Josephus, The Jewish War

BMCR 2017.02.51 on the BMCR blog Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.02.51 Steve Mason, A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66-74.   New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2016.  Pp. xii, 689.  ISBN 9780521853293.  $150.00.    Reviewed by Matthew V. Novenson, University of Edinburgh (matthew.novenson@ed.ac.uk) Preview When I discovered the package containing Steve Mason’s A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66-74 in my office mailbox, my first response was excitement, since I, like many scholars of Judaism in antiquity, had known about and been anticipating Mason’s summa on the war for some years now. My second response, upon opening the package, was surprise at the book’s title, since one of Mason’s professional calling cards is his insistence upon using “Judaean” rather than “Jew” or “Jewish” for Greek Ἰουδαῖος and Latin  Iudaeus. (I can only guess that the title represents a compromise between author and publisher, since in the pages of the book Mason uses his customary “Judaean” throughout.) My third and lasting response, upon reading the book, was deep appreciation for Mason’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the contexts of the war and his nimble handling of numerous historiographical problems. Mason’s  Jewish War was originally commissioned for Cambridge University Press’s Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity series, a match made in publishing heaven. But whereas the previous entries in that series—Michael Kulikowski’s Rome’s Gothic Wars and Waldemar Heckel’s Conquests of Alexander the Great—weigh in at about 240 pages, Mason’s Jewish War runs to nearly 700. While a series-appropriate 240-page “foundation for undergraduates with no background in ancient history” (as per the series description in the CUP catalogue) on the Jewish War from Mason would be very welcome, the book that he has in fact produced is a far more interesting one. This book undertakes two discrete tasks, corresponding to parts I and II of its table of contents. Part I, “Contexts,” treats several key conceptual and methodological issues over three chapters. Chapter 1, “A Famous and Unknown War,” does some initial de-mystifying of the war, showing how modern perceptions of it, both popular and academic, are unwittingly in thrall to Flavian propaganda and Christian (and latterly also Jewish) mythmaking: “Flavian propagandists conjured up Jews as a foreign enemy with a great army, or as a nation in revolt. Christians portrayed them as the people that had crucified God and so faced eternal punishment. That was all anyone needed to know” (58). Chapter 2, “Understanding Historical Evidence: Josephus’ Judean War in Context,” situates Josephus’s War as a work of Roman literary art, warning against the modern temptation to approach it as a trove of data: “It should now be clear why [Josephus’s] literary effort could never be reliable for us. We might as well ask whether a song or a mountain is reliable… [The modern] longing for safe, unskewed data is not only a mirage but a recipe for misery. A realistic approach to Josephus’ work is far more interesting” (136). Here Mason also briefly but efficiently theorises the concept of history: “I shall use history to mean simply the investigation of the human past” (69). Chapter 3, “Parthian Saviours, Sieges, and Morale: Ancient Warfare in Human Perspective,” explicates a number of unspectacular but nonetheless important factors in the conduct of the war on both sides. Mason writes, “Rome’s legions have acquired the mystique of an unstoppable machine driven by a cool, purely military discipline, whereas Jewish-Judaean rebels appear in film (Ben-Hur, Life of Brian) as motivated by wide-eyed, religious-nationalist fervour. On both sides, we easily forget the human conditions that affected both and their largely shared values” (138), namely: pragmatism regarding loss of life and potential strategic gains, the hope or fear of Parthian intervention, the awarding of military commands to men of high status but no competence, the high rate of infectious disease in military camps, and the psychological appeal of desertion, inter alia. The longer Part II, “Investigations,” effectively comprises Mason’s history of the war as such. It is organised as a series of topical studies rather than a march through the war year by year, but it manages pretty well to cover the waterfront. In chapter 4, “Why Did They Do It? Antecedents, Circumstances, and ‘Causes’ of the Revolt,” Mason roundly rejects the old idea that the Judaeans were uniquely intolerant of Roman rule and so inevitably rose up. He writes, “The beginnings of this war had little to do with long-term antagonism… Judaea’s real, and finally existential threats, were local” (200). And again, “The Judaean War was not the revolt of a ‘province of Judaea’ against Roman rule. Judaea was not a province but the ethnic zone around world-famous Jerusalem. Its people and elite found themselves in the autumn of 66 awaiting Roman retribution because they had recently acted against the local apparatus of administration—Caesarea, its resident prefect, and the auxiliary force” (278). Chapter 5, “Nero’s War I: The Blunder of Cestius Gallus?” analyses the particular event that kindled the war: the expedition of the legate C. Cestius Gallus to Jerusalem in autumn of 66 C.E. Against the received view that Cestius found Judaea already in revolt and went to Jerusalem to crush it, Mason argues, “[It is] unlikely that he ever imagined Jerusalem or Judaeans to be in revolt against him or Rome. Certainly he seems not [to] have known about a province of Judaea or an independent rebel state. Nor could he have intended his reluctant expedition… to culminate in an assault on Jerusalem” (327). Ironically, Mason suggests, Cestius’s expedition to Jerusalem created new enemies of Rome among Judaeans who had not hitherto been thus inclined. Chapter 6, “Nero’s War II: Flavians in Galilee,” poses the question why Vespasian spent the year 67 fighting in Galilee. Against the common view, read off the surface of Josephus, that his Galilean campaign was phase one of a grand plan to crush a nation-wide revolt, Mason argues, “[War book 3] is simply not the story of a ‘Judaean-Roman war in Galilee,’ much less of Vespasian’s scorched- earth destruction en route to Jerusalem. The Roman general has no expectation of fighting after Sepphoris’ pre-emptive submission, which leaves his confident army with only patrols, confidence-building exercises, [and so on]” (377). At any number of points, events could have unfolded very differently than they did. But Josephus, looking back after the war’s end, invests these early episodes in Galilee—especially the ones in which he himself had participated—with world-historical importance. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of the “Investigations” examine the Romans campaigns at Jerusalem and in the Judaean desert. In chapter 7, “Jerusalem I: Josephus and the Education of Titus,” Mason treats the events recounted in War books 4-6, reconstructing what happened in and around Jerusalem from 68 to 70. Taking a cue from Josephus’s emphasis on intra-Judaean stasis—and noting how Josephus parallels this to the Roman civil war of 69—Mason characterizes the several parties who occupied Jerusalem during the siege: the partisans of Simon bar Giora, those of John of Gischala, priestly Zelotai (“Disciples” in Mason’s rendering), Adiabenians, and Idumeans. As most of these were not native Jerusalemites but wartime refugees, Mason suggests that perhaps “Jerusalem itself would have capitulated, had it not been for the large numbers of desperate men who fled to Jerusalem from elsewhere and who could not surrender” (465). Chapter 8, “Jerusalem II: Coins, Councils, Constructions,” is a companion-piece to chapter 7. It adduces evidence for the siege of Jerusalem from sources other than Josephus, in particular, first, the numerous and diverse wartime coins excavated in Jerusalem and, second, the account of Titus’s council of war related by Sulpicius Severus. An especial burden of the chapter is to account for Titus’s decision to raze the the temple, about which Mason concludes, “There seems no reason to imagine that Titus had a policy concerning the city or temple, any more than Vespasian had one in 68… Titus was happy to exploit what had happened, as part of the myth of Flavian origins. But he could not have planned it” (513). Finally, chapter 9, “A Tale of Two Eleazars: Machaerus and Masada,” treats the sieges of the Judaean desert strongholds, some three years after Titus’s victory in Jerusalem, as related in War book 7. Masada, Mason argues, was not the last stand of the most heroic Judaean rebels, but a refugee camp for families which operated on its own bandit economy and so, from a Roman perspective, needed eventually to be shuttered. Reasoning from Josephus’s account, Mason argues, “Masada’s wartime Judaean inhabitants [were] family men seeking the security of the former royal refuge for their women and children. Fearing the bloody factionalism in Jerusalem… they remove themselves from the fray to this remote, fortified site… [hoping to] ride out the storm in security” (534). He finds corroboration in Ronny Reich’s account of the archaeology of Masada: “From 66 until the final siege, Masada was ‘a camp of displaced persons.’ It was not a ‘Zealot’ stronghold but rather a place for different kinds of refugees” (550). The book ends with 15 or so pages of “Conclusions,” which include a pithy statement of Mason’s realist and “human” account of the war: “The Judaean-Roman conflict broke out… not from anti-Roman ideas or dreams among the uniquely favoured Judaean population, but from the sort of thing that more commonly drives nations to arms: injury, threats of more injury, perceived helplessness, the closure of avenues of redress, and ultimately the concern for survival” (584). Mason’s resolutely realist account of the war is in most respects a triumph. Given the disproportionately elaborate mythology that has grown up around this war (“the greatest not only of the wars of our own time, but well nigh of all that ever broke out between cities or nations” [Josephus, War 1.1]), the task of writing its history requires not only a thorough command of the mass of relevant evidence but also a tough-minded demythologizing programme, both of which Mason amply provides. There is one theme, however, on which, it seems to me, Mason mishandles his own method, namely, the religion of the Judaeans: their god, temple, priests, oracles, and so on. On the Judaean side of the conflict, Mason treats religion as an anomaly: extreme, irrational, and unusual, not to be invoked by way of explanation if simpler, more realist, more human factors (e.g., ambition, self-preservation) are on offer, as they always are. But I would argue that for the Jews, as for ancient peoples generally (though not for us moderns), nothing was more realist or more human than religion. For just this reason, they often expressed other, ostensibly more realist ideas in the language of religion. By their lights, military intervention by the Parthians was not a different, simpler outcome than salvation by a god. The former just was the latter. Interestingly, on the Roman side, Mason does allow for the tremendous importance of gods, priests, and sacrifices as social facts (see 139-155, especially 152-153). But he does not extend this courtesy to the Judaeans, perhaps on the assumption that their god has been given rather too much credit for the war already (see 199). Mason’s History of the Jewish War is, as I have said, a triumph. The physical artefact is a handsome and substantial hardback, well suited for a magisterial volume such as this. The back matter includes an appendix on distance measurements in Josephus’s  Warand thorough indices of modern authors, historical persons, groups, and places, and ancient texts, inscriptions, and papyri. The main text is complemented by some 40 high-quality illustrations (maps, coins, inscriptions, archaeological site plans, landscape photographs, and the like) and four tables. There are a few inconsistences of style, for instance, the occasional “Judean” for “Judaean.” I spotted only a very few typos, including the running page header for chapter 2, which reads “in Contest” for “in Context” throughout. On the whole, however, the Press’s production values live up to contents of the book. This is as it should be, since it seems clear to the present reviewer, at least, that Mason’s Jewish War is now the definitive treatment of the subject.  Read comments on this review or add a comment on the BMCR blog Home Read Latest Archives BMCR Blog About BMCR Review for BMCR Commentaries Support BMCR

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Crusaders vs. Islam

Morton, Nicholas. Encountering Islam on the First Crusade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 319. $99.99. ISBN: 978-1-107-15689-0.

  Reviewed by Niall Christie
       Langara College
       niallchristie@yahoo.com


The question of the motives and attitudes of the participants in the First Crusade has increasingly engaged scholars in recent decades, and has been addressed in a number of important studies, of which the best known are probably the late lamented Jonathan Riley-Smith's The First Crusaders (1997) and The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1986). One might be tempted, then, to ask why we need another book on this topic. Nicholas Morton's Encountering Islam on the First Crusade is an outstanding response to this question, demonstrating that there is still much to be discussed and that the evidence of the sources can still be understood in new and fascinating ways. As a result, his book is essential reading for those interested in what the first crusaders thought of their enemies.

In the introduction to the book, Morton lays out the aim of his work: to explore how the first crusaders understood the peoples of the Levant, and how they drew on their own experiences and the resources that were available to them in order to do so. As the discussion proceeds it becomes clear that his primary focus will be on the Franks' relations with the Turks, who had recently established themselves as the ruling powers in much of the Levantine region, and who feature most prominently in the western crusading sources. Morton then goes on to survey previous scholarship on the topic, before laying out his terminology and methodologies. One particularly noteworthy part of the latter is his consideration of how far western European sources' depictions of the east can be trusted; while remaining suitably cautious, Morton suggests that we need to avoid the easy temptation to be over-skeptical of accounts that seem on the surface to be fanciful, when in fact deeper exploration of other sources from the time can reveal kernels of unexpected truths hidden in these accounts.

Five chapters follow. The first, "Predicates," surveys European experiences of Muslims before the crusading period, noting, in particular, that unlike other threats such as the Vikings or Magyars, which eventually receded, the Muslims continued to pose a danger, becoming the "normative' enemy" (41) for Europeans. This state of affairs conditioned Europeans' views of Muslims, as can be seen in both theological works of clerics and the epic and chanson literature that circulated among the knightly class. One particularly interesting point that Morton notes is that European writers of the time drew a distinction between Islam and Muslims, i.e. the religion and its adherents; Muslims were seen as mistakenly following a false religion rather than inherently evil themselves, which meant that they were capable of redemption if only they turned to the true faith. This opened up the possibility for tolerance and co-operation between Franks and Muslims even before the onset of the crusades.

Chapter 2, "The Launch of the First Crusade," begins with the valuable observation that when Urban II launched the First Crusade, he "did the same thing that rulers across the Near East and Southern Asia (whether Islamic, Hindu, or Christian) had been doing for over a century: he launched a campaign against the Turks" (67). Morton then goes on to place the threat that the Turks posed to the Byzantine Empire within the wider context of the various regions into which they ventured, noting that the First Crusade was simply the latest (and possibly most successful) response that was made to their activities. This then leads Morton into an analysis of the motives of both Pope Urban and the crusaders, as it is presented in the various accounts of Pope Urban's sermon at Clermont and other sources. He concludes that the primary motivator for the crusaders seems to have been the desire to reach Jerusalem, with fighting the Turks, about whom the participants' knowledge was clearly sparse, having been a secondary incentive and an objective that was probably more important to the pope than it was to his listeners.

In chapter 3, "The First Crusade and the Conquest of Jerusalem," we accompany the crusaders on their expedition, as Morton leads us through a detailed examination of the impressions that the crusaders had of their enemies now that they were encountering them face-to-face; these include not only military aspects, but also crusader impressions of the Turks' hierarchies, culture and religion. Nor does Morton neglect the Arab Muslims whom the crusaders encountered, and he also offers some interesting thoughts on the wars between the (Sunni) Saljuqs and the (Shi'ite) Fatimids, suggesting that the Frankish sources at least give the impression that the root of the Saljuq-Fatimid conflict may have been ethnic rather than religious; this is an intriguing suggestion that would bear further investigation, especially in the Arabic sources from the period. Morton then goes on to consider how far the Muslims were important to the crusaders, rejecting the binary model of "good" crusaders vs. "bad" Muslims, and instead noting that the Muslims are often presented as instruments of God intended to test the crusaders' faith and punish them for misdeeds. (Interestingly, the crusaders occupy a similar position in some of the Muslim sources from the period.) This allows Morton to establish a new binary, in that the "other" for the crusaders was actually God, as a positive ideal to which they aspired. In the meantime, in the sources we see again the distinction between Islam and Muslims, with the crusaders generally hating Islam but not the Muslims. Thus in the wake of the massacre at Jerusalem (which Morton also discusses), the Franks were able to establish peaceful relations with some of their foes, while we see the establishment of another binary in the sources, those who follow the will of God and those who do not, a definition that transcends the religious boundaries and represents the wider battle of God vs. the Devil.

Chapter 4, "Aftermath," examines the impressions that the writers of the Frankish sources formed of non-Christians in the wake of the conquest of Jerusalem, as part of their wider attempt to understand what had just happened. Since most of the authors were not direct participants in the crusade, or making wide use of accounts by crusaders, we do not witness a sudden improvement in their knowledge of Muslims. Instead, their descriptions of the non-Christian enemy are often filtered through a mixture of Biblical perspectives and Classical sources, leavened with some Byzantine sources and some occasional details that do seem to come from accounts of participants in the crusade, resulting in images that are highly variable and for the most part inaccurate. Meanwhile, their views of the East itself are multifaceted, presenting us with a place that they saw as simultaneously a frontier but also the centre of their faith, both foreign and yet also familiar.

With chapter 5, "The Impact of the Crusade," Morton considers the question of whether or not the First Crusade let to a worsening of relations between the Muslim world and Christian Europe. He examines a variety of sources, especially those written away from the immediate frontiers between Muslims and Christians; this includes taking a new approach drawn from historians of the modern period, quantifying references to Muslims (effectively "column inches") in (mostly ecclesiastical) letter collections. On the basis of his sources he concludes that while the First Crusade created a short period of interest among the western writers in Muslims and the events in the East, soon after they returned to their own, more locally-focused concerns, and interest was only taken again on those occasions when the Muslims posed an immediate threat to Christian control of Jerusalem. Probably the greatest impact the First Crusade had was on chanson literature, which saw a popularization of the theme of wars between Muslims and Christians. However, it did not lead to a wider escalation of tensions between Christian Europe and the Muslim states of the eastern Mediterranean.

In his conclusion, Morton sums up what his evidence reveals, noting that the main conflict in western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean was not seen as being between Muslims and Christians, but rather between God and the Devil, a struggle in which the Muslims were sometimes minor participants. Instead, the greatest enemy that Christians in general and the crusaders in particular faced was themselves, with the fate of their souls being the issue at stake. In the process, Morton refutes the Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" paradigm, showing that the attitudes of the crusaders to their Muslim enemies were in fact extremely complex, leaving scope for not only conflict but also tolerance and even co-operation. Thus any view of the First Crusade as initiating a clash of civilizations reflects the views and agendas of those writing about the period, rather than the realities of the period itself.

In this book Morton's approach to his research is methodical and meticulous, making careful and comprehensive use of the sources, but without being unadventurous or plodding. At times his writing includes positively entertaining turns of phrase ("Thus, the chansons resemble works of theology in the same way that a sledge hammer resembles a surgical laser" [59]), and he employs new and innovative approaches to his source material. The result is a thorough, wide-ranging, incisive study that opens up new lines of research, poses thought-provoking challenges to conventional wisdom, and offers novel and convincing interpretations of the source material. I recommend it highly to students and scholars of the crusades, as well as interested laypersons.
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Short History of NATO

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Dylan Cash Sessions

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One Too Many Mornings

Big River

When the young Dylan arrived on the scene in 1962, Cash was impressed.

“I was deeply into folk music in the early 1960s,” he wrote in Cash: The Autobiography, “both the authentic songs from various periods and areas of American life and the new ‘folk revival’ songs of the time, so I took note of Bob Dylan as soon as the Bob Dylan album came out in early ’62 and listened almost constantly to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in ’63. I had a portable record player I’d take along on the road, and I’d put on Freewheelin’ backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off.”

Cash wrote the young Dylan a fan letter, and they began corresponding. When they met at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Cash gave Dylan his guitar as a gesture of respect and admiration. Five years later, when Dylan was in Nashville recording his ninth studio album, Cash was recording in the studio next door. He decided to drop in. On February 17 and 18, 1969, Cash and Dylan recorded more than a dozen duets. Only one of them, a version of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country,” made it onto the album, Nashville Skyline. The others were never officially released, but have long been circulating as bootlegs. In the video above, Dylan and Cash work on one of two versions they made of “One Too Many Mornings,” a song originally recorded by Dylan in 1964 for The Times They Are a-Changin’. The outtakes Dylan and Cash recorded together are all scattered around Youtube. One Youtuber posted a compilation back in 2013.

A few weeks after the release of Nashville Skyline, Dylan and Cash performed “Girl From the North Country” on The Johnny Cash Show. It was taped on May 1, 1969 at the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. A rough video clip (around the 30 minute mark) captures the moment. Despite Dylan’s reported nervousness, the performance was well-received. “I didn’t feel anything about it,” Cash said later. “But everybody said it was the most magnetic, powerful thing they ever heard in their life. They were just raving about electricity and magnetism. And all I did was just sit there hitting G chords.”

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Project One

Description 

Project One

Learn How to Use the Interface 

Entrepreneurship Co-op Student Improves Learning Process with Technology and Innovation - See more at: http://drexel.edu/close/news/announcements/2016/June/Project%20One/#sthash.jzoa4HPV.dpuf


Vimeo

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What is Self-Study?

During the self-study process, Strayer University carefully considers its educational programs and services, with particular attention to student learning and achievement, and determines how well these programs and services accomplish its goals, fulfill its mission, and meet the Commission’s standards.

Under the leadership of a steering committee appointed by Strayer University, working groups or subcommittees examine existing data and evaluative reports, gather new information, and prepare analytical reports on their assigned topics. The purpose of the report is to demonstrate that the University is in compliance with MSCHE’s 14 Standards of Excellence in Higher Education.

Goals of the Self-Study Process

The self-study should provide MSCHE with evidence that the University is invested in a sustained and ethical process of improving student learning, instruction, the curriculum, planning, and the overall effectiveness of the University.

The self-study should also:

• Demonstrate to the Visiting Team, the Commission, and the University community that Strayer is willing to identify and address challenges, and to capitalize on its strengths.
• Be an educational experience for staff, faculty, and students, yielding a greater understanding of the importance of accreditation generally and the role of assessment in continuous improvement of institutional effectiveness and student learning in particular.
• Be instructive to faculty and staff regarding the roles they play in meeting MSCHE’s accreditation standards and in understanding how the standards relate to the University’s mission and Strategic Plan.
• Provide information that validates the new Strategic Plan or will identify changes that are needed to improve it.

