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Study 135 - The Sword of Spartacus (Patreon)

Published:
2025-07-03 20:06:02
Imported:
2025-07
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Imperial Rome collides with the Cthulhu Mythos in The Sword of Spartacus by Richard L. Tierney!

Special thanks to reader Travis Bedard! Check him out this year in both The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet!

Next up: Feedback and King Conan in The Scarlet Citadel!

Comments

Karsa Torvald

I love love these stories! Story time. Approximately 100 years ago when I was an active duty Marine, pre 9/11 for sure, I was flying back to California with a stopover in I'm going to say st Paul. I had the Chaosium Scroll of Thoth collected stories on the plane and I'm burning through them during the flight. As we're about to land, the guy next to me says "hey, do you like these stories?" "Yes! I'd never heard of Richard Tierney but I try to get everything Chaosium publishes - and these are my new favorites for sure. A cool blend of Howard and [CAS]." He says- " thats great to hear bc we're the publishers!" And across the aisle his colleague leans forward and waves. I was so... dumbstruck i didn't even get their names, but we spent the next 15 min talking about weird fiction and what authors they were looking to publish next, etc, and how the two of them noticed me reading it the entire flight and thought, "well that's one fan for sure." I haven't had a chance to listen to the episode yet, and if you don't like it, I won't be heartbroken but man these stories have a special place in my weird fiction origin story!

The Spider Incident

Don't know if this is in the sound design every Thew-ly, but I appreciated the panther yowl at the end

Jb Lee

This is a great tale to start this month off with! You can find SWORD OF SPARTACUS and a whole pile of other Simon of Gitta tales in the Chaosium tome SCROLL OF THOTH. You'll also get a 17 -- sev! en! teen! --page introduction by Robert M. Price, which will probably tell you more about Simon than you or anyone else ever wanted to know. Sure hope Thew-Ly will host Larry Niven's classic NOT LONG BEFORE THE END. If you guys don't know that one, you need to. It's brilliant. It's short. And it has a warlock and a barbarian! And magic! And a nubile lass, too, or something like that. And I found it here! https://www.scribd.com/document/503127864/larry-niven-not-long-before-the-end

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

Loved this! I never thought you'd cover a Simon of Gitta story. If you want another awesome Sword & Sandals story I highly recommend David Drake and Karl Wagner's "Killer" (1974). I won't say too much about it except that it came to me from a friend based on my request for a story that was like Predator but predated the film. Also much like how TED Kline later rewrote "The Events at Poroth Farm" as The Ceremonies, Drake later expanded this short story into a 1985 novel. But for the purposes of this show I think it would be sufficient to just cover the original short story. One other thing... I always find Tierney's "The Derleth Mythos" essay to be just a tad hypocritical since he criticizes Derleth for "Christianizing" the Mythos, but then goes and does the same thing himself in the Simon of Gitta stories. Even Joshi makes note of this contradiction in his The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos. To be clear I don't personally have an issue with either Derleth or Tierney doing this. Lovecraft wanted other writers to play with his mythology and put their own spin on it.

Forrest Rush

Chris: Democracy didn’t last? Chad: Democracy didn’t last. I’m afraid that the future will consist of many many podcasts with these lines being tossed around.

Rick Hound

I’m very sad the story where kid Jesus instantly domesticated a bunch of dragons in a cave didn’t get added to the Final Cut of the New Testament

Rick Hound

For a more in-depth understanding of early Roman republic history I recommend Kathryn Lomas and Harriet Flower’s books on the matter. They’ve with various sources say that the concept of a ‘Republic’ as we understand it, for most of its history after kicking out the king they were probably just a bunch of aristocratic warlords taking each other’s animal herds. The recognizable form of the republic was formed from two distinct events, first was a destructive sacking by the Gauls which required the survivors to be more organized and the second being the various wars by the Italian tribes and Carthage to give it what we see as ‘The Roman Republic’.

Wulf Mungus

Had no idea there was a mix of Rome v. Cthulhu outside if a few TTRPGs

Andronicus

Cool story to kick off Thew-ly! Glad to hear that Simon had a run in with Kane! I want to recommend Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane short stories for future Thew-ly’s…I think you’ll dig them…particularly Cold Light (Lawful Fanatic Paladin hunts Kane in a city of despair) and Reflections for the Winter of my Soul (Kane trapped by a blizzard in a keep with a vengeance werewolf!). Keep up the steely muscled, pantherish, great work!

