A Gladiator Dies Only Once (34 page)

Reading Theocritus during my research for “Archimedes’s Tomb,” I came across the poet’s twenty-third idyll, which became the inspiration for “Death by Eros.” The details of the spurned lover, the cold-hearted boy, the suicide, the pool, and the statue of Eros are all from Theocritus. In his version, death is a result of divine, not human, vengeance; I turned the poet’s moral fable into a murder mystery. “Death by Eros” was originally written for
Yesterday’s Blood: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology
(Headline, 1998), in which various authors paid homage to the late creator of Brother Cadfael. In that book, I noted that the story’s theme “would be familiar to Ellis Peters, who frequently cast lovers (secret and otherwise) among her characters. In her tales, for the most part, love is vindicated and lovers triumph; would that it could have been so for the various lovers in this story.”

Having never written at any length about gladiators, I decided to do so with “A Gladiator Dies Only Once.” The financial and critical success of the movie
Gladiator
was something of a puzzle to me (inspiring me to post my own review of the film at my Web site), but the timeless fascination of the gladiator cannot be denied. Not all Romans craved the sight of bloodshed in the arena (Cicero found the combats distasteful); nonetheless, the distinctly Roman tradition that linked blood sports with funeral games eventually grew into a cultural mania. Centuries later, these gruesome enterprises continue to puzzle us, prick at our conscience, and tickle our prurient interest.

“Poppy and the Poisoned Cake” was written at the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal; hence its cynical flavor. The details of the crime can be found in Valerius Maximus (5.9.1) and are further explicated in Gruen’s
The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
(particularly on page 527). Cicero’s quip regarding the piece of cake is recounted by Plutarch; that I have tied it to this particular case is an exercise of artistic license. (Small-world tidbit: The Palla in this story is the same Palla whose property was said to have been stolen by Marcus Caelius; that accusation was one of the counts against Caelius, along with the murder of an Egyptian envoy, in the trial at the center of my novel
The Venus Throw.
The ruling class of Gordianus’s Rome was a very tight-knit community, indeed.)

“The Cherries of Lucullus” was inspired, in a roundabout way, by a reader in Germany, Stefan Cramme, who maintains a Web site about fiction set in ancient Rome (
www.hist-rom.de
). When my editor told me a new paperback edition of
Roman Blood
would be forthcoming, giving me a chance to correct any small errors in the book, I contacted Cramme, whose knowledge of ancient Rome is encyclopedic, and asked him to “do his worst.” Cramme informed me of an anachronism, which until then seemed to have slipped past every other reader: in
Roman Blood,
in a moment of erotic reverie, Gordianus commented that Bethesda’s lips were “like cherries.” Alas, as Cramme pointed out, most historians agree that cherries did not appear in Rome until they were brought back from the Black Sea region by the returning general Lucullus around 66 B.C.—fourteen years after the action of
Roman Blood.
Since it appeared unlikely that Gordianus could have used cherries as a simile, I amended that reference. In current paperback editions of
Roman Blood,
Bethesda’s lips are likened not to cherries but to pomegranates—an echo, perhaps not entirely fortunate, of a line uttered by the wicked Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) to taunt Moses (Charlton Heston) in the campy film classic
The Ten Commandments.

No historical novelist likes to be found in error, and the problem of cherries at Rome continued to nag at me. I did further research into the diffusion of cherries around the Mediterranean, and discovered that the sources are not entirely unanimous in asserting that cherries were unknown in Rome prior to Lucullus’s return from the Black Sea region, and so there is a slight chance that Gordianus’s musing was not anachronistic after all; but a more significant result of my research was a growing fascination with Lucullus and his amazing career. (Plutarch’s biography makes splendid reading.) Never having touched upon him in the course of the novels, I decided to do so with a short story—and at the same time, to confront head-on that business about cherries and exorcise it from my psyche once and for all. Thus “The Cherries of Lucullus” was conceived. The incident of the gardener Motho is fictional, but the members of Lucullus’s circle, including the philosopher Antiochus, Arcesislaus the sculptor, and the poet Aulus Archias, were actual persons, and all the pertinent details of Lucullus’s remarkable rise and sad decline are based on fact.