The Spanish Civil War

From Richard Rhodes' Hell and Good Company:
The Spanish Filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who participated in the defense of Madrid in the first days of the rebellion, recalls another and larger oddity, one that opens a window into the depths of the conflict. “Certain exploits,” Bunuel writes of that time, “seemed to me both absurd and glorious--like the workers who climbed into a truck one day and drove out to the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus about twenty kilometers south of the city, formed a firing squad, and executed the statue of Christ.” The London Daily Mail published a photograph of that exuberant “execution” on 7 August 1936, claiming it illustrated “the Spanish Reds’ war on religion.” Within a month, workers with Chisels and explosives had destroyed the ninety-two-foot statue at the geographic center of the country in Getafe as they were destroying similar religious monuments throughout republican Spain.

The demolitions had more to do with lighting oppression than with warring against religion. The Getafe monument had been unveiled by Alfonso XIII in May 1919, at the end of the Great War, when he reconsecrated Spain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a long-standing Roman Catholic cult associated with royalty since before the French Revolution. With the king’s endorsement, Sacred Heart statues and plaques had proliferated all over Spain. Many of Spain’s urban and rural poor lived from season to season in abject poverty, on the raw edge of starvation. The Spanish school system in the 1930s was 17,500 schools short,

More than 30 percent of Spanish men and an even higher percentage of Spanish women were illiterate. To that exploited population, the proliferation of monuments meant no escape from the presence of a corrupt church that Haunted its wealth and power.

When the people voted for a republic in 1931, the new government Went to work reclaiming public spaces; removing religious symbols from schools, streets, and cemeteries; and opening secular equivalents. A new constitution decreed the separation of church and state and the dissolution of some religious orders and prohibited religious orders from Engaging in commerce, industry, and teaching. The Church fought its increasing disenfranchisement with new lay organizations, political action, and lawsuits. Processions, festivals, and retreats became demonstrations, which leftist groups in turn found ways to interrupt. In those years, the historian Hugh Thomas writes, the Getafe monument “became the spiritual and physical centre of Catholic mobilization.” Whatever else they were doing, the young militiamen who executed Christ at Getafe were expressing a commitment to social transformation.

With the challenge of the generals’ rebellion to the existence of the secular Spanish state, a challenge that Franco elevated to the status of a religious crusade, churches were burned, icons destroyed, religious vestments cut up and resewn into militia uniforms. More radical anticlericals went beyond slapping idols. They exhumed the desiccated bodies of priests and nuns from church crypts and put them on pub« lic display to expose their fetid mortality. In a period seemingly free of legal constraints, with bullets flying in both directions and artillery shattering buildings, the anarchist militias began killing priests, the living idols of a church that had conspired with their class enemies to oppress them. Four thousand, one hundred eighty-four priests. 283 nuns, and 2,365 other religious would be murdered in republican territory in the course of the war- significantly, half during the first six weeks. Lluis Companys, the president of Catalonia, told a French journalist that the killings represented “the explosion of an immense store of wrath, an immense need for vengeance, which had been gathering force from very early times.”

More on the Roman Empire

From Tom Holland:
Meanwhile. beyond its walls, in the teeming streets of a city whose population now numbered well over a million, many had begun to wonder what precisely it meant to talk of the Roman people. Rome, as Claudius had reminded the Senate in his speech, had been founded on immigration. Exotic languages had been heard in the city for centuries. Street names still bore witness to the settlement of foreigners on them in ancient times: the Vicus Tuscus, where Etruscans had once congregated, and the Vicus Africus. Yet even as many Romans saw in their city’s diversity the homage paid by the world to its greatness, and a potent source of renewal, so others were less convinced. All very well to host immigrants, so long as they ended up Roman; but what if they preserved their barbarous ways, infecting decent citizens with their superstitions? ‘In the capital, appalling customs and disgraceful practices from across the world are forever cross-pollinating and becoming fashionable.’ A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman.

Such an anxiety was nothing new. Back in the first century of the Republic, a mania for outlandish cults had seen the Senate legislate to ensure that only the traditional gods be worshipped, and only with traditional rites. Since then, there had been numerous attempts to purge the city of alien ways. In 186 BC, the Senate had even launched a campaign of suppression against the worship of Liber, on the grounds that a Greek soothsayer had perverted its rituals and fostered unspeakable orgies. Egyptians and astrologers from Mesopotamia also tended to be regarded by most right-thinking citizens with profound suspicion. More alarming yet were the Syrians, with their devotion to a goddess, lion-flanked and jewel-adorned, whose cult, sinister as only a Syrian cult could be, had long been a thing of revulsion to every decent Roman. There was no value so fundamental, no propriety so settled, that her worshippers might not trample on them, and howl in exultant frenzy as they did so. Appearing to slaves in visions, the

Syrian Goddess had been known to encourage them to rebel; driving mad her most frenzied devotees, she would inspire them to make a sacrifice of their testicles. Galli, these self-castrated priests were called: matches who, abandoning the privileges and responsibilities of manhood, had willingly chosen to become women. With their painted faces and their feminine robes, their depilated bodies and their braided hair dyed blonde, they could not possibly have been more offensive to Roman sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, then, the authorities had done all they could to prevent their fellow citizens from joining their ranks, banning the practice of self-castration outright at first, and then, from 101 BC, permitting it only under the tightest of regulations. Yet this had done nothing to diminish the popularity of the cult: disturbingly, it had turned out, some Romans quite fancied living as women. By the time that Claudius, surrendering to the inevitable, finally lifted all legal restrictions on citizens becoming Galli, processions in honour of the Syrian Goddess, complete with flutes, tambourines and spectacular displays of self-laceration, had become a common sight in Rome. Naturally, those who held fast to traditional values continued to find it all revolting. ‘If a god desires worship of this kind,’ Seneca declared flatly, ‘then she does not deserve to be worshipped in the first place?“ For those on the cutting edge of fashion, however, a protestation of devotion to the Syrian Goddess had become an easy and entertaining way to shock. Rumour had it, for instance, that she was the only deity for whose cult Nero had any respect.

Yet when it came to sheer jaw-dropping weirdness, not even the beliefs of the Syrians could compare with those of their near neigh~ hours, the Jews. Immigrants from Judaea had been settling in Rome for two centuries, mainly in the cheap housing on the far side of the Tiber, where the principal temple of the Syrian Goddess was also to be found; and in all that time, they had never lost their distinctive ness. No people in the world had customs more perverse or ludicrous. They abstained from pork; they took every seventh day off; they obstinately refused to worship any god save their own. Yer Jewish practices and beliefs, although self-evidently grotesque, were not without a certain glamour. Like the cults of the Egyptians or the star charts of the Mesopotamians, they were capable of seducing those with a taste for the exotic. This was why, from the moment that Jews had first settled in the city, the authorities had periodically sought to expel them. The policy, though, had never proven effective. Whether in 139 BC, when the Jews had been banned from Rome ‘for trying to corrupt Roman values’, or in AD 19, when Tiberius had repeated the measure, or thirty years later, when Claudius had banished them yet again for making trouble at the instigation of a sinister-sounding agitator named Chrestus they had always crept back.
(( It is possible, indeed probable, that this is an allusion to arguments in Rome‘s Jewish community about the claims to messianic status of Jesus. (Chrestus. it is true, was a common name, particularly for slaves; but against that. there is no recorded instance of a Jew in Rome ever being called
up number of scholars have suggested that Suetonius might have derived his info from a police
report. and that Chrestus’ is mistransliteration of Christus. The truth, though, is ultimately unknowable.
A decade on from their expulsion by Claudius, they had once again returned to Rome. The fascination that they were capable of exerting, and the corresponding sense of alarm that they provoked in those contemptuous of foreign rituals, reached to the very top. ‘They are the most wicked of peoples."’ Seneca’s mistrust of the Jews would only have been confirmed for him by the reported interest of Poppaea in their teachings. The appeal of alien superstitions, it seemed, reached even into Caesar’s bedroom. Many in Rome, when they contemplated the slave quarters of their own homes, or the shrines in the streets raised to mysterious gods, or the tenements crammed with immigrants from every corner of the world, dreaded what loathsome practices might be brewing in their city. Nervousness about mass immigration and the peculiar cults that it had brought to Rome came to a head in 61, when the City Prefect, the man charged with the maintenance of order in the capital, was stabbed to death. His killer was one of his own slaves -and this, by the terms of a stern law passed half a century before, required that every slave in the murdered mans household be executed. The savagery of the penalty generated widespread revulsion; and it seemed in a debate on the matter in the Senate House, that clemency might prevail. In the event what swung senators into backing the execution of hundreds of slaves owned by the murdered Prefect was a bloodcurdling reminder of the numerous alien practices that had been imported into Rome. (Nowadays, the slaves in our households come from across the world, and engage in every kind of weird cult- or none at all. Terror tactics alone can serve to keep this rabble in check. The law was duly upheld, the death sentence confirmed. Out on the streets, where many of the protestors were themselves freedmen, or else the descendants of slaves, furious demonstrations were held. Crowds armed with stones and torches sought to prevent the sentence from being carried out. Nero, rather than permit agitators to override the law, issued them with an official rebuke, and ordered soldiers to line the route along which the wretched slaves were led to their deaths. Yet there were limits to the vindictiveness that he was prepared to sanction. When it was proposed that the freedmen of the murdered Prefect be rounded up and deported, Nero vetoed the motion. ‘What mercy has failed to moderate,’ he declared, ‘should not be aggravated by savagery.

