It is 425 AD. The Roman Empire is declining. The Legions have been withdrawn from Britain. Goths and Vandals are swarming over the West. Rome has been sacked, and the Emperor is skulking in Ravenna. Officially Christian for a century, the Empire is split by theological controversies, heresies, and lingering paganism.
Marcellus, an off-duty army officer, is about to sail to Gaul when he is dragged back into Rome for an interview with the head of the secret police. Under pressure, he agrees to become an imperial agent and carry out a secret mission. His task is to go to North Africa, find the heretic Pelagius, and put an end to his trouble-making. As a covert pagan, Marcellus does not care which Christian faction prevails. But the mission offers him a chance to escape from some trouble he has got into in Rome, without having to apply for help from his unreliable family in Gaul.
Marcellus sets off on his travels, accompanied by his two slaves, Armin, a gigantic German, and Melek, an autodidact scholar of uncertain origins. Melek is knowledgeable and resourceful, but Marcellus does not entirely trust him. Nor does the mission go well. Pelagius has vanished, his followers have scattered and divided, and neither the Governor or the Bishop want the Emperor to find out what is going on in their province. Marcellus loses interest, preferring to explore the vestiges of paganism before it is finally suppressed. His visits to shrines and temples cause Marcellus to question the reality of what he has seen. Is Melek sabotaging the search for Pelagius by leading his master on a series of diversions? Or is the mission a diversion in itself, designed to get Marcellus out of the way?
When political change makes the search for Pelagius pointless, or perhaps even dangerous, Melek suggests a longer journey. But, however far he travels, Marcellus cannot escape Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, who first appeared in an abandoned African necropolis, and has plagued him ever since. Should Marcellus listen to the ramblings of the mad god, or the practical advice of his learned slave?
The End Of The World consists of the memoirs of Marcellus, edited after his death by his slave. Melek adds footnotes to the text, correcting his master, supplying more detail, disputing any suggestion that he has misled his master or done anything wrong.
Master & servant
The relationship between a clever servant and his master is a trope at least as old as Athenian New Comedy. It was borrowed by Roman playwrights, such as Plautus and Terence, then borrowed again, notably by Shakespeare, and in Commedia dell’Arte. The servant may be more knowledgeable, more devious, or more virtuous than his master. Sometimes he was a simply comedic device, adding plot twists and farcical complexity. But he could also serve as a social commentator. He was often revived when the social order was being questioned. Beaumarchais’ Figaro, was considered revolutionary in his questioning and defiance of authority. Da Ponte’s Leporello was not so clever, but his simple virtues showed up Don Giovanni’s immorality. An Edwardian example is The Admirable Crichton, in which a resourceful butler becomes the leader of the noble family he used to serve, when they are all shipwrecked on a desert island. The play might have been subversive, but, in the last act, J M Barrie returned all his characters to their rightful places. Slightly later, P G Wodehouse began the Jeeves and Wooster stories, in which the valet’s superiority is used for comic effect, and there is no social comment. In the sixties, A Funny Thing happened On The Way To The Forum (based on Plautus) was followed by Up Pompeii, in which the Roman slave Lurchio (played by Frankie Howerd) mocks everyone and everything, and bemoans the moral decline of his time (and by implication ours). Now that slavery is unthinkable and servants are rare, the trope has been transformed into the clever robot, or the insubordinate computer (e.g. HAL, C-3PO, Marvin the Paranoid Android), which have the same power to make us feel uneasy about our place in the world.