What Mystery Novels Set in Rome Can Tell Us About Life in the Ancient World
In popular imagination, “ancient Rome” conjures up images of gleaming marble edifices, bloody battles and debauched affairs, and brilliant political speeches. However, one subgenre of fiction — historical mysteries — aptly combats this one-note portrayal. Instead, these mysteries offer up multi-layered depictions of the breadth of cultural diversity of Rome. In creating sleuths whose investigations take them through every stratum of society and every location of the Empire, bestselling authors help readers understand your Average Quintus’s day-to-day life and, indeed, serve as detectives themselves, seamlessly integrating fact with fiction.
In her 1989 essay “Reading and Writing Historical Fiction,” Sue Peabody outlines some of the benefits readers derive from historical fiction. In recreating history, the genre satiates readers’ desire to learn more about the past; in particular, historical fiction provides “acts, in some ways, as a metaphor for the past. Through the novel, the past is portrayed as a visual scene, a drama, which the reader can understand.” Authors must balance their intensive research with reconstructions of life that aren’t recorded in ancient primary sources.
Readers might be surprised to see the universality in modern and ancient conflicts, which range from dealing with autocrats to problematic sexual and gender dynamics. Amidst the #MeToo movement, issues of consent have appeared in Roman mysteries; since an enslaved person can never fully give his or her consent, authors tread carefully when creating potential romances between enslavers and the enslaved. Just like any city dweller today, Romans faced incompetent governments and infrastructure, pricy rents, and sudden violence on their streets. But how do mysteries bring these to life?
Because justice has no class, sleuths traverse all the hills of Rome, every class of society, and every province to seek out answers, and in the process, readers see more of the Roman world. What follows are excerpts from email conversations I had with historical novelists Lindsey Davis, Ruth Downie, and Steven Saylor about their research processes, how they reimagine Roman life, and the connections between the ancient and modern worlds.
Mr. Caesar, I Presume?
Ruth Downie’s Medicus series focuses on a clever Army medic named Gaius Petreius Ruso, who solves crimes in Roman Britain during the reign of Hadrian. When plotting out Ruso’s adventures, Downie must rely on information not supplied by literary sources and use deductive reasoning to create plausible solutions to answer such questions. Here, archaeological discoveries have proven invaluable.
Downie has dived into experimental archaeology spade-first. She notes that “archaeology has been a major inspiration ever since — both with site and museum visits, and wielding my own trowel as part of a community archaeology group excavating a Roman villa site. I think it helps to be literally ‘grounded’ in the physical reality of the period.”
She adds, “The written accounts that Roman historians give us of Britain are very patchy but other documents are available — notably the writing-tablets that have come to light at [the northern British fort] Vindolanda and elsewhere. They offer us little glimmers of light, and some idea of people as individuals instead of just ‘soldiers,’ or ‘slaves,’ or whatever we might glean from the official descriptions on altars and tombstones. Again, it’s reassurance that there are plenty of stories that have slipped down the gaps of history.”
For nearly 30 years, Lindsey Davis has drawn in readers with her tales featuring witty investigators Marcus Didius Falco and his adoptive daughter, Flavia Albia. A smooth-talking charmer with little to his name other than his keen mind when the series begins, Falco brings blue-collar Rome to vivid, sparkling life. But Davis focused more on creating engaging characters and conflicts rather than historical didactic. Davis notes, “I am a novelist first. My tools are narrative, plot, character and dialogue, supplemented by jokes.”
Davis works to create conflicts relatable to ancient characters and modern readers alike: “If some fact isn’t available I can invent intelligently — and not tell anyone I have done so. What I say to readers is that we can never really know what it was like to live in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago — yet my job is to persuade you that I do know.”
Her approach emphasizes the universality of human nature, regardless of the time period. She notes that she “believe[s] that although society changes human nature never does.” The bestseller adds, “Anyway, my novels were conceived as spoofs of 1940 gumshoe books. I don’t start from admiring the elite as portrayed in Roman authors, I start from the archaeology at street level. This has a lot in common with the modern street life.”
Davis has gathered information about life in ancient Rome for decades. She doesn’t discriminate between sources, noting, “I use primary sources, secondary sources, site visits, museums, and anything else that comes my way. I don’t feel any is more useful than any other; I use the accumulation — which of course I have now been gathering in for over 30 years.” As a veteran historical fiction writer, she often relies on her own imagination, at first because “I was too diffident so I got used to doing it alone … Now I occasionally discuss things with a friend, such as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, or have special access to sites with the British School at Rome or the Friends of Herculaneum. I am a private writer. I don’t do mentoring or peer review.”
