J.linderski, Ink and Blood. Ernst Badian, Rome, And the Art of History 2013

Ernst Badian at the Macedonian site of Pella, 1973. Photo courtesy of Eugene N. Borza.

THE LEGACY OF

ERNST BADIAN

Association of Ancient Historians

Carol G. Thomas, Editor

© 2013 All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,

including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission from the publisher,

except for brief passages quoted in a review.

Book and cover design: Mary Stoddard

ISBN-13: 978-0-615-79212-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

Association of Ancient Historians

Cindy Nimchuk, Ph.D.

Secretary-Treasurer

[email protected]

Contents

I Ernst Badian and the Association of Ancient Historians 1Carol G. Thomas

II Ernst Badian’s Methodological Maxims 9T. Corey Brennan

III A Peltast Among Hoplites Ernst Badian and Athenian History 27Stanley M. Burstein

IV Ernst Badian’s Alexander 45Eugene N. Borza

V Ink and Blood Ernst Badian, Rome, and the Art of History 59Jerzy Linderski

The Scholarship of Ernst Badian: A Complete Bibliography 79

V

Ink and Blood

ernst BadIan, roMe, and the art of hIstory*

Jerzy Linderski

Toward the end of the year 2010 an untidy xerox copy of an article arrived in my mailbox. It was entitled “From the Iulii to Caesar,” and it was written by

Ernst Badian.1 A holiday card was appended, and on it, in a rather creaky hand, a note was scribbled intimating that the enclosed piece would “probably be my last essay.” Immediately I replied; and this was the essence of my plea: “I have been reading your stuff throughout all of my scholarly life. I cannot stop now. You must continue writing.”

A few weeks later Ernst was no longer with us. He is now part of History, and he dwells, with his scripta, in the

∗

*This is a slightly enlarged and briefly annotated text of the lecture delivered on May 4, 2012 at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Ancient Histo-rians at Chapel Hill and Durham. Please note the following abbreviations:

FC= E. Badian, Foreign Clientelae (Oxford 1958).Gn= E. Badian, review of C. Meier, Caesar (Berlin 1982) in Gnomon 62 (1990)

22-39.LS= E. Badian, Lucius Sulla, the Deadly Reformer (Sydney 1970).

RI= E. Badian, Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic2 (Oxford 1968).RR= R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford 1939).

1 Published in M. Griffin (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar (Chichester 2009) 11-22.

Jerzy

Typewritten Text

60 The Legacy of Ernst Badian

two worlds: the world of the living, and the vanished and vanishing world of the past, together with Caesar and Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, separated by two millennia, but united by the mastery of the art. For why have we been reading, avidly at times, or with trepidation, his books, essays, articles and polemics? Yes, they do provide information on all sorts of Greek and Roman subjects, great and small; but such products we tend just to consult, and then gratefully we deposit them away in a footnote. Yes, they do impart instruction—what Corey Brennan so aptly calls “methodological maxims,” and which he has so compellingly illuminated.2

Lily Ross Taylor once composed a memorable encomium of curiosity as a necessary ingredient of a scholar;3 and method was praised throughout the course of human thought. Badian’s pages nourish curiosity; and his method engages logic. Thus if the students of Greece and Rome, of History, depart from his pages knowing more, and knowing better, he already would have left a towering and enduring legacy of learning.

Yet if that be all that has been to Badian’s work, this finding would then also spell the end of this essay—unless we would wish to go through his pieces one by one, and attempt to assess the contribution of each of them to knowledge and understanding. But this endeavor is beyond the ken and strength of any single person; and in truth the confrontation with Badian’s mind had begun already years ago, and it will occupy, we prophesy, the coming generations of historians—and antiquarians.

2 T.C. Brennan, “Badian’s Methodological Maxims,” presented as the first paper at the session devoted to the commemoration of Ernst Badian. It is included in this volume.

