Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This books is a wonderful way to get a sense of the vast sweep of this rising Roman power, the lives and incredible adventures and exotic fights, in one individual soldier’s lifetime.
So the topic you’ve chosen is Enemies of Ancient Rome.
Yes, Rome is really hot right now: there are video games, TV series and lots of books out there about the Roman Empire. It was hard making a choice, so I’ve chosen some personal favourites and some that are off the beaten track.
Your first choice is a work of fiction, Winter Quarters.
This is a historical novel written by Alfred Duggan. It came out in 1956, and it’s my favourite. I still have the battered paperback, held together with yellowing Scotch tape, that I read on my first trip to Greece 30 years ago, and really was my entry into the ancient world. It’s an odyssey about a warrior from Gaul, which had been recently conquered by Rome. And every time I reread it – and I do that every few years – I get swept up in it, this perspective of a former enemy of Ancient Rome, who decides to join the army of Julius Caesar. He leaves his village in the Pyrenees, and goes on Roman campaigns across Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor. Then they travel to the edges of the Steppes, to what is now southern Russia. Finally his Roman army is defeated in Parthia, now modern Iran, and our hero survives and decides to join the victorious Parthian army. He finds himself patrolling the borders of Afghanistan.
So he ends up once again as an enemy of Ancient Rome?
He’s an enemy of Rome again, but now he’s actually looking out towards the East, towards the raiders that are harassing Parthia. He is hoping to be rescued by the Romans, who will then reward him with citizenship, though it’s pretty hopeless. Duggan has got a deep knowledge of the first century BC, but what I really enjoy is his ability to write from the point of view of non-Romans. These are enemies of Rome, outsiders, former foes, who are drawn into Rome, this powerful magnetic force. The defeated Gauls were welcomed into Rome’s legions, but they experienced a lot of ambivalence. They’re wary, they’re proud. The hero is proud of being from the Pyrenees, but also feels pride in serving in the greatest army in the ancient world – and he struggles to understand the alien character and culture of Rome. This book allows you to peer at the Romans through their enemies’ eyes. It’s also a wonderful way to get a sense of the vast sweep of this rising Roman power, the incredible adventures and exotic sights that could be packed into one individual soldier’s lifetime. These were tumultuous times.
I also think it’s relevant today, because it shows how the wealth and military might of a great empire can become this inexorable force, that either destroys the enemy or it can attract them, sucking outsiders into its world view and drawing them in.
Yes, I can see why it could apply to America today, also in terms of the ambivalence. People love America but they also love to hate it.
They want to participate in the empire’s wealth and the power, but they’re really wary and cautious and adversarial and want to resist it too. And that tension really comes out in this novel.
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Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in classics and history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. Her most recent book, Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates the Great, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. The comparison between Mithradates and Osama bin Laden is, she says, a tempting one – Mithradates began with a really terrifying act of genocide, which lured the Romans into a costly, long and unwinnable war in the Near East. ‘It was quite a wild goose chase he led them on. And they lost track of him at the end of the Third Mithradatic War. In 63BC he died, old and free.’
