All posts tagged dictator

Robert Harris reviews

Robert Harris CBE (born 1957) has had a spectacularly successful career. He went from a humble background in Nottingham, to Cambridge University, and then to the BBC where he worked on flagship news programmes Panorama and Newsnight before becoming political editor of The Observer at the age of just 30.

In the later 1980s he wrote half a dozen factual journalistic books, and then in 1992 published the first of his fiction books, ‘Fatherland’, which became a popular bestseller. Since then he has kept up an impressive workrate, producing a new novel in the popular thriller genre, every three or so years.

The first few were set against the Second World War which has been a recurring setting (‘Fatherland’, ‘Enigma’, ‘Munich’, ‘V2’) but he soon branched out, writing page-turners set in the contemporary world, (‘The Ghost’, ‘The Fear Index’), late nineteenth century France (‘An Officer and a Spy’), the ancient world (‘Pompeii’), the future (‘The Second Sleep’). In 2006 he embarked upon a brilliant trilogy based on the life of Cicero, the leading writer and political player at the time of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian.

Several of Harris’s novels have been adapted into films – for example, The Ghost Writer (2010), An Officer and a Spy (2019) – but he recently hit gold when ‘Conclave’ was made into a movie directed by Edward Berger with award-nominated performances by Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci.

Harris’s novels

1992 Fatherland A brilliantly gripping alternative history in which the Nazis won the Second World War. The story’s protagonist, Xavier March, is an officer of the Kripo, the criminal police, who is investigating the murder of a Nazi government official who participated at the Wannsee Conference. Slowly he realises he has stumbled on a vast conspiracy at the heart of Nazi rule, the Holocaust which, in this world, has been hushed up. The documents March eventually uncovers contain some of the most searing descriptions of going into the gas chambers of a concentration camp I’ve read in any genre.

1995 Enigma Enigma as in the famous code-cracking operation at Bletchley Park. The story focuses on gifted cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, recuperating in Cambridge from a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of work and the breakup of his relationship with Claire Romilly, a cipher clerk, but when he gets back to Cambridge, Claire has gone missing. Who? Why? Where? Another gripping mystery.

1998 Archangel Set in the present: Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso is a historian attending a conference in Moscow. He meets an old communist who tells him about a secret notebook which contains a secret concerning Stalin which threatens to turn history upside down.

2007 The Ghost The unnamed ghost writer who narrates the story, has been hired and flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to help write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, transparently based in Tony Blair, who Harris was close to. The unexplained disappearance of the writer whose place he’s taken prompts the narrator to undertake investigations which (like the previous two thrillers) lead to a momentous revelation.

2011 The Fear Index Also set in the modern world, this concerns the way an artificial intelligence created to dabble in the stock market, runs out of control.

2013 An Officer and a Spy Leaping back a century, this one follows French military intelligence officer Georges Picquart who begins to discover that the evidence used to convict Alfred Dreyfus of espionage was likely invented, in which case a German agent is still at large in the French military.

2016 Conclave Set in the present, this bestseller describes in typically thorough fashion what happens when Pope dies and a conclave is called to elect a new one: taking us into the heart of the process during which various leading contenders turn out to be ineligible for all manner of Machiavellian reasons. Clever, gripping.

2017 Munich Set over four days in September 1938 during the Munich Agreement, the novel describes the activities of two characters, aides to the British and Nazi delegations. This has the structure and mannerisms of the previous thrillers but, for the first time, didn’t have the same ‘grip’. All the historical detail is there, and the panic-stricken meetings and the twists and turns. Except we know this changed nothing. The Second World War still came. So who cares?

2019 Second Sleep Set in the future after some disaster has set England back to medieval technology and culture. In this world a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives at a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor to bury a priest who has died ‘in mysterious circumstances’. Slowly he realises the locals are concealing a secret i.e. the book builds to the same kind of Revelation that characterised Harris’s first half dozen novels. Except the final revelation is deeply underwhelming: we find out that the Old World (i.e. our world) experienced some catastrophic breakdown of its digital infrastructure. This is deeply disappointing because a) we knew right from the start that this was a future after some catastrophe; b) so it is just like many, many other science fiction novels set in the future after some catastrophe wiped out ‘our’ culture, all the ones I’m familiar with (The Chrysalids, A Canticle for Leibowitz) being much, much better; and c) the final revelation, that the satellites which keep global digital tech working all crashed, is not really a believable cause for a worldwide apocalypse. OK there’d be disasters but surely we’d just revert to life in the 1970s before digital tech: cars would still drive, food would still grow, not as much but still quite a lot; livestock would be farmed etc etc. The idea that the end of digital tech would devastate the world beyond recognition is not plausible or thrilling. This is the first Harris novel I read but couldn’t be bothered to review because it’s the first one that’s actively bad.

The Cicero trilogy

A brilliant trilogy of novels describing the fraught political career of ancient Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC). They manage to stick very closely to the historical record while at the same time conveying the genuine excitement and danger of 1st century BC Rome.

2006 Imperium All three are narrated by Cicero’s secretary, Tiro. This first volume covers 15 years and is divided into two parts: Part one, ‘Senator’ (79 to 70 BC) leading up to Cicero’s career-making prosecution of a corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres; Part two, ‘Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)’ covers his campaign to be elected consul, which becomes entangled with a major plot by Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus to stitch up control of the Roman state.

2009 Lustrum Continues Cicero’s career in fraught first century BC Rome, as related by his secretary Tiro. It covers the next five years in Cicero’s life and career (the Latin word lustrum referring to the religious sacrifice offered every five years by state officials)and is again divided into two parts: Part one ‘Consul’, covers the dramatic year of 63 BC giving a thrilling description of the slow escalation of the crisis which developed into Lucius Sergius Catalina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state. Part two, ‘Pater Patriae’, covers the next four years, 62 to 58 BC: beneath a blizzard of more overt incidents and challenges, the two underlying themes are the unstoppable rise of Caesar and his creation of the First Triumvirate (in 60 BC).

2015 Dictator The final book in the trilogy covers the last 15 years of Cicero’s life, from 58 BC to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC. It’s divided into Part one, ‘Exile’ (58 to 47 BC), and Part two ‘Redux (47 to 43 BC), leading up to Cicero’s flight form Rome and eventual murder by agents of Mark Anthony’s. Outstanding.

2 Comments

by Simon on March 27, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Tagged Adam Lang, Alfred dreyfus, An Officer and a Spy, ancient Rome, Archangel, BBC, Bletchley Park, Cambridge, Cambridge University, Catalina, Christopher Fairfax, Christopher Kelso, Cicero trilogy, Claire Romilly, code-cracking, Communism, Conclave, cryptanalysis, dictator, Dreyfus Affair, Edward Berger, Enigma, Exmoor, Fatherland, fiction, First Triumvirate, Gaius Verres, gas chambers, Georges Picquart, Imperium, journalism, Julius Caesar, Kripo, Lucius Sergius Catalina, lustrum, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Moscow, Munich, Munich Agreement, Munich Crisis, Nazi, Newsnight, Nottingham, novels, Panorama, Pope, Ralph Fiennes, Robert Harris, Roman Catholicism, Rome, Second Sleep, Second World War, Stalin, Stanley Tucci, The Fear Index, The Ghost, The Holocaust, The Observer, thriller, Tiro, Tom Jericho, Tony Blair, USSR, Vatican, Wannsee Conference, Xavier March

Posted by Simon on March 27, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/robert-harris-reviews/

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the
Rev HP (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
(Bertie summarises the plot at the beginning)

‘Man and boy, Jeeves,’ I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven
miles, ‘I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.’
(and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet)

‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’
‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’
(Servant and Master repartee)

‘Good old blackmail ! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.’
(Aunt Dahlia proving what a good egg she is)

‘Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’
(Stiffy explaining the title of the book)

‘The Code of the Woosters’ is the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.

The Jeeves and Wooster narratives come in two forms: in the 1920s Wodehouse published about 35 J&W short stories; thereafter he switched to novels and wrote 11 novels (from 1934 to the last one, in 1974). What’s interesting is the way the novels refer back to events in the short stories. It’s as if the short stories defined a sort of palette of colours, which he then invoked in the larger canvases of the novels. To be less pretentious, the novels regularly refer back to incidents featured in the stories, say something like ‘Remember old so-and-so; it was him I was involved with in the adventure of the so-and-so’. Thus at various points Bertie, the posh dim narrator, reminds us:

that his Aunt Dahlia edits a lady’s magazine to which he once contributed an article (as told in ‘Clustering Round Young Bingo’)
that Madeline Bassett’s father is a judge who once fined him £5 for disorderly conduct (as told in ‘Without The Option’)
of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle gave a speech at a school prize-giving while very drunk (in the previous novel in the series, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves”))
(twice) of the time Roberta Wickham persuaded him to sneak into the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning-needle on the end of a stick (‘Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit’)
of the time when the American millionaire J. Washburn Stoker kidnapped Bertie who escaped by blacking up with boot polish to pretend to be part of a minstrel party (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time a temporary replacement for Jeeves named Brinkley, tried to attack Bertie with a carving knife then set fire to his cottage (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time Bertie had to look after his Aunt Agatha’s dog (‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’)
the time Bertie saved the Cabinet Minister A.B. Filmer from a wild swan (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’)

The effect is very much to create a world of its own, full of references to a fairly small number of characters in its orbit. Bertie himself is made to notice the fact:

It bore out what I often say—viz, that it’s a small world.

Except that it is very much not a small world. It is a very big world with over 8 billion people in it who mostly speak languages you and I can’t speak, and hold values and beliefs we can’t relate to. Which is why it’s so comfy and reassuring to retreat to a small, hermetically sealed and safe place like WoosterWorld.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

Nothing wrong with that. Highfalutin’ critics like to claim that fiction engages with the world, subverts this or that power structure etc, missing the obvious point that sitting in a quiet room or train or plane, quietly reading a novel is more or less the opposite of engaging with the world.

The Mixture as Before

When Somerset Maugham published a volume of short stories in 1936 The Times rather rudely described it as ‘the mixture as before’. This nettled Maugham so much that he titled his next short story The Mixture As Before. The same could be said of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. He had established a set of comic conventions for the series, including:

Bertie struggles to find the right word

There was a brief and—if that’s the word I want—pregnant silence.
A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word.
She made what I believe is known as a moue…. Is it moue?.. Shoving out the lips, I mean, and drawing them quickly back again.
‘What? Incredulous!’
‘Incredible, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!’
‘Spode, qua menace… is it qua?’
‘Yes, sir. Quite correct.’
‘I thought so.’

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, ‘like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.’
‘Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate—if that’s the word?’
‘Perfectly correct, sir.’

The joke in this one is you have to know that ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is the name of a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the kind of thing soppy Madeline knows and Bertie is clueless about.

‘I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie–’A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’

Shelley crops up again later on:

After what Gussie had said, I ought to have been expecting Stiffy, of course. Seeing an Aberdeen terrier, I should have gathered that it belonged to her. I might have said to myself : If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Which is a reference to Shelley’s well-known poem, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the line being ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Mind you, Bertie can pull off the big quotes when he wants to; in a previous novel he referred to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and he goes to town on the key lines here.

Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.

And it’s not just Bertie who struggles with classic quotes and has to be put right by Jeeves. Here’s Stiffy struggling to remember the right name of a literary character:

You remind me of Carter Patterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’
‘Sidney Carton, miss.’
‘That’s right. Sidney Carton.’

That would be the Sidney Carton who ends up being the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by offering to lay down his life to be executed by the French revolutionaries so that the male lead of the story, Charles Darnay, can escape. Not that Bertie sees him as the hero. Later on he reflects:

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

It feels slightly new that Jeeves recites famous literary quotations in their entirety, not prompted by Bertie, with the comic intention of showing that Bertie hasn’t a clue what he’s on about. Mostly from Shakespeare because it’s a fair bet that Wodehouse’s original audience should have known their Shakespeare:

‘I quite understand, sir. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly. You take the words out of my mouth.’
(Shakespeare: Hamlet)

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.
(Shakespeare: King Lear)

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.
(The italicised phrase is from Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

Jeeves and clothes

In almost all the stories, right at the start Jeeves and Bertie have a falling out over an item of clothing, there follows the long complicated narrative, and by the end of the story Bertie is so grateful to him for solving everything that he gives in. Not in this one. But there are still some choice ‘clothes moments’. Bertie is getting dressed for dinner when Jeeves advises a quarter inch adjustment in the trousers, prompting Bertie to say:

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself “Do trousers matter?”‘
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

In this case, the plan which starts the story, Jeeves’s wish which Bertie categorically refuses but then, by the end of the complex series of events, finds himself exhaustedly acquiescing in, is the idea of going on a cruise.

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road.

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with.

He had been looking like a man who had missed the finer shades, and he still looked like a man who had missed the finer shades.

Clash of registers

It’s a tried and tested comic trope to have two characters who speak in different registers – the straight man who expresses things in a high-falutin pretentious style, and then the comic who puts it in the crudest demotic. Jeeves and Wooster embody a variation on this comic trope. Bertie expresses something in his poshboy slang and then Jeeves repeats the same idea but expressed in his refined, restrained, verbosely intellectual manner. The result = comic contrast.

‘You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.’

The village constable

Speaking of registers, Wodehouse briefly gives the village constable a comic accent, the tone of the officious provincial copper.

‘I was proceeding along the public highway,’ he began, in a slow, measured tone, as if he were giving evidence in court, ‘and the dorg leaped at me in a verlent manner. I was zurled from my bersicle.’

Abbreviations

Either a) trimming a word of a few syllables or b) paring it right back to the first letter. Sometimes a little hard to follow.

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent.

The gravity of the situash had at last impressed itself upon her.

It was entirely owing to Stiffy that I found myself in my present predic.

One letter

I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath. It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b.

That sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore
what-not.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

I sank into the chair which she had vacated, and mopped the b.

The sight of Gussie and Madeline Bassett sitting side by side at the other end of the table turned the food to ashes in my m.

‘You’re talking absolute rot,’ she said, but it was with a quaver in the v.

I turned on the h. again.

Kipling was right. D. than the m. No getting round it.

I proceeded to work off the pent-up f’s.

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

Homer is famous for coining poetic phrases or formulas to describe common objects (rosy-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea) and Wodehouse does something similar by devising humorous phrases for common elements in Bertie’s life. They’re a sort of Metonymy which is ‘a figure of speech where a word or phrase is replaced by another’, in this instance by related adjectives but shorn of the expected noun – so in that respect also a kind of abbreviation.

I was able to imbibe about a fluid ounce of the hot and strengthening before he spoke. [tea]

Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. [tears]

Inappropriate

Related to which is using inappropriate terminology, often using phrases normally used to describe inanimate objects to people, as if from sales brochures advertising houses or cars.

I looked round. Those parted lips… Those saucerlike eyes… That slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges…

For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

Slang phrases

Sometimes Bertie uses phrases which may reflect the slang of his class but are obscure to us.

In that shop, on the other hand, he had given the impression of a man who has found the blue bird. [?]

After that exhibition of his at the prizegiving, she handed Gussie the mitten. [dumped him]

The news of the betrothal was, therefore, conveyed to him by letter, and I imagine that the dear girl must have hauled up her slacks about me in a way that led him to suppose that what he was getting was a sort of cross between Robert Taylor and Einstein. [boasted]

‘Suppose old Bassett does find that book, what do you think will ensue?’ I could answer that one. ‘He would immediately put the bee on the wedding.’ [cancel]

‘Consult Jeeves, you mean?’ I shook the lemon. [head]

Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy. [face]

I can testify that when you are riding [a bicycle] without your hands, privacy and a complete freedom from interruption are of the essence. The merest suggestion of an unexpected Scottie connecting with the ankle-bone, at such a time, and you swoop into a sudden swerve. And, as everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller.

The nibs [higher-ups, those in authority, clever ones, superiors]

‘Ha!’ said Spode, and biffed off with a short, sharp laugh. [left, walked away]

I got into the full soup and fish, and was immediately conscious of a marked improvement. [evening dress]

Brass rags had been parted by the young couple… [they’d broken up]

I racked the bean. [head, brain, mind]

‘Who do you think you are, coming strolling into a girl’s bedroom, sticking on dog about the right way and the wrong way of pinching helmets?’

I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

In the second novel it became noticeable how Aunt Dahlia lost no opportunity to cheerfully insult Bertie and the pattern continues here. She calls him:

‘Hello, ugly’
my little chickadee
young hound

What feels new is that Bertie feels confident enough to bandy friendly nicknames right back at her, to her face calling her:

aged relative
my fluttering old aspen
my dear old mysterious hinter
old ancestor
old flesh and blood
old thicker than water
My dear old faulty reasoner
my misguided old object

Jeeves’s wisdom

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and–’,
‘Switches the light on?’
‘Precisely.’

Sir Roderick Spode

Rather surprisingly, this Sir Roderick Spode turns out to be leader of a Fascist party i.e. is a satire on the real-world English fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

‘Don’t you ever read the papers ? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’

Bertie clarifies an important element:

‘By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.’
‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’
‘Footer bags, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘How perfectly foul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bare knees?’
‘Bare knees.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes.’

Spode is a huge, threatening bully right up to the moment when Bertie discovers he has a dark secret and threatens to reveal it – at which point he becomes oilily sycophantic i.e. like all bullies, can be instantly deflated. When pressed, right at the end of the novel, Jeeves reveals Spode’s guilty secret: it is that he moonlights as a designer of women’s underclothing and is the uncredited owner of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs. Would ruin his reputation as a manly Fascist if that ever came out. A ludicrous puncture of his sub-Mussolinian braggadocio.

Plot

This third Jeeves and Wooster novel feels longer and even more insanely complicated than its predecessors. Wodehouse has this reputation for comedy and I start off loving the tone and characters but do rather find that halfway through the novels they begin to seem quite long, and the blizzard of farcically improbable twists and turns does, eventually, become quite wearing. I’m always very relieved as I enter the final furlongs.

As briefly as I can:

Uncle Tom Travers is a collector of silverware and has his eye on a fine silver cow creamer at an antique shop on the Brompton Road. His wife, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, wants Tom not to buy it, as she needs to touch him for money to fund her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, particularly as she has just signed up an expensive lady novelist to write some articles for it.

In the event the cow creamer is purchased by Sir Watkyn Bassett, the odious magistrate who fined Bertie £5 for drunkenly stealing a policeman’s helmet a few years earlier, and who has now retired to his country estate, Totleigh Towers. This Bassett has a daughter, soppy Madeline Bassett, who’s still in love with the hopeless newt-fancier, Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who Sir Watkyn thoroughly disapproves of. At the same time, Bassett’s niece, Stephanie ‘Stiffy’ Byng, who lives at the Towers, is in love with the local curate, another old college pal of Bertie’s, one Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker. Another guest of Sir Watkyns is a giant of a man called Roderick Spode—leader of a silly fascist organisation called the Black Shorts—who takes an instant dislike to Bertie when he happens to bump into him in the Brompton Road antique shop, and keeps a fierce and jealous eye over Stephanie Byng. There’s one last element which is that Gussie, a guest at Totleigh Towers, has been keeping a notebook containing very unflattering portraits of both Bassett and Spode.

Right. That’s a summary of the cast and main issues. The ball gets rolling when Bertie is summoned to Totleigh by a telegram from Madeline, asking his help to sort out her troubled engagement to Gussie; but he has simultaneously been instructed to get his hands on the silver cow creamer, in order to placate her husband Tom. Then Stiffy arbitrarily decides to test her boyfriend Harold’s devotion to her, by demanding that he knock off and steal the helmet of the local constable, Oates, because she thinks he’s been beastly to her beloved dog, Bartholomew. Then Gussie stupidly manages to lose the notebook full of incriminating descriptions of Bassett and Spode.

For an impressive 300 pages, Wodehouse manages to wring every conceivable variation on these themes, having all the couples fall out with each other, make impossible demands, threaten Bertie, while the silver cow, the notebook and the policeman’s helmet all get stolen, stolen again, hidden, found, searched for, accompanied by all manner of threats and blackmail between various characters far too complicated to set down in detail.

In the end it is Jeeves who saves the day, managing to blackmail both Sir Watkyn (with a suit for malicious libel and damages) and Spode (with revealing his guilty secret) into acquiescing in the marriages of the two young couples, and releasing Bertie from the various charges he faced. This is because, at various points, Bertie is angrily accused of stealing all the two central objects – the cow creamer and the policemen’s helmet – which he keeps being caught red-handed with because the actual thieves (Aunt Dahlia and Stiffy, respectively) dump them on him at incriminating moments – anyway, once all the comic complications have been utterly wrung out of the plot, Jeeves manages to get Bertie cleared of all charges, in return for which, as I mentioned above, Bertie acquiesces in Jeeves’s wish to go for a big cruise.

Cast

Bertie Wooster – narrator of the stories, amusingly dim upper-class layabout
Jeeves – his suave and hyper-intelligent valet
Aunt Dahlia aka Mrs Dahlia Travers
Uncle Tom Travers – her husband, famous for his delicate digestion, and (newly introduced in this novel) a keen silverware collector:

This uncle is a bird who, sighting a nephew, is apt to buttonhole him and become a bit informative on the subject of sconces and foliation, not to mention scrolls, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, and it seemed to me that silence was best.

Anatole – their legendary cook, from Provence
Gussie Fink-Nottle – ‘a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts’
Madeline Bassett – ‘A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits’
Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE – retired judge, father of Madeline, residing at Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
- Butterfield – his butler
Sir Roderick Spode – guest of Sir Watkyn’s and leader of the Fascist organisation, the Saviours of England; according to Bertie a ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’
Pomona Grindle – popular novelist – funny how popular novelists like Wodehouse or Agatha Christie, enjoy putting fictional popular novelists into their novels to satirise
Miss Stephanie Byng aka Stiffy – Madeline’s cousin, who lives at Totleigh Towers
- Bartholomew – her dog
Constable Oates – the local policeman
Harold Pinker aka Stinker Pinker – village curate who Stiffy’s engaged to – ‘a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes—always doing his best, true, but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it’

The Junior Ganymede club

The Junior Ganymede is a club for gentlemen’s personal gentlemen in Curzon Street, to which Jeeves has belonged for some years. Under Rule Eleven, every new member is required to supply the club with full information regarding his employer. This not only provides entertaining reading, but serves as a warning to members who may be contemplating taking service with gentlemen who fall short of the ideal.

Menus

I have often lamented that in the majority of Great Literature people regularly have meals, lunches and dinners, but the author never tells you what they ate, which is extremely frustrating. In this book there’s a rare mention of a complete menu of a country house dinner:

Grade A soup (content unknown)
a toothsome fish (species unknown)
a salmi of game which
asparagus
a jam omelette
some spirited sardines on toast

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

‘If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts ? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this—Behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’

But on the other hand:

‘I should have known better than to doubt Aunt Dahlia. Aunts always know. It’s a sort of intuition.’

Why so many aunts? And why are aunts such figures of fun? Aunts dominate almost all the J&W stories and crop up in many others outside the series. They are also prominent in works by other popular authors as figures of fun, such as Agatha Christie. Why? Two big reasons.

1. Because aunts are parent replacements. They are parents but without the strict control of parents. They are representatives of the older and so, in theory, controlling generation, the generation which should bridle and control the young, but without any of an actual parent’s actual legal responsibilities and duties. This is partly why they’re figures of fun: they’re parents but stripped of all actual parental authority.

2. Because they’re female. A hundred years ago fathers were figures with total legal control over their children until they reached the age of 21, as well as dominating moral and psychological power. An uncle is a male authority figure from the parental generation but, typically, stripped of responsibility, is classically considered a more approachable and sympathetic figure, someone you can turn to for help and advice, maybe. Whereas an aunt is two times removed from the figure of authority being a) not the legal guardian and b) a female, and so one step removed from the classically male patriarchal authority role.

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

P.S. Mind you, the whole point of the 1920s was the widespread feeling that the younger generation scorned parental control, something Bertie himself comments on:

A glance at her [Madeline] was enough to tell one that she belonged to that small group of girls who still think a parent should have something to say about things…

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

Earnest Americans, academics and feminists have plenty of ammunition to denounce Bertie – and through him, Wodehouse – as a misogynist. Certainly he misses no opportunity to roll his eyes about women, and the underlying premise of the stories is his morbid fear of ever losing his bachelor status and getting hitched to a woman. I read it, I’m aware of it, but I read it as a comic trope, like Bertie’s own stupidity, his heedless drunkenness, like Jeeves’s Godlike omniscience, like the bad-tempered old judge, the priceless chef, and so on. They’re all stereotypes. But for the record I’ll record some of the grosser incidences.

I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

When you really read many of these comments them, you realise the real victim of them is Bertie, because any time he expresses any opinion about anything, he reveals what a dimwit he is.

‘I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack.

If you wanted to take a feminist line, I suppose you could say that, no matter how humorously intended, the anti-women sentiments which are found throughout Wodehouse’s works are just one more brick in the huge wall of misogynistic patriarchy which dominated British society until late in the 20th century and can, of course, still be found in many places. I.e. the humorous context doesn’t count, or doesn’t invalidate the essentially negative attitude. Whether funny or not, it’s still negative.

‘You know, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘when you really start to look into it, it’s perfectly amazing how the opposite sex seems to go out of its way to snooter me. You recall Miss Wickham and the hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Gwladys what-was-her-name, who put her boy friend with the broken leg to bed in my flat?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pauline Stoker, who invaded my rural cottage at dead of night in a bathing suit?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a sex! What a sex, Jeeves! But none of that sex, however deadlier than the male, can be ranked in the same class with this Stiffy.’

Or:

‘She wasn’t kidding. She meant business. She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modem emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?’

It’s a literally humourless interpretation, but I’m sympathetic to it…

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

In my review of the previous novel, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’, I pointed out the surprisingly large influence on Wodehouse of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that Bertie refers to his adventures as ‘cases’ and the people who come to him and Jeeves for help as ‘clients’. And very obviously the entire idea of a partnership solving problems, one of whom is the super-intelligent problem-solver while the other is his dim sidekick (i.e. Jeeves and Wooster), obviously echoes Holmes and Watson.

The Holmes influence is toned down in this novel so that there’s only one reference to Watson and one to Holmes. Instead what surprised me is that Wodehouse chucks in a reference to Hercule Poirot! It’s an interesting indication of how Christie’s detective had penetrated so deeply into popular culture that he could be jokily referenced in other popular fiction.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well!

But in fact there’s more to it than that. Wodehouse deliberately drops a number of Christie references throughout the novel, turning the text itself into a sort of Christie-esque mystery.

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

To while away the time I pulled the arm-chair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders and I was soon absorbed.

And the novel even gives him clues what to do, as when he’s looking for the hidden notebook and the mystery he’s reading has the detective recommend looking on top of the suspect’s wardrobe.

Comparison with thrillers: Here’s Bertie recruiting Jeeves to help him write out a summary of the situation:

‘I think it would help if we did what they do in the thrillers. Do you ever read thrillers?’
‘Not very frequently, sir.’
‘Well, there’s always a bit where the detective, in order to clarify his thoughts, writes down a list of suspects, motives, times when, alibis, clues and what not. Let us try this plan. Take pencil and paper, Jeeves, and we will assemble the facts. Entitle the thing ‘ Wooster, B.—position of.’

That’s exactly what Poirot does in many of his stories.

Adversary Earlier there’d been a passing reference in a telegram. Bertie had described Bassett being suspicious of him as:

like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty.

This is precisely what happens in one of Christie’s early spy adventures, The Secret Adversary.

Fiddling Further, in chapter 4 while wondering what to do, Gussie stands at the mantlepiece and fiddles with a statuette on it. This is exactly what Poirot does in many of the Christie stories, rearranging bits and bobs on mantlepieces or desks under the influence of his symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Little grey cells And it becomes unquestionable that Wodehouse is parodying Poirot when a moment later:

He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells seemed to stir.

This phrase is copyright Poirot, occurs in all the stories, and lays any doubt to rest.

Psychology Christie was at pains to distinguish Poirot from Holmes in all sorts of ways but one is to make Poirot focus not on material clues but on analysing the psychology of the murderer. Well, it’s no coincidence that throughout this novel Bertie, and others, insist on Jeeves’s superior reading of psychology. It is clearly meant to align him with Christie’s Poirot.

In these delicate matters of psychology [Jeeves] never errs.
‘I think we can find one [a solution], sir, if we approach the matter from the psychological angle.’
‘Oh, psychological?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The psychology of the individual?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘Jeeves,’ I explained to Stiffy, who, of course, knew the man only slightly, scarcely more, indeed, than as a silent figure that had done some smooth potato-handing when she had lunched at my flat, ‘is and always has been a whale on the psychology of the individual. He eats it alive.’

Gooseflesher Incidentally, Bertie converts the thriller into his own poshboy argot and refers to it as a gooseflesher.

Comic phrases

About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now. He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here.’

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I turned to Aunt Dahlia, who was making noises like a motorbicycle in the background.

Animal similes

He paused, and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill.

The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

I turned to Gussie, who was now looking like a bewildered halibut.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map—gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events.

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

However, the last female had no sooner passed through the door than Gussie, who had been holding it open, shot after her like a diving duck and did not return.

He was staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit.

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

Old Bassett, who had gone into a coma again, came out of it and uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.

There came the sound of furniture being dragged away, and presently the door opened and his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look round after a thunderstorm.

I don’t say I didn’t leave my chair like a jackrabbit that has sat on a cactus.

The Drones club

Wodehouse’s fictitious Drones Club was located in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. A drone is a male bee that does no work and lives off the labour of others so the name is a satire on the 1920s stereotype of rich, idle young men. The Drones Club appears in not just the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but the Psmith and Blandings series, as well as others. Members mentioned in this book are:

Bertie
Freddie Widgeon
Bingo Little
Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright
Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps
Oofy Prosser

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

‘The Code of the Woosters’ was published in 1938 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

This lax post-war world

She was naming the Price of the Papers. In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world.

Leave a comment

by Simon on December 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Tagged A Tale of Two Cities, A.B. Filmer, abbreviations, Aberdeen terrier, Anatole, Aunt Dahlia, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Bartholomew, Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Black Shorts, Bond Street, braggadocio, Brompton Road, Butterfield, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Charles Dickens, comic novel, Comic simile, Constable Oates, Curzon Street, dictator, Dover Street, Dr Watson, Drones Club, Einstein, Eulalie Soeurs, fascism, Feminism, fiction, Freddie Widgeon, Gloucestershire, gooseflesher, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Hamlet, Harold Pinker, Herbert Jenkins, Hercule Poirot, humour, J. Washburn Stoker, Jeeves, Jeeves and Wooster, Junior Ganymede, Keats, King Lear, Kipling, little grey cells, Macbeth, Madeline Bassett, metonymy, Milady's Boudoir, misogyny, Murder Mystery, Mussolini, newts, novel, Ode to the West Wind, Oofy Prosser, Oswald Mosely, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Piccadilly, Poirot, Pomona Grindle, Pop Bassett, Provence, Psychology, Queen Victoria, rannygazoo, Rev HP Pinker, Robert Taylor, Roberta Wickham, Roderick Spode, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Carton, silverware, Sir Roderick Spode, Sir Watkyn Bassett, Somerset Maugham, Spode, Stiffy Byng, Stinker Pinker, the Black Shorts, the Code of the Woosters, the Drones Club, The Junior Ganymede club, the Saviours of Britain, The Secret Adversary, The Sensitive Plant, The Times, Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Uncle Tom Travers, Upon Reading Chapman's Homer, WoosterWorld

Posted by Simon on December 8, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-code-of-the-woosters-p-g-wodehouse/

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe (1987)

‘Your Excellency is not only our leader but also our Teacher. We are always ready to learn…Your Excellency is absolutely right. I never thought of that. It is surprising how Your Excellency thinks about everything.’
(The head of the secret police, Professor Okong, grovelling to the military dictator in Anthills of the Savannah, page 18)

‘Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was merely a matter of dancing upside down on your head. With practice anyone could learn to do that. The real problem is having no way of knowing from one day to another, from one minute to the next, what is up and what is down.’
(Irreverent journalist Ikem Osodi, page 45)

‘This is negritude country, not Devonshire.’
(John Kent, also known as the Mad Medico, page 57)

‘This country na so so thief-man full am.’
(Drunk police sergeant at a roadblock lamenting the theft of his radio, page 213)

Background

There was a gap of 21 years between Chinua Achebe’s fourth and fifth novels. A lot happened in his life and in Nigeria, which I’ve summarised in my review of his 1983 pamphlet, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’.

Achebe wrote five novels. Two are emphatically set in the past, in the colonial period of the 1890s (Things Fall Apart) and the 1920s (Arrow of God). Three of them have contemporary settings: No Longer At Ease (late 1950s), A Man of the People (mid-1960s), and this one, Anthills of the Savannah (late 1970s). Read in sequence, they neatly represent a story of decline and fall of the nation, at the same time as the characters go up the political pecking order.

No Longer At Ease takes the time and trouble to portray one man, Obi Okwonkwo, a university graduate who has studied in Britain, who struggles to maintain his high moral ideals in the face of a series of personal crises and difficulties, culminating in him doing what he spent most of the novel swearing he would never resort to, which is to start taking bribes to influence his decisions as a civil servant in the Education Department. It is a private tragedy limited to just one fairly lowly civil servant, which Achebe makes symbolic of the widespread corruption afflicting Nigeria even before Independence.

A Man of the People ups the stakes by having its protagonist, Odilo, take an active part in politics, standing as a candidate in a general election against his far more canny opponent, a tribal chief and sitting cabinet minister. So A Man of the People a) steps up a rung to examine politics at a regional level but b) in terms of decline and fall, is a far more wide-ranging depiction of corruption, bribery and bad leadership than No Longer.

And Anthills of the Savannah completes the progress: in terms of social rank, it is set at the highest level, opening with ministers attending a meeting chaired by the terrifying military dictator who now runs their country. In terms of what I’ve called decline and fall, it shows how the purely personal scruples of Obi, and then the party political idealism of Odili, both from the idealistic 1960s, have been completely swept away in the tsunami of a military coup.

In the late 1950s Achebe’s characters are fretting about corruption; in the mid-60s they are feebly trying to set up a new political party; by the late 1970s they exist in a state of continual fear about how to survive an arbitrary and violent military regime.

That’s what I mean by saying that Achebe’s three contemporary novels chart the decline and fall of Nigerian political life, from high-flown optimism at the time of independence (the early 1960s) to cynicism and terror 20 years later.

The detail with which Achebe wanted to portray a military dictator and the impact of military rule on a nation presumably also explains why Anthills is the first of his novels not to be set explicitly in Nigeria, but in the fictional Africa country of ‘Kangan’. Presumably it was just too dangerous to write something which would be interpreted as a direct attack on very powerful people still pulling the strings in 1980s Nigeria.

(Nigeria was ruled by the military from 1966 to 1979, in which year the army allowed free elections and the return to civilian rule. Achebe worked on Anthills throughout the 1970s so, although the army relinquished power in 1979, the novel very much captures the atmosphere and fear of living under military rule. In the event, the short-lived Nigerian Second Republic came to an end when another military coup overthrew it in 1983, ironically in the same year Achebe had published ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ complaining about the country’s terrible leaders. Renewed military rule was to last another 16 years, until 1998.)

Military coups in Nigeria

Setup

Anthills is set in the fictional African nation of Kangan (capital city: Bassa). The military dictator is a successful general named Sam. He didn’t carry out the military coup himself but the coup leaders asked him to become President and he agreed.

Trained at Sandhurst and a lifelong soldier Sam knew nothing about how to run a country so he turned to his civilian friends. Chief among these was Christopher Oriko, an academic. He and Sam had been schoolboys together at the Lord Lugard College 20 years earlier (pages 65, 66). Oriko helped Sam recruit various eminent figures to become his cabinet and was made Commissioner of Information.

The novel opens (Chapter 1) with a meeting of this cabinet which makes it perfectly clear that all these grown men are now absolutely terrified of the general. He has shed his initial nerves, is now in complete control of the situation, and has grown into a mercurial and quick-to-anger tyrant on the model of Idi Amin. (The comparison with Amin is explicitly made by Captain Abdu Medani in the final chapter, who says that rumour had it that Amin used to personally strangle then behead rivals for any woman who took his fancy, storing their heads in a fridge, p.221.)

What’s making him cross today is that a delegation from the troublesome province of Abazon has arrived in the city and wants to meet him to plead for investment in water holes and wells for their drought-stricken region. The President wants to fob them off by sending a photographer and journalist to give their visit lots of publicity but not actually have to meet them, make excuses about him having to meet some other VIP or something.

Technique

Such is the power of his subject matter that it’s easy to overlook Achebe’s interest in technique. Take his deployment of a consciously simplified monumental style in the two tribal novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Or the way No Longer At Ease starts at the end, with the protagonist in court facing corruption charges, then flashes back in time to describe the sequence of events which led him there.

Well, Anthills represents a notable leap forward in narrative technique. Two things are immediately noticeable, in structure and style.

In terms of structure, many of the characters have periodic chapters named after themselves, which give their points of view in the first person. These are mixed with other chapters told in the third person. This is surprisingly effective.

In terms of style, one big thing. Some of the text is in the conventional past tense, but there are also passages told in the present. The interesting thing is this doesn’t bother the reader, you barely notice the switch from past to present tense in the verbs even when it happens in sequential sentences.

She shot up from my face where she was lying and gave my face a quick scrutiny. ‘I hope you are not being sarcastic,’ she said. I affect great solemnity, pull her back and kiss her mildly. (p.67)

Summary

In a sense Anthills of the Savannah is an African version of the terror experienced by the courtiers of any tyrant. It reminded me of descriptions I’ve read of Stalin’s court. My mind also leaps to the scenes featuring Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII in the movie ‘A Man For All Seasons’, by turns hugely jovial and terrifyingly angry. And Henry isn’t an inapt comparison because Achebe has his character Chris remark that most African leaders are like ‘late-flowering medieval monarchs’ (p.74).

The book describes in detail the changing relationships between:

Chris Oriko, who helped General Sam to the presidency and is now the government’s Commissioner for Information
his girlfriend, Beatrice Okoh, also known as BB, a Senior Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Finance (p.75)
his old schoolfriend Ikem Osodi, now editor of the National Gazette, a newspaper fiercely critical of the regime
and his girlfriend, Elewa

The three men have known each other since school and their lives have been intimately connected.

‘We are all connected. You cannot tell the story of any of us without implicating the others.’ (p.66)

Oriko and Osodi have settled into a long-term antagonism because, as the former explains, he’s tired of waking up every Thursday knowing he’s going to have to defend Osodi’s latest inflammatory editorial to His Excellency (HE).

It was only in the last quarter or so of the book that I realised how privileged Achebe intends us to see his characters as – living in a privileged government compound, having servants, cars and drivers, operating at the highest levels of state and politics. This didn’t come over at first because the characters seem so ordinary and even banal. It’s only when they step outside their privilege bubble into the ‘real world’ that the characters, and the reader, begins to feel the real poverty which the huge majority of the population live in…

Chapter 3

Ikem gets into a ludicrous race/rivalry with a taxi driver to get ahead in spaces in the colossal traffic jam on the route to the Presidential Palace, both losing their tempers in the temper-fraying permanent bad traffic which characterises Bassa.

Chapter 4 (Ikem)

Ikem remembers a year earlier attending a public execution on a beach. The crowd roared its approval and he was disgusted. Welcome to the Colosseum.

(Compare and contrast the brilliantly thorough exhibition about public executions at the Museum of London Docklands, which explained how executions were the occasions of public holidays, festivals, celebrations, eating and drinking and picking pockets in London from the 16th to 19th centuries.)

Ikem is appalled at watching four criminals being led out of the police van, tied to stakes on a beach with bull’s eyes attached to their chests, and then killed by firing squad, while the crowd roared. This episode seems to demonstrate a) the crudeness of civil life in the newly independent state and b) Ikem’s huge distance from the mass of the people which, like any Third World intellectual, he claims to represent or speak for.

Chapter 5 (Chris)

White man John Kent, who goes by the nickname Mad Medico, hosts a drinks party for Chris, Ikem, their girlfriends and an arrival from London, Dick, who set up a new literary magazine, Reject, nearly four years ago (p.58). They reminisce about how approachable and innocent Sam was back in the old days. The chapter starts with anecdotes about how Mad Medico acquired his nickname and ends with stories about sex, see below.

Chapter 6 (Beatrice)

His Excellency phones Beatrice and invites her to a small dinner party. We get a sense of the closeness of the trio when Beatrice tells us that for the first year of HE’s rule, she and Chris went regularly to the palace, till HE found his style and became more aloof. I think Achebe indicates the voice of Beatrice by making her sentences long and clumsy, and having her mangle some phrases i.e. not as fluent as Chris or Ikem.

It’s a fairly formal dinner of 15 or so people, including senior officials, the Army Chief of Staff, that kind of level. There’s a woman American journalist who Beatrice, characteristically snaps at. A long difficult dinner is followed by dancing in the drawing room overlooking the lake. The President boomingly introduces the subject of African polygamy to roars of laughter from his sycophants. For reasons I didn’t fully understand Beatrice undertakes to seduce him and shimmies so close against him that she feels his erection growing (see Sex, below). But then for reasons I didn’t understand tells him a story about being jilted by a lover when she was at a student dance in London, something which infuriates the President who storms off. Next thing Beatrice knows she’s being escorted to the car to take her home. Was it because she didn’t simply go to bed with him but insisted on telling some moralising anecdote?

Chapter 7 (Beatrice)

Yes, the prose style of Beatrice’s sections is different from the others, deliberately long winded and confusing. In this chapter she seems to be explaining that she is bringing together all the scattered parts of the narrative to tell ‘their’ story. This begins, however, with the story of her life, how she was raised on an Anglican Mission and how if any of the children misbehaved, their father thrashed them with a cane and sent them to bed (p.85). In fact her father whipped insubordinate children throughout the region, and whipped her mother, too. Once she tried to console her mother, who instead pushed her away so violently she hit her head on a stone mortar. She was 7 or 8 at the time. Man hands on violence to man.

Then she describes her very close blood-brother friendship with Ikem who she met as students in London, how she’s always been enchanted by his grand thoughts and fluency but they never quite became lovers.

Chapter 8: Daughters

This chapter continues the theme of interpolated stories, in this case Igbo legends, starting with the story of Idemili, daughter of God.

The text becomes confusing. It jumps to Beatrice being marched in disgrace from HE’s soirée, as described at the end of chapter 6. Next morning she wakes to bird song and remembers stories from her girlhood although, as the omniscient narrator points out, she was brought up in a British Anglican compound and so was deprived of her cultural legacy (the legacy Achebe devoted his lifetime to promoting).

Chris calls her the next morning and motors over, they have an argument, she bursts into tears, he cuddles her, they kiss, then go to the bedroom tear off each other’s clothes and Achebe wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 1987 (p.114).

Beatrice tells Chris everybody was criticising Ikem at HE’s party and so he (Chris) must patch up his arguments with Ikem.

Chapter 9: Views of Struggle

Ikem drives to the seedy Hotel Harmoney which is where the delegation from Abazon is staying. He is welcomed and feted at which point I realised that Ikem is himself from the province in question, which becomes even clearer when some of the speakers mildly criticise him for not attending the monthly meetings of the Abazon community in Bassa (the capital city). This is identical to the structure of No Longer at Ease whose protagonist, Obi Okwonkwo, is an Igbo and is severely criticised by the monthly meeting of Igbos living in the capital (Lagos).

At which an illiterate elder from among the Abazon delegation stands up and delivers an extended speech which concludes that folk stories are what save us (p.124). He goes on to describe what the referendum held two years earlier to decide whether Sam should be made president for life looked like to village illiterates like himself i.e. highly suspect. They trusted the opinion of Ikem and when he didn’t write in favour of it, they voted No. Then the Big Chief’s people were in touch and said that as punishment for voting no all investment in water infrastructure in their region would be cancelled.

Now the white-haired old man says they have travelled all the way to Bassa to put their case to the Big Chief but he claimed to be meeting some other Big Chief so he couldn’t meet them. He tells the folk story of the tortoise and the leopard, whose point is that the tortoise was determined not to give up without a fight. The elder says they may lose but at least future generations will know at least they put up a fight.

In the hotel parking lot Ikem is issued with a totally spurious parking ticket by a typically arrogant mocking threatening policeman. Next day he calls the Chief of Police and uses his reputation, goes to visit the police HQ. The Chief is embarrassed such an important man was hassled by his traffic cops, calls in everybody on duty that night and gives them a bollocking before identifying the culprit who is ordered to hand over Ikem’s papers, which he had confiscated.

Clout. Pull. Intimidation. The thing is it works both ways: in the cop who threw his weight around, and then in the Chief’s embarrassment at having bothered a VIP. Somehow everything about this trivial incident highlights the lack of principle, the lack of objective service, the personalised nature of law enforcement, which is at one with its universal corruption.

Chapter 10: Impetuous Son

A knock at the door of Ikem’s apartment and it’s two taxi drivers, the one he got into the silly race for spaces in the traffic jam in chapter 2, and the head of his union of taxi drivers. They’ve come to thank Ikemi for standing up for them and the working classes in his editorials. Most of this chapter consists of dialogue in pidgin which I didn’t understand a word of.

Chapter 11

That night Ikem has sex with Elewa then drives her home. He returns home, brews a coffee and reflects on the absurdity of so-called ‘public affairs’:

nothing but the closed transactions of soldiers-turned-politicians, with their cohorts in business and the bureaucracy (p.141)

Characteristically, for Achebe, the only actual political ‘policy’ Ikem is associated with is writing editorials against capital punishment. Nothing about industrial, economic or fiscal policy. Instead a load of poetic guff about how the leaders need to:

re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being. (p.141)

Not particularly practical. Meanwhile Sam calls Chris to his office and announces he is going to have Ikem arrested for working cahoots with treasonous elements from Abazon, for attending a secret meeting with them in the north of the capital (i.e. the meeting with the Bassa Abazon Association we saw being dominated by a worthy old man). He goes on, in classic security state style, to claim Ikem also had a role in conspiring to deliver a No vote in Abazon during the presidential referendum. Sam orders Chris to sack Ikem as editor of the Gazette. Chris refuses and tenders his resignation. Sam laughs in his face and says he better watch out, or he’ll be next (p.144). Chris refuses to write the letter but Sam says it will get written anyway, and also that the head of the security service will be investigating his (Chris’s) role in the referendum.

So it’s Ikem’s visit to the Hotel Harmoney to see the Abazon delegation (as Sam himself requested back in chapter 1) which looks like it’s going to be the mainspring of the tragedy.

The letter of his dismissal is couriered to Ikem that afternoon. Ikem drives over to Chris’s place, finding Beatrice there. It’s only now that Chris tells everyone how deeply upset Sam was when he lost the president-for-life referendum, and was particularly hurt that his two closest friends let him down, that Chris as Commissioner for Information, didn’t do more, and Ikem chose to take annual leave and so didn’t write an editorial supporting it.

Elewa turns up and they all watch the 8 o’clock news. Ikema smiles through the item about his sacking but leaps from his chair when the next item announces that the six men in the delegation from Abazon, including the kindly old tribal elder, have been arrested on charges of conspiracy.

Chapter 12

Ikem delivers a speech at the university on the folk story of the tortoise and the leopard, as told him by the white-haired Abazon elder in chapter 9. Tough audience of students who all appear to take Marxism with literal seriousness, one student calling for Kangan to be placed under the dictatorship of the proletariat. He then mocks the leaders of the ‘working classes’ i.e. the trade union leaders who are more concerned about preserving their privileges and being treated like VIPs than changing the system they inherited. Ikem refuses to give easy answers. Obviously acting as Achebe’s spokesman in the text, he says everybody asks the writer for easy answers but the writer’s job is to ask questions.

‘No, I cannot give you the answers you are clamouring for. Go home and think! I cannot decree your pet, textbook revolution. I want instead to excite general enlightenment by forcing all the people to examine the condition of their lives because, as the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth living. As a writer I aspire only to widen the scope of that self-examination.’ (p.158)

Everyone in the country must, in other words, become a reflective intellectual like himself. And when this doesn’t happen, as it can’t happen, Ikem will, like Achebe, write a long essay explaining why his country has let him down.

Ikem’s lecture concludes with an attack on his student audience for replicating in miniature all the vices of the nation at large, tribalism, corruption and the preservation of mediocrity and bad management. All covered by parroting right-on revolutionary phrases from Marxist professors who have absolutely no intention of overthrowing or even reforming the system they do so well out of.

During the jokey question and answer session which follows his lecture, someone asks whether he’s heard the proposals by the president to have his face put on the currency. Ikem jokes that any head of state who puts his head on a coin is tempting his people to take it off, the head he means. Much laughter. It was probably this light-hearted joke which condemned him to death (see below).

Chapter 13

Next day’s newspapers lead in the biggest type that Ikem has been promoting seditious beliefs including the suggestion that our Beloved President be beheaded! The secret police have been monitoring the Mad Medico. He is arrested, held and interrogated for four days, then deported. Chris and BB drive round to Ikem’s flat (at 202 Kingsway Road) to find his flat has been ransacked and he (Ikem) is not there. The neighbours say they saw two army jeeps outside in the middle of the night.

Chris spends the day on the phone ringing round the other high officials (he is a cabinet member, after all) like the Attorney General, the head of the State Research Council, the President himself, but they are all either unavailable or claim to have no knowledge.

Then the 6 o’clock news leads with a long story which accuses Ikem of being at the heart of a conspiracy to overthrow the state, how he was arrested by security forces but chose to fight and in the struggle a gun went off which killed him (p.169).

Chris packs and leaves for a ‘safe house’ immediately. He reaches out to foreign journalists to disseminate the true story of Ikem’s behaviour and murder, and claims on the BBC that Ikem was murdered by the Kangan security forces. He has a clandestine meeting with the leaders of students who photocopy Chris’s leaflet on the case and widely distribute it. In retaliation the security forces descend on the university campus, rampaging through it with batons (not actually shooting anyone) raping some female students. Then the campus is closed down.

The British High Commissioner complains but is handed a letter written by that poet, Dick, from chapter 5, who had written to the Mad Medico about the little drinks party at his flat at which he had heard a member of the cabinet (Chris) speak so openly and critically of the president. In other words, the security services have done a very good job of marshalling and then twisting all available evidence to make it seem like Ikem and Chris really were part of a conspiracy against the President and the State.

That night security forces come knocking on the door of Beatrice’s flat, where the terrified Ewela had come to seek sanctuary. Both women dress and watch the soldiers as they search everywhere, but leave without arresting either woman.

Chapter 14

Someone in the security forces phones Beatrice and tells her he knows where Chris is but doesn’t want to arrest him, tell him to move safe houses. Is it a trick to catch him? Beatrice phones and tells him to move. She goes to work as normal, then shopping to give an air of normality. The unknown mole in the security services calls again to say the city isn’t safe; Chris has to move out. The TV news announces that anyone found guilty of helping Chris, now an enemy of the people, will be guilty of treason which is punishable by death.

