278: NOW YOU SEE THEM, NOW YOU DON’T

When Canada’s Prime Minister Joe Clark was ousted after only six months, humourist Allan Fotheringham memorably dubbed him a ‘Hiccup of History’. How should we describe Truss, been and gone in a mere 45 days? A ‘Hiccuplette’? Perhaps not. The feminine form (as with, say, ‘actress’) has long been infra dig.I tentatively suggest a case of ‘Liz-Majesté.

The Romans had their fair share of political instabilities. Take this poem of Catullus from the 40s BC when the Republic was approaching its death throes: What’s up, Catullus? Why do you put off dying? That excrescence Nonius is squatting in the government chair. Vatinius brags about his consulship. What’s up, Catullus? Why do you put off dying?

Nonius was world-famous in this poem. Romans and Greeks treated physical deformities as a legitimate source of cruel fun. Vatinius (mocked Cicero) had a similar swelling – a sense of tumour..? When he finally became consul in 47 BC, he only held office for three weeks.

Moving to the Empire, Rome had its first taste of political instability after Nero’s suicide (AD 68) with the so-called ‘Year of Four Emperors’. A second round followed in 193, after Commodus was strangled in his bath on New Year’s Eve by his personal trainer. The roof fell in with a vengeance in AD 235, the assassination of Alexander Severus ushering in 50 years of what textbooks call ‘The Age of Anarchy’ – cue the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK – It’s coming sometime…”

Sources for the first are Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Dio Cassius. Dio again for the second, plus Herodian and the so-called ‘Augustan History’ which dominates the third period. This last demands a few words. It is a collection of imperial biographies (a popular genre, after Suetonius), purporting to be the collective work of six otherwise (to us) unknown authors, written in the late-third/ early-fourth centuries. Most commentators disbelieve this. Thanks, first to the 19thcentury German Hermann Dessau and the 20th’s Sir Ronald Syme (who devoted three books and many articles to the topic), it is now commonly regarded as the production of a single unnamed man around AD 395, dubbed by Some ‘a rogue grammarian’.

Worth noting, en passant, that, despite this seemingly endless turmoil, the Romans clung on to almost their full territorial empire – that speaks volumes…

Nero committed suicide on 9 June 68. Leaving no son, this brought the JulioClaudian dynasty to an untimely end. The ensuing power vacuum was memorably described by Tacitus (Histories, bk1 ch4) thus: The Secret of Empire was out. Emperors could be made outside of Rome.

The free-spending Nero was replaced by the austerity-minded Galba, a septuagenarian general. His pennypinching was immediately and fatally unpopular. He was lynched after six months – perhaps British voters missed a chance with George Osborne?

Tacitus (Histories, 1.49) hit off a memorable epigram to describe Galba: capax imperil nisi imperasset – unimprovably translated by Syme as “a man with a glorious future behind him” – change the gender and it is easily transferred to Truss.

Next up was Otho (above), an effeminate dandy, famous for his ‘good hair’, associated with Nero through their common femme fatale, Poppaea. Wide-scale civil war ensued, Otho soon lost hope of victory and suicided on the 95th day of his reign.

The victor, Vitellius, notable as the fattest of all emperors and former courtier of Nero, lasted six months before being captured and publicly tortured to death. (Sorry to say I share my birthday with him.)

Eventual winner was Vespasian who created the Flavian dynasty consisting of himself, elder son Titus, possibly poisoned by younger sibling Domitian, assassinated in AD 96.

Commodus was succeeded by one-time school teacher, the grizzled army veteran Pertinax. He made the fatal mistake of trying to discipline the praetorian guard, which showed its displeasure by killing him after a reign of 85 days.

Having no candidate of their own (as they had had with Claudius back in AD 41), the guards auctioned off the throne to the highest bidder. The foolish purchaser was a mega-rich senator, Didius Julianus. A clear case of Going Going Gone.

Didius, who had also had a creditable military career, won the bidding war by promising 25,000 sesterces to every soldier (precursor to ‘Trussonomics’?).

A disgusted civilian population verbally execrated him, this encouraging at least three provincial generals to embark on civil war. The pampered praetorians, having no taste for combat, deserted him, and he was slain in the palace by a squaddie after 66 days in power. The winner was African-born Septimius Severus (193-211), after crushing his rivals Albinus and Niger, semantically equalling Black and White.

Septimius bequeathed his throne to sons Caracalla and Geta. It only took a few months for the former to liquidate the latter, cynically remarking “Let him be a god (deus), provided he’s not alive (vivus)”

The rot set in with a vengeance during the reign of Gallienus, assassinated in 268, following a series of civil wars beginning in 235. From these, I simply mention Maximus the Thracian, allegedly 8ft 2in (2.49m) tall, capable of eating 40-60 pounds of meat a day, swill down an amphora of wine, and sweat two to three pints worth in the process.

The ‘Augustan History’ covers this nadir by grouping the ephemeral contenders under the rubric ‘Thirty Tyrants’. It is not always easy to separate fact from fiction; Wikipedia provides a list with useful commentary. ‘Thirty Tyrants’ is a typically silly AH rubric, fitting none of the contenders, no doubt intended as an echo of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ of Athens back in 404-03. Space limits confine me to select examples – the Wikipedia list provides individual links. The usual pattern was for someone to be proclaimed emperor by his troops, then either promptly slain by them or in combat with another pretender.

Victoranus was “slain almost immediately”. Likewise, Macrianus, Piso, and Valens. Celsus was killed by an unidentified woman after seven days, Marius after three. One woman, Victoria, went the same way after her proclamation.

Obvious parallels here with Truss and Kwarteng. Edward Gibbon (DFRE,

ch10) summed up thus: There is not any difficulty in conceiving that the successive murders of so many emperors had loosened all the ties of allegiance between the prince and people. Mutatis Mutandis,

that may be said to apply to the Tory Party, both within and without.