The story is set in December AD 33. The prominent ‘Julian’ Asinius Gallus, Drusus Caesar and Agrippina did indeed die in this year, all from starvation, after a long term of imprisonment in separate locations and within weeks of each other. It is also interesting – from my point of view – that the deaths coincided more or less with Gaius’s own marriage to Junia Claudilla, who had connections with the imperial family; with the marriages, likewise arranged, of his two sisters; and with Gaius’s virtual establishment as Tiberius’s de facto successor.
Tacitus, of course – being Tacitus – puts the blame squarely on Tiberius. In the case of both Drusus and Agrippina, he cites a campaign on the emperor’s part to blacken the characters of the dead Julians, alleging persistent treason and, in Agrippina’s case, adultery with Gallus. Also interestingly from my conspiracy-theory novelist’s viewpoint, the historian reports the Senate’s shock that Tiberius should make public Drusus’s slanderous attack on his own person, as reported verbatim to them by (significantly) an officer of Macro’s Praetorians, which included the wish that the emperor might suffer divine punishment for killing so many members of his family. The Senate, Tacitus says (Annals, VI, 24), ‘were both horrified and amazed that [Tiberius], who had once been so clever and secretive at concealing his crimes, had become so confident that he had stripped away the very walls [of Drusus’s prison] and shown his grandson thrashed by a centurion, beaten by slaves, and begging in vain for life’s basic necessities.’
Damning stuff, and a neat bit of constructive propaganda, possibly, on the part of Gaius and Macro: another handful of mud thrown at the old regime which would set it nicely in contrast with its up-and-coming replacement. Certainly it would make sense in the context of my fictional framework, with Macro – Tiberius’s mouthpiece at Rome – carefully engineering matters so that the blame falls on the emperor while his real patron Gaius goes unsuspected.
Whatever the truth may be, I would stress yet again that the story per se, in common with all the Corvinus stories, is a work of fiction, not of fact; in the case of Last Rites, specifically, there was no murder of a Vestal in AD 33, nor is Sextius Nomentanus a historical figure. As with Ovid, Germanicus and Sejanus – the other ‘political’ Corvinus books – I hope that readers who know something of the background will find the underlying theory plausible and even thought-provoking in terms of real history, but – and very importantly – it must be kept in mind that being a novelist I can and do create links and invent motives for which no objective proof exists, even where the people and incidents themselves are real; which practice, of course, is complete anathema to the academic historian. Thus to view the stories in any way as ‘history’ would be dangerous in the extreme.
That aside, the reader may be interested in the actual, historical fates of some of the characters. Galba became – very briefly – emperor on Nero’s death in AD 69. He was killed while attempting to escape during an insurrection by the Praetorians fomented by his equally short-lived successor Salvius Otho. Macro survived into Gaius’s principate as his major supporter but was forced into suicide by him the following year, AD 38. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus Senior died in the course of the year of the story’s setting, although Tacitus does not give a precise date. I have implied a terminal illness, but held back the death for reasons of plot and also to link it (through Furius Camillus’s promise to Corvinus) with his daughter Lepida’s death three years later. She had lived, Tacitus says, ‘detested [for her immoralities], but escaped punishment while her father was alive’, a comment which was the origin of the part she plays in my story. After Lepidus Senior’s death she was prosecuted for adultery: the names of the prosecutors are not given. The charge being proved beyond doubt, she committed suicide.
Latin names, where the characters actually existed, are always a problem. I turned the confusion of the two Marci Aemilii Lepidi – father and son – to use in the plot, but had to separate out the two women, Aemilia (Galba’s wife) and Lepida. Both, in reality, had the same name, Aemilia Lepida. Obviously this would have caused difficulties both for me and for the reader; hence my (purely arbitrary) division of the single name between them.
Another area of potential difficulty, or rather of difference between the Roman world and ours, is that of the priesthood. We tend to think of a priest as a person with a religious vocation who fills a role clearly marked off – in its essence, anyway – from the secular. The Romans did not; at least where the state religion was concerned (mystery religions such as that of the Great Mother Cybele were another matter, as was the priesthood of Jupiter, which was governed by archaic taboos). Roman priests did not, in any sense, ‘represent’ the gods, still less preach a code of moral values to a laical flock: their function was more administrative, to see to it that the rites and sacrifices of the religious year were properly conducted and, in certain cases, to prescribe ad hoc ceremonies on the authority of a written compendium of past precedents. Because of this, there was nothing at all anomalous to Roman eyes in a priest simultaneously holding both a priesthood and a secular magistracy, nor did he necessarily even have to be religiously inclined: to give a priest the title of ‘Reverend’ or similar – or for a priest to expect it – would, to a Roman, make no sense at all. Thus although in Roman terms Nomentanus would be a ‘priest’ – his title in Latin translates as ‘one of the Fifteen responsible for conducting the necessary rites’ – I have avoided the word where he is concerned and used the invented phrase ‘religious officer’, which emphasises his administrative function.
The reader might also be interested in the custom of the Winter Festival (‘Saturnalia’ in Latin). This took place over three days, from 17 to 19 December, and has definite similarities to our own Christmas; or rather to the medieval festival characterised by the Lord of Misrule. During this period the normal rules governing society were relaxed, suspended or even reversed; for example, slaves ate in the dining-room before the family meal and the party-mantle (‘synthesis’) plus freedman’s cap replaced the toga as ordinary outdoor day-dress for upper-class citizens – at least, on the first day. Gifts were exchanged, and also candles and clay dolls, which served the same function as our Christmas cards. There was a great deal of gambling (not strictly legal at other times) and people played games. On the first day, dice were thrown to determine the ‘King’ – who could be a slave – and for the duration of the Festival his instructions had to be obeyed by all on pain of forfeits.
Finally, the clock. The smart-as-paint Greeks were fully capable of producing a water clock (‘clepsydra’ – literally ‘water-stealer’) of the kind I’ve described, although I have gone over the top a bit with the duck-valves: the differing length of the Roman hour throughout the year was catered for – as I imply in the text – by adding and removing wax to vary the flow of water. The clock’s origins, however, owe a lot to the new all-singing, all-dancing computer which we’ve just acquired although, like Corvinus, I view it as too smart for its own good and continue to use my steam-driven Amstrad PCW8256 for writing. It hasn’t, as yet, shown any signs of megalomania, let alone incontinence, but I’m keeping tabs on it.My thanks, as always, to the staff of Carnoustie library for getting me books; to my wife Rona, ditto; and to Roy Pinkerton and his colleagues of Edinburgh University’s Classics Department for fielding the occasional awkward technical question.
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Last Rites (Marcus Corvinus Book 6) Page 28