The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena.
World Fantasy Award winner S.P. Somtow weaves a vivid adventure about one of the most colorful personalities in ancient Rome. Delicatus, the first volume in a trilogy, speaks of Sporus, from his enslavement by pirates in a remote corner of the Empire to his meeting with the great satirist Petronius and the woman to whom he bears a striking resemblance, the beautiful Poppaea with her manipulative plans to seduce the Emperor Nero and become Divine Empress.
Quote:…chains and the sea… Hold still. The rouge must be even. It seems I'm ending as I began, my feet chained to the wall, a roar in my ears. Back then, though, it was the sea, and today it's a crowd. Both hungry, both eager to devour souls. Don't talk so much. Wait. Let me finish your lips first. My life begins with the wooden wall and the roaring sea. To remember further back is to be in hell, and I won't do that. Though fragments of it have haunted me all along. Burning villages. Blood. A crucifixion at a crossroads, an auction in an agora. Smeared! Don't be nervous. You have time to finish this. And… I feel like talking. You must let me. There are things I wish I could tell someone. Especially now, as I'm about to enter the next plane of my existence. I was a refugee. I was a slave boy. I was an empress. I mated with two gods and will soon be a god myself. And all this before my twentieth birthday. Again! Should I mix the rouge myself? Be still. Does it matter? We all know how this will end. Demeter's daughter, the spirit of spring, Proserpina, the beautiful one, appears among the flowers, trees, and meadows. The earth opens, and from the gates of Hades itself appears Pluto, the lord of the dead, with his three-headed hound in tow. He violently seizes the maiden, drags her onto his chariot, kicks and screams, and drives his skeletal horses into the bowels of the earth, while the flowers begin to wilt, while the fruit falls and rots on the barren ground, while the leaves become brittle and yellow, and cold envelops the world. You know how Ceres-Demeter scours the desolate world. How the plants grieve, how the soil turns to stone and can no longer sustain life, how people and animals begin to starve from lack of food. As you know, Proserpina's mother descends into the depths of hell, where her daughter is now queen. How she pleads with the dark god until he relents. How Proserpina is tricked into eating six of its seeds.
