Nero and Sporus
By S.P. Somtow
Publication Date: May 30th, 2025
Publisher: Diplodocus Press
Pages: 750
Genre: Historical Autobiographical Fiction / LGBTQ+ Fiction
Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters.
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.
Excerpt
“You’d never lie to me,” he said.
“No,” I lied.
A lyre appeared in his hands. He motioned for me to sit, and I did so on a stone bench in front of the herm. And then he sang.
Not in the Greek of immortal poets, but in plain Latin, the language of the mob, the language you speak when you’re among close friends, the language you speak to slaves.
I strive with the winds
but soon I will go
where everyone else has gone
wisdom and beauty are never found together
but in you, youth, they are;
seek other shores; seek adventures;
but as for me, love pinches
like an old crab
There were no fanciful apostrophes to mythical beings. No protests against the Fates. No plaints to the Nine Muses. And to go with the words, Nero had found a melody that was almost like a folksong. Since moving to the palace I had walled off my heart and mind, but I felt my reserve crumbling. Hadn’t I once fallen stupidly in love with him, when he was distant and impossible to get close to, when I was nobody? Then again, how long had those feelings lasted?
Tears were welling up when it slowly dawned on me that Nero had stolen these words. No wonder they sounded familiar. They were lines lifted wholesale from Petronius’s Satyricon, scrambled and served up together like a dish of eggs and honey.
The Master of the World was a thief. He stole words. He stole Divinity itself. He had stolen my dreams. And, as he looked deeply into my eyes, I knew that he knew this.
Now I was really weeping. I was mourning my patronus as I never had before. I poured out all my pent-up sorrow.
Nero knew I did not weep for him.
He did know me, you see.
There was a boy named Lucius Domitius who had been banished from court together with his ambitious, stiflingly protective mother. He had grown up among slaves. He had spoken Latin all day long, like ordinary people. He had loved Actë. He had known, as humans understand the word, happiness.
One day, he had been summoned back to Rome, and Rome had devoured him and left him without a heart.
Lucius Domitius had become Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Pater Patriae, Pontifex Maximus, the Living God.
Lucius Domitius was dead.
Yet, long after Nero had buried him, it was Lucius Domitius who truly saw me.
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S.P. Somtow
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, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children's books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.
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. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok's first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
According to London's Opera magazine, 'in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.' His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.
Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with "Homeworld of the Heart", a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.
Currently he has just finished Nero and Sporus, a massive historical novel set in Imperial Rome.
To support S.P. Somtow's work, visit his patreon account at patreon.com/spsomtow.
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