Screwed by "Screwed".

Why is it that in Hollywood Romans almost invariably speak "olde-worlde" English? Even the TV series Rome, which made a big effort to puncture lots of Roman stereotypes, still sometimes floundered with its dialogue choices, occasionally lapsing into bizarre linguistic anachronisms that were especially jarring when set against the modern phrasing that the characters often used.

If we want to understand the roots of this, it's probably partly the Romans' own fault. We know the Romans largely through their own literature, but their own literature was not written in "everyday" Latin. Literary Latin is an extraordinarily highly-wrought and artificial "dialect" of Latin. Real Romans didn't speak in Ciceronian Latin any more than real Elizabethans spoke high Shakespearean English. If we want to get close to the "real" sound of classical Latin, we have to look not at the grand works of philosophy, rhetoric and history, but at the graffiti from the walls of Pompeii, or perhaps at the work of the small number of authors (like Catullus) who occasionally used "street" vernacular in their writings. And what we find is curiously modern - a racy, fluid, flexible language, full of allusion, slang, proverb and obscenity ("I had a great fuck here", reads one memorable graffito from a Pompeian brothel).

But all this has consequences for us humble purveyors of historical fiction. Readers probably expect fictional Romans to talk in the grand, noble, clunking cadences of the Hollywood depictions. So what do I do? The "honourable" thing, and puncture those stereotypes by presenting dialogue in (what I would argue is) a more authentic way? Or the "cowardly" thing and pander to the tired linguistic stereotypes so as not to throw the readers? You can probably see what my heart wants me to do - but if I ever want to get this manuscript sold, I'll need to do some pandering somewhere along the line!

The "translation" effect complicates things even further. What, for instance, is a poor boy to do when an otherwise extremely perceptive and valuable reader tells me that I shouldn't use the word "screwed" in the sexual sense because it can only be dated back to the 18th Century? Is it really necessary to point out that when the characters in my novel speak, literally every single word they say is an anachronism, since in the novel they are speaking in a language which didn't even exist when they were alive? Can I think of any Latin words that could justifiably be translated as "screwed"? Yes, probably half a dozen. However, this highly perceptive reader finds it hard to stomach the idea of Romans saying "screwed". So what do I do - stubbornly keep it in, knowing I'm really "in the right" and giving an accurate impression of how real Romans spoke? Or axe it so as not to scare off editors and potential readers? After all, if an experienced and perceptive reader stumbles over "screwed", what's a casual reader going to think?

Just a taster of some of the ridiculous decisions that exercise my time nowadays!

How To Love A Bad Boy

One of the problems I have faced in writing this novel is very simply this: Publius Clodius Pulcher was an absolute turd.

This is problematic since, as anybody who has studied the "science" of writing knows, readers are supposed to be able to empathise or sympathise with the narrators or main characters of novels. It's hard to drum up sympathy for someone as extreme and amoral as Clodius. I could take refuge in the "loveable cad" trope, and cash in on what I think of as "Flashman syndrome" - a belief that readers can learn to love an unpleasant character if he brings a certain style and panache to his unpleasantness, but I suspect that Clodius would test this paradigm to destruction. Flashman was a cad - but Clodius was an utter bastard.

The only way around this, I decided, was to regard the whole thing as a tragedy - the story of someone who could have been better, but who was dragged by circumstances and society down the path of darkness (think of Euripides' Medea - "I know the better course and I approve it; and yet I choose the worse.") . Since I do not believe that anybody is wholly bad, I decided that I should give my Clodius some redeeming features, something for the reader to hold on to, some potential for improvement or "salvation". My main 'redeeming features' are:

- His growing love for his wife Fulvia (see my previous post on this).

- A genuine and deep concern for his blood relatives. This, I think, is historicalluy justifiable since, as a member of the aristocratic gens Claudii, Clodius would have had reverence for his family hammered into his head from a very early youth (something I dwell on, perhaps excessively, in Chapter 1). I think that, in the context of this type of education, it's not implausible that, for instance, he would want to protect his sisters, or that he would feel grief at his father's death. And this can help to partially redeem him in readers' eyes.

- Humour. Readers will forgive a lot of outrageous behaviour if it is presented in a self-aware and humorous manner. I try to let Clodius' wit come out in his bitter asides and reflections on the experience he narrates.

These (and a few other potentially sympathetic traits) are intended to give the reader grounds for hope - can Clodius somehow hang onto these humanising qualities and rise above the horrific spiral of violence that whirls around him? The tragedy of the book, I hope, is that ultimately he cannot. The violence gradually consumes him, and we are forced to watch as every human quality is stripped from him and he becomes more and more monstrous.

Hey, I never said it would be a cheerful read!

Infamy, infamy, they've all ....

No, this blog hasn't died an entirely unlamented death, I've just been moving house and "offline" for most of the past week!

I'll post something more substantial when I've actually had a chance to write some more of my book, but for now, here's a thought - how about this for a cover image? It's "The Ides of March" by Poynter (the same guy who did the background image of "Lesbia"), it's full of deep shadows and suspicions of skulduggery.

The Curious Case of Clodius and Fulvia

One of the odder aspects of the story of the "real" Clodius is his relationship to his wife. Clodius married a woman called Fulvia, a daughter of the formidable house of the Sempronii (after Clodius died, the historical Fulvia married that old reprobate Antony and become a powerful woman in her own right). Now here's what's odd about their story. Despite the fact that Clodius, in his youth, led an utterly scandalous and reprehensible private life, at some point he actually, against all expectation, seems to have fallen in love with Fulvia!

Certainly there's some evidence that his dubious behaviour continued for a while after their marriage, so I doubt it was a "love match" initially - it is more likely that love grew after a loveless, politically-motivated wedding. But even those Roman writers who hated Clodius (and let's be honest, that's all of them) do not deny that, in his later years, he was the model of a devoted and considerate husband!

There's something that makes this even odder. Clodius seems to go on two distinct "character arcs". His political career gets steadily more outrageous at precisely the same time as his private life gets more "respectable" and conventional! The problem for me is this: how can I plausibly present an indiviudal getting sucked into a tragic whirlpool of spiralling violence while simultaneously getting ever more tender and besotted with his lady love? How can I do that without making his relations with Fulvia seem utterly out of character?

I want this love story in my novel, because without it I'm not doing justice to the life of the historical Clodius, and at the same time it gives me something that would otherwise be utterly missing in his later years - a tragically missed chance of redemption, one little glimpse of something noble and laudable in the character of a man who, by the end, is almost completely amoral and perhaps even psychotic. But I'm going to have to work like a demon and employ every writer's trick in the book to make this historically-attested phenomenon not seem like something hugely out of character!

I have some ideas about how I might "pull this off". I'll share them with you when I've better worked them out. Until then, Fulvia is destined to remain a conundrum.

Papyrology - Get Stuck In!!!!

I have to alert people to an excellent and important project run by Oxford University.

If you're already an ancient history fanatic, you'll already have heard of Oxyrhynchus. It's a small town in Egypt where vast numbers of Roman-period papyri, mostly in Greek, have been excavated. The site has turned up everything from fragments of lost works of literature to everyday administrative documents, and even an early Christian "lost gospel". The problem is that there are so many texts that they are swamping papyrologists, meaning that it is taking decades and decades to get them all transcribed and translated.

If you've ever fancied helping out with real ancient history, the online "Ancient Lives" project may just be for you. On the site, you will be presented with papyrus fragments and asked to "transcribe" them on a Greek keyboard panel. You don't need to know any Greek to do it (it's just a case of matching symbols), and it's curiously satisfying. You may never get to find out what the texts you are transcribing actually mean, but you can feel good in the knowledge that you have made a contribution to the serious academic study of Roman and Egyptian history, and have helped experts shed a little light on a previously unknown bit of the ancient world.

Anyway, it's a very constructive activity to while away a spare 15 minutes or so, and as I said there's a strange satisfaction to the process. "Ancient Lives" can be visited at the following website:

Ancient Lives Project.

Passing the Dormouse Test

Are you a fan of Roman historical fiction? Would you like a straightforward and convenient method to help you work out how reliable and well-researched a Roman novel is? Never fear: step forward the outstanding Cambridge classicist Mary Beard and her brilliant "dormouse" test.

Before we proceed, I just want to say that Mary Beard is AMAZING! I have read her books, watched her on TV and I even met her once (she won't remember). Her blog, "A Don's Life", is an essential read for anyone interested in classics or education, and there's a link to it in my sidebar.

Her dormouse test is very simple - the sooner an author makes any mention of stuffed dormice, the less "authentic" or deeply researched the book is likely to be.

The Romans often ate dormice as an easy hot snack, sans hair and stuffed with a sort of spiced pork mince. I read somewhere that the bones were usually left in, to give it some bite. It sounds rather like a savoury Dime Bar - soft on the outside, crunchy within. This is the sort of fact that non-specialists might think is impressive and unusual, but there is a curious, inexplicable phenomenon here: it's one of those facts that anybody who tries to research the Roman world, whatever the specific nature of their research, will just inevitably happen upon quite early in their reading. It's one of the best-known little-known facts about the Romans there is! If an author lays on the dormice too keenly, it may be an indication that they are reaching too eagerly for obvious, cliched, faux-recherche splashes of "period colour".

It sounds odd, but I've applied the "dormouse test" to numerous works of fiction, film and television set in the Roman world, and it actually seems to be a pretty reliable indicator. Books which seemed, to me, poorly researched or superficial invariably roll out the dormice at the earliest possible opportunity. I'm delighted to announce that, in 60,000 words, I have so far not once resorted to stuffed dormice!

Maybe that's just because I knew about the test when I was writing ...

When Ancient History Is Annoying

Just finished a rewrite of Chapter 4, which deals with Clodius' typically disgraceful stint in the Roman Army as a junior officer under Lucullus during the Third Mithridatic War.

When writing my first draft, I came across a really surprising difficulty. Despite the fact that the Third Mithridatic was a really important war, I was utterly unable to find in any primary source the identity of the five legions Lucullus took with him.

It's a typical problem. The practice of numbering legions dates back to the Marian Reforms, but it's notoriously difficult to identify specific legions prior to the Gallic campaigns of Julius Caesar. I did all manner of "detective work" on this, trying to trace the exact history of Lucullus' five legions, which didn't help (I discovered that he levied one at Rome, and inherited two others that had previously served under Fimbria - but I couldn't work out where the other two came from or what any of them were called). I looked at later campaigns, to try and work out if any of Lucullus' legions might have been left in the East and picked up by subsequent commanders. All I got out of that (thanks to an extraordinarily obscure image on a coin of Augustus, courtesy of a very astute poster on the history discussion forum Historum) was that the Tenth Legion would later fight at Carrhae under Crassus. So I had a tentative suggestion that one of Lucullus' five legions might have been the Tenth - and no idea at all about the other four!

Feeling defeated, I simply had to "make up" the numbers of the other four legions (I'm sure the Roman history enthusiasts will be understanding!) But it's a good illustration of the occasional frustrations that arise from ancient history. I mean come on - this was one of the most crucial wars in the Late Republic, and we don't even know something as basic as the identity of the Roman legions involved!

I like historical accuracy, and these gaps in our ancient literature can be maddening. They occasionally make me long for better-documented age. Just you wait, my next book will be a Regency romance!

Solving the Catullus Conundrum

For the uninitiated, Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin lyric poet of the first century BC, whose slim volume of poetry survives to this day. He is known to have moved in the same circles as my waggish narrator Clodius Pulcher. For many centuries his verse was overlooked because of its occasional obscenity, but nowadays he is acknowledged by classical scholars as one of the "big hitters" of the Latin canon. His most famous works are love poems, devoted to a mysterious woman called "Lesbia" (think Ancient Rome's version of Shakespeare's Dark Lady). Now, for a whole raft of reasons that I frankly can't be bothered outlining here, many literary scholars suspect or believe that the "real" Lesbia, the woman who inspired Catullus' fabulous femme fatale, was none other than Clodia, my narrator's sister and favourite lover.

