How do you research a novel set in 3rd Century AD

1st March 2021

How do you research a novel set in 3rd Century AD…

Sons of Rome (Rise of Emperors 1) by Gordon Doherty and Simon Turner

Four Emperors. Two Friends. One Destiny.
As twilight descends on the 3rd century AD, the Roman Empire is but a shadow of its former self. Decades of usurping emperors, splinter kingdoms and savage wars have left the people beleaguered, the armies weary and the future uncertain. And into this chaos Emperor Diocletian steps, reforming the succession to allow for not one emperor to rule the world, but four.

The Rise of Emperors trilogy spans the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, taking the reader to famous cities like Rome, Mediolanum (Milan), Augusta Treverorum (Trier), Nicomedia (Izmit), Eboracum (York). The saga even spreads its wings beyond the old Roman borders – taking trips into the sweltering semi-deserts of the Sassanid Persian Empire, into the foggy and freezing forests of the German tribes and far north into the Caledonian highlands. In that sense, the great variety of locations is one of the series’ strengths. It also presents something of a challenge, in that no matter how much the two authors of the series would want to visit each and every site in person, for this project it simply wasn’t viable.

Constantinium model

That said, both Simon and Gordon already had well-stamped passports, and knew a number of the locations very well. They were both familiar with The Eastern Empire, particularly the regions around Constantinople, (visiting modern day Istanbul) plus Rome and parts of Italy. Equally, with Simon living close to York and Gordon living in Caledonia (Scotland), those locations were easy to write authentically. Both could with ready confidence delve into and describe these places in some historical detail: grand gateways; the view of the mountains from a certain part of a city at a specific time of year; obscure carvings in lintel stones – that kind of thing.

Of course there were those other locations in areas the pair simply could not visit or which have more or less vanished since the days of Constantine and Maxentius.

Gordon, the voice of Constantine in the trilogy, believes that when faced with such challenges, one has to be resourceful and pragmatic. Take Sirmium, for example, the Tetrarchic capital of Galerius, Caesar of the East, visited by our cast of characters early in book 1 for an imperial wedding. Today, Sirmium lies buried beneath the town of Sremska Mitrovica in modern Serbia. Apart from a few crumbling excavations, there isn’t much else to see. So Gordon set about building a mental model of the city by pulling together the patchwork of information and resources available: Google Earth for topography, distances and line of sight; Artists’ reconstructions of the city to visualise in one image what was once there; Video documentaries to gain a sensory understanding of the countryside – e.g. can you hear the River Sava flowing from the centre of the town?; And of course, library visits to sift through stacks of archaeological papers for the real brass tacks. All of this helped him to write with a degree of authenticity and confidence about a place which is long gone.

Here is a link to a short video about Sirmium, including a 3D reconstruction

For Simon in the writing of Maxentius, location was both a boon and a burden. Constantine traversed much of the known world in his time, but apart from spending his youth moving with the imperial court to places such as Trier, Milan and Izmit, as the story progresses, the vast majority of Maxentius’s life centres around the city of Rome and its environs.

While the scenery of ancient Treverorum, Nicomedia and Mediolanum could largely be recreated using composites of reconstructions of late Imperial palaces and standard Roman cities, and Simon was already familiar with Carthage, Rome needed to be portrayed with as much accuracy as possible, being at the heart of the tale.

The issue with somewhere like the eternal city is that the urban landscape one encounters now is actually a series of strata from the days of early Republican Rome through the empire, the Byzantine and Medieval eras, the Renaissance, and right to the modern world. What the visitor thinks of as “ancient Rome,” preserved across the city in ruins, is actually a spread of remains covering over a millennium, and there is little chance that what one sees at one side of the street is contemporary with what one sees on the other side. As an author who has explored the city in books over many years it can be difficult peeling back the layers to expose a stratum of the city at that time. One has to be careful not to include buildings that were already in ruins by then, or buildings that had yet to be constructed. The bright point for this book is that the latest classical structures to be found in Rome coincide with the era for Sons of Rome, in that Maxentius was the last emperor to initiate any kind of building projects in the city.

Sirmium excavations

The basilica, temple, villa, circus and more that can still be visited, date back to Maxentius and the time of the book. Thus with Rome, we can peel back everything post-Roman, and what remains more or less stood when Maxentius walked its streets. Indeed, the famous full-scale reconstruction of the city which can be visited in the Museo della Civiltà Romana shows Rome as it stood in the reign of Constantine and is therefore almost exactly what Maxentius would see, give or take a couple of structures. Additionally, the Rome in 3D project helps bring that model to a new kind of life.

Sirmium model

So that’s it. The locations of the late third century Roman empire can be lovingly recreated with a combination of visiting remains where possible, using resources to “virtually” visit, where it is not possible, and to postulate a reconstruction of vanished complexes based on research and similar existing locations.

Buy Now

Join Team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts