GIBBONS
This is my method. It works for my readers. Namby-pamby would-be writers who hope I’ll give them a magic formula that requires neither work nor narrative skill will be disappointed. ‘How do you use the history?’ I use it to tell a good story. There is no other point.
As a novelist, my need for information covers a wider field than classics and archaeology. I don’t just need ancient jewellery, wine, pots and hypocausts but geography, weather, plants, psychology and physical illness … While writing a book I will be constantly burrowing for ‘stuff’. This isn’t just crackpot meticulousness. Every time a reader knows, or feels, that I have told them something right, whether it’s a ‘fact’ or an insight into human nature, that increases their trust. This is the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, a theory which has ancient roots in Horace but was most famously propounded by Coleridge to explain how introducing the everyday could persuade readers to accept the fantastic. It works just as well for building a historical novel.
A slave in a hypocaust(Arles)
Interestingly, it also works for creating a false alibi after a crime: the more truth a statement contains, the easier it is to conceal holes in the story from a sceptical investigator.
Routinely, I omit bibliographies. Novels should stand unsupported. If they happen to lead people to deeper study, there are experts to provide reading lists. But you have asked me to suggest good books.
My earliest Roman encounters were in Rosemary Sutcliff, and a copy of The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which I suspect my dad had acquired because of the sex – my first sight of sex too. Thirty years on (when I had mastered sex), Richard gave me Peter Salway’s Roman Britain. There I discovered Vespasian (more sex? I’ve never forgotten a BBC interviewer who broke down in front of a statue and could not continue when I said, Well, look at him – he was obviously good in bed).
While I was at school, someone clearing a house thought of me and I was given a two-volume Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities by Smith, Wayte and Marindin, which I still use, though it dates from 1890 and there are modern versions. My vision of imperial Rome was grounded in Carcopino’s famous Daily Life in Ancient Rome – 1941, but it still works because its literary examples are culled from Latin authors. I read many classical authors, usually in the Penguin Classics translations: Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars (which just fell apart as I wrote this); the satirical works of Juvenal, Martial and Horace; the Histories of Tacitus and Josephus; Petronius’ Satyricon; the Letters of Pliny the Younger and of Seneca (much more palatable than Pliny, though he was famous for not practising what he preached) – then plays, poems, essays and recipes. For our first trips to Rome and Naples I had the Blue Guides, the Rome City Guide and Southern Italy, which cover monuments and art for all periods and remind me Rome had a history outside the Empire …
If, today, I had to snatch a suitcase of Roman books from my own shelves to save from rising flood waters, I would grab:
Rome and Her Empire, Barry Cunliffe (McGraw-Hill)
Daily Life in Ancient Rome, Jérôme Carcopino (Taylor & Francis)
Ancient Inventions, Peter James and Nick Thorpe (Michael O’Mara)
Oxford Archaeological Guide to Rome, Amanda Claridge (Oxford University Press)
Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Princeton University Press)
The Making of the Roman Army, Lawrence Keppie, (Batsford)
Ancient Rome, City Planning and Administration, O.F. Robinson (Routledge)
Imperial Inquisitions, Steven Rutledge (Routledge)
Satires of Juvenal (Penguin Classics)
Apicius, Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger (Prospect)
Travel in the Ancient World, Lionel Casson (Johns Hopkins)
Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins (Facts on File)
The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (OxfordUniversity Press)
The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, ed. Richard J.A. Talbert (Princeton University Press)
But – and for me this is a big but – if bailiffs took everything except the tools of my trade, those would be: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary; A Dictionary of the Underworld by Eric Partridge; Roget’s Thesaurus; and John Woodforde’s absolutely indispensable The Strange Story of False Teeth.
I won’t recommend Internet sites, which change so often and are so variable in quality, but you will now find virtual tours of Rome. For its reliable scholarship, I use the University of Virginia’s Rome Reborn. I still think imagination is the best virtual tool, but I’m so old-fashioned I know how to make my own entertainment.
When in trouble, I shove in a smell. I believe I am famous for my smells … How do you research an odour? Site visits, perhaps – or that other vital author tool: memory.
People were nonplussed when I claimed that for One Virgin Too Many, I researched virginity from memory too.
Sometimes you have a lucky break. Richard paced out the bridge at Cordoba for me, enabling Falco to say it was three hundred and sixty-five paces, one for every day of the year.
Experts
I am bolder now, but for years I was very shy of asking people for help and information. I did everything myself. By Last Act in Palmyra, I needed to contact the Reptile House at London Zoo about pythons. Have I imagined that Richard dialled the number, announced ‘A young lady wants to ask about snakes’ then passed over the handset sternly? It proved wise, because the Reptile House staff begged that I did not show a python killing a person, even by constriction, since pythons are loath to do it. I later heard a lovely piece on the radio about keeping snakes, including a pet python who was so lonely and upset when left alone in the house, he spitefully destroyed a stereo set …
Now, if I know who to approach and I really need more information, I ask.
