Delicatus follows a young boy from ancient Rome who is enslaved by pirates and becomes a key player in Poppeae’s plot to become the Divine Empress. Where did the idea for this novel come from?

I first encountered Sporus at Eton, studying Alexander Pope with the remarkable teacher Michael Meredith, a guru to generations of literary and stage personalities. Pope’s satire on an 18th century local aristocrat notorious for sexual ambiguity led me to be fascinated by this figure, who was well known enough in 18th century England for a poet to allude to him in a satire, yet mostly just a footnote in history books about ancient Rome today if he appears at all. I would encounter this character from time to time (there’s an illusion, for instance, in the TV series “Succession”) but there are only scraps in the historical record. But what scraps they were! Not just the relatively well-known bit about Sporus getting castrated by the emperor Nero and made his wife … but what happened to Sporus in the year 69 AD when four different emperors held the throne and all had a different relationship with Sporus … from a second wedding to an order to execute him in the arena … and all before Sporus turned twenty. But it took me another fifty years before thinking of it as a novel.

What kind of research did you do for this novel to ensure you captured the essence of the story’s theme?

I’ve always been interested in ancient history and I’ve written both serious and satirical novels in that setting, so I have been doing research for decades. It’s a way of taking revenge on my bullying Latin teacher, as well. I’ve read most of the primary sources (some in the original) but more important, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what that world, with its radically alien attitudes, was really like … because, despite its weirdness, it is a world populated by real people who speak to us today. One of the things that is hardest to wrap one’s mind around is that absolutely no one that there was anything wrong with slavery, and that because slaves could not be distinguished by race, there was a kind of continuum where you rise to a position of great power and still technically be a slave. Big things like that influence the world-view, but also little things, like human urine being collected to use in laundries. This is a very well studied period so there is a lot of consensus about what this world was like. But there are still gaps in the consensus and this is where imagination comes in.

What is one pivotal moment in the story that you think best defines Sporus?

When Sporus receives his freedom from Petronius, and realizes that in many ways nothing has changed. In a sense this is a central theme of the story. Even the Emperor, we’ll see in the second book, suffers from a kind of enslavement.

To be honest, I didn’t originally conceive of this as a trilogy but as a big fat book. But I’m getting on in years and I want to make sure the whole story comes out. In terms of the trilogy, the real pivotal moment probably happens in the middle of Book Two … I am writing that moment even as we speak.

Can you tell us what the second book will be about and when it will be available for fans to purchase?

The second book will be on sale Dec 1 and is already available for pre-order. The second book deals with Sporus actually becoming Empress and takes us to the humiliating end of his reign … and the third book deals with Sporus’s life in the Year of Four Emperors … perhaps the most eventful time of all.

If readers can’t wait, and have a U.S. Amazon account, they can find the Delicatus series posted in installments on the amazon vella platform, where we are almost half-way through the second book.

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