As crazy as this may sound, given the Sibylline Oracles depiction of “the widow,” the “cataract of fire” and the cohabitation with a “man-eating lion” as well as the mutilated fragment involving Cleopatra being buried: “thee the stately shall the encircling tomb receive… is gone… living within,” this book was not inspired by them. I found these bits of awesomeness long after I conceived the book’s plotline, as I was in the midst of writing the final battle. Needless to say, I screamed with joy when I discovered them. Augustus really did historically burn a vast quantity of books, and personally and specifically censored the Sibylline Oracles. I took a few wild, thoroughly enjoyable leaps in imagining the creation of the Sibylline fragments, and the literal nature of them.

The historian Nicolaus of Damascus is a real character, with the outlines of his actual biography roughly as Zelig-ish as they are portrayed here: philosopher to King Herod’s court, tutor to Cleopatra’s children, and at some point biographer of Augustus. I’ve reorganized his chronology somewhat. The 144-volume History of the Universe, mostly lost, is an accurate description of Nicolaus’s work —though the secrets that might have been loosed in that 144-volume set are my invention. There are scraps of Nicolaus’s work on Augustus still extant, mainly dealing with the boyhood of Octavian, and I consulted those when researching this book.

The outlines of the biography of Selene, Cleopatra and Antony’s daughter, are depicted with significant poetic license here —but she did travel to Rome along with her two brothers after her parents’ deaths. Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus disappear without explanation from the historical record soon after, and most historians guess that they both died of childhood illness. I don’t think it’s a huge leap to imagine a sinister fate for the sons of Antony and Cleopatra in Augustus’s Rome. Cleopatra Selene, on the other hand, remained loyal to Rome, and was eventually married, with a large dowry provided by Augustus, to the young African King, Juba II. Interestingly, Juba had, as a three-year-old child, walked in Julius Caesar’s triumphal procession into Rome after Caesar’s own Alexandrian idyll —the one that put Cleopatra on the throne. Selene reigned as queen of Mauretania (today’s Algeria), loyal and subservient to Rome, and died in A.D. 6. The epitaph Augustus recites to Cleopatra in the epilogue is by Crinagoras of Mytilene, a famed Greek poet who lived in Rome as a court poet. So it’s quite possible that said epitaph was indeed commissioned by Augustus to memorialize his one loyal “daughter.”

Speaking of: A sidenote on daughters, and a storyline I couldn’t manage to squeeze much of into this book, to my great sorrow. Julia, Augustus’s only child, eventually fell in love with Mark Antony and Fulvia’s orphaned eldest son, Iullus, sustaining a long affair with him (during her marriage to Marcus Agrippa, and later to Tiberius), which led to her banishment by her father, and to Iullus’s execution. As well, there were rumors of her other activities, some of them involving illicit dancing and ritual in temples, and perhaps a plot against Augustus’s life. Augustus died without blood inheritors, having banished not only Julia, but her daughter as well. One of his final acts was to order the execution of his last grandson, Julia’s son. Personally, I suspect this might’ve had something to do with Augustus’s suspicion that the bloodlines of his grandchildren had been tainted by his daughter’s infidelity with Mark Antony’s son. Regardless, Antony’s line would eventually inherit the empire. The emperors Claudius and Nero were both descendants of Mark Antony and Fulvia’s remaining Roman daughters.