Book Review: The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
My thoughts on a fictionalized retelling of the lead-up to the Sullan Civil War
In the public eye, Roman history is a time period that exists at 753 BC, skips forward to 64 BC and, if we’re lucky, lasts until AD 325. This spotty account of the Western Mediterranean leaves the majority of the population with a vague understanding of what the Roman republic was, and an even vaguer understanding of its downfall. Political commentators have shown the ease with which they can take advantage of this ignorance by gesturing towards any handful of modern administrative policies and claiming that they represent an impending collapse into autocracy. The best way to combat these narratives is to display the circumstances surrounding the dissolution so people can judge the comparisons for themselves. The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough lays out the facts of the matter leading up to the Sullan civil war. This narrative is laid out in an entertaining and enjoyable fashion.
The first thing to know before approaching this work is that McCullough cut her teeth in the publishing world as an author of romance novels. While the topic at hand in something like The Wolf Den is hard to miss at the outset, there are fairly graphic depictions of sex in this book that were not expected going in blindly. Likewise, McCullough does not hold back on her depictions of violence, corruption, or perversion. Even when the characters speak of bribing voters as a mundane and commonplace task, the narration makes it clear that these acts are meant to be condemned. Most of the time, this steadfast approach to historical fiction impedes the layman from a proper understanding of the events at hand. There’s only one spot where I could foresee the author’s expertise superseding their audience’s understanding of the history, and that has to do with the gens Julia. There are two characters named Gaius Julius Caesar in the narrative, neither of which is Rome’s most famous dictator. The memorization of key historical dates in McCullough’s day was a common practice, but the practice has fallen to the wayside in the subsequent 30 years. Modern readers who do not realize that Caesar’s birth will come 10 years after the first chapter may be clued in a quarter of the way through when Gaius Marius is prophesied to have a nephew who becomes more famous than him. Other than that, there is a significant possibility that someone will truncate forty years of Roman history into ten.
There were some moments I had to look up for my own edification. When the elder Julius Caesar negotiates with Gaius Marius for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he receives 160 talents in cash, with another 200 sent to his bank account. Trying to estimate monetary value across centuries never maps over well, and can often lead to disastrous mistakes. One anecdote that historians use as a baseline is from Plutarch’s Life of Crassus, where Rome’s richest man is said to have inherited 300 talents at the beginning of his career that would later turn into 7,100 talents. The Crassus line of the gens Licinia had had a reputation for their wealth long before that triumvir, and we can assume that 300 talents would have been a hefty inheritance. There was no mandatory minimum amount of wealth that a patrician was required to own to enter the senate before Augustus revised the Senatorial and Equestrian orders, but it seems that McCullough may have amended that passage in order to imply Caesar’s requested sum had more to do with ensuring compliance with an aspect of the mos maiorum. Even so, the 360 talents (plus a litany of additional costly promises that Gaius Marius made) seems excessive, even for a former governor of a brand-new province. Otherwise, the research she has done is particularly well-informed, especially considering that she’s an autodidact.1
It can be hard for students to pin down the exact responsibilities of the municipal offices in the Roman governmental system, but McCullough intersperses pithy didactic passages throughout to aid the layman. Instead of being outright explanatory, as I have noted in Gore Vidal’s works, she couches these descriptions in arguments over the particulars of one office or another. For example, when Gaius Marius and Caecilius Metellus argue in Africa about the former wanting to return to Rome to run for office, he waxes on about the difficulties that the army faces in the present moment. Conscription is more easily justified to the average soldier, says Marius, when he knows he will be close enough to Rome that he can tend to his farm as necessary. Long campaigns outside of the Italian peninsula had undermined morale for years. The nature of the dispute is recorded differently in Plutarch,2 who says it had more to do with Marius bringing charges of treachery against a hereditary guest-friend of Metellus, but McCullough’s account of a class-based disagreement anticipates the Marian reforms some 60 pages later.
I don’t have any major hangups about Colleen McCullough’s portrayal of the Roman world. Her work may be lampshaded by her prior reputation for sultry romance novels, but as long as you don’t make the same mistake of reading it in public that I did, you’ll be fine. That being said, I don’t know if I have any interest in continuing the series; the title of the next novel is The Grass Crown, which to me implies a return to the Romance genre. If I have any desire to read more fictionalized accounts of the lead-up to Caesar’s rise to power, there is hardly a shortage anyway. I’ll leave this content in my decision to give it one star.
She herself admits that the character “Julilla” is a fabrication. We know that Sulla marries someone of the gens Julia, and that the dictator Julius Caesar had two aunts, but that they are the same woman is pure speculation.
I should note that McCullough seems to rely more on Sallust than Plutarch for the Jugurthine war, for obvious reasons, but Turpillius is conspicuous in his absence. Sal. Jug. 64