Youth solving crimes isn’t exactly a novel idea whether it involves a van full of hippies and a talking dog, brothers who always seem to go up against smugglers, or an intrepid young female detective.
For today’s post, though, if they’d be driving around in anything, it would be a chariot…
Ironically, the fact that Caroline Lawrence’s TheRomanMysteriesare set in the ancient past actually helps the series do something pretty new and unique with the premise of “bunch of kids solve crimes.”
But, alas, there is no talking dog.
Our story begins in Ostia – Rome’s port, known by the same name in the modern day; not too far down the Tiber from Rome itself – in AD 79.
Hearing that for the first time, I got really excited to start reading the series. Ostia, AD 79?
That’s my jam!
By which I mean “thing I have two degrees in.”
Well, strictly speaking, my “jam” (i.e. thesis subject) was Judaism in Late Antique Roman society…
And our story follows a group of four tweens who ultimately cross paths in Ostia.
The mainest character is Flavia, a girl from what is essentially the Roman upper-middle class. The second main character introduced is Nubia — that’s not her real name; the Romans are clearly just calling her by the region she’s originally from — a slave rescued from a cruel slave trader by Flavia’s family.
And that established that, despite being a kids’ series, The Roman Mysteries doesn’t really pull any punches in depicting the most uncomfortable aspects of Roman society – as you’ll learn with any superficial level of study, the Romans were not very nice people.
Things like slavery, the corruption of Roman politics and business practices, the brutalness of Roman warfare, and the ancient past’s much lower life expectancy are all depicted pretty frankly in The Roman Mysteries, not necessarily in a way that’s inappropriate for a children’s book, but I would not be surprised if it’s enough to upset more sensitive readers (adults and children).
Later on over the course of the first book, The Thieves of Ostia, Flavia meets the other two main characters: Jonathan, a Jewish doctor’s son (there was indeed a well-established Jewish community in and around Rome at this point in history) and a mute beggar boy called Lupus (technically, his name is “Lykos”, he’s Greek — both names mean “wolf” and Lupus is the Latin).
Once the four main characters are together, the spend the rest of the series kicking around Ostia and environs, occasionally crossing paths with real historical figures, then stumbling upon mysteries to solve.
That’s a very diverse (both in terms of ethnicity and social status) cross-section of the Roman population and I appreciate the books for offering a glimpse of how diverse Roman society actually was.
As a quick aside, since we’re on the note of diversity, here’s another reminder to check out the Diverse Fantasy & Sci Fi giveawy I’m involved in:
To get a sense of what the Roman Empire looked like in 79, consult this map from website Omniatlas. Obvious at a glance from that is that Rome was big – and it would get bigger. Rome’s territory would max out in 117, which Rome at its greatest extent looking like this:
All of which is to say, of course Rome was culturally and ethnically diverse.
An Empire doesn’t control the entire Mediterranean for centuries without creating an ethnically, culturally, religious diverse society. And the Romans themselves, despite a certain level of cultural posturing and sense of the inherent superiority of the Roman way did readily adopt non-Roman gods into their own practices – particularly noteworthy non-Roman gods who became widely worshipped by Romans include the Anatolian Cybele, the Egyptian Isis – both of whose cult practices feature heavily into the 2nd-century Roman novel The Golden Ass (i.e. donkey; the main character is magically transformed into a donkey and ultimately saved by Isis) – and the Iranian Mithras, whose mystery religion was widespread in Late Antiquity.
I’m not actually that much of a mystery reader, though most of the mystery series I have read do have a historical setting that does interest me – in addition to The Roman Mysteries, I’ve also really liked Medicus (which is basically The Roman Mysteries for grown-ups) and Judge Dee, fictional mysteries based on a real Tang Dynasty-era magistrate, who was introduced to the English-speaking world by a series written by the Dutch author Robert van Gulik after finding an old copy of the Chinese Judge Dee stories in an antique bookstore.
Ancient Rome is something I’ve loved reading about since I was a kid. My copy of the Eyewitness Rome book got a lot of mileage, so regardless of my feelings on the Mysteries part, I am all in on the Roman part.
And what I particularly like about The Roman Mysteries is that, although the kids do meet prominent, important people throughout the books, for the most part, they are themselves pretty unimportant, average people. Daily life of average people tends, both in pop culture and academia, to take a back seat to the big, exciting decisive set-pieces of history — the battles, the conquests, the assassinations, the big heroic dudes (and it is usually dudes, rather than women…) doing big heroic things.
Part of that is because the surviving sources are (again, almost invariably male) historians writing about the things historians like to read about. And part is the fact that most people think that “And then Scipio beat up Hannibal at Zama” is more interesting than “And then Quintus the Cypriot bought a new hat.”
Roman Mysteries author Caroline Lawrence has Classics degrees. Clearly, all the best authors do…
And she’s putting it to good use.
The Roman Mysteriesreally shines is in describing the details of daily life of average, everyday people. And, like I talked about above, one of the major details of daily life in Rome that quickly becomes apparent is that ancient Rome was not a great place to live.
In just the first book we have: a pretty frank description of a Roman slave market, Flavia’s memories of her mother and newborn siblings dying in childbirth, Nubia being sold as a slave, parents mourning the death of their young daughter from rabies, dogs getting killed (though the most graphic instance of this is potentially mitigated by being done in self-defence), religious intolerance, Lupus having had his tongue cut out, and a suicide described in a nightmarish amount of detail that is shocking for a kids’ book.
And the second book is basically a ground-level account of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The Roman Mysteries do get dark, but in a way that illustrates what daily life in Rome was actually like, but there’s also a lot of humour and I think a lot of potential to educate both kids and adults on life in the first century.
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