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, he only suggested Lower Moesia because the diploma had been discovered in the territory of that province. But as for Julius Mar[--’s identity, 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. 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.