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Gary Devore

~ archaeologist and author

Gary Devore

Category Archives: Roman

Meat-Scenery

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Film, Hadrian's Wall, Pedius, Roman, Rome, Writing

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mystery, publishing, Rome, writing

 

butterfly

The penultimate scene of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a far better piece of cinema than anything associated with Mel Gibson.  If you don’t know it, learn it.

In the 19th century, photography brought the carnage of the American Civil War home to the civilian population.  Photographers captured the torn and twisted bodies of anonymous soldiers strewn across battlefields, and those images were published in newspapers and journals to show the cost of a war that would go on to kill 2% of the entire population of the country.  The barbaric violence was put on full display and changed our national perception of death.

civilwarbattlefield

During the brutal trench warfare of WWI, photography, and also increasingly the moving image, documented horrible new forms of mass death men inflicted upon men.  Poison gas and the machine gun rendered killing impersonal.  The brutal slaughter, the bloody sundering of bodies without discrimination, horrified a generation of European men.

Now such graphic violence is masturbatory fodder for men (almost always men) playing a gory video game or watching a violent movie.  Especially a fucking Mel Gibson movie.

hacksaw-ridge-banner

Anonymous men in uniform get torn apart let and right in Gibson’s new film– and most of the time in “cool” graphic ways bordering on both the sadistic and acrobatic.  Unnamed soldiers are “disposable people” and their cinematic suffering is presented without any real thought or comment other than a voyeuristic pleasure inversely proportional to any audience’s sense of compassion.  These torn-apart bodies are dehumanized on the screen (especially the non-Christian Japanese).  They are background meat-scenery.  They are not protagonists.  They are not actual humans with thoughts and emotions, or anything the camera is willing to linger on except their blood, viscera, and gore.  These men are mute but for their screams.  In the larger narrative, they don’t matter because the camera only objectifies their anguish.  The film perversely revels in their messy deaths.  Their only role is to convey whatever pious, cruel, muddled message Gibson’s harping on now (jonesing for some sort of professional comeback without, you know, actually doing any real contrition to deserve it).

This lack of compassion, or at least the failure to apply it uniformly, is a tiresome hallmark of Gibson’s directorial work.  It is also a theme in the novel I just finished.  I’ve written a murder mystery set in the ancient Roman world– a brutal world Gibson would have felt at home in.  But I didn’t want to just present corpses for my detective, already cold MacGuffins simply representing puzzles to be deciphered.  I wanted to explore what it meant to be a compassionate man in that time who understood on a deep level that there really are no “disposable people,” and only our immature selfishness deems them so.  My main character, Gaius Pedius, learns every life has value.  He realizes that every man who dies on a battlefield (or is cut down by a murderer) is the subject of his own tragedy, his own subjectified reality.  Pedius’ investigations are not just a search for justice, but a forceful rejection of men like Gibson (who exist in every age) and their bloodthirsty nihilism.

death-meleager

I’m assembling the final draft now and getting ready to begin the protracted process of querying agents to shepherd it toward publication.  Along with hopefully being an enjoyable, amusing mystery novel, I hope A Murder of Crows on the Wall can also be, in its small way, a compassionate, Humanistic counter to our modern American trend toward dehumanization and cruelty.  And anything else Gibson puts up on the screen.

 

Crows: A Tyrant’s Empire

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Hadrian's Wall, Roman, Writing

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3071

I mentioned in my last post that my new mystery novel A Murder of Crows on the Wall takes place in 209 CE. For most people in the Roman world, I suppose that year was one of relative calm and security, although they could easily remember violence and civil war. A North African military man named Septimius Severus had been their emperor for 16 years. In the beginning, he had been just one of four powerful men attempting to seize power after the assassination of the despotic Commodus (the villain from that Gladiator movie). Severus had succeeded by force of arms after a chaotic four-year civil war when Roman legions fought other Roman legions on behalf of their favored imperial candidate.

After a short respite, the question of who was finally going to be the uncontested emperor was only solved after a big, bloody battle in 197, twelve years before the opening of my story. For context, Bush’s electoral defeat of John Kerry was only 12 years ago from now. The seizure of the throne by a powerful family of upstarts and outsiders from North Africa was fresh in the Romans’ minds.

