Book Title: Nero and Sports
Series: Nero and Sporus
Author: S.P. Somtow
Publication Date: May 30, 2025
Publisher: Diplodocus Press
Pages: 750
Genre: Historical Fiction / Historical Biographical Fiction / LGBTQ Interest
Any Triggers: Sexuality of various kinds, violence, slavery.
https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/05/blog-tour-nero-and-sporus-by-sp-somtow.html
Nero and Sporus
by S.P. Somtow
Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters.
The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena.
Preparing to go out took us almost until dawn, but I still was not tired. Just one hour of freedom, I thought, one hour of anonymity. When we left through the front door, we weren’t noticed. Gallio’s slaves were probably too busy worrying about whether they would live or die, and they weren’t that familiar with what I looked like. In Roman society, what you wear identifies you as much as many facial features.
We giggled like children as we left the villa behind us. Though this was a strange city, it was not cluttered and labyrinthine like Rome. The real Corinth was long gone, from a series of civil wars; Julius Caesar’s recreation of Corinth was strictly according to the Roman colonial template: here the temples, over there the theater, here again a forum.
But I felt like a boy again, giddy with short-term freedom, running down an alley with a playmate. I had not felt this way for a long time. The unimaginative architecture was not my concern. We raced down an alley, rounded a temple, startled a dove-seller as he hawked sacrificial birds in cages in front of the Temple of Octavia.
We laughed as he chased the birds, hopping along the steps.
“Let’s help him,” I said to Hylas.
We bent down and started to catch the birds. They seemed tame, not wanting to fly away.
I realized their wings were clipped.
I handed a bird to the vendor, and he sighed as he returned it to the cage. “Yes, I know,” he said. “It saves time.”
“It seems a pity,” I said. “Birds should fly.” I thought of my own fate.
“In my country,” he said in a strange accent, “the buyers don’t wring their necks to honor the gods. In fact, they set them free, to earn merit in their next life.”
“That is a beautiful idea.”
“But what the clients don’t know is … their wings are clipped anyway. I was a bird-seller’s slave once. My job was to catch the escaped birds so we could sell them again. The clients did not know the birds were used again and again, so their intentions were pure.”
“It seems less wasteful than killing them,” I said.
“If me was a bird,” Hylas said — his Greek had not yet caught up with his Latin — “Me rather die than not fly.”
“What country are you from?” I asked him.
“I’m from the very farthest limit of the Hellenic world,” said the vendor, “beyond even the Empire of Caesar. “I am from Bactria, which is in India.”
“The farthest footfall of Alexander the Great,” I said, remembering some past comment of my tutor Aristarchos.
“You’ve heard of it! My, you had a good tutor,” he said. “You are not who you seem to be, young master.” We finished caging the birds and the vendor handed us an obol for our efforts. “Go share a lamb skewer.”
We left the temple steps and turned another corner. The sun was rising. I could smell grilled spiced meat and warm bread, and I could tell we were near a market. “You heard him,” Hylas said in Latin. “Lamb.”
“You go.” I had become despondent suddenly. I could not help thinking of the flightless doves, captured and recaptured to ease the sensibilities of pilgrims.
Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/ba90Qx
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Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as 'the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,' Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.
Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.
His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, 'skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.' Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers' Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children's books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.
In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon's Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok's first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
According to London's Opera magazine, 'in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.' His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.
Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with "Homeworld of the Heart", a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.
Currently he has just finished Nero and Sporus, a massive historical novel set in Imperial Rome.
To support S.P. Somtow's work, visit his patreon account at patreon.com/spsomtow. His website is at www.somtow.com.
Author Links:
Website: https://www.somtow.com/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/spsomtow
Twitter / X: https://x.com/somtow
Facebook: http://facebook.com/somtow
Instagram: http://instagram.com/somtow
Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/s-p-somtow
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APBJXC/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/81037.S_P_Somtow
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