Special Episode - Enemy of My Dreams with Jenny Williamson

We were titillated to speak to the scintillating Jenny Freaking Williamson. Jenny is one of the co-hosts of Ancient History Fangirl, which we like to consider part of the unofficial but highly exclusive #ladypodsquad. Jenny and Genn have been on our show before to discuss their fabulous book, Women and Myth, which was released in 2023. However, today Jenny is here to discuss a solo venture. She has just completed her debut novel, a historical romantasy called Enemy of My Dreams, slated for release through Harlequin in February 2025 and available for pre-order now.

Enemy of my Dreams is set during the late Roman Empire and focuses on a romance between an imperial princess named Julia and a ‘barbarian’ leader, Alaric of the Visigoths. Julia was largely inspired by three historical figures: Julia the Elder (daughter of Augustus), Galla Placidia and Honoria.

It was a delight to hear about Jenny’s process in crafting historical fiction.

Special Episode – Enemy of my Dreams with Jenny Williamson

Here are some quick bios for the ladies in question!

Julia the Elder

Julia the Elder was the only biological child of Augustus, which was a nasty surprise for him. Without a son, Julia’s importance as a dynastic pawn grew. She was married off to her cousin, then Augustus’ BFF Agrippa, and finally her stepbrother, Tiberius. Although it was normal for an elite woman to marry for the benefit of her family, there was a huge amount of pressure on Julia to in these scenarios, especially as her last marriage a trainwreck. Let that be a lesson to you – don’t marry your step-siblings!

Julia was suddenly exiled for scandalous behaviour in 2 BCE… or was she plotting against her father? We will never know. All we can be sure of is her fate. Julia was exiled to the island of Pandataria before her exile was moved to Rhegium. She was never allowed to return and died of “malnutrition” early in the reign of Tiberius, her ex-husband. If Augustus intended to put his errant daughter in her place, mission accomplished.  

Bust of Julia the Elder by Egisto Sani on Flickr. 

Galla Placidia

Galla Placidia lived hundreds of years after Julia, in the twilight of the 4^th century CE. She was the daughter of Theodosius the Great, a very capable emperor (as the name implies). Sadly for Rome, he died in 395 CE and left the purple to his sons, Honorius and Arcadius, who split the empire between them. Placidia resided in the west with Honorius

These were not easy times for Rome as there was a lot of movement around their borders, and within the empire. The Goths were looking for a new home and the Roman Empire was it! The Romans were not always so thrilled by this prospect. In Placidia’s youth, they decided to unite behind a Visigoth named Alaric. Alaric was a pretty successful guy, and in 410 CE he and his followers managed to penetrate the walls of Rome itself. It’s hard to put into words how shameful and shocking this event was for the Romans.

It became even more embarrassing when Placidia was taken captive by the Goths. She remained with them for years, eventually marrying Alaric’s brother-in-law Athaulf, who became the leader of the Gothic forces after Alaric’s death. It is one of the tragedies of history that we know so little about this time in her life. Did she and Athaulf fall in love, or did it just seem wise to marry a man of status, given the circumstances?

This could have been an interesting union that changed history as we know it, except that Athaulf was murdered soon after their wedding and eventually the Romans found the time to negotiate for her return. Placidia was married to her brother’s right-hand man, Constantius, whom she despised. Hatred is not an effective birth control method, and she had two children by this marriage. Honorius had not produced any children, so Placidia’s son was a likely heir.

Placidia was highly respected in her lifetime for her piety and for her capabilities. When her brother died, she helped to engineer the succession of her son, Valentinian III. As Valentinian was so young, Placidia acted as regent, and she never really left the imperial stage. This probably had something to due with the fact that Valentinian was as useless an emperor as Honorius. She died peacefully in 450. She did not have to witness the assassination of Valentinian a few years later.

Honoria

We know very little about Honoria, the daughter of Galla Placidia and sister to the rather pathetic Valentinian III. Honoria was either born with a wild streak or developed one because she was oddly left single for too long, which was a weird status for an imperial princess. After an affair with one of the imperial stewards, she was being forced into a marriage with a rich senator. That oughtta fix this whole situation!

Honoria refused to go down quietly. She may have contacted Atilla the Hun, the latest barbarian threat on the block. She sent him a ring and asked for his help – was this an offer of marriage? Atilla certainly thought so.

We don’t know much about Honoria’s life after this treasonous act, aside from the fact that Placidia intervened to prevent her execution, and she was not given over to Atilla when he came knocking for his bride. She fades into obscurity, best known for this bizarre rebellion.   

Jenny Williamson pictured with her book.

Enemy of My Dreams

You can order Enemy of My Dreams now through your local independent bookstore, as well as online suppliers such as Amazon. Use this link! For our fellow Sydneysiders, you might consider Abbey’s Bookstore.

If you’re keen to follow Jenny’s work, we suggest checking out her blog and the wonderful Ancient History Fangirl podcast.

And if you would like to read more about the history behind this novel, you might consider consulting the following:

• A History of Roman Empire in 21 Women by Dr Emma Southon – a highly readable, humorous work which has a chapter on Galla Placidia.
• Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire – our light-hearted guide to Rome which contains entries on both Julia and Galla Placidia.
• Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boin
• At the Gates of Rome: The Battle for a Dying Empire by Don Hollway
• Galla Placidia: The Last Roman Empress by Hagith Sivan
• Julia Augusti by Elaine Fantham
• Women and Politics in Ancient Rome by Richard Bauman, which has a relevant chapter on Julia the Elder’s time
• As well as the many primary sources on both of these women, many of which can be found online

Sound Credits

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman

Automated Transcript

Dr Rad 0:15
Music. Welcome to the partial historians.

Dr G 0:18
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Speaker 1 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I'm Dr rad and

Dr G 0:33
I'm Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Speaker 1 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:54
Welcome to this special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G

And I am Dr Rad

And we are absolutely thrilled to be joined today by Jenny Williamson. Now we have talked to Jenny before. She is one of the fabulous co hosts of ancient history fangirl and part of the exclusive and unofficial lady pod squad. So we had Jenny and Jen on the show to discuss their book, women and myth, which was released in 2023 which doesn't feel like that long ago, but at the same time, is actually ages ago. And we're really excited to have Jenny here today to discuss her latest solo venture. She's just completed her debut novel, which is labeled as a historical romanticy. And I love that sort of portmanteau of going on there, and it is called enemy of my dreams, and it's going to be coming out in February 2025, at the time of recording. It's a pre order situation. But maybe when you hear this episode, it'll be out and about, in which case you should just go and grab it. Welcome to the show. Jenny,

Jenny W 2:08
hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr G 2:12
It is an absolute pleasure.

Jenny W 2:16
So much fun.

Speaker 1 2:17
So look, enemy of my dreams is right up our alley as it takes place in the later Roman Empire. We love our things Roman, and one of the lead characters is Alaric of the Visigoths. However, we are most interested in your female lead, Julia, daughter of the Emperor of Rome, Theodosius the great. And we're here to talk about the history that inspired you to create this intriguing character today. So we believe that there are three women from ancient Rome whose lives inspired your story, Julia, the elder, daughter of the First Emperor. I'm using my little flesh rabbits there Augustus, as well as some women from the fifth century CE such as the Empress gala Placidia or plaquitia, depending on your preference, and her daughter, Honoria. So we're very excited to delve into that today.

Jenny W 3:14
Yes, I am so thrilled to talk about all these ladies.

Dr G 3:18
So I think we'd still like to start with, like, maybe the originator of bad women under the imperial system, and that would be Julia the elder. And I love this woman. She's great. I'm wondering if you can talk us through a little bit about her family connections and her character. Yeah,

Jenny W 3:40
so Julia the Elder is such a she's such a fun character for me. And I really, I think that my very early draft of this book, my Julia was just absolutely straight up Julia the elder, like she was just and Julia the Elder as a, sort of like very surface reading of Julia the Elder, who is very much just like a party girl who likes to sleep around and do what she wants, you know, which is kind of like I said the surface reading, she was the only biological child of the Emperor Augustus, quote, unquote, Emperor Augustus, you know. And listeners of our podcast will also know him as Octavian. We had a whole series about Mark Antony and Cleopatra, in which he figured very prominently. And we're gonna do a series on him later on in the year, I think, where he takes the Empire the, you know, Rome from Republic to Empire. So she was his only biological daughter, his only child, and he had her with, I believe it would have been his second wife, scribonia, and his first wife. I think, was I correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think it was the daughter of Fulvia, who he married very early on and then wound up cruelly rejecting based on the sort of wars that he was having with Mark Antony, who was her dad. So that was his second wife, Scribonia, and I think he divorced her while she was pregnant. And definitely did, yeah, embarrassing, yeah, to marry his third wife, Livia, who was also a badass. And I believe that Julia the Elder as a child, was sent to live with Livia, her stepmom, and was taught to be like a noble woman in her house. She grew up and was engaged to various people, starting at a very young age, wound up being married, I think, first to her cousin at a very early age, I want to say, like 14 or 15 or something like that. Her cousin was Marcellus, was maybe a few years older. He died, and she wound up being married to Agrippa, her dad's best friend, who was also her dad's age. Ew, yeah, gross. They were married for a little while. They had a bunch of kids together, and then when Agrippa died, her dad married her off again to his other son. Was it his adopted? I don't know. How are they related…?

