Nero and Sporus
by S.P. Somtow
Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters.
The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena.
“Can you not posture in such a boyish manner, domine? You’ll ruin the effect.”
“What effect?”
“My dear domine, can you turn that wrist more daintily? Can you not stampede about the room like a raging adolescent lad?”
“Is that not what I am?”
“You will play a role, domine. And if you don’t do it well, it will fare badly for us, as well.”
Realizing that their fates as well as mine rested on my performance, I sat still while they padded my hips and chest a little, and while a cosmetician painted my face with delicate strokes, and two others teased and piled my hair.
And presently I found myself looking at my reflection in a mirror of polished bronze and I was transformed. My hair was elaborately coifed and extended with a tall wig. Exotic fabrics caressed my skin, and an outer layer of rich purple left no doubt as to my Imperial status. The fibula I recognized was holding it all together at one shoulder. Lead white gave my face an unearthly pallor and my lips were stained blood-crimson.
I stood taller. Arrogance flecked my lips. I felt ennobled. Entitled, indeed.
I was not just the Divine Poppaea Sabina, Mistress of the World. I was an idealized version of the Empress. And I have to admit that, in these garments, my way of moving, my way of walking, shifted towards the feminine. It was instinctive. I never felt beautiful as a boy, but as a woman, as an Empress …
Perhaps it was just a role, but I was pulling something from deep within myself.
Extracts from S.P. Somtow's Interview with Literary Titan:
Delicatus follows a young boy from ancient Rome who is enslaved by pirates and becomes a key player in Poppeae’s plot to become the Divine Empress. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I first encountered Sporus at Eton, studying Alexander Pope with the remarkable teacher Michael Meredith, a guru to generations of literary and stage personalities. Pope’s satire on an 18th century local aristocrat notorious for sexual ambiguity led me to be fascinated by this figure, who was well known enough in 18th century England for a poet to allude to him in a satire, yet mostly just a footnote in history books about ancient Rome today if he appears at all.
I would encounter this character from time to time (there’s an illusion, for instance, in the TV series “Succession”) but there are only scraps in the historical record. But what scraps they were! Not just the relatively well-known bit about Sporus getting castrated by the emperor Nero and made his wife … but what happened to Sporus in the year 69 AD when four different emperors held the throne and all had a different relationship with Sporus … from a second wedding to an order to execute him in the arena … and all before Sporus turned twenty. But it took me another fifty years before thinking of it as a novel.
What kind of research did you do for this novel to ensure you captured the essence of the story’s theme?
I’ve always been interested in ancient history and I’ve written both serious and satirical novels in that setting, so I have been doing research for decades. It’s a way of taking revenge on my bullying Latin teacher, as well. I’ve read most of the primary sources (some in the original) but more important, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what that world, with its radically alien attitudes, was really like … because, despite its weirdness, it is a world populated by real people who speak to us today. One of the things that is hardest to wrap one’s mind around is that absolutely no one thought that there was anything wrong with slavery, and that because slaves could not be distinguished by race, there was a kind of continuum where you rise to a position of great power and still technically be a slave. Big things like that influence the world-view, but also little things, like human urine being collected to use in laundries. This is a very well studied period so there is a lot of consensus about what this world was like. But there are still gaps in the consensus and this is where imagination comes in.
Sporus is a complex and captivating character. Can you share the process of developing his personality and how you balanced his vulnerability and resilience throughout the story?
So many bad things happened to Sporus that he could not have survived without a great deal of native wit and real intelligence. To survive in Nero’s court was tough even for people who had been raised and bred for it. To develop his character, I imagined him talking to me, letting me share his innermost, often contradictory thoughts. It’s the core of innocence that people around Sporus love — the thing they themselves do not possess. But that innocence is constantly besieged by the realities of his world. I think that making this a first-person narrative makes you constantly strive to understand the realities of that world. It’s an imaginative exercise in chanelling if you will.
How did you approach crafting Nero’s character, and what were the challenges in depicting his divine madness and capricious nature?
Of course, we know a lot more about Nero than we do about Sporus. This means not only that it’s easier to create a character people would recognize as Nero, but also harder to bring out qualities that might be concealed behind the very well-known persona. Nero was not raised to be an Emperor, so on some level, he must have been able to understand how ordinary people felt. The evil madman image is to some extent anti-Julio-Claudian propaganda — followed by Christian propaganda. He was, almost to the end, rather popular, but the mob was fickle.
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S.P. Somtow
Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as 'the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,' Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.
Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.
His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, 'skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.' Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers' Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children's books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.
In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon's Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok's first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
According to London's Opera magazine, 'in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.' His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.
Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with "Homeworld of the Heart", a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.
Currently he has just finished Nero and Sporus, a massive historical novel set in Imperial Rome.
To support S.P. Somtow's work, visit his patreon account at patreon.com/spsomtow. His website is at www.somtow.com.
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