Tom Holland's Dynasty

On the House of Augustus.
Excerpts:
Augustus preferred a perpetual play of radiance and shadow to be evident across his face. His image was as tightly controlled as it was charged with ambivalence. The portrait of him fashioned by sculptors offered to the Roman people a fitting reflection of the infinite subtleties and paradoxes of the man himself. In the jug ears of his statues it was possible to catch the glimpse of a thoroughly human Princeps: one whose eyebrows met above his nose, whose teeth were bad, and whose anxieties about his height were such that he wore platform heels. Yet he was a handsome man for all that; and it was his conceit, one that plenty were willing to flatter, that he had only to fix people with ‘his clear and brilliant gaze for them to lower their eyes, as though before the sun. In his statues, the jugeared Princeps appeared as beauteous as Apollo. Suspended midway between youth and maturity, between melancholy and triumph, between the mortal and divine, he was a Roman in every sense.

There was certainly to be no place in his portraits for the thinning hair and sagging jowls that once, in the heyday of the Republic, had served as the markers of high-achieving statesmen. What need for Augustus to emphasise his experience? All stood in awe of his achievements. He had accomplished more than any number of senators scored with wrinkles. The close association between ugliness and virtus, always cherished by conservatives, was hardly one to appeal to Augustus. The Princeps, rather than reining in his taste for self-promotion, aimed instead to mould tastes to the contours of his own. Never before in history had so many portraits of a single man been manufactured, disseminated and put on public display. A new orthodoxy was being marketed to the Roman people: that power should be good-looking. Evident to all those who gazed upon the statues of Augustus, it could increasingly be read as well in an even more prominent sphere: the fabric of the city.
and
Or did it? There was, perhaps, for those up to speed with the times, something just a little bit provincial, just a little bit musty about an antique sexual taboo. ‘How like a rustic, to get upset when your wife cheats on you.’ So Ovid, a man with his finger on the pulse of high society, observed with practised smoothness....The various prohibitions and perils erected by custom in the path of the adulterer were liable to strike the seasoned connoisseur of erotic pleasure less as deterrents than as incentives, spicing up the fun. ‘We always want what we’re not allowed.’ Ovid, in offering this sage observation, was putting his finger on a mocking truth, Forbidden fruit tasted the sweetest. ‘Prohibitions, trust me, only encourage bad behaviour. This, in a city as addicted to gossip as Rome, was a paradox that plenty were prepared to swallow. Speculation as to what might be going on in the city’s most exclusive bedrooms naturally transfixed the public. That adultery was regarded by the upper classes as one tremendous game, in which the rules were there to be broken, and the measure of cool was to smuggle a lover into the marital bed, was widely taken for granted. No smoke without fire, after all. Proofs of the adulterous and effeminate character of Rome’s fast set were everywhere to be seen. In the dandyishly loose way they wore their togas; in their clean nails, sprucely clipped nasal hair and sinister lack of body odour; above all, in the oiled sheen of their limbs. For a man to shave his armpits was, everyone could agree, simply good manners; but to do as Augustus was said to have done, and depilate the legs, was disgusting, plain and simple. Body hair was the mark of a man. Everyone knew, though, that adulterers cared nothing for that. Smooth skin, not a pelt, was what they brought to seduction. It was all most deviant and alarming. Even Ovid might sometimes be provoked to pontificate: ‘Men are all such fashion victims these days that, really, we can hardly blame women for feeling the pressure.’

