What image comes to mind when I say “book”? If you’re like most people, you think of separate pages bound together, with a cover. Known as the “codex,” this has been the most common form of a book for the past two millennia. The codex is a book constructed of a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar …
Meet Sextus
The hero of Deep Calling Deep is Sextus Afranius Burrus. Sextus was a real person, born around born AD 1 in Vasio, Gallia Narbonensis (now southern France). By all accounts, Sextus was an honorable man. In 51 AD, Nero’s mother Agrippina, then married to Claudius, chose him to be the sole Praetorian Prefect, going against the tradition of having two people fill the most important …