REL 212: Music and Beyond the Sound Bytes

Christian Music in not so expected/traditional ways - all clean lyrics - very interesting in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WopyrETP-CU - You Can't Stop Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvKRWpFmGho - Saint's - Most people will point to Gospel or Country as the likely places for Christian themes in music but, Christian Hip-Hop is making a huge leap into the mainstream as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE9mc0XcFAs - Lord Give Me A Sign - Hardcore rapper turned Christian DMX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=EfAhpX_wIBk - Flood - a secularly popular song from Jars of Clay that is a devotional to God

Beyond the soundbytes
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/13/jakarta-election-christian-incumbent-against-muslim-majority/97863290/
http://www.reuters.com/article/turkey-attack-testimony-idUSKBN15S1OR
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/13/iraqi-christians-protest-in-beirut-demanding-resettlement.html
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/02/13/more-coptic-christians-murdered-the-past-two-months-than-admitted-as-refugees-during-obamas-presidency/

iStand

Stand

Roman Religion

BMCR 2017.02.13 on the BMCR blog Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.02.13 Duncan MacRae, Legible Religion. Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture.   Cambridge, MA; London:  Harvard University Press, 2016.  Pp. 259.  ISBN 9780674088719.  $49.95.    Reviewed by Lindsay G. Driediger-Murphy, University of Calgary (ldriedig@ucalgary.ca) Preview This is an excellent and important book. Duncan MacRae’s aim is to illuminate the centrality of Late Republican writings about religion (especially those lost and fragmentary texts usually described as ‘antiquarian’ or ‘technical’) to both Roman and modern understandings of what constituted ‘Roman religion’. This work encourages a re-evaluation of the place and significance of texts in Roman religion, and is sure to generate further progress in this field. The book consists of an introduction, six chapters (divided into three parts), and a brief conclusion. The introduction outlines MacRae’s approach, focusing on the appropriateness and definition of the term ‘religion’, and advocating a sensibly cautious handling of fragments. Rather than dividing Roman texts on religion by genre (legal, philosophical, grammatical, antiquarian, and so on), MacRae proposes to view them all as exemplars of ‘civil theology’, which he defines as writings that focused on ‘the intellectual discussion of the gods and their worship’ in the specific context of what their authors ‘perceived as particularly  Roman religious culture’.1 The three chapters of Part 1, ‘Writing Roman Religion’, elucidate the content, strategies, and context of the production of these texts. Chapter 1 draws on recent critiques of the polis-religion/‘civic religion’ model to sketch a view of the lived religion of Romans as diverse and extending far beyond civic cult. This sets up MacRae’s argument in succeeding chapters that the Late Republican writers on religion overrepresented the role of the state and the priestly colleges in shaping and mediating Roman religious experience. Chapter 2 turns to the texts themselves, to identify the style and strategies common to their writers. MacRae identifies their key shared features as the use of etymology, description, invocations of ethnography and the material remains of the city, and the adoption of the pose of the expert, unveiling to his readers what would otherwise have been lost or mysterious. Chapter 3 turns to the question of why there was a boom of such works in the Late Republic. MacRae sees them as the product of the competitive intellectual culture of the elite, a means by which priests and statesmen could enact (what they saw as) their own primacy in Rome’s religious system. Part 2, ‘Comparison’, comprises one of the most innovative chapters of the book, a comparison between the Roman civil theological writings and the Mishnah. Whilst acknowledging the significant differences between Roman and Jewish religious priorities and theologies, MacRae argues convincingly that we see in both Late Republican Rome and the writings of the rabbis the desire to textualize religion, and to present this textual instantiation as the definitive or normative version of each religion. The two chapters of Part 3, ‘Reading Roman Religion’, consider the influence of the civil theological texts on later centuries. Chapter 5 discusses their reception under the Empire, arguing that Augustus and his successors adopted and promoted the civil theological understanding of Roman religion. Chapter 6 moves to Christian reception, focusing on the responses to Varro’s  Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum in Tertullian and Augustine. Finally, the Conclusion addresses the broader place of writings on religion in Roman culture, arguing that our interpretations must move beyond a dichotomy between ‘Scripture’ and ‘literature’: though not canonized or considered sacred in the way promoted by more obvious ‘Religions of the Book’, these writings played a part in shaping Roman religion and made the religion itself ‘an object of writing and reading’.2 The most important and original contribution of MacRae’s book is to illuminate the vitality of the Late Republican writings on religion, and their importance to their readers and writers. By looking past generic classifications of these writings, MacRae adds a new dimension to our understanding of their effects on Roman knowledge. To Wallace-Hadrill’s perception of this writing as a shift in power from the elite to the specialist,3 and to Moatti's and Rüpke’s view of the process as one of rationalization,4 MacRae rightly adds that because many of the Late Republican writers were themselves priests and ritual experts, their work must also be read as an outworking of their own religious mastery and commitment. Using the surviving evidence for the dedicatees of these works, as well as for their implied readers, MacRae demonstrates masterfully that these texts were not mere exercises in academic speculation, or abstruse enquiries into the arcane, but had contemporary relevance and a wide elite readership. MacRae also provides an interesting, if difficult to prove, alternative perspective on the significance of such writing in the early Empire and even into Late Antiquity. He sees Varro’s ARD, for example, not so much as an unusual and abortive experiment in differentiating the religious as a distinct sphere of Roman life, nor as a text invoked but seldom read in later centuries, but rather as a construction of Roman religion that was not just accepted but actively realized and propagated by pagan readers before it was challenged by Christian ones. In such a rich discussion there is always room for further debate. The characterization of opposing views sometimes reads as being a little too extreme. In Chapter 1 on the variety of Roman religious experience, for example, MacRae criticizes Scheid as well as Beard, North, and Price for holding that ‘citizenship (according to a juridical understanding of that term) entirely constituted religious identity for Romans and carried a set of obligations about forms of worship’.5This may be a fair summary of the impression created by Scheid’s early work, where ‘la communauté cultuelle romaine comprend donc avant tout et presque exclusivement les citoyens’,[6]] but I am not sure that it does justice to the more cautious position of Beard, North, and Price, who argue not that public rites were the only way Romans experienced religion, but rather that these are best documented in the evidence we have.7 Similarly, Chapter 2 reproaches ‘the use of modernity (…) whether in the guise of Enlightenment or Weberian rationalization’ as ‘an explicit or implicit comparison’ for Roman rationalization; MacRae objects that this ‘begs fundamental questions about how appropriately “modernity” describes the culture of late Republican Rome’, citing as culprits Moatti, Wallace-Hadrill, and Rüpke. I am not certain that modernity is a fair target here: the word is not a touchstone for Wallace- Hadrill, and Moatti seems to me to use it purely to denote the products of her ‘esprit critique’, explicitly disavowing the issue of ‘whether the Romans were rational in the modern sense of the word’.8 Rüpke does draw on Weber’s theories of rationalization, but whether this is inherently inappropriate requires demonstration. Further discussion of what MacRae means by modernity and the role he sees it playing in the scholarship would have been useful. Taking up MacRae’s invitation to take Late Republican writings on religion seriously, I offer two further thoughts, less in the spirit of critique than in tribute to the engagement his work deserves. One key issue, it seems to me, is the relationship between the civil theological texts and actual practice. MacRae walks an interesting and unusual line, holding in essence that there was little overlap between the two in the Late Republican period, but more under the Empire, when Augustus, his successors, and those intellectuals in his orbit sought to implement in practice the civil theologians’ textual construction of Roman religion. This argument works well for the Empire, where MacRae supports it with such examples as Augustus’ revival (invention?) of the fetial spear-throwing ritual and reinvention of the Secular Games. There seems to be more room for debate when we turn to the Late Republican period. For example, MacRae rightly notes that the technical treatises whose fragments have come down to us cannot be viewed as ‘authoritative legal handbooks’, but perhaps accepts too readily the view that there were no other books used to guide ritual practice and considered authoritative amongst the priestly colleges. Given the mentions in our surviving sources of books ‘of’ the various priests, I am less comfortable than MacRae with saying that ‘On the whole (…) the pontifical and augural law were the creations of the theologians’, or even with concluding that ‘there is no evidence for a “real” set of secret pontifical books in Rome’.9 This view has become popular in the last few decades, and may be right, but it remains an assumption so long as we lack access to whatever priestly archives may once have existed. It would have been interesting to see more discussion of why, if there was no pre-existing body of ritual and religious law, the civil theologians considered it appropriate to speak as if there were. The issue of the relationship between texts and practice is raised on a broader level by MacRae’s argument that the civil theologians ‘created, for the first time’ the concept of ‘Roman’ religion. MacRae must be right that the vision presented by the civil theologians was a selective one, which may have overstated the significance of the priestly colleges and the state religious apparatus, because the writers were themselves members of these. What seems less certain is whether the civil theological texts not only drastically narrowed the definition of what counted as Roman religion, but also created that concept itself. MacRae’s argument is that prior to these writers there was no ‘Roman state religion’, because ‘most interactions with the gods at Rome existed beyond the reach of the state and were not (…) the object of surveillance or legal regulation’10; even our texts’ focus on the city of Rome as defining ‘Roman’ religion was ‘an arbitrary delimitation, one that fit awkwardly with the complex realities of the religious landscape’.11 I wonder whether we need go as far as this. That the Roman state tended to leave its citizens to get on with their religion(s) so long as these did not threaten the authorities or lead to the abandonment of public rites is well known, but even these boundaries seem to me to testify to a sense that there were some rituals that were appropriate, and others that were not, for the Roman citizen qua citizen. Nor was the emphasis upon Rome and its priests restricted to the Late Republican civil theological texts: as early as Ennius, Rome is founded augusto augurio, the unique site where, in the words of Livy’s Camillus, the rites of ‘all public and private gods’ have ‘their appointed places no less than they have their appointed days.’12MacRae does not use Livy in his study save to assert that he, too, embraced the view of Roman religion crafted by the civil theologians, but there is a slight risk of circular argument here. Is nearly everything that now survives for us civil theology? And if so, on what basis can we safely claim that civil theology misrepresented the realities of Roman religious life? These questions do not detract from what is a fascinating and thought-provoking work. Duncan MacRae has given Late Republican texts on religion an exciting new lease on life. We are indebted to him for a book which is sure to encourage further exploration of Rome’s ‘legible religion’. Notes: 1.   MacRae 2016: 3. 2.   MacRae 2016: 141-146. 3.   Wallace-Hadrill, A. 2008. Rome’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge. 4.   Moatti, C. 1997. La raison de Rome. Naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République. Paris; Rüpke, J. 2012. Religion in Republican Rome. Rationalization and Ritual Change. Philadelphia, PA. 5.   MacRae 2016: 16. 6.   Scheid, J. 2001. Religion et piété à Rome. Paris. 34. Note however a more nuanced approach to polis-religion and its limits in Scheid, J. 2013. Les Dieux, l’État et l’individu: Réflexions sur la religion civique à Rome. Paris (and the English edition with forward by Clifford Ando: Scheid, J. 2016. The Gods, the State, and the Individual: Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome. Philadelphia.) 7.   Beard, M., North, J., and Price, S. R. F. 1998. Religions of Rome. Cambridge. E.g. vol. 1: ch. 1. 8.   Moatti 1997 with additions to the English edition, Moatti 2015 (Cambridge): 1. 9.   E.g. Cicero, Rep.2.54; Div. 1.72; Varro, Ling. Lat.5.21; cf. MacRae 2016: 43, 66-8, 179 n. 76. 10.   MacRae 2016: 18. 11.   MacRae 2016: 35. 12.   Ennius, Ann. 245 M = 494 V; Livy, AUC 5.52.  Read comments on this review or add a comment on the BMCR blog Home Read Latest Archives BMCR Blog About BMCR Review for BMCR Commentaries Support BMCR

