Today's city is Paderborn, and as during my last visit here, which was several years ago, what touched me most about this city is the small statue representing Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635). A Jesuit, he lived and taught here for a while, at the local unversity. Spee was famous for two things during his time - the Thirty Years War - and after: his poetry, and the Cautio Criminalis, the book he wrote about and against the twitch trials. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, it's easy to consider the burning of witches a horrible crime today, when we don't believe in them. But Spee lived in a time when everybody did. (And as likely as not believed they existed himself.) A time, moreover, where thanks to the most devastating international war to rage anywhere till WWI people easily induced to look for scapegoats and compassion was in ever rarer demand. A time of religious war, where the "you're either for us or against us" attitude was almost dogma, and any criticism could easily get you prison (at the least) yourself. Still, he wrote, and for once, a book really made a difference for the better. Not everywhere, of course, and not at once, but towns such as Mainz abolished witch burnings because of the Cautio Criminalis.

I haven't posted a poem through all of April, but I'd like to post one of Spee's today, and an excerpt from the Cautio. He wasn't the best writer of his epoch, either in poetry or in prose. But he was a writer whom all epochs should remember. One of our later poets, Heinrich Heine, once wrote "where they burn books, they soon burn humans", something that often gets quoted as eerily prescient in regards to the Holocaust. But Spee showed the reverse is also true: where they write books, they sometimes save people from burning.

So, a passage from the Cautio Criminalis, regarding the use of torture in criminal investigations. One might say this has contemporary relevance.

( German version (the original is in Latin) )

( English version )


And a spring poem of Spee's, which was, centuries later, made into a song by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (as "Altdeutsches Frühlingslied" , op. 86 no. 6 (1847)" if there are any Mendelssohn fans reading this). Ortography changed to present-day German:

( Der trübe Winter ist vorbei... )

Lastly, a picture of the man himself is here.

vaznetti talks about liking the Romans, and with the Ides of March nearly upon us, I thought this was as good a time as any to make a short list of my favourite novels set in Ancient Rome (and in one case, Byzantium, but hey - it's the second Rome!). In no way is this my pathetic attempt to avoid spoiling myself for the BSG finale.

In no particular order:

Thornton Wilder: The Ides of March. Set during the last year of Caesar's life, and a great example of literary ventriloquism as Wilder presents his story via letters, diary excerpts and later reportings by all the usual players of that time, Caesar, Cicero, Clodia Pulcher, Brutus, etc. Being a certified author of the literary canon, he takes some crucial liberties with dates in order have a few people of the late Republic be still alive who simply weren't (to wit, Clodius and Catullus, oh, and Caesar's aunt Julia, the one who was married to Marius) and we don't mind, because he manages to do that rare thing, give every letter writer an individual voice. (First person narration that sounds different from the author is tough. Multiple first person narration, all different from each other, and among those Cicero, whose actual letters we have to compare? Awesome.

Colleen McCullough: The First Man of Rome. Also the first two sequels, up to Fortune's Favourites. Then her saga gets a) too hero worshipping of Caesar, and b) loses the ability to make the individual characters come to life. But The First Man of Rome, her take on Marius and Sulla at the start of their careers, right until the moment where Marius is at his zenit and Sulla starts to come into his own, is excellent, and both men are presented with skill and sympathy, in three dimensions. Caesar is still a baby here, so McCullough's crush on him isn't a problem. (She also crushes on Sulla but that doesn't stop her from painting him in full ambiguity and with future ruthless dictator potential. Ditto Marius. Whom, not-handsome-fellow that he was, she doesn't crush upon, which benefits his characterization to no end.)

Gillian Bradshaw: The Bearkeeper's Daughterr. I like Gillian Bradshaw in general. This novel of hers takes on Theodora through the eyes of her illegitimate son Johannes. Novels about ambiguous men are sadly still far more common than novels about ambiguous women; this one is a welcome exception. Theodora, at once one of the most admired and reviled women of her time who went from actress (and, depending on whom you believe, prostitute) to Empress, is a fascinating character here; like her son, we're drawn to her, apalled by some of her deeds and impressed by others, and would like to trust her but can't.

Lindsey Davis: Silver Pigs. I do like Davis' Falco series, mysteries set in Flavian Rome, with its narrative tone a deliberate spoof of the hard boiled novel, but you notice the routine after a while. The first novel, however, remains ever so readable no matter how often you have a go at it. It even made me squee when I saw a silver pig in the British Museum on a more recent visit. (Err, that particular pig isn't a pig in the animal sense, but a... heck, read the novel.)

Stephen Saylor: Roma Sub Rosa series. Here I love the entire mystery series published so far, but my two favourite novels among it remain Catilina's Riddle (aka Saylor's take on the Catiline Conspiracy, with Catilina a fascinating and charismatic enigma; friends of slash, there is an ever so discreet and for its discretion even more erotic scene between him and Our Hero, Gordianus, here) and Murder on the Appian Way (aka Saylor takes on the death of Clodius Pulcher, another colourful Late Republic player; like its predecessor in the series, this novel features Clodia, and remember what I said about the rarity of ambiguous women? She'd be a great exception).

Lion Feuchtwanger: The Josephus Trilogy. (Josephus, The Jew of Rome, Josephus and the Emperor). Back to ambiguos men. Flavius Josephus, aka Josef Ben Matthias, has something of a bad reputation - he was one of the leaders in the Jewish war against the Romans that started under Nero, then switched sides and started to work for the general and later Emperor Vespasian. This might not have been very noble but allowed him to survive and give us both the Jewish and the Roman perspective on said war, plus various other works on the history of Israel which he later published in Rome. (Details like Herodes' dealings with Antony and Cleopatra, which Plutarch could have cared less about? All come from Josephus.) Feuchtwanger's take on Josef (as he's called throughout the trilogy), written when Feuchtwanger himself was in exile throughout the Third Reich, is at once a vivid presentation of the ancient time and a meditation on Jewish identity in (Feuchtwanger's) present.

Robert Graves: I, Claudius. Well, naturally. Often imitated, never quite matched, this takes on the story of the Julian-Claudian dynasty via the eyes of Claudius and has the inspired idea to declare Claudius' reputation as a fool and the scorn in which his handicaps (stuttering, limping) were held as the (deliberate, on his part) reason for his survival throughout all power games until he himself ascends the throne. Augustus' wife Livia (Claudius' grandmother) is one of the best villainesses in literature, all the more so because Graves lets her be both deeply intelligent and witty in addition to being murderously ruthless, and his rendition of Caligula makes all mad Emperors in films and books alike look like copycats. Oh, buy the book already or at least borrow it from a library, and while you're at it, get the BBC series as well.

It must be a curse, cast at either the city of Bamberg, my parents' house or myself. For lo and behold, on Saturday there arrived another surprise parcel, this one by hmpf, also containing CDs, though with picture scans... and they're also unreadable on any of the computers in the house, of which there are several. Were it not for the fact that the CDs and DVDs I brought along from Munich work perfectly well, I'd be tempted to call a technician. As it is, I'm still baffled.

I went and saw The Island. Ho-hum. The first part and the basic concept were well done and intriguing, but then it degenerated into action set pieces. (If I never see another car chase again, I'll be happy. Ewan McGreggor was solidly good, Scarlett Johanssen was wasted as her role was severely underwritten and basically your standard late 70s action movie love interest but did what little was required, and Sean Bean was a competent villain. I've seen all three of them both giving more memorable performances and in better movies. What might have made the difference: script and direction like Gattaca, a film which manages to deliver a dystopia, suspense and an ending that doesn't feel too Hollywoodian.

Trying to avoid online spoilers for 2.04 of BSG, I also delved into an old favourite, a little-known novel set in ancient Rome which deserves a wider audience. It got published in the early 70s, and is called The Conspiracy, written by John Hersey. Like Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March (an obvious inspiration), it is a novel consisting of letters and reports. The historical background is the so-called Piso Conspiracy against Nero around 65 AD. Now Hersey, like Wilder, pulls off the trick of not only writing letters that read as if they could have been written by Romans but also to give the letter writers individual voices. As opposed to Wilder, he pulls off an additional tricky feat - one of the main characters of the novel is never presented by a single letter or direct message. He's quoted, talked about and debated incessantly, but we never hear his direct voice, and yet he comes across as vividly as the other main characters whom we "meet" via their letters - i.e. Tigellinus (Nero's right hand at the time) and his chief investigator Paenus on the one hand, the poet Lucan and the philosopher Seneca on the other. (Playing the ventriloquist for Seneca, btw, is no mean feat in itself since we actually have a lot of his letters intended for publication.) This powerful offstage presence is Nero himself, and here Hersey manages to present a credible alternative to the entertaining caricature found in Quo Vadis (or for that matter in the last episode of I, Claudius). His Nero is guilty of the usual offenses (murder of stepbrother, wife and mother; the question of the big fire is left open, as it is with most historians today) but is no madman or stupid tool. What makes him far more interesting and chilling is that he had the potential for being a good ruler but chose, and keeps choosing, the other way. (Considering that the first five years of Nero's reign, the "Quinquenium" under Seneca's and Burrus' influence get called five of the happiest in Roman history, you could say Hersey has an argument there.)

This must be one of the very few treatments of the period in which the Christians get hardly mentioned, again a refreshing difference. The period of the big fire is past, and the main characters just aren't interested. All of them are layered; Seneca, for example, is neither the stoic saint nor the greedy hypocrite he has at various times been painted at - that letter format comes in really handy to present pros and cons and leave the readers to make up their minds. Same for Tigellinus; Hersey gets far more effective by not making him a moustache-twirling villain but someone who is sincerely convinced that the ever increasing tyranny, deaths and degradations are all to the benefit of the state and the Emperor.

What probably makes the novel less accessible to some readers is that there isn't a "hero" in sight, nor a happy ending. (If you know your history, you know how the conspiracy ends anyway, and if you don't, you're not seriously expecting it to go differently, either; the very premise of the novel is that everyone has been under surveillance from the start.) But then, "what is the task of a writer in a dictatorship" (something which Lucan, the poet who used to be Nero's friend, and his uncle Seneca keep debating) is what interests Hersey, not "how to get rid of a tyrant in five practicable steps". So, Quo Vadis and The Gladiator, this is not. But if you want to read a novel which has lots of atmosphere, interesting characters and very topical questions, go for it.