Roman Historical Fiction: 2012

Best-selling 20th century novelist Taylor Caldwell didn't consider it odd to have President Kennedy in mind while she was writing Pillar of Iron, her much-praised novel about the Roman politician and orator Cicero. “Any resemblance between the Republics of Rome and the United States of America,” she tells readers in her Foreward, “is purely historical ...” After his death, in sadness, Caldwell dedicated Pillar of Iron (published in 1965) to his memory, writing that Kennedy's murder was “so similar in many ways to Cicero's.” That Cicero's and Kennedy's murders weren't similar in any way hardly matters; what matters is that nobody ever wrote a loving Kennedy-invoking historical novel set in the reign of King Ashurnasirpal of Assyria.

But with Roman historical reconstructions, the parallelism espoused by Caldwell (with the enthusiastic agreement of a President of the United States who was no mean student of history himself) is almost a prerequisite. When Howard Fast wrote his 1951 novel Spartacus, he explained that his decision to self-publish was a bitter result of his McCarthyite era, that “the political temper of the times” had prompted publishes to stay away from the book. No similar claim was made by the great historical novelist Alfred Duggan, who also published a Roman historical novel in 1951 – but the parallelism was there just the same: The Little Emperors couldn't be any more clearly about the bureaucracy-choked Labour government of Clement Attlee if all the Romans carried umbrellas.

When Shakespeare wanted to tap the prevailing anxieties about the transfer of state power from an aging and increasingly autocratic ruler in the final years of the 16th Century, he turned naturally to 44 B.C., and his Julius Caesar is above all a warning-cry against the perils of contested power (Orson Welles' warning-cry against the perils of Roman dictators was also a performance of Julius Caesar – in 1937, with his scheming senators dressed as Mussolini's brownshirts). Only a few years later, Ben Jonson used Rome as a scourge for fledgling tyrants and aimed his Sejanus His Fall squarely at the heart of the new Jacobean court (and such was the immediacy of the parallel that the play got its author hauled before the Privy Council on a charge of treason).

This facility of Roman historical fiction to be used as a mirror of the times is a characteristic of the sub-genre – and like so much else, it was invented by the ancient Romans themselves. In the wake of disastrous civil wars and internecine slaughters, a victorious Octavian (and his cultural mastermind Maecenas) set about immediately lining up the fractious present with a past of his own creation; artists, poets, sculptors, and historians were not-so-gently persuaded to massage the records in order to produce a pre-ordained Augustan mandate. Livy crafted a historiography ready-made to be taught to schoolchildren; Ovid ended his Metamorphoses with Julius Caesar transforming into a (dynasty-establishing) deity; and when it came to this embryonic Roman fictional parallelism, Virgil quite literally wrote the book. In the Aeneid, past and present are mutually reinforcing, and Jupiter himself connects the dots, proclaiming of the Romans-to-come: “To them, no Bounds of Empire I assign;/Nor term of Years to their immortal Line.”

Flash forward 2000 years and we find the picture largely unchanged. The sub-genre of Roman historical fiction is enjoying a boom period not seen since the 1960s – and resulting from the same kind of cause. Joseph Mankiewicz' lavish 1963 movie Cleopatra gave rise to a flood of novels, and likewise the success of such cornball productions as Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator and the Starz Channel's Spartacus series have made many a publisher hopeful that there's a book-buying audience for the days of Caesar and the legions.

But though the genre might not have changed, the times most certainly have: gone is both the background of triumphant military hegemony and the foreground of sixties-infused sultry sexuality. Instead, we have novel after novel of disaffection, class warfare, and nervous distrust of “Mission Accomplished” imperialist bravado. Rome – the empire, the statesmen (like poor old Cicero), the glorious machinery Livy, Ovid, and Virgil et al were at pains to celebrate – is now the enemy, and we find most of our heroes on the outskirts of both society and empire. The main characters in Ben Kane's popular “Forgotten Legion” series are a collection of such outcasts: twin brother and sister Romulus and Fabiola, born to a slave woman by an unknown Roman aristocrat, Brennus, an embittered gladiator whose family were slaughtered by Roman soldiers, and Tarquinius, an Etruscan who's understandably irate because his entire people have been slaughtered or subsumed by the Romans.

