Blood and Steel

HISTORICAL AFTERWORD

A Note on Chronology

All the events in this novel take place between 6-25 March AD238. An ancient Roman would have numbered the days after the Ides of March (the 15th of the month) as X days before the Kalends of the next month (1 April). For the ease of the modern reader, to keep things in the ‘right’ month for us, the chapter headings reckon them as Y days after the Ides.

Another source of potential confusion is the Roman habit of counting days inclusively. For us 15 March is fourteen days after 1 March. For most Romans it would have been fifteen days later.

The precise chronology of the revolt of the Gordiani is uncertain. For an insightful modern discussion see Karen Haegemans, Imperial Authority and Dissent: The Roman Empire in AD235-238 (Leuven, Paris and Walpole, MA, 2010), with a tabulation of the evidence at 257-8.

ANCIENT SOURCES — THE AUGUSTAN HISTORY

One of the most fascinating texts to survive from Classical Antiquity is a series of Latin biographies of Roman Emperors which is known as the Augustan History (often referred to as the Historia Augusta, sometimes in older scholarship the Scriptores Historiae Augustae). They run from Hadrian (reigned AD117-38) to Carinus (AD283-5). There is a gap in the manuscript. Missing are the reigns from Philip (AD244-9) to near the end of the life of Valerian (AD253-60).

The biographies claim to be written by six authors, working around the year AD300. In reality they are the work of one man, writing about a century later. Why an unknown author about AD400 set out to compose this lengthy and elaborate fraud is unknown. Sir Ronald Syme suggested the author was a schoolteacher getting his own back on a world that undervalued him, and motivated by a lifetime of his pupils’ mocking laughter.

Scholars tend to divide the biographies into two groups. The ‘Major Lives’ of the more important emperors from Hadrian to Caracalla appear to be based on good sources, with the addition of some fiction. In the ‘Minor Lives’ — imperial princes and pretenders before Caracalla, and all biographies subsequent to that ruler — invention predomi-nates. The turning point falls about halfway through the life of Heliogabalus (a name that the author may well have invented from that Emperor’s favoured god, Elagabalus). All the biographies covering AD235-8 are ‘Minor Lives’. Given the paucity of other literary evidence, they remain of the utmost importance for historians of the period. They are an inexhaustible inspiration for Throne of the Caesars.

A. R. Birley provides a lucid introduction in his Lives of the Later Caesars (Harmondsworth, 1976), 7-22, before translating the biographies from Hadrian to Heliogabalus. There is a complete translation, with the Latin on the facing page, in three Loeb volumes by D. Magie (Cambidge, Mass., 1921-32). Emperors and Biography: Studies in the Historia Augusta (Oxford, 1971) by R. Syme, is a classic of modern scholarship.

SENATORIAL CAREERS

In theory the career of a Senator followed an ordered progression up the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’. After military service as a tribune with a legion, and a minor post, such as serving on the board of the Tresviri Monetales, the first major magistracy was to be a Quaestor, election to which gave admission to the Senate. All except patricians should then serve as either Aedile or Tribune of the Plebs. The next rank was to be a Praetor, and the final step to be a Consul. Each office was to be held for no more than one year, there were prescribed age limits, and under the Emperors no one was expected to seek any office more than once, except that of Consul. Imperial patronage and the exigencies of politics often complicated the pattern.

The cursus honorum under the principate is set out with clarity and precision by A. R. Birley, The Fasti of Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981), 4-35.

To avoid complication, in Throne of the Caesars some characters remain in a magistracy for several years. Menophilus is a Quaestor in AD235 in Iron amp; Rust, and he is still in that office in AD238 in Blood amp; Steel. Similarly, the same three young men are Tresviri Monetales in both novels.

EPICUREANISM

There is no ancient evidence that Gordian II was an epicurean, but it fits well with the portrait of him in the Augustan History. In Blood amp; Steel Gordian does not have a profound understanding of the philosophical system, but there again nor does his creator. What little I have learnt has been drawn from B. Inwood, and L. P. Gerson, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Indianapolis, and Cambridge, 1994); and J. Warren (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Cambridge, 2009).

SASSANID PERSIANS

The main story of Blood amp; Steel plays out against a background of the rise of Sassanid (or Sasanian) Persia. With hindsight the gravity of the eastern threat is obvious, but it was a matter of debate for contemporaries within the Roman empire (e.g. Cassius Dio 80.4.1).

Excellent overviews of ancient Persia are J. Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia from 550bc to ad650 (London, and New York, 1996); and M. Brosius, The Persians: An Introduction (London, and New York, 2006).

Two recent surveys specifically on the Sassanids are provided by T. Daryaee, Sasanian Iran (224-651ce): Portrait of a Late Antique Empire (Costa Mesa, California, 2008); and Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London, and New York, 2009).

A different and engaging way into the subject is through B. Dignas, and E. Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals (English translation, Cambridge, 2007).

THE TOWN OF CARRHAE

Geographic remoteness, and political instability have hindered archaeological investigations at Carrhae, modern Harran in Turkey. The map of Carrhae is based on an elderly article by S. Lloyd, and W. Brick, ‘Harran’, Anatolian Studies I (1951), 77-111. The assumptions have been made that the location of the citadel would not have moved, and that the surviving Byzantine/Medieval walls follow the course of those in Roman times. Most of the names of the gates come from a later period. I named the Gate of Sin because I liked the sound, and because the road from it led to the ancient Temple of the deity of that name. The novel puts a legionary camp on the site of the medieval castle.

CLASSICAL SEXUALITY

The study of gender and sexuality is a growth industry in Classical scholarship. Among much that is obscurantist and pretentious, J. R. Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100BC-AD250 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1998) stands out for its elegance and good sense.

The modern orthodoxy holds that for the Greeks and Romans the essential categories were not heterosexual or homosexual, but active or passive. To be the penetrator was good, irrespective of the gender of the sexual partner. It was socially acceptable for an elite adult male to have active sex with almost anyone, providing he avoided the wives and children of other elite males. Conversely if a man was penetrated, it shamed him for life.

Unsurprisingly, ancient opinions varied. Some Romans claimed male-male sex was a reprehensible Greek import. Among the proponents of male-male sex there was a sometimes expressed opinion that the passive partner should not have reached maturity. Certain moral philosophers dissented to all sexual indulgence, as one might expect. One or two even made the extraordinary suggestion that a man should not have sex with anyone but his wife, not even with his slaves.

The attitudes of Priscus towards sex with young males — seemingly conventional enough in Classical culture, if shocking in ours — is constructed from Lucian, Erotes, and Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Cleitophon. The very different views of his fellow easterners are drawn from Bardaisan of Edessa, The Book of the Laws of the Countries, translated by H. J. W. Drijvers (Assen, 1964).

Notes on prostitution will be given in the next novel, Fire amp; Sword.

JOKES

Mary Beard has brought the obscure Greek collection of ancient jokes that goes under the title Philogelos, ‘Laughter lover’, to scholarly and popular attention in her splendid Laughter in Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2014). The jokes in chapter eighteen of this novel are adapted from the translation of Philogelos by D. Crompton, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (London, 1910).

QUOTES

The speeches in chapters three and eleven are drawn from the third century AD book of advice to orators by Menander Rhetor (edited, with translation and commentary, by D. A. Russell, and N. G. Wilson, Oxford, 1981).

In chapter twenty-four the Odyssey of Homer is recited in the translation of Robert Fagles (2006).

PREVIOUS WRITERS

In all my novels I like to include homages to writers who have given me great pleasure and inspiration.

Manu’s song in chapter twenty-eight is a paederastic version of one sung by Harry Paget Flashman in George MacDonald Fraser’s first outing with the arch cad (1969).

George R.R. Martin is very good at killing characters. The death of one character in Blood amp; Steel contains an echo of the death of … someone, in A Dance with Dragons (2011).

The final chapters are haunted by Cavafy’s poem The God Abandons Antony (and a bit of Plutarch and Shakespeare).