Roman Games (25 page)

Authors: Bruce MacBain

BOOK: Roman Games

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The Author

Bruce Macbain has earned a B.A. in classical studies from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught Classics and Greek and Roman history at Vanderbilt University and Boston University. His special interest is religion in the Roman Empire. This is his first novel.

For Discussion

Pliny struggles with the question of how to serve a tyrannical regime without entirely betraying his values. People have continued to face this problem in modern times, under Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin and many others. Do you believe it is possible to walk this tightrope? Where does one draw the line?

Religion played an important role in Roman political life and there was no separation of Church and State. Were you surprised that pagan Romans regarded the followers of Judaism and Christianity as atheists and traitors?

Roman attitudes toward sex owed much to the Greeks, for whom male bisexuality was a cultural norm. But even within the Roman world, moralists of the first century fulminated against the hedonism and immorality of the ruling class and issued dire warnings of social collapse. Do you think excessive sexual freedom or lack of morals in a culture is a sign that it is “on the way down?”

In the ancient world, as in many traditional cultures today, girls were expected to marry and bear children when they themselves were barely out of childhood. And boys might find themselves taking on mature responsibilities at an age when many of our sons enjoy the sheltered life of a college campus. On the other hand, a young Roman, like Lucius in the novel, continued under his father’s power to a degree that seems inconceivable to us. How would you compare ancient and modern notions of childhood and adolescence?

Slavery was a fact of life in the ancient world; no one ever seriously advocated its abolition. Nevertheless, Stoicism, the dominant philosophy among Romans, held that no one was a slave by nature but only by an unlucky accident of birth or Fate. And we have seen in the novel how a freed slave like Parthenius could rise to a position of great power. How would you contrast this situation to American slavery in the antebellum South?

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