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Luxury and power: Persia to Greece @ the British Museum

This is an exhibition with a thesis. The layout and design, the structure, the choice of topics addressed and even the selection of individual artefacts, have all been made to support the central argument. What is this thesis? It’s another one of those ‘undermining received opinion’ exhibitions, so common nowadays.

In this case the received opinion goes like this: in the fifth century BC, from roughly 500 to 450 BC, the federation of Greek city states, led by Athens, fought off repeated attempts to invade and conquer them mounted by the huge Persian (proper scholarly name, Achaemenid) Empire, under its kings, Darius the Great (ruled 522 to 486 BC) and Xerxes the Great (ruled 486 to 465 BC).

You can see from this map how the Achaemenid Empire, at its height around 500 BC, covered a large swathe of south-central Asia and how vexing it was for its rulers that it swept through the Middle East, all of Turkey and up into the Balkans only to be blocked by the obstinate city states of Greece (at the far left of the map).

The Achaemenid Empire at its Greatest Extent, about 500 BC. Created by Mossmaps, accessed from Wikipedia

Contemporary Greeks, notably the historian Herodotus, but many other politicians and playwrights whose works have survived, portrayed the conflict as a desperate struggle against the odds of free, democratic states battling oriental tyranny.

In particular – and the focus of this exhibition – is the way that Greek leaders, politicians, writers and historians, but also artists, sculptors and craftsmen, routinely associated the Persians with luxury, with excessive wealth, which they went on to associate with moral failings such as decadence, greed, corruption, effeminacy, and so on.

The legendary King Midas (originally an actual ruler of Phrygia in central Anatolia) and how he was curse to turn everything he touched into gold, became associated with the Persians, a symbol of the punishment incurred by unlimited greed.

Recreation of an Achaemenid court robe, made with expensive dyes, rich embroidery and gold applique, designed to be draped and belted across the middle. Designed by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University (2022)

According to Greek writers all this Oriental extravagance and decadence starkly contrasted with their own pure, restrained and high-minded art and culture, which was summed up in the inscription above the famous oracle at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess‘.

East versus West

This stark dichotomy or binary view of civilisations, of a fundamental opposition the West and the Eastern Mediterranean, was to have a strong influence on the Roman Empire, whose leaders and writers also associated themselves with lofty principle and morality, and their opponents in the East – the successors to the Persians, the Parthian Empire – in identical terms. We are brave, they are warlike. We are high-minded and principled, they are lawless and treacherous. We live lives of dignity and restraint, they wallow on luxury and sensuality. All tropes which would again be revived when, in the late Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then pushed on into Thrace, eventually conquering Greece itself in the 1700s.

These tropes lived on into 18th and 19h century scholarly works, of history, art and anthropology, as what the American critic Edward Said called ‘Orientalism’ i.e. associating the empires, states and peoples of the East with luxury, corruption, decadence, sexual profligacy and so on.

Arguably, this great founding binary between noble democratic West and tyrannical barbarous East underwent another enormous revival in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, in aftermath of which loads of American leaders and opinion-makers revived all these old tropes, painting the Middle East as a land of wild-eyed religious fanatics, with the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington going as far as claiming the terrorist attacks had revived an age-old, unchangeable and inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’.

The only thing problem with this long and hallowed tradition is that, right back where it started, with the polar opposition between Greeks and the Persians… it’s wrong. And this exhibition at the British Museum sets out to show why.

Undoing the stereotype

It does so by presenting two counter-claims:

  1. Persian luxury wasn’t what the Greeks claimed it to be
  2. the Greeks were far from being as spartan and luxury-free as they claimed, but themselves valued luxury goods and incorporated many aspects of Persian craftsmanship and style into their own artefacts

To put it another way, for over two thousand years scholars and writers in the West have tended to take the Greeks’ at their own valuation of themselves, not least because our own power structures (of Christendom versus the Turks, of the European powers when they created their empires, of the modern 21st century American empire) found the Greeks’ binary tropes useful to confirm the superiority of the moral West. But the actual objects from these two supposedly distinct cultures tell a different story. They reveal a far more complex and messy picture of cultural interaction, interpenetration, influence and involvement than the official documents.

Thus, with disarming simplicity, the exhibition reflect this binary worldview, starting with two rooms: the first one displays a range of objects from different parts of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, some to explain the history and structure of the empire, some to demonstrate how luxury objects were used to express and support political and cultural power.

Room two focuses on the other half of the dyad, classical Athens of the 5th century BC, again with some objects used to explain the history and cultural highpoints of the period (of which the construction of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 BC is the most notable item), before going on to display cases which indicate how the Athenians incorporated, remodelled and adapted influences from the East through a variety of handicrafts and objects.

Hellenistic

And then, to prove its point that there was always more complex interplay between cultures right across the region, the third and final room looks in detail at the culture which arose after the conquest of Alexander the Great.

Alexander turned the tables on the Persians for, after conquering all of Greece, he swiftly took Anatolia, conquered Egypt and then pushed on into modern Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan. It was here that his dazzling ten-year career of ceaseless conquests came to an end with his untimely death in Babylon in 323 BC.

On his death Alexander’s short-lived empire quickly collapsed into individual kingdoms ruled by his various generals and there’s a display of coins with heads of those who managed to emerge as new rulers including the Antigonids (who emerged to rule Macedonia), the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Persia. Nonetheless the Greek culture, literacy, models of poetry and writing, models of sculpture and architecture, lived on after him across the whole region.

Because some Greeks called their homeland Hellas and its inhabitants Hellenes, scholars have for hundreds of years referred to the period from 323 until the Romans conquered Egypt in 31 BC, as the Hellenistic period, and art historians refer to the style which developed across it as the Hellenistic style.

The curators include a room on post-Alexander Hellenistic culture in this exhibition because they want us to arrive at it with fresh eyes: instead of the Hellenistic style representing a new synthesis of opposing traditions – which art historians have traditionally seen it as – this exhibition argues that Hellenism was more like the logical continuation of complex cross-cultural contacts and currents which had been swirling across the region for centuries before, despite the insistence to the contrary of Greek propagandists, who scholars for too long have taken too literally.

Room 1. The Achaemenid Empire

So room one attempts to show that the so-called ‘luxury’ of the Persians wasn’t indicative of moral failings, as Greek propagandists liked to claim, but was an intrinsic aspect of their statecraft. In other words, artefacts and objects, ceremonies and rituals which involved or highlighted wealth were important tools in keeping together such a huge and heterogeneous empire. When the Achaemenids conquered a territory, they went out of their way to appease populations. They often left native rulers in place (such as King Arbinas of Lycia for whom the Nereid Monument was built which is viewable elsewhere in the museum) or replaced them with regional administrators called satraps.

The new Persian rulers let their subject peoples continue to practice their religions – but they insisted on the pomp and pageantry which established them firmly as the ultimate rulers, distributing largesse and gifts to confirm the hierarchy of client king or satrap, and emperor. Satraps in turn collected taxes and tributes, and then granted largesse on a local level.

Thus the Persian administrative system court used objects of exquisite luxury not only as markers of authority but as intrinsic means to the administration of the empire. In doing so, a distinctive Persian style developed that was copied by different social classes throughout the empire and spread far beyond, into Greece itself and up into the Balkans. To quote one curator, the ‘Persians wielded “luxury” as a political tool across a vast and complex empire.

The Greek interpretation of Persian ‘luxury’ was a misreading: the Greeks interpreted it through a moralising prism and failed to understand that ostentatious displays of luxury were central to the Persian Empire’s administrative methodology.

Power was demonstrated not just by luxury objects but ceremonies and activities such as holding public audiences, banquets for subject kings and courtiers, and hunting expeditions. The court moved seasonally between the capital Persepolis, Babylon, Susa and Ecbatana, to hold court, administer justice, and confirm his power around his huge multicultural empire. The king travelled with a vast camp including a royal tent equivalent to a palace throne.

According to the Greek writer Xenophon, the Persian emperor would reward client kings and courtiers with gits such as a horse with a gold bit, a necklace of gold, a gold bracelet, a gold scimitar, a Persian coat, and so on.

Persian armlet © The Trustees of the British Museum

The room starts with historical background to the Greco-Persian wars: with Cyrus the Great (died in 530 BC), founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then Darius I (550 to 486 BC) who launched the first invasion of Greece (492 to 492). This failed, he began preparation for another one, but died before it could start and handed on preparations to his son, Xerxes.

Xerxes (486 to 465 BC) led the second attempted invasion of Greece, invading via a bridge he had constructed across the Hellespont (480 BC), and mounting a military campaign marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Although he at one point captured Athens and burned the buildings on the Acropolis (480), Xerxes was defeated at Plataea and, facing revolts in various provinces back in the empire, was forced to retreat from Greece. The defeat of his huge campaign spelled the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenian Empire.

Room 1 displays

Having given a brisk overview of the historical background, the exhibition moves on to cases devoted to various aspects of the central topic, ‘luxury’.

One of the most numerous types of object are so-called rhytons. These are drinking vessels but, the exhibition tells us, were part of a surprisingly ornate ritual. You’re a very senior Persian official and, at a banquet, you hold the rhyton in one hand while a slave fills it with wine. When it reaches a certain level you tip it with one hand and a stream of wine gushes forth from a small hole at the bottom, often concealed amid an elaborate design, and the thing is, you had to direct this stream of wine towards a shallow bowl you’re holding in your other hand. You don’t drink from the rhyton, you drink from the bowl. The rhyton is a luxury object designed to showcase your power and prestige, as is the entire ritual.

Gilt silver rhyton shaped as a griffin © The Trustees of the British Museum

Sound unlikely? Well, there’s a carved stone relief showing precisely this action being carried out at a banquet and there’s several cases full of beautifully worked examples of these wine pourers, crafted into all kinds of animal motifs.

Detail of the Nereid Monument showing Arbinas, king of Lycia, at a banquet using a rhyton and drinking bowl. In multicultural fashion, he sports a Persian beard but is wearing a Greek gown © The Trustees of the British Museum

Other aspects of Persian ‘luxury’ include bottles created to contain rare and precious spices and oils and objects such as the exquisite gold armlet (above), details of peacocks and parasols, jewellery and make-up. The king wore fur-lined coats, a golden torc around his throat, all markers of supreme power.

Persian rulers used chariots for hunting but also as symbols of power and dominance. The most common animals in Persian imagery are the mightiest animal then known, the lion, and the mythical creature, the griffin, both of which are depicted across all media from the Persian Empire.

Gateway 1. The Persian wars

You pass from room 1 to room 2 through a kind of gateway, angular upright and lintel painted jet black to distinguish it from the dazzling white of the rest of the show. In each of these there is an animated map and a couple of artefacts reflecting war. The first one is a 30-second animation showing the path of the two Persian invasions into mainland Greece: the first one from 492 to 490, ending in defeat at the Battle of Marathon; the second one, from 480 to 479, which featured the battle of Thermopylae, the naval battle of Salamis (480) and the Persians’ definitive defeat at Plataea. To set the tone the animation is accompanied by a classic Greek helmet and a figurine of a warrior.

Room 2. Ancient Athens

Again, the room starts with the basic history, describing the development of the Greek city states, especially Athens, which rose to have an empire of its own, complete with an enormous population of slaves and a flock of smaller cities who paid her handsome tributes, as well as wealth from the silver mines discovered in 483.

Bust of Pericles (about 430 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a bust of Pericles the great statesman (495 to 429 BC), whose noble speeches are recorded by the historian Thucydides, and who oversaw the development of Athenian democracy and the building of a new, astonishingly beautiful and mathematically precise temple to Athena Parthenos atop the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was not only a temple but a treasury, a storehouse, packed with treasures of all kinds.

The exhibition backs this up with an illustration of the original Parthenon, brightly painted and decorated, and photos of the modern reconstruction of the enormous statue of Athena Parthenos (‘the virgin’) which was the focal point of the Parthenon and which was a gaudy, brightly painted figure, 12 metres tall, made of ivory, wood and gold.

Reconstruction of the statue of Athena Parthenos at the reconstruction of the entire Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Luxury permitted when it enhanced the prestige of the city.

There’s an inventory of some of the treasure the temple once contained, carved in stone (including the throne of King Xerxes, captured at the Battle of Salamis); and part of a relief from the Elgin Marbles showing women processing towards the temple carrying luxury plates and objects, possibly captured from the Persian army, to devote to the goddess.

This section explains how the Athenians struggled to reconcile their self image as noble, egalitarian democrats with their growing wealth. One solution was to decide ‘luxury’ was permissible so long as it wasn’t attached to individuals but was used to honour that state.

It also explains the socio-political reasons for this aversion to luxury. Democracy was a response to civil conflict. Competitive displays of wealth among Athens’s richest families had led to tensions and violence at the end of the 6th century. When the statesman Kleisthenes introduced his reforms in 508 they were designed to defuse these tensions by enforcing greater equality between citizens. The laws he introduced distributed political responsibility among all adult male citizens in a system they came to call the rule of the people, demos-kratos.

Thus the animadversions of so many writers against personal displays of ‘luxury’ wasn’t based on morality alone, but on a very real fear that they would revive the social conflicts of the late 6th century which had threatened to plunge the city into civil war. Banning private displays of wealth was a political necessity.

Room 2 displays

Take peacocks. Peacocks were a very Persian marker of luxury and caste. They arrived in Athens sometime during the 5th century BC. Expensive to keep and with no practical purpose, they were classic markers of wealth and luxury, which meant their owners had to be careful not to raise democratic hackles. One aristocrat publicly displayed his peacocks once a month: luxury was acceptable so long as it was presented as benefiting the community.

As to Athenian views of the Persians, there’s a hilarious display case showing how the Greeks portrayed them on the many, many vases they made, decorated with line drawings of characters and animals. On earlier pots Persian characters are depicted as wearing trousers and jackets, very barbaric from a Greek perspective, but dignified and noble warriors.

After the triumphs of the Persian war, the depiction of Persians became more mocking and derisive, notably in the image of a defeated Persian sitting side-saddle (effeminate) on a donkey (not a warlike horse) facing backwards.

Green pot showing a Persian warrior seated side-saddle, facing backwards on a donkey (about 470 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Or take the Persian habit of having slaves carry a parasol to protect you from the fierce Middle Eastern sun. In Greek depictions, this was turned into parasols for delicate ladies, associating the Persians with effeminacy. In part this was because women played no part in Athenian politics and so were, in a sense, free to toy with decadent habits. Another one the exhibition points out, is the use of make-up and eyeliner, something Persian men wore but would be unthinkable in a fine, upstanding male Greek citizen.

Fish were another pressure point. Rich Athenians imported from the Persians a taste for rare and exotic fish, something which was publicly disapproved of, as shown here by a vase illustration and a disapproving quote from the playwright Aristophanes. (Compare and contrast with Roman moralists from Cicero onwards singling out ownership of rare fish ponds as one of the first markers of the Roman Republic’s slide into decadence and decay.)

Remember the rhytons which figured largely in the first room? This room has half a dozen examples showing how the Greeks adapted and undermined their grandiloquent originals. For a start they’re generally made from the Greeks’ favourite material, good democratic clay not ostentatious silver. And , as in this example, the bombastic use of an animal’s head (a lion’s) is undermined by the realistic and very Greek narrative depicted on the main body of the vase, above it.

Lion head drinking cup © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a case explaining that the Persians used images of bulls, lions and griffins in their power objects, but that these characteristically Persian motifs were also incorporated by Athenian designers. The exhibition features examples including beautifully crafted jewellery such as pendants and bracelets, and even a wonderful pair of earrings with tiny deer-heads in the shape of rhytons. What had been exemplary markers of Achaemenid royal court have been transformed into high-end fashion accessories for wealthy Athenians.

Interestingly, Persian motifs and depictions of characters wearing classic Persian dress became slowly more stylised and generalised, over time. A century after peace had been made with Persia (i.e. by 350) Persian motifs had been generalised into images and symbols of the vague East, including griffins, Amazons and other legendary animals and peoples.

Gateway 2. Alexander’s conquests

As with the passage from room 1 to room 2, so the passage from room 2 to room 3 is through a narrow, relatively low archway painted jet black in which is embedded a screen showing an animation, in this case showing the path of Alexander’s astonishing victories across Anatolia, into Egypt and then across Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan.

Map showing extent of Alexander’s conquests in 323 BC. As you can see, it almost completely replicates the extent of the Achaemenid Empire at its height (source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Room 3. Hellenistic culture

Born in 356 BC Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia on the death of his father, Philip II, in 336, at the age of 20, and almost immediately set about fighting his rivals in northern and central Greece, wars in which he enjoyed unparalleled success, uniting all of Greece under his rue before pursuing campaigns in Asia Minor, into Egypt and then east into Mesopotamia.

The period from Alexander’s death in 323 down until the overthrow (suicide) of Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 31 BC, is generally referred to as the Hellenistic period.

Alexander not only swept aside the Persian empire but the range and cosmopolitan nature of his empire ushered in a new age in which eastern and western styles of luxury were fused, hence the need for a distinct adjective, ‘Hellenistic’ style, a style which originated in Greece but freely incorporated eastern and oriental subject matter and styles.

Alexander has, of course, been traditionally viewed as a great Greek hero. The curators ask the teasing question, was he? Or could he more accurately be described as the last Achaemenid king? Because when he conquered the Persian Empire he inherited a highly organised, centralised administration. He maintained the existing system of provinces and retained some Persian governors. And then he remodelled images of his rule on the Persian style. He held court in the tent of his foe, Darius III and ordered suppliants to kneel before him, in a most ungreek manner.

In the era after Alexander’s conquests, cities across Asia developed as trading hubs for precious materials such as gold, silvery and ivory, housing specialist craftsmen. True to the spirit of Hellenism, they mixed motifs from Greece, Persia and Egypt.

Room 3 displays

Again there are a couple of panels summarising the history before we move on to look in detail at a range of objects. One of the most stunning is a gold wreath from Turkey, similar to those found in elite tombs in the kingdom of Macedonia. The gold oak wreath consists of two branches, bound together at the front by a model of a bee and with two gold cicadas concealed among the leaves. From the tomb of a local aristocrat in western Turkey, it epitomises the spread of ‘luxury’ across the region and the evolution of cosmopolitan styles in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.

Gold wreath: can you spot the two cicadas hidden among the leaves? One is just above the bottom-left leaf; the ‘bee’ is at the top of the thin circle of gold, with 3 triangular wedges at the bottom, looking more like a tiny owl © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a display case about ivory, explaining the culture’s attitude to elephants, the trade in tusks and the ‘luxury’ good made from them. There’s a set of clothes, trousers and a jacket, representing Hellenistic cultural synthesis. It’s actually a recreation of a Persian riding costume. Persians wore a costume which included cap, coat, tunic and trousers. Alexander liked to mix Persian and Macedonian costume. He adopted the tunic, cap and sash but not the trousers which, as a good Greek, he considered barbaric.

Persian riding costume as recreated by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (2022)

The Panagyurishte Treasure

But pride of place in the third room goes to extraordinary Panagyurishte Treasure from Bulgaria (roughly equivalent to ancient Thrace). Accidentally discovered by three brothers in 1949, these treasures are outstanding examples of ancient metalworking and demonstrate the influence of Persian and Greek luxury across the Balkans.

Remember the Persian rhytons from room one, and how we saw them being echoed and rework by the Athenians in room two? Well, of the nine pieces in the Panagyurishte Treasure, no fewer than eight are rhytons, beautifully crafted gleaming gold. The ninth object, the big circular plate, is one of the shallow bowls which you poured wine into from a rhyton and actually drank from. Still can’t really imagine how you’d do this without spilling loads of wine down your front, unless you were exceptionally dexterous.

Panagyurishte Treasure © National Museum of History, Bulgaria

The Panagyurishte treasures rarely leave Bulgaria, and were last seen in the UK in 1976, so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see them.

Information cabinets: raw materials and techniques

The exhibition is punctuated by information ‘boxes’, white cubes with text printed on them and a little glass pane showing samples of the material being explained. So there’s a box devoted to frankincense which contains samples of the aromatic gum from frankincense trees which was used in antiquity as medicine and incense. Apparently rulers of Arabia sent to the Achaemenid emperor every year about 26,000 tonnes of frankincense as tribute, which was then distributed to rulers across the empire as a symbol of the emperor’s largesse.

There’s a box about silver and its role in Persian artistry, which contains some actual silver ore, ingots and silver coins.

There’s one about the marble the ancient Greeks used to build the Parthenon and other temples, explaining that the particular type they used (‘Pentelic’ marble from Mount Pentelikon, 10k from Athens) contained traces of oxidised iron which gives the buildings that warm glow around sunset time, with some examples of marble fragments.

There were other similar explanations and samples of alabaster (‘a soft, luminous stone prized for its coloration and distinctive veining’) and ivory (the role of elephants in Persian and Greek culture, and the use of ivory, having a display case to themselves, including a cute ivory carving of a satyr’s head, which once decorated the head-rest of a couch).

Some of these info boxes are complemented by videos, each only about 60 seconds long, which give you insight into methods and techniques. There’s an interesting one about techniques used to manufacture a stunning Persian robe (displayed next to it), another one about how to create black glaze pottery ancient Greek style, one showing how the Greeks used glazes to give ceramic pottery a finish which mimicked Persian metalware. Persian metalware = decadent luxury; Greek pottery = democracy and morality.

But the standout one for me, one of the highlights of the exhibition, was a 60-second video showing how the Tyrian purple dye, famous across the Mediterranean for over for millennia, is actually made. I’ve read about it hundreds of times but never before seen a craftsman take one of the murex sea snails, crack it open with a hammer, dexterously extract its hypobranchial gland from the gloopy body and add this to a load of others kept in a jar, where sunlight and decay make them turn a rich purple colour. Once the coloration process is complete, the jar of glands is laid out in the sun to dry, then ground to a fine powder to create the basis of the purple dye, for over a thousand years associated with royalty and power. Because of its labour-intensive production, pure Tyrian dye was more expensive, pound for pound, than gold.

Conclusions

Does the exhibition succeed in its aim of persuading me that there was less of a binary opposition between Greek abstemiousness and Persian ‘luxury’ than previously thought? To be honest, it’s difficult to say. I imagine that most visitors, like me, are just not qualified enough to judge and are entirely in the hands of the curators. If they say so, I guess it must be so.

What does come over, for me at any rate, was a related but different conclusion, which is to do with the profound disconnect between official discourse (Greek texts) and the evidence of the objects on the ground, of the life of people in the broader culture which, the curators claim, strongly contradicts official Greek propaganda.

It made me wonder if it’s always true, if it’s a rule of human societies, that governments, almost by their nature, have views and official versions which fetishise a nation’s culture and heritage and so on – but that these will always clash with the far more messy and complex realities of life on the ground, of how people actually live, with the language and artefacts and habits and customs of actual populations, which often don’t fit into anybody’s neat categories.

To put it another way: that, throughout history, societies are always more multicultural than their leaders want or imagine them to be.*

Other rooms

The Greeks and Persians are favourite attractions at the museum, and at the end of the exhibition there’s a list of rooms where you can see objects related to the exhibition, being:

  • Nereid monument (room 17)
  • Parthenon (room 18)
  • ancient Athens (room 19)
  • The world of Alexander (room 22)
  • ancient Iran (room 52)
  • Mesopotamia 1500 to 539 BC (room 55)

* This thought has behind it the evidence and analysis presented in Michael Ignatieff’s trilogy of books about nations and nationalism.

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Posted by Simon on May 5, 2023

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The Life of Nero by Suetonius

Executive summary

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus in 37 AD. He was the fifth Roman emperor and the final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, reigning from 54 AD until his suicide in 68, aged just 33.

He was the son of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the Younger, one of the daughters of Germanicus and sister to the emperor Gaius (Caligula). After Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD, Germanicus’ brother Claudius – who was Agrippina’s uncle – took the throne. Claudius took his niece as his fourth wife in 49 AD.

A year later Claudius was persuaded by Agrippina to adopt her son, Lucius Domitius, and make him his heir. Nero was 13 when he was adopted. When Claudius died (in October 54) it was widely believed that Agrippina poisoned him to ensure her son succeeded to the throne before Claudius’s biological son by his third wife, Britannicus, came of age and presented a more natural successor. A year later, Nero had Britannicus murdered to secure his position.

Nero was 17 when he came to the throne. In the early years of his reign Nero was advised and guided by his mother Agrippina, his tutor Seneca the Younger, and his praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus and ruled moderately and well. But he soon sought to rule independently and to rid himself of restraining influences. His power struggle with his mother was eventually resolved when he had her murdered in 59. Both the murder of Britannicus and Agrippina have elements of farcical ineptitude (see below).

Nero was popular with the members of his Praetorian Guard and lower-class commoners in Rome and its provinces. He organised lavish games, he periodically gave money to the people, he carried out modernising building works. But he was deeply resented by the Roman aristocracy.

The historically closest sources we have – Suetonius in his Lives and Tacitus in his Annals – describe Nero as tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched. But then, they were all written under the aegis of the dynasty which succeeded the Julio-Claudians – the Flavians – and so, to some extent, represent propaganda for that dynasty with the aim of rubbishing the emperors which came before.

After his increasingly debauched, spendthrift and reckless rule alienated the aristocracy, Nero was declared a public enemy by the Roman Senate, and forced to flee Rome to a country estate where he committed suicide at the age of 33.

Nero’s death led to chaos as three military commanders vied for supremacy, in what came to be called the Year of Four Emperors, AD 69, the rivals being Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian.

I’ve reviewed Suetonius’s biographies of the four emperors who preceded Nero, namely Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula) and Claudius and along the way given several summaries of Suetonius’s approach. This is to give a brisk overview of his subject’s biography before moving on to look at specific areas of the emperor’s person – his appearance, family history and relationships, personality, quotes, the omens which surrounded his birth and death, and much other gossip and scandal.

Suetonius’s life of Nero is 57 (short) chapters long. It can be divided into five sections or parts:

  • the first five chapters describe Nero’s male forebears among the Ahenobarbi family
  • chapters 6 to 19 describe ‘Nero’s less atrocious acts’, many actually deserving praise
  • then, at chapter 20, Suetonius lets rip and commences a lurid account of Nero’s ‘follies and crimes’
  • chapters 40 to 49 give a long drawn-out description of his moral collapse following the revolt in Gaul, his abandonment by servants and friends, his flight from Rome and suicide
  • 50 to 57 describe his funeral and the aftermath

Suetonius’s life of Nero

The first five chapters describe Nero’s make forebears from the Ahenobarbi family:

  • Nero’s great-great-great grandfather, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, when tribune of the commons in 104 BC, was enraged at the priests for choosing someone else as pontifex maximus, so he transferred the right of filling vacancies in the priesthoods from the colleges themselves to the people in the Tribal Assembly (the law was subsequently repealed by Sulla). Having defeated the Allobroges and the Arverni in his consul­ship, he rode through the province on an elephant, attended by a throng of soldiers, in a kind of triumphal procession
  • His son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (98 to 48 BC), when consul in 54 BC, tried to deprive Caesar of the command of the armies in Gaul. The senate appointed him to succeed Caesar as governor of further Gaul and when Caesar invaded Italy in 49, he was the only one of the aristocratic party who showed any energy or courage, organising the defense of Corfinium. When Corfinium was taken Caesar characteristically granted him clemency but he rejoined the aristocratic party. He was killed at the battle of Pharsalus and is mentioned in one of Cicero’s speeches as a principled example of the old Republic.
  • He left a son, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (died 31 BC) who was beyond all question better than the rest of the family. He was condemned among those involved in Caesar’s assassination and so went to join Brutus and Cassius. Upon their defeat he surrendered the republican fleet to Mark Antony. This Ahenobarbus successively held all the highest offices including consul in 32 BC. When the civil war between Augustus and Anthony broke out, he was appointed one of Antony’s lieutenants, but defected to Octavian just a few days before the decisive battle of Actium. Although Antony was upset by this betrayal, he still sent him all his gear, his friends and his attendants. (This incident is described in Plutarch’s Life of Anthony, chapter 63.) He died just a few days later.
  • Gnaeus had a son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (49 BC to 25 AD) who was later well known for being named in Augustus’ will as the purchaser of his goods and chattels. He won the insignia of a triumph in the war in Germany. He gave a gladiatorial games so cruel that Augustus admonished him. He married Antonia the Elder (niece of emperor Augustus) and had a son:
  • This man, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (2 BC to 41 AD) was widely hated: while on the staff of Gaius Caesar out East he murdered one of his own freedmen for refusing to drink as much as he ordered. In a village on the Appian Way, suddenly whipping up his team, he purposely ran over and killed a boy. In the Roman Forum he gouged out the eye​ of a Roman knight for being too outspoken in chiding him. When praetor he defrauded the victors in the chariot races of their prizes. Just before the death of Tiberius he was charged with treason, adultery and incest with his sister Lepida, but escaped owing to the change of rulers. Domitius married his first cousin once removed, Agrippina the Younger, Caligula’s sister, after her thirteenth birthday in 28. He was far older than her at the time. Tiberius arranged the marriage. Nine years later his son by Agrippina, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, was born.

6. Nero was born at on 15 December 37, nine months after the death of Tiberius. When shown the baby his father is supposed to have remarked that ‘any child born to him and Agrippina was bound to have a detestable nature and become a public danger’. At the age of three Nero’s father died but his fellow heir Gaius seized all the property.

He had a troubled upbringing in this cursed family. First Gaius banished his mother so that young Domitius was brought up in relative poverty in the house of his aunt Lepida, who assigned him as tutors a dancer and a barber. But when Claudius became emperor, in 41, he restored to Nero his father’s legacy added to it, and recalled his mother from exile.

There is a widely attested legend that Claudius’s third wife, Messalina, came to regard the boy Nero as a rival to her own son, Britannicus, and so sent assassins to murder him, and that they were at the cradle when they were scared away by a snake which suddenly appeared from under his pillow. [A clear copy of the legend of Hercules strangling snakes as a baby.]

[After Claudius had Messalina executed, in 48 AD, for bigamously marrying the senator Gaius Silius and plotting against him, he proceeded to take this same Agrippina as his fourth wife, despite her being his niece, marrying her on New year’s Day 49. At this point Domitius became Claudius’s step-son and Agrippina persuaded Claudius to formally adopted him as his son and heir. This was when the boy was given an entirely new name, Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus.]

