BOOK: Coluccio Salutati, "Political Writings"

Coluccio Salutati: Political Writings. Edited by Stefano U. Baldassarri, translated by Rolf Bagemihl. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 64. Harvard University Press, 2014. 9780674728677. xxxv + 489 pp.

Selected State Letters

Salutati worked many decades as the chancellor of the Florentine republic, and wrote numerous official letters in this role; apparently almost 7500 are known (p. 397). This section contains nine of them, mostly addressed to various popes, kings, etc. I didn't find them terribly interesting to read, and I thought it would be useful if the notes said more about the context of each letter. I guess most of the recipients were rulers of stronger countries than Florence, therefore Salutati often adopts a sort of whining or supplicating tone, which I didn't like much.

There are some nice rhetorical features from time to time, such as the practice of piling up synonyms in groups of three; from the interesting introduction by editor (p. xxvi, n. 11) I learned that this sort of thing is called a “tricolon” and that many of Salutati's letters must have been meant to be read aloud. My favourite tricolon, in any case, remains ‘no, I haven't stolen, filched or purloined your thesaurus’ :)

One interesting recurring theme in these letters is his animosity towards Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, whom he likes to refer to as “the viper” (because of his coat of arms) or, sarcastically, as “the count of Virtue” (because he owned some land around Vertus, France; p. 426, n. 34).

On Tyranny

As Salutati explains in his preface, he wrote this treatise on the request of a student from Padua who wrote to him, praising his learning and asking him whether killing a tyrant is justified and whether it was fair for Dante to put Brutus and Cassius into the lowest circle of hell for their murder of Julius Caesar. Salutati starts with a discussion of the different types of government; his division struck me as somewhat odd and certainly different than what I vaguely remember of ancient Greeks' ideas on the subject. In 1.6, he divides governments into monarchical (the monarch rules on the basis of his own prudence and will), constitutional (the government is constrained by laws) and despotic (“that system of government which is exercised over slaves and beasts” and aims mostly at promoting the owner's property rights). He tries to explain this by a household analogy that sounds hilariously offensive by present-day standards: “The father of a family governs his son monarchically through his affection for him, his wife constitutionally according to the principles of right, but his slaves despotically as being his own property.” (1.7) He says that a tyrant can occur in any system of government and is defined by having no legal right to rule, or by breaking the laws that restrict his powers.

He then argues that it is lawful to kill a tyrant, mostly it seems by analogy with the fact that in private life it is legal to resist an attacker, burglar etc. (2.1). However, I was greatly disappointed by the examples he gave, mostly from early Roman history as reported by Livy and the like. The fine tradition of killing tyrants seems to have in practice been little more than an excuse for Roman noblemen to murder anyone who looked like he wants to do anything good for masses of the people, with the excuse that he must surely be a conniving demagogue who plans to dupe the masses into elevating him to tyranny. They justified the murder of Tiberius Gracchus that way, as well as of one Marcus Manlius who “used his private property to release debtors and redeem those who were enslaved for debt” (2.3)! Just when I thought I could not be any more disgusted by the ancient Romans, they go and prove me wrong. — Salutati also adds some major qualifications to the right of tyrannicide: if the people recognize some lawful prince, the decision to kill the tyrant should come from him; if not, then from the people as a whole; but it isn't lawful for an individual to do this on his own initiative (2.15, 2.17, 2.19). I'm not quite sure how he expected this to work; it's not like the tyrant will allow the people to hold a mass meeting and vote on whether they want to kill him or not. . .

Next there's a discussion on whether Caesar was a tyrant or not. Salutati spends most of this section citing opinions of Cicero and the like to the effect that Caesar was not a bad or cruel ruler, that he was magnanimous to the losers of the civil war in which he came to power, etc. This struck me as irrelevant since Salutati had previously defined a tyrant as someone who rules despite having no legal right to it; whether his rule is benevolent or not has nothing to do with this definition. But he does come back to this definition at the end of the section, where he claims that the Roman people, grateful for Caesar's handling of the civil war and its aftermath, lawfully and freely conferred upon him the various honours, offices, etc. that he thenceforth held (3.11–12), which means that he was no tyrant as he got his power legally.

