Bad Dogs by Caroline Lawrence

In nearly twenty years of trying to be a writer, I notice that authors tend to return to the same themes again and again. It’s as if certain incidents or impressions from childhood have branded our creative impulses. 

One of my recurring themes is scary dogs. I’m not sure where this obsession came from because I hardly think about dogs in my waking hours and have not had one as a pet since childhood, but there they are, popping up in all my books. 

My first Roman Mystery features running dogs on all three versions of the cover. I often say it has ‘good dogs, bad dogs and dead dogs’ because someone is killing the watchdogs of Rome’s ancient seaport. I thought canicide was more suitable for a children’s detective novel than homicide. 

I thought wrong. After outraged complaints from British readers, I vowed never to kill another dog. And in thirty subsequent books I’ve hardly ever broken that vow. 

So where does my primal obsession with dogs come from?

I vaguely remember being scared by a barking dog behind a fence when I was a little girl. And I remember having nightmares of being chased by dogs. When I was about eight or nine my family acquired a delightful black and white Boston Terrier named Duchess. She had an adorably ugly little face and loved to play with us. Her favourite game was Tug Towel. One of us kids would hold one end, she would clamp jaws on the other and then pull, with ecstatic growls and bulging eyes. 

But I also remember my distaste at finding red spots of her menstrual blood dotted around the house. One day she was seduced by Sandy, a big golden laborador who belonged to a neighbour. They got stuck together mid-coitus and the entire neighbourhood came out to witness them waddling about in the middle of the road like the proverbial two-backed beast. Duchess rolled her eyes with embarrassment, or so it seemed to me. The ultimate humiliation came when someone trained a hose on the ignominious pair, drenching them with water as well as mocking laughter. 

Duchess died of old age and after a suitable period of mourning we went to the animal shelter to find a replacement. There were no Boston terriers so we settled for a pretty Sheltie mix cowering in a corner. I was going through an African phase and insisted on naming her Simba – Swahili for ‘lion’ – on account of her white mane. Far from being lion-like she was neurotic and cringing, with a tendency to snap at men who made sudden moves to stroke her. When I went to college I was relieved to leave her at home, in the care of my long-suffering parents. 

I only spent a year studying at U.C. Santa Barbara before I transferred to another campus, but I still remember the packs of dogs that roamed the streets and beaches. Abandoned by their feckless student owners, these once-beloved pets had become feral. There was a story, no doubt apocryphal, that a band of them had once cornered an undergraduate in a vacant lot and forced him to throw a stick for hours. Readers of The Thieves of Ostia now know where I got the idea for the cover scene. 

In our affluent culture saturated by images of cute animals, it is hard to think of dogs as sinister, but as I read ancient texts I am often reminded of the deeply unpleasant aspects of canine behaviour. Throughout most of human history, dogs have been considered unclean scavengers and dangerous killers. 

Dogs appear in the very first line of Homer’s Iliad, where they vie with carrion birds to feed on the bodies of dead warriors. They’re in the Odyssey, too, where a savage pack of them strike terror into the heart of our hero: 

Suddenly the baying dogs caught sight of Odysseus and flew at him, barking loudly. He had the sense to sit down and drop his staff. Even so he would have suffered ignominious injuries there and then, at his own farm, had not the swineherd dashed through the gateway, shouted at the dogs and sent them scurrying off in all directions with a shower of stones. 
(Homer Odyssey 14.28)

In fifth century Greece, the poet Euripides died after being torn apart by a pack of his host’s watchdogs as he returned late from a banquet. ‘Such a great genius did not deserve this cruel fate,’ laments the Roman who tells this story. 
(Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings 9.12.4)

In the Jewish scriptures, dogs are presented as consistently negative. They lick human blood, devour corpses and return to their vomit. (e.g. 1 Kings 22.38, 2 Kings 9:10 & Proverbs 26:11) To be called a ‘dog’ was the most degrading epithet imaginable. 
(e.g. 1 Samuel 17:43 & 2 Samuel 16:9 )

In the New Testament even Jesus refers to dogs as unclean, showing how deeply engrained this attitude was in the ancient Middle East. (Matthew 7:6 & Matthew 15:26) 

We know from naturalists like Pliny the Elder and doctors like Galen that rabid dog bites were common enough to be genuine concerns. Today, this problem has been all but eradicated in the prosperous first world, where dogs have to get their shots, but in poorer parts of the third world dog bites account for a horrifying number of child deaths.  

In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass (a mid-second century fable sometimes called ‘the first Latin novel’) our hero meets many dogs, none of them pleasant. At one point a bandit recounts the death of his fellow robber, who was wearing the ill-judged disguise of a bearskin.

Guards called long-eared, bristling hunting dogs and commanded them to attack Thrasyleon. Hiding behind a door, I clearly saw my friend bravely fighting off the dogs… Finally he slipped out of the house and sought safety in flight. But as he ran along the streets of the town, all the dogs from neighbouring alleys poured out, just as fierce and numerous as the hunting dogs who were still in pursuit… I witnessed a pathetic and ghastly sight: that of my friend surrounded by the seething pack of dogs and ripped to pieces by their jaws. 
(Apuleius, Metamorphoses IV.19 ff)

Similarly, the myth of Actaeon has the eponymous hero torn apart by his own hunting dogs after Artemis has turned him into a deer. This adds a horrible new layer to our primal fear of being devoured by predators: that of being eaten by our own faithful pets. 

For Greeks and Romans did not keep dogs solely for hunting, herding and guarding. Some of them, especially women and children, had small lapdogs purely for companionship and play. 

From the Roman world we have Helena, a dog beloved enough to receive an expensive tombstone praising her as her ‘matchless’ and ‘well-deserving’. Even the poet Martial, who can be very rude about certain women and their lapdogs, penned a charming poem about a pet dog called Issa. Unlike my family’s childhood pet Duchess, she never soiled the bedcovers with a single drop but put an imploring paw on her master’s neck whenever nature called. 
(Martial Epigrams 1.109 )

Perhaps the most famous dog from ancient sources is Argos from Homer’s Odyssey. Tick-ridden and lying on a heap of manure, the old hound recognises his returning master after twenty years and, with a feeble wag of his tail, he dies of happiness. 
(Homer, Odyssey 17.290ff)

I suppose not all ancient dogs are bad. 

Caroline Lawrence’s latest book, Death in the Arena, has a good dog on the cover. Set in Roman Britain, it is suitable for kids 9+

Denying the doldrums through history, food, and favourite cookbooks - by Gillian Polack

I’m having a bad day. Not a day when big things go wrong and the world is a walking disaster. Just one of the those days that don’t feel quite right. 

Normally, to fix bad days, I cook. I can’t do that today, because I’ve had a lot of bad days recently, and my refrigerator is full. If anyone wants mango pasta with berry sauce, or homemade bread or a number of other delectable foodstuffs, I’m your person. However, I still have a way out of the badness of the day. You’re going to help me: I’m going to introduce you two a couple of historical (food-related) books. It would cheer me up even more if we talked about historical food in the comments!

Nicholas Stavroulakis’ The Cookbook of the Jews of Greece is one of the best cookbooks I own. So many amazing recipes. So much history. What interests me today is the history, for the recipes are among those I cooked last week.

The Jews of Greece have a complex and fascinating past. Thre is not one simple Jewish culture or group in Greece, but several, so they don’t have just one cuisine. Stravroulakis gives us recipes from Jews who come from the Greece of Classical times, and from later Sephardi arrivals. Just the two. The Sephardi dishes aren’t the same (although there are overlaps) as Sephardi dishes from elsewhere. And the Romaniot (the ancient Jews of Greec) are purely Greek in their cooking, but Jewish. Some of the names of recipes are in Ladino (a cousin of Spanish) and others are in in Greek. And they’re all related to the Jewish dishes I have from my very different set of backgrounds. 

Every now and again I open the book at random and cook from it, because cooking from it gives me more of the history and reminds me of the people. Each dish contains history. 

I was going to talk about one or two recipes with you, but they’re all so lovely. I think I shall make this the type of food I eat for Passover this year. I have no Greek ancestry, but I’m an 1/8 Sephardi, so that will do. Either way, I shall celebrate one of the finest cuisines I’ve encountered.

Passover is an eight day festival that has very specific cooking. No observant Jews eat leavening, Askenazis don’t eat some legumes. It can be complicated. Just for today (for Passover is over a week away) I shall skip the complications and head straight for the special recipes for the festival itself. My family has a chicken soup, and something we call “matzah brie” (its name doesn’t rhyme with the name of the cheese) and we eat a lot of pickles. This is very much the Australian version of Eastern and Central European Jewish food.

This year I shall be adding haminados (an egg dish) to that, along with a chicken soup and bourekia, both made without leavening. 

This cookbook also gives some of the history of the festival. Stravroulakis talks about the picnic that Greek Jews have on the last day of the festival, for instance, and the ovens some localities had that were specifically used for the unleavened bread we eat throughout the eight days. 

History and food are so tightly linked that it’s impossible to separate them. The world likes to assume that Jewish history is simple and that Jews are all the same. Our food reminds us that the world is wrong. We eat our favourite foods to keep our identities straight. We’ve done this for a very long time, so it helps keep our history straight, too. This is one of the critical reasons why food and history are so tightly linked. It’s also a reason why concentration camp victims sometime wrote cookbooks while being starved. We can retain joy in our food-culture even when there is no joy left in the world.

This is my theory, anyhow. Stravroulakis supports my theory (without knowing it) by giving five recipes for charoset. Charoest is a symbolic dish – it’s to remind Jews of the mortar used when we were forced to build for others in Ancient Egypt. It’s the history and the food tightly bound

Add different recipes for different regions and groups within the region and even families, and it’s possible to explain how Jewish cultural integrity works, historically, just by eating. The Greek charoseth recipes have dates and raisins and currants. My family’s recipe has almonds and apple and cinnamon. All our recipes have wine.

The other cookbook is the polar opposite in history terms. It’s someone saying “Look at me!” Not “We shall remember who we are and celebrate survival” but “I am important enough to write my own cookbook.”

I don’t use this volume very often, but I look at it a lot. It reminds me that some people are shiny and get a lot of attention in their time, but are forgotten very soon after. In this case, Mrs Mary Eales is remembered only through her cookbook. 

Eales claims in her book that she was the confectioner to Queen Anne. Shiny. Someone who pushed her own importance during her lifetime and was probably given great respect for it, but whose star waned and who is now largely forgotten. This is important to me now because of the number of people who push and say “Look how important I am.”

We can judge Eales by her recipes and her cuisine. We no longer get the glamour. Some historical figures retain glamour – Richard I, for instance, or Madame de Pompadour. In everyday life, these aren’t the people we would think are shiny if we were around them. They wouldn’t move in our circles, or even at the edge of our circles. We’d focus on those closer to home and talk about how special they are. Some of them would genuinely be special and some of them would be hollow with only the shine making them worthy of attention. 

The fact that Eales wrote down her recipes and that someone published them after her death means that she was one of these shiny people. Not so many people published in the early eighteenth century, so this small cookbook says a lot about how she was seen. It enabled her to continue to be seen, too, for the book was published and republished, and republished again. Mrs Mary Eales was very shiny for a while. This is certain. Her shine faded later in the century and her book went out of print. 

The book is a careful listing of the types of sweets one can make with a set range of ingredients. The recipes are mostly not very original. They’re very much of their time, which is the early eighteenth century. She wasn’t testing herself by creating the limited range: those were the ingredients available just then. 

Those ingredients reflect the trade routes and the local farms. They show us a lot about the society Mrs Eales lived in. They also show us a careful woman who didn’t just buy ingredients and cook with them. She thought about preservation and making sure there was food across the null seasons. Angelica was dried, green apricots were preserved, cherries were turned into jam, currants were transformed into clear-cakes. 

Mrs Eales gives a complete guide for making sure that the fruit and even some of the nuts and vegetables of one season could be available for cooking all year round. Then she gives the recipes using both fresh and preserved fruit.

It’s very much the food of the south of England. So much cream! Clouted Cream and Spanish Butter and “all sorts of Fruit-Cream” and, for the first time in any English language cookbook, ice cream.

It’s a household manual as much as a cookbook, but it’s at the luxury end. How to make the food that enriches the day and widens the waistline and makes many people much happier. Given how even writing about it makes me happier, I’d say that the woman who carefully worked all this out and made all these recipes (which I have tested for deliciousness, but which I don’t make any more because of the sheer abundance of cream and because some of the ingredients are not easy to find or even safe) is a woman of substance. Not just shiny. 

These recipes make history sexier. So do those of the Jews of Greece. They do so, however, in entirely different ways.

"My Era's Better Than Your Era": reported by Penny Dolan

I’ve been writing my Christmas List, as requested by some nearest and dearest, and as ever, the list is mostly books, However, as I scan down the titles, I can see I’m not being very loyal to the Victorian setting of my work-in-progress. I am very easily lured away by the excitement and interest of a different period.

So I was intrigued when I heard four historians defending a chosen era recently.

Which era did they claim was "the best"?

Ben Kane chose the Romans for their amazing influence on the world, and for their empire which lasted two and a half thousand years. The Roman legions were bold fighters, defeating the German tribes who wouldn’t pay taxes. Their language, Latin, underpins the English, French, Spanish and Italian languages, wherever they have spread across the world. They had a good legal system, even if it was largely borrowed from the Greeks. They built aquaducts and miles of roads and impressive buildings which can still be seen today. Not only that, he said, but there are a host of great tales about the Romans from the well-known legends and histories through to interesting small stories, such as the Roman cow that ran up to the third storey of a block of flats and jumped off into the street below, or the fact that famous gladiators would sell small bottles of their sweat to rich ladies. Not only that, but the Roman era can also boast of that political & military genius, Julius Caesar.

Janina Ramirez was roused to defend the era of the Vikings. They were, she said, the roots of the British identity. She agreed that the Vikings - especially with the destruction of Lindisfarne - had had a bad press but the Viking invaders only took gold and treasures at the start. Over thirty years, they became cosmopolitan and cultured, she said, settling and trading and establishing the area known as the Danelaw, Although the Romans classifying the Vikings as Barbarians, that was because the Romans simply viewed any other culture as un-civilised. Janina felt that the Vikings were different and fascinating. They were the first to reach America, Russia and North Africa; their skills included the fine boat-building, metalwork and jewellery while their sagas and literature  show a modernity about their language and are evidence of the Vikings great love of learning. Janina spoke about the role and respect of women within the Viking culture, demonstrated in Queen Emma of Norway, whose marriage to Cnut, the King of Denmark and England created an ultimate power couple. That long and successful reign so transformed the country that in many ways, Janina claimed, the Vikings have never left but exist deep within the culture and landscape of the British Isles.

S.J.Parris said she hardly needed to suggest the importance of the Tudor era. The sexual and religious politics of that era explain why England is not now a small colony of Spain, and why we enjoy the religious freedoms of today.

It is hard now, she suggested, to understand the feeling among people back in 1580, when the Protestant faith was still seen as just a passing fad. Many went along with the new religion because of the need to keep their head on their shoulders. It was an insecure time. Many of the Catholic families believed that the whole of Protestant England hung on the “person” of the King. If only Queen Elizabeth could be removed, they felt, all would be well, especially with Mary Queen of Scots waiting in the wings.  .

Moreover, the Pope had issued a Papal Bull, declaring Elizabeth’s reign illegal and implying that killing her would not be a sin. With religious schools on continent eagerly sending their students to convert Protestants and drumming up support for the Catholics once Elizabeth had been assassinated, there was no shortage of young men glad to do the deed.

So, said S,J, Parris, the Tudor age saw the beginning of modern espionage, in the person of Sir Francis Walsingham. He was, she said, quoting the Bond franchise, “the first M”. Although his grandfather was a common vintner and tradesman, Walsingham himself became central to the safety of England.  Using a system of spies and ciphers and dead letter boxes, he set up a centralised intelligence system that led to the uncovering of treason such as the Babbington plot. This network helped the Tudor age become an era rich in exploration, science and intellectual growth.

Edwin Thomas, coming last on the list, spoke of the Ancient Greeks. Their culture, he pointed out, lay behind the grandeur of Rome. The Greeks were cosmopolitan globetrotters, valuing intellectual freedom and if we were to judge the best era as the one whose influence lasted longest, it was possible to see examples of Greek architecture, such as perfect Grecian pilasters, on many buildings around town. The Greeks, being great ship builders, invented the tri-reme. They fought many military wars of defence, including those against the Turks, a conflict that still has echoes in that area to this day. Without the Greeks, Thomas suggested, we could have been a colony of Iran. The Greek culture fed deep into the cultures of the Mediterranean and Britain, and their ferment of the Greek intellectual ideas still speaks to us today: witness the series of Greek plays running at The Almeida theatre on London. Democracy existed in Ancient Greece, he said, but did not reach England until the nineteenth century, and we have only just caught up, he claimed, with their relaxed attitude to sexuality. Besides, he added, think of the weather in Greece, a climate that allowed the establishment of open air symposiums, and to the teachings of Socrates and Plato.

I must admit that novelist Antonia Hodgson was so busy keeping the peace between these four passionate arguments that she had no time to defend “her” era - the eighteenth century - during this "contest" at Harrogate’s History Festival.Janina won the vote, mainly because she stressed the role of women in the Viking era which rather won this particular audience.

I wonder what era would be your personal favourite - or maybe it is really is impossible to choose?