#jlrrt reads
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That's one book for every 2.7 years he lived. Given that he didn't do anything notable for the first thirty, I can only imagine what they were about.
Volume I: Baby Lucius and I Find Weird Bugs in the Road
Volume VI: Best Lute Tunes to Pick Up Girls
Volume VIII: Blackjack and Orgies
Volume XII: Don't Ask How I Got the Money to Run for Quaestor
Volume XVVI: I Think I Messed Up Numbering These
Volumes XIX, XX, XXI: War, What is It Good For? (My Career!)
Volume XXII: Blackjack and Orgies
#and you thought cicero never shut up#lucius cornelius sulla#harriet flower#roman republics#just roman memes#jlrrt reads
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Just finished Harriet Flower's Roman Republics. I'll write up my notes on the final chapters later, but here's my general thoughts for now:
I like the basic idea of dividing the republic into more than just the early/middle/late periods, but I don't think all of Flower's proposed divisions are well supported.
She brings up some good points that are often overlooked (like the impact of the Servile Wars on Tiberius Gracchus' tribunate and the Cimbric War), but I disagree with others (e.g. characterizing the first triumvirate as a decade-long hegemony).
I wish she'd included a more detailed timeline of milestone laws and events - although doing so may have undermined her argument.
I also believe she understates the impact of the First and Second Punic Wars on Roman politics.
I would've liked to see more concrete, specific examples defining the political culture of each time period as distinct, a la Gruen's systematic, multi-tiered argument in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic. Granted, that's very difficult for earlier time periods, but that should serve to emphasize our uncertainty there. As-is, the book feels more like an outline than an in-depth analysis. Gruen also makes several arguments opposite to Flowers which I don't think she adequately addressed.
The complete skipping of 300-180 BCE, without even acknowledging it, still bothers me. A lot.
On the bright side, I do think she effectively demonstrates that the Roman republic changed greatly from 509-133 BCE, perhaps more than most people give it credit for. And I think she makes a solid case for viewing Sulla's constitution as a new form of government in itself, one that was never fully accepted by the people, and that this made it more vulnerable to coups and harder for the new Senate to work together.
It's an interesting book, and sometimes thought-provoking, but needs to be read very carefully so you can decide which parts you agree and disagree with. I have enough reservations about it that I won't be putting it on my favorites list. Still, I respect the author's work, and might suggest it for people who enjoy reading critically, want to examine an alternative viewpoint, and who already know a fair bit about Roman history.
#i only review/liveblog authors i respect on here. if i detest someone i prefer not to give them free publicity at all#book review#harriet flower#roman republics#jlrrt reads
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Times Caligula was probably fucking with people
I have a pet theory that at least some of Caligula's "madness" was really him being a huge troll and screwing with people, and that several incidents the ancient historians take seriously were shitty jokes taken out of context. From Suetonius, Gaius:
Wandering into emperor Tiberius' bedroom at night with a dagger, thinking, "Eh..." and wandering back out. (12)
Chucking money into crowds to make people scramble for it. (18, 26)
Telling people "I'm gonna fuck the moon." (22)
Getting into arguments with a statue of Jupiter. (22)
Constantly pranking his uncle Claudius. (23)
[Caligula's daughter violently attacks her playmates] Caligula: "Yep, she's definitely mine." (25)
Promising an exciting gladiator show and then swapping in old shitty fighters at the last second. (26)
Reminding people "I could kill you whenever I like." (29, 32)
Grumbling about how the empire was too peaceful and there was nothing heroic left for him to do. (31)
"Everyone reads Homer. I should ban him and see what happens." (34)
Leading an army to the coast, making them gather seashells as "spoils of war," then telling them "Treat yourselves!" on the tiny monetary bonus he awarded them. (46)
Practicing goofy faces in his mirror to freak people out. (50)
Invites three terrified senators to the palace in the dead of night. Jumps out from behind a curtain and does a song and dance number in drag. Refuses to explain. Leaves. (54)
Does not actually make his horse consul, but pampers it so much people said he wanted to. (55)
Taunts the praetorian guards with so many "sissy" jokes they get fed up and shank him. (56, 58)
When people heard he was dead they thought he was pulling a stunt. (60)
#i left out the really dark/gory stuff. reader beware if you look these up!#also take everything suetonius says with a truckload of salt. many of these stories are probably false#still funny tho#suetonius#caligula#jlrrt reads#jlrrt essays#the twelve caesars is a comedy
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And they were triumvirs...oh my god they were triumvirs
(Also “long term associate”...you mean the childhood friend whom Augustus entrusted with all his plans, the one who held all the same legal powers Augustus did, the one who was included in family portraits and buried with him? That kind of associate?)
(David Shotter, Tiberius)
#i can not be the only one who sees this right#octavian has two hands#octavian#marcus agrippa#livia drusilla#ancient Rome#jlrrt reads#david shotter#octagrippa
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[Grabbing Octavian] show us Julius Caesar's terrible Oedipus fanfiction you coward
For Caesar, like many other young aristocrats, it was not enough simply to read great literature - he was also inspired to compose his own works. Suetonius mentions a poem praising Hercules as well as a tragedy entitled Oedipus. The quality of these immature works may not have been especially high - though probably no better or no worse than those written by other aristocrats who later went on to greater things - and they were suppressed by Caesar's adopted son, Emperor Augustus.
Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus, trans. Teresa Martín Lorenzo
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That being said, if you put a plate of bay leaves in front of Julius Caesar and told him it was a salad, with perfume oil on as a dressing, it's quite possible he would eat it just to be polite.
Suetonius, Divus Iulius, 53
#if you snuck it to him when he was busy he might not even notice#suetonius#julius caesar#just roman memes#jlrrt reads
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Plutarch. My man. Are you telling me Gaius Gracchus kept his audience's attention by taking off his clothes? Are you telling me other Roman politicians started doing that too??
Plutarch, Life of Tiberius Gracchus
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We need to talk about the fact that Servilia, Caesar's longtime mistress, was
Cato's sister
Brutus' mom
Cassius' mother-in-law
Bibulus' aunt-in-law
Ahenobarbus' sister-in-law
Catulus' first cousin
Wife of next year's consul when her sexy message to Caesar got blown up on the floor of the Senate during the Catilinarian conspiracy
Legally and financially independent from the age of 24 onward, with her own political influence
Able to to piss off the entire Catonian faction by sleeping with Caesar
I've only just started Servilia and Her Family by Susan Treggiari, but I think I've found another Roman matron to get overly attached to.
#it's servilia time!!#i'm tired of only hearing about her in relation to men#what kind of woman must she have been to put up with cato & bibulus & ahenobarbie's bullshit?#DID she put up with their bullshit? i suspect not#servilia#jlrrt reads#servilia and her family#susan treggiari#the great roman clusterfuck
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Cassius' to-do list, March 15, 44 BCE:
Assassinate tyrant
Liberate republic
Celebrate son-boy
(Susan Treggiari, Servilia and Her Family, p. 139)
#[cassius] we should bring him to the senate. father-son bonding time#[brutus] he's 14 and we're planning to stab someone#[cassius] it can be an early birthday present#gaius cassius longinus#ides of march#just roman memes#jlrrt reads#susan treggiari#servilia and her family
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Things Agrippa did during his year as aedile:
Repaired three aqueducts (Aqua Marcia, Aqua Appia and Aqua Vetus).
Built a fourth aqueduct (Aqua Iulia).
Repaired and cleaned the sewer system, at one point taking a boat through the Cloaca Maxima to prove it.
Repaired public streets and buildings.
Built 170 free public bathhouses, 500 fountains, 700 wells and 130 reservoirs.
Installed 300 statues and 400 columns, mostly on the fountains and wells.
Established a permanent construction crew to prevent Rome's infrastructure from falling into disrepair again.
Built public gardens and warehouses to store food.
Provided free haircuts/shaves to everyone in Rome.
Hosted public games and theater productions.
Paid for all of this with his own money.
