It seems that the publishing industry is trying to make Cleopatra Selene into the new 'Tudors' -- this is the third recent historical fiction treatment. I haven't read Michelle Moran's Cleopatra's Daughter, but I have read the first two books in Stephanie Dray's trilogy, and now, Vicky Shecter's Cleopatra's Moon.

The tropes seem to be pretty constant: Cleopatra's family is extremely (and un-historically) Egyptianized, Selene is a devotee of Isis (Isis rigorously part of the Egyptian pantheon, usually) and a complete, patriotic partisan, Octavian/Augustus is the evilest person who ever eviled, Greco-Egyptians are cultured, intellectual, open-minded and gentle while Romans are brutal, patriarchal, and uncivilized.

Shecter, like Dray, seems to be hampered by history, which puts an awkward necessity (there will be spoilers coming up) on the way that their narratives go. ( Spoilers for History )

In conclusion: You could write so many awesome YA novels set in this general period. Livia in the late 40's and 30's: 16 years old and newly married, watching her male relatives get killed, fleeing around the Mediterranean and doing everything she can to protect who's left. "Turia", also newly married and having to play party politics and work really hard in a man's world to keep her family hidden and get amnesty for them. On a lighter note, Sulpicia and the Tibullan circle hanging out, writing love poetry, and maybe getting involved with Gallus and that whole debacle. Heck, someone should take Julia seriously, and not just dismiss her has the frivolous, immoral daughter of Augustus with a million affairs (it's frustrating that these Cleopatra Selene novels, in trying to rehabilitate one or two ancient women, just reapply and intensify the stereotypes to all of the other (in)famous women of the period) -- recall that all of the men she was rumored to have been involved with were *also* all of the remaining descendants of the oldest senatorial families. Julia the dedicated republican idealist, anyone? To move a bit later: what about a novel about teen-aged Agrippina the Younger and her mother? What about Epicharis? What about Berenike? (What about the Arrias and the Fannias? What about Servilia?) The field is wide open, people!

...I still don't know how I didn't read Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth before. It is my favorite kind of old-fashioned (or new-fashioned) children's story: all about epic friendship and undying loyalty across a slightly uncomfortable status divide.* Marcus, young, painfully upright Roman centurion badly wounded in his second year of service; Esca, the young British slave he saves from the gladiatorial arena. Becoming fast friends; embarking on an adventure to recover the lost standard of the IX Hispania. Sutcliff is a brilliant writer, and she does quite a good job both capturing the Roman mindset and portraying the complexities of Roman-British interactions, hybridity, tension -- much better than one might expect for a book published in 1954.

And now I am feeling a strong urge to write fic -- possibly about the legal shenanigans that Marcus's friend the Legate has to go through to see that Esca's manumission is legitimate. Possibly in Latin...

At last we are finally getting beyond Wives of Henry The Eighth Syndrome in YA historical fiction!

I've been preparing for months to sneer at Stephanie Dray's Lily of the Nile, the first book in a trilogy about Augustan-era daughter of Cleopatra Cleopatra Selene. In fact, I quite enjoyed it, and found it a much more respectable contribution to the (admittedly small) set of novels about Ancient Rome for girls. But -- a summary: after Actium, Selene and her brothers Alexander Helios and Ptolomy Philadelphus are captured, forced to march in Octavian's Triumph, and then made wards in the puritanical household of the princeps. Selene determined to be true to her faith and place as priestess of Isis and to return to her rightful kingdom in spite of her hated captors, but she has to decide how best to serve her goddess and her people in the brave new world of Augustan Rome.

To begin with, there were three surprisingly excellent things about this novel. First, magic/miracles/actually supernatural goings-on have a small but significant place, as I think they should in a novel about the ancient world. Second, the Romans are pretty unambiguously the bad guys -- brutal severe jack-booted conquering thugs -- but considered from a Roman perspective, they appear pretty acceptable. To be sure, Selene and her Alexandrinian-Ptolomaic background are made rather more acceptable to 21st century norms that they probably should be, but Tacitus would probably be disgusted at how sympathetically and eulogistically Dray portrayed Augustus! Third, this is (historical spoilers!) a novel about a protagonist who is forced to compromise in unheroic ways and who sacrifices (at times) her principles and her freedom for her security. Which is...interesting.

But Lily operates on a number of generic axes, so to speak, and they interact in strange ways. A part of this story is the story about the girl from a warm and temperate and tolerant clime forced into the hands of cruel and puritanical guardians -- think The Witch of Blackbird Pond or even A Little Princess -- who rant about Sin and Evil and won't let her play music or dance or wear bright colors or express her femininity at all.

