Movie: Argo

a/k/a: Good movie, true story (mostly), but I think some of the audience missed a few salient points

I actually started this last night, but I think I over did it at the gym. I was just too tired to keep typing, which is *sad*. Also, I know I'm too tired to write when I start over explaining. As in, the original draft of this tried to explain the entire Iranian Revolution. If you think this version is long, you should have seen the original! So here we go. 

I don't usually go in for movies based off of true stories unless they're historical. As in, 1800's and earlier historical. But Ben Affleck has been doing some good work lately (if you haven't seen The Town, I'm not sure we can keep speaking to one another. Go watch it. Go. Go. It's worth it.) and the previews really caught my interest as well as the interests of my movie buddies. So we broke our usual rule and went to see Argo this weekend.

The basic plot runs like this: In 1979, during the Iranian Revolution, the American embassy is overrun by Iranian students (and some say Islamic militants but I am going to admit to only a general knowledge of these events so I can't call for or against either opinion with any honesty). They take about 50 people hostage (the staff of the embassy) and hold them for more than a year, demanding the return of the ousted Shah, Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavī who had taken refuge in the US. In the end, all of the hostages were released (though some soldiers were killed in a botched rescue attempt) and Iranian-American relations have been less than friendly ever since.

Most people, I think, know at least that vague outline. What they might not know (as in, I didn't know it until I heard of this movie and started reading a little about it and I assume that the majority of people know about as much as I do because I am the center of the universe...) is that six embassy employees escaped when the embassy was being taken over and hid out in the Canadian ambassador's house until the CIA sent someone in to get them out of the country.

His cover story was that they were a movie production crew scouting 'exotic' locations for a sci-fi movie called 'Argo'. Hence the name of the movie about the fake movie that was thought up between Hollywood and the CIA.

Now before I start, one thing to keep in mind is that this movie is 'based on' a true story. What that translates to is 'we saw a really great story that happened and then we amped up the drama and tension to make it marketable'. Not everything that happens on the screen happened in real life. And I, not having read the book that this is based off of, cannot judge which are which. So what I'm talking about is not the reality of this event, but the movie loosely based on the reality of the event. Got that? Good.

I think we all remember how much I loved Taken 2 last week and it's *super* fair and balanced and *totally* necessary portrayal of Muslims? Yeah. I went into this movie with my major concern being that it was going to out-fail Taken 2 so I was pleasantly surprised when it managed to not do that.

In the opening sequence, the narrator does a brief outlay as to how we get to the point at which the movie itself begins, which is the day that the embassy is overrun. The important point, in my opinion, is that they point out that Mohammed Reza was put into power by a U.S. backed coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister and forced Mohammed Reza's father off of the throne. And why, you may ask, did the U.S. do this? The film points this out as well, though I have to say that they didn't point it out as harshly as I think it deserved. The U.S. put Mohammed Reza into power because under the previous regime the oil industry was nationalized, removing it from the control of the British and handing it over to the people or Iran. So...yeah. *cough* Our 'interests were affected' to paraphrase our wannabe VP and we stepped in.

Which was really nice for the people of Iran. They went from having some level of autonomy and growth to being crushed under a dictator who lived it up while they starved. His intelligence service, SAVAK, was set up with the aide of the US government and made a habit of torturing and murdering those opposed to the regime.

Not that the US makes a habit of backing dictators or anything as long as they're our 'friends' and supply us with whatever we want from their country. Nope.

Well the Iranian people eventually revolt - the Shah was put into power in 1953, the Iranians didn't revolt until 1979 - and the Shah escapes and is given asylum in the US for medical treatment (supposedly). The Iranians, understandably in my view, wanted him back. For reasons which I don't think really need explaining, but if they do, they weren't inviting him back for a tea party, okay?

The US refused to give him back because, as one character says later in the film, they're protecting him so all the other dictators that they've put into power know that when everything goes to shit we won't leave them to be worked on by some 'goat vet'.

Here's why I liked this, even though I think that the majority of the audience (at least in my theater) missed this point entirely. (I'm guessing this because of a comment or two that I overheard as we were leaving the theater. I won't repeat them due to overwhelming stupidity.) They didn't *have* to include that. Would it have been an historically inaccurate and dishonest movie without that little fact? Yes. But that's never stopped anyone before. After all it's a movie 'based on' true events, which as I said before, gives them license to make a movie that is less than 100% historically accurate. Any complaints could have been met with that argument, or the argument that it is not the job of the film makers to educate the populace on relatively recent historical events. Which is also true, so far as it goes.

