海角大神

The city of Rome has been inviting epic histories considerably longer than it has actually warranted them, and the historians involved have a whole gamut of approaches. Ennius wrote the story in execrable verse; Livy worked most of his life on a stirring prose portrait of "the life and beliefs of the state, the men and manners through which wars were won and culture widened;" Flavio Biondo combined larger theoretical questions with painstaking analysis of original sources. Edward Gibbon combined a wariness of 海角大神ity with the most gorgeous prose of his era. Earlier this year, novelist Matthew Kneale鈥檚 fascinating book "A History of Rome in Seven Sackings" took a chronicle-through-catastrophe approach to telling the story of the city.聽

In these and innumerable other instances, the writer must face a bitter choice. Here is a plot of ground on a navigable river, marshy lowland overhung by ridges and steep hills, and from this plot, which Italian politician Giuseppe Mazzini called "the temple of Humanity," have reverberated almost 30 centuries of human history. No book, not even something as sprawling as Livy鈥檚 or Gibbon鈥檚, can hope to tell that story seriatim, so what鈥檚 necessary is an approach, a theme, a conception.聽

In The Eternal City: A History of Rome, his astonishingly ambitious debut work of nonfiction, Ferdinand Addis tells his readers about the shocking wreckage of Rome encountered by the great poet Petrarch when he visited in the early 14th century. 鈥淏ut even in its dilapidated condition the city still made a mighty impact,鈥� he writes. 鈥淲herever he went, Petrarch populated the ruined streets with antique ghosts plucked out of Livy: unchaste Vestals, Lucretia falling on her dagger; Curtius, throwing himself down the abyss in the Roman Forum."

In captivating and very strange ways, this is also true of "The Eternal City." Under its stately presentation (in a hardcover edition from Pegasus Books) and past its smoothly engrossing prose, this is an intensely odd book. In many ways, it reads more like a slightly modernized and extended version of Livy than an actual work of what we would consider modern, serious history. There鈥檚 a list of ancient Roman writers and a bibliography of modern histories, but there isn鈥檛 really even an attempt to link those works to any of the actual claims in the book. Instead, Addis populates the ruined streets with antique ghosts plucked out of Livy.聽

He begins with Romulus and Remus, proceeds through the villainous Tarquins, tells of the rise of the Republic, and lavishes the usual amount of attention on Julius Caesar, for instance retailing uncritically this bit of obvious propaganda about the Battle of Munda in 45 BC: "Caesar came within an inch of defeat," Addis writes. "For a moment, he stood alone, catching enemy javelins on his shield, while his men wavered behind him." He spares a single sentence for Hadrian, "famous for his fashionable beard, his wall across northern Britain and his doomed love of the Bithynian youth Antinous, the beautiful boy whose marble features decorate so many of Rome鈥檚 museums today." With no factual basis at all, he tells us about the emperor Elagabalus: 鈥淗is eyes are dark with kohl. His pale throat is laden with necklaces and baubles. His head is crowned with a tiara, gleaming with jewels. His pose is delicate - priestly.鈥� About Nero at the time of the great fire of Rome, we鈥檙e told he was 鈥渟till young, more or less - running a little to fat, despite a regime of regular enemas and emetics, but energetic.鈥� It鈥檚 all very enjoyably cinematic, provided you remember that movies deal in make-believe.聽

"The Eternal City" proceeds in leaps and pauses all the way through the best stories of Rome鈥檚 history, taking readers through the Inquisition, the Reformation, the Risorgimento, the reign of Mussolini, and the "La Dolce Vita" era of Fellini. One chapter is anchored in the life of Ovid; another hinges on Petarch; the one on Mussolini, in a bizarre and intriguing choice, is told mostly from the perspective of one of the dictator鈥檚 mistresses - sometimes with no doubt unintentionally comic effect: "Many years later, in bitter exile, Margherita Sarfatti remembered the exhilaration of those first days after the march on Rome, the moonlit nights she and Mussolini spent together," Addis writes. "He would serenade her on the violin as she gazed into the velvet blue of the Roman sky, musing on how far they had come, and the glories that still lay ahead."

Addis says his book is an attempt 鈥渢o give Rome meaning,鈥� and he very wisely notes that this is always the aim of the city鈥檚 historians, however self-centered it inevitably turns out to be. "For centuries," he writes, "people have thrilled themselves with the discovery that, by a miracle, all Rome鈥檚 countless aspects converge on their own position." This is at once insightful and an obvious dodge, and readers of "The Eternal City" will be left wondering if it can possibly justify this more-than-600-page m茅lange of folklore, fiction, and fact. If it鈥檚 any consolation, Livy鈥檚 readers must have wondered the same thing.