i should have posted this over the weekend. A review by Tom Holland of Frank McLynn's new biography Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor. Holland has a few caveats, but it looks rather good to me:
Among the most entertaining passages in McLynn's book are those devoted
to a gloriously scabrous character assassination of the famous orator,
and one-time tutor to Marcus, Cornelius Fronto. Drawing on the
correspondence between the two men, which came to light as recently as
1815, McLynn portrays Fronto as compulsively orotund and prolix, a
showoff who is never content with a single sentence when a whole
battery of them will do. Here, perhaps, was a warning from history that
McLynn would have done well to heed. Had he done so, then his book
would surely have been a good deal lighter. Rather than listing every
single province that Hadrian visited, for instance, he might have
contented himself with saying that the emperor was well travelled;
instead of likening Marcus to Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Cicero to Georges
Simenon, he might have reined back on far-fetched and unhelpful
comparisons; rather than discoursing windily on the career of Rousseau
or Smuts, he might profitably have cut his entire last chapter. "We
have come a long way from Marcus Aurelius," he comments at one point -
to which the reader can only wearily assent.
Full review here.
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