A couple of pages devoted to describing how callous and harsh Beatrice had been on her servant, Agatha, for years, ridiculing her membership of a revivalist Christian congregation and so on. Now, for the first time, Beatrice begins to feel compassion for her.

Chapter 15

Describes how Chris was handled through a succession of safe spaces. But the announcement of the death penalty for people helping him makes his current patron think someone might grass him up, so he better move out the city. First step is to move from the Government reservation to a safe house in the northern slums.

He’s collected in a taxi which is part of the network, with three minders. They get through three roadblocks but are stopped at a big one with many cop cars, lights flashing. On impulse Chris gets out of the car but this draws attention to him and his companion and a fierce soldier approaches. Tense scene where his companion does most of the talking, assuring him Chris works in a garage, and he has the brainwave of taking a kolanut out of his pocket and offering the soldier some. That’s all it takes. The soldier’s face lights up and he waves them through.

Chapter 16

Five days later Chris starts the move north. For those days he stays in the house of the very poor Braimoh, a taxi driver with five children. Beatrice elects to spend the night with him on the noisy bed Braimoh and his wife give up for their distinguished guests.

It was only at the point I realised just how privileged and elite a lifestyle Chris in particular had enjoyed, with a big house in the Government compound. a) the height of his privilege and so now b) the depth to which he has fallen, cadging a kip on the bed of a dirt-poor, taxi driver.

And realised that his journey represents an odyssey out among the common people who he and Ikem and their ilk spend so much time pontificating about but of whose lives they really know next to nothing. It is by way of being an education and a sort of penance. He has become ‘a wide-eyed newcomer to the ways of Kangan’ (p.201) undergoing a ‘transformation’ of the man he was (p.204).

Chapter 17

The bus journey on the Great North Road. The colourful design and slogans painted on long distance buses. The poverty of the passengers. The change from tropical rain country to dusty savannah as you head north. There’s been drought for two years. All water has to be bussed in (p.208).

Chris had been joined on the run by a student leader who is also wanted by the authorities, Emmanuel. He is still being accompanied/guarded by the faithful taxi driver, Braimoh. So there are three of them watching the landscape change, become more arid. Chris notices the anthills dotted around the savannah and thinks of Ikem’s prose poem hymn to the sun (the one quoted in full in chapter 3).

The bus is regularly stopped at checkpoints whose sole purpose is to extort money from the driver. Chris begins to understand the universal extent of the low-level extortion which dominates all Nigerians’ lives.

Then they come to a ‘checkpoint’ which is packed with a crowd all drinking beer and talking loudly, some dancing. When the bus stops, instead of just the driver going to pay the routine bribe, all the passengers get out and hear the astonishing news that there’s been a coup. The sergeant in charge of the checkpoint heard it on the radio half an hour ago just as a lorryload of beer pulled up, so they stopped the lorry and impounded its contents and distributed it to the growing crown and triggered an impromptu street party. Chris and Emmanuel try to get sense out of the crowd or the drunk policemen, but they just tell them to stop asking questions and drink like everyone else.

There’s a scream and Chris sees the drunk police sergeant dragging a young woman towards a nearby group of mud huts, with the obvious intention of raping her. Some women are asking him to stop, lots of the men are cheering. Chris strides right over and confronts the sergeant, tells him to stop, tells him he will report him to the Inspector-General of Police. The sergeant takes his gun from his holster, cocks it and shoots Chris point blank in the chest. Emmanuel runs over and kneels by Chris as he lays on his back and dies.

The cop drops his gun and runs off chased by Braimoh who tackles him on the edge of the scrub and they roll around struggling a bit but the cop is bigger, stronger and more desperate than Braimoh, staggering to his feet and running off leaving the latter lying in the dust.

Chapter 18

Beatrice arranges a naming ceremony for Elewa’s 28-day-old baby. Seeing as we were told Elewa was just barely pregnant in chapter 14 as Chris’s flight began, I take it this must be 7 or 8 months later.

In a brief recap we learn that after hearing about Chris’s death Beatrice collapsed, withdrew into herself etc. But then Elewa nearly had a miscarriage which forced Beatrice to emerge from her grief and assume responsibility for the young, poor, uneducated woman. So, it turns out, Beatrice has gone on a journey of self discovery comparable to Chris’s.

A group of friends or comrades regularly come to her flat, worried about her, namely:

Braimoh the taxi driver (so he wasn’t hurt in the fight with the drunk sergeant, as I’d feared)
Emmanuel the rebel student leader who accompanied Chris on his journey
Captain Abdul Medani, who had led the search of her fat and, she realises, was the voice of the mystery calls warning Chris to move on
Adamma, the pretty girl Emmanuel spent the later stages of the ill-fated bus journey trying to chat up, joking about his failure to do so with Chris

As far as I can tell the coup was an intra-military affair i.e. one bit of the army overthrew the President and the new leader is Major-General Ahmed Lango (p.218).

We learn that in the coup Sam was kidnapped from the Presidential Palace, tortured, shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave in the bush. The obvious point is that all three of the men who had been friends since their schooldays and whose fates were entwined with the modern history of Kangan (or so Achebe tries to persuade us) are now dead, run over by the juggernaut of history. And that kind of flaccid rhetoric about ‘history’ is precisely how Beatrice/Achebe see it. Were, she wonders, Ikem and Chris just victims of random accidents, or:

Were they not in fact trailed travellers whose journeys from start to finish had been carefully programmed by an alienated history? If so, how many more doomed voyagers were already in transit or just setting out, faces fresh with illusions of duty-free travel and happy landings ahead of them? (p.220)

This is OK as ‘literary’ writing, I suppose, but pointless waste of breath as political or sociological or historical analysis. I doubt it, because Achebe clearly believes in his characters and much of their debate, especially the long speech Ikem gives at the university defending the importance of storytellers – but you could argue that the entire novel is a satire on the uselessness of writers and writing, vapouring away in their ivory towers while history or events continue relentlessly on, completely ignoring all their fierce inconsequential debates.

The naming ceremony is held in Beatrice’s flat amid much tears over the dead father (Ikem) whose spirit, however is floating over them and smiling, apparently. Many tears which the reader is, I think, meant to join in.

Agatha chants one of her Christian songs and starts dancing. A Muslim woman who we’ve never heard of before, more or less invented for this scene I think, starts dancing along. So Beatrice, a self-declared pagan, thinks what the hell and starts dancing, too. I think we’re meant to see it as significant that this ecumenical gesture, this healing of communities, takes place among women, the healing sex according to much feminist thought (p.224).

Elewa’s mother and uncle turn up. The latter is a keen guzzler of booze but then unexpectedly becomes quite authoritative, and leads a traditional prayer (described as ‘the kolanut ritual’) for the long life, health and happiness of the newborn child (a girl) and indeed for everybody there (p.228).

(The baby is named Amaechina which means May-the-path-never-close, or Ama for short, p.222.)

On the book’s last pages we learn a secret. As he lay dying Chris’s last words to a tearful Emmanuel were ‘The last grin’, or at least that’s what he thought. When Emmanuel tells the christening party this, Beatrice rushes off in tears. When she returns, it’s to explain that this was a coded message or in-joke for her benefit. In one of their many arguments, Chris and Ikem had referred to themselves and Sam as three green bottles hanging on the wall (as in the song ten green bottles).

Somehow Beatrice manages to slightly distort this message into the Author’s Message for the book as a whole, which is about the isolation of its intellectual protagonists from the mass of the people.

‘The bottles are up there on the wall hanging by a hair’s breadth, yet looking down pompously on the world. Chris was sending us a message to beware. This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented…’ (p.232)

The very last paragraphs describe Beatrice achieving a kind of serene happiness, knowing that Chris died a good death, achieved wisdom at his death, like a holy man in a parable. ‘Beautiful,’ whispers Beatrice with tears running down her face, ‘Beautiful.’

Servants

A theme of the novel is how the intelligentsia as represented by Chris and Ikem, are out of touch with, disconnected from, remote from, the ‘ordinary people’, despite Ikem in particular going on about how his class needs to reconnect with ‘the poor and dispossessed of this country’.

Meanwhile, it seems to be taken for granted that all of Achebe’s characters have servants. I was staggered that even the poor young civil servant in No Longer At Ease had a houseboy, and the characters in this novel all seem to have a ‘boy’, housekeeper or cook. For example, Ikem’s cook Sylvanus, who is itching to demonstrate his culinary prowess to Beatrice when Ikem brings her home (chapter 5), or Beatrice’s maid, Agatha. Servants? A cook? A maid?

The African intellectuals go on and on about how the wicked white imperialist used to boss around and humiliate their fathers and grandfathers…and then boss around and humiliate their own (black) servants. The narrator tells us that Beatrice regularly reduces her maid Agatha to tears, making her cry for hours (p.185). Here’s Beatrice addressing her:

‘Agatha, you are a very stupid girl and a wicked girl… get out of the way!’ (p.182)

Only towards the end of the book is there a kind of set-piece where Beatrice for the first time sees Agatha as a human being, and realises how mean she’s been for years and years. Illumination too late.

Marxism

The chapter describing Ikem’s lecture crystallises the sense that a lot of the opposition to the military regime back then was couched in the date rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism. The radical characters refer to ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ as if this was a viable policy or could ever be the answer to anything.

This led me to realise that Achebe wrote Anthills of the Savannah through the 1970s and 80s i.e. in a dire period of the Cold War, when communist rhetoric was very popular, not just among students in the West, but much more pressingly in Third World countries, in places like Angola or Mozambique where Marxist parties were at war, in the rhetoric of the ANC in South Africa and so on. A whole mental worldview cast in terms of outdated concepts like ‘the bourgeoisie’ and ‘the proletariat’, ‘class war’, ‘revolution’, ‘communist utopia’ and so on.

It was only two short years after Anthills of the Savannah was published that the Berlin Wall came down leading the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Leaving Marxist intellectuals around the world intellectually and morally bankrupt. Epic fail.

It was a sudden insight for me that Achebe’s entire writing career took place during the Cold War. He wrote poems, some stories and essays after the Wall came down, but no more novels. He may well have been the godfather of African literature but he was also a Cold War author.

Anger

Lack of self discipline, immaturity and quick temper are just some of the things Achebe accuses his countrymen of in his withering essay, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’. These negative attributes are very visible in the quick tempers and violence dramatised in A Man of The People and are on ample display here. Nigerians, according to this book, get furious with each other at the drop of a hat.

When Ikem phones Chris at work and the latter’s secretary insists he’s not in, Ikem starts yelling down the phone, ‘an angry man’ (p.27). It doesn’t take much to make Elewa become ‘really aggressive’ (p.35). Ikem is in the middle of his morning conference when his stenographer peers round the door to say he’s got a call, and Kiem asks who it is ‘angrily’ (p.36). Chris’s secretary makes a pert remark after Ikem has had an angry meeting with him, so he slams the door behind him in his rage (p.44). Ikem is parked in a market when he sees a soldier aggressively park his car, nearly knocking a trader over. The soldier then insults the trader ‘with a vehemence I found astounding’ which leaves Ikem ‘truly seething with anger’ (p.48). When the soldier sent to collect her tells her they’re not going to the Palace but the Presidential Guesthouse Beatrice is ready to ‘explode in violent froths of anger’ (p.72).

According to Beatrice, Ikem and Chris are always having ‘fierce arguments’ (p.73). When the security guard at Chris’s apartment complex won’t let a taxi driver in, they get into a heated altercation (p.149). When the soldiers come to search Beatrice’s flat, the sergeant leading his platoon is bursting with anger and hatred of her (p.177). When Beatrice loses her car keys and returns to a phone box where she made a call to find a man using it, when she taps on the window he angrily insists there’s no keys there and makes an angry hissing noise at her (p.181). When Beatrice gets back to her flat and finds her servant Agatha hasn’t made Elewa a proper big breakfast, she is furious at her (p.183).

As Achebe suggests in ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, this lack of self-control, this lack of self-discipline, is connected to immaturity and childishness. The reader can extend the trait to the country’s leaders, whose speeches are full of petulant complaints, and are themselves quick to rain down dire threats on their opponents. Everyone seems to be angry all of the time.

Stupidity

Notoriously, the central claim of Achebe’s long essay ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ was that the problem was the terrible quality of its leaders, not least that these leaders were uneducated, ignorant and stupid. In this book His Excellency Sam is described by Ikem as ‘not very bright’ (p.49) and there is a constant, understated hum throughout the book, a continual criticism of people who are illiterate, semi-literate and uneducated; and an implicit valorisation of Chris and Ikem and their like for having enjoyed a top hole education, first within Kangan and then topped off with post-graduate study in Britain.

Sex

As in A Man of the People I was dismayed by the novel’s bluntness about sex. Take Ikem’s description of Elewa’s lovemaking, ‘I shall never discover where in that little body of hers she finds the power to lift you up bodily on her trunk while she is slowly curving upwards like a suspension bridge’ (p.37). Or how he believes that, soon after sex a man should return to his own apartment in order to work. How he ‘couldn’t write tomorrow’s editorials with Elewa’s hands cradling my damp crotch’ (p.38).

How, when young Sam was in bed in Camberley recovering from double pneumonia, MM set him up with a good-time girl who gave excellent blowjobs (with an ‘invigorating tongue’, p.61). Which in turn makes Chris recall his ill-fated 6-month marriage to a woman named Louise who was ‘totally frigid in bed’ (p.63), and then another girl he went out with who ‘flaunted her flesh’, lacing her performance with ‘moans and all that ardent crap’ (p.63).

On one of their early nights together, Chris tells Beatrice loads about him and Ikem and Sam, including the morning after Sam and his then-girlfriend, Gwen, had sex, she woke and wanted another go, he said ‘there was nothing left in the pipeline’ so she:

‘swings herself around and picks up his limp wetin-call with her mouth’

at which point he gets an erection. This leads to a whole page devoted to Beatrice commenting on this behaviour, saying ‘how disgusting’, asking whether he ejaculated in her mouth, that’s something she’ll never do, and so on (p.69).

When Chris and Beatrice have sex in chapter 8 it should win an award for embarrassingly over-written sex scenes. In the same chapter Chris caricatures what would happen if he fled Kanga, went into exile in the west and it is typical of the novel’s worldview that he immediately thinks that in exile he would ‘sleep with a lot of white girls’ (p.118). Are white girls that sexually available to Nigerian students? Apparently so.

When Beatrice compares Chris and Ikem the salient point is not regarding their political position or economic theory or ideals for the country, it’s that Ikem has had a ‘string of earthy girlfriends’ (p.119).

When Beatrice insists on spending Chris’s last night in Bassa with him, even though it’s at the slum home of taxi driver Braimoh, the pair still have sex in someone else’s bed and despite the fact that his host’s five small children are sleeping on mats in the same room, separated only by a sheet hung from string strung across the room, so any wakeful children can hear the act (p.198).

Maybe we’re meant to find the sexual anecdotes, especially in the first half of the text, warm and funny; maybe they’re meant to indicate the openness between the three former friends and their girlfriends, a kind of prolongation of their student-era, light-hearted promiscuity. But to me almost all this sex talk felt somehow joyless and crude. It put me off the characters and the book.

And, just as in A Man of the People, I found it disappointing that these so-called ‘intellectuals’ don’t have an idea in their heads, don’t have a single practical suggestion about how to improve the law or commerce, industry, investment or economy of their country: they just spend all their time telling stories or thinking about sex.

And, of course, the entire narrative climaxes, or ends, with a fight over a sex act, namely Chris intervening to stop the police sergeant raping a young woman. Putting aside the (nasty) content of the act, it’s characteristic of Achebe’s contemporary stories that the decisive event is sexual rather than political, just as the swing event in A Man of the People is not a political decision but Odilo’s anger at Chief Nanga sleeping with his girlfriend. Seems like, in Achebe, sexual hot-headedness always trumps politics analysis.

Embedded stories

The character Ikem is now a powerful newspaper editor but like all literature students, fancies himself as a poet and author. All Achebe’s books contain numerous traditional proverbs and some of them (Arrow of God) describe characters telling each other traditional folk stories. In this one, we have Ikem’s productions quote in full, being:

a Hymn to the Sun (pages 30 to 33)
a ‘love letter’ to Women (i.e. a feminist interpretation of history and reform) (pages 97 to 101)
the leopard and the tortoise

Explanation of the title

At the end of chapter 3 Ikem composes a Hymn to the Sun – an unlikely thing, maybe, for a tough newspaper editor to do, but adding an interesting extra layer of meaning to the novel’s text. Half-way through he describes the way a hallucinatorily fierce sun burns away vegetation from the face of the earth, leaving trees looking like bronze statues:

like anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s brush fires.

So the anthills are repositories of history which survive a disastrous fire in order to tell succeeding generations what happened. So maybe that is the purpose of this book: to survive in the fierce times of Nigeria’s military dictatorship, to preserve history and stories for later generations.

Conclusion

I read Anthills of the Savannah when it first came out and it left a lasting, positive impression on me. Rereading it almost 40 years later I found I disliked many things about it. Of Achebe’s five novels I think it’s the weakest: I’d recommend any of the others, but especially Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God before it.

Without maybe being fully aware of it, Achebe seems to have moved into thriller territory, with the last 40 pages being an account of a man on the run from the state security services and he does a capable job but it’s not really his forte. The folk stories interspersed in the narrative are not as numerous as I expected, only about three in total, not enough to lift the book into the realm of magical realism which was so fashionable when it was published.

He makes a clear effort to be a feminist, taking time to flesh out the character of Beatrice, her one-sided upbringing, her experiences in London, falling in love with Chris, her boldness at the President’s party, overcoming her terror when Chris goes on the run, with plenty of reflections thrown in about the plight of women, the oppression of women, how women have to stick together, women are the future etc. All correct sentiments, but not really dramatised in the plot. Good intentions, somehow not fully worked through.

Also his prose style has gone to pot. I initially thought the long unravelling sentences were limited to Beatrice’s sections of the novel and designed to characterise her feminine thought processes like Molly Bloom’s in Ulysses. But they’re not. They occur throughout and are often really clumsy.

All these attractions of Abazon had of course to be set against the one considerable disadvantage of being a place where the regime might be sleeping with one eye open especially since the death of Ikem and an ugly eruption of a new crisis over the government’s refusal to turn over his body to his people for burial under the provocative pretext that investigations were still proceeding into the circumstances of his death! (p.195, cf p.196)

Achebe took over a decade to write this relatively short novel. Don’t you think that sentence could have been a teeny bit improved? Probably by breaking it up into two or more shorter sentences? And does it need the exclamation mark at the end? It serves mainly to make the thought it contains come over as callow and naive.

But most of all I disliked how useless, impractical, spurious and distracting most of its intellectual content is. Economic, social, industrial, developmental, fiscal and social problems need practical, thought-out and costed solutions, not folk stories and witless vapouring about:

re-establishing vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being.

I know it’s only a novel not an economic strategy, but it was Achebe himself who chose to make it a novel about politics, to get his hands dirty by entering the political arena and to give his characters great long speeches about the future of their country, the future of democracy, the validity of revolution, about feminism and overthrowing the patriarchy and smashing the system and supporting the poor.

So it is deeply disappointing that amid all this fine rhetoric the book’s political analyses are so limited and shallow – big on rhetoric about stories and feelings but, for all practical purposes, quite useless.

Credit

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe was published in 1987 by Heinemann Books. References are to the 1988 African Writers Series paperback edition.

Chinua Achebe reviews

Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on January 29, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel

Tagged 202 Kingsway Road, A Man of the People, Abazon, academia, Achebe, Adamma, Africa, African literature, African novel, African Writers Series, Agatha, Amaechina, anger, Angola, Anthills of the Savannah, Arrow of God, bad traffic, Bassa, BB, Beatrice, Beatrice Okoh, Berlin Wall, Braimoh, bribery, British Empire, Camberley, Captain Abdu Medani, Captain Abdul Medani, Chief Nanga, Chinua Achebe, Chris Oriko, Christopher Oriko, colonialism, Commissioner for Information, Communism, corruption, daughter of God, dictator, dictatorship, Elewa, Emmanuel, extortion, Feminism, fiction, folk stories, General Sam, Great North Road, His Excellency, Hotel Harmoney, Hymn to the Sun, Idemili, Idi Amin, Igbo, Igbo legends, Ikem Osodi, illiteracy, imperialism, John Kent, Kangan, kolanut, Lagos, Lord Lugard College, Mad Medico, Major-General Ahmed Lango, Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, May-the-path-never-close, military coup, Molly Bloom, Mozambique, Museum of London Docklands, narrative, National Gazette, Nigeria, Nigeria's military dictatorship, Nigerian Second Republic, No Longer at Ease, novel, obi, Obi Okwonkwo, Odili, Oriko, Osodi, Pidgin, Politics, polygamy, Privilege, Professor Okong, proverbs, public affairs, public execution, Sam, servants, sex, Stalin, State Research Council, Sylvanus, the Cold War, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the kolanut ritual, the leopard and the tortoise, the Mad Medico, the tortoise and the leopard, The trouble with Nigeria, Things Fall Apart, Third World countries, Third World intellectual, treason, Ulysses

Posted by Simon on January 29, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/anthills-of-the-savannah-chinua-achebe/

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (2007)

I walked inside [the former Belgian restaurant in the Congo town of Kalemie] to find a wreck. A wooden bar ran along one wall and a Congolese lady stood behind it.
‘Do you have anything I could drink?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have anything I could eat?’
‘No.’
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, page 103)

In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.134)

The Congo river system is potentially one of the most valuable assets in all of Africa, but in recent years it has been choked to a standstill by war and mismanagement.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.295)

As the lurid title suggests, Butcher is a journalist, not a historian or scholar. He was appointed Africa correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in 2000 and this book is a colourful description of his self-appointed task of repeating Henry Morton Stanley’s famous expedition across central Africa, from Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika, across country for 500 kilometres until he hit the River Congo, and then 3,000 or so kilometres down Africa’s second longest river, right down to the sea, beyond Boma – a journey he undertook in August 2004 (just as the Athens Olympics were about to start, p.322).

Limited use as a reference

Early on, Butcher inadvertently indicates the limits of his journalistic style or knowledge or interest or research, when he knocks off a description of the Rwanda genocide and how it unravelled into the two Congo Wars, which themselves degenerated into the Great War of Africa, in a mere two pages (13 to 14).

As it happens I’ve read about six book-length or chapter-length accounts of the Rwandan genocide and the wars which followed, all of which go into vastly more detail about this complicated and terrible sequence of events, and so I flinched a bit at the superficiality and, in my opinion, errors in Butcher’s brief summary. He has an interviewee say that Mobutu ‘invited’ ‘the Hutu gunmen’, the interahamwe, to flee into Zaire. He writes that ‘the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government’ then sent troops to support Laurent Kabila’s insurgency (p.13).

This is not only very simplified but, in my opinion, actively misleading. It wasn’t just the interahamwe that fled into Zaire but the entire Hutu government and administration which had planned and carried out the appalling genocide of the Tutsi minority. Justifiably terrified of being captured and punished for their crimes, the Hutu administration terrified millions of Hutus into thinking the invading Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front would take revenge on them for the genocide, and so it turned into a mass exodus of a large part (about a quarter) of Rwanda’s population across the border into Congo.

It’s true that Mobutu had a long-standing close relationship with the Hutu leadership of Rwanda, but he didn’t ‘invite’ the fleeing génocidaires nor their million peasant compatriots into his country, they just crossed the border and presented Mobutu with a crisis (and an opportunity).

Butcher skips any explanation of the pre-existing civil war in Rwanda which was the context for the genocide and helps to explain it. Nowhere in the book does he mention the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), or its leader and still the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, or the key role the RPF played in ending the genocide when the entire international community (the UN, Britain, America, France) was standing by and letting it happen (to our eternal shame).

He nowhere explains that the Hutu génocidaires established an iron control of the vast refugee camps just inside the Zaire border and used them as bases to launch attacks against Tutsi villages inside Rwanda, continuing the genocide on a small scale while marshalling their resources to launch a re-invasion with the aim of completing the job of exterminating all the Tutsis.

He nowhere explains that the new Rwandan government of national unity repeatedly complained about the Hutu exiles to the Congo government of Mobutu, and begged the UN and international partners to step in and stop the raids and to rein in the Hutu génocidaires but that, once again, the international community did nothing.

He doesn’t explain that this was why, after a year of putting up with this destabilising presence on its western border, the RPF-backed Rwanda government decided to do something about it: to send its army into the Congo, dismantle the refugee camps, force the Hutu population to return to their country with promise of safe passage and that they would be unpunished if they just returned to their villages, while at the same time chasing the genocidal Hutu leaders and their mass-murdering militia, the interahamwe, deeper into Congo with the aim of killing them and putting an end to their genocidal plans once and for all.

He doesn’t explain how Kigali found a willing partner in the government of Uganda, which contributed its own forces, and suggested they use as a fig leaf and front man for their invasion, the drunken, womanising guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had been ‘fighting’ a small-scale insurgency against the Mobutu regime for 30 years and who they now put at the head of a new rebel force concocted for the purpose (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo). Nor that the initial operation was so successful that Rwanda and Uganda decided to send their forces on right across Congo to the capital, Kinshasa, forcing the ageing ailing dictator Mobutu to flee the country (May 1996) and installing their puppet, Kabila, as new president of Congo.

Butcher’s narrative gives the rough shape of these events but is, on my reading of the sources, wrong in most of its details, for example claiming that Rwanda and Uganda ‘backed’ a pre-existing military campaign by Kabila rather than Kabila being a convenient front man for an armed group invented for the purpose to cover an invasion entirely planned and led by Uganda-Rwanda.

It was when Kabila, safely established in power as the new president of Congo in 1997, began attacking his own Rwandan and Ugandan backers, ordering their troops to leave the capital, refusing to obey their orders any more, that Uganda and Rwanda, infuriated that their puppet had turned against them, mounted a second invasion, in 1998, to overthrow him.

This is why people refer to two Congo wars. The First Congo War, from 1996 to 1997 was the Rwanda-Uganda invasion to a) empty the Hutu refugee camps and b) overthrow Mobutu. The Second Congo War started in 1998 and was Rwanda-Uganda’s attempt to overthrow Kabila and impose a regime more friendly to them. It was this second invasion which got seriously bogged down because many of Congo’s neighbouring countries sent forces to support either the Kabila government or to ally with Uganda-Rwanda. Generally the alliances were influenced by deals to get their hands on Congo’s mineral resources. Thus Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe supported Kabila in exchange for access to minerals in Congo’s south-east, and so units of the Zimbabwean army found themselves fighting units from other nations in the tropical jungles of Congo, an expensive and bewildering waste of men and resources which distanced the Zimbabwe army from the regime (as described in Douglas Rogers’s account of the coup which eventually overthrew Mugabe).

This second conflict unravelled as not only forces from ten or so neighbouring countries got involved, but as regional warlords arose and seized control of different parts of the huge country. This is the complicated, multi-party conflict which is sometimes referred to as the Great War of Africa. Theoretically it ended with a peace treaty in 2003 but, on the ground, much violence continued in the form of roving bands of ‘soldiers’ or warlord-led militias, who emerged from the jungle, massacred villages, terrorised towns, looted all the food, raped all the women, murdered the men, then disappeared back into the jungle.

This, then, was the deeply insecure and scary environment in which Butcher planned to stage his recreation of Henry Morton Stanley’s epic journey down the Congo river. In the event, although he hears many rumours of roving warbands, although he hears from inhabitants of towns and villages of past attacks, and although he and his travelling companions race past small guard posts, he never in fact meets or has any encounters with any of the terrifying army, militia or tribal warriors.

I’ve summarised the events of the Congo wars in such detail because they are the vital backdrop to Butcher’s adventure, and because he refers to them again and again throughout the book, but mostly in what I regard as a misleadingly simplistic way. In particular I went from being puzzled to feeling a bit disturbed by his complete omission of the context of the genocide (i.e. the Rwandan civil war) and its cause (a deliberate policy of mass extermination in the name of Hutu Power), by his systematic downplaying of the genocide itself, by his complete omission of the name of the key organisation in both the civil war, the ending of the genocide, and the Congo wars i.e. the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and his preference for using the phrase ‘the Tutsi-dominated’ Rwandan government. The repeated use of this phrase cumulatively gives the impression that the source of all the disruption and violence in the region was the RPF-backed government in Kigali.

Now it is definitely true that the two Rwanda-Uganda invasions of Congo, first to overthrow Mobutu, and then to overthrow Kabila, massively destabilised the whole centre of Africa. But you have to understand that the RPF’s aim was to dismantle the Hutu regime which had just carried out the worst genocide of modern times, and then to overthrow the génocidaires’ main supporter, Mobutu, and install a government which would ensure that such a genocide never took place again. Unless you grasp that underlying motive for their actions you make it seem as if the Tutsi government was the unmotivated source of the disorder in the region. It certainly evolved into that situation, especially once all Congo’s neighbours piled in, but that wasn’t their initial motive.

The general thrust of Butcher’s account is correct and he repeats the outline of events several more times throughout the book, but almost all the fine details and the deeper background, which would help you make more sense of these tumultuous events, are either wrong or just missing.

In particular I found Butcher’s underplaying of the genocide (he mentions it but never dwells on what a truly horrific and regionally seismic event it was), his casting of the Hutus as helpless victims, and his continual nudging references to the violence across the region being caused by the ‘Tutsis-dominated’ government in Kigali, build up into a misleadingly incomplete and worryingly biased account of events. A casual reading of the book would lead you to believe that the Tutsis are the bad guys in the story and behind all the violence.

What I’ve just written is based on the following sources:

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995)
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998)
In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michaela Wrong (2000)
Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern (2004)
The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2
Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010) – 3 The Great War of Africa
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns (2011)

And, of course, Wikipedia:

But the same goes for Butcher’s versions of earlier events. On pages 58 to 59 he gives a brisk summary of the murder of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, which is heavy on gruesome detail (the acid used to dissolve the corpse) but very light indeed on the complex international and domestic crises Lumumba found himself facing and made considerably worse by his own troubled character and his chaotic and rash decisions, alienating the Americans who found him impossible to work with, then inviting the Soviet Union to send armed forces to help him put down secessionist movements, which alarmed all the Western powers, the Americans and the UN.

Again, Butcher’s account isn’t wrong, as far as it goes, but by focusing narrowly on Lumumba’s murder and heavily blaming the colonial power, the Belgians (Belgian army officers helped kidnap Lumumba then fly him to a remote part of the country, were present when he was badly beaten, then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave) Butcher’s account omits the six months of hectic crises which preceded it, and Lumumba’s role in exacerbating it.

He gives no sense of how Lumumba’s difficult character worsened the crises and, eventually, led everyone concerned (including many of his own ministers and his army) to believe that Congo would be better off with him out of the way and replaced by someone more stable and predictable.

I’m not defending these events. I’m just pointing out that Butcher’s zippy two-page account, focusing (like a thriller) on the gruesome events of the murder itself, omits the complexity of the context and so militates against a proper understanding.

For all these reasons I would actively advise against reading this book as any kind of authoritative source for the geopolitics of the region and the period. For that, the best place to start would be the outstanding ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’ by David Van Reybrouck (2010).

Chaps in Africa

So, having established Butcher as a poor source of historical description or analysis, I was, in a sense, freed up to read the book for what it really is: a boy’s own adventure story, a ripping yarn, a white man’s tale of derring-do in the heart of Africa etc.

The ripping yarn tone of the story explains the praise on the cover from an impressive list of white, public school-educated, male Africa hands who recognise one of their own. These include: Alexander McCall Smith, Giles Foden, John le Carré and William Boyd. Boyd is quoted as saying: ‘The day of the intrepid traveller is not over’, which can be translated as: ‘White chaps can still have ripping adventures in the jungle’, a slice of cheery public school optimism which, once you’ve actually read the book with its bleak descriptions of super violence, social collapse and cannibalism, you might come to regard as pretty inappropriate.

Look at me, I’m woke

Butcher is at pains to stay on the right side of the reviewers and modern woke opinion by lambasting the wicked colonialists who exploited Africa during the wicked colonial period (the evils of wicked colonialism are described or referred to scores and scores of time) with a vehemence typical of a certain sort of middle-aged, middle-class, literary white man.

But I found the same is true of his dogged insistence on the evils of colonialism as of his references to the origins of the Congo wars, namely he’s not wrong, but, after a while, you start to realise he’s not describing the issue in its full complexity. He is, after all, a journalist, and so he’s writing in catchy headlines and peppy phrases.

For example, in several places he elides the truly evil, wicked, genocidal regime of the disgusting King Leopold in the 1880s and 1890s with the much more benign rule of the Belgian colonialists after the Second World War. OK, maybe they still had the same racist, white supremacist beliefs, but, as his actual narrative makes abundantly clear, they no longer massacred entire villages and cut people’s hands off; instead the post-war colonial regime built airports and railways and roads, and ports and docks, and ran mines and plantations and businesses and, above all, maintained the peace, creating the basis of a potentially prosperous country. Eliding the two eras and their policies into one thing struck me as morally dubious but also historically and politically misleading.

At one point, in a typically jeering throwaway remark, Butcher says it was one of Belgium’s most notable blunders that they didn’t train up a cohort of educated native politicians and administrators to take over the running of the country when they left. This sounds fine but it’s really a cheap shot because the Belgian colonial authorities, just like the French and British ones, thought they would be running Africa for decades to come and so had plenty of time to create an infrastructure and slowly train up the indigenes.

None of them anticipated the sudden rush for independence which was triggered by the independence of Ghana (in 1957). In particular none of them anticipated a key factor, which I’ve highlighted in my reviews of, for example, Martin Meredith’s bleakly hilarious book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence’, which was that, once negotiations started, the African nationalist parties tried to outdo each other in demanding independence, soon, sooner, NOW!

With the result that the fiery nationalists at the conference called to discuss the future of the Belgian Congo demanded they be given independence within three months of the conference ending. Many commentators at the time thought this was wildly rash but they were, of course, all denounced as racist imperialists.

Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist is set against the backdrop of the crisis of 1960 and gives a lot of factual detail about the lead-up to Lumumba’s murder. Some of the secondary characters who the impeccably liberal protagonist meets at cocktail parties etc point out that the Africans are nowhere near being able to run a country, that handing over rule to them will lead to massacres, white flight and the collapse of the country into civil war and…they are treated as racist bigots, disliked by the woke hero, ignored by the politicians. Trouble is, those racist bigots turned out to be 100% correct and then some. Rushed independence turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for the people of the Congo.

White privilege

Butcher takes every possible opportunity to slag off the wicked Belgian colonialists, but he is considerably less attuned to the way that he, a middle-class, well-connected white westerner, with thousands of dollars stashed in his kit, along with zippy technology (laptop and satellite phone) and possessor of tiptop connections to government authorities, numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the press (his employer, The Telegraph newspaper) is only able to undertake the journey because of his (relative) wealth, his white privilege and his western privilege.

Quite a few times he walks into the offices of bureaucrats or confronts African officials who are notably more respectful of him than of their fellow Africans who they’ve just been bullying, simply because he is a white man. The entire journey is only possible because he is, by Congo standards, rich, because he has thousands of dollars stashed in his clothes and so is able to pay Africans hard cash to drive him through the jungle, canoe him down the river, and generally bribe his way out of trouble.

That William Boyd quote could more accurately be rewritten as: ‘The day of the intrepid [western white male] traveller [with lots of cash and connections] is not over’.

In the footsteps of Stanley

Butcher’s entire expedition is an attempt to recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s great expedition across country to, and then down, the mighty Congo River, in which he was accompanied by three white companions and over 300 African porters, and which took three long gruelling years, from 1874 to 1877.

As you might expect, this inevitably entails several summaries of Stanley’s biography and character, of the great expedition (pages 44 to 49), and Stanley’s narrative (and illustrations) are referenced throughout the book, in particular whenever Butcher arrives at a place which Stanley first visited, or a town he in fact founded (for example, the settlement of Stanleyville which he founded at the end of the series of treacherous rapids which he modestly named, the Stanley Falls). Inevitably, Butcher also references Stanley’s central role in opening up central Africa for the murderous genocidal regime of the truly evil King Leopold of Belgium.

But again, I found Butcher’s account good as far as it went, but it never goes much beyond the stereotype of the wicked, brutal racist Victorian explorer. Butcher takes the standard journalistic view that Stanley was a wicked, violent, racist who treated his hundreds of native porters with appalling brutality and didn’t hesitate to open fire on tribespeople who got in his way. All the subtlety and complexity about the man and his achievements to be found in the (obviously much longer) biographies like that of Tim Jeal (2007) are simply absent. Jeal doesn’t gloss over Stanley’s brutality, but places him in the context of his time, compares him with other explorers, and explains the challenges he faced, from the treacherous Arab slave traders who dominated the region, to the often violent and sometimes cannibal tribes Stanley had to deal with.

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (2007)

I’m not in the slightest exonerating Stanley: the work he went on to do for King Leopold, systematically swindling scores of tribal leaders out of their ancestral lands by making them sign contract with Leopold which they obviously didn’t understand and had no legal validity, was obviously wicked and inexcusable. I’m just saying that, as with the Congo wars and Lumumba’s murder, Butcher’s journalistic summaries of Stanley gloss over the far more complex, more fascinating and therefore more useful facts.

Butcher’s mum

The blurb, the preface and much of the text all emphasise that Butcher is setting out to recreate Stanley’s epic voyage of explanation down the Congo – but on pages 8 to 11 we learn of a much more homely, domestic motive for his trip. His mother did it.

Butcher’s mum was a jolly hockey sticks daughter of the empire who, aged 21 in 1958, was packed off to southern Africa, with a friend, as a sort of finishing school. She travelled from Cape Town to Salisbury (modern Harare in Zimbabwe). It was the very end of the colonial era and so all the countries she travelled through – South Africa, Rhodesia – were still run by white colonial administrations, and so there was law and order and a good travel infrastructure: planes and trains and ferries ran on time and regularly.

This applied just as much to the 1958 Belgian Congo which the two young gells crossed as the final part of their journey. Leopoldville was the hub of one of Africa’s largest airline and the Congo’s chief port, Matadi, was served by a fleet of ocean liners. Everything – trains, planes, ferries – worked like clockwork , staffed by polite porters and obliging stewards – and so Butcher’s mother, when he used to question her, had little or no memory of it.

Now, 45 or so years later (2004), the countries she travelled through have collapsed into dictatorship (Zimbabwe) or chaos (Congo), most of the infrastructure of the latter having collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle (railway lines and railway sleepers long ago dismantled and sold for scrap or burned as firewood; stations derelict; docks abandoned, as in a dystopian sci fi movie).

Butcher’s mum kept brochures and posters and timetables from her trip which Butcher describes poring over lovingly as a boy and young man. And so Butcher’s adventure has this second level, not only retracing the steps of the man who ‘discovered’, mapped, named and revealed central Africa to western readers in the 1870s and 80s – but at the same time moving through the surreal ruins of what had once been the thriving and efficient colonial infrastructure remembered by his mum and recorded in the various brochures and timetables she kept, circa 1958 (plus other 1950s documents and guides he acquired in preparation for his trip).

So: two sets of ghosts, and that’s just the white ghosts. Obviously Butcher discovers, once he enters the country, that he is also moving among spirits of all the African tribes who lived and died, fought and were enslaved, and, more recently, burned and looted, their way through the same terrain. (See Ryszard Kapuściński’s excellent book, The Shadow of The Sun, for extended descriptions of how belief in the spirits of the dead continue to saturate African culture.)

So Butcher’s trip is alive with resonances and echoes.

Kalemie

Butcher starts his journey in the port of Kalemie on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika, which is where Stanley arrived with his huge expedition of over 300 porters, after having crossed country from Zanzibar and then crossed the lake from east to west. Instead Butcher kicks off his journey by flying there, direct from South Africa. I thought this was a slightly odd decision. To fully recreate the Stanley expedition he ought to have travelled overland from the Tanzanian coast to Lake Tanganyika, as Stanley did. It would have been interesting to have his description of modern-day Zanzibar and Tanzania, and would have maybe provided a useful contrast between one African country and another.

So anyway, Butcher flies direct to Kalemie on the western, Congo, side of Lake Tanganyika and it’s here that, after quite a few digressions about Stanley, his mum, the contacts he has drummed up in preparation for the trip, and the briefings he’s had, that he finally gets the journey started.

Kalemie straightaway provides a good example of the decline and decay all of Congo has fallen into, after 32 years of Mobutu’s systematic looting of his own country, zero investment and appalling corrupt local administration, followed by seven years (1997 to the time of his visit, 2004) of increasingly chaotic and widespread conflict. From a distance it looks like a modern town but once he’s landed and looks more closely:

What I had taken to be an estate of factories, damaged in the recent war in the Congo, turned out to be a ruin dating from a much earlier age. Faded advertisements could just be made out on the walls…Grass grew long and untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the disused station…An old railway carriage…stood rusting in the tropical heat. In one of the compartments someone had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by various dirty pots…Instead of a functioning high street what I found was a dusty space filled by gaggles of meandering locals…Of the buildings themselves there was little beyond the fronts. Rust had not just coloured the roofs but eaten out huge holes through which tropical rain had flooded for countless rainy seasons…Pipes that once brought mains water to each building lay broken and there was not one working lightbulb…Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders’ interest here, Kelamie had been hollowed out by the years. Where there had once been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk remained. (pages 85 to 85)

And this in ‘one of the biggest towns in the Congo’, a town with no state radio or TV, no newspaper, no landline phones and no internet, no petrol stations or cars, where the 1950s airport the Belgians built has become a bullet-riddled ruin (p.88).

This is what decades of neglect, lack of investment, lack of law and lack of local government produce, in a place ‘run by’ officials and administrators who do nothing but loot and steal and demand bribes for every transaction, a place where the state fails to provide either teachers or doctors or police (p.105). A key word or theme or image which threads through the text is ‘ruin’, along with its cousins, ‘derelict’, ‘wreck’, ‘decline’, ‘decay’ and ‘abandoned’.

Going backwards

Butcher hires some guys to take him by motorbike (two bikes and their owners for security’s sake, and because they know the route) inland from Kalemie. The key fact to grasp is that there are no roads any more, let alone railways. In the 1950s guides and the memory of his mother (and other accounts from the 1950s, which he cites) the major cities and many of the towns were connected by good asphalt roads which the Belgians built. Every single one of these has disappeared and been swallowed back into the jungle. Several times he comes across vehicles buried under decades of tropical foliage and realises that the narrow track through the jungle where he’s standing was, 50 years previously, an open, asphalt highway busy with cars and lorries. Now all gone, disappeared.

Similarly, Congo’s main cities were joined by railway lines and all of these have disappeared. In some cases the metal rails have been removed along with the sleepers and all that’s left is a track worn flat by the trudging of African feet. In town after town he comes across derelict, abandoned railway stations. In one particularly vivid moment he’s struggling through thick tropical forest, the sky blocked out by interlocking trees swaying high above him, dense foliage pressing right up against the narrow path he’s pushing his motorbike through when his boot clunks against something metallic. When he squats down and scrapes away at the thick soil and undergrowth at his feet he is stunned to reveal a metal rail. Beneath his feet and completely swallowed up by raw jungle is a railway which was part of thriving, developing country just 40 years previously. He is staggered by how quickly, and how totally all these infrastructures have been utterly lost, by how swiftly the country has unravelled and gone backwards.

Butcher’s journey

So Butcher rides pillion on the back of a motorbike from Kalemie heading directly west, roughly following the old abandoned overgrown railway line which once ran alongside the River Lukuga and linked Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika to join the River Lualaba between Kabalo and Kongolo. But after a 110k or so they take an abrupt right turn, heading north towards Mukumbo, then onto Kabambarre, and then to Kasongo, a now-ruined port on the River Congo.

This journey doesn’t look much on the (very good) map in the book, but it was in fact a mind-boggling 500 kilometres. (The book contains one master map of the entire route, done in a professional cartographic style, and then each chapter of the actual narrative starts with a charming hand-drawn map of that particular leg of the journey, complete with hand-drawn dotted lines, place names, and distances. Sweet. And handy.)

Anyway, Butcher covered this awesome 500k on the back of a motorbike! Along rutted, narrow, earth tracks bounded by tropical rainforest and continually littered with tree roots, bumps and ravines, streams, gulley and occasional rivers. No wonder he got a sore bum!

He takes a (very basic) ferry across the river and, on the other side, contracts more motorcyclists to drive him through 200km more narrow winding jungle paths, via the (ruined) town of Kibombo and on to another riverside port, Kindu. It’s on this leg that he comes across the wreckage of an armoured car which was shelled and destroyed during a firefight on a major road paralleling the river. Now the road has completely disappeared and all that’s left is a rusting metal hulk, almost completely overgrown by jungle.

In Kindu he contacts the local UN station (‘Hi, I’m a white jounralist’) which agrees to convey him in one of their river patrol boats 150k north, to the riverside settlement (not a town, just a few huts on the muddy bank) of Lowa. Here the friendly, civilised UN sailors set him ashore, with much shaking of heads over his folly, and Butcher, very scared, approaches some local Congolese lounging near huge wooden canoes. He is greatly relieved when one of them agrees to take him by canoe, or pirogue, the 200k by river further north to the town of Ubundu. This man, Malike Bade, quickly recruits three other oarsmen and off they set.

Ubundu, the ruined town which had once been the thriving Belgian port of Ponthierville, marks the start of the 150k or so of rapids and waterfalls collectively (still) named the Stanley Falls. Butcher has to transfer from the river to dry land and hitches a ride with some motorcyclists who work for a western charity (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’), who have just delivered supplies to Ubundu and are now returning to their base at Kisangani, the big settlement which marks the end of the Stanley Falls.

It’s on this leg that he has the haunting experience of stumbling across a rail from the railway the Belgians built running north-south parallel to the river, now not only abandoned but completely buried by the tropical jungle (pages 248 to 249).

It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards. (p.249)

Kisangani is the first town in nearly 1,000 kilometres which has proper roads, car, electric power, hotels worth the name, and running water, and bed with clean sheets, so he has an orgy of showers and sleeping and eating proper food, and then more showers and more eating and sleeping.

He discovers Kisangani may look like a big functioning town but most of the infrastructure here, as everywhere else in Congo, is in ruins – the ruined railway station and the ruined harbour, the riverside cranes which look so impressive from a distance but haven’t worked for decades, broken beyond repair:

a shell, prone to spasms of political anarchy and chaotically administered by inept, corrupt local politicians…It owed what little stability it had to the artificial props of a large UN force and foreign aid workers. (p.255)

And the local politicians do everything they can to undermine even these fragile elements of stability. A few months before he arrived in Congo there had been conflict in the profoundly unstable Bukavu region far to the east on the Rwandan border, with reports of Rwandan forces massacring Congolese. Instead of calming opinion, Kisangani’s officials inflamed it and blamed the deaths on the UN for failing to protect the Bukavese, with the result that angry mobs went on the rampage, looting then setting fire to UN buildings, ransacking aid organisations’ offices and warehouses, while the so-called police stood by or even joined in.

When you read of events like this you wonder, why are we bothering to give money to help people who are so absolutely determined to ruin themselves?

I heard heartbreaking stories about corrupt Congolese officials pocketing aid money intended for local public-health workers, and local soldiers not just looting aid equipment, but brazenly asking for cash to hand it back to its rightful owners. Many in the aid community spent their time counting the days until their contracts were up and they could go back to the real world. (p.285)

A Catholic missionary, Father Leon, tells him about the notorious massacre of monks and gang rape of nuns which took place here in 1964 (24 November 1964, to be precise), was widely reported, and helped crystallise world opinion that Congo was slipping back into Stone Age barbarism (pages 270 to 274).

After five days Butcher moves out of his hotel and into the last large mission being run in the city, by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After two weeks of sounding out local ship crews and NGOs, trying to find a boat which will take him down the river, after numerous disappointments, Butcher eventually secures a ride on a UN patrol boat (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’) which will take him the 1,000 kilometres down the river to the port of Mbandaka.

On the way he becomes ill and weak with fever so that by the time he arrives at Mbandaka, he just can’t face another week or two or three hustling for his next ride down the river. Mbandaka is much smaller and more ruinous than Kisanagani was, so there isn’t even a hotel. God knows where he’d stay. Whereas the UN riverboat captain had told him that a UN helicopter service left the following morning for Kinshasa.

Reluctantly, but with great relief, Butcher travels the 600k from Mbandaka to the country’s capital, Kinshasa by helicopter. Here he is put up in the amazingly luxurious gated compound owned by a major international mining company, which won lucrative contracts by helping with the smooth transition of power after wily old Laurent Kabila was unexpectedly assassinated (16 January 2001) and succeeded by his completely inexperienced son, Joseph Kabila, aged just 30 at the time.

Only after days of showers, lots of sleep, taking a variety of medicines, eating proper food and drinking clean water in this rich, privileged western enclave, does Butcher feel human again, and in a position to decide what to do next. He consults with the senior guy minding the mining company compound who explains that there are no buses or taxis in Kinshasa. The only possible option is to pay to have one of the mining company’s cars and driver drive him along the only remaining road in the entire country (recently refurbished with foreign aid money) the 350k to the Atlantic port at Boma. So that is what he does.

In total the journey took him ‘six harrowing weeks’, 44 days, and was a dazzling, deeply depressing insight into the state of contemporary Africa.

Butcher’s bleak view of Africa

As the Telegraph‘s Africa correspondent, Butcher is amusingly blunt: Africa is fucked, that’s his basic position. African nations were screwed by the colonial powers from the Congress of Berlin to independence (the 1880s to the 1960s); then suffered epic civil wars and/or the extended rule of vicious kleptocrats; and have now mostly fallen into states of disrepair, degradation, police states, autocracies, characterised by epic corruption, horrible everyday violence, and the regular occurrence of coups or civil wars.

The one constant through all these episodes was the heavy undertow of human suffering. It gnawed away at every African epoch I read about, no matter whether it was caused by nineteenth-century colonial brutes or twenty-first century despots. Generations of Africans have suffered the triumph of disappointment over potential, creating the only continent on the planet where the normal rules of human development and advancement simply don’t apply.

It was this sense of stagnation that troubled me most as I worked my way through my reading list. Sub-Saharan Africa has forty-one separate countries of stunning variety – from parched desert to sweaty rainforest, from wide savannah to snow-tipped volcano – and yet as I did my background research, the history of these varied countries merged into a single, pro forma analysis…as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status.

By the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability… (p.4)

Certainly, when it comes to Congo, Butcher regards it as a country which has comprehensively gone to ruin, a place which has not only ceased developing but is actively undeveloping, moving at speed back into pre-20th century, pre-industrial times.

The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you. (p.289)

Butcher has a map from 1961 which shows all the railways, roads, airports, mines and towns built by the Belgians. Now almost all of them are abandoned and have faded back into the jungle. The Great War has left the huge territory divided between regional powers, armies and militias or just local bandits, any of whom might stop and shoot you for no reason.

Butcher is continually, vehemently rude about the white man, about colonialists, about outsiders who came into Congo, and is much consumed by the white supremacist, racist, arrogance which thought it knew what was best for the Congolese. Again and again he makes the same point.

And yet very often, in the very next paragraph, he goes on to describe at great length, and very upsettingly, just how completely Congo was devastated by its kleptocratic rulers, by Mobutu and his clique in faraway Kinshasa, who developed the cult of the leader of the nation while all the while stealing every last dollar from their people, building grotesquely luxurious palaces and villas, buying scores of properties around the world, while the infrastructure of entire provinces such as Katanga collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle.

And then he goes on to describe the work of the United Nations which strives hard to bring the warring sides in Congo’s endless conflicts to the negotiating table, which expends a small fortune trying to police the ceasefire at locations all across this country as large as a continent. For example, the story of Kisangani which saw horrific levels of violence in various civil conflicts, whose infrastructure and economy collapsed, and is nowadays only just about propped up by the UN and western NGOs, when the local population aren’t ransacking them.

The point being that, no matter how woke, anti-colonial and politically correct Butcher tries to be in his editorialising, the blindingly clear conclusion from his long, gripping narrative is that the Congolese simply cannot rule themselves. (p.319).

As soon as they tried to (June 1960) the place collapsed into a series of civil wars along with tribal massacres on a hair-raising scale, and now, as he writes (2004), 43 years after independence, Butcher’s journey amounts to an odyssey through a country which has not only failed to develop but is, to use his powerful neologism, undeveloping, with communities all across the country deprived of the clean water, electricity, communications, industry, travel infrastructure, even minimal education, even the most basic medical facilities, all things they took for granted under the Belgians.

Now it’s all gone, decayed, corroded, overgrown, crumbled to dust, and the country has reverted to its African origins: impenetrably difficult to travel across, riddled with disease (cholera from the water, malaria from the ubiquitous mosquitos) and infested with blood-thirsty, savage warrior bands, who arrive out of nowhere, kill all the men, rape all the women, burn the village to the ground, then disappear back into the jungle.

It’s a tropical hell. It’s Hieronymus Bosch in the jungle.

Summary

As I’ve probably stated at too great a length, I was unhappy with Butcher’s journalistic and rather superficial descriptions of many key aspects of Congo’s modern history. And I am gently mocking of the contradiction that, despite his insistent criticism of colonialism and white racism and imperial exploitation etc, it is only because he is a white westerner and (relatively) rich that he can pay the locals to ferry him wherever he wants, waltz into UN offices anywhere in the country and not only get their attention but persuade them to help him out (by boat, by bike, by helicopter). He’s a white man. Of course they’ll help.

But what I haven’t emphasised enough is that Butcher is also a cracking writer, with a great eye for detail. His descriptions of the jungle, the ruined settlements, primitive villages or scary cities (like Kisangani) are vivid and compelling. It’s a gripping, exciting read.

And also, Butcher has a knack for interviewing people or getting them to tell him about themselves and stories about their trade, village, town, or local history. Obviously these stories are tidied up and made fit for western consumption, he’s a journalist, that’s what he does. But he talks to a wide range of people who begin to build up a sense of opinions and experiences from right across this vast country.

(There are obvious omissions: he never speaks to anyone from any of the armed militias which, according to his interviewees, roam so much of the jungle, emerging to carry out unspeakable atrocities, but then journalists rarely do. They’re not the kind of people who make for compliant and articulate interviewees and so their voices are consistently absent from most western accounts.)

So although there are better books to go to in order to to understand the recent political and military history of the Congo, Butcher’s sweaty, fearful, sleepless, buttock-bruising account gives you a really vivid feel for what the country and its actual population – thousands of miles from the slick government spokesmen and official narratives of downtown Kinshasa – are really like. And a vivid and almost overwhelming sense of the dreadful fate, almost complete social collapse back into the Stone Age, which so much of it has undergone.

On the long slow journey down the river aboard a UN patrol boat (more accurately, a primitive tug or ‘pusher’) Butcher finds himself audience to an impassioned diatribe by the Malaysian captain, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, who explains that Malaysia, like Congo, was colonised for centuries; Malaysia like Congo was subject to a cruel racist colonial masters (the British); Malaysia gained independence about the same time as Congo (1957 and 1960); Malaysia like Congo was dragged into Cold War conflicts. And yet, 50 years later, Malaysia is part of the world, has achieved great things in education and health, has a booming economy, they even host a Grand Prix every year. While Congo is collapsing year by year into pre-industrial, Stone Age poverty. Why? Why has Malaysia stormed ahead and Congo fallen so far behind? The skipper:

had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa? (p.310)

Credit

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher was first published by Chatto and Windus in 2007. References are to the 2008 Vintage paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on November 22, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Africa, History

Tagged African history, Athens Olympics, Belgian empire, Belgium, Blood River: A Journey To Africa's Broken Heart, Boma, Bukavu, cannibalism, central Africa, Congo, Congo river system, Congo: the epic history of a people, Congress of Berlin, contemporary Africa, Daily Telegraph, David Van Reybrouck, dictator, Douglas Rogers, Father Leon, First Congo War, génocidaires, Ghana, Great War of Africa, Henry Morton Stanley, history, Hutu genocidaires, Hutus, Independence, Interahamwe, international community, Joseph Kabila, Kabalo, Kabambarre, Kalemie, Kasongo, Kibombo, Kigali, Kindu, King Leopold II, Kinshasa, kleptocracy, kleptocrat, Kongolo, Lake Tanganyika, Laurence Kabila, Laurent Kabila, Lowa, Malaysia, Malike Bade, Maniema, Martin Meredith, Matadi, Mbandaka, Mobutu, modern history, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, Mukumbo, NGOs, Patrice Lumumba, Paul Kagame, Ponthierville, River Congo, river Lualaba, River Lukuga, Robert Mugabe, Ronan Bennett, RPF, Rwanda, Rwanda genocide, Rwandan genocide, Rwandan Patriotic Front, Ryszard Kapuściński, Second Congo War, South Africa, Soviet Union, Stanley Falls, Stanleyville, Stone Age, Tanzania, The Catastrophist, The Congo, the Stanley Falls, The Telegraph, the UN, Tim Butcher, Tim Jeal, Tutsis, Ubundu, Uganda, UN, undevelopment, United Nations, White privilege, William Boyd, Zaire, Zanzibar, Zimbabwe

Posted by Simon on November 22, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/22/blood-river-tim-butcher/

The Pharsalia by Lucan – 2: Summary

In this book-by-book summary of Lucan’s Pharsalia, I started with the short text summaries provided by Wikipedia, pasted in the section summaries provided by A.S. Kline’s online translation, and then added my own observations.

Book 1 The civil war begins (695 lines)

After a brief introduction lamenting the idea of Romans fighting Romans there is a flattering dedication to Nero (‘to me you are already divine…you alone grant power to Roman verse’). Considering that Nero had Lucan killed, some critics read this as deeply ironic. But Susan Braund (translator of the Oxford University Press edition of the Pharsalia) sees no reason to. Before their falling out, while he was writing the early books of the poem, they were close friends and the first part of Nero’s reign was seen by many as ideal, peaceful and just.

The narrative summarizes background material leading up to the present war and introduces Caesar in northern Italy. Despite an urgent plea from the Spirit of Rome to lay down his arms, Caesar crosses the Rubicon, rallies his troops and marches south to Rome, joined by Curio along the way. The book closes with panic in the city, terrible portents and visions of the disaster to come.

Lines 1 to 32: The ruinous nature of civil war on earth and chaos in the heavens

33 to 66: Sycophantic homage to Nero, saying that if it took a civil war to produce such a wise and good emperor, then maybe it was worth it

67 to 97: The motives of the two leaders

98 to 157: Comparisons, Pompey the old oak tree and Caesar the unstoppable bolt of lightning

158 to 182: The hidden causes of the war, namely Rome’s wealth and decadence, bribery and corruption

183 to 227: Despite a vision of Italy as a weeping woman, Caesar denies her accusations and crosses the Rubicon

228 to 265: Caesar’s entry into Ariminum whose citizens lament that they are the first stopping point for all invaders

266 to 351: The exiled tribunes: Curio’s speech whips Caesar up to a speech detailing his grievances against Pompey and the Senate

352 to 391: The troops hesitate but are convinced by the speech of Laelius, the chief centurion

392 to 465: Caesar gathers his forces

466 to 525: Rumour triggers panic in Rome which is cowardly abandoned by its population

526 to 583: Ghosts and portents, anarchy in heaven, terrify the world

584 to 637: The soothsayer Arruns reads the future in the rotten entrails of a sacrificed bull and predicts disaster

638 to 672: Figulus reads the prophecies in the heavens

673 to 695: Apollo inspires a Roman matron in a frenzied vision to see the locations of all the forthcoming battles and bloodshed

Book 2 Pompey flees Italy (736 lines)

In a city overcome by despair, an old veteran presents a lengthy interlude regarding the previous civil war that pitted Marius against Sulla. Cato the Younger is introduced as a heroic man of principle; as abhorrent as civil war is, he argues to Brutus that it is better to fight than do nothing. After siding with Pompey—the lesser of two evils—he remarries his ex-wife, Marcia, and heads to the field. Caesar continues south through Italy and is delayed by Domitius’ brave resistance. He attempts a blockade of Pompey at Brundisium, but the general makes a narrow escape to Greece.

Lines 1 to 66: In Rome women beat their breasts in lamentation and men wish they were fighting Rome’s enemies not each other

67 to 138: An elder gives a detailed account of Marius’s career i.e. flight, then vengeful bloody return to Rome

139 to 233: The same elder recalls Sulla’s victory and vengeance against the Marian party, recalls seeking the body of his murdered brother, the Tiber was clogged with corpses

234 to 285: Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger visits Cato and makes a long speech

286 to 325: Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger’s speech of reply: wherever fate leads, virtue must follow without fear; he wishes his death could unite the enemies

326 to 349: Marcia knocks on the door; she has come from burying her husband, Hortensius, and wants to remarry Cato in order to share his tribulations

350 to 391: So Marcia and Cato marry on the spot, with Brutus as witness, but Lucan emphasises Cato’s stern devotion to duty and Rome above personal reward or pleasure

392 to 438: Pompey bases himself at Capua, with an extended geographical description of the city’s location among the Apennine mountains

439 to 461: Caesar advances into Italy

462 to 525: Commander after commander abandons his post and cities fall before Caesars advance, with the noble exception of Domitius who tried to defend Corfinium, before being given up his soldiers and then ignominiously granted clemency by Caesar (the fate Cato is determined to avoid)

526 to 595: Pompey’s speech to the army defending his cause against Caesar’s ‘pitiful madness’ and listing his many triumphs

596 to 649: But little applause follows his speech, and Pompey leads his troops to Brindisi, which is given an extended geographical description, like Capua, above; he sends his son and envoys to raise allies in Greece and the East

650 to 703: Caesar lays siege to Brindisi

704 to 736: Pompey escapes Brindisi, taking his fleet across the Adriatic to Illyricum

Book 3 War in the Mediterranean (762 lines)

As his ships sail, Pompey is visited in a dream by Julia, his dead wife and Caesar’s daughter. Caesar returns to Rome and plunders the city while Pompey reviews potential foreign allies. To protect his read Caesar heads for Spain, but his troops are detained at the lengthy siege of Massilia (Marseille). The city ultimately falls in a bloody naval battle.

Lines 1 to 45: Pompey’s vision of Julia, his previous wife, daughter of Caesar, who bound the two rivals together until her early death in 54 BC

46 to 83: Caesar sends officers to secure the grain supply from Sicily and Sardinia, then marches on Rome

84 to 140: While the senators are ignominously summoned to the House to hear Caesar, the tribune Lucius Metellus defends the treasury with his life

141 to 168: Metellus is pushed aside and the cumulated treasury of the ages seized

169 to 213: A long list of cities in Greece and Asia Minor who send men to Pompey

214 to 263: The Middle East and India rally to Pompey

264 to 297: The Black Sea and North Africa rally to Pompey – these three sections comprise a massive list of tribes and cities and peoples on the model of the List of Allies in the Iliad, itself copied in the Aeneid

298 to 357: speech of the Greek inhabitants of Marseille opposing Caesar, arguing to remain neutral

358 to 398: Caesar blockades Marseille, throwing up an enormous earthwork

399 to 452: Caesar destroys the sacred grove

453 to 496: Caesar leaves for Spain but the siege of Marseille continues, Roman siege techniques described in detail

497 to 537: The Greek inhabitants of Marseille mount a successful sortie so the Romans initiate a naval battle

538 to 582: The fleets engage with a vivid description of grappling irons, hand to hand fighting and thousands of soldiers dying in the sea, hit by random arrows, javelins, fire and sinking ships

583 to 634: The death of Catus, Telo, Gyareus, the mutilated twin

635 to 669: The death of Lycidas, the man skewered by two prows meeting

670 to 708: The death of Phoceus, who drowned many before hitting the keel of a ship, many more drown, are crushed, transfixed

709 to 751: Lygdamus, a Balearic sling-thrower, blinds Tyrrhenus who, in turn, throws a javelin which kills Argus, whose father is so distraught he stabs himself then jumps overboard – the focus on gruesome anatomical details recalls the Iliad

752 to 762: Lamentation of the women and parents of Marseille as they embraced mangled corpses or fought over headless bodies to place on funeral pyres

Book 4 Caesar victory in Spain

The first half of this book describes Caesar’s victorious campaign in Spain against Afranius and Petreius. Lucan then switches scene to focus on Pompey, his forces intercept a raft carrying Caesarians, who prefer to kill each other rather than be taken prisoner. The book concludes with Curio launching an African campaign on Caesar’s behalf, where he is defeated and killed by the African King Juba.

1 to 47: Caesar attacks the base of the two Pompeian leaders in Spain, Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius, but his soldiers, fighting uphill, are thrown back

48 to 120: Caesar’s camp is flooded, interesting because of the extended description of the geography of Spain and the causes of heavy rain and, after the flooding, the famine

121 to 156: The campaign is renewed: Caesar builds bridges across the river Sicoris, prompting Petreius to abandon the heights of Ilerda and head for central Spain

157 to 207: The two armies camp within sight of each other and this prompts many to call out then go and meet friends on the other side; Lucan praises the god Harmony, soon bitterly to be broken

208 to 253: Angry, Petreius gives a speech rousing his troops in the name of the Senate and Pompey and Freedom, whipping them up to attack the friends of Caesar’s army who had come among them, bloodshed, horror

254 to 318: Afranius loses the moral high ground with this action; Caesar pursues his army to high ground, with no water, and there surrounds it, ordering his army to resist attacks and wear the trapped enemy down from extreme thirst

319 to 362: Worn down by privations Lucius Afranius surrenders with a dignified speech

363 to 401: Pompey’s army in Spain disbands and immediately quench their thirst at the river Caesar had prevented them reaching; they are lucky, banned from fighting they will see out the long civil war in peace

402 to 447: Conflict in Dalmatia, where Gaius Antonius’s Caesarian force builds rafts to escape the island of Curicta

448 to 528: One of these rafts, bearing 600 Caesarians commanded by Vulteius, is surrounded by Pompeyan forces; as night falls Vulteius makes a long speech advocating their noble suicide

529 to 581: Vulteius and his men commit suicide

582 to 660: The myth of Hercules and Antaeus i.e. their legendary wrestling match

661 to 714: Pompey’s African army under Varus i.e. another long list of allied tribes and peoples; Caesarian Curio determines to throw his army against Varus

715 to 787: King Juba’s army lures Curio into an ambush, surrounds and massacres the Romans

788 to 824: How jarring that Pompey’s side could only triumph by pleasing the shades of Hannibal and the Carthaginians with a north African defeat of Roman legions; lament that so noble a figure as Curio was corrupted by the degenerate times to take Caesar’s shilling and inflame civil war

Book 5 Caesar in Illyria (815 lines)

The Senate in exile confirms Pompey the true leader of Rome. Appius consults the Delphic oracle to learn of his fate in the war, and leaves with a misleading prophecy. In Italy, after defusing a mutiny, Caesar marches to Brundisium and sails across the Adriatic to meet Pompey’s army. Only a portion of Caesar’s troops complete the crossing when a storm prevents further transit; he tries to personally send a message back but is himself nearly drowned. Finally, the storm subsides, and the armies face each other at full strength. With battle at hand, Pompey sends his wife to the island of Lesbos, despite her protests.

1 to 70: The consul Lentulus addresses the senators in exile in Epirus, telling them wherever they are, that is the Roman state; the senators appoint as allies the kings who have rallied to their cause

71 to 101: History of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi and speculation about how it works, what god lies buried deep in Mount Parnassus and speaks through the priestess

102 to 140: History of the oracle’s most famous predictions and why it was shut down; Appius Claudius tries to reopen the shrine, Phemonoe, the priestess, tries to resist him

141 to 197: The priestess pretends to prophesy but Appius realises she is faking and pushes her towards the chasm until she is possessed by Apollo and delivers a genuine prophecy which is that Appius will escape the storms of war

198 to 236: Further description the wild frenzy the priestess had been thrown into, then lament that Appius, like so many others, misread the oracle to mean that he was safe, when what it really meant was his premature death

237 to 299: Caesar’s troops on the verge of mutiny: given a long speech which displays Lucan’s skill at suasoria

300 to 373: Caesar quells the mutiny, exposing his chest to them, daring them to mutiny; but Lucan says shame on him for delighting in a war his own men condemn; Caesar more or less calls his men scum:

The gods will never stoop so low as to care about
the lives or deaths of such as you; events depend
on the actions of great men: humankind lives for
the few.

374 to 402: While his armies assemble at Brundisium Caesar hurried to half-empty Rome where has himself declared dictator; Lucan laments that this age ‘invented all the false titles that we have granted our masters for so long’

403 to 460: Arriving back at Brundisium Caesar finds the sea beset by storms; he persuades his fleet to set sail but, ironically, once out of sight of land it is becalmed; next morning a wind picks up and blows Caesar’s fleet to Paeneste

461 to 503: Caesar impatiently summons Mark Antony with the rest of his fleet and army

504 to 576: Caesar dresses in disguise and visits the hut of a humble fisherman, Amyclas, and persuades him, against his better judgement, to take him across the sea to Italy

577 to 637: Then the seas blow up into a real storm which Lucan with hyperbole describes as nearly drowning the entire world, till Jupiter intervenes

638 to 677: Exulting, Caesar defies the storm, saying its epic force matches his world-shattering ambition, at which point a freak wave carries the little boat back to shore and flings him safely on the beach

678 to 721: Next morning the troops in Caesar’s camp reproach him for risking his life without them; the sun comes out and Mark Anthony beings the rest of Caesar’s fleet over from Italy to Nymphaion

722 to 760: Pompey tells his wife Cornelia that Caesar’s army has landed in Illyria and so he is sending her to Lesbos for her own safety

761 to 815: Cornelia’s gives a long speech in which she laments that Caesar is forcing her and Pompey’s marriage to come to an end, laments that she won’t be with him (Pompey) when the great battle occurs, if Pompey is defeated would rather know the news at once so she can kill herself if he dies; then she packs hurriedly and is taken down to the ship to Lesbos; next night she sleeps alone in an alien bed – but Fate held worse in store

Book 6 Thessaly and Erictho the witch (830 lines)

Pompey’s troops force Caesar’s armies – featuring the heroic centurion Scaeva – to fall back to Thessaly. Lucan describes the wild Thessalian terrain as the armies wait for battle the next day. The remainder of the book follows Pompey’s son Sextus, who wishes to know the future. He finds the most powerful witch in Thessaly, Erictho, and she reanimates the corpse of a dead soldier in a terrifying ceremony. The soldier predicts Pompey’s defeat and Caesar’s eventual assassination.

Lines 1 to 27: Pompey moves to seize the town of Dyrrachium

28 to 63: Caesar hems Pompey in by building a vast fortification around his army; Lucan laments at so much effort expended for such a futile end

64 to 117: Both camps afflicted: horses die and illness spreads in Pompey’s camp, while Caesar’s men begin to starve

118 to 195: The super-heroism of the centurion Scaeva who single-handedly rallies Caesar’s troops when Pompey’s army attempts a breakout at Minicius

196 to 262: More of Scaeva’s superhuman resistance, fighting single-handed against a wall of enemies till his mutilated face is one mass of bleeding flesh; the arrival of Caesarian reinforcements puts the Pompeyans to flight, and only then does Scaeva collapse. But, Lucan asks, what was it all for?

But you can never adorn the Thunderer’s shrine
with your trophies, nor will you shout for joy
in the triumph. Unhappy man, how great your
bravery that merely paved the way for a tyrant!

263 to 313: Pompey attacks at points along the perimeter wall; at one of them Caesar counter-attacks but then Pompeyan forces charge from all sides; the civil war might have ended there in total defeat for Caesar except that Pompey ‘restrained his army’ and Caesar’s army regrouped and fought its way clear; Lucan laments the lost opportunity and lists all the disasters which would follow:

Cruel fate! Libya and Spain would not have mourned for
the disasters at Utica and Munda; neither would the Nile,
defiled by vile bloodshed, have borne that corpse nobler
than a Pharaoh’s; King Juba’s naked body would not have
burdened the African sand, nor Metellus Scipio appeased
the Carthaginian dead with his blood; nor the living have
lost their virtuous Cato. That day might have ended your
ills, Rome, and erased Pharsalia from the scroll of fate.

314 to 380: Caesar strikes camp and marches east into the interior, into Thessaly

381 to 412: Extensive description of the geography and legendary history of Thessaly or ‘the accursed land’ as Lucan calls it (see above)

413 to 506: The armies follow then camp near each other with a growing sense of Fate, that this is where the Great Confrontation will take place; but Pompey’s son, Sextus, wants to know more and, as it happens, his side have camped ‘near the dwellings of those Thessalian witches whom no conjuring of imaginary horrors can outdo’; a very long passage about their supernatural powers, especially to affect rain and tides, the oceans and even the earth’s rotation

507 to 568: An extended description of the wickedness of Erictho who is the worst witch ever

569 to 623: Erictho is pointed out to Sextus by a local guide, sitting on a high cliff, casting spells unknown to wizards in order to keep the armies at Pharsalus and make the great massacre happen here; Lucan blames Erictho for magically making the armies stay here; she’s doing this so that she can use the blood and bones and body parts of the dead soldiers in her magic rites

624 to 666: Erictho picks a corpse off the battlefield and drags it to her terrifying cave where she ties her hair with snakes and prepares to bring it back to life

667 to 718: Erictho invokes the infernal powers with tremendous power, at considerable length

719 to 774: Erictho raises the dead body to life to prophesy

775 to 830: The prophecy of the dead

Book 7 Pompey loses the Battle of Pharsalia (872 lines)

The soldiers are pressing for battle, but Pompey is reluctant until Cicero convinces him to attack. Against all the odds, the Caesarians are victorious, and Lucan laments the resulting loss of liberty. Caesar is especially cruel as he a) mocks the dying Domitius and b) forbids the cremation of the dead Pompeians. The scene is punctuated by a description of wild animals gnawing at the corpses and a lament from Lucan for Thessalia infelix, ill-fated Thessaly.

Lines 1 to 44: Pompey dreams that he is in Rome enjoying the cheers of his victories in Spain against Sertorius in 73 BC; he would have been happy if he had died at that moment; unlucky Rome, never to see him again

45 to 86: Cicero’s speech summing up the general mood, asking why Pompey is delaying battle

87 to 130: Pompey’s reply, pointing out that he is slowly winning and counselling patience, lamenting that he is being forced into a confrontation he will lose

What evil and suffering this day will bring
the nations! How many kingdoms will be ruined!

131 to 184: Omens and portents

185 to 214: The augur’s cry

215 to 234: Pompey deploys his army, including many foreign kings (Gauls and Spanish)

235 to 302: Caesar addresses his men, pointing out most of Pompey’s army is made of foreigners who care nothing for Rome

303 to 336: Continuation of Caesar’s speech in which he associates Pompey with Sulla, and says if that if the Caesarians lose, he, Caesar, will kill himself rather than be taken in chains to Rome to be punished in the Forum; his army tramples down their camp and trench and throw themselves into battle formation

337 to 384: Pompey addresses his men

385 to 459: The effects of the Battle of Pharsalia: Lucan attributes all Rome’s subsequent failings, the loss of an entire generation, the failure to expand the borders of empire, all to this fateful day:

The fields of Italy are tilled by men in chains, no one
lives beneath our ancient roofs, rotten and set to fall;
Rome is not peopled by citizens; full of the world’s
dross we have so ruined her, civil war among such
is no longer a threat. Pharsalia was the cause of all
that evil.

460 to 505: Battle is joined

506 to 544: Caesar destroys Pompey’s cavalry who Lucan depicts as mostly ill-disciplined foreigners and barbarians

545 to 596: Caesar seizes victory

597 to 646: ‘There all the glory of our country perished… a whole world died there’; Lucan associates the defeat with the birth of the imperial tyranny he says he and his generation still live under a hundred years later:

we were laid low for centuries, all
generations doomed to slavery were conquered
by those swords. What fault did we, their sons,
their grandsons, commit that we deserved to be
born under tyranny?

647 to 697: Pompey takes flight

698 to 727: Pompey reaches Larissa, where he is enthusiastically greeted, even though he has lost

728 to 780: Caesar encourages his men to loot Pompey’s abandoned camp, but that night his men have guilty dreams about murdering their kin

Neither Pentheus raving nor Agave newly sane
were subject to greater horror or mental turmoil.