Perhaps this is true, but if so, it just shows how inadequate his definition of a tyrant is. Many tyrants seize power in a way that is more or less technically legal — Hitler is perhaps the most famous example; and even nowadays we see all sorts of wanna-be-dictator strongmen popping up all over the world on the basis of elections, referendums etc. I think the true definition of a tyrant should consider how easy or difficult it is for the people to get rid of him. But then this would make it hard to consider monarchy (of the sort where a hereditary monarch really runs the country and isn't just a figurehead) a legitimate (non-tyrannous) form of government, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that someone like Salutati doesn't adopt this definition of tyranny.

There's an interesting passage where Salutati points out that the civil war between Pompey and Caesar “was not about whether some one man should rule and have supreme control of the state, but which of the two it should be. [. . .] It was a contest, not to preserve the commonwealth, but to destroy it.” (3.9) That is sad but probably true; but it still doesn't mean that the winner of the contest was not a tyrant. Ideally, instead of assassinating Caesar after he became a tyrant, they should have assassinated both him *and* Pompey before the civil war even started.

Anyway, Salutati thus argues that killing Caesar was wrong because he was no tyrant, but a benevolent ruler who brought peace to a country previously torn apart by civil war; a veritable “father of his country” (4.1, 4.20). He also follows the old idea that monarchy is the best form of government (4.16–17), provided of course that you have a good monarch, such as Caesar (in Salutati's view at least) obviously was. This reminded me a little of the dialogue Republics and Kingdoms Compared that I read a few years ago, and then ranted at interminable length about these things, so I shouldn't repeat myself too much here. But it seems obvious to me that even if you had a good monarch (which I don't for a moment believe possible anyway), it's the very principle of monarchy that is the problem. People get used to obeying one man, and sooner or later the present good monarch will be succeeded by a bad one, and people will still obey him, leading to all sorts of horrors. Rome itself is an excellent example — you start with monarchs like Caesar and Augustus, who were by all accounts good and capable rulers, and then within like 50 years you end up with degenerates like Caligula and Nero, who were allowed to get away with their abuses for years because by then people were already so used to obeying an emperor that somehow nobody thought to run them through with a sword as should have been done in the first year of each of their reigns. . .

So killing Caesar, in my opinion, was a good and necessary thing regardless of whether he was personally a good ruler or not. It was necessary simply as a statement that monarchy is wrong and shouldn't be accepted as a legitimate form of government. (Salutati himself hints at this sort of motivation in 4.6, but doesn't go into detail.) If they had kept murdering people like him quickly and regularly enough, perhaps they wouldn't have had Caligula and Nero the next century. The only problem I have with the assassination of Caesar is that I doubt that the assassins really cared much about the people as a whole. It seems that they were either supporters of Pompey's faction who were sore about having just lost the civil war, or simply high-ranking aristocrats who wanted the regime to remain basically oligarchic so they could keep running the country without having a pesky monarch above them. In any case they didn't care about the masses of the regular people. Caesar seems to have actually been popular with the people at the time of his assassination, and it was almost touching to read Salutati's description of the expressions of grief after his death, and of the people's anger at the assassins (4.4).

I was somewhat surprised and disappointed to see Salutati defend monarchy like this, considering that he himself came from a republic. Perhaps his thinking was influenced by the instability and civil strife that was so typical of republican city-states like Florence, and liked the idea of a monarch as someone who, by his power, prevents the state from descending into civil war. Throughout chapter 4, he emphasizes that Caesar's administration brought peace and that Rome entered a new civil war immediately after his assassination. But this is the wrong solution to the problem of civil wars. From what I remember of reading Tom Holland's Rubicon, the instabilities in the late Roman republic were coming from the fact that the people at the top of the social pyramid were getting too rich and too powerful. What would have been smallish groups of supporters shouting at each other or brawling in the streets a couple centuries earlier was now able to grow into armies fighting a civil war against each other. The solution to this is obviously to do away with this dangerous concentration of power — kill them, nationalize their property, whatever. Concentrating the power even more, in the hands of just one man, is the last thing you should do in a situation like this — you might get a little temporary peace, but then you'll also get Nero and Caligula, and eventually new civil wars anyway as the various usurpers start fighting for the throne.

