Review: Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

Last night I finished Anthony Everitt's Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome. This is actually the second time I've read one of Everitt's books; the first time being several years back when I attempted to read Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. I was hoping that giving Everitt a second chance would improve my opinion somewhat, but it didn't. The fact is, I find Everitt's writing to be phenomenally sloppy and boring, and I take issue with him as a scholar.

My most overwhelming beef with Everitt's work is that, at the end of the book (at least in the case of Hadrian; I never made it to the end of Cicero) I inexplicably feel as though the author's treatment of the subject has made the subject seem less important, rather than more important. Any good work of history or biography ought to be enlightening the reader as to the larger impact of the subject matter in the grand scheme of things. Everitt's premise did seem to be that he thinks Hadrian's reputation was given a raw deal by contemporaries, but none of the body of the work did much to back that idea up. In fact, by the end I felt more as though I supported Hadrian's detractors!

Everitt's inability to showcase his subject matter is certainly not my only complaint, however. The narrative in Hadrian, as in Cicero, reads like a vast collection of disjointed, loosely-related snippets. The writer is unable to transition smoothly between segments, leaving the reader feeling as if being jerked from point to point and topic to topic. In addition, many of the quotations used (presumably to support the author's points) seem to say nothing of any purpose at all. There are also many grammatically awkward moments throughout the book where one must read backward and forward a few sentences to figure out to whom some ambiguous pronoun refers. These factors come together to give the impression of careless, haphazard writing.

My final complaint against Everitt's work (again, in Hadrian as in Cicero) is what comes across as a lack of responsible scholarship. When real evidence is lacking, Everitt seems to enjoy giving way entirely to the realm of imagination, and then analyzing his guesses as if they are fact. He also has no qualms about questioning the reliability of a source and then in the next sentence basing his opinions on the very same questionable source material. When multiple rational hypotheses may be readily apparent, Everitt is content choosing one that may or may not even be the most plausible, and treating it as though it is reality.

I was sincerely hoping that I would go into Hadrian and formulate a completely different opinion than what I was left with from my time with Cicero, but sadly, that didn't happen. My previous opinions of Everitt's merit as a writer and historian were completely confirmed. I can say with relative confidence that I won't be venturing into this author's work again. His books seem to be relatively popular, so I wish I could give them more credit. Maybe other people see something in this guy that I just don't see (if you do, more power to you; I'm not judging and we don't need to argue about it). It's entirely possible, since I seem to be much more persnickety in my book choices than most of my acquaintances are. Personally, though, I just wish he would stop writing on subjects that I'm interested in, so that I would know that I wouldn't have any future temptations to torture myself with his work.

Review: A History of Pagan Europe

Moving right along in my autumn reading spree, I just finished A History of Pagan Europe by Prudence Jones & Nigel Pennick.

I'm going to start right off with the book's major weakness: Because so many centuries and so much territory was crammed into a relatively short volume, the text had a tendency to degenerate into a list of dates and events. Also, for the same reasons, the book was able to do little more than summarize traditions and pantheons, without giving more depth to cultural context. In addition, some of the illustrations were downright irrelevant. Their captions offered little information, and many of them were never even mentioned in the main body of the text, so they served no purpose.

On the other hand, the book had a few notable strengths. For one thing, this history of paganism was not offered through the lens of a Christian bias, yet doesn't seem to project modern Neo-Pagan concepts on ancient traditions. This is remarkably refreshing. Also, the book addresses more than simply classical Greek and Roman practices and Celtic practices. I found the second half of the book much more interesting than the first half because of its glimpses into societies and traditions that aren't covered ad nauseam elsewhere. Another virtue of the text is that, unlike many Christian-biased histories, it does not portray the displacement of official paganism by official Christianity as a simple clear-cut event; rather, the sometimes lengthy persistence of many folk practices through time is given proper acknowledgement (without being unduly portrayed as the continuance of a formal pagan priesthood through the ages). Lastly, the book illustrates the roots of some not-so-obvious remnants of folk religion in modern culture.

All-in-all, I would recommend this book as a basic overview for readers who have not already engaged in any in-depth study of pre-Christian religion in Europe. If you're pretty grounded in Celtic or classical Greco-Roman culture, the latter half of the book still has value for you as it addresses Germanic and Slavic religion and the interaction of those cultures with the better-known Celtic and Greco-Roman traditions.