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In Search of the Romans, by James Renshaw (Bristol
Classical Press, London 2012)
The stated purpose of this handy-sized and
solid-looking book is to provide a ‘strong and broad foundation’ for students starting
out on Classical Civilization courses. It is undoubtedly true that Classical
Civilization is not well-served by bespoke textbooks. This is becoming more and
more obvious at a time when examination boards are increasingly commissioning
textbooks for their mainstream courses, such as History and English Literature,
with dedicated content directly linked to their specifications. Classical
Civilization, at school level, is unlikely to be taken other than by small
numbers of students if it is offered at all, making bespoke textbooks unviable.
Recommended reading lists produced by examination boards therefore tend to
resort to existing publications that all too often means patchy and inadequate
coverage, which is especially challenging for non-specialist teachers.
So any effort to produce a background work
is to be welcomed though given the range of options usually offered with
Classical Civilization courses it is a tall order to provide a
jack-of-all-trades even if the focus is restricted, as in this case, to the
Roman world. There is no clear indication in this book of whether it is aimed
at GCSE, GCE or degree level and the implication is that it ought to be of use
to a wide range of courses. In that respect the book clearly has a very general
remit, which may be ideal for some readers, though this does not help a
potential reader (or teacher) identify easily whether or not the book is ideal
for his or her course in terms of specific content. It might have been useful
therefore to have given an indication of which courses the book is explicitly
useful for, but I can appreciate that this carries the risk of built-in
obsolescence. However, the impression I gained is that the author has, for
example, taken little or no notice of A-level courses (see comments on Herculaneum below).
The text is divided into four thematic
chapters: history, religion, society, and entertainment, together with a fifth
and sixth chapter on Pompeii
and Herculaneum
respectively. Several appendices tackles variously Rome the city, Roman
politics, money, clothing and ‘time’ (here meaning calendars). Review boxes
scattered through the book provide students with questions to answer which
ought to aid their reading and digestion of the text. The text is well
broken-up with headings, an essential feature for today’s student who seems
increasingly dependent on everything being neatly packaged. The focus on Pompeii and Herculaneum is obviously
important since these form the epicenter of any course focused on the Roman
world.
The book undoubtedly looks as if it ought
to be useful as a kind of general background textbook but an essential
ingredient is the apparatus of referencing, bibliography and index. In all
these respects the book is a little wanting and I felt this was a real pity
since this undoubtedly reduces its utility if its ambition is to serve courses
beyond GCSE.
There is a very short (one page) index, of
minimal value from which for example the frequently cited sources are omitted,
and also many of the topics in the book, though conversely ‘drama’ merits a
listing along with six sub-listings in page order rather than alphabetical
order. Five classifications start with ‘Roman’. A reader seeking information,
for example, on a haruspex has to flick through the chapter on religion to find
it on p. 99. Further comments on the index follow below.
There is no Bibliography or suggested
further reading which seems strange in a book aimed at students. I appreciate
that a GCSE student is unlikely to want to wander much further but it is a pity
he or she is not encouraged to look beyond the book; A-level and university
students should definitely be encouraged to read further. It is also worth
bearing in mind that Classical Civilization courses are quite often delivered
in a school context by non-specialists who would doubtless welcome more guidance
on where the evidence has originated or where to dig further, even if this book
is an answer to some of their prayers in other respects.
The text is mostly competent and
well-written, but there are occasional infelicities when it comes to detail. On
p. 41 Augustus is started to have had ‘ensured he was always elected a tribune
of the people’. In fact Augustus held the power of a tribune but was not
elected to the actual post; this power was renewed annually but it was a means
by which he avoided the legal obstruction to a patrician holding the actual
post and, as Barbara Levick puts it, ‘the collegiality inherent in the
consulship and other offices’ (2010, 84). While one does not want to carp about
minor points, this is a technicality of enormous significance and it is a pity
a mistake has been made which is amplified on p. 364 where we are told Augustus
held the position either of consul or tribune annually, suggesting it was an
either/or. Augustus’s tribunician power was renewed annually from 23 BC and
recorded on the base-metal coinage. He held the consulship annually until 23BC
and again in 5BC and 2BC, of course holding the tribunician power
simultaneously. Augustus’s crucial possession of imperium goes
unmentioned.
