Classics Salon!
Dec. 3rd, 2025 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSo yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.
But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!
My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.
Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)
(This is not supposed to be just formildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )
But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!
My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.
Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)
(This is not supposed to be just for
mildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )
Classics salon
Date: 2025-12-03 08:26 pm (UTC)I wish I had about 10 times as much free time as I do, but I'm going to try anyway.
First of all, I just want to say that my main motivation for Classics salon is I want to write a paper about source criticism in history, and I specifically want to compare the sparsity of sources in ancient history with the abundance of sources in more modern history. I think Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great are a perfect pair to use as case studies, so I just need to brush up on my Alexander historiography.
So,
In particular, there's one claim that I SWEAR I read in 2019 and now can't find. It's that Olympias and Alexander were probably not in on the Philip assassination, because the assassin (Pausanias) almost got away, and if he had escaped, he would have talked. If you come across this claim, Selena, PLEASE tell me. It's the perfect exemplar of a specific category of argumentation I'm trying to point out is flawed.
And I will try to have something useful to say soon!
Oh, recs. A couple quick ones:
Fiction: Jeanne Reames' Dancing with the Lion.
Nonfiction: Well, Jeanne Reames has a post here: https://www.tumblr.com/jeannereames/742984337387143168/hi-there-ive-really-enjoyed-your-blog-theres
Re: Classics salon
Date: 2025-12-04 09:42 am (UTC)What I’m getting at: how about collecting some reactions through the centuries or even millennia in AtG’s case about who claimed what about their sex life and how that went into their image, and when it did and didn’t feature in the public perception of them?
Re: Classics salon
Date: 2025-12-04 07:36 pm (UTC)Blanning saying Katte was executed by axe, while Peter's mother says she's heard her son was executed by sword in England, and Wilhelmine putting a scaffold in her description of Katte's execution, are all excellent examples of a specific type of historical error that doesn't get discussed enough: having a mental "schema" of what a phenomenon (like an execution) looks like, and innocently, yet erroneously, supplying details from that schema into a specific instance of that phenomenon.
People saying that Fredersdorf was stationed in Küstrin, that Peter escaped Wesel because he was warned, that Fritz and Katte were arrested in Wesel, are examples of another type of error: story simplification.
Pausanias almost escaping: historians putting too much weight on claims of eyewitness testimony, of which there are plenty of easily refuted examples in Fritzian history.
I have specific things I want to say about these categories of methodological flaws, by drawing on the field of cognitive science, things I think are new or at least not often said in the domain of historiography. And that's what I'm goign to be on the lookout for when it comes to combing through Alexander sources.
The main thrust of the planned article is twofold:
1) Fritzian historiography, which has an abundance of contemporary sources that all contradict each other, shows us how unreliable many claims are. Just because those claims are uncontested in Alexandrian historiography doesn't mean we should blindly trust them. It just means we don't have enough contemporary written material to see the extent of contradictions that we see in a more abundantly attested period.
2) Cognitive science shows us patterns in the mistakes that Fritizan contemporaries made. We can apply those to look for types of uncontradicted claims in more poorly attested periods that we shouldn't put too much weight on.
I suspect this is a fairly original argument (very few people study multiple very different types of historical periods well enough to do source study, *and* add cognitive science on top of it), and I have a journal picked out and everything. I just need a good selection of examples from Alexander's life, and some confidence that I have a handle on Alexandrian source analysis (if I say something is uncontradicted, or fits a contemporary schema, I'd better have some reason for saying so).
This is rather an ambitious effort at rather a busy time of my life, so source analysis with you, if you're willing, will be invaluable!
Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-04 05:21 pm (UTC)Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-04 09:52 pm (UTC)I did read a Judith Tarr about Alexander once, long ago. Chiefly what I remember about it is that there's an obviously (but not described as such) autistic savant girl/young woman, whom the narrative diagnoses as having no soul, and the "happy" ending is when the soul of a recently deceased Alexander possesses her and goes off in her body to engage in feats of glory as queen of the Amazons, thus finally giving her life meaning.
...Even 25 years ago I could see *some* of how problematic that was.
Mary Renault never worked for me, not in college and not a few years ago, but I'm definitely in a minority. You might like her!
If I find good nonfiction (I haven't read anything in the Reames post, which is why I linked to someone else's post) that I can rec you, I will. Mostly I think the things that have worked really well for me, with my specific tastes and background, probably wouldn't work for a beginner. I'll keep my eye out!
