Ancient Roman Fantasy

 I’m behind on a lot of things again, and it’s really bothering me. At the time I’m writing this I haven’t even answered Fun Fact Friday on Tumblr. We’re that behind! Part of this is a function of Camp NaNoWriMo (which I am also sucking at, thanks for asking). 

But good news! Soon I’m going to be further in the Wheel of Time than I’ve ever been before! I kind of can’t wait to see how it all ends.

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Ancient Roman Fantasy

I’ve been reading Britannia and it got me thinking about Roman historical fantasy, and what it would be like to see more fantasy fiction set in a world based off of ancient Rome. There’s actually not that much out there, that I recall anyway. There are a lot of fantasy stories where the alternate Rome is a faction in the story--The Elder Scrolls for example, but in the game actually in the Empire that Roman aspect is scrubbed away for standard fantasy setting.

So ancient Roman fantasy! Here are some things I would think you’d see if you were in a fantasy world inspired by ancient Rome. I will say that these are not all things that I would say HAVE to be in ancient Roman fantasy, and in a fantasy story you can play with what should and shouldn’t be in your invented world. But here are things that I think would be good elements to play with in the story.

[Military structure, armor, and titles will not be mentioned--those get copied enough, I think.]

Mystery Cults

You know Rome had a heck of a lot of mystery cults, right? Underground cults where people got together to have a weird religion, very often built off of an appropriated foreign deity, that catered to a certain group. Military men really liked the Cult of Mithras, for instance, whereas the Cult of Isis was popular with women. Yes, people would pay tribute to the emperor, and the state religion of traditional Roman gods and all, but they’d also do the mystery cults.

[Part of pagan Rome’s problem with Christianity was that they assumed it was another mystery cult, and were utterly baffled by these people’s refusal to pay tribute to the traditional gods and the emperor like all the others did.]

I suspect that many of these were also ways to, y’know, hang out, like secret social clubs that were kind of like open secrets? A way to talk to other people outside of strict public rules. 

Fantasy set in a Roman world would have these out the wazoo. If the main character isn’t in one, then someone he or she knows certainly would be. They wouldn’t be threatening human sacrifice-type cults, at least probably not, but there would be some strange rituals that wouldn’t allow outsiders. Probably like hazing, if you think about it.

Now this being a fantasy story, whether there is any truth to the god in the cult is up to the writer. I imagine Mithra, the Persian divinity, would be very weirded out by watching what Romans are doing in his name and absolutely butchering his life story to make weird hazing rituals.

Public Religion

You know what, let’s talk about how weird religion was in general in ancient Rome. This idea of religion as a private thing you keep to yourself? Nope! There were plenty of really large public religious festivals, and even religious orders that had more power than you’d expect. The Vestal Virgins, for instance, were able to pardon people that the law was pretty dead set on killing. There is this common idea that pops up in fiction that the Roman elites didn’t actually believe in the gods. Whether or not this is true is up to debate, but I’d like to see a story in which this is true, only to have an actual god show up and throw his/her existence in the face of the nonbelievers.

This kind of thing happens in Christian fiction a lot more often, but I rarely see this is in the context of a pagan religion. I think it’d be fun. And what do the gods think of all these ceremonies? The sacrifices, the augers, the big parades in the street? And how much power in this fantasy world would the priesthoods of different deities have? I imagine someone like the high priest of the king of the gods or the patron war god would have a lot of power, whereas the priesthood of the deities of the death, which people don’t like very much, would be a group of kind of nobodies, who nonetheless hold official position and you wouldn’t want to get on their bad side.

There’s also a tendency for Romans to assume that other religions were pretty backwards. I know a lot of people believed pagan religions were all tolerant of each other, and some were. But the Romans tended to assume that other religions (that weren’t mystery cults) were all barbaric twistings of true religion. So many of the Celtic and Germanic religions of the time are lost in part because the Romans didn’t record that many of the pagan religions, assuming their gods were just different manifestations of their gods, and applied those names to their gods as titles.  And they didn’t always get it right. Compare English and Spanish days of the week--the Romans assumed that Wodin/Odin was the Norse/Germanic equivalent of Mercury of all deities.

