The Masters Of Rome Series

[indianasmith]

I am a huge fan of Colleen McCullough's novel series - I've read all of the books at least 3 times each.

I love the way she really does capture the attitudes and mores of the ancient world instead of taking 20th century characters and dressing them in ancient clothes.  I do think she tries to stick as close as possible to the actual train of events (although her huge crush on Julius Caesar is painfully obvious!).  So what do all of you think of this series? What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses?  Any passages that really spoke to you - or turned you off?

[Onasander]

I recall a story about a twentieth century thinker, Wittgenstein, listening to a statement of a female colleague.

 

She said sometimes, when she looks up at the sun, rising and setting, she could understand by seeing it how the ancients could believe the sun revolved around the earth, as that's how it appears to be.

 

Wittgenstein responded with the question "Just how should the sky look if the earth was the one traveling around the sun?"

 

I, a resident of the 21st century, lpoking back, find alot of simularity between such 20th century insights as say, that of the Cynics challenging the knowledge and assumptions of everyday life.

 

I, prior to meeting you, have heard this criticism of mixing eras by fans of literature, but now that I have access to you, a author who focuses on another era.... what exactly do you mean? I seem to grasp it in a sense, but in most senses I'm reaching for I only grasp at contradictions in trying to accept this idea, that personality typology somehow magically changed in some 2000 years.

 

What is it? The underlining hermeneutics for 20th stock characters struggling with existentialist questions in predictable cast iron story formats can't be transplanted to the Roman psuedo-historical literature? Why not? Their brains worked differently? Does knowledge really change personality that much? If Nero knew about space shuttles, microorganisms, and toilets, would he of been any less of a self infatuated wreck? The boy had access to pretty advance technology as it was, as well as moral intellectuals. What really stopped him from being a modern?

 

Nothing. He was. We have guys just like him running amok, shooting people, dying with heroine needles in their arms, dying in panic suicides not thinking stuff through. There is remarkably little between our ages that separate such men.

 

Every age fetishize, specialize in kinds of men, kinds of thinking, but we never stomp out the universal template for other personalities. They always coexist. It's in our neurology.

 

Could the characters of Theophrastus, or the mimes of Publius Syrus, exist in our would? Do you think the Romans would get Seinfeld, the gladiator show about nothing? The interposition of artistic styles and overall formulas might dance between novel and alien at first, and the acceptance of mores, but the audience is still a spectator.... after grasping the mode of presentation, they would grasp the comedy and drama instinctively..... as the rules for that still hasn't changed.

 

Now, if I haven't touched your answer yet, I do ask you, just what you mean? I assume there are different rules for writing about characters in your prefered era over another? Why? Why give more humanity to one era over another? Is it a rule to intentionally dumb down the romans? Are they prescriptions in writing that dictate they musy be emotionally retarded, or less inclined to reason or skepticism, just because we view ourselves as more knowledgeable and enlightened?

 

Are we more enlightened because of superior knowledge, or because of a lack of freedom to act with the range of a Roman, who could choose to be meek like us, or enslave someone, or easily get away with murder? Would someone being raped, enslaved or murder feel differently then from any era? What's the underlining emotion to write about any of it.... excitement? A vision? A telling?

 

I want to know how a twenty first century author can write about a person 2000 years ago, and affirm they differ. Just how should the sun in the sky 2000 years ago of looked? You think their scientist reassured everyone the world was flat and the sun revolved, and someone looked at Arius Didymus and said "You know, looking at the sky, seeing how the shadows shift and the light plays between the solcists, and the phases of the moon, I can grasp how the ancients thought the earth was round and moved around the sun.....

[indianasmith]

That's an interesting question you pose.  I think what changes from age to age are the views of what behaviors are considered acceptable and which are not, and the philosophies and religious beliefs that undergird those views.

 

I live in America in the 21st century, specifically in the South.  We have a culture where certain ideas have been engrained in us, which are developed from philosophical trends that did not exist two thousand years ago - Protestant Christianity, the Enlightenment, Marxism, the notion of equality between genders and races.  Just to pick one example, my current project about Claudius Caesar.  The idea of women being fully equal to men, legally and morally, would have been alien to him or almost any man of his era.  His culture was accepting of things that we find morally reprehensible - infanticide, for one (infant exposure was still practiced by Romans in this era), and of course, the biggie, slavery, was accepted as a natural part of the order of the world.  His religious worldview would have been based on a set of assumptions largely foreign to the modern world as well.

 

   Let me pick an example of the kind of writing I had in mind: Ken Follett's historical works, like THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH - a great story overall, but most of his characters seem to be a lot more contemporary in their thinking than they should be. 

 

  So do you think my criticism has any validity, or do you think that humanity is, at its core, unchanged?