Kevin's Watch

I am a Julius Caesar freak who has just discovered a new Julius Caesar series, the Emperor series. Conn Iggulden has written THE GATES OF ROME, THE DEATH OF KINGS, and now THE FIELD OF SWORDS, which takes us up through the crossing of the Rubicon.

Has anyone here read the Emperor series?

I am a dedicated fan of Colleen McCullough's FIRST MAN IN ROME and GRASS CROWN, but have been disappointed with the later books. I don't feel those characters come to life. I am hoping this series will satisfy me more.

I thought about starting this series. My local Barnes & Noble is pushing The Death of Kings in paperback, but when I looked for The Gates of Rome, there were no copies. Pretty inept marketing strategy, seems to me.

I don't want to start the series in the middle. I'll guess I'll have to order Gates.

I got lucky, I guess. My local branch of Powells had GATES and Powells Central had DEATH OF KINGS.

However, I stopped off for pizza on the way home from Central, and had to read something. "Something" was THE SWORD OF ATTILA by Michael Curtis Ford, which I bought at the same time. I'm starting a Michael Curtis Ford thread.

Dragonlily wrote:I am a Julius Caesar freak who has just discovered a new Julius Caesar series, the Emperor series. Conn Iggulden has written THE GATES OF ROME, THE DEATH OF KINGS, and now THE FIELD OF SWORDS, which takes us up through the crossing of the Rubicon.

Has anyone here read the Emperor series?

I am a dedicated fan of Colleen McCullough's FIRST MAN IN ROME and GRASS CROWN, but have been disappointed with the later books. I don't feel those characters come to life. I am hoping this series will satisfy me more.

I glanced at one of the Emperor books in a bookshop once, but didn't bite. From the little I read, it seemed almost deliberately generic, as if the author wanted you to believe that it could have happened anywhere. I don't suppose my impression was correct, but I just didn't get the feeling of ancient Rome the way I did from the McCullough books.

I think I know what you mean about the McCullough series, but actually I prefer the later volumes. The thing is that after the era of The Grass Crown, the ancient sources suddenly become a lot more copious and reliable. That means we know a great deal more about what actually happened, which is good in itself, but leaves less for the novelist to do.

When the characters in the early books come to life, it is with Ms. McCullough's own life, because we know so little about the lives they actually lived. One of the most vivid characters in The First Man in Rome, Julilla, is entirely fictitious. (We know that Sulla was once married to a Julian woman, but there is no evidence that she was any close relation to Julius Caesar.)

In the later books, Ms. McCullough is obliged to stick more closely to historical fact; and the things Caesar, Pompey, and Cato did are not things that you would do for the kind of motives she is best at portraying. Caesar in particular comes across as a cross between Superman and a plaster saint. I think Ms. McCullough fell a little too deeply in love with her character, and wasn't willing to portray him with the flaws he must surely have had.

Nevertheless, I rank that series as the best historical fiction I have read. Even I, Claudius seems a bit pale and stagy by comparison. I shall have to have another go at Iggulden, though, when I have more attention to spend on fiction.

McCullough's wildest departure in the Caesar family has always seemed to me to be Caesar's mother: Aurelia moving her children into the slums and taking on the running of a tenament. Yes, I know Roman women could own and manage property, but I always saw Aurelia as a conventional type of Roman matron making the best of a reduced life style in the better part of town.

On the other hand, I revel in McCullough's invention of Cornelius Sulla. No, he couldn't possibly be true, but what a glorious fiction! His eyes, in which a wolf could be found howling at the moon... And then to find him meet his match, when he sees the same wolves in the eyes of Julius ... *sigh of satisfaction*

Dragonlily wrote:On the other hand, I revel in McCullough's invention of Cornelius Sulla. No, he couldn't possibly be true, but what a glorious fiction!

Definitely drawn larger than life, but then the real Sulla seems to have been rather larger than life himself. He could never forgive the world for giving him patrician blood and then dumping him in the slums, penniless and forgotten. I suspect he had a large measure of what is nowadays called 'Napoleon complex' -- not based on his size, but on his inferior status at a time when rich nobodies seemed to be taking over Rome from the families who had always ruled it. He served Marius competently in the Jugurthine war, but he must have been bitterly envious of this man who bestrode Rome like a colossus without having any ancestors to speak of. At the same time, he must have taken heart in seeing Marius, the rank outsider, persist through setback after setback and finally reach the consulship in his fifties. Sulla, too, was fifty by the time he was consul.

It wouldn't surprise me to find that Sulla saw himself as a sort of exiled prince, one-upping the ghastly novi homines at their own game, retaking Rome from the barbarians. Certainly he did his utmost to restore the Patriciate to supremacy, though his work was doomed to unravel as soon as he retired. That, I think, might have been a more interesting character than the dissembling libertine Ms. McCullough made him out to be.

Variol Farseer wrote:He could never forgive the world for giving him patrician blood and then dumping him in the slums, penniless and forgotten.

This sounds like a valid analysis, if you add in the fact that throughout his public career he emphasized the idea that he was beloved of the Goddess Fortune.

I think one of my favorite fictional treatments of Caesar would be Shakespeare play. I was lucky enough to see it in Stratford (Ontario) at the big theater festival about fifteen years ago with a top notch cast, and I still get shivers (in a good way) when I think about it.

I also have read the Grass Crown series and preferred the earlier books. I think I saw the other series you were talking about, Dragonlily, but I never bought one. How are they?

It's going to be a while before I can read the Iggulden series, Caam. They are at the end of the second tray of tbr books. I did open FIELD OF SWORDS up long enough to get an eyeful, and it was difficult to stop reading.