The Bride of Corinth: A Ghost Story from the 2nd Century AD

"A youth to Corinth, whilst the city slumbered,
Came from Athens: though a stranger there,
Soon among its townsmen to be numbered,
For a bride awaits him, young and fair.
From their childhoods' years
They were plighted feres,
So contracted by their parents' care. ...

... All the house is hushed; - to rest retreated
Father, daughters - not the mother quite;
She the guest with cordial welcome greeted,
Led him to a room with tapers bright;
Wine and food she brought,
Ere of them he thought,
Then departed with a fair good-night. ..."

The verses above are translated from Goethe's poem, Die Braut von Korinth (in Volume 9 of Nathan Haskell's 19th Century English edition of his collected works), but the story Goethe tells is a much older one, originally collected by Phlegon of Tralles (a freedman of the Emperor Hadrian) in the 2nd Century AD. It is, perhaps, the oldest surviving ghost story in the European literary tradition.

The opening of Phlegon's story is missing, but its sense is clear enough. What follows is my own free re-telling of it.

**************

The young man, Machates, exhausted by his travels, had little appetite for the food and wine left by his prospective mother-in-law, Charito. Still fully clothed, he lay down on his bed and fell asleep. He was awoken during the night by a creaking of the door and, by the glow of the waning lamp placed beside his bed, he saw a young girl at the door, in a white dress and with a black and gold band around her forehead.

"I am sorry," said the maiden. "Nobody told me that we had a guest. I will leave you to sleep."

But Machates, enchanted by her beauty, had risen to his feet. "Please stay," he insisted. "There is wine and food that we can share. My name is Machates. I think we are betrothed."

The damsel smiled at him. "I am Philinnion," she said, sitting down on the bed beside him.

Machates poured a cup of wine and handed it to her. She drank eagerly from it, then handed it to him. Merely to place his lips where hers had been sent him into a rapture of ecstasy. He offered her bread and olives, but she said she was not hungry. They talked late into the night. Suddenly she placed her finger to his lips. There was a rustling outside the bedroom door. "One of the slaves must have heard us," she whispered in his ear. They held each other in a silent embrace. Through a chink in the door, they saw the light of two lamps. When they had gone, and the rustling ceased, Philinnion stood up.

"My parents should not know of my visit to you," she insisted. "For they deserve the honour of introducing us." She took a silk scarf from her bosom and wrapped it around his neck, and a gold ring from her finger, which she placed on his. He went to his chest and took out a silver cup, a family heirloom from the time of the Divine Augustus. He presented it to her, along with an iron ring from his own hand. She asked if she might take with her a lock of his hair. He reached for his razor and cut one for her. "I will come to you again tomorrow evening," she whispered. Bidding him good night, she slipped quietly out of the door, anxious not to wake her parents or their slaves.

When he awoke in the morning, he placed the scarf and the ring in his travelling chest, and was about to go downstairs. There was a knock on the door, and Charito entered with two of her maids. Charito gestured to one of them. "Fortunata heard you talking to a woman last night," she said. "I must ask you who it was."

Machates blushed. "It was your daughter," he admitted. "My betrothed. I swear by all the gods that I laid not a hand on her. We merely introduced ourselves and supped together."

"Did she tell you her name?" Charito asked.

"Philinnion," he replied.

He watched as Charito turned quickly to Fortunata, both womens' mouths falling open, gazing at each other at each other, dumbstruck.

"Philinnion is not your betrothed," said the other slave. "It is to her sister you are plighted."

Charito started wailing and tearing at her hair. The two slaves ushered her from his room. He began to wonder if he had entered the house of a mad woman.

All that day, Machates wandered in the garden, catching not a glimpse either of Philinnion or her un-named sister. At noon he fetched a writing tablet and stylus from his room, and sat down at the foot of a pear tree to write a letter to his father, telling of his love for Philinnion, and asking that the arrangements be changed so that he could marry her.

After he had retired for the evening, Philinnion came to him again, as she had promised, and climbed into bed with him. He took her in his arms and made love to her with passion. But they were disturbed by a sharp rap on the door. Charito entered with her husband, Demostratus. They gazed in astonishment at their daughter.

                                    Edvard Munch, "The Vampire."

"How dare you defile your sister's marriage bed?" Charito shrieked. "You have no right even to be here."

Machates put a protective arm around he shoulder, but she shook him off and stood to face her parents.

"Mother and Father," she said, calmly. "You are both cruel and unjust, that you begrudge me just three nights of love, here beneath my father's roof. Now, because of your busy curiosity, you shall be made once again to mourn. But for me, I return to my appointed place, for you cannot think that I came here without the assistance of the gods."

Philinnon, having spoken, collapsed onto the bed. Machates felt for her pulse, found none, realised that her flesh was cold. He stared up at her parents. "What have you done?" he cried. "You have killed your daughter with your words."

"Words cannot kill," Demostratus insisted. "And you saw for yourself that neither I nor her mother laid hands on her. In any case, how could we kill her, when we ourselves have buried her these six months since?"

Distraught, Machates spent the morning in the garden, whilst Demostratus's male servants searched the family vault. Fortunata sought him out and told him that all of the bodies had been found in their allotted places, with the exception of Philinnion's. "These were found where that had lain," she added, handing him the iron ring and silver cup that he had given to his dead lover when they had first met.

Grave-stone of a Roman girl of the 2nd Century AD, from Virunum, Austria. Photo: O. Harl (licensed under CCA).

Machates ran from the house and through the streets of Corinth until he came to a steep wooded slope. He climbed it, and there looked down on the city. He watched as the body of Philinnion was carried to be cremated outside the walls of Corinth. As the smoke rose from the pyre of her second funeral, he heard her voice call to him. Unwilling to live without her, he took his dagger from his belt and fell upon it.

Grave-stone of a Roman girl from Stallhofen, Austria. Photo: O. Harl (licensed under CCA).

**************

Goethe adds a twist to the tale, which is not there in Phlegon's original. In his telling of it, Demostratus and Charito are Christians, whilst Machates and his family are pagans. With her last undead words, Philinnion rejects the faith of her parents:

"Mother, to this final prayer give ear!
Let a funeral pyre be straightway dress'd;
Open then my cell so sad and drear,
That the flames may give the lovers rest!

When ascends the fire
From the glowing pyre,
To the gods of old we'll hasten, blest."

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

Pages from History: True Tales from Historical Novelists

Castles, Customs and Kings, True Tales by English Historical Fiction Writers, edited by Debra Brown and M.M. Bennetts and published by Madison Street Publishing, is a miscellany of non-fiction articles written by historical novelists, not all of whom are English (the selection also includes articles by Scottish, Welsh, Irish, American, Canadian and Australian authors), and covering all aspects of British, rather than solely English, history.

All of the articles appeared originally on the English Historical Fiction Authors' Blog (http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com), a website to which I now contribute. This volume, however, does not include any of my articles, because its contents are drawn from the first year of the blog's existence (September 2011-2012) before I joined the team.

The editors' aims are set out in the introduction. "The authors of this book are, for the most part, historical fiction writers. To create good historical fiction, we have studied the times of which we write, and the events that came before. We would like to share some of the fascinating things we have learned..."

It's an urge that I well understand. In the course of my own research over the past year for my next novel, and for a series of short stories, documents that have crossed my various desks at the British Library, the National Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives have included the 12th Century manuscript of the Liber Sancti Jacobi, giving details of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella (I went back to the original manuscript because historians agree that the only complete translation is deeply flawed); Medieval penitentiaries (used by priests to set penances for sins); service records from the Metropolitan Police in the late 19th and early 20th Century); and Royal Navy muster lists and log books from the 18th Century. Only a tiny portion of what I gleaned from these documents will ever find its way directly into my fiction. We are distillers, not regurgitators, of history.

I asked editor, Debra Brown, what makes for a good blog post, given that it is a relatively new literary form which, like the tweet, did not exist when she and I were first reading. "....the posts, for the most part, are a report of historical events.." she replied. "On many blogs, historical topics are debated, as we have seen with the differences of opinion on the character of Richard III...authors using different resources...may offer different points of view."

To my mind, blog-posts tend to be read rather more casually than more conventional forms of non-fiction. They need to be short and to the point (capable of being read and absorbed in the time it takes, or perhaps half the time it takes, to drink a cup of tea or coffee) and, as Debra hints, it is no bad thing if they encapsulate a note of historical controversy and (in the context of historical fiction writers), if we give clues as to why we wrote our characters and scenes in the way that we did, in the full knowledge that this represents only one possible interpretation. Blogs are an opportunity for us to "show our workings," to reveal the complexities that few fiction readers want to see in a footnote or an endnote.

The contributions to the book cover the full scope of the British past, from prehistory to the 20th Century. Among my favourite articles are Richard Denning's, on the first written word in English (runes on the bone of a deer from Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk, perhaps scratched by a Saxon mercenary in c420 AD); Roseanne Lortz's on The Venerable Bede and the origins of the modern western calendar; and Carol McGrath's discussion of the Christmas of 1065 and the iconography of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Inscribed deer-bone from Caistor St Edmund. The runic inscription reads "from a roe."

The death of Edward the Confessor, as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry: one of the turning points of English History.

There are even recipes (Katherine Ashe tells us how to re-stage a feast from 760 years ago, including galantine sauce for fowl, meat and fish, pease pottage and mawmange of lamb and lentils - I am thinking of this for Christmas 2013, if a certain person can be persuaded to join me...). It is a book to dip in and out of, rather than read from cover to cover. It makes no claim or attempt to be a substitute for academic works of history, but it offers some fascinating insights.

Castles, Customs & Kings, True Tales by English Historical Fiction Writers, is published by Madison Street Publishing, and can be purchased from www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com.

Julian Fellowes on Shakespeare: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

In today's Guardian, the screenwriter, director, novelist and Conservative peer, Julian Fellowes, is reported (www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/oct/14/globe-theatre-julian-fellowes-shakespeare) as saying that Shakespeare's plays, in their "unchanged form," are inaccessible to those who have not had "a very expensive education" such as his own (Ampleforth and Magdalene College, Cambridge). He made these remarks following the UK launch of his screen adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, on which I will not comment, since I haven't yet seen it, although it has been criticised for rewriting Shakespeare's original text.

I have no problem with adaptations, however loose, of "classic" works. With my own students, I explore The Island, a very free-flowing South African adaptation of Sophocles's Antigone, by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. There is a place for such adaptations, and no doubt for Fellowes's Romeo and Juliet as well. I have a big problem, however, with the notion that "unadulterated" Shakespeare is accessible only to a small cultural elite.

Unlike Fellowes, I did not go to an expensive private school. My sister and I were educated in the state sector. When she was thirteen, my sister decided that it was time to dip into Shakespeare. She took a volume from the school library (I can't remember whether it was Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night's Dream). The librarian refused to issue it to her on the grounds that she was "too young." When she mentioned this to her English teacher, he promptly went into the library, borrowed the volume on his own ticket, and placed it in her hand. She loved it, and has been passionate about Shakespeare ever since. No doubt her teacher had to explain some of the language and concepts to her. That's what good teachers do, whether in the state or the private sector.

Like Fellowes, I did go to Cambridge, so I suppose I have had a privileged education, but that's not where I developed my appreciation of Shakespeare and the other classics of English literature. I studied Archaeology and Anthropology. Cambridge, however, had no entrance exams for these subjects, so I sat my papers in English Literature (including a Shakespeare paper), Geology and Classics. It was my passion for Shakespeare (fostered by teachers in the state education sector) that helped me to access the privileged environment of Cambridge, not vice versa.

Near to my home is the Brockley Jack, a pub with a small theatre attached. Their productions, many of them amateur, include Shakespearean works as well as original new work by local writers. It is very much a community venture, and holds only a small audience. At a recent production (minimally adapted, if at all) of Julius Caesar, I recognised the local plumber, the taxi-driver who took me to the airport for my last long-haul trip, and a woman who serves in the local supermarket. I know that there are similar small theatres the length and breadth of the country which do remarkable work and reach very wide audiences.

One of the most moving exhibits in last year's British Museum exhibition on Shakespeare was the "Robben Island Shakespeare" volume, which was circulated secretly among the political prisoners of the Apartheid era, annotated by many of them, and used to improvise the performances that allowed them to keep a sense of proportion under the most appalling circumstances. Few of these men and women can have had the sort of "expensive education" of which Fellowes writes.

I do think that our education system sometimes ruins the experience of Shakespeare for young people by insisting that they "read" texts that were always intended to be performed by skilled actors. There is a case for line-by-line analysis, but I'm firmly of the view that a young person's first experience of any dramatic text (as distinct from a novel or poem) should be a performance. Whilst live performances may be a "gold standard," televised versions (which do not need to be heavily adapted, and certainly not "dumbed down") allow the teacher to pause and explain where necessary. Among my earliest Shakespeare memories from school are the BBC versions of Macbeth (starring a very young Ian McKellan and Judi Dench), and Twelfth Night (starring Robert Hardy and Felicity Kendall). These early experiences have remained with me for a lifetime, and are etched indelibly on my mind. At a recent live performance of Twelfth Night (starring Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry) a close friend and I suddenly glanced at each other as we realised, simultaneously, that a line from the play had found its way, almost verbatim, into my novel, Undreamed Shores, without my having any awareness that I had been citing it.

There are those, of course, who believe that William Shakespeare (the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon) cannot possibly have written the works of "Shakespeare" because he had not, himself, received a sufficiently expensive education to have set him up for the task. They are, I believe, as wrong-headed as those who now argue that only a small elite can ever be capable of understanding his works as he originally wrote them.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores and An Accidental King, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com.

On the Lee-Shore: A Page from Naval History

Last week's discussion of club-hauling reminded me of a page of naval history on which I have done some research.

As a teenager, I learned a song with the lyrics "She's like the swallow that flies so high, she's like the river that never runs dry, she's like the sunshine on the lee-shore, I love my love, and love is no more."

The song was clearly written by a land-lubber. For a sailor, there is absolutely nothing romantic about a lee-shore. What it presages is death. Trapped between the wind and the rocks, the only hope for a mariner who finds himself on a lee-shore is to club-haul the vessel, an emergency U-turn with a success rate significantly less than 50%. This is the position in which Captain Philippe Dauvergne, the commander of HMS Rattlesnake, found himself on the 11th October 1781. He was on the barren, rocky coast of the island of Trinidada, in the South Atlantic.

     Philippe Dauvergne. The picture is in the public domain.

His attempt to club-haul the vessel failed, and the ship ran aground. Remarkably, Dauvergne managed to save all but four of his crew. Other ships were in the area, and Captain Edward Pasley of HMS Jupiter offered to evacuate Dauvergne and his men.  Dauvergne's commands, however, were to establish a colony on the island, and he insisted on seeing this through. Pasley sailed away, leaving Dauvergne and his companions on the island. This was Robinson Crusoe with a cast of 24 men and one woman (Rebecca Stephens, the wife of a Warrant Officer). Pasley also left them with "a bull, a calf, a he-goat and a she-goat, a ram and three ewes."

The island of Trinidada. Picture: John Vergeris, licensed under CCA.

We know little of what happened on the island, since no log-book survives. There are descriptions of the island in Pasley's published sea-diaries, in Frederick Marryat's novel, Frank Mildmay, and in Edward Knight's (1889) non-fiction account, The Cruise of the Alerte. Reading between the lines of these accounts, I think it likely that Dauvergne established a village of stone-built houses on the east side of the island (Knight thought this to have been a Portuguese penal colony), and that he planted beans and maize (the maize may not have been entirely successful, but the beans clearly were, since they were growing wild on the island when Knight visited). There also seems to have been a disastrous fire on the western side of the island, which may have been started accidentally by members of Dauvergne's crew. They must have suffered many difficulties, not least on account of the land-crabs, which Knight describes as having raided his supplies and nipped himself and his companions on a nightly basis.

             A land-crab. Picture: Gargolylesoftware, licensed under CCA.

When, on 27th December 1782, HMS Bristol arrived off the coast of Trinidada, and put a party ashore, Dauvergne and his men were close to starvation. They were taken aboard the ship, which was en route for India. There Dauvergne was court-martialled and exonerated. A treaty had, by this stage, been concluded between Britain and Portugal, ending any British claims to Trinidada. It is now a Brazilian naval outpost. I did, at one stage, have the intention of writing a novel about the Trinidada episode, but gave up when I realised that I had no prospect of ever visiting the island. It seemed to me that the physicality of the place would have been so firmly imprinted on the minds of those who had been trapped there that I could hardly do justice to their experience without seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching it myself. It will, however, feature in one of my short stories.

HMS Bristol and HMS Hector. William Elliott, 1784 (the picture is in the public domain).

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Dauvergne returned to his native Jersey, where he established La Correspondence, a network of spies that liaised closely with royalists in France. Trinidada was far behind him, but it is unlikely that he, or any of his companions, ever forgot the eighteen months they spent in one of the most barren and inhospitable places on Earth.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores and An Accidental King, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com.

Frederick Marryat: A Writer's Writer in the Age of Sail

The novels of Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) do not have a particularly wide readership today. Some of us have distant childhood memories of enjoying his Children of the New Forest, a saga of the English Civil War (and one of his few novels to remain in print as a paperback) but, in his lifetime, he was better known for his adult fiction and, most especially, for his sea stories, which had a profound influence on Joseph Conrad, C.S. Forester, William Golding and Patrick O'Brian. His main readership today is perhaps among those writing fiction about the age of sail.

Frederick Marryat was the son of the MP and "merchant prince," Joseph Marryat, and his German wife, Charlotte. He joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1806, and retired as a captain in 1830, making a very respectable living as a writer. He was an acquaintance of Charles Dickens, but did not share his talent for finding the most appropriate names for his characters. Action heroes with names like Peter Simple, Frank Mildmay or Mr Midshipman Easy were never likely to endure alongside Mr Midshipman Hornblower, Jack Aubrey or John McWhirr, even if they were on the scene first. Marryat's novels, however, are so closely based on his own naval experience that it is often difficult to know where the memoir ends and the fiction begins. That makes them a tremendous resource for anyone writing about nautical life in the 18th or 19th Century. They give us real glimpses into the realities, both social and technical, of life under sail.

Thomas Whitcombe's "Destruction of the French Fleet in Basque Roads." The ship in the foreground is HMS Imperieuse, the first on which Marryat served.

In Frank Mildmay, or the Naval Officer (1829), he shows us an encounter between a young officer and a condemned man. The older man, facing death without any consolation of religious belief, gives the officer some advice.

"When you are a captain, as I am very sure you will be, do not worry your men into mutiny by making what is called a smart ship. Cleanliness and good order are what seamen like, but niggling, polishing, scraping iron bars and ringbolts and the like of that, a sailor dislikes more than a flogging at the gangway. If, in reefing the topsails, you happen to be a minute later than another ship, never mind it, so long as your sails are well-reefed and fit to stand blowing weather."

In Peter Simple (1834), he shows us the club-hauling of a vessel, a complex and desperate manoeuvre rapidly to turn a ship when it is in danger of being driven aground on a lee-shore.

" ... the whole sky was covered with one black cloud, which sank so low as nearly to touch our mast-heads, and a tremendous sea ... rolled in upon us, setting the vessel on a dead lee-shore ... 'Pipe Belay,' said the captain ... our lives may depend on it! ... Hands by the best bower anchor, Mr Wilson, attend below with the carpenter and his mates, ready to cut away the cable at the moment I give the order ... The captain waved his hand in silence to the quarter-master at the wheel, and the helm was put down. The ship turned slowly to the wind, pitching and chapping as the sails were spilling ... The captain gave the order, 'Let go the anchor' ... At last the ship was head to wind, and the captain gave the signal. The yards flew around with such a creaking noise that I thought the masts had gone over the side, and the next moment the wind had caught the sails and the ship ... careened over to her gunnel with its force ... A few strokes of the axes were heard, and then the cable flew out of the hawse-hole in a blaze of fire ..."

It is, quite simply, the best description that exists of a manoeuvre that has probably not been performed by anyone alive today, and there are plenty of similar examples in Marryat's books that I could have chosen.

Willem Van de Velde's "English ship in a gale trying to claw off a lee shore" (1672). Her captain is attempting precisely the manoeuvre Marryat describes.

Since most of Marryat's books are out of print, I had to consult the British Library's copies but, within the past few months, many of them have been digitised, and are freely available for e-readers, opening these windows on naval life to a new generation of readers and writers.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores and An Accidental King, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com.

You might like to take a look at the blogs of my fellow authors, all of whom are posting something with a nautical historical theme:

J.M. Aucoin
Helen Hollick
Doug Boren
Linda Collison
Margaret Muir
Julian Stockwin
Anna Belfrage
Andy Millen
V.E. Ulett
T.S. Rhodes
Mark Patton
Katherine Bone
Alaric Bond
Ginger Myrick
Judith Starkston
Seymour Hamilton
Rick Spilman
James L. Nelson
S.J. Turney
Prue Batten
Antoine Vanner
Joan Druett
Edward James
Nighthawk News

 

The First Age of Sail?

The Bronze Age (c2000-700 BC in Britain) is, perhaps, the most underestimated period in our history. Not only was metal-working introduced, thereby ending the Stone Age, but the period also saw the appearance of the domestic horse, and of the wheel. It may also have been the first age of sail, although specific evidence for this is tantalisingly elusive. Certainly there was a great explosion of trade. Objects made by the same hands, and with the same tools, are found in Ireland, Wiltshire and Brittany.

Bronze Age boats have been found at North Ferriby in Yorkshire, and in Dover Harbour, their planks literally sewn together with willow withies. These boats, however, had neither masts nor oar-locks. They must have been paddled. When the Ferriby boats were first discovered, it was assumed that they were used for river transport, but the discovery at Dover provoked a reassessment. Why would it be there if it were not a sea-going vessel?

One of the Ferriby boats at the time of its discovery in 1963. Photo: W. Wright.

The National Maritime Museum in Cornwall recently built a replica of one of the Ferriby boats and launched it at Falmouth. If it were not for the shipping lanes, I would probably be willing to take my chances crossing the Channel in one of these, as my characters do in Undreamed Shores, but to take one from Cornwall to Brittany or Ireland would be another matter entirely.

The replica Bronze Age boat launched at Falmouth.

The boats or ships depicted in rock art in Sweden, similarly, seem in most cases to lack masts, although one from Tanum might just show a ship under sail.

Depiction of a small boat and larger ship from Tanum, Sweden. Photo: Ch. Purkner (licensed under GNU).

Rock engravings from Haljesta, Sweden. Photo: Olof Ekstrom (licensed under GNU).

The little gold model of a boat found at Broighter in Ireland has both a mast and oar-locks, but this dates to a late stage in the Iron Age (c50 BC).

The Broighter gold boat. Photo: Ardfern (licensed under CCA).

Parts of the Broighter Boat. 1. Mast. 2. Yard. 3. Steering oar. 4. Grappling iron. 5. Forked implement. 6-7. Oars. (Image is in the public domain).

The demand for bronze would, in itself, have been a spur for the development of maritime trade. The components of bronze are copper and tin. There are relatively few sources of tin in western Europe, and one of the most significant is in Cornwall. At some point between 2000 BC and 50 BC, someone must have set sail from Cornwall for the first time, in a boat that looked more like the one from Broighter than the one from Ferriby.