3 L.R. Taylor, “In Praise of Curiosity,” Boston University Graduate Journal 8, no. 2 (1959) 35–43.

Ink and Blood: Ernst Badian, Rome, and the Art of History 61

But all of this still does not explain why Badian speaks so powerfully to us. Perhaps because so far we have been talking only of mind and logic, of the procedures which a Romantic poet, looking back at the Enlightenment’s scientific assurance and rigor, described as “the sage’s glass and eye”—that still misses the essence of things.4

Even if splitting rocks or dissecting plants, we need that fleeting moment of understanding. Indeed historians endeavor to accomplish a task even more daunting than splitting atoms, to grasp something that does not exist—the past, and to resurrect the dead. The human species is endowed with a mind, which perhaps can logically be dissected, but it is a mind burdened or enriched with the archaic layers of feeling and emotion, and this part of human essence only a poet or philosopher can touch—through empathy and inspiration. Modern scientific historians have often acted as if they were ashamed of all those irrational outpourings and chose to present the actors on the historical stage as just coolly calculating machines; their most important destiny to figure in our data banks. A historian, thinker and master of exposition, has recently issued a warning and a plea: history devoid of feelings is a desiccated plant.5 And that, I submit, is why Ernst Badian engages us: he is a weaver of words that sound right, even if peevish or impish or impudent, because they are strung not only on the loom of reason and reflection but also polemic and passion and struggle.

Mathematicians often speak of beauty and elegance of mathematical proofs: the fewer steps the more elegant the proof, and there must always be a clear crisp final equation. How to encapsulate history, its reason and folly?

4 Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), a Polish poet, in the programmatic ballad “Romantyczność” [“Romanticism”].

5 R. MacMullen, Feelings in History (Claremont 2003).


The Roman revolution, the transition from the Republic to the Empire, opened a fault that still sends tremors. How did this fracture come to pass, by what conjuration? Here is Ernst Badian’s diagnosis and equation. Speaking of Sulla’s abdication of his dictatorship, unexpected and unexplainable to many, then and now, he writes:

“The time for military monarchy had not yet come—as even Caesar found out, a generation and a bloodbath later, when the republic could in fact be seen to be dead. It took a great deal more slaughter to make it possible, and then by degrees, with caution and tact” (LS 26).

It is a dynamic equation: not enough blood spilled—no monarchy; insufficient cunning—no monarchy either. To propel History the ingredients in this brew must be mixed in the right proportion; and unfortunately for the practitioners of history the right proportion can be found out only by experiment. “Bloodbath” in Badian’s passage refers to Caesar’s war against the senate and Pompeius; “slaughter” is the war of the Triumvirs against the Liberators and the struggle between Octavian and Antonius; “caution and tact” describe Octavian’s comportment after Actium.

It will be of interest to confront Badian’s language and formula with the idiom of his great predecessor. Thanks to the miracles of searchable texts we can now parse everybody. Sir Ronald eschewed bloodbath and slaughter: no instance of the former in The Roman Revolution, and only one non-instance of the latter. After the capitulation of Perusia (where we remember the brother of Antonius led a rebellion against Octavian) a number of prominent captives were put to death. “These judicial murders,” writes Syme, “were magnified by defamation and credulity into a hecatomb of three hundred knights slaughtered in solemn and religious ceremony on the Ides of March before


an altar dedicated to Divus Julius” (RR 212). Murders of course (hardly judicial, one might add), but slaughter is just slander. Syme’s History is as violent and unpleasant as Badian’s—Syme was linguistically not averse to simple bloodshed6 —but it is much more gentlemanly. What about tact? Two occurrences, one unexpected, the other negligible. In 49 “Antonius, then in charge of Italy, treated Cicero with tact and respect” (RR 140)—not exactly an impression one would get from reading the Philippics. It turns out, however, that after all Antonius was a boor entirely lacking in tact: after the assassination of Caesar he “became bewildered, impatient and tactless” (RR 123). In the later years of Augustus, Sallustius Crispus, a successor of Maecenas as the political supervisor of literature, “was perhaps lacking in tact and skill” (RR 412), and this might explain the re-flourishing of the anti-Augustan barbs and pamphlets. Now caution: ten examples, all mundane, as for instance the observation that the patrician Lentuli “were noted more for pride of birth and political caution” than for any spectacular ability (RR 44); several other characters exercise caution when they refrain from taking potentially risky steps,7 most prominent among them L. Marcius Philippus, consul in 91, whose “caution and craft” uniquely and oddly earns an entry in the book’s index (554). Caution is thus for Syme largely akin to the art of survival. There is still Octavian. There were four cardinal features of his character: “the hard realism, the lack of chivalry, the caution and the parsimony.” All these

6 Eight instances in RR: interestingly four times referring to the avoidance of bloodshed, but fully crimson of Sulla and Augustus: “Sulla prevailed and settled order at Rome again through violence and bloodshed” (17); “Yet the new dispensation, or ‘novus status,’ was the work of fraud and bloodshed, based upon the seizure of power and redistribution of property by a revolu-tionary leader” (2, cf. 494, 519).

