Introduction

Historical fiction writers walk a fine line between making their characters relatable and relevant to our present and keeping them true to the alienness of the past. This presents difficulties: historical people believed things we nowadays find incredible, ridiculous, or offensive, and did things out of honest conviction of those beliefs. Sometimes the easiest solution for a writer is to sidestep and whitewash, because as readers we’re only willing to buy a story as long as we can buy the characters’ motivations.

All that said, I was interested to read an interview—now a couple years old—with Lindsey Davis, who writes historical fiction set in Flavian Rome. She’s probably best known for her Marcus Didius Falco mystery series, and deservedly so, but I also particularly enjoyed The Course of Honor, a wonderful romance, the (true) love story of the emperor Vespasian and the freedwoman Caenis. In the interview Davis discusses her writing process and some of the issues unique to historical fiction, and this tidbit in particular intrigued me:

RL: What do you find most alien about the past? Does it help or hinder your writing?
LD: Religion. I leave it out as much as possible.

I had noticed, when reading The Course of Honor, that Davis’ characters displayed a modern, generally liberal attitude towards religion: they are tolerant, when they can be bothered to think about the topic. I admit it didn’t really surprise me at the time; it’s the attitude I’ve come to expect from main characters in historical novels. On reading the interview, though, and following some discussion with a friend on Twitter, I really began to think about the way Roman religion has been portrayed in fiction—or, perhaps more precisely, the way it hasn’t. Having grown up on Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman fiction—like most contemporary writers of Roman fiction—I think I also grew up with Sutcliff’s idea of the Romans as essentially like us (or as we like to think of ourselves): that is, generally secular, practical, and “level-headed.” The Romans were engineers, builders, doers, and—unlike the Greeks, for instance—unconcerned with the spiritual and metaphysical. They coopted the Greek pantheon for convenience’s sake and went about their road-building. This quote from Sutcliff serves to encapsulate:

“I think that I am happiest of all in Roman Britain. I feel very much at home there. The Middle Ages I am not at home in. I am interested in them and love to read about them, but I can’t write about them, or practically not at all. I think it is because I can’t take the all-pervasiveness of religion which has a stranglehold on life. The more level-headed viewpoint of the Romans is nearer to our own way of looking at things.”

It would be gross generalization to say that an entire generation of Roman-fiction writers has gone on to embrace Sutcliff’s idea of “level-headed” (read: secular) Romans, but at the same time I don’t think Sutcliff’s influence should be understated, as writers from Lindsey Davis to Simon Scarrow to M.C. Scott to Paul Kearney, who writes Greco-Roman-influenced historical fantasy, cite her as an inspiration. And, as in Sutcliff’s work, religion is mostly relegated to the background in these authors’ books: a world-building detail, very rarely if ever a driving impetus of the narrative.

For the purposes of this blog post I thought I’d limit my scope to the area of Roman history I know best—military history—and to the subgenre of Roman fiction I know best, military fiction—a justifiably good subject for a case study, I believe, as (once again thanks to Sutcliff) it’s by far the most prevalent subgenre of Roman fiction. How is religion portrayed in Roman military fiction, and how does this match up with Roman army religion as we know it historically?

Army religion: history and fiction

I think most writers of Roman military fiction would acknowledge that it’s impossible to write a Roman military story without at least a passing nod to religious practice—the festivals, games, and sacrifices that permeated the Roman calendar and are the most visible element of Roman religion. But neither in Sutcliff nor in Scarrow do we get a good idea of just how pervasive religion was within the army. In the words of John Helgeland, the Roman army camp was “a religious microcosm.” Ritual dictated the camp’s layout and set it apart as its own “sacred world.” Apart from the big festivals and ceremonies, religious practice was a daily part of camp life:

“Each day [in the camp] began with an assembly before the standards and the imagines, the sacred images of the emperors. Here the commanding officer, as the emperor’s representative in the camp, performed a sacrifice of wine and incense…followed by a corporate reaffirmation of loyalty to the emperor.”*

Since there was no distinction at all between “church” and “state” in Roman society, affirming loyalty to the emperor was fundamentally a religious practice. And apart from corporate religious expression, private religious practice also flourished: according to Helgeland, “Soldiers from all over the empire brought their own gods wherever they went and soldiers recruited locally were never far from their gods.” Cults abounded in the army, and many soldiers practiced various faiths simultaneously; the army was generally tolerant of religious diversity, as long as the soldiers’ practices didn’t interfere with their participation in the public religious life of the camp. (This is where things became especially thorny for Christian soldiers.) We know from archaeological finds that individual soldiers prayed and sacrificed to local spirits and deities as well as to the traditional Roman pantheon for their own health and well-being, for their loved ones, for good fortune in battle. Suffice it to say, religion and spirituality played an important (even all-pervasive!) role in their lives.

Mithraism—the Persian mystery religion which was very popular among Roman soldiers, across the ranks—does get a nod from Sutcliff in The Eagle of the Ninth, as her protagonist is an adherent. But we know very little historically about Mithraism, and Marcus’ devotion is likewise rather vague. It’s very much a modern and secular interpretation of religious experience: the ceremonial provides Marcus some solace when he thinks about it, but by no means does his Mithraism shape him as a character or influence his actions over the course of the story. Similarly, Aquila’s Christianity in The Lantern Bearers is cultural and nominal, at best.

A trope which pops up fairly often in Roman fiction—military and otherwise—is the secular Roman put up against the spiritual barbarian Other: either the Romans are portrayed positively as the “level-headed” counterpart to religious fanaticism (Druids are the usual suspects; Christians and others may serve too)—or negatively as brutish and chauvinistic warmongers opposed to, say, the Celts, who are sensitive, spiritual, “mysterious,” and often feminist (The Eagle and the Raven). I am not aware of a novel that balances Roman and Celtic spirituality, though traditional Roman religion was equally (to us perhaps surprisingly) spiritual. On a related note, quite a few novels have featured Christian soldiers as main characters (The Robe, The Spear, Quo Vadis; recently I read and enjoyed Patrick Larkin’s The Tribune), but none that I know of have explored the Christian experience in day-to-day army camp life.

Conclusion

Clearly, there’s a lot more that could be said on the topic: military fiction might be the most prevalent subgenre, but it’s by no means the only subgenre. With military fiction as my go-to example, though, I feel fairly confident in saying that Roman fiction tends to modernize or downplay its main characters’ religious sensibilities. The one exception I can name is Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, an excellent reinterpretation of The Aeneid which does a remarkable job exploring day-to-day religious experience in ancient Italy. Rather than alienating the reader from her setting or her main character, Le Guin’s attention to religious practice brings setting and character to life much more vividly than would be possible otherwise. To think of the Romans as safely, familiarly “level-headed” on matters of religion and spirituality is not only to minimize important elements of the historical Roman experience but—particularly for writers—to lose all kinds of narrative potential.

*I apologize for the utter presumption of quoting myself, but I did just so happen to write on Roman army religion for my senior thesis.

Works cited

Helgeland, John, Robert J. Daly, and J. Patout Burns. Christians and the Military: The Early Experience. Edited by Robert J. Daly. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

McCrina, Amanda. “Render Unto Caesar: Christianity in the Late Roman Army.” Unpublished, 2013.