We should not allow ourselves to be educated by the media, by which I mean television shows and movies. They're *fiction*. Even news shows have their own biases, their own agendas. Which is not to say that they're all untrustworthy (though some of them are), but that it is the responsibility of every individual to look further than just the soundbites that we are fed. But back to movies. I think that far too many people allow their 'knowledge' of things to be based on fictional accounts of these events. They seem to think that there's some rule about honesty or accuracy that bleeds over into entertainment media. There isn't. If you want to watch a 'movie' about something and have it be (maybe) historically accurate or factual, find a documentary. Even then you aren't guaranteed, just like you aren't guaranteed an unbiased point of view. You aren't even guaranteed an unbiased point of view in history books. For your own sake, if nothing else, take the time and make the effort to look for other perspectives on what you're hearing.

And now back to the movie! Yay tangents!

Apart from the opening sequence there are several small mentions of the U.S. being responsible for certain events that caused the Revolution, or at the very least didn't help the situation any.

Yes, the 'heroes' in the movie are the Americans. That's...kind of inevitable given the makers of the movie and the situation itself. There is apparently some argument between Canadians and Americans as to how much each country did with regards to the extraction, but again, just going off of the movie.

That being said, I think that the population of Iran was portrayed in a far more even way than the people of Turkey were in Taken 2. Yes, there are many instances in the movie that portray Iranians being frightening. A man being dragged out of the house next door to the Canadian ambassador's residence and being shot. Screaming, guns being waved around, the hostage taking itself. A scene where several of the male hostages are taken down to the basement of the embassy, tied up and made to believe that they are going to be shot. It can be a hard thing to watch, especially given the skill with which the movie is made, but as far as I know it's realistic to what was going on in the country at that time.

They do try to offset this portrayal, though, by showing the Iranian people as people. A few minor instances here and there of normal interaction without there being anything sinister between the Americans and Iranians. One that sticks out in my memory is when the Americans are meeting a representative of the Iranian government in the Grand Bazaar in order to 'scout' the location. The man tries to joke and talk with them, but of course they're too nervous to really pull it off. So he comes across as being friendly and helpful and they come across as being abrupt and kind of weird.

One major point is that the Canadians' maid, Sahar, figures out who the 'Canadian' guests really are and not only does she not turn them over, she actively helps to conceal them. Which, of course, puts her life at extreme risk, so much so that she has to flee Iran once the Americans and her Canadian employers are out of the country.

Religion, while present, is not really thrown out as a major factor. Though perhaps that's because they assume that everyone knows Iran is an Islamic country. The only mention that I can recall is in a bit of dialogue between Sahar and one of the Iranian guards. He's trying to lean on her, to make her aware of how important her answer is, and he mentions 'Rasool Allah'. Which I know refers to Mohammed, but I will lay money on the majority of the people watching this movie having no clue what it means.

I don't want to give the impression that I thought this movie was perfect, or a perfect example of how to portray a culture without demonizing it. It's not. But I think it's a step in the right direction, that they made a point of seeding a movie that could have been all about how evil the Iranians are with moments where it's clear that they are human too, and not evil. There could have been more of them, they could have made it better in any number of ways, but for what it was, I am pleased with the movie.

For another perspective on the movie, check out Malik's review here.

And you don't have to worry about getting another long movie rant next week. We're seeing Paranormal Activity 4, so you're safe!

ETA: In a moment of complete travesty, Taken 2 beat Argo at the box office. Excuse me while I go mourn this terrible event.

I find myself wondering

About the religion of my ancestor's. Not the more recent ones. I know that. They were Lutherans and quite proud of it. German Lutherans, in my experience, tend to be proud of that. The combined ethnicity and religion. Because, after all, Luther himself was German.