7. Domitius/Nero was ten years old when he was adopted by Claudius and assigned the senator and writer Annaeus Seneca as tutor. He almost immediately began a campaign to discredit Britannicus and his surviving relatives.

Nero entered public life aged just 14, reviewing march pasts of the army, pleading the cause of towns with cases before Claudius, appearing as a judge. When he turned 16 (in 53), Nero married Claudius’s daughter (i.e. his own step-sister), Claudia Octavia. He gave games and a beast-baiting in the Circus.

8. Nero was just 17 when the death of Claudius was announced. Most commentators think Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina because she was worried Britannicus would soon come of age and Claudius would change his mind and make his biological son heir. Nero was hailed emperor on the steps of the Palace, carried in a litter to the praetorian camp, made a brief address to the soldiers, and proceeded to the Senate House where he was awarded all manner of honours.

9. He started off with displays of filial duty, giving Claudius a magnificent funeral then paying the highest honours to the memory of his father Domitius. He left to his mother the management of all public and private business. He often rode with her through the streets in her litter. He curried favour with the Praetorian Guard, such a key player in Roman politics since it had been consolidated by Sejanus, by establishing a colony for them at Antium and building a harbour there at great expense.

10. Nero proclaimed he would model his rule on Augustus. He was conspicuously generous. He abolished some taxes and lowered others. popularity. He lowered rewards paid to informers. He distributed a largess of 400 sesterces to the commons and granted the poorest senators a salary. Like Augustus he had a good memory and greeted men of all ranks by name. Wise and popular moves.

11. Nero gave many entertainments of different kinds: the Juvenales,​ chariot races in the Circus, stage-plays and a gladiatorial show. He organised races for chariots drawn by four camels. At the Great Festival (Ludi Maximi) he organised a series of plays devoted to the eternity of the Empire.

12. At the gladiatorial show Nero had no one put to death, not even criminals. But he did compel 400 senators and 600 Roman knights, some of whom were well to do and of unblemished reputation, to fight in the arena. Some were forced to fight with the wild beasts or perform various services in the arena. He arranged a huge naval battle in salt water with sea monsters swimming about in it. And numerous dances which were a kind of ballet based on legendary themes (the life of the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus).

He inaugurated the ‘Neronia’, a festival of competitions in music, gymnastics and horsemanship, modelled on the Greek ones. Nero recited his own poetry and was unanimously awarded the prize for oratory. At the gymnastic contest, which he gave in the Saepta he shaved his chin for the first time, to the accompaniment of a great sacrifice of bullocks, and put the wispy hairs in a golden box adorned with pearls of great price, and dedicated it to the Capitoline Jupiter.

13. Suetonius describes the elaborate ceremonial surrounding the entrance of Tiridates, king of Armenia, into Rome and his obeisance before Nero on a sumptuously decorated platform and then again, in the Theatre. After which Nero to great applause closed the doors of the temple of Janus to signify that the whole empire was at peace.

14. Nero held four consul­ships.

15. Nero was secretive about deciding law cases, insisting on being given full written explanations of both sides of a case and retiring to consider them in private. He began to tamper with the constitution. He refused to admit the sons of freedmen to the senate. He began to appoint consuls for six months instead of the customary 12. He conferred the triumphal regalia even on men of the rank of quaestor, as well as on some of the knights, and sometimes for other than military services. When he sent speeches to be read to the senate he did so via consuls instead of the quaestors, as had been customary.

16. Nero introduced a new style of architecture to Rome, building porches out in front of houses and apartment blocks whose flat roofs allowed fires to be fought. He considered extending the city walls as far as the port of Ostia and to bring the sea from there to Rome by a canal.

During his reign many abuses were put down. Sumptuary laws limited private expenditures. Expensive public banquets were replaced by a distribution of grain. Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous superstition. He ended the licence afforded to chariot drivers, of being able to walk down the street cheating and robbing the people. All pantomime actors and their hangers-on were expelled from the city.

17. Nero made many legal reforms including promulgating protection against forgers, preventing will writers from adding clauses benefiting themselves, and that customers should pay a fixed and reasonable fee for the services of their lawyers.

18. Nero showed no interest in extending the bounds of the empire and considered withdrawing the army from Britain and only changed his mind because it would have diminished the memory of his adoptive father, Claudius. Two minor territorial extensions occurred when the kingdom of Pontus was ceded to Rome by its king, Polemon, and when part of the Alps reverted to Roman control on the death of its king, Cottius.

19. Nero planned two foreign tours but cancelled one to Alexandria after bad omens. He went to Greece where he proposed building a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, going so far as to breaking ground with a mattock and to carrying off a basket­ful of earth upon his shoulders before an audience of the Praetorian Guard. He also prepared for an expedition to the Caspian Gates, after enrolling a new legion of raw recruits of Italian birth, each six feet tall, which he grandly called ‘the phalanx of Alexander the Great.’

Chapter 20 marks a dividing point in the biography. Up to this point Suetonius had listed Nero’s respectable and positive achievements, many of which deserved praise. But from this point onwards, Suetonius announces that he will catalogue Nero’s ‘follies and crimes’.

Nero the performer

20. Nero enjoyed music. As soon as he became emperor he sent for Terpnus, the greatest lyre-player of the day, made him perform over successive nights over dinner, and then began to take lessons. And perform the exercises required, namely: lying on his back with a slab of lead on his chest; using enemas and emetics to keep down his weight; refrained from eating apples and other fruits considered damaging to the health (!) Despite all this his voice remained weak and husky.

Nero made his début at Naples, where he did not cease singing until he had finished the number which he had begun, even though the theatre was shaken by a sudden earthquake. He was impressed by the rhythmical clapping of crowds from Alexandria and commissioned some knights and 5,000 commoners to be divided into groups and learn the Alexandrian styles of applause. They were divided into ‘the bees’ (who made a loud humming noise), ‘the roof-tiles’ (who clapped with hollow hands) and ‘the bricks’ (who clapped with flat palms). They were ordered to attend all Nero’s performances and applaud loudly after his performance. You could tell them by their thick hair, splendid dress, and the absence of rings on their left hands. The knights who led them were paid 400 gold pieces for each performance.

21. Nero repeated the Neronian games so he could sing at them. ​He arranged it so the crowd clamoured to hear him, dropped his name into the urn to take pot luck along with everyone else, but made sure he was called and then came forward, attended by prefects of the Praetorian Guard carrying his lyre, had an ex-consul announce him and then performed the song of Niobe until late in the afternoon.

He toyed with performing opposite professional actors in public shows. He did actually perform in tragedies, taking the parts of mortals and gods, sometimes even goddesses, wearing masks modelled on his own, or women’s masked based on his lover of the moment. He performed in ‘Canace in Childborth’, ‘Orestes the Matricide’, ‘The Blinding of Oedipus’ and the ‘Frenzy of Hercules’. There’s a story that , the last of these plays, a young recruit, seeing the emperor in rags and fetters, dashed forward to his assistance. [Like so many Roman anecdotes, a bit too good to be true.]

22. Nero was obsessed with horse racing from an early age and played with toys of chariots and horses. Once in power, he attended every race day and made no secret of his wish to have the number of races and prizes increased.

He desperately wanted to drive a chariot himself and, after practicing in the privacy of his own grounds, made a public appearance at the Circus Maximus (when one of his freedmen replaced the magistrate who usually took the job of dropping the napkin to start the race).

He went to Greece because all the cities which held musical competitions had swiftly adopted the sycophantic practice of awarding the emperor top prize. He declared that ‘the Greeks were the only ones who had an ear for music and that they alone were worthy of my efforts.’

So he took ship to Greece and immediately on arriving at Cassiope gave his first recital before the altar of Jupiter Cassius, and then went the round of all the contests.

23. During his visit to Greece Nero used his power to make the Greeks hold competitions between the usual intervals and introduced a musical competition into the Olympic Games. When his advisers told him he was needed back at Rome he angrily told them he had to remain performing in Greece until he had proved himself worthy of Nero.

No one was allowed to leave a theatre when Nero was performing. So Suetonius shares comic stories of women giving birth to children there, some secretly dropping down from the back wall, some even feigning death in order to be carried out. He sucked up to his rivals, praising them to their faces but badmouthing them behind their backs. When they were particularly good performers, he bribed them to sing badly. He addressed the judges in deferential terms but was surprisingly nervous before each performance.

24. Nero took the competitions very seriously, scrupulously observing the rules most scrupulously, never daring to clear his throat nor wipe the sweat from his brow with his arm (both actions which lost the competitor points). To obliterate the memory of all other victors in games​ he had their statues and busts taken down and placed in public lavatories.

Nero drove a chariot in many places. At Olympia he drove a ten-horse team, a novelty. He fell from the chariot, had to be helped back into it and failed to complete the course, but he received the prize just the same. The judges weren’t stupid. On his departure he presented the entire province with freedom​ and gave the judges Roman citizen­ship and money. He announced these gifts in in person during the Isthmian Games, standing in the middle of the stadium.

25. Arriving back at Naples, Nero ordered part of the wall to be razed so he could ride white horses through the gap, as was customary with victors in the sacred games.​ He entered Antium, then Albanum and finally Rome in the same manner. In Rome he rode in the same chariot which Augustus had used in his triumphs and wore a purple robe and a Greek cloak adorned with stars of gold, bearing on his head the Olympic wreath, the Pythian wreath in his right hand. Other wreaths were borne before him with placards describing where he won them, what he sang, who the competition was. He processed through the city to the cheers of the adoring crowd and the accompaniment of lavish sacrifices.

He placed the victor’s wreaths above the couches in his sleeping quarters and set up several statues of himself playing the lyre, and had a coin struck with the same image.

[What an extraordinary travesty and mockery of the military triumphs of the preceding centuries.]

In order to preserve his voice, Nero never addressed the soldiers except by letter or in a speech delivered by others, he never did anything for amusement or in earnest without a voice trainer by his side, to warn him to spare his vocal organs and hold a handkerchief to his mouth. He made friends or enemies according to how enthusiastically they applauded him.

Delinquent behaviour

26. Meanwhile, Nero performed his first acts of wantonness, lust, extravagance, avarice and cruelty in secret. Some might say boys will be boys, but this was the true Nero coming out.

When night fell, he took a cap or wig and went from tavern to tavern, roaming the streets performing pranks, but these weren’t harmless. He used to beat men as they came home from dinner, stabbing any who resisted him and throwing them into the sewers. He broke into shops then sold the loot openly in the market. After he was beaten almost to death by a senator whose wife he had maltreated, he thenceforth had a squad of tribunes follow him at a distance and unobserved.

He attended the theatre in the upper part of the proscenium. When fights broke out on stage (fighting with stones and broken benches) Nero himself threw many missiles at the people and even broke a praetor’s head.

Lavish feasts

27. Slowly Nero’s decadent behaviour became more overt and entrenched. His feasts lasted from noon till midnight with breaks for a swim in a warm bath or, if it was summer, into snow-cooled water. Sometimes he drained the artificial lakes in the Campus Martius or the Circus and held banquets there, including prostitutes and dancing girls as guests.

Whenever he cruised down the Tiber to Ostia, or sailed about the Gulf of Baiae, he had rows of temporary brothels set up along the shore, where married women, pretending to be inn-keepers, solicited him to come ashore. [This is the kind of story which seems superficially colourful but as soon as you think about the practicalities, seems wildly impractical.]

He forced his friends to hold lavish banquets: one friend spent 4 million sesterces on a banquet where everyone wore turbans were distributed, another spent even more on a rose dinner.

Sex

28. Not satisifed with seducing free-born boys and married women, Nero raped the Vestal Virgin, Rubria. Then he tried to marry the freed-woman Acte by bribing some ex-consuls to perjure themselves by swearing that she was of royal birth.

He tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castrating him and then went through a marriage ceremony with him, dowry, bridal veil and all, took him back to the palace attended by a huge crowd and lived with him as man and wife. This gave rise to a joke that the world would have been a better place if Nero’s father had taken that kind of wife.

Nero dressed this Sporus in all the finery of an empress and took him everywhere with him in his litter, kissing him openly in public.

It was no secret that he lusted after his mother. it was said that only her enemies held him back, fearing that she would gain such control over him that her power would be absolute. So Nero added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look just like Agrippina. Others said that they had incestuous relations whenever he rode in a litter with his mother; you could tell by the stains when he emerged.

29. Nero ran through every type of obscenity and invented new ones. He devised a game in which he dressed in the skin of wild animals, was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women who were bound to stakes. When he had worked himself up to a frenzy he was ‘finished off’ by his freedman Doryphorus.

In fact he got this Doryphorus to marry him, as he had married Sporus, and on their ‘wedding night’ imitated the screams and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. Like perverts, abusers, wife beaters and misogynists everywhere, he thought all men were secretly just like him, but kept their vices hidden.

Extravagance

30. Nero believed money should be lavished on riotous extravagance. He thought it the mark of a true gentleman to waste and squander. He admired his uncle (his mother Agrippina’s brother, Gaius aka Caligula) because in less than four years he ran through the huge fortune it had taken Tiberius 30 years to amass.

He spent 8,000 gold pieces a day on King Tiridates and on his departure from Rome gave him more than a million. He gave the lyre-player Menecrates and the gladiator Spiculus houses and estates worthy of men who had celebrated triumphs. He was equally generous to the monkey-faced usurer Paneros and later on, had him buried with almost regal splendour.

Nero never wore the same garment twice. He staked 4,000 gold pieces on each throw of the dice. When he went fishing he used a golden net. It was said that he never made a journey with less than a thousand carriages. His mules were shod with silver and their drivers clad in wool from Canusium. He was attended by outriders with jingling bracelets and trappings.

Building works

31. Nero’s wastefulness was most on show in his architectural projects. He built a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called ‘The Passageway’. After it burned down, he had it rebuilt and named it the Golden House.

The entrance hall was large enough to hold a statue of himself 120 feet high. The triple-pillared colonnade ran for a mile. A huge lake was surrounded with buildings designed to represent entire cities and by a landscaped garden containing ploughed fields, vineyards, pastures and woodland, where every type of domestic animal roamed at large.

Parts of the house were inlaid with gold and studded with precious jewels. All the dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory. The panels could be drawn back to rain down dried flowers or perfume. The main banqueting hall was circular and its roof revolved day and night in time with the sky.

When this enormous luxury palace was completed he uttered some immortal words which can go down as the motto for every sybarite and decadent ever since: ‘Good. Now at last I can begin to live like a human being!’

He also began a covered bath, surrounded by colonnades, which stretched from Misenum to Lake Avernus. The plan was to divert all the hot springs in the Baiae region to feed it. Another grand project was to build a ship canal from Avernus all the way to Ostia, 160 miles long and wide enough for two quinqueremes to pass. Prisoners from all over the empire were to be brought in to build it.

He was led on to these wild extravagances by the promises of a Roman knight, who declared that the enormous wealth which queen Dido had taken with her in her flight from Tyre was hidden away in huge caves in Africa and could be easily recovered.

32. When this hope, inevitably, proved false, Nero found himself destitute, discovered that he didn’t even have enough money for the soldiers’ pay or veterans benefits. So he found himself forced to resort to false accusations and robbery. He increased taxes and excises. He seized the estates of anyone rich who died without leaving him enough in their will, and fined lawyers who wrote unsatisfactory wills.

Any man whose words or deeds left him exposed to accusation by an informer was accused of treason. He recalled the lavish gifts he had given to the Greek cities. He decoyed marketeers into buying amethystine or Tyrian dyes (both illegal under the sumptuary laws) then closed them all down and seized their goods. Once he spotted an aristocratic lady wearing this illegal colour at one of his recitals and had her dragged off, stripped off her clothes, but also of her estates.

When he appointed magistrates his instructions were simple: ‘You know my needs; let us leave no-one with any possessions.’ In the end he was forced to strip temples of their gifts and melted down the images of gold and silver, among them the household gods of Rome itself. (Galba, soon afterwards, had them all recast and restored).

Murdering Claudius

33. Claudius himself was the first victim of Nero’s murderous career, for even if Nero wasn’t directly involved in his uncle’s poisoning, he knew all about it, as he later admitted. For he used to mockingly praise mushrooms (the dish by which Claudius was poisoned) as ‘the food of the gods’. After the initial phase of filial duty was over, he took to openly insulting Claudius as stupid and cruel. He joked that he hoped Claudius wasn’t still ‘playing the fool’ in heaven. Nero annulled many of Claudius’s edicts on the ground that he was a doddering old idiot.

Murdering Britannicus

Nero attempted to poison Britannicus for two reasons: a) trivially, he was jealous that Britannicus’s voice was better than his b) he worried that, as he grew up, the people would come to prefer the natural son of Claudius to him, the adoptive one. The Suetonius gives what purports to be a detailed account of how Nero commissioned an arch-poisoner named Locusta to kill his half-brother and, when it didn’t work, flogged her with his own hand. He forced her to devise a stronger and stronger poison, which they tried on a goat – it took 5 hours to work, so he had her reduce it further, and try on a pig, which died on the spot.

That night at dinner Nero administered it to Britannicus who dropped dead at the very first taste. Nero assured the horrified guests that Britannicus was having an epileptic fit but the next day had him hastily buried in a pouring rainstorm, without any ceremony. He rewarded Locusta for her services with a large estates in the country, and actually sent her pupils to study the art of poison.

Murdering Agrippina

34. The over-watchful, over-protective eye that his mother, Agrippina the Younger, shone on Nero eventually proved more than he could bear. At first he tried to intimidate her by threatening to retire to Rhodes (as his grandfather Tiberius had done 60 years earlier). He then deprived her of all honours, even of her Roman and German guard. He forbade her to live with him and drove her from the Palace.

He bribed men to annoy her with lawsuits while she remained in the city, and after she had retired to the country, to pass her house by land and sea and break her rest with abuse and mockery. At last, terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept.

When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat, to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. Then he pretended a reconciliation and invited her in a most cordial letter to come to Baiae and celebrate the feast of Minerva​ with him. He then instructed his captains to wreck the galley in which she had come, by running into it as if by accident. So she had to return to Bauli in the craft he offered her. He saw her off in high spirits, then spent the night anxiously waiting for news.

When he learned that the ship had foundered, alright, but Agrippina had escaped by swimming, he had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman who had brought the news, and ordered that he had made an attempt on his life. The freedman was promptly arrested, tortured, admitted being part of a plot to assassinate the emperor, his mother was part of it, and so she too was executed, giving out that she had tried to assassinate him but then committed suicide when she learned the plan had failed. He is said to have travelled to her house and handled her limp limbs, assessing her looks, between swigs of wine.

However, her memory haunted him and gave him bad dreams. He told confidants that he was hounded by his mother’s ghost and by the whips and blazing torches of the Furies. He even had rites performed by Persian magicians, in an effort to summon her shade and entreat it for forgiveness.

Then he murdered his aunt, Domitia Lepida. He visited her when she was confined to her bed with constipation and ordered her doctors to poison her, seizing her property before she was cold, suppressing her will, that nothing might escape him.

Nero’s wives

35. Besides Octavia Nero later took two wives, Poppaea Sabina, daughter of an ex-quaestor and married to a Roman knight, and then Statilia Messalina. To take Statilia he had to murder her husband Atticus Vestinus while he held the office of consul.

He soon grew tired of living with Octavia. He made several attempts to strangle her, then divorced her on the ground of barrenness. This was unpopular, so then he banished her. And finally he had her put to death on a charge of adultery that was so shameless and unfounded, that even when her slaves were tortured they refused to validate it.

Nero dearly loved Poppaea, whom he married twelve days after his divorce from Octavia, yet he caused her death by kicking her when she was pregnant and ill, because she had scolded him for coming home late from the races.

There is no kind of relation­ship that he did not violate in his career of crime. He put to death Antonia, daughter of Claudius, for refusing to marry him after Poppaea’s death, charging her with an attempt at revolution. He treated in the same way all others who were in any way connected with him by blood or by marriage.

Among these was the young Aulus Plautius, whom he forcibly defiled before his death, saying ‘Let my mother come now and kiss my successor,’ implying that Agrippina had loved Plautius and that this had roused him to hopes of the throne.

Rufrius Crispinus, a mere boy, his stepson and the child of Poppaea, he ordered to be drowned by the child’s own slaves while he was fishing, because it was said that he used to play at being a general and an emperor.

He banished his nurse’s son Tuscus, because when procurator in Egypt, he had bathed in some baths which were built for a visit of Nero’s.

He drove his tutor Seneca to suicide, although when the old man often pleaded to be allowed to retire and offered to give up his estates, Nero had sworn most solemnly that he was wrong to suspect him and that he would rather die than harm him.

He sent poison to Burrus, prefect of the Guard, in place of a throat medicine which he had promised him. The old and wealthy freedmen who had helped him first to his adoption and later to the throne, and aided him by their advice,​ he killed by poison, administered partly in their food and partly in their drink.

36. Two conspiracies against Nero’s life were uncovered. The earlier and more dangerous of these was that of Piso at Rome; the other was set on foot by Vinicius at Beneventum. The conspirators made their defence in fetters, some voluntarily admitting their guilt, some saying they were doing a favour to man so steeped in evil as Nero. The children of those who were condemned were banished or put to death by poison or starvation: a number are known to have been murdered all together at a single meal along with their tutors and attendants.

37. After this Nero showed neither discrimination nor moderation in putting to death whoever he pleased on any pretext whatever. Salvidienus Orfitus was charged with having let to certain states as headquarters three shops which formed part of his house near the Forum; Cassius Longinus, a blind jurist, with retaining in the old family tree of his house the mask of Gaius Cassius, the assassin of Julius Caesar; Paetus Thrasea with having a sullen expression.

To those ordered to die he never granted more than an hour’s respite, and to avoid any delay, he brought physicians who were ordered to ‘attend to’ such as lingered – that was the phrase he used for killing them by opening their veins.

Puffed up by success, Nero boasted that no prince had ever known the power he, Nero, now enjoyed. He broadly hinted that he would not spare the senate, but would one day blot out the whole order from the State and hand over the rule of the provinces and command of the armies to the Roman knights and his freedmen.

He even made vows ‘for himself and the people of Rome’, leaving the senate out of the traditional formula.

The great fire of Rome

38. Displeased with the ugliness of the old buildings and the narrow, crooked streets, he set fire to the city. Some granaries near the Golden House, whose location he desired, were demolished and set on fire. For six days and seven nights destruction raged, while the people were driven for shelter to monuments and tombs.

An immense number of common dwellings, houses of great military leaders along with all their treasures and insignia, along with the temples of the gods, and ancient monuments of historical interest, all went up in flames. Nero watched the fire from the tower of Maecenas​, exulting in ‘the beauty of the flames’ and sang the entire ‘Sack of Ilium’ in his regular stage costume.

He set out to profit from the disaster so, while promising the removal of the debris and dead bodies free of cost, he allowed no one to approach the ruins of their own property so he could loot them. And he demanded such exorbitant contributions from the provinces for the rebuilding that he nearly bankrupted them.

39. Disaster was added to disaster. A plague killed 30,000. In Britain two important towns were sacked and great numbers of citizens and allies were butchered. (The towns were Camulodunum [Meldon] and Verulamium [St. Albans]. According to the historian Xiphilinus, 80,000 perished).

A Roman army was defeated in Armenia and Syria was all but lost.

The Gaulish revolt

40. After the world had put up with such a ruler for nearly fourteen years, it at last cast him off, and the first steps began in Gaul. Gaul at that time was governed by Julius Vindex as propraetor who now rose against the emperor, sending him a series of increasingly abusive messages. When he heard of the Gaul rebellion, at first Nero was delighted, thinking this would give him the opportunity to fleece the rebellious provinces. When it escalated, he did his best to ignore it.

41. At last a series of insulting edicts of Vindex prompted him to address the senate (but only by letter) to avenge him and the state. When more urgent despatches reached Antium Nero finally repaired to the capital. But here he didn’t address either the senate (in the House) or the people (in the Forum) but invited some of the leading men to his house where, after a hasty consultation about Gaul, he spent the rest of the day exhibiting a new type of water-organ.

42. But when news arrived that the Roman governor Galba was leading a revolt in Spain, Nero fainted. When he regained consciousness, Nero abandoned hope, tearing his robe, declaring that it was all over with him. But instead of taking active steps to quell the rebellions he continued his luxurious habits and whenever good news arrived from the provinces, he gave lavish feasts and composed comic songs about the leaders of the revolt.

43. At the start of the revolt Nero made wild and characteristically brutal plans. He planned to depose all army commanders and all provincial governors and have them all executed, then massacre all exiles everywhere and kill all the Gauls then present in Rome.

[What this clearly demonstrates is Nero’s inability to manage the subtlety and detail of individual men with individual grievances. Augustus and Tiberius knew their officials, knew their strengths and weaknesses and allegiances, knew how to manage them, play them off against each other, keep their ambition under control. In fact they knew that that’s what being Roman emperor consisted of – unending man management, of army leaders, provincial governors, and the jockeying factions in the Senate. Caligula and Nero didn’t understand this and had no interest in it. If anyone stood in their way they just had them killed. Which explains Nero’s blunt, sweeping and ineffective response to the revolts.]

Maybe Suetonius exaggerates when he said Nero also considered poisoning the entire senate and setting Rome on fire again. You feel the heavy hand of Flavian propaganda in such tales. Or maybe they were popular rumours. But they testify to Nero’s inability to manage specific rebel leaders and situations with anything approaching subtlety or intelligence.

Instead, Nero dismissed the two consuls and appointed himself sole consul. He left a feast leaning on the shoulders of his comrades, and declaring that all he need do was confront the rebellious army and fall to his knees weeping for them to realise they loved him and asking forgiveness. Next day he would be dancing and singing hymns of praise, so he was just off to compose a few in preparation.

44. In preparing for his campaign Nero was mainly concerned with finding enough wagons to carry all his musical instruments, and arranging for all his concubines to have male haircuts and be issued with Amazonian axes and shields.

He issued a general conscription which was largely ignored so compelled every household to contribute a certain number of slaves and part of their incomes. All tenants of private houses and apartments had to pay a year’s rent to the Treasury.

45. This aroused bad feeling against Nero which was compounded when he profited from the high cost of grain. A rumour went round that while the people were starving a ship had arrived from Alexandria, bringing sand for the court wrestlers. Graffiti, slogans and angry jokes at his expense proliferated.

46. Nero was frightened by bad dreams, auspices and omens. He dreamed:

  • that he was steering a ship in his sleep and that the helm was wrenched from his hands
  • that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into thickest darkness
  • that he was covered with a swarm of winged ants
  • that a Spanish horse he was fond of was changed into an ape
  • that the doors of the Mausoleum (built to house the dead of the royal family) flew open and a voice called him to enter
  • on the Kalends of January the city gods toppled over and in front of the assembled people the keys of the Capitol could not be found

In his last public appearance as a singer he performed ‘Oedipus in Exile’ which ends with the line:

Wife, father, mother drive me to my death.

Seeing as how he had murdered his (adoptive) father, Claudius, his own mother (Agrippina the Younger), had his first wife Octavia murdered then kicked to death Poppaea.

47. When word came that the other armies had revolted, Nero tore up the dispatches, pushed over his table, smashing his favourite ‘Homeric’ cups, ordered some poison from the arch-poisoner Locusta, to keep with him, and went into the Servilian gardens, where he tried to induce the tribunes and centurions of the Guard to accompany him in his flight. They refused.

He considered other plans: to go as a suppliant to the Parthians; or to Galba; or to appear to the people on the rostra, dressed in black, and beg for pardon for his past offences. Maybe they would allow him the prefecture of Egypt. Afterwards a speech composed for this purpose was found in his writing desk, but it is thought that he didn’t dare deliver it for fear of being torn to pieces before he could reach the Forum.

Next morning Nero awoke to discover his guard of soldiers had abandoned him. He sent for his friends but no-one replied. He roamed round the palace but doors were bolted, no-one answered his calls. Back at his rooms he found even the caretakers had absconded, taking his bed linen and the box of poison.

He called for the gladiator Spiculus​ or any other trained executioner to put an end to him, but none came and he ran out as if to throw himself into the Tiber.

48. But Nero abandoned that plan and said he needed to go somewhere quiet to gather his thoughts. His freedman Phaon suggested his villa in the suburbs, just four miles away. So Nero pulled on a faded cloak, covered his head, and set off on horseback accompanied by just four attendants, one of whom was Sporus.

The short journey was eventful, with a mild earthquake and a flash of lightning; then shouting from an army camp in favour of Galba. Then his horse took fright at the smell of a corpse which had been thrown out into the road.

They arrived at Phaon’s villa and made their way through brambles to the back door. Nero scooped water from a pool, quipping that this was ‘Nero’s own special brew.’ Once inside the villa he sank down on a couch with a common mattress, over which an old cloak had been thrown. Though suffering from hunger and renewed thirst, he refused some coarse bread which was offered him, but drank a little lukewarm water.

49. At last, as it became clear his enemies were closing in, Nero bad his servants dig a grave and assemble wood for a pyre. As he watched this being done he wept and said again and again: ‘What an artist the world is losing!’

Then a runner brought a letter from Phaon announcing that he had been declared a public enemy by the senate and that, when caught, he would be punished ‘in the ancient style’. When he asked what that meant, his servants told him it meant the criminal was stripped, fastened by the neck in a fork​ and then beaten to death with rods.

Terrified, Nero seized two daggers but couldn’t bring himself to use them. He ordered one of his slaves to set an example by killing himself, but none of them would. He reproached himself for his cowardice, lamenting that this sordid end didn’t become the great artist Nero at all.

Then they heard a troop of cavalry approaching up the road to arrest him and, with the help of his private secretary, Epaphroditus, he stabbed himself in the throat. He was all but dead when a centurion rushed in. As this centurion placed a cloak to the wound, Nero gasped: ‘Tool ate! But what loyalty!’ Then he died.

Burial

50. Nero was buried at a cost of 200,000 sesterces and laid out in white robes embroidered with gold, which he had worn on the Kalends of January. His ashes were deposited by his nurses, Egloge and Alexandria, accompanied by his mistress Acte, in the family tomb of the Domitii on the summit of the Hill of Gardens.

51. Nero was about average height, his body was marked with pimples and smelt bad. His hair was light blond, his features regular rather than attractive, his eyes blue and somewhat weak. His neck was thick and squat, his belly prominent and his legs very slender.