Archaeology
My Latin teacher Elys Varney (who probably taught me more than she thinks – or more than she thought at the time) ran an archaeological society. We all joined because, as a ‘minority’ subject, it was joint with the Boys’ School; it produced some career archaeologists and left me with a lifelong interest. I was too nesh to like crouching on my knees in the earth, out of doors, but I nonetheless ended up making a career from my fascination. Elys can be proud of that.
Scholarship has changed in the past twenty years: a British tribe in the Midlands, once the Coritani, are now the Corieltauvi. King Cogidumnus, I’ve learned, should be Togidubnus. I do make fun of this in A Body in the Bath House, hoping that might indicate to people that I may know something … It doesn’t stop those frosty letters: Miss Davis! I seem to remember that fifty years ago my teacher told us that the king was called Cogi!
At least when you are writing a series you can adapt. In Venus in Copper Falco’s cheese grater poignantly survives his apartment collapse; it was modelled on one in a case of First Century domestic implements at the British Museum. For their exhibition Vases and Volcanoes, they reassessed it as Etruscan and centuries older. Hence: The cheesegrater had a curious history. I had swiped it at Pa’s warehouse, thinking it looked like an ordinary product of a house clearance. When Pa noticed it at our apartment one day, he told me it had in fact come from an Etruscan tomb. Whether he was himself the tomb robber remained vague as usual. He reckoned it might be five hundred years old. [TFL]
In writing about the First Century I have a vivid heritage from Vesuvius to assist – I couldn’t have chosen better!
Archaeology is my starting point, where so many other novelists have begun with Latin literature, often fawningly. Even the best archaeologists are prone to hanker after a grand Forum dig – but they do cover the workshops and houses too; I think this gives a wider spectrum than relying on texts. (Ideally you need both, it goes without saying.) My own interest is not just in the remains and what they tell us, but in the history of archaeology as a discipline; problems of conservation and presentation to the public; and funding. All
these issues are live in Rome and the Bay of Naples sites particularly.
And what could be better to fire up the creative furnace than sitting on a lump of fallen stone, in sun or shade, letting ideas just drift into your brain? So let’s talk about where it’s taken me …
The Novels
The Course of Honour
First published 1997
Shortlisted for the Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize 1986
I remember the wolfhound, howling. When his owners went on holiday, he stayed with my neighbours, desolately homesick. He howled every night, all night. I worked late on my portable typewriter, with the dog mournfully serenading a new moon over the slate rooftops of south London, a Mars Bar to sustain me. I was living in my first flat, all I had been able to afford as a government employee. This maisonette would one day inspire Falco’s bachelor apartment, but it first informed the rented room where Caenis lives. Her landlord came from older memories: one Bryan in Croydon, when I first worked in London. I felt good, finally nailing that creep Bryan, he of the mouse, the remark about blouse buttons, the professed liking for single lady tenants, the habit of entering a girl’s room without knocking, as he hoped for a glimpse of underwear …
Head of Vespasian
I was nailing a lot of other things, too. I had found my writing ‘voice’; I became brave enough to speak my mind about people and life, back when I tended to be rude, bitter or pessimistic. I had known tragedy, loneliness and disappointment, so there is much of me in Caenis, and vice versa – yet we always were distinct. Mrs Thatcher’s Britain was depressing for people of my tastes and background, but it was hardly the Rome of Tiberius, Caligula or Nero. The Iron Lady and her fawning grey henchmen were more akin to Augustans, stamping down the masses with platitudes while diligently accruing cash and covering up hypocrisy. This is relevant; it shows why I found Vespasian so good-hearted and intelligent as a man and a ruler.
Until The Course of Honour, I tried to write novels set in the Seventeenth Century. After a few feints, I was changing to this love story about the ancient Romans. Even I suspected publishers would baulk, but I knew it was the right time for me.
I looked at Roman Britain because that seemed less worrying for British publishers. I grasped that they only liked the familiar, but they did know Robert Graves’ I, Claudius which had gripped the nation on TV. Descriptions of the Claudian invasion of Britain always mentioned ‘the future emperor Vespasian’ bopping the Dorset hill forts. I discovered his biography by the Roman historian Suetonius. Vespasian’s background and public service ethic, his talent and modesty were attractive, especially after the weirdness and extravagance of the more famous – that is, infamous – Julio-Claudians. Suetonius clearly wants to sneer and sensationalise, but with the Flavians he cannot find much scandal; after Livia, Messalina and Agrippina, he is brief with Caenis. A sentence which is primarily about Vespasian’s wife and children dispatches my heroine fast: he then took up again with Caenis, his former mistress and one of Antonia’s freedwomen and secretaries, who remained his wife in all but name even after he became Emperor. Caenis can be glimpsed elsewhere, including in the anecdote about Antonia’s letter to Tiberius given by the historian Dio Cassius, but generally I built my whole novel on that first statement. The more I explored, the more I was amazed that apparently this wonderful personal story had been ignored by historians and novelists.
Part of the reason is that Roman snobbery towards the non-patrician Vespasian has subtly persisted down the centuries. So many historical novels concentrate on men: heroes and aristocrats, never frugal jokers who can get a job done while still seeming surprised at their own capability. Because Caenis had been a slave, she rated even less attention. It left me a clear field, a challenge in which I revelled. I could make my own rules.
Bust, thought to represent Antonia
As with all historical figures I had genuine diffidence, respect and reluctance to get Caenis and Vespasian wrong. Their story is glorious, but covers forty years, much longer than the scope of most novels, with many a tricky hiatus when the couple lived apart. Long periods passed where, even if we now know what happened to her lover, Caenis can have had little idea. None of the historians bother to say what she herself was up to in the Year of the Four Emperors. It’s my own guess that Caenis sorted out Nero when he turned up at Vespasian’s house in the chariot of Jupiter.
Primarily, I had to illuminate her background. First I used the times in which she lived, retold from a woman’s and a slave’s perspective. Robert Graves made these extraordinary events familiar, but I could take the story forwards, making it my own. My civil service career was unexpectedly useful for government behind the scenes, rule through imperial freedmen. My own experiences of love and loss resonated. My deep fondness for social and political satire must be obvious on every page. I am proud of how I handled that – how the grim jokes zing and the narrative surges through often-ridiculous episodes. But I am proudest of the way I considered what it meant to be a Roman slave.
As the property of the imperial family, Caenis was relatively fortunate. In a secretarial position, she lived in an elegant home and her work was not physically onerous; she must have been given education; we know she enjoyed trust, with its associated benefits. As a freedwoman, she became part of the Claudian extended family, the imperial familia – as high as anyone could go. Vespasian realises she has to some extent outstripped him, even though he is a senator. To illustrate the permanent damage inflicted on a slave, I also had to find telling details such as the fact that Caenis never knows her birthday. Crucially, Vespasian could never marry her; it was illegal under Roman law. The fact that he was a deep traditionalist makes his response to this situation the more admirable, and that he stayed true points up just how special Antonia Caenis must have been.
I made my Caenis uncertain of her parentage – though I have since been told that in Istria, in the former Yugoslavia, inscriptions record she originated there. She eventually visited the province. Vespasian endowed buildings in her honour; I would like to have shown him doing this after he became sufficiently influential to have palace records unearthed – or perhaps Narcissus would have found her birth records … Too late now. That’s the trouble with history. New facts will pop up after you compose your big work. It is all the more maddening because in my teens I went to Pula, visited the amphitheatre and may have seen those inscriptions, long before they held any significance for me. Now I just have to smile to myself and imagine some wry quip from Caenis at the impossibility of creating perfect work, however hard you strive.
Strive at it I did. The roof was leaking, my savings were fast running out and the howling wolfhound seemed all too apt as night music. Had not the research for this book inspired Falco, it would have been the grim path back to ‘real’ work for me. Falco, who sprang out of the Rome I described in this book, saved me in the nick of time.
When I wrote The Course of Honour it was the best thing I had ever produced. Perhaps it still is. Even so, nobody would publish it for ten years; a love story set so long ago was seen as too difficult for readers in the 1980s. Only after I had established the lighter-hearted Falco series as a selling genre, once archaeology regularly featured on TV, reconstructions of ancient equipment and re-enactions of ancient life began to grip documentary-makers, and Latin was even taught in primary school lunch clubs, did a publisher risk it. I was able to revise the text, with ten years as a professional writer behind me, though it needed little editing; I did add details I had discovered in the interim, particularly in the passages about Antonia, and I had discovered the real name of Caenis’ steward, Aglaeus (who put up a memorial to her near her house – now under the Italian Ministry of Transport …). The English edition has remained permanently in print, delighting many readers with this strong true story where moral strength, sanity and devotion manage to endure through appalling times. In the dark world we have now, it may be even more of a beacon.
When I re-read The Course of Honour
, I confess I am startled at what I achieved. If I had written nothing else, this book would justify that long-ago change of careers. It is a story that reminds us in the West of a moment in the past when much of our present social structure was formed. Set at the dawn of the Golden Age of the Roman Empire, it holds apt lessons about imperialism, of course. Madness, extravagance, perversion and ambition will always be entertaining, but against the dangerous glamour of power gone wrong, the steady tale of Vespasian and Caenis has much to tell us. We see how fragile ‘civilisation’ can be, but we also see how human decency can doggedly survive.
The Falco Novels
I was in correspondence with an agent. She (Heather) couldn’t sell The Course of Honour at that time, but said to carry on with the Roman detective I mentioned, making sure I paid attention to the plot …
The Silver Pigs
First published 1989
Shortlisted for the Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize 1988
Winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Prize 1989
There were no prototypes, or none that I knew. For me, that was the point. I innocently thought a new writer should be original.
In order to ground my historical figure, this book has references to the ‘real’ detective genre: I was wearing my powder blue suit, with dark shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars [CHANDLER]. So in Falco: Since I was visiting a million sesterces I risked my throat under a barber’s razor. I wore a worn white toga with the holes folded out of sight, a short clean tunic, my best belt with the Celtic buckle, and brown boots. [SP]
I had to balance familiar elements and my own new ideas: I went to the funeral. In my line of work, it is traditional. [SP] But it is a specifically ancient Roman cremation. I had fixed my creed: I would use classics and archaeology. I would care about them. I would not alter or pervert what we know, or believe we know.
Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery) Page 5