7 RR 95-6, 128, 195, 219, 504, 517, 525.


features, Syme tells us, “may not unfairly be attributed” to Octavian’s “origin from a small and old-fashioned town” (RR 453-54). He was also lucky: his “native caution” was, at the battle at Philippi, “happily seconded by fortune” (RR 480). What a contrast: for Badian caution occupies a prominent place among Augustus’ arcana imperii; for Syme it is at best a supporting agent, somewhat undignified.

Badian’s true predecessors were the Romans themselves. Sallust in one of his generalizing asides comments on the old dispute whether in military affairs it is brawn or brain that matters most, vis corporis or virtus animi, and he observes that by trial and error, periculo atque negotiis, it has been found out that in war most important is ingenium. And he laments that rulers and generals applied this virtue of mind much less successfully in peace, with the resulting miseries of instability, turmoil and confusion (Cat. 4.2-3). Among the major virtutes imperatoriae Cicero names in his encomium of Pompeius consilium in providendo (Imp.Cn.Pomp. 29), which the Loeb translator rather lamely renders as “wisdom in strategy.” But consilium is not wisdom. It is a process of deliberation in one’s own mind or with one’s advisors (and indeed the advisory board of a Roman commander was very appropriately described as his consilium). It is a process that employs reason, ratio, and arrives at a balanced decision. Furthermore providere is not just strategy. It is a careful assessment and prevention of dangers that might lurk ahead, as Sallust’s Cato reminds us speaking of Catiline (52.4), and Cicero speaking of omens (Div. 1.29). There is a proper word to describe this comportment: caution.

The father of Africanus appears in Livy as imperator cautus et providens; yet for one temerarium consilium he pays with defeat, and his life (25.34.7). The supreme practitioner of military restraint, the dictator Fabius Maximus, nobis


cunctando restituit rem—so Ennius (12.1 = 363Sk.); in an elogium he was praised as “dux aetatis suae cautissimus.”8 Linguistic and strategic echoes reverberated through centuries. At the battle at Adrianople against the Goths (in 378) the emperor Valens and his flattering advisors inconsiderately rush to fight; debacle ensues, the emperor dies. Only one general, Sarmatian by birth, gave sane counsel, urging caution. Ammianus Marcellinus remarks: “Sarmata, sed cunctator et cautus” (31.12.7).9

In civil life the main obligation of a jurisprudent was cavere, taking all precautions in drafting legal documents, and when giving advice. It was also a virtue of pater familias diligens, and consequently, and in the highest degree, of pater patriae.10 But it was a peculiar virtue. It manifested itself solely in action. A person was either cautus or incautus; acted caute or incaute. Lacking the abstract personification, this virtue could not suitably be displayed on the emperor’s clupeus virtutis, but in the background, as adverb or adjective, it securely guided Augustus to success in war and stability in peace.

Badian got it right, and in one sentence.Almost right, I should say. We must take exception

to the initial phrase “The time for military monarchy had not yet come.” Such metaphysical pronouncements arrest and perplex a skeptical reader. All we can know is the path taken—but there always shimmers a path not

8 A. Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae XIII.III (1937) 61, no. 80.9 See a good collection of examples in W. Seyfarth, “Miles cautus,” in Miscel-

lanea Critica 2 (Leipzig 1965) 334-36.10 On the cavere of jurisprudents, see e.g. B. Nicholas, Historical Introduction to

the Study of Roman Law 3 (1972) 95-7. The figure of diligens pater familias was a legal construct, and has been much discussed by students of Roman law. He was supposed always to exercise due care and foresight. See (briefly) A. Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia 1953) 457.


chosen. Badian argues that once Sulla had embarked on the path of his reforms, there was no other alternative for him, no other choice, but to relinquish power. Logical, certainly. But what if Sulla had decided to extend indefinitely genus illud regni, as Cicero calls it (Att. 8.11.2), and installed himself as, for instance, dictator rei gerundae perpetuus? Would anything or anybody stop him? Only in that parallel non-existent reality would it be possible to ascertain whether the time had or had not yet come for military monarchy. Interestingly, on various occasions Badian offers an admonition, “we cannot know,” and very rightly so, for his own example shows how difficult it is consistently to abide by that modest precept.

