The History Blog

One of my favorite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin, has written a book about my favorite subject: Ancient Rome.

It’s called “Lavinia”, and the eponymous heroine is the legendary daughter of Latinus, King of the Latins, and the wife of Aeneas, hero of Troy, son of Venus and progenitor of the Julian clan. (For a quick and dirty rundown of the period, check out the remaining fragments of Appian’s History of Early Rome.)

It’s no garden variety historical novel, though. For one thing, Lavinia has some understanding that she might actually be fiction, a creation of the poet Virgil whose shade she encounters in a sacred grove.

For another thing:

Lavinia makes for an unlikely heroine, which is just what Le Guin likes about her. From Mulan to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sassy, kick-ass girls are preferred nowadays to circumspect homebodies like Virgil’s Latin princess. There may even be a touch of self-reproach in Le Guin’s choice of Lavinia as her main character, since the heroine of her 1971 novel, “The Tombs of Atuan,” is a priestess named Tenar who rebels against a life entirely devoted to serving a pantheon of nameless, implacable gods. Lavinia, by contrast, embraces the ritual aspect of her designated role, all the humble and solemn daily sacrifices, the scattering of sacred salt, the tending of clan totems, and even her own fate, as a woman destined to have little choice in who her husband will be.

To be fair, the Tombs of Atuan aren’t anywhere near as appealing a childhood home as the bucolic hills of central Italy, and Lavinia wasn’t snatched from her parents as a wee sprog to be raised by servile eunuchs and cold priestesses.

Amazon tells me I’ll have “Lavinia” by Tuesday. A book report will ensue.

Taking a short break from their busy schedule of exploitation and war-fomenting, diamond cartel De Beers has found a late 15th/early 16th c. shipwreck laden with bronze cannon, gold coins and elephant tusks off the coast of Namibia.

The site yielded a wealth of objects, including several tons of copper, more than 50 elephant tusks, pewter tableware, navigational instruments, weapons and the gold coins, which were minted in the late 1400s and early 1500s, according to the statement.

The Namibian government will claim ownership of the treasure found, Halifa Mbako, group corporate affairs manager at Namdeb, said in a telephone interview from Windhoek today.

According to company sources, the human remains and royal artifacts suggest that the ship might have belonged to Portuguese aristocrat Bartolomeu Dias whose caravel sank off the Cape of Good Hope in 1500.

Dias was not only the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, but he charted the trade routes to Asia later used by Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral. He also accompanied de Gama on his voyage to India and Cabral on the voyage that inadvertently resulted in their discovering Brasil.