Empress of Rome: The Life of Livia
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'Ebullient' The Times.
'Brilliant' Daily Express.
'Brilliant' Daily Express.
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'Ebullient' The Times. 'Brilliant' Daily Express.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is one of those books where the author has set out to relate a complex story (a different time; hundreds of characters; conflicting sources) but makes it into much more than a processional "x followed y who was the son in law of z's cousin" account. You can tell a huge amount of research and scholarship went into it but the need to keep the narrative and central argument running is always balanced by a wealth of anecdotes and social history detail which make it anything but dry. The result is a book which both makes the case that there's no real evidence Livia was the poisoner-witch of legend, and also gives a fascinating picture as to what life in Rome at the zenith of its power would have been like for a member of the ruling class.
The seemingly incidental details covered which build up to form this picture include everything from the significance of wax death masks, to fashion wars, aspects of the law - one man poisoned 130 people at one sitting and got off! -, the health debate over lead piping, consequences of sex scandals, education policy, the position of women in the social hierarchy, the incredible numbers of crocodiles, lions, people etc required to be slaughtered to provide a good games, and so on. And along the way famous and evocative non-Romans such as Cleopatra, Herod and Salome appear to place events and Roman practices in more perspective.
When it comes to Livia the author is meticulous in identifying what is fact/ rumour/ his or other's supposition, so you get a balanced view. In view of the lack of sources on the subject it seems by general consensus unprovable either way, but the basic fact that she wasn't accused of the serial murders until much later, and indeed outlived by decades all contemporaries in a society where the death rate for politically ambitious people was alarmingly high - and price of women's lives very low - would seem to me to tilt the case in her favour. The great thing about this book is that you can make up your mind if you want, or as in my case not really mind too much by the end of it because the read along the way has been so good.
The seemingly incidental details covered which build up to form this picture include everything from the significance of wax death masks, to fashion wars, aspects of the law - one man poisoned 130 people at one sitting and got off! -, the health debate over lead piping, consequences of sex scandals, education policy, the position of women in the social hierarchy, the incredible numbers of crocodiles, lions, people etc required to be slaughtered to provide a good games, and so on. And along the way famous and evocative non-Romans such as Cleopatra, Herod and Salome appear to place events and Roman practices in more perspective.
When it comes to Livia the author is meticulous in identifying what is fact/ rumour/ his or other's supposition, so you get a balanced view. In view of the lack of sources on the subject it seems by general consensus unprovable either way, but the basic fact that she wasn't accused of the serial murders until much later, and indeed outlived by decades all contemporaries in a society where the death rate for politically ambitious people was alarmingly high - and price of women's lives very low - would seem to me to tilt the case in her favour. The great thing about this book is that you can make up your mind if you want, or as in my case not really mind too much by the end of it because the read along the way has been so good.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If you enjoy Roman history and pick arguably the most interesting and best-documented period - the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Julio-Claudian dynasty - then this work on Livia deserves a place on your bookshelf. However my copy is now tucked away at the back. Simply this is an attempt to answer the charge that Livia - the definitive éminence grise of ancient Rome - plotted and poisoned her son Tiberius to power. With no criticism of the author who can only work with what is there, the hard content of this book could have been reduced from 269 pages to a 25-page essay.
From gossamer thin evidence, deductions and inference this is a commentary on the wife of the first Emperor Augustus. We know her as one of history's great villains - whose demonisation has sold books, Robert Graves "I Claudius" being the obvious. But was she that bad? Much of the book deals with Livia's manipulated public identity as she became the model Roman wife, the materfamilias. Feminists would find a positive woman of her time, but one severely tested by the immorality of her own extended family. The frustration is you have to differentiate between novelist's melodrama and academic history. Livia's proximity to power must have translated in some form of her exercising power, yes but... Matthew Dennison's book is well written yet he admits "At and interval of two thousand years the truth cannot be recovered, obscured rather than elucidated by the cloak-and-dagger insinuations of ancient writers." (p229) And by the way those writers mostly wrote centuries after the events with their own agendas.
So where is the truth - the scheming ambitious stepmother hell-bent on power or an innocent bystander? Any guess is valid because nothing comes near to conclusive proof - but is it somewhere between both extremes? Essentially that is Dennison's conclusion. If you have acquired a reasonable knowledge of the period, if you are intrigued by Augustus (one of the greatest politicians of any age), then this book is good supplementary reading. It does not stand-alone as a history of the events or the period. As a journalist Dennison makes a fine story of what is complicated, contradictory and often dreary material. As an historian he has limitations. For instance he does not explain (understand) Roman religion. Deification, joining the pantheon of the Gods, has to be qualified when looked at from a contemporary perspective. Despite the authors endeavours to collate the sources there is nowhere near enough evidence to formulate charges against Livia, let alone to put her before a jury.
From gossamer thin evidence, deductions and inference this is a commentary on the wife of the first Emperor Augustus. We know her as one of history's great villains - whose demonisation has sold books, Robert Graves "I Claudius" being the obvious. But was she that bad? Much of the book deals with Livia's manipulated public identity as she became the model Roman wife, the materfamilias. Feminists would find a positive woman of her time, but one severely tested by the immorality of her own extended family. The frustration is you have to differentiate between novelist's melodrama and academic history. Livia's proximity to power must have translated in some form of her exercising power, yes but... Matthew Dennison's book is well written yet he admits "At and interval of two thousand years the truth cannot be recovered, obscured rather than elucidated by the cloak-and-dagger insinuations of ancient writers." (p229) And by the way those writers mostly wrote centuries after the events with their own agendas.
So where is the truth - the scheming ambitious stepmother hell-bent on power or an innocent bystander? Any guess is valid because nothing comes near to conclusive proof - but is it somewhere between both extremes? Essentially that is Dennison's conclusion. If you have acquired a reasonable knowledge of the period, if you are intrigued by Augustus (one of the greatest politicians of any age), then this book is good supplementary reading. It does not stand-alone as a history of the events or the period. As a journalist Dennison makes a fine story of what is complicated, contradictory and often dreary material. As an historian he has limitations. For instance he does not explain (understand) Roman religion. Deification, joining the pantheon of the Gods, has to be qualified when looked at from a contemporary perspective. Despite the authors endeavours to collate the sources there is nowhere near enough evidence to formulate charges against Livia, let alone to put her before a jury.
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I am quite fond of speculation, and allusion, and I can even tolerate quite a lot of repetition (for good didactic purpose), but I found this book gave me too much of all three. Now, having said that, I quite concede that Livia is not the easiest of subjects - the material is thin, and comes in patches, which poses a terrible difficulty to presenting a balanced biography covering the whole life. Moreover any biographer pretty much has to assume that the reader is going to come to the book with the tabloid version which Graves permissibly took from a lot of fairly hostile sources and immortalised via I Claudius (with able help from the marvellous Sian Phillips in the TV version).
So what to do? Dennison is not helped by the fact that one good approach has already been taken by Barrett (Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome) who essentially has "written against" Graves. What he ends up doing instead is producing an inquiry which seems to have the aim of combining accessible scene setting with allowing the reader to take their own view. This sounds fine, but somehow (at least for me) it really doesn't work, though I find it hard to put my finger on why. I think it may be because the spoon feeding of the background, combined with the speculation, steer us down this course or that, without coming to any conclusion.
To illustrate what I mean: (i) Quotations from various Roman authors are taken again and again to scene set the life of a Roman family. These are good and well used - but then the quotation (which will have no reference actually to Livia) will be used to invite us to picture her at this that or the other stage of her life, based on this speculative basis. (ii) There is too much of the "How must she have felt ..?" stuff which is the hallmark of what one might term the romantic biographer (let's face it, we are all capable of asking that question for ourselves at striking points in a factual story). There is also a good deal of the "Was she really doing X or Y" - posing the Graves allegations without weighing the evidence.
I also felt that while all this speculation was going on there was insufficent control of certain building blocks of a really good biography: consistency (going from decribing the fecundity of the Claudius Pulchers scant pages before stating as a fact that noble Romans never had many children), sound factual basis (Atticus was NOT Cicero's "secretary" - his mother was a Caecilia Metella for heavens sake; Tiro was Cicero's secretary), and disciplined structure (enough dotting forward and back in time to leave one's head whirling).
So overall, while I wanted to like the book, and found the use of allusions from Ovid and Horace etc clever and pleasant, and I even quite like what I think is being attempted, I found it more annoying than enjoyable.
So what to do? Dennison is not helped by the fact that one good approach has already been taken by Barrett (Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome) who essentially has "written against" Graves. What he ends up doing instead is producing an inquiry which seems to have the aim of combining accessible scene setting with allowing the reader to take their own view. This sounds fine, but somehow (at least for me) it really doesn't work, though I find it hard to put my finger on why. I think it may be because the spoon feeding of the background, combined with the speculation, steer us down this course or that, without coming to any conclusion.
To illustrate what I mean: (i) Quotations from various Roman authors are taken again and again to scene set the life of a Roman family. These are good and well used - but then the quotation (which will have no reference actually to Livia) will be used to invite us to picture her at this that or the other stage of her life, based on this speculative basis. (ii) There is too much of the "How must she have felt ..?" stuff which is the hallmark of what one might term the romantic biographer (let's face it, we are all capable of asking that question for ourselves at striking points in a factual story). There is also a good deal of the "Was she really doing X or Y" - posing the Graves allegations without weighing the evidence.
I also felt that while all this speculation was going on there was insufficent control of certain building blocks of a really good biography: consistency (going from decribing the fecundity of the Claudius Pulchers scant pages before stating as a fact that noble Romans never had many children), sound factual basis (Atticus was NOT Cicero's "secretary" - his mother was a Caecilia Metella for heavens sake; Tiro was Cicero's secretary), and disciplined structure (enough dotting forward and back in time to leave one's head whirling).
So overall, while I wanted to like the book, and found the use of allusions from Ovid and Horace etc clever and pleasant, and I even quite like what I think is being attempted, I found it more annoying than enjoyable.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Probably not Siān Phillips
This is a good book but I eventually lost interest because the myth of Livia is more interesting than the probable reality. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Mac McAleer
Not good enough
Matthew Dennison is a regular contributor to "The Times" and "Country Life." He is also the author of a book about Victorian history: The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Torben Retboll
Ancient Rome's first "First Lady".
Although steeped in speculation when it comes to its subject-matter, the book is still an enjoyable, informative and well-written romp through one of the most fascinating periods... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Pasquino
A rather weak defense
The history of Ancient Rome has always fascinated me, especially the transition from Republic to Empire with the rise of Augustus (Octavian) in 31 BCE. Read more
Published 9 months ago by David Roy
A good 'introduction' to Livia
This book is wonderfully written, but offers no new insights or revelations into the life of Livia. If you have never read about the empress than buy this book to get an overall... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Verstaen Tom
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