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| Roma |
Steven Saylor’s Roma is a book in the Edward Rutherfurd-mode: a generational story of a city. It follows a pair of families down through the centuries, highlighting the turning points in their city’s history. In this case, that city is Rome. Saylor follows the Pinarii and Potitii families from 1000 BC to 1 BC and we get to see Rome grow from a small trading post to the seat of an Empire.
Because the book is structure as a series of short stories, it’s hard to bond with any of the characters. It also doesn’t help that some of the characters are jerks. Just like a Rutherfurd novel, you have to keep remembering that the main character isn’t really a person; it’s the city. If you read it that way, Roma is an amazing novel. Like the best works of historical fiction, it shows how much like us our ancestors were. They were smart. Their civilizations were complex. And yet…the Romans are also alien. They were brutal. They were very religious and superstitious.
As I read Roma, one of the things that struck me was how small historical events can become legendary. Saylor uses Roman festivals like the Lupercalia and places like the Caci Stairs (Scalae Caci) and invents stories to explain their origins. Something will happen, sometimes something small, and then a few stories and a few generations later, its a venerable tradition and no one knows exactly how it got started.
One of things that bothered me about this book–and it bothered me a lot–was Saylor’s tendency to gloss over important events in history. Granted, Roma covers 1,000 years of history. Saylor can’t cover everything. But a lot of events were omitted that I was really hoping to read about: the Battle of Actium, the story of Cincinnatus, the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Augustus‘ rise to become emperor, etc. Some of the chapters would cover the aftermath or mention this events, but these elisions made the last third of the book unsatisfying. I might read Empire, the sequel that covers 14 CE to 138 CE, but I don’t have high hopes.