The Roman Template: How Ancient Rome Shaped English Historical Fiction
The tradition of serious English historical fiction about Rome begins, in its modern form, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii in 1834 — a novel that invented the sub-genre of Roman disaster narrative, established the template of the virtuous Christian and the corrupt pagan Roman, and sold in numbers that established ancient Rome as a commercially viable fictional setting for the Victorian reading public. The novel is not much read today and deserves to be read less. Its historical importance is entirely distinct from its literary quality.
Lytton established the Victorian Rome — decadent, spectacular, doomed — that shaped English popular engagement with the ancient world for a generation. The Rome of this tradition is a civilization whose visible wealth and evident power are the symptoms of an underlying moral corruption, whose fall is both inevitable and deserved, and whose destruction provides the spectacle that the Victorian reading public was willing to pay for. Pompeii’s eruption as divine judgment on a sinful city is a theological claim barely concealed as a natural disaster narrative. The novel’s Christianity, inserted into a period predating the religion’s significant presence in the city, is the anachronism that drives the moral argument.
Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, published in 1880, refined this template and added the narrative device that would dominate Roman historical fiction for decades: the Jewish or early Christian protagonist who experiences the Roman world from the perspective of its victims while being caught up in the events that will produce Christianity’s triumph. This device allowed Victorian and Edwardian writers to have the Rome they wanted — spectacular, violent, historically documented — while providing a moral center that the Roman tradition itself could not supply. The Romans in these novels are backdrop and antagonist simultaneously. The real story is always the religion they will eventually be forced to adopt.
Graves’s I, Claudius broke with this tradition in 1934 by finding the moral center inside the Roman world rather than importing it from outside. His Claudius is not a proto-Christian observing pagan decadence; he is a Roman intellectual whose values — honesty, scholarship, the careful observation of what is actually happening — are Roman values in conflict with the dynastic violence that the principate generates. This shift from exoticism to interiority — from Rome as the spectacle observed by a morally superior outsider to Rome as the world inhabited by its own morally serious participants — is the defining move of twentieth-century Roman historical fiction.
Mary Renault, writing about Greece rather than Rome but working in the same tradition, made the comparable move in The Last of the Wine and The Mask of Apollo: historical fiction whose characters think about their world in terms of their world’s categories rather than the author’s. The technique requires genuine historical imagination — the ability to construct a perspective that is authentically of its time rather than anachronistically modern — and it is harder to achieve than it appears. Most Roman historical fiction fails at exactly this point, giving its characters contemporary psychological frameworks dressed in ancient costume.
The influence runs in unexpected directions. Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy — Imperium, Conspirata, Dictator — published between 2006 and 2015, approaches the late Republic through the perspective of Cicero’s secretary Tiro and achieves something remarkable: a representation of Roman political life that is genuinely of its moment rather than contemporary politics in a toga. Harris’s Cicero thinks about the Republic in Roman terms, values what Romans valued, fears what Romans feared, and makes the mistakes that Romans made — not the mistakes that a modern liberal democrat would have avoided. This historical authenticity is the quality that makes the trilogy more than competent entertainment.
The persistence of Rome as a setting for serious historical fiction reflects something real about the period’s relevance to the questions that serious fiction addresses. Power and its corruption, the relationship between personal ambition and civic virtue, the cost of building a civilization and the inevitability of its decay — these are Roman questions because Rome documented them more completely than any other ancient civilization, and they are our questions because we have not resolved them either. The best Roman historical fiction does not use Rome to comment on the present by disguise. It uses Rome to think about Rome, and finds that thinking about Rome is thinking about something that has not gone away.