Aethiopia: A term used by the Romans for regions and peoples south of Egypt (see Authors’ Note).
Africa Proconsularis: A Mediterranean coastal area encompassing modern-day Tunisia and part of Libya. Formerly Carthaginian territory that by Augustus’s time was under the dominion of Rome.
Aksum: An ancient kingdom on the Horn of Africa (see Authors’ Note).
Amazigh: The ethnic name for a people of Northwest Africa, also known as “Berbers” today (see Authors’ Note).
Atrium: The open-ceilinged central court that formed the heart of the Roman home and held a pool to collect rainwater. Romans received guests and clients formally there.
Bithynia: A Hellenistic region in modern-day Turkey. Bithynia was a key Roman province.
Calidarium: A room in the Roman bathhouse where hot baths were taken. This was the hottest, steamiest room in the bathhouse progression.
Cinaedus: An effeminate or flamboyant man who didn’t conform to Roman standards of sexuality and masculinity; also used to refer to a man who takes on a passive role in anal sex.
Cyrenaica: A city in modern-day eastern Libya.
Damnati: (singular: damnatus) Criminals sentenced to the arena to die or become gladiators.
Denarius: (plural: denarii) In Roman currency, the denarius was the most common coin, made of silver.
Domus: The city home of a wealthy Roman.
Eques: (plural: equites) The equestrian order was the next-highest rank after plebeians. Originally, it was linked to cavalry service in the military, but by Augustus’s time, the association with cavalry and horsemanship was no longer strong. Members of the equestrian order were required to maintain a certain level of wealth or become unenrolled.
Flagrum: A scourge with sharp pieces of metal attached to each strand of the whip. Punishment by flagrum was intended to mutilate and kill.
Frigidarium: The cold room of the Roman bathhouse, which contained either a small cool dipping pool or a swimming pool.
Galli: (singular: Gallus) An order of eunuch worshippers of the Phrygian goddess Cybele. After voluntarily castrating themselves, the Galli adopted the dress and mannerisms of women.
Gaul: A region of Western Europe that would later encompass modern-day France and Belgium, as well as parts of Northern Italy and Western Germany. By the time of Mark of the Gladiator, parts of Germany were under Roman rule (see Authors’ Note).
Genii: (singular: genius) An important animist religious/spiritual concept for ancient Romans. People, places and things could all have guiding spirits, referred to as their genius.
Gladiatrix: (plural: gladiatrices) A female gladiator.
Hades: The ancient Greek god of the underworld. The term is also used to refer to Hades’s domain—in other words, the land of the dead.
Insula: Literally“island,”but also used to describe the many apartment buildings in Rome, which were as heavily populated as small islands. All but the wealthiest Romans lived in insulae of varying quality. They reached as high as nine stories.
Lanista: The head of a gladiator troupe. Generally a disreputable and lowborn profession, although nobles could own gladiators and hire lanistae with no loss to reputation.
Ludus: A gladiator school.
Murmillo: A type of gladiator. Murmillos had distinctive heavy crested helmets and fought with large shields and straight swords.
Numidians: People of the old Numidian Empire in Northern Africa west of Carthage (roughly modern-day Algeria). The Numidian Empire flourished in the second century BCE, though by the first century BCE, it was under Roman rule.
Ornatrix: A hairdresser, beautician, and cosmetologist to Roman women.
Parthia: A region of modern-day northeastern Iran. Under the Arsacid rulers of the time, the Parthian Empire stretched from Mesopotamia into Central Asia.
Paterfamilias: The head of the Roman household. Not merely the father, this man was the absolute ruler of his house and all the people in it, including his adult sons or brothers as well as women, children, and slaves.
Peculium: A slave’s money and property, which was under control of his or her master but could eventually be used to purchase their freedom.
Peristylium (also: peristyle) Large Roman houses had an open area both in front (the atrium) and in back (the peristylium). The peristyle was a more private area mostly devoted to a garden. The division between the two open areas contained a room called the tablinium, which commanded the house and served as the study for the head of the household.
Pharmacopola: A sometimes derogatory term for a seller of medicines.
Phrygia: A Hellenistic region in modern-day Turkey. The King Midas of legend was a Phrygian.
Plebeian: The lowest and most common division of Roman citizen, neither noble nor patrician. However, many plebeians were extremely rich and influential. Certain political posts were reserved for plebeians. By Augustus’s time, people of plebeian descent could even become senators.
Sarmatian: A group of central Asian horse nomads with a warlike reputation (see Authors’ Note).
Senator: A political and class position. The senatorial order ranked above the equestrian order. Although the original Roman senate had only patrician members, by the time of Augustus there were also plebeian senators.
Serica: A land in central Asia that the Romans believed silk came from.
Tepidarium: A room in the Roman bathhouse where warm baths were taken.
Thraex: A type of gladiator whose armor and weapons were based on those of Thracian warriors. The thraex fought with a curved sword and small rectangular shield.
TMQF: Tene me quia fugio. Literally, “Halt me, for I am a runaway.” One of several potential messages tattooed on slaves in order to mark their status and decrease their chances of escape.
