Dan Scott

Dan Scott

About Author

Dan Scott was born in Surrey, England. Growing up, he loved swimming, climbing and playing guitar. A visit to Fishbourne Roman Palace in Sussex when he was 11 sparked a lifelong fascination with ancient Rome. This, combined with his hobby of reading historical fiction, gave him plenty of inspiration for the adventure stories he began to write.

His enthusiasm for all things Roman was encouraged by his history teacher, and he went on to study Classics & Ancient History at university.

After graduating, Dan contemplated a career as a historian, but decided in the end that he preferred writing fiction. The characters he'd developed in the stories he wrote as a child eventually developed into the action-packed Gladiator School series.

Dan still lives in Surrey in a small cottage which he shares with his large English Mastiff, Argos. However, he can often be sighted in places like Cumbria, Northern Italy and the Ardennes indulging his other great passion: rock climbing.

Dan also writes as Alex Woolf.

Interview

GLADIATOR SCHOOL: BLOOD JUSTICE

PUBLISHED BY SCRIBO

MARCH 2015


Blood Justice is the sixth and final book in the thrilling GLADIATOR SCHOOL series by Dan Scott, which takes us back in time to the first century, when Rome was ruled by the emperor Titus and gladiators were the stars of the Colosseum.

Scott's series plunges us into the tumult of those times as we follow brothers Lucius and Quintus as they fight to clear their father's name. Alongside their adventures, the books give us a real sense of what it might have been like to have lived as an ordinary citizen of Rome during that period and to have travelled across that empire, including to Roman Britain.

We asked author DAN SCOTT to tell us more about writing historical fiction and its appeal to contemporary readers.

 

Q: Why were you so interested in writing a series set in Rome during during this period, the first century AD?

A: This is a fascinating time in history for me, I have always loved it especially the first century when the Roman empire becomes established and is becoming the central city of the known world.

I used this period for the books because there was so much happening. You had the great fire in Rome, the Emperor Titus died mysteriously and may have been murdered, there was the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and Rome invaded Caledonia and needed legionaires. So I could pull all these events into the plot lines of each book, following the fortunes of the brothers Quintus and Lucius, and I enjoyed exploring these historical events through their adventures.

 

Q: Did you visit Rome to research the series?

A: I spent about a week in Rome doing research for the books. I found it very useful to see places I mention in the books, like the Circus Maximus, as well as just walking around and finding how long it would have taken to walk from the Colosseum to the Forum or the Palatine, or seeing what the hills looked like from ground level. So I got a real sense of the geography of the city and I could use that in the book to help readers visualise Rome.

Once I was back in the UK, I did other kinds of research like reading novels and scholarly studies about the period and trying to get a sense of how people actually lived. I found a lot of information about how the emperors and senators lived but not much about street life and how ordinary people got by, so I had to work harder to find that kind of information.

There were some Roman writers from the time writing about street life, like Seneca, he would write about ordinary people and day to day things like what it was like to live above a bath house and how noisy he found it. Reading his work is like listening to someone talking today, complaining about the neighbours. So I was reading original writings and historian's interpretations of what life was like then.

I found a lot of maps of Rome as it would have been up to the first century, but you also have to use your imagination to envisage what it would have actually been like to live there at that time.

 

Q: Were the gladiators as much a part of Roman life as we seem to think today?

A: Gladiators were the rock stars, the football stars, of their day! They could come from nowhere and rise to the top - in those days it was very much about whose family you were born into. Gladiators were also often slaves who had nothing to lose, the only thing they had going for them was their fighting skills.

 

Q: How well organised were the gladiatorial games, were there rules?

A: Yes, there were rules and a pecking order among the gladiators. Each gladiator had a role and a way of fighting and weapons and I enjoyed getting into that kind of detail, which you can do when you're writing a series of books.

The games actually began as funeral games; when someone important died, as part of the funerary ritual two people were selected to fight. Over the centuries, the games developed into this regular entertainment for the citizens of Rome.

