The gritty intimacy of the Roman army

Sometimes a tiny element of something is so irritating that it colours our view of the whole thing.

I have been reading a book in which the author repeatedly uses the meaningless phrase “by far and away”, when he means either “far and away” or (more likely) “by far”, but not a fusion of both. Silly, isn’t it?

But this is the least of the problems that I encountered in my spirited attempt to plough through Guy de la Bédoyère’s 500-page 2020 book Gladius, subtitled “The World of the Roman Soldier”. (Incidentally, I see that, in the latest reprint, this has already changed to “Living, Fighting and Dying in the Roman Army” — presumably to match the same author’s Populus: Living and Dying in Ancient Rome.)

Definitely not a handbook

The author opens by excusing himself from writing a handbook or a history in favour of presenting a rather impressionistic image of what he imagines “it was like to be a soldier in the army that brought the Romans their vast empire”. A three-page listing of Roman emperors takes the timeline from Augustus in 27 BC to Valens in AD 378, although the author claims to “focus mainly on the Roman army up to the time of Constantine I”. So it’s quite definitely a book about “the army of the emperors” (although page after page is devoted to the Republican army, presumably to boost the page count).

Missing provinces

The accompanying map of the Roman Empire is, unfortunately, an unintended mish-mash of periods. As we glance from left to right, we travel back through time — part of the map belongs to the mid-2nd century AD, since Pannonia has been divided and the Antonine Wall built, but part is still in the 1st century AD, since Arabia does not exist and Judaea has not yet become Palaestina, and part even seems to predate Augustus, since the only “Major Battles” shown are Trasimene, Cannae, Zama, Carrhae, and Actium. Curious and confusing.

As clear as a cloudy day

The text is all a little vague, a little woolly. Ideas parade as facts, and I worry about the impression of the Roman army that the average interested reader will gain. We should brace ourselves for a slew of factoids generated by this book. Nothing is stated precisely. Everything is rather cloudy, rather nebulous. Redundant phrases are added for padding. “The Roman army reached its most coherent and consistent form under the emperors”, we read in the Introduction, “especially from the time of Augustus until the middle of the third century AD”. So, let’s be clear: the author is saying that the army of the emperors reached its most coherent form during the period of the emperors. Very informative.

Apparently, “auxiliary organization varied wildly”. I beg to differ. Three basic unit-types, available in two generalized sizes, doesn’t seem overly “wild” to me. And yet, we are informed that “they were in a constant state of flux”. How so? The author believes that “it is impossible to say how many legions and auxiliary units there were in the Roman army at any point in Roman history”, owing no doubt to this “flux”. This kind of statement is, at best, unhelpful, or (let’s speak plainly) just wrong.

Spurious facts

It would be tedious to fact-check absolutely everything (perhaps the University of Chicago Press editor should have done this?) but I was taken aback by just how many statements are incorrect, just how many assertions are untrue.

For example, Zosimus did not “dismiss Valerian as ‘effeminate and indolent’”, but gives rather the opposite impression. Diocletian did not divide the army into a fixed frontier defence force and four “highly mobile forces that could race to trouble spots”. The Praetorian Guard was not called the Cohortes Praetorianae, and the Germani corporis custodes were not “hired by some emperors”. The eques singularis Augusti Aurelius Martinus (pictured here) did not belong to “the cavalry attached to the Praetorian Guard”.

Victor, the Moorish freedman of the cavalryman Numerianus of the ala I Asturum (depicted below, reclining on a funeral couch), did not serve at South Shields, and the author does not explain (beyond wishful thinking) how “the text makes it clear that the two were engaged in a same-sex relationship”. Our primary evidence does not “include writing tablets preserved in bogs in northern Britain” (presumably an allusion to the Vindolanda tablets, and a phrase I have had occasion to query before, when Jonathan Roth, in his 2009 book Roman Warfare, informed his readers that Vindolanda “was built, inadvertently, on a bog. When it began to sink, it was abandoned”).

Errors abound

The inscription listing the legions under Marcus Aurelius does not “list all the legions and the provinces in which they were stationed”. (This latter error probably arose as a result of using Brian Campbell’s ‘translation’ of the inscription, which adds the names of provinces in brackets, rather than consulting the primary evidence, as he claims to have done in the Foreword.)

It is nonsensical to suggest that “Legio XXX was supposed to be the first of a new series of legions, starting with XXX”. The word vexillationes for legionary detachments does not mean “wings”. The fact that auxiliary cohorts numbered approximately 500 men was probably not because “anything bigger might have risked creating a potential rebel force of dangerous size”, and probably has more to do with logistics and provisioning.

As for the parade held by Gallienus in Rome, probably in AD 263 (not “in around 261”), far from being “a publicity stunt to divert attention for (sic) the military disasters and troubles that had afflicted his reign”, this was none other than the emperor’s decenalia, celebrating ten years in power, no mean feat and definitely deserving of a parade. And Valens was certainly not “the first Roman emperor to be killed in battle by a barbarian force” — that distinction must go to Decius.

Arrant nonsense

It is also irresponsible for the author to inform his general readership (without reference to any evidence) that “even the word Rome itself was derived from the Greek word ῥώμη, which means ‘strength’ or ‘might’”, when this was nothing more than a folk etymology amongst Greek writers intrigued by the similarity of the words. Every schoolchild, Roman or modern, knows that Rome (Roma) was named after Romulus.

The author claims that “the evidence shows that, whatever the position [viz. regarding the military establishment] at one date, it was different at others, and usually in ways we cannot now resolve”. Didn’t an editor, at some point, ask what on earth the author thought he was saying here? (I keep hearing the Rumsfeldian “known unknowns, that we don’t know, and unknown unknowns, that we don’t know we don’t know”.) Is this the “flux” we read about earlier?

When he writes that “It is extremely unlikely that the Romans themselves ever knew the army’s size with any precision”, he is just plain wrong. No two ways about it. This is nonsense. Half-a-dozen or so pages earlier, he just told us that “the army was the Roman world’s biggest bureaucracy”, alluding (I suppose) to the almost fanatical fact-recording evident from the Dura-Europos papyri and elsewhere. Of course they knew exactly how big their army was. They even knew every soldier’s name!

There are many questionable opinions on show, as well. Was the legionary legate really “approaching the climax of his senatorial career”? It might be another decade before he had a shot at the consulship, which opened up the possibility of a major provincial governorship like Britain or Syria. Wasn’t that more likely to be the climax? Then again, we are told that optio is “a word that meant ‘assistant’”, but actually it probably derives from the verb opto, “to choose or select”, meaning that the centurion chose him (which is what Polybius implies, in any case).

Dodgy Latin

The author’s Latin is a little dodgy, too. The word contubernium does not mean “with a tent”; it is the tent, as Tacitus makes clear. The men who sleep in it are the contubernales. An evocatus was not just any soldier “who voluntarily signed on again”, but specifically a Praetorian. It is odd to translate valetudinarium (a hospital) as “place of health/sickness”, and it was not necessary for a vexillum (a flag or banner, normally carried by a detachment of soldiers) to be “erected in the ground to mark the presence of soldiers”. We are told that a centurion placed in charge of a unit was called a princeps praepositus, but this tautology (a man could either be princeps, “chief”, or praepositus, “placed in charge”, but not both) is only found (as far as I’m aware) on a single inscription from Dura Europos (illustrated above), where it occurs, heavily abbreviated, on the bottom line (princ(eps) pr(aepositus) ve[x(illationum)); the same man elsewhere calls himself simply princ(eps) vexill(ationum), which is the normal term.

The plural of signifer is not signifer (this, at least, may be a typographical error), nor is the plural of imaginifer (the standard-bearer responsible for carrying the emperor’s imago or “image”) imaginiferes. (The plural of both words ends in -feri.) The speculatores appear in the text as “the emperor’s personal mounted bodyguard”, but in the Glossary as “scouts”; neither seems quite right. The position of subpraefectus is glossed as “an under-prefect”, chiefly it seems to enable the career of the imperial freedman Tiberius Julius Xanthus to be mentioned, but this seems to have been a shadowy sinecure associated with the imperial fleet, whereas readers are in danger of assuming incorrectly that all praefecti were supplied with a deputy. The non-military term tractator (here, erroneously, tractatorus) is included for the same reason — Xanthus apparently performed this “handling” function (Seneca suggests that it means “masseur”) for the emperors Tiberius and Claudius, presumably before being rewarded with his sub-prefecture.

