Last Seen in Massilia (by Steven Saylor)

Following on from the cliffhanger at the end of Rubicon, Last Seen in Massilia follows three main plot threads; the resolution of the cliffhanger, a mystery concerning the death of a young woman and the story of the siege of Massilia by Caesar's troops. The story of the siege is true, in the general outline; the story of the young woman is an ancient fiction (Saylor mentions in his Author's Note that it comes from Lucian) and the story of Meto is, of course, modern fiction. All three are effectively told, gripping stories, though since about a third of the book is concerned with wrapping up earlier plot threads, it definitely isn't a good volume to start reading the series with!

The narrative of the siege is especially effective - Vitruvius is once again a very useful tool for explaining the mechanics of the thing and the in-story narration of the sea battle immediately calls to mind Lucan's equally gory account of the battle in his poem the Civil War. Lucan is one of my favourite ancient epic poets, so I was especially pleased to see this shout-out of sorts to him (our heroes don't witness the battle, but are told about it later by a survivor). Other elements, like the banquet in which one entire course is composed of a single olive, provide evocative snapshots of the horrors of a prolonged siege.

The tradition of the scapegoat, as outlined in the book (in which the people of Massilia would fatten up and then sacrifice one of their citizens in the hope of encouraging the gods to be more kind to the rest of them) is one of those things that I tend to be a bit sceptical about in real life - like all those various and extreme Spartan traditions that we hear about from outsiders who may have been exaggerating, or may have misunderstood. On the other hand, people do terrible things when frightened, so perahps it is true, depressing as that thought is. Hieronymous the scapegoat himself is both an extremely likeable character - these come few and far between in stories about the Late Republic! - and a very useful narrative device that ensures Gordianus and Davus do not become malnourished or even seriously threatened, for the most part, and they are able to observe the siege as outsiders even while they're within the walls.

As in some of the stories in The House of Vestals, I guessed the solution to the mystery(ies) fairly early on, but could not foresee how the whole thing would resolve itself. As in the case of Rubicon, the ending is so bittersweet as to verge on the downright tragic, but lightened by another, happier resolution that cheers up the final few pages. I enjoyed this very much and I'm looking forward to the next book - which I'm sure will refer back to this one a bit - but I do hope it has a happier ending!

Marseille (Massilia) today - sadly not my picture, I haven't yet been there!

Living Dead in Dallas (by Charlaine Harris)

We return to vampires and maenads, the original version (if there’s another story featuring vampires and maenads out there, I need to see it, but somehow I doubt such a thing exists). Spoilers follow.

Unlike TV!maenad Maryann, Book!maenad actually has a Greek name, though it doesn’t seem especially related to her character. Callisto was a nymph/princess who used to hang out with Artemis, but she was raped by Zeus (or sometimes Apollo), became pregnant, and when Artemis discovered she was pregnant Bad Things happened (specifics varying according to which version you read) and she got turned into a bear. Greek mythology; not a friend to feminists.

Anyway, this Callisto doesn’t seem especially closely related to her namesake, other than having a genuinely Greek name (a few other Classical bits and pieces are scattered through the book as well – I definitely remember hubris getting a mention at some point. Godric has tattoos from the Roman period, but I don’t think he’s meant to be Roman; the name sounds like he could come perhaps from somewhere in the Empire, but wouldn’t be a Roman citizen. And while we're on the subject of Godric, his supposedly more 'modern' name, Godfrey, did not conjure up the right mental image for me).

The existence or otherwise of the god Dionysus is an interesting point in a supernatural story like this, in which all manner of mythical or folkloric creatures can be assumed to be real, but usually the line is drawn at actual gods, even – or perhaps especially – in a story with a broadly Christian base like this one (Sookie is a churchgoer and she’s the narrator, so there are basic Christian assumptions underlying the supernatural stuff). The gods can be included if they’re revealed really to be something else, like supernatural humans, aliens and so on, but gods as gods are more unusual (though they do appear – Buffy Season 5 being the best known example). The implication here seems to be that Dionysus/Bacchus was at some point real in some god-type form – maenads were ‘driven made by the god’. On the other hand, there’s a reference to the fact that maenads have ‘lost’ the god, and whether this means he used to exist in some form and doesn’t any more, or is just a reference to the lack of belief in Dionysus these days, is unclear, though the lack of current belief is brought up as a specific problem. As in the TV series, the exact process by which a human woman would become an immortal psycho is left deliberately vague, but Bacchus/Dionysus definitely seems to be involved somehow, while whatever existence he once had now seems to be lost.

As someone whose initial exposure to ancient history, pre-university, was through I, Claudius, my favourite bit of the whole explanation scene was Sookie admitting to the reader that she knew about maenads because they featured in a mystery novel she’d read, but deciding to let Eric think she ‘reads ancient Greek literature in the original language’ if he wanted to. Hehe. That would’ve been me ten years ago.

There are various minor differences between book and TV series in the plot and particularly the resolution, but the most interesting difference by far between Callisto and Maryann is that, as far as I can tell, Callisto is not actually the cause of any of the sex and murder going on until she takes her tribute at the very end. She’s attracted to drunkenness and sex and violence, but whereas Maryann brings out behavior that the people around her would usually repress, Callisto merely feeds off behavior that is already happening. Lafayette’s murder, it turns out, was a human act carried out from lust and fear, and the orgy that Sookie finds so repulsive is a simple human activity that Callisto is drawn to, but certainly hasn’t instigated. It’s hard to say which is the more cynical view of human nature – the TV version, which implies that such desires (the violent as well as the sexual) are in all of us, but we keep them buried, or the book version, that leaves the rest of the characters alone but clearly shows some of them actively engaging in such behavior without supernatural prompting. It also explains why poor Lafayette had to die – in his very little ‘screentime’ (page-time?) Lafayette came across as easily likeable, and you can believe that Sookie would go to such extreme lengths to avenge him, which she certainly would not do for Miss Jeanette.

I have to say, in places this was a strange book! Not because of the orgy per se – I am a Roman historian, after all – but because Sookie thought it was a good idea to ask someone who’s been trying to get into her pants since the moment they met to accompany her to one. As a bodyguard. While her boyfriend’s away. He actually has to tell her how crazy this is and it still doesn’t stop her. Even weirder than that, which can at least be explained away as the result of suppressed warm and fuzzy feelings she’s in denial about, is Sam’s affair with Callisto. He doesn’t seem remotely bothered that his fling is a psychotic several thousand year old Thing which Sookie describes as actively evil. Perhaps he’s in denial too.

I did like the book’s depiction of Andy Bellefleur though, one of the most complex characters in both the book and the TV series, albeit in slightly different ways. Andy is a good person trying to do the right thing who sometimes gets it horribly wrong by, for example, pointing a gun at our heroine. He’ll never be a fan favourite, but something about this character keeps Bon Temps and its inhabitants grounded while madness (literally) goes on around them.