(From Lindsay Powell's Marcus Agrippa, ch. 3)
#if you leave him unassigned to a task he just starts building things. like a prairie dog making tunnels#when did he sleep??#jlrrt reads#lindsay powell#marcus agrippa
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Herod: Hail Caesar! I, King Herod of Judea, have come to request an alliance with your benevolent not-a-dictatorship-we-promise!
Augustus: Haven't I seen you before?
Herod: I can't imagine where. Behold, I named a new city after you!
Augustus: I remember now - you were on Antony's side at Actium!
Herod: Must have been one of my cousins. We're just a poor dynasty, our men have to share three names between us.
Augustus: That sounds wrong but I don't know enough about Judea to argue.
Lindsay Powell, Marcus Agrippa
(Σεβαστός is a loose translation of "revered" or "Augustus.")
#jlrrt reads#herod#octavian#lindsay powell#the herodian dynasty did repeat its names a lot tho#just roman memes
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Just started reading The City War by Sam Starbuck and I like how from the very first page I can tell Marcus Brutus is into men.
#aka copperbadge#i really liked his other works so i'm excited for this one!#marcus junius brutus#the city war#sam starbuck#jlrrt reads
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And now, a book review I've been saving. I want to savor this one:
Julius Caesar and the Roman People, by Robert Morstein-Marx, 2021.
It's hard to overstate how much I love this book. If you only read one book about Julius Caesar, get this one. It's not just a biography of Caesar, but a reassessment of the role of the "People" in Roman politics, of how democratic vs. oligarchic the republic truly was, of reliability and bias in ancient sources, and how we construct history through the lens of our own values and fears. Morstein-Marx sets out not merely to describe Caesar's life, but explore where our ideas about him came from, what biases are in our sources, and how those biases erased the agency and diversity of the Roman People themselves.
When I first read this book, I found it persuasive and well-researched - Morstein-Marx is a professor of classics, after all - but its conclusions were so different from the pop culture view of Caesar I had to check if this was another Michael Parenti situation, where an author exaggerates and cherry-picks evidence to support his own political agenda. But, from all the other references to this book I found, Morstein-Marx does seem to be a respected scholar who knows what he's talking about, and other historians like Erich Gruen, Fred Drogula and John T. Ramsey seem to agree with a lot of his points.
So, what are his main points?
That Caesar was not a radical popularis or Marian, nor was he consciously attempting to subvert the republic or install himself as an autocrat; his career up till 49 BCE was broadly conventional, his policies moderate, and his rift with Cato et al is better explained by personal rivalries, not ideology.
That Caesar was in many ways more traditional and respectful of the law than Cato, Bibulus and their allies, and there was a legitimate argument for siding with him in 49 BCE.
That much of the argument for seeing Caesar as subversive or radical depends on equating the government with the Senate, and downplaying the role of the People.
That neither Caesar nor Pompey deliberately started the civil war, but that it happened due to a breakdown in communications between the triumvirs, and fearmongering from a pro-war faction in the Senate.
That the majority of the Senate and People probably sided with him during the civil war.
That it's not actually clear whether Caesar "wanted to be king." Many of his actions as dictator are better explained as ad hoc responses to immediate political crises, while others may have been taken out of context, exaggerated or misattributed to him.
Now, you might be thinking this sounds awfully pro-Caesar. And Caesar does come across more sympathetically than in most portrayals. But Morstein-Marx also reminds us that Caesar killed or enslaved about two million people, ended free Roman elections, and other awful things. He tries to explain Caesar's actions, but not to excuse them.
Morstein-Marx's argument is not that Caesar was a hero, or a villain, but an ordinary man and product of his time. He was, to be honest, just not that important until his runaway success in Gaul. He had no long-term master plan, but was reacting to immediate issues most of the time, like all politicians do. His policies were mostly conventional, not revolutionary.
Julius Caesar and the Roman People is an attempt to take off the filters of hindsight, myth, and propaganda, and try to understand Julius Caesar's actions in the context of his time. And it will teach you a lot about how history is "constructed" along the way.