The treatise ends with a short chapter on the treatment of Brutus and Cassius by Dante. In his Divine Comedy, he puts them in the lowest circle of hell, being eaten by Lucifer in the form of a three-headed monster (so there's room for Judas Iscariot as well). From what we've seen in the previous chapters, it's no surprise that Salutati approves of this, since treason is bad, monarchy is good, etc. (5.4, 5.6). Dante makes each of the devil's heads a different colour, so Salutati includes some discussion about their symbolical meaning (5.2–3)

Antonio Loschi's Invective Against the Florentines

This is the only piece in this book that is not by Salutati. Loschi worked for the duke of Milan, with which Florence had been at war several times in the late 14th century, so it's understandable that he had much to say against the Florentines. His invective reminded me a little of those by Petrarch that I had read some time ago (see my old post about that book), but I actually liked Loschi's invective better. It's relatively short and contains a good balance of fine rhetoric and actual specific points. In other words, at least he points to specific things that the Florentines had done (and that he objects to), unlike Petrarch, who, as far as I remember his invectives, was too often content to remain on the level of ‘my opponent is an idiot, and his feet smell bad’.

I don't know the details of the political situation at the time, so I can't comment on whether Loschi's claims are valid, but one recurring idea is that Florence interferes too much in other countries' affairs, and there's probably some truth to that, the same as it is true of any powerful country. He also complains about their alliance with the king of France and their attempts to get him involved in Italian affairs as well. I can sympathize with that; nobody likes to see foreigners interfering in his country's internal struggles.

A nice remark on this latter subject: “it is very easy for the French to enter Italy, but difficult to return thence victorious. Whence our popular proverb: Italy is the tomb of the French.” (¶16)

Reply to a Slanderous Detractor

Salutati's reply to Loschi is almost ten times the length of Loschi's invective. He starts by saying that the invective is so bad that he refuses to believe it's by Loschi — “so many are the mendacious insults, so many are the grammatical faults, unworthy of a man of his erudition, that riddle this invective, so many are the enraged but ignorant taunts that disfigure it” (p. 171 and ¶3). This is either a remarkable example of charity, or a delicious backhanded insult. I was reminded of the famous remark that “some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters”.

He also points out that the invective mostly just asserts things without providing any proof or argument, so the whole thing can be dismissed simply by denying that his claims are true (¶2). I guess he is on to something here, but then I never had the impression that invectives were supposed to do more than brazenly assert that your enemy's feet smell bad.

The bulk of his reply then consists of what would nowadays be called fisking. Salutati quotes the invective a few sentences or a paragraph at a time and then provides his reply to the quoted passage before moving on to the next one. Most of the time his reply is not really an invective by itself, which in a way is commendable but also made for somewhat boring reading.

Occasionally he does stoop to cheap and annoying tricks such as taking a very literal interpretation of some passage in Loschi's invective (e.g. something that employs hyperbole or metaphor) and then replying to that, even though it's obvious to everyone that this isn't exactly what Loschi had had in mind. See e.g. the dissection of Loschi's phrase “legions of cavalry” (¶78), where Salutati digs deeply into the etymology of these terms and into Roman practices of assembling their forces, arguing that applying the word “legion” to anything other than infantry is nonsensical.

And similarly in ¶141, when Loschi complains about the Florentine's “craftiness and ungovernable license to lie and engage in conspiracies”, Salutati replies: “what is this ungovernable license to plot and lie? Do tell me, who ever granted this license to the Florentines? [. . .] If license was granted us, why censure us? Surely it's not wicked for us or anyone else to exercise what is our right?” :))) [By the way, this is also a nice illustration of how much English has borrowed from Latin. . . Salutati is basically making a joke based on two senses of the Latin word licentia, and the same joke works in English as well.]

He also makes pedantically uncharitable remarks about Loschi's grammar from time to time (e.g. ¶129).

Often, however, he points out genuine weaknesses in the invective. For example, Loschi makes it seem as if the Florentines were trying to spread tyranny and slavery around, but meanwhile he is in the employ of the duke of Milan, who is an even bigger tyrant. Many of Loschi's calumnies against Florence can be rejected simply by pointing out that hey, it's renaissance Florence — a city prosperous both materially and culturally, and thus bound to come out looking pretty good when compared against pretty much any of their neighbours. While pointing this out, Salutati goes into a fine bit of righteous fury: “And you, you foul and vile being, you disgusting filth, offspring of filth, how dare you call Florence the dregs of Italy!” (¶115)

Salutati also goes into a considerable amount of detail about various recent conflicts, the Florentine alliance with France, etc., to show that Loschi got pretty much everything wrong. I wasn't really terribly interested in this stuff at this level of detail, but I imagine it must have meant a lot to Salutati, who had been in a way involved in all these events during his thirty or so years as the chancellor of the Florentine republic (“I stand armed with knowledge of facts, the truth behind events, and a just cause. I know the treaties, I know the alliances, I know the violations and betrayals:” ¶180).

