A traveller on the Silk Road

Spoiler alert! One of the mysteries not explained until the end of the second book of the Wisdom of Rhiannon series is Geraint’s origin.

Read no further if you would prefer to find out through the story in the book, otherwise, the answer follows below.

In fact in one of those mysteries that all authors seem to experience, even this author, is that often the story somehow tells itself. Nowhere in the author’s mind was the so-called “back-story” to the history of Geraint (one of the central characters). That is until the story decided to reveal it, through the device of a historical article concerning one of Caesar’s huge extravagances. His purchase of a large quantity of silk.

At the time of Caesar there was a huge controversy in Rome over the cost and use of silk, especially by Roman women.

In vain the Senate issued several edicts to prohibit the wearing of silk, on economic and moral grounds.  We are told that the importation of Chinese silk resulted in a huge outflow of gold, and silk clothes were considered to be decadent and immoral. To quote Seneca the Younger (c. 3 BCE- 65 CE, Declamations Vol. I):

I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes… Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body. 

He was not alone, Pliny the Elder (23- 79, The Natural History), wrote:

The Seres (Chinese), are famous for the woolen substance obtained from their forests; after a soaking in water they comb off the white down of the leaves… So manifold is the labour employed, and so distant is the region of the globe drawn upon, to enable the Roman maiden to flaunt transparent clothing in public. 

But in his way, Caesar was even more extravagant, purchasing a huge quantity of silk and using it to shade the spectating Romans as he was carried triumphantly through the City to celebrate one of his triumphs.  Even his own soldiers were critical of his expenditure, complaining that it was money that could have been better spent on rewarding them.

And so the seed was planted. Who conveyed the silk from China to Rome? Who would have guarded it on its long journey? And so the back-story was born.