I enjoyed this one, strangeness aside, though like anything you’ve seen in another form of media first, it probably needs a second look to be appreciated on its own merits (even if this version is the 'original'). You’ve got to have some admiration for anything that includes a full-on, named-as-such orgy outside of ancient Rome, though I have to say, that scene left me with some mental pictures that can never be erased…

Actual maenads, with Dionysus

 

Top Five Gladiatorial Combats

I'm once again buried under an enormous pile of exam marking, so forgive me if things are a little quiet around here this week! Once I emerge, I can promise posts on Priam playing Augustus, some more Classical Places, more maenads and vampires, more Rome and more Xena.

In the meantime, I've been giving serious consideration to the Top Five Roman-style Gladiatorial combats in popular culture (that I've seen). Spoilers follow.



5. Spock and McCoy vs Flavius and Achilles in Star Trek, 'Bread and Circuses'
Why? Becuase any gladiatoral combat that ends in a double Vulcan Nerve Grip is a great gladiatorial combat.
How Roman is it? I'm not aware that the Vulcan Nerve Grip was known in ancient Rome. The replacement of the audience in the arena with a television audience works brilliantly, and the network's need to provide an entertaining combat is surely representative of something that must have been an issue for Roman lanistas.

4. The Face-Dude vs Spartacus in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, 'The Thing in the Pit'
Why? Of all the many, many fights we've seen on Spartacus: Blood and Sand and the prequel series Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, this is by far the most memorable. It's a face! It's a face!
How Roman is it? There's no evidence of a Fight Club-style set-up like this in ancient Rome and with gladiatorial combats available regularly, why would you need one? It gives the show a nice change of pace for an episode though.

3. Spartacus vs Draba in Spartacus (1960)

Why? It's a tense scene, a pretty decent fight - but it's the expression on the face of Woody Strode, as Draba, as he throws his trident at Batiatus and Crassus and then launches himself at them, that makes this a memorble and chilling fight and a great end to an intriguing character. Plus, of course, it's a turning point for Spartacus himself.
How Roman is it? I can't see why Crassus would randomly demand to see two gladiators killed purely for the amusement of himself and two friends, when they could be killed for the amusement of hundreds. On the other hand, there's be nothing to stop him and he wasn't exactly the tender type.

2. Katniss and Peeta vs Cato and the muttations/ Katniss vs Peeta in The Hunger Games
Why? Just when you think The Hunger Games can't get worse or more horrible... it gets worse and more horrible. Cato meets such a nasty end you actually feel sorry for him, and then we finally get to the resolution we all knew was coming since about page 15. And very satisfying it is too.
How Roman is it? Like Star Trek, these gladiatorial games have replaced live audiences with television, which I suspect is what would have happened if the Romans had invented television. With much more space to explore the concept, Collins really gets into how that removal of the audience from the horror of what's happening might affect such a series of games, which is really interesting. Beyond that, well, there's a character called Cato. That's about it. Again, if the Romans had known how to genetically mutate animals, they probably would have done so - but they didn't.

1. Maximus and his men vs 'Scipio Africanus' (actually several female gladiators) in Gladiator
Why? Undoubtedly the highlight of a great film, this fight is the lead-in to the famous 'My name is Maximus Decimus Meridus...' scene, and it does a fantastic job of showering Maximus in glory right before his big moment. The way he uses his military training to beat the odds, the re-writing of the history of the Battle of Carthage (much to the announcer's embarrassment), the excitement of the fight itself and the way the gladiators band together to face the emperor when it's over, all go together to make the best scene of gladiatorial combat in the movies, topped off with Hans Zimmer's majestic score.

How Roman is it? I'm not sure the Romans would have chosen a bunch of women to represent Scipio Africanus, but otherwise this all looks pretty good to me. Perhaps the number of old soldiers in Maximus' group of fellow gladiators is a bit on the implausible side.

Honorable mention goes to the lovely little British arena in The Eagle, and the beginning of a beautiful friendship. There aren't many gladiatorial combats that can claim that!

Asterix the Gaul: Asterix and the Banquet

It's been years since I read any Asterix the Gaul, which my parents sometimes used to buy for my brother (in English) when we went to France on holiday. What I'd remembered most was the wonderfully punny names - the old man Geriatrix, Poisonus Fungus, Getafix the druid and so on (there are lots of jokes about drugs around, a clear sign of Asterix's '60s origins!*). Asterix and Obelix themselves, of course, are designed as literal 'footnotes in history', asterisk and obelisk, an idea I love, since I always enjoy stories about the minor characters and side stories of history, even entirely fictional ones like these two.

For those unfamilir with the comics, Asterix and Obelix live in a Gaulish village that has held out alone against the Romans following the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar. This is largely thanks to the magic potion brewed by Getafix, which allows our two heroes to beat up entire legions without breaking a sweat (though Obelix doesn't need to take any, as he fell into a cauldron-full of the stuff as a child). The village is in northern Brittany, and Obelix has a regular job as a menhir delivery man. The translations are excellent, mostly successfully translating the puns and Christmas-cracker level jokes into something appropriate (you only occasionally find something that isn't quite as effective as English).

In this story, Astrix and Obelix travel all over France collecting regional delicacies to win a bet with the new centurion who has blockaded the village. Apparently inspired by the Tour de France, the story provides a chance to see them travel all over France, and each Latin or Celtic name is accompanied by a footnote explaining which modern town or city they're in. This provides the chance for a few regional jokes - my favourite is the joke about the traffic jams on the way to Nice in the summer. Although I haven't ever been to Nice, I have been to Devon by car and lived in Bristol for a year, so I'm very familiar with the inevitable traffic jams caused by the summer getaway!

The plot provides a nice opportunity for the French authors to revel in two of the things the French are most proud of - their cuisine, and the Resistance. There is an attempt to stick vaguely to the period with the specialities by not naming champagne and calling white Bordeaux, white Burdigala, but since the whole point of the Asterix comics is to satirise modern Europe in the guise of an ancient-set story, this is largely a celebration of modern French cuisine, and thoroughly mouth-watering it is too. Other elements of the story, meanwhile, are pure Word War Two, with various helpful townspeople sabotaging Roman transport to help our heroes get away, while a couple of traitors get their comeuppance.

The Romans here tend to come across as rather inept and not very bright, though several are presented fairly sympathetically. Plus, of course, no one actually dies, as this is a children's comic - they just get knocked out and see the obligatory stars floating above their heads. It's nice to see some Latin included as well, though readers would probably prefer it to be accompanied by a translation rather than left by itself.

I love France, so I really enjoyed this story, though the Romans featured were really too stupid to provide an effective enemy for our heroes. I'll have to get hold of one of the books featuring Caesar or Cleopatra who, while losing in the end, might give the main characters more of a run for their money!

A Breton menhir, as delivered by Obelix

*Yes, I know the first comic was written in 1959. That was a joke.

The House of the Vestals (by Steven Saylor)

 
I'm delighted to say, I have a new flash fiction (short short fiction) story up at 365 Tomorrows: 'A Shared Interest in History'. Not actually as connected to Classics as the title might sound, but there's definitely a running theme in what I'm writing at the moment..