His reply concludes with some fine rhetoric again. There is probably a fancy Greek name for this sort of thing, doing something while pretending not to be doing it: “I could call you [. . .] a Nero or a Caligula [. . .] I could call you a Sardanapalus of sensuality, a Xerxes of pleasure [. . .] For lust I can call you Priapus or Silenus or [. . .] that champion of venereal monstrosity, that wretched example of the worst perversion that was Varius Antoninus, known as Heliogabalus.” (¶177) He ends with a challenge to Loschi, saying that he is ready to continue the debate, and a few parting insults: “If you start to lie again, I'll not stand for it and I'll return to the fray. [. . .] And be careful at least not to offend my ears with more grammatical errors, of which you have already made a disgraceful number.” (¶183)

I don't think that Loschi wrote any reply to Salutati's reply, or at least I don't remember any mention of such a thing in the notes to this book, so I guess the debate ended there. Overall I have to say that there are some very nice passages in Salutati's reply, but most of it wasn't terribly interesting. If someone were to cut it down to be about the same length as Loschi's invective, it could be quite enjoyable.

A nice bit of invective from ¶40: “Your speech seems to smacks not only of stupidity, but blasphemy and heresy — a charge easy to suppose in the case of Ghibellines — and utter, helpless mendacity.”

BOOK: Gordon Martel, "The Month that Changed the World"

Gordon Martel: The Month that Changed the World: July 1914 and WW1. Oxford University Press, 2017 (first ed. 2014). 9780199665396. xxv + 484 pp.

How could I resist another book about the July Crisis, the flurry of diplomatic activity between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of WW1 about a month later? I have read several such books already — Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer, McMeekin's July 1914: Countdown to War, Clark's Slepwalkers (shame on me, I was too lazy to write blog posts about the last two of these) — but this one, by Gordon Martel, is probably the best one yet.

What sets this book apart from the others I've read is that it very deliberately refrains from looking for any deeper explanations for the war. It starts with a provocative epigraph: “After the historian has ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiring into their causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened. — R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History.” I could practically see the author making a troll face when picking that quote :)

Like many such books, it starts with a bit of background, through it doesn't go into this as broadly and as far back as e.g. Sleepwalkers does. One notable thing about this introductory chapter is its focus on the idea that Europe had been at peace for a long time by then and that nobody saw much of a reason why this should change. There were no obvious reasons for Great Powers to go to war against one another and war was increasingly seen as an obsolete thing that was only happening in the colonies or in peripheral, backwards regions such as the Balkans (pp. 2–5). (As I vaguely remember it, many other books present the situation as much more tense, as if everyone was holding their breath waiting for a war to break out. Fromkin says (p. 39) that Europe was “in a mood [. . .] to smash things”.)

There is a chapter about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which goes into a reasonable but not excessive amount of detail. There is a bit more about the background of the various conspirators involved in the assassination (pp. 50–64) than I remember from some of the other books about this. One detail that was new to me from this chapter was how poor the security had been during Franz Ferdinand's visit — Martel contrasts it with the much tighter security during the visit of Emperor Franz Josef a few years earlier (p. 72). In other words, you can't help feeling that the assassination, and hence the outbreak of the WW1, the millions of casualties, etc., could have been prevented just with some additional security measures that should have been routine in such cases anyway — wow!

The book then goes into a fairly detailed week-by-week treatment of the developing crisis over the next three weeks, but its main focus, and what the author reserves the term ‘July Crisis’ for, is the one-week period between the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia and the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia. In this period each day gets a separate chapter to itself. There were many interesting details here that I hadn't heard of before or at least hadn't been really aware of them. I used to think of the war as being more or less the fault of Germany, though after reading Sleepwalkers I thought that some of the blame might also go to Russia for its mobilizing while pretending that it wasn't really doing so. But now after this book I couldn't help feeling that there is plenty of blame to go around for nearly everyone involved.

I was impressed by the extent of the concessions that the Serbs were prepared to make in response to the Austrian ultimatum (pp. 206–7, 304), and depressed by how relentlessly stubborn the Austrians were in their wish to go to war against Serbia (pp. 249, 305). The Serbian reply was seen by nearly everyone else as an excellent basis to solve the crisis peacefully with a bit more negotiation (pp. 243–5, 265, 271). Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, was proposing that a conference of ambassadors (British, German, French, Italian) should mediate between Austria and Russia (the latter being the chief protector of Serbia in this crisis); pp. 180, 195, 346. Others proposed direct discussions between Austria and Russia (pp. 223–4, 269). But the Austrians wanted to go to war against Serbia, they were convinced that their prestige and their status as a Great Power requires it, and the ultimatum had really been just an excuse and nothing more. I was in principle aware of this before, but it comes across more clearly in the more detailed exposition in this book.

I also couldn't help being annoyed by the British for not announcing clearly and early that they would stand by France and Russia. Perhaps if they had done so, Germany would have backed down, then Austria might have backed down and the war would not have happened at all. But sadly, Grey stubbornly refused to make any sort of commitments (and admittedly, most of the British cabinet, as well as the public, was strongly against any such involvement up until the German invason of Belgium; pp. 251, 280, 290, 367, 376–8, 384–8). On August 2: “No one was certain what the British would do. Especially not the British.” (P. 374.) :))

An interesting detail that I wasn't previously aware of concerns the involvement of Italy. Their alliance with Germany and Austria was defensive, so I thought that this was by itself enough of a reason for them not to enter the war. But in this book it turns out there was another issue: their alliance included the concept of ‘compensation’, in the sense that if one of Austria and Italy expanded its territory in southeastern Europe, the other one must get some territory as well, as a sort of compensation, to keep the balance of power between them I suppose. During the July crisis, Germany was constantly urging the Austrians to sort out the matter of compensation with Italy and thereby ensure that Italy would stand by them. Ideally Austria would have offered some of its own predominantly-Italian territories, which had been coveted for some time by Italian irredentists; or at least some bits of territory in the Balkans. But the Austrians pretty much offered nothing, and as a result Italy stayed neutral (pp. 185–6, 231–5, 276, 289, 339, 342).

But the overall impression of the way the crisis is presented in this book is one of chaos and madness. (“By evening [of July 30] there was confusion everywhere”, p. 328.) This is no doubt in large part because the author deliberately keeps the narrative at a fairly low level: the story proceeds chronologically, day by day, almost hour by hour, and the story is basically one long procession of meetings and telegrams being sent back and forth, often at the most unholy late-night hours. (“By Sunday [August 2] morning everyone involved in the crisis was utterly exhausted”, p. 374.) I didn't even try to keep all the details in my head as the story is too complex for that and the cast of characters too numerous. But these events probably felt just as confusing and chaotic to the participants themselves, and the good thing about the way this book presents the story is that it gives you an idea of what it must have felt like to them.

Perhaps my favourite part of the book is the concluding chapter, “Making Sense of the Madness”. First it tells the history of the history of the July Crisis, so to speak — i.e. how the crisis was seen by historians and politicians over the rest of the 20th century. Already during the war, the various countries involved published (more or less biased) selections of diplomatic correspondence in an attempt to justify their involvement in the war and blame their enemies for causing it (p. 402). The question of war guilt also attracted a great deal of interest just after the war; the Versailles Treaty famously included an article that blamed the war on Germany. More and more diplomatic papers were published by various governments in an effort to facilitate the study of the origins of the war (pp. 408–10).

By the 1930s, as most of the politicians directly involved in the outbreak of WW1 were dead or retired, the question of the origins of war became more of a topic for historians than politicians, and it began to be studied by a new generation of slightly less biased historians such as Sidney B. Fay and Bernadotte Schmitt (pp. 412–3). Accordingly attention focused away from the July Crisis and more towards various deeper causes of the war: nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, etc. (Martel makes an interesting argument that this had an unfortunate side effect in the 1930s: as people widely accepted the idea that the war had such deeper causes, this meant that they couldn't blame it primarily on Germany; but this, since the Versailles treaty was premised on the idea that Germany was guilty for the war, made it hard for them to object when Hitler started dismantling the treaty after he came to power. “When Hitler came to power and began his campaign to tear up the treaty of Versailles, there was no one left to speak up for it.” P. 415. See also pp. 421–2.)

Since then, countless books have been written about the origins of the WW1, and you can't help feeling that Martel is a bit jaded about the whole thing: you can pick one or more (or all) of the Great Powers (and/or your favourite -ism) and you can surely find, in the inexhaustible mass of diplomatic documents and other sources from the July crisis, something to blame the war on them in particular. I guess this is why his book very deliberately refuses to blame anyone (and indeed when I got to this point in the book I couldn't help admitting that it had never really pushed me into assigning blame to anyone in particular — any ideas about blame that I had had while reading it had come from my biases and my interpretations of the story as described in the book).

Considering that so many different ideas have been put forth as to the deeper causes of the war or which Great Power(s) should be blamed for it, you can hardly blame the author for not wanting to commit himself to any of these theories (or putting forth yet another one of his own). This is why he focuses on the July Crisis itself, and argues that ultimately the war was triggered by the decisions made by those specific people in those specific days, mostly that fateful week at the end of July 1914. “War was not inevitable. It was the choices that men made during those fateful days that plunged the world into a war. They did not walk in their sleep.” (I guess this must be a jab at Clark's Sleepwalkers? :]) “They knew what they were doing. They were not stupid. They were not ignorant. The choices they made were rational, carefully calculated, premised on the assumptions an attitudes, ideas and experience that they had accumulated over the years. Real people, actual flesh-and-blood human beings, were responsible for the tragedy of 1914 — not unseen, barely understood forces beyond their control.” (Pp. 420–1.) “Blind ‘historical forces’ did not devise ultimatums or mobilize millions: men of flesh and blood did.” (P. 425.)

Another epic sentence from p. 422: “Men do learn from their mistakes: they learn how to make new ones.” :)) The author demonstrates how some of the lessons learned from the outbreak of the WW1 led to new problems in the years leading up to the WW2 (pp. 422–3, 430).

What to say at the end? I really liked this book. Some of the middle parts while the crisis is in progress can be a bit dry at times, but the concluding chapter more than makes up for it. This book gave me a fresh perspective on the July Crisis and the outbreak of the war.

BOOK: Martijn Icks, "The Crimes of Elagabalus"

Martijn Icks: The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013. 9781780765501. xi + 276 pp.

Elagabalus was an early-3rd-century Roman emperor who, if he isn't quite as notorious as Nero or Caligula, it certainly isn't for want of trying. I'm not sure when I first heard of him, but it was probably in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (see the quotations at the end of this post). Later I encountered him again in Alma-Tadema's beautiful painting The Roses of Heliogabalus, which illustrates one of the ancient anecdotes about him: supposedly, as a sort of cruel prank, he had a massive pile of rose petals thrown upon some of his guests, some of whom actually suffocated before they could dig themselves out.

When I saw that someone wrote a whole book about this curious and bizarre figure, I naturally couldn't resist buying and eventually reading it. It seems to be based on the author's PhD thesis, and I was very glad to see that it exhibits almost none of the faults that such books usually have. Usually they end up being too pedantic and retaining too much of the irrelevant stuff that a PhD thesis is supposed to have but that isn't really of interest to anyone except perhaps the thesis committee (or, let's be honest, probably not even them :]). But there is nothing of that here; it's a pleasant and readable book, and perhaps the only trace of its origins is the careful way it's structured (for example, each chapter has a short conclusion at the end) and the amount of attention it devotes to changes in historiographical trends over the centuries.

The book is partly about Elagabalus himself, but partly also about his ‘afterlife’ — the way he was presented over the centuries since his death, both in fiction and in non-fiction. I found both aspects of the book very interesting. Elagabalus originated from the town of Emesa in Syria; his family had been locally prominent there for a while, but their big break came when the future emperor Septimius Severus married into it (pp. 50, 54, 58). Elagabalus became emperor at the tender age of 14 thanks to the machinations of his relatives, especially his ambitious grandmother Julia Maesa (Severus's sister-in-law), who passed him off as an illegitimate son of the late emperor Caracalla (Severus's son, who was actually a cousin of Elagabalus's mother; pp. 10–11).

Clearly the idea was for Elagabalus to be a puppet in the hands of his older relatives and various other people, but he got harder to control as he got older (p. 27). Like many members of his family, he was heavily involved in the cult of Elagabal, a local deity that had started as a mountain god (hence its name: El = god, Gabal = mountain) but later became a sun god (pp. 48–9). About two years after becoming emperor, Elagabalus tried to push a big religious reform with Elagabal becoming the main god of the Roman state religion, with Elagabalus as his high-priest (p. 29). He built two large temples to Elagabal in Rome and brought from Emesa a large black stone that represented the new god and was then moved periodically from one temple to another with great ceremony (p. 30). These and other similar outrages (such as marrying a vestal virgin; p. 31) made him increasingly unpopular with pretty much everyone, including the his relatives and the army, so that he was eventually killed (having reigned for only four years) and his younger cousin, Severus Alexander, installed as a new emperor. Elagabalus's reforms were reversed and his memory condemned (p. 43).

Icks pays a lot of attention not only to the story of Elagabalus's life and career, but also to how it can be reconstructed and what sources are available concerning it. I liked this aspect of the book a lot since it gives us a peek behind the curtains, so to speak, showing us how historians figure things out. There are three main written sources about him: the accounts of Dio Cassius and Herodian, contemporaries of Elagabalus, and a biography in the Augustan History, written one or two centuries later. Icks points out that each of these sources has certain biases, and in particular the last of these, since it was written so long after Elagabalus's time, could afford to embellish the story with exaggerations or even outright fabrications (p. 121). Another important source are coins and inscriptions, which give us an idea of what sort of image the emperor tried to promote to the public (chap. 3).

The second half or so of the book deals with Elagabalus's ‘afterlife’, and I was impressed by the amount of works mentioning Elagabalus that Icks has managed to dig up; many of them are quite obscure. Many authors, especially in earlier times, tended to rely too uncritically on the three written accounts mentioned earlier, repeating their most outrageous anecdotes as if they were solid, reliable facts. They mostly show Elagabalus as an example of a grotesquely bad ruler, a cruel tyrant, etc. (Icks points out that from the perspective of the empire as a whole, the administration during the four years of Elagabalus' rule wasn't unusually bad — the country was stable, etc. (pp. 88, 215). As long as you weren't in Rome, dodging rose petals (p. 112) and large felines (p. 110) at Elagabalus's dinner-parties, you might hardly even notice that there was anything particularly bad about him.)

One of the reasons why the Icks tends to be skeptical of many of the more outrageous anecdotes about Elagabalus is that they fit so neatly into well-established tropes (or “topoi” as he calls them; p. 93) of writing about tyrants, effeminate Orientals, homosexuals, etc. For example, he points out that Dio describes Augustus as an example of a nearly-ideal emperor early in his work, and that his description of Elagabalus is pretty much the exact opposite of this ideal on all counts (pp. 94–5).

A curious mention of Elagabalus in the Renaissance: the historian Leonardo Bruni wrote a fictional ‘Oration of Elagabalus to the harlots’ through which he “criticises the (perceived) decadence of Renaissance Rome. [. . .] Heliogabalus tells his audience that there is too much chastity in the capital. To remedy this unfortunate state of affairs, he introduces a new law, decreeing that all women will be public property from now on.” (P. 129.) Emperor of the incels :)))

As late as the 19th century, historians still portrayed him negatively. One Johann Schiller, writing in 1883, said that “his reign is verily a witches' Sabbath of fornication, excesses and luxury” (p. 153). Woo hoo :) A notable change in depictions of Elagabalus took place in the late 19th century with the Decadent movement, when artists started portraying him slightly more sympathetically. His “desire to be larger than life” (p. 159) appealed to the decadent sensibilities, and his excesses could be linked to the idea of ‘art for art's sake’ so beloved of the decadents (p. 170) — except that in the case of Elagabalus, I guess, his medium was not stone or paint, but life. A notable example is Stefan George's cycle of poems, Algabal, whose protagonist is a “monarch-artist” somewhat reminiscent of the ‘Mad King’ Ludwig of Bavaria (p. 173).

In the 20th and 21st century the range of portrayals of Elagabalus has expanded still further, and you can't help feeling that many authors just use him as a canvas on which they project whatever it is that they are personally interested in, often something having to do with homosexuality or androgyny (the latter is actually not associated with him by any ancient source, p. 217), or not fitting into society's established gender roles. He is no longer seen as a cruel tyrant or degenerate Easterner like before, but as a misunderstood individual who stands up to the unreasonable strictures of a conservative and intolerant society (most of these works seem to predate the rise of the modern clickbait websites, otherwise they would probably add: ‘and that's a good thing’ :P).

