Castrated and forcibly cross-dressed by the Roman Caesars

Tom Holland (Oxford, 56 years old), that great chronicler of the history of Antiquity and especially of the ancient Romans, returns, after passing a Rubicon of illness, and he does so with

Pax

(Attic of Books, 2024,) an exciting fresco about the era of splendor of imperial Rome that goes from Nero to Hadrian and that includes, despite the title, great military emperors such as Vespasian and Trajan.

Of course, he emphasizes in an interview in Barcelona in which he will address topics as diverse as his passion for Herodotus (of whose

History

he has made a highly praised translation into English) and his defense of hedgehogs, we are talking about the

Pax Romana,

imposed to the extreme. of gladio for the legions.

All in all, in a monumental story that takes us from the glittering marbles of the eternal city to the barbaric bloody forests of Germania and the violent sands of the Arsacids where the cataphracts thrive;

Covering such sensational events as the Dacian Wars, the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii, the Batavian Revolt, the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Titus, and the construction of the Colosseum, nothing is as moving as the intimate stories of two young men who They joined their destiny to the Caesars and died for it.

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“Trump, like Caligula, bases his regime on the fun of humiliation”

One, with whom the book practically closes, is Antinous, the Greek boy from Bithynia with whom Hadrian fell in love when the boy was a 12-year-old boy and who drowned under strange circumstances—perhaps murdered or sacrificed—during a cruise of the emperor along the Nile in 130 AD in which he traveled as an official lover.

The other, a creepy and very sad case that Holland explains in the first chapter of his book, is the young slave whom Nero castrated, cross-dressed and forcibly married because she reminded him of his dead wife (possibly pregnant), the beautiful and promiscuous Empress Poppaea Sabina.

Tom Holland.

The sources (Suetonius, Tacitus, Dio Cassius) have not recorded the true name of the unfortunate boy, who Nero, after having a surgeon (of the time) tie him to an operating table and live amputate his penis and testicles, he jokingly nicknamed Sporo (seed or semen).

But the emperor, immersed in the Frankensteinian fantasy that he was bringing his wife back to life (whom according to some he had kicked to death himself in a fit of fury), forced everyone to call him Poppaea and treat him as if he were. was the true empress.

Thus, a new Poppaea, with the same soft skin and reddish-brown hair, miraculously occupied Nero's bed, combed and dressed alike, she was carried in her litter and her honors were paid to her.

It says a lot about the atmosphere in Rome that people took the case as another occurrence of the emperor, that it even seemed a manifestation of Nero's genius and divine power to modify nature and transmute his desires into reality (in that vision the boy was a fascinating, almost magical creature, subhuman and suprahuman at the same time), and that jokes were even made, like the one Suetonius reports about someone commenting how well things would have gone if Domitius, Nero's father, had had a woman like that.

Tom Holland, who with

Pax

offers the third part of a Roman journey begun with

Rubicon

(Julius Caesar), and

Dynasty

(Augustus and the Claudios), fascinatingly tells the story of Sporo-Popea, recalling its less known and no less tragic continuation.

What happened to the poor boy who became a

doppelgänger

and sterile parody of the dead empress?

He passed from hand to hand, as a trophy and a valuable (and sorry for the term) imperial attribute.

After Nero's suicide, he made the young man his own as the prefect of the Praetorians Ninfidius Sabinus as a way of shoring up his position.

“To sleep with Sporo, the unfortunate boy transformed into the image of the most beautiful empress in Rome, was to sleep with her,” explains Holland.

The forcibly castrated young man, a living doll, symbolized imperial power and provided legitimacy to the one who possessed it.

Thus, when Nymphidius was murdered, Sporo, as in a terrible version of the story of Alatiel - the daughter of the sultan of Babylon in the

Decameron

- changed hands again.

He was taken by Otho, who would become emperor after Galba in the stormy year 69 (the year of the four emperors: Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian).

A scene from the series 'Spartacus'.

The thing about Otho, with a reputation for being vicious, depraved and shaving daily, is especially morbid because he had been married to the real Poppaea before she became the wife of Nero prior, it was said,

ménage à trois

(so that they would later say that ancient history is not interesting).

Otho committed suicide, and he appropriated Sporo Vitellius, another figure who added gluttony to his dissipations although he was a good general.

Vitellius, of whom it was rumored, recalls Holland, that as a child Tiberius had abused him and he was given the nickname Sphincter, had the idea of ​​using the boy to put on a show: making him appear on a stage representing the rape of Proserpina by the god Pluto.

The idea was that Sporo, without ceasing to be Poppaea, played the role of Proserpina and was forced to play her in front of the public.

Unable to continue supporting everything that life threw at him, increasingly deplorable, the young man committed suicide before making his debut.

“The problem with writing narrative history is that often the sources focus only on the great figures,” reflects Holland.

“It's okay, because they are very interesting, but people like that young gelding who we would like to know more about are usually left out.

They are fascinating stories that bring us closer to Roman society in a different way.

A society that we cannot understand only by those who held power.

The entire range of people must be shown: merchants, bureaucrats, slaves, children.

Sporo, or should we call him Poppaea, passes from hand to hand, like a spoil of war.

How strange it must have been for Otto to find his dead wife in the form of a castrated young man.

And apparently how exciting it was for all of them to have it.

And that end, after going through so many beds, that Vitellius organized a rape session for him in the sand, and he committed suicide before that last humiliation... "

Roman auxiliaries show barbarian heads to the emperor.

Holland reflects that although the whole story seems aberrant to us, we should not see the past, and look at Roman sexuality, with our eyes, just as it would be absurd because it is anachronistic to compare the experience of Sporo with our stories of transsexuality.

For Sporo it was another humiliation to be turned into a woman.

“The Romans fantasized about it a lot, but it was never seen as something positive.”

The case of Sporo, although extreme, is not unique in the history of Rome.

There was the figure of the

delicati,

slaves who were sexual toys for their masters (and also for their mistresses) and sometimes they were eunuchs (a predilection, apparently, of Titus when he was not with Queen Berenice).

There was a real passion in elite circles for boys of extraordinary beauty and they especially liked

Greek

pretty boys .

Holland recalls that it was dishonorable for higher-ranking Roman men to be treated like a woman and penetrated, but there was no shame in being the active part with a handsome boy.

In that sense they were not binary at all.

The pond called Canopus, in Hadrian's Villa, near Rome.RENÉ MATTES, AGE

Holland closes his

Pax

(in which a thank you goes to his cancer surgeon) with Antinous.

Is that symmetry deliberate?

“Yes,” he admits.

“There are similarities between Nero and Hadrian, such as their love for Greece and architecture.

And there are those two relationships with boys, although they are very different.

Hadrian seems to have been truly in love with Antinous.

But he also does something as surprising for the time as Nero by transforming Sporo into a woman: he turns his dead lover, who is neither a citizen nor a Roman, into a god and establishes a cult for her.

Both Nero and Hadrian showed excessive emotions in their duel for Poppaea (the original) and Antinous, a shock that seemed unmanly and was shocking.

They are both transgressors.

However, Hadrian looks to the future: a future in which the borders between the inhabitants of the empire disappear."

It could be said that Nero also had a vision (in his case materialized in a terrible, cruel and monstrous way) of a world in which gender boundaries could be crossed.

It is not surprising that Tom Holland, who started out as a horror writer before launching into classical history and giving us books like

Persian Fire, Rubicon

and

Dynasty

, was interested in the story of Sporo.

How do you go from writing about vampires to writing about Antiquity and Caesars?

“My original

background

is more in literature than in history, I started doing my PhD at Oxford on Lord Byron and, of course, he was Polidori's model for his aristocratic vampire so I started making gothic vampire novels with that knowledge of Byron and they worked very well.

But then I found the reality of the past much more interesting than fiction and everything I could invent.”

Holland surprisingly combined both interests in an amazing horror novel about Ancient Egypt that mixes Akhenaten and Carter (Howard) with entities with a Lovecraftian air,

The Dream of Tutankhamun

(Planet, 2000).

“Have you read it?”, the writer is surprised to move logically from Egypt to Herotodo.

“I am a big fan of Herodotus, for me he is a constant source of inspiration and I aspire to explain history with literary flair like him.

When I published

Persian Fire,

about the Persian Wars, the director of Penguin classics told me that they needed a translation of the

History

and if he encouraged me to do it myself.

"I only had basic Greek, but I started to study it and translating Herodotus has been one of the great privileges of my life."

A woman takes a selfie in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii.

'Alessio Paduano/corbis

In

Pax

, as we have said, there is a lot of war.

“Indeed, but they, the Romans, saw no paradox in conquering peace by the sword.

There could be no peace without war and without military supremacy (theirs, of course).

Peace is imposed through violence.

In fact, the word emperor literally means victorious general.

And Vespasian or Trajan are examples of that military, martial concept, of the imperial purple and of the empire.

Roman soldiers in Germania in a historical reconstruction show.

Something surprising in

Pax

is that Holland shows sympathy for Domitian, the last of the Flavians, considered one of the cruelest emperors and whose persecution of Christians is considered the worst.

“The truth is that he stabilized the empire's finances and prepared Trajan's conquests, increasing the army.

He was seen badly because he offended the senatorial elites.

But only an autocrat could prevail.

It should not be forgotten that he came to power in the midst of a series of disasters that seemed to suggest that the gods were dissatisfied and he wanted to appease them by returning Rome to its original values.

He was very devout and believed in the mission of regenerating the empire.

In essence, Domitian, more a censor than a tyrant, is close to some great Christian emperors of the 4th and 5th centuries such as Justinian.

Which did not prevent him from liking to personally shave his concubines, frolic in the pool with street whores, and get his niece pregnant.

In

Pax

it is shown how dangerous the Dacians and the Parthians were.

“Yes, but the Roman State was so formidable that it could destroy any other power on the battlefield.

As a legionnaire wrote in graffiti beyond Palestine and I collect at the end of my book: 'The Romans always win.'"

Holland, who has already visited the British Museum's exhibition on the legions - he himself addresses cases such as Galba's

decimatio

or the dishonor of the XII Fulminata by losing its eagle - and praises it ("very clear and enjoyable, full of very interesting"), clarifies that, after Trajan's victories, Hadrian had to stabilize the empire, but the Roman will was invincible.

They might have occasional setbacks, but they could not conceive of defeat.

The historian, younger brother of World War II specialist James Holland and author of documentaries, radio programs and the successful podcast

The rest is History

, is in favor of traveling to the scenes on which he works and remembers the impact that visiting had on him. the ruins of Sarmizegetusa, the capital of the Dacians.

“I took advantage of being invited to give a talk in Cluj and went there.”

Well, that's in Transylvania, vampire territory.

“Yes,” laughs Holland, “Sarmizegetusa is a very sinister place and you can almost sense that the forests are full of strange creatures.”

In any case, there is no question of returning to the horror genre.

“I will continue reviewing the history of Rome.

I have four more books in my head.

As I said, the story is more amazing and interesting.”

It is tempting to end with a small sample of Holland's stirring prose in

Pax

(translation by Joan Eloi Roca): “Summer after summer, the legions had marched across the Rhine. Summer after summer they had unleashed fire and slaughter on all they encountered. in its path.

Summer after summer they had sent the rumor of Rome's anger and violence to the remotest reaches of Germany, to its most impenetrable depths.

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