The games became very strict in terms of the types of fighters you could have facing each other. In these books, Quintus, the older brother, is a Retiarius gladiator, so he has a trident and a net and won't wear much armour; he needs to be quick and use his speed to attack and to get out of danger. The Retiarius gladiator would traditionally fight a Secutor, who'd be heavily armed with a shield and full face armour. They were generally big, strong men who would use their weight to fight. In my series there is also a female gladiator, Isi, who is disguised as a boy because women wouldn't have fought men as gladiators.

According to Hollywood, the fight would end in death but the economics of running a gladiator school and the years of training they would need to train gladiators makes it more likely that they would try to keep their gladiators alive. A good gladiator was a big expense! Plus they'd have a recruitment problem if no one survived. Some gladiators would fight for years and then retire to become trainers themselves or start their own gladiator school.

 

Q: So just how gory would it have been to watch gladiators fighting?

A: Very - but my philosophy for the book was to keep to what was real but not to describe it in gory detail, like the gladiator scenes. We never read what it was like when a sword hits flesh, no one needs that, so there is nothing too graphic in the books.

 

Q: How different was society then from now?

A: The period actually has some interesting modern parallels, like their system of law which are very recognisable to us. So in some ways they seem very modern and in others - like their gladiatorial combat - very alien.

Society then was also much more stratified. At the top you had the patricians from the noble families who were the ruling classes, and then a knightly class that didn't have as many rights but were still important. Then there were the plebeians - the bakers and butchers, ordinary people who had their own assembly and rights and were Roman citizens.

Freed men were like freed slaves, they were often poor but could also be rich, there was no bar to wealth. Then there were the slaves who did all the work. They had no rights and were often prisoners of war, or they were slaves because their family had always been slaves. They could be well educated and go on to become teachers etc but unless their master set them free, they remained as slaves.

In the stories I try to bring in people from all the classes so in the course of a story the main characters will meet a range of people, including slaves.

 

Q: How well would you survive if you found yourself in ancient Rome?

A: My best chance of survival would be to be in Rome itself because it was such a melting pot; you could be from anywhere, they wouldn't ask who you were or who your family was, which was less the case in provincial areas. But I wouldn't have been a gladiator. Perhaps I'd have been like Seneca, and found myself an apartment and written for a living and been a commentator on my fellow beings!

It would have been incredible to see some of its landmarks in their heyday, like the Collosseum which had just been built, the Palace of the People, and the Forum which would have been so full of life with lawyers pursuing their cases and stores full of goods. I could happily have wandered around there and just watched what was going on.

 

Q: Can you explain what happens during the course of the Gladiator School series?

A: There are two parts to the Gladiator School series, books one to three which are all about Lucius and Quintus's father, who disappears. It's up to Lucius, with the help of Isidora and Quintus, to discover his whereabouts. They eventually discover the evil person who is behind this and the other two books are about resolving the mystery and bringing this person to justice.

In books four to six, something horrible and dramatic happens, alongside the death of the emperor Titus, which is a personal tragedy for Lucius and that sets him off on an adventure of vengeance that takes him into exile, he becomes a gladiator and goes travelling and gradually discovers things that help him to get revenge. The final book in the series is book six, Blood Justice.

Each volume in the series has its theme. Book one is about informers and spies within the Roman state, book two is about Pompeii and the volcano, book three is about the animals and animal fighters of the collosseum, and so on until we reach book six, which is about the legal system.

 

Q: Why should we encourage young people to read historical fiction?

A: as a writer, I have written lots of non-fiction and quite a bit of fiction, too, but history is my passion and I do just as much research for my fiction books as for non-fiction. Historical fiction is a fantastic way of finding out about a world that did exist; the characters in my stories are interacting with events and characters that were real. What a great way to bring alive the sights and sounds of the city of Rome, to show what it was like to live there.

 

Q: What are your top tips for writing historical fiction?

A: Do your research, read as much as you can, not just books by historians but original writings from the period, and don't be scared to use your imagination because there's so much about these times that we just don't know. I always try to hook my plots to real events but you don't need to do that. I love history as a narrative as well as a social thing.

 

Q: Do you have another job, as well as being a writer?

A: I write fulltime and love making a living as as writer. I've just finished the second book in the Steampunk series (which I write as Alex Woolf), set in an alternative nineteenth century, and now I'm writing a non-fiction book about the Tudors.

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