There are no surviving first person accounts by those enslaved by Romans, as there are by formerly enslaved Americans. More importantly, I wanted to tell a truthful story about the lived experience of Roman slavery. Nearly all fictional narratives about the ancient world feature famous, usually elite Romans and/or well-known episodes in Roman history, and I wanted to see if I could make life on the Roman street vivid, entertaining, and suspenseful, without recourse to emperors, gladiators, or volcanoes. I wanted to write about Roman life from below, and I wanted to write a character as far from my own experience as I could get, in this case a Roman slave who didn’t know who his parents were, or even when or where he was born. Why did you choose to write about slavery and sex? You can also still see the city’s Roman necropolis, which occupies a covered courtyard at the center of the Museo Arqueologico Municipal. The Roman theater there is pretty spectacular, and from one of the displays in the theater’s museum, I learned that by the time of my novel (the last decade of the fourth century), the theater had been converted into a market, which provided one of the major settings of my book.

In 2016, I took a field trip to the city of Cartagena, formerly Carthago Nova, on the southeastern Mediterranean coast of Spain. In addition to Roman history and culture, I read, for comparative purposes, narratives of enslaved people in America from the nineteenth century (Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs in particular), and I also read scholarship by and about modern-day sex workers, as well as books about the psychology of trauma, the history of sexuality, and the history of slavery in general. While I was writing Sparrow, I held down a state government job, so for the ten years it took to research and write the book, I did most of my work during my off hours. I had two years of Latin in high school many years ago, but I’m hopeless at it, so I have also read a lot of Roman literature in translation. In my home in Austin, Texas, I am up to my knees in cat hair and books about Roman history, society, and culture. What sort of research did you do in order to write Sparrow ?

Roman history mary beard