, but it’s not. at the base, it is about questioning and exploring things that anyone can be guided by. that’s what she does so well. she is not simplifying but she is making accessible what is incredibly interesting.
your final pick is pagans and christians by robin lane fox, which looks at pagans and christians before the time of emperor constantine.
i chose this because the great revolution in moral and ethical issues, which the roman empire witnessed and which gibbon also addresses, in a very funny and biting way, is the rise of christianity. We tend not to think of Christianity as an expression of Roman civilization, but in many ways it is, even though it radically transformed the empire. Robin Lane Fox’s book is the best modern account I can think of that will give people an idea of how this remarkable revolution took place. The first half looks at how the pagans functioned in the years before Constantine’s reign, and you get glimpses into the deep-seated beliefs and practices of the pagans. and then, in the second half, the same treatment is given to Christians. is an absolutely panoramic tour de raison of how people believed and thought, and the revolution and upheaval that underlay religious life at the time.
This book was very influential to me because until I read it I hadn’t really thought about Christianity as part of Rome’s history. and ever since i read it i became much more interested in how the great religions like judaism and islam emerged from the world of the roman empire and antiquity in general. the book i am writing at the moment is about how islam arose in the context of the roman empire and the persian empire. and mary beard’s book influenced that too because i’m applying the kind of treatment she gave to “triumph” to the stories that are told about the origins of islam.
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