Subtitle: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic
(Book Review--History)Started: January 02, 2023
Finished: January 08, 2023
(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.)
Background Information
Mike Duncan is famous for the award winning The History of Rome Podcast which started out from very humble beginnings to amass a huge following.
As is common in the world of Podcasting, Mike Duncan had no formal credentials as a historian. When he began the podcast, he had a BA in political science with a minor in philosophy, and was working as a fishmonger. But he did have an ability to voraciously read history books in his spare time, and then synthesize this information into his own interesting and entertaining narratives.
After completing The History of Rome podcast, Mike Duncan left the ancient world behind and went on to do a new podcast series: Revolutions. While he was in the middle of Revolutions, Mike Duncan was contacted by a literary agent who asked if he had any ideas for a book. So Mike Duncan decided to go back to ancient Rome.
As the subtitle indicates, this book is about the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic.
Every schoolboy knows that the Roman republic ended with Julius Caesar, or (depending on how you count it) possibly August Caesar. But Julius and Augustus Caesar did not simply come out of nowhere to topple a perfectly functioning republic. The wheels had started coming off of the Roman Republic about 100 years before Julius Caesar's assassination. This period, known as The Crisis of the Roman Republic (W), was marked by increasing wealth inequality, civil unrest, mob violence, radical populist agitators, and civil wars.
Mike Duncan decided to only focus on first 50 years of this 100 year time period--i.e. from the Gracchi Brothers to Sulla. This is the generation right before the final collapse of the Roman Republic.
Mike Duncan says that he chose to focus on this generation (instead of the actual collapse) for a couple of reasons. First of all, so much has already been written about the final years of the Roman Republic--we already have more than enough biographies of Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Antony and Cleopatra, etc. So, better to focus on the slightly less known stories of the Gracchi Brothers, Marius and Sulla.
But secondly, Mike Duncan also says that he frequently gets asked if he sees any parallels between the collapse of the Roman Republic and the current state of the American republic. Mike Duncan says he doesn’t think we’re at the stage of Caesar and civil war. Not yet. That, he says, is at least a couple generations away. But, he claims, we may be able to see some historical parallels between current day America, and the generation before the collapse of the Roman Republic.
As events turned out, this book ended up becoming even more timely than Mike Duncan intended. The book is about how the old institutions of the Roman Republic started to come apart. But as Mike Duncan was still writing the book, the institutions of the American republic started to come apart.
As Mike Duncan says in his final retrospective episode of Revolutions:
We have entered the year of Our Lord 2016 with all that comes with it. In addition to writing the podcast, I was hard at work on this book about the disintegration of a centuries-old republic and was not thrilled by current events. There was this running joke on Twitter where the latest piece of insane political news would break and people would write to me and say, “Mike, you got to write that book faster man,” and I would say, “I'm writing the book as fast as I can.” I meant for The Storm Before the Storm to be vaguely prescient. That's the vibe I was going for. I was not happy at all that the book stood in danger of being overtaken by events.
Why I Read This Book
The social turmoil surrounding the last 100 years of the Roman Republic is one of my favorite periods of history. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog several times before:
I find it fascinating because there’s a lot about the ancient Roman world that seems strange and barbaric to us nowadays, but there’s also a lot about it that seems eerily familiar. For example, the conflict between the optimates and the populares (W) seems to mirror the conflict between the right and the left in the modern world.
It’s also fascinating because it’s moving into one of the more well-documented periods of Roman history, so we know a lot about the people and events involved--enough to tell a fairly detailed story.
And it’s also just inherently interesting because of all the large personalities and drama of the period.
I first learned about this period way back in high school, when I read The Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough.
The first 3 books in that series The First Man in Rome, The Grass Crown, and Fortune's Favorites deal with the same time period as The Storm Before the Storm.
Also covering the same time period as The Storm Before the Storm are a couple of other books that I’ve previously read, and reviewed on this blog:
And:
So I’m right in the target audience for a book like this.
"Wow, this guy has exactly the same interests as me," I thought. I had been obsessed with the history of ancient Rome, and obsessed with the history of revolutions in my 20s. And here's a guy who's created two podcasts on the exact two subjects I'm interested in. It's like he's making podcasts just for me.
The feeling that Mike Duncan was making content just for me was then further confirmed when I found out his book was on exactly the same period of Roman history that I was most interested in.
I’ve been meaning to read this book ever since I found out about it, but I thought I should finish off The History of Rome podcast first. (When I was back in America in 2019, I saw this book on the shelves of my local bookstore, but, as I hadn’t yet listened to the podcast, I didn’t buy it at the time.)
