Category: Historical Fiction Publisher: ASJA Press imprint, iUniverse, Inc.
ISBN-10: 0595429777
Type: Fiction
Pages: 157
Copyright: February 2007
Proper Parenting in Ancient Rome: A Time-Travel Novel of Love as Growth of Consciousness & Peace in the Home.
This ancient Roman family time travels to study the human condition and world peace. They recommend finding inner peace in art galleries in order to find peace in the home. Visionary historical fiction: time-travel adventure, suspense, intrigue.
It is 150 BCE. Twenty-year old Quintus Cincinnatus Aemilianus arrives at his family estate in the Etruscan-farmed countryside an hour’s ride from Rome to face adult responsibilities. He’s a world traveler, senator-in-training, and learned in architecture. But he has only one mission in life: to maintain peace in the home. He believes family harmony is a microcosm of all that exists.
He learns his father, a man with Etruscan enemies, is missing. After childhood years spent learning Greek, Latin, and Aramaic from diverse sages in Alexandria, seeking proper, holistic parenting is no problem. He owns the Antikythera device, a mechanism of complicated gears physically representing the Callippic and Saros astronomical cycles. It’s not only gears he wants to mesh. It’s the human condition. And he looks for patterns in nature.
Quintus believes in proper holistic parenting as an adventure within a timeless search for the perfect nurturing mother. His goal and life purpose are achieved through practical deeds. He is an ancient builder of dreams so far ahead of his century, that he finds time travel a gift of destiny. For Quintus, the explorer and observer of comparative thought, the best way to study the human condition is through art. He believes that peace in the home feeds the growth of consciousness.
Excerpt
The characters are ancient builders of dreams so far ahead of their century, that they find time travel a gift of destiny in the golden age of the ancient Roman Republic, the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, and the Carthaginian slave rebellion in Setia, near Rome.
Octavia’s Fortune
Often, as a proper Roman boy of ten years I, Quintus Cincinnatus Aemilianus spent nights on special feast days at the house of Salonius, most senior scribe to Cato. At those times my five-year-old playmate, Octavia and I lied awake, well protected, I thought, close to Octavia and to her rotund mother, Cornelia. As chaperoned children, we slept in the roped, rutted wool and feathered torus next to Cornelia.
I used my own family members as models by memorizing the fruits of our family deeds, not creeds. I jostled the words to Cornelia without understanding their impact. “Our Roman family time travels only to study and understand the human condition for inner peace. And you can only learn about the human condition by studying what is in the art galleries of all peoples. Our goal is peace in the home. You have to practice it in every room if you ever want to grow world peace.”
“You grow peace, like a vine or a tree?” Cornelia looked up in surprise, grinning crookedly, but not smiling with her eyes.
“That’s right. You pray yourself into peace in an art gallery, not in a pantheon. Otherwise you’re talking to yourself. Don’t you know that the purpose of life is to understand the human condition?”
“You certainly can’t do anything about it.” Cornelia huffed with impatience. You’re only a ten-year old boy…a very wealthy and smart boy. Maybe you can fix some of the broken furniture around this house. What’s more of a human condition than that torus I sleep on arriving back from repair full of vermin?
“My father told me that the purpose of life is to take care of one another.”
“So that’s how you repair what’s broken,” Cornelia laughed, admonishing me. “That’s a lot of strange information from a ten-year old Roman boy. Learning architecture might not be a useless plan after all.”
“My tutor from Alexandria told me the purpose of life is to repair.”
“Repair the stench of life with what healing unguent or spice your tutor brought you from Alexandria? What’s in that sack?”
“Watch how he stretches his body in a dance.” The Mau kitten I pulled from a perforated goatskin pack leaped from my hands, scattering across the mosaic floor. “Octavia will find that he is a good listener.”
I watched the slaves overstuff Cornelia’s torus with swans down. They placed it upon the lectus so it would be high enough from the flagstones to be free from vermin and covered it with goat hide.
Cornelia had coarse, yellowed linens that scratched my arms and made me itch, and her bleached wool coverings reeked of the urine used to bleach it. The stench of sweat, roses, and myrrh still couldn’t mask the bleaching with stale urine, no matter how many times the slaves beat the fabric underwater.
Even when dried in the sun, the damp coverings smelled rancid. Fresh air couldn’t erase what secrets those covers witnessed.
I watched in Salonius’s villa as the carpenters made the first woodcut on the sopha and applied its moldings to match the room. Above, the ceiling murals of clouds on faded blue-green skies lulled me to sleep.
I had my tenth birthday the day Octavia had her fifth, and we celebrated so that I was invited to sleep in the house of Salonius, chaperoned by Cornelia so that little Octavia, skinny me, and rotund Cornelia all shared and slept upon the same, soft torus on this enormous lectus full of wormholes. Cornelia even allowed Octavia to hold the kitten in the folds of her tunic.
Salonius, in the next bedroom slept with his 20-year old son in two separate lectus and torus far apart at opposite ends of the room. In the darkest hours of the early morning pouring rain chilled the room yet soothed the scraping of the crickets like nails on dry pumice stone and the erudite screams of the night.
“Remember when we played Suffering’? And I’d rub your belly, and your doll would be delivered like a baby?" Cornelia laughed and whooped her perpetual hacking cough from years of inhaling the dust of granite in her father’s sculpture and stone mason industry. I rolled over, pulling my short dark hair from my eyes. Next to me five-year old Octavia soundly slept.
My mouth and nose felt paper-thin and raw as I trembled against the roar of thunder and the wintry rain pounding the roof tiles. Salonius tiptoed out of his sleeping chamber and crawled into bed with his wife.
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