781 to 824: Caesar also has poisonous dreams but awakes and orders his dining table to be set out on the battlefield which he can survey choked with Roman dead: Caesar denies them burial

825 to 872: Wolves, dogs, birds of prey, descend to ravage the many dead bodies on the battlefield; which god did Thessaly offend to not only host the disastrous battle of Pharsalus, but its echo, Philippi, six years later?

Book 8 The death of Pompey in Egypt (870 lines)

Pompey himself escapes to Lesbos, reunites with his wife, then goes to Cilicia to consider his options. He decides to enlist aid from Egypt, but the Pharaoh (Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopator) is fearful of retribution from Caesar and plots to murder Pompey when he lands. Pompey suspects treachery; he consoles his wife and rows alone to the shore, meeting his fate (assassination) with Stoic poise. His headless body is flung into the ocean, but washes up on shore and receives a humble burial from Cordus.

Lines 1 to 85: Pompey sails to Lesbos; Cornelia, scanning the seas, faints when she sees his approach; he revives her, saying now is the time for her love and loyalty

86 to 108: Cornelia says she brings a curse to everyone she marries and wishes Julia would come and take her as a sacrifice so as to spare Pompey; everyone bursts into tears

109 to 158: The people of Lesbos beg Pompey to stay another night and put themselves at his disposal; Pompey is moved by their loyalty, pays them tribute, but sets sail with Cornelia

159 to 201: Pompey asks the ship’s navigator to explain how he navigates by the stars

202 to 255: Though defeated, Pompey retains loyalty; he sends Deiotarus to rally the kingdoms of the East, especially Parthia, to his cause; detailed geographical description of his route by sea

256 to 330: Pompey sails along the coast of Cilicia (southern Turkey) till he arrives at the port of Syhedra where he addresses the senators and other leaders who followed him: he rejects Ptolemy of Egypt and King Juba of Africa as allies; instead he says they must ally in the East with the Parthians, with the bonus that Parthians killed in this civil

331 to 455: Lentulus speaks against Pompey’s plans, scandalised that he is considering relying on Rome’s most ancient enemy; also the Parthians are soft and lousy fighters, and Lentulus goes on to accuse Easterners in general of polygamy, sexual perversions, incest; all Roman armies should be uniting against the Parthians to avenge the infamous massacre of Crassus’s legions; he advocates going to Egypt

456 to 535: As Pompey reaches Egypt, debate among the young Pharaoh’s advisers, with a long speech by Pothinus, his regent, counselling amoral Realpolitik, namely that Pompey has obviously lost, that they don’t want to be dragged down with him: he argues they should kill Pompey

536 to 636: The Egyptian council approve this policy; thus Pompey approaches the sandy shore, is met by a rowing boat and invited to step down into it, is rowed to the beach and there stabbed to death, shamefully by a renegade Roman servant of Pharaoh’s, Septimius: Lucan gives Pompey a last internal soliloquy as he overcomes pain and fear at his death

637 to 662: Cornelia laments and begs to be killed, herself

663 to 711: The assassins hack off Pompey’s head and take it to Pharaoh who has it embalmed, leaving his headless body to be battered by the surf and rocks

712 to 822: Cordus, a former soldier of Pompey’s, claims his corpse from the sea, builds a makeshift pyre from a wrecked boat, places the body amidst it and lights it, hours later, at dawn, scoops up the bones, buries the ashes under sand and a stone, a memorial wildly out of keeping with Pompey’s world-straddling achievements

823 to 870: A curse on Egypt

Book 9 Cato in Libya

Pompey’s wife mourns her husband as Cato takes up leadership of the Senate’s cause. He plans to regroup and heroically marches the army across Africa to join forces with King Juba, a trek that occupies most of the middle section of the book. On the way, he passes an oracle but refuses to consult it, citing Stoic principles. Caesar visits Troy and pays respects to his ancestral gods. A short time later he arrives in Egypt. When Pharaoh’s messenger presents him with the head of Pompey, Caesar feigns grief to hide his joy at Pompey’s death.

It’s important to realise that Cato didn’t support Pompey, he went along with Pompey because he offered the best chances of achieving what Cato really wanted which was the restoration of the Republic with no strong men. When Pompey dies it doesn’t mean the end of the struggle (as it does for many of the allies); for Cato it means one strongman down, just one more to finish off (Caesar) then Freedom can be restored.

1 to 50: Pompey’s spirit rises into the lower heavens, realm of demi-gods, to watch the stars, then back down to earth to imbue Cato with more resolution to oppose Caesar (and later, to fortify Caesar’s assassin, Brutus)

51 to 116: Cornelia laments her fallen husbands (she was previously married to ill-fated Crassus) then repeats Pompey’s last message to his sons, namely to raise fleets to plague Caesar, recommending Cato as the only leader to follow; she locks herself belowdecks as a storm hits the fleet

117 to 166: Sextus Pompeius tells his older brother, Gnaeus, about the murder of their father; Gnaeus vows fierce revenge on Egypt

167 to 214: Cornelia sails west to meet with Cato at Utica, and burns all Pompey’s belongings in a big pyre; Cato eulogises Pompey and praises suicide

215 to 252: Many of the rulers who followed Pompey now depart Cato’s stronghold, explaining that they followed the man not the cause and now he is dead, they will return tom their homelands and take their chances

253 to 293: Cato wins them over (‘Shame on you, vile slaves’)

294 to 347: Another extended geographical description, of ‘the Syrtes’ on the coast of Libya, which Cato’s fleet skirts as it sails along the coast to Lake Tritonis

348 to 410: Mythological background of the region, including the story of Hercules stealing apples from the Garden of the Hesperides: Cato gives a speech encouraging the men to march inland from the coast across the desert

411 to 462: Geographical description of North Africa

463 to 510: The Romans battle on through a massive sandstorm

511 to 586: Description of the Libyans’ god Ammon; Labienus persuades Cato to consult the oracle because he has ‘always ruled your life according to heavenly law, a follower of the divine’; Cato gives a sound rebuttal, with the Stoic argument that God planted all the knowledge in our mind at birth to live virtuous lives, he doesn’t need oracles in the desert

587 to 618: Cato leads the men on the long march

619 to 699: Digression for the mythical tale of Perseus and Medusa; Perseus flew over Libya carrying Medusa’s severed head which dropped blood onto the desert and spawned countless species of poisonous snakes

700 to 760: Catalogue of the snakes of Libya; the gruesome death of standard bearer Aulus, bitten by a dipsas (species of poison snake)

761 to 788: The cruel death of Sabellus, bitten by a seps, which makes its victims’ bodies melt!

789 to 838: Further deaths by snake bite

839 to 889: The soldiers’ heroic endurance and many deaths, Cato always being at the soldier’s side to make them unafraid

890 to 937: One local tribe is immune to the snakebites, being the Psylli of Marmarica; they select their infants by exposing them to snakebites, the survivors joining the tribe; how they help Cato and his soldiers survive snake bites

938 to 986: Finally Cato and his men arrive at inhabited territory near to Leptis where they erect winter quarters. Cut to Caesar as he visits the site of Troy, taking a detailed tour; triggering Lucan to promise that his poem will live and preserve its protagonists’ names, as long as Homer’s did

987 to 1,063: Caesar prays to the gods of Troy that if they make his journey prosper, he will rebuild their city; sails to Egypt; is met by an envoy who presents him with Pompey’s head; Lucan flays Caesar’s hypocrisy at pretending to be upset and weeping

1,064 to 1,108: Caesar’s speech berating Pharaoh for murdering Pompey because it prevented Caesar from exercising his clemency; he had wanted to triumph, yes, but then be reconciled with Pompey; he orders the Egyptians to gather Pompey’s ashes and erect a proper shrine

Book 10 Caesar in Egypt and Cleopatra

Caesar in Egypt is beguiled by the Pharaoh’s sister, Cleopatra. A banquet is held. Pothinus, Ptolemy’s cynical and bloodthirsty chief minister, plots an assassination of Caesar but is killed in his surprise attack on the palace. A second attack comes from Ganymede, an Egyptian noble, and the poem breaks off abruptly as Caesar is fighting for his life.

Lines 1 to 52: Caesar visits Alexander’s grave; Lucan calls him a ‘chance marauder’, ‘a plague on earth’, another conqueror and tyrant

53 to 103: The people of Alexandria bridle at Roman occupation; Caesar takes Pharaoh hostage; Cleopatra smuggles herself into the palace, ‘Egypt’s shame, Latium’s Fury’; Lucan execrates Caesar for letting himself be seduced, giving into ‘adulterous lust’, engendering siblings for his dead Julia: Cleopatra’s speech, pointing out her father intended her to be co-ruler and saying her brother the Pharaoh is in the clutches of the advisor, Pothinus

104 to 135: Cleopatra seduces Caesar; they sleep together; description of Cleopatra’s magnificent palace

136 to 193: At a luxurious feast (‘Caesar learns how to squander the riches of a ransacked world’); Caesar asks Acoreus the priest to give him some background on Egypt’s geography and history, starting with the source and flooding of the Nile

194 to 267: Acoreus discourses on the sources of the Nile, invoking a lot of useless astrology and then reviewing a series of theories, all of them nonsense

268 to 331: Acorius discourses more on the source of the Nile, about which he knows nothing (cf my review of Explorers of the Nile by Tim Jeal)

332 to 433: A very long speech in which Pharaoh’s regent, Pothinus, tells Achillas (one of the two men who assassinated Pompey) that they must do the same to Caesar i.e. assassinate him that very evening; but when evening comes, they bottle out and miss the opportunity

434 to 485: Next morning the conspirators lead an entire army against Alexandria; seeing it approach the city, Caesar barricades himself into the royal palace, taking Pharaoh as a hostage, while the Egyptians set up a siege

486 to 546: The siege includes ships blocking the harbour; Caesar orders these set fire and the fire spreads to houses on the mainland; he seizes the Pharos, the island attached to the mainland by a mole, which controlled entrance to Alexandria’s port; Caesar has Pothinus beheaded; Cleopatra’s sister, Arsinoe, is smuggled out of the palace to take control of the besieging army where she in turn has the incompetent Achillas executed; Caesar is moving his troops onto the empty ships in the harbour when he is attacked from all sides, from the Pharos, from the sea, and from the mainland – at which point the poem abruptly stops

Horror and madness

Lucan emphasises the horrific nature of his subject matter in the poem’s first seven lines (the same number as the opening sentence of Virgil’s Aeneid):

I sing of a worse than civil war, of war fought between kinsmen
over Pharsalia’s plains, of wickedness deemed justice; of how
a powerful people turned their own right hands against themselves;
of strife within families; how, with the first Triumvirate broken,
the forces of the quivering globe contended in mutual sinfulness;
standard ranged against standard, eagle matched against eagle,
spear threatening spear. What madness, my countrymen, how wild
that slaughter!

Any civil war represents the complete inversion of all the normal rules and values of society, starting with patriotism and love of your fellow countrymen.

Events throughout the poem are described in terms of madness and sacrilege. Far from glorious, the battle scenes are portraits of bloody horror, where nature is ravaged to build terrible siege engines and wild animals tear mercilessly at the flesh of the dead (perhaps reflecting the taste of an audience accustomed to the bloodlust of gladiatorial games).

Horror

Arruns reading the entrails:

Behold, he saw a horror never once witnessed
in a victim’s entrails without disaster following;
a vast second lobe grew on the lobe of the liver,
so that one part hung flabby with sickness,
while the other quivered and its veins trembled
to an a-rhythmic beat.

Madness

War’s madness is upon us,
where the sword’s power will wildly confound
all law, and vicious crime be called virtue.
(1.665)

Say, O Phoebus,
what madness embroils Roman arms
and spears in battle, in war without a foe?
(1.679)

Terror

Julia doesn’t just appear as just a ghost to Pompey, but as a Fury:

Julia, a phantom full of menace and terror, raising her
sorrowful face above the yawning earth, stood there in
the shape of a Fury amid the flames of her funeral pyre.
(3.8 to 10)

But then again, if Seneca’s tragedies are anything to go by, elite audiences in Nero’s Rome revelled in horrific subject matter, in the depiction of madness, horror, incest, mutilation, all wrapped in the most lurid, extreme rhetoric the poet could concoct.

Anti-imperialism

Given Lucan’s clear anti-imperialism, the flattering Book I dedication to Nero is somewhat puzzling. Some scholars have tried to read these lines ironically, but most see it as a traditional dedication written at a time before the (supposed) true depravity of Lucan’s patron was revealed. The extant “Lives” of the poet support this interpretation, stating that a portion of the Pharsalia was in circulation before Lucan and Nero had their falling out.

Furthermore, according to Braund, Lucan’s negative portrayal of Caesar in the early portion of the poem was not likely meant as criticism of Nero, and it may have been Lucan’s way of warning the new emperor about the issues of the past.

The poem as civil war

A critic named Jamie Masters has come up with a clever idea which is that the Pharsalia is not just a poem about a civil war but, in a metaphorical way, is a civil war. Not only are the two characters, Caesar and Pompey, at war with each other, but the poem can be divided into Pompeian and Caesarian styles and approaches.

Thus the sections about Pompey are slow, embody delay, and revels in delay, and dwell on the horrors of civil war. The passages describing Caesar are noticeably faster, cover more ground, with less lamenting and more energy.

This leads Masters to maybe overdo it a bit, suggesting the conflict was ultimately within Lucan’s mind so that the binary opposition that he sees throughout the entire poem embodies Lucan’s own ‘schizophrenic poetic persona.’

Lucan’s influence

Lucan’s work was popular in his own day and remained a school text in late antiquity and during the Middle Ages. Over 400 manuscripts survive. Its interest to the court of Charlemagne is proved by the existence of five complete manuscripts from the 9th century. Dante includes Lucan among other classical poets in the first circle of the Inferno, and draws on the Pharsalia in his scene with Antaeus (the giant depicted in Lucan’s book 4).

Christopher Marlowe wrote a translation of Book 1. Thomas May followed with translation of the other nine books in 1626, and then went on to invent a continuation, adding seven books to take the story up to Caesar’s assassination.

Suetonius’s Life of Lucan

Suetonius’s Life of Lucan is very short. This is it, in its entirety, in the Loeb Classical Library 1914 translation:

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus of Corduba made his first appearance as a poet with a ‘Eulogy of Nero’ at the emperor’s Quinquennial Contests, and then gave a public reading of his poem on the ‘Civil War’ waged between Pompey and Caesar. In a kind of introduction to the latter, comparing his time of life and his first essays with those of Vergil, he had the audacity to ask:

“How far, pray, do I fall short of the Culex”?

In his early youth, learning that his father was living in the remote country districts because of an unhappy marriage…He was recalled from Athens by Nero and made one of his intimate friends, besides being honoured with the quaestorship; but he could not keep the emperor’s favour. For piqued because Nero had suddenly called a meeting of the senate and gone out when he was giving a reading, with no other motive than to throw cold water on the performance, he afterwards did not refrain from words and acts of hostility to the prince, which are still notorious. Once for example in a public privy, when he relieved his bowels with an uncommonly loud noise, he shouted out this half line of the emperor’s, while those who were there for the same purpose took to their heels:

“You might suppose it thundered ‘neath the earth.”

He also tongue-lashed not only the emperor but also his most powerful friends in a scurrilous poem. Finally, he came out almost as the ringleader in the conspiracy of Piso, publicly making great talk about the glory of tyrannicides, and full of threats, even going to the length of offering Caesar’s head to all his friends. But when the conspiracy was detected, he showed by no means equal firmness of purpose; for he was easily forced to a confession, descended to the most abject entreaties, and even named his own mother among the guilty parties, although she was innocent, in hopes that this lack of filial devotion would win him favour with a parricidal prince.

But when he was allowed free choice of the manner of his death, he wrote a letter to his father, containing corrections for some of his verses, and after eating heartily, offered his arms to a physician, to cut his veins. I recall that his poems were even read in public, while they were published and offered for sale by editors lacking in taste, as well as by some who were painstaking and careful.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on December 30, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation, War

Tagged A.S. Kline, Achillas, Acoreus, Afranius, Agave, Albania, Alexander the Great, Alexander's grave, Alexandria, Alexandrine war, Amyclas, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient world, Antaeus, Anthony Kline, Anti-imperialism, Apollo, Appius Claudius, Argus, Ariminum, Arruns, Arsinoe, Asia Minor, Aulus, battle of Pharsalia, Black Sea, Brindisi, Brundisium, Brutus, Capua, Carthage, Cato the Younger, Catus, Charlemagne, Christopher Marlowe, Cicero, Cilicia, civil war, classics, Cleopatra, Cordus, Corfinium, Cornelia, Curicta, Curio, Dalmatia, Dante, Deiotarus, Delphi, dictator, Dipsas, Domitius, Dyrrachium, emperor Nero, epic poem, epic poetry, Epirus, Erictho, f Marmarica, Fate, Figulus, Fortune, Fury, Gaius Antonius, Ganymede, Garden of the Hesperides, Ghosts and portents, Gnaeus Pompeius, Gyareus, Hannibal, Harmony, Hercules, Hispania, Homer, horror, Hortensius, Ilerda, Iliad, Illyria, Italy, Jamie Masters, Julia, Julius Caesar, Jupiter, King Juba, Labienus, Laelius, Lake Tritonis, Larissa, Lentulus, Lesbos, Libya, Loeb Classical Library, Lucan, Lucius Afranius, Lucius Metellus, Lycidas, Lygdamus, madness, Marcia, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, Marcus Petreius, Marcus Porcius Cato, Marius, Mark Antony, Marseille, Medusa, Metellus Scipio, Middle Ages, Minicius, Mount Parnassus, mutiny, naval battle, Nero, North Africa, Nymphaion, Paeneste, Parthia, Parthian Empire, Pentheus, Perseus, Perseus and Medusa, Petreius, Pharaoh, Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopator, Pharsalia, Phemonoe, Phoceus, Phœbus, Pisonian conspiracy, poetry, Pompey, Pothinus, Quinquennial Contest, River Nile, River Rubicon, river Sicoris, Roman Empire, Roman literature, Rumour, Sabellus, sandsorm, Sardinia, Scaeva, seps, Septimius, Sextus Pompeius, Sicily, siege of Massilia, snakes, Spain, Stoic philosophy, Stoicism, suasoria, Suetonius Life of Lucan, suicide, Sulla, Susan Braund, Syhedra, Telo, the Adriatic, the Aeneid, the Delphic oracle, the Forum, the Mediterranean, the Pharos, the Psylli, the Senate, the Tiber, Thessalia infelix, Thessaly, Thomas May, Translation, Troy, Tyrrhenus, Varus, Virtue, Vulteius, witch, witchcraft

Posted by Simon on December 30, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/12/30/the-pharsalia-by-lucan-2-summary/

Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)

‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)

This is the third and concluding novel in the Robert Harris’s epic ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.

Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.

I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:

Tiro’s memoirs

As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:

I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)

A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.

Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).

Sources

Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.

Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:

Part one: Exile (58 to 47 BC)

‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.

The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.

They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.

Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).

Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.

But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).

Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)

Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).

Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).

Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).

Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.

Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.

Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).

Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).

But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).

Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)

The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.

Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).

The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)

Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).

Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.

First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).

And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.

Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).

He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).

Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.

After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.

And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.

Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.

But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).

Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).

(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).

Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):

politics is the most noble of callings
there is no nobler motive for entering public life than the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men
no individual or combination of individuals should be allowed to become too powerful
politics is a profession not a pastime for dilettantes
a statesman should devote his life to studying the science of politics in order to acquire all the knowledge that is necessary
that authority in a state must always be divided
that of the three known forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and people – the optimum is a combination of all three, since kings can be capricious, an aristocracy self-interested, and an uncontrolled multitude is a mob

Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission

Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators

detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)

Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).

En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).

In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.

Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.

Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.

So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.

Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.

Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.

Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.

Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.

It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).

The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.

And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:

out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)

In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).

Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.

Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.

Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).

Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).

In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.

Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.

It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.

‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)

The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).

Part two: Redux (47 to 43 BC)

They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).

He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.

Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).

Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).

Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.

Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).

His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).

Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:

On the fear of death
On the endurance of pain
On the alleviation of distress
On the remaining disorders of the soul
On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:

to desire nothing too much
to be content with what you have
to be entirely self sufficient within yourself so that whatever you lose, you can carry on regardless
to do no harm
to realise it is better to suffer an injury than inflict one
to acknowledge that life is a loan from nature which must be paid back at any time

‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).

Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.

Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.

Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.

Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).

Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).

Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).

Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.

On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.

Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.

Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:

A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)

Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)

So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).

The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).

Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.

Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.

One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.

An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.

Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).

Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.

Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.

He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).

Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).

It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).

Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).

It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.

Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).

Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).

Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.

BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).

But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.

A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.

The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.

It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.

Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)

In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.

When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:

That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)

And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.

Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.

At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).

Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).

Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).

Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.

A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:

the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)

So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.

At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).

Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.

It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.

They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).

They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.

Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.

They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.

They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.

The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).

Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.

They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).

Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.

All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.

My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)

The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.

It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.

And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.

Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.

Key themes

Politics

As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.

There is always this to be said of politics: it is never static. (p.51)
‘Nothing in politics can be planned in advance for seven years.’ (p.137)
It is the most important rule in politics always to keep things moving. (p.433)

But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.

Power

I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.

And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.

It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.

With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).

And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.

It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.

Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.

The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.

The law

A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.

Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.

Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.

So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:

‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)

War atrocities

As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:

Dyrrachium is still recovering from the fate ordained by the Senate in the 150s, namely razed to the ground and its entire population of 150,000 sold into slavery
Harris makes room for a scene in which Tiro reads through Caesar’s Commentaries on his Gallic Wars and works out that by Caesar’s own account, he has been responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 Gauls and Germans in just one campaigning season (p.45)
Metellus Nepos reads out a despatch from Caesar to the senate in which the great man admits that of the 65,000 strong army of the Nervii only 500 were left alive (p.70)
Caesar’s lieutenant wins a great naval battle against the Celts, has their leaders executed and their entire nation sold into slavery. (p.147)
Caesar lures 430,000 members of the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes across the Rhine and then annihilates them. (p.148)

It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.

Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.

Family ties

The stern republican Brutus was the nephew of the stern moralist Marcus Portius Cato (140).
Julius Caesar married off his daughter Julia to Pompey.
Mark Antony was the stepson of Publius Lentulus Sura, one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death. One among many sources of enmity between the two men.
Cassius Longinus was married to Brutus’s sister.
Domitius Ahenobarbus was married to Cato’s sister.
The consul Marcus Philippus was married to Caesar’s niece (142).
Octavian was Caesar’s great-nephew.

Dated diction

In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.

I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.

Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.

It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.

‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).

On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?

Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.

When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:

‘What an utter villain that fellow is.’ (Cicero about Crassus, p.154)
‘The man’s ingratitude is unbelievable!’ (Milo on Pompey, p.178)
‘I am delighted to meet you! My wife has always talked of you most fondly.’ (Dolabella to Tiro, p.296)

Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.

I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)

Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.

Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.

The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.

But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.

Scraps

Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).

Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).

Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).

Credit

Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. Page references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.

The Cicero trilogy

My Cicero reviews

Roman reviews

My ancient Rome reviews

Robert Harris reviews

Robert Harris reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on July 29, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Politics, Thriller

Tagged Africa, Agathe Licinia, Alexander the Great, ancient Rome, Antium, Apuleius Saturninus, Aristatus, Asicius, assassination of Caesar, Astura, Atticus, Aulus Hirtius, Baiae, Battle of Carrhae, Battle of Mutena, battle of Pharsalus, Bay of Naples, Birria, Brundisium, Brutus, Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, Caesar's Gallic Wars, Caieta, Caius Popillius Laenas, Capitol Hill, Cassius, Cassius Longinus, Catalina, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Cicero trilogy, Cisalpine Gaul, Cisapline Gaul, Cleopatra, Clodia, Clodius, College of Pontiffs, Conference of Luca, Corfu, Cornutus, Cumae, Cyprus, Decimus Brutus, Demosthenes, dictator, Dio of Alexander, Dolabella, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Dream of Scipio, Dyrrachium, Ealing Comedy, Feast of Saturnalia, fiction, First Triumvirate, Formiae, Fulvia, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Gaius Vibius Pansa, Gaul, Gnaeus Plancius, Gnaeus Pompeius, Helvius Cinna, Ides of March, Isauricus, Italy, Julius Caesar, king of Armenia, King Philip II, L.P. Wilkinson, Labienus, Lake Volsinii, Lentulus Sura, Letters of Cicero, Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, Lupercal, Marcus Antonius, Marcus Calius Rufus, Marcus Cornutus, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Philippus, Marcus Portius Cato, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, Metellus Nepos, Mutena, Mutina, novel, Octavian, Octavianus, On auguries, On divination, On duties, On fate, On Friendship, On glory, On the Nature of the Gods, On virtues, Parthian Empire, Philippics, Philotimus, Plutarch's Life of Cicero, Politics, Pompey, Popollius, power, Publilia, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Publius Crassus, Publius Lentulus Sura, Publius Vatinius, Quintus Cicero, River Rubicon, Robert Harris, Rogue One, Roman Republic, Roman Senate, Rome, Second Triumvirate, Servilia, Sicily, Slavery, St Trinians, Star Wars, Terentia, The Sibyl, Thessalonika, Thrapsus, thriller, Tiro, Titus Annius Milo, Tullia, Tusculan Disputations, Tusculum, Vatinius, War atrocities

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/dictator-robert-harris/

The Life of Mark Antony by Plutarch

This is one of the longest lives at 87 chapters, longer than Sertorius (27), Crassus (33), Cicero (49), Brutus (53), Caesar (69), Cato the Younger (73) or Pompey (80). Dates and other information in square brackets are not in Plutarch but content I’ve added in to make the account more accurate.

