Conan the Praetorian

I have been reading the “Warrior of Rome” trilogy by Harry Sidebottom (sorry, “Dr Harry Sidebottom”, as he appears on the title page, to assure us that he knows what he’s talking about).

The books are now a dozen or more years old, and have always been greeted with favourable reviews, like this one from TV’s Bettany Hughes: “Dr Harry Sidebottom’s prose blazes with such searing scholarship that there is enormous enjoyment in this rumbustuous tale of the late Roman empire”.

I must agree that Sidebottom knows how to spin a yarn, dragging his hero Marcus Clodius Ballista into (and out of) all sorts of predicaments, but in my opinion he’s no Patrick O’Brian (as British explorer Tim Severin claimed in his review). Rather, he reminds me of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. It cannot be a coincidence that his Ballista is really “Dernhelm, son of Isangrim, Warleader of the Angles and one of the Woden-born” (which, incidentally, permits him the liberal use of Anglo-Saxon expletives throughout).

I must admit that I enjoyed Fire in the East (Part One of the trilogy), as it was soundly based on the Sasanid siege of Dura-Europos around AD 255 (though why Sidebottom coyly renamed the town “Arete” I cannot imagine). My enjoyment gradually declined thereafter, through Part Two (King of Kings) and Part Three (Lion of the Sun), as Sidebottom, lacking the focus of the siege, took his hero traipsing rather tediously up and down the Middle East. (Sidebottom later added a second trilogy, and I confess that I started to read Part Four, The Caspian Gates, but ... life’s too short.)

The sure hand of a scholar?

Several reviewers praised Sidebottom’s “superb knowledge of the ancient world” (this was Professor Bryan Ward-Perkins) or his “sure hand of a scholar” (this was Professor Barry Strauss), while the late Lucinda Hamilton (wife of Bryn Mawr College’s Rick Hamilton) lauded “his considerable knowledge of 3rd century warfare and Roman military terminology”.

I think I find this most ironic of all. The one thing that never rang true to me, in each of the three books, was Sidebottom’s attempt to evoke the Roman third century, for there is no doubt in my mind that his version of Ballista inhabits the fourth century. When the hero enters the presence of the emperor Valerian, who is floating like something out of Frank Herbert’s Dune (“as befitted his role as mediator between mankind and the gods, the emperor Valerian appeared suspended in mid-air ... bathed in bright sunlight ... gaze fixed over the heads of mere mortals”), Ballista “prostrated himself full length on the floor” (which Sidebottom calls “proskynesis”, the adoration reserved for Persian kings).

However, the fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus explains that “it was the emperor Diocletian who was the first to introduce this foreign and royal form of adoration, whereas we have read that, always previously, our emperors were saluted like the holders of other high offices” (Roman History XV.5.18). Aurelius Victor agrees that it was Diocletian, some thirty years after Valerian, who “was the first of all, besides Caligula and Domitian, to allow himself to be called ‘Lord’ and to be worshipped and addressed as a god” (On the Caesars 39.4). The recuitment of northern barbarians into positions of military authority is also a fourth-century phenomenon. (It is interesting that reviewers like Bettany Hughes, quoted above, assume that the novels are set in the “late Roman empire”, which is not how historians characterize the mid-third century.)

Military expert?

Lucinda Hamilton was not the only reviewer to praise Sidebottom’s military expertise. But is this particular compliment deserved?

One of the most egregious errors in Part One must be the classification of Ballista’s military engineering friend Mamurra as a praefectus fabrum, which he translates as “chief of engineers” (in fact, it is literally “prefect of the workmen”, which in practice was an honorary “rank” given to non-military toffs).

Another is certainly the repeated translation of Ballista’s title Dux Ripae as “Commander of the Riverbanks”, when the Romans held only one bank of the Euphrates river (ripae is the genitive case of a singular noun meaning “of the riverbank”). Several other such blunders, while admittedly minor irritations, make Sidebottom’s flippant comment — that, because his books are set in a period “about which so little is known”, no one can prove him wrong — seem just a little ironic.

We may certainly forgive Sidebottom’s ignorance of technical matters, such as the 20-pounder ballista on the north-west tower of “Arete”, which is pointlessly over-engineered if its torsion-frame is 10 feet wide and its springs “as high as a very tall man”. (For comparison, the ballista illustrated on the cover of my Greek and Roman Artillery book is a 40-pounder.) And finally, still on the subject of artillery, Ballista is credited (in Part Four) with the invention of the onager, the single-armed catapult used by the Romans at least since the days of Hadrian and which, in truth, had probably taken over as the standard stone-projecting catapult by the time Sidebottom is writing about. But in Sidebottom’s version, the machine’s single arm held the stone “in a sort of bowl at the end”, so Ballista had actually built a medieval mangonel!

Clearly, many thousands of readers have enjoyed Sidebottom’s ripping yarns, but the unwary Roman army enthusiast may assume that they are historically sound, whereas Ballista is as grounded in reality as Conan the Barbarian.