Yesterday's mail brought my contributor's copy of Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, edited by Jaym Gates. It's a big handsome paperback with interior illustrations by Lisa A. Grabenstetter and Evan M. Jensen and more than five hundred pages of fiction by Haralambi Markov, Caroline Ratajski, Gemma Files, Scott Edelman, z.m. quỳnh, Anatoly Belilovsky, Sunil Patel, Richard Dansky, Chaz Brenchley, Cat Rambo, Ken Liu, Laura Anne Gilmam, and many more. My very short story "Imperator Noster" is among them. This one comes with notes!
There is no extant tradition of sea-people in the harbor of ancient Rome. In January 2014, C.S.E. Cooney left an enigmatic summary of her New Year's Eve on Facebook: "On parties. And seaweed. And Roman Emperors." The last two of these items sparked the story more or less entire.
According to Suetonius and Dio Cassius, Caligula infamously ended his abortive campaign to Britain in 40 CE by arranging his forces on the shore of the English Channel and then declaring victory over the sea, commanding his soldiers to gather sea-shells as "spoils of Ocean, due to the Capitol and the Palatine" and dismissing them with the ritual phrasing of a triumphant commander to his rewarded troops. In 42 CE, Claudius inaugurated one of the most elaborate public works projects of his thirteen-year reign: the construction of a new harbor at Ostia to supplement the old grain port at Puteoli, excavating acres out of the silty, sandy coastline and laying massive breakwaters around the sea that flooded in. While the complex structure was not fully completed until the reign of Trajan, it was in use in Claudius' lifetime. If Caligula had insulted Ocean with his spurious claim of triumph, perhaps Claudius had mollified it by ceding Roman ground.
Retiarius is the name applied to the class of gladiator who fought equipped as stylized fishermen, minimally armored and armed only with a weighted net (rete), a trident, and a knife. Traditionally paired with the heavily armored and helmet-masked secutor, the net-wielding retiarius offered the theme of a fisherman trying to land a deadly, scale-sheathed fish. Despite their distinctive appearance and the popularity of their matches, retiarii were not highly rated as fighters—were stigmatized, in fact, as ineffectual and unmanly. Gravestones and graffiti attesting to the prowess of individual retiarii argue against the accuracy of the stereotype. It seemed an appropriate name for an irreverent rumor turned uncanny reality. Plus I have loved the word since high school; I learned it from my very first (and only) Latin textbook. It was nice to find it a suitably strange home.
The Romans called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum, "Our Sea." The title of the story is the same construction—"Our Emperor."
Basically, with this story, you get the classical world, the sea, and a high probability of at least an allusion to the underworld, which is about as characteristic as I get outside of "The Boatman's Cure." And if that's a strike against rather than a recommendation for, the rest of the anthology is still pretty great, too.
There is no extant tradition of sea-people in the harbor of ancient Rome. In January 2014, C.S.E. Cooney left an enigmatic summary of her New Year's Eve on Facebook: "On parties. And seaweed. And Roman Emperors." The last two of these items sparked the story more or less entire.
According to Suetonius and Dio Cassius, Caligula infamously ended his abortive campaign to Britain in 40 CE by arranging his forces on the shore of the English Channel and then declaring victory over the sea, commanding his soldiers to gather sea-shells as "spoils of Ocean, due to the Capitol and the Palatine" and dismissing them with the ritual phrasing of a triumphant commander to his rewarded troops. In 42 CE, Claudius inaugurated one of the most elaborate public works projects of his thirteen-year reign: the construction of a new harbor at Ostia to supplement the old grain port at Puteoli, excavating acres out of the silty, sandy coastline and laying massive breakwaters around the sea that flooded in. While the complex structure was not fully completed until the reign of Trajan, it was in use in Claudius' lifetime. If Caligula had insulted Ocean with his spurious claim of triumph, perhaps Claudius had mollified it by ceding Roman ground.
Retiarius is the name applied to the class of gladiator who fought equipped as stylized fishermen, minimally armored and armed only with a weighted net (rete), a trident, and a knife. Traditionally paired with the heavily armored and helmet-masked secutor, the net-wielding retiarius offered the theme of a fisherman trying to land a deadly, scale-sheathed fish. Despite their distinctive appearance and the popularity of their matches, retiarii were not highly rated as fighters—were stigmatized, in fact, as ineffectual and unmanly. Gravestones and graffiti attesting to the prowess of individual retiarii argue against the accuracy of the stereotype. It seemed an appropriate name for an irreverent rumor turned uncanny reality. Plus I have loved the word since high school; I learned it from my very first (and only) Latin textbook. It was nice to find it a suitably strange home.
The Romans called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum, "Our Sea." The title of the story is the same construction—"Our Emperor."
Basically, with this story, you get the classical world, the sea, and a high probability of at least an allusion to the underworld, which is about as characteristic as I get outside of "The Boatman's Cure." And if that's a strike against rather than a recommendation for, the rest of the anthology is still pretty great, too.
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