Proper Parenting in Ancient Rome, a Time-travel Novel by Anne Hart Set in 150 BCE and Beyond

Thousands of Carthaginian prisoners of war in Setia, near Rome have now banded with their former Carthaginian slaves, and falsely promising their slaves freedom if they revolt and aid them in their return to Carthage. Only the slave and foreign master uprising is wreaking terror all over the Roman countryside and is headed for Rome with wanton destruction of Romans all along the roads between Setia and Rome.

Just when Cato convinces the senate to destroy Carthage, the king of Numidia in Africa (modern Algeria) pays a visit to Cato's home at his wedding dinner, and suddenly, after Cato convinces the senate to make a third Punic War with Carthage (modern Tunisia) and destroy it forever, all of a sudden Cato, Masinissa, king of Numidia, Petronius and the Roman Army are off to Numidia to destroy Carthage.

Meanwhile, the praetor tells Petronius that he's hired his father to spy on the Carthaginians in Setia. Two Carthaginian slaves in Rome who didn't like their Carthaginian master, now a Roman prisoner of war, have revealed to the Roman praetor that a slave uprising the likes of which has never before seen will begin in Setia the day of the games. Torrents of slaves have run away when the leaders of the ring were caught. Now they threaten Rome itself, but Petronius and Cato are on their way to Numidia with the Roman Army, leaving Rome itself more or less unprotected.

Romans too hot to handle are in 150 BCE on the prowl to find missing persons as they find a purpose. When wealthy young men and Cato, the Elder's nephew disappear and moving forward more than a century in time, in this time-travel humorous historical continuing series of a story, the daughter of Cleopatra and Marc Antony trades places with the daughter of the Roman Emperor, Octavian-Augustus's sister and Marc Antony, one private eye in a toga, Petronius, must solve the mystery before the war with Carthage breaks out and the slave riot overtakes Rome. He has his hands full.

What happens when he meets the immortal time traveler, king Masinissa of Numidia, and becomes a Roman personal eye, a proto-detective in a toga, with a profound responsibility to do good deeds and tend to charity while on his way to start a war?

Rome, the Republic, Second Century BCE

I'm more than Cato's ransomer, hired this time by him to find not only his nephew which I had been falsely told were taken by slave traders, but also hired to find my own two brothers and father, Tertius, held by Cato's greatest enemy, Scipio Africanus. My client, Marcus Porcius Cato, a political leader and morals regulator of great integrity and determination, also known as Cato the Elder, ordered his galley anchored beside the galley of Scipio Africanus near the port of Neapolis.

I'm only Petronius Candius, in this lifetime, the most free-spending ransomer, a private locator of missing people for hire, but also a Fabius, a high-born inventor of practical farm equipment, physician, and comparatively wealthy young man walking beside the most severe but moral censor, orator, and taxer of the rich. And if I hadn't been hired to find Cato's nephew, I would have been at my own wedding feast today.

Instead, I watched through open shutters from where Cato and I cowered in the rat-infested salt fish room beneath the mews and falcons copse. I watched from above, as my Roman father this year by marriage to a foreign woman of Ephesus, was now disguised as yet one more Antiochus of Asia, the second, (after the first was defeated) and last year the object of gossip in Rome as well as its greatest physician. My father is a man of a thousand disguises as uses them for healing in a nontraditional fashion.

Here, my father writhed and stumbled over coiled ropes in the sour blackness of the galleys hatches. There, Scipio Africanus, the commander of the greatest popularity who defeated Hannibal at Zama, had chained my father because he wouldn't reveal the whereabouts of my older brother, Lucius, my younger brother, Marcus, or Cato's nephew, Antonius.

Several young men have been missing lately, the wealthiest men in Rome, all from first families, their memories wiped clean, and then taken by slave traders. My father needed to tell me which potions wipe the memory and whether it was permanent when he tracked the very plants to Scipio's galley. Scipio stared at me brazenly, as if my presence would mark him publicly.

Cato asked me to find these eldest sons of the first families of Rome and return them to their fathers. And now I watched olive oil from tankards dripping slowly into my father's eyes and running down his arms. It streaked the blood as he kicked against the manacles that held him steadfast to the rolling galley. "You're only a pedantic bigot, Cato," Scipio roared crookedly with a wavering smile as he glanced at the two of us.

