Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic - Tom Holland (2003)

 

Rating: Excellent

At the tail-end of my recovery from a hip replacement I felt that some hard-core history reading was in order, and in fact that is a good modern phrase to sum-up the Roman Republic - hard-core. Rubicon takes us from the foundation of Rome in 753 BCE to 14 ACE, and throughout the Roman Republic is revealed as an intense example of all of humanity's worst attributes; hubris, arrogance, cruelty, a whole litany of negative attributes basically, but it is not all bad, as Rome helped give Western culture a fine political and societal framework to improve upon. It's pointless here it try to go into Roman history, but what really stood out is just how similar the modern world is to that of Rome's, in particular the USA. Both feature ego-driven political figures bent on stamping their authority on the world, expecting to bask in the glory of success and have the populous love them for it. A Roman figure such as Pompey has a modern equivalent in Donald Trump (except the Pompey actually did some work, like subduing Asia Minor). In fact there were plenty of Trumps in the Roman world, whipping up mobs to intimidate political rivals and attempting to use the law to bend the republic to their will. Both civilisations feature political back-stabbing, military might, the use of the court of law for political ends, vast inequality, unchecked hubris and assassinations. Would we really expect much to change in just two and a half thousand years? It's long been a historical cliche, but essentially we are Romans, just with better technology with more checks and balances in place that give us some higher ground morally.

Pompey the Great, Rockstar General

As for the quality of the book itself? It's right up there with the best I've ever read in terms of history books. Holland delivers the story of the Republic in great detail, but with a verve that reflects the drama of such a dynamic and tumultuous civilisation. His writing is not overly academic, but is nowhere near being dumbed down for popular consumption, it's classy writing basically. Holland delves deeply into such matters as the Roman Senate, populated with the significant historical figures from that period, such as Cicero, Sulla (whom I was unfamiliar with) and Augustus Caesar, who led the way forward out of the Republic and into Empire after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Aside from the Republic's political life, Holland does an excellent job at placing you in the heart of Rome, in its streets teeming with citizens and slaves, from the exalted individuals from noble families and the peasants living in squalor in the narrow market thoroughfares. One aspect that really stood out was the status of military generals, such as Pompey, who were tasked with taking out leaders from neighbouring regions before they could pose a threat to the Republic, if successful they were like rockstars or celebrities, treated on their return to Rome with parades and granted status and wealth. Despite this Holland reveals that whilst the Republic needed figures such as Pompey to build their empire, there existed inherent boundaries that kept such figures from becoming too powerful and endangering what was ultimately a democracy, until, that is, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in northern Italy and swept all before him, beginning the end of the Roman Republic. Once again here lies historical echoes of present day America, caught in a fight between fascism and democracy on its own soil. What will future students of history be reading about our current time and will they be musing over historical parallels with the ancient world? Unfortunately it looks probable at the moment.

Vikings: A History - Neil Oliver (2012)

Rating: Admirable

I am an avowed fan of the History Network's Vikings series, which is apparently extending to a sixth and final season this year. I have often wondered how much of the series was based on what is known about the Viking era (quite a bit as it turns out...) and was looking for a succinct history, when I spied Oliver's book languishing on a table at Planet Books. Neil Oliver is an archeologist, historian and BBC presenter of shows such as Coast (2005), The History of Ancient Britain (2011) and Vikings (2012), from which this book is based. Oliver's writing style is very much like his TV presenting and you can certainly picture him looking rigorously Scottish whilst standing on a cliff-top discussing just how the Vikings came to strike fear into the hearts of Europeans between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Vikings is perfect if, like me, you want an easy to digest short history of the Viking era. Vikings is akin to an amiable but passionate historian holding forth with a class of wine in front of a roaring fire; you don't have to concentrate all that hard, but you can still feel like you are receiving a solid enough historical account.

