Captured by Mark Anthony during the conquest of Gaul, 18-year-old Julia was already nicknamed the Goddess of Whores by the women whose husbands and sons she’d seduced before he brought her to Rome to live as his mistress on his farm just outside Rome.
But her blonde good looks and her voracious appetite for men mean she’s becomes well-known in the upper echelons of Roman society, and soon becomes embroiled in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar – a plot instigated by Mark Anthony’s scheming wife.
Her plan includes using Julia as a decoy, and also to take the blame for Caesar’s death. Mark Anthony’s plan is slightly different, and includes marrying Cleopatra once Caesar is murdered.
Julia just wants to go on living – and go on having as many men as possible as often as possible. Including the goat-god Pan, brought to life in the cellars under the city by Cleopatra and equipped with a real-life member that was even bigger than those on the exaggerated statues of the god which were in every Roman household.
This is a book about a completely alien era: Roman customs and behaviour were utterly different to our own and may be shocking if you’re unaware of the things they thought of as normal. It might even shock people who know what went on in Rome, and not just at the Circus. The truth is that the things they did were far more outrageous than what we thought they did.
Any nation which practised human bloodsports on an epic scale for the purposes of entertainment is obviously operating on a totally different set of values to our own, and that makes it a difficult topic to write about. And that’s not just me. Over the years plenty of historians have fudged this issue, avoided it completely, or even tried to conceal the truth.
Some rooms in Pompeii are filled with erotic sculptures and paintings, but have been hidden for a hundred years because scholars thought they were too shocking for uneducated eyes and minds. And these artworks weren’t just in brothels, or the posh villas of the super-rich – the whole city is filled with depictions of sex, in houses and on public buildings, many of which would have been visible to people passing by in the street. And there’s no cause to believe that Pompeii is unique in this respect. It’s reasonable to assume that the same is true in the other cities which haven’t been preserved in stone for two thousand years, and that Romans simply weren’t embarrassed about fucking other people, nor about watching it, or showing it off as art.
Nor about staging it as entertainment, and once again this isn’t something under the counter in the backstreets. It was a prominent and public affair, happening all over town but most notably in the games that took place at the Circus Maximus and later at the Colosseum, and other smaller arenas around the Roman world. And these were public buildings, erected by the state, not by private enterprise. Every major city had an arena of some kind, complete with gladiators, death and sex.
That’s the other thing the historians fudged: although the Romans liked watching people die, they also loved watching them have sex, often with animals and usually against their will in the context of the Games. This is so well-documented that there’s no question of its veracity, but it’s not something they teach in school. You have to pass a lot of exams before you’re considered serious enough to study things like this.
And that’s mostly because of the moral dilemma we all have to deal with when thinking about and writing about these topics, both fact and fiction alike. When Barbara Cartland wrote all her bodice-rippers, and legions of writers emulated her in the pages of Mills and Boon novels, they all ended the chapter at the critical moment, but we all know very well that the three little dots at the end of the sentence are a substitute for descriptions of an epic fuck between hero and heroine…
Or villain and heroine…
People like me replace the three dots with graphic descriptions of epic fucking – or at least we do so up to a point. Exactly where that point is, and where to draw the line between a ripping good yarn and an unpleasant story is where the problems lie.
The association between sex and violence is something that inflames tempers as well as senses, and has done for centuries.
During his lifetime Julius Caesar was known as the Father of the Games, because he staged so many and because he was the one who changed them from a refined gladiatorial contest into the bloody spectacle for which they are best known. He was also the one who passed a law requiring segregated seating at the Circus Maximus, because of the hysteria that overcame female spectators and caused them to fornicate indiscrimately with anyone who happened to be sitting next to them. Obviously young men from the slums made a point of sitting next to rich women from high society and were rewarded with a posh fuck, while the wives of the Roman elite enjoyed a bit of rough – right there on the wooden bleachers, in broad daylight and with 100,000 people watching, so overcome with hysteria that they didn’t care.
You can see the same overpowering emotions in embyonic form if you watch a modern boxing or wrestling match; women in the front rows getting completely carried away. The same sort of thing happens at rock and pop concerts – venues take on extra medical staff to deal with the huge numbers of young girls who are so hysterically excited by the occasion that they pass out. Anyone who has been in one of the recovery rooms, with rows and rows of recumbent girls, will tell you that the room has an overpowering aroma, and it’s not perfume.
Something else historians have fudged is the real meaning of Lisztomania. We all know that the concert pianist was the rock idol of his day and his performances sent countless hordes of respectable young women into fits of hysterics. What you won’t read on Wikipedia is that after the concert when everyone had left, you could easily tell which of the seats had been occupied by girls and women.
How much of that is a sniggery little secret we all guess at in our private thoughts but don’t really share, and how much of it is a legitimate topic for authors? And what changes when the purpose of the book is not so much historical explanation as hysterical titillation? Is it any less acceptable when it’s just for fun? Who decides, and on what basis?
These are blurred lines that are constantly moving. I remember reading the headlines at the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in 1960, but was too young to care about the verdict. By 1971 I was old enough to see the Oz trial for the farce it really was, and later on to laugh at Mary Whitehouse and her prudish attempts to conceal all forms of sex from view. Now I’m old enough to despair as the cancel culture of social media has replaced the National Viewers and Listeners Association she created with a force far more powerful and judgemental. Write something the twitterati don’t like, and you WILL lose your job, and possibly your freedom as well.
It’s too late to change that without becoming the subject of a twitter pile-on yourself, and anyway I don’t have a ready-made solution to offer. I do think there’s a difference between The Goddess books and an instruction manual on how to make a bomb from stuff you can buy in B & Q, and I don’t think it takes much more than common sense to tell them apart, but once you’re looking at two books about sex and sexuality and only one of them is banned because someone thought it was a bit too flippant for the general public while the other is a scholarly work of reference – you’ve got a problem.
therogerquine 