Where Coriolanus Sabotages Himself

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a tragedy (spoiler right out of the gate!) and I really don't like tragedies. Whatever sympathetic magic it is that works on some people, giving them a dose of catharsis or some pleasing schadenfreude, it just doesn't work for me. Teaching Othello to my students year after year, period after period, was a kind of torture--he made the same stupid mistake every time we read it, and the sweet Desdemona died every. single. time. Brutal. Depressing. Discouraging. I hate that story.

(That experience will probably be my villain origin story. I'm gonna go around rewriting the ends of all the Shakespearian tragedies, giving each one an implausible happy ending, thereby incurring the wrath of literature lovers everywhere and making my name a hiss and a byword.)

Anyway, the point is that I actually liked this play. Or I should say, probably, that I liked this story. I didn't expect to. I expected to hate it and curse it like I do the other tragedies. (Still hated the end, of course. But if I squint I can pretend the last page is missing and everything turned out great.) I'm still sorting out why.

The intro discusses the fact that this is seldom performed, being staged far less often than many of his other plays, and one reason is that there is almost no one to root for. The characters aren't very sympathetic, especially the MC. Coriolanus is selfish and proud and eventually turns traitor; his mother is a hardcore stage mom (I picture a tough-talking Diana Rigg in this role); the common folk are ungrateful; the patrician leaders are all self-serving; and the enemies are... well, not Roman. And while that's all kinda true, I still feel like they're all interesting and well-drawn.

One of the most interesting themes in this play addresses the question asking what political leaders and the people owe one another. I kinda side with the people here, not trusting Coriolanus to protect their rights, but I get it that they aren't crediting his heroism that saved them from death and slavery. At the same time, Coriolanus and the other leaders are proud of what they do for the city, but then treat the people--the overwhelming majority of Rome--like they're nobody and unimportant. Coriolanus is the worst about this. My dude, they support you. They do all the work. They are Rome. What a jerk.

But my favorite part is where he's questioning the utility or necessity of the tradition where a hero standing for public office must go out to the people, acting humble, showing off his scars earned in their defense, begging for their support, and he just doesn't want to do it. He wonders to himself if respecting old norms and customs without thinking about whether they should still have a place in modern life risks filling their culture up with meaningless or even harmful traditions:

Why in this wolfish toga should I stand here,
To beg of Hob and Dick that does appear
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to't.
What custom wills, in all things should we do't
The dust on antique time would lie unswept
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to overpeer.

In a culture (I mean English culture, but it could just as fittingly apply to Roman culture) that has such reverence for custom, it's refreshing to see someone questioning the continuation of some random old tradition. It's unfortunate it's in Coriolanus's mouth, though; he's not a good spokesman for mixing things up.

Coriolanus is a hero; nevertheless, he's exiled because he refuses to satisfy the people that, once in office, he won't take away their rights; he defects to Rome's main enemy, who happily put him in front of troops to go fight Rome; he defeats his own homeland for them; but then he concludes a peace treaty (at the request of his family); this infuriates the Volsces people, who kill him.

Tragedy.

Aufidius, who plays Hector to Coriolanus's Achilles, Salieri to Coriolanus's Mozart, is an interesting character, and I wish he got a little more attention, a little more time on stage. Ultimately, after the events here, his people get swallowed up by Rome, but in the course of this story, he's probably the most honorable character. He never stopped fighting for his people, and he sure was able to think outside the box. I'd like to see his story.

In any case, it's an entertaining play, despite my misgivings about sad endings. Or maybe I just liked it because the introduction said I wouldn't. Maybe.

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Where It's One Fight After Another

With Arrow, Sword, and Spear: A History of Warfare in the Ancient World by Alfred S. Bradford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this a very useful look at the history of ancient warfare, and it was reasonably fun to read.

It was a little weird how I got through it, though. I read about half straight through many years ago. (8? 9?) I guess I got busy; I forget. But I put it on the shelf with a bookmark and didn't come back to it until just a bit ago. Then I read the second half, pretty much straight through again. And it's good.

The first half is Egyptians, Assyrians et al, Persians, and Greeks. I guess that's the stuff I find most interesting, the part that's most distant, and the author does a good job not just with the outlines and broad brushstrokes but with the personalities and details. It's kinda surprising how much we know about some things 3000 years ago. In part, the book deals with evolving technology, like chariots and elephants and compound bows, but it's also about evolving systems--fighting systems, economic systems, government and army management systems. I found it all interesting and entertaining as presented.

The second half is India and China and then Rome, which gets the most time. That last bit remains less interesting to me. I'm not sure why. But he handles it well, and I learned a bunch.

One thing the author gets right for me is the level of information he uses, the scope and scale of his approach. I didn't want to read a textbook or The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (it's not that deep), but I also don't want a wikipedia entry. The space between is still pretty big. Some books like this I've found to be aimed at a reader who is nearer an expert than a novice, and for most of us those are too dense to be interesting or comprehensible. When I'm first looking at a topic I don't know much about (say, desert fauna, or the physics of space flight), I've often found that books on the topic for young people is at the right level of comprehension--tuned toward entertainment, with clear descriptions, mostly everyday language, and lots of clarifying explanations. Now, this book isn't quite aimed at that demographic, and it presupposes a little knowledge of the world, but it has a similar scope, aimed at helping a non-scholar make sense of a pretty broad topic.

I wouldn't say this book is for casual readers. However, people interested in this topic and other motivated readers (authors, for example, who wanna get a battle scene right) would probably find this enjoyable and pretty readable.

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Where Rome Seems Terrifyingly Real

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I expected this to be good, since I'd read a historical novel by the author before and liked it (set in 17th century Poland), and this was his most popular book by far. The people are right--this is very good.

I'll explain.

More than anything, Sienkiewicz has done an amazing job with world-building. I've read many books of many genres set in Rome, and they always gave me a claustrophobic feeling; either it's all palaces and parties or it's all poor people in the tenements. Usually there's little sense of scale, little color, little true complexity. But this has all of that. This Rome is full and complete, with all levels of society, with temples and streets and slaves and tribunes, with Greeks and Jews and Germans and Poles and Egyptians, with people at work and people at play. I now understand (intellectually) what it's like to be a slave there, what it's like to be a freedman, and what it's like to be a member of court. It is a believable world, richly imagined, and a terrifying place to live, and I can't say whether he got it right or not, but it sure gives me a lot to work with.

It tells the story of a rich young tribune who has encountered and fallen in love with a northern woman, Lygia, living in Rome as a hostage. Vinicius is no better or worse than other men of his rank, which means he's horrible, willing to punish slaves for nothing, kill men for very little, and use every ounce of his power and authority to steal a woman from her protectors to take advantage of her--all without reservations, without any trouble to his conscience. Through the course of the novel, he falls in love with her for real, gradually growing a conscience and converting to Christianity, all while trying to rescue her from Nero and the persecution and destruction of Rome's Christians.

(The least interesting aspect of the novel, and it's a significant fraction, is the religious stuff. Peter and Paul are here as minor characters, though actually pretty good characters, and there's quite a bit of elevating Christianity as a breakthrough religion, all of it clearly written for a Christian audience. Fortunately, IMO, the novel is still largely secular, telling a love story in the midst of a historical novel, and though I think most Christians over the last 100 years would feel pretty good about reading it, I think those of different persuasions as well as post-religious people will find a very interesting novel under the churchy veneer. Much of it reads like modern fantasy. I mean, there's sex and violence in here that would make Game of Thrones look mild, just f'rinstance.)

Vinicius is a great character, with a long arc that feels earned, going from being a cruel narcissist to a caring, empathetic human. It takes the whole book, and it doesn't feel forced. His uncle Petronius, who is his main ally throughout, is brilliant and fearless and so clever, constantly hatching plans to help Vinicius, constantly handling Nero at court, fending off adversaries. Some of the minor characters are really cool, like the Greek Chilo, who is a devious sort-of-philosopher they hire to track down Lygia among the Christians. He's clever and scheming but he also succeeds with every job he's given. Nero is the main villain of the novel, but Chilo becomes a secondary villain, betraying the Christians, who he has to watch die by the hundreds. He has a cool arc, too, leading [spoiler--but this is 100 years old, so....] to a change of heart and his martyrdom in the end.

