ByzReview: Theophylact Simocatta, and Maurice's 'Strategikon'

I have already covered the majority of the ‘Classicizing’ historians of 6^th century Byzantium in previous reviews – Procopius, Agathias, Menander the Guardsman, and now we can finish off with the last example: Theophylact Simocatta. The dramatic events that surround the reign of the emperor Maurice (582-602) are of crucial importance to Byzantine and world history, and it is these events for which Theophylact Simocatta is one of our best sources.

                When the emperor Tiberius II Constantine died, he bequeathed  rule of the empire to his son-in-law Maurice, along with the ongoing border disputes with every one of the Romans’ neighbours – especially the Persians to the east and the Avars to the north. The narrative of Theophylact’s history is built entirely around Maurice, beginning with his accession and then recounting the various wars until Maurice is brutally overthrown and murdered by the man who would succeed him, the notorious emperor Phocas (602-610). As far as historical narratives go, Theophylact seems especially committed to this one era, and reads more like the story of one emperor than Procopius, Agathias or Menander ever did. Whereas the earlier historians concerned themselves almost solely with foreign policy issues, Theophylact holds Maurice as a central character to his narrative, beginning and ending with this man and ensuring that this history is nothing less than the story of Maurice.

Maurice's empire

                The history is divided into eight books, taking the narrative in a fairly logical direction and offering some rather interesting stories. One of the stories which most dominates the narrative is the conclusion to the Persian war, which had been raging for a decade before Maurice inherited the throne. After several years of inconclusive action, the war takes a dramatic turn when a revolution erupts against the rule of the Persian king Hormisdas (Hormizd IV – 579-590). Hormisdas is finally overthrown by a palace coup in favour of his son Chosroes (Khosrow II), who subsequently has to escape the capital as the rebel army bears down on it. Fleeing into exile, Chosroes makes his way to his ostensible enemies, the Romans, where he asks Maurice to help him regain his throne in exchange for peace and territorial concessions. Chosroes, with Roman help, is once again put in charge of the Persian empire, beginning a new era of peace between Rome and Persia and allowing Maurice to try to tackle the encroaching Avar people in the north.

                The tragedy of Maurice’s reign is its brutal end, and the subsequent undoing of all his diplomatic successes with Persia which would ultimately bring about the downfall of both empires. Maurice was not the savviest of emperors, and his mismanagement of the army caused a full-blown military rebellion against him. With the capital revolting and his army now following a general called Phocas, Maurice does what Justinian nearly did seventy years beforehand – he fled the capital for his life, handing over the empire to his enemies. In essence it was the same problem that Chosroes had had about a decade earlier, and like Chosroes Maurice tried to enlist help from the other empire in order to regain his throne. It would have been good for him to cash in on the favour owed to him, but sadly Phocas’ supporters found him first, and butchered the former-emperor and his entire family.

                The emperor Phocas’ bloody rise to power was a disaster for the Romans, and every account of the period casts him as one of the most dreadful villains ever to rule the empire. It was not simply that Maurice was the first Roman emperor to die a violent death in generations, but added to this was the fact it gave the Persian king Chosroes the excuse he needed to get even with the Romans. The subsequent twenty-five year war, waged by the Persians under the pretext of restoring Maurice’s family to power, marked the climax of the longstanding hostile Roman-Persian relations, and would almost result in the final defeat of the Romans. Occasionally we get references within the text to this war and its associated horrors, though the narrative never takes us beyond the beginning of Phocas’ reign. In essence then it is a history of a great disaster, explaining the war of the first quarter of the 7^th century in terms of the good emperor Maurice being overthrown. The Byzantines did occasionally write their histories for this reason – to recount the events of the recent past in order to explain the misery of the current age. The previous historians of the 6^th century – Procopius and his continuators – were simply recounting past events, but Theophylact seems to be telling a proper story.

                I can honestly say that the history of Theophylact Simocatta is a worthwhile and interesting piece of history and (dare I say it), even an enjoyable one. Like his predecessors he does spend a lot of time describing tedious campaigns and battles, but his devotion to a central narrative, to the life, character and reign of the emperor Maurice, and the inclusion of the interesting and important regime change in Persia all make this is a most accessible and fascinating text. The style of the Greek original is said to be awkward and difficult to read, but the translation is one of the more readable I have encountered. Theophylact marks the end of the ‘Classicizing’ historians of the 6^th century, and with the monumental upheavals of the reign of Heraclius which lead us conveniently into the so-called ‘Byzantine Dark Age’, we can wave good-bye to antiquity for good.

                As a rough addendum, we can take this moment to consider another important text associated with Maurice: the Strategikon. A military handbook composed in the late 6^th century and divided into twelve sections of wildly differing length, the Strategikon is considered to be the work of the future emperor Maurice from his days as a general. Whether or not he was the one who actually wrote, dictated or ordered this text to be produced is not an especially important issue; many of the manuscripts bear his name, the text perfectly describes the ideal composition of the Late-Roman army at the end of the 6^th century and, as Maurice was an experienced military commander, he fits the bill as the most likely author of the Strategikon.

                This book is probably the best starting-point for anybody who wishes to understand the Byzantine-Roman army. Maurice knows his audience, and he describes as clearly and as logically as possible everything the Byzantine commander needs to know about the forces at his disposal. Right at the beginning Maurice explains the basics: the different ranks of officer, the different sizes of division of the army, the armaments and equipment of the troops and, most significantly, the importance of mounted troops; cavalry! The infantry legions of the old Republic are a thing of the ancient past by the time of Justinian and his successors, and centuries of fighting alongside and against mounted nomadic peoples must have taught the Romans the value of horseback soldiers equipped as archers. As Maurice tells us, the troops should be equipped in the manner of the Avars (the nation who occupied the lands north of Byzantium), using Avar-style tents and carrying all their equipment on their horses, including a suitable amount of arrows for ammunition. Next come the many tactics and drills the troops must perform, in order to ready them against any possible foe they could face – and probably will face, considering the number of nations who share the empire’s borders. As it happens, the Strategikon does contain sections on the tactics and style of warfare of other peoples, including the Persians and Avars, which though loaded with prejudice about these peoples can be of use for anybody seeking to learn more about these peoples. Personally I see them as little more than Byzantine-Roman prejudices against foreign nations, perhaps touched with bitter memories of past experiences with said peoples.

                The baggage train is an important feature in the Strategikon, and Maurice keeps driving home an important message: Keep your Baggage Train Safe. Obviously, if you want to keep your army supplied and happy then you must keep their supplies, provisions and property behind your army, keep an eye on them, and make sure the enemy don’t get to it. Another feature of the advanced tactics on show in this new Roman army are the depotatoi, or medical corpsmen, who ride behind the line in order to pick up wounded or unhorsed men. The Byzantine acknowledgement of the value of individual soldiers is on show here, and for good reason. Later-Roman troops underwent a lot of training, and any who could be prevented from being trampled by the second line is time and money saved as far as the treasury is concerned. But one of the best features of this book is that it has the most wonderful diagrams! It can be a tad difficult to visualise how an army should look if you’re only reading about it, and the Strategikon tries to get round this by showing the composition of the army visually; arranging symbols representing different troop-types into formations in order to show what your army should look like from up above. They can be a bit bewildering, these diagrams, but they are amazing and beautiful nonetheless.

                I believe this concludes the subject of the emperor Maurice, his historian and his own military treatise. If you’re keen on military history, read the Strategikon even if you have no real interest in late Roman or Byzantine history. It’s more interesting than the Art of War, at any rate.  Theophylact Simocatta and the Strategikon are incredible sources, and the life and times of Maurice are well worth acquainting yourselves with.

Bibliozantium 6

Theophylactus Simocatta and Genesius. Theophylacti Simmocattae Historiarum Libri Octo. I. Bekker (ed). Bonn. [Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae], 46, (1834).

Theophylact Simocatta. The History of Theophylact Simocatta – An English Translation with Introduction and Notes. Translated by M. Whitby and M. Whitby. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1986).

Maurice. Mauricii Strategicon. G.T. Dennis (ed). German translation by E. Gamillscheg. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. [Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae], 17, (1981).

Maurice. Maurice’s Strategikon – Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy. Translated by G.T. Dennis. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. (1984).

               

[A Brief Gnote: The first entry in this bibliograph is, as always, the CSHB Bonn edition of the original Greek. The funny thing about these Bonn editions is that they sometimes compile several different Byzantine writers into the same edition. Along with the work of Theophylact Simocatta, the Bonn edition of his work also includes the shorter history of the 9^th century by a certain Genesios. How they decided to include these two very different histories together in the same edition is mystifying. The second title on this list is a straight up English translation of Theophylact. As this is the version I read, and the only one that seems to be available, I recommend it to the casual or new reader. In terms of the Strategikon, the best properly edited text is the CFHB version which includes a facing-page translation into German, but a separate English translation by the original editor, George T. Dennis, has been produced – and this would be the best and most easily accessible version available to both casual reader and scholar alike].

The Tragic History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe

This is the first play I have reviewed here. It had to happen eventually, and I suppose I could not have chosen a better start than with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a tale of poor life choices and what not to do when offered a deal by the devil.

          The historical ‘Johann Faust’ is a creature of popular legend, a figure of Early-Modern Germany who consorted in trickery, alchemy, and darker arts than that. Such a reputation he gained (assuming, of course, that he was ever a single figure to start with, and not just a concoction of different personalities and folk tales given life under the name ‘Faust’), that written stories of him began to circulate in the later 16^th century, which almost certainly inspired Christopher Marlowe in his writing of the Doctor Faustus play. The other most famous work based on the legendary Faustus is Goethe’s Faust, which was written in the late 18^th/early 19^th century, but that shall not be considered here.

          The story of Marlowe’s work can basically be summed up with the maxim “Pride Comes Before the Fall”, as the play opens with a certain reckless scholar by the name of Faustus decides to summon himself a demon, bargaining away his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of unbridled power on Earth, in which the demon Mephostophilis will carry out his every whim. Going out with his newfound abilities, and fully aware of the price he will have to pay, what does Faustus actually do? He meddles in European politics, plays tricks on people, becomes a petty snake-oil salesman, and tries to impress his scholarly friends by offering them glimpses of Helen of Troy. Two extended sequences involve his tampering between the Pope of the Catholic Church and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, although in the latter of these scenes it mostly involves the emperor’s three cronies trying to do away with the mad Doctor. Eventually, after both pissing off and amazing most of Germany, Doctor Faustus’ twenty-four years run out and Mephostophilis returns to claim his dues.

          Right then, first thing to note is that this thing is a play. That means, if you’re reading this thing as opposed to watching it staged, then you get dialogue and pretty much that. The novel as we know it is a fairly recent innovation, and the stuff that goes into bulking out a modern story – the descriptions, the moments of silence, the flourish of writing – all tends to go into making a story much thicker than it could actually be. When all of that is stripped out, and only dialogue remains then a story can actually be quite short. A play which runs for a couple of hours takes up barely a hundred pages in actual text, so reading one is potentially less arduous than taking up a novel. That said, the leaner reading material might not be to everybody’s taste – it’s certainly not to mine. Oh, I enjoyed Doctor Faustus, but I find novels often more enjoyable to deal with. One tactic for plays, however, is to read them out loud, as they are rightfully meant to be. Better yet, force somebody else to join in reading it with you and therefore take advantage of a play’s dialogical nature. They are written to be performed out-loud after all, unlike novels,* and so giving a play this sort of treatment might be the best way to appreciate it.

          Of interesting characters we have a grand host of them, from a pope and an emperor, to Faustus’ dogsbody Wagner (no, not Richard Wagner the 19^th century composer). There are a couple of chaps called Robin and Dick, who are supposedly in the story to provide comic relief – though I found them a bit annoying myself – as well as a whole host of other characters who serve mostly to give Faustus somebody to play cruel tricks on. The central characters however are Faustus himself, whose tendency to slip into Latin during his opening soliloquy can be frustrating, and his demonic buddy Mephostophilis. This demon is a most interesting chap, giving Faustus all due warning of the price that will have to be paid for his servitude, yet Faustus ignores this advice and goes ahead with the whole thing anyway. While Mephostophilis is the main demonic character, one whose main function is to carry out Faustus’ command and cause havoc when he orders it, we also get Lucifer the Devil himself make a couple of appearances along with a couple of other demons, and all seven of the Deadly Sins!

          Last thing to mention, something that I’m really finding an interesting overarching point in my life at the moment, is the painful yet delightful concept of ‘editions’. There are only two copies of the text of Doctor Faustus that have survived to the modern era, and though both are from approximately the same time, there are significant differences between the two. These two versions of the play, known helpfully as ‘A’ Text and ‘B’ Text, are both very clearly the same play but bear considerable differences in terms of language and length. B Text is considerably longer than its counterpart, with many additional lines and a number of alterations and omissions from A Text, while A Text is leaner and bears language which could be construed as of a more blasphemous nature. Scholars have debated over the relationship of these two texts for many many decades, and so I will avoid joining in on something I know very little about. All I can say is that no matter which one you personally consider to be more authoritative or closer to Christopher Marlowe’s hypothetical original text, there are two different texts out there and this will affect your choice of readings. The edition I made use of used the longer B Text as a basis, amending it with readings from A Text when the editor felt that was appropriate. If you want to avoid reading the same play twice and playing ‘spot the difference’ between the two texts, then this is probably the best approach.

          So there you go. Doctor Faustus is an entertaining and memorable little gem of 16^th century playwriting, and is well worth a read. Otherwise it is a good and nice little way into the modern legend of Doctor Faust, a fascinating character who may possibly have caused a bit of havoc, and whose selling of his own soul to the Devil counts as one of the stupidest life-choices ever made.

* Although there is something to be said for reading novels out loud. Had I enough breath in my body, I would certainly like to try this with all books. A funny thing to consider that several centuries ago, it was a highly unusual ability for people to be able to read in their heads, while nowadays just about everybody can do this. Isn’t the world a funny old place?

The Tragicall Bibliographie of the Life and Death of One Man’s Reading Affliction  

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Edited by Sylvan Barnet. New American Library: New York. (1969 [Originally premiered c.1592])

The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White

T.H. White’s rather eclectic novelisation of the childhood adventures of King Arthur is one of the more curious books you could ever read. A mishmash of Arthurian legend, fantasy, comedy and sweaty-palmed Medieval fanboy tomfoolery, there are many things about this story that almost don’t work. The tone, the setting, the story; none of it should rightfully hold together. Yet somehow, against all the logic of publishing, this novel manages to exist and better than that, tells a memorable and fairly decent story.

          We are quickly introduced to our protagonists, a young boy with who goes by the lovely nickname of the Wart, and his adoptive brother Kay. The landscape is unambiguously Medieval, taking place in a castle in the middle of the forest, where its lord Sir Ector – the Wart’s foster-father – needs to find a tutor for the two boys. Thanks to a mishap by Kay and the Wart, a tutor is found in the form of the master-magician Merlyn, who happily accompanies the Wart back to the castle and begins to oversee his education. Having a wizard as a mentor proves to be more interesting than expected, as Merlyn teaches his pupil by transforming him into one animal or another to teach him valuable life lessons; a fish, a hawk, an owl, a badger, and other things besides. Other adventures include witnessing the duel between two silly knights, a rescue-mission in the forest alongside Robin Hood, and a Christmastime boar hunt.

Apparently this is T.H. White

          Overall the story, though a tad episodic, is told entertainingly and with added medieval gusto. The characters each bring something unique to the table, be it Wart’s mildly-tense relationship with his foster-brother Kay, or Merlyn’s eccentricity or the wonderful bumbling character of King Pellinore, and the book’s rather comic nature keeps it fun throughout. It is an odd beast, made odder by the slightly confused setting. The Arthurian legend was born of the so-called Dark Ages of post-Roman Britain, and while the many legends and adaptations involving this story quite rightly put it in a generally non-specific medieval setting, T.H. White’s version is a little more confusing than most. There is no definite placing of the story in terms of period, while events, places and concepts that have no place in the Arthurian canon are dotted all over the place. Eton College (est. 1440) and the Battle of Crecy (part of the Hundred Years’ War, 1337-1453) are both mentioned in dialogue, while Robin Hood and every single one of his Merry Men (including Friar Tuck) play a rather significant role in the story, despite Robin Hood being associated with the reign of Richard I at the end of the 12^th Century. Even Uther Pendragon, legendary king of Birtain and Arthur’s unknown father, is given no real place in time, an offhanded reference from Pellinore assigning him the vague dates of ‘1066 to 1216’ [Once and Future King 1996 edition, pg. 207]. It’s as though the entire English Middle Ages had been poured into a bowl, and T.H. White has helped himself to any aspect of it that pleases him.

          Fortunately this queer displacement in time is nicely explained in one edition of the novel. At the beginning of the story Sir Ector and Sir Grummore sit discussing Eton college over a bottle of Port, the writer helpfully adding:

‘It was not really Eton that he mentioned, for the College of the Blessed Mary was not founded until 1440, but it was a place of the same sort. Also they were drinking Metheglyn, not Port, but by mentioning the modern wine it is easier to give you the feel.’ [Once and Future King 1996 edition, pg. 4].

This is a helpful justification by the writer, and explains away most of the anachronistic nature of the book (while the backwards nature of Merlyn’s existence provides a rather more comedic excuse for everything that particular character says and does). This short paragraph we’re on, however, brings up one of the stranger issues that I have with this book. One I have never properly encountered before in a work of fiction. The fact that this explanatory passage appears in one of two different editions that are still in circulation.

This is the edition I read. The cover's quite nice

          T.H. White published his original novel about Arthur’s childhood, The Sword in the Stone, in 1938. Having spent the following years writing about subsequent events and refining his concept, he then published the large 4-part epic The Once and Future King in 1958, of which the Sword in the Stone formed the first part. He must have spent some twenty years tweaking the ideas since he originally published his earlier book, for the version of the story from The Once and Future King has numerous differences from its predecessor, including – but by no means limited to – the aforementioned passage explaining away the oddly anachronistic setting. Whole chapters have been changed, events and story-arcs which appeared in the 1938 edition have been removed and replaced, and subtle alterations in narration and dialogue creep in all over the place. Chapters 11 and 12, for instance, in which the Wart and Kay join forces with Robin Hood to mount a rescue operation, are markedly different in each edition. In 1938 they have to ambush a swarm of grotesque man-eating creatures called Anthropophagi and slaughter every last one of them. In 1958 they must instead break into Castle Chariot and confront Morgan le Fay and her pet Griffin. In both cases they have to rescue the same prisoners.

Other chapters have not just been edited, but were completely rewritten. Whereas in the earlier edition the Wart has adventures in which he is transformed into a grass snake, meets the goddess Athena, and enters a giant’s stronghold to rescue King Pellinore, these sections have been entirely done away with during the book’s incorporation into The Once and Future King. They are instead replaced with a dystopian chapter as an ant, and an extended sequence where the Wart pisses around as a goose. The thing is, that these differences in the writing are not just part of a fascinating curio left over from an earlier edition of the story. It’s not just a stage on the road of publication towards the book we all know and love. Both versions of The Sword in the Stone are still being reprinted and published, the one from 1938, and the version that’s part of The Once and Future King, and it means that you kind of have to know which one you’re reading before you read it.

The Disney movie (1963). Watch it; it's quite all right.

So this raises the issue of how much control an author has over their own work. There is a significant casualty from T.H. White’s re-editing process, one who might upset fans of the 1963 Disney movie based on The Sword in the Stone: the cannibalistic witch Madam Mim. This sequence forms a substantial part of chapter 6, involving Wart and Kay losing an arrow, and in the process of retrieving it from an isolated cottage in the woods they end up captured by the evil witch Madam Mim, locked away in oversized rabbit-hutches, only to be rescued by Merlin who defeats the witch in a duel. In The Once and Future King however chapter 6 is truncated at the moment the boys lose their arrow, and Madam Mim makes no appearance in the book. T.H. White had clearly decided by 1958 that she was extraneous to the tale he wanted to tell, essentially subjecting the poor cannibal to a damnatio memoriae. If we accept the author’s later version as the ‘correct’ and final edition of the story, then it would mean losing Mim, it would mean losing a boring chapter about a snake, and it would mean having Morgan le Fay rather than a worrying and potentially xenophobic slaughter of some creatures whose species is nearly unpronounceable.

This is a goose, like the one what Wart is turned into

By this point I feel lost and confused myself. The fact of the matter is that a text is not entirely ‘locked’ or ‘static’, and should a living writer wish to come in at a stage post-publication and alter a work to reflect changed circumstances or opinions, or if they felt the original did not accurately reflect their intentions at the time, then we as readers might have to wrestle with that most dangerous concept – *authorial intent*. Or perhaps not, because do we really have to give a damn what the author wanted? When it comes to things like The Hobbit, Tolkien’s revision of the character of Gollum to bring the book more into line with its sequel The Lord of the Rings is now unanimously accepted as the standard work, and it would be unusual to find a re-print of an earlier edition lying around or on sale at your local Waterstones. With The Sword in the Stone however the matter is completely different. The previous edition, before T.H. White’s revisions, is still very much in circulation, and as this is the one which the Disney movie is based on I daresay it is probably just as well known as the 1958 version – if not more so.

As this review has already rambled on for quite a while it would be foolish for me to tackle the remaining parts of The Once and Future King, and so I will not delve any further into it at this time and just stick with my review of The Sword in the Stone. If I had to pick a preference between the two editions then it would probably be The Once and Future King version, because I like having Morgan le Fay instead of those most-questionable Anthropophagi, and I don’t think the loss of an ant chapter for one on snakes and evolutionary biology is really much of a trade-off. I do miss Madam Mim, however, as that is a relatively good scene and chapter 6 is fairly pointless without it.

All in all though, the novel holds together thanks to its own merits. It is a shameless love-letter to an idealised Medieval England, populated by fine characters and wacky sorcery, lost in its own anachronistically cobbled-together setting and occasionally displaying some of the most beautiful writing you might ever read. Seriously, at odd moments I could be convinced I had before me one of the greatest books ever written, but sadly T.H. White cannot keep up such a high standard of writing for the entire length of the novel. Certain episodes in the story are memorable and glorious, such as the boar-hunt, while a few are tedious and tend to dull one’s enthusiasm. Some of the animal chapters, for instance. The ‘sword in the stone’ scene itself, that quintessential Arthurian moment, is actually quite good, for it proves a satisfying finale for the whole affair and gives the book its absolute justification for being the way it is. Again, T.H. White could really put his words together when he set his mind to it. 

I will read the remainder of The Once and Future King in at a later date, assuming the assassins do not get me before then, but for now The Sword in the Stone has been dealt with. It is rather unique a work of art, and is well worth a read if only because it is such a strange literary concoction.

Bibliostone

White, T.H. The Sword in the Stone. Fontana Lions: London. (1971 [First published 1938])

White, T.H. The Once and Future King – The Complete Edition. HarperCollins: London. (1996 [First published 1958])