I was lucky enough to be there with my son, in silence. Standing on the Spartan acropolis and looking at the mountains around me – the ones Leonidas would have known – was an eerie experience. In Protectoryou describe Spartans and Athenians brilliantly – what research did you carry out to gain an understanding of the ancient world, and Sparta in particular? There comes a point where the reader knows the character’s family better than he does. Wilbur Smith did it best with his Courtney series, I think. To understand Pericles, you have to know his mother’s family and his father. There is a terrific story there, if I can do it justice. It’s not general knowledge that Pericles was evacuated twice as a child and made to watch Athens burned. Like Genghis, that is a name most of us have heard, without knowing much about his actual life. They were the literal founders of Greece and they were all holding spear and shield on the same day. There, we have Themistocles, Aristides, Miltiades and Xanthippus all in the field. Marathon in 490 BC – the fennel field – was the origin point for me. Why did you pick him as one of your heroes for the series? There are many great names from the Persian Wars (eg Aristides, Miltiades, Themistocles, Pausanias and of course, Leonidas), all of whom feature strongly in your novels, but Xanthippus is probably less well-known. It is the foundation of Greece at Delos, the origin of the west.
My current series is the golden thread – those who stood at Marathon and Salamis, on to Pericles and war with Sparta. I told it in Falcon of Sparta and in the process, realised I was enjoying ancient Greece. His eyewitness story of ten thousand Greek mercenaries fighting their way home is wonderful.
That held true for almost twenty years, until I came across the extraordinary story of Xenophon.
Lion of Macedon was so ridiculously good it meant I could never touch the period. I avoided Greece for the longest time because of David Gemmell’s heroic fantasy on Alexander the Great. Wars of the Roses came from Henry VI being in a coma for 18 months, while Dunstan was the discovery that one man had known seven kings! History starts yesterday – and contains all the great tales. With Caesar, it was discovering he was captured by pirates with Genghis, being left to die by his tribe. I look for stories first, before everything. You’ve written about ancient Rome, the Mongols, the Wars of the Roses and Early England, but in the last few years turned your attention to ancient Greece with Protector, why did you choose this period? Conn Iggulden, welcome to Aspects of History.
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