Steven Saylor pens the bestselling Roma Sub Rosa series, in which Gordianus the Finder interacts with the good and great of the late Republic while cracking cases. In his latest mystery, The Throne of Caesar (Minotaur, 2018), Saylor revisits one of the most infamous murders in history: that of none other than Gaius Julius Caesar. As in Throne and the other Gordianus adventures, Saylor begins his impeccable research process with a book — in this case, a familiar little green bible:
In the course of writing 16 novels and 21 short stories set in the ancient world, there’s hardly a Loeb volume on the shelf I haven’t reached for at one time or another. One of the most useful tools to come along in recent years is access to the whole Loeb Library online, to which I subscribe each year.
Saylor prefers to turn to the original Roman sources where possible, noting, “I do turn to books and articles by modern historians, but mostly to discover the primary sources. I spend a lot of time reading and annotating footnotes. Right now I’m delving deep into the world of Marcus Aurelius, for the third novel in my Roma and Empire series. That means reading and rereading the Meditations, the letters between Marcus and his mentor Fronto, the medical works of Galen, the satires of Lucian, and also the early Church Fathers, since Christianity now begins to play a role in the story of Rome.” How does a writer inject life into an event and period that has been discussed many times? Saylor takes a different approach: Throne deals with the events leading up to the Ides of March.
Even after dozens of books, the creative process still beguiles him. He comments, “The way historical sources become transmuted into modern fiction remains a mystery even to me. It happens in a black box. Data goes in, fiction comes out. In between, I suspect, are several million steps inside my brain. I can’t possibly parse them out. I can only keep doing it, hopefully getting better each time, but I can’t really explain it.”
Downie bases her initial investigative approaches on archaeological and historical record. She says, “Because our evidence about Roman Britain as opposed to, say, Victorian Britain, is so limited, it’s often necessary to choose between silence and invention. I tend to go for informed invention, because if fiction writers don’t go beyond what we ‘know,’ we risk trampling around in the same circles and producing cliché. The nightmare scenario for any author is that you use your imagination to fill in something that ‘nobody knows’ when you write the book, but then somebody finds out just as it’s published…When there’s a gap I try to find something in the ancient world from which I can extrapolate.”
Saylor prefers a boots-on-the-ground approach to his research. He says, “I love visiting sites and museums: walking the ground our ancestors walked (even if it’s much changed) and seeing the things they would have seen and handled. Ancient medical textbooks, for example, take on much richer meanings when you’re standing in front of a case of surgical instruments that might have been used by a doctor who had studied the words you’ve been reading.”
In Downie’s latest Ruso novel, Memento Mori (Bloomsbury, 2018), our hero must solve a mystery in the town of Aquae Sulis (modern Bath in Somerset, England). Renowned for its healing springs and cult dedicated to the hybridized goddess Sulis Minerva, Aquae Sulis was a cosmopolitan center from which many artifacts and primary sources, like ritually deposited curse tablets, have survived. A century of archaeological digs and reported findings gave Downie an excellent outline for what the ancient town would have looked like, but there is no evidence that the priests at Sulis Minerva’s sanctum sanctorum recorded their rituals and practices.
As a result, Downie had to draw extant evidence from other cultic sanctuaries across the Roman Empire. She says, “Although we don’t have records for the healing sanctuary at Aquae Sulis, we do have testimonies from places like Epidaurus (yes I know, separated by time and geography — but I’m writing fiction!)… There’s evidence for hymns elsewhere, and I gave Sulis Minerva a feast day and a parade because I thought the locals would have wanted her to have one…”
The More Things Change…
Falco and Albia often butt heads with governmental flunkeys, which Davis describes as “more injecting archaeology into human nature” than vice-versa. Similarly, as an Army medic, Ruso regularly battles institutional inadequacy. Downie notes that Ruso’s specific struggles are “largely retrojection … but I’ve worked in several large organizations and as the clerk to a local council, and I suspect it’s not far off the mark. We have lots of evidence of the detail of Roman administration, and it all feels oddly familiar, down to the count of the chickens consumed for lunch in the commanding officer’s residence at Vindolanda, and the travel expenses of someone sent off on a trip.”
When recreating important personages of the late Republican period, Saylor also draws on references both contemporary and ancient. He comments, “As a general rule, I begin with the presumption that most of the really rich and powerful figures of history, like Mithridates the Great (in my novel Wrath of the Furies), were high-functioning sociopaths… Yes, I think that describes Mithridates, or Cleopatra, for that matter.”
Similarly, while Davis’s detective Falco works relatively well with his imperial master Vespasian, Albia conducts her investigations twelve years later, under the reign of a notorious “high-functioning sociopath”: Emperor Domitian. Her insights into power and gender are profound; as a British-born former slave, “she is a woman and an outsider looking at society and tradition, so I am freer to wonder and to mock,” Davis notes.
