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Robert M. Price has been a contributor of articles to Lovecraftian Studies as well as the editor of Crypt of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Codex, and Midnight Shambler. He currently edits Cthulhu Mythos fiction anthologies for Fedogan & Bremer and for Chaosium, Inc.
Introduction to The Gardens
of Lucullus
by Robert M. Price
THE GARDENS OF LUCULLU is a gem, a find, a rare combination of a modern historical novel, a sword-and-sorcery epic, and the ancient Hellenistic novel. How foolish it would be for me to tell you why the writing is good. It will speak for itself. And if it did not, then no Cyrano de Bergerac efforts of mine would help. No, my job is merely to share with you just how excellent is the background research and the care taken to weave it into the narrative. Such craft is familiar to us from Richard L. Tierney's Simon of Gitta stories in general, though here we see it on a grander scale, a bigger screen, than ever. Tierney and Glenn Rahman have, first, preserved the hallmark of sword-and-sorcery fiction: Robert E. Howard's combination of headlong action with Lovecraftian eldritch supernaturalism, his retrojection of the Chandleresque recipe of chivalric sentimentality mixed with hard-boiled attitude into the ancient world. But, second, they have supplied a complex, realistic, and thoroughly believable scenario of Roman intrigues familiar from Robert Graves's I, Claudius. Such intrigues are familiar from Howard, e.g., The Hour of the Dragon, too, but on nothing quite like this scale.Third, our authors have managed to sketch in the convincing lines of an alien culture simply by virtue of getting so much ancient coloring , itself alien to us, right on target. For instance, the horribly grim portrait of Rome in this novel comports well with what we know of ancient Mediterranean cities. They had no real sanitation except for the curbside variety. The public baths and latrines were too few and far between to have served anyone but the aristocracy on any regular basis. Most wretches lived in poorly constructed tenements, no more than five stories high (or they'd collapse even more often than they did!) and filled with tiny cubicles shared among large families and their livestock. Streets were so narrow, with overhanging balconies, that one could chat with one's neighbors across the street without having to raise one's voice. There was virtually no police protection, no privacy, no medicine, no soap! Cities were what Lovecraft called New York: "pest-zones." Life expectancy was hardly above thirty (which didn't mean there weren't plenty of gray-bearded elders; it just meant infant mortality was staggering on the other end of the scale). We are more "familiar" with an ancient Rome that never existed outside Hollywood epics. But Tierney and Rahman offer us a sobering glimpse of the real thing.
Central to the premise of this novel is the fascinating phenomenon of the Hellenistic Mystery Religions, those systems of initiation that began as Asian and Egyptian agricultural religions and traveled via slave trade, missionaries, and military tours of duty into the West where they mutated into esoteric salvation cults. We know quite a bit about them from various ancient records, some of them (like Lucius Apuleius' Metamorphosis) autobiographical. They involved pre- or non-Olympian gods. Mother goddesses, as in this book, were mighty popular, too. The cult (which just means, to sociologists anyway, a religion transplanted to a new culture and not yet assimilated into it) of Cybele, the Magna Mater, was very important in Rome, where it had been imported from Phrygia in Asia Minor. It entailed fevered public rites of self-castration, where initiates repeated the self-emasculation of the savior Attis, who maimed himself in remorse at having betrayed his divine bride Cybele. She forgave him and raised him from the dead, and this Passion narrative was yearly celebrated in the spring. Cybele had many variant versions in myth and name alike, including Isis, Astarte, Eve, Ishtar, and others. Readers of Lovecraft may have first become acquainted with this fossil religion through the mention of it in "The Rats in the Walls." There Lovecraft makes the religion of Attis and Cybele a late survival of an even more ghastly form of worship involving the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep. Tierney and Rahman are clearly walking in HPL's shambling footsteps here, and it is a brilliant idea, difficult to pass by. (I confess to ringing my own changes on the theme in "The Beard of Byatis" in the Ramsey Campbell tribute collection Made in Goatswood, Chaosium, Inc. 1995).
Tierney and Rahman have gone beyond Lovecraft in accurately situating the worship of Cybele amid the well-attested Roman male anxiety over their women secretly participating in forbidden Eastern cults. For instance, a second or third century BCE Pythagorean writing instructs the reader, "Women of importance... make modest sacrifices to the gods... according to their means. They keep away from secret cults and Cybeline orgies in their homes. For public law prevents women from participating in these rites, particularly because these forms of worship encourage drunkenness and ecstasy." Plutarch, in his second-century CE work "Advice to the Bride and Groom," similarly says: "A wife ought not to acquire friends of her own, but share in her husband's friends. First and greatest of friends are the gods, and hence it becomes the wife to worship the gods her husband believes in and to recognize none other. Her house should be closed to exotic rites and alien superstitions. No god can be pleased with clandestine and surreptitious rituals performed by women." Juvenal's Sixth Satire pursues the same theme at great length, as does Euripides' The Baccahae, where we see in lurid colors the fears ancient men had of their women indulging in ritual bloodbaths. What Tierney and Rahman depict is just what ancient Roman (and Greek) menfolk were so afraid of!
It is not just that Tierney and Rahman have the ancient frame of reference startlingly correct. They have even managed to preserve some of the most important genre markers of ancient adventure novels. And there were quite a few of these. The genre reached its height of popularity in the second century CE, and the extant examples may be found conveniently collected and translated in B.P. Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels (University of California Press, 1989). One of the favorite plot devices was that of the feigned death, or docetism ("seeming" death). The hero or heroine seems to have died, sending the spouse/lover into despair until it becomes evident that the loved one was in a coma, prematurely buried, and now alive. In some cases, there is an elaborate attempt to make it appear the hero or heroine was sacrificed or executed, all by sleight-of-hand, precisely as you will read somewhere in The Gardens of Lucullus. I think of a particularly elaborate example in Achilles Tatius' Leucippa and Clitophon, Book 3, paragraph 21.
The docetism device evolves into a major piece of theology in the mystical and heretical circles from which the historical Simon of Gitta, Simon Magus, is familiar. The Gnostic sects spoke of Jesus Christ (of whom Simon is said to have claimed to be a reincarnation) as having survived or escaped the cross. Some of them taught that his true, spiritual self did not die, though his body did, while others took it to mean the cross was empty, and the onlookers were prevented from seeing it (as in the movie version of The Last Temptation of Christ). The belief passed on into Islam in the version that Judas or someone else died on the cross, having been miraculously transformed into Jesus' likeness, Jesus himself having been meanwhile caught up to heaven. At any rate, it seems quite fitting to find an elementary form of docetism in The Gardens of Lucullus, as we do in ancient novels.
Another element of the old novels, surviving into novels much closer to our time, is the recognition scene where the identities of long-parted relatives or lovers are disclosed, both to the characters themselves and to us the readers. It is the climactic importance of such scenes in ancient fiction that gave the Clementine Recognitions its title. We find this, too, in The Gardens of Lucullus, though given fairly minor weight, so as not to make the whole plot depend on it, a device with which post-Dickens readers have become increasingly impatient.
You will notice occasional mentions of one of the most tantalizing figures of the ancient world, Apollonius of Tyana. Robert Bloch occasionally mentioned him as a part of ancient magical lore, and Apollonius' third-century biographer Flavius Philostratus labored mightily to elevate the image of his subject from that of a mere charlatan wizard to that of a Neo-Pythagorean sage whose miracles were but natural effluences of the divine wisdom that permeated him. Philostratus' hagiography of Apollonius matches the genre of the Gospels almost exactly, from a divine annunciation of his miraculous conception, through a precocious youth, to a life full of journeys and miracles, all the way to a trial before an evil Roman tyrant, a joyous reunion with his disciples, and a final ascension into heaven. He was a contemporary of Jesus, and there has been some speculation that, like the character Simon Magus, Apollonius may have been one of the ingredients entering into the fictive New Testament portrait of the Apostle Paul (along with Proteus Peregrinus, King Pentheus from Euripides' The Bacchae, and the converted Heliodorus in 2 Maccabees chapter 3).
What I am saying is that The Gardens of Lucullus is much better than it needs to be. Fans (I am one) of Howardian sword-and-sorcery will immediately feel at home, but so will Graves's readers. The novel depicts the ancient world correctly, and in addition, it is the very kind of novel ancient readers would have identified with and enjoyed. I tell you, this is no mean feat! One can only conclude that the authors carry off the magical elements of this piece of supernatural fiction so well because they, like Simon of Gitta, have learned a good bit of the art themselves!