Re: Classics salon - fiction
From:Re: Classics salon - fiction
Date: 2025-12-05 03:44 am (UTC)I also strongly recommend Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin (based on Lavinia in the Aeneid). I also enjoyed Colleen McCullough's late Republic ancient Rome series (though IMO she isn't as good when she gets up to Julius Caesar because he's her favorite and you can tell). :D
Oh! Also! If you would consider reading graphic novels and are okay with canon levels of sex/nudity/violence in drawn form, I strongly recommend Eric Shanower's series about the Trojan War. The first volume is A Thousand Ships. Your library may have it.
Re: Classics salon - fiction
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From:Alexander sources
Date: 2025-12-17 11:50 pm (UTC)If you want a quick overview, see the first part of this blog post.
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Date: 2025-12-03 11:40 pm (UTC)With regard to dubious claims by historians, the debates over the historicity of various New Testament figures and events are a good place to look. I think the methods of the Jesus Seminar (now quite dated, but still) were utterly insufficient to answer the questions they were asking, for example.
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Date: 2025-12-04 05:46 pm (UTC)Uhhhhh in my head Church Latin is classics too :P Close enough! (As I think I've told you, I've sung church Latin, does that count :P )
Oh I remember reading about the Jesus Seminar in Time magazine as a kid! Though I don't remember anything about it except that it was a Big Deal at the time. I read the Wikipedia article and wow, that was a wild ride. They voted on whether stuff was historically attested??
Since
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Date: 2025-12-04 11:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-12-04 09:24 am (UTC)Re: Plutarch, here I must admit I never until now read more than excerpts, usually quoted in more modern biographies, and definitely not the biographies in the way he wrote them i.e. pairing up a Roman and a Greek guy (of course they’re always men) for compare and contrast. Given that Mildred wants to write an “Alexander and Fritz” as a modern variation of that principle, it might be interesting to check out some of those pairings in the original, rather than just one or the other.
Josephus and Plutarch
Date: 2025-12-04 05:52 pm (UTC)Also up for Plutarch, though if we do any of that, I think I might need a lot of historical scaffolding :P (Although I am with the right crowd for that! :D ) Part of the allure of Josephus, of course, is that Feuchtwanger already gave me that scaffolding :D
Let's talk more about this in January! I'm aware that your darth real life doesn't stop then, but hey, you reading at a darth RL speed might be... well, maybe it's only a single order of magnitude higher than my reading at normal RL speed :)
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Date: 2025-12-05 04:00 am (UTC)I mentioned my favorite fiction above, but I think you should read some ancient Greek tragedies! They're very operatic and I think you would like them.
In chronological order, the surviving tragedies are by: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They each have a different style and how they deal with myth and the gods is different.
Sophocles is my personal favorite, but they're all good. The Oedipus Cycle would be a very classic place to start? Or maybe Sophocles' Ajax, since you've just read the Odyssey and it features Iliad-Odyssey characters. I also love Euripides' The Bacchae -- it gives me chills. Euripides' The Trojan Women is a heartbreaking play about what happens to the women and children after the fall of Troy.
As for translations, I anti-rec Lattimore. I find his translations flat and unpoetic and boring. :P Some Classicists like him because he sticks close to the original Greek (at the expense of making the English sound good in my opinion), but I think that's not very helpful when you don't know ancient Greek and are relatively new to reading the Classics.
I can probably dig up some positive recs if you let me know where you want to start. :D
Oh, and maybe Suetonius if you want to read about the early Roman emperors? He's kinda the gossip tabloid of the ancient world. :D Not always reliable, but entertaining.
Speaking of not always reliable but entertaining: Herodotus! :D I'm actually quite fond of him. And every once in a while you get something like gold-digging giant ants.
Also also, if you're not familiar with Berlioz's opera Les Troyens: the music is great and it sticks close to the Aeneid.
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Date: 2025-12-05 04:33 am (UTC)Ohhhhh I actually saw The Trojan Women... decades ago now... put on by a Classics department in Greek (we had translations of course), and I remember it being just stunning.
But okay, let's see, maybe let's go with the Oedipus cycle to start, do you know any good translations? And ha, I am glad you also do not like Lattimore (who I tried out and who put me off the Odyssey for a while).
Ahhhh I have seen Suetonius and Herodotus name-dropped, excellent!
I have seen Les Troyens around but I have not listened or watched it at all! Right, I will have to rectify that!
The probability I get to any of this before Yuletide is over is dim but I am really hoping to at that point! Thank you!!
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Date: 2025-12-05 05:21 am (UTC)One is the complete plays of Sophocles, translated by Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, edited by Moses Hadas. The other is the Oedipus Cycle, translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald.
Haha, no, not a Lattimore fan! The Classics department at my college kept trying to push his translations on us, and I Did Not Like them!
I should mention, in case you're not aware: it was a convention of ancient Greek tragedy that characters could not die on stage. So it's very common for a dramatic death scene or other catastrophe to take place offstage, and then you get a messenger who comes onstage to tell the audience about it. :)
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Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars
Date: 2025-12-15 12:19 pm (UTC)Anyway. Holland in his preface is a bit defensive of Suetonius. Basically: "No, he wasn't just the tabloid sensationalist of Roman writers! Look of how he's demonstrating source criticism of different claims and deduction when deciding exactly where Caligula was born! Also, he never claimed to be a historian like Tacitus, he was a biographer, which is a different thing! He became a role model for medieval writers like Einhard and has shaped our mental image of those guys and Roman Emperors in general forever more!"
All true, though I would say I wish Suetonius had employed source criticism and deduction a bit more often and about more important subjects than where his main subjects and their entourage were born, instead of delivering the sex fiend parts without as much as a raised eyebrow (well, if he doesn't like someone). Even Tom Holland admits that the one biography where one really really needed the ancient equivalent of a footnote or several because it's glaringly obvious Suetonius is using mutually exclusive and completely contradictory sources is Tiberius, more about this later.
(Like Holland, I also note he does mention the source for a lot of uncomplimentary Augustus claims every time in his overall "this is the greatest Caesar of them all!" biography, because it's either Antony or Antony's relations, the insinuation being of course it's all just propaganda, whereas for later Caesars, negative claims are "it is said" or "people say" or "it is alleged that" without saying who does the alleging.)
Since Suetonius worked as Hadrian's secretary for several years, he had complete access to the Imperial archives during that time, and he thus is able to quote directly from several letters - but these are all from the Octavian/Augustus era. (So we get excerpts from Augustus' letters to Livia, and to Tiberius, for example, and also a letter from Marc Antony to Octavian which I knew because it does get quoted a lot.) Now part of the archive was lost in the year of the four emperors when part of the Palatine went up in fire, but I do find it telling that he doesn't quote from letters much closer to his own life time.
Except for the first one - Gaius Julius Caesar - whose first section is lost, all the biographies are structured the same way: 1.) Ancestry, especially paternal ancestors, 2.) Chronological life of the guy, great achievements and battles and laws, if any 3.) Character dissection - how did he look like, what habits did he have, quirks and foibles (sex scandals, if any). In the case of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, you also have a division that's best phrased in the Caligula biography where he famously says "But enough of the princeps - what now remains to be described is the monster", i.e. up to a point, the Emperor in question is still described as a mixed bag, with good and bad qualities, and then it's all scum, all the time. Though come to think of it, Vitellius, aka Emperor No.3 in the Year of the Four Emperors and the one the Austrian secret service used as the code name of FW, is described as bad from the start.)
There is some attempt at what we'd call psychology, i.e. he thinks Tiberius must have always had these urges, he just repressed them for most of his life and that he grew old and bitter before making it to the throne didn't help, or that killing his mother both destroyed the last restraints Nero had and ensured he'd never get a hold on himself again because of the guilt, but not much. For example, Augustus going from ruthless killer Octavian who Father of the Fatherland Augustus is just presented as happening, same with Titus basically having the character arc of Shakespeare's Prince Hal to Henry V , becoming better, not worse with more power.
Naturally, the patriarchal mindset abounds. Augustus, we learn, even as an old man with decades of harping on bringing back Roman morality "greatly enjoyed deflowering virgins", and hey, why not, but the poor man having to banish his daughter Julia and his granddaughter of the same name because they had extramarital sex, the sluts!) But we're also constantly reminded that Roman taboos are not our taboos.
(I mean, not completely - there are some obvious overlaps: incest, for starters.)
The two eras where this is most obvious are a) slaves and b) homosexual encounters. Suetonius notes approvingly that Vespasian after the long time assault on Roman morality that were the reigns of the previous Emperors introduced a law by which Roman women who had sex with someone else's slave lost their privileges as free women and were to be treated as slaves themselves. Having sex with your own slaves, by contrast, is cool - unless you're a man and you're letting your slave top you. Then you're just a degenerate.
Which brings us to: m/m relations. If Suetonius is an example (which of course can be argued), Romans were cool with adolescent fumblings, and also man (of higher social status)/ boy (of lower social status) pairings as long as the man was on top. But consensual m/m relations between social equals? Quelle horreur! No matter who tops. If they're not social equals but both free Roman men, it's still bad. It means one of them is treating the other like a slave, and the other is allowing that. If one of these men is the Emperor, then we're talking of human scum here, clearly.
(Of course the Emperors in question get accused of genuinely awful (to us) sexual acts as well. But it still feels somewhat bizarre, even knowing about this in theory, when again and again, you come across consensual relations between two adult men as being seen as bad whereas any Roman (either gender)/ their own slave or Roman man/young male adolescent relation is not.
(Given Suetonius' boss was Hadrian and one of the explanations for Antinous' death was "he was grown up and couldn't stand being used as a boy by Hadrian anymore", that's enlightening re: the social climate Antinous lived in.)
Two examples for "their taboos are not our taboos", one from Julius Caesar's biography which is a good illustration of Roman snobbery: With an equal disregard for the law and the traditions of his country, (...) he admitted into the Senate House men who had actually been given their citzenship - some of them Gauls who had barely left barbarism behind! What is more, he put his own slaves in charge of the mint and of collecting revenues for the sate, and trusted the care and command of the three legions he had left behind in Alexandria to Rufio - a man who was not just the son of one of his freedmen, but someone he had continued to use sexuall well past adolescence.
And one from the short biogrpahy of Otho, another of the four in the Year of the Four Emperors: Subsequently, following his father's death, he wormed his way into the favour of a freedwoman who, although so old as to be virtually decrepit, nevertheless wielded greatinfluence at the court: all the incentive he needed to pretend to be in love with her. Then, once he had exploited his relationship with the freedwoman to ingratiate himself with Nero, he found it a simple matter to become the Emperor's best friend: partly because they were so similar in character, but also, it is alleged, because they were in the habit of abusing each other sexually.
Speaking of it being worth remembering what was happening in Suetonius' own life time: in the Julius Caesor biography, there is something mentioned I don't recall reading about before, to wit, that the Jews saw him as their special patron. At the height of the public mourning, large numbers of people from distant lands also joined in the lamentations, each in their own distinctive fashion - and none more so than the Judeans, who night after night would gather in a great crowd at the place where the body had been burned.
This felt like a neutral mention to me, and I just thought "how interesting". Then, in the Tiberius bio, when we're still in the "good things Tiberius did" section, we get this: He suppressed varoious foreign cults, including those of the Egyptians and the Ju8aeans, and obliged those who practised such superstitions to burn the vestments they wore for their rituals, and all their parapharnalia, too. Young Judeans he sent to a range of provinces with unhealthy climates, ostansibly to undertake military service, while the other Judeans (and those attracted to Judean customs as well) he explelled from Rome, under pain of enslavement for life, should their fail to comply..
Next section: What Tiberius did against bandits. Yes, this is really in the "good things" colum. Later Emperors also get a plus is the "good deeds" column if they do something anti-Judean, and then it hit me: Suetonius was writing this in the era of the Bar Kokhba Revolt and Hadrian's subsequent actions. Yeah, no wonder. Anyway, that means Julius Caesar being seen as a patron for Judeans wasn't intended as neutral or a compliment. (Suetonius thinks he's interesting and gifted but by and large, he had it coming. I mean, the guy even multitasked and was answering letters and reports during gladiator shows! Augustus never made that mistake.)
