Violence in the Forum by Natale Barca

Violence in the Forum:

Factional Struggles in Ancient Rome (133-78 BC)

By Natale Barca

Casemate Publishers 2024

It’s been almost half a century since Keith Richardson’s Daggers in the Forum related for a non-specialist the complex escalations of violence and thuggery that accompanied the transformation of ancient Rome from a republic to the raw beginnings of a dictatorship. Richardson’s book appeared just a few years after the national upheaval of Watergate, which somehow seemed to make the subject feel apt. The appearance of that book’s natural successor, Natale Barca’s Violence in the Forum, in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election obviously upgrades ‘apt’ to ‘foreboding.’

The story remains the same, following a thread of political unrest and popular revolt as one bloodthirsty opportunist after another tried to turn the chaos to his own personal profit. Barca begins his narrative with Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and moves it on to his brother Caius Sempronius Gracchus, both firebrand tribunes of the plebs, both murdered in the kinds of bloody riots that increasingly typified the era Barca is describing.

He does a genuinely gripping job. Readers familiar with this story will be expecting the marquee names that start to take the spotlight later in the book, but Barca has poured an enormous amount of research into these pages (the book starts with a glossary, ends with a chronology, and bristles with footnotes and end notes), and one happy result is the vivid turning-out of even his most minor characters all through the narrative. He brings his characters on like figures in a novel, and against considerable odds, the approach works, as when he describes the death of another tribune of the plebs, Marcus Livius Drusus:

One clear, cold evening in January 90, he is dismissing a small crowd when he is stabbed by a stranger, who immediately takes advantage of the confusion to escape. Drusus is in agony. His demise is imminent. After his brother Mamercus gives him a kiss to collect his last living breath, Drusus loses consciousness and dies.

The combination of scrupulous research and dramatic treatment serves Barca’s stated aim of writing for a general audience. “I start from the premise that I’m also addressing an audience of non-specialists,” he charmingly notes, “and that if the reader doesn’t understand what I’m saying, I’m an idiot.”

His book is considerably less well-served by the staff at Casemate Publishers, who’ve let the text go to print speckled with typographical errors. “There, he tears the corpse apart, breaking its limps and gouging out its eyes,” and “It is then that Marius stops thinging about nothing other than the extermination of his enemies,” for instance, occur only a few pages away from each other. The cumulative effect is an ironic counterpoint to the extensive fine care of Barca’s scholarship.

But persevering readers will ignore such things in order to enjoy this terrifying story Barca tells, hoping for a few more months that it’s a warning rather than a prediction.

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 has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News