Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery)

by Lindsey Davis

  Ostia was discovered when the airport (Fiumicino) was built; Portus lies on private land but has recently been explored by archaeologists from the British School.You can still easily get to Ostia Antica by road or rail; it is a very enjoyable site, one of my favourites.

  Lindsey’s Favourite Roman Places

  People write and ask me where to go. I can’t mention everywhere I’ve been in the past twenty years, but here are ideas for anyone starting from scratch:

  In Italy the two main areas are, obviously, Rome and the Bay of Naples. Sicily has stunning remains but when I went, many years ago, I found the atmosphere so threatening it’s enshrined in Falco’s visit to Croton in Shadows in Bronze. But one day, Piazza Armerina …

  Rome

  ‘Falco’s Rome’, above, gives a few ideas.

  My little tour would start with the Forum, including the Colosseum; don’t omit the Palatine. I’m looking forward to visiting the new ‘3D immersive infotainment centre’ where Rewind Rome presents the models I’ve been able to use in the Companion. Add the Pantheon, the Mecenate (the Auditorium of Maecenas) if it’s open, the Ara Pacis (Augustus’ Altar of Peace) and a couple of museums, say the Vatican (go early) and the National Museum of Rome (Palazzo Massimo) by the Baths of Diocletian. Should the Domus Aurea (Golden House) be open, beg for a timed ticket. Then try just walking about, soaking up atmosphere. You’ll need to do this, won’t you, as you plan your next delicious Italian meal?

  A must is Ostia Antica. It can be reached easily and cheaply by train. I always cover my legs because the grass gives me a rash.

  Of course Rome has wonderful museums and monuments from other periods (which I do grudgingly pop into …) There are lovely trips out, to Tivoli in particular where you can see Hadrian’s Villa as well as the Villa d’Este.

  The Bay of Naples

  Every time I visit this area, I think Vesuvius may blow again soon and we’ll lose it all – so better enjoy it!

  For many years, after I had handed in my manuscript each autumn, Richard and I took a short November holiday in Naples. We never cared for Sorrento or Capri. We preferred Herculaneum to Pompeii, while our favourite site was the villa at Oplontis (Torre Annunciata). If you have time, go south to Paestum. I have fond memories of having Herculaneum almost to ourselves on balmy autumn days. Once, before the site dogs were cleared out, a keen doggie who knew a soft Englishwoman when he saw one acted as our guide, running eagerly from ancient house to house, as if wanting to show us all the best mosaics. Once we came across another couple – who were reading a Falco book; they looked bemused, and possibly nervous, when my beloved bounded up and announced who I was.

  ‘A place that intends to last!’ One of my sharper remarks. All right; I do know what happened at Pompeii – but this was eight years before Vesuvius exploded. Any student of natural science who did notice that their local mountain was shaped like a volcano deduced it was extinct. Meanwhile the Pompeian playboys believed in art, Isis, Campanian gladiators, and ready cash to purchase gorgeous women; few of the flashy bastards were great readers of natural science. [SB]

  In Naples the National Museum is unmissable - though check opening times and, as always in Italy, be prepared for unexpectedly closed galleries. We had favourite spots that were not Roman at all: the Castel d’Ovo (which we only managed to visit on our very last trip); the Galleria Umberto IV (which had and maybe still has a private detective’s office adjacent); the Café Gambrinus and the Royal Palace, a delightful late discovery.

  Naples was one of ‘our’ places. I’ll go back, of course. But it can never be the same.

  Roman Britain

  See Hadrian’s Wall (Vindolanda and the other forts, Arbeia and the reconstructed baths at Newcastle). See Fishbourne; Bath; St Albans; a villa (my local is Lullingstone); Dolaucothi gold mine if you are tough. Trimontium (Melrose) has special Roman facilities for visitors. Soak yourself in Roman artefacts at the British Museum and Museum of London.

  Use the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain to pick out other places or just browse.

