Roman Army doctor

Press, 10 December 1988, Page 27

Roman Army doctor

The Beacon at Alexandria. By Gillian Bradshaw. Penguin, 1988. 376 pp. $16.99 (paperback).

“I wrote it for fun and in the hope that others would enjoy it,” says the author of this engaging historical romance. It is a thumping success. Blurb that makes “Beacon” sound like a raging feminist text (“she was a woman in conflict with her time”) is misleading. The story is a sensitive account of one woman’s curious journey through the Roman Empire in the grim days when Goths and Huns were breaking down the outer defences of the known world. To be sure the heroine, Charis of Ephesus (on what is now the western coast of Turkey) must disguise herself as a man — a eunuch — to escape a disastrous arranged marriage and to pursue her chosen career of medicine. In Alexandria, 375 years after the birth of Christ, she achieves her object, passes her final examinations, only to. fall foul of the law in a religious controversy. Charis — still disguised — is drafted into the Roman Army as a camp physician and sent to Thrace, on the wild border where

Goths and Romans meet, somewhere in what is now Romania.

Her disguise seldom fails her. There are handsome Romans and handsome Goths aplenty, but what can she do about them? They treat her with disdain, or amusement, or friendship — the half-male with the healing touch. Until one day, while a prisoner of the Goths, her disguise is penetrated ...

“Beacon” escapes being a Classical Goth-meets-eunuch romp by the sheer skill of the writing and the meticulous, unobtrusive scholarship of its American author. After enjoying the story a reader discovers that she (or he) has also learned a good deal about Hippocratic medicine.

Over it all broods the sense of a great empire in decline. We know the end of the story — the fall of Rome — what Gibbon • called “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.” In the twilight of a civilisation, with Charis of Ephesus as a guide, one can find alarming echoes of the modern world. —Literary Editor.