When I was two years old, my family moved to Libya. I grew up in Benghazi. On weekends we sometimes went on long drives to the ruins of ancient Greek and Roman cities like Cyrene, where we played among fallen columns and picnicked with a view of temples.
I think this was where my love of history began. It was so easy to feel a connection to the ancient world when you were running around the same backyards and houses that children had run around over a thousand years ago. Of course, things had changed since the days of the Roman Empire, but some things were not so different. For example, the billboard-sized portraits of Libya’s ruler, which were everywhere, were a lot like the arch of Septimius Severus.
As a result, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself into Camilla’s world. Nor was it hard to see that people have always travelled across the world, whether they wanted to or not, and created new homes, families and cultures wherever they went. All of these real people, for example, lived at around the same time that Empire’s End is set:
•Septimius Severus: a Libyan-born emperor who died in York (Eboracum).
•The powerful Syrian wife of Septimius who followed him across the world, taking her religion with her.
•A Syrian called Barates who freed, then married, his British slave, Regina.
•The ‘ivory bangle lady’, found buried with rich jewellery in York. She had black African heritage and may have been a Christian.
•Galen, a Greek from Turkey, who became the most famous doctor ever. He treated emperors, including Septimius Severus – and invented the ham ’n’ cheese treatment. (Yes, it’s real. No, it doesn’t work.)
Together, this group makes up a picture of a Roman world that was full of many different cultures, religions and ethnicities.
The Roman Empire, of course, was not paradise. It was a bloody, violent place, based on slave labour, where murder was entertainment and most women had little control over their lives. As soon as I introduced the fact that Camilla’s family owned slaves (as they would have done in real life), I found I had to explore that in some way. I didn’t feel comfortable ignoring the injustice of slavery, but nor did I feel comfortable pretending Camilla would have had the attitudes of a twenty-first-century person. I wanted Camilla to seem like a real girl, but a real Roman girl. As a result, slavery ended up being a bigger part of the book than I had first intended it to be.
In 235 AD, the year in which Camilla buries her treasure, the Roman Empire began to fall apart. When it was finally united again, it was as a Christian empire – a huge change from Camilla’s world. Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, in Turkey) became the centre of a new Holy Roman Empire. The city of Rome itself was overrun by invaders, and so were its provinces, including Britain. A world that people had thought would last forever had lasted just a few hundred years.
In the final chapter, Camilla is history and mystery for someone who will never know her story. The most interesting thing about history, I think, is that one day we will be history for someone else, in a world we can’t imagine. How long will our world last? What treasures will we leave behind, and what will future historical fiction writers say about us?