Unreliable testimonials

Apart from errors of fact and judgement, there are referencing issues, as well. The end note for the career of Tiberius Claudius Maximus, famous as the man quod cepisset Decebalum et caput eius pertulisset Traiano (“who caught Decebalus [King of the Dacians] and delivered his head to Trajan”), refers us to Cassius Dio’s story of the heroism of a badly wounded cavalryman and (inexplicably) a dedication by the townsfolk of Carnuntum for the good health of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. We actually want Dio 68.14.3 for the capture of Decebalus, and AE 1969/70, 583 for the impressive tombstone of Maximus. Incidentally, it is this tombstone that gives us the only instance (again, as far as I’m aware) of a soldier missus voluntarius honesta missione (“released voluntarily with an honourable discharge”). Although we are informed, in the Glossary, that voluntarius indicates “a veteran who volunteered to fight again after retirement”, it rather seems, on the contrary, that Maximus was making the point that, having served for thirty years, it was his decision to call it a day.

The University of Chicago Press copywriters must have been dreaming about a different book when they wrote: “Gladius gives us a portrait of an ancient society that is unprecedented in both its broad sweep and gritty intimacy”.

Likewise, the New York Times reviewer (quoted by the publisher) knows little about Roman studies if he believes that this book “collects pretty much every fact known about what it was like to be in the military arm of the Roman empire”. No, it really doesn’t. But then, this is precisely the danger I alluded to at the start. Brace yourselves for those factoids.

The Roman army was full of men’s bodies

Against my better judgement, I have been reading a veritable word salad of impenetrable jargon, allegedly advancing the study of the Roman army.

Sentences like these — “the rapid and violent expansion of the Roman empire was accomplished through the reterritorialisation of geographical terrain and, likewise, of bodies and identities. Yet, this reterritorialisation did not generate perfectly ‘Roman’ simulacra, rather a synthetic, mass-produced military mutation which purported the illusion, and enforced the sovereignty, of Romanness” — are an unnecessary affront to plain English, in my opinion.

There is more like this, much more, in “The military step: theorising the mobilisation of the Roman army”, a 25-page article by Dr Hannah-Marie D Chidwick.

Chidwick lectures in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol, where (her “Research Outputs” on the university web site suggest) she specializes in Lucan. I cannot imagine that hers is a straightforward appreciation of the poet, but I cannot be sure, as neither her doctoral thesis nor any of her published papers have been made available to the reading public — with the single exception of this one, for access to which Taylor & Francis charge £41.00 per 48hrs (which thankfully is quite long enough to form a sound opinion).

Unnecessary obscurity

It’s not an easy read. It’s not an entertaining read. I must admit to harbouring mixed feelings about published work that, even when read by a native speaker, requires frequent consultation of a dictionary. I immediately wonder if perhaps the commonplace is being stylistically disguised to appear profound. (And none of this is helped by an overabundance of poorly-placed commas.)

Here is an example: Chidwick contends that “The Roman empire’s rapid expansion was, of course, made possible by a fluctuating body of men’s bodies, revered as the most ruthless military force in the ancient world”, for which she cites Cicero. (But the Cicero passage, De Re Publica 3.36, simply says “But our people by defending their allies have gained dominion over the whole world” — no mention of rapidity, no mention of ruthlessness.) Here is the plain English version: the Roman army was responsible for the expansion of the Roman empire.

Here is another: “The review of Roman sources in this article therefore has at its philosophical heart this perception of the army as a state operated, territorialising machine – a force mobilised for the safeguarding of sovereignty and the continuance of government power”. Here is the plain English version: the Roman army was employed by the Roman state to protect and enlarge it.