None of which stopped the poet himself from cheerily offering grooming tips to his male as well as his female fans. Ovid, though did not have the care of Roman morals in his charge. Frivolous metrosexuality, in the opinion of the man who did, was part of the problem, not a solution. Augustus, who had brought order where previously there was chaos, who had lavished on his fellow citizens the riches of conquered kingdoms, who had transformed their city into a capital of unrivalled beauty and splendour, did not care to think that his labours might merely have contributed to a softening of their ancestral virtues. Such a prospect was too appalling to be borne. The Romans were either the heirs of their upright forefathers or they were nothing. The Princeps’s ambition was simple: that his fellow citizens should be true to all that was best about their past. They were the Romans: the lords of the world, the people of the toga. This, in the mirror that he had set up to his fellow citizens, fashioned out of monuments, and festivals, and all the various fruits of peace, was the reflection that he wished them always to catch of themselves.

Yet what if they caught something else? Perhaps there lay a warning in a recent scandalous development in the field of interior decoration. In bedrooms across Rome, walls and ceilings were coming to be lined with mirrors. Even beyond the limits of the city, out in his rural retreat among the Sabine hills, Horace had signed up to the craze. Notoriously, so had a billionaire by the name of Hostius Quadra. The mirrors on his walls boasted a particularly distinctive feature: everything reflected in them appeared larger than .it actually was. ‘So it was that the freak made a show of his own deviancy.’As one girl gave him a blow-job, and he licked out a second, so his anus, in a hideous desecration of all that a Roman should properly be, was shafted by a man with a giant cock -which, seen in the mirror, appeared possessed of truly gargantuan size, ‘larger than his capacity to take’ To groom, depilate and titivate like a woman was one thing; but to be fucked like one was a hideous extreme of degradation. What else was it, after all, but the willing surrender of everything that made a Roman a man?

and

‘lt takes courage to advance into a forbidden realm of shadow.When Drusus, on his final campaign, had found himself hundreds of miles east of the Rhine, on the banks of a second mighty natural barrier, a river named the Elbe, a spectre in the form of a colossal woman had materialised before him and forbidden him to cross it. That the lands of the north were the haunt of phantoms and hideous monsters came as no surprise. In the gloomy forests which covered vast reaches of Germany, giant bull-like creatures roamed, and mysterious entities named elks, without ankles or knees; in the icy waters of the Ocean, which would retreat and then advance twice a day, tearing loose oak trees and engulfing entire plains beneath their flood-tides, there shimmered ‘the outline of enigmatic beings half-men, half beast’.Just as Ovid, peering askance at the Tomitans, had fingered them as lycanthropes, so in the savage reaches of Germany were the borders between animal and human even more unsettlingly blurred. Chieftains who wished for a policy briefing, it was reported by Roman scholars who had made a close study of German customs, were likeliest to consult a horse. Conversely, ‘the towering stature of the Germans, their fierce blue eyes and reddish hair’ spoke of a nature barely less bestial than that of some steel-clawed bear, padding over mountain slopes. Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape. weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.

Or was it? Much the same after all could be said Gauls. Bad memories of them in Rome ran very deep. Back in 390 BC, a Gallic horde had erupted into Italy, annihilated six whole legions and sacked the city itself. Only with the conquests won by Augustus’s deified father had Gaul finally ceased to be a place of dread. Now, fifty years on. great changes were afoot beyond the Alps. Roman rule had brought to a people once notorious for their trousers and their gravy-soaked moustaches, their drunken brawling and their taste for collecting heads, a very different way of life. The grandsons of Chieftains who had hurled themselves half-naked against the invading legions now draped themselves in the toga and rejoiced in the name of ‘Julius’. Rather than guzzle wines indiscriminately, they were coming to develop a nose for the classiest Italian and Eastern grands crus and even, remarkably, to plant the odd vineyard themselves. Most promisingly of all, dotted across a landscape that had previously boasted only villages and rough stockades perched on hills, cities were starting to appear: islands of civilisation complete with flashy monuments and street-grids.

