Tom Holland interview: Caligula, vampires and coping with death threats

Tom Holland is, excitably, showing me his latest acquisition, in his high-ceilinged study in south London. Ten shelves of books soar up above us, from tomes on sexual practice in the ancient world to Fred Donner’s Narratives of Islamic Origins. Above his desk is a reproduction of a lovely 15th-century fresco of the young Cicero reading, and laid here and there are reproduction military helmets (one, in the Roman style, elaborately plumed), a shield and a cricket bat. The last relates to Holland’s second obsession, aside from history: he is an ardent member of the Authors XI, and is much pained to have missed a recent match against the Thespian Thunderers.

The new toy, which he fetches from a tiny vitrine occupied by pottery shards and other small treasures, is a gold coin minted in Rome, aglint with the unmistakably cherubic cheeks of the emperor Nero. “It’s rather an expensive hobby,” he says, a little guiltily. Nero is, perhaps, the most colourful character in his latest book, Dynasty – a thrilling account of the rise and fall of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. It is in a sense the sequel to Rubicon, his bestselling book on the collapse of the Roman republic published in 2003, a sequel long delayed by other projects – books on late antique and medieval history, an account of the Persian wars, and a translation of Herodotus’s Histories.

Dynasty draws on the accounts of the period by Tacitus, Suetonius and others, and yet has a flavour all of its own: Augustus is revealed as a sinister manipulator of the offices of the republic, his apparent refusal of honours a mere feint as he, in reality, heaped up more and more power for himself. Tiberius is his melancholic foil, the man of principle who struggled to fit himself into the template created by Augustus. Caligula is revealed not as a wild-eyed psychopath, as he was so brilliantly portrayed by John Hurt in the TV adaptation of I, Claudius, but as a cynic and sophisticate, who threatens to make his horse consul as a kind of cruel mockery of the recumbent senate. And Nero: he is the rococo culmination of them all, whose elaborate, brilliant self-creation as a figure of myth eventually causes the dynasty to collapse in on itself. Holland wrote the last section in a kind of fugue: “I’d wake up in the morning and think, ‘Oh my God! I have another day of writing about Nero.’ And I’d write about him and think about him all the time: he dominated my every waking moment. And I’d reach the end of the day and be too tired to continue, and instead of thinking, ‘Brilliant, I can stop now,’ I would think, ‘I wish I could carry on.’” One thing becomes abundantly clear: the story is sexually lurid, bloody and, at times, macabre. But the Julio-Claudians, in his account, were not mad. They were all, according to him, “remarkably able men”.

Holland, 47, is tall, beaky, resplendently nerdy about history and fantastically quick-brained. Over the decade I have known him a little (the world of classics is small) he has also become steeled to a certain kind of battle. Last year, before the Scottish referendum, he threw himself, with fellow historian Dan Snow, into campaigning for the union, organising an open letter to Scottish voters by English celebrities from Tom Daley to David Attenborough. Whether or not this lovebombing had any effect is moot: it certainly annoyed some, who felt patronised by the notion that their vote on a serious constitutional issue would be swayed by the views of, say, Bobby Charlton. More seriously, though, in 2012, a documentary he made for Channel 4 called Islam: the Untold Story – based on his book In the Shadow of the Sword – provoked huge controversy. (The book itself was largely received very well.) The documentary looked at the origins of Islam from a strictly historical perspective, and expressed certain ideas – that Islam may not have originated near Mecca, that there was a lack of Muslim historical evidence relating to the origins of the religion, and that little was known about the circumstances of the Qur’an’s composition – that sparked 1,200 complaints to Channel 4 and Ofcom.

