Quirites: A ritual term for Roman citizens
Salutatio: The morning ceremony in which clients paid court to their patron in return for a handout of food or money
Salve: “Greetings”
Sestertius (in English, sesterce): A silver coin equal to a quarter of a denarius used to count small or large sums of money.
Sica: A curved dagger
Sistrum: A rattle made of bronze or other metal used in ritual performances by priests and priestesses of Isis
Stola: A woman’s dress
Tablinum: The master’s office in a Roman house
Tepidarium: The warm water pool in a Roman bath
Thermae: Large public baths
Triclinium: The dining room (specifically, the dining table with couches on three sides, each couch holding three diners)
Tullianum: Rome’s prison. Located in the Forum, it was quite small and used as a holding cell for political prisoners, generally of high status, awaiting trial or execution.
Vale: ‘Goodbye’
Vestis: Clothing
Victimarius: An attendant at a sacrifice who slaughters the animal
Author’s Note
The Roman historian Dio Cassius writes: At this time [the 90s A.D.] some people made a practice of smearing needles with poison and pricking with them whomever they pleased. From this sprang the idea for my story. From Dio also comes the description of the bizarre “black banquet” that the emperor hosted, although I have put my own interpretation on his motive.
Sextus Ingentius Verpa and his family are fictitious. However, the conspiracy to assassinate Domitian is historical and well documented by both Dio and by Suetonius, in his biography of the emperor.
The most valuable source for the social background of the period are the letters of my protagonist, Pliny the Younger (as he is called in English to distinguish him from his uncle, the author of the Natural History). I have made use of numerous events described in the Letters (though without regard to their chronology). Perhaps most curious to the reader will be Pliny’s observation of the floating islands (actually dense mats of reeds) in Lake Vadimon. I have followed his description exactly. He himself could offer no explanation for this startling trompe-l’oeil.
A different slant on the mores of the age is provided by the poet Martial, whose Epigrams can be read in countless English translations—some bawdier than others. The translations in the novel (plus one poem that Martial never wrote) are my own.
Martial had several literary patrons, but Pliny is not known to have been one of them. Nevertheless, the two men did know each other and Pliny did, in fact, pay Martial’s passage back to Spain and see him off. Based on this I have ventured to imagine a patron-client bond between them.
This is a work of fiction and I have taken a few liberties with history. I have coined the title “Purissima” for the vestalis maxima. Pliny never held the office of vice-prefect of Rome and is not known to have investigated a murder. I have predated his marriage to Calpurnia by several years. But, of his three wives, she was the last and the only one that he ever mentions. She was, in fact, less than half his age when they married and, she did suffer a miscarriage. They never succeeded in having children.
Concerning the religion of Clemens and Domitilla, there continues to be debate as to whether their “atheism” took the form of Judaism or Christianity—they are claimed as martyrs by both faiths. I have chosen to follow Dio, who says they were accused of “atheism and Jewish practices.” The so-called God-fearers (Romans and Greeks who were attracted to Jewish monotheism and morality) are authentic. Christianity was still in its infancy, especially in the Latin-speaking half of the Empire. (Some years after the date of our story, Pliny, as governor of Bithynia, had occasion to investigate accusations of Christianity.) Isis worship, on the other hand, was enormously popular.
The gouty old senator, Corellius Rufus (of whose death Pliny writes a moving account in the Letters), was a fierce critic of Domitian, but there is no evidence that he participated in the conspiracy to assassinate him. Soranus of Ephesus is not known to have been Pliny’s physician, but he was beginning his career in Rome at about this time. His Gynecology makes fascinating reading.
Finally, the execution of the Chief Vestal Cornelia by suffocation in an underground chamber actually happened and is described in detail in our sources.
Bibliography
For readers interested in learning more about Pliny’s Rome and the background to this story, I suggest the following as a good starting point:
Primary sources:
Dio Cassius. Roman History. Translated by Earnest Cary. Harvard University Press (The Loeb Classical Library), 1925.
Martial. Epigrams. An excellent recent translation of a selection of the poems by Garry Wills is both skillful and properly racy.
Pliny the Younger. The Complete Letters. Translated by P. G. Walsh. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves. Penguin Books, 1957.
Secondary works:
Balsdon, J. P. V. D. Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome. McGraw-Hill, 1969.
Beard, Mary; John North, and Simon Price. Religions of Rome. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Clauss, Manfred. The Roman Cult of Mithras. Routledge, 2001.
Crook, J. A. Law and Life of Rome. Cornell University Press, 1967.
Hopkins, Keith. A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity. Plume, 1.
Shelton, Jo-Ann, ed. As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Witt, R. E. Isis in the Ancient World. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.
The Author
Bruce Macbain has earned a B.A. in classical studies from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught Classics and Greek and Roman history at Vanderbilt University and Boston University. His special interest is religion in the Roman Empire. This is his first novel.
For Discussion
Pliny struggles with the question of how to serve a tyrannical regime without entirely betraying his values. People have continued to face this problem in modern times, under Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin and many others. Do you believe it is possible to walk this tightrope? Where does one draw the line?
Religion played an important role in Roman political life and there was no separation of Church and State. Were you surprised that pagan Romans regarded the followers of Judaism and Christianity as atheists and traitors?
Roman attitudes toward sex owed much to the Greeks, for whom male bisexuality was a cultural norm. But even within the Roman world, moralists of the first century fulminated against the hedonism and immorality of the ruling class and issued dire warnings of social collapse. Do you think excessive sexual freedom or lack of morals in a culture is a sign that it is “on the way down?”
In the ancient world, as in many traditional cultures today, girls were expected to marry and bear children when they themselves were barely out of childhood. And boys might find themselves taking on mature responsibilities at an age when many of our sons enjoy the sheltered life of a college campus. On the other hand, a young Roman, like Lucius in the novel, continued under his father’s power to a degree that seems inconceivable to us. How would you compare ancient and modern notions of childhood and adolescence?
Slavery was a fact of life in the ancient world; no one ever seriously advocated its abolition. Nevertheless, Stoicism, the dominant philosophy among Romans, held that no one was a slave by nature but only by an unlucky accident of birth or Fate. And we have seen in the novel how a freed slave like Parthenius could rise to a position of great power. How would you contrast this situation to American slavery in the antebellum South?
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