Harry Sidebottom's Reading List

"If I give an example it’s probably easier. The Roman Social War was fought in the early first century BC. I knew a lot about it before I read this book, about its causes and its effects, but it had never really been brought home to me that it was in many ways a war of the people of the plains against the people of the mountains. Then, in the middle of this book, there is this wonderful map of Italy, with all the areas of the rebellion and which places revolted, and it suddenly just struck me that the heart of the rebellion was in the Apennine Mountains and it had never come home to me before. Well, it’s got a huge scope, from the founding of Rome to the fall of the Empire in the west in the fifth century, but somehow it sort of does it in a not-big-fat-frightening-book way. It actually just rattles along. I always recommend my students read it as their first book on ancient history before they come up to Oxford. What makes it so good is that it’s very readable and clear and yet it manages to be clear without dumbing down, and it manages to construct a popular history narrative underpinned by deep scholarship. It doesn’t just deal with political and military history. It deals with languages and artistic movements and things like that and it pulls them all together. OK. Portrait sculpture. In the last century BC the rich upper-class senators decided, for some reason, that they wanted their portraits immortalised in stone looking incredibly old, ugly, care-worn, heavily-lined, warts, creases and all. Good question. We don’t really know the answer, but probably they are making themselves look old and shattered because it’s something to do with the Roman concept of dignitas , and that comes with age. It’s also bound up with negotium , hard work in the cause of the Republic – ‘Here’s my public image – I’m not a Greek pretty boy. I’m a careworn figure and I’ve been out in the snow and sun and I’ve devoted my life to the republic so give me respect.’ No. Romans had a weird thing with this though. They liked to couple it up with Greek heroic sculpture. To our eyes, this is ludicrous mismatching. The old wizened face slapped on top of the beautiful body of a man of about 20 – heavily ripped, heavily muscled. It actually never totally goes away. It’s the dominant one in the last century BC but they moved to a slightly more, not pretty boy, but idealised middle-aged standard portrait. Some do go for the youthful look, but even in the fourth century AD, you do find Romans who like to show themselves in this way. Of course, they are also doing another thing at that point. They are saying: ‘I’m the sort of man who harks back to the free Republic, as well as being a careworn man.’ Everywhere. Where are you? British Museum. But outside Rome, the best place to find them is actually Copenhagen. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. I went there almost by mistake and it’s an absolutely breathtaking collection."

"It’s about the fall of the Republic, the overthrow of the Republic and the re-establishment of the monarchy. It’s centred on the life and career of Octavian, who becomes the first emperor, Augustus . It’s a strange and distinctive book, self-consciously literary. Syme, who was something of an old poseur, said his main influence when writing the book was Stendhal, Le Rouge et Le Noir . He employs a method that scholars call prosopography, which is basically the study of marriage links between people, geographic origins of upper-class people, office holdings and stuff. From that, he started making patterns of faction politics in the late Republic. It may not be right, but it almost reads like a novel and it’s absolutely fascinating. You get the feeling of going beneath the surface of the straightforward story of the great man Octavian, and you start wondering who the powerbrokers were. Who were the behind-the-scenes men? Who were his backers and opponents? It’s a classic of modern scholarship and it’s also about the rise of fascism – he uses Octavian as an allegory of the rise of Mussolini. It’s an incredible book. Slightly daunting because it’s very long. I read it just before I did finals and I’m convinced I got a first in that paper because I’d just read that. It’s got a lovely literary style. As he got older his literary style became a parody of itself. It was always quite brief and Tacitean, but by the end of his life he was writing bizarre sentences like ‘But. Not to men of understanding.’ I’m a Roman historian and I’ve read his later books and thought: I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re arguing."

"This is written by Ramsey MacMullen, an American scholar and one of my heroes. What’s really cool about this is that it’s so different from most modern books on ancient history . Most start with the basic premise that I’m going to study x period of ancient history, y geographic area, z war. This one starts with an idea. He wonders what, if the Romans had had something similar to the House Un-American Activities Committee, would that committee have investigated and persecuted. It’s a brilliant idea and it’s superbly written. It sheds light on how Rome was governed by looking at the flip side, at the people who undermined the empire, the rebels. He uncovered a strange pattern which was the rebels, just like the people who held power, progressively moved down the social scale, so in the early first century AD the men holding the real power and the revolutionaries tend to come from the very élite noble families, but by the fourth century, they don’t. They tend to come from obscure provincial backgrounds, strange geographic places, the Danube, the Balkans, the Near East. Why is something he never actually answers but it’s a fascinating insight. Either they want to restore the Republic or they want to overthrow Rome and re-establish their own ethnic independence, and others are Christians wanting to overthrow paganism. I know of her! I did read one of her books. Its basic drift was an attempt to prove that the ancient world had chemical and biological weapons. No. But it had things that could almost be called that. Like putting snakes in a jar and throwing it at your enemies."

"The only time I’ve actually met Professor Zanker he mistook me for a wine waiter. I was wearing a very sharp black suit and white shirt and he came up to me and said: ‘Mineral water.’ And lacking any dignitas at all I went and got him one. This is an odd choice because I disagree with almost all his conclusions. He argues that the reign of Augustus sees the Roman élite finally dealing with the problems of the Greek culture that they love and the nasty Greeks they rule. He’s just wrong. They don’t. They carry on loving the culture and despising Greeks. I don’t agree with his methods. He doesn’t argue things. He just tells you stuff. He’s obsessed with the shock of the new. He imagines the ordinary Romans in the forum looking up at the new buildings and wonders what effect it has on them. He never speculates about the big old buildings that were also there and what would be the effect of the new building in its context with the old buildings. That’s my main problem with it. Yes. It is one of those rare books that changes a whole field of study. Before Zanker art history was just for aesthetes like Brian Sewell and obscure art history departments. If you studied the ancient world you didn’t really have to engage with visual images. But he brought art history back where it should be – connected to political power, social history, economic history. Now you can’t write about Rome or any part of the ancient world without drawing on visual imagery, architecture, town planning. I think so. Even though I don’t like being mistaken for a wine waiter and I don’t like his methods. It’s one of those books you half enjoy and half hate. My favourite is Aeneas. So, one of the key images promoted by the new order of Augustus’s new monarchy, dressed up as a return to the Republic, is a sculpture group, a big sculpture group of Aeneas, the sort of founder of Rome, escaping from the ruins of Troy, carrying his aged father on his shoulders, leading his small son by the hand. It’s meant to symbolise a lot of concepts: piety, familial duty and being a warrior too. We don’t have the original but it was replicated again and again by private patrons. They had terracottas of it, paintings of it. One image in the book that Zanker reproduces is a wall painting from a villa outside Rome and it has this standard image, very recognisable, except that Aeneas and his father and son have been turned into apes with dogs’ heads and huge penises. This is, clearly to my mind, a patron of art, a well-off man who has commissioned a work of subversive art. He’s asked for something that is deliberately mocking the autocracy and its ideology. They weren’t all swallowing what the new leader was telling them. Zanker isn’t interested in possible objections to the party line. Also, he never considers the possibility of the average man just ignoring these things. It might be because he’s German and of an age when Albert Speer redesigning Berlin probably kind of mattered."

"The Fall of Rome. Probably the most exciting new book on ancient history for years. Unbelievably readable, in a popular style. It takes very complicated scholarly ideas published in obscure places in a range of languages and makes them clear, accessible, understandable and interesting. There has been a trend for about 25 years among American and British scholars arguing that the fall of the Roman Empire was all about compromise, diplomacy and accommodation. It wasn’t about burning and raping and pillaging. It was all actually quite nice. They just said: ‘Come on in you hairy Germans and rule us.’ Perkins has driven a horse and cart through this and shown that it’s not true. The kind of negotiation that went on was the kind that happens after a huge Vandal army has conquered you. Of course, the leaders who remained had to reach some kind of rapprochement . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And he’s wonderfully anecdotal. He starts with this bit from one of the church fathers discussing the problem of the number of nuns raped by Barbarians and whether or not they still count as virgins. I forget now what the answer was. It also has the virtue of being rather short. Gibbon? Yes. Unlike that. And it’s got really nice pictures, maps and plans. It’s 183 pages long. Some books are too long to read. I can’t say that. It’s the end of my career."

"I’ve put them not in order of date of publication, but in chronology of when they were set. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault is the earliest. Looking at them now it strikes me that they were all published in quite a narrow window between 1960 and 1972, with Mary Renault the last to be published. It was obviously a golden age of fiction, but that wasn’t in my thinking at all when I picked them. The Persian Boy is the story of the last seven years of Alexander the Great’s life. It’s told through the eyes of Bagoas, the Persian boy. What it does superbly well, and makes it stand out from almost any other historical novel, is the way it recreates not just one ancient culture, but two, because you’ve got the Macedonians viewed through the eyes of a Persian. It works. Both are utterly convincing. It’s also an incredibly clever technical device, and one from which I’ve learned an awful lot. Because Bagoas, the Persian boy, is a eunuch, and a concubine at first of the Persian king’s and then of Alexander’s, he’s an outsider to the Macedonians. So the Macedonians are strange to him. The things they do make him think, and he comments on them. It’s an incredibly clever device. What happens all too much in historical fiction is that you have two Romans, they’re both Roman senators, they walk out of the senate house and then, in the fiction, they turn to each other and explain in great detail how the Roman Republic works. But they would have already known how it works: why do they say it? Having this device of the outsider as a main character gives the novelist the chance to actually tell the reader things and show the reader things without it seeming laboured and forced and never veering into the dreaded ‘info dump’, which often crops up. “They’re often similar to us but, at the same time, they’re as alien as a tribe in the Amazonian jungle” Another fascinating thing about The Persian Boy is her hero. Bagoas is a eunuch. He’s had a very bad life. He is a concubine of two kings. He’s the antithesis of the traditional hero of a historical novel. He’s not brave, he doesn’t have a great sense of justice. He’s actually rather cowardly, rather sneaky. He is, in many ways, not a terribly likeable person. But somehow Renault manages to make him intensely sympathetic to the reader. It’s not just because he’s had such a bad start to his life. He does have redeeming qualities: his loyalty and his love for Alexander make up for all the scheming, the plotting and the weakness. So I think that’s another great strength of this book. I’ve read this book twice, first when I was a schoolboy at an English public school. I found it quite disturbing because it was the first book I’d ever read that dealt with male-male sexuality. And published in 1972—I mean, back then, to be openly gay was a very rare choice and a very brave thing to do. So I think now we have to remember that this was a very daring novel. It explores sexuality. This is something the classical world is very good for. A lot of fiction has used the ancient world to explore contemporary issues of sexuality—but through the lens of Greece or Rome, not Macedonia or Persia. That’s another thing that makes this book stand out."

"For me, Votan , published in 1966, is an object lesson of how the quality of a book has absolutely no bearing on its success whatsoever. John Jones is a brilliant writer, I think Votan is a great book—and it is completely and utterly forgotten. I’ve only ever seen one living writer mention John James, which oddly enough was Neil Gaiman , who absolutely raves about him. But apart from Neil Gaiman and me, it seems no one in the world reads John James anymore. Votan is a novel about a Greek merchant called Photinus, who travels outside the Roman Empire sometime in the Antonine peace, probably late first, early second century AD. He travels into Germany and north to the Baltic. It’s an adventure novel. What’s very clever about it is that the adventures that Photinus has form the nucleus of the Norse sagas. In a sense, he becomes Votan (or Woden) the All-Father, and his settlement becomes Asgard. What happened to it becomes Ragnarök, the death of the gods. There is an incredibly clever literary play with the Norse sagas going on throughout this book. Now for me, as a historian, this smacks of The Golden Bough by James George Frazer or Robert Graves’s Greek Myths , that searching of every myth for a kernel of real historical truth. That couldn’t be less fashionable in modern scholarship. In a way, I ought to absolutely loathe this book, but I don’t, I love it because it’s so exciting and so well written. There’s one other thing to draw out about this book. Like Mary Renault, James manages to recreate an alien thought world, but he does it in a different way. With Mary Renault, you get that brilliant layering and texturing of historical detail that reminds me of Patrick O’Brian and his Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin novels , that building up of a believable world with layer after layer, detail after detail. John James in Votan doesn’t do that. What he does is a more broad-brush approach where everything is just like us, but slightly offset and strange. It works really, really well."

"It’s a novel about the Roman emperor Heliogabalus. He’s viewed through the eyes of a fairly staid, fairly conventional Gallic Roman nobleman. This is one of the very few books that actually changed my life. I read it when I was an undergraduate. It’s the first time I’d ever heard of the emperor Heliogabalus, also known as Elagabalus. I became fascinated by him and actually did my master’s thesis on him. I then applied to Cambridge and Oxford to do my doctorate on him. At that point, writing a biography was very unfashionable in academe, so I ended up writing about the sources that wrote about him instead of about him. But I’m just finishing a book with the not-at-all-shouty title of The Mad Emperor Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome . My original working title was Sex and Death: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome , but my publisher changed it. So this is a book that really interested me in a period of history that otherwise I wouldn’t have known. What’s so good about this novel—and, indeed, all Alfred Duggan’s novels, he wrote an awful lot of them, nonfiction too—is that although he didn’t really engage all that much with contemporary scholarship, he did read all the primary sources and thought about them. That really shines through at the level of day-to-day life. It’s a theme I keep going back to, the attitudes and mentalities of the characters. He somehow recreates them in a believable way, even though they are sometimes a little Christian—Duggan himself was a very devout Catholic, a convert. There is a sort of morality and a duty to his characters, but he managed to shape that into the morality and duty of the times he writes about. It’s also interesting because Alfred Duggan when he was in his heyday was a genre novelist, but he wrote so well that lots and lots of literary novelists admired him enormously, including Evelyn Waugh. He’s one of those novelists, a bit like Mary Renault or Patrick O’Brian, who stopped being regarded as a genre novelist in that slightly dismissive way and was just thought of as a novelist. Yes he was part of what is now called the ‘Brideshead set’ . Heliogabalus was a 13- or 14-year-old boy from a Syrian family when, in AD218, his grandmother engineered a civil war that put him on the throne. She clearly wanted him to be a puppet ruler. She’s an elderly woman. She’s lived at the imperial court for almost half a century, and she wanted someone to rule through. Unfortunately, her grandson wasn’t that amenable. He was an absolute devotee of a Syrian god called Elagabal, and he ignored every duty of being Roman emperor in favour of worshipping his god, which was a huge black stone. He carted it all the way from what is now Homs to Rome. He installed it at the head of the Roman pantheon and married a vestal virgin. He offended traditional Roman and religious sentiment in every way he could. If there was a social barrier, a no-no, he went ahead and did it, whether in religion, in politics, or sexuality. He was an extraordinary figure and he makes a great lens through which to view the Romans. You can almost work out what normal Roman attitudes to anything were by looking at what Heliogabalus did—and it will be the opposite. He’s fascinating. Now, for some of the wilder fringes of the LGBTQ+ community, he has become something of an icon. That only really works if you concentrate on his sexuality and the fact he may have wanted a sex change—and ignore the fact that he was massively irresponsible and exceedingly violent. It’s hard to say. Duggan was very influenced by the late 19th century Decadent movement, which had already reclaimed Heliogabalus, not as a perverted madman or religious nutter, but as the ultimate aesthete. I think it was that that really caught Duggan’s attention, especially as he moved in Harold Acton’s aesthetic set in Oxford."

"Gore Vidal’s Julian is about the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Julian was emperor from 361 to 363 AD and attempted to turn the empire back from Christianity to paganism. It is very much a literary novel. It has quite a complex structure whereby it starts with letters between Libanius and Priscus—two real pagan intellectuals—who write to each other about Julian after the emperor’s death. Then it shifts into a manuscript that one of them has miraculously got in Julian’s own words, which takes us up to Julian’s death. Then it shifts back to the two men writing to each other. I think its key theme is the impact of Christianity and, in many ways, it is a deeply anti-Christian novel. At the heart of that is a protest against the way Christianity altered the sexuality of the ancient world, not just with its antipathy to homosexuality, but its loathing of the body and sex. That’s the core of the novel. It’s a very rare novel because what we’ve got here is a very established literary novelist turning out a historical novel set in the ancient world. Usually, when this happens, the result is absolutely awful because the literary novelist already sees themself as an established commentator on the human condition, so doesn’t feel the need to actually bother to do any work and get anything right. They also almost always, like the worst of genre novelists, fall into the trap of assuming their characters—in this case Romans—were just like them. There are endless examples of this, which Gore Vidal managed to avoid. He was keenly intelligent and had enough empathy to realise the people he was writing about weren’t just Gore Vidal dressed up in Roman costume."

"This is the most lowbrow of the five novels I’ve picked. It really is a genre novel. I tend to dislike and dismiss the concept of genre. I’m always quoting John Banville, the Booker Prize winner, who was once criticised for writing detective stories. He said that genre doesn’t exist; there’s just good writing and bad writing. But Wallace Breem was a genre writer. His story is about a man called Maximus—by the way, there are far too many characters in ancient historical fiction called Maximus: I know, I’ve done it myself once or twice. Worryingly enough, the germ of the idea for Gladiator came from a novel called Those About to Die by Daniel P. Mannix . It is widely regarded as being the worst novel ever written set in the ancient world. It is abysmally bad. Its opening paragraph has the Roman Empire “coming apart like an unraveling sweater.” In Eagle in the Snow, Maximus, a Roman general who’s a pagan, is given the impossible task of defending the Rhine frontier with just one legion against six German tribes. It’s a novel that is full of historical mistakes. For example, a real legion at that time would have had 1,000 men. His legion has 6,000. A lot of their kit is wrong. He didn’t get the real externals right at all. And I’m not 100% sure he even made much of an effort to get the internals right, beyond making his hero a pagan, and putting him in the tricky position of defending a Christian empire. “A lot of fiction has used the ancient world to explore contemporary issues of sexuality” But what is so good about Wallace Breem’s Eagle in the Snow is the action sequences. He wrote really good battle scenes. And, although his main character may be a bit anachronistic, he’s interesting and conflicted. He’s a man who is the archetype for all sorts of later heroes in historical fiction. He’s a man going to do his duty even though he really, really doesn’t want to. I read it when I was a child and I loved it. It had a huge impact on me and turned me on to historical fiction. All these years later, I think it probably had even more of an influence on me than I realised, in that the portrait of the hero, Maximus in Eagle in the Snow , this man who is forced to be the hero when he doesn’t want to be, might well, unconsciously, underpin quite a bit of my hero Ballista, who has featured in eight of my novels so far. Once you’ve written a few novels, you look back on things and you have a different perspective. Now and then you think, ‘Blimey, so maybe that’s where that came from, not my native, staggering genius!’ I love writing action sequences. They do pose a huge technical challenge. I don’t want to generalise for what every novelist does or should do, but what I do is I tend to plan out the action sequence very carefully. I choreograph it with maps and bits of cardboard, moving them around to make sure that the characters physically can see and hear what I’m claiming they can see and hear. If it’s a hand-to-hand fight, then—yes, I’m a sad geek—I have replica swords, and I will actually check if it is physically possible to move from position A to position B in one fluid movement. But once you’ve done all this very careful planning to make sure it works, I find it best to write it really quickly, to try and get some pace into the narrative. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Sex scenes, on the other hand, are hideously difficult to write. I received criticism of my first novel Fire in the East that there wasn’t enough sex in it, so in my second novel, King of Kings , I tried to put a couple of pretty adult, raunchy sex scenes in. My editor’s comment in the margin on the first one was just ‘Errr.’ His comment on the second one was, ‘Harry, I’m worried by your gathering obsession with writing Carry on Bonking scenes.’ You’re treading a fine line between writing pornography and toppling over into a Carry On comedy. I didn’t have any problem with my mother or any of my relatives or students reading them. Having said that, it is amazing how some readers assume that all sex scenes are ultimately autobiographical. There’s an element of ‘Oh that’s what you like to do!’ No, it’s what an imaginary character I’ve made up would like to do! No one does the same with the violent scenes, assuming that I actually stalk the back streets of Oxford with a bladed weapon, looking to mutilate people. That’s one of the differences between us nice, modern, Western, not-as-repressed-as-we-used-to-be in our Judaeo-Christian way people and the Romans. A Roman house was full of other people who weren’t your family. There’s an awful lot of Roman art that shows a perfectly loving couple having sex on a bed and there’s a servant happily standing by with the drinks. It’s extraordinary to our way of thinking and, presumably, isn’t just an artistic convention. It presumably did reflect their lives, that slaves were so unimportant you could have sex with your partner in front of them, and who cares what they think or if they’re even there—which is mind-blowing, really."