Written for readers who have finished What the Scrolls Were Worth.
The overseer's wife, and the warm centre of the house. Married thirty years, she keeps a home in the streets above the State Agora where the door opens to whoever knocks and nobody is hurried out again. She holds no office and says little in a gathering; the household, and a good many of the people who pass through it, run on her all the same.
A silversmith of Ephesus whose living comes off the pilgrim trade — the miniature shrines, the amulets, the…
The man who taught Philaretos the scroll trade — and taught his father before him. Broad, slow, generous…
Neokoros — the priest-administrator of the Temple of the Sebastoi, and therefore keeper of the honour that…
Philaretos's sister, and the reason the household stands up. Kira has kept the accounts since she was…
Senior overseer of the Ephesian church: a man in his sixties who has spent thirty years keeping order in a…
A scroll-copyist in the craftsman quarter of Ephesus, and a specialist in the Ephesia grammata — the famous…
The seven cities are real, and so is the road that joined them, in the order the letter names them. So is the province of Asia under Domitian: its temples to the emperors, its guilds and their feasts, its harbours and trades. Most historians date the seven letters to the last years of his reign, around AD 95–96; a respectable minority place them earlier, under Nero, and the books do not hang on either date.
The pressure on believers in these cities was mostly civic and local: what a loyal city expected of its people. The evidence for an empire-wide persecution under Domitian is thin, and the books do not invent one.
The people. Every lead, household and neighbour in these novels is fictional, and so is the bearer who carries the letter. A few figures the New Testament itself names, such as Lydia of Thyatira, Epaphras of the Lycus valley and Antipas of Pergamum, stand at the edges, drawn only as far as the sources go. Later legends about them are told as rumour, not as fact.
Nothing in The Kept Flame is out yet. The opening chapters of What the Scrolls Were Worth are free now, and the list tells you when each city's books arrive.