"I saw you minting Antiochus's coins," Cato waved a pointed finger at Scipio, gloriously. "How dare you lead a decadent lifestyle to pursue Greek customs and then be so clumsy as to ship to Petronius priceless statuary and works of art smashed in pieces?"

"You forced a court trial with me and won," Scipio barked, squinting at the irony in his words. Yes, irony, Cato. "You lost your reputation. Look at you now, withdrawn from politics."

"My father found you, Scipio, minting coinage based on the known world's standards governing weights and measures of our times. I know that's why you chained my father in the darkest hold of this galley. It's not my brother or father who is the pirate you seek."

"Then who do I seek?" Scipio interrupted me. "Your brothers disguise themselves as pirates from Carthage."

"They are not here to take the blame. And they sail not as pirates, but as physicians. Have you sunk their hospital galley? Our family plies the seas to heal the sick and the soldiers of Rome. We bring spices, instruments, and herbs from the roads of Asia, the star of the Indus."

Cato and his family haven't shaken the stigma of having to withdraw from politics some years ago, but now my father, brothers, and I saw to it that the citizens of Rome elected Cato as censor. What if I supported the losing side?

"I've sought Carthage's destruction more fiercely than you have, Scipio, "Cato muttered under his raspy breath.

"What do you want with me?" Scipio turned to Cato. You're Rome's guardian of biting morality, and now you've come after me as merely one more enemy. What will you do, Cato, tax me again?"

"While you were at sea, I expelled Manilius," Cato answered, moving me forward with his right arm. "He'll no more run as a candidate in the next election for the office of consul, and I'll see the same happens to you."

"Is that a threat or a promise?" Scipio barked wide-eyed and in high spirits. "Everyone knows why Cato expelled him, Scipio. Manilius dared to embrace his wife in public, and his daughter watched him put his arms around his wife."

Scipio shook his ivory stirgil as he stirred a cauldron of olive oil. I wondered whether he planned to boil my father in oil or spice his own bath. He waved his hand, and the pot of oil was slid across the floor and moved to another room.

Scipio pointed his thick finger at me. "He embraced his wife in front of his daughter in public because she tripped over her palla and stumbled. Manilius merely broke her fall."

"No, Cato insisted. He embraced his wife in public like a wolf in heat, in full view of his daughter's innocent gaze. He had to be expelled."

My client, Cato intervened once more on my behalf. Another beating had spared my father's life for today. Scipio's guard laughed at my father, mocking as he crashed a bucket of water across the floor boards.

"What are you complaining about? We told you that you'd earn money working the oars. Instead, you're protecting barbarous refugees fleeing into our lands like thirsty rats."

"More often, I'm a physician healing soldiers in their own lands. Where are my wife and sons?"

The guard again laughed. "Now what business would we have in Rome or Neapolis with your wife? He waved his torch before my father's eyes. But if she were blind, what need would she have of eyes to share the captain's table? Now your sons, that's another matter."

Marius struggled in pain, filling his lungs with the dark mold that steamed the air. My father didn't scream out. Instead, he listened to the squealing rats fighting in the darkness. His guard let fly the plug of musty water from a public slop bucket, and it slimed my father with fish guts, blood, and seaweed.

Before he left him in darkness, the guard dipped his torch made of twisted reeds in pitch and waved the burning smoke in my father's face, forcing him to crawl even lower in the black space as the smoke burned his nostrils. Are you an animal or a man, Marius of Rome? Do I see a wolf's tail on you? By the bite of the wolf you were born, and like the wild man-wolf you are, you shall die here, very slowly, unless you tell me where I can find your pirate son. Has he returned to Rome? Is he here in Neapolis?"

Scipio paced back and forth. "So you spread the word I misuse public property, eh, Cato?" His hooded eyes blazed. "You severed the pipes for the public water supply because one person drew water illegally. You demolished my family's home because it overlapped onto public land. You tax the rich way beyond what reason or conscience allows."

"I won't stand for excessive luxuries," Cato replied. You won't make of Rome an Egyptian temple."

