I first read Rubicon by Tom Holland when I was fourteen years-old, enthralled with what little Roman history I had encountered in the hardcover picture books of my youth and on amateurish websites that catered to ancient history enthusiasts. Truthfully, the book transformed my life; by the time I had put it down, I was obsessed with Roman late Republican history. Holland, not unlike the most successful novelists, has a taste for the dramatic, a keen ability to touch upon and shift seamlessly between many thematic foci, and sufficient scholarly acumen to convince readers that they should take him seriously. Rubicon, then, when coupled with my own embryonic interest in ancient Roman society, cultivated in me a passion for the study of Roman politics and, especially, for historical questions about the fall of the Republic. Far before I had to declare a major at university, I knew that I wanted to study classics. In fact, inspired by Holland’s Rubicon and other popular histories of its ilk, I decided to learn Latin and Greek and aspired to become an ancient historian.
How little I knew about the field! As an adolescent untrained in Latin and unaware of what the term “classical studies” even referred to, I was enamored with Rubicon and oblivious to the fact that there was any other way to write history. Dynasty, much like Rubicon, is a narrative history that seeks to entertain readers just as much as it seeks to convey the “what happened” apropos its historical context. In both books, just as with his Persian Fire on the Greco-Persian wars of the fifth century BCE, Holland makes no attempt to put forth new scholarly conclusions. He offers sparse analyses of complex events, relies almost exclusively on textual evidence in Roman literature and history, only rarely points to the interpretations of other scholars in secondary sources, and casually inserts quotes from primary textual sources without any explanation of their source, context, or, sometimes, relevancy to the topic at hand (this last tendency perhaps vexed me the most; more often than not, one must turn to the notes, in the back of the book, to discover whom Holland has just quoted. Even then, I sometimes wondered why Holland had quoted a particular author. Given the absence of much elaboration, I was left mystified). The fact is, Tom Holland is an independent scholar and a popular historian (he is also a translator; see his translation of Herodotus’s Histories). He only does research—and it is clear, I should note, that he is extremely well-read and comfortable with primary and secondary source material—insofar as he seeks to tell a story, and not because he hopes to make new discoveries about how we interpret ancient Roman society.
When I read Rubicon as a fourteen-year-old, none of this bothered me, in part because (as I mentioned) I simply assumed that this was how scholars wrote history. Now, with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics and a thesis under my belt, and as a current Latin teacher, I am far less impressed by Holland’s “scholarship.” To be sure, Dynasty, a la Rubicon, is lucid, if somewhat florid, and dramatically re-tells the same stories told by Tacitus and Suetonius with a helpful touch of modernity. Unfortunately, just as Tacitus and Suetonius’s histories are inhibited by their narrow, aristocratic scope, Holland’s subject matter is notably limited to his principle characters from the crème de la crème of the Roman elite: the Julio-Claudians and their upper-class associates (read: enemies) in Rome. Consequently, Holland almost wholly overlooks the day-to-day lives of ordinary Romans of the early Principate (that is, beyond their fickle sentiment toward the Julio-Claudians, typically marked by either adoration or revulsion; Holland does, however, incorporate a much-appreciated aside into the lives of slaves), steers clear of systemic questions that address the Roman economy or climate’s impact on the success of the Pax Romana, and rarely cites evidence from material culture unless it pertains to monumental structures commissioned by the Julio-Claudian dynasts (there are also some references to coins and altars insofar as these depict the imperial family). The reader, then, must accept that Holland’s historical portraiture of the early Principate, however accurate it may (or may not) be, is monochrome and extremely sparse. That is not to say that one cannot or will not enjoy Dynasty; to the contrary, I think most readers will relish Holland’s narrative. Yet it is to say that ancient Roman society at this period was far more dynamic, complex, diverse, and even colorful than Holland makes it out to have been.