It's also the story about the girl with a strong and personal faith in a miraculous and loving savior, forced to live among people who mock and persecute believers, but with whom she is anxious to share the truth salvation of her religion. Dray is pretty explicit about the parallels she is drawing with Christianity -- rightly so, I think, at least as far as the prevalence of mystery religions in the period. I've read the Christian versions of this story, however, and it's interesting that essentially the same story -- no longer popular among increasing modern discomfort with Christianity presenting itself as gentle and persecuted -- as Elsie Dinsmore. Only with Isis.

In another layer, however, it's the colonial story: a person who is derided as an immoral Other and who is tragically forced to lose/hide/change her cultural norms to comply with those of her conquerors in order to effect anything. Dray decided to go the route of "the Ptolomies are Egyptianizing and essentially Egyptian," and I was all set to sigh over that when I realized that this post-colonialism-inflected story might actually be a more important and significant story to tell than the story of a privileged Hellenistic princess who loses her royal autonomy. Nevertheless, there's a way in which this is A Little Princess: Selene may think of herself as Egyptian but she's the foreign dynast imposed by conquest in Egypt as much as Augustus!

I finally found a copy of All Roads Lead to Murder for a price I was willing to pay (read: v. cheap). Given how awful the title is, I wasn't too optimistic, and yet... Pliny and Tacitus solve murders! And the author is a semi-legit scholar (PhD, a few articles on Pliny in respectable journals on JSTOR), so how bad can it be?

The answer, one chapter in, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, is very. First, the writing is bad: unprofessionally awkward and clunky, full of "as you know, Bob Publius" info-dumping. Secondly, and I am trying not to be judgmental here from a modern liberal perspective, or a pedantic Romans-actually-weren't-like-that perspective, or a Tacitus-fangirl perspective, but perhaps it is clear that there are issues in all of these areas.

I know that Pliny always gets the short end of the Pliny/Tacitus duo because on the one hand, the greatest historian ever of Rome, and keen observer-critic of Power and Dissimulation and Realpolitik; on the other, lots of letters of a nice Roman gentleman about how nice and gentlemanly he is. (Also the Panegyric, which doesn't exactly endear him to anyone). And obviously, that isn't completely fair. BUT, making Pliny out to be the superior intellect and deeper ethical thinker just doesn't work. In fact, it's ludicrous, and annoys me, and, insofar as one might want to base these characters on their literary representations on themselves (not that one should, at all), isn't true to what Pliny depicts of their relationship. And the author's note notes that the model for this relationship was Holmes and Watson. Um. Actually, I don't think that I can argue this rationally, because my argument does come down to: "no, but Tacitus was the intellectually superior one!"

And then there is this weird business where Tacitus has bisexual proclivities, and since Pliny does not approve of either homosexuality or marital infidelity (nb as of yet, T. has not actually propositioned P., but has just made passes at pretty slave boys and women, which it seems is nearly as bad; obviously, I am holding out for the former, because if you are going to make a big deal about this kind of thing, you might as well go all the way), this is the source of some tension between the two friends. At which point, two things came to mind: (1) The author is an ordained Baptist minister, and teaches at a small Christian college, neither of which *should* be meaningful, and yet... (2) seriously, would Pliny have been likely to care about this?

Also, the plot seems to revolve around a slave girl (T. has yet to seduce here, but I'm only a few chapters in) and an abusive master, and so far Pliny has been flipping between a very modern-compassionate "slaves are people too means you shouldn't beat them" and a Roman "this is not my business." I'm afraid it won't end well. But consistency is the least of the problems I'm finding, I suppose.

I. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (M.T. Anderson). I had been meaning to read this ever since it came out, but I could never bring myself to pick it up. It always felt like a book I *should* like -- historical fiction, literary narrator, twisty views on the heroical revolution -- and so I kept on putting it off. Then I found a completely new copy for 10¢ at the library sale table (my mother made me put in a dollar). I read it on the plane: one quarter of the novel for every couple pages of Cicero. And, Reader, this is a fantastic novel. Octavian grows up in a strange but retrospectively fortunate household, where a host of neo-classical scholars and Enlightenment intellectuals known only by numbers tutor him and flirt with his mother, an African princess in exile, as he is told. Gradually, the outside world begins to intrude, and Octavian realizes that what is really going on is rather different and rather more horrible than what he has been allowed to know.

First of all, most of the book is O.'s narration, and it is beautiful to read. It's a brilliant character to have created: O. has a complete classical education, and has a huge breadth of literary, historical, and 'scientific' background with which to describe his increasingly (or maybe just increasingly understood to be) horrific experiences as his fortune changes from protegé to experiment, to slave, to captive and fugitive, and in the context of which to think about the inhumanity and insidiousness of slavery, and the evil behind the motto "revolution to protect our property." There i definitely an anti-capitalist strain -- the chief villain repudiates the liberal arts and insists that the only good is profit and hence utility, as well -- and a strain of "oh, yeah, so you thought the American Revolution was all about freedom and justice and the rights of man, did you?" I wasn't bothered by either, actually, as both mostly agree with my own feelings.

II. The Winter Prince (Elizabeth Wein). Another book that I finally read, one that I have been seeing for much longer on the library shelf. I don't like stories about Mordred, and Mists of Avalon pretty much ruined any Arthurian telling with Celtic names (exception: Mary Stewart's). So I was not ever about to pick up this YA novel, where "Medraut" is embittered over his father "Artos'" preference for his legitimate son "Lleu." (Lleu? Double ll's alone pretty much rule out the book!) But now the series is four books one, seems to involve a North African kingdom as well/instead, and is recommended by Meghan Whalen Turner. So I steeled myself, and read the first one.

And I liked it. It didn't thrill me, or jump to the top of any list, but it was compelling, one of the most interior fantasies that I've read. It also reminded me of Mary Stewart, in that it was mostly grounded in post-Roman Britain, with ruined villas and old mines, and kingdoms where the whole royal family has to get out in the fields at harvest time, and goes hungry if it's a bad year. The set up is more or less as outlined above, but is make particularly creepy by the fact that Medraut narrates it to Morgause (= the sister who slept with Arthur and the sister who is plotting against him, in this version). It's after the fact, before we know what the fact are, as if Medraut is explaining his actions, possibly trying to justify them, to someone he hates and fears, and maybe loves. Her relationship with her son, it is clear from the beginning, has always been strong and unpleasant, but the details only come out bit by bit. Not everything worked for me: the character of Lleu didn't quite solidify for me, and it was his developing relationship with Medraut that turned out to be the most important.

III. One or another of the "Gordianus the Finder" mysteries (Steven Saylor). This was my third foray into Mystery Series Set in Ancient Rome. The first was the one set in the late Republic, called SPQR, or something, about a young senatorial type, I think. I only read one book -- the one that borrowed its plot from Book I of Bello Gallico. The second was Lindsey Davis' Falco series -- 1st century A.D., plebian lowlife with an aristocratic girlfriend, v. funny. I read a bunch of those. Anyway, so this one is also late Republic, commoner -- I'm not sure what the angle is after only one book. It was okay. Gordianus was moderately fun as a protagonist, but I think I may stick to Sir Peter Whimsey.

That would be Hannah's, not Thomas'. Although I wish Thomas More had written a Regulus, because that would be pretty awesome.

I'm not sure why I am fixating on this right now, but tonight I read my second post-classical Regulus play. I know of at least one more (Crowne -- the introduction makes it out to be unbelievably bad, possibly worse that the Havard, so that should be exciting).

Hannah More based her play on either a play or a long poem of an Italian poet, so I don't know which plot elements can fairly be called hers, and which are borrowings. But basically, this play had most of what I wanted in Regulus fanfiction an expansion of the story: there were no Carthaginian secret agents, in fact there were no villains, and the one character (the consul Manlius, more on whom later) who is presented as slightly less than good, turns out to be the Second Most Virtuous Roman. The plot mostly focuses around Regulus' family: son Publius (historically, either Gaius or Marcus, but we'll let that pass), daughter Attilia, and protegé and now tribune Licinius. Most of the play is Regulus storming on about virtue, with Publius protesting that he can't abandon his filial duty (but: "are you a son, or are you a Roman?"), Attilia weeping and wailing, and Licinius telling himself that if they can just save Regulus, he'll thank them later. There is also a small love triangle between Publius, Attilia's Carthaginian slave Barce, and Hamilcar, the Carthaginin ambassador, and a sort of half-baked romance between Licinius and Attilia. And Manlius appears to hit on Regulus at one point, just to complete the romantic entanglements, but I assume that wasn't intentional on the part of the authoress.

More follows Horace, in general, more than Havard, and this a good thing. (I think Horace is the most extended classical version, but I should probably check Appian, or Dio, or something). For my purposes, this means there is a hilarious/thrilling scene in the senate when Regulus refuses to sit (can a slave sit in the presence of senators?), then Publius jumps up (can a son sit while his father stands?) and Regulus more or less tells him to sit down and shut up (and if you were really a good son, you'd obey me). I think that the promise of this sort of thing is why I am hunting down Regulus sources: open discussion of hierarchy in terms of who is sitting when. I admit that this has fascinated me at least since I connected us all standing up in elementary school orchestra concerts when the director walked, with all of those scenes of standing up: when the judge comes in, when the President comes in, when, in movies and plays, the king came in, and realized that it was the same thing. Then I wondered whether it was supposed to be as meaningless a gesture as I mentally treated it, or whether I was actually supposed to be feeling some sort of sense of inferior status and/or respect due. Then I started to obsess, and the rest, as they say, is history. In my case, the history of rather a lot of my thought.

