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Aug. 14th, 2008 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ricardienneSo I have a stomach bug today, and I feel crummy. I should go to bed, but I don't want to go to bed.
Read most of Catilina's Riddle (Steven Sayler); today, while moping around. About 30 pages from the end, I got frustrated by the twistyness (SPOILERS?) of the MC's theories, by which Cicero was actually machinating everything, and using his spies to plant and instigate all of illegal activity/apparent illegal activity among the so-called conspirators, which, okay, is not that implausible, because doen't the FBI do that now, sometimes, but anyway, I skipped and read the author's note at the end, and and found my suspicions confirmed, because "I am not trying to rehabilitate Cataline like Josephine Tey and Richard III, but OMG ALL THE SOURCES ARE TOTALLY BIASED."
Which is true, except that Sallust was an enemy of Cicero, so you do have at least two sources which would be inimical to each-other agreeing.
(Also, I am not in a good position to judge how plausible all of this convolution is, partly because I am sick, partly because what I remember about Cicero's version is "quouseque abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra" and the bit about Catiline's followers being the types to dance naked at parties, and the post-conspiracy debate between Cato and Caesar from Sallust. Although I think that A Slave of Catiline had more or less the outline, except for the bizarre bit with Cicero handing off the mantle of future rescue of the res p. to Caesar at the end.)
Um. So the point of this post, I think, was to wonder about how someone with the username "ricardienne" can get annoyed by historical conspiracy theories. It's true that I no longer either 1) care so much about Richard III's innocence as I did in, say, 8th grade, or (shall I be honest here?) high school, or 2) think that he was TEH EPITOME OF INNOCENCE (although maybe he was a moderately decent person who tried to do some kind of right thing most of the time, and didn't necessarily murder his nephews). Seriously, there was a point when I used to lie awake at night getting angsty with doubt about R3's True Character.
I also like Cicero, and I think he gets bashed a bit unfairly. Just because he was a lawyer and a politician, and ambitious and vain and left an immense body of writing to document it all... but then, all that writing survived because he was a freaking brilliant writer and intellectual and orator, too. (Why don't people ever mock Caesar, hmm? He doesn't even get a bad rap in Asterix, for crying out loud?). So if feels like a cheap shot to say "oh, Cataline: probably innocent, because, after, all it's Cicero who's going on about it, and we all know what his agenda was like."
Even though that's PRETTY MUCH THE SAME ARGUMENT that gets used in defense of R3. So maybe I'm just encountering this later in life, when I have, *sigh*, grown more *conservative* and don't want to start anything too *radical* within the historical canon.
Whatever. Maybe I will finish the novel: I kind of what to find out where the headless bodies were coming from. Also whether there will be a giant family feud over Cicero vs. Catiline.
Read most of Catilina's Riddle (Steven Sayler); today, while moping around. About 30 pages from the end, I got frustrated by the twistyness (SPOILERS?) of the MC's theories, by which Cicero was actually machinating everything, and using his spies to plant and instigate all of illegal activity/apparent illegal activity among the so-called conspirators, which, okay, is not that implausible, because doen't the FBI do that now, sometimes, but anyway, I skipped and read the author's note at the end, and and found my suspicions confirmed, because "I am not trying to rehabilitate Cataline like Josephine Tey and Richard III, but OMG ALL THE SOURCES ARE TOTALLY BIASED."
Which is true, except that Sallust was an enemy of Cicero, so you do have at least two sources which would be inimical to each-other agreeing.
(Also, I am not in a good position to judge how plausible all of this convolution is, partly because I am sick, partly because what I remember about Cicero's version is "quouseque abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra" and the bit about Catiline's followers being the types to dance naked at parties, and the post-conspiracy debate between Cato and Caesar from Sallust. Although I think that A Slave of Catiline had more or less the outline, except for the bizarre bit with Cicero handing off the mantle of future rescue of the res p. to Caesar at the end.)
Um. So the point of this post, I think, was to wonder about how someone with the username "ricardienne" can get annoyed by historical conspiracy theories. It's true that I no longer either 1) care so much about Richard III's innocence as I did in, say, 8th grade, or (shall I be honest here?) high school, or 2) think that he was TEH EPITOME OF INNOCENCE (although maybe he was a moderately decent person who tried to do some kind of right thing most of the time, and didn't necessarily murder his nephews). Seriously, there was a point when I used to lie awake at night getting angsty with doubt about R3's True Character.
I also like Cicero, and I think he gets bashed a bit unfairly. Just because he was a lawyer and a politician, and ambitious and vain and left an immense body of writing to document it all... but then, all that writing survived because he was a freaking brilliant writer and intellectual and orator, too. (Why don't people ever mock Caesar, hmm? He doesn't even get a bad rap in Asterix, for crying out loud?). So if feels like a cheap shot to say "oh, Cataline: probably innocent, because, after, all it's Cicero who's going on about it, and we all know what his agenda was like."
Even though that's PRETTY MUCH THE SAME ARGUMENT that gets used in defense of R3. So maybe I'm just encountering this later in life, when I have, *sigh*, grown more *conservative* and don't want to start anything too *radical* within the historical canon.
Whatever. Maybe I will finish the novel: I kind of what to find out where the headless bodies were coming from. Also whether there will be a giant family feud over Cicero vs. Catiline.
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Date: 2008-08-15 02:10 am (UTC)God, I could have written that paragraph, though it was mostly year 11-12 for me, and it might be accurately said that I had a massive crush on the poor man, which was only fueled by the need to write a 5,000 word extended essay for the IB on the Titulus Regius and whether Eleanor Talbot really was married to Edward IV (I even wrote to a historian who was a descendant of her brother to ask about family papers, and received a very nice letter back saying that there were no family papers but in his view there was certainly nothing to indicate that she wasn't, and he was inclined to think he was).
For a long time I celebrated the anniversary of Bosworth by wearing black from head to toe and rereading Daughter of Time or The Sunne in Splendour, and to my amusement, I programmed myself so well in this matter that I managed to do so for a number of years entirely by accident, despite not having all that many black clothes in my wardrobe.
People who knew me at school still groan when the topic of Plantagenets come up, and I strongly suspect that this is why all of them have chosen *not* to participate in the Henry VI - Richard III readings...
OK, that was a bit pointless and self-indulgent, but I thought you'd like to know that you are not alone in your teenage passion for Richard.
love
Catherine
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Date: 2008-08-15 02:54 am (UTC)So then I was assigned to read Richard III at eighteen, and I was COMPLETELY prepared to hate it, only then it turned out that I have a raging crush on Shakespeare's version of Richard too. Only, of course, for totally different reasons.
... All of which, of course, has nothing to do with Steven Sayler, since I haven't read any of his books, as far as I know, and am probably too old to develop a crush on Catiline.