Plutarch’s life of Marcus Antonius

(1) Marcus Antonius [83 to 30] came from an undistinguished family. His grandfather was murdered during the purges of Marius in 87 BC. Plutarch tells an anecdote about how, when a friend came asking for money, all his father could give him was a bowl, and that when his wife discovered it was missing she threatened to torture all the slaves to find it until his father confessed to having given it away. (Torture all the slaves? So the references to torturing slaves to establish something, as jokily referred to in the plays of Plautus and Terence, is based on common practice.)

(2) His mother was Julia, a third cousin of Julius Caesar. When his father died, his mother remarried Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, an eminent man of noble family who was always in debt due to his extravagance and so had got lured into the Catiline conspiracy. He was one of the conspirators caught in the capital about whom the famous debate in the senate was held (where Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger put opposing views, namely clemency versus execution, as described in detail in Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy). As a result of Cato’s violent argument, Lentulus was summarily executed on the orders of Cicero, consul at the time. According to Plutarch, this explains Antony’s violent hatred of Cicero who he would, 20 years later, directly cause to be executed. Thus does the whirligig of time being in his revenges.

A promising youth, Antony fell under the influence of Gaius Scribonius Curio, who debauched him with wine and women till he was massively in debt and Curio’s father banned him from the house. Then he fell in with Publius Clodius Pulcher, the street demagogue and rabble rouser. He acquired so many enemies that he thought it wise to leave Italy for Greece, where he studied military tactics and oratory. Interestingly, Plutarch tells us that Antonius adopted:

the Asiatic style of oratory, which was at the height of its popularity in those days and bore a strong resemblance to his own life, which was swashbuckling and boastful, full of empty exultation and distorted ambition.

So by chapter 2 we know where Plutarch’s sympathies lie. With Brutus the liberator and Cato the principled, against Caesar the tyrant and Antony his swaggering lieutenant. OK. Good.

(3) Antony accompanies Grabinius to Syria as captain of his horse and distinguishes himself in a siege against Aristobulus at Jerusalem in 57 BC. He plays a leading role in the campaign to restore King Ptolemy XII Auletes to the throne of Egypt after he’d been dethroned by his people. For example, capturing the city of Pelusium. (Cato 35, Pompey 49) Something which, presumably, endeared him to Ptolemy’s daughter, Cleopatra, when he was to meet her 15 years later.

(4) “He had also a noble dignity of form; and a shapely beard, a broad forehead, and an aquiline nose were thought to show the virile qualities peculiar to the portraits and statues of Hercules.” He liked to play on his putative descent from Hercules. He dressed casually, was boastful and banterish, all this produced goodwill and reputation among the soldiers, helped by ‘his liberality, and his bestowal of favours upon friends and soldiers’.

(5) When the crisis between Caesar and Pompey came to a head, Curio, with money provided by Caesar, got Antony elected tribune of the plebs in 50 BC [following straight on from Curio’s own term]. During the crisis Antony played a key role at crucial moments. In January 49 he read out Caesar’s letter to the senate with his proposals for a compromise. It was he who suggested the further compromise that both Caesar and Pompey lay down their arms simultaneously, but this proposal was rejected by the consuls and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus (not the same Lentulus as the one involved in the conspiracy) expelled Antony from the Senate building by force and threats.

Which is why Antony changed into the clothes of a slave and headed to Caesar’s camp by the river Rubicon, there to brief him that all compromise was impossible. (Pompey 58, Caesar 30) It was the hounding of Antony in his capacity as tribune which made it possible for Caesar to dress up his motivation for invading Italy as being in part to restore the rights of the tribunes i.e. to dress up personal ambition in lofty rhetoric about rights and customs. [See the opening chapters of Caesar’s Civil War.]

(6) It was this which allowed Cicero to write, in his Philippics against Antony, that he was the prime cause of the civil war, which is, of course, silly, and Plutarch goes on to say so, and to explain that Caesar was not a man to do anything on a whim. No:

that which led [Caesar] to war against all mankind, as it had led Alexander before him, and Cyrus of old, was an insatiable love of power and a mad desire to be first and greatest.

Not a fan, then.

After Caesar crossed into Italy and drove Pompey across the Adriatic to Macedonia, he lacked the ships to follow and so turned around and headed to Spain to quell the Pompeian legions there, leaving Rome to Lepidus, who was praetor, and Italy and the troops to Antony, in his capacity as tribune of the people.

Antony curried favour with the troops by living with them and sharing their exercises and making generous gifts of money, but he was impatient with administering justice and gained a reputation for sleeping with other men’s wives. In other words, he did a lot of damage to Caesar’s cause.

(7) Nonetheless Caesar was right to put his faith in him as a general. Early in 48, having crushed Spain, Caesar has marched his army all the way back into Italy and rustled up the ships to transport them across the Adriatic. He was besieging Pompey’s army at Dyrrhachium in the Balkans with limited forces and sent word for Antony to send reinforcements. And Antony did a very good job by embarking 20,000 men and escaping the blockade of Brundisium being carried out by Lucius Scribonius Libo. He sailed them down the Macedonian coast in a storm but managed to find a safe port and so brought his forces safely to Caesar – the forces with which Caesar was to win the decisive Battle of Pharsalus later that summer.

(8) Antony distinguished himself at two engagements, where he stood and rallied fleeing troops, and Caesar gave him the decisive command of the left wing at the Battle of Pharsalus. [This is skipped over here because Plutarch describes it at length in his life of Pompey, chapters 68 to 73]. After Caesar won and had himself appointed dictator, he set off in pursuit of Pompey to Egypt, but made Antony his Master of Horse and sent him back to Rome. This post was second only to dictator and when the dictator was absent, as Caesar was, Antony was effectively in complete control.

(9) But while Caesar is away Antony shocked Rome with his loose living, his drunkenness, his heavy expenditures, his debauches with women, his spending the days in sleep or wandering about with an aching head, or attending the nuptial feasts of mimes and jesters. He has a falling out with Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who he thought had had an affair with his wife, so he drove the latter from his house. When Dolabella proposed a law for the abolition of debts and sought to enact it by force and seized the Roman Forum, Antony responded by unleashing his soldiers upon the assembled masses, killing hundreds. – The civil war had taught them nothing. Political street violence wouldn’t go away (at least not until the arrival of the ultimate strong man).

(10) When Caesar returned to Rome he disapproved of Antony’s actions, pardoned Dolabella and chose Lepidus rather than Antony to be his co-consul the next year. (Antony, in fact, was stripped of all official positions and received no appointments for the year 46 or 45 BC.)

Anthony took to wife Fulvia, the widow of both the demagogue Clodius and the hellraiser Curio, who was a tough woman and determined to reform him. Plutarch waspishly claims that Cleopatra owed her a debt because Fulvia house-trained Antony and made him ready to be ruled by a woman. [Before you get too impressed, remember this is the woman who delighted in seeing the severed head and hands of Cicero, executed in December 43 and sparked a full blown war with Octavian in 41.]

An anecdote: Antony goes to meet Caesar on his return from Spain, but then news breaks that Caesar is dead. So Antony made his way back to Rome disguised as a slave (an echo or repeat of his flight from Rome at the start of 49) and in disguise gained admittance to his own house claiming to be a slave with a message. He hands it to Fulvia who tearfully begs for news about her beloved Antony, at which point he drops his disguise and embraces her.

(11) When Caesar returned from victory in Rome, from all the men who went to meet him it was Antony he honoured and had accompany him in his ‘car’ back to the capital. Plutarch continues the idea of rivalry with Dolabella, claiming Caesar wanted to hand over power to him but Antony vehemently opposed it. Plutarch repeats the story about Caesar being warned about Antony and Dolabella and replying that it wasn’t these fat men who worried him, it was the pale and thin ones, indicating Brutus and Cassius. [Told less convincingly than in the lives of Caesar (62) or Brutus (8).]

(12) A repeat of the story of how Antony was taking part in the annual festival of the Lupercalia and ran with a diadem to the rostra where Caesar was sitting, had his fellow athletes lift him up and place the diadem on Caesar’s head. Some applauded but when Caesar pushed it away the whole crowd applauded. This happened several times before Caesar stood in displeasure, pulled the toga from his throat and said anyone who wanted could strike him there and then. It’s an odd story, isn’t it, with a folk legend aptness but also a deep implausibility. And the related anecdote that unknown hands hung wreaths on the heads of Caesar’s statues, which were then torn down by the tribunes. All this is told better in Caesar 61.

(13) The conspirators discuss inviting Antony to join. Trebonius shared a tent with Antony as they both accompanied Caesar back to Rome, hinted at the idea and Antony firmly refused. At which they switched round to considering killing Antony along with Caesar – a neat illustration of the way that, once you’ve crossed the line into deciding you need to kill people to get rid of the ‘tyrant’ and the ‘dictator’, it quickly becomes a list. In fact, Brutus is held up as the man of principle who insists that nobody else is harmed. Fearing Antony’s popularity and position, they nonetheless arrange for some of their number to engage Antony outside the senate hall so he is not present when the deed is done.

(14) In this account the actual assassination of Caesar takes up one short sentence. Fair enough; it is described in great and dramatic detail in the life of Caesar [chapters 63 to 69]. Anthony flees into hiding but when he realises the conspirators are harming no-one else but are holed up on the Capitol, he comes out of hiding, gives his son to them as a hostage guaranteeing safe passage, and then entertains the assassins to dinner. In the senate he proposes an act of amnesty and a distribution of provinces among Brutus and Cassius and their partisans.

In the immediate aftermath Antony was widely thought to have acted with immense wisdom to calm the risk of civil war. But everything changed when he made the official funeral address over Caesar’s body.

At the close of his speech shook on high the garments of the dead, all bloody and tattered by the swords as they were, called those who had wrought such work villains and murderers, and inspired his hearers with such rage that they heaped together benches and tables and burned Caesar’s body in the forum, and then, snatching the blazing faggots from the pyre, ran to the houses of the assassins and assaulted them.

This one act split the city, terrified the assassins into fleeing and, in effect, restarted the civil war.

(15) The assassins fled Rome. Caesar’s wife gave Antony his fortune to dispense with and all his papers. Antony implemented Caesar’s wishes but went further, appointing magistrates who suited him, acting increasingly autocratically.

(16) Octavian It was at this point that 18-year-old Octavian arrived in Rome, a son of Caesar’s niece. When Octavian asked for the money Caesar had left him, in order to distribute the payment of 75 drachmas which Caesar had enjoined, Antony ridiculed the boy for being a mere stripling, and also blocked his attempt to become a tribune. But Octavian allied with Cicero and others of the anti-Caesar party and Antony began to fear him, so held a summit conference, gave into his demands, and was reconciled. Briefly. For then Antony learned Octavian was touring the country drumming up old soldiers and recruiting an army.

(17) Cicero was the most powerful man in Rome and got the senate to declare Antony a public enemy while he was out of the city conducting a siege. Plutarch says this drove Antony and his army out of Italy and over the Alps and they suffered hardships and starvation, but this brought out the best in him, as adversity always did, and the soldiers admired him for sharing their privations.

(18) When Antony’s army came close to camp near to Lepidus‘s the latter, who owed Antony many favours, surprised him by being reluctant to acknowledge him. He came to Lepidus’s campy dishevelled and unshaven and won the sympathy of the troops. Many of Lepidus’s soldiers implored him to usurp their commander and take over but Antony insisted Lepidus be treated with respect and when their armies united he did so. This inspired Munatius Plancus also to join him so that he crossed the Alps into Italy with 17 legions of infantry and 10,000 horse.

(19) Octavian had realised he couldn’t treat with Cicero because the latter was a man of principle, so realised he had to come to an accommodation with Antony. So Octavian, Antony and Lepidus met on an island where ‘they divided up the whole empire among themselves as though it were an ancestral inheritance’. The Second Triumvirate. They all wanted to get rid of political enemies but agreeing a list presented great difficulties. Octavian gave up Cicero to Antony, Antony gave up Lucius Caesar (Antony’s uncle) to Octavian, Lepidus gave up Paulus his brother. ‘Nothing, in my opinion, could be more savage or cruel than this exchange.’

(20) Plutarch has it that the soldiers demanded additional tokens of their alliance so Octavian married Clodia, a daughter of Antony’s wife Fulvia. As a result of these agreements, 300 men were proscribed and put to death, including Cicero. [Wikipedia has 2,000 Roman knights and one third of the senate.] Antony ordered his head and right hand be cut off, the one he had used to write his savage criticisms of Antony with, and nailed to the rostra in the forum [Cicero 48]. In the Gallic Wars Caesar remarked on the Gauls’ ‘barbaric’ practice of sticking the heads of defeated enemies on poles around their camps. How is this different? What could be more savage and barbarian?

(21) Antony emerges as the most powerful of the triumvirate but makes himself very unpopular for his dissolute living. And because he had bought up the house of Pompey [only recently and tragically dead] and the people were upset to see it closed against commanders, magistrates and ambassadors and filled instead with mimes, jugglers and drunken flatterers.

The triumvirate not only sold the properties of those they slew, but brought false charges against their wives and heirs in order to confiscate their belongings. They instituted new taxes, and plundered the treasure deposited with the Vestal Virgins.

Then Octavian and Antony led their armies into Macedonia against Brutus and Cassius, leaving Rome in charge of Lepidus.

(22) This short chapter deals with the campaign of Octavian and Antony in Greece against Brutus and Cassius, describing but not mentioning by name the crucial two battles at Philippi in October 42, mainly to bring out how it was Antony who was victorious while Octavian was sick in his tent and his forces lost their part of the battle. [Brutus and Cassius’s campaigns in Greece, the long buildup to the battle, the battle and its aftermath are described in great detail in Plutarch’s life of Brutus, taking up the final third of the text, chapters 38 to 53, which is why he skimps it here.] In Plutarch’s account Cassius commits suicide after the first battle, Brutus after the second.

In the negotiations of the triumvirate it was Antony who insisted that Cicero was killed. In revenge Brutus ordered Hortensius to execute Antony’s own brother, Caius. In revenge, Antony had Hortensius executed on his family tomb. Thus the logic of civil wars.

(23) After the battle Octavian, still sick, returns to Rome, while Antony remains in Greece, raising money and enjoying himself, gaining a reputation as a philhellene, listening to learned debates, attending games, giving money to Athens.

(24) In 41 Antony left Lucius Censorinus in charge of Greece and he and his army crossed into Asia meaning the Eastern, Greek-speaking part of what is now Turkey. Here he was greeted as conqueror, lavished with gifts and women and lapsed into his former lifestyle of debauchery. His tax gatherers milked the territory till a brave local politician complained that they had already given Antony 200,000 talents, now he was demanding more. Which gave him pause.

For Antony was simple and slow, quick to forgive, lavish of gifts, but easily flattered and deceived by his subordinates.

(25) Enter Cleopatra who:

roused and drove to frenzy many of the passions that were still hidden and quiescent in him, and dissipated and destroyed whatever good and saving qualities still offered resistance.

Antony sends to her to attend him in Cilicia to explain her support for Cassius. Antony’s messenger, Dellius, on meeting her immediately realises his boss will be enslaved by such a lustrous woman, now at the peak of her beauty [born in 69 BC, in 41 she was 28].

(26) Cleopatra first meets Antony by sailing down the river Cydnus to his camp. This inspires the single most gorgeous description in Plutarch who says she sailed up:

the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple, its rowers urging it on with silver oars to the sound of the flute blended with pipes and lutes. She herself reclined beneath a canopy spangled with gold, adorned like Venus in a painting, while boys like Loves in paintings stood on either side and fanned her. Likewise also the fairest of her serving-maidens, attired like Nereïds and Graces, were stationed, some at the rudder-sweeps, and others at the reefing-ropes. Wondrous odours from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.

Antony asked her to come meet him but Cleopatra refused and told him to come meet her. And he obeyed.

(27) A chapter on the character of Cleopatra, tactfully observing that she was no necessarily the most beautiful of women, but she had an ineffable charm and wove a magic every time she spoke.

(28) Instead of preparing for war against the Parthians, Antony sank into oriental sloth, went to Alexandria with Cleopatra and spent his time in feasting and drinking. Plutarch includes a very rare snippet of autobiography which hints at the personal sources of information for his biographies.

Philotas, the physician of Amphissa, used to tell my grandfather, Lamprias, that he was in Alexandria at the time, studying his profession, and that having got well acquainted with one of the royal cooks, he was easily persuaded by him (young man that he was) to take a view of the extravagant preparations for a royal supper. Accordingly, he was introduced into the kitchen, and when he saw all the other provisions in great abundance, and eight wild boars a-roasting, he expressed his amazement at what must be the number of guests. But the cook burst out laughing and said: “The guests are not many, only about twelve; but everything that is set before them must be at perfection, and this an instant of time reduces. For it might happen that Antony would ask for supper immediately, and after a little while, perhaps, would postpone it and call for a cup of wine, or engage in conversation with some one. Wherefore,” he said, “not one, but many suppers are arranged; for the precise time is hard to hit.” This tale, then, Philotas used to tell; and he said also that as time went on he became one of the medical attendants of Antony’s oldest son, whom he had of Fulvia, and that he usually supped with him at his house in company with the rest of his comrades, when the young man did not sup with his father. Accordingly, on one occasion, as a physician was making too bold and giving much annoyance to them as they supped, Philotas stopped his mouth with some such sophism as the: “To the patient who is somewhat feverish cold water must be given; but everyone who has a fever is somewhat feverish; therefore to everyone who has a fever cold water should be given.” The fellow was confounded and put to silence, whereat Antony’s son was delighted and said with a laugh: “All this I bestow upon thee, Philotas,” pointing to a table covered with a great many large beakers. Philotas acknowledged his good intentions, but was far from supposing that a boy so young had the power to give away so much. After a little while, however, one of the slaves brought the beakers to him in a sack, and bade him put his seal upon it. And when Philotas protested and was afraid to take them, “You miserable man,” said the fellow, “why hesitate? Don’t you know that the giver is the son of Antony, and that he has the right to bestow so many golden vessels? However, take my advice and exchange them all with us for money; since perchance the boy’s father might miss some of the vessels, which are of ancient workmanship and highly valued for their art.” Such details, then, my grandfather used to tell me, Philotas would recount at every opportunity.

(29) Astonishingly, Antony liked to dress up as a slave and go round the streets of Alexandria, looking through people’s doors and mocking them. And Cleopatra accompanied him in these merry jaunts! She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him, and watched him as he exercised himself in arms. The Alexandrians said that he used the tragic mask with the Romans, but the comic mask with them.

He was fishing once, and had bad luck, and was vexed at it because Cleopatra was there to see. He therefore ordered his fishermen to dive down and secretly fasten to his hook some fish that had been previously caught, and pulled up two or three of them. But the Egyptian saw through the trick, and pretending to admire her lover’s skill, told her friends about it, and invited them to be spectators of it the following day. So great numbers of them got into the fishing boats, and when Antony had let down his line, she ordered one of her own attendants to get the start of him by swimming onto his hook and fastening on it a salted Pontic herring. Antony thought he had caught something, and pulled it up, whereupon there was great laughter, as was natural, and Cleopatra said: “Imperator, hand over thy fishing-rod to the fishermen of Pharos and Canopus; thy sport is the hunting of cities, realms, and continents.”

(30) Eventually the real world intruded on these larks. His wife and brother had become enemies of Octavian and been forced to flee Italy. Meanwhile, Labienus, Caesar’s best lieutenant in Gaul, who had gone over to Pompey and then escaped East after Pharsalus, was leading a Parthian army into Asia. Antony set off to engage Labienus but received messages from Fulvia.

[Fulvia had become involved in a full-blown conflict with Octavian which is known as Fulvia’s civil war or the Perusine war, because it ended up with Octavian besieging the forces of Fulvia and Antony’s younger brother, Lucius Antonius, in the Italian town of Perusia, modern Perugia.]

Plutarch has Antony changing direction to meet her but she died en route to meet him. [Wikipedia, by contrast, says Octavian took Perusia but spared both Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, sending the latter into exile at Sicyone near Corinth where she promptly died of disease.] Either way, when Antony arrived in Rome, he was able to restore friendship with Octavian by blaming any dissension on his headstrong wife.

The triumvirs divided up the empire, making the Ionian sea a boundary, assigning the East to Antony and the West to Caesar and giving Africa to Lepidus. They then arranged either to be consuls themselves or arranged for their friends and allies to have senior offices. So the Republic was in effect dead.

(31) In order to cement their alliance, Antony married Octavian’s half sister, Octavia, who was recently widowed. The senate passed a law allowing her to marry in less than the legal requirement of 10 months mourning. It’s one among many examples of the way the laws and the senate operated on a micro level to adjust things for fellow members of the small Roman elite.

(32) Pompey’s son Sextus Pompeius inherited command of his big fleet. Antony and Octavian meet him at Misenum, where they make peace [August 39]. As he is entertaining them on his flagship, a senior officer of Sextus’s whispers in his ear that they could cut their ropes, set sail, execute them, and Sextus would become ruler of the Roman world. But Sextus chooses integrity and rejects the idea.

(33) Antony sends Antony sent Publius Ventidius Bassus on ahead into Asia to oppose the Parthians while he has himself made Pontifex Maximus, as Julius had been. The partnership between Octavian and Antony functioned but Antony consistently came off worse in all their deals, even when things were decided (improbably enough) by throwing dice or cockfights (!). A soothsayer tells Antony to avoid Octavian.

Antony leaves Rome for Greece taking Octavia who has borne him a daughter. In Athens he learns that Ventidius had conquered the Parthians in battle [of the Cilician Gates] and slain Labienus [39 BC]. Antony takes part in traditional Athenian games.

(34) A more detailed description of Publius Ventidius’s successes against the Parthians which go some way to redeeming the disastrous defeat of Crassus in 53 BC. in 40 BC the Parthians invaded Syria led by Pacorus, the son of King Orodes. Ventidius met Pacorus’ huge army [in the Battle of Cyrrhestica] where he inflicted an overwhelming defeat in which Pacorus was killed [38 BC].

Ventidius doesn’t pursue them into their own land as he is worried about Antony’s jealousy, and when Antony arrived with an army, he takes over Ventidius’s siege of Antiochus of Commagené in the city of Samosata, which in fact goes very badly, leaving Antony chagrined. He sends Ventidius back to Rome for a triumph.

Plutarch makes a general point that other generals flourished under Antony or that he was more successful in campaigns conducted by those under him, namely: Ventidius against the Parthians, Sossius in Syria, and Canidius who conquered , who was left by the Armenians.

(35) Tensions had been building between Octavian and Antony who sailed for Italy with 200 ships but sent his wife on ahead of him, and when Octavia met Octavian she pleaded with him not to make her a widow, and so the two imperators were reconciled again, for the time being…

So they ate and conferred in peace, then Octavian gave Antony two legions to pursue his wars in the East while Octavian set off to quell remaining Pompeians in Sicily. Antony left Octavia and his children with Octavian.

(36) But in Asia Antony fell back into his old infatuation with Cleopatra. In October 41 he called her to attend him in Cilicia and made her a gift of ‘Phoenicia, Coele Syria, Cyprus and a large part of Cilicia…and.. the balsam-producing part of Judaea and all that part of Arabia Nabataea which slopes toward the outer sea’. Antony set up or removed monarchs, punished nations and ruled like an eastern potentate. He acknowledged his children by Cleopatra, and granted her numerous honours. In 40 she bore him two children. All this scandalised conservative Roman opinion.

37 to 52: the Parthian War

(37) In 38 BC Phraates put his father Hyrodes, king of Parthia, to death, and many nobles fled Parthia. Antony assembles a vast army, including the forces of many vassal kings, against Phraates but Plutarch tells us he mismanaged everything in his haste to win quick victories so he could get back to Cleopatra.

(38) For example, in his haste he left behind a number of state of the art siege engines in Armenia in charge of Statianus and 10,000 men. But this meant that when he laid siege to Phraata, a large city, in which were the wives and children of the king of Media a) the siege dragged on needlessly, but b) Phraates attacked the waggon camp back in Armenia, massacred the soldiers, killed Statianus and destroyed the engines. A calamity.

(39) The Parthians then march up to the besieged city, Antony lifts the siege and marches off, pretending to flee, but then turns and engages the Parthians in perfect battle order. They see them off, attacked first by the cavalry then the infantry and follow the Parthian army for many miles, but are disheartened to see how few of them they’ve killed. Then the Medes in their own camp turn traitor and attack them.

(40) It is a long punitive campaign. Some Parthian soldiers ride alongside Romans and tell them they and their king Phraates respect them, but despise Antony for relying on fear and famine rather than fighting. Eventually Antony decides to break camp and retreat. He is too downhearted to address his men but gets Domitius Ahenobarbus to do it.

(41) A man of the Mardian race offers to guide the Roman army back, emphasising that they should avoid the open plain and cleave to hilly country. Antony is not sure whether to trust him, till the Mardian offers to be put in chains as he guides them, so they agree. On the third day the Mardian notices a dyke has been cut to pour water across then Roman path and predicts an ambush, giving Antony enough time to prepare his legions and fight it off.

(42) Having cracked the strategy for fighting them off, Antony puts his army in the shape of a hollow square with slingers and cavalry on the outside and succeeds in fighting off the notorious Parthian cavalry for four days. But Antony makes the bad decision of letting Flavius Gallus lead an attack against the Parthians and, when he gets cut off, sending only small detachments to reinforce him which all get massacred. Eventually the entire Roman army wheels round to attack the Parthians, but it was a defeat.