#i really need to reread this one and see if i still agree with all his conclusions#but he definitely Did The Research#robert morstein-marx#julius caesar and the roman people#jlrrt reads#book rec#book review#julius caesar#hot takes with jlrrt
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Notes on Roman demography:
It's really, really hard to estimate how many people lived in Rome or in Italy as a whole. In republican times, the census only counted free adult men.
Augustus' census recorded 4 million people in Italy, but we don't know how to interpret this number. If it's like earlier censuses (male citizens only), it implies a total population of around 10 million, and a big surge in the last 200 years.
But our literary sources almost all imply the population was stagnating or declining due to the wars and famines of the 1st century BCE, and Augustus himself thought the population was declining.
So, most historians now think the 4 million number does include all Roman citizens in Italy, male and female. If so, this is indeed a decrease from the 4.5 million we've estimated for 225 BCE, based on Polybius' account of the Second Punic War.
Losing over 11% of the population, even after adding new citizens through manumission, immigration and colony-founding, would have had massive effects on politics. (It's the equivalent of the USA losing 37 million people.) This may have made the surviving Romans more willing to accept Augustus' autocratic rule, which at least promised stability. It might have offered career opportunities to new men like Cicero and Marcus Agrippa as the ranks of the nobility were thinned. And I strongly suspect it contributed to Augustus' notorious marriage laws, which unsuccessfully tried to incentivize having more kids.
I also wonder if high mortality rates are part of the reason Rome was so open to integrating foreigners as citizens. Rome was at war nearly every year, and in the Second Punic War (for instance) lost over 25% of its adult male population in battles. (1)
However! Rome's slow recovery during and after the Augustan age, plus greater economic mobility, helped the population bounce back, reaching a high around 120 CE of 1 million in Rome and ~75 million for the empire as a whole. (2)
(The population and economy got so big we can see traces of it in polar ice cores - they raised Earth's carbon dioxide levels!) (3)
Life expectancy at birth was probably around 25-35. Half of all children probably died before the age of 10, but if you lived past that, it wasn't unusual to reach your 50s or 60s.
Slaves made up somewhere between 20-33% of the population of the late republic. (4)
Freedmen made up another big chunk. The highest estimate I've seen was 50% in Rome itself; lowest is around 20-25%. But in any case, there were a lot. (4)
Due to such high child mortality, and adult mortality due to war and disease, the average Roman woman gave birth around nine times. This partly accounts for why Roman girls were married off in their teens. The age gap between first-time brides and their husbands, and the number of pregnancies and children, were major systemic factors that kept Roman women subjugated under patriarchy. (5)
Adrian Goldsworthy, Antony and Cleopatra
Walter Scheidel, "Demography," The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World.
Mary Beard, Meet the Romans (documentary series)
Erich Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
Mary Beard, SPQR
The rest comes from Neville Morley's "Social Structure and Demography," in A Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx.
#my epubs make it hard to cite page numbers but poke me if you need a quote to ctrl+F#roman demography#neville morley#social structure and demography#a companion to the roman republic#jlrrt reads
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I need everyone to understand how horrendously socially awkward Tiberius actually was. We are talking about a man who tried to do the Roman equivalent of a princess visiting a hospital to fundraise for charity, and--
Suetonius, Tiberius, 11
#jlrrt reads#with your help we can meowmeow emperor tiberius#tiberius#suetonius#just roman memes#the twelve caesars is a comedy
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I love how they've found independent confirmation of Stupid Weather Bullshit happening after Caesar died, for completely unrelated reasons.
Imagine you're one of the conspirators, and Caesar's been honored with fancy titles that are waaay too close to declaring him a god, and now there's his own temple and priesthood dedicated to him. And you're like, fuck that, Caesar's just some dude. Only his army and bank account make him special. Stab him and he's just as dead as any of us.
So you do. He's super dead now. Y'all shanked him 23 times just to make sure.
And then the fucking sun goes out.
(Kathryn Tempest, Brutus: The Noble Conspirator, chapter 5)
#the comet at his funeral games was independently confirmed in chinese records#only caesar could manage to be a drama queen after he died#people must've been scared shitless#julius caesar#ides of march#jlrrt reads#kathryn tempest#brutus: the noble conspirator
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