His health was good. For all his riotous excess he was only ill three times during the fourteen years of his reign, and even then not enough to give up wine or any of his usual habits.

He was utterly shameless in the care of his person and in his dress, always having his hair arranged in tiers of curls, and during the trip to Greece let it grow long and hang down behind.

He often gave audiences in an unbelted silk dressing gown and slippers.

52. When a boy he studied the usual liberal arts except philosophy which his mother Agrippina told him was no subject for a future ruler.

His tutor Seneca kept him from reading the early orators in order to make himself appear better to the boy, so Nero turned to poetry. He wrote poetry easily, with great facility. Some people claimed that he passed off other writer’s work as his own but “notebooks and papers have come into my possession which contain some of Nero’s best-known poems in his own handwriting. Many erasures and cancellations as well as words substituted above the lines, prove that he was neither copying nor dictating but are written just as people write when they are thinking and composing.”

[a) what an extraordinary thought, that Suetonius had before him on the table the actual notebooks of Nero; b) Have any of Nero’s poems survived?]

Nero also took more than an amateur’s interest in painting and sculpture.

53. But Nero’s dominant characteristic was his thirst for popularity and his jealousy of anyone who caught the public eye for any achievement whatsoever. Not content with singing, playing the lyre and chariot racing, he studied and practised wrestling constantly, watching contests from right next to the ring.

It is said that he planned to emulate the exploits of Hercules and had had a lion specially trained so he could safely face it naked in the amphitheatre and, in front of the whole population of Rome, kill it with a club or even strangle it with his bare hands.

54. Towards the end of his reign Nero publicly vowed that if he retained his power, he would celebrate his victory by giving a performance on the water-organ, the flute, and the bagpipes, and that on the last day he would appear as an actor and dance ‘Vergil’s Turnus’. Some claim he had the actor Paris put to death because he saw him as a dangerous rival.

55. Nero’s obsession with immortality and undying fame made him name many places and things after himself: he renamed the month of April Neroneus and was tempted to rename Rome Neropolis.

56. Nero despised all cults except that of the Syrian goddess Atagarsis but he eventually changed his mind even about her and urinated on her image. He came instead to have a superstitious belief which he kept to the end: for an unknown commoner sent him the gift of a little image of a girl as a protection against plots. As it happened a plot was revealed immediately afterwards so Nero took to worshipping this little image as if she were a powerful goddess and sacrificed to her three times a day.

57. Nero died at the age of 31, on the anniversary of the murder of Octavia. Such was the public rejoicing that the public ran through the streets wearing liberty caps​ and cheering. Yet for a long time afterwards, some secret admirers garlanded his tomb with spring and summer flowers and had statues made of him which they placed on the rostra wearing his characteristic fringed toga.

Vologaesus, king of the Parthians, when he sent envoys to the senate to renew his alliance, asked that honour be paid to the memory of Nero. In fact, Suetonius tells us that 20 years later, when he was a young man, a person of obscure origin appeared in Parthia claiming to be Nero and such was the power of his name to Parthian ears that they supported him vigorously and surrendered him to the Romans only with great reluctance.

Credit

Robert Graves’s translation of The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius was published by Penguin in 1957. A revised translation by Classicist Michael Grant, more faithful to the Latin original, was published in 1979. A further revised edition was published in 1989 with an updated bibliography.

Related links

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Roman reviews

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Posted by Simon on December 12, 2022

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The Aeneid by Virgil – books 4 to 6

‘[This is] Trojan Aeneas, famous for his devotion and his feats of arms.’
(The Sibyl defending Aeneas to Charon in Aeneid book 6, line 404)

Book 4 Dido, love and death

Dido admits to her sister, Anna, that she is falling in love with Aeneas. Anna says she has held aloof from suitors from all the neighbouring tribes, but yes, she needs to let go of her dead husband and fall in love. Encouraged by this, Dido falls madly in love. Virgil – in his Epicurean, anti-emotion way – describes it as a madness, a fever, a fire in the bones, and other alarming analogies.

Remember that in the third Georgic Virgil wrote an extended denunciation of love and sex and passion in all its forms, whether in animals or humans, as a fire and frenzy which completely derails efforts to live rationally and orderly:

Man and beast, each and every race of earth,
creatures of the sea, domesticated animals, and birds in all their finery,
all of them rush headlong into its raging fury; love’s the same for one and all.
(Georgic 3: lines 242 to 244, translated by Peter Fallon)

Venus meets with Juno. Juno suggests they let Aeneas and Dido marry, thus uniting exiled Tyrians and Trojans into a super-tribe. Venus interprets this as a transparent attempt to stop Aeneas continuing on to Italy and founding the Roman people who will, centuries hence, crush Dido’s heirs. She agrees in principle but diplomatically suggests Juno asks her husband, Jupiter, king of the gods, what he thinks. Juno outlines her plans to interrupt Dido and Aeneas’s next hunting trip, conjure up a storm, separate the lovers from their entourages, drive them into a cave and there have them consummate their love.

And this is what happens, with fire flashing and nymphs wailing from the mountaintops. For centuries of readers their love has been reinterpreted in the light of the medieval concept of courtly love and the sentimental romantic ideas which followed. But Virgil is harshly critical. Not only does this mark the beginning of the end for Dido:

This day was the beginning of her death, the first cause of all her sufferings. (4. 170)

But it had a ruinous effect on her people. When she slackened her leadership, they stopped building the city. The towers ceased to rise. The harbours and fortifications were left half-finished. All stood idle.

Virgil spends a page describing the genealogy and character of Rumour which runs fleet of foot among all men and communities spreading lies and when he describes Rumour as telling foreign rulers that Dido and Aeneas have ceased leading their people in order to wallow in lust…I immediately realise Virgil has made them Antony and Cleopatra, ‘lovers who had lost all recollection of their good name’ (4.221) which makes Creusa the emblem of Octavia, Antony’s loyal dutiful Roman wife, abandoned for an oriental whore.

The local king, Iarbas, had long harboured plans of marrying Dido so now he is infuriated that she abruptly abandoned herself to another. He offers up heartfelt angry complaints to his father, Jupiter.

Jupiter hears and is angry that Aeneas is shirking his duty. He calls Mercury and tells him to deliver an angry message to the Trojan. Is this the hero Venus promised them? Hardly. ‘He must sail. That is all there is to say.’

Mercury puts on his winged sandals, takes his caduceus and skims down through the skies to alight by Aeneas, busy helping build a temple. Mercury gets straight to it, telling Aeneas he is a disgrace by abandoning his destiny and to think about his little son who is meant to inherit leadership of a brave new race: ‘You owe him the land of Rome and the kingdom of Italy.’ (4.286)

So Aeneas immediately calls his lieutenants to him and tells them to ready the ships and the people for departure. Dido obviously hears about this and comes raging to see him, eyes blazing with anger. he tries to justify himself, but furious Dido dismisses all his excuses, calls him a traitor, mocks his stories about Jupiter this and Mercury that, then dismisses him, tells him to leave, but warns that her furious ghost will return to haunt him. (Lots of ghosts, a poem of ghosts, bringing with them the sad wisdom of the dead.)

Dido runs off into her palace, collapsing with despair. Virgil points the moral: See? This is where ‘love’ gets you:

Love is a cruel master. There are no lengths to which it does not force the human heart. (4.413)

But Aeneas, unlike Antony, is faithful to his duty (4.394) and continues preparations for departure. Dido pours her heart out to her sister, Anna, and sends her again and again with heartfelt pleas for pity or at least a delay – but the Fates forbade it and God blocked his ears to all appeals.

‘Possessed by madness’, Dido perceives all kinds of portents. Her sacrificial offerings turn black and bloody, She hears muttering at the shrine of her dead husband. She has nightmares in which she is abandoned on the African shore alone. Madness is the key word, repeated again and again.

She instructs her sister to build a big funeral pyre in the atrium of the palace where she says she will burn all Aeneas’s belongings. She attends ceremonies supervised by a terrifying priestess from Ethiopia who chants incantations to all the deities of hell.

Like all suicides Dido can’t see a way out: if she goes with Aeneas and the Trojans she will be their chattel; if she tries to persuade the entire Tyrian people to follow her they will refuse; if she stays behind she will be the laughing stock of all the tribes around who she used to treat so haughtily and will now see her humbled. No. She must die. [Virgil dramatises the logic of her thinking all too vividly.] And she reproaches herself for ever abandoning her independent single status as a widow.

Aeneas is asleep in the stern of a ship but he has a terrifying dream vision of ‘the god’ who warns him not to wait, but to leave now before morning comes and Dido comes to talk him out of leaving or to burn his ships. He wakes and wakes his men, they weight anchor and depart.

Dido waking with the dawn sees the sea covered with their ships and the harbour empty and delivers a magnificent harangue cursing Aeneas mightily and ends with an actual curse, invoking all the gods to ensure Aeneas in his new homeland never enjoys it, but is harried by a strong race, and driven from his own land, and beg for help and see his people dying. Let him die before his time and lie unburied on the sand. And may undying enmity be between her people and his (obviously referring to the legendary enmity which grew up between Rome and Carthage in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC).

Then she climbs onto the pyre she has prepared, delivers another magnificent speech about her destiny and her good intentions and plunges upon Aeneas’s sword and her blood foams out. Her serving women see and a great wailing spreads across the city as if the enemy were within and destroying everything (exactly as they had at Troy: repetitions and echoes).

Her sister Anna comes running, cursing herself for not realising this is what her sister really wanted the pyre built for and recriminating Dido for not waiting or sharing her death. She climbs atop the pyre and holds her sister as three times she tries to rise on her elbow but collapses and then expires.

Thus Dido died ‘in a sudden blaze of madness’ and Juno took pity and sent Iris down to loosen the binding of her soul. And so Iris descends as a rainbow through the sky and alights on the pyre and cuts a lock of Dido’s hair and thus releases her soul from its anguish.

God, surely this is the most magnificent and moving book ever written! It is breathtakingly powerful, cuts deep, and yet is short, just 23 pages in the Penguin edition, with not an ounce of fat, nothing verbose or long-winded or tiresome, but fast-moving, alert and to the point, fiercely and deeply imagined, and transcendently moving!

Book 5 Funeral games

Another storm hits, forcing them ashore back in Sicily, in the port run by his brother Eryx, where the bones of his father Anchises are buried. They are greeted by Acestes, half Trojan. The months pass until it is a full year since Anchises died and was buried. Aeneas leads sacrifices and ceremonies at his tomb.

Then he holds grand funeral games. First a boat race across the sea to a prominent rock and back. Then a running race. Then boxing matches. All are described in loving (and surprisingly exciting) detail. An arrow shooting competition and then equipage, horse management by the young contemporaries of Ascanius. They young cavalry perform a mock battle. Virgil explains how Ascanius will pass this on to his descendants and eventually it will be performed in Rome by youthful cavalry and called the lusus Troiae.

For the first time Virgil associates specific companions of Aeneas with the patrician Roman families they will establish (Mnestheus giving his name to the Memmii family, Sergestus the Sergii, Cloanthus the Cluentii [5.120], Atys founder of the Atii [5.569]).

The games are then officially ended but meanwhile the wretched women of Troy, fed up with seven years wandering over the endless ocean, rebel. Juno, font of endless schemes against Aeneas, sends Iris in disguise of one of their number to rouse them to indignation and insist that they sail no further but settle here on Sicily. Possessed by divine fury, they seize brands from the various altars and throw them into the Trojan ships.

The men quickly drop their games and rush to the beach just as the goddess leaves the women’s minds and, coming to their senses, the realise what they’ve done and run off into the woods and hills. Aeneas stares at his burning fleet and calls on Jupiter to save what little remains – at which there is a sudden torrential downpour. Most of the ships are saved but four are write-offs.

Aeneas is downhearted. But old Nautes gives good advice: he says Aeneas and the young and fit must continue on to Italy; but leave here on Sicily the old men, the women worn out by the sea, the ‘heart-weary’. Let them build a city and call it Acesta.

Still, Aeneas is worried and careworn when the ghost of his father slides down through the dark. He reinforces Nautes’ advice to leave the old and sick here on Sicily and only take the young and strong with him to Italy for there, as he has been told quite a few times by now, he will have to overcome ‘a wild and strong people’.

But Anchises tells him something new. First he will have to go down into Dis, the underworld, to meet his spirit there. He will be helped through the doorway to hell by a Sibyll. There he will learn about all the descendants who are to follow him. Then, like so many of his visions, he disappears into thin air like smoke.

Aeneas, as is his wont, goes straight into action (as he did after the god told him to leave Carthage immediately). For nine days he helps the people they’re leaving behind lay out the boundaries of the new city, build a forum, ordain laws and erect a temple to Venus, building a mini-Troy.

Then they say their farewells, make the sacrifices and oblations, and set sail, with a fair wind and rowing. Cut to Venus visiting Neptune god of the sea and bewailing Juno’s unending spite against the Trojans and beseeching Neptune to take pity on them. Neptune reminds her how he protected Aeneas when Achilles was running mad in front of Troy, and promises fair seas.

All the mortals see is the appearance of a clear sky and fair winds and they set sail for Italy with good heart. Thus Virgil shows us, behind every physical event, especially large scale ones like the weather, storms, shooting stars, erupting volcanoes and so on, the direct involvement of the gods. The gods are the environment through which mortals walk, purblind and ignorant.

And Palinurus, the loyal helmsman who has always given the best advice – the god of sleep wafts down from heaven, taps him on the temples with a stick dripping with water from the rivers Lethe and the Styx (rivers of the underworld), Palinurus is plunged into a deep sleep and the god of sleep chucks him overboard where he drowns down down down into the blue ocean.

Noticing something wrong, Aeneas goes astern and discovers his top helmsman has fall overboard, and blames him for trusting to a calm sea. But, as we know, it is not his fault. Like all mortals, there is nothing he can do to resist the whims of the gods.

Half way through the book I am noticing:

  • how many visions, ghosts, dream visitations, spectral appearances and just as sudden disappearances there are
  • by extension, the way there are few if any conversations, but rather great block chunks of speeches
  • the enormous amount of sacrifices – so many bullocks slaughtered, so many entrails, so much steaming gore

Book 6 The underworld

They make land at Cumae (according to Wikipedia ‘the first ancient Greek colony on the mainland of Italy, founded by settlers from Euboea in the 8th century BC and soon becoming one of the strongest colonies.’) Aeneas makes to the citadel with its huge temple of Apollo, and a vast cave, retreat of ‘the awesome Sibyl’. On the doors of the temple are depicted scenes from legend including the story of the Minotaur. For legend has it that this is where Daedalus touched down after making wings for himself to escape from captivity in Crete.

The daughter of the high priest tells them to make animal sacrifices then come with her. She is suddenly possessed by the go and tells Aeneas to pray. Aeneas delivers a page-long supplication to the god Apollo to have mercy on his people.

The priestess fights against the god but finally he possesses her and delivers his prophecy to Aeneas. They have finished their travels by sea. But what awaits them by land will be worse.

I see wars, deadly wars, I see the Thybris foaming with torrents of blood. (6.86)

Immigration

This line was notoriously quoted out of context by the British politician Enoch Powell in his virulently anti-immigration speech of April 1968. Reading it here, I realise there’s a political irony here, because this speech, about bloodshed, isn’t addressed to the native people, warning them against immigrants – Aeneas is the immigrant. He is the one arriving in a strange land and it is his god-inspired conviction that he’s owed a living and a future here which brings bloodshed and war.

Women’s wombs

Anyway, the god goes on to predict he must face ‘a second Achilles’. More interestingly, he warns that ‘Once again the cause of all this Trojan suffering will be a foreign bride’ – just as the entire Trojan war was fought over Helen (and just as the action of the Iliad is triggered by a squabble between Agamemnon and Achilles about who should be assigned a slave girl they captured at a raid on an outlying temple). The rightful ownership of women, and their reproductive capacity, is the core cause of these wars between violent men. Next to ownership of the land and its food-producing capacity, comes ownership of women and their baby-producing capacity. It is as primitive as that.

Madness

The visionary state in which the priestess speaks Apollo’s words is described as ‘madness’. Did Virgil use the same word for this as for the ‘madness’ of Dido? In which case it weakens the rhetoric of his argument against love and passion. If so, is it the same word he used for the ‘madness’ of the Trojan women who set fire to the ships in Sicily (5.660, 670)? In which case, is he making the point that a certain kind of madness is restricted to, or characteristic of, women?

Aeneas begs the Sibyl to allow him to go down into hell to see his father. The Sibyl warns the way down is easy, it’s the coming back that’s difficult. When the Sibyl warns that undertaking such a journey is ‘the labour of madness‘ I begin to see frenzy, insanity and madness as being a recurring theme or motif of the poem.

The Sibyl tells him a) there is a dead man lying unburied which is polluting the fleet; he must find and bury him and perform the rituals b) there is a tree in a dark grove which bears a golden bough; he must pluck it and carry it down to hell to please Queen Proserpina; but only the favoured of the gods can find it or pluck it.

Aeneas leaves, accompanied by his faithful friend Achates, and on the shore above the tideline they discover the body of Misenus. He had engaged in a horn blowing competition with a Triton who drowned him. So the Trojans chop down a load of trees (whose species Virgil carefully lists) to build a shrine and altar. While doing so Aeneas prays for help in finding the grove of the golden bough and his mother Venus sends two white doves who lead him to the tree.

He plucks the golden bough, presents it to the Sibyl, who insists on numerous more rites and sacrifices and then leads him down into hell, taking him past a checklist of the florid monsters who guard the gates, centaurs, scyllas, chimera, gorgons, harpies and so on.

Dante

I can see why Virgil was such a model for Dante in terms of format. Aeneas spots individuals among the various crowds (such as the crowd waiting to be ferried by Charon across the Styx), asks them a question, and the other briefly tells his story, explaining why he’s ended up here. This is more or less the recurring format for the entire Divine Comedy.

So Aeneas sees Palinurus, quizzes him, and Palinurus tells him his sad fate – he was not drowned after all, but swam to shore where he was murdered by ruffians. He begs to be allowed to cross the river; the sibyl says this is not possible till his body is given a decent burial; the sibyl reassures him that the people who live near his corpse will be driven by signs from heaven to find it and give it a decent burial

This entire story of Palinurus seems designed to evoke a sweet sadness, as we observe his grief, his regrets, Aeneas’s grief for him, their manly love for each other – commander and staunch helmsman – who met a cruel fate through no fault of his own. The Palinurus story encapsulates Virgil’s pity for suffering humanity. Seeing the great tide of woeful humanity waiting on the river bank, ‘the helpless souls of the unburied’, Aeneas ‘pitied their cruel fate.’

The hell sequence is packed with mythological details (three-headed Cerberus etc), but it is the human moments which strike home, not least his encounter with the shade of Dido. Till this moment he wasn’t sure what became of her but now he realises the rumours were true and she killed herself. He fulsomely apologises, saying he was driven on by the command of the gods, but she won’t even look at him, stands silent, then wafts away to be with her first, murdered, husband, grief speaking to grief.

In Wilfred Owen’s famous preface to his war poems he said ‘the poetry is in the pity’. Well, there is poetry in every aspect of this magnificent poem, but the consistent underlying tone of the Aeneid is heartfelt pity at the sad and tragic plight of humanity.

There is an awesome description of their walk through hell while the aged priestess of Apollo explains the variety and ingenuity of the punishments for all who have broken the laws of gods and men, including the shades of all the Greeks and the Trojans who fought and died during the recent war. Then they come to the home of the blessed: here there is singing and games, poets, leading up to the great Musaeus, who tells Aeneas where to find his father.

Aeneas is reunited with the spirit of his father. He goes to embrace him three times (the rule of three; just as Aeneas tried to embrace the ghost of Creusa three times, 2.792) but, like Creusa, Anchises is soft as the wind (6.700). But he can speak. He is delighted to see his son and then explains how some souls in the afterlife are purged of their earthly memories and returned to the primeval fire which first began the universe; but others buzz round Elysium for a thousand years and then are sent back to inhabit new bodies on earth. In other words, reincarnation.

He leads Aeneas and the Sibyl to a slight mound in the plain and predicts the long line of Aeneas’s descendants who will make Rome and Italy great. Reincarnation seems very unGreek but then, if his prime aim was to have scene where Aeneas is shown all his descendants, it’s hard to see how else this could have been achieved. The souls of famous men had to be available before they were born in order for Aeneas to review them. The more you think about it, the weirder it becomes.

Anchises points out Aeneas’s descendants starting with his posthumous son, Silvius who will be followed by Procas, Capys, Numitor, Silvius Aeneas, founders of Alba Longa and other settlements. Then Romulus founder of Rome ‘whose empire shall cover the earth’.

Then Anchises turns to the Caesar, mentioning Julius Caesar (remote descendant of Iulus, or Ascanius, Aeneas’s son). Then follows the famous hymn to Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who will bring back the golden years of the age of Saturn, who will extend the borders of the empire to the edge of the known world, who will achieve more than Hercules or Bacchus. Is that enough brown-nosing?

Rather anachronistically, Anchises goes back to recount the line of kings who ruled Rome, before switching to heroes of the early Republic, the Brutus who drove out the Tarquins, others who invented the consulship, Cato the Elder, the Gracchi, the two Scipios, Fabius Maximus, great figures from Roman history. And then some sternly patriotic rhetoric:

Your task, Romans, and do not forget it, will be to govern the peoples of the world in your empire. These will be your arts – and to impose a settled pattern upon peace, to pardon the defeated and war down the proud. (6.851)

Then Anchises delivers a page-long lament for a young man they see accompanying Marcellus on his triumph. This is Marcus Claudius Marcellus (42 to 23 BC), nephew of Augustus and his closest male relative, who enjoyed an accelerated political career and was married to Augustus’s daughter, Julia. But he died of an infection which swept through Italy (Augustus got it but recovered) dashing Augustus’s hopes of making him his heir. So it seems likely that this extended passage in praise of young Marcellus was written just after his death in 23 BC, in order to please Virgil’s patron, the great Augustus.

David West, the translator of the Penguin Classics edition of the Aeneid, devotes a 3-page appendix to this section, the procession of Roman heroes, giving brief descriptions of all the eminent Romans who feature in it. He mentions the story, recorded in a near-contemporary biography of Virgil, that when he was reading his poem to Augustus and his family, his sister – Octavia (mother of Marcellus) – fainted at this passage. It’s worth repeating this anecdote to emphasise just how direct and personal Augustus’s relationship with Virgil was, and therefore, by extension, with much of the content of the poem.

After the long passage of praise for Marcellus the last few sentences of the book are an anti-climax. Virgil tells us that Anchises told Aeneas about the entire future course of events, his war against the Laurentines, how he should maximise his fate.

Aeneas’s return through hell, crossing back over the Styx, climbing back up to the entrance to the great cavern – all this isn’t even described. Instead all we get is a short, abrupt sentence saying that Aeneas made his way back to his ships and his comrades, then steered a straight course to the harbour of Caieta, where they dropped anchor.

It’s an oddly abrupt ending to one of the most magnificent and influential books of poetry ever written.

Epithets of Aeneas

I’ve slowly been realising that, as the poem progresses, Aeneas comes to be accompanied by more and more adjectives. I mean that, in the early books, he is mostly plain ‘Aeneas’. But it’s noticeable that, certainly by book 6, his name rarely occurs without being accompanied by an adjective indicating his greatness. By this sly method, Virgil implies the way Aeneas grows in stature, experience and leadership as the adventures continue. I’d noticed the same happening to Anchises who, in the earlier books, comes to be referred to more and more frequently as Father Anchises. When he dies the title passes quietly to Aeneas, Father Aeneas, sometimes referred to as ‘the son of Anchises’, and then the epithets begin to occur more frequently:

  • the leader of the Trojans (4.165)
  • the son of Anchises (5.424)
  • the great-hearted son of Anchises
  • Father Aeneas (5.461)
  • dutiful Aeneas (6.233)
  • devout Aeneas (5.685, 12.175)
  • the hero Aeneas (6.103)
  • huge Aeneas (6.413)
  • great glory of our Troy (6.547)
  • Aeneas, greatest of warriors (9.41)
  • great Aeneas (10.159)

Roman reviews

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by Simon on August 31, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 31, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/08/31/the-aeneid-virgil-books-4-to-6/

The Aeneid by Virgil – books 1 to 3

I am Aeneas, known for my devotion. (Aeneid book 1, line 378)

I own three translations of the Aeneid:

  • the 1956 Penguin Classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
  • the 1971 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
  • the 1991 Penguin Classics prose translation by David West

I read most of the Aeneid in the West prose translation. It seemed easy and modern. I dipped into the Mandelbaum but was put off by his tone, too hectically American, maybe because I read it at the height of the heatwave when everything felt a bit hysterical. But I did use Mandelbaum’s comprehensive Glossary of Names and Places. The West edition doesn’t have a glossary or any notes at all. The idea is for you to rely entirely on the information Virgil gives in the poem itself which, it turns out, is all you need, most of the time.

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, generally referred to as Virgil (70 to 19 BC) was the great Roman poet who straddled the epochal transition from the Roman Republic to the early Roman Empire. There were other very important figures, such as Catullus from the generation before (b.84), Virgil’s younger contemporary, Horace (b.63 BC), and, a generation younger, the great poet of mythology, Ovid (b.43). But Virgil towers above them all.

Virgil was born near the northern city of Mantua to parents who owned farmland. He was sent to Rome to complete his education where he probably met the young Augustus (63 BC to 14 AD) and his friends, namely his future patron and Augustus’s ‘minister of culture’, Maecenas (68 to 8 BC).

Always a sickly, sensitive young man, Virgil left Rome and settled near Naples where he spent the rest of his life quietly studying and writing poetry.

Virgil left no juvenilia or collections of random poems. He wrote just three works, each of them masterpieces:

  • the ten very short and highly stylised poems of idealised country life featuring lovelorn shepherds, the Eclogues
  • the four longer, tougher-minded, sometimes lyrical, sometimes practical, sometimes sweepingly destructive Georgics, are, on paper, poems of advice to farmers and livestock owners, but in reality a lot more varied and complex than that
  • the long epic poem the Aeneid, which has a claim to being the most important and most influential poem ever written in Europe

Epic poem

An epic poem is a long poem with a historical or legendary setting, which usually tells the adventures of one or more heroes on an epic journey or pitched into a mighty struggle, all with the input of gods and goddesses. Many societies and cultures have produced epic poems.

Sometimes an epic poem has as part of its purpose to explain the origin of cities or races or gods and religions. (The Greeks had a word for such an origin story, an aition.) Always epics are characterised by long narratives with multiple incidents or episodes strung along the central plot.

In the 1940s C.S. Lewis proposed an elemental distinction between primary and secondary epic. Primary epic is produced in illiterate cultures, often by travelling poets or troubadors, often using familiar narratives, well-known characters and using time-honoured, stock descriptions. The process by which they’re written down is obscure but by the time they are recorded they already display very sophisticated techniques of oral storytelling. In our European tradition, the two Greek epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey show these characteristics. They are attributed to a figure called ‘Homer’ but it’s not certain that anyone named Homer ever existed.

By complete contrast, secondary epic is the production of a literate culture. It is the product of known authors, was written at a known time and place. It self-consciously invokes many of the tropes and techniques of primary epic, such as well-known legends and legendary characters, famous episodes or adventures, extended similes, stock descriptive phrases, episodic structure and so on. Virgil’s Aeneid has a good claim to be the greatest secondary epic.

A poem of multiple levels

The Aeneid is a carefully wrought collation of numerous themes on multiple levels.

Adventure story

In terms of storyline or plot it tells the story of Aeneas, a prince of Troy – a story familiar to all educated Romans of Virgil’s day – who escapes the destruction of the city at the climax of the ten-year-long siege by the Greeks, and describes the wanderings of him and 20 shiploads of comrades as they sail west across the Mediterranean looking for a new home.

Foundation story

Why bother with this story? Because the Romans believed that their city ultimately owed its founding to prince Aeneas. The traditional view (which is recapped in book 1) goes that Aeneas underwent numerous florid adventures as he sailed west from Troy before finally making landfall in western Italy. After fighting off the local tribes he establishes a settlement at a place he calls Lavinium.

His son, Ascanius, also known as Iulus, will move their settlement to a place named Alba Longa, where his descendants will live for 300 years. Then Ilia, the royal priestess of Vesta, will be seduced and impregnated by the god Mars and give birth to twins, Romulus and Remus. Romulus will grow up to build a new settlement, named Rome after him, which will go on to rule the world.

Patriotic story

So on one level the poem is an ultra-patriotic dramatisation of the man who founds the settlement which was to form the basis of Rome. Aeneas is shown as an epitome of the Roman virtues, a man who puts duty to family and country before self.

Pleasing Augustus

Throughout the narrative Virgil goes out of his way to suck up to the current ruler of Rome, the princeps Gaius Octavianus who was awarded the title Augustus while he was composing the work. Gaius Octavianus had been adopted by Julius Caesar in his will and so took his name, becoming Gaius Julius Caesar.

Virgil is at pains to demonstrate the extreme antiquity of the family of ‘Julii’ of which Octavianus had become a member, and so goes out of his way to tell us, repeatedly, that Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, had this second name Iulus (this name had been Ilus while Troy, which was also called Ilium, had stood). Ilus – Iulus – Iulius. The aim was to create a direct link from Aeneas via Ilus-Iulius to the house of Julius Caesar, and so to the current emperor, Gaius Julius Caesar aka Augustus.

Those are the public and political aims of the poem. Two additional factors make it a masterpiece.

Adapting Homer

One is the tremendous skill with which Virgil closely models himself on the two outstanding epics of his tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, adopting the tone of voice, the capacious bird’s-eye-view of the narrator, the confident intertwining of the human level with the character of the immortal gods who play a crucial role in the plot, either supporting or scheming against Aeneas. It is a very sophisticated invocation and twining together of the epic tradition up to his time.

Virgil’s sensibility

But more important is Virgil’s sensitivity. Homer’s heroes are killing machines. They may be sad and burst into tears, but only when there is good justification (weeping over the dead) and most of the time they are just angry and keying themselves up for yet another fight.

By contrast, the Aeneid is soulful. The narrator and his hero are sensitive to ‘the tears of things’, to the tragic inevitability of the universe. Aeneas does his duty, but with a heavy heart at the suffering he has seen and the new suffering he causes. It is an epic poem with lyrical feeling.

