Lips Like Cherries

by Kathleen Bradean

Steven Saylor writes a wonderful detective series set in ancient Rome. His hero Gordianus the Finder treads carefully through politics and intrigue in pursuit of truth. Years ago at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, Steven talked about the pitfalls of writing historical fiction. This is recall, so forgive me if I have the story wrong, but he mentioned that in one of his stories, he compared the lips of Gordianus’ lover to cherries, which prompted a reader to inform him that his story was clearly set several years before cherries were introduced to the Romans. Horrors!  Steven mentioned that in the reprint he changed the comparison to pomegranates. But his point was that no matter how much research you do, there’s someone out there whose entire life revolves around fruit in ancient Rome, chariot wheels, or armor, and if you make an error on their obsession, they will hunt you down and mock you.

Put me off writing historicals.

 Oh, I can see someone complaining that a character couldn’t have walked from Bath to London in two days during the Regency period or when a sycophantic courtier says that a Ming Dynasty emperor has the wisdom of Solomon, but I’m not going to drag a writer to the public pillory for cherry lips. I’ll forgive a lot when reading a ripping yarn.

But my concern, both as a reader and a writer, is how can we ever know we got it right? I’m not as concerned about details of cherries and chariot wheels as I am about how we assume people felt about issues. The things we ‘know’ about the past are often a lot of nonsense. For example, the way we’ve been taught to view the Victorians. We think of them a puritanical zealots who covered the arms and legs of their furniture to stop lustful thoughts. Sure, maybe someone did that, but some people in this current time believe that the Grand Canyon was created during Noah’s Flood. I wouldn't want someone two hundred years from now thinking I believed that about the Grand Canyon. Maybe the reason we know about the furniture modesty thing was that someone thought it was so stupid that they wrote about it assuming the audience would get how absurd it was, not that they'd take it as a widespread practice.

What we forget about the Victorians, if we ever knew it, was that they were incredibly forward thinking people. Women’s suffrage, the Humane Society, public sanitation, spiritualism, vegetarianism, public police forces, free-love communes… You name it, they got into it. The best part was that they stopped looking to their rulers to fix problems, rolled up their sleeves, applied scientific methods, and got it done with their committees and teas and societies at the public level. Yeah, some things didn’t work out so well, but at least they tried to make life better for everyone. Bunch of radicals!

So I’m afraid when I read that people didn't know about sex when they probably watched their livestock or neighbors or parents getting it on all the time that we’re not giving our predecessors much credit for common sense. I think plenty people knew the earth was a sphere long before it became the official doctrine. I think most cultures fostered explorers who traveled as well as homebodies who made sure they had a hearth to return to. I don’t believe in the noble savage or that anyone ever properly revered the earth. There were no real saints and everyone was (is) capable of savagery as well as deep compassion, often applied simultaneously, because humans are weird that way. I think a lot of people paid (pay) lip service to the local religion but did (do) what they damn well pleased, because no matter what era, continent, race or religion people were born to, people are, and always were, people. My favorite historical novels have a way of pointing that out.