I knew very soon after I conceived this project that I wanted a relationship between Catullus and Clodia to feature in my book as a sub-plot. But here's the problem - I had to acknowledge that, although I love the poems of Catullus, most of my prospective readers have probably never heard of him. To the non-specialist reader there is nothing inherently exciting about the fact that the narrator's sister has an affair with "some poet or other". I had to find some substance to this story, something that would make their relationship interesting and exciting enough to justify its inclusion in my book.

The solution came from a careful re-reading of the Lesbia poems. Now not all of Catullus' Lesbia poems are sweet. Many are very bitter, obscene, angry, even threatening. The relationship depicted between the poet and "Lesbia" is a stormy one, an affair that clearly meant more to the man than the woman. "Lesbia" infuriated the poet with her promiscuity, her occasional coldness, her refusal to seriously commit. The more bitter poems seem to depict Catullus' anger in the wake of a break-up. And, when read in a certain way, it seems that "passionate" is a rather generous adjective to describe his feelings towards Lesbia. In fact his angrier Lesbia poems start to read like the deranged ramblings of an obsessive stalker ....

So that was my way in! Suddenly I had a way to put tension and peril into the relationship between Clodia and Catullus. And, thanks to a bit of clever re-organisation of material (and a couple of outrageous liberties taken with the accepted chronology of the poet's life) I was even able to engineer a way to make this "sub-plot" blow up spectacularly in the face of Clodius himself! I love the writery buzz you get when your sub-plot and main narrative dovetail together like that.

Unfortunately, this all means I had to make Catullus look like a bit of a jerk. I hope his many admirers will forgive me. They should remember that it's just fiction, that we don't have to like the poet to appreciate the poetry, and that the only reason I was so keen to put him in my book in the first place was because I'm such a Catullus groupie myself!

I only ever directly quote one excerpt from his poetry, and curously it's not from his Lesbia poems. It's the first four lines of Poem 101, the meditation on the death of the poet's brother. Here's my translation of those lines - I hope you like them!

Carried through many lands, o'er many seas,

I have come here, my brother, to these wretched rites

To honour you, finally, with gifts for the dead

And fruitlessly speak to your now-silent ashes.

Writing is Hard

... And concentration is even harder!

Meant to be re-drafting Chapter 4 tonight. Instead, I caught myself on YouTube watching an old video of the Beatles performing the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from "A Midsummer Night's Dream". So that's why this novel is taking so long!!!!!

Anyway, it's a funny vid, so I'll share it here:

The Mechanical Beatles.

Talking Like Clodius

Before I started writing my book, I bought and read a large stack of modern-day political memoirs (particularly useful were Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years and Bill Clinton's My Life). I did this for a very simple reason: I knew my book would be first-person, and I wanted to find out how very powerful people write about their careers. Clodius was a powerful man and, if I wanted to write credibly in his voice, I decided I should find out how modern day leaders write.

What struck me was this: without a doubt, every memoirist whose work I read was remarkably unsentimental (even when describing things like meeting their spouse for the first time), and on the descriptive front rather terse. There's little direct speech, and little description, and I knew that, to feel credible, Clodius would have to approach his memoirs in the same way. After all, the fate of Rome turned on his actions: when writing his memoirs, he would be unlikely to devote whole paragraphs to describing what his brother-in-law's kitchen looked like, for instance!

