In October 1917, Norman became a cipher officer with British Army HQ in Italy, on the front facing the Austrians, and he remained there until 1919. The other British war in the Mediterranean was against the Ottomans, culminating in General Allenby’s victorious entry into Jerusalem in December 1917. My character Everett’s activities in Jerusalem are fictional, though there had been a long tradition of British officers devoting themselves to the archaeology of the Holy Land. I myself was fortunate to spend time with the Ethiopian Coptic monks on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the days leading up to the First Gulf War, when Jerusalem was virtually empty of tourists. One day, when the Old City was in lockdown because of violence, I had the extraordinary experience of being in the church alone, and descended past the carved pilgrim crosses to the Chapel of St Helena. The ship graffito described in this novel is preserved in the Chapel of St Vartan, normally closed to visitors. The passage beyond the graffito is fictional, though there are many cisterns and unexplored spaces nearby and much still to be discovered about the site of the Holy Sepulchre in the first century AD.
The quote at the beginning of the book is from Letters of the Younger Pliny vi, 16 (trans. Betty Radice, Harvard 1969); the same source is used for quotes in Chapters 6 and 17, the latter from x, 96. In Chapter 9, the quote from the Elder Pliny’s Natural History is from xi, 79 (trans. John L. Healey, Penguin 1991), and in Chapter 10, from v, 70-4 (trans. H. Rackham, Harvard 1942, with place-names rendered by me in their ancient form); the discussion between Pliny and Claudius in Chapter 4 derives material from the Natural History too, including the account of different types of ink. In the Prologue, the line Facilis descensus Averno is from Virgil’s Aeneid (vi: 126), as is the quote in Chapter 5 (vi, 237-42, trans. H.R. Fairclough, Loeb 1916); the other Virgil quotes are from his fourth Eclogue, including the passage spoken by Claudius in the Epilogue (trans. H.R. Fairclough, ibid., but rendered in verse by me). The quotes from Acts of the Apostles, in Chapters 1, 5 and 25, and from The Gospel of Matthew, in Chapter 18, are from the King James Version. The Dies Irae is a traditional part of the Requiem Mass; the translation used here, in the Prologue – in the utterance of the Sibyl – and in Chapters 5 and 12, was made by John Adams Dix (1798-1879), American Civil War general, Governor of New York and a remarkable classicist, who preserved the trochaic metre of the medieval Latin.
In Chapter 15, the quotes from Tacitus are from Annals xiv, 30 (trans. John Jackson, Harvard 1937), also the source of the line of Latin read by Jack from Claudius’ fictional history, in chapter 17; from Dio Cassius his Roman History, lxii, 2-13 (trans. Earnest Cary and Herbert Baldwin Foster, Harvard, 1925); and from Gildas his De Excidio Britonum, ‘The Ruin of Britain’, 15 (trans. Michael Winterbottom, Phillimore, 1978). The ‘sacramentum gladiatorium’ is my translation of the gladiators’ oath in Petronius, Satyricon 117.
In Chapter 2, the hieroglyphics on the Anubis statue are text from the ‘Instruction of Merikare’, an Egyptian Middle Kingdom document preserved in several eighteenth Dynasty papyri. In Chapter 7, the inscription of Piso, though fictional, is worded after an actual inscription of Piso found on the Greek island of Samothrace. In Chapter 12, the fictional inscription under the Palatine Hill, including the archaic spelling Caisar, is based on the inscription of Claudius on the Porta Maggiore, originally part of his aqueduct – the aqua Claudia – where you can still see masonry in the ‘rusticated’ style typical of Claudius. In Chapter 16, the delightful baroque prose of Sir Thomas Browne in treating the grim business of saponification and ‘body liqueur’ can be appreciated throughout his Hydrotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658). In Chapter 20, the words of Winston Churchill are from his obituary of Harvey Augustus Butters in the Observer, 10 September 1916. In Chapter 21, the ‘Paternoster’ is based on an actual word-square found scratched on a second-century Roman amphora sherd from Manchester, once thought to be the earliest evidence for Christianity in Britain. In Chapter 24, the quote from Mark Twain is from his The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress (San Francisco, 1870), p. 497.
DOMINE IVMIVS is the painted inscription under the St Vartan’s Chapel ship graffito in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the other inscription found there in the novel is fictional. The illustrations in the text are based on the ship graffito, still in situ in Jerusalem, on the Lullingstone Villa Chi-Rho mosaic and the St Mary Hinton ‘Christ’ painting – both on display in the British Museum – and on the map of Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in Antichita Romane de’tempo prima Repubblica e dei prima imperatori (Rome, 1756), Vol. I, Pl. II. The Roman painting of Vesuvius described in Chapter 5 is from the House of the Centenary in Pompeii, and is now in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Other images, including the coins of Claudius and Herod Agrippa and finds from the Plemmirio shipwreck, can be seen on my website www.davidgibbins.com.