Gossipy Romans
Jul. 30th, 2005 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel09 July 2005
A Murder on the Appian Way / A Mist of Prophecies - Steven Saylor - Robinson 1998 / 2002
* * * / * * * *
Comparisons are invidious but inevitable. Lyndsey Davis and Steven Saylor both write murder mysteries based around a single viewpoint character and set in ancient Rome. Both make use of their protagonist's family and friends as a source of soap operatic elements to leaven the procedural strands of the story (neither of them, it must be said, is particularly good at whodunnit plots). Both clearly have an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Rome and a nice eye for detail. Both are witty, humane and intelligent writers. But I have to say that I prefer Davis' Falco series to Saylor's Roma sub Rosa, and the reasons for this are related to the aspects in which their milieux differ.
First, the main characters. Whereas Falco is a pleb who only has dealings with the Roman upper crust thanks to his unlikely relationship with a senator's daughter and his occasional work for the Emperor, Saylor's Gordianus is an established patrician who hobnobs with the likes of Cicero and Pompey. This means that whereas Falco performs his investigations by a combination of inveigling his way into high class homes through his aristocratic connections and direct and occasionally thuggish action, Gordianus' investigations are generally limited to inviting himself round to tea and asking pertinent questions of the lady of the house. Gordianus is also in his fifties, which further limits his capacity for direct intervention and forces him to involve his son Eco or his muscle-bound bodyguard for protection when roughhousing may be involved. As a result, there is relatively little dramatic action in Saylor's books. Instead, a good part is taken up with descriptions of the gossip that Gordianus hears in the Forum or which he learns at the homes of his patrician friends. Falco also has the impetuosity of youth, which means that he jumps to conclusions and is frequently wrong, whereas Gordianus is wise and rarely makes a mistake.
For the most part, Gordianus is a believable Roman character, but his attitude to slaves seems anomalously twentieth century. He regards his slaves as human beings, taking an interest in their welfare and even going so far as to marry one. He never seems to punish his slaves, even when they overstep the mark. Falco, by contrast, has noticeable contempt for the slaves he has to deal with, regarding them as dim-witted and slovenly sub-humans. Falco's attitude, in my view, is by far the more realistic one - it seems to me that only be dehumanising slaves could you justify keeping them. Apparently Saylor deliberately chose to give his main character this highly untypical viewpoint on the justification that decent, humane people exist and always have existed in every human society. A fine sentiment, but the fact remains that Gordianus' attitude doesn't make sense.
That said, the attitude of his wife Bethesda, an Egyptian ex-slave, is even harder to understand. Why does she permit the keeping of slaves? Not that we ever find out very much about her, at least in these books. In contrast to Falco's pushy Helena, a woman who is clearly considerably more intelligent than her husband, Bethesda behaves as a more typical Roman matron, capable of expressing forceful opinions about domestic affairs but not intruding into Gordianus' work. It is probably true that Saylor probably has the edge here in terms of realism (and he makes up for the relative weakness of Bethesda by having several prominent Roman wives in his dramatis personae), but Helena is by far the more interesting character.
But perhaps the most significant difference is when the two series are set. Davis, I think quite deliberately, decided to place her stories in the relatively uneventful reign of Vespasian, one of the more enlightened of the Roman Emperors. Saylor's series is set during the extremely dramatic death-throes of the Republic some one hundred and twenty years earlier, when Pompey and Caesar and their various followers were duking it out for control of the city. This provides a rich source of rumours and events for his characters to gossip about, but also means that his books sometimes feel like Roman History 101 rather than novels. By contrast Davis, who has deliberately not availed herself of the prop of historical events, has to entertain the reader with rumbustuous characterisation and pungent descriptions of what life in ancient Rome must actually have been like for ordinary people. I personally find Davis' social history rather more engaging and original than Saylor's more conventional observer of great events, which has been done before (albeit for different periods) by the likes of Robert Graves and Mary Renault.
Which is not to say that Saylor's books are without merit. A Murder on the Appian Way, which concerns itself with the death of Clodius, a rabble-rousing demagogue, is okay but not brilliant - the portrayal of Cicero is excellent, but any alert reader will quickly spot the murderer, and Saylor does himself no favours by having his characters pendantically spell out the important questions for the hard of thinking. A Mist of Prophecies is rather better. It starts with a woman called Cassandra, who like her famous namesake is a prophetess, dying by poison in Gordianus' arms. The seven suspects are all the wives of prominent Roman citizens. And it appears that Gordianus himself has had an affair with Cassandra, unbeknownst to his sickly wife... The plot suffers from the opposite problem to A Murder on the Appian Way in that the information needed to work out who the murderess was is given only just before the denouement, but the focus on the women of Rome was nice. And the clever title - a "mist" is absolutely the right collective noun for prophecies - is worth an extra star in itself.
So - not quite up to Lyndsey Davis, but definitely an acceptable alternative.
