|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Thornbirds in Togas
| Article
# : |
19744 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,831 Words |
| Author
: |
Barry Baldwin
Barry Baldwin is professor in the Department of Classics at
the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta. |
THE FIRST MAN IN ROME
Colleen McCullough
New York: Morrow, 1990
896 pp., $22.95
The first man; but (alas) only the first installment. McCullough promises (threatens might be a better word) several more volumes by way of continuation. One shudders to think how many trees will die in this dubious cause. Pulp for pulp, indeed. This prequel (to use Spielbergian terms) encompasses 896 pages and weighs in at four pounds. As Ambrose Bierce remarked of a big bad book, "The distance between its covers is too great."
This installment covers the years 110-100 B.C. Overseas, the growing but by no means final Roman empire fights and wins a particularly squalid war in North Africa against the wily prince Jugurtha. Nearer home, a dangerous slave revolt (the second such, and Spartacus is still to come) is put down in Sicily, whilst in northern Italy Roman armies and generals face, first lose to, and then overcome a terrifying invasion by Gallic and Germanic tribes.
These events comport the rise and intertwined careers of two disparate and desperate men: Marius, the bumpkin from rural Arpinum who is elected (overall) to an unprecedented seven consulships and whose generalship settles the hash of Jugurtha the northern invaders; and the urban and urbane Sulla, a seedy and dissolute scion of an aristocratic Roman family, whose reduced circumstances are both his despair and his impetus. Most of what we know about this pretty pair comes from the cynical historian Sallust of the next generation and the biographer Plutarch, who lived and wrote in the first and early second centuries A.D.
The novel closes on the violent and ominous note of the deaths of Marius' erstwhile political crones, the tribune Saturninus and his ally Glaucia. All this foreshadows the end of the Roman Republic in a round of civil wars (banana republic/African style) to be death with in future volumes--first between Marius and Sulla themselves, then after Marius' death and the dictatorship, abdication, and ghastly demise of Sulla, between Julius Caesar and Pompey, culminating in Caesar's brief dictatorship and assassination in the fateful game of Ides and Seek, and a final decade or so of civil war between Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Roddy McDowell, a.k.a. Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian-Augustus, the end result being the replacement of the Republic by the emperors or principate, in the reign of the first of which there also occurs
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
