Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (141 page)

HISTORICAL NOTES

‘The Consul’s Wife’ grew out of two desires: to deal with Sempronia, one of the more remarkable women of her age, and to explore the role of the chariot race at this period of the Roman Republic. No one who saw the movie
Ben-Hur
as a child could ever forget the spectacular chariot race staged (long before the advent of computer-generated images) with live riders and horses and an audience of thousands.
Ben-Hur
left indelible images in my mind; for further research, I turned to
Sport in Greece and Rome
by H. A. Harris (Thames and Hudson/Cornell University Press, 1972), a
very
British take on Roman racing and gambling that includes an amusing list of translated Latin names for actual horses.

The
Daily Acts
referred to in the story actually existed, as we know from references to the
Acta Diurna
in Cicero and Petronius; my use of the
Daily Acts
owes a debt to a very funny but painfully dated hard-boiled mystery titled
The Julius Caesar Murder Case
by Wallace Irwin, published in 1935, in which the intrepid ‘reporter’ Manny (short for Manlius) snoops out trouble along the Tiber.

As for Sempronia, readers may learn more about her in Sallust’s
Conspiracy of Catiline
, which gives an intriguing description of her pedigree, character and motives; not only did she play a small role in that conspiracy, but she was the mother of Decimus Brutus, who with the more famous Junius Brutus was one of the assassins of Caesar. In an early draft of my novel
Catilina’s Riddle
, I wrote a lengthy passage describing her, which I later decided to cut; I was glad to be able to return to Sempronia in ‘The Consul’s Wife.’ ‘That she was a daughter of Gaius Gracchus is unlikely,’ writes Erich Gruen in
The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
(University of California Press, 1974), but it is intriguing to speculate that Sempronia might nonetheless have been a descendant of that radical firebrand of the late Republic who was murdered by the ruling class and achieved the status of a populist martyr.

‘If a Cyclops Could Vanish in the Blink of an Eye’ reflects on the domestic life of Gordianus. Cats were still something of a novelty in Rome at this time, and not universally welcomed. The cultural clash of East and West, as exemplified by the different worldviews of Gordianus and the Egyptian-born Bethesda, will increasingly become a part of the fabric of cosmopolitan Roman life, as the emerging world capital attracts new people and new ideas from the faraway lands drawn into her orbit.

Of all the historical incidents between
Roman Blood
and
Arms of Nemesis
, the most notable is the revolt of Sertorius; ‘The White Fawn’ tells his story. The fabulous tale of the white fawn is given in several sources, including Plutarch’s biography of the rebel general. The discontent of those who flocked to Sertorius’ side presages the growing discord in Rome, where a series of escalating disruptions will eventually climax in the civil wars that put an end to the republic forever.

In 2000, on a book tour to Portugal, my publisher arranged a private tour of the excavations of a garum manufactory located directly beneath a bank building in downtown Lisbon (ancient Olisipo); that experience inspired me to take Gordianus to such a manufactory, and to uncover ‘Something Fishy in Pompeii.’ Readers craving a taste of garum can make their own; consult
A Taste of Ancient Rome
by Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa (University of Chicago Press, 1992), which gives the recipe of Gargilius Martialis, who wrote in the third century A.D.

How Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, put a puzzle to the inventor Archimedes, who solved it in a bathtub with the cry ‘Eureka!’, is a famous tale from the ancient world. When I came across Cicero’s claim (in his
Tusculan Disputations
) to have rediscovered the neglected tomb of Archimedes, I decided there must be a mystery yarn to be made from such material, and so ‘Archimedes’ Tomb’ came to be written. The sixteenth idyll of Theocritus, extolling the good government of Hiero’s reign, makes an interesting contrast to Cicero’s own
Verrine Orations
, which exposed rampant corruption and mismanagement in the Roman-run Sicily of his own time.

