NY/China

Manhattan & HangZhou:

The author of a new book on pagan Rome reports on his research (via Arts & Letters Daily). His main insights, he says, came from living in Manhattan:

Just listening to my beloved 10th Street cacophony every morning puts me at one with the ancients: "Insomnia is the main cause of death in Rome," ranted Juvenal. "Show me the apartment that lets you sleep!" Of course, instead of sirens and car alarms, the Romans were driven mad by the shrieks of street vendors and bells from pagan rituals. The night traffic was deafening: Axle grease was rarely used in ancient times, so the high-pitched squeal of wagon wheels grinding through the narrow streets was as piercing as the brakes on New York's garbage trucks.

Whenever I make my way downstairs to the rubbish-strewn sidewalk, I can gather more inspiration about ancient life: Strolling the Subura was once an assault on the senses, weaving through an obstacle course of filth and pushy crowds. ("One man digs an elbow into my side, another a hard pole," wrote Juvenal, "one bangs a beam, another a wine cask, against my skull.")

I sympathize with this writer entirely. While living in HangZhou, China, I wrote an entire novel (never published) about the Varangian Guard. The Varangians were a group of Norse and Rus warriors who had come to be employed as mercenaries by the "Romans" of Byzantium. I happened to have a fairly complete personal library as far as the surviving writings and chronicles of the Norse who were involved -- particularly the saga of King Harald Hardrada, and a companion saga about one of his personal companions and fellow warriors.

However, I knew nothing at all about Byzantium except as it was presented by the Norse writers, who were relating to print tales that had been passed down for more than a hundred years. Still, the experience of being a rather warlike foreigner in an ancient land with an alien culture was entirely familiar. The book's first third, treating the life in the warriors while in Constantinople, was really about living in HangZhou among the foreign community.

When I returned to the United States, I got some books on Byzantine history and revised the book to fit the reality as presented by real historians. Not very much revision turned out to be necessary, however. It proved that HangZhou was a pretty reliable guide to the experience, just as I had imagined it to be.