Customer Reviews

The Life Of Belisarius

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The life of Belisarius, a late-Georgian (not Victorian) history in the vein of Gibbons, is the story of one of the most interesting figures of late antiquity. The author does a great job of combining Byzantine court intrigue and gripping battle accounts--the entrance into Naples through an abandoned aqueduct and the seige of Rome are particularly well drawn--to chronicle the amazing military campaigns and tribulations of Belisarius. This is a sumptuous narrative--old fashioned in the best sense. These is also a very interesting subplot of the struggle between the Arian and Catholic faiths; also, the suggestion that Belisarius' defeat of the Vandals and subsequent abandonment by Byzantium led to a power vacuum in North Africa on the eve of the Islamic conquests. Professor Coulston explains in his introduction how the sources mined by Mahon are impressive for their breadth and range--and that is what makes the book relevant to the modern audience. "Lord Mahon closely attended the literary sources so in the biography we not only have a powerful story, well told, but also a solid work of history standing alongside, and interacting with, the work of other nineteenth century historians." Since the book was written more than 150 years ago, Coulston also provides a helpful "Further Reading" section.
When I decided to post a review, I became a bit concerned after reading the review below. Is this history really that "politically incorrect?" Well, I went back through the book carefully and I was relieved to find that the reviewer's claims are specious. I found no consistent allusion to "north versus south" or "east versus west." In fact to Mahon's credit, writing in an age where it was common to make sweeping generalizations based on prejudices, most of the "barbarians" are from the north. He does express dismay at the conditions along the Italian peninsula, but any criticism of Mahon's observations (and support from ancient sources) has to be viewed in the context of the time. (It would be another thirty years after the book first appeared before Italy would become a unified country.) But all of this is minor and takes up exceedingly little space in this engrossing narrative. According to Coulston--and from the notes in the book--Lord Mahon was very well traveled for his age, and he is sympathetic to other cultures. If any charge of "political incorrectness" can be leveled at Mahon it is that he plays into centuries-old mysogyny, blaming the influence of the wives of Belisarius and Justinian for most bad decisions. Enjoy this book for what it is: it is a great read, a classic account of a very interesting historical figure.

This book is the only scholarly biography I'm aware of that deals with the life of the great Roman general Belisarius. As the author points out, Belisarius was one of the few great men in history who deserved to wear a crown but never did. He has been called the greatest Roman general of them all, having defeated the Persians, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths in turn with forces that would have been considered paltry by Caesar. He achieved what might have been his most glorious victory of all near the end of his life when he turned away an invading army of Huns from the very walls of Constantinople with a scant 300 veterans and some ill-equipped city-dwellers.

The depth of scholarly research needed to produce this volume is impressive. Lord Mahon cast a wide net to include a wealth of citations from historians both ancient and more contemporary to himself. Let the reader beware, however--Lord Mahon includes a number of references written in the original Latin and Greek so a working knowledge of those two languages is helpful but not necessary. My only minor criticism of Lord Mahon's scholarship is that he falls prey to one of the bugbears of his times--antipathy toward Roman Catholicism in general and the Papacy in particular. While his animus toward Catholics was not nearly as pronounced as some of his contemporaries, I still found it irksome in the few instances where it reared its ugly head.

I recommend the edition of The Life of Belisarius (Christian Roman Empire Series) by Evolution Publishing. It is a completely unabridged version of the 1848 edition of the work and is not a facsimile. The clumsy footnotes of the original have been helpfully reset as chapter endnotes. It includes a reference list of modern sources in English and additional notes and citations which help bring the text up-to-date. If, like me, you find Belisarius to be a fascinating historical figure, you might also like Belisarius: The First Shall Be Last by Paolo Belzoni which is a novel about the young general's early years.

The two stars, and the bulk of this review, are not for the work itself, but for this specific edition, a horrendous example of OCR production from General Books LLC. Before getting into that, however, a couple of comments on the book, to which, on its own merits, I would have given four stars.

This is, in fact an excellent biography, which illuminates a key era in European history. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian's effort to re-conquer the Western territories of the Roman Empire ended up being a disaster in the long run, largely through his failure to follow through on initial success, and to commit sufficient resources for the attempt. His greatest general, Belisarius, did an incredible job with the limited resources at his command, re-conquering the Vandal kingdom of North Africa, and bringing Italy to the point where other commanders, with more troops at their disposal, could finish the job. It's a fascinating period in history, which, if you insist on relevance, has lessons for our own era.

Stanhope was a meticulous historian, careful not to draw definite conclusions where the evidence is lacking. This work was written in 1829, and modern readers will find some prejudices and attitudes that grate a bit in the early 21st century. Let's get over it. Who knows what our own attitudes will seem like to people 180 years in our future? This is an exceptionally well written and informative work. Where it gives opinions on matters of fact, they are supported either by evidence or by clearly explained reasoning.

Now, about this edition. It's truly awful. I have to fault myself for carelessly overlooking that this book was produced by OCR, but even if I had known, I would not have anticipated just how bad it could be. The human role in producing this must have been minimal at best. Here are some of the worst faults.

The footnotes get mixed in with the text, without any indication where one leaves off and the other begins. Unlike modern works, where the footnotes are numbered, Stanhope used a sequence of special symbols, which the OCR program often didn't know what to do with.

The original work included short quotations and words in the Greek alphabet. Again, the OCR didn't know what to do, and tried to interpret these in the Roman alphabet, resulting in strings of gibberish.

Stanhope had put marginal notes on some of the pages indicating the year in which the events were taking place. You guessed it, the OCR just took these and stuck them somewhere in the middle of a sentence. Chapter headings also appear in the middle of sentences.

This edition is divided into "sections" instead of chapters, which often break off in the middle of a sentence, and pick up in the next.