Meanwhile, Holland was immersed in the mother of all Twitter storms. “Well, what I was really nervous about was less that someone would come and cut my head off than I would lose caste with fellow liberals – that people would think I was racist. So I went on Twitter to rebut accusations that I had got things wrong in the book, but also to square up to people saying, ‘You are doing this because you are racist.’ The problem with doing that meant that anyone could send me abusive comments or make threats against my family or me.” It must, I say, have been frightening and bleak for them (his wife, Sadie, is a midwife, and they have two daughters). “The experience of being in that storm – for a month or so, every day I would get a multitude of threats – was a bit like when you have a bruise on the lip. You feel that it’s enormous, and that everyone is looking at you. But if you look in the mirror, you can barely see it. No one really cares. In the eye of that storm, though, it is quite frightening.”

Holland’s views on Islam, he says, were affected by the violent opinions he encountered online: “Certainly on Twitter there is a disturbing number of Muslims who do think apostates ought to be put to death, and you can see the effect of that in the Middle East, where Isis is not remiss in putting apostates to death. That’s the horror of it: one man’s apostate is another’s liberal Muslim.” I suggest that those who believe such things are in a tiny, tiny minority. Holland’s point, though, is that there are enough militants using the Qur’an as “the equivalent of a technical manual” for there to be real concern – and real value in applying historical methodologies to early Islamic history. He almost laughs at the surreal notion that late-antique history has become such an explosive force in modern politics and warfare – he recalls arguing about Sasanian law codes and their possible relationship with certain hadiths on Twitter – but of course we both know it is no laughing matter. The day after we speak the director of antiquities at Palmyra, Khaled al-Asaad, is murdered by Isis.

Holland thinks historical inquiry into early Islam can, in the long term, play a part in neutralising violent fundamentalist groups such as Isis – a position he laid out in the Christopher Hitchens lecture this summer at the Hay festival. While I salute Holland’s aims as a historian – surely nothing should be out of bounds as a field of historical inquiry – I am, I admit, less certain of this notion. We briefly argue about whether the movement to historicise the events recounted in the Bible in the 19th century actually had much effect on people’s faith, which to my mind is governed by factors beyond the rational. And the radicalisation of a minority of Muslims surely cannot be separated from the effects of western foreign policy. Christian fundamentalism, by way of comparison, furthermore seems to me to be a postmodern phenomenon, not something that was tempered by 19th-century rational historical inquiry. He disagrees: the work of scholars such as Albert Schweitzer “changed the terms of argument in the west: Christians do not take the Old Testament as literally as they did 200 years ago and even creationists accept that evolution is a challenge they have to answer.” He becomes animated: “To be honest, I wouldn’t care about any of these things were it not for the fact that people are using these [religious] texts to justify the raping of nine-year-old girls.” He is referring here to the appalling acts visited on, particularly, Yazidi girls and women by Isis. “To me, if you think that raping nine-year-old girls is wrong, it’s wrong not to point out that the traditions concerning Muhammad might have a contributory factor to play. It’s not to say that that is all they mean, or that’s the only interpretation that can be placed on them, because to do so would be to be as fundamentalist as the most diehard Isis fighter. But to pretend it is not an issue at all seems disingenuous.”

In fact all this is to put the cart before the horse: Isis had yet to emerge when Holland started work on In the Shadow of the Sword, and his interest in the origins of Islam stemmed not from modern politics and religion but from a desire to investigate how the Arab Muslim empire had emerged from the collapse of two ancient empires, the Roman and the Persian. Millennium, his 2008 book, had looked at the distinctive culture that had emerged from the rubble of the Roman empire in western Europe. “The sense was that the Franks and the Goths and the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths were as Roman as they were barbarian – and that seemed a very interesting template for early Islam. You only have to look at [Jerusalem’s] Dome of the Rock to see that it is very Roman. I wanted to know the extent to which the paradigms that govern the understanding of how the empire in the west fell apply to the east.”

He adds: “I think in a sense you’re engaging in trahison des clercs if you think paradigms you are happy to apply to any other period of history should not be applied to this one. We are happy to study the way religion and empire relate in every other era. Are we really saying that this is the one period in which we should not be doing this? Because that, in a sense, seems the really Islamophobic thing to do.”