Book 1 Storm and banquet

In the best tradition, the poem starts in media res meaning ‘in the middle of things’. We find our hero aboard ship, having set sail from Sicily towards the cost of Italy but caught up in a violent storm. His fleet is dispersed and at least one ship sinks.

In fact the read of the poem is informed that this storm has been whipped up by Juno queen of the gods. She hates Aeneas and is his steady foe. She cannot forgive the Trojans for the snub when Paris awarded the apple of beauty to Venus. This long-standing grudge is why we see her visit the home of Aeolus, gods of the winds, and ask him to whip up a storm to shipwreck Aeneas, which he promptly does.

But we also see Venus, Aeneas’s mother, who was impregnated by Aeneas’s father Anchises, rushing to confront Jupiter, king of the gods, and tearfully ask how he can let his wife massacre her son and his colleagues. Jupiter calmly tells her to dry her eyes, he has no intention of letting Aeneas drown, and it is now that he reveals what the fates have in store for the Trojan prince (as I outlined above).

And as he speaks he gets his brother Neptune, king of the seas, to abate the storm, and gently blow the remainder of Aeneas’s fleet towards the coast of north Africa, referred to here as Libya. Here the Trojans gratefully anchor, come ashore, dry off, go hunting, shoot some deer, build fires, eat and drink wine and recover their strength.

And here Aeneas is visited by his mother in the guise of a local woman who assures him all will be well and tells him about the nearby town of Carthage, just now being built by exiles from Tyre. Venus-in-disguise tells the rather complicated backstory of this people. Tyre is a rich city on the coast of Phoenicia (what is now Israel) ruled by king Pygmalion. He has a sister, princess Dido. Dido marries a rich man Sychaeus. But Pygmalion is jealous of Sychaeus’s wealth and murders him while he worships at an altar. For a while no-one knows who committed the crime and Pygmalion hypocritically comforts his sister.

But then the ghost of Sychaeus appears to Dido, reveals the truth, warns her to flee her brother, and shows her the burial place of a huge secret treasure. She gathers her friends and supporters and the many people opposed to the ‘tyrant’ Pygmalion, they dig up the treasure, load it onto some ships and sail away forever.

Now she and her people have arrived at the other end of the Mediterranean, made land, settled and Aeneas and his crew have arrived just as the Tyrians are laying out and building a new ‘city’, a city the narrative refers to as Carthage.

You don’t need to be a literary critic to spot that both Aeneas and Dido are in similar plight, both refugees from distant lands in the eastern Mediterranean, forced by tragic events to flee their home cities, and now trying to build new lives, and new cities, in the west.

All this is explained to him by Aeneas’s mother, Venus who, having intervened to save Aeneas from the storm, now appears to him in the guise of a local maiden. She has wrapped Aeneas in a magic cloud so he and his companion can walk up to the new city walls and watch the Tyrians building Carthage.

Then she disappears the cloud and Aeneas is welcomed by the Tyrians. Their queen, Dido, welcomes Aeneas and his men to a lavish feast. Venus waylays Aeneas’s son as he comes from the beach where they’ve all landed towards the city, makes him fall asleep in a copse of trees. And gets her other son, the god Eros, to take on Ascanius’s form, and be introduced to Queen Dido, and sit on her lap during the feast (!) and deliberately make her fall in love with Aeneas. Because we all know how this love affair will end Virgil describes her as poor Dido and ‘doomed’ Dido.

Homer is always full of a kind of metallic energy. Even when his heroes weep, they do so in a virile, manly way. But in his treatment of Dido Virgil displays a completely different sensibility, sympathetic and sad.

Back at the feast, Dido asks Aeneas to tell them about his adventures. He has already told them he has been wandering for seven years since the fall of Troy. Reluctantly, Aeneas agrees.

Book 2 The fall of Troy

Aeneas’s story. He cuts straight to the final days of the 10-year-long siege as the Greeks cut down mighty trees to make the enormous wooden horse. Then strike camp and sail away leaving it alone on the plain in front of Troy. The Trojans come out to admire it. The priest Laocoön warns them all that it is a Greek scam but at that point a Trojan patrol returns with a Greek captive. He tells them he’s called Sinon and, after incurring the enmity of the mighty Odysseus (here called Ulixes) he was chosen to be the human sacrifice the Greek fleet needed to set sail (just as it had required the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia in order to set sail from Greece, 10 long years ago).

Sinon tells them he managed to escape the night before he was due to be killed and has hidden. Now they can kill him or spare him as they please. But he is a plant left by the Greeks to give a false explanation of the horse. He says it is a peace offering to the gods to let the fleet sail. More precisely, it is atonement for the incident when Ulixes and Diomede stole the Palladium from the temple of Pallas Athene in the citadel of Troy. Since then she has persecuted them and their chief priest, Calchas, ordered them a) to return to Greece to worship the gods, atone for their sins, rearm and return to renew the siege, and b) to build this enormous horse as a peace offering to Athena. Sinon warns that if the Trojans damage it at all it will bring down the wrath of Athena on them. If, on the other hand, they take it into the city and venerate it, then Athena will bless them and, when the Greeks return, allies from all across Asia will rally to their cause and they will defeat the Greeks in a final battle.

The Trojans are still hesitating when an amazing thing happens. The priest of Neptune, Laocoön, is sacrificing to an altar by the shore when two might sea snakes emerge from the waves and envelop his two young sons. Laocoön goes to their rescue and tries to fight them off but the snakes strangle all three to death and then slither into the city and up to the citadel of the goddess Venus.

Well, that decides it for the Trojans who set about dismantling part of their walls (the horse is too big to go through the city gates) in a kind of mad frenzy. Aeneas tells the story with much regret and sorrow at their foolhardiness, but they were whipped on by the scheming gods. The priestess Cassandra warns against letting the horse in but, of course, she was doomed never to be believed.

That night the Trojans hold a mighty feast to celebrate the end of the war then pass out on their beds. In the middle of the night Aeneas is woken by the ghost of Hector, looking grim and broken and bloody as he was after Achilles dragged his corpse round the walls of Troy, tied by the ankles to his chariot.

Hector’s ghost warns Aeneas to flee and sure enough, now he is awake, he hears screams and smells smoke. While they were asleep, Sinon snuck out to the horse, undid the pine bolts which secured its secret trap door, the Greeks inside the horse lowered themselves by a rope to the ground and set about massacring the guards set on the horse, while a contingent went and opened the main gates to the Greeks who had a) silently sailed back from where the fleet had hidden behind the offshore island of Tenedos and b) swarmed across the plain, till they were massed outside the gates.

Now the Greek army is pouring into the city determined to kill every man, woman and child. Hector’s ghost tells Aeneas all his lost, to gather his family and companions and flee, and predicts that, after long wanderings, he will found a new city.

But if you think about it, Virgil can’t depict the legendary founder of Rome as a coward who turns and bolts. Instead Aeneas leaps from his bed, grabs his armour, runs into the street, and rallies other warriors he finds emerging from their homes. They form a troop and roam through the streets taking on Greeks. They massacre one group of Greeks and put on their armour. This allows them to mingle with other Greeks before turning on them and many, the narrative assures us, they sent down to Orcus (hell), many fled back across the plain, and some even scuttled back up inside the horse.

Then a huge fight develops around the figure of the priestess Cassandra who is being dragged bound and gagged by Greeks from her temple. Aeneas and his band rally to save her but a hornet’s nest of Greeks counter attack, and they are even struck down by some Trojan brothers because they are wearing Greek armour.

He doesn’t mention Cassandra again but shifts the focus to the battle round the palace of Priam. Trojans are reduced to tearing down their walls and roofs to throw down on the Greeks climbing siege ladders. Aeneas enters the palace by a secret back passage and makes his way to the top of the tallest tower where he joins Trojans loosening the masonry to send huge blocks of stone falling on the Greek attackers.

Aeneas knows his audience will want to know how King Priam died. He gives a vivid, heart-breaking account of the old man buckling on his armour and heading for the fight, how his wife Hecuba tries to persuade him to desist, how Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, chases and kills Polites, one of Priam’s sons, right in front of him. How Priam defies him, harmlessly throws his spear, reproaches Pyrrhus for being a shame to his noble father. But Pyrrhus doesn’t care, grabs Priam by his long hair, drags him over to the altar and thrusts his sword up to the hilt in Priam’s side. Then his head is hacked from his body which is left to rot on the shore, unknown and unmourned.

Aeneas looks around and realises all his companions are dead i.e. he has done all that honour demanded. Now his thoughts turn to his aged father Anchises, his wife, Creusa, and son, Ascanius.

He spots Helen hiding in a temple, cause of all this death and destruction. Shall she survive and be taken back to Sparta to live in luxury, waited on by Trojan slaves? In a burst of fury Aeneas rushes forward to kill her but suddenly his mother, the goddess Venus appears. She tells him the war is not really Helen or even Paris’s fault. It is the gods. And she strips away the fog which clouds his mortal vision and shows him Neptune shaking the city’s foundations, Juno opening the gates and egging on the Greeks, Pallas Athena taking command of the citadel, and Jupiter himself leading the gods and supporting the Greeks. No mortal can stop this. As the Sibyl says, much later, in book 6:

You must cease to hope that the fates of the gods can be altered by prayer. (6.376)

Venus now orders Aeneas to collect his family and flee. But Anchises refuses to leave the city he has lived in all his life, determined to die in his house. Aeneas remonstrates, the old man refuses, so Aeneas says he’ll buckle back on his armour and die defending him rather than leave him. But Creusa throws herself in front of him and tells him his first duty is to his family.

At this tense moment there are signs from heaven. A heatless flame settles on Ascanius’s head and there was a peal of thunder and a star fell from the sky, a meteorite crashing down into Mount Ida.

This persuades Anchises to leave, so Aeneas puts a lion skin on his shoulders, tells the household slaves to meet them at a hill outside the city, puts his father on his shoulder, takes little Ascanius by the hand and Creusa follows behind as they set off through the dark side streets of the burning city.

It was then that his father heard marching soldiers’ feet and told Aeneas to run and Aeneas was overcome by irrational fear and bolted and somehow his wife Creusa got left behind, He never saw her again.

I stormed and raged and blamed every man and god that ever was. (2.745)

He puts his armour back on and runs back to the city, through the same gate they exited, trying to retrace his steps, going first to his house then to the palace of Priam, finding death, devastation and flames everywhere.

But then Creusa appears in a vision to him, calmly telling him that this is the wish of the gods and destiny. He is to sail far away and come to rest in Hesperia by the river Thybris in a land of warriors and take another bride. It is for the best. Their gods will protect her. She promises she will never be led away a slave for some Greek wife, although what her exact fate is is left unstated. He goes to put his arms around her but she fades like a phantom.

Anyway, this, like the account of Aeneas’s brave fighting, are obviously both designed to show him to best advantage, full of patriotic, familial and husbandly loyalty, but at every step overpowered by fate and destiny and the will of the gods. Now, sadly. Aeneas returns to the mound where his father and son are waiting and is amazed at the sheer number of other survivors who have gathered there. From now on he is to be their leader.

[Maybe worth pointing out the number of ghostly and visionary appearances: Dido’s husband’s ghost appears to her; Hector’s ghost appears to Aeneas; Creusa’s spirit appears to him. Although ostensibly about fighting there is a good deal of this otherworldly, visionary, shimmering quality about much of the story.]

Book 3 The wanderings

Aeneas is still talking, recounting his adventures to Dido and her court. He describes how the survivors built a settlement not far from ruined Troy, in the lee of the Ida mountains and built ships. Then set sail. This is described very briefly, in successive sentences. The lack of detail is very characteristic of Virgil. Unlike the hard-edged detailing of Homer, Virgil’s habit of skipping over details (for example, not telling us the outcome of the battle over Cassandra) creates a kind of shimmering, dreamy quality to the poem.

They sail to Thrace and begin to lay out foundations for a city but when Aeneas pulls up trees to decorate the altar he’s going to sacrifice on, he is horrified when they and spurt blood. Then terrified when a voice speaks and declares himself to be the spirit of Polydorus, sent by Priam to Thrace with a treasure, to be raised there, far from war-torn Troy. Now he tells Aeneas he was murdered by the king of Thrace who simply stole the gold.

Aeneas tells Anchises who responds that this is no place to stay. So they rebury the body of Polydorus with full rites, and set sail, letting the gods decide their final destination. They sail onto the island of Delos, dock in the harbour of Ortygia, and are greeted by King Anius.

Aeneas prays at the temple of Apollo, asking what he should do. A booming voice replies he must seek out the land of his ‘ancient mother’. Father Anchises interprets this to mean Crete, where the founder of Troy, Teucer, first came from.

So they sail and row from Delos via Naxos, Donusa, Olearos, Paros, through the Cyclades to Crete, where they land and begin to build a settlement Aeneas calls Pergamea. Things are just beginning to thrive when the settlement is struck down by a great plague and the crops wither in the fields.

One night the household gods are bathed in sunlight and speak to him, telling him again the prophecy that he will sail the seas, come to a peaceful land, and found a race who rule the world. The Greeks call the land Hesperia but it has been settled by the Oenetrians who have called it Italy after their god, Italus.

When he tells Father Anchises the latter remembers that Troy had two founders. One was Teucer from Crete but the other was Dardanus from Hesperia. They misinterpreted the message from Apollo and mistakenly came to Crete. So now they pack ship and set sail for Hesperia/Italy.

For three days and nights a black storm descends, blotting out the sky. Then it lifts and they sail into the harbour of the Strophades. They see fat cattle and goats and storm ashore, kill some and are feasting when they are attacked by the foul harpies, birds with the faces of girls, bellies oozing filth, talons like birds, which tear the food from their hands.

The harpies’ leader, Celaeno, perches on a pinnacle of rock and announces a prophecy which Jupiter gave Apollo, and Apollo gave her, and she is now giving the Trojans. They will settle a new land but not until they have passed through a famine which makes them gnaw their tables. (The prophesy is fulfilled at 7.116 to 130.)

So the Trojans abandon the feast and the land, take ship and scud over the waves to the island of Leucas. Here they performed rites of purification and then held games. They stayed here till mid-winter, when Aeneas pinned a shield taken from a Greek on the temple doors and they set sail again.

They dock at Chaonia and walk up to the city of Buthrotum. Here they are astounded to come across Andromache, wife of the great hero Hector, making ritual sacrifices for her dead husband. She tells them that she survived the sack of Troy and was taken as wife by Pyrrhus to whom she bore a child. But Pyrrhus dumped her on fellow slave Helenus (one of the sons of Priam) in order to marry Hermione. But Orestes loved Hermione and so murdered Pyrrhus. At his death some of Pyrrhus’s land descended to Helenus. He built a settlement there, a new Pergamum, and here Andromache lives.

At which point Helenus arrives and, amid much weeping by everyone, escorts them to his city which is a miniature copy of Troy in all aspects. They stay for some time. Eventually Aeneas asks the priest Helenus to answer his questions: should he set sail, will he come to the promised land?

So Helenus sacrifices some bullocks and then gives Aeneas the latest in the line of prophecies, first of all warning it won’t be a short voyage, but a long one fraught with adventures. He will recognise the place to build his city because he will find a sow suckling 30 piglets. He must make it a priority to worship Juno and try to win her over. He must make time to visit the prophetess at Cumae. He must avoid sailing through the straits of Messina, which are terrorised by Scylla and Charybdis.

Helenus gives them gifts of gold and ivory and silver, and blesses them as they set sail. They sight Italy and sail into harbour. They sail on past Tarentum in the instep of Italy. They sail past the gulf of Scylla and Charybdis and make shore in the land of the Cyclopes, a peaceful harbour but in the shadow of the fearsome Mount Etna who belching black smoke darkens the sky.

Next morning they are surprised to see a wretched filthy man in rags come running towards them. He announces he is Achaemenides, one of Ulixe’s crew. He describes how they were captured by the Cyclops which ate some of their comrades, drank and fell asleep and how, in the night, they conspired to blind him. But they sailed and left him behind. He has just about survived for three months, since then. But he warns them to flee.

At that moment they see blinded Polyphemus appear with his flocks on the side of the mountain and run down to their ships and set sail, rowing for all they’re worth. Polyphemus hears them and lets out a road which shakes the earth and brings all the other cyclops to the shore to rage at them, but they are clear of harm.

They sail down the east coast of Sicily past Syracuse. Then along the south coast, ticking off all the settlements and sights till they come to Lilybaeum. They put in at Drepanum but here Aeneas ‘lost’ his father Anchises. There is, as so often with Virgil, no detail, no explanation, just a focus on Aeneas’s loss and sadness.

When they set sail from there to head north and east to the Italian coast the great storm described at the start of book 1 was stirred up and so they were blown to the African shore which the Tyrians are settling. And with that, Aeneas’s recital of his story comes to an end.

Epicurean rest

It is noticeable that Virgil/West phrase the very end of Aeneas’s recital with ‘Here he made an end and was at peace.’ When I read Virgil’s Georgics I was struck by how much he told us he was struggling to complete the poem. He had to ask his patron, Maecenas, for help and support, he kept telling himself ‘onwards and upwards!’, he wrote with relief about reaching the end of each of the four books. Then the very opening of book 4 describes how Dido fell in love and ‘love gave her body no rest or peace‘.

It was only when I read the Georgics that I became aware for the first time of Virgil’s adherence to the teachings of Epicurus. In the blurb to the Penguin edition, I learn that Virgil lived most of his adult life in an Epicurean colony near Naples.

Epicurus’s teachings are above all designed to cultivate freedom from stress and anxiety in his followers. Peace of mind and spirit. So these references in the Aeneid to peace of spirit, or lack of it, acquired, for me, two deeper resonances. On one level, Virgil uses the word ‘peace’ to mean an end to the gruelling torment of writing this long, demanding poem, which comes over as being a huge ordeal for him. But the word also means far more than it does to you or me – for the Epicurean Virgil, ‘peace’ represents the nirvana, the blessed state sought for by his philosophy. When he says his characters achieve ‘peace’ or, conversely, are deprived of ‘peace’, it isn’t in the casual way that you or I might use the word, but has this much deeper resonance, referring to a philosophically idealised state of complete detachment from all sources of strife or worry.

Looked at this way, the entire poem represents a kind of vast detour from man’s ideal condition of rest or stasis, into a world of strife and anxiety. It helps to explain Virgil’s sad and doleful tone, lamenting the endless destiny of man to be troubled – by duties, responsibilities, the need to work, to eat, to love, to be a social animal – all of it endlessly distracting from his best, optimum state of complete Buddhist detachment. Hence Virgil’s insistent tone of lamentation over humanity in general, continually remarking on the sadness of their poor mortal existence.

It was the time when sleep, the most grateful gift of the gods, was first beginning to creep over suffering mortals… (2.270)

I guess there’s a third interpretation which is literally to do with rest after physical labour. This harks back to the many images in the Georgics of the sheer amount of physical labour involved in human existence. How many times in that long book did weary shepherds, farmers, goatherds, horticulturalists and livestock herders and outdoor workers greet the end of the day, the westering of the sun, as a welcome sign of the end of their day’s labours. Well, that tone is repeated again and again in the Aeneid. Night and, with it, sleep, represent welcome oblivion for animals and humans exhausted by their labours.

It was night and weary living things were peacefully taking their rest upon the earth. (4.522)

It was night and over the whole earth the weary animals, all manner of birds and all manner of flocks, were already deep in sleep.. (8.28)

Over the whole world the creatures of the earth were relaxed in sleep, all resting from their cares, and their hearts had forgotten their labours… (9.226)

Contrasting with the mellifluous descriptions of restful sleep are the hard descriptions of the scenes of fighting and the days of war (especially in the harsh, second half of the Aeneid, which I’ll be discussing in a later blog post).

Bitter grief was everywhere. Everywhere there was fear and death in many forms. (2.369)

Aurora meanwhile had lifted up her life-giving light for miserable mortals, bringing back their toil and sufferings. (11.184)

As an English poet wrote, 1,600 years later:

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on August 29, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/08/29/the-aeneid-virgil-books-1-to-3/

Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010)

According to legend Carthage was founded in 814 BC. Its history came to an end in 146 BC, the year in which Rome defeated and utterly destroyed it. Richard Miles is a young historian whose book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, sets out to record everything we know about Carthage, from the legends of its founding, through its umpteen wars, up to the final catastrophe.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed is long, 373 pages of text, 77 pages of notes, 34 page bibliography and a 66-page index = 521 pages.

It is not a social or political history. There is hardly anything about Carthage’s form of government, a reasonable amount about its economy (trade and some agriculture), a surprising amount about the evolving design and metallurgy of its coinage (in the absence of other evidence, coins are a good indicator of cultural changes and economic success), and quite a lot about its religion, in particular a recurring thread about the syncretistic melding of the Phoenician god of Melqat with the Hellenistic demigod Heracles, about which Miles has a real bee in his bonnet.

But what the text is really filled with is relentless details of Carthage’s endless wars, wars, wars. It is an overwhelmingly military history. Countless battles, an apparently endless stream of generals with the same four names (Hannibal, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal or Hanno) and gruesome references to torture. Failed generals, defeated enemies, rebellious mercenaries, overthrown tyrants, unlucky hostages or ambassadors, an endless stream of unfortunates are publicly tortured, beheaded or crucified (pages 131, 147, 152, 165, 173, 203, 208, 211, 212, 219, 273, 358). The ideal reader of this book will really love details of ancient wars and sadistic punishments.

The single most surprising thing about the history of Carthage is how much of it took place on the island of Sicily. The western half of Sicily was colonised by Carthage from about 900 BC, the eastern half by Greek colonists from different mother cities from about 750 BC, and the economic and territorial rivalry led to almost continuous warfare between the two sets of colonists between 580 and 265 BC, a period known as the Sicilian Wars.

If you know nothing whatever about Carthage, here are the key facts:

The Phoenicians

is the general name given to the people who, 3,000 years ago (1,000 BC) inhabited the trading cities situated along the coast of modern-day Lebanon, ports like Byblos, Sidon and Tyre. The Phoenicians invented new types of more efficient sailing ships with which they established trading routes all round the Mediterranean, trading in precious metals and manufactured goods such as jewellery, ceramics, and food. The high point of Phoenician culture and sea power is usually placed between about 1,200 to 800 BC. They founded trading settlements on all the Mediterranean islands (Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia) and as far afield as Gades (modern Cadiz) beyond what the ancients called the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. beyond the Mediterranean, onto the Atlantic coast of modern-day Spain.

Carthage

The most successful of these settlements was Carthage. Carthage was founded in the 9th century BC on the coast of North Africa, in what is now Tunisia, by traders from Tyre in Phoenicia (Phoenicia being the coastal strip of the what is now Syria and Lebanon). It was a pivotal position, half way along the trade routes from east to west and also handy for the short routes north to and south from Italy and its two big islands, Sardinia and Sicily.

Map of the Mediterranean showing position, central to various trade routes (source: Politeia website)

In the following centuries Carthage became independent of its mother city (which was eventually subjugated by the Asian empire of Assyria) to become a trading empire in its own right, creating its own colonies around the Mediterranean and spreading inland from its coastal location to conquer territory originally occupied by Libyan tribes.

New city

Carthage’s status as a colony or settlement is indicated by its name: the Punic term qrt-ḥdšt directly translates as ‘new city’, implying it was a ‘new Tyre’ (p.62). The city states of Phoenicia – the leading ones being Sidon and Tyre – had thrived in the vacuum caused by the late Bronze Age collapse (about 1,200 to 1,100 BC). But from 900 to 800 onwards the big land empires returned, namely Egypt to the south and Assyria to the east, and repeatedly invaded and conquered the city states. Miles shows how they allowed some, Tyre in particular, a measure of independence because the Assyrian rulers relied on the luxury goods, and especially the rare metals, which were brought in from their trade around the Med (copper from Cyprus, silver from southern Spain).

Nonetheless, as the mother city, Tyre, lost power, its strongest child, Carthage, grew.

Punic wars

From the 300s BC onwards Carthage found its maritime empire threatened by the fast-growing new power of Rome, half-way up the west coast of the Italian peninsula. The Romans used the adjective poenus to refer to the Phoenicians and, by extension, the Carthaginians, and so the three wars Rome fought against Carthage are referred to as ‘the Punic Wars’:

  • First Punic War (264–241 BC)
  • Second Punic War (218–201 BC)
  • Third and final Punic War (149–146 BC)

Rome wins

Rome won the Third Punic War, stormed the city and utterly destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, leading away the survivors into brutal slavery and razing the buildings to the ground. During the final war a leading Roman politician, Cato the Censor, made a reputation by, whatever subject he was nominally addressing in the Senate, ending all his speeches with the same words, ‘Carthago delenda est’, meaning ‘Carthage must be destroyed’. It is this famous catchphrase that gives this book its title.

Not only did the Romans destroy all buildings, but all statues, inscriptions and records, emptying the libraries of Carthage and giving away the manuscripts and codices to local tribes. None have survived. This explains why, despite its long history and one-time predominance, the historiography of Carthage is so shadowy, and has to be reconstructed from references in the writings of its enemies or from the often obscure or ambiguous archaeological evidence.

Archaeology

The victorious Romans razed Carthage to the ground. Generations later, the first emperor, Augustus, ordered the erection of a new city on its ruins, Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago (p.364). Both are now embedded in the huge modern city of Tunis, capital of Tunisia (current population 11 million), which makes archaeological investigation difficult to this day. However, the Carthaginians had established many of their own colonies both across northern Tunisia and on many Mediterranean islands, and from time to time new Punic sites are discovered, or new discoveries are made at existing sites, which provide information which keep our view of Carthage’s history slowly changing and updating.

Punic gods

All written records were destroyed, all the poems and hymns and inscriptions which we have for the Greek or Roman pantheons. From archaeological evidence and references in Greek or Roman works it appears the main gods of Carthage were a couple, the god Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit (list of 3 triads of gods on page 289).

Baal was a Phoenician name for ‘Lord’, so there were a lot of gods whose first name was Baal. In fact the common Carthaginian men’s name Hannibal is a combination of the Carthaginian name Hanno with the word ‘Baal’.

Melqart was the tutelary god of Carthage’s mother-city, Tyre, sometimes titled the ‘Lord of Tyre’ (Ba‘al Ṣūr), King of the Underworld, and Protector of the Universe. Miles shows how worship of Melqart was encouraged at all Phoenician colonies across the Mediterranean as a way of binding them together culturally.

Miles also shows how Melqart became identified and merged with Greek worship of Heracles, the hugely popular Greek figure who could be taken as both a demigod or a mortal hero, depending on context, and who was the signature figure for Greeks colonising westwards through the Mediterranean in the sixth century and later (pages 105, 221). Heracles was even adopted as a patron and icon by Alexander the Great.

In fact the prevalence of Melqart-Heracles becomes a recurring theme of Miles’s book, popping up wherever Carthage creates colonies, for example becoming the god/face or brand of the new colony in south Spain in the third century (p.221), depicted on the coins of Hannibal (p.227), and then co-opted by the post-Punic emperor Augustus. Miles develops what almost amounts to an obsession with Heracles, turning his myths and legends into a kind of central narrative to the five or six centuries leading up to the Christian Era which are fought over by Greeks and Carthaginians and Romans in turn, who each seek to commandeer and appropriate him as ancestor and avatar for their own colonial ambitions.

By contrast with the hundreds of mentions and extended passages about Heracles, the goddess Astarte is only mentioned a handful of times. She was a goddess of the Levant, of not only Phoenicians but the Canaanites too, rather than distinctively of the Phoenician diaspora. Still, I could have done with more about Astarte.

Carthage as ‘the other’ for Rome

Miles’s central point is that, for the reasons explained above, almost everything we know about ancient Carthage comes down to us from Greek, and then Roman sources, and that both of them were bitter rivals of Carthage’s trading and military might. In other words, all the written evidence we have about Carthage comes from her enemies.

Miles uses ideas derived from Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism about how colonial conquerors project onto their victims their own vices, to suggest that in these accounts the ancient Greeks and Romans projected onto the Carthaginians all the moral and social sins and transgressions and weaknesses they could think of. These included cruelty, dishonesty, effeminacy, luxuriousness, barbarity, sexual immorality, and so on. The notion of the unreliability or deceitfulness of the Carthaginians gave rise to a Roman proverb, fides Punica, meaning Punic or Carthaginian ‘faith’ – ironically indicating the exact opposite. Towards the end of the book he spends three pages describing how the Roman comic playwright Plautus’s play, The Little Carthaginian, performed in the lull between the second and third Punic wars, attributed all these perfidious characteristics to the hapless protagonist (pages

So Miles’s mission is to use the latest up-to-the-minute archaeological and scholarly knowledge to penetrate back through centuries of Greek and Roman prejudice and anti-Carthage propaganda to try and establish who the Carthaginians really were.

There are two problems with this approach:

1. It assumes that you are already fairly familiar with all the Roman prejudices against Carthage which he is setting out to overthrow. If you’re not familiar with Roman slurs against Carthage, then the book has to explain the prejudiced view first, before going on to rebut it and, in doing so, it turns out that the accusations of the Greeks and Romans are often so florid and vivid that you remember them more than Miles’s myth-busting antidotes.

2. This is especially the case when Miles’s anti-prejudice myth-busting is not as exciting or as clear-cut as you might hope, substituting a clearly defined line with the uncertain speculations of modern scholars.

The most obvious example is when Miles sets out to undermine the Greek and Roman accusation that the Carthaginians practised the ritual sacrifice of babies. But to do so he has to present all the evidence supporting the baby-killing view and this turns out to be pretty persuasive. He explains that a ‘tophet’ was the general term the Carthaginians used for a site where infants were sacrificed. It was a Hebrew term derived from a location in Jerusalem in the Gehinnom where worshippers, influenced by the ancient Canaanite religion, practised the human sacrifice of children to the gods Moloch and Baal by burning them alive.

Miles then goes on to look very thoroughly at the archaeological evidence from the cemeteries which have been found in Carthage itself and in the surrounding towns, where urns have been found which contain the ashes of infants. Up-to-the minute scholarly research using DNA and other types of scientific technology seem to have established that many of the infants who were (undoubtedly) burned to ashes, were so young as to maybe have been still-born. Maybe it was only still-born infants or infants who died within months of birth (i.e. who were already dead) who were burned as offerings to the gods. But still… the accusation is not completely baseless… the Carthaginians did burn babies… So Miles’s attempt to overthrow a modern ‘prejudice’ against the Carthaginians ends up bringing the prejudice more prominently to my attention and not really decisively rebutting it.