I imagine, in a fantasy version, in which gods could be real, they wouldn’t have much fun with that either. 

Political Corruption

We have this idea, and it pops up in Roman fiction all the time, that the tyrannical emperors wrestled power from the people, and before the Senate was a much more benevolent, representative government. History doesn’t bear us out. If your Roman fantasy counterpart is in the Empire or Republic phase, there should be a LOT of corruption. Rome in its Republic was in constant cycles of civil wars, public feuds, and all attempts at reform pretty much failed and the ring leaders were executed by the state or by lynch mobs.

Romans had tons of problems with their government. Part of the reason a totalitarian ruler took hold was because people were sick of government corruption and the cycle of violence. A dictator that would, at least in theory, clean up the mess of corrupt politicians who most certainly did NOT represent the people (made up of the ruling class), well, they liked that.

Mind you, emperors weren’t always better. In many ways they could be worse. Sometimes they were tyrants. Sometimes they were puppets. Sometimes they killed family members. Sometimes they killed unpopular religious minorities. And sometimes people got sick of them. It got to the point that the Praetorian guard, the people tasked with protecting the emperor, got so fed up they had a habit of killing their boss. Which is kind of sad, actually--it’s the exact opposite of their intended job, after all.

Any representation of an empire anything like Rome in fantasy should be crawling with corruption. Whether that’s a bunch of two-faced politicians cutting backroom deals and bribing each other, or an emperor appointing his family members (or pets!) to important positions, or imperial guards that are the power behind the throne, there should be something rotten in the state of Rome.

Engineering Marvels

Look, the Romans had fantastic taste in design. One of the things that amazes people to this day is how well put-together their stuff is, for so many ruins to still be standing after all these centuries. Without these massive achievements in architecture and engineering, a fantasy version of Rome wouldn’t actually be a fantasy version of Rome.

There are other ways in which Roman engineering paid off. In warfare, they designed efficient weapons and war machines. The pilum, the Roman spear, for instance, was designed that you can’t rethrow it--after being thrown, the spear bends and becomes pretty much useless as a weapon. Your enemy can’t throw it back at you, and if it lands on a shield it immediately drags the shield down.

Likewise, siege weapons like catapults and ballista? Roman inventions (although in some cases, based off of earlier designs). Roman camps and defenses could be taken down and set up easily.

I’d like to see writers making a fantasy version of Rome with some of these inventions, but also with a lot of original designs. What other kinds of weapons could these not-Romans make in a fantasy world, with the fantasy resources at their disposal? If magic is a thing that can be harnessed, would there be magic projectile weapons? Would magic weapons only work for Roman soldiers? Would there be some kind of magic used in making even bigger architectural marvels? If this world has fantasy races, are any of them big enough to help with construction of huge monuments? Small enough to manipulate tiny, delicate mechanisms? 

Xenophobia/Nationalism

The Romans thought the world of themselves, but not so much of the people around them. Rome was civilization--everyone else was a barbarian that could do with some Romans around to show them how to properly live their lives (though of course, not become as privileged as the Roman citizens themselves). Rome was destined to rule the world, after all. Not everyone else was a slave, but they were, at best, second-class. They didn’t get the same rights, and certainly didn’t get much of a say in the way the government was run.

This actually continued after the Roman Empire’s decline. Some thinkers thought of Rome as the rightful secular rulers of the world. Hence you see people try to emulate them, or become their inheritors, with things like the Holy Roman Empire, or titles like ‘czar’ and ‘kaiser’ derived from ‘Caesar’. And also, notice that Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno, ranks the betrayal of Julius Caesar by Brutus and Cassius as on equal footing as Judas Iscariot betraying Jesus.

A character raised in a Roman analogue would have grown up with this attitude. Whether or not that belief sticks throughout the story is up to the writer (though if it’s the protagonist I lean towards ‘not,’ especially with the way modern politics are going nowadays), but it should at least be touched upon. If he or she runs into characters from other countries/provinces, it’d be nice to see how those points of view contrast with each other.

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