Imperium

Author’s Note

Although Imperium is a novel, the majority of the events it describes did actually happen; the remainder at least could have happened; and nothing, I hope (a hostage to fortune, this), demonstrably did not happen. That Tiro wrote a life of Cicero is attested both by Plutarch and Asconius; it vanished in the general collapse of the Roman empire.

My principal debt is to the twenty-nine volumes of Cicero ’s speeches and letters collected in the Loeb Classical Library and published by Harvard University Press. Another invaluable aid has been The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, Volume II, 99 B.C.-31 B.C. by T. Robert S. Broughton, published by the American Philological Association. I should also like to salute Sir William Smith (1813-1893), who edited the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, and the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography -three immense and unsurpassed monuments of Victorian classical scholarship. There are, of course, many other works of more recent authorship which I hope to acknowledge in due course.

R. H.

16 MAY 2006