I have just (re) discovered a slew of posts I made, and largely forgot, at the Economics Psychology Policy blog. Having just posted a quote from Rosemary Sutcliff’s “The Mark of the Horse Lord” on slavery, I recalled I had written something somewhere about how contemporary authors writing Ancient Rome-set fiction handle what is – to our sensibilities -the repellent topic of slavery. I don’t think this is the piece I meant, but interesting nevertheless.
This is a post I wrote on the Economics, Psychology, Policy blog, which I got involved with via rather tangential links with the UCD Geary Institute – Liam Delaney, who I got to know then, was then Prof of Behavioural Economics in Stirling University and the blog seems now to be part of the Stirling course – but now it seems Liam is back in UCD!
I have a weakness for sword’n’sandal type historical fiction set in Ancient Rome. One author I particularly enjoy is Steven Saylor who writes detective novels set in Ancient Rome, which manage to combine a modern sensibility – with the archetypal cynical, Sam Spadeish detective hero – with a real immersion into the foreign world of the classical past. The most recent book of his I’ve read, Arms of Nemesis, really brought home how horrific it must have been to be a…
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Séamus Sweeney 