Literature / SPQR

The SPQR series is a series of historical novels by John Maddox Roberts that take place in the last years of the The Roman Republic (prior to the civil war and the rise of The Roman Empire). Its main character is the fictional Senator Decius Metellus, who becomes an amateur sleuth and is now writing his memoirs as a bitter old man in the early days of Augustus's reign.

Novels in the seres

1. The King's Gambit (1990)
2. The Cataline Conspiracy
3. The Sacrilege
4. The Temple of the Muses
5. Saturnalia
6. Nobody Loves A Centurion
7. The Tribune's Curse
8. The River God's Vengeance
9. The Princess and the Pirates
10. A Point Of Law
11. Under Vesuvius
12. Oracle of the Dead
13. The Year of Confusion (2010)

Short stories

• "The Statuette of Rhodes"
• "Mightier Than the Sword"
• "The Etruscan House"
• "An Academic Question"
• "Venus in Pearls"
• "Beware the Snake"
• "The Will"
• "The King of Sacrifices"

This Literature series contains examples of:

• Amateur Sleuth: Since The Roman Republic has no regular police force, let alone a detective force, Decius’s friends and family regard his penchant for “finding out” things as some kind of oddball hobby. His friend, the scholar Callista, even suggests defining it as a new branch of philosophy.
• Arch-Enemy: Decius and Appius Clodius.
• Badass on Paper: In The King's Gambit, Decius reflects that Roman propaganda has an annoying, though understandable, tendency to make a superman out of any foreign general or potentate who is even moderately successful at contesting Rome on the battlefield, whether it's Hannibal, Jugurtha, or (as is the case in that year) Mithridates VI, under whose rule Pontus has stubbornly resisted conquest for long enough that he is painted to Roman audiences as a Herculean strongman who could "outdrink, outfight, and out-fornicate" any ten Roman men half his age - which at that time is pushing seventy.
• Battle in the Rain: Decius and Calpurnius Bestia, at the conclusion of Saturnalia.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Pompey and Crassus in The Sacrilege, when they form the First Triumvirate with Caesar. Reading over the terms of their agreement, Decius marvels that the first two, who have all the power and wealth worth having in Rome between them, have somehow been hoodwinked into giving a nobody like Caesar equal footing with them, and speculates which of the first two will come out on top of the inevitable power struggle.
• Bling of War: Nobody Loves A Centurion gives an avid Costume Porn description of Decius putting on his Roman officer's uniform, complete with an anatomically correct breastplate and a push-broom helmet. After he finishes, another officer arrives with the message that their commanding officer wants everyone to wear their combat uniforms to the meeting instead. There's no time to change, and everyone has a good laugh at Decius's expense.
• Combat Pragmatist: Street fighting is a daily occurrence in Rome, even for Senators, so Decius is an experienced scrapper. He always carries a dagger and his favored weapon is a caestus - a set of metal-studded leather straps that wrap his fist - and he knows exactly where to plant it that will hurt most. He also notes that he has many friends who think wrestling or bare-knuckle boxing is the "honorable" way to fight, and has this to say to them:
  Pugilism is the silliest of all combat arts. It consists of taking the human hand, with its multitude of tiny, frangible bones, and smashing it against the human skull, a most unyielding target.
• The Coroner: Decius's friend Asklepiodes, a Greek physician attached to a ludus (gladiator school). Thanks to his position he knows more about violence-related injuries than any other doctor in Rome, and is also an avid collector of exotic swords and other melee weapons. Because physicians are considered "philosophers", he is technically forbidden from practicing medicine with his own hands, but he has a number of well-trained slaves, and when he does get his own hands bloody, his employers and Decius always look the other way.
• Cut Himself Shaving: In A Point of Law, Fulvia's late husband Clodius used to come home gravely wounded due to his position as a gangster and tell her he cut himself shaving. This comes up because her new fiancé Curio comes home with a wound he informs her is minor and she has to be talked out of going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Unfortunately for Curio, one of the concessions the authorities make to avert the rampage is launching a thorough investigation, exposing his Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
• Despair Event Horizon: A slow-burning one for Decius. In Saturnalia, the priestess Furia tells his fortune and says he has one great love, and his destiny is to watch it die, very slowly. She's speaking of the Republic, and its eventual downfall into an absolute monarchy.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Centurion Vinius, the Primus Pilus ("First Spear") of Caesar's legion in Gaul.
• Everyone Has Standards: In The River God's Vengeance, Decius is investigating the collapse of an insula (apartment building) that resulted in the deaths of the owner, his wife, and their slaves. During a wrestling session with Mark Antony at the baths, the latter confides that his uncle, nicknamed Hybrida ("half-beast") for his cruelty and viciousness, actually stormed out of a dinner party thrown by the owner, the highlight of which was the wife making some comment about the main course being off, and "apologizing" to the guests by having the slave cook flogged to death in front of everybody.
