Field of Mars (The Complete Novel) (36 page)

I would like to credit the excellent non-fiction work by Stephen Dando-Collins,
The Legions of Rome
, for various technical elements used concerning legions and legionaries (their formation and “kit” and so forth). I hope Mr. Dando-Collins sees that his knowledge has been put to good effect.

My good friend Mike “Panda” Pandolfo was a great help in the writing of this book, challenging me and my facts often and vociferously. Mike is a fairly recently retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel, who flew in EC-130s in the Vietnam war, was a back seater in Phantoms afterward, and has been involved in almost every US conflict since in some way or other. He came on board after the first Vin Cooper novel,
The Death Trust
, was published, nitpicking his way through the book’s factual blunders. I was so impressed, I hired him.

Luckily for me, Panda is even more nerd-like on the subject of Ancient Rome than he is on the US military. And if I ever want to write a book about the American Civil War, he says he can help there too (his great, great, granddaddy fought with the 62nd Georgia Cavalry).

Thanks, Panda. You’re the best.

David

Two of my “desert island” books are Livy’s
Second Punic War
and Caesar’s
Conquest of Gaul
. My bookcase has two entire shelves crammed with Penguin black spine works from a range of writers from antiquity. Back in the day, I was an enormous fan of Robert Graves’s
I, Claudius
and
Claudius the God
. Also, like others from countless generations, I’ve wandered around Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean gobsmacked by the feats of Roman architecture and engineering that remain. While I’m fascinated and captivated by Ancient Rome, I am far from being an historian and certainly no scholar on the subject. You should, therefore, read this book through that filter. In short, if you are a pedant, I am attempting to head you off at the pass. While I researched to get many aspects of the period (the late Roman Republic) right, I readily acknowledge some choices made for the sake of the story will be a burr in the saddle for some folks.

Language. I set out on this writing journey using Latin terms for many everyday items and persons, along with double and triple barrelled names (praenomen, nomen, cognomen) for all the protagonists. The result was unreadable for anyone who wasn’t an aficionado. So I had to rewrite it, taking a less authentic path, some might say. One word recurs throughout the story that needs some explaining: “primor”. I used it as a stand in for “sir”, but it translates more accurately to words like “head”, “uppermost”, “most distinguished” and so forth. I used primor because there didn’t seem to be a translation that
felt
right. “Dominus” is the actual translation of sir, apparently. It was rendered as “sieur” in French, which became “sir” in English. But in a military context, “dominus” seemed less than suitable because it also means “lord”. This was purely a creative choice on my part. Apologies to the purists among you.

Swearing. The legionaries in this story swear like, well, troopers, which of course they were. My experience is that, when groups of men get together, profanity is used in place of nouns, adjectives, verbs et cetera. I am pretty sure that Crassus’s men wouldn’t have censored their language and so I’ve taken the brakes off in this department. Please be assured that the swearing is not there to offend. (I once read a letter between two WWI diggers. It was fuck this and fuck that, fucking here and there . . . Up until that moment I had only read letters from the period that were positively genteel, especially given the horror these men were forced to endure. This made me realise that so much of what I’d read – letters home to loved ones, mostly – had been self sanitised and censored by the writer, probably because there was a chance that a woman might read them (even if they weren’t addressed to the fairer sex). Interestingly, though, it seems the word “fuck”, which we can use in myriad ways and tones, didn’t really have an equivalent form back in 50 BC. Of course, Latin of the day had something similar – “futuo”, to have vaginal sex – but this doesn’t appear to have been used with quite the dexterity of its modern equivalent. It seems one of the biggest insults you could throw at someone back then was to liken him or her to a woman’s clitoris.

While researching this book, I was often amazed at how little academics agree about various aspects of Roman life. Yes, while there’s a lot we do know, far more is contested, unanswered or still just plain mystery. Take the legions Crassus lost at Carrhae. The ones annihilated at Teutoburg due to Varus’s ineptitude are well documented, but on the names of the ones that perished in that disastrous battle against Selenas and his Parthians, the history books are silent. (I do hope no one turns up with the answer on this because I spent a hell of a lot of time trying to unearth it without the least success.)

This is the first book in a trilogy about a legion of Roman soldiers that ends up fighting in China. The question possibly uppermost in your mind might therefore be: did this actually happen? If you go online you’ll read plenty of speculation about it, most notably touched off by Pliny the Elder who wrote that 10,000 Roman legionaries captured by the Parthians were sent to “Margiana” (somewhere in the southeast of Turkmenistan) to defend the border there. And then a Chinese writer Bau Gau claimed some of these soldiers found their way into the army of Xiongnu King Zhizhi and ultimately fought against the Han in 36 BC, displaying a “fish-scale” formation on the battlefield of interlocked shields. That sounded a lot like the “testudo” formation used by Roman legions and the legend (some would say myth) grew from there.

So did this actually happen? You won’t find many reputable scholars prepared to back the notion. An historian by the name of Homer H. Dubs suggested back in 1941 that the Romans captured at Carrhae were transferred to the eastern Parthian border where they indeed fought against the Han (though no proof was forthcoming). All roads then led to the small Chinese town of “Li-ch’ien” (also written as Liqian and several other ways, all of which look a lot like “Legion” to my mind; but which apparently mean “Alexandria” in Han Chinese), the inhabitants of which claim to be descendants of this lost Roman legion. But DNA testing of the local population has shown that “a Roman mercenary origin could not be accepted as true according to paternal genetic variation, and the current Liqian population is more likely to be a subgroup of the Chinese majority Han” [Zhou, Ruixia; An, Lizhe et al.“Testing the hypothesis of an ancient Roman soldier origin of the Liqian people in northwest China: a Y-chromosome perspective”, Journal of Human Genetics, June 2007].

If you hunger for books about Rome and her legions, I hope this one hasn’t disappointed. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing it, and, lucky you, there are two more to come!

David

With the release of
Field of Mars
, David Rollins is the author of ten international best selling novels, six of which feature Special Agent Vin Cooper, OSI. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia. Want more? Visit
davidrollins.net
.

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