I intended to share -- and will -- more writing tools gleaned from this summer's conferences. Then my newsfeed was overrun by ancient Romans. What started as a whimsical TikTok prank opened the aqueduct to demonstrate how often a lot of people -- and not only men -- had been thinking about ancient Rome. For a very long time.
Long enough for award-winning author Lindsey Davis to publish a pair of decades-long mystery series set in ancient Rome. Davis's books about private informer/imperial spy Marcus Didius Falco and more recently, his daughter, Flavia Alba, start where most stories about the ancients leave off: with the lives of ordinary first century CE Romans. And the dark and deadly crimes seething outside (and sometimes inside) the city's marble halls.
During a long-ago assignment in Britannia, plebian Marcus Didius and his high society wife, senator's daughter Helena Justina, adopted orphan street kid Flavia Alba. Fast forward a decade or so, and Alba is now an informer on her own, bent on muscling in on her dad's line of work.
(I'm still puzzling over Roman naming rules, but Alba and Didius get testy if anyone other than close friends and family members refers to them by their first names.)
Informers, also known as delators, functioned as private investigators in Roman society, which had little of what we in the 21st century would recognize as police forces or public prosecutors.
Informing could be a lucrative profession, but not one in high esteem. Definitely not a respectable job for a woman. In fact, there pretty much were no respectable jobs for women in ancient Rome. Luckily, Alba has a thick skin and an intimate knowledge of the shadier streets of the city. If all else fails, she keeps a sharp dagger handy.
In A Comedy of Terrors, Alba is recently married and supposedly retired from informing. But the life of a respectable young Roman matron can be stultifying. Worse, she's stuck planning her new family's first Saturnalia holiday with her husband's two young wards in tow.
Saturnalia is the big, really big, winter Roman holiday, when religious obligations all too often devolve into drunken mayhem and debauchery.
Still, how much trouble can Alba get into by taking the youngsters to buy holiday toys?
The answer is, plenty. It's bad enough that she and the kids find their favorite toy seller in a pool of blood with a knife in his back. Then, an organized crime gang starts using the most unsavory of methods to eliminate its rivals for the seasonal market in holiday snacks. How unjolly! Worse, the gang resorts to poisoned treats, murder and arson, and still more, threatening Alba's family.
With her dad Marcus Didius riding out the holidays in his seaside villa, Alba -- with some help from her new husband -- has no choice but to hit the dirty back streets of Rome herself in an attempt to bring the bad guys to justice.
***
As if the cases of Didius and Alba aren't enough to feed our thirst for all things ancient Roman, there's more! Readers in the North Texas area can hear classicist Mary Beard discuss her latest nonfiction book, Emperor of Rome, October 24 as part of the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts and Letters Live programming. Beard's book promises to include not only those who ruled the Roman Empire, but their "wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers, and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters" into the hand of those rulers. See the Arts & Letters site for details, venue, and ticket purchases.
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