Reading Theocritus during my research for ‘Archimedes’ Tomb,’ I came across the poet’s twenty-third idyll, which became the inspiration for ‘Death by Eros.’ The details of the spurned lover, the cold-hearted boy, the suicide, the pool and the statue of Eros are all from Theocritus. In his version, death is the result of divine, not human, vengeance; I turned the poet’s moral fable into a murder mystery. ‘Death by Eros’ was originally written for
Yesterday’s Blood: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology
(Headline, 1998), in which various authors paid homage to the late creator of Brother Cadfael. In that book, I noted that the story’s theme ‘would be familiar to Ellis Peters, who frequently cast lovers (secret and otherwise) among her characters. In her tales, for the most part, love is vindicated and lovers triumph; would that it could have been so for the various lovers in this story.’

Having never written at any length about gladiators, I decided to do so with ‘A Gladiator Dies Only Once.’ The financial and critical success of the movie
Gladiator
was something of a puzzle to me (inspiring me to post my own review of the film at my Web site), but the timeless fascination of the gladiator cannot be denied. Not all Romans craved the sight of bloodshed in the arena (Cicero found the combats distasteful); nonetheless, the distinctly Roman tradition that linked blood sports with funeral games eventually grew into a cultural mania. Centuries later, these gruesome enterprises continue to puzzle us, prick at our conscience and tickle our prurient interest.

‘Poppy and the Poisoned Cake’ was written at the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal; hence its cynical flavour. The details of the crime can be found in Valerius Maximus (5.9.1) and are further explicated in Gruen’s
The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
(particularly on page 527). Cicero’s quip regarding the piece of cake is recounted by Plutarch; that I have tied it to this particular case is an exercise of artistic licence. (Small-world titbit: the Palla in this story is the same Palla whose property was said to have been stolen by Marcus Caelius; that accusation was one of the counts against Caelius, along with the murder of an Egyptian envoy, in the trial at the centre of my novel
The Venus Throw
. The ruling class of Gordianus’ Rome was a very tight-knit community, indeed.)

‘The Cherries of Lucullus’ was inspired, in a roundabout way, by a reader in Germany, Stefan Cramme, who maintains a Web site about fiction set in Ancient Rome (
www.histrom.de
). When my editor told me a new paperback edition of
Roman Blood
would be forthcoming, giving me a chance to correct any small errors in the book, I contacted Cramme, whose knowledge of ancient Rome is encyclopedic, and asked him to ‘do his worst.’ Cramme informed me of an anachronism, which until then seemed to have slipped past every other reader: in
Roman Blood
, in a moment of erotic reverie, Gordianus commented that Bethesda’s lips were ‘like cherries.’ Alas, as Cramme pointed out, most historians agree that cherries did not appear in Rome until they were brought back from the Black Sea region by the returning general Lucullus around 66 B.C. – fourteen years after the action of
Roman Blood
. Since it appeared unlikely that Gordianus could have used cherries as a simile, I amended that reference. In current paperback editions of
Roman Blood
, Bethesda’s lips are likened not to cherries but to pomegranates – an echo, perhaps not entirely fortunate, of a line uttered by the wicked Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) to taunt Moses (Charlton Heston) in the campy film classic
The Ten Commandments
.

No historical novelist likes to be found in error, and the problem of cherries at Rome continued to nag at me. I did further research into the diffusion of cherries around the Mediterranean, and discovered that the sources are not entirely unanimous in asserting that cherries were unknown in Rome prior to Lucullus’ return from the Black Sea region, and so there is a slight chance that Gordianus’ musing was not anachronistic after all; but a more significant result of my research was a growing fascination with Lucullus and his amazing career. (Plutarch’s biography makes splendid reading.) Never having touched upon him in the course of the novels, I decided to do so with a short story – and at the same time, to confront head-on that business about cherries and exorcise it from my psyche once and for all. Thus ‘The Cherries of Lucullus’ was conceived. The incident of the gardener Motho is fictional, but the members of Lucullus’ circle, including the philosopher Antiochus, Arcesislaus the sculptor, and the poet Aulus Archias, were actual persons, and all the pertinent details of Lucullus’ remarkable rise and sad decline are based on fact.

ARMS OF NEMESIS

A MYSTERY OF ANCIENT ROME

Steven Saylor

ROBINSON

London

To Penni Kimmel,
Helluo librorum et litterarum studiosus