Geschiedenisboeken: geef en vraag hier tips

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Op donderdag 23 juli 2009 20:00 schreef De_Hertog het volgende:

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Nou kan ik daar vooralsnog geen vertaling van vinden. Mijn Engels en Duits zijn goed genoeg, maar een serieus boek in het Frans lezen gaat me vrees ik niet lukken. Klopt het dat hier geen vertaling van is, of zie ik iets over het hoofd?

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Op woensdag 22 juli 2009 12:04 schreef Johnny-V het volgende:
Misschien kan iemand mij helpen. Ik ben op zoek naar een boek maar ik kom niet meer op de titel. Volgens mij gaat het boek over de zware kanten van leven in het verleden en bestaat de titel uit enkele woorden die negatieve punten uit leven in de geschiedenis weergeven. Of ben ik nu te vaag ?

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Op zaterdag 12 september 2009 21:47 schreef zuiderbuur het volgende:
Ik heb "Ooggetuigen van de Russische geschiedenis" gelezen.

In dit boek wordt bjna duizend jaar Russische geschiedenis geschetst aan de hand van allerlei verslagen van ooggetuigen. Soms zijn het gewone Russen, soms buitenlandse journalisten, soms vorsten,... De meeste verslagen zijn een paar pagina's lang, en worden steeds voorafgegaan door een paar lijntjes om de situatie te schetsen.

Een aanrader! Of je nu al wat gelezen hebt over Russische geschiedenis of niet, het leest heel vlot en het is zo gevarieerd dat het nooit gaat vervelen. Als anderen nog boeken kennen van dit soort over andere landen, wil ik het zeker horen.

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As night fell over Rome early on the winter’s evening of December 4, 62BC, a group of well-to-do women began converging on a large house in the centre of the city. Their destination — the remains of which can still be seen — was the Domus Publica, the official residence of Rome’s recently elected chief priest, Julius Caesar.

What happened on this spot over the next few hours gradually swelled into the greatest political sex scandal in history. It was to be a cause célèbre that had everything: adultery, incest, transvestism, sacrilege, secret rites, dancing girls, senators, priests, aristocrats, generals ... The nearest modern equivalent was probably the Profumo affair of 1963, but that was trivial in comparison. This was a scandal that didn’t merely tarnish the reputation of the ruling class: it undermined the very foundations of the republic.

I have spent most of the past nine years researching and writing about ancient Rome but I have never come across any episode that more clearly demonstrates how strange the Romans were and yet how stunningly similar to ourselves, nor one that shows so vividly the way lust and power, scandal and statecraft, have always been inextricably entwined.

Caesar, then 38, was not present when the women arrived: like every member of the male sex he had been obliged to vacate the premises. The annual nocturnal ritual they had come to celebrate — in honour of Bona Dea, “the Good Goddess” — was a centuries-old, highly secret and strictly women-only occasion. Those present included the two hostesses — Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, and his wife, Pompeia — plus the wives of a couple of dozen other senior senators, among them Cicero’s wife, Terentia. Also attending were the six vestal virgins, who lived in the house next door.

Roman men — forbidden even to look upon the robes and relics of the Good Goddess — speculated endlessly about what these prominent ladies got up to in the dimly lit apartments each year, especially as the rite was known to involve wine and music. The satirist Juvenal envisaged a kind of orgiastic hen party: “Carried away by the horn and the wine together/in frenzy, they shriek and whirl their hair ... /Oh, how their minds are burning then/for sex, how they cry for the leaping lust, how full/the torrent of old neat wine down their dripping thighs!”

Despite this intense masculine prurience, no one ever tried to intrude upon the sacred mysteries — until that night. At some point after sunset, Pompeia’s maid, Abra, admitted into the house a hefty figure in a gown and wig, carrying a harp. While Abra went off to fetch her mistress, this curious apparition lingered for a while in the semi-darkness and then began to prowl the passages until being intercepted by a woman who asked to hear some music.

When the harpist gruffly refused, the woman screamed. He was a man! There was a man in the house! The other women came running. The intruder was lucky not to be clawed to pieces. In the end he managed to escape, but not before his disguise had been wrenched away and he had been clearly identified as Publius Clodius Pulcher, a rumbustious 30-year-old aristocratic rake known to be having an affair with Caesar’s wife. All the sacred objects of the cult were quickly covered or put away, the rite abandoned and the women dispersed to their homes.

There is generally a point in the evolution of a scandal where one of two things can happen. Either it can be treated as a regrettable lapse or foible and hence kept under control, or someone solemnly declares it to be “a matter of national security”, demands an official inquiry and the affair begins to get out of hand.

The Good Goddess scandal, like that of Profumo, followed the latter course. It could, in fact, quite easily have been hushed up. Indeed, for a time it was. The senior magistrate presiding over the senate that December was Clodius’s father-in-law, Lucius Murena. Anxious to head off disgrace for his family, he flatly refused to allow a debate on the issue, ruling that no civil crime had been committed — which was true — and that it was purely a matter for the religious authorities.

There matters might have rested had it not been for the fact that both Caesar and Clodius had taken great delight in offending morality for many years and as a result had both made a lot of enemies.

Caesar’s affairs with married women were notorious: he had slept with the wives of at least four men who achieved the consulship (the senior magistracy in the republic). “Home we bring our bald whoremonger,” his soldiers would later sing as they paraded through the streets. “Romans, lock your wives away! All the bags of gold you lent him, went his Gallic tarts to pay.”

Clodius was, if anything, even more notorious, having allegedly committed incest with all three of his sisters. One of these, Clodia, was the great femme fatale of the Roman republic, famous for her husky voice and her long-lashed, lustrous brown eyes. A rake named Vettius, who had tried to seduce her and failed, circulated quite a good pun about her: “In triclinio Coa, in cubiculo Nola” (“A silky island in the dining room, a rocky fortress in bed”) with the result that two of her other admirers, Camurtius and Caesernius, took revenge on her behalf: first they beat him up and then, to make the punishment fit the crime, they buggered him half to death. This was the rackety world that the Good Goddess scandal was about to expose.

In January, when the senate reassembled after its festive recess, a famously stuffy and pompous senator, Quintus Cornificius, rose to demand that the college of priests should investigate what had happened on December 4 and report to the senate on whether or not an outrage had been committed against the Good Goddess. If it had, his argument ran, she might turn against the Roman people and the whole safety and prosperity of Rome might be put in jeopardy. This was the ancient version of the “national security” argument. The college of priests duly interviewed the women who had been present on December 4, noted that the rites had been abandoned and reported back that it was an obvious case of nefas: an offence against divine law.

For Caesar, as chief priest, this was exquisitely embarrassing and he acted with characteristic ruthlessness. At the same time as denying that his wife had been involved in any impropriety, he also announced that he was divorcing her. Of course, the contradiction was immediately pointed out: why, if Pompeia had done nothing wrong, was he getting rid of her? Caesar’s famous reply — that his wife must be above suspicion — is now more well-known than the scandal that spawned it, just as Mandy Rice-Davies’s witty retort, when told Lord Astor had denied having an affair with her — “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” — is still repeated by people who know nothing of the Profumo affair. For Clodius the situation was worse than embarrassing. His most implacable enemy was his former brother-in-law, the great patrician general, Lucius Lucullus. He had been married to one of Clodius’s sisters and had allegedly discovered them in bed together, whereupon Lucullus immediately divorced her. Clodius had retaliated by encouraging some of Lucullus’s soldiers to mutiny. Now Lucullus seized his chance for revenge. Urged on by him, the senate accepted the college of priests’ findings and ruled that the only way of propitiating the Good Goddess for such an insult was to exact a commensurately terrible punishment on the man who had offended her.

Clodius was accordingly to be charged with incestum — sexual intercourse with a vestal virgin — a capital offence for which the penalty was to be beaten to death. The minor technical difficulty — that Clodius had actually done no such thing — was surmounted by proposing a retrospective law which stated that violating the ceremony was tantamount to violating a vestal virgin. Finally, to make absolutely sure that Clodius had no chance of escape, it was decreed that the judge at his trial would select the jury personally and draw it solely from among sympathetic members of the senate.

The effect of this heavy-handed approach, in the eyes of most ordinary Romans, was to transform Clodius overnight from aristocratic rogue to popular martyr. The law authorising his prosecution was drafted in the senate but could only be passed into law by a general vote of Roman citizens. When people assembled in the forum to vote, gangs of Clodius’s supporters blocked the aisles to prevent the ballot boxes being distributed. Scuffles broke out. The meeting was abandoned.

Lucullus and the rest of the senate, by an overwhelming majority of 400-15, refused to back down. Rome, the most powerful nation on earth, was politically paralysed by this ludicrous affair. (Again, one is struck by the parallels with our own time when a single peccadillo — Profumo’s dalliance with Christine Keeler, Lord Lambton’s payment of a prostitute, Cecil Parkinson’s affair with his secretary — was sufficient to convulse the entire political class.) The most distinguished senator of the period, Marcus Cicero, had at first regarded the scandal as a joke. As it happened, he was something of a friend of Clodius; indeed, he had entertained him in his house on the morning of the Good Goddess ceremony. “You will have heard,” he wrote sarcastically to his friend Atticus, “that Clodius was caught dressed up as a woman in Caesar’s house at the national sacrifice ... a spectacular scandal. I am sure it distresses you.”

Nevertheless, as a leading conservative, he supported Clodius’s prosecution. But by the end of the month he was starting to detect a disaster in the making, writing again to Atticus: “The honest men are yielding to Clodius’s pleas and dropping out. Gangs of roughs are in formation. I myself ... am softening every day. All in all, I am afraid that what with neglect by the honest men and resistance by the rascals these proceedings may be productive of great mischief in the body politic.”

Eventually a compromise was agreed: the jurors would be selected by lot, not by the judge; the jury would not be exclusively composed of senators but would include other, less wealthy citizens; and the penalty, if found guilty, was reduced from death to exile. On this basis, in May, in front of a vast crowd, the trial of Clodius began.

It was a sensation from start to finish. The prosecution called on many of the female celebrants of the Good Goddess, including Caesar’s mother and his aunt, to identify Clodius as the man who had invaded the secret ritual. “Many of the better class of people,” according to the Greek historian Plutarch, “also gave evidence against Clodius for perjury, fraud, bribing the people and seductions of women. Lucullus actually produced female slaves who testified that Clodius had had sexual relations with his youngest sister at the time when she was living with Lucullus as his wife. It was also generally believed that Clodius had had intercourse with his other two sisters.”

One can only imagine the lip-smacking glee with which the average Roman lapped up these tales of aristocratic debauchery. Up to this date the Roman nobility had maintained an almost Victorian facade of stern moral rectitude and martial vigour. The trial of Clodius, coinciding with the flood of easy money and luxury goods into Rome from its new empire in the eastern Mediterranean, marks the point at which the Roman ruling class started to become a byword for sexual licentiousness and conspicuous consumption.

Naturally, everyone assumed that Clodius, faced with this mass of evidence, would be found guilty. But he produced an unexpected defence witness: a man who claimed to have had dinner with him on the evening of December 4, not in Rome but in Interamna, a town 90 miles away.

Suddenly all Cicero’s forebodings were proved correct. Worse, because he had seen Clodius in his own house that morning and because it would have been impossible for Clodius to have travelled 90 miles by nightfall, it fell to Cicero to supply the testimony that would destroy his alibi. His appearance on the witness stand created uproar. Clodius’s supporters tried to storm the tribunal. The jury had to form a human shield around the famous orator to protect him from the mob.

The verdict, when it came, was as stunning to the Romans as the O J Simpson verdict was to most Americans two milleniums later. Despite what seemed to be an open-and-shut prosecution case, by a vote of 31-25 the jury acquitted Clodius of all charges. They had, it transpired, been bribed — almost certainly by Cicero’s arch enemy, the multimillionaire Roman businessman Marcus Crassus, who saw an opportunity to ruin his rival.

“Inside a couple of days,” Cicero wrote grimly to Atticus, “with a single slave (a former gladiator at that) for a go-between, he settled the whole business — called the jurors to his house, made promises, backed bills or paid cash down. On top of that (it’s really too abominable!) some jurors actually received a bonus in the form of assignations with certain ladies or introductions to youths of noble family.”

In the space of six lurid months the Roman world had been turned upside down and it never quite righted itself. Freed by the court to wreak political havoc on the Roman constitution, Clodius used the techniques of mob rule he developed during his trial to drive Cicero into exile. Caesar, who had emerged from the affair equally unscathed, encouraged him. Immoral youth triumphed over moral respectability. Ultimately the 450-year-old republic became ungovernable and, after a civil war, Caesar seized dictatorial powers.

In this way did a high-spirited prank on a December evening help to change the course of history — which is why, out of all the sexual scandals to rock politics in the past 2,000 years, the Good Goddess affair, for my money, remains the greatest of them all.

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Op zondag 4 oktober 2009 09:28 schreef Pietverdriet het volgende:
Vind dat geschiedenis vooral moet beschrijven wat er gebeurd is, en niet nationalistische propaganda of antipropaganda zijn.

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Op donderdag 15 oktober 2009 22:34 schreef Bilmiyorem het volgende:
Kent er iemand een goed boek over Mesopotamie en Byzantijnse Rijk?

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Op donderdag 15 oktober 2009 22:19 schreef Burakius het volgende:
Iemand nog een goed boek met de algemene geschiedenis van de Verenigde Staten?

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Verder nog iemand een goed boek met de algemene geschiedenis van het Romeinse Rijk?

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Op vrijdag 16 oktober 2009 15:27 schreef AryaMehr het volgende:
Ik zoek een boek waar de gehele geschiedenis van Nederland weergegeven wordt?

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Op vrijdag 16 oktober 2009 16:34 schreef karottetrekker het volgende:

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"De Republiek" van Jonathan I. Israel, compleet met voetnoten. Aan te raden boek, al is het maar omdat het niet op licht-patriotische Hollandocentrische toon geschreven is (schrijver is een Britse Jood en expert over Nederlandse en Europees-Joodse geschiedenis) en ook focust op de eeuwen vóór de Nederlandse Opstand, vanaf de tijd van zelfstandige graafschappen tot de Bourgondische later Habsburgse tijden tot de val van de Bataafse Republiek en een analyse van de periode erna.

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Op vrijdag 16 oktober 2009 16:34 schreef karottetrekker het volgende:

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[ afbeelding ][ afbeelding ]

"De Republiek" van Jonathan I. Israel, compleet met voetnoten. Aan te raden boek, al is het maar omdat het niet op licht-patriotische Hollandocentrische toon geschreven is (schrijver is een Britse Jood en expert over Nederlandse en Europees-Joodse geschiedenis) en ook focust op de eeuwen vóór de Nederlandse Opstand, vanaf de tijd van zelfstandige graafschappen tot de Bourgondische later Habsburgse tijden tot de val van de Bataafse Republiek en een analyse van de periode erna.

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Op vrijdag 16 oktober 2009 16:34 schreef karottetrekker het volgende:

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[ afbeelding ][ afbeelding ]

"De Republiek" van Jonathan I. Israel, compleet met voetnoten. Aan te raden boek, al is het maar omdat het niet op licht-patriotische Hollandocentrische toon geschreven is (schrijver is een Britse Jood en expert over Nederlandse en Europees-Joodse geschiedenis) en ook focust op de eeuwen vóór de Nederlandse Opstand, vanaf de tijd van zelfstandige graafschappen tot de Bourgondische later Habsburgse tijden tot de val van de Bataafse Republiek en een analyse van de periode erna.