Bread and Circuses

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Putting the band back together again

It has been just over a year since I last posted and figured that it was time to start again. Much has happened in the world of late antiquity and research continues to evolve. New sites have been uncovered, new manuscripts discovered and new books have been published. All of this quite apart from the genius television that was Bonekickers.

Bread and Circuses will continue where it left off and with pretty much the same obsessions: the battle of Teutoburg Forest, Julian the Apostate and the later Roman empire, though other bits and pieces will find their way in.

The Last Pagan, my bio of the Emperor Julian is now out in the US; Rome's Greatest Defeat, the only full account of the battle of Teutoburg Forest, is out in a revised paperback in the UK, and The Art of War, a collection of essays on early warfare edited by Andrew Roberts, is out in a couple of weeks. I was lucky enough to contribute a chapter on Arminius. The proofs look incredible. It is amazing what can be done when a publisher has an art budget.

The blog also looks pretty much as it did before. I have been able to recover my original posts, though images have been deleted. I will be adding links down the side as I go. If I have forgotten someone, please take it as an oversight rather than a deliberate slight.

Good news

Rather good news - have been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Bread and circuses

Looking back over past postings, I realise that I have never cited the passage from which this blog takes its name. Here are the lines (77-81) from Juvenal’s tenth satire. The translation is Peter Green’s from the Penguin edition.

iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses.

But nowadays with no votes to sell, their motto
Is “Couldn’t care less”. Time was when their plebiscite elected
Generals, heads of state, commanders of legions: but now
They’ve pulled in their horns, there’s only two things that
concern them:
Bread and circuses.

Where next?

The manuscript for The Last Roman is now happily in the hands of my publishers. The original intention of the blog was to keep track of my thoughts and references as I was writing the book. I wanted to see whether a blog was a help or a hindrance to the process. 

I have been surprised how useful it has been both to help organise my thoughts and as a place to explore the distractions you inevitably come across as you write; those that are not appropriate for the final draft for reasons of space or relevance. A happy-side effect I had not anticipated has been the number of professionals in the field I have had the pleasure of meeting through the blog.

Blogging has been a curious process. An old friend had been encouraging me to start for years and I am pleased that he did so, indeed wish I had listened to him long ago. David Meadows has posted on and off (see here as well) about how best to blog and he is right. When blogging become folded into your normal daily routine, it become much easier, especially so if you are an early riser.

The question is what to do next. Bread and Circuses is likely to change its focus slightly. I am working on a number of classically-oriented projects and the blog will begin to reflect those research interests, though I shall continue to post about late antiquity, the Emperor Julian and Teutoburg Forest whenever I see something of relevance.

Introduction

I am a journalist and writer working on a book on the very last moments of the Roman empire called The Last Roman: Romulus Augustulus and the Decline of the West. With the film The Last Legion, based on the book by Valerio Massimo Manfredi and starring Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley, due for a release in January 2007, The Last Roman explores the history of the events that the film inspired. As with my previous books, the publisher is Sutton. The manuscript is due at the end of March and should be in the shops by the end of summer.

“Bread and circuses” is an experiment. Partly intended as a vade mecum, the blog will let me think out loud as I write and allow me to explore some ideas in depth which are only of peripheral relevance to the book.