What do you think?
Rate this book
Canongate Classics
The Blood of the Martyrs
Introduced by Donald Smith. Set in Rome during Nero's reign of terror, The Blood of the Martyrs is a disciplined historical novel tracing the destruction of one cell of the early church. With a cast of slaves, ordinary Roman people, exiles and entertainers, it is thorough in its historical interpretation and in its determination to make the past accessible and readable. Written in 1938-9, the novel contains many symbolic parallels to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s and the desperate plight of persecuted minorities such as the Jews and the left-wing activists with whom Naomi Mitchison personally campaigned at the time. With the invasion of Britain a real possibility, she felt compelled to write a testament to the power of human solidarity which, even faced with death, can overcome the worst that human evil can achieve. The Blood of the Martyrs is the least autobiographical of Mitchison's major works of fiction, yet, with its implicit credo, is her most passionately self-revealing.
432 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 1990
7 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Naomi Mitchison
162 books136 followersNaomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 20, 2020
have just finished this fantastic book! If you have read and enjoyed Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz you will love this one too. Set In Rome during the reign of Nero this is a wonderful historical novel which tells of the lives of both slaves and Roman citizens and how they are affected by the rise of Christianity. The author takes time to introduce you to each of the characters and as you get to know them you become involved with their lives and concerned for their well being. As the story progresses to its inevitable conclusion it is very moving and you are drawn into the lives of the Christians and start to care very much what happens to them. The cruelty and inhumanity of the Roman's towards the Christians at the time was diabolical and it is so hard to realise how such things could be done by one human being to another when reading it today.
June 2, 2021
Loved some of the characters - Beric and Argas. It felt like they were struggling with understanding what was right and doing the right thing, and failing miserably half the time.
I found the swiftly changing POVs a bit chaotic and the first 140 pages which set out to introduce each of the characters felt like many short stories that didn’t necessarily fit well in the overall structure of the novel. A bit repetitive in displaying the characters’ beliefs and mostly quick acceptance of their self-sacrifice which made them almost stereotypes and not fleshed out characters.
I enjoyed how you can draw a parallelism between Rome, how modern it was and how convenient for its citizens to dismiss the use of slaves as a necessary way to progress, and our modern world, where privileged citizens live off underdeveloped countries but don’t change their behaviour out of fear of having to give up their comfortable lifestyle.
I found the swiftly changing POVs a bit chaotic and the first 140 pages which set out to introduce each of the characters felt like many short stories that didn’t necessarily fit well in the overall structure of the novel. A bit repetitive in displaying the characters’ beliefs and mostly quick acceptance of their self-sacrifice which made them almost stereotypes and not fleshed out characters.
I enjoyed how you can draw a parallelism between Rome, how modern it was and how convenient for its citizens to dismiss the use of slaves as a necessary way to progress, and our modern world, where privileged citizens live off underdeveloped countries but don’t change their behaviour out of fear of having to give up their comfortable lifestyle.
November 8, 2023
The Blood of the Martyrs is the story of a group of Christians under persecution in Nero’s Rome.
The first part gathers the different characters and gives their backstories, the second ties them together and the third sees how they will act when the pressure is increased. There’s something methodical, almost scientific about the book. Explaining the chemicals that will be used, mixing them together and turning up the heat. Some may find the first part a little slow but I really enjoyed finding out the type of people in play during the story before the plot really asserts itself.
One of the most enjoyable details is the dramatis personae at the beginning. Characters are listed in order of importance, with Roman citizens getting a name and description, then important non-Romans having the same and the slaves all bunched up at the end and only listed under who owns them. Yet most of the main characters of the book are the ones bunched up at the end. We are presented, at first, with the slaves having no identity other than their owner but they end up controlling the narrative - it’s a neat thing.
Although it’s largely an ensemble piece, the main character is probably Beric. He’s in a strange position, son of the British King Caradog (or Caractacus), he’s been raised in a noble Roman household but is not a citizen himself. At first he is blind to the oppression he grows up around, finding it good clean fun to force Jewish slaves to eat pork, and he’s in love with the truly nasty Flavia. It’s when she publicly turns him down that some slaves comfort him and he sees the glimpse into a different world, the world of Christians.
Christianity is presented in a really interesting way in the book. For most of the characters, it’s more of a set of social and political beliefs. Christ’s Kingdom is not a spiritual realm or an afterlife, it’s a hope for a world in which all people treat each other like brother and sister. Christ himself, though regarded as divine, is so because he shows people a new and better way to live, with dignity, courage and fellowship. They wash each other’s feet, the communion is a simple shared meal where what is celebrated is not some mystical oneness with God but oneness with each other. Their practice of forgiving is a truly radical act, something they strive to do and something which gives even the slaves a modicum of power and control - they have the power to forgive those that hurt them.
It’s also interesting how many types of Christianity are represented in the book. For some, it is wholly political, with Jesus being part of a long list of leaders who died for their people from Kleomenes (featured in her previous book, The Corn King and the Spring Queen) and Sparticus. For the practising Jewish/Essene Christians, it is part of a great drama of creation, with a promised collision of good and evil. Most of the Christians in the book see the Resurrection as irrelevant to being a Christian, with living in a Christlike way being far more important than any sense of a grand redemption.
St Paul is in the book. He’s locked in prison and is somewhat a laughable figure. He keeps trying to bring big spiritual and neoplatonist concepts into the new religion but most people regard him as a bit of a crank in that regard. Many of the other imprisoned Christians find him quite tiresome, with one coming back from torture and sighing; “Isn’t it enough being beaten up without Paul coming to talk at me too?” Another time, Paul is discussing his recent letter to the Ephesian church and another Christian rags him, telling him how terrible it would be if that letter was regarded as general dogma and not a specific letter for a specific church. Paul says people, especially Christians, would never be so blinkered.
It’s interesting to see Christianity as something radical and dangerous, appealing to the urban youth. One observer says that the religion is just ‘a problem of overcrowding’ and the forms the groups take in the book could only happen in a cosmopolitan city.
There’s more than just this (very appealing) form of Christianity in the book though, there are murders and plots and a big chunk of the characters are mauled to death by animals.
Ultimately, the biggest shame is that Christianity became the Roman Empire.
The first part gathers the different characters and gives their backstories, the second ties them together and the third sees how they will act when the pressure is increased. There’s something methodical, almost scientific about the book. Explaining the chemicals that will be used, mixing them together and turning up the heat. Some may find the first part a little slow but I really enjoyed finding out the type of people in play during the story before the plot really asserts itself.
One of the most enjoyable details is the dramatis personae at the beginning. Characters are listed in order of importance, with Roman citizens getting a name and description, then important non-Romans having the same and the slaves all bunched up at the end and only listed under who owns them. Yet most of the main characters of the book are the ones bunched up at the end. We are presented, at first, with the slaves having no identity other than their owner but they end up controlling the narrative - it’s a neat thing.
Although it’s largely an ensemble piece, the main character is probably Beric. He’s in a strange position, son of the British King Caradog (or Caractacus), he’s been raised in a noble Roman household but is not a citizen himself. At first he is blind to the oppression he grows up around, finding it good clean fun to force Jewish slaves to eat pork, and he’s in love with the truly nasty Flavia. It’s when she publicly turns him down that some slaves comfort him and he sees the glimpse into a different world, the world of Christians.
Christianity is presented in a really interesting way in the book. For most of the characters, it’s more of a set of social and political beliefs. Christ’s Kingdom is not a spiritual realm or an afterlife, it’s a hope for a world in which all people treat each other like brother and sister. Christ himself, though regarded as divine, is so because he shows people a new and better way to live, with dignity, courage and fellowship. They wash each other’s feet, the communion is a simple shared meal where what is celebrated is not some mystical oneness with God but oneness with each other. Their practice of forgiving is a truly radical act, something they strive to do and something which gives even the slaves a modicum of power and control - they have the power to forgive those that hurt them.
It’s also interesting how many types of Christianity are represented in the book. For some, it is wholly political, with Jesus being part of a long list of leaders who died for their people from Kleomenes (featured in her previous book, The Corn King and the Spring Queen) and Sparticus. For the practising Jewish/Essene Christians, it is part of a great drama of creation, with a promised collision of good and evil. Most of the Christians in the book see the Resurrection as irrelevant to being a Christian, with living in a Christlike way being far more important than any sense of a grand redemption.
St Paul is in the book. He’s locked in prison and is somewhat a laughable figure. He keeps trying to bring big spiritual and neoplatonist concepts into the new religion but most people regard him as a bit of a crank in that regard. Many of the other imprisoned Christians find him quite tiresome, with one coming back from torture and sighing; “Isn’t it enough being beaten up without Paul coming to talk at me too?” Another time, Paul is discussing his recent letter to the Ephesian church and another Christian rags him, telling him how terrible it would be if that letter was regarded as general dogma and not a specific letter for a specific church. Paul says people, especially Christians, would never be so blinkered.
It’s interesting to see Christianity as something radical and dangerous, appealing to the urban youth. One observer says that the religion is just ‘a problem of overcrowding’ and the forms the groups take in the book could only happen in a cosmopolitan city.
There’s more than just this (very appealing) form of Christianity in the book though, there are murders and plots and a big chunk of the characters are mauled to death by animals.
Ultimately, the biggest shame is that Christianity became the Roman Empire.
May 21, 2024
I was looking forward to reading this portrayal of the early church in Rome but I found this book disappointing. I did enjoy the historical information and insight into the practicalities and danger of being a Christian under Roman power and the descriptions of other religions and politics of the period. However, as a novel, there were too many characters and most of the book is taken up with introducing them before it gets to the plot.I also found the writing style sentimental and there was not a clear message of the gospel in the whole book!
September 3, 2017
Master class in creating characters and letting them act and interact as true individuals. Book of the year so far: 1939 and 2016.
July 2, 2019
The story is great and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I quite like the slightly old-fashioned grammar and expression, although these could irritate some.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews