Violence in the Natale Barca forum – review of the open letters

Violence in the forum:

Factional fighting in ancient Rome (133–78 BC)

By Natale Barca

Casemate Publishers 2024

Almost half a century has passed since Keith Richardson Daggers in the forum To a layman, it recounted the complex escalations of violence and violence that accompanied the transformation of ancient Rome from a republic into the early beginnings of a dictatorship. Richardson’s book was published just a few years after the national uproar of Watergate, which made the subject matter seem somewhat appropriate. The appearance of the natural successor to this book, that of Natale Barca Violence in the forumin the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, “suitable” obviously upgrades to “foreboding.”

The story remains the same, following a series of political unrest and popular uprisings as one bloodthirsty opportunist after another sought to exploit the chaos for their personal gain. Barca begins his narrative with Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and continues with his brother Caius Sempronius Gracchus, both fiery tribunes of the people, both murdered in the bloody uprisings that are increasingly typical of the era that Barca describes.

He does a really exciting job. Readers familiar with this story will expect the big names to come into the spotlight later in the book, but Barca has put a tremendous amount of research into these pages (the book begins with a glossary, ends with a chronology, and is brimming with it). before footnotes and endnotes), and a pleasing result is the vivid portrayal of even its most minor characters throughout the course of the narrative. He presents his characters like characters in a novel, and despite all odds, this approach works, as when he describes the death of another tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus:

On a clear, cold evening in January 90, he is dismissing a small crowd when he is stabbed by a stranger, who immediately takes advantage of the confusion to escape. Drusus suffers from fear of death. His death is imminent. After his brother Mamercus gives him a kiss to breathe his last, Drusus loses consciousness and dies.

The combination of careful research and dramatic treatment serves Barca’s stated goal of writing for a broad audience. “I assume that I’m also addressing a lay audience,” he notes charmingly, “and that I’m an idiot if the reader doesn’t understand what I’m saying.”

His book is much less well served by the staff at Casemate Publishers because the text is riddled with typos. “There he tears up the corpse, breaks its legs and gouges out its eyes” and “Then Marius stops thinking about nothing other than the destruction of his enemies,” just a few pages later, others. The cumulative effect is an ironic counterpoint to the comprehensive rigor of Barca’s scholarly work.

But die-hard readers will ignore such things to enjoy this terrible story that Barca are telling and hope that it remains a warning and not a prediction for a few more months.

Steve Donoghue is founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the American Conservative, the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, the National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for the Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette and the Christian Science Monitor and is books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News