  Some other ideas

  Diehards will love Syria and Libya but unless you speak and read Arabic, I’d recommend joining an organised tour with a specialist guide. I really like to have remains explained properly. I’m keeping Tunisia in reserve …

  I love museum visits. From Paris, travel out by train to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a gracious town in itself with a superb archaeological museum in a palace (and amazing lunch across the square! adds Michelle). Cologne and Mainz have special Roman collections. Recently at Zaragoza I was impressed by the explication of the Roman river port and only barely resisted formally committing myself to setting a Falco story there.

  This is just the tip of a fabulous iceberg. I haven’t tried everywhere myself yet. Explore; that should be part of the fun.

  Romans and the Country

  In Rome you long for the country; once there, you praise to the skies

  The city you’ve just left.

  HORACE

  Romulus and Remus were shepherds. In the Republic, the ideal life for Romans was working on a farm, being called away only in times of emergency when a good man would do his duty, even though his heart was in the land. The financial qualifications for rank were to be invested in Italian land. In the country you could throw off your toga; you were not pestered with responsibilities.

  For this reason, I gave Falco a country connection. His mother came from a market garden on the Campagna (the area around Rome – not to be confused with Campania, a district further south which included Naples). In troubled times, Falco has spent time at the market garden and when it suits a novel’s plot he revisits. He himself buys a run-down rural retreat close to, or perhaps the site of, Hadrian’s future villa at Tivoli.

  I am a city girl and though I garden, I view the country as a place where I visit good friends, then scarper. Not for me a writer’s cottage with roses round the door at the end of an inaccessible lane, surrounded by cows, cowpats and dodgy country characters. I want to live in a street, close to shops. This may explain the joy I take in writing about the Campagna market garden, making Falco equip it with a crazy excrescence of agricultural myth. They are always going off for a foreign love affair, or to recover from a fit of remorse because their cart ran over a grass-cutter. Then just when someone is delivering twins on the kitchen table and the radish crop has failed, they arrive home unexpectedly, all eager to rape the goatherd’s teenage daughter and full of mad ideas for horticultural change … Unless Uncle Fabius discovers he has an illegitimate son by a woman with a weak heart who is threatening a lawsuit, he counts the day lost … [PG]

  This is what I prayed for.

  A piece of land – not so very big,

  With a garden and, near the house, a spring that never fails

  With a bit of wood to round it off.

  HORACE

  Poets are always praising the simple life (while yearning for Rome!). As early as The Silver Pigs, we find Falco, at the procurator’s villa, musing: I was enjoying myself in this hospitable house. By day I read, wrote letters, or limped around the farm. The staff were friendly and being pampered felt quite acceptable. Every evening I talked cheerfully with my host. Even in Britain this was the ideal Roman life …

  So maybe, as Helena Justina jokes, a villa in a remote rural location will be Falco’s eventual retirement.

  Travel and Transport

  The Roman roads ran absolutely straight in all directions and all led to Rome

  SELLAR AND YEATMAN

  … The Appian is easier when you take it slowly.

  Here I declared war on my stomach because of the water which was quite appalling, and waited impatiently as the other travellers enjoyed their dinner …

  The blasted mosquitoes and the marsh frogs made sleep impossible …

  From there we bowled along in wagons for twenty four miles putting up at a little town which can’t be identified in verse though it can very easily by its features; th
ey sell the most common of all commodities – water, though their bread is quite unbeatable, and a traveller, if he’s wise, usually carries some with him on his journey …

  … a long stretch of road damaged by heavy rain. On the next day the weather was better but the road worse …

  HORACE

  As he and Pa make their way down the Via Appia to Capua, Falco remembers Horace: a farrago of crooked landlords, potholes, house fires, gritty bread and infected eyes; of being packed into a ferry to cross the Pontine Marshes … of staying awake half the night all keyed up for a girl who never bothered to turn up … [PG]

  Falco and Helena travel a lot; they like it and so do I. It enables me to visit new places – some, like Syria and Libya, where I might never have gone otherwise. The Romans did travel for leisure and education, which seems so modern.

