Screwed by "Screwed".

Why is it that in Hollywood Romans almost invariably speak "olde-worlde" English? Even the TV series Rome, which made a big effort to puncture lots of Roman stereotypes, still sometimes floundered with its dialogue choices, occasionally lapsing into bizarre linguistic anachronisms that were especially jarring when set against the modern phrasing that the characters often used.

If we want to understand the roots of this, it's probably partly the Romans' own fault. We know the Romans largely through their own literature, but their own literature was not written in "everyday" Latin. Literary Latin is an extraordinarily highly-wrought and artificial "dialect" of Latin. Real Romans didn't speak in Ciceronian Latin any more than real Elizabethans spoke high Shakespearean English. If we want to get close to the "real" sound of classical Latin, we have to look not at the grand works of philosophy, rhetoric and history, but at the graffiti from the walls of Pompeii, or perhaps at the work of the small number of authors (like Catullus) who occasionally used "street" vernacular in their writings. And what we find is curiously modern - a racy, fluid, flexible language, full of allusion, slang, proverb and obscenity ("I had a great fuck here", reads one memorable graffito from a Pompeian brothel).

But all this has consequences for us humble purveyors of historical fiction. Readers probably expect fictional Romans to talk in the grand, noble, clunking cadences of the Hollywood depictions. So what do I do? The "honourable" thing, and puncture those stereotypes by presenting dialogue in (what I would argue is) a more authentic way? Or the "cowardly" thing and pander to the tired linguistic stereotypes so as not to throw the readers? You can probably see what my heart wants me to do - but if I ever want to get this manuscript sold, I'll need to do some pandering somewhere along the line!

The "translation" effect complicates things even further. What, for instance, is a poor boy to do when an otherwise extremely perceptive and valuable reader tells me that I shouldn't use the word "screwed" in the sexual sense because it can only be dated back to the 18th Century? Is it really necessary to point out that when the characters in my novel speak, literally every single word they say is an anachronism, since in the novel they are speaking in a language which didn't even exist when they were alive? Can I think of any Latin words that could justifiably be translated as "screwed"? Yes, probably half a dozen. However, this highly perceptive reader finds it hard to stomach the idea of Romans saying "screwed". So what do I do - stubbornly keep it in, knowing I'm really "in the right" and giving an accurate impression of how real Romans spoke? Or axe it so as not to scare off editors and potential readers? After all, if an experienced and perceptive reader stumbles over "screwed", what's a casual reader going to think?

Just a taster of some of the ridiculous decisions that exercise my time nowadays!

How To Love A Bad Boy

One of the problems I have faced in writing this novel is very simply this: Publius Clodius Pulcher was an absolute turd.

This is problematic since, as anybody who has studied the "science" of writing knows, readers are supposed to be able to empathise or sympathise with the narrators or main characters of novels. It's hard to drum up sympathy for someone as extreme and amoral as Clodius. I could take refuge in the "loveable cad" trope, and cash in on what I think of as "Flashman syndrome" - a belief that readers can learn to love an unpleasant character if he brings a certain style and panache to his unpleasantness, but I suspect that Clodius would test this paradigm to destruction. Flashman was a cad - but Clodius was an utter bastard.

The only way around this, I decided, was to regard the whole thing as a tragedy - the story of someone who could have been better, but who was dragged by circumstances and society down the path of darkness (think of Euripides' Medea - "I know the better course and I approve it; and yet I choose the worse.") . Since I do not believe that anybody is wholly bad, I decided that I should give my Clodius some redeeming features, something for the reader to hold on to, some potential for improvement or "salvation". My main 'redeeming features' are:

- His growing love for his wife Fulvia (see my previous post on this).

- A genuine and deep concern for his blood relatives. This, I think, is historicalluy justifiable since, as a member of the aristocratic gens Claudii, Clodius would have had reverence for his family hammered into his head from a very early youth (something I dwell on, perhaps excessively, in Chapter 1). I think that, in the context of this type of education, it's not implausible that, for instance, he would want to protect his sisters, or that he would feel grief at his father's death. And this can help to partially redeem him in readers' eyes.

- Humour. Readers will forgive a lot of outrageous behaviour if it is presented in a self-aware and humorous manner. I try to let Clodius' wit come out in his bitter asides and reflections on the experience he narrates.

These (and a few other potentially sympathetic traits) are intended to give the reader grounds for hope - can Clodius somehow hang onto these humanising qualities and rise above the horrific spiral of violence that whirls around him? The tragedy of the book, I hope, is that ultimately he cannot. The violence gradually consumes him, and we are forced to watch as every human quality is stripped from him and he becomes more and more monstrous.

Hey, I never said it would be a cheerful read!

Infamy, infamy, they've all ....

No, this blog hasn't died an entirely unlamented death, I've just been moving house and "offline" for most of the past week!

I'll post something more substantial when I've actually had a chance to write some more of my book, but for now, here's a thought - how about this for a cover image? It's "The Ides of March" by Poynter (the same guy who did the background image of "Lesbia"), it's full of deep shadows and suspicions of skulduggery.

The Curious Case of Clodius and Fulvia

One of the odder aspects of the story of the "real" Clodius is his relationship to his wife. Clodius married a woman called Fulvia, a daughter of the formidable house of the Sempronii (after Clodius died, the historical Fulvia married that old reprobate Antony and become a powerful woman in her own right). Now here's what's odd about their story. Despite the fact that Clodius, in his youth, led an utterly scandalous and reprehensible private life, at some point he actually, against all expectation, seems to have fallen in love with Fulvia!

Certainly there's some evidence that his dubious behaviour continued for a while after their marriage, so I doubt it was a "love match" initially - it is more likely that love grew after a loveless, politically-motivated wedding. But even those Roman writers who hated Clodius (and let's be honest, that's all of them) do not deny that, in his later years, he was the model of a devoted and considerate husband!

There's something that makes this even odder. Clodius seems to go on two distinct "character arcs". His political career gets steadily more outrageous at precisely the same time as his private life gets more "respectable" and conventional! The problem for me is this: how can I plausibly present an indiviudal getting sucked into a tragic whirlpool of spiralling violence while simultaneously getting ever more tender and besotted with his lady love? How can I do that without making his relations with Fulvia seem utterly out of character?

I want this love story in my novel, because without it I'm not doing justice to the life of the historical Clodius, and at the same time it gives me something that would otherwise be utterly missing in his later years - a tragically missed chance of redemption, one little glimpse of something noble and laudable in the character of a man who, by the end, is almost completely amoral and perhaps even psychotic. But I'm going to have to work like a demon and employ every writer's trick in the book to make this historically-attested phenomenon not seem like something hugely out of character!

I have some ideas about how I might "pull this off". I'll share them with you when I've better worked them out. Until then, Fulvia is destined to remain a conundrum.

Papyrology - Get Stuck In!!!!

I have to alert people to an excellent and important project run by Oxford University.

If you're already an ancient history fanatic, you'll already have heard of Oxyrhynchus. It's a small town in Egypt where vast numbers of Roman-period papyri, mostly in Greek, have been excavated. The site has turned up everything from fragments of lost works of literature to everyday administrative documents, and even an early Christian "lost gospel". The problem is that there are so many texts that they are swamping papyrologists, meaning that it is taking decades and decades to get them all transcribed and translated.

If you've ever fancied helping out with real ancient history, the online "Ancient Lives" project may just be for you. On the site, you will be presented with papyrus fragments and asked to "transcribe" them on a Greek keyboard panel. You don't need to know any Greek to do it (it's just a case of matching symbols), and it's curiously satisfying. You may never get to find out what the texts you are transcribing actually mean, but you can feel good in the knowledge that you have made a contribution to the serious academic study of Roman and Egyptian history, and have helped experts shed a little light on a previously unknown bit of the ancient world.

Anyway, it's a very constructive activity to while away a spare 15 minutes or so, and as I said there's a strange satisfaction to the process. "Ancient Lives" can be visited at the following website:

Ancient Lives Project.

Passing the Dormouse Test

Are you a fan of Roman historical fiction? Would you like a straightforward and convenient method to help you work out how reliable and well-researched a Roman novel is? Never fear: step forward the outstanding Cambridge classicist Mary Beard and her brilliant "dormouse" test.

Before we proceed, I just want to say that Mary Beard is AMAZING! I have read her books, watched her on TV and I even met her once (she won't remember). Her blog, "A Don's Life", is an essential read for anyone interested in classics or education, and there's a link to it in my sidebar.

Her dormouse test is very simple - the sooner an author makes any mention of stuffed dormice, the less "authentic" or deeply researched the book is likely to be.

The Romans often ate dormice as an easy hot snack, sans hair and stuffed with a sort of spiced pork mince. I read somewhere that the bones were usually left in, to give it some bite. It sounds rather like a savoury Dime Bar - soft on the outside, crunchy within. This is the sort of fact that non-specialists might think is impressive and unusual, but there is a curious, inexplicable phenomenon here: it's one of those facts that anybody who tries to research the Roman world, whatever the specific nature of their research, will just inevitably happen upon quite early in their reading. It's one of the best-known little-known facts about the Romans there is! If an author lays on the dormice too keenly, it may be an indication that they are reaching too eagerly for obvious, cliched, faux-recherche splashes of "period colour".

It sounds odd, but I've applied the "dormouse test" to numerous works of fiction, film and television set in the Roman world, and it actually seems to be a pretty reliable indicator. Books which seemed, to me, poorly researched or superficial invariably roll out the dormice at the earliest possible opportunity. I'm delighted to announce that, in 60,000 words, I have so far not once resorted to stuffed dormice!

Maybe that's just because I knew about the test when I was writing ...

When Ancient History Is Annoying

Just finished a rewrite of Chapter 4, which deals with Clodius' typically disgraceful stint in the Roman Army as a junior officer under Lucullus during the Third Mithridatic War.

When writing my first draft, I came across a really surprising difficulty. Despite the fact that the Third Mithridatic was a really important war, I was utterly unable to find in any primary source the identity of the five legions Lucullus took with him.

It's a typical problem. The practice of numbering legions dates back to the Marian Reforms, but it's notoriously difficult to identify specific legions prior to the Gallic campaigns of Julius Caesar. I did all manner of "detective work" on this, trying to trace the exact history of Lucullus' five legions, which didn't help (I discovered that he levied one at Rome, and inherited two others that had previously served under Fimbria - but I couldn't work out where the other two came from or what any of them were called). I looked at later campaigns, to try and work out if any of Lucullus' legions might have been left in the East and picked up by subsequent commanders. All I got out of that (thanks to an extraordinarily obscure image on a coin of Augustus, courtesy of a very astute poster on the history discussion forum Historum) was that the Tenth Legion would later fight at Carrhae under Crassus. So I had a tentative suggestion that one of Lucullus' five legions might have been the Tenth - and no idea at all about the other four!

Feeling defeated, I simply had to "make up" the numbers of the other four legions (I'm sure the Roman history enthusiasts will be understanding!) But it's a good illustration of the occasional frustrations that arise from ancient history. I mean come on - this was one of the most crucial wars in the Late Republic, and we don't even know something as basic as the identity of the Roman legions involved!

I like historical accuracy, and these gaps in our ancient literature can be maddening. They occasionally make me long for better-documented age. Just you wait, my next book will be a Regency romance!