A Murder On the Appian Way

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For the names of certain historical figures in these pages, I have used familiar literary forms rather than the more authentic Latin. While their contemporaries never referred to Marcus Antonius as "Marc Antony," or to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus as "Pompey the Great," these traditional versions carry such a magic that it seemed pedantic to resist them.

The ancient Romans did not number their hours as we do, in twelve-hour segments before and after midday, but rather beginning at daybreak, so that when a Roman spoke of the first hour of the day, he meant, quite literally, the first hour of daylight; and the first hour of the night was the first hour of darkness. The following table roughly approximates the equivalent hours of the day, as drawn from the historical sources and used in Murder on the Appian Way:

7 a.m. the first hour of the day

8 a.m. the second hour of the day

9 a.m. the third hour of the day

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