The conceit here is that the vision-haunted hero gradually realises that his destiny is to lose for the greater good – Gaul has to go down in order for it to become modern France, a millennium or two later. She has a passion that is lacking, most of the time, from Norman Spinrad's highly professional The Druid King, which does something similar for Vercingetorix and his struggle with Caesar. This redeems a writing style that is at best clear and precise, but never more interesting. It helps that, in a sometimes cluttered way, Scott has an intense visual sense. Significantly, the villain for her is not any of her Romans, not even the demented and capricious Caligula himself, so much as a British traitor: Amminios, one of the sons of Cymbeline, to whom nothing is sacred, and animals and men are just pieces to move around the chequerboard of his mind. Scott is almost as good on the authoritarian, rational piety of the best of the Roman invaders as she is on the wild, intense spirituality of her Druids and women warriors.
This is an interesting historical novel because it deals with a clash of two very different senses of the sacred. Much of European history and culture comes from this split attitude: we want to be like the Romans and to be horribly warned against being like them.įor her Romans, animals are only tools, but then, so are people. It is to see the Romans as the builders of the continent's first long-distance roads and the people who tortured their enemies to death on crosses it is to marvel at a state that endured for a half-millennium and to be appalled at its corruption and fall.
To be a European is to be descended from the people whom they beat into submission or who helped kick them when they were eventually down. They are familiar because they haunt Europe's imagination they are our story of how absolute power corrodes the soul but gets to wear clean, white linen or golden armour along the way. The scary thing is how many of them look just as we expect – Caligula has calculating, brutal eyes Heliogabalus is so achingly pretty, and mildly deranged. You walk in from the heat of a Roman morning, and there they are, 40 pairs of marble eyes, sneering coolly across the ages.
There is a room in the Capitoline Museum that is full of the heads of emperors.
0 kommentar(er)