Vindicta: The act of recompense or redress under Roman law. Also refers to a special rod used in the ceremony of manumission.
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This book could not have been written without many online historical resources. Chief among them is the Perseus Digital Project at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper.
Dates
Mark of the Gladiator is set in Rome, 26 BCE. It’s been five years since Augustus defeated Marcus Antonius (also commonly known as Marc Antony) at the Battle of Actium, and Rome is transitioning from republic to empire. There are still two elected consuls every year . . . but now Augustus is always one of them, and the other is always one of his closest supporters. Augustus himself will eventually become deified in his own right, by Senate vote, but for now, he’s known as the son of the divine Julius Caesar.
Roman historians told dates mainly by who was consul that year, a maddening system in l
ight of the fact that many consuls had the same names because they came from the same families. The secondary dating system was based on years from the founding of the city. According to this notation, 26 BCE was 728 years after founding.
Poetry
The Romans based much of their literature on Greek sources; educated Romans studied Greek literature in the original and in translation. In the comic dinner scene when Felix snatches up a ladle, he’s declaiming from Homer’s Iliad, in Latin.
Cornelius Gallus is a real figure who was a famous poet before he became governor of Egypt. Contemporaries like Virgil and Horace spoke of him as a literary god. But he fell into disgrace, was stripped of his position by the Emperor Augustus, and killed himself in 26 BCE. Today, only a few lines of his poetry survive.
Sextus Propertius was a young rising star in 26 BCE. He published his second book of elegies around this year, and it’s from that book that Felix’s “don’t hate me because I love too much” lines are taken. He wrote four books of elegies in all.
Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, the one Anazâr’s new family uses for writing practice, came out a generation earlier, in 50 BCE, and was a major influence on later Latin poets.
Catullus, a poet of the same generation as Lucretius, is not mentioned in the text, but he did write a poem threatening to rape a literary rival with a radish. Roman poetry spanned a very wide range of subject matter.
All the translations featured here are part of the public domain.
Ethnicity
The Roman world centered around the Mediterranean, and Northern Africa was an integral part of it. Romans used many geographical terms for this area, some of which have quite different meanings today. Libya might mean any part of Africa west of Egypt. Aethiopia might mean any region south of Egypt. The Romans also used the word “Aethiopian” to describe anyone with dark skin.
Anazâr’s people were politically part of the old Numidian empire, which spanned much of modern-day Algeria and Tunisia before being subsumed into the Roman Empire. Today they’re commonly named “Berbers,” which comes from the same word family as “barbarians” and is often considered offensive by the modern-day people, who refer to themselves as Amazigh people, or in the plural as Imazighen. Retired soccer player Zinedine Zidane is probably the most famous person worldwide of this ethnicity.
Nubia, directly south of Egypt, overlapped with modern-day Sudan. At the time of the story, the Roman Empire was engaged in a border war with the kingdom of Kush in Nubia. The Kushite queen Amanirenas successfully defended these borders. Our “Aethiopian” character, however, is most definitely not from Nubia, but from the Red Sea coast area that became modern-day northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. In that region, the kingdom of Aksum was a rising power, competing with Kush for trade with Egypt and also trading with India via sea routes.
The Gauls in modern-day France and Switzerland had already been conquered by Julius Caesar in his campaigns of 58 to 50 BCE, resulting in the massive enslavement referred to above. A generation later, there were still intermittent rebellions of Gallic tribes. Roman border wars with Germanic tribes had been going on for a century by this time, and would continue on for centuries longer.
The Sarmatians were central Asian horse nomads notorious for their warlike tendencies. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed that Sarmatian women were not allowed to marry until they had killed a man in battle. Archaeologists have since backed up some of the legends with physical evidence: many Sarmatian tombs include women buried with their armor and weapons. The closest people to the ancient Sarmatians are the modern-day Ossetians in Russia and Georgia.
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Violetta Vane grew up a drifter and a third culture kid who eventually put down roots in the Southeast US, although her heart lives somewhere along the Pacific coast of Mexico. She’s worked in restaurants, strip clubs, academia, and the corporate world and studied everything from the philosophy of science, to queer theory, to medieval Spanish literature. She has a faintly checkered past, a cinematic imagination, and a passion for stories that make readers shiver, sweat, and think.
Heidi Belleau was born and raised in small-town New Brunswick, Canada. She now lives in the rugged oil-patch frontier of Northern BC with her husband, an Irish ex-pat whose long work hours in the trades leave her plenty of quiet time to write. She has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in British and Irish studies; much of her work centered on popular culture, oral folklore, and sexuality, but she was known to perplex her professors with non-ironic papers on the historical roots of modern romance novel tropes. (Ask her about Highlanders!) Her writing reflects everything she loves: diverse casts of characters, a sense of history and place, equal parts witty and filthy dialogue, the occasional mythological twist, and most of all, love—in all its weird and wonderful forms.
Please visit www.violettavane.com and/or www.heidibelleau.com to find free short stories, book extras, and news.
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