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.