and

Bad enough as it was to be trapped on the wrong side of the Rhine, how much more terrifying was the prospect of being stranded on the wrong side of the Ocean. Few knew much about Britain --but what they did know was deeply off-putting. The natives were, if anything, even more barbarous than the Germans. They painted themselves blue; they held their wives in common; they wore hair on the upper lip, an affectation so grotesque that Latin did not even have a word for it. Nor were their women any better. They were reported to dye their bodies black, and even on occasion to go naked. Savages capable of such unspeakable customs were clearly capable of anything; and sure enough, just as it was part of the terror of the Germans that they practised murderous rites in the depths of their dripping forests, so did the Britons have priests who, in groves festooned with mistletoe, were reported to commit human sacrifice and cannibalism. These ‘Druids’, as the priests were called, had once infested Gaul as well, until their suppression on the orders of Tiberius; but across the Ocean, beyond the stern reach of Roman law, they still thrived. ‘Magic, to this very day, holds Britain in its shadow.’ No wonder. then ordered to embark for a land of such sorcery and menace, that many soldiers should have blanched.

and

The art of attracting an emperor’s attention was a fine one.

When Calpurnia came into Claudius’s presence, she was accompanied, for good measure, by a second of his concubines. Those who wanted his ear often made sure to exploit his sexual tastes, for everyone knew that he only ever slept with women. Like his concern that people should feel free to break wind at table, or his insistence on adding three new letters to the Latin alphabet, the complete lack of interest he had always shown in forcing himself on male partners marked Claudius out as a true eccentric. Not that people particularly disapproved for it was the way of the world that different men had different foibles, and just as some might prefer blondes and others brunettes, so were there a few who only ever fucked females, and a few who only ever fucked males.“ That Galba, for instance, was the mirror image of Claudius liking as he did ‘mature, hard-muscled men never did any harm to his standing as a model of martial rectitude. Seasoned soldier that he was, he well knew what it was to seize control, to thrust hard, to take possession.

Which was, it went without saying, the responsibility of every citizen who chose to have sex. Nothing was more shocking to Roman sensibilities than the man who, as Hostius Quadra had so notoriously done, submitted for his own pleasure to being fucked. The sword-stab of a penis was, of course. precisely what the female body had been shaped by the gods to receive: but the male body too was not lacking in orifices. Pay obeisance with the mouth or the anus to another man’s cock, and a citizen was doubly shamed. It was not just that in was playing the part of a woman (although that was of course bad enough) it was also that he was playing the part of a slave. Just as it was the privilege of the free-born. male and female alike. to have any violation of their bodies condemned as a monstrous crime. so was it the duty of slaves to serve a master‘s every conceivable sexual need. For some, indeed, it might be their principal responsibility. Pretty boys, long-haired, smooth-shaven and glistening with oils were must-have accessories at any fashionable soiree and all the more so if twins. One senator, in the time of Augustus. had abandoned subtlety altogether, employing waitresses who served entirely in the nude. Every slave knew, as a matter of course. that the threat of rape. like that of corporal punishment. might he realised at any moment. This did not mean that a master was necessarily incapable of tenderness: Lucius Vitellius, for instance. ended up so besotted with one of his slavegirls that not only did he free her. but he took to mixing up her spit with honey and using it as a throat medicine. Such eases. though, were the exception that proved the rule. In general. the right of a master to glut his sexual appetites on a slave. rather as he might blow his nose or use a latrine, was taken for granted. It was a perk of ownership, plain and simple. ‘No sense of shame is permitted a slave.“ Except that freedom itself, in a city where even senators had been subjected to the rack and whip was no longer all it had been. The implications, even for the grandest, were unsettling in the extreme. In AD 47, a year before Calpurnia came calling on Claudius at Ostia. one of the Senate’s most flamboyant and charismatic figures had been destroyed. Valerius Asiaticus, charged with a variety of crimes, had been arrested in the pleasure resort of Baiae and hauled hack to Rome in chains. His prosecutor had been an old associate of Germanicus's. a man as opportunistic as he was remorseless. by the name of Publius Suillius Rufus. His talent, given a victim. was for sinking his jaws deep and sure enough, at a private trial attended by both Claudius and Lucius Vitellius, Suillius had done just that. Rounding off the various charges, he had accused Asiaticus, for good measure, of the very ultimate in deviancy: of being ‘soft and giving, like a woman’. The prisoner, silent until then, had found this particular slander too much. ‘Ask your sons, Suillius,’ he had yelled. ‘They will confirm that I am all man.’ Desperate, aggressive banter -but also something more. The scorning of Suillius, a father to sons used by Asiaticus as women, had been the scorning too of an order so rotten that it had given power to such a man. Later, once Asiaticus had been sentenced to death, but permitted, on the recommendation of Lucius Vitellius, to choose how he died, he had made his contempt for Claudius’s regime even more explicit. He would rather, he had declared, have perished at the hands of Tiberius or Caligula than on the say-so of the smooth-tongued Vitellius -whose mouth was rancid from his addiction to lapping at genitals. And then, having made sure that the flames of his pyre would do no damage to the trees of his beloved garden, Asiaticus had slit his wrists.

Defiant assertion of his own masculinity and suicide: no other means had been available to him, in the final reckoning, of maintaining his dignity as a citizen. That Claudius, paranoid and insecure, had feared to let him live was clear enough; but that was hardly the Whole story. Senators, convinced as they were that the Emperor was mentally deficient, saw in Asiaticus’s fate confirmation of all their darkest suspicions: that he was the gullible plaything of perverts, and Even worse. ‘He, more conspicuously than any of his peers, was ruled by slaves -and by women." Certainly, when it came to identifying the person ultimately responsible for the downfall of Asiaticus, the consensus was clear. Messalina had envied him his gardens and wanted them for herself. Worse: he had died to satisfy her passion for Mnester, former paramour of Caligula and Rome’s most famous actor, who was rumoured to have been conducting affairs with both Messalina herself and an equally high-ranking beauty named Poppaea Sabina. The prosecution of Asiaticus had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone: for among the charges levelled against him had been one ofadultery with Poppaea. Messalina, far from keeping discreetly to the sidelines. had been present at his secret trial; and she had deployed her agents, even as Asiaticus was being condemned, to bully her rival into suicide. Nothing, in short, could possibly have been more demeaning or grotesquely sordid. One of the most eminent senators in Rome, a man who had once aspired to rule the world, had been sacrificed upon the altar of a woman’s jealousy.

‘How shaming it is to be submissive to a girl." Ovid’s maxim was one that Roman moralists had always taken for granted. Whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom, so clearly had men been intended by the gods to hold the whip-hand that very few of them ever thought to question it. ‘An unhappy state indeed it would be which saw women usurp masculine prerogatives -be it the Senate, the army or the magistracies!" The very prospect was incredible. Nevertheless, in a city where a feminine tiff over an actor appeared to have ended up destroying a two-times consul, it was clear that something had gone badly wrong. That women of wealth and breeding might exploit their influence on behalf of their menfolk was one thing; that they should openly flaunt it quite another. No matter the rumours whispered of Livia, she had always made a point, before ascending into the heavens and taking her place beside Augustus on his celestial throne. of operating from the shadows. Certainly, she had never thought to play her husband for a fool. That, though, it seemed -if the increasingly feverish swirlings of gossip were to be trusted -was precisely what Messalina was doing. A few days after the suicide of Poppae Sabina, Claudius had invited her husband to supper and asked him «here his wife was. Told that she was dead, he had simply looked bemused. Messalina, it seemed to those who despised the Emperor had him wrapped around her finger. As gullible as he was besotted. he had delivered the great and the good into her hands. Consuls, a Praetorian prefect, the granddaughter of Tiberius: all had been eliminated as a result of her manoeuvrings. Those who prized their skin5 made sure to crawl to her. Lucius Vitellius, that veteran trimmer, had even begged permission to take oil her shoes, ‘and once he had removed her right slipper. he slipped it between his toga and tunic. Carrying it round with him the whole time, and every so often kissing it'. Not merely degrading. it was emasculating in the extreme.

