Peter Taylor-Gooby

A very thoughtful Amazon review:
*****
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2025
Set in fifth century BCE Athens, Peter Taylor Gooby spins a lively and dynamic tale. We might salute Athens as the cradle of Western democracy. But it is a warts-and-all democracy which the author brings to life - one riven by all the familiar weaknesses cruelties and societal prejudices of the human condition.

The immigrant queen is Aspasia, a woman of forceful vitality, who rises through a many-tiered class society to become confidante and lover to Athen’s most prominent statesman – Pericles. The author describes this unusual relationship through the eyes of Aspasia’s slave Limander, the novel’s narrator. As her resident musician, Limander is privy to the household’s intimate exchanges.

Aspasia has penetrated into the upper echelons of Athenian society, despite all the impediments of her birth - and her colourful life after reaching Athens. First and foremost, being female conferred few freedoms and certainly no political rights. In Taylor Gooby’s telling of her story, Aspasia was coy about her birth, though she claims to be the daughter of Queen Halicarnassus, ally of Athen’s arch-foe, the Persians. At the crucial battle of Salamis, this mother of hers switches allegiance, and Athens emerges victorious. Perhaps nobody loves a turncoat, or her spawn.….

If Aspasia hailed from Miletus, as history records, it is likely that she had a relatively good start in a life, helping to propel her far beyond any humble beginnings. Miletus, on the southwest coast of modern-day Turkey, was a major outpost of Aegean civilisation with its own extensive colonies; the city state also had a homegrown philosophical tradition which would have stood Aspasia in good stead when it came to her later immersion in the Athenian milieu of rhetoricians and teachers. In the narrative, to Pericles at least she becomes the ‘wise woman’.

In Athen’s very circumscribed democracy there were many barbed hurdles which lay in Aspasia’s way. Her slave Limander bore the stigma of being both immigrant and slave. Aspasia herself was both immigrant and bore the burden in Athens society, such as it was, of womanhood. The author weaves into the narrative the many examples of the vexatious status which the outlanders bore as second-and third-class citizens. Even more of an obstacle cast in Aspasia’s path was the accusation that before she met Pericles, she had worked as a courtesan, a madam even, and was well rehearsed in all the wiles for ensnaring Athen’s nobles.

The book describes her trial for impiety; the reader assumes that her de facto defence rests on her hammering to destruction of what she regarded as a lewd statue. The author has her modelling for the statue at the instigation of Pericles. The city’s most esteemed sculptor Phidias, who has his well-described walk-on role, did indeed create a famous statue of the Goddess Athena, patron of the city. Here the author intrudes a rift between the humiliated Aspasia – portrayed naked for all Athenians to gape upon - and Pericles. But her shunning of the beloved old warrior is only temporary and the narrative tension resolves.

The Athenian democracy is not one in which the city’s huge slave population could share. Limander, captive in the war against the powerful island state of Mytilene in the Aegean’s far east was no slave before he was taken prisoner. Throughout the narrative we follow his growing illicit relationship with the noble-born Alcis. Historians aver that homosexuality was not especially frowned upon in Athenian society, particularly if it involved an older man with a younger. It is said, however, that society deprecated a relationship between men of the same age. Yet here we have similarly-aged Limander the musician and Alcis the noble, the soldier. Though Limander was born of high caste before his capture and enslavement, now he is a slave and intercourse – social or sexual - with one of noble birth is highly dangerous for both parties. The author well conveys the dramatic tension of the relationship.

Finally, after saving Pericles in a boating accident, Aspasia grants Limander his freedom, which means the liberty to pursue the relationship with Alcis with far less danger. Tragically, though, Alcis dies in battle with the encroaching Spartans. The start of the gigantic and drawn out Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta is the tableau in which Alcis loses his life; Taylor Gooby might have glimpsed into the future for us – the epic conflict ended, after all, with Athen’s demise.

While the small people of Athens are by no means passed over in the book, memorable are the passages telling of the demeanour and foibles of the familiar ‘great men’ - Socrates to Phidias, Sophocles to Thucydides.

The Immigrant Queen above all reminds us, unhappily and depressingly even, that in our own world the multi-faceted prejudices of ancient Greece endure. This is a novel of unusual ambition and one demanding a broad knowledge of Greek society as the historians have portrayed it. The author rises to the challenge and has given us a very plausible and lively dramatization of the life of one of ancient Greece’s most captivating figures.

Hi Everyone
I'm planning an E-Book giveaway for my new novel "A Kinder City", starting on 19th May. Check in nearer the time fo further details.
A tale of love and environmental disaster set in a world a little bit like ours.
You can sample the book through "Look Inside" on Amazon