Fiction Reviews | September 2003
by Simon Puttock
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Salve! Dear reader, or, if you are not big up on Latin, greetings!

I will begin my writing about history with a little history: when I was a child, I was taught Latin at school. I was taught it very well. But I was not taught Roman history at all. What I learned about Roman life from my Latin textbooks goes something like this: Julia, the daughter of the house, played with her little wooden doll. Her brother, Julius Junior went round saying ‘Salve!’ so his teacher all day long, and they had a father (Julius Senior who kept arriving home from unspecified business.

I don’t remember there being a mother - but if there was, I expect she was called Julia too. To sum up, the Romans seemed a very dull and unimaginative people with only one name to share between the lot of them.

Thankfully, there were (and are) OTHER books (about a million miles away from dry and dusty textbooks) that opened my eyes to the raciness of Roman life. When they finally, properly invent the time-machine, I’m there!

In 2000, Orion Books began publishing a series of Roman Mysteries by Caroline lawrence, and I love them! It all began with The Thieves of Ostia. As it says on the back of the book, ‘Ancient Rome, four children, and a mystery’. The ancientness of Rome is 79 AD. The children are: free-born Flavia Gemina, apple of her father’s patrician eye; Jonathan, whose family is Jewish, but are also early Christians (not a hot thing to be at that time); Nubia, an African girl who was abducted from her tribe and sold into slavery; Lupus, a street boy who has had his tongue cut out. And the mystery? Well, obviously I can’t tell you.

But it’s pretty much a set up we can recognise today - people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds all thrown in the pot together in a busy, dirty town where not everybody is friendly and not everyone fits in.

Ancient Ostia (which, if you don’t know - I didn’t - was Rome’s eighteen miles away port) is so wonderfully described, with such perfect throwaway detail, that you’d think Ms Lawrence was watching it all unfold from her kitchen window as she wrote. And the whole book, despite the odd missing tongue and decapitated dog, reads like a great, rainy day detective adventure. Rather cosy, really.

But then I read on. There are (so far), four more books in the series, (all mysteries) and they just get better. Each story is a little darker than the one before. Rome’s underbelly is gradually revealed, and each book is spirals you further in and further down into real Roman life. (On the one hand they had probably the greatest bathing system in the world EVER, and on the other, they sold the bath-time body scrapings of gladiators as something to put in a love potion. As Jonathan says, ‘Ewwww!’ (from The Twelve Tasks of Flavia Gemina, the latest in the series). And the whole series is set around the time of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the annihilation of Pompeii, which certainly adds spice!

Anyway, the books can all be read quite separately, and probably in any order, but there are threads in the stories that pick up and interweave perfectly between books. The characters are fully drawn with real, complex emotions and needs and histories, and uncovering their internal lives bit by bit is part of the bonus mystery of the series. (None of the children are by any means perfect, either, so you don’t have to wish a runaway chariot would run them over to put them out of your misery.) But I would recommend starting at the beginning and and going through in order if you can.

And now, for a less down to earth (pun intended) take on ancient Rome, there’s Fighting Fit by Annie Dalton, which is part of the Angels Unlimited series.

Mel Beeby is a trainee angel (she used to be a regular teenage girl, but she’s dead now) who is sent on a dangerous assignment to ancient Rome to fight the Powers of Darkness (aka PODS) who are mustering their strength. Mel herself is a feisty, modern girl with feisty modern attitudes and a HUGE crush on Orlando, another angel and head of the POD busting Roman posse.

Mel’s thoroughly modern take on things, along with her love distractions, brings a nice culture-clash element to the story: kind of ancient Rome meets Destiny’s Child (well, they’ve got a sort of angelic sounding name) in a fight to the (in one case) death between good and evil. So it’s pretty funky really, but: once again the Roman detail is exceptionally and convincingly drawn. I now know for sure that the life of a Vestal Virgin was not all flinging rose petals and floating around next to pretty vases, and that Roman daughters, when it came to marriage, could be in some ways no better off than their slaves. Of course, the whole Roman slavery thing is a can of worms in itself!

I’ve just noticed that with Fighting Fit, I’ve concentrated exclusively on the plights of females. Well, on the face of it, this is a book more easily approached by GIRLS than BOYS. Which isn’t to say there isn’t some brilliantly gruesome stuff in there, but HEY, boys don’t have a monopoly on that!

I suppose what is especially interesting about Lawrence’s and Dalton’s books, is that they’re about one of the greatest civilisations of all time. Just like we think we have now. And those books not only dish the dirt on the Romans, they remind you a lot of our own ‘civilised’ grime. And Fighting Fit does take on some fairly BIG, cosmic ideas with real humour and attitude to boot.

Now I come to an ‘and lest we forget’. Returning to my childhood, I had two main sources of fictional Romans: Asterix, and Rosemary Sutcliff. The first I discounted for years because they were so funny. There couldn’t possibly be any historical truth in them, could there? But when I think about it, nothing could have prepared me better for some of my recent sordid Roman revelations than the (food) orgy scene in Asterix in Switzerland. Now I know that at the moment many of the Asterix books are unavailable (but will be again quite soon from Orion Books), but they should not be pooh-poohed the way my stupid younger self did. They are a wealth of well observed historical detail wrapped up in some of the funniest, silliest books I read as a child. I still smile fondly as I remember almost laughing myself into a fit over Asterix and the Big Fight.

And Rosemary Sutcliff? Well, I guess I sidelined her in terms of ROMAN history purely because they were set mainly in Britain. But there are about a zillion good reasons why she’s still (mostly) in print today. She was a GREAT story teller, and what she didn’t know about Roman soldiery probably isn’t WORTH knowing. She was also pretty hip on ancient Britain. And into that she mixed some of the most in your face adventure stories I have ever read. I really do not exagerate when I say that, at age ten, reading The Mark of the Horse Lord changed me DEEPLY forever. (And you can’t say that about a lot of books.) If you want to know what did it, then read it and see if you can work it out for yourself. Even today, it is a story that goes further and does something bigger and braver than many a contemporary writer for children is willing to allow themselves to do.

Damn! I’ve just looked it up on the internet, and it’s currently unavailable. So, try The Eagle of the Ninth whilst your combing the charity shops for a copy of TMOTHL.

On that disappointed note, I will leave you with a fair summary of what I have learnt from reading the above-mentioned books: in the words of Obelix, ‘these Romans are crazy!’ Just like us.

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