Thanks, Morgana.

I also love history and have been a fan of ancient history, especially Rome and Greece, since my early youth.

However, when I set out to write a work of fiction based on an authentic historical setting, I found I was kind of limited in my choices as my imagination wanted to go one way and history had already stated this or that, based on various sources.

There is something to be said about historical sources. Some of them are good and some of them really need to be taken with a pinch of salt as what passes for 'history' may be a fiction invented by the writer and some, especially the enemies of Caesar, to use an example, may be actually distorting history to suit their own political agendas. Even Caesar in his commentaries cannot be said to be completely unbiased, although he took great pains to make sure that his contemporaries understood that he was trying to be an impartial observer of events.

At the end of the day, most of history is subject to some form of interpretation. Sure, we have facts, dates, places, names, etc. However, there is always a fine line between one event and the other and tremendous gaps which can be filled in by an imaginative mind. I think this is what makes history so exciting as there are plenty of things we don't know, except for hints and scattered accounts from different periods of time.

With regard to the current series "Rome" I think I'm enjoying the episodes as they are dramatic and engaging, although they may not be historically accurate, which has been pointed out time and again in various posts in this forum and on HBO's forums as well as the unrv.com forum, to name just a few.

I do feel, however, that most of the historians are enjoying the show as it stimulates interest in Rome and also encourages the true facts to be also published and read by the general public on these forums. In a way, we are educating tons of people who are curious about history for the first time and are actually learning from these posts. I therefore thank HBO for producing a show based on Rome and I hope they soon move on to other periods of history as I would definitely like to see a show based on Greece or Egypt.

Skarr