Liberty by Kim Iverson Headlee is on virtual book tour. The historical romance stops at Readeropolis with an author guest post...
Liberty by Kim Iverson Headlee is on virtual book tour.
The historical romance stops at Readeropolis with an author guest post.
Be sure to enter for a chance to win the giveaway for a $20 Amazon GC and follow the Silver Dagger book tour (for other dates see the link at the bottom of the post).
Historical Research Connected to Liberty
Thank you for hosting Liberty on your blog today!
In September 2000, British archaeologists announced an extraordinary find: the cremated remains of a wealthy
young woman buried in a Roman-era paupers’ cemetery on the south bank of the Thames, outside the perimeter of
AD second-century London. The ossuary was remarkable for its eight oil lamps, bearing gladiator and Egyptian
motifs; evidence of an exotic feast that included almonds, dates, and figs; and traces of stone pine incense from the
cones of trees that grew nowhere in Britain save for the grounds encircling London’s amphitheater. The “Great
Dover Street Woman,” as the London Museum archaeologists prosaically named her, was either a gladiator’s
aristocratic consort or else a superstar gladiatrix in her own right.
I chose the latter interpretation and gave her a story.
Carbon dating placed Great Dover Street Woman’s remains at about a hundred years earlier than I depicted,
coinciding with the rebuilding of London’s amphitheater following a cataclysmic fire, and at about the same time as
the opening of Rome’s Flavian Amphitheater, or Colosseum, as it quickly came to be known. Since I wanted to
show an emperor who wasn’t a raving megalomaniac, I employed literary license to set Rhyddes’s story during the
early reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the governorship of Sextus Calpurnius Agricola.
Contemporary inscriptions show that Agricola was responsible for refurbishing an eastern section of Hadrian’s Wall,
and Roman lighthouses were built along Britain’s northeastern coastline at approximately the same time. If those
lighthouses weren’t Agricola’s idea, they should have been.
Other historic personages in Liberty include the emperor’s wife, Empress Faustina, and their son, Prince
Commodus—who did not grow up to murder his father, as shown in Russell Crowe’s movie Gladiator, although
Commodus did enjoy fighting as a gladiator in later years and became arguably the worst of Rome’s megalomaniac
emperors.
The Greek physician Galen of Pergamum received his professional start treating gladiators and cured Commodus
of some unspecified childhood disease; I selected chicken pox, with complications. As a result, Galen became
Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s physician in Rome during the precise period depicted in Liberty. Galen’s prolific medical
treatises, which have proven to be about 80 percent accurate by present-day standards, including essays about the
dangers and avoidance of infection, formed the vast bulk of the Roman world’s medical knowledge. Healers
continued to consult them well into the medieval era.
My major written source for gladiatorial research was Gladiators and Caesars, edited by Eckart Köhne and Cornelia
Ewigleben, University of California Press, 2000, and my research was supplemented by various television
documentaries, produced by the Discovery Channel and History Channel, and aired between 2000 and 2004. For
everyday details I found the Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins, Oxford
University Press, 1994, to be indispensable. My research into the history and cultures of British Celts and Picts
spans more than twenty-five years, and those sources are far too numerous to mention.
But, educational nuggets aside, my primary goal with Liberty was to create a story that inspires as well as
entertains. Observed the newspaper reporter who interviewed James Stewart’s character, Ransom Stoddard, at the
end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:
“When the legend becomes fact... print the legend.”
Liberty
by
Kim Iverson Headlee
Genre:
Historical Romance
How
hard would you fight for a chance at love across a vast social
divide?
“Epic.”
~ Drue’s Random Chatter Reviews.
Betrayed
by her father and sold as payment of a Roman tax debt to fight in
Londinium's arena, gladiatrix-slave Rhyddes feels like a wild beast
in a gilded cage. Celtic warrior blood flows in her veins, but Roman
masters own her body. She clings to her vow that no man shall claim
her soul, though Marcus Calpurnius Aquila, son of the Roman governor,
makes her yearn for a love she believes impossible.
Groomed
to follow in his father’s footsteps and trapped in a politically
advantageous betrothal, Aquila prefers the purity of combat on the
amphitheater sands to the sinister intrigues of imperial politics,
and the raw power and athletic grace of the flame-haired Libertas to
the adoring deference of Rome's noblewomen.
When
a plot to overthrow Caesar ensnares them as pawns in the dark design,
Aquila must choose between the Celtic slave who has won his heart and
the empire to which they both owe allegiance. Trusting no man and
knowing the opposite of obedience is death, the only liberty offered
to any slave, Rhyddes must embrace her arena name, Libertas—and the
love of a man willing to sacrifice everything to forge a future with
her.
WINNER,
2015 BooksGoSocial Best Book.
**Only
.99 cents until Aug 26th!!**
Kim
Headlee lives on a farm in southwestern Virginia with her family,
cats, goats, Great Pyrenees goat guards, and assorted wildlife.
People and creatures come and go, but the cave and the 250-year-old
house ruins--the latter having been occupied as recently as the
mid-twentieth century--seem to be sticking around for a while
yet.
Kim has been a published novelist since 1999 with the first edition of Dawnflight (Sonnet Books, Simon & Schuster) and has been studying the Arthurian legends for nigh on half a century.
Kim has been a published novelist since 1999 with the first edition of Dawnflight (Sonnet Books, Simon & Schuster) and has been studying the Arthurian legends for nigh on half a century.
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Thank you for hosting LIBERTY as the top post on your blog, and it’s on sale today for $0.99!
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