“Rome: An Empire’s Story”, by Greg Woolf

384 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199775293

“Even now the Roman World feels like a vast sandpit in which I can play…” says Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews and the author in the preface to this work, and it is a pleasure to join him in the box. Like ancient astrologers scanning the heavens for answers and warnings, contemporary man studies Rome’s past for clues to the problems they face. Most of us look for warnings in the end of the Roman Republic, or the Empire’s fall; but after reading this superb analysis, to me the closest parallel to our times is Rome in the 2^nd Century BC. Like Rome, we have seen the termination of older imperial states and, with our withdrawal, their replacement with weaker, semi-chaotic successor states that often turn against us. Other similarities are economic dislocation at home, with the decline in economic viability of productive small producers, and the inward migration of subject peoples which further displace said small producers. Internal politics seem to encourage bitterness and hostility among the ruling classes as domestic affairs become more chaotic and violent. Foreign policy is in disarray as client states openly try to manipulate policy makers thru thinly disguised bribes and gifts. Even an over-stretched citizen based military that was never designed for conflicts that seem to last for generations in distant lands is paralleled today.

This is a fascinating analysis, which you don’t always have to agree with. I found one minor error on page 274 where Antiochus III is mentioned as a Persian emperor. His take on the current historical debate over the nature of the changes that took place with the fall of the Roman Empire makes a lot of sense; while there may have been “continuity and transformation” at the bottom of the social scale, the change was catastrophic at the top and “Measured in terms of territory, population, influence, and military power there is no doubt at all about the fact of collapse. Ancients recognized this, and so should we.” He gives no reason for the Empire’s fall, but believes the fact that no other empire rapidly arose to succeed would argue against the fall being due to systemic reasons – or were the emperors to blame?

This is not a work for the novice, as it is truly speaking not a detailed history, but rather an analytical work. It tells the whole story of the Roman Empire from the beginning of the town of Rome until the fall of Constantinople (although it really doesn't go until 1453 AD but ends in the early 700s AD when it was in decline). The book does this at a very high level in terms of telling the story of Rome, the overthrow of the Etruscan kings, the republic, the civil wars (Caesar, Pompey, Octavian, etc.), the early empire and the late empire. What is excellent about this book is the analysis of each segment of Rome's history – why things occurred the way that they did. It accomplishes this using primary sources and excellent secondary sources that evaluate these primary sources. The book is at its best in its brief discussions of the latest theories of Roman history. Although it can be dry at times due to the analytical approach, this book is a must have for any reader interested in the Roman Empire, its growth, the primary period, and its decline.

“What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist -- The Facts of Daily Life in 19th Century England”, by Daniel Pool

416 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671793371

Have you ever wondered why Fanny Price was so dizzy after drinking negus (it’s a drink made with port in this case and not an African king)? What exactly was the difference between a gig and a curricle (the former is a two-wheeled cart pulled by a single horse; the latter is much smarter a two-wheeled chaise pulled by a pair of horses)? Where in the Order of Precedence did Sir William Lucas fall as a baronet (he was above hereditary knights but beneath barons)? If you love 19^th Century English literature but sometimes feel at sea in the terminology of the period, Daniel Pool comes to your rescue with What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, a pleasant, sometimes shocking look at those ever-fascinating Victorians. Quoting liberally from the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, The Brontës, Thomas Hardy, and many more besides, as well as from journalistic and non-fiction dispatches of the period, Pool clues us in on the intricacies of social rank, the relative value of money, the etiquette observed and dishes served at a formal dinner, the operations of Parliament, the tortures inflicted on the sick by the medical profession, and the miseries of the workhouse. So much of that society and its basic suppositions are so different from ours that it reminds us of the quote from the novelist L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”.

Pool’s book is divided into two parts: a series of essays on daily life in the 19^th Century; and an exhaustive glossary of words common to the folk of the period, but not to us. Both parts are engaging and interesting, admirably filling in the gaps in one’s Victorian vocabulary (I certainly wish that I had this book before I started reading Jane Austen, because it would have answered so many of my questions; I had tried to use a modern dictionary and was not always successful). The only area that needed further clarification was the chapter about Entails and Protecting The Estate; I never quite understood how Miss Anne de Bourgh was able to inherit her father’s estate upon his death (since “A girl should not inherit because if she remained single the line could die out and if she married the estate would pass in possession to someone outside the family”). Apart from that, I would advise anyone who loves 19^th Century English Literature to add it to their collection as an invaluable reference guide of the period.

“Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth”, by Charles Beauclerk

448 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-0802145383

There are, as far as I can tell, two principle claimants to the Shakespeare-Was-Not-Shakespeare Alternative Interpretation/Paranoid Delusion Historical Conspiracy Thing: 1^st is Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford and the supposed son of Elizabeth I and Lord Thomas Seymour; 2^nd is Henry Wriothesley, 3^rd Earl of Southampton and the supposed son of Elizabeth I and the afore-mentioned Earl of Oxford; thus, either of these illegitimate sons of the Queen were potential heirs to the throne. Integral to the latter “Prince Tudor Theory” is the assumption that, after the secret birth of a son in May-June 1574 by the Queen and Oxford, the baby was placed in the Southampton household as a substitute for the son known to have been born to the Southamptons in October 1573, a theory that originated with Alfred Dodd, who claimed in his book, Francis Bacon’s Personal Life Story (first published in 1910) that both Sir Francis Bacon and Robert Devereux, 2^nd Earl of Essex, were the sons of Queen Elizabeth. In his article, “Occultist Influence on the Authorship Controversy” in the Spring 1998 issue of The Elizabethan Review, Roger Nyle Parisious, explained how this Baconian scenario was taken over by two British Oxfordians, Captain B. M. Ward and Percy Allen, at some time between 1930 and 1933. Since then, the “Prince Tudor Theory” has been the subject of any number of books and was even the subject of Anonymous, a feature film directed by Roland Emmerich and released in late 2011.

A wide range of historical documents decisively refutes the “Prince Tudor Theory”, a significant number of which were examined by Diana Price in “Rough Winds Do Shake: A Fresh Look at the Tudor Rose Theory” in the Autumn 1996 issue of The Elizabethan Review. Another refutation of is Christopher Paul’s article “The Prince Tudor Dilemma: Hip Thesis, Hypothesis or Old Wives’ Tale?” published in the October 2002 issue of The Oxfordian.

Readers who demand hard evidence rather than flatulent conjecture will come up empty with Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth. Yes, it’s true that we have very little fact about Shakespeare’s life, but the fact that he acted in at least one of his friend Ben Jonson’s plays, and that when it came time to collect Shakespeare’s work in 1623 (seven years after his death) Ben Jonson wrote an eloquent introduction in which he lauded his friend’s genius should put paid to any claim that Shakespeare the playwright was not a real person. I believe Shakespeare wrote the plays because Ben Jonson tells me he wrote them as even a cursory examination of Jonson’s career shows that he was no candidate to be part of an Elizabethan cover-up. In short, if the plays had been written by Queen Elizabeth’s love child, as Lost Kingdom posits, Jonson would have been all over that cock-up faster than you can say Da Vinci Code. I can at least thank Beauclerk for helping me to wise up, for since reading his book I have definitively removed from the list of “Shakespeare Doubters”.

The vast consensus of the academic experts on the authorship of Shakespeare’s works is that he was William Shakespeare of Stratford and that there are gaps in his biography should not be read as an invitation to conspiracy. The Shakespeare authorship controversy, as evidenced by the hilarious mélange of candidates and theories – besides Edward de Vere and Henry Wriothesley, other candidates include Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Sir William Stanley, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, to name just a few – is a prime example of what Michael Shermer means by “smart people believing weird things”. Who was it said: “The surest sign of a theory in trouble is the vast number of versions of that theory that exist?”