A thank you to N.S. Gill for finding this essay by Allan Massie — one of my favorite British fiction writers of the genre — in Prospect Magazine, titled “Return of the Roman.”
His starting point is a recently published book by Salvatore Settis, The Future of the Classical.
In this thoughtful piece, Mr. Massie discusses the attraction of classics oriented fiction, both to the writer and the reader, and concludes:
People may have only a vague notion as to the exact nature of our debt to antiquity. They may be—indeed, must be—further from understanding classical culture than those belonging to earlier generations, whose education was dominated by Greek and Roman texts. Nevertheless, Greece and Rome continue in some way to matter as other periods of history, and other cultures, do not. Those of us who write and read novels set in the ancient world are striving to absorb something of its significance. Our novels may offer only a shadowy representation of the reality of Greece and Rome, but even that shadowy version is preferable to classical culture being submerged in the dark.
I whole-heartedly agree! Mr. Massie's Roman novels:
Caesar
Antony (out of print in the U.S.)
Augustus, a Novel
Tiberius: The Memoirs of the Emperor
Caligula
Nero's Heirs see my review
