Clodia’s Comments (group member since Jan 25, 2015)

Clodia’s comments from the The House of Dionysus group.

I read The Persian Boy a few years ago and really enjoyed it.
One of the things I liked is how the hero faces the kinds of tragic upheavals in his life that would destroy many people, but instead he emerges from the ashes of his old identity as a son of Persian nobility and forges himself a new and powerful persona. (I'm trying to explain what I mean without dropping too many spoilers.)

Good luck, Kayla!

No, sounds appropriate to the context. :)

J.P. wrote: "Clodia, may I share this with a couple of relevant m/m reading groups over at Facebook?

JP"

Please do :)

Seems worth mentioning here that Dancing Phaedra and Gaius and Achilles are half price over the month of July at Smashwords with coupon code SSW50

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/vi...

The late Roman Republic has always had a fascination for me. I love the larger than life characters such as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Cleopatra who had with everything to play for and did it with style. I also enjoy the work of the poet Catullus who wrote around this time and similarly evoked grand passions and a freedom to be himself.

In Dancing Phaedra, I enjoyed including a meeting with my hero Antyllus and Gaius Julius Caesar himself, and also weaving into the plot a few hints of the forthcoming scandal that would erupt when Julius Caesar's wife Pompeia got too friendly with the dangerous radical aristocrat Clodius Pulcher in the context of a women only religious festival attended by the Vestal Virgins..

J.P. wrote: "I think kink is great and there should be more, but BDSM becomes problematic within the master/slave dynamic, at least for me. BDSM in a master/slave relationship where the Dom is also the master i..."

This tension was something I wrestled with in Gaius and Achilles.

I would agree in general that such a disparity in terms of actual power as that between master and slave would make any sexual activity, let alone those under the BDSM umbrella liable to be labelled 'dub-con' at the least.

I attempt to get round this issue in Gaius and Achilles by relying on the personalities and individual circumstances of the two protagonists.

Achilles is a slave, but he is also a recently captured aristocratic youth and still thinks like one. He is unbroken, having previously demonstrated that he was willing to risk dire consequences to resist unwanted sex.

Gaius is a sensitive and affectionate man who is feeling rather lonely and vulnerable at the start of the novel. He is physically attracted to Achilles, but is only interested in a willing bed-partner, not a sullen, traumatised victim.

Gaius legally has the power to physically and mentally break Achilles to his will, but he doesn't have that in him and it's not what he wants and Achilles well understands this.

This is dubious territory and I'm walking a fine line here, but I think it is possible to juggle the dynamics so that a BDSM relationship between legal master and slave could work, even with the master as the top.

Conversely, of course, you could have a situation where a master is being flogged every night by his slave who would really rather not but daren't say so...

J.P. wrote: "Clodia wrote: "Oh - I hope the unexpected turn wasn't an unpleasant shock! I gave some indication of the contents in the blurb but I alluded to it rather too delicately perhaps.

Part of the reaso..."

Thanks JP! :)

:) Excellent! Dodgy classical puns are to be encouraged in the young.

What did Mark Anthony say when he arrived at a northern English town in search of black puddings?

I come to Bury, Caesar...

Oh - I hope the unexpected turn wasn't an unpleasant shock! I gave some indication of the contents in the blurb but I alluded to it rather too delicately perhaps.

Part of the reason for the strong BDSM theme is the character of Gaius himself. In Gaius and Achilles where we first meet him, he becomes involved in a carefully negotiated consensual BDSM relationship with his slave Achilles.

In that book, I hint that Gaius previously suffered guilt and confusion with regard to his urges to dominate and inflict pain on his lovers, in contrast to his otherwise notably gentle and considerate persona. I also mention that he went through a process with his friend and former lover Tiberius which helped him to come to terms with his urges in a safe and constructive way.
In a sense then, The Education of Gaius is an exploration of the hints dropped in the earlier book.

The question of BDSM in the ancient world as in other times and places is an interesting and complex one. Of course what we understand by the modern term BDSM is highly culturally specific. It represents a conscious development over the last few decades of carefully reflected upon practices and attitudes.

As you say, however, there's nothing new under the sun and there is evidence that games involving pain, power, restraint and submission have been part of the sexual repertoire of human beings of all times and cultures. The Indian sex manual The Kama Sutra famously details various kinds of impact play along with suggestions for keeping it safe (don't poke your concubine's eye out with scissors!)

Ancient Greek vases show men flagellating their sexual partners with slippers, while Roman erotic elegy glories in rough sex with bites and bruising seen as desirable tokens of passion.

What we don't have here, of course, is any evident ethics of consent or equality. Graeco-Roman society, as we know, understood itself in terms of patriarchal hierarchy - man/woman, citizen/slave citizen/prostitute. Writers such as Ovid treat rape as a joke, and informed consent is not seen as sexy or important to the elite producers of these texts and images.

Nonetheless, I do not think it's beyond the legitimate scope of a writer of fiction to speculate that people of the ancient world who were frequently involved in such activities in a consensual relationship might spontaneously develop rules and codes to ensure that such erotic games proceeded safely and to the satisfaction of all parties. After all the concept of the 'safeword' is closely related to signals used in contact sports and even children's games to end play when one person has had enough.

I did also come across some very intriguing research and speculation about the ancient Etruscans' attitudes to sexuality.

Apparently, these ancient peoples who ruled over part of Italy before the Romans had a reputation as decadent experts in all things erotic. When this is combined with the discovery of an erotic flogging scene in an Etruscan fresco, it inspired me to make the mischievous and somewhat tongue-in-cheek leap of suggesting that Gaius' mentor Tiberius might have developed such an in-depth praxis for such consensual erotic play by way of his mysterious Etruscan origins. Even the other protagonists take this with a pinch of salt and suggest that instead he made it up as he went along.


Here is an interesting speculative exploration of the Etruscan evidence -http://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/th...

Thanks for getting me to construct this answer and apologies for the length - think I'll have to turn it into it's own blog post! :)

Interesting topic.
Of course one of the attractions of writing stories set in the Greco-Roman world as opposed to say the Middle Ages or Victorian London is that under certain circumstances sexual relationships between men were seen as acceptable though generally within defined perimeters of relative age and social status. The question of how far such relationships could be 'romantic' as such rather than often exploitative is always an interesting margin to explore in fiction.

I'm looking forward to reading it too. It sounds fascinating from what I've heard so far!

There have been a few votes -

https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/1...

There seems to be a total of 6 votes here.

J.P. wrote: "You are, from this day hence, Magister Equitum, oh bringer of Antinous yum!

K, I gotta stop this and write. Night, amici!"

Night!

Would an Antinous pic do? :)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...

(Not sure how to insert images properly here)

Not a gladiator true, but nonetheless his presence must lend support to my candidacy for the office of Magister Equitum?

I shall forgo the dubious glories of the Dictatorship and instead opt for the title of Tribune...Tribunetrix :) or I could always gallop about as Magister Equitum.

One of my favourite myths is that of Arachne. Arachne was a girl who was amazingly good at weaving, producing beautiful tapestries that people marvelled at. Arachne was prideful of her skill and instead of giving thanks to the Gods for her gift, she boasted that she was a better weaver than the Goddess Athene herself.

Angered by this, the Goddess Athene nonetheless gave Arachne one chance to mend her ways. She appeared before the girl in the guise of an old woman and warned her that she should have more humility and proper respect for Athene. Arachne responded rudely and arrogantly.
Athene then appeared before Arachne in her full awe and majesty as a Goddess and challenged her to a weaving competition. Arachne had no choice but to accept and the two women, divine and mortal in silence set up their looms and began to weave.
When they were finished, Athene displayed a magnificent tapestry, pointedly showing stories of the Gods who had punished arrogant mortals in the past. Arachne's design insolently depicted the Immortals at their worst moments, in ludicrous or nefarious situations.
Outraged, all the more so because she could find no fault in the quality of the mortal girl's work, Athene attacked Arachne, beating her about the head with her wooden shuttle. Terrified at being assaulted by the enraged Goddess, Arachne hung herself from a beam. Seeing her strangling, Athene felt compassion. Striking her with the shuttle she transformed Arachne into a spider, and now she hangs still in the corners, busy at her weaving.

Lacus Curtius - http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E...

is an amazing site with myriad subsections including texts and translations, maps and out of copyright encyclopaedias on every topic of Roman life!

I like to see details that bring the everyday environment to life such as what people ate and wore and how they did everyday things like heat or light a room. I also like to get a vivid sense of external environment like streets or marketplace.

Sometimes it can be little details that remind you that this is a world very different from ours.

An example is the realisation of how unusual in would be to be really alone. If you were poor or a slave obviously you wouldn't have the time or space to be alone much, but even if you were well off with a suite of private rooms there would always be a slave in earshot in case you wanted something. You couldn't just wander to the kitchen and make yourself a quiet sandwich or run yourself a bath.

I think details only become too much when they pull you out of the story, when they're not really relevant to the current action or the character's state of mind but become an embedded mini essay. To me it's a question of lightness of touch, sketching the details in as you tell your story.

J.P. wrote: "We had a convo that went something like this:

"Piss, again?"

"Well, Allerix has been tied naked to a column all night. He's gonna piss at some point and there'll be some on the floor, no?"

"Make..."

:) A fine line to be drawn between realism and delicacy... (Poor Allerix)

Speaking of Roman plumbing, I've been finding it strangely hard to track down how exactly a private Roman bathhouse might work - taps that could be turned on and off? A constant flow from a fountain?