Although the Vikings were a dynamic people, the first part of the book keeps you waiting around for quite a while for the real action to start. Oliver spends the first 100 pages of the book giving the back history of the northern European peoples who became the Vikings through the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages, as well as the wider historical context leading up to that first historically recorded Viking raid on Lindisfarne Abbey in 793. This is all very necessary, however I was left feeling that this part of the Vikings story could have done with some brevity, particularly as the book is not an extensively detailed history of the Vikings. Vikings contains maps, a list of principle Viking figures, colour plates and a timeline, all of which are very useful as Oliver takes you on a mostly chronological accounts of the viking era. Although not all of the most significant Viking historical events are contained within Oliver's book (I did some reading online as well...), there was enough to give you a rounded idea of who the Vikings were and just why they were significant part of European Medieval history. If you are interested in an exhaustive account of the Viking era (as I now am) Vikings can be viewed as an adequate entree to further reading.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

Rating: Excellent

About six months ago I had a friend over for dinner and he brought along a friend of his I'd never met before, who noticed my copy of Sapiens on one of my book piles and proceeded to enthuse about it; he also mentioned that reading it made him decide to become a vegetarian, which was something I found puzzling at the time. Now I've read Sapiens I can fully understand its power to create life changing decisions. Sapiens takes a cold hard look at humanity as a species, not just our origins but just how we've arrived at this point in our history. Sapiens is not a blow by blow historical account of humanity, rather Harari examines particular significant turning points in our history and the manner in which we have shaped our shared destinies for better or worse. Harari divides the book into four parts: 'The Cognitive Revolution', 'The Agricultural Revolution', 'The Unification of Humankind' and 'The Scientific Revolution', which gives you a very good idea of the main focus of his arguments. 

We are, in many ways, a remarkable species, however throughout Sapiens our flaws are repeatedly revealed, something that stands out the further you progress through the book and the reality is there's no escaping it. Just one of a long intersecting line of hominins descended from apes, Homo Sapiens embarked on a journey of adaptation that is characterized by repeated destruction of the natural world and of each other. The agricultural revolution, Harari argues, did much more harm than good and trapped humanity in a cycle of disease, deprivation and misery and led to untold suffering of all the animals we rely on for sustenance (the source of my new acquaintance's vegetarianism). This is just one example of the double edge sword of humanity's progress through history.

Early in the book Harari notes that the word Sapiens means 'wise' and Homo means 'man' - so we are men who are wise, something that my own world view (I've always been an atheist and now have embraced nihilism, which is very freeing to say the least) has a hard time reconciling. Perhaps the most compelling argument made by Harari is the way in which humanity has the ability to organise ourselves by using 'fictions' that create realities that are not rooted in the objective world around us, such as money, nationalism and religion. These fictions have united us as a species and have helped foster much of our evolutionary success, however they have also led to great suffering and decision-making that has led to calamities that have left us with a future that is cloudy at best. 

A fine example of the negative power of these fictions is the recent Australian election. Australia's Liberal party is one of the most morally reprehensible governments in modern history, yet they easily won the election and increased their parliamentary majority. In Scott Morrison we have a Pentecostal Christian (don't get me started) who a few years ago brandished a lump of coal in parliament to illustrate his belief that coal is nothing to be afraid of (yes, he is a climate change denier/criminal). The principal fictions at play here are capitalism, combined with an ideological belief that humanity's impact on the world is negligible and in any case absolutely necessary in order to maintain the status quo. The election was dubbed by many commentators as the climate election, yet despite having seen the leader of our country brandish a lump of coal in parliament Australians chose to ignore the most urgent problem of our times to vote for him anyway (I know it was more complex than that, however climate change is the main deal here). Clearly the fictional systems we are enmeshed in sway our thinking in such a way that we can happily choose to ignore the objective fact of climate change.

A certain Homo Sapien with some 'harmless' coal

Although Sapiens is not a flawless book; Harari often labours his points with lengthy extrapolations that sometimes cause the book to get bogged down, it is an important book. It is pleasing that Sapiens has remained a best seller for years and it is partly down to the fact that Harari has achieved the right balance between intelligent writing and producing a text that can be readily read by the general population. Sapiens should be part of the high school curriculum, although no doubt that would start a fresh bout of culture wars with the right arguing that Harari is too left wing and therefore dangerous to our treasured cultural fictions.

Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present - Christopher Harding (2018)

Rating: Excellent

Late last year while I was reading Mishima on the plane flying from Perth to Melbourne it occurred to me that I should source a book about the history of Japan. The very first night in Melbourne I walked into the fantastic Readings book store in Carton to find Japan Story waiting on the shelves in the well stocked history section. Harding's biographical blurb at the back of the book indicates that he is a cultural historian; which is perhaps why his approach in Japan Story is certainly different to most other history books I've read. Harding uses the lives of particular individuals, from doctors, writers, feminists, revolutionaries and ordinary people to illustrate how each phase of Japan's modern history effected their lives both practically and psychologically. There is still plenty of fairly straight historical reportage, but ultimately Harding's approach is both intriguing and refreshing. Also Harding's writing style reveals a rigorous thinker with a deft touch, something that is not always evident in some historians work.

Harding manages to say considerably more about Japan than just where their aggressive expansionist desires came from that climaxed in the middle of last century; I completed the book feeling like I understood the nation and its peoples considerably more, including the evolution of Japanese family life, feminism, the arts and politics. It was particularly fascinating to read about how Japanese society was effected by and dealt with the multiple forces of modernism in the early twentieth century relative to what I know about how it effected western society. In this way the book is aptly named, as Japan Story does indeed outline a story that is divergent from familiar western histories, which is a valuable thing in our self obsessed nationalistic age.  

Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud - Peter Watson (2005)

When I first saw this rather large tome (1015 pages to be exact...) on the shelves at Planet Books years ago I was immediately intrigued by its title. The book presented as a fascinating angle on history, rather than the usual examination of events, wars, ruling dynasties, historical figures and so forth. What I didn’t know until I finally finished Ideas is that the history of ideas is actually a specific field of research in history and as an academic discipline it dates back to 1932 when a gentleman called Johan Nordstrom became the first professor of the new discipline at Uppsala University in Sweden. Watson’s Ideas is a hugely ambitious, but on the whole successful, undertaking; the kind of book that gets you talking with others about its contents. I read most of the book without knowing too much about the author and appropriately it turns out that Watson is extremely accomplished, having attended universities in London, Rome and Durham; he is a former journalist, an academic, intellectual and author of not only twelve non-fiction books but also seven novels.
 
Ideas is presented in five chronological parts: Lucy to Gilgamesh - The Evolution of Imagination; Isaiah to Zhu Xi - The Romance of the Soul; The Great Hinge of History - European Acceleration; Aquinas to Jefferson - The Attack on Authority, the Idea of the Secular and the Birth of Modern Individualism; and finally Vico to Freud - Parallel Truths: The Modern Incoherence. Each part features a series of fascinating chapters discussing the major influential ideas of that era. Watson’s style is engaging and rigorous in its intention to both be accurate and thought provoking, without being too dry and formal. Watson does what every worthwhile writer of non-fiction should do, he presents his arguments in a compelling manner, lodging them in your consciousness so that you can think about them within the context of your own evolving world view. Although Watson sometimes uses broad brush strokes there is a plethora of well researched detail to wonder over. Although Ideas took me a long time to get through, partly because for quite a while I was just reading bits here and there, a great deal of its dense text still remains with me and it has definitely altered my world view in useful and sometimes intriguing ways.

Some of the most prominent ideas that really stood out for me were the rise of statistics (yes, statistics), Romanticism, Monotheism and the utmost importance of both the Renaissance and Protestantism. Statistics is a remarkably significant and influential idea that is still significant today. The Victorians developed and used statistical methods as a way to accurately analyze human behavior, which then heavily influenced government decision making regarding such things as town planning. The initial chapter that covers the Renaissance: The Arrival of the Secular: Capitalism, Humanism, Individualism, and the chapters that follow, highlight just how much significant innovation in thought, art, the sciences and questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries. Having studied medieval history at university I had a reasonable idea of the importance of this period in history, but Watson’s approach was both revealing and though-provoking. Humanism, the eventual rise of Atheism (initially to be an atheist meant that you denied Jesus, but not God) and Martin Luther’s decisive reaction to the all powerful Catholic Church all served to loosen the profound influence of Monotheism and in in particular Catholicism and paved the way, for good or bad, for the modern world of secularism, individualism and ultimately capitalism. Romanticism acted as an extension to Humanism, with the significant idea that the only thing that humans could be certain of was their own consciousness. This idea was spectacularly expressed by the multitude of amazing Romantic classical composers and poets that worked during that era (1770 - 1850). These ideas are, as you’d imagine, far more complex than my simplistic summation, but fortunately Watson’s eloquent arguments are superbly realised, so your best bet is to read the book and enjoy.

Realistically is almost impossible to summarize this amazing book, however apart from the fact that it is among the most thought-provoking non-fiction books I’ve ever read, it is worth considering aspects of Watson’s concluding statements. Watson claims that the three most influential ideas in history are the soul (surprisingly not God...), the idea of Europe and the idea of the experiment. The importance and profound impact of the experiment needs no further elaboration, however both Europe and the soul seem to be unusual choices. Watson explains that the concept of Europe as a cultural entity, in opposition to that of the medieval Islamic states, who turned their back on the innovations that Europe had to offer by isolating themselves within their own belief system, was integral to providing succor to education via universities as well as significant scientific and cultural advances. As for the idea of the soul Watson points out that the ancient idea that there is a eternal soul essence within humans allowed significant control over the lives of humanity wherever and whenever this idea prevailed. Watson argues that one only needs to ponder the profound control religion has exercised over humanity by manipulating the fear associated with what would happen to the soul after death. Christianity (and Monotheism generally) stands as a prime example of how powerful this idea has been.

Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that what a truly great non-fiction book needs to do is not just inform, but to inspire the reader to make their own connections and conclusions. Ideas provided such inspiration and I certainly count it as one of the most important non-fiction books I’ve ever read. Although Watson’s arguments are both compelling and sound throughout much of the book I’m uneasy with the idea that the soul is more influential than the idea of God. The idea of God has certainly inspired humanity in positive ways, for example to better ourselves morally and to try and understand reality, however more prevalent is the negative way in which God has significantly inhibited progress throughout history and has led to the deaths of millions of humans through war and persecution. Watson himself presents all the evidence you need, in particular the way in which the Catholic Church attempted to inhibit intellectual progress for centuries. Lastly if you are wondering, like I certainly did, why Ideas ends on the cusp of the twentieth century, it is because Watson had dedicated a previous book to the last hundred years or so, called A Terrible Beauty: the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind (2000). A book I will no doubt get around to reading at some point in the coming years.

Decline and Fall?

College girl Clinton

In 1776 Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his six volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the great achievements in historical literature. Just what caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire has been one of the most contentious subjects within the discipline of history. Gibbon cited a decline in civic will coupled the pacifism of Christianity as prime contributors to the Roman Empire being susceptible to successive waves of barbarian invasions. More generally there were also many specific events and particular individuals whose abuse of power contributed to Rome’s eventual fate. There certainly would have been many occasions when the Roman Empire was at the crossroads of history.

How will future historians view this point in history in which the closest we have to a modern day analogue of the Roman Empire, the United State of America, stands at its own crossroads? Will it be the point when the decline becomes the fall if Donald Trump is elected president? Trump should be a very recognisable figure to anyone familiar with history - a true demagogue taking advantage of the fall-out from nearly forty years of neo-liberalism. Capitalism is itself also at the crossroads, but that is another story. The difference now is that rather than an empire’s future being at stake, the very future of humanity is on the line. The fact that Trump is a climate change denier (therefore a climate change criminal) is of much more concern than his racism, his misogyny, his unbridled narcissism, his anti-intellectualism and his blatant disregard for the facts. As hopeless as much of humanity’s attempts at addressing climate change has been there is still some hope, but the time to act is now and if Trump is elected then future generations world-wide will be the hapless victims of America’s poor judgement (or to take kinder point of view - the victims of the vicissitudes of history).

Hopefully the coming days will be viewed by future historians as an unprecedented time when America followed the election of its first black American president with the election of its first female president. It will be viewed as a time when action on climate change took its next crucial step and millions of Americans continued to enjoy some hard won freedoms. Perhaps never before in world history has one woman had such responsibility, and perhaps never before have the stakes been so high. So Hillary Clinton, for all your flaws and all your past and future mistakes I desperately hope that you are the next President of the United States of America and not Donald Trump, the greatest, and perhaps most dangerous, narcissistic fool of our age.