Some splendidly devastating reviews of history books lurk on Amazon. A particular favourite is Ted’s Welter of Conjecture, in which a professional Scotsman gets both barrels.
Less brutal, but only slightly less critical, is this assessment of Ilkka Syvänne’s The Reign of Emperor Gallienus: The Apogee of Roman Cavalry. “A turgid read,” opines the reviewer. That’s a little harsh: English is not Syvänne’s first language and copyediting - the responsibility of the publisher - is minimal to nonexistent. But the reviewer makes a very valid point concerning the Finn’s method:
Too often in Syvänne's work one gets the feeling that the author has decided what he wants to discover and then manipulates his sources to achieve those ends.
Take, for example, Syvänne’s use of the single source concerning Gallienus’ proposed battle of champions with the usurper Postumus. The single combat never took place, but Syvänne’s special pleading results in his hero Gallienus being cast as a duellist to rank alongside the famous Roman champions of yore. The emperor’s full name was Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus. He was a scion of an ancient and proud Roman clan, the gens Licinia. Oddly, Syvänne fails to mention that Gallienus' challenge may have been inspired by the deed of his glorious ancestor, Marcus Licinius Crassus, who slew the barbarian king Deldo and took the spolia opima (29 BC).
In my review of Roman Britain’s Missing Legion, Simon Elliott’s entertaining but flawed book about the disappearance of the Ninth Legion, I felt that “rather than follow the not inconsiderable prosopographical and archaeological material with an open mind, [the author began the project] with his conclusion already fixed.” And, having dabbled in the popular history market myself, I could understand why:
This makes sound commercial sense. Elliott’s target audience is familiar with Rosemary Sutcliff’s hugely popular Eagle of the Ninth and its sequels. ‘Facts’ firmly embedded in the popular imagination are difficult to shift. Elliott has written a book that tallies with what is already ‘known’, i.e. that the Ninth was destroyed by British tribesmen in c. AD 117/119. This is history as many feel it ought to have been, but not as it was.
Ditto Syvänne. The popular history buff wants more, and reinforcement, of what he already ‘knows’. In the case of Gallienus, it’s that the emperor instituted major military reforms and established an indepedent cavalry army under the command of the general Aureolus. Based at Mediolanum (Milan), it was in constant readiness to take the field against usurpers and barbarian invaders. This is the central conceit of Syvänne’s work, hence its subtitle. But Gallienus’ military reforms and his cavalry army are a modern myth.
I suggested Elliott’s readers were better served by Duncan B. Campbell’s The Fate of the Ninth, and I now urge those interested in the Crisis of the Third Century AD and the apparent military reforms of Gallienus, to consult Dr Campbell’s new book, Phantom Horsemen.
Campbell charts the development of the myth of Gallienus’ reforms, in particular the ‘battle cavalry’, from Schiller (via a confused remark in about Gallienus’ army in Cedrenus’ Compendium of Histories), Ritterling, Domaszewski, Homo, Grosse to Alföldi. He demonstrates how their accumulative assertions became accepted as fact by generations of surprisingly uncritical scholars and proceeds to dismantle the myth they created. Gallienus’ ghost riders are exorcised and the traditonal organisation and deployment of the emperor’s exercitus is reasserted. Campbell's book is also a handy repository of translations of obscure sources (including Peter the Patrician on Gallienus’ proposed single combat), and contains enlightening discussions on subjects ranging from numismatics to the origins of the protectores and the careers of fascinating warriors like Trajan Mucianus.
The excellent Phantom Horsemen prompted me to dip into a related work, Paul Cooper’s ‘The Third Century Origins of the ‘New’ Roman Army' (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford 1968). For those who know, it is a something of bible, especially on the development - and demise - of the classic legion from the late second to early fourth centuries AD. It is regrettable that Cooper’s thesis was not published. “Two and a half chapters”, removed to meet the length requirements of the Modern History Board, have never seen the light of day. Cooper also cut his “full textual study” of Hyginus’ de mutionibus castrorum.1 As far as I am aware, he never published any scholarly articles. J.R. Hepworth is a similar case. He disappears from academic view after completing his doctoral thesis at Durham in 1963, but at least his ‘Studies in the Later Roman Army’ is easily accessible.
Coincidentally, I was contacted by a colleague of Cooper’s, asking if I knew what happened to him after he completed his thesis. Alas, no. But the elusive historian has cameos in two memoirs.
Eric Hebborn held a scholarship at the British School at Rome from 1959-1961. He didn’t much like his fellow inmates. In Drawn to Trouble: Confessions of a Master Forger, he dismisses them as a "miserable lot" except for "Victor, the Rome Scholar in painting, and Paul, the Rome Scholar in classical studies". Victor was the artist Victor Newsome. Having read Classics at Lincoln College, Oxford, Paul Cooper won the prestigious Rome scholarship in 1960.
Cooper’s other, more substantial, appearance is in Peter Levi’s The Flutes of Autumn. The former Jesuit priest reminisces about a hike from Oxford to London:
I recollect one year Denis [Bethell] and me washing in the Thames at Henley, having left Paul Cooper asleep in a haystack. Where is he now? Last heard of as an archaeologist and a historian of the Roman army. He kept an academic lodging house in Rome for mildly Bohemian scholars. One night they brought in some film people celebrating the end of a film, and the next morning Paul found a live lion in his kitchen.
My paper copy of Cooper’s thesis, ordered 27 years ago from the British Library’s thesis service, is in a sorry state. It is coffee-stained, dog-eared and battered. Pages have ejected themselves from the feeble gluestrip ‘binding’. It is has been much read and is much loved. Like Phantom Horsemen, it is essential reading on the later Roman army.2
See D.B. Campbell, Fortifying a Roman Camp: The Liber de mutionibus castrorum of Hyginus (2018).
With thanks to William Meacham and Lawrence Keppie.