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Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic

BMCR 2017.02.19 on the BMCR blog
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.02.19

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Henriette van der Blom, Oratory and Political Career in the Late Roman Republic.   Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016.  Pp. xiii, 377.  ISBN 9781107051935.  $120.00.  

Reviewed by Joanna Kenty, University of New Hampshire (joanna.kenty@unh.edu)
Preview

Henriette van der Blom’s new monograph is an exciting and important contribution to a new wave of scholarship on Roman oratory and rhetoric. She has gathered a trove of useful information about well-known figures of the late Republic, but much of that information will be new to her readers, who know figures like Pompey, Caesar, and Antony better as military leaders than as practitioners of oratory. Likewise, scholars familiar with these individuals have a strong sense of each man’s personality; van der Blom argues that each man in fact constructed and communicated that personality through speech above all. She therefore leads us back to the orations that helped the Roman populus to get to know each man in the first place.

In her first monograph, Cicero’s Role Models (2010, BMCR 2011.07.49), van der Blom focused on Cicero’s orations (and particularly his use of exempla). Here, she removes Cicero from the picture (insofar as that is possible in any study of the late Roman Republic) to examine oratory in the context of the careers of six of his fellow statesmen: Gaius Gracchus, Pompeius Magnus, Julius Caesar, Piso Caesoninus (cos. 58), Cato the Younger, and Marcus Antonius. Cicero, she rightly observes, exploited oratory more than any of his contemporaries in carving out a political niche for himself. He is not representative or typical, and his tendency to describe Roman politics as if his own behavior and career were normative can further distort our understanding of the world in which he operates. As a corrective, van der Blom’s selection is intended to offer a representative sample of the full spectrum of ways in which and the degree to which oratory was used as a tool in Roman public life, as opposed to other means of self-promotion (p. 9). She also seems to have chosen generally well-attested figures, even those of no more than adequate eloquence (see especially Piso), at the expense of lesser known individuals whose eloquence was more noteworthy but whose biography would necessarily be incomplete or spotty because of a lack of evidence. van der Blom offers a condensed political biography of each of these individuals in discrete chapters, focusing particularly on the important orations that each delivered in the course of his life.

Throughout these case studies, van der Blom provides clear, straightforward, and meticulous discussion of what we know about a given speech occasion, why the individual in question might have chosen to use oratory as a tool on that occasion, and what (if anything) we can reliably know about the content of what he said. van der Blom’s experience working on Catherine Steel’s Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators database, a much-needed update to Malcovati’s collection, clearly offered inspiration and facilitated the research for the monograph. van der Blom often translates fragments of orations in the course of her chapters and even extracts some speculations about the orator’s style as evident in the fragment. Much of her material derives from Plutarch’s Roman lives, and she attempts to sort fact from Plutarch’s embellishments, especially when it comes to the personality or character of each of her case study subjects. She also explores the implications of choosing to run for the tribunate and of balancing military service with political office, and notes how each man foregrounded certain features of his persona (ancestry, ideological bent, military exploits, e.g.) at the expense of others in campaigning for office. Each political biography, in her view, amounts to the sum of a sequence of conscious choices of career paths, and a series of choices about self-presentation, primarily but not exclusively through oratory. In her words, “the most important factor for political success in Rome was the willingness and ability to communicate the various elements in a politician’s public profile ... in a credible, consistent and appealing manner through a range of communicative means..., not least, public oratory” (285).

In Part I (Chapters 1-2), van der Blom offers a concise, basic introduction to oratory and Roman public life more generally, which undergraduates might find extremely helpful. She reviews the main venues of oratory (contio, senate, and courts) and the relative importance of oratory for various magistracies. She discusses the import both of the mere act of speaking and of the opportunity to communicate particular messages, which could allow the orator to publicize his ideological stance for the long term or to influence events in the short term. Those with noteworthy oratorical ability could seek out or generate occasions to display their skill and use it to achieve their goals, while others chose not to manufacture those opportunities, or deliberately avoided them, choosing to operate through other means. van der Blom’s discussion of changes in the political arena in the first century BCE, including the under-studied era of Sulla’s dictatorships and the Social Wars, is particularly useful.

