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When the
Vandals sailed up the Tiber and sacked Rome in 455 A.D.,
the western Roman Empire had a remaining life-span of
twenty-one years; in 476, the year of the famous
"fall," the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus was
dethroned and replaced by a barbarian king. Following
Valentinian III’s murder in 455, no fewer than nine
emperors ruled from Rome and Ravenna. Petronius Maximus
was killed by a mob in 455 after a reign of eleven weeks.
His successor, Eparchius Avitus, occupied the throne for
fifteen months. The rest were only marginally more
fortunate. At Carthage, the pirate kingdom of the Vandals
outlived imperial Rome by several decades; North Africa
was reconquered in 553 by the Byzantine general Belisarius.
The
political convulsions of the mid-fifth century, then,
supply the historical framework of Highroad to Carthage.
Among its characters, Aetius the Patrician, Pope Leo the
Great, Valentinian III, Petronius Maximus, Eparchius
Avitus, and Geiseric "King of Terrors" are all
historical, as are the eunuch Heraclius, the two murderous
Huns with Gothic nicknames, and various other minor
figures. Their doings in the novel are more or less
faithful to history. My principal actors are, however,
fictitious. The character of Faustinus incorporates a clue
or two from ancient sources, but my interpretation has
been fanciful rather than scholarly. Adriana, Flavia,
Quintus, and Wolf are entirely imaginary.
Working up
a satisfactory impression of life in Italy at the
beginning of the Dark Ages is like reconstructing a
dinosaur from a jawbone and three vertebrae. Literary
evidence from the mid-fifth century is limited to brief
passages in the works of Apollinaris Sidonius, Jordanes,
Marcellinus, Prosper of Aquitaine, and other late-Roman
and Gothic writers. Standard modern sources in English are
J. B. Bury’s History of the Later Roman Empire
and A. H. M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire. A
full account of the years just after Valentinian III’s
death is given in the Epilogue to Stewart Irvin Oost’s Galla
Placidia Augusta. Thomas Hodgkin’s Italy and Her
Invaders presents an outdated but wonderfully
suggestive picture of the age.
Highroad
to Carthage, my first novel, is the product of a long
apprenticeship. Most of my literary mentors are long dead
and all-but-forgotten: Robert W. Chambers, F. Marion
Crawford, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, Edmondo de Amicis,
Maurice Hewlett, Louise de la Ramée ("Ouida"),
and other once-celebrated writers of a century ago. The
story is my own, of course, but I have drawn gratefully on
these old authors for incidental inspiration and local
color.
For patient
assistance during more than a decade of research I am
indebted to the staff of the University of St. Thomas
Library, St. Paul, Minnesota. My special thanks must go to
Catherine Lutz, Dorothy McIlvenna, and Susan Davis Price,
for suggestions and encouragement.
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