Despoiling Venus by Jack Lindsay (1935)

It's strange that Lindsay's first three novels of ancient Rome are regarded popularly as a trilogy, when this one, his fourth, is just as related to the other three as they are amongst themselves. No answer for that. Anyway, he has now developed a very toothsome prose style, having left off the poetic riffing so prevalent in the previous instalment, where short stabs of sentence were used in an attempt to build up a very immediate semblance of the feel of events. One of the other major pillars of his modus is his insistence on psychology - following an individual's mind through its many changes and tensions as events pull it into and out of shape. Here that is again key, as Marcus Caelius Rufus details the topography of his affair with, and love of, Clodia. It starts with fascination and flirtation, and then develops into strong obsession, all fairly faithfully recorded by Lindsay's passionate, muscular style. Then a point is reached where Marcus is drunkenly forced into an odd action by Clodia, then reacts to having done what he's done in hindsight quite strangely, then teams up with her previously despised brother Clodius in a not quite believable way, and then nervously and unaccountably commits a murder: an extraordinary string of events where Lindsay's insistence on psychology completely undoes him. The hoops through which he has had to jump unbalance his story terribly. What I'm not sure about is how much of this is recorded history; in which case, has he developed a theory about how this series of events unfolded on the one hand, a theory about who these people were and what moved them on the other, and desperately tried to meld the two? If so, the result is a dog's dinner from a psychological point of view. His muscularity and passion keep up, which kept this reader involved, but of course my appreciation of the plot was fatally compromised. At the end, he seems aware of this, and has Marcus break from Clodia and Clodius very finally, as if coming up for air. In his meditation on what happened he puts the whole thing down to the frustration he and the already married Clodia felt at not being able to commit themselves in wedlock. It's a feeble reasoning, and a mismatch for the character of Marcus, and indeed Clodia, as they have been built up. In much that it attempts this book is successful, but ultimately it's a case of a vital element failing.