- SANDRA SCHWAB | Historical Romance Author

I blame Twitter for the Romans: Back in the summer of 2014 I was part of a conversation on Twitter about Roman historicals - or rather, the scarcity of them. And when I mentioned I live near a former border of the Roman Empire and near a reconstructed fort, somebody suggested I ought to write a Roman historical myself.

For some strange, unfathomable reason I said I would think about it.

A couple of days later, I visited said reconstructed fort, the Saalburg, where I was struck by the strangest feeling. Walking between the barrack blocks and the granaries, I suddenly felt as if I had stepped back in time. For a just a little moment, I felt a keen connection to the men who had once been stationed at this fort. Indeed, that feeling was so strong that the sight of the eagle standard in the shrine of the standards nearly made me burst into tears because I was so very touched. (And the eagle standard doesn't even belong in that shrine! After all, it's a legionary standard, and the fort was only ever garrisoned by auxiliary troops.) It was then that I decided I would indeed write a Roman historical.

After some thinking and planning (and frantic buying of research books), I had soon plotted a whole series, consisting of four books. In honor of my love for Rosemary Sutcliff's books, especially her novels set in Roman Britain, I chose to make the connecting element a snake armring with a set-in stone with a dolphin from a man's ring. (A dolphin ring also appears in several of Sutcliff's stories, from Eagle of the Ninth to Sword at Sunset.)

Again, in honor of Sutcliff, I decided to set the first full-length novel of the series, Eagle's Honor: Banished, in Roman Britain. I was very tempted to set the book in Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall - mainly because I love the name so much. In the end I decided against it: after all, I had never visited its remains, and choosing a real place with real people seemed rather ripe for pitfalls. But I came up with a very similar name for the fort Marcus is sent to in Banished: Vindulum. :-) 

For Ravished and Vanquished, by contrast, I did choose a real place as the setting: the Saalburg. Its original Roman name has been lost, so I came up with my own: Saalensium.