In some ways, this was annoying, because I'd done my research and I knew exactly what an upper-class Roman kitchen would have looked like. It also went against all my writerly instincts, because normally when writing 3rd person stuff I do lots of description and dialogue. I have had to impose on myself a practically Roman level of discipline when it comes to cutting back on that stuff! When I write, I pretty much just dash out the storyline, with reflections and observations from Clodius, and then go back and add in descriptive touches and dialogue scenes at particularly important moments of the narrative. But this is actually a high-risk strategy. Conventionally, historical fiction is "dialogue-heavy" and very descriptive (as it should be, to draw the reader into whatever exciting historical milieu the author is reconstructing). My book is clearly a very different sort of historical fiction, and one that requires readers used to the conventions of the genre to reconfigure their expectations somewhat and appreciate the book in a different way. That's where the risk lies.

However, I took comfort in the knowledge that this type of writing is not unprecedented, and has given the world books which have been both commercial and critical successes. Robert Graves' I, Claudius, the source of this blog's title, is a classic, a book beloved by millions, and it contains less description and dialogue than mine! Likewise Robert Harris' ongoing trilogy about the life of Cicero, told by his secretary Tiro, yielded excellent reviews and best-seller sales, and that too is written in my odd memoir style. What is it about these books that makes them work, that hooks the reader? Very simply, the combination of two things: an astonishingly good story (and I know I've got that - thank you History!) coupled with a really compelling and memorable narrative voice. We feel we know Claudius and Tiro and, though we don't necessarily like them, their personalities are vivid and they enliven the whole book. I have come to the conclusion that, if I can give my readers a great story told in a unique and compelling voice, they won't miss the direct speech and descriptions.

One of the best ever illustration of the power of "voice" in first-person fiction (even better than Graves and Harris) comes from Duncan Sprott's remarkable Ptolemies quartet. I understand that each book in the series has a different narrator, though I've only yet read the first one, The House of the Eagle. The House of the Eagle is narrated by Thoth (or more properly Thut), the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing. The book contains almost no dialogue whatsoever, and very little descriptive prose. Yet it is compelling and magnetic - largely because the narrative voice is so extraordinary. As an example, let me quote you the very first paragraph of Chapter 1:

HO! Stranger! OHO! Ignorant One! YOU have been such a long time a-coming! You are so very late in time! YES! It is YOU I am speaking to, Reader, YOU. Because I think you know nothing of Ptolemaios - Ptolemy - the Greek who was Pharaoh of Egypt, or of the terrible tragedy of his House. You do not know who Ptolemy is, do you? You have never heard of him, have you? You cannot so much as pronounce his name (do not say the P, Reader!). Truly, what you deserve just now is a beating upon the soles of your feet.

Wow! Find me another narrator like that. Very few narrators would dare to challenge the readers. This one threatens them with physical violence. I have decided that in first-person fiction voice is nearly everything. And so it is that, with the exception of my research, I have devoted more time to crafting Clodius' voice than anything else.

So I have taken consolation from Graves, Harris and Sprott. Books written in the sparse "memoir" style can work, if readers allow them to cast their spell. The book has had a mixed reaction on a critique group to which I belong, but I've had enough positive feedback to convince me that, overall and on some levels at least, this writing style is basically "working". But, like any writer, I have to remain open to the idea that I'm on the wrong track. It's still an experiment for me, and the old "substantial rewrite" option has to stay on the table. I'll keep you posted!

Republican Rome: "Sexing Up" Politics.

I've been reflecting on exactly why I feel so drawn to the late Roman Republic, and why I think it's a great setting for gripping fiction. Here are my thoughts.

Firstly, I'm quite a political person, but I recognise that many people aren't and that, for a lot of readers, the idea of a novel about politics would be a big turn-off. However, even people who don't really like politics could, I am sure, enjoy a book about the politics of the Roman Republic for one very simple reason: the stakes were so much higher. Nowadays a political miscalculation might get someone fired. In Rome, a political miscalculation could get a person's throat slit. This was a world where it was regarded (by some) as a legitimate political tactic to round up a mob of armed followers and attack an opponent's house! A lot of our most gripping conspiracy theories revolve around the idea that our political leaders might order or sanction murder to preserve their positions. That definitely happened in Rome, but there was nothing conspiratorial about it - all the violence and intimidation was right out there in the open! In this context, it becomes possible to write a book about politics that has all the peril and violence of a crime thriller or an adventure novel.

The second thing that's great about Republican Rome is this: that the politics are recognisably our own. This isn't the manoeuvrings of kings or Emperors, the vicissitudes of court politics: it's all part of a democratic process that, for all its peculiarities, we can recognise. The chapter I'm working on right now, for instance, covers Clodius' attempt to introduce, for the first time, a government-subsidised dole of completely free grain to the poorest people in Rome. This provoked huge opposition from the conservative senators, and we can very clearly discern the same arguments that still rage today taking place all those centuries ago. It's all about the state provision of welfare: Obamacare BC, in effect. If Clodius was alive today and working in Washington (we should be very grateful that he is not), his opponents would be Republicans, ferociously objecting to his "Socialist" scheme to dish out freebies to the unemployed.

Taken together, it's easy to see (I hope) why this period is so appealing for a politically-minded writer: it's our politics plus extreme violence. Whilst voyaging aimlessly through Cyberspace, I found this amusing little image (riffing on Vincenzo Camuccini's famous painting Morte di Giulio Cesare) -

Salvete omnes!

Hi, I'm Johnny, and I thought I'd write a few words of introduction to my new blog.

This blog is designed to chronicle my experiences as I write and try to publish a historical novel. The book is provisionally titled "The Procession of the Dead" (a title I'll probably change, not least because apparently there is already a novel with that name), and it is a dark tale of politics, scandal and skulduggery in ancient Rome. It is a first-person novel told from the perspective of Publius Clodius Pulcher, a real-life historical troublemaker, one of the most controversial politicians in all history.

I hope to chart the numerous issues that arise from the writing process. I'll be blogging on the difficulties of first-person narrative (especially when the narrator is actually a rather unpleasant man!), the problems of pacing, the relationship between historical fiction and fact, the issues that can arise from introducing real people into a fictional narrative, and my ongoing struggles trying to "get into the head" of my rather extreme and psychologically damaged protagonist. I will post progress updates and, when the time comes to send my literary baby out into the world, I'll talk about what I learn about the process of trying to get published. I'll probably sometimes post about things not related to writing (I'm undisciplined like that), and throw out the occasional fascinating tit-bit about Republican Rome that I have learned over the course of my extensive research. It should be quite a ride!

I haven't yet written a blurb for this novel, but I've started to think about writing a sort of "historical introduction" at the very beginning of the book. I'll throw out a rough (rather improvised) version of that introduction, to give you a flavour of what the book will be about.

"Rome was not always ruled by Emperors. For five centuries its sovereign body was an elected Senate, and it boasted a complex and revered Republican constitution. Over the centuries, Rome's fragile democracy came to be enervated by growing corruption and decadence. Its constitution was subverted and undermined by the dictator Julius Caesar, before being destroyed and replaced by an autocracy under his heir Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. The final generation of Republican Rome was a terrible time when a string of ambitious men strove for mastery over the rotten Republic by any means necessary. Politics degenerated into gang violence, pitched battles and repeated bloody purges. It was this apocalyptic political landscape that produced Publius Clodius Pulcher.

Clodius was a key player in his Republic's decline and the rise of Caesar. He was a major catalyst in the escalating violence that overwhelmed the state. His private life was every bit as shocking and unorthodox as his ruinous political career. He was not an easy man to like, and he made many enemies. Those enemies dictated how his history would be written. He often appears as a "bogeyman" in mainstream histories of the period. Few historians have ever tried to see the world as he saw it, to understand and explain his apparently demented and contemptible behaviour. That is precisely the purpose of this novel.

This is a story of violence, vendetta, bloodlust and the degradation of politics, all told through the eyes of one of the most extreme and controversial figures in all political history. This is a tale of the collapse of a democracy and the rise of absolute rule, and the extraordinary role played in this process by a lone, despised, terrifying maverick, the bringer of apocalypse, the man who laughed as Rome burned."

Or something like that!

Anyway, thanks for dropping by, and I hope I'll see you again!