Lictors
LICTOR, n. This word might come from Latin “ligare,” meaning “to bind,” and it indicates a soldier who worked as a bodyguard for a magistrate in ancient Rome.
“Lictor” has been on my mind this week because I read Tamsyn Muir’s bonkers lesbian-necromancers-in-space novel Harrow the Ninth, whose prequel Gideon the Ninth I wrote about in March. In these books, many of the characters are “Lyctors,” sort of super-powered bodyguards for God (who is also the Emperor).
I wouldn’t have bothered to look up “Lyctor”—sci-fi and fantasy novels always have made-up words in them—except that I remembered that there is a Jacques-Louis David painting called The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons from 1789, and then I realized that the historical term “Lictor” must have been an inspiration for Muir when she made up “Lyctor.” She sprinkles her prose with “poppling” and “epiparodos,” so she obviously loves unusual words, which makes me feel sure she invented her own words with care.
Anyway, fifteen years ago I took a philosophy of art class where we sometimes discussed specific works of art but never looked at a single image and I am still upset about that. It will keep me awake at night if I discuss a painting without showing it. Here are the Lictors, and Brutus, and at least one (1) Body:
The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons by Jacques-Louis David, 1789, image sourced from Wikipedia
This painting, for context, is in the Louvre and it measures 146 square feet (if you are a person who prefers the metric system, I salute you, that’s 13.6 square meters; if you are a person who does not like numbers, that’s also cool, what matters is that this painting is gigantic).
So the Brutus in this painting is not the same Brutus as the one who stabbed Caesar. (Though the Caesar-stabbing one did claim this one as an ancestor. I accidentally flipped their order in the original email version of this newsletter—sorry!) This Brutus, painting!Brutus, founded the Roman Republic. What’s he doing in this image? Sitting alone in the shadowed foreground in contemplation, not even looking while the lictors carry in one of his dead sons on a stretcher in the background, that’s what. And over on the right, Brutus’s wife and daughters are wailing and fainting and weeping over their dead family members, you know, like normal people.
tellling my miserable wife and sons all about the Importance of Media
March 21st 2018 968 Retweets 6,305 Likes
Why is Brutus being so cold? Well, he founded a republic, and meanwhile his large adult sons plotted to restore the monarchy. Kids these days! Naturally Brutus had to order their executions.
measure to approve massive depressing statue in the center of town depicting an emaciated mayor carrying a boulder that says "My Sons" on it
September 26th 2014 204 Retweets 753 Likes
So this is a painting of Brutus choosing the republic over his family and then sitting alone with the consequences. It’s the ultimate in duty and loyalty, but it turns out duty and loyalty to the republic hurt a lot. And perhaps you, eagle-eyed reader, noted that this is a French painting, and the date is 1789, the moment of the incipient Revolution. People were mad as hell about this painting, which I suspect was the point. You don’t spend 13.6 square meters of canvas on a painting unless you intend to make a goddamn statement.
David had quite a career as a political propagandist, first for the Revolution, where one faction eventually jailed him for picking the losing side, and later he got released from prison and “retired from politics” by painting literally all of the most famous images of Napoleon, lol. (He probably didn’t have a choice, it being a dictatorship and all.)
I’ve strayed far from lictors by now, but anyway, one kind of lictor is a soldier/bodyguard/enforcer of political authority who brings you the bodies of your sons after they betray you and you have to order their death for the good of the republic. The other kind, still in ancient Rome, escorted priests around town or sacrifices to the altar, and both kinds of lictors—the enforcer of political power and the person who guards the priests or makes sure the sacrifices don’t escape—have clear connections with Tamsyn Muir’s magic Lyctors.
There is a lot more I’d like to say about Harrow the Ninth—it was absolutely bananas, full of first-class narrative trickery, goofy meme jokes, fucked-up horny vibes, and some deliciously weird words—but it’s late here and I don’t want to spoil anything, since this was the kind of book that had me highlighting clues from the first page. But if you’ve read it and you want to talk about it, I am dying (ha) to talk about what it all means, so hit reply.
I will close with this excerpt from Tamsyn Muir’s pronunciation guide for the series:
Lyctor
LICK-tor (“Lyctor? I hardly touched her,” etc)
I didn’t finish any works of Capital-R Romance or any small-r romance novels this week, but in addition to Harrow, I also read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, which is like a Brontë novel set in a crumbling isolated mansion in the mountains of Mexico in 1951, except with more literal monsters. It has great prose, a whip-smart socialite for a protagonist, a wildly creepy atmosphere, and a super satisfying ending. Books where characters find themselves in an irretrievably fucked-up, bad place and need to burn the whole thing to the ground in order to survive and start anew are just resonating right now.
(Both books in this week’s newsletter come with a lot of content warnings, but in both cases—and especially Mexican Gothic—the content warnings are also sort of spoilers for the mystery, so I decided not to print them here. But I’m happy to provide a list. Let me know if you want one!)
If you find yourself in a haunted house this week, my advice is get the hell out of there. See you next Sunday!