Back two Tiberius, and how his biography is when Suetonius just combining all sources no matter how contradictory is most apparant: the best example of this are the two contradictory descriptions of Tiberius' attitude towards Julia (as in, Augustus' daughter, his stepsister and later wife, a spectacularly unhappy marriage which according to Tacitus neither of them wanted and according to Suetonius Julia wanted but Tiberius did not) after her fall. Because in section 11 of the Tiberius bio, it says (oh, Tiberius is in self chosen exile in Rhodos at this point)
In due course he learned that Julia, his wife, had been convicted of sexual impropriety and adultery, and that, on the authority of Augustus, shes had been served a notice of divorce in his name; delighted though he was by this news, he still saw it as his duty to write numerous letters to augustus, pleading the cause of his daughter as best he could, and to allow her to keep everything he had given her, no matter how little she might have merited it.
Whereas in section 50 of the Tiberius biography, it says (after he's become Emperor following Augustus' deaht: Far from showing his wife Julia even a measure of respect and kindness when she was sent into exile (the least one might have expected!), he instead tightened the restrictions imposed on her by her father, who had confined her to a single town, by banning her from leaving her house, or indeed enjoying any human contact at all. He also cheated her of the allowance granted her by her father, and of her annual income as well, on the specious legal grounds that Augustus had made no provision for them in his will.
I mean - which is it? Tom Holland makes a footnote and basically throws up his hands, and so do I.
Re: Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars
Date: 2025-12-16 03:08 am (UTC)As always, I'm here for the source criticism! It was interesting to know what Suetonius did and didn't do re his sources.
There is some attempt at what we'd call psychology, i.e. he thinks Tiberius must have always had these urges, he just repressed them for most of his life and that he grew old and bitter before making it to the throne didn't help, or that killing his mother both destroyed the last restraints Nero had and ensured he'd never get a hold on himself again because of the guilt, but not much.
This is also very interesting. One reason Guicciardini (Cahn: Renaissance historian, friend and correspondent of Machiavelli) is on my to-read list is he's supposed to have been fairly innovative in terms of how much space he devoted to psychological analysis of the key players as having explanatory power for historical events.
(Cahn, in case this isn't clear: Guicciardini was not writing about the Twelve Emperors, but about contemporary Renaissance Italian history.)
(Suetonius thinks he's interesting and gifted but by and large, he had it coming. I mean, the guy even multitasked and was answering letters and reports during gladiator shows! Augustus never made that mistake.)
Hahaha. Being nice to Jews: bad. Being a workaholic: bad.
But it still feels somewhat bizarre, even knowing about this in theory, when again and again, you come across consensual relations between two adult men as being seen as bad whereas any Roman (either gender)/ their own slave or Roman man/young male adolescent relation is not.
Yeah, this is maybe where having immersed myself in writing about homosexual mores in classical Athens during college and grad school helps, in that every time I encounter this attitude, it just comes across as totally normal to me. Fanfiction authors and even pro fiction authors devote a lot of space to agonizing over "Who tops?" and "Is it okay to keep doing this now that we're both adult men?"
I have a fair amount of things I want to post about, but if one of you could develop telepathy, that would help, because I have no time!
In the meantime, Selena, if you have reading time on your hands looking for recs of things I'd love you to summarize for salon, here are some takes on critical analysis of sensationalist gossip:
Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. I read this in grad school and remember liking it, though no idea what I would think today.
Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. I bought this many years ago, but never found time to read it. But it's a collection of relevant excerpts from primary sources, what more could you want!
Re: Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars
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Date: 2025-12-16 05:32 am (UTC)Augustus, we learn, even as an old man with decades of harping on bringing back Roman morality "greatly enjoyed deflowering virgins", and hey, why not, but the poor man having to banish his daughter Julia and his granddaughter of the same name because they had extramarital sex, the sluts!)
sigh
But it still feels somewhat bizarre, even knowing about this in theory, when again and again, you come across consensual relations between two adult men as being seen as bad whereas any Roman (either gender)/ their own slave or Roman man/young male adolescent relation is not.
Well this definitely seems bizarre to me!
With an equal disregard for the law and the traditions of his country, (...) he admitted into the Senate House men who had actually been given their citzenship - some of them Gauls who had barely left barbarism behind!
That seems very forward-thinking -- I mean, barbaric!
Anyway, that means Julius Caesar being seen as a patron for Judeans wasn't intended as neutral or a compliment. (Suetonius thinks he's interesting and gifted but by and large, he had it coming. I mean, the guy even multitasked and was answering letters and reports during gladiator shows! Augustus never made that mistake.)
I was dying through this whole paragraph, omg. Suetonius!
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From:Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?
Date: 2025-12-17 02:35 pm (UTC)Now, in terms of source evaluation and scepticism, already decades ago some modern historians pointed out that 98% of the historians writing about Roman history are from the Senatorial class, i.e. exactly the aristocrats who lost out by the fall of the Republic and the ensueing development of the Empire where the senate went from most important to irrelevant in Roman politics, and that might hugely influence how they evaluate Roman Emperors. (The other 2% are Flavius Josephus and some Greeks, who are aristocrats in their society as well, though arguably our boy Joseph while born an aristocrat did go through the experience of war imprisonment and slavery which the others did not.) Plus of course the more obvious bias of not dissing the current Emperor while the previous ones from another dynasty could be fair game. And/or projecting, i.e critisizing the current Emperor by writing about a past Emperor with the phrasing making clear the parallels without them ever being drawn explicitly.
(There's a famous German example of this. A journalist in pre WWI Germany wrote a novella length essay about Caligula which everyone and their sidekick understood to be a satire on Wilhelm II., but of course censorship couldn't prove it. Nevertheless the author was accused of Majestätsbeleidigung but avoided judgment because he denied all charges and brought the prosecution in the awkward position of having to point out parallels between Caligula and Wilhelm II themselves, at which point they threw up their hands and ended the law suit. If anyone wants to read the Caligula/Willy essay in German, it's here.)
Now, about that Senatorial bias: on the one hand, I can see it. For example, speaking of Caligula, when he makes his horse Incitatus consul, it's likely about taunting the Senate, not because he's crazy. (Doesn't mean he wasn't crazy, but that's not an example for it.) I can also see the case that Nero basically went from following the Augustan to following the Hellenistic monarch model (you can see this in the way he's depicted on coins and statues, too, especially if you compare it to late Ptolemaic coins. Young Nero looks like every Augustus successor, i.e. clearly modelled on Augustus, and then he suddenly looks like one of the Ptolemies.) And that this raised every xenophobic hackle in the Senatorial elite, while your standard butcher and baker in the population couldn't have cared less for as long as the grain supply was coming in. And the case against Nero being actually responsible for burning Rome is pretty solid. (According to Tacitus, who LOATHED Nero and really can't be accused of pro Nero bias but is the first one to write about this, he was in the countryside when the fire started, he when returning upon hearing the news was pretty good at organizing fire fighting and relief efforts, and the idea that he burned the city so he could compose a song about Troy comes in with Suetonius onwards who is prone for going with the most sensational.
However. What Nero definitely did do was looking for someone to blame once people started to demand a guilty party for the catastrophe (that's where the Christians in the arena came in). And even with a sceptical filter, he still ends up with a very high body count (including various family members). Plus: if the last years have taught me one thing, then that half the population absolutely loving a vile head of government who does incredibly shitty things is very much possible. So I've gone from "yeah, his enemies wrote his story, we have to consider that" to "nah, he probably was terrible".
Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?
Date: 2025-12-17 08:41 pm (UTC)I either never knew or had forgotten about this, but it's such a clever defence, I love it. Thanks for mentioning that particular detail.
(Also, yes, I'm around and reading along, but I probably won't have much to contribute, because my classics knowledge is pretty abysmal I'm afraid, despite my years of Latin. Looking forward to learning things, though!)
Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?
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From:Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?
From:Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?
From:Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?
Date: 2025-12-18 05:40 am (UTC)oh this is AMAZING, I love it!
And the case against Nero being actually responsible for burning Rome is pretty solid. (According to Tacitus, who LOATHED Nero and really can't be accused of pro Nero bias but is the first one to write about this, he was in the countryside when the fire started, he when returning upon hearing the news was pretty good at organizing fire fighting and relief efforts, and the idea that he burned the city so he could compose a song about Troy comes in with Suetonius onwards who is prone for going with the most sensational.
I had heard that Nero probably didn't burn Rome, but I didn't know what the evidence actually was, thank you! (I think in the Riordan books he just goes with the Rome burning thing, which I did point out to my kiddo.)
Plus: if the last years have taught me one thing, then that half the population absolutely loving a vile head of government who does incredibly shitty things is very much possible.
Yeah, as you probably figured out, the last few years have been what made me think of the possibility of divided opinion. I don't know that I would have thought of it as a possibility before that.
Re: Divided Populace? Fake News? Senatorial Bias vs Popularity of the Worst?
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