Story Ideas from a Classic

Writing Journal: I'm rewriting the sex scene in The Adjusters #50. It was lacking... something. And I have the sinking feeling there's a better way to manage the switch from #50 to #51. Damn. This is going to require some thinking...

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I was re-reading Robert Graves' I, Claudius the other day, and I noticed two passages that beg, simply beg to be expanded out into full-fledged smut.

I said straight out, in Greek: “My mother Antonia does not pamper me, but she has let me learn Greek from someone who learned it directly from Apollo.” All I meant was that I understood what they were saying. The person who had taught me Greek was a woman who had been a priestess of Apollo on one of the Greek islands but had been captured by pirates and sold to a brothel-keeper in Tyre. She had managed to escape, but was not permitted to be priestess again because she had been a prostitute. My mother Antonia, recognizing her gifts, took her into the family as a governess. This woman used to tell me that she had learned directly from Apollo, and I was merely quoting her: but as Apollo was the God of learning and poetry my remark sounded far wittier than I intended. (Chapter 5)

I love the touch that the poor girl can not longer be a priestess because she was a prostitute, even though it was not of her own choice.

Now Julia deserves far greater sympathy than she has popularly won. She was, I believe, naturally a decent, goodhearted woman, though fond of pleasures and excitements, and the only one of my female relations who had a kindly word for me. I also believed that there were no grounds for the charges made against her many years later, of infidelity to Agrippa while she was married to him. Certainly all her three boys resembled him closely. The true story is as follows. In her widowhood, as I have related, she fell in love with Tiberius and persuaded Augustus to let her marry him. Tiberius, enraged at having to divorce his own wife for her sake, treated her very coldly. She was then imprudent enough to approach Livia, whom she feared but trusted, and ask her advice. Livia gave her a love-philtre, which she was to drink, saying that within a year it would make her irresistible to her husband, but that she must take it once a month, at full moon, and make certain prayers to Venus, saying nothing about it to a living soul, or the drug would lose its virtue and do her a great deal of harm. What Livia very cruelly gave her was a distillation of the crushed bodies of certain little green flies, from Spain, which so stimulated her sexual appetite that she became like a demented woman. (I will explain later how I came to learn all this.) For a while indeed she fired Tiberius' appetite by the abandoned wantonness to which the drug drove her, against her natural modesty; but soon she wearied him and he refused to have any further marital commerce with her. She was forced by the action of the drug, which I suppose became a habit with her, to satisfy her sexual cravings by adulterous intercourse with whatever young courtiers she could trust to behave with discretion. She did this in Rome, I mean: in Germany and France she seduced private soldiers of Tiberius' bodyguard and even German slaves, threatening, if they hesitated, to accuse them of offering her familiarities and to have them flogged to death. As she was still a fine-looking woman, they apparently did not hesitate long. (Chapter 6)

Now tell me that this does not belong on the EMCSA? Note that the Julia they are referring to is the daughter of Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, just to add some weight to the situation.

Maybe one day I'll write up those stories, though it'll be tough with the delightful prose of Robert Graves laughing at me from the sidelines.

Here are some Rome-inspired stories to keep you entertained. I've enjoyed the first two—they're pretty straightforward sex tales—and the third one I've read the first few chapters but haven't finished it yet.

Caesar's Wife, by Sulpicia: “Ancient Rome: Antony takes Caesar's wife.”

Laelia, by Digital_bath: “Being a slave girl in ancient rome is... perilous.”

Educating Caesar, by Needful Things: “Young Caesar seeks the assistance of a wealthy prostitute.”