Imagine getting a job recommendation for a seemingly qualified candidate where 60 percent of the letter is devoted to how little the referring party knows about the candidate and, further, those who said they did know him were probably bullshitting. In fact, those bullshitters weren't all that good at their jobs. Interested?
An unlikely proposition, but as James Harold Edward Crees - Cambridge classics professor, winner of academic prizes - demonstrates with his Reign of the Emperor Probus, not an impossible one.
A bit of background. The Roman Empire - of which Probus was one of 70 bosses, give or take - had periods that are extraordinarily well-documented, while others are far less so. Why this is would take a book to explain, but for our purposes it merely needs to be asserted that very little is known of what Crees attempted to memorialize. What he had to work with are coverage of his subject by a half-dozen ancient historians plus evidence from coins as well as inscriptions on tablets and buildings and the like. That's it.
Undaunted, Crees decided to write a biography of the Third-century A.D. emperor, who ruled Rome with some success for six years before he was fragged by his troops for reasons not entirely clear. Crees managed to squeeze out 158 pages, almost ex nihilo, in the University of London Press edition of 1907, which has somehow managed to remain in print.
How does he do it? By devoting 60 percent of the biography to how fucked he is for trying because ancient historians have left him fuck all to work with. And by the way, they sucked at their jobs.
"He who attempts to investigate the reign of Probus must often feel that he is attempting to make bricks without straw," Crees writes in his concluding chapter. "The mist which hangs over the predecessors of Diocletian is one which even the strongest historical searchlight cannot penetrate." (He appends another metaphor to this, no doubt to help reach his contractual word count.)
And how bad are the ancient historians? Of his principal source, the fourth-century co-author of The Augustan History, he writes, "His faults are obvious and manifold.
"A magnificent disdain of detail or chronology, a deep-seated mendaciousness, which prompts him to fabricate confirmations of his statements, a penchant for rhetorical platitude, an elaborate parade of historical principles, without historical insight or an historical conscience, a series of irritating mannerisms, a volubility which 'never deviates into sense,' would make him an ideal hero for an historical Dunciad*.
"The scraps of information which he vouchsafes are told to us incidentally, for never for one moment can he keep to the point. He fabricates and forgets, he quotes his grandfather and his friends, and the senseless causerie does not cease till the subject and the reader are exhausted. Yet, though it is both a crime and a blunder to write a bad book, admitting to the full the heinousness of Vopiscus's offence, and not seeking to extenuate that verbosity, which is at once his pride and his undoing, one may feel that the worst historian on record has undergone a sufficiently severe punishment, and might now be consigned to merciful oblivion."
Even through the oceans of time, that's got to hurt!
It's hardly the lone swipe at Vopiscus; there's as much, if not more, material on him than there is on Probus. (Crees finds the Greek historian Zosimus more reliable, though the big Z doesn't spend much time on Probus and is dicey on geography, to boot.)
Another huge chunk of the book is devoted to Crees's high-level summary of the various opinions contemporary British, French, Italian, and German classicists have about Vopiscus and his Augustan History co-authors, which run the gamut from "bad but we can work with them" to "bad." As many would imagine, this epistemological tour is chockablock with gentlemanly swipes at the faults of these historians - their prejudices (often ethnically based, though not based against ethnicity; more along the lines of "here's the problem with the school of thought in Germany"), their analyses, their styles, their conclusions.
A table-setting worthy of Versailles is placed before we get to our boy, Probus. And here's what's given, in no particular order save the bookends of accession and death since the sources are so contradictory they don't agree on chronology:
(Probus, in the Capitoline Museum in Rome)
o Acceded to the throne in around 275 A.D. at the urging of his troops while somewhere "in the East," which was an invitation that would've resulted in his death had he declined.
o Put down usurpers: Saturninus (a fully-Romanized Moor or Gaul), Proculus (a Germanic barbarian, "rarely has even a tyrant possessed fewer qualifications for ruling"), and Bosonus (a resident of what is now Spain, born of a British father and a Gallic mother, "his capacity [he was called the barrel] was that he could [drink] any barbarian under the table, and thus he was useful in winning valuable secrets from them").
o Straightened out rebels and raiders in Gaul (modern France), Illyria (the western Balkans), Isauria (south-central Turkish highlands), and Egypt, where he defeated the Ethiopia-based Blenyes.
o Initiated governmental reforms, which remain somewhat mysterious.
o Said to have permitted Gaul to plant grapevines for winemaking, though it's probably truer to say he permitted viniculture further north beyond its traditional locations around Arles in southern Gaul.
o Planned to invade Persia, but was murdered by his troops for reasons that aren't clear. (Either they thought him a martinet or they opposed his plans for reducing the number of legions, which would put a lot of people out of their fairly lucrative jobs.)
That's about it. The narrative is so thin Crees is able to put it in charts; his prose is supplemented with speculation and squaring circles such as the order of events. He's also not averse to the wry observation; e.g., "when a general conquers a province without striking a blow, we may reasonably doubt whether that province had ever been really lost." The summary is all any but the most astute reader could take from Crees's pages on Probus.
Since much of The Reign of the Emperor Probus is conjecture, however informed it may be, allow me to offer up two reasons why someone would write a book that doesn't have sufficient information on a subject to fill its pages.
First is my "I done fucked up" theory. Crees may have entered the project thinking he had enough for a book, but after looking at what he had in its entirety realized there was not enough there there. His solution - a deconstruction of his sources, including suppositions about their motives and an analysis of what in the Third or Fourth century constituted a proper approach to writing history - is certainly forward-looking. Take that, Michel Foucault!
(A modern version of this, I suspect, is David Henry & Joe Henry's Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him, which reads as a project that started as a straight biography until circumstances or the limitations imposed by money advanced by the publisher forced them to turn it into an essay on Pryor "and the world that made him" which also happens to be adorned with biographical information.)
Second, which may be argued is a version of the first, is Crees was a pedant more than a biographer. Perhaps because of their more tangible nature, Crees is more passionate about explicating the problems with sourcing and how ancient historians tackled them; thus, the 60 percent devoted to this. Probus just happened to be the right vehicle for such a project, one that is more epistemological than historical. Maybe he formulated the book cynically, thinking people aren't interested in the issues early 20th century classicists faced, but they may be interested in an emperor who presaged the Roman Empire getting its shit together after a near-century of civil war.
(The modern analogy would be Nick Tosches's King of the Jews, an almost unreadable, book length essay on the gangster Arnold Rothstein. Nothing about its outward presentation indicates it's anything but a biography, but you'll find scant information about its subject within. It does have a couple of ancient Roman metaphors running throughout**.)
Either way, 19th and early-20th century classicists weren't in medias res types to begin with, so Crees wasn't that far out on a limb. J.B. Bury spends oceans of ink setting up his sprawling histories of late antiquity - page after page of quaestors did this and Roman law said that - while even earlier figures like Gibbon felt the need to catch the reader up on several centuries' worth of events before tackling Rome's decline and fall. It's how it was done.
But I do not mind our modern way of writing history, where the background is painted swiftly and we get to the heart of things in short order.
*Dunciad is a satirical poem by Alexander Pope which describes godlike agents who bring decline to Great Britain.
**In fairness to the Henrys and Tosches, it's been years since I've read their books, but I don't think time has clouded my overall judgement.
Modern reprint of The Reign of the Emperor Probus
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