Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
When you are adapting Latin texts for use by the BBC, how do you go about bringing them to life for today’s audience?
The thing about adapting the texts is that the framework is there for you. Essentially, all that you are doing is a glorified cutting job. But you have to cut it in such a way that preserves both the structure of the narrative and those episodes within it that will give the listener, who may not be familiar with the text, some sense of the reason why it is so powerful and the reason why it has had the impact not just over the centuries but also over the millennia. Obviously it is harder to adapt a classical text than it is, say, a 19th century novel, simply because we are further removed from the Roman world.
With all the upheavals in the world do you think there are things that we can still learn from Roman times?
I think that the quality of great literature is that it contains timeless truths. It is like a kaleidoscope – our understanding of the text will change according to the way that we ourselves change. In terms of the lessons to be drawn from Roman history, of course it will always hold a mirror up to the present, for the simple reason that what is distinctive about Western civilisation, particularly compared with the other great civilisations like China or India or even the Middle East, is that in the West we have had two cracks at it. We had the first starting in BC and lasting up until the collapse of the Roman Empire and then the second, building on the ruins left by classical civilisation, continuing into the present. And all the way through our attempts to construct civilisation we are always overshadowed by the previous attempt, so we will find in Roman history what I guess we find in science fiction – that there are points of resemblance heightened and made strange by the way that they are also completely different.
Let’s have a look at some of your choices. The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius gives the inside story on some of Rome’s greatest emperors.
I thought that 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 classics! Throughout the Middle Ages when people wanted to have a model they would look back to great Roman historians. I was thinking I should possibly have chosen the man who I think is the greatest Roman historian, Tacitus, who is a sort of pathologist of vice, particularly the vice of autocracy. I think he is one of the all-time great historians. But I decided against that because my next two choices are very infused with the spirit of Tacitus. So I thought I would go for something slightly lighter, which is to Tacitus what I guess a gossip magazine like Heat is to The Times Literary Supplement!
Suetonius’s work is a collection of biographies of the first 12 Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar through to Domitian. And it really had a crucial sense of shaping our understanding of Imperial Rome as a place of vice and savagery and sexual depravity and violent, brutal, bawdy splendour.
What particular emperors would make the headlines for one of today’s gossip magazines?
I think that what would leap out would be the shenanigans of Caligula, who indulged in incest, forced prostitution – lunacies that would put…
Tom Holland’s novels are set in various periods of history, ranging from Ancient Egypt to 1880s London. He is also the author of three highly praised works of history – Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History; Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West won the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006, and Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom was published in 2008. He has also adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. His translation of Herodotus for Penguin Classics will be published next year
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Charming essay on Roman life in first century AD, including eruption of Vesuvius. Pliny's letters spiced with tales of haunted houses, Vestal virgins, "strange cultists known as Christians"
Short list of great books from classical antiquity that have shaped our civilization. "Reading these books will make you a better reader of almost everything else that comes out of the western world"
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