Virgins, Lions, and Honest Pluck

Abstract

This chapter examines particular novels of the Roman Empire and their engagement with antiquity—which often takes the form of a polemical appropriation. It asks how Jews fit into this normative world, how sexual identity is an issue, whether a negotiation can be found between the barbarism of early Britain in Roman eyes and myths of origin, and how complex a picture of conversion, of the spread of Christianity, of the attractions of the pagan world can be developed. The chapter first considers Edward Bulwer Lytton's novel The Last Days of Pompeii, which set in place many of the narrative and ideological structures that were to become the commonplaces of the fiction of the Roman Empire. It then discusses how the representation of Christians and Christianity in the novels of empire changes over the seventy years after Lytton's aggressive Olinthus died, unmartyred, at Pompeii, a post-Gibbonian narrative victim.