  I suppose it is unlikely that individual Romans visited quite so many provinces as Falco and Helena, though they could. Senators were supposed to stay in Italy unless they had permission (this was to stop them going abroad to plot rebellion) but for anyone else there were good roads, fairly good shipping connections, a common currency, common languages (both Latin and Greek) and the right to go for trade or tourism wherever they wanted.

  Maps existed, showing distances between towns and posting stations, with inns identified: our inn, which Helena had rightly identified on her pictograph map as a four-tower effort. [SDD]

  The Imperial Post

  Because Roman travel was slow, for logistical reasons I have Falco using the imperial transport system when I need to move him around quickly. Only the Emperor could issue passes; we see Pliny the Younger sycophantically asking Trajan for permission to let his wife use one after a family bereavement.

  Falco spells out how it worked: Use of the imperial courier service is a dismal privilege. The special messengers on horseback travel fifty miles a day. We classed ourselves as a less urgent despatch and took an official carriage: four wheels on stout axles, high seats, change of mules every dozen miles, and after the double distance food and lodging – all charged to the locals thanks to our pass. [SP] In A Dying Light in Corduba, he takes advantage of an official pass to gallop desperately in search of Helena who is about to give birth to Julia, then in Three Hands in the Fountain he gets away with an outdated Baetican pass, during his headlong flight after the serial killer.

  Up to now, Sir, I have made it a rule not to issue anyone a permit to use the Imperial Post unless he is travelling on your service, but I have just been obliged to make an exception. My wife had news of her grandfather’s death and was anxious to visit her aunt …

  PLINY THE YOUNGER

  Transport

  I don’t talk about car designs in real life. Transport was requested – but I’m not going to do it!

  Falco of course hankers for a boy-racer chariot. It’s a dream, Marcus.

  Time

  A First Century Roman Timeline

  Note: I generally use the BC/AD system for dates, rather than BCE/CE, because it will look more familiar to the majority of my readers.

  Significant Events

  The Battle of Actium

  The crucial sea battle where Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, defeated Antony and Cleopatra in 31BC. Although long before Falco’s time, this period had a profound effect on the Roman psyche. He makes regular reference to it, especially in Alexandria. Cleopatra remained the archetypal femme fatale, an exotic threat to the Roman world in the Roman mind; she was a comparison for Boudicca and Veleda (and later Xenobia). Actium led to the end of the Republic and the rise of the Julio-Claudian imperial dynasty – that vivid mix of scandal and sound political administration. Vespasian owed his career to association with Claudius in particular. A wish to emulate Augustus’ acquisition of Egypt may have lured first Gaius (Caligula) then Claudius to plan an invasion of Britain.

  The Varus Disaster in Germany

  In AD9, P. Quinctilius Varus was consolidating the Roman presence east of the Rhine. He was lured into a trap by a German leader the Romans called Arminius, a catastrophic military defeat, with the loss of three legions. The distraught Augustus famously beat his head against a wall, crying, Varus, Varus, give me back my legions! His stepson Germanicus visited Germany with a handful of survivors, buried some bodies and recaptured the legions’ eagle standards, which were deposited in the Temple of Mars in Rome.

  The battle location was unknown for centuries until an off-duty British army officer found evidence near Kalkriese; this led to a firm identification of the site, new understanding of how the massacre occurred, documentaries and a museum.

  The Boudiccan Revolt in Britain

  In AD60, the widowed Queen of the Iceni, a wealthy tribe in East Anglia, was targeted by brutal imperialist greed. Her two teenaged daughters were raped by Roman soldiers in front of her. Taking advantage of the Roman governor’s absence on campaign, Boudicca raised a rebellion, which nearly succeeded in driving the Romans out. They were defeated in battle, a tactical triumph for Suetonius Paulinus, who lured the tribes into a trap, perhaps at Letocetum – Wall in the Midlands, close to where I grew up. Archaeology has long revealed the terrible devastation that happened at Colchester, London and St Albans.