Frankly, I liked him better as a degenerate tyrant :)

An interesting-looking 20th-century appearance of Elagabalus: Heliogabalus, a Buffoonery in Three Acts (1920), co-authored by H. L. Mencken, sounds like a light-hearted play that pokes fun both at the emperor's desperately decadent excesses and on the prudish morality of his overzealous Christian contemporaries (and those of Mencken's own day); pp. 187–8.

Historians also take a greater interest in him than before; several monographs about him appeared (though judging by Icks' description, the quality of many of them leaves much to be desired; pp. 182–6), and they began to increasingly treat the ancient sources with due skepticism. The only thing I really disliked about these developments is the evident creep of political corectness into historians' views of Elagabalus. Like, before the late 19th century people would say: ‘Elagabalus was an effeminate, degenerate, greasy Easterner, and therefore the embodiment of everything that is bad and wrong.’ The Decadents said: ‘Elagabalus was an effeminate, degenerate, greasy Easterner, and that's awesome! That's just why we like him!’ But modern-day political correctness says: ‘How dare you even imagine that one culture could be inferior to another, you evil racist imperialist orientalist ist ist ist. . . ’

And this last stage, it seems, is where we are now. Ickes writes that “hostile rhetoric concerning ‘Orientals’, let alone Semites, has mostly gone out of scholarly fashion. As a result, the portrayal of Elagabalus in handbooks and reference books tends to be a lot more nuanced than it used to be.” (P. 187.) He quotes, as an example, the description of Elagabalus in two editions of Cambridge Ancient History, 1939 (featuring some fine, nearly Gibbonesque writing: “the obscenities of a Syrian cult”) and 2005 (where the worst thing they dare to say of him is that he was “undiplomatic”). Clearly Icks is on board with these developments, and buys into Said's orientalism thing and all that (p. 154), but I for my part can't help feeling that, if you can no longer call even Elagabalus a degenerate, things have really gone too far.

The book ends with an interesting list of appearances of Elagabalus in media (pp. 219–23). I was particularly impressed by the variety there — besides novels and the like, you can find plays, music albums, two operas (one from the 17th century (pp. 134–7) and one from 2003 (“like an ancient Michael Jackson”, p. 193), comics (one by Neil Gaiman!), even a nice oil painting, etc. The only thing missing is a video game :)

The author's delightful eclecticism in seeking out the references to Elagabalus also shows itself in the plates section. There are plates showing the coins minted during his reign, a few paintings including Alma-Tadema's (unfortunately in grayscale, which robs it of much of its charm), but finally there's a photo of an Italian store called “Eliogabalo”: they sell designer clothes, but “[a]ppropriately for an emperor who worshipped the sun, there is a tanning salon above” :)))

All in all, this was a very interesting book and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in Elagabalus.

ToRead:

• Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado: The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact or Fiction (2010), another recent book about Elagabalus, seems potentially interesting. Icks wrote an interesting review of this book, and it seems that Prado adopted an excessively skeptical approach, the description of which sounded to me as something that would happen if you tried to replace the historians with the cyc inference engine :)) Prado later edited and published several volumes of “Varian Studies” (e.g. Vol. 3), named after Elagabalus' original first name (Varius).
• R. Gilman: Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (NY, 1979). Mentioned here in the bibliography on p. 262

P.S. I went and re-read what Gibbon had written about Elagabalus in his Decline and Fall and here are a few of my favourite passages:

“The grave senators confessed with a sigh, that, after having long experienced the stern tyranny of their own countrymen, Rome was at length humbled beneath the effeminate luxury of Oriental despotism.”

“Elagabalus [. . .] corrupted by his youth, his country, and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments.”

Gibbon on the “vices and follies of Elagabalus”: “their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country”.

“The emperor [. . .] viewing every rank of his subjects with the same contemptuous indifference, asserted without control his sovereign privilege of lust and luxury.”

P.P.S. Some time after buying a printed copy of this book, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it is also available online: link. It seems to be a slightly earlier version than my paper copy; for example, the URL of Matt Hugher's painting on p. 222 of my printed edition is different and more recent (“accessed 9 August 2012”) than on the web page (“accessed 27 September 2007”). Interestingly, the description under that painting on Hughes' website now just calls it “Ceasar” (sic), without mentioning Elagabalus.