But anyway, what I liked about More's treatment of Regulus was that it mostly wasn't about Regulus. It was more about all of the people around him as they variously Don't Get It, then, Get It But Wish They Didn't, and, eventually, Come to an Understanding of It.

That said, I had one major personal issue with this treatment:
African vs. Roman. Now, in general, I don't get that uncomfortable with Roman moral division between themselves and "Africans." There are political reasons (124 year war, for example, plus that unpleasantness with Cleopatra later), and cultural prejudices going on that I don't feel guilty about, because I can distance myself. The Romans can be pretty condescending/prone to rude stereotypes about the Greeks, the Persians (as are the Greeks, obviously), the Germans, and provincials of all types, including people from the 'wrong' parts of Italy. But when an Anglo-American (obviously, Hannah More is only the former, and I probably shouldn't take them together, England having a different (maybe less problematic) history of race than we do, but I'm not talking so much about slavery as about racial attitudes in general) makes a big deal about this, I do get uncomfortable. And I couldn't help but read more into "African" than "Roman generalization about people from Africa" when the two Carthaginian characters most profoundly, and, actually, alone of the characters, didn't get it. They admired the amazing virtue and honor of the Romans, but completely failed to understand it. There was a really iffy scene where the Carthaginian ambassador decides that he's going to show Regulus that Carthaginians have honor too, and so offers to let him escape. Regulus rants a refusal, of course, but the ambassador doesn't even get that he doesn't get it. Very awkward.

Three further observations:

1. About half way through, around the time when Regulus won his son over, I started to think about the division that seemed to be happening men Getting It and women Not Getting It. Obviously, women:emotion::men:reason, particularly with all the exhorting to repress ummanly passions that was going on. This was mostly confirmed when Attilia finally Gets It, although with much suffering and weeping, and makes the interesting claim that "Roman virgins should be better than women" i.e. not be weepy and wimpy. Again, clearly not original with More or her era, but nice to see a default vs. potential identity being applied. (On the other hand, what finally pushes Attilia into fortitude is her father's comment that since she can't do anything useful for the state, she can at least not embarrass him by making a scene.)

2. The more interesting division into Getting It and Not Getting it happened by class. By the end, we get a huge confrontation between the senators, led by Manlius, and the people, led by the still-misguided Licinius. The moral, as expounded by Regulus when he finally 'shames' the masses in acquiescence, is certainly "listen to your betters, damn it, because you're fools." And certainly, barring the Carthaginians, who never Get It, Licinius Gets It even later than Attilia, making patrician vs. plebeian possibly the more telling distinction. Except, of course, they are all Romans, and all basically committed to Doing the Right Thing. I should probably find out how (or whether) this is is relevant to Hannah More's politics, which I suspect it is, but I don't feel like it right now.

3. An amusing "hasn't language changed in 175 years moment" occurred when Manlius apostrophized Regulus as "thou awfully good Roman."

So. I think that's all for tonight.

So I started Roman Revolution this week. Syme is very entertaining, not least because he thinks he's Tacitus. Which makes it very readable. This is my favorite quote so far:

That the private life of the Caesarian soldier [sc. Antony] was careless, disorderly, and even disgraceful, is evident and admitted. He longed to a class of Roman noles by no means uncommon under Republic of Empire, whose unofficial follies did not prevent them from rising, when duty called, to services of consicuous ability or the most disinterested patriotism. For such men, the most austere of historians cannot altogether suppress a timid and perhaps perverse admiration. A blameless life is not the whole of virtue, and inflexible rectitude may prove a menace to the Commonwealth.*
*Tacitus commends to the voluptary Petronius, an excellent proconsul of Bithynia (Ann. 16, 18), Otho, who governed Lusitania with integrity (ib. 13, 46) and took his own life rather than prolong a civil war (Hist. 2, 47) and L. Vitellius: 'eo de homine haud sum ignarus sinistram in urbe famam, pleraque foeda memorari; ceterum regendis provinciis prisca virtute egit' (Ann. 6, 32). The same historian's cool treatment of the virtuous Emperor Galba will not escape notices (Hist. 1, 49)-- 'magis extra vitia quam cum virtutibus'.

In other words: the wicked and debauched are sometimes more fun, and it's okay to like them (I love the juxtaposition of austere historians and their timid and perverse admirations -- it makes me think of elderly British dons doing a Walter Mitty) because Tacitus did to. I think this is an excellent rule for historiography.