Robert Hughes on Rome

I don't want to be picky but I have not had a good afternoon.

A new history of Rome by the Australian historian and critic, Robert Hughes, has arrived.

Doubtless it will be widely reviewed. This morning The Sunday Times, here in London, hailed it as 'superb'.

The author 'couldn't have chosen a better subject for himself'', I read. 

So two hours ago I settled down to enjoy the 'feast'.

I have bad reading habits sometimes. I browsed before I began.

And on the last page of Chapter Two, I read about the death of the Emperor Augustus and how 'smoothly' went the transition of power to his successor,  'Livia's eldest son by him, Tiberius'.

Peculiar?

If Tiberius had been Livia's son by Augustus, the succession might well have gone smoothly (or not) but Tiberius was Livia's son by her first husband Tiberius Claudius Nero, an interesting character who lost his wife to the most powerful man of his age but ended up siring a vast dynasty of imperial potentates. 

An easy mistake? Well, quite easy, I suppose, unless you are writing a history of Rome (and have forgotten Robert Graves and all the soap-opera versions too). Augustus sired only one child, a daughter, a matter often considered of some historical and dramatic note.

Two pages further on there is another death, that of the African king, Jugurtha, 'of starvation in 105 CE'. Which would be a fine addition to a section on the Emperor Caligula's prison policy if Jugurtha had not died more than 200 years before.

OK. That's the old BC/AD confusion. Easily done. So easily that it's done in the next line too. Vercingetorix , 'Caesar's chief  enemy in Gaul' , is executed in '46 CE', ninety years after Caesar himself was killed.

I have some personal interest in gladiatorial games. But I can still be surprised by a declaration that 'a succession of autocrats, starting with Augustus himself and continuing onwards through Pompey and Julius Caesar, treated them as the greatest imperial show of all'.

Onwards? This is the 'Times Arrow' school of history where forward is forever back.

And then two pages later we have reached the gladiator emperor, Commodus, not an obscure modern figure (above) following his role in the film, Gladiator, starring that Australian icon, Russell Crowe .  In 138 CE Commodus was the 'son and successor' of the Emperor Hadrian, Hughes writes, which is odd when Commodus's father, as shown in the film and in all other history books, was the philosopher emperor, Marcus Aurelius whom Commodus succeeded some forty years after the date given here.

So after 24 pages I have now stopped reading this book.

The wise advice to myself might be to skip all the chapters before the Renaissance and to see what Hughes has to say about the Trevi Fountain. The excellent Jonathan Keates, I discover, has done that already.

But I can still wonder why someone wants to write ancient history when he has such a strange lack of concern for what is known about it.

I can wait to be accused of pedantry. We are used to that at the TLS.  But these are not errors about the obscure; they are mistakes about some of the best known episodes and characters in the ancient history of Rome. 

Once upon a time - not so very long ago - an editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson would have quietly  corrected the errors of a best-selling star; or the text might have been shown to someone who had read some schoolbooks  or watched some late night TV.

But that sort of nostalgia is useless. Perhaps next week I will start again at the beginning - and hope pages 102-126 were just a bad patch.

 

 

 

 

  

  

 

 

Comments

[mike paterson]

Not pedantry. The Basics. Disappointed to hear, I quite like Hughes.

[Guy Aron]

I quite agree; correcting factual errors isn't pedantry. Errors make readers lose confidence. Just look up the Oxford Dictionary of Writers and their Works' (online version) entry on George Orwell. According to that he wrote 11 posthumous plays, the titles of which bear a strong resemblance to those of John Osborne. I have sent several emails about this to OUP to no avail, and have resorted to a letter in THES. So *nil carborundum illegitemi*.

[Lord Truth]

Im so glad Stothard has put the boot into this Australian poseurs latest...
Decades ago, when the only people who knew the meaning of the word paedophile were classical scholars ,there was a British institution called ^Bob a Job Week^when scouts and cubs would call on people to do small jobs for a shilling.I never had any jobs but always a gave a few shillngs...
One day having obtained (from the library) Hughes bestseller ^The Shock of the New^,a tome as thick and swollen as Hughes own head ,I offered it to a cub who had chanced to call.I told him ^Sit in the garden and check every page carefully.I will give a shilling for every reference to Britain or the British that you find ^.After half an hours labour the disapointed cub had earned a mere two shillings. I could not burn this library book but did return it in a bag once used for the remains of the cats dinner ...

[Clayton Burns]

The London Evening Standard review:

ROME by Robert Hughes
Michael Prodger
23 Jun 2011

[An honorary citizen he may be but Hughes has a claim to be the noblest (modern) Roman of them all.]

An earlier Independent article noted a dozen "Stars of the ultimate book group:"

[Literary editors comprise one of Fleet Street's most exclusive tribes.]

I have been unable to find that the brilliant dozen literary editors have swarmed "Rome" for its errors. In fact, unless their comments keep slipping under the radar of Google advanced search, they have said zero.

Typical. One might say that book reviewing is an elaborate scam to befuddle the ignorant. It is certainly not a noble trade. There is nothing Roman about it.

Sir Peter is a good and attentive reader.

[DES Houghton (Brisbane)]

Stothard, still telling it like it is.

[Clayton Burns]

Expanding on Sir Peter's seemingly lone stand against Robert Hughes's slovenly work in "Rome," we might examine the chaotic media coverage of Conrad Black's statement at his resentencing hearing Friday:

Conrad Black's statement (National Post, June 25, 2011): "And I believe that even if a reasonable person still concludes that I am guilty of these two surviving, resurrected, counts, tortuously arrived at and threadbare though their evidentiary basis now is, that the same reasonable person would conclude that I have been adequately punished."

Black sent back to jail for 13 months PAUL WALDIE CHICAGO— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jun. 24, 2011

Lord Black said he had some regrets, such as over-trusting his former business partner, David Radler, who ended up testifying against him. He also offered little remorse, telling the judge that a “reasonable person” would conclude he was guilty but that a reasonable person would not find it just for him to return to prison.

Globe and Mail comment:
Pibworth Score 5.
9:30 AM on June 25, 2011
I cannot believe the pomposity of this arrogant twit..."telling the judge that a “reasonable person” would conclude he was guilty but that a reasonable person would not find it just for him to return to prison"...thank you Judge St. Eve for standing your ground to this elitist. CB, do your time, move on, and spare us the drama...

Conrad Black to return to jail, Barbara Amiel collapses
By Mitch Potter Washington Bureau
The Toronto Star

But earlier, Black had his say in a blistering 25-minute soliloquy to the court that cast the vast majority of blame for his downfall elsewhere. It was only the second time in eight years that Black spoke directly to his accusers.

This time, however, the tone was different — not merely lashing out, but also acknowledging he could accept that “a reasonable person” would believe him guilty on the two counts that stuck: one involving mail fraud, a second involving obstruction of justice.

Former media mogul Conrad Black sent back to prison for 13 months
By Ameet Sachdev Chicago Tribune
Saturday, June 25, 2011

The closest he came to accepting responsibility for his actions was when he said, "I accept that a reasonable person could conclude that I am guilty." He quickly added that he also believed the same reasonable person could conclude he had been "adequately punished."

In his statement, Black makes reference to how when he was a candidate psychoanalyst "many years ago" he concluded that "it is practically impossible to repress conscientious remorse." In Ex-media mogul Conrad Black sent back to prison By Andrew Stern CHICAGO Friday June 24, 2011 (Reuters):

He quoted Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and other notables, and said he had become a patient in psychoanalysis since his release in July, learning that "it is practically impossible to suppress conscientious remorse."

It all would make a good case study for journalism students.

[dan]

russell crowe is not Australian: he is from New Zealand.

This review might've been taken seriously, but the author of it elevates himself to a god-like status able to knock down any historical reference without the slightest proof. What's this anecdotal bullshit? I don't see the slightest hint of genuine historical/textual evidence.

Rofl, this critic has nothing on Hughes, is nothing compared to Hughes, and never will be, what an eloquent display of schadenfreude.

The way he talks of his 'bad habits' as a reader skipping about to the end of this and that chapter leads me to conclude he is a bad reader.
One might wonder how someone with so well established bad habits can even think of taking on Hughes at all.

IT might be time to develop some good reading habits so you don't sound like you're talking out of your ass, which you do with such aplomb.

[Clayton Burns]

This review is worth considering, even if Sturgis does not analyze Sir Peter's blog post:

Telegraph: Rome by Robert Hughes:

A hotchpotch cultural history of the Eternal City would have been more convincing had it been briefer
By Matthew Sturgis 2:00PM BST 27 Jun 2011

[...] The ground is not unfamiliar, and we have been spoilt in recent years by the narrative histories of Tom Holland, the novels of Robert Harris, and even the miniseries Rome.

[...] And then, after 175 pages, this historical impulse founders. Five hundred years of Roman history simply disappear...

[...] I enjoyed the couple of sprightly paragraphs on Guido Reni, but couldn’t help noticing their remarkable similarity to the couple of sprightly paragraphs that appear in Hughes’s 1989 article on the artist, reprinted in his anthology, Nothing If Not Critical.

[...] There are sparkling passages on the Campo dei Fiori and Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, on Caravaggio’s pictures of pouting youths “with their lumbrous dark eyes and hair like black ice cream”...

[Clayton Burns]

"Rome" could well be a contender for the title of worst editorial disaster of the past 25 years (any book after McCarthy's "Blood Meridian").

William Gibson on Blood Meridian
BY BIBLIOKLEPT. At The Guardian, William Gibson says... "my most memorable holiday reading is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian...".

Harold Bloom on McCarthy’s Blood Meridian BY BIBLIOKLEPT. AV Club posted a great interview with... Bloom this week... "The first time I read Blood Meridian, I was so appalled... I gave up after about 60 pages... And then the third time... I said, 'My God! This reminds me of Thomas Pynchon at his best, or Nathanael West.' It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying."

http://collider.com Yesterday, we reported that James Franco was looking to direct adaptations of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian... Now... Franco confirms... that he hopes to direct both films, with As I Lay Dying shooting in the summer and then Blood Meridian going before cameras sometime in 2012.

If McCarthy were to rewrite "Blood Meridian" so that it would be about 60 percent of its original length, and incorporating the techniques of his later fiction and "2666," another editorial disaster could be transformed into great fiction:

Cormac McCarthy Journal, Vol 8, No 1 (2010) A Note on a Review of Blood Meridian by Roberto Bolaño
Samuel Sotillo.

Perhaps the ultimate puzzle of response to American literature over the past ten years is the inability to appreciate the editor's failure in "Blood Meridian." It is the most over-written and tactless of all serious fiction of the Mexican-American borderlands.

Name the most prominent book editorial disasters of 1985-2011.

Name the five novels from the same period that would most benefit from comprehensive rewriting by the original author.

[Judith Geary]

What have we come to when this type of flagrant disregard for what's supposed to the subject of the piece makes it into print? And get's reviewed -- positively. I could tell none of the reviewers had actually read Satanic Verses past the first 100 pages when it came out, but thought maybe they'd have learned by now. www.judithgeary.com

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Someone remarked, "Eveyone is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts."

[Robert Johnson]

I have just been reading the book (now I can afford it) and I am astounded by the repetition / typographical mistakes / factual errors), e.g. "(The 'Roman mile' was about 1.5 modern ones.)" I have never studied history but I hope the publishers clean the work up and then this otherwise fine book could serve as a fitting memorial to the lovable old curmudgeon. And I do hope Mary Beard finishes reading the book as the exposed errors are hugely entertaining. Did Hughes just write it off the top of his head and send the text to the printers himself? Or should he sue the publisher for gross negligence?

[Clayton Burns]

[WSJ. MAGAZINE OCTOBER 28, 2011
The Forever City

In this exclusive excerpt from his new cultural history of Rome, our most outspoken art critic, Robert Hughes, remembers when he was first dazzled by the eternal city.]

In this WSJ magazine promotion, it is as if the Peter Stothard objections had never been written. Nor are there any comments at the excerpt to point that out.

There should be an international literary board for News Corp., to examine such anomalies and suggest firmly that lapses in coverage be corrected. That would mean not just technical lapses, but the failure to pursue coverage in enough depth.

There is a striking example that I will post on elsewhere. The TLS is the elite literary supplement, without question. Any enhancements in literary procedures world-wide would be to the good.

[Anthony Majanlahti]

After getting about nine-tenths of the way through this book, I decided I wanted to see what the critics said. I was terribly disheartened to read so many glowing encomia, when I had so often wanted to throw it across the room. It really is supremely awful in many parts. I'm relieved to come here and find other people complaining about the same things. It's an editorial disaster with mistakes on almost every page in the first section. But there are mistakes all the way through. I should have taken a red pen to the thing so I could produce examples. I kept calling a friend of mine, who'd given me the book, to recount the latest howler. "Hughes thinks Tiberius was Augustus' son by Livia!" One or two of this sort of thing is fine. But two a page? Was no one fact-checking this monster? Apparently not.

As I said, I'm not at the end of the book yet, just near the end. But what I hoped would be a pleasure has become somewhat embarrassing to read, and worst of all, the nature of the city itself remains elusive in Hughes' account. He wanders from subject to subject, never afraid to leap back in time to discuss something about a past epoch while nominally dealing with a later one, and I would say that the narrative thread was elusive if I believed Hughes had one. There is no sense of the physical city at all, of its growth or change. Instead we get occasional mentions of buildings (more often we get mentions of pictures, which is fair enough, given that Hughes is an art critic). Hughes makes a robust attack on visiting the Sistine Chapel, for instance, but I accuse him of choosing too easy a target. Sometimes it feels like he's spent very little time in the actual city.

I really wanted to love this book and learn from it. At a few dozen pages from the end, all I've learned is to be suspicious of its facts.