For obvious reasons the book does not and
cannot get deeply involved in arcane historical debates, but by the same token
an up-to-date synthesis ought at least to reflect something of contemporary
thinking. Instead on p. 44 we learn that according to Suetonius Tiberius led a
life of ‘disgusting immorality’ (without any evidence being cited). There is no
sense of critical evaluation of this judgment which appears to be accepted at
face value. Caligula’s reign is condemned with the comment that ‘he became
drunk on power and ruled with great cruelty’, again with nothing to
substantiate that judgment and no suggestion that modern revisionist
perspectives like that of Richard Alston (1998) exist. Here the lack of a
reading list is a shame because it would help demonstrate the whole subject to be
far more dynamic than the impression created by the sense that all ancient
historians do is reiterate Suetonius.
The principal emperors are awarded a few
sentences each, making for an enjoyable trawl if one knows nothing about the Roman Empire but providing little hint at what might be
usefully researched further. The pace hots up when the third century is tackled
in little more than a page and the end result is that the whole of Roman
history is afforded less space than that allocated to Pompeii.
The chapters on Religion and Society have a
useful litany of topics and anecdotes but the sparse index inhibits the sort of
dipping and quick referencing a book like this will mostly be used for. The text
sometimes seems unnecessarily fragmented. For example, on p. 64 we are told
that the Romans primarily objected only to exclusive cults like Judaism or
Christianity because ‘Romans expected all the inhabitants of their empire to
worship their gods as well as any others’. This was surely an opportunity to cross-reference
the Pliny-Trajan correspondence on dealing with Christians which the author
discusses and quotes from on p. 120 (using the Penguin translation by Betty
Radice, but uncredited). Family religion appears incongruously in the chapter
on Society at pp. 133-5 and is indexed under ‘family religion’.
An absence of footnotes here and elsewhere
and limited or erratic use of references also makes it difficult to research
the author’s points further. On p. 74 the author references book and chapter in
Livy for his point about the early worship of Apollo whereas a box on the
imperial cult on p. 80 includes quotes but no information on the author’s
sources. The latter is far more typical of the book as a whole. On p. 284 the
CIL reference is given for the Holconii at the Pompeii theatre. That’s all very well, but
CIL will mean nothing to the average student (or non-specialist teacher) who
will have no access to the source material anyway; moreover, in the absence of
a Bibliography or Further Reading, the reader is not supplied with any
expansion of CIL, any other abbreviations or list of ancient sources. It would
have been far better in this instance at least to add a reference to the Cooley
Sourcebook of inscriptions from Pompeii
which is both in English and in print.
The chapter on Pompeii is serviceable enough with a potted
history of the town, the eruption, excavation and the physical remains. But one
wonders just how useful this book would be even to a casual student when so
many other books are available with considerably more detail. Baths, for
example, are covered in under ten lines and obviously therefore little substantive
information is supplied though a rare cross-reference directs the reader to p.
250 and a plan of the Stabian Baths in a more general section on baths. Other
buildings such as the theatre are treated in slightly more depth and linked to
other sections in the book (see below). The brief descriptions of some public
buildings and houses, together with their plans are useful but anyone with a
serious interest (perhaps for a GCSE Coursework option) would need to
investigate further; without any notes or suggested further reading this is not
easy.
The Herculaneum
chapter follows the same pattern though very few buildings are described in any
detail, these mainly being the Forum Baths, the House of the Wooden Partition,
the House of Neptune and Amphitrite, and the Villa of the Papyri, while
considerably more space is devoted to the skeletons found in the vaulted
chambers along the shoreline. As a passing matter of interest, none of these
buildings is specifically cited amongst the prescribed material for OCR’s
A-level paper CC6 (City Life in Roman Italy) or AQA’s A-level Option E on Roman
Architecture and Town Planning; the several Herculaneum buildings that are in
these specifications are more or less ignored. The Herculaneum buildings he has included are
useful, but it does seem odd that they appear to have been featured at the
expense of structures which A-level students will have a specific interest in.
Instead, the included material appears to have been built almost entirely
around AQA’s GCSE in Classical Civilization. Nothing wrong with that, but it
does mean that the potential for meeting the book’s wider remit is limited.
I wondered whether it would not have been
better to deal with these classes of buildings in a single place, rather than
scatter the information. Housing, for example, ends up being dealt with
generally from pp. 125-32, at Pompeii
from pp. 308-24, and at Herculaneum
from pp. 341-8. Temples
are covered generally at pp. 85-7, but also appear in other places such as pp.
112-13 where Pompeii’s
temple of Isis is featured, and then other temples
at Pompeii on
pp. 290-2. Temples
are, however, only indexed at pp. 85-7 making it unlikely a reader would
appreciate initially that he or she needed to look in at least three different
places. Theatres and amphitheatres (amongst others) escape the index altogether
unless one looks under ‘drama’; in any case they too are dispersed – a general
section on theatres appears at pp. 225-6, with a description of the theatre
district at Pompeii on pp. 283-5.
A general description of amphitheatres is a component of
a section on Gladiatorial Games in Chapter 4 (Entertainment) between pp.
211-22, but then we have three pages on the Pompeii amphitheatre starting at p. 285; all
these are only indexed under ‘gladiatorial games’.
The images which proliferate throughout the
book are generally well-chosen and range from the familiar to the new. Some are
clearly recent shots, such as those taken at ground level in Pompeii whereas others such as the aerial
view of the Herculaneum
excavations (p. 338) are positively antediluvian. Quality of reproduction is
patchy – some seem to bear the hallmarks of relatively low resolution digital
images (a common issue with digital pictures taken around five years ago or
more), while others are sharp and well-defined. Captions are of limited utility
and often do not attribute artifacts to precise locations. For example, the ‘Cave
Canem’ mosaic illustrated on p. 128 is from Pompeii’s House of the Tragic Poet but this
is not mentioned, and the furniture casts and replica illustrated on p. 131 are
from Pompeii’s
House of Julius Polybius but this is also not stated. Various other statues and
reliefs are illustrated throughout but most give no provenance or information
beyond the basic, such as ‘a young man in a toga’ (p. 147) or ‘Mars dressed in
armour’ (p. 73) where, in addition, no hint of size or scale is provided. The
Piazza Armerina bikini mosaic is illustrated on p. 244 but not identified as
such, and nor is it supplied with a date. Some are simply wrong although these
are very few – the image captioned ‘Marcus Aurelius’ on p. 52 is actually of
Caracalla.
Images seem totally appropriate for this sort
of book but I could not help wondering whether the book has the aura and
appearance of a title produced a generation or more ago; students today are
entirely accustomed to high resolution colour images available in a trice on
tablet computers or other media. To be fair this affects many BCP titles so
perhaps it is time the publishers looked into upgrading their approach to
illustrations.
In the end then, does the book fulfil its
remit? The overall impression I obtained was that this book has been assembled
laboriously from an extensive archive of personal interests but has lacked the
discipline of an editor who might have borne the needs of the reader, rather
than the author, in mind and who might have encouraged a more precise link to
the exam board specifications. For this the BCP editorial committee must bear
some responsibility. Had the book been armed with guidance on where to take
research further this would have ameliorated the inevitable consequences of
trying to wedge a quart into a pint pot. I can see this book finding a place in
a school classroom where a student might dip casually into it, but it would
have been vastly improved by the simple expedient of fuller referencing, a
comprehensive and properly-organized index, detailed captions and a less
fragmented text.
These criticisms may seem too harsh if the
book’s intended readership is really restricted to GCSE students and their
teachers. In that respect it will probably fulfil its purpose well, in spite of
the limited assistance to encourage further research. However, this should be
made much clearer in the book. If the intended purpose is genuinely to serve a
much wider range of courses including A-level then my feeling is that it will
be of no more than limited utility.
Conversely, at around £16.99 in terms of
pages per pound this book represents sound value compared to most of Bristol
Classical Press’s offerings which are mostly around two-thirds of the price but
a third or less of the length.
Guy de la Bédoyère
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