The endlessness of scholarly debate

And that’s the trouble with any book which sets out to take us into the heart of scholarly debate – the trouble is that scholarly debate is endless. And it is particularly exacerbated with a subject like Carthage where the Romans went out of their way to destroy every building, statue, stele or inscription, and all the books and manuscripts which recorded Carthaginian religion, culture or history.

What we are left with is an admittedly copious amount of archaeological evidence from the city itself and its numerous colonies around the Mediterranean, but evidence which is always partial, fragmentary, complex and open to differing interpretation.

Therefore Miles’s book doesn’t tell ‘the’ story of Carthage, it tells one possible story and, as his narrative proceeds, it is very scrupulous in pointing out where scholars differ and mentioning different interpretations. In fact he does this so often you feel you are reading not one but multiple versions, multiple possible histories of Carthage.

Take something as simple as the start of the Punic period itself, the period of Phoenician economic hegemony in the Mediterranean, presumably, after two and a half thousand years, historians are fairly clear when this began, right? Wrong.

The advent of what we call the ‘Punic’ era is notoriously difficult to define. (p.88)

Presumably historians have a clear sense of what ‘Punic’ culture was, right? Wrong. Turns out that Punic culture was highly ‘syncretic’ i.e. incorporating elements from many other Mediterranean cultures:

What we refer to as ‘Punic’ culture is an umbrella term for a whole series of diffuse cultural experiences that took place all over the western and central Mediterranean. (p.89)

In other words, wherever you look in the subject of Punic or Carthaginian history, there are scholarly problems of interpretation which the steady trickle of modern archaeological discoveries only makes more complex, sometimes bewilderingly so. In fact rather than one coherent story, the text can more accurately be described as a succession of puzzles, historical teasers for which Miles presents the evidence for and against particular solutions or interpretations.

For example, does the existence of the Ara Maxima altar and temple in the Forum Boarium in Rome testify to the early Roman adaptation of a local legend about a hero-brigand with the Greek legends about the wandering hero Heracles? Or, on the contrary, might it point towards early Rome being a mish-mash of Etrurian, Greek, Phoenician, Punic and other peoples in a typically Phoenician cosmopolitan trading community?

Miles devotes pages 108 to 111 to presenting the evidence for either interpretation, which were intriguing to follow but, ultimately, quite hard to remember or care about – and my point is that a good deal of the book is like this, a sequence of puzzles and mysteries and obscurities which scholars are wrangling over right up to the present day, and which Miles shares with us in some detail.

  • There is no consensus on the meaning of the Nora stone… (p385)
  • There has been considerable debate over the provenance of the Cacus myth… (p.404)
  • The identification of the goddess figure has been controversial… (p.405)

Greece, the first rival

For centuries before Rome rose, Carthage’s rival was Greece or, more precisely, the numerous Greek colonies around the Mediterranean. Not a lot of people know that the Greeks colonised or, more accurately, set up trading centres which became towns and sometimes fortified citadels, at points all round the Mediterranean coast, the ones Carthage clashed with dotting the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily. I’m always surprised to reread that the southern coast of Italy was for centuries known as Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece, because of the dominance of Greek towns.

The ubiquity of Greek colonisation was reflected in the spread of the cult of the Greek hero and demi-god, Herakles, whose legendary travels, labours and womanising, as Miles shows, became a symbol of ‘the Greek colonial project’, the ‘Greek colonial endeavour’ (p.171). Temples were built for him all over the Mediterranean littoral and local towns and cities and even ethnic groups claimed descent from the far-travelling bully. A particularly striking example is the way that the Celtic race claimed to be descended from Heracles after he slept with the daughter of the king of Galicia and fathered a son named Kelta (p.399).

Sicily, the endless battlefield

Sicily is separated from Italy by a strait just 1.9 miles wide at its narrowest point and is only 87 miles from the African shore.

Around 500 the narrative emerges from speculation based on archaeology into more reliable history documented by Greek sources, in the form of military campaigns in Sicily. A glance at the map shows why Sicily was important to anyone trying to set up a trading empire in the Mediterranean and Miles devotes several chapters to accounts of the long-running conflict between towns founded by Carthage in the west of the island, and towns founded by Greeks in the east, specifically Syracuse, founded by Greek settlers from Corinth.

The Sicilian Wars, or Greco-Punic Wars, were a series of conflicts fought between ancient Carthage and the Greek city-states led by Syracuse over control of Sicily and the western Mediterranean between 580 and 265 BC. (Wikipedia)

The Carthaginians set up small trading settlements on Sicily as early as 900 BC but never penetrated far inland. They had traded with the local peoples, the Elymians, Sicani and Sicels. Greek colonists began arriving after 750 BC.

  • 580 BC – The Phoenicians in Sicily and the Elymians unite to defeat the Greeks of Selinus and Rhodes near Lilybaeum, the first such recorded incident in Sicily
  • 540 – Carthaginian Malchus is said to have ‘conquered all Sicily’ and sent captured booty to Tyre
  • 510 BC – Carthage helped the town of Segesta defeat the expedition of the Greek Dorieus
  • early 5th century; the higher 400s BC were the era of Sicilian ‘tyrants’ i.e. rulers who ruled a town and its surrounding area without consulting the landed elite; examples of these ‘tyrants’ crop up in the writings about contemporary political theory of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle; for example, Gelon who captured the main Greek city, Syracuse, in 485 BC and then deployed a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing, deportation and enslavement’
  • 483 – Terrilus, tyrant of Himera, was deposed by the tyrant Theron of Acragas, and called on Carthage to help; Carthage was motivate to defend its Sicilian territory against Theron who threatened to take over; Carthage sent a large army, maybe as many as 50,000, many mercenaries, under general Hamilcar; the fleet suffered heavy losses en route to Sicily and was then slaughtered at the Battle of Himera; the defeat was a catastrophe and had political ramifications back in Carthage, leading to the replacement of government by an aristocratic elite with the institution of a special form of republic managed by a Council of 104 and an Assembly of Elders (pages 116, 130, 215); Carthage didn’t intervene in Sicily for 70 years, allowing the Greeks to undergo an era of expansion and building, although they themselves then collapsed into a dozen or so bickering commonwealths
  • 410 – Carthage got involved in the complicated internecine Sicilian wars when Hannibal Mago helped the town of Segesta defeat the town of Selinus and then destroyed Himera, thus avenging the disastrous defeat of 73 years earlier
  • 406 – second expedition led by Hannibal Mago was ravaged by plague which killed Hannibal but his successor Himilco, captured and sacked Akragas, then captured the city of Gela, sacked Camarina and repeatedly defeated the army of Dionysius I, the new tyrant of Syracuse, before plague brought the fighting to a halt

And so on for another 150 years. I’m not going to explain the details of this map from the Turning Points of Ancient History website, I’m including it to show how the island of Sicily was characteristically divided up into a surprising number of territories and towns all of which were, at some point, attacking each other, besieged, surrendered, burnt down and so on during the 300 years of the Sicilian Wars. Basically, for most of that period Carthage held the west of the island, various Greek rulers held Syracuse in the south-east, and then they got embroiled in scores of alliances to try and grab as much of the territory between them.

Map of Sicily 483 BC showing its division between different rulers.

What was surprising to me about this was:

  • realising just how much of a colonising, imperialist peoples the Greeks were: I had a very limited image of the ancient Greeks as philosophers in togas strolling round the agora in Athens or heroically defending themselves against the Persians at Thermopylae; it’s chastening to read about their ambitious imperial aims and their success at founding Greek towns on coastlines all around the Mediterranean; in this respect the long chapter Miles devotes to the cult and legends of Herakles and the way his cult was used to both explain and justify Greek imperialism, is genuinely eye-opening
  • and of course, where you have colonies you have people being colonised; Miles’s book and the Wikipedia article devote all their time to the names of Carthaginian and Greek leaders and their battles and only in passing mention the names of the local ‘peoples’ whose land and livings were stolen from them by one or other set of invaders – the natives being the Elymians, Sicani and Sicels – having read so much about the European colonisation of Africa recently, I was struck by the similarities, only on a much smaller scale, in the sense that we hear a lot about the colonists because they were literate and left records, and almost nothing about the illiterate subject tribes who have gone down in history without a voice

Rome’s civic nationalism

Most people think of Carthage in connection with its rivalry with Rome, which led to the three Punic wars (264 to 146 BC) and which climaxed in the conquest and utter destruction of the city. Miles describes the long prehistory to the conflict, describing the slow but steady rise of Rome from a Carthaginian point of view.

Putting to one side the blizzard of dates, events and individuals, what is fascinating is Miles’s analysis of Rome’s success. It had a number of causes. One was that Rome was ruled by a pair of consuls who were elected for one year’s service. This meant they were in a hurry to make their name in history and were encouraged to aggressive policies now. A contrast to most other polities led by kings or tyrants who could afford to take their time. Miles explains that this ‘war without respite’ was a new thing, and economically exhausted Carthage (p.192).

Another was that when the Romans were defeated they simply raised more troops and came back to avenge the defeat, unlike the Carthaginians who tended to withdraw.

Another big reason for Rome’s success was its astonishing ability to integrate newly conquered territory and peoples into the Roman state (pages 158-9 and 197). This was done via infrastructure – conquered territory soon benefited from the building of the famous roads and aqueducts and laying out towns rationally and efficiently. But also by law, whereby newly integrated populations became equal under Roman law. Rome espoused what Michael Ignatieff calls ‘civic nationalism’ – all Roman citizens were treated equally under the law regardless of race or religion – as opposed to the ‘ethnic nationalism’ which most other states (then and for most of history) employed to unite its populations.

The ancient Latin identity survived, but only as a set of duties, rights and privileges enshrined in Roman law. (p.159)

A huge consequence of this is that Rome was able to recruit its armies from citizens, albeit only recently incorporated into the Roman state, but still, freeborn Roman citizens, who were inculcated with a sincere belief in Roman laws and values. This was in striking contrast to most other Mediterranean powers, including Carthage, which relied heavily on mercenaries to fill their armies, mercenaries who were both unreliable (often mutinied or defected) but also very expensive (a fact pointed out by the contemporary historian Polybius, quoted page 241). One of the reasons for Carthage’s relative decline was it bankrupted itself paying mercenaries to fight the wars against Rome.

(The best example of this was the Mercenary War which began at the end of the first Punic War when a huge force of some 20,000 mercenaries mutinied and turned on Carthage because they hadn’t been paid. Under canny leaders, who allied with neighbouring African tribes who would benefit from the overthrow of Carthage, it turned into a full-blown war on its own account which lasted from 241 to 237 BC when the mercenaries were finally defeated and massacred. Miles describes it in vivid detail pages 200 to 211. The mutiny contributed to the further weakening of Carthage in her long-running feud with Rome and vividly demonstrated the weakness of relying on foreign mercenaries. It is also the vivid and barbaric background to Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Salammbô.)

To be honest, this was one of the seven main things I took away from this long detailed book:

  1. The Carthaginians sacrificed (or were widely accused of sacrificing) babies to their gods.
  2. The huge cultural importance of the figure of Heracles to Greek imperialism and how he was incorporated into the Carthaginian cult of Melqart.
  3. Rome’s success was in large part to its efficiency at incorporating conquered territory and peoples into the civic nationalism of its polity.
  4. Rome’s military success was attributable, in part, to the way they just would not stop or admit defeat, put pressed on relentlessly till they won. (A point seconded by Adrian Goldsworthy’s book about the Punic Wars.)
  5. The gigantic role played by Sicily in Carthage’s history.
  6. The Mercenary War.
  7. The origins and career of Hannibal Barca.

The Punic Wars

Obviously Miles gives a very thorough account of the Punic Wars although here, as in his account of the Sicilian Wars, the immense detail and the explanation of scholarly debate about various key points and cruxes, often threatened to obscure the outline of the bigger picture. For example, in Miles’s narrative, it wasn’t exactly clear when each of the Punic wars either started or ended, since they merged into peace negotiations and visits by ambassadors and skirmishes and violent rebellions or coups and so on.

The overall message seems to be that the three Punic wars accelerated the rise of Rome, in all sorts of ways, militarily, culturally, economically and culturally.

The first war (264 to 241 BC) was fought mainly on the island of Sicily. Rome’s involvement was the first time that a Roman army was sent outside Italy (p.357). However, even having just read about it, it pales into the background compared to the second one (218 to 201 BC) which is dominated by the ‘romantic’ figure of Hannibal. Part of the reason is that, apparently, we have far better sources for the second war, not least because a number of biographies of the famous Hannibal survive in whole or part.

Slavery

In case it’s not clear, all these societies the ancient Greeks, the Romans and the Carthaginians, relied on slaves. In all the wars, the populations of captured towns and cities were routinely sold into slavery by the victors (pages 127, 140, 281, 296, 315, 347, 352).

Iberia

A fascinating aspect of the final period of Carthage was the success of its sub-colony in the south of Spain, which was established and triumphed due to the region’s extensive silver deposits. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca invaded and subdued the locals in 237 BC, putting them to work on the silver mines on an industrial scale. Eventually there were something like 40,000 slaves working in the silver mines to generate the precious metal to prop up Carthage and its military campaigns. (The town of Cartagena in south-east Spain was founded by Hamilcar as qrt-ḥdšt, which the Romans called ‘Cartago Nova,’ which was corrupted by the locals to Cartagena. So the city of Cartagena in Colombia owes its name to the same origin in the Phoenician language of the Middle East, page 224.)

The Barcids

Hamilcar’s success really brought to prominence the family of Barca whose era or influence is referred to by the adjective ‘Barcid’. Hence ‘Barcid Spain’. In fact the most famous Hannibal of all, the one who took his elephants over the Alps in 218 BC, was a Barcid, the son of the Hamilcar Barca who subjugated the Iberian tribes. When Hamilcar died in the early 220s, his son-in-law Hasdrupal took over, with Hannibal becoming a senior officer in the army aged just 18. When Hasdrupal was assassinated in 221 Hannibal was acclaimed leader by the army (and promptly issued new coinage depicting Heracles/Melqart, just one of the way in which Hannibal consciously associated himself with the oldest iconography of Carthaginian power, pages 227, 245, 247, 250-258).

Hannibal and the second Punic war (218 to 201 BC)

I remember Hannibal taking his elephants over the Alps from boyhood history books. I must have wondered why he did it. This book makes things clear.

1. Hannibal was seeking revenge or, more accurately, restitution from the peace settlement of the first Punic war (264 to 241 BC) which had given Sicily to Rome as a Roman province – the first ever Roman province – and cemented Rome as the leading military power in the western Mediterranean and, increasingly, the Mediterranean region as a whole. (Coming 20 years after the end of the first war, and seeking to correct the ‘injustices’ of the peace treaty which ended it, reminds me of the 20 year gap between the first and second world wars.)

2. Having been acclaimed general of the Carthaginian army in Spain Hannibal was ambitious to make his mark and confident, having been raised in an army family, gone on campaigns from an early age and been an officer at age 18, that he could do it.

3. But instead of trying to invade and conquer Sicily – graveyard of so many Carthaginian campaigns in the past – he would strike direct at the enemy and invade Italy.

4. But why over the Alps? Simples. The Romans controlled the seas. A sea-borne invasion was just too risky.

As it was, as soon as Hannibal’s left Carthage-occupied Spain they were attacked by Celtic Iberian tribes. Crossing the Pyrenees was dangerous. Then crossing the entire south of France, again, involved armed confrontations with a succession of local Gaulish tribes. Finally they were shown by guides how to ascend one side of the Alps, go through passes, and descend into Italy in late autumn 218, with 20,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and an unknown number of elephants – the survivors of the 37 with which he left Iberia.

Here Hannibal spent several years marching and fighting and campaigning. He won one of the most famous victories of the ancient world, crushing a Roman army at Cannae in 216 BC, but the description of the war quickly gets bogged down and complicated. Overall the war makes the point that you can be the best general of your day and win stunning battles but still lose a war which is being fought on numerous fronts. While he was in Italy the Romans shrewdly sent an army to Iberia; although they suffered numerous setbacks, the Iberian tribes the Carthaginians had oppressed were happy to defect to them and so, eventually, the Romans defeated them, and, despite mutinies in their own army and local rebellions, eventually forced all Carthaginian forces, led by Hasdrubal Gisco, out of Iberia. The thirty-year Punic occupation of south Iberia was over, and it became a Roman province, as Sicily had at the end of the first war.

Hannibal was in Italy from 218 to 203. 15 years. Long time, isn’t it? Lots of battles. Early on the Roman authorities panicked and appointed Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator. Fabius introduced the strategy of avoiding open battle with his opponent, instead skirmishing with small detachments of the enemy. This was unpopular with the army, public or Roman elite, as Hannibal marched through the richest and most fertile provinces of Italy wreaking devastation as he went. (This softly, slowly approach explains the name of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884 as a British socialist organisation which aims to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.)

At one point he seized key towns in the very south, Magna Graecia, notably Capua, not as Punic fiefs but giving them their independence. His aim was not to destroy Rome but to mortally weaken it by giving Rome’s Latin and Italian allies their independence. This explains why he only once marched on the actual city and then was rebuffed by its thorough defences. In the end, though, all the cities he’d liberated ended up being retaken by the Romans.

Nonetheless, in the book’s conclusion, Miles says that these fifteen years during which an alien invader roamed more at less at will across the sacred territory of Rome left a deep psychological scar on the Roman psyche which took generations to exorcise (p.361).

In 203 Hannibal was recalled to Africa because in his absence, Publius Cornelius Scipio who had led the Romans to victory in Iberia, had led a force to Africa. Scipio destroyed an army of 50,000 sent against him but failed to capture the town of Utica and realised that besieging Carthage itself would probably be a long drawn-out process, costly in men and resources.

Thus both sides had fought themselves to a standstill and were ready to sue for peace. The Romans imposed very harsh terms but when Hannibal finally arrived back in Carthaginian territory the stage was set for a massive battle between the two old enemies. At the Battle of Zama in October 202 BC Scipio won a decisive victory and brought the war to an end (p.316).

Wikipedia has a cool animated graphic which sums up the change in territorial holdings over the course of the wars:

Changes in Rome and Carthage’s territories during the three Punic Wars, 264 to 146 BC. (Image by Agata Brilli ‘DensityDesign Integrated Course Final Synthesis Studio’, Polytechnic University of Milan)

The third Punic war

Surprisingly, shorn of its empire, Carthage flourished after the second war, quickly paying off the reparations owed to Rome and actively supplying her with vast amounts of wheat and food to support Rome’s wars against Macedon and other kingdoms in the East. When the end came it was entirely of Roman prompting. Factions in the Senate warned endlessly of the threat Carthage could still pose. Cato visited Carthage and was appalled at its prosperity. Eventually argument in the Senate led to an embassy being sent to demand impossible conditions of the Carthaginians – to uproot their city and move inland and cease to be an ocean-going, trading nation at all.

The embassy withdrew into the city and a 3-year siege commenced. Scipio adopted grandson of the great Scipio Africanus. Eventually stormed the walls and broke into the city and destroyed it and massacred its population. There is no doubt in Miles’s mind the Carthaginians did everything they could to abide by the letter of the treaties and to avoid war, and that the Romans would accept nothing but utter destruction. Once again it was Roman inflexibility and relentlessness which triumphed. Miles notes how this was recorded around the Mediterranean where Rome’s determination was noted but many lamented its bad faith, its falling short of the values it claimed to promote, of fairness and good faith.

Appropriating Carthage

At the end of the book, Miles shows how Carthage served numerous ideological purposes for Rome. For a start, in later works it became THE enemy which Rome had to overcome to in order to become great. In a sense, if Carthage hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to invent her (p.373).

Closely connected, as mentioned above re. Said, even as it was being besieged and for centuries afterwards, Carthage became the anti-type of all the virtues the Romans congratulated themselves on, perfidious compared to Roman fides, with a disgusting baby-killing religion compared to Rome’s dignified ceremonies. Rome’s self-image was built by contrasting itself with the imagined vices of Carthage.

Third, however, a series of poets and historians wondered whether, in defeating Carthage, Rome had somehow peaked. The existence of a potent rival in a sense kept Rome on her toes, not just militarily but morally. For some later moralists, the defeat of Carthage marked the start of the internal squabbles, factions and corruption which were to lead to the civil wars, starting in the 80s BC.

The many dead

Deep down, the book made me marvel and gape at just how many, many men, throughout history, have miserably lost their lives in war. As Adrian Goldsworthy writes in his book on the Punic Wars:

In just one battle, in 216, the Romans and their allies lost 50,000 dead. During the second Punic war a sizeable part of Rome’s adult make population perished, mostly in the first few years of the conflict.

Between one and a quarter and one and three quarter millions of men died in the 120-year war. God knows how many civilians perished or were sold into slavery.

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Posted by Simon on January 24, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/24/carthage-must-be-destroyed-richard-miles/

Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe (1587)

Information about Marlowe’s plays is patchy. Dido, Queen of Carthage is generally thought to be Marlowe’s first play but it is anyone’s guess when it was written, sometime between 1587 when Marlowe arrived in London from Cambridge and 1594 when it was published. The Marlowe scholar Roma Gill thinks it was probably written before Marlowe left Cambridge in 1587. The title page of the 1594 edition credits the hack writer Thomas Nashe as co-writer, though scholars query this.

The play was first performed by the Children of the Chapel Royal, a company of boy actors in London a fact – like the performance of many of Ben Jonson and Dekker’s plays by companies of boy actors, which I find gob-smacking.

Dido is based on books 1, 2 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid which opens with the Trojan soldier Aeneas, having fled Troy after it fell to the Greeks, sailed west across the Mediterranean and found refuge in Carthage, the city on the north coast of Africa, then ruled by Queen Dido, herself an exile.

The gods interfere, Venus using Cupid to trick Dido into falling in love with Aeneas, rather than with Iarbus, King of Gaetulia, her local suitor, who gave Dido refuge when she and her people were exiles, and expects to be rewarded with her hand in marriage.

Dido and Aeneas pledge their love to each other, but the Trojans remind Aeneas that their future is in Italy, which is also where Mercury and the other gods order Aeneas to proceed. The play ends when Aeneas leaves for Italy with the Trojans and despairing Dido setting off a triple suicide by throwing herself on a funeral pyre, followed by her despairing suitor Iarbus and then by Anna, her sister, who loved Iarbus all along.

A suitably lurid and exorbitant subject for the theatrical genius of extremity and intensity. The play, of course, features the main human characters, as you’d expect – what is surprising is the inclusion of quite so many gods and goddesses. Marlowe is not shy about putting words into the mouths of gods.

Cast

Immortals

Jupiter, king of the gods
Juno, queen of the gods
Venus, goddess of love
Mercury, messenger of the gods
Cupid, son of Venus, impish god of love
Ganymede, cup-bearer to the gods

Mortals

Aeneas, prince of Troy
Ascanius, son of Aeneas
Dido, queen of Dido
Anna, her sister
Achates, companion of Aeneas
Ilioneus
Iarbus, King of Gaetulia
Cloanthes
Sergestus

Act 1

Indeed the play opens in heaven with Jupiter ‘dandling’ Ganymede on his lap (‘that female wanton boy’) and flirting with his beloved boy (‘Come gentle Ganimede and play with me,’). Ganymede complains that Juno whacked him round the head when he was serving wine. Here, right at the beginning of his career, Marlowe’s ambition reaches to the utter heights, putting words into the mouth of the king of the gods on Olympus, and not just casual chit-chat, Zeus threatening vengeance on his bossy wife.

JUPITER: What? dares she strike the darling of my thoughts?
By Saturn’s soul, and this earth threatening air,
That shaken thrice, makes Nature’s buildings quake,
I vow, if she but once frown on thee more,
To hang her meteor like twixt heaven and earth,
And bind her hand and foot with golden cords,
As once I did for harming Hercules.

What scale! What bombast! Nature quaking and the king of the gods hanging his wife between heaven and earth – these are enormous image of vast power. Not only that but Ganymede cackles, like a spoilt catamite, at Zeus’s suggestion and says, Go on, go on, he would bring all the gods to marvel at the sight.

So right at the start of the play the tone is set of 1. world-reaching, heaven-aspiring settings 2. a kind of spoilt teenager cruelty and amorality, and 3, of course, Marlowe’s powerful sensuality:

Sit on my knee, and call for thy content,
Control proud Fate, and cut the thread of time,
Why are not all the Gods at thy command,
And heaven and earth the bounds of thy delight?
Vulcan shall dance to make thee laughing sport,
And my nine Daughters sing when thou art sad,
From Juno’s bird I’ll pluck her spotted pride,
To make thee fans wherewith to cool thy face,
And Venus’ Swans shall shed their silver down,
To sweeten out the slumbers of thy bed

It starts out being about Power but ends up with Venus’ swans feathering the boy’s bed, power and sensuality are amorally mingled.

Anyway, back to the plot and enter Venus berating Zeus for his frivolity and indifference when her beloved son, Aeneas, is struggling against stormy seas. More than that, she conjures a vision of the seas stirred up by Juno, queen of the gods, against Aeneas and so re-enacting a second overthrow of Troy (since Aeneas and his twenty ships carry all the survivors of the city), Aeolus god of winds summoning the waves as Agamemnon leader of the Greek army summoned his soldiers to attack.

Zeus snaps out of gay flirting mode to assure Venus that Aeneas is safe, and describes his destiny, to voyage on to Rome, to fight and defeat the native inhabitants, to found a city where, 300 years later, a priestess will be impregnated by Mars and bear the twins Romulus and Remus who will go on to found the greatest city in the world.

Ganymede and Zeus exit and Venus thanks him for saving her beautiful son, and then, next thing we know, Aeneas and some of his companions come onstage having obviously survived the storms. Venus hides so she can overhear her beamish boy. The men praise Aeneas for his leadership, and wonder where they’ve been driven ashore. Aeneas tasks them with fetching wood to make a fire to cook the meat they’ve killed.

At this point Venue steps out before them, in disguise as a native of the land. Aeneas immediately spots her for a goddess and asks what land is this. Venus explains it is the Punic shore where Sidonian Dido rules as queen. Aeneas introduces himself which gives him an opportunity to explain his backstory i.e. how he fled defeated Troy with all the survivors in 24 ships, though they’ve been battered by storms and only seven have survived to find haven here on this rocky shore. Venus assures him that all his ships have arrived safely then quickly departs, just as Aeneas realises she is his mother, the goddess Venus and laments that she never stays for them to have a proper conversation.

Act 2

Scene 1

Outside the walls of Carthage, near a temple to Juno, Aeneas laments with his friend Achates and his son Ascanius for lost Troy and her dead and momentarily mistakes a statue in the temple for old King Priam. But then Cloanthus, Sergestus, Ilioneus and others of their comrades appear, they are all joyfully reunited, and tell Aeneas they were taken in and given food, new clothes etc by Queen Dido.

Dido is introduced to Aeneas and to his son, Ascanius, who she takes a liking to. They appear to sit as for a banquet and Aeneas’s renewed laments prompt Dido to ask him to tell them all what happened when Troy fell. Which he does at length and very vividly (lines 177 to 369) how the Trojans were fooled by lying Sinon to take the wooden horse into the city walls and how that night the scheming Greeks got loose and massacred the inhabitants, how old King Priam was found at the altar of his gods by Pyrrhus, Achilles’ son, who first chopped off the old man’s hands, held up in supplication, then cut him open like a fish.

Amid the mayhem, Aeneas put his father Anchises on his back, took his son Ascanius by one hand and his wife Creusa by the other and made his way out of the burning city ankle deep in blood. His wife let go his hand and was lost and he never regained her, he saw Cassandra sprawling in the street, bloodied after being raped by Ajax and, as he reached the sea and the Trojan ships, Priam’s daughter Polyxena cried out from the shore, so Aeneas saw his son and father safe onto a ship and turned to wade back for her, but as he watched Pyrrhus’s Myrmidons seized and murdered her.

Aeneas is so overcome with grief that Achates takes up the story, telling how they think Queen Hecuba was led off to slavery while Helen – the cause of all the trouble – betrayed her Trojan lover, Deïphobus, to the Greeks and so was reconciled with Menelaus.

Scene 2

Dido decides everyone needs cheering up and leads them off. The last to leave is little Ascanius and Venus and Cupid enter at just that moment, seizing his hand and Venus promises him sweets and treats to lull him, takes him in her arms and sings and… Ascanius falls asleep. They carry his sleeping body to a grove of trees where they lay him and half cover him with flowers.

Now is he fast asleep, and in this grove,
Amongst green brakes I’ll lay Ascanius,
And strew him with sweet-smelling violets,
Blushing roses, purple hyacinth:
These milk-white doves shall be his centronels,
Who, if that any seek to do him hurt,
Will quickly fly to Cythereä’s fist.

They have a Cunning Plan. Cupid will impersonate Ascanius, insinuate himself into Dido’s embrace and while she is dandling him on her lap, touch her with one of his golden arrows and make her fall helplessly in love with Aeneas. Why? So that Dido will repair his ships, victual his soldiers and give him wealthy gifts.

Act 3

Scene 1

In Dido’s palace King Iarbas is trying to persuade Dido much in love with her she is, but Dido is bewitched by Cupid-disguised-as-Ascanius and confuses Iarbas with contradictory instructions, that she will listen to his love suit, then telling him to leave and never come back. Eventually, deeply upset, Iarbas does exit.

Anna, who had entered with them and watched all this, is Dido’s sister and encourages her growing love of Aeneas because she – Anna – carries a torch for Iarbas. Cupid inflames Dido with love, so that when Aeneas does enter with comrades-in-arms she is infatuated for him. When Aeneas chastely asks if she can help the Trojans rerig their ships, Dido replies they shall have all they want so long as… Aeneas stays with her.

The verse in which she describes how she will help with the ships is typical of Marlowe’s wonderful and rich descriptive ability:

I’ll give thee tackling made of riveled gold,
Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees,
Oars of massy ivory, full of holes,
Through which the water shall delight to play:
Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks,
Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves;
The masts, whereon thy swelling sails shall hang,
Hollow pyrámides of silver plate;
The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought
The wars of Troy, but not Troy’s overthrow…

As if caught out, she hastens to say she doesn’t want Aeneas to stay because she is in love with him, no no no no, she needs a general to lead her army in war against her neighbours. She emphasises she has been wooed by famous men from around the Mediterranean, in fact she has a gallery of portraits, and indeed Aeneas’s men examine these portraits and recognise many of the great men who wooed but could not win her.

To be honest, Dido’s being in two minds about her feelings seems to me clumsily done. She says he might be her lover – but then again not. She wants him to stay as her general… but maybe something more… but no, don’t think he could become her lover… and yet he might…

Scene 2 A grove near Carthage

Juno comes across Ascanius laid asleep under the flowers in the grove and is minded to murder him. But as she stands pondering the deed, Venus enters, alerted by the turtle doves she set to guard over him, and furiously accuses Juno. Juno admits she has sent storms and waves to batter Aeneas’s fleet but says she now realises it is futile to battle against fixed fate and so has come round to wanting to help him. Venus believes her and is much softened, saying that if Juno will help Aeneas, she (Venus) will give Juno all the gifts of love.

Juno points out that Dido and Aeneas are now both firmly in love (thus conveying a sense of the passage of time). She thinks it best that Dido and Aeneas, Juno’s favourite and Venus’s son, are married and thus the two goddesses will be united. Venus thinks it is good but doubts that Aeneas can be deterred from his resolution to travel on to Italy.

Juno has a plan. The couple are going hunting this afternoon, accompanied by all their attendants. Juno will send s rainstorm, separate them from their followers, make them take shelter in a cave where they will finally ‘seal their union’. Venus agrees and meanwhile lifts Ascanius and will take him ff to safety on Mount Ida.

Scene 3 The woods

Enter Dido, Aeneas, Anna, Iarbas, Achates, Cupid as Ascanius, and Followers. Once again Dido humiliates Iarbas in front of everyone, Aeneas joining in on her side, leaving the Gaetulian king furious.

Scene 4 A cave

As Juno promised, a rainstorm has broken and Dido and Aeneas been separated from everyone else and taken shelter in a cave. It takes a while of coyness on both parts but eventually Aeneas promises to stay in Carthage and be her love and Dido is delighted and showers him with presents.

Hold; take these jewèls at thy lover’s hand,
These golden bracelets, and this wedding ring,
Wherewith my husband wooed me, yet a maid,
And be thou king of Libya by my gift.

Act 4

Scene 1 In front of the same cave

Achates, Cupid as Ascanius, Iarbas, and Anna all marvel at the sudden onset of the storm which they suspect had divine origins. When they see Dido and Aeneas emerge from the cave Iarbas is consumed with envy and anger.

Scene 2 A room in Iarbas’ house

Iarbas sacrifices and makes a prayer to Jove, remembering how Dido was herself a refugee on this shore and how he, Iarbas, gave her land and help to build her city and now she scorns his love in favour of this interloper, Aeneas. At which point Anna enters and asks him what he’s praying for. To get rid of Aeneas, he explains, and win Dido’s love.

Why, Anna says, doesn’t he forget Dido and think of plighting his love somewhere else. Somewhere closer to home. Take her for example. But Iarbas laughs and says his heart is set on Dido. Anna abandons all discretion and declares she loves him ‘more than heaven’, but Iarbas rejects such a ‘loathsome change’.

Scene 3 A room in Dido’s palace

Aeneas declares he must leave, his destiny calls. He summons his companions. God, Marlowe has such a way with a driving cutting line of verse:

Aboard! aboard! since Fates do bid aboard,
And slice the sea with sable-coloured ships

Enter Achates, Cloanthus, Sergestus, and Ilioneus who all reinforce Aeneas’s decision, lamenting that dallying with women effeminates warriors like them. To Italy! To Italy! They exit leaving Aeneas to lament that he ought to tell Dido they’re going, but he knows she will take him in her arms, and cry tears of pearl and beg, and he will weaken.

Scene 4 Another apartment in Dido’s palace

Enter Dido and Anna. Dido laments that the Trojans seem to be doing a runner without saying goodbye. At which enter Aeneas, Achates, Ilioneus, Sergestus and Carthaginan Lords. Dido accuses Aeneas of panning to leave without saying goodbye. Aeneas lies that he had merely gone down to the harbour to see his friends off: how could he depart and leave behind his son, Ascanius? Did on the spot gives him her crown and sceptre and says he is her king, she will obey him. Dido sings the praise of how kingly, how godly Aeneas looks.

Aeneas says he will never leave, if he leaves her let death be his punishment. Which is odd because we saw him a few minutes earlier pledging to leave immediately for Italy. Is this meant to be an example of the spell she holds over him? She orders Anna to prepare her horse and have Aeneas led in triumph through the city as its new king, and Aeneas tells Achates they will stay and train and raise a host with which to voyage to Greece and punish the Greeks for destroying Troy, and he and the Trojans exit.

Left to herself Dido begins to worry that he’ll leave nonetheless, and 1. orders Anna to tell the nurse to take Ascanius away into the countryside 2. to bring her all the Trojans’s ship tackle and rigging so they cannot leave. As in the scene with Iarbas and then in the cave with Aeneas, Dido gives way in successive lines to waves of doubt, sure that he loves her yet paranoid that he will leave.

Lords enter and tell her her commands have been obeyed, Ascanius has been taken into the countryside and they have brought all Aeneas’s rigging and tackle. Dido addresses the wood and spars and ropes and rigging in a wonderfully high and eloquent speech about how all these objects were going to betray her and her love, but now she will lock them up safe and sound.

Scene 5 The country

Enter the nurse, with Cupid as Ascanius. the nurse tells Cupid-as-Ascanius she is going to take him to the country. As written, the scene has the same strange schizophrenia and Dido and Iarbas and Dido with Aeneas in the cave, namely that in alternate lines she on the one hand declares she is still young and frisky and ready to take a lover and in the other lines declares, no, she is old now and ripe only for the grave. Is this odd back and forth meant to be the result of Cupid maybe touching her with his love dart – was it almost comic the way Cupid touches her and makes her feel randy, then stops and she feels old and wizened again? There are no stage directions, so we can only guess. (It’s worth mentioning that all the locations described in this review are the inventions of a British scholar named Alexander Dyce in the 1870s. This man has, therefore, had a huge impact on the way all modern readers envision, imagine and conceive the play’s action.)

Act 5

Scene 1 An apartment in Dido’s palace

Enter Aeneas, with a paper in his hand drawing the platform of the city, with him Achates, Cloanthus, and Ilioneus. Aeneas is drawing a map of Carthage’s walls and confidently describe to his companions how he will make the place magnificent, borrowing the river Ganges from India to form the moat, the sun from Egypt, what shall they call it? Troy? Aenea? Anchseon after his father? We, the audience, know these are bootless fantasies.

Enter Hermes carrying the real Ascanius and explains he has been kept safe by the gods while Dido has been frolicking with Cupid in disguise. In a flash Aeneas realises why Dido is so besottedly in love with him, it is the god’s influence.

Hermes tells Aeneas he is forgetting his duty to the future, he must sail for Italy. Aeneas says, ‘How can I since Dido has taken all my masts and rigging?’ At this exact moment Iarbas enters and asks Aeneas why he looks so gloomy. When Aeneas explains that Jove is ordering him to leave for Italy but he has no rigging for his ships, Iarbas enthusiastically offers to give him everything he needs. Aeneas orders his followers to go with Iarbas and collect the necessary.

Enter Dido who asks Aeneas why his ships are fully equipped and lying in the roads off the harbour as if ready to leave (that happened quickly! in theatre there is no time). He tells her straight out that Hermes brought orders for Jove that he MUST leave. That is the only reason. But you can’t be leaving. But I am. But I will die if you go. But the father of the gods orders me to go.

Dido accuses Aeneas of being selfish and using the gods as an excuse. No I want to stay. Then why don’t you stay? Because the father of the gods has ordered me to go etc.

At which point Dido pivots round to woman scorned mode, and calls down dire revenge and hate on Aeneas, calls him a serpent she has harboured in her bosom, she hopes the waves smash their ships and their lifeless bodies are thrown up on the Libyan shore where she will leave them. Is he going to go? She opens her arms wide: Stay, stay here with me. Aeneas walks away.

Dido raves, sees him changing his mind at the last minute. Anna enters and Dido orders her to make haste to the harbour and persuade Aeneas to return. The nurse enters and tells Dido that Ascanius vanished overnight as if raptured away by the gods. He was, of course, Dido’s security, her hostage to prevent Aeneas leaving. Now nothing can prevent him. Dido orders the nurse thrown in prison.

Anna returns to say she saw the Trojan fleet set sail and cried out to Aeneas to stay but he hardened his heart and went below deck so as not to see her. Dido raves that she will follow him in verse typically full of extreme images of imaginative power and fantasy.

I’ll frame me wings of wax, like Icarus,
And, o’er his ship, will soar unto the sun,
That they may melt, and I fall in his arms;
Or else, I’ll make a prayer unto the waves,
That I may swim to him, like Triton’s niece:
O Anna! fetch Arion’s harp,
That I may tice a dolphin to the shore,
And ride upon his back unto my love!

She is beside herself with grief. She orders servants to go fetch all Aeneas’ belongings. Iarbas enters and asks Dido how much longer she will humiliate herself by mourning for a lost lover. What comes over from this as from other  moments in the play, is how time is wonderfully telescoped onstage, so that Aeneas’ ships have been rigged and set sail minutes after they were unrigged and docked. Everything takes place in this imaginative zone where wishes and thoughts come true almost immediately, where key bits of the plot take place in the time it takes to describe them.

Dido bids Iarbas help her build a large fire, ostensibly to burn all Aeneas’s things, then leave her. She is left alone onstage. One by one she throws onto the all the tokens of Aeneas and her love for him, the sword he swore love on, the tunic she first clothed him in, his letters and papers, and finally requests of the gods the Aeneas and his line may never live in peace, and from her city will arise a race to plague and pester Aeneas’ lineage (as the Carthaginians were to be the chief rivals in the Western Mediterranean for centuries).

Dido throws herself onto the funeral pyre. Anne enters, sees it, shrieks for help. Iarbas comes running, sees that Dido is dead, and kills himself. Anna makes a short speech saying life isn’t worth living and also kills herself.

Footnotes

Aeneas would sail onto Italy, where he fought the local tribes, the Rutulians led by King Turnus, as described in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid. Aeneas’ son Ascanius, will be the first king of Alba Longa and his descendants will rule for 300 years.

Until Silvia, a vestal virgin, would be ravished by Mars (Ares) and give birth to the twins Romulus and Remus, the former of whom would, of course, found the city of Rome a few miles north-west of Alba Longa and where, five hundred years later, Virgil would dedicate his epic treatment of the foundation of his city to the Emperor Augustus.

And Dido’s descendants, the Carthaginians, would rise to become the main opponents of Rome in the western Mediterranean for centuries. In fact the Carthaginians were themselves recent immigrants from Phoenicia, an ancient kingdom on the coast of the Levant, whose principal cities were Tyre and Sidon. Hence Dido is sometimes referred to as Sidonian Dido or queen. They were welcomed on the north African shore of what is now Tunisia by the local king, Iarbus, which is why he is so bitter that, after everything he did for her and her people, Dido rejects him and even mocks him publicly.

For those who don’t know the ancient Romans took over Greek mythology and the Greek gods wholesale, giving them their Roman names. In what follows the Roman god is named first (because these are the names used by Virgil in his epic, and by Marlowe, following him) and the Greek name in brackets.

Ceres is the Roman goddess of crops from which we get the word cereal.

Diana (Artemis) the goddess of the hunt, was the twin sister of Apollo, the sun god (making her the sun’s bright sister). As a virgin-goddess, Diana’s woodland followers – her nymphs – were also expected to retain their maidenhoods.

Ganymede was a Trojan prince, captured by Jove (Zeus) in the shape of an eagle and carried up to Olympos to be cup-bearer at the gods’ feasts.

Hector, a cousin of Aeneas, was a Trojan prince, a son of Troy’s King Priam, and the greatest fighter on the Trojan
side. Killed in a duel by the Greeks’ great champion, Achilles.

In a single night, the Greek princess Leda both slept with her husband and was seduced by Jupiter, who had taken on the form of a swan for this episode. The result was the birth of both Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra, and the twin brothers Castor and Pollux.

Helen was married to Menelaus, King of Sparta in Greece, from where, on a goodwill visit, Paris son of Priam, King of Troy, abducted her. That was the proximate cause of the Trojan War. Menelaus reached out to his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and senior king among the many Greek rulers, who rounded up the other Greek leaders and assembled the fleet of a thousand ships which sailed for Troy and besieged it for ten long years.

Ulysses (Odysseus) king of Ithaca, widely described as cunning and crafty, he was credited with coming up with the scheme for a wooden horse to end the siege of Troy. The second great epic by the legendary Greek poet, Homer, the Odyssey, describes Ulysses’ ten-year-long journey home from the war, during which he had adventures with the Cyclops, the Sirens, Scilla and Charybdis and the sorceress Circe who turned his crew into pigs.

Vulcan (Hephaestus) was the god of fire and the blacksmith god. He was lame leading the other able-bodied gods to mock him. But when he discovered Mars (Ares) god of war, was having an affair with Vulcan’s wife Venus (Aphrodite) Vulcan wove a net of metal in which he caught the adulterous gods and exposed them to the ridicule of all the other gods.

Venus (Aphrodite) the goddess of beauty, was the daughter of Jupiter with the Titan goddess Dione. She was the mother of Aeneas, who got pregnant by the Trojan prince Anchises.

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil (70 – 19 BC) was the greatest poet of the golden age of Roman poetry, as the Republic collapsed and was replaced by the Empire under its first emperor, Augustus. Virgil wrote exemplary shorter forms before creating one of the most influential epic poems in history, the Aeneid, the epic story of Aeneas’ post-Troy travels and adventures.

Related links

Dido, Queen of Carthage on the Elizabethan Drama website This excellent website gives you a choice of reading the play script unencumbered by notes, or a very comprehensively annotated text, full of fascinating facts.

Marlowe reviews

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

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Posted by Simon on October 14, 2020

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A Chronology of the Crusades

The Crusades lasted about two hundred years from 1095 to about 1295 and were designed to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Places from the control of Muslim rulers. Although there were later military adventures or social movements which called themselves crusades, they either petered out or were diverted to other targets. Historians squabble over whether there were seven or eight or nine crusades.

Muhammed

632 Muhammed dies.

637 Muslim armies besiege and take Jerusalem from the Byzantines.

The Great Schism

1054 Eastern and Western Christianity finally split after years of drift, crystallising into the Eastern Orthodox church based in Byzantium and the Roman Catholic church based in Rome, their respective followers known as Latins (or Franks) and Greeks.

1063 King Ramiro I of Aragon murdered by a Muslim and Pope Alexander II offers an indulgence (forgiveness of all sins; go directly to heaven) to anyone taking arms to revenge this crime.

1064 to 1066 – A group of about 7,000 Germans, some heavily armed, travel to Jerusalem and back unhindered.

1073 Pope Gregory VII helps organise an army against the Muslims in Spain, promising any soldier he can keep the land he seizes.

1095 Byzantine Emperor Alexios I sends an ambassador to Pope Urban II asking for military help against the growing Turkish threat (in fact the fast-expanding Great Seljuk Empire). Urban sees an opportunity to reassert Western control over the East and starts preaching a new idea: anyone who takes up arms and travels to liberate the Holy Land under the order of the Pope will go to heaven. Killing the infidel will no longer require penance: it will be a penance.

The First Crusade 1096 to 1099

1096 Easter. Peter the Hermit led a mass of maybe 20,000 people to set off to the Holy Land. As they moved through Germany they sparked off a series of massacres of Jews in every town and city. Having reached the Byzantine Empire they were ambushed by Muslim forces and only about 3,000 survived. Official crusader armies departed Europe August and September 1096.

1097 Siege of Antioch until June 1098. Crusaders massacre the Muslim inhabitants and loot the city.

1099 15 July – CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM The remnants of the army enter/liberate Jerusalem, massacre native Muslims, killing all the Jews, burning the synagogue, looting all the holy buildings. The chronicler claims some 70,000 were slaughtered and the streets piled high with corpses.

1100 On Christmas Day in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Baldwin of Edessa is crowned King of Jerusalem.

[1101 The Crusade of 1101, also known as The crusade of the faint-hearted due to the involvement of soldiers who had turned back from the First Crusade, was in three distinct groups of western soldiers, all of which were soundly thrashed by Seljuk Turks led by Kilij Arslan. As usual when the crusaders took Caesarea they rounded up all the Muslims into the Grand Mosque and massacred them all. And were then themselves beaten and killed by Kilij. The survivors eventually made it to Jerusalem, more as a pilgrimage than a military force.]

1109 The Franks sack the city of Tripoli after a five year siege, then rampage through it, burning the Banu Ammar library, the largest in the Muslim world, containing over 100,000 manuscripts.

1118 Baldwin dies, succeeded by his cousin, Baldwin II.

1124 Tyre falls to the Franks who now hold the entire cost from Egypt to Antioch.

1131 King Baldwin II dies and is succeeded by his son-in-law, Count Fulk of Anjou.

1122 to 1124 The Venetian Crusade A combination of religious fervour (it was sponsored by Pope Callixtus II) and commercial savvy, some 120 ships carrying over 15,000 men left Venice on 8 August 1122: they besieged Corfu to settle a commercial dispute; defeated a navy from Fatimid Egypt; besieged and took the sea port of Tyre, which became a Venetian trading centre, and on the way home ravaged various Greek islands, forcing the Empire to concede their trading privileges.

1135 Pope Innocent II’s grant of crusading indulgences to anyone who opposed papal enemies can be seen as the beginning of politically motivated crusades.

The Second Crusade 1145 to 1149

1144 King Fulk dies. Army of Imad ad-Din Zengi recaptures Edessa (modern Urfa), massacring the men and selling the women into slavery. Which leads Pope Eugenius III to call for another crusade, supported by various clerics, notably Bernard of Clairvaux.

1146 March 31 – Bernard delivers the first of many thundering first crusade sermons. In May and June armies from France and Germany led by King Louis VII and Conrad III set off.

[1147 A group of crusaders from northern Europe allied with the king of Portugal, Afonso I, retaking Lisbon from the Muslims.]

1147 October 25 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Conrad III and his army of 20,000 men was badly defeated by the Seljuk Turks led by Mesud I. The Germans abandoned the crusade and Conrad and the 2,000 survivors retreated to join the forces of King Louis VII of France.

1148 Louis and Conrad’s surviving soldiers besiege Damascus. It ends in complete defeat and a ruinous retreat. ‘St Bernard’s crusade ended in fiasco.’ (p.93)

1150 Louis and Conrad return home, failures.

The Wendish Crusade

1147 German knights attacked western Slavs on their border with a view to christianising them. Henry restarted efforts to conquer the Wends in 1160, and they were defeated in 1162.

[1172 Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, made a pilgrimage that is sometimes considered a crusade.]

Saladin

1169 Saladin – Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb – a Kurdish Muslim from Damascus, is in complete control of Egypt.

1169 to 1187 the campaigns of Saladin to unite the usually warring Arab kingdoms.

1180 King Baldwin IV negotiates a peace treaty with Saladin.

1185 24-year-old Baldwin IV dies, leaving the throne of Jerusalem to the eight-year-old Baldwin V.

1186 Baldwin V dies. The kingdom is weakened by complicated dynastic feuds which lead to Guy of Lusignan being crowned king.

1187 SALADIN RETAKES JERUSALEM Saladin led an enormous army of 30,000 into Palestine and inflicted a crushing defeat on the army of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July. He took his time capturing all the surrounding towns and then retook Jerusalem on 29 September. In studied contrast to the crusader’s massacre and pogrom of 1099, Saladin enforces his army to respect the city and its inhabitants: not a building was looted, not a person harmed.

When Pope Urban III heard the news he died of a heart attack. On 29 October Pope Gregory VIII issued a papal bull calling for the…

The Third Crusade 1189 to 1192

1189 Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, Holy Roman Emperor, commanded a vast army which sailed to Constantinople, then fought its way across Anatolia, winning battles but suffering from the heat and lack of supplies. Coming down the other side of the Taurus Mountains, Frederick went for a swim in the river Göksu and drowned. His disheartened troops turned back. Philip II of France, and Richard I of England led their armies on to the Holy Land.

1190 Pre-Crusade pogroms of Jews spread across England climaxing in a particularly violent massacre of Jews at York in March.

1191 Richard the Lionheart captured Cyprus from the Byzantines, then recaptured Acre and Jaffa. But they ran out of food before reaching Jerusalem which he knew, anyway, he didn’t have the force to hold.

1192 Richard negotiates a treaty with Saladin allowing Christian pilgrims free passage, then sails home. ‘Jerusalem would never again be captured by crusaders.’ (Crusades p.151) In Palestine Richard had had a big argument with Leopold of Austria. Now, travelling overland back through Leopold’s territory, Richard was identified and arrested. Leopold handed him over to the Emperor Henry VI who held him in prison for a year before a vast ransom could be organised to buy his freedom.

1193 Saladin dies worn out.

1199 Richard dies of gangrene from an arrow wound at an insignificant siege in Aquitaine.

The German Crusade

1197 Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, fulfils a promise to his father. Led by Conrad of Wittelsbach the army landed at Acre and captured Sidon and Beirut, but when Henry died most of the forces returned to Germany.

The North European Crusade

1193 Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against Northern European pagans and his successor Pope Innocent III issued a papal bull declaring a crusade against the pagan Livonians. Bishop Berthold of Hanover led a large army against them, during which the Christian settlers found the city of Riga, although Berthold was himself killed in battle in 1198.

1201 Albrecht von Buxthoeven established Riga as the seat of his bishopric in 1201.

1202 Albrecht formed the Livonian Knights to convert the pagans to Catholicism. The Livonians were conquered and converted between 1202 and 1209.

1217 Pope Honorius III declared a crusade against the Prussians.

1226 Konrad of Masovia gave Chelmno to the Teutonic Knights in 1226 as a base for the crusade.

1236 The Livonian Knights were defeated by the Lithuanians at Saule.

1237 Pope Gregory IX merged the remainder of the troops into the Teutonic Knights as the Livonian Order.

1249 The Teutonic Knights completed their conquest of the Old Prussians. They then conquered and converted the Lithuanians, a process which lasted into the 1380s. The order tried unsuccessfully to conquer Orthodox Russia.

The Fourth Crusade 1202 to 1004: the Sack of Constantinople

1199 Pope Innocent III began preaching the Fourth Crusade in France, England, and Germany. The two military leaders Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice and German King Philip of Swabia had their own political agendas and when the enterprise turned out not be able to pay the Venetian fleet, they decided to conquer and loot Constantinople instead.

1202 They seized the Christian city of Zara prompting Innocent to excommunicate them.

1203 Easter – the army set sail for Byzantium.

1204 The army entered Constantinople and enacted the complicated plot to put Prince Alexius IV on the throne. Alexius had promised wild amounts of money in return but turned out to be unable to pay. Alexius was murdered in a palace coup; the blind old emperor died; the coup plotter announced himself emperor. All this made it easier for the Latins and their Catholic leaders to give the go-ahead for a devastating sack of the city, which spread out of control to unbridled looting, massacring, churches pillaged and thousands murdered in the streets.

1205 Bulgars defeated the crusaders and remaining Greeks at Adrianople. The devastation of Byzantium permanently weakened the Eastern Empire, didn’t bring its church under Latin rule, as the Pope dreamed, and probably benefited Venice most, which seized control of commerce in the empire.

The Albigensian Crusade 1208 to 1229

1208 launched to eliminate the Cathars of Occitania (present-day southern France) lasted for decades and led to Northern French domination of the South. In July 1208 the crusaders took Béziers and massacred every man, woman and child. When soldiers asked the Abbot how they could avoid killing ‘true’ believers, he replied:

‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’

Mindset of terrorists throughout the ages.

[1221 Pope Honorius III asked King Andrew II to put down heretics in Bosnia. Hungarian forces answered further papal calls in

1234 and 1241. This campaign ended with the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241.]

The Fifth Crusade 1213 to 1221

1215 Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215. It was at this mass assembly of bishops and cardinals that ‘heresy’ was defined, ‘inquisition’ formalised, Jews were ordered to wear special clothing and Innocent announced his new crusade.

1216 Innocent III dies.

1217 Duke Leopold VI and Andrew II arrived in Acre but failed to assert their power and left.

1219 The remaining forces besieged Damietta in Egypt and captured it in November 1219. But further plans were blocked by the Arab leader Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil and the crusaders were forced to surrender and hand back Damietta.

The Sixth Crusade b.1228

1228 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, after being repeatedly threatened and eventually excommunicated by Innocent’s successor, Pope Honorius III, for his delays, finally landed at Acre.

1229 RESTORATION OF JERUSALEM – However, both sides being reluctant to fight, Frederick agreed a peace treaty with Al-Kamil which allowed Latin Christians to rule most of Jerusalem and a strip of land along the coast, with the Muslims controlling their sacred areas in Jerusalem. Frederick had himself crowned in the Holy Sepulchre and declared himself the mouthpiece of God. Frederick returned home to find the Pope had organised armies to invade his realm.

1238 Frederick tried to extend his lands into northern Italy and Pope Gregory declared a crusade against him. ‘The Holy War was now being preached not against the ‘infidel’, not even against a heretic – no such charge was made against Frederick – but against a political enemy of the Pope.’ (Crusades p.181) Crusade had become degraded to a purely secular concept.

1239 A force led by King Theobald I of Navarre arrived in Acre in September. Defeated in battle in November, Theobald negotiated another treaty with the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil.

1244 The Destruction OF Jerusalem

The Ayyubids invited Khwarazmian forces whose empire had been destroyed by Genghiz Khan’s Mongols, to reconquer the city. It fell July 15, 1244 and the Khwarezmians completely razed Jerusalem to the ground, leaving it in ruins.
1244 An Arab force led by al-Salih Ayyub seized Jerusalem.

The Seventh Crusade 1248 to 1254

1245 to 1250 King Louis IX of France organized a vast army, set sail in 1248 and landed in Egypt in June 1249. In a series of battles they were defeated, and in 1250 Louis was captured and ransomed for 800,000 bezants, and a ten-year truce agreed.

1254 Louis withdrew to Acre, now the only Crusader territory of any significance, which he built up again until his money ran out in 1254 and he had to return to France.

[1256 The Venetians were evicted from Tyre, prompting the War of Saint Sabas over territory in Acre claimed by Genoa and Venice. The war dragged on for a decade during which both Christian sides allied with Muslim forces and most fortified buildings in Acre were destroyed.

1266 Louis IX’s brother Charles seized Sicily and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean with a view to restoring the Latin empire by reconquering Byzantium.]

The Eighth Crusade 1270

1265 The ferocious Mameluk Sultan Baibars ibn-Abdullah had captured Caesarea, Nazareth, Haifa, Safed, Toron, and Arsuf.

1268 Baibars captures Antioch and massacres its entire population.

1270 These events inspire King Louis IX of France to sail to Tunis with a large fleet and impressive army. However it was the height of the Saharan summer, the army was devastated by disease and Louis died. Thus ended the last major attempt to take the Holy Land.

The Ninth Crusade 1272

1270 The future Edward I of England had travelled with Louis. He sailed with his forces to Acre in May 1271. His forces were small and he was unable to alter the existing peace treaties between Baibars and King Hugh of Jerusalem.

1272 Edward learned of his father’s death.

1274 Edward I returns to England to take up his crown.

1277 The fearsome Baibars dies.

The last crusade

1281 Election of a French pope, Martin IV who threw himself behind the campaigns of French king Charles I. His ships were at Sicily when the Emperor of Byzantium conspired to provoke the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, an uprising during which the crusader fleet was abandoned and burnt.

1287 King Charles I dies, allowing Henry II of Cyprus to reclaim Jerusalem.

These kinds of struggles are typical of the endless disunity and conflict among the Roman Christians which continually undermined efforts to hold the Holy Land. In this two hundred year period the papacy, far from creating the kind of total control over Christendom which Innocent and Urban dreamed of, had become just one among a hectic throng of nationalist kings and princes all fighting each other. The papacy had lost all its moral authority. Thus:

1284 The Crusade of Aragon was called by Pope Martin against Peter III of Aragon, Peter supporting anti-Angevin forces in Sicily, Martin supporting Charles of Anjou.

1298 Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed a crusade against Frederick III of Sicily (Peter’s younger brother).

The end of the Crusader states

1291 A group of pilgrims from Acre was attacked by Muslim forces and in retaliations killed some innocent Muslim merchants. The Sultan demanded compensation from the king of Acre and, when none came, used it as a pretext to besiege and then capture the city. Men, women and children were massacred: prisoners were beheaded. Acre had been the last independent Crusader state in the Holy Land and its fall signified that – The Crusades had ended.

Non-Holy Land ‘crusades’

1365 The Alexandrian Crusade Peter I of Cyprus captured and sacked Alexandria for mainly commercial reasons, killing as many Christians as Muslims and Jews.

1390 The Mahdian Crusade Louis II led a ten-week campaign against Muslim pirates in North Africa. After a siege the crusaders signed a ten-year truce.

1396 Crusade against the Ottomans led by Sigismund of Luxemburg, king of Hungary which was defeated by the Ottomans in the Battle of Nicopolis.

1420s The Hussite Crusades military action against the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia from 1420 to about 1431. Crusades were declared five times during that period: in 1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, and 1431.

1440s Crusade against the Ottomans Polish-Hungarian King Władysław Warneńczyk invaded recently conquered Ottoman territory, reaching Belgrade in January 1444. Negotiated a truce with Sultan Murad II. The Ottomans won a decisive victory at the Battle of Varna on 10 November, and the crusaders withdrew. This left Constantinople exposed and it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

John Hunyadi and Giovanni da Capistrano organized a 1456 crusade to lift the Ottomon siege of Belgrade.
1487 Pope Innocent VIII called for a crusade against the Waldensians in the south of France but little military activity followed and it had no effect…

Sources

Other medieval reviews

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Posted by Simon on December 4, 2015

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The short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 to 1930) wrote some hundred and twenty short stories, excluding the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories and the 17 or so Brigadier Gerard stories. The excellent Société Sherlock Holmes de France website estimates the total number of all Conan Doyle’s fictions as 239, for he also wrote some 20 short novels. His first story was published when he was 20, the last when he was 70.

