Volume 8, Number 9 · May 18, 1967
UnRoman Activities
By M.I. Finley
The Mask of Jove
by Stringfellow Barr
Lippincott, 598 pp., $15.00
Enemies of the Roman Order
by Ramsay MacMullen
Harvard, 370 pp., $7.95
After The Will of Zeus, The Mask of Jove, a 'history of Graeco-Roman civilization from the death of Alexander to the death of Constantine'—'a narrative,' says Stringfellow Barr, 'not an argument, a drama in which I have again allowed the actors to tell the story in their own words whenever available documents permitted.' Some translation is required. I shan't quibble over the equation, narrative=drama, but the reader must not expect documents in the sense in which the historian and the layman both customarily employ that world. Mr. Barr's method is to quote extensively from Greek and Roman historians, poets, orators, and philosophers, and from early Christian writers, but almost never from laws, decrees, treaties, epitaphs, or private letters, and they are available in much greater number than the unsuspecting reader might imagine. But then, 'available' also has to be translated: 'whenever a quotation suits my purposes.' The result, in the nature of the case, is that the actors almost never tell the story in their own words, except when the actors are themselves historians, poets, orators, philosophers, or Church fathers.
Review, 1894 words
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