Falcophilia

Once you get into Rome, it's hard to get out. If it's not Suetonius wth his gossip, it's Julius Caesar with his Ides and et tu Brute; it is aqueducts and Asterix; Mark Antony and Liz Taylor; the Circus Maximus and Russell 'Maximus' Crowe; I, Claudius and Caligula's orgies. The fasces and the fascists and the American eagle, e pluribus unum and so forth. I was foolish enough to ask a professor once why exactly the Romans meant so much to early modern Europe. Quite a silly question if you have any idea at all of European history. Rome is about as cool as it gets, in the 15th century or the 8th or the 21st: the rich are appalling (the Satyricon), the poor are numerous, human beings are property, democracy is wedded to power and money and panem et circenses, the government mind encompassed interstate highways and absurd walls between civilised and barbarian, there are lobbies and mafias, odd sects and Christians, bad wine and novelty foods, limitless piped water and plumbing that kills slowly -- all signs of a superbly successful civilisation. It sounds so damn modern. All of us are Romans; we all live in different districts of Rome. This means that it is hard to know Rome as it 'really' was.

So when you're done with Suetonius, go read Lindsey Davis' detective novels/spy thrillers/romances, called the Falco series. They are set in Vespasian's Rome (AD 70s) and various provinces. Marcus Didius Falco, a delator (private informer), is the lowlife scum with dingy morals but honest heart, a quick mind, sharp tongue, and a great deal of experience in dealing with other lowlife scum, who is the narrator in these novels. Falco, as he is called, also has a girlfriend/partner who is a senator's daughter and is even more strong-willed and stubborn than her plebeian lover.

The story, exciting as it always is, is not all there is to these books. You cannot write a decent historical novel unless you are thoroughly familiar with life in your chosen period. (I keep wishing for a Latin translation of the spoken dialogues.) In this, I trust Lindsey Davis -- and, in addition to being a habitual doubter, I am a history student who is very prissy about 'it couldn't possibly have been that way, you worthless ulloo ka pattha'. Watching the History channel and all those crummy Nat Geo/Discovery 'reconstructions' gives me indigestion (apoplexy, even). I wish I could aspire to such mastery, so lightly worn. Then I, too, would write a historical novel, set in Mughal Delhi.

(But go see Davis' website and she comes across as a bit of a supercilious know-it-all. Authors [and professors] ought not to have websites named after themselves. It's just not decorous.)

I regret my local library has only a patchy sampling of the Falco books (there are fourteen thus far, I think). But because of Falco, I've gone back to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Robert Graves' Count Belisarius, and am wistfully thinking of my copies of Tacitus' Germania and Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline, old Latin textbooks, Greek plays, etc., all sitting in someone's basement in a distant place.