#HistFicThursdays - Death and The Poet by Fiona Forsyth - Guest Post

 

For today's #HistFicThursdays blog, I am so excited to be welcoming Fiona Forsyth to the blog with a guest post about her new book Death and The Poet, as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. Her fabulous guest post discusses the book's setting, moving away from the perception of Ancient Rome to its reality with just enough artistic license to keep readers deeply engaged with the story.

But first, let's meet the book...

Blurb

14 AD.

When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour.

But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman world is uncertain.

Even as far away as Tomis, this political shadow creates tension as the pompous Roman legate Flaccus thinks more of his career than solving a local murder.

Avitius and Ovid become convinced that an injustice has been done in the case of the murdered vegetable seller. But Flaccus continues to turn a deaf ear.

When Ovid’s wife, Fabia, arrives unexpectedly, carrying a cryptic message from the Empress Livia, the poet becomes distracted - and another crime is committed. 

Ovid hopes for a return to Rome - only to discover that he is under threat from an enemy much closer to home.

Death and The Poet

is available in paperback, eBook and #KindleUnlimited

via this Universal Link

Guest Post

If I hear the phrase “Ancient Rome” nowadays my mind immediately goes to Jason Momoa on Saturday Night Live, dressed as a gladiator. It’s one of my favourite sketches and it works because we have been schooled by Hollywood for whom the Colosseum is the ultimate symbol of a country, a culture and an empire. And yet, we know that millions of people living across a variety of lands were also “Rome”, and for many of them the Colosseum would have been an image on a coin and gladiators a rare treat, if ever.

The attraction of the idea that got me writing a series about the poet Ovid is that he spent the last years of his life far from Rome, on the western shore of the Black Sea. Tomis had been around since before the Greeks founded a colony there six hundred years before Ovid, and at the time of Ovid’s exile, it was a Greek-speaking town that hoped to become the capital of a new Roman province. It had a good harbour, and some very interesting finds by archaeologists indicate a wealthy trading port whose inhabitants venerated the eastern deities Isis, Mithras and Cybele alongside Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

I was very taken with writing about a corner of Rome that I felt was not widely-known, but there was a problem. What is left of Tomis lies under the modern Romanian city of Constanța or beneath the sea - the topography of the coastline is very different. It just isn’t possible to clear away the layers to reveal Ovid’s Tomis. Fortunately, I can access a lot of what archaeologists know about Tomis through Constanța’s superb museum, Muzeul de Istorie Națională și Arheologie, currently closed for renovation. I hope to be able to visit as soon as it is open and in the meantime the museum’s website generously makes a lot of material available, so I feel very fortunate.

But I should confess that the Tomis I describe in Death and the Poet, probably never existed. I took what I was able to find out and I constructed what seemed to me to be a sensible sort of town, one that had baths and temples and a market and all the necessary accoutrements of a prosperous town at the time. Ovid would be able to get his clothes laundered, send letters home and find someone to supply him with decent wine. It is unlikely that he lived the life of deprivation that he describes in his exile poetry, but then he had a vested interest in making people back in Rome feel sorry for him.

When I embarked on writing historical novels set in this time, I did know a bit about Ovid and Roman history – I had after all been working as a Classics teacher for a long time, I could read Latin, I studied the subject at University. But my initial writing was constantly interrupted by my ignorance of what ordinary people did on a day to day basis. I had very little idea about clothing or food, I didn’t even know how Romans brushed their teeth (apart from one poem by Catullus, which I refuse to believe!). I became the classic historical fiction writer who spends four hours researching so as to be able to write one sentence with confidence. I tried making my own Roman cold cream (quite nice on the skin to my surprise), and Apicius’ rose petal wine (disgusting) and spectacularly failed to make myself a Roman ladies’ tunic and stola. I had a lively discussion on Threads on how one might open a sealed letter and reseal it without evidence of tampering. Many people told me about Sir Francis Walsingham and the letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, which was interesting, and fortunately the owner of this blog came to my aid with some solid expertise. I tested her advice on papyrus and yes, it is possible! Of course I didn’t ask her how she knew, one doesn’t ask any HistFic writer such things. For those of you now eager to try at home, the solution is to slide a heated knife blade under not the wax itself but the papyrus under the seal. It’s still quite tricky and needs practice. Children, if you are reading this, do not try it without a HistFic trained adult to supervise.

So with much research and some imagination, Ovid’s life in Tomis has been built. A (completely fictional) street plan of Tomis is on my wall, and I recently discovered a nest of wax-smeared papyrus in the bottom of a drawer, a reminder of an enjoyable afternoon practising my criminal skills. And alongside my hero and his home, I have loved building up a cast of characters to people Tomis, run its bars and market stalls, cremate its dead, import goods from all over the Empire, and maybe even discover that being on its Town Council wasn’t as glamorous as hoped. 

I even brought Ovid’s wife to Tomis and that is an ongoing delight, as I work out how the highly-born Fabia copes with life in Tomis. Don’t worry, though, Fabia is tough. She can even handle Jason Momoa in a gladiator costume.

Now, let's meet the author:

Fiona studied Classics at Oxford before teaching it for 25 years. A family move to Qatar gave her the opportunity to write about ancient Rome, and she is now back in the UK, working on her seventh novel.

You can follow Fiona on these links:

Website - Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - BSky - BookBub - Amazon Author Page - Goodreads

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