Chapter V: LXI
on 12 October 2016
at 8:30 pm
Got the laptop to keep working long enough for some quick shading.
I’ll work on inking the second row tomorrow.
ETA: Finished! For as far as I’m going to push the laptop tonight 🙂
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Got the laptop to keep working long enough for some quick shading.
I’ll work on inking the second row tomorrow.
ETA: Finished! For as far as I’m going to push the laptop tonight 🙂
I think little Mus is becoming Alexander.
Speudon has one silver lining in this disaster. Very likely all his debts were erased be Vesubius so he doesn’t needs Iusta anymore.
Well, he (Mus /Alexander) is now the head of the family. And maybe the head of the family business as well?
Mus-Alexander’s cousins aka Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can run things on the Egyptian side while he picks up the patrilineal reins of the business.
Titus is said to have been uncharacteristically generous distributing funds to the Vesuvius survivors. So many families had vanished that, too frequently, he couldn’t find any heirs, so he distributed their property to other survivors. So, no debt for Speudon. But no inventory of pretty youths to rent and sell to cover the costs of replacing all his fancy statuary, furs, jewelry, etc. etc.
By Mus becoming Alexander I am saying that Mus is maturing. He no longer acts as the carefree young man who married on a whim so he could please his father and that dreamed with Felix as his partner.
He is now acting as the sole surviving heir of the family’s business.
Speudon obviousle had his debts erased and probably that insula is the only property he has. It provides him with a semi-comfortable living but not much more.
Sigh. “All those beautiful boys and girls.” Now I feel sad all over again.
Yeah, but the way he said sounded creepy.
His being creepy and a bit sincere aren’t necessarily entirely mutually exclusive… which just makes it even more creepy.
Living in the apartment building from PLEBS can humble a (creepy) person.
How could Speudon have seen Felix on Mus’s family’s ship?? Felix was on the Greek ship when the pyroclastic flow hit Herculaneum, and moreover, Iusta didn’t know Felix had survived at all until some time later.
You’re right. That’s just flat-out an editing mistake. Watch how it just DISAPPEARS and no one EVER knows it was there.
Maybe he saw Felix later… i.e., after they all reached their destination?
I am absolutely going with that explanation.
Also, I’ve known I would be drawing this scene for years. You’d think I’d have gotten it right 🙂
::hangs up a large “nothing to see here” sign::
He only claims to have “seen” Felix after the eruption. Not necessarily in any place or context. It’s possible he’s “seen” just about everyone who survived in one way or another. He may be playing his cards close to his chest, for whatever reason.
Or maybe he knows now, but is lying for nefarious reasons.
Maybe he went looking for a job at the House of Genia and spotted Felix (plausible?). He does have a long résumé of management skills in the industry….
he can’t even afford a beautiful boy servant. and the boy he does have is tired of being constantly being reminded of this.
Could Mus divorce Iusta, and if he did, what then?
He can and it depends on the marriage contract.
So very true. Although some ancient Roman and ancient Jewish laws and mores around marriage and divorce (and who could initiate a divorce and under what circumstances) might seem bizarre or draconian to some modern people, many of those customs and contracts were extremely protective of a divorced woman–on the theory that, without a husband, a woman might become destitute unless some provision was made for her.
Children and volcanoes, of course, complicate everything.
Yeah, children and volcanoes. Before they showed up, Mus + Menander + Iusta + Felix + Spendusa were all smooth. Not complicated at all. 🙂
Actually it was Felix + Elisa + Spendusa + Baby and Mus + Menander + Iusta before the volcano. Now it is Felix + Iusta + Mus.
Our favorite author likes romantic polygons.
Larry, Baby Felicia’s still around.
I understand that Susan, but Felicia was part of the Elisa + Spendusa romantic polygon. Felix was engaged to Elisa and had a baby girl with Spendusa. I doubt Elisa was aware that Felicia or even Spendusa ever existed.
On the other hand both Iusta and Mus were very much aware and involved in Felicia’s birth. So Baby Felicia is not part of the Felix + Iusta + Mus romantic polygon even if she is part of the family along with Damon.
I feel inspired to create some sort of illustrated chart 😀
I am sure that the Romans were the inventors of the formal marriage contract. Other societies relied on the dowry or “bride price”as woman protection, mostly because most of them were functionally iliterate. If the couple divorced, her dowry was returned to her in full because that was her investment in the failed marriage.
Post-Roman, but the Welsh had several different forms of Marriage (legitimizing children and dealing with community property) including a Agweddy, a limited term contract marriage, and Priodas, which was considered to be permanent. I suppose it’s not impossible such forms may have pre-dated contact with the Romans.
That’s really interesting! You can live together–as Judge Judy says, in her disdain for the courts getting involved in unmarried couples’ disputes, “play house”–but the important thing is concern for the disposition of the children. And the stuff. Of course.
Was there a stigma on coupling up without either form of contract?
In the Roman case, living together was more informal, but still had rules, and your community/village/street probably knew quite well who had been where and for how long.
Ancient Jewish marriage contracts and regulations could be very detailed.
But I’ll bet you the Romans would be the first require the contract to be signed in triplicate, filed at the government office, then sufficiently misplaced so that a bored clerk would have to be paid at an hourly fee to go find it.
Among other things, in Welsh marriage, if you renewed your Agweddy contract so many times (I think 3 or 4…. say 2 to 4 years) it automatically because Priodas. And yes, there were rules for divicing up possessions, children, pets or whatever. Then again, bastardy was never very important for the old Celtic tribs anyway, and Royal lines were often defined by who the mother was… Arthur’s bastard son (by his sister) Mordred had a legitimate claim to the throne.
automatically BECAME, not ‘because’ When will I learn to type? As a matter of fact, after living in sin about a year, my wife and I held an Agweddy ceremony with our friends. A year later, we had a real church wedding, so I suppose it became Priodas.
And after we announced our Agweddy to my family, they started just putting us in the same bedroom when we came to visit. My maiden aunt declared our ‘trial marriage’ an excellent idea.