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

Because this feels like the sort of comment that will get Chris and Chad's attention, I think it's worth elaborating on. Also it gives me a chance to correct something which Chris said in this episode, which is that the contemporary cannon of Christian scripture was determined at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE). This is a common misconception. The Council of Nicaea was convened to settle a number of important theological issues - most importantly the nature of Jesus' divinity (God or demigod basically) but it did not determine what books comprise the Bible. The answer to how we got the Bible we have today is far more complicated, also it's not even a settled issue. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians have seven more books in their Bibles than Protestants. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians are the only ones who consider The Book of Enoch canonical, even though it's quote in the New Testament Epistle of Jude 1:14–15. Anyway, the story about Jesus domesticating dragons is from the 18th Chapter of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and is a gloss on Psalms 148:7 which reads: “Praise the Lord from the earth, dragons and all the depths.” We also shouldn't think that just because these books were left out of the canonical New Testament (such as it is) that this means that Christians stopped reading them. The Austrian Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk from 1340 CE despicts various scenes from Christ's naivety, including this one. Likewise the ceiling of St. Martin's church in Zillis-Reischen, Switzerland depicts a scene from the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas in which kid Jesus brings some clay birds to life after a churlish rabbi told him to stop playing in the mud. That was painted in 1100 CE. And the 15th-century "The Nativity Polyptych" shows baby Jesus being 'beamed down' into the manager from the 'Star of Bethlehem.' That comes from a non-canonical text called The Revelation of the Magi. Like the Necronomicon, apparently if the church says a book is forbidden that just makes people want to read it even more.

Jim Cannon

It was only ever an experiment, I try to console myself by saying

Jim Cannon

Between the History of Rome, Apocrypals, and the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast, I feel like the last fifteen years of audio I've been digesting have prepared me for this one episode. Perhaps overprepared!

Tomas Rawlings

Love how the sorcerer maintains his longevity not via fasting or antioxidants or a Mediterranean diet but good old fashioned hate. I bet he’s got a mug with “Live, Hate, Laugh” on

Stephen Hampshire

Immediately downloading the Simon of Gitta collection, this was great! I’ve just finished the Anthony Burgess book “Kingdom of the Wicked”, so pretty ready to hear about Romans getting slaughtered.

Brian Pitt

Ancient world/Cthulhu crossovers is a setting that's ripe with potential but really seems underserved. I've read a couple more modern short story collections (like Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time) that touch on it but there's no much. I should look into the Simon of Gitta stories. Though I'll be honest, what really came to mind was the part of the Cthulhu Invictus RPG book where it casually drops a mention of Simon Magus learning sorcery from the serpent men and using it to fight vampire Pontius Pilate. And now I know where that came from!

James Holloway

Some naming trivia: "Pugio" means "dagger," at least if it's spelled like I think it is. Also, the raven's name, "Carbo," means "charcoal" -- same root word as "carbon." But it often just means "black," which is presumably the case here.

Shay Fargel

Thew-ly is always such a delightful birthday present!

Ben Gilbert

You should cover one of George Alec Effinger’s stories about Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordswoman.

Aaron La Vene

Don’t you tell me who is or is not my mama

Nic Wassell

It's a shame there wasn't an elected position in Rome called a Schulcha that Tuchulcha could have run for, using the slogan "Tuchulcha for Schulca"...

superkeaton

Ancient Roman Wizards? Demon summoning? Weapons possessed by power? Eternal Darkness, is that you?

Paul Zimmerman

[puts on his tedious pedant hat] As someone who studies ancient Mesopotamia for a living, I can assure you that Sumerians are from Sumer, not Sumeria.

The Aaron Campbell Studio

OK, this is creepy. Social media is no longer just listening and responding to our habits and activity in real time, it’s now predicting what we will experience in the future. Just a few days ago I saw a post about the collapse of a Roman amphitheater which killed 20,000 people of its 50,000 capacity. I did some independent research and found out that, sure enough, such an event did happen in the town of Fidenae in 27 AD. And now I learned of this story, which is obviously built around that exact historical occurrence. I don’t know what’s more Cthulhean; this story or Instagram.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

My academic focus is the early Roman Empire via the historian Tacitus, so when I heard "Attilius" and "50,000," I thought, "well, THESE folks are screwed." Tacitus (Annals book 4, chapters 62-63) says the crowded amphitheatre collapsed because Attilius, to maximize profits, had skipped building a solid foundation. The historian also gives an affecting description of the panic and sorrow of the aftermath. But though he provides the horrible detail that the bodies were so mangled that fights would break out over whose dead relatives were whose, Tacitus neglects to include the giant flying tentacle monster! Man, I'd have written a completely different dissertation. I see that the Fidenae amphitheatre collapse has the Guinness World Record for "worst sporting disaster." Guinness also skips the Etruscan sorcery, so thanks for this educational service.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

(Maybe you'll be glad to know that Attilius was exiled, and the Roman Senate passed some new construction regulations. They also set a minimum wealth requirement for putting on gladiator shows, since richer guys would never cut corners. )

RebeccaR

Sorry if anyonre has already mentioned this: the majority of gladiators were slaves, but some were Roman soldiers being punished for serious transgressions (e.g. allegedly Spartacus himself), a few were citizen debtors trying to pay off their creditors and another minority were maniacs in it for the violence & sex (Roman women clamoured to sleep with the best fighters (e.g. Fausta Sulla and her husband Milo's gladiator bodyguards Eudamus & Birria).

Tara Murphy

Reminder: it continues to exist in many places. Source: I am Canadian.