Severus was a cruel and ruthless man who valued the might of the military above all else. He began a new imperial dynasty at Rome, and his family members mostly took after him. His eldest son Caracalla would eventually be his disastrous successor, becoming what Edward Gibbon called, “the common enemy of mankind” (quite a statement given the general reputation of Roman emperors). Caracalla’s reign would also begin with great violence, including the murder of his brother Geta by his own hand in the presence of their mother. Both brothers are characters we meet in my novel.

It is no surprise that between 197 and 209, Severus conducted several large-scale military campaigns around the empire. Warfare was mostly what he knew, and he felt the most comfortable on campaign. The economy and internal politics at Rome were still relatively stable, an inheritance from the period of prosperity cultivated by the second century emperors (such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius). Severus launched offensives in the east, conquering some land from the mighty Parthian empire, and in Africa where he established a line of fortifications to protect the southern frontier of the Roman Empire.

Severus then turned his sights on the province of Britain, to do something the Romans had never quite been able to accomplish­– lay claim to the entire north of the island (modern Scotland). So for the first time in two generations, Roman troops marched into Britain and conducted a brutal war of suppression against the northern tribes. Severus led the campaign, although he was old and infirm and had to be carried around in a litter because of his painful gout. Before the end of the war, he would be dead and his son Caracalla would hurry back to Rome as the new emperor.

This northern war is the backdrop for my novel. My main character, a Romanized Greek named Gaius Pedius, is a mapmaker and surveyor sent (with a hundred others) to Britain in order to re-survey property lines in the province. It is part of the war effort, since Severus hopes to redraw the tax records in his favor and extract more funds for his expensive campaigns. While there, Pedius stumbles into a murder mystery involving a mysterious religious cult and five dead soldiers.

(More information about A Murder of Crows on the Wall can be found at garydevore.com/crows/)

 

 

 

 

209 CE – A Year of Murder

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Archaeology, Hadrian's Wall, Roman, Rome, Writing

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Sir_Lawrence_Alma-Tadema,_English_(born_Netherlands)_-_A_Reading_from_Homer_-_Google_Art_Project

I’ve finished the entire working draft of my next novel that is set during the year 209.  It is a historical murder mystery with a cast of Romans, Greeks, and native Britons. It is called A Murder of Crows on the Wall, a title that references both the fact it takes place along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England and involves initiates of the mystery cult of the god Mithras (who were called ‘crows’).

For the past year, my head has been in the third century CE, specifically the autumn of 209.  It’s been interesting to see what focusing upon that one period of history has brought up creatively.

Getting the novel finished has been a long process, but I’m so happy it’s finally done.  In the coming weeks I’ll post some thoughts here about the novel’s setting, characters, and theme, and also about the process of writing this historical murder mystery.  The next step is to solicit beta readers and ultimately agents and publishers.  Join me in my historical journey!

(More information about A Murder of Crows on the Wall can be found at garydevore.com/crows/)

 

Oldest Mentions of Rome?

04 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by Gary Devore in Academia, Archaeology, Roman

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archaeology, Rome

sword1Brought to my attention by Dorothy King the PhDiva: “A fourth century BC sword may have the oldest known inscription of the name of Rome.”

The inscription reads: TR POMPONIO(S) C (f.?) (M)E FECET ROMA(I).  The letters in parentheses are supplied by the excavators, since often Latin inscriptions could leave out parts of words and endings.  They reconstruct it as: “Trebius Pomponius, son of Gaius, made me in Rome”.  Presumably the “ROMAI” they supply is in the locative case, which would be “AE” normally but was “AI” in Old Latin (or so JSTOR tells me)

vittore03The sword was found in 2003 in the excavations of a water cult sanctuary near San Vittore del Lazio (southern Lazio).  The excavators claim it is similar to swords used in the La Tène B2 period.  (Notice posted in Italian)

The sword is mainly dated by the Macedonian star decorations.  Another very early inscription that records it was made “ROMAI” is the famous Ficoroni Cista.  It also possibly dates to the 4th century BCE.  If both can be considered products of Archaic Rome (having recovered from the 5th century economic crisis), they are important archaeological evidence that the settlement on the Tiber called itself Rome.

