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Roma - A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Steven Saylor

St Martin's Press, HK$208

An accepted practice in writing ancient history, dating  from  Roman historian Titus Livius  (better known as Livy), is the novelistic embellishment of character and  plot pertaining to known facts, says Steven Saylor in an author's note at the end of his epic on ancient Rome.

'For sheer pleasure and escape, reading Livy straight through  is an experience comparable  to reading Tolkien, Tolstoy, or  Gibbon; in other words, it is one of the great experiences of a lifetime,' Saylor  writes.

His groundbreaking Roma Sub Rosa series, featuring his fictional detective Gordianus the Finder - from Roman Blood (1991) to  The Judgement of Caesar (2004) - brought ancient history alive for  many readers.

Roma - The Novel of Ancient Rome is a sweeping 555-page saga, an imaginative mixture of fact and fiction that  sets the record straight on numerous scholarly questions without missing a beat. Traces of ancient Rome are everywhere - in language, technology and laws - and its  shades still haunt us today.

Even its myths are finding foundation. 'Through most of the  20th century it was fashionable to dismiss the foundation accounts of the ancient sources as fabrications, but recent archaeological finds have given fresh credence to stories once dismissed as legends,' Saylor writes.

Roma is intelligent fun. It's also an oddly disturbing commentary on contemporary society and what it means to be civilised.

Saylor begins his story on the river Tiber. It's 1000BC. Life is tough for the half-dozen intermingled families of a largely nomadic tribe. They hunt and gather,  but mostly endure an endless back-and-forth journey along the river from 'the great salt beds beside the sea' to the  forest villages and meadows at the foothills of  distant mountains.  There they  swap the salt for 'dried meat, animal skins, cloth spun from wool, clay pots, needles and scraping  tools carved from bone, and little toys made of wood'.  Then they encounter Fascinus, which Saylor contends was the first deity of  the Romans, a winged phallus 'a masculine member, disembodied but nonetheless rampant and upright [that]  existed in and of itself, without beginning or end'.

Roma  follows the fate of an amulet, a lump of soft metal crudely shaped in the form of Fascinus,  as it's passed from generation to generation, mysteriously becoming an object of worship by the vestal virgins along the way.

Saylor divides his story into 11 parts to focus on the role of Fascinus in the  better known bits of Roman history. The reader learns  that the Roman god Hercules was a mere mighty mortal, that the rape of the Sabine women was figurative, and that Romulus and Remus, the twins who founded Rome on the seven hills, were named after the breasts  of the woman who suckled them, a 'she-wolf', or whore.

There's the story of Coriolanus (510-491BC), which turns on the conquest of Corioli  by Gnaeus Marcius.   A chapter entitled The Vestal covers 393-373BC and  makes clear the role and function  of  virgins in Roman tradition. Scipio's Shadow recounts the victories of Scipio Africanus  (216-183BC) over Hannibal, and the ultimate destruction of Carthage, while offering a glimpse into the 'unspeakable' cult of Bacchus.

Saylor doesn't stint on the  blood, sex and intrigue as families rise and fall, civil wars rage, tens  of thousands die in battle,  and  the honourable title of dictator  is forever sullied after the ruthless  rule of Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

By the time Saylor reaches  Julius Caesar, the reader will have consulted more than a few times  the family tree at the start of the book that traces the wearers of Fascinus. And as the story builds,  so does Rome.

Each chapter begins with a  map showing the increasingly crowded seven hills, from a single landmark fig tree to temples, altars, statues, and state buildings.

Probably the best literary comparison to Roma is the two-volume I, Claudius and Claudius  the God by Robert Graves. It's a  good companion, too. Saylor ends his saga at Augustus Caesar, where Graves' begins.



Roma - A Novel of Ancient Rome