A few minor quibbles, and then a few major criticisms: first, Holland habitually enters into the minds of his historical characters and makes assertions that, while perhaps plausible, are in reality fictitious projections more suited to fantasy than history. Thus Octavian “knew from the scale of his ascent, none better, just how far he had to fall.” Holland likewise asserts that “certainly, to a man of his proven murderousness, character assassination [of Antony] was a minor consideration.” Such sentiments are, I suppose, conceivably attributable to Octavian, yet fall outside the realm of what the historian can claim for certain. Holland does this with other characters as well, and often: in the midst of the Triumvirate, “Livia could have been left with no illusions as to the brute realities of the new order”; Tiberius, faced with his ulcerous reflection in the mirror, “needed no reminder” of how treacherous intimate relationships could be; “Claudius understood as well as anyone” the benefits of insider information, nor was he “a man to cause deliberate offence.” Most fantastical: “For Claudius himself, who all his youth had been cooped up in his study while his elder brother played the war hero, the chance to lead an army into battle was a dream come true.” How, exactly, does Holland know Claudius’s most cherished hopes and dreams?
Second, Holland’s flare for the dramatic leads him far too frequently to assert some position or character perspective with a touch of hyperbole, then to start a new section with questions like “Or was it?” and, “Or could it?” This penchant for melodrama lends the book an air of amateurism that Holland’s editor would have done well to excise. On the same token, Holland never truly explains the validity of his conjectures, whether with respect to his characterizations or why he follows a particular narrative, the facts of which are up for debate (see, for instance, his explanation for why Ovid was exiled; Holland maintains in a footnote that it was for political reasons, yet does not explain why). Sometimes, I felt as if Holland was more reliant on the stereotypes established by Robert Graves and the I, Claudius television series (and, by connection, those first conveyed by Tacitus and Suetonius), than his own heady textual and historical analyses.
Finally, Holland’s use of the Italian mafia metaphor across Dynasty is kitsch and unwelcome. I understand his intentions and I see the obvious parallels between the autocratic rule and deviant behavior of the Julio-Claudians and the criminal excesses of mafia culture. Yet with the two major sections of the book titled “Padrone” and “Cosa Nostra,” and two heavy-handed characterizations of Agrippa and Sejanus as consiglieri, there came a point at which Holland’s coy allusions started to wear on me. Moreover, the fact remains that the entire client-patron system upon which Rome’s sociopolitical life was founded, well before the Julio-Claudians, already anticipates mafia power hierarchies. The political machinations of Rome’s first imperial family were not unique in this respect.
There are, however, far more substantive issues with Holland’s Dynasty. At times, when he describes the character and customs of non-Roman peoples, Holland ostensibly assumes the narrative voice of his characters, and as such articulates an un-nuanced ethnocentrism that needlessly exoticizes northern “barbarians.” Take, for instance, his depiction of the tribes north of the Greek city of Tomis on the Black Sea, where Ovid was exiled in 8 CE. Holland speaks of “the brutes who lurked beyond” the Danube, their “beards white with frost”; “plumes of smoke . . . above the sunless horizon” marked their ominous descent upon civilized peoples, which left in its wake “bodies . . . twisted by poisoned arrows, the survivors tethered and driven off.” Holland makes these unwashed heathens more closely resemble the White Walkers from Game of Thrones than any historical Eurasian tribe. Similarly, when he introduces the Germans, Holland speaks with less cultural awareness than Tacitus himself. The lands of the north that the German tribes inhabited “were the haunt of phantoms and hideous monsters,” their environment so harsh that it “doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate.” The Germans are, to put it bluntly, “hairy primitives.” Earlier in the book, Holland similarly describes the Celts of Gallia Comata as “hordes of barbarians: spike-haired, semi-nude warriors” who stuck the heads of enemies on posts and “[downed] their liquor neat.” Fortunately, Caesar had pacified these formerly “mustachioed” ruffians who by the time of the Principate had abandoned their drunken brawls and hill-forts in favor of vineyards and planned urban centers. The Bastarnians of the Balkans, likewise, fare no better on Holland’s account; they “lurked in the dank forests by the mouth of the Danube” and “were a patent menace” to Roman civilization.
Holland never qualifies these characterizations. He never explains how the tribes of northern Europe were “barbarians” from a distinct Roman perspective and why we may want to complicate Roman writers’ exotic portraitures. The reader is left to assume that despite obvious instances wherein Holland intentionally draws upon Roman hyperbole (his comment about the phantoms and monsters of Germania is representative of this narrative technique, I think), he mostly shares the ethnocentric views of Roman authors. While I should hope that a historian as well read as Holland does not buy wholeheartedly into the myth of Roman exceptionalism, there is little in Dynasty which intimates that he understands the historical inaccuracies that surround such a concept. This is a major flaw of the book.
The other major problem with Dynasty is Holland’s readiness to accept the claims made by Rome’s aristocratic authors about the most eccentric Julio-Claudians, and most especially about Tiberius. While Holland remains appropriately sympathetic to the flawed second princeps, he nevertheless endorses the traditional narrative that Tiberius reveled in sexual perversities while on Capri and that his principate was marked most notably for its maiestas trials and capital convictions. In particular, this tendency to take at face value Tacitus’s unfavorable characterization of Tiberius and his depravities overlooks the potentiality that Tacitus projects revulsion at his own political milieu under the Flavian emperor Domitian onto Tiberius, who ruled Rome nearly a century before Tacitus wrote his Annales. Tacitus, not unlike the senators he depicts in his histories, affected obeisance in the midst of Domitian’s own tyranny, which resulted in the deaths of many of his fellow conscript fathers. Once Nerva became princeps, Tacitus could safely show his true political colors: contempt for the new monarchical order and wistfulness for the republicanism of yesteryear. Yet Tacitus was ashamed of his behavior under Domitian, and much of what one reads in the Annales, especially with respect to the senate’s pathetic obsequiousness to Tiberius, perhaps reflects Tacitus’s own self-contempt.
Whatever the case may be, some skepticism is warranted when it comes to Tacitus’s portrayal of Tiberius, first on account of the clear similarities between the second emperor and Domitian, and second because most Romans (as Holland points out repeatedly) did not look favorably upon excessive privacy. Tiberius’s retreat to Capri could only mean that he wished to hide his perverse sexual proclivities from the senate and people of Rome. That he may well have reasonably despised public scrutiny to such an extent that he intended to administer the empire from afar, or that he actually wanted the senate to step up and reassert its auctoritas, were implausible explanations to first century CE Roman writers, and for that matter far too nuanced for public taste. (It should be noted that whatever his justifiable reasons may have been to leave Rome, Tiberius’s decision spelt disaster for the city. Sejanus was probably as corrupt and ambitious as Tacitus makes him out to be, and Tiberius’s confidence in the upstart equestrian turned Praetorian prefect certainly ruffled senators’ feathers.) At times, Holland alludes to the problems with our sources; for the most part however, he accepts their veracity without question. Most deficiently, he rarely probes Tacitus, Suetonius, and other writers with skepticism, and most often fails to craft his own narrative solution to problems the ancient sources pose (when faced with disparate accounts, Holland usually presents one side, then falls back on his “Or could it have been” technique and presents the other).
Despite these issues, Dynasty is mostly an enjoyable read. There are many positive elements to Holland’s historical narrative as well: his plausible and persuasive take on Nero’s theatricality, which may explain (in part) his motivation for some of his most heinous crimes; his repeated emphasis on the paradoxical nature of power in the early Principate, i.e. the shadow-play between the appearance of power within a republican framework and power itself, enforced as if by a monarch (which helps one better comprehend Gaius and Nero’s actions, for whom the princeps’ political dance, intended to satisfy the people, the senate, and the army all at once, was patently inauthentic and therefore mockable); his sensible take on Claudius, a paranoid man with ambition and intellect perennially hampered by domestic volatility. These sophisticated interpretations reflect Holland’s own scholarly acumen and save the book from its tendency to chronicle, rather than to explain.
To non-classicist readers, or to those who enjoyed Rubicon and seek to learn more about the early imperial period, I unreservedly recommend Dynasty. While I do not condone the sacrifices Holland makes in an attempt to render ancient history accessible to a popular audience (there are better ways to do this; see Mary Beard’s work), I see the attraction of his approach. No doubt, many readers will come to love ancient Roman history because of Dynasty, and will therefore come to value the important work of classicists and ancient historians. For this reason alone, I sincerely hope for Dynasty’s continued commercial success. Someday, perhaps, the academic journey upon which Holland sets readers will take them to other books, other writers, and even to the study of Latin and Greek, and thus to the primary sources themselves. Then, a more complicated, more colorful portrait of the ancient world will materialize, and the study of ancient peoples will become their life’s work, as it is mine.
The Classical Examiner 