But then in September 2021, I finally finished off The History of Rome Podcast. (By the way, episodes 29 through 34 of The History of Rome Podcast cover the same time period as The Storm Before the Storm.
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| https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9oaXN0b3J5b2Zyb21lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz |
So this book represents the second time Mike Duncan is covering the same material. But that’s no problem. I enjoy this historical period enough that I was willing to come along for the ride a second time. )
At the very end of the podcast feed, there's one last episode from 2017 (5 years after the podcast ended), which is an excerpt from the audiobook of Mike Duncan's book The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (A). Even though this is a late addition to the podcast, and is actually just an extended advertisement for Mike Duncan's book, because it was in the podcast feed, I decided to count it as part of the podcast, and I've listened to it as I worked my way through the podcast feed. And I've got to say, I'm hooked. It is a great excerpt. The excerpt is the story of Tiberius Gracchus, and it's told with great storytelling skill. Whenever I'm next back in the United States, I'm going to make it a point to buy The Storm Before the Storm.
I haven’t managed to make it back since I wrote that, but my parents actually came out to visit me in December, and I asked them to bring a copy of The Storm Before the Storm with them. Which they were kind enough to do. (*2)
The Review
I don’t really have a lot of intelligent things to say about this book.
I mean, I absolutely loved it. But then, of course I did. I’m right smack in the target audience for this book.
This is one of those books where the ideal readers will be able to self-select easily. If you hate history, don’t bother with this book. If you like history, you’re going to love this book.
Mike Duncan does a great job of telling this period of history as an engaging story, so it’s a great narrative history.
Of course, The Storm Before the Storm is not the only narrative history of this period. Tom Holland’s Rubicon was also a great narrative.
It’s tough to say which author is the better storyteller--especially since I read Rubicon 9 years ago now, and it’s somewhat faded in my memory. But I do have really fond memories of Rubicon. I’ve just now been trying to refresh my memory by rereading some of Rubicon online (looking at some of the chapter fragments freely available on Google Books previews), and I think that on balance both books are about equally well-told overall, but there are a few dramatic key scenes that Tom Holland tells better.
But it’s probably not necessary to agonize for too long about which book is better. The point is that they're both really good.
Take, for example, this paragraph from page 200 of The Storm Before the Storm:
The abandoned Marius sat for a time and contemplated his sorry state. Then he picked himself up and moved inland, tromping through swampland, still aiming for Minturnae. With night falling, he ran into a peasant and begged shelter for the night. The peasant complied, but then a cavalry patrol rode up and banged on the door. While the frightened peasant confessed everything, Marius tore off his clothes and dove into a nearby swamp. He hid in murky water with “his eyes and nostrils alone showing above the water”. But the patrol found him anyway. Gaius Marius, six-time consul and Third Founder of Rome, was dragged out of the swamp “naked and covered with mud”. Then he was led into Minturnae by a rope around his neck.
Pretty great storytelling, right?
In addition, Mike Duncan’s analysis of the political systems of ancient Rome is also pretty interesting. Political science is, after all, Mike Duncan’s background. (He was a political science major in college, not a history major.) Anyone who is familiar with his podcasts will be aware that he’s very good at giving interesting but succinct explanations about government systems. And this comes through in the book.
With all the books I’ve read on ancient Rome, I kind of hate to admit it, but I don’t think I ever realized how laws were passed in Republican Rome before reading Mike Duncan's book. I didn’t realize that it was the tribal assemblies, not the Senate, that actually voted on and passed the laws. (The Senate just acted as an advisory body to debate the laws before they were passed on to the tribal assembly. And, actually, there was technically no law that said that a law had to be proposed to the Senate first. It could, in theory, go straight to the Assembly, although, as Mike Duncan recounts, nobody had ever done that before the career of Tiberius Gracchus.)
I also enjoyed Mike Duncan’s summary of the Greek philosopher Polybius’s analysis of the Roman constitution on pages 8 and 9. Polybius came from the Aristotle school of politics, which believed that monarchy, aristocracy and democracy all had their merits, but all of them would naturally devolve into their most repressive forms. However, Polybius believed that the Romans had managed to find the perfect system by mixing all of these elements--the monarchical element was the consuls, the aristocratic element was the Senate, and the democratic element was the Assemblies. I found it an interesting analysis. Mike Duncan spends two pages exploring the idea (pages 8 and 9) which is just enough time to break it down slightly, but not enough for the analysis to become boring.
And I really enjoyed those kind of bite-sized little pieces of political analysis throughout the book.