A Murder on the Appian Way / A Mist of Prophecies - Steven Saylor - Robinson 1998 / 2002
* * * / * * * *
Comparisons are invidious but inevitable. Lyndsey Davis and Steven Saylor both write murder mysteries based around a single viewpoint character and set in ancient Rome. Both make use of their protagonist's family and friends as a source of soap operatic elements to leaven the procedural strands of the story (neither of them, it must be said, is particularly good at whodunnit plots). Both clearly have an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Rome and a nice eye for detail. Both are witty, humane and intelligent writers. But I have to say that I prefer Davis' Falco series to Saylor's Roma sub Rosa, and the reasons for this are related to the aspects in which their milieux differ.
First, the main characters. Whereas Falco is a pleb who only has dealings with the Roman upper crust thanks to his unlikely relationship with a senator's daughter and his occasional work for the Emperor, Saylor's Gordianus is an established patrician who hobnobs with the likes of Cicero and Pompey. This means that whereas Falco performs his investigations by a combination of inveigling his way into high class homes through his aristocratic connections and direct and occasionally thuggish action, Gordianus' investigations are generally limited to inviting himself round to tea and asking pertinent questions of the lady of the house. Gordianus is also in his fifties, which further limits his capacity for direct intervention and forces him to involve his son Eco or his muscle-bound bodyguard for protection when roughhousing may be involved. As a result, there is relatively little dramatic action in Saylor's books. Instead, a good part is taken up with descriptions of the gossip that Gordianus hears in the Forum or which he learns at the homes of his patrician friends. Falco also has the impetuosity of youth, which means that he jumps to conclusions and is frequently wrong, whereas Gordianus is wise and rarely makes a mistake.
For the most part, Gordianus is a believable Roman character, but his attitude to slaves seems anomalously twentieth century. He regards his slaves as human beings, taking an interest in their welfare and even going so far as to marry one. He never seems to punish his slaves, even when they overstep the mark. Falco, by contrast, has noticeable contempt for the slaves he has to deal with, regarding them as dim-witted and slovenly sub-humans. Falco's attitude, in my view, is by far the more realistic one - it seems to me that only be dehumanising slaves could you justify keeping them. Apparently Saylor deliberately chose to give his main character this highly untypical viewpoint on the justification that decent, humane people exist and always have existed in every human society. A fine sentiment, but the fact remains that Gordianus' attitude doesn't make sense.
That said, the attitude of his wife Bethesda, an Egyptian ex-slave, is even harder to understand. Why does she permit the keeping of slaves? Not that we ever find out very much about her, at least in these books. In contrast to Falco's pushy Helena, a woman who is clearly considerably more intelligent than her husband, Bethesda behaves as a more typical Roman matron, capable of expressing forceful opinions about domestic affairs but not intruding into Gordianus' work. It is probably true that Saylor probably has the edge here in terms of realism (and he makes up for the relative weakness of Bethesda by having several prominent Roman wives in his dramatis personae), but Helena is by far the more interesting character.
But perhaps the most significant difference is when the two series are set. Davis, I think quite deliberately, decided to place her stories in the relatively uneventful reign of Vespasian, one of the more enlightened of the Roman Emperors. Saylor's series is set during the extremely dramatic death-throes of the Republic some one hundred and twenty years earlier, when Pompey and Caesar and their various followers were duking it out for control of the city. This provides a rich source of rumours and events for his characters to gossip about, but also means that his books sometimes feel like Roman History 101 rather than novels. By contrast Davis, who has deliberately not availed herself of the prop of historical events, has to entertain the reader with rumbustuous characterisation and pungent descriptions of what life in ancient Rome must actually have been like for ordinary people. I personally find Davis' social history rather more engaging and original than Saylor's more conventional observer of great events, which has been done before (albeit for different periods) by the likes of Robert Graves and Mary Renault.
Which is not to say that Saylor's books are without merit. A Murder on the Appian Way, which concerns itself with the death of Clodius, a rabble-rousing demagogue, is okay but not brilliant - the portrayal of Cicero is excellent, but any alert reader will quickly spot the murderer, and Saylor does himself no favours by having his characters pendantically spell out the important questions for the hard of thinking. A Mist of Prophecies is rather better. It starts with a woman called Cassandra, who like her famous namesake is a prophetess, dying by poison in Gordianus' arms. The seven suspects are all the wives of prominent Roman citizens. And it appears that Gordianus himself has had an affair with Cassandra, unbeknownst to his sickly wife... The plot suffers from the opposite problem to A Murder on the Appian Way in that the information needed to work out who the murderess was is given only just before the denouement, but the focus on the women of Rome was nice. And the clever title - a "mist" is absolutely the right collective noun for prophecies - is worth an extra star in itself.
So - not quite up to Lyndsey Davis, but definitely an acceptable alternative.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-31 06:56 pm (UTC)As to Bethesda keeping slaves, you might ask why in certain types of society, women who've been mistreated as daughter/junior wife perpetuate this abuse when and if they become senior wives. Or why people who were bullied become bullies. It seems to be natural for people to expect the system to continue, merely to want to better their position within it. To attempt to change the system requires a bigger step.