For boys

The overall affect is rip-roaring adventures for boys. None of them are really for adults, none of them have much psychology, much interiority, and the plots – though superficially gripping – are all wound up in a brisk few final paras. They anticipate hundreds of adventure movies and comics and graphic novels. They are short and punchy and great fun.

Reassuring

Even the horror and science fiction stories, though they ostensibly deal with the bizarre and grotesque, are ultimately reassuring because there is never any doubt as to the good sense and decency of the narrator(s). It is always a man and he is always soundly for the Empire and the natural fair play of the British, innately superior to all other nations and divinely ordained to rule vast tracts of the world and over their occasionally troublesome natives (and, quite often, over the great unwashed back here in Blighty).

Many of the stories exemplify that specially British sense of justice and fairmindedness which, in the mind of Imperialists, justified, indeed demanded, our Imperial role and which, similarly, justified the existence of a landed aristocracy with its Justices of the Peace, Lord Lieutenants and whatnot.

(For a thorough depiction of this deeply conservative worldview see my review of Andrew Young’s biography of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902.)

G.M. Young, historian of the Victorian era, writes about ‘the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity’, and Conan Doyle is a kind of quintessence of this, a charmingly unreflective, unquestioning, untroubled supporter of everything British.

Conan Doyle comes over as everyone’s favourite uncle, full of rattling good stories and anecdotes – but nobody for a minute takes any of his opinions seriously. He is Mr Chips.

Magazines

The stories were written for money to be published in the impressively wide variety of magazines which flourished in the 1890s. They were reprinted in numerous subsequent collections. One of the collections was titled Round the Fire Stories and that perfectly captures the Boy Scout ambience of so many of them.

The 1880s and 90s were a golden age of little magazines, created to feed the appetite of the middle and lower classes who had been taught to read as a result of the 1870 Education Act and its sequels, who, due to the wealth-creating effect of the Second Industrial Revolution, increasingly had the means to buy cheap titles.

Conan Doyle’s most effective outlet was the Strand magazine (established 1891), packed with articles, news and stories by leading writers of the day, all for the bargain price of one shilling in which he continued to publish to the end of his career.

These magazines demanded sensational storylines, glamorous protagonists, short, sharp doses of the mysterious, the macabre, the haunting or the humorous, and this well-defined format and sensation-seeking audience should be kept in mind when reading Conan Doyle’s stories.

Themes

Patriotism

‘I do not go so far as to say that the English are more honest than any other nation, but I have found them more expensive to buy.’ (The Lost Special)

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!’ said the captain, at last. ‘He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’ (The Slapping Sal)

No more striking example could be given of the long arm and steel hand of the British law than that within a few months this mixed crew, Sclavonian, negro, Manila men, Norwegian, Turk and Frenchman, gathered on the shore of the distant Argentine, were all brought face to face at the Central Criminal Court in the heart of London town. (The Tragedy of Flowery Land)

The British Empire

The colonies, especially Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, are the playground of white men – the justification of the Empire goes without saying i.e. that native peoples should have their land taken and their goods stolen doesn’t occur. See Doyle’s good-humoured and open-handed pamphlets justifying the Second Boer War, which simply don’t consider the possibility that the British might have been motivated solely by power politics and greed. In The Green Flag even mutinous Irish republicans, when faced with the fuzzy wuzzies, turn out to be the stoutest defenders of the British Empire.

London

‘…now gradually overtaken and surrounded by the red brick tentacles of the London octopus.’

London is always growing, throwing out ever-expanding avenues of redbrick terraces. The ones so many of us still live in to this day.

Women

Chivalry is the way the patriarchy, men, reassured themselves that they deserved to be in charge, that it was OK to keep women in powerless subjugation. Chivalry was men’s reply to women demanding the vote or control of their own lives: look, we defer to you in everything sweet ladies, why on earth would you need the vote?

‘Ladies are in danger of losing their privileges when they usurp the place of the other sex. They cannot claim both.’ (Doctors of Hoyland)

Women in Conan Doyle are tall, stately, and the most beautiful woman in England. Defending their ‘honour’ is the motivation for quite a few of the stories.

Diamonds

Diamonds seem to be the treasure and currency of choice, the bigger the better, and feature in his very first story, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley as well as The Stone of Boxman’s Drift, Our Midnight Visitor, The Club-Footed Grocer.

Comedy

A constant throughout is Conan Doyle’s bluff good humour. Rising to overt comedy in the GP reminiscences and Brigadier Gerard stories, or just lying low, purring in the background. Constantly, pervasively there is his confidence and solidity, as ubiquitous as his splendid Edwardian moustache.

Crime

Crime of the most sensational and puzzling sort, of course, for example, The Story of the Lost Special or The Story of the Lost Watches.

Sensation

The stories were published in popular magazines which often contained sensational news or features. The stories take this tone from their surroundings. Nothing is subtle or underplayed. Everything is the most sensational scandal in London or England or the world.

Stanniford, the banker! I remembered the name at once. His flight from the country some seven years before had been one of the scandals and sensations of the time. (The Sealed Room)

Such was the position of affairs when, upon the evening of Monday, June 21st, there came a fresh development which changed what had been a mere village scandal into a tragedy which arrested the attention of the whole nation. (The Black Doctor)

It’s the same breathless sensationalism which characterises the Holmes stories and give them their delightful, thrilling sense of (utterly spurious) importance.

Scandal

Scandal and the fear of scandal is a motivation in these and the Holmes stories to a degree which is hard for us to understand. The reputation of upper middle class people was so important that they were willing to kill or die to preserve it. Just the hint that some misbehaviour in a former life abroad might revisit someone in respectable England causes numerous Conan Doyle protagonists to drop dead of horror. The Jew’s Breastplate is a particularly preposterous example of a story driven by this ludicrous sentiment.

Secret societies

Secret societies flourished in the 1880s and 1890s. They merged in the public mind with terrorist groups such as nihilists, anarchists, Fenians, even the violent suffragettes. They are routinely offered as explanations when some crime, especially a murder, goes unsolved and were so familiar a subject that Conan Doyle can make a comic story about a chemist who is mistakenly invited to give a lecture about dynamite to a group of nihilists.

Murder

Plenty of people get murdered and the murders are horrible and yet, in some difficult-to-define way, romantic and exciting. They upset the characters – but they don’t upset us, because they are so transparently the engines of a rattling good yarn.

Horror

The great horror trope of the pale ghastly face at the window occurs in scores of the stories – Uncle Jeremy’s Household, A Pastoral Horror – and melodramatic horror is one of the commonest emotions: ‘… and she realized, with a thrill of horror, that what she had taken to be a glove was the hand of a man, who was prostrate upon the floor.’

And now I come to that portion of my story which fills me even now with a shuddering horror when I think of it (The Striped Chest)

This could be the epigraph to many of the collected stories.

The 1880s

The Mystery of Sasassa Valley (September 1879)

‘Tell it? Oh, certainly; but it is a longish story and a very strange one; so fill up your glass again, and light another cigar, while I try to reel it off.’

The opening words sets the tone for the entire oeuvre. Jack Turnbull as an old man recalls how he and Lucky Tom Donahue, two young lawyers who packed in study to emigrate to South Africa, took their cue from a native tale of a haunted valley and discovered the weird glowing was given off not by demons but by diamonds!

The American’s Tale (December 1880)

“Deuced rum yarn!” said young Sinclair. Hard core Western redneck Jefferson Adams regales a posh English literary club with a tall tale about a feud in 1870s Arizona between cool Brit called Scott and short-fused Alabama Joe which ends with Joe being eaten alive by a giant Venus flytrap plant!

A Night Among the Nihilists (April 1881)

‘By the way,’ he remarked, as we smoked a cigar over our wine, ‘we should never have known you but for the English labels on your luggage.’

Robinson, a clerk in a corn merchant’s, is sent to Russia to open up trade with a major landowner. There is a mix-up and he is introduced into a secret society of Nihilists and saved just as he is rumbled, when the police burst in!

That Little Square Box (December 1881)

‘Dick was just the man I wanted; kindly and shrewd in his nature, and prompt in his actions, I should have no difficulty in telling him my suspicions, and could rely upon his sound sense to point out the best course to pursue. Since I was a little lad in the second form at Harrow, Dick had been my adviser and protector.’

The narrator is a nervous, solitary, literary type who, when he boards the ship from Boston to London, overhears two foreign men whispering about a secret box and when to set it off, thinks he is hearing anarchist/terrorists. In fact, they are releasing racing pigeons!

The Gully of Bluemansdyke: A True Colonial Story (December 1881)

‘The two men lapsed into silence for some time, moodily staring into the glow of the fire, and pulling at their short clays.’

New Zealand in the 1850s. A posse is formed to hunt down seven men who bushwhacked the young sons of two old-timers. A paean to the rugged spirit of the emigrant colonial trooper. Trooper Braxton and his capture of the Bluemansdyke murderers. The Australia stories are linked.

Bones, The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice (April 1882)

Comic tale. ‘

Boss, with the keen power of calculation which had made him the finest cricketer at Rugby in his day, had caught the rein immediately below the bit, and clung to it with silent concentration.’

Another tale of derring-do in the New Zealand outback, but lightened with romance and humour, as two English miners, posh John ‘Boss’ Morgan and herculean Abe ‘Bones’ Durton save the life of pretty young Miss Carrie Sinclair who transforms the life of mining shanty Harvey’s Sluice.

‘With these few broken words the strangely assorted friends shook hands and looked lovingly into each other’s eyes.’

Reminiscent of Paint Your Wagon. Climaxes with a big shootout as the pals save Miss Sinclair from bushrangers.

Our Derby Sweepstakes (May 1882)

Two men compete for the hand of the fair Miss Eleanor Montague and decide the winner of the Derby will win her hand. Told in 1st person by Eleanor in an impersonation of a Victorian airhead.

That Veteran (September 1882)

Very amusing. A gentleman on a walking holiday in Wales pulls into an inn where he is regaled with stories of the Crimean War and a soldier’s career by one sergeant Turnbull until his head is swimming and he passes out. The soldier is a fake, a criminal, who has drugged him and stolen his watch.

My Friend the Murderer (December 1882)

A further New Zealand story: the prison doctor narrator (Conan Doyle/Watson) hears the life story of Maloney, the Bluemansdyke murderer who escaped the rope by turning queen’s evidence and had sundry adventures trying to escape revengers as he fled to Australia, England, France and then back to Oz where he finally dies in a bar brawl.

The Captain of the Polestar (January 1883)

‘Being an extract from the singular journal of John McAlister Ray, student of medicine’. He is the doctor on the Polestar which travels unwisely far into the northern, Arctic ice fields, supposedly in search of whales, but in fact driven by the haunted captain Nicholas Craigie who is pursuing the phantom of his murdered sweetheart which flees across the ice.

See an interesting article about the story’s origins in Conan Doyle’s actual Arctic voyage aboard the whaler Hope.

Gentlemanly Joe (March 1883)

The narrator is a young man working at a bank along with four other blue-bloods and the vulgar, jumped-up son of a bookie who they ironically name Gentlemanly Joe. They mercilessly rib him, especially when he falls in love with little Miss Cissy who is in fact engaged to one of them. Then comes the night of the great fire when the Newsome house burns down and it is big strong Gentlemanly Joe who breaks down the door and rescues Miss Cissy. Though she marries her fiancée she and the others will never forget Gentlemanly Joe!

The Winning Shot (July 1883)

A genuinely eerie supernatural story. One Octavius Gaster arrives at a charming upper class household in Dartmoor where Lottie Underwood is due to marry her sweetheart. He casts clouds over the gathering, defends spiritualism, has a newspaper cutting implicating him in black magic, falls in love with Lottie, which leads to a fight with Charley and he is evicted. Then the great shooting match between soldiers at locals where Gaster turns up and, at the climax of the match, appears to make Charley shoot through a phantasm of himself, killing himself. The spookiest thing is that after weeks of delirium Lottie is seen getting into a train with him.

Selecting a Ghost (December 1883)

Comic story told by a preposterously pretentious narrator Mr d’Odd, a successful grocer who has bought a big old house and now wants a ghost to go with it so he asks his brother-in-law in London to find one, resulting in a crook from London coming down and pretending to be a purveyor of ghosts who audition for him as he drinks some magic potion. When he awakes, he has of course been robbed.

The Silver Hatchet (December 1883)

‘On the 3rd of December 1861, Dr. Otto von Hopstein, Regius Professor of Comparative Anatomy of the University of Budapest, and Curator of the Academical Museum, was foully and brutally murdered within a stone-throw of the entrance to the college quadrangle.’

Then another victim is found. Then the friendship of two medical students who stumble across a silver-handled ax and, as he holds it, one goes homicidally mad. They are arrested it and the police inspector handling it also becomes homicidal. It is cursed:

‘Ever evil, never good, Reddened with a loved one’s blood.’

The inclusion of the students makes it seem like the short melodramatic plot of an Austrian operetta.

An Exciting Christmas Eve or, My Lecture on Dynamite (December 1883)

Odd tone of tale about a short bespectacled Herr Doctor Otto von Spee to whom lots of accidents occur, the final one being kidnapped on Christmas Eve to deliver a lecture on gunpowder to a secret, presumably revolutionary, society which climaxes with some sample guncotton being detonated and Dr von Spee escaping.

J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement (January 1884)

Remarkably powerful fiction which claims to be a true account of what happened on the Marie Celeste (discovered drifting December 1873): the boat is slowly taken over by an evil half-caste – Mr. Septimius Goring – who along with two black sailors murders all the white crew and passengers, steering to a remote African settlement where he lords it over the natives instead of to Portugal. When the natives see the lucky charm an old slave gave him in America their superstitious reverence forces Goring to set Jephson adrift and so be picked up by a passing ship.

The Heiress of Glenmahowley (January 1884)

First person narrative. Bob Elliott and John Vereker are two unsuccessful lawyers marooned in a pub in the west of Ireland, passing the time being unpleasantly racist about the locals when the publican tells them of a local widow who is fabulously wealthy and her beautiful young daughter the heiress. Comedy as both men pretend not to be interested but next day climb over the big spiked wall, tumbling into the ditch and scrambling through briars to try to woo and win the beauty. It is made plain he English narrator is a pompous preening twerp.

The Blood-Stone Tragedy: A Druidical Story (February 1884)

The narrator begins to discuss the recent case of Williams the druid when the other man in the railway carriage says, Hush, don’t mention the word, it might wake my sleeping wife. And then proceeds to tell the story of how his then fiancée got lost in the mountains and fell into the clutches of a maniac who thinks he is a druid and plans to sacrifice her at midnight.

John Barrington Cowles (April 1884)

Longer and more psychologically penetrating than usual: the narrator’s friend falls for an ice cold beauty who is associated with two men who went mad, with cruelty to her dog, with tyranny over her mother, the daughter of a soldier in India who indulged in black magic. She beats a mesmerist at a public lecture and then, at the height of their engagement, she reveals something hideous to John Barrington Cowles. He raves that she is a werewolf. He goes down with brain fever and then is taken by the narrator to the Isle of May to recover. One night with a storm approaching, JBC hears her calling and runs to his death over a cliff.

The Cabman’s Story: the Mysteries of a London ‘Growler’ (May 1884)

A London cabbie tells a few of his colourful experiences like carrying a corpse, and carrying a forger. Nice ventriloquism of the cabbie, similar to My Friend The Murderer.

The Tragedians (August 1884)

Young Mr Barker the narrator enters the happy life of the Latour family in Paris, the widowed Madame, young Rose and brother Henry the would-be actor. In another part of town the famous actor and seducer of women, Lablas, wins at cards and plans the abduction of Rose. Barker and the brothers are walking home late when they encounter Lablas and accomplices abducting Rose. Fight. Broken up with the promise of a duel. And, as Henry had just got the role of Laertes opposite Hamlet, the duel is fought for real onstage in a scene which rises to real intensity and power.

Crabbe’s Practice (December 1884)

Pure comedy as two medical students cook up a fake drowning and electrical resuscitation to boost Crabbe’s practice.

The Man from Archangel (January 1885)

1st person narrator. Lonely young scientist John M’Vittie inherits money and a barren stretch of property in Scotland to which he moves to carry out his obscure experiments. One stormy night a schooner is shipwrecked on the shore and, out of character, he rows out and saves a beautiful young damsel who doesn’t speak English. Days later a tall, brown-faced, red-shirted, leather-booted pirate-type comes snooping claiming the woman is his bride. But she hates him. He and his crew kidnapped her from her wedding.

The Lonely Hampshire Cottage (May 1885)

3rd person. Very moody landlord John Ranter is advised by his doctor to retire and moves to a remote cottage where he beats his wife and is a byword. Then a strange sailor appears, walking to Southampton, in need of a bed for the night. Ranter offers it and slowly unravels that the stranger has struck it rich in California and bears dollars and gold. In the middle of the night he creeps up the stairs to murder him but is caught by the stranger who reveals himself as Ranter’s runaway son.

The Great Keinplatz Experiment (July 1885)

Professor von Baumgarten is an expert on mesmerism and spiritualism and carries out an experiment with his daughter’s fiancé and his student, Fritz von Hartmann, to see if souls leave the body during hypnosis. They do, but re-enter the wrong bodies, the professor’s soul entering the student’s body and vice versa, with hilarious consequences. Played for laughs, this reminded me of a Laurel and Hardy short.

The Parson of Jackman’s Gulch (December 1885)

1853 in this rough mining settlement 150 miles from Ballarat when a pastor arrives and wins over the miners by reading the Bible whenever they blaspheme. His campaign climaxes with the first ever sermon in the back of the pub where he proceeds to lock them in and reveal himself to be the noted bushranger Conky Jim while his partners rob the assay office of its entire haul of gold.

The Fate of the Evangeline (December 1885)

1st person. John Vincent Gibbs reveals the true story behind the loss of the ‘Evangeline’, namely that, rejected in love he had become an anchorite on a remote Scottish island when who should turn up but his erstwhile fiancée, mercenary father and calculating suitor, all of whom he overhears, before swimming out to the yacht Miss Lucy is sleeping aboard, cutting the painter and absconding with her. The schooner is run down in the Irish Sea by a freighter bound for Australia where they make a new life and, ultimately, write this ‘true account’. Quotes the Scotsman quoting Edgar Allen Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, on the necessity of eliminating the impossible etc.

Touch and Go: A Midshipman’s Story (April 1886)

1st person. It is 1868 and the narrator was a lad of 14 back on the banks of the river Clyde from his first journey as a seaman. He, his sister and cousin fool old Jock their minder and take a sailing boat out for a pleasure run alone and on impulse decide to sail to the mouth of the river where a storm pushes them out into the Irish Sea. Caught in heavy waters they are like to drown when they are rescued by a steam launch, dried and slept and dropped on the beach of the Isle of Man.

Cyprian Overbeck Wells : A Literary Mosaic (December 1886)

1st person. Humorous: the narrator Smith fancies himself a writer and after 10 years a clerk leaves his job to write a masterpiece, decides to read all English literature to give himself a boost: then one night hallucinates a tableful of the great novelists who proceed to tell a story in tag.

Uncle Jeremy’s Household (February 1887)

1st person. Long one. Student Hugh Lawrence goes to Dunklethwaite House in Yorkshire to stay with his friend John Thurston who is staying with old eccentric, poetry-obsessed Uncle Jeremy and the nanny, Miss Warrender, an attractive Indian young woman, orphan of a famous Indian chief, and Uncle J’s amanuensis, the tall creepy Copperthorne. Hugh becomes curious about the troubled relationship between secretary and nanny and puzzled by her sometimes savage demeanour until one night, he overhears their conversation in the greenhouse and discovers she is the daughter of a Thuggee leader, worships a goddess of murder, killed her adopted father’s daughter and the little girl Uncle J had adopted; and now they both plan to murder old Uncle J as the secretary has got himself named in the will. In the end a) Miss Warrender escapes having b) tasked a wandering Indian stranger in the village to murder Copperthorne.

The Stone of Boxman’s Drift (December 1887)

3rd person. The early 1870s in the Vaal valley near Kimberley, South Africa, barren land except for the diamonds and therefore wild prospectors from all over the world.

Headley Dean, with his crisp, neatly-trimmed hair and beard, his quick, glancing eyes, and his nervous, impulsive ways, had something of the Celt, both in his appearance and in his manner. Eager, active, energetic, he gave the impression of a man who must succeed in the world, but who might be a little unscrupulous in his methods of doing so. Big Bill, on the other hand, quiet, unimpressionable, and easy-going, with a sweeping yellow beard and open Saxon countenance, may have had a stronger and deeper nature than his partner, but was inferior to him in fertility of resource, and in decision of character in all the minor matters of life.

A morality tale whereby the Celt comes over selfish and greedy when they find a huge carbuncle. In their struggle it bounces into a bottomless pit. The dim Saxon reveals he had found it earlier and placed it for the Celt to discover, who is then covered in guilt and shame.

John Huxford’s Hiatus (June 1888)

John works in a cork factory in Brisport which is forced to close down by competition from south America. He is offered a job in Canada and leaves his weeping fiancée, promising to write. Within days of arriving he is attacked and beaten over the head in a low dive. He recovers but has amnesia. He rises by hard work to be a rich man and, upon hearing Devon voices down at the docks, suddenly remembers everything. He sails over the sea and is reunited with his sweetheart who has stayed true to him these past seventy years.

The 1890s

The Ring of Thoth (January 1890)

Third person. An Egyptologist in the Louvre stumbles upon a 4,000 year old Egyptian who discovered the secret of eternal life and now is going to end his life in the arms of his mummified love.

A Physiologist’s Wife (September 1890)

3rd person. Social comedy/satire in which cold-hearted rationalist and scientist Professor Ainslie Grey marries one Mrs. O’James. A younger colleague is due to marry his daughter, until he meets the new Mrs Grey and is stunned to realise she is his first wife from Australia who ran off and left him and was drowned in a shipwreck. In fact she didn’t take the boat but came to England to start a new life. Cold rationalist Professor tells them to go be happy and reunited. He dies of a broken heart.

A Pastoral Horror (December 1890)

1st person. Murder in a beautiful Alpine valley. An Englishman awaiting the outcome of a bankruptcy case in England has moved to the isolated village of Laden where he is witness to several gruesome murders of peasants. The one other educated man in the village is the curé, Father Verhagen. So imagine everyone’s horror when it turns out to be him, going insane.

The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (December 1890)

1st person. 1885. James Upperton moves to an isolated cottage on the Yorkshire Moors to study but becomes embroiled with several mysterious people, Miss Cameron, the Italianate beautiful young woman staying in the boarding house he puts up in, and the self-styled surgeon of Gaster Fell who is the only neighbour, who warns him to bolt his door at night and who he sees cruelly mistreating a wizened old man. One stormy night his front door creaks open and a ghastly evil figure is revealed by lightning. Chased off by another man. In the cold light of day it turns out the old man is clinically and violently insane and being ‘cared’ for by his son and daughter, the surgeon and mysterious young lady.

Our Midnight Visitor (February 1891)

1st person. A long atmospheric story set on the small isle of Uffan near Arran. The scenery and mood painted very well in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson. A stranger appears, a wealthy American calling himself Digby, dropped by his yacht who comes to stay with young MacDonald and his bad-tempered father. The narrator’s suspicions mount until a newspaper cutting reveals that Digby is Frenchman who has stolen a fabulous diamond and is on the run.

A Straggler of ’15 (March 1891)

A patriotic portrait of Corporal Gregory Brewster, last survivor of the battle of Waterloo. Superpatriotic and vivid description of working class Chatham. This was turned into a play, as describe in Andrew Lycett’s biography of Doyle.

The Voice of Science (March 1891)

3rd person. Drawing room comedy as Mrs Esdaile’s son Rupert takes advantage of the new ‘phonograph’ to record a message listing the conquests and cheating of his sister Rose’s fiancé, Captain Beesley, who mysteriously runs out the French windows and down the drive never to be seen again.

The Colonel’s Choice (July 1891)

Colonel Bolsover marries young Miss Hilda Thornton despite rumours and the attempt of friends to dissuade him. Several years of happiness follow but then Captain Tresillian appears from India and, in a confrontation scene, he reveals that he and Hilda were engaged but he was penniless. A fire breaks out at Melrose Lodge and the colonel saves his wife then nobly steps into the flames to give her a better life.

A Sordid Affair (November 1891)

A hymn to honest working women. Mrs Raby is trying hard to support her ex-drunk husband by dressmaking. She makes a beautiful dress for a posh client but her husband steals it, pawns it and gets blind drunk, forcing Mrs Raby to spend all her savings buying the original dress from its Bond Street shop in order to keep her promise to her client. Then she recovers her husband from the gutter and takes him home.

Oh, blind, angelic, foolish love of woman! Why should men demand a miracle while you remain upon earth?

A False Start (December 1891)

3rd person. Comedy about young Dr Horace Wilkinson who has several false starts of first patients including the gas man and an impoverished gypsy before he called quite by mistake to the house of the local millionaire. Turns out to be a comedy case of mistaken identity in which Wilkinson shines nobly.

Out of the Running (January 1892)

Pretty young Dolly, farmer’s daughter, has two suitors Adam and Elias and in a number of scenes we meet them and hear her mother’s opinion about which one to take. Dolly thinks it is Adam leaves a dog rose on her window sill every morning and so accepts him. There is an accident with the hayrick which crushes the orphan inarticulate farmhand Bill. Next morning, unable to walk, he crawls to her window to leave another rose sprig and is found there dead. Dolly distraught. Hardy territory.

The Great Brown-Pericord Motor (March 1892)

3rd person. Short, grotesque story of two inventors who fall out over a flying machine they’ve created. They fight and one is killed in the struggle. Pericord attaches Brown’s body to the machine and sends it off out to sea, then goes mad. ‘He walked swiftly down the stair and was quickly reabsorbed into the flood of comfortless clammy humanity which ebbed and flowed along the Strand.’

De Profundis (March 1892)

Strange and gruesome. Starts with a hymn to the British Empire and its insatiable need for British men. Then the tale of John Vansittart a planter from Ceylon who visits the narrator, goes staying with his friends, marries suddenly but just before departing comes down with smallpox. He sails early and is due to be met by his wife and friend at Falmouth; the ship goes on to Madeira and JV appears in a vision to the narrator out of the calm Atlantic waves…

A Regimental Scandal (May 1892)

A tale of our fine men in the Army, specifically rich Major Errington who tries to help Colonel Lovell when his shares crash by cheating against himself at cards – until it is revealed. Far from being a scandal this is a hymn to how jolly decent the British Army is.

A Question of Diplomacy (summer 1892)

Comedy. The Foreign Secretary, laid up with gout, is outwitted by his wife who arranges for his daughter’s fiancé to get a position in Tangiers and for the daughter to accompany him and for them to get married asap, all against the FS’s wishes.

Lot No.249 (September 1892)

At an old Oxford college a fat evil undergraduate has been conducting experiments, bringing a 4,000 year old mummy back to life, and increasingly using it to terrorise his enemies – before a steady young sporting chap steps in and stops it.

Jelland’s Voyage (November 1892)

Henry Jelland and Willy McEvoy get into serious debt in a trading port in Japan, and steal the money from their employer who’s on a long trip. When he unexpectedly returns they steal more money to buy a yacht, which is then pursued by the irate employer until the men shoot themselves but their empty yacht is then carried by storm into the wastes of the Pacific.

The Los Amigos Fiasco (December 1892)

A very short light-hearted comic-horror piece about a town which tries to execute a man with electricity by increasing the voltage, but only succeed in giving him superhuman life.

The Green Flag (June 1893)

The Irish Question:

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their officers have dashed to the front with a wave and halloo, those rebel hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the mad Joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades.

In faraway Sudan a British force is overcome by attacking dervishes, the square collapses, things are going badly, when the Republican leader Dennis Connolly unexpectedly rallies the Irish contingent and dies saving the day. Propaganda how even dissidents within rally to the Empire when faced with opponents from without.

The Slapping Sal (August 1893)

An 18th century yarn.

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!” said the captain, at last. “He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’

A British man o’war is struggling against a more powerful French ship but is saved by the mutineers of another British boat, the Slapping Sal and their fierce leader Hairy Hudson who turned out to be a true Brit.

The Case of Lady Sannox (November 1893)

A dashing surgeon is having an affair with a high society lady, is called late at night to operate on the wife of a Turkish merchant; he horribly disfigures the woman, then it is revealed it is his high-born lover and the merchant her husband who has taken a horrific revenge.

The Lord of Château Noir (July 1894)

During the Franco-Prussian War a French aristocrat terrorises a Prussian officer in vengeance for his dead son.

Round The Red Lamp (1894)

A collection 15 stories themed around medicine, the red lamp being the sign of a GP.

A Medical Document (October 1894)

Three old doctors – a GP, a surgeon and an alienist – sit around discussing eerie cases. There’s passing reference to the way popular fiction uses very rare or vague conditions (‘brain fever’) but rarely actually common diseases (typhoid). And how fiction rarely uses those outbreaks of vice which are so common. I think he’s talking about sex.

Behind the Times (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of an old-fashioned doctor way behind modern scientific times, but with a magical healing touch and bedside manner.

His First Operation (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of a young student attending his first operation and fainting.

The Third Generation (October 1894)

Seasoned Dr Horace Selby is visited by Sir Francis Norton who, it quickly transpires, is infected with syphilis. He explains the taint comes from his hard-living Regency grandfather. He is due to marry the following week. The doctor suggests creating a sudden reason to go abroad and cancel the nuptials. But next morning Dr Selby reads that the noble aristocrat has thrown himself under the wheels of a heavy dray and died, in order to spare the damsel and kill the hereditary taint. True Brit.

Sweethearts (October 1894)

The doctor in a seaside town meets an old man on a bench who wastes and declines over three consecutive days. Finally he reveals it is because he is waiting for his wife, his childhood sweetheart, to return. I wonder whether Conan Doyle’s readers found this sickly sweet, or lapped it up.

The Curse of Eve (October 1894)

The nondescript life of Robert Johnson, gentleman’s outfitter, is turned upside down when his wife begins her labour. He chase all over town for one doctor, and then again for a second opinion. After an all-night vigil, his son is delivered.

