You are absolutely right about the content warning. I hesitated to write this, and then to publish it, because I was afraid it would be seen as an apologia for rape. However, based on feedback I believe readers have generally understood what I was trying to do.
I certainly understand your hesitation, but I think you thread the needle well. I don't think a modern reader could come away not recognizing the profound wrong that had been committed.
I have to admit that when I read this (probably when it first came out... It's been awhile...) what I wanted more than anything was a bibliography so I could go look at the author's research material myself.
Trying to write something like this is one hell of a challenge; I have to give the author due props for doing that, but... There was something "off" with the whole thing, in terms of the male perspective of that era, as she wrote it.
I've been through a bunch of material on the Romans, particularly regarding the Roman military, and what I came away with was a very different perspective on what I think the average junior legionary would have been like. You have to remember that these were hard men; they did things like loot, rape, and enslave as a matter of course. That was their world; they saw nothing immoral or wrong with it.
Neither did anyone else. Go back and look at a lot of the things that were done by the Romans and everyone else up to the modern era. The Mongols? Yeesh. Those were not people who'd have had second thoughts about what they were doing; remember, they spent weeks after entering Merv slaughtering the inhabitants and going so far as to search the bodies for swallowed valuables. PTSD was not on the menu for the ancients, and if they suffered anything analogous to it, you'd have a hard time telling from what evidence we have left from them. The Romans weren't any different from the Mongols; see Dacia for examples.
You are correct. I should probably put together a bibliography. It would be good to get other eyes on my interpretation of the data. Or even on whether my data sources are good enough.
I agree with you that these men did not see anything wrong with rape, looting, and enslaving. That should have been clear in my story. Especially since it is exactly because of looting that Procerus was able to afford to buy her in the first place. And it is exactly because, as a slave, she is, according to Roman law, a "res", a "thing", with no legal right to physical and sexual integrity, that he sees nothing wrong in forcing himself on her to consummate their "marriage." The whole point of the story is that he never does anything viewed by his society or himself (or Sophie herself!) that is wrong. He is "lawful good" all the way.
The fact that the Romans thought slavery was perfectly normal, though, did not mean that they thought BEING a slave was good. They certainly did not see it as a good thing for themselves. Slavery was perfectly fine for other people, but you didn't want it for yourself. It might also be fine for your slave, to whom you had every right of sexual access. But interestingly enough, it was NOT okay for your wife, because it meant your children were automatically slaves, and you did not necessarily have the right to free them. (This law came about because some people were freeing too many of their slaves, and the kin that would have inherited that human property objected. Roman laws changed over time, and I find it hard to determine exactly where and when such laws applied, stopped applying, applied again, etc.)
This does seem to differ from other places, where it appears that the child of a slave woman could easily be claimed as an heir without freeing her first. My research outside of a very narrow timeframe of ancient Rome, however, isn't very great. I can't even speak to the Greeks, let alone the Mongols, etc.
The reason it matters to Procerus whether or not she is a slave is because he is looking to start a family. Normally, someone of his class (which is probably still landowning but not necessarily slave owning) would have married a Roman woman, and his children would be freeborn Roman citizens. I don't believe he would normally have considered buying a woman as a slave at all otherwise. For sexual access, brothels were much cheaper, more convenient, and often located very close to a fort or garrison. In addition, when the military leaders ALLOWED looting, there was the option to rape the conquered women. Whether or not looting or rape was allowed was not a question of morality but of military objectives for Roman legion soldiers, according to: "Spare No One: Mass Violence in Roman Warfare (War and Society)" by Gabriel Baker.
Slaves were expensive, but again, it was difficult for me to determine exactly what the price of a slave would be at any particular place and time. I settled on Sophie's price being roughly the gross pay of a rank and file Roman soldier for one year, but I could easily be wrong.
In terms of Procerus leaving Sophie alone after the first night, as JE Tabor states he is indulgent (more so than Tritius), he can very well see that she is bothered, and he doesn't want to make her unhappy because he considers her his wife, even though legally, she isn't. Not because he sees, or ever sees, what he did as wrong. Again, as JE Tabor notes, both he and Sophie are limited by their time and culture in how far they can actually address the issue.
If you are implying that people in general, and men in particular, are unable to compartmentalize, and treat "these people / women" differently from "those people / women", or that fighting men back then didn't care about making the women that mattered to them happy, then I simply disagree with you.
What I think is that the people of that era "thought differently" to the point that they'd be almost entirely alien to our way of thinking and understanding others. It's not just a paradigm shift; it's a full-scale *frame* shift. Were we able to talk to them? It'd be about like a normal person talking to and trying to understand the worldview of a diagnosed sociopath: We'd be the ones they regarded as clearly insane, while we looked at them the same way.
There is one thing that I think a lot of women from our era look back at and discount, and that is the effect of childbirth mortality on the male mind. You knew, going in, that odds were quite good that you were almost certainly not going to "marry for life" because of that factor. Whoever you married or got pregnant, she was very likely to die delivering one of your children, and you were going to have to move on. You *knew* that from observation of the world around you, and that colored everything about the relationships between men and women; men could not afford to get "too attached" simply because of that factor alone, and oh-by-the-way, that was also why there was such a major difference in ages: Many younger males died due to the high mortality rates of daily life, and that meant that the only available males for younger women were older men, who were naturally not going to be on the same level, so far as life-experience went. Which factors are what really led to the social attitudes towards women of the era; in all too many cases, they really were children compared to the husbands fate threw at both of them. We'd look at a lot of the family relationships of that era and say we were looking exploitation and child-rape; they'd look back at us dumbfounded, and wonder how else they were supposed to proceed, and still have a functioning society?
I think one of the huge problems we have looking back at the ancients, and even people only a few generations removed from our times, is that we really, truly do not grasp or even begin to understand the implications from all the "contributing factors" stemming from the prevailing realities of the times. You and I see a 17-year-old girl marrying a forty-year-old man with children of his own, and what we see is a situation ripe with potential for abuse. The ancients saw a healthy potential marriage, providing that young woman with a stable, successful male, and giving him someone to take care of his kids, as well as a few others to enhance the odds some would survive. Their baseline assumptions about such things were entirely different than our own; we think "Well, she's pregnant, that's a new mother and a new kid to look forward to...", and feel cheated by life if she miscarries or dies in childbirth. Both are things that are uncommon enough, these days, that we simply don't expect them to happen. When they do? They're world-shatteringly tragic for all involved...
For the ancients? That was another Tuesday.
Which is why it's so damn difficult to get a handle on what they thought, what motivated them, and how they looked at things. The baseline assumptions simply were not the same as ours, based on the lives they led.
Which was my point, really... Most of my reading on the Romans has had a military focus, and very little of that has reflected family considerations in the lower ranks. It's about like trying to wrap your head around the lives of camp followers during the Napoleonic Wars, and the easy shifts the women and kids made between men as they became casualties. I certainly cannot comprehend the lives of those people, and really understand what the hell they were thinking; I mean, take your wife and kids with you to campaign in Spain, during the Peninsular War? What the hell? How on earth could you do that, but if you did not, then you weren't going to have a wife and kids at all, in all likelihood. What were the women thinking, knowing what they were going into, alongside their husbands, risking their children as well?
I've got a lot of problems trying to put myself in their shoes, and follow the logic. That's only a few short generations back, with people whose cultural traditions were not that much different than ours, yet...?
Trying to template our patterns of thought to correspond to those of pagan Romans, raised in a culture that would have looked at most of our values and mores as utterly alien? I'm not sure it is all that possible, to be honest. I like the job you did with this piece, and I want to believe in it, but... I've got my doubts, TBH. I am not sure that it is really even possible for someone from our era and culture to accurately capture it.
There's also a severe paucity of actual written accounts from that level within the Roman legions. Even the centurion-class left little mark on written history; the majority of what we have are upper-class things, which I'm here to tell you are a lot like Vegetius, where the writer got broad-stroke accuracy in his accounts, but utterly failed to record the minutiae of daily life.
Little things, you know? Like, did the Roman legions march in step, and what foot did they step off on? You think that a trivial question, but then you try to wrap your head around the tactical evolutions and maneuvers, and then you're left going "Well, if they didn't march in step, how the hell did they do *that*?"
We don't know something as simple as that? How on earth are we to really know what the hell the lower-ranking sorts were thinking and feeling about their family situations? Not knowing the actual conditions and attitudes? It's almost impossible to really say anything definitive, which was why I'd love to see your sources. I've obviously missed them, in my reading through the years.
BTW, "alien" is apparently how my story, in general, comes off, which I think is probably a sign I'm getting some of it right. Although it never occurred to me that is how it would read. I am often surprised by the reactions to my writing.
The effect of childbirth mortality on the viewpoint of men: that's a very good point -- I have not considered that at all. You have a lot of interesting points. And I agree with the different point of view / framing. I completely agree that people seem to ignore the impact of childbirth (and child!) mortality.
I'll try to put together a post with my sources over the next few days. And I'll also try to put something together about what led this kind of interpretation of the Roman rank and file soldiers.
One of the more memorable things I found, and would have one hell of a hard time finding again, was a translated passage from some surviving late Empire Roman correspondence between a Roman Senatorial-class father and his son who was out in the provinces doing his time as an official in some governor's office. Gist of the correspondence was son complaining to father about the expenses his wife was running up, and how he was having trouble reining her in. Father wrote back to the effect that she was his first wife, and that he had a duty to make her life as comfortable as he could, indulge her as much as he could, and make life as pleasant as possible for her. Why? Because she was very likely to be dead, soon, and die trying to produce the son an heir. Because of that, the father didn't mind any extra expenses she had, and to send the bills on to him!
The father wrote fondly of the son's mother, who'd died early in his childhood birthing his younger sister, and said how much he wished he'd done for her now that he was in his older years, and fondly recounted the other wives he'd had along the way...
The ratcheting effect of the age differential you often encounter going back in the genealogies and old graveyards is thought-provoking for a thinking person: How much of the junior relationship women often had stemmed from the very real differences in age and life experience between husbands and wives? If you're a teen or a twenty-something marrying a man in his late thirties or forties, who already has some children and is established, what sort of relationship is that going to be? How many years would you need to survive, before there was any real sort of equality there? As well, if you're the male in that situation, how are you going to cope with your third or fourth wife, having lost two or three to misadventure in childbirth? How will that color your thinking, in terms of the marital power relationship, and how will you think about the expense of educating your daughters?
These are all things I never see considered at all, whenever someone is talking about the "patriarchy". The current thinking is often expressed as though the person talking "patriarchy" thinks it was some sort of gender-related conspiracy, when in actual terms, it was people dealing with the prevailing conditions of the times as best they could. There wasn't the slack in the economics or in the needs of society that we have today; we don't realize just how good we have it.
Imagine being in your late thirties, male, and having to bury wife number three, with small children whose care you can't hire someone for, and then realize that you're going to have to approach the neighbor about his teenage daughter as wife number four... How does that play into your mindset, with regards to what we call "gender relations"? Is that *de facto* patriarch going to have very enlightened ideas about his wife's input into decisions he has to make for her and all the kids he's responsible for? Is she ever going to be anything other than the junior partner in that marriage?
Ignace Semmelweis doesn't get half the respect he's owed. The man ought to have statues outside every maternity ward in the world...
Based on this, I bought it....
I hope you like it as much as I did!
You are absolutely right about the content warning. I hesitated to write this, and then to publish it, because I was afraid it would be seen as an apologia for rape. However, based on feedback I believe readers have generally understood what I was trying to do.
I certainly understand your hesitation, but I think you thread the needle well. I don't think a modern reader could come away not recognizing the profound wrong that had been committed.
I have to admit that when I read this (probably when it first came out... It's been awhile...) what I wanted more than anything was a bibliography so I could go look at the author's research material myself.
Trying to write something like this is one hell of a challenge; I have to give the author due props for doing that, but... There was something "off" with the whole thing, in terms of the male perspective of that era, as she wrote it.
I've been through a bunch of material on the Romans, particularly regarding the Roman military, and what I came away with was a very different perspective on what I think the average junior legionary would have been like. You have to remember that these were hard men; they did things like loot, rape, and enslave as a matter of course. That was their world; they saw nothing immoral or wrong with it.
Neither did anyone else. Go back and look at a lot of the things that were done by the Romans and everyone else up to the modern era. The Mongols? Yeesh. Those were not people who'd have had second thoughts about what they were doing; remember, they spent weeks after entering Merv slaughtering the inhabitants and going so far as to search the bodies for swallowed valuables. PTSD was not on the menu for the ancients, and if they suffered anything analogous to it, you'd have a hard time telling from what evidence we have left from them. The Romans weren't any different from the Mongols; see Dacia for examples.
You are correct. I should probably put together a bibliography. It would be good to get other eyes on my interpretation of the data. Or even on whether my data sources are good enough.
I agree with you that these men did not see anything wrong with rape, looting, and enslaving. That should have been clear in my story. Especially since it is exactly because of looting that Procerus was able to afford to buy her in the first place. And it is exactly because, as a slave, she is, according to Roman law, a "res", a "thing", with no legal right to physical and sexual integrity, that he sees nothing wrong in forcing himself on her to consummate their "marriage." The whole point of the story is that he never does anything viewed by his society or himself (or Sophie herself!) that is wrong. He is "lawful good" all the way.
The fact that the Romans thought slavery was perfectly normal, though, did not mean that they thought BEING a slave was good. They certainly did not see it as a good thing for themselves. Slavery was perfectly fine for other people, but you didn't want it for yourself. It might also be fine for your slave, to whom you had every right of sexual access. But interestingly enough, it was NOT okay for your wife, because it meant your children were automatically slaves, and you did not necessarily have the right to free them. (This law came about because some people were freeing too many of their slaves, and the kin that would have inherited that human property objected. Roman laws changed over time, and I find it hard to determine exactly where and when such laws applied, stopped applying, applied again, etc.)
This does seem to differ from other places, where it appears that the child of a slave woman could easily be claimed as an heir without freeing her first. My research outside of a very narrow timeframe of ancient Rome, however, isn't very great. I can't even speak to the Greeks, let alone the Mongols, etc.
The reason it matters to Procerus whether or not she is a slave is because he is looking to start a family. Normally, someone of his class (which is probably still landowning but not necessarily slave owning) would have married a Roman woman, and his children would be freeborn Roman citizens. I don't believe he would normally have considered buying a woman as a slave at all otherwise. For sexual access, brothels were much cheaper, more convenient, and often located very close to a fort or garrison. In addition, when the military leaders ALLOWED looting, there was the option to rape the conquered women. Whether or not looting or rape was allowed was not a question of morality but of military objectives for Roman legion soldiers, according to: "Spare No One: Mass Violence in Roman Warfare (War and Society)" by Gabriel Baker.
Slaves were expensive, but again, it was difficult for me to determine exactly what the price of a slave would be at any particular place and time. I settled on Sophie's price being roughly the gross pay of a rank and file Roman soldier for one year, but I could easily be wrong.
In terms of Procerus leaving Sophie alone after the first night, as JE Tabor states he is indulgent (more so than Tritius), he can very well see that she is bothered, and he doesn't want to make her unhappy because he considers her his wife, even though legally, she isn't. Not because he sees, or ever sees, what he did as wrong. Again, as JE Tabor notes, both he and Sophie are limited by their time and culture in how far they can actually address the issue.
If you are implying that people in general, and men in particular, are unable to compartmentalize, and treat "these people / women" differently from "those people / women", or that fighting men back then didn't care about making the women that mattered to them happy, then I simply disagree with you.
What I think is that the people of that era "thought differently" to the point that they'd be almost entirely alien to our way of thinking and understanding others. It's not just a paradigm shift; it's a full-scale *frame* shift. Were we able to talk to them? It'd be about like a normal person talking to and trying to understand the worldview of a diagnosed sociopath: We'd be the ones they regarded as clearly insane, while we looked at them the same way.
There is one thing that I think a lot of women from our era look back at and discount, and that is the effect of childbirth mortality on the male mind. You knew, going in, that odds were quite good that you were almost certainly not going to "marry for life" because of that factor. Whoever you married or got pregnant, she was very likely to die delivering one of your children, and you were going to have to move on. You *knew* that from observation of the world around you, and that colored everything about the relationships between men and women; men could not afford to get "too attached" simply because of that factor alone, and oh-by-the-way, that was also why there was such a major difference in ages: Many younger males died due to the high mortality rates of daily life, and that meant that the only available males for younger women were older men, who were naturally not going to be on the same level, so far as life-experience went. Which factors are what really led to the social attitudes towards women of the era; in all too many cases, they really were children compared to the husbands fate threw at both of them. We'd look at a lot of the family relationships of that era and say we were looking exploitation and child-rape; they'd look back at us dumbfounded, and wonder how else they were supposed to proceed, and still have a functioning society?
I think one of the huge problems we have looking back at the ancients, and even people only a few generations removed from our times, is that we really, truly do not grasp or even begin to understand the implications from all the "contributing factors" stemming from the prevailing realities of the times. You and I see a 17-year-old girl marrying a forty-year-old man with children of his own, and what we see is a situation ripe with potential for abuse. The ancients saw a healthy potential marriage, providing that young woman with a stable, successful male, and giving him someone to take care of his kids, as well as a few others to enhance the odds some would survive. Their baseline assumptions about such things were entirely different than our own; we think "Well, she's pregnant, that's a new mother and a new kid to look forward to...", and feel cheated by life if she miscarries or dies in childbirth. Both are things that are uncommon enough, these days, that we simply don't expect them to happen. When they do? They're world-shatteringly tragic for all involved...
For the ancients? That was another Tuesday.
Which is why it's so damn difficult to get a handle on what they thought, what motivated them, and how they looked at things. The baseline assumptions simply were not the same as ours, based on the lives they led.
Which was my point, really... Most of my reading on the Romans has had a military focus, and very little of that has reflected family considerations in the lower ranks. It's about like trying to wrap your head around the lives of camp followers during the Napoleonic Wars, and the easy shifts the women and kids made between men as they became casualties. I certainly cannot comprehend the lives of those people, and really understand what the hell they were thinking; I mean, take your wife and kids with you to campaign in Spain, during the Peninsular War? What the hell? How on earth could you do that, but if you did not, then you weren't going to have a wife and kids at all, in all likelihood. What were the women thinking, knowing what they were going into, alongside their husbands, risking their children as well?
I've got a lot of problems trying to put myself in their shoes, and follow the logic. That's only a few short generations back, with people whose cultural traditions were not that much different than ours, yet...?
Trying to template our patterns of thought to correspond to those of pagan Romans, raised in a culture that would have looked at most of our values and mores as utterly alien? I'm not sure it is all that possible, to be honest. I like the job you did with this piece, and I want to believe in it, but... I've got my doubts, TBH. I am not sure that it is really even possible for someone from our era and culture to accurately capture it.
There's also a severe paucity of actual written accounts from that level within the Roman legions. Even the centurion-class left little mark on written history; the majority of what we have are upper-class things, which I'm here to tell you are a lot like Vegetius, where the writer got broad-stroke accuracy in his accounts, but utterly failed to record the minutiae of daily life.
Little things, you know? Like, did the Roman legions march in step, and what foot did they step off on? You think that a trivial question, but then you try to wrap your head around the tactical evolutions and maneuvers, and then you're left going "Well, if they didn't march in step, how the hell did they do *that*?"
We don't know something as simple as that? How on earth are we to really know what the hell the lower-ranking sorts were thinking and feeling about their family situations? Not knowing the actual conditions and attitudes? It's almost impossible to really say anything definitive, which was why I'd love to see your sources. I've obviously missed them, in my reading through the years.
BTW, "alien" is apparently how my story, in general, comes off, which I think is probably a sign I'm getting some of it right. Although it never occurred to me that is how it would read. I am often surprised by the reactions to my writing.
The effect of childbirth mortality on the viewpoint of men: that's a very good point -- I have not considered that at all. You have a lot of interesting points. And I agree with the different point of view / framing. I completely agree that people seem to ignore the impact of childbirth (and child!) mortality.
I'll try to put together a post with my sources over the next few days. And I'll also try to put something together about what led this kind of interpretation of the Roman rank and file soldiers.
One of the more memorable things I found, and would have one hell of a hard time finding again, was a translated passage from some surviving late Empire Roman correspondence between a Roman Senatorial-class father and his son who was out in the provinces doing his time as an official in some governor's office. Gist of the correspondence was son complaining to father about the expenses his wife was running up, and how he was having trouble reining her in. Father wrote back to the effect that she was his first wife, and that he had a duty to make her life as comfortable as he could, indulge her as much as he could, and make life as pleasant as possible for her. Why? Because she was very likely to be dead, soon, and die trying to produce the son an heir. Because of that, the father didn't mind any extra expenses she had, and to send the bills on to him!
The father wrote fondly of the son's mother, who'd died early in his childhood birthing his younger sister, and said how much he wished he'd done for her now that he was in his older years, and fondly recounted the other wives he'd had along the way...
The ratcheting effect of the age differential you often encounter going back in the genealogies and old graveyards is thought-provoking for a thinking person: How much of the junior relationship women often had stemmed from the very real differences in age and life experience between husbands and wives? If you're a teen or a twenty-something marrying a man in his late thirties or forties, who already has some children and is established, what sort of relationship is that going to be? How many years would you need to survive, before there was any real sort of equality there? As well, if you're the male in that situation, how are you going to cope with your third or fourth wife, having lost two or three to misadventure in childbirth? How will that color your thinking, in terms of the marital power relationship, and how will you think about the expense of educating your daughters?
These are all things I never see considered at all, whenever someone is talking about the "patriarchy". The current thinking is often expressed as though the person talking "patriarchy" thinks it was some sort of gender-related conspiracy, when in actual terms, it was people dealing with the prevailing conditions of the times as best they could. There wasn't the slack in the economics or in the needs of society that we have today; we don't realize just how good we have it.
Imagine being in your late thirties, male, and having to bury wife number three, with small children whose care you can't hire someone for, and then realize that you're going to have to approach the neighbor about his teenage daughter as wife number four... How does that play into your mindset, with regards to what we call "gender relations"? Is that *de facto* patriarch going to have very enlightened ideas about his wife's input into decisions he has to make for her and all the kids he's responsible for? Is she ever going to be anything other than the junior partner in that marriage?
Ignace Semmelweis doesn't get half the respect he's owed. The man ought to have statues outside every maternity ward in the world...
Have posted some of my sources here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-141176430
Thank you!
I wish every historical fiction author would do this, as well as highlight the "I totally made this up because I thought it sounded good..." bits.
Your story inspired me to write this: https://maryh10000.substack.com/p/her-father-made-this