Parnell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Belisarius & Antonina: Love and War in the Age of Justinian, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Belisarius & Antonina drops the reader right into the middle of a battle outside Rome in 537 AD:Learn more about Belisarius & Antonina at the Oxford University Press website.Of all these assaults, Vittigis’ personal attack on the Praenestine Gate was the most serious. Here, Belisarius’ officers Bessas and Peranios were in command of the defense, and they sent a request for Belisarius to come personally to assist. When Belisarius arrived, he sent a small force of soldiers under Cyprian to distract some of the Goths attempting to breach the wall, and then he opened the gate and sent out the majority of his army in a sally against the Gothic forces. Whether by design or chance, the Roman soldiers still at the Salarian Gate also sallied forth at this time, and the result was a complete rout of the attacking Gothic army. The Goths turned their backs and fled, and the Romans chased them, slaughtering those whom they could reach and also burning their abandoned siege towers. Procopius writes that 30,000 Goths died in this battle, which is probably an exaggeration, just like his claim that the Gothic army consisted of 150,000 soldiers. However, if the total numbers are ignored and the ratio is instead examined, Procopius is claiming that the Goths lost a fifth of their army in this attack, which is not an impossible casualty rate. Such a defeat would have still left the Goths with an army comfortably larger than the Romans, but chastised enough to avoid further open battles, which is in fact exactly what happened. This was such a significant victory for Belisarius that Vittigis would not attempt another general assault of the city for the remainder of the long siege.While suitably dramatic, the contents of page 99 do not really give the reader a good idea of Belisarius & Antonina as a whole. Belisarius was a prominent Roman general, and he fought many battles such as this one. So, in that sense, this page is representative of Belisarius’ career. But the book is not just about Belisarius’ career: it is an examination of the marriage and partnership of Belisarius and his wife Antonina. And here we get to the crux of the problem with page 99: Antonina is nowhere to be seen on this page! She does appear on the very next page, however. The reader only looking at page 99 may conclude that Belisarius & Antonina is a work of military history. It is that, but it is also a social and gender history. Other chapters describe the marriage of Belisarius and Antonina, their children, and their personal arguments. Still others focus on Antonina herself. She was a political operative of considerable skill. In one particularly striking episode, she befriends the daughter of a political enemy, and uses that friendship to entrap the enemy into treason, which causes him to get fired and disgraced. While page 99 gives a good idea of the military career of Belisarius, the book shows that he was well matched in skill by his clever and successful wife.
--Marshal Zeringue
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