Lives had come and lives had gone, but the great machine was still working out its dim and tragic destiny.

The Doctors of Hoyland (October 1894)

Dr James Ripley of Hoyland in Hampshire is astonished when a lady doctor moves to the town. Quickly she establishes herself a practice and ends up treating Ripley himself after he fractures his leg falling from a carriage. His initial sexist resistance to a female doctor is completely overcome by close experience of her ability and he inevitably falls in love with her. Thankfully, Conan Doyle foresees the utter hopelessness of such a resolution and has her remaining devoted to Science, departing for further education in Paris, leaving the country doctor sadder and wiser.

The Surgeon Talks (October 1894)

Like A Medical Document this consists of paragraph-long anecdotes: how they removed the ear from the wrong patient; how most people receive the diagnosis of impending death nobly etc. The woman who hides her cancer form her husband.

‘…Besides, [a doctor] is forced to be a good man. It is impossible for him to be anything else. How can a man spend his whole life in seeing suffering bravely borne and yet remain a hard or a vicious man? It is a noble, generous, kindly profession, and you youngsters have got to see that it remains so.’

The Parasite (December 1894)

‘He has to thank his phlegmatic Saxon temperament for it. I am black and Celtic, and this hag’s clutch is deep in my nerves.’

A Foreign Office Romance (December 1894)

Introduces the figure of the comically garrulous old Frenchman who would mutate into Brigadier Gerard. Here he is named Alphonse Lacour, assistant to the French ambassador who is finalising a treaty with the English Foreign Secretary when a messenger arrives to say the French have handed over Egypt i.e. lost their bargaining power; at which Alphonse kidnaps the messenger and drives him up and down in a carriage reciting the Koran until it is too late, the treaty is signed, and Alphonse flees back to France a national hero.

The Recollections of Captain Wilkie (January 1895)

On a train an experienced doctor carries out some Holmesian analysis of the man sitting opposite. He reveals himself to be a reformed professional thief and recounts a number of his adventures. The collection-of-anecdotes story.

The Three Correspondents (1896)

Incredibly Kiplingey. Three newspaper correspondents riding through the heat of Egypt to join the army. Racial stereotypes:

‘Mortimer was Saxon—slow, conscientious, and deliberate; Scott was Celtic—quick, happy-go-lucky, and brilliant. Mortimer was the more solid, Scott the more attractive. Mortimer was the deeper thinker, Scott the brighter talker.’

And Anerley the nube. They are attacked by four Arabs who they shoot, Anerley is wounded. But it is he who finds the Arabs’ camel and beats his colleagues back to the telegraph station to send a famous despatch to his paper.

Tales of the High Seas: I. The Governor of St. Kitt’s (January 1897)

Set in the early 18th century, time of pirates in the Caribbean and among all the pirates the most feared and savage is Captain Sharkey. Captain Scarrow of the ship Morning Star is told that: a) Sharkey is captured and due to hang next morning, b) ordered to take the governor of St Kitts back to London.

The governor is duly rowed out the next morning and off they set and he proves a jovial guest who can hold his liquor and tell a good yarn. Having crossed the Atlantic to Beachy Head he rips off his disguise to realise that he is Captain Sharkey, who had cut the governor’s throat and stolen his clothes! With his loyal mate he departs on the only seaworthy boat left and Scarrow watches them commandeer a fishing barque and disappear.

Tales of the High Seas: II. The Two Barques (March 1897)

Stephen Craddock, an American Puritan gone bad, volunteers to the governor of Kingston to lead an expedition to trap Sharkey when his boat is reported as drydocked on a remote island, with a similar boat painted to look the same. Doubles. Craddock and crew go hunting for him ashore for several days, then return to their own ship, only to find it is Sharkey’s own Happy Delivery. They imprison him and sail to Kingston where they are greeted as victorious heroes and are about to capture the governor and leading citizens, when heroic Craddock breaks free of his bonds, dives into the sea, and raises the alarm before being shot and drowned by Sharkey.

Tales of the High Seas: III. The Voyage of Copley Banks (May 1897)

Captain Sharkey murdered Copley Banks’s wife and two children. He plans his revenge, hiring a crew of wrong ‘uns and himself becoming a pirate then fast friends with Sharkey before tricking him aboard his ship, tying him to the muzzle of a gun and booby trapping it all with gunpowder. Boom! End of Captain Sharkey.

The Striped Chest (July 1897)

Captain Barclay and mate Allardyce go aboard a Portuguese barque which has foundered in a storm. It is abandoned except for a corpse they find. They carry to portable cargo aboard their ship, including an enormously heavy chest which has a note on saying, Don’t open. The second mate, overcome by greed, is discovered dead with his head cloven in like the corpse on the wreck. As the first mate goes to open it Captain Allardyce pulls him back just as a mechanism springs out to crush his head. This is a genuinely atmospheric and powerful story.

The Fiend of the Cooperage (October 1897)

Mr Meldrum, skipper of the private yacht The Cooperage, puts into an island off Sierra Leone where two Brits are maintaining a trading outpost (compare with Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands). The nautical terms and atmosphere of the island very well described. But something evil is haunting the island, scaring the negro servants, and stealing away a man every third day… Meldrum and Dr Spelling stay up all night in a tropical thunderstorm to find out what…

The New Catacomb (1898)

Two archaeologists in Rome, one of them a dashing bounder just returned from a failed elopement with an English girl. His colleague takes him at night to a new catacomb then traps him there; for he had loved the girl he had ‘ruined’.

The Confession (January 1898)

She looked down at the grating, and shrank in terror from the sight. A convulsed face was looking out at her, framed in that little square of oak. Two terrible eyes looked out of it—two eyes so full of hungry longing and hopeless despair that all the secret miseries of thirty years flashed into that one glance.

Very short. A Jesuit priest accidentally reunited with his long-lost love who has herself taken the veil, and they bemoan the doomed love affair which separated them.

The Story of the Beetle-Hunter (June 1898)

This and the following stories make a set in the Strand of longish, factual stories about mysterious crimes, Holmes stories without Holmes. An unemployed doctor answers an advert in the Standard and goes for an interview with Lord Linchfield who requires a strong man with a good knowledge of beetles. They go by train to Pangbourne to Delamere Court, home of tall eccentric beetle expert Sir Thomas Rossiter. In the middle of the night Rossiter sneaks into their bedroom and attacks the dummy figure in the bed. They are able to accost him and show that he is subject to mad fits, as his wife had claimed.

The Story of The Man with the Watches (July 1898)

A long puzzle concerning that could almost be a Holmes mystery. A man and lady enter a train to Manchester, having refused to enter a carriage with a bearded man smoking. At Manchester all three are gone, and a young man no-one can account for is found shot dead. The article describes the various theories of police detectives before quoting a long letter form one of the protagonists which explains what happened. It is one of Doyle’s favourite tropes, the ‘revenge from overseas’. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The King of the Foxes (July 1898)

The setting is a crew of old fox hunters telling yarns and one tells the story of Wat Danbury, whose doctor had told him to lay off alcohol before he began hallucinating, who goes an epic hunt, finally being the only rider left as he enters spooky woods to find himself confronted by a monster giant fox, the king of foxes, killing the hounds. He flees home and never touches a drop again.

The Story of The Lost Special (August 1898)

‘It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning, that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth.’

A foreigner hires a special train from Liverpool to Manchester. it never arrives but vanishes into thin air. As in The Man with the Watches the story takes the form of an official report, collating the puzzling crime and then revealing the unriddling solution.

The Story of the Sealed Room (September 1898)

‘It was in the course of one of these aimless rambles that I first met Felix Stanniford, and so led up to what has been the most extraordinary adventure of my lifetime.’

Lawyer sees a young man nearly run over by a cab and helps him into his decayed big house. Discovers his father was the banker who ruined lots of people and disappeared. There is one room sealed shut which the absconded father wrote the son not to open till he was 21. A few months later the young man arrives at that age and the lawyer is present at the unsealing of the door where they find the father’s body, dead these seven years. He committed suicide in shame but didn’t want his poorly wife to know.

The Story of the Black Doctor (October 1898)

Another very detailed and forensic crime mystery which the narrator examines in detail, weighing all the evidence in the mysterious murder of the dark-skinned doctor of Bishop’s Crossing near Liverpool. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The Story of The Club-Footed Grocer (November 1898)

‘With every fresh incident I felt that I was moving in an atmosphere of mystery and peril…’

Stephen is invited by letter to visit his disreputable uncle who used to be a ship’s chandler in Stepney but was attacked and beaten and, when the attacker was gaoled, moved to a remote cottage in the Lake District. Thence Stephen goes to discover the pirate has been released from gaol, gathered his crew and is besieging the uncle. There’s a showdown in which the uncle leaps to his death and the stolen diamonds are – cunningly – discovered to be hidden in his club foot boot heel.

The Brazilian Cat (December 1898)

The protagonist visits his cousin, Everard King, at his country pile where he has housed his large collection of Brazilian flora and fauna, especially the prize exhibit, a huge black puma. Despite warnings from the collector’s wife, the protagonist allows himself to be locked in to the animal’s cage. He manages to survive and when evil Everard returns in the morning it is he and not the protagonist who is killed. And as a result, the protagonist inherits the land, house and title.

The Retirement of Signor Lambert (December 1898)

A grim and sadistic story in which, like The Case of Lady Sannox, a jealous husband arranges the disfigurement of a lover; in this case the strong-minded self-made man Sir William Sparter discovers a letter from his wife to a celebrated tenor, Signor Lambert. He teaches himself about neck anatomy, goes to the tenor’s house, chloroforms him and permanently damages his vocal cords.

A Shadow Before (December 1898)

‘Before’ meaning before the Franco-Prussian War. We are in Ireland, 1870, and City financier (i.e. gambler) John Worlington Doddshorse, ordered by his doctor to treat the stress of incipient bankruptcy, stumbles across the biggest horse fair in the land. He sees two different men in the hotel opening lengthy telegrams which appear to be in code. Then witnesses them paying way over the odds for the horses brought to sale. He telegrams his colleague in the City – sells all French and German stocks – there’s going to be a war.

The Story of The Japanned Box (January 1899)

The old crumbling Thorpe Place in the Malverns in the heart of England, where the narrator goes as tutor to the children of old weathered Sir John Bollamore. He was a hellraiser in his youth but reformed by his sweet wife who died. But the narrator hears a woman’s voice coming from his rooms, and so do the servants. He thinks Sir John a reprobate and hypocrite until he falls asleep in an alcove of the room (ah, that old ruse, like the narrator of The Ring of Thoth) and accidentally sees Sir John open and play a phonograph of his dying wife’s voice.

The Story of The Jew’s Breastplate (February 1899)

Preposterous chauvinist tosh in which a young curator is given responsibility for a museum of antiquities only to receive an anonymous letter warning that it might be burgled. Which it duly is the the urim and thurim breastplate of the ancient Hebrews tampered with. The narrator lies in wait with the young curator and they are astonished to discover it is the eminent archaeologist and former curator, Professor Andreas, who is damaging the breastplate. Why? Because his daughter is in love with a cad who had already stolen the jewels and the former curator is ham-fistedly tying to replace them in order to prevent a ‘scandal’, shame and disgrace.

The Story of B.24 (March 1899)

Cast entirely as a written submission to a court of appeal, it is from a burglar who is tempted to burgle the grand house of Lord Mannering but discovers Lady Mannering waiting to aid and abet him so furious is her hatred of her husband and she then proceeds to stab him to death and blame the burglar.

A True Story of the Tragedy of Flowery Land (March 1899)

Grim unrelenting account of the mutiny of rebellious Malays aboard a British barque, they murder the captain and captain’s brother and first mate and Chinaman, pilot the ship to South America, scuttle it and go ashore. Nonetheless they are betrayed and end up standing in a London court and are hanged.

The Story of the Latin Tutor aka The Usher of Lea House School (April 1899)

The narrator gets a job at a dodgy sounding school in Hampstead and is astonished at the rudeness with which the only other master treats the Head. Things come to a head when he hears them fighting and intrudes, only to discover the repellent master is the Head’s son!

The Story of The Brown Hand (May 1899)

After a successful career in India a surgeon retires to England where he is haunted by the ghost of an Indian whose hand he promised to keep safe after having to amputate it. the hand was lost in a fire. the ghostly Indian searches for it every night. The protagonist goes to a surgeon in the East End and obtains a hand recently amputated from an Indian sailor and returns with it to the country house where the ghostly Indian finds it, politely bows to the surgeon, and departs for ever. Which is why the protagonist is made the surgeon’s heir.

The Croxley Master (October to December 1899)

A long and very persuasive account of a poor but educated doctor’s assistant, starved of funds, who is persuaded to take part in a boxing match against the local champion. If the plot is contrived the writing conveys real atmosphere. Depiction of the mining community reminds me of DH Lawrence whose first novel, The White Peacock, was published only 12 years later.

‘Work was struck at one o’clock at the coal-pits and the iron-works, and the fight was arranged for three. From the Croxley Furnaces, from Wilson’s Coal-pits, from the Heartsease Mine, from the Dodd Mills, from the Leverworth Smelters the workmen came trooping, each with his fox-terrier or his lurcher at his heels. Warped with labour and twisted by toil, bent double by week-long work in the cramped coal galleries or half-blinded with years spent in front of white-hot fluid metal, these men still gilded their harsh and hopeless lives by their devotion to sport. It was their one relief, the only thing which could distract their minds from sordid surroundings, and give them an interest beyond the blackened circle which enclosed them. Literature, art, science, all these things were beyond their horizon; but the race, the football match, the cricket, the fight, these were things which they could understand, which they could speculate upon in advance and comment upon afterwards. Sometimes brutal, sometimes grotesque, the love of sport is still one of the great agencies which make for the happiness of our people. It lies very deeply in the springs of our nature, and when it has been educated out, a higher, more refined nature may be left, but it will not be of that robust British type which has left its mark so deeply on the world. Every one of these raddled workers, slouching with his dog at his heels to see something of the fight, was a true unit of his race.’

The 1900s

The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce (January 1900)

Sent out to command one of the front line garrisons in south Egypt against incursions by the Mahdists, young Joyce is taken in by a wandering Arab who they nearly torture to get him to speak and turns out to be the senior head of intelligence in disguise. They all joke about it over a fine meal then cigars. No irony when Doyle writes that, in riposte to the successes of fanatical Islam, ‘ten years of silent work in Cairo, and then all was ready, and it was time for civilisation to take a trip south once more, travelling as her wont is in an armoured train.’

Playing with Fire (March 1900)

Account of a séance including an artist who had been painting a unicorn. At the height of the séance the ectoplasm forms a unicorn which goes rampaging through the house!

An Impression of the Regency (August 1900)

A brief powerful vignette of the Prince Regent and his gross companions larking about when the mad George III bursts in, lowing like an animal, to appal them all.

The Leather Funnel (1902)

The narrator visits a friend in Paris who suggests objects which have witnessed powerful scenes affect our dreams. As an experiment the narrator sleeps with a battered leather funnel by his bed and has a nightmare of a woman being tried and then beginning a course of water torture. Screaming himself awake, his friend shows the historical documents proving he has witnessed the torture of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a real historical woman, a poisoner and murder!

There’s a hiatus in my list of Conan Doyle’s short stories between 1902 and 1908, as this is a period when he wrote and published six Brigadier Gerard stories as well as 13 Holmes stories (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere) and two novels, Waterloo and Sir Nigel. Then:

The Pot of Caviare (1908)

Set during the Boxer Rebellion (overlapped with the Boer War 1899 to 1901) in the absurd little legation of Ichau where a handful of white men and woman hold out against the encroaching fanatics. The American professor tells the German colonel about the last time he survived a siege because he was a doctor but he was forced to witness rape and torture. Never again. They both realise the relief column is delayed three days. Almost certainly they will be overrun. The colonel bids the professor put arsenic in the prized caviar. The others think it is a celebration dinner. They all eat it and die but, in is dying moments the professor hears the shots of the relief column which does arrive to save them!

The Silver Mirror (August 1908)

Classic diary format. A boring accountant is set a demanding task of combing 20 big ledgers to find evidence against a forger but, as the work intensifies he begins to feel he is going mad because he starts to see visions in the big old mirror he keeps on his side table. Each night the same scene emerges from a mist, assuming steadily clearer shape and showing some atrocity from remote history…

The Home-Coming (December 1909)

The first of the historical stories. 528 AD in Constantinople. 10 year old Leon is the daughter of the Empress Theodora, her love child who she abandoned at a monastery before rising to become consort to the great Emperor Justinian. When the old Abbot brings Leon to Constantinople the wicked eunuch sees his chance to control the Empress, and she must make a cruel choice…

The Lord of Falconbridge (August 1909)

1818. Tom Cribb has retired from prize fighting to become a publican but his son is in the fancy. A strange woman enters and offers the son £50 to train for a fight. Despite misgivings Tom Spring trains, then is instructed by the woman to catch a stagecoach to Tonbridge where he is taken to a remote country house. Here walks the brutish husband of the mystery woman and it is he she wishes Tom to fight, and so they fight, Tom eventually overcoming the brute. He is abandoned by the fair lady but rescued by the landlord of the pub he change coaches in, a devoted fan of the fancy.

The 1910s

The Terror of Blue John Gap (August 1910)

Dr John Hardcastle is on a rest cure in Derbyshire, and finds out the hard way that local lore about a monster inhabiting a deep ancient cavern is in fact true.

In 1911 Conan Doyle published a collection bringing together a number of historical tales, The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales. His interest in history is stimulating, even if he used the different settings for more or less the same tales of derring-do and romance. In the preface he wrote:

It has seemed to me that there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give, and fictitious characters and conversations might illustrate them; but none the less the actual drama of history and not the drama of invention should claim the attention of the reader. I have been tempted sometimes to try the effect upon a larger scale; but meanwhile these short sketches, portraying various crises in the story of the human race, are to be judged as experiments in that direction.

Fine words, but what they mean in practice is Doyle selects tableaux from the past which form an improving picture, in which noble sentiments may be vapoured forth. His ‘history’ stories are the equivalent of the luxuriously smug, hyper-realistic paintings of the late Victorian Olympians such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Frederick Leighton and Albert Moore. They are pre-Modern in that there is no threat to the narrator’s psyche, to his sturdy Edwardian values. No matter how gruesome or bloody the events described, they are profoundly unthreatening. This is their main selling point and appeal, as it is of the Holmes stories.

The link with contemporary art is also pointed by the way the stories are, mostly, illustrated by fine late-Victorian and Edwardian illustrators who depict a world of tall, manly men and lovely chaste Victorian women, threatened by stunted foreign or working class villains.

The Last Galley (November 1910)

146 BC. Boy scout tableau of the final Phoenician galley returning to Carthage after the fleet has been destroyed by Rome. Watched by Carthaginians from their terrace, one of them has met a strange prophetess in the Land of Tin (Cornwall) who predicted that the Romans would succeed Carthage as Queen of the Sea but that people form her own island would, in time, become rulers of a great empire. It ends with the Romans destroying and sowing salt into the ruins of Carthage, and with the same message as Kipling’s Islanders:

And they understood too late that it is the law of heaven that the world is given to the hardy and to the self-denying, whilst he who would escape the duties of manhood will soon be stripped of the pride, the wealth, and the power, which are the prizes which manhood brings.

Through the Mists I: The Coming of the Huns (November 1910)

Unusually detailed impression of the Christian heresies of the mid-fourth century, the Donatists, Arians and Trinitarians, is the backdrop to a Greek leaving his city to go be a hermit in the mountains beyond the river Dniester where, one day, he witnesses the arrival of the Huns. He kills a Hun who enters his cave then rides in a frenzy to the nearest Roman outpost to warn them.

Through the Mists II: The First Cargo (1910)

A Roman who’s remained behind in Britain writes to one who’s returned to Italy to describe his first meeting with the Saxons who British king Vortigern has invited to come and defend them. There is strong racial stereotyping as the narrator contrasts the strong, practical, democratic Saxons with the weak-minded, impetuous, unwarlike Britons (who will go on to become the Welsh and Cornish).

The Last of the Legions (December 1910)

The last Roman governor receives the order to leave (410) and then, ironically receives a deputation of Britons calling for independence. When they learn that they suddenly are going to become independent the beg the Romans to stay but it is too late. A parable on the various movements demanding independence from the British empire i.e. Ireland, India.

Through the Mists III: The Red Star (January 1911)

630 in Constantinople, three successful merchants reminisce, and one remembers being on a long caravan trail through Arabia when they meet the caravan of Mohammed and his followers and how he stays up all night listening to the charismatic leader. Interesting insight into how 1911 saw the Prophet.

The Contest (March 1911)

A comic story of Nero who set sail to Greece with an army of supporters to compete in singing competitions and is bested by a peasant goatherd who, however, is hustled off by his friends. A canny courtier tells Nero it was none other than the great god Pan in disguise which pleases the megalomaniac.

An Iconoclast (March 1911)

The year 92 in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in Rome. Senator Emilius Flaccus returns from boozing with the emperor to find his priceless statue has been damaged by a fanatical Christian. When the emperor arrives Flaccus decides to show him mercy and release Datus from his chains if he will only pray to the statue. But once again he attacks it, to the emperor’s amusement.

The Blighting of Sharkey (April 1911)

1720. Return to the antihero wicked pirate Jack Sharkey from the three Tales of the High Seas from 1897. The crew are mutinying when a rich merchantman is seen and boarded. They kill all the passengers except a fine Spanish maiden but back in Sharkey’s cabin she strokes them all with her leprous hand. This clinches the crew’s decision to mutiny and they set Sharkey and the girl adrift in an open boat.

Through the Veil (April 1911)

A decent married Scottish man and wife are shown round he recent excavations of a Roman fort and later that night they both dream powerfully that they are participants in the storming of the fort by Picts some 1800 years previously.

Giant Maximin (July 1911)

210 AD. The fate of the eight-foot giant Theckla told in three scenes: who sees the Roman Army marching by and runs down to join it, becoming the bodyguard of the Emperor; 25 years later who is there when the Army mutinies against the emperor Alexander and is unexpectedly proclaimed emperor himself; who fails to cultivate Rome and the politicians and loses the love of the army as it starves, and so is killed by the very legionaries who raised him to the purple.

One Crowded Hour (A Pirate Of The Land) (August 1911)

A light dash of social history. On the Eastbourne-Tunbridge road one Sunday night a masked man holds up three cars, taking the slim pickings of a don’t-you-know posh young chap, of two screechy actresses, and then he assaults a rich man in a big Daimler beating him insensible before stealing everything of value. Next morning the dashed young chap walks into the morning room of Sir Henry Hailworthy, of Walcot Old Place, Deputy-Lieutenant of the county and accuses him of being the highway robber. He admits it. The first two robberies were to disguise the third one, of a loathsome City spiv who diddled him out of his savings. The dashed young chap shakes his hand and agrees to forget about it. The title refers to the poem and the usually staid, respectable Deputy Lord Lieutenant and JP quotes it to express his excitement at pretending to be a highway robber.

Most of 1912 was taken up with the serialisation in the Strand of the great adventure novel, The Lost World.

The Fall of Lord Barrymore (December 1912)

Very entertaining story about London man about town Sir Charles Tregellis during the Regency. His sophisticated nephew appears and promises to do down his rival about town, the thuggish Lord Barrymore. And proceeds to do it. Told with great wit and gusto!

The spring of 1913 was taken up with the serialisation of the novella The Poison Belt.

How It Happened (September 1913)

Haunting short account of a man who is in an early car crash, recalling the lead-up to it and then, in the final sentences, realising he is dead!

Borrowed Scenes (September 1913)

A peculiar squib which seems to be satirising the style and the character of the contemporary author George Borrow.

The Horror of the Heights (November 1913)

Brilliantly gripping account of Captain Joyce-Armstrong, an airman who flies higher than any man before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters.

Danger! being the Log of Captain Sirius (July 1914)

A strange and disturbing story. The Captain Sirius works for a ‘small country’ which offends Britain which issues an ultimatum. He persuades his king to let him take his eight submarines and destroy British merchant navy, thus starving her. Predicts German tactics in both World Wars – but why was it published within days of the Great War breaking out?

As the Great War began, for September 1914 to May 1915, Conan Doyle was serialising the last of the four Sherlock Holmes novellas, the Valley of Fear.

The Prisoner’s Defence (January 1916)

An intense melodrama set in the present day, during the War. An officer is charged with murdering a beautiful woman but refuses to defend himself. Only a month later does he read out a prepared statement. He was in love with tall French blonde. On leave she pushed him so hard, he was indiscreet and mentioned an Allied offensive. Later he discovers she has written it all up and is posting it to her control: she is a German spy! They lock her in a room and he goes to alert the cops but on his return she tears past him on her motorbike (!). He shoots his revolver and kills her. The prisoner’s defence rests.

In 1917 Doyle published only one story, the Holmes spy tale His Last Bow.

Three of Them (April 1918)

After 3 and a half years of war, Conan Doyle could only bring himself to write five ‘stories’ which are really just chats between a kindly middle aged dad and his three adorable middle class children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. If you were in a cynical mood the tweeness of these little sketches might make you puke. They certainly capture a fantasy of professional upper middle class living. The titles sum them up. I. A Chat About Children, Snakes and Zebus (April). II. About cricket (April) III. Speculations [about God and the Devil] (July). IV. The Leatherskin Tribe (August). V. About Naughtiness and Frogs and Historical Pictures (December).

‘Oh, Daddy, come and talk about cricket!’ Daddy was pulled on the side of the bed, and the white figure dived between the sheets. ‘Yes; tell us about cwicket!’ came a cooing voice from the corner. Dimples was sitting up in his cot.

A Point of View (December 1918)

An odd short squib wherein an American journalist, staying at an English country house, writes a piece wondering why any self-respecting man would be a servant. At a later stay the valet this was based on takes exception and makes it very plain that servants have self-respect and deserve respect: ‘I wish you would make them understand that an English servant can give good and proper service and yet that he’s a human bein’ after all.’

The 1920s

The Bully of Brocas Court (November 1921)

1878. Bareknuckle fighting has been outlawed but special rings and gloves not come in. Sir Fred Milburn is despatched to London to find someone who can stand up to Farrier-Sergeant Burton. He chooses the London fighter Alf Stevens. They are returning to Luton when their coach is stopped by an oddly-dressed pair of men in a dark dell who challenge them to a fight. So they fight and it’s honours even when they hear a howling from the woods and clear off. Later, at an inn, the landlord says they were fighting the ghosts of Tom Hickman and Joe Rowe, both killed in a carriage accident in the 1820s.

The Nightmare Room (December 1921)

A room is all Victorian sumptuous rugs and curtains at one end, completely bare at the other, with a divan upon which a beautiful but immoral woman is lounging. In bursts her husband declaring he knows about her affair with young Douglas; she must choose one of them. In bursts Douglas and the husband produces poison: Let’s play cards for her, old man. All written in the highest pitch of melodrama with everyone gasping or turning white. In the final line the director steps forward and shouts, Cut! It was all a scene from a movie 🙂

The Lift (June 1922)

Flight-Commander Stangate with his sweetheart has a premonition of evil. They ascend the big funfair lift with a motley crew of civilians. It jams 500 feet up. The wild-eyed bearded engineer reveals, from the girders, that he has arranged for it to plummet to their deaths as a sign to this wicked generation. At the last minute Stangate kicks down the wooden walls of the lift and helps the passengers onto the girders just as the madmen jumps into it and the cable snaps!

The Centurion (October 1922)

[Being the fragment of a letter from Sulpicius Balbus, Legate of the Tenth Legion, to his uncle, Lucius Piso, in his villa near Baiæ, dated The Kalends of the month of Augustus in the year 824 of Rome.] wherein he witnesses the siege and fall of Jerusalem, 70AD, and then talks to a centurion who was there when Jesus was crucified.

A Point of Contact (October 1922)

Tyre. 1100BC. In the noble stereotypes to which we are accustomed, Doyle paints a tableau, the moment when King David of the Israelites, come to buy building material for Jerusalem, meets Odysseus, refitting his ship before sailing on to Troy.

One of these men was clearly by his face and demeanour a great chieftain. His strongly-marked features were those of a man who had led an adventurous life, and were suggestive of every virile quality from brave resolve to desperate execution. His broad, high brow and contemplative eyes showed that he was a man of wisdom as well as of valour.

Billy Bones (December 1922)

One more in the twee three of Them series about Daddy and his three adorable children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. Written as practical advice to daddies about how to create a Treasure Hunt.

The years 1923 to 1928 were taken up with a reduced turnover of 11 Sherlock Holmes stories and a couple of Professor Challenger novellas.

Spedegue’s Dropper (October 1928)

The Death Voyage (September 1929)

A long and detailed counterfactual in which Doyle envisions the Kaiser not abdicating but travelling to Kiel to inspire his Navy to set out for a final epic battle against the joint British and American fleets. What a strange story. And, like so many Great War fictions, it had to wait 11 years to be born.

The Last Resource (August 1930)

Kid Wilson is an American gangster in hiding in Soho. Late one night he tells his English crook hosts about an American town whose citizens form a committee, tell the chief of police to go away for a few days, round up all the crooks in town and machine gun them to death in a dance hall. It was only a dream 🙂 Interesting though, that that’s the kind of solution which people invoked to the out-of-control gangster violence of the Prohibition era.

The End of Devil Hawker (August 1930)

Back to the Regency period and another boxing story.

It was in these very rooms of Cribb that this little sketch of those days opens, where, as on a marionette stage, I would try to show you what manner of place it was and what manner of people walked London in those full-blooded, brutal and virile old days.

The Parish Magazine (1930)

Very funny light-hearted story set in the present day of a printer who is persuaded to publish an addendum to the parish magazine. Only when he receives letters from outraged local worthies and their lawyers does he actually read it and realise it is full of scandalous allegations and innuendoes about half the parish. After a sleepless night he is called to a mysterious meeting which turns out to be of the ‘Rotherheath Society of Bright Young People’ who have, in fact, not sent it out, fabricated the outraged letters to him, and did it all as a practical joke.

It is very fitting that his last published story should be one which continued to show the jovial good-humour which makes Conan Doyle such a good companion.

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Posted by Simon on February 10, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-short-stories-of-arthur-conan-doyle/