There’s No Place Like Rome
An Introduction, with Unpardonable Digressions
Hank Davis
Of course, Rome is known as the Eternal City. I’m sure the long-suffering reader was expecting me to mention that, so I thought I’d get it out of the way right off the bat. It’s true that a city is unlikely to endure longer than the planet it’s sitting on, and current astronomical thinking about the Earth and its sun is that the latter will engulf the former in four to seven billion years. Yes, and engulf Rome, too. However, this is a science fiction anthology, so my immediate thought is that, if humans, or the highly evolved descendants of humans are still around then, they might slap a dome over Rome or surround it with a spindizzy-type force field (pardon my borrowing, please, James Blish) and lift the still-eternal city to a younger star that’s good for a few more billion years yet. Might make an interesting story, but that idea is not in this book. (I should add that James Blish did end, not just the sun, but his entire spindizzy universe in The Triumph of Time/A Clash of Cymbals, but that was accomplished by nothing so trivial as a main sequence star bloating into a red giant.)
But I’m getting off the subject, and having too much fun doing it, too, and must reluctantly steer away from subjects about which I know a great deal, such as science fiction, and back to Rome, Roma in Latin, about which I know…well, I have seen movies such as Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Gladiator, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (plus the 1996 Broadway revival), etc., and that’s about it.
Even so, Rome is in the background white noise, and bits of it have snuck in. When Cole Porter wrote “You’re the Top,” and praised that “You’re the Coliseum,” he wasn’t talking about a mere football stadium. From Rome, we get the word senate and the occupation of senators (I’ll let you decide how grateful we should be). Our calendar, with some tweaks, is a mostly Roman creation, and if you’re in the northern hemisphere, like me, the two hottest months are named after Roman emperors (regarding gratitude, repeat previous parenthetical remark). When I was in grade school, we had to learn Roman numerals, though nowadays, I’m not sure that students even have to learn the English alphabet.
As for science fiction, if an author wants to have an interstellar empire, or even a galactic empire, will she or he make it up, or turn to history for a model to base it on? Yes, that model. (Dr. Asimov, I’m looking at you.) But before an interstellar empire can be founded, the would-be founders have to take account of, and possibly even fight wars over, the planets in the Solar System, all of whom are named after Roman gods. Of course all these Roman gods used to be Greek gods, albeit with different names and sometimes different characteristics, so there’s a question of originality here. But then, the Greeks were big on originality, what with Hero inventing jet-propulsion, Aristotle arguing that the world was round, Euclid and Pythagoras founding geometry, and Socrates and his sidekick Plato inventing the talk show millennia before TV, even if Socrates still got killed in the ratings. But I need to get back to the later Romans, and after all, they did conquer most of the known world and built big, impressive buildings which have defied time, decay, and urban renewal, and influenced architecture down through the centuries, as in buildings with big domes and towering rows of columns, as in Washington, D.C. And their legions could really do a forced march, tromping along on those superbly engineered roads of theirs (and, since you’ve seen the title already, you know where those roads led).
Once again, ancient Rome lingers on in the air and in the background noise, so it’s not surprising that science fiction writers have invoked Rome in many ways, either directly, as in an episode early in Doc Smith’s Lensman series set in the period, or surviving into the modern world, as in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and the Lost Empire, in which Lord Greystoke, in his ape-man aspect, is searching for a missing explorer when he stumbles across a surviving lost outpost of Rome, surviving unchanged to the present (that is, the 1930s), complete with a coliseum and bread and circuses. Of course, the bad guys really shouldn’t have thrown Tarzan into the coliseum. And then they compounded their error by turning a gang of apes loose on him. Big mistake, toga-boys!
But I’m digressing again, even if I have brought up the picture of the Coliseum, filled with bored, but bloodthirsty mobs cheering on gladiators fighting to the death, an image that has been repeated in many SF stories, including one which was suggested for this book, but which I vetoed for other reasons. It also appeared early in the Flash Gordon comic strip. When the first Flash Gordon serial was filmed, a version of the episode was repeated, perhaps not wisely, since the budget required that the action be moved from a huge coliseum to the throne room of Ming the Merciless, and Buster Crabbe only had to battle a guy in a gorilla suit with a horn added to its forehead. The episode was also parodied in the early days of Mad, when it was still a comic book, in Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood’s brilliant satire “Flesh Garden.” A lesser example of satire was the second season episode of Star Trek when the Enterprise discovers a planet duplicating ancient Rome, with the added wrinkle that the gladiators have at each other on TV while a commentator describes the action for the sports fans in a very familiar manner. Unfortunately, the cleverness in the script ran out at that point.
And I’ve already mentioned the influence of the example of the Roman Empire on many of SF’s interstellar empires, such as Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Foundation series, Poul Anderson’s Sir Dominic Flandry epic, and others.
Heading back into the past, rather than the future, L. Sprague de Camp, a writer possessing considerable historical knowledge, wrote a classic of science fiction, Lest Darkness Fall, telling of Martin Padway, a young student in 1930s Rome, who is struck by a lightning bolt which snaps him back in time to 535 A.D., in the declining years of the Roman Empire. He has no hope of returning to his own time, and he knows that after the empire finishes its collapse, the dark ages wait in the wings. With his modern knowledge, can he keep the dark times from coming? But first, can he even manage to survive?
The story first appeared as a short novel in the December 1939 issue of the now-legendary fantasy magazy, Unknown (later retitled Unknown Worlds). De Camp preceded the novella with an author’s note which, I think, is worth reproducing in part here:
This story represents the realization of two ideas that have been bothering—in a nice sense of the word—me for some time. One is that of writing a story on the Connecticut Yankee theme. The other is that of writing a story about the period that Toynbee calls the Western Interregnum—a period that has not, I think, had as much attention from writers of historical fiction as its melodramatic history entitles it to.
The present story is laid shortly after the time of King Arthur—assuming that Arthur actually lived. Fortunately we know a lot more about Gothic Italy than we do about post-Roman Britain. (About the latter, in fact, our knowledge is practically nil.) So I did not have to draw too heavily on my imagination for the setting of my story. Just about half the characters mentioned by name were real people, including Thiudahad and his family, Mathaswentha, Wittigis, Urias, Cassiodorus, Honorius, Belisarius and his generals, Bloody John, Antiochus—Thomasus the Syrian’s cousin—and a lot of others. As far as possible, I have tried to make their actions consistent with what is known of their real characters—often precious little.
All that might lead the long-suffering reader to expect to find de Camp’s novel in the pages which follow, but there wasn’t room for a novella of over a hundred pages (in the case of the shorter magazine version), but we have included a bit of comic verse recapitulating the novel’s events by Randall Garrett, once called the “Clown Prince of Science Fiction,” and followed that up with a sequel by David Weber, best-selling author of the Honor Harrington novels. Also, Mr. de Camp’s author’s note might be a handy thing to show to the next dingbat who complains that science fiction writers “just make up all that stuff.”
The Roman Empire has also been figuring in online mentions in the last couple of years or so (though it may have taken a while for me to notice it, since the topic first popped up on TikTok, with which I have no diplomatic relations), that is, that people may think of the Roman Empire, and even do it several times a day. And supposedly, men do it more often than women. In fact, women reportedly find the whole thing baffling, not that there’s anything new about the sexes baffling each other, but while I’m not one of those Rome-thinking males (I’m much more likely to think of Diana Rigg, though she is now as gone as the Roman Empire, alas), that is another example of how ancient Rome still influences our allegedly modern world.
One male who must have been thinking of Rome is Michael Gants, who not only suggested to publisher Toni Weisskopf the theme of this anthology, but also provided the title and a list of possible stories, six of which are included between the covers of the book in your hand. While his name isn’t on the cover, it really belongs there more than mine, and any gratitude you have after finishing these pages should be directed largely his way, though not exclusively. To quote another aphorism about the subject matter, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” but sometimes, it seems like this anthology had to be put together nearly that quickly, so my thanks to coeditor David Afsharirad and production wizard Joy Freeman, who should have their photos in the dictionary next to the definition for the word “indispensable.”
We all hope you enjoy the book. And now, I will try thinking about other things than Rome. There’s always bourbon.…
—Hank Davis
March 2025