Cicero's A Brief Handbook on Canvassing for Office, and co-translator of Plutarch's The Rise of Rome.
Tatum applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Noble Ruin: Mark Antony, Civil War, and the Collapse of the Roman Republic, and reported the following:
On page 99 I wrap up a controversial, I think engaging phase of Antony’s career (public life dogged by financial troubles and family troubles), but none of that here: it’s the happy resolution. Then it’s Antony elevated to the consulship by Caesar, which was exciting from him because it was exceptional, but the exceptional bits involve a few technicalities, so it’s a bit wonkish.Learn more about A Noble Ruin at the Oxford University Press website.
The content is vital and the style is (I hope) clear enough and engaging enough. But no purple patches here. In that sense, maybe it does give a good (goodish?) idea of the work as a whole.
A biography of this kind has to include a bit of technical explication in its narrative of important events in a society different from the one most of us live in. For that reason, not a few pages of A Noble Ruin will read like page 99. Looking at this page, I believe the wonky bits are painless and underline the historical importance of a moment which could come across as more straightforward than it really is. At the same time, much of what happens in Antony’s life is more colourful that what one encounters here, which at least raises the question of what should count more in a biography: the sensational bits or the rest?
--Marshal Zeringue
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