And speaking of the politics, let’s talk about the political factions in Republican Rome: the optimates and the populares.
Some history books on Republican Rome treat the optimates and the populares as if they were equivalent to modern political parties. The optimates are equal to the conservatives, the populares are equal to the leftists.
Dan Carlin, in his podcast Death Throes of the Republic, for example, took this view.
Other historians are more skeptical, and say that the terms optimate and populare represented a style of politicking and not a coherent ideology.
I’m not a professional historian. (I only read popular histories, not scholarly works.) So I suppose I don’t really have an informed opinion on this. But I do find it interesting to consider that the fight between the optimates and the populares was an ancient parallel to the modern political divisions, and so for that reason I tend to gravitate towards history writers who emphasize the ideological split between optimates and populares.
Like Dan Carlin, Mike Duncan leans hard into the framework that the last 100 years of the Roman Republic was a battle between radical reformers (the populares) and an intransigent aristocracy (the optimates).
Mike Duncan briefly acknowledges that society of Republican Rome was structured differently than modern society, and so it is difficult to map modern political divisions onto ancient society. In Republican Rome, rich nobles acted as patrons to poorer clients, and these client-patron relationships were the basis of political factions. So, as Mike Duncan puts it, political conflicts in Republican Rome were much more akin to tribal conflict than to Marxist class war.
However, after making this disclaimer, Mike Duncan then kind of goes on to ignore it. In fact, Mike Duncan often refers to the populares as “revolutionaries” and talks about them almost as if they were proto-Jacobins.
Mike Duncan had only just recently finished his podcast on the French Revolution at the time he was writing this book, and there are a few references to the French Revolution in the narrative.
For example, on page 138, when describing a new law court established by the populare Saturninus, Mike Duncan says, “The new court would not exactly be the Revolutionary Tribunal that became such a feared tool during the French Revolution. But it was close.”
On page 156, when describing how one populare reformer was killed by a lower class mob that had been excited by another populare radical, Mike Duncan quotes the famous line from the French Revolution: “The revolution was devouring her children” (p.156)
I’m sure that Mike Duncan’s portrayal of the populares as proto-Jacobins could be debated by historians. But then, that’s all part of the fun, isn’t it? Agree or disagree, it’s an interesting debate to have. How much were the populares ideological reformers? How much were they simply populist politicians? How much of this is similar to modern day politics?
I enjoyed Mike Duncan’s political framing of this period, in other words. I’m not sure if I agree with it, but I enjoyed it.
The other thing that could be an interesting debate is what the lessons of this period are, and how much of this, if any, could apply to current day United States.
As for lessons and modern political parallels, I've actually opined on this subject before--when talking about The Civil Wars, The Brothers Gracchi, and Rubicon. So I don't want to repeat myself here. And besides, readers of Mike Duncan will be able to draw their own conclusions. When you read Storm Before the Storm, you'll be able to catch which aspects seem analogous to modern day America without my help.
Extended Quotation
Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had been elected quaestor along with the other populare nobiles in the election of 105. Assigned to Ostia to monitor the grain supply, Saturninus took over just as the Second Servile War shut down the supply line from Sicily. Due to the crisis, the Senate took the extraordinary step of stripping Saturninus of his responsibilities. The princeps senatus Scaurus assumed his post for the duration of the year. Though the historian Diodorus attributes Saturninus’s humiliating censure to “laziness and his debased character,” it is just as likely that even the most active and virtuous quaestor would have been unable to cope with such a dire situation.
Spurred by the insult, Saturninus returned to Rome and ran for tribune. Cicero, who held Saturninus in disdain, said that “of all the factious declaimers since the time of the Gracchi, he was generally esteemed the ablest: and yet he caught the attention of the public, more by his appearance, his gesture, and his dress, than by any real fluency of expression, or even a tolerable share of good sense.” But his performance was good enough—Saturninus won a tribunate for 103.
Though a man like Marius used populare rhetoric to fuel his political rise, he also burned to be accepted by the nobility, to be recognized as their equal. Saturninus, on the other hand, was a bomb-thrower. Like many popular revolutions in history, the men who unlock the door are not always the same men who come bursting through. The men who had run populare programs the year before, like Ahenobarbus, Longinus, and Philippus, were all from ancient noble families who, like Marius, saw populare rhetoric as a path to power. Saturninus, on the other hand, really did seem to want to just burn the whole thing down.
Now a tribune, Saturninus joined with fellow populare Gaius Norbanus to bring the despised Caepio back to trial. Two of their optimate-aligned colleagues tried to veto the trial, but with respect for mos maiorum running dangerously low, Norbanus instigated a riot that physically drove the rival tribunes out of the Assembly. Caepio was duly prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile. Violence once again proved to be the last word in Roman politics.