And perhaps, for that very reason, truth be told, just a bit erotic, Ovid, had he lived to see the former governor of Syria raining kisses on a woman's slipper. would not have been unduly surprised. He had always enjoyed exploring the paradoxes that hedged propriety about.

Don ’t be ashamed (though shameful it is which is why it's fun)
To hold a mirror in your hand as though you were a slave

As with adultery, so with role reversal: the greater the taboo, the more of a thrill it might be to break it. The pressure on a male always to take the lead, always to exact submission, served to close off whole dimensions of pleasure. That it was the responsibility of a respectable matron, while being fucked, to lie back passively and leave the action to her partner, was taken for granted by moralists; but that did not prevent some women, greatly daring, from spicing things up during sex by actually moving -almost as though they themselves were the males. Shocking, yes, and threatening to the masculinity of any self respecting citizen, to be sure; but there were, for the man who found his partner bucking her thighs in time to his thrustings. or grinding her buttocks, or sucking and licking his cock, undeniable compensations. That a woman might be so sexually aggressive as to play the role of a man was certainly, for any self-respecting citizen. a most unsettling possibility; but there was rarely anything so deviant that some would not find it exciting. A woman such as Messalina was pie tamed to be, predatory in her ambitions and demonic in her taste to: blood, was a figure fit to stalk fantasies as well as fears. Young. beautiful and dangerous. she was the very stuff of pornography.

Robinson Crusoe

As I had never read Robinson Crusoe, it was time. I'm not sure why I avoided it. It was no great pleasure and no hardship. I found a Heritage Press edition with enjoyable illustrations but none nearly as nice as the N.C. Wyeth illustrations. I carried around copies of Michel Tournier's version of Crusoe, called Friday for almost 25 years, and so read that next, and after that the Muriel Spark novel Robinson, which obliquely references Defoe.

Ugh. I can't even type the title...

I read the greatly unilluminating Luminaries and as I was predisposed to like it, I read it with care and interest. It was chock full of conceits like extraordinary chapter titles and astrological charts of the characters. I knew its reputation. It won the Man Booker prize and received rapturous reviews. I believe a respected reviewer wrote that Catton had managed to create something to that point entirely unexperienced in literature. Between raves on Amazon one review called the author a charlatan which at the time seemed like an extreme reaction but which now perfectly expresses my reaction on finishing this fraud.
The Luminaries is conceived to resemble a Victorian novel in breadth and style but feels like the sort of thing a fan might do while in thrall to authentic art. It is Victorian fan-fiction. It is the echo of an author's voice that a fan hears that convinces them they too can create as well as partake.
A noted newspaper reviewer called it a brilliant parody which I cannot see. It is humorless. It is blind to its own many faults in a way that makes me think that the author could not possibly understand the impact and significance of Victorian writers' temporal limitations. It is so heavily weighted with the author's research that it resembles the missing fortune (which.... it turns out.... was sewn into the boning of the heroine's dress all along!) It makes the decorative ponderous, the historical leaden and the inspiration and solution rather too fortunately close at hand. It seems lacking in anything but the commonest self-analysis representing itself as insight. It is so packed with characters' improbable responses that at times it seems that that lack of reasonable response is a method of pointing to the gulf in manners from the past to our own time. It's not. Many actions which define the circumstances of the mystery defy common patterns of behavior.
In the first 400 or so pages one character recounts a story which brings he and 11 others together (to pool their knowledge). It is narrated to someone who just happens to enter the lounge. This interloper has had an encounter with one of the characters in this narrative-that person was locked in a trunk in the lower decks of a ship on which the man was travelling. He drops his gloves through a hatch, climbs down, hears scratching coming from the inside of the trunk, opens it and assists the man out, sits him down and notices that he is wounded, does not ask his name or offer assistance, but after sitting next to someone who he physically lifted from a trunk becomes convinced that it is only an apparition. He then rejoins others who are disembarking above and does not mention that he either helped someone locked in a trunk who is bleeding profusely, or that he has seen an apparition.
Still one gives the story the benefit of the doubt.
The author disguises recondite facts on mining and the way of life in mining towns as glimpses of authenticity while tessellating her every scrap of dialogue and exposition with bits of research so that nothing feels actual. It is as repellent in its stratagem and as callow and unmemorable as anything I have read in years. The only parts that don't seem written during dull shifts in a museum of Victorian textiles or in a coffee-house between errands feel cadged from only slightly superior sources. The episodes are as wearying as can be imagined- what follows might be a general example, with only the felicitous phrase making these two passages notable:

But Nilssen’s longing for the button became so great that one night when Magnus was sleeping he crept in, unlatched the chest and stole it; he walked about the darkened nursery for a while, fingering the thing, testing its weight, running his finger over the body of the fox, feeling the brass take on the warmth of his hand until something overcame him, not remorse exactly, but a dawning fatigue, an emptiness, and he returned the button to the place where he had found it. Cousin Magnus never knew. Nobody knew. But for months and years and even decades afterward, long after Cousin Magnus was dead, that theft was as a splinter in his heart. He saw the moonlit nursery every time he spoke his cousin’s name; by blushed at nothing; he sometimes pinched himself, or uttered an oath, at the memory. For although a man is judged by his actions by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done wa judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

+ + +

"You’re in black,’ Mannering observed.

“Naturally,” she returned. “I am recently widowed, and therefore mourning.”

“Here’s a fact,” Mannering said. “The color black is invisible to spirits. I’ll make a bet that you didn’t know that ...did you, now! It’s why we wear black at funerals: if we dressed in color we’d attract the attention of the dead. Wearing black, they can’t make us out.”

‘What a charming piece of trivia,” said Mrs. Wells.

“Do you know what it means, though? It means that Mr. Staines won’t be able to see you. Not in that gown. You’ll be quite invisible to him‘”

The Seven Dials Mystery

The execrable The Seven Dials Mystery, a Superintendent Battle book, published in the relatively early career of Agatha Christie is a carefree caper with international espionage and a secret society (of the Seven Dials) accounting for all murders and thefts. The contrivances strain even Dame Agatha's abilities, and the explanation of why a body is found with seven alarm clocks arranged on a mantel above it with an eighth smashed on the lawn is so unconvincing that the subsequent meeting of 6 people who, invited to join a seven person society, meet with bags over their heads so they don't recognize one another seems very nearly probable. Still, I would read it a dozen times over before I would relive a chapter of The Luminaries. Dame Christie fairly romps through this.
From the 7 Dials:

Lord Caterham was happily reading a catalogue of a forthcoming sale of rare editions and was immeasurably astonished to see Bundle. ‘Even you,’ he said, “cant have been to London and back in this time:"
I haven’t been to London,” said Bundle. “I ran over a man. "
“What?"
‘Only I didn’t really. He was shot.”
“How could he have been?”
“I don’ t know how he could have been, but he was.“
“But why did you shoot him?”
“I didn’t shoot him.”
“You shouldn’t shoot people,” said Lord Caterham m a tone of mild remonstrance. “You shouldn’t really. I dare say some of them richly deserve it-but all the same it will lead to trouble."
“I tell you I didn’t shoot him.”
“Well, who did?”
“Nobody knows,” said Bundle.
“Nonsense,” said Lord Caterham. “A man can’t be shot and run over without anyone having done it.”
“He wasn’t run over, ”said Bundle.
“I thought you said he was."
“I said I thought I had.”
“A tyre burst, I suppose,” said Lord Caterham. “It does sound like a shot. It says so in detective stories."
“You really are perfectly impossible Father. You don’t seem to have the brains of a rabbit.” 
“Not at all,” said Lord Caterham. “You come in with a wildly impossible tale about men being run over and shot and I don’t know what, and then you expect me to know all about it by magic.” 

Bundle sighed wearily. “Just attend,” she said. “I’ll tell you all about it in words
of one syllable.” “There,” she said when she had concluded. “Now have
you got it?”
“Of course. I understand perfectly now I can make allowances for your being a little upset, my dear I was not far wrong when I remarked to you before starting out that people looking for trouble usually found it. I am thankful finished Lord Caterham with a slight shiver, “that I stayed quietly here."