• Faking the Dead: Catiline's cabal has a very simple initiation ritual: they each have to murder someone (it doesn't matter who), and thereby put themselves in the power of the rest of the group. Decius, as the Senate's mole inside the cabal, has to recruit Asklepiodes to fake his death in as public a manner as possible. Asklepiodes's masquerade is so convincing that Decius is horror-struck, believing that he actually did kill his friend in some fit of temporary madness or drug-induced haze.
• Foregone Conclusion: Everyone knows what happened to the Republic, and to Caesar.
• Foreigner for a Day: In The Tribune's Curse, Pompey references the Roman tradition of declaring a patch of earth on the Campus Martius to be "foreign soil", and hurling a spear into it as a declaration of war. This is a holdover from Rome's earliest days, when it was traditional to declare war on a rival state in Italy by traveling to the border and hurling a spear into enemy territory. As Rome expanded to dominate all of Italy and several overseas territories, traveling to the actual border with a hostile foreign power became impractical. Pompey warns the Egyptian ambassador that if his demands are not met immediately, then the next morning that patch of earth will be Egypt and Pompey will personally hurl the spear into it.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Marcus Portius Cato (the Younger). Decius acknowledges in The River God's Vengeance that Cato is a good man to have at your side in a tough situation, being fearless, utterly incorruptible, and as intolerant of wrongdoing among the rich and powerful as among the lower classes. However, none of that makes him tolerable company, as he is such a snob and pompous ass that Decius cannot stand him for more than a few minutes.
• The Ghost: Augustus, except for a brief cameo in "A Point of Law", when Decius briefly meets him as a snot-nosed teenager, and is sure he will never amount to much of anything.
• Happily Arranged Marriage: Decius and Julia (Caesar's niece). Decius's family wanted to build a bridge with Caesar's faction, and the fact that Decius and Julia had already met, fallen in love and wanted to get married was entirely irrelevant.
• Happily Married: Decius and Julia, the sole sore point in their relationship being their lack of children.
• Hidden Depths: Decius is outwardly your prototypical Hard Boiled Detective, doing what he has to do to please his family but paying little more than lip service to their notions of tradition, family honor, or service to the state, largely because he knows firsthand what Hypocrites they and the rest of the Senate are. But inside he has moments of spirituality, and cares deeply about the future of the Republic, and men who treat either subject lightly trigger his Berserk Button.
  • In Saturnalia, the priestess Furia asks Decius why he is pursuing the murderer so fervently, since assassination is commonplace in Rome, and Decius has fulfilled his commission to clear Clodia of blame, which means Decius can walk away without guilt now. Decius says that when the murderer threw his victim's body into the Tiber, he did so in deliberate mockery of a ritual sacred to one of Rome's agricultural feasts, and that makes him mad.
• Historical Character's Fictional Relative: Decius is a scion of the Caecilius Metellus gens, the most prominent plebian voting bloc in the Senate, and he is married to the (also fictional) niece of Julius Caesar, Julia.
• Historical Domain Character: Quite a few, including Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and several of the other most famous figures of the late Republic, including Cicero, Clodius and Clodia, Milo, Corbulo, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra VII.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: Referenced In-Universe as happening to Caesar after his death. In The Sacrilege, when Caesar's pompous pronouncement that his wife must be "above suspicion" provokes gales of riotous laughter from the entire Senate, Decius - writing during Augustus's rule - hastens to explain to his reader that the now-deified Julius Caesar was, at this time in his life, a complete nonentity, undistinguished either politically or militarily. Therefore, the notion held by later generations of Romans that Caesar's contemporaries always saw him as a god among men is pure hogwash.
  At this time in his life, only two things were known for sure about Caesar: that his debts were larger than any other man in history, and that he had definitely been buggered as a child by King Nicomedes of Bithynia.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: In The Year of Confusion, Decius and Hermes interview a grain merchant who was taken in by the murder victims' "touting pyramid" con; walking away, Hermes remarks that the man seemed intelligent and savvy, and it is hard to credit that he was taken in by a conman. Decius rejoins that intelligent, accomplished people are the easiest marks, as they assume their expertise in one field translates to knowing everything important there is to know in other fields. Hermes shudders, remembering their experiences with Caesar's army in Gaul, having to deal with young sons of the aristocracy who assumed that their noble birth automatically made them great military leaders, and caused no end of trouble.
• Initialism Title: S.P.Q.R.