The fact remains that in Sulla’s wake not a dictatorship but a restored and remade republic was born. Badian’s essay, worth a stack of books, is an accusation brief, poignant and memorable. The title is ominous: Lucius Sulla, the Deadly Reformer. Not only the dictator himself was deadly—need we repeat after Martial Sulla cruentus? (11.5.9)—deadly were also his reforms. The Republic was deformed, and left to die a protracted death. Badian so describes that creature (LS 29-32):

Sulla’s system may have been well planned—he concedes; it failed because the dictator “had overrated the oligarchy to which he had entrusted his res publica.” Thus a lesson in assessing history: laws are important, but the people are more important, and the most important of all is the ethos of the ruling class.11 In Rome after Sulla’s victory “the vast majority of the ruling class” flocked to

11 Badian never uses the term ‘elite’ or ‘elites’ (currently voguish but squashy—hence its popularity on the leafy campuses). He employs the hard hitting and precise expressions ‘ruling class’ or ‘governing class.’ Indeed ‘class’ and ‘classes’ are his favorite words appearing with a variety of defining adjectives: political, upper, lower, wealthy, poor or poorer; and he does not refrain from speaking of ‘class division’ and ‘class struggle.’


him, but the Republic was for them “merely a pretext for their own privilege.” They “had no sense of mission,” and so in the end Sulla handed over his creation to “a class of proved cowards and open self-seekers.” And the final verdict: “Sulla’s new state was based on an absurd parody of natural selection—the survival of the unfittest.” Those who opposed “were mercilessly weeded out”—again need we remind ourselves of proscriptions, purges, we now would call them, spearheaded by the Sullan head-hunters, roaming like the storm troopers of the recent past; of the cruel suppression of the Italics akin to modern ethnic cleansing; and finally let us remember mass expropriations in towns and countryside, the catastrophic settlement of Sulla’s veterans on the confiscated land, which produced a vast reservoir of restless men ready to join any charismatic adventurer, and destabilized Italy for several decades.

In a challenging book an imaginative scholar has recently suggested that Sulla acted the part of a traditional Greek lawgiver, and that the Romans did not accept him because such a figure was alien to their tradition. “The content, style, and origins of Sulla’s New Republic were too revolutionary and too foreign to last in Rome.”12 I am the last person to contest the weight of constitutional arrangements, but this interpretation appears to touch only the surface of things; it is too genteel to cut to the sick entrails of Sulla’s republic. Again we do not know; we do not know whether Sulla fancied himself another Solon or Lykurgos; but we do know that no revered Greek lawgiver of yore or legend arrived at the head of an army with his tablets carried on the rivers of blood. The Greeks had a word for such a person: tyrannos.

12 H.I. Flower, Roman Republics (Princeton 2010) 134.


In his towering early achievement, Foreign Clientelae, Badian put his finger straight on the sore wound, never healed: Sulla was the first man to lead “an army of citizens against Rome, and who later combined with a foreign enemy against the Roman Government” (FC 272)—indeed he abandoned the war of the republic against Mithridates, let his army feast on the rich cities of Asia and, having thus at once softened the morale and hardened the personal devotion of the troops, he marched at their head to reconquer Italy and Rome. The result Badian so described in 1958: “his settlement, imposed by an aristocratic adventurer and his client army upon a conquered country, with the help of minor dynasts and their private armies—this return to an ‘ancestral constitution,’ wanted only by a small faction, was a farce and an abortion” (FC 280).

Under the regime of Sulla laws were passed with all procedural niceties by the assembly of the people; but he behaved rather like a Roman imperator who, after a rebellious city had surrendered, received it in his fides, purged it of anti-Roman elements, and proceeded to restore to the inhabitants their property, their government and their laws. Rome was diminished. It became something like another colonia Veneria (a name bestowed on the Sullan colony at Pompei); the abject culmination came two centuries later when the emperor Commodus renamed the city colonia Commodiana.

