Special Guest Post by Amanda Cockrell, Author of Shadow of the Eagle (The Borderlands Book 1)

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Faustus Valerianus is the son of a Roman father and a British mother, a captive sold among the spoils after Claudius’s invasion. Now both parents have died within a month of each other, and so he sells the family farm and enlists, joining legendary general Agricola’s campaign to conquer the entirety of the British Isles culminating in a devastating battle amongst Caledonia's dark mountains.

Researching a Soldier’s Life in First Century Britain

I am always more interested in what it was like for an ordinary man or woman to live at a particular time than I am in the wealthy political and military leaders who ran things, and during the Roman Empire squabbled and fought and murdered their way to the Principate. Faustus, the hero of my newest novel, Shadow of the Eagle, is not one of these, but a junior centurion, entirely fictional, the son of a provincial Gaulish father and a British mother. He is haunted, occasionally literally, by the shade of his disapproving father. He falls inadvisably in love with a provincial girl. He finds that his mother’s roots in Britain go rather deeper than he had bargained for. He owns one slave and a horse.

However the generals he would have served were indeed real people and so must be characters on their own, if secondary characters. I’ve always liked Julius Agricola, governor of Britain from 77 or 78 CE (there is some dispute about this) until 85. How can you not like a general who was described by certain contemporaries as showing “an unhealthy interest in philosophy.” He appeared for a few chapters in the second of my Centurions series and I got quite fond of him. The hero of that book departed from Britain before the march north and I’ve always wanted to go on with that campaign, so Shadow of the Eagle gave me the chance. It’s the first in a series called The Borderlands, about the edges of the Roman Empire, and Agricola was the general who pushed those edges farther out than ever.

Almost everything we know about his campaign for Scotland comes from the historian Cornelius Tacitus. Tacitus was Agricola’s son-in-law, and so is suspect in his more extravagant praise of his wife’s father as well as his dislike of the Emperor Domitian, and maddeningly vague on the things that make later historians tear their hair out.

For instance, on the possible conquest of Ireland: “Agricola had given welcome to an Irish prince, who had been driven from home by a rebellion; nominally a friend, he might be used as a pawn in the game.” What was this prince’s name? Surely you might have mentioned that?

Or: “[Agricola] reached Mons Graupius, which he found occupied by the enemy.” What exactly is Mons Graupius? Does it have any other name? Where the hell is it?

Or: “One of the [Caledonians’] many leaders, named Calgacus, a man of outstanding valor and nobility, summoned the masses who were already thirsting for battle and addressed them...” What happened to Calgacus, defeated at Mons Graupius, wherever it was? Tacitus quotes Calgacus in a lengthy speech which was clearly made up by Tacitus, and never tells us what happened to him afterward. We are left to wonder whether he ever existed, or was merely a convenient mouthpiece for Tacitus to elaborate on what he thought was wrong with the Roman Empire’s thirst for expansion. If Calgacus had been captured, or killed, he would, like Vercingetorix or the head of Decebalus, no doubt have featured in some triumphal procession in Rome, of which there is no evidence.

Archaeology, the obsession of the historical novelist, fills a lot of gaps, although not those. Roman remains surface in Britain nearly every time someone puts a spade to his back garden or tries to build a shopping mall. If we don’t know where Mons Graupius is, we know what the soldiers who fought there wore, and ate for breakfast, and sacrificed to read the omens before a battle. We know what their forts looked like, and where they were, and their heating systems and plumbing. Unlike the book I was mad enough to set in Decebalus’s Dacia, which is now essentially Romania, this project had a wealth of research available, including guidebooks to the British sites, and books on native wildlife and topography and landscape. In English. Not to mention the wonderful British Ordnance Survey maps Ancient Britain and Roman Britain.

Someone had to lead the Caledones, however, so why not Calgacus? He appears in Shadow of the Eagle as Calgacos, not nearly as eloquent but I hope somewhat more human. And that exiled Irish prince? How can a novelist ignore him? There was an actual Irish prince, Tuathal Techtmar, whose father was deposed as high king of Ireland by a competitor, and whose mother fled with the infant Tuathal to her people in Britain. He eventually went back with an army and took the throne from the usurper. Historians put him anywhere from Vespasian to Hadrian, and there is speculation that he might have been Agricola’s prince, so I have adopted that theory because it is too good to waste. Agricola, despite telling Tacitus that Ireland could be taken with a single legion, never got the chance. So in the second book of The Borderlands Faustus will go haring off to Ireland with Tuathal to restore him to his throne, strictly unofficially.

Despite armies and generals and larger-than-life commanders, at the end it’s the small things that make a setting come alive. That kind of research has always been a joy to me. There was no way I was going to resist having Faustus buy his infant nephew a fascinus, that universal Roman good luck symbol of a phallus with wings. Or talk about the comparative efficacy and dangers of henbane and poppy tears as anesthetic in a military surgery. Or any of the peculiar festivals that dotted the Roman calendar, such as the Lemuria for dispelling insistent ghosts. Or the curse tablets of Bath, once Aquae Sulis. Curse tablets are not found only in Bath, but a particularly wonderful trove has surfaced from the sacred spring there. They were thin sheets of lead inscribed to order, rolled up like a scroll with a nail driven through the center to make the buyer’s point, and dropped into the spring for Sulis Minerva. Most had to do with the return of stolen items – the baths were notorious for light-fingered types hanging about the changing rooms — but others cursed faithless lovers or cheating business partners. Often they were ready made, with blanks to fill in the stolen item and/or the name of the curse’s target, with a promise of another sacrifice to the goddess if she gave the matter her attention.

My shelves of research books grow daily, because who can not order a title like Household Gods or Roman Dress Accessories or Roman Record Keeping and Communications? Books like that will tell you things you didn’t know you needed to know, something you may end up building a critical scene around. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, “the little things are infinitely the most important.”

Amanda Cockrell

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About the Author

Amanda Cockrell grew up in Ojai, California, a wonderful place where one could ride one’s horse down Main Street and there was a hitching post outside the library. It was a bedroom town for Hollywood, full of writers and actors and directors, so there was always something going on, and famous people’s discarded trousers tended to end up in the local thrift shop.  Her father was a screenwriter and her mother a screenwriter and novelist. Besides her Roman books, she is the author of three contemporary novels, two of them set in a fictional version of her beloved home town. She has a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University and is managing editor of that university’s literary journal, The Hollins Critic. She also had the privilege of teaching creative writing at Hollins for many years. She lives with her husband, Tony Neuron, and a substantial assortment of dogs and cats, in Roanoke, Virginia. Find out more at https://www.amandacockrell.com/ and find Amanda on Facebook and Twitter @CockrellAmanda1