I, Claudius - Robert Graves [57]
I smiled. "Well, at least it's easier to read."
"Easier, eh. How's that?"
"He makes the people of Ancient Rome behave and talk as if they were alive now."
Pollio was delighted. "He has you there, Livy, on your weakest spot. You credit the Romans of seven centuries ago with impossibly modern motives and habits and speeches.
Yes, it's readable all right, but it's not history."
Before I record more of this conversation 1 must say a few words about old Pollio, perhaps the most gifted man of his day, not even excepting Augustus. He was now nearly eighty years old but in full possession of his mental powers and seemingly in better physical health than many a man of sixty. He had crossed the Rubicon with Julius Caesar and fought with him against Pompey, and served under my grandfather Antony, before his quarrel with Augustus, and had been Consul and Governor of Further Spain and of Lombardy, and had won a triumph for a victory in the Balkans and had been a personal friend of Cicero's until he grew disgusted with him, and a patron of the poets, Virgil and Horace. Besides all this he was a distinguished orator and writer of tragedies. But he was a better historian than he was either tragedian or orator, because he had a love or literal truth, amounting to pedantry, which he could not square with the conventions or these other literary forms. With the spoils of the Balkan campaign he had founded a public library, the first public library at Rome. There were now two others: the one we were in and another called after my grandmother Octavia; but Pollio's was much better organised for reading purposes than either.
Sulpicius had now found the book, and after a word of thanks to him they renewed their argument.
Livy said: "The trouble with Pollio is that when he writes history he feels obliged to suppress all his finer, more poetical feelings, and make his characters behave with conscientious dullness, and when he puts a speech into their mouths he denies them the least oratorical ability."
Pollio said: "Yes, Poetry is Poetry, and Oratory is Oratory, and History is History, and you can't mix them."
"Can't I? Indeed I can." said Livy. "Do you mean to say that I mustn't write a history with an epic theme because that's a prerogative of poetry or put worthy eve-of-battle speeches in the mouths of my generals because to compose such speeches is the prerogative of oratory?"
"That is precisely what I do mean. History is a true record of what happened, how people lived and died, what they did and said; an epic theme merely distorts the record. As for your general's speeches they are admirable as oratory but damnably unhistorical: not only is there no particle of evidence for any one of them, but they are inappropriate. I have heard more eve-of-battle speeches than most men and though the generals that made them, Caesar and Antony especially, were remarkably fine platform orators, they were all too good soldiers to try any platform business on the troops. They spoke to them in a conversational way, they did not orate. What sort of speech did Caesar make before the Battle of Pharsalia? Did he beg us to remember our wives and children and the sacred temples of Rome and the glories of our past campaigns?
By God, he didn'tl He climbed up on the stump of a pinetree with one of those monster-radishes in one hand and a lump of hard soldiers' bread in the other, and joked, between mouthfuls. Not dainty jokes but the real stuff told with the straightest face: about how chaste Pompey's life was compared with his own reprobate one. The things he did with that radish would have made an ox laugh. I remember one broad anecdote about how Pompey won his surname The Great—oh, that radish!—and another still worse one about how he himself had lost his hair in the Bazaar at Alexandria. I'd tell you them both now but for this boy here, and but for your being certain to miss the point, not having been educated in Caesar's camp. Not a word about the approaching battle except just at