The House of the Vestals is a collection of short stories that fills in some of the gaps in Gordianus the Finder’s earlier years, between the events of his debut novel Roman Blood and the second novel in the series, Arms of Nemesis. A mixture of stories from historical records and purely fictional mysteries, the collection is broad ranging in terms of setting, subject matter and outcome and is as enjoyable to read as all Saylor’s work. The historical material is interesting, but the real value of this book for fans of the series is the way it enriches the life history and character of the fictional Gordianus and his friends and family.

The best thing about this collection for fans is that it outlines the entire friendship between Gordianus and Lucius Claudius, a character we only meet once he’s dead in Catilina’s Riddle because the country farm he leaves Gordianus in his will is required for the plot of that novel. Here, Saylor gets a chance to introduce us properly to Lucius Claudius and explain how he and Gordianus became friends, and Lucius Claudius features in several of the stories here. He’s a thoroughly likeable character, and I found myself wishing he could feature more – while alive – in a full length novel. He’s also rather useful, as a rich and well-connected friend who doesn’t come with the mass of hidden intentions and conflicting loyalties of Cicero and other powerful (and real) people.

Another nice thing about this collection is that it gives us a glimpse of Gordianus, Eco and Bethesda’s life together when they were younger, and even better, both Eco and Bethesda get the chance to solve a mystery themselves. Bethesda, especially, always strikes me as a very underused character in the novels (though she gets a chance to shine – if that’s the right word in the circumstances – every now and again) so it’s lovely to see her get some attention here. It’s also interesting to see how she and Gordianus interact while she is still his slave, since she is absent for much of Arms of Nemesis and freed and married to Gordianus after that. Their interactions fit quite neatly with how I imagine some master/concubine relationships might have functioned, when the master is kind (and single).

The historical content in the stories is as entertaining and as accurate as ever. ‘The Tale of the Treasure House’ suffers somewhat if you know the sources, because it’s lifted almost directly from a story in Herodotus’ best known part of his Histories, his description of Egypt, with just some minor tweaking by Bethesda. Since the change is so minimal, this does make the story rather a lot less interesting when you already know it. The other historical stories, though (‘Death Wears a Mask’, ‘A Will is a Way’, ‘The Alexandrian Cat’ and ‘The House of the Vestals’) are from more obscure bits of sources and are more substantially altered or added to, while ‘Little Caesar and the Pirates’ takes inspiration from history and creates a new story around it. I particularly like the expansion of very brief historical notes in ‘A Will is a Way’, which is very effective. The reamining stories, 'The Lemures', 'The Disappearance of the Saturnalia Silver' and 'King Bee and Honey', are purely fictional, though inspired by bits and pieces of Roman literature and social history.

Saylor includes an excellent Author’s Note at the back of the book, detailing all the sources for the stories. For ‘The House of the Vestals’, he explains that he had to do an enormous amount of legwork tracking down one and two-line references to the incident in question. Luckily for those of us working on this story at the moment, two articles have since been published (in journals that are available on JSTOR, the online journal storage site, even better!) which go through all the references to the case in minute detail, thus saving the rest of us hours of trawling through Cicero and Plutarch. (Also, we now have the ability to do electronic word searches of the texts. Which helps too.) Both articles offer slightly different summaries of the case but they’re in broad agreement, and they highlight a couple of inconsistencies that lead them to different conclusions from Saylor – not that this matters, since a) Saylor’s conclusions are also perfectly reasonable, the whole incident is extremely difficult to reconstruct and b) he’s writing fiction and any changes would easily fall under artistic license anyway. But since I happen to have looked into this recently, it seemed worth bringing it up!

As always with Saylor’s books, I enjoyed this very much. There were a couple of cases in which I worked out the culprit straight away, but the resolution was never quite so clear, so apart from ‘The Tale of the Treasure House’, I was hooked throughout. There’s also something strangely satisfying about reading about Gordianus’ life when he was poorer, when it was just him and Eco and Bethesda, and when Eco was mute – like reading the scenes with the old Watch in Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, sometimes, when fictional characters make progress, you find yourself wanting to go back to how they were when you first met them. This collection provides a perfect opportunity to do so!

Pandora (by Anne Rice)

I'll be away at the Hay festival with no internet access until next week, so I'll return next Monday with a review of the Doctor Who mid-series-not-quite-a-finale-more-like-a-Sweeps-episode-except-we-don't-have-those-in-this-country thing, 'A Good Man Goes to War' (which has both River and Roman Rory in it).

For fans of The Roman Mysteries, Caroline Lawrence has just released the first book in a new childrens' mystery series, The Western Mysteries, which I've reviewed over at Fantastic Reads. Thanks to Caroline for sending me a review copy of the book and to Ali for hosting the review!

Thanks also to Hasan from Three Pipe Problem, who kindly sent me a copy of a very different Roman history-based book. I'm not sure if I've read any Anne Rice before; I might have done. What happened was, a long time ago (it must have been about fifteen years ago I think) I was staying in a hotel in London with my parents. I had my own room in a really nice hotel that was decorated like an old-fashioned living room and had a shelf of books in it. I've always had trouble sleeping and I picked up a book at random, which turned out to be a romantic story about a vampire. All I really remember is that it involved a trip to the opera in the late nineteenth century, and possibly also to the ballet. Yes, definitely the ballet. Or maybe I'm mixing it up with that episode of Angel. Anyway, I got halfway through the book, fell asleep, and the next morning we left the hotel and I never finished it. I assume that the book must have been an Anne Rice, but I didn't bother to check at the time so really, it could have been anything.

What this means is that I came to Pandora with only the limited knowledge of Anne Rice's world that you can get from watching Interview with the Vampire a few years back, and with a confused head full of Buffy, True Blood and Twilight. (Yes, I've read Twilight. All the first three, not the fourth. I really like the first two, the third one got too weird. There's nothing wrong with a good trashy read from time to time. I've been re-reading Sweet Valley High recently as well). Pandora is apparently one of the 'New Tales of the Vampires' and I get the feeling it's aimed at a loyal readership who are familiar with Rice's world and her characters, beyond a vague knowledge that Lestat is Tom Cruise (yum). No one sparkled, obviously, but I did occasionally get a bit lost trying to work out which rules applied to these particular vampires and which didn't!

Tom Cruise as Lestat. Yum.

As far as I can tell, Rice!Vampires are extremely similar to TrueBlood!Vampires. However, while Harris may have taken inspiration from Rice's vampires to create her own, there is one crucial difference between the two sets of books - Harris knows how to find the funny. Her series knows full well how daft it is and her characters are self-aware, her heroine's narration dry and often hilarious. Rice perhaps puts herself at a disadvantage, funny-wise, by writing from the point of view of the vampire, but that's not the only issue. Pandora, narrating her own story, makes frequent references to ancient comedies that Rice obviously loves as much as I do, but none of that humour comes through in her own story, which is told is a dry and terribly pompous manner. I'm afraid this made the book occasionally hard-going for me, as I have a tendency to avoid anything that entirely misplaces its sense of humour, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy the book at all - the story was well paced and usually interesting, and the characters reasonably well drawn, especially the anti-heroine.

The story follows Pandora, formerly Lydia, a Roman vampire who's taken the name of the woman from Greek mythology who unleashed all sorts of evils on the world by opening a jar (very Symbolic). Rice has clearly done her homework, and name-checks a wide variety of ancient sources, including Suetonius, Tacitus, Apuleius, Ovid (lots of Ovid), Plautus and so on. She ties Pandora the Roman vampire's story into the story of Tiberius and Sejanus and also to Germanicus, which gives it a nice sense of being firmly located in history, and her characters behave in a reasonably Roman manner for the most part (though I'm not sure why a Greek has the very Roman name 'Flavius'). The only thing that's missing is a sense of what made ancient authors like Ovid or Apuleius so successful - that missing sense of humour and fun.

I was surprised to realise that the book focuses almost entirely on Pandora's human life (partly because of a misleading bit of blurb on the back). Much of this story might simply be a novel about a woman's misfortunes under the reign of Tiberius. This allows the story to take its time and really explore Pandora's character and situation, which is nice. The problem with this approach emerges at the end of the novel, at which point Rice suddenly rushes through two hundred years of history in a hurry to get Pandora to where she is in the opening, twentieth century sequence (a story which, I get the feeling, is designed to fill in blanks in earlier novels that I haven't read). Not only is this section horribly awkwardly narrated in places, the narrator urging readers not to bother remembering all the names she keeps throwing at them, but insisting on mentioning them anyway (just leave out the names if they're that unimportant) but in her rush, errors start to creep into Rice's research. Suddenly, we get 'monks' a good couple of centuries too early, a description of second century emperors in general that better fits third century emperors and a truly bizarre spelling of the word 'deities' (as 'dieties' - Slim Fast fanatics?!).

'Pandora's' overview of the way social history developed during this period clearly follows the classic assessment of E. R. Dodds in his most famous scholarly work, The Greeks and the Irrational. Dodds argued that rationality ruled hearts and minds during the Classical Athenian period in the fifth century BC and again during the Roman Republic but that, from the second century AD onwards, society crumbled into growing 'irrationality' and religious fervour, finally culminating in the success of Christianity. His argument is still widely accepted today, but it's one that I am less convinced by than many others, and that I have argued against in my thesis, as I don't believe any particular century in the ancient world was that much less rational than any other century. It's a popular analysis, though, and it fits with Rice's preoccupations in this book, much of which is concerned with working through arguments about faith, religious fanaticism and rationality.

Pandora's 'conversion' to vampire is connected to the mystery cult of Isis and Osiris, a subject I've written about a few times here - but it's also intimately connected to Rice's vampire mythology, and I get the definite feeling that there's a whole lot going on here that I won't fully appreciate without reading more of Rice's books. Still, going just on this book, the Isis connection actually works rather well. Mystery cults were so secretive that they offer great ground for authors to play in, since it's virtually impossible to prove or disprove anything you say about them. Isis is particularly suitable for a vampire story, since bringing her husband back to life and conceiving a child by magic from a dead body with no vital male organ is such an important part of her mythology - it fits beautifully with the vampiric themes of unlife from death and non-sexual (well, metaphorically sexual) reproduction. I also liked the use of Near Eastern names and others for Isis and Osiris, which I assume relates to Rice's other books but which also parallels the ancient habit of conflating different gods together quite neatly.

Vincent Perez as Marius, Pandora's lover and sort-of-maker (there are three different vampires involved, it's complicated), in the movie version of

Queen of the Damned. Which I haven't seen, but even if I had, I'd probably just be even more confused!

For the most part, this is a fun enough, if slightly pretentious, novel about a woman struggling to survive in Tiberius' Rome and Antioch. Then at the end she gets turned into a vampire. Pandora is a strong character and her story brightened up a dull afternoon sitting in my car waiting for the breakdown repair man, but characters arguing about religion and faith in novels isn't to my personal taste, and I need a bit more self-deprecation in my first-person narrators. I also wanted more about Flavius, the one-legged philospher-vampire, but perhaps he belongs in another book as well. I'm sure there are other readers, though, who will revel in Pandora's struggle to find meaning, her encounters with strange dark temples and vampire queens who sound more like mummies to me (Vampire Mummies? Has anyone written about those? Now there's an idea...). I certainly get the sense that knowing this story will enrich Rice's other novels for regular readers, and that if I ever read any more of her work, I'll probably have a greater appreciation for this one.

King Arthur: Stories of the Knights of the Round Table (by Vladimir Hulpach)

When I was little, I had a couple of big compendium books I really loved. One was A Treasury of Literature for Children, which was a collection of excerpts from longer novels and poems (the story of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi from The Jungle Book, an extract from What Katy Did, 'A Smuggler's Song' and so on). King Arthur: Stories of the Knights of the Round Table, a collection of various stories relating to Arthur and his knights, was the other.

When I read it, though, I always skipped the first chapter. The second chapter told the story of Merlin's childhood and the third finally got to the birth of Arthur (and therefore, to me, the interesting bit) but the first explained how the kingdom of Britain was, in fact, founded by Trojans. This chapter, I'm afraid to say, did not interest me at all!

The story given in the book (which I presume became attached to Arthurian legend somewhere in the medieval or early modern period, though I don't know when) is that Ascanius' grandson Brutus was exiled after accidentally killing his father and was led to Britain by Artemis through a dream. However it got attached to Arthurian legend, the intention is clear - to make Arthur a great Classical hero as well as a British one and to tie the Britons, like the Romans before them, to Homeric legend. Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain is reimagined as a meeting of ancient kinfolk and Arthurian legend is made part of a larger Classical story.

This only means anything, though, if you are already familiar with Classical mythology and can enjoy drawing links between the two systems. I didn't know anything about Classical mythology as a child, so, being an obstinate child, I wasn't interested in it. This problem is compounded by the fact that the story is taken right from the Trojan War to the founding of Britain, through Aeneas, Ascanias, Silvus and Brutus, and the story whizzes through the whole of the Aeneid and more in a few hundred words, leaving no time to get to care about any of the story. Plus, the only thing I did know about Classics at the time was that Brutus killed Julius Caesar, so I was also really confused.

Going back to it as an adult, the chapter still feels a bit rushed, but works much better. Artemis, orders given in dreams, people accidentally shooting relatives and going off to found new kingdoms all seems much more familiar to me now and the tying together of the two mythologies is quite fun. I've no idea if this book is still in print, but I'm glad I still have it - it's beautifully illustrated by Jan Cerny and I always enjoyed its retellings of the Arthurian legends as a child. I'm glad it includes the Classical sections as well, as I can really appreciate them now - no more skipping Chapter One!

Caveat Emptor (by Ruth Downie)

The blog now has its very own Facebook page! You can find it here. This involved creating an account for 'Pop Classics', so Facebook now addresses me as 'Pop', which is very weird and makes me sound like someone's grandfather...

Following on from Tuesday's interview with author Ruth Downie, today I'm reviewing her latest release, the fourth in her series featuring Gaius Petreius Ruso, physician and investigator. It's called Caveat Emptor in the States, and Ruso and the River of Darkness in the UK. I'm going with Caveat Emptor, partly because it's more closely related to the plot and partly because it's quicker to type. The review copy was kindly sent to me by Hasan Niyazi over at Three Pipe Problem, with Downie's permission. Spoilers follow.

When I reviewed Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March, I talked about the various different ways of approaching historical fiction. Like The Ides of March, this novel fits into the third category of works of historical fiction, the kind that is, more or less, a story about twenty-first century people in Roman clothes. This is not a critcism and not a negative quality - as the comparison with Wilder indicates, this is a deliberate choice on the part of a novelist to create an entertaining story with a likeable hero (and heroine) for a modern audience. And unlike The Ides of March, the resolution to this story depends on Roman issues and Roman problems. It could not have happened in the twenty-first century, and so it is not so far along the extreme end of the imaginary scale as Wilder's novel (which, while based around the death of Caesar, used a twentieth-century political incident as part of its final plotting). This is an historical story that could only take place at the time and place in which it is set. It's the language, characterisation and some elements of the setting that modernise it, creating a nice balance between a historical story and relatable heroes.

It's clear from Downie's interview that she's particularly enthusiastic about archaeological research, and it shows in her story. The plot revolves around coinage and her descriptions of the various coins are clearly those of someone who has handled these things and who is fascinated by them. (This is also why I prefer the American title - I like the inversion of 'buyer beware' to refer to the need to beware of the coins, not the purchased item). Other bits and pieces of Roman stuff are scattered liberally throughout the novel, providing lovely bits of period detail about bathhouses, funeral rites and especially, on a less archaeological note, the tensions between the various British tribes and between the Britons and the Romans.

It's in dialogue, vocabulary and characterisation that our characters show themselves to be a wee bit less Roman. On the superficial side and related to the mental associations of the vocabulary more than questions of accuracy or inaccuracy, there's things like the 'reception' at the mansio with its 'night porter', which sounds like the hotel I used to work in, and the 'laundry basket' dirty socks are kept in - there is absolutely no way to demonstrate whether or not Romans had laundry baskets, but the use of the item somehow feels so utterly domestic and familiar, I end up picturing the blue thing I got from Tesco's. Then there's the baby who somehow manages to sleep on a Roman road (it would be far too rough) and who is fed water and some form of animal milk at only a couple of weeks old when his mother dies - perhaps the Romans did do this but it isn't a good idea and really, you'd need to find a wet nurse as soon as possible (the characters do mention finding a wet nurse, but they put it off).

More seriously, there are 'servants' and 'maids' running around all over the place. This rather reminds me of translations of the Bible, which are forever throwing the word 'servant' around when they mean 'slave'. In Roman society, there were slaves and there were freedmen (and freedwomen). A freedman might stay and do the same job he or she did as a slave but with a wage, or they might leave and set up their own business. No Romans would run around town looking for a 'housekeeper', they would buy a new slave. Come to that, unless the previous 'housekeeper' had been freed in the dead man's will, you wouldn't need to find a new one after a death because the old one would belong to the next of kin or beneficiary of the will (though, since there's no mention of wills, perhaps the dead man didn't leave one). We don't know much about Roman Britain, but in a town striving to adopt Roman customs, I'm pretty sure this would still be the case (and the British almost certainly had some slaves as well).

On the character side, Ruso, like all Roman detectives, has a very modern outlook, as does his (British, outspoken) wife. He occasionally considers the gods but not often (to be fair, I think that was probably true of a lot of Romans as well), he puts his trust in medicine and forensics (like Cadfael, a forward-thinking medieval Crusader turned monk), he marries for love (at least, the second time) and most tellingly, he has no slaves.

The great benefit of all this is that the reader can really sympathise with the main characters and enjoy a story with a fair number of twists and turns without being distracted by passing judgement on a hero who enjoys gladiatorial games or keeps lots of slaves. Every literary Roman detective is like this to an extent, some more than others. Ruso and Tilla are fun, likeable characters and you can really feel for them over the course of the story, both when they're endangering themselves looking for a murderer and during their more personal problems. They are also pleasantly three-dimesional, fully-rounded characters who have plenty of flaws, even if they're not specifically Roman flaws - the downside of this is that occasionally they have to do really stupid things for the sake of the plot, but that's fairly common.

The book is easy to follow for those who haven't read Ruso stories before, which is good (though it will of course spoil the earlier books!). It features a colourful cast of memorable characters in a vividly depicted setting. The shady figure of Metellus in the background adds to the danger and the intrigue and the ending is distinctly bittersweet - once again, the constraints of the historical period do come to the fore at this point and any kind of justice has to be achieved in a thoroughly roundabout fashion. That, I suspect, is a very Roman quality.

All in all this a fun read with a likeable cast and offers a pleasant opportunity to read something set in Roman Britain that isn't about the Ninth Legion! (Though it is a little bit about Boudicca...)

Guest Post: Interview with author Ruth Downie

Apologies to subscribers for the onslaught of slightly odd posts yesterday. I've been doing some minor redesign on the site, trying to make it easier to navigate, and I nicked Billie Doux's excellent idea of back-dating some posts to 2000 so that they can stand as 'homepages' for my regular series, as it were. I've also put a few adverts on the site, which I hope are not too instrusive.

Today's post is a guest post by Hasan Niyazi from Three Pipe Problem, and is an interview with author Ruth Downie. Ruth writes a series of Roman-set 'detective' novels about army physician Gaius Petreius Ruso, and the fourth, Ruso and the River of Darkness in the UK and Australia or Caveat Emptor in the US and Canada, has just been released. I'll be reviewing Caveat Emptor on Thursday but in the meantime, I'll hand you over to Hasan.

What was the key inspiration that led you to write stories based in an historical setting?

The usual advice is to ‘write what you know,’ but when I began to write I was spending most of my time rushing between a part-time job and looking after small children. Writing was a way to escape, so I was on the lookout for a story as far from my own life as possible.

We were on a family visit to Hadrian’s Wall when I read that the Roman troops ‘were not allowed to marry the local women, but were allowed to have relationships with them’. This early example of the military having their cake and eating it set me wondering what life must have been like for those two very different communities, Roman and native, occupier and occupied, living side by side.

The historical sleuth genre is becoming increasingly popular, what do you think is the explanation for this?

My first thought here is that the aftermath of a serious crime now involves a crowd of professionals and a lot of technology.  There isn’t much room for the amateur sleuth to get past the yellow police tape and the white paper suits – which narrows down the crime writer’s choice of protagonist.

Historical fiction can take us back beyond the development of a professional police force, to a time when an enthusiastic amateur from a different walk of life might realistically have stood a chance of solving a mystery.  So I wonder if the breadth of scope is part of the appeal.

Also, since ‘history’ in general is enjoying a revival in popular culture at the moment, you could say that the detective story is a useful vessel in which to travel through time.

Were the writings of Conan-Doyle or Edgar Allan Poe influential in your development of your Ruso Series?

Anyone working in the detective/mystery genre owes a debt to the writers who pioneered the form, but it’s so long since I read any Poe that his influence must be well buried!

As for Conan Doyle – Ruso is certainly no Holmes but there’s definitely a structural inheritance.  The partner as a sounding-board for the detective’s ideas; the idea that a mystery can be solved by careful observation and deductive reasoning; the lurking existence of a powerful enemy across several episodes  – and come to think of it, the ‘two gentlemen and the housekeeper’ setup in the first Ruso book – they’re all there in Conan Doyle.

It is well known that Sherlock Holmes was based on Dr Joseph Bell, a Lecturer in Medicine who mentored Conan-Doyle. Is Gaius Petreius Ruso based on anyone in particular?

No.  I never find it helps to have real people in mind when I write, because they tend to get in the way.

Much of writing – the way I do it, at least - seems to be about beating one’s head against a dead end until a useful idea falls into place. Ruso sprang from something else I was trying to write, where the main character embodied the tensions of the time by having a Roman father and a British mother.  I can’t believe how long it took me to realise that the parents, who could actually move about and speak to each other, were much more interesting than the memory of them in the son’s head.

Can you describe some of the historical research that goes into your books?

It’s just as well publishers have deadlines, because without them the books would never get written: I’d be too happy doing the research. I like to wander around the locations of the books, visiting museums and taking far too many photos. Often the setting dictates part of the plot:  once I’d seen the maze of tunnels and staircases and corridors beneath the amphitheatre seating in Nimes, it was obvious that Ruso had to chase somebody around them.

Back at home, there’s plenty of written evidence to explore but it’s patchy. The Romans left us everything from official histories and epic poems to tombstones, election slogans and rude graffiti,   but Britain only seems to feature in the histories when somebody important was here.  We have very little idea of what was going on here at the start of Hadrian’s reign, except that the Army had to deal with some sort of trouble.

Since the Britons themselves left no written records, the field is open to speculation – and to archaeology. I have to confess something of an obsession here. It’s not strictly necessary, for the sake of the novels, to spend several weeks of each summer covered in mud and suncream while attempting to scrape out the remains of a Roman sheep farm from a Northamptonshire hillside.  It is, however, enormous fun. And perhaps it serves as a reminder that most of our ancestors were not famous generals or politicians but ordinary people, making a living as best they could.

On the subject of making a living, I did have a couple of characters who were obliged to tread grapes. In the interests of authenticity, and probably because I was stuck with the plot, I put a bunch of grapes in a washing-up bowl and tried it. Grapes are very slimy.

Some of the most fascinating aspects of your books are the descriptions of the interactions between Romans and the native Britons. Are the dynamics of these accounts congruent with the historical record?

It’s surprising how little the native Britons figure in the Army letters that have been unearthed at Vindolanda. Just about the only mention calls them ‘Brittunculi’, which translates as something like ‘wretched little Brits’. One gets the impression that unless the natives needed suppressing or taxing, the Army was largely preoccupied with its own business. However, the way that small settlements sprang up outside the forts suggests that there was plenty of trade going on with individual soldiers, and occasionally we find native wives and families mentioned on tombstones.

There must have been serious tensions, though.  A legion was an expensive unit to fund, and the fact that three of them were stationed here for much of the occupation suggests the Britons could not be trusted to run their own affairs.

Finally – and I think this is what makes the period really interesting - the Britons, who were split into various tribes, couldn’t agree amongst themselves. For instance, Tacitus tells us that Caratacus’s resistance to Rome finally ended when he fled to the queen of a northern tribe for sanctuary - and was promptly arrested and handed over. That same queen also fought a civil war against her own husband.

There’s archaeological evidence for division, too. In the south, many of the tribes seem to have been keen to adopt imported fashions and move out of their traditional roundhouses. Further north, there’s no sign of the locals building themselves smart new Roman-style villas. They had a huge wall put up by the Army instead, with defensive ditches on both sides. I think that’s a fair hint that not everyone was clamouring to be part of the Empire.

Cases from the legal career of Marcus Tullius Cicero are precious surviving glimpses of Roman investigative processes. Have these and similar accounts been influential in crafting the structure of your stories?

Someone once described the story of Cicero’s ‘Cluentius’ case to me as being ‘worthy of the plot of Dynasty’ – and indeed it is. His speeches are great examples of how to sway a jury (including all sorts of hearsay and insinuation that would be totally inadmissible today) but not many people would be wealthy or influential enough to have such a lawyer on their side. That was if they ever got to court in the first place.

We don’t know what the ‘grassroots’ legal system was for ordinary people in Britain, where most of my stories are set, but if it was anything like Rome, there was no state prosecution service.  It was up to the victim, or someone acting on their behalf, to bring a case. It’s widely believed that Roman citizens could appeal to the Emperor (as St. Paul did) but if you were a common-or-garden Briton, that wasn’t open to you either.  You might try complaining to the authorities, or your tribal leaders, or the local centurion, but you would have to wait at least 1400 years for the police to arrive. So a private citizen like Ruso might just feel moved enough by injustice to want to do something about it. As for the Cluentius case– it’s a marvellous tale of sex, murder and family betrayal, but I haven’t yet figured out a way to fit it all into one book.

What advice do you have for aspiring fiction writers?

Find friends who write, and encourage each other.  Write about what fascinates you, and be prepared to rewrite. Don’t give up.

What is a memorable site from antiquity which you have visited?

Pompeii and Herculaneum are the most evocative sites, but my favourite remains the unostentatious Northamptonshire sheep farm, because I’ve been part of the team that’s uncovered it.  (www.whitehallvilla.co.uk)

Your book is available in hard copy, audio and electronic edition. As an author, do you feel it is important to maximise the audience for your work through these different media?

To be honest an author has very little control over this sort of thing, but I’m delighted that there are now several options for people who don’t find printed books practical. I also think it’s important that readers can access books in whatever way they find easiest. There are so many competing demands on people’s time, and whilst hardcore readers will always hunt out a book, others will simply give up and do something else instead. And that’s a shame.

Many thanks to both Hasan and Ruth! I'll be back with my review of Caveat Emptor on Thursday.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (by Diana Wynne Jones)

A couple of bits of housekeeping: I've made comments available to registered users only (anyone signed in to OpenID can still comment) in an attempt to avoid spending another morning deleting viagra salespeople from my comments sections. So far, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have worked - I'll leave it this way for a while and if it doesn't do any good, I'll open up the comments to anonymous users again (if you're the viagra salespeople who keep leaving inane but vaguely relevant comments linked to your viagra-selling site on the blog, please stop doing it. I am never going to let you push drugs, legal or otherwise, on my blog and if I ever decide to advertise anything on here, that will be my decision and mine alone).

I also have a new article up at Sound on Sight, on the six best films based on a television series.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a comic A-Z of common fantasy tropes written by Diana Wynne Jones back in the mid-1990s. It's written in the form of a travel guide for the adventurous Tourist (i.e. the protagonist) about to set out on a Tour of Fantasyland. The obligatory map is provided at the beginning, of course, and for some reason includes, alongside The Smoking Mountain of G'wd, the River Smealt and the Sea of Caysif, small town labelled 'Nuneaton'. This was rather surprising - I went to the railway station there once, but had no idea it was a gateway to Fantasyland. It certainly made me laugh to see it on there, though.

