A Book A Week - Week 43: Medicus

This week's book:
  Medicus:  a Novel of the Roman Empire   by Ruth Downie

Grade:   A

In college one of my concentrations was Classics, Latin and Greek.  Later I taught Latin, which included a healthy helping of Roman culture and customs.  I always told my students that even though we modern Americans get many of our legal traditions and symbols from Romans - not to mention Christianity - the Romans of classical times were very, very different people from you and I.  Their culture was a slave culture through and through, and that's not something modern people really get.  Sure, we understand it intellectually, but we don't feel it, we haven't ever participated in the cultural evil of holding another person in bondage so our understanding of slavery lies on the shallow end of the enlightenment pool.  It was always tough, maybe impossible, to get the truth across to my students.

I wish this book had been available back then.

Medicus is a murder mystery, set in Roman-occupied Britain back in the Second Century AD.  The hero is the physician - a 'medicus' - Gaius Petreius Ruso, late of Rome itself.  He used to be in the Emperor's favor, but Roman politics and intrigue conspired against him, his wife divorced him, and his family farm in Gaul is in trouble and his brother might have to sell.  Overwhelmed by circumstance, he flees to military medical service in the Empire's hinterlands, among the barbarians.  He's slowly coming undone, becoming less than who he thought he was without finding who he really is.  Then, someone finds a body in the river, and Ruso can't stop asking questions.  His already complicated life becomes much more messy.

So far it sounds like a fairly straightforward mystery.  Sure, the trappings are Roman - and suitably authentic, I can vouch for that - but the situation could be a regular modern mystery.  Then we find out that the dead woman fished out of the river was a slave.  And then we find out there are more dead slaves, all women, and no one seems to know anything.  Slowly the author pulls back the veil and lets the readers see that slavery corrupts.  Everyone touched by the slave trade, even the hero Ruso, becomes soiled by it.  They're all dirty, it's just that some are dirtier than others.

Balancing that tension is what led me to like this book.  More than once characters say 'anyone can buy a girl,' with a casual voice that made me shiver.  It's true, that's the way things work in a slave economy, people aren't people, they're property, and treated only as well as their owner treats his things.  The characters are in a terrible society, but it's the only one they have; they don't know any other way.  They try to do good, but it never works out right.

The story is suitably convoluted for a murder mystery, complicated by the hero's own personal shortcomings, and it comes to a satisfactory conclusion, with all the loose ends tied off.  But even the final pages, where the hero comes to a triumph of sorts, involve slavery and the inherent power imbalance between master and slave.

You can read this book just for the mystery part, which is very good, or just for the Roman culture and history part, which is also very good and incredibly real, or you can read it for the deeper shades of meaning that apply to our own time and place.  I recommend the third one. 

Next week:
  Damned    by Chuck Palahniuk
The dude who wrote 'Fight Club.'  I read 'Fight Club' years ago and didn't really like it.  Too... I don't know... angry white guy?  This is about a dead teenaged girl.  I'm trying to go into it with no expectations, we'll see how well that works out.