Henry Venmore-Rowland is the author of The Last Caesar, a book about the infamous Year of the Four Emperors, told from the point of view of Aulus Caecina Severus (later dubbed Aulus Caecina Alienus).  The Last Caesar will be published by Transworld on June 21st and will be available via Amazon.  I have to say that I’m pretty excited about this upcoming book because it has tapped into an ignored period of Roman history, at least for historical fiction writers.  Henry V-R was kind enough to agree to an interview, so read on to see our discussion about accuracy in historical fiction, the road to his publication and inviting Cicero over for dinner.

Of all of the fascinating figures in Roman history, why did you choose Aulus Caecina Severus?

It was a case of story first, character second. After starting a novel in a completely different period, I decided to come back to my comfort zone of Rome. The trouble is there are lots of great authors who have done/are doing Rome so well, it was tricky to find an exciting story that hadn’t really been done. Then in the back of my mind I remembered something called the Year of the Four Emperors, and surely there had to be a great story there. After a quick read of everything from Tacitus to Wikipedia, I found the perfect narrator for the events in Caecina. He had an extraordinary knack of picking the winning side, and the fact that we know next to nothing about the man before AD 68 meant that I had the freedom to give him a backstory that told you something about the character and it gave me room to play with the relationship between his friend the future general Agricola, as well as his wife Salonina.

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