This author’s note originally appeared in the August 29th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.
I’ve recently been relistening to the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you’re in for a treat. It’s about 180 episodes, each one about thirty minutes long, and it covers the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus to the dismantling of the western empire in 476. Great stuff.
Anyway, listening to the podcast again has given me all sorts of story ideas. 5th century Rome is basically a more interesting version of Game of Thrones, without the stupid ending (though I do have to admit, blasting the throne with dragon fire is much more awesome than sending the scepter and diadem to Constantinople). The schemes within schemes, plots within plots are rich with story potential, either for a grand fantasy epic or a sweeping space opera.
This isn’t a new thing, of course. Many sci-fi and fantasy authors have drawn inspiration from Roman history, including Asimov for his Foundation series and Frank Herbert for Dune. That’s partly because of how rich the history is, but it’s also because of how foundational Rome it is to our modern world. All of our institutions of government, law, and culture were built on the ashes of Rome, and the grand arc of Western Civilization traces an unbroken path from Augustus and Constantine to the present day.
I first became interested in Roman history by doing my own family history. My ancestry is a mixture of Czech, British, German, and Scandinavian origins, with lots of violent upheavals along the way (my British ancestors were basically the bad guys in The Last Kingdom). We know a lot about the Czech lines, where the records go back to the Battle of White Mountain after the protestants were expelled from the Czech lands. Beyond that, the records are scanty.
As I traced my lines back, I wanted to know how far it would be possible to trace them reliably. In the Czech lands, the cutoff is basically the Hussite wars. However, if you have royal ancestry (and most of us do, if you go back far enough—it was good to be the king), the records go back much further. Trouble is, most of the European genealogies get fantastical at some point, either connecting to ancient pagan gods or to the Bible.
Realistically, you can only trace European lines back to the 8th or 9th centuries with any reliability. Most of the royal families were founded by the descendants of the barbarian chieftains who had destroyed the Roman Empire, and to legitimize their rule, they traced all their bloodlines back to divinity. That was what I learned when I got into family history.
Of course, that answer led to even more questions. Why was there so much chaos after the fall of Rome? If the empire was so strong only a few centuries before, why did it fall? What caused all of the migrations, and why did the barbarians decide to invade the empire? Was the fall of Rome inevitable? Where were my ancestors when all of this was happening?
For the last three years, I’ve been on this personal journey of discovery, and it’s led to some very profound changes in my understanding of the world. It hasn’t ended yet, either. My big family history goal is to find all of my first generation American immigrant ancestors, which will probably take the rest of my lifetime to accomplish. In the meantime, it is fascinating to place my ancestors in the context of history and to think “when that big thing was happening, this is where my ancestors were.”
History is rich with stories, but it’s the personal connection that makes those stories relevant. That’s just as true for fiction as it is for history. Without the personal connection of characters just like us, or like we aspire to be, a book is just so many words on the page. It’s when we can see ourselves in the story that it begins to feel real and memorable.
I don’t know yet what kinds of stories I’ll write in the months and years ahead. It’ll take another year to finish the Genesis Earth Trilogy and the Twelfth Sword Trilogy, but after that, my writing schedule is wide open. Whatever I end up writing, however, I’m sure that the things I’m reading and learning about now will have an influence. So many ideas, so little time!
