The Spanish Boom In Books About The Roman Empire

Rome has never gone out of fashion, its past has always been close. Figures such as Julius Caesar or Augustus, Republican or Imperial Rome have influenced leaders of all times. Virgil, Titus Livius and Seneca have been a recurring source of inspiration in visual literature throughout the ages. The Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla or Pompeii buried by Vesuvius always fascinate us, so we celebrate Ferragosto under the blazing sun by visiting its ruins and uploading a photo to Instagram. The legacy of Rome is still very, very present in the 21st century.

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However, there were many of us who discovered ancient Rome with Asterix and Obelix and those crazy Romans. From this restful childhood we remember the weekly anticipation of seeing a new episode of “I, Claudio” on TVE, and even when the savings banks gave away books and not kitchen utensils, we read the book in exchange on a distant day excellent novel by Robert Graves a symbolic income in our cards. Authors like Graves and actors like Derek Jacobi introduced us to Julio-Claudian Rome and introduced us to Tacitus through the use of family intrigue and dynastic strife, with the Romans busy conquering the world, forging an empire, and… Orgies attend banquets. Since childhood we were addicted to the peplum, Peter Ustinov in Quo Vadis was our face of Nero and we trained our adult sensibilities with Kubrick's Spartacus, Fellini's Satyricon or Monty Python's The Life of Brian. This does not mean that we, the unconditional fans of Roman cinema – even the evil Romans in Holy Week, like Ben-Hur's Messala – gave up on Ridley Scott's epic “Gladiator” and forgave the occasional historical error because we are loyal to Rome and its gladiators stayed. , its legions and its tyrannical and unleashed emperors.

Now we are told by TikTok that this is typical of men who constantly think about the Roman Empire, perhaps because our heterobasic nature finds the blood and sand in ancient Rome to strengthen our threatened patriarchal reason, that Rome in which By the way, women played a significant role in all areas.

In our country, it was not easy to get into the knowledge of Ancient Rome in other ways if you were not a specialist. Popular works were rare because we had no tradition like the Anglo-Saxon one. There were a few here and there, but they were failed essays by profane authors alike from history and the literary arts that went against what had really happened. Our salvation found historical novels, those of Robert Harris and Colleen McCullough, and through the novels of Lindsey Davis we even became fans of Marco Didio Falco. This situation soon changed and publishers decided to publish essays by wise authors from international science who mastered making the vicissitudes of ancient Rome accessible to a curious and educated audience. The books of the scholar Pierre Grimal are paradigmatic in this respect, the war in the classical world of Peter Connolly was precocious in Espasa-Calp and the Anglo-Saxon tradition continues in iron health with successes such as those of Adrian Goldsworthy and Mary Beard.

A few decades ago it was difficult to learn about Rome in our country

Was Spain different here too? Here the distribution did not entirely convince the experts, who confused popularization with popularization. They believed that if the general public wanted to get closer to Rome, they already had translations by Gibbon or Mommsen – their History of Rome won the Nobel Prize in Literature – masterpieces that had been translated into Spanish long ago, although they had a cultured impression mediated on our living room shelves, read only by specialists or enlightened fans of the history of Rome who had more time than a Proust reader and a reading voraciousness that would make it easier not to give up the attempt. It is true that kiosk collections soon appeared in which scholars brought ancient history closer to the general public, and it would be unfair not to recognize that in our country we had excellent disseminators of the classical world, for example Carlos García Gual, the academic who did more, to introduce readers to Greece and Rome, or Fernando Quesada and Francisco Gracia, who taught us so much about the archeology of war in antiquity. At this point we should remember the commendable work of the publisher Desperta Ferro, which had great success with its series about the Roman legions.

Still from “Gladiator,” directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe. Year 2000.

This uncertainty has changed radically and there are now many names of authors who teleport us to ancient Rome, university professors or simply graduates of history, archeology or classical philology who are committed to dissemination and who have understood that the transfer of knowledge is more necessary than ever, not to mention the duty to a citizenry that funds our research. The success of these works is proportional to their quality and they are the best proof of how a young and not so young generation of authors managed to awaken society's curiosity about ancient history and even to unify it once again To make Magistra Vitae from the platforms of university halls to the streets, on paper and digital, through multiple publishing houses or the Internet, but undoubtedly it satisfies the need for history to fulfill its purpose and to provide us with tools to reflect on our social project and to rethink it. The reader always tends to reward quality and returns again and again to ancient Rome without caring too much whether its story is addressed by politics, war or sexuality, the most common themes.

If the reader has been seduced by the Romans with Asterix's Julius Caesar and his favorite phrase “To the lions!”, with the four Arabian horses in Ben-Hur or with Maximus Decimus Meridius fighting Bengal tigers in Gladiator, he will find a good one Immerse yourself in Roman society through the circus or the amphitheater in the books of David Álvarez Jiménez Panem et circenses. A History of Rome through the Circus (Alianza Editorial) and María Engracia Muñoz-Santos, Animales in Harena. Exotic animals in Roman shows (Confluences) or gladiators, beasts, chariots and other shows in ancient Rome (Synthesis). Both authors have provided us with excellent works that delight both the general public and professional historians. The recipe is simple, but not so easy to implement successfully: they found out what Martial, Pliny, Plutarch and Dio Cassius said here and there about spectacles with animals, and they understood how to show the reader the spectacular mosaic to bring iconography closer. Reliefs and paintings such as those from Pompeii or the Roman Villa del Casale in Piazza Armerina in Sicily.

Now we are told by Tiktok that it is typical for men to constantly think about the empire

How not to immerse yourself in ancient Rome by hosting banquets with Trimalchio at the Satyricon or attending orgies with Messalina. Freud taught us that erotic literature, pornography, or the phallocentrism of Roman frescoes are cultural products that, over the centuries, have served to sublimate the prevailing repression of community morality. One cannot stop thinking about Rome and remembering its Bacchanals, to which Pedro Ángel Fernández Vega dedicated a very detailed essay (Bacchanals. The Myth, Sex and the Witch Hunt, Siglo XXI) and a historical novel (Bacanalia, Espasa). has a fertile field of distribution and a genre with which to seduce the general public. If anyone can say I am Rome, it is Santiago Posteguillo, who has felt the power of fictional antiquity like no other, with million-dollar sales of his Trajan trilogy and even a Planeta Award with his Yo, Julia (Ediciones B and Planeta ). . Miguel Díaz Espada follows in the footsteps of his television series “The Heart of the Empire” and offers us a gallery of portraits of Roman matrons who wanted to join Ovid in the art of loving like furtive Venuses and in the art of loving commandingly like Caesar's dressing stole. Patricia González Gutiérrez, who participated in the same series in Cunnus. Sex and Power in Rome (Desperta Ferro) showed how right Foucault was when he taught us in his history of sexuality that everything sexual is political and that when we say sex we really mean power. Previously, she and her soror had given us a fascinating immersion into the world of Roman women. Women in Rome (Desperta Ferro) who play with the art of provocation to enlighten and shock the reader in equal measure, without ever betraying the scientific rigor, although they prefer to inform us with the vulgus sermo of the customs of the Romans that they called to bring didactically closer at all times to the moralizing customs of the ancestors, the mos maiorum, who, however, gave in to the constraints of desire and the temptations of a refined and docile life.

A still from “Ben-Hur,” 1959, starring Charlton Heston.

Politics and war are always a safe investment. Alberto Monterroso, professor of Latin and Greek, has done a fluent biography of Seneca to transport us to the Rome of Nero (Séneca. The Wisdom of the Empire, Almuzara), as well as an essay on the Hispanic emperors (Emperadores de Hispania). , La Esfera of books), crucial to the history of the Roman Empire and, for some, anachronistically an outdated reason for patriotic pride. Anyone who believes that the corruption of politicians is an evil of our days should read again Pedro Ángel Fernández Vega (Corrupta Roma, La Esfera de los Libros), who reveals to us with Plauto that corruption has always been sanctified by customs and by exempt from all law. The Romans blamed this atmosphere of widespread moral corruption on the adoption of the harmful customs of the Greeks, something Marcus Porcius Cato vehemently decried more than 2,000 years ago when he chided that those who steal from the state spend their lives between gold and purple , although he was also unaware that the Roman virtue of Camilo from Manrique and his love of the land and the land (the land is liberated with iron, not gold) were perfectly compatible with the greed of the tax collector or the tax collector general, the feeds on spoils of war and abusive tax revenues.

It is not easy to explain this period without falling into the clichés that are repeated from generation to generation.

The French history school of the Annales has shown us how fascinating the history of private life and everyday life can be. Here too we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the Romans, their customs, their joys and fears, and an anthology of magical texts or about paranormal phenomena captivates us just as the extensive work of Gonzalo Fontana Elboj Sub looks evil. Anthology of texts from ancient Rome about supernatural creatures and events (Password), such as the bestselling phenomenon by Néstor F. Marqués (A Year in Ancient Rome. The Daily Life of the Romans through their Calendar; Fake News from Ancient Rome Rome . Deceptions, propaganda and lies from 2000 years ago; May the gods help us! Religions, rites and superstitions of ancient Rome or moments of ancient Rome that changed the world, all in Espasa), which with his books his participation in the television show El Condenser de Fluzo (TVE) or his thousands of followers

The spread of the history of Rome has reached the age of majority without complexes in our country, that of the autonomy of the will that not only creates original, without resigning itself to what it invents, but also gradually gains loyalty from a curious one audience and begins to be translated into languages from other latitudes such as Italian or Polish. It is true that it is not an easy task to explain another Roman story without falling into the clichés that are reproduced from generation to generation. Although all that glitters is not always gold, we can state without hesitation that there is no subject in Roman history that the Spanish dissemination has not made available to the public, blessed by good fortune and by the simple fact that Rome is always a present past.