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The Conquered
A story of the Gauls under Caesar.
328 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1923
1 person is currently reading
134 people want to read
About the author
Naomi Mitchison
163 books136 followersNaomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 9, 2024
Unrecognized classic! Caesar's Gallic Wars as experienced by a Gaul. Mitchison has done a marvelous job getting us into the experiences, emotions, and thoughts of her Gallic protagonist, Meromic. We see the whole conquest through his eyes. Born the son of a chieftain, he is enslaved by the Romans and finally is owned by Titus Barrus, a tribune, and a kind and compassionate master. They become friends as much as a slave and master can be. Titus then frees him. Meromic finds and murders in fair fight the Briton who had been betrothed to his sister, then had jilted her. Also, the man had promised allies to the Gauls then reneged. After Meromic's honorable return to Titus, in anguish, with torn loyalties between Titus and the Gallic cause, he decides, honor-bound to Titus, who had saved his life earlier, to fight with the Roman auxiliaries. But after Caesar's conquest, he runs and fights with a pocket of rebels who lose and are punished by Caesar. The fighters lose their right hands. Titus, after searching for him, finds him and takes him back to Rome, his property in the country, and Titus's family. You'd think with this, the ending would be happy, but there is poignancy in Meromic's fate. I got misty-eyed the last couple of chapters. The last few pages were especially powerful.
I believe this was one of the first historical novels [1923] where character development was so important for all the main characters. Meromic all through is conflicted with divided loyalties: to his own people and to Titus. The incidents involving the druid/storyteller who appears several times briefly and suddenly, were short-lived notes of fantasy. I consider this Mitchison's best novel, although her first. Mitchison was affected by the Irish Rebellion and the Easter Rising; she made Caesar's conquest of Gaul and the situation in Ireland at the time of Mitchison's writing her novel roughly analogous; both concerned one people subdued by another. I surmise that is why the epigraphs were all from Irish songs or poetry, the latter mostly Yeats.
Most highly recommended. As soon as the mailman delivered the book, I tore off the wrapping and began reading. I couldn't put it down.
I believe this was one of the first historical novels [1923] where character development was so important for all the main characters. Meromic all through is conflicted with divided loyalties: to his own people and to Titus. The incidents involving the druid/storyteller who appears several times briefly and suddenly, were short-lived notes of fantasy. I consider this Mitchison's best novel, although her first. Mitchison was affected by the Irish Rebellion and the Easter Rising; she made Caesar's conquest of Gaul and the situation in Ireland at the time of Mitchison's writing her novel roughly analogous; both concerned one people subdued by another. I surmise that is why the epigraphs were all from Irish songs or poetry, the latter mostly Yeats.
Most highly recommended. As soon as the mailman delivered the book, I tore off the wrapping and began reading. I couldn't put it down.
February 6, 2015
Naomi Mitchison’s first novel, written five years after the end of the First World War and two years after the Irish war of independence, is deeply influenced implicitly and explicitly by both. The title perhaps gives an ironic nod to Julius Caesar’s own statement, ‘veni, vidi, vici’ – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ or to Virgil’s declaration of Roman duty in the Aeneid, ‘to spare the conquered’.
The novel focuses on Caesar’s Gallic conquest, but largely from the point of view of the defeated, the victims and those who suffer. The novel opens with an almost light-hearted, optimistic view of the glory of war but becomes progressively darker as it proceeds, culminating in terror, mutilation and bitter savagery. Meromic, a noble of the Veneti, loses family, country, freedom and self-respect, but finds a sort of friendship with the honourable Roman officer Titus Barrus and an assortment of others who have suffered under the Romans. An impulsive and conflicted warrior throughout, the portrayal of Meromic is moving and as a symbol of the Gallic nation, poignant.
Caesar’s Gallic Wars would have been a standard school text when the novel was published in 1923, but Mitchison’s interpretation is revolutionary and for its time unique in its criticism of imperialism. Titus proposes the decent man’s view of the benefits of Roman rule to Meromic in a key scene; Meromic’s reply, ‘There’s liberty in the other scale: it’s heavy.’
The novel focuses on Caesar’s Gallic conquest, but largely from the point of view of the defeated, the victims and those who suffer. The novel opens with an almost light-hearted, optimistic view of the glory of war but becomes progressively darker as it proceeds, culminating in terror, mutilation and bitter savagery. Meromic, a noble of the Veneti, loses family, country, freedom and self-respect, but finds a sort of friendship with the honourable Roman officer Titus Barrus and an assortment of others who have suffered under the Romans. An impulsive and conflicted warrior throughout, the portrayal of Meromic is moving and as a symbol of the Gallic nation, poignant.
Caesar’s Gallic Wars would have been a standard school text when the novel was published in 1923, but Mitchison’s interpretation is revolutionary and for its time unique in its criticism of imperialism. Titus proposes the decent man’s view of the benefits of Roman rule to Meromic in a key scene; Meromic’s reply, ‘There’s liberty in the other scale: it’s heavy.’
September 1, 2020
I am fond of Mitchison as a person -- not that I knew her, of course, but I have read her first two memoirs and I very much enjoyed the person I found there. This is her first novel, and I recognised the younger self she described in it; she imagines the past with passion, loves the landscape, recognises the virtues of Roman civilisation but yearns for a freer, wilder time where ideas of individual honour mattered -- very much the sort of Edwardian upper-class mentality that led so many young men to throw themselves into the crucible of the first World War hoping to be a glorious sacrifice to larger ideals. Yet hand in hand with all of that is some complication; fighting to retain one's freedom is joyful but war itself is terrible, and there is no resolution for Meromic's divided loyalties except the numinous. It is not a tidy novel, not even a particularly good one, but it was very interesting to me as someone interested in Mitchison, and I look forward to moving on to the next.
May 25, 2016
Precise and visually correct writing is at the forefront here. A truly original historical novel by a master story teller. Hard to believe Ms. Hutchison wasn't reincarnated from Ancient times! How else could she write in a way that you're not on a hillside observing activities but rather at the bottom of said hillside chatting with the people there. Remarkable!!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews