“Meto stared blankly at the wall and bit his lip. A tear
spilled down his cheek. A good, stern Roman father would have slapped the tear
away, shaken him until his teeth rattled, and then made him go stand in the
courtyard and keep watch all night, to face up to his fears and beat them down,
and the more miserable the lesson the better. But I have never claimed to be a
good father by Roman standards. I embraced him for a long moment…”
-Steven Saylor, “Catilina’s Riddle” (1998)
The nature of a
hero, as opposed to a mere protagonist, is a tricky thing to pin down,
particularly in historical novels and even more so in history in general.
Modern ideals of heroism, as filtered through popular culture, can seem
wrongheaded and oddly twee compared to the far messier reality of countless
clashing value systems that make up the endless, bizarre, brutal saga of the
human race. This isn’t solely a contemporary problem; the more saintly paragons
of Victorian literature can seem absurd in the harsh light of history, where
the villains aren’t always obvious cads and grotesques and the heroes aren’t
always rewarded for their second act travails with everlasting comfort and
security. The grubby tragedies that are real life wars are often sanitised by
the victors into pat narratives of Righteousness upper-cutting Vice, with
examples ranging from the divinely-sanctioned genocides of the Old Testament to
Shakespeare’s posthumous transformation of Richard III into a gruesome,
bloodthirsty hunchback.
In truth, there are almost no actual saints in history (apart from the actual saints obviously, but the true natures of older saints are usually shrouded in the fantastic legendry of medieval Christendom), just the occasional driven, brilliant man or woman who is often just as much ruthless as noble (the realities of leadership during tumultuous eras being what it is), and whose reputations are jealously preserved by nationalistic admirers. What place is there for the bottomless benevolence exemplified by pop culture icons like Superman and Batman in the harsh epochs of Ancient Rome or Medieval Europe? Do the iron-clad, fastidious sensibilities of such modern hero-archetypes not look excruciatingly daft compared to the past’s endless vistas of human cruelty and indifference?
Yet there is a sound place in fiction for men and women whose keen sympathies put them out of step with the bleaker standards of their time periods; handled well, it can be a rich source of drama, as the hero struggles to effectively make his way through the snake-pit of a sinful mortal world and emerge reasonably unstained by the experience.
Steven Saylor’s creation Gordianus the Finder, star of his “Roma Sub Rosa” series of mystery novels, is a prime example, being an eccentrically decent man in an age of indecency. A low-born native Roman, Gordianus is able to transcend his humble origins thanks to his keen analytical mind and his ability to hunt down elusive truths in seemingly baffling cases, which make his services much in demand with Rome’s moneyed patrician elite. Whether it is solving particularly shadowy murders or unravelling affairs of the heart, Gordianus gets to see much of the seedy underbelly of Roman society during the corrupt, passionate, endlessly dangerous days of the Late Republic.
Yet, while Gordianus’s financial need to please the whims of his mighty patrons by doing what he does is usually at the forefront in the earlier stories, this is only flimsy camouflage for a far more profound side to his nature; an overpowering, almost irrational need to bring some measure of justice to the most wretched and downtrodden members of his highly-stratified society. Hapless slaves, anonymous victims; the faceless, voiceless, struggling ciphers whose very memories evaporate into obscurity while the reputations of the likes of Caesar and Cicero ring down the ages; these are Gordianus’s people, the people he is prepared to cross some of history’s most celebrated names to help, even if only to bring some closure to their restless ghosts. His ever-growing family are an unlikely mixture of exotic characters; his wife and second son are freed slaves, his firstborn a mute waif adopted in order to save the lad from the mean streets of the Eternal City.
It would be easy to see Gordianus’s un-Roman preoccupation with the lowly over the glorious as a dubious attempt at creating a sleuth with thought processes palatable to a delicate modern readership, who might be alienated by, say, a typical Roman’s casual contempt for a quarry-slave. If Gordianus was some sort of wide-eyed social crusader, it would indeed fall flat. But instead he is a sly, streetwise, deeply cynical and guileful investigator, who carries a broad streak of decency and empathy through the dark heart of a troubled century.
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