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A review by readerstephen86
Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar by Tom Holland
4.0
SUMMARY - It cuts corners, but still make space in your hand luggage. This populist history comes with layers, and it's morish.
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Tom Holland's books have that WH Smith's Bestseller airport display feeling. Like the toblerone you guiltily stuff into your backpack (squashing the toothbrush to the bottom in the process), you know it's going to be all too easy just to keep devouring it. It reads like a gossip magazine and like the glinting gold of its cover art - which I do like - it's designed to catch the eye of the reader with a sweet tooth for an undemanding read.
But as other reviewers have said, I think the easy reading belies hard writing. This isn't just a biography of men-made-into-monsters, however much the portraits stand out from the page (Caligula, Nero, Claudius, Augustus, Germanicus, and not to mention the women such as Agrippina et al.). We get the politics or empire, which manages to outline the local terrain of the Germanic tribes, Gaul, British colonisation and Welsh/Icenic rebellions, Syria, Greece, and Egypt. More, we get an elaboration of the problems of governance within Italy and Rome set out so well in Holland's first book, Rubicon. The erosion of idealised civic 'virtue' and with it democracy and its institutional counterbalances is set out with a more-than-impressionistic sweep of the brush.
I didn't feel there was quite such a clearly articulated narrative thrust on any of these, perhaps because the hideous fascination of the emperors proves too compelling to ignore. Each chapter is framed around the man (and their wives and mothers) who cast mesmeric power, and perhaps even more mesmeric weaknesses that often lead to their downfall. I liked that Holland doesn't give total credence to the rumours or incest and other forms of debauchery, not least because smear tactics and grudges were the mainstays of Roman power politics. The writer (or rumour-monger) controls the message. Yet the rumours, like that lovely sugar-packed Swiss chocolate, are hard to put down.
For readability this is a five, in a way that few histories manage. Even if I didn't rate this quite as highly as Rubicon, it's a deft feat to combine unputdownable storytelling with the range of scope and scholarship that underpins the footnotes.
The shortcuts make this book as readable as it is, and yes, passing WH Smiths in the airport I'd absolutely reach up for my fourth installment of a Holland-penned history. There are certainly devils in the detail. One of the pictures is credited to Wikipedia, which made me wonder how many other liberties Holland might have taken to make his task easier. Similarly slapdash, quotes are chucked whole into paragraphs without any context or analysis; they spash into the water of words purely to make waves. So too, the sources are there to see at the end, but their relative reliability are moored to the sidelines, and too rarely examined. This is Popular, capital 'P', and history small 'h'. Don't necessarily trust everything that's said as being at face value, but if like me you want a carnivalesque introduction to ancient history full of life, human interest and broader scene-setting, go and make space alongside that toblerone - you won't regret it.
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Tom Holland's books have that WH Smith's Bestseller airport display feeling. Like the toblerone you guiltily stuff into your backpack (squashing the toothbrush to the bottom in the process), you know it's going to be all too easy just to keep devouring it. It reads like a gossip magazine and like the glinting gold of its cover art - which I do like - it's designed to catch the eye of the reader with a sweet tooth for an undemanding read.
But as other reviewers have said, I think the easy reading belies hard writing. This isn't just a biography of men-made-into-monsters, however much the portraits stand out from the page (Caligula, Nero, Claudius, Augustus, Germanicus, and not to mention the women such as Agrippina et al.). We get the politics or empire, which manages to outline the local terrain of the Germanic tribes, Gaul, British colonisation and Welsh/Icenic rebellions, Syria, Greece, and Egypt. More, we get an elaboration of the problems of governance within Italy and Rome set out so well in Holland's first book, Rubicon. The erosion of idealised civic 'virtue' and with it democracy and its institutional counterbalances is set out with a more-than-impressionistic sweep of the brush.
I didn't feel there was quite such a clearly articulated narrative thrust on any of these, perhaps because the hideous fascination of the emperors proves too compelling to ignore. Each chapter is framed around the man (and their wives and mothers) who cast mesmeric power, and perhaps even more mesmeric weaknesses that often lead to their downfall. I liked that Holland doesn't give total credence to the rumours or incest and other forms of debauchery, not least because smear tactics and grudges were the mainstays of Roman power politics. The writer (or rumour-monger) controls the message. Yet the rumours, like that lovely sugar-packed Swiss chocolate, are hard to put down.
For readability this is a five, in a way that few histories manage. Even if I didn't rate this quite as highly as Rubicon, it's a deft feat to combine unputdownable storytelling with the range of scope and scholarship that underpins the footnotes.
The shortcuts make this book as readable as it is, and yes, passing WH Smiths in the airport I'd absolutely reach up for my fourth installment of a Holland-penned history. There are certainly devils in the detail. One of the pictures is credited to Wikipedia, which made me wonder how many other liberties Holland might have taken to make his task easier. Similarly slapdash, quotes are chucked whole into paragraphs without any context or analysis; they spash into the water of words purely to make waves. So too, the sources are there to see at the end, but their relative reliability are moored to the sidelines, and too rarely examined. This is Popular, capital 'P', and history small 'h'. Don't necessarily trust everything that's said as being at face value, but if like me you want a carnivalesque introduction to ancient history full of life, human interest and broader scene-setting, go and make space alongside that toblerone - you won't regret it.