James Islington

Yeah, I mean, Rome was just a logical choice.

You know, like you said, how many times do you think about Rome?

It's, you know, but it's also, it made a lot of sense not just in terms of the themes, but, you know, as a writer, especially introducing people to a new world

it's really helpful if you can give them a nice distinct visual without having to explain everything yeah so if i say ah the coliseum like you've got you've got an image of that and if i put that in the fantasy world you've still got an image of that um and so you know

you can sort of have all this Roman architecture and Roman flavor to things, but not have to spell out every single detail of this fantasy world, which I think really helped.

So I was...

terrible at history.

Like, you know, my knowledge of Roman history extended to like Gladiator and, you know, Asterix.

So I did a bunch of, it was mainly audio books, just lectures and so on on Roman history.

And I did that

As I'd started writing the book, writing the first draft, and that was great because, you know, you're obviously not doing things one-to-one, but you're going, oh, this is a really cool detail that, you know, works perfectly in this world that I've, you know, I'm creating.

I'm going to add that.

And so you get all these little sort of flavor details as well that kind of bring it to life a little bit.

And, you know, it's not, again, it's not one-to-one.

So, you know, some things are from,

400 BC, you know, Roman Republic and then, you know, some are from, you know, the Empire and 180 sort of thing.

But it's still, you know, it doesn't matter.

You're drawing inspiration.

You're not trying to make it historical.

So, yeah, there was a decent amount of research for that.