76

"King Bee and Honey"} (late April)

"The White Fawn"* (summer-fall)

75

"Something Fishy in Pompeii"* "Archimedes's Tomb"*

"Death by Eros"*

74

Oppianicus is tried and convicted on numerous charges

Gordianus tells Lucius Claudius the story of "The Alexandrian Cat"} (summer)

73 "The House of the Vestals"} (spring)

"A Gladiator Dies Only Once"* (June and after)

Spartacus slave revolt begins (September)

72

Oppianicus is murdered

Arms of Nemesis (September); the murder of Lucius Licinius at Baiae 71 Final defeat of Spartacus (March) 70

Gordiana (Diana) born to Gordianus and Bethesda at Rome (August) "Poppy and the Poisoned Cake"* Virgil born

67

Pompey clears the seas of piracy

64

"The Cherries of Lucullus"* (spring)

Gordianus moves to the Etruscan farm (autumn)

63 Catilina's Riddle (story begins 1 June 63, epilogue ends August 58); the consulship of Cicero and the conspiracy of Catilina

60

Titus and Titania (the Twins) born to Eco and Menenia at Rome (spring) Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus form the First Triumvirate

56

The Venus Throw (January to 5 April); the

murder of the philosopher Dio 55

Pompey builds the first permanent theater in Rome

52

A Murder on the Appian Way (18 January to April); the murder of Clodius and the burning of the Senate House Aulus born to Diana and Davus at Rome (October)

(January to March); Caesar crosses the Rubicon River and civil war begins Last Seen in Massilia (late summer to fall);

Trebonius, under Caesar's command, lays siege to Massilia A Mist of Prophecies (story begins 9 August);

Gordianus investigates the death of the woman known as Cassandra Caesar defeats Pompey at Pharsalus (9 August)

and pursues him to Egypt The Judgment of Caesar (story begins 27

September); Gordianus travels to Egypt;

Caesar arrives in Alexandria where he confronts the royal siblings Cleopatra and Ptolemy

Bethesda is born to Diana and Davus at Rome Ptolemy

Caesar (Caesarion) is born to Cleopatra (23 June)

Caesar is assassinated at Rome (15 March)

"The Consul's Wife" grew out of two desires: to deal with Sempronia, one of the more remarkable women of her age, and to explore the role of the chariot race at this period of the Roman Republic. No one who saw the movie Ben-Hur as a child could ever forget the spectacular chariot race staged (long before the advent of computer-generated images) with live riders and horses and an audience of thousands. Ben-Hur left indelible images in my mind; for further research, I turned to Sport in Greece and Rome by H. A. Harris (Thames and Hudson/Cornell University Press, 1972), a very British take on Roman racing and gambling that includes an amusing list of translated Latin names for actual horses.

The Daily Acts referred to in the story actually existed, as we know from references to the Acta Diuma in Cicero and Petronius; my use of the Daily Acts owes a debt to a very funny but painfully dated hard-boiled mystery titled The]ulius Caesar Murder Case by

Wallace Irwin, published in 1935, in which the intrepid "reporter" Manny (short for Manlius) snoops out trouble along the Tiber.

As for Sempronia, readers may learn more about her in Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline, which gives an intriguing description of her pedigree, character, and motives; not only did she play a small role in that conspiracy, but she was the mother of Decimus Brutus, who with the more famous Junius Brutus was one of the assassins of Caesar. In an early draft of my novel Catilina's Riddle, I wrote a lengthy passage describing her, which I later decided to cut; I was glad to be able to return to Sempronia in "The Consul's Wife." "That she was a daughter of Gaius Gracchus is unlikely," writes Erich Gruen in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (University of California Press, 1974), but it is intriguing to speculate that Sempronia might nonetheless have been a descendant of that radical firebrand of the late Republic who was murdered by the ruling class and achieved the status of a populist martyr.

"If a Cyclops Could Vanish in the Blink of an Eye" reflects on the domestic life of Gordianus. Cats were still something of a nov-elty in Rome at this time, and not universally welcomed. The cultural clash of East and West, as exemplified by the different worldviews of Gordianus and the Egyptian-born Bethesda, will increasingly become a part of the fabric of cosmopolitan Roman life, as the emerging world capital attracts new people and new ideas from the faraway lands drawn into her orbit.

Of all the historical incidents between Roman Blood and Arms of Nemesis, the most notable is the revolt of Sertorius; "The White Fawn" tells his story. The fabulous tale of the white fawn is given in several sources, including Plutarch's biography of the rebel general. The discontent of those who flocked to Sertotius's side presages the growing discord in Rome, where a series of escalating disruptions will eventually climax in the civil wars that put an end to the republic forever.

In 2000, on a book tour to Portugal, my publisher arranged a pri-vate tour of the excavations of a garum manufactory located directly beneath a bank building in downtown Lisbon (ancient Olisipo); that experience inspired me to take Gordianus to such a manufactory, and to uncover "Something Fishy in Pompeii." Readers craving a taste of garum can make their own; consult A Taste of Ancient Rome by llaria Gozzini Giacosa (University of Chicago Press, 1992), which gives the recipe of Gargilius Martialis, who wrote in the third century A.D.

How Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, put a puzzle to the inventor Archimedes, who solved it in a bathtub with the cry "Eureka!", is a famous tale from the ancient world. When I came across Cicero's claim (in his Tusculan Disputations) to have rediscovered the neg-lected tomb of Archimedes, I decided there must be a mystery yarn to be made from such material, and so "Archimedes's Tomb" came to be written. The sixteenth idyll of Theocritus, extolling the good government of Hiero's reign, makes an interesting contrast to Cicero's own Verrine Orations, which exposed rampant corruption and mismanagement in the Roman-run Sicily of his own time.

Reading Theocritus during my research for "Archimedes's Tomb," I came across the poet's twenty-third idyll, which became the inspiration for "Death by Eros." The details of the spurned lover, the cold-hearted boy, the suicide, the pool, and the statue of Eros are all from Theocritus. In his version, death is a result of divine, not human, vengeance; I turned the poet's moral fable into a murder mystery. "Death by Eros" was originally written for Yesterday's Blood: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology (Headline, 1998), in which various authors paid homage to the late creator of Brother Cadfael. In that book, I noted that the story's theme "would be familiar to Ellis Peters, who frequently cast lovers (secret and otherwise) among her characters. In her tales, for the most part, love is vindicated and lovers triumph; would that it could have been so for the various lovers in this story."