Elodie Harper

it wasn't just endless horror, but it was still pretty hairy in Britain throughout this period.

And then in the year of the four emperors, which is what I show in Rome, so Selina's present for another civil war, but this time in Italy is kind of where my book ends.

And in Britain at this time, you know,

there was a civil war or rebellion going on against Cartimandria in the north, and then you've got further campaigns against Scotland and the Caledonians.

So it was still a pretty hairy time.

It wasn't a settled province for quite some while.

My passion is really thinking about the lives of women in this period.

I do think that we're in a really exciting period of scholarship at this point.

We were talking earlier about the archaeological discoveries that are suggesting women held a great deal more power

and that actually they've been buried not only by sexism that was contemporary to them, but in subsequent centuries, just this assumption that women could not have been a certain way.

And I think that the archaeology and the scholarship now in the nonfiction world is absolutely challenging that assumption very significantly.

And so as a novelist,

I find that really fascinating to kind of take that and run with it.

And for me, the huge pull and draw of writing about the ancient world is both the fact that this time is so alien and one cannot impose your own contemporary value system or morality onto it.

You have to kind of try and approach the ancient world to a degree on its own terms and

So, you know, it's a morally fascinating process in the sense that, of course, some of the things that you see are absolutely abhorrent, but you can't apply the same value judgments because the way people thought and behaved then was just so fundamentally different.

And yet, at the same time, aspects of human nature do not change.

in the same way.

So there are certain emotions that are timeless, and this is why the story of Boudicca still resonates.

The idea of revenge, of love, of grief, of rage, of justice, these would still have been drivers and motivators for people personally and politically.