Palatine by Peter Stothard

Palatine: An Alternative History of the Caesars
By Peter Stothard
Oxford University Press 2023

Critic and former TLS editor Peter Stothard’s previous book, The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar, laid out a narrative course and practically advertised its own predictability: reel off a couple of chapters about the rule of Julius Caesar, try your hand at dramatizing the famous assassination, then plod through whatever the ancient sources have to say about the fates of all the men who killed the dictator – the kind of thing Michael Grant could have turned out in the course of just one rainy afternoon. 

Readers of The Last Assassin will know how thoroughly it avoided any such well-traveled road. Instead, it grew through bright, often beautiful prose and odd jumps and dodges into a surreal kind of biography of one assassin only, an obscure figure named Cassius Parmensis. It was a striking performance, the kind of slim work of nonfiction that stays stubbornly in the mind long after it's been read and shelved. 

Likewise Stothard’s new book, Palatine: An Alternative History of the Caesars, which seems to purport to be a panoramic look at the Julio-Claudians who ruled Rome in the decades after Julius Caesar’s death. Those Julio-Claudians and their various satellites dutifully show up in these pages, from Augustus and his exile of the great poet Ovid (“In an archery competition Ovid’s word for bow was not just a bow. No part was just a part, no service just a job, and a goal was an ejaculation as much as any other end in mind”) to gloomy Tiberius to mad Caligula and unexpected Claudius and notorious Nero. And after Nero, the well-known catastrophe of “the Year of the Four Emperors,” in which Vespasian won out only after three other men had declared themselves ruler of Rome.

It all sounds very standard, but Stothard tells a refreshingly different story almost entirely: the biography of the loutish Vitellii clan. 

Old Publius Vitellius had been an official under Augustus, and his son Lucius had been an official under the successors of Augustus, and Aulus, the son of Lucius, eventually reached the throne of Rome itself: he was one of those four emperors, ruling for only eight months in AD 69. Vitellius is the subject of one of the shortest and most scathing mini-biographies of Suetonius, and more than anybody else, he’s also the subject of Stothard’s smart, visionary book. 

Aulus, known to history as an epic trencherman, was no sexual libertine, readers are assured, although he did reportedly have a passion for mixing the saliva of one of his ex-slaves into a honeyed concoction for soothing his throat after a long day of talking. The odd preference could be weaponized. “Sexual charges, like charges of gluttony, were verbal weapons whose relationship to reality was often the least important fact about them,” Stothard writes. “Any kind of oral sex – with man, woman, or footwear – was especially good to use against a man whose words needed to be brought into disrepute. In the rhetoric of the street a befouled tongue could not be trusted as a conveyor of the truth.”

If the reader’s first reaction is that a great tottering gluttonous dope like Aulus Vitellius is an undeserving object for such eloquence, how much more will such a reaction apply to, for instance, Publius, uncle of Aulus, whose doomed and inept military exertions in Germany are poetically evoked:

Indistinguishable from his men, the military standard-bearer for the Vitellii was stumbling through salt ponds that were every minute less distinguishable from the great grey surrounding sea and sky. Winds filled with rain were roaring over banks of sand that had been laid only an hour before. With every cloud of freezing air or fleeing birds came whips of grass like leather, shards of razor shells, goggle-eyed fish, lurid, orange, purple and alive, blood-red parts of what may once have been fish, prawns as clear as water, spiked fins and gills hardened and heading for the few rocks that anyone could see.

Palatine works very much like this; hard, adroit research (there are endnotes and a three-page bibliography, for a biography of a pea-brained glutton who only achieved his footnote in history by accident; simply wonderful) paired with visionary imaginings, flashes of light and color that illuminate the story while subtly shaping it. No reader of Roman history should miss it, both for the sheer thrill of the reading experience and for the challenges such an approach consistently poses to the wary. 

The US cover of Stothard’s book, for instance, shows a detail from Georges Rochegrosse’s sumptuous 1883 painting “Vitellius Dragged Through the Streets of Rome,” showing the unlucky Aulus, bound and battered, being taken to the infamous Gemonian Stairs in order to be butchered. The painter takes his viewers only as far as the jeering and the chaos and leaves the sequel to the imagination. But we can hardly expect such restraint of Stothard after 300 pages; he narrates the moment with marvelous panache:

He was led like the companion of his kennel, stumbling before he fell. His last sight of the Palatine was in the smoky distance. His last words were a reply to a barracker in the crowd. He cried out that, whatever his failings and present fate, he had been that man’s emperor … He died slowly by blows and cuts, torn to fat, fleshy pieces, tumbling towards the memorial to his father, a sword under his chin to make him face his torturers, his belly protruding forever to stand for his failure to control his appetites, his opportunities and himself. Galeria [his wife] received what was left of his body. His head disappeared into the spreading crowd.

Marvelous panache, yes, but also selective. In another ancient account, the whole of the emperor’s vast remains are dumped into the Tiber like yesterday’s slop.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.