My first rant!
I’ll start by saying that if criticism is valid, then I’ll take it. There are a few to do with The Forgotten Legion, which well meaning bloggers have put out there: E.g. the gladiator bouts in the later afternoon were the most anticipated events of the day, which meant that everyone wanted to see them, not just the most bloodthirsty. True. The fact that the thumbs down was not used to sentence a defeated fighter to die at the hands of his opponent. True. (That one I did know, but left it in the book as I was advised – grrrr – that it would be better to do so, as that’s what most people think. I wish I hadn’t.) Another one was the use of ‘Pax Romanum’, not ’Pax Romana’. True. Major crime that one, although it got corrected for the paperback. Also Caesar owed money to Crassus a few years before the time frame in The Forgotten Legion – I knew that, but didn’t acknowledge it. Mea culpa. My slip ups.
What I don’t like is invalid or unwarranted criticism. There are a couple of reviews of my book out there in cyberspace which have incorrect or unwarranted critical points that I feel strongly enough about to write answers to them. Here are the ones which bug me the most:
1) While ox carts were banned in Imperial Rome, they were allowed in the city in Republican times.
2) While women might have been seated separately in the Colosseum (not built for a century after my book), we do not know how they were treated in Republican times, in the temporary stands in the Forum Boarium, or in Pompey’s theatre. Without proof that they were segregated, it’s OK in my opinion to have them present with men.
3) As for the rape of the slave girl at the beginning of the novel – how does anyone know what Caesar might or might not have done after a few glasses of wine? I don’t care how many lovers he had or how abstemious he might have been. People do the strangest things when they’re drunk. And to another blogger who thought rape wasn’t that likely on the streets of Rome – hello? This is the city in which Pompey was barricaded into his own house for months by thugs; the same place where Julius Caesar had his men beat up a consul in public; and where the Senate House was burnt to the ground in broad daylight by rioters. Is one rape that unlikely in the midst of that?
4) In the Republican period, it was known for slaves to wear manacles on the street, and on estates. I’ve got the textbooks to prove it. And while Plautus did write that slaves called their masters by their names, I did not feel that was appropriate in my novel, given that I was recounting brutal masters. I reckon that it’s impossible to prove wrong. If you’ve got the evidence, please let me know.
5) My ’modern’ attitude to rape. Some things a person knows are just wrong (that’s recognised by psychologists), and for a child to see his mother taken by force every night is one of those in my opinion. The period in history doesn’t matter for abhorrent things like that.
6) So Romulus couldn’t have defeated Lentulus in the duel, because he was only 14 years old? To ease any concern in readers’ minds, I made Romulus’ foe only a couple of years older than he was. I also only had him win because of a trick, not because of his greater strength or skill. And, last time I checked, The Forgotten Legion is a novel. Hmmm. Let’s think what would have happened if Romulus had been killed by Lentulus. Not too much.
That’s about it…for now…