Roman History in Chains

Fergus Millar

• Romans and Aliens by J.P.V.D. Balsdon
  Duckworth, 310 pp, £18.00, August 1979, ISBN 0 7156 1043 0
• Pompey: A Political Biography by Robin Seager
  Blackwell, 209 pp, £12.00, August 1979, ISBN 4 631 10841 X
• The Gracchi by David Stockton
  Oxford, 251 pp, £9.50, October 1979, ISBN 0 19 872104 8
• Cicero: the Ascending Years by Thomas Mitchell
  Yale, 257 pp, £11.00, September 1979, ISBN 3 00 002277 5
• Clio’s Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature by T.P. Wiseman
  Leicester University Press, 209 pp, £13.00, November 1979, ISBN 0 7185 1165 4

These five books, all published in the second half of 1979, are very good evidence for the established place of Roman history in contemporary English-speaking culture and (even more) education. Books on familiar subjects continue to be written, and to find publishers and – presumably – readers. One of the five, indeed, is offered with the sole justification – outdated by the time the book appeared – that no biography of Pompey exists in English. Each of them also bears witness to the quite high standards of scholarship and respect for facts which prevail in English ancient history. Yet, in another way, they all, with the exception of Wiseman’s Clio’s Cosmetics, give an uneasy impression of parochialism, of an unconsciousness of debates and questions current elsewhere in the writing of history, and of a lack of any perspective on the very particular problems posed by the enormous but erratically distributed mass of different types of evidence surviving from the ancient world.