My name is Turia, and I am a Roman noblewoman and wife. My husband and I lived on Earth during a very tumultuous time, when the world as we knew it was changing more dramatically than we ever thought possible. We saw the rise of the all-powerful Octavian Augustus, who brought peace and harmony to the world after decades of civil war. My parents were cruelly murdered when I was young, but I did not leave them unavenged. I fought for and won the inheritance rightly owed to my husband and me.
We were married on Earth for forty years. In a time fraught with conflict I advanced the causes of my husband and advocated tirelessly on his behalf. To my great despair I could not give him the children he so rightly deserved, but he refused to leave me for another woman regardless of my insistence. Our bond, despite many tests, was only broken by my death.
After I passed into the underworld, my husband gave a very praiseworthy oratio funebris for me, of which I was undeserving. I merely lived my life in service of him, as a woman rightly should; that deserves no special recognition.
We have been together with the shades for some time now, and the living world has changed quite a bit. Of course, the glorious empire of Rome, founded by the great Augustus, has long perished. New powers have risen. New technologies have been created. What amazes me most is this new thing that they call “television.” I met a man named Steve something or other last week who tried to explain this new technology to me, but I couldn’t completely comprehend it. He also went on to tell me of these new “apple” devices, which seem to be like televisions but smaller, and which you can use to talk to other people, although I don’t quite understand how you can do that with a piece of fruit.
Even though I can’t grasp how this new technology works, I do take a lot of pleasure in watching things with my husband on the television. One of my guilty pleasures is a show called Bachelor in Paradise. I feel a bit odd watching this show, but it is so interesting to see how much the world of sex, love, and marriage has changed since my time in the human world.
Essentially, this TV show is about people trying to find what they call “love,” although they seem to me to have a deluded vision of what that means. A large group of men and women with accents unlike any barbarians I’ve ever heard before go to a beach in a strange province called Mexico. While there, they go on “dates” with one another to try to create feelings of romantic attraction, which will apparently lead to a long lasting marriage. This is another concept which I just don’t get. When I was alive, our parents usually told us who to marry. The political and financial benefits of different options were weighed and compared, sometimes with special attention paid to the virtue of the potential match, and then a decision was made. There was little shopping around and few secret one-on-one meetings, unless one was looking for an illicit relationship. If you were looking for a spouse, you focused on the practicalities of the match and cared little about potential romantic feelings. When the match was no longer practical, divorce was usually not an issue.
The people on this TV show, men and women alike, talk a lot about finding “the one,” as if there’s more than one person in the world whom it would make sense to marry. This seems like a nice concept, but it isn’t very rational, in my opinion. For us Romans, marriage is mostly about practicality and duty. The people on this show talk about marriage purely in how it relates to feelings of romantic “love,” making it seem like a marriage can only be successful if you “love” someone first. I would say my husband and I had a very successful marriage even though we didn’t necessarily love one another at the beginning. The philosophy of this show hinges on a definition of love as it relates to physical and emotional attraction, but is love not a product of fulfilled duty? Of course, my husband and I grew to have strong physical and emotional feelings for one another, but I also know plenty of other couples from my day who fulfilled their duties towards one another faithfully without having any sort of romantic connection.
Even though I don’t necessarily understand how the people on this show think and act, I can definitely see why people like to watch it. It’s so performative, and if there’s one thing we Romans love, it’s a performance. My husband claims he doesn’t like this show and says that it’s “too dramatic,” but who is he to judge? He used to go down to the Colosseum every weekend to watch people fight to the death in front of an audience.
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