Holland grew up in Wiltshire, near Stonehenge and Wilton, whose origins go back to Anglo-Saxon Wessex. (His next book, aside from a translation of Suetonius’s The 12 Caesars, is a study of the 10th-century king Athelstan for the Penguin Monarchs series, a project bound up with childhood memories that he calls an “emotional core of magma waiting to be expressed”.) There wasn’t much to do except read, he says. His younger brother James, a historian of the second world war, was doubtless at it, too. “I have always felt that the past contains more glamour, colour and excitement than the present. I was neurotically, obsessively into dinosaurs as a five-year-old. And prehistory generally. The whole sweep. What moved and excited me was the sense of empires rising and falling: the Palaeozoic, the Mesozoic, the Cenozoic. Then I was given, all at roughly the same time: Asterix; a book about the Roman army with a picture on the cover of a centurion with a Gallic spear in his stomach; and a book about Greek myths. I was moved and excited by them in exactly the same way as I was by looking at pictures of trilobites or the asteroid hitting cretaceous biospheres.”

He became very interested in the Persian wars, and, at 12, took out a translation of Herodotus from the library. “It was the first classic of any kind I read.” What he hadn’t realised is that before you get to the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae you have to plough through endless “shaggy-dog stuff” including various chunks of Lydian and Persian history, and a lengthy account of the habits of the Egyptians. Gradually, though, he fell in love with Herodotus. “Over the course of my writing career I have done the Histories as a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, as a BBC radio drama, I used him as a source in Persian Fire, and then I had the privilege of being asked to translate him. It’s an amazing intimacy with a writer – it’s like a marriage. You will never be closer to a writer than when you are translating him.” Astonishingly, Holland is completely self-taught in Greek. He set himself the task of tackling a chunk a day, seven days a week, and the experience now, he says, acts as a kind of memory diary: when he reads any given part of the Histories he can call to mind when and where he was when he translated it. When he finished, his children garlanded the small bust of Herodotus that sits in his study and made him a Greek feast in celebration. Delight was mixed with melancholy. “I thought: ‘It’s all over, and I will never have that closeness again.’”

Despite his love of ancient history Holland studied English at Cambridge. He had found “Dickens and Shakespeare and poetry compulsively wonderful in the way I had found ancient history and dinosaurs wonderful”. He now thinks that “subliminally I was worried that doing a degree in ancient history or classics would somehow let the light in on it”. But in a way it made perfect sense: it was the literary quality of history that he adored, especially “the mythopoetic quality of history” that drenches ancient texts. He began a PhD on Byron and ancient Greece “and rapidly realised that everything that was most interesting about Byron was that he was a great popular hero who invented the cult of celebrity. So I thought a way of paying tribute to that would be to write a novel in which he is a vampire.” The book (The Vampyre, 1995) did well enough, and he was contracted into writing another three, “which had never been a part of my life plan”. He says: “The last one was set in Egypt and it was like a Russian doll, so the outer structure was Howard Carter discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb, inside it was Al-Hakim, the Muslim Caligula of the 11th century, and the inner core was the story of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who were probably the parents of Tutankhamun. And I just did an incredible amount of research for it. There was almost nothing I didn’t know about the career of Carter or Fatimid Cairo or the 18th dynasty. I thought: people are going to love all this research I have put into it. But because it was a vampire book, nobody gave a toss.” So he went back to what he had loved as a teenager. He says – using a rather striking, and I think unconscious, vampiric image: “I had sucked every book dry that I could on the Roman republic when I was a young and I thought: ‘That’s what I want to write about now.’” And so he started on Rubicon and the rest is, in every sense, history. There is a great deal of desire in Holland’s inner world. He tells me of writing Dynasty: “When I was writing it the process was charged with a kind of excitement and passion and joy – the same kind of passion and joy I can imagine a poet channelling when writing about love.” It shows.