ficoroni_cista1355783408539Archaic inscription on the Cista: DINDIA MACOLNIA FILEAI DEDIT NOVIOS PLAUTIOS MED ROMAI FECID (“Dindia Macolnia gave me to her daughter, Novios Plutios made me in Rome”)

Playing as a Roman in Skyrim

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Gary Devore in Games, Roman

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Tags

games, roman, skyrim

Roman Skyrim 1One of the best things about one of the best games out there, Skyrim, is the ability to use mods to personally tailor the PC gaming experience.  I have played around with creating some of my own mods (like this waterfall house), but my absolute favorite, and must-have mod was a Roman Imperial Armor and Weapons one made by Jedo Dre.

On the whole, we are poorly served by adventure games set in the Roman world, despite there being a lot of Roman themed games out there.  Rome Total War is a decent strategy challenge, but gameplay is mostly set battles and a mix of Risk/Civilization resource micromanaging.  There have been a few city-builder games using Roman architecture, but none actually allow you to play as a Roman.  There was a short-lived independent MMORPG called Roma Victor that attracted some attention (especially from the Nova Roma types), but another called Gods and Heroes was cancelled before launch.  Fallout New Vegas had a Caesar’s Legion faction, but joining it required playing as an amoral character, which I never do.  According to the trailer, the upcoming Ryse: Son of Rome, with its depressing Call-Of-Duty-esque macho posturing and over-the-top violence porn, looks absolutely dismal.

2012-09-20_00003So, for folks like myself who love open-world games, Skyrim is king, and with mods I  have the ability to adventure dressed as a a version of an ancient Roman.  Since one of the major factions in the game are the Romanesque Imperials, it was relatively easy to justify the costume in the world, adapting it to the fantasy setting.

When I play a game like Skyrim, I want to identify with and develop a strong fondness for my character.  I’m not always sure game devs realize this, given the often unattractive character design options included in such games (or specifically straight devs with regard to male character design, since the female characters are always buxom and beautiful while the male skins are usually cartoonish or ugly).  Vanilla Skyrim is definitely an example of this (with a huge discrepancy between male and female attractiveness in appearance choices), so modding also allowed me to improve the look of my character, as well as giving him a set of fantasy-inspired Roman armor.

Below is an image gallery of my adventures as a Roman throughout the world of Skyrim (each image opens as a larger version):

The stealth archer
The stealth archer
Atmospheric snow covered ruins
Atmospheric snow covered ruins
Taking down a centurion (the other kind)
Taking down a centurion (the other kind)
Surveying Skyrim
Surveying Skyrim
Guided by a favorite firefly lantern mod
Guided by a favorite firefly lantern mod
Roman in Skyrim
Roman in Skyrim
Decided not to jump
Decided not to jump
Another view of the firefly lantern mod
Another view of the firefly lantern mod
Tomb hunting
Tomb hunting
Looking out over a very cold sea
Looking out over a very cold sea
My friend the crow
My friend the crow
Not sure if he's friendly or not
Not sure if he’s friendly or not
The stunning vistas of Skyrim
The stunning vistas of Skyrim
I built a mod house atop this waterfall.
I built a mod house atop this waterfall.
Bloody bandits
Bloody bandits
Walk or teleport?
Walk or teleport?
Catching salmon in the river
Catching salmon in the river
Playing with an "animal friend" mod
Playing with an “animal friend” mod
Playing with an "animal friend" mod
Playing with an “animal friend” mod
"Animal friend" mod does not work on dragons
“Animal friend” mod does not work on dragons
Running away from danger
Running away from danger
Even the ugly scrubland is beautiful in Skyrim
Even the ugly scrubland is beautiful in Skyrim
I amassed a huge collection of wonderful bows
I amassed a huge collection of wonderful bows
The Roman, the vampire, and the troll
The Roman, the vampire, and the troll
The Roman mod I used also changed all the imperial troops' armor to lorica
The Roman mod I used also changed all the imperial troops’ armor to lorica
Soon before the proposal
Soon before the proposal
Cleaning up the dirty city of Riften
Cleaning up the dirty city of Riften

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