In 146 BC, after a three year siege, Carthage was razed to the ground, its citizens sold into slavery and the fields where this once magnificent city had stood, ploughed by oxen.
When Cato the Censor demanded that ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ Rome did just that. This liminal ground between these two worlds is what fires and excites me as a writer. Historical novelists inhabit that hinterland between evidence and imagination. In Hilary Mantel’s BBC Reith Lectures, she said that writers of historical fiction ‘Need to know ten times as much as they will ever tell.’ Only then can the imagination be fired up and take flight. Any historical novelist worth their salt only begins the creative process after all the written sources of evidence, archaeology, experimental evidence, practical and logical implications have been borne in mind, sifted through and intellectually exhausted. Imagination and invention isn’t just making it up. But for historical novelists like me, it is our greatest strength.
I think archeologists, classical scholars and historians have an unhealthy suspicion of imagination and invention.