The rest of the book is an alphabetical encyclopedia of sorts, each section headed with a Gnomic Utterance starting with the appropriate letter (things like 'Insights are always valuable, even if they only show you your duodenal ulcer'). This includes an entry for the Vestigial Empire; the 'most civilised' part of the continent, where both food (non-stew-based) and baths are available, with the only decent roads in Fantasyland, lots of white villas and vineyards and it has 'a parliament and a senate'. The Vestigial Empire is quite clearly a clinging remnant of the Roman Empire, existing alongside the medieval setting of the rest of Fantasyland.

Like so many recurring themes in sword 'n' sourcery, this particular theme originates with Tolkien, whose Gondor has a vaguely Byzantine feel alongside Rohan's Anglo-Saxon Cossacks (another entry in the Guide). It has its roots in history, especially in Tolkien's version, as the remnants of the Roman Empire continued to exist in the form of the Byzantine Empire while early medieval western Europe developed slowly into late medieval western Europe.

The Vestigial Empire as Wynne Jones describes it, though, is not quite Tolkien's ageing glory of Byzantium and even Tolkien was creating fantasy, not writing history; all in all the whole trope is rather unfair to the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was a large and prosperous Empire which survived the fall of Rome by a thousand years (it fell when the Turks invaded Constantinople in 1453). Although it was, technically, the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire, it was really a force and a culture in its own right and, historically, should never be dismissed as just a lingering 'vestigial' outpost of fallen Rome.

Tolkien started the downgrading of Byzantium's fantasy equivalent when he portrayed Gondor as a fading, suffering, shrinking shadow of its former self (excluding the ending, of course). The common Fantasyland Vesitigal Empire, as described by Wynne Jones, is even more Roman and even less impressive. It is quite clearly playing on the idea of Rome, but a Rome shrunk to a much less powerful force and struggling to survive against a fantastical Dark Lord. This is the most traditional, Victorian view of Rome imaginable, as a corner of 'civilisation' against barbaric tribes and countries with no decent roads, food or buildings (I should probably reiterate here that Wynne Jones' book is satire - she is deliberately highlighting the corniest fantasy tropes around, not endorsing them!).

There was one other somewhat bizarre bit of Roman stuff tucked away in the book. The book contains black and white, sort of old fashioned feeling illustrations throughout - I couldn't find the illustrator's name, so presumably it was either Steve Crisp, who designed the front cover, or Wynne Jones herself. Under the entry for 'Palaces' was the following illustration:


This is not a palace. It is quite clearly a drawing of Birmingham Town Hall. I recognise the entrance in the nearest corner, where we went in to see my brother play some kind of musical instrument in something, and to see Nosferatu with live accompanying organist at Halloween a couple of years ago.

Birmingham Town Hall

I didn't have a picture on my computer from the right angle, but here's one of mine from the snow last December - you can just about see the town hall in the far left side, behind the merry-go-round (which is part of the annual Frankfurt German Market) over the other side of the steps from the Floozie in the Jacuzzi.

I'm not sure what's more puzzling about this particular illustration - the fact that a drawing of the town hall of Britain's second city has been used to illustrate Fantasyland, or the fact that it's included under 'Palaces'. Birmingham Town Hall, you see, is such a good replica of a Roman temple that our lecturer in our first year undergraduate class told us all to go and have a look at it so we could understand Roman temples better.

A Roman temple in Nimes, which I haven't yet seen in person, unfortunately.

Clearly, the Vestigial Empire has somehow, possibly through the portal in Nuneaton, extended itself into our world, where it's old temples are becoming palaces. For fantasy kings. Or something.

Anyway, The Tough Guide is well worth a read if you're a fantasy fan as it's good fun and some of it is hilarious - the entries on 'Horses' and 'Swords' were especially high points for me.

Dead in the Family (by Charlaine Harris)

Yes, I have now read up to Book 10 in this series already. No, I haven't read any more of the things I'm actually supposed to be reading. Yes, it is true, I have no willpower whatsoever and am lucky books and TV shows are my worst addictions. No, I haven't read the new one, Dead Reckoning, yet, because the postal service round here is truly awful (no spoilers please!).

We already know (from Dead and Gone I think, but to be honest they've all started to blend together in my head at this point) that Book!Eric's maker was a Roman called Appius Livius Ocella. In Dead in the Family, we actually get to meet him, though he doesn't make quite as much of an impression as his other offspring, only the second famous vampire we meet in the series, Alexei Romanov (is that a pun? Roman/Romanov? I don't know, I'm very tired!).

TV!Eric's maker, Godric, was a fluffy bunny of a vampire who just wanted peace, love and forgiveness. OK, he was an awesome fluffy bunny who got rid of evil human rapists, and a fluffy bunny who'd clearly been pretty hardcore/badass/downright evil back in the day, but by the time we meet him, fluffiness is definitely to the forefront of his personality. Godric's purpose, TV-wise, is to provide Eric with what TV Tropes would call a Pet the Dog moment, to prove that there are actually some feelings under there and he doesn't spend all his time throwing people's dismembered arms around the cellar, since that's not something a girl generally finds attractive. I haven't read the first three books yet, so I don't know how Eric comes across in them, but in later books he's definitely a touch soppier than his TV incarnation, so presumably this was not such an urgent concern for Book!Eric.

As a result, Book!Eric's maker turns up much, much later and is a thoroughly different kettle of fish; a hard-as-nails Roman with an unfortunate soft spot for psychotic young boys. (TV!Godric is about the right age to be a Roman as well, but he never mentions it, except to note that he missed Jesus). Book!Eric is sufficiently fond of his maker to object to Sookie's attempt to off him as soon as possible, but he gets over Appius' subsequent death-by-enraged-fairy pretty quickly, having spent most of Appius' visit in something of a state of tension, a bit like his mother-in-law's come to visit, and brought a dangerous psychotic with her to boot.

Because there's no need for Book!Eric to demonstrate his soft side, since he's done that a few times already, his maker can be that much scarier. The casting of said scary maker as a Roman works brilliantly. The fact that the Roman world was a bit more bloodthirsty than ours is something that comes up a lot in popular culture, but never with any subtlty. Representations of Romans tend towards either giving us heroes who are just like us and way ahead of their time in their dislike of gladiatorial Games and so on, or they go in the other direction and give us wildly bloodthirsty Romans who revel in blood, gore and sex as much as possible (Spartacus: Blood and Sand, I'm looking at you).

What Harris gives us here is a slightly more subtle interpretation of a Roman (bearing in mind that this particular Roman is also a vampire, and a certain amount of violent bloodthirst comes with the territory). Appius has an even more casual attitude towards murder and mayhem than your average vampire, because he lived in a world with gladiatorial Games in it. However, this attitude doesn't sway into the realms of the ridiculous and as far as we know, he doesn't organise any orgies (though to be fair, Sookie doesn't know what's going on at Fangtasia for days at a time, so perhaps the jury's out on that one). Similarly, the book avoids implying Romans were Classical Athenians (where close, sexual or otherwise, relationships between older men and young boys were the norm among the elite) but at the same time, notes and makes a plot point out of the fact that having a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old boy would not seem criminal to a Roman - in fact, they wouldn't see anything wrong with it. Appius is just Roman enough to seem thoroughly foreign and downright creepy to Sookie, while staying the right side of totally ridiculous.

Harris doesn't include any major errors on the Roman history side, and she provides the currently accepted pronunication for the Latin name ('Li - wee - us'). Although most of us read Latin with the 'w' pronunciation for 'v's, I don't think I'm alone in reading names within a translation or English book with the 'v' - Livia, not Liwia - so that actually threw me for a moment, even though it's correct! I liked the emphasis on the importance of the different names and which ones are only for close family members to use. One of my favourite things about the books and the TV show is Bill's Civil War-era speech and vocabulary, so I was mildly disappointed not to see Appius' speech marked out that way, but then, as we've seen in Gods of the Arena, that can go too far when the original language is Latin, so it's probably for the best and I guess Appius would have learned modern English anyway.

Godric. Much nicer than Appius. Equally doomed.

Appius really is a very creepy and unpleasant presence in the book, although his actual 'screentime', as it were, is limited. I rather like this use of a Roman as a positively terrifying presence, due partly to his being a vampire, but also at least partly to his being a Roman (largely in the area of sexual morality - but treated realistically for once, and not orgy-based). So often the Romans are the protagonists in any story in which they feature, it's refreshing to see the nastier side of ancient Rome brought to the fore. I'm rather sad Appius got offed, as he was an interesting character, but still, he was pretty nasty, so he's no great loss, and given the series' tendency to kill off just about everyone who isn't Sookie, one of her love interests or her brother, I'm just relieved it was him that bought it and not Pam...

CS Lewis' Lost Aeneid

I had meant to get hold of another Jesus film to review for Easter, but I didn't get around to it - still, a book by/about CS Lewis, one of the twentieth-century's most famous lay theologians, seems vaguely relevant anyway! On a more strictly Easter-y theme, last year's post on The Passion of the Christ is here and an article including some thoughts about the Latin in that film here.

I realise translations of the Aeneid are not exactly popular culture, but I wanted to review this as a new work of CS Lewis (not many of those around!) that all fans of his work may enjoy, whether or not they're familiar with Virgil or Roman poetry. This was a review copy of the book, organised for me by Hasan Niyazi over at Three Pipe Problem, sent by the distributor Inbooks and supplied by the publisher, Yale University Press. The book is edited by AT Reyes and has a forward by Walter Hooper (CS Lewis' secretary) and preface by DO Ross.

Since I'm interested in this as a book for general audiences who are fans of Lewis, I won't say too much about the translation itself, which is so incomplete as to be little use to those just wanting to read the Aeneid anyway (The book contains all of Book 1, a substantial proportion of Book 2 and a section from Book 6. Any other sections Lewis had translated before he died were burned when his brother was clearing out the house after his death - the book's introduction explains how Walter Hooper rescued what we have from the fire. This edition also includes various other lines and fragments Lewis had translated or mentioned in his other works, and summaries of the missing nine books and the missing material from Books 2 and 6). There are many different ways to translate from one language to another, but generaly speaking there are two broad approaches; you can try to translate the specific vocabulary of the original text as closely as possible, or you can produce a text which conveys the feeling and sense of the original without necessarily transferring specific vocabulary. When translating poetry, translators also have to decide whether to write their version in plain prose, to stick as closely as possible to the vocabulary of the original but lose the rhythm and feel of it, or a freer style of poetry, keeping the verse but losing the precise rhythm, or to try to ape the original metre as closely as possible.

Lewis, being a poet and English Literature professor, chose a metre which he felt was as close to Virgil as possible (Virgil used dactylic hexameter; Lewis used short alexandrine lines with six beats). His translation is of the kind that tries to convey the sense and feeling of the poem without sticking slavishly to the ancient vocabulary (though for the most part he's pretty close). Because Lewis felt so strongly that literature had lost something since the arrival of machines in the nineteenth century, he translated the poem into pseudo-medieval English - using a medieval style, but not actually writing in Middle English.

The upshot of this is that the poem reads beatifully, but probably shouldn't be used by undergraduates studying Virgil in translation, as it's not quite literal enough. Whether you'll enjoy reading it really depends on your taste - if you enjoy Shakespeare, especially his rhyming couplets, you'll probably enjoy this.

The book has been beautifully put together. Hooper's forward is personal and touching, Ross' preface effectively explains Lewis' attitude and approach to the poem and Reyes' introduction explains the process of translation and of putting together the manuscript clearly and simply. For those who don't read Latin, the introduction explains the differences between Lewis' translation and others and how Lewis' translation compares to the Latin, and provides a thorough introduction to the text. There are also a few prints of Lewis' manuscript, which is lovely to see (he had really neat handwriting!) I would imagine any fan of CS Lewis who isn't familiar with Classics will thoroughly enjoy this.

The translation is, of course, unfinished so you're not getting the whole of the Aeneid - unfortuantely, only a tiny fraction of it has been translated and preserved. No one needs to worry about not knowing the story, though, as Reyes provides summaries for the rest of the poem - these are very, very brief but they will fill readers in on the essential details. Luckily, the surviving material includes some of the most interesting sections from Book 6 (the journey through the underworld), which Lewis seems to have translated first - his language is slightly different in this section (thees and thous instead of you) so presumably he'd done this before he started the whole thing from the beginning. Unluckily, the translation of Book 2 runs out just as it gets to the really exciting bit - I'd recommend printing out the First Player's speech from Shakespeare's Hamlet about Priam and Hecuba and sticking it in the book right below the end of the translation of Book 2, so you can at least finish off the scene!

Reyes has made one decision I didn't agree with. He's included the Latin text opposite Lewis', which is brilliant and for which I'm very grateful, as it's so much easier to compare translation with Latin that way. However, he's used the most recent edition of the Latin, not the older edition Lewis used. Since this incomplete, medievalist translation is going to be of far more interest to Lewis fans and scholars than people needing a translation of the Aeneid, it would seem to make more sense to me to use the edition Lewis translated from, so his translation can be directly compared with the source material. Reyes has also not included any footnotes. He has a 'Notes' section, but no indication in the text itself of which parts of the translation come with notes. This is supposed to prevent the reader from being distracted and allow them to enjoy the poem artistically - unfortunately, it renders the Notes section somewhat difficult to use, as much flipping is required to work out which Notes refer to which bits of text.

That said, this has been really nicely put together and is a must-buy for rabid Lewis fans like me. Perhaps it's true that you get more out of it if you know the Aeneid, but I think Reyes has provided more than enough guidance for anyone who doesn't and Lewis really was a lyrical poet. Lewis' own love for Virgil comes through clearly, and every line aims to be, basically, as beautiful as possible. Just make sure you slip in that bit of Shakespeare, so you're not left hanging in the middle of Book 2!