Tros of Samothrace: Howardian Forefather

In 1900 Mark Twain defined: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” That definition comes close to describing Tros of Samothrace. Perhaps a better way to put it would be: “a book everybody talks about but nobody has read.” Tros has been something of a classic within genre circles even in many cases where it hasn’t been available.

The plot of the Tros saga runs over six volumes. Set during the 1st Century BC, Tros is a pirate who goes up against the Roman might of Julius Caesar. Mundy portrays Caesar as a ruthless villain, a point-of-view that caused some controversy in the letter columns of Adventure. Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, editor of the magazine, claimed it was the most controversial thing they ever published.

In the opening chapters, Tros and father are sent to the Britons by the Greeks to urge them to fight Caesar but before they can do so, they fall into Roman hands and forced into service. Tros is one of Caesar’s spies and when he returns from Britain, he and his father will pilot Caesar’s invasion fleet. Father and son then fight a war of wits to foil Caesar’s invasion. This is just the beginning of a saga that would see Tros’s father killed by Caesar and the son embarking on a career as a pirate, always fighting Rome.

Tros of Samothrace was serialized in Adventure between February 1925 and February 1926. Sequels followed as late as 1935. Tros was later printed in hard cover 1934 and then more importantly by Gnome Press in 1958. In the 1970’s it was separated into parts and sold as four paperback books. (And it never seemed you ever had all four parts at the same time.) What had been seen as a historical novel by readers of Adventure was considered something of a fantasy novel by later readers because of one author: Robert E. Howard. Howard has had several booms and anything he touched or touched his work has been of avid interest to readers.

Mundy had a major influence on several Howard characters. The tales of Bran Mak Morn set in Roman England are largely spawned from the Samothracian. Certain aspects of the Conan saga, especially the novel The Hour of the Dragon bears signs of this lineage as well. When Fantasy readers learned of this connection in the 1950s and again in the 1970s everybody wanted to read Tros. Some even succeeded.

Talbot Mundy (1879-1940) is considered a “Pulp” writer these days. Why would he write a massive novel of Rome’s enemies? Today such books would be written by people with extensive backgrounds in Roman research. Things were different in 1925. Only H. Warner Munn can claim a similar victory with his “King of the World’s Edge” series in Weird Tales and later with The Lost Legion (1980). Fritz Leiber, another Fantasy writer said in Danger is my Business: an illustrated history of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines (1993): “The Tros stories made a great impression on me as a young man. I read and re-read them…it was wonderful, imaginative writing”. Mundy’s influence on Sword & Sorcery can’t be underplayed.

Is Tros of Samothrace a fantasy? (Somehow this is expected more of Pulpsters than mainstream writers.) This may depend on your own beliefs. Mundy was a believer with Spiritualist or Theosophical leanings. He may have believed that such things were possible and therefore not fantastic at all. You decide.