cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 40

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I'm trying to use my other account at least occasionally so I posted about my Yuletide gifts there, including the salon-relevant 12k fic that features Fritz, Heinrich, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Saint Germain, Caroline Daum (Fredersdorf's wife), and Groundhog Day tropes! (Don't need to know canon.)

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From:

cahn

Another thing we don't know: what is up with the Tetrarchy? The word "tetrarch" meant something different in the ancient world, and the word was never used by contemporaries to describe the structure of the Roman empire under Diocletian.

What did it mean in the ancient world? (I just read it as "four people ruling.")

From:

mildred_of_midgard

To quote from Leadbetter:

"Tetrarchs" were independent rulers of portions of a kingdom, most famously post-Herodian Judaea, divided between surviving sons. Later in the century, Pliny the Elder described tetrarchies as regnorum instar singulae et in regna contribuuntur ("each is the equivalent of a kingdom, and also part of one"). But at no point was the term ever employed to refer to collegial power: a "tetrach" was not one of four rulers but the ruler of a quarter of a discrete region. It is hardly surprising to find that Diocletian, his colleagues and successors were never referred to in antiquity as "tetrachs"...

It was Edward Gibbon who, in magnificent and laudatory prose, identified the "new empire" as an entirely new system for the mediation of power. Gibbon's Diocletian is a noble prince and wise politician, a man, above all, of reason and moderation...Gibbon's Diocletian is a man of reason and his arrangements are to be comprehended as the constructions of a rational man. Gibbon's political analysis of Diocletian's entirely sensible, indeed clockwork, reform of the imperial office has been deeply influential and still provokes responses. It was not, however, Gibbon who called it a "Tetrarchy".

Indeed, the term does not seem to have been devised for this purpose until the 1870s.

Really, I should just nominate Gibbon's Decline and Fall as the fandom and Diocletian and Maximian as the characters. :P

In the *exact same way* as my love of Hannibal came from a 19th century German historian (and you know how they can be), Theodor Mommsen, and when I started reading modern works, I had to give the same internal sigh and go, "Okay, fannish brain is separate from scholarly brain" ~~Oh hi Fritz~~.

From:

selenak

Hey, as 19th century German historians go, Theodor Mommsen was one of the more liberal ones. And you're in good company; no less a man than George Bernard Shaw fell in love with his Caesar and based the characterisation in his play Caesar and Cleopatra on Mommsen.

I really need to read Gibbon some day. I only know quotes, I confess.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, Mommsen's far from the worst if you're comparing him to other 19th century German historians! But if you're comparing him to late 20th/early 21st century historians, he does his "great man of history" shtick to the point where it skews the narrative. Among other things, I felt he gave Cicero and Cato short shrift, while giving Peter III some fanboying competition in his treatment of Caesar. I need to quote this sentence for Cahn: "[Caesar] retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance, or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness of his own manly beauty."

How could Shaw help falling for Mommsen's Caesar, I ask!

So I had to give the people around Hannibal a bit more credit and him a bit less after reading more modern takes.

Mommsen also manages to produce opinions like this, which I still remember 12 years later:

The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared from Rome. It is implied in the very nature of the case, that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp more quickly than any subordinate community. There the upper classes speedily withdraw from urban public life, in order to find their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city; there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctuating population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt, and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble.

I need to reread Gibbon, I keep meaning to and then I get sucked into something else. He's pretty great if you take him for what he is, an 18th century Englishman breaking new ground and making a lot of mistakes along the way. (I really liked Mommsen too. I really liked Mommsen, to the point where he's been one of my motivations to learn German! I just had to adjust some opinions based on new evidence, as I did with Gibbon.)

Edited Date: 2023-01-04 06:38 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Ah, makes sense and I do remember that they were called tetrarchs in post-Herodian Judea now that he brings that up (although I probably still didn't know what one was).

Gibbon's Decline and Fall was something I always meant to read and didn't, during the period in my life where I would actually have carried it out and possibly also fallen in love. Maybe someday!