Dr G 5:57
Yeah, Tiberius, he's Livia's son.

Jenny W 6:00
right? That's what it was, you're right. He did adopt him, yeah, he adopted him. So, like keeping, keeping their, you know, family trees straight in my head is always a struggle. But it was her step brother. So yeah, it was, yeah, she was engaged her own step brother. They hated each other. And I think ever since her marriage to Agrippa, there were rumors about Julia the elder, you know, sleeping around, having boyfriends. And as far as I know, this really kind of got started with Tiberius, who also had been married to somebody else, and was made to divorce that person, to marry Julia. Neither of them were happy about it. And at some point, Augustus was trying to put he was trying to take Rome from Republic to Empire. And he was doing a lot of things like trying to craft this sort of unifying story about who Rome was, and change the laws to, like, restore what he considered to be, quote, unquote, Roman greatness. And one of the problems he noticed was that the women they were just were having affairs and being slutty and horrible things. So he was like, you know, tightening these laws around women and reducing their freedoms and kind of expecting them to be more embodying of the traits of a, you know, virtuous Roman Matron. This involved a lot of spinning. As far as I know, he really expected his daughter, Julia, to embody all of these traits of like an upright Roman matron herself, and she just did not want to do it. And there were all these wild rumors about her sleeping with with men in the forum and doing all kinds of crazy things. And she got exiled to Pandatarea, where it was kind of like a prison situation. And she was there for, I don't know, several years, like very, very curtailed, and was eventually allowed to come back. I think she might have been, I'm not 100% sure, but I think she might have been exiled several times. She

Speaker 1 7:46
was allowed to return to the mainland, I believe, for some of her exile, but she was never taken out of exile, and she actually died in exile under Tiberius, yeah,

Dr G 7:58
yeah. So yeah. Part of what happens is that when Julia is exiled. So this is in around two BC, she goes to Pandataria, this island in the Mediterranean. And do you think to yourself now, oh, that sounds not so bad, but it's not ideal when you're an imperial daughter and you're used to living in the city, and now you're on like, you know, a goat ridden island in the middle of the Mediterranean. Her mother, Scribonia, goes with her, so that's nice. She's got a mum, and they do have fun, so they're able to live a modest life. But what Tiberius does is he withdraws all funding from the exile, so they are essentially a starved to death. I don't know how they end up actually dying, but the withdrawal of funds sort of means that they're unable to maintain any life whatsoever, and it seems like they maybe haven't made enough friends on the island to sustain a life and be taken in by others.

Dr Rad 8:58
Ancient Rome. Survivor edition, yeah, exactly.

Dr G 9:02
It's like, there were only chickens here.

Jenny W 9:05
I don't think there would have been people to befriend. I mean, there were maybe not even that, I don't know. Like it was a very dire situation, right? I remember doing an interview with an author who had written a book, kind of a fictionalized version of the life of Julia the younger, and Julia the elder was in it as well. Who Julia the younger was also exiled for something like 20 years. And we were discussing like, the dangers of having this happen, where you were ex, you're sent into exile and then starved to death, or perhaps, you know, beaten by the guards, or really mistreated like this is not a good situation. And what she was telling me, her name is Tana Rebellis. She has she's written some really interesting, I think it was a duology about Julia the younger. But what she was discussing was how, you know, the power of Augustus in his time meant that the guards were gonna be pretty careful about Julia the elder, at least maintain her health and make sure she was okay. When Augustus died like that, was when you had to worry about the guards. That's when it got a little more dangerous because you didn't have that protection anymore. Yeah,

Dr G 10:07
and certainly, like, the orders are now coming from somebody else, and they're coming from somebody who has not liked her time. Think

Speaker 1 10:15
we all have nightmares about our ex being in control of our lives. No, like, Oh no,

Dr G 10:20
Tiberius is now in charge. But I really enjoy the focus of what is Julia the elder trying to do, because she's kind of like a classic, sort of stick it to the man figure in this scenario, because she gets caught in the forum, that's the rumor. And she's kind of got this whole group of senatorial young bloods who are very happy to like party on and have orgies in the forum. So it's like she's hanging out with some very elite characters, and she's really flaunting it all. And at the same time, this is precisely when Augustus is building up his reputation, and he's been awarded a really prestigious title pater patriae, the father of the Fatherland. So he's kind of gotten to this real pinnacle of his own political success, but at the same time that family life is like completely falling apart. And I think there is a really nice mirror to the opening scene of your novel, of how your protagonist, Julia, is kind of as we meet her for the first time, and the kinds of things that she's up to gives that real sense of somebody who's like, I'm going to do exactly what I please. I have the right I'm in a position of power. Life is here for the taking

Jenny W 11:37
exactly. And I think in my book, I was also really thinking about, and I'm sure, like, this was, this is an issue for Julia too, because she kind of lived in the midst of this time, like, what happens when there's a transfer of power, you know? And that's always a really dangerous time for for emperors and, you know, ruling, ruling families and their survivors when they die. So just thinking about how, how the rules are going to change, and they're changing underneath her. And my Julia doesn't really realize that that is what's happening until, until she does kind of too late.

Dr G 12:06
Yeah, interesting. So when we're thinking about the connections between, like the ancient source material and the way that you've interwoven it into this new form, what were the sort of aspects of Julia the elder that really appealed to you, and which elements Did you really try to bring in for this novel?

Jenny W 12:26
So I really enjoyed, and like, I said, like, I really enjoyed this idea of, here's here's this woman who's just kind of careening LIKE A WRECKING BALL through this very upright society, and just, you know, having these orgies and doing whatever she feels like, and probably having a lot of sex and drugs and just that is not normally what you hear about women in the ancient world at all. So I was just very drawn to this party animal character, and I think I wanted to bring that into my book. But you know, my my Julia, has reasons why she's like that and things that she's sort of coping with by sort of drowning her sorrows, basically, and it's like a coping mechanism for her. But I was also thinking about Julia the elder, and kind of how she's perceived, and all these screwless rumors that kind of show up in the sources about her and other figures, where you kind of wonder, like, is this the whole story? Did this actually happen this way, or is this kind of a smear campaign? So my Julia is, she's kind of wild, but she's not as wild as you think at first. And there are, of course, like rumors swirling around her, just like there would have been rumors around Julia the elder, and that was something that really interested me later, is that, you know, the reasons given for her exile, and whether they, in fact, did involve her sleeping around, or whether she was doing some deeper plotting against her dad, is kind of something I've always been interested in, yeah,

Dr G 13:46
and that's the thing, isn't it? Because what we get in the historical source material a lot of the time, we have to question it, because the political invective nature of how do you make it possible to exile somebody like you? Do have to find a way to really trash their reputation. And is it more useful to say openly that there was a political plot against you? It's probably not a great move that might just encourage more plots, for instance, so being able to find a way to tarnish somebody's character is a much more convenient way of ensuring that they're effectively disposed of, and people can no longer associate with them because it becomes hugely problematic. And also, like, if they're stuck on an island, good luck. How are they going to organize anything from there?

Jenny W 14:30
Exactly, exactly. So my Julia, I would say she's, she's a partier, but she's also a plotter, you know? So I kind of was inspired by those two sides that I saw in Julia the elder that I kind of wanted to be true, fair enough.

Speaker 1 14:43
I definitely got visions of I saw Megalopolis, which I would not recommend to anybody, but the opening sequence of Megalopolis, where they have this character of Julia as a party girl. I definitely got visions of your Julia like. When I was reading your book from that movie,

Jenny W 15:03
I have got to watch this. I have got to watch it. I haven't seen it yet. It is so terrible.

Speaker 1 15:07
It's honestly one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my whole life. Oh, wow. The fact that it is inspired by ancient Rome is the reason why I went to see it. But oh my god, what a trash fire. What a mess.

Jenny W 15:22
My goodness, I feel like I maybe just have to watch the first scene then,

Speaker 1 15:26
yeah, maybe the opening five minutes. That's what I would recommend you watch. Gotcha. So thinking about Julia the elder and how you wove various pieces into your book, I was just wondering what specific sources did you actually revisit? Because, as you said, you've done a series where Julie the elder was a major feature in the podcast before, when you were writing the book. Did you go back to any of the ancient source material, or were you more using sort of secondary sources? What was your sort of process with that? So

Jenny W 15:56
it's been so long since I actually had to do it, you know? But like, I remember going back to, like, the gossipy sources like Cassius Dio has some things to say about Julia, if I remember right, who else covered her Suetonius. I honestly forget at this point. But like any book that I could find, and I used a lot of secondary sources, too, and fiction, like whatever I could find, basically, and my own imagination, you know, because that's ultimately what it's about?

Speaker 1 16:21
No, I think what you've done is actually, it's really hard for people that tend to write history, which obviously is what we all do when we're podcasting. I find it really interesting to think about taking all of that material and then turning it into a fictionalized story, because it sort of goes against, in some ways, what we've been trained to do in terms of using so much of your imagination.

Jenny W 16:46
Yeah, I think that's true. When we started the podcast, Jen and I remember being very, sort of intimidated by the idea that I would have to be correct about things, because I did not train as a historian at all, like I have a degree in English, so I was always a little bit nervous, what if I just, you know, write this whole episode about something and just completely because I was, I loved history. I always loved history, but I was just like, what if I just get it wrong? And what's interesting about that in the podcast, in fangirl is that we have a lot of historians and archeologists who listen to us. So far, that seems to be a lot of our fan base. And I'm just like, that seems to be going okay so far. But it's not, it's not that weird to me, because we always kind of incorporated that into our podcast already. You know, like we do Jen and I, my podcast co host and I, we've done a lot of sort of fictionalized, kind of micro fiction intros to podcast episodes that we've done. Then we do a lot of extrapolating, you know, and kind of fan fictioning, and like imagining these scenarios and things like that, and picking a lane like I'm sure you have to do that as historians too, where there's many different possibilities of how the sources could be interpreted, or how the archeology could be interpreted. And you kind of even, even when you have that material in front of you, you have to kind of craft a story about what has happened here in order to make sense of it. So I don't know, like I feel like in my work, in the podcast, I find myself using my imagination more than I thought. Yeah,

Dr G 18:15
definitely, I would agree with that, because, and particularly for ancient history, like modern history, you're almost overwhelmed by the amount of source material you have access to, so you've really got to pick a niche. But with ancient history, I feel like it's more like you're crafting a lace, or you're a spider that's sort of creating a web. And like, what can you connect to? What and what would be most plausible to connect to something else given the other little pieces of information you've been able to scrounge together. So ultimately, the imaginative process is fundamental to doing ancient history, because you're trying to join together things that are just sort of sitting slightly far apart from each other, and how they are connected is going to be the key, and you have to make that connection. Yeah,

Jenny W 18:57
I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I

Speaker 1 19:00
think it's more the idea of having to put it all into the format of a fictionalized book, you know, having the actual conversations and interactions between characters and, you know, and really fully fleshing out the pieces where we don't know as much and that sort of aspect, that's where I think I would struggle,

Jenny W 19:19
yeah, like giving them a voice, like, What do they sound like, you know, when they're irritated or when they're excited, or, you know, like, well, actual words come out of their mouth, and what would that sound like if you translate that into English? Yes, I frequently struggle with dialog.

Speaker 1 19:32
I can, I can understand that. That's, I think, where I would struggle. As you say, it's not that unusual for us to have to pick a lane, but then to have to turn that into something that is more of a story where you've got people interacting and having those sorts of moments between each other. It's a different kind of style of writing completely to what we tend to do.

Jenny W 19:52
Yeah, and it's just to for me in this moment, it was two characters who obviously never met, like if I took Julia the Elder and introduced her to Alaric of the Goths, how would that conversation go like? These are two people from wildly different parts of the empire, from the beginning and the end, you know. So that also kind of interested me as like an exercise is to bring those two people together in a way, and just see what kind of sparks flew and like, how would their understanding of the world be different? And I think, like in the very, very beginning of the book, when I first started it. This was ages ago, and I was really, did not know what I was doing, and I was just kind of playing around. I was like, what if Augustus just lived in the time of Alaric, and this was the real Julia the Elder, like, what if I just did that? And I had, like, a few, you know, scenes written, you know, Intro scenes written with just Julia, where that was her dad instead of her brother. And there were lots of conversations about these, you know, laws, these, sort of like, “women can't be slutty anymore” laws, it was just me having fun. But that is definitely a huge source of inspiration for me. Is these, this sort of wild, what if of history, absolutely.

Speaker 1 21:02
So we can definitely see the influence of Julie the Elder in the characterization, particularly earlier on in your novel, but obviously a large part of your inspiration comes from much later in Roman history, and that is talking about Galla Placidia. Now I'd say that a lot of our listeners probably have heard of Julia the elder, but they probably haven't heard that much about Galla Placidia. She is definitely a lesser known figure, even though she was also very important at Rome's history. So can you tell us a little bit about her family background, her connections and the time in which she lived?

Jenny W 21:37
Yeah, absolutely so Galla Placidia, she was the daughter of Theodosius, the real daughter of Theodosius, and Theodosius was this emperor who lived in the late three hundreds. AD, I don't think he made it into the four hundreds. Ad, I'm trying to think, but he was a really big figure in the history of Roman Christianity, and establishing Christianity as the state religion of Rome. I think he was involved in the Nicene I think he was like the guy who laid down the Nicene Creed, which established Nicene Christianity as the state religion that would be different from Arian Christianity, which was the form of Christianity that alarca The Visigoths was part of. So she was his daughter, and she would have been in Rome during multiple Alaric related sieges, or, like, you know, invasions, he made it down to Rome several times. Yeah, he got there a couple of times. Yeah, yeah. It's actually kind of weird, because I'm like, there are so many times when he made it into the peninsula and then had to leave, and then made it all the way down, and then kind of went up again and then back down. Like, there was a lot of moving around, you know, but she was in the city for a lot of that, I think, 15 years old. There was news of Alaric at one of his sieges. This was not the final one, coming down the peninsula and setting fire to cities along his way. And all these, this horrible news of like sacking and burning, terrible things happening. And the people in Rome were freaking out. And there's all this paranoia. At one point, the priests in the city, these would have been Christian priests, allowed the pagan priests, the worshipers of the old religion, to fire up the old altars again because of all this, you know, horrible stuff happening, and they wanted them to appeal to the gods in every way that they could. And the wife of Stilicho, the old general who had been Alaric's main opponent, the guy who had been keeping him out, who had previously been executed for suspicion of colluding with Alaric. And that's a whole backstory of its own. Anyway, he had been executed. His wife, Serena was arrested on the belief that she was somehow colluding with Alaric. And like, strangled and Galla Placidia at one point, I think, was like witness that, and like, voted for it, or something like that. And from that early age, she just had this kind of cold spine to her that just fascinated me. And she was in the city of Rome when it was sacked by Alaric and the Visigoths. We're not sure exactly how she came to be in his entourage, but she was probably a captive who was taken at that point, she possibly met Alaric himself, but she wound up marrying Alaric's second in command, and his brother in law, Athaulf. Athaulf was this guy who was another Gothic warlord type of guy, said to be very attractive, said to be also short. So, you know, hot, but we is kind of how I pictured him. Here. They got married. It's, there's all kinds of stuff in Edward Gibbon about, like, the history of Rome, about her dowry, which is absolutely amazing, like she supposedly had this enormous table made entirely of precious stones that had 365, legs and, like, just giant gold, solid gold plates, the size of wagon wheels and all kinds of crazy things, supposedly awesome. And I'm just like, you know, reading all this, I'm like, How can I work this in? Where do I put the giant table in Alaric's war tent? So supposedly, depending on the source you. This is really kind of presented as these were two people who fell in love, which is another thing that really drew me to this story, because that's another thing you actually don't see a lot in in the sources about women in the ancient world falling in love with somebody that they wind up marrying, like a lot of is a lot of these noble marriages were like, marriage is a convenience, and if this is a kidnapping, obviously you would not think that that would be the case. And I think that that there are definitely sources that don't show it that way. And I think modern historians that I've read have been more skeptical of that interpretation. So it kind of depends on how you see it. But that's one interpretation. I remember being super drawn to that, because I was just like, oh my gosh, a situation where it's not the worst for the woman, how about that? So I liked it. And I thought, you know, I have early commentary about my book and the way I kind of wove Galla Placidia in. I don't use that name. I couldn't have her fall in love with Athaulf because he gets killed by this guy who was a servant of an enemy of Alaric about, like, a year or maybe two years in the bath after they get married. So they don't stay married long, and it's not a happy story for that reason. So I couldn't have written just a straight historical fiction romance novel about them. I kind of had to make it my own thing. And I definitely, you know, allergic dies five minutes after sacking Rome, so that that had, like, I knew it was suspending disbelief anyway, writing this book, and I wanted to give it a happy ending, so that's what I did. And, you know, early, sort of, you know, reviews about this book have pointed out that this is not historically accurate, like, if I wanted to write a romance novel about this time period, why didn't I just write about gull of lasidia? And my answer to that is, well, because that wouldn't be a romance novel, because romance novels have to have a happy ending any way I did it. If I was writing about Alaric, or if I was writing about Ataulf and Galla Placidia, I would have to completely change it to give them the happy ending anyway. So as long as I was messing with the history, I wanted to do it my way,

Speaker 1 27:02
absolutely. I mean, that's the whole idea, again, of writing historical fiction and not writing a history

Jenny W 27:09
Exactly, exactly. So Galla Placidia, after a tough dies, she gets basically sold back to the Romans. They're like a series of unfortunate events that happened where the Goths are in a terrible position again and wind up having to negotiate with the Romans to survive and send her back, along with a bunch of other concessions, she winds up marrying this general called Constantius, who she loathed, down to her soul, hated this guy. I think that's pretty clear in the sources, as I remember, he eventually becomes emperor, and then dies, and then she becomes Empress, and rules for about 12 years. And she is really, really good at it. Rules completely with an iron fist. She's like, very good at, like, negotiating disputes. She oversaw a lot of building projects in Ravenna, and was really pretty much undisputed. And I just love the idea of my Julia kind of growing into the gala Placidia, part of herself over the course of this story. So that's kind of part of the clay I was working with.

Speaker 1 28:12
I kind of imagine Agrippina, the younger, loving the position that Galla Placidia ends up having, which is after making it through all the marriages and all the men, she ends up getting to be regent for her son and effectively being Empress of the Roman Empire, which I think is what Agrippina the younger probably had in mind when Nero came to reign, and it just didn't work out for her that way. Oh, absolutely.

Jenny W 28:35
And, I mean, I think that there's a lot, there's a there's a huge interesting conversation to be had, because we saw how Cleopatra dealt with her brother husbands, you know, having them killed off. As long as you have a son who is a child, you can rule undisputed. But once that kid gets to be about Nero's age, he's like, 15 years old, he starts to want to do it himself. Then you have a problem, you know, and you see Cleopatra having a similar situation with these brother husbands that she's married to who are like, you know, 12 years old. I mean, she starts to assassinate them. At least that's the rumor. I don't know that's actually all 100% historically accurate all the time. I've

Dr G 29:16
got opinions. They've got to go,

Jenny W 29:18
you know, there's all kinds of stuff happening here, where, as a woman, if you want to rule, you have to rule through this son that you have most of the time if you're alone, you don't have, like, a husband. So that can be a problem as the son ages, unless, unless you have a good relationship with him, or, like, you know, you work it out somehow, I guess.

Speaker 1 29:39
Valentinian the third from memory was not the most inspirational character in history.

Jenny W 29:47
No, no, I don't know what happened with him.

Dr Rad 29:51
Nothing good.

Jenny W 29:53
Yeah, I

Dr G 29:55
think it's a really interesting aspect of history, is that we get the. Women who grow up in the imperial court, so they're very familiar with how things are done. They understand that on some in some respects, that they're locked out of official power in many ways. And we see that with particularly with Honoria as well. And yet, if they get the chance, some of them are like, I can make this work, and it's like, I found my conduit. I've got the small child. It's a man that's great, and now I can start to leverage within that system of power, which I'm very familiar with. I know he's working against me, but if I say I'm speaking on behalf of this kid over here, all of a sudden I can get some stuff done. And I was like, it's like, really face in the face of adversity, finding a way to be powerful anyway, which I think is pretty cool.

Jenny W 30:50
Yeah, I think it's fascinating, too. And it's also dangerous. Like, I think that as your son ages, that can become a time of transition that's dangerous for women rulers. Just as you know, times of transition when a male king dies could be dangerous for everybody. And

Speaker 1 31:02
it's interesting to think about you using Galla Placidia as well, because, as you highlighted when you were talking about the timing of her life, it isn't a completely different Rome. It's the room that most people don't really think about because it's not often presented in popular history, I think, is effectively as earlier parts of Roman history, because this is a really Christianized version of the Roman Empire. And as a result, the way that our sources write about people is different to the way that say, you know your Suetonius, your A Tacitus, would write about people. So what sense Did you really get of the character of Galla Placidia when you were crafting her, I just

Jenny W 31:44
got this sense of just this is a woman who is going to make it work no matter what. You know. She finds herself in the midst of this Gothic horde of people who has just sacked her city and she's gonna rule them. And she finds herself depending on this man who maybe makes her marry him. I don't know exactly how that would have happened, but, or maybe she fell in love with him, but what I suspect is that she wound up having to marry him because he took a shine to her. He decided that it would be politically advantageous to him to marry the daughter of Theodosius. And she decided, I'm going to rule over this man, and then I'm going to rule over your people. And when that fell apart and she wound up going back to Rome and having to marry this other guy, she made it work that way as well. Like she was somebody who was just not gonna she was not gonna take anything lying down, you know, like, whatever situation she came into, she was gonna dominate that situation. And that was really interesting to me.

Dr Rad 32:38
It is really interesting when you think about the what if of that situation, because, as you say, definitely the accepted version of things, even though modern scholars might be a bit more skeptical about it, is that there was some sort of affection or relationship developing between Galla Placidia and her husband, Adolf in that they had a child, they seem to have been really sad when that child died, and if her husband hadn't died so quickly as well. I mean, who knows what would have happened, given that her son ends up dying only a few years after she does, and it's during these increasing problems with the quote, unquote, barbarians. It's just so interesting to think about what would have happened if gala had managed to hold everything together and have preserved a union between the barbarians, again, flesh rabbits and the Romans. Yeah.

Jenny W 33:36
I mean, I think that it would have been a stronger kingdom, you know, because she she leaves it at a point of weakness. And I'm gonna do a whole series coming up on the history of the Goths, and what happens to the Goths after this whole episode with the Romans, after they move out of Italy and things like that like that's also just really interesting history, but I haven't quite gotten to that yet. It's a big undertaking. That's a lot of them. That's the thing. It's a huge undertaking. And that's what part of what made this book so heavily fictionalized, like how I had to write it that way, is because there's so much we don't know about Gothic culture. We have reams and reams and reams and reams and reams of military history, but there's a lot we don't know about how they saw things in just sort of daily life. And it's really easy to assume that they were kind of proto Vikings for various reasons, but that may not have been the case. I am doing a deep dive later. I'm not sure, but I made some choices in the book, you know, because there's a lot of gaps to fill in,

Dr G 34:38
for sure, and I think in a way that becomes like a perfect sort of Canvas for historical fiction, because we don't have those insights into exactly how they live their lives, how their leadership was structured in many respects, and sort of like cross culturally between different Gothic groups as well. Were not sure about when they really sort of came together and decided to work in a more unified way, and what led to that? So there's lots of potential for coloring in all of those gaps to create a really rich world for the reader to explore. Yeah, exactly.

Jenny W 35:17
And that's just so much fun like that is something I absolutely love to do. And

Dr Rad 35:21
so I'd love to ask for Galla Placidia, because, as I say, she's someone that people don't know as well, but she definitely was a major part of your character of Julia. What kind of source material was out there for you for her? So

Jenny W 35:35
I think I first met her in Edward Gibbon. So like the honestly, I'm terrible with names of books, so I should have had a list of things. There is Jordanes, there's Zosimus. There's various writers at the time who come at this mainly from a Christian lens. I would say, I think it's Jordanes, who is actually Gothic and who is writing a history of things. Those are like sources from my for the world in general, and about Alaric, and some of them also talk about Galla Placidia and Athaulf as well. So I think there was one, I forget the name, but there was one that was definitely talking about the relationship between Galla Placidita and Athaulf as servitude. That was the word that was used. But most of them talk about it as she fell in love with him, and he was very handsome, if just a bit short, but she didn't mind. They were in love. One

Dr Rad 36:25
down, full,

Jenny W 36:27
right? No, she was like, You know what? I like a guy who's my height. I don't know. I mean, that's definitely, I feel like that's just defi