St Michael's Mount, a possible loading point for Cornish tin bound for the continent.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that this happened at quite an early stage in this time-scale. Perhaps, like the vessel in which Tim Severin crossed the Atlantic, it was made of ox-hides stretched over a light wooden frame, in which case the chances of its being preserved archaeologically are minimal. I strongly suspect that, by 1500 BC, such vessels would have been a common sight around British and European shores, and they would have changed forever the relationship between Britain and its continental neighbours.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores and An Accidental King, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com. For this week only, the e-book versions are available for just 77 pence.

You might like to take a look at the blogs of my fellow authors, all of whom are posting something with a nautical historical theme:

J.M. Aucoin
Helen Hollick
Doug Boren
Linda Collison
Margaret Muir
Julian Stockwin
Anna Belfrage
Andy Millen
V.E. Ulett
T.S. Rhodes
Mark Patton
Katherine Bone
Alaric Bond
Ginger Myrick
Judith Starkston
Seymour Hamilton
Rick Spilman
James L. Nelson
S.J. Turney
Prue Batten
Antoine Vanner
Joan Druett
Edward James
Nighthawk News

Ville-es-Nouaux, the site of the final battle in Undreamed Shores. The monument in the foreground is Zilar's burial place, and that behind it is the "accursed shrine" built by his people ,and buried on Meruskine's orders.

Cassius Dio and Roman Britain

If Tacitus wrote history in the tradition of Thucydides, then Cassius Dio (c155-235 AD) wrote in the tradition of Herodotus. His 80 volumes of Roman history, not all of which survive, cover 1400 years, from the foundation of Rome in 735 BC down to 229 AD. He wrote in Greek rather than Latin, and is thought to have imitated the writing style of Thucydides, but the scope of his work is much more akin to that of Herodotus.

He spent much of his adult life in Rome (he was an aristocrat, who also served as Governor of Smyrna and Proconsul in Africa), so he would have had access to archival sources which do not survive today, but he cheerfully mixes myth and history when he discusses Rome's early years, and never allows a lack of evidence to spoil the telling of a great tale. Sometimes, when I read his work, it is very tempting to see him as the father of my own craft - historical fiction, rather than "history" in the sense that we understand it today.

He provides much the most detailed accounts we have both of the Claudian invasion of 43 AD, and of the Boudiccan Revolt of 60/61 AD. It is important to remember, however, that he was writing more than a century after the events which he describes. Unlike Tacitus, he is very unlikely to have spoken to anyone who was actually there.

Like Tacitus and Thucydides before him, he does not demur to put words in the mouths of his characters. Here is part of his rendition of the speech that he claims Boudicca gave on the eve of her revolt (it can be read in full at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio).

"I thank thee, Andraste [an ancient British goddess], and call upon thee as woman speaking to woman...that those over whom I rule are Britons...thoroughly versed in the arts of war, who hold all things in common, even women and children, so that they possess the same valour as the men. As the queen, then, of such men, and of such women, I supplicate and pray thee for victory against men insolent, unjust, insatiable...Let the wench sing and lord it over the Romans, for they surely deserve to be the slaves of such a woman."
Translation by Earnest Carey.

"Boadicea haranguing the Britons." Photo: Oksmith, from an 1860 edition of David Hume's The History of England in Three Volumes.

It is, of course, it must be, pure fiction, but, as a novelist, I hope I can be forgiven for wishing I had written it. I may not be the first, either. It has long seemed likely to me (though one could never prove it) that this speech inspired Elizabeth I when she came to write her own speech given at Tilbury on the eve of the confrontation with the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth was fluent in Latin and Greek, and well-versed in the works of the classical authors. To what other source would she turn, as a woman leading her British forces into battle, not just against Spain, but against the "insolence," as she would have seen it, of the Roman (Catholic) world?

Elizabeth I, the "Armada Portrait." Anne-Marie Duff performs the Tilbury speech at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbjj9Nmn6ZU.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores and An Accidental King, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com. His course on "The Classical World and its Inheritance" is now open for enrolments at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution (www.hlsi.net/courses.aspx).