Fortuna was an especially pitiless figure for the Romans: Pliny the Elder wrote of her, “we are so subject to chance that Chance herself takes the place of god; she proves that God is uncertain,” and it is this aspect of the goddess which pervades my novel. In some senses the whole Roman world is a temple to Fortuna, and nowhere is the power of chance over human life as obvious as in the eruption of Vesuvius.
Paste: How would you describe Amara’s journey in this third book versus where she started this series? How has she grown or changed?
Harper: In Amara, I wanted to create a woman who was neither wholly good nor bad—-none of us are perfect!—but who is always someone whom we can empathize with and whose strength of character in a relentlessly tough world is something we can admire, even if we don’t always feel comfortable with her behavior. At the start of The Temple of Fortuna, she is a woman of wealth and status, and one of Amara’s perhaps less endearing traits is her intense attachment to both. Her journey to this point has been vertiginous, as a few years earlier she was enslaved in a brothel, forced by circumstances to become a ruthless survivor. Over the course of the trilogy, and after gaining her freedom, Amara has had to balance her ruthlessness with the love she has for others and her desire to have meaningful relationships.
In particular, in The House with the Golden Door, Amara is someone who has just been through trauma and bereavement and this hugely impacts her decisions, such as embarking on a high-risk love affair. In The Temple of Fortuna she is also a mother and having a child makes her even more vulnerable, complicating her decisions and challenging her sometimes selfish impulses.
Paste: I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say—and thank goodness it’s on the cover—is that this is the Vesuvius book, something that the series has been building to from the very beginning. And yet it’s…really not as much of a focus as you might expect. Talk to me a little about how you wanted to tell that part of this story.
Harper: The aspect of Pompeii that has always fascinated me most is not how it was destroyed, but all it can tell us about how ordinary Roman people lived. While writing the first book in the series, I genuinely forgot about Vesuvius at times! However, while planning the trilogy I did always know that the eruption would be a part of the story.
How I chose to write about it was defined firstly by the fact that I didn’t want to write a frustratingly abrupt end, leaving readers without proper resolution for the characters, and also because I wanted to explore the less well-known events after the volcanic explosion. The Roman state staged a major relief effort to support survivors from Pompeii and other affected towns, with Emperor Titus himself even putting in a morale-boosting appearance. It would have been a time of horror, grief, and confusion but also of major building work and new beginnings. It is a scenario that gives you a lot of scope as a writer, as well as the opportunity to introduce readers to a less familiar side of a famous event.
Paste: Is it strange to say that even though I knew the history of what happened, I was still hoping things might go differently for some people? Pliny’s death just broke my heart. Were there any historical elements you found difficult to write about?
Harper: I knew what happened to the real Pliny before starting the trilogy, but I still vainly hoped I might be able to write a different ending!
I think Pliny’s death was the hardest to write because he was an actual historical figure, and his loss left his family grief-stricken, as would have been true for all the survivors at that time. His nephew Pliny the Younger’s eyewitness account of the eruption, written many years after the elder Pliny died, is still permeated by a profound sense of loss.
I drew heavily on this account in writing my fictional version of the eruption; it is full of human details such as people tying pillows to their heads to protect themselves from volcanic debris, or carrying lamps in the daytime as the world turned dark. My overall aim in this section of the book was to try and capture the sense Pliny the Younger conveys of total confusion, rather than to stuff in scientific detail I had read about volcanos.
Paste: One of my favorite things about this book is the way we’re allowed to see how different characters we met previously have grown or changed as it’s gone alone, from Julia and Livia’s relationship to Britannica’s success as a gladiator and the sort of overall tragedy that is Victoria. Was there anyone whose story you wished you could have spent more time with?
Harper: Victoria is, for me, the most tragic character in the trilogy. We only see her—as we see all the characters—from Amara’s point of view. This is a less sympathetic lens than Victoria deserves. Like Amara, Victoria is far from perfect. She is manipulative and can be cruel and dislikable in the ways she puts others down, as she does to Beronice or Britannica, but she is also an incredibly resilient woman.
Victoria has had none of Amara’s advantages of love or education in her own brutal childhood, yet she brings joy, humor, and strength to her fellow she-wolves in the brothel. I really adored the Victoria of The Wolf Den. Her impassioned singing in the morning, in a place that is so vicious, expresses a sense of vitality and defiance which she will not allow the world to crush. Like the real graffiti motto on the brothel’s walls on which I based Victoria’s character, she is declaring Victoria is unconquered here.
Her tragedy is that she is trapped in an intense cycle of love and abuse with Felix, from which she is unable to break free. While not minimizing her eventual, unforgivable betrayal of Amara, I also think Victoria’s accusation that Amara does not treat her with the same love and respect that Amara would have shown Dido is true. Amara frees Victoria but never fully loves her, making Victoria more vulnerable to Felix. I hate the way Victoria’s spirit is destroyed by a man she loves, but I was determined to write this story because it happens so often. Even today, many strong, wonderful women are unable to escape from the devastation of emotionally and physically abusive relationships.
Paste: What was the most surprising—or ridiculous—thing you learned doing the research for this series?
Harper: I found it absolutely wild that Pliny the Elder not only had such strong opinions on how women groomed their body hair, but also expounded on the topic in his Natural History, going into nerdy detail on techniques for hair removal. I had to find a way of expressing this in the trilogy, so during an exchange between Pliny and Amara in The Wolf Den, he praises her for not shaving everything off!
Paste: What would you recommend, reading-wise, for folks who want to experience or learn more about this period of history? (Fiction and non-fiction answers acceptable.)
Harper: For Pompeii, you cannot do better than Mary Beard’s wonderfully colorful, evocative book on the town. I also regularly recommend Robert Knapp’s Invisible Romans, which is exceptional for his attempt to reimagine the ‘mind-world’ of enslaved Romans, which he constructs through the surviving literary and archeological evidence.
Paste: Other than, I assume, a well-deserved vacation, what’s next for you as an author? (I’m not going to take this opportunity to campaign for a Britannica companion book, I promise. At least not much.) What kinds of stories do you want to tell next?
Harper: Well, your wish is (almost!) granted. At the moment I am writing Boudicca’s Daughter which is set just over a decade before The Wolf Den. It covers the uprising of the famous British queen against the Romans and the rebellion’s aftermath.
It is a standalone novel, with no direct link to the Wolf Den trilogy, though the worlds do have an overlap through some of the characters. Britannica gets a cameo as a young child, and Pliny will also play a role.
Paste: And, the question I always end on — what are you reading right now? (Or if not right now, the best thing you’ve read recently?)
Harper: I recently read Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, an absolutely sensational (and shattering) novel about a forbidden relationship, set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is one of those books where the characters get completely underneath your skin. I have never read a more skillful, poignant depiction of romantic love between a man and a woman, and the way that Kennedy weaves the personal and political together is flawless.
The Wolf Den, The House with the Golden Door, and The Temple of Fortuna are all available now.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB
