In Atrox Caedes: A Latin Novella, Merula finds her younger sister Catula endlessly annoying. Since the death of their mother, they only seem to be able to fight. After another pointless fight, Catula storms out of the house… and doesn’t return home when a riot breaks out on the streets of Pompeii. Merula is afraid but ventures out to search for her missing sister. Amid the atrocious slaughter, Merula will find the strength to save her family and heal its fractures.
Atrox Caedes is suitable for use in Latin II/III. This novella may be appropriate at other levels depending on the students’ years of study and its intended use. The first chapter of the novella is available here.
Atrox Caedes is available on Amazon. It can also be purchased as part of a classroom set on Bombax Press or part of FVR classroom sets.
About the Plot of Atrox Caedes
Atrox Caedes: A Latin Novella occurs on the day of the gladiator riot in Pompeii in 59 CE. The main characters are family of women who are Roman Egyptians and what happens to them on the day of the riot. We have two surviving accounts of this riot: Tacitus’ description of it and its aftermath and the fresco in the house of Actius Anicetus. During the riot, people from Pompeii and Nuceria fought each other, brutally.
Tacitus describes the origin of the riot as starting from jeering and then leading to a slaughter. It seems that the Nucerians suffered the most, and Tacitus describes how wounded and mutilated survivors went to the capital for redress. The fresco certainly supports this chaos as images of people fighting all around and inside the amphitheater appear everywhere on it. It looks chaotic. Romans raise their hands, flailing, fighting, and fleeing from the scene. A tiered reading of the Tacitus account is available here.
Although scholars debate what the nature of the games held that day were and the exact nature of the punishment Pompeii received, those points were not the focus on my novella. What mattered to me was the two sisters and how they navigated the crisis together after their lives and relationship had already been fractured by the death of their mother.
This novella does contain scenes of death and dying and violence. It is not a light-hearted read. People die. It also has strong themes of loss, grief, and love—a deep love where you risk your own life for the life of someone you love, even (perhaps especially) when that person vexes you. Another critical element of this novella touches on tribalism, bravery, and helping strangers during a crisis. Merula thinks she can tell who is an outsider and who is an insider, and she encounters people on either side of the riot who confront her expectations of what it means to be a Pompeian. Merula confronts her identity and what it means to act despite being afraid. She asks herself—and us— who are we in the depths of a crisis?
About the Vocabulary and Grammar
The vocabulary is intentionally sheltered to allow for more extensive and independent reading. This novella contains 6,900 total words using a total of 239 words. Of those words, 12 are proper nouns like Nuceria and Merula. In addition, I glossed 22 words that might be unfamiliar to students or are used infrequently but were relevant for making the stories engaging. I also carefully identified and used 35 cognates like confūsus and dēfendere that were used infrequently in the novella. With proper names, glossed words, and clear cognates removed, students need a working vocabulary of 170 words to read this novella.
In addition, I paid careful attention to the frequency that words appear in Latin literature. When choosing between synonyms, for example, I chose the more common word or compounds with frequently occurring words. I am also careful about what I consider to be a cognate and choose only words that I consider to be especially clear and in most students’ English vocabulary at the level that the book was written. After all, it doesn’t matter if a word is a clear cognate if it’s not in a typical student’s vocabulary.
Unlike the vocabulary, the grammar in this novella is not sheltered. This novella is set in the past tense, but it does include substantial dialogue, incorporating the present and future tenses. The grammar does include some uses of the subjunctive and participles.
About the Artwork
For a variety of reasons, I try to find art in the public domain when I am looking for art for a novella. However, I was not able to find pictures in the public domain that portrayed low-to-middle class pictures of Roman Egyptians. I have used before Roman Egyptian funerary portraits, and I found several beautiful pictures of people who once lived who I thought could be Merula or Catula or Figula except… they were clearly wealthy women. They wear large jewelry and have pearl earrings. I wanted to use them… but they just didn’t work for my group of artisans and women who live in a one room apartment.
Instead, I searched for someone I could commission to take these images (and others) and create the art for the book. Mushfiq Emon created the line art for the interior of the book as well as the cover art. I sent him a slew of inspirational images, pictures of tunics and dresses and footwear and even pictures of the dilapidated gate that Merula runs through in search of her sister. I also, of course, sent him the iconic fresco of the gladiator fight itself. He took all of my careful comments, and with a hilarious exception or two that he quickly fixed, he turned it into the excellent artwork that compliments the story of this novella so perfectly.
If you want to commission Mushfiq for art, you can find him on Fiverr here. Here are sample images from the novella created by Musfiq.
About the Text Features
Atrox Caedes: A Latin Novella has a full index of all the words in their various forms. In the index, the reader can look up all unknown words. The index lists verbs separately. As such, a reader could independently look up both fert and tulī without knowing the dictionary entry of the word. The index provides a general translation of the word. Verbs include a translation that is grammatically appropriate and would fit the context of the sentence. This text also contains a dictionary. This dictionary offers all the principal parts. The dictionary notes how frequently the words appear in Latin Literature according to the Core Latin Vocabulary or Essential Latin vocabulary.
If you would like to review the vocabulary used in Atrox Caedes: A Latin Novella, the dictionary is available here.
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