And another: “Roman military praxes can be read as mechanistically deterritorialising recruits of their ‘original ethnicity and social level’ on many overlapping strata, reterritorialising them as Roman military”. This one serves to illustrate Chadwick’s often shaky grasp of Roman military studies, as she is suggesting that new recruits shed their old identities to become Roman soldiers, which is manifestly untrue. The same error is clear later on: “Whether Roman or ‘barbarian’, the body had to be overcoded, reterritorialised, from citizen to soldier, from head to toe”.

One final example: “Military presence disrupts spaces that were formerly rural or civic with the potential of becoming a base or battleground, a potential manifested in modes geographical and human”. Here, Chadwick (pictured at Hadrian’s Wall milecastle 39) is saying that the movement of large armies and their periodic requirement to encamp tends to devastate terrain and displace inhabitants.

Often, Chidwick’s prose is so ambagious (a lovely word from the Latin ambagiosus, referring to the twists and turns of a labyrinth) that her meaning remains obscure. Here is an example: “This article contends that the activity of being-Roman-army exemplarily makes manifest philosophies of territorialisation, in terms of the dynamic interrelation between movement, space and identity”. Sometimes, we must throw up our hands and admit that life is too short to waste another moment on deciphering such banalities.

Back to the sources

Leaving aside her verbose articulation, Chidwick’s command of the ancient sources is not always sure. She cites Tacitus, Annales 13.40–41, as evidence of Roman “scorched earth” tactics, but this passage describes Corbulo’s attack and capture of Artaxata (Annales 15.27 would have been a better choice, where the Romans advise their Parthian enemies not to provoke an attack but to accept a “kingdom untouched by devastations”).

And again, to support her contention that “The devastation of armoured territorialisation was not lost on Roman writers like Lucan, Cicero, or Sallust”, she cites Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 10.6, but this passage is a diatribe against the evils of avarice and a desire for power. It’s not about devastation, or armour, or territory. But then, she also informs us that Frontinus’ Strategemata “survives only in fragments. It is mentioned in Aelian’s Tactics, a Greek work on the Hellenic military”, but neither of these statements is true. (Chidwick is perhaps confused by the fact that Aelian briefly met Frontinus and mentions the fact in his Taktika.)

To conclude: quite frankly, I am baffled by the whole thing. If it advances our understanding of the Roman military in any way, then I am none the wiser. And on that note, let us give the last word to Dr Chidwick: “Thinking with philosophies of territorialisation reconfigures how activity is environment, how bodies are territories, and their actions generate these landscapes as much as the ground beneath them”. Hmm.

Bad bad beef dis!

I have finally made my peace with The Bafut Beagles. It has taken fifty years, but I have laid the ghost to rest.

As a young teenager — probably a twelve-year-old, I think — I was made to read The Bafut Beagles at school by a terrifying old walrus who went by the name of Mister Porter. It was the prescribed book for Second Year English class.

I did not enjoy the experience.

Not even the charming line drawings by animal-illustrator Ralph Thompson could persuade me to like this book (and the rather creepy cover did not help).

So for half a century, I have avoided thinking about it entirely.

Now we walka good

I recently came across a copy and decided to give it another chance, and — I must admit — I really don’t know why I disliked it so much.

Besides the interspersal of largely unintelligible pidgin English (“If we go meet bad beef how we go kill um if we go lef’ our gun for dis place?” — “I go take gun. Den if beef go kill me it no be your palaver, you hear?”), the story is simple and engaging.

Gerald Durrell arrives in Cameroon in 1949, in order to collect exotic animals to sell to British zoos. He bases his operation in the remote and picturesque setting of Bafut, a traditional kingdom ruled by a Fon, and hires a small team of four local hunters, who are inordinately proud of the new name he gives them (“you no savvay dat I be Bafut Beagle?”).

Naturally, for a book written about Africans by an Englishman in the 1950s, there is an unconsciously racist undercurrent.

The Fon of Bafut, who rules the area, is a caricature of a gin-drinking fogy with several wives who are “all naked except for meagre loin-cloths”; his people are simple-minded folk who mistake western medicine for sorcery. The scene of an old woman berating a Bafutian man for beating a young woman in the road is dismissed as “an ordinary domestic upheaval with the usual ingredients of an erring wife, a hungry husband, an uncooked dinner, and an interfering mother-in-law”.