Sulla’s regnum is thus the original sin, and for Badian the trump card in his accusation: “Sulla had left a legacy of guilt,” he writes, and from this legacy there was no escape: “The Sullan oligarchy had a fatal flaw: it governed with a guilty conscience.” Perhaps this may sound quaint to some, particularly if reared on turgid sociological prose,


but feelings and perceptions are as real as naked power. Still ‘conscience’ is not the term a Roman would readily use, 13 and we might attempt to re-phrase Badian’s words, guarding the sense and spirit. The Sullan oligarchy—so Badian tells us—lacked legitimacy; and they as the beneficiaries of proscriptions and confiscations were fully aware of that fact. My computer informs me that ‘legitimacy’ generally does not figure in Badian’s political idiom; and unfortunately the semantic fields of Roman auctoritas and English ‘legitimacy’ overlap only partially. Yet it is a useful and evocative term. A Chinese philosopher might call it the mandate of heaven. One tested way for any governing class to prove they are worthy of the task is in war. The Roman nobilitas and the Senate earned the mandate guiding the Republic in the wars of survival and conquest, subduing Italy, overthrowing Carthage and the mighty kings, but they frittered their authority away piece by piece unable to solve the mounting agrarian crisis, the demands of the Italics, the partisan strife, and they lost it entirely in the crushing embrace of Marius and Sulla. The new mandate was bestowed upon them as gift; they did not earn it. And the benefit of the great new wars of conquest did not accrue to them, but to the new generation of warlords, Pompeius and Caesar. The one imperator, a former close associate of Sulla, who might have lifted the fortunes of the aristocracy and the senate, L. Licinius Lucullus, after a series of signal victories in Asia, fell victim

13 Conscientia does not generally figure in the political idiom of the republic, and earns no entry in the index of J. Hellegouarch, Le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous la république (Paris 1963), but see 87-9 on conscius. And when conscientia and conscius were employed, they indicated knowledge of, or participation in, an activity that may or may not have been criminal, but in that latter application only very occasionally with any sense of guilt. R. Mulder, De conscientiae notione, quae et qualis fuerit Romanis (Lugduni Batavorum 1908) 50, observes that before Cicero the word did not have any moral force, vim moralem.


to intrigue and his own probity, and ended up remembered in popular culture not for his military and administrative prowess but for the Lucullan feasts and the importation to Rome of cherry trees from the Pontic Kerisus, another example of the decadent pursuit of pleasure—not virtue.

In the conclusion to his much debated Roman Imperialism, Badian again unabashedly proclaims that the study of the Roman Republic is not the study of “its masses or even of great individuals” but “chiefly the study of its ruling class” (92). Coming from a scholar who devoted so much attention precisely to a host of “great individuals,” this statement may appear surprising, but on closer reflection it reveals a deeper understanding of the motion of history. Once the social tectonic plates have shifted, and they shift for a variety of causes, tensions building up over time, there is not much an individual, however great, can do to change the direction—he can take a stand in the path of the plate, and be crushed; or he can ride with it to victory and dominance. The Roman planet was composed of the upper crust, the senatorial aristocracy, and the layer of the equestrians, the latter partially emasculated by Sulla and partially co-opted into the senate; later, after the constitutional adjustments effected by Pompeius and Crassus, they were given significant participation in the courts and thus admitted again through a back door to the governance of the state. The dominance of the aristocracy rested on their vast land holdings, and a multitude of dependent supporters. To that class of clientes Badian devoted many studies brilliant in their attention to detail and in their illuminating historical perspective. He studied those people not for their own sake, but in order to uncover the roots of the nobles’ power. This net of dependencies covered all of Italy, and in the age of transmarine conquests it spread throughout particularly the eastern Mediterranean.


(FC 264). In particular “Sulla’s march on Rome had shown how the new ‘military clientela’ had burst the bonds of the oligarchic Republic” (FC 266). Thus “the traditional loyalty to mos maiorum and piety towards Rome” was broken, and the client army became “in the hands of a brilliant and unscrupulous Patrician, the tool of naked military domination” (FC 290).

The Sullan oligarchy was not only incompetent and illegitimate; it had also been dealt a bad hand. Their republic was, however, given a reprieve. Pompeius, Badian fastidiously notes, “the son of a novus homo, was respecting the mos maiorum at heart and lacking the will to establish a revolutionary domination.” Thus, “It was another Patrician, of even older lineage than Sulla and even more brilliant and unscrupulous, who brought matters to their logical conclusion” (FC 290).

Reading those enunciations we feel a desire to immerse ourselves in a sequel, and indeed Badian intended to continue his story of clientelae in another volume, a discussion of “Caesar’s triumph and failure” (FC 290). We are unfortunate: it remains unwritten.

