selenak

The beta-read version of my Buffy-and-Dawn-in-Rome story, City Girls, is up now - by popular demand with more Lamia!

You know, it did occur to me that a story about a Slayer in the Ancient World, fighting with the monsters it had to offer, would be great fun to write, too. Of course for all I know one already exists in Tales of the Slayer. (Sadly, I do not possess those.) I do dimly recall there was a Roman vampire, and a flashback to a Roman Slayer, in one of Christopher Golden's novels, but then that one struck me as woefully under-researched.

Which reminds me: in the last decade or so, detective stories set in Ancient Rome have become quite popular. I like Lindsey Davis' Falco series for what it is - a deliberately anachronistic blend of tongue-in-cheek noir a la Raymond Chandler, and the historical novel. I also enjoyed some of John Ford Maddox SPQR novels. But the only mysteries set in the Roman world which struck me as authentic in the sense of the author managing to create a narrative voice that doesn't try for 20th (or 21st) century views but rings as something translated directly (and very elegantly) from the Latin are Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa novels, featuring Gordianus the Finder. They're set in the late Roman Republic, and his take on the various historical personalities is always three-dimensional. Take Cicero, who is characterized as pompous, ambitious, manipulative, and a downright prig, but also in the end as honestly concerned for the Republic. In the third of the Roma Sub Rosa novels, Catilina's Riddle, he says at one point to Gordianus that he knows he lacks charme and charisma (as opposed to Catilina - and, the reader can add, Caesar) but that it will be the charming, charismatic men who bring Rome down.

Speaking of Catilina, he's another fascinating character, very ambiguous - Gordianus keeps being in two minds about him while acknowledging the charme and the attraction. (Meanwhile, Saylor makes a plausible case for much of Catilina's reputation being due to propaganda during election campaigns and then the defeat of his uprising while pointing out that this doesn't necessarily mean Catilina was sincere.)

And then there's Clodia Pulcher. The Clodia which the poet Catullus, who was in love with her, both cursed and adored. (If you're into hate/love relationships, Catullus' poems are first class examples.) Now in detective stories, sexual women are usually either femme fatales, destined for a tragic ends, or vicious sluts, who also end badly. Clodia in Saylor's version is neither. (Though readers will start out reading her as a femme fatale in the first novel she appears in, The Venus Throw. Gordianus originally makes the same mistake.) She's capable of both casual sex and deep emotional committment (though not necessarily to the men she has sex with), cruelty and compassion. There is something broken in her, but she is a survivor. (As opposed to, say Catilina.)

Lastly, the ongoing OC characters, if you allow the fanfic term, Gordianus' family, all develop and change, as does his relationship with each of them. And again, they're not a 20th century family. When Gordianus, in one of the later novels, makes a decision about one of his sons, it is very much the act of a pater familias. You understand his reasons because you have been drawn into his world, instead of him acting out in a manner according to yours.

An a completely different note, the entry over at

theatrical_muse made for Frodo in reply to the "If you could dine with anyone of all of history, who would it be?" challenge is touching and perfectly in character; read it here.

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