  The Icenian Revolt was brought about by the combination of indifferent politicians, overbearing armed forces and ill-judged financial control. This had alienated the populace, with results that were sheer murder. [DLC]

  The time when Paulinus, the British governor, decided to invade Mona – Druids’ Island – to clear out that rats’ net of troublemakers once and for all. Paulinus left us at Isca, guarding his back, but was accompanied by our commandant in his advisory corps. We were stuck therefore with an incompetent Camp Prefect named Poenius Postumus, who called Queen Boudicca’s Revolt ‘just a local tiff’. When the governor’s frantic orders arrived, informing this halfwit that the Iceni had swept a bloody swathe all through the south, instead of haring off to join the beleaguered field army, either from terror or further misjudgement Postumus refused to march out … After the rebels were annihilated and the truth came out, our pea-brained Camp Prefect fell on his sword. We made sure of that. But first he had forced us to abandon twenty thousand comrades in open country with no supplies and nowhere to retreat, facing two hundred thousand screaming Celts. Eighty thousand civilians had been massacred while we polished our studs in barracks. We might have lost all four British legions. We might have lost the governor. We might have lost the province … If a Roman province had fallen, in a native rebellion, led by a mere woman, the whole Empire might have blown away. It could have been the end of Rome. [SP]

  Falco has terrible memories of this event. It helps give him the bitterness a fictional detective should have. His legion’s disgrace is a leitmotif. Things are desperately tricky in The Iron Hand of Mars, when Falco must investigate the XIV Gemina – one of the three legions who were let down by his. And it haunts him again when he revisits London.

  The event left Falco and Petro scarred for life. They found excuses to leave the army and came back to Rome to pursue other careers. The experience is part of the great bond between them.

  The Year of the Four Emperors

  It was longer than a year, but basically AD69.

  Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, had ruled for fourteen years, with increasingly eccentric behaviour. His outrageous behaviour as a Games participant in Greece colours See Delphi and Die, while the ensuing nightmare of civil war is still recent when the Falco series begins. Rome, including Falco, accepted Vespasian to end the destruction, waste and bloodshed. Competing for the throne were:

  Galba

  Seen as old and failing, who made his bid using legions from Spain. He was brutally killed in the Forum. First Galba, a doddering old autocrat … [SP]

  Otho

  Otho, who according to Tacitus had nothing to hope for from settled conditions; his whole policy was based on exploiting chaos: portrayed by contemporaries as a bewigged dilettante
who was only redeemed by the dignified manner in which he committed suicide. Next Otto, who had been Nero’s ponce, so judged himself Nero’s legitimate heir … [SP]

  Vitellius

  After him, Vitellius, a bullying glutton, who drank himself into and out of the job with a certain ironclad style, then had a recipe for mushy peas named after him … [SP]

  Vespasian

  If one except his meanness in money matters he was a worthy successor to the commanders of old [TACITUS] He benefited by having two adult sons who could guarantee the succession and stability.

  At the end of the struggle, as Falco says, Three Sabine provincials no one had ever heard of until last year had, with good luck and some merit, made themselves dynastic princes in Rome. [SP]

  The eruption of Vesuvius

  24 August, AD79. What happened to Pompeii and Herculaneum has to overshadow any novel set in First Century Italy. It was a climactic event for Romans (which Falco clearly knows about with hindsight), and its time capsule of remains has provided – and continues to reveal – much of what we know about Roman life.

  Whether or not I ever write about the eruption, we have the joke of Falco claiming Pompeii was a town that intended to last. [SB]

  My own twenty-year relationship with Naples and its archaeological sites resonates through the series.

  The Daily Routine and the Hours of the Day

  The Daily Routine

  Crimes are deplorable. To set this in social perspective and heighten our sense of outrage it is important to show the cycles of normal life against which occur murders and other murky things Falco investigates; in other words, to show the life that a reasonable person would think was desirable. Roman writers describe a daily routine for the man about town: