Rome, indexes and madmen: nonfiction reading

THE ETERNAL DECLINE AND FALL OF ROME: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Edward J. Watts looks at how people were bewailing Rome’s collapse long before Edward Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall Of the Roman Empire. Even in the Empire’s peak eras, Romans were writing about how they’d fallen from the greatness of their ancestors and wondering where they’d gone wrong, though part of that was new emperors promoting themselves as the ones who would make Rome great again.

After tracing the Roman lamentations, Watts looks at how Rome’s fall became a symbol countless later writers and leaders would invoke (A Coup discusses how it plays into the image of decadent empires crushed by barbarians). Whatever contemporary bogeyman they want to vent about — gays, feminists, immigration — they can hold up Rome’s fall as the example of what they’re fighting against. The end results are interesting but at times this is too much a Roman history — I wish Watts had spent more time looking at how Rome was invoked by post-Roman rhetoric.

INDEX, A History of The: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan shows, like Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything on alphabetical order, something that seems intuitively obvious isn’t that at all. Duncan shows how different some eras treated the index, for example going by chapters or quartos when page numbers weren’t a thing, the role of indexing in the digital age, the problems of writing a good one (I’ve done enough of them to say his diagnosis is pot-on), satirical indexes and worries that indexing was a tool for lazy readers who don’t want to tackle whole books. A good job.

Now that I’m working on my Jekyll and Hyde book, it’s time for research reading. I’d thought my first book would be the original Stevenson novel but for various reasons it wound up being A LITTLE MAD SOMETIMES: Film Psychopaths from Jekyll and Hyde to Hannibal Lector by John McCarty. I will keep some of his ideas (that Spencer Tracy’s Hyde is more about sex than Fredric March‘s) in mind as I watch the films but mostly I’m underwhelmed. I don’t agree that any killer who hides behind a seemingly normal facade is a Jekyll/Hyde riff and I spotted too many errors, from misspelling actor Valentine Dyall’s name to repeating a now debunked legend about the silent Cabinet of Caligari. Not the worst filmreference book I’ve read, though.

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