The real meat of the project, however, comes in Part II with the case studies, beginning with Gaius Gracchus in Chapter 3. van der Blom’s thorough scrutiny of the sources, contexts, and historicity of our well-known portrait of Gaius Gracchus is fascinating, delving beyond the apocrypha of a semi-mythologized martyr to reveal a canny political actor of great eloquence and energy. Gracchus knew that in the arena of speech, he had an advantage over his opponents, and van der Blom shows that he consistently shifted his political battles to that arena in order to exploit his abilities. By contrast, in Chapter 4, van der Blom argues that Pompeius Magnus, while “a master of staged events and planned speeches of self-praise” (p. 123), generally turned to other means of self-fashioning and avoided giving speeches when he could. Oratory helped him to nurture and maintain his popularity, but he benefited more often from orations by other speakers than from his own speaking efforts. When he did speak, he was perceived as either diffident or evasive. Whether or not van der Blom is right to give him the benefit of the doubt in arguing that he consciously cultivated that effect,1 oratory was not one of his preferred tools. Julius Caesar, the subject of Chapter 5, falls more on Gracchus’ end of the spectrum, both in his inclination to deploy his eloquence whenever possible for political ends, and in his use of popularis political markers in his orations. His funeral speech for his aunt Julia shows a rather opportunistic exploitation of one such occasion. From his spectacular debut — prosecutions of Dolabella and Antonius Hybrida for maladministration (de pecuniis repetundis), the “springboard” referred to in the title of van der Blom’s chapter, and speeches against Sullan reforms — to his controversial consulship, Caesar’s use of the contio as a vehicle for political self-promotion is, as van der Blom shows, distinct and consistent. van der Blom emphasizes the important question of when Caesar chose to publish his speeches, and when our later sources seem to be relying on notes taken by others or on mere hearsay for their evidence of Caesar’s eloquence.

In chapter 6 we move on to Caesar’s father-in-law Piso Caesoninus, the least familiar of van der Blom’s subjects, and a politician whose speaking abilities allowed him to function adequately in public, but hardly made oratory a preferred medium. Cicero includes oratory among Piso’s many failings in his bilious In Pisonem, for instance. van der Blom’s assertion that Cicero’s scornful assessment is shown “to be misleading, even wrong” (p. 202) seems to me to be overly kind to Piso, but the discussion of his career is useful nonetheless in raising awareness of a senator like Piso, who was (after all) a consul and a prominent public figure who is usually allowed to fall into obscurity as we focus obsessively on Caesar, Pompey, and Cicero. In developing a sense of Piso’s persona, van der Blom elucidates a pattern in Piso’s oratory (such as it is) of appealing to precedent and the letter of the law, as well as principled and perhaps Epicurean insistence on not getting involved in other men’s battles. This kind of rigidity emerges much more strongly, of course, in chapter 7, in van der Blom’s profile of Cato the Younger. No Late Republican politician, as van der Blom notes, impressed his contemporaries with a stronger sense of his idiosyncratic personality, and no politician relied more on his personality for auctoritas, for Cato’s influence is quite striking given his electoral failures. Cato, like Gracchus, is often seen distorted through the lens of hero worship, but van der Blom’s portrait is detailed and careful, avoiding over-generalization or speculation. Cato was principled in the extreme, but demonstrably capable of pragmatism and occasionally guilty of nepotism. Like Piso’s Epicureanism, Cato’s Stoicism appears to have been an element that he could but did not always invoke as a driving principle of political action. A strong pattern of resistence to the “first triumvirate” emerges from the assembled testimonia, as does the proclivity to nonconformity and obstructionism for which Cato is so well known, and which, as van der Blom shows, Cato made the centerpiece of his own spectacular self-fashioning.

The monograph concludes with a chapter on Marcus Antonius, a man whose career is well known and who delivered several famous speeches of great historical import. Nevertheless, van der Blom notes, no fragments survive to confirm or refute assessments of Antonius’ oratory or Plutarch’s characterization of Antonius’ oratory as Asianist. Indeed, the lack of specific information about Antony’s speeches means that this chapter remains rather frustratingly speculative. van der Blom does make the important point, however, that Antonius’ clash with Cicero in late 44 challenged the great orator on his own turf, so to speak, and that Antony must either have chosen or been forced by circumstance to use oratory as a tool on this occasion nonetheless (p. 271).

The importance of oratory as an arena of political action in this tumultuous period thus emerges clearly. Brief mention is also made of the importance of propaganda in the triumviral period, much of which was disseminated through oratory. van der Blom occasionally remarks in the course of the book on the apparent increase in the relative importance of oratory as a component of public life in the first century BCE, as military achievements and provincial administration experienced a corresponding decline in their potential to confer prestige and influence. This comes out most prominently in van der Blom’s conclusion, in which she sets aside Cicero’s schema in the Brutus of good versus bad orators in favor of a new schema: good versus (unstudied) bad builders of public profiles. Politicians could use oratory to as great or as small an extent as they liked in creating such a public profile, and speech was hardly their only tool; in fact, van der Blom notes, this flexibility opened all kinds of possibilities for accessing political influence and made the Roman political elite rather more open to outsiders than has previously been thought by some scholars. This all bears directly on Cicero’s own career, of course: his Philippics offer our best evidence for the oratorical fray of 44-43 BCE, and more broadly, his published speeches and spectacular career spurred, if they did not initiate, the growing importance of oratory. This, however, remains unstated in van der Blom’s project, as a result of her more general goal of avoiding Cicero.

This study exposes myriad opportunities for further study, investigation, and analysis, in the best possible way. By shedding light on the speech-making activities of these prominent late Republican politicians, van der Blom has convincingly demonstrated that oratory was an essential tool for them, and has broadened our perspective on oratory in the period, far beyond a myopic spotlight on Cicero.

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