A great loss, for there hardly existed, down to our days, after Mommsen’s failure, a historian better suited emotionally and intellectually to square his wits with Caesar’s deeds and style. However, much of what Badian wrote in the next half-a-century, down to his last script, can be viewed as a preparation for a final aim at that elusive target. And a direct hit it would have been, for Badian harbors no sympathy for the man who has not inaccurately been hailed, albeit by a former ardent national socialist, the pathfinder of Europe, Wegbereiter Europas.14 Indeed

14 H. Oppermann, Caesar, Wegbereiter Europas (Göttingen 1958), otherwise unexceptional and flat, except for the subtitle.


without Caesar France would not have existed, and C. Octavius may have been known as the first man in Velitrae.

One would not disagree, but Badian was appalled by the process. His thoughts on Caesar are scattered in many places, but they naturally congregate in his long essay on Roman Imperialism (87-90) and his famously acerbic long review of Christian Meier’s rhetorical biography.15 In the former piece, continuing the line of argument sketched in Foreign Clientelae, Badian observes that Caesar perfected the “lessons of Pompey both at home and abroad,” and proceeded “with a single-mindedness not weakened by scruples about traditional forms or by desire for the approval of his peers.” And so he started major wars, foreign and civil, “for a variety of reasons,”—this may sound like an excuse, but the condemnation is swiftly issued: “the sweet reasonableness of the Commentaries cannot disguise the fact” that Caesar started the wars “chiefly for his personal glory and profit.” Badian’s choice of words often startles, and “sweet reasonableness” is high on that list. But as so often, there is an ancient and modern echo in that formula, intertextuality to some, but really the literary culture of a humanist.

The phrase is frequent enough in clerical, mostly protestant, sermons and writings. It is of a relatively recent

15 C. Meier, Caesar (Berlin 1982). English translation: Caesar. A Biography (New York 1996). The translation by D. McLintock is generally accurate and reliable, but it does not reproduce the verbal exuberance of the original. Badian castigates Meier for getting “intoxicated with his words” (Gn 36); Meier’s book is a Romance of Caesar not a History of Caesar. A retort did come. The 1996 reprint of Caesar contains a translation of Meier’s “Afterword to the Third German Paperback Edition” (pp. 496-97). Meier records his “gratitude” to Badian for pointing out “some omissions,” which not unexpectedly turn out to be quite paltry, and Badian’s cavilla-tions jejune. Badian is generously introduced as “one of the greatest proso-pographical experts on the late republic,” a jewel of damning praise: it corners Badian as a narrow specialist, and clears the stage for Caesar’s true Historian.


coinage. It sounds poetic. The inventor was Matthew Arnold (who, we might remember, had previously been a professor of poetry at Oxford). It purports to translate the Greek words and concepts in the New Testament, ἐπιεικής and ἐπιείκεια which had traditionally been rendered, and still are, as ‘gentle,’ ‘fair,’ ‘equitable,’ or as ‘forbearance’ and ‘moderation.’16 ‘Sweet” has a much more archaic pedigree. Who can forget Caesar’s Shakespearean soliloquy, Caesar haughtily comparing himself to the fixed northern star that will not be moved by “sweet words,” or Antony’s presentation to the people of “sweet Caesar’s wounds” which are more eloquent than his own words could ever be.17

If we substitute for the mildly old-fashioned ‘sweet’ the more palatable ‘charming’ or ‘pleasing,’ we will arrive at the testimony of Cicero, fawning in his letters to Quintus (3.1.17=SB 21) and Atticus, and rather more sincere in his treatise on the orators. In 54, in a letter to his brother, Cicero describes Caesar’s dispatch he had just received from Gaul as ‘suavissimae litterae,’ and writing to Atticus he extols his personal association with Caesar as ‘suavissima coniunctio’ (4.19.2=SB 93), memorably rendered by Shackleton Bailey as “my delectable rapprochement with Caesar.” Several years later, in the Brutus (262), he so characterized the Commentarii: they are “straight and charming,” recti et venusti; and they demonstrate that “in history there is nothing more pleasing than brevity clear and bright”—“nihil est enim in historia pura et illustri brevitate dulcius.”

16 See the entry on ἐπιεικής and ἐπιείκεια by H. Preisker in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament 2 (Stuttgart 1935) 585-87. English trans-lation by G.W. Bromiley: Theological Dictionary of the New Testament 2 (Grand Rapids 1964) 588-90.

17 Julius Caesar, lines 42, 60-62, 230-31.18 M. Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism 2 (London 1870) XVIII-XIX. For Arnold

mildness and sweet reasonableness was the core message of the Gospels.

J.linderski, Ink and Blood. Ernst Badian, Rome, And the Art of History 2013

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