#like it's a decent enough observation but I sound really paranoid and gatekeepy about New Rome when I try to explain it

[haec-est-fides]

I briefly mentioned in a previous post that I wanted to talk about Lavinia Asimov and the sly way I think Riordan tried to use her to “develop” Camp Jupiter / New Rome.

Right off the bat, I should establish that a) I don’t particularly like Lavinia and b) I operate from the understanding that the way Riordan wrote the books, he very much frames Romans in a bad light. These may both be controversial opinions, and this is a long post, so fair warning.

Regarding that b point, the idea is that Riordan introducing the Romans as opposites of / antagonists to the Greeks (whom he’d already spent a whole series building up) inherently made his attitude towards New Rome less than fair. Camp Jupiter does a lot of things better than Camp Half-Blood, but it seems to go unacknowledged most of the time. Riordan spends so little time developing the Romans, or throws in little jabs at them for frankly really minor issues, because if he didn’t they’d easily overpower his beloved Greeks, narratively speaking. It doesn’t help that, throughout Heroes of Olympus, the chapters are all narrated by Greeks or Greek-oriented Romans. There’s inevitably a bias there. (Are we on the same page? Cool. Hang tight.)

In fact, the main characters who are “Roman” -- Frank, Hazel, Reyna, Jason -- are very anti-Roman when it comes down to it. I’m not saying that they actively hate New Rome or anything, but they just aren’t very (traditionally) Roman -- and Riordan himself makes a big point of this!

All of them are demigods who didn’t grow up in / have no history with New Rome, which automatically means they don’t represent a good portion of the legion.

Frank’s godly heritage goes back to Neptune (?) and the Greeks, if you follow it far enough.

Hazel, daughter of Pluto, doesn’t exactly fit comfortably under Roman rules and values, emphasized in how she prefers her spatha and to fight as cavalry.

Reyna had an,,,unorthodox life before joining the legion, which included time spent among Greeks.

And Jason? Jason is perhaps the clearest example, feeling torn between the camps and actually losing his recognizably Roman status enough that a ghost legion wouldn’t take his command. (Remember? That’s why he promoted Frank.)

All of them are also from the fifth cohort -- the least prestigious since the Alaska expedition, where those without references (which are a good indicator of a Roman background) end up.

Lastly, even though they ALL became praetor at some point, only Jason ever served the minimum number of years required to hold that office. The rest were promoted based on ~ popularity ~ and didn’t follow the cursus honorum.

Point is, there’s a pretty serious bias against traditional Romans.

Well, you might ask, if all of the main Roman characters “aren’t traditional Romans”, then who is? Who are we comparing them to? Simple: Octavian -- the one character built up as Roman, and who -- not coincidentally -- is written in direct opposition to “the good guys”.

Before anyone argues that Octavian took the “traditional Roman” thing too far and therefore cannot be used as a baseline, remember that he had a lot of support within the legion when war broke out and often reflected the opinions of the lares (who are, in fact, actual ancient Romans).

This is where Riordan’s problem roots. He designed Camp Jupiter and its defining character as largely antagonistic.

Now, Lavinia Asimov is an interesting character, I’ll give her that. However, I think it’s fair to say that she isn’t the best legionnaire, nor is she particularly representative of Roman values. When we first meet her, she’s abandoned her post during wartime for no real reason. She constantly shows a lack of decorum, a lack of discipline, and a lack of obedience. She’s highly unorthodox, to say the least. She’s in the same boat as the other main Romans we’ve seen before, but with a slight difference: her name. Her name wouldn’t lead a Roman you to believe any of those things. In fact, it should give you the opposite expectation.

You see, the only character at Camp Jupiter who had an obviously Roman name before Lavinia was Octavian. Octavian was, simply put, Riordan’s tool to make Camp Jupiter the minor antagonists for much of Heroes of Olympus. He was everything a Roman should be, but weaponized and pushed to (almost caricatured) extremes. At a camp where everyone has names like Frank, Jason, Gwen, Dakota, and Larry, blatantly Roman names mean something -- at least, they did. Lavinia turns that on its head.

Lavinia was the name of Aeneas’ Latin wife, and as such the name is fairly weighty, mythologically. It’s associated with the founding of Rome, tradition, and good rulership.

I think that, in giving a character who is clearly in line with the other not-quite-Roman protagonists a very Roman name, Riordan was,,,attempting to absolve New Rome of Octavian’s sins, so to speak. In Trials of Apollo, Riordan tried to develop New Rome more than he had in the past, but to do that he had to decouple Rome from “evil” (which was more than ingrained in the books by both Heroes of Olympus and the Triumvirate). He presents Lavinia as a kind of progressive Roman, who -- alongside Jason, Frank, and Hazel in particular -- will change Camp Jupiter for the better.

In short, Lavinia serves as a kind of ultimate foil to Octavian -- which is exactly what Riordan needed to “fix” New Rome, and her name is a key indicator of that.