by marthamarks | Rome
Among the many intriguing first-century locations where Rubies of the Viper takes place—Nero’s sumptuous palace, Theodosia’s Villa Varroniana, an Etruscan necropolis, and others—none fascinated me more as I was writing than the infamous slum known as Subura.
The area known as Subura, a notorious part of the ancient city of Rome, was originally a swamp lying between the Viminal Hill and the Esquiline Hill. Sometime around 600 B.C., the Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Sewer”) was built through the area to serve the twin purposes of carrying human waste to the Tiber River and draining the swamp for development. As one might expect, given the technology of 600 B.C., the drainage wasn’t perfect, so Subura remained an unsanitary, mosquito-infested, disease-ridden place to live.
At first, it was the home of respectable citizens, including the family of Gaius Julius Caesar. Single-family houses were the norm, as were prosperous shops. It was also the site of an early Jewish synagogue.
Over time, as hordes of foreigners, landless former farmers (see Gigantic Estates), and impoverished ex-slaves poured into the city looking for work, Subura turned into a noisy, dirty, and wet dumping ground for the dregs of society. There was no law enforcement. No social order. No sanitation. No safety net. Prostitutes, pimps, and pickpockets flourished. Tiny shops built into the walls of houses offered fish, eggs, cabbages, bread, and other cheap provisions. Barbers, cobblers, and peddlers of tinware and fabrics cluttered the narrow streets.
In a first-century version of “white flight,” prosperous Romans literally headed for the hills, two of which—the Caelian and the Palatine—would forever after be enclaves of wealth and nobility.
Here’s how a Rubies of the Viper reader experiences Subura on Theodosia’s first visit back there after spending months in her luxurious coastal villa:
Overhead loomed the wooden firetraps where thousands of Rome’s poorest, mostly foreigners and former slaves, found crude shelter but little else. So tall and tightly packed were the buildings that the sun made its way to the streets for only a few hours a day. An open window on the top storey of one building belched the sounds of a ferocious argument. Balcony-hung laundry—flapping and snapping in the breeze—formed a counterpoint to the slaps and curses and breaking pottery.
Nor was life any more pleasant on the ground. A pack of feral dogs—nosing through the offal and creating more—snarled if anyone came too close. Four naked toddlers played unattended in the dirt. A trio of drunks quarreled in a corner bar. The streets stank of urine, sewage, and rotting garbage.
Theodosia’s house stood in a slightly better neighborhood in the heart of Subura, where people owned their single-storey homes and attached street-side shops. Buildings were lower, so there was more sunlight. At one time, the entire area had been like this, but the surrounding blocks had been razed over the years to pack in more cheap housing.
She stopped in front of the shop where Dinos—the elderly sandal maker who was her tenant—and his slave eked out a living and slept on the floor. Dinos’ meager payments had been Theodosia’s main income for years, but she had charged him no rent since Gaius died.
Dinos was sitting on a shaded stool just inside the doorway, a bright-eyed spider alert for prey in the web of sandals spread out along the edge of the street. Now he hopped down… eyes agog at the sight of Theodosia.
—text copyright © Martha Marks—
by marthamarks | Theodosia Varro, Women (Roman)
Recently, I was intrigued by the opinion of a young reviewer of Rubies of the Viper who complained that Theodosia “made bad decisions” and “acted like an idiot.” Since a different reviewer on Amazon had a similar “stupid heroine” gripe, this reaction to my protagonist was worth thinking about.
It was time, I decided, for a discussion of DRAMATIC IRONY.
After thanking the young woman for her review, I gently suggested that she do a Google search on the term dramatic irony, because it might help her better understand what’s going on in my novel and hundreds of others that she’ll read in her lifetime. She did look it up and later changed her review to reflect her increased knowledge of how an author uses literary devices (such as dramatic irony, point of view, and others) to build tension and play with a reader’s emotions.
Complaints about my “stupid” protagonist seem to be based on who Theodosia is at the start of the novel: a naive, inexperienced young woman thrust without preparation into a complex and dangerous situation. (See What Theodosia Never Learned and Not Your Garden-Variety Roman Lady.)
The reader first sees what’s happening from inside Theodosia’s head (her point of view, or POV), which provides one interpretation of events. Soon after, the reader goes inside Alexander’s head (his POV), which provides a very different interpretation of events. The POV alternates from Theodosia to Alexander throughout the novel, offering readers a shifting perspective on the fictional “reality” of the novel. Along the way, there is also omniscient narration (a third POV), which provides yet another interpretation of events.
In other words… the reader benefits from seeing the “reality” of the novel from a variety of perspectives, while the protagonist can only see that “reality” through her own POV, which is often incomplete.
Theodosia doesn’t know everything the reader knows, or even everything Alexander knows. The result is dramatic irony, a major source of tension in Rubies of the Viper and scads of other works.
Without spoiling the plot for those who have not yet read my novel, I can offer the following example:
At the beginning—the very morning after her brother’s murder—Marcus Salvio Otho begins setting Theodosia up to see him as a good guy… her brother’s best friend and a trustworthy advisor/confidant to her. As a naive, innocent, unprepared young woman who has never spoken with Otho before, she has no reason to question what he’s saying and doing. But Alexander, who has years of experience dealing with Otho, isn’t fooled. By being inside Alexander’s mind (his POV) when the reader first meets Otho in person, we get a clear picture of who and what Otho is. Theodosia has no experience dealing with rich, patrician suitors, so it’s easy for Otho to sweep her off her feet. Later, of course, she comes to see him just as Alexander—and the reader—saw him all along.
Is Theodosia stupid not to see Otho as he really is from the beginning? Read on, and we’ll address that question below.
There are actually many layers of dramatic irony in Rubies of the Viper, and they all have different effects on Theodosia… and on the reader’s emotions.
At one point, Theodosia finds out that Stefan has been sleeping with her maid, Lucilla. It’s a shock to her, but not to the reader or to Alexander. Is Theodosia stupid not to see this earlier?
And later, when Theodosia is incarcerated, she doesn’t know if Alexander, Stefan, and Lycos got away or not. The reader learns what happened to them long before she does. Is Theodosia stupid not to know this earlier?
And later, Theodosia reacts badly when led to believe that Flavia has betrayed her, but the reader knows that’s not true. Is Theodosia stupid not to realize this earlier?
Etc, etc, etc. I could go on and on, but I don’t want to give away the whole plot!
This kind of dramatic irony is a major source of tension in lots of books, not just mine. When we readers know more than the characters do, we often find ourselves cringing or saying “No, don’t do it!!!” We see disaster ahead and want to warn the characters, but we have no power to stop them from making dumb/innocent mistakes.
Now that I’ve shown a few examples of how dramatic irony plays out in Rubies of the Viper, let me offer info from other sources:
A good basic definition from Wikipedia: “Dramatic irony is the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of (at least consciously), thus placing the spectator a step ahead of at least one of the characters.”
Here’s perceptive snip (and there’s plenty more!) from TVtropes.org:
Dramatic irony lets the audience “see the whole picture when the protagonist, or even the entire cast, is kept largely in the dark.
“Fat lot of good it does us though. When dramatic irony crops up, it’s usually not to let us feel smugly superior. It’s to toy with our fragile little emotions. If we’re lucky, the emotion being manipulated will be amusement. If we’re not, dramatic irony will be present to make us cringe or bite our fingernails down to the knuckles.
“To really fit the definition though, one of the characters must make a statement, or perform an action, to fully illustrate that they are unaware of the situation. To the character, what they’re saying or doing is perfectly sensible based on the knowledge they have. To the audience though, the statement or action is ludicrous or dangerously uninformed.” (emphasis mine)
And with that, I think the question I posed above has an obvious answer.
No, Theodosia is not stupid. As the story progresses, she sorts through all the red herrings, pieces together the real clues, and ultimately uncovers the deepest secrets of **both** of the men who killed her brother. She just doesn’t always know everything the reader knows… and therein lies much of the suspense.
—except as noted, text copyright © Martha Marks—
by marthamarks | Nizzo, Otho
Of all the characters in Rubies of the Viper, I probably had the most fun with Otho and Nizzo. Neither one of them is a nice man. Could it be that’s the reason they were such rollicking pleasures to create and, I hope, read about?
Hmmm…
Marcus Salvius Otho was a real man who played an interesting role in first-century history, so in my novel I had to make him as true-to-life as possible. And I think I did… as regards his overbearing personality, his foppish physical traits, his driving ambition, and his willingness to claw and crawl all over anybody who got in his way.
History has not been kind to Otho. He’s generally remembered as a bully who—with the unique exception of his time as governor of Lusitania (now Portugal)—squandered most of the golden opportunities that fate put into his hands. Equally loaded with ambition and personality flaws, he rose to become emperor of the Roman Empire only to commit suicide three months later.
A nasty man for sure, with very little nice about him.
Aulus Terentius Nizzo , on the other hand, is purely a figment of my imagination… a complete tabla rasa for my creative juices. Even his name was fun to concoct. His slave name (Nizzo)—carried over as his cognomen—is what most people in the novel call him. His praenomen (Aulus) and nomen (Terentius) came from his master, Aulus Terentius Varro (Theodosia’s father), the man who liberated him and with his name gave him a legal identity.
Nizzo first appears in Chapter 9 of Rubies of the Viper as a former farm slave—now a freedman—who runs the vast agricultural estate that Theodosia Varro has inherited from Gaius, her morally corrupt and recently murdered half-brother. And his role grows increasingly important as the story builds toward its conclusion.
From a physical point of view, Nizzo is exactly what one might expect of a former slave now in charge of an immense plantation: dirty, brutish, and foul-mouthed. He doesn’t hesitate to exercise the power he has over powerless people who don’t belong to him but are completely under his control.
He’s definitely not the kind of guy a young lady like Theodosia Varro would care to hang out with.
But his deep-down personal qualities are less easy to characterize. Before Theodosia meets Nizzo, Alexander assures her that the farm manager is worthy of respect:
“There’s a reason why your father lifted that one man above a thousand others who started exactly where he did and placed him in charge of them, even while he was still a slave. Nizzo isn’t polished, but he’s smart and tough and honest and ambitious.”
Those sterling traits aren’t easy for Theodosia to recognize, however. It takes three years and a lot of suffering on her part before she finally comes to see Nizzo for what he really is. And that’s as much as I’m going to say on that subject, because to delve further into it would spoil the story.
Suffice it to say that, while “nice” isn’t a word that anybody would credibly pin on Nizzo, “nasty” isn’t exactly the right word for him either.
—text copyright © Martha Marks—
by marthamarks | Agriculture
In Rubies of the Viper , the Varro family’s closest-to-home source of wealth is their large agricultural estate, or plantation (latifundium; pl: latifundia). This was a relatively recent development in the first century A.D. and an important one. It’s worth understanding how the latifundia developed and how they changed Roman society forever.
The traditional Italian lifestyle was based on the family farm.
For hundreds of years—from the original tribal settlements (starting about 1,000-900 B.C.) through the Roman kings (752 B.C.-509 B.C.) and the first centuries of the Roman Republic (509 B.C.-27 B.C.)—family-owned and -operated farms were the backbone of the economy. Small-scale, privately owned parcels could be worked productively by a free man and his wife, sons, and daughters, plus a handful of born-on-the-farm slaves (collectively called the familia rustica).
The great latifundia came about as the result of war and other interrelated social changes.
1. During the Punic Wars (against Carthage, 3rd to 2nd century B.C.), many Italian farmers were compelled to serve in the Roman army and sometimes spent years at a time away from home. In their absence, wives and children—hard pressed to maintain the agricultural activities that had sustained their families—often were forced to sell their land and slaves to wealthier individuals, simply to survive.
2. In the second century B.C., the ager publicus—large tracts of publicly owned lands in newly conquered parts of Italy and beyond—began to be leased to generals, to heroes of military campaigns, and to wealthy individuals. At first, these estates were modeled on the traditional single-family farm, each with its villa (similar to Theodosia’s Villa Varroniana), near-by pastures, and crop land.
3. As time went on, slaves from conquered lands began to be imported into Italy. Most had done agricultural work at home, so it made sense to put them to work on Italian estates. As the conquests mounted, so did the number of slaves brought in.
4. It didn’t take long before this vast pool of cheap labor began to put the family farmers out of business. Few small, family-owned and -worked farms could compete with the gigantic, slave-worked latifundia. One after another, farmers sold their land and slaves to wealthier people, many of them absentee landlords, who gradually solidified their control over the agricultural landscape. (Obviously, this situation was much like that of modern corporate agribusinesses, which outcompete and often buy up the small family farms in a given area.)
5. Former land owners were forced to seek other ways of making a living. Most either became tenant farmers on land they had previously owned, or joined the army, or migrated to Rome, where they added to the burgeoning population of urban poor living in a vast slum called Subura.
In one Rubies of the Viper scene, set in A.D. 53, the fast-fading, traditional farming lifestyle is reflected in the following exchange between Theodosia Varro and two legionaries:
“Do you build bonfires, Vespillo, when you’re home for Saturnalia?”
“Sure. We’ve only got three slaves to work the fields with my father, but tonight they’ll be the kings of the harvest. Father and my sisters should be serving ‘em dinner about now.” He sighed. “I ain’t been home for Saturnalia in years.”
“Where’s home?”
“Arretium. Just this side of the Apennines.”
“So… you’re an Umbrian! And you, sir?”
“From Tarentum, in the south,” Silvanus said. “Too poor to have land or slaves. Me and my oldest son are both in the army. My wife and younger children live off our wages. Ain’t much of a life.”
And this description accurately captures the history of the land that now belongs to Theodosia:
Rolling pinewoods stretched for miles on both sides of the Via Aurelia, broken only by occasional patches of once-cultivated land. A century earlier—before the rise of rich landowners like the Varros—those had been small farms. Now they fed no one. Few farm families could compete with the big, slave-worked plantations.
Theodosia felt a quick flash of guilt. Still, there was no denying that those overgrown fields were beautiful. Gray-green leaves of gnarled olive trees rustled in the breeze. Strips of wildflowers carpeted the spaces between them and spread out along the roadway, mixed with wild fennel and rosemary. The scent was incomparable.
She led the way across a stone bridge toward a hill that promised a fine view of the sea. Guiding the filly off the paving stones, she threaded her way up the slope through pines and plane trees. At the top, she reined in again to savor the panorama of her property. To the north and east lay forests and hills. Somewhere inland was the farm. To the southwest, beside the sea, sat her villa… its red-tile roof seemingly afire in the afternoon sun.
—text copyright © Martha Marks—
by marthamarks | Italy, Rural Places
An Etruscan necropolis outside the ancient Italian town of Caere (modern-day Cerveteri) serves as a “sleeper” location in Rubies of the Viper. I say “sleeper” because at first the necropolis seems merely to provide local color, but it turns out to play a critical role in the story.
I had already written Rubies of the Viper, including those scenes in the necropolis, before I actually set foot in that real-life city of the dead… at which point I was delighted to discover how spot-on my descriptions (based on extensive research) were—both on the outside and within a specific tomb. Walking those ancient, rutted streets gave me goose bumps… not only because of the Etruscan presence on that spot thousands of years earlier, but also because several very-real-to-me characters had also “been there.” I kept saying to my husband: “Alexander did such-and-such right here!” and “That’s where Theodosia met so-and-so!”
The necropolis near Caere/Cerveteri was almost a millennium old by the first century A.D. It had been established circa 900-800 B.C. by the Etruscans, a local tribe that ultimately colonized a large area that included all of modern Tuscany. The etymological root of “Tuscany” is, of course, “Etruscan.” (Similarly, the body of water to the west of the Italian peninsula was called the Etruscan Sea in Roman times; it’s still known as the Tyrrhenian Sea… “Tyrrhenian” being another word for “Etruscan.”)
The Etruscan culture is fascinating for many reasons. Unlike most other ancient civilizations (and many modern ones), they enjoyed equality of the sexes. They were the first tribe in Italy to develop writing, using an alphabet they created based on the Greek one. Their language was spoken for well over a thousand years… continuing in use for several hundred years A.D. Rivals to the Greeks, they developed impressive agricultural and shipping enterprises as well as finely crafted works of art.
By the time Theodosia, Alexander, and Stefan paid their first visit there in A.D. 53, the necropolis at Caere had already been plundered for treasures (coins, jewels, pottery, funeral urns, etc)… the best of which ended up in homes of the uber-wealthy… such as Theodosia’s Villa Varroniana.
From the outside, the necropolis at Caere/Cerveteri is a mass of grass-covered, beehive-shaped mounds, plus a few rectangular structures, all connected by a series of unpaved streets with deep ruts carved over the centuries by wagons bearing bodies to the tombs. This web page offers two exterior photos, a map, and additional information.
On the inside, the tombs were set up like the Etruscans’ homes: with benches, rooms, doors, colorful frescoes on the walls, etc. They were mostly subterranean, so they had stairs—in some cases quite long ones—leading down from the street.
For somebody else’s photos of the tombs, click here and be sure to click “next” to see many more great images.
The image above is from the Italian website, Comune di Cerveteri.
—text copyright © Martha Marks—