The “Beagles” get into various scrapes as they attempt to fulfil Durrell’s wish-list of animals, in return for “dash” and cigarettes. And when Durrell finally ships his menagerie home, he doesn’t seem too perturbed that all but one of his pygmy flying squirrels have perished from starvation en route, owing to their specialized diet.

A curious book, all in all. Definitely a product of its times. But quite why the Scottish Education Department of the 1970s thought that this was suitable literature for teenaged children is baffling.

A troublesome diploma

I have been reading Bürokratie und Politik in der römischen Kaiserzeit by Werner Eck, Emeritus Professor at Cologne University. I only just became aware of it, although it appeared in 2012.

It’s a short book. Although supposedly 100 pages long, I calculated that there are actually only 58 pages of text, owing to the positioning of the 21 illustrations and the generous allocation of “white space”. And to my considerable dismay, after I parted with £23.99 for the privilege of reading it, I discovered that the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library has made the book freely available online!

On the plus side, Professor Eck usually has something interesting to say, and he doesn’t usually charge 40 pence per page to say it. However, he is also guilty of that irritating crime, republishing the same material repeatedly under different guises.

A mysterious provincial governor

The bulk of the book, as it turns out, is a discussion of the curious events surrounding the elevation of the emperor Trajan in AD 97/98. It is a fascinating story, but it’s one that Eck already told in 2002, first in more popularizing style in the lavish Traian: Ein Kaiser der Superlative am Beginn einer Umbruchzeit? volume, and second (in English) in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin. And it’s one that he continues to tell, this time in Italian, in Epigraphica Volume 84 (2022). The latter is freely available online.

Research marches on, of course. Although the tale remains the same, I did notice that the Epigraphica version (written 10 years after the book) sports another piece of evidence for the extraordinary honorific title exercitus Germanicus pia fidelis — p. 149 note 49, if you’re interested — and on p. 152, Professor Eck has quietly acknowledged that he jumped the gun in placing Tiberius Julius Candidus Marius Celsus in Lower Moesia in AD 97.

Don’t we deserve an explanation?

To be fair, he never explained this properly in Bürokratie pp. 68–69, where he simply cited CIL XVI 41, a small diploma fragment of January AD 97 naming the governor of “[Moesia inferior]e” as “Julius Mar[--”. It should be plain to everyone that (a) this might not be Lower Moesia, and (b) this might not be Julius Candidus Marius Celsus. However, there was clearly much more going on at the back of Eck’s mind in 2012 than he let on.

When the godfather of diploma studies, Herbert Nesselhauf, published CIL XVI 41 in 1936 (see picture at right), he only suggested Lower Moesia because the diploma had been discovered in the territory of that province. But as for Julius Mar[--’s identity (IVLIO MAR in line 1), Dr Leiva Petersen, compiling the J fascicule of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani in 1966, invented “Lucius Julius Marinus ..?”, whom she suggested as the father of the homonymous consul of AD 101.

It was only some years later, in 1985, that Karl Strobel (then a 30-year-old researcher, now an Emeritus Professor) suggested that the governor might actually be Tiberius Julius Candidus Marius Celsus. He had reasonably good grounds for this. The word placing on the fragment suggested to him that the scribes had been obliged to squeeze the required information onto the bronze plate. In this case, it seemed reasonable to suppose that the polyonymous governor’s name might have been drastically abbreviated to “Julius Marius”, perhaps with “Candidus” on the next line. Eck tells us none of this.

But which province?

At around the same time, the province was thrown into doubt, as the governor of Lower Moesia in the mid-90s was known to have been Sextus Octavius Fronto, attested there in June AD 92 and in September AD 97. (Remember, our diploma is from January AD 97.) Upper Moesia was then suggested, which would fit “[Moesia superior]e” equally well, and there is a gap in the later AD 90s where the governor remains unknown. However, by 2005, another diploma of Upper Moesia dating from AD 97 had come to light, casting doubt on this new attribution, since it would have been highly irregular, not to say downright impossible, for two diploma issues for the same province within the same year.

As early as 2006, Paul Holder had suggested that our Julius Mar[-- could only have governed Upper or Lower Germany, being the only two alternatives that, in the context of AD 97, would fit the name of a province ending in E: “[Germania superior]e”, for example. And yet, Trajan himself is known to have been governor of Upper Germany in AD 97, while his colleague Lucius Licinius Sura is known to have been in charge of Lower Germany at the same time. The problem seemed intractable.

Currently, the only solution seems to be to return to Upper Moesia and to assume that something unusual had happened, occasioning the granting of privileges to soldiers twice in one year. Perhaps Eck will tell us in a future (hopefully not as expensive) publication.

Odysseus or Ulysses - what’s in a name?

Recent talk of Odysseus and Ralph Fiennes’ The Return brought to mind a book that I purchased as a schoolboy in 1974 from the Scholastic Corporation Book Club.

It was The Adventures of Ulysses, by the American author Bernard Evslin (who evidently adapted quite a few ancient myths for children), and — fifty years on — it still sits on my bookshelf.

Although Homer begins the Odyssey “in medias res” (“in the midst of things”) and incorporates a flashback in which Odysseus narrates the earlier part of the tale, Evslin had decided to tell the story in its correct chronological order.

In this, Evslin was simply following the simplifying technique pioneered by Charles Lamb in his own Adventures of Ulysses in 1808. But Evslin managed to make his version more exciting for Generation X readers.

A new retelling

At the start, where Lamb, following Homer, relates how the Lotus-eaters benignly drugged Odysseus’ men, so that, in order to escape, “Ulysses caused them to be bound hand and foot, and cast under the hatches, and set sail with all possible speed from that baneful coast”, Evslin devises an entire storyline of his own.

Under the influence of the lotus drug, Morpheus, god of dreams, interprets the terrible nightmares of the survivors of the Trojan War, and describes Ulysses’ own prophetic visions: “Look at that giant with the single eye in the middle of his forehead, and that terrible spider-woman with all those legs. Ah, the things he dreams, this angry sleeper. What bloody mouths, what masts falling, sails ripping, what rocks and reefs, what shipwrecks ... how many deaths?”

Beautiful illustrations

Part of the charm of Evslin’s book came from the illustrations, attributed to a certain William Hunter. (I would love to think that this was the Glaswegian artist William Hunter, but he would have been aged 79 when Evslin’s book was first published.) Each chapter has its own Aubrey Beardsleyesque pen-and-ink drawing, all of them utterly beguiling, and the book begins with a beautifully decorated map (see above).

But it would be wrong to ignore Evslin’s own genius for storytelling. Take the episode of the giant Laestrygonians, to which Homer devotes some 20-odd lines. Lamb, in a single page, relates how these giants “issued out at the gates and, making for the harbour, tore up huge pieces of rocks and flung them at the ships which lay there, all which they utterly overwhelmed and sank, and the unfortunate bodies of men which the sea did not devour these cannibals bore off to their dire feast”. Ulysses alone escaped to his own ship. But Evslin has a whole chapter entitled “Cannibal Beach” — a delight for a twelve-year-old reader.

Who is the hero?

It never occurred to me to ask why the Odysseus of my Penguin Classics Odyssey was here named “Ulysses”. And, down through the years — fifty years! — I have simply accepted that Ulysses was “the Latin form of Odysseus’ name”. So Agamemnon is Agamemnon, Menelaus is Menelaus, Achilles is Achilles, ... but Odysseus is Ulysses? Why?

The true explanation is complicated. It seems that, in the earliest form of his name, the D (Δ in Greek) alternates with L (Λ in Greek), so that the familiar Greek Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseus) could appear as Ὀλυσευς (Olyseus) — as in this Greek “Skyphos” vase from the Oxford Beazley collection, showing Olyseus running before the North wind Borias. From Olyseus, it is a short step to Ulyseus or Ulysses.

In fact, the Romans more usually called him Ulixes! Strange but true. Meanwhile, Ajax remained Ajax, Diomedes Diomedes, and Nestor Nestor. But Odysseus became Ulysses.

Returning to Ithaca

I am very much looking forward to seeing Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, a movie based on the last 10 chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, despite the verdict of Deborah Ross (in The Spectator) that “the narrative is so parched and meditative it’s ultimately enervating and seems as depressed as the hero himself”.

According to an interview for The Guardian, Fiennes (who plays the part of Odysseus) remembers his mother reading the adventure story to him when he was a child, but he singled out Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation as having inspired him.

Pasolini, on the other hand, has credited an original screenplay written in the 1990s by the late Edward Bond and subsequently adapted by John Collee (known for, among other movies, Master and Commander and, more recently, Lee).

Homer in translation

I found myself wondering which Odyssey Bond and Collee (and Fiennes, for that matter) had grown up with.

As a schoolboy, my Odyssey was the 1946 Penguin Classics version by classicist (and founder of the Penguin Classics series) E.V. Rieu, which was continuously reprinted throughout the 1960s. His opening stanza — “The hero of the tale which I beg the Muse to help me tell is that resourceful man who roamed the wide world after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy” — is, as Rieu promised, a faithful but easy-to-read prose translation, for Rieu was no poet.

I also owned a childhood copy of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of 1965, which seemed at once more epic and more poetic than Rieu’s. Here is his opening stanza — “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven | far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel” — in which he unobtrusively gave each line six down-beats, to approximate Homer’s dactylic hexameter (itself impossible to reproduce in English).

Sadly, Lattimore’s translation was savagely disparaged by critics who preferred Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version. The essayist and translator Donald Carne-Ross was particularly waspish in his championing of Fitzgerald over Lattimore: Fitzgerald’s was poetry, while all that Lattimore could aspire to was mere verse.

Here is Fitzgerald’s opening stanza: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story | of that man skilled in all ways of contending, | the wanderer, harried for years on end, | after he plundered the stronghold | on the proud height of Troy”.

It’s poetry, but is it Homer? At university in the 1980s, I finally encountered the 1919 Loeb edition by Professor A.T. Murray. Like Rieu, Murray had attempted a prose version that stuck faithfully to the Greek. (What Carne-Ross would probably have called a “student crib”.)

Here is his opening stanza: “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy”. Better than Rieu, but I still preferred Lattimore.

Throughout the twentieth century, translations came and went. (I wasn’t even aware of the version by Oliver Taplin, whose Greek Fire I reviewed for The Sunday Times thirty-odd years ago.) I have only recently discovered the version produced in 1932 by T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and was dismayed to see his cavalier treatment of the text. (He omits the opening stanza entirely.)

The zenith seemed to have been reached in 1996 with the poetic translation of Robert Fagles. Here is his first stanza:

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns | driven time and again off course, once he had plundered | the hallowed heights of Troy”. This was surely an Odyssey to end all Odysseys. Surely?

But publishers have their profits to make and new generations to seduce, and new incentives to exploit, too. Which brings us around to Ralph Fiennes and his innocent plug for the latest Odyssey, the version of Emily Wilson published in 2018, “the first translation”, so Norton and Co. inform us, “of the Homeric Greek by a woman into English verse”. Astonishing. “A cultural landmark”, we are informed, “that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem”. So, is it any good?

Here is her first stanza: “Tell me about a complicated man. | Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost | when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy ...”. Wilson actually runs onto the second stanza, which the manuscripts separate with a semi-colon. But, hey-ho. It’s poetry.

Incidentally, the epithet πολύτροπος (polytropos) which Homer uses to identify his protagonist, indeed to introduce him, perhaps to define him — “man of many devices”, “resourceful man”, “the man of many ways” — is probably meant to sum up Odysseus’ cunning. I’m not sure that Fitzgerald’s “man skilled in all ways of contending” quite hits the mark. Or, indeed, Wilson’s “complicated man”. No, that just won’t do.

But I’m still looking forward to The Return, for, as Fagles observed in his book, the Odyssey stops but never really ends.

The other Melsonby hoard

The Melsonby Hoard has hit the news.

The find was unveiled this week, having undergone years of cleaning, conservation, and analysis following its excavation in 2022.

It apparently comprises Iron Age feasting equipment (a large decorated cauldron is mentioned) and copious quantities of harness fittings and vehicle parts, which the archaeologists have attributed to four-wheeled wagons, rather than the expected two-wheeled chariots.

We are informed that the material “could rewrite Iron Age Britain”. Sensational stuff! A statement from Historic England explains that the find “alters our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.” And one science journal claims that it “challenges centuries-old ideas about wealth, power, and identity in ancient northern Britain”. Quite significant, then.

Oddly, the BBC relegated the story to its Newsround web site for children, but other news outlets seem to have taken the discovery more seriously, even if equally melodramatically, with liberal use of superlatives.

Surprising?

The find is undoubtedly exciting, and some of the metalwork seems awe-inspiring. But is it about to “rewrite Iron Age Britain”?

Forty-odd years ago, I was fortunate to be in on the ground floor, when the real rewriting began. As an archaeology undergraduate at Glasgow University searching for a suitable subject for a dissertation (and keen to avoid Agricolan Scotland, which was flavour of the day in the 1980s), I selected the pre-Agricolan period, when the emperor Vespasian’s governors were coming to grips with northern England, the rich lands of the Brigantes, in the early to mid AD 70s.

Royal capital of a wealthy nation

We have always known something of the Roman interactions with the Brigantes during the AD 70s. The historian Tacitus chronicled the internecine squabbling that necessitated Roman intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Queen Cartimandua. Archaeologists and historians had sought Cartimandua’s capital around York (site of the future Roman fortress) or further south on a low hilltop at Barwick-in-Elmet. (See map, above, from my 1983 dissertation.)

As I embarked on my undergraduate research, the sprawling archaeological site of Stanwick immediately caught my attention — a massive earthwork complex extending across 350ha, which had been selectively excavated in the 1950s by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (amongst whose assistants was a certain Leslie Alcock, who became Professor of Archaeology at Glasgow University in 1973).

Here is the plan I drew for my dissertation (with Barwick inset at top-left for comparison). Incidentally, Melsonby lies barely 1km beyond the bottom righthand corner of the earthworks.

Stanwick was then generally accepted as the headquarters of Cartimandua’s rebel consort Venutius, who (so the story went) fled north to avoid the Romans. Amongst the rich material already found there was a hoard, mainly of harness fittings but including a sword and scabbard, the so-called “Stanwick Hoard”, uncovered in 1843 at — did you guess where? — Melsonby. But it seemed to me, particularly after discussions with the Durham archaeologist Perce Turnbull (now deceased), that the enormous, apparently wealthy site (around which Perce generously drove me at sometimes alarming speed, with the gearbox of his Morris Minor grinding and screaming atrociously) was not Venutius’ base, but could only be the royal capital of Queen Cartimandua herself.

Quite apart from the contents of the original Melsonby hoard (the “Stanwick Hoard”), the imported Roman material discovered on the site by Turnbull in 1981 surely hinted at this conclusion. (I well remember that my one and only conversation with Professor Leslie Alcock, during the five or six years I spent in his Department of Archaeology — the only time I ever entered his spacious office — concerned his disagreement with my reinterpretation of the site, which he took to be disrespectful to the work of Wheeler.)

It amuses me to reflect that, in my unpublished 1983 dissertation, I was probably the first to identify Stanwick as Queen Cartimandua’s capital. It is true that Turnbull, in 1982, had described Stanwick as “a major social and economic centre, which probably owed its success, if not its very existence, to the enormously increased opportunities for external trade which must have been afforded by the proximity of an expanding Roman world”. But it took several years before archaeologist Colin Haselgrove (if memory serves me correctly) started to talk in terms of Cartimandua’s royal seat. Even in his 2016 book, The late Iron Age royal site at Stanwick, North Yorkshire, he still defended Wheeler’s interpretation — Wheeler had “valid enough geographical reasons for placing Venutius at Stanwick” — while acknowledging that “there is no site in northern England more obviously qualified than Stanwick to be the seat of a ruler who had a treaty with Rome”. (I still wonder why he balks at naming Cartimandua.)

The new Melsonby hoard is a wonderful find, without question, but hardly unexpected, hardly surprising, and it won’t lead to a “rewrite” of Iron Age Britain. It is frankly baffling that, in this day and age, archaeologists should talk in terms of “challenging the idea that ancient northern Britain was a backwater”. That idea died forty years ago.