One of the unique perspectives Downie offers is that of British-born Tilla. The indigenous point of view has unsurprisingly not survived often in historical records written by the conquered. Historical reconstruction gives invaluable insight into how a native person functions in a society designed to oppress them. “The silence of British voices is such that we can either say nothing and let the Romans do all the talking, or try and speculate on what fits in the gaps, honouring the Britons as best we can,” she observes.
To write the character of Tilla, Downie also channels “experiences of modern life in what might be parallel situations,” adding, “I was a student in London when the last Irish troubles were at their height: bomb scares were common and not infrequently followed by explosions.” During the Irish Troubles in the latter half of the twentieth century, accusations of terrorism ran rampant on both side of the conflict. She recalls of liberation forces, “Their supporters saw them as freedom fighters, and some saw the troops and the police as oppressors. Passions ran high, and what you believed to be the truth of events depended on who you listened to.” She adds, “Given the remarkably high concentration of troops that Rome retained here, was this how things might have been in parts of Roman Britain?”
The issues of sexual and romantic consent also present themselves when both Gordianus and Ruso fall in love with, and marry, their slaves: Bethesda and Tilla, respectively. The ancient Roman concept of consent, insofar as it even existed, would not have been all that similar to what we understand it to be today. Today, consent is absolutely necessary to a functional relationship between two partners — let alone two characters in a book. When discussing the “relationship” between Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson for Teen Vogue, Lincoln Anthony Blades notes that “a relationship predicated on mutual choice, autonomy, and affirmative consent” are “things slaves do not have. As a slave, Hemings was not afforded the privilege of self-determination, meaning she didn’t do what she wanted; she did what she was told. The word to describe that type of interaction is not ‘affair’; it’s rape.”
Arguably, the same could be said for Tilla and Bethesda; marrying them off to their masters doesn’t imply consent. So how do authors make their male Roman protagonists heroes while acknowledging the fact they literally own partners who cannot give their consent?
In building Ruso’s character, Downie doesn’t attempt to whitewash his privileges or assert that his perspective is morally upright. She shows how he learns about Tilla’s life over the course of the series. According to Downie, Ruso rescued Tilla rather reluctantly from an abusive owner, “lured into it by exasperation with the man rather than any desire to rescue the girl,” Downie says, adding that “most of his rather unwilling ‘enlightenment’ has stemmed from that moment.” Of his empathy, Downie elaborates, “I think it helps that Ruso is a doctor, who’s used to paying close attention to people and asking them personal questions. Also, Tilla is a very useful character, because she’s a constant reminder to Ruso that the Roman attitude is not the only one, and maybe he might like to think about things a different way?” The more time Ruso spends with Tilla, the more he becomes aware of the plights of the enslaved and the lower classes. Admittedly, “Ruso’s awareness of the plight of the downtrodden is not completely unRoman,” Downie observed. “Hadrian decreed that a slave could not be sold to a pimp or a gladiator trainer unless the owner could demonstrate a good reason. A small concession, admittedly, but there must have been owners who were restrained and individuals who were helped by it.”
Saylor flips the script of consent by reversing stereotypical gender roles. He said, “Gordianus may be the ‘owner’ of Bethesda, but she calls the shots, because he’s so hopelessly smitten by her. That was how I dealt with their initial relationship in Raiders of the Nile. As they grow older together, the relationship changes, as do all relationships, but the power dynamic continues to give her a psychological advantage. When she becomes pregnant, Gordianus manumits her, so that their child may be born free, and then Bethesda is well on her way to becoming a respectable Roman matron.” And indeed, as the relationship evolves, so, too, do how Gordianus and the reader look at the world of ancient Rome.
Solving the Mystery: And the Culprit Is….
Reimaginings of ancient Rome allow it to be “animated,” as Peabody says, “in a way that conventional history is (apparently) unable to do.” Nowhere is this more present than in a historical mystery, in which famous characters spring from the pages, fully formed, alongside regular people whose lives and problems wouldn’t make it into a major historical chronicle. These issues weren’t trivial for these average folk, by any means, but just not as world-shaking as, say, the death of Caesar or the eruption of Vesuvius.
By allowing sleuths to infiltrate multiple societal strata, Roman mystery authors like Davis, Saylor, and Downie make Rome come alive for readers, whose daily dilemmas are all too similar to those their ancient Italian counterparts faced. Issues like militia violence, sexual consent, administrative incompetence, and sociopathic tyrants are present in every era. And by creating deeply flawed characters who work to pursue justice, no matter the cost or the time period, these authors effortlessly transport readers through the centuries, back to their ancient counterparts.
Carly Silver is a writer, historian, and editor currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Since graduating summa cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 2012, with a B.A. in religion and ancient history, Carly has penned feature articles for The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Archaeology, Atlas Obscura, Narratively, About.com, and History Today, among other publications. She specializes in uncovering unusual stories and writing articles that engage a wider audience and introduce a sense of relevance to history. Visit her at CarlySilver.com.