• It Will Never Catch On: Decius makes several wrong calls during his lifetime, which he ruefully acknowledges with the benefit of hindsight.
  • In The Catiline Conspiracy, he exchanges words at a public banquet with a young Parthian diplomat named Surena. Decius finds him pleasant enough company, but dismisses him, like all Parthians, as an effete fop - not knowing he is speaking to the future general who will annihilate Crassus's army at Carrhae.
  • In A Point of Law, Decius meets the future emperor Augustus at the age of ten, and dismisses him as a snot-nosed kid who will never amount to much of anything.
  • Inverted in The Temple of the Muses: while touring Alexandria, Julia marvels that the Egyptian civilization lasted for almost five thousand years, and asks if the Roman Republic will last as long. Decius snorts and says of course it will.
• Decius has a few run-ins with Gaius Sallustius Crispus, and dismisses his aspirations of being a historian as the ramblings of a dilettante trying to make dinner-party conversation.
• Just the First Citizen: Decius is writing his memoirs during the reign of Augustus, whom Decius despises so much that he refuses to refer to him except as "The First Citizen" (Princeps);
  • In The Year of Confusion, Caesar's apologists make much of the fact that he refused to be acclaimed as Rome's "king"; Decius reflects sourly that this is not humility as much as pragmatism; Caesar doesn't need to be called a king when he's already dictator, an office that carries all the same powers and (unlike a kingship) is actually provided for in the Republic's constitution.
• Long-Running Book Series: The first volume was published in 1990; the latest to date was published in 2010.
• Moral Myopia: Asklepiodes (and others) point out several baffling hypocrisies in the Roman society, such as the fact that they stage brutal gladiator fights for public entertainment, yet their priests are forbidden to see blood or else the whole city is cursed. Decius, a true Roman, just Hand Waves these away with some variant of "you're a foreigner, you just don't get it."
• Noble Bigot: Downplayed with Decius. He knows that Rome is the most advanced civilization and will endure for millennia, but he also concedes that it adapted (read: stole) many of its designs and innovations from other cultures, usually by conquering them.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Sallust points out to Decius that Clodius is his mortal enemy, and Milo is his close friend, yet they both play the same role in Roman politics - the "political gangster" and street-level Dragon for their patrons in the Senate (Milo for Cicero and later for Pompey, Clodius for Caesar) - and there is very little difference in the methods they use or the lengths they will go for the sake of power. Decius responds stubbornly that he likes Milo, but hates Clodius.
• Offered the Crown: Caesar, who ostentatiously turns it down (since he's already dictator and holds absolute power anyway).
• One-Steve Limit: Averted to the extreme. Just about everyone in Rome shares the same first name as six other members of his family, and often have to rely on family nicknames to tell each other apart.
• Overzealous Underling: Calpurnius Bestia in Saturnalia, who admits to poisoning Decius's Uncle Celer because of his political opposition to Pompey. When Decius asks if Pompey actually ordered Celer killed, the smiling reply is:
  You know how one serves great men, Decius. Try to do what they want, without them having to tell you. That way their hands stay clean, but they are conscious of how much they owe you.
• The Quisling: In The Temple of the Muses, Decius warns one of his fellows in the Roman embassy in Alexandria that someone in Ptolemy Auletes's court is conspiring against Rome. The friend, a senior diplomat, brushes this off, explaining that whenever such a plot forms, inevitably one of the conspirators realizes how much better he can do by betraying the plot to Rome and setting himself up to reap the rewards. Truth in Television, as this was a cornerstone of Rome's foreign policy, and usually worked astonishingly well. Decius remembers these words later, when he is in Egypt with Caesar and encounters Antipater and his son Herod (yes, that Herod).
• Shame If Something Happened: In Saturnalia, Decius is commissioned by his family to investigate the death of his uncle, Metellus Celer. His family assumes that he was poisoned by his wife, Clodia, so this investigation shouldn't take long. While Decius is relaxing in the baths, Clodia's brother Clodius comes in with several of his men and casually surround Decius, saying he'd be "grateful" if Decius's investigation cleared his sister of any suspicion. Decius knows that they could drown him then and there without breaking a sweat, so naturally he says yes.
• Snipe Hunt: In Nobody Loves A Centurion, Caesar cheerfully owns that his extraordinary assignment to Gaul - the whole of which he is expected to conquer with minimal forces - is somewhere between this and a Uriah Gambit, and his two frenemies on the triumvirate, Caesar and Crassus, expect him to either be killed or to slink back to Rome in abject failure. Little do they know...
• Young Future Famous People:
  • Cleopatra VII is a charming 13-year-old when Decius meets her in Alexandria.
  • While visiting the home of the Lady Octavia, Decius meets her precocious 10-year-old brother, Octavianus, whom Decius predicts will never amount to much of anything.