Two events dominate the second half of the book. The first is the great fire, which I never understood until now. The action there, with Vinicius trying to help Lygia escape from it, is brilliant and goes on for chapters. It's a great action sequence. The second event, or group of events, is the persecution of the Christians, who they are blaming the fire on. This takes up the last quarter of the novel at least, and it's so much more complete than any other depiction I've ever seen. The author imagines these events so fully, with so much detail, with so much action and drama, that I have to tip my hat. It's impressive. It's also horrible at the same time as being absolutely compelling.

So, despite the overt religious themes of the novel, which I don't care for, this is a 5-star book. Some of the history might be wrong, but as a work of fiction, it doesn't make a wrong move. Highly recommended.

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Where They All Are Horrible People

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I find this so tedious. Probably my least favorite Shakespeare play.

There's just no one to like in this story. Cleopatra is horrible, the most spoiled, narcissistic, useless character since Iago. Antony is an unsympathetic, selfish fool. Lepidus is useless. Caesar is no better than the rest. I literally don't care who wins and who survives in this story.

My Roman Empire is how stories set in the Roman Empire are dry as dirt.

Everyone here is fighting for a huge empire, for riches, all while holding on to their honor and reputations, and then when they have a bunch of power and money and honors they... just spend their time sitting around, eating, arguing, being obnoxious. If they aren't fighting, they're out of ideas. Some of the richest people in the history of the world and their lives look unbearably crappy.

So I don't care about them and I don't like them and I'm glad when I get to the end.

Wait--I actually like Caesar's sister who marries Antony. Octavia. She's a good character. She didn't deserve the stuff that happened to her, and Antony's death was probably a good thing in her life.

I'd like to see a play about Octavia. Maybe she took up painting miniatures and had a happy life with her second husband, a kind man who managed an import-export business and taught their kids how to fly kites.

Anyway.

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Where Rienzi Tried to Save Rome

Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You are supposed to make fun of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The contest named for him is a competition to write "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels," harking back to his "dark and stormy night" sentence. (Look it up. It's not that bad. In fact, I want to read that book.) Anyway, that's kinda nonsense. Yes, he writes like a well-educated 19th Century male novelist. That's what he was. High diction, occasionally archaic in tone. Long-ish sentences. A sometimes-intrusive narrator who directly addresses the reader. That does not set him apart from his contemporaries.

Give him a chance--that's my point.

This is a very entertaining adventure novel in the high romantic tradition. Set in Rome in the 14th Century, when the nobles were no better than robber barons, when the people had no allies and Rome was only half populated, a brilliant commoner named Cola de Rienzi rose to prominence and tried to restore some of the glory of the ancient city. (Think Alexander Hamilton, except he was liked by almost everyone.) In real life, recounted here in a fictionalized account, he leveraged the power of the people to evict the nobles and rule for a time as Tribune, bringing justice to the oppressed citizens, never forgetting he was himself a commoner. Later chased from the city by the resurgent nobles and their German mercenaries, and for a time imprisoned by the pope in Avignon, Rienzi rose again years later to retake the city (this time with the pope's support). But Rome looked a lot like other cities waking up from tyranny (Paris in the 1790's, Moscow and Russia in the 1990's), and the route to justice, fairness, opportunity, and safety was still a tough one.

Like other novels of the sort, we have true love, duels, intrigue, children wanting to discover their true parents, and honorable enemies (as well as dishonorable ones). Castles and palaces. Haughty noblewomen. All that stuff. But there's more! The plague hits Rome in the middle of the story; Petrarch is everywhere present and discussed, though never actually met; and some hippy type young people who look a lot like Boccaccio's ten story-tellers from the Decameron are revealed to be hedonistic and unlikable. In the midst of all this, the idealistic but highly intelligent Rienzi is trying to find the right way to lead a fractious people to a better society, scraping together whatever authority and support he can find. His wife, his sister, and his best friend work with him, but almost no one else, and yet he achieves amazing things. For a little while.

It's a great story.

It's the writer's language that put him on the "so bad it's just bad" list, and discourages people from reading him today, but here's a purely random page of his prose for you to judge:

As the traveller neared the city the scene became less solitary, yet more dread. There might be seen carts and litters, thick awnings wrapped closely round them, containing those who sought safety in fight, forgetful that the Plague was everywhere! And while these gloomy vehicles, conducted by horses, gaunt shadowy skeletons, crawling heavily along, passed by, like hearses of the dead, sometimes a cry burst the silence in which they moved, and the traveller's steed started aside, as some wretch, on whom the disease had broke forth, was dropped from the vehicle by the selfish inhumanity of his comrades, and left to perish by the way. Hard by the gate a wagon paused, and a man with a mask threw out its contents in a green, slimy ditch that bordered the road. These were garments and robes of all kind and value; the broidered mantle of the gallant, the hood and veil of my lady, and the rags of the peasant. While glancing at the labor of the masker, the cavalier beheld a herd of swine, gaunt and half-famished, run to the spot in hopes of food, and the traveller shuddered to think what food they might have anticipated!

I like it.

Rienzi is an admirable character, but so is his greatest enemy, the mercenary Montreal. They are sometimes friends, or at least friendly, and their interaction makes the story. But the other amazing aspect of this novel is the setting and how much the novel fills in (for me, anyway) the history of Rome between empire and modern times. It helps me see what life looked like there in those times, who it was who kept the lights on, so to speak, after it dwindled to a backwater. The author speaks with some authority on the topic and includes notes throughout, so even if his scholarship turns out to be out of date, it isn't made up.

And the history of Rienzi is well worth knowing. I'd never even heard of him before.

Recommended

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Where I Like the Author but Didn't Enjoy the Book. Don't Rat Me Out

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't love it.

I can't speak to the scholarship. Tom Holland (still not Spider-man) seems to know a great deal on the topic. He says a lot of smart things. I just didn't like reading this very much. (And I have enjoyed other books by this author in the past, like Persian Fire.) I found it a slog. Still, I made myself finish, a few pages a day, over a long stretch. And here we are.

The story here is narrowly focused on the fortunes of individual politicians (a cast of thousands, actually, most of them with names starting with C, like Crassus, Catulus, Cethegus, Caesar, Cato, Catiline, Cicero, Clodia, Clodius, Curio, Caelius, Cinna, and others--and though I can't blame the author for this, it really was poor planning by History) and who's up today, who's down, who's making an alliance, who's double-crossing an ally, and so on. It may be real life, but as far as the the story goes, it reads like summary of a soap opera. I mean that in the "I can't follow this story" kind of way. The "I can't remember who Clodia was" kind of way. (As well as the "Weren't they enemies?" kind of way.)

For me to understand the story better, I needed to see a bigger picture, get more of a bird's-eye view of events and less of a nose-against-the-TV view. However, as always, YMMV.

And yet, despite all that, despite my bad attitude, I still learned a lot about Rome and its people and society. In fact, in terms of knowledge about Rome, I'm probably a lot closer now to where I should have been before I attempted the book.

I suspect those with greater background knowledge will enjoy reading this more than I did.

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Almost Everything that Ever Happened

A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future by Charles Van Doren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's a lot to enjoy in this book. It is very readable with a suitably broad scope, and it is filled with things I didn't know or only half-knew or looked at a different way before, especially with reference to ancient times. I'll admit, that's what I was looking for most, and so that was the part I enjoyed most.

The discussion of modern times has some interesting twists--the author refers to WWI and WWII as a single war with a pause in the middle, and I found that perspective and the discussion that went with it useful. The closer we get to modern times, the more it looks like topics in cultural history rather than an overview of the progress of knowledge, and looking back over it I think that's really what the author was going for. The description after the title and subtitle would probably be more accurate and could be reworked into a title: "The pivotal events, people, and achievements of world history." I get it that he had to settle for just the pivotal moments. It is, after all, a single volume, not an encyclopedia; he had to choose what he included.

The last section, about the future, written about 1990, is interesting because of what has come true and what hasn't. He was overly optimistic about the future of communism in China (at least so far as we can see 28 years after) but his discussion of AI sounds like it could have been written this year. He has other hits and misses, looked at with the benefit of hindsight, but it may be that the next few decades will prove him right on a few more things.

Although I was entertained and engaged in some sections, especially the first half, I did not find the entire book compelling. (Is that on me? Maybe.) Nevertheless, I give high marks for erudition and clarity, finding it comprehensible throughout, and recommend it for other non-expert history enthusiasts.

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