"So you regulated luxuries so severely, there isn't any because you've turned Rome into a military camp."

"That's the idea," Cato said sharply. "What Rome needs is harder mattresses." The cold dampness allowed all of us to think. I moved closer to my father, but Marius refused to struggle and contained his fury as Cato seized his chains from the guard's fists.

Tell me again about the day you taxed the rich blind, I asked Cato, mapping out a plan in my mind of how we would free my father from Scipio's chains and prove he wasn't the pirate Scipio was after.

Except for one distraction-my father mastered a thousand disguises and many dialects. Which one did he use with Scipio now? Of all the men who ever hired me as a ransomer, the one who could save my father and brother enjoyed publicly playing the role of a miser.

Cato's new young bride worked hard for balance in her life, but all her choices led to paradoxical twists. Used to putting out family wildfires by working behind the scenes, she chose from among distinct cultures and deities as if they were trays at the feast of Saturnalia.

Gossip among the senators' wives blasted her as a social climber, and she would finally reach the top if Cato didn't mind that her new sandals cost more than her dowry.

Her father, Cato's scribe, Salonius, described her as too Roman to handle, and he signed the marriage contract witnessed by a handful of Cato's bodyguards. Poor Salonius had worked as a scribe for Cato when he was a magistrate, and now remained loyal to him still as his client.

Cato beckoned Salonius, waving his emerald ring, and the old scribe hurried to Cato's side wondering why Cato needed all those escorts, those bodyguards with him here in the forum.

"Did you perchance find a husband yet for your daughter?" The old Cato snapped, and then grinned widely, wheezing as Salonius approached. "No. I wait to ask your opinion first," Salonius replied bowing his head in
respect to honor his famous client.

"Heh, heh. It seems I've already found the most worthy match in Rome for your daughter, unless you find his advanced age an obstacle. He is very old.

"Who? Age is of no importance," Salonius added softly, glancing sideways at Cato's escorts.

"I will be the fiancé of your young daughter," Cato cackled.

"I'm honored," Salonius replied, lowering his head and at the same time thinking to himself, "Oh no."

A few moments later, Salonius hurried his shaking hand to sign Cato's marriage contract. "She'd better give me a son quickly,"

Cato whispered. "A son who will assume the surname of his maternal grandfather, Salonius, no doubt."

"How come a widower like you with that Egyptian slave girl who comes to visit you nightly wants all of a sudden to marry a Roman girl so young she barely has entered her teen years?" Salonius asked cautiously.

Cato winced. "It's my elder son and his new bride. Personally I think men in love are a joke. I laugh at them. My work is producing encyclopedias," Cato said curtly.

"My son is hounding me ever since my wife died. His wife is mortified by the visits of the slave girl to my room nightly. It's probably the orange cat she brings with her that troubles him. The cat pollutes my food."

Salonius looked at Cato slyly. "Believe me, it's not the scent of the cat that bothers your son's new bride."
"Yes, it makes her wheeze."

"A morality-centric man such as you, Cato, knows it's not the cat. And it's not your scornful attitude about women who insist on owning property either that has upset your son's wife. After all, she's a new bride and living in your house.

Your son is trying to protect her from your shocking behavior. Your reputation as the moral protector of Rome hardly befits the single life when your son and his young bride are trying to start a family in your home."

My son's bride and your daughter will find much in common with their friendship. They're the same age," Cato sighed.

"Two fifteen year old brides will have much to say to each other," Salonius replied, bowing his head. "I'm honored but astonished you asked me, a mere scribe."

Ah, but it's my work to make sure the scribe in Rome holds a place he deserves. I, too have produced a work on medicine, and with your help, wrote my History of Rome, and a text on farming, an encyclopedia, and..."

"Cato, you'll find my daughter is more of a scribe than I. She's a young girl, true, but she has written an encyclopedia on herbs within the last two years. This is no ordinary fifteen-year old Roman bride. She is a practical inventor, and you might find her well, too Roman to handle."

Want to read the rest of this continuing humorous time-travel story set in ancient Rome during the days of the Republic and beyond? Then check out my paperback novel, Proper Parenting in Ancient Rome: A Time-Travel Novel of Love as Growth of Consciousness & Peace in the Home.