(43) 3,000 dead and 5,000 wounded. Plutarch is typically sentimental, saying Antony went to visit the sick and they all with tears in their eyes assured him they were fine and would be happy so long as great Antony makes it to safety i.e. testament to his popularity.

(44) The Parthians camp near the Roman camp. Antony makes a speech berating those who have fled but asking for any punishment for transgressions to come down on his head so long as his army can be victorious.

(45) The Parthians continue to harry the retreating Romans. The Romans begin to starve and experiment with unknown vegetables. One of these is a herb which drives the eater mad, producing a mad obsession to turn over and move stones, and then death.

(46) Once again some individual Parthians fraternise with Roman soldiers and say their army, too, is exhausted and hungry. But a local named Mithridates came offering advice and showed one of Antony’s lieutenants hills in the distance and told him the entire Parthian host is waiting there to ambush them.

(47) Thus warned that the road through the deserts would leave them exposed, Antony holds a council of advisers and opts to take the path through the mountains, short of water though this would leave them. The Parthians attack their rear while the troops in the van fall on a river and start drinking but the water is salt and poisonous, causing stomach cramps.

(48) The Romans march on, assured by their guide that once they cross the next river the Parthians won’t pursues them. A garbled passage seems to imply that some of the Romans attacked and looted their own baggage train. There is such confusion that Antony calls one of the freedmen in his body-guard, Rhamnus, and tells him that, when he gives the order, he is to run Antony through then cut off his head. Weeping and lamentation from his entourage. But their guide swears the river is close and word comes that the disorder in the rearguard is caused by their own forces, and everyone cheers up.

(49) The Parthians continue to harass their rearguard, raining down arrows till they arrive at The River and cross it at which point the Parthians (supposedly) unstrung their bows and praised their bravery. Would be lovely to hear the Parthian version of all this. Finally they cross the river Araxes into the kingdom of Armenia and drop to the ground and kiss it. Although they promptly fall ill of dropsies and dysenteries.

(50) Antony undertakes a review and discovers 20,000 of his infantry and 4,000 cavalry have perished. (These numbers are always suspiciously round.) More than half from disease, which sounds the right kind of amount from modern accounts of the impact of disease and famine. Plutarch says Antony blamed their defeat on Artavasdes the Armenian who had led back from Media 16,000 horsemen who would have made all the difference in encounters with the mounted Parthian cavalry.

(51) They marched on to the coast at Sidon through snowstorms and lost another 8,000 men. Here Antony was beside himself with impatience to see Cleopatra.

(52) The king of the Medes falls out with the king of the Parthians and sends word to Antony that he is ready to join him on another campaign against the Parthians. This is music to Antony’s ears because it was precisely the lack of Medean cavalry which he blamed for his previous failure.

(53) In 35 Octavian gave permission to his sister, Antony’s wife, to sail east with a fleet carrying extensive supplies. Antony wrote her telling her to stop at Athens, at which point she realised he wanted her out of the way while he consorted with Cleopatra. And Cleopatra realised her rival wanted to engage in battle. So Cleopatra loses weight and takes to simpering when Antony is there and pining when he’s not, and is backed up by a host of sycophants who tell Antony Octavia only married him as a matter of public policy. And so Antony puts off the war to go to Alexandria to see Cleopatra.

(54) Octavia returns to Rome where she continues to live in her absent husband’s house, raising their children, behaving nobly and honourably, and by doing so helping to highlight Antony’s disreputable behaviour. By contrast Antony dresses up in oriental royal costumes, holds an elaborate ceremony at which he distributes thrones and honours to Cleopatra, and her children, for all the world like an eastern king of kings.

(55) Octavian made sure to keep all these accusations before the senate and people, drip feeding scandal. Antony replies with his own accusations:

Octavian seized Sicily from Pompey but never gave him a share of it
Antony lent Octavian ships which he never gave back
after ejecting their fellow triumvir Lepidus from office and degrading him, Octavian was keeping for himself the army, the territory, and the revenues which had been assigned to Lepidus
Octavian had distributed almost all Italy in allotments, to his own soldiers, and had left nothing for the soldiers of Antony

Octavian replied:

he had deposed Lepidus from office because he was abusing it
he would share whatever he’d won in war with Antony whenever Antony should share Armenia with him
Antony’s soldiers had no claim upon Italy, since they had Media and Persia

Playground squabbles.

(56) Antony gathers a huge naval force of 800 ships of which 200 are Cleopatra’s though he sends her back to Egypt. Cleopatra bribes his advisers to plead her case, that she needs to be by his side. So Antony relents and invites her to Samos where they party to the sound of theatre performances, music, banquets and processions. ‘How will the conquerors celebrate their victories if their preparations for the war are marked by festivals so costly?’

(57) Then on to Athens where there are more festivals and parties and Antony makes a great speech to Cleopatra, ostensibly on behalf of the city. Antony sends word to have Octavia ejected from his house and she leaves with all his children, to the great scandal of the people.

(58) It is 32 BC and Octavian is alarmed at Antony’s preparations for war. He is unpopular because he is enforcing high taxes, a quarter of income for citizens, and eighth for freedmen. If Antony had struck now he might have won the people, but he delayed. Then senior Antony officials who had been hounded out by Cleopatra maliciously told Octavian about Antony’s will. Octavian seized this from the Vestal Virgins and read it out to the senate. The most offensive provision was that he wanted to be buried in Egypt.

A man called Calvisius then made the following charges against Antony:

he had bestowed upon Cleopatra the libraries from Pergamum, in which there were two hundred thousand volumes
at a banquet where there were many guests he had stood up and rubbed her feet, in compliance with some agreement they had made
he consented to have the Ephesians in his presence salute Cleopatra as mistress
many times, while seated on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them
and once when Furnius was speaking, the ablest orator in Rome, Cleopatra was carried through the forum on a litter, and Antony, when he saw her, sprang up from his tribunal and forsook the trial and, hanging on to Cleopatra’s litter, escorted her on her way

(59) Cleopatra’s suspicion or jealousy of Antony’s entourage, many of whom she forces to flee.

(60) When Octavian was quite ready a law was passed to wage war on Cleopatra and remove from Antony the power he had handed over to her i.e. reclaim it for the Roman authorities. Octavian claimed Antony had been drugged and bewitched and was under the thumb of Cleopatra’s officials.

Plutarch gives us the usual litany of ill omens he claims occur before every war or battle:

Pisaurum, a city colonized by Antony situated near the Adriatic, was swallowed by chasms in the earth
from one of the marble statues of Antony near Alba sweat oozed for many days, and though it was wiped away it did not cease
in Patrae while Antony was staying there, the Heracleium was destroyed by lightning
at Athens the Dionysus in the Battle of the Giants was dislodged by the winds and carried down into the theatre
the same tempest fell upon the colossal figures of Eumenes and Attalus at Athens, on which the name of Antony had been inscribed and prostrated them
the admiral’s ship of Cleopatra was called Antonius; some swallows made their nest under its stern but other swallows attacked these, drove them out and destroyed their nestlings

(61) So war begins between Octavian and Antony. Antony had 500 fighting ships, 100,000 infantry soldiers and 12,000 horsemen and the tribute of all the kings in the east.

(62) But so in thrall is Antony to Cleopatra that he decides to fight the battle at sea, even though they are struggling to fully man their ships. These are high-sided with as many as ten ranks of oars and heavy and slow to manoeuvre. Whereas Octavian’s ships are fully manned and in perfect array. He invites Antony to come and dock at Brundisium and Tarentum and that he’ll withdraw a day’s march to allow Antony to land and arrange his forces perfectly for battle.

Antony replies by challenging Octavian to single combat; then to re-enacting the battle of Pharsalus. But while Antony was lying at anchor off Actium, where now Nicopolis stands, Caesar got the start of him by crossing the Ionian sea and occupying a place in Epirus called Toruné.

(63) Octavian’s fleet engaged Antony’s but Antony boldly had his rowers released and sent up top to look like soldiers and his ships drawn up in battle array so that Octavian was put off and withdrew. Antony sealed off watersources to prevent Octavian’s fleet watering. Domitius defected from Antony to Octavian but Antony generously sent his baggage, servants and friends after him.

Some allied kings defected. Canidius advises Antony to send Cleopatra away and abandon the naval strategy, drawing Octavian onto land where Antony has the bigger force and better track record.

But Cleopatra’s insistence that they fight a naval battle prevailed, even though she was already making preparations to flee. Octavian approves a plan to kidnap Antony as he walked on the shore and it nearly succeeded, they captured the man in front of him but Antony managed to get away.

(64) Antony burns all but 60 of the Egyptian ships and packs these with 20,000 heavy-armed soldiers and 2,000 archers. An old infantry centurion complains to Antony that naval battles are all very well for Egyptians and Phoenicians but Romans fare best on land.

(65) Four days of rough winds and high seas but on the fifth, 2 September 31 BC the Battle of Actium took place. Antony exhorts his men and tells the captains to keep the ships in the narrow mouth of the gulf. At first Antony’s ships refused to budge and Octavian thought they were anchored, but then the more impetuous left their line to attack him. Excellent! His ships were smaller and lighter and more nimble and able to surround Anthony’s.

(66) There was little ramming because Antony’s ships were too slow and Octavian didn’t want to risk his. It was as if three or four of Octavian’s ships were laying siege to Antony’s monsters. The battle is in mid flow when Cleopatra’s 60 ships made sail and began to leave right through the battlefield. Abandoning all reason, betraying his soldiers and sailors and allies, as if bewitched, Antony leapt into a five-oared galley and made after her.

(67) He caught up with her and was taken aboard Cleopatra’s ship where he sat with his head in his hands after they’d docked at Taenarum. For three days he didn’t move until her women persuaded him to come ashore and be reconciled with her. The world lost for love.

Some of their friends arrive in heavy transport ships and tell them the fleet is destroyed but they still possess an awesome land force. So Antony wrote to Canidius ordering him to withdraw across Greece into Asia. And he hands over a big transport ship full of the rarest treasure to his friends, telling them to divide it up and make the best of their fortune.

(68) In fact his fleet held out for hours at Actium and was only overcome by a storm, while he abandoned nineteen legions of undefeated men-at‑arms and 12,000 horsemen. Madness. The greatest example in human history of a man who was pussywhipped, meaning: “Totally controlled, domineered, or emasculated by a woman.”

His men held out for seven days expecting Antony to return at any moment, but he didn’t and after their commander Canidius ran away in the night, they handed themselves over to Octavian. Octavian sails on to Greece where he redistributes the grain which Antony had stripped from them for his forces. And here again a second unusually direct bit of reminiscence by Plutarch:

My great-grandfather Nicarchus used to tell how all his fellow-citizens were compelled to carry on their shoulders a stipulated measure of wheat down to the sea at Anticyra, and how their pace was quickened by the whip; they had carried one load in this way, he said, the second was already measured out, and they were just about to set forth, when word was brought that Antony had been defeated, and this was the salvation of the city; for immediately the stewards and soldiers of Antony took to flight, and the citizens divided the grain among themselves.

(69) Antony reaches the coast of Libya, sends Cleopatra ahead to Alexandria, and takes to roaming around with just two companions. Plutarch says nothing about Antony’s state of mind but his actions betoken a ghost man, a man who has ruined his cause and his reputation and has nothing to live for. When the general commanding Antony’s forces in Libya defected to Octavian Antony tried to kill himself but is stopped by his friends.

Eventually he sails on to Alexandria where he discovers Cleopatra is engaged in a ridiculous scheme, namely to raise and drag her fleet along the course of the current Suez canal, from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea and thus go and colonise somewhere to escape conquest by Octavian. But the Arabs burned her boats and Antony convinced her he still had a land army so she desisted.

And now Antony forsook the city and the society of his friends, and built for himself a dwelling in the sea at Pharos, by throwing a mole out into the water. Here he lived an exile from men, and declared that he was contentedly imitating the life of Timon, since, indeed, his experiences had been like Timon’s; for he himself also had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends, and therefore hated and distrusted all mankind.

(70) A digression on the life and notorious misanthropy of Timon of Athens, clearly a legendary figure by Antony’s time.

(71) Canidius arrives to tell him what finally happened at Actium and the news that all the kings and tetrarchs and whatnot of the Middle East are defecting to Octavian. All he has left is Egypt. At which Antony abandons his depression and goes back into Alexandria where he embarks on a new round of feasting and partying, holding coming of age feasts for his children. Antony and Cleopatra establish a new society which they call Partners in Death. Cleopatra starts collecting rare poisons and experimenting with them on prisoners. the painless ones are too slow but the quick ones are very painful. After lengthy experimentation she settles on the venom of the asp.

(72) They send a petition to Octavian, Cleopatra asking that she be allowed to keep her children, Antony that he may go and live as a private citizen in Athens.

(73) Octavian wrote to Cleopatra that he would treat her well if she would kill or expel Antony. Plutarch shares some typical gossip, telling us that the leader of Octavian’s embassy was one Thyrsus, ‘a man of no mean parts’ who had frequent converse with Cleopatra till it made Antony jealous and he had Thyrsus strung up and flogged then sent back to Octavian. After that Cleopatra went out of her way to suck back up to Antony, celebrating her own birthday very modestly but Antony’s birthday with great splendour. Octavian was called back to Rome by Agrippa.

(74) The war is suspended for winter, but next spring Octavian advanced on two fronts, coming down through Syria and advancing east across Libya. Octavian hears that Cleopatra has built an extravagant tomb into which she has collected all her treasure and sends reassuring messages to her, because he is scared she will kill herself, set light to it and thus deprive him of his loot.

When Octavian is at the outskirts of the city Antony sallies force and fought brilliantly, routing Octavian’s cavalry and driving him back to his camp. Plutarch tells a typically waspish anecdote.

Then, exalted by his victory, he went into the palace, kissed Cleopatra, all armed as he was, and presented to her the one of his soldiers who had fought most spiritedly. Cleopatra gave the man as a reward of valour a golden breastplate and a helmet. The man took them, of course — and in the night deserted to Caesar.

(75) Antony makes Octavian a second offer of single combat. Octavian of course refuses so Antony insists on leading his army into battle. At feast the night before the battle, he tells his friends he will be victorious or die trying, while they all cry.

That night, as usual with Plutarch there are omens. Just the one this time which is that over the city a great music and noise is heard as of a Dionysian festival, but it is heard to move from the city centre towards the gate facing Octavian’s camp and then disappear. It was, people said, the god he had devoted his life to, Dionysius, abandoning him.

(76) On 1 August 30 BC Antony watches his fleet set out to engage Octavian’s but, at the last minute, raise their oars in peace, surrender, and be accepted into Octavian’s fleet. Also his cavalry defects. He fights with his infantry but they are defeated. He withdraws into Alexandria ranting that he has been betrayed by Cleopatra. Scared, Cleopatra retired into her refuge, had the doors locked and barred and messengers sent to Antony telling her he was dead.

Antony goes into his chamber, laments that he has been found wanting in courage to a woman, and orders his man Eros to kill him. Instead Eros kills himself. You just can’t get the staff. So Antony tries to stab himself but makes a hash of it. When he recovers he orders the bystanders to finish him off but they all run away. Until the secretary Diomedes arrives with orders to take Antony to her tomb.

(77) A peculiar scene. Antony is carried to Cleopatra’s tomb but she refuses to unbar the doors to let him in, instead insisting that he is laid on a bier and that she and her serving women haul him up using a rope and pulley system, even though this is extremely difficult for her. When they’ve finally got him inside, Cleopatra rents her clothes and beats her breasts and there’s blood everywhere, but he tells her he’s had a good life and to look out for herself.

(78) Antony dies and his sword is taken by a servant who shows it to Octavian.

When Caesar heard these tidings, he retired within his tent and wept for a man who had been his relation by marriage, his colleague in office and command, and his partner in many undertakings and struggles.

Octavian calls in colleagues and reads out his correspondence with Antony, emphasising how reasonable he had been and how rude Antony’s replies. Then Octavian sends Proculeius to negotiate with Cleopatra, anxious that she will burn her treasure and wanting her to adorn his triumph through Rome.

(79) Proculeius wangles his way into the tomb. He goes back accompanied by Gallus and while Gallus is keeping Cleopatra in conversation by the door, Proculeius uses a ladder to get up to that window, the window they hauled Antony in through, and then down the stairs and to the door and takes Cleopatra by surprise. She tries to stab herself with a small knife but Proculeius is too fast, seizes it, shakes her down to ensure she has no other weapons, then sends her under guard to Octavian.

(80) Now Octavian finally arrives in Alexandria, proceeds to a tribunal erected in the gymnasium. The population prostrate themselves in terror but Octavian says he holds them blameless and won’t punish them. At this crucial moment Plutarch rather spoils the effect by saying Octavian does it at least in part to gratify his companion, Areius the philosopher.

(81) As for the children of Antony, Antyllus, his son by Fulvia, was betrayed by Theodorus his tutor and put to death. Theodorus stole the precious stone the boy wore about his neck but when this was discovered he was crucified. Cleopatra’s children, together with their attendants, were kept under guard and had generous treatment.

Caesarion, who was said to be Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar, was sent by his mother, with much treasure, into India, by way of Ethiopia. There Rhodon, another tutor like Theodorus, persuaded him to go back, on the ground that Octavian invited him to take the kingdom. And Octavian had him executed, after his mother died. One way of regarding this is barbaric. But it should be out in the context of the mass proscriptions Octavian enforced in Rome. His rule was characterised by large scale executions.

(82) Octavian allowed Cleopatra to bury Antony with lavish rites. Then she began to starve herself. But Octavian threatened the lives of her children and thus forced her to eke out a miserable existence.

(83) An interview between Octavian and Cleopatra at which she tries to justify her course of action but Octavian refutes her interpretations at every step. When a servant reveals that she is hiding away her jewellery she crossly slaps him and insists to Octavian that she is storing up women’s ornaments in order to send to Octavia and Livia to beg them to intercede for her. And so Octavian went away confident that she wanted to live. But she fooled him.

(84) One of Octavian’s entourage tells Cleopatra that his army is setting off for Syria and will be taking her, so she obtains permission to pour libations at Antony’s tomb one last tie and Plutarch give her a long sentimental speech.

(85) Cleopatra has a bath and then dinner. A man from the country arrives carrying a basket. The suspicious guards tell him to open it and are amazed at the size of the figs it contains. He bids them have a taste if they like so they let him pass. After her meal Cleopatra sends Octavian a written message, then has herself locked in her chamber with her two serving women. When Caesar opens the tablet and reads the message asking for her body to be buried next to Antony’s he knows what has happened and sends messengers to go instantly to prevent her. But they find Cleopatra lying dead upon a golden couch, arrayed in royal state.

And of her two women, the one called Iras was dying at her feet, while Charmion, already tottering and heavy-handed, was trying to arrange the diadem which encircled the queen’s brow. Then somebody said in anger: “A fine deed, this, Charmion!” “It is indeed most fine,” she said, “and befitting the descendant of so many kings.” Not a word more did she speak, but fell there by the side of the couch.

(86) Plutarch reports the 4 or 5 different versions of how she was poisoned, whether she stirred up the asp to make it angry, dipped her hand in the basket or took the snake out and applied it to her arm or breast. In Octavian’s triumph an ‘image’ (does this mean a model or effigy) of Cleopatra was included with the snake hanging from her, though Plutarch doesn’t say where exactly on her body.

Octavian was cross but admired her lofty spirit and so let her be buried with full rites next to Antony. Statues of Antony throughout Alexandria were torn down but those of Cleopatra were allowed to remain standing after one of her friends, Archibius, gave Caesar two thousand talents. She was 39, Antony was 55, they had been an item for 15 years.

(87) As in many a Victorian novel, Plutarch ends his narrative by tying up all the loose threads and telling us what happened to all Antony’s children and their descendants. He had seven children by three wives and their marriages and second marriages and intermarriages make for a complicated diagram. One of the two daughters he had by Octavia:

Antonia, famous for her beauty and discretion, was married to Drusus, who was the son of Livia and the step-son of Octavian. From this marriage sprang Germanicus and Claudius, Germanicus dying young but Claudius coming to the throne in the chaos after Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD.

Before Germanicus died he fathered Julia Agrippina, who, at age 13, was married off to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. They had a son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. 21 years later, with Ehenobarbus dead, Agrippina married the emperor Claudius. And Claudius, having adopted Agrippina’s son, gave him the name of Nero Germanicus. This was the Nero who came to the throne in 54 AD.

So Antony’s ‘blood’, if there is such a thing, ran on into the Julio-Claudian dynasty for several generations.

Learnings

Predestination

Plutarch is a fatalist. He believes everything is predestined to happen. Not very often, but at various key moments when central characters try to avert war or settle conflicts or lay high-minded plans, Plutarch is at hand to tell us that an implacable fate controls our ends.

It was destined that everything should come into Caesar’s hands. (55)

A maze of cross-references

The way that the lives refer to each other creates an evermore complex matrix of cross-references, which turn them into a complex meta-narrative, or a multi-stranded history.

Iraq, Iran and the West

At some point, reading about the inexorable opposition of the Parthian Empire to the Romans (i.e. ‘the West’) and learning that the Parthian Empire was roughly cognate with present-day Iraq and Iran – made me think of the never-ending conflict between those places and ‘the West’ in my day.

Modes of death of Plutarch’s eminent Romans

Marius (died a natural death aged 71)
Sulla (died a natural death aged 60)
Lucullus (died a natural death aged 61)

Crassus (died killed in battle aged 61)
Sertorius (assassinated aged 53)
Pompey (murdered aged 57)
Caesar (assassinated aged 55)
Cato the Younger (suicide aged 49)
Brutus (suicide aged 43)
Cicero (murdered aged 63)
Antony (suicide aged 53)

It’s the opposite of a scientific sample but you notice how the first three died of natural causes, although Marius and Sulla had been mass murderers; somehow there was the space for them to retire, as for lucky Lucullus. But from then onwards all the rest die violent deaths, and the third aspect of trend is the number of suicides. It feels like Rome no longer had room for many of its eminent men. They were no longer just killed in battle or assassinated but removed themselves from a world which no longer had room for the beliefs or values or causes they had supported. In a voodoo kind of way it’s as if the Republic liquidated itself.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on June 22, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation

Tagged Actium, Alexandria, Amphissa, ancient Egypt, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, Anticyra, Antiochus of Commagené, antiquity, Antonia, Antyllus, Archibius, Aristobulus, Armenia, Artavasdes the Armenian, Asia, assassination, Athens, Battle of Actium, Battle of Cyrrhestica, battle of Pharsalus, Biography, Brundisium, Brutus, Caesar's Civil War, Caesarion, Caligula, Calvisius, Canidius, Cassius, Catiline Conspiracy, Cato, Cato the Younger, Charmion, Cicero, Cilicia, civil war, Claudius, Clodia, Clodius, Crassus, Curio, Dellius, dictator, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Drusus, Dyrrhachium, Ephesians, Epirus, Eros, Forum, Fulvia, Furnius, Gaius Marius, Gaius Scribonius Curio, Gallic Wars, Gauls, Germanicus, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, Gnaeus Pompeius, Grabinius, Hercules, history, Hortensius, Hyrodes, Iras, Jerusalem, Julia Agrippina, Julio-Claudian dynasty, Julius Caesar, king of Media, king of Parthia, King Orodes, Labienus, Lamprias, Lentulus, Lepidus, Lucius Antonius, Lucius Caesar, Lucius Censorinus, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Agrippina, Lucius Scribonius Libo, Marcus Antonius, Mark Antony, Misenum, Munatius Plancus, Nero, Nero Germanicus, Nicarchus, Octavia, Octavian, Pacorus, Parthian War, Parthians, Patrae, Pelusium. Cleopatra, Pergamum, Perugia, Perusia, Pharos, Philippics, Philotas, Phraata, Phraates, Pisaurum, Plautus, Plutarch, Proculeius, Ptolemy XII Auletes, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, Publius Ventidius Bassus, Rhamnus, river Araxes, river Cydnus, River Rubicon, Roman history, Sallust, Samosata, Second Triumvirate, Sextus Pompeius, Statianus, suicide, Syria, Taenarum, Terence, Thyrsus, Timon of Athens, Toruné, Translation, Trebonius, Ventidius, Vestal Virgins

Posted by Simon on June 22, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/mark-antony-plutarch/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (619)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (84)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (5)
- Books (780)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (584)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (64)
- French literature (52)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (703)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (64)
- Philosophy (42)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

All posts tagged dictator

Harris’s novels

The Cicero trilogy

Share this:

The Mixture as Before

Bertie struggles to find the right word

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

Jeeves’s literary quotes

Jeeves and clothes

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

Clash of registers

The village constable

Abbreviations

Trimmed

One letter

Formulaic phraseology

Inappropriate

Slang phrases

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

Jeeves’s wisdom

Sir Roderick Spode

Plot

Cast

The Junior Ganymede club

Menus

On aunts

Bertie on girls and women

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

Comic phrases

Animal similes

The Drones club

Addresses

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

This lax post-war world

Share this:

Background

Setup

Technique

Summary

Chapter 3

Chapter 4 (Ikem)

Chapter 5 (Chris)

Chapter 6 (Beatrice)

Chapter 7 (Beatrice)

Chapter 8: Daughters

Chapter 9: Views of Struggle

Chapter 10: Impetuous Son

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Servants

Marxism

Anger

Stupidity

Sex

Embedded stories

Explanation of the title

Conclusion

Credit

Related link

Chinua Achebe reviews

Africa reviews

Share this:

Limited use as a reference

Chaps in Africa

Look at me, I’m woke

White privilege

In the footsteps of Stanley

Butcher’s mum

Kalemie

Going backwards

Butcher’s journey

Butcher’s bleak view of Africa