The names
It was an anomaly of Roman society that the names given to children appear to us to be relatively unimportant, but it is true that many children were named simply according to the order of their birth. The first three or four sons of a family might be called Gaius or Caius, Marcus or Paulus, but the fifth son was likely to be Quintus, which means fifth, and thereafter, in large families, would come Sextus and Septimus or Septimius (sixth and seventh). Octavius Caesar, who would name himself Caesar Augustus, was the eighth son of his parents.
Roman place names give us problems today, too, because they are Latin names and the modern cities that have replaced the Roman originals all have different names. For the sake of authenticity in a story like this, however, it would be really jarring and unnatural to use the modern place names, and so I have supplied a list (below) of the most important place names in this story, along with their modern equivalents. The most obvious and enlightening example of this usage is the Roman fort at Lutetia in Gaul. It was originally built during the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, and its sole purpose, situated as it was on a critical river ford, was to keep a lid on the warlike activities of the local tribesmen, a clan called the Parisii. That fort, Lutetia, has since grown to become the city of Paris.
ROMAN NAME MODERN NAMEGenava GenevaAutessiodurum AuxerreTreves TroyesMassilia MarseilleCarcasso CarcassonneLutetia ParisLugdunum LyonsCenabum Orleans
Language
The major difficulty an author faces in writing historical fiction is that of language. Language is constantly evolving and we have no real knowledge of how people spoke and sounded, in any language, hundreds of years ago. I have chosen to write in standard English, but even that is a relatively new development, since the language was only “standardized” in the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, there was no orthographically correct way to spell anything. Most of the characters in my stories would have spoken in the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Gallic tongues, while the major characters, like Bishop Germanus and his associates, would most probably have conversed in Latin. In those instances where people of mixed tongues met and mingled, they would have spoken the lingua franca of their time, although the real lingua franca, literally, the Language of the Franks, had not yet come into common use. But throughout history, whenever people of mixed tongues and races have come together to trade, human ingenuity has quickly developed basic, fundamental languages to fit the needs of the traders. In Africa, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that language was Swahili. In Oriental Asia, it was Pidgin. We do not know the name of whatever trading language was dominant in fifth-century Europe but I have chosen to call it the Coastal Tongue, because the coast was the interface point for most traders.
There are many terms and expressions used in this story, however, for which there is no modern equivalent, and there are others that seem modern and up-to-date when in fact they are genuinely ancient. I have addressed a few of these in the notes that follow here. Modern readers are sometimes surprised, for example, to find the term and title “Duke” being used in the ancient world, but the word originally sprang from the Roman army, where a man who had distinguished himself by demonstrating spectacular heroism and leadership could earn himself the title of dux, which is the Latin word for a leader, a man who is foremost among his companions, and out of that title came the English title of Duke.
In much the same way, people in North America today tend to feel proprietorial about nouns like “corn” and “bannock,” not realizing that corn has always been the generic Old World term for any kind of grain and that bannock—the simplest form of unleavened bread—is common to every primitive society, no matter what they call it. The Celtic clans of Scotland and Ireland have always called it bannock, and it was their use of the name that the aboriginal peoples of America adopted. The plant Americans call corn, on the other hand, is known as maize in Europe, where it is a coarse, mealy grain fed to cattle. American sweet corn really only came to be known in Europe during and after the Second World War.
Another problematical word for us is the Roman word “mile,” because a modern mile is 1,760 yards, or approximately 1,500 meters. The original Roman mile came from the Latin word mille, meaning a thousand, and a mile was one thousand paces long. Bearing in mind that the average Old World Roman was less than five feet six inches tall, their marching pace would have been short, probably in the range of twenty-six inches to twenty-nine inches, making their mile shorter than a modern kilometer.
And then there are the latifundiae. Few people today have any concept of how highly organized, and even industrialized, the Roman Empire was, sixteen and seventeen hundred years ago. The Romans had a thriving stock market and a highly refined and regulated real estate industry, and the food production and distribution system they constructed to feed their citizenry, founded upon a system of enormous ranches and collective farming establishments called latifundiae, was extremely sophisticated even by today’s standards. These were private enterprises, run by corporations and funded and owned by investors, and they produced grain, cattle, wines, fruits and vegetables, and other commodities in huge quantities for shipment to markets throughout the Empire.
The Latin word magister gives us our modern words “magistrate” and “magisterial,” but it was a word in common use in the Roman Army in the fifth century. In terms of its use, it appears to have had two levels of meaning, and I have used it in both senses throughout this book: The first of these was the literal use, where a student or pupil would refer to his teacher or mentor as magister (master) with all appropriate deference. The second usage, however, resembled the way we today use the term “boss,” denoting a superior—officer or otherwise—whose title entails the accordance of a degree of respect but falls far short of the subservience suggested by the use of the word “master.”
Similarly, the word ecclesia gives us our modern word “ecclesiastical,” but the original meaning of the word was a church, particularly a permanent church, built of stone.
Citrus wood is well documented as being the most precious wood in the Ancient World, but we have no idea what it was like. No trace of it survives. It is one of the earliest known instances of a precious commodity being exploited to extinction.
And finally, a word about horse-troopers. Roman cavalry units were traditionally organized into turmae (squadrons) and alae (battalions). There were thirty to forty men in a turma (the singular form of turmae) and the strength of the alae ranged anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four turmae, which meant that a cavalry battalion could number between four hundred eighty and nine hundred sixty men. The contus, a substantial, two-handed cavalry spear, was the weapon of many heavy cavalry turmae and those troops were known, in turn, as contus cavalry.
FORGE BOOKS BY JACK WHYTE
THE CAMULOD CHRONICLES
The Skystone
The Singing Sword
The Eagles’ Brood
The Saxon Shore