Enemies At Home (A Flavia Albia Mystery #2), by Lindsey Davis

If the Flavia Albia mystery series is inaugurated with a novel that reflects on the role of gender in dealing with Roman society and its occasional benefits in solving crimes and dealing with other women, this novel presents yet more social issues for the author to deal with when it comes to the problems of slavery.  As an American reader, I am used to dealing with fiction (and nonfiction) that deals sympathetically with the plight of slaves and with the danger that slaveowners faced as a result of their iniquitous tyranny over other men and women and their dependence on such labor at home.  And so it is that the novelist, obviously aware of the massive social issues of the Roman Empire and the fear that slaves would rise up and murder their masters.  This fear was one that all slave societies have possessed, from Nazi Germany and the gulag or laogai archipelagos to the antebellum South.  However much masters may mouth platitudes about the love and trust of their human property, the fear was there that their trusted slaves who bathed them and slept with them and cooked their food and did various other jobs would turn on them.

And that is precisely the mystery we find here.  When newlyweds are found naked and strangled in their beds at night, suspicion immediately falls upon their slaves, who escape to sanctuary.  The local aedile, which perhaps can be considered as a police chief of sorts, if one wants to translate it to contemporary American terms, hires Flavia to investigate the case.  The slaves cast aspersion on a local criminal operation which is told to have robbed the place, but they plead innocence while engaging in gangland violence that attacks Flavia’s uncles, who happen to be both brilliant attorneys and Senators, threatening the wrath of the Roman establishment on generally tolerated local criminality.  And the slaves try to stick to their story even in the face of contradictions and unpleasant realities, until Flavia is able to uncover most of the reality and wrestle with the reality of slavery in the whiny Dromo who follows her around for safety as a temporary body servant.  And, of course, we not only witness Flavia’s insight in solving a theft and series of murders (and a suicide) but also her lapses in judgment that endanger her life.

It is to the benefit of many readers that the author chose to write novels rather than screeds against the injustices of this and every age.  All too often writers assume that others, especially privileged white males who have a fondness for classical Greece and Rome, are the sort of people who need to be attacked for some sort of unenlightened beliefs and opinions about others.  Yet this novel does not attack its reader, but rather exposes the reader to moral complexities, including the way that masters use slaves as concubines to fulfill sexual lusts, and the way that slaves (and freedmen) are often ignorant of what is in their best interests and guilty of acting in ways or encouraging behaviors that threaten such security as they can have in the context of the unjust and unstable systems of slavery that have existed throughout history.  And rather than attacking readers, the author (correctly) assumes that the reader will have a great deal of sympathy for an intelligent but flawed heroine and for slaves who desire dignity but who find themselves imperiled by the system of slavery that denies their humanity and that places them in great harm of sexual and physical and emotional violence at home.  Every master feared enemies at home, but every slave had them by virtue of being a slave.