There are many spelling errors which probably result from problems in the clarity of the scan used by the program.

Now all this might be marginally acceptable if the publisher had revealed that this edition did in fact contain all these defects, not just that it "might". It might also be acceptable if they had charged only one or two dollars for the book. I don't care what they needed to charge to make a profit. If you're going to produce work this shoddy, either sell it for a pittance or don't sell it.

It's an absolute disgrace that the publisher would charge a premium paperback price for this travesty. I see it has gone up 50% over what I paid, which itself was way too much.

I won't use this review to plug another specific edition, but I did find one that was much better, and thought well enough of Stanhope's work to buy it. I just wish I hadn't wasted my money on the General Books version.

The 'Life of Belisarius' is really just a retelling of the works of Prokopios and Agathias, with a heavy Victorian slant. The 'scholarship' is shallow, and the writing is loaded with Gibbonisms, but nonetheless it still maintains some commendable features. The narrative, while loaded with all sorts of silly judgments that have no place amongst scholarly works, is very easy to follow. Coulston's introduction is very good, and he acknowledges the faults of the work he is writing the preface for. The maps are generally useless, being much to small to see anything, and placed at random places in the book, making it very hard to find them once again.

Nonetheless, I can't bring myself to give it less than 3 stars. While it is shallow, extremely biased, and has virtually no support material, the narrative is very readable. The modern reader should be able to see through most of the Victorian/Georgian mindset. If you want to write an essay, just go and get Prokopios and Agathias (and Malalas and Scholastikos if you're a little braver.) If you just want some light reading on the Justinianic period, this is a fine book. It does not take an advanced student to see past Mahon's faults as a historian.

...then make sure it's the following unabridged edition from Evolution Publishing's Christian Roman Empire Series:

The Life of Belisarius (Christian Roman Empire Series)

As mentioned, it is a completely unabridged version of the 1848 edition and not a facsimile. The clumsy footnotes of the original have been reset as chapter endnotes. It also includes a reference list of modern sources in English and additional notes and citations which help in bring the text up-to-date.

Most others (especially those which list the author merely as Philip Henry Stanhope Stanhope) are Optical Character Recognition (OCR) editions with your typical OCR problems (e.g. Greek letters are rendered into gibberish, footnotes run into the text, etc.).

I gave this review 5 stars because the book itself is outstanding and many of the criticisms on here are asinine. However, do not, under any circumstance, order the hardcover edition from Kessinger Publishing. It is an abomination that looks like it was put together from a (crummy) laser printer in someone's basement. Many of the pages aren't even legible --and I mean that seriously: you literally cannot read the text on many pages in the first half of the book. I'm returning my copy to Amazon and they need to stop selling books from this publisher. Just because someone sets up a publishing company reprinting public domain books in their mom's garage doesn't mean Amazon needs to sell their garbage.

The Life of Belisarius is an excellent period history. This book provides an interesting picture of the time between the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the emergence of both Islam in North Africa and the medieval principalities in Europe. The first modern reprint (2005) is the Westholme edition that includes an important introduction and further reading section by St Andrews historian Jon Coulston. I recommend that edition and not those that are simply a facsimile.

Jon Coulston's introduction describes this as "...a work of meticulous scholarship penned by a British aristocrat with the resources and leisure for travel and research." Philip Stanhope (a/k/a Lord Mahon) was 24 years old when "The Life of Belisarius" was published, and it is clearly a commendable, if flawed, effort. The authorial voice is positively enslaved by a compulsion to mimic Edward Gibbon. Even so, it's a good (definitive?) source for the perspectives of mildly pompous, 19th Century English dandies on the life and times of Belisarius.

Mahon is churlishly misogynistic (a fault which Coulston attempts to minimize by ascribing it to his [Mahon's] era rather than his person), as well as nakedly pro-Christian. Even Gibbon acknowledged the inherent superstitious quality of all religions; Mahon finds it only in non-Christian actors (and occasionally in those Christian sects of which he personally disapproves). These are, in themselves, petty criticisms. However, throughout his book Mahon relies heavily upon his own biases and prejudices to explain historical causation.

Nevertheless, it is an engrossing and entertaining book - in no small measure because of the subject himself. Belisarius may not have bequeathed to posterity enough material to construct a first-rate psychological biography, but his actions precluded the necessity. His story would be impressive in any telling of it.

When the West was threatened only one man could save it. This is not today, but its symbolism is important, this is the story of the Byzantine Roman empire and the threat from easern hordes whose immigrant populations moving into anatolia and accompanied by a rampaging, terrible, hateful, intolerant Persian army were confronted with one man, a simple general whose aspirations were for nation and country, a man of honor named Belisarius. This is the story of courage, of victory over great odds, of barbarism versus fairness, of honesty in the face of terror, of resolution and perseverence, of genious against the masses.

A very well written tale. A prescient tale that mirrors todays problems with societies in Europe being overun so that the native peoples and indigenous Europeans are becoming minorities in their own lands. Belisarius is a model, a worthwhile tale that many in the West have forgotten about a simple man setting out to defend a dying, sinful, gluttunous, licientous, selfish culture, against a much worse intolerant slave owning culture. Belisarius didnt go to war to defend the rich court of Byzantium, he went to war to protect the simple Roman farmers and Greek peasants who were not living the urban bon vivant culture.

Seth J. Frantzman

I became intrigued with this little known historical figure after reading the massive Gibbons book. Although Lord Mahon wrote long ago i found his style easy to follow and, as this work is a straight historical piece, I believe he was impartial in his reporting and research. The Life of Belisarius itself would make a great movie. It has all the elements needed; a heroic and loyal figure, a decadent royalty, palace intrigue, adultrous relationships and warfare. All of this under crumbling empire and religion distorted by evil men. For history buffs I highly recommend it.