But Saturninus did not stop with Caepio. The tribune turned his attention to the unfortunate Mallius. Until now Mallius had been a martyr of the populare, the novus homo who had been betrayed by an arrogant noble. But Saturninus was now wielding a more indiscriminate weapon and Mallius too was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile.
After securing these convictions, Saturninus then passed a law establishing a new permanent court that would deal with cases of maiestas, crimes that damaged the prestige of the state. This law took the ad hoc corruption tribunals and made them a permanent fixture of public life. Any noble who took a wrong step could now expect to find himself brought before the new court and prosecuted before a panel of Equestrian jurors on the flimsiest of pretenses. The new court would not exactly be the Revolutionary Tribunal that became such a feared tool during the French Revolution. But it was close.
p.137-138
Plans for Future Reading
Re-read this book as an audiobook
When I first started this book review project, I did a lot of audiobooks. However I’ve since moved away from audiobooks because:
1) I’ve decided that my brain doesn’t always absorb audiobooks fully.
2) There’s so many free podcasts available nowadays, who needs audiobooks anymore?
However, because Mike Duncan’s whole brand is audio entertainment, I should make an exception for this one. As Mike Duncan himself says in the free audio excerpt that he released on his podcast:
Guys, of course there's going to be an audiobook version, and of course I will read it. It would have taken a whole series of blunders to not release the book as an audiobook or even worse to have someone else read it. Of course i'm going to read it. I am working with the good people at hatchet audio and it will be there for you in October. Don't worry, it will be my very great pleasure to read to you what I have written just like I’ve always read to you what I have written and like I am about to read to you what I have written right now. That is the very heart of our relationship.
Well said, Mike. I guess that is the heart of our relationship. Well, I’ll go ahead and do this one as an audiobook as well then.
I don’t know when I’m ever going to get my hands on an audiobook. (It’s not being sold here in Vietnam.) So it may be awhile. But that’s okay. It’s probably best to let a few years go by before I re-read it again anyway. And in the meantime, I have plenty of other Mike Duncan audio content to keep me busy as I’m still only on Season 4 of Revolutions.
So, as I was reading about Gaius Marius and Sulla in The Storm Before the Storm, I couldn’t help but remember about the first time I had read about Gaius Marius and Sulla way back in 9th grade with The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown. And I was thinking that I’m long overdue to just sit down and re-read the whole Masters of Rome series.
This is yet another reading project that’s going to have to wait until I can get my hands on the books. Again, they’re not being sold out here in Vietnam. But someday I’ll track down those books again and re-read them.
Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch (W)
A lot of the lives that Plutarch chronicles are actually from this period: Scipio Aemilianus, Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Gaius Marius and Sulla are all in Plutarch.
After reading about The Peloponnesian War, I mentioned that I really should read Plutarch. Here is yet another reason.
Links
Scipio Aemilianus, one of the characters in this history, was apparently fond of quoting from Homer. When watching Carthage burn, Mike Duncan says (p.15) that Scipio quoted from The Iliad “A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people will be slain.” When he learned of Tiberius Gracchus’s death (p.41), Scipio Aemlinus quoted from The Odyssey "So perish all who attempt such crimes"
10 out of 10. Granted that’s only a 10 out of 10 if you happen to be in the small group of history nerds to whom this book will appeal to. But I am in that group, and I find it very hard to find fault with this book. It does everything you want it to.
January 8, 2023 The Storm before the Storm p.1-226
January 15, 2023 The Storm Before the Storm p.226-268
(*1) Mike Duncan writes in the introduction:
The critical generation that preceded that of Caesar, Cicero, and Antony--that of the revolutionary Gracchi brothers, the stubbornly ambitious Marius, and the infamously brash Sulla--is neglected. We have long been denied a story that is as equally thrilling, chaotic, frightening, hilarious and riveting as that of the final generation of the Republic. This book tells that story. (Author’s Note p.xx)
But I think this is exaggeration. The stories of the Gracchi Brothers, Marius and Sulla were never entirely neglected.
(*2) In an email, I said to my parents: “It'll be in the history section of the bookstore. It was widely available the last time I was back home. (I didn't buy a copy at the time unfortunately). So it should hopefully still be easy to find in bookstores.”
But as it turned out, they couldn’t find it in the bookstores, and they had to special order it. No big deal (it was easy enough to special order), but I guess the book isn’t as popular now as it was a few years ago.
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