Review of A Grand Tour of the Roman Empire by Marcus Sidonius Falx: Jerry Toner, Profile Books 2022
Jerry Toner is a classical scholar who specialises in writing accessible versions of Roman social and cultural history. This book is an account of a “grand tour” through the Roman empire at around the time of Antonius Pius by an imaginary Roman aristocrat called Marcus Sidonius Falx and his amanuensis, a “Brittunculus” called Jerry Toner. In each chapter Falx gives his impressions of various bits of Empire while Toner adds his own commentary afterwards.
The point of this narrative method is to give us the tour of the empire as it appears to Falx, an archetypal Roman aristocrat who, while not in himself an unkind man, sees nothing wrong with slavery, conquest, vast inequality and brutal repression of all who don’t buy into the pax romana. He thinks the Roman Empire is the best thing that ever happened to the world, which is natural enough since it runs, and is designed to run, for the benefit of people like him. At the end of each chapter, Toner in his character of amanuensis can give a somewhat corrected view. An incidental benefit is that this method enables Toner to give Falx a character, which ends up being surprisingly individual and credible, despite the fact that his words, impressions and experiences are an amalgam of umpteen real people who left us their writings on the places he visits. Although it’s evident if you read carefully that Falx cannot be writing earlier than the reign of Antoninus, and maybe a bit later (at one point he notes that “recently, the emperor Antoninus Pius extended the sanctuary and his imperial patronage has only added to the popularity and prestige of the place”), the people and events on his travels are drawn by Toner from various reigns.
Falx is, in fact, a sort of composite Roman Aristocrat, being used to embody the kind of things that happened to people like him because the Empire was how it was. It’s quite impossible, for instance, that Falx, an echt Italian-born Roman, could have been the father of Aelius Brocchus, an officer on Hadrian’s Wall who was probably from Batavia (modern-day Netherlands), nor could he have attended the birthday party of Brocchus’s wife Claudia Severa in Britain in around 100 AD, given that the journey on which he was engaged at the time can’t have taken place earlier than 138 AD, when Antoninus’s reign began. But this sort of thing doesn’t really matter, because Falx is a representative figure and it is actually quite entertaining when on his travels he comes across people (albeit unnamed) or events we know from elsewhere. Claudia Severa’s birthday invitation to her friend Sulpicia is one of the most famous of the Vindolanda tablets; most readers will be happy to see her again and to assume that a man like Falx might well have a son serving on the Wall, whatever his name may have been.
And it’s a sheer delight when Falx, an arch-snob with a keen appreciation of art, is entertained by a Romanophile Briton whose pronunciation of Latin is reminiscent of Officer Crabtree’s French from ‘Allo! ‘Allo (“‘Groatings!’ he cried, ‘Long live the umperor!’ It was going to be a long couple of days”) and who possesses one of the most ineptly executed (and ill-spelled) floor mosaics in the Empire:
“On the floor was a fearful mosaic of some hideous harpy. ‘Your craftsmen have certainly captured the very likeness of the monster’, I commented. ‘Monster?’ he replied in bewilderment […] It is surely Venus after winning the beauty contest’. The female figure was naked and her long hair stuck out wildly. Her lower body and hips were oversized, while her legs tapered to tiny feet. […] If this is the Britons’ ideal of beauty, I can only pity their men.”
I have seen pictures of this remarkable mosaic (from a villa in Rudston, Yorkshire); it’s third-century, but who cares? It was an old friend which probably represented many such clumsy efforts at Romanising, and hence has a place in this composite picture.
All through the book, interest is generated both by the ways in which Falx’s world resembles ours, and by the ways in which it differs. He uses a version of the Peutinger Map, a medieval copy of a Roman original which was “a practical shorthand that helped the traveller plan their journey by representing the communications network, in a similar way to the London Underground map, which helps tourists traverse the capital while bearing only a vague likeness to the geography of the city above ground”. It also used symbols as guides do today - “The inns are represented by different symbols according to their quality. A sign of a building with a courtyard means that it is a high-class inn, whereas a drawing of a simple box house with a single peaked roof means that the traveller can expect a modest establishment at best”. The souvenir trade has not changed much, either; “Miniature replicas of the Parthenon are very popular as are glass vials with pictures of all the city’s chief sites identified by labels. The miniature temples are available at a range of prices, with silver being the costliest and terracotta the cheapest”.
But then Falx will do or say something that brings home to us how far apart we are; “As we left one large town, we passed by an infant that had been abandoned by its parents, who by dint of poverty or some other inclination, had decided not to rear their offspring. The slave dealers or dogs would soon pick it up”. Or his observations on gambling; he only indulges “during Saturnalia when I let the slaves win. It costs me a few sesterces but it keeps them happy. And if it helps them buy their freedom eventually then I will get my money back in any case”.
Falx can be genuinely funny, often unintentionally: “The advantage in travelling with only the essentials was that it meant I needed the bare minimum of slaves, twenty or so at most”. And his travels and observations (plus those of his faithful though often disapproving amanuensis) are invariably not just entertaining but richly informative about how people actually lived under the Empire. My only cavil would concern the frame for Falx’s journey. Though many Romans travelled to visit their estates, or absorb Greek culture, or merely for pleasure, Falx is given an extra reason in the shape of having displeased a tetchy emperor, a motif that reappears at the end. This is the one time when the mix of periods doesn’t work for me. It might have, if the emperor in question had not been so clearly identifiable with Gaius, aka Caligula, but he’s too recognisable and too clearly out of his time. As far as I can see, Falx’s real emperor would have to be either Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius, both of whom were, for Caesars, fairly amiable. I can guess Toner’s authorial reason for doing this: he wants to stress how unpredictable and dangerous life in the Empire could be, even for folk like Falx, but I wish he had made his “emperor” more generic. But I shall long cherish the image of Falx “completing the tour with a return journey down the Rhine, past the hairy barbarians on the further bank”.