I'm thinking of further back. Earlier than Luther. Earlier than Christianity. The pre-Christian tribal religions. It's an aspect of my ancestry that I've never thought of before. I'm proud of my German heritage but I've never considered the religion that my forefathers (and mothers) lived. Clearly I'm thinking about it now - something I blame on you, sanil. :)

Funny thing. In just the basic, googling beginnings of research it turns out that the tribal religions of Germany were closely related to the Nordic tribal religions. Which makes perfect sense once you know it and probably before that even if you bother to think about it, which I never did. :)

And I've been mildly obsessed with the Vikings for ages, which is what makes it funny for me. It's something I should have known but didn't!

Augustus - I mainlined the rest of the book

Title says it all. I was pacing myself and then Antony and Octavian started trying to kill one another and it was all over. Let's see...

Antony's over in Egypt with Cleopatra, making motions that looked a whole lot like putting Caesarian in a position to be hailed as Caesar's legitimate son. Octavian, back in Rome, starts pushing the facts about Antony's misbehavior with Cleopatra, playing on the Roman prejudice against mixed marriages.

They snark back and forth for a while, insulting one another. The thing with Octavian calling Antony a sexual deviant is that Octavian was hardly a model citizen in that respect himself. He had his affairs, just like every other Roman male. Here's one of Antony's replies to Octavian's insults:

"What's come over you? Is it that I am screwing the Queen? But she isn't my wife, is she? It isn't as if it's something new, is it? Or has it actually been going on for nine years now? What about you then? Is Livia the only woman you shag? Good luck to you if, when you read this letter, you haven't also shagged Tertulla or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia, or all of them. Does it really matter where and in whom you insert your stiff prick?"

But all the personal insults really served to highlight the fact that the alliance between Antony and Octavian was at an end. Political disagreements at the time were often expressed through slanderously personal insults and attacks.

"Each triumvir claimed that he stood for a restoration of the Republic, and the other for tyranny by one man. Neither was telling the truth. Ten years after the murder of Cicero, the Republic was a thing of the past, irretrievable. The choice was simply between two kinds of autocracy - tidy and efficient, or laid-back and rowdy."

Time rolls on and Octavian's forces and Antony's (and Cleopatra's) have their showdown. The battle of Actium decides things, though Octavian follows Antony and Cleopatra on their retreat back to Egypt. Both of them eventually commit suicide. Antony falls on his sword, a traditional Roman method. Cleopatra's death is a little more questionable. The traditional story holds that she had an asp brought to her in a basket of figs and caused it to bite her.

The problem with that being that asps are kind of large and noticeable, even in a basket of figs. Oh! of interest: she spent her last days locked into a mausoleum. At first it was her hide out, but once Octavian came it became her prison. Some people speculate that two courses of action are likely: 1) Octavian had people drop hints around Cleopatra of what he intended to do with her. Namely, drag her off to Rome and humiliate her, driving her to suicide. 2) He had her killed and the story spread around that she killed herself. Both seem likely enough. Taking Cleopatra back to Rome was risky and more trouble than it was worth.

Octavian had Caesarion and Antony's only adult child killed, taking the others, including the children Antony and Cleopatra had back to Rome with him and gave them into the care of his sister Octavia. They were too potentially useful in future marriage arrangements to discard just yet.

Once Octavian was the victor, and he owed that victory to his friends, especially Agrippa, stories began to be spread around the Republic of all sorts of signs and portents that had followed Octavian since his birth. A nice little bit of retroactive prophecy. Now, Agrippa. Octavian, in the beginning, was a terrible military commander. Because of his health, he'd never gone off to any battles as was usual for a young man in his position. Agrippa was the one who kept Octavian from failing spectacularly and getting his men killed in the beginning. Octavian learned military proficiency, but Agrippa remained the better of the two at military strategy.

Right. So, three years after he's 'saved' the Republic from Antony's autocracy, Octavian (at 36 years old), abdicates his power. He returns power to the Senate, sets up a constitutional blueprint and announces that he's retiring. It's a huge gamble, but he does it because he's learned from the mistakes of his 'father'. One man can't seize power. People will always resent him as a dictator, no matter how benevolent he may believe himself to be. But if you make them dependent on you, presumably within the bounds of the law and propriety and then leave, they'll beg for you to come back if they're still feeling uncertain enough of their futures. Which is what happened.

He was renamed Imperator Caesar Augustus, called princeps as a title, and was 'persuaded' to take governorship of Spain, Gaul, Syria and Rome. Augustus made the people make him emperor without them realizing what they were really doing.

Through various technicalities and sneakiness, he grew his power and maintained it, sort of behind the scenes for the rest of his life. The people all thought that the Senate ruled, but in reality, it was Augustus. It was just that no one knew the extent of his involvement. Which was in everything.

In 23 BC, when Augustus had been secretly reigning for eight years, there was a flood and a food shortage in Rome. The people, seeing the Senate as ineffective, wanted Augustus to take absolute control. Seeing as how he pretty much had it, only without the trouble of being seen to have it, he rejected it. It was illegal. And just asking for someone to come after him later on as a tyrant.

"When facing disgrace a Roman would tear his clothes in public, and this was what the princeps did to dramatize his refusal to be moved. He went up to the crowd, bared his throat, and swore that he would rather be stabbed to death by its daggers than accept the appointment."

Augustus took control of the food supply and put an end to the shortages, sometimes paying to make up any shortfall out of his own pockets.

Augustus kept trying to reform the Senate system, trying to get the number of Senators down to a manageable level. The Senate was so large that they couldn't ever get anything done. He never quite managed that, but his own powers continued to grow, out of sight of the Roman people. There were, of course, one or two assassinations. People who were inconvenient.

In public, in Rome, Augustus and his family lived very austere lives. This was in keeping with Augustus' platform, a return to traditional Roman values. In private, out of sight, he had a palace built on an island thirty miles or so west of Naples where he could take close friends and family.

One of the few things that marred Augustus' reign and must have pissed him off mightily was that fate kept interfering with his plans for his successors. He had several adopted sons and grandsons, boys that he raised to be his perfect successors. He doted on them and gave them every advantage he could think of. Unfortunately, all the ones that were best suited, theoretically, died before they could assume power. In the end, Augustus was left with Tiberius. Not a bad choice, but not his first, second or third.

"It was not Augustus' fault that fate kept unpicking his arrangements for the succession, but his ruthless rearrangement of the lives of his close relatives led to one after another refusing to serve and perhaps even conspiring against him - Agrippa perhaps, Tiberius, Gaius, the two Julias, Agrippa Posthumus. The consequence was the almost complete destruction of the divine family as an effective, mutually loyal group. The only survivors were the patient wife and her suspicious son."

Augustus died at the age of 76, only a few months short of his 77th birthday. He ruled the Roman Empire for 44 years. There is speculation about his death, of course. Some stories hold that he arranged for his beloved wife, Livia, to poison him to help ensure the smooth transference of power to Tiberius. Others believe that Livia poisoned him all on her own. Livia, deserved or not, was accused many times through her life of killing people who got in her way by poison. There is, of course, always the possibility that Augustus, having never been a particularly healthy man, simply died of old age.

One of the last things he did - it was actually carried out after his death - was, presumably, to order the assassination of his own grandson. There are, as always, theories as to whether or not it was on his order, but the other suspects are Tiberius, who ordered the Senate to investigate Agrippa Postumus' death (not the action you'd expect if he'd had him killed), and Livia. Who, as a woman, would have had a hell of a time getting soldiers to obey her. The most likely and capable person to have had it done is Augustus himself. Again, presumably, to ensure that there were no further battles for his empire.

Final analysis: Augustus was a magnificent bastard. And I love him for it!

Augustus - Roman Sexual Attitudes

Another interesting thing: I think we tend to romanticise the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra. It's nearly always portrayed as this huge passionate love affair that got them both killed.

Except it really wasn't. Cleopatra and Antony were two powerful politicians who enjoyed one anothers company on occasion. But they also didn't see one another for years on end. They had two children that were illegitimate in *both* of their cultures together, sure. But their alliance was mainly one of political strength and convenience.

Anyway. I found this little aside about Roman sexual mores interesting:

"The Romans took an unsentimental view of sexual relations. Romantic love, as we know it, was rare. Public displays of affection were frowned on, as was excessive sexual activity. Marcus Porcius Cato the Censor, who lived in the second century B.C., set the standard for conventional good behavior when he expelled a man from the Senate for kissing his wife in the street.

"A Roman man, almost invariably locked into a marriage of convenience (although second or later unions often permitted a freer choice), did not suffer feelings of moral guilt about sex, nor did he feel necessarily bound to any particular sexual object. He would not have understood modern terms such as 'heterosexuality' or 'homosexuality,' which categorize people as sexual types. What he did was the issue, not what he was.

"To judge by literary sources, it did not greatly matter whether the randy husband fancied a young man or woman. The poet Horace was not untypical of his age:

When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl

Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know

You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?

Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.

"According to Suetonius, Horace had his bedroom lined with mirrors; he brought hookers or rent boys there and enhanced his pleasure by turning his own sexual experience into pornographic imagery.

"Two chief concerns governed sexual conduct. First, a free male citizen should be the one who performed the penetrative or insertive act, who was the 'active' rather than the 'passive' partner. For him to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned. This was why Julius Caesar deeply resented the story that in his youth he had been the catamite of the king of Bithya, and the gibe of a political opponent that he was 'every woman's man and every man's woman.'

"Second, an adulterer or fornicator was meant to restrict his attentions to noncitizens and slaves, as in Horace's case; freeborn boys and women were out of bounds. Although there is plenty of evidence that this was a custom honored mostly in the breach, it was essential that there should be no doubt as to the identity of a Roman citizen's father. This was why Octavian ordered a favorite freedman of his to commit suicide after he had been convicted of adultery with Roman matrons. In addition, foreign genes should not be permitted to enter the Roman gene pool; only citizens could marry citizens, and to wed a foreigner was frowned on; if not illegal, such a union was unrecognized by the law, especially when it came to acknowledging heirs in a will.

"What all this signified as far as Antony was concerned was straight-forward: he could not marry Cleopatra, who was as non-Roman as they came, but if he wanted to conduct an affair with her it would be odd if anyone complained. Roman women, such as Octavia, well understood the conventions; her husband's extramarital dallying did not strain her loyalty to him. It was her brother who could not stand the idea of her betrayal by Antony's entanglement with an eastern temptress." - p. 149 - 150

In case you didn't know, Antony married Octavian's sister, Octavia, in a bid to cement the two families together and stop some of the fighting. It only worked marginally. Antony and Octavian were rivals forced to work together until all their other enemies and rivals were gone. Then they would turn on one another.

Also, Octavian couldn't let Cleopatra and Antony join forces, or at least not for long. Cleopatra, after all, was the mother of a blood child of Caesar's. Caesarion. While illegitimate, since his father had been declared a god, Caesarion represented an untenable threat that would have to be removed. Let's keep in mind that Caesarion, at this point, was only 11. But he was already technically co-monarch of Egypt, with his mother.

You can probably guess, from the way history talks about Augustus and *not* Caesarion, that this story does not end well for Caesarion.

More Augustus

I'm slow going through this book because I've been oversleeping in the mornings! Probably because I'm staying up too late!

And I keep getting so caught up in reading the book that I forget to make notes or mark pages or anything. So, general reflections.

I keep being surprise by how sick Augustus was as a child. There's at least half a dozen instances where his weak constitution nearly killed him before he became an adult. His mother, even after he was officially an adult, kept him very firmly under her thumb. Partially, it seems, out of concern for his health and partially out of worries that his great-uncle Caesar's enemies would strike at him.

The interesting part is that Augustus didn't really have anything to do with Caesar until a couple of years before Caesar's assassination. He must have really impressed Caesar with something, his intellect most likely, since Augustus was never in a battle until after Caesar's death and Caesar had a new will written up before his death making Augustus his adopted son (a really common practice back then, to 'adopt' grown sons of other families in order to facilitate peace between them) and his legal heir.

Something I think it's important to remember is that, much as I love Augustus, his reign and everything that he accomplished was built on top of what Caesar did. Without Caesar, there would have been no Augustus.

The long running fight between Antony, Augustus and the Senate is really very interesting. Antony and Augustus were both Caesarians but they had to let the men who had killed their friend, their leader and their family (in the case of Augustus) go in order to secure their own power. But pretty much the first thing they did, when they formed the Second Triumvirate and took power in Rome was to have those who had killed Caesar assassinated. Plus all their political enemies. The funniest part of that is that the assassinations were kind of done in 'broad daylight'. They came up with a *list* of people who needed to be killed, negotiated between themselves, giving up friends and family that one or the other hated in order to get someone they wanted on the list. And then the list was posted in the middle of Rome! So that anyone could take up the job and, upon completion, be paid for it.

It's like writing up a list of people who have pissed you off, posting it on your FB and saying, I will pay anyone who kills any of these people x dollars, no questions asked. And there's no *penalty* for this, because while in office, no one is able to be brought up on criminal charges in the Roman republic (which is already dead and just doesn't know it yet).

The More Things Change

See if any of this sounds familiar:

"The year 49 B.C. saw the world turned upside down. The Roman Republic was facing catastrophe, thanks to a civil war in which one of the protagonists was Gaius' great-uncle.


What were the causes of the crisis? It was partly the product of stubborn political, military, and economic facts, and partly of colorful but obstinate personalities.


It was also the inadvertent outcome of astonishing success. As the patricians and the plebs fought for constitutional mastery, Rome's legions slowly fought their way through Italy in war after war until they controlled the peninsula. After a titanic struggle with Carthage in northern Africa, the Republic emerged as a Mediterranean power by the beginning of the second century B.C.


From then on, Rome increasingly acted as an international 'policeman', sending its legions to right wrongs in foreign countries - especially the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Middle East. Invited to intervene by some Greek cities, it vanquished Macedonia and eventually annexed it as a Roman province. It went on to defeat Antiochus, King of Syria, who unwisely challenged Rome to a fight. In 133 B.C., the king of Pergamum (in today's western Turkey) died, leaving his kingdom to Rome, which renamed it the province of Asia.


The Republic was now the leading power not only in the western Mediterranean but also in the Middle East. It commanded an empire stretching from Spain (which it had inherited from the Carthaginians nearly a century before) to western Turkey. A band of client kingdoms marked the boundary with the Parthian empire (today's Iraq and Iran).


The triumph of Rome has puzzled historians down the centuries. Of the many factors that accounted for the city's emergence on the world stage, the most important was that from their earliest beginnings Romans lived in a permanent state of struggle - with their enemies abroad and with one another at home. Tempered in that fire, they became formidable soldiers as well as learning the political arts of negotiation, compromise, and anger resolution. Flexible and skilled at improvisation, they developed a practical imagination. They usually tried to settle a dispute, if they could, without violence, but when military force became necessary, they applied it with a ruthless vigor.


Three important consequences followed Rome's emergence as a super-power. The first was a huge influx of wealth and slaves. Direct taxation for Roman citizens living in Italy was abolished. The lives of the ruling class became more and more opulent, the frequent festivals and gladiatorial games increasingly elaborate. With the opening up of foreign markets, cheap grain flooded into Italy, driving the native smallholder out of business and replacing him with large livestock ranches often run with slave labor.


The rural unemployed fled to the big city, which became yet bigger. Unfortunately, the job market could not expand to soak up the refugees from the countryside. The authorities began to provide free grain to quiet a febrile and uncontrollable urban population.


Second, to manage such extensive dominions demanded substantial military forces. In the old days, country smallholders were called up to fight short military campaigns as and when necessary. Now standing armies were required, with soldiers serving for long periods. These soldiers depended on their generals to persuade the Senate to allocate farms to them when they retired, either in Italy or further afield. These farms would be their 'pensions'.


Largely as a result of conquest, the state owned a good deal of land. However, rich landowners, among whom were many senators, had quietly appropriated much of it without payment. These noble squatters were, to put it mildly, disinclined to disgorge their ill-gotten gains. So the legionaries depended on their generals to bully, finesse, or persuade the Senate to free up land for their retirement farms. They developed a loyalty to their generals rather than to Rome.


The third consequence of empire was the strain that its administration placed on the ruling class, and indeed on the Republic's constitution. So large was the throughput of elected officials that it is hardly surprising that their caliber was variable. A good number were corrupt and incompetent.


Many Romans believed that their traditional virtues of austere duty and healthy poverty were being eroded, and that this decadence explained the growing violence and selfishness of political life. The picture was not quite so bleak as it was depicted, for some nobiles worked hard to maintain standards. However, others did live in extravagant, irresponsible, and self-indulgent ways, and it was they who set the tone." - p. 16 - 18, The Life of Rome's First Emperor Augustus, Anthony Everitt

Augustus Notes From Ch. 1

"The family seems to have been in trade, a sure sign that it was not of aristocratic status. Gaius' paternal great-grandfather fought in Sicily as a military tribune during the second war against the great merchant state of Carthage in North Africa."

"Gaius' grandfather, who lived to an advanced age, was well-off, but had no ambitions for a career in national politics, being apparently content to hold local political office.


"Later hostile gossip claimed that the great-grandfather was an ex-slave who, having won his freedom, made a living as a rope maker in the neighborhood of Thurii, a town in Italy's deep south. It was also rumored that the grandfather was a money changer, with 'coin-stained hands.' Friendly propagandists took a different tack and invented a fictitious link with a blue-blooded Roman clan of the same name."

"Gaius merely noted that he 'came from a rich old equestrian family.' The equites, or knights, were the affluent middle class, occupying a political level below that of the nobility and members of the ruling Senate, but often overlapping with them socially."

Men who were 'novus homo' - 'new men', people who came from the non-noble levels of society but were elevated due to having made their fortunes had a hard time breaking in to politics. "The Roman constitution was a complicated contraption of checks and balances, and the odds were stacked against an outsider winning a position of authority."


"Rome became a republic in 509 B.C., after driving out its king and abolishing the monarchy. The next two centuries saw a long struggle for power between a group of noble families, patricians, and ordinary citizens, plebians, who were excluded from public office. The outcome was an apparent victory for the people, but the old aristocracy, supplemented by rich plebian nobles, still controlled the state. What looked in many ways like a democracy was, in fact, an oligarchy modified by elections."

Only Roman men were allowed to vote.

"By tradition, the paterfamilias held the power of life and death over his household, both his relatives and his slaves. When a child was born, the midwife took the infant and placed it on the floor in front of the father. Should the father wish to acknowledge his paternity, he would lift the baby into his arms if it was a boy; if a girl, he would simply instruct that she be fed. Only after this ritual had taken place did the child receive his or her first nourishment.

"Apparently, Gaius was lucky to survive this procedure, for an astrologer had given him a bad prognosis and he narrowly escaped infanticide. If Gaius had been rejected, he would have been abandoned in the open air and left to die; this was a fate to which illegitimate children and girls were especially liable, as were (one may surmise) sickly or disabled babies. Rejected infants were left on dunghills, or near cisterns. They were often picked up there by slave traders (although the family might reclaim the child later, if it so wished) or, more rarely, rescued by a kindly passerby. Otherwise, they would starve, unless eaten by stray dogs."


"A slave was something one could own, like a horse or a table. In the Roman view, he or she was 'a talking instrument.' Slaves could not marry, although they could make and save money and could receive legacies. If a master was murdered by a slave, all the slaves in his ownership were killed. It was believed that a slave could give true evidence only under torture. Perhaps a third of the population of Italy were slaves in the late Republic - as many as three million people."

I'm really enjoying this book, it's full of really neat information. But I'm trying not to spam you guys with my obsession!

Augustus: Some Quotes from the Preface

I have a bit of an historical fan-crush on Caesar Augustus (Octavian). I was *extremely* pleased to find a biography of him in the mail as a birthday present from Susanne! *waves*

So now you get posts as I read. For now, quotes from the preface.

"If anyone qualifies as the founding father of western civilization, it is Augustus."

"His career was a masterly study in the wielding of power. He learned how to obtain it and, more important, how to keep it."

"Augustus was a very great man, but he grew gradually into greatness. He did not possess Julius Caesar's bravura and political genius (it was that genius, of course, which killed Caesar, for it made him incapable of compromise). He was a physical coward who taught himself to be brave. He was intelligent, painstaking, and patient, but he could also be cruel and ruthless. He work extraordinarily hard. He thought in the long term, achieving his aims slowly and by trial and error."

"Augustus is one of the few historical figures who improved with the passage of time. He began as a bloodthirsty adventurer, but once he had achieved power, he made a respectable man of himself. He repealed his illegal acts and took trouble to govern fairly and efficiently."

"We are right to call Augustus Rome's first emperor, yet the title is anachronistic. At the time he was simply regarded as the chief man in the state. The Roman Republic had, apparently, been restored, not abolished. Augustus developed a personality cult, but he did not hold permanent authority and had to have his powers regularly renewed. Only with the accession of Tiberius did people finally realize that they were no longer citizens of a free commonwealth, but subjects living under a permanent monarchy."