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Captured by pirates and sold to a Roman aristocrat as a sex slave,
Sporus attracted the attention of no less a personage than the Emperor Nero,
ruler of the known world. Would-be poet, patron of the arts, aesthete, and
brutal autocrat, the Divine Nero saw in the boy a startling resemblance to the
Empress Poppaea - and made him an empress as well.
Suetonius, Tacitus, and other Roman historians have given tantalizing
glimpses into the incredible life story of the boy who became twice an empress
to two emperors, and was condemned to die in the arena by a third.
In this meticulously researched trilogy, World Fantasy Award winning
author S.P. Somtow lays bare the darkest secrets of Imperial Rome - its
triumphs and its nadirs, its beauty and its cruelty. Through this chaos, a
contorted mirror of our contemporary world, this figure of Sporus moves, all
too knowing yet all too innocent, providing a worm's eye view of one of the
wildest periods in ancient history.
Imperatrix, the second volume of the tale, takes
us into the heart of the Imperial palace with all its intrigue, depravity, and
splendor.
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Snippet
“Can
you not posture in such a boyish manner, domine? You’ll ruin
the effect.”
“What
effect?”
“My
dear domine, can you turn that wrist more daintily? Can you not stampede about the room like a
raging adolescent lad?”
“Is that
not what I am?”
“You
will play a role, domine. And if you don’t do it well, it will fare badly for us, as well.”
Realizing
that their fates as well as mine rested on my performance, I sat still while
they padded my hips and chest a little, and while a cosmetician applied painted
my face with delicate strokes, and two others teased and piled my hair.
And
presently I found myself looking at my reflection in a mirror of polished
bronze and I was transformed. My hair
was elaborately coifed and extended with a tall wig. Exotic fabrics caressed my skin, and an outer
layer of rich purple left no doubt as to my Imperial status. The fibula I recognized was holding it all
together at one shoulder. Lead white
gave my face an unearthly pallor and my lips were stained blood-crimson.
I
stood taller. Arrogance flecked my
lips. I felt ennobled. Entitled, indeed.
I
was not just the Divine Poppaea Sabina, Mistress of the World. I was an idealized version of the
Empress. And I have to admit that, in
these garments, my way of moving, my way of walking, shifted towards the
feminine. It was instinctive. I never felt beautiful as a boy, but as a
woman, as an Empress …
Perhaps
it was just a role, but I was pulling something from deep within myself.
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.
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.
Returning to Thailand in 2001, he
became artistic director of Opera Siam and has had more than a dozen operas
produced around the world, including The Snow Dragon and The Silent
Prince, premiered in the United States, Helena Citronova, an opera
set during the Holocaust, and the ten-part DasJati: Ten Lives of the Buddha.
In the last few years he has made a
return to writing novels with the Nero and Sporus trilogy and the young
adult series, Club X.
In 2021 the film he produced and wrote,
The Maestro: Symphony of Terror received over forty awards at
international festivals and in 2023 the Thai government officially elevated him
to the status of National Artist.
Read S.P. Somtow’s interview on
Literary Titan about Imperatrix on https://literarytitan.com/2024/01/21/the-core-of-innocence/.
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