Among those Romans, one figure is bound to stand out in the search for modern-day parallelisms - the irascible Roman financier Marcus Crassus. He wasn't a larger-than-life military figure like Pompey the Great or Julius Caesar, but he uncannily combined two of our era's most pressing preoccupations: the rapacity of high finance and a dangerous entanglement with the savage and unaccountable satrapies of Western Asia. Crassus was Republican Rome's wealthiest man and its most notorious money-lender; a character in Kane's 2012 novel Spartacus the Gladiator, could be talking about any 21st century sub-prime lending bank when he says, 'Crassus is the personification of friendliness and jollity when he lends money. If he's decided to foreclose on a debt, however, he's a devil incarnate.” When Crassus impulsively leads an army into Parthia (modern-day Turkey) and is defeated at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C., his men – including hapless Romulus and his friends – are captured and sent far from the world of Roman rule: a failed Arabian conquest sets the whole series of books in motion.

(Andrew Levkoff attempts a much more sympathetic view of Crassus in The Other Alexander, the first volume of his very smart and very funny series “The Bow of Heaven,” in which the great man's sardonic slave Alexander grudgingly loves him but seldom misses an opportunity to twit him. “What use are you to me if you won't agree with me?” Crassus plaintively asks Alexander at one point, only to be told “None whatsoever. I shall have myself thrashed directly after you've supped” – Levkoff's book, published independently in 2011, is considerably better-crafted and better-written than most current Roman historical fiction, proving among other things that the Howard Fast tradition of self-publishing first-rate genre fiction is still alive and well)

Crassus is long dead when the action of Henry Sidebottom's gritty and engrossing “Warrior of Rome” series opens, but the obsession with the East is undimmed. This series takes place in the mid 3rd Century AD and features a Russell Crowe-style hardened warrior named Ballista, whose prodigious military skills and dispassionate outlook come to the service of a far-flung Empire fracturing under assaults from the resurgent Sassanid regime. Sidebottom's books are fast-paced and deeply researched, and they're hardened with a very modern cynicism – as in a scene from the second book in the series, King of Kings, in which a certain new religion called Christianity is greeted with skepticism when one of the faithful talks about their holy man: 'He is an inspiration to us all,' Aulus continued reverently. 'He has nearly attained sixty years and never once lapsed from bodily continence.' 'A sixty-year-old virgin,' exclaimed Maximus. 'No wonder he is off his head.' He shook his head in wonder. 'I cannot see this religion catching on at all with my countrymen.'

Both Kane and Sidebottom work with perhaps ill-advised energy to make their books rhetorically welcoming to modern readers. Current slang (and expletives – oh, the superabundance of expletives) abounds in all their books, sometimes to amusing effect, as The Road to Rome when Kane's Romulus, in the arena, finds himself facing an enormous rhinoceros whose horn is already reddened: That's Petronius' blood – Mine will soon join it – but maybe not, if the gods are willing. Either way, this is the end of the line. Or in Sidebottom's The Caspian Gates when a warrior snarls a line that's HBO-ready: “Come on, you little piggies … Come and get skewered.” Novelist Kate Quinn, whose three works to date have all been set during the first-century heyday of imperial Rome, takes this modernizing further, giving us characters who are almost transparent in their contemporary attitudes. Here, again, ancient Rome is meant to do stand-in duty as a kind of ersatz modern West. A character in Quinn's highly enjoyable latest, Empress of the Seven Hills, doesn't bat an eyelash at the sexual tastes of the emperor Trajan or the forbearance of his steely wife Plotina: “She manages his household and gives him sensible advice; he runs the Empire and sleeps with strapping young soldiers. They get along very well.”

Ancient Rome, as one wag once put it, isn't going anywhere, so this odd mirroring function it's been serving